Listening in the Dusk

by Celia Fremlin

  Alice gave up. Huddling most of her clothes back on again, she crawled into the chilly bed, pulled the thin blankets over her, and her winter coat as well. She did not expect to sleep. She lay there clutching the hot-water bottle against her, waiting, with abject resignation, for it to start leaking.

  Chapter 5

  Her eyes opened on the great red ball of the winter sun. Through the small high window it filled the room with rosy light, and she realised to her astonishment that she must have slept solidly the whole night through, a thing that hadn’t happened to her in weeks. And the hot-water bottle hadn’t leaked; it still lay faintly warm against her body where she had been clutching it last night. With a hot-water bottle that didn’t leak, and with the mighty crimson globe of the sun welcoming her back to consciousness, Alice felt herself momentarily filled with new strength, new hope.

  But strength to perform what task? Hope for what sort of a future? These weighty questions, like a pair of over-full suitcases, brought her brief optimism to a standstill. Before they could drag her all the way back into last night’s depression, she resolved to do, one by one, the things you can do anyway, whether you are depressed or not.

  Like getting out of bed. Like going down all those stairs to the bathroom, and then on to the kitchen in the basement.

  *

  The kitchen lay deserted now in the half-light of the winter dawn, and silent too until with a sudden peremptory rattle from the scullery, a large tabby cat appeared and planted itself, with stern expectancy, right in her path, fixing Alice with a gold, unblinking gaze. Evidently, the first person who came down in the morning was expected to do something about the animal.

  But what? There was no telling. “Sorry, Puss, you’ll have to wait for Hetty,” she apologised, and with a vague idea of making herself a cup of coffee, moved in the direction of the cooker.

  A small, agonised sound stopped her in her tracks. Not exactly a ‘miaow’, the situation was too desperate for that; more a sort of tortured hiccup, the last gasp of a soul in torment, and glancing down Alice was confronted by a look of such absolute outrage in those golden eyes that she almost shrank away. Obviously, she was doing the wrong thing. She tried moving in a new direction, and this time, it seemed, she was doing better … getting warmer … warmer, for the creature was now purring on a high, frantic note, coiling and weaving itself about her ankles as she moved.

  The refrigerator. Of course. Led there unerringly by her expert guide, Alice opened the door and peered inside. No fewer than nine bottles of milk confronted her, all of them opened, and most more than half empty. One carried round its neck a sort of paper collar bearing the message ‘HANDS OFF!’ and another, very neat and black, the initials ‘DD’ — Miss Dorinda, presumably, who liked everything to be just so; certainly, she must leave that one alone. A third, looking as if it had seen better days, carried the initials ‘WX’; and the last in the line, more cryptically still, bore the inscription ‘YESTERDAY ONLY’.

  But she couldn’t puzzle over these symbols for long. The single-minded intensity of desire that radiated knee-high from where the cat coiled and writhed in serpentine rapture was too much for her, and grabbing the ‘YESTERDAY’ bottle she rapidly poured half of it into a pie-dish, set it on the floor, and then stood back, contemplating the full glory of her achievement; the creation, single-handed, of absolute contentment, of that peace which passeth all understanding, of a whole tiny universe at harmony with itself, pulsing to the rhythm of a pink, darting tongue.

  She couldn’t find any coffee (she must buy some for herself this morning), and so made do with boiling up some water and adding a spoonful of sugar and a dash of the ‘YESTERDAY ONLY’ milk. A label like that seemed to put it outside the conventional morality of Mine and Thine. It wasn’t bad; it was better than nothing, and carrying it up to her bleak and fireless attic, she sat on the edge of the bed and sipped it slowly, trying, now that it was full daylight, to take in more clearly the extent and nature of her new domain.

  You could look at the room in two ways really. You could see it as so awful that hours and hours of daunting effort — not to mention Herculean physical strength — would be required to make it even half-way habitable. Or, on the other hand, you could see it as so awful that nothing could be done, and therefore nothing need be. You could see yourself sinking into the chaos, as one more item landing up in this graveyard of failed, unwanted, unworkable appliances. You could give up. Go to pieces. Lots of discarded wives do.

