A Telephone Call by Stephen Silvester

In a tall narrow house by the sea lived three women of mature years, comfortably or uncomfortably settled in their maturity. The house belonged to Agatha, who had lived in it for the greater part of her life, which she never failed to mention whenever the topic came up in conversation. ‘And I shall die in it,’ she would add with grim satisfaction. ‘Don’t be so morbid,’ Marjorie responded every time. Marjorie was a widow, not so much merry, as relentlessly cheerful. After the deaths of Agatha’s parents, within a few months of each other – whether from loyalty or cluelessness their daughter could never make up her mind – she felt the house to be an echo chamber of her thoughts and memories, and so placed an advertisement for potential cohabitees in a magazine for ladies, and ended up with Marjorie and Dorothy, a retired teacher of geography. Marjorie occupied the front room on the first floor, but she was rarely in it, except to sleep and read a little before doing so, preferring to spend the greater part of the daylight hours walking briskly, every day and in all weathers. Dorothy, on the other hand, rarely left her room on the second floor, where she sat scanning the horizon with her telescope. Agatha, who for some reason couldn’t stand the sight of the sea, was happy to stay in her room at the back on the first floor. The three women got on well enough. They shared a living room on the ground floor, at the front of the house, where Agatha sat with her back to the window, pointedly so.  

One morning, when it was Marjorie’s turn to make the morning coffee, Agatha stomped into the kitchen and said ‘You’re wanted on the telephone.’ It was an accusation. The telephone. They shared the rental; it was a good thing, they had agreed, to have one in case of emergency. None of them used it, ever. There was no one to call.

When Marjorie returned to the living room, the other two threw covert glances in her direction, not wishing to display any curiosity, but the synchronous return of coffee cups to saucers gave them away.

‘Yours is over there,’ said Agatha, nodding towards the occasional table next to Marjorie’s chair. ‘It’ll be cold by now.’

Marjorie sat down, reached for her coffee and downed it in one. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ Agatha interpreted this in her own special way.

‘Well, well, well,’ said Marjorie a matter of seconds later, to no one in particular, though she wasn’t in the habit of talking to herself. ‘He’s taken his time.’

‘Who’s taken his time?’ Agatha pounced irritably. ‘To do what?’

‘Raymond. It must be …’ – Marjorie made a none-too-quick calculation and concluded incredulously – ‘… more than forty-one years since I last saw him.’ She remembered Agatha’s supplementary question. ‘To get in touch.’

‘You’re right. That certainly is quite a while,’ Agatha responded drily. Dorothy, who was following the exchange as unobtrusively as possible, had not previously suspected Agatha of having a sense of humour. ‘And who might’ – Agatha contrived a tiny stagey hesitation as if the name were already fading – ‘Raymond be?’

‘My sweetheart.’ Dorothy could not contain a quiet drawn-out ‘Aah!’ ‘Well, not exactly. I was very fond of him, and he was crazy about me. Perhaps he was just crazy, in fact,’ she added with a nostalgic chuckle. ‘Wanted to marry me, but …’

‘But what?’ Agatha and Dorothy asked simultaneously, with different tones and intentions.

‘My parents didn’t approve. Raymond sang and played the ukulele and the accordion and worked at Butlins. They thought him unsuitable for their daughter.’ A pause for reflection. ‘He always made me laugh. He was a charmer. But unsuitable. So I married Kenneth. In 1950. He was in insurance and in the City, which my parents thought had a more respectable image. I suppose it did. It was a respectable marriage. It was all right.’

‘Were there …’ Dorothy began, then tried again. ‘Did you have children?’

‘No, it didn’t turn out that way. It wasn’t that he had anything against them. In fact he was always very active with the scouts. It was just the practical business of making them. He wasn’t very keen on that sort of thing. Preferred a book at bedtime. “Tales of derring-do,” he called them. But anyway, for better or for worse, we rubbed along together, until two years ago.’

‘That’s when …?’ prompted Dorothy.

‘Yes. After thirty-eight years of marriage. I was wondering what the anniversary between silver and golden was called, but by then it was too late, and in any case Kenneth never remembered any of them until after we received cards, and they stopped after my mother died and my father lost his memory and there was no one left to …’

‘How did he …? I’m sorry, I mean what was the …?’

