The Listeners

by Monica Dickens

  ‘You shouldn’t treat the poor boy like that,’ a round woman like suet said. ‘That’s not very nice.’

  ‘Sick to death of it ... always some bloody loony ... have us all inside before we’re done ...’

  Tim stood at the back of the van with the impatient women, listening to Ted without properly hearing. ‘Never you mind, dear,’ the pudding woman said. He did not mind. He liked to ride about the countryside, as he had when he used to drift round the Lincolnshire villages with the subsize vegetables and hyacinth seconds. He liked to earn six pounds a week, and he liked to live at Diddlecot, where he had the room under the roof because he was the shortest, and could go out every night as long as Felicity agreed.

  He did not mind Ted Dace. He was not afraid of him, as he was afraid of Larry, who had a chopper under his mattress and would one night have all their heads.

  Tim told Mary Tolliver. She wagged her large head, which was said to have a plate in it the size of a florin piece, and said, ‘Don’t make up stories, Timmy. I turned that mattress yesterday.’ He told Miss Ogden, the Social Worker, and she made an excuse to come back after Larry had gone out to the pub, and sneaked upstairs like a thief.

  ‘No, Tim.’ She came down shaking her head. ‘You must have dreamed it.’ She looked embarrassed, as if she felt silly to have believed him.

  Mary Tolliver and the old man were always quarrelling. She cooked a lot of mutton stew, because the meat was cheap and she was salting away some of the food money for her old age. The old man did not like mutton stew. He would come into the kitchen in his long underwear when he smelled the onions starting up, and he and Mary would hit each other with anything handy, spoons, the newspaper, a saucepan, a cushion, nothing hard enough to hurt. Thwack! Thud! You could hear them at it all over the little stucco house.

  The old man should not be in Diddlecot, because the Highfield cottages were supposed to be for ex-patients who went out to work and could contribute towards the housekeeping. He had got a job as sweeper in the local box works, and as soon as they moved him into Diddlecot, he had officially retired. He cried if they talked of moving him out, because it would be back to the Gerry ward at Highfield, so Miss Ogden let him stay, with his pension and his foul tobacco and his cat which spent the day on the exact middle of the dining-room table, like a great white icing cake.

  Tim was glad to find him and Mary always in the house, even when Ted Dace went on strike against the farthest farms and they fetched up early at the garage. It was like it must be to have a gran and a grandad nattering about the place and whacking each other and telling him, ‘You young lads don’t know the meaning of a day’s work.’

  Every night after tea, or after washing up, if it was his turn, Tim put on his suit and walked the mile and a half to the road where the nursing home was. He picked a blade of grass and holding it between his hollowed thumbs, blew gently on it like the ghost of an owl.

  Sometimes with no result. The light in Felicity’s back room would be out, which could mean she was working, or watching television downstairs. Sometimes the light was on, but the blind was down and it never moved. Sometimes the blind flew up and she flung up the window and leaned far out, reaching down with her arms as if she were going to hurl herself on to the laundry lines.

  With Tim’s wealth, they could take a bus into the town and have something to eat, or go to the cinema, or go to the Town Hall if there was a dance or a concert on. Tim could not dance. He stood and shuffled in a corner, getting an erection while Felicity pranced and wiggled round him, throwing her body about in extraordinary ways as if her bones were put together backwards.

  Sometimes they walked far out to the other end of the town for sentimental reasons, and tumbled about a bit in the back of the junk car. Once, she made him sit in the front, and compared him unfavourably with the gear lever. After that, he would not go to the old car with her any more.

  Although he had some small power over her at times, when she begged him, ‘Do it, do it, I can’t stand it,’ behind the bushes of the cricket field, or in one of the punts pulled up on the river bank by the boathouse, he usually had to do what Felicity wanted. She was quite changeable. If he wanted to do it, and she didn’t, they didn’t do it. ‘I’ll have you up for assault,’ she hissed, ‘and they’ll put you in the nick, Tim Shaw, and I’ll come and laugh at you through the bars and throw peanuts.’

