Dangerous Thoughts (2 page)

I first met Celia Fremlin at the end of 1969. I was newly arrived in London, a recent graduate from Swansea University, working for a publisher and aspiring to be a writer. Celia was a leading light in the North West London Writers’ Group and the first meeting I attended was in her house in South Hill Park, Hampstead. (Already I had reason to be grateful to her, because she had judged a Mensa short-story competition and awarded me second prize.)

My first experience of Celia’s writing was, I think, her reading of the first chapter of
Appointment with Yesterday
, sometime during 1970. I was transfixed: certainly it was the most vivid thing I ever heard in my attendance at the group. Celia was writing about people who seemed completely real, whose experiences could happen to anyone. The shock of recognition was extreme. Here were women in their own homes, with noise and kindness and fear and desperation all astonishingly true to life. And there was wit – we always laughed when Celia read to us.

Four decades would pass before I could understand something of what was really happening in Celia’s life at the time we met. It was an unpublished memoir by her daughter Geraldine that finally enlightened me. But at those meetings there was never any mention – at least in my hearing – of Celia’s daughter Sylvia or her husband Elia, both of whom had died by their own hand the previous year. It was as if these were, understandably, taboo subjects. Celia’s son, Nick, lived in the same house, with his wife Fran and little son. Their second baby, Lancelot, was born during those years when we often met at South Hill Park. (In due course Nick would publish a novel of his own,
Tomorrow’s Silence,
in 1979.)

I have always resisted attempts to connect a writer’s life directly with his or her work: to do so can often diminish the power and value of the imagination. But in Celia’s case, I have always believed that her novel
With No Crying
would never have been written if Sylvia hadn’t died. The novel is, essentially, about the deprivation and grief that the wider family experiences when a child is lost. It is very well plotted – perhaps the best of all her work. The ‘message’ at the end is honest and wise and sad. It was not published until 1980, and – I believe – not written until a year or so before that, which was over ten years after the agonising events of 1968.

Celia’s short stories are perhaps more telling in some ways. They are certainly unforgettably good. Those in her first collection,
Don’t Go To Sleep in the Dark
, are the ones I especially remember. Many of her stories involve sunlit beaches, couples on holiday, people out in the open air. This contrasts with her novels, which are usually set indoors, often in the winter or at night. Darkness and light is a strong theme in all her work.

I was lavishly praised and encouraged by Celia in my early writing endeavours and I’m in no doubt that she was a real influence on me, if mostly subliminally. She was also very affectionate with my two baby boys, when they arrived in the mid-1970s. When we moved out of London, she came to visit us several times with her second husband, Leslie. She read my first published novel and wrote an endorsement for it. I last saw her in 1999, shortly before Leslie died.

I am highly delighted that Celia’s books are being reissued. Her ability to capture the combination of ordinariness and individuality in her characters and their relationships, which readers find so compelling, is something I have tried to emulate. I have no doubt
that these books will find a large audience of new readers, who will wonder why they hadn’t heard of her before.

Rebecca Tope

Rebecca Tope is a crime novelist and journalist whose novels are published in the UK by Allison & Busby. Her official website is www.rebeccatope.com.

“How did you feel,” they ask me, “when you first heard that your husband had escaped the terrorists and was on his way home?”

Well, what do they expect us to say? For of course it’s not only me: I’m just one more in a long series of wives, mothers, sisters, girlfriends. How many times in recent years have you found yourself staring into the bemused close-up of some woman or other while she attempts to answer this sort of question? How did you feel when you heard he was one of the survivors …? When you heard that he’d been brought out alive …? That sort of thing. What
can
the poor woman say, you ask yourself: and sometimes — perhaps a little cattily — you add inside your head: and how come she’s managed to get her hair so perfectly set at such a traumatic juncture in her life?

But of course, as a mere viewer, sitting comfortably in front of your set, there’s a lot you don’t see, and don’t know about. The way the camera crew have moved all the furniture around, for example, you’d never have guessed they’d done that, rearranging it all, even the piano, in order — I suppose — to make your very ordinary little front room look more like the kind of room a newsworthy lady like yourself might be expected to inhabit. Or is it, perhaps, not that at all, but merely to make room for the five cameras with their five sets of wires and tripods? Why
five
, one wonders, just for photographing one unremarkable face — but of course one doesn’t ask.
You
are not the one to ask the questions on an occasion like this:
your
job is to answer
them. So anyway, five cameras, and a corresponding number of photographers and technicians, large, loose-limbed and space-consuming, all crowding in with their bags and their boxes of equipment and wires all over the carpet. There’s the sound man too, and the earnest little girl with the notebook; and the bigger girl too — much bigger, actually, quite a hockey-playing type who now and then claps two boards together and says “Oick!” or some such syllable. And then, of course, standing out among all the rest, there is the stunningly handsome young man (well, he’s forty, probably, but you know what I mean) in jeans and sweater who seems to be running the show and whose job it is, when the time comes, to ask the silly questions.

Ah yes, the questions: I still don’t seem to have answered them, not even the first one; but luckily the sound man seems to have hit some kind of a problem; he’s getting the little girl with the notebook to start bleating something into an amplifier for him; so that gives me a few more moments in which to think. What
did
I feel when I first heard etc. etc.?

“Over the moon!” is, I know, the standard response — and of course I should have come out with it at once, soundtrack or no soundtrack. “Over the moon!” or, “It was the most wonderful moment of my life!”

That kind of thing. The way the others all do.

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!