Listening in the Dusk Page 7

  “I don’t think it’s as common as all that,” Alice was beginning, but Miss Dorinda interrupted, full of indignation, as people tend to be at any suggestion that something isn’t as dreadful as they thought it was.

  “It’s all very well to talk like that, if you’ll excuse my saying so! You wouldn’t talk like that if you’d been one of the victims! Suppose you’d been attacked by the Yorkshire Ripper? Or the Cambridge Rapist? Or the Flittermouse Fiend? He was a vampire, too, as well as a murderer. That’s what flittermouse means, it means a vampire —”

  “No it doesn’t, it just means a bat,” interposed Brian, roused from his dark mood by the prospect of controversy. “It’s simply the old English word for ‘bat’ —”

  “Well, and that’s just what I’ve been saying!” retorted Miss Dorinda triumphantly. “A vampire is a bat. It’s a huge, savage bat that sucks human blood! Didn’t you ever see the Dracula film? Those awful yellow fangs, and claws dripping with blood? The Flittermouse Fiend must have been …”

  They all heard it. A soft scuffling from beyond the closed door; light footsteps racing up the stairs; and then the slam of a door, high up in the old house. Brian’s chair scraped back with a violent shudder, and he was across the room, out of the door and racing up the stairs.

  The three women, struck silent, were left facing each other, but not for long. In less than a minute, Brian could be heard thundering down the stairs, and he burst into the kitchen, wild-eyed, his whole body grown somehow loose and disjointed with shock.

  “Something terrible has happened!” he gasped. “Her door … Mary’s door, it’s all over blood! I can’t get it open! A hammer, Hetty! An axe! Something to smash it down with …!”

  “All over blood” was an exaggeration. The doorhandle, as Alice bent to examine it, was indeed stained with red, and there were smears of red here and there on the panels. Alice bent lower — sniffed — and burst into hysterical laughter.

  “Brian! You idiot! It’s not blood at all — it’s paint! Red paint! The wretched girl’s been mucking about in my room, and she’s got the motor bike paint all over her. That’s what it is!” And her anxiety abruptly transferred itself from Mary’s safety to the fate of her new décor.

  The delicately outlined rim of scarlet was indeed smudged and spoiled, and the whole contraption had been dragged a few inches out of position as if to allow space — but only just — for a slender figure to creep in behind it. By now, Brian had joined in her mirth, though still with the residue of shock jerking somewhere in his lungs; and together they stood contemplating, with relief and bewilderment, their now somewhat blemished handiwork, while behind them, agog for their fair share in this happening, whatever it might prove to be, stood Hetty and Miss Dorinda.

  Hetty, despite the inconclusive nature of the data so far, was already able to discern a bright side.

  “It’s a mercy,” she pointed out, “that I couldn’t remember where that axe had got put. It hasn’t been used since that sculpture fellow was here trying to turn the outside lav into a studio. It must still be out there somewhere, and if I’d been able to lay hands on it, Brian, like you yelled at me to, then we’d have had that door in splinters all to no purpose! And then, oh dear me, men in and out for days repairing it, and most likely telling me I’ve got dry-rot into the bargain, you know what they are these builder chappies. And then the insurance … I don’t know what they’d make of a story like this, I really don’t … A fuss, anyway, it’s surprising the fuss they can make, every tiny thing … Never mind. All’s well that ends well.”

  If indeed it had ended. After the others had gone downstairs, Alice knocked, and knocked again; but inside the room was absolute silence, and she had to desist. After all, Mary had a right to her privacy. All the same, Alice went to bed feeling uneasy, and half-afraid; which was no doubt why, just before dawn, she had such a very horrid dream. She dreamed she was back in her old job, sitting at her desk correcting a set of exercises, when she came upon one written in red ink, making it difficult for her to mark corrections. She spoke to the girl in question, pointing out the problem, and asking her to use a black biro next time; but the girl shook her head sadly. “Oh no,” she said, “I can’t write in black any more, from now on I have to write everything in blood — look!” and pushing up the sleeve of her blouse, she displayed a nasty jagged wound into which she must dip her pen.

