Listening in the Dusk

by Celia Fremlin

  And at that point, she heard the knock on the front door. Really loud, and once again Mary’s heart was beating wildly, irrationally; and she tiptoed to her door, full of dread, opening it softly, just a crack, to try and make out what was going on.

  Her landlady answering the door, of course. Voices. The landlady’s voice buoyantly welcoming — as it always was, to absolutely anyone, in absolutely any situation — and then the other voice, the strange one. Yes, strange. A total stranger.

  So that was all right. It was nothing to do with her. All the same, when she heard the double set of footsteps beginning to mount the stairs, she found herself holding her breath again. Softly, she closed her door — it would never do to be caught peeping — and through the crack listened tensely to the approaching sounds. How far up were they coming? There were two sets of tenants on the floors below her; doubtless this was a visitor to one of them. But no … On came the laboured footsteps … past the first floor … past the second … on and on, with agonising slowness.

  Outside her door, they paused, and Mary’s heart missed a beat. It was for her, then, a visitor for her! An unwelcome visitor — for all visitors were unwelcome — and there could be no news for her but bad news.

  Mary cowered, tensing herself for the knock on her door …

  But it was all right! With a rush of utterly disproportionate thankfulness, she heard the footsteps start up again … on past her door … across the landing, and then on up the narrow uncarpeted stairs that led to the topmost part of the tall house, the lumber-room, and the big gurgling water-tank that murmured all night long, the pipes clucking and whispering up and down the old walls. She had found it frightening at first, these unfamiliar intermittent sounds when she was trying to sleep, but she had grown used to them after a while, and they didn’t frighten her any more.

  It was everything else that frightened her now.

  Chapter 2

  On the third landing, Alice paused to remove her rain-hat and shake loose her damp hair. Ahead of her, the fourth and last flight of stairs was uncarpeted, and already awash with darkness. Through the small, grimy skylight the fading remnants of daylight filtered down to show up the worst of the cobwebs and the peeling wallpaper; and for a moment Alice felt a wild impulse to turn and run, her heels clattering first on these bare wooden treads, and then slithering, stumbling over worn stair-carpet, round and round, down and down, to the narrow entrance-hall with its clutter of bicycles, free newspapers and unclaimed letters, and then out through the front door, back into the rainy December street.

  She didn’t, of course. Too many things were against it, some of them harshly practical, others verging on the idiotic; and, as commonly happens at such moments, it was one of the idiotic ones that forced the decision on her.

  Simply, she didn’t want to hurt the feelings of this vague and amiable person in orange slacks (if they were orange, it was hard to tell in this light) who was labouring up the stairs ahead of her.

  Unlike most landladies, Mrs Harman (“Call me Hetty,” she’d urged, almost before Alice was through the front door) was making not the smallest attempt to minimise the deficiencies of the accommodation she had on offer. On the contrary, she seemed bent on making the worst of it, even, at the beginning, declaring it unfit for human habitation.

  “No, I’m awfully sorry, I’ve nothing left at all,” she’d said at first, shaking her mop of rust-coloured hair and blinking sleepily, as if just roused from a belated afternoon nap; and then, perhaps taking pity on Alice’s look of weary disappointment, she amended: “Well … That is … But it’s an awful room, you know, it really is. Right up at the top of the house, no cooking facilities, not even a gas-ring, and the bathroom three flights down. I don’t really have the nerve to let it at all, the rain coming in under the slates like it does in winter-time … Well, it is winter-time, isn’t it, right now? It’ll be at its worst. And it’s not furnished, either, just an old chair or two, and a grotty old divan bed that’s got shoved up there because of no one wanting to sleep on it. It’s probably damp right through by now.

