The Eavesdroppers

by Rosie Chard

  An elderly man leant against the coach, his mouth crinkled like the peel of a dried-up orange. He was mouthing something, drowned out by the drone of the traffic.

  I turned my ear in his direction.

  “Listen,” he wailed. “Will someone listen to me?”

  I stared at the grid of wrinkles on his cheeks, felt phlegm form in my throat, and rushed on.

  Wilson’s office was empty as I drifted by in a coat of nonchalance. I slipped into my office and started an afternoon of fake business.

  “You all right?” said James.

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure you’re alright?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Oh, you know. Stuff.”

  I tidied my desk, James observed me, and then I typed random letters of the alphabet on a blank page. I studied it after, noting that two combinations kept cropping up by themselves: self and skew. Finally, I let myself pause, sat back in my chair and thought of St. Paul’s: the painted ceiling, the painted horse, the purple painted mouth. It had seemed that something was coming straight from the horse’s mouth. I turned the phrase over in my mouth in silence. Straight from the horse’s mouth.

  I flung open my drawer, dragged out some paper, grabbed a pen and started to write.

  VIOLET had never touched his grass before. She waited until the last light went out in the upstairs bedroom then tiptoed across the front garden and lay down against the side of the house. Grass was her mattress, and ivy, crisp with frost, was her pillow. She shivered several times before she relaxed, feeling separated from the world. She looked up. The underside of the eaves was dark against the luminous night sky, but she could see drips of rainwater on the edge of the roof. She wanted one to drop onto her face, a cold drip that had been hanging there, waiting for the moment. But the drop didn’t move; it clung to the eaves. Violet put her hand into her pocket and pulled out her phone. She dialled. She didn’t speak. She listened.

  “Hello? Hello? Hello. . . . Who is this? I know you’re there. I can hear you breathing. . . . For God’s sake! Say who it is or stop calling me. . . . I know you’re there. . . . Bloody coward. I can hear you, you know. I can hear you breathing. I can hear you.”

  CHAPTER

  37

  They were late, all of them. I sat alone in the meeting room, my ears tuned to the direction of the corridor, straining, willing, sifting, but no sound came.

  Fog had shrouded London that morning and during my walk to the Tube I had understood why the word fog always got itself entangled with the word blanket. Muffled birds, muffled cars, muffled conversations, all seemed to be wrapped in wool. I could almost see passers-by pulling stray hairs from their mouths. The office had seemed quieter too and I found myself tiptoeing up to the room upstairs. I’d had to tell Wilson something of course. A ‘final debriefing’ had sounded lame even as it left my mouth, but he seemed to accept it. As I picked up a packet of saccharine and squeezed the granules one by one, I wondered if the eavesdroppers had stood me up, preferring to hatch a mini gunpowder plot, huddled round the table in Stanley’s kitchen.

  “Good morning, Mr. Harcourt.”

  I looked up. And there, yes, right there, in the meeting room with the polished table and broken phone and trolley packed with cups, stood the old man from Lydd.

  “Mr. Watt! You got my letter. I thought you weren’t–”

  “Of course I got your letter.” He moved into the room soundlessly, pulled out a chair and sat down.

  “I’m so glad to see you.”

  His cheeks were shiny, as if painted with a ceramic glaze. “Why? Your letter was rather short on detail.”

  “I. . . .” Simplicity was all I needed. And truth. “I need your help.”

  He didn’t reply. He just stared at my mouth as though I had sworn. “I can’t help you,” he said. “I told you that before.”

  My mind hunted for something to say: words, phrases, sentences . . . anything. When the words finally emerged they were tainted with sulk. “Then why did you come, Mr. Watt?”

  Before he could reply voices began rumbling down the corridor – the sound of assorted sole types on wood. The door opened and five eavesdroppers entered the room, a great tumbling gang.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry, Mr. B.” Stanley was raucous and dribbling and loud, so loud, and flushed in the face. “Shall we shit . . . sit down? So happy to be back!” A faded eavesdropper T-shirt peeped out from the innards of his coat.

