by Rosie Chard
I glanced at his ear, expecting to see a state-of-the-art hearing aid, but all I saw were little grey tufts stuffed into a hole. “It had too much jam in it . . .” I said.
He didn’t respond, just fished about in his pocket. He pulled a large handkerchief out of his left pocket and pushed it into the right one. “Your first letter wasn’t very polite,” he said, walking faster.
“Neither was yours,” I replied.
“You didn’t want to listen to me.”
“I didn’t know what I was listening to.”
“That seems to be your problem.”
The man increased his pace; I scurried in his wake.
Living a walker’s life in the more elevated part of London I was used to exercising my legs, but not like this, not pushing against a wardrobe of wind. My companion walked unflinchingly; I panted behind. The edge between the road and pavement dissolved and I saw a caravan park coming into view. I’d always been a bit queasy about towns on the south coast, the accusing glare of seagulls from rooftops, the smell of chips held too long in the pan, and I was feeling increasingly apprehensive, wondering about the small garden gnome perched on the ‘Welcome’ doormat of a nearby house, when the old man took a sharp left through the caravan site’s rickety gates.
“Is this where you live?” I asked.
He paused and turned towards me. “I thought you’d be wiser than this.”
I tried not to display the sulk I fell into and decided to let my magnanimous side shine through. “I thought everyone lived in a caravan round here. Holiday town, and all that.”
“This isn’t a holiday town.”
The man at my side increased his pace – I increased mine – and we walked between the caravans in silence. I couldn’t imagine who lived inside the little tin dwellings. Miniature people with an obsession for satellite dishes, I guessed. As we reached the edge of the site and the man pressed a barbed wire fence down with his foot and gesticulated for me to step over, I began to wonder if this was nothing but a huge practical joke. Or, was he luring me to a quiet death behind the caravans? But a quick look at the tremble in his hand on the wire reassured me of my chances should a fight ensue.
Walking on shingle is hard, and I sorely missed the solid pavements of London at that moment. But my companion had no problem; he marched across the landscape like a long-legged coot, born to lifting his feet high and traversing shifting pebbles. And the crunch, it seemed to echo across the ground, stones rubbing and grinding beneath our soles. As the caravan park dropped behind us we skirted the edge of what looked like a flooded gravel pit. A place good for a murder, I thought again – a slow, horrible death.
Something huge, grey and round was on the horizon. It came slowly into view as we rounded a clump of trees.
“What’s that?” I said, raising my voice above the wind.
“What’s what?”
“The thing beyond those trees, that massive concrete thing.”
He paused and peered into my face. I smelt the acrid aroma of a Fisherman’s Friend on his breath. “You’ve never seen one before?”
One? “No. I’ve no idea what it is.”
“I’ll explain when we get there.”
He set off again; I crunched behind. Had I been a naturalist I would have been distracted by the birdlife that busied itself round us, but with the gloomy back of my companion ahead of me and clouds sagging on the horizon I felt only irritation when a duck quacked, overly loudly I thought, in the murky water beside my heels. What did distract me was the object looming ever closer. As we passed through the trees and stepped onto the thing’s grassy forecourt I realised it was not just a huge lump of concrete but something more elaborate.
“What is that?” I said, craning my neck to catch sight of the top. “That . . . thing?
“Do you see the shape?” said the man.
“A sort of giant ball cut in half, isn’t it?”
“And?”
“C’mon, mate. I’ve come all this way. Just tell me.”
“And . . . ?”
I scanned the object towering above us. “It’s tilted, it’s . . . pointing slightly upwards.”
“Towards what?”
I followed his gaze. The clouds had now regrouped into miserable bulks. “The sea?”
I looked at the side of his face as he continued to gaze skyward. His sideburns reminded me of an old dog I once had, all moulting and grey.
He turned towards me when I was least expecting it. “You know what these objects are doing, don’t you?”
“No.” I pursed my lips. “I don’t.”
He stretched the grid of wrinkles on his cheek. “They’re listening.”
I felt a chill on the back of my neck and turned up my collar. “What is it called, this . . . this . . . ?”
The man looked at me with sadness in his eyes. “Sound mirror,” he said.
The pairing of words puzzled me. Not only was the great beast utterly silent but the disc’s spalled surface bore no resemblance to glass, and unless my skin was now pockmarked with black circles and dusted with cement the object had not the slightest ability to reflect. But mirrors he’d said, and as I turned my mind to this new possibility the old man looked beyond it to a long, curved wall about thirty metres away.
“What’s that . . . wall?” I asked.
“Another mirror. They tried out different shapes. It was an experiment.”
“They . . . ?”
The old man met my eyes, then he started a story. A story of war and listening for war.
“The first mirror was built in the 1920s,” he began. “A time of national fear about the perils of being an island nation close to a fist-shaking neighbour. Back then,” he moved his face closer to mine – more Fisherman’s, more Friends, “after the Second World War finally broke out, listening was about survival. Even the smallest child could recognise the whine of the doodlebug and the growl of a Spitfire as it flew overhead.” He paused to tighten his scarf around his neck. “Night was the worst time. Tension lay in every bed as the sounds of the night were analysed from all angles, then mentally ticked off as safe. But the limit of human ears can only stretch so far.” He paused.
