Dangerous Thoughts

by Celia Fremlin

  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.

  CHAPTER III

  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.

  Blind optimism. Sometimes, I’ve wondered whether it is really as blind as it seems? I’ve met people like Sally before — people who, in the face of the direst predicaments — divorce, lost jobs, homelessness — still go around smiling happily in the confidence (quite unfounded) that ‘Something will turn up’; that ‘It will work out somehow’.

  It looks idiotic, feckless to the last degree: but is it? The more closely I observe such people — as I was now closely observing Sally — the more certain I am that such unreasoning optimism is not really unreasoning at all, but at a deep and possibly unconscious level is profoundly rational. It’s not that ‘something will turn up’ — it probably won’t. Rather it is that the person in question is deeply aware of qualities within themselves which will lift them out of trouble no matter what happens. I looked across at Sally, relaxed and lovely against the dark green of the sofa cushions, her young, firm breasts lifting her casual tee-shirt into top-model class, and I saw clearly what her unquenchable optimism consisted of. Warmed through and through by a lifetime of being loved and admired and sought-after, something inside her knew, and knew for certain, that whether her husband came back or didn’t come back, whether he died tragically or lived happily ever after, she, Sally, would be OK. She would be loved again, she would be sought-after again; her own capacity for love and happiness was still intact; nothing had happened in her short life to damage it. She was in a no-lose situation, and at some level, conscious or unconscious, she knew it.