Dangerous Thoughts (11 page)

The Indian summer had returned. Barnaby, who had hurried out of the front door at the sound of my car drawing up, now escorted me through a gate at the side of the house into a sunlit glory of green and gold and bronze. A wide lawn stretched before us, flanked by shrubs and tall trees ablaze with autumn colours, and in the centre of this glowing space Edwin reclined at ease in a red-and-white canvas deckchair. A tall glass of some sparkling drink stood on a wrought-iron table to his right, while on his left Sally was curled companionably on a rug, her laughing face tilted up towards him as if he had just made some exquisitely amusing joke. Edwin loves to feel that his jokes have been exquisitely amusing — well, I suppose we all do — and it was obvious to me that he was having the time of his life: though just how he had come by it was still obscure. Had he simply gate-crashed the little family? Or had one of them phoned him? Or what?

“S’not Daddy,” Barnaby announced, marching purposefully up to the tranquil pair, “s’only Clare. So we can play ‘Plink’ some more, can’t we Edwin? ‘
Plink
’”
he repeated, with further emphasis, fixing an imperious gaze on Edwin. “‘
PLINK
’”
.
And then, prompting his laggard playmate: “You have to ask me, what does ‘Plink’ mean?”

“All right. What does ‘Plink’ mean?” Edwin asked obligingly without bothering to open his eyes — the sun was blazing full into his face, so one couldn’t blame him — “Go on — what does ‘Plink’ mean?”

‘It means I’ve got to run to the end of the garden and swing six swings in the swing and then run back,” shrilled Barnaby, suiting the action to the word: but all too soon, and long before any adult conversation could be properly resumed, he was back again.

“‘Grum’!” he squealed, “Edwin, Edwin, you have to ask me, What does ‘Grum’ mean?”

Apparently ‘Grum’ meant that Barnaby had to run to the shrubbery, fetch a red thing, a blue thing and a brown thing, and bring them back to us: which assignment being completed in about twelve seconds flat, I could see Edwin’s patience coming swiftly to an end.

“What does ‘Crig’ mean? Why, it means you’ve got to run round and round the lawn four hundred times, and then sit still for an hour without speaking,” Edwin pronounced sternly; and when, after a moment’s bemused calculation, both Barnaby and his mother fell about laughing, he looked both startled and gratified. He had not anticipated so flattering a response to his intended
coup
de
grâce.

“Oh, well, all right:
you
tell me what ‘Crig’ means,” he conceded; and so the game went on, greatly to Barnaby’s satisfaction, and to Edwin’s too, I fancied, basking as he was in the glow of Sally’s maternal approval.

“He’s marvellous with children, your husband, isn’t he?” she enthused during one of Barnaby’s self-imposed sorties out of hearing. “It must have been wonderful for you when
your
son was small.”

My heart twisted with nostalgic pain and with the pure unsullied envy I had felt more than once in Sally’s presence. Because Edwin
had
been marvellous with Jason when he’d been this sort of age. The contrast between the father-son relationship of those days and the way it was now between the two of them was almost too much to be borne. I was jealous, jealous, jealous. Not (as some wives might have been) of my husband’s chatting-up a lovely young woman in the sunshine,
but of his effortless success with this child who was not ours, in contrast to his dark and damaging failure with the child who was.

Lunch time came, and still no Richard.

“It’s really very odd,” observed Daphne, ladling out some very good tomato soup flavoured with fennel, “He was so definite about being back in time for lunch. He has the last instalment of that
Changes
in
the
Eastern
Bloc
series to finish. I suppose …” she turned to Edwin — “he didn’t say anything to
you
,
did he, about his plans for today? I imagine that when you arranged to come here …”

“Oh, but Mother-I-mean-Daphne, Edwin came on impulse.” Here she turned to me: “It was so funny, Clare, you know that path which runs along the bottom of all these gardens? Well, I was looking out of our bedroom window, watching Barnaby twirling himself around on the swing — he can’t swing himself properly yet, you know; Richard’s been trying to teach him, but …”

“I
can
swing myself properly!” interrupted Barnaby darkly, clashing his spoon ferociously against the rim of his plate. “That
was
properly, how I was swinging myself!”

