Listening in the Dusk by Celia Fremlin Page A

with red, and there were smears of red here and there on the panels. Alice bent lower — sniffed — and burst into hysterical laughter.
    “Brian! You idiot! It’s not blood at all — it’s paint! Red paint! The wretched girl’s been mucking about in my room, and she’s got the motor bike paint all over her. That’s what it is!” And her anxiety abruptly transferred itself from Mary’s safety to the fate of her new décor.
    The delicately outlined rim of scarlet was indeed smudged and spoiled, and the whole contraption had been dragged a few inches out of position as if to allow space — but only just — for a slender figure to creep in behind it. By now, Brian had joined in her mirth, though still with the residue of shock jerking somewhere in his lungs; and together they stood contemplating, with relief and bewilderment, their now somewhat blemished handiwork, while behind them, agog for their fair share in this happening, whatever it might prove to be, stood Hetty and Miss Dorinda.
    Hetty, despite the inconclusive nature of the data so far, was already able to discern a bright side.
    “It’s a mercy,” she pointed out, “that I couldn’t remember where that axe had got put. It hasn’t been used since that sculpture fellow was here trying to turn the outside lav into a studio. It must still be out there somewhere, and if I’d been able to lay hands on it, Brian, like you yelled at me to, then we’d have had that door in splinters all to no purpose! And then, oh dear me, men in and out for days repairing it, and most likely telling me I’ve got dry-rot into the bargain, you know what they are these builder chappies. And then the insurance … I don’t know what they’d make of a story like this, I really don’t … A fuss, anyway, it’s surprising the fuss they can make, every tiny thing … Never mind. All’s well that ends well.”
    If indeed it had ended. After the others had gone downstairs, Alice knocked, and knocked again; but inside the room was absolute silence, and she had to desist. After all, Mary had a right to her privacy. All the same, Alice went to bed feeling uneasy, and half-afraid; which was no doubt why, just before dawn, she had such a very horrid dream. She dreamed she was back in her old job, sitting at her desk correcting a set of exercises, when she came upon one written in red ink, making it difficult for her to mark corrections. She spoke to the girl in question, pointing out the problem, and asking her to use a black biro next time; but the girl shook her head sadly. “Oh no,” she said, “I can’t write in black any more, from now on I have to write everything in blood — look!” and pushing up the sleeve of her blouse, she displayed a nasty jagged wound into which she must dip her pen.
    Alice woke, shaken with horror, and then with relief at knowing it was only a dream. But for a few moments she was quite disorientated, in the darkness, and in her still unfamiliar surroundings. By the time she had located the small square of the window and recovered her bearings, and the sense of where she was, the dream had already begun to fade. She could no longer recall whether the girl in the dream had actually resembled Mary, or whether she had been a mere faceless ghost, of the sort that habitually drift through dreams.
    Not that it mattered. The shocks and alarms of last night were quite enough to account for such a dream, and there was no point at all in looking for anything subtle in the way of interpretation; and so Alice settled back on her pillow, and tried to sleep. Already, it was nearly morning.

Chapter 9
    “I’m sorry, ”Mary was sulkily repeating. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry !But how could I know you’d painted the bloody thing? You said I could have my stuff whenever I liked, and then you set a trap like that to catch me!”
    “Don’t be ridiculous!” Alice retorted. “It wasn’t a trap, and of course I wasn’t trying to ‘catch’ you,