Of course, in the last few days our no-go areas of conversation had increased dramatically. On top of all the usual taboo subjects, we now couldn’t talk about editors, garages, journeys across London, phases of the moon, newspaper headlines or tomato soup flavoured with fennel. Even the weather was tricky, reminiscent as it might be of the sunlit afternoon on the Barlows’ lawn.
So, the balance of payments deficit was exactly right. We had never quarrelled about the balance of payments deficit, Edwin and I; it was a genuinely neutral subject between us, and so for nearly an hour we were able to sit side by side, not listening, but enjoying something really rather like peace — there is no other word for it. We were relieved not only from the need to say anything, but also from the stress and strain of not speaking to each other. What couples did before there was television, I can’t imagine. There were books, of course, but the trouble with these is that to sit separately, each with a good book, carries an aura of not-speaking which watching TV in silence doesn’t. I suppose it’s because somebody is speaking, even though it’s not you.
The balance of payments crisis was succeeded by a fairly pretty girl giving lightening answers to lightening questions about the life and works of Archbishop Laud — again a subject on which Edwin and I had mercifully never differed; and before this was over, there came the first of the evening’s telephone calls.
Even though Edwin’s brief burst of fame seemed to be at an end, there were still quite a lot of callers: friends, acquaintances, relatives seeking to congratulate or to ask questions; not to mention the increasingly fed-up editor of International Focus, contact with whom Edwin was still sedulously avoiding.
Partly because of this, and partly because I felt that I could more plausibly fail to answer the man’s questions than could Edwin himself, I made a point of being the one to get to the phone first each time it rang (not that there was any perceptible competition); and thus it came about that it was I (mercifully) who was the one to get the brunt of Jason’s indignation. He was ringing, I gathered, from the home of his friend Tim:
“Look, Mum, I’ve been trying to get you for ages! What have you done with my boletus?”
Boletus? Boletus? Then the penny dropped.
“My dear Jason, I haven’t done anything! I —”
Then I remembered. Of course: last night I’d shoved the thing hastily behind the breadbin so that Edwin wouldn’t catch sight of it and make some kind of a fuss: but of course I couldn’t explain this to Jason. For years now, I had been fighting a losing battle to kid Jason that he had a steady, fair-minded father who could be counted on to judge things rationally; and though it hadn’t worked — not for the last decade at least — it still seemed better than open treachery. I think Jason felt it to be better, too — anyway, he played along, so long as the issue wasn’t one really important to him. This one, apparently was, and so I must choose my words carefully.
“I’m sorry, Jason,” I said, “I was giving the kitchen a good clear up, and I put it on the dresser. Behind the breadbin. I meant to tell you, but you’d already gone off to school. And anyway, I thought you’d taken it. It was gone by the time I got up.”
“No, of course I didn’t take it, that’s why I’m ringing! And it wasn’t behind the breadbin; I looked everywhere. It’s a bit rotten, you know, because I promised Tim — I told you I wanted to show it to him, because according to his book …”
I’m sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry. What else could I be? I hadn’t got the thing, hadn’t thrown it away, well, of course I hadn’t, what an idea!
All the same, it did seem to be vaguely my fault. This is an attitude, I know, which Women’s Lib have been fighting against for years, this guilt-complex of the typical housewife: her feeling that everything that goes wrong in the home is her fault.
Well, I agree with them in deploring this attitude, especially when I catch myself succumbing to it; the only thing I’d say is that it isn’t basically a guilt-complex at all, it’s more to do with power. If everything is your fault, then it stands to reason that everything was under your control in the first place: and what is this but megalomania on the grand scale? It seems clear that much of what masquerades as guilt is merely a power-crazy delusion; an arrogant assumption of personal power ludicrously at variance with the reality.
