With No Crying (10 page)

“B
ABY SNATCHED FROM PRAM IN BUSY HIGH STREET
!” screamed the headlines; and although Mrs Field, in common with almost every other woman in the country scanned the item with sharp attention, the idea never for one moment crossed her mind that her missing daughter might possibly have had a hand in the affair. Later, there were not a few of her acquaintances to upbraid her with not having been more perspicacious; but then it is easy, is it not, to be wise after the event. And, too, it must be remembered that at this time Norah Field hadn’t even realised that her daughter
was
missing—not in any definite, official sense. That the girl was away from home, and that the date of her return had been left vague—this, of course, she knew very well, having herself altruistically been party (or so she thought) to all the arrangements.

That Miranda should go on holiday with Sharon Whittaker and her parents to their Derbyshire cottage had seemed a godsend of an idea, after all the trauma and misery at home. In that lovely countryside, enjoying long healthy walks over the hills in the company of her best friend, and with the sensible Whittaker parents in the background, surely Miranda would recover fast from the shock and disappointment of the abortion. All that irrational rage and resentment would quickly fade away, and she would return from the holiday her own happy, loving self again, all forgotten and forgiven. And even before that, of course, there would be letters. Hardly had the Whittakers set off on their holiday, than Norah Field found herself watching for the post with beating heart. Just a postcard to start with, no doubt; to be followed by a slightly stilted, awkward letter—to which Norah’s reply would be so warm, so loving, so overflowing with
forgiveness
that all the barriers would be down, the air cleared; and thereafter would arrive, by almost every post, the amusing, newsy letters that Miranda had always been accustomed to send when on holiday away from home…

But there was nothing so far; and as a week became a fortnight, and still no news, Norah found herself trying to hide the intensity of her disappointment even from herself. Postal delays, perhaps? A strike of some sort, or a go-slow? This would explain, too, why Mrs Whittaker hadn’t written either. It was odd not to have had a single word from her, not even a telephone call to confirm the invitation issued so abruptly by Sharon, on the very eve of their departure. Maybe Mrs Whittaker was embarrassed, having learned from Sharon of her friend’s unfortunate situation, and just couldn’t think what to say?

Meantime, Norah didn’t even know the address of the
Derbyshire
cottage, or how long they were all staying there, or anything. There was nothing she could do but wait; and of course it was something, at least, to know that Miranda was safe and well.

*

Thus loyally, and with consummate cunning, had Sharon succeeded in keeping faith with her vanished friend; and all this without the faintest idea of what was going on, or what the secret could possibly be with which she’d been tacitly, but
unmistakeably
, entrusted.

It was a miracle, really, that she’d even spotted that there
was
a secret. Miranda had told her absolutely nothing, and had it not been for her, Sharon’s presence of mind, together with her swift and delicate antennae for parental fuss in any shape or form, the whole thing could have been absolute disaster. For when, at about eleven o’clock on that first night, Mrs Field had rung up the Whittakers’ house and asked to speak to her daughter, Sharon (who had luckily been the one to pick up the phone) had been on the very brink of saying, “I’m sorry, I’m afraid she’s not here,” when something—some indescribable nuance in Mrs Field’s voice—had warned her that here was Trouble. Trouble with a big “T”. What the trouble was she could not tell, for Miranda
had told her nothing whatever—indeed, for these last two or three days seemed to have been inexplicably avoiding her old friend—but whatever it was, whatever Miranda might be up to, Sharon’s loyalty was unshakeable. If Miranda had told her mother that she was here at Sharon’s, then here she should unquestionably be.

“I’m sorry…” (she managed to change direction just in time) “I’m sorry, Mrs Field, she’s in the bath at the moment. Is it urgent?”

The suspense was almost unbearable. Suppose Miranda’s mother were to say, as she well might, “Well then, would you ask her to give me a ring when she comes out?”
Then
what was Sharon to do?

But it didn’t happen. With an almost audible release of breath in sheer thankfulness, Sharon heard the tension and anxiety drain out of Mrs Field’s voice.

