Listening in the Dusk (19 page)

It didn’t, though. They closed in too suddenly, perhaps; or the rush of adrenalin came too late. Or something.

Anyway, they got him. They took him alive, which he had sworn they should never do.

Alice’s words hung in the quiet room unanswered. “Do you want to throw it away?” she’d asked.

It was after midnight. She was exhausted, and so must Mary be after their day-long journey into tragedy. Had she made a mistake in more or less forcing Mary to sit down and read the diary with her? It was bound to upset her — to re-awaken all the dreadful memories — but was it not better, in the long run, to face everything that had to be faced, and then begin putting it behind you, rather than have it for ever hanging over you?

“Or shall we keep it?” she continued.

Mary still did not speak, but sat, head in hands, her mouth pulled into a thin, down-turned line, like an old woman, by the pressure of her tense palms. Alice felt obliged to go on talking, to hold at bay, somehow, the terrible silence which threatened to become irreversible.

“The way it seems to me,” she hazarded, not even knowing yet how she was going to finish the sentence. “The way one
could
look at it, I mean, well, in
some
ways hasn’t reading it made you feel a bit better? I mean, obviously these were dreadful crimes, no one is going to argue with that, but at least he imagined he had a
purpose
… In his own eyes, he was doing it
for
something. Fighting single-handed for a
cause
…”

At this last word, Mary’s head jerked up, her eyes sharp with the feverish glitter of exhaustion as well as panic.

“
A
cause
!
But that’s the worst thing of all, the lawyers said! All the time, preparing for the trial, they were insistent that the whole question of Julian working for a cause must be kept strictly out of it. Juries have no sympathy for causes, they told us. They are likely to view a crime committed for a cause in a much worse light than the same crime committed for money, or revenge, or
some other sort of personal gain. And anyway, they told us, the Judge would disallow it. He would instruct the Jury that the rights or wrongs of any cause whatsoever were outside their terms of reference: it was their duty to decide only two things: first, were they satisfied that the alleged crimes had been committed; and second, were they satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that it was the defendant who’d committed them.

“And of course it
was
beyond reasonable doubt. Julian never made the slightest effort to deny any of it.”

“No, well, he wouldn’t, would he?” Alice pointed out. “It’s obvious from the diary that he
wanted
the world to know what he’d done and why he’d done it. He felt that he was striking a blow, making a huge, unforgettable gesture on behalf of, well, of life on earth. That’s what he felt he was doing, and he wanted the world to know it. He didn’t know, I imagine, all this about judges disallowing discussion of principles, of ethical fors and againsts, in Court. Besides, he never expected to
be
in Court, did he? He planned to finish himself off before it came to that. He says so — over and over again — and my reading of it is that he truly and honestly meant it. Not all suicides do; but I’m sure he did.”

“Oh, yes. I’m sure too. He even talked of it to me, long before all this. When we first heard that they were going to build on Flittermouse Hill, that’s when it was. He felt
awful
about it; I knew he did, though I suppose I didn’t quite realise
how
awful. Well, I felt awful too, but of course it wasn’t quite the same for me. I’d already left home, you see, I was at college by then, my life had already moved on to somewhere else, if you know what I mean, while his hadn’t. He was still there, still at school, still living at home, right in the thick of it. I didn’t realise … Well, I did, but I didn’t see what I could do about it; except go with him on those demos and things, whenever I was home; and a bloody lot of use
that
was!”

She paused, and reached out absently for one of the biscuits which had been virtually their sole sustenance during the day.

“And another thing, Alice, which would have gone against him, the fact that it was not only a cause, but a cause that concerned animals.
You
know, the idea of valuing animal life above human life. It gives people the shudders.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Alice was beginning, thinking about this being a nation of animal-lovers, but Mary interrupted.

“It
is
so, Alice,” she insisted. “It really is. You know how horrified everyone is if a motorist swerves to avoid a dog and hits a pedestrian? There’s a national outcry. Whereas if he’s swerved to avoid a sack of potatoes and had had exactly the same accident, no one would have said a word; it would just have been an unlucky accident. And that time two or three years ago — do you remember?—when a man drowned trying to rescue his dog from a rough sea, and a policeman got drowned too trying to save him? It was a scandal for days, endangering human life for the sake of a
dog.
Whereas if exactly the same tragedy had occurred as a result of him swimming out after a lilo, there’d have been no fuss at all. It would have been just one more unfortunate bathing fatality. It was because it was a
dog
— an
animal
— that’s what caused the moral outrage.

