Listening in the Dusk by Celia Fremlin Read Free Book Online Page A

pinky-yellowy pattern …
    Yes, here it was. Crumpled and dusty indeed, but after being properly washed and ironed … Bending lower still under the sloping roof, she tugged at the pieces of material, trying to ease them from under a length of garden trellis, whose projecting slats threatened to catch on the stuff and tear it …
    “Christ!”
    At the suddenness of the exclamation, Alice sprang to her feet, or rather tried to. In fact, she banged her head with considerable violence against the low beam that spanned that part of the roof; and so it was through a whirl of dizzying pain and flashing lights that she first looked at her unexpected visitor. A slight figure — wearing something blueish — standing in the doorway … And as the effects of the blow subsided, and normal vision was restored, Alice found herself able to take in that the visitor was a young girl wearing jeans and a washed-out blouse. Her light brown hair was cropped short, and her eyes, startlingly blue, were darting from object to object in the disordered room. In ordinary circumstances she would have been outstandingly pretty, Alice guessed, but at the moment her face was pinched with outrage.
    “What are you doing ?” The girl’s voice was shrill. “What the hell are you doing? And who are you, anyway? What are you looking for?”
    The better to cope with this unexpected onslaught, Alice clambered slowly out from her uncomfortable perch under the low ceiling, circumnavigated as best she could the motor bike handlebars which stuck up like horns, and faced her inquisitor. The pain was beginning to subside now, and she felt more able to hold her own.
    “Doing? Getting my room in order, of course. Trying to … If it comes to that, what are you doing? Barging in like this,” sheadded for good measure, trying to turn the tables vaguely in her own direction.
    The girl still stared at her accusingly, but some of the shock had subsided from her face.
    “What do you mean, your room!” she asked now. “It can’t be your room, it isn’t anybody’s room, it’s all of us’s. It’s a … Well, it’s where we all dump our stuff. Hetty told us we could. ‘Liberty lumber-room, that’s what that room is’ she told me when I came, and that’s how everyone has always been using it. As you can see. Right back to the year dot. So it can’t be yours.”
    Well, it is mine. I’m renting it, Alice would like to have said, but of course, she wasn’t, not yet. She wasn’t paying anything so far, and that put her at rather a disadvantage in the argument.
    “Well,” she said, “I’m sorry, there seems to be some sort of misunderstanding, we’ll have to talk to Hetty …”
    But the girl seemed now to be hardly listening. Her eyes were travelling round the room anxiously, as if she was trying to make mental notes of everything in it.
    “It’s not fair !”she burst out after a minute. “She might at least have warned me, warned us, I mean …”
    Her protest faltered to an uneasy halt, and Alice broke in hastily, trying to be reassuring.
    “Look,” she said, “I don’t see why we need quarrel about this. This is to be my room, it’s all arranged, but I don’t see that it need affect you. You can go on storing your things here just as long as you like. I’m not trying to throw anything out, I’m just stacking things up neatly so as to give myself a bit of space.” And then, trying to be friendly, she added: “I’m Alice, by the way. You’re Mary, aren’t you?”
    “How do you know? Who told you?”
    The voice was sharp with suspicion, and Alice was momentarily quite thrown. What was the matter with the girl?
    “Why … I suppose … Well, Hetty told me,” she stammered , feeling absurdly apologetic under the impact of that accusing stare. “She was just telling me — you know — about the rest of you who live here. I mean, we’re all going to be sharing the kitchen and everything, and so I suppose …”
    “What else did she tell