Dangerous Thoughts Read online

  Am I the only one — the only one ever — whose first feeling — and I mean the very first feeling, the one that comes instantly and uncensored, taking even one’s own self by surprise — was:

  “Oh, God, so my little holiday is over! Now the rows are going to start up again!”

  Believe me, I didn’t want to feel like this. Still less was I going to admit it in front of all those cameras — though, looking back, I think they’d have loved it: something different at last, to set before all those jaded viewers, punch-drunk, by now, with the predictably OK emotions of victims and relatives all over the earth, in every conceivable kind od predicament.

  It’s when you don’t feel the OK feelings that you find yourself hesitating for a second, hoping desperately that no one will have noticed the hesitation. Because, of course, you can’t answer truthfully, it would sound too awful. And the reason it would sound awful is because it is awful. I mean, what a way for a wife to feel! How could I be wanting Edwin’s ordeal to go on for one moment longer than it already had — five days, cooped up, possibly at gun-point, in some awful terrorist hide-out in some awful Middle Eastern slum?

  I didn’t want this. Of course I didn’t. The thing that I wanted was peace and quiet; the kind of domestic peace totally incompatible with Edwin’s restless and irritable presence, but appallingly, horrifyingly compatible with his continued incarceration thousands of miles away without access to a telephone.

  Damn, the soundtrack has recovered! The cameras are at the ready. The two girls, the big breezy one and the small neat one, are poised in readiness to do whatever it is they are supposed to be there for. Everyone is waiting for my lips to open, and sure enough they do.

  “Over the moon,” I said. “Absolutely over the moon!”

  Well, of course I did. You have to lie sometimes. Anyway, what is it actually like over the moon? On the other side of the moon presumably. Bleak, I should think. Bleak and terrifying. So perhaps it wasn’t a lie after all.

  It’s over now, anyway. They are folding up their bits and pieces, tramping back and forth, pushing and pulling and lifting and telling me how marvellous I’ve been. Pity, they say, that my son isn’t back from school yet; they’ll be back to interview him later, if that’s OK? Yes, that’s OK: why not? I can trust Jason to give the sensible OK answers, just as I do. Why, he may even be feeling the OK feelings, for all I know. Has he, on the other hand, been experiencing, secretly and guiltily, exactly the same relief at his father’s extended absence that I have? He hasn’t said anything of the sort, but then neither have I. I wouldn’t be so wicked. Neither of us would.

  After the TV crew had gone, I fell to wondering about all this; reflecting, rather sadly, on how completely in the dark I was about my son’s real feelings. Watching him the previous evening, working so deftly and with such purposeful concentration on a battery-powered Meccano robot, designed partly by himself and partly from a daunting array of diagrams and print-outs, I couldn’t help wondering if he, like myself, was revelling in the blessed absence of a contemptuous paternal voice: “Playing with Meccano! At your age! Really, I’d have thought …”

  Or something like that. Everything Jason did these days was wrong. If he brought friends to the house, it was, “Do we have to have these bloody louts tramping about the place?” If he didn’t, it was, “What’s the matter with the boy, always moping around on his own? When I was his age …” And if (the only other option) Jason went out to his friends’ homes in the evenings, then he was “treating the house as a hotel”.

  The things he didn’t do irritated his father every bit as much as the things he did. Why wasn’t he in the cricket team? Why hadn’t he joined a cycling club? Why hadn’t he got himself a girlfriend yet; was he abnormal or something? Or — a day or so later — Who was that bloody tart I saw him on the bus with yesterday?

