The Listeners (20 page)

‘It’s the students’,’ she said, ‘but they don’t mind. I was in here once with one of them.’ She dropped her voice excitingly. Oh, she was a wild girl, all right. Why was she interested in someone like Tim? In a dream of adventure, he did not let himself wonder. He watched her as she crouched on her long legs to switch on the electric fire, her knees sticking far out, her bare flushed heels coming out of her shoes. He watched her go to the gramophone and slide a pile of records about impatiently.

‘Do you like the Ninnies?’

‘I don’t mind.’ Tim liked all the groups, but on the ward if someone turned the wireless up, Mr Gilbert would put his head out of his office and yell, ‘Not so loud!’ as if he did not know that it was no good any other way.

Felicity had the record nice and loud, and she and Tim sat on the sofa side by side, not touching, while the sound beat over them, like being in a lovely hot water shower with no one tweaking at the curtain and saying, ‘My turn.’

When the record was finished, she turned it over and sat back again and sighed. They could not have talked if they had wanted to.

After a while, Felicity took Tim’s left hand out of his jacket pocket and turned it over. Tim kept it still in the lap of her dress while with a long light finger, she traced the scar. Then she brought her own left hand over and laid it next to his, palm up. Two narrow white scars and a thicker one, mauvish pink and not so neat. In silence, while the electric guitars battered them about the ears, they sat and looked down at their stigmata, side by side in the lap of Felicity’s red wool dress.

They managed to meet quite often. Some afternoons they put on coats and scarves and Felicity’s red rubber boots with the bells she had stuck on the toes, and walked on the Highfield paths, sometimes talking, sometimes silent, sometimes quarrelling, sometimes friendly, sometimes deliberately misunderstanding. Felicity was very good at that.

When it was too cold or wet, they sat at a corner table in the library, and Mrs Fletcher brought them illustrated magazines which she thought they read, because they turned the pages over whether they were talking or not.

One dark January afternoon, with a dirty rain weeping down the tall windows, Tim found himself stammering into the memory of the night he went to the dance hall with Frank. Hesitantly, ready to clamp his mouth if she threatened to mock or yawn, he told Felicity how he had wandered in fear and despair through the town, and how at last he had rung the Samaritans.

She had never heard of them. Nor had Tim before he saw the posters, but he said, ‘I thought everybody knew their number. 333-4000.’ He would never forget it.

‘Enough to give anybody ideas, I should think.’ Felicity said, disregarding that. ‘You mean it was seeing that poster gave you the idea to cut yourself?’

‘No, Fliss.’ She invariably managed to turn what you said into something different. ‘I’d had it on my mind. I tried to do something once before, with aspirin, but I brought it all up. No, it was seeing that poster, it was like - well, someone telling you they cared whether you lived or died.’

Felicity did not like sentiment. She blew a raspberry, quietly because of Mrs Fletcher, and said, ‘Why?’

‘Because it said they did.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t see why they should.’

‘I mean why did you want to do it?’

The doctors had not asked him that yet. Paul had not asked him. In some way, it seemed as if he did not need to ask, but if he knew anything, it was not because Tim had told him. How could he? He did not really know himself.

Paul had come on Christmas Eve and taken Tim out to lunch in the little market town where the newcomers were afraid of Highfield people and the old-timers were used to them. He had given Tim a blue pullover, brightly wrapped and tied.

Tim gave him a quilted chintz toaster cover from the
hospital gift shop. ‘Have you got a toaster?’ he asked anxiously. The gift had taken long deciding.

‘Oh yes. This will be just the thing. My wife will be delighted.’

‘What’s your wife like then?’

‘She’s very nice. You’d like her.’

One day Paul would invite Tim to his home to sit down with his very nice wife and his schoolboy son and his daughter who was married to a man twelve years older. Warmed by the glass of sherry and the steak pie and the thought of Paul’s family lifting off his quilted cover to make toast in a white-painted kitchen with nasturtiums on the window-sill, Tim was led to tell Paul that his own father and mother had died when he was a baby and that his foster mother had died too (‘There I was without food or warmth for two days alone in the house with Aunt Posy before they found me’), and that was how he came to be in the House of God’s Angels.

To Olive Barrow, who questioned quite directly because she did not think about people having anything to hide, he admitted that he thought his mother might still be alive.

