Listening in the Dusk by Celia Fremlin Read Free Book Online

sofa, for example, with its back made of two sets of three boxes piled on top of each other against the wall, and then another three in front to form the seat? Such a seat would be quite a comfortable height — Alice tried it — and quite firm and steady, crammed as most of them were with tight-packed papers.
    Some of them, though, were a bit too crammed, their tattered contents toppling lopsidedly well above the level of the lid; others were only sparsely filled, so that if you tried to sit on them you would sink slowly into a welter of collapsing cardboard . After a brief struggle with her conscience, Alice decided that although she mustn’t throw anything away, she would be within her rights in transferring an armful of this into a vacant space among that, and so rendering the boxes homogeneous enough for her purposes.
    Old colour supplements; antediluvian sets of Lilliputs ; newspaper cuttings going back to the News Chronicle, and even the Daily Graphic … the hoarder of all this must surely be in his grave this many a year? Yanking from one of the over-full boxes a yellowing armful of Agriculture and Fishery Bulletins, Alice was slightly surprised to come across a set of exercise books — a dozen or more of them — neatly stacked, and looking much more recent than most of the stuff she had come across.
    Someone’s amateur attempt at a novel, it seemed to be. A thriller, presumably, for opening one of the little books at random her eyes fell on a highly-coloured passage describing in fulsome — though probably inaccurate — detail the collapse of some character from a gun-shot wound:
    ‘His fall was like that of an ancient tree, sinking gently to the ground, settling there, without protest, arms outstretched like branches …’
    Not bad, in a way, thought Alice, reverting momentarily to her school-teaching persona. Spelling, grammar, punctuation all beyond reproach, though five out of ten for handwriting would be generous. Sad, really, that the author—someone very young, she felt sure — should have abandoned his task to this limbo. Fed up with it, perhaps? In despair of ever getting it published? At a loss how to end it?
    She flipped through a few more of the volumes, smiling a little. There seemed to be a death, or the aftermath of a death, on almost every page: a very amateur writer, obviously, who had not yet learned that by piling on the thrills you take all the thrill out of them. Here and there, loose among the text, were old newspaper cuttings and magazine pictures, presumably to stir the creative process. One in particular caught Alice’s attention. It was a page from some magazine — a colour supplement, probably — on which was reproduced a photograph of an autumn landscape, a hillside dotted with rowan trees in full glory of scarlet berries, and emerging from behind one of these, with wings outspread, appeared an enormous bat. So enormous, for one mad second one could have taken it for a pterodactyl photographed in full flight. A clever piece of trick photography, of course, a picture of a bat somehow superimposed on the tranquil autumn landscape, and looking at the caption below “Flittermouse Hill in Autumn”, Alice saw that the cleverness had indeed been appreciated; a ten pound prize had been awarded in a Junior Photographic Competition to Julian somebody, aged fourteen, from Medley Green Comprehensive.
    Enough! If she stopped to read and examine every intriguing snippet she might come across, she’d never get anything done at all. Replacing the exercise books, and piling in above them therequisite thickness of National Geographic magazines from a neighbouring pile, Alice gave her attention again to the construction of her sofa. Or divan. Or whatever.
    The basic structure was soon in place. Now, if she could dig out from all that lumber behind the motor bike some of those bits of material she’d noticed — old curtains or something — cretonne it looked like, with a faded,