Listening in the Dusk

by Celia Fremlin

  “And so what is wrong with him is really him, and not any damage that he’s suffered. Whatever it is is genetic, it has to be; and so now I can never marry, never have children. No man will ever let himself even fancy me once he knows who I am. He’ll be thinking all the time about my horrible polluted genes, and the horrible polluted children he would get if he let himself care about me …

  “I came here to start a new life, Alice. To be a new person, called Mary. But I’m not a new person, I’ve just got a new name that I don’t even like. All the rest of it is still clinging round me, and it will go on clinging round me for ever. Whatever I do, wherever I go, for the rest of my life. You know what it’s like, Alice? It’s like that medieval punishment for murderers — I read about it once. Instead of hanging the murderer, they would chain the corpse to him, tightly, face to face, and then let him go. To go where he liked, and to do what he liked, but with this horrible rotting corpse fixed against his body, staring into his face with its horrible rotting eyes, bulging with decay and slowly dangling down its cheeks … That’s what it’s like, Alice. That’s what I’ve got to offer to any man who ever falls for me. That’s what he’ll be taking about with him; out to dinner, to a film, then take it home to bed with him, a rotting corpse, lying there in the bed between us. Once he knows who I am, finds out my real name … Oh, Alice, don’t ever tell anyone! Don’t let Brian find out … Don’t …! Don’t …!”

  *

  That had been the worst day. Or night, rather, for it had been far into the small hours when the confession reached this point. The candles Alice had lit at the beginning of the evening had guttered out and the room was in darkness except for the grey, starless square of the window. The street three storeys below was silent, not a footstep, not a car, had passed for a very long time, and when Mary’s voice ceased, Alice found herself yet again in the quandary with which she was becoming sickeningly familiar — that of being an ignorant interloper in a world of tragedy quite beyond her experience, and yet finding herself cast in the role of confidante and guide. It was like being parachute-dropped without a map into unknown territory, and having one of the natives coming up and asking the way to somewhere.

  “I’m a stranger here myself,” she felt like saying; but of course that wouldn’t do. Through the darkness she could feel Mary’s expectancy, her need, her hunger for — well, for what? For advice? For sympathy? For some sort of shock, even? Something to jolt her spirit out of the strait-jacket of fears in which it had become lodged? How about criticism, then? There are few souls so deeply sunk in despair that they don’t rouse themselves, at least temporarily, to rebut an unfair accusation.

  “Listen, Mary,” she began, “just listen to me. All this carry-on of yours, it’s a cop-out. Or whatever the sociological jargon is, you should know, you’re the sociology student. Listen to what you’ve been saying, how it sounds to an outsider. You have this secret to keep, and so you came to London to start a new life; and it’s essential to this new life that you shouldn’t be recognised. Right? Well, you haven’t been recognised, have you, but you still haven’t started the new life.

  “It’s all too difficult? OK, so it’s all too difficult. But let’s analyse this difficulty, pull it apart, and see what it consists of. As I see it, there are two main ingredients — one is the tragedy itself, and the other is keeping it secret. These are two quite separate things, of which the first is given, unalterable, it’s happened, and you have no control over it. But the second thing — the secret — that’s optional. It’s something you’ve chosen, of your own free will, and so you have got control over it. I’m not saying it was a wrong choice — it may have been the best one open to you — but all the same, I think you should take another look at it now, and see where it’s getting you. I think if you have a secret — if anyone has a secret, not just you — I think they should review that secret every now and then, take it out and have a look at it, see what purpose it is still serving. See if the keeping of it hasn’t escalated into being half the problem. More than half. This is what I mean about it being a cop-out. You’re hiding behind the part of the problem you can’t alter — the tragedy — and using it as an excuse for not doing anything about the part that you can — the secrecy.

