Listening in the Dusk by Celia Fremlin

received three phone calls: one from a retired postman who had spent the first years of his retirement in the local library reading Homer, Plato and most of the plays in translation, and had been fired with the ambition to read them in the original before he died; a second from a lady who thought that those enormously large round spectacles would suit her a lot better than the National Health ones she had at present, and could Alice tell her where they could be obtained? A third was from the mother of a twelve-year-old boy called Cyril, about whose wish to learn Greek she was almost insultingly apologetic, but nevertheless contemplated an interview “just to talk about it”.
    Excitedly, Alice found herself with quite a timetable to organise. The postman, a small wiry man with a lined, rosy face, a slight limp and a freckled balding skull wanted to come on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Alice tried to explain that she might be coaching schoolchildren who would only have Saturdays free;but this distressed him greatly. Although (he had to agree) he wasn’t a schoolchild, he nevertheless did have other engagements , and these Greek lessons would have to be fitted in with his classes at the local Institute: Drama, Car-Maintenance, the History of Art. Saturday it would have to be. He knew the Greek alphabet already, he told her, he’d learned it by himself, and now couldn’t wait to go further, in particular to read Alcestis right through in the original.
    Alice tried, without being too discouraging, to give her prospective pupil some idea of the vast tracts of grammar and vocabulary that lay between knowing the alphabet and reading Alcestis in the original; but he was undeterred.
    “If I make up my mind to a thing, then I keep going until I get there,” he told her; and to substantiate this self-assessment, he told her how he had had polio as a boy and had been told that he’d have to settle for a desk job, as his leg would never be up to very much walking.
    “‘Very much walking!’ Tens of thousands of miles I reckon I’ve walked on my rounds — five times round the world, just about! Forty-seven years, and never a day off sick, bar just the one winter, a bad go of pleurisy …”
    As a qualification for embarking on a study of ancient Greek, walking five times round the world might seem to some teachers irrelevant; but not to Alice. She took Mr Bates on with alacrity, and after discussing terms and the books he would need, they parted with a sense of happy anticipation on both sides.
    Cyril proved a little more complicated to enrol. For one thing, the negotiations had to be primarily with his parents, not with him; and for another, Alice was to be expected to travel to his home for the lessons, and not he to hers. The distance was not great — less than a mile — but the elegance of the suburban road in which he lived was in itself intimidating, with its large and well-kept late-Victorian houses set well back from the road behind wrought-iron gates and barriers of smugly evergreen shrubs that looked as if they had lived there for a hundred years.
    Walking up the short gravel drive to her preliminary interview with the Bensons, Alice felt her heart thudding uncomfortably, and her brain (even more uncomfortably) emptying itself ofsuitable sentences with which to advocate the claims of both herself and her outdated subject.
    Both were necessary. The beautifully-proportioned pale grey drawing-room, with its floor-length velvet curtains and its silver vases of out-of-season roses, formed a setting singularly unkind to Alice’s one and only winter coat and her scuffed suede boots. Not that Mrs Benson, an anxious and well-preserved blonde of about Alice’s own age, showed any signs of being overtly snobbish about this. On the contrary, you could see her deciding, after a single glance, that one can’t go by appearances and that anyway in this new high-speed age with which it was so important to keep up, class didn’t count