Listening in the Dusk Read online

  He’d hoped to get a laugh; and from three of the company he did; but Miss Dorinda slowly turned a dull red.

  “It’s very, very wrong of you, Brian,” she said. “Encouraging her in crime! That’s what it is — crime!” Then, turning to Mary: “You’ll be a very, very foolish girl, Mary, if you listen to a word he says, or to this Sharon girl either. It’s lies, as well as being wicked. You’ll get caught at once, I assure you, and then you’ll go to prison! Yes, you will! Prison!”

  Mary’s face, bright with laughter only a few moments ago, had grown very still. Now, she burst out:

  “I’d love to go to prison! I can’t think of anything I’d like more! If only I was in prison too, it wouldn’t seem so …”

  She broke off. Too late she realised just what she was saying, and clapped her hand over her mouth. She glanced wildly round the table for a moment, meeting Alice’s eye in desperate appeal, then lunged to her feet, almost upsetting the chair, which rocked to her departure. “Excuse me,” she muttered, and with tears running down her face fled from the room; and once again with sinking hearts — even Miss Dorinda must have felt qualms at the startling effect of her admonitions — they heard the old familiar sound of Mary’s feet pattering up the stairs in headlong flight, and the door of her room slamming shut behind her with all the old finality. As Hetty had once colourfully described it, it reminded her of the gates of Hell clanging shut behind a lost soul.

  Chapter 21

  It looked as if they were back to square one. By next morning, however, Mary’s panic seemed to have subsided somewhat. Knocking on Alice’s door almost before it was light, she was soon seated on the improvised sofa and sipping the hot coffee that Alice had contrived to heat up on the up-ended electric fire, a practice that she had been told by someone some time — maybe by Rodney himself, in the days when he still told her such things? — was dangerous. Whoever it was had also explained to her what the danger consisted of; but since she could no longer remember the explanation, she did not see why she should any longer heed the warning either; and certainly the practice saved many a long trek down to the basement and back.

  “If only you didn’t over-react so,” she was now admonishing Mary. “No one — except me, of course — had the slightest idea what you were talking about, and so, in effect, they didn’t really hear it. People don’t, you know, when something is said which conveys nothing to them; it’s pretty much as if it hadn’t been said. If only, as soon as you realised you’d put your foot in it about prison, you’d just given a little laugh and gone on to some other subject, no one would have taken the slightest notice. They’d have vaguely assumed it to be some sort of over-subtle joke that they’d missed the point of: it’s always happening in conversations.

  “But there’s more at stake, Mary, than just this one unlucky episode. It illustrates what I’ve been saying all along about your policy of keeping the whole thing such a desperate secret. You’re going to be having to watch your tongue, day in and day out, for ever on the alert to cover up for yourself every time you make the tiniest slip in casual conversation. And it’s not as if you’re any good at it, either, Mary; if you were, it might be different; but in fact you’re just plumb rotten. I’ve told you before: if you’re going to keep this wretched secret from everyone for evermore, then you’re going to have to learn to be one hell of a lot better at it! Of course you’re going to make slips now and again, like last night; in fact, you’re going to make an awful lot of them if you’re really planning to keep it up for the rest of your life, because life is a long time, all sorts of things are bound to happen that might catch you out. Tiny things. Your real name, for instance: one of these days, someone is going to shout ‘Imogen!’ to somebody across a crowded room, and you’re going to jump out of your skin! I can just see it; spilling a glass of red wine down your dress, knocking into the waiter with his tray of canapés as you charge out of the room … Slamming the front door so hard that a pane of glass falls out … Oh, yes, I can see it all!

  “And that’s just one little scenario, which happens to have come into my head at this moment. Millions of things are going to happen that we can’t possibly think of in advance, every day, practically … And every time you’re going to have to be a bloody good actress. Which you’re not. You’re bloody hopeless. Why, even I could do better! If it was my brother, I’d …”

  She stopped. This could be going too far. Mary was sitting quietly, with bent head, both hands clasped tightly round her mug of coffee as if she was warming them on it; though she hardly could be, the little low-ceilinged room was already stiflingly warm from the two-bar fire full on. Did her quiet, almost meek demeanour indicate some measure of acquiescence in Alice’s strictures?

  “So what did happen, Alice?” she asked. “Last night, I mean, after I’d gone? What did they say? What did Brian say?”

  “Brian? He jumped up too, nearly knocking his chair over just like you did! He’s a rotten actor, too — that makes two of you! He was all set to rush after you, adding fuel to the general hysteria, but I stopped him. I told him you’d want to be alone. I hope that was right? I don’t actually know what you want; and I sometimes wonder whether you do …”

  Mary smiled weakly, reached out and helped herself to an Ovaltine rusk which she proceeded to nibble at with a sort of absent-minded intensity reminiscent of one of those hamsters resident in a Primary School classroom.

  “What did they say, though?” she asked again. “The others, I mean … What I said about prison, did it make them suspect anything? What did they think I meant?”

