The Listeners Page 7

  ‘Ha, ha,’ said Harriet, trying to make the children laugh by force.

  Jackie said a very bad word. He was fitting the last few pieces into the sailing ship puzzle. ‘Fuck,’ he said, and the girl with the painted eyelashes heard him. Her brown eyebrows went up and her pale mouth pulled down into her chin as if she would cry, but she was laughing really. Jackie uncoiled himself from the chair. ‘Want come fetch a mi-uh!’ he shouted, to make sure she understood. Harriet did not always understand him. She pretended she did, but she bobbed her head and said ‘Cheers’ when he told her he had a cold.

  The girl understood. She nodded and let the smile break on her face. She put out her hand and said her name was Sarah. Jackie took her hand as if she were Charlie and led her towards the kitchen.

  ‘Darling? Darling, is that you?’

  ‘Who else were you expecting?’

  He sounded rather cross, but Sarah threw herself down the dark little hall and flattened herself to him, cheeks, breasts, stomach, the front of her white mesh thighs, as if she could pass right into him like an astral spirit re-entering its earthbound body.

  ‘Oh, I love you, I love you. You smell like my husband.’

  ‘What kind of man would he be, Madam?’ Brian pushed her away gently and took off his coat. He was not tall, but square and muscular under the sharp grey trousers, the double-breasted blazer with the monogram FRH.

  ‘He’s the junior assistant to the assistant manager at the Front Royal Hotel,’ Sarah said. ‘I’ve just made him a martini, but you may have it.’

  ‘Thank God.’ Brian went up the staircase, which was no wider than a ship’s ladder, and fell into a chair with his legs stuck out in front of the glowing mouth of the little iron stove. Their house in Salt Street in the old fishing village part of the town was so narrow that there was only one room on each floor, kitchen, sitting-room, bedroom, with a bathroom hanging on at the back like a papoose.

  ‘God, I’m tired,’ Brian groaned. ‘We’ve had a hell of a day. Everything blew up at once.’

  ‘Tell me’, Sarah gave him his glass arid sat on a stool by the stove to stare at him. They had married three months after they met — couldn’t wait, now or never, whichever way you saw it. She still could not at all get used to him, with his fair glinting hair and lazy spoiled blue eyes and his hands and the alien smell of his shoes, and his continuing presence in her life. She watched him constantly, trying to understand. Sometimes, sitting opposite while he ate, or watching him at the mirror tying his tie or narrowing his eyes conceitedly with his head turned to smooth the side of his hair, she panicked: I don’t know you! What have I done?

  He did not know who she was. She dressed the way she always had, big sweaters, tiny squares of skirt, coloured tights, her boots the most expensive thing she bought, her hair carefully ragged, ten minutes to outline her startled eyes and paint lashes one by one on her cheeks. She had looked like that since he knew her, except for the painted lashes, which was a brief fad that had almost run its course as disguise. She was disguised as Sarah King, and he was Brian. How long did you have to live together before you could be honest?

  Pouting a little, sipping his gin, his fingers holding the glass in just the way his father did, he told her of the hells and calamities that always chose to break loose when he was on the reception desk. Of the two men with the same name, one an actor of whom he had never heard, of the epileptic liftman, the couple in Suite Four, the woman with the giraffe coat who had moved to three different rooms and finally out and away to the Grand, the taxi driver coming back to Brian for his fare. Of the colossal muddle of next week’s American convention. ‘Twenty more than we expected and not a cupboard left to put them in and everywhere else jammed for the boat show – why the bloody boat show now of all times? I’ve got to go back in a while and start trying some of the smaller hotels.’

  ‘Do you want to have dinner now?’

  ‘God, no. I couldn’t eat. This is all I want.’ He lifted his glass. ‘Perhaps some biscuits and cheese.’

  The biscuits were stale. She could put them quickly in the oven? Oh God, she had used the last of the Cheddar on the fish! It was not that he was demanding or critical. He had not had a hard-cooking mother, nor been married before to some smooth-haired girl who washed out her dish towels. He was undomestic, product of nomadic, cruising people, unaware of things that Sarah did when he was not there, which gave them, for some reason, extra neurotic importance.

