"Twice Shy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Francis Dick)

CHAPTER 1

I told the boys to stay quiet while I went to fetch my gun.

It usually worked. For the five minutes that it took me to get to the locker in the common-room and to return to the classroom, thirty fourteen-year-old semi-repressed hooligans could be counted on to be held in a state of fragile good behaviour, restrained only by the promise of a lesson they'd actually looked forward to. Physics in general they took to be unacceptably hard mental labour, but what happened when a gun spat out a bullet… that was interesting.

Jenkins delayed me for a moment in the common-room: Jenkins with his sour expression and bad-tempered moustache, telling me I could teach momentum more clearly with chalk on a blackboard, and that an actual firearm was on my part simply self-indulgent dramatics.

'No doubt you're right,' I said blandly, edging round him.

He gave me his usual look of frustrated spite. He hated my policy of always agreeing with him, which was, of course, why I did it.

'Excuse me,' I said, retreating, 'Four A are waiting.'

Four A, however, weren't waiting in the hoped-for state of gently simmering excitement. They were, instead, in collective giggles fast approaching mild hysteria.

'Look,' I said flatly, sensing the atmosphere with one foot through the door, 'steady down, or you'll copy notes…'

This direst of threats had no result. The giggles couldn't be stifled. The eyes of the class darted between me and my gun and the blackboard, which was still out of my sight behind the open door, and upon every young face there was the most gleeful anticipation.

'OK,' I said, closing the door, 'so what have you writ-'

I stopped.

They hadn't written anything.

One of the boys stood there, in front of the blackboard, straight and still: Paul Arcady, the wit of the class. He stood straight and still because, balanced on his head, there was an apple.

The giggles all around me exploded into laughter, and I couldn't myself keep a straight face.

'Can you shoot it off, sir?'

The voices rose above a general hubbub.

'William Tell could, sir.'

'Shall we call an ambulance, sir, just in case?'

'How long will it take a bullet to get through Paul's skull, sir?'

'Very funny,' I said repressively, but indeed it was very funny, and they knew it. But if I laughed too much I'd lose control of them, and control of such a volatile mass was always precarious.

'Very clever, Paul,' I said. 'Go and sit down.'

He was satisfied. He'd produced his effect perfectly. He took the apple off his head with a natural elegance and returned in good order to his place, accepting as his due the admiring jokes and the envious catcalls.

'Right then,' I said, planting myself firmly where he had stood, 'by the end of this lesson you'll all know how long it would take for a bullet travelling at a certain speed to cross a certain distance…'

The gun I had taken to the lesson had been a simple air-gun, but I told them also how a rifle worked, and why in each case a bullet or a pellet came out fast. I let them handle the smooth metal: the first time many of them had seen an actual gun, even an air-gun, at close quarters. I explained how bullets were made, and how they differed from the pellets I had with me. How loading mechanisms worked. How the grooves inside a rifle barrel rotated the bullet, to send it out spinning. I told them about air friction, and heat.

They listened with concentration and asked the questions they always did.

'Can you tell us how a bomb works, sir?'

'One day,' I said.

'A nuclear bomb?'

'One day.'

'A hydrogen… cobalt… neutron bomb?'

'One day.'

They never asked how radio waves crossed the ether, which was to me a greater mystery. They asked about destruction, not creation; about power, not symmetry. The seed of violence born in every male child looked out of every face, and I knew how they were thinking, because I'd been there myself. Why else had I spent countless hours at their age practising with a. 22 cadet rifle on a range, improving my skill until I could hit a target the size of a thumbnail at fifty yards, nine times out of ten. A strange, pointless, sublimated skill, which I never intended to use on any living creature, but had never since lost.

'Is it true, sir,' one of them said,'that you won an Olympic medal for rifle shooting?'

'No, it isn't.'

'What, then, sir?'

'I want you all to consider the speed of a bullet compared to the speed of other objects you are all familiar with. Now, do you think that you could be flying along in an aeroplane, and look out of the window, and see a bullet keeping pace with you, appearing to be standing still just outside the window?'

The lesson wound on. They would remember it all their lives, because of the gun. Without the gun, whatever Jenkins might think, it would have faded into the general dust they shook from their shoes every afternoon at four o'clock. Teaching, it often seemed to me, was as much a matter of image-jerking as of imparting actual information. The facts dressed up in jokes were the ones they got right in exams.

I liked teaching. Specifically I liked teaching physics, a subject I suppose I embraced with passion and joy, knowing full well that most people shied away in horror. Physics was only the science of the unseen world, as geography was of the seen. Physics was the science of all the tremendously powerful invisibilities – of magnetism, electricity, gravity, light, sound, cosmic rays… Physics was the science of the mysteries of the universe. How could anyone think it dull?

