‘Oh - did they take you?’ she was going to say, but it might sound rude. Meredith said it to her, and it did sound rude.
In the reception room, there was a young medical student called Andrew, friendly and casual, sporting a staple-shaped moustache, talking in jerks and hesitations, leaning on the lesser parts of speech.
‘Don’t be nervous.’ he told her, ‘because, it’s all quite -you know. Look, Sarah, when people come in, what you do - chat ‘em up a bit. See what they want. May only want to sell us paper clips, but don’t leave them, you know, standing.’
When the door opened and a woman looked in, waxen, drained, no stockings, her thick legs blue, Andrew broke off in mid-sentence and jumped up.
‘Hullo, come in. Here—’ He grabbed her arm and caught her as she staggered, and put her into a chair. ‘Poor dearie. It’s - oh yes, it’s Agnes, isn’t it? We’ve been expecting you.’
‘I couldn’t—’
‘Look, it’s all right. Sit for a minute. Then we’ll talk. Sarah will get you a cup of tea.’
Sarah jumped up as if she had been asked to go to the top of St Saviour’s tower and pull someone in off the ledge. When she came back, the woman thanked her weakly. She looked as if she had been walking all night, all day and all night. Andrew sat beside her, not looking at her, not not looking at her, just being with her while she drank the hot tea and sighed.
‘There’s some bread and – something or other in the kitchen,’ Andrew told Sarah. ‘Could you make, like - you know, a sandwich?’
14.10 Max Legge, a father looking for his missing daughter Jane, came in to ask if we knew anything. Nothing in files. (Sarah, 589.)
‘Aren’t you going to the office, Max?’
‘I can’t. Phil and Olive will have to manage.’
‘Don’t worry so. Why do you worry like this all the time? It doesn’t do any good.’
‘My daughter’s been gone four months. Your daughter. Don’t you worry?’
‘Not any more. I hate her now.’
‘Margaret - don’t!’
‘Why not? After all we’ve done for her...’ The old tune.
‘Did we do it to get gratitude?’
‘I don’t know. All right, yes. What’s wrong with parents wanting that from their children?’
‘If there were something I could do...’ His old tune.
‘You’ve tried everything. Police. Hospitals. Church Army - you must have rung every agency there is. Janie is probably hundreds of miles away.’
‘I think she is in terrible trouble. That’s why she won’t come home, or write to us. I’m so afraid, Margaret.’
She looked at him, her face drawn down.
‘I keep thinking she might be dead.’
When Sarah was in the hall, a tall woman with a head of swathed sandy red hair cupped in the turned-up collar of her coat came in at the front door and stood looking at her.
Don’t leave them, you know, standing. Sarah went to her, smiling shakily. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Oh thanks.’ The long mouth curved into a friendly smile. ‘Are you new? I’m Victoria, 4.22. Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Everyone does it till they get to know people. My first day, the Director came wandering in looking exhausted in a jacket I wouldn’t give to the Salvation Army, and I rushed up and almost killed him with sympathy.’
As they went to the back of the house, the unlatched front door was pushed open and a middle-aged man with an astrakhan hat came in. He looked at the notice which told him to go to the reception room, then looked uncertainly down the hall at Victoria and Sarah.
‘Try again.’ Victoria murmured. ‘That’s a genuine one.’
‘No, you.’
‘I’ve got to take off my coat.’
‘Can I help you?’
The man was tall and stiff. His overcoat was a black tube, too long. He took off his hat and looked down at Sarah as if it was not what he had expected to see. ‘I doubt it,’ he said wearily, ‘but I thought I’d better try everything.’
‘Would you like to come in and sit down?’ Sarah asked, like a polite child at a grown-up party.
‘I only want an answer, yes or no.’
His daughter had been missing for four months. Had she been here for help? He believed she was in some trouble.
‘How dreadful for you.’ Sarah stared up at him, transfixed by what she now saw was sorrow and pain in the lines of his grey face.
‘What shall I do?’ She went to ask Andrew.