  His stomach, hard and flat as it was under the hotel blazer, was quite a worry to her. Sometimes he wanted no dinner, but would be ravenous for her to get up and fry bacon and eggs at midnight. Sometimes he would come home at some odd time in the middle of the afternoon and expect to smell beef roasting as he opened the yellow front door. There was no way of knowing what to cook or when.

  ‘Why? What’s the matter?’ He looked at her. She sat hugging her knees, her head on one side, wondering what she could do with the rotten mistake of the fish pie. ‘Had you cooked something?’ He screwed up his fine healthy face which had a golden fuzz on it like fruit in the sun. ‘I don’t smell fish, do I?’

  ‘Oh no.’ She was not going to be caught. ‘Well — Mr Dobbs gave me a whiting for the cats. I haven’t made anything, honestly. I was going to see how you—’

  ‘Lousy, that’s how. I tell you darling, I don’t know how much longer I can stick it. There are people in that hotel ... and as for Dick Rattigan, that little pock-marked scab — “Brian, old boy,” coming at me with a sheaf of papers as big as your head, “this seems to be your balls-up. Perhaps you’d straighten it out like a good chap before you go home? Won’t take a moment. Yes, I know the girls are going off, but you can type, can’t you?” Looking at me with those eyes like poached testicles...’

  Sarah sat and hugged her knees and smiled at him and got up to fetch the martini jug when his glass was empty, and sat down again and drank Dubonnet and waited. She was bursting to talk about her day, but she waited. The women’s magazines were right. If you did not let them tell their story first, they would not listen to yours. One of the flat surprises of marriage was how many people had been there before.

  ‘You’re a lovely girl,’ Brian said contentedly. He sat up and she went to kneel in front of him. When they stared into each other’s eyes, they were in love.

  ‘Should we go to bed, do you think?’ Sarah asked. ‘Would you — I mean, would there be time?’

  ‘Later, love,’ Brian said. ‘I promise you later.’

  ‘Can’t wait.’ She kissed the hand that rested too placidly on her small breast. She was supposed to be now in a fervour of expectation for what he would vouchsafe her. But since in her limited experience — one fumbled affair with a physics student and one romantic two-nighter in an Austrian ski lodge — the man often seemed to get the most out of it, why was it the girl who was supposed to be grateful?

  ‘About the cheese?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ She ran downstairs and up again with what there was. She put a piece of wood into the stove and while she was kneeling there, he said, ‘What did you do today?’

  He yawned even before he stopped saying it, but she rushed in. ‘It was marvellous — really the best day I’ve had for ages.’

  ‘At the men’s sauna?’ The health food shop where she worked part time was called The Men’s Sana, but he always called it the men’s sauna. (There couldn’t be anything marvellous about stone-ground senna and macrobiotic olives.)

  ‘I don’t go today, you know that. But you remember I answered that advertisement from the Society for the Handicapped, asking for helpers? They rang up this morning and asked me if I could go out to Butterfields and help with a sort of nursery school. Only it wasn’t a nursery really, some of them were quite old. Oh, Bri, it was fascinating. There was a mongol boy, terribly interesting, and some of the children, they were completely, you know, withdrawn, no expression, no reactions, you can’t get at them. This woman called Harriet, when I came in -1 was late, of course, bec
ause I got lost — she was rolling on the floor and I thought, hullo, she’s in a bad way, but she was trying to get this little boy to notice her. When he put out a finger once and touched her, she cheered like a football match.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Well, nothing very much. There was this woman, you see, she was sort of running the show, at least I don’t think she was supposed to, but she did anyway. She’s one of those people, she knows it all, you know the kind. When she talks to the children, it’s very slow and me-ti-cu-lous, as if they were daft — well, they are, I suppose, but you don’t have to talk as if they were.’ Sarah talked in rushes, in gabbles with breathy gasps. She could not keep still when she was enthusiastic. She got up and moved about the small room touching things while she talked, leaning, falling over a claw foot of the table, while he watched her over the rim of his icily misted glass.

  ‘And she knows all the names of everything, it’s too sickening. When the children are doing something ordinary like playing ball, she says they are motivated, or relating. She didn’t like me because I didn’t know what autistic meant.’

