King of the World (16 page)

“Of course you’re implying it! What would be the point of all this psycho-babble if that wasn’t the
implication
? But you’re forgetting one thing, Dr Payne. If I’ve been your patient for a sufficient number of weeks, for this sort of story to be plausible, then my records would be in the hospital files. Or are you planning to cook the hospital records? Not so easy these days, when they’re all on computer …”

“Oh dear, that clever little brain of yours thinks of everything doesn’t it? But once again you are wrong. You’re one of my
private
patients, you see, and the
records are entirely in my hands. I do have private patients, you know, as well as my hospital appointments A lot of us do….”

He paused, fingered the gun almost lovingly with his gloved hand, then looked up again.

“Another thing, my dear, that may not have occurred to you: your finger-prints are all over this gun already. Suicide will
have
to be the verdict.”

Bridget caught her breath – inaudibly, she hoped. So that was why the gun was at the bottom of a plastic bag, so that whoever took it out would leave it covered with fingerprints other than those of Dr Payne. It didn’t matter whose they were – anyone’s would be enough to put the authorities off the true scent.

The whole scenario now seemed clear. The original plan had doubtless been that a gang of imaginary
burglars
should have broken into the house and have shot Christopher dead when he caught them in the act. No doubt the house was to appear ransacked, it was all to have happened on that very Sunday afternoon; but the timing had gone disastrously wrong. Christopher was out somewhere, leaving no clue as to when he could be expected back, and on top of this the three tiresome females had come barging in and stayed for hours, creating further havoc with the remaining options. A new, last-minute plan had to be concocted, and quickly. No wonder it had been full of loose ends.

With Bridget out of the way, though, Mervyn might yet get away with it. She was the one who had kept her head, had reported what she knew to the police. Above all, she was the only person, so far as he knew, who had guessed that Christopher was dead. She was the one who would have no compunction about reporting
to the police anything else that she happened to find out – including the whole of this evening’s interview: the attempted bribery: the threats.

Across the table, Dr Payne was still fiddling, idly, thoughtfully, with the gun.

“I hate doing this,” he said. “I really do. Are you
sure
you wouldn’t rather have twenty thousand pounds? You could go on a world cruise. You could buy a yacht. You could start a new life …”

He raised the gun, purposefully, and leaned towards her, taking aim.

“I’m sorry to bring it so close to you,” he apologised, “But I don’t want to miss, and cause you
unnecessary
pain.”

He paused, seemed to hesitate.

“Are you sure?” he repeated, “Are you quite, quite sure that you wouldn’t rather have twenty thousand pounds?”

I
won’t
be scared, Bridget told herself. I
won’t
. Once you’ve let your self get scared, you’ve already let your enemy win. I won’t. I won’t, I won’t!

Once more, for the second time that evening, she made her disastrous mistake.

She laughed.

“I don’t believe it’s even loaded!” she jeered, reaching for it across the table.

The noise was like the end of the world; but, strangely, she felt no pain. It was as if a mighty hand had lifted her from her chair and laid her, quite gently, full-length on the floor.

I hope I’m not bleeding onto our lovely carpet, was her last thought before losing consciousness.

But she was; she was.

It was during her second day in hospital after the operation to remove the bullet from her rib-cage that Bridget was allowed to receive vistors, and reluctantly, propped against pillows, she prepared to do so.

For really and truly, given the choice, she would have preferred not to have any visitors at all. The invalid role was anathema to her. Absolutely not her thing. She was the strong one, the always-well one; the one who could boast of never having had a day’s sick-leave in all her working life. It was
other
people,
weaker and more fragile human specimens than herself, who found themselves in hospitals, in doctor’s surgeries, on sick-leave: humbled recipients of largesse in the form of flowers and grapes and get-well cards. These were the people, quite unlike herself, who needed to be asked how they were feeling, and to be listened to as they answered.

Bridget wished for none of this. Given the choice, she would have chosen to be left entirely on her own –
reading
, listening to the radio, working as best she could, until she was on her feet again completely recovered.

But of course she wasn’t being given the choice. No one is. Once in hospital, you are a sitting-duck for anyone who chooses to come to your bedside: you
have no control over who they are, when they come, or how long they stay. At home, you can, as a last resort, pretend to have an appointment with somebody else, but here there could be no such escape route.

She would have to go through with it. She would have to respond to the sympathy, to the kind enquiries. She would have to explain, to one after another of them that, yes thank you, she was feeling fine, and that the surgeon had promised complete recovery in days rather than weeks; back at work, probably, inside a month. It could have been so much worse. The bullet had mercifully missed both her heart and her lungs, though it had been a near thing. It could have been much, much worse.

Well, yes, of course it could have been worse. She might have been having to tell her visitors that she wasn’t feeling fine at all, but absolutely awful, and that the surgeon had warned her that it would be a long business and might leave her unable to continue with her chosen career. Of course that would have been worse. Of course she was lucky that it was only this; but all the same it was humiliating to be ill at all. Even more humiliating to have been saved by Alistair, who had let himself into the flat before Mervyn had had time to fire a second shot.