  “And then there’s the junk, you wouldn’t believe it, everyone shoves their junk up there, I can’t stop them, you know how it is. I keep meaning to have a good clear out one day, tell them, once and for all, anything that’s not gone by Sunday, it’ll go straight to Oxfam! ‘OK, Hetty,’ they’ll say. ‘We’ll get on to it right away, no problem!’ And of course there is no problem, not for them, because they don’t do anything. And Oxfam would never look at it anyway, a pile of rubbish like that, and half of it too heavy to shift. Believe it or not, my dear, there’s half a motor bike up there. More than half, actually,” (here she glanced a little anxiously at Alice, to see how she was taking it), “two wheels, anyway, as well as no end of bars and bits and bobs of metal. And I can’t tell you how many clapped-out TVs there are up there, I’ve given up counting. And then all the labour-saving stuff, mixers that don’t mix, full of fluff and dried-up bits of food; slicers that don’t slice … Things with their handles missing, or their insides, or something. It’s enough to make you weep!”

  Actually, Alice had felt much more like weeping before hearing this tale of woe. A list of disamenities on this scale had a sort of bizarre splendour of its own, and was oddly cheering.

  “Well, let me see it, anyway,” she said. “I’m not looking for luxury, you know, and I might be able to stack things up somehow, make a nice little area to live in …”

  “Oh, do you think you might?” Hetty’s face lit up. “That’d be a grand thing for me. I’d feel really good if that room could be a room again and not a rubbish-tip. Living under a rubbish-tip, it makes you quite depressed sometimes, when you think about it. Well, here goes; you’re the first person I’ve even dared show it to!”

  She made it sound like a singular honour, and Alice felt quite absurdly elated, as if she had at last come top in something. After all the months of coming bottom, in nearly every test that life can set up, it was really quite exhilarating.

  Afterwards, looking back, Alice realised that this was the moment when her decision was made; the moment when she suddenly became irrevocably committed to this room, whatever it turned out to be like. At the time, she’d imagined that she was still undecided, still waiting to make a rational choice after having inspected the room.

  “I’ll fix a light bulb, of course,” Hetty was saying as they reached the shadowy top landing. “I’ve got one somewhere, isn’t it funny how the bulbs you’ve got are always either fifteens or hundred and fifties, nothing in between. I keep buying sixties and hundreds, but can I ever find one when I want it? I can not! Do you think it’s like that for everyone?” Without waiting for Alice to answer this possibly profound philosophical question, Hetty continued: “Well, here we are now. Just take a look!” Here she flung open a door, or, rather, tried to fling it open, but after the first six inches it stuck groaningly on a bulge of lino swollen up with the damp. She had to go down on her knees, reach through the crack and hammer with her clenched fist at the offending bulge, until at last the door could be edged open.

  “You see?” she exclaimed, puffing to her feet and brushing ineffectually at the knees of her orange trousers. “That’s just typical! Nothing works up here! Nothing!” She spoke with gloomy triumph, in the tones of one who has at last won a long and closely-reasoned argument.

  “Damn, there isn’t a light here either!” she exclaimed, flipping ineffectually at the switch just inside the door. “What a nuisance! Now you can’t see properly how frightful it is!”

  Alice peered into the shadowed spaces ahead. Such light as filtered in from the fast-fading afternoon came through a small dormer window set high in the sloping attic ceiling, and her first impression was of a monstrous army standing to attention, shield-to-shield in silent battle-order. Huge shapes loomed; as her eyes became accustomed to the darkness she could see the floor at her feet awash with old newspapers and cardboard boxes.

  Discouraging. But so what
? Discouragement is hardly relevant to one whose courage is already just about drained away.

  “How much?” Alice found herself asking, and Hetty gave quite a little start of surprise, as if taken unawares.

  “How much what?” she began, and then gave an apologetic little laugh. “How much rent, do you mean? Well, it’s a problem, isn’t it? I don’t know how I’ve the nerve to charge anything for such a hell-hole, but on the other hand … Look, what do you think, Alice? What would you charge, if it was yours?”

  It was heart-warming to be called ‘Alice’ after such short acquaintance; and the more so after all the weeks of formal letters from lawyers starting ‘Dear Mrs Saunders’, a name which anyway seemed to belong to her less and less as the day of the divorce approached.

