King of the World (12 page)

Just as they opened the front door of the flat, the telephone stopped ringing. They stood for a moment looking at each other, in anxious surmise.

“The gun, of course,” hazarded Bridget, echoing the thoughts of them all. “I felt sure the police would be getting onto us straight away. They’ll want to confirm Mervyn’s story about having found it lying in a
flower-bed
like that. Wrapped in a plastic bag. I mean, it’s not a very likely story, is it? On the face of it.”

No, it wasn’t. And the fact that it had actually happened, that they had all three of them seen it happen, didn’t, somehow, make it seem any more plausible.

“You mean they’re going to suspect one of
us
? Of having planted it there, or something?” Diana looked from one to the other of her companions. “But that’s ridiculous!”

“Of course it is. I’m sure they don’t suspect anything of the sort. No – what I’m afraid of – I don’t want to upset you, Norah – but I’m afraid the gun must be something to do with Christopher. It
must
be … It’s too much of a coincidence.”

Having gone so far in voicing her suspicions, there seemed nothing for it but to relate in full her encounter
with Christopher this evening – which she had so far refrained from doing for fear of upsetting Norah.

But Norah would have to be upset. Probably was already. Sooner or later, she would have to face the facts. It is well-known that facts are easier to face than speculations, and the reason is obvious: facts, of their very nature, are limited to what is possible, whereas anxieties know no such limitations.

“And you see,” she finished, “Christopher’s
delusions
about having me in his power and forcing me to commit a murder might have inspired some muddled notion of laying a weapon in my path and ‘forcing’ me to pick it up. He imagines, you see …”

“But how could he get hold of a gun?” protested Diana. “It’d be difficult, you know, even for a nor – well, for an ordinary average sort of boy, and for someone like Christopher …”

“It’s nothing to do with him, it can’t be!” broke in Norah. Christopher wouldn’t hurt a fly!”

He would, though. He had. He did. Spiders,
anyway
. Her voice faltered. Then, recovering herself, she continued: “And anyway it’s impossible. Boys get hold of guns through friends, and Christopher hasn’t any friends. Besides – Oh, Bridget, you’re not going to say all this to the police, are you?”

“About Christopher and the gun?” She paused for a moment. “No-o, I shouldn’t think so. I don’t think it will be necessary. I mean, it’s only my guess that the mad things he said to me about murder might be relevant. The police aren’t interested in guesses. They’ll only be asking us for facts. Like what time was it, and which bit of the garden did we see Dr Payne picking it up from. That sort of thing. That’s all we need tell
them. It’s all we
can
tell them. We don’t actually
know
anything …”

“So you won’t say anything at all about Christopher, then?” Norah insisted. “I mean, they’re sure to ring again. I don’t know what I’m going to say, either. I’m Mervyn’s wife, I live there, they’ll expect me to know a lot more than they’ll expect you to –”

“I don’t see why …” Bridget was beginning; but at that moment the phone went again.

For just a second, they all looked at each other, and no one moved. It was Bridget who first overcame the communal reluctance to face the expected inquisition. She moved briskly across the room, with a clear plan ready of what she was going to say.

And so her first sensation was one of amazement that an unknown official in the police station at Medfield should be addressing her as “darling”. Only
momentarily
, of course; in less than a second she had
recognised
her father’s voice; and had recognised, also, the tinge of reproach in it. Why hadn’t she rung home as she had promised, to explain the nature of the emergency that had necessitated her sudden departure yesterday?

“Your mother’s been agonising about you all day,” he reproached her. “She’s been imagining all sorts of ghastly traumas. She didn’t like to ring because – and besides, you’d said
you
were going to ring
us
… Ah, here she is … It’s all right, Connie, I’ve got her! She seems all right. Here,
you
talk to her.”

And so here it was again. The old, familiar situation: Bridget’s mother longing to hear what her daughter was doing, and Bridget racking her brains to think how not to tell her.

The truth was, of course, that when mothers long to
hear what their grown-up daughters are doing, what they really long to hear is that everything is all right: that the daughter isn’t unhappy about anything, isn’t at risk of losing her job or of having her heart broken.

