The Listening Silence

by Marie Joseph

  It was his home life that seemed to be tumbling in disorder around him. Josie, his wife, well, she had always had a hard side to her but now her tongue was as sharp as a new razor-blade. She never wore anything but trousers, even at weekends, and in his opinion God had given women bottoms that were better disguised in a feminine flutter of skirts. She was still sleeping in John’s room, so his so-called sex life was apparently finished. He frowned as the bootlace refused to knot the way he wanted it to. Not that sex had ever bothered him much. He accepted that he wouldn’t even make the starting post as a Casanova, but damn it, at their age, should it matter?

  It wasn’t money that was the trouble either. Josie was earning more than she had ever earned at that dress shop; Sally was handing over more than a fair share of her wages, and altogether they were better off financially than they had been for years.

  He finished repairing the lace and, straightening up, met his daughter’s direct gaze. He felt a muscle twitch at the side of his jaw-line. Once he could have laid down the law and Sally would have immediately acquiesced, listening to him in her own special way, nodding in agreement and seeing his point of view. She had been his beloved daughter, the apple of his eye, the veritable corner-stone of his existence. The joy of his life, he supposed wryly.

  They had never meant to be a divided family, but from early on it had always been Josie and John, Sally and him. Siding two against two, even matching in appearance. John was the one who had inherited his mother’s colouring and flippant way of speaking, while Sally took after her dad, dark of hair and eyes, with a bright untutored intelligence that no university course could have instilled in her. Now she never seemed to want to talk to him about the books she read, or have him explain the way the war was going. The war for Sally was that unseen American and his avalanche of letters and airgraphs plopping through the letter-box almost every flippin’ day.

  Now he had to talk to Barbara Shawfield at the office when he wanted to discuss what he had heard on the wireless. Her comments on what Professor Joad had said on ‘Any Questions?’ last week about his disbelief in astrology had put that old know-all into place. Barbara was a great believer in the stars. She had told him that he was a typical Capricorn, stolid and set in his ways, a man of integrity.

  Stanley blinked. He wished Sally would stop looking at him like that as if she found him wanting. All he wanted was a bit of peace in his own home, his meals on the table at the proper time, his work and his Home Guard duties, and his women-folk sticking to the roles the good Lord had intended them to play.

  ‘I’m going to London,’ Sally said clearly.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ Stanley said with equal clarity.

  ‘You can’t stop me.’ Sally knew this was the wrong tack to take, but said it just the same.

  ‘Can’t I?’ Stanley widened his eyes at her, trying to keep his voice light. ‘Till you’re twenty-one, my lass, I can stop you doing anything. While you’re under my roof you do as I say.’

  Sally put a hand to her forehead in a dramatic gesture that sent a flick of irritation across her father’s face.

  ‘You’re not exactly Mr Barrett of Wimpole Street, you know, Dad. Queen Victoria’s been dead a long time. It’s nineteen forty-one, remember? And there’s a war on. Lee may be posted overseas when he joins his squadron, then soon he’ll be on operations.’ Her soft voice was suddenly bleak. ‘The odds are so much against them once they start that.’ She got up and actually twisted her hands together in distress. ‘Look what happened to David Turner. We were only friends, me and David, but I keep thinking about him, and I wish sometimes I’d been kinder to him. But with Lee, I don’t intend to have any regrets, not now, or ever. I shall wait until he sends for me, then I will go.’

  There was a vulnerability about her that made Stanley’s heart contract with love. She seemed to have grown thinner lately, and her eyes had a bruised look about them as if she hadn’t been sleeping too well. Suddenly he was blustering: ‘You won’t be safe on the train on your own.’ There was an infinite compassion in his expression. ‘What about the announcements? You won’t be able to hear them. And the stations – they’ve taken all the names down.’

  ‘I won’t have to change trains. You know that. I’ll get there all right.’ Joining her hands around her knees she rocked herself backwards and forwards. ‘I know what’s bothering you, Dad, but I have to make my own way. You can’t keep me wrapped up in cotton wool just because I’m deaf.’ She stopped the rocking and looked straight at him. ‘You’re only really happy when I’m not going anywhere, aren’t you? I can go to work and I can come home, but you’d like to keep me where you have your eye on me.’ Her voice rose uncontrollably the way it always did when she was troubled. ‘You have to stand back from me, Dad! If I hurt myself or make mistakes, or get lost, then that’s fine, because the next time I’ll do better. You have to stop smothering me!’

