Dangerous Thoughts

by Celia Fremlin

  By six o’clock I had reached my destination — or, rather, the windswept local station about three miles, so far as I could judge from my map, from the Coburn’s home. It was still dark, and I felt it to be far too early to be bothering a prospective hostess — especially one who has been more or less press ganged into the role — and so I decided not to set off along the road straight away, but to walk down to the sea. I could tell the direction by the fierce, salty wind that hit me as I stepped out into the station forecourt.

  The darkness was lifting now, just a little, and I was able to make my way down a rutted track which led, after about a quarter of a mile, to a wild, windswept landscape of sand dunes and marram grass, the stiff, wintry blades rattling and rustling under the gusts of the dawn wind.

  Stumbling and slithering, clutching my suitcase, I clambered to the top of the first dune, and there — Oh, the sudden sense of being on a planet, hurtling through space, overwhelmed me. Dwarfed and battered by the gigantic and random forces of Earth’s atmosphere, I struggled to get my breath; then turned to face the huge curve of the sea, beyond which the first silvery streaks of dawn were breaking, flicking into sharp relief the long white rims of the waves that moaned across the sand towards me.

  There must have been a storm during the night, and for a moment I felt a slight sense of shock as I saw, a mile or so further along the coast, the outlines of a sunken ship. Was I the sole witness of a maritime disaster? Should I do something? Fetch somebody? But before I had come to any sort of decision, the light had already brightened, and I could see now that this was indeed a wreck, but a very long-ago one. With its broken rails and rotting uptilted bows, it had probably been lying there half-submerged for years.

  The sky low in the east was becoming yellow now, a pale lemon yellow and then pink; flashes of pink radiance danced across the tumbled waters and touched the stretches of wet sand with streaks of light. One could imagine slithering down the sand dune, down and down to that expanse of shining sand, on and on to the curved edge of the water and beyond, to share totally in the burgeoning of the new day as the planet tipped one eastward towards the sun …

  A numbness was stealing over me, I was stiff with cold; the wind chiselled past my ears, and what about my suitcase?

  Welcome or not, too early or not, I must be on my way.

  Once off the sand dunes and on the coast road, I began to feel less numb, more in charge of what I should do next. I didn’t have to go straight to the Coburns’. There was the village, wasn’t there, Dereham Market, where there might quite easily be some sort of café open serving breakfasts for building-site workers and farm labourers and so forth? I could sit there spinning out some sort of a meal and a cup of coffee for as long as I judged expedient.

  By now, it was nearly full daylight, and I paused to study my map. It seemed that, from here, the village was on the other side of the Coburns’ farm house; in fact I would have to go right past their gate to reach it, unless I made a deliberate detour. Oh, well, never mind. It would all help to fill in time.

  The coast road, at this hour in the morning, was completely deserted. On one side the sand dunes cut off sight of the sea, but on the other barley fields—well I think it was barley, but of course at this time of year there was only stubble to be seen—stretched flat and bare to the other horizon, almost like a second sea.

  I met no one, heard no sounds except for the endless whistling of the wind and the muffled thudding of the incoming tide beyond the dunes. There seemed to be no sign of human life anywhere, so I was quite startled when just round a bend in the road I came upon a parked car. It was parked half on the road, half on the sandy verge, its front wheels partially sunk in the loose, powdery sand. I was even more startled when I took in that it was our car.

  I read the number twice before I could believe it, and even then had to walk right up to it and peer in through the window in order to be convinced by the familiar clutter on the back seat. A torn rain-hat. Road maps too out of date to be any use, only we didn’t want them indoors either. A thermos flask with its cap missing so that nothing stays hot in it. And, in the back, Edwin’s tennis racket dating from the days before he quarrelled with the secretary of our local tennis club — I forget what about, and actually I think it was more that Edwin was putting on weight and losing his knack; but anyway, there the tennis racket has remained. Well, we didn’t want that indoors either. I didn’t, anyway: it would only end up as one more thing in the kitchen, leaning against something.

