The Listening Silence Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Marie Joseph

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Marie Joseph was born in Lancashire and was educated at Blackburn High School for Girls. Before her marriage she was in the Civil Service. She now lives in Middlesex with her husband, a retired chartered Engineer, and they have two married daughters and eight grandchildren.

  Also by Marie Joseph

  Ring-a-Roses

  Maggie Craig

  A Leaf in the Wind

  Emma Sparrow

  Gemini Girls

  For James Stevenson

  One

  ‘I THINK WE’RE moving at last.’

  ‘What did you say, David?’

  ‘I think we’re going in now.’

  Because she was deaf, Sally Barnes’s face had what David Turner always thought of as a listening look about it. It was a bright look, emphasized by the clarity of her blue-grey eyes, and watching her now he wondered why he had never thought of taking her out before. She was certainly attractive, with her dark hair cut into a curly Claudette Colbert fringe, her round face and clear Lancashire complexion. In that spring of 1941, as the German bombers turned their attention to the northwest of England, David found himself wishing Sally lived in a far safer place than the outskirts of Liverpool.

  Only the week before, flying over the North Sea bound for Germany, he had found himself thinking about her. Once over the Ruhr, their target for the night, there would be no chance to think about anything but getting through the flak, dropping their bomb load and making for home. But crouched over his instrument table, David’s muttered thoughts had taken him by surprise.

  ‘That young Sally Barnes won’t be able to hear the blasted sirens if they start up when she’s alone. She should have been evacuated along with the kids and pregnant women.’

  Then he had raised his head from his calculations to announce unemotionally: ‘Skip? Alter course 110.’

  ‘110 okay.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Standing now with Sally in the long queue outside the cinema, overcome by the same gut-churning feeling of tenderness, David kissed her cheek, cold as marble from the wind.

  ‘What was that in aid of?’ Sally laughed and clung to his arm, startled by the unexpected caress.

  ‘We’re going in at last, thanks be to goodness,’ she said.

  The queue edged its way slowly into the comparative warmth of the foyer, with its hectically patterned carpets and lush-lipped film stars pouting down from framed photographs on the stippled walls. When David stopped at the pay box she ran a finger down the cheek he had kissed, wondering what it would be like to be kissed ‘properly’ by David Turner. Not that she cared one way or the other …

  Flying Officer David Turner in his immaculate uniform, with his neat moustache and the observer’s wing sewn above his left breast pocket, was still only the polite boy from down the road.

  ‘Care to come to the pictures, Sally?’

  He had asked her in a take-it-or-leave-it way, and when Sally had told her mother, Josie Barnes’s plucked eyebrows had disappeared into the peroxided fluff of curls on her forehead.

  ‘We are honoured! I wonder what his miserable ma has to say about that?’

  ‘Oh, Mum, for heaven’s sake! He’s lonely, that’s all. Flying on operations means he’s home quite a lot. Oh, stop looking at me like that!’ Sally had tried not to laugh at her mother’s expression. ‘Going out with David Turner will be like going out with my uncle!’

  ‘Your uncle! Oh, come on now, love! David Turner was born towards the end of the last war, not long after his father was killed in France, so that makes him no more than twenty-three or twenty-four.’

  Sally buttoned herself into her dark green coat, frowning at the frayed bit where the buckle had rubbed the stitched belt. Her voice came out louder than she realized.

  ‘He treats me like a child. I might be nearly nineteen, but he still sees me as the kid down the road. He’s flying on ops, Mum! Night after night, over Germany. He looks so tired he makes me want to cry. He’s got lines on his face and his hands tremble. He looks terrible! It’s company he needs, that’s all.’

  Turning away, Sally failed to see the expression on her mother’s face. It was compounded of love and a resigned acceptance of her daughter’s naïvety. Josie slowly shook her head from side to side. How was it possible for a girl to be that guileless, with the war in its second year, and Liverpool swarming with servicemen from all over the world?

  Sally was, Josie realized, still the happy-go-lucky schoolgirl of two years ago, embarrassed because her breasts bounced beneath her white blouse as she walked into Assembly with other lesser endowed pupils; sitting in the front row in class to facilitate her quite remarkable gift of lip-reading; accepting the teacher’s notes at the end of each lesson with a dignified nod of thanks.

  By no means an imaginative woman, Josie Barnes could see it all. She could picture the girls Sally worked with in her job as a copy typist, chattering about their conquests, their sexual experiences and near heart-breaks.

  And now Sally was getting ready to go out with an airman who looked as if he had left his youth behind him a long, long time ago.

  Settling Sally into a seat in the back stalls of the cinema, David Turner watched her unbutton her coat, revealing the round swell of her breasts beneath the pale lemon knitted jumper. Her skin had a sheen on it, and by her ears a fluff of down grew. He wanted to stretch out a hand and trail a finger round and round the endearing softness.

  He saw her smile as the white cinema organ rose majestically into view, then clap as the audience realized the organist was home on leave, resplendent in army dress uniform. He saw the way her hands dropped to her lap when the music began, her face stilled into a touching repose.

