Listening in the Dusk

by Celia Fremlin

  Alice got the point, and together they set off up the stairs. On the third landing Brian retreated tactfully into his room, leaving Alice alone outside Mary’s door.

  A minute later she rejoined him, shaking her head.

  “Her door’s wedged on the inside again,” she reported. “And there’s no light under it. But at least it means she must be there. I mean, wedging her door — she’s always doing that, isn’t she? It doesn’t mean anything’s wrong.”

  So there’s nothing to worry about, Alice would like to have added, but it wouldn’t have been true. There was something to worry about. She knew it, and so did Brian.

  He was having trouble with his voice. His habitual, jokey style had collided head-on with something beyond its scope.

  “Why the hell can’t she tell me!” he burst out at last, in a sort of whispered shout. “She knows how I care about her, she must know. I could help her, I know I could. Whatever it is, I’d fix it for her … I’d go to the ends of the earth … I’d fight whoever it is … Little bloody yellow dwarfs, the lot! If only she’d tell me! Oh, Alice, she’s in some dreadful trouble, I know she is. How can I find out …? She’s so cold, so distant, it’s like I’m her worst enemy … Why? Why?”

  “Me too. She’s like that with all of us, not just you,” Alice pointed out reassuringly, aware even while she spoke of how totally non-reassuring the fact actually was. Then, on a sudden impulse: “Look,” she said. “We’ve got to get to know her better. In general, I mean; not delving into her secrets whatever they are. Bring her into things; get her to join in a bit of harmless fun sometimes. There’s not much you can do, Brian, the way things are between you, it’d be misinterpreted. But why don’t I give a little party? Up in my room, for the whole household? A sort of attic-warming? Now that we’ve finished painting the motor bike — I did the gold this afternoon, you know, you haven’t seen it yet, it looks kind of splendid with the dark blue spokes. We’ll have candles instead of that awful glaring light, and I’ll bring in some pork pies and some beer —”

  “I’ll bring the beer!” exclaimed Brian, his spirits miraculously reviving at the prospect of some action. “And Hetty can bring up the rest of that long-life bacon joint she’s been on at us to finish, it can go out in a blaze of glory. That’s a super idea, Alice. But we must make sure Mary knows it’s a party, not any kind of a tête-à-tête, which would frighten her off, I’m sure. Let’s get out some invitation cards and push them under everyone’s door, JUNK ROOM GALA NIGHT — something like that? With a picture of a motor bike sitting in an armchair holding a beer-glass in one handle-bar and a pork pie in the other. Look — I’ll show you. Pass me that old envelope. No, the big one …”

  Chapter 12

  The danger seemed to be over, for the time being. All the same, Mary lingered just inside her door to make sure that her barricade was securely in position under the handle; then she tiptoed warily back to the bed on which she spent so many of the long days, and even longer nights.

  Just as if she was ill.

  Well, a shock is an illness, of a sort, especially a bad shock like the one she’d had this afternoon. It would have been a shock to anyone, however normal. A man, a perfectly strange man marching into one’s room as if he had a right to do so. For a moment, she’d thought he was a plain-clothes policeman; and then, even more terrifyingly, that he wasn’t, that he must be bent on darker business. It had happened at last! She’d been sussed out, hunted down, finally cornered, in spite of all her desperate precautions …

  What a fool he must have thought her! Standing in the doorway, blocking his path, choking and stammering, bracing herself to lie and lie, to fend off his questions with one fabrication after another — when all he wanted, actually, was to find Alice! He’d mistaken the room … Was full of apologies for intruding …

  Her relief at finding that the visitor wasn’t for her at all had been so overwhelming that she’d been barely able to speak; had simply waved him on up the further flight of stairs, and then slammed the door in his face. Well, that was what it amounted to. And then she had listened, as she always seemed to be listening; had heard him stumbling about up there, first into the cistern loft, and then, yes, she heard him cross the bare boards of that attic landing towards Alice’s room. This time, he’d knocked — presumably having learned his lesson — and then had knocked again; but whether Alice was out, or simply not answering the door, of course she could not tell.

