How do you get him back into the world? Paul felt depressed and discouraged. Tim seemed to have slipped back a long way.
It was late. He would be late to fetch Alice. She would be late for the South End A.A. meeting. She would have to go into a crowded hall after the meeting had started, and it would panic her.
He stopped at a garage to telephone.
‘Don’t bother,’ Alice said. ‘Don’t bother to come home. I’m not going to the damned meeting.’
‘You must. It won’t matter, the others can talk first. I’ll be there in half an hour. Be ready and we’ll go right away.’
‘I am ready.’ She laughed that hoarse nicotine laugh, and then Paul realized.
Punishing his small car, taking chances, he drove home as fast as he could, and left the car in a forbidden place, its end sticking out into the traffic. The lift was stuck with the doors open on the top floor. He ran up the stairs, seeing himself collapse there, turn blue. ‘Heart,’ they would say as they turned him over. ‘What a wonderful way to go.’
His unsteady hands fumbled with the key. He crashed in, shouting. Alice was sitting calmly at the kitchen table with a bottle and a glass, quite civilized, quite ladylike in the oatmeal dress (’the colour of sick - so suitable’) she often wore to A.A. meetings.
‘For God’s sake - after all you’ve been through! How can you be such a damn fool?’ He was furious with her. He smashed her glass into the sink, took the bottle and poured the whisky on the broken glass.
Alice half rose to get at the cupboard, but he pushed her back into her chair.
‘I’m through with you. All the chances you’ve had, and you chuck the whole bloody thing away—’ He shouted at her, chanting abuse as if he were speaking dialogue in a play.
‘That makes us even then,’ Alice said rather gleefully. ‘I’m really glad I found out about your fancy lady. It would have been too sad to have missed such a watertight excuse to have a drink. Though I’ve thought for some time you must have someone. I mean, you’d be pretty silly if you didn’t, all things considered, but it’s a pity she was lying on your shirt-tail tonight. It’s bad luck on Jane.’
‘I went to Highfield to see Tim.’
‘I mean, I didn’t mind. I didn’t really want to speak at the meeting, but it’s a bit hard on poor old Jane. Eight years sober, and St Paul lets her down. Who, as they say, is she?’
‘God, this is ironical, Alice, I was at Highfield, I told you. Tim Shaw is in trouble. I had to go to him.’
‘Don’t lie, you fake Samaritan.’
‘Call the Samaritan Centre. Ask someone to look in the log book and see if Tim rang for me.’
‘That would give them a laugh, wouldn’t it? Poor old sozzled Mrs Hammond, checking up on the old man.’
Look – Alice, I’ll make coffee. We can still get to the meeting. You’ll be all right.’
‘No thanks. I’d rather stay here.’ She got up and took another glass and a bottle of something from the cupboard under the sink.
Paul went to the telephone.
‘Want me to come round?’ Scott sounded very tired.
‘Not much good tonight. Perhaps tomorrow you could talk to her?’
‘I’ll try. It’s going to be tough, if I know Alice.’
‘She say’s it my fault.’
‘Oh, of course. It’s always someone else’s fault. God damn acoholics, they’ll do this every time,’ Scott said disgustedly, as if he were not one himself.
On a Saturday afternoon in spring, when Brian had gone cursing to the Front Royal to ‘wait on people who aren’t fit to wait on me,’ Sarah King was in the small panelled study at the Samaritan Centre, listening to Paul on the telephone.
‘Of course, Jim. Come up right away ... Bit of a sit, of course, as long as you like. Do you want to talk to someone? Yes, I’m sure he will. Don’t worry, Jim. Come on up. I’m glad you rang.’
He wrote in the log, ‘Jim Baxter rang, distressed. Will come in for a sit and poss. talk to 100
‘Why is he distressed?’ Sarah asked.
‘He mucks about with young children. Got about twenty convictions, been in and out of mental hospitals, it’s hardly helped at all. He comes in here when he feels it coming on. Bit of a sit. You can go and chat to him when he comes in. He likes a new ear.’
‘What shall I say?’
‘He’ll do most of the saying. Don’t worry. I’ve heard you talking to clients. You’re doing very well.’