  ‘Then I’m coming with you.’ From the depths of his abject misery and misunderstanding, Stanley blundered into the unforgivable. ‘I’m not having you standing up in the corridor of a train all that way. I’m not having you landing down in London with nowhere to stay, finding yourself marooned on Euston Station in the black-out with your luggage and that American chap not turning up. If you’re set on going then I’ll take you, see you settled in a decent hotel, then when you’ve introduced me to this Yank and I’ve sized him up I’ll come back.’

  Immediately, when it was too late, he realized his mistake. Sally jumped to her feet, her rosy cheeks even redder with anger. Her voice, so carefully monitored most of the time, came out in a hoarse wail.

  ‘You’re the deaf one, not me! You haven’t been listening to a word I said! I am nineteen! If I’d been a boy I could be flying a plane or serving in a submarine! As it is I could be married, with a baby, or even two or three! I could be working away from home, living in a room and fending for myself. I’m grown up, Dad, and you want to take me on a train, and hold my hand, and keep my ticket safe in your wallet … Oh, God, I can just imagine the look on Lee’s face if I turned up with you in tow! It’s laughable! If it wasn’t so pathetic it would be funny!’

  Then just as quickly as her anger had flared, it seemed to evaporate. Sally shook her head from side to side, more in pity than harsh despair. ‘Oh, Dad,’ she whispered, her voice at its normal low pitch again, ‘those days when you could boss me around have gone. I am going to think for myself, and act for myself, and if it makes you unhappy then I am truly sorry.’

  There was an incipient bald patch on the top of his head; there was a sleeveless fair-isle pullover underneath the open battle-dress top, and these two homely ordinary things wrenched at her heart-strings. Conditioned over the years of her childhood into wanting to please this beloved father of hers, Sally was finding her metamorphosis into defiance difficult to cope with. But the war was going on and on. David Turner was just one of the growing list of casualties, and she was sick of the grey drabness of everything. It was unpatriotic to grumble, people were ordered to smile and take it on the chin, but Lee was back in England, he wanted to see her and not even her father’s obvious distress was going to stand in her way.

  ‘I’ll finish unravelling this jumper, then I’ll come up,’ she said tonelessly. ‘I never liked this lacey pattern anyway. I’m not a very good make-do-and-mender, but I’m saving my coupons to buy a new swagger coat for when I go down to London. I don’t suppose …?’

  ‘You can have any coupons I’ve got left.’ Stanley got up from his chair and stood looking down at the daughter he had once been able to guide and advise knowing with certainty that she would listen and see his point. Now there was this unknown Yank who only needed to crook his little finger to have her rushing to meet him. ‘I don’t know what your mother will have to say,’ he muttered.

  Realizing Sally hadn’t heard, he stretched out a hand to touch her wrist in the old familiar way, drawing it back as he changed his mind. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He turned and limped towa
rds the door, leaving his boots set side by side beside his chair.

  ‘Oh, to hell with it all!’ he whispered as he climbed the stairs, and his tone held a bitterness alien even to his own ears.

  ‘Is your journey really necessary?’

  The phrase, first dreamed up at the beginning of the war to discourage civil servants from going home for Christmas, was blazoned on a poster in the station entrance.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Sally nodded at the poster, gave a twitch to the saucy little maroon felt hat secured to her head by a band of elastic underneath her hair, adjusted the collar of her new grey swagger coat, and joined the scramble of pushing passengers on the platform.

  An hour later there was still no sign of the train, and looking round the crowded platform Sally decided that they would be lucky if even half of them got on the train, let alone found a seat.

  There were servicemen dragging bursting kitbags, civilians lugging cases, and a general air of good temper and resigned tolerance that made Sally, in a sudden unexpected pricking behind her eyelids, feel proud that she was British.

