Twice Shy Read online

  “Yes, he is.”

  “I spent so much time on them. I’d really like to know how they work out in practice. I mean, from someone who knows horses.”

  “All right,” I said. But Grantley computers weren’t scattered freely around the landscape, and William had his exams ahead, so the prospect of actually using the programs seemed a long way off.

  “I wish you were still here,” he said. “All the telephone calls, they’re really getting me down. And did you have any of those poisonous abusive beastly voices spitting out hate against Donna, when you were answering?”

  “Yes, several.”

  “But they’ve never even met her.”

  “They’re unbalanced. Just don’t listen.”

  “What did you say to them?”

  “I told them to take their problems to a doctor.”

  There was a slightly uncomfortable pause, then he said explosively, “I wish to God Donna had gone to a doctor.” A gulp. “I didn’t even know . . . I mean, I knew she’d wanted children, but I thought, well, we couldn’t have them, so that was that. I never dreamed . . . I mean, she’s always so quiet and wouldn’t hurt a fly. She never showed any signs . . . We’re pretty fond of each other, you know. Or at least I thought—”

  “Peter, stop it.”

  “Yes.” A pause. “Of course, you’re right. But it’s difficult to think of anything else.”

  We talked a bit more, but only covering the same old ground, and we disconnected with me feeling that somehow I could have done more for him than I had.

  Two evenings later he went down to the river to work on his two-berth cabin cruiser, filling its tanks with water and fuel, installing new cooking-gas cylinders and checking that everything was in working order for his trip with Donna.

  He had been telling me earlier that he was afraid the ship’s battery was wearing out and that if he didn’t get a new one they would run it down flat with their lights at night and in the morning find themselves unable to start the engine. It had happened once before, he said.

  He wanted to check that the battery still had enough life in it.

  It had.

  When he raised the first spark, the rear half of the boat exploded.

  3

  Sarah told me.

  Sarah on the telephone with the stark over-controlled voice of exhaustion.

  “They think it was gas, or petrol vapor. They don’t know yet.”

  “Peter . . .”

  “He’s dead,” she said. “There were people around. They saw him moving . . . with his clothes on fire. He went over the side into the water, but when they got him out—” A sudden silence, then, slowly, “We weren’t there. Thank God Donna and I weren’t there.”

  I felt shaky and slightly sick. “Do you want me to come?” I said.

  “No. What time is it?”

  “Eleven.” I had undressed, in fact, to go to bed.

  “Donna’s asleep. Knockout drops.”

  “And how . . . is she?”

  “Christ, how would you expect?” Sarah seldom spoke in that way: a true measure of the general awfulness. “And Friday,” she said. “The day after tomorrow. She’s due in court.”

  “They’ll be kind to her.”

  “There’s already been one call, just now, with some beastly woman telling me it served her right.”

  “I’d better come,” I said.

  “You can’t. There’s school. No, don’t worry. I can cope. The doctor at least said he’d keep Donna heavily sedated for several days.”

  “Let me know, then, if I can help.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Good night, now. I’m going to bed. There’s a lot to do tomorrow. Good night.”

  I lay long awake in bed and thought of Peter and the unfairness of death: and in the morning I went to school and found him flicking in and out of my mind all day.

  Driving home I saw that his cassettes were still lying in a jumble on the dashboard. Once parked in the garage I put the tapes back into their boxes, slipped them in my jacket pocket, and carried my usual burden of books indoors.

  The telephone rang almost at once, but it was not Sarah, which was my first thought, but William.

  “Did you send my check?” he said.

  “Hell, I forgot.” I told him why, and he allowed that forgetting in such circs could be overlooked.

  “I’ll write it straight away, and send it direct to the farm.”

  “OK. Look, I’m sorry about Peter. He seemed a nice guy, that time we met.”

  “Yes.” I told William about the computer tapes, and about Peter wanting his opinion on them.

  “Bit late now.”

  “But you still might find them interesting.”

  “Yeah,” he said without much enthusiasm. “Probably some nutty betting system. There’s a computer here somewhere in the math department. I’ll ask what sort it is. And look, how would it grab you if I didn’t go to university?”

  “Badly.”

  “Yeah. I was afraid so. Anyway, work on it, big brother. There’s been a lot of guff going on this term about choosing a career, but I reckon it’s the career that chooses you. I’m going to be a jockey. I can’t help it.”