  And here it suddenly occurred to Mary that maybe the man’s visit was giving Alice just as big a fright as Mary herself had suffered! Well, and serve her right too! And really, it was quite likely. It seemed obvious, by now, that this new lodger had something to hide. Why else would a well-heeled, well-educated woman, barely middle-aged, be fetching up in a dump like this?

  But what was she hiding? This was what concerned Mary. The irrational conviction that it must be something that had to do with herself once more took over, obliterating any sensible weighing-up of probabilities. In her over-stretched imagination, the scenario grew more and more horribly clear the more she allowed herself to dwell on it. It went like this: the strange man had tried Mary’s door first not because he’d made a mistake, as he’d alleged, but because he’d wanted to make sure that she was indeed living here, before going on upstairs to discuss with Alice their next move. They were in league together, the two of them, of course they were. Alice had been planted here as a spy to watch over Mary’s movements, to note her comings and goings, to record her every careless word. And above all, to search for the thing hidden in the attic. On the pretext of “arranging the room”, this Alice woman had given herself an excuse for searching every nook and cranny. She would find it in the end. She was bound to. Had she, indeed, already found it? Was that why she had sent for this man, her fellow-conspirator, to share the revelation? Were they, at this very moment, staring wild-eyed at the dreadful secret …?

  The absolute silence from above had been hardly in keeping with this scenario. Nor, come to that, were the footsteps — the stranger’s footsteps — tramping heavily down the stairs barely five minutes later, right past Mary’s door without a break in their rhythm, on and on, down and down, until the slam of the front door betokened final departure.

  Lying on her bed with eyes tight closed against the outside world, Mary weighed up all these bits of data and could see that they were reassuring. But something inside her refused to be reassured. “The Impact on Paranoia of the Rational Assessment of Data” — this would have been a good essay title once. To do well in that exam, to qualify in psychology, you had to know absolutely everything about feelings, except what they felt like.

  Chapter 13

  When Alice found the note from her estranged husband propped against her Jane Austens, her first reaction was one of amazement. Not so much at the fact that Rodney had taken the trouble to track her down — though this was indeed surprising — but at the wholly unexpected feelings that the sight of his handwriting aroused in her. Not grief; not hope of reconciliation; but simple, uncomplicated relief that the note was merely from him, and not from one of her prospective pupils cancelling the lessons.

  Did she already care more about her new life than about the old? And if so, was this an indication that …?

  And then she read the letter, and at once the more-to-be expected feelings took over, and she found herself trembling, mostly with anger.

  It was the word “we” that got through to her; the reiteration of those cruel little mini-syllables, “we” and “us” with which a new partnership can so effortlessly (and often unconsciously?) torture the discarded member of the old:

  We’ve been worrying about you, Alice. You should have left an address, you really should. We wanted to make sure you were all right.

  What lies! How could Ivy possibly be wanting to make sure that the discarded wife was “all right”? Surely Ivy’s cup of joy would only be completely full if she could learn that her rival was not all right at all? That she had
taken to drink … had let herself go … was shuffling around in slippers all day, hair all over the place, egg-stains down the front of her dressing-gown? Isn’t this the secret dream of almost any woman in Ivy’s triumphant but still slightly precarious position? The letter went on:

  We want to help you as much as we can, if only you will let us. To start with, we’d like to take you out to dinner one evening soon, talk it all over in a sensible, friendly way.

  Yes, Ivy would like that, very possibly. To glide across a restaurant on Rodney’s arm, while Alice walked a pace or two behind, the guest, the third party; to discuss with Rodney how to seat the three of them, playing hostess to Alice’s gooseberry … Well, of course she’d like it. She’d be disappointed — genuinely disappointed — if it didn’t happen.

  As it bloody wouldn’t.

  Refolding the note, Alice noticed a PS scribbled on the back:

  Really, Alice, you must get those bells at the front door to work!! And label them properly. ‘Top Floor’ is pretty ambiguous, you know, to anyone who doesn’t know the house. I found myself barging into the room of a perfectly strange young lady who wasn’t at all pleased to see me!

