Bridget felt relieved, for her own sake as well as Norah’s, that no new crisis seemed to be imminent. Other people’s troubles are time-consuming, and Bridget was exceptionally busy this week. She had two international conferences outside London to prepare for and, more immediately, a session of unpredictable length with a Polish philosopher who was querying a number of points in her translation of his article on Linguistic Analysis and the Falsification Principle. Her English version did not seem to him to do justice to the force and vigour of the prose with which he was demolishing the arguments of his philosophical opponents in all parts of Europe as well as in Poland.
And indeed he might have a point. She had been aware at the time of translating his sentences rather over-literally, and without a proper grasp of what he was driving at. Perhaps she should do a bit more background reading – Wittgenstein and Popper and so forth – before embarking on a re-draft. A long and concentrated evening’s work would be needed, anyway, and she hoped there would be no interruptions. Surely she was entitled to a bit of peace and quiet after having devoted almost the whole weekend to Norah and her problems? She realised, of course, that the ebb and flow of a person’s problems couldn’t be expected to dovetail precisely with the amount of leisure her friends had for hearing about them, but surely something could be worked out? Shouldn’t there be some sort of unwritten rule about it, she wondered? If I’ve got an important deadline to meet by Tuesday midday, then you must keep your broken heart on ice until Tuesday after lunch. Ideally, you must arrange not to break up with your lover until Tuesday. Or let your cat get run over, or whatever. That way, friendship can flourish, and we all get on with earning a living. That’s how it would be, in an ideal world.
And Bridget could create a temporarily ideal world of this kind, by retiring to her own room, shutting the door, and letting the others answer the telephone. Diana was good about this, she quite enjoyed telling effortless white lies about Bridget being out, confident that Bridget would do the same for her, should the occasion (such as Alistair turning up unexpectedly) arise. They were well-practised, too, in taking messages for each other, with commendable accuracy and discretion.
It was unfortunate, though, that on this particular evening Professor Brzozowski should choose to call. His message, conserning his article for the Journal of Linguistic Analysis, delivered in a heavy East European accent, defeated even Diana; and the desperate urgency of it, which he managed to convey despite the language barrier, was such as to force her to summon Bridget from her seclusion.
A question about the nature of Reality and its relationship to human thought-processes might strike some as not being particularly urgent, the question having been debated continuously for at least three thousand years, but this was not how it struck Professor Brzozowski. For had he not solved the problem once and for all in his Linguistic Analysis article? Was it not a tragic loss to mankind that this once-and-for-all solution should not be laid before them in its perfect clarity? Properly translated, it would provide irrefutable arguments in favour of this interpretation of the Universe and mankind’s place in it, provided it reached the Editorial Department of the Linguistic Analysis Journal by 9.00 on Friday morning.
The conversation was a protracted one, as might have been expected, and in the course of it Bridget suffered the additional annoyance of registering, out of the corner of her eye, the arrival of Alistair. He was carrying a bottle of red wine and an evening paper, but all the same managed to have a hand free to tweak her hair as he passed; managed too to murmur “What-ho, Smarty-pants?” into her ear, just as she was trying to make out the title of an abstruse Polish journal from which the professor was quoting.
By the time the laborious interchange was over a meal was ready. Roast chicken, with all the trimmings. Diana (whose turn it was to cook) must have known that Alistair would be coming, though she hadn’t warned any of them. No reason why she should, of course, but all the same … Bridget saw her evening of concentrated work fast vanishing as she found herself drawn into the after-dinner conversation. Norah had retired to her room almost as soon as the meal was over, which left Diana a free hand to make a colourful story, for Alistair’s benefit, of Sunday’s alarms and excursions.
He listened, as always, with a judicious mixture of scorn for female gossip and an avid lust for every last detail. His eager questioning elicited from Diana more, perhaps, than a strict regard for confidentiality should have allowed her to divulge; but it couldn’t really do any harm, could it? – especially as her every revelation was conscientiously prefaced by “Don’t let it go any further, will you …?”