  The euphoric mood was short-lived as the London train backed into the station. Even before it jerked to a halt the smiling Britishers turned into a frightening shoving mob, elbowing their way into the compartments. Hesitating only briefly, Sally dived in, clutching at the carefully positioned hat as she felt it knocked sideways. A soldier trod on her foot whilst another pushed her roughly from behind. With one foot precariously on the high step Sally could see that the compartments all along the carriage were full, with servicemen and women hurling their kitbags onto the racks and claiming their seats in a spirit of good old ‘Bugger you, Jack, I’m all right.’

  With travellers surging in through the other doors, Sally saw with dismay that the corridor was already packed solid.

  ‘They’ll have to get off,’ somebody shouted, and as she lip-read the command Sally’s mind was made up.

  Using her case as a battering ram, she barged her way into the train. Three soldiers opened a door and almost fell inside. The first one, with a smile of triumph, took up his position on the lavatory seat, and the other two sat down on the floor, tipped their forage caps over their foreheads and settled themselves for sleep. Sally, taking advantage of the manoeuvre, stood with her back against the door jamb, planted her feet apart and prepared to stand firm. The seething mass trying to get past her all seemed to have extra-sharp elbows or kitbags with unidentified objects which jabbed into her, but, red in the face, her small jaw set in fierce lines of determination, she refused to move.

  Over two hundred miles away down in London, Lee would be waiting for her, and if they tried to make her get off the train then it would have to be on a stretcher, she decided, because they would have to render her unconscious first!

  ‘The whistle’s been blown, so why the flamin’ heck don’t they set off?’ A sailor with a pock-marked face lumped his kitbag on top of Sally’s case. ‘At this rate it’ll be dark before we get to London and I’ve a train to catch to Southampton. Turn your back, love. The Gestapo’s here!’

  The guard, making the most of his hour of glory, was walking down the long platform, chivvying people off the train. ‘We can’t set off, tha knows,’ he shouted. ‘There’s some of you lot come for the train after this. There’s some of you only going as far as Crewe,’ he scolded. ‘Now come on, missus, it’s servicemen first. There’s a war on, tha knows!’

  ‘Who d’you think you are? Adolf Hitler?’ the woman shouted back.

  At last the train started, leaving a furious knot of people on the platform. Sally breathed a deep sigh of relief. Standing all the way to London was nothing compared to the unthinkable possibility of watching the train depart without her. She felt feverish and light-headed. The train made two unscheduled stops even before reaching Crewe, and unbelievably a few more passengers squashed themselves into the corridor, treading on other people’s feet, arms pinioned to their sides, leaving Sally propped against the lavatory door, her head swimming. She began to feel sicker by the minute.

  But all the time the train was getting closer to London, its wheels clattering over the rails, taking her nearer to Lee, now Pilot Officer Lee Willis, a man she hardly knew. A foreigner, in spite of his British uniform.

  When darkness fell the compartments were lit dimly by a boxed-in central light fitting. Blinds were drawn down over the windows, but in the corridors the darkness was almost complete. From time to time a fairly steady stream of passengers literally fought their way to the toilet, forcing the three soldiers to emerge from their comparative comfort to perch on top of a handy kitbag or weld themselves to a standing passenger until their bolt-hole became vacant once again.

  Sally had long ago given up all hope of trying to reach her sandwiches in the case now hidden beneath piles of other people’s luggage, and the sailor had given up trying to make conversation with her. Mistakenly deciding that her small set face and lowered eyes were indicative of shyness or reserve, he slid down to rest his forehead on his knees and fell into a jerking, open-mouthed sleep.

  At long last the small stations of Hertfordshire were gliding past the darkened windows. The train whistled its way through the Watford tunnel, and the weary dishevelled passengers began to stretch cramped limbs. Sally felt beads of sweat form on her upper lip. Soon she would be seeing him, and whatever boats she had decided to burn were about to burst into flame.

  Moving like a sleep-walker she was carried along the platform by the stream of exhausted travellers, her case bumping against her legs. She walked through to the ticket barrier, and out into the station foyer, and saw Lee waiting anxiously in a sea of faces, his blue eyes scanning the crowds, looking more English in his new Air Force officer’s uniform than any American had a right to do.