Bracing herself for she knew not whom, and resolving to behave nicely to whoever it was, she felt quite a little rush of relief when she saw that her first visitor was to be Diana, tap-tapping across the ward, her face alight with happiness, and her bright hair swinging as she moved.

She was pleased, of course, to find Bridget so much better and out of danger, but to Bridget’s enormous relief she did not spend many words on solicitous
enquiries, but plunged straight ahead into an account of the real source of her radiant looks.

“It’s been confirmed!” she exulted. “There’s
absolutely
no doubt at all any more! I
am
pregnant! July it will be … Isn’t that marvellous!”

One couldn’t agree, in all honesty, that it
was
marvellous
; to Bridget it all seemed most ill-judged. But she was surprised to find herself feeling much more benign towards the project than she had before. Was it sheer physical weakness that was softening her capacity for clear and practical judgement? – the anaesthetic, perhaps, or the loss of blood? Or was she genuinely seeing the thing in a new way? After all, you only live once, and if in this one and only life of yours there is something you want as passionately as Diana wanted this baby, and if it is something that brings you as much joy as was now shining in her friend’s face – should you not grab it with both hands and be thankful? And who could tell that Diana wouldn’t make a success of being a single mother? Lots of women did. More and more of them with every passing year. Likewise, with every passing year, the child of a one-parent family must be feeling less and less exceptional. Indeed, by the time this one was of school-age, one-parent families could well have become the norm.

“Mummy, why have I only got one Daddy?” an anxious five-year-old could be asking after his first week at school.

“But it won’t
be
a one-parent family!” cried Diana, as Bridget began to expound something of her new philosophy. “You won’t believe this, but Alistair is actually
pleased
! Yes, I know I said I wasn’t going to tell him just yet, but … well, it sort of came out.
And he was
pleased
! Didn’t I tell you he would be? He even went out and bought a copy of the Dictionary of Christian Names, and he’s been hunting out the most ghastly names you can possibly imagine. ‘Genghis Khan,’ ‘Assurbanipal,’ that sort of thing. Well, you know how he is. He wouldn’t bother to do that sort of thing if he wasn’t thrilled to bits, would he? Besides, I feel sure it’s going to be a girl …”

She chattered on and Bridget, listening to her, found it impossible not to feel, however irrationally, that such happiness as this was going to be worth
whatever
it cost.

And who knew? Alistair might, after all, turn out to be a devoted father. Goodness knows, he was
inconsistent
enough; there was just no telling.

“He’s coming to see you later on,” Diana was saying as she gathered up her belongings and prepared to leave. “I expect he’ll tell you all about it – if not, you must ask him. Because he really
is
pleased, you know, and I’d like you to hear for yourself what he says.”

What Alistair said turned out to be not quite what Bridget had been led to expect.

“I shall marry her, of course,” he announced, helping himself to a substantial cluster of Bridget’s grapes. “Well, it’s what a chap is supposed to do, isn’t it, in this situation? But don’t worry. The more I think about it, the more I don’t see why it should make any difference to any of us. We can all go on living comfortably exactly as we are now, with me dropping in and out when I feel like it, just as I do now. I’ll be keeping on my own place, of course. Nothing odd about that, not these days. All the best people are doing it. All the most trendy and newsworthy couples – especially the
super-high-brow ones – are opting for this life-style; and making a go of it, too, by all accounts. ‘Go’ being the operative word, of course. Staying becomes much more acceptable once you have the option of going.

“No, Bridget, don’t be silly;
of
course
you’ll stay on at the flat. Like I say, we can all carry on exactly as we do now. I’ll be married to Diana, that’s true, but I can still go on yearning after you, can’t I? And don’t look like that, you know perfectly well that I’ve been yearning after you all this time. I like your spiky ways, and married men really do need someone to yearn after as well as a wife. There are good historical precedents for that, too. Look at Shelley, yearning after Mary’s half-sister. And Dickens, too; wasn’t there a
yearn-worthy
sister-in-law in his household? Though of course it depends on which biography you’ve been reading; but such a well-read know-all as you, Bridget …”

Bridget could have kicked herself for her strange inability to think quickly enough of an appropriately devastating put-down. Normally, her quick tongue would have been ready enough with some abrasive retort; but not now. Some sort of power seemed to have drained out of her; and after Alistair’s departure she was appalled to find tears trickling weakly down her face; tears partly of weakness, and partly of an idiotic kind of pleasure. She was actually feeling
flattered
by the man’s silly remarks. What on earth had happened to that strong, sensible self which was the only self she knew?

It would return, of course, as soon as the effects of the anaesthetic and the shock had worn off, but meantime she was undergoing some strange reversals of feeling. When, later that same evening, her mother arrived, tearful with relief at finding her daughter on
the way to recovery, Bridget found herself weeping too, uncontrollably; tears of relief, and love, and long-ago childlike dependence, in her mother’s arms.