‘Oh! Oh, well then,
that’s
all right! No, don’t bother her, dear, it doesn’t matter, I just wanted to make sure she’d turned up all right. Just give her my—my love—and tell her I’ll ring again in the morning…”

In the
morning
?
So Miranda must have told her mother that she was
staying
here?

Well, so be it. No doubt all would be made clear before long, and meantime the important thing was that it should be Sharon, and not either of her parents, who reached the telephone should it ring before the two of them left for work in the morning.

It didn’t; but it rang almost immediately afterwards—the man about the gutters. He was coming—or maybe
wasn’t
coming, Sharon was too flustered to take in minor details—at ten o’clock on Saturday morning; and before Sharon had managed to devise a message for her father sufficiently wide-ranging to embrace both possibilities, the phone went again; and this time, it
was
Mrs Field.

Miranda couldn’t be having
another
bath. Sharon did some quick thinking.

“I’m afraid she’s still asleep, Mrs Field,” she declared
cheerfully
, though with a thudding heart. “You see—” here she forced
an apologetic little laugh, “I’m afraid we were playing my tapes until all hours last night… she’s sleeping like the dead! But I’ll wake her, shall I?… If it’s important?”

Once again, a breath-stopping gamble; but necessary in the interests of an easy, natural atmosphere.

“Oh no! No … no … don’t do that. It’s not necessary. No, no, it’s nothing, dear … not important. Thank you so much. I’ll try again later…”

Ping! Breath released again. Heart resumes beating again. The gamble has paid off, and all is well. Until next time.

*

There would
be
a next time; that was for sure. Hell, what
was
Miranda up to? For the first time, Sharon allowed herself some stirrings of resentment. Why couldn’t the wretched girl
telephone
? Or somehow get
some
sort of message through to her, give her at least
some
idea of what was going on; of what was expected of her, and for how long? Being faithful unto death is all very fine and noble, but you do need to know what you are being faithful
about.

The phone again; and Sharon, trembling, leaped into action.

It was the gutter man again, this time something about Monday afternoon: though whether this was as well as, or instead of, or nothing to do with, the Saturday morning appointment, she was too rattled to take in. Anyway, he either was or wasn’t coming, either morning or afternoon, on either Monday or Saturday, or maybe contrariwise, if that was convenient?

“Oh, yes,
yes
!”
gasped Sharon thankfully; indeed, “
convenient
” was altogether too feeble a term for the sheer
marvellousness
of the call not being anything about Miranda. “Oh
yes,
that would be
super
!
Oh,
thank
you
!”

The gutter man must have been not a little startled. Such overwhelming gratitude and warmth was not the usual response of his customers to delays and cancelled appointments. Still, you never know your luck. It just goes to show.

Twice more the telephone rang through the quiet house—once for the people upstairs, and once about an overdue library book. Perfectly innocuous calls, both of them, but by this time Sharon’s
nerves were all on edge waiting for the next one, and planning what on earth to say when it came.

In bed still? In the bath? In the loo? Out shopping? There weren’t all that many excuses on which to ring the changes… Sooner or later Miranda’s mother was going to suspect something.

And suspect something she did, as was made clear by her very first words when Sharon next picked up the phone.

“Sharon, dear, please don’t lie to me any more,” she started off, causing Sharon’s heart to hurl itself against her ribs in terror. “I know you mean well, dear, I know you are only doing it to spare my feelings, but please,
please
stop it, and tell me the truth. Miranda’s refusing to come to the telephone, isn’t she? She doesn’t want to speak to her own mother any more. That’s it, isn’t it?
Isn’t
it?”

Well, really, this
was
a way out of it! It really was! Sharon would never have thought of it herself in a hundred years; but having it handed to her on a plate like this…

“Look, Mrs Field, I’m awfully sorry, but … well … since you’ve guessed … well, yes, I’m afraid it
is
a bit like that, just at the moment…”

Well, and it was, too. It must be. Nothing short of a most
frightful
row with her mother would have induced Miranda to take flight in this precipitate and unprecedented manner. Sharon wasn’t lying, then, but telling what must be (surely it must?) the sober truth: after a row on that scale, Miranda
wouldn’t
be feeling like speaking to her mother.

