Listening in the Dusk (2 page)

I first met Celia Fremlin at the end of 1969. I was newly arrived in London, a recent graduate from Swansea University, working for a publisher and aspiring to be a writer. Celia was a leading light in the North West London Writers’ Group and the first meeting I attended was in her house in South Hill Park, Hampstead. (Already I had reason to be grateful to her, because she had judged a Mensa short-story competition and awarded me second prize.)

My first experience of Celia’s writing was, I think, her reading of the first chapter of
Appointment with Yesterday,
sometime during 1970. I was transfixed: certainly it was the most vivid thing I ever heard in my attendance at the group. Celia was writing about people who seemed completely real, whose experiences could happen to anyone. The shock of recognition was extreme. Here were women in their own homes, with noise and kindness and fear and desperation all astonishingly true to life. And there was wit – we always laughed when Celia read to us.

Four decades would pass before I could understand something of what was really happening in Celia’s life at the time we met. It was an unpublished memoir by her daughter Geraldine that finally enlightened me. But at those meetings there was never any mention – at least in my hearing – of Celia’s daughter Sylvia or her husband Elia, both of whom had died by their own hand the previous year. It was as if these were, understandably, taboo subjects. Celia’s son, Nick, lived in the same house, with his wife Fran and little son. Their second baby, Lancelot, was born during those years when we often met at South Hill Park. (In due course Nick would publish a novel of his own,
Tomorrow’s Silence
, in 1979.)

I have always resisted attempts to connect a writer’s life directly with his or her work: to do so can often diminish the power and value of the imagination. But in Celia’s case, I have always believed that her novel
With No Crying
would never have been written if Sylvia hadn’t died. The novel is, essentially, about the deprivation and grief that the wider family experiences when a child is lost. It is very well plotted – perhaps the best of all her work. The ‘message’ at the end is honest and wise and sad. It was not published until 1980, and – I believe – not written until a year or so before that, which was over ten years after the agonising events of 1968.

Celia’s short stories are perhaps more telling in some ways. They are certainly unforgettably good. Those in her first collection,
Don’t Go To Sleep in the Dark
, are the ones I especially remember. Many of her stories involve sunlit beaches, couples on holiday, people out in the open air. This contrasts with her novels, which are usually set indoors, often in the winter or at night. Darkness and light is a strong theme in all her work.

I was lavishly praised and encouraged by Celia in my early writing endeavours and I’m in no doubt that she was a real influence on me, if mostly subliminally. She was also very affectionate with my two baby boys, when they arrived in the mid-1970s. When we moved out of London, she came to visit us several times with her second husband, Leslie. She read my first published novel and wrote an endorsement for it. I last saw her in 1999, shortly before Leslie died.

I am highly delighted that Celia’s books are being reissued. Her ability to capture the combination of ordinariness and individuality in her characters and their relationships, which readers find so compelling, is something I have tried to emulate. I have no doubt that these books will find a large audience of new readers, who will wonder why they hadn’t heard of her before.

Rebecca Tope

Rebecca Tope is a crime novelist and journalist whose novels are published in the UK by Allison & Busby. Her official website is www.rebeccatope.com.

Dusk was the best time for Mary; especially the winter dusk, and especially in London. Leaning out from her third-floor window, breathing gratefully the sharp, anonymous air, she felt, for a few minutes, perfectly normal; just an ordinary young girl who has left her home town and come up to the big city in search of a new life, a new job, new friends — new everything.

And she had, indeed, already done a number of the things this ordinary girl would do. She had looked for the cheapest room she could find; with a landlady willing to take her on trust despite her lack of references and her vagueness about her previous address. She had even — though so far unsuccessfully — tried to find a job. Nothing unusual in that, of course, unemployment being the way it was. Though what
was
unusual, in her case, was that she could not make use of any of her qualifications. Dared not even mention them, not to anybody, let alone to a potential employer. Still, no one knew of this problem. No one
could
know, so long as she didn’t tell them. From the point of view of her landlady, and of her fellow-lodgers, she was just one more young woman unlucky in her search for work. And it had only been five weeks after all; nothing at all remarkable about it so far.

Still, this was one more reason why she welcomed the coming of twilight, the beginning of darkness. Soon, the world’s workers would be on their way home, and she would no longer be the only one with nothing to do. There they would all be, slacking off after their day’s work, indulging in a bit of leisure, maybe leaning idly out of their windows, just as she was doing, watching the lights coming on here and there in the houses opposite, while beyond the still faintly-gleaming slate roofs the massed clouds, grey on grey, gathered themselves towards the coming of the dark.

Twilight. Bat-light. Though of course there were no bats now,
not in December, not in the middle of London: and even if there had been, she could not have borne to watch them; not after what had happened.

With every advance of darkness, Mary felt a little bit safer. If anyone looked up now, all they would see would be the pale blur of a face that might be any face. Besides, no one
would
look up, why should they? They would be hurrying along, head down, eyes on the pavement, minds focused on getting to wherever they were going, out of the cold and damp. But even as this vaguely reassuring thought crossed her mind, someone
did
look up. A woman, of indeterminate age, hair and face almost invisible under a plastic rain-hat, was pausing outside this very house, looking it up and down with an air both uncertain and
purposeful
.

