Dangerous Thoughts (6 page)

You may well ask — as do some of my more liberated friends — why I didn’t occasionally turn on him, yelling “Get that bloody thing out of my kitchen!” But you have to remember that in our house, Edwin’s good moods are like gold-dust, and not to be shattered by so inhospitable a reception of his newly acquired treasures.

And anyway, one does learn to live with them, and they do provide extra surfaces. Last year’s Christmas cards, for instance, still repose, unsorted, in the bowl of the thing that is supposed to churn milk and unsalted butter into cream; and on top of the microwave with the faulty wiring I keep the saucepans that are too burnt to use any more, but not quite burnt enough to be thrown away.

A place for everything and everything in its place, as our grandmothers used to say.

We were more than half way through the meal — the syrup sponge had just been set down in all its steaming golden glory — when Sally suddenly burst out:

“Oh! That reminds me!” (Though how a syrup sponge could remind her of any such thing I never did discover.) “The Leonard woman rang up. She had an urgent question and wanted us to ring her before twelve while Clare was still here. But of course Clare
is
still here, and so … Well, anyway, I’m sorry — I should have told you before.”

Yes, you bloody well should, I thought, and glancing at Daphne’s face I could see her thinking exactly the same thing, with pursed lips.

The Leonard woman. That would be Leonard Coburn’s wife Jessica, of course. This was the first time, to my knowledge, that she had made any attempt to contact either me or Sally: and when I had tried to contact her I had had no success. The phone just rang and rang in the Coburns’ windswept stone farmhouse on the Norfolk coast, and I had come to the conclusion that she must be away — staying with relatives, perhaps, to give her support through this anxious time. Now, it flashed across my mind that perhaps she, alone among us three wives, had actually got herself over to Beirut in order to — well, I don’t know, what
could
one do? — but all the same, Brownie points to her for trying. And perhaps she had indeed learned something?

If so, we were destined not to hear it that day. Once again, the phone just rang and rang in the deserted house. We must already have left it too late, and Sally, whose fault it was, said once again that she was sorry, ever so sorry, but after all, we could try again later, couldn’t we? On which unsatisfactory note we returned disconsolately to our cooling golden pudding.

I arrived home at something after four, and found Edwin already there. Not in the flesh, you understand, but on the box, happy and mouthing. For several moments I did not turn the sound on, such a joy was it to see him in such a good mood, uncomplicated by what he might be saying.

But no sooner was the sound on, than I became aware that all was not going entirely well. The interviewer was out to get him. I’d seen this technique before — maybe it was the same interviewer? Very like him anyway — a middle-aged sort of young man, not fat exactly, but somehow bloated with well-being and upward-mobility. They tend to set up this kind of interview when someone — in the opinion of someone else — has been getting too good a run for his money and needs taking down a peg. I trembled for my poor Edwin. He wasn’t up to it, I felt sure. Apart from these last two or three hectic days, he hadn’t had any experience of appearing on TV and no skill at all — it was already evident — in parrying loaded questions. Did he realise that this smooth-tongued professional was even now moving in for the kill?

“So you just went off and left your companions to their fate — is that what you’re saying?” His interrogator was asking, his gimlet eyes under their sleepy lids watching for Edwin to get rattled.

Which he did, of course, poor Edwin.

“Oh — I say …! No, I mean, look here, it wasn’t like that!”

“Not like what?” His tormentor was smiling now, an easy victor. “You mean you
didn’t
leave them? But you told us just a moment ago that …”

“Yes, yes, of course I — Well, I mean, there was nothing else I could do. I did try to — well, like I told you … but I didn’t know where they … and soon it would begin to get light. I’d have been recaptured instantly if …”

“Yes, yes, of course, we all understand. I expect I’d have done the same myself; I don’t pretend to be a hero. Relax, Eddie!” (Yes, he was ‘Eddie’ by now to all the world except for his family and friends.) “Just relax, calm down, nobody’s blaming you, not for one minute. We just want to get the sequence straight, OK? You were scared of being recaptured, and so off you went. On your own. While it was still dark. Right? That would be the Tuesday, I take it?”

I saw Edwin give a tiny start.
Tuesday
?
he was thinking; and then he nodded.

“Yes, Tuesday.”

“So, OK, you walked across the desert all through Tuesday and into the next night — Wednesday night. Right? How was it Eddie, alone in the desert at night? How did you feel?”

Edwin had recovered himself. You could see him feeling that he had successfully hauled himself back on to firm ground; and now here he was, describing to millions of viewers the scene that he had described to Jason and me, using almost the same words, waxing eloquent about the velvet blackness of the sky, the brilliance of the stars.

Casually, the interviewer glanced down at some kind of document that happened to be conveniently to hand.

