The Listening Silence

by Marie Joseph

  ‘I ought to be going.’ He settled more comfortably. ‘But my daughter won’t be home for a long time yet, and since my wife started on night shifts at the ordnance factory it’s a case of her coming back in the mornings as I go out to work. A topsy-turvy life I suppose.’

  Barbara tore her gaze reluctantly away from the tired, shabby man to stare into the fire. She knew all about his wife and his deaf daughter. She had had Josie Barnes pointed out to her once in the market and had been asking herself ever since how a man like Stanley could ever have married a woman so obviously out of his class. From her dyed hair to her pillar box red swagger coat, Josie had looked what she was – common. And lately he had worn an air of sadness, sitting at his desk, talking on the telephone, taking off his spectacles and rubbing his aching eyes. She had wanted to ask him if there was anything she could do to help. But sensibly she had bided her time, and now, to their mutual surprise, here he was sitting as she had so often imagined him in her flat, smiling at her.

  ‘Please let me make you something to eat.’ She nodded towards the tiny kitchen leading off the pleasant room. ‘I’ve got a hoarded tin of prawns, and some tomatoes. It wouldn’t take a minute to make a salad. That’s what I’ll be having anyway.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ Stanley wagged a finger at her. ‘A tin of prawns calls for a celebration, a sharing. I can’t see you woofing them down all on your own.’

  But him being there was a celebration, Barbara thought. She suggested a spot of music, feeling instinctively it was in keeping with his mood.

  ‘Debussy? I always think that Debussy goes with rain at the windows and a fire in the grate.’

  Stanley closed his eyes again and felt peace trickle through him in a warm tide. Yet even as he relaxed, his mind chewed over and fretted about the situation at home. Since that May evening when Josie had flown at him in a frenzy, she had slept in John’s room, going off to her new job of work making sten guns and shell parts, wearing trousers and bundling her blonde hair up into a turban. Of the man with whom she had spent the weekend he had heard no more, and his wounded pride would not permit him to ask. They were strangers living together, if you could call it living. Even Sally had changed. There was a hardness about her eyes that had never been there before. If she wasn’t writing long letters to her American she was out dancing with her friends from work. Sally dancing! Going out alone and coming home alone as far as he could judge, slapping together a makeshift meal for them in the evenings, picking at hers, then flying off with her sandals in a paper bag. If it hadn’t been for the companionship of his friends in the Home Guard Stanley felt at times he would have sunk into an unhealthy state of depression.

  The music was so beautiful. If he wasn’t careful the melancholy choking at his throat would spill out into his eyes. He was lonely. Why not admit it? He was achingly, dreadfully lonely. He opened his eyes to see Barbara at the gramophone turning the sound down, then turning to stare at him with a look of such sympathy and caring on her face that he had to blink the threatening tears away.

  ‘Do you listen to Quentin Reynolds on the wireless?’ She came to kneel down on the rug by his side, so close he could smell the sharp flower scent she used. Lily-of-the-valley, he guessed, and was reminded of how Josie had once told him it was her favourite flower. Because of that he had planted a clump in the back garden, in a patch dug over now for rows of Brussels sprouts.

  ‘He’s so funny when he addresses Hitler by his real name. Schicklgruber. He’s so clever with a turn of phrase, don’t you think? His voice gave me a positive thrill when he declared it unthinkable that a man by the name of Winston Churchill could ever bow the knee to someone called Schicklgruber …’

  Stanley smiled. He felt his loneliness, his recent terrifying sense of inadequacy, leaving him as his deeply considered thoughts spilled into words. Words listened to and understood by a woman at his side. The music soared to haunting heights as the rain slid silently down the long window, and in the darkening room a soothing sense of warmth and tranquillity seemed to wrap him around.

  ‘He was going to kiss me,’ Barbara told herself when Stanley had gone. He had jumped up from his chair with a suddenness that had startled her for a moment. ‘That lovely man. In another minute he would have kissed me. The kiss was there between us, I know it.’

