The Listeners (39 page)

‘You can do anything, can’t you, Sarah?’ They had been swimming in the public gardens pool that rivalled, successfully, the sea. Sarah in a bikini had performed on the diving board. Carrie floundered in the shallow end, getting water up her nose, capsized by tots on rubber sea-monsters.

‘I’ve always been able to swim.’

‘But you do all that pottery, and you know how to play tennis, and ride horses, and type, and play the piano.’ Carrie could not do anything. She had not been brought up that way. She played no games. She had no talents. She could not even cook or sew, because her mother had never had time to teach her. She had won the teaching scholarship because there was nothing else to do at home but study, if you wanted to avoid the pig pens. Now she was discovering that she could not teach.

‘You’ll learn,’ Sarah said.

‘Never.’ When she went out for her first sessions as a student teacher, the children had practically broken up the classroom, and Carrie had to be rescued by the principal. ‘I’m not going back to college next year.’ she said. ‘I don’t want to finish the course.’

‘What will you do?’ Sarah was secretly glad that Carrie was not going to have the chance to mould young minds.

‘I may go home. I can get a job in the town. There’s a shop I was in before.’

‘I thought you didn’t want to go home.’

‘Don’t take me up on everything I say!’ The mildest remark could set her off. ‘I wanted to get away where nobody knew me. In the village, I was Caroline who went to University, Caroline who won the scholarship, tuppence to speak to you now, I daresay. They thought I had such a wonderful life. I’ve never told anybody about failing that last exam. I wanted them to think, there’s that Caroline who’s gone up in the world. That’s why I -you know – I wanted to take those pills, because I wasn’t going up and I couldn’t go back and I wasn’t going anywhere. I did go home before that, just for the day, just in case. It was the spring. You can’t imagine what spring is like at our place. Everything was pregnant or hatched out, seedlings coming up all over the place. The blossom was out, the cat was stretched on the doorstep feeding eight kittens. To top it all, my mother told me she was going to have a baby. At forty-two! After eighteen years. Can you imagine anything more disgusting? I wouldn’t speak to my father.’

The next time she went home, she took Sarah with her. They went unannounced. Carrie would not telephone or write. They drove in Brian’s car between fields of cabbages and beans to a small brick and flint house surrounded by sheds and sties and henhouses, and trampled yards fenced in with barbed wire and bedsteads.

They walked round the house and went in to the kitchen where her mother and father were eating. A row of boots stood by the door. A chicken was dying in a box by the stove.

‘Well, you are a stranger, Caroline!’

The father continued to eat bread and cheese. The mother’s greying hair was cut in a square round her weather-pickled face. She wore trousers and a man’s jersey several sizes too large as a maternity jacket.

‘You told me to bring home a friend,’ Carrie said defensively, ‘so I’ve brought one. This is Sarah King. My friend.’

When she told them that she was going to leave the
University, they did not seem to mind. They were not sinister, dominating people, but a quite complacent couple who worked hard on their land and had no time to bother about anyone else, or even their own relationship. The baby must have been conceived in the few moments between falling exhausted into bed and falling exhaustedly asleep.

‘You must do what you want.’ they said. ‘You must do what you think best.’

‘I thought I might come home for a bit.’ Carrie said. ‘Would you mind?’

‘Mind?’ Her mother was at the stone sink, standing on a carrot box because she was so short. The father had gone out to kill a chicken for supper. ‘Why should we mind, Caroline?’

‘You wanted me to be a teacher.’

‘You wanted it. It’s your life. If you go back to Benting’s, you’ll be earning good money, I daresay.’ She stepped off the box and turned round. Although she was only about four months gone, her initial shape and stance exaggerated her pregnancy, but her seasoned face and hair made it seem more like an ovarian cyst than a baby.

‘Well, I—’ It was difficult for Carrie to say anything real to her. ‘I’ll not be so crabby, I don’t think.’

‘Oh my yes, you were a misery.’ Her mother’s smile spread her tanned lips to show her cheap false teeth, unnecessarily yellow. The father had them too, cavern meeting cavern in a big bed that filled a little upstairs room. ‘Growing pains.’

‘It wasn’t growing pains.’ Carrie pressed on, as if it were possible to get through. ‘I was very unhappy.’

‘Oh well, some folks can be unhappy anywhere.’ Her mother hung the torn wet dishcloth on a nail and went to the door, wiping her hands on her trousers.

