If she was not at home when he left for the Butterfields school, he pencilled a message on the refrigerator door: ‘Back about five,’ or, ‘I’ll bring something in for dinner.’ He did not write, ‘Where have you been?’
By the time he came home, especially if he had a late detention class, Alice would be several drinks into the evening, and would not remember where she had spent the night out, nor even whether. Often when he came home, she was already out again, with a rude addendum to his refrigerator message.
‘Ought we to feel guilty?’ Barbara asked.
‘What about?’ In Paul’s imagination, they went to Bahama Cays, to Scottish inns, to a hotel he knew in a farming village in the Perigord, where the water meadows nudged the white-washed walls.
‘But Alice—’
‘Laura says I owe her nothing.’
‘Do you believe that?’
‘Of course not. Laura sees everything black and white. If your marriage doesn’t work, you drop it, as she will, and shut the door on the ghosts. Only for her there won’t be any ghosts, and she won’t wonder about Nigel’s.’
And then there was a weekend when Barbara’s son was going away and Alice announced in the middle of the night that she was going down the coast to stay with Hazel Rencher.
‘You’re a glutton for punishment.’ Paul was wide awake now, trying not to sound pleased.
‘Hazel has been a good friend.’ Alice had pulled off her girdle and she fell into bed in a pinned petticoat, her stockings wrinkled round her ankles. ‘But I’d go there anyway,’ she humped her bony back to Paul, ‘because it’s obvious you don’t want me here.’
‘You hardly ever are here.’
‘Why should I be when you don’t want me?’
She could keep that sort of thing up for hours. Sometimes Paul got up and made tea or a drink and sat reading until she fell asleep, her mouth open, snoring stale alcohol.
‘I want you here, of course,’ he said. ‘The flat isn’t the same without you.’
‘As if I was a sofa repossessed by the Hire Purchase people. At least you can sit on a sofa. Remember when—’
‘Oh stop.’
‘You haven’t slept with me for months,’ she whined, ‘do you know that?’
‘You’re always drunk. You’d fall alseep.’
‘You’re past it, I expect, dear,’ Alice said comfortably. ‘Hazel thought you were looking awfully old the last time she saw you.’
‘Hazel can go and screw herself.’
‘I daresay she does,’ Alice said equably. ‘Who else would?’
In the morning when Alice woke fairly cheerful, which could either mean that she had drunk less last night, or that she was still slightly drunk, Paul offered to drive her to Hazel’s after school.
‘That would be getting rid of me too fast. I shall free you of me more slowly, in a bus.’
‘This is improbably easy,’ Barbara said when she got into the car. She was wearing a coat with big red and white squares like a horse blanket. She always wore very good shoes on her narrow feet. Her silk scarf was French. Her bag was the kind of leather that costs a lot to buy, but well kept, lasts for years. Short locks of hair lay softly over each other, like leaves. She looked like the best kind of Burlington mother setting off for the Burlington-Stowe rugger match, the social event of the Spring term. She looked like Mrs Watts, mother of the star forward in Paul’s time. Except that no one would ever take Mrs Watts to a hotel they knew of which looked, and treated its few guests, as if it was still a comfortable shabby manor house in a park with a walled fruit garden.
Mr and Mrs Harding. Barbara did not blush. Her skin and circulation did not work that way.
Before they got home, Paul asked, ‘How are you going to feel about this?’
‘All right, I think. Surprised at myself. I always thought I was so cautious, but - yes, all right,’ After a pause, she said, ‘I’d forgotten what I’d been missing.*
There was a yellow bar under the front door of Paul’s flat. He had left the hall light on. Chronically worried about money, the electricity bill flipped through his mind’s letter box. He could not even light the grill for steak without seeing the gas roar through the pipes and burn away.
He carried his suitcase down the hall. As he passed the open door of the sitting room, his eyes registered something before his mind and body. He had gone past the doorway before he realized that Alice was sitting on an upright chair with her feet neatly crossed, ironing.
He went back. ‘I thought you weren’t coming home till tomorrow.’
‘I couldn’t wait to see you. Have you been at the Samaritans?’