He told her to look in the files for the girl’s name. ‘But if she has been to us, we’d have to get in touch with her before we could tell him anything.’
‘But her father?’
‘Anyone. You never tell.’
There was nothing. Two or three cards in the file identified as ‘Jane’, but too long ago.
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s not your fault.’ The father put on his astrakhan hat dead centre over his sad face and went away.
Later, when Sarah had dealt breathlessly with the office telephone, ‘You talk too fast,’ Andrew told her. ‘And too much. Got to learn you know, to shut up in this place.’
‘At least she’s articulate,’ Victoria said. ‘She doesn’t call everyone Whatsaname or Thing.’
‘Doesn’t talk like a secretary either.’
‘Do I still?’
‘Once in a while. A bit too official.’
‘Oh God, that’s my office training. “Courier, good morning. Mr Fisher is in conference. Can I take a message?” Thanks for reminding me, Andrew.’
They criticized without rancour or affront. ‘People don’t do that anywhere else.’ Sarah said.
‘They would if they were all after the same thing. It’s like - well, there is this Unanism thing. A sort of non-religion. The most significant human relationship is when people do something in the same way and for the same what’s-it. Kon-tiki. Doctors and nurses in an operating theatre. Even a football team. Unanism. It’s why grownups go on playing schoolboy games.’
‘Or become Samaritans,’ Victoria said.
‘Yeh. Boy from London came in here the other day, on the - you know - on the run. Wild with me, though I spent all morning trying to find him a room. What was I doing here, why wasn’t I up there chucking bricks through the windows of the American Embassy?’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘Too busy. Nothing I can do about Viet Nam. Something here I can do. What got you in here, Victoria?’
‘Unoriginal reason. Someone I knew killed himself. Someone I thought I loved.’
‘With me—’ the reception room was empty now. Andrew was lounging on a sofa in his jeans and torn sweaters; Victoria was writing a report about her talk with Agnes - ‘with me, it was someone I detested. My first year at University. I shared a room with him, till I could find some kind of - you know - to move out. The world’s bore. He still came to my room all the time, talk, talk, all his problems, I stopped listening. One day, he hanged himself. Sorry? Yes, I was, but- you know? - for myself. Cheated. He cheated me of the chance to do something for him. Not that I ever did, but he was sort of - filed away. I might. Now I couldn’t. Make you sick? It did me. I came up here and learned how to listen.’
And Sarah too, as the weeks went by, Sarah learned to listen. For some of the people to whom she listened, nothing could be resolved; it was part of an endless quest for what they could not find in themselves. Listen, Sarah, listen, you have nothing to give but your ears. She did not think she was much use.
One evening, leaving late, she met David, 520, getting out of his shuddery car.
‘Hullo?’ He peered through his thick smeared glasses. ‘Oh, hullo. Are you one of us now?’
‘Yes, I am. Sarah, 589.’
Sarah King. Warm. Alertly young. Eager. She will make a better Samaritan than me, Victoria thought. I’d like to meet her husband, and know the rest of what she is.
Sarah had looked at Victoria’s left hand, then curiously up at he
r face, seeing - what? Would she evaluate me differently if I were married to Robbie? The Hon. Mrs Robert Fielding. Lady Roundswell. Who would even speak to me?
‘If I were married to a Lord,’ she asked Peter, rummaging through the boxes in his office to find shoes for Michael, ‘could I still be a Samaritan?’
‘You could still be Victoria, 422,’ he said. ‘Why are you so neurotic?’
‘I’d be an anachronism.’
‘We’ve all been anachronisms since we were born, to the babies that come tumbling after.’ He was reading her report. ‘Did Agnes ask you to find out where her children were?’
‘Oh yes. I talked to the Children’s Officer. She wanted me to do that before she would tell me anything.’
With an old Army overcoat and a pair of shoes and thick socks to stuff them with, Victoria went down to Marsh Lane that evening. Michael was not on his beat. The Brethren of the Judgement was open for business, however, and she went in.
