Listening in the Dusk Read online

  Was this what was happening to Mary? Had she now reached the point when the forces of mental health were taking over, willy nilly, regardless of the intractable nature of the dreadful facts? More hopeful about the girl than she had been for some time, Alice continued on her way down to the kitchen to make herself some toast and a cup of coffee.

  Miss Dorinda was there already, just finishing her bowl of re-inforced low-fat peanut crunchies, and full of complaints which (though she didn’t say so) filled Alice with optimism. That girl, declared Miss Dorinda, had not only been washing her hair before seven in the morning — all that noise from the pipes, bath-mat soaked, and you should just see the basin! — but had been down here in the kitchen frying sausages. Sausages, if you please, the smell all over the house, at twenty-five past seven.

  “Twenty-five past seven!” she repeated, thinking Alice couldn’t have heard her, so casual was her response. For “Oh” was all she’d said, and had proceeded to switch on the toaster just as if nothing had happened.

  “Twenty-five past seven! That’s not her time, that’s my time! My time is quarter past seven till quarter to eight, it’s been my time for years, it was agreed right from the start! And if that girl thinks she can get away with defying the house rules …”

  “I don’t think she’s defying anything,” suggested Alice placatingly. “I don’t think she knows anything about the breakfast times here. Until now, she’s never been down at this sort of hour, has she, she doesn’t come out of her room till —”

  “You’re telling me! I don’t know what the young are coming to, I really don’t. And that Brian, too, he’s never up until goodness knows what hour either. What they’ll do when us old ones are all gone, and no longer working ourselves into the ground to pay for their free this and thats, their Social Security, and their unemployment hand-outs … They’ll soon find —”

  “Well, at least she’s got herself a job now,” Alice interposed hastily; “Mary, I mean; she’s starting today. Don’t you remember? On the till at Brandgoods. She’ll just about be there by now. And as to Brian, he’s a musician, you know. A lot of the time he has to be working at home, practising, going through things for his pupils —”

  “Well, and isn’t that just what I’m saying?” snapped Miss Dorinda. “A musician!” and it was clear from her tone that in her scheme of things being a musician was just one more way of being unemployed, and a singularly tiresome one at that insofar as it involved keeping other people awake after 10.00 pm.

  “‘Early to bed and early to rise’, that was my mother’s motto,” Miss Dorinda finished complacently, laying down her spoon and dabbing at her lips with a tissue; and Alice forbore to point out that Mary’s one and only attempt to live by this worthy maxim seemed to have caused nothing but trouble.

  On and off during the day, Alice’s thoughts turned anxiously to Mary, struggling with all that money and the intricacies of the unfamiliar till. How was she getting on? Were they telling her off a lot? Or upsetting her in some other, perfectly innocent way, by asking friendly questions about her home and family? Once again, Alice found herself querying the wisdom of Mary’s policy of impenetrable secrecy as a technique for minimising her troubles. For a technique it was, one of the many techniques the mind employs for self-healing, a method of protecting the injury from further assault while it slowly mends. Looked at this way, all this secrecy was Mary’s life-support system, the healing method of choice for her traumatised spirit, as necessary as a bandage on an open wound, or plaster round a broken bone.

  Still, life-support systems shouldn’t be kept switched on for ever; sooner or later, the patient must start breathing on his own. Hadn’t this time arrived for Mary? Shouldn’t she start being Imogen again — or Midge — and let the truth be known? Brazen it out, let the whole thing be a nine-days-wonder, after which it would gradually subside as everyone got tired of it, as they surely would?

  It crossed Alice’s mind to take a trip down to Brandgoods, at the far end of the High Street, and have a peep at Mary while she worked; but she decided against it. With Mary’s rooted terror of being spied on, checked-up on, such a visit might re-activate all sorts of irrational suspicions. Also, on a more practical level, it might simply distract her from her task, get her pressing the wrong knobs, ringing-up too many noughts and find herself charging £2,800 for a £2.80 pair of gloves. Or whatever it was that one was liable to do wrong on those machines; Alice was rather vague about it. For all she knew, some small slip not much different from a typing error might cost the firm hundreds of thousands of pounds.