  The soldier organist was working his feet from side to side on the pedals, his back swaying to the rhythm of his frenzied playing. The noise of the chords seemed to vibrate the air – chords which Sally, sitting smiling, could not hear.

  David knew that her deafness was almost total, a legacy from measles at the age of eight. But The Great Dictator was Chaplin at his best, and if any man could break through the barriers of deafness then surely Chaplin, the little Jew from the East End of London, was that man.

  Mesmerized by the changing expressions on her face, David was taken completely by surprise when Sally suddenly turned to stare straight into his eyes.

  ‘Look!’ She pointed to the sober-jacketed manager climbing onto the stage. ‘That means the sirens have gone.’ She squeezed David’s arm. ‘This is the bit they like best.’

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen!’

  The polite opening was drowned in a roar of derision.

  ‘Get on with it! Get your finger out, you soppy ’aporth!’

  ‘Let the poor bugger say his recitation!’

  The manager, his bald head gleaming pearl white in a spotlight, held up an arm like a traffic cop.

  ‘A h’air raid warning ’as just been sounded. H’if you wish to leave the cinema, please do so as quietly as possible. Those who wish to remain may do so at their own risk. Thank you!’

  To ear-splitting whistles he climbed down. David gently turned Sally towards him. ‘Shall we go? What do you usually …?’ To his dismay, he could feel hi
s heart beginning to pound. ‘Do you want to go?’ he whispered again, more urgently.

  Sally shook her head. ‘No. It’s okay. Nobody bothers … really.’ She gave his hand three little pats before facing the screen again.

  Clenching his fists David subsided into his seat. His heart was going like a drum, boom, boom, boom, and any minute now he would have to get his handkerchief out of his pocket and mop his brow. He glanced round. The rows of faces remained forward fixed, like a regiment after the ‘eyes front’ order, while up on the screen Chaplin’s Hitler marched and ranted, the familiar moustache quivering with the passion of his words.

  ‘Tell him he looks a right Charlie!’ somebody shouted from the back. There was a ripple of laughter, but David sat rigid, every nerve in his body alive and quivering. When he heard the guns boom out, he imagined the great flashes in the sky outside. When the first crunch of the bombs came, he winced and laced his fingers tightly beneath the greatcoat folded on his knee.

  Closing his eyes, he was immediately transported in his mind from the warm darkness of the cinema stalls to the darker interior of a Wellington bomber suspended in space over a German town. It felt as if he were actually there, reminding himself that the survival of his crew depended on the accuracy of his calculations. Possible survival, that was all. The odds were no greater than that.

  David lowered his head, feeling the perspiration on his forehead cold and clammy. Of the hundred and thirty-odd boys with him on that last raid ninety-three had got back, with a mere handful baling out for the doubtful privilege of spending the rest of the war in a German prison.

  He felt very weary, very old, very tired of risking his life over and over again. The euphoria had long since evaporated. As the oldest member of his crew he accepted without conceit that he was considered to be the best observer on the squadron. He often reminded himself wryly that practice could make anyone perfect.

  He jerked his head upwards. The last bomb had sounded very close. Some of the audience were moving back to the seats under the overhanging canopy of the circle. He flinched as one of the exit doors down on the right blew open with a great rush of sound.

  He felt Sally’s hand creeping over the red plush of the armrest dividing their seats. He grasped it firmly in his own, squeezing tight, so that neither knew who was comforting the other.

  ‘If the “all clear” hadn’t gone when it did they would have shown the big picture through again.’

  Sally was clinging to David’s arm as they went out into the street. ‘I saw Pinocchio twice on the same programme the other week. Once would have been enough for me. It’s not all that easy lip-reading a puppet!’ She laughed out loud.

  It was exactly like the clear easy laughter of a child, David thought. Suddenly he wanted to swing her round to face him, to kiss her cheeks, her nose, and tell her how much he loved hearing her laugh. She was still talking, bending her head close to his shoulder, words bubbling out of her.

  ‘And then, after the second Pinocchio, they showed a couple of Food Flashes and a Board of Trade fashion film. Okay for those who fancy cakes made out of carrots, and cami-knickers skimped out of a yard of material.’

  ‘I hope you never go out alone at night.’

  David forgot that without seeing him speak, Sally could not hear. He swerved as a lamp post loomed up not six inches away from his face, then drew her to him so that they walked along entwined.

  The tram was so crowded that they had to stand together on the boarding platform, bodies touching, moving even closer as people got on or off. Just before the terminus they found seats, but not together. Three-quarters of David’s seat was taken up by a heavy-bodied woman with a look on her flat face which said she wasn’t going to ‘utchup’ for anyone, thank you very much.

  Sally smiled to herself at the sight of David clinging to the edge, far too polite to do anything about it.

  That was it! Sally nodded to herself. That was why she always chattered too much, laughed too much and blushed too readily when David Turner talked to her. It was his old-fashioned courtesy that embarrassed more than it impressed. Like the time he’d worn a brown trilby hat and tipped it at her, sending her into fits of schoolgirl giggles.

