Such Men Are Dangerous (28 page)

“And from the sound of it, oh by hook or by crook, you most certainly succeeded.”

“That’s nothing to accuse me of. You succeeded, too.”

“Yes. Well…”

“And I know that I do get carried away by things. I show off. I exaggerate. You see, I have this real need to impress, which you…You don’t have the same excuse. I imagine you know what people say about small men?”

She muttered: “I told you, I’m not in the mood for sob stories.
Everybody
has a need to impress.”

“Did it cause you lots of hassle, then—that remark of mine?”

“You know, Mr Heath, this isn’t the way to get on the right side of me.”

“It must be, a little. Because I don’t know any other and because I’m trying very hard to be sincere.”

“In fact, for you there isn’t any way at all. I’m sorry. None whatsoever.”

“I should have asked about your parents; I realized that afterwards. I should have asked you how they’d died, how old you were, how it felt, who brought you up. There were so many things I should have asked. That night, after I’d gone to bed, you don’t know how much I wished I could have acted differently during that afternoon and evening.”

“Yes. Well, it seems to me you should have wished you’d acted differently during the morning. Which is the whole crux of this matter. The rest is purely vanity: yours—mine—who cares?”

“I care. Care very much.”

She shrugged.

“But, listen,” he said, “don’t you see? You heard our noble vicar’s sermon. Maybe alternative routes can conceivably be better ones? Like getting there faster or more safely on a detour, because you could have encountered trouble on the main road.”

“Josh, spare me the theology.”

He was heartened by the use of his first name, however unconscious its utterance.

“Yet I’m here in church. I’ve actually come to church. What better place for theology? And the very fact of my presence…doesn’t that say anything?”

“Yes. That you were hoping the television cameras would be here.” Indeed they had now gone. Without being of any use to him at all.

He smiled. He felt persuaded she was softening towards him. “I agree. That was definitely a part of it.”

“It was all of it.”

“Nine-tenths.”

“I’m not convinced.”

“Can’t an agnostic give an atheist the benefit of the doubt?”

“In fact you’re out of date.”

“Geraldine,” he said. He waved a hand before her eyes. “This is
not
the Russell Harty Show.”

It was a small laugh, quickly stifled, but it had happened.

“Since last Monday?” He was both pleased and not pleased. “That was fast.”

“Does there need to be a time factor?”

“It must be the Simon Madison Show.”

“Yes,” she answered, candidly. “I think it must.”

He hesitated.

“But doesn’t it occur to you this was a show I also might have caught—just briefly?”

“No. Or
so
briefly that if you did you switched off almost at once.”

And here she had to remind herself not only of what he had done to Simon but of what he had done to his own family. Judas called Joshua. The man without scruple. The man with one eye invariably alive to the main chance. She reminded herself about his talk of bandwagons.

Or to be absolutely fair, she supposed,
her
talk of bandwagons.

“Will you excuse me now? I’d like to speak to Mrs Madison. And to be perfectly frank with you—”

“In
that
tone? Brutally frank is the expression.
Perfectly
’s a long way from anything that’s going on here at the moment. And if I, too, may be brutally frank for just an instant: it doesn’t say much for the Simon Madison Show. Does it now? ‘By their fruits shall ye know them.’ Perhaps I’m better off with Harty.”

“Oh, you—!”

“Shit? Don’t be afraid to say it. It’s utterly in keeping.” This time it was he who turned away.

It was he, though, who came back about fifteen seconds later. It would have been hard to tell which of them looked the more defeated.

“But I was under the impression,” he said, “that to start out on the road to Christianity, or of course the road to any properly based religion, one had to put other things in one’s knapsack than toilet paper and toothpaste. I would have sworn that absolution and charity, though less immediately useful in a British public convenience, were just as indispensable. I don’t suppose the father of the prodigal son had all that much toilet paper or toothpaste knocking about the house. But there,” he said. “If that’s the way you want it.”

“No. Hold on.”

She couldn’t deny that if only on the lowest level he evoked in her a powerful response. She recalled how she had shied away from him in the car, as though from something electric, something dangerous.

“Suppose,” she asked, “that you could put the clock back? To last Monday?”