  Alice woke, shaken with horror, and then with relief at knowing it was only a dream. But for a few moments she was quite disorientated, in the darkness, and in her still unfamiliar surroundings. By the time she had located the small square of the window and recovered her bearings, and the sense of where she was, the dream had already begun to fade. She could no longer recall whether the girl in the dream had actually resembled Mary, or whether she had been a mere faceless ghost, of the sort that habitually drift through dreams.

  Not that it mattered. The shocks and alarms of last night were quite enough to account for such a dream, and there was no point at all in looking for anything subtle in the way of interpretation; and so Alice settled back on her pillow, and tried to sleep. Already, it was nearly morning.

  Chapter 9

  “I’m sorry,” Mary was sulkily repeating. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! But how could I know you’d painted the bloody thing? You said I could have my stuff whenever I liked, and then you set a trap like that to catch me!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” Alice retorted. “It wasn’t a trap, and of course I wasn’t trying to ‘catch’ you, why should I? Catch you at what, anyway? All we were doing — Brian and I — we were trying to brighten the place up with a bit of colour. Don’t you think it looks better already? You saw the ghastly mess it was yesterday: look at all the extra space we’ve made just by stacking things up tidily.”

  Alice was trying to turn the conversation, which had started as an altercation about the wet paint, and whose fault it was that Mary had got it all over her hands last night, into something more amiable. “Don’t you think it looks nice?” she persisted, when her companion remained silent. “And see that couch affair, with the cretonne cover? Cardboard boxes it’s made of! All those boxes crammed with ancient papers —”

  “What papers?”

  Alice was thrown by this sudden twist to the conversation, and found herself stammering.

  “I … I … Well, I don’t … I don’t know really. Magazines and things — you know. Newspapers —”

  “What newspapers?”

  The inquisition was relentless. Alice found annoyance coming to her aid, and she spoke briskly.

  “Look, Mary, why don’t you just tell me what you want — what you were looking for last night? Perhaps I can help you find it?”

  “Help me find it! That’s rich, that really is! First you muck up the whole room, dragging everything about so that no one can find anything ever again, and then you say … You say …”

  Abruptly, the girl turned and darted out of the room, but not before Alice had glimpsed the tears suddenly welling in the hostile blue eyes, and heard the choking of the young voice.

  “Mary! Wait!” she cried, full of compunction, running out to the landing, leaning over the banisters.

  But it was too late. Mary’s door had closed with that curious, controlled savagery which she had noticed before, and which she recognised now as a substitute for a resounding slam.

  *

  Again! I’ve done it again! Mary lay face downward on her bed, listening while Alice rattled on the door, calling her name. Listening as Alice rattled again … and yet again: and listening still as the tiresome woman gave up, and retreated slowly up the stairs.

  As the sounds faded, as the impending danger of sympathy, of caring, of compassion began to recede, Mary’s tension relaxed a little, and she found herself able to think again, to try and assess this new and terrifying onslaught on her privacy. How could she have guessed that the attic lumber-room, which by all accounts — and indeed by all appearances — had l
ain untouched and neglected for goodness knows how many years, should suddenly, within twenty-four hours, become subject to all this upheaval? It had seemed so secure a hiding-place at the beginning. The worst that could happen to her dreadful secret — so she’d thought — was that it might be overlaid by daunting piles of fresh rubbish, chucked in pell-mell on top of the existing strata. The possibility that someone in this sloppy, down-at-heel household should suddenly take it into their heads to tidy the place — this had seemed too remote to be considered. That darkest, dustiest, most inaccessible corner, under the low beam, behind the almost immovable barrier of the motor bike, and underneath a pile of ancient curtains and mysterious rags of carpeting — this had seemed as safe a place as one could ever hope to find. Safer, certainly, than the sparsely-furnished barn of a room that she, Mary, had been allotted, and which offered almost no hiding-places at all. A huge wardrobe, with a door which wouldn’t stay shut even when you wedged it: a rickety chest-of-drawers with drawers that stuck and groaned and jerked when you tried to shut them; and — as a last resort — the dusty, fluff-ridden space under the bed, already occupied by the many discarded shoes of some previous incumbent and the remains of a huge garden-party hat, pale straw and tattered artificial roses. It wouldn’t take a person so much as five minutes to search through these meagre and obvious hiding-places, especially if they knew what they were looking for. And the people she was afraid of would know what they were looking for.