‘Am I? Am I really?’ She snapped at it like a dog biscuit.
‘What’s the matter, Sarah? Why are you so unsure?’
Paul looked very tired. When Sarah had first come like a magnetized sleepwalker up to Church Grove and this old stone house, Paul had seemed strong and wise and unassailable. Since then she saw him sometimes looking older than he was, his hair greyer, his face more deeply lined, his voice lower, his broad shoulders not stooped, but carrying some burden which he only set down when he turned with his slow smile to take up the burdens that were brought to the Samaritans.
When he asked her, ‘What’s the matter?’ Sarah wished that she could give him back the question.
‘I don’t think I’m unsure,’ she said, ‘Do I look it?’
‘Only if you feel it. People take each other at face value. That woman who went into the bank after the thief had locked up the staff, she saw him as a bank clerk because he was behind the grill. A client who comes in here sees you as a Samaritan, existing just for him. Your funny chopped hair and the nothing skirt and that damn dangly thing my mother used to swing like a lasso in the Twenties. You are there for him.’
‘I always feel he thinks, “What’s she doing here? I came for help.”’
‘So he sees you as someone who can help.’
She got up restlessly and went to the window, moving the curtain. Nothing in the road beyond the brick wall. In the garden, the lush green weeds that had devoured the vicar’s lawn steamed in the surprising sun.
‘Brian calls it playing angels, coming up here, a dropout from reality. I go home excited, wanting to tell him what happened, but he wants to tell me about Colonel Sebastian and the Spanish waiter, and I think that’s unreal.’
‘Do you fight?’
‘Sometimes. No, not really. That’s unreal too We throw things carefully. He shouts. I cry. As if it were expected of us.’ She came back to sit opposite him. ‘Do you fight with your wife?’ She felt secure enough with Paul to ask it.
He laughed instead of answering, and then said, ‘You’ll find out that being a Samaritan here doesn’t make you one at home.’
‘It ought to.‘
He shook his head. Rachel, number 350, pearls and aqua cardigan and undulated dated hair, came in with a bottle and a cloth.
‘My weekly sanitizing.’ She wiped round the mouthpiece of the telephone. ‘This phone must be loaded with germs. No wonder we all get colds. I do mine at home every day in the flu season.’
‘Do you get flu?’ You were supposed to give tolerance to the other Samaritans as well as the clients.
‘My Robin, you know,’ she perched a rubbery haunch on the desk to prattle to Paul, ‘I thought he would never pick up after last time. Cough - it would break your heart. He came back from school with a note. “Please, Mrs Drew, keep him away.’ But he’s so behind with his maths, it’s such a worry with exams coming up. He could pass them on his head, but he—’
4000 rang like a sharp rebuke. Paul picked it up at once, glad to cut Rachel off in mid-flight. A click, then nothing. The burr of the dialling tone. He wrote ‘Dud call’ in the log book.
‘—because you see,’ Rachel went on as if she had never stopped, ‘if he doesn’t pass enough subjects this year, he’ll miss his chance at Grenoble. And with my cousin so near ... I wish you could see her house. Last summer when I—’
Paul picked up the strident telephone, listened for a moment, and wrote again, ‘Dud call.’
SAMARITAN LOG BOOK. DAY DUTY.
15-
30 Dud call. (Paul, 401.)
15.35 Dud call. (Paul, 401.)
When Gretchen had ironed the flax of her hair and gone out, Carrie heaved herself clumsily out of her bed nest and padded into the other room, narrowing her eyes to see, because her glasses were lost. The piece of furniture they pretended was a settee still looked like Gretchen’s bed, unmade, magazines and underwear and toast crusts among the rumpled sheets. It was a two-roomed flat, with a bathroom on another floor and a niche across the passage to cook in, a cold tap on the half landing.
‘It’s a slum really,’ Gretchen told people. She was proud of it, in an irritating, unnecessary way. Her mother pronounced it ‘fascinating, atmospheric,’ jangling the jewellery she crafted out of bits of old cars. Carrie’s parents had never seen it. Her young brother had been there once on his way to a motorcycle rally, and been ordered not to tell.