He was fascinated by the story of the gun in the flower-bed, and expressed surprise that they weren’t all three of them in prison already.
“Because it’s in the paper tonight,” he informed them, gesturing towards the copy of the Standard, which by now lay around dismembered on the carpet, as papers were liable to do when Alistair had been reading them, “It’s in the paper that there has been a murder in this benighted Medfield of yours. Well, on Medfield Common, anyway. I suppose that must be somewhere near. A body’s been found in some undergrowth, and a hand-gun near it. Your cock-and-bull story about a gun in a flower-bed will be on the front page of every newspaper tomorrow. It’ll be on the police computer already, and they’ll …”
“Oh, but darling, it was in the flower-bed!” cried Diana. “We all saw Mervyn picking it up, didn’t we, Bridget? It’s not a cock-and-bull story. It’s the truth!”
“Sweetie, whatever’s that got to do with it? You don’t really believe that the mere truth is going to be relevant, do you? You’ve been watching too much T.V.. Correction: you’ve been producing too much T.V., and it’s turned your little head. I’ve kept telling you all along that it was going to land you in trouble, now haven’t I? It stands to reason that anyone whose job it is to involve herself, day in and day out, in situations of on-going catastrophe – she’s bound to get the blame sooner or later. It’s like social workers: if some scoundrel beats his child to death, it’s not his fault, it’s the fault of the social worker who didn’t stop him. And it’s just the same with T.V. T.V. these days is simply a gigantic social worker who hasn’t had to go through any training. It not only has to remedy every known evil, but has to make evil amusing as well. Your trouble, Di dear, is that you’re too kind-hearted. Your actual job is to be the life and soul of every disaster, but you let your sympathies get in the way. You empathise. You worry about people’s feelings. Now, if it was our Bridget” – he threw a mocking glance in her direction – “a lady so clever and so highly educated that she understands nothing whatsoever about people’s feelings …”
“Oh, but darling, that’s not fair!” cried Diana. “Bridget does …”
“Oh, all right, all right! Alistair mimicked cringing terror, shutting his eyes and pressing himself deep into the sofa cushions, “I’ll withdraw the charge. Put it this way: Bridget understands other people’s feelings all right, she just doesn’t think they’re of any importance. Is that better?”
He half-opened his eyes, to see how Bridget was taking all this.
She wasn’t looking at him at all; seemed, indeed, not to be listening, busying herself with piecing together the maltreated evening paper, sorting the pages neatly into their original correct order
“I don’t see anything about the murder,” she remarked, when she’d finished. “Are you sure you didn’t dream it?”
“Dream it? Good God, when I dream, I dream of better things than that, I can tell you!” His attempt to meet Bridget’s eye with flirtatious innuendo was a failure, for she was still scanning the paper intently.
“It’s only the Stop Press, so far,” he pointed out. “It caught my eye when I was checking on the Stock Market, and I must say I chuckled a bit. Do you remember I moved the car round the corner because I didn’t want the whole neighbourhood noticing me sitting there in the same place for hours? “Supposing there’s a murder around here,” I said, a
nd you thought I was joking. Well, to be honest, I thought I was joking, too. But I wasn’t, was I? It was probably happening right then, while I said it!”
He sounded pleased with hiself, rather proud, as people are when they turn out by chance to have been right about something.
By this time Bridget had tracked down the item.
“It doesn’t say much,” she remarked; “Just that enquiries are …” She broke off abruptly: “Why, Norah! We thought you’d gone to bed!”
