The Listeners (13 page)

She was fairly inarticulate, from caution and lack of ideas rather than shyness. His fat, silly Lordship was so uncomfortably shy that you automatically checked the exits if you found yourself alone in a room with him. When Robbie was at home, he dropped back into their habit of clearing his throat and emitting little Hms and Wells and small nasal sounds to fill silences. Victoria was no great hand at small talk, but nervously she tried, and succeeded only in sounding garrulous.

The two couples who came to dinner on Friday night were more or less untitled versions of the Roundswells. Everyone stood round with drinks, giving out little moans and hums from up in the nose, while his Lordship went ‘Ha ha, well’, and ‘Well, ha ha’ a few times, and Victoria wished they could all sit down and read magazines till dinner.

The food was marvellous and the wine was good. Victoria looked across at Robbie’s nice polite face under the short fringe he had started to wear after he saw Richard Harris in ‘Camelot’, and tried to imagine eating with him at this table her own food that she was not allowed to cook. Why could she not throw everybody out of the kitchen? And have the guilt on her soul of Ethel Mobsby, whose whole life was here? And Robbie’s mother would move pointedly from the end of the table, though nobody asked her to, and watch Victoria trying to be Lady Roundswell; or sit stuffed into her Paisley, picking at the pheasant, because the Hon. Robbie had had himself demoted to Mister. Though if he did, they would not get this house.

Sometimes Robbie went wild and heaped on Victoria exhilarating ideas of an island in the Hebrides, a boat in the south seas, a plunge to Australia. She joined in the heady plans, but when he pressed her, ‘Is that the adventure you want? Is that the kind of marriage you’d like to have?’ Victoria could not answer, because she could not say, ‘But it wouldn’t be an adventure with you.’

Before they went home, one of the couples, who had
not seemed to enjoy themselves at all, said with surprising warmth. ‘You must
all
come round to us for drinks tomorrow.’

‘Oh I say.’

‘Oh splendid.’

‘Oh jolly good.’

That would be tomorrow taken care of then. ‘Well now. Ha ha, yes.’

Victoria said, ‘Thank you so much, but I have to be back in the evening.’ But they meant drinks before lunch, bloody Marys, gin and bitter lemon. Ha ha, jolly good. She and Robbie would not be able to take the long walk across the hills and lunch at the Lamb and Flag.

Afterwards when the Roundswells had gone up — there was a bed in his Lordship’s dressing-room, but Victoria could not guess whether he used it, and Robbie did not know, didn’t
know
whether his parents slept together! — he sulked under his fringe and said, ‘You didn’t say you had to go back tomorrow. I was taking you to a party.’

‘I’m sorry, Rob. I must get back. I have to be on duty by eight on Sunday so that Kathleen can get to Mass.’

He groaned and tutted and swung his head about. He was not so enthusiastic about the Samaritans when they interfered with his plans.

Victoria would not let him drive her back. She took a train and went straight from the station to a cinema, dropping into her seat in the darkness with the familiar drugged satisfaction, alone, unknown, craving the safety of the dream.

When Billie rang up on Sunday, opening defensively, ‘You said to ring,’ she had been to the cinema too.

With Morna. ‘That’s the name of my friend, I told you. Morna, her name is. Short for Maureen that her mother called her, but she spelled it wrong and they put it on the birth certificate as Momeen. Silly, you know, but then.’ Billie sounded very chirpy.

‘I’m so glad you’re feeling better.’

‘Well, I’m better than when I rang you Thursday night, I’ll say that much.’

‘I know. Poor Billie. Things are all right now, are they, between you and Morna?’

‘I don’t know about
all right.’
Billie would never have everything roses. ‘She’s not really the sort of girl you can trust. A bit tricky, you see. Sometimes she won’t answer the phone, to make me think she’s gone out. I never quite know who she’s with. But Saturday lunchtime when I came back from work — oh, you should see my feet, the standing is criminal — there she was at the door, pushing a bar of chocolate nougat through the letter-box. So in the afternoon we went to see
Twisted Nerve
and we got a bit of supper and then went down to South Parade and saw
Rosemary’s Baby.’

‘How is it?’