‘I was unhappy at the University too.’ Sarah reached out and squeezed Carrie’s hand, wanting her to stop. The mother had trodden into boots and had her hand on the door knob. ‘They didn’t like me.’

‘Oh come oil yes, of course they did.’ the mother said.

‘But they put a lot of fanciful nonsense into your head, if you ask me. You’re all right. You look better than I’ve seen you for years, even though the hair’s a fright.’

‘Sarah’s helped me.’

‘Well, that’s nice, I’m sure. I’m very grateful.’ She gave the impression of bobbmg her head, as if Sarah were a tyrant social worker.

That’s not the point! Sarah wanted to shout after her as she went down the cinder path, clucking to the various animals pecking and rootling about. You’ve got it all wrong!

While the chicken was roasting, Carrie took Sarah round the village, introducing her to people as My friend Sarah, and ordering her about – ‘Pick up your feet. Look at Mrs Daniel’s roses. Don’t touch that dog’ – to show that she had not only a friend, but one she could control.

After the chicken, they had apple pie. ‘I was saving it for Sunday,’ the mother said, ‘but you can have it if you like.’

The napkins smelled of gravy. No, it was the apple pie. No, it was the spoon. Sarah could never again eat apple pie without the taste of gravy coming unbidden into her mouth.

Because Sarah enjoyed doing things for Carrie, she thought that Carrie might enjoy doing something for somebody. There were some extra children at the Play School, two of them in wheelchairs and one of them almost blind, and the student helpers were mostly tied up with exams, so one morning she took Carrie with her to help.

Carrie went along, not so much to please Sarah as because Gretchen was at home, doing what she called swotting, which meant one pound of apples and glass after glass of buttermilk, gurgling down like bathwater. When she went into the basement room of the church, she hung back behind Sarah.

‘This is my friend Carrie. She’s come to help. She’s worked with children,’ Sarah said hopefully.

‘Splendid, splendid.’ Harriet welcomed Carrie as if she were another Special child. ‘Another pair of hands, hooray!’

Jackie’s mother went on building a house of blocks with Beth – ‘And-a now a beeg one for ower corner’ -and did not look up.

Neddy crawled over to clutch at Carrie’s knees and squint up at her, trying to smile, trying to laugh, with his terrible sore stretched face. He had had another operation on his ears, and still wore a bandage round his head, covered with a plastic shower cap.

‘This is my Neddy.’ Sarah bent to pick him up.

Carrie said, ‘Ugh,’ and would not touch him. She stared appalled at Charlie, who was lying on the floor in his underpants while Harriet tried to find dry trousers, head lolling, fists in his slobbering mouth.

‘I wish you hadn’t made me come.’

‘I thought you wanted to.’

‘To please you. I’m going.’

‘I can’t drive you back till twelve.’

‘I’ll get a bus or something. These children – my
God.’

‘Your friend is leaving?’ Jackie’s mother looked up when Carrie went to get her coat.

‘She doesn’t feel well.’

‘I have some bicarbonate tablets.’ Jackie’s mother’s bag was always stocked with pills and Band-aids and little bottles of breath sweetener which she had been known to offer to people, like cigarettes or a bag of toffees.

‘It’s her sinuses.’

‘She could have asked for my inhaler.’

It was going to be a special day. Even this morning Jackie had known it, when they started out late for the school because of Miriam, and then it came down hailing and they had to take a taxi from the Broadway to Saint Barnabas Church, and Muh had begun to gasp because she could not get the window open.

‘Here – you pay the man.’ She gave Jackie her wallet -a thing she would never have done when not in distress – and
he got a look at the money she had in there before he picked out the five shillings for the taxi.

Seven or eight pound notes. Now let her say she could not afford to stop for ice lollies on the way home!

‘Huh-o Sair.’

‘Hullo, Jackie. How does it go?’

‘Swi-ing.’ He hopped his feet about and flapped his hands. Sarah had been teaching him to dance. She had a friend with her, a great ugly girl like the statue on the corner of the Bank, all spots with white heads on them you would be able to squeeze if they were yours. Poor old Ned was making up to her in that bathing hat. She went, ‘Ugh!’ at him, Jackie heard her. She and Sarah whispered, frowning. Would there be a fight? The friend went away. Muh was not very pleased, although a girl like that was not much use, staring at the children in the room as if they were all idiots.

Sarah and Harriet were trying to teach Charlie to read words, as a surprise for Mrs Manson when she came back from her holiday. Jackie was helping. He held up the big cards before Charlie’s empty eyes while Sarah clutched him on her lap and Harriet repeated the word over and over. ‘Ball... ball... ball.’