  So that had been Hetty’s strange man. And now Alice’s emotions made another U-turn, and she was flooded with protective tenderness towards her errant husband. “Not too bad … A bit yellow perhaps … A bit on the small side.” How dared she describe him thus! Rodney wasn’t tall, certainly; not quite as tall as Ivy, actually (as Alice had noticed quite early on); but this was only because Ivy was so large, as well as so ungainly. And as to yellow — what a way to describe Rodney’s healthily sallow complexion! Anger boiled in her; and then she remembered that tomorrow she was due to go to the Bensons for her first coaching session with Cyril, and that she ought to be making some sort of preparation for it. But what sort? Not for the first time, she thought longingly of her well-stocked shelves of classics at “home”, including several elementary textbooks for beginners. To go back there and help herself was of course out of the question. She would have to ring on her own front-door bell, be ushered into her own house as a visitor, and have Rodney cordially giving her permission (as he certainly would) to help herself to her own property. And Ivy would be there too, of course, backing him up, and falling over her lumpy self to show what a tolerant, what a magnanimous Other Woman she was.

  “Take anything you want,” she would say sweetly, making generous gestures with her plump wrists towards the books that weren’t hers and of which she couldn’t even read the titles.

  No. She would manage somehow.

  And actually it wasn’t too difficult. Once ensconced with Cyril in the lofty and elegant drawing-room, and once Mrs Benson had stopped teetering in and out, ostensibly to make sure that Alice had everything she needed, but in fact consumed by a shadowy and unfocused anxiety at the idea of her son being exposed to something beyond his mother’s ken — once this was over, and teacher and pupil were on their own, it soon became clear that Cyril had every intention of directing operations himself. He had come equipped with the books he wanted to study, a Lexicon, a Goodwin’s Greek Grammar, and Book I of Herodotus’ Histories.

  “I hope you don’t mind starting with chapter 109,” he apologised. “But you see I’m specially interested in Cyrus, and how he founded the Persian Empire. Absolutely single-handed, just by being brave enough, because to start with he didn’t know he was a King’s son at all, he just felt like one. Anyway, I’ve got to where Cyrus as a baby was to be put out to die on a hillside. Do you mind if we go on from there?”

  Far from minding, Alice was thankful to have so many decisions taken out of her hands, and the relevant books so efficiently supplied. At first, when he began translating, she wondered how far he was really following the text, and how far he simply knew the story already in detail; but a few searching questions about specific words soon elicited the fact that he was in the habit of making systematic lists of all the words he had needed to look up; and as to his proficiency in grammar, she had no sooner queried the tense of a certain irregular verb than he treated her to such an exhaustive lecture on the Ionic form of the optative as compared with the Attic, that she decided then and there to leave grammar alone in sheer self-defence. What on earth was she going to be able to teach him that he didn’t already know?

  Plenty, as it turned out. As with any self-taught amateur, Cyril’s knowledge was patchy, startlingly extensive in some directions, and with incongruously elementary gaps in others. He was quick, though, attentive, and deeply interested. The session flew by, and Alice was both surprised and disappointed when Mrs Benson came into the room to announce with an air of quite disproportionate relief (apparently at finding her son still alive) that the hour was up.

  “Satisfactory?” she asked, with an air of unease; but when Alice began assuring her that the lesson had indeed been satisfactory, and that Cyril was proving a most apt pupil, Mrs Benson’s attention began almost at once to wander. Her eyes drifted round the room as if in search of something, and she interrupted Alice in mid-sentence:

  “Cyril dear, have you seen Sophy’s new toy? You know, the toy tractor Daddy bought for her? She’s been looking for it everywhere. I thought I saw it in here this morning?”

  “Yes, here it is,” Cyril reached down beside the sofa, and pulled out a sizeable toy tractor of a bright metallic grey with touches of green, and very shiny. “Here you are. You’d left it on the table, but it was a bit in the way, and so I …”

  His mother’s face cleared. She looked really happy for the first time since Alice had made her acquaintance.

