Dangerous Thoughts (15 page)

Risotto, I decided, was the best solution. One thing Jessica
had
got plenty of was long grain, unpolished rice, though of most other foodstuffs she was running lamentably short. It was impossible to get to the shops, she’d explained, without a car, and since she couldn’t drive because of her tranquilisers, and Edwin couldn’t because of his car being at this garage, there was nothing, literally nothing, to eat. She had spread her hands despairingly: what should she do? So I had taken up the challenge — well, I could hardly do less, and so now here I was, rooting round her kitchen and into the deepest recesses of her refrigerator. No deep freeze, I noted — was this also due to Leo’s having been born here?

Remains of the corned beef. Half a dozen slightly dried-up olives. A heel of cheddar cheese. Oh, but I mustn’t use that on account of her anti-depressants. A large Spanish onion, though, and several smaller ones, already sprouting. Tomatoes, too, set to ripen on a window-ledge, some already yellowish, and just about usable if fried. Dandelion leaves for the picking, while the light lasted. Oh, and eggs. Goose eggs, naturally, but also half a dozen hens’ eggs in a carton. Which, I asked, would she like me to use?

“
Oh
.” She paused, indecision creasing her white brow. “That’s a problem, Clare. You see, the goose eggs want eating, no doubt about that, but there’s been all this about salmonella:
goose eggs and duck eggs are supposed to be the worst. They were on about it again last night, in
Panorama
;
did you watch it?”

I didn’t as it happened, and as she could have worked out for herself if she’d thought about it for a moment, because by nine thirty that evening I was already on the train. But it didn’t matter, because Jessica was ready and willing to tell me all about the programme: the symptoms, the special danger for the old, the young, the victims of this or that disability, which included — did it? didn’t it? — one or more of Jessica’s own complaints? Nervous tension? Headaches? Delayed-shock syndrome? What did I think?

I thought (for my own culinary convenience, largely) that these ailments would be of no significance in relation to salmonella poisoning. Jessica seemed to accept this off-the-cuff verdict contentedly enough, warning me, however, that it took fifteen minutes, not seven, to hard-boil a goose egg, and be sure to do them thoroughly because if you don’t they tend to taste of fish.

The eggs — I hadn’t quite realised how huge they were — had had half their allocated time when the telephone rang. Through the open door I had been listening to Jessica and Edwin chatting companionably about the symptoms of salmonella poisioning. The voices suddenly ceased, and a moment later Jessica’s head came round the kitchen door.

“It’s for you, Clare,” she said. “She seems to want to speak to you, not me. Mrs Barlow — you know, Richard’s mother. You can take it in here, if you like, on the extension, so you can watch the eggs at the same time.”

“Clare! Oh, thank goodness I’ve got you. I’ve been ringing and ringing you at home, I had no idea … What are you
doing
up there, if you don’t mind my asking? Has something happened to Leonard? — What
is
going on?”

What indeed? Should I tell her — well, you see, my husband is planning to murder your son as soon as he can think up some way of doing it that actually works. He’s made some half-baked
attempts already; twice trying to cause a motoring accident — then toying with ideas about poisonous fungi; and right now he’s learning all he can about salmonella poisoning. This morning he was into ergot, too, but I guess he’s given that up as a non-starter. Oh, and why he’s here is because he has similar intentions towards Leonard Coburn. The point is, you see, that the story he’s been telling on TV and to the world’s press is all lies from beginning to end; he never went on the trip at all, as your Richard well knows, and Leonard does too. They are the only two people in the world who know for certain that he is lying, and so he’s hell-bent on silencing them before they can get together and show him up. So you see, Daphne …

“So you see, Daphne,” I heard myself saying aloud, “we got this rather desperate letter from Jessica; she’s been ill, and didn’t know how she could cope with Leonard’s return single handed, and so we felt — well, we both felt — that …”

“Yes, yes!” Daphne’s tone, usually so controlled and calm, was tense with impatience and anxiety. “Yes, I gathered she was in some sort of difficulty … She rang us, you see; that is, she rang Richard — unfortunately I was out at the time — and so I’ve only got Sally’s account of what happened …”

She paused here for a fraught second or two, giving me time to translate the remark. ‘I’ve only got Sally’s account,’ meant, of course, ‘I’ve only got a most woolly, garbled and wildly over-optimistic version of what’s going on.’

