Dangerous Thoughts (12 page)

“Daddy! Daddy!”

Barnaby’s shriek of welcome was the first indication to any of us that Richard was home again, safe and sound, making his way swiftly across the lawn towards us. Sally and Edwin, sprawled side by side on the rug, both lurched to a sitting position far more guiltily than the actual situation warranted; Edwin, in particular, looked as if he had seen a ghost.

For a few seconds we were all struck motionless, as in a game of Grandmother’s Footsteps, while Richard, despite his slight limp, came on apace, albeit encumbered by the clutching, squealing Barnaby.

We drove home almost in silence, Edwin and I. My mind was in a turmoil of suspicion, panic, and an overwhelming reluctance to confront Edwin about anything at all. Not now, anyway. Maybe the perfect time would be presently? It often is.

And Edwin’s mind? In a turmoil too, I have no doubt, but the actual ingredients of that turmoil I could only guess at.

That moment of confrontation with Richard on the Barlow’s lawn had not, after all, resulted in a stand-up row. Richard had behaved impeccably. In accordance with his creed, the host-to-guest relationship was given absolute precedence over the victim-to-murderer one (if that indeed was how he already saw it?). He greeted me and Edwin with polite correctness and with no sign of surprise at our presence, and he endorsed without flinching his wife’s eager suggestion that we should stay for tea.

The tea-time conversation centred, naturally, on Richard’s day-long absence. There had been a problem with the car, he said, he had needed the help of the AA to get it to a garage. From there, he had phoned the office explaining his delay, and asking them to ring his home to say he wouldn’t be back for lunch …

“And they didn’t, of course,” broke in Sally. “It’s that new girl of yours, darling, that June Somebody, she’s always forgetting things and muddling messages. And you can’t wonder, because do you know what her boyfriend said when he broke it off with her …? I mean, if you
have
to break it off with someone, you can at least …”

“Darling! The things you know!”

Instead of being irritated by the foolish irrelevance of the interruption, Richard was beaming round at us all.

“Sally’s marvellous!
Everyone
confides in her about
every
thing
!
She knows more about the girls in our office after a two-minute telephone conversation than I’ve learned in ten years of daily contact! Don’t you, darling?”

His eyes feasted on her as she giggled her appreciation, her bright hair falling across her face as she relaxed yet more deeply into the armchair in which she was curled.

We were having tea in the drawing-room, the sudden chill of the autumn evening having swept in icy shadows across the lawn and driven us indoors. Daphne was pouring tea into delicate china cups — Rockingham china, I think — and she had paused when Sally began speaking. Unlike her son, she had been irritated, I could tell, by the girl’s irrelevant interruption, but was making a more or less successful effort not to show it.

“Well, never mind,” she said now, “
You
were all right, Richard, that’s the main thing. But what was wrong with the car? It was serviced only a month or so ago, wasn’t it?”

Richard shrugged.

“I know. Most annoying. I must have a word with them at our own garage. It was the brakes, actually: most remiss of whoever was responsible; there could have been a nasty accident. When I think how it might have happened when
Sally
was driving, fetching Barnaby from the nursery, or something … I feel quite sick …”

Discussion of the brakes followed. What could have caused such a sudden failure? How could it have escaped notice earlier?

“They’ll be able to tell me more tomorrow,” said Richard. “At a first glance, the chap said, it looked as if they’d been tampered with, but …”

“Those boys!” broke in Sally. “That wretched gang who went round stealing petrol caps last summer … you remember? Just
for the hell of it — they couldn’t possibly have had any
use
for them!”

“Those were cars left out in the road,” pointed out Daphne. “Since we always put our car away in the garage, I don’t see how anyone could have …”

“But the garage doors weren’t locked,” here broke in Edwin. “A gang of boys could easily have …”

The sudden stillness must have made him realise what he was saying; with clumsy haste he struggled to get out of it.

“I mean,” he stumbled on, “one doesn’t always lock one’s garage doors, does one? Not if one’s in a hurry, I mean … if one is going out again very shortly. Or one can forget …”

“So one can,” observed Richard drily. “One is capable, it seems, of all sorts of things, isn’t one?”

Here Sally rushed in to save the situation — though whether, at this stage, she realised there was a situation to be saved, I shall never know. “It was
me,
Richard darling! It was my fault, I’m terribly dreadfully sorry.
I
left the doors unlocked! After I’d brought Barnaby back from the play-group yesterday, I thought I’d be going out again straight after lunch, you see, it was my aerobics afternoon, but then Maisie rang up to say it was cancelled because of Gwen’s husband having to go into hospital. He’s had this trouble with his sinuses, you see, and they were going to do tests, but they’d had to put the appointment forward, and so …”

“And so my naughty little Sally didn’t lock the garage doors!” said Richard, smiling, shaking his head. “Really, darling, you
should
be more careful …”

But no, she shouldn’t, his look said. He loved her to be like that, despite inconveniences such as fatal accidents due to faulty brakes.

