Dangerous Thoughts (14 page)

I had assumed (a recognised sympton of anxiety, this) that they’d been talking about me, but of course they hadn’t. After the brief flurry attendant on my arrival, I found myself with a cup of good hot coffee in my hand, the welcome warmth from the flames playing on my legs and listening to the plump lady (a Mrs Fairbrother, I learned, from the other side of the village) holding forth on the subject of werewolves. Apparently a film crew had recently been on location in the marshes alongside the estuary, setting up backgrounds for a new horror film on the subject, and they’d got it all wrong.

“For a start, a marsh is entirely the wrong setting,” Rhoda Fairbrother was declaring. “The werewolf legend belongs to forests, but some people seem to have got the idea that ‘Were’ is an old word for ‘Marsh’ — mixing it up with ‘Mere’ perhaps? But of course it isn’t, it’s just the word for ‘Man’ in Old Dutch — ‘Man-Wolf’ …

“My goodness, you
have
been doing your homework!” interposed Jessica, with just that touch of jocular reprimand with which a hostess tries to indicate to Guest A that his pet subject is about to become boring to Guests B, C, and D. “Have another biscuit?”

“Oh — I mean, thank you, no, I still have one,” Rhoda Fairbrother hastily quelled the interruption, waving her custard-cream in the air impatiently: then continued:

“So absolutely wrong they’ve got it — really, you’d think
they’d got it mixed up with the Hound of the Baskervilles! You know, this monstrous dog looming up through the mist and baying across the marshes. But the whole point of a werewolf is that by day he isn’t a monster at all. By day, he is a man, a perfectly ordinary man, unless you happen to know the signs. Eyebrows meeting in the middle is one of the wolf-marks. Another is secret indulgence in cannibalism. The eating of children, you know, was rife right across Europe during the famines of the seventh and eighth centuries …”

Throughout this dissertation, I had been watching Edwin’s face. Far from being bored, he had the air of a student picking up last-minute tips for a forthcoming examination. I think Jessica must have noticed the intensity of his interest, for she quickly gave up her hostessy little interventions, and allowed her knowledgeable guest a free rein. As a keen local historian, Rhoda was understandably enjoying her role as expert putting in its place a brash American film crew bent on piling up box office horrors rather than on getting anything right.

“Though of course,” she conceded, “a certain amount of confusion is understandable, because over the centuries there have been many werewolf legends. The most widespread is that the man actually and physically turns into a wolf at night, so that if the wolf should be wounded, then the man next morning will display the corresponding injuries. Another belief is that he simply projects his soul into a real wolf, and from inside its brain directs it to do terrible things. According to some historians, the whole thing may have been drug-induced, a sort of mass-hallucination on the part of both the populace and the alleged werewolf — he fantasizing that he really is a wolf, and going lolloping around on all fours, biting and foaming at the mouth; and the populace hallucinating a real wolf as he charges among them inflicting terrible injuries …”

“Hallucinating?” Edwin pounced on the word like a cat on a half-fledged bird. “Drug-induced, didn’t you say?
What
drug?”

Rhoda beamed with pleasure, and smoothed back her grey-blonde
curls. It wasn’t often, I felt sure, that she encountered such an assiduous imbiber of her historical expertise.

“Now, that’s a
very
interesting question. There are any number of theories, but the one that I personally find the most convincing is that it was ergot. As you may know (clearly she imagined, poor soul, that she had found a fellow-enthusiast for medieval history) the harvests in Europe during the eleventh and twelfth centuries were catastrophic. It was the time of the little ice-age, and a series of wet, cold summers meant that most crops were affected by blight, producing the poison ergot. Contemporary evidence suggests that many people knew that their grain was poisonous — but what could they do? They were starving. Of course, they ate it, and they suffered accordingly. Hallucinations were a major sympton, but not the only one by any means …”

“What were the others?” Edwin was leaning forward, alert and attentive, for all the world as if he were collecting data for some article. Only the notebook was missing, and the tape recorder, and the prospect of a fee.

