Listening in the Dusk (7 page)

He really was a singularly good-natured fellow. Too
good-natured
, perhaps, Alice mused, to be likely to succeed in “getting somewhere” in the fiercely competitive musical world. Not that she knew anything about this world, but it was common sense that a streak of ruthless determination, even of savagery, would be needed in the process of clawing one’s way up, however outstanding one’s talent. Savagery was certainly no part of Brian’s nature; on being ushered into Alice’s domain, and finding that his electric fire had not only found its way up here — as he had surmised — but had also, in the kindness of Hetty’s heart, been switched full on, all three bars, he had merely laughed.

“She
is
a nice old stick, isn’t she?” he commented. “
This
ought to knock the damp for six, Alice, if anything could. This is a
hell-hole
for damp, you know, especially under the eaves. I tried keeping my old college notes up here, you know, in boxes. I’d
been dragging them about with me for years, ever since my parents got divorced and ceased to provide a convenient dumping-ground. I fancied I’d be needing them — the notes I mean, not the parents — but I might just as well have let them go down the chute with the rest of the happy home, because when I came to look at them they were glued together with mould, right through. Mind you, I could have won a prize or two at art exhibitions, if I’d thought of it, because they were wonderful moulds, a kind of pink and green tracery, some like trees, some like diagrams in a medical book. Each page different, like a set of Rorschach blots. They’d have been a wow in the art world, ending up on television, probably, illustrating some grievance or other about Arts Council grants. Still, one can’t think of everything …”

By the time darkness came down, the room had been transformed. Brian had dragged out the various bits of rolled-up carpet from their various hiding places, and unrolled them one by one for Alice’s inspection. Most of them were too worn and tattered to be worth considering, but one, of intricate Persian design, had only a couple of easily-mendable tears in it, and spread out over the bare boards alongside the divan, it gave a wonderful air of luxury to the room, a glow of pink and orange and copper which toned rather than clashed with the
multi-coloured
pinkish cretonne already covering the improvised sofa. The final and most useful task performed by Brian was the raising of the motor bike from its prone position, in which it took up a couple of square yards of precious floor-space, and up-ending it against one of the beams. Tossing aside the lace bed-cover with which Hetty had swathed its ugliness, Brian stood back to admire his handiwork.

“You should never cover things up just because they’re ugly,” he pronounced. “You should feature them, make something of them. Just as you should with your own failings and failures. Don’t hide them from the world. Stand forth boldly and say, ‘Here I am, the chap who fails at everything! The chap who gets doors slammed in his face by pretty girls, publishers,
concert-promoters
— the lot!’ Look, Alice, I’ve got an idea! Why don’t we
paint
the motor bike — scarlet, gold, blue — that sort of
thing! Make it the central feature of your decor! We could start now. I’ve got the remains of some red paint downstairs, and we could buy the blue and the gold — just small tins — tomorrow. No, Monday, those sort of shops won’t be open on Sunday. Anyway, let’s get going with the red … just a sec.”

In less than a minute he was back, with not only the tin of paint but a couple of relatively un-congealed paint brushes, and they set to work. The rims of the wheels scarlet, they thought, and the antler-like handlebars too. The hubs of the wheels should be gold, and so should its mysterious broken insides, with touches of deep blue here and there to add depth.

“And significance, too,” Brian insisted. “You must go a bundle on significance, Alice, if you’re going to live in a place like this,” and with swift, deft strokes he set about outlining in scarlet the lopsided rim of the back wheel, while Alice, with a damp rag, prepared the front one for a similarly glorious new career.

The sausage supper didn’t turn out quite as Alice had
anticipated
. Hetty had agreed without protest to her request to be allowed some time after seven-thirty to fry her sausages, but nevertheless seemed a little crestfallen at the proposal. The reason for this soon became clear. It happened that Hetty had, that very day, come into possession of a nice big bacon joint — a real butcher’s joint, with the bone still in, none of your boneless rubbish from the supermarket all done up in plastic. It had been simmering all afternoon with carrots, swedes and a couple of bay leaves, and it had occurred to Hetty that it would make a nice hot supper for everybody, it being such a cold, miserable sort of a night. Especially if she popped a few nice large potatoes into the oven, which it happened she had already done.