  By now, she felt that her prospective landlady was almost an old friend, and she tried to answer the question in the simple, unembarrassed way in which it had been asked.

  “I do see what you mean about the — well — all that,” she said, gesturing vaguely into the darkness. “But, on the other hand, to have any sort of room in London these days, any sort of a roof over one’s head … Well, it’s quite something, isn’t it, to get anything …?

  “What I’d charge? Well, I think I’d see what the person could afford, the kind of person, I mean, who’d be wanting a room like this. I’d try to find out how desperate they were,” she continued, and then wished she hadn’t. It not only sounded rather rude, but it drew quite unnecessary attention to the question of her own desperation, and the reasons for it.

  However, Hetty seemed unperturbed, and certainly not offended. A somewhat untypical landlady-tenant argument ensued, with the landlady citing all the manifold disadvantages of the place, and Alice countering these as best she could by extolling the quiet and privacy afforded by an attic and enthusing about the superb view. (Well, this high up you surely could see something?)

  “Oh well,” said Hetty finally, “I’ll tell you what. Let’s leave it vague for the moment, shall we, and any time I’m short I’ll ask you for something towards the rates, or something. Or if the electricity bill is too frightful … That sort of thing. How about that?”

  For a moment, Alice had an alarming vision of what Rodney would have said to a business arrangement of this nature. But this was followed almost immediately by the realisation that it didn’t matter what Rodney would have said. Not any more. She could say ‘Yes’ to anything she liked now.

  So, ‘Yes’ she said, and it was like a signpost pointing to the unknown. It was wild, and terrible, and exhilarating, like being cast adrift in an open boat.

  “Yes, that will be just fine,” she said.

  Chapter 3

  When she came back about two hours later, with her suitcase and her set of Jane Austens, Alice found that her landlady had added what she could in the way of homely touches by fixing a hundred and fifty watt bulb in the light socket, and throwing a dirty lace bed-cover over the dismembered motor bike. In the relentless glare from the low, sloping ceiling the room looked derelict beyond description. Each broken-down discarded object now obtruded not only itself but also a bizarre and jagged shadow cast by the low-slung naked bulb; the whole presenting a sinister tangle of inter-lacing darkness, black on black, far into the narrowing recesses of the room where the ceiling sloped almost to the floor. It could have been a film set for one of those Sci.Fi. movies about the collapse of technological civilisation: enlarged to monster size on the big screen, it would look like the whole world crumbling to ruin. And there in the middle of it was Alice, the last humanoid left alive after whatever-it-was, inter-planetary war, or something. Only of course in the film she wouldn’t have been a deserted wife, pushing forty, hunched into a winter coat and boots, mouth ugly with anxiety and cold. She would have been a dazzling blonde in a bikini, her lithe body tanned to perfection and impervious to danger, cold and discomfort as it preened and cavorted its way to pre-ordained happiness.

  Pre-ordained happiness. Not so long ago, Alice had thought — indeed had taken for granted — that happiness was pre-ordained for her, too; that she had a right to it, somehow, as a consequence of all the pleasant, uneventful years during which disasters had only happened to other people. She had got into the university of her choice; had graduated from it with a first-class degree; had found a satisfying job in a school where they actually wanted a teacher of Classics. She had married the man she loved, and found herself totally happy with him. After such a run of good luck, it was hard not to feel like a fully paid-up member of some mysterious élite to whom Providence had granted special immunity, and to feel correspondingly outraged when Providence suddenly reneges on the bargain.

  It’s not fair! Alice found herself silently protesting as she stared at her new home under the cruel light. It’s not fair! This is something that can’t happen to me!

  For several seconds, she felt like flinging herself on to the narrow sagging divan that flanked one wall, covering her eyes with both hands against the glare, and screaming aloud until somebody came and did something. But of course no one would. Or, rather, they would come, and would do something, but inevitably it would be something intolerable to her pride.

  Pride was the only thing she had left now (apart from the Jane Austens), and having hung on to it so grimly through all the bitter weeks since Rodney’s ultimatum, it would be absurd to squander it now.