It wouldn’t last, of course. By the very next morning she could already feel, in her fast-healing body, the beginnings of returning strength and vigour, and this, of course, she found immensely reassuring.

Reassuring, yes, but something in her had changed, and would stay changed. She would be strong again, and brave again, but never again would she be a person who did not know what it was like to be weak. It was a piece of knowledge to be added to her already extensive store, and it would never be forgotten.

The following afternoon, Bridget received a surprise visitor. A young woman was hurrying lightly,
purposefully
across the ward, and for a moment Bridget couldn’t put a name to her. The face was familiar, certainly – but who …? where …? It was a face she’d seen quite recently – and now, in a flash, she remembered
where
she’d seen it. On a mantelpiece. The mantelpiece over the fireplace in Norah’s home.

Yes, it
was
Norah; it really was – but what a
transformation
! For a moment, Bridget fancied that the unhappy lady must suddenly have bought herself a lot of new, smart clothes … must have had her hair done in a new style – something like that. But no, at a second glance, Bridget realised that her hair was still the same tight, gingery-grey frizz. She wore the usual cardigan, the usual nondescript blouse. What was different was her face, her walk, her whole demeanour. Even her
height
was altered, now that her cringing stance had been replaced by straight, swinging shoulders and a lifted head.

What could have caused so startling a transformation, at a time of such unmitigated disaster in the poor woman’s life? Her son was dead; her husband on a murder charge. What on earth could have caused such rejuvenation?

The disaster itself, of course. However much a
disaster
sweeps away, it also inevitably leaves a slate clean, and its born-again victim has nowhere to go but forward. Around her, even before she knows it, doors have been flung open by the very force of the storm. Newness shines in her face long, long before it penetrates her mind.

Of course, Norah had first to ask Bridget how she was, and of course Bridget had to answer; but almost at once they found themselves piecing together, on the basis of what each already knew, the probable sequence of events on that fatal Sunday afternoon. There seemed little doubt that a phoney break-in was what Mervyn had first tried to organise. Christopher was to be found dead indoors, with a bullet through his head; and the gun that the imaginary robbers had used would be found discarded in the garden. A son who had died heroically fighting off burglars would be a far, far more creditable son to boast of than the ever-deteriorating mental wreck which was the alternative.

But the plan had misfired. Christopher had
wandered
off somewhere: he had not returned home at the appropriate time to play his appointed part in this scenario, and Mervyn had panicked. Those same agonising questions that Norah had so often had to ask herself were now homing in on Mervyn. Where
is
he? What is he up to? Who is he upsetting? What sort of disgrace is he bringing the family into
this
time? For the first time, it was the father, not the mother who had to face these questions. For the first time he had to cope, to decide by himself what to do. He was aware, by this time, that Christopher was mad, and that his madness was escalating with terrifying speed into one of his worst
manic phases. Possibly – indeed, probably – he had been talking to his father in exactly the way he had talked to Bridget. “You are my creature,” he would have said: “I genetically engineered you … You can only do what I’ve programmed you to do.”

The child is father of the man: a new and horrifying gloss on the old proverb.

For Mervyn, compelled at last to awake from his years of self-imposed blindness, it had been too much. Too terrifying. Too humiliating. To have
this
son roaming the neighbourhood in
this
sort of state … He had
got
to be found, and urgently. After the three intrusive women had at last left, and when Christopher still hadn’t got home, Mervyn had gone, gun in hand, in search of him.

Had he guessed the boy would be wandering on the Common, intent on some crazy project? Or had he tracked him down elsewhere, and lured him into the car for his last, fatal journey? Whichever it was, the deserted Common, after dark, must have seemed like a good place, with its dark bushes and overhanging dripping trees.

“I could blow up the world!” Christopher had boasted to Bridget on that Sunday afternoon. Was this what he believed he had done, as the noise roared through him, just as it had roared through Bridget? Had it been as painless for him as it had been for her? Did he die in triumph, world destroyer, world creator, King of the World?

While they talked, sometimes even laughing at some bizarre little incident that one or other of them recalled, speculations about Mervyn escalated. Right now,
probably
, the story was being pieced together by the police.
He had no defence, of course, having been caught red-handed.

Somehow, Norah couldn’t bring herself to care, one way or the other. It all seemed too complicated to care about. It was beyond the range of her still-battered emotions.

They both laughed a little, guiltily, uneasily. Norah was still feeling vaguely surprised to find herself
laughing
, even at a time like this. A time like what? She had not yet in any way faced the vastness of her freedom, the multiplicity of the options that would soon be edging their way into her field of vision.

The process would begin very gradually, of course. Indeed, in a very small way, it had begun already. Only that morning, she’d picked up the telephone and had heard the voice of her neighbour and confidante, Louise. The voice, as of old, was once again bubbling over with warm and eager curiosity. Once again it was the voice of friendship; a cup of tea was being offered, and the prospect of a long, long talk.

“Why don’t you pop in?” Louise had said, and Norah, for the first time in years, and without any qualms or backward glances at what might be going on at home, was able to say “Yes, I’d love to.”