Dangerous Thoughts (3 page)

It was hard to believe, but the whole thing had taken little more than a week, from Edwin’s departure at the airport to the dramatic news bulletins: first of his capture along with his two companions, then of his release.

It had been a strange week. Where there should have been emotions, there had been phone calls, interviews and news bulletins. Did you know that there are seventy news programmes a day, if you add the radio and all the TV channels together? And on top of this, I seemed to spend a lot of time agreeing bemusedly with well-wishers who kept telling me that it would be all right in the end.

And how right they were. Well, depending on what you mean by ‘all right’, of course. Anyway, Edwin was now on his way home, safe and sound after his ordeal. He would be here, all being well, some time tomorrow.

One last evening of peace. I tried not to think of it that way, I really did. But what can you do?

Anyway, there could be no harm in treating the occasion as a festive one. We lit candles, we brought in cider, we invited in a couple of Jason’s closest friends; and whether what we were celebrating was Dad’s miraculous escape, or our last evening of freedom, who could say? Who
need
say?

Anyway, I remember the occasion with peculiar vividness partly because it was such fun, and partly because of the slightly disconcerting phone call that came in the middle of it. It came
about nine o’clock, just as the boys were spreading greasy cartons from the Indian takeaway all over the kitchen table, their recently broken voices ricocheting from wall to wall, and setting the very crockery on the dresser ringing. The mounting din was music in my ears; the sheer joy of not having to shut them up was coursing through my veins like wine.

“What?” I shouted into the receiver, “Excuse me, hang on a moment, I must go to the other phone …”

And so it was in the relative quiet of the sitting-room that I took the call, well out of hearing of Jason and his friends. Naturally, during the last few hours since the good news broke, we had been getting numerous congratulatory calls, and, picking up the phone, I was assuming that this was another one: but it wasn’t. At first, I didn’t recognise the voice, and it was several moments before I realised that the person I was talking to was Hank Armour, assistant editor of
International
Focus,
the paper destined to be the recipient of Edwin’s ‘biggest scoop of the season’.

He sounded bothered rather than congratulatory. Had Edwin arrived home yet? Had he phoned me from anywhere? Had I had any further news? No, and no, and no, I had to say. The only news I’d had was the same as he’d presumably had, from radio and television. Still, such as it was, I summarised it as best I could: how Edwin and the two other journalists with him on the trip had been ambushed on a rough desert road and had been taken into captivity by an as yet unnamed group of terrorists, no ransom had been demanded, and the motive for the kidnapping was as yet unclear. Police were examining the abandoned jeep for clues …

I could hear the man’s boredom and impatience right down the length of the wire. Well, naturally, These bare facts were just as well known to him as to me, and indeed to half the world by now; so I changed tack, and began to ask
him
a few questions. Did
he
know where Edwin was right now? Had he had any sort of report from him yet?

“Yes … That’s the trouble, really, Mrs Wakefield. We
have
had a report … he was phoning it from Stuttgart, so he said …”

“Why ‘so he said’?” I demanded; but the answer was evasive; and something in the man’s tone warned me not to press the matter. You see, I am always very careful not ever to say anything that might queer Edwin’s pitch — Edwin’s pitches so often proving so sadly queerable — and thus, after a few meaningless pleasantries, the conversation was allowed to grind to a halt.

Looking back, I realise that this abortive and unsatisfactory exchange should have left me feeling more uneasy than it did. But at the time my mind was elsewhere. How far away is Stuttgart, I was asking myself? Jolly close, I expect, by air.
Everywhere
is jolly close nowadays. Soon, no one will be able to get away from anyone else at all, ever. Thank God Hotol is still only on the drawing-board, otherwise Edwin might be here within twenty minutes, with the boys still creating this hell of a racket and the smell of the Indian takeaway permeating the entire house. Edwin can’t bear takeaways, and he hates them even more when he’s not eating them himself than when he is.