‘A strangulated hernia. From lifting a lawnmower, a motor mower with a nearly full tank. Don’t ask why. I never did. To prove something, perhaps.’

‘Men,’ said Agatha. ‘Typical.’

‘We never know,’ Dorothy remonstrated, ‘why anybody does anything.’

Marjorie understood her imperfectly, not knowing whether Dorothy was talking about the choice of husband, the endurance of the marriage, or the banality of Kenneth’s death, but felt a general sympathy in her. She had sensed this for the first time when, coming out of the bathroom on the second floor, she had seen Dorothy through her open door, engaged in her survey of the horizon, and had dared go in and interrupt. She walked quietly, but not silently, to Dorothy’s side. Dorothy looked up and smiled.

‘You must find it very peaceful.’

‘Yes. Though it would be nice to see a few little puffs of smoke now and then, as in the old days. Now monsters – juggernauts, more appropriately – move inexorably from left to right – or from right to left – as a statement, a stately and indifferent statement, of their existence. But there we are. One lives in hope. A little puff, a sign of life on a human scale, would make one’s day.’

‘How far can you see? Can you see the Atlantic?’

‘In my imagination. I would have to move past the English Channel and the Celtic Sea first. Even with something more powerful than this’ – she patted the telescope affectionately – ‘the horizon would still be only ten miles away. Can’t see over the curve, you see. And I’m not sure I’d want to. This is enough. Better than the view from my little flat in Highbury. In fact, infinitely better, except that one can’t see the infinite from here either.’

‘So you just watch the world go by?’

‘Yes. A little bit of it. The rest, as I suggested, will have to exist in my imagination.’

‘But you taught geography … Why not really travel, to see the world for yourself?’

‘Travelling involves other people. I have always felt uncomfortable when I am in close proximity to them. I don’t understand why, but that’s the way it is. I suppose that’s one of the reasons I have always lived alone. The idea of somebody else in my space, touching my things, disturbs me. It’s different here, we keep ourselves to ourselves. Most of the time.’

‘But you must have had some sort of social life, I mean colleagues, friends …’ Marjorie was innately, unshakably, disposed to the bright side.

‘Hardly interchangeable,’ said Dorothy. ‘I attended gatherings at work only when my absence would have caused a problem, then left as soon as might be considered acceptable.’

‘Friends, then,’ Marjorie pursued, unable to stop herself, and at once wished she hadn’t, sensing she was pushing too far,

Dorothy considered this, looking into Marjorie’s anxious eyes and then beyond them towards something infinitely distant. ‘I had a friend once. I thought we were … close, but of course we couldn’t be. Life sometimes rushes impetuously down a cul-de-sac, then backs up and goes on. Everything must come to an end.’

Marjorie was silent for a moment, then, as if to check that she had understood what she had heard, said in a small voice, as if to herself, ‘So you can never travel except through your telescope and your imagination?’

Dorothy smiled. ‘You will probably think that cruel, but I’m strangely satisfied with my life. No, not strangely at all. Quietly.’

‘So what did this … Raymond want?’ Agatha was still irked by the presumptuousness of the telephone call. ‘To reminisce over old times that were hardly any time at all? And, more importantly, how did he find you after forty-one years?’

‘Through Mrs Bubb. She was my next door neighbour. I wrote to her as soon as I arrived here, to let her know my address. Just in case. In case of what, I don’t know. I only ever received bills and statements and I’d tidied all that stuff up before I left. And when we had the telephone put in, I wrote again to let her know the number. To be complete. She sent me a lovely little note saying she hoped I’d settled in and was enjoying the sea air. Beautiful handwriting she has. I never knew. Well, there was no occasion to see it before.’

‘And what brought Raymond to Mrs …?’

‘Bubb. He saw the funeral notice in the paper. I don’t know how. Said he didn’t want to intrude on my grief so soon after, so he waited. Delicate, I thought. Sensitive. Never used to hesitate over anything. Jump in with both boots, would Raymond. Maybe this time he was scared. Anyway, he waited too long. He found my old address somehow and went there, to find that I was gone. I can’t imagine how he felt. Or rather, I can. Mrs Bubb saw him there, standing on the front path, staring at the empty house. She took pity on him, believed his story at once, and trusted him with my new address. She didn’t know about the telephone then. He said he’s thought about writing, but he’d never been much of a one for letters. In fact, I don’t think I ever knew him to write anything. What he meant by thinking about writing I don’t know. He was put out of his misery when Mrs Bubb passed on the telephone number. He’d given her his, just in case. Just in case again.’

