Dangerous Thoughts (9 page)

“Just that it’s not there, and he doesn’t know where it’s gone. I started trying to tell him that I’d seen it on my way home from school, parked safe and sound, by the gate here, but … Oh,
you
know, Mum, what Dad’s like when he gets things into his head! Worries them to pieces like a terrier, and then bites your head off if you try to help any … So anyway, I thought I’d retire temporarily from the line of fire, and come to suss it out for him.

“And so here I am. Behold, you’re sussed. And so …” Suddenly his voice changed: “Mum! I say! D’you know what you’ve got there? Look — just by your right foot — don’t move! It may be only a boletus, but it’s a fantastic size. I wonder if … I must show it to Tim, he’ll know …”

Taking a couple of steps forward, he bent down and very gently detached the yellowish, bloated thing from its moorings, and then stood, uncertainly, cupping it in both hands.

“I ought to have brought a tin, or something,” he lamented, moving the thing cautiously from one palm to the other, “It’ll be a tragedy if I let it get broken before Tim sees it.”

Tim Fergusson, bespectacled, ginger-haired and very polite was one of the most assiduous visitors to our household after school, and I had lately become aware of the lad’s craze for mycology, as a result of the hitherto unknown Mrs Fergusson’s
increasingly urgent telephone calls asking me to check whether our
Edible
Fungi
of
the
British
Isles
saw eye to eye with her
Why
Only
Mushrooms?
in respect of the particular specimen that her son was on the point of frying in butter for the family’s evening meal. So far, Jason’s more theoretical interest in the subject hadn’t extended to this sort of thing, and I could only hope that this remarkable specimen, plump as a doughnut and twice the size, wasn’t going to prove an inspiration to culinary experiment. I knew very well what the
Edible
Fungi
book would say — it would declare the ugly thing to be not only edible, but ‘delicately flavoured’ — all that sort of thing, for all the world like an advert for vintage wine.

I observed, uneasily, the loving way he cradled the specimen in both hands, walking gingerly among the slippery ruts of the woodland path so as not to jolt it.

That’s all I needed for my encounter with Edwin tonight — a teenage son frying fungi for our supper. It crossed my mind to ring up Mrs Fergusson and beg her to ring back and say that
her
book said that the boletus was deadly poisonous: but something — a sort of moral weariness rather than a real moral scruple — restrained me. To get involved in
another
web of lying was too much; my whole soul shrank from it in exhaustion.

“Where have you been? Why didn’t you tell me?”

Because you were still asleep when I left. Because I knew it would make you furious, and I didn’t see why we should have two rows where one would do: the one we’ll be having now I’m back will be plenty.

And, above all, because I can’t think what in the world to say to you now that I know for certain that you’ve been lying, that your whole story has been a fabrication from beginning to end. Well, I’d known it for quite a while, actually, but all the while no one else knew, it was a sort of ghost-knowledge; ordinary day-to-day life could just walk through it as if it wasn’t there.

But not any longer. Now that Richard Barlow knew, and I knew that he knew, and Edwin knew that I knew that he knew, no further pretence was possible between us. And without pretence, what was there? For a couple like us, I mean?

I looked across at Edwin and my heart sank. Indeed, the whole setting within which we were confronting each other was conducive to foreboding. We were in Edwin’s study, the untidiness of which was tonight dismally aggravated by the glare of the single unshaded bulb dangling from the ceiling. He hadn’t even switched on the electric fire against the chill of the October evening — a sure sign, if one was needed, of trouble to come. When Edwin is in one of his bad moods, the first thing he does is to cocoon himself in as many minor discomforts as he can assemble at short notice; I suppose to attract pity, though in fact
pity is the very thing that seems to infuriate him most on such occasions. No good, then, to fling my arms round his neck crying, “Oh, Edwin, darling, how perfectly awful for you, I’m terribly, terribly sorry, I can just imagine how you’re feeling.” Any such display would have been worse than useless.

Or would it? I’ve sometimes wondered, since: but anyway, I didn’t do it, and so we’ll never know. Instead, I simply answered his questions, as coolly as I could.

“I think you know where I’ve been, Edwin. I’ve been to see Richard Barlow. He’s told me everything, including the details of your visit to him last night. So now we know. You’ve been rumbled. The balloon’s gone up; the cat’s out of the bag. We have to think how to face it.”

I paused. In a way, the worst was already over: I had broached the subject.