“Yes, well, I’ll let you know if I hear anything,” I said, scribbling down the number that was being dictated to me. “Yes, I’ll tell him as soon as he arrives … Yes, of course … Yes, I’m sure he will … Yes, thank you so much … Goodbye …”

Jason received the news appropriately though slightly offhandedly. “Great.” I think was what he said, and his friends echoed the sentiment with hurried politeness — they were all longing to get back to the much more enthralling topic which had been raising such gales of laughter when I came into the kitchen. Anyway, we poured another round of cider, all the mugs were filled to the brim, and soon the decibels were satisfactorily rising again, making a good recovery from my interruption.

There were several more phone calls, of course, as the evening went on, all of them congratulatory.

“Yes, isn’t it thrilling!” I kept saying, and “Yes, I’m sure he’d love you to ring.”

He would, too. Normally, Edwin hates the telephone; he can’t see why people should imagine they have the right to interrupt his work — or his cup of tea or his newspaper or whatever — just whenever they choose; but he won’t mind being rung up to be told how marvellous he is, of that I feel sure.

It was past midnight when the last call came. Jason and his two friends had gone to bed — they were both staying the night, their last chance to do so for goodness knows how long — and I was wandering around downstairs, vaguely tidying up and putting things to rights. Really I prefer to leave this sort of chore for the morning, but that ‘just in case’ feeling was upon me, and I knew I wouldn’t sleep until the worst of it was coped with.

“Hullo?” I said, a little perfunctorily, I fear; I’d already said it so many times, you see, the ‘Yes, isn’t it thrilling!’ bit. “Hullo, Clare Wakefield speaking …”

The voice was strange to me: young, eager, and with a quality of lightness which was instantly endearing.

“Oh, Mrs Wakefield — or may I call you Clare? I feel we know each other
so
well
already, though of course we don’t, if you see what I mean.”

I didn’t see, but it seemed best not to interrupt. You know how it is with people who ring up and don’t give their names: if you interrupt to ask who they are, they may be mortally offended, having assumed that they were among your nearest and dearest and you would recognise their voices anywhere. However, if you lie low and let them run on, light usually dawns: sooner or later they will mention Uncle Robert, or the mix-up at the tennis-club lunch, and you will know where you are.

“Thank goodness I’ve got you at last!” the voice continued. “Your line’s been engaged the
entire
evening … I was getting quite frantic! That is to say, my mother-in-law was … still is, actually, she’s making wild signs to me (It’s
all
right,
Mother! I’ve
got
her! Yes — I told you — it’s
her
!) Listen, Clare, I’m sorry to
be ringing so late, but like I told you … Besides, I guess you’re too excited to go to bed anyway, I know I would be. It’s marvellous news, isn’t it, about your husband? Just super! I’m really thrilled for you. Though actually I’ve said all along … (
Yes
, Mother,
of course
I will! I’m
going
to! That’s what I’m ringing her
for
!) Sorry, Clare, but Mother’s having kittens; she’s just hopping with impatience, and so am I of course, though I’ve said all along they were going to be all right, Haven’t I, Mother? I’ve felt it in my bones, right from the very beginning.”

“Look,” I interrupted (I felt I had been waiting for that identifying clue quite long enough), “Look, I’m terribly sorry, but I’m still not quite sure who …”

“
Who?
Why, your husband, of course! Your husband Edwin, that’s who I’m talking about. Well, obviously! Or …” and here for the first time a flicker of uncertainty could be heard in the exuberant voice “Or — I say — you are
the
Clare Wakefield, aren’t you? Gosh, I …”

To agree that, yes, I am
the
Clare Wakefield sounds a bit conceited, doesn’t it; but all the same, it had to be said; and in the same breath (before my interlocutor could draw her hopping-with-impatience mother-in-law into the discussion yet again, to the further obfuscation of the issue) I repeated my question, but this time in point-blank style. “Please,” I said, “tell me who you
are.
I’m grateful for all your good wishes, thank you very much, but do tell me your name.”