“I don’t know.”

She waited.

“I simply don’t know.”

“Is that an honest answer?”

“As you suggest, I may have switched off almost at once. But the sound waves or the emanations could still have been getting through to me.”

A child approached them shyly, asked if Geraldine had finished with her cup, then bore it off importantly in the centre of his small round tray.

“The other evening (don’t get me wrong when I say this, it’s not one of my more lurid revelations) I had an experience in the lavatory.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. That’s the whole point.” He elaborated.

“Then do you mean to say he hasn’t come looking for you?”

“If he has, he must be rather better as a vicar than a tracking scout.”

“Listen. You asked just now how you could get back on the right side of me.”

“Okay? What of it?” He didn’t even question the ‘back’. He was learning.

“Well, he’s standing over there. And for the moment there’s nobody speaking to him.”

“Poor lonely soul! Why don’t
you
go to speak to him?”

Privately, there was an answer to this, too. Up to now it was she who’d made all the running and she wanted to know whether or not Simon was going to follow it up. Last night she had taken him out to dinner but this morning he had done little more than respond politely to her congratulation, before hurrying off to speak to the youth leader and the church secretary.

“I mean it, Josh. Remember how you told me you believed in making a grab for what you wanted? Or was that just a lot of talk?” She paused. “And don’t you even realize this could be your last chance?”

She didn’t know that a little more than thirty-six hours later, in a sunlit forest somewhere in the south of France, she would be taking off her clothes for him.

As a matter of fact, a short while earlier, in marginally less exotic climes, merely her bedroom on the third floor of the Royal Hotel in Scunthorpe, she’d had him perform a similar service for herself—reciprocally—her clothes, his clothes…although she’d been less wakeful at the time. She didn’t even know how it had turned out to be Josh. It had begun as Simon. But, like the handover in some kind of not-quite-conventional relay race, the torch must have passed from one contender to another without her being fully aware.

Or perhaps not even passed. The details had become blurred. Jointly carried? Might such a thing be possible?

And where would that leave Dawn?

Thank God, she thought, you couldn’t be held accountable for your dreams!

Yes. Josh woke on the Tuesday morning having spent another largely sleepless night. He gave up all further attempt to doze when it finally penetrated his consciousness that, in the bathroom, Mickey was singing.

“No more Latin, no more French,

No more sitting on the old school bench…”

It was Dawn who knocked on the bathroom door: not because she wanted to go in there: she herself had been up since half-past-five getting things ready.

“Michael, I’m glad you’re happy. It’s nice to hear you singing. But not
that
. There’s something more to this important day than that.”

“
Onward Christian Soldiers
, please,” called out Josh, severely. “Or,
When They Begin the Beguine
.”

But by the time they were ready to depart his good humour had diminished. Should he go? Shouldn’t he? This year, next year? Sometime, never? There didn’t seem to be much point: he might do better on his own, even here in Scunthorpe: a free agent with his own flat who might find somebody to share it with him for a short while. For instance, there was this young woman behind the cheese counter in Littlewood’s, whom last week he had chatted up a couple of times and who had appeared to him…receptive. She wasn’t Geraldine Coe, of course, but Geraldine Coe would have other company upon that march. Tall and blond and handsome: literally the blue-eyed boy, or man. Josh had few illusions as to why Miss Geraldine Coe had suddenly found religion. (Though in all justice he thought she herself didn’t have many illusions about that, either.) And since he realized that there wasn’t a chance in hell of his being able successfully to compete, why not simply wish them luck and proceed upon his way? Old Jericho and Moses. They deserved one another. They were both pleasant people.

So if
he
went on this march, that would leave him, essentially, with Dawn and the children. And certainly they, too, were pleasant people, but…well, they were just Dawn and the children, and call him any name you liked—immature, irresponsible, utterly self-centred, king of all the shits—that was simply not enough. And maybe never had been.

He shouldn’t have been a father. That was the trouble.

(No, it wasn’t. How in all honesty could he regret fatherhood? No matter, of course, how his children might well regret him being the father they’d been saddled with.)

