Listening in the Dusk

by Celia Fremlin

  “So why is the verb in the infinitive?” Alice was asking; and Cyril quickly turned his mind back to the text in front of him. In a way, he liked her being pernickety like this, even though it slowed things down rather irritatingly and interrupted the progress of the story. All the same, he did want to understand the twists and turns of this fascinating language, and this was the only way. He listened carefully to her explanation of the whole passage being in indirect speech because of Herodotus having been told the story by some chap, starting pages and pages back so that you’d almost forgotten, but the infinitive made it clear that it was still indirect speech, and therefore the chap must be still talking. What an ingenious system! You couldn’t do that in English. Greek was a wonderful language.

  “When we’ve finished Herodotus,” he said, “I’d like to go on to Homer. He uses the Ionic forms too, doesn’t he? Can we do that?”

  Alice was slightly taken aback. Finish Herodotus?

  “You know, Cyril, there are nine books of the Histories,” she pointed out, “and we’re not a quarter through this one yet. I don’t see how there will be time.”

  “Why, aren’t you going to go on teaching me?” demanded Cyril, suddenly shocked. “Have you got another job, or something?”

  “No … Oh no …” Alice laughed uneasily. “Not so far, and even if I had I’m sure I could still fit you in all right. But you know, Cyril, I don’t think your parents are going to want you to study Greek for ever. You’ve got all your school subjects, remember; and in a year or two you’re going to have to start thinking about exams. What you’re going to take for O-level. That sort of thing. I know your parents are expecting you to do Maths and Science —”

  “Of course I’m going to do Maths and Science. They more or less make you, if you’re at all bright. And I am bright, so there isn’t much option, is there? I just wish people wouldn’t go on about it, that’s all. I don’t want to have to think about it. It’s depressing.”

  “Well …” Alice hesitated. It seemed a glum sort of way for a promising boy to be embarking on his special subjects; but on the other hand, a lifetime of teaching had ingrained in her the necessity for displaying a degree of solidarity with parents and their wishes. “Yes, well,” she temporised, “they’re anxious for your future, naturally they are, and they want you to have an education which will lead to a really good job. As you say, you are bright …”

  Cyril did not dispute this; he had already admitted it, and certainly did not suffer from false modesty. But why was being bright made to seem so much like being crippled? Far from increasing your range of options, it drastically reduced them. The cleverer you were, the more narrowly specialised would be your job, and the more certain to be indoors, sitting down, for forty or fifty years. Not very different from being confined to a wheelchair, when you thought about it.

  “Well, we’ll see,” said Alice, meaninglessly, as befitted the intractability of the problem. “Anyway, we’ll keep on like this for the time being. So long as your parents are happy about it. By the way, will they want you to go on coming here after the holidays are over? Or will I be coming to your house again?”

  “Oh, here!” said Cyril emphatically. “Ma hasn’t said, but I’m sure that’s what she’d rather. She doesn’t really like Greek going on in the drawing-room, where people might come in and out, you know, and might think it’s funny. Besides, I’d rather come here, much rather. It’s more fun. And I love this room …” He leaned back in his chair and glanced round appreciatively. “All these funny things you’ve got … Would you like a dried octopus? I could bring you one if you liked, and you could hang it up somewhere.”

  The lesson had stretched well beyond the allotted hour, as it nearly always did. Quite often, it ended with an invitation to Cyril to stay to supper. On this occasion, though, they had to keep an eye on the time as Cyril was expected home to babysit for his small sister while his parents played Bridge next door.

  “No, I don’t mind,” he said, in answer to Alice’s sympathetic query. “I expect I’ll let her stay up and play for a bit. She’s trying to teach Tracty the Greek alphabet, you know, and Ma worries about it, even though she mostly gets it wrong. The only letters she really knows are gamma and delta, and so now she wants to call our new hamster Gammerdelta, that’s what’s worrying my mother at the moment. She’s afraid that Sophy’s catching the Greek bug from me, though I wouldn’t think myself that calling a hamster Gammerdelta showed a tremendous leaning towards the Classics, would you? It’s partly because of Sophy being a girl, my mother wants to bring her up in a very Women’s Lib sort of way to be interested in technology and things. That’s why they give her tractors and things to play with instead of dolls, just to prove that girls are exactly the same as boys.

  “Mind you, they’re a bit illogical, it seems to me, because they never forced me to play with dolls, which I would have thought would have proved the point just as effectively … Hey, look, I’ve got to go. I’m going to be late …!”

  The whole house shook to Cyril’s departure, as he sprang from landing to half-landing almost in single bounds; and Alice waited on tenterhooks for Miss Dorinda to launch herself into the hallway trembling with not unjustified protestations. One of these days that boy will have the ceiling down, she would point out, and it could well be true. Most of the ceilings had cracks spidering across them already — ever since the Blitz, according to Hetty. The bomb damage people had gone off and kept saying they were coming back, but they never did. In a manner of speaking she, Hetty, was waiting for them still. No good crying over spilt milk, though, and it seemed to Hetty that the Blitz (here the metaphor began to get a little bit out of hand) was just about as spilt as anything can get, after all this time, didn’t Alice agree?

