Fremlin Dangerous Thoughts

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-31268-9
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

'Britain's equivalent to Patricia Highsmith, Celia Fremlin wrote psychological thrillers that changed the landscape of crime fiction for ever: her novels are domestic, subtle, penetrating - and quite horribly chilling.' Andrew Taylor Clare Wakefield - protagonist of Celia Fremlin's 1991 novel, her fourteenth - is more dismayed than elated when she learns of her journalist husband's escape from Middle Eastern kidnappers. Edwin is a difficult man, and home life had been so much more relaxed without him. But dismay turns to fear once Clare begins to suspect that Edwin has practiced an extraordinary deception - and for the purpose of murder. 'A thoughtful, entertaining thriller.' Booklist 'I cannot recommend [it] too highly.' Time Out 'Celia Fremlin is an astonishing writer, who explores that nightmare country where brain, mind and self battle to establish the truth. She illuminates her dark world with acute perception and great wit.' Natasha Cooper

Celia Fremlin (1914-2009) was born in Kent and spent her childhood in Hertfordshire, before studying at Oxford (whilst working as a charwoman). During World War Two, she served as an air-raid warden before becoming involved with the Mass Observation Project, collaborating on a study of women workers, War Factory. In 1942 she married Elia Goller, moved to Hampstead and had three children. In 1968, their youngest daughter committed suicide aged 19; a month later, her husband also killed himself. In the wake of these tragedies, Fremlin briefly relocated to Geneva. In 1985, she married Leslie Minchin, with whom she lived until his death in 1999. Over four decades, Fremlin wrote sixteen celebrated novels - including the classic summer holiday seaside mystery Uncle Paul (1959) - one book of poetry and three story collections. Her debut The Hours Before Dawnwon the Edgar Award in 1960.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fremlin, Celia

Leseproben

CHAPTER I

“How did you feel,” they ask me, “when you first heard that your husband had escaped the terrorists and was on his way home?”

Well, what do they expect us to say? For of course it’s not only me: I’m just one more in a long series of wives, mothers, sisters, girlfriends. How many times in recent years have you found yourself staring into the bemused close-up of some woman or other while she attempts to answer this sort of question? How did you feel when you heard he was one of the survivors …? When you heard that he’d been brought out alive …? That sort of thing. What can the poor woman say, you ask yourself: and sometimes — perhaps a little cattily — you add inside your head: and how come she’s managed to get her hair so perfectly set at such a traumatic juncture in her life?

But of course, as a mere viewer, sitting comfortably in front of your set, there’s a lot you don’t see, and don’t know about. The way the camera crew have moved all the furniture around, for example, you’d never have guessed they’d done that, rearranging it all, even the piano, in order — I suppose — to make your very ordinary little front room look more like the kind of room a newsworthy lady like yourself might be expected to inhabit. Or is it, perhaps, not that at all, but merely to make room for the five cameras with their five sets of wires and tripods? Why five, one wonders, just for photographing one unremarkable face — but of course one doesn’t ask. You are not the one to ask the questions on an occasion like this: your job is to answer them. So anyway, five cameras, and a corresponding number of photographers and technicians, large, loose-limbed and space-consuming, all crowding in with their bags and their boxes of equipment and wires all over the carpet. There’s the sound man too, and the earnest little girl with the notebook; and the bigger girl too — much bigger, actually, quite a hockey-playing type who now and then claps two boards together and says “Oick!” or some such syllable. And then, of course, standing out among all the rest, there is the stunningly handsome young man (well, he’s forty, probably, but you know what I mean) in jeans and sweater who seems to be running the show and whose job it is, when the time comes, to ask the silly questions.

Ah yes, the questions: I still don’t seem to have answered them, not even the first one; but luckily the sound man seems to have hit some kind of a problem; he’s getting the little girl with the notebook to start bleating something into an amplifier for him; so that gives me a few more moments in which to think. What did I feel when I first heard etc. etc.?

“Over the moon!” is, I know, the standard response — and of course I should have come out with it at once, soundtrack or no soundtrack. “Over the moon!” or, “It was the most wonderful moment of my life!”

That kind of thing. The way the others all do.

Am I the only one — the only one ever — whose first feeling — and I mean the very first feeling, the one that comes instantly and uncensored, taking even one’s own self by surprise — was:

“Oh, God, so my little holiday is over! Now the rows are going to start up again!”

Believe me, I didn’t want to feel like this. Still less was I going to admit it in front of all those cameras — though, looking back, I think they’d have loved it: something different at last, to set before all those jaded viewers, punch-drunk, by now, with the predictably OK emotions of victims and relatives all over the earth, in every conceivable kind od predicament.