  “Take me, for instance,” Alice went on (by now they were well into Boxing Day, almost time to be thinking about breakfast). “Take me, and the way you’ve behaved to me. You spent days and days imagining that I’d somehow arrived here to spy on you: to catch you out, to show you up, to track you down, et cetera. And it was all wasted, because I wasn’t. All that happened was that you worked yourself into a state of paranoia — yes, you did, I’m not misusing the word — there you were, prowling around my room at all hours, whenever I wasn’t there; messing things about; getting yourself covered in red paint; and all totally unnecessary, because if you’d simply told me in the first place what you were looking for, we could have found it in five minutes. And then there was all that panic when you met my husband — my ex-husband — on the stairs; he has to be in the plot, too! Soon, everyone will be, if you don’t watch out …

  “Can’t you see what you’re doing to yourself? All the while you keep this secret, you’re going to be suspecting more and more people of having guessed it; and that’s going to make you behave in a peculiar sort of way towards them, the way you did towards me … And then they really will begin to wonder about you, and to look at you in a suspicious way. The good old vicious circle. You don’t need me to tell you that that’s the way to turn yourself into a text-book case! Which gives me an idea. Why don’t you look at the whole thing as if it was a text-book case? Let’s assume that you’re already qualified, a social worker, and you’ve been assigned this case of a young woman whose brother has been convicted of some horrible crime. What would you say to her?

  “Go and hide yourself in some big city, would you say? Cut yourself off from everyone you ever knew — friends, acquaintances, colleagues, the lot. Make your life among strangers, don’t speak to them more than you can help, and if anyone tries to be nice to you, bite their heads off in case they’re getting at you in some way. Don’t go out anywhere, in case someone in the street recognises you. Don’t try to get a job, in case they find out your real name. Don’t go anywhere, don’t do anything, don’t make any friends … Is that really what you’d advise? Honestly? And if not, why not?”

  This, or roughly this, was the advice Alice remembered herself having given during that curious, out-of-time interlude while everyone else was experiencing Christmas, somewhere, with somebody; and though Mary had cried a lot, had denied a lot, and had indignantly refuted the charge that she’d bitten anyone’s head off ever, or been disagreeable to anyone, or behaved oddly in any way, nevertheless her behaviour did change, gradually and unobtrusively over the next few days. She ventured out to the shops by daylight; she ate with increasing appetite the meals that Alice cooked for both of them; she would even, now and again, cook a proper meal herself. And when the others came back, weary from the holiday and laden with gifts that they’d now have to find storage space for until next Christmas — when they could give them to somebody else — one by one, as they came back, Mary greeted them with a smile, even with a pleasant word.

  And then, at the beginning of January, the startling news burst upon the household:

  “Mary’s got a job!”

  Chapter 20

  Only a Saturday job, it was true, and only on the till at a local supermarket, but all the same it was a big breakthrough. She’d at least gone out in broad daylight and got it, in spite of all her fears. She’d faced the ordeal of the interview at which, far from recognising her face from last summer’s TV screens, the bored manageress hadn’t even looked at her; just gave her a form to fill in with her imaginary name and the discreet omission of her four A-levels and suchlike over-qualifications. The managerial brows had been raised only at the section wherein Mary (after much deliberation) had admitted to O-level Maths, on the assumption
that, on a till, this might be reckoned an asset. She’d experienced a moment’s panic at those raised brows, which seemed to imply that O-level Maths was so singular a qualification as to arouse suspicion as to the applicant’s true identity.

  But no; all was well. No further questions were asked, and she got the job; the O-level Maths must simply have been a surprise; or — as Brian was later to suggest — had maybe raised qualms as to whether this unnervingly egg-headed applicant might prove to have the wits to fiddle the till. This, he declared, was what they actually meant by the term “over-qualified”.

  This was at supper in Hetty’s big kitchen. It was a celebration meal of a sort, as near as could be managed at such short notice, for it was already well after five when Mary had burst in, pale no longer but rosy with the cold, and actually noisy as she raced up and down the stairs looking for people to tell.

  Although only Alice understood just what had been at stake, the whole household were aware that this was something of an event, and all contributed what they had by them to the makeshift celebration which Hetty immediately set herself to organise.