  There was, though, a third option. You could walk out. Tell the landlady how sorry you were, how much you would have enjoyed living here, but unfortunately this, that and the other and so forth …

  Thinking on these lines last night, Alice had resolved to leave the final decision till this morning, when she would apply herself to it with a fresh mind and a sheet of paper — well, the back of an old envelope, anyway — setting out in two columns the fors and againsts: “Quiet road, not much traffic; No rent at the moment; No references required; Kindly, easy-going landlady” in one column, and in the other: “Sloppy, incompetent landlady; No heating; Extreme discomfort; No space; No hot water” — that sort of thing. She would work out a points system for all these items, and then add up the totals. Easy.

  She found an old envelope all right. She even found a pencil. But by this time the whole scheme had quietly and imperceptibly become obsolete, for she knew already that she was going to stay. She wasn’t quite sure why, or where the decision had come from, but there it was. In the last few minutes the room had become hers. It was as if a marriage ceremony had been taking place inside her head, and without really noticing it she had said “I will”, and was now confronted (like any bride) with the necessity of making the best of her new acquisition; working out the minimum alterations necessary to render life tolerable.

  Her first problem, she realised, was that she did not know what, if any, were her rights over her new domain. Was she entitled to get rid of anything she wished — and was physically able to carry down to the dustbins — or was her role that of reluctant curator on behalf of shadowy battalions of claimants, past and present? Looking around, it seemed to Alice highly unlikely that anyone in his right mind could possibly be going to claim any of it; but, on the other hand, if Hetty, the rightful householder, had felt hesitant about throwing anything away, then certainly Alice, the interloper, must feel even more hesitant.

  But all the same, things could be stacked up a bit better to give more floor space. Those crates of china or whatever could be pushed further in under the beams, and the bits of rolled-up carpet could go on top of them; and all those cardboard boxes, crammed to overflowing with old journals and newspapers and such, they could be piled one on top of the other to take less space … Within a few minutes, Alice was bent double, pushing and pulling at the heavy, cumbersome things.

  But as she did so, a better idea came to her. Instead of trying to get these boxes stacked up as much out of the way as possible, could she not build them into some useful piece of furniture? A sort of sofa, for example, with its back made of two sets of three boxes piled on top of each other against the wall, and then another three in front to form the seat? Such a seat would be quite a comfortable height — Alice tried it — and quite firm and steady, crammed as most of them were with tight-packed papers.

  Some of them, though, were a bit too crammed, their tattered contents toppling lopsidedly well above the level of the lid; others were only sparsely filled, so that if you tried to sit on them you would sink slowly into a welter of collapsing cardboard. After a brief struggle with her conscience, Alice decided that although she mustn’t throw anything away, she would be within her rights in transferring an armful of this into a vacant space among that, and so rendering the boxes homogeneous enough for her purposes.

  Old colour supplements; antediluvian sets of Lilliputs; newspaper cuttings going back to the News Chronicle, and even the Daily Graphic … the hoarder of all this must surely be in his grave this m
any a year? Yanking from one of the over-full boxes a yellowing armful of Agriculture and Fishery Bulletins, Alice was slightly surprised to come across a set of exercise books — a dozen or more of them — neatly stacked, and looking much more recent than most of the stuff she had come across.

  Someone’s amateur attempt at a novel, it seemed to be. A thriller, presumably, for opening one of the little books at random her eyes fell on a highly-coloured passage describing in fulsome — though probably inaccurate — detail the collapse of some character from a gun-shot wound:

  ‘His fall was like that of an ancient tree, sinking gently to the ground, settling there, without protest, arms outstretched like branches …’

  Not bad, in a way, thought Alice, reverting momentarily to her school-teaching persona. Spelling, grammar, punctuation all beyond reproach, though five out of ten for handwriting would be generous. Sad, really, that the author—someone very young, she felt sure — should have abandoned his task to this limbo. Fed up with it, perhaps? In despair of ever getting it published? At a loss how to end it?