  “I don’t think they thought you’d meant anything,” said Alice crisply. “Like I’ve told you, when people have no idea what you’re on about, they just give up, they don’t bother, why should they? What did they all think, you ask me? They just thought you were being hysterical again, the way you often are. Have been, anyway. No, they didn’t say anything much … Let me see. Oh yes, the ice-pudding someone had brought in. Hetty asked hadn’t she better put aside a helping of it for you, and did we think it should go in the freezing-compartment and get too hard, or on to the top shelf and get too melty?

  “Oh, and Miss Dorinda started in about the young, the way she does. Not just you, my dear — the Young in general, how lazy they are, how ill-mannered, how undisciplined and inconsiderate. I was the one on the carpet, though, not you. Having been a school teacher most of my working life, I’m used to being counted vaguely responsible for vaguely everything, but she did rather hammer it in. I tried to get it across to her that I hadn’t personally created a million unemployed teenagers, nor deliberately engineered the rising crime rate. Nor had I with my own hands …”

  She stopped. She had been going to say “Committed each and every one of the three hundred or so murders we get each year,” but she stopped just in time.

  Or, rather, not just in time, for Mary had instantly guessed what the end of the sentence was going to be, and looked up sharply.

  “I wish people wouldn’t do that!” she exclaimed. “I mean, I wish they wouldn’t tie themselves in knots right under my nose to avoid saying things that might upset me. That’s what everyone was doing, and it was awful. It makes things worse, not better. It makes you feel more of a freak than ever. That’s partly — well, it’s a tiny bit of the reason — why I have to keep it a secret. If people don’t know anything, then they don’t know what subjects to avoid when they talk to me. They don’t know what will upset me, and so they can’t …”

  But everything upsets you, Alice felt like protesting. I don’t mean just this evening, I mean all the other times, ever since I’ve been here. How can you expect people to talk to you normally when absolutely anything may send you through the roof? I daren’t even talk about the weather half the time in case it reminds you of something that once happened in just that kind of weather! Let me tell you something, Mary; the surest way to get yourself treated like an outcast is to act like one. You don’t have to look far back in history to
see …

  But the little lecture never got delivered; for just then Mary looked up, her tear-stained face suddenly bright with a new thought.

  “Look,” she said, “Alice, would you? — could you? — I mean, there’s something which really would be a help, if you’d do it for me. Would you? Do you think you possibly could …?”

  By the age of forty, one has learned to resist the temptation to say Yes to this kind of no-holds-barred test of friendship. One has learned to be mean-spirited, and cautious, ever mindful of the welter of unkeepable promises and uncontrollable betrayals into which a more heart-felt response can lead one. “Yes, within reason” is one possible ploy; but the trouble here is that one person’s reason is another person’s arrant nonsense; and where can you go from there?

  “What is it?” Alice asked, wishing she could make the chilly little question sound less mean and cowardly than it did. She wanted to sound warm and generous — she felt warm and generous — but into what terrible course of action might she not be precipitating herself, the nature of the whole problem being so intrinsically dreadful?

  But it turned out to be nothing dreadful at all that was being asked of her, or so it seemed at the time. It was the diary that Mary was worrying about: her brother’s tragic diary, which at the moment lay hidden in the cardboard box which formed the bottom-left segment of Alice’s improvised sofa. It seemed that Mary wasn’t satisfied with this hiding place. Supposing someone, for some reason, was prying about in Alice’s attic, and should chance to …

  “But that’s nonsense!” Alice was beginning. “Why in the world would anyone …?” But Mary interrupted. She had set down her mug with a little thump, and now clasped her hands beseechingly, the pale fingers writhing in and out among themselves as if engaged in some complex competitive game.

  “Oh, please, Alice! I want it out of the house, you see. I’ll never feel safe while it’s here, never! So I was wondering … I mean, I know your marriage is broken up, and all that, but after all, you still have got your old home. Lots of your things are still there — you told me they were — books and things. And so couldn’t you — couldn’t you possibly? — take the box along and pack it away there among all your other stuff? No one would dream of looking for it there. Not the police or … or anyone. Oh, please take it, Alice! Once I know it’s somewhere else, somewhere nothing to do with me, where I’ll never see it again … Well, I mean, I don’t even know the address, do I, and I don’t want you to tell me. Oh, please, Alice; it would make me feel so much safer! You could do it, couldn’t you? It wouldn’t be impossible?”

  Impossible, no. But safe? Safer than here? Ivy was the one in residence now, and what more likely than that she would spend idle, inquisitive hours now and again, going through Alice’s abandoned belongings, impelled by natural curiosity and by equally natural Other-Womanly hope of unearthing something discreditable? Secret bank accounts, perhaps? Records of sexual misdemeanours? Something, anyway, to make a dent in her rival’s hitherto unassailable probity. The diary, in this context, would be quite something: a detailed personal account of murder after murder would look like a revelation of misdemeanour beyond Ivy’s wildest dreams …

  It wouldn’t happen like this. Of course it wouldn’t. In any case, it would be perfectly possible to seal up the package in such a way as to be proof against idle curiosity.