‘And the end result of all this fascinating toing and froing?’

‘He wants to see me. He’s thinking of coming down here, but he needs to know that he’ll be welcome. I said I’d think about it.’

‘That’s good. It’ll give you something to occupy you. You’re restless. You can’t stand still. Always on the go. I’ve often thought that if you stopped for a moment you would seize up. Or think.’           

Marjorie was determined not to rise to the bait, and diverted the exchange in a direction she knew would annoy. ‘It’s being so busy as what keeps me cheerful. Do you remember Mona Lott?’      

‘Oh yes,’ volunteered Dorothy. ‘On the wireless. ITMA. It’s That Man Again. Very … jolly. Enlivening. Though I must confess I didn’t always understand it. Topical references, I suppose. But I seem to remember it was being cheerful rather than busy that did the trick.’

‘I listened to it once,’ said Agatha. ‘That was more than enough. Pandered to the lowest senses of humour.’

‘Well, it made me chuckle,’ said Marjorie.

There was quiet for a moment as the three women mulled over their preoccupations, but Agatha was not one to let things settle.

‘So an ancient sweetheart appears from nowhere and suddenly you are all a-flutter.’ It wasn’t quite clear whether this was an assessment or a question. Marjorie didn’t react immediately. Instead she considered Agatha’s life; it seemed to involve nothing much more than concerning herself with the maintenance of the house and the provision of day-to-day necessities, always turning inwards, towards the town centre (‘I never see you on the front. It can be so refreshing, bracing,’ Marjorie had remarked to her once and received only a cold stare and silence in reply), retiring after the evening meal to her first floor room at the back. What she did there was unknown.

‘Have you never had a sweetheart?’ Marjorie asked calmly. Agatha’s face reacted as if to a slap.             

‘No.’ A staccato, definitive reply. ‘Never felt the need for one. Didn’t see the point. Oh, Cyril introduced me to his friends, and once or twice we went dancing, but they were silly boys. Not a patch on Cyril.

‘Cyril?’

‘My older brother. Born in 1925 and dead in 1944. His ship went down in Lyme Bay. All those exotic spots in the world where men can blow one another up, and he has to die so near to home.’     

‘I’m sorry,’ said Marjorie.

‘No point in being sorry. That’s what wars do. Kill people. But that wasn’t enough for the sea. Oh no, it had to take my little brother, too. In the first year of peace. A sunny day at the seaside. Bognor, it was. He had one of his asthma attacks. There was nothing I could do, I wasn’t a very good swimmer. I saw him go down three times. He wasn’t quite fifteen. I’ve never been in the sea since. It’s full of dead people. Well, not quite full. They found Michael miles down the coast. I hate the sea. Can’t stand the sight of it. The sea is death.’ She paused for a moment. ‘The irony is that when my father took early retirement – he was something or other in the Civil Service and had commuted between Merstham and London every day of his working life – he decided that we should move to the coast. Here.’

Nothing more was said that day beyond the customary civilities at the table and other necessary or accidental occasions of contact. The following morning Marjorie served the coffee, even though it wasn’t her turn, confident that there would be no interruption; she had told Raymond not to contact her again before she had made a decision.

‘I intend to speak to Raymond today,’ she announced. ‘I’m inclined to say yes.’

Agatha shook her head slowly. It would disturb things, upset the fragile balance that still held.

Dorothy beamed. ‘Good for you. I think it’s a lovely idea.

Agatha said ‘It would be silly at your age. You don’t know anything about him.’

‘Yes I do,’ Marjorie retorted. ‘He’s eighteen and he loves me and he’s heartbroken, though he laughs it off with a song and a dance.’                                                                                                

‘Take your chance for happiness,’ said Dorothy.

They are both right in their different ways, thought Marjorie. Perhaps it would be for the best not to resuscitate the past. But on the other hand I’ll never know unless I see him.

Stephen Silvester

Image by Alexa from Pixabay An old rotary dial telephone in grey with gold trim.