Dangerous Thoughts

by Celia Fremlin

  “My mother and my wife are expecting you,” he explained, “and I wouldn’t like them to be disappointed. Perhaps I should tell you that I have decided to tell them nothing of this unfortunate affair between me and your husband. As a matter of fact I have so far told nothing to anyone. I refused to give interviews until after I got home. My chief concern right now is not to upset my family. And they would be upset. Very much so. They already feel that you yourself are now a close friend of the family, and they would be much distressed if anything were to come about to destroy that friendship. Particularly Sally” — and as he spoke the name, a softness and a brightness came over the rather severe features, and one knew that here was a man in love — “I would be very sad indeed if this day — this very happy day for her — were to be spoiled by so sordid an imbroglio. And so, Mrs Wakefield, if you could find it in your conscience to say nothing to them about our conversation, and to continue behaving to them just as you have done hitherto, I would be most grateful.

  “By the way, to alleviate any embarrassment you may be feeling in my company, let me assure you that I won’t be present at this little lunch party. I have an appointment at one-fifteen (glancing at his watch) and shall be fully occupied all the afternoon. There is a lot to see to — and none of it made easier by your husband’s machinations, I’m sorry to say. Enough of that, though; I don’t intend ever again to refer to … Ah, Mother! Hello! I hope I’m not holding things up by keeping our guest chatting for too long …” and a minute later I was walking in Daphne’s wake across the polished floor towards the dining-room.

  CHAPTER X

  The readiness with which human beings expand to fill the roles allotted to them has always amazed me. The callow youth gets dressed in the morning, and becomes a policeman. The henpecked husband unlocks the gate and becomes the Headmaster. The flustered elderly woman muddling her change in the supermarket walks up the road and becomes Granny. It is this quality, I suppose, which has allowed human beings to evolve as a social species at all, and so I don’t know why I should have been so surprised to find myself partaking of it in full measure during that lunch time. Once in the company of Daphne and Sally, exposed on every side to their uncomplicated relief and joy, I found it impossible not to share in this mood of rejoicing. It was my role: I had been invited here to share it, and so share it I did, my recent distress and humiliation not exactly forgotten, but hovering ghost-like on the edge of my consciousness, rather like a severe pain for which one has taken pain-killers.

  “You see?” Sally was exclaiming, laughter and pure happiness blended in her voice, “You see, I said he was going to be all right, and he is, isn’t he? I felt it in my bones, I told you! I kept saying it, and you wouldn’t believe me!”

  “No, dear. And you were quite right, weren’t you? How lucky we are!”

  Clearly, Daphne was feeling too relieved and happy to allow the thing to turn into an argument: she was allowing her daughter-in-law an easy win. Because, of course, Sally’s bones hadn’t really constituted evidence, and a lucky guess doesn’t really argue a superior assessment of the situation.

  Sally had simply been lucky.

  Lucky, lucky, lucky.

  “And we had another bit of luck, too,” Sally was babbling on, “I don’t suppose Richard told you, did he, Clare; he always makes light of anything at all dangerous — that’s one of the things that’s so marvellous about him, isn’t it, Mother-I-mean-Daphne?”

  “Well — up to a point,” Daphne agreed, smiling, “though I must say I’d worry about him less on these trips if he’d …”

  “But like I’m saying, this wasn’t the trip!” Sally broke in, “This was on the way back from the airport! Would you believe it, Clare, after all that wildly dangerous stuff out in God-knows-where … and then to be within an inch of death when we’re just nearly home! It’s lucky he was the one driving, I’m sure I’d never have managed to …”

  “Sally! Sally, darling! Poor Clare doesn’t know what you’re talking about! Do tell the story properly … Start at the beginning.”

