Listening in the Dusk

by Celia Fremlin

  It had been a wonderful place for children, for anyone, really, but not many people came, because the rutted tracks that led to it were almost impossible for cars. But to Mary and Julian it had been a sort of Paradise during their growing years. A short cycle ride from their home in Medley Green, it was their favourite haunt during school holidays, for it had everything. It was part of an unspoiled stretch of the Downs from which, on a clear day, you could see away and away across the rolling green distances to the glitter of the sea itself. Being up there felt not merely like being on top of the world, it felt like owning it, as a God might own it. She remembered how they’d talked about this, she and Julian (about twelve and ten they must have been) as they stood on the summit one noonday, the sun blazing down and the breeze of the high hills blowing about their heads. In her class at school, a few days back, they’d been doing the Temptation in the Wilderness for a Scripture lesson, and the teacher had been trying to impress the children with the hugeness of temptation that Jesus had faced.

  “Just fancy. He was promised the whole world if he did what the Devil said! The whole world, just imagine it,” she urged the children. “Just imagine owning the whole world!”

  The words had come back to her as she stood amid the golden gorse and golden sunshine at the topmost point of Flittermouse Hill, and she was puzzled. In what sense don’t I own it? she wondered. Here it is. Here I am, seeing it, knowing it, being right in the centre of it, as far as I can see. How is this not owning it? How can owning it be a temptation, when you’ve already got it?

  She put the problem to Julian. He loved philosophical problems, even at that age. He thought about it gravely, his fairish hair blown about by the wind, and his eyes scouring the blue distances wherein the problem had its being.

  “It must have been different for Jesus,” he said at last. “I don’t think He bothered about things being beautiful. Look at the way He blasted that tree. I’m glad He’s not alive now.”

  This was blasphemy. Mary shuddered in delighted awe, as she often did at Julian’s more outlandish thoughts. She wondered what her Scripture teacher would have said if she had heard him?

  “Oh, but Julian, do you think one should …?” she began; but already his thoughts were elsewhere, his small wiry body suddenly taut and braced for challenge:

  “C’mon, Midge! Race you!” he cried; and they were off. He never did succeed in racing her during these early years, his legs were too much shorter than hers; but likewise he never gave up the hope that, this time, he just might. She heard his breath, gasping with determination, close behind her as she ran: in and out among the clumps of gorse, scrambling through thick bracken, and landing up at the entrance to one of the caves which were a feature of these upper slopes. Mary (or Midge as she was then) had often, when she was younger, wanted to continue their games inside one or other of the caves, turning it into a wizard’s castle, or a pirates’ hide-away or something, but Julian would not allow it. It would disturb the bats, he said. This was their bedroom, he explained, where they rested all day ready for their night’s hunting, and it would upset them terribly to have pirates and wizards and things charging in and out while they were trying to sleep. Mary had acquiesced, as she nearly always did to Julian’s pronouncements. Although he was nearly two years younger, he always seemed to know more than she did about almost everything; it was this, maybe, that made them such close companions all through the years of their childhood. The age-gap seemed to be nil; it was almost as if they were twins.

  Julian’s fascination with the bats, and their near-miraculous way of life, had grown and grown; but it was not until they were both in their teens that their parents had allowed them to stay out on the hillside late enough for successful bat-watching; and even then, it still provoked a good deal of parental unease.

  “There might be nasty men …” their mother had anxiously speculated, not realising (for how could she?) how ironic were these fears, in view of what was to come.

  By the time they were, what? Fourteen? Fifteen? the ban had been lifted, albeit reluctantly, and they would set off to Flittermouse Hill on their bicycles in the late afternoon — sometimes with sandwiches, sometimes with just a bar of chocolate — and settle themselves outside the caves, at a fair distance from the openings in accordance with Julian’s assessment of the bats’ peace of mind as they made their exit. There they would lie, sometimes talking, sometimes in silence, waiting for the sun to go down and for evening to spread over the hill. The air would be shimmering still with late-afternoon heat when they arrived, and Mary recalled the peace of it, the solitude, and the feel of the hot, blissful turf against her bare legs as she and Julian flopped down, breathless after their cycle ride followed by the long, up-hill scramble through gorse and bracken to reach their chosen eyrie.