  The others followed: Jack in a black jacket, Missy in a tie-dye dress and long hairy cardigan, Eve in a beige coat and white knitted gloves and Violet in a violet suit, entirely violet.

  I glimpsed Watt’s expression as I stood up and ushered them into their chairs. They seemed oddly unfamiliar with the room, unable to decide who should sit beside whom. When they eventually settled, an empty chair remained either side of the old man.

  We sat. We all waited in complete silence. But there is never silence. We knew that. An ambulance siren wailed somewhere far away, still we sat.

  I cleared my throat. “I’d like to introduce Mr. Watt, he’s. . . .” I paused. I was starting a speech I’d had no time to prepare, a great oration, a sweeping explanation that showed them how it was “. . . from Lydd.”

  The eavesdroppers slumped in their seats; Eve absent-mindedly fingered the bruise fading on her face. It looked normal, part of her.

  The old man took a breath, placed his hands on the table and spoke. “You’re probably wondering who I am and why I’m here.”

  I sensed heads nodding out of the corner of my eye.

  “The reason I am here is that I was once like you. I was once an eavesdropper.” He looked round the table: his forefinger lifted slightly as if he was counting something we couldn’t see. “Mr. Harcourt invited me here today.”

  All eyes swivelled in my direction.

  “I haven’t been to London for thirty years,” he continued, “but I felt compelled to come. I know what has happened here. What happened here has happened before. Over seventy years ago in a place called Lydd.” He looked round the table, pausing at each face. “I know you have been suffering. Eavesdropping changes your life. It changes you. I know.”

  Fake silence descended again. Together we listened to someone in the next room drain water from the water cooler, glug, glug, glug, glop.

  “What are we doing here?” asked Jack. “Our project is over.”

  With the onus thrown back so suddenly onto me I almost failed to catch it. “I . . . we. . . .”

  “It’s never over,” said Watt. He began struggling to his feet.

  “You’re not going are you?” I knocked my pen off the desk – loud, so loud.

  “I need to visit the toilet,” he said.

  “Do you need a hand? I. . . .”

  “No, thank you. I’ll finish what I have to say when I get back.”

  “Third on the left,” said Violet.

  As the door closed it was Jack who spoke. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re in . . . trouble,” I said.

  Violet placed her hands on the table in the same way as the old man. Her spans looked big. “Who’s in trouble?”

  “All of us,” someone said.

  Silence. Then more silence. Then even more silence that filled the room and hurt my ears. I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs to speak.

  “Who is that man?” said Eve.

  “Schh! He’s coming back,” whispered Missy.

  Watt entered the room slowly, and resumed his position in the friendless chair at the top of the table. He looked around without expectation.

  “Find it okay?” said Stanley.

  The old man nodded. “I need to tell you a story.”

  We settled into our chairs, remnants of our childhood selves, all except Violet who sat bolt upright and stared straight ahead.

  “I’ve been watching you,” he began. “From the moment the advertisement for eavesdroppers blew into my garden a
nd landed on the grass I’ve been watching you in my mind.”

  Missy’s chair creaked.

  “The original eavesdropper project began at Lydd in 1939. We used sound mirrors–”

  “What are they?” said Stanley.

  The man hesitated. “Sound mirrors were enormous concrete discs designed to listen for the German planes crossing the channel. We were a team. A close group of highly trained listeners and our job was to give warning of impending attack. To save lives. And we did. We saved thousands of lives, But. . . .”

  A pair of heels rubbed together beneath the table.

  “ . . . but . . . these warnings came at a cost. The eavesdroppers suffered . . . how they suffered. Five young, spirited men changed into five . . . five frightened shells of their former selves.”

  A pause inserted itself into the room.

  “One snooped on his wife and lost her, one had a mental breakdown, one gentle soul was blinded in a fight, one gave away national secrets and was court martialled.