  “Well, all right, but there wasn’t a beginning, not really, it was all absolutely sudden. You see, we were bowling home along the High Road, just before you get to the church, when suddenly this madman drove out of a side road slap in front of us! Richard had to do an instant U-bendy sort of loop, right on to the wrong side of the road — if anything had been coming, we’d have had it, but luckily it’s pretty quiet at that time of night, and so there’s no harm done …”

  “Well, a broken rear light and a lot of scratches, I wouldn’t call that no harm,” interposed Daphne. “Not to mention this lunatic — a drunken driver, one presumes—getting away scot-free! I do think, Sally, if only you’d had the presence of mind to note the number …”

  “Oh, but Mother-I-mean-Daphne, how could I? It was so sudden, you’ve no idea. I didn’t even know if we’d been killed until I found that we hadn’t, if you see what I mean, and by that time the other car was clean away …”

  The mild bickering was just beginning to cloud the occasion, when a timely diversion introduced by Barnaby forced the discourse into new channels.

  “S’a caterpillar in my salad,” he announced, with evident satisfaction. “S’a green one, all wriggling! … Yuck!”

  Instant concern. Chairs scraped back, adult faces loomed over the child, one on each side, peering anxiously at his plate.

  “Where, Barnaby?” “Show me!” “Where is it …?”

  “There!” His fork traversed a vague parabola above the food, randomly pointing. “S’there! Yuck!”

  Careful search ensued.

  “Now, Barnaby, don’t be silly, there’s nothing there; just delicious lettuce …”

  “Barnaby, dear, you’re imagining it, look again, you’ll see there just isn’t a …”

  “Oh, well, I must’ve eatened it, then,” hazarded the star of the show: and then, pathetically: “have I got to eat the rest?”

  An ingenious choice of words: ‘The rest of the caterpillars’ would seem to be implied, and what mother — or grandmother — would be so heartless as to insist on this?

  “Well …”

  “Now look, Barnaby dear …”

  The concerned voices wove in and out above his head, locked in familiar argument: “Why give him salad, dear, if he isn’t going to eat it?” “Oh, but Mother, it’s good for him. They all say …” “Yes, I daresay, but it’s only good for him if he eats it. If you aren’t going to make him eat it, then what’s the point of …?”

  “Oh, Mother! You should never make a child eat anything! That’s just the way to set up food-phobias …”

  “Yuck!” contributed Barnaby, “Yucky caterpillar dinner!” and pushing the offending vegetation so far to the side of his plate that it toppled over the edge, he sat back contentedly to watch his minions clearing up the mess, continuing as they did so to discuss, in eminently reasonable tones, the ethical, physiological and educational issues involved.

  It reminded me of Edwin, I don’t know why. Just when I least wanted to be reminded of him. All too soon, I was going to have to go home and face him; face the despair, the fear, the humiliation which Richard Barlow’s unanswerable accusations must inevitably have caused. I must face, too, the implications of something I had noticed earlier without attaching any significance to it — I mean, the scratches and the slight dent in the bonnet of our car. The damage was very minor — I couldn’t even be sure it was new — and all I thought at the time was, I must ask Edwin about it. Now, all I thought was, I must not ask Edwin about it. I must get it repaired as quickly as possible, and never think about it again.

  By the time I left, the rain had ceased, the sky had cleared, and the low autumn sun was blazing with uncanny brilliance right into my eyes, making a small hazard of every roundabout or side-road. How convenient, I found myself thinking at one point, if I did have a small, a very small accident, creating a few fresh scrapes, one or two minor dents, among which the existing
ones could merge without trace. Not that these reflections did anything at all to alleviate my natural motorist’s alarm at each individual hazard as I encountered it. I have read that it is often like this for suicides, too: on their way to the high jump, they will still spring in terror from the path of an oncoming bus: on preparing to slit their wrists they will still concern themselves with whether or not the carving knife is clean.

  With every stage of the journey, my reluctance to actually reach home mounted: soon, I was crawling along at a pace which won me hoots of annoyance and derision from every side, and I began to realise that I was faced with two options: either to arrive home, or to stop now.

  Not far from where we live, there is a park abutting on a small stretch of woodland not yet demolished by the developers. Thither I made my way, and having parked the car by the main entrance I set off towards the trees with the vague feeling that among those silver-birch trunks gleaming wetly in the last of the sunshine, I would be able to set my thoughts in order, and know what was the right thing to do.