It sounded most inviting; but what about the sausages? “Besides,” continued Alice, “I can’t keep sponging off you for meals. I had that delicious shepherd’s pie last night, remember.”

Sponging? Oh no, that’s not how Hetty saw it at all. “It’s helping me out, really,” she explained. “I do like a cut off a nice big joint now and again, and how can I have it if I’m just cooking only for myself? I’d be finishing up cold meat day in and day out until my stomach turned. But I’ll tell you what, love, why don’t we be devils and have your sausages as well? Sausages and bacon — it doesn’t go too badly, does it? Sausage and bacon — bacon and sausage — you only have to say it out loud and you can hear how it kind of
belongs,
if you know what I mean. Our Brian, he’s going to be over the moon when I tell him we’re having
both.
He does enjoy his food, that boy does, it’s a pleasure to watch his knife and fork going. I only wish I could say the same of Mary; so picky that girl is, it’s not true! Still, I’ll try to get her to come down this evening; maybe if I tell her Brian’s coming too …”

Clearly this inducement (if indeed it had been an
inducement
, which Alice doubted after witnessing the little scene on the landing this morning) had failed, for when the little party gathered round the large scrubbed kitchen table, Mary was conspicuous by her absence. In her place, however — much to Alice’s surprise, after all she had heard — was Miss Dorinda, the lady who liked everything just so, and who was supposed to enjoy special privileges each evening for cooking her own carefully-balanced meals. Alice had already met Miss Dorinda earlier in the evening — on the stairs, in fact, exactly as she’d envisaged it — and her first impression had indeed been of someone intimidatingly smart: bleached up-swept hair, a svelte and slender figure, and painfully high heels teetering round the ill-lit bend of the stairway. Not so ill-lit, however, as to obscure the cool thumbs-down glance which seemed to take in Alice from top to toe — from her no-bother hairstyle, that is, to her discreditably comfortable shoes.

But now, seated directly under the glare of one of Hetty’s hundred-and-fifty-watt bulbs, Miss Dorinda seemed both smaller and less imposing. Lines of tiredness, clearly visible now under the make-up, softened the rigid pink-and-white perfection of her enamelled cheeks. Her eye-shadow was
reassuringly
smudged after its long day’s service in the salon, and even her slimness was somehow modified by the eager glint in her eyes as she watched the steaming slices of bacon sliding one after another from under Hetty’s expertly wielded knife. You felt, watching her, that here was somebody who
should
have been comfortably plump. “Inside every fat woman there is a thin one struggling to get out,” they say. Well, this one had got out, and here she was. Alas for the plump, comfortable one that had been left behind!

“Good God!
Dorrie
!” exclaimed Brian, taking his place opposite her. “Whatever on earth are
you
doing among the carnivores? I thought you were supposed to be vegetarian?”

“Well, yes, I am …” Miss Dorinda looked both confused and affronted, marshalling her arguments. “But … Well, this isn’t
meat,
exactly, is it? This is
bacon
…” and she reached out hungrily for the lavishly-filled plate that Hetty was passing her.

“Of course it’s meat!” Brian insisted, ignoring Hetty’s
protesting
glances and shake of the head. “Whatever do you mean, it’s not meat? It’s meat from a
pi
g
. A pig is just as much an animal as a cow or a sheep is — and a lot more intelligent, actually. Do you know, a pig can work out how to lift a latch and open a gate? I remember, when I was a kid, the pig they had just up the lane from us, it used to —”

“Hush, Brian, do hush!” Hetty could contain herself no longer. “You’re spoiling Miss Dorinda’s meal for her! I don’t think it’s nice, it’s not nice at all, to talk about pigs while we are eating bacon. Just get on with your food, Brian, and let us get on with ours.”