  Often, as they lay there side by side on the dry, sun-baked grass, waiting for dusk to fall, Julian would start telling her about bats. Each time, he would have learned something new about them, something fascinating, and almost incredible. That they steered themselves not by sight, but by echo-location, was of course one of the first things that Mary learned; and although much of what he told her during subsequent sessions was beyond her grasp, it still held a magic for her which did not depend on understanding. About reflected sound, for example, radiating away from the object in an expanding spherical wave-front; and how the volume of the sound decays according to the square of the distance from the object, so that by the time the echo of his own voice comes back to him, the bat, like a tiny mathematician, can calculate from the loudness or softness of it how far away the object must have been.

  And as time went on, with practice, she did begin to understand more and more of what he told her; and fascinating it was, sometimes almost beyond belief. How, at cruising speed, they emit sounds at the rate of ten per second, rising to two hundred per second when they are closing in on their prey, a moth, maybe, or some other night-flying insect. And how their voices are high-pitched far beyond the range of human ears because the very short wave-lengths of very high-pitched sounds are necessary for conveying accurate information about very tiny objects at varying distances. These tiny objects have to be located, and then relocated, in fractions of a second, because they are fast-moving, as insects always are …

  “You can’t really imagine it, Midge,” he said, his voice half-choked with the effort of trying to convey to her something quite beyond her — or anyone else’s — experience. “You see, most of the noises they make are so far beyond the range of our hearing that they are higher than the highest note anyone can possibly imagine,” he told her. “And that’s jolly lucky, in a way,” he added, “because as well as being so high, they are also incredibly loud. They have to be, for the echo to come back strong enough. They are actually shouting and yelling at this high-frequency. If we could hear them, we’d be almost deafened. No one would be able to sleep through it, even with their windows shut!”

  Thus would he talk, and tell her things; and thus would she lie listening, in absolute contentment, and occasionally asking a question, while above them the blue of the sky grew pale and paler, changing to the green and lemon of sunset, and then to the slow, encroaching violet of the coming night. And presently his voice would cease, and with one accord they would fall silent, or almost silent. “Venus!” one of them might whisper as the silvery point of light first flickered into visibility in the western sky; or, “Look, a new moon!” as the pale, gleaming thread of a crescent first detached itself from the pale gleaming background of the dying light.

  But that was all; for by now it was necessary to be absolutely quiet. The time had arrived for the coming of the bats.

  Rarely did they manage to observe them actually emerging from the mouth of a cave. They came out for their night’s hunting intermittently, it seemed, in ones and twos, not at all in the spectacular dark mass, like starlings, that Mary had at first envisaged. The first they saw of them, usually, would be a single one, darting in zig-zag flight acro
ss the darkening sky, changing direction at angles as sharp and clear as a diagram in a geometry text-book. And then there would be another … and another … flashing this way and that across the sky like dark lightning. More and more of them would come, until the sky was alive with them; it was like watching a firework display, all in black, only more amazing, more incomprehensible, than any firework display ever devised by man.

  Sometimes, lying there, Mary fancied that she heard the magically high-pitched cries, as they shouted and yelled across the night sky, but Julian assured her that she couldn’t have. There are some species of bats where you just might, he said, the Rousettus Fruit Bats, for example; but these were Mouse-Eared Bats, and their echo-location system was such that …

  This, of course, was on the way home. They never talked while they were watching the bats, even though the bats almost certainly couldn’t have heard them. Their silence was like the silence of a religious gathering, in a church or a cathedral; to both of them it would have seemed wrong to break it, as though something of the spectacle would have been destroyed by a human voice.