“My wife leads a charmed life,” he smiled. “Whatever silly thing she does, it always works out all right in the end. Like now, for instance. Here I am, alive and well, am I not, in the teeth of all the disastrous possibilities? She’s like that — her charmed life
extends to everyone in contact with her. It’s amazing! In spite of which, do, please, darling, lock the garage in future? Even if the aerobics class
isn’t
cancelled. OK?”

Very OK, evidently. Sally, overwhelmed with sheer happiness at having so effortlessly delighted her husband with her carelessness, promised faithfully that she would be more careful in future, indeed she would: while Daphne, lips firmly and diplomatically closed, poured second cups of tea for us all.

Soon after this we left, Edwin and I, Richard playing the perfect host to the very end, even to the extent of expressing the hope that we might meet again before long.

On a seventeenth-century duelling-ground, with pistols? Or where? I shuddered when I thought about who it was who would inevitably lose.

And so we embarked on our silent drive home.

How much did Edwin know that I knew? That I suspected, rather — I mustn’t let myself admit that I
knew
anything.

Though of course I did: and before the evening was over, I was to know more.

I wonder how many marriages have been saved — or at least had their break-up postponed — by television? Not many, you may say, if you go by the divorce statistics: but who knows how much worse these figures might be
without
these structured respites from one-to-one communication? The relief to me and Edwin of being able to switch on a programme about the balance of payments deficit the moment we walked into the house was indescribable: from that moment on, neither of us had to say
anything.

I know the experts tell us that the stepping-up of communication between the partners is the prime recipe for improving a bad marriage: I’m sorry, but it’s a lie. As a way of enriching yet further an already happy marriage — maybe: but as a recipe for saving an unhappy one it’s a total non-starter, for in nine cases out of ten it’s communication that has got them into this trouble in the first place. If only she hadn’t told him that she found Shakespeare boring, then maybe he would never have been alerted to the other symptoms of her execrable taste: the flight of pottery ducks across the bedroom wall and the appearance of tomato ketchup on the table at every meal might well have passed unnoticed. And if only he’d never confided to her that he was sick to death of hearing about starving children on the radio, then it is probable that she would never have started on that dossier of non-compassionate remarks uttered by him, and from which she can quote with
such good effect whenever he refuses to do something that she wants done.

The truth is that unhappy marriages come about in large measure as the end result of a prolonged exercise in communication: in particular, the communicating of unflattering truths on a wide variety of topics, ranging from the correct handling of a tube of toothpaste to the squandering of the family fortunes on drink or self-awareness courses. In these sort of cases, ‘Least Said Soonest Mended’ would be my proverb of choice. Certainly it has long seemed to be the right proverb for me and Edwin: provided we kept off sensitive subjects, such as almost everything, we have been able to rub along pretty well for a lot of the time.

Of course, in the last few days our no-go areas of conversation had increased dramatically. On top of all the usual taboo subjects, we now couldn’t talk about editors, garages, journeys across London, phases of the moon, newspaper headlines or tomato soup flavoured with fennel. Even the weather was tricky, reminiscent as it might be of the sunlit afternoon on the Barlows’ lawn.

So, the balance of payments deficit was exactly right. We had never quarrelled about the balance of payments deficit, Edwin and I; it was a genuinely neutral subject between us, and so for nearly an hour we were able to sit side by side, not listening, but enjoying something really rather like peace — there is no other word for it. We were relieved not only from the need to say anything, but also from the stress and strain of not speaking to each other. What couples did before there was television, I can’t imagine. There were books, of course, but the trouble with these is that to sit separately, each with a good book, carries an aura of not-speaking which watching TV in silence doesn’t. I suppose it’s because
somebody
is speaking, even though it’s not you.

The balance of payments crisis was succeeded by a fairly pretty girl giving lightening answers to lightening questions about the life and works of Archbishop Laud — again a subject on which
Edwin and I had mercifully never differed; and before this was over, there came the first of the evening’s telephone calls.

Even though Edwin’s brief burst of fame seemed to be at an end, there were still quite a lot of callers: friends, acquaintances, relatives seeking to congratulate or to ask questions; not to mention the increasingly fed-up editor of
International
Focus,
contact with whom Edwin was still sedulously avoiding.

