State of Emergency
Page 4
“It’s all right,” I told him. “Actually, I was going to bring you some breakfast in bed.”
I went into the hall to shout to the boys to hurry up. “You’ve still got the guinea pigs to feed before school.” Then I switched on the radio in the kitchen and tuned it to Radio 3. The music helped to take the raw edge off the atmosphere. I made another pot of tea and fresh toast for Alan. He accepted it and ate almost as if he was unaware of what he was doing, his eyes fixed blankly on the centre of the table. The boys clattered downstairs and out into the garden to attend to the animals. I was occupied for a while organizing lunch boxes and finding coats and gloves and school bags. Then they were gone and I was alone with Alan.
I said, “Alan, I’m sorry about last night —and about Clare. If what I said was—well, the last straw. . . .”
He looked up and shook his head. “It wasn’t that. She’d have gone anyway. But I had a feeling she was—waiting for something.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I think she’d made up her mind to leave me weeks ago, but she wasn’t quite ready. I knew it wouldn’t be long.” He met my eyes, and said wryly, “Thanks for putting up with us.”
I swallowed. “I haven’t minded having you, Alan. You know that. It’s just that Clare has become so —so strange. All this KBG business. Mike says I’m silly to take it seriously, but it frightens me, Alan.”
For a moment his face lost the loose lines of dejection and became alert. “Mike’s wrong, Nell. The KBG is no joke, believe me. In the days when —when Clare and I were—closer, she used to tell me things. That’s when it all started to go wrong. I couldn’t go along with some of the things she told me about.”
“What sort of things?”
He dropped his eyes and shook his head and in the pause the radio announcer began to read the news.
“It has just been announced from 10, Downing Street after an all-night meeting of the Cabinet that the Government has decided to resign. New elections will be held as soon as possible, but the date has not yet been chosen. Immediately following this announcement comes news of a new political party, to be known as The National Unity Party. A statement from the party’s headquarters in London names several prominent people as founder-members and states that the party intends to fight as many seats at the forth-coming election as possible. Among those named were ...” We listened in silence to the list of names, looking into each other’s faces. One of the names was that of Jocelyn Wentworth. Others were also associated with the KBG. Several belonged to prominent figures inside and outside of politics whose involvement came as a surprise to me.
“You see . . .?” Alan said.
I nodded. The radio announcer was talking about chaotic conditions on the railways, with drivers walking out in the middle of journeys and leaving train-loads of angry commuters stranded. There had been ugly scenes at several stations when passengers attempted to force drivers to continue.
The phone rang. Automatically I went to answer it. It was Clare asking coolly to speak to Alan. I called him and went back to the kitchen. He came back quite quickly and sat down again at the table.
“So that’s it. I knew she was waiting for something.”
“What do you mean?”
Alan spoke in a faint parody of Clare’s voice. “Now that Jocelyn is standing for Parliament he needs her with him all the time. They are leaving for his constituency today.”
I sat down opposite him. “Has she gone for the political involvement, the excitement of being where the power is —or is it for Jocelyn himself?”
He gave me a wry, lop-sided grin. “I think the two are inseparable as far as she’s concerned, Nell. Jocelyn is her guru, the Messiah, the Fuehrer. I don’t think she’s ever questioned anything he’s told her.”
“Do you think he’ll get in?” I asked.
He lifted both hands and shook his head in a gesture of helplessness. “I’ve no more idea than you have. The way things are at the moment anything could happen at this election.”
“But suppose a lot of his people get in. I mean, is there any chance at all that they could form a government?”
“I shouldn’t think it’s likely but there’s no doubt that all this unrest has produced a tremendous right-wing backlash and there are a lot of people who would give anything for a ‘strong’ government to put an end to all the uncertainty. They could end up holding the balance of power.”
“And then what?”
“Then God help us all!” His shoulders sagged and his eyes became fixed again. The wry grin touched his lips. “Specially me. Once Clare gets the taste of real power she’ll never let go again.”
I hesitated. Questions seemed impertinent and yet was it not still more heartless to remain silent?
“Do you still love her, Alan?”
I thought at first he had not heard me, or chose to ignore the question. Then he took a deep breath.
“There was a time, Nell, when I thought she was the most perfect creature I’d ever met. Her face, her figure, her mind, her whole style and manner of being—impeccable! When I married her it was like owning a —a Ming vase or a painting by Renoir. And she was good at everything, Nell —I mean, everything. Clare may have looked cool, but she certainly wasn’t cold.”
“And do you still feel like that about her?”
“I feel,” he said heavily, “as if someone, perhaps it was me, had taken a pot of paint and defaced the picture, or smashed the vase. It no longer exists as the thing it once was.”
I looked at him and remembered the witty, smart Alan with his beautiful wife who had once made me feel inadequate; and I put out my hand and laid it on his. He glanced up at me with a trace of the old, humorous charm and then he put my hand against his cheek and held it there tightly for a moment. Then he got up quickly, without looking at me, and went out of the room.