For a moment, Bridget felt as guilty as a school-child caught cheating. How much had Norah heard? Did it matter how much she’d heard? In her present state of nerves, everything upset her, and so this would too. Unobtrusively, Bridget slipped the neatly-folded paper out of sight behind the sofa, and set herself, under Alistair’s cynical gaze, to change the subject. With deliberate perversity – or so it seemed – he tried to foil her every attempt at an innocuous topic. Holidays in the South of France? At once he had to remind them of the couple who had been shot dead there last summer. Recent proposed changes in Primary Education? Immediately he referred to primary schools in America where pupils were searched for knives and guns as they came in every morning. Autumn pruning of roses? Hadn’t there been a rose bush right there where they found the gun?
Bridget gave up; and was greatly relieved when Norah, after hovering uneasily around for a while, said goodnight for a second time and left the room.
In her absence it seemed opportune to switch on the news in case there was any mention of the murder; and sure enough there was. The police were conducting investigations, and would appreciate assistance from the public. If anyone had noticed anything unusual in the vicinity … had been walking in the wooded area of Common recently … had noticed anything suspicious. “Any clue, however seemingly trivial, may be just the one that we are looking for …”
The news came to an end, and the party broke up: Alistair and Diana went off to their king-size bed and Bridget returned to her desk, where she settled down to her much-interrupted studies.
So absorbed was she that she did not notice the faint, tiny sounds which Norah could not help making as she crept out of her bedroom and back into the sitting-room. She had waited, sleepless, staring into the dark, until she felt quite sure that the others were finally settled in their rooms: and now, at last, was her chance. Furtive as any burglar, she tiptoed barefoot across the landing, across the soft, pale sitting-room carpet that muffled her every step, and retrieved the evening paper from behind the sofa, where she had observed Bridget stowing it. She did not dare open it out straight away, but tiptoed back with it to the seclusion of her room; and even there she found herself taking obsessional care to avoid rustling the pages as she searched. Just in case anyone was still awake. Just in case anyone was listening through the wall.
As a result of all these precautions it took her some minutes to locate the item from which her friends had so obviously been trying to shield her: and when she did, she read it not once, but three or four times, short though it was.
“It doesn’t say much,” Bridget had remarked; and certainly, on the face of it, this was the case. But for Norah it said enough. She hadn’t really needed to read it over and over again like this, for she had known at once, after a single glance, what it was that had happened.
Chapter 20
Bridget had to be up early the next morning, before it was light. She was surprised, when she entered the kitchen, to find that Diana was already there. She was leaning dreamily against the counter, while the electric kettle boiled alongside. Luckily, it was the kind which in the end switches itself off when confronted by this degree of inattention; and this it duly did, just as Diana began to speak.
“Oh, Bridget, such wonderful news!” she exclaimed; and then: “Oh – all right! You make your coffee first, if you like. I’m feeling just too blissful to bother about coffee, I really am!”
Too blissful to bother about coffee? Spooning instant into her own mug, Bridget silently toyed with one or two guesses. An offer of a top job in one of the new channels? Or had Alistair at last popped the question? Or – and here Bridget’s heart sank – could it be that …?
Yes, it could. Diana was five days overdue. “I didn’t say anything before, because I was afraid of bringing it on – you know, tempting Providence!” she exulted. “I was scared last night that it might be starting – but it wasn’t. Not a sign. Oh, Bridget, I’m so thrilled! Five days! It’s never been as late as this before!”
It had, though. Bridget could remember it all too well. Much though she deplored her friend’s determination to have a baby regardless of circumstances, she dreaded still more the wailing and gnashing of teeth which would engulf the whole household when, after five, seven – even eight days, the premature hopes would all be washed away.
That’s how it had been last time, anyway, and though Bridget had done her best to sympathise, and to hide her own extreme relief that the threatened upheaval in their comfortable lives was not, after all, going to materialise, it had still been a traumatic time. Diana’s disappointment and depression had lingered on for – how long was it? Days? Weeks? Too long, anyway. And an additional annoyance was that Alistair, the fons et origo of the whole business, had been elaborately spared all suffering and annoyance. Diana had revealed to him nothing either of her initial hopes nor of their subsequent collapse. That he would have been put out and dismayed by the idea of Diana’s pregnancy was of course beyond question. Even Diana herself was in no doubt about this: but she clung pertinaciously to the theory that he could come to like the idea once he got used to it (“Men do, you know”); and that he would adore the baby once it was there.
