Listening in the Dusk by Celia Fremlin Page B

why should I? Catch you at what, anyway? All we were doing — Brian and I — we were trying to brighten the place up with a bit of colour. Don’t you think it looks better already? You saw the ghastly mess it was yesterday: look at all the extra space we’ve made just by stacking things up tidily.”
    Alice was trying to turn the conversation, which had started as an altercation about the wet paint, and whose fault it was that Mary had got it all over her hands last night, into something more amiable. “Don’t you think it looks nice?” she persisted, when her companion remained silent. “And see that couch affair, with the cretonne cover? Cardboard boxes it’s made of! All those boxes crammed with ancient papers —”
    “What papers?”
    Alice was thrown by this sudden twist to the conversation, and found herself stammering.
    “I … I … Well, I don’t … I don’t know really. Magazines and things — you know. Newspapers —”
    “What newspapers?”
    The inquisition was relentless. Alice found annoyance coming to her aid, and she spoke briskly.
    “Look, Mary, why don’t you just tell me what you want — what you were looking for last night? Perhaps I can help you find it?”
    “Help me find it! That’s rich, that really is! First you muck upthe whole room, dragging everything about so that no one can find anything ever again, and then you say … You say …”
    Abruptly, the girl turned and darted out of the room, but not before Alice had glimpsed the tears suddenly welling in the hostile blue eyes, and heard the choking of the young voice.
    “Mary! Wait!” she cried, full of compunction, running out to the landing, leaning over the banisters.
    But it was too late. Mary’s door had closed with that curious, controlled savagery which she had noticed before, and which she recognised now as a substitute for a resounding slam.
    *
    Again! I’ve done it again! Mary lay face downward on her bed, listening while Alice rattled on the door, calling her name. Listening as Alice rattled again … and yet again: and listening still as the tiresome woman gave up, and retreated slowly up the stairs.
    As the sounds faded, as the impending danger of sympathy, of caring, of compassion began to recede, Mary’s tension relaxed a little, and she found herself able to think again, to try and assess this new and terrifying onslaught on her privacy. How could she have guessed that the attic lumber-room, which by all accounts — and indeed by all appearances — had lain untouched and neglected for goodness knows how many years, should suddenly, within twenty-four hours, become subject to all this upheaval? It had seemed so secure a hiding-place at the beginning. The worst that could happen to her dreadful secret — so she’d thought — was that it might be overlaid by daunting piles of fresh rubbish, chucked in pell-mell on top of the existing strata. The possibility that someone in this sloppy, down-at-heel household should suddenly take it into their heads to tidy the place — this had seemed too remote to be considered. That darkest, dustiest, most inaccessible corner, under the low beam, behind the almost immovable barrier of the motor bike, and underneath a pile of ancient curtains and mysterious rags of carpeting — this had seemed as safe a place as one could ever hope to find. Safer, certainly, than the sparsely-furnished barn of a room that she, Mary, had been allotted, and which offered almost no hiding-places at all. A huge wardrobe, with a door which wouldn’t stayshut even when you wedged it: a rickety chest-of-drawers with drawers that stuck and groaned and jerked when you tried to shut them; and — as a last resort — the dusty, fluff-ridden space under the bed, already occupied by the many discarded shoes of some previous incumbent and the remains of a huge garden-party hat, pale straw and tattered artificial roses. It wouldn’t take a person so much as five minutes to search through these