  Based on spaghetti, of which it was possible to boil enough for a dozen people in the old iron cooking pot which stood permanently on the cooker since there was no shelf wide enough to accommodate it — or, indeed, steady enough to bear its weight — the menu soon gathered momentum as various ad hoc contributions, together with a number of ambitious but not very practical suggestions, poured in. Brian produced a sizeable remnant of gorgonzola cheese and a couple of cans of beer. Alice hard-boiled her last three eggs, and collected together the bits and pieces purchased for the abortive party. She also unearthed the bottle of wine destined for that same non-occasion, while Miss Dorinda, peering into the simmering pot and shaking her head, proceeded to explain just where it was that you could buy whole-wheat spaghetti, at the far end of the High Street, on the same side as Tesco’s.

  Hetty meantime thought of the two tired turkey wings she’d brought back from her sister-in-law’s; a kindly act, because even though there were now only the two of them for Christmas dinner, the sister-in-law still stuck to the tradition of a full-size turkey, with trimmings, and was thus left stranded with an awesome quantity of cold remains. So appalling were the dimensions of the Boxing Day carcase that it would have taken a far harder heart than Hetty’s to refuse to share at least part of the burden; so back the wings had come, to languish in the freezing compartment of the fridge until this opportune moment released them. The only problem now was to slice the meat into thin enough strips as to render them indistinguishable from the spaghetti with which they were to be blended, as otherwise Miss Dorinda might get upset. As Hetty said, although she wasn’t a vegetarian herself, she did believe in respecting the principles of others. And anyway, it was the least she could do when Miss Dorinda had not only been so kind as to produce all those dehydrated Healthi-Grow mushrooms, but had also refrained from uttering a word about Hengist’s stance on the dresser, alongside the bread-bin; from which vantage point he was overseeing the preparations with a golden and expert eye, alert for any signs of relaxation of supervision over the tastier morsels. Not spaghetti, of course, nor mushrooms. He had his eye specially on the turkey, but that, alas, was to prove hopelessly inaccessible on account of the tiresome way Hetty was standing over it, trying to keep her slicing operations hidden in order to spare Miss Dorinda’s feelings.

  It was a joyous occasion, with Alice’s bottle of white wine shared out into such tumblers and wine-glasses as could be mustered, and with Mary, for the first time ever, joining eagerly in the communal meal, enjoying the food, and praising Alice’s wine. It was a delight to see her flushed and talkative as never before. Brian couldn’t keep his eyes off her, Alice noted, as half-way into her second glass she began to recount her adventures of the afternoon:

  “And so after the interview, they took me down to the shop, and Mrs Foulkes — the others call her Peggy, actually, but I don’t know if I should, not yet, what do you think? Anyway, she took me down and showed me the list of prices, I’ve got to learn them by heart, about two hundred of them, though actually Sharon — that’s the girl who does it weekdays — says there’s no need, you just look at the prices as you take them out of the basket and clock them up as you go. It’s pointless, she says, to try to learn them because they keep changing one day to the next. They only make you do it, she says, just to put you in your place, show you who’s boss, kind of thing. It’s awfully interesting really, you know, quite different from the kinds of things you get in the Business Studies part of the syllabus. Oh, and another thing, she — Sharon, I mean — said not to worry about getting the money exactly right, no one does, no one can, they’re never less than ten pounds out by the end of the day, on any of the tills. They turn a blind eye to it, they have to, with a turnover of thousands and thousands of pounds every day, what can they do? It was a big relief, I must say, because the way Mrs Foulkes went on, it sounded like you had to make good any discrepancy out of your own pocket. But Sharon says no, it would be ridiculous, your whole pay packet for the whole day would hardly cover it. Still, she says, it pays to be as exact as you can, because if you can keep the discrepancy down to say two or three pounds, then you can keep the extra for yourself, up to about ten pounds. Not exactly ten pounds, of course, or they’d begin to suspect. Might do, anyway; they don’t bother that much most of the time, she says. So I asked her, wasn’t that kind of stealing? She was kind of shocked, as if I’d used a rude word — which I had, of course, when I thought about it — I felt quite ashamed. Oh no, she told me, it’s not stealing, no way, it’s perks. It’s what keeps us on the job, and they know it. Why else would we do it, for one pound eighty an hour? You’ll get more, of course, she told me, being Saturday, but all the same …”