That was one alibi he would never use. ‘I was playing golf with Upjohn. The father of that boy Stephen. You remember.’ You remember that day at Archway when he came to tea with Bluey Morgan and you were sloshed.
‘Carry your clubs in a suitcase?’
‘I spent the night with them.’
Now it began. It had been too easy. Now the lies must begin. He looked at Alice. There was something wrong. Not just that she was ironing a shirt, but it was six-thirty on a Saturday evening and she - he went closer and looked at her prominent pale blue eyes - yes, she was sober.
‘Don’t say anything. Please don’t say you’re glad, or it’s about time. Please don’t laugh. It’s bad enough without that.’ She pressed firmly on the iron, but when she stood it on its heel to turn the shirt, he saw that her hands were shaking. She was smiling with her teeth closed. Tiny beads of sweat spattered her lip. ‘Hazel’s been working on me. You’re right. She is a damn bore. To shut her up, I said I’d try again. That’s really why I came home. I want you to take me to A.A. tonight.’
For weeks, they went to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting almost every night. There were several groups in the town. There was always a meeting somewhere. Alice could only hang on to sobriety if she went among the people who fought the same battle. She did not beg Paul to go with her, but she would not go without him.
Occasionally Paul could see Barbara on his way home from school. Brief times together, not happy, not properly talking, because there was no time. Alice could hardly survive the day without his support.
Tor how long?’ Barbara asked.
‘It depends. There are people who’ve been going to A.A. meetings for sixteen, twenty years. It replaces social life, church going, everything. It’s like being on an artificial kidney. They can’t cope without it.’
‘What are we going to do?’ Barbara was the one who asked it.
‘I don’t know. Don’t ask me yet. I can’t see ahead. I only know I have to do this now. All the times I’ve begged her, nagged at her, even threatened her, had A.A. people round to talk to her, prayed for it, God knows, it was the one thing I wanted.’
‘And now you don’t want it?’
‘Of course I want it for her.’
‘But not for us.’ Barbara looked at him candidly. ‘It was better for us when she was drinking.’
Barbara could voice the forbidden things, the things he hated himself for thinking. She was willing to understand, but not to pretend.
Alice’s group had been asked to put on a meeting for another branch in a town fifteen miles away where the river ran under green willows and bungalow gardens came down to the bank. A place where you would not expect to find alcoholics, but there were just as many there as anywhere else. Alice and two men called Leslie and Scott were to speak.
‘Are you going in Scott’s car?’
‘I said we could go in ours. Scott’s good eye is getting worse.’
‘Doesn’t Leslie drive?’
‘Paul—’ Alice’s eyes were instantly full of tears. She cried more easily now than when she was drinking. She was under a great strain. Every waking hour of her day was a conflict. It tired her, made her weaker than her nature. ‘I’ve got to speak.’
‘Yes, I know. I’m glad.’
‘I can’t do it.’
‘You’ve done it before.’
<
br /> ‘But you were there.’ She was forced to say it. ‘Paul, I—’ She looked at him with eyes that the years of drinking had paled and bleared, now with drops quivering under the stubby lashes. ‘I can’t do it without you.’
‘You never used to need me so much.’ He said it lightly.
‘I’m asking too much of you, aren’t I?’ She wiped her eyes, and her mouth trembled into a smile.
‘I was the one who wanted you to get sober.’
‘God, what will the children say!’ Alice veered into a laugh. ‘It will kill Jeff when he comes home at Easter and finds me wholesome and sweet-breathed as a dairy cow.’
‘He isn’t coming home,’ Paul said. ‘He’s going to Sweden. Don’t you remember?’
‘I forget things. My brain has been rotted by years of alcohol.’
All the way in the car, she and Leslie and Scott made terrible crude jokes about booze, things that Paul would never dream of saying to an alcoholic, but they did it with a sort of spontaneous compulsion. It was part of their need for alcohol that they must talk about it endlessly, set it up and knock it down, deride it, nostalgically lament it, take it out and shake it, worry it, chew it into tag ends of old jests, as if by constant onslaught they could wear away its power.