I thought it best to leave him to himself for a while and got on with my work. When I heard the front door close I had an impulse to run and call him back, but there seemed no real point in doing so. There was, after all, nothing to occupy him in the house. When he did not come back for lunch I guessed that he had not liked to impose on me for an extra meal, and felt guilty about my outburst the previous evening.
The day passed and the children came home from school. With darkness there was still no sign of Alan. I wondered if he had changed his mind and gone up to Town after all. Perhaps he would come back with Mike. The radio still spoke of trains cancelled and delayed, so I gave the boys their meal and read to them until bedtime. There was still no sign of either of the men. I ate myself and settled down to wait in the glow of the gas-fire. It seemed a waste to burn candles now unless I really needed to see.
Presently it occurred to me to wonder if Alan had made his bed. That had been one job which Clare had previously taken care of and I had always avoided going into their room as far as possible. I went upstairs and knew as soon as I entered the room that Alan would not be coming back. Previously the room had surprised me when I had looked in by its untidiness, as if Clare’s obsessive neatness somehow failed to embrace this temporary refuge. Now no sign of occupation remained, except for a letter lying on the dressing-table. It was so obvious, so necessary a part of the scenario, that it seemed ridiculous that I had waited all day before finding it.
‘Dear Nell,
I know this will seem cowardly and ungrateful of me, but I can’t stand the thought of explanations and arguments just now. Clare and I have imposed on you far too long already and now that she is gone I can’t go on trying to fool myself that the old life is just around the corner and all I need is a lucky break. I know now that the old days are never coming back —not for me, at any rate.
Don’t go jumping to the conclusion that I’m about to do myself in or anything equally dramatic. I’m much too conventional for that. There must be someone, somewhere who wants an engineer —even if it’s only to mend a broken ploughshare. Anyway, I’m going to look.
I’ve left one or two suits and things in the wardrobe. They are too heavy to carry about with me, and leaving them there gives me a feeling that I shall come back for them, one day. I hope it will be soon.
Love,
Alan.
I took the letter downstairs and sat by the fire again, trying to imagine where Alan might have gone. North, perhaps, to one of the great industrial cities? I pictured him tramping the streets with the faceless thousands already searching for work. There seemed no sense in that. ‘Ploughshares’ he had said. Perhaps he had gone into the country then, searching the villages and the quiet market towns. How had he travelled? On a crowded train, with no certainty that it would ever reach its destination? By coach, maybe, if he had the money for his fare. Or had he hitched? Alan, who had parted so unwillingly with his Audi only a couple of months before. I sighed and shivered, in spite of the fire. Mike would be upset, that was certain. I knew that Alan, the old school friend, the one remaining link with childhood and adolescence, was important to him in a primitive, tribal way which I only half understood. He would worry about him, perhaps even want to look for him; but where could you start looking?
It suddenly occurred to me that it was almost nine o’clock and I had had no word from Mike. I was used to him being delayed, but he usually managed to telephone. I went to the telephone and dialled his mobile but there was no response. I couldn't even leave a voice mail. I tried my mobile, in the hope that I might get a better response. Then I saw on the opening screen the words 'breaking news; riot in Waterloo station.'
I opened my laptop but the battery was dead. I fetched the radio and switched it on. There was still some life in that battery and I used it very sparingly. The news came on. I turned up the volume, expecting further information about the election and the National Unity Party.
“Four people have died and more than thirty were injured, some of them seriously, in the riot which broke out in Waterloo Station this evening. Trouble began when angry commuters tried to force the driver of a train which had just arrived to return to his cab and take the train out again. The driver refused and a scuffle broke out in which the driver was hit over the head. Other railway workers came to his assistance and the drivers of two trains which had been about to leave left their cabs in protest. Fighting spread all through the station, which was packed with people trying to get home after leaving work. Gates to platforms were forced open and passengers occupied trains and even threatened to drive them themselves. It took police more than an hour to restore order. Of the four men who died, one was a railway porter who was killed when one of the gates collapsed and two others were passengers who were crushed by the pressure of the crowd as they attempted to reach a train which was about to leave. How the fourth man died is not yet known. Names are not being released until next of kin have been informed. The injured have been taken to St Thomas’s hospital.”
It took me a long time to get through to the hospital. Mike was not among the injured. I knelt before the fire and thrust my fists against my mouth to stifle the howl of terror that rose in my throat. He could still be on his way home! I repeated the words aloud. What had happened when it was all over? Had the trains run in the end? I turned back to the radio which had continued to talk unheeded. Jocelyn Wentworth was being interviewed about his return to politics. The interviewer probed the connection between the KBG and the National Unity Party. Jocelyn insisted that there was none, but added that the NUP embodied the same yearning for effective government and a rebirth of national pride which had produced the KBG movement. Listening with half my mind, the other half willing the sound of his latchkey in the door, I heard the interviewer say,
“It has been suggested, Mr Wentworth, that men wearing KBG badges in their lapels were among those who started the trouble at Waterloo Station tonight. It has even been suggested on this, as on previous occasions, that KBG members have acted as agents provocateurs. Have you any comment to make about that?”