“My
name
?” There was a stunned silence: then, “I’m
Sally
, of course! I took for granted — well, I mean, of course I did — that you’ve been hearing about
me
on the radio just as much as I’ve been hearing about
you.
I’m Sally. Sally Barlow, Richard’s wife. I’ve been on TV no end of times since it happened, didn’t you see me? I saw
you
this very evening, I thought you looked super, Clare, I really did; so calm and dignified and answering them in such few, words … And when I think of the way
I
rattle on in front of the cameras, I felt … (
Yes
, Mother,
of course
I’m going to ask her, what do you think? But she doesn’t even know who I
am
yet, would you credit it? Well, she does now, I mean, I’ve just told her, but …)”

I left them to it, thankful for a few moments in which to marshal my thoughts. So this was the wife of Richard Barlow, one of Edwin’s two colleagues on this ill-fated trip. I ought to have recognised her voice easily — I had heard it often enough, on radio and television, during the past few days — but somehow it hadn’t sounded the same. Her face I would certainly have recognised — as indeed would half the world: young, blonde and limitlessly photogenic, the large, lustrous blue eyes being tantalisingly revealed as in a strip-tease whenever she brushed aside her tangle of pale fringe.

And now it was not Sally’s voice in my ear any longer, it was the mother-in-law who was interrogating me — Richard Barlow’s mother, that is. No doubt in despair of getting her loquacious daughter-in-law to ask the sort of straight questions that would evoke straight answers, she must have snatched the phone from the girl’s hand — and I couldn’t blame her.

She found it hard to believe that I had not as yet heard anything from Edwin himself.

“Surely,” she was saying, “he must have phoned you by now? Yes, I know, I can understand how careful they have to be; but surely, just to say ‘Hello’ to his own wife! Just a few words so that you can hear his voice! I find it very extraordinary that he hasn’t at least …”

She was making it sound as if it was
my
fault, and it annoyed me. How could it be my fault if they weren’t allowing Edwin to phone — whoever ‘they’ might be, over there in Stuttgart? I tried not to let the annoyance sound in my voice — after all, the poor woman must be desperately worried about her son, and disappointed, too, that I had been of so little help.

“Yes, well, I’m terribly sorry I can’t tell you anything right now,” I said. “But the moment I get any more news — anything at all — I’ll phone you at once. And of course, as soon as Edwin gets home, we’ll …”

Well, we’ll what? Like everything else in this household, it would depend on what mood Edwin was in. And what mood
would
he be in after his ordeal? Not, I feared, a mood for being cross-questioned by this rather insistent stranger.

“Well — that is — I’ll phone you anyway,” I temporised. “Just give me your number …” By now, weariness was catching up with me, and I had to force myself to realise that the fact that I couldn’t lay hands on either a biro or an unbroken pencil wasn’t
her
fault, any more than the fact that Edwin hadn’t phoned was mine. And so I sounded as amiable as I possibly could while I gouged the number with my thumbnail down the margin of the Arts page of yesterday’s
Guardian.