  ‘As a loyal wife, you will of course take your husband’s side,’ Richard Barlow had said: and I envied him the rigid code from which this remark had sprung. If only I, too, had the guidance of some moral principle, no matter how blinkered, bigoted and prejudiced, from which it would be impossible for me to deviate. Other principles came into my mind, more ancient by far than Richard’s: like that passage in the Jewish funeral service for a deceased wife, where the bereaved husband declares:

  ‘She did me good and not evil all the days of her life.’

  What was the good that at this juncture I could do to Edwin? And what the evil? Simply taking his side, encouraging him to stick to his false story, assuredly might not be doing him good: but on the other hand, refusing to take his side, insisting on showing him up as the liar that he was — would not this assuredly be doing him evil? It would look like it, certainly. And what is evil, anyway? At least half of it consists of what it looks like, and of what it feels like to the victim.

  I was deep among the trees now, the gleams of sunlight on the wet trunks were gone, and I looked around, vaguely, for somewhere to sit. I could think better — or thought I could — if I was sitting down.

  But everywhere was wet, so wet. Every tempting log was slushy with moss and lichen, the floor of the woodland was awash with sodden leaves. I must keep walking, then, but slowly … slower … and soon I was leaning up against the ancient drooping branch of an ancient dying oak, and staring into a quietness broken only by the faint drip-drip from some twig or dead leaf saturated beyond its power of absorption in the moist air. Large, luscious fungi, the most silent form of vegetation ever evolved, shared with me the great dying bough, sucking nutrients from the sodden bark.

  Why, why had Edwin concocted this elaborate, this preposterous falsehood? What had he hoped to gain? Perhaps this was putting the question the wrong way round: it wasn’t anything he had hoped to gain so much as something he was desperately seeking not to lose: namely, his self-respect as a professional journalist, as well as all the glory and glitter of his new-found fame.

  Knowing him as I did, and over so many years, I could see exactly how it had come about. He had been thrilled — yes, he had been genuinely thrilled — at being assigned to this trip. He had seen real success — yes, and fame — within his grasp at last, and on making the final arrangements with his prospective colleagues he had, I am certain, intended to fulfil his part in the enterprise.

  And then, as the time for setting off drew near, and as the dangers inherent in the undertaking bit deeper and deeper into his imagination — well, as Richard Barlow had put it, he got cold feet. He had panicked, and had done the unforgivable thing for an investigative journalist; he had lost his nerve and backed out, letting down his colleagues, his editor, and disgracing himself for ever in his profession.

  Even so, how had he come to venture on this ludicrous farrago of lies, any or all of which his two putative colleagues could disprove in a moment?

  Well, no, they couldn’t, could they, as things seemed to be turning out? The rumours, followed by the apparently definitive news, that Richard and Leo had been captured and probably killed, must have seemed to let him off the hook entirely, and must have inspired him to invent his own face-saving story, which could now (in all probability) never be questioned, and on the crest of which he could now ride not merely to acceptance, but to all the dazzle of fame which had been his original motive for embarking on the whole enterprise.

  Simple, I saw it all. And so this was the man I must go home to this evening. A coward, a liar, a betrayer of his colleagues. And, incidentally, a total and disgraceful failure in his chosen career.

  Well, not incidentally. It’s being a failure that turns a person into a liar and a coward, not the other way round. Looking back now, in the deepening twilight of the wood, I thought about what Edwin had done to himself over the years. He had seen himself all along as a man he simply wasn’t — a man of courage, stamina and iron will-power — and had landed himself in a career which demanded these qualities to an extreme degree. When the crunch came, and these exalted qualities failed him, his only resource was lying and cheating.