  I tried the doors, but of course they were locked, and so, I just stood there, trying, weakly, to make sense of the situation. That Edwin had driven up yesterday of course I knew — but why leave the car here? Why not have driven right to the house, and parked in the Coburns’ front yard, or wherever?

  Had he, for some devious reason of his own, not wanted Jessica to know that he had come by car? Why not? Did he want to avoid having to drive her to the airport to meet her husband when the time came? This, actually, was the one and only obvious bit of help he could have given her. To have come all this way more or less uninvited, and then refuse to give her this bit of help, would be intolerably ungracious even by Edwin’s standards. And anyway, why? Surely, the whole motive for this trip was to make contact with Leonard as soon as he possibly could, before Richard had a chance to do so? This must be his motive, surely? Nothing else made sense. What, exactly, he had in mind to do, having made this contact, I hadn’t yet begun to speculate. I think I was avoiding doing so. I didn’t want to know what he was planning, I only knew that I must be on hand to frustrate it. How, I didn’t know. Simply by being there presumably, and keeping an eye on everything all of the time.

  I tried the doors again, and also the boot. All locked. It then occurred to me — a most simple and obvious explanation — that Edwin might genuinely have run into trouble with the vehicle? Just because someone is planning a murder, it doesn’t follow that they are no longer subject to the ordinary hazards of life — flat batteries, leaking oil and so forth. Murderers can catch flu, suffer nosebleeds and lose their reading glasses just as easily as anyone else; it just seems incongruous somehow.

  So, if I waited around, Edwin might turn up, complete with plausible explanation.

  Did I want him to turn up?

  Did I want to hear the explanation?

  I did not. I continued on my way.

  It wasn’t until I was sitting at a plastic-topped table in a small, fairly grimy café in Dereham Market, with a cup of coffee and a rock bun in front of me, that an idea came into my head which was more disturbing than anything I had yet thought of. Supposing Edwin, defeated at last by the evermore complex web of deceit he had been weaving around himself, had decided to end it all? There at hand was the grey, sounding sea, not a soul in sight from horizon to horizon, no witnesses, no would-be rescuers — would he be tempted, even momentarily, to take the easy way out?

  If it had been easy, then maybe, yes. But of course it wouldn’t be. Edwin was a strong swimmer — or had been; maybe a bit out of training now, but still pretty good — and surely no one even half-competent in the water is going to choose death by drowning? For a swimmer, it cannot be an easy death; on the contrary, he will face hours and hours of mounting exhaustion, and yet still be debarred from succumbing to it, for all the time you can swim just one more stroke, however agonising, your body will force you to do so …

  No. Not Edwin. Not anybody really. I tried to picture Edwin facing even the earliest stage of this ordeal … the first steps into the icy water … the freezing ache mounting to his knees … his thighs … the wind slicing past his bare torso, and unable, this time, to say to himself “I’ll just dip in for a moment, and then dash out”. For there would be no dashing out, ever again. Once in, he would have to stay there. For ever.

  No. Not Edwin.

  All the same, I hastily finished the rock bun, swallowed half the coffee, and hurried out into the narrow street.

  By now, it was bright morning
, the blue, windswept sky dazzling above the bare, brown fields, and the sun hot on my shoulders as I walked, or rather half-ran, along the field path which the café proprietor had pointed out to me as the quickest way to Coburn’s Farm. I could see the grey building, foursquare to the winds, ahead of me, with its barns and outbuildings: and the nearer I came, the more I was aware of my heart thudding behind my ribs.

  Of course, I’d been running. Or more or less running.

  I pulled the massive dangling chunk of iron that looked as if it operated a bell, and sure enough it did. I heard the hollow peal clanging round and round the unseen stone spaces within, and it sounded to my jangled nerves like the Trump of Doom. What was I going to find? With what news would I be greeted?

  The door was opened, warily — or was it merely very heavy? — by a very young girl who looked about fourteen, with a round freckled face and a mouth slightly open. Without a word she led me across the stone-flagged hall, pushed open another heavy door, and stood, clutching it, while I made my entrance.