I had been for three years head of the physics department of the East Middlesex Comprehensive, with four masters and two technicians within my domain. My future, from my present age of thirty-three, looked like a possible deputy head-mastership, most likely with a move involved, and even perhaps a headship, though if I hadn't achieved that by forty I could forget it. Headmasters got younger every year; mostly, cynics suggested, because the younger the man they appointed, the more the authorities could boss him about.

I was, all in all, contented with my job and hopeful of my prospects. It was only at home that things weren't so good.

Four A learned about momentum and Arcady ate his apple when he thought I wasn't looking. My peripheral vision after ten years of teaching was, however, so acute that at times they thought I could literally see out of the back of my head. It did no harm: it made control easier.

'Don't drop the core on the floor, Paul,' I said mildly. It was one thing to let him eat the apple – he'd deserved it – but quite another to let him think I hadn't seen. Keeping a grip on the monsters was a perpetual psychological game, but also priority number one. I'd seen stronger men than myself reduced to nervous breakdowns by the hunting-pack instincts of children.

When the end-of-lesson bell rang, they did me the ultimate courtesy of letting me finish what I was saying before erupting into the going-home stampede. It was, after all, the last lesson on Friday – and God be thanked for weekends.

I made my way slowly round the four physics laboratories and the two equipment rooms, checking that everything was in order. The two technicians, Louisa and David, were dismantling and putting away all apparatus not needed on Monday, picking Five E's efforts at radio-circuitry to pieces and returning the batteries, clips, bases and transistors to the countless racks and drawers in the equipment rooms.

'Shooting anyone special?' Louisa said, eyeing the gun which I was carrying with me.

'Didn't want to leave it unattended.'

'Is it loaded?' Her voice sounded almost hopeful. By late Friday, she was always in the state in which one never asked her for an extra favour: not, that is, unless one was willing to endure a weepy ten minutes of 'you don't realise how much this job entails', which, on most occasions, I wasn't. Louisa's tantrums, I reckoned, were based on her belief that life had cheated her, finding her at forty as a sort of store-keeper (efficient, meticulous and helpful) but not a Great Scientist. 'If I'd gone to college…' she would say, leaving the strong impression that if she had, Einstein would have been relegated. I dealt with Louisa by retreating at the warning signs of trouble, which was maybe weak, but I had to live with her professionally, and bouts of sullenness made her slow.

'My list for Monday!' I said, handing it to her.

She glanced disparagingly down it. 'Martin has ordered the oscilloscopes for third period.'

The school's shortage of oscilloscopes was a constant source of friction.

'See what you can manage,' I said.

'Can you make do with only two?'

I said I supposed so, smiled, hoped it would keep fine for her gardening, and left for home.

I drove slowly with the leaden feeling of resignation clamping down, as it always did on the return journey. Between Sarah and me there was no joy left; no springing love. Eight years of marriage, and nothing to feel but a growing boredom.

We had been unable to have children. Sarah had hoped for them, longed for them, pined for them. We'd been to every conceivable specialist and Sarah had had countless injections and pills and two operations. My own disappointment was bearable, though none the less deep. Hers had proved intractable and finally disabling in that she had gone into a state of permanent depression from which it seemed nothing could rescue her.

We'd been told by encouraging therapists that many childless marriages were highly successful, husband and wife forging exceptionally strong bonds through their misfortune, but with us it had worked in reverse. Where once there had been passion there was now politeness; where plans and laughter, now a grinding hopelessness; where tears and heartbreak, silence.

I hadn't been enough for her, without babies. I'd been forced to face the fact that to her motherhood mattered most, that marriage had been but the pathway, that many a man would have done. I wondered unhappily from time to time how soon she would have divorced me had it been I who had proved infertile: and it was profitless also to guess that we would have been contented enough for ever if she herself had been fulfilled.

I dare say it was a marriage like many another. We never quarrelled. Seldom argued. Neither of us any longer cared enough for that; and as a total, prolonged way of life it was infinitely dispiriting.

It was a homecoming like thousands of others. I parked outside the closed garage doors and let myself into the house with arms full of air-gun and exercise books. Sarah, home as usual from her part-time job as a dentist's receptionist, sat on the sofa in the sitting-room reading a magazine.

'Hullo,'I said.

'Hullo. Good day?'

'Not bad.'

She hadn't looked up from her pages. I hadn't kissed her. Perhaps for both of us it was better than total loneliness, but not much.

'There's ham for supper,' she said. 'And coleslaw. That all right?'

'Fine.'

She went on reading; a slim fair-haired girl, still arrestingly pretty but now with a settled resentful expression. I was used to it, but in flashes suffered unbearable nostalgia for the laughing eagerness of the early days. I wondered sometimes if she noticed that the fun had gone out of me, too, although I could sometimes feel it still bubbling along inside, deeply buried.