  ‘Hi, there, Sally, honey!’

  Suddenly overcome by a terrible shyness, she could only stare at him. ‘I’m sorry the train is so late. I don’t know if I’m right, but we seem to have come half-way round England. It was so crowded you wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘So it seems.’

  She looked very different in her grey swagger coat swinging from a yoke across the shoulders. The last time he had seen her she had been wearing a flowered summer dress with short puffed sleeves. Her hair had cascaded down her shoulders in wispy curls, but now she had rolled it up somehow underneath the saucer hat, making her look older, and so much a stranger that his heart sank.

  ‘You look real smart,’ he said. ‘Give me your bag and we’ll go find a cab.’

  She handed the case over, then fell into step by his side. He seemed to be shorter in height than she remembered, and broader of shoulder. His heavy greatcoat was almost Russian-style in length, and his new cap was already squashed down and perched at a jaunty angle on his corn-yellow hair. He had a rolling way of walking, almost as if he were walking on the shifting deck of a ship. Sally frowned and chewed her lip.

  Why had she never noticed these things before? She felt a weight of depression settle on her shoulders. His letters had been just words, after all, making her laugh, brightening the grey drabness of her days. Now she was painfully aware of his ‘difference’. Almost as if he were a stranger. He was unlike any other man she had ever known, and having known so few it was surely pointless to begin to look for details of similarity. He was of a different breed, a stranger from a land over three thousand miles away, a land of cowboys and film stars, chewing gum and being familiar with strangers.

  ‘I could stay at the YMCA,’ she told him when they were seated side by side on the back seat of a taxi. ‘I mean the YWCA.’

  He patted her hand, his smile showing his perfect white teeth and the dimples in his cheeks. ‘It’s okay, honey. I’ve booked us into a hotel. Separate rooms. Okay?’

  They were half-way through their meal, sitting alone in a corner of the dining-room, eating fried spam and mashed potatoes flanked by watery Brussels sprouts, when Sally looked across at him and recognized with relief the crazy lau
ghing American she had remembered from what she would always think of as their own bluebell summer.

  ‘What have they done to this so-called food?’ he grinned, spearing a yellowed sprout on his fork. ‘I know a charcoal-grilled steak can’t be come by, but do they have to boil the stuffing out of the darned things?’ He put the sprout back onto his plate. ‘Okay, okay, don’t tell me. There’s a war on.’ His eyes twinkled. ‘What have you done to your hair, honey? For a minute I couldn’t believe it was you back at the railroad station.’

  ‘Tucked it into a top cut from one of my stockings. An old laddered pair,’ Sally confided, then she blushed. ‘Thanks for the lovely presents in my room. I’ve never seen stockings like that before, and the … the other things are beautiful.’

  ‘I should think so considering what I had to pay on them to get them into the country.’ Lee pushed his plate to one side and leaned his elbows on the table. ‘I had to guess your size for the nightgown and the slip. I hope they fit okay.’

  Sally lowered her eyes to her plate as she thought about the oyster satin nightgown, cut on the cross, with a halter neck. She remembered seeing Betty Grable in a film wearing one very similar, or was it Veronica Lake? The cream winceyette pyjamas sprigged with forget-me-knots in her case were hardly to be compared.

  ‘Oh Lord,’ she thought, and wished she wasn’t quite so hungry. It was embarrassing eating so heartily with those blue eyes watching her every mouthful.

  ‘What are we going to do tomorrow?’ she asked. ‘You won’t believe it, but this is the first time I’ve been to London. North Wales or the Yorkshire coast have been as far as my father was prepared to go.’ She smiled. ‘He looks on London as the city of vice. Could we walk round the West End? I’d love to see the shops in Oxford and Regent Streets.’

  ‘If you’d like to do that, honey, then that’s what we’ll do.’ Lee reached across the table and took her hand. ‘There’s no need to be afraid of me, Sally. I don’t know what your father has told you about Americans, but we’re not all hell-bent on stealing a young maiden’s virtue.’ He jiggled her hand up and down. ‘You look exhausted. My guess is, the right place for you right now is bed. Then tomorrow we’ll start out fresh. Okay?’