“Anyway, Clare, the long and the short of it is that Richard has rushed up there, forbidding Sally to accompany him. Apparently they almost had a row about it, and so I know it must be something serious as normally he gives in to Sally about
everything.
There’s only one reason why he would put his foot down about her going with him, and that’s if he knew he was going into danger.
That’s
why I’m worried. Now do you understand?”

All too well. She was dead right, he
was
going into danger. Aloud I said: “Of course I do. I can see how worrying it is for you. What do you …? That is, is there anything
I
can do? Really, I’m
just here to help Jessica through a difficult patch, but if there’s anything …?”

“Just to let me know when Richard arrives. Get him to ring me
at
once.
I’m not asking him to explain anything, I know his work is sometimes highly confidential, and I respect that, I always have; he knows I always have. But just to let me know that he is all right. That he has at least arrived all right. That’s all. I hate to play the possessive mother, I just hate it, it’s not me at all, but when it’s a question of real danger …”

Yes, indeed. In the same way, I was going to hate playing the possessive wife during that drive to the airport. Again, real danger. Fear is the parent of possessiveness. Always has been.

“Of course I’ll get him to ring,” I assured her. “Though he may be staying in a hotel, you know; he wouldn’t necessarily come straight here, even if he
is
planning to meet up with Leonard — which I suppose he must be. Anyway, as soon as I know anything, I’ll ring you. OK?”

But as it happened, it was she who rang me. Only an hour or so later, just as we were finishing the last of the risotto, which had really turned out surprisingly successful.

It was Jessica who picked up the receiver, and she handed it to me almost at once. Daphne’s voice had a stiff, taut quality which was quite frightening. It sounded as if she was talking with teeth clenched, exercising almost superhuman control.

Sally, too, had disappeared now.
With
Barnaby. No, she had left no note. Nothing.

Our room looked larger than ever, and full of shadows, when we came up to bed late that evening. The double bed was a problem; it always is when we are confronted with one away from home after a day of holiday bickering. Still, we have grown used to it over the years, and have tacitly evolved a technique for dealing with it, after a fashion. Politeness. Coolness. Please and Thank you. Do you mind if …?

Rather the same, I suppose, as sharing a cabin with a stranger on a Channel crossing. Restful in a way, compared with actual communication.

But on this occasion, we were barely into the opening moves of this ploy when we were interrupted by an urgent knock on the door, followed by the entrance of Jessica in a lacy coffee-coloured négligé, and with her glossy black hair swinging loose about her shoulders.

“Oh, dear, I’m so sorry,” she apologised, “I thought I’d remembered everything and taken all the things I was going to need, but I find I’m down to my last Temazepam! Just one left, I shan’t get a wink of sleep with only one, and so I’ll have to fall back on my Mogadons …”

She had crossed the room as she spoke, and had pulled open one of the small top drawers of the chest of drawers. From where I stood, I could see that it was filled almost to overflowing with an amazing assortment of bottles, jars and phials; tins of throat lozenges, indigestion pills, vitamin supplements, the lot. Confidently,
she plunged her hand into the recesses of the drawer — she seemed to know, amazingly, exactly where to find the required bottle among all this chaos.

But apparently she was mistaken.

“Oh dear!” She withdrew her hand, looking momentarily bemused. “I could have sworn … I wonder, though …?” Again the hand immersed itself in the medley of medicaments. The containers rattled and clinked against one another.

“Though of course,” she remarked, as she continued her search. “Mogadons aren’t nearly as good as Temazepams, not so strong, I’ll have to take extra. That’s why my doctor prescribes me the Temazepams now; he said that three Mogadons was too many. They build up in your system, he says, and they can affect your eyes if you keep on with them for years, which would be awful, of course. But just now and again it can’t hurt, can it and that’s why I’ve kept them, in case I run out of my proper ones … Oh dear, where
can
they be …?”

At last, she gave up, shutting the drawer with an irritable slam.

“Oh well, I suppose I’ll have to make do with my tranks. It’s not the same … not a bit the same … and just when I
need
a decent night’s sleep! All the things I’m going to have to see to tomorrow … I don’t know how I shall get through the day if I don’t get a decent night’s sleep …”

There was no way I could help — well, no way I
dared
help, anyway, whatever my suspicions. I didn’t look at Edwin, and he didn’t look at me. After she had gone, I summoned all my courage to ask him — still not looking him in the eye — whether he had by any chance come across the pills, somewhere about the room?