  In any case, it being Saturday, she herself was more than usually busy; Cyril in the morning, and no doubt he would stay for lunch, and the postman, Mr Bates, in the afternoon, with his carefully prepared homework. Alice had given up for the time being the attempt to teach him any grammar, and contented herself with preparing lists of all the nouns, adjectives and verbs he would encounter in a given portion of text, encouraging him to learn them, and sharing his delight when he recognised them as they turned up. His other delight lay in criticising Euripides for his handling of the plot. On this particular afternoon, they were tackling Admetus’ long speech about the difficulty he’d encountered in trying to persuade other people to go down to Hades in his stead; and the dubious ethics therein displayed really got Mr Bates on the raw. For a wife to volunteer to die for the sake of a husband, that was all fine and dandy, but it was a bit off for the husband to expect her to do so, didn’t Alice agree. And then dragging the poor old father into it, too, expecting him to trot off down to Hades at the drop of a hat! Mr Bates was tickled pink when they came to the bit where the old boy had put his foot down good and proper, and quite right too! Put Admetus in his place, after all that back-answering; “I’d like to’ve seen what my Dad would’ve said if I’d even …”

  And at that point, the telephone rang.

  Now, it so happened that it was the custom at number seventeen Beckford Road — indeed it had acquired almost the status of an unwritten law — that everyone should wait for someone else to be the one to run up (or down) the long flights of stairs to answer the phone; to be the one to scrabble in the semi-darkness for a pencil with a point, with which laboriously to transcribe the message for somebody else, with its characteristic content of unspellable names and long, out-of-town numbers.

  The ringing went on and on. It was a question of who cracked first; and on this occasion (as commonly happened) it was Alice. On the eighth ring, with a hasty apology to her pupil, she hurried down into the hall.

  It was a male voice, and one strange to her.

  “Good evening. Could I speak to Imogen, please?” it enquired with easy confidence; and for a moment Alice was completely thrown. ‘Imogen’, the name that Mary was keeping a total secret. The name by which she was never to be known again. I’m sorry, you’ve got a wrong number, Alice should have said, and should have said it instantly. By the time she had collected her wits enough actually to say it, an awkward little pause had intervened, indicating a measure of uncertainty; enough, anyway, for the caller to feel it worth while to argue the toss:

  “Imogen,” he repeated. “Imogen Gray. I understand she is residing at that address, seventeen Beckford —”

  “No … No …!” cried Alice and was she, this time, rushing in too fast, suspiciously over-emphatic? “No … No one of that name … No, not living here … No, we’ve never heard of her.” And she slammed the receiver down before she could be embroiled in further bouts of incompetent and ill-rehearsed lying.

  Sitting down once more alongside her expectantly waiting pupil, she was dismayed to find herself trembling from head to foot. It was impossible to concentrate. Admetus’ moral dilemma concerning life or death for himself and/or his wife seemed both feeble and contrived when compared with Alice’s own moral dilemma. To tell Mary, or not to tell her, about this disconcerting phone call? It was the same dilemma as had been posed earlier, when that intrusive stranger had accosted her on t
he way to the Bensons. Could it indeed be the same man? Voices are not always easy to recognise on the telephone.

  But, in any case, whoever it was, the problem was the same. To tell Mary would inevitably fling her right back into the state of obsessional distrust and terror out of which — or so it had seemed to Alice this morning — she was just beginning to emerge: not to tell her, on the other hand, would be outright deception, almost amounting to betrayal. Supposing something awful happened as a result of her failure to warn the girl of …

  Well, of what? Of the possibility that someone from her past had tracked her down, was on her trail, was bent on exposing her? Inevitably Mary herself would see it in these terms, but did Alice have to? She wasn’t the one in the grip of an obsession, she was able to look at the thing from outside, rationally, and from this vantage point she could already see the whole episode as probably quite trivial and entailing no dire consequences of any kind. After all, she had told the caller, quite decisively, that this Imogen Gray did not live here. Why should he disbelieve her? The fact that someone from her former life was trying to get in touch with her was neither surprising nor sinister, and on being told that he’d got the wrong address, he would surely try elsewhere, or else give up altogether? Anyone would.

