Reckless

by William Nicholson

  ‘I am vague,’ she said. ‘My life has yet to come into focus.’

  The gin and tonic was doing its work. She was surrounded by a haze of smoke. She felt unfocused.

  ‘Lucky you,’ he said. ‘I have to focus like mad. But not for ever. I plan to make partner by thirty-five. Then it’s hello golf and long lunches.’

  ‘God, Simon, you sound middle-aged already.’

  ‘Once you start an actual job things have a way of getting serious. It’ll be the same for you.’

  ‘I may not do a job.’

  ‘But you’ll get married. You’ll have children.’

  ‘I may not.’

  ‘Of course you will.’ He smiled at her, and ate peanuts. ‘You’ll be a gorgeous wife and a gorgeous mother.’

  ‘Will I?’

  She couldn’t see herself as a wife and mother at all. But if not that, what?

  ‘I may become an artist,’ she said. ‘Or a film star. Or a spy.’

  ‘You’d make a beautiful spy,’ he said. ‘I’d tell you all my secrets.’

  ‘You don’t have any secrets,’ she said.

  ‘That’s what you don’t know.’

  ‘Go on, then. Tell me a secret.’

  He shook his head, and ate the last of the peanuts. For some reason this annoyed her more than it should.

  ‘There. You don’t have any secrets.’

  ‘Not from you.’

  Everything he said was slightly loaded. It was all very tiring.

  ‘I can never be sure with you, Pammy,’ he said. ‘Either you’re much deeper than you appear, or much shallower.’

  ‘Oh, much shallower,’ she said. ‘I’m terribly shallow. I’m vague and shallow. I’m sort of a puddle, really.’

  Even this appeared to enchant him.

  ‘You’re a mystery,’ he said. ‘I don’t know any other girl like you.’

  She took out a fresh cigarette, and he leaned forward to light it.

  ‘That’s me,’ she said, exhaling a thin stream of smoke. ‘The mystery girl.’

  ‘A beautiful mystery.’

  Someone must have told him that a girl can never have too many compliments. But you can’t dish out praise like payments on an instalment plan. Not everyone wants to be bought.

  ‘Better take me home, Simon.’

  In the car he said, as she had known he would, ‘When can I see you again?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘My plans are still up in the air.’

  She had no plans at all. What she had up in the air was a lot of nothing. That was the problem. A lot of nothing, and this burning feeling that there had to be more.

  She could see from Simon’s face as they parted that she had disappointed him. But that was how it would always be with Simon: he would always want more than she was prepared to give.

  ‘I’ll call you,’ he said.

  ‘You do that.’

  Once he had driven away, and those puzzled eyes had ceased leaning on her, she felt bad about the way she had treated him. He was a good friend, an old friend. He deserved better.

  There’s something wrong with me.

  It was a thought that was never very far away. Some crack in her nature made her dissatisfied, where a normal person would have been satisfied. Most of the girls she knew locally regarded Simon Shuttleworth as a major catch. This mysterious fault both disturbed and excited her. She had taken to calling it her devil. Her devil made her do things for no reason. Why had she told Mr Jenks to scratch her back? Why had she made Simon take her to the Riverside?

  Her body burned with a terrible restlessness. At the same time she felt as if she were tied down by fine cords. The cords tugged at her, cut into her.

  Am I a bad person?

  She thought then of how she had told the art teacher about her great love affair. It was only a dream as yet, but she knew it would come true. And she knew something more. Her lover, when at last he stepped out of the shadows to claim her, would look deep into her heart and would see the devil in her, and he would still love her. He would love her even if she was bad. He would take her in his arms and say, ‘You’re wild and wicked and wonderful,’ and for that she would love him for ever. For ever and ever.

  When her stepfather came home that evening, Pamela tackled him on the subject of her future.

  ‘Why can’t I go to art school?’ she said. ‘You went to art school.’

  ‘But it was all a waste of time,’ Larry Cornford said. ‘I was never really good enough. Someone should have told me that from the beginning.’

