Listen to the Voice

by Iain Crichton Smith

  The little girl Sheila was taking large steps to keep up with the two of them, now and again taking her mother’s hand and gazing gravely up into her face as if she were silently interrogating her, and then withdrawing her hand quickly and moving away. She talked hardly at all and was very serious and self-possessed. In fact it seemed to her mother that she was more like what she imagined a writer ought to be than Hugh was, for he didn’t seem to notice anything but wandered about absent-mindedly, never listening to anything she was saying and never calling her attention to any interesting sight in the world around him. His silence was profound. She had never seen anyone who paid so little attention to the world: she sometimes thought that if a woman with green hair and a green face walked past him he wouldn’t notice. That surely was not the way a writer ought to be.

  Anyway he wasn’t a very successful writer as far as sales went. He had had two small books of poetry published by printing presses no one had ever heard of except himself, and had sold one short story to an equally unknown magazine. She had long ago given up trying to understand his poetry. He himself wavered between thinking that he was a good poet as yet unrecognised and a black despair which made her impatient and often angry with him. In any case the people they lived among didn’t know about writing and certainly couldn’t have cared less about poetry: if you didn’t appear on TV you weren’t quoted. They lived in a council house in a noisy neighbourhood which seemed to have more than the average share of large dogs and small grubby children who stared at you as you went by.

  The fair was really immense and she looked down at her small daughter now and again to make sure that she hadn’t got lost. She sometimes worried about her daughter’s silences, thinking that perhaps they were a protection against the two of them.

  Hugh said to her, ‘We could spend a lot of money here, do you know that? There are so many things.’

  She was suddenly impatient. ‘Well, we only get out once in a while.’ She knew that Hugh worried about money because he himself hardly earned anything, and also because his nature was fundamentally less generous than her own. He had given up working two years before, just to give himself a chance to see if he could succeed as a writer. Before that he had worked in a library, but he complained that working in a library was too much like writing, and in any case he was bored by it and the ignorant people he met. As far as she could see nothing had in fact happened since he gave up writing, for when he wasn’t writing he was reading, and he hardly ever went out. He would sit at his typewriter in the morning but most of the time he didn’t write anything or if he did he threw it in the bucket. When she came home at five she would find the bucket full of small balls of paper. She herself knew very little about literature and couldn’t judge whether such work as he completed was of the slightest value. She sometimes wondered whether she was losing her respect for him: his writing she often thought was a device for avoiding the problems of the real world. On the other hand her own more passionate nature dominated his colder one. Before she met him she had gone out with other men but her resolute self-willed character had led to quarrels of such intensity and fierceness that she knew they would eventually sour any permanent relationship.

  As they walked through the fair, pushing their way among crowds of people, they arrived at a stall where one could throw three darts at three different dartboards, and if one got a bull each time would win a prize.

  ‘Would you like to try this?’ she asked him.

  ‘Not me. You try it.’

  ‘All right then,’ she said. ‘I’m going to try it.’ She took the three darts from the rather sour-looking unsmiling woman who looked after the stall and stood steady in front of the board. She was always a little dramatic, wanting to be the centre of attention, though she didn’t realise this herself. She didn’t know about darts, but she would try to get the bulls, for she was very determined and she didn’t see why she couldn’t throw the darts as well as anybody else.

  ‘Ten pence,’ said the woman handing her the darts with a bored expression.

  A number of other people were there, and she smiled at them as if saying, ‘Look at me. I don’t know anything about darts but I’m willing to try. Aren’t I brave?’ She threw the first dart and missed the board altogether. She laughed, and threw the second dart which this time hit the outer rim of the board. She looked proudly round but her husband’s face was turned away, as if he was angry or ashamed of her. She drew back her round pretty tanned arm and threw the dart and it landed quivering in a place near the bull. She turned to him in triumph but he had moved on, little Sheila clutching his hand. There was some scattered ironic applause from the crowd and she bowed to them with a flourish.

  When she came up to him, he said, ‘You didn’t do so badly. But these darts are rigged. Some of them don’t stick in the board. All the fairs are the same. They cheat you.’

  ‘Oh cheer up,’ she said, ‘cheer up. We came here to enjoy ourselves.’

  Two youths carrying football scarves in their hands went past and whistled, and Hugh’s face darkened and became stormy and set. She smiled, aware of her slim body in the yellow dress. She hoped that he wouldn’t settle into one of his gloomy childish moods and spoil the day. He looked quite funny really from the back, as he had had a haircut recently: most of the time he wore his hair long like an artist’s or a poet’s but today it was much shorter, showing more clearly the baldish patches at the back.