If the situation in which Jason and I found ourselves at this juncture had been less acerbic, I might have put this theory to him, and we could have had an interesting discussion; but this was clearly not the moment. And so the call petered out unsatisfactorily, with me saying that if it turned up I’d ring him at Tim’s, and him saying that that would be too late, as they were both going out as soon as they had finished supper: at which meal, presumably, the errant fungus was to have featured in all its glory, fried in butter. Oh, well, it can’t be helped: we rang off, in a mood of mutual dissatisfaction.
The next two calls were easier: one from my old schoolfriend Gladys, saying how lovely it must be for me to have Edwin home again, and me saying, Yes, wasn’t it: and the second from my temping agency, saying they’d got a job for me tomorrow afternoon, and probably for the rest of the week as someone had just let them down, and so …
I accepted, though very uneasily. I had already turned down two offers since Edwin’s return, on the grounds of having too much on my plate at home; I couldn’t go on doing this for ever, though the temptation continued to be great. This is the trouble with temping: it sounds marvellous, this option of working or not working as one’s life-situation permits, giving yourself a break whenever there’s something to worry about at home; but it’s a snare really because, actually, there’s always something to worry about at home. This week, that is: next week will be clear. Until it arrives, that is, at which point it inevitably becomes this week, and we start all over again …
Still, as I say, you can’t go on turning jobs down for ever, and so, “Yes”, I said; and Edwin, hovering a few feet away — eavesdropping, one might say — wanted to know what I was saying ‘Yes’ to? He seemed to be really agitated, and I tried to guess what he might be imagining I was assenting to … but before anything had been resolved, the phone went yet again.
“Yes?” I said. “Yes, this is Mrs Wakefield speaking,” and waited. The South Dulwich Botanical Research Centre, the cultured voice explained. “Your husband was here this morning with a rather interesting specimen of fungus which he urgently wanted identified. I just wanted to let him know that it’s non-poisonous, perfectly edible. It is a boletus, tell him, though an exceptionally large one. The unusual purplish tinge is simply due to …”
“Edwin,” I said, “this is for you,” and I thrust the receiver at him as if it had bitten me. I didn’t want to hear any more, and to make sure that I didn’t I headed swiftly for the kitchen, slamming the door behind me.
CHAPTER XVIII
With the morning came a letter for me, handwritten, with a Norfolk postmark. By extreme ill-luck, Edwin had been the one right there in the hall as the letter came through the box, and he was now standing over me, like a terrier at a rabbit-hole, watching for me to open it.
I don’t know what good I thought my delaying tactics would do, they were instinctive really. Slowly, I spread another blob of marmalade on my last scrap of toast. Languidly, and with extreme reluctance, I started on the junk mail, actually reading it for the first time ever. A £25,000 car was to be mine: ‘You have drawn one of the lucky numbers, Mrs Wakefield, which entitles you to take part in our Grand something-something …’ I could feel Edwin’s impatience gathering around the back of my neck and down my shoulder blades.
He wasn’t going to go away. No sense in prolonging the agony. Like a suicide nerving himself for the final leap, I drew a deep breath, reached for a knife, and slit open the fatal missive.
Well, not fatal exactly. Indeed, on the face of it, it was good news. Leonard Coburn had been pronounced well enough to be flown home within the next few days, and the next half-page of Jessica’s letter was filled wit
h expressions of wifely relief and rapture.
BUT … and there followed a fairly extensive list of all the problems, difficulties and inconveniences attendant on this rapturous event at just this exact moment in Jessica’s life. How, for instance, was she to meet him at the airport now she was on this anti-histamine drug which meant that she couldn’t drive? And then — wasn’t it just her luck?! — her daily woman had gone sick, and so how in the world was she going to cope with an invalid as well as all the housework.
“And it’s such a big house, you know, and really dreadfully inconvenient, but of course Leo loves it …”
And so on and so on. Did it all add up to a request for me to go and help out in some way …? Before I had reached the end of the six closely written pages, Edwin had burst out with his own answer:
“The poor woman! We must drive up and help her at once! We can’t leave her in all this trouble … We must start now!”
