Dangerous Thoughts

by Celia Fremlin

  And then came the story of the ambush. It was pretty much the same as we’d heard on the news bulletins, except of course that this was an eye-witness account, and not just pieced together from scattered clues after the event. Five … six figures suddenly looming out of the glare … and then more still, a dozen or so, seeming to dance about in the shimmering heat. Shots fired … the jeep tipping and lurching to a halt … and then total confusion, a tumult of noise, shouting, dust in clouds all around almost blotting out the sun. Edwin and his two companions had struggled briefly against their assailants, but the odds were overwhelming … a dozen or more armed terrorists against three unarmed journalists: in a matter of moments the three were tied up and blindfolded, and bundled into some kind of a vehicle. And then, for what seemed like hours and hours, there was the jolting across rough country, or maybe primitive roads, arriving, after dark, at some sort of small town or village where each of the three were carried separately into different houses. Edwin found himself in an upstairs room lit only by an oil lamp (yes, they’d taken the blindfold off as soon as they got him indoors). The room was almost empty of furniture, the narrow high window was boarded up. Some sort of drug, he thought, must have been added to the odd-tasting stew they brought him, because the next thing he knew it was bright morning, sunlight shining through the cracks in the boarded-up windows, and he was lying — as he must have been lying all night, in deep unbroken sleep, on those bare boards. Someone brought him breakfast — or was it lunch? — and spoke to him, asking questions in a language he did not understand … and then, later on, another man repeated the performance … and then another. This last one, apparently, did seem to know a little English, for he managed to say: “Tomorrow we question again: tomorrow you answer. Yes, you answer. Tomorrow, they make you answer …”

  When darkness fell beyond the cracks in the window, the oil lamp was brought in again, and also a bowl of the same strange-tasting soup, but this time he did not eat it. He knew what he was going to do that night, and he would need all his wits about him.

  It was a risk, a terrible risk; but the next time one of his guards came into the room to take the supper things away, Edwin jerked round as if in surprise, and managed in this swift movement to knock the oil lamp to the floor, where the flames spread terrifyingly across the oil-soaked wooden boards.

  The guard shrieked in terror and rushed downstairs, shouting words that must have meant ‘Fire! Fire!’, with Edwin close on his heels, and during the ensuing terror and confusion, the rushing in and out with buckets of water, Edwin managed to slip through the outer door and out into the night.

  It was at this point, I recalled, that there had occurred a very small hiccup in the new and delightful relationship that had so suddenly sprung up between father and son.

  “But Dad,” Jason had interposed, “What was it that made the paraffin ignite so easily? I mean, a thin film spread across a whole area of floor … It’s not as if it was petrol, or …”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Jason, how do I know what the stuff was? Paraffin? Kerosene? Should I have taken a home chemistry set with me and started to analyse it? I can assure you, boy, that in a situation like that — which God grant you never find yourself in — you don’t stop to —!”

  “Of course, Dad! I didn’t mean … I was only thinking …” Jason’s words stumbled to a halt, and I knew that he was as upset as I was at his father’s reversion to this old, censorious mode. The boy hastened to repair the damage.

  “So, go on, Dad. You managed to slip out of the door … and so then …?”

  “And so then,” resumed Edwin, readily allowing himself to be mollified — for after all, sulking is not compatible with holding the attention of an audience — “So then, well, I made myself scarce, didn’t I? I vanished into the dark. It wasn’t too difficult, actually, because there was a whole mob by that time, rushing around yelling at each other — hoses and buckets and stuff — as well as half the village gathered round rubber-necking.

  “But what was difficult was the rest of the night. I felt I couldn’t leave without finding out what was happening to Richard and Leo, so I had to hang about as best I could without being seen. Lying low … creeping around … peeking in through windows, listening if I could hear any English being spoken inside any of the buildings. Luckily, it was a dark night, only the stars, no moon, and so …”

  “But Dad …” Jason was beginning: and then thought better of it. In the last light of the guttering candles I was watching his face, and I could see him thinking better of it.

