Listening in the Dusk (5 page)

Her protest faltered to an uneasy halt, and Alice broke in hastily, trying to be reassuring.

“Look,” she said, “I don’t see why we need quarrel about this. This
is
to be my room, it’s all arranged, but I don’t see that it need affect you. You can go on storing your things here just as long as you like. I’m not trying to throw anything out, I’m just stacking things up neatly so as to give myself a bit of space.” And then, trying to be friendly, she added: “I’m Alice, by the way. You’re Mary, aren’t you?”

“How do you know? Who told you?”

The voice was sharp with suspicion, and Alice was momentarily quite thrown. What was the matter with the girl?

“Why … I suppose … Well, Hetty told me,” she
stammered
, feeling absurdly apologetic under the impact of that
accusing
stare. “She was just telling me — you know — about the rest of you who live here. I mean, we’re all going to be sharing the kitchen and everything, and so I suppose …”

“What else did she tell you?”

Alice no longer felt apologetic. Annoyance mounted under this ludicrous inquisition.

“Nothing,” she snapped. “Just that you were Mary, and someone called Brian was Brian, and someone else was Miss Dorinda. I haven’t even
met
any of these people, and so I don’t see what she could possibly …”

“No, of course not. I … I’m sorry, Alice,” the girl was
half-heartedly
trying to make amends for her rudeness. “I’m sorry, but it was kind of a shock finding you up here, and I thought for a moment that Hetty must have …”

She stopped; then continued, at something of a tangent: “You’ll like Hetty, Alice, she’s as kind as can be, as I expect you’ve discovered. She just loves people with problems. Do you have a problem, Alice? A real, juicy humdinger of a disaster? If so, you’re
in
!
No wonder she’s letting you have the bloody room! You’ll be Landlady’s Pet, and the rest of us will have our noses out of joint, even Brian!”

She gave a short, hard laugh, and turned to leave the room; then paused, and turning back continued, more gently: “I’m sorry, Alice, don’t take too much notice of me, I’m in a bad mood. I shouldn’t be saying nasty things about poor Hetty, she really is terribly good natured. It’s just that … Well, it’s not so much that she pokes her nose into other people’s business, it’s that she takes for granted that everything
is
her business. She’s a marvellous person if you ever need help with your troubles, but a right pain in the neck if you don’t!”

With which double-edged tribute Mary whisked around and clattered off down the wooden stairs. Alice heard a door on the third-floor landing slam shut, and then there was silence; broken only by a faint gurgle of water-pipes from somewhere across the landing. By now, it seemed like the voice of an old friend.

The gurgle of the water-pipes was in Mary’s ears, too, as she lay face-down on her bed, cursing herself for being every kind of a fool.

She had made another enemy. No, enemy was an
exaggeration
; all she had done, actually, was to discourage a possible friend, to slap down Alice’s kindly overtures before they became any kind of a threat.

Why did she keep doing this? With everyone? Surely she, with her star record as a psychology student, should be able to analyse it? Should have sufficient insight to diagnose her own case and suggest a cure?

The diagnosis was easy; but all the psychology textbooks in the world weren’t going to come up with a cure. Advice on how to win friends — in books, articles and Agony Columns — must run into millions and millions of words by now, but of what use are all these words when, in your particular case, friends are more dangerous than enemies? When kindness, concern and sympathy present a bigger threat than the most virulent hostility?

The fog was thickening outside her window, and she was getting cold, very cold. She did not bother to go across the room and switch on her electric fire; only one bar of it was working, and it made scarcely any difference to this big draughty room with its ill-fitting door and windows. Instead, she slipped off her shoes and crawled back into the bed, properly under the bedclothes this time, and with the shabby eiderdown pulled up to her chin. This way, with her eyes closed, and with the slow build-up of warmth generated by her own body inside its cocoon of bedclothes, she would be able to withdraw from the wintry chill of this room, this house, this street, and travel back,
back to the place where it was always summer, and the soft, sweet air was always warm. Flittermouse Hill.