  Sometimes, though, without speaking, they would take a more positive part in the bats’ hunting rituals. They would bring pellets of bread with them, and little dry bits from the cake-tin, and fling them into the air as high as they could, and watch the bats swoop unerringly to snatch each crumb out of the empty sky. It was like watching Wimbledon tennis, only a thousand times swifter and more exact, the same reliance on perfect timing and unerring pace.

  And then home again — later than expected — their mother anxious and waiting, hurrying them into hot baths, and cooking them bacon and eggs at nearly midnight, so thankful was she that they’d arrived home safe, and hadn’t encountered any Nasty Men.

  Chapter 7

  There was a haze gathering over the brightness of the sun now. By afternoon, a fog would have come down, so Alice decided to go out straight away and buy essentials for the weekend. Bread. Coffee. Sausages. A pint of milk, which presumably must have ‘A’ slung around its neck before it joined its down-at-heel companions in Hetty’s fridge. First of all, though, she must go to the Post Office and draw out some money. Luckily — or rather prudently, albeit guiltily — she had brought her Post Office Savings Book with her: an action somewhat at variance with her current self-image of having walked out with nothing, but justifiable (she told herself) on the grounds that the savings therein were indisputably hers, her own earnings, nothing to do with the joint bank account which she was treating as untouchable, a monument to pride and ex-wifely renunciation.

  The shops were near, and pleasantly various, and for a little while she just wandered along, getting the feel of her new neighbourhood, and seeking vaguely for some good and sufficient reason for patronising one rather than another of the supermarkets that seemed to abound in this area. Suddenly catching sight of her meandering self in a large plate-glass window, she stopped and examined the rather sparse window-display, consisting of a yellow chiffon scarf on a pole and two very large, very succulent cacti with spiky leaves. She glanced upwards, and yes, just opposite Tesco’s as she’d been apprised, she read the words “Dorinda’s Hair Fashions” in large gold letters, and lower down, in smaller and merely black letters, a list of the wonderful things that could be done for you within, at a price — or, rather, a whole list of prices — starting with manicure and ending with cold-perm and semi-permanent high-lighting.

  Curiosity mildly aroused, she peered more closely through the glass, and on the other side of a flutter of gauzy curtaining she could just make out the shapes of the Young Ladies employed here (they didn’t have to be young, of course, merely perfect to the last eyelash). In their pink beauty-parlour overalls, they glided back and forth among the shadowy hunks of customers who crouched like untidy bundles of washing under the various machines, a totally different species, one might have supposed, from the glittering lovelies who ministered to them.

  And which of the lovelies, Alice wondered, pressing her face yet closer against the glass, was going to prove to be the redoubtable Miss Dorinda with whom she was destined to share the rather patchy amenities of seventeen Beckford Road? It would be a daunting prospect, the encountering of such elegance, such flawless grooming, on the dark stairways first thing in the morning as you stumbled up from the bathroom in dressing-gown and slippers, hair still a mess.

  Perhaps, though, Miss Dorinda, being the manageress, no longer had to be perfect? Maybe she had by now attained the exalted status of being able to bite her nails, wear woolly cardigans, and leave her hair untinted? Maybe she would right now be sitting over a gas-fire in a cosy cubby-hole somewhere at the back, smoking a cigarette, reading a tattered copy of Woman’s Dream, and only emerging when she felt like it to reprove one of those glittering underlings, in a super-posh accent, for some small neglect of one of those hunched-up shapes who paid the money that kept the whole thing going …?

  At this point in her speculations, Alice became aware of one of the pink shapes gliding purposefully in her direction, and realising suddenly that her rudely staring face must be clearly visible from inside, she backed hastily away and moved on along the pavement, praying that it wasn’t Miss Dorinda herself who had spotted her unmannerly curiosity. Not that the lady would know who Alice was, of course; probably didn’t even know of her existence yet, so no harm had been done. Putting the little incident from her mind, Alice took her list from her handbag and applied herself seriously to her shopping.