  Once, when she gave the same excuse three times running, he said, ‘I thought you didn’t see your monthlies,’ and she said, ‘Don’t talk dirty,’ and hit him hard across the face, wearing a sharp ring.

  Being with Felicity was the thing he thought about all day as the mobile shop careened up and down the narrow lanes, or rolled among the new brick Council houses with an eye out for dogs and toddlers. Ted Dace talked about his wife a lot. Her name was Doreen and she was going to have a baby. That was why the stealing and trickery were so bitter, since Ted’s commission could mean the difference between this or that cot mattress, a play pen, a painted swing to hang in the doorway. He was always buying things for the baby. Tim and Felicity agreed that it would be a laugh if it was born dead.

  When a tin of peaches or a half-dozen of the Finnish sardines went missing, Ted would chew on the match and mutter, ‘Child murderers,’ as he drove away. He did not know about the cigarettes that Tim slipped into his pockets for Larry, to keep on his good side, or the sweets he took for Felicity, and the little silver balls she loved to tip into her mouth, pop, pop, pop, catching them on her long tongue.

  All day he thought of her, and the evenings when she would not come out, he sat about the lounge of Diddlecot, biting his nails and kicking the old man’s cat.

  ‘Want a game cards, young Tim?’ Vernon was always pleasant, a plump, fresh-featured young man who worked as a post office sorter and had somehow got the authorities to promise they would never send him back to his mother.

  Tim shook his head.

  ‘Play Old Maid if you like.’

  ‘OK.’ He did not speak much more at Diddlecot than he did in the mobile. He did not need to. Vernon was nice to you whether you talked or not. Gussie never said a word. Larry told dark tales of the injustices of the railway yard, and Mary Tolliver and the old man kept up their cackle and whack all day and half the night if the fit was on them.

  One evening he had hooted for half an hour outside the back of the nursing home before walking the mile and a half home. The next evening, Felicity accused him, ‘Why didn’t you come? I waited and waited, I had my new dress on.’

  ‘That one?’ She was wearing a very short orange skirt, just a square of stuff, with her long skinny legs in patterned stockings, like snakes going up.

  ‘This old thing – you’ve seen it hundreds of times.’

  ‘Where’s the new one then?’ They were in the café, spooning custard ice cream from plastic bowls that had got bent in the dishwasher.

  ‘I gave it to one of the girls.’

  ‘Mad—’

  ‘I didn’t like it.’

  ‘Why d’you buy it then?’

  ‘I didn’t. Somebody gave it to me.”

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘Mrs Laidlaw?’

  ‘Her.’ Felicity laughed, spraying yellow ice at him. ‘She wouldn’t give you the crust off her corns.’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘That old man.’ She bent her head, so that her loose hair fell forward, and looked up at him through it with one glittering eye.

  ‘What old man?’

  ‘Mr Sissons. I told you about him.’

  ‘The one who’s always after you to fetch him in the special food and that?’ Mr Sissons had been put into the nursing home by his children, and he could not stand the food, nor the life, nor the other patients, who urinated into his bottle of lemon squash.

  ‘Mm.’ Her head was still down. The long finger which he liked to suck like a sugar stick traced puddles in the melting ice on the table. ‘He likes me, Mr Sissons. He’s always givi
ng me things. Money sometimes. You get me this, you get me that, Felicity. Felicitations. Felicitous girl. That’s how he talks. Get me some chocolate peppermint creams, he says, Oh Felicitous young lady.’

  ‘That where the cholcolate peps went I give you?’ Tim scraped back his chair.

  Felicity looked up and shook back her hair. ‘Yeth.’ She lisped it. ‘Yeth, Timothy. I’m thorry for poor old Mithter Thithonth.’

  Tim would not talk to her any more. He went home to Diddlecot without seeing her back up the hill to the nursing home. She did not mind. She was laughing and waving as he trudged away.

  On the country road, a car slowed and offered Tim a lift. He shook his head. There was a man and two women in the car, kidnappers all.

  He felt very unhappy for a few days. He fumbled with groceries, spilling a packet of lentils, and dropped a two-pound tin of apricots on Ted’s toe. He would not go out in the evenings. He would not play cards or work at the big communal jigsaw. He would not eat Mary Tolliver’s toad-in-the-hole.

