Read Listening in the Dusk for Free Online Page B

contentment, of that peace which passeth all understanding, of a whole tiny universe at harmony with itself, pulsing to the rhythm of a pink, darting tongue.
    She couldn’t find any coffee (she must buy some for herself this morning), and so made do with boiling up some water and adding a spoonful of sugar and a dash of the ‘ YESTERDAY ONLY ’ milk. A label like that seemed to put it outside the conventional morality of Mine and Thine. It wasn’t bad; it was better than nothing, and carrying it up to her bleak and fireless attic, she sat on the edge of the bed and sipped it slowly, trying, now that it was full daylight, to take in more clearly the extent and nature of her new domain.
    You could look at the room in two ways really. You could see it as so awful that hours and hours of daunting effort — not to mention Herculean physical strength — would be required tomake it even half-way habitable. Or, on the other hand, you could see it as so awful that nothing could be done, and therefore nothing need be. You could see yourself sinking into the chaos, as one more item landing up in this graveyard of failed, unwanted, unworkable appliances. You could give up. Go to pieces. Lots of discarded wives do.
    There was, though, a third option. You could walk out. Tell the landlady how sorry you were, how much you would have enjoyed living here, but unfortunately this, that and the other and so forth …
    Thinking on these lines last night, Alice had resolved to leave the final decision till this morning, when she would apply herself to it with a fresh mind and a sheet of paper — well, the back of an old envelope, anyway — setting out in two columns the fors and againsts: “Quiet road, not much traffic; No rent at the moment; No references required; Kindly, easy-going landlady” in one column, and in the other: “Sloppy, incompetent landlady; No heating; Extreme discomfort; No space; No hot water” — that sort of thing. She would work out a points system for all these items, and then add up the totals. Easy.
    She found an old envelope all right. She even found a pencil. But by this time the whole scheme had quietly and imperceptibly become obsolete, for she knew already that she was going to stay. She wasn’t quite sure why, or where the decision had come from, but there it was. In the last few minutes the room had become hers. It was as if a marriage ceremony had been taking place inside her head, and without really noticing it she had said “I will”, and was now confronted (like any bride) with the necessity of making the best of her new acquisition; working out the minimum alterations necessary to render life tolerable.
    Her first problem, she realised, was that she did not know what, if any, were her rights over her new domain. Was she entitled to get rid of anything she wished — and was physically able to carry down to the dustbins — or was her role that of reluctant curator on behalf of shadowy battalions of claimants, past and present? Looking around, it seemed to Alice highly unlikely that anyone in his right mind could possibly be going to claim any of it; but, on the other hand, if Hetty, the rightfulhouseholder, had felt hesitant about throwing anything away, then certainly Alice, the interloper, must feel even more hesitant .
    But all the same, things could be stacked up a bit better to give more floor space. Those crates of china or whatever could be pushed further in under the beams, and the bits of rolled-up carpet could go on top of them; and all those cardboard boxes, crammed to overflowing with old journals and newspapers and such, they could be piled one on top of the other to take less space … Within a few minutes, Alice was bent double, pushing and pulling at the heavy, cumbersome things.
    But as she did so, a better idea came to her. Instead of trying to get these boxes stacked up as much out of the way as possible, could she not build them into some useful piece of furniture? A sort of