It had been a wonderful place for children, for anyone, really, but not many people came, because the rutted tracks that led to it were almost impossible for cars. But to Mary and Julian it had been a sort of Paradise during their growing years. A short cycle ride from their home in Medley Green, it was their favourite haunt during school holidays, for it had everything. It was part of an unspoiled stretch of the Downs from which, on a clear day, you could see away and away across the rolling green distances to the glitter of the sea itself. Being up there felt not merely like being on top of the world, it felt like owning it, as a God might own it. She remembered how they’d talked about this, she and Julian (about twelve and ten they must have been) as they stood on the summit one noonday, the sun blazing down and the breeze of the high hills blowing about their heads. In her class at school, a few days back, they’d been doing the Temptation in the Wilderness for a Scripture lesson, and the teacher had been trying to impress the children with the hugeness of temptation that Jesus had faced.

“Just fancy. He was promised the
whole
world
if he did what the Devil said! The
whole
world,
just imagine it,” she urged the children. “Just imagine owning the whole world!”

The words had come back to her as she stood amid the golden gorse and golden sunshine at the topmost point of Flittermouse Hill, and she was puzzled. In what sense
don’t
I own it? she wondered. Here it
is.
Here I am, seeing it, knowing it, being right in the centre of it, as far as I can see. How is this not owning it? How can owning it be a temptation, when you’ve already got it?

She put the problem to Julian. He loved philosophical
problems
, even at that age. He thought about it gravely, his fairish hair blown about by the wind, and his eyes scouring the blue distances wherein the problem had its being.

“It must have been different for Jesus,” he said at last. “I don’t think He bothered about things being beautiful. Look at the way He blasted that tree. I’m glad He’s not alive now.”

This was blasphemy. Mary shuddered in delighted awe, as she often did at Julian’s more outlandish thoughts. She wondered what her Scripture teacher would have said if she had heard him?

“Oh, but Julian, do you think one should …?” she began; but already his thoughts were elsewhere, his small wiry body suddenly taut and braced for challenge:

“C’mon, Midge! Race you!” he cried; and they were off. He never
did
succeed in racing her during these early years, his legs were too much shorter than hers; but likewise he never gave up the hope that, this time, he just might. She heard his breath, gasping with determination, close behind her as she ran: in and out among the clumps of gorse, scrambling through thick bracken, and landing up at the entrance to one of the caves which were a feature of these upper slopes. Mary (or Midge as she was then) had often, when she was younger, wanted to continue their games inside one or other of the caves, turning it into a wizard’s castle, or a pirates’ hide-away or something, but Julian would not allow it. It would disturb the bats, he said. This was their bedroom, he explained, where they rested all day ready for their night’s hunting, and it would upset them terribly to have pirates and wizards and things charging in and out while they were trying to sleep. Mary had acquiesced, as she nearly always did to Julian’s pronouncements. Although he was nearly two years younger, he always seemed to know more than she did about almost everything; it was this, maybe, that made them such close companions all through the years of their childhood. The
age-gap
seemed to be nil; it was almost as if they were twins.

Julian’s fascination with the bats, and their near-miraculous way of life, had grown and grown; but it was not until they were both in their teens that their parents had allowed them to stay out on the hillside late enough for successful bat-watching; and even then, it still provoked a good deal of parental unease.

“There might be nasty men …” their mother had anxiously speculated, not realising (for how could she?) how ironic were these fears, in view of what was to come.

By the time they were, what? Fourteen? Fifteen? the ban had been lifted, albeit reluctantly, and they would set off to Flittermouse Hill on their bicycles in the late afternoon — sometimes with sandwiches, sometimes with just a bar of chocolate — and settle themselves outside the caves, at a fair distance from the openings in accordance with Julian’s assessment
of the bats’ peace of mind as they made their exit. There they would lie, sometimes talking, sometimes in silence, waiting for the sun to go down and for evening to spread over the hill. The air would be shimmering still with late-afternoon heat when they arrived, and Mary recalled the peace of it, the solitude, and the feel of the hot, blissful turf against her bare legs as she and Julian flopped down, breathless after their cycle ride followed by the long, up-hill scramble through gorse and bracken to reach their chosen eyrie.