“The others?” Rhoda was racking her well-stocked brain. “Well, fever of course. Headache. Mania sometimes. Mental confusion …”

“Amnesia?” here chipped in Edwin. “Could it cause amnesia?”

“Why — yes, I should think so. Anything like that. The whole brain would be to some extent deranged, you see; all the chemical messages haywire. I can’t tell you the details, I’m not a pharmacist, you know. Just a
very
amateur historian.”

“A very expert one,
I’d
say,” remarked Edwin with warm approval; though what, exactly, he was approving of was anyone’s guess. “I think it’s all just fascinating.”

There followed a tiny pause. Then: “This ergot stuff — what
is
it? I mean, is it
for
anything? As a chemical? Nowadays, I mean? Like, could you buy it at a chemist’s?”

Sadly, Rhoda had to shake her head. Here was something she didn’t know. Tragic.

But happily Jessica was able to fill the intellectual gap that threatened to yawn.

“Ergot? Oh, I can tell you all about ergot. It came into
Maternity
Ward
Three
on ITV. Did you see it? It’s what they give to mothers after childbirth, to contract the womb, or something. Isn’t that right?” She turned to me as to an authority, I being, apparently, the only person present who had had even one baby. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man, etc …

But, alas, I hadn’t had ergot when Jason was born. Or if I had, they didn’t tell me. I hadn’t had hallucinations, either. Altogether, I was a rather useless participant in the conversation.

“I think maybe it was before my time?” I ventured, casting my mind back to that bustling maternity ward; mothers in, mothers out, babies weighing more, less, or just the same as the next baby; never a dull minute. I remembered, too, Edwin striding towards my bed, grinning hugely, and bearing an absurdly gigantic bunch of gladioli, enough to upset both day and night staff at one go. How he had enjoyed the effortless glory of being a brand-new father! If only it could have remained both effortless and brand-new for ever!

By now, the conversation had moved on — or, perhaps one should say, back, for they were talking once again about amnesia. I had noticed how Edwin’s face had fallen when he learned that ergot was a specific for childbirth, which put it hopelessly beyond the range of whatever it was he was plotting; but now, having manoeuvred the conversation back onto his chosen topic, he was holding forth in great style:

“By far the commonest cause of amnesia,” he was explaining “is concussion. Upon recovering consciousness after a severe blow on the head, the patient often remembers nothing at all of the hours leading up to the injury. That is why it is notoriously difficult, in cases where assault is involved, or dangerous driving, to know how much credence to give to the patient’s account of events …

‘Notoriously difficult.’ ‘How much credence to give.’ Edwin had been reading it up in some book, obviously. These weren’t
his
phrases. I waited for the medical dissertation to continue, but at this point Jessica broke in:

“Yes, I’ve been worrying about that quite a bit. About Leo, I mean, when he gets back. I did ask Dr Davies about it, but he says not to worry, they wouldn’t be letting him out of hospital if he’d still been having problems with the concussion. He’s had a report from them already, and it seems that apart from his collar-bone, and his leg still in plaster, he’s OK. In every other way he’s in normal health —”

“Normal?
” Again Edwin did his cat-pounce on a significant word. “In his general health — maybe. But his memory — that can’t possibly be back to normal as soon as this. I don’t want to frighten you, Jessica, and I’m sure he’ll be just fine in every other way: it’s just that those few hours of his life, just before the injury, will be blacked out completely. Or else distorted out of all recognition. It’s always like that, and the important thing is not to let him worry about it. Just don’t bring the subject up, that’s the best thing.”

Here he looked from one to another of us, and spoke with yet greater emphasis: “We must all be careful, when he gets home, not to ask him one single thing about the hours leading up to the attack. And if he himself starts talking about what he thinks he remembers, we must firmly discourage him. All of us. Is that understood?”

“Look, Edwin —” I began, but he flapped his hand to silence me.