  But this wasn’t the point, not really. The real point was — why did it matter so much that the diary should remain hidden? Now that the trial was over and done with, the sentence passed, there was nothing the diary could reveal, however horrendous, that could affect the unhappy young man one way or the other.

  “No, but don’t you see?” cried Mary. “It’s not him — it’s me! You see, I lied to the police. I told them there were no diaries, that they’d just been a childhood craze of his, and had all been thrown away long ago. I’d already hidden them, of course, like I told you; I’d already taken them to the Left Luggage place — don’t you remember me telling you?”

  “Yes, of course I remember. But, Mary — I wanted to ask you at the time, but somehow we didn’t get around to it — why were you so anxious the police shouldn’t see them? Your brother had admitted everything right from the start, you told me, and so there was no doubt that he had, well, that he was guilty of everything they’d accused him of, and so …”

  Mary shook her head impatiently.

  “No, No! I told you, that was afterwards. At the time when I hid them, that was while the police were still looking for evidence, that was when I lied to them. And if they were to find it out now, that that was what I’d done, suppressing evidence and all that … Oh, I couldn’t bear it, Alice! It would start the whole thing up again, right from the beginning, you know it would! I couldn’t … I couldn’t … go through it all again …”

  Fair enough. But, in that case:

  “Well, then, Mary, why don’t we just get rid of them? Straight away: burn them; shred them; something like that. Get it over with?”

  But Mary once again shook her head. Shook it quite hard, as though to loosen from it some obstinate thought that had lodged there and could not be shifted.

  “Alice, I’m too frightened! I daren’t! I did think of it, but, you know, it’s more difficult than you think. They find you out, you know, however clever you think you’ve been. They rake through the ashes of bonfires, they analyse the paper out of shredders — I’ve often read about it. Did you see, on Crimewatch one time, there was this man they’d managed to catch because of his fingerprints on a bottle at the bottle-bank? A bottle-bank, if you please! You wouldn’t think anything could be more anonymous, would you? It was something to do with the fact he was colour-blind, and this green bottle was in the container meant for brown ones … Something like that. Anyway, it shows how dangerous it is trying to get rid of something. However cunning you are, they’re cunninger still. They’re trained to be cunning, you see, and you’re not, you’ve had no practice, and so they’re always going to be one jump ahead of you …”

  Was this a fact? At the time of the murder-hunt, maybe. But afterwards? Months and months afterwards, like now?

  But Mary would not be reassured. She shook her head obstinately. And then, suddenly, she burst into tears.

  “I can’t throw them away!” she sobbed. “I haven’t read them! How can I throw them away without having read them? But I can’t read them either … I don’t dare. I can’t bear to. I don’t dare find out what’s in them, I don’t want to know! I don’t want to know anything, not anything! It’s Catch-22, I can’t throw them away, and I can’t not throw them away! Oh, Alice, help me! Do something!”

  *

  It was only afterwards that it occurred to Alice that in all this discussion about the diaries, the question of what Julian himself might have wished had just never been raised. Amid all the turmoil, he had become a non-person.

  Or perhaps it didn’t matter to him any more, and never would? When he came out of prison, shrunken, brow-beaten, nearly fifty — thirty years away, a thousand years away from his terrible youth — how could he still care?

  Oh, Alice, help me! Do something! These were the words ringing in her ears right now. This was the plea to which she must find an answer.

  Chapter 22

  “Well, and so now you have read them, you can throw them away,” said Alice wearily, “if that’s what you want to do.” Her eyes were sore and aching (as Mary’s must be too) after all these hours of deciphering page after page, notebook after notebook, of hasty, impassioned handwriting. At one point they’d found themselves struggling over their task in semi-darkness, both of them having omitted to switch the light on, or even to notice that daylight was fading as missing lunch slowly merged into missing tea as well.

  Twice, Hetty had made her way up the long flights of stairs to enquire if they were all right? So quiet it had been all day, like not a mouse stirring nor even hotting up a bit of something in a pan (not that mice do normally hot things up in pans,
but they got Hetty’s point). She’d got a pot of tea on the go, as a matter of fact, wouldn’t they like to come down and join her, have a bit of a break, like?

  No, truly they wouldn’t, not just now; and while Alice thanked her for the kind offer, Mary embarked on a hasty and quite unnecessary farrago of lies about what all these miscellaneous papers and newspaper cuttings were all about. Notes for a thesis, she babbled … sorting them, getting them back in order for the friend she’d borrowed them from, and who was in a hurry to have them back … Would be calling for them … Might be here any minute, really; you know, exams and things …

  Hetty nodded uncomprehendingly, and then remarked on the sad aspect of Alice’s sofa with one of its most crucial supports removed, and would they like one of the cardboard boxes from Mr Singh’s room to replace it? Crammed up with papers his boxes were too, just like the ones here; Alice would never know the difference, once she’d got it in place. Nor would Mr Singh know the difference; he wouldn’t mind what they did, poor man, because it didn’t look like he’d ever be coming back, did it? And if he did come back … Well, that’d mean that his troubles were a bit sorted out, wouldn’t it, the Home Office off his back, that sort of thing. He’d be so happy he wouldn’t care about a box or two, now would he?