  She picked up the brown velvet cushion from the chair where he had sat, and hugged it to her, swaying gently backwards and forwards on her sturdy heels, seeing their heads drawing closer together and her eyes half closing in anticipation of the kiss that hadn’t materialized.

  At twenty-nine years old Barbara Shawfield had known only one man, and then in what she thought to herself as a purely spiritual way. Like Stanley Barnes, he had been unhappily married too. For four years she had anguished about him, meeting him now and again to hold hands across a restaurant table, drinking in his every word and expression as he assured her she was the only joy in his life, his one bright star. She had wasted long, lonely hours waiting for the telephone to ring, willing it to ring, but understanding when it didn’t. His wife had been a semi-invalid, and so of course he couldn’t leave her, but Barbara’s love had sustained him through what he had described as his barren existence. To consummate their love would have despoiled its loveliness, he had said. She had believed that too until the day she had seen him out with his wife, holding her arm with tender solicitude as, heavily pregnant, she had made her way slowly along the pavement.

  Barbara had cried for a month, grieved for six more, then on her promotion to the engineers’ department at Telephone House had transferred all her longing to Stanley Barnes.

  ‘Oh, my love,’ she whispered. ‘My own dear love.’ She turned the record over, and to the background of Debussy took a precious egg from the cupboard and began to boil it for her supper.

  The object of her affection was at that very moment hurrying down the road, with his dot-and-carry-one walk, to catch his tram, the brim of his dark brown trilby pulled low over his forehead. He was glancing at his watch, shaking his head and hoping he would be home in time for the nine o’clock news. Cursing himself for staying so long, but admitting how pleasing it was to have found a friend. There was no silly romantic nonsense about Miss Shawfield, he decided as he took his place at the end of a long, dripping queue. She was more like a man than a woman in her tweed skirts and tailored blouses, with her mouse-coloured hair scragged back into a sausage-like roll. For a fleeting second he wondered why she had never married? At thirty or thereabouts she must have considered it at times? As he moved his head a thin trickle of rain seeped down his neck. He cursed the apology for a summer, the non-appearance of his tram, and the war.

  ‘Did you read where blackberries are to be fixed at five-pence a pound?’ A stout woman in front of him nudged her companion and laughed out loud. ‘I can just see thee and me queueing up for flamin’ blackberries, even if there is any, which I doubt. Making jam ’bout enough sugar! Them silly buggers at the Food Office want their thick heads examining.’

  ‘The woman next door to me got a pair of kippers from the Isle of Man,’ her friend said.

  ‘I thought it were full of foreign internals,’ the stout woman said as the tram came into sight.

  Oh, yes, Barbara Shawfield was a natural born spinster if ever there was one, Stanley decided as he boarded the tram. And if the pair in front of him didn’t stop nattering and find a seat so the rest of the long queue could squeeze on, he would definitely miss the news. Besides, Sally would be wondering where on earth he’d got to.

  Sally had stopped monitoring her parents’ movements. Since the terrible scene between them that evening in May she had felt quite differently towards them somehow. Gone was the good-little-girl expression on her round face as her eyes had searched first one face and then the other for approval. Now the house was filled with a bitterness that was almost tangible. Josie’s latent contempt for her husband showed itself in her raucous voice, and her broad Lancashire dialect was more prono
unced than ever. Her dolly-blue eyes were hard as flint. She used the house merely as a place to eat and sleep in between her shifts at the factory and her weekend jaunts into town. She went out with her face caked with make-up and her too-tight skirts riding up as she walked.

  Stanley, in desperation one night, had gone to John’s room, telling her he was prepared to forget and forgive, and she had ranted and raved, telling him there was nowt to forgive and the blame for what she had done lay at his door, not hers. Sally had come onto the landing and seen them shouting at each other, and later, when she had crept downstairs to find her father sobbing quietly into his hands, Stanley knocked her hand away. He had spurned her comfort, even mumbled at her without lifting his head, as if her deafness was an added irritation to his jagged nerves.

