Listening in the Dusk (14 page)

The gaping hollow gouged out of December by Christmas is never easy to fill; but it was made easier on this occasion by the fact that the other members of the household were all away, and Mary and Alice were left alone in the tall echoing house to talk and talk and talk all through the short darkening days and far into the night. In retrospect, it seemed to Alice less like a series of separate conversations than one single one, going on non-stop through blurred, yellowing afternoons as daylight merged into streetlights, and then the lights from passing cars swept in procession across the smudgy walls of Alice’s little room, flickering from poster to poster, from dried octopus to Jane Austen to motor bike, like some avant-garde film without storyline, only some vague, inscrutable message about the Human Condition.

Rarely did they put the light on; Mary felt safer in the dark, she said. Not very safe, though. Every so often the discourse would be interrupted by a quick indrawn breath as the girl stopped in mid-sentence, tilted her head and listened, as a cat sometimes does, when to other ears there is no sound. A creaking stair? A tapping of rain against a window? The murmur of a door
half-opening
in the draught?

Sometimes Alice would tour the empty house, at Mary’s urgent insistence, and would return, slightly breathless from all the flights of stairs, with reassuring news of a rattling
window-frame
; of the geyser softly hiccuping to itself as it sometimes did even when no one was using it. Or perhaps Hengist was prowling around his lonely kitchen, unnervingly tidy and empty of unpremeditated snacks. He got his regular meals, of course, while Hetty was away — Alice saw to that — but he missed the odd remnant of chicken, the unfinished parcel of fish-and-chips,
the half-eaten yoghurt pot left open and unattended on the table — all those things that were such a feature of life when everyone was in residence.

Reassured, temporarily, by these news items, Mary would relax, and the conversation would continue, though rarely at the same point at which it had broken off; and so it was only gradually, bit by bit, that Alice got a coherent picture of how it had been, and of how — in Mary’s tortured mind — it still was.

To start with, her name wasn’t Mary. Of course it wasn’t. She’d seized on the name in a panic, as the most unremarkable name she could at the moment think of, but the trouble was, she just couldn’t get used to it. She didn’t feel like a Mary; she didn’t know how Marys behave, or how they talk. Her real name was Imogen, but actually they’d always called her ‘Midge’, and in a way, that made a good shortening — for Mary, too, didn’t Alice think? But in any case, no one would ever call her Midge again, and so what? Yes, her mother was still alive, but finding it all as unendurable as Mary had found it, had fled to someone’s
hide-away
home in Spain, just as Mary — Imogen, Midge — had fled to London. To get away from it all; only of course you couldn’t. Or perhaps you could, in Spain — who could tell? They didn’t write to each other about anything of that sort, well about anything at all, actually, because how could you? Everything was too awful to write about. Her mother had gone back to her maiden name, she knew that much, and felt vaguely envious, because this was an escape-route denied to her.

And Julian? The once beloved brother? Julian had got a
life-sentence
. Had Alice really not heard this on the news, in the papers, at the time?

“I suppose it must have been happening just when my marriage was breaking up,” Alice tried to explain. “I was too occupied with my own troubles. You see …”

But the explanation faltered to a stop under the impact of Mary’s open-mouthed disbelief. The idea that anyone, anywhere in the world, could have been more concerned with their own problems than with Mary’s appalling and much-publicised tragedy, seemed to be an entirely new one to her, and she went on with her confession as if Alice hadn’t spoken.

Yes, Julian had got a life sentence. Well, how could he not? There had been some talk at the trial of diminished
responsibility
, but nothing had come of it. If that had been the verdict, he would presumably have been sent to Broadmoor instead of the high security place where he now was. So what? The place where Mary had been imprisoned, in disgrace for ever, would have been unchanged.

Had Mary — Midge — visited her brother in prison?
No
!
the girl’s voice was high with panic.

“No! No! I can’t! I
can’t
Alice! I couldn’t bear it! They can’t make me! No! No!”

*

How
did
she feel about her brother, Alice wondered, though she dared not ask. How
do
you feel about someone you have once deeply loved, and who has now done something appalling beyond comprehension? So close they had been once, this brother and sister, through all the long years of their growing up, sharing a happy childhood, enjoying together a secure and loving home.

