The Listeners (15 page)

After Tim was installed at Highfield, where a quietly smiling woman in a blue overall had shown him his bed and where to put his things, and a friendly man in the day room had immediately approached with a cigarette, Paul said, ‘Shall I come out one evening this week?’

Tim nodded. He sat very stiff and awkward by the wall, like a shy stag at a village dance. All of a sudden, just as Paul was turning to go, he began to talk very fast, gabbling and partly incoherent. Paul found himself crouching down in front of him to shield him from the others, for the boy was beginning to cry.

‘Don’t leave me leave me because I done it to myself. I didn’t mean to. I wanted to be good it was no good no good there’s no one.’

‘There’s me.’ Paul gave him a handkerchief and the boy passed it over his face and neck as if he were drying himself after a bath. He sucked up a shuddery liquid sniff, then looked at Paul and shook his head in a melancholy way.

How on earth to leave him?

‘Come on now, Tim old chap, let’s see that cast.’ The male nurse in charge of the ward came up, loose face like a gun dog, clean freckled hands that picked up Tim’s arm with impersonal care. The chubby man in the other hospital had written ‘Goodbye old pal’ on the plaster before his mother took him away. The nurse murmured to Paul, ‘Better go now.’

In the corridor, where the doors of narrow bedrooms were open, thank God, with the old boltholes puttied over and the spy windows boarded up, Paul was heavy with guilt. Selfishly, for it would do the boy no good, he wanted to rush back into the day room and grab Tim by the good arm and say, ‘Come on, I won’t leave you.’

And take him back to Alice?

And take him away, away somewhere to a hill village in the sun where he could sit all day in the dusty square and be the village simpleton if that was what he wanted, going to the back door of the bakery when he was hungry, gathering flowers for the processions.

In the car, thinking of Tim beleaguered there among the terrifying assortment of faces and voices and feet shuffling on the swabbed linoleum, Paul realized that he was reliving his feelings of years ago when he had left Jeff at his first boarding-school.

‘Better go now, Mr Hammond.’ The kindly master, nodding with his chin pushed up into his smile, as if he had seen it all. ‘Parents don’t believe it, but they’re always better after you’re gone.’

As a schoolmaster, Paul had known that was true, but now he was discovering the parent’s angle. The pain of abandoning a boy no bigger than a child – pushing him off or giving him his best chance – mixed with jealous resentment against whoever was taking over.

At Singleton Court: ‘I’m getting a bit sick of the bloody Samaritans,’ Alice yelled, loud enough to make herself cough.

‘That’s nothing new.’ Paul came down the narrow hall painted in someone else’s colour choice, smelling faintly of bacon fat, hung with Archway House group pictures. Paul in the middle with his dog, Jeff with a cricket team, almost obliterated by huge white pads, a gap in the wall where Alice had thrown a pie-dish (with pie in it) at the school picture with the headmaster’s wife in a dirndl and flowered braces. ‘You’ve been sick of them ever since I joined.’

‘Joined. Went in there one night half sloshed and got hooked by an evangelist. Where have you been? I can’t get my zip done up.’

Alice was sitting before the mirror with her dress falling off her bony shoulders, a large gin keeping company with the pots and crusted bottles on her dressing-table.
Well, all right, who didn’t need a drink before they went out to dinner? Paul made one for himself, although he had heard that the inevitable drink while dressing was one of the signs of potential alcoholism.

The dinner-party was at the house of a couple Paul had met through the school, a mixed group of people, mostly familiar, not University, but in some capacity close enough to its fringes to talk as if they were.

The host brought Paul a whisky and something for Alice that looked like ginger ale.

It was. ‘Take it away, John.’

‘I thought you—’ He had been pleased at the nicety of his tact.

‘Stupid, I’ve been through with A.A. for ages. Liberated. Cured. Stop being so delicate.’

John’s wife had started to drink before she finished cooking, so there was a long wait during which the guests drank enough to lose interest in whether she ever got the meal on to the table. Paul was worried about Alice, although she appeared to be holding her head above the gin. She had amazing powers of maintaining a coherent dam, but it could suddenly, disastrously, be breached. He sat on the other side of the room and drank slowly, feeling himself rather stiff and stuffy, bored with the endless argument about the last student riot, the ill-formed opinions salivated through beards, the puny, acquired radicalism.