‘Smashing. All those old bags standing round without a stitch on, I had to laugh. And there’s poor old Mia Farrow stretched out like a stewing chicken, not a bit of flesh on her, and you see the devil doing it, right there before your amazed eyes, you ought to see it. Or are you prudish, Victoria? Funny, it’s as if I know you quite well, but I don’t know anything about you. You’re thirty-five. Old maid. Not a lez. Right? So you’re a prude.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘It’s all orgasms now though, isn’t it, the films, all orgasms. I get a bit sick of it.
Tereese and Isabella
— I don’t know. Morna and I started to laugh, and pretty soon we had the whole house in fits. “It wasn’t like that when I was at school,” someone said, and it started everybody off again. In
Twisted Nerve,
where poor old Billie Whitelaw is off to the woodshed, there was a woman giggled. Nerves, you see. She was still sniggering when he smashes that hatchet down on her forehead and all blood and stuff comes out. How do they do that? Like that bit in
Psycho
where the dick is coming up the stairs and Anthony Perkins puts the knife into his face. I’ve seen that picture three times.’

‘I’ve seen it four.’

‘My God, you’re as bad as me, Victoria. Do you see everything?’

‘Except the surfing ones.’

‘I go all the time. That’s how I met Morna, as a matter of fact. It was
The Americanisation of Emily.
A person like an elephant came and sat down in front of me, so I moved my seat and there she was. Someone had finally got Julie Andrews into bed.’

‘James Garner.’

‘You’re right, I’d forgotten. It’s what they call a merciful oblivion.’

When Victoria put down the telephone, laughing, Paul raised an eyebrow. Apart from bare facts in the log, you could tell or not tell about telephone conversations. No one would bother you.

‘Isn’t it nice when people ring up to say they feel better, instead of worse?’ she said. ‘I wish I knew what to do about Jean – you know, the agoraphobia woman I’m befriending. She’s terribly depressed. It just seems that every time she gets up the nerve to go out alone, something happens to panic her, and so she’s even more afraid to try it the next time.’

‘Is she married — what’s the husband like?’

‘Oh, he tried, but it’s been going on for so long, he gets a bit sick of it, you can’t blame him in a way, Their doctor told him it was nerves and she should pull herself together, and so he was against the idea of a psychiatrist from the start. That’s perhaps why Jean stopped going. I tried to persuade her on Friday, and said I’d go with her. She’s all right when we’re together. I thought at first that I was really helping, but now she’s afraid of that too, because she thinks she
ought
to be going out by herself. So what do I do now?’

‘That does happen,’ Paul said. ‘People feel guilty about some problems. They ask for help and then when they get it, they begin to feel guilty about needing the help.’

‘So should I go on nursing her along or encourage her to try and be tough?’

Samaritan befriending seemed so clear when you were instructed in your training that what was needed of you
was simply a caring, accepting friendship. Then when the clients were real people instead of hypothetical examples, it was not so clear. Jean was so sad, so difficult, quick to see the snags and slow to see the joys in anything. Victoria usually felt depressed when she had been with her, hearing Jean’s view of life where everything was a threat or a burden. ‘She’s difficult to help,’ she told Paul, ‘because she doesn’t seem to want to hope.’

‘But don’t forget,’ he said, ‘that if she wasn’t difficult, she wouldn’t need befriending. Why don’t you have a word with Peter when he comes in?’

‘I hate to bother him all the time.’

‘It’s not bothering. We can’t run this thing with a bunch of amateurs like you and me. There have to be the experts behind us.’

One of them, a youngish man with a Christian name so intolerable that he was known simply as 200, came into the long reception room, where Paul and Victoria were at the desk in the bay window at the back. He held the door for a frail-looking girl, pregnant and down at heel, a huge red-faced child so heavy in her arms that she could hardly walk in her miserable shoes.

‘This is Judy,’ 200 said. ‘Will you look after her for a while? I’m trying some addresses.’

Victoria tried to take the child, but he screamed and clung to his brittle childlike mother, who seemed to have no substance but her pregnancy. ‘He won’t go to anyone else,’ she whispered.

‘Sit down then, Judy.’

She sat down with her double burden, and sighed. Victoria went out to get her a cup of tea. When she came back, Paul was talking to a middle-aged man and a boy who both looked furtive. Which one was the client? The man had brought the boy — no, the boy had brought the man, who was just out of prison.

‘Your son?’

‘No.’ The man laughed and pulled at the boy’s hair. ‘He’s what you might call a neighbour. “Here, what do you want, keep bothering me,” I tell him. “I’m going to
see you don’t get back inside,” he says. ‘What do you think of that?’

The boy giggled and ducked his head to flick back his hair, and the man rumpled it forward again. The pregnant girl watched apathetically, her flat anaemic eyes moving from face to face without interest.