Edwin made no response. His face, lined and almost old in the harsh light was quite blank of expression, and I went on talking. A weird rush of exhilaration was making my words flow freely, and I found myself launched on a torrent of off-the-cuff condolences.

“But you know, Edwin, it’s not the end of the world — that is, it needn’t be. People have come home with tall stories, travellers’ tales, before now; since the beginning of time, actually, and right up to the present day. Why, it’s almost common! Look at that chap who pretended to have sailed round the world single-handed when actually he’d been coasting up and down off the Isle of Wight, or somewhere. Or that chap in the earthquake disaster, who claimed to have been buried under rubble for twenty-six days, when in fact nothing had happened to him at all and his home was quite undamaged, but he felt he’d missed out on the publicity. And then the Piltdown Skull, of course.”

“What the hell is all this in aid of?” Edwin shouted, whirling round in his swivel chair and confronting me face-to-face for the first time. “Why are you wittering on like this about cheats and liars? Of course there have been cheats and liars, all through history. So what?”

So, you’re in good company, is what I’d intended to convey; but clearly I’d put a foot wrong. Which foot? What
should
I have said? I started again:

“Look,” I said, “let’s get it straight. I’ve just had this long talk with Richard Barlow, and he’s told me everything. Now, we have to decide what to do about it. Obviously he’s angry, you can’t wonder at that, but he did imply that he had no intention of giving you away, and so —”

“
Him
giving
me
away! I like that! That’s rich, that’s really rich! First he tells the most outrageous and implausible lies, accusing me to my face of having chickened-out on the trip; and then out of the kindness of his heart he offers not to tell on me! Come off it, Clare, don’t tell me that
you
were taken in by his libellous nonsense!
You
, of all people …”

My head was spinning. Everything had gone into reverse. I felt as Newton would have felt if the apple had started lifting itself off the ground and settling itself back on the twig. What would have happened then to gravitation, to the Inverse Square Law …?

I must hang on to my common sense. Above all, I must hang on to the facts. One of the facts was that well before my fatal interview with Richard Barlow, I had already realised that there was something badly wrong with Edwin’s story. Both his behaviour and the discrepancies in his account of his adventures had forced me to the conclusion that he must be lying. Richard Barlow’s revelations merely corroborated what I knew in my heart already.

“The two-faced double-crossing swine!” Edwin was blustering. “He’s counting on getting his version into the heavies in preference to mine, because that’s where he’s got the pull — he’s older than I am, better-known than I am … He’s going to pull rank to get my story rubbished! Just because he’s at the top of this racket, and I’m a mere beginner …”

A beginner? After twenty years or so? “Because he’s a success and you’re a failure,” would be nearer to the harsh truth, but of course I said no such thing; and anyway, Edwin was still talking,
warming to an indignation which was fast ceasing to be phoney. Was I witnessing the very early stages of that well-known phenomenon, the liar slowly, bit by bit, coming to believe his own lies?

“He thinks he can make a monkey of me, but mark my words, he’s got another think coming! He thinks he’s got me over a barrel because of the lack of independent evidence; he’s banking on it being just my word against his …”

“But, Edwin,” I could not help interrupting, “it’s
not
just your word against his. Leonard Coburn was there too, remember. I know the doctors aren’t allowing him to be questioned at the moment, but as soon as he’s well enough …”

“That won’t prove a thing!” His head jerked up, and I could hear in his voice the familiar gleeful lift-off as he soared towards what seemed to him a clinching argument: “you forget, Clare, that Leo is supposed to have had concussion. In a coma, one of the reports said. Who’s going to trust the memory of a man just out of a coma? Everyone knows that concussion affects the memory — it blots out everything that happened before the accident, sometimes there’s a blank of hours and hours. So if he starts saying I wasn’t with them on the trip—well, it’ll just be that he’s forgotten! Post-traumatic amnesia. Anyone with any medical knowledge at all knows about
that
.”

He’d just looked it up in the
Medical
Dictionary,
anyone could tell. Certainly Richard Barlow would have been able to tell if Edwin had in fact brought up this same argument during their colloquy last night.

Had he? I hoped, for his sake, that he had
not,
because if ever a man had condemned himself out of his own mouth, this was what Edwin had done in leaping so prematurely on to Leonard Coburn’s putative amnesia as a weapon on his, Edwin’s, side. For it implied, did it not, that Edwin was already assuming that Leonard’s story when he came out of his coma was going to tally with Richard’s; had there been any likelihood that it would tally with Edwin’s, then the amnesia argument would never have come up at all.