“It seems it was full moon on that Tuesday night,” he drawled. “Funny the sky was so black and the stars so brilliant. You’d have thought …”

Now
what? Oh, poor Edwin …!

For a moment he just stared, his mouth opening and shutting soundlessly. Then:

“You forget, I was two thousand miles east of here,” he countered. “It may have been full moon here in England, but where I was …”

I covered my face with my hands, not wanting to witness the humiliation that would follow on this idiot remark. Poor Edwin! Poor, baffled Edwin …!

But when I cautiously uncovered my eyes and ventured to glance again at the screen, I saw, to my amazement that it was the interviewer, not Edwin, who was floundering. I watched this highly paid professional, glossy with success, frantically trying to work out whether the moon is, or is not, at the same phase in every part of the world. One had to feel sorry for the man. After all, it must be many a long year since teacher had explained about tides, and the phases of the moon, patiently tapping and prodding at the wall-charts with her long stick. And naturally, once out of primary school, he had never had occasion to think about the moon ever again, or even look at it, why should he? After all, he wasn’t on the
Sky
at
Night
team, was he, he was on Current Affairs, for God’s sake! In fact, the whole thing was a bit below the belt — it was as if Edwin had committed a foul and got away with it.

Good old Edwin! So I would be siding with a winner, after all!

Siding? Taking sides? About what? Against whom?

It’s strange the way unwelcome suspicions can float unacknowledged around one’s skull, like a boatload of refugees, unwanted, not allowed to land anywhere, yet all the time becoming more insistent, more inescapable. Thus it is that when the moment of revelation comes it isn’t a shock at all, because by then you realise that you’ve known it all along.

Not that this
was
the final revelation, this about the full moon; it was just one more thing on top of all the other small discrepancies in Edwin’s account of his adventures; the gaps in it, the bits that didn’t quite add up; not least of which was Edwin’s glowing and buoyant good health at the end of his ordeal. The beating-up; the two days of incarceration and interrogation; the
powerful dose of some mysterious drug; the hair-raising escape; the forty-mile trek across empty desert without so much as a bottle of water to sustain him: would one not expect a man to arrive home in a somewhat battered and exhausted state after all this?

A man like Edwin, I mean. Of course, I know there are people who will swim across twenty miles of shark-infested water and then step ashore bronzed and smiling, declaring there was nothing to it, anyone could have done it.

But not Edwin, I assure you. There are so many things, you see, that Edwin can’t stand, and I am quite certain that swimming across twenty miles of shark-infested water would be one of them, together with fixing a new typewriter ribbon, moving his papers out of the way of the window cleaner, and finding cold used tea-bags at the bottom of the teapot. He just isn’t the stiff-upper-lip type; never has been.

But wait; perhaps I am wrong? Suppose they were to come with their cameras and sound-track stuff and
televise
him fixing the typewriter ribbon and coping with the used tea-bags — would the scenario then not be entirely changed? Would he not then perform these chores willingly, joyfully, over and over again if necessary, until he got it right? (“A little further to left, please Eddie, we want to get the light on the hand that’s holding the teapot”.) In the same way it could be that under the stimulus of fame, under the bright lights of television, his reaction to the hardships and dangers he had undergone might …

It was at this point in my speculations that the telephone rang, and as soon as I learned who it was, I hastened to switch off the TV. This was going to need concentration.

Concentration, and tact as well, because I guessed at once what my caller was going to ask, and also that Edwin wasn’t going to like it, not one little bit; but I could hardly tell her this outright.

For this was Jessica Coburn, the third member of the Club — the Club consisting of us wives, I mean; randomly selected women linked willy-nilly and irrevocably by the fact that our
husbands had planned together this ill-fated journey into God-knows-where. So far, this Mrs Coburn and I had never met; we had experienced only an uneasy crossed-wire sort of relationship, consisting of missed telephone calls and the occasional sight of one another mouthing sweet this-that-and-the-others on the TV screen.

“Ah, Jessica!” I began (well, we were obviously going to be pitched headlong into Christian name terms in almost no time at all, so why not start that way?). “I’m so glad we’ve made contact at last, I did try to ring you from Sally’s but …”

“From Mrs Barlow’s,” she corrected me lightly. “Yes, I’m afraid you left it rather late, Mrs Wakefield, I’d had to go out. I stayed in as long as I could waiting for your call, but I was due at the doctor’s at four-fifteen, and so …”

Already, in less than forty seconds, she had given me a lot to make amends for. For the uncalled-for intimacy of calling her ‘Jessica’ when she was still calling me ‘Mrs Wakefield’; for having failed to telephone at the time requested; and now for having made her late at the doctor’s with who knew what dire results?

