Such Men Are Dangerous (7 page)

“His neck was broken,” she said suddenly. “Did you know that?”

“Yes.” The inquest had been lengthily reported.

“He’d been hanging in that wood a week.” She looked towards him now with eyes which seemed enlarged by bewilderment; but at a time when one might have expected tears they remained dry, and slightly out of focus. It appeared she had to justify herself. “He’d been depressed, you see. I thought he’d just gone off again without saying nothing. He’d done it before.”

This he knew as well.

“Once he walked to London and back—well, anyhow, walked most of the way there, because people don’t like giving lifts and by then he’d had to sell the car. But he didn’t find no job.”

To his consternation Simon found his own eyes growing moist.

“I used to talk to him quite spiteful,” she said.

“You can’t blame yourself for that, Sharon.”

“How do you know?”

“Listen. When anybody dies, even in the most ordinary of circumstances, those closest to them
always
feel a lot of guilt. But people are people; very few of us are saints. You were both under great pressure.”

“Well, even if that’s true…,” she said. (Surreptitiously, he wiped his nose on the back of his hand, thought of the box of tissues in his glove compartment.) “I could still have been a lot nicer.”

“We could all have been a lot nicer.”

“And I was mean about his pictures.”

“Pictures?”

“He and the son of that neighbour I told you about. He was teaching Imran to draw: animals and things. Jerry had a knack for doing pictures. He often joked about someday being a famous artist. But they used to go off all the time, you see: into the parks and the warren and suchlike. I got jealous of them having fun…”

“Sharon, there’s nothing you could have said that didn’t arise out of your situation and out of the kind of people you both were. Honest.”

“Meaning, I suppose, that everything, bloody well everything, is forgiven? Just like that? I think that’s daft.”

He tried to make her see the truth of it, as far as he was capable of seeing the truth of it himself. (Hitler forgiven? Stalin forgiven? Pol Pot?) After little more than three minutes, though, he cut his fumbling explanations short, aware that he’d said enough, probably too much, for the time being. But he was pleased to have seen evidence of anger. It offered up some hope.

He asked after an appropriate pause:

“Have you any of Jerry’s pictures that I could look at?”

“I suppose so.” She gave a shrug. “Sometime.”

“Would you like me to go now?”

“I just want to get some sleep. I wish I never had to wake up, neither.”

“Yes, I can believe that.”

“Jerry’s well out of it, if you ask me.”

“But it
will
get better. It may be impossible to imagine, but it will.”

“How do
you
know?” she asked again.

Because it has to, he thought, with some vehemence; if there’s a God, it has to. And because I
do
know. I’ve been through it all myself.

Oh, yes, indeed.
Simon the Self-Pitier. Simon the Competitive
.

And sometimes, too, at moments such as these, he really had to wonder.

Simon the Hypocrite
?

10

On his way home he called in on both Alison and Dulcie.

“You shouldn’t have left her,” said Alison.

“What choice did I have? I could hardly have put her to bed. And she hasn’t got a phone. Well, even if she had, I couldn’t have used it in front of her.” He was edgy.

“She’ll be okay until morning,” said Alison’s husband, who was short and fat and smoking a cigar, his slippered feet at ease upon a pouffe. “That is, unless those kids wake up in the small hours and start to bawl.”

“You’re not either of you a lot of comfort. Should I get in touch with the hospital or something?”

“No,” said Alison, reassuringly decisive. “Robert’s right. Tonight what can one do? In the morning I’ll get round there good and early.”

“Not too early,” warned her husband, dropping cigar ash. Simon jaundicedly assumed that he was thinking of a lie-in. “Or, anyhow, you’d better wait outside until you hear the first whimper.”

“I suppose,” said Alison, “that the social services
have
been alerted about all of this?”

Simon groaned. “Oh, it didn’t occur to me! How stupid can I get? And surely Sharon would have told me if she were expecting a home help.”

But all the same he was feeling a little more optimistic by the time he got to Jack and Dulcie’s.

“Did you look at the kids?” she asked a few minutes later.

“No. Why should I?”

“I hope they were all right,” she said, lugubriously.

