Listening in the Dusk Read Free Page B

…”
    “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