I had a strange dream that night. Well, not particularly strange in itself, perhaps, but strange in the context of my life at that particular juncture. In the midst of this turmoil of suspense and guilty heart-searchings one would have expected anxiety dreams, nightmares even: dreams of being threatened or attacked; of missing trains and planes and ferries and losing one’s luggage; that sort of thing. Instead of which, my dream that night was a dream of such carefree uncomplicated happiness as my waking self finds it almost impossible to describe. We were coming down a mountain-side, Edwin and I, tramping and stumbling through the scree, calling to one another and laughing. Somewhere in the Lake District I think it must have been, for though details were lacking, I was vaguely aware of blueness and distance, and the luminous grey of damp rocks. They do say, don’t they, that if you dream in colour, then the dream has some special psychological significance; but I don’t need any expert or pop-psychology-monger to tell me that this dream was something special. You see, in my dream I still
loved
Edwin. We had been hill-walking, as we used to do in those long past days of our early marriage, and as we slipped and slithered among the loose stones, Edwin was mocking me, as was his wont, about wearing plimsolls for such an expedition. “They’ll be torn to pieces on the scree,” he used to predict, his own feet smugly encased in heavy climbing boots. “No, they won’t!” I used to retort (and nor were they); and now, in the dream, I added: “Look, wearing these I
can skim over the surface — like this!
You
can’t, in those great heavy things!” And sure enough, skim over the surface I did, floating, soaring down the mountain-side, springing like a gazelle from boulder to boulder, with perfect balance, perfect timing, down and down and down. And Edwin, no longer jeering, was watching with amazement, his face alight with admiration and surprise. His arms were outstretched, and as his arms embraced me, I was engulfed by a terrible sadness, an unbearable poignancy: for in that moment I knew that Edwin was going away, he was leaving me. This was our last climb together.

Where was he going? Why? These sort of questions are waking questions; one doesn’t ask ‘Why?’ in dreams; and sure enough, I
was
waking. The mountains were gone, the blueness and the distance, and it was morning. I could hear the boys tramping about, opening doors, leaving them to slam, turning on swirls of water, calling to each other, “Have you got …?” “Where’s my …?” the epicentre of the commotion slowly spreading from upstairs to downstairs in an unstoppable tide.

My heart contracted in familiar dread: supposing Edwin walked in right now, in the midst of all this! He might … he actually might … If he was in Stuttgart seven hours ago, he could easily be here now. Easily! Oh, God, I prayed, let him not have caught the night plane …!

I was glad, though, that I’d had that dream, it was a sort of antidote to this unkind prayer. It was a comfort to know that my subconscious was capable of nicer thoughts than I was. Isn’t it usually the other way round?

Naturally, the Barlows rang again this morning. True, I’d promised I’d let them know immediately if there was any news, but they weren’t taking any chances. After all, how could
they
know how reliable I was? Promising things and then failing to do them might be the story of my life for all they knew.

So anyway, they rang again, quite early — though not, thank goodness, until the boys had left. There is nothing more disconcerting than dealing with a difficult phone call while two
visitors stand politely waiting to say ‘Thank You for Having Them’.

It was Sally this time, not the mother-in-law. I was glad of this, for I couldn’t face being quizzed all over again about Edwin not having telephoned me, and this I felt sure Sally would refrain from doing. Indeed, I felt she was brushing aside almost
too
light-heartedly my regretful pronouncement that no, I hadn’t heard anything more, Edwin wasn’t back yet, hadn’t phoned and so …”

“Ah, not to worry!” Sally broke in. “It’s going to be all right, I know it is. The fact that they’ve let your Edwin out means — well, obviously it does — that they’re going to let the others out too. It stands to reason.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to remind her that — if the reports were correct — Edwin hadn’t been
let
out, he had escaped; but I checked myself in time. If Sally was managing to keep her spirits up by blotting out negative data, then why disillusion her? It wasn’t as if there was anything she could
do
if she faced the facts squarely. She would just be making herself miserable to no purpose.

“And anyway,” she was saying, “that’s not actually what I was ringing about. No, the thing is, Clare, I think we ought to meet. You and me. Here we are, both in the same boat kind of thing. You’ve seen me on television no end of times, and I’ve seen you. Why don’t we get together for a coffee, or something? Or lunch, if you’d rather. Soon, anyway. Like now, I mean? This morning?”

I could almost hear my mind whirring as it sprang to anxiety-stations. Edwin was due home today. They
said
afternoon, but no one seemed actually to know — he might quite easily turn up this morning, and if I simply wasn’t there to welcome him — I shuddered to think of the blazing row with which we would then have to celebrate his home-coming.