On that particular evening I made an effort (as I did more and more rarely) to jog us out of our dimness.

'Look, let's just dump everything and go out to dinner. Maybe to Florestan's, where there's dancing.'

She didn't look up. 'Don't be silly.'

'Let's just go.'

'I don't want to.' A pause. I'd rather watch television.' She turned a page, and added with indifference, 'And we can't afford Florestan's prices.'

'We could, if you'd enjoy it.'

'No, I wouldn't.'

'Well,' I sighed, 'I'll make a start on the books, then.'

She nodded faintly. 'Supper at seven.'

'All right.'

I turned to go.

'There's a letter for you from William,' she said with boredom in her voice. 'I put it upstairs.'

'Oh? Well, thanks.'

She went on reading, and I took my stuff up to the third and smallest of our three bedrooms, which I used as a sort of study-cum-office. The estate agent who had shown us the house had brightly described the room as 'just right for the nursery', and had nearly lost himself the sale. I'd annexed the place for myself and made it as masculine as possible, but I was aware that for Sarah the spirit of unborn children still hovered there. She rarely went in. It was slightly unusual that she should have put the letter from my brother on my desk.

It said:

Dear Jonathan,

Please can I have thirty pounds? It's for going to the farm at half-term. I wrote to Mrs Porter, and she'll have me. She says her rates have gone up because of inflation. It can't be for what I eat, as she mostly gives me bread and honey. (No complaints.) Also actually I need some money for riding, in case they won't let me earn any more rides at the stables by mucking out, they were a bit funny about it last time, something to do with the law and exploiting juveniles, I ask you. Roll on sixteen. Anyway, if you could make it fifty quid it would be fine. If I can earn my riding, I'll send the extra twenty back, because if you don't want your heavy dough lifted at this high-class nick you have to have it embedded in concrete. Half term is a week on Friday, early this term, so could you send it pronto?

Did you notice that Clinker did win the Wrap-Up 'chase at Stratford? If you don't want me to be a jockey, how about a tipster?

Hope you are well. And Sarah.

William.

P.S. Can you come for sports day, or for Blah-Blah day? I've got a prize for two plus two, you'll be astounded to hear.

Blah-Blah day was Speech Day, at which the school prizes were handed out. I'd missed every one of William's for one reason or another. I would go this time, I thought. Even William might sometimes feel lonely with no one close to him ever to see him collect his prizes, which he did with some monotony.

William went to public school thanks to a rich godfather who had left him a lot of money on trust 'for his education and vocational training, and good luck to the little brat'. William's trustees regularly paid his fees to the school and maintenance for clothes and etceteras to me, and I passed on cash to William as required. It was an arrangement which worked excellently on many counts, not least that it meant that William didn't have to live with Sarah and me. Her husband's noisy and independent-minded brother was not the child she wanted.

William spent his holidays on farms, and Sarah occasionally said that it was most unfair that William should have more money than I had and that William had been spoiled rotten from the day my mother had discovered she was pregnant again at the age of forty-six. Sarah and William, whenever they met, behaved mostly with wary restraint and only occasionally with direct truth. William had learned very quickly not to tease her, which was his natural inclination, and she had accepted that doling out sarcastic criticism invited a cutting response. They circled each other, in consequence, like exactly matched opponents unwilling to declare open war.

For as long as he could remember William had been irresistibly attracted to horses and had long affirmed his intention to be a jockey, of which Sarah strongly and I mildly disapproved. Security, William said, was a dirty word. There were better things in life than a safe job. Sarah and I, I suppose, were happier with pattern and order and achievement. William increasingly as he grew through thirteen, fourteen, and now fifteen, seemed to hunger for air and speed and uncertainty. It was typical of him that he proposed to spend the week's mid-term break in riding horses instead of working for the eight 'O' Level exams he was due to take immediately afterwards.

I left his letter on my desk to remind myself to send him a cheque and unlocked the cupboard where I kept my guns.

The air-gun that I'd taken to school was little more than a toy and needed no licence or secure storage, but I also owned two Mauser 7.62s, an Enfield No. 4 7.62 and two Anschtz. 22s around which all sorts of regulations bristled, and also an old Lee Enfield. 303 dating back from my early days which was still as lethal as ever if one could raise the ammunition for it. The little I had, I hoarded, mostly out of nostalgia. There were no more. 303 rounds being made, thanks to the army switching to 7.62 mm in the sixties.

I put the air-gun back in its rack, checked that everything was as it should be, and locked the doors on the familiar smell of oil.