  Missy’s hands moved slowly to her cheeks. She held them there.

  “Then finally, one of the eavesdroppers, the best, killed a man.” He looked straight at me. “Jamie was my brother.”

  Brother. All the time the old man had been talking of a brother, shared DNA, shared mother, everything shared. “What . . . happened?” I said.

  “Jamie heard something he shouldn’t have.”

  “What did he hear?”

  “He overheard a man talking about a woman. The man . . . the talking man, he had raped a woman – a woman with red hair and pale blue eyes. Just like my brother’s wife – red hair, pale blue eyes.”

  “And then what happened?” I said.

  “Jamie killed the man. Jamie went to court. Jamie, my brother, was shot by a firing squad.”

  Pure silence – at last. So intense, it was as if the world had halted on its axis. I became aware of the tiniest of sounds, a whoosh, a pulse in my ears.

  “Our project is over,” said Jack.

  “It’s never over,” said the old man again. He glanced in my direction then gripped the sides of his chair and hauled himself to his feet.

  “Are you leaving?” I said.

  He pulled on his coat, walked across to the door and turned. “Yes.I have nothing else to say. Please take this as a warning. Listen to me. Don’t listen any more.”

  I jumped up. “Let me–”

  “No. I won’t let you.” Before anyone could move he walked nimbly though the door and shut it firmly behind him.

  I slumped back in my chair and my ears slowly emptied of sound.

  “Shit,” said Jack.

  I examined the perfect roundness of a coffee ring on the table.

  Stanley sighed. “Of course, we all knew it.”

  “Knew what?” asked Eve quietly.

  “That the listening had got to us.”

  “It didn’t get to me,” Violet said.

  Stanley oozed understanding. “You maybe didn’t know it, Vi, but it did.”

  “What shall we do now?” said Eve.

  I looked at Eve. Silence again – my ears throbbed with the weight of it. I couldn’t meet anyone’s eye: I just stared out of the window and listened – glug, glug, glug, glop.

  Outside 29 Craven Street. London. 5 pm.

  Older woman: Awful.

  Old man: You mean –

  Older woman: Yes, I mean those men. Dead, and killed and . . . and. . . .

  Loud woman: Broken.

  Young man: Who was that man?

  Old man: Dunno. Do you think it was true? What he said?

  Loud woman: I think it was true.

  Young man: Anyone want a cigarette?

  Old man: We don’t smoke.

  Young man: Not even a bit?

  Loud woman: I’ll have one.

  Older woman: You won’t.

  Young woman: She will.

  Old man: He didn’t have to do it.

  Young man: Do what?

  Old man: Blame it on us.

  Young woman: He didn’t blame it on us! He stopped it.

  Young man: Yeah, glad he stopped it.

  Young woman: Yes, I’m so glad he stopped it.

  EVE arrived at the stationer’s. It was empty and she surveyed the shelves at a leisurely pace. No shop within a shop for her. This place was dedicated: a small empire of pens, nibs, inks, watermarked paper and notebooks. It smelt of books. It sounded like a library.

  “Can I help you?”

  Eve looked at the shop assistant’s face, a woman of the grey-eyed type. “Yes. I’m looking for a notebook.”

  “Ah!” The woman’s eyes brightened. “My area of expertise. Come this way.”

  With a feathery wave of her hand the woman swept Eve along to the other side of the shop. “Daily use, special occasions or gift?” she said, as they paused at a shelf.

  “Daily use . . . that is special.”

  “Oh. . . .”

  Eve didn’t want to be mean, but she did want to be precise. She felt no sympathy as she watched the woman struggle for a reply.

  “Well . . . it depends a bit on your budget.”

  “I don’t have a budget.”

  The woman searched her face. “Well. I like this one.” She picked a notebook off the shelf.

  “I like that one too.” Eve took the leather-bound book and sniffed its cover.

  “May I ask what you are going to use it for?” asked the woman.

  “Making a record.”

  “Oh. A record of what might I enquire?”