  Had it always been like this between the two of them? No, it certainly hadn’t. When Jason had been small, they’d got on very well, with Jason asking questions that Edwin knew the answers to, and wanting to be shown how to do things. It was when Jason became able to do things by himself without advice from his father — when he began to seek answers not from his parents but from books, from friends, from the wide world itself — that’s when the trouble started. It roughly coincided, too, with the time when Edwin gave up his regular job on the Daily Winnower: some sort of row with the editor about the way he had handled some complicated fracas in West Africa — he’d never clearly explained to me exactly what went wrong, but anyway, the outcome was that he’d gone freelance with — to begin with — only very mediocre success. This meant not only anxiety about money — Edwin had always been anxious about money, even when his career was going well — but it meant also that he was now at home for great tracts of the day when formerly he’d have been working. Home for elevenses; home for lunch; home when Jason arrived back from school, boisterous with end-of-afternoon freedom, and often with a gaggle of friends. At which juncture Edwin, having done nothing much all day except yawn and watch television, would suddenly spring purposefully to his typewriter in order (it seemed to me) to be able to complain loudly and bitterly about the impossibility of getting any work done in this madhouse.

  Yes, that’s when it started: it had improved slightly — but only slightly — as Edwin gradually managed to get more work — particularly, of course, if some assignment took him away for a few days.

  So it had been a red-letter day for all of us when he was offered this opportunity of joining a team following up some possible clues about the whereabouts of some hostages who, some weeks previously, had been snatched from their place of work in the vicinity of Beirut, and about whom nothing had been heard since. Edwin had been really excited over it, and so had I — though it had been frustrating that he’d been able to tell me so very little about it.

  “It’s an out-and-out hush-hush thing, you see, Clare,” he’d boasted, his eyes bright and boyish with importance and intrigue, just as they’d been all those years ago, in the early stages of his career, when things were still on the up-and-up for him, or at least hadn’t started on the down-and-down. I remembered how I’d once loved that look, in the days before I’d realised how consistently it was a prelude to some sort of disaster or disappointment; to some sort of unfairness; to some touchy git having taken umbrage at some perfectly innocent remark of his.

  But one never learns; not really. There is something inside one that defies evidence, and which has, I’ll swear, been implanted by evolution for that very purpose; as a vital survival mechanism to keep one going when there is nowhere to go; when all the observable evidence says Stop.

  Something like that. How else can I explain how my heart still leaped (though a trifle wearily) in response to this long-suspect look? This time it’s going to be all right, I found myself thinking, my evidence-defying mechanisms springing into automatic action, so that I found myself responding as if for the first time ever to this doomed euphoria.

  “If I bring it off — and I will bring it off, I know I will — it’ll be the biggest scoop of the season. How long …? As long as it takes, is all I can tell you. I’m sorry, Clare, I’d tell you more if I could, but … well … there’s top-level stuff involved. Just don’t ask me about it.”

  I hadn’t asked him about it, actually; I’m not such a fool, but I knew he liked to feel as if I had, so I didn’t argue. I didn’t argue about anything, in fact, during that final day or two — not even the fact that we should have started for the airport a good hour earlier than we did, to allow for the hold-up of traffic. Edwin loved starting late for things, working himself up, cursing the lumbering lines of vehicles ahead, hurling shafts of vindictive will-power at the traffic lights which only resulted (it seemed to me) in making the green one red. He loved the sense of battling through, of getting there by the skin of his teeth — my teeth on this occasion, since I was the one driving — and then, once at the airport, he would create a tight cocoon of urgency around him, pushing
through queues, grabbing at luggage-trolleys, barking questions at passing airline staff, glaring suspiciously at announcement boards, checking them against his watch, and finally racing and pushing to beat the Last Call to Gate Something-or-other. He loved the feeling of having just made it, of having come off best in a battle with Time itself; of having caught the plane just before it managed to take off without him. A tycoonish, film star kind of a feeling, I suppose.

  Of course, these days, more often than not, the ploy was frustrated by the plane being two or three hours late: and difficult though it may be for any of us to get through these frustrating hours, it is even more difficult to hurry through them, which is what Edwin was always trying to do.

  Can you wonder, then, that I was almost dancing towards the car park after seeing him off? Singing, too, as I wove my way among the snarls of traffic in blessed solitude — singing in my heart, and even aloud occasionally, as the sheer joy of Edwin not being there overcame me. Not there now, and not for days and days to come — a fortnight at least, from the look of things. A whole fortnight of not being nagged and criticised; of being able to do the hoovering without complaints about the bloody noise; of being able to not do the hoovering without remarks about crumbs on the carpet and the place looking like a pigsty!

