Listening in the Dusk Read online

  “Now for the caption …” Brian’s face was alight with creative fervour as he sucked his pencil and stared at the wall for inspiration. “I know!” and in large imposing capitals he quickly printed under the sketch:

  IT’S GREEK TO ME!

  “There, that’ll get ’em looking. Everyone loves a code. Or you can make it actual Greek if you like, in case they know some already. Underneath all that — and in much smaller letters — you can get in the serious stuff for the parents about what you are actually going to teach, and why it’s going to turn their kid into a paragon of all the virtues as well as equipping him to knock hell out of his little friends in Life’s rat-race …

  “Something like that. Or — and from what you say this might be a better bet — you could highlight the sheer uselessness of your subject. An antidote to the crass materialism which is currently destroying the world, that sort of thing. Everyone likes the idea of everyone else being crassly materialistic; and of course the lure of the useless is irresistible. Always has been. Look at the pyramids, and the sacred cows, and the cathedrals. Not to mention crinolines, crossword-puzzles and space-travel.

  “We’ll soon knock something out. Indian ink, of course, for the pic. I’ve got some somewhere …”

  *

  And so, a couple of hours later, with four spectacular postcard-size notices lurking in her handbag, Alice found herself slinking past the hair and beauty salon like a criminal, irrationally fearful lest Miss Dorinda should be glancing out of the display window at just that moment, and should somehow guess at her embarrassing errand. For embarrassing it was: not because there is anything inherently disgraceful about offering to the public your skills, whatever they may be, but because she had never done it before, and couldn’t as yet slot it into her self-image. Moreover, Brian’s flamboyant style of advertisement was very much not Alice’s own style. Something much more sober and low-key would have evolved if she had designed the notices on her own — that is, if she had nerved herself to embark on the project at all.

  That was the point. Brian’s enthusiasm, his flair for the eye-catching, had supplied the impetus which Alice lacked, and so she had gone along with it. Also, it would have seemed most ungracious, even snubbing, to have turned down his so-eagerly proffered help. Lastly, of course, it might work.

  What’s more, it did. Before the week was out, she had received three phone calls: one from a retired postman who had spent the first years of his retirement in the local library reading Homer, Plato and most of the plays in translation, and had been fired with the ambition to read them in the original before he died; a second from a lady who thought that those enormously large round spectacles would suit her a lot better than the National Health ones she had at present, and could Alice tell her where they could be obtained? A third was from the mother of a twelve-year-old boy called Cyril, about whose wish to learn Greek she was almost insultingly apologetic, but nevertheless contemplated an interview “just to talk about it”.

  Excitedly, Alice found herself with quite a timetable to organise. The postman, a small wiry man with a lined, rosy face, a slight limp and a freckled balding skull wanted to come on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Alice tried to explain that she might be coaching schoolchildren who would only have Saturdays free; but this distressed him greatly. Although (he had to agree) he wasn’t a schoolchild, he nevertheless did have other engagements, and these Greek lessons would have to be fitted in with his classes at the local Institute: Drama, Car-Maintenance, the History of Art. Saturday it would have to be. He knew the Greek alphabet already, he told her, he’d learned it by himself, and now couldn’t wait to go further, in particular to read Alcestis right through in the original.

  Alice tried, without being too discouraging, to give her prospective pupil some idea of the vast tracts of grammar and vocabulary that lay between knowing the alphabet and reading Alcestis in the original; but he was undeterred.

  “If I make up my mind to a thing, then I keep going until I get there,” he told her; and to substantiate this self-assessment, he told her how he had had polio as a boy and had been told that he’d have to settle for a desk job, as his leg would never be up to very much walking.

  “‘Very much walking!’ Tens of thousands of miles I reckon I’ve walked on my rounds — five times round the world, just about! Forty-seven years, and never a day off sick, bar just the one winter, a bad go of pleurisy …”

  As a qualification for embarking on a study of ancient Greek, walking five times round the world might seem to some teachers irrelevant; but not to Alice. She took Mr Bates on with alacrity, and after discussing terms and the books he would need, they parted with a sense of happy anticipation on both sides.