“It’s true, Alice. People
do
feel this horror. And on top of all this his cause, as you call it — Nature, and animals and things — could only have been harmed. A woman I know from the Animal Guardian Group said it would set the cause back a hundred years if it ever became known
why
Julian had run amok like that. I assure you, Alice — I’ve lived with all this awfulness for long enough to know this for certain — it’s better to kill for sheer wickedness than for the sake of an animal. People feel like that. They just do.”

“And do
you
feel like that?” Alice had hesitated for several seconds before putting the question; and straight away it was clear that she had said the wrong thing.

“It’s not
fair
!
It’s not
fair
!” Mary cried. “Why should you expect me to feel differently from the way other people feel? I don’t
want
to feel differently! I want to be
ordinary
!
I want to feel the way other people feel, I want to think the way other people think. I want to think ordinary thoughts; and so would you if you’d been through what I’ve been through!

“Oh, Alice, it’s not my
thing
!
I’ve been dragged into it. It’s like being kidnapped in mistake for someone else … it’s not
fair
!

“Sometimes, Alice, I envy him, I really do. I envy all these dreadful criminals because they actually did commit their crimes, themselves; it’s in their nature to do whatever they did, they’re
kind of all of a piece with it. And I’m
not.
How can I be? It’s not in my nature to be the sister of a murderer, I wasn’t born for it, it’s something I don’t know how to be, something I
can’t
be, it’s impossible …”

By this time her voice was almost lost in gusts of exhausted weeping, and the single desperate plea was all that Alice could distinguish amid the uncontrollable sobs:

“I want to be
or
dinary
!
All I want is to be
ordinary
!
Surely that’s not much to ask …”

Actually, it is a lot to ask. Too weary to follow up this thought, Alice summoned up all her remaining energies for the task of persuading Mary to go to bed. Tomorrow — today, rather, for it was long after midnight — would be Saturday, the first day of the new job in the supermarket, and as this fact crossed her mind Alice knew, with absolute certainty, that Mary must be made to go to it, no matter what she was feeling like. It was a watershed, on the other side of which might surely lie the new life she had been so hopelessly seeking all this time. No way must she be allowed to oversleep, to lie in bed till it was too late to go, sobbing I can’t, I won’t and What’s the point, my life is in ruins.

And so, heartless though it seemed at such a juncture, Alice reached out both hands and yanked Mary to her feet, tears and all.

“Come along. Pull yourself together (the one phrase you must
never
use, all the books say so, as Mary would well know; which would make the shock of hearing it all the more salutary). Come on, it’s nearly two and you’ve got to be out of the house by eight and properly dressed, too, looking your best. How do you think you’re going to do that if you go on crying all night? Let alone getting the money right in the till. Never mind that discrepancy of ten pounds, you’ll be getting a discrepancy of hundreds if you don’t get any sleep.

“Listen. You said just now you wanted to be ordinary. So, OK,
be
ordinary; an ordinary working girl off to an ordinary job at which she’s ordinarily efficient and picks up an ordinary pay-packet at the end of the day. A girl who
looks
ordinary, too, not one with red eyes and a swollen face and can’t stop sniffing. Now, get
on
!
Out of that door, down those stairs, and into bed. I’ll
bring you a hot drink in ten minutes, and then that’s got to be the last we hear of you until the alarm goes in the morning. Here you are; I’ve set it for seven, and if I don’t hear you moving around by seven fifteen, I’ll come and drag you out of bed. Right?

“
Out,
then. Don’t just sit there. Make yourself scarce. Which is Old-Speak for ‘Fuck Off’, in case you haven’t come across it before!”

The effect seemed to be little short of miraculous. Well before eight, Mary must have been up and away, or so Alice concluded, glancing into the room on her way downstairs. She had made the bed, too, and flung the window open at the bottom before leaving. Both good signs, though the latter was admitting so icy a blast of damp January air that Alice could not refrain from closing it. A pity: Mary’s flinging of it open on to the wild, windy outdoors, after all these weeks of cowering away from
everything,
seemed to indicate a wonderful lifting of the spirit, a revival of confidence and hope.

Of course, this had been almost bound to happen, sooner or later. The living mind, just like the living body, is resilient beyond the wit of man to comprehend. Just as an injured body will instantly set about mobilising all the appropriate
mechanisms
of repair and healing, so also will the mind. Nor do these processes of repair demand any particular co-operation on the part of the sufferer. Without encouragement of any sort, a burned area of skin will form for itself a blister, beneath the shelter of which new skin can regenerate. It will do this whether the victim wants it to or not; whether he is conscious,
unconscious
, happy, unhappy, crossed in love, on top of the world, sunk in apathy or intending to die, his body will go on quietly doing its job regardless. So, likewise, will the mind. However great the trauma, however terrible the shock, or how hopeless the situation, the mind will very soon set in motion the forces of recovery. Even during the period of apparently total despair, the process will already have begun, far below the level of
awareness
, and the final breakthrough may take the sufferer himself quite by surprise.