After being with a group of dry alcoholics, the one thing Paul wanted was a drink.
And before. ‘Oh good,’ said Leslie, getting into the front seat of the car. ‘I can get drunk on your breath. No - forget the peppermints. I like it.’
The meeting was in a parish hall, bare wood and iron-rod rafters, bleak with the memories of ill-attended jumble sales. When they went in, Leslie and Scott slid into the small crowd like fish into their own element, greeting several people by name. Alice hung back, her hand on Paul’s arm. He pressed her wrist, feeling how little substance there was between flesh and bone. Her cheeks were flushed, her nose white and shiny. She used less make-up when she was not drinking.
‘Don’t be afraid, Alice.’
‘How can anyone be expected to stand up and talk cold sober?’
‘Inhuman, isn’t it?’ The evening’s chairman came up, a mop-and-duster sort of woman on whom an actress might model herself for a margarine commercial. ‘You must be Alice. I’m June.’
‘My husband, Paul.’
‘On the programme too?’ June asked.
‘Practically, he’s been with me to so many meetings. I think it’s putting him off not drinking.’
Alice was smiling and pleasant, but Paul could see that her whole body was trembling very slightly. A faint sour smell of something like fear came from her. They drank black coffee out of paper cups and stood about exchanging bright harmless small talk - to Paul and Alice the hardest part of alcoholism - until June called the meeting to order.
‘My name is June and I’m an alcoholic. I’m conducting the meeting tonight, but I’m not going to talk for long, because I know you all want to hear our three fine speakers who have come from Town to be with us.’ She sent her margarine smile to Alice and Leslie and Scott sitting beside her at the table. ‘All I’m going to say, and you’ve heard me say it before and you’ll hear me again, is that if it wasn’t for A.A., I wouldn’t be here tonight. I would probably be dead. Or in prison. I’ve been there, and if by any unlikely chance any of you have not,’ (laughter) ‘let me tell you it’s no fun.’
Although he had listened to many horror stories from many perfectly ordinary people, Paul had never quite got over the surprise that a woman like this - short curly brown hair, lipstick too bright, green knit suit straight out of a woman’s magazine, right forefinger that peeled potatoes every day - could have descended into hell and been dragged out of it with so little outward blemish.
When Leslie began to speak, the surprise was the same. He was a youngish, beaky man with thin fluffy hair and a way of clearing a non-existent obstruction in his throat that must drive his wife up the wall if he did it at home. He wore a grey suit and a striped tie and he worked for the Post Office as a telephone linesman. He had only been in the A.A. programme for two years. Before that, he had been in hospital five times with DTs, he had lost his job, his money, his wife, his children. Sleeping rough in a derelict house, he had talked to another drunk who had been in and out of A.A. like a needle through a hem. Next day, the police took him to hospital with a raging pneumonia. When he came out, he went back to the same derry, but the drunk had disappeared.
Leslie disappeared too- ‘run-down metal polish this time’ - until one night, desperate, cynical, belligerent, he stumbled into the house on Flagg’s Hill where every Saturday at midnight an A.A. meeting was held for anyone who could drag themselves in from the gutter.
‘I don’t remember any of it. I don’t think I heard anything that was said. But next day, I found a card in my pocket that a chap I’d talked to had put there. I phoned him. He left his office and came to me. That was the day I was born.’
Leslie got back his job, and eventually his wife, ‘though she keeps a suitcase packed,’ he grinned, ‘in case I take a drink again.’
He had been drinking since he was eleven, sneaking sherry out of a bottle in his father’s sideboard. ‘I see now that with those first secret nips, I was on my way. I can’t drink. I’m an alcoholic. I give thanks every day that I came to A.A. That A.A. found me, rather. I wouldn’t have had the sense or the guts to get in on my own.’
When he finished, the running commentary of racking coughs among the rows of chairs before him broke into a storm. Saved from cirrhosis of the liver, the alcoholics were all furiously engaged in smoking themselves to death, almost everyone with an ashtray or a saucer on their laps, burning little troughs in the plastic, a chest surgeon’s dream.