Had all that closeness, all that love, vanished totally and at once when she learned what he had done?

Mary knew the answer to that one: and suddenly — on December 25th, it so happened — she came out with it. Love just isn’t relevant, she said, when things are really awful. Love doesn’t come into it any more, one way or the other. It reminded her (she told Alice) of an incident in the school swimming bath, years ago, when she and her best friend, fooling about in the deep end, had somehow lost control, or balance, or something, and found their heads going under, each clutching frantically on to the other for support, somehow pushing one another down and down. She recalled the
desperate,
mindless struggle to be the one to clamber on top, to be the one to reach the sweet air, pushing the other down regardless.

“The fact that she was my best friend — that I loved her — simply wasn’t
there.
It was something totally irrelevant. The only thing that existed was myself struggling not to drown. She — my best friend — was just a lump of something to get a purchase on.

“That’s how it was when I heard about Julian. It wasn’t him at all I was thinking about, not for a moment: it was
me
!
Me
having to be the sister of a murderer — I couldn’t bother about him
being
the murderer — it was me being the sister of one that mattered. Like the drowning, though of course that was all over in a couple of minutes, someone dragged us out, and afterwards we were as good friends as ever. But this isn’t just for a couple of minutes; this is for
life.
No one is ever going to drag me out of it, I’m caught in it until I die. That’s why I can’t think about Julian, I can’t about him
at all
,
just about me, that’s all I can think of. That’s what it’s done to me. You ask whether I still love him (actually Alice hadn’t, she wouldn’t have dared) and all I can say is, it isn’t relevant any more. Like I say, love
isn
’t
relevant once things are really bad. They say love makes the world go round, but it doesn’t, you know. Love is a luxury, and you indulge in it when things are OK. As soon as they are bad —
really
bad — there just isn’t a place for it any more, no place where there could be room for it.

“And no, Alice, I don’t love my mother any more either, and she doesn’t love me. We can’t, it’s too awful. We’ve both had to run away and never see each other again, because we couldn’t bear it, neither of us could. The way we couldn’t talk, just sat and looked at each other, and I was looking at the Mother of the Monster, and she was looking at the Sister of the Monster.

“No, you don’t understand, it was impossible to talk, it really was, there was nothing either of us could say that wasn’t even more awful than saying nothing.

“‘Where did I go wrong?’ I could see her thinking, as she sat staring at the picture-rail; and she could see me thinking the same thing, because after all, I was the eldest, and perhaps if I’d …”

At this point (Alice remembered) she had felt compelled to intervene.

“That’s something you must
never
feel, Mary!” she exclaimed. “That you could possibly have been to blame in any way: that it was something you did — or didn’t do — that made him … Well, that made him how he turned out. You were only a child, Mary, only a young teenager, when his character was being formed. It
couldn’t
have been your fault. Nor your mother’s either, I daresay. These things —”

Alice had meant her words as some sort of consolation or reassurance, and so was quite unprepared for the outburst they provoked.

“Oh, God, if only it
was
my fault! If only there was some
reason
why my life should be ruined like this! If only I’d bullied him, tortured him, locked him in dark cupboards, burnt him with lighted matches, told him he would go to Hell if he didn’t give me his pocket-money …! Told him that masturbation would send him blind, that he was adopted from a lunatic asylum! If only
something
awful had happened to him in his childhood! If our father had been an alcoholic, our mother a battered wife! Or if he’d been a battered baby …!

“If only it
was
someone’s fault, so that you could feel it wasn’t really him, but merely something done to him … Some damage from outside … Some awful trauma … But there was nothing like that at all, ever. We had a wonderful childhood; love, security, everything that every expert you’ve ever heard of has extolled in every child-psychology book you’ve ever read — we had it all.