  And hadn’t it been the same at home? He had embarked happily enough on fatherhood, possessing only the modest skills required for getting on with a toddler, or perhaps with a small, admiring five-or six-year old: and then, later, when confronted by a creature taller than himself, better at fixing the video, and with the whole world still ahead of him instead of half of it already behind — caught in such a predicament, what could a frightened man do other than try desperately to belittle the burgeoning creature, to rubbish its encroaching powers?

  I thought about those marks, still visible on the kitchen door, with which we, proud parents, had once recorded the growth of our small son, giving no thought at all to the direction in which those marks were unstoppably leading.

  The silence seemed to thicken in the damp, darkening air, and I felt inexpressibly alien in this secret world of vegetation moving harmoniously towards its long sleep. Me, I was irreversibly awake, a creature so constituted that it must constantly move about, must do things, must decide on a course of action or against a course of action: if not this, then that …

  A sudden stirring of the undergrowth only a few feet away shot through my body like a flash of lightening: complex moral decisions vanished, the options reduced to the utter clarity of fight or flight.

  But only for a second. Less than a second.

  “Mum!” exclaimed Jason, pushing through the tangle of dripping foliage, shaking the loose wetness from his hair. “What on earth are you …? The chap at the gate said he’d seen a lady on her own coming down this way, and so I … Look, Mum, for Pete’s sake come home! Dad’s doing his nut about the car …!”

  My shoulders had grown so stiff from leaning so long against the wet branch, it was quite difficult to propel myself upright; but I made it.

  “What about the car?” I asked, my mind a turmoil of evasion and anxiety. Something about those dents and scratches …? Hell, I was becoming quite paranoic about them! Surely, if my suspicions were well-founded, this was the last subject Edwin would be likely to raise with his young son.

  “Just that it’s not there, and he doesn’t know where it’s gone. I started trying to tell him that I’d seen it on my way home from school, parked safe and sound, by the gate here, but … Oh, you know, Mum, what Dad’s like when he gets things into his head! Worries them to pieces like a terrier, and then bites your head off if you try to help any … So anyway, I thought I’d retire temporarily from the line of fire, and come to suss it out for him.

  “And so here I am. Behold, you’re sussed. And so …” Suddenly his voice changed: “Mum! I say! D’you know what you’ve got there? Look — just by your right foot — don’t move! It may be only a boletus, but it’s a fantastic size. I wonder if … I must show it to Tim, he’ll know …”

  Taking a coupl
e of steps forward, he bent down and very gently detached the yellowish, bloated thing from its moorings, and then stood, uncertainly, cupping it in both hands.

  “I ought to have brought a tin, or something,” he lamented, moving the thing cautiously from one palm to the other, “It’ll be a tragedy if I let it get broken before Tim sees it.”

  Tim Fergusson, bespectacled, ginger-haired and very polite was one of the most assiduous visitors to our household after school, and I had lately become aware of the lad’s craze for mycology, as a result of the hitherto unknown Mrs Fergusson’s increasingly urgent telephone calls asking me to check whether our Edible Fungi of the British Isles saw eye to eye with her Why Only Mushrooms? in respect of the particular specimen that her son was on the point of frying in butter for the family’s evening meal. So far, Jason’s more theoretical interest in the subject hadn’t extended to this sort of thing, and I could only hope that this remarkable specimen, plump as a doughnut and twice the size, wasn’t going to prove an inspiration to culinary experiment. I knew very well what the Edible Fungi book would say — it would declare the ugly thing to be not only edible, but ‘delicately flavoured’ — all that sort of thing, for all the world like an advert for vintage wine.

  I observed, uneasily, the loving way he cradled the specimen in both hands, walking gingerly among the slippery ruts of the woodland path so as not to jolt it.

  That’s all I needed for my encounter with Edwin tonight — a teenage son frying fungi for our supper. It crossed my mind to ring up Mrs Fergusson and beg her to ring back and say that her book said that the boletus was deadly poisonous: but something — a sort of moral weariness rather than a real moral scruple — restrained me. To get involved in another web of lying was too much; my whole soul shrank from it in exhaustion.

  CHAPTER XI

  “Where have you been? Why didn’t you tell me?”