And of course, at a distance of a hundred miles or so, it is quite easy, with the aid of a very few, very white lies, to assure one’s mother that this is in fact the case. Bridget had done this before, and would do so again as necessary. The only trouble with the method was that it was so boring, for both parties.

If only Bridget had felt able to tell her mother what had
really
happened yesterday, what a fascinating
conversation
they could have had. Ironically, it would have been just the kind of exciting gossip that her mother loved best – so long as the heroine of the drama was anyone else in the whole world other than her own daughter.

It was a difficult story to make boring, but she managed it. Her mother had to be protected from the truth because of the intensity of her concern. Of her love, actually, to give the thing its proper name. It is love that creates the barriers between parents and grown-up children. Indifference, or even hate, might be less inhibiting.

As soon as she realised that it wasn’t the police that Bridget was talking to, it also occurred to Norah that it couldn’t have been. Because how would the police have found out their telephone number – or their address – Norah having kept her whereabouts so carefully secret? Or, she now wondered uneasily, might Diana have inadvertently revealed it during that first interview with Christopher? “If you have any questions, you can get hold of me here,” she might
have said, handing him her card automatically. And then Christopher could have handed it to his father – or simply left it lying around. Might Christopher and his father have actually discussed the television project? With what result? Were they, in fact, talking to one another at all?

She must think, think. Murmuring something about having an early night, she retired to her room. She closed the door, drew the curtains, and lay down full length on the bed, closing her eyes. She didn’t even have the light on – what was the point when her eyes were shut? She could think better that way; felt she could, anyway.

In considering the implications of Mervyn’s forging of that letter – and she was almost one hundred percent certain that it
was
a forgery – it was necessary first to ask herself how she had
expected
him to behave, once he was left alone with total responsibility for his schizophrenic son. Deliberately, and after careful consideration, she had landed him in this situation. Her idea had been that once he was on his own, face to face with the boy’s bizarre and frightening behaviour, he would be forced to recognise that
something
was wrong. He would be forced to swallow his professional pride and let it be known that he, a top-ranking psychotherapist, a specialist in mental illness, had a son who was mentally ill. The humiliation of it was something he had been warding off for years, as Norah knew to her cost. He had been warding off not only the humiliation of the facts becoming known to his colleagues and patients, but, perhaps even more, the humiliation of knowing them fully himself. His near-crazy attempts to interpret his son’s behaviour
as being within the range of normality had been no mere pretence: it had been genuine, a last-ditch effort to make himself
see
the behaviour as normal.

Norah understood all this; she had understood it, all too well, for a long time. To understand all
may
be to forgive all, she mused; but that was not the same as being able to put up with it. For months and years, Norah had put up with being the accursed and derided messenger, the buffer between Mervyn and his son’s worsening insanity. All the time she was there, in the house, it was possible for her husband to claim that it was
her
anxieties,
her
neurotic behaviour, that forced their son to put up psychological defences against her, taking the form sometimes, of bizarre behaviour. And, of course, Dr Mervyn Payne’s high professional qualifications made it hard for anyone – let alone his wife – to query any of his psychological pronouncements. Especially when, at some level, he believed them himself; he had forced himself, trained himself over the long months to believe them. To have believed otherwise would have been intolerable.

Norah understood all this. Of course she did. She just couldn’t put up with it; it was as simple as that.

Right, then. So what had she
expected
would happen if she succeeded in forcing her husband to confront something that was intolerable to him? Really, actually intolerable? What
did
people do when the intolerable became the inescapable?

On and off, over the years, Norah had occasionally wondered if, just possibly, her husband might be right, and that her own neurotic and irrational attitudes were at the root of the problem. This thought had briefly re-surfaced in her mind yesterday, when she had found
Christopher apparently so well and so rational after her ten-day absence. The possibility that his problems had been, after all, her own doing had filled her both with dismay and with wild hope. If the fault actually
was
in herself, then it was within her power to do something about it, if only by removing herself from his life.