  Brian was by now grinning in boundless appreciation of all this, though his delight, Alice suspected, was less at the actual content of Mary’s recital than at the fact that she was talking at all, and with such uncomplicated zest and good-humour. Tossing back the final drops of wine at the bottom of his glass, he sought to enhance the rare and precious mood: “What am I waiting for?” he enquired of the company at large. “Why do I spend the golden hours of my youth slaving over a hot piano? I don’t have to be a world-famous pianist, no one’s twisting my arm, especially not the ten thousand other goons who are right now practising their guts out in order to pip me to the post. Do they have chaps, too, on these tills, Mary, or does it have to be girls?”

  For the first time ever, Mary smiled at a sally of Brian’s and forbore to snub him.

  “Girls, I think,” she said. “Well, so far as I could see, in this shop, anyway. I did notice one or two chaps, but they seemed to be more wandering about, up and down the aisles, and being brought cups of tea in the cubby-hole at the back. Supervisors and trainee managers: that sort of thing. You know …”

  “It looks like we’ve got it made, Mary, love! I’ve got O-level Maths too, believe it or not; not to mention A-level. So with you fiddling the till in the front, and me fiddling the books at the back, we’ll soon —”

  “Brian!” Miss Dorinda’s voice was sharp with outrage. For some minutes now, Alice had watched her tightening her shoulders and sitting more and more stiffly upright, pursing her lips as the discourse plunged to ever-increasing depths of infamy; and Alice was praying that she would not burst out with some painful snub, thus quenching Mary’s new-found (and probably still precarious) enthusiasm, and driving her back once again into withdrawal, suspicion and silence. The ethics of the discussion seemed to matter not at all in comparison with the resurgence of life, of hope, in that shattered, broken spirit.

  But of course Miss Dorinda didn’t know that the spirit across the table from her had been shattered and broken. All she had seen these past weeks was a sulky, ill-mannered young person making no visible attempts to find a proper full-time job, sponging off the State — off Miss Dorinda, that is, and the ever-escalating rates she paid
for the salon; and now here was the idle, unprincipled young woman all set to sponge off her employer as well. Time she got her come-uppance!

  “Brian!” she repeated indignantly — though everyone could tell that she was really addressing her remarks to Mary — “How dare you encourage such … such … wickedness!” and as she chose the word and pronounced it, her glance stabbed across the table to where Mary was still smiling, and with lips already parted for some witty rejoinder — the first ever — to Brian’s teasing. “Wickedness!” she said again, in case anyone had failed to hear her the first time. “Cheating … Stealing … And lying, too!” she spat out, warming to that sense of unassailable power which being in the right brings with it. “Lying, I tell you, that’s what it is, you can tell your friend Sharon that from me! It’s lies she’s telling you! No one could run a business that way! Of course they check the discrepancies, you can take it from me they do. I’ve run a business for nearly twenty years, and I can assure you that not so much as a ten pence piece goes missing at the end of the day! Not a ten pence piece. Even the tips, I make my girls keep an exact record of the tips they get, so I know where I am: who’s satisfying the customers and who isn’t; all that sort of thing. And let me tell you, they respect me for it, my girls do. I’m strict, but I’m fair. I don’t tolerate sloppiness in any form and they know it!”

  In the teeth of this onslaught, Brian strove to restore the former bantering exchange — so delightful and so rare — between himself and Mary.

  “But listen: from what Mary says, her bosses don’t allow any sloppiness either; far from it. On the contrary, they seem to have a clear and well-established understanding with the girls that they are permitted to fiddle up to ten pounds a day, but no more. They allow for it in the accounts, I’m sure. It’s a way of keeping the wages down and rewarding the brightest girls without incurring howls of wrath from the Unions. It’s a kind of under-the-counter merit award for the ones bright enough to fiddle the highest rake-off as a result of getting the actual money very nearly right. The ones too stupid to do this will find the whole of their possible ten pounds mopped up by genuine mistakes and muddle. The management will notice this, you may be sure, and these girls won’t get promotion. If you can’t even fiddle the till, they’ll reckon, then you’ll never be much good in management.”