  But, on the other hand, there was just the possibility that …

  “Oi, listen to this!” Mr Bates was saying, and proceeded to read from the translation of Alcestis’ dying words, as Death comes to fetch her away.

  “His hand in mine, he leads me down to the House of the Dead … He has wings … his eyes are dark under his frowning brows …”

  He read the passage with great feeling, before subjecting it to comparison with his Dad’s last words, which, it so happened, concerned the lid of a biscuit-tin that someone hadn’t replaced properly. “Airtight! Gotta be airtight,” he’d said, quite loudly, before closing his eyes for ever, and like Alcestis, seeing no more the sun nor the light of the day.

  Chapter 26

  The moral dilemma was solved, after a fashion, by Mary herself. In such good spirits did she arrive home after her first day’s work that one would have to have been an outright sadist to confront her with a piece of news that could not fail to wreck her evening. Alice had never before seen her so full of fun and chatter; she had only to report that telephone call and she never would again.

  They were in the kitchen, just the two of them, Hetty having gone to the pictures, and Miss Dorinda having gone to bed early with one of her headaches, a mild one so far, but poised to get worse should Brian start playing the piano; which he didn’t, as it happened, but all the same, he might have, and that is quite distressing enough, as anyone nursing a headache will tell you.

  And so by nine o’clock Alice and Mary were sitting companionably one on each side of the big scrubbed table, finishing off the free hamburgers which (Mary had been assured) were legitimate perks for the Saturday staff, together with two tomatoes out of the fridge which didn’t seem to belong to anybody.

  “You know something, Alice,” Mary was saying, ‘it’s like you told me. I’m beginning to see it now, and I really am getting — you know — not so neurotic about everything. Trying, anyway. You know what I do? Every time something starts to upset me — you know, someone looking at me, or something — I take a big breath, and I ask myself: ‘What would Alice say?’”

  “And what would I?” Alice asked, amused, and not sure whether to be flattered by this implication that her opinions were as predictable as all this.

  “Oh, you would say that wonderful thing about other people not being interested in me, not at all. After feeling all this time that everyone’s watching me, and perhaps recognising me. Oh, it was like a blood-transfusion to hear you saying that they weren’t even interested! I couldn’t quite believe it, but all the same it was wonderful just to hear it, to feel like a nobody at last! You’ve no idea what a help that is. I keep saying it to myself, whenever something happens that spooks me …”

  Alice laughed.

  “And what are the things that ‘spook’ you?” she asked. “Remember, I’m one of the oldies, and a schoolteacher at that, so my vocabulary only stretches that far (she held up thumb and forefinger a fraction of an inch apart), so I don’t know what the verb ‘to spook’ really means. Give me some examples.”

  “Oh. Well …” Mary’s face became grave, and she slowly wiped a piece of bread round and round her plate to catch the last scraps of meaty flavour before popping it into her mouth. “Well, the kind of thing I mean … Well, like Hilda, she’s the girl on the till just across from me; she’s nice, she helped me when my drawer got wedged, I’d shut it too hard, or something. Well, anyway, while we were queuing up for our tea-break, she asked me quite casually ‘Have you any brothers or sisters?’ and Alice, honestly, I thought I was going to faint! Everything went black, I had to clutch on to the rail. Then out of the blackness I seemed to hear your voice inside my head: ‘Don’t be silly, Midge.’ Wasn’t that funny, you were calling me ‘Midge’, not Mary. ‘Don’t be silly,’ you said, ‘she’s not the least bit interested really, she’s just making conversation, just being friendly.’ And of course she was. The blackness cleared away, and I found that I could answer her in an ordinary casual way. Wasn’t that good?”