  ‘But you liked it, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I liked it. But that’s not the only reason for doing something.’

  ‘What other reasons are there?’

  ‘Well, I needed to earn a living, for a start.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re a man. I’ll get married.’

  ‘And anyway, this isn’t the time to start at art school. You start in the autumn.’

  ‘I could do a course.’

  ‘Oh, Pammy, darling. You know what it is you really want. You want to go to London and have fun.’

  ‘Is that wrong?’

  ‘No, not wrong. But it can lead to things going wrong.’ ‘You mean I’ll be seduced by some heartless man about town and have my life ruined for ever.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Larry, darling.’ She leaned her lovely head against his arm. ‘Doesn’t everyone have to be ruined, just a little bit?’

  Larry sighed.

  ‘I’ll talk to Kitty.’

  ‘Mummy won’t want me to be ruined. She’ll want me to stay unruined till I’m long past anyone wanting to ruin me.’

  ‘I’ll talk to her.’

  Larry had an idea for a compromise solution, which he put to Kitty.

  ‘Why don’t we ask Hugo if he’ll have her to stay? Harriet’s still not getting any better, and I know they have quite a time of it getting Emily to school and back. Pammy could stay with them and help them out in exchange for bed and board, and Hugo could keep a bit of an eye on her.’

  Hugo and Larry’s wine business had flourished. Caulder & Avenell now had premises in St James.

  ‘Do you think Hugo would want that?’

  ‘To be honest, I think he finds Harriet’s illness quite a trial. Pammy would bring a bit of life into the house. And he’s certainly got enough room.’

  ‘What would she do all day?’

  ‘I’m sure I could sort something out for her at Camberwell. There’s a couple of people still there from my time.’

  He went up to find Pamela in her room. She was lying on her bed, smoking, drawing circles in the air with her cigarette. He told her his plan. She jumped up and threw her arms round his neck and kissed him.

  ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you. Does Mummy really not mind?’

  ‘She feels better about it knowing Hugo will be keeping an eye on you.’

  ‘Has Hugo said yes?’

  ‘I haven’t asked him yet. But I don’t see why he shouldn’t. You will be good and sensible if we do this, won’t you, Pammy?’

  ‘I’ll be so good and sensible. I truly will.’ She unwrapped herself from him and tapped the ash from her cigarette into an overflowing ashtray. ‘You don’t think I’m a bad person, do you, Larry?’

  ‘Why on earth should you be a bad person?’

  ‘Sometimes I think I’ve got a devil in me.’

  ‘What form does this devil take?’ said Larry, smiling.

  ‘Oh, you know. It makes me do things I shouldn’t.’

  ‘Things you like doing?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Then I shouldn’t worry,’ said Larry. ‘But I do think you smoke too much.’

  12

  ‘Darling,’ said Hugo Caulder to his wife Harriet, as she lay in her reclining chair in the darkened front room, ‘I do hope you’ll be feeling better by Thursday.’

  ‘Thursday?’ She was using her special voice, the low sweet voice that had so enchanted
him when they fell in love. ‘I’ll do my best. I know it’s such a bore for you.’

  ‘It’s just that we have our buyers’ tasting on Thursday evening. And you know Emily has a dance class.’

  Emily, seven years old, dutiful and silent, sat by her mother’s side reading School Friend. Mother and daughter were very close.

  ‘She may have to miss it,’ said Harriet. ‘Do you mind terribly, darling?’

  She stroked her daughter’s long ash-blonde hair with gentle fingers.

  ‘You know I hate dance class,’ said Emily.

  ‘Yes, darling, but everyone has to learn to dance.’

  There was no reproach in her voice. It was well understood in their little family that they preferred evenings at home to noisy parties.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve had a chance to do anything about supper,’ said Hugo.

  ‘Emily’s had a soft-boiled egg,’ said his wife. ‘I don’t want anything at all. You know how it is on my quiet days.’

  Harriet’s ‘quiet days’ were times of silent suffering. She would lie in her chair, her head pulsing with pain, overwhelmed by an unexplained fatigue. Doctors had been consulted, but no physical cause discovered. It was suggested that she had never got over the stillbirth of her second child, six years ago now.