But subsequent events had put paid to all this. Christopher
wasn’t
better. He had merely succeeded (as is not uncommon with schizophrenics) in putting on a good show for outsiders. But now, today, he was as bad as ever. Worse, as the encounter with Bridget amply proved. Norah had listened, with mounting apprehension, to Bridget’s account. ‘I can
make
you commit murder,” he’d said to her; and Norah had felt herself growing numb with fear. Not about Bridget – that was obviously nonsense, but about her son’s
revelling
in thoughts of murder. This was a new symptom, and it had a sinister quality that had never been in evidence before. With thoughts of murder churning in his brain, and with his powers of reasoning so deranged, what might he not do next? And where did that gun come into it? A gun, in a plastic bag, shoved carelessly into a clump of foliage – this, surely, could not be the work of a sane person? In spite of her assertion that the gun could have nothing to do with Christopher, she had not really believed her own words. That it should appear so soon after the murder threat seemed beyond the bounds of coincidence.

Had Mervyn, too, suspected that the gun must be something to do with his crazy son? Had Christopher been talking to his father in the same sort of way as he’d been talking to Bridget? If Mervyn did indeed suspect that his son’s illness was now escalating to a stage when
he might become violent, then this would be some sort of explanation of the forged letter. It might – might it not? – be a father’s clumsy and desperate attempt to provide his son with an alibi for whatever deed of violence might be pending.

In the midst of their dark and terrifying family situation, it was a little bit touching, was it not, that Mervyn should be trying so frantically to provide his son with an alibi for an as yet uncommitted crime. It seemed that, in his proud and desperate way, Mervyn
loved
his son.

Was it the real son that he loved, the sick, mad one? Or was it still the imaginary one, the long-vanished little boy, so brilliant at maths and music?

By Monday morning; life at the flat was rapidly going back to normal. It occurred to Bridget that they had probably been over-reacting to the situation. The
discovery
of a hand-gun in a flower-bed in a suburban garden had certainly struck them as a remarkable event, and somewhat sinister; but perhaps the police wouldn’t see it like that at all. This sort of thing was probably all in a day’s work to them; maybe dozens of guns turned up in odd places every week and were merely added to an existing list of similar findings, only to re-surface if some crime of violence in the neighbourhood made one or other of these abandoned guns seem relevant.

Bridget felt relieved, for her own sake as well as Norah’s, that no new crisis seemed to be
imminent
. Other people’s troubles are time-consuming, and Bridget was exceptionally busy this week. She had two international conferences outside London to prepare for and, more immediately, a session of unpredictable length with a Polish philosopher who was querying a number of points in her translation of his article on Linguistic Analysis and the Falsification Principle. Her English version did not seem to him to do justice to the force and vigour of the prose with which he was demolishing the arguments of his
philosophical opponents in all parts of Europe as well as in Poland.

And indeed he might have a point. She had been aware at the time of translating his sentences rather over-literally, and without a proper grasp of what he was driving at. Perhaps she should do a bit more background reading – Wittgenstein and Popper and so forth – before embarking on a re-draft. A long and concentrated
evening
’s work would be needed, anyway, and she hoped there would be no interruptions. Surely she was entitled to a bit of peace and quiet after having devoted almost the whole weekend to Norah and her problems? She realised, of course, that the ebb and flow of a person’s problems couldn’t be expected to dovetail precisely with the amount of leisure her friends had for hearing about them, but surely
something
could be worked out? Shouldn’t there be some sort of unwritten rule about it, she wondered? If
I’ve
got an important deadline to meet by Tuesday midday, then
you
must keep your broken heart on ice until Tuesday after lunch. Ideally, you must arrange not to break up with your lover
until
Tuesday. Or let your cat get run over, or whatever. That way, friendship can flourish,
and
we all get on with earning a living. That’s how it would be, in an ideal world.

And Bridget could create a temporarily ideal world of this kind, by retiring to her own room, shutting the door, and letting the others answer the telephone. Diana was good about this, she quite enjoyed telling effortless white lies about Bridget being out, confident that Bridget would do the same for her, should the
occasion
(such as Alistair turning up unexpectedly) arise. They were well-practised, too, in taking messages for each other, with commendable accuracy and discretion.