  ‘All fairs cheat you,’ he repeated as if he were worried about the amount of money they might spend, as if he were busy adding a sum in his mind. For a poet, she thought, he brooded rather much on money, and far more so than she did. Her philosophy was a simple one: if she had enough for the moment she was quite happy. But today she didn’t care, she actually wanted to spend money, positively and extravagantly, as if by doing so she was making a gesture of hope and joy to the world. As they were passing a machine which emitted cartons of orangeade when money was inserted she bought three and they drank them as they walked along. She threw hers away carelessly on the road, but Hugh and Sheila waited till they came to a bin before depositing theirs.

  The heat was really quite intense and she was annoyed that he showed no sign of removing his jacket.

  What had she expected from marriage? Was this really what she had expected? Before her marriage she had been lively and alert and carefree but now she wasn’t like that at all. She was always thinking before she made a remark in case she said something that would wound her husband, in case he found buried in it a sharp intended thorn which he would turn over masochistically in his tormented mind.

  They came to a shooting stall and she said, ‘Would you like to try this then?’

  ‘Well …’ She put down the fifteen pence and he took the rifle in his hand, looking at it for a moment helplessly before breaking it in two. The woman gave him some pellets which he laid beside him, inserting one in the rifle after fumbling with it shortsightedly for some time. He snapped the broken rifle together and took aim: it seemed ages before he was ready to fire. She kept saying to herself, Why are you taking so long? Why don’t you fire? Fire.

  He sighted along the rifle and fired, and one fat duck in the moving procession fell down. Again he aimed steadily and carefully, at one point putting the rifle down in order to wipe the sweat from his eyes, but then raising it and firing. He looked extremely serious and concentrated as if there was nothing in the world he liked better than shooting down these fat slow ducks passing in procession in front of him. And again he knocked one down. So he had a talent after all—another talent, that is, apart from his poetry. He steadily aimed and again hit a duck.

  ‘What do I get for that?’ he asked the woman excitedly.

  The woman pointed without speaking to a miscellany of what appeared to be undifferentiated rubbish but which on examination defined itself as clay dishes, cheap soiled brooches and a teddy bear.

  ‘Take the teddy bear,’ Ruth suggested and he took it, handing it over proudly. She in tur
n gave it to Sheila who gravely clutched it like a trophy.

  ‘I didn’t know you could shoot,’ she said as they walked along together.

  ‘I used to go to fairs when I was younger,’ he replied, but didn’t volunteer any more. She was proud that he had won a prize though it was a not very plush teddy bear and she put her arm momently in his. He seemed pleased, and relaxed a little, but she wished that he would remove his jacket.

  ‘The prize wasn’t worth the entry fee,’ he commented as they walked along.

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘All these fairs are the same. They cheat you all the time.’

  She knew that what he was saying was true but she thought that he shouldn’t be repeating it so often: after all there were more things that they could talk about than the deceitfulness of fairs. When she had married him his conversation had been less monotonous and more enterprising than this, but she supposed that sitting in the house all day, every day, there wasn’t much new experience flooding into his life.

  A woman on toppling heels and wearing blue-rinsed hair walked past them.

  ‘Did you see that woman?’ she asked. ‘Do you see her hair?’

  ‘What woman? I didn’t notice.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she sighed.

  Yet he had aimed carefully and with great concentration at the ducks as if more than anything else in the world he had wanted to shoot them down. He was pretty well as quiet as Sheila most of the time; she herself wasn’t like that at all, she liked to talk to people, that was why she worked in an office. She liked the trivia of existence. She would take stories home to him at night but he hardly ever listened to her or suddenly in the middle of what she was saying he would talk about something else. He might for instance say, ‘Do you think poetry is important?’ And she would answer, ‘I suppose so,’ and immediately afterwards, ‘Of course it is.’ And she herself would have been thinking about her boss whose wife had visited him in the office that day and how he had shown her round as if she had been a complete stranger. Or about Marjorie who had told her how she had thrown a frying pan at her husband with the eggs still in it.

  And he would say, ‘It’s just that sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I …’ They had come to the Hall of Mirrors and she said, ‘What do you think? It costs fifteen pence.’

  ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’

  Why was he always asking her what she thought? She wished he would accept some responsibility for at least part of the time. But, no, he would always ask, ‘What do you think?’ If only once he would say what he himself thought.

  She didn’t know what a Hall of Mirrors would be like but she said aloud, ‘Why not?’ It was she who always walked adventurously into the future, throwing herself on its mercy without much previous thought.

  ‘Come on then,’ she said. ‘Let’s go in.’

  Hugh and Sheila followed her into the large tent.

  It was hilarious. When they entered they saw two people whom they assumed to be husband and wife doubled over with laughter in front of a mirror, the wife pointing at her reflection and unable to utter a word. The husband glanced at the three of them and at her in particular, raising his hands to the roof as if saying, ‘Look at her.’ Hugh stared at his wife angrily and she thought, ‘To hell with him. Can’t I even look at another man?’