  Or had it, rather, been absurd to hang on to it in the first place? Why had she not done what the other forty-ish wives of her acquaintance had done, and fought (through solicitors, of course), for every penny she could screw out of her errant husband, for every stick of furniture, and above all for the right to stay in her comfortable, well-equipped home with its fitted carpets, its constant hot water, its books, its pictures, its plump cushions and softly-shaded lighting …?

  She could have demanded all these things, quite easily. Rodney would have been reasonable; her own solicitors would have been pleased, and so, she suspected, would Rodney’s, committed though they were to fighting such claims. They would have known where they were then: they could have set in motion the familiar machinery for bargaining with bitter, rapacious wives — the sort of wives they best understood — and after the long, formal wrangling, everyone would have got their rights. Or what they wanted. Or what they ought to want. Or something …

  But she hadn’t given them the satisfaction, none of them, neither the friends nor the foes.

  “I’m not taking anything!” she had cried. “Not a penny of your money, not a stick of furniture! Nothing!”

  And out she had walked. With nothing. Well, nothing that she couldn’t carry to the bus-stop in her own two hands, anyway.

  To what purpose? In the interests of whose happiness? Certainly not Rodney’s, who would have vastly preferred a fair — even a generous — settlement. And as to her own happiness? Well, look at her now, spread-eagled on a damp, lumpy mattress in a derelict junk-room, icy cold, trying not to scream.

  You’re crazy! You want your head examined! her friends had said when they heard of her plans, or rather, her lack of plans. How do you think you’re going to manage? they’d said. Where can you go, anyway? How do you think you’re going to get another job at your age? And it’s not fair on Rodney, they’d pointed out, when all other arguments had failed. It’s making him feel awful — this last from her sister-in-law.

  Well, OK, so it wasn’t fair on Rodney. Why should it be? And of course it made him feel awful. Was this, perhaps, the whole object of the exercise? She had chosen to think of her motive as pride, but was it, rather, revenge? The subtle, sophisticated revenge that a woman like her, an intellectual sort of a woman, was turning out to be rather good at? The woman she had become, that is. The woman she had been only a few months ago was immeasurably nicer in every way, and would never have dreamed of hurting anyone deliberately, let alone her own husband.

  It had been a good marriage, despite being childless. Or maybe because of being childless, each of th
em having no one but the other to please. Over the years, they’d had lots of fun together as well as love; indeed, it was the memory of the fun, and the betrayal of it, that hurt even more than the betrayal of love. She felt that she could perhaps have forgiven Rodney’s loving another woman: it was the drying-up of intimate, long-standing jokes that hurt most; the blank, uncomprehending stare with which he began to greet her amusing little anecdotes which would once have sent them into fits of shared laughter. This was the real betrayal. This was the pain which had lodged in her heart like a fishbone in one’s throat, and would not go away.

  The most recent of their shared jokes was the one that hurt most to look back on.

  “Watch out!” she remembered calling across the bedroom to Rodney one summer Saturday morning, her voice full of laughter. “Watch out! She’s there again!”

  “Oh God, no! Where?” he’d answered, laughing likewise; and together they’d peered from behind the bedroom curtains, giggling like schoolchildren, as they watched the lumpy figure in its too-youthful summer dress sauntering by with would-be nonchalance, looking everywhere except up at the windows of the Saunders’ home.

  Ivy Budd. A silly enough name in its own right, and conducive to a certain amount of idle mockery, even if it hadn’t been compounded by a degree of actual silliness almost beyond belief. Since parting from a rather shadowy Mr Budd some two or three years ago — whether by divorce or by some other form of natural wastage was unclear — Ivy had developed a forlorn and hopeless crush on Rodney Saunders, trailing him along the corridors of the polytechnic where they both worked, hanging about in the car-park at the end of the day in the hopes of seeing him come out and get into his car: even — who knows? — cherishing the even fainter hope that he might notice her, and offer her a lift to the station.