The Listeners Read online

  Fighting for breath, fighting for time, he could hear his own breathing, harsh and urgent in the sour mouthpiece.

  ‘Tell me the number. It’s all right. It’s all right...’

  Shrill and demanding, the beeps cut the thread that held them. Tim slid his fingers into his trousers pocket, felt a ten shilling note and crumpled it as he listened to the senseless beeps as if they were a voice. Soon they gave him up as a lost cause, and the dialling tone came smoothly in.

  Tim stood and listened to it for quite a long time while his breath slowed and quietened. He could talk now. He would get his money changed and try again. The woman would say: Can I help you? and Tim would say: Yes. Help me. There’s no one. Please listen to me.

  When he put down the telephone and turned to go, he saw that the young man in the next box was looking at him, still laughing, contemptuously, his eyes far away, as if Tim were not worth a focus.

  Tim pushed open the folding door and went through the black archway into the station, empty and dim under the high glass roof, a few people moving slowly or sitting inert, looking at nothing. On a bench in the pillared shadow beyond the parcels office, a heap of rags and newspapers was already asleep, with no head or feet. Tim went to the only window in the booking office that was not blanked with a board shaped like a gravestone.

  ‘Change for ten bob?’ He put the crumpled note on the ledge without letting go of it.

  ‘Sorry.’ The floor inside was raised so that the man could look down his nose at his customers. He had crinkled ginger hair and a moustache no wider than his nostrils. ‘No change for the phone. Sell you a ticket, though.’

  Banging against the curved wooden bottom of the ticket office, a stunted woman with a great wide broom as high as her chin was collecting unnamable refuse from the station floor. Tim put the ten shilling note back in his pocket and ran past her and out through the archway entrance against a funnelling wind that tried to drive him back in again.

  SAMARITAN LOG BOOK. NIGHT DUTY.

  23.00 Phone-box call. Breathing only. (Victoria, 422)

  23.15 Billie again. Bit tight. Less miserable. (Victoria, 422)

  23.20 Michael still asleep here. Rang students’ hostel again about a bed for him. (Victoria, 422)

  Some time before midnight, a young Spanish theology student with a ruffianly beard, and a beautiful girl with soft clean hair came in a little yellow van painted with daisy flowers.

  ‘Hullo, Michael. I thought you were in the hospital.’

  ‘I got out.’ The homeless man woke easily, accustomed to napping where he could, and being moved on from anywhere that was warm and comfortable. He wiped his nose with an old bus ticket and put it back in his pocket.

  ‘I’m afraid it will have to be the floor,’ the girl said. ‘That’s all we’ve got left tonight.’

  ‘Not a bed in town,’ Helen said, ‘except the Government hostel.’

  ‘He can’t estand that.’ The Spanish student wore a skiing sweater and a pair of old Army trousers. His eyes were a clear tropical blue between his thick black hair and beard.

  ‘I was at the Spike a couple of times. Camberwell.’ The man bent down to arrange his shoes so that what was left of the soles was flat on the floor, and took the Spaniard’s arm to pull himself more or less upright. ‘They make you stay on in the morning and do all their work for them.’

  ‘You scrubbed the bottom of my pans though, last time you were with us,’ The girl, who was in her first year at the University, had a lovely full-cheeked smile, which turned with completely honest kindness on the tattered smelly man. No, not as deliberate as kindness, Victoria thought. An effortless acceptance. God — in the unlikely event I had ever done anything for anyone at her age, I can picture my strained condescension, how I would have admired myself, and run afterwards to wash my hands and tell someone about it.

  ‘That’s something else, darling. I’d work my fingers to the bone for you people, if I had my strength.’ The thought of it brought on a foul, waterlogged cough.

  The girl took his other arm. ‘You sure you shouldn’t go back to the hospital, Michael?’

  ‘Don’t talk like that to an old man.’ He hung on her arm and turned up eyes that swam rheumy and colourless between inflamed lids. ‘Been through two wars. Pensioned off. Lungs all to bits. They don’t care. Police State, dear, you mark me. Milk, give him milky feeds. Cut his rotten toe-nails off...’