Was this what was happening to Mary? Had she now reached
the point when the forces of mental health were taking over, willy nilly, regardless of the intractable nature of the dreadful facts? More hopeful about the girl than she had been for some time, Alice continued on her way down to the kitchen to make herself some toast and a cup of coffee.

Miss Dorinda was there already, just finishing her bowl of re-inforced low-fat peanut crunchies, and full of complaints which (though she didn’t say so) filled Alice with optimism.
That
girl,
declared Miss Dorinda, had not only been washing her hair before seven in the morning — all that noise from the pipes, bath-mat soaked, and you should just
see
the basin! — but had been down here in the kitchen frying sausages.
Sausages
, if you please, the smell all over the house, at twenty-five past seven.

“
Twenty-five
past
seven
!”
she repeated, thinking Alice couldn’t have heard her, so casual was her response. For “Oh” was all she’d said, and had proceeded to switch on the toaster just as if nothing had happened.

“
Twenty-five
past
seven
!
That’s not her time, that’s my time! My time is quarter past seven till quarter to eight, it’s been my time for years, it was agreed right from the start! And if that girl thinks she can get away with defying the house rules …”

“I don’t think she’s defying anything,” suggested Alice
placatingly
. “I don’t think she knows anything about the breakfast times here. Until now, she’s never been down at this sort of hour, has she, she doesn’t come out of her room till —”

“You’re telling me! I don’t know what the young are coming to, I really don’t. And that Brian, too, he’s never up until goodness knows what hour either. What they’ll do when us old ones are all gone, and no longer working ourselves into the ground to pay for their free this and thats, their Social Security, and their unemployment hand-outs … They’ll soon find —”

“Well, at least she’s got herself a job
now
,” Alice interposed hastily; “Mary, I mean; she’s starting today. Don’t you
remember?
On the till at Brandgoods. She’ll just about be there by now. And as to Brian, he’s a musician, you know. A lot of the time he has to be working at home, practising, going through things for his pupils —”

“Well, and isn’t that just what I’m saying?” snapped Miss Dorinda. “A musician!” and it was clear from her tone that in her scheme of things being a musician was just one more way of being unemployed, and a singularly tiresome one at that insofar as it involved keeping other people awake after 10.00 pm.

“‘Early to bed and early to rise’, that was my mother’s motto,” Miss Dorinda finished complacently, laying down her spoon and dabbing at her lips with a tissue; and Alice forbore to point out that Mary’s one and only attempt to live by this worthy maxim seemed to have caused nothing but trouble.

On and off during the day, Alice’s thoughts turned anxiously to Mary, struggling with all that money and the intricacies of the unfamiliar till. How was she getting on? Were they telling her off a lot? Or upsetting her in some other, perfectly innocent way, by asking friendly questions about her home and family? Once again, Alice found herself querying the wisdom of Mary’s policy of impenetrable secrecy as a technique for minimising her troubles. For a technique it was, one of the many techniques the mind employs for self-healing, a method of protecting the injury from further assault while it slowly mends. Looked at this way, all this secrecy was Mary’s life-support system, the healing method of choice for her traumatised spirit, as necessary as a bandage on an open wound, or plaster round a broken bone.

Still, life-support systems shouldn’t be kept switched on for ever; sooner or later, the patient must start breathing on his own. Hadn’t this time arrived for Mary? Shouldn’t she start being Imogen again — or Midge — and let the truth be known? Brazen it out, let the whole thing be a nine-days-wonder, after which it would gradually subside as everyone got tired of it, as they surely would?

It crossed Alice’s mind to take a trip down to Brandgoods, at the far end of the High Street, and have a peep at Mary while she worked; but she decided against it. With Mary’s rooted terror of being spied on, checked-up on, such a visit might re-activate all sorts of irrational suspicions. Also, on a more practical level, it might simply distract her from her task, get her pressing the wrong knobs, ringing-up too many noughts and find herself charging £2,800 for a £2.80 pair of gloves. Or whatever it was that
one was liable to do wrong on those machines; Alice was rather vague about it. For all she knew, some small slip not much different from a typing error might cost the firm hundreds of thousands of pounds.