  Was this Alice woman one of them? Or not? How could one tell? What clues should one look for? That a person might seem, on the face of it, to be quite pleasant and ordinary proved nothing — nothing. As Mary knew only too well.

  If only she could have locked her door! But Hetty, maddeningly, didn’t “hold with” locks and keys. How smug can you get, you people who can afford not to “hold with” locks and keys?

  Besides, a locked door (she was beginning to learn) does little but attract the very things it is supposed to fend off— namely, interference, prying and suspicion.

  Last night, for instance, if she hadn’t panicked, and wedged the door with a chair-back under the handle, there would never have been a fraction of the fuss and upset that had in fact been aroused. Brian would presumably have walked in and instantly noticed her paint-stained hands and jersey, and the whole thing would have passed off as a tiresome mishap, quite funny really, and the rest of the household would never have been alerted at all.

  Or — going only a few minutes further back — if only she’d boldly marched in on the supper-party and asked Hetty openly for a bottle of turpentine-substitute, explained what she wanted it for, then the disturbance would have been minimal. Instead of which, by hanging about outside the door, hesitating, while the paint congealed on her hands; and then, when she heard what they were talking about, taking to her heels — all this had simply been a recipe for stirring up maximum curiosity, maximum interference and questioning.

  Part of the trouble, of course, was that when she went downstairs she’d still been in a state of shock from touching the newly-painted motor bike. For one mad moment, she had imagined that the wet red stains on her hands were indeed blood: that somehow, by some weird and virulent magic, her secret had come horribly alive during the hours of darkness and had crawled out from under the beams …

  Absurd! Almost at once she had realised that the stuff was only paint: but it was only her mind that knew this: her body thought it knew better, and it wouldn’t stop trembling …

  There was a lesson in all this somewhere, and already she could see, more or less, what it was. She must not panic. If she hadn’t panicked on discovering that this new woman had actually taken up residence in the room that concealed her secret; and if she hadn’t given way to further panic when she found that the hiding-place itself had been dismantled …

  Now, reflecting on the episode more calmly, Mary realised how damagingly she had over-reacted. She could see, now, that the Alice woman probably hadn’t been searching for anything, but, exactly as she’d said, was simply trying to clear the room. This was a perfectly viable hypothesis, consistent with all the facts. But all the same, the shock of discovering that her terrible secret had simply disappeared from its accustomed hiding-place … That she had no idea, now, where it might be, or even whether Alice had in fact seen it, examined it, and already drawn the inescapable inference — all this had been too much for Mary’s self-control. She had burst out into pointless but uncontrollable rudeness towards this devastating interloper who had — albeit unintentionally — upset the precarious balance on which Mary’s existence here was poised. The fact that it was unintentional made it worse, in a way, more alarming. It was like being a tightrope-walker, with the rope juddering hideously beneath you on account of someone blandly hanging out their washing on the far end, totally unaware of your predicament. How can you not scream at such a person? And thereby make an enemy? One more unnecessary enemy to add to the growing list …

  The sense of enemies moving in on her, more and more of them, from every direction, gripped her yet again. So powerful it was, closing in on her rational faculties, crushing them as if with an iron fist, rendering them incapable of ordinary common-sense reasoning. And the irony was that she knew very well the correct name for this feeling of hers; it was paranoia. Only a couple of years ago, in the unimaginably blissful days of not yet knowing anything about it, she had been given an ‘A’ for an essay on this very subject. Her innocent, book-learned dissertation on the malady had impressed her tutor, and had helped, via continuous assessment, to bring her the coveted First Year Prize for Outstanding Achievement.