Despite Jack’s solid reassurance, and even Dulcie’s own smiling acknowledgment that when her Harry was a baby she’d looked in on him six times an evening to make sure he wasn’t being gassed by fumes emanating from the radiator, or the steelworks, or the oil rigs in the North Sea, Simon felt so stricken by what he thought of as an oversight that, on leaving, he seriously wondered if he ought to see the police. It wasn’t that he visualized the children with their throats cut; he imagined them, rather, as having slipped into a coma, weak from lack of nourishment and incessant yet unnoticed crying.

He was tired; he knew that he was tired.

Notwithstanding the usually sympathetic presence of his mother, he didn’t for the moment wish to go home. Instead of the police station he pulled up outside a pub and as soon as he had walked into its noisy, welcoming and warmly lit interior he was sure he had done the right thing. Better tonight a double Scotch in company, soothed by the hum of Friday night vitality, than an even larger one in the seclusion of his study.

He revived. Things returned into perspective.

Then he realized that, oddly, neither Alison nor Robert had once mentioned the angel. Nor Jack. Nor Dulcie.

But, come to that, neither had he. So why should it seem odd?

“Good evening, vicar!”

No collar; no clerical black; and this was a pub he’d never been into. He looked in perplexity at the thinly fair-haired man standing with a pint of lager in his hand.

“Benson,” the man said. “High Ridge. Religious Education.”

“Oh, yes! Forgive me.”

They shook hands. Simon, who’d spoken at Morning Assembly on two occasions and had, on the strength of this, played in the staff-versus-school football match last April, would still have supposed he was looking at a stranger.

What made it worse, the fellow then inquired, smilingly, “And how are you getting on with that book?” Evidently they’d shared a conversation. Simon seldom had time to read and couldn’t think what book was being referred to.

“No,” said Benson, “nothing that you’d been reading. The book you were thinking of writing.”

And then he remembered. He had passed on a remark made by Paula, who, at round about Easter, had been looking for a Life of Jesus to enthral her dozen or so charges on a Sunday. “Simon, everything I come across is either utterly turgid or hopelessly sentimental; there seems to be nothing in between. And yet our Saviour’s life should be the most dramatic and exciting on record, wouldn’t you agree?” Yes, he had certainly agreed, although he hadn’t passed on the remainder of her comment. “Simon,
you
could do it!
You’d
have the proper magic touch! I know you would! And only think of all those little ones you would be leading closer to the Lord!”

Oddly, Benson had made the same suggestion. “If there’s a gap in the market, why don’t you try to fill it?”

“Well…who knows?” He’d been intrigued by the idea but had rapidly pushed it aside (along with, apparently, the whole encounter). Now he felt embarrassed and experienced no wish to reopen the topic. Such a project might have proved satisfying but it would surely have entailed too great a sacrifice. He couldn’t consider it.

“I wonder,” he said now, to minimize the danger of his companion pursuing it afresh, “do you happen to know either of the Heath boys?”

He asked this both for the sake of something to say and possibly because his failure to remember
any
of their faces had somehow linked the three of them as positively as their shared scholastic background. He habitually tried to remind himself that everyone he came across was special; therefore it was worrying, this new awareness of not recognizing people whom he had most likely seen on at least a couple of occasions. He swirled the whisky at the bottom of his glass and endeavoured to give his companion the whole of his attention.

“Yes, I know them quite well,” Benson replied. “Taught their sister, too.”

“I wasn’t aware they had one.”

“I think she’s now a trainee nurse. Outstandingly…well-favoured girl; high-spirited; you’d never take them for the same family.”

“The boys certainly seem…” Simon hesitated over his choice of an adjective.

“Earnest?”

“No, I wasn’t going to say that. You must be thinking of their mother. Beside her, I can assure you, they seem positively frivolous.”

“Well, in school, let me assure
you
, they are not frivolous. Thank God! For instance, only a few days ago I let their joined classes hold a debate on nuclear disarmament and some of the facts and figures I gave out seriously alarmed them, while most of the other kids just shook them off like water.”

Simon asked tonelessly:

“When was this?”