Paul took the man upstairs to talk in private. The boy settled down with a comic. A new young Samaritan called Ronnie came back from buying buns and was sent out again to drive Judy and her child to the address in the country which 200 had found for her.

200 sat down by the desk with Victoria, an oldish young man with a high domed forehead and a slow, thoughtful way of looking at you intently and then suddenly relaxing into a deep, sweet smile. Victoria had known him for a year, because he was at the Centre almost every day, but it was not until she ran into him one evening in a corridor of the hospital’s new clinic, that she found out that he was a psychiatric nurse. He knew a lot about the other Samaritans but they did not know much about him, except that he was a strong, refreshing mixture of wisdom and naïveté, experience and discovery.

‘How was the weekend?’

‘All right. I stayed with Robbie’s family.’

‘What are they like?’

Victoria shrugged. ‘They can’t help it, I suppose.’

‘As bad as that?’

‘They don’t bend in the middle, and they go ha ha and rub their hands.’

‘Not going to marry him, are you?’ 200 asked anxiously.

‘I shall if I want to.’ Victoria tired of the joke. ‘It’s too easy to jibe at those sort of people.’

‘The whole country’s turned on them,’ 200 said. ‘Backbone of England, they used to say. With fused vertebrae.’

People came in and out. A boy in a tight leather jacket with the sleeves half-way up his arms, who looked as if he was on drugs. A regular called Nancy who had been dropping in several times a week since she had been hauled out of suicidal depression last year. A professor
from the University to ask if the Samaritans would help one of his students. ‘Only if he will come in, or ring us himself.’

Eric, who was a police sergeant for the rest of the week, was at the emergency telephone in the little study across the hall. Ronnie came back. Peter arrived with a box full of clothes and toys, crashing the front door open with his shoulder. The Samaritans did not hand out money, except to tide over an emergency, but Peter always had jerseys, coats, socks, dolls in the corner of his office. Where did he get all the stuff he gave away? ‘He steals it off the hotel guests,’ Helen said.

One of his clients, a smart pretty woman in a fur coat was waiting to talk to him. The boy in the leather jacket was waiting for 200, head in hands, feet tapping a bored rhythm. Nancy was in the kitchen washing up. A girl with a white skin and big dark blue eyes fringed with unlikely lashes opened the door and stood childishly for a moment, head down and stomach out, the toes of her white boots turned in. Ronnie, who was still new enough to try not to be responsible for a client, looked round the room, saw that the others were leaving her to him and ambled up, swallowing. ‘Can I help you?’ He was as nervous as the girl.

‘I don’t know.’ She pulled in her stomach and lifted her small chest in a bright red coat like a military tunic. ‘I — well, the trouble is—’

‘Won’t you sit down?’ But they remained standing. ‘Well, look, tell me.’ Ronnie took the plunge. ‘What’s the trouble?’

‘Oh.’ She smiled and shook her head. ‘It isn’t that. But thank you.’

From the sofa where she was talking to Peter’s client, Victoria heard them conversing like a minuet, with the very serious and courteous attention that the young reserved for each other.

‘I don’t know if it’s right, to just come in like this without an appointment.’

‘Of course it is.’ Ronnie waited. She looked at him as if
he were her confessor, and then got it out. ‘How do you become a Samaritan?’

Coincidence number three! ! ! First Sarah’s friend at the Play School, Jackie with the awful articulating mother, who stole out of bed to ring up his friend Helen. Then the customer in the shop, talking to Mr Lox about his cousin’s wife, ‘red as a cherry’. And then — when Brian was on the hated Sunday shift and Sarah wandered like a somnambulist up to the address in Church Grove, reading the names of the seedy old houses behind bulging walls and dilapidated hedges —
then,
the man manœuvring himself out of a small dusty car outside the stone house green with creeper stains was the owner of the Bay tree Hotel, who had said to her, ‘If I can’t get my staff back early, I’ll call you.’

Was he in such desperate straits that he sought help? He had not seemed to be. Oh God — her mind flew loyally to Brian — what if this man shot himself in front of the American insurance brokers? Carrying a big grocery box of what looked like clothes, he went through the gateless gateway that had ‘St George’s Rectory’ carved into one stone pillar and a board on the other that said, ‘Samaritans. Please come in’, along the mossy path and up the two front steps. The door was unlatched. He pushed it open with his shoulder and disappeared inside.