Griselda, the wife of one of the wet-lipped beards came to sit on the floor by the fire. She sat near Paul’s feet, her bare brown back exuding health and a permanent animal need to be caressed. ‘Don’t you get sick of it?’ she asked, knowing that he was. ‘I try to make Henry see that the students wouldn’t want him on their side anyway, but it gives him the illusion of youth. So.’

‘Jeff says that what sickens him most about what he calls Older People is that having forced the young to create their own society, we haven’t even the grace to stay out of it.’

‘What do you know about what Jeff thinks?’ Alice
who had been quiet for a while, suddenly called quite loudly from across the room. ‘He puts on an act for you.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘He pretends to be whatever you want him to be. Don’t listen to him anybody. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’

When she reached this stage – and the next would follow if that idiot Sybil did not soon bring on some food – Paul could either tell her to shut up, which would make two of them shouting, or take her home, or pretend it was not happening. He turned his back slightly and leaned forward to push the end of a log back into the fire. Griselda had moved nearer to his legs when Alice attacked him. As he leaned forward, she leaned back, her long too-girlish swatch of someone else’s glossy hair falling on his thigh.

At dinner, it started again. Alice brought her gin glass to the table, and when it was empty, asked John to refill it.

‘Aren’t you going to try my wine?’ But they were all slightly afraid of Alice, afraid of what she might do or say, but without the guts to help her not to. John took the glass back to the drink trolley and refilled it.

The dam was still holding. Although she ate very little, Alice laughed and talked and appeared to be managing quite well on her side of the table, but when Paul made some comment about a new book, her voice rasped through the conversation as if she had been waiting for this chance.

‘Listen to him.’ She rocked back a little in her chair. ‘He hasn’t even read it.’

What could he do? Bark across the table, ‘I have’? (He hadn’t.) Throw wine in her blurred face? Ignore her?

‘Don’t you recognize the review he’s quoting?’ Alice was no fool, even when she was drunk. ‘Not an original thought in his head, pontificating on while those poor deprived children have to sit for hours masturbating under the desks.’

‘Alice, please.’ Sybil said mildly as she got up to clear plates.

‘Yes, Alice please. Leave poor Paul alone. Poor badly used Paul – why do you think he doesn’t say anything? Because it suits him to get all the women on his side.’

‘Oh come on, Alice.’ Griselda said. ‘That’s not fair.’

‘No, it’s not, my dear. It’s not fair at all for you to sit rubbing yourself against my husband like a little pussycat in heat while he sits there with that noble suffering profile.’

‘Come on.’ Paul got up. ‘We’re going home.’

‘I don’t care.’

Paul took her out. ‘Sorry, John.’

‘Sorry my wife got drunk again.’ Alice could hear anything, even when she appeared to be in the unaware asterisms of booze. In the car, hunched into her last year’s coat with the fur collar matted from sponging, she said almost soberly, ‘It is true, you know. You play for the women’s sympathy. Poor Paul. Horrid Alice. That’s why you don’t hit back, isn’t it? Isn’t it?’ She leaned her head in front of his to peer at him.

‘For God’s sake.’ He pushed her back and swerved round the island that appeared just ahead. ‘Do you want to get us killed?’

‘Yes.’ She huddled in her coat like a bedraggled tropical monkey exposed to the English climate.

At lunch hour on Monday, Paul went to the open hooded booth outside the staff room and telephoned Unitech Electronics. He could not get the right extension. The girl at the switchboard was as unhelpful as if she were deliberately trying to make it difficult. Eventually he was through to Mr Upjohn’s secretary. What if she had told Upjohn? Let her.

‘Oh yes, thank you. That, er – that lady—’ His mind was sponged out like a blackboard. ‘She cooks – serves the lunches. For the directors. Could I speak to her if she’s there?’

‘Mrs Frost?’

‘Yes. Mrs Frost.’

‘Just one moment.’ Paul collected himself to speak, for the secretary’s voice sounded as if it would add, ‘I’ll put you through,’ but it added, ‘I’m sorry, she’s not here at the moment. She’s on holiday.’

‘Could you please give me her number at home?’

‘Who is calling, please?’

‘Mr Hammond.’

‘How are you spelling that?’

Good God, suppose I was called Strzemsky? ‘H-A-double M-’

‘Hammond, yes,’ said the secretary, as if it were her idea. ‘I haven’t got Mrs Frost’s number listed. I’m sorry.’