“Of course not!” he snapped. “Why should you think such a thing? I’d have told her, wouldn’t I, not left her scrabbling around like that. It was a bloody nuisance, if you ask me. Do you realise it’s after midnight?”

A bloody nuisance indeed. Just when he thought the time had come when he could safely purloin the pills, his hostess had to come barging in like that and start searching for them.

What should I do? Accuse him to his face? The only outcome of this would be yet more furious denials. And of course I had no
proof
that he had taken them. I just knew it, that’s all.

Also, to accuse him point-blank would assuredly put him on his guard, and make my self-appointed task of keeping an eye on him even more difficult.

Keeping an eye on him. An unsleeping eye, ideally, but this was impossible. I’d been up all night last night, I couldn’t possibly stay awake tonight as well.

Besides, Leonard wasn’t here yet. Nothing could happen until he came.

Tonight, I must sleep, and sleep and sleep …

*

I woke barely an hour later with the feeling that I had been roused suddenly by someone talking, right here in the room.

I lay very still. No, it wasn’t Edwin; in his tacitly allotted fifty per cent of the bed he was breathing deeply, evenly, and I could tell that he was sleeping soundly, not pretending. Luckily, he is not very good at pretending, I can tell at once.

The voice — if it had indeed been a voice — had ceased; had I dreamed it, then?

And then, without warning, it all started again, right here, only inches from my ear, and for one terrifying moment I thought I had gone mad, was hallucinating — ergot, or something …

“Who is the person in your life you love most?” a seductive male voice was crooning into my ear. “Your husband, you say? —Wrong! Your child, then? Your mother? Wrong again! Your lover? Wrong, Wrong, Wrong! The person you must love most is
yourself
!
Unless you love yourself, you can love no one …”

It was coming along the pipes in the wall, I realised now, right behind the draped bedhead. Somewhere, an all-night radio programme was on. The assortment of soporifics to which Jessica had treated herself had evidently not been enough, and she was whiling away the sleepless hours with the radio.

It was a relief, of course, to realise that I hadn’t gone mad, but of course that didn’t stop it being annoying. It was a woman this time:

“It may look easy, but once you are up here, with only a thin wire between you and a hundred-foot drop …”

How could it possibly look easy, whatever it was? It crossed my mind to go and remonstrate with our hostess, to point out to her that a programme designed to be soothing to insomniacs wasn’t soothing at all to people whose habit it was to sleep at night.

But I thought better of it. Her nerves were in a bad way already, by all accounts, and if the sleeping pills weren’t working for her, then it would be cruel to deprive her of such solace as this purpose-built programme could provide.

“And do remember that it may not be cancer at all. In fact, it almost certainly isn’t. Of the two thousand or so worried women who turn up at our clinic each week, less than …”

Of course, I reflected, a great wave of irritation meeting head-on with a counter-wave of drowsiness inside my skull, of course, she doesn’t realise: she has no idea that the sound is carrying through the wall like this, she’s not really being inconsiderate.

So what was she really being? Something about plastic bottles now, that you should save them for recycling, or perhaps that you shouldn’t. I was in a kind of a dream by now, all those plastic bottles leaning precariously against each other on that high shelf, someone should do something, they were obviously about to fall. “Casting off!” cried the first one decisively as it clattered onto the floor, click click, clatter clatter, click … “For casting
off
you should use a smaller size needle than the one you used in the pattern; for casting
on,
a larger one. This way, you get a neater, firmer edge …”

Neater. Firmer. She can say that again. Trying to get things neater and firmer is the story of my life. Perhaps of everyone’s. Next thing I knew, someone was reciting ‘Under the faraway, faraway tree’, which soon turned into a talk about Pissarro, or
was it pistachios; whichever it was I couldn’t see what that nice little bit of a Chopin prelude could have to do with it, except that it had been asked for by a Mr William Willis of Dorking …

It must have been nearly three o’clock when the chattering voices at last fell silent. Perhaps Jessica had got fed up with them herself, and had switched them off; or perhaps they had finally come to the end of everything that could possibly be said to soften all those brains rigid with wakefulness and to lead the weary band of the nation’s insomniacs into unconsciousness?

Whatever the reason, it was a huge relief, and with the onset of blessed silence I felt sleep rushing over me in unstoppable waves.