  Alice did; but all the same, she must have a word with Cyril before next time. Even if none of the ceilings did fall down, Miss Dorinda’s would assuredly threaten they would do so, and would rival the erratic geyser as a topic of conversation for weeks to come.

  The slamming of the front door ended the suspense. All was quiet. Evidently Miss Dorinda wasn’t back from her salon yet, and Alice relaxed. No one else would complain. Hetty wouldn’t because she always liked the sound, however ear-splitting, of a bit of life around the house. Brian wouldn’t, because no pianist ever ventures to complain of any sort of noise, ever, for fear of bringing on his own head an avalanche of tit-for-tat grievances about his practising. And Mary wouldn’t complain because, well, she just wouldn’t. She had too much to brood over for the house falling about her ears to make much impact on her.

  How was Mary? Hadn’t she been asleep for rather a long time now, even allowing for the sleepless night which had gone before? That is, if she was still asleep? Or was she just sitting in her room, moping, as had been her custom for so long? Was she, then, slipping back into her old habits just as if nothing had happened? Had the long night of talk and confidences made no difference for her at all?

  Alice felt a little hurt, but also relieved. She had been wondering, on and off during the day, what she would do when Mary reappeared, perhaps desperate for further tête-à-têtes, and she, Alice, too busy to attend to her, maybe with one of the pupils just about to arrive. It would look heartless to give them priority over Mary’s desperate need — and yet you couldn’t cancel everything on account of someone else’s tragedy. Life must go on, as the cliché has it. Though Mary herself seemed to have taken the opposite view — that life mustn’t go on. It must come to a dead stop.

  Well, as it happened, the conflict hadn’t arisen. Alice had neither had to cancel any lessons, nor feel guilty about not having done so, for Mary hadn’t appeared at all. The party she had cancelled though, much to Brian’s puzzlement and displeasure; for of course she had been debarred from giving him the real reason, and her invented excuses sounded feeble in the extreme, as well as too many of them. Two excuses are always less convincing than one, but it is difficult to remember this while in the throes of white-lying.


  And on top of all this, Christmas was almost upon them. You can cancel a party, though maybe with some difficulty; but nobody can cancel Christmas.

  Chapter 19

  The gaping hollow gouged out of December by Christmas is never easy to fill; but it was made easier on this occasion by the fact that the other members of the household were all away, and Mary and Alice were left alone in the tall echoing house to talk and talk and talk all through the short darkening days and far into the night. In retrospect, it seemed to Alice less like a series of separate conversations than one single one, going on non-stop through blurred, yellowing afternoons as daylight merged into streetlights, and then the lights from passing cars swept in procession across the smudgy walls of Alice’s little room, flickering from poster to poster, from dried octopus to Jane Austen to motor bike, like some avant-garde film without storyline, only some vague, inscrutable message about the Human Condition.

  Rarely did they put the light on; Mary felt safer in the dark, she said. Not very safe, though. Every so often the discourse would be interrupted by a quick indrawn breath as the girl stopped in mid-sentence, tilted her head and listened, as a cat sometimes does, when to other ears there is no sound. A creaking stair? A tapping of rain against a window? The murmur of a door half-opening in the draught?

  Sometimes Alice would tour the empty house, at Mary’s urgent insistence, and would return, slightly breathless from all the flights of stairs, with reassuring news of a rattling window-frame; of the geyser softly hiccuping to itself as it sometimes did even when no one was using it. Or perhaps Hengist was prowling around his lonely kitchen, unnervingly tidy and empty of unpremeditated snacks. He got his regular meals, of course, while Hetty was away — Alice saw to that — but he missed the odd remnant of chicken, the unfinished parcel of fish-and-chips, the half-eaten yoghurt pot left open and unattended on the table — all those things that were such a feature of life when everyone was in residence.

  Reassured, temporarily, by these news items, Mary would relax, and the conversation would continue, though rarely at the same point at which it had broken off; and so it was only gradually, bit by bit, that Alice got a coherent picture of how it had been, and of how — in Mary’s tortured mind — it still was.

  To start with, her name wasn’t Mary. Of course it wasn’t. She’d seized on the name in a panic, as the most unremarkable name she could at the moment think of, but the trouble was, she just couldn’t get used to it. She didn’t feel like a Mary; she didn’t know how Marys behave, or how they talk. Her real name was Imogen, but actually they’d always called her ‘Midge’, and in a way, that made a good shortening — for Mary, too, didn’t Alice think? But in any case, no one would ever call her Midge again, and so what? Yes, her mother was still alive, but finding it all as unendurable as Mary had found it, had fled to someone’s hide-away home in Spain, just as Mary — Imogen, Midge — had fled to London. To get away from it all; only of course you couldn’t. Or perhaps you could, in Spain — who could tell? They didn’t write to each other about anything of that sort, well about anything at all, actually, because how could you? Everything was too awful to write about. Her mother had gone back to her maiden name, she knew that much, and felt vaguely envious, because this was an escape-route denied to her.