  Hugo retreated to the kitchen and made himself scrambled egg on toast. He ate alone, reading the sports pages of the newspaper, lingering attentively over the cricket.

  Hugo Caulder thought of himself as a straightforward, uncomplicated, decent sort of person, not unduly clever, but well up to doing what was required of him. He knew he would never be a captain of industry like his father, but he was proud of the success of his wine business, and proud of his delicately pretty wife. It was her yielding softness he had fallen in love with, the way that she made him feel strong and protective. She had taught him that their marriage was made special by a shared sensitivity. ‘Hugo and I can read each other’s thoughts,’ she liked to say, ‘because we always think the same way.’

  The chief virtue in their household was ‘quietness’. The chief vice was ‘noisiness’. How, Hugo wondered, would Pamela Avenell fit in?

  So far he had not found the right opportunity to broach the plan to Harriet. It had been easy to say to Larry, his friend and partner, ‘Yes, of course we’ll have Pammy to stay. We’d love it.’ He was also aware that the prospect rather cheered him. He had known Pammy almost all her life, he was fond of her, and she was extremely pretty. Harriet, however, might see things differently.

  When he had finished his solitary supper, he returned to the darkened front room.

  ‘I really am the most useless wife in the world,’ whispered Harriet from her low chair.

  ‘You know it’s not your fault,’ said Hugo loyally, ‘and so do I. What’s so rotten about it is the way it makes you feel guilty. I should think you hate that.’

  ‘I do, darling. How well you know me.’

  ‘You know what?’ He spoke as if the idea had just come to him. ‘What we need is some help in the house. Not full-time, just for those occasions when you’re having a quiet day and I’m tied up at work.’

  ‘I don’t see how,’ said Harriet. ‘Emily, sweetheart, don’t strain your eyes.’

  Hugo then floated the Pamela plan. Harriet, who had thought they were talking in general terms, was caught off-guard by such a specific proposal.

  ‘But we’re so happy here,’ she said, ‘just being us. It’s all my fault for being so silly and feeble.’

  ‘There you go again, blaming yourself.’ Hugo spoke with loving firmness. ‘You’re not silly and feeble, you’re ill. You need rest, and you need help.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Harriet found herself puzzled as to how to counter this argument.

  ‘And if we don’t like having her, she can be sent away again.’

  In this way Hugo gained his point, and it was agreed that Pamela would come, and occupy the spare room beside the room called ‘John’s room’, after the baby who had not lived to use it.

  *

  From the moment Pamela entered the house it was as if a bright light had been switched on. She was excited, and lovely, and determined to please.

  ‘What a pretty house! Oh, aren’t you lucky to live in London! Is that your cat? I adore cats. Oh, isn’t it dark in here! That is such a beautiful portrait, he’s really caught your delicate beauty, hasn’t he? And you must be Emily. I’m Pamela. I’ve brought you a little present, nothing really. It’s a doll who has all these different outfits she can wear. Oh, look at your garden! Do you sit out in it all summer long?’

  Both Harriet and Emily reeled a little under the impact of Pamela’s enthusiasm, but on the whole she was a success.

  ‘You can’t imagine how happy I am to be here,’ she said to Hugo, sitting with him later. Emily and Harriet had both gone to bed. ‘Your wife is so lovely.’

  ‘I think so too,’ said Hugo, smiling.

  ‘Is it all right to smoke?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ said Pamela, lighting up a cigarette, ‘what is it she suffers from?’

  ‘We don’t really know,’ said Hugo. ‘She gets tired very easily. In some ways perhaps she’s oversensitive. Also we had a loss in the family, a child. She’s never really got over it.’

  ‘That is so sad.’

  ‘He was stillborn, six years ago. You may hear her speak of him. We called him John.’

  ‘Six years ago!’

  ‘Harriet feels things very deeply.’