“No, Clare, don’t interrupt. What I’m saying is important. I’ve known no end of chaps in Leonard’s situation, recovering from concussion, and if they’re cross-questioned about what they remember, they can simply go round the bend, and start to hallucinate. They fancy they remember all sorts of things that didn’t happen, and forget all sorts of things that did. They know that
something’s
wrong, but they don’t know what. It can be very
frightening for them, to be forced to confront their own delusions. I’ve seen it happen. I do know what I’m talking about.”

He did, too. He’d been reading it up in a big way, and not just in our
Home
Doctor’s
ABC.
He must have been scouring the libraries as well, and had picked out just those case histories which corresponded most closely to his requirements.

It’s not difficult. Shut your eyes and think of something awful, and if you search through enough weighty medical tomes, you’ll find an example of it.

You may ask — and indeed I have asked myself the same question many times — why I didn’t challenge him the moment we found ourselves alone, and stop once and for all this dangerous lying? It would have been easy. All these chaps he had known recovering from concussion. Which chaps? When? On what occasion? I could have cornered him with the greatest of ease, and he must have known I could.

He trusted me not to, I’m not quite sure why. But in fact his trust — if that’s what it was — was well-founded. I wasn’t going to show him up because I didn’t dare. This edifice of falsehood he was setting up as a bulwark against exposure and disgrace, it was a terrifyingly precarious structure, and growing more top-heavy day by day. If it collapsed, then what? To what desperate measures might he then resort?

For, in a way, the lies he had chosen to tell this morning had left me feeling slightly reassured. He was not, after all, planning to murder Leonard, but simply to rubbish his story in advance by all this talk of amnesia. It might work, it might not. Surely it would be wise to wait and see what actually happened before showing him up?

For one thing was certain: Edwin was a frightened man. By making a frightened man more frightened, you don’t make him less dangerous: quite the reverse.

“I’ve put you in our room,” Jessica was saying, showing me into a large, low-ceilinged room dominated by a huge four-poster bed, complete with cretonne curtains looped back against the ornately carved posts. Matching cretonne draped the lattice window through which the pale afternoon sunshine gleamed and leaped off polished oak; a dressing-table, a rocking chair, and a Victorian tallboy reaching almost to the beamed ceiling.

“You see, Leo’s leg is going to be in plaster for some time yet, and so it’ll be much easier for him to be downstairs. We’ve fixed up a spare bed in his study — Edwin helped Phoebe bring it downstairs, and the mattress too. Oh, Clare, he’s been
such
a help, I can’t tell you! I’m so glad I thought of writing to you — I almost didn’t, you know, it seemed such cheek, but I was at my wits’ end, and Edwin has been
so
reassuring. He says he’d never have forgiven me if I hadn’t turned to him for help in this crisis, Leo being such a close friend, and a colleague and everything. And Leo will be thrilled to find him here, I know he will; they’ll have so much to talk about after all they’ve been through together. And do you know, Clare, Edwin has even offered to type up Leo’s reports for him, and cope with all the correspondence — Leo won’t be able to type just yet, with his collar-bone and everything. He’s our angel of mercy, your Edwin, he really is! And on top of all this, he’s going to drive me to the airport when the time comes. I expect he told you, didn’t he? Of course, the
car is in the garage at the moment, having the new wheel fixed, but it’ll be ready in plenty of time, he says …”

“Whose car?” The Coburns’ car? Or ours?

“Oh, yours, of course,” said Jessica lightly. “Well naturally Edwin would be happier driving his own car, wouldn’t he? Besides, I don’t suppose he
could
drive ours anyway, all the fuss with third-party insurance and things. Anyway, it’s going to be OK, they’ve promised it will be ready first thing in the morning, and Leo won’t be arriving before Thursday or Friday at the earliest.”

In a garage. A new wheel being fixed. The wheels had looked all right to me, and it certainly hadn’t been in a garage.

Oh, well. What this latest bout of fibbing was in aid of I couldn’t guess, but did I have to? The essential thing was for me to keep an eye on Edwin’s every movement after Leo’s arrival, starting by going with him and Jessica to the airport. On this I would have to insist. The possessive-wife image wasn’t one which I relished: it would look as if I couldn’t trust my husband alone in a car with the elegant Jessica and her shining pony-tail, whereas the truth was that I couldn’t trust him anywhere, doing anything. But it couldn’t be helped. In a crisis, one’s self-image is often the first thing that has to go.