This last was the most difficult. It’s always awkward when people tell you they’ve been to the doctor, or to a hospital appointment, without telling you why. You have to say
some
thing
vaguely sympathetic, but the vaguely sympathetic remark appropriate to a prescription for cough-mixture is very different from the sympathetic remark appropriate to a diagnosis of inoperable cancer; and any probing for clues on your part simply sounds like impertinent curiosity.

“I’m so sorry,” I began, trying to make the words sound both as heartfelt and as non-specific as I possibly could, but fortunately Jessica (as I shall persist in calling her) broke in:

“You’ve no idea how
difficult
it all is,” she was complaining. “I suppose in London it’s all right, you can find a chemist open at any hour of the night, but here, we’re only a tiny village, you know. If you don’t get your prescription in by five-thirty, you’ve had it. Another night without sleep — I don’t know how I’ll be
able to stand it. Worrying and worrying … Listening to the waves breaking, all night long. We’re right on the coast, you know, in a direct line to the North Pole … You lie there, hour after hour; the house creaks, and you think of the erosion, the land being eaten away and eaten away … The coast line is being eroded, you know, year by year, I daresay you’ve read about it … It’s Norfolk I’m talking about, the north coast of Norfolk … You did know, did you, that we live in Norfolk …?”

Well, I did, yes: it had been quite a business looking up the number in the Directory as it was one of those villages where if the number has more than five digits you have to do this, whereas if it has seven or less you have to do that. Jessica’s number, needless to say, had six: the long-term result of which was that you were switched on to a golden girl who kept crooning: “This number has now been discontinued, please consult King’s Lynn 50574; which, when consulted, gave you a second golden girl directing you to the number you had first looked up. You could go round and round the cycle as often as you pleased, it was up to you. None of the golden voices ever got tired of it, they were bound to win in the end.

Still, this was no time to be discussing the shortcomings of telephonic communication: Jessica Coburn was ringing about something important. ‘An urgent question,’ Sally had said, and I braced myself to answer it. I say ‘braced’ because it was clearly going to involve Edwin, and he wasn’t here to answer for himself. Mind you, I knew very well it would have been a lot worse if he had been, but all the same it was going to be difficult.

“So you see,” Jessica Coburn was concluding, “I
must
see your husband. He was the last person to see and talk to Leonard, and I just have to know — well — the details. All he can remember of what my husband said … how he was feeling. How he — well, you know, all the obvious things. Were they
expecting
that something like this might happen? I mean, let’s face it, they must have talked about
something
during a seven-hour drive, and in all
his TV appearances your husband hasn’t said one word about this … or about how the other two were feeling … Nothing!”

Automatically, as wives do, I tried to defend Edwin. The pressure he was under; the nervous strain. The artificiality of TV interviews, the amount they cut out of them before they go on the air: and then Edwin still being in a state of shock after his ordeal …

He wasn’t, of course; never had I known him in such good form, so pleased with himself, but of course these were not the OK things to say. By now, I knew quite well what
were
the OK things, and I said them. After a few days — or even a few hours — of media attention you find your tongue saying the right things quite automatically, without any thought or effort, the way your fingers find the right keys on a typewriter.

“Yes, yes, of course I understand,” Jessica was saying impatiently (meaning that she didn’t, and that in her view Edwin’s account of the disaster had been grossly inadequate). “That’s why it’s so important that I should
see
him … have a proper talk. Naturally, I’m not going to expect him to drive all the way up here — I’m sure he’s far too busy (a euphemism, I’m sure, for ‘far too selfish’). So perhaps it will be best if I come to you. As soon as possible, if you don’t mind. How about tomorrow? I’m afraid I’ll have to come by train. I can’t drive because I’m on these tranquilizers, and my doctor says … Listen, there’s a train getting into Liverpool Street just after twelve, and I could …”

Lunch, that meant. As well as going to Liverpool Street to meet her. And I suppose, looking on the black side, I ought to ask her to stay the night, really, coming all that way …

How much of this programme would I be able to sell to Edwin? It would depend, presumably, on how many name-dropping parties and glitzy chat shows he’d got lined-up for tomorrow.

No, it mustn’t depend on that. He’d
got
to see this woman. It was cruel to leave these other wives in an agony of uncertainty, tormented by unanswered questions. This was something he had
got
to do.

“Lunch, then,” I heard myself saying. “—We’ll be looking forward to it very much” — and after a short exchange about meeting her at the entrance to the platform, and about her not being able to eat anything with cheese in it because of her anti-depressants, we rang off, and I settled down, as Napoleon might, or Alexander the Great, to plan in every detail my campaign for getting Edwin to behave properly when the time came.

I felt weary already. They talk about wives who allow themselves to be doormats, but actually it’s more like being a whole carpet under which your husband’s social gaffes have to be swept.