  Surprise, quite as much as relief, stopped me in my tracks. There, sitting round a bright log fire, drinking coffee, sat three people: Edwin, his hostess and a stout lady I did not know. Animated conversation had been going on, and when they turned at my entrance, with varying degrees of welcome, the tail end of a smile was fading from each face. They’d been having fun, and I’d interrupted it.

  CHAPTER XX

  I had assumed (a recognised sympton of anxiety, this) that they’d been talking about me, but of course they hadn’t. After the brief flurry attendant on my arrival, I found myself with a cup of good hot coffee in my hand, the welcome warmth from the flames playing on my legs and listening to the plump lady (a Mrs Fairbrother, I learned, from the other side of the village) holding forth on the subject of werewolves. Apparently a film crew had recently been on location in the marshes alongside the estuary, setting up backgrounds for a new horror film on the subject, and they’d got it all wrong.

  “For a start, a marsh is entirely the wrong setting,” Rhoda Fairbrother was declaring. “The werewolf legend belongs to forests, but some people seem to have got the idea that ‘Were’ is an old word for ‘Marsh’ — mixing it up with ‘Mere’ perhaps? But of course it isn’t, it’s just the word for ‘Man’ in Old Dutch — ‘Man-Wolf’ …

  “My goodness, you have been doing your homework!” interposed Jessica, with just that touch of jocular reprimand with which a hostess tries to indicate to Guest A that his pet subject is about to become boring to Guests B, C, and D. “Have another biscuit?”

  “Oh — I mean, thank you, no, I still have one,” Rhoda Fairbrother hastily quelled the interruption, waving her custard-cream in the air impatiently: then continued:

  “So absolutely wrong they’ve got it — really, you’d think they’d got it mixed up with the Hound of the Baskervilles! You know, this monstrous dog looming up through the mist and baying across the marshes. But the whole point of a werewolf is that by day he isn’t a monster at all. By day, he is a man, a perfectly ordinary man, unless you happen to know the signs. Eyebrows meeting in the middle is one of the wolf-marks. Another is secret indulgence in cannibalism. The eating of children, you know, was rife right across Europe during the famines of the seventh and eighth centuries …”

  Throughout this dissertation, I had been watching Edwin’s face. Far from being bored, he had the air of a student picking up last-minute tips for a forthcoming examination. I think Jessica must have noticed the intensity of his interest, for she quickly gave up her hostessy little interventions, and allowed her knowledgeable guest a free rein. As a keen local historian, Rhoda was understandably enjoying her role as expert putting in its place a brash American film crew bent on piling up box office horrors rather than on getting anything right.

  “Though of course,” she conceded, “a certain amount of confusion is understandable, because over the centuries there have been many werewolf legends. The most widespread is that the man actually and physically turns into a wolf at night, so that if the wolf should be wounded, then the man next morning will display the corresponding injuries. Another belief is that he simply projects his soul into a real wolf, and from inside its brain directs it to do terrible things. According to some historians, the whole thing may have been drug-induced, a sort of mass-hallucination on the part of both the populace and the alleged werewolf — he fantasizing that he really is a wolf, and going lolloping around on all fours, biting and foaming at the mouth; and the populace hallucinating a real wolf as he charges among them inflicting terrible injuries …”

  “Hallucinating?” Edwin pounced on the word like a cat on a half-fledged bird. “Drug-induced, didn’t you say? What drug?”

  Rhoda beamed with pleasure, and smoothed back her grey-blonde curls. It wasn’t often, I felt sure, that she encountered such an assiduous imbiber of her historical expertise.