“Yes, Mrs Field,” she repeated, more firmly. “I’m awfully sorry, but I’m afraid there’s no way I can get her to come to the phone … not just now, anyway…”

And this again was as true a word as she had ever spoken.

“N
ORAH
! N
ORAH
! D
ID
you listen to the News just now? That baby was snatched from its pram—apparently it all happened quite near here! Not ten minutes away from the bus station!—Just imagine!”

Janine Parkes, a bouncing divorcée in her forties, with lacquered golden curls, beautifully manicured hands, and a pair of tattered down-at-heel slippers quite good enough for popping in on Norah, had burst in from next door; and although it was not yet nine o’clock, was already settling herself cosily at Norah’s kitchen table in expectation of a nice cup of coffee. She felt confident of a warm welcome, so bad was the news with which she had come primed.

“They still haven’t found it, you know,” she reported, leaning forward confidentially, elbows on table. “They’ve had police dogs out all night … and house-to-house enquiries all over the neighbourhood… Isn’t it
awful
!
I don’t know how a person can do such a thing… And when you think of that poor young mother—well, not all
that
young, actually, not by her looks anyway. She looked really quite middle-aged—and that awful jumper she was wearing—you know, really
frumpy.
They had her picture in the Gazette this morning, did you see it, and all those children lined up on either side of her, left to right you know—all their names and ages. Look, here you are—I brought it over to show you.”

As a matter of fact, Norah had already seen the picture, but all the same she took the proffered copy, and while the kettle boiled she had another look.

Janine was absolutely right—though not, of course,
particularly
kind, in view of the unhappy circumstances. The woman
was
frumpish. There was no other word for it. With her sagging jowls, her layer upon layer of ill-fitting and unseasonable woollies, and her grimly down-turned lips, it was impossible to see her as a figure of tragedy or high drama. The lineaments of that heavy face were less those of grief than of one damn thing after another, with this the final bloody straw. Nor were the pack of children
alongside
in much better case. They looked awkward rather than
grief-stricken
, and a bit embarrassed, as if no one had told them how they ought to feel. Well, I suppose no one has, mused Norah. Having a three-week-old baby sister stolen from the family circle isn’t a thing that happens all that often; there aren’t any rituals for it.

Steam spurted from the kettle, the lid leaped and chattered, and Norah went through the routine of making coffee, though she herself had only just finished breakfast, having made a late start this morning.

Milk? Sugar? Sorry there aren’t any biscuits, I had to rather rush through my shopping yesterday. I’ve been a bit disorganised lately, since—

No, she didn’t want to talk about Miranda, not if she could help it. And certainly not to Janine. Fortunately, Janine did not seem to notice the hiatus, she was still busily scanning the paper for further items of information to titillate her sense of outrage.

Outside
Sainsbury
’s,
would you believe it? She, Janine, shopped there quite often, or would do if it wasn’t for the parking … and so if this shocking event had only taken place a week … a month … a year go, and if instead of being on a Thursday it had been on a Saturday, and if it had been morning instead of late afternoon—why, then she, Janine herself, might actually have been there when it happened!

“Now, that’s the thing I really
don’t
understand,” she remarked, gently censorious as the indubitably non-involved can afford to be, “How all these people—‘Hundreds of shoppers’ it says—how they can all have just
let
it
happen
!
Now, if
I’d
caught sight of someone stealing a baby…!”

They argued, for a few desultory minutes, the justification or otherwise of this reproach. By what signs or symptoms could the
ordinary passer-by be expected to recognise such a crime, even if it should take place under his very eyes? Snatching a baby isn’t like snatching a handbag: all that the outsider would observe would be a young woman lifting from its pram—tenderly and solicitously, in all probability—a baby that he would take for granted was her own. Well, he
oughtn’t
to take it for granted, Janine countered: people should check on these things. What, on
everything
?
Every time you see someone opening a car door, it
might
be someone other than the owner, mightn’t it? Soon, the streets would be jammed solid with everyone checking on
everyone
else, and business would come to a standstill.

