The Listeners (10 page)

The bar was closed, and the hotel would not be open until the week before Christmas, but the owner, a friendly man with a head like a lion on powerful shoulders, gave them a drink and said in his surprisingly gentle voice, ‘Americans? All right, we can probably open a bit early to help you out.’

Feeling important to Brian, Sarah went up with the wife to see the rooms. ‘They’re so attractive,’ she said when she came down. ‘I hate to say this, but if I was an American insurance man, I’d rather be here than at the Front Royal.’

The owner laughed and said, ‘If I can’t get my staff back early, I’ll send for you.’

From the
Courier,
Friday Evening. YOUTH FOUND STABBED.

Early this morning, a passer-by answered cries for help from a disused area on Flagg’s Hill. An unidentified youth was taken to University Hospital for treatment of what are thought to be stab wounds.

Sammy ‘the boy’ came up from the press-room with the first run of the Friday edition and tossed one on to Victoria’s desk as he slammed into the reporters’ room, like a bicycling newsboy in a small-town American film pitching the newspaper on to the front porch. Victoria looked through it, and identified the story about the unknown youth as the suicide attempt that Paul had rescued. The old cliché about nothing you happened to know ever being reported quite right was especially true if you worked on a newspaper.

Uncle Willie’s light glowed, a startling innovation, sole upshot of a Time and Motion man’s untimely sweep through the office. She picked up his telephone. ‘Come in here will you, Victoria? I think Curly and I are being brilliant, so you’d better take it down while it lasts.’

‘Yes, Mr Fisher.’ She rang downstairs for Margot, then got up and offered the paper to the young man with the folder of drawings who had been waiting for an hour
under the window-sill, with Victoria’s sun-starved
impatiens
straggling into his hair.

He had been day-dreaming. ‘Mm?’ He looked at the ink-smelling newspaper as if it were the last thing he expected to find here. ‘Oh — no thanks.’

‘There’s a rather clever cartoon—’

He blew into his upper lip, as if he knew his were cleverer.

She put the paper on the table. ‘I don’t think he’ll be much longer.’

‘God, I hope not.’ He ran his hand through his hair, and some
impatiens
leaves fell out.

‘Are you all right?’ He looked pale and limply damp, like the first copies of the Friday edition.

‘It’s OK.’ His young face locked its secret.

You must be a Samaritan all the time, not just on duty.
Easy to say.

One night last week, Victoria had sat upstairs on a bus, alone except for a woman who sat behind her on the back seat, weeping.

What’s the matter ... Let me help you ... Tell me ... By the time Victoria had found courage to get up, the bus slowed and the woman had stumbled down the stairs. When Victoria went after her, she was already gone somewhere down the dark street.

‘Getting off?’ The conductress looked like a mother of six, attacking housework and laundry after work with copper-tainted fingers.

‘I wanted to ask that woman — she was crying, wasn’t she?’

‘Best not to turn a stone,’ the conductress said. ‘We see it all, in this game.’

Margot came up with her hair all frizzed out like a Kalahari bushman, and Victoria went into Uncle Willie’s inferno of an office, where fat steam pipes clanked like the engine room of a ship and the waste-paper basket was often on fire. When Victoria had to call Margot up to Reception, Mrs Watcher, who refused to be alone on the Classifieds desk, rang through to Circulation
for Bridget, and Circulation made a pot of tea and would not finish Bridget’s work, even to catch the post. It would have been simpler to hire one more girl, but the
Courier
could not thrive that way. It had to be lop-sided, stopgap, stumbling every Tuesday and Friday hairsbreadth on to the streets.

When Victoria came out of the editor’s office, a reporter who was sitting on the corner of her desk got up to go, and Margot said, ‘There was a phone message for you.’

‘Who?’

‘They wouldn’t say. A private call, they said. I wrote the number somewhere.’ She riffled through bits of paper, licking her finger.

‘It’s all right, I know it.’

‘Ho ho, a man then?’

‘Yes, ho ho, a man.’ No one at the
Courier
knew that she was a Samaritan. When Margot had gone she dialled the Centre. ‘This is 422. Do you want me?’

‘Oh yes.’ Betty’s soft Welsh voice. ‘Can you ring Jean? She said she must speak to you.’

Jean answered the telephone in a defensive moan. ‘You may not believe it, but I went out. I did go out, and I thought, well, Victoria will be pleased anyway, even if nobody else cares one way or another. I was in a shop — I actually was, and it was all right, until that woman had to speak to me. I hardly knew her. Why couldn’t she leave me alone?’

