Such Men Are Dangerous

by Stephen Benatar

  The sense of loss extended itself. She had spent almost ten years working on the Chronicle and as she’d said to Josh they had been pleasant years. She owed a lot both to Geoff and to several others on the staff including Graeme. She would write to Geoff, she decided—at the first opportunity call in, as well, and further make her peace.

  Peace…She stretched out on the bed, luxuriously, and told herself she didn’t for one moment regret the fact of having terminated those ten years: only the fact that, perhaps, she had handled the phone call too lightly. Both phone calls, possibly. Never mind. That slightly unstable but basically underlying awareness of happiness was returning to her. Earlier, during Simon’s sermon and for at least twenty minutes afterwards, it had felt overwhelming. Intoxicating. She could have hugged herself with the enormity of it.

  Yet then she’d had an encounter in the church hall and that elation had faded. To be truthful, it must have been fading a little beforehand (and, of course, she knew why), otherwise she couldn’t have conducted herself in the way she had. Return of the demon, possibly?

  She had said a short prayer, however, and—beginner’s luck?—things had righted themselves: Mrs Madison had come over to invite her to the vicarage that evening for a light supper; and clearly she wouldn’t have done this without consulting her son.

  Euphoria returned.

  But…Always the joker? No, that wasn’t true, except maybe in one respect. The fifty-third card…The outsider…Used only in certain games; and often employed as a substitute.

  Too late, she thought of what might have been an appropriate exit line. “This joker,” she could have snapped, “is wild!”

  But from now on, she vowed, she was going to be one of the pack. More than that. One of the court cards.

  She smiled. Simon would say, of course, that every card in the pack was of equal value. (She couldn’t imagine Josh Heath ever saying such a thing!) But she wasn’t thinking of celestial parity. She wanted to be (for once) the highest in value. Or at any rate, remembering that photograph on his desk, she wanted to be currently the highest.

  With the chance and the challenge, she knew, of eventually taking over!

  She dreamt a little…then after some half-hour reached out lazily for one of the books on her bedside table. Her hand first encountered the Gideon bible which she’d put there on the Friday evening out of a vague sense of obligation but so far done nothing about. She supposed that really…really…

  Having acknowledged this much, however, she instead picked up the paperback of Jules and Jim which had come as a free gift with a copy of Options and which she found that she was very much enjoying.

  She said: “Has everybody gone? Am I really that late?”

  “No, you’re not really that late. And it isn’t that everybody’s gone; it’s more that nobody’s arrived. It seems as if the two of us are on our own.”

  “But…? But, Simon…?” She looked at the group of women sheltering from the rain. Out of the four of them the only one she knew was Mrs Madison.

  “They’re here to see us off,” said Simon.

  “Then where’s Dawn? And William and Michael? Why, I’d have bet a thousand pounds…”

  He told her about the accident.

  “You don’t want to back out, do you?” he asked.

  “No!”

  She added a little less explosively: “Besides. I wouldn’t dare.”

  “Good.” She could tell that he was doing his best to be upbeat. “So how many banners do you reckon you can carry?”

  In fact, she and Tony and Mrs Madison had spent most of the previous day preparing them.

  “Fully spread?” she checked.

  “Well, naturally. What on earth would be the use if people couldn’t read them?”

  “Then I’m sorry,” she answered. “I know this must sound pretty feeble. No more than half a dozen.”

  37

  Josh awoke on that Tuesday morning having spent like Mrs Madison and many others a further sleepless night. He’d been having a lot of them lately. Dawn had said he should go to the doctor and get some tablets, either that or sleep on the sofa in the lounge. On Monday night he had slept on the sofa in the lounge. The principal benefit, for him, had been that he could lie there and masturbate without any fear of detection: slowly and with intense enjoyment: although it hadn’t helped him to relax. He’d been chiefly in a wood with Geraldine Coe, the warm sun filtering through the branches, and had lain on the leaf-strewn, perfumed earth and watched her perform a tantalizing striptease. Then, naked, she had come to him and freed him of the little clothing he himself had worn.

  He had seen her at St Matthew’s on Sunday. (They had both been fully clothed.) It was the single time he’d been there since the confirmation of Dawn and the children. In the church hall, after the service, she had tried to avoid him.

  But when it had proved impossible to do so she gave in to what had been a very strong temptation.

  “You shit!” she said. “You complete and utter shit!”

  Josh had been more than a little disconcerted—although it was true that he’d expected difficulties.

  “People will hear you.” He couldn’t give it quite the levity he’d aimed for.

  “You knew how much it meant to him.”

  “Whom?” he asked, teasingly.

  “How could you do it? For just a bit of rotten money.”

  “I told you. I was mercenary. In The Buccaneer you seemed more understanding.”

  “In The Buccaneer I didn’t know what was involved.”

  “Four-and-a-half years of unemployment. That hasn’t changed.”

  “My God! Still he offers me a sob story!”

  “I’m sorry.” He tried to indicate that the apology covered more than merely the offering of a sob story.

  “May I go now?”

  “I can’t hold you here against your will.”

  He watched her starting to walk off, between small crowded tables and animated groups of people holding Pyrex cups of tea. A minute or two earlier (it was laughable) he had been feeling somewhat uplifted. By lots of cheap emotion, by the thrill of mass involvement, by the thought of seeing her. But now he felt tired. All he wanted was to get away.

  She turned.

  “And something else while we’re about it. Purely personal yet it still rankles.”

  “I know what it is.”

  “‘Part of the endearing charm of Fleet Street…’ If I hadn’t actually heard that with my own ears—”

  “What else could I have said?”

  “What else could you have said!”

  “In such a situation? It really wasn’t done without a twinge of conscience.”

  “Oh? Thank you for that twinge. Well, that makes it all all right, then.”

  She was again on the point of leaving.

  “But do you remember what you said yourself?” he added. “How sometimes you come out with things just to impress or to amuse: things which you later feel ashamed of?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do remember that.” But her tone remained cool.

  “And you were wanting (I mean, I know it was only at that stage, don’t think that I’ve forgotten), you were wanting to amuse or impress merely one person—or maybe two. But I was wanting to amuse and impress…millions.”

  “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.”

&
nbsp; “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 i
t 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.