  Muttering, he let himself be shuffled towards the door on the feeble legs that somehow carried him up and down the kerb of Marsh Lane on their good days, announcing the end of the world to sinners only.

  They got him into the front of the yellow van. The Spanish student got in beside him, propping him with his shoulder, and the girl climbed into the back among the boxes of sandwiches and meat pies and the cans of tea and soup which they would take round to the vagrant derelicts of the town.

  Victoria and Helen switched the telephone through to the upstairs room that had once been the vicarage nursery, and lay down on the bunks.

  ‘Who’s on call?’

  ‘Peter is Home Service all this month. You check with him first and if he thinks it’s an emergency, you get hold of, let’s see’ — Helen licked her finger and ran it down the duty list — ‘Paul’s on Flying Squad tonight/

  ‘Which Paul?’

  ‘401.’ Samaritans were identified by Christian name and a number. ‘Big man with a very deep voice. Teacher or something/

  ‘Oh yes, I know him. He’s nice. Calm. Patient.’

  ‘Going to read?’

  ‘No.’ Victoria turned out the overhead light, and Helen said, ‘He was marvellous to me once. I don’t know what I’d have done without him.’ She waited, then added more lightly, ‘Saved my life, to coin a phrase.’

  ‘You?’ Victoria looked across to the other bunk in shadow beyond the light over the telephones.

  Helen laughed. ‘Why are you so surprised? Everyone feels like slicing their bleeding throat some time in their life. Didn’t you learn that in your training?’

  ‘But you always seem as if you were — well, on an even keel.’

  ‘A puff of wind could sink me. When my husband walked out, and I didn’t know how I was going to keep the three kids, I sank.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I rang 4000. Told them I’d found myself in the garage with the engine running without knowing how I got there. They said come round and talk. I did. Brought all the kids, what a turmoil. Someone took care of them while I went into one of the rooms and talked to Paul.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Oh — I don’t know. It wasn’t that. It was just the thing of him listening. A man with problems of his own, I thought from his face, and here he is spending a couple of hours with a stupid, jealous bitch who couldn’t hold a man and hasn’t got the guts to get up and go to work to feed the kids she was selfish enough to have.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Only thing I knew. Taking care of people who are too stupid to take care of themselves. Housekeeper, they call me where I am now, which is an upgraded term for cook-general, I don’t care. We’ve got our own flat, run of the garden, use the pool when it’s too cold for them, free food, the lot. They’re terrified I’ll leave. Can’t do enough for me. Even listen for the kids Thursday nights.’

  ‘They know you come here?’

  ‘I tell ‘em I go on the streets, what the hell. It’s not their business.’

  Paul Hammond, Samaritan number 401, went out for dinner. When he came home that Thursday evening, his wife was out somewhere and he could not be bothered to cook anything for himself.

  There was nothing to cook. He stood in the narrow kitchen of the flat, opening doors all round him without moving his feet. Nothing feasible in the cupboards, nothing in the middle, edible range. Baked beans, mulligatawny soup, half-used packets of semolina and prunes. Then jars of expensive unnecessary things like artichoke hearts, pine kernels, foie gras, lichees.

 
; Mouse droppings round the boxes of stale cereal. Fermenting ketchup. A piece of honeycomb on a saucer stuck to the stained shelf. In the refrigerator, three bottles of milk with the cream drunk off, no eggs, some unwrapped bacon extravasating salt, sweated cheese, three doubtful sausages. and again the kind of things they could not afford, uneaten, unneeded beyond the placebo of their purchasing. Caviare, an avocado black and squashy, packets of frozen lobster and rum babas thrown in among the ice trays.

  Paul took a piece of paper from the burgeoning wastebin and wrote, ‘You have got to clean this place up.’ He made a hole in the paper and pushed it over the knob of the cupboard under the counter where they kept the drink.

  On the refrigerator door he wrote in pencil, ‘Alice. Tomorrow, Friday is laundry day. No more clean shirts. Love P.’ He licked his finger and rubbed out ‘Love’. Then he took the pencil and wrote it in again. ‘Give up,’ his daughter had said. ‘You’re a fool to go on.’ But he would go on trying.