  ‘Why don’t you go and see your young lady?’ Vernon asked. ‘That would cheer you up.’

  Tim shook his head.

  ‘Had a tiff? She a bit tricky, eh?’ Vernon knew a lot for someone who had never been anywhere or done anything or had anything to do with women except his mother, in whose bed he had still slept when he was fourteen.

  ‘Messing about with old men.’ Tim could say things to Vernon that he would not tell even to Paul. Paul was kind and wise and dependable, but he was one of the All Rights. When you felt yourself a human wreck, you needed another human wreck, like Vernon.

  ‘Whore,’ Vernon said. That was not the word the men had taught him to use at Highfield, but he preferred it.

  ‘Kill her,’ Tim muttered. And then, ‘Remember I told you, Vernon, if she messes me up, I’ll shoot myself.’

  ‘Oh, yes, yes, we’ve heard all that before. If you was to shoot yourself every time you said, we could strain the spinach through you.’

  One day when Sarah was sitting by the emergency telephone, hoping that it would not ring and yet that it would, Peter came in to talk.

  He stood by the desk, hitching his trousers out and up, as he still did, although he had given up smoking and regained all the weight he had lost.

  ‘How are things at the bran and carrots shop?’

  Sarah made a face. ‘Some of the complexion creams are going off. It’s the weather.’

  ‘How long are you going to stay there?’

  ‘I don’t think I can stick it much longer. Mrs Wrigley is making bio-chemical pickles in the back store-room. I’m going to look for something else.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like to come down to the Baytree for a bit?’ He said it diffidently, not looking at her, his large hand fiddling with something on the desk. He was a shyconfident mixture, very strong and sure about clients, talking only with difficulty about himself.

  ‘As a maid?’ She would get a blue check gingham dress, no make-up at all, just her brown face and legs and very pale lipstick. Good morning, here’s your tea. It’s a lovely day. Rattling the big curtain rings back to show the morning beyond the promenade, sparkling and fresh before the tourists used it, herself sparkling and healthy because she had been up and about with mops and brushes while the holidaymakers frowsted.

  ‘We need some help in the office. The cook broke her leg, so my wife has to spend most of her time in the kitchen. Can you type?’

  ‘Two fingers.’

  ‘Enough.’

  The office was a small hutch separated from the hall of the Baytree by a partition covered with photographs of guests, and postcards they had sent from other places, saying it was not nearly so nice. On the first morning when Sarah went there early to catch up on the accumulation of letters and bills, everyone who came past the office window stopped to speak to her and ask her name. The staff at the Baytree never changed. Sarah King was a small event on a cold misty day, with a fire at each end of the lounge and nothing to do with the children that would not cost money.

  One of the men who came down the stairs and stopped to speak to her on his way to breakfast was Mr Reynolds, the American in the bar of the Front Royal who had shown her the pictures of his wife and children.

  Remembering that he had told her he must bring his wife to the Baytree, Sarah asked, ‘Is your wife with you?’ She had asked him something like that before, and regretted it before he answered. She regretted it now, knowing, even as she asked it, what he was going to say.

  ‘She couldn’t make it.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘We’ve been taking the kids to Maine the last few years. They made her take them again. Well—’ he smiled, ‘not made, exactly, but she wanted to, I guess.’

  ‘She’s not missing much in weather,’ Sarah said brightly, because he looked glum. ‘Are you having a nice time?’

  ‘It’ll do. I’m hoping a friend may join me at the end of the week.’

  He went into the dining-room. When he came out, he put on a green hat and a short, very British raincoat and went out.

  What did he do all day? He talked very little with the other guests, many of whom knew each other from other years, or became easily friendly, because it was that kind of hotel, with children everywhere, and Peter’s wife roasting beautiful meat, and evening regulars coming in to hear Peter playing the piano in the bar.

  Every morning, Mr Reynolds stopped by the office for a little conversation with Sarah about nothing.