“So . . . ?”
“So the government built massive concrete ears at key locations on the coast.”
“And . . . ?”
“If you stop interrupting me, I’ll tell you.”
I listened. The wartime adjectives and dabs of emotion in his voice made his words hard to follow, but I was soon taken back so many decades that I could almost smell the cordite in the air and hear hands rubbing together in the cold.
“Every single night a team of shivering listeners had to operate the mirrors,” he said. “Their numb backsides perched on stools, special stethoscopes in their ears, listening for what was coming. And something was coming. The German army was massing just across the English Channel, packing the planes with bombs, turning the planes in the direction of England.”
“How do you know all this?” I said.
He looked disconcerted for the first time and stared at my face, stared but did not blink. “I was there, Mr. Harcourt. I was one of the listeners.”
I struggled to hold his gaze. “Mr. Watt. Why did you bring me here?”
He blinked. “I needed to tell you what happened. I needed to warn you.”
“What did happen?” I hardly wanted the answer.
“Let’s get some shelter from this wind,” he said, gesticulating for me to follow him to the leeward side of the mirror. Silence engulfed us the moment we turned the corner.
The old man took his handkerchief out of his right pocket, and then stuffed it into his left. Then he leant against the mirror. “There were five eavesdroppers on this site,” he said. “I was their leader. We worked in shifts, took it in turns to listen. The lads were excited at first. More than excited, proud. We were proud to be part of something so important, something so . . . ingenious. These mirrors, they were brilliant. Born of b
rilliant minds. Before the mirrors, before radar was invented, we were ignorant of the movements of enemy aircraft, until they were right upon us.”
“I understand,” I said. “But what has all this got to do with me?”
The old man wet his upper lip with his tongue; a small intake of breath dried it. “Mr. Harcourt, listening is exhausting. It’s draining. Eventually it starts to do something to a person.”
“What does it do?” Butterflies were opening wings inside my stomach.
“Too much listening starts to change a person.”
The wings were moving. “In what way?”
“It can affect your mind . . . your character.”
“Your character? You mean like your personality?”
“Yes. This wasn’t casual eavesdropping. These men weren’t sitting in cafes listening to people talk about the weather. They were listening for warplanes loaded with bombs. Can you imagine what that was like?”
“No . . . I can’t imagine.”
The wind crept round our side of the mirror and ruffled the old man’s hair.
“We didn’t notice anything at first,” he continued. “War makes everyone a bit strange. People aren’t themselves. When people live in constant fear they are often out of sorts. But straining to hear something important, hour after hour, day after day, gets to you. The other senses – sight, taste, – fade a little, but the ears, they get stronger. The ears more than hear. They actively listen – without being told to.”
I heard a skylark cry out, high above us. Always heard, never seen. “Please continue,” I said.
“The mirrors began to take their toll on the listeners. There was so much pressure. Pressure to hear the planes coming. Pressure to know precisely where they were.”
“I don’t mean to be rude, but again, what has all this got to do with me? Now.”
“I’m about to tell you.” His eyes were unforgiving. “Jimmy was the first to go. The youngest listener was the first to change. Jimmy started to close his eyes when he spoke to you. Closed eyes and a slight nod of his head. Said it sharpened his hearing. We didn’t mind, just one of the wartime tics common in young recruits, but then he started listening to his wife. He followed her and listened, always listening, behind the door, an ear at the keyhole. Every time she answered the phone he was there, lurking in the corridor. She left him in the end. She didn’t tell him to his face. She wrote him a note. He told me.”
“What’d it say?” I could have bitten my tongue off.
His lips seem to have trouble shaping the words. “‘I don’t love you any more.’”
The breeze took up our conversation, humming across the face of the mirror. It slapped a leaf onto the base; it sighed.
“And the others?” I asked.
The man’s cheek twitched. “Charlie went mad. Completely bonkers. He thought everyone was listening to him. He suspected his best friend. He suspected his mother. He even suspected me. Finally, they put him in a mental hospital. That was easily done in those days. Someone signs a piece of paper and you’re rocking on your heels for the rest of your life.”
I wanted to say something.
The man continued. “We didn’t notice Malcolm at first. It was slow . . . so slow, so subtle. Such a quiet, gentle lad, he wouldn’t say boo to a goose. But ever so slowly, he took the listening into his other life. His private life. And he didn’t just listen. He had to get involved. The listener spoke back.”
My heart chugged up a gear. “What do you mean?”
“No one likes an eavesdropper.”
“So you mean . . . ?”
“Yes. He got caught. He had to say his bit. Got into an argument, a scrap with a man with a temper and a knife. His retinas sliced clean off.”
I flinched as the wind wiped my eyes. “And . . . ?”
“He lost his sight. Listening was all he had left.”
“Is that . . . everyone?”
“Almost. There was Trevor.”
“What . . . happened to him?”
“Prison.”
“What for?”
“I can’t give you the details, but all I can say is careless talk costs lives.”
The phrase was vaguely familiar. “Do you mean–?”