Mary withdrew her head so precipitately that she banged it quite sharply on the raised sash. With violently beating heart she retreated into the recesses of her room, already scolding herself for so ridiculous an over-reaction.

A strange woman happening to glance up at a house — why on earth should it be anything to do with her, Mary? This was a city of six or seven million people — which was precisely why she had come here in the first place — and the chances of any random one of them being one of those she had reason to fear was so remote that …

And at that point, she heard the knock on the front door. Really loud, and once again Mary’s heart was beating wildly, irrationally; and she tiptoed to her door, full of dread, opening it softly, just a crack, to try and make out what was going on.

Her landlady answering the door, of course. Voices. The landlady’s voice buoyantly welcoming — as it always was, to absolutely anyone, in absolutely any situation — and then the other voice, the strange one. Yes, strange. A total stranger.

So
that
was all right. It was nothing to do with her. All the same, when she heard the double set of footsteps beginning to mount the stairs, she found herself holding her breath again. Softly, she closed her door — it would never do to be caught peeping — and through the crack listened tensely to the approaching sounds. How far up were they coming? There were
two sets of tenants on the floors below her; doubtless this was a visitor to one of them. But no … On came the laboured footsteps … past the first floor … past the second … on and on, with agonising slowness.

Outside her door, they paused, and Mary’s heart missed a beat. It was for
her
, then, a visitor for
her
! An unwelcome visitor — for all visitors were unwelcome — and there could be no news for her but bad news.

Mary cowered, tensing herself for the knock on her door …

But it was all right! With a rush of utterly disproportionate thankfulness, she heard the footsteps start up again … on past her door … across the landing, and then on up the narrow uncarpeted stairs that led to the topmost part of the tall house, the lumber-room, and the big gurgling water-tank that
murmured
all night long, the pipes clucking and whispering up and down the old walls. She had found it frightening at first, these unfamiliar intermittent sounds when she was trying to sleep, but she had grown used to them after a while, and they didn’t frighten her any more.

It was everything else that frightened her now.

On the third landing, Alice paused to remove her rain-hat and shake loose her damp hair. Ahead of her, the fourth and last flight of stairs was uncarpeted, and already awash with darkness. Through the small, grimy skylight the fading remnants of
daylight
filtered down to show up the worst of the cobwebs and the peeling wallpaper; and for a moment Alice felt a wild impulse to turn and run, her heels clattering first on these bare wooden treads, and then slithering, stumbling over worn stair-carpet, round and round, down and down, to the narrow entrance-hall with its clutter of bicycles, free newspapers and unclaimed letters, and then out through the front door, back into the rainy December street.

She didn’t, of course. Too many things were against it, some of them harshly practical, others verging on the idiotic; and, as commonly happens at such moments, it was one of the idiotic ones that forced the decision on her.

Simply, she didn’t want to hurt the feelings of this vague and amiable person in orange slacks (if they were orange, it was hard to tell in this light) who was labouring up the stairs ahead of her.

Unlike most landladies, Mrs Harman (“Call me Hetty,” she’d urged, almost before Alice was through the front door) was making not the smallest attempt to minimise the deficiencies of the accommodation she had on offer. On the contrary, she seemed bent on making the worst of it, even, at the beginning, declaring it unfit for human habitation.

“No, I’m awfully sorry, I’ve nothing left at all,” she’d said at first, shaking her mop of rust-coloured hair and blinking sleepily, as if just roused from a belated afternoon nap; and then, perhaps taking pity on Alice’s look of weary disappointment, she amended: “Well … That is … But it’s an awful room, you
know, it really is. Right up at the top of the house, no cooking facilities, not even a gas-ring, and the bathroom three flights down. I don’t really have the nerve to let it at all, the rain coming in under the slates like it does in winter-time … Well, it
is
winter-time, isn’t it, right now? It’ll be at its worst. And it’s not furnished, either, just an old chair or two, and a grotty old divan bed that’s got shoved up there because of no one wanting to sleep on it. It’s probably damp right through by now.

“And then there’s the
junk,
you wouldn’t believe it, everyone shoves their junk up there, I can’t stop them, you know how it is. I keep meaning to have a good clear out one day, tell them, once and for all, anything that’s not gone by Sunday, it’ll go straight to Oxfam! ‘OK, Hetty,’ they’ll say. ‘We’ll get on to it right away, no problem!’ And of course there
is
no problem, not for them, because they don’t do anything. And Oxfam would never look at it anyway, a pile of rubbish like that, and half of it too heavy to shift. Believe it or not, my dear, there’s half a motor bike up there. More than half, actually,” (here she glanced a little anxiously at Alice, to see how she was taking it), “two wheels, anyway, as well as no end of bars and bits and bobs of metal. And I can’t tell you how many clapped-out TVs there are up there, I’ve given up counting. And then all the labour-saving stuff, mixers that don’t mix, full of fluff and dried-up bits of food; slicers that don’t slice … Things with their handles missing, or their insides, or something. It’s enough to make you weep!”