  ‘Why do the British keep talking about the weather?’ he asked, leaning his elbows on the ledge of the window, nothing to do and all day to do it. One day soon he was going to ask Sarah to go out to lunch, she could see it coming.

  ‘You have to say something. If you say something that means anything, people back away.’

  ‘Why say anything then?’

  ‘I don’t know. To sort of – reassure each other? Like making familiar noises to babies and animals. Like Americans asking people where they come from.’

  ‘Where do you come from, Sarah?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nowhere special. You see – that always stumps the English, because why does it matter? It tells you nothing about a person.’

  ‘Nor does the weather.’

  Sarah did go to lunch with Mr Reynolds one day. When she told Brian, and he began to work himself up to object, she said, ‘You don’t have to. He’s a homosexual.’

  ‘He tell you that at lunch?’

  ‘Yes.’ He had told her a lot of things. He told her that his wife had left him. He told her about the boy he had picked up on a New England beach – ‘Two solid miles of queers, Sarah, you’ve never seen anything like it, and me one of them.’ He told her about the friend in London. ‘I don’t know whether to hope he will come here, or hope he won’t. Anne might come back, maybe, if I could lick this thing.’

  ‘Can one?’

  ‘I’ve tried. Then I get a couple of belts in me, and there’s always some kid, some boy…’

  The friend from London did not arrive, although Mr Reynolds continued to tell Peter’s wife every day that he was expecting him. He was quite unhappy. He wandered about on the pier or the seafront with his badly cut hair and his too-thin suit and his air of slight seediness, his slight smell of failure, of not being liked. In an era when ninety-nine per cent of opinion was visual, he had the bad luck, like Carrie, to have a physical presence that was somehow repellent, the shape of a burgundy bottle, the tedious face of a yak.

  His wife did not write to him. No one wrote to him. He showed Sarah some more pictures of his children. He told her they were beautiful and brilliant, although the pictures belied it. Walking part of the way home with her along the hard wet sand, the sea far out, their footsteps spreading and filling, he told her that he had thought of killing himself.

  In the morning at the Baytree, she went through to the flat where Peter and his wife lived.

  ‘I’ve found a client.’

  ‘They’re supposed
to find us.’

  Peter was having breakfast in a rough blue shirt with the top buttons missing, large and bulky in tne small room which was overcrowded with useless gifts from guests which they could not throw away, not remembering who had given what.

  ‘It’s Mr Reynolds.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, as if he knew.

  ‘Do you know about him?’

  ‘Not much. Do you?’

  ‘He needs help. He’s terribly unhappy.’

  ‘So are lots of people. We can’t help anybody unless they ask.’

  ‘He won’t. I told him about the Samaritans, but he jeered, He called it exhibitionism. He told me yesterday he had thought of suicide.’

  Pete went, ‘Mm-hm,’ as he did when he was listening on the telephone.

  ‘Can’t you talk to him?’

  ‘Not unless he talks to me first.’

  Sarah had hardly slept for worrying about Mr Reynolds. She had exhausted Brian by talking about it obsessively. Now Peter only sat there eating a boiled egg that looked too small for him.

  ‘But he said that, he said, “I’ve thought about killing myself.”’

  ‘Try and get him to ring us.’

  ‘I told you, he won’t. Can’t you help him?’

  ‘Look, if we went charging in every time we saw someone unhappy, we’d be accosting half the population of this town. All I can do is try and help you to try and help him.’

  ‘What can I do?’ Sarah said miserably. ‘A middle-aged queer who doesn’t know if he wants to be queer or not, who doesn’t like himself or anyone else—’

  ‘You can like him. You can do that.’

  ‘It’s not enough!’

  ‘It’s all you have. Try and persuade him to look for proper help. Meanwhile, be his friend.’

  ‘I don’t like him,’ Sarah said rather sulkily. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Did you think being a Samaritan was going to be so easy?’

  It was not easy. It was terribly, defeatingly difficult. The harder she tried with Mr Reynolds, the further he withdrew.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ he said, when she found him huddled on the blustery beach among a few children with macintoshes and sou’westers who had been brought to the seaside and by God were going to build sandcastles even if they could hardly keep on their feet.