  What a triumph! What rejoicings there had been! Parents delighted; Julian delighted too, it seemed, teasing her with brotherly incredulity about her success.

  “They must be potty, these examiners of yours,” he’d jeered admiringly. “All that psychology has warped their tiny minds! Still, it’s a jolly good happening to have happened to you, Midge, so let’s celebrate …”

  Had the clouds already begun to gather, and did Julian already know it? Was it with monstrous irony, or helpless in the grip of the dark gods, that he’d suggested they should go for a celebratory picnic, just the two of them, champagne and all, to their favourite picnic spot on Flittermouse Hill? Such games they’d played there as children, long ago, sometimes with friends, sometimes on their own. Traditional games like Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians; and many another, invented by themselves. Lying there on that hot June day, almost the last day of unclouded happiness she would ever know, she and Julian had laughed, and reminisced, and stared up through the rowan boughs at the blue, incredible sky. She recalled, now, how she had noticed the beginnings of colour just lightly tinging the clusters of nascent berries which, by September, would be a glory of scarlet.

  She had not known, of course, that she was looking at this scene for the last time. By next summer, the bulldozers would have moved in.

  Dusk was falling. The shadows and smudges of the stained and faded wallpaper were changing, growing palely luminous in the last of the silver-grey light, and Mary rolled slowly off the bed, blinking and rubbing her eyes as though waking from a deep sleep; but this was an illusion. She didn’t sleep deeply any more, neither by night nor by day. Peering closely into the small, specked mirror, badly placed, she wondered how much it showed.

  Chapter 10

  “What you want,” said Brian, with the kindly condescension of experienced youth towards helpless middle-age, “what you want is to stop looking at advertisements for jobs vacant, and start advertising for yourself. Not in the local paper, that’s a dead loss as well as costing a bomb, but on the boards outside newsagents, among the baby-sitters and the handymen and the house-trained kittens. That way, you get the impulse-clients. That’s my experience, anyway. What happens, you see, they’re standing there looking to see if their own notice about a wardrobe for sale has gone up yet, and — hey presto — they catch sight of my ad about piano lessons, with its pretty pi
cture of notes and staves. And they think, well, why not? I may never get shot of Aunt Agatha’s bloody wardrobe, but at least I might be able to put her bloody piano to use. Or my kid might, it’ll give him something to do after school besides teasing his sister, and who knows, he might turn out to be a genius?

  “That’s the thought-process, roughly, and that’s what you want to cash in on. I’ll help you with the wording if you like, I’ve had a lot of experience, and if we can work in a funny illustration, it does help. It’s coaching you’re after, isn’t it? Private coaching in, well, something or other? You say you’ve been a teacher up to now, well, you must know something …”

  Good thinking. So I must. Aloud, Alice said: “That’s the trouble, really. My subjects — no one wants them any more. Latin and Greek — they’re the extinct dinosaurs of education nowadays. In my last job I was amazingly lucky. In the very town where my husband worked there was this old-fashioned all-girls school where they still went in for that sort of thing. Not so much now, though — it was some years ago when I got the job, and it went on ticking over in a sort of a way, though lately I’ve found myself teaching French as well, and Religious Studies, because there weren’t enough girls opting for Classics. I don’t think there’d be the slightest chance of a full-time job in Classics now — even if it wasn’t for my age — and, well, the way I left. Rather sudden. Normally, you’d never leave a teaching job until you’d got yourself fixed up for another one: it’ll look funny on my record —”

  “But it’s coaching we’re talking about,” Brian interrupted briskly, “not a full-blown job. Everyone doing coaching has a record that looks funny, else they wouldn’t be doing it, would they? Now, let’s get down to it. A picture, that’s the first thing. You have to have a picture to catch the eye, to compete with the kittens …”

  He pulled a large brown envelope out of the wastepaper basket at his side, and in a few swift lines had sketched a lively caricature of a very small boy with very large spectacles bending over an enormous tome, open to reveal an imaginary script hitherto unknown to linguists.