“Of course,” Jocelyn’s familiar voice was urbane and slightly husky. (Why did I always think of him as Jocelyn? Because of Clare I supposed. I had met him once with her and found him waspish and self-absorbed. My brain was working hard on a conscious, almost verbal level, in order to contain the panic beneath.) “Of course, there is absolutely no foundation for the latter accusation. May I emphasize that the KBG movement, as it has come to be called, is not a centralized organization. It is simply a spontaneous coming together of people in many areas who are fed up with seeing this country sliding further and further into decline simply because the majority have been too weak and spineless to stand up to the subversive elements who want to see our society totally undermined. If some people who back this movement were enraged at the prospect of yet more disruption and infuriated by the fact that a few dissidents can prevent the rest of us from getting on with the jobs which we want to do, I can only sympathize with them. I deplore the results of their action, of course, but I sympathize with the frustration which produced it.”
I switched off the radio. Outside, the street was dark and silent. I tried to telephone the station but there was no reply.
The police came about half an hour later. They had brought my next-door neighbour, Molly Randall, with them. She was an older woman with a rather bossy manner and we had never been particularly friendly, but now she oozed sympathy and self-importance. I felt neither surprise or terror at their appearance. The knowledge was already contained inside me. Their arrival was merely confirmation. I led them into the lounge and sat as before by the fire. That night I could not seem to get warm. I half listened to their careful, anxious voices. Mike had fallen between two carriages when the pressure of people forcing their way onto the platform had pushed him over the edge. The train had been about to leave. In the confusion no-one had seen him fall. His body had not been discovered until after the train had pulled out. . . .
Molly fussed around making tea. The policemen stood awkwardly, unsure how to take my silence. I got rid of them eventually and went upstairs to the room where the children slept. Simon lay on his back, arms and legs spread-eagled; Tim was curled into a neat bundle. Both breathed so quietly that I had to strain my ears to hear it. We had had to move them both into one room to make room for Alan and Clare, so the beds were quite close together. I knelt down between them and stretched out my arms so that I could touch them both. Simon rolled onto his side and sighed. It was cold and after a few minutes my arms began to ache and my legs were cramped. I lifted my head and opened my mouth in a great, soundless howl of despair. Again and again I screamed silently within myself. Then I bent my head and heard my tears dropping on the carpet. I wept, as I had screamed, silently, so as not to wake the children. Morning and its explanations would come too soon for all of us.
THREE - STATE OF EMERGENCY
I do not think very often of the weeks which followed Mike’s death and when I do the memories are vague. I am not sure whether this is a deliberate refusal to recall or whether my mind genuinely has not retained a clear picture. Nature, at least in retrospect, performs its own anaesthesia. I know Jane more or less took me over. I had become, over night, not just a friend but that far more deserving cause — ‘someone in trouble’. Jane dealt with all the formalities, arranged the funeral, coped with the children and began to reorganize my life. The only thing she did not do, could not do, being Jane, was to take me in her arms and let me sob my heart out. There was no-one who could do that for me.
Alan had disappeared without trace. Mike’s name was in the papers and I thought this might bring him back, but it did not. Clare wrote from Jocelyn’s midlands constituency — a formal expression of regret with a hint that if I was in difficulties she might be able to help, through Jocelyn, of course. I imagined her with bitter envy, sitting in her office, manipulating people and circumstances; pulling strings, arranging things thro
ugh the black market —a bribe —a hint of blackmail. I do not know what evidence I had for such a picture, but I never doubted that it was the right one.
I got through to my parents the morning after the accident. I could tell from her voice that my mother’s asthma was bad. They had retired to the inaccessible farm house perched on a mountainside above Dolgelly because she had been told that she should live high up. It did not seem to have done the asthma much good but it suited them otherwise. My father had never been fond of company and he was happier among the dour Welsh farmers than he had been among the suburban neighbours who had expected to entertain and be entertained. As for my mother, she was content to be where he was content.
She wept down the telephone when I told her my news and insisted that they would come immediately to stay with me. Desperately, I begged them not to, thinking of the chaos on the railways and imagining them struggling with their suitcases from platform to platform or stranded in unheated waiting rooms; thinking, too, of my mother fighting for every breath as she struggled to take the load of household responsibilities from my shoulders and cope with all the attendant circumstances of sudden death; for our leafy and low-lying village suited her less than Wales and emotional disturbance always brought on an attack. Finally I persuaded them to stay where they were, promising that as soon as things were ‘a bit more normal’ I would bring the children to stay with them.
I thought often of that promise in the following weeks and a great yearning grew in me to be in Wales. “Away in the lovable west, On the pastoral forehead of Wales”; “Evening on the olden, the golden sea of Wales, When the first star flickers and the last wave pales ...” The lines kept running in my head like some oft-repeated charm —a talisman against loss and confusion. “When it’s all over,” I kept telling myself, “we’ll go to Wales.” But, when what was all over?