  “Life.”

  “I see. . . .”

  CHAPTER

  38

  I promise. I promise I won’t. Pale, wide-eyed and sad, every eavesdropper had spouted the easily articulated verb at the end of the meeting. Missy was shocked and tearful – I promise I won’t go to the toilet any more. Stanley was martyrous – I promise not to go to the dentist ever again, and Eve, bruised and buffeted Eve, crossed her heart and hoped to die. Jack had looked me straight in the eye, ‘No. I won’t take notes on the Tube again. I promise.’ I had no need to extract assurances from Violet. She was the only eavesdropper to have kept her listening at a distance, yet her eyes shone with such innocence I felt a reborn bite of worry inside.

  I tried out a promise on my mother - I’ll call you, I will. But when the next day came it was easy, so easy to not. Useless, empty, treacherous word.

  Feeling a new weight in my shoulders I toured every eavesdropper site one more time. The launderette was empty, the dentist’s waiting room contained just two people, a surly receptionist and a fearful-looking teenager, and the toilets beneath the street in Camden Town were locked and bolted and a paper bag being blown down the street bore a curious resemblance to tumbleweed. Finally, I walked back along Whitehall and peered through the gates of Downing Street. The same policeman stared back at me. Same gun at his hip, same gum in his mouth.

  Everything was going to be all right. It was over. Finished. I would be able to lay my head on my pillow and sleep all night. I’d heard the words; I’d seen their lips move. I promise.

  MISSY wasn’t ready for the knock at the door when it came. On a dry day she could hear footsteps from the street, but not that day. The sharp tap forced her right out of her skin. She tiptoed to the window and peeped out. A top of a head was visible. How happy she was to see the top of that head: the comfort of the parting, the pleasure of early hints of baldness. She rushed down the stairs and opened the door. “Mr. Harcourt!”

  “Missy, that was fast. You look . . . happy.”

  “I am . . . happy to see you.”

  “Would you mind if I come inside for a moment.”

  “Of course not, come up.”

  She rushed ahead and opened the door to her flat. This time she was ready.

  “Wow! You’ve had a party!”

  Missy saw admiration in his eyes. “Yes – a bit of a riot.”

  He took off his coat, laid it over the arm of the sofa and sa
t down. “This blue light’s cool.”

  “Yes, isn’t it.”

  His lips formed into a ghastly smile. “We look like aliens,” he said.

  She laughed. “Everything looks different in blue light.”

  He tilted his head. “Everything?”

  “Everything that matters.”

  Mr. Harcourt sat down on the sofa. Missy sat on the chair opposite him and studied his discomfort. “Is everything okay?”

  He sighed. “I just wanted to make sure that you were alright.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well . . . you know.”

  She didn’t know. She did. “I’m fine.”

  He smiled. “Your teeth look blue!”

  “Ha! Yours too.”

  He glanced round the room. “Where do your friends live, Missy? Around here?”

  “My friends . . . oh, all over.”

  Mr. Harcourt looked at her. She wondered how well his eyes focused. He leant forward in a gesture that suggested he might take her hand.

  “There’s nothing wrong with being someone else,” he said.

  She sucked in a silent breath. Her instinct was to deny, summon a loud, ‘You’ve got me all wrong,’ but she couldn’t. She gazed into his face – patient, bloodshot eyes. She thought of the cans of stale beer, the fag ends squashed into ashtrays, the stain on the sofa. She thought of her party shoes, scuffed at the toes. “Will you help me clear up?” she said.

  He smiled a blue smile. “Sure.”

  She opened every kitchen cupboard and scanned the insides. Then she flapped air into a bin bag, stretched its skin over the back of a chair where its large black mouth drooped open, and they set to work. The box of plastic wine glasses dropped willingly out of her hands and the paper plates fitted into the bag as if it had been made for them. Serviettes, novelty ice-cubes, unopened packets of cocktail umbrellas made the bag bulge and she gritted her teeth as she forced the top shut.