  All at once, taking her completely by surprise, he turned round. ‘All right?’ his eyebrows said. Sally nodded, hating the blush staining her cheeks, before she realized that in the near gloom of the darkened tram blushes could come and go unnoticed.

  Beyond the terminus the road widened, flanked on either side by dim silhouettes of semi-detached houses set back behind neat front gardens. After walking for ten minutes they came to Sally’s house, its gates gone for salvage and its garage doors closed on a car jacked-up for the duration.

  The pebble-dashed house looked forlorn and empty, shrouded for the night in its black-out curtains. Sally moved away from David so that his arm dropped from her waist. She stared up into the thin serious face beneath the peaked cap, wishing she wasn’t obliged to peer so closely to lip-read whatever he might be saying. He had been holding her so tightly on the way up the road that walking had been difficult, and now he was looking down at her, the fine lines of his face taking on a certain nobility in the darkness.

  ‘Well then?’ Sally smiled, then began to feel uncomfortable. Could it be that the polite David Turner from down the road thought she wanted him to kiss her, standing like that with her mouth raised to his? She looked away. ‘Thank you for taking me to the pictures. And good luck when you go back in the morning. Take care.’

  ‘Don’t go!’

  Sally blinked as David swung her round to face him. As he gripped her arms she was shocked to feel a restrained violence shuddering through his fingers. His eyes were suddenly glittering. He looked ill as if he burned with a fever.

  ‘What is it, David?’

  The expression on Sally’s face, so trustingly turned up to his own, her eyes searching his mouth, snapped the last vestige of David’s slipping control.

  She gasped as his mouth came down over her own, forcing her lips apart, hurting with the pressure of his teeth. He was holding her round the waist with one arm, pressing the back of her head with his other hand, making it impossible for her to break away. When the long, painful kiss ended he pulled her even harder up against him, burying his face in her neck, whispering words she could not hear.

  ‘Oh, God … I’m sorry. Oh God, what’s wrong with me? I can’t go back tomorrow, yet I know I will go back tomorrow. They’ll be there, waiting for me, little Sally. Jock and Tim, Bob and Lofty … all the same. Eager bloody beavers, listening to the briefings at six o’clock, so sure it won’t happen to them. Oh, God! They’re so young, Sally. I was flying on ops when they were just rookies doing their square-bashing at Blackpool!’

  When she tried to pull away he jerked her closer, sliding his fingers round the back of her neck. ‘They actually fight to fly with me. Do you know that? Because they think I’m the tops; because they know I can get them across the Channel with both eyes closed.’

  He started to shake so that now it was Sally who was doing the holding. He moaned into her hair. ‘But I’m not the tops. And I can’t pretend any more.’

  ‘I can’t hear you, David!’

  It was a small, piteous cry, lost in the revers of the heavy Air Force greatcoat.

  ‘I’m scared witless, Sally. When the flak comes at us I keep remembering our last rear-gunner with his face blown clean away. I remember Chris with a piece of shrapnel in his throat, choking with his own blood. And I hear yet another plane screaming down, burning up the crew as it goes.’

  ‘David! Please!’ Sally beat at him with bunched fists. ‘David? I want to hear! I want to listen! Oh, please, lift your head and look at me.’

  Her struggles and the sound of her soft voice calling his name inflamed David further. He moved his hands round her throat then slid them down inside her coat. He could feel her breast moving with the agitated beating of her heart. She was all softness. The softness of her meant com
fort, and without comfort at that moment he was as bereft as if he were the last man left alive on earth.

  When his mouth took hers again it was with a deep hurting hunger. As he ground his body into hers she could feel the heat from his face. When he tore at her coat and she felt the erect hardness of him thrusting and pushing against her skirt her terror exploded into a blinding anger. Fighting like a trapped animal she brought up a foot and kicked him hard on the shin.

  ‘No! Not like this! No!’

  Normally in control of the pitch of her voice, Sally shouted her fury and fear aloud. When David, blinded with pain, reached for her she knocked his hand furiously away.

  Running headlong up the path she almost stumbled and fell, but the front door was on the latch as usual, and the first thing she saw was the edging of light showing from the living-room.

  Tiptoeing through the darkened hall, making for the foot of the stairs, Sally groped her way up, praying she could get to her room unheard.

  For a long time David stood there, slumped against the dusty privet hedge. An air-raid warden wearing his tin hat walked briskly past, stopped and turned.

  ‘Are you all right, lad?’

  The voice was kindly, but David ignored him to stumble away in the opposite direction. He wasn’t ready to face his mother waiting for him in the house further down the road. He wasn’t in the mood to face anybody, least of all his mother.

  There was a Morrison shelter in the sitting-room, a huge steel table filling half the room, its sides closed in with wire netting. Edna Turner had promised her son to use it when the sirens wailed. She would probably be in it now, half awake and half asleep, peering at him through the mesh, like an animal at the zoo.

  Clenching his hands deep down in his pockets, walking with head bent and feet turned inwards, he went on down the road, turning a corner into a rutted lane leading to what had once been a farmstead set in rolling fields.