  She flipped through a few more of the volumes, smiling a little. There seemed to be a death, or the aftermath of a death, on almost every page: a very amateur writer, obviously, who had not yet learned that by piling on the thrills you take all the thrill out of them. Here and there, loose among the text, were old newspaper cuttings and magazine pictures, presumably to stir the creative process. One in particular caught Alice’s attention. It was a page from some magazine — a colour supplement, probably — on which was reproduced a photograph of an autumn landscape, a hillside dotted with rowan trees in full glory of scarlet berries, and emerging from behind one of these, with wings outspread, appeared an enormous bat. So enormous, for one mad second one could have taken it for a pterodactyl photographed in full flight. A clever piece of trick photography, of course, a picture of a bat somehow superimposed on the tranquil autumn landscape, and looking at the caption below “Flittermouse Hill in Autumn”, Alice saw that the cleverness had indeed been appreciated; a ten pound prize had been awarded in a Junior Photographic Competition to Julian somebody, aged fourteen, from Medley Green Comprehensive.

  Enough! If she stopped to read and examine every intriguing snippet she might come across, she’d never get anything done at all. Replacing the exercise books, and piling in above them the requisite thickness of National Geographic magazines from a neighbouring pile, Alice gave her attention again to the construction of her sofa. Or divan. Or whatever.

  The basic structure was soon in place. Now, if she could dig out from all that lumber behind the motor bike some of those bits of material she’d noticed — old curtains or something — cretonne it looked like, with a faded, pinky-yellowy pattern …

  Yes, here it was. Crumpled and dusty indeed, but after being properly washed and ironed … Bending lower still under the sloping roof, she tugged at the pieces of material, trying to ease them from under a length of garden trellis, whose projecting slats threatened to catch on the stuff and tear it …

  “Christ!”

  At the suddenness of the exclamation, Alice sprang to her feet, or rather tried to. In fact, she banged her head with considerable violence against the low beam that spanned that part of the roof; and so it was through a whirl of dizzying pain and flashing lights that she first looked at her unexpected visitor. A slight figure — wearing something blueish — standing in the doorway … And as the effects of the blow subsided, and normal vision was restored, Alice found herself able to take in that the visitor was a young girl wearing jeans and a washed-out blouse. Her light brown hair was cropped short, and her eyes, startlingly blue, were darting from object to object in the disordered room. In ordinary circumstances she would have been outstandingly pretty, Alice guessed, but at the moment her face was pinched with outrage.

  “What are you doing?” The girl’s voice was shrill. “What the hell are you doing? And who are you, anyway? What are you looking for?”

  The better to cope with this unexpected onslaught, Alice clambered slowly out from her uncomfortable perch under the low ceiling, circumnavigated as best she could the motor bike handlebars which stuck up like horns, and faced her inquisitor. The pain was beginning to subside now, and she felt more able to hold her own.

  “Doing? Getting my room in order, of course. Trying to … If it comes to that, what are you doing? Barging in like this,” she added for good measure, trying to turn the tables vaguely in her own direction.

  The girl still stared at her accusingly, but some of the shock had subsided from her face.

  “What do you mean, your room!” she asked now. “It can’t be your room, it isn’t anybody’s room, it’s all of us’s. It’s a … Well, it’s where we all dump our stuff. Hetty told us we could. ‘Liberty lumber-room, that’s what that room is’ she told me when I came, and that’s how everyone has always been using it. As you can see. Right back to the year dot. So it can’t be yours.”

  Well, it is mine. I’m renting it, Alice would like to have said, but of course, she wasn’t, not yet. She wasn’t paying anything so far, and that put her at rather a disadvantage in the argument.

  “Well,” she said, “I’m sorry, there seems to be some sort of misunderstanding, we’ll have to talk to Hetty …”

  But the girl seemed now to be hardly listening. Her eyes were travelling round the room anxiously, as if she was trying to make mental notes of everything in it.