I don’t know if he thought that this unprecedented burst of altruism was actually going to deceive me? Or did he know very well — and gamble on it making no difference — that I knew exactly what his real motive was? Clearly, he wanted to be there, on the spot, to prevent any disastrous reunion between Leonard and Richard; already he could envisage them backing up one another’s accounts of the expedition, and giving the lie to him, Edwin, so decisively that no amount of twisting and prevaricating on his part could possibly extricate him.
As before, my first instinct was to delay things.
“But Edwin — we can’t possibly — not just like that — right now. What about Jason …?”
I had brought it on myself, I admit it. The angry explosion about fifteen-year-olds being to all intents and purposes adults, who could surely be left to run their own lives for a day or two without all this ridiculous nannying?
There have been other occasions, of course, when the opposite theme has ricocheted off our walls, about how fifteen-year-olds are still irresponsible children who shouldn’t be allowed out in the evenings without saying exactly where they were going and being back by nine.
I kept my head down, as I usually did when this fraught subject got its periodic airing, and waited for the steam to go out of it. Which it did, of course, after a few minutes, and Edwin, unable to think of anything more to say, slammed out of the kitchen.
Slowly, my mind a whirl of plans and counter-plans, I carried the breakfast crockery to the sink, put away the marmalade, the milk, the butter, and found myself calculating, as I contemplated the contents of the refrigerator, what I could leave for Jason’s meal tonight … whether there was enough milk … cheese … orange juice to tide him over?
So had I already decided we must go to Norfolk today? In spite of knowing Edwin’s real motive for wishing to do so? The decision — if it was a decision — shocked me, and I wondered where it had come from? Only a few days ago, sitting on that damp dead log in the damp autumnal wood, I had been wrestling — or thought I had been wrestling — with the original decision about whether to back Edwin up in his deception — as perhaps a loyal wife should? — or whether (in his long-term interest, perhaps?) — to expose him as the liar that he was — or at least to use whatever influence I had to force him to a public confession?
I had no sense of having succeeded in coming to any decision about this tangled moral dilemma; and yet now, after only three days, I found that the decision had in fact been irrevocably made: not by any clear act of will on my part, but by a series of small, ad hoc evasions; moments of taking the line of least resistance; of not interrupting him when his discourse took off into flights of fancy; of taking a non-controversial stance on every issue as it cropped up. By all these escapist manoeuvres I found myself, now, committed inescapably to helping him save face; to protecting him from himself by heading him off from whatever wild and desperate schemes might be churning inside his panicky soul. First and foremost, to head him off from trying to murder Richard, which, it was clear by now, he had already attempted more than once — though with such monumental inefficiency that one could not help wondering how realistic the intention had actually been? Anyway, the risk was there, and I was the only person in the world who was in a position to monitor Edwin’s movements, to make sure that the opportunity for murder never arose.
And now there was Leonard Coburn, too. Once back in England, he too would be at risk. All this frantic urgency to set off this very day to go and ‘help’ in the Coburns’ Norfolk home seemed to me sinister in the extreme. Clearly, Edwin was determined to be first on the spot when Leonard arrived home, and somehow to prevent him making contact with Richard.
Somehow? How? I found my hands trembling as I put away the glasses, each one clinking a tiny, horrid little message to me about the state of my nerves.
I must calm down … calm down. No good would come of my allowing myself to become just as hysterical as Edwin himself …
It was as this thought went through my mind that it occurred to me that Edwin had been extraordinarily quiet during these last few minutes. I would have expected him, in the course of packing for this headlong trip, to have been in and out of the kitchen half a dozen times, howling for clean socks, for ironed handkerchiefs, for the one and only shirt which happened, at just this moment, to be the one which hadn’t been washed. Racing up and down the stairs, too, searching here there and everywhere for reading glasses, distance glasses, clip-on sunglasses, road map, bankcard, the lot. All the things which any wife other than me would have been able to lay her hands on unerringly, and without a moment’s hesitation.