In any case, it being Saturday, she herself was more than usually busy; Cyril in the morning, and no doubt he would stay for lunch, and the postman, Mr Bates, in the afternoon, with his carefully prepared homework. Alice had given up for the time being the attempt to teach him any grammar, and contented herself with preparing lists of all the nouns, adjectives and verbs he would encounter in a given portion of text, encouraging him to learn them, and sharing his delight when he recognised them as they turned up. His other delight lay in criticising Euripides for his handling of the plot. On this particular afternoon, they were tackling Admetus’ long speech about the difficulty he’d
encountered
in trying to persuade other people to go down to Hades in his stead; and the dubious ethics therein displayed really got Mr Bates on the raw. For a wife to volunteer to die for the sake of a husband, that was all fine and dandy, but it was a bit off for the husband to
expect
her to do so, didn’t Alice agree. And then dragging the poor old father into it, too, expecting
him
to trot off down to Hades at the drop of a hat! Mr Bates was tickled pink when they came to the bit where the old boy had put his foot down good and proper, and quite right too! Put Admetus in his place, after all that back-answering; “I’d like to’ve seen what
my
Dad would’ve said if I’d even …”

And at that point, the telephone rang.

Now, it so happened that it was the custom at number seventeen Beckford Road — indeed it had acquired almost the status of an unwritten law — that everyone should wait for someone else to be the one to run up (or down) the long flights of stairs to answer the phone; to be the one to scrabble in the semi-darkness for a pencil with a point, with which laboriously to transcribe the message for somebody else, with its characteristic content of unspellable names and long,
out-of-town
numbers.

The ringing went on and on. It was a question of who cracked first; and on this occasion (as commonly happened) it was
Alice. On the eighth ring, with a hasty apology to her pupil, she hurried down into the hall.

It was a male voice, and one strange to her.

“Good evening. Could I speak to Imogen, please?” it
enquired
with easy confidence; and for a moment Alice was
completely
thrown. ‘Imogen’, the name that Mary was keeping a total secret. The name by which she was never to be known again. I’m sorry, you’ve got a wrong number, Alice should have said, and should have said it instantly. By the time she had collected her wits enough actually to say it, an awkward little pause had intervened, indicating a measure of uncertainty; enough, anyway, for the caller to feel it worth while to argue the toss:

“Imogen,” he repeated. “Imogen Gray. I understand she is residing at that address, seventeen Beckford —”

“No … No …!” cried Alice and was she, this time, rushing in
too
fast, suspiciously over-emphatic? “No … No one of that name … No, not living here … No, we’ve never heard of her.” And she slammed the receiver down before she could be embroiled in further bouts of incompetent and
ill-rehearsed
lying.

Sitting down once more alongside her expectantly waiting pupil, she was dismayed to find herself trembling from head to foot. It was impossible to concentrate. Admetus’ moral
dilemma
concerning life or death for himself and/or his wife seemed both feeble and contrived when compared with Alice’s own moral dilemma. To tell Mary, or not to tell her, about this disconcerting phone call? It was the same dilemma as had been posed earlier, when that intrusive stranger had accosted her on the way to the Bensons. Could it indeed be the same man? Voices are not always easy to recognise on the telephone.

But, in any case, whoever it was, the problem was the same. To tell Mary would inevitably fling her right back into the state of obsessional distrust and terror out of which — or so it had seemed to Alice this morning — she was just beginning to emerge:
not
to tell her, on the other hand, would be outright deception, almost amounting to betrayal. Supposing something awful happened as a result of her failure to warn the girl of …

Well, of what? Of the possibility that someone from her past had tracked her down, was on her trail, was bent on exposing her? Inevitably Mary herself would see it in these terms, but did Alice have to?
She
wasn’t the one in the grip of an obsession, she was able to look at the thing from outside, rationally, and from this vantage point she could already see the whole episode as probably quite trivial and entailing no dire consequences of any kind. After all, she had told the caller, quite decisively, that this Imogen Gray did not live here. Why should he disbelieve her? The fact that someone from her former life was trying to get in touch with her was neither surprising nor sinister, and on being told that he’d got the wrong address, he would surely try elsewhere, or else give up altogether? Anyone would.

But, on the other hand, there was just the possibility that …

“Oi, listen to this!” Mr Bates was saying, and proceeded to read from the translation of Alcestis’ dying words, as Death comes to fetch her away.

“His hand in mine, he leads me down to the House of the Dead … He has wings … his eyes are dark under his frowning brows …”

He read the passage with great feeling, before subjecting it to comparison with his Dad’s last words, which, it so happened, concerned the lid of a biscuit-tin that someone hadn’t replaced properly. “Airtight! Gotta be airtight,” he’d said, quite loudly, before closing his eyes for ever, and like Alcestis, seeing no more the sun nor the light of the day.