  “Yes, very good.” Alice paused. “And what did you answer?”

  Mary gave her a quick, sidelong look. “Oh, I said no, I hadn’t, I was an only child …”

  “I see.” Alice began collecting up the plates, experiencing a sharp little pang of disappointment. Couldn’t Mary have admitted at least to having a brother, surely an innocuous admission by any standards?

  Still, it was a start. At least she hadn’t told her companion to mind her own business.

  “And then after lunch,” Mary was continuing, “I got another scare, a worse one really, but just listen how sensible I was about it! There was this man, you see, who kept eyeing me. I’d noticed him before lunch too; he was standing just inside the door, and every time I looked up from what I was doing, there he was, looking right at me. A middle-aged sort of man, rather tall, that’s why I noticed him I think, he stood out among the rest of them, and he had one of those lined faces that looked more lined than they ought to be, if you know what I mean. Anyway, when I saw him again in the afternoon, that was really scary. We were fairly quiet just then, and I could see him edging nearer. I tried not to look, of course, but my hands were shaking. I was dropping the money, the customers were having to help me; they do, you know, they’re awfully nice, some of them. I was terrified, you see, that he was going to say something when he got close up, and … Oh, Alice, he did! He said: ‘Well, well, my dear, I do believe I’ve seen that pretty face before, haven’t I?’ You can imagine how I felt! You ask me what ‘spooked’ means, well that’s what it means, the way I felt that minute! I felt like screaming, and dropping everything and rushing out of the shop, leaving the till open with hundreds of pounds up for grabs! But I didn’t. I made myself stand still and look unconcerned, and I made myself think the ordinary sensible thoughts that an ordinary sensible girl would think. Calm down, I said to myself, he’s only making a pass, he probably tries it on with all the girls, what’s so special about you? And it worked; I really did feel that I wasn’t special, it was a real good feeling. I couldn’t think what to say, though, so I just giggled a bit and looked away: Hilda says you should never do that — not unless you really do fancy them, of course — you should look them in the eye, she says, and slap them down good and proper when they start getting fresh. Else, she says, you’ll find them waiting outside when you finish, and then it’s a job to get rid of them, they can turn really nasty, she says …”

  And actually, Mary continued, he was waiting outside at the end of the afternoon. She saw him standing at the extreme edge of the pavement, a cigarette burning down to nearly nothing between his fingers; but he didn’t turn nasty. Didn’t even look at her as she came out, let alone speak to her, and so she concluded h
e’d picked up another girl on one of the other tills, and was anticipating better luck with her …

  “And you know, Alice, I think I’m pretty good at the job,” she boasted; “I did pretty well with the money. I think I did. We don’t count it ourselves at the end of the day. I thought we would, but Mr Wayland comes round and takes it all, he tips it into a large bag, and they work it out at the back somehow. But anyway, I think it must have been all right, because they want me to come in again on Monday, because someone’s off sick. And probably Tuesday and Wednesday as well. They wouldn’t have done that, would they, if my money hadn’t been fairly all right?”

  Indeed they wouldn’t, Alice agreed; though privately she did wonder whether they could actually have checked the money as quickly as all that. Was the day of reckoning still to come? She hoped not. To have succeeded at anything, even at a relatively unskilled job like this, would do wonders for Mary’s morale.

  Once again, she said nothing of her uneasy suspicion that this might be the same man who had been asking for her previously. Even if it was—so what? Nothing was more important than to save Mary from slipping back into her former state of paranoia about everything and everybody.

  “Good night, Midge,” she found herself saying when they parted on the landing later on that evening; and Mary, though startled by the name, was unmistakably pleased.

  “But don’t do it when anyone else is around, will you!” she urged, glancing nervously up and down the stairs. “Not anyone! Ever!”