Often, as they lay there side by side on the dry, sun-baked grass, waiting for dusk to fall, Julian would start telling her about bats. Each time, he would have learned something new about them, something fascinating, and almost incredible. That they steered themselves not by sight, but by echo-location, was of course one of the first things that Mary learned; and although much of what he told her during subsequent sessions was beyond her grasp, it still held a magic for her which did not depend on understanding. About reflected sound, for example, radiating away from the object in an expanding spherical wave-front; and how the volume of the sound decays according to the square of the distance from the object, so that by the time the echo of his own voice comes back to him, the bat, like a tiny mathematician, can calculate from the loudness or softness of it how far away the object must have been.

And as time went on, with practice, she did begin to understand more and more of what he told her; and fascinating it was, sometimes almost beyond belief. How, at cruising speed, they emit sounds at the rate of ten per second, rising to two hundred per second when they are closing in on their prey, a moth, maybe, or some other night-flying insect. And how their voices are
high-pitched
far beyond the range of human ears because the very short wave-lengths of very high-pitched sounds are necessary for conveying accurate information about very tiny objects at varying distances. These tiny objects have to be located, and then
relocated
, in fractions of a second, because they are fast-moving, as insects always are …

“You can’t really imagine it, Midge,” he said, his voice
half-choked
with the effort of trying to convey to her something quite beyond her — or anyone else’s — experience. “You see, most of
the noises they make are so far beyond the range of our hearing that they are higher than the highest note anyone can possibly imagine,” he told her. “And that’s jolly lucky, in a way,” he added, “because as well as being so high, they are also incredibly loud. They have to be, for the echo to come back strong enough. They are actually shouting and yelling at this high-frequency. If we
could
hear them, we’d be almost deafened. No one would be able to sleep through it, even with their windows shut!”

Thus would he talk, and tell her things; and thus would she lie listening, in absolute contentment, and occasionally asking a question, while above them the blue of the sky grew pale and paler, changing to the green and lemon of sunset, and then to the slow, encroaching violet of the coming night. And presently his voice would cease, and with one accord they would fall silent, or almost silent. “Venus!” one of them might whisper as the silvery point of light first flickered into visibility in the western sky; or, “Look, a new moon!” as the pale, gleaming thread of a crescent first detached itself from the pale gleaming background of the dying light.

But that was all; for by now it was necessary to be absolutely quiet. The time had arrived for the coming of the bats.

Rarely did they manage to observe them actually emerging from the mouth of a cave. They came out for their night’s hunting intermittently, it seemed, in ones and twos, not at all in the spectacular dark mass, like starlings, that Mary had at first envisaged. The first they saw of them, usually, would be a single one, darting in zig-zag flight across the darkening sky, changing direction at angles as sharp and clear as a diagram in a geometry text-book. And then there would be another … and another … flashing this way and that across the sky like dark lightning. More and more of them would come, until the sky was alive with them; it was like watching a firework display, all in black, only more amazing, more incomprehensible, than any firework display ever devised by man.

Sometimes, lying there, Mary fancied that she heard the magically high-pitched cries, as they shouted and yelled across the night sky, but Julian assured her that she couldn’t have. There are some species of bats where you just might, he said, the
Rousettus Fruit Bats, for example; but these were Mouse-Eared Bats, and their echo-location system was such that …

This, of course, was on the way home. They never talked while they were watching the bats, even though the bats almost certainly couldn’t have heard them. Their silence was like the silence of a religious gathering, in a church or a cathedral; to both of them it would have seemed wrong to break it, as though something of the spectacle would have been destroyed by a human voice.

Sometimes, though, without speaking, they would take a more positive part in the bats’ hunting rituals. They would bring pellets of bread with them, and little dry bits from the cake-tin, and fling them into the air as high as they could, and watch the bats swoop unerringly to snatch each crumb out of the empty sky. It was like watching Wimbledon tennis, only a thousand times swifter and more exact, the same reliance on perfect timing and unerring pace.

And then home again — later than expected — their mother anxious and waiting, hurrying them into hot baths, and cooking them bacon and eggs at nearly midnight, so thankful was she that they’d arrived home safe, and hadn’t encountered any Nasty Men.