  ‘What does it?’

  ‘I don’t know. She didn’t tell me, She didn’t like me being there. They didn’t need anybody, but the Society had sent someone away. First, she wouldn’t let me do anything, and then she kept telling me what not to do. “Oh, we don’t get seconds of milk until we have wiped our mouths, Mrs King.” There was this poor boy with his ears taped and his face all pulled back as if a hand took hold of the skin at the back of his head and pulled it tight. He had spilled two mugs of milk in a rage, but then I had got him to drink some and want more. Why should he wipe his mouth? Oh, I hate her. She talks like this: “We don’t-a-get-a seconds of meelk...” She imitated the neat sterile woman with the cheese-paring mouth and the sliced-bean nostrils, and Brian laughed.

  ‘That the end of that craze then?’

  ‘Oh no. I might not have risked going again, not unless I could find out when she wouldn’t be there, but then I made a friend. This woman — the Don’t-a-get-a meelk woman — she’s got a son, he’s about twenty, but he has the brain of, let’s say about eight, because it was injured before birth, or during, or something. I don’t know. She looks as if you’d need a tin opener to get in or out of her. Jackie, his name is. He’s sweet. He hates her. Then she said it was circle time. “Circle Time, everybody! “ ‘ Sarah clapped her hands and put on the clear carrying voice.

  ‘All these poor little things, they sit round in a circle. I sat too and Harriet and the mongol boy’s mother, and we sang songs about windmills and teapots. I didn’t know what to do, but the girl next to me, very solemn, pushed my arms where she thought they should be, and when I didn’t know the words, she took hold of my hips to make them work. Then Jackie’s mother sings, in that sort of voice that puts you off going to church, “Good morning to Johnny, good morning to you, good morning to Johnny and how-do-you-do?” And at the end bit, they’re supposed to stand up and bow. And they do. Some of them get right down and knock their foreheads on the floor. The withdrawn ones, who don’t really know if it’s Christmas or Easter, somebody stands them up and pushes them in the middle to make them fold over, and their heads flop and their arms dangle, like puppets. “Good morning to Mara” — she was so fat she could hardly bend, but she put her legs apart and squatted down somehow with her hair hanging on the floor. If that meelk woman hadn’t been there, I would have cried. Then of course Jackie wanted to be in it too. His mother shook her head at him. She treats him quite austerely, though really he likes to be cooed at like a child, and so I, God help me, sang for him “Good morning to Jackie” — and he stood and bowed. He’s about six foot tall with feet like barge boats, but the other children clapped and so did the mother of the mongol boy, but Jackie’s mother just got up and went away.

  ‘And now this was what was so odd. I talked to Jackie for a bit, because his mother had all the children lying on the floor — “Come along people, rest-a-time!” — and he kept talking about someone called Helen, who is his friend. Helen, who’s Helen? And he told me a telephone number that he rings up at night. It seems to be the Samaritan place—’

  ‘Where they help suicides?’

  ‘Yes, but you can ring if you just want to talk, and they listen. “I taw to He’en,” Jackie said — that’s how he talks, with his mouth open, not making any consonants. And then he suddenly clamped it shut and went blank because his mother was approaching on dreaded feet. And then — this was what was odd — you know when you hear something interesting, you almost always hear about it again the same day? Well you do. Listen, this was such a coincidence. On the way home—’

  The dolphin knocker jounded on their yellow front door. Sarah went down, jumping the last four stairs as you had to, because of the momentum of the steep narrow treads. The flap of the letter-box was up and a hand was groping. Theo — she recognized the bitten nails. She slapped the hand and opened the door. Theo and a girl with hair down to the hem of her skirt.

  ‘Brian in?’

  ‘Didn’t you come to see me?’ But she did not like Theo too much, so why the automatic archness?

  ‘Yes darling, if I was alone, but I’ve got this positive limpet hanging round me. Anna, this is Sarah. You see what I mean?’

  ‘Yes, I do see.’ Anna had a slight foreign accent and a long perpendicular nose modelled unsuccessfully on Edith Sitwell. What did she see?

