John Bingham - A Fragment of Fear

Stanley had bought champagne to celebrate her return. He was never mean with drinks. By the middle of the meal she looked a little better. So far, I had said nothing about the woman in the train from Brighton, the message, the police visit, or the telephone call.

Now I thought I might as well do so. I was banking on a lighthearted reaction from Stanley, mellow with drink. Lighthearted it certainly was. I hoped it would set the tone for the women. He gave one of the muffled guffaws which served him for a laugh.

“Somebody’s pulling your leg, old boy.”

“Probably.”

“Of course they are, old boy!”

“Why?”

“Why? I don’t know why, old boy. Why does anybody play a practical joke. Damn silly, if you ask me, old boy.”

I nodded.

“You’re probably right. It’s a bit elaborate, it’s spread over a wide area, and I don’t see the point of it, but-”

“There never is much point in a practical joke, old boy.”

I felt that at any moment he was going to tell me stories of practical jokers who had dug up holes in main thoroughfares, of undergraduates who had dressed up as visiting Indian potentates and inspected guards of honour, and other tales from the hoary old repertoire of practical jokers.

“There’s no end to some people’s childishness,” said Elaine Bristow brightly. “Even Stanley, when we were first married, used to tinker about with people’s cars when they came to dinner, and remove some bit of the engine, and then while they were ringing up for help he used to sneak out and put it back again, didn’t you Stanley?”

“I expect you’re both right,” I said quickly. “I expect it’s something like that.”

I felt instinctively that I had to tell them about it, in case it went on. I suppose I knew instinctively that it would go on. Now I had told them. Now I could change the subject.

“What’s going to win the November Handicap?” I asked.

He looked pleased. He began to tell me, at some length, going through the merits of the main equine contenders one by one, almost leg by leg. I lit a cigarette and settled back, nodding from time to time. His wife sat back, too, bored but resigned.

Juliet was fiddling about with her coffee cup. Her skin and dark hair looked paler and more exciting, in the subdued lighting of even that mediocre Soho restaurant. She wasn’t wearing her glasses.

Once or twice she looked at me without moving her head, moving her eyes only, using the shy secretive glance which hitherto had always excited me. Tonight her glance didn’t excite me. Her eyes were worried. She had caught my true mood.

Juliet said she would go straight to bed when we got back to her parents’ flat. The fatigue caused by the work of the Washington conference and the Atlantic flight had finally caught up with her. I would have been content to take the taxi on, back to my own flat, but Stanley insisted that I should come in for a final drink and paid off the driver.

One of Juliet’s two pieces of luggage still stood in the hall, and I followed her along the passage, carrying it for her. In her bedroom, I put it down, and saw she was staggering with exhaustion and although we had hardly had a moment to ourselves since her return, I just murmured a few words and kissed her, and gave her a warm hug, and said I would see her at lunchtime next day, and made for the bedroom door.

But as I drew away from her, she caught hold of me and I turned round. I thought she wanted me to kiss her again, and was rather touched, and I did, and she didn’t object, but it wasn’t why she had detained me. After I had kissed her again, she looked at me, and then away, in the withdrawn manner peculiar to her, and said quietly:

“You are worried. I mean, you really are a bit, aren’t you?”

“No, not really. No, I’m not worried. It’s a bit bewildering, and it’s all rather childish and melodramatic, and I don’t understand why they don’t want me to go on with this story, whoever they are. But I’m not worried, because I don’t see what there is to be worried about.”

“Isn’t that a reason to be worried?”

I laughed and said:

“Now don’t you try and scare me, darling.”

“I’m not trying to scare you.”

“Good.”

“It’s just that-these times we live in.”

“What about these times?”

“One feels there’s so much evil around one. So much hidden danger. You know? Bits and pieces appear in the papers. Killings and kidnappings, and inexplicable scandals, and treachery, and cold, cold hate, and those are only the bits you see, you never know where it’s going to erupt next, or why it happens.”

“There always have been these things.”

Suddenly she started to cry. I put my arm round her. I had never seen her cry before and I didn’t like it.

“Come along, darling, pop into bed, and forget these things.”

“How can I forget them, when they may be touching you and me? Clawing at what may be our only chance of happiness in this life, threatening our marriage.”

She dabbed her eyes with the handkerchief I offered her.

“Why not drop it, darling?” she said.

“Drop what?”

“Drop the story of Lucy Dawson.”

I stared at her, feeling the obstinacy which has done me so much good and harm in life almost literally congealing my mind.

“Good God, whose side are you on?” I muttered.

She began to sob in earnest now.

“Whose side are you on?” I said again.

“Yours, darling. Ours,” she whispered. “I just want to be happy, that’s all.”

“If I knew the reason why they want me to drop it, I might-or I might not. But I don’t. So I won’t.”

She turned away and murmured, “Men, men.”

From down the passage Stanley’s snuffly voice called me. He said something about, come on you two lovebirds, it’s time Juliet was in bed. Something nauseating, anyway.

I kissed her again. She did her best to respond, but her heart was not in it. I went along to the sitting room, and found Stanley alone. He said Elaine had gone to bed. I wanted to go to bed, too, but he was standing by the drinks tray, fiddling about with his cutglass whisky decanter, and tumblers, and soda syphon. I thought he was going to say, “Well, what about a nightcap, old boy?” but he didn’t. He said, “What about one for the road, old boy?” To make it worse, he said, “If you drink, don’t drive-if you drive, don’t drink. Well, you aren’t driving, old boy.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I’m walking back. I’ll have a small one.”

I lit a cigarette and sighed. He handed me a whisky.

“Tired, old boy?”

“No, not really.”

I wasn’t feeling particularly tired. I was just dismayed, once again, at the prospect of endless periodic drinks with Stanley, of being pinned in corners by him, of looking up at him and into his protruding watery grey eyes with their touch of ex-ophthalmic goitre, while he smoothed his sparse hair with one hand, held a glass in the other, and told me yet another feeble, smutty story.

“Well, drink up, old boy-all the best!”

I drank half the tumbler of whisky and soda without a pause.

The sooner it was finished, the sooner I could go. He was standing by the mantelpiece, his back to me, and without looking round he said:

“Look, old boy, there’s something I think you should know.”

His voice was as snuffly as ever, but lacked the normal lighthearted overtones.

“It’s about Juliet, old boy.”

What about Juliet?”

“I expect she’d tell you herself, if she hasn’t done so already. I suppose she hasn’t?”

“Hasn’t told me what, for heaven’s sake? How do I know?” I asked, and couldn’t keep the irritation out of my voice.