Twice Shy Read online

  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 it 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 forever if she herself had been fulfilled.

  I dare say it was a marriage like many another. We never quarreled. 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.

  “Hallo,” I said.

  “Hallo . . . 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 cole slaw. 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 real 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. Can’t wait to be sixteen and legally earn what I like. 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 year, 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 private 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 supposed, 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 midterm break in riding horses instead of working for the eight O level exams he was due to take immediately afterward.

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

  The air gun that I’d taken to school was little more than a toy and needed no license or secure storage, but I also owned two Mauser 7.62’s, an Enfield No. 4 7.62 and two Anschütz .22’s, around which all sorts of regulations bristled, and also an old Lee Enfield .303, dating back from my early days and 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’s switching to 7.62mm 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 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 Sar
ah’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 stared at me unseeingly, neck stretched upward, 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 damn 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 toward 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 agonized 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 get to school 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 noninvolvement. I followed her upward 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 antagonized.

  “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. Organized. 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.”

  2

  We went to Norwich.

  Sarah had been right. I didn’t like the reason for our journey. I felt a severe aversion to being dragged into a highly charged emotional situation where nothing constructive could possibly be done. My feelings of friendship toward Peter and Donna were nowhere near strong enough. For Peter, perhaps. For Donna, definitely not.

  All the same, when I thought of the tremendous forces working on that poor girl to impel her to such an action it occurred to me that perhaps the unseen universe didn’t stop at the sort of electromagnetics that I taught. Every living cell, after all, generated electric charges: especially brain cells. If I put baby-snatching on a par with an electric storm, I could be happier with it.

  Sarah sat silently beside me for most of the way, recovering, readjusting, preparing. She said only once what must have been in both of our minds.

  “It could have been me.”

  “No,” I said.

  “You don’t know . . . what it’s like.”

  There was no answer. Short of having been born female and barren, there was no way of knowing. I had been told about five hundred times over the years in various tones from anguish to spite that I didn’t know what it was like, and there was no more answer now than there had been the first time.

  The long, lingering May evening made the driving easier than usual, although going northward out of London in the Friday night exodus was always a beast of a journey.

  At the far, far end of it lay the neat new boxlike house with its big featureless net-curtained windows and its tidy oblongs of grass. One bright house in a street of others much the same. One proud statement that Peter had reached a certain salary level and still aspired to future improvement. A place and a way of life that I understood and saw no harm in: where William would suffocate.

  The turmoil behind the uninformative net curtains was much as expected in some ways and much worse in others.

  The usually meticulously tidy interior was in disarray, with unwashed cups and mugs making wet rings on every surface and clothes and papers scattered around. The trail, I came to realize, left by the in-and-out tramp of officialdom over the past two days.

  Peter greeted us with gaunt eyes and the hushed voice of a death in the family; and probably for him and Donna what had happened was literally hurting them worse than a death. Donna herself sat in a silent huddle at one end of the big green sofa in their sitting room and made no attempt to respond to Sarah when she rushed to her side and put her arms around her in almost a frenzy of affection.

  Peter said helplessly, “She won’
t talk . . . or eat ...”

  “Or go to the bathroom?”

  “What?”

  Sarah looked up at me with furious reproach, but I said mildly, “If she goes off to the bathroom when she feels the need, it’s surely a good sign. It’s such a normal act.”

  “Well, yes,” Peter said limply. “She does.”

  “Good, then.”

  Sarah clearly thought that this was another prime example of what she called my general heartlessness, but I had meant only to reassure. I asked Peter what exactly had taken place, and as he wouldn’t tell me in front of Donna herself, we removed to the kitchen.

  In there, too, the police and medics and court officials and social workers had made the coffee and left the dishes. Peter seemed not to see the mess that in past times would have set both him and Donna busily wiping up. We sat at the table with the last remnants of daytime fading to dusk, and in that gentle light he slowly unlocked the horrors.

  It was on the previous morning, he said, that Donna had taken the baby from its pram and driven off with it in her car. She had driven seventy-odd miles northeast to the coast, and had at some point abandoned the car with the baby inside it, and had walked off along the beach.

  The car and the baby had been traced and found within hours, and Donna herself had been discovered sitting on the sand in pouring rain, speechless and stunned.

  The police had arrested her, taken her to the station for a night in the cells, and paraded her before a magistrate in the morning. The bench had called for psychiatric reports, set a date for a hearing a week ahead and, despite protests from the baby’s mother, set Donna free. Everyone had assured Peter she would only be put on probation, but he still shuddered from their appalling future of ignominy via the press and the neighborhood.

  After a pause, and thinking of Donna’s trancelike stare, I said, “You told Sarah she was suicidal.”

  He nodded miserably. “This afternoon I wanted to warm her. To put her to bed. I ran the bath for her.” It was a while before he could go on. It seemed that the suicide attempt had been in deadly earnest: he had stopped her on the instant before she plunged herself and her switched-on hair-drier into the water. “And she still had all her clothes on,” he said.