  ‘Brian’s upstairs.’ Sarah turned her back and went ahead. ‘Come on up.’

  Anna pronounced the house charming. ‘That’s a relief,’ Brian said. ‘We were afraid you wouldn’t like it.’ Four people talking at once, pouring drinks, inspecting the bookcase, cutting wedges of the waxy Dutch cheese, made quite a turmoil in the small low-ceilinged room. Brian’s voice, which he was training to be urbane and reassuring for hotel work, was always louder for friends. Sarah often heard herself a little shriller, trying too hard. She did not like all Brian’s family or friends, but they must all like her. What did they want her to be? What did Brian want her to be to make them envy him?

  ‘Tell us about the coincidence.’ he said. ‘Go on. Sarah was all steamed up about what happened today among the mongols—’

  ‘What mongols?’

  ‘Oh nothing.’ She was not going to tell Theo about the play school, and certainly not Anna, who would tell her what Krafft-Ebing said.

  ‘But you said, on the way home — what was so odd?’ He wanted to have her standing on the bright rug in front of the stove with her long white legs and her angular poses, telling an amusing story.

  ‘It was only just that I went to get some oranges, and Mr Lox was telling a woman in the shop about his cousin’s wife who had tried to kill herself. She thought she had an incurable disease, but it turned out it was only an ovarian cyst. “Ah,” the woman said, “we had one of those once in our family, and they thought it was a false pregnancy.”’

  ‘Why false?’ Anna’s black eyes arrowed down her nose.

  ‘Because she was eighty.’ They laughed, and Sarah went on embroidering the story about the smell of gas and the window stuffed up with socks and how Mr Lox and his cousin dragged her out like dead on to the scullery roof, red as a cherry. Lo — listen everyone! If you are Sarah, going to the greengrocer’s can be a tragicomedy, with Mr Lox and the customer as jesters. Whereas really the whole conversation had been dead serious, and Sarah had been not an audience, but very much at one with them, sharing Mr Lox’s distress, like the warm interest of the customer, who had a country face and a contented child who leaned against her.

  ‘We never knew,’ Mr Lox had said, ‘That’s the pity of it.’

  And Sarah had said, ‘How terrible to think of someone being so alone and desperate that they could do something like that.’

  And the country woman had said, ‘She ought to have got in touch with those people who try to save lives, the Samaritans, they call them.’

  That was the odd coincidence. Sarah
had not heard of them in this town, and now today, twice within an hour ... but Brian and the others were talking about something else by this time, so she did not get to the point of the greengrocer story.

  Theo and Anna would have stayed all evening and might even have granted asylum to the fish pie, but Brian turned them out, since he had to go back to work.

  The rain had stopped. To the right, where their cobbled street tipped down to the little walled harbour, thick with masts and flags in summer, a D-shaped moon stood high over the cold flat sea. ‘Come with me,’ Brian said. ‘I think I’ll go round to some of the smaller hotels instead of telephoning. Then if the Rat says I have to go and personally ensure that the rooms are good enough for our guests from overseas, I’ll be able to say, sucks, I have.’

  In the car, he ate one of the chlorophyll pills supplied to all the hotel staff along with the monogrammed blazers and ties and the instructions about hair. They drove up Salt Street and turned at the top round the public gardens with the shuttered restaurant and empty paddling pool, along the sea-front, past the new expensive flats with bushes swaddled in sacking on the roof garden, past the old white houses which had once stood alone along this coast, past all the big hotels, the Grand, the Ivor, the Front Royal, the Paramount, the Queen’s Ship. Towards the estuary, where the Esplanade narrowed and the pavements were common coloured instead of impressively terracotta, they turned among the back streets where ten thousand boarding-houses and guesthouses (no difference) kept off-season hibernation. Several of the small hotels were open at weekends. They stopped at the Glenalmond, the Essex, the Victoria, the Marbledown, the Bristol, the Baytree. Sarah sat in the car while Brian went inside, and came out checking his list. At the Victoria, he came out smelling of beer, and at the Bay-tree, he leaned across Sarah to open her door and said, ‘Come on, there’s a nice little bar here.’