“OK, OK,” Brian shrugged. “I don’t want to spoil Dorrie’s meal, I just want her to be logical. If she would only be logical, she would enjoy it more, not less, because she’d realise it was no more cruel to eat a pig than to eat a slice of bread. How many mice, and squirrels, and rabbits does she think have had to be killed in order to preserve for humans the grain which goes into bread? And muesli, too, and All-Bran — all those Health Foods she’s so —”

“
Brian
! If you aren’t careful, I won’t invite you down any more. You know what I was planning for Sunday lunch? A nice roast chicken, with bread sauce, and roast potatoes, and sprouts. But of course I won’t be doing it now, not if it’s going to start all this argy bargy —”

“Argy bargy about whether a chicken is a vegetable?” Brian was beginning; and it seemed to Alice that it was time someone changed the subject.

“What a pity Mary couldn’t be here,” she said, rather at random. “I don’t know how she could resist all these delicious smells. I suppose she has a date this evening …”

She was aware, as she spoke, of a slight tension to her left. Brian had paused in his eating, and with fork poised half-way to his mouth, was listening with painful intentness. She realised that she had tactlessly blundered from one awkward topic right into another.

“A date? Not on your life!” declared Hetty, beginning to apply herself to the carving of second helpings. “That girl never has dates. I wish she did. It really worries me, you know, the way she
stays up there evening after evening. Sometimes she doesn’t even have the light on. What does she
do
I wonder?”

“Perhaps she has to go to bed early,” suggested Alice, trying to render innocuous this topic she had so inadvertently raised. “Perhaps her job …?”

“And that’s another thing,” continued Hetty. “A job. She hasn’t got a job. Of course, I know it’s difficult these days, unemployment and that; but so far as I can see she’s not even looking for one. It makes me really unhappy, you know, the way that girl’s wasting her life. No dates. No proper meals. And if I invite her down, like this evening, when I happen to have done a bit of cooking, what do I get? Such a look she gives me, like she wouldn’t demean herself. ‘Thank you, Mrs Harman’ she says, ‘but I’m not hungry.’ Kind of uppity, you know, as if not being hungry was the in-thing for top people, and the rest of us too uneducated to know it! It makes me really annoyed sometimes, I feel I want to put her in her place good and proper. But then again, I can’t help worrying — after all, she’s only young. There’s something wrong. I know there is. Something badly wrong. But what can I do? I can’t keep asking questions and interfering, can I? It’s not my business. Do you think she’s maybe got that illness they’ve been on about lately on TV — Anna-something?”

“Anorexia?” supplied Alice. “Well, I suppose she might have. Though she’s a bit past the usual age, I should think — it’s more a thing with teenagers.” And then, in a vague attempt to reassure Brian, who was still sitting unwontedly tense and silent at her side: “Perhaps she eats more than you think she does? Like now — for all we know she might be out getting fish and chips at this very moment.”

But Hetty shook her head. “I’d have noticed,” she asserted. “I’d have heard her. I’ve got so I listen for her, I’m that worried. Like I say, she stops in nearly all the time. Five weeks she’s been here, and never once has she gone out in the evening —”

“And can you wonder?” here broke in Miss Dorinda, dabbing her lips delicately and laying down her fork. “
I
don’t go out in the evening either, not on my own. You hear of such dreadful things happening nowadays, the rapes and the muggings …”

“I don’t think it’s as common as all that,” Alice was beginning,
but Miss Dorinda interrupted, full of indignation, as people tend to be at any suggestion that something isn’t as dreadful as they thought it was.