  And Jason, too, able to come and go at will, to bring friends in or not bring friends in … to invite them to stay for a meal … to stay overnight … to play records up in his room … to laugh loudly at silly jokes on the radio … to come out with off-the-cuff opinions about the Common Market or the ozone layer …

  And me? I was going to have a once-in-a-lifetime holiday from endlessly pouring oil on eternally troubled waters.

  What bliss!

  That was all I thought, in those first euphoric hours: what bliss!

  CHAPTER II

  It was hard to believe, but the whole thing had taken little more than a week, from Edwin’s departure at the airport to the dramatic news bulletins: first of his capture along with his two companions, then of his release.

  It had been a strange week. Where there should have been emotions, there had been phone calls, interviews and news bulletins. Did you know that there are seventy news programmes a day, if you add the radio and all the TV channels together? And on top of this, I seemed to spend a lot of time agreeing bemusedly with well-wishers who kept telling me that it would be all right in the end.

  And how right they were. Well, depending on what you mean by ‘all right’, of course. Anyway, Edwin was now on his way home, safe and sound after his ordeal. He would be here, all being well, some time tomorrow.

  One last evening of peace. I tried not to think of it that way, I really did. But what can you do?

  Anyway, there could be no harm in treating the occasion as a festive one. We lit candles, we brought in cider, we invited in a couple of Jason’s closest friends; and whether what we were celebrating was Dad’s miraculous escape, or our last evening of freedom, who could say? Who need say?

  Anyway, I remember the occasion with peculiar vividness partly because it was such fun, and partly because of the slightly disconcerting phone call that came in the middle of it. It came about nine o’clock, just as the boys were spreading greasy cartons from the Indian takeaway all over the kitchen table, their recently broken voices ricocheting from wall to wall, and setting the very crockery on the dresser ringing. The mounting din was music in my ears; the sheer joy of not having to shut them up was coursing through my veins like wine.

  “What?” I shouted into the receiver, “Excuse me, hang on a moment, I must go to the other phone …”

  And so it was in the relative quiet of the sitting-room that I took the call, well out of hearing of Jason and his friends. Naturally, during the last few hours since the good news broke, we had been getting numerous congratulatory calls, and, picking up the phone, I was assuming that this was another one: but it wasn’t. At first, I didn’t recognise the voice, and it was several moments before I realised that the person I was talking to was Hank Armour, assistant editor of International Focus, the paper destined to be the recipient of Edwin’s ‘biggest scoop of the season’.

  He sounded bothered rather than congratulatory. Had Edwin arrived home yet? Had he phoned me from anywhere? Had I had any further news? No, and no, and no, I had to say. The only news I’d had was the same as he’d presumably had, from radio and television. Still, such as it was, I summarised it as best I could: how Edwin and the two other journalists with him on the trip had been ambushed on a rough desert road and had been taken into captivity by an as yet unnamed group of terrorists, no ransom had been demanded, and the motive for the kidnapping was as yet unclear. Police were examining the abandoned jeep for clues …

  I could hear the man’s boredom and impatience right down the length of the wire. Well, naturally, These bare facts were just as well known to him as to me, and indeed to half the world by now; so I changed tack, and began to ask him a few questions. Did he know where Edwin was right now? Had he had any sort of report from him yet?

  “Yes … That’s the trouble, really, Mrs Wakefield. We have had a report … he was phoning it from Stuttgart, so he said …”

  “Why ‘so he said’?” I demanded; but the answer was evasive; and something in the man’s tone warned me not to press the matter. You see, I am always very careful not ever to say anything that might queer Edwin’s pitch — Edwin’s pitches so often proving so sadly queerable — and thus, after a few meaningless pleasantries, the conversation was allowed to grind to a halt.