*

An hour? — two hours later? I don’t know. At first, I thought it was the radio voices starting up again, and I cursed as I felt myself being dragged kicking and screaming back into consciousness. This was too much! It was beyond bearing! This time, I really
would
…

And then, suddenly, I was fully awake, every nerve alert, every muscle at the ready. Something was happening. Edwin was no longer here, and the sound that had roused me — yes, here it was again:

“Leo! Leo! Oh no!
No
!”

Jessica’s voice, shrill with terror. “No! No!”

I was out of bed and out on the dark landing barefoot and in my nightdress, groping wildly in the direction from which I had heard the cry coming.

But which door? This door? That door? Oh, for a light! My hand, crab-like, clawed its way this way and that, up and down the uncharted stretches of unfamiliar wall.

“It’s all right, Jessica, I’m coming!” I called into the darkness, though what I meant to convey by ‘all right’ I cannot imagine. It’s all right, it’s only Edwin murdering your husband under your very eyes. It’s all right, your husband has only gone mad as
a result of concussion and is murdering
you.
It’s all right. It’s all right, Clare is coming. Or would be if she could only find the bloody light switch …

My bare toe stubbed against some recalcitrant wooden obstacle — an old oak dower chest I discovered in the morning — and while the pain paused for that eerie second that it takes to travel from the toe to the pain-centres in the brain, a thin streak of light flared across the darkness through the crack in a nearby door, and I plunged headlong towards it, and into the room beyond.

Jessica was sitting up in bed, blinking, breathing in short, panicky gasps and looking incongruously glamorous in the rosy light from her bedside lamp, her swathes of luxuriant black hair falling across her bare shoulders.

No scene of bloodshed. Neither her husband nor mine was standing, knife in hand, poised to strike.

“I’m so sorry, Clare,” she said, her voice now quite normal and composed. “Did I wake you? It happens sometimes. I didn’t mean to, but I had this awful dream and I couldn’t stop myself screaming. It’s these pills, you know” — she reached across her bedside table towards a plastic container and shook it irritably. “If only I had my proper pills, this wouldn’t happen. The doctor did say not to take these any more, but I hadn’t anything else as I’d forgotten to phone up about a repeat prescription. These are the ones that tend to give me nightmares — Oh, Clare, it was so awful! I’m still shaking — look!” She held out her white, slender hand towards me, and I clasped it, trying to convey reassurance, for it was indeed trembling.

“It’s all right,” I said, yet again, and still somewhat at random. “It’s all right now.” And then:

“What was it? You were calling out for Leo — he’s not here, is he? He hasn’t come back?”

“No, no. Of course he hasn’t. He can’t possibly be here until tomorrow or the next day. It was only a dream … but, oh, Clare, it was such an awful dream! I dreamed he was here,
standing beside the bed, smiling down at me. He was wearing his anorak, just like when he went away, and I knew I should be so pleased to see him, but I couldn’t be, because I knew that there was something wrong. ‘Leo,’ I said, ‘What’s happened? What’s the matter?’ He opened his mouth to answer, but what came out of it wasn’t words, but an awful whining, which went on and on. And his smile became full of teeth, great yellow teeth, turning into fangs while I watched, and I knew then that he had turned into a werewolf. Someone had given him ergot, and I hadn’t got the antidote. I needed a prescription … Oh dear, isn’t it mad the way things get mixed up in dreams?” She laughed a little, apologetically. “Anyway, the next thing, I found myself screaming. I’m so sorry, Clare, it must have scared you dreadfully …”

She was calmer now, assuring me that she would be all right. All the same, I stayed with her until she fell asleep, as if she was a child. Then, very quietly, I tiptoed back to bed. Edwin was still not there, and as well as I could for weariness, I tried to worry about it. But what could I do? Where could I look for him? What might he be up to?

It dawned on me then that he must have been wakened, just before I was, by Jessica’s first cry of ‘Leo! Leo!’ He must have imagined that the man really had arrived back in the middle of the night. Right now, he would be lurking somewhere, still in his pyjamas, freezing cold, preparing himself for an encounter that wasn’t going to happen.

It would be funny if it hadn’t been so frightening, but neither fear nor laughter was any match for the total exhaustion that now overcame me, and I sank into a sleep so deep that it was just like being dead. Well, like my idea of being dead, anyway: the same sense of total escape: of having gone beyond the range of absolutely everything, into a place where no one can get at you, nothing be demanded of you, ever again.

*

When at length I woke, it was past nine o’clock. The wind had
dropped, the sun was streaming in dazzlingly through the lattice window, and from downstairs came the reassuring sounds of a household already astir.