Jackie turned the card round to look. ‘Baw.’ he said, to show Charlie how easy it was.

Charlie made a noise. Sarah bent her head to hear it, then she gave a little cry and hugged Charlie, laughing. ‘He said it, Harriet, he said it! Read it again, Charlie. Ball, ball, ball.’

‘Bah-h-h!’ Charlie expelled a lot of breath. Sarah and Harriet looked at each other with sparkling eyes. Jackie, who had been squatting with the card, lost his balance and fell over, kicking his heels in the air.

‘Get up, Jack, that floor is dusty.’ His mother had looked over to see what the commotion was.

‘Charlie read the card,’ Harriet called excitedly. ‘He said ball. Oh Sarah – oh frabjous day!’

‘Anyone would think the boy had recited Shakespeare.’ This was not Muh’s day for rejoicing. She had one of her
heads when she got up, but when Miriam suggested lying down instead of going to the Play School, she had said, ‘Those who have much to offer, can-a not withhold it.’ Miriam blew a raspberry. ‘Besides,’ said Muh, ignoring that, ‘I have to think of Jack.’

‘He won’t mind not going, just this once.’

‘That’s not the point. It’s very important for him to go to the Play School and see others worse off than himself.’

She told Sarah and Harriet, ‘I’d be obliged if you two would get on with the job in hand.’

‘This is the job in hand,’ Harriet said. ‘Everyone is playing quite happily. We’re teaching Charlie to read.’

‘You know that child has a mental age of about two.’ Muh came over, her mouth buttoned, her eyes like coloured glass. ‘And you’re trying to make him
read?’

‘They’re teaching them with cards like this at a year old,’ Sarah said.

‘Not mongoloids.’ Muh looked at Sarah as if she were dog mess. ‘I studied this at College. A child like that can’t possibly begin to learn anything until he’s ten, and then he may only live another few years, if Mrs Manson is lucky.’ She meant unlucky. ‘You’re wasting your time, and the time of everyone else.’

‘Don’t you believe it!’ Harriet flung herself at Charlie and picked him up and swung him to the ceiling. ‘This child can
learn.’

Muh made such a rude pooh noise that Harriet turned on her with a face Jackie had never seen, teeth bared in anger instead of in a grin. ‘So could Jackie,’ she said, ‘if you’d only let him.’

‘You leave Jackie out of it.’ Muh drew him to her. She was so much shorter than he that her arm went round his hips instead of his waist. ‘He knows all he needs to know.’ They glared at each other, Muh holding Jackie, Harriet holding Charlie, flopping like a rag doll, dribbling all down into her front. ‘You leave him alone. He can read numbers and write his name. He helps in the shop. He contributes to society.’

‘Mending heels – oh ha ha.’

It was thrilling. Jackie stood with his mouth open, enjoying the fight as if it was about somebody else. Sarah was staring and grinning. When Harriet said, ‘When you were at College! Centuries ago, my dear. Ideas have changed since then.’ Jackie and Sarah wanted to cheer.

The whole morning went to pot. They never had Circle Time. Half the kids wet themselves. Jackie had to take the rest to the toilet by himself. He and Sarah had to manage Table Time as best they could, because Harriet stayed with Charlie, who was bawling, and Muh had shut herself in the storeroom. She had shut herself in with the biscuits, so the children had to have stale potato crisps.

When Charlie let up and Harriet came over, still panting lightly, Jackie heard her say things to Sarah like, ‘Bloody fool woman.’ and, ‘Should be a Law against.’ He could not wait to get home and tell Malcom. ‘Should be a Law’ could be one of their jokes to mutter without moving their lips across the dinner table.

Muh was still shaken so wordless when she came out of the storeroom after the great and famous row, that Sarah and Jackie decided to ask her if he could go home with Sarah for lunch. They had planned this, but neither of them had yet dared to ask his mother.

Surprisingly, she said, ‘I don’t mind.’

‘I’ll bring him back to the shop. I think I know where it is.’

‘Jackie can show you the way,’ Muh said and added crisply, getting back on the tracks, ‘He’s not an idiot, you know.’

Jackie had hardly ever been in a proper car. He had been in taxis, and once in a big black Daimler to his cousin Delia’s wedding. There was a little silver trumpet in that, with a flower in it, but no water. He had stuck his finger in to see.