Carrie was taking a teachers’ course. Gretchen, who was a Sociology student unfitted by temperament or desire for any kind of sociological career, had only asked her to share because she was no threat. They were both dislikeable girls. Gretchen was bossy and coarse, with tombstone teeth. Carrie was sullen, heavy-jawed, her major talent the giving of offence or taking it. When they had people in for spaghetti, or the sticky mass of rice which Gretchen said was paella, Gretchen made a lot of noise and ill-informed argument, while Carrie ‘The Carrier’ slouched round with coffee and some kind of wine which you could not get drunk on before you brought it up.
At home in the spiritual wastelands of Bucks, where her parents grew vegetables and various smaller livestock with edible flesh or products, she had always been called Caroline, with the O pronounced to rhyme with barrow. She had changed it to Carrie when she won the scholarship (’Were they sorry for her, or what?’ her brother marvelled) and escaped to the University. Gretchen’s name was not Gretchen. She had changed to that when she discovered how to make her hair this colour.
The water jug was empty. In her pyjamas, Carrie went barefoot down to the tap that dripped out of the wall into a stained metal basin like a urinal.
‘Not dressed yet?’ Mrs Mason was climbing the stairs with two loaded string-bags.
‘I didn’t feel well.’
‘You girls.’ Mrs Mason wagged her head as if Carrie were hung over or pregnant, and turned up the next flight.
I was the last one to see her, she would be able to say. The last one to lay eyes on her and she said to me, ‘Mrs Mason, I don’t feel well.’ If I had only - if I had only -wouldn’t you think that ordinary human kindness would have led me to ask what was the matter? But that’s the way we all are now, sir, everyone so caught up in the pace of life, men on the moon, hydrofoils across the Channel, we don’t look close and see our brother.
Carrie brought the water jug back, treading heavily on the large feet that were never completely clean, since they were bare most of the time or with the thong of a cracked sandal hanging between the toes, like everybody else. She had let her hair grow, like everybody else, but it was so thick, with those tight corrugations which used to cause strange ladies to exclaim when she was little, that it would not hang in curtains, like everybody else. It stuck out all round her shoulders in a sort of pyramid, and with her heavy face and large bumpy nose, people thought she was a boy. She hung weights on the ends of it. She ironed it into a dry frizz, burnt hair stopping up the steam holes on Gretchen’s iron, then chopped it off quite short and someone said, ‘Kinky! My cousin brought one of those Afro wigs back from the States.’ It was now cut completely short, like an American footballer. Carrie’s father, as short-sighted as she was, might have difficulty identifying her. Her mother would not be able to come, if the pigs were farrowing.
She poured a glass of water and sat down amid the fusty chaos of Gretchen’s bed. Unfair to die in here? But if she was in her own room, Gretchen might not come in for a long time. Carrie hated anyone in her room. At home, she locked the door whether she was in or out of it. Here at the flat, she had only agreed to share the rent if she could have the inner room.
When Gretchen came back, she might have Teddo with her, if she was not at the restaurant. Her globular eyes would bulge, stretching the blood vessels. She would stare, her lips dropping away from her outsize teeth. A scream. ‘Carrie - oh my God!’ Carrie’s life meant nothing to her. Carrie dead would be another thing.
‘Don’t look, Gretch. Don’t touch her.’
Teddo would not look or touch either. He would probably run shrieking from the building, and Gretchen could begin to give interviews. Carrie was doing her that favour, at least, but she would only be a supporting player. Carrie would be the star.
She sat for a while, swirling the water round in the glass and sighing. This seemed to need a lot of oxygen. The telephone was on the floor under the bed. With her feet flat on the floor and her knees apart, Carrie bent down like an old woman and dragged it out. She listened to the dialling tone as if it were telling her something.
Sorry to be so long, her mother would say. I was in with the baby chicks. What is it - what? I don’t understand. What do you mean, Caroline, what do you mean - fail? But I don’t understand, you’ve always been able to work at your books.
Carrie put down the telephone and stood up, went to the window and drew the curtains. She went into her own room and pulled the lopsided blind as far down as it would reach. In the front room, she pressed the catch on the lock so that Gretchen’s key would not turn it, sat down, got up again and released the catch, then wandered about the room, touching things, running her hand along flat surfaces, the table, the fretted shelf above the tiny Victorian grate, the top of the bookcase, ‘environmental surfaces’, as it said in Orientation of the Child’s Visual Experience.