‘I don’t remember what she looks like,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t know her if I saw her, I suppose. Funny, innit? You might be my mother and I wouldn’t even know.’

‘I’ll
be
your mother, Timothy.’ He was helping her to make beds, and she leaned across and pulled him forward to hug him, so that they almost fell together on to Mr Podgorsky’s shameful rubber sheet. ‘I’ll love you, dear.’ And she had glanced over her shoulder, as if she had done and said more than she should.

Tim used to help Olive wash up the teas, but now he had something better to do at five o’clock recreation time.

When Olive said to him, stacking plates, ‘Come on then, sonny Jim, no rest for the wicked,’ he mumbled, ‘I’ve got something to do,’ and got up and went off in the opposite direction from the kitchen. He did not look back, but he was sure that Olive would be standing holding
the plates to her soft chest, looking after him like a dog left outside a butcher’s shop.

He did not tell Felicity much about Olive Barrow, or Paul, or anything, because it was not often he could get her attention to talk about himself. She told him many things of her own, murmuring on for ages under cover of the library door squeaking open and shut, and people dropping books, and the dishwasher fan outside the window going off like Vesuvius after the staff cafeteria teas. She told him about her big family, her father a builder, her mother who had never had time to take a job because she was always on her back, either having kids put into her or taken out. About the brothers and sisters she hated, the whole bloody lot of ‘em, teachers’ college, training to be an officer, who does he think he is, giving orders to men who wouldn’t give him their used toilet paper? About Janice who went to Business, and Dottie who had won scholarships all along the line and left school two years early. About Mark-who was in cameras, who had married a dreadful classy girl called Harrie the Whore.

They had visited her over Christmas in bulk and singly. ‘Buck up, Flick,’ they had said, and when she cried because Dottie told her the decaying apple tree had fallen down at last, Mark had said, ‘You want to pull yourself together, old girl, you really do.’

‘They wanted me to go home for Christmas,’ she hissed into Tim’s ear, ‘so I did something bad, so Doctor Max wouldn’t let me go.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Guess.’

By her face, he knew it was something rude. He giggled.

‘Gently dear.’ Mrs Fletcher stopped by their table. ‘This is a quiet place, remember.’ Crash, scream, as one of the goons who helped in the library dropped a whole pile of books on the foot of a man who was reading a crime story standing up, as if he were eating it. ‘Ah, I see you’ve finished these.’ Mrs Fletcher believed in letting chaos sort itself out. ‘I’il bring you this week’s
Life.
’

‘No thanks.’ Felicity finished turning the last magazine page and stood up. ‘I’ve got to go.’

Round the corner from the library, there was a place they knew where brooms and pails and great drums of scouring powder and floor wax were kept in a sort of big cupboard. Sometimes the maids forgot to lock it. Felicity pulled Tim in there and they squeezed and pressed each other and gasped in the tiny space between the scrubbing board and the shelves.

‘Do it.’

‘No.’ He was afraid.

‘You’re afraid.’

‘I’m not.’

‘I’m not afraid of anything.’ But then she jammed her face against his, her mouth stringy and wet with tears. ‘Yes, I am, yes, I am. I was always afraid at home.’

‘What of?’

‘That they would find me out.’

‘What had you done?’ He held her off. She was taller than him. She had to sag at the knees to make their bodies fit.

‘Nothing. I couldn’t do nothing. It was them, them, always them, don’t you see?’

Tim did not know how to hush or comfort her. ‘I don’t see what’s so awful about a family,’ he began. ‘I think I—’

‘Who cares what you think?’ She pulled away from him, knocking down a broom, and was gone in an instant, leaving Tim crouched behind the rubbish bin for a full five minutes in case anybody had heard the noise.

He did not tell anyone about Felicity. Not Doctor Ling nor the great Doctor Vandenburg, whom he hardly ever saw, except striding by with a cheery wave. Not Mr Podgorsky, who was the only one he talked to in the carpentry shop. Not anyone on the ward, because he hardly talked to anyone on the ward. Not even much to Olive, although she knew something was up, and that was why she was jealous.

When Felicity did not turn up at any of their meeting
places for days, Tim began stacking plates again one evening. Olive never said, ‘Look who’s helping,’ or, ‘Well, we
have
missed you.’ She handed him the plates out of the sudsy water, smooth, smooth, smooth, working like an oiled machine together - ‘a peck of method saves a bushel of time’ - chattering comfortably away about nothing.