  Then she turned and looked in the mirror. Her body had been broadened enormously, her legs were like tree trunks, and her large head rested like a big staring boulder on massive shoulders. It was like seeing an ogre in a fairy story, in a world of glass, a short wide ogre so close to the earth that he might have been planted in it. She began to laugh and she couldn’t stop. Even Sheila was laughing and crying: ‘Look at Mummy she’s so fat.’ She looked so rustic in the mirror as if she had lived all her life on a farm and had only gained from it a disease which gave her eyes a staring thyroid look, and her body the appearance of someone suffering from advanced dropsy. The man smiled at her again—as if caught up in her simple laughter—and Hugh glowered at the two of them.

  Then he himself turned and looked in an adjacent mirror. This particular one elongated his body so that he seemed very tall and thin and his head with its frail brow was like a tall egg on top of his stalklike body. He smiled without thinking and she laughed from behind him and so did Sheila, clapping her hands, and shouting, ‘Daddy’s so thin. Look at Daddy.’ She moved from mirror to mirror. In one she was squat and heavy and lumpish, in another her legs were as thin as the stalks of plants, climbing vertically to her incredibly shrunken waist. And all the time Sheila was running from one to the other excitedly. Hugh wasn’t laughing as much as she was, he seemed rather to be studying the reflections as if they had philosophical or poetical implications.

  Most of the people in the tent were laughing so loudly and with such abandon that they were like occupants of an asylum, rocking and roaring and leaning on each other, hardly able to breathe. But though she laughed she didn’t abandon herself as helplessly as they did. And Hugh gazed at the reflections gravely as if they were pictures in an art gallery which he was trying to memorise.

  She looked down at her slim body in the yellow dress as if to make sure that she wasn’t after all the distorted woman in the mirror, the gross heavy-rooted peasant with the swollen arms and the swollen legs. And all around her was the perpetual storm of laughter and the rocking red-faced people. And suddenly she too abandoned herself, doubled over, banging her fist on her knee, shrieking hysterically at the squat figure, making faces at her. Tears came into her eyes, she wept with a laughter that was close to pain, and in the middle of it all she saw the reflection of her husband, tall and incredibly thin, with the immensely frail tall egg perched on his shoulders, gazing disapprovingly at her.

  She couldn’t stop laughing, it was as if a torrent had been released in her, as if she were a river in spate. And beside her the man and his wife were doubled over with laughter, their faces red and streaming, the man making faces in the mirror to make his reflection even more macabre.

  Finally she stood up and made her way to the door, Hugh following her with Sheila. He was silent as if he felt that she had betrayed him in some way.

  ‘Didn’t you like that?’ she asked him. ‘It was really funny.’ And she began to laugh again, this time more decorously, as if at the memory of what she had seen, rather than at its present existence. Why on earth did he never let himself go? Ever? She was angry with him and gritted her teeth. She supposed that even when he had been working in the library he had been like that, sad and serious, gravely spectacled, a source of tall disapproval when women borrowed their romances or thrillers. But how on earth had he learned to be so dull?

  The two youths who were wearing striped green and white scarves came back up the road again, shouting. Hugh pulled Sheila aside out of their way, turning his eyes from them.

  Damn you, damn you, she almost shouted, why didn’t you go straight on? But she knew that he shouldn’t have done so and that she was being unreasonable, for after all the creatures she had just seen were quarrelsome, irrational, and violent. But was that what writing did for you, sitting day after day in your room and then drawing aside from the rawness of reality when you emerged into it? Oh my God, she thought, what is it I want? Joy, life … She listened to the steady beat of the music which animated the fair. In the old days she used to dance such a lot, now she didn’t dance at all. She even knew some of the tunes they were playing, nostalgic reminders of her youth. Paper roses,paper roses, she hummed to herself, as she walked along. But why couldn’t he take off his damned jacket? There were men passing all the time with bare torsos tanned to a deep brown and looking like gipsies, while by contrast Hugh seemed so pale even in this gorgeous summer because he never left his room. Damn, damn, damn. If only one was a gipsy, wandering about the world in a coloured caravan, without destination, without worry.

  She wanted to dance, to sing, to shout out loud. But she didn’t do any of these things and she merely walked
on beside Sheila and Hugh looking as demure as any of the other women she met, a member of an apparently contented family, while all the time the beat of the music throbbed around her and inside her.

  They came to a place where there were small cars for the children to drive and she asked Sheila if she would like to go on one of them. Sheila gravely nodded and then paid the man with the money her mother gave her, stepping with the same unhurried gravity into one of the cars which ran on tracks so that there was no danger. Ruth watched her daughter as the latter gazed around her with the same unsmiling serious self-possessed expression and when one of the other little girls began to cry Sheila gazed at her with a faint distaste. It worried Ruth that her daughter should be so unsmilingly serene and while she was thinking that thought Hugh said, ‘She’s cool, isn’t she?’

  ‘Isn’t she?’ Ruth hissed back and Hugh turned to her in surprise.