“Yes, sweetie, yes, of course it was,” Sally assured him hastily. “Yes, well, there he was, swinging himself properly, and suddenly I noticed a man watching him from over the hedge. Well, for a minute I was quite scared — you know — a strange man — one hears such awful things nowadays, I thought it might be a murderer or something, so I rushed downstairs … but it was all right, it wasn’t a murderer at all, it was
Edwin!
”

She looked round the table, beaming. “He’d got lost, poor sweet, hadn’t you, Edwin? He thought it was a short cut, a lot of people do, but actually you can’t get into the gardens from that path at all, it only leads to the golf course, and to the Botanical Centre …”

“So Sally kindly directed me back on my tracks, and I was able to make a thoroughly respectable entry by the front gate —” Edwin took up the tale; and then, turning to Daphne: “No, I’m
afraid I
don’t
know anything about Richard’s movements. As Sally says, nothing was planned, I just came on spec. And how glad I am that I did … Such a delightful morning, in such delightful company …”

His spirits, I could see, were quite recovered from the breakfast-time gloom, and throughout the meal he and Sally kept up an increasingly flirtatious exchange of banter, highly entertaining to both, though less so, I could see, to Daphne, whose look of quiet disapproval deepened. Apart from a few polite remarks necessitated by her role as hostess, she spoke scarcely at all.

Only when we were alone together in the drawing-room after lunch — Sally and Edwin having undertaken jointly the apparently onerous task of settling Barnaby for his afternoon rest — did she put her unease into words.

“I do hope, Clare,” she said, “that Sally’s behaviour hasn’t upset you? Do let me assure you, it doesn’t mean a thing. She has this flirtatious way with her, but it’s just high spirits really, and she does it with anyone when she’s in the mood; it’s part of her nature. She’s like a child, you know, in many ways, and she doesn’t always quite realise the impression she’s making. I’ve tried to have a word with her now and again, but of course, as mother-in-law, I have to be so
very
careful. One must never, ever, seem to criticise. And of course, I do know that she’s absolutely devoted to my son really. There’s nothing actually to worry about …”

Here she glanced down, restlessly turning her wedding-ring round and round on her white, shapely finger.

“But all the same, I don’t like outsiders getting a wrong impression. As mother-in-law you can’t win. If you intervene … or if you don’t intervene … it’s difficult … One’s solitary, well-meaning self pitted against the whole, vast Mother-in-Law as Interfering Monster image. And in my case it’s further complicated by the fact that my son has chosen this rather hazardous profession and devotes himself to it heart and
soul. There are many occasions when I can’t help worrying about him, but I mustn’t show it, or talk about it, because Sally herself doesn’t worry at all. She seems immune to anxiety in any shape or form, and so
my
worry comes across as a sort of mother-hen fussing. Right now, for instance, Richard not being back yet. Sally’s not bothered in the least. ‘Something’s cropped up,’ she says, and no doubt it has; but what? Apart from anything else, he’s expecting several important phone calls today — there was one from Tokyo just before lunch, and they seemed very put out, in a Japanese kind of way, when I had to say he wasn’t here …

“
I
don’t know; perhaps I
do
worry too much. Perhaps, given the nature of Richard’s job, it really is better to be like Sally. Actually, I think he loves her to be like that … I’m sure he does. A worrying kind of wife wouldn’t suit him at all. Tell me, Clare, do
you
worry about your husband when …?”

But our discussion of the pros and cons of worrying over our loved ones was abruptly halted by the crashing open of the drawing-room door by an outraged Barnaby, shoeless, and with flaxen curls tumbled all over his scarlet tear-stained face.

“’S’not fair!” he raged. “Granny, tell Mummy it’s not fair! She says it’s not three o’clock yet, and it
is
three o’clock …!”

By this time Sally too had appeared in the doorway, likewise somewhat dishevelled.

“Barnaby, you shouldn’t come asking Granny the time when I’ve already
tol
d
you the time. It’s …”

“’Tisn’t!”

For a moment, deadlock supervened. Neither of the adults seemed to know what to do next, though the ball was clearly in their court. By now, I had divined the nature of the dispute: Barnaby’s afternoon rest was scheduled to last until three o’clock, and here he was, at barely half-past two, throwing down the gauntlet.

