Listening in the Dusk (3 page)

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 them 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.

Which, in the early days, he had quite often done, as befitted a friendly colleague as yet unaware of his passenger’s girlish and unrequited passion.

It was Alice who had noted the symptoms first. She’d been walking up the road with the weekend shopping one Saturday morning when she’d encountered — slightly to her surprise, for the quiet residential road with its bright front gardens and flowering cherry-trees didn’t really lead to anywhere — this colleague of Rodney’s whom she knew at the time only very slightly.

“Hello,” she’d said, with the small polite smile one gives to near-strangers; and was about to pass on without further exchange, when the woman came to an awkward and jerky halt right in front of her, gulped uncomfortably and burst into rapid speech.

“I … I’m just on my way to post a letter,” she gabbled, displaying the envelope with a flourish as if it was a key exhibit for the Defence. “I only meant … That is, I thought if I could maybe catch the midday post …”

Vaguely puzzled by the gratuitous volley of information, Alice was at a loss for a reply. Why on earth should the woman find it necessary to explain to a near stranger her reason for walking peaceably along a public highway?

Oh, well. No business of mine, Alice had reflected, and passed on with a vague smile. She had thought no more about it until the following Saturday, when, looking out of the bedroom window she noticed once again this same woman, strolling, this time, at a leisurely pace as if waiting for someone to catch her up. But no one did, and not many minutes later, back she came again. Her pace was that of someone out for a stroll in the spring sunshine, and yet there was something intent and purposeful about her, an air of expectancy. The day was warm, and she was wearing a short cotton dress from which her muscular thighs projected like roof-supports, while her arms, scarlet with sunburn, hung from the sleeveless garment heavily, and somehow helplessly, as if they didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing. No handbag. No load of weekend shopping. Just two thick, freckled arms with hands on the end of them.

“That woman from the Fine Arts Department,” she remarked to Rodney at lunch-time, “Ivy somebody — the one you sometimes give lifts to — has she come to live in our road, or something?”

“Ivy Budd? The one with the legs? No, I don’t think so. Not that I know of. Why?”

“Well, I keep seeing her around, that’s all. It seems funny, if she still lives over in Fulham. I saw her last Saturday, she said she’d come to post a letter. Can you credit it, travelling all the way from Fulham to post a letter in our pillar-box instead of in her own!”

Rodney shrugged. He didn’t seem very interested, and merely murmured that there were no zoning regulations about
pillar-boxes,
were there? Anyone could post anything anywhere they liked, and anyway it takes all sorts, especially in the Fine Arts Department …

The next Saturday, there she was again, hanging about on the other side of the road watching Rodney cut the front hedge; and finally when she crossed the road to ask him, blushing furiously, for a spray of the cut privet to take home with her, at this, even Rodney was a bit taken aback.

“A spray of
privet
,” he speculated over lunch. “What on earth can she want it for? I started asking her, does she keep
stick-insects
? — but she seemed terrified. She just gave a great gulp, and ran off down the road.
Ran
!
Did I say something wrong, do you suppose? Is ‘stick-insect’ the latest rude word, or
something
?”

Alice laughed. “She’s potty about you, darling, that’s all it is,” she explained. “She’s going to press that privet spray between sheets of blotting-paper, and keep it for ever! She’s got a crush on you, like a lovesick teenager.”

“
Teenager.
She’s fifty if she’s a day,” protested Rodney — though actually she wasn’t, she was only forty-four, as Alice was to discover later. “Are you seriously suggesting that a grown woman …?”

“Yes, I am,” Alice insisted. “It’s not as extraordinary as you seem to think. A crush isn’t peculiar to teenagers, you know. It’s a kind of loving that people go in for when the object of their love is unattainable. It can happen at any age, in fact it’s quite common, to judge by what one hears. Middle-aged women and their doctors. Vicars and devoted female members of their congregations …”

“Well, I’m not a bloody vicar,” Rodney grumbled. “Vicars are paid to be pestered, the topping-up of half-empty souls is their job. But it’s not mine, and I’m damned if I’m going to be
press-ganged
into it! I’ll take out an injunction against her if she’s not careful!”

But very soon irritation gave way to amusement, and he and Alice spent many an odd minute giggling over the excesses of his undeclared admirer. Indeed, it would have been difficult to be other than amused by some of the antics the love-lorn lady got up to in her attempts to engineer an “accidental” meeting with her beloved. Popping out from the shelter of some doorway as he came by; lurking in the nearby telephone box watching for him to
come out into the front garden so that she could happen to walk past and say “Hello”, in the tremulous expectation of hearing him say “Hello” back. Which, of course, he had to do; and though this was usually the extreme limit of the exchange, it seemed to suffice. On such insubstantial nourishment can an insubstantial passion thrive, Alice used to reflect, watching the ungainly figure fairly prancing down the road after one of these encounters, all lit up with unspeakable joy, with the sound of that perfunctory “Hello” still echoing in her ears.

Part of the fun was the way Alice would tease him about his “conquest”, and he in his turn would appeal to Alice, in
mock-terror
, for her protection.

“Go and have a dekko, darling,” he would urge, with exaggerated wariness. “See if I can mow the front lawn this morning without getting raped!” and Alice, with barely
suppressed
giggles, would peer up and down the road and report that the coast was clear, or otherwise.

“She’ll be writing you anonymous poems next!” Alice
laughingly
predicted one Saturday; and lo and behold, that was exactly what happened.

They would arrive by post, and Rodney and Alice would find themselves in fits of laughter, reading out to one another lines about love so true being spurned by you, or about hearts still yearning and passion burning.

“And stomachs turning,” Alice remembered improvising, and together they had leaned back against the cushions and laughed until they cried.