“You wouldn’t talk like that if it was
your
baby that had been stolen!” Janine retaliated, illogically but with crushing effect; almost anyone can be persuaded to agree that two and two make five if the assertion that they make four can be made to seem heartless and lacking in compassion.

Besides, she did have a point, of sorts.

“I’m quite absolutely sure,” Janine resumed, “that someone
stealing
a baby from a pram would behave quite absolutely differently from a real mother. There’d be all sorts of signs… Here, listen to this—
this
is the kind of thing I mean…”

Here she proceeded to read out in full detail an account (which, as it happened, Norah had already read for herself, as well as hearing it on the news) of how some woman had noticed—or claimed she had noticed—a young girl with long fair hair leaning over a pram, whispering to the baby, and crying. Nothing seemed to have come of this clue—there was so far no iota of proof that the pram that was being cried over was the same as that from which a baby was snatched—but no doubt the police were following it up. If there was anything in it, then in due course they’d hear all about it on the News.

A young girl with long fair hair, crying.

Later, Janine was to declare that she’d known all along that it was Miranda Field, from the very first moment she’d read about this fair-haired girl; but you’d never have guessed it at the time. On the contrary, it was at just about this point in the conversation that her interest in the whole matter appeared to flag, as if she felt
that the episode had by now been milked dry of all it had to offer of coffee-morning scandal. And when, a little later, she
did
come round to the subject of Miranda, it was in a totally different connection.

Like everyone else in their circle, Janine had heard rumours of Miranda’s little slip-up, and she assumed (again like everyone else) that the Fields, enlightened couple that they were, would have arranged an abortion for their daughter. It was unthinkable that they’d have any old-fashioned moral scruples about it—wasn’t Edwin Field a prospective Left Wing candidate of some sort, and thus wholly in favour of the Permissive Society in all its manifestations?

Probably, the whole thing was over and done with by now; but it was tantalising—it really was—not to have been told
any
of the details while it was all going on. Such close neighbours, too, she and Norah, and still friends of a sort, despite Norah’s reluctance, at the time of Janine’s divorce, to corroborate Janine’s claim to be a battered wife. True, she hadn’t
looked
battered, whereas Charlie had, rather; but surely women should stand together on this sort of issue, otherwise what is Women’s Lib all about?
Wife-battering
is so heinous a crime that a man shouldn’t get away scot free even if he
hasn’t
done it.

Still, all this was water under the bridge now, or would be if Charlie would stop being so difficult about the maintenance. One way and another, she and Norah Field had been through a lot together as measured in gallons of tea and coffee over the years. It was mean of Norah, now, to be so secretive over this Miranda business. More than mean, indeed: it was downright anti-social. For is it not very nearly a duty, if something bad happens to you, to feed it into the neighbourhood pool of gossip? To donate it, as it were, to those with less eventful lives than your own? Some people are stingy with their misfortunes as others are stingy over money. Still, this is no reason for letting them get away with it.

“Miranda still on holiday, is she?” Janine asked, carefully casual, and with an air of simply making conversation; but when nothing more revealing than a non-commital murmur of assent was forthcoming, she allowed herself to press a little harder.

“She’s been gone for more than a fortnight, hasn’t she?” she continued; and when this, too, evoked nothing beyond an affirmative nod, Janine, with a pleasant smile, moved in for the kill.

“It seems funny, not seeing her around all this time. I
quite
thought last night that she must be back … all that pop music… My goodness, you could hear it three gardens away! I could have
sworn
it came from here … one of your upstairs windows… But I suppose…”

When you leave a sentence unfinished specially to give your companion a chance to interrupt, and then she doesn’t, it can be most annoying. Janine gave a little shrug of irritation and impatience. Really, Norah was being impossible! What a waste of a morning! And not even any biscuits, either… But before this silent catalogue of her hostess’s omissions and shortcomings had got any further, the object of them raised her head and gave an apologetic little laugh.