“Now, look, Barnaby …”

“Barnaby dear, don’t you think you’d better …”

“Listen, Barnaby, if you’ll come and finish your rest like a good boy, then when you get up you can have a …”

“Sally, dear, are you sure it’s a good idea, bribing him with …”

The controversy being thus raised to the more lofty heights of the moral and ethical issues involved in child-rearing, Barnaby’s tears dried on the instant. His eyes darted with professional aplomb from one to the other of the disputants, like a spectator at a tennis match. He didn’t mind who won, the game was the thing, every second taking them nearer and nearer to the witching hour when afternoon rests come to an end.

Game, set and match to Barnaby. By ten to three, it was obviously not worth while to force, lure or bribe him back to his bed; and so here we all were, out in the sunshine again, Sally sprawled on a rug and Edwin, sitting cross-legged at her side being, at Barnaby’s insistence, the Prince to her Sleeping Beauty. An easy role while it lasted, for whenever the small producer tried to introduce some action into the scene, he was sharply reminded by the leading man that the princess had to sleep for a hundred years before anything happened, and it wasn’t a hundred years yet, now was it?

Even Barnaby found this a difficult assertion to refute, and so comparative quiet reigned, during which I found the mounting uneasiness of the last few hours coming to a head.

Why
hadn’t Richard come home at the time expected? Why hadn’t he phoned? How come he hadn’t even arrived at his office this morning? Why — and this, of course, was the huge, dark question looming over my meditations — why had his mysterious disappearance coincided so exactly with Edwin’s allegedly unpremeditated visit to the Barlows’ home?

Coincidence? Don’t be silly! You
know
there must be a connection.

But a sinister one? Quite unbidden, and indeed in defiance of common sense, a picture flashed into my mind of Richard’s body half-hidden among the tall dusty nettles and the dangling
autumnal curtains of traveller’s joy which must surely line the margins of that footpath at the far end of the garden. In my vision, blood was soaking into Richard’s white shirt (did Richard wear white shirts? I couldn’t remember from our one and only meeting, but anyway, that’s how it indelibly was in my imagination) and blood had dried on his jacket. His face I couldn’t visualise, never having seen a dead person (such sheltered lives we lead, amid the slaughter and mayhem of our TV screens). Nor could I visualise the wound from which the blood was flowing — never having seen a wound either — nor imagine with what kind of a weapon it could have been inflicted. A penknife? Well, yes, Edwin possessed a penknife, but would that be adequate for the scenario which my imagination was conjuring up? Had he, then, slipped our breadknife? — carving knife? — into his briefcase before hurrying — so swiftly, so furtively, a bag of nerves if ever there was one — out of our house this morning?

What would be the next scene in the drama?

The TV screen, of course. We would be sitting, Edwin and I, side by side, safely home just in time for the six o’clock news, on which the murder of the distinguished journalist Richard Barlow would take pride of place. Sidelong, I would be glancing at Edwin’s face: sidelong, he would be glancing at mine; a penny for your thoughts … No, no, a penny would not be the appropriate coin at all, at all …

Sally was laughing at something Edwin had just said, and I was brought back to reality with a jolt … Lying back, eyes half closed, sunbathing in the last of the autumn sunshine, Edwin presented a persona impossible to slot into the role allotted by my fevered imagination. So laid-back he looked, so contented, so — I have to say it — so
trivial
a person; he just couldn’t be the perpetrator of huge crimes, any more than he had been capable of huge deeds of daring. Angry, frightened, caught in a very tight corner indeed as a result of his own lies and deceptions, he might well have fantasized Richard’s death;
might even have devised wild, imaginary plans for bringing it about: but when it came to the point — Ah, no! Not my Edwin!

And, after all, was there not another, and perfectly innocuous explanation for Richard’s sudden disappearance today? Quite possibly, he had caught sight of Edwin lurking around the neighbourhood this morning — as by Sally’s account he had undoubtedly been doing — and had resolved to get the hell out of the house before some sort of embarrassing encounter was forced upon him.

Of course! What could be more understandable?

All the same, this didn’t explain why Edwin had come here so furtively, so unannounced in the first place. If not to murder Richard, then to do what to him?

To threaten? To plead? To bargain? And then, finding the bird flown, and himself irretrievably spotted lurking on the footpath, he had done the only sensible thing — had turned the whole thing into a casual social call. And a singularly pleasant one, as things turned out. And why not? Such innocent fun as it all was, the two of them basking idly in the sunshine under a dazzlingly blue sky framed by the massed loops and curves of multi-coloured autumn foliage.