“I’m sorry, Sally, I simply can’t go out today. I
must
stay right here, on the end of the telephone. You do see, don’t you?”

“Oh, but …! Look, can’t you really …?” She sounded quite dismayed. Then, “Well, look, suppose I were to come to
your
place? I could be there in — let’s see — not much over an hour, I should think. The only thing is — I’d have to bring Barnaby with me. Would you mind?”

Barnaby? Barnaby? Not that I needed to know who — or what — this appendage might be in order to know that I
would
mind. If Edwin were to arrive home during the visit, he might just tolerate the intrusion into his homecoming of just one singularly pretty girl; but to expect him to take in his stride a barking, hair-shedding dog or a bored fidgety child … Yes, that was it. A child. I remembered now, he had appeared on one of the programmes, leaning fetchingly against his mother — or was he straining away? You couldn’t tell, really, so skilfully had he been posed by the photographers, with his mother’s arm so firmly around him. Aged about four, I had guessed, and rather Little Lord Fauntleroyish in style, with big blue eyes like his mother’s, and a mass of golden curls — the sort of curls that commonly elicit the remark: ‘Wasted on a boy!’ Or used to. I believe Women’s Lib have put a stop to this now, though I can’t quite work out on what grounds. Perhaps the phrase just
sounds
sexist, so that you don’t need to examine its meaning. A lot of phrases are like this. I remember a speaker once complaining that he’d had an under-deprived childhood, expecting to raise a laugh; instead of which the audience all sighed in automatic sympathy.

“OK then, I’ll be setting off straight away,” Sally was saying, evidently taking my preoccupied silence as consent. “We’ll be with you by half-ten, that’s if the traffic’s not
too
awful,” and she rang off before I had a chance to protest. Not that I would have. After all, the poor girl must actually be terribly anxious in spite of her brave words — or her idiot optimism, whichever way you like to look at it. To talk it all over, however pointlessly, with someone who had been ‘in the same boat’ as she described it, might be just what she needed. The mother-in-law,
it was already clear to me, was an unsatisfactory confidante despite — or perhaps because of — the shared nature of their anxieties.

*

“What a lovely room!” Sally was saying, pushing aside the light tangle of her fringe just as she had on television. “And what super flowers!” The flowers, gold and bronze chrysanthemums, had in fact been brought by a well-wisher, and I was glad that she had noticed them: they did indeed look lovely in the blue-and-white Chinese vase I had found for them. I was glad, too, that she had noticed how nice the sitting-room was looking. I’d worked hard on it, both last night and this morning, scrubbing and hoovering, clearing the desktop of unanswered and unanswerable mail, polishing the coffee-table and the oak bookshelves, realigning as best I could the books for which there was insufficient space so that fewer of them sprawled horizontally in ungainly piles. I’d been doing all this, of course, in preparation for Edwin’s imminent arrival, but all the same it was nice to have it noticed by a stranger. Edwin himself wouldn’t notice it, of course, unless I had failed to do it, and naturally I didn’t want the house’s resemblance or otherwise to a pigsty to be our very first topic of conversation.

“And you get the morning sun, too,” Sally enthused. “Sometimes I wish that
our
sitting-room faced south-east like this, but actually the afternoon and evening sun are more important for us. Richard usually gets in about four, you see, and we have tea looking out into the garden through the french windows. He quite often has to go out again afterwards, of course, he works most evenings, but he always tries to be in for teatime. It’s our special time, you see, before I have to start putting Barnaby to bed.”

Our special time. I was swept by a gust of purest envy; not because she was young and lovely — though she was — but because she actually enjoyed having her husband home with her. They had happy times together, special times that she looked forward to.

“So today I’m baking his favourite nut cake,” she chattered on. “It needs six eggs, the whites separated from the yolks … No, Barnaby, leave that
alone
! Put it
down
!”