Well, the clip-on sunglasses I could help him with. And he would need them, too, driving in an easterly direction this early in the day. They were right here, inside the soup tureen which, long since missing a lid, had become the receptacle of choice for just this sort of thing — objects that are wanted desperately, and with extreme urgency, but only now and then.
“Edwin,” I called, opening the door into the hall, “your sunglasses …”
Silence. Out I went into the hall, to the foot of the stairs.
“Edwin!” I shouted.
Still no answer. Seized by sudden apprehension, I ran into the sitting-room and looked out of the window.
Yes, the car was gone. Without a word to me, he had sneaked off, making no pre-journey fuss about anything, in total silence, shutting the front door furtively behind him.
My first instinct was to follow him, immediately. To ring up a taxi, to head for Liverpool Street, and jump on to the first train to King’s Lynn whence there would be some sort of connection (surely there would) to Dereham Market.
But why? What was the rush? Leonard Coburn wouldn’t be home yet. ‘The end of the week’, Jessica had said in her letter, and today was only Tuesday. Until Leonard actually arrived, surely there was nothing in the way of mischief that Edwin could get up to?
I must reread Jessica’s letter, and see exactly what she had said: but — wouldn’t you know it? — the letter was gone. Edwin must have decided he wanted it with him, either to pore over at leisure and without interference by me, or else as a sort of passport to legitimise his sudden and unannounced descent on his possibly reluctant hostess. “But look, you asked us to come,” he could say, and he would point to the bit of the letter which perhaps could — just — be interpreted that way.
I sat down at the kitchen table and collected my thoughts. There wasn’t all that much hurry, there really wasn’t. I needn’t, after all, cancel my temping job yet again. It would be finished by six, I could be home in time to get Jason’s supper and explain to him — with suitable omissions — what we were doing, and still be able to get a train from Liverpool Street.
By rights, I should at this point have rung Jessica Coburn to find out what kind of help, if any, she was asking for: but then what was I going to do if it turned out to be something I could perfectly well do for her here in London? I had to go, now that Edwin had gone, whether she wanted me or not; and so what would be the point of finding out
that she didn’t?
CHAPTER XIX
King’s Lynn in time for the connection to Dereham Halt. Well, that’s how it was going to be in theory, that is, in the small print of the Eastern Region Winter Timetable. But I was reckoning without the idiosyncrasies of today’s transport systems. It was nearly midnight when the train, after many a pause for thought, arrived at King’s Lynn, and I disembarked on to a brightly lit but totally deserted platform. No one in the booking office, no one behind any of the doors marked ‘Private’, and nothing written up on the indicator board. In spite of the brilliant illumination elsewhere, the waiting-room was in darkness. Still, at least it was open, and I could feel grateful that whoever had forgotten to put a bulb in the light socket had also forgotten to lock the door when he went off duty. So there was somewhere to sit sheltered from the wind, though of course one couldn’t read one’s book in there. For that, one had to stand on the bright, freezing platform buffeted by the east wind. One was spoilt for choice.
Twenty to one. Presumably there would be some sort of a train, some time? A freight train, perhaps? Nuclear waste, or something? Every now and then I would start up from my uneasy doze in the dark waiting-room, fancying I heard a singing of the rails, heralding the approach of a train, but always it was nothing, just the gusts of wind, rising and falling. And then I would stay outside for a little, trying to read, until the wicked cold drove me in again, to sit on the hard bench, shivering and half-dozing in the darkness.
And so, sitting, standing, cowering, shivering, I edged and pushed myself through the recalcitrant stretches of the night until at last, icy cold and almost believing that time itself had come to a stop, I saw, with incredulous joy, that another living being, hunched in a greatcoat had come on to the platform; and then another, and another. It was five-fifteen. The workmen’s train was due at last.
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