Actually, Alice had felt much more like weeping
before
hearing this tale of woe. A list of disamenities on this scale had a sort of bizarre splendour of its own, and was oddly cheering.

“Well, let me see it, anyway,” she said. “I’m not looking for luxury, you know, and I might be able to stack things up somehow, make a nice little area to live in …”

“Oh, do you think you might?” Hetty’s face lit up. “That’d be a grand thing for me. I’d feel really good if that room could be a room again and not a rubbish-tip. Living under a rubbish-tip, it makes you quite depressed sometimes, when you think about it. Well, here goes; you’re the first person I’ve even dared show it to!”

She made it sound like a singular honour, and Alice felt quite absurdly elated, as if she had at last come top in something. After all the months of coming bottom, in nearly every test that life can set up, it was really quite exhilarating.

Afterwards, looking back, Alice realised that this was the moment when her decision was made; the moment when she suddenly became irrevocably committed to this room, whatever it turned out to be like. At the time, she’d imagined that she was still undecided, still waiting to make a rational choice after having inspected the room.

“I’ll fix a light bulb, of course,” Hetty was saying as they reached the shadowy top landing. “I’ve got one somewhere, isn’t it funny how the bulbs you’ve got are always either fifteens or hundred and fifties, nothing in between. I keep buying sixties and hundreds, but can I ever find one when I want it? I can not! Do you think it’s like that for everyone?” Without waiting for Alice to answer this possibly profound philosophical question, Hetty continued: “Well, here we are now. Just take a look!” Here she flung open a door, or, rather, tried to fling it open, but after the first six inches it stuck groaningly on a bulge of lino swollen up with the damp. She had to go down on her knees, reach through the crack and hammer with her clenched fist at the offending bulge, until at last the door could be edged open.

“You see?” she exclaimed, puffing to her feet and brushing ineffectually at the knees of her orange trousers. “That’s just typical! Nothing works up here!
Nothing
!”
She spoke with gloomy triumph, in the tones of one who has at last won a long and closely-reasoned argument.

“Damn, there isn’t a light here either!” she exclaimed, flipping ineffectually at the switch just inside the door. “What a nuisance! Now you can’t see properly how frightful it is!”

Alice peered into the shadowed spaces ahead. Such light as filtered in from the fast-fading afternoon came through a small dormer window set high in the sloping attic ceiling, and her first impression was of a monstrous army standing to attention, shield-to-shield in silent battle-order. Huge shapes loomed; as her eyes became accustomed to the darkness she could see the floor at her feet awash with old newspapers and cardboard boxes.

Discouraging. But so what? Discouragement is hardly
relevant
to one whose courage is already just about drained away.

“How much?” Alice found herself asking, and Hetty gave quite a little start of surprise, as if taken unawares.

“How much what?” she began, and then gave an apologetic little laugh. “How much rent, do you mean? Well, it’s a problem, isn’t it? I don’t know how I’ve the nerve to charge
anything
for such a hell-hole, but on the other hand … Look, what do
you
think, Alice? What would
you
charge, if it was yours?”

It was heart-warming to be called ‘Alice’ after such short acquaintance; and the more so after all the weeks of formal letters from lawyers starting ‘Dear Mrs Saunders’, a name which anyway seemed to belong to her less and less as the day of the divorce approached.

By now, she felt that her prospective landlady was almost an old friend, and she tried to answer the question in the simple, unembarrassed way in which it had been asked.

“I do see what you mean about the — well — all that,” she said, gesturing vaguely into the darkness. “But, on the other hand, to have
any
sort of room in London these days,
any
sort of a roof over one’s head … Well, it’s quite something, isn’t it, to get
anything
…?

“What I’d charge? Well, I think I’d see what the person could afford, the kind of person, I mean, who’d be wanting a room like this. I’d try to find out how desperate they were,” she continued, and then wished she hadn’t. It not only sounded rather rude, but it drew quite unnecessary attention to the question of her own desperation, and the reasons for it.

However, Hetty seemed unperturbed, and certainly not offended. A somewhat untypical landlady-tenant argument ensued, with the landlady citing all the manifold disadvantages of the place, and Alice countering these as best she could by extolling the quiet and privacy afforded by an attic and enthusing about the superb view. (Well, this high up you surely could see
something
?)

“Oh well,” said Hetty finally, “I’ll tell you what. Let’s leave it vague for the moment, shall we, and any time I’m short I’ll ask you for something towards the rates, or something. Or if the
electricity bill is too frightful … That sort of thing. How about that?”

For a moment, Alice had an alarming vision of what Rodney would have said to a business arrangement of this nature. But this was followed almost immediately by the realisation that it didn’t matter what Rodney would have said. Not any more. She could say ‘Yes’ to anything she liked now.

So, ‘Yes’ she said, and it was like a signpost pointing to the unknown. It was wild, and terrible, and exhilarating, like being cast adrift in an open boat.

“Yes, that will be just fine,” she said.