In the small room behind the black glass window, there was a counter, shelves of books and leaflets, and a few chairs and low tables, like a carrot-juice cocktailbar.
‘Have you come to read?’ The woman behind the counter wore a tam o’shanter and a black overall pinned tightly across the chest as if Marsh Lane were full of rapists.
‘It was about the old man with the boards—’
‘You are interested in the Brethren? You’re early for the meeting. Are you going to wait?’
‘It’s really old Michael I want to see. He’s a friend of mine.’
‘I see,’ said the woman, not seeing anything. ‘Well, it’s nothing to do with me. It’s Mr Naylor who pays the old gentleman, for not very much, if they want my opinion, but Mr Naylor is like that. Man or beast, he’ll not see anybody go in need.’
‘Is he here?’
‘On a Thursday? No, my dear. He’s in the field.’
‘Where is that?’
‘Wherever he sets down his stand and banner. Street corners, car parks, the zoo. He spoke on the pier one Whitsun. It was quite nice.’ Her eyes glazed over.
‘You haven’t seen Michael?’ Victoria tried to bring her back. ‘I’ve got some shoes and a coat for him. It’s cold.’
‘Don’t look at me.’ The glazing slid back like shutters. ‘If he chooses to traipse up and down in the gutter, it’s no affair of mine.’
Victoria went on up Marsh Lane, which became increasingly shabbier and more downhearted, until it died among a huddle of condemned houses and abandoned workshops near the coalyards. Under the railway, the arches dripped and stank. On one side of the street that ran along these sluggish reaches of the river, warehouses and garages and blocks of prosaic flats had been raised out of bomb ruins after the war. On the other, many of the old factories still tottered on the river bank, window-less shells, chimneys standing alone, blackened timbers fallen across burned-out floors.
Rusted chain fencing topped with spikes locked these sad relics from the street. A hole clipped out of the wire and replaced by an old door led through a puddled yard to the two-storey building where the students ran their house of last hope for the jakies and junkies and rejected derelicts, the carrion of the town.
‘But we don’t really run it, you know,’ a streamlined Jamaican girl, like a dark greyhound, told Victoria. ‘We are just working here with the men. This is their place. That’s why they come. They help each other, whatever they can do, even if it’s only sharing their last quarter-bottle of meths. They can go away when they like and come back, no questions asked. That’s what old Mike does. Leave the clothes here. If he doesn’t come in, we’ll find him some night on the soup run.’
‘Where do you go?’
‘The stations, the derries, the camps, the skipper behind Caxton’s bakery where the hot air blows out. A whole sub-continent. You ought to come out with us some night.’
‘Could I?’
A body that had been swaddled on the floor in a corner of the room unwound itself from the blanket and stood up, wild-lipped, and began to shout.
‘It’s all right, Donald.’ The girl went to him, a man with a nest of hair like snakes, tatters of cloth you could hardly call clothes, the smell and filth of him stronger than the fumes of the rusted oil heater.
He shook off her hand, and stood balanced on wide unsteady legs, trying to focus where he was. She put up her hand again to his shoulder.
‘Donald? It’s Hattie.’
He lurched out of the room and thudded down, screaming in the passage.
Feet on the stairs. Through the doorway, Victoria saw a stocky young man with bare feet jump down. ‘Come down and help, Nosey!’ he called.
A tall top-heavy person with a bashed-in nose came down the stairs two at a time, long arms swinging like a chimpanzee, and together they dragged the bellowing man upstairs.
‘Nosey is a marvellous stong man. He can fight two, three people even when he’s drunk. Jack thinks he might
go dry if he could get away from the others who are stuck with meths, keeping them alive until it kills them.’
‘I think it’s marvellous what you—’
‘It’s not enough. We can’t cure anyone. We can only be here. Most of these people have nobody anywhere, you see.’
The banging and shouting upstairs subsided. Jack came down lightfooted. ‘I’m going to start the sandwiches,’ he said to Hattie. ‘Dick’s got a bottle up there and it’s no good waiting for Doris when she’s gone as long as this.’