The feel of the room meant nothing. It had no power over her. The flat was just an ugly place where she had been unhappy, more unhappy than in the dormitory building, since she was more alone. At the dormitory, she could walk among the people in the halls and downstairs rooms quite briskly, as if she were going somewhere.
She took the bottle from the pocket of her pyjama jacket, and read the label for the hundredth time, with one eye shut. ‘Be careful.’ the doctor had said, but she had not taken any of the pills. If she could sleep, there would be no excuse for failing. If she got another pair of National Health glasses, there would be no excuse for the print to swim before her aching eyes. Staring at words without seeing them, prowling round her room in the night, smoking, weeping, once she had opened the window and sat on the sill, her thick bare legs dangling over the Mortons’ coal shed. When she slept, she could not rouse herself. She missed morning lectures, hiding in her bed. Her mole eyes were drawn back into their lairs. Bruised shadows marked her puffy skin. That girl is ill.
She put the bottle on the table beside the glass of water. Still life. Something was missing. If she could call up to Mrs Mason - bring someone in from the street to stand in the doorway like cab-drivers conscripted into a wedding - ‘I’m going to kill myself. Will you watch me?’
Mummy! Mummy! Watch me, I’m going to dive!
Yes dear, I see you.
Back at the window, Carrie opened the curtains and thrust her blank face against the glass. A woman pushing a baby smothered in groceries. A man with a briefcase. Running children, squinting at the sun. Cars, bicycles. Two half-empty buses, torsos staring straight ahead, newspapers up. They would read it in tomorrow’s. Except there would be no tomorrow. She could stop the whole thing, blot it out. No me, no world.
Turning from the window, she peered into an endless succession of tomorrows, mirrors within mirrors, empty of hope. She dropped to the floor and crouched by Gretchen’s bed. She was as cold as if her blood had stopped running. At this hollow core of loneliness, she was abandoned even by herself.
The torn telephone book was under the bed with shoes, an apple core, a cigarette packet. She could not see numbers.
‘Operator - those people -1 want the Samaritans.’
One ring. A click. �
��Samaritans - can I help you?’ She banged down the receiver. He can’t change it. It’s nothing to do with him.
What would he have said? Would he use the doctor’s word, neurotic? Would he say, like her father, ‘Go out and get some friends’, as if they were to be had in shops?
She tried again, listened to the man’s deep patient voice for half a minute, then hung up quietly. Nothing was changed. There was no way of changing anything.
She put the telephone on to the bed among the disordered sheets and the purple shawl that Gretchen had found in a street market. She knelt up to reach the bottle from the table and shook out all the pills into her cupped hand. One by one? All at once? The pills were very difficult to swallow. She took four and put the rest back in the bottle, then she sat on the floor, leaning against the bed, and pulled down the shawl to wrap round herself like a shroud.
‘Next time it rings,’ Paul said, ‘you answer it, Sarah. They may have rung off because they want to talk to a woman.’
‘I can take it,’ Rachel said.
‘Let Sarah. She’s got to start some time.’
Rachel looked at her doubtfully. ‘I will if you like.’
‘It’s all right,’ Sarah said, but after Rachel had gone out, she told Paul, ‘I’m scared.’
She had talked to many people who came into the reception room. She had talked to regular clients who rang the office telephone number so as to leave the emergency line free. Free for what? The instrument that Paul pushed across the desk to her was a black mystery, charged with the dynamite of the unknown. She stared at it. I can’t—
‘So you’re one of us now,’ David, 520 had said. Sarah, 589. If she were one of them, she must do this, or go away and never come back, and they would give her number, 589, to someone else, and Peter would say, ‘A pity about that girl, I thought she was the type,’ and then no one would say anything, and they would forget her.
‘I hope they ring again,’ Paul said. ‘It’s worrying not to know. It might be a joker, it might be a wrong number, but it’s more likely to be someone whose trouble is too bad to talk about.’
The Listeners Page 25