He should never have been a husband. Now
that
was the trouble. Certainly not Dawnie’s. Perhaps not anyone’s.

Also, if he did go on this march he would have to be a witness to the strengthening of the bond between Simon and Geraldine. It was one thing to wish them luck. It was another to be there and be forced to see that wish bear fruit.

38

There was a ring at the doorbell.

A young man stood outside who said he’d come to fetch them in his car. “At least try and keep you dry until we start!”

It was the rain as much as anything that had got on Josh’s nerves…his wife’s reaction to the rain.

“What we can’t help we must endure!” She would have made a far better teacher than ever he did; especially good with six-year-olds. (He couldn’t imagine her trying to seduce them, either.) “Swearing at the weather is just the same as swearing at our Lord.” (He’d only said, “Oh, blast this rain!”) “We should wrap up well and walk out singing.”

“If Gene Kelly were dead,” he said bitterly, although he personally wished Gene Kelly not the least harm in the world, “I would now swear he’d come back to haunt us…Except that you can’t dance as well as he can.”

And then it occurred to him that he would possibly have preferred—oh dear—living with Gene Kelly than with Dawn Heath.

He hadn’t thought of that before.

This man who’d come to get them was likewise your submissive and cheerful philosopher. Even when Josh said that, speaking for himself, he always liked to have a really good grumble, this Tony-person humoured him with the same brand of patient jollity; told him just to go ahead and grumble. Why not?

Hell.

Besides being artificial they were cliquey. And clearly very pleased with themselves.

“I don’t think I’m coming,” he said. “I’ve decided not to come.”

They humoured him in that, too. “Oh, Josh,” Dawn repeated twice, without much variation. “I wish you would. Won’t you? It would be so much nicer if you did.” But that was it, more or less.

“In that case,” she said, “I’m sorry I gave the milk and margarine to Mrs Newton.”

“I’ll go and get them back.”

“You can’t do that!”

“Why not?”

“Because you just
can’t
!” Maybe not such a very good teacher, after all. But she might have got on okay with the inspectors: judging from the harried smile she flashed at Tony, trying on the one hand to apologize, dissociate herself, and on the other to pretend it was all just part of the day’s fun, thoroughly structured and perfectly healthy. “You’ll have to leave another note for the milkman then and—for today—get whatever you need at Presto’s.”

As soon as they were gone, however, he couldn’t face the thought of leaving another note for the milkman or of getting whatever he needed at Presto’s. (Cream, please. Butter. A female with a sense of humour. How about a fairly witty cow?) Nor even at Littlewood’s. He
could
go back to bed, he supposed, induce sweet dreams. Though where was the point? The only dreams worth having were those which had at least a fighting chance of coming true.

Fighting…chance: an adjective and noun he’d always thought made stimulating bedfellows.

Five minutes after the four of them had gone he closed the door behind himself as well. Locked it. Put the key under the mat; he needed no extraneous luggage. From now on anything he wanted he would buy new. Colourful socks. Sexy underwear. Toothbrush. Nail clippers. Razor. In London he’d get a job—eventually—no big rush. (Labourer? Dishwasher? Something would turn up. Kept man? Male escort? TV personality?) In the meantime Cashpoint would keep him ticking over fairly nicely. (He’d given Dawnie her share of the loot in cash—an envelope containing seventy-five twenty-pound notes—he hoped she wouldn’t give most of it away. But just in case she did he’d left a hundred pounds on the kitchen table.)

There was bound to be a London train quite frequently.

He could have got to the station in several ways, the station being nearly next door to the employment office. Generally he cut through the side roads: past the auctioneers, the magistrates’ court, the Civic Theatre.

Generally
? No, always.

This morning he went up the High Street.

Afterwards he tried to work out why—since it was undeniably a longer route, busier, less attractive. This way, of course, there were the men’s outfitters and the travel agent’s and the shop that sold Walkmans…but what kind of idiot would buy anything in Scunthorpe when three hours later he could be in London? Here, indeed, he had wandered a lot more often with his family yet he was in no frame of mind for nostalgic recollections nor for journeys of farewell. There was no reason on earth why he should have chosen to walk up the High Street on his way to the railway station.