  I was glad. Not that I knew, then, what it was that he’d been about to say, but I knew already that whatever it was, it was better left unsaid.

  And so Edwin’s happy mood was preserved, and we ended the evening with a celebratory liqueur, served — wonder of wonders! — by Raymond. Did I tell you that Jason’s half-built robot was named Raymond? Well, it was, and Edwin had not only remembered this, but had actually asked that the creature should be trundled into service to pass round our drinks on this very special evening.

  CHAPTER VI

  Sally and her mother-in-law were watching for me on the steps outside their front door when I arrived. The journey had taken longer than I’d expected, and I’d had some difficulty in parking — quite unnecessarily, I now saw, for a wide sweep of gravel led up to the house, and I could easily have brought the car inside. Indeed, the whole aspect of the place was a good deal grander than I’d expected. The gravel drive curved round an oval of beautifully kept lawn, raked free of leaves and newly-mown, each blade of well-trimmed grass glittering with wetness in the morning light. A wide herbaceous border was brilliant with autumn flowers — dahlias, michaelmas daisies, golden-rod — with tangles of nasturtiums, scarlet and gold, scrambling unstoppably here there and everywhere. Nearer the front door late-flowering roses bloomed in profusion pink and crimson and creamy yellow; their scent floated sweetly towards me as I hurried across the gravel, apologising as I came: for being late, for having failed to bring Edwin with me, for knowing as little as I did — for everything, really, while my two hostesses bore down on me, smiling, polite, holding out hands, effecting introductions; in fact giving the social niceties absolute priority over those matters of life and death which had brought me here.

  This is usual, of course; you see it at funerals. Even the police who arrive at the front door with dreadful news are still thanked nicely and offered a cup of tea.

  “I’ll make some coffee,” Sally volunteered as we crossed a spacious entrance-hall with a polished parquet floor and shaggy off-white rugs; then, pausing in a doorway, she turned back to us. “Drawing-room or library?” she enquired of her mother-in-law. Clearly, the house was going to prove as spacious and elegant as the garden I had already seen.

  “Oh — library,” answered Mrs Barlow unhesitatingly; and then, turning to me: “It’s Richard’s room, really, but we use it quite a lot, Sally and I, when he’s away. It gets the morning sun, you see. Come —” and she led me into a pleasant book-lined room, comfortably enough furnished, but obviously intensively used as a study. It was dominated by a large, workmanlike desk bearing typewriter, telephone, and an assortment of papers and journals, all neatly stacked and docketed.

  I was envious. It looked the way Edwin’s study could have looked, if only he’d ever tidied it up, or ever finished anything, or ever thrown anything away. I mean, all those letters he knew he was never going to answer; all those journals he knew he was never going to read — why keep them? Not to mention the obsolete files spilled out of the filing-cabinet to make way for other, not yet obsolete ones; or the piles of newspapers, each of which contained some controversial article, or some set of statistics relevant to some project or other that Edwin had been engaged on in 1977 … Oh, well, it takes all sorts, as the cliché has it. Some men are naturally tidy, while others regard their entire house as one gigantic in-tray. It’s just the luck of the draw, which kind you turn out to have married.

  I had spok
en to Mrs Barlow — Daphne — on the phone already, but this was the first time I had actually met her in the flesh and I found that my initial impression, of a rather intimidating person, was confirmed. Her lined, weather-beaten face was the face of a woman who had coped with a difficult life efficiently and without whingeing, a woman disinclined to stand any nonsense. It crossed my mind to speculate whether nonsense was something she quite often had to stand from her daughter-in-law? It was already clear to me, from our two or three telephone calls, that there was a certain tension between them. Seventy or more I guessed she must be, but she moved briskly and decisively about the room in very white trainers, arranging chairs, drawing up a low table ready for the coffee-tray. She was wearing brown corduroy trousers and a white polo-necked sweater: her whole get-up, in fact, would have been entirely suitable to a teenager, and yet, somehow, she didn’t give the impression of ‘mutton dressed as lamb’. Perhaps this was due to her still-slim figure and brisk movements — or was it, perhaps, some more generalised feature of our times? I mean, what does mutton look like nowadays, or lamb either, come to that? Historically speaking, old ladies have always been characterised by still wearing the garments that were fashionable in their heyday. Thus, in the twenties, long Edwardian skirts marked out the old decisively from the short-skirted young. But what were the garments fashionable in the heyday of today’s crop of old ladies? WAAF uniform? The Sack look? Hot pants? The mini-skirt? Winkle-pickers? Tee-shirts proclaiming ‘I Love Elvis’? The truth is that the fashion people, in the last few decades, seem to have overreached themselves at last, bringing about their own destruction by changing styles so rapidly that women have simply given up on it.