  “Now, that’s a very interesting question. There are any number of theories, but the one that I personally find the most convincing is that it was ergot. As you may know (clearly she imagined, poor soul, that she had found a fellow-enthusiast for medieval history) the harvests in Europe during the eleventh and twelfth centuries were catastrophic. It was the time of the little ice-age, and a series of wet, cold summers meant that most crops were affected by blight, producing the poison ergot. Contemporary evidence suggests that many people knew that their grain was poisonous — but what could they do? They were starving. Of course, they ate it, and they suffered accordingly. Hallucinations were a major sympton, but not the only one by any means …”

  “What were the others?” Edwin was leaning forward, alert and attentive, for all the world as if he were collecting data for some article. Only the notebook was missing, and the tape recorder, and the prospect of a fee.

  “The others?” Rhoda was racking her well-stocked brain. “Well, fever of course. Headache. Mania sometimes. Mental confusion …”

  “Amnesia?” here chipped in Edwin. “Could it cause amnesia?”

  “Why — yes, I should think so. Anything like that. The whole brain would be to some extent deranged, you see; all the chemical messages haywire. I can’t tell you the details, I’m not a pharmacist, you know. Just a very amateur historian.”

  “A very expert one, I’d say,” remarked Edwin with warm approval; though what, exactly, he was approving of was anyone’s guess. “I think it’s all just fascinating.”

  There followed a tiny pause. Then: “This ergot stuff — what is it? I mean, is it for anything? As a chemical? Nowadays, I mean? Like, could you buy it at a chemist’s?”

  Sadly, Rhoda had to shake her head. Here was something she didn’t know. Tragic.

  But happily Jessica was able to fill the intellectual gap that threatened to yawn.

  “Ergot? Oh, I can tell you all about ergot. It came into Maternity Ward Three on ITV. Did you see it? It’s what they give to mothers after childbirth, to contract the womb, or something. Isn’t that right?” She turned to me as to an authority, I being, apparently, the only person present who had had even one baby. In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man, etc …

  But, alas, I hadn’t had ergot when Jason was born. Or if I had, they didn’t tell me. I hadn’t had hallucinations, either. Altogether, I was a rather useless participant in the conversation.

  “I think maybe it was before my time?” I ventured, casting my mind back to that bustling maternity ward; mothers in, mothers out, babies weighing more, less, or just the same as the next baby; never a dull minute. I remembered, too, Edwin striding towards my bed, grinning hugely, and bearing an absurdly gigantic bunch of gladioli, enough to upset both day and night staff at one go. How he had enjoyed the effortless glory of being a brand-new father! If only it could have remained both effortless and brand-new for ever!

  By now, the conversation had moved on — or, perhaps one should say, back, for they were talking once again about amnesia. I had noticed how Edwin’s face had fallen when he learned that
ergot was a specific for childbirth, which put it hopelessly beyond the range of whatever it was he was plotting; but now, having manoeuvred the conversation back onto his chosen topic, he was holding forth in great style:

  “By far the commonest cause of amnesia,” he was explaining “is concussion. Upon recovering consciousness after a severe blow on the head, the patient often remembers nothing at all of the hours leading up to the injury. That is why it is notoriously difficult, in cases where assault is involved, or dangerous driving, to know how much credence to give to the patient’s account of events …

  ‘Notoriously difficult.’ ‘How much credence to give.’ Edwin had been reading it up in some book, obviously. These weren’t his phrases. I waited for the medical dissertation to continue, but at this point Jessica broke in:

  “Yes, I’ve been worrying about that quite a bit. About Leo, I mean, when he gets back. I did ask Dr Davies about it, but he says not to worry, they wouldn’t be letting him out of hospital if he’d still been having problems with the concussion. He’s had a report from them already, and it seems that apart from his collar-bone, and his leg still in plaster, he’s OK. In every other way he’s in normal health —”

  “Normal?” Again Edwin did his cat-pounce on a significant word. “In his general health — maybe. But his memory — that can’t possibly be back to normal as soon as this. I don’t want to frighten you, Jessica, and I’m sure he’ll be just fine in every other way: it’s just that those few hours of his life, just before the injury, will be blacked out completely. Or else distorted out of all recognition. It’s always like that, and the important thing is not to let him worry about it. Just don’t bring the subject up, that’s the best thing.”