Jessica’s relief at having us here was gratifyingly evident, though my role was not quite as clear as Edwin’s. So far, all I had done was to wash up after lunch — not a very onerous task, the meal having consisted of corned beef, tomatoes, and sticks of celery. For the plainness of this meal Jessica had apologised fulsomely, despite our (mine, anyway) assurances that this was exactly the sort of lunch we had at home.

“It’s all so difficult,” she said, “my woman going sick at a time like this, it’s most upsetting. Phoebe isn’t the same at all. She’s a nice enough girl and she means well, I daresay, but she’s supposed to be still at school really; she won’t be sixteen till the end of the month, and I have to show her
everything
!
She doesn’t even know that the small knife has to go
outside
the large knife
when she’s laying the table! I ask you! And she can’t stay after four, because that’s when her mother expects her home — her mother thinks she’s been to school you see — and so I’m left with the whole evening on my hands. The evening meal. Feeding the geese.
Everything
!

“Look, Clare, I’ve cleared a drawer for you — here —” She pulled open the middle drawer of a bow-fronted chest of drawers. “I hope that’ll be enough … I hope I’ve thought of everything …” Her eyes roved anxiously round the room, while I assured her as emphatically as I could that everything was absolutely fine, what a lovely room it was; I just love those old beams — and a real old-fashioned patchwork bedspread, too! — and what a gorgeous view!

As indeed it was. Moving beside me to the lattice window, Jessica raised the latch and pushed it open on to the wide, bare landscape of dunes and sea and sky, The salty air, already laced with the chill of evening, swept past us into the room, and I drew deep breaths of a larger, clearer world, away and beyond the turmoil of my present life. Whatever happened, whatever Edwin was plotting, was tiny compared with the vastness of this sky.

“It’s the draughts that are the problem,” Jessica was gently complaining. “It’s not so bad at the moment, because the wind’s more from the south east, but when it’s in this direction, straight off the sea … Oh dear! Of course, if we had proper, modern windows fitted, then it would … but Leo won’t hear of it. He was born here, you know, and that always makes a person sentimental about discomforts, haven’t you noticed? And of course he’s not here half the time — off on assignments, or spending nights in our
pied-à-terre
in Ealing. That’s one good thing, you know, that might come out of this accident of his. He’s going to be stuck here for weeks by the look of things, until the plaster’s off, anyway, and with winter coming on, he’ll really find out for himself … Perhaps after this he won’t be so keen on preserving all the draughts as family heirlooms. What do you think?”

As a marital problem, this one concerning family heirlooms was so different from any of mine and Edwin’s that I was at a loss for any very helpful response. So I made a few sympathetic noises, and then sought to change the subject.

“That wreck,” I said, pointing. “What happened? Is it quite recent?”

“Recent? Oh no. Before my time, anyway. Well before. Every now and then there’s a fuss about it, letters in the local paper, that sort of thing. They want it salvaged, you see, or somehow cleared away, it’s a maritime hazard, but all the authorities say it’s some other authority that ought to pay for it, and so it looks like staying there for ever. Actually, it’s becoming a tourist attraction of sorts, an enterprising chap in the village runs boat trips out to it in the season. The visitors love it, they tear off bits of rotten wood to take home and put on their sideboards. ‘From a real wreck.’ You know.
Trippers.
They love that sort of thing.”

“It hardly looks far enough out for a boat trip,” I remarked. “From here, it looks as if you could just about paddle out to it.”

Jessica laughed (the first time, incidentally, I had heard her laugh). “Oh
no
!
It’s deceptive, you know, the distance. It’s the best part of half a mile, I believe, at high tide. Not that I’ve ever been out there, but my woman knows all about it — of course it’s her cousin that runs the trips. It’s a bit of lark, she says …”

“I hope she’s getting better,” I interposed, feeling that I should have asked after the lady earlier, but somehow there hadn’t been an opportunity. “I hope it isn’t anything serious?”