  From the fourth floor, he went down to the restaurant under the block of flats. It was twilit, with dusty plastic plants and a smell of curry hanging about the carpet. Some unidentifiable music seeped out of the walls like marsh gas.

  ‘How’s Mrs Hammond?’ Phyllis, with a towering topknot of Dynel scrollwork two shades lighter than her hair, could make a pretty good guess how Mrs Hammond was. Had seen and heard her in the restaurant on occasion and been moved, like many other people, to feel sorry for Paul. ‘You drive me to excesses,’ Alice accused him, ‘so that other women will be sorry for you.’

  ‘She’s gone to see her sister.’ Reading the appetite-routing menu, Paul smiled at the image of Alice’s sister Myrna at the Capstan Club in one of the turned-up felt hats she had been wearing ever since she left school, twenty years ago.

  ‘That’s nice.’ Phyllis took the smile for herself and made crescents of her eyes over her fat cheeks. ‘You’ll have the roast chicken, I expect.’

  ‘I think I’ll risk the fish.’

  ‘No one’s died of it yet.’

  The restaurant was only half full, mostly married couples, eating the small dry tiles of bread for something to do, very polite, raking over stale items in their heads for something to say. A few men alone with a drink and the evening paper. Women alone, eating as guiltily as a dog with the cat’s dinner, knives and forks making mimsy little packets of the food.

  Each time Phyllis came back, with bread, soup, beer, the turbot, she and Paul exchanged the ritual small talk and Phyllis was quite pleased. She would tell her husband, ‘Mr Hammond was in.’

  What would happen if, instead of asking after her husband and being told that he went on much the same, Paul could ask, ‘Is it cancer? Where? Is he going to die? Does he know?’ and be told, ‘He’s got about six months and it’s destroying me because I can’t tell him’ ?

  What would happen if, instead of asking after his married daughter and being told that she was all right, Phyllis could say, ‘How could you let her marry a man like that?’ and be told, ‘We thought she was pregnant’?

  The food was tasteless because the fish was cut in a square chunk and the cabbage was an insulting wedge. Paul thought of the pleasing shapes of the food at lunch, the potatoes and carrots cut in olives, the diagonal beans exactly crisp and green, the thin expert strips of saddle of lamb, the cool dew on the butter, the good rough bread tossed in the basket with a haphazard success of textures and mealy colours.

  It had been lunch in the dining-room of an electronics company, one of whose directors had had a son at Burlington when Paul was a housemaster there.

  The week before, Paul had met him by chance in the street.

  ‘Aren’t you Mr Upjohn?’ They were waiting for the traffic light on a windy Saturday morning corner.

  ‘Yes — I know you, don’t I?’

  ‘Paul Hammond. Steven was in my house my last year at Burlington.’

  ‘Good Lord, my dear chap.’ The lights changed and they started across the street, were separated by a surge of people from the opposite side and came together on the other corner, exchanging grins and exclamations of surprise, while Mr Upjohn tried to cast back his mind - some scandal, what was it? Shot his wife or something?

  ‘Alice and I are living at Singleton Court, out towards Haddington.’

  Not shot her then, or a messy divorce ... homo probably. Must remember to ask Steven.

  ‘I’m teaching at Butterfields Comprehensive,’ Paul said, and Mr Upjohn had said, ‘That’s where our new plant is. Tell you what, love to have you up for lunch one day.’ A gust of wind made an attempt on his hat. ‘God, this weather! Ring me at the office next week. Love to fix something up.’

  At first Paul had not meant to ring Unitech. Then he did, for some reason — all right, nostalgia for Burlington. More exactly, nostalgia for himself as a master at Burlington.

  He sat in the middle of the table and did not get a chance to talk to the only woman at the lunch, a tall and gravely smiling person with calm eyes and grey in her brown hair, although her skin was smooth. When she was introduced as Mrs Frost, Paul had thought at first that she was a director’s wife, but there was no Mr Frost. After the first drink, she went through a door in the panelling and came back with a man in a white steward’s jacket and some trays, and Paul saw that she was a sort of hostess for the company, and had indeed cooked the beautiful lunch.