‘Did you talk to her?’

‘How could I? I was terrified. I ran home like a rabbit. That was ages ago, and I’ve been here in the bedroom ever since, feeling so dreadful. I tried to get hold of you. Where were you?’

‘I’m sorry. I’m at the office.’

‘Victoria, I must talk to you. Please come and see me. Can’t you come in your lunch hour?’

‘Oh, Jean — I’ve had that.’

‘When you get out then.
Please.’

‘Well, I—’

‘Look, you’re the only one who cares. If you let me down, I don’t know what I’ll do.’

‘Did you see Dr Hunt last week?’ Victoria had her hands round the telephone talking softly. The pale boy with the folder had gone off with Curly, but there were other people passing in and out.

‘It’s no use. He doesn’t help me. He doesn’t tell me anything.’

‘Would you like me to make another appointment?’

‘I couldn’t get there.’

‘Even if I went with you?’

But when Jean was like this, her mind slithered away from anything practical or positive. ‘Can’t you come here? I know you don’t want to. I know I’m a nuisance to you...’

Don’t whine, Victoria wanted to say, but she said, ‘All right. I’ll try and be there about six.’

‘If no one is home, there’s a key buried under that little bush the dogs killed. I can’t come down.’

When Robbie fetched her for a family weekend in the next county, driving patiently round and round the old brown newspaper building because there was nowhere to park, Victoria kissed his cheek briefly, turning away from his quickly searching lips, and said, ‘I’m sorry, Rob. I have to stop and see someone on the way. Could we go out by Newton?’

He groaned. ‘Through all that traffic? Victoria, I wish you—’

‘All right, I’ll get a taxi. You can meet me somewhere later.’ Anger was in the car with them even before she had rolled down the window to exorcize his thin cigars.

‘Don’t be stupid.’ He reached across to push down the lock of her door. ‘Of course I’ll take you. Who is it?’

‘A client.’

‘Why didn’t you say so?’ His voice grew dutifully considerate, as if the Samaritans were a crank religion. ‘Newton — oh, it’s Jean, is it?’

‘Yes. I don’t know what to do about her. She isn’t getting any better. I don’t seem to be helping her much.’

‘I’m sure you do,’ Robbie said, too dotingly. ‘I think it’s marvellous what you do. I only wish I had the time to be a Samaritan myself, but I’m afraid I’d get too involved.’

That’s the point. Victoria did not say it. You have to.

At ten that morning the telephone woke Billie from the drowned, snuffling sleep into which she had fallen after she talked to Victoria. She raised her face an inch from the pillow. Morna? She never rang from work, even when Billie begged, ‘Just to say hullo, that’s not much to ask when someone’s got flu.’ There’s no phone in the laundry,’ Morna said. But you could bet old Sister Speculum could ring down any time and say, ‘I’m short two drawsheets.’

‘Oh sod off.’ Billie collapsed again, but the telephone went on ringing.
Bad news
was the rhythm with which it rang. When it was evening, and Morna’s squeaky voice might say, ‘There’s a
fantastic
picture at the Odeon,’ the ringing drummed out
Good news.

Billie rolled over, reached out and jerked the telephone to silence. ‘
What
is it?’

Bad news was right. ‘That’s what I want to know,’ Mr Fettiche snapped. ‘I need you down here, worse my luck.’

‘I’m ill.’ Billie lowered her voice an octave from its normal baritone. ‘Really ill this time. I ache all over. There’s a lot of polio about, you know.’

‘Not since the vaccine,’ said Mr Fettiche cruelly. ‘You get down here by ten-thirty, or I’ll see you sacked.’

‘You’ll not get another counter hand to work the hours I do.’

The student committee is talking of running the cafeteria,’ he said, ‘unless the service improves. That means you, Camilla Cripps.’

‘Oh shit.’ She said it after she heard him ring off. She was not ready to lose the job. Not yet.

Hots on Friday were ham and beans, lamb stew with a papery white skin on it, macaroni and cheese for the strapped, baked haddock for the children of Mary. In her green overall which had big pockets below counter level for slipping buns and sugar lumps into, and squares of
cheese for Thing, Billie ladled out hot lunches gracelessly, like the Trusty with the dinner wagon in
Birdman of Alcatraz.