“It’s all very well to talk like that, if you’ll excuse my saying so! You wouldn’t talk like that if you’d been one of the victims! Suppose you’d been attacked by the Yorkshire Ripper? Or the Cambridge Rapist? Or the Flittermouse Fiend? He was a
vampire
, too, as well as a murderer. That’s what flittermouse means, it means a vampire —”

“No it doesn’t, it just means a bat,” interposed Brian, roused from his dark mood by the prospect of controversy. “It’s simply the old English word for ‘bat’ —”

“Well, and that’s just what I’ve been saying!” retorted Miss Dorinda triumphantly. “A vampire
is
a bat. It’s a huge, savage bat that sucks human blood! Didn’t you ever see the Dracula film? Those awful yellow fangs, and claws dripping with blood? The Flittermouse Fiend must have been …”

They all heard it. A soft scuffling from beyond the closed door; light footsteps racing up the stairs; and then the slam of a door, high up in the old house. Brian’s chair scraped back with a violent shudder, and he was across the room, out of the door and racing up the stairs.

The three women, struck silent, were left facing each other, but not for long. In less than a minute, Brian could be heard thundering down the stairs, and he burst into the kitchen, wild-eyed, his whole body grown somehow loose and disjointed with shock.

“Something terrible has happened!” he gasped. “Her door … Mary’s door, it’s all over blood! I can’t get it open! A hammer, Hetty! An axe! Something to smash it down with …!”

“All over blood” was an exaggeration. The doorhandle, as Alice bent to examine it, was indeed stained with red, and there were smears of red here and there on the panels. Alice bent lower — sniffed — and burst into hysterical laughter.

“Brian! You idiot! It’s not blood at all — it’s paint! Red paint! The wretched girl’s been mucking about in my room, and she’s got the motor bike paint all over her. That’s what it is!” And her anxiety abruptly transferred itself from Mary’s safety to the fate of her new décor.

The delicately outlined rim of scarlet was indeed smudged and spoiled, and the whole contraption had been dragged a few inches out of position as if to allow space — but only just — for a slender figure to creep in behind it. By now, Brian had joined in her mirth, though still with the residue of shock jerking somewhere in his lungs; and together they stood contemplating, with relief and bewilderment, their now somewhat blemished handiwork, while behind them, agog for their fair share in this happening, whatever it might prove to be, stood Hetty and Miss Dorinda.

Hetty, despite the inconclusive nature of the data so far, was already able to discern a bright side.

“It’s a mercy,” she pointed out, “that I couldn’t remember where that axe had got put. It hasn’t been used since that sculpture fellow was here trying to turn the outside lav into a studio. It must still be out there somewhere, and if I’d been able to lay hands on it, Brian, like you yelled at me to, then we’d have had that door in splinters all to no purpose! And then, oh dear me, men in and out for days repairing it, and most likely telling me I’ve got dry-rot into the bargain, you know what they are these builder chappies. And then the insurance … I don’t know what they’d make of a story like this, I really don’t … A fuss, anyway, it’s surprising the fuss they can make, every tiny thing … Never mind. All’s well that ends well.”

If indeed it had ended. After the others had gone downstairs, Alice knocked, and knocked again; but inside the room was absolute silence, and she had to desist. After all, Mary had a right to her privacy. All the same, Alice went to bed feeling uneasy, and half-afraid; which was no doubt why, just before dawn, she had such a very horrid dream. She dreamed she was back in her old job, sitting at her desk correcting a set of exercises, when she came upon one written in red ink, making it difficult for her to mark corrections. She spoke to the girl in question, pointing out the problem, and asking her to use a black biro next time; but the girl shook her head sadly. “Oh no,” she said, “I can’t write in black any more, from now on I have to write everything in blood — look!” and pushing up the sleeve of her blouse, she displayed a nasty jagged wound into which she must dip her pen.

Alice woke, shaken with horror, and then with relief at knowing it was only a dream. But for a few moments she was quite disorientated, in the darkness, and in her still unfamiliar surroundings. By the time she had located the small square of the window and recovered her bearings, and the sense of where she was, the dream had already begun to fade. She could no longer recall whether the girl in the dream had actually resembled Mary, or whether she had been a mere faceless ghost, of the sort that habitually drift through dreams.

Not that it mattered. The shocks and alarms of last night were quite enough to account for such a dream, and there was no point at all in looking for anything subtle in the way of interpretation; and so Alice settled back on her pillow, and tried to sleep. Already, it was nearly morning.