  Pamela gazed at him, and he could see that she didn’t really understand. The odd thing was that under the impact of her sceptical smoke-blurred gaze he found he didn’t really understand either.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ said Pamela, settling down in Harriet’s reclining chair, curling her legs beneath her. ‘Now that I’m here you must tell me what I can do to help.’

  Hugo thought how amazingly unlike Harriet she was. Where Harriet was muted and shadowed, Pamela was bright. Where Harriet was droopy, Pamela was coiled, full of energy, as if she was ready to spring up at any moment. She looked so like her mother, but she was also entirely herself. The child he had watched grow up was now a self-possessed, almost frightening, young woman. And she was so beautiful.

  ‘It’s mostly things to do with Emily,’ he said. ‘For example, we need someone to take her to her dance class tomorrow evening.’

  ‘Oh, bother,’ said Pamela. ‘Tomorrow’s no good. I fixed to go out with my friend Susie.’

  13

  ‘So are you going to say it?’ said Rupert Blundell.

  ‘Say what?’ said Mountbatten.

  ‘The thing you can’t say.’

  ‘Oh, that. Yes, I shall say that. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?’

  A cluster of senior officials strode down Horse Guards Parade from the Cabinet Office to the Old Admiralty Building, on this cool and overcast spring afternoon. They were the members of the group set up at Mountbatten’s request, known after some juggling with word order as the Joint Inter-Services Group for the Study of All-Out War, or JIGSAW. The group included senior scientific adviser Sir Solly Zuckerman, representatives of all three services, the Department of Defence and the Home Office, and lesser advisers, of whom Rupert Blundell was one. Today they were convening in the Admiralty cinema to brief a much larger assembly of ministers and civil servants on current defence plans.

  The cinema audience was addressed by the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook; by the Minister of Defence, Harold Watkinson; and by the Chief of the Defence Staff. It fell to Mountbatten to paint a word picture of the threat the nation faced. He took as his example the city of Birmingham.

  ‘Let us suppose,’ he said, ‘a single bomb of one megaton strength is detonated at an altitude of 2,500 metres above the city. The impact would be as follows. First, an intense flash of light, accompanied by a pulse of X-rays that would kill everyone within two miles, and a pulse of heat that would
set fire to everything combustible within ten miles. Then a fireball would form above Birmingham that would be so bright it would blind people up to fifty miles away. Then the blast wave would ripple outwards, flattening everything within one mile, and all non-reinforced buildings for five miles. Then hurricane-force winds would be generated out from the explosion, followed a few seconds later by an inward suction of tornado force, over a three-mile area, pulling people and objects into the heart of the inferno. The multiple fires ignited by the flash would burn up all available oxygen. One-third of the inhabitants would die instantly; another third would be seriously injured; the survivors would be contaminated by poisonous radiation. All the city’s hospitals would be destroyed. All rescue services that survived would be overwhelmed. There would be no water, no electricity, no phones. Birmingham would have ceased to exist. And all this with one relatively modest thermonuclear device.’

  The audience in the Admiralty cinema listened in silence.

  ‘We are therefore obliged to conclude,’ said Mountbatten, ‘that if there is ever a full exchange of nuclear weapons this nation will cease to exist.’

  Harold Watkinson took over the podium to explain the current government’s policy on defence.

  ‘Broadly speaking, the policy remains as laid down by Churchill in ’54. The conclusion reached then was that effective civil defence, bunkers and so forth, was not practical. A facility does exist, and has recently become operational, to house the government in the event of a nuclear attack. To do the same for the whole population is out of the question. HMG’s policy there-fore rests on the threat of retaliation by our own nuclear forces. In short, our policy is to deter nuclear attack, not to survive it.’

  In the space allocated for questions, a civil servant in the audience raised the issue of the American nuclear forces stationed in Britain.

  ‘What would happen,’ he asked, ‘if the Soviets had reason to believe the Americans were planning to attack them? Would they not move to destroy the American weapons in Britain first, since they represent the closest threat?’

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ said Mountbatten. ‘If nuclear war were ever to break out, Britain would be in the front line.’