‘Where’s your cap?’ Mr Fettiche stood at the board behind her on tiptoe, changing the plastic letters that spelled Swiss Roll to Trifle. That meant the Swiss had gone stale. ‘I said where’s your cap?’ He had had the inspector down last term, lifting lids and recoiling from the roller towels.

‘In my pocket.’ The caps were only stiff green bows, but still technically a head covering. Billie pulled hers out, shook off biscuit crumbs and pinned it somewhere on the back of her head without letting go of the ladle.

Colds were the usual. Ham, galantine, Scotch eggs, sardine salad and egg mayonnaise — they had it soft, these kids, but they did nothing but grumble, passing sideways with their bent-up trays, their hair a scandal, trailing in the butter the fringes of shawls that Billie’s grandmother would not have given attic room to, leaving wiry beard hairs on the jelly as they bent to sniff.

‘What is it?’

‘Lemon-lime.’

‘It looks like spawn.’

‘Is it the fish that’s off, or what?’

‘Man,’ they said to each other, ‘I was hungry before I saw this.’

Anyone would think they had eaten real food, where they came from. In their skinny jeans which bent at the knees like broken drainpipes, skirts to the crotch or trailing in the dirt like stuffy old women, parting their hair to get a cavilling look at the haddock — most of them looked as if they had never had a decent meal, nor a home to eat it in.

The stew ladle in one hand and the fish slice in the other, Billie caught a vision of Morna with her bubbly hair and baby strap shoes, and felt suddenly faint.

When Helen got home to ‘The Maltings’ after Samaritan night duty, her children had gone to school, leaving
messages all over the kitchen. ‘Out of peanut butter. Please iron my blue dress. Good a.m. mother with love from Danny.’

Mrs Weinberg had been in the flat. The door to the kitchen sighed shut as Helen untied the cross-eyed dog from the boot scraper and came in from the garden.

‘Looking for something, Mrs W?’

‘Oh hullo, Helen.’ Mrs Weinberg was in a jutting pink overall with a strand of thick pink wool round her new Egyptian haircut. Must be Incurables library day. She hardly needed any civvies, since she was always dressed in Ranger Guide uniform, or WRVS green, or a doggy white coat for the PDSA, or the tricorne and starch of St John’s Ambulance, the Maltese cross so far out on the apron front that she could hardly get the smelling salts to the noses of the fallen at the Whitsun fair.

‘I was just going to see about breakfast, as you weren’t back.’

‘That’s funny, I thought you’d been in the flat. The beer is mine, in case you wondered.’

Helen said more or less what she liked to her, or to Mr Weinberg or any of the family. They pretended that they thought it amusing, but sometimes they talked about it. ‘You must say something to her.’ ‘She might leave.’ ‘Let her.’ ‘But I’ll
never
get another!’ ‘If you didn’t run about all the time disguised as a Christian, you wouldn’t need anyone,’ And etc, and etc. Helen had heard them at it through the back of a bookcase which used to be a window before the flat was built on.

‘Had a good night, dear?’

‘Yes, love.’

‘Any casualties?’ As a first-aider, Mrs Weinberg was always interested in overdose or haemorrhage, though with a hint sometimes of jealousy. If a person was in danger of hanging himself or opening a vein, what could the amateurish Samaritans do that St John’s couldn’t do better?

‘Not to speak of.’ Helen began to bang noisily about the kitchen in the motions of making breakfast. ‘There’s
this man comes in and says, “Is this the place where they stop people killing themselves?” “That’s right,” I say, so he pulls out a pistol and drills himself, right there on our carpet.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘If you say so, Madam.’ Helen put on her underdog drone, beaten stupid by years of service. She bent to pat the dog as if he were her only ally, then she made up a few more Samaritan clients to keep Mrs Weinberg happy while she watched Helen fry eggs. She did not tell her about Jackie or old Mike or the homosexual librarian, or the boy with the slashed wrist who would by now have woken from the anaesthetic to find himself alive, with what? Relief? Disappointment? Had he gone bleeding to the telephone because he did not want to die, or because he only wanted someone to know? When Helen had woken choking in the garage, the terrifying thing was how easy it would have been.

Tim’s bed was opposite the ward door, with the television set on the wall above his head. Everybody stared his way, but he could not see the picture.

After tea, fed into him through a small teapot by a nervous boy in a white coat who seemed to be learning, they took the needle out of the inside of his arm and put on a piece of plaster.