  The letters from Lee were her only consolation. Before he left for Canada he had written to tell her he was deeply in love with her, and wanted to marry her. Not after the war finished, but maybe in the spring. And after the war finished she would sail to America, and at the farm in Texas he would teach her to ride a horse, and drive a car down long straight roads. And he would feed her with steaks as big as the biggest plate.

  That August evening as the rain swept down outside she was reading, for the third time, his first letter since his arrival at a Royal Canadian flying training base in Ontario.

  ‘After leaving the ship, we caught a train, with a stopover in Montreal. Boy, was that some experience, honey! For three hours I wandered around, and I can’t find the words to describe the contrast to Great Britain. Imagine everything lit up, real pretty, and goodies in the lighted shop windows – things I reckon you’ve almost forgotten existed. Now, at the base, we’ve already gotten a start on flying training, which is great. You just wouldn’t believe the kindness shown to the RAF boys by the Canadians! They treat me as if I were a Britisher! I suppose some of your accent must have rubbed off? I’m determined to make good grades so I come back as a commissioned officer. That’s me, honey. A real go-gettin’ American!’

  He had ended by saying he had always dreamed of meeting a girl like her. ‘A girl who always sees the funny side of this cock-eyed existence. A girl with dreams in her eyes and warmth in her heart. You are as soft and sweet as English summer rain, Sally. Don’t ever change, okay? I want to come back and see you just the way you were …’

  Sally looked through the window and pulled a face. Nothing soft about the deluge out there, overspilling the gutters, and nothing soft about her either. The girl who had run frantically away from David Turner, heart pounding with terror, existed no more. Twice since then she had fended off unwelcome attentions from dancing partners, refusing all eager offers to see her home and instead walking alone through the blacked-out streets, the soles of her feet still feeling the rhythm of the music.

  Sally looked up from the letter to see her father standing in the doorway, shrugging off his wet coat before walking to the wireless and switching it on. As she went to fetch his cold meal from the kitchen she identified for a fleeting moment with her mother, recalling the times Josie must have experienced the same feeling of resentment at the sight of her husband, his small head inclined towards the speaker as he listened to the news.

  ‘The Russians are killing those very same Germans who would have invaded us,’ Stanley said at last, turning away from the set with reluctance. He sat down at the table and picked up his knife and fork. ‘Is that a letter from David Turner?’

  ‘From Lee,’ Sally sighed. ‘I haven’t heard from David for ages. He’s under no obligation to write to me. Why should he be? I haven’t heard from him since his mother’s funeral, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘I thought you were good friends?’ Stanley speared a pink slice of spam on his fork, and began to chew it absent-mindedly.

  ‘We are friends. But not pen friends.’ Sally suddenly felt a pang of pity for the man going through the motions of eating the uninspired meal. ‘The last letter I had from David read as if he had dictated it to a secretary. He’s a strange sort of person. Inarticulate, almost. He doesn’t seem able to express his thoughts at all.’

  ‘And the Yank does?’

  There was no way she could tell from how Stanley spoke whether he was joking. But his eyes weren’t joking. Sally opened her mouth to answer but Stanley suddenly pointed his knife at her.

  ‘I know Americans, and what I know of them I don’t much like. They’re brash individuals, all talk and no do. David Turner’s worth a whole platoon of them. I’m telling you.’ He jerked his head towards the letter. ‘All sweet talk and most of it lies. What’s he told you? That his father owns the Empire State Building in New York, or a hundred-acre ranch in Texas?’

  Sally flinched. ‘How many Americans have you met, Dad? Actually met and talked to?’

  ‘None. But I know them.’

  ‘Collectively?’

  ‘Well, all right. So I’m generalizing. But I’m not having you getting mixed up with one.’ He pushed his plate away. ‘Stick to your own sort, love. Get yourself a boy you can trust. One with your own background. One who knows you and your family.’