  We said goodbye and I put the receiver down thinking that it wasn’t much good fighting to dissuade someone who at fifteen already felt that a vocation had him by the scruff of the neck.

  He was slim and light: past puberty but still physically a boy, with the growth into man’s stature just ahead. Perhaps nature, I thought hopefully, would take him to my height of six feet and break his heart.

  Sarah rang almost immediately afterward, speaking crisply with her dentist’s-assistant voice. The shock had gone, and the exhaustion. She spoke to me with edgy bossiness, a leftover, I guessed, from a very demanding day.

  “It seems that Peter should have been more careful,” she said. “Everyone who owns a boat with an inboard engine is repeatedly told not to start up until they are sure that no gas or petrol or petrol vapor has accumulated in the bilge. Boats blow up every year. He must have known. You wouldn’t think he would be so stupid.”

  I said mildly, “He had a great deal else on his mind.”

  “I suppose he had, but all the same everyone says—”

  If you could blame a man for his own death, I thought, it diminished the chore of sympathy. “It was his own fault . . .” I could hear the sharp voice of my aunt over the death of her neighbor. “He shouldn’t have gone out with that cold.”

  “The insurance company,” I said to Sarah, “may be trying to wriggle out of paying all they might.”

  “What?”

  “Putting the blame onto the victim is a well-known ploy.”

  “But he should have been more careful.”

  “Oh, sure. But for Donna’s sake, I wouldn’t go around saying so.”

  There was a silence which came across as resentful. Then she said, “Donna wanted me to tell you . . . she’d rather you didn’t come here this weekend. She says she could bear things better if she’s alone with me.”

  “And you agree?”

  “Well, yes, frankly, I do.”

  “OK, then.”

  “You don’t mind?” She sounded surprised.

  “No. I’m sure she’s right. She relies on you.” And too much, I thought. “Is she still drugged?”

  “Sedated.” The word was a reproof.

  “Sedated, then?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And for the court hearing tomorrow?” I asked.

  “Tranquilizers,” Sarah said decisively. “Sleeping pills after.”

  “Good luck with it.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  She disconnected almost brusquely, leaving me with the easement of having been let off an unpleasant task. Once upon a time, I supposed, we would have clung together to help Donna. At the beginning our reactions would have been truer, less complicated, less distorted by our own depressions. I mourned for the dead days, but undoubtedly I was
pleased not to be spending the weekend with my wife.

  On the Friday I went to school still with the computer tapes in my jacket pocket, and, feeling that I owed it to Peter at least to try to play them, sought out one of the math masters in the common room. Ted Pitts, short-sighted, clear-headed, bilingual in English and algebra.

  “That computer you’ve got tucked away somewhere in a cubbyhole in the math department,” I said. “It’s your special baby, isn’t it?”

  “We all use it. We teach the kids.”

  “But it’s you who plays it like Beethoven while the rest are still at chopsticks?”

  He enjoyed the compliment in his quiet way. “Maybe,” he said.

  “Could you tell me what make it is?” I asked.

  “Sure. It’s a Harris.”

  “I suppose,” I said unhopefully, “that you couldn’t run a tape on it that was recorded on a Grantley?”

  “It depends,” he said. He was earnest and thoughtful, twenty-six, short on humor but full of good intentions and ideals of fair play. He suffered greatly under the sourly detestable Jenkins who was head of the math department and extracted from his assistants the reverential attitude he never got from me.

  “The Harris has no language built into it,” Ted said. “You can feed it any computer language, FORTRAN, COBOL, ALGOL, Z-80, BASIC, you name it, the Harris will take it. Then you can run any programs written in those languages. But the Grantley is a smaller affair which comes all ready preprogramed with its own form of BASIC. If you had a Grantley BASIC language tape, you could feed it into our Harris’s memory, and then you could run Grantley BASIC programs.” He paused. “Er . . . is that clear?”

  “Sort of.” I reflected. “How difficult would it be to get a Grantley BASIC language tape?”

  “Don’t know. Best to write to the firm direct. They might send you one. And they might not.”

  “Why might they not?”

  He shrugged. “They might say you’d have to buy one of their computers.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” I said.

  “Yeah. Well, see, these computer firms are very awkward. All the smaller personal computers use BASIC, because it’s the easiest language and also one of the best. But the firms making them all build in their own variations, so that if you record your programs from their machines, you can’t run them on anyone else’s. That keeps you faithful to them in the future, because if you change to another make, all your tapes will be useless.”