  “You see?” she exclaimed, turning to Alice with an air of quiet triumph. “We don’t believe in sex-stereotyping when it comes to children’s toys. We give Sophy exactly the same kind of toys as we used to give to Cyril. We’re so very anxious not to brain-wash her into the traditional ‘feminine’ role, you see, as happens to so many little girls. She’s never had a doll in her whole life!” she added proudly. “And you can see the results already; she takes to the traditionally ‘masculine’ toys every bit as eagerly as any boy. She just loves this model tractor, it’s her very favourite toy. Isn’t it, darling?”

  Here she turned to the sturdy little figure who was lurking behind her, peering warily and with provisional disapproval at Alice’s unfamiliar presence. “Here you are, Sophy darling, here’s your tractor, it was here all the time. Why don’t you wind it up and show Mrs Saunders how well it goes, even on the carpet? It has three speeds, you know,” she continued, turning to Alice again, “and a reversing lever, so she can —”

  By this time Sophy had reached out eagerly for the proffered toy, and was clutching it to her breast.

  “No,” she said firmly. “No, Tracty’s tired. He’s not to be wound up, not no more today, it’s his bedtime,” and wrapping the awkwardly-shaped vehicle in a loose woolly garment, and hugging it close to her, she marched out of the room, crooning gently: “Tracty go by-byes, then. Tracty be a good Tracty, come with Mummy and go by-byes …”

  For a moment, Mrs Benson looked as if she was going to cry; then, with an effort, controlled herself.

  “Oh, well. Anyway,” she said.

  To which Alice could find nothing to add.

  *

  It was only after she had reached home, and was about to settle down to preparing tomorrow’s lesson with Mr Bates, that Alice discovered that her reading-glasses were missing. Hell! She must have left them at the Bensons’, departing as she had in a hurry, somewhat embarrassed by Mrs Benson’s discomfiture over the Tracty episode.

  A phone call confirmed that the glasses had indeed been found, and Alice set off at once to recover them.

  The rain had stopped, but the air was still heavy with damp, and the pavements glistened wetly under the occasional streetlights, few and far between in this rather down-at-heel neighbourhood. She walked briskly, pulling her coat collar up over her ears against the encroaching chill: which was perhaps why she did not at fir
st hear the footsteps following steadily at a short distance behind her. Didn’t notice them, anyway — well, why should she, it was a public highway — until, reaching the bus-stop in the High Road, and pausing to see if a bus were just coming (if so, it would be worth jumping on it to save herself the last half-mile or so), it came to her that the footsteps behind her had also stopped. Turning quickly, with a twinge of uneasiness, she looked back along the way she had come; but no one seemed to be watching her, or furtively lurking. Indeed, few people were in sight at all: a busy shopping-centre by day, the High Road was almost empty at this hour of the evening: empty of pedestrians, that is: as always, there were plenty of cars passing.

  For a few moments, she lingered at the stop, peering into the moving maze of headlights, hoping to discern among them the looming, lit-up oblong of an approaching bus. But no: and so, shrugging even deeper into her coat, she continued on her way.

  No more footsteps. Or maybe it was the noise of the passing traffic that had drowned them? — because less than a minute after she had turned into the broad, leafy avenue where the Bensons lived, she became aware of them again — the same steady, purposeful pad-pad that she had heard before. Whoever it was must be wearing trainers or something of the sort, the characteristic footwear, according to Miss Dorinda, of the muggers, rapists and murderers who infested the London streets when darkness fell.

  It was the thought of Miss Dorinda that prevented Alice looking behind her now. I’m not going to be like her, she thought: letting herself be turned into a bag of nerves by all the hyped-up horrors she watches on TV each night, imagining them to be commonplace when in fact they are once-in-a-lifetime rarities. After all, if they were common, they would no longer be news, would they? Alice remembered carefully making this point to Miss Dorinda one evening recently, but totally without success. Now she made this same point to herself, even more carefully, and strode forward boldly, albeit slightly increasing her pace. Only a hundred yards or so now, and she would be safe inside the Bensons’ front garden. She chided herself for using the word “safe” even in her own mind, for wasn’t she safe anyway? Statistics were massively on her side — a woman living in London is likely to be raped or mugged once every five hundred years, she had read somewhere.