“And so what is wrong with him is really
him
,
and not any damage that he’s suffered. Whatever it is is genetic, it has to be; and so now
I
can never marry, never have children. No man will ever let himself even fancy me once he knows who I am. He’ll be thinking all the time about my horrible polluted genes, and the horrible polluted children he would get if he let himself care about me …

“I came here to start a new life, Alice. To be a new person, called Mary. But I’m
not
a new person, I’ve just got a new name that I don’t even like. All the rest of it is still clinging round me, and it will go on clinging round me for ever. Whatever I do, wherever I go, for the rest of my life. You know what it’s like, Alice? It’s like that medieval punishment for murderers — I read about it once. Instead of hanging the murderer, they would chain the corpse to him, tightly, face to face, and then let him go. To go where he liked, and to do what he liked, but with this horrible rotting corpse fixed against his body, staring into his face with its horrible rotting eyes, bulging with decay and slowly dangling down its cheeks … That’s what it’s like, Alice. That’s what I’ve
got to offer to any man who ever falls for me. That’s what he’ll be taking about with him; out to dinner, to a film, then take it home to bed with him, a rotting corpse, lying there in the bed between us. Once he knows who I am, finds out my real name … Oh, Alice,
don’t
ever tell anyone! Don’t let Brian find out … Don’t …! Don’t …!”

*

That had been the worst day. Or night, rather, for it had been far into the small hours when the confession reached this point. The candles Alice had lit at the beginning of the evening had guttered out and the room was in darkness except for the grey, starless square of the window. The street three storeys below was silent, not a footstep, not a car, had passed for a very long time, and when Mary’s voice ceased, Alice found herself yet again in the quandary with which she was becoming sickeningly familiar — that of being an ignorant interloper in a world of tragedy quite beyond her experience, and yet finding herself cast in the role of confidante and guide. It was like being parachute-dropped without a map into unknown territory, and having one of the natives coming up and asking the way to somewhere.

“I’m a stranger here myself,” she felt like saying; but of course that wouldn’t do. Through the darkness she could feel Mary’s expectancy, her need, her hunger for — well, for what? For advice? For sympathy? For some sort of shock, even? Something to jolt her spirit out of the strait-jacket of fears in which it had become lodged? How about criticism, then? There are few souls so deeply sunk in despair that they don’t rouse themselves, at least temporarily, to rebut an unfair accusation.

“Listen, Mary,” she began, “just listen to me. All this carry-on of yours, it’s a cop-out. Or whatever the sociological jargon is, you should know, you’re the sociology student. Listen to what you’ve been saying, how it sounds to an outsider. You have this secret to keep, and so you came to London to start a new life; and it’s essential to this new life that you shouldn’t be recognised. Right? Well, you
haven’t
been recognised, have you, but you still haven’t started the new life.

“It’s all too difficult? OK, so it’s all too difficult. But let’s analyse this difficulty, pull it apart, and see what it consists of. As
I see it, there are two main ingredients — one is the tragedy itself, and the other is keeping it secret. These are two quite separate things, of which the first is given, unalterable, it’s happened, and you have no control over it. But the second thing — the secret — that’s optional. It’s something you’ve
chosen
,
of your own free will, and so you
have
got control over it. I’m not saying it was a wrong choice — it may have been the best one open to you — but all the same, I think you should take another look at it now, and see where it’s getting you. I think if you have a secret — if
anyone
has a secret, not just you — I think they should review that secret every now and then, take it out and have a look at it, see what purpose it is still serving. See if the keeping of it hasn’t escalated into being half the problem. More than half. This is what I mean about it being a cop-out. You’re hiding behind the part of the problem you
can’t
alter — the tragedy — and using it as an excuse for not doing anything about the part that you
can
— the secrecy.

“Take
me
,
for instance,” Alice went on (by now they were well into Boxing Day, almost time to be thinking about breakfast). “Take
me
,
and the way you’ve behaved to me. You spent days and days imagining that I’d somehow arrived here to spy on you: to catch you out, to show you up, to track you down, et cetera. And it was all wasted, because I wasn’t. All that happened was that you worked yourself into a state of paranoia — yes, you did, I’m not misusing the word — there you were, prowling around my room at all hours, whenever I wasn’t there; messing things about; getting yourself covered in red paint; and all totally unnecessary, because if you’d simply told me in the first place what you were looking for, we could have found it in five minutes. And then there was all that panic when you met my husband — my ex-husband — on the stairs;
he
has to be in the plot, too! Soon, everyone will be, if you don’t watch out …