It’s when you don’t feel the OK feelings that you find yourself hesitating for a second, hoping desperately that no one will have noticed the hesitation. Because, of course, you can’t answer truthfully, it would sound too awful. And the reason it would sound awful is because it is awful. I mean, what a way for a wife to feel! How could I be wanting Edwin’s ordeal to go on for one moment longer than it already had — five days, cooped up, possibly at gun-point, in some awful terrorist hide-out in some awful Middle Eastern slum?

I didn’t want this. Of course I didn’t. The thing that I wanted was peace and quiet; the kind of domestic peace totally incompatible with Edwin’s restless and irritable presence, but appallingly, horrifyingly compatible with his continued incarceration thousands of miles away without access to a telephone.

Damn, the soundtrack has recovered! The cameras are at the ready. The two girls, the big breezy one and the small neat one, are poised in readiness to do whatever it is they are supposed to be there for. Everyone is waiting for my lips to open, and sure enough they do.

“Over the moon,” I said. “Absolutely over the moon!”

Well, of course I did. You have to lie sometimes. Anyway, what is it actually like over the moon? On the other side of the moon presumably. Bleak, I should think. Bleak and terrifying. So perhaps it wasn’t a lie after all.

It’s over now, anyway. They are folding up their bits and pieces, tramping back and forth, pushing and pulling and lifting and telling me how marvellous I’ve been. Pity, they say, that my son isn’t back from school yet; they’ll be back to interview him later, if that’s OK? Yes, that’s OK: why not? I can trust Jason to give the sensible OK answers, just as I do. Why, he may even be feeling the OK feelings, for all I know. Has he, on the other hand, been experiencing, secretly and guiltily, exactly the same relief at his father’s extended absence that I have? He hasn’t said anything of the sort, but then neither have I. I wouldn’t be so wicked. Neither of us would.

After the TV crew had gone, I fell to wondering about all this; reflecting, rather sadly, on how completely in the dark I was about my son’s real feelings. Watching him the previous evening, working so deftly and with such purposeful concentration on a battery-powered Meccano robot, designed partly by himself and partly from a daunting array of diagrams and print-outs, I couldn’t help wondering if he, like myself, was revelling in the blessed absence of a contemptuous paternal voice: “Playing with Meccano! At your age! Really, I’d have thought …”

Or something like that. Everything Jason did these days was wrong. If he brought friends to the house, it was, “Do we have to have these bloody louts tramping about the place?” If he didn’t, it was, “What’s the matter with the boy, always moping around on his own? When I was his age …” And if (the only other option) Jason went out to his friends’ homes in the evenings, then he was “treating the house as a hotel”.

The things he didn’t do irritated his father every bit as much as the things he did. Why wasn’t he in the cricket team? Why hadn’t he joined a cycling club? Why hadn’t he got himself a girlfriend yet; was he abnormal or something? Or — a day or so later — Who was that bloody tart I saw him on the bus with yesterday?

Had it always been like this between the two of them? No, it certainly hadn’t. When Jason had been small, they’d got on very well, with Jason asking questions that Edwin knew the answers to, and wanting to be shown how to do things. It was when Jason became able to do things by himself without advice from his father — when he began to seek answers not from his parents but from books, from friends, from the wide world itself — that’s when the trouble started. It roughly coincided, too, with the time when Edwin gave up his regular job on the Daily Winnower: some sort of row with the editor about the way he had handled some complicated fracas in West Africa — he’d never clearly explained to me exactly what went wrong, but anyway, the outcome was that he’d gone freelance with — to begin with — only very mediocre success. This meant not only anxiety about money — Edwin had always been anxious about money, even when his career was going well — but it meant also that he was now at home for great tracts of the day when formerly he’d have been working. Home for elevenses; home for lunch; home when Jason arrived back from school, boisterous with end-of-afternoon freedom, and often with a gaggle of friends. At which juncture Edwin, having done nothing much all day except yawn and watch television, would suddenly spring purposefully to his typewriter in order (it seemed to me) to be able to complain loudly and bitterly about the impossibility of getting any work done in this madhouse.

Yes, that’s when it started: it had improved slightly — but only slightly — as Edwin gradually managed to get more work — particularly, of course, if some assignment took him away for a few days.

So it had been a red-letter day for all of us when he was offered this opportunity of joining a team following up some possible clues about the whereabouts of some hostages who, some weeks previously, had been snatched from their place of work in the vicinity of Beirut, and about whom nothing had been heard since. Edwin had been really excited over it, and so had I — though it had been frustrating that he’d been able to tell me so very little about it.

“It’s an out-and-out hush-hush thing, you see, Clare,” he’d boasted, his eyes bright and boyish with importance and intrigue, just as they’d been all those years ago, in the early stages of his career, when things were still on the up-and-up for him, or at least hadn’t started on the down-and-down. I remembered how I’d once loved that look, in the days before I’d...