Listening in the Dusk by Celia Fremlin Page A

for anything. Though of course if this woman who was proposing to coach her son had actually had an accent …
    Mercifully, Alice hadn’t. As soon as she began to speak, she could see her employer’s face clear, and knew she was over the first hurdle. The second was more difficult.
    “You see,” Mrs Benson was saying, crossing her shapely legs and settling herself more securely against her discreetly- positioned back-support cushion, “you see, without meaning to disparage your qualifications in any way, Mrs Saunders, I’m sure they are excellent, but we are a little unhappy, my husband and I, about the whole idea of our boy spending time — valuable homework time — on studying an outdated language that no one is ever going to speak. Where will it get him?”
    Where would it? This was the question that was bound to arise. Alice had prepared for it.
    “I think,” she began, “— and this is simply my experience as a teacher — I think that in educating a child one has to look beyond the immediate practical qualifications that he —”
    Mrs Benson was on to it in a flash. “Why ‘he’?” she demanded. “Why not ‘she’? I hope, I do hope, Mrs Saunders, that you haven’t a sexist attitude? I wouldn’t like Cyril to, well …”
    She paused, perhaps a little uncertain herself exactly what it was that she wouldn’t like Cyril to do, or be, or have, or become as a result of Alice’s instruction in elementary Greek syntax; so Alice intervened to help her out.
    “Of course not,” she said. “I was just using the word ‘he’ in ageneral sense. If you’d got a daughter I was to teach, I’d naturally have said —”
    “I have got a daughter actually,” interrupted Mrs Benson, with a touch of reproof at the implied accusation of not having one, “but she’s only six, and so .. But anyway …” Here she changed tack slightly, “I must be frank with you. If it was a daughter of mine who wanted to learn Greek, I’d be even more worried than I am about Cyril. I feel it is so important for girls, just as much as for boys, to learn science and technology and … and … well, technology. Wouldn’t you agree? And that’s what worries me about Cyril. We — his father and I — we naturally want him to do Maths and Science, and this whim of his to learn Greek, naturally we find it rather upsetting. But, on the other hand, if we oppose him about it, if we forbid him to have lessons, it might just drive it underground. What do you think? As a teacher?”
    “Well,” Alice was beginning, “it does seem to me —”
    “Exactly!” exclaimed Mrs Benson in tones of relief. “Just what we were saying, his father and I. I thought you’d agree. And so, for the moment … You see, there are signs that he may be already learning, in secret. Only last week, I was going through his clothes, and in his sock drawer I found a book called ‘ The Republic ’. At first I thought it was just politics — you know, Peace Studies, that sort of thing — but when I opened it, I saw it was all in Greek !Mind you, I don’t suppose for a moment that he can read it, but all the same, there’s no knowing how it will end if we don’t handle it right at this stage.”
    She sounded like a mother who has come across a secret hoard of drugs in her son’s bedroom. Her face, under its neat and superbly-styled cap of shining, straw-blonde hair was puckered with concern; and Alice, partly to change the subject and partly because she felt it was high time, suggested that she should be introduced to the boy himself. “I can’t really judge the situation until I’ve met him,” she pointed out. “And in case we do decide on the lessons, I’d like to know how far he’s already got. You know, for books and things.”
    After a half-hearted flutter of demur, in deference to Maths and Science and the modern high-speed age, the boy was summoned from upstairs, and Alice had the few moments beforehis arrival to wonder what he would be