While we had been talking, Barnaby had at first been sitting close beside his mother on the sofa, very quiet and good; in other words, very shy. Within the last few minutes, though, confidence had seeped back into his reluctant soul (I well remembered how much small boys hate visiting the houses of their mother’s friends), and he had slid off the sofa and begun exploring his new environs.

“I said, put it down!” repeated Sally, trying implausibly to inject a note of sternness into her sweet light voice. “You mustn’t touch Mrs Wakefield’s things without asking.”

Barnaby turned to face us, my brass elephant paper-weight still clutched firmly in his fist.

“T’s a toy,” he countered, and I could follow the logic of this concisely worded argument. Toys belong by right to children, not to adults, and therefore they can’t justly be put into the category of ‘Mrs Wakefield’s things’.

“It’s quite all right,” I hastily assured his mother. “Let him play with it. I’m only sorry we haven’t any
real
toys for him, but you see my son is fifteen now, and so of course …”

“Of course,” agreed Sally, not quite listening. “Say ‘Thank you’ to Mrs Wakefield, Barnaby, and play with it quietly. Don’t drop it.”

“’K you” was just audible from the child’s lips, pitched in any direction except mine, and then, propelled by his new master, the elephant set off on his journey into the unknown.

“What I really wanted to ask you,” Sally was now saying; “when your husband — when Edwin — first told you about this expedition, what exactly did he
say
? Where did he say they were going? What, exactly, were they planning to
do
?”

I’d had plenty of time to ask myself these questions, and I still didn’t know the answers. Perhaps, if I’d listened more attentively when Edwin had first mentioned the possibility of this assignment
— but there, how can one know in advance that something is going to go so gravely wrong with a project that one’s memory is going to be raked and scoured for tiny clues — for nuances of tone, for inadvertently dropped syllables? All I knew — and so all that I could tell Sally — was that the expedition concerned the gleaning of information about certain (un-named) hostages — information which might — just might — be conducive to their release. He was going out as an investigative journalist in company with two others — Sally’s husband Richard and one other, a certain Leonard Coburn. Oh, and that he — Edwin — would be travelling on his own from Heathrow to a destination in the Middle East, and would meet up with the others on arrival. That the whole thing would take ‘quite a while’. Also, that he might not be able to write home very often.

Actually he hadn’t written at all; but then he often didn’t. For Sally it was different. Richard normally wrote to her
every
day when he was away, often twice, and went to heroic lengths to see that his missives got through, even if he found himself up a mountain or tossing in an open boat on some politically sensitive stretch of ocean.

“So you see I
know
I’ll hear from him soon,” she insisted. “He’ll contrive it somehow, I know he will; he always does no matter how difficult the circumstances. I just watch the post every day, I rush out to the postman, and when there isn’t anything — why, in a few hours there’ll be the
next
post, won’t there?

“It upsets his mother rather, that I’m like this: she wants me to be despairing, like her. She was
dreadfully
upset about this cake, you know, this nut cake that’s Richard’s favourite. Tempting providence, she called it, to make a cake for him when we don’t even know if he’s still alive.

“But we
do
know, Clare; at least, I mean,
I
know. I just feel
certain
he’s all right. Daphne — that’s my mother-in-law, she likes me to call her ‘Daphne’ and not ‘Mother’, but I don’t always
remember, she seems a bit old to be called Daphne, if you know what I mean — well, anyway, Daphne seems to think it’s actually
wrong
of me to feel so optimistic. But how can it be wrong? And anyway, how can one help one’s
feelings
…?”

How indeed? Once again, I was filled with envy. How wonderful it must be to have such
nice
feelings to control instead of grudging, un-loving ones like mine!

All the same, I couldn’t help sympathising somewhat with this mother-in-law. In a situation so fraught with danger and with dreadful possibilities — dreadful
probabilities,
indeed, — all this blind, unreasoning optimism must occasionally grate on the nerves terribly.