  It was bound to happen, of course, as technological advances made faster and faster changes more and more feasible.

  “The nightmare of every fashion designer is that one day women are going to start wearing what they like”, lamented one of the top designers of the Thirties; and how prophetic the remark seems to have proved.

  White or black? Milk or cream? Sugar? Chocolate digestive biscuits or sponge-fingers? And now, at last: Edwin?

  I had, of course, already given them a brief summary over the phone earlier this morning, but naturally it wasn’t enough; there were a myriad questions they still wanted to ask … all sorts of details that Edwin might still be able to give them. It was a pity, Mrs Barlow senior pointed out, the very greatest pity, that my husband hadn’t managed to find the time to come with me this morning.

  It was a pity, I couldn’t agree more.

  “It’s all these interviews he’s got lined-up,” I explained. “All these people he’s got to see …” I heard my voice uncontrollably picking up speed towards that defensive gabble in which wives the world over cover-up for their husbands’ misdemeanours. He was quite desolated, I assured them, to find that this visit just couldn’t be fitted in, not this morning; there’s so much, you see, that he’s got to deal with right now … Just as soon as he has a moment to spare there’s nothing he wants more than to …

  Actually, of course, there were plenty of things he wanted more. Like appearing on the Mick Dawson Chat Show … like lunching with this new agent fellow who was on the verge of getting the Today and Tomorrow people interested: and then there was this party where the producer of Man of the Week was likely to be one of the guests … Yes, there were an awful lot of things that Edwin wanted to do more than he wanted to drive across London to be cross-questioned by a couple of neurotic women.

  That Sally and her mother-in-law were neurotic, Edwin had decided at once, though he had never met them. Whether this judgement was based on things Richard had said about his wife and mother during the trip, or whether (more likely) Edwin’s preferred definition of a neurotic woman was a woman who wanted him to do something he didn’t want to do, I couldn’t be quite sure, but either way it made no difference to my immediate task which was to recount to them in the greatest possible detail every single thing that Edwin had told me about the journey into the desert and its catastrophic denouement. Above all, I wanted to reassure the anxious pair that (so far as Edwin could tell) neither of his companions had been killed or seriously injured in the encounter: the object of the kidnapping would appear to have been the acquiring of hostages, not the slaughter or injury of the victims.

  “But hadn’t they got any guns with them?” Sally was asking, wide-eyed. “I mean, if Richard had had a gun, I’m sure he’d never have let himself be …”

  For a moment, I was flummoxed. Edwin hadn’t said anything about guns, one way or the other. Would such weapons be part of the normal equipment of investigative journalists in these dangerous parts? Or not? To my relief, I did not need to answer for Mrs Barlow had intervened.

  “Sally, dear, that’s not a very sensible question, is it? The job of a reporter is to find out facts, to get people talking, not to shoot them.” Then, turning to me, she asked abruptly:

  “Did Richard have his heart pills with him? That’s the thing that worries me most; that he may have been without them all this time.”

  Heart pills? For a man embarking on this sort of adventure? I swallowed my astonishment and pointed out that this was something Edwin hadn’t known about — well, how could he, if Richard didn’t tell him?

  “And Richard wouldn’t,” Sally broke in. “You know he wouldn’t Mother-I-mean-Daphne? He hated people knowing about his heart — particularly me, actually, and so I pretended not to. Well, sort of pretend, but as a matter of fact I hate it just as much as he does, so we sort of — well, he’s careful to take the things when I’m not looking, and I’m careful not to be looking when he takes them. And so it’s OK, sort of.”