In the passage, Victoria and Hattie stepped round a yellow puddle of vomit. Outside in the wet yard, pocked and hillocked with years of shifting coal dust, an old man was sitting on an upturned tank.
‘Mike?’
He turned his face round under a mushroom hat. It was not Michael, but another old man, wasted, toothless, his face no different from what it would be when he was dead.
‘Are you coming in?’
He turned his face away again.
‘He hates being indoors. I’ll bring you out a mug of soup.’ Hattie went inside. As Victoria walked past the old man, she saw the hands that lay on his scarecrow knees, bone white and bloodless. One had only three fingers. The other had only stumps.
There was nothing she had to do tonight. Why did she not go back in to the shabby smelly house and cut sandwiches and clean up the vomit and go out with Hattie and Jack in the little daisy van to the derries and ramps and skippers? She walked on to the end of the chain fence. A boat in the river hooted jadedly at the bridge, dragging a string of covered barges like coffins. At the corner a taxi passed with its roof light on. She stopped it and got in. The last woman had left a flower scent behind. Victoria was instantly removed from Hattie’s subcontinent. Ahead of her, a drink, a bath, meat to cook in her easy kitchen. A new dress to try on. A book she was enjoying. The lonely self indulgence of her white bed.
She paid the taxi and went up. Robbie had sent his week’s flowers. Mrs Edgar from downstairs had arranged them with care and propped the card proudly, as if it were from a new exciting lover. Victoria made a drink and sat for a moment, thinking about the black greyhound girl and Jack and how they did not have to force themselves to conquer revulsion. It was never there.
She sighed and turned to the telephone by the fireplace. Dialling Billie’s number made her feel suddenly very tired.
Billie - how are you?
Grumble, grumble. She always started off negatively to disguise any positive pleasure.
Let’s meet somewhere and go to the cinema. Have you seen the Space thing? They say you hate it or love it but you can’t not see it.
Don’t do me any favours, Victoria. You’ve got something better to do than go out with me.
Not home ... not home ... not home... Victoria let the telephone ring for quite a long time before she hung up.
‘Barbara. Barbara. When are you going to sleep with me?’
‘Wait, Paul, we must wait.’
‘Why wait? What for?’
In this town, which wa
s full of odd pockets of different variegations of society, it was easy to conduct a discreet affair without anyone knowing or caring. What was happening between Paul and Barbara Frost was not yet an affair. They met often, discovered each other, discovered their love. She had cooked dinner for him in her small ivy-swamped house where the suburbs relaxed into country, but he had never stayed. One son was still at home. The married son’s room was let to a student who shook the house with wild piano music.
‘When are you going to sleep with me?’ Paul began to ask it very soon. A sense of urgency plagued him. The world would end. He would be too old. One of them would die. There was no time, no time for gradual growth of love. He was afraid, not that they would be found out, but that something would happen to take this away.
‘Wait, darling, we must wait.’ More passive, her sexuality for a long pause asleep, for Barbara it was enough that they had found each other.
‘Why wait? What for? There’s no time.’
‘Because we’re both so old?’ She was six years younger than he was. He had been feeling used and finished at fifty. He did not now think of either of them as anything but in their prime.
He told her she was beautiful, and after a while she gave up denying it. ‘And I don’t look in the mirror so much. I used to force myself to look in a strong light, because I thought that you must face the truth of what Nature does to your face as the price of using it. Now I think it’s better to imagine you look all right than to keep reminding yourself you don’t.’
Alice was drinking very heavily after Christmas. That was not an excuse, but it was a cause perhaps. It made this more necessary.
‘It also makes it more possible.’ Barbara was endowed with a rueful commonsense that stood her in good stead of wit. She was calm, accepting, un-volatile, very peaceful and lovely to be with.
They were able to be quite often together. Alice spent whole evenings at the club by the harbour, returning sometimes in a taxi after midnight and waking Paul to rail at him. Sometimes not returning at all. Paul thought she stayed with some raffish friends who lived in the harbour village, but one morning when he rang them, she was not there.
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