The telephone bell rang downstairs and Sarah answered it. I looked at the pile of exercise books which would all have to be read and corrected and handed out to the boys again on Monday, and wondered why I didn't have a fixed-hours job that one didn't have to take home. It wasn't only for the pupils that homework was a drag.

I could hear Sarah's telephone-answering voice, loud and bright.

'Oh. Hallo, Peter. How nice…'

There was a long pause while Peter talked, and then from Sarah a rising wail.

'Oh, no! Oh, my God! Oh, no, Peter…' Horror, disbelief, great distress. A quality, anyway, which took me straight downstairs.

Sarah was sitting stiffly upright on the sofa, holding the telephone at the end of its long cord. 'Oh no,' she was saying wildly. 'It can't be true. It just can't.'

She stard at me unseeingly, neck stretched upwards, listening with even her eyes.

'Well, of course… of course we will… Oh, Peter, yes, of course… Yes, straight away. Yes… yes… we'll be there…' She glanced at her watch. 'Nine o'clock. Perhaps a bit later. Will that do?… All right then… and Peter, give her my love…'

She clattered the receiver down with shaking hands.

'We'll have to go,' she said. 'Peter and Donna-'

'Not tonight,' I protested. 'Whatever it is, not tonight. I'm damned tired and I've got all those books…'

'Yes, at once, we must go at once.'

'It's a hundred miles.'

'I don't care how far it is. We must go now. Now!'

She stood up and practically ran towards the stairs. 'Pack a suitcase,' she said. 'Come on.'

I followed her more slowly, half exasperated, half moved by her urgency. 'Sarah, hold on a minute, what exactly has happened to Peter and Donna?'

She stopped four stairs up, and looked down at me over the bannister. She was already crying, her whole face screwed into agonised disorder.

'Donna.' The words were indistinct. 'Donna…'

'Has she had an accident?'

'No… not…'

'What, then?'

The question served only to increase the tears. 'She… needs… me.'

'You go, then.' I said, feeling relieved at the solution. 'I can manage without the car for a few days. Until Tuesday anyway. Monday I can do by bus.'

'No. Peter wants you, too. He begged me… both of us.'

'Why?' I said, but she was already running again up the stairs, and wouldn't answer.

I won't like it, I thought abruptly. Whatever had happened she knew that I wouldn't like it and that my instincts would all be on the side of non-involvement. I followed her upwards with reluctance and found her already gathering clothes and toothpaste onto the bed.

'Donna has parents, hasn't she?' I said. 'And Peter, too? So if something terrible's happened, why in God's name do they need us?

'They're our friends.' She was rushing about, crying and gulping and dropping things. It was much, much more than ordinary sympathy for any ill that might have befallen Donna: there was a quality of extravagance that both disturbed and antagonised.

'It's beyond the bounds of friendship,'I said,'to go charging off to Norfolk hungry and tired and not knowing why. And I'm not going.'

Sarah didn't seem to hear. The haphazard packing went ahead without pause and the tears developed into a low continuous grizzle.

Where once we had had many friends, we now had just Donna and Peter, notwithstanding that they no longer lived five miles away and played squash on Tuesdays. All our other friends from before and after marriage had either dropped away or coupled and bred; and it was only Donna and Peter who, like us, had produced no children. Only Donna and Peter, who never talked nursery, whose company Sarah could bear.

She and Donna had once been long-time flat-mates. Peter and I, meeting for the first time as their subsequent husbands, had got on together amicably enough for the friendship to survive the Norfolk removal, though it was by now more a matter of birthday cards and telephone calls than of frequent house-to-house visits. We had spent a boating holiday together once on the canals. 'We'll do it again next year,' we'd all said: but we didn't.

'Is Donna ill?' I asked.

'No…'

'I'm not going,' I said.

The keening grizzle stopped. Sarah looked a mess, standing there with vague reddened eyes and a clumsily folded nightdress. She stared down at the pale green froth that she wore against the chill of separate beds and the disastrous news finally burst out of her.

'She was arrested,' she said.

'Donna… arrested?' I was astounded. Donna was mouselike. Organised. Gentle. Apologetic. Anything but likely to be in trouble with the police.

'She's home now,' Sarah said. 'She's… Peter says she's… well… suicidal. He says he can't cope with it.' Her voice was rising. 'He says he needs us… now… this minute. He doesn't know what to do. He says we're the only people who can help.'

She was crying again. Whatever it was, was too much.

'What,' I said slowly, 'has Donna done?'

'She went out shopping,' Sarah said, trying at last to speak clearly. 'And she stole… She stole…'

Well, for heaven's sake,' I said, 'I know it's bloody for them but thousands of people shoplift. So why all this excessive drama?'

'You don't listen,' Sarah shouted. 'Why don't you listen?

'I-'

'She stole a baby.'