He wouldn’t, of that Bridget felt absolutely sure: though whether he would find the inconveniences of fatherhood so great as to warrant dislodging himself from a comfortable second home, this was more doubtful. If Diana could somehow protect him from broken nights, interrupted meals, and all the other inconveniences of parenthood, he might well stay around. Diana would interpret this as “adoring the baby”. He wouldn’t be unkind to it: as he himself had pointed out on other occasions, being unkind to people was inordinately time-consuming: it always ended in some kind of a fuss, and a busy man had better things to do than to get involved in fusses.
With these thoughts coursing through her mind, Bridget found it difficult to congratulate Diana wholeheartedly, but she did her best; made a second cup of coffee and set it in front of her friend, and only then ventured on a carefully-worded warning to the effect that five days wasn’t all that late; it could happen to anybody – “Especially if they keep thinking about it all the time, the way you do.”
“Oh, but Bridget, it’s not just that! I’ve got a tingling feeling in my breasts, too, and that’s one of the very first signs, everyone says so. And there’s more even than that – I don’t know how to explain it, but I can feel the baby inside me! Truly I can! Yes, I know it’s less than a millimeter long, I know all that, all the scientific stuff, of course I do; but there’s something else as well – something beyond science. It’s a person, already. I can feel it is. It’s my baby, and I love it, love it, love it …!”
“Oh, Bridget, this baby is going to be loved so much, so much! Whatever happens, love like this will make up to him for anything!”
In hopes of hiding the luke-warmness of her response to her friend’s ecstasies, Bridget got up from her stool and went across the room to pull up the blinds. By now, it was growing light, and above the roofs opposite a pale yellow dawn, flecked with wisps of cloud, was creeping up the sky. For nearly a minute she stood there, her back to Diana, trying to adjust her thoughts – or rather her feelings – to this new development.
It was a nuisance. This, she realised to her shame, was her predominant feeling. And it was especially a nuisance right now, when they were already coping with a major irritant in the form of Norah and her problems; and just when Bridget herself was planning, this very morning, to involve herself yet deeper i
n the unhappy events at Medfield. Not because she wanted to – far from it – but because, in her view, it was a civic duty, and inescapable.
Would this be Norah’s view, too, when she heard what Bridget had done? Or would she see it not as a civic duty at all, but as black treachery?
For Bridget would have to tell her – of course she would. For one thing, Norah would be bound to hear about it in the end; and for another it was only decent, it was common honesty, to put her in the picture.
As soon as possible after the deed was done, she must seek an opportunity to talk to Norah on her own.
The opportunity came quite early in the afternoon, Diana was at the studio, and expected to be there until quite late – concentrating on the job in hand, one hoped, and not drifting about in her precarious dream of bliss – and Alistair had taken himself off, and with any luck wouldn’t re-appear until tomorrow. And so when Bridget arrived back at the flat, having had a quick lunch at the station buffet, she found Norah on her own, as she had hoped. Or half-hoped, anyway; the encounter wasn’t one to which she was looking forward.
Did it make it easier, or harder, that Norah looked already as if she was bracing herself for just such an uncomfortable interview as Bridget had in store for her? She was sitting on the very edge of the sofa in the large, light sitting room, and seemed to be doing absolutely nothing; just staring through the long windows at an expanse of winter sky.
She looked up, warily, as Bridget crossed the room towards her, but did not speak: not even to say “Hullo”, or to respond to Bridget’s own greeting. And so, without preamble, Bridget pulled forward one of the straight-backed dining chairs (this was not an occasion for lounging in comfort), settled herself in it facing Norah, and began.
King of the World Page 13