  Cyril proved a little more complicated to enrol. For one thing, the negotiations had to be primarily with his parents, not with him; and for another, Alice was to be expected to travel to his home for the lessons, and not he to hers. The distance was not great — less than a mile — but the elegance of the suburban road in which he lived was in itself intimidating, with its large and well-kept late-Victorian houses set well back from the road behind wrought-iron gates and barriers of smugly evergreen shrubs that looked as if they had lived there for a hundred years.

  Walking up the short gravel drive to her preliminary interview with the Bensons, Alice felt her heart thudding uncomfortably, and her brain (even more uncomfortably) emptying itself of suitable sentences with which to advocate the claims of both herself and her outdated subject.

  Both were necessary. The beautifully-proportioned pale grey drawing-room, with its floor-length velvet curtains and its silver vases of out-of-season roses, formed a setting singularly unkind to Alice’s one and only winter coat and her scuffed suede boots. Not that Mrs Benson, an anxious and well-preserved blonde of about Alice’s own age, showed any signs of being overtly snobbish about this. On the contrary, you could see her deciding, after a single glance, that one can’t go by appearances and that anyway in this new high-speed age with which it was so important to keep up, class didn’t count for anything. Though of course if this woman who was proposing to coach her son had actually had an accent …

  Mercifully, Alice hadn’t. As soon as she began to speak, she could see her employer’s face clear, and knew she was over the first hurdle. The second was more difficult.

  “You see,” Mrs Benson was saying, crossing her shapely legs and settling herself more securely against her discreetly-positioned back-support cushion, “you see, without meaning to disparage your qualifications in any way, Mrs Saunders, I’m sure they are excellent, but we are a little unhappy, my husband and I, about the whole idea of our boy spending time — valuable homework time — on studying an outdated language that no one is ever going to speak. Where will it get him?”

  Where would it? This was the question that was bound to arise. Alice had prepared for it.

  “I think,” she began, “— and this is simply my experience as a teacher — I think that in educating a child one has to look beyond the immediate practical qualifications that he —”

  Mrs Benson was on to it in a flash. “Why ‘he’?” she demanded. “Why not ‘she’? I hope, I do hope, Mrs Saunders, that you haven’t a sexist attitude? I wouldn’t like Cyril to, well …”

  She paused, perhaps a little uncertain herself exactly what it was that she wouldn’t like Cyril to do, or be, or have, or become as a result of Alice’s instruction in elementary Greek syntax; so Alice intervened to help her out.

  “Of course not,” she said. “I was just using the word ‘he’ in a general sense. If you’d got a daughter I was to teach, I’d naturally have said —”

  “I have got a daughter actually,” interrupted Mrs Benson, with a touch of reproof at the implied accusation of not having one, “but she’s only six, and so .. But anyway …” Here she changed tack slightly, “I must be frank with you. If it was a daughter of mine who wanted to learn Greek, I’d be even more worried than I am about Cyril. I feel it is so i
mportant for girls, just as much as for boys, to learn science and technology and … and … well, technology. Wouldn’t you agree? And that’s what worries me about Cyril. We — his father and I — we naturally want him to do Maths and Science, and this whim of his to learn Greek, naturally we find it rather upsetting. But, on the other hand, if we oppose him about it, if we forbid him to have lessons, it might just drive it underground. What do you think? As a teacher?”

  “Well,” Alice was beginning, “it does seem to me —”

  “Exactly!” exclaimed Mrs Benson in tones of relief. “Just what we were saying, his father and I. I thought you’d agree. And so, for the moment … You see, there are signs that he may be already learning, in secret. Only last week, I was going through his clothes, and in his sock drawer I found a book called ‘The Republic’. At first I thought it was just politics — you know, Peace Studies, that sort of thing — but when I opened it, I saw it was all in Greek! Mind you, I don’t suppose for a moment that he can read it, but all the same, there’s no knowing how it will end if we don’t handle it right at this stage.”

