Listening in the Dusk Read Online Free PDF Page A

interested, and merely murmured that there were no zoning regulations about pillar-boxes, were there? Anyone could post anything anywhere they liked, and anyway it takes all sorts, especially in the Fine Arts Department …
    The next Saturday, there she was again, hanging about on the other side of the road watching Rodney cut the front hedge; and finally when she crossed the road to ask him, blushing furiously, for a spray of the cut privet to take home with her, at this, even Rodney was a bit taken aback.
    “A spray of privet ,” he speculated over lunch. “What on earth can she want it for? I started asking her, does she keep stick-insects ? — but she seemed terrified. She just gave a great gulp, and ran off down the road. Ran !Did I say something wrong, do you suppose? Is ‘stick-insect’ the latest rude word, or something ?”
    Alice laughed. “She’s potty about you, darling, that’s all it is,” she explained. “She’s going to press that privet spray between sheets of blotting-paper, and keep it for ever! She’s got a crush on you, like a lovesick teenager.”
    “ Teenager. She’s fifty if she’s a day,” protested Rodney — though actually she wasn’t, she was only forty-four, as Alice was to discover later. “Are you seriously suggesting that a grown woman …?”
    “Yes, I am,” Alice insisted. “It’s not as extraordinary as you seem to think. A crush isn’t peculiar to teenagers, you know. It’s a kind of loving that people go in for when the object of their love is unattainable. It can happen at any age, in fact it’s quite common, to judge by what one hears. Middle-aged women and their doctors. Vicars and devoted female members of their congregations …”
    “Well, I’m not a bloody vicar,” Rodney grumbled. “Vicars are paid to be pestered, the topping-up of half-empty souls is their job. But it’s not mine, and I’m damned if I’m going to be press-ganged into it! I’ll take out an injunction against her if she’s not careful!”
    But very soon irritation gave way to amusement, and he and Alice spent many an odd minute giggling over the excesses of his undeclared admirer. Indeed, it would have been difficult to be other than amused by some of the antics the love-lorn lady got up to in her attempts to engineer an “accidental” meeting with her beloved. Popping out from the shelter of some doorway as he came by; lurking in the nearby telephone box watching for him tocome out into the front garden so that she could happen to walk past and say “Hello”, in the tremulous expectation of hearing him say “Hello” back. Which, of course, he had to do; and though this was usually the extreme limit of the exchange, it seemed to suffice. On such insubstantial nourishment can an insubstantial passion thrive, Alice used to reflect, watching the ungainly figure fairly prancing down the road after one of these encounters, all lit up with unspeakable joy, with the sound of that perfunctory “Hello” still echoing in her ears.
    Part of the fun was the way Alice would tease him about his “conquest”, and he in his turn would appeal to Alice, in mock-terror , for her protection.
    “Go and have a dekko, darling,” he would urge, with exaggerated wariness. “See if I can mow the front lawn this morning without getting raped!” and Alice, with barely suppressed giggles, would peer up and down the road and report that the coast was clear, or otherwise.
    “She’ll be writing you anonymous poems next!” Alice laughingly predicted one Saturday; and lo and behold, that was exactly what happened.
    They would arrive by post, and Rodney and Alice would find themselves in fits of laughter, reading out to one another lines about love so true being spurned by you, or about hearts still yearning and passion burning.
    “And stomachs turning,” Alice remembered improvising, and together they had leaned back against the cushions and laughed until they cried.
    Was this the last time —