Read Online The Listeners by Monica Dickens - Free Book Online

seagoing village where chestnut trees grew out of uneven brick pavements and artists real and quasi set up easels in the leafy summer streets.
    It was a town that had everything, although chunks ofit had nothing much. Singleton Court, where Paul and Alice Hammond had lived for the two years since he had been allowed the charitable chance to resign from the Cotswolds school, had not much to do with the town, the suburbs or the countryside, its flats designed with nothing much in mind but housing bodies. It was full of people like Alice who had nothing much to do but get through the day, and people like Paul who had not much choice but to survive their marriage, and hope for something better for their children.
    ‘Where have you been?’ When Paul went home for a shave, Alice was in the sitting-room, cutting her toe-nails on to the fireplace rug.
    ‘I left you a note.’
    ‘Can’t read.’
    ‘I was called out about five.’
    ‘Did somebody, as we say, “put an end to it all”?’
    ‘Almost. I think he’ll be all right. He lost a lot of blood.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘I don’t know yet. I’ll try and talk to him this evening.’
    Alice sighed. ‘Are you going to make some tea?’
    When Paul came back with a cup for her, she was sitting hugging her knees, her bare feet yellow, the toes distorted by the pointed shoes she had continued to wear after they went out of style, because it met some neurotic need in her to walk painfully.
    ‘Darling.’ She was staring at the fire which glowed and flickered through logs whose metal mesh foundation was wearing through the painted bark. They had inherited it from the last tenant. ‘Darling, you know, now that the children are off my hands,’ (they were twenty and seventeen) ‘I ought to have some purpose in my life.’ She said this about once a week. ‘I might try the library, or get a job in a boutique. I’d like to take a course at the University. Sometimes I think I’ll join the Samaritans. Would you sponsor me?’
    ‘We don’t “sponsor” people. Either you are the right type and they take you, or you’re wrong and they don’t.’
    ‘I feel I could offer so much to people who were plumbing depths, because I’ve been there myself.’
    ‘You said that when we started in A.A.’
    ‘Oh, them. I’m not an alcoholic, that’s why it was no good. And I don’t like coffee in paper cups. And everyone being nice to each other, and jolly.’
    ‘And not being able to have a drink.’
    ‘Right, as usual. Darling,’ as Paul went to the door, ‘the tea is too hot. I can’t drink it.’ She was whining like her own daughter, a dozen years ago. ‘Get me a little short one, will you? Just to set me up.’
    ‘Help yourself.’ Paul went out yawning. Alice went into the kitchen, poured something, and had to be sick in the sink because Paul was shaving in the bathroom with the door locked.
    ‘One to bring up, the next to keep down,’ she chanted like a nursery rhyme, sitting red-eyed on a counter stool in the tiny kitchen, clutching a glass while Paul made toast and ate it quickly. When he went to get his jacket, she followed him and stood in the bedroom doorway, so that he had to move her aside to get out. Her shoulder under the torn frills of her birthday negligée (he should have bought something that was easier to wash) was a bony knob.
    ‘One day,’ she called after him when he was at the front door, ‘you’ll be killed in a car crash or stoned to death by the children, without kissing me goodbye.’
    He came back to kiss her and she bent her head to rub the dry colourless hair under his chin.
    ‘I couldn’t have married anyone but you.’ She put a sob into her voice.
    ‘Have I made you happy?’
    ‘So very happy.’
    Sometimes they played at being closely married, to disguise the possibility that under the misery and disgust and disappointment, they still might be.
    Hungry and with a headache, a little sick from sleeplessness, Paul drove to work through the