I felt a great sadness. Edwin wasn’t even any good at this sort of thing. And the sadness went deeper than that, much deeper. I realised now for the first time how very much during these last hours I had been looking forward to sharing Edwin’s secret, terrible though it was. It was years since we had shared anything: our many and various troubles had invariably divided us; had found expression in bad temper, evasion, and bickering. Not once, in the last decade or so, had we sat down to face something together, talked it over fully and freely, and decided, jointly, what to do about it. Not once: and during the last few hours I realised I had been indulging a fantasy that just this was going to happen at last. Edwin was going to confide in me about everything; about his lies, about the fear that had led up to them. How he had started off by longing for the fame and professional advancement that this hazardous venture was likely to have brought him; and how, when it came to the crunch, sheer terror had overcome him, and he had ‘chickened-out’. Which, of course, brought with it the almost greater terror of irreversible disgrace and humiliation. At which desperate moment, the news of the capture of his two colleagues had seemed to provide a heaven-sent opportunity, a more or less foolproof way out of his predicament. Provided that they were either dead or subjected to prolonged incarceration (and experience with former hostages suggested that one of these two would prove to be the case), then all he had to do was to make up his own story and stick to it. A simple exercise in lying; one lie leading to another, of course, and then another, as is the way of lies.

But in the event, it wasn’t working out like that; the whole thing had been blown sky-high by the wholly unexpected return of Richard Barlow, safe and sound.

All this, Edwin was going to confide in me, and together we were going to decide what to do.

This, anyway, was my fantasy, and it included myself in the star part of the fantasy wife: sympathetic, non-judgmental, infinitely wise; a wife who understood all, forgave all, and proved
herself a tower of strength to support him through the inevitable showdown when it came. I had even decided what I was going to say, what advice I was going to give. I would point out that it would be, at worst, a nine-days’ wonder in the Press; everyone would soon lose interest, and he would then be able to live down the disgrace; even, perhaps, to salvage some paradoxical advantages from it. The headlines, for instance:

These were the kind of headlines I was going to predict for him, facetious to the point of good-humour. And I truly think that this is how they would have been, in the tabloids, anyway; because, after all, deep in its black heart, the world loves a failure. Through all the shock-horror condemnations, the love shows. All this I was going to point out to him, and as, under my ministrations, he began to feel a bit better, I was going to tease him about the cartoons we were going to see: The notorious Eddie crouched over his typewriter knocking out a piece for the Editor of
THE
WHOPPING
LIAR
—
that sort of thing. In the end, he would have to laugh a little, just as the world would be laughing … Bit by bit, he might end up as a folk hero, patron saint of the tall story, and a new verb ‘to Eddiefy’ could come into the language, not, of course, to be confused with ‘edify’.

All this, and more, I was preparing myself to expound when the whole thing was flung back in my face by Edwin’s startling insistence on sticking to his implausible lies, even with me. Instead of a shared problem, us against the world, there gaped between us now an abyss of pretence and counter-pretence. I must pretend to believe in him: he must pretend to believe that I believed in him … Where did he think this would get us? What did he expect me to say? More important, what did I expect
myself
to say?

A great weariness came over me, and I think over Edwin too. We both fell silent. He moved restlessly in his chair, put his hands over his eyes as if the light was hurting them.

Lies are tiring, no doubt about it. They require a life-support system which must never be switched off. They must be monitored constantly, you are never off duty: no wonder Edwin looked so lined and tired.

“I’ll make some tea,” I suggested — this being the most non-committal proposal I could think of at short notice — and hurried off to the kitchen before Edwin could think up a way of making the issue a controversial one. And as it turned out, this was a lucky move on my part, as it meant that it was I, not Edwin, who was confronted by that wretched toadstool thing — I’d already forgotten its name — lying in a pie-dish in the very centre of the kitchen table, as if on display. Hastily, I shoved it out of sight behind the breadbin. Why the sight of it would so certainly have upset Edwin I couldn’t for the moment work out: I just knew that it would. In the same way, I suppose, as our primitive ancestors knew for certain that the sun would rise tomorrow without knowing anything at all of the forces which make the earth spin on its axis; without, indeed, knowing that the earth is spinning at all. So easy is it to come to an entirely correct conclusion from an entirely fallacious line of reasoning: but this, of course, only becomes clear with hindsight.