Why, she was not jealous at all! Tim should be spanked for thinking it.

After the lunch with Tim at the Appledore Café in the town which lay under the hill where Highfield loomed, grey and battlemented, scheduled so long ago for urgent rebuilding that it was no longer top priority, Paul felt rather encouraged. It was the first time the boy had talked to him at all about his family. Such terrible damage seemed to have been done to him in his childhood and boyhood years that it was no wonder that he had become, as Doctor Vandenberg categorized him, ‘an inadequate personality’

Paul saw the doctor when he brought Tim back after lunch.

‘Get anything significant out of the boy?’ he asked.

‘He talked a bit about his parents.’ As a Samaritan, Paul could not pass on anything without Tim’s permission.

‘The father was in gaol, I gather, and the mother on the streets.’

‘Oh?’

‘Isn’t that what he told you?’

‘Well - he didn’t say much.’

‘There’s a lot of fantasy, of course, with a boy like that, but we’re really quite pleased with him. With antidepressant drugs and the regular work programme - I think we may get him back into the swim quite nicely. Your help, as usual, invaluable.’ He sketched a bow.

‘I should come more often. It’s been chaos at school. Everyone’s got flu.’

‘It’s all right. He’s too dependent anyway. That’s one of the main problems of these institutionalized youngsters.’ He stood up. ‘And a happy Christmas to you, sir,’
he said, as if Paul had already begun to take his leave.

At Singleton Court, happy Christmas was in progress. Laura and her husband had arrived before Paul got home.

‘Daddy, where have you
been?
’ She galloped down the hall like a child and flung herself against his stomach, lifting her feet off the floor as he hugged her. She always greeted him with a surge of her old childish joy, then ebbed back to where he was not completely at ease with her.

‘Out to Highfield to see a boy I’m befriending. Didn’t your mother tell you?’

‘She said she had no idea where you were.’ Laura did not frown or look puzzled. Her young face had a smooth, static quality like a china dish. Not secretive or wary. Composed. Controlled.

‘I suppose she forgot.’ No point in confronting Alice with ‘You knew I was at Highfield.’ He had given up those tactics long ago. Let them just get through Christmas without a fight.

Laura and Nigel could only stay one night, so they were having the turkey this evening. Laura was wearing an apron. ‘When we got here, she hadn’t even put the thing in the
oven,
’ she whispered to Paul as he took off his coat. ‘There were no potatoes, nothing for a vegetable, she hadn’t done a thing except make hard sauce for the pudding. Mountains of it. Jeff has gone out to get what I need.’

‘I’m sorry, pet.’

‘Don’t worry.’ She brisked off his guilt, his regret, his pity for her homecoming. ‘I’m coping. But dinner will be pretty late, I’m afraid.’

‘Laura turned me out of the kitchen,’ Alice told him.

‘Were you in it?’

‘No, but she insisted on taking over. She thinks she is a better cook than me, so we’ll see.’

‘I am,’ Laura said quite fondly. Alice smiled at her in what would have been a friendly moment, had not Laura’s husband, a specious, unsubtle man, much too old
and used for her, cut in with, ‘You all talk as if Alice was a mental defective. I object to that.’

Alice did not particularly like him, but he behaved as if he and she were in some sort of league together. He thought Alice was ‘fun’ and Paul rather dull. He made his special martinis for her, with a minim of whisky and the lemon peel twisted clockwise, never the other way.

When Laura said to him in the kitchen where he appeared with the empty martini jug and that clubbable smile on his face, ‘Please don’t make any more,’ he wagged his finger and told her not to nág.

‘It’s Christmas, dearie. Your mother and I are going to pin one on.’

‘Please, Nigel.’

Nigel did not believe in people being alcoholics. You either drank or you did not. You got drunk, rather drunk, merry, or you stayed sober. Alcoholism as a disease had been explained to him by Paul, by Laura and even by Jeff. He still wooed his mother-in-law with his extra special Nigelinis.

To marry him, Laura had said that she was going to have his baby. Perhaps she had really believed that. Perhaps, as she had told them, the laboratory had really mixed the tests and given her another woman’s positive report. Perhaps Nigel would have married her anyway. Perhaps he would not. Paul did not think that Laura would stay with him after next year when she got her degree and left London University. Nigel would hardly notice her going.