  By the time she got back to Beckford Road, the sun was quite gone, and the damp misty air was fast thickening into fog. She stood on the top step, her plastic carrier-bags strewn around her feet, while she struggled with the key Hetty had supplied her with, trying to make it open the door. Was it the wrong key? Hetty had fished it out of her sewing-basket with great aplomb last night, but of course keys that find their way to the bottom of sewing-baskets are bound to be slightly suspect, however encouraging the assurances with which they are handed over.

  Alice gave another twist to the thing, still to no avail. It seemed to go in all right, but after that nothing happened; and by now her right hand, from which she had removed the glove the better to cope with the whole manoeuvre, was growing numb with cold and clumsy.

  Perhaps it wasn’t the key that was at fault at all? Perhaps the lock was in a mood this morning, like the geyser? Reluctant though she was to be a nuisance on this her first morning in her new home, to which her entitlement was still slightly precarious, Alice gave up and pressed the bell. Which didn’t work either. By now really annoyed, and quite pleased at the idea of being a nuisance, Alice raised the knocker and brought it down with a resounding thump, at which the door burst effortlessly open. It hadn’t been locked at all apparently, merely swollen and stuck with damp. In the whole episode Alice felt herself recognising yet another example of her landlady’s special brand of off-beat logic: it’s all right to give people keys that quite likely won’t work, so long as you also have a front door that quite likely won’t be locked.

  Wisps of fog seemed to follow her indoors as she gathered up her scattered packages and moved into the cluttered hallway. Edging her way past the bicycle, and the awesome array of empties waiting for someone to take them to the bottle-bank, Alice made it to the foot of the stairs, where she became aware of lovely strains of music floating down towards her. One of the Schubert piano sonatas, beautiful! As if she were really entering a concert hall, late and shamefaced, Alice tiptoed up the stairs, clutching her parcels, until she came to the source of the sounds, on the third landing. Here, from behind one of the doors with its dark chipped paint, the music poured out, and Alice stood entranced, quite awed by the performance. Brian it must be, the young musician of whom Hetty had generously declared that she quite liked to hear his tinkle-tonking, it gave the place a bit of life.

  The third movement was starting now, and Alice found herself scarcely conscious any longer of the dark, shabby stairway, of her cold hands or her heavy parce
ls. She was in a kind of dream, totally lost in the music, when she was abruptly and disconcertingly brought to earth by the sound of a door opening behind her. Swivelling round, she found herself confronted for a second time that morning, by the sharp, suspicious gaze of the girl, Mary. The blue eyes, wary and hostile, bored into her own for a moment, and then, without a word, the girl withdrew once more, closing the door quietly behind her.

  At the same moment, the music ceased abruptly, and the door facing Alice burst open, revealing a sturdy, dark young man with horn-rimmed glasses and a mop of very thick black hair, and wearing a heavy fisherman’s jersey and corduroy trousers. But the most noticeable thing about him at the moment was the look of almost comical disappointment that flashed across his face as he caught sight of Alice.

  “Oh!” he exclaimed, in tones of unflattering dismay. “Oh, I thought it was Mary … I thought I heard her door opening …” and then, recovering himself and remembering his manners: “I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ve met before. How do you do? I’m Brian.”

  “How do you do?” responded Alice, taking the proffered hand, noticing that the strong, flexible pianist’s fingers were somewhat inkstained, and also beautifully warm to the touch despite the coldness of the room in which he was working. “I’m Alice,” she continued, “Alice Saunders;” and then, with a little laugh: “I’m sorry I’m not Mary. She was here only a moment ago, though. She’s in her room, if you want her …” and she stepped aside, leaving him space to cross the landing to Mary’s door opposite.

  He made no move to do so. Simply stood where he was, looking as if he had been slapped in the face, though whether by Mary herself, or by the malignant fate which had placed Alice, and not Mary, on this third-floor landing at just this moment, was unclear. In an effort to lighten an obviously fraught moment, Alice changed the subject.