It was unfortunate, though, that on this particular evening Professor Brzozowski should choose to call. His message, conserning his article for the Journal of Linguistic Analysis, delivered in a heavy East European accent, defeated even Diana; and the desperate urgency of it, which he managed to convey despite the language barrier, was such as to force her to summon Bridget from her seclusion.

A question about the nature of Reality and its relationship to human thought-processes might strike some as not being particularly urgent, the question having been debated continuously for at least three thousand years, but this was not how it struck Professor Brzozowski. For had he not solved the problem once and for all in his Linguistic Analysis article? Was it not a tragic loss to mankind that this once-and-for-all solution should not be laid before them in its perfect clarity? Properly translated, it would provide irrefutable arguments in favour of this interpretation of the
Universe
and mankind’s place in it, provided it reached the Editorial Department of the Linguistic Analysis Journal by 9.00 on Friday morning.

The conversation was a protracted one, as might have been expected, and in the course of it Bridget suffered the additional annoyance of registering, out of the corner of her eye, the arrival of Alistair. He was carrying a bottle of red wine and an evening paper, but all the same managed to have a hand free to tweak her hair as he passed; managed too to murmur “What-ho, Smarty-pants?” into her ear, just as she was trying to make out the title of an abstruse Polish journal from which the professor was quoting.

By the time the laborious interchange was over a
meal was ready. Roast chicken, with all the trimmings. Diana (whose turn it was to cook) must have known that Alistair would be coming, though she hadn’t warned any of them. No reason why she should, of course, but all the same … Bridget saw her evening of concentrated work fast vanishing as she found herself drawn into the after-dinner conversation. Norah had retired to her room almost as soon as the meal was over, which left Diana a free hand to make a colourful story, for Alistair’s benefit, of Sunday’s alarms and excursions.

He listened, as always, with a judicious mixture of scorn for female gossip and an avid lust for every last detail. His eager questioning elicited from Diana more, perhaps, than a strict regard for confidentiality should have allowed her to divulge; but it couldn’t really do any harm, could it? – especially as her every revelation was conscientiously prefaced by “Don’t let it go any further, will you …?”

He was fascinated by the story of the gun in the flower-bed, and expressed surprise that they weren’t all three of them in prison already.

“Because it’s in the paper tonight,” he informed them, gesturing towards the copy of the
Standard,
which by now lay around dismembered on the
carpet
, as papers were liable to do when Alistair had been reading them, “It’s in the paper that there
has
been a murder in this benighted Medfield of yours. Well, on Medfield Common, anyway. I
suppose
that must be somewhere near. A body’s been found in some undergrowth, and a hand-gun near it. Your cock-and-bull story about a gun in a
flower-bed
will be on the front page of every newspaper
tomorrow. It’ll be on the police computer already, and they’ll …”

“Oh, but darling, it
was
in the flower-bed!” cried Diana. “We all saw Mervyn picking it up, didn’t we, Bridget? It’s
not
a cock-and-bull story. It’s the truth!”

“Sweetie, whatever’s that got to do with it? You don’t really believe that the mere truth is going to be relevant, do you? You’ve been watching too much T.V..
Correction
: you’ve been
producing
too much T.V., and it’s turned your little head. I’ve kept telling you all along that it was going to land you in trouble, now haven’t I? It stands to reason that anyone whose job it is to involve herself, day in and day out, in situations of on-going catastrophe – she’s bound to get the blame sooner or later. It’s like social workers: if some scoundrel beats his child to death, it’s not his fault, it’s the fault of the social worker who didn’t stop him. And it’s just the same with T.V. T.V. these days is simply a gigantic social worker who hasn’t had to go through any training. It not only has to remedy every known evil, but has to make evil amusing as well. Your trouble, Di dear, is that you’re too kind-hearted. Your actual job is to be the life and soul of every disaster, but you let your sympathies get in the way. You empathise. You worry about people’s feelings. Now, if it was our Bridget” – he threw a mocking glance in her direction – “a lady so clever and so highly educated that she understands nothing whatsoever about people’s feelings …”

“Oh, but darling, that’s not fair!” cried Diana. “Bridget
does
…”

“Oh, all right, all right! Alistair mimicked cringing terror, shutting his eyes and pressing himself deep into the sofa cushions, “I’ll withdraw the charge. Put it this
way: Bridget understands other people’s feelings all right, she just doesn’t think they’re of any importance. Is that better?”