“I can’t tell you. It’s classified.”
‘Still? It’s been over . . . what . . . seventy years–”
“I can’t tell you.”
I looked at his gridded skin. His face seemed gentler than earlier. “What about you?”
“Me?”
“Yes. Did you survive the listening?”
He seemed to notice something on the wind. Then he spoke slowly. “I was their leader. I saw what was happening, but I left it too late, Mr. Harcourt. You are the leader now. You can stop this project. I know it’s not about war, but all eavesdropping is potentially dangerous. You can stop the project, before it’s too late. It’s all up to you.”
The train back to London was empty. I was glad. Not only did I get a window seat and a table to myself, but I also had a chance to sift through the events of the last couple of hours inside a peaceful head. Mr. Watt had said a lot. His story was sad. I wasn’t such a heartless bastard that I hadn’t been moved by it, but it was history. London had reached the twenty-first century. Ears were different back then.
I hadn’t felt the need to mention my eavesdroppers to the old man. I didn’t feel like another lecture. But back in the train I began to wonder. Wonder and doubt.
As the train crawled into the shadows of Clapham Junction I went through each listener in my head: Violet fine, Stanley, too many fillings but fine, Missy fine, Jack fine. Only Eve had brushed up against any real problem and that had been sorted out. A change of launderette, a change of scene, all it needed.
I looked out of the window. I tried to count the trees rushing by 1, 2, 3, 4 . . . 1, 2, 3, 4 . . .
I thought of the wartime eavesdroppers – 1, 2, 3, 4 . . .
VIOLET didn’t like the notebook Bill Harcourt had given her. The beige cover, rather than allowing her to merge into the background, made her stick out in a crowd. What woman of her status, and more importantly style, would be seen dead with such an inelegant piece of stationary? Women of her calibre should be resting their delicate wrists on pink notebooks with gold-edged pages with silky ribbon bookmarks. And such a specimen now rested on the table in front of her. But even this new addition to her eavesdropping arsenal, bought in a velvet-smelling stationers’ on Charing Cross Road, was hidden by her laptop, the proper tool of professional researchers, and any writing with a pencil had to be done awkwardly, quickly and with the minimum of fuss. But in a spirit of fastidiousness she noted down every single thing she heard and the book was now half full.
It had been a slow morning. There weren’t that many people in the cafe and she had to move table twice in order to be in earshot of anything that was coming out of people’s mouths. The first couple she listened to appeared to have run out of things to say to each other, their half hour in the cafe marked by nothing more than a cursory, ‘D’ya want a bun with your tea?’ followed by an even glummer, ‘Nah.’ The second table provided even less ear fodder as all three occupants sent text messages to friends elsewhere and Violet was so engrossed in re-reading her notes from the previous day that she didn’t notice the table behind her had become occupied, until someone spoke.
“You won’t want to make that client list. It’s tedious work,” said a man.
A man. Not any man, but the man she’d heard the previous day. The one with the delicious voice.
“But I like tedious work,” the woman replied. “Interesting work is overrated.”
“Don’t be silly, you need to go for something more gutsy.”
Violet heard air blown down a nose.
“What do you want?” said the woman.
“A coffee, but we need to hurry. I don’t have much time.”
“I’ll fetch it, that waitress is texting.”
“Okay.”
Violet watched the woman’s back as she walked across the room: pink sweater, black skirt, flabby bottom. Fear of being caught staring forced Violet’s gaze back to her notebook and she thought of the clothes on her own back. Her ensemble had been carefully chosen early that morning; soft grey trousers, mustard sweater and a necklace made of big black beads, which matched her earrings – little jades that caught the light if she turned her head. But gutsy? Did anything she was wearing show her strong side? Did any of her clothes say – no, shout – ‘I don’t give a damn?’
She was alone with him, in their own private space, yet still she didn’t look. She wanted to look; she didn’t want to look. She closed her eyes and tried to filter his breathing from the other sounds in the room. But her concentration was broken as the woman returned; chair legs scraped the floor; a backside slapped onto a seat.
“This coffee’s lukewarm,” said the woman.
“Send it back.”
“I don’t like to.”
Violet would have sent it back. Oh, yes. She would have had that little waitress running to their table before she’d had a chance to settle back down behind the cappuccino machine.
“Anyway . . . ”
Violet held her breath; he was speaking. His voice was beautiful – so smooth and beautiful. He must be an actor. She turned her face to the wall, closed her eyes and listened. Plunged behind the black of her eyelids, a sensuous pleasure enveloped her. The words became sounds stripped of meaning, just vibrations and air and a hidden rhythm going up and down, up and down, up and finally down. But would she look? No, she wouldn’t. She wanted only his sound. She squeezed her eyes shut and waited.
“You could come to my house tomorrow and we could go over the list.”
“Won’t your wife be there?”
“No, she’ll be out. Number twenty-seven. Suit you?”
“Okay. Lexington St., right?”
“Yes, it’s the house on the corner, the one with the big tree outside which looks like it’s about to fall over.”
“I’ll be there.”
Behind a cupped hand, Violet wrote fast.