  She helped the man to serve, and while he poured the wine, she slipped into her place at the end of the table, unfolded her napkin, and at once said something appropriately gracious to the guests on either side of her.

  Because she was there (perhaps that was why she was there?) no business was talked at lunch. A young man with an idea to sell made some opening remarks, but most of the talk was about the New Town and the complexities of the huge comprehensive school, deferring to Paul, as if that was all he could talk about.

  Afterwards, over coffee and brandy at the end of the room where great chairs like the tombs of Pharaohs overlooked the green and piney hillside, Paul thanked Mrs Frost for the lunch. They talked briefly about France, and then she caught the eye of one of the men, and left.

  Paul got the message too and made his goodbyes.

  ‘Oh my dear chap, must you really?’

  ‘I got out of a class as it is.’

  ‘Look in again any time. Love to see you.’

  ‘Thanks. Remember me to Steven.’

  He went out into the passage to get his coat. He turned the wrong way and found himself in a little spotless kitchen like a ship’s galley, all stainless steel and white enamel, where Mrs Frost in a red butcher’s apron was drying glasses.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  She smiled. Short locks of soft undemanding hair lay on her cool forehead. Her rings were on the back of the sink. ‘Oh no, thank you. I’ve got plenty of time.’

  She was somebody’s wife. Whose wife? Paul wanted to sit down on the stainless steel stool and say, ‘Tell me about your husband.’ ‘He’s dead,’ she would say, and Paul would wait until she had finished drying all the glasses with her clean expensive cloth, and they would go and have tea somewhere in the South End and walk on the raw beach among the dog-owners and lonely winter-people. He said, ‘All right then. And thanks for the lunch.’

  ‘I’m glad you liked the soufflé.’

  Phyllis brought coffee in a narrow tube impossible to get the nose into or over. The coffee was slippery like soap, with flakes of curdling milk skin.

  ‘How can you expect anyone to drink that?’ he wanted to ask. But other people were tipping up the awkward little cups without reaction, either not knowing or not wanting to know. Mrs Frost’s coffee had been burning hot, a fragrant drug, strong and stimulating.

  Upstairs in the flat, he did various small things, automatically previewing Alice’s reactions if she should come home at that point. Don’t you read anything but books about the war? It’s plebeian to make coffee in a saucepan. I thought you never watched television. I thought you had a
bath this morning. If you’re writing to Jeff, tell him I’ll write soon.

  At ten o’clock, she was not home, but Paul went to bed. He was on Flying Squad tonight. He had not been called out to an emergency for weeks, but there was still the chance that he might spend most of the night trying to help someone to see that destroying yourself was not the answer. And tomorrow he had an early class.

  He was asleep when Alice came home. She banged into the room, turned on the light and said, ‘What do you mean, got to clean the place up? I haven’t got to do any thing.’

  She was half drunk. Not very drunk. Quite a nice surprise. So Paul rewarded her by asking without opening his eyes if she had had a good time.

  ‘Yes, it was rather gay. Bruce was there, and Roma and that man from Nicaragua — well, you don’t know them, and you wouldn’t like them if you did.’

  Alice was still not bad looking, with short beige hair which she thought had kept its colour, having forgotten that it was once golden. She was thin and wide-hipped, a figure that looked better from the side. She had been drinking for so long that Paul had got used to the blurring of what had once been a neat round face, the slackening of the mouth, the slight protrusion of the eyes, as if the gin had backed up behind them.

  ‘Have you had anything to eat?’ He rolled his head round on the pillow and opened his eyes to see that she had bought a new dress. Why? It was bile-coloured, with bright stripes round the bottom of the skirt, well above her middle-aged knees.

  ‘I forgot. Paul fry Alice eggs and bacon?’ She sucked in her bottom lip and pouted the top one. The lipstick had melted out and down at the corners. There was a faint moustache of nicotine.

  ‘Look, Alice, I must sleep. I’ve got an early class tomorrow and you know I’m on call.’

  ‘Oh, God, is it Thursday? What a farce. The blind leading the blind. I hate it when you try to play Jesus.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Jumping out of bed in the middle of the night with that glad crusading face, dashing out to put your finger on the artery of some poor bugger who isn’t even allowed to die in peace—’