Listening in the Dusk Read Free Page A

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, youknow, 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