It was Alice’s turn. Paul, sitting in the second row, trying to smile encouragement to her, was almost as nervous as she was. If she failed at this, actually or in her own mind, if she showed up worse than some of the normally inarticulate people who were so incredibly articulate in describing their lives in hell, he knew she might go back to the bottle from one day to the next.
She knew that too. When June introduced her, she got up, wringing her knuckly fingers, and then she gave a little gasp and said, ‘Do you mind if Scott speaks next? I - it’s ridiculous to be so nervous—’
‘What you need is a drink,’ Scott said, getting heavily to his feet. He was a stout blockbuster of a man, a boxer in his Army days, his girth in a double-breasted blue suit immense.
‘Excuse me. I’m nervous too.’ He unbuttoned the jacket on an enormous expanse of white shirt like the side of a marquee. He was a lovely genial man, kindly and full of inherent wisdom not gathered from books. A man of whom the lady who drooled, ‘I wish I was blind so I could have one of them lovely dogs’ might say, ‘I wish my husband was an alcoholic so he could be like that when he was reformed.’
Scott wore a patch over one eye. He told the audience, as he had told other audiences over and over again for almost five years, how a lifetime of drinking and fighting and losing his Army career and everything else since had culminated in three months’ oblivion, ended by a shot through the head and the loss of one eye.
‘I can see why I did it,’ he said, ‘though I don’t remember doing it. I only remember I woke up in a hospital somewhere and I couldn’t see, and when they told me what I’d done, by God, I yelled and fought them. To have got so near to getting out of the whole bloody mess and just missed ... There was an A.A. group at that hospital. I fought them too, but they fought harder. One of the nurses, he was an alcoholic. I don’t think he took any off-duty while I was there. There was a pal of mine, Freddie, his name was, my old boozing pal. He sneaked me in a bottle one day under his coat and this nurse kicked him out of that ward like a drunk out of a bar.
‘I’ve been sober now for about five years, grace of God who would have been within his rights for not troubling about me. I’ve still got a chip of metal in me brain,’ he ended chattily, ‘just to remind me.’
Applause. Vol
canic coughing. Scott looked at Alice and nodded, and she stood up, resting her fingers on the edge of the table and licking her lips.
‘My name is Alice.’ She was wearing one of the old tailored dresses Paul used to like on her before she began buying neon-coloured brief vulgar things much too young for her. ‘I’m an alcoholic.’
She began the story that Paul knew so well. But told like this, it sounded different, as if it were a stage play in which he had no part. When she talked about, ‘my husband’, it did not seem to be him. ‘My son’ was not Jeff, sobbing once to Paul, ‘Mummy’s ill, what’s wrong with Mummy?’
‘My daughter’ was not tough, unsentimental Laura at fourteen telling him, ‘I don’t want to have a birthday party if she’s going to get drunk.’
Alice was not concealing or embroidering. She was telling her story simply and coherently, giving it a pattern of descent, whereas at the time, it had been a shapeless chaos of wasted years, quarrels, crises, tears, false hopes, despair, and all the sordid episodes of living with a drunk.
‘And then, towards the end of the time when we were at the school, my husband started on the serious drinking. You could hardly blame him. I was polluted most of the time and when he was drinking too, it was the only thing we were doing together, the only fun we ever had. We pretended it was fun, but it was a hideous business of two or three drinks before we could even dress for those awful parties the other masters used to throw, and coming home stumbling and paralytic and scared to death one of the boys would hear us. It was a wonder we weren’t kicked out long before. But my husband was popular and they made allowances. Until I got stupefied enough to start sleeping with a randy Australian who still smelled of sheep. He was the cousin of the Assistant Headmaster’s wife. I think she’d had a bit of a go with him herself.’
Alice was quite relaxed now. The release of being able to tell everything to people who had been there themselves was working in her, as it did on all the speakers. People who did not know anything about A.A. called it exhibitionism, and said they could not bear to sit and listen all evening to squalid confessions, not understanding the two-way therapy of release and reassurance.
The Listeners Page 22