“When?” Mr Benson looked puzzled. “Well, like I say—”

“I mean, was it before Wednesday? No, don’t worry. Forget it.” Simon left his drink unfinished on the counter.

“As a matter of fact, now you mention it, it
was
last Wednesday.”

“Yes. Well. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, it really makes no odds. Good to have spoken to you.”

Glancing back from the doorway, he saw the man watching his exit, curiously. He knew he’d behaved badly but didn’t much care. Or, rather, he did—yet what was one more care among so many others?

Disgustedly, he found that his predominant feeling was one of self-pity.
Still
. Even more disgustedly, he found the mere fact of having recognized this did nothing to dislodge it.

Why did God play these little games?

Or even…This was hardly a thought new to him of course (and, indeed, hadn’t it fleetingly crossed his mind within the past hour?) but nowadays he found it difficult to give it entry, let alone respect. Couldn’t people simply be fooling themselves when they said that God existed?

It was a terrifying notion. Too terrifying. Apart from all else…the sheer
waste
! Of time, money, effort, passion, dedication. The sheer waste of every life sacrificed; of every life lost through a billion acts of cruelty.

But thankfully it was a notion which for years he had known he would never be able to accept—and he pitied those for whom it had become a truth. In what small things did they find meaning? Comfort?

When he reached home his mother was in the kitchen filling her hot-water bottle. “My poor love, you do look done in! I thought Fridays were supposed to be your day off?”

He answered apathetically: “We can forget all about that angel business. It was just some sort of…well, freak hallucination.”

“Oh, no! No, it can’t have been! And after all that hard work you put in! Darling, I
am
sorry. What a shame! Still, I don’t suppose they meant it.”

“It seems they’d been very much affected by some debate in school. Nuclear disarmament. But if only they had said so.”

“They probably thought it would lessen the impact.”

“That in itself then was a form of deception.”

She was now hugging the hot-water bottle to her chest. “Tonight, shall
I
build up the fire?”

“Why? What’s so different about tonight?” He didn’t say it with a good grace.

“Well, if you’re quite sure? But please don’t be downhearted. Shall I bring you some cocoa in bed?”

“No, I don’t want cocoa. I’m off into the study.” He kissed her, very perfunctorily, on the cheek.

“Just don’t stay there for hours; you need your sleep. Oh, by the way…How was the Turner girl?”

“None too good. She wants looking after.”

“Oh, my darling, don’t we all?” The cry was humorous, not unfeeling.

The phone rang.

Oh God, he thought, who’s dying now? That’s all I need. For the instant before he lifted the receiver he looked up at the crucifix. Help me, Lord—give me strength. He changed the pronoun, made it plural.

“St Matthew’s Vicarage.”

He listened drearily to the pips; it was either a faulty coin box or some idiot trying to work it. Occasionally the telephone rang as many as six times before there was finally a voice at the other end.

“Oh, Simon. It’s Dawn here. Dawn Heath.”

He had an eerie sense of
déjà vu
. He remembered a film where someone had been relieved to wake from a bad dream, only to find the circumstances of the dream beginning to repeat themselves in real life. In a moment she was going to say she had something wonderful to tell him. Could she pop round?

“I’m sorry if it’s late. But…Well, we thought you ought to know.”

“I’ve got to be at the youth club at six.”

He realized with a shock what he’d just said.

“Know what?” he asked quickly. He saw his mother standing in the doorway.

Dawn obviously hadn’t been listening. “Two things. One of them’s incredible.” Yes. The scenario was clearly by the same scriptwriter. “You see, they suddenly remembered, both of them, wholly out of the blue, a scripture lesson they’d had last Wednesday. One of the teachers was away; their classes had to double up. Well, it doesn’t really alter anything, I told them that but they were worried that it did. ‘It’s still a miracle,’ I said. ‘Mr Madison knows far more than we do and even he thinks it’s a miracle.’ William said, ‘But when we tell him what we’ve remembered he won’t go on thinking it. Nothing will make him believe it any more. And then we’ll just be on our own.’ And after that he started to cry.”

Dawn paused, perhaps for breath. Simon said: “Poor lad. It isn’t anyone’s fault. These things…happen. If he’s with you could I speak to him?”