  Looking back, I realise that this abortive and unsatisfactory exchange should have left me feeling more uneasy than it did. But at the time my mind was elsewhere. How far away is Stuttgart, I was asking myself? Jolly close, I expect, by air. Everywhere is jolly close nowadays. Soon, no one will be able to get away from anyone else at all, ever. Thank God Hotol is still only on the drawing-board, otherwise Edwin might be here within twenty minutes, with the boys still creating this hell of a racket and the smell of the Indian takeaway permeating the entire house. Edwin can’t bear takeaways, and he hates them even more when he’s not eating them himself than when he is.

  “Yes, well, I’ll let you know if I hear anything,” I said, scribbling down the number that was being dictated to me. “Yes, I’ll tell him as soon as he arrives … Yes, of course … Yes, I’m sure he will … Yes, thank you so much … Goodbye …”

  Jason received the news appropriately though slightly offhandedly. “Great.” I think was what he said, and his friends echoed the sentiment with hurried politeness — they were all longing to get back to the much more enthralling topic which had been raising such gales of laughter when I came into the kitchen. Anyway, we poured another round of cider, all the mugs were filled to the brim, and soon the decibels were satisfactorily rising again, making a good recovery from my interruption.

  There were several more phone calls, of course, as the evening went on, all of them congratulatory.

  “Yes, isn’t it thrilling!” I kept saying, and “Yes, I’m sure he’d love you to ring.”

  He would, too. Normally, Edwin hates the telephone; he can’t see why people should imagine they have the right to interrupt his work — or his cup of tea or his newspaper or whatever — just whenever they choose; but he won’t mind being rung up to be told how marvellous he is, of that I feel sure.

  It was past midnight when the last call came. Jason and his two friends had gone to bed — they were both staying the night, their last chance to do so for goodness knows how long — and I was wandering around downstairs, vaguely tidying up and putting things to rights. Really I prefer to leave this sort of chore for the morning, but that ‘just in case’ feeling was upon me, and I knew I wouldn’t sleep until the worst of it was coped with.

  “Hullo?” I said, a little perfunctorily, I fear; I’d already said it so many times, you see, the ‘Yes, isn’t it thrilling!’ bit. “Hullo, Clare Wakefield speaking …”

  The voice was str
ange to me: young, eager, and with a quality of lightness which was instantly endearing.

  “Oh, Mrs Wakefield — or may I call you Clare? I feel we know each other so well already, though of course we don’t, if you see what I mean.”

  I didn’t see, but it seemed best not to interrupt. You know how it is with people who ring up and don’t give their names: if you interrupt to ask who they are, they may be mortally offended, having assumed that they were among your nearest and dearest and you would recognise their voices anywhere. However, if you lie low and let them run on, light usually dawns: sooner or later they will mention Uncle Robert, or the mix-up at the tennis-club lunch, and you will know where you are.

  “Thank goodness I’ve got you at last!” the voice continued. “Your line’s been engaged the entire evening … I was getting quite frantic! That is to say, my mother-in-law was … still is, actually, she’s making wild signs to me (It’s all right, Mother! I’ve got her! Yes — I told you — it’s her!) Listen, Clare, I’m sorry to be ringing so late, but like I told you … Besides, I guess you’re too excited to go to bed anyway, I know I would be. It’s marvellous news, isn’t it, about your husband? Just super! I’m really thrilled for you. Though actually I’ve said all along … (Yes, Mother, of course I will! I’m going to! That’s what I’m ringing her for!) Sorry, Clare, but Mother’s having kittens; she’s just hopping with impatience, and so am I of course, though I’ve said all along they were going to be all right, Haven’t I, Mother? I’ve felt it in my bones, right from the very beginning.”

  “Look,” I interrupted (I felt I had been waiting for that identifying clue quite long enough), “Look, I’m terribly sorry, but I’m still not quite sure who …”

  “Who? Why, your husband, of course! Your husband Edwin, that’s who I’m talking about. Well, obviously! Or …” and here for the first time a flicker of uncertainty could be heard in the exuberant voice “Or — I say — you are the Clare Wakefield, aren’t you? Gosh, I …”