Paul went down to the lunch-room. It was his week to take a table.

‘Did you have a nice weekend, Mr Hammond?’

‘Thank you, Amanda, very nice. Did you?’

If Mrs Frost had been at Unitech, if she had been less prudent than she looked and had agreed to meet him – tea, drinks, dinner, anything – would it have ended up with Paul milking her for sympathy?

It was true. With Alice always wrong and Paul in the right – admit it, Paul, you hypocrite, you like it that way. You want to seem a martyred hero to Griselda, to Sybil, to that silly little woman in the celery earrings. You like that. Yes. You hear them say, after, you’ve made your triumphal exit. ‘Poor Paul, he’s so patient and good.’

‘And then, you see, there was this man,’ Amanda said, through what Butterfields Comprehensive called fried plaice. ‘No, not the one in the helicopter, the one they thought was the spy…’

Samaritan? You Pharisee.

‘Is that the Samaritans?’

‘Yes. Can I help you?’

‘I want to speak to Victoria.’ Careful, Biliie. Neaten up your vowels.

‘I’m sorry, she’s not here at the moment. Could I—’

‘This is Thursday, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but – that’s right, she was here a couple of Thursdays ago.’

‘Why not now? She been fired?’

A laugh. ‘Not yet. This isn’t her regular duty.’

‘Oh shit.’ Billie surged into a sweat of anger. What was the good of Victoria if she wasn’t there when she was needed? ‘Give me her number at home then.’

‘Sorry, I can’t do that. If you give me your name and phone number, I’ll get hold of her in the morning and ask her to ring you.”

‘Do it now.’

‘It’s awfully late.’

‘I want her now.’

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s Billie.’

‘Oh yes, I know.’

‘What do you know?’

‘I was here when you talked to Victoria. My name’s Helen.’

‘What did she tell you?’

‘Nothing much.’

‘She been discussing my business all over the do-gooders?’

‘She doesn’t do that. None of us do. What’s the matter, Billie? You sound upset.’

‘Upset – ha!’ Billie barked like a seal. ‘I’m pissed, if you want to know.’

‘How about talking to her tomorrow when you’re sober?’

‘Afraid she’ll be shocked? Listen Helen, you can’t shock that old girl. I’ve fucking tried.’

‘You can’t shock me either.’

‘I wouldn’t waste my breath trying…’

While she waited, Billie ambled into the cupboard that called itself a kitchen and refilled her smeary glass. Thing roosted on the tiny stove like a hedgehog, all paws concealed.
Billie trod in the bowl of fish. She rubbed her bare foot against the flabby white calf of the other leg – veins, a crime at your age – and went back into the bedroom. She sat on the side of the bed and observed herself in the mirror which hung over the tilting chest of drawers. One of the nails was pulling loose from the plaster of this hovel and the mirror hung slightly crooked, so that you had to tip your head to make your reflection fit. Billie raised her glass to herself without enthusiasm. She always looked the same, except when Morna had just cut her hair, so why bother with the mirror?

Morna put all sorts of stuff on her face. It took her hours in the morning. She was always late for work, and they had missed the beginning of
Bonnie and Clyde
– Billie would never forgive her for that – because at the last moment she had stripped a whole new face off and started it again.

Billie occasionally coated her short stiff lashes with some black stuff in a box she spat into, but mostly she rubbed a flannel over her rugged features as if she were polishing an apple, banged at her head with a brush and pulled on clothes as she was wandering about the two small rooms trying to find things, trying to remember what she was trying to find.

So that proved it. Ring me any time, Billie. But I’ll not bother to ring you.

The telephone sat on the locker by the bed, some of the holes on its dial full of grey dough from the scones Billie had made for Morna, since the girl was half starved for want of nourishing starch. Billie’s mother was always baking. Baking, baking, that’s all she did. Constantly at the oven with that broad bo-hind sticking out. It was a wonder Dad didn’t take a running kick at it.

When Victoria rang ... but she wouldn’t. That Nellie, Helen, whatever her name was – ‘Can I help you?’ but underneath, her voice was more Billie’s kind and could probably give as good as it got – she wouldn’t wake Victoria for someone like Billie. And if she did, Victoria
would say. ‘Oh her. She isn’t going to kill herself.’ She hadn’t believed it about the aspirin. ‘I’ll ring in the morning.’