  She sounded like a mother who has come across a secret hoard of drugs in her son’s bedroom. Her face, under its neat and superbly-styled cap of shining, straw-blonde hair was puckered with concern; and Alice, partly to change the subject and partly because she felt it was high time, suggested that she should be introduced to the boy himself. “I can’t really judge the situation until I’ve met him,” she pointed out. “And in case we do decide on the lessons, I’d like to know how far he’s already got. You know, for books and things.”

  After a half-hearted flutter of demur, in deference to Maths and Science and the modern high-speed age, the boy was summoned from upstairs, and Alice had the few moments before his arrival to wonder what he would be like. Boys of twelve come in two main categories; tall, half-formed young men, loose limbed, with voices already broken; or they can be children still, little boys with scraped knees, scrubbed innocent faces and high, piping voices.

  Cyril at first sight was decidedly in the latter category; not exactly small for his age, but compact and wiry, with the innocent, inquiring face and agile body of the pre-pubescent child. Beneath a mop of fairish hair the wide-spaced grey eyes, alert and inquisitive, sparkled out at the newcomer, assessing her, measuring her up against some inscrutable yardstick of childhood judgement.

  He was polite enough, though, shook hands nicely, smiled a neat smile, and did not interrupt while his mother launched into a long — and by now surely familiar? — dissertation on the demerits of a classical education. He spoke only when she at last turned to him with a direct question:

  “So why do you want to learn Greek, Cyril? See if you can explain to Mrs Saunders. Because we all know, don’t we, that Science and Maths are —”

  “‘The essential qualifications for the new technological age,’” he quoted in a clear childish treble, whose innocent tone very nearly cancelled out the underlying impertinence of the interruption. “Science and Maths are the gateway to tomorrow’s world.” Here he stopped quoting, looked straight at Alice and spoke in his own, slightly less child-like voice: “But you see I don’t specially want to live in tomorrow’s world. I don’t think I’m going to like it. But I do like Greek, especially Plato and Herodotus, and I want to learn to read them properly.”

  Chapter 11

  “So I’ve got two jobs!” Alice announced that evening as she, Brian and Hetty gathered round the kitchen table for a midnight feast of doughnuts and the remains of a jumbo packet of crisps, washed down by the much-stewed pot of tea with which Hetty had been regaling all comers ever since ten o’clock. “And pretty well paid, too,” Alice continued. “At least one of them is. It’s funny you know, the mother doesn’t really seem to approve of the boy learning Greek at all, and yet she’s quite happy to pay the earth for it.”

  “It figures, though, doesn’t it?” Brian suggested. “I’ve had mothers like that too. Having tin ears themselves, they have no idea of what music is for, or why anyone should want to spend time on it, but on the other hand they’re dead scared that their kid might miss out on something, or be traumatised by the sound of the word No — that kind of thing. So what they can’t provide in understanding and intelligent support, they fall over themselves to provide in money. Paying off their own guilt-feelings. Inadequacy-feelings, rather. For lots of people it’s the same thing. Anyway, congratulations, Alice! Long may Mrs Whats-it’s guilt feelings screw her up, and long may Master Whats-it —”

  “Cyril, actually,” Alice interposed. “Rather a prissy name, isn’t it, for nowadays, but then they’re rather prissy people, what I’ve seen of them. Anyway, I start this Saturday as ever. Oh, and I’ve got a dear old chap as well, not so much money, of course, but he’s dead keen. He’s coming to me, thank goodness, so if you run into a slightly Worzel Gummidge sort of figure on the stairs on Wednesdays and Saturdays —”

  “Which reminds me,” Hetty broke in, “figures on the stairs, I mean. There’s a piece of good news! This fellow, quite a nice-looking fellow actually, well, not too bad, anyway. A bit yellow, perhaps, unless it was the light; that one without a shade, you know at the turn of the landing, puts years on anyone that light does. So maybe he was fairly young, really; on the old side of fairly young, if you know what I mean. Anyway, I’ve always said that an age difference doesn’t really matter all that much, provided there’s common interests … Presentable he was, anyway, quite neat and all that. A bit on the small side maybe, still, you mustn’t go by that, there’s plenty of short men who —”