He half-opened his eyes, to see how Bridget was taking all this.

She wasn’t looking at him at all; seemed, indeed, not to be listening, busying herself with piecing together the maltreated evening paper, sorting the pages neatly into their original correct order

“I don’t see anything about the murder,” she remarked, when she’d finished. “Are you sure you didn’t dream it?”

“
Dream
it? Good God, when I dream, I dream of better things than that, I can tell you!” His attempt to meet Bridget’s eye with flirtatious innuendo was a failure, for she was still scanning the paper intently.

“It’s only the Stop Press, so far,” he pointed out. “It caught my eye when I was checking on the Stock Market, and I must say I chuckled a bit. Do you remember I moved the car round the corner because I didn’t want the whole neighbourhood noticing me sitting there in the same place for hours? “Supposing there’s a murder around here,” I said, and you thought I was joking. Well, to be honest,
I
thought I was joking, too. But I wasn’t, was I? It was probably happening right then, while I said it!”

He sounded pleased with hiself, rather proud, as people are when they turn out by chance to have been right about something.

By this time Bridget had tracked down the item.

“It doesn’t say much,” she remarked; “Just that enquiries are …” She broke off abruptly: “Why,
Norah
! We thought you’d gone to bed!”

For a moment, Bridget felt as guilty as a school-child caught cheating. How much had Norah heard? Did it
matter
how much she’d heard? In her present state of nerves,
everything
upset her, and so this would too. Unobtrusively, Bridget slipped the neatly-folded paper out of sight behind the sofa, and set herself, under Alistair’s cynical gaze, to change the subject. With deliberate perversity – or so it seemed – he tried to foil her every attempt at an innocuous topic. Holidays in the South of France? At once he had to remind them of the couple who had been shot dead there last summer. Recent proposed changes in Primary Education? Immediately he referred to primary schools in America where pupils were searched for knives and guns as they came in every morning. Autumn pruning of roses? Hadn’t there been a rose bush right there where they found the gun?

Bridget gave up; and was greatly relieved when Norah, after hovering uneasily around for a while, said goodnight for a second time and left the room.

In her absence it seemed opportune to switch on the news in case there was any mention of the murder; and sure enough there was. The police were conducting investigations, and would appreciate assistance from the public. If anyone had noticed anything unusual in the vicinity … had been walking in the wooded area of Common recently … had noticed anything suspicious. “Any clue, however seemingly trivial, may be just the one that we are looking for …”

The news came to an end, and the party broke up: Alistair and Diana went off to their king-size bed and Bridget returned to her desk, where she settled down to her much-interrupted studies.

So absorbed was she that she did not notice the faint, tiny sounds which Norah could not help making as she crept out of her bedroom and back into the sitting-room. She had waited, sleepless, staring into the dark, until she felt quite sure that the others were finally settled in their rooms: and now, at last, was her chance. Furtive as any burglar, she tiptoed barefoot across the landing, across the soft, pale sitting-room carpet that muffled her every step, and retrieved the evening paper from behind the sofa, where she had observed Bridget stowing it. She did not dare open it out straight away, but tiptoed back with it to the seclusion of her room; and even there she found herself taking obsessional care to avoid rustling the pages as she searched. Just in case anyone was still awake. Just in case anyone was listening through the wall.

As a result of all these precautions it took her some minutes to locate the item from which her friends had so obviously been trying to shield her: and when she did, she read it not once, but three or four times, short though it was.

“It doesn’t say much,” Bridget had remarked; and certainly, on the face of it, this was the case. But for Norah it said enough. She hadn’t really needed to read it over and over again like this, for she had known at once, after a single glance, what it was that had happened.