  “Sort of,” repeated Mrs Barlow drily. “For Sally, anyway …” and then, turning to her daughter-in-law: “Sally, dear, isn’t it time you went to fetch Barnaby from the playgroup? It’s gone quarter-to. I’ll be getting on with the lunch meantime. You will stay to lunch, won’t you?” she added, turning graciously in my direction, “We have a very light lunch normally —” and as I murmured my thanks, combined with fervent assurances that a very light lunch was what I always had too, she added, with a small smile, “All except the pudding, that is. We have proper puddings — syrup sponge it’s going to be today in order to bribe Barnaby to eat his salad. He hates salad; children all do, but he’s got to get used to it because that’s what they have for school dinners nowadays. And then they wonder why the kids go truanting at lunch time! … What is it, dear, can’t you find something?” For Sally, dressed now in a very fetching canary-yellow coat and black silk scarf, was back again, and was rooting about the room with an air of anguished urgency.

  “The car keys? — here they are, dear, you left them by the telephone.” And then, as the front door slammed for a second time behind her daughter-in-law, Daphne (for such I was now to call her) turned to me with a shrug and a small laugh.

  “She’s a scatty little thing, isn’t she, but we get used to it. Even Barnaby never bothers to cry until the second time the door slams behind her; he knows she’ll be back within a minute for something she’s forgotten. Children are very practical, aren’t they? They respond so readily to what is, without any sidelong glances at what ought to be …

  “And now, what about a glass of sherry? I’ll be with you in a moment, I’ve just got to check that the sponge is simmering, it mustn’t actually boil …”

  Over the sherry, we talked some more about Richard and his chances of release — or escape, as the case might be; and naturally, on my side, I presented the case in as optimistic a light as I possibly could. Since Edwin had remained unharmed during his captivity, I pointed out, there seemed every hope that the same would be true of the others. Whatever the motive for the capture, the same presumably would apply to all three of them.

  “Yes … Yes, I know; that’s what I’ve been telling myself ever since I heard the news about your husband. I was very happy for you, naturally, as well as more hopeful about Richard. Much more hopeful
. And then I’ve got Sally, of course, the archetypal little ray of sunshine if ever there was one! As you must have observed, she’s absolutely certain that Richard will be all right. But then, you see, Sally likes things to be all right. She finds it a bother when things go wrong.”

  She paused, her large, rather prominent grey eyes staring fixedly into the ruby liquid in the decanter from which she was refilling our glasses. Then, with a tight little smile, she went on:

  “She’s the perfect little child-bride, is our Sally; and since Richard likes it that way — well, who’s complaining? He’s a great deal older than she is, you know — more than twenty years, in fact — and I was afraid at first that what with this huge age-gap, and the fact that Sally — well, she’s a sweet girl, but she’s not an intellectual high-flier exactly, is she? Well, I did wonder if they mightn’t find after a while that they really hadn’t got anything much in common — no shared interests at all. But as it turns out, they do have a shared interest — that of making sure that nothing ever goes wrong for Sally —”

  Here she paused again, perhaps feeling that she had revealed too much to a near-stranger like myself. Then: “My son had a very unhappy first marriage, you know. His first wife was a career woman dead-set against having children. I could see her point of view, of course, she was very talented, and doing extremely well in a large advertising firm; but I could see Richard’s too. He longed for a son … and also, I suppose, for a cosy little wife to come back to after these sometimes gruelling assignments. And of course, now, that’s exactly what he’s got. And a lovely little boy into the bargain. He adores them both — absolutely adores them — which of course makes me very happy. If only, though …”

  But here the confidences were abruptly broken by the slam of the front door and a shrill voice in the hall proclaiming that its owner had drawn the bestest picture of a bunny, much bestester than Paul’s bunny, Paul’s bunny was blue, “Blue’s silly, isn’t it, Mummy? Bunnies don’t be blue …”