  “It’s not fair!” she burst out after a minute. “She might at least have warned me, warned us, I mean …”

  Her protest faltered to an uneasy halt, and Alice broke in hastily, trying to be reassuring.

  “Look,” she said, “I don’t see why we need quarrel about this. This is to be my room, it’s all arranged, but I don’t see that it need affect you. You can go on storing your things here just as long as you like. I’m not trying to throw anything out, I’m just stacking things up neatly so as to give myself a bit of space.” And then, trying to be friendly, she added: “I’m Alice, by the way. You’re Mary, aren’t you?”

  “How do you know? Who told you?”

  The voice was sharp with suspicion, and Alice was momentarily quite thrown. What was the matter with the girl?

  “Why … I suppose … Well, Hetty told me,” she stammered, feeling absurdly apologetic under the impact of that accusing stare. “She was just telling me — you know — about the rest of you who live here. I mean, we’re all going to be sharing the kitchen and everything, and so I suppose …”

  “What else did she tell you?”

  Alice no longer felt apologetic. Annoyance mounted under this ludicrous inquisition.

  “Nothing,” she snapped. “Just that you were Mary, and someone called Brian was Brian, and someone else was Miss Dorinda. I haven’t even met any of these people, and so I don’t see what she could possibly …”

  “No, of course not. I … I’m sorry, Alice,” the girl was half-heartedly trying to make amends for her rudeness. “I’m sorry, but it was kind of a shock finding you up here, and I thought for a moment that Hetty must have …”

  She stopped; then continued, at something of a tangent: “You’ll like Hetty, Alice, she’s as kind as can be, as I expect you’ve discovered. She just loves people with problems. Do you have a problem, Alice? A real, juicy humdinger of a disaster? If so, you’re in! No wonder she’s letting you have the bloody room! You’ll be Landlady’s Pet, and the rest of us will have our noses out of joint, even Brian!”

  She gave a short, hard laugh, and turned to leave the room; then paused, and turning back continued, more gently: “I’m sorry, Alice, don’t take too much notice of me, I’m in a bad mood. I shouldn’t be saying nasty things about poor Hetty, she really is terribly good natured. It’s just that … Well, it’s not so much that she pokes her nose into other people’s business, it’s that she takes for granted that everything is her business. She’s a marvellous person if you ever need help with your troubles, but a right pain in
the neck if you don’t!”

  With which double-edged tribute Mary whisked around and clattered off down the wooden stairs. Alice heard a door on the third-floor landing slam shut, and then there was silence; broken only by a faint gurgle of water-pipes from somewhere across the landing. By now, it seemed like the voice of an old friend.

  Chapter 6

  The gurgle of the water-pipes was in Mary’s ears, too, as she lay face-down on her bed, cursing herself for being every kind of a fool.

  She had made another enemy. No, enemy was an exaggeration; all she had done, actually, was to discourage a possible friend, to slap down Alice’s kindly overtures before they became any kind of a threat.

  Why did she keep doing this? With everyone? Surely she, with her star record as a psychology student, should be able to analyse it? Should have sufficient insight to diagnose her own case and suggest a cure?

  The diagnosis was easy; but all the psychology textbooks in the world weren’t going to come up with a cure. Advice on how to win friends — in books, articles and Agony Columns — must run into millions and millions of words by now, but of what use are all these words when, in your particular case, friends are more dangerous than enemies? When kindness, concern and sympathy present a bigger threat than the most virulent hostility?

  The fog was thickening outside her window, and she was getting cold, very cold. She did not bother to go across the room and switch on her electric fire; only one bar of it was working, and it made scarcely any difference to this big draughty room with its ill-fitting door and windows. Instead, she slipped off her shoes and crawled back into the bed, properly under the bedclothes this time, and with the shabby eiderdown pulled up to her chin. This way, with her eyes closed, and with the slow build-up of warmth generated by her own body inside its cocoon of bedclothes, she would be able to withdraw from the wintry chill of this room, this house, this street, and travel back, back to the place where it was always summer, and the soft, sweet air was always warm. Flittermouse Hill.