“Oh,
that
!
Yes, I’m afraid it
was
from here, actually—I’m awfully sorry if it disturbed you. Sam’s home, you see—” here she paused, as if waiting for the significance of this to sink in; then, “Yes, he’s back home again—you know, from that Overland trip to India.”

Ah, Sam! The delinquent son; the blot on the Field escutcheon. Janine pricked up her ears.

“And you know what?” Norah was laughing again, wryly. “He’s brought back this extraordinary friend with him, that he picked up in Katmandu, or somewhere. A terribly thin,
disapproving
young man who’s allergic to whatever it is our pillows are stuffed with, and goes on and on about us being middle class. He told me last night that the amount of food I’d put on his plate would keep an Indian peasant for a week. I nearly asked him if his second helping would have kept
another
Indian peasant for
another
week, but I didn’t dare because Sam thinks he’s wonderful. He’s into the Wider Consciousness, Sam says, and so we’re going to be stuck with him for weeks and weeks while he seeks the Reality within the Reality, which apparently takes ages and ages, and is why his parents won’t have him home, they’re sick of it. He’s
recovering from hepatitis, too, so we have to swill out every single cup and glass with boiling water after he’s drunk from it—and in secret, too, so as not to hurt his feelings. Sam nearly killed me when he smelt Dettol in the bathroom last night, he accused me of trying to disinfect Yoshi as if he was a
thing,
a non-sterile object… Well, he is, isn’t he? Hepatitis is no joke, after all. And then of course I’ve got poor Edwin to worry about as well, you know how he relies on me to keep things from him, and how
can
I when they’re
both
of them around the place
all
day long? And then the pop records as well—I
will
do something about that, Janine, I promise I will, but just at the moment I’m having to be so tactful it’s not true! What with telling Edwin that it’s only for another day or two, and telling Sam that of course his friends are welcome for as long as they like to stay—Oh, dear, I
never
seem to stop telling lies from morning till night! You know how it is! And now, Janine, if you don’t awfully mind, I really think I ought to be…”

Reluctantly, Janine took her leave. It was a pity that it should all have to finish now, just when it was getting really interesting; but at least it was good to know that Sam was still being a problem despite his travels. Having heard so little about him all these months, Janine had almost begun to fear that he was going the way so many of her friends’ problem children had gone, one after another getting jobs, coming off drugs, going back to finish their degrees—really, it was quite getting her down, especially just now, with her own life going so rottenly.

A blast of discordant noise from the top floor of the Fields’ home cheered her a little as she made her way past the side entrance and into her own garden. Soon, the rest of the
neighbours
would be complaining, and that was always fun. Jauntily, and more or less in time with the screeching music, she almost skipped up the path and into the pleasant, well-appointed home which Charlie was still rabbiting on about his half of; but who cared? Charlie was a born loser—that was the very thing that had wrecked the marriage, actually—and so let him damn well lose this one, too!

It wasn’t such a bad old life: and there was still half a bottle of
gin left in the dining room cupboard. Not that Janine was letting her troubles turn her into an alcoholic, or anything like it, but it did give you something to look forward to in the mornings when coffee time was over.

As she sipped, it crossed Janine’s mind that she hadn’t after all succeeded in worming out of her neighbour any of the low-down on Miranda and her misfortunes; the Sam saga had somehow intervened, and all that stuff about the hepatitis and everything. It was odd that Norah was being so uninhibitedly communicative about her problems with her son, and yet so obstinately silent about those of her daughter. Surely she wasn’t
ashamed
of Miranda’s predicament? Schoolgirl pregnancies were two-a-penny these days, and abortion the obvious and easy answer in any modern, enlightened family of even mildly Left-Wing leanings…

It was this last phrase, drifting through her mind, which brought Janine up with a jerk; it illumined, in a single, blinding flash, the whole tantalizing puzzle.

Of course! Fancy not having thought of it before! It was not their daughter’s pregnancy that the Fields were so ashamed of, nor the abortion. No, it was the fact that they must have had the operation done
privately
!
To people of their egalitarian
convictions
,
this
was the disgrace,
this
the unmentionable shame, the skeleton in their Left-Wing cupboard!