“Serious? Oh
no.
Just her back. She’s got to take things easy, the doctor says, which is all very well, but what about
me
?
I
can’t take things easy! One thing on top of another, and Leo coming home any day now …
My
back will be playing up if I’m not careful, and
then
how will we manage …?”

Thus it came about that by the end of the afternoon I had acquired myself a substantial role in the Coburn ménage. I undertook, for a start, to produce an evening meal for the three of us — no, four, Jessica hastily corrected me, because Rhoda
Fairbrother would be dropping in again about the Pageant. That’s what she’d come about this morning, actually, but had been side-tracked by finding Edwin here, and him so interested in medieval history. The pageant wasn’t till June, actually, but Rhoda was like that, and meantime could I — could I possibly? — see to the geese? She, Jessica, was feeling the beginnings of a tickle in her throat, and it would be just too awful if she was laid up with one of her chests just when Leo was arriving …

Geese. Well, there has to be a first time. Under my hostess’ instructions, I mixed up a porridgy concoction of coarse meal and kitchen scraps, and carried it out through the old stable-yard beyond the disused wash-house.

The wind hit me as I opened the door and I could scarcely close it behind me against the force of the rising gale.

“They’ll be in the top meadow,” Jessica had said, with an explanatory wave of the hand in the required direction, and so thither I made my way, almost losing my breath as I battled against the wind.

The meadow was large and neglected, overgrown with tall thistles, but as to locating the geese, there was no problem: they were already gathered in a tight phalanx athwart the gate, and at the sight of me and my bucket they set up that hysterical whispering which is the goose equivalent of a rousing cheer.

I had been instructed not to feed them until they were inside the untidy structure of chicken-wire and corrugated iron which protected them at night from foxes, rats, and the sheer force of rain and wind; and so with some trepidation I pushed and waded my way through the hissing, frantic concourse, surprised — townswoman as I am — at the gentleness of the soft little pecks which came my way as the snake-like heads tried to thrust themselves into my bucket.

I won through in the end; when it came to the crunch, I was bigger than they were — and within a very few minutes my charges were safely inside, guzzling, gulping and gasping in rapture, while with chilled fingers I was fastening the complicated
contraption of wire, staples and metal hooks which secured the door.

The journey back across the field was a whole lot easier; no geese going spare around my ankles, and the wind behind me. Jauntily, I swung my empty bucket, the wind catching it like a sail on every up-swing; and it wasn’t until I reached the gate that I realised I was being watched.

“Where have you been? What the hell are you doing?”

Edwin’s voice was sharp with outrage — or was it fear? — and I was startled, naturally. But the hugeness of the wind, the sky, the vast spaces, was still with me, and I simply laughed. Yes, I laughed; he looked so furtive, so guilty, and — yes — so trivial, somehow. What did I care? He was up to something, obviously, but it couldn’t be anything very dire, because Leonard wasn’t even in England yet … And just look at that sky, the huge, galloping clouds …!

And so I laughed. His face, already pinched with cold (had he been lurking here for some time?) darkened.

“I don’t see what’s so funny. Where have you been? What have you got in there?”

I swung the empty bucket almost into his face, and laughed again.

“Nothing! Look for yourself! I’ve been feeding the geese, if you want to know. Jessica asked me to. I don’t know why she didn’t ask you, if it comes to that. It’s a man’s job, this sort of thing.”

Not true, of course. It’s
goose-girls
that crop up in the fairy stories, not goose-boys. And what about the goose that laid the golden egg? Wasn’t it the old woman who killed it, which of course is the final stage of looking after a goose. However, the remark sufficed to annoy Edwin. Why I wanted to do this I cannot say; I think it was something to do with the wind whistling into my buzzing, aching ears.

We made our way back to the house in silence, each of us, I suppose, filled to overflowing with thoughts that must be kept hidden from the other.