  ‘From down the road? Like David Turner?’ All at once Sally’s temper flared. ‘Oh, Dad, you don’t know how wrong you are! You don’t know anything! You sit there making statements, passing judgement, as if you were God! You care about nothing but your flamin’ news. You don’t care anything about feelings. You don’t even care about how Mum must be feeling! People do what they do sometimes because they can’t help it. She was breaking her heart and you didn’t even notice! She’s suffering now just as much as the Russians and the Poles. And you can hardly bear to look at her! I love you both and I have to watch you hurting and destroying each other.’ She nodded in the direction of the letter. ‘And when Lee comes back I’m going to him. I’m not stopping in this house any longer. It’s cold and dead, like you’re cold and dead.’

  When she got up and rushed from the room, taking the letter with her, Stanley sat for a long time at the table. The bitterness in Sally’s young voice had shocked him. He fingered his moustache thoughtfully. And he was responsible for putting it there. Josie and he between them had destroyed Sally’s taken-for-granted security, neither one of them stopping to think what they were doing to her.

  Making his mind up quickly, he took the stairs two at a time and opened her door to see her curled up on her bed, the thin pages of the letter spread out around her on the counterpane.

  ‘Look, love.’ He walked over to the window and drew the curtains against the darkness and the driving rain. He switched on the light and faced her. ‘Look, love. You can’t be expected to understand. But you’re old enough to try. Your mother and me.’ He swallowed hard. ‘We’re going through a sticky patch, but things will work out all right. We’ve been selfish, I see that now, and what I said about the Yank, well, that was silly. When he comes back – if he comes back to this country – well, till then I’ll reserve my judgement, right?’ He smiled, the thin lines of his face lifting out of their customary sadness. ‘And I don’t feel like God. In no way am I as wise as God. And I don’t pretend to be.’

  ‘I can’t hear you, Dad.’ Sally picked up one of the closely written pages and began to read again. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Suddenly Stanley felt an almost irresistible urge to shake her. She had lip-read every word he had said. His little girl was behaving like the difficult adolescent she had somehow never needed to be. Sighing deeply, he left her alone, telling himself it was the only thing to do. But somehow he would force Josie to listen to him. He would show her that they weren’t playing fair. Filled with a virtuous sense of righteousness, he cleared the table, piled the dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, then hurried back to switch on the wireless again. Colonel Britton was talking to the ‘V’ army again, advising them to go slow in all they did.

  ‘Good man,’ he muttered, nodding his head in total agreement. ‘That will show the devils which side their bread is buttered on.’

  In th
e office canteen of Duckworth Brothers the next morning the talk was all of Christine Duckworth’s September wedding. Sally caught some of the words, then carried her plate over to a table by the window.

  ‘What were they saying about Christine Duckworth? Did I hear someone say she was getting married?’

  Sally had chosen the window table deliberately. Jean Davies was a plumply pleasant girl with a mouth filled with what seemed to be more than the normal quota of teeth, a girl always more than ready to tolerate Sally’s deafness and interpret for her.

  ‘In September,’ Jean verified. ‘To a family friend.’ The teeth flashed in an engaging grin. ‘The Duckworths are praying he gets leave. Otherwise our Christine will shame the lot of them by having to be married in a maternity smock.’

  ‘No!’ Sally remembered just in time to monitor the depth of her voice. ‘I didn’t know she was engaged.’

  ‘She’s not.’ Jean poked around in her portion of potato pie and forked a piece of meat triumphantly. ‘He’s called Nigel.’ She pulled a comical face. ‘He used to pick her up from the office before he got called up. I’d have sworn he was one of “those”, you know? But it just goes to show.’ Her smile was entirely without malice. ‘Surely you’ve noticed Christine’s waist-line? The way she belts her dresses in doesn’t leave much to the imagination.’

  Sally forced herself to chew and swallow the almost tasteless pie. Now that she had found out what she wanted to know she wished that Jean would get on with her own meal and stop talking. She appreciated the kindness and the tolerance of the other girl, but once Jean got started there was no stopping her. The wide mouth opened and closed, a plump hand waved about in the air to emphasize a point, and the slightly bulging eyes glittered as she elaborated to her captive audience of one.