Partly because of this, and partly because I felt that I could more plausibly fail to answer the man’s questions than could Edwin himself, I made a point of being the one to get to the phone first each time it rang (not that there was any perceptible competition); and thus it came about that it was I (mercifully) who was the one to get the brunt of Jason’s indignation. He was ringing, I gathered, from the home of his friend Tim:

“Look, Mum, I’ve been trying to get you for ages! What have you done with my boletus?”

Boletus?
Boletus?
Then the penny dropped.

“My dear Jason, I haven’t done anything! I —”

Then I remembered. Of course: last night I’d shoved the thing hastily behind the breadbin so that Edwin wouldn’t catch sight of it and make some kind of a fuss: but of course I couldn’t explain this to Jason. For years now, I had been fighting a losing battle to kid Jason that he had a steady, fair-minded father who could be counted on to judge things rationally; and though it hadn’t worked — not for the last decade at least — it still seemed better than open treachery. I think Jason felt it to be better, too — anyway, he played along, so long as the issue wasn’t one really important to him. This one, apparently was, and so I must choose my words carefully.

“I’m sorry, Jason,” I said, “I was giving the kitchen a good clear up, and I put it on the dresser. Behind the breadbin. I meant to tell you, but you’d already gone off to school. And anyway, I thought you’d taken it. It was gone by the time I got up.”

“No, of course I didn’t take it, that’s why I’m ringing! And it
wasn’t
behind the breadbin; I looked everywhere. It’s a bit rotten, you know, because I promised Tim — I
told
you I wanted to show it to him, because according to his book …”

I’m sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry. What else could I be? I hadn’t got the thing, hadn’t thrown it away, well, of course I hadn’t, what an idea!

All the same, it did seem to be vaguely my fault. This is an attitude, I know, which Women’s Lib have been fighting against for years, this guilt-complex of the typical housewife: her feeling that everything that goes wrong in the home is
her
fault.

Well, I agree with them in deploring this attitude, especially when I catch myself succumbing to it; the only thing I’d say is that it isn’t basically a guilt-complex at all, it’s more to do with power. If everything is your fault, then it stands to reason that everything was under your control in the first place: and what is this but megalomania on the grand scale? It seems clear that much of what masquerades as guilt is merely a power-crazy delusion; an arrogant assumption of personal power ludicrously at variance with the reality.

If the situation in which Jason and I found ourselves at this juncture had been less acerbic, I might have put this theory to him, and we could have had an interesting discussion; but this was clearly not the moment. And so the call petered out unsatisfactorily, with me saying that if it turned up I’d ring him at Tim’s, and him saying that that would be too late, as they were both going out as soon as they had finished supper: at which meal, presumably, the errant fungus was to have featured in all its glory, fried in butter. Oh, well, it can’t be helped: we rang off, in a mood of mutual dissatisfaction.

The next two calls were easier: one from my old schoolfriend Gladys, saying how lovely it must be for me to have Edwin home again, and me saying, Yes, wasn’t it: and the second from my temping agency, saying they’d got a job for me tomorrow
afternoon, and probably for the rest of the week as someone had just let them down, and so …

I accepted, though very uneasily. I had already turned down two offers since Edwin’s return, on the grounds of having too much on my plate at home; I couldn’t go on doing this for ever, though the temptation continued to be great. This is the trouble with temping: it sounds marvellous, this option of working or not working as one’s life-situation permits, giving yourself a break whenever there’s something to worry about at home; but it’s a snare really because, actually, there’s always something to worry about at home.
This
week, that is:
next
week will be clear. Until it arrives, that is, at which point it inevitably becomes
this
week, and we start all over again …

Still, as I say, you can’t go on turning jobs down for ever, and so, “Yes”, I said; and Edwin, hovering a few feet away — eavesdropping, one might say — wanted to know what I was saying ‘Yes’ to? He seemed to be really agitated, and I tried to guess what he might be imagining I was assenting to … but before anything had been resolved, the phone went yet again.

“Yes?” I said. “Yes, this is Mrs Wakefield speaking,” and waited. The South Dulwich Botanical Research Centre, the cultured voice explained. “Your husband was here this morning with a rather interesting specimen of fungus which he urgently wanted identified. I just wanted to let him know that it’s non-poisonous, perfectly edible. It
is
a boletus, tell him, though an exceptionally large one. The unusual purplish tinge is simply due to …”

“Edwin,” I said, “this is for you,” and I thrust the receiver at him as if it had bitten me. I didn’t want to hear any more, and to make sure that I didn’t I headed swiftly for the kitchen, slamming the door behind me.