  “Hetty, darling, the suspense is terrible!” Brian interrupted. “This yellow dwarf in his natty suiting — what about him? You’ve told us everything, in splendid detail, except what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “I was just coming to that, and just you keep your mouth shut, young Brian, and let me tell it my own way. It’s a boyfriend, I do believe! A boyfriend for our Mary at last! You know how worried I’ve been about that girl, how she never goes out, never has anyone in. Well, it’s happened at last! I’m so relieved! And I don’t think it can be his first visit, either, because when he got up as far as her room, he just pushed the door open and walked in. Well, you wouldn’t do that, would you, if it was a first visit? You’d knock on the door, wouldn’t you? And he didn’t: nothing like that. I know he didn’t, because I was watching up through the banisters.”

  “And what happened?” Brian had quite dropped his bantering tone. “Did Mary …? I mean, did she say anything? Did you hear how she sounded?”

  Hetty bridled, putting on what Alice thought of as her “tut-tut” look.

  “Really, Brian! How should I know how she sounded? I didn’t stay to listen, what do you take me for? I just hurried off down the stairs as fast as I could go to leave them their privacy. All I do know is that everything seemed very quiet up there, and I really began to hope — you know — that they might be … Well, I mean, it would do her a power of good, wouldn’t it, poor child? Just what she needs to cure her of the megrims.”

  “When was all this? Is he still there?”

  Brian was leaning forward over the table, poised as if to spring to his feet at Hetty’s slightest word. But Hetty merely flapped her hand at him.

  “Relax, boy, relax! Hours ago it happened, not long after lunch it must have been. He wasn’t here above half an hour, I heard the door go when he left. Still, it’s something isn’t it, to know that she’s got a friend at all. It could be the start of something. And Brian, don’t look like that. You’ve no call to look like that, all the chances you’ve had up there on the same landing all these weeks, and you’ve never taken advantage … Oh no you haven’t, Brian, I can tell, you can’t deceive me … And so now when another chap comes along, well, you’ve brought it on yourself, is all I can say. Right dog-in-the-manger, I’d call it if you start complaining now.”

  “I’m not complaining!” He sounded quite angry. “I’m just simply worried: is
she all right? Have you seen her since? I mean, you don’t know if she knew him at all. He might have been a total stranger. A rapist! A murderer! Anything! This leaving the front door swinging open day and night is all very fine and dandy, but —”

  “‘Swinging open’ is a lie, and well you know it. Just I put the latch up now and again, that’s all, and so would you if you were the one who had to be up and down all day long answering the bell to every Tom, Dick and Harry —”

  “Seeing that the bell doesn’t even work,” Brian retorted, “I don’t see how —”

  “And whose fault is that, I’d like to know!” Hetty crowed triumphantly, delighted at being dealt so unsolicited a trump card. “Who promised he’d fix it? Days ago it was! And the geyser, too! All these tepid baths, I’m just about fed up with it, and so is Miss Dorinda. And Alice too, aren’t you, Alice? We all are. And the fridge as well, while we’re on the subject, the funny noise it makes when you shut the door too hard, and the light inside has gone on the blink too. All those bits of milk going sour, or will do if you don’t get on with it. And it’s no good saying give them to Hengist, he won’t touch sour milk, as you well know —”

  “That cat won’t touch anything except best steak and breast of chicken, if you ask me,” Brian retorted, recovering something of his usual tone under the reassuring onslaught of familiar reproaches. “Ever tried giving him the chips from the fish-and-chips parcel? The look he gives you fairly burns a hole in the paper!” And then, turning to Alice: “Look, Alice, couldn’t you come up with me and check that Mary’s all right? I know it’s late, but you could just peep round the door, see if she’s safe in bed sort of thing? Obviously, I can’t because we aren’t … I mean she doesn’t …”