  And Julian? The once beloved brother? Julian had got a life-sentence. Had Alice really not heard this on the news, in the papers, at the time?

  “I suppose it must have been happening just when my marriage was breaking up,” Alice tried to explain. “I was too occupied with my own troubles. You see …”

  But the explanation faltered to a stop under the impact of Mary’s open-mouthed disbelief. The idea that anyone, anywhere in the world, could have been more concerned with their own problems than with Mary’s appalling and much-publicised tragedy, seemed to be an entirely new one to her, and she went on with her confession as if Alice hadn’t spoken.

  Yes, Julian had got a life sentence. Well, how could he not? There had been some talk at the trial of diminished responsibility, but nothing had come of it. If that had been the verdict, he would presumably have been sent to Broadmoor instead of the high security place where he now was. So what? The place where Mary had been imprisoned, in disgrace for ever, would have been unchanged.

  Had Mary — Midge — visited her brother in prison? No! the girl’s voice was high with panic.

  “No! No! I can’t! I can’t Alice! I couldn’t bear it! They can’t make me! No! No!”

  *

  How did she feel about her brother, Alice wondered, though she dared not ask. How do you feel about someone you have once deeply loved, and who has now done something appalling beyond comprehension? So close they had been once, this brother and sister, through all the long years of their growing up, sharing a happy childhood, enjoying together a secure and loving home.

  Had all that closeness, all that love, vanished totally and at once when she learned what he had done?

  Mary knew the answer to that one: and suddenly — on December 25th, it so happened — she came out with it. Love just isn’t relevant, she said, when things are really awful. Love doesn’t come into it any more, one way or the other. It reminded her (she told Alice) of an incident in the school swimming bath, years ago, when she and her best friend, fooling about in the deep end, had somehow lost control, or balance, or something, and found their heads going under, each clutching frantically on to the other for support, somehow pushing one another down and down. She recalled the desperate, mindless struggle to be the one to clamber on top, to be the one to reach the sweet air, pushing the other down regardless.

  “The fact that she was my best friend — that I loved her — simply wasn’t there. It was something totally irrelevant. The only thing that existed was myself struggling not to drown. She — my best friend — was just a lump of something to get a purchase on.

  “That’s how it was when I heard about Julian. It wasn’t him at all I was thinking about, not for a moment: it was me! Me having to be the sister of a murderer — I couldn’t bother about him being the murderer — it was me being the sister of one that mattered. Like the drowning, though of course that was all over in a couple of minutes, someone dragged us out, and afterwards we were as good friends as ever. But this isn’t just for a couple of minutes; this is for life. No one is ever going to drag me out of it, I’m caught in it until I die. That’s why I can’t think about Julian, I can’t about him at all, just about me, that’s all I can think of. That’s what it’s done to me. You ask whether I still love him (actually Alice hadn’t, she wouldn’t have dared) and all I can say is, it isn’t relevant any more. Like I say, love isn’t relevant once things are really bad. They say love makes the world go round, but it doesn’t, you know. Love is a luxury, and you indulge in it when things are OK. As soon as they are bad — really bad — there just isn’t a place for it any more, no place where there could be room for it.

  “And no, Alice, I don’t love my mother any more either, and she doesn’t love me. We can’t, it’s too awful. We’ve both had to run away and never see each other again, because we couldn’t bear it, neither of us could. The way we couldn’t talk, just sat and looked at each other, and I was looking at the Mother of the Monster, and she was looking at the Sister of the Monster.

  “No, you don’t understand, it was impossible to talk, it really was, there was nothing either of us could say that wasn’t even more awful than saying nothing.

  “‘Where did I go wrong?’ I could see her thinking, as she sat staring at the picture-rail; and she could see me thinking the same thing, because after all, I was the eldest, and perhaps if I’d …”

  At this point (Alice remembered) she had felt compelled to intervene.

  “That’s something you must never feel, Mary!” she exclaimed. “That you could possibly have been to blame in any way: that it was something you did — or didn’t do — that made him … Well, that made him how he turned out. You were only a child, Mary
, only a young teenager, when his character was being formed. It couldn’t have been your fault. Nor your mother’s either, I daresay. These things —”

  Alice had meant her words as some sort of consolation or reassurance, and so was quite unprepared for the outburst they provoked.

  “Oh, God, if only it was my fault! If only there was some reason why my life should be ruined like this! If only I’d bullied him, tortured him, locked him in dark cupboards, burnt him with lighted matches, told him he would go to Hell if he didn’t give me his pocket-money …! Told him that masturbation would send him blind, that he was adopted from a lunatic asylum! If only something awful had happened to him in his childhood! If our father had been an alcoholic, our mother a battered wife! Or if he’d been a battered baby …!

  “If only it was someone’s fault, so that you could feel it wasn’t really him, but merely something done to him … Some damage from outside … Some awful trauma … But there was nothing like that at all, ever. We had a wonderful childhood; love, security, everything that every expert you’ve ever heard of has extolled in every child-psychology book you’ve ever read — we had it all.