  “What a bore,” I said.

  He nodded. “Profits getting the better of common sense.”

  “Like all those infuriatingly incompatible video recorders.”

  “Exactly. But you’d think the computer firms would have more sense. They may hang on to their own customers by force, but they’re sure as Hades not going to persuade anyone else to switch.”

  “Thanks anyway,” I said.

  “You’re welcome.” He hesitated. “Do you actually have a tape that you want to use?”

  “Yes.” I fished in my pocket and produced Oklahoma! “This one and two others. Don’t be misled by the packaging. It’s got computer noise all right on the tape.”

  “Were they recorded by an expert or an amateur?”

  “An expert. Does it make any difference?”

  “Sometimes.”

  I explained about Peter’s making the tapes for a client who had a Grantley, and I added that the customer wouldn’t let Peter try out the programs on the machine they were designed to run on.

  “Oh, really?” Ted Pitts seemed happy with the news. “In that case, if he was a conscientious and careful chap, it’s just possible that he recorded the machine language itself on the first of the tapes. TOMs can be very touchy. He might have thought it would be safer.”

  “You’ve lost me,” I said. “What are TOMs?”

  “Computers.” He grinned. “Stands for Totally Obedient Moron.”

  “You’ve made a joke,” I said disbelievingly.

  “Not mine, though.”

  “So why should it be safer?”

  He looked at me reproachfully. “I thought you knew more about computers than you appear to.”

  “It’s ten years at least since I knew more. I’ve forgotten and they’ve changed.”

  “It would be safer,” he said patiently, “because if the client rang up and complained that the program wouldn’t run, your friend could tell them how to stuff into their computer a brand-new version of its own language, and then your friend’s programs would run from that. Mind you,” he added judiciously, “you’d use up an awful lot of computer space putting the language in. You might not have much room for the actual programs.”

  He looked at my expression and sighed.

  “OK,” he said. “Suppose a Grantley has a 32K store, which is a pretty normal size. That means it has about forty-nine thousand store-slots, of which probably the first seventeen thousand are used in providing the right circuits to function as BASIC. That would leave you about thirty-two thousand store-slots for punching in your programs. Right?”

  I nodded. “I’ll take it on trust.”

  “But then if you feed in the language all over again it would take another seventeen thousand store-slots, which would leave you with under fifteen thousand store-slots to work with. And as you need one store-slot for every letter you type, and one for every number, and one for every space, and comma, and bracket, you wouldn’t be able to do a great deal before all the store-slots were used and the whole thing was full up. And at that point the computer would stop working.” He smiled. “So many people think computers are bottomless pits. They’re more like bean bags. Once they’re full you have to empty the beans out before you can start to fill them again.”

  “Is that what you teach the kids?”

  He looked slightly confused. “Er . . . yes. Same words. One gets into a rut.”

  The bell rang for afternoon registration and he stretched out his hand for the tape. “I could try that,” he said, “if you like.”

  “Yes. If it isn’t an awful bother.”

  He shook his head encouragingly, and I gave him The King and I and West Side Story for good measure.

  “Can’t promise it will be today,” he said. “I’ve got classes all afternoon and Jenkins wants to see me at four.” He grimaced. “Jenkins. Why can’t we call him Ralph and be done with it.”

  “There’s no hurry,” I said, “with the tapes.”

  Donna got her probation.

  Sarah reported, again sounding tired, that even the baby’s mother had quieted down because of Peter’s being killed, and Donna had gently wept in court, and even some of the policemen had been fatherly.

  “How is she?” I said.

  “Miserable. It’s just hitting her, I think, that Peter’s really gone.” Her voice sounded protective.

  “No more suicide?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so, but the poor darling is so vulnerable. So easily hurt. She says it’s like living without skin.”

  “Have you enough money?” I said.

  “That’s just like you!” she exclaimed. “Always so damned practical.”

  “But—”

  “I’ve got my bank card.”

  I hadn’t wanted to wallow too long in Donna’s emotions and it had irritated her. We both knew it. We knew each other too well.

  “Don’t let her wear you out,” I said.

  Her voice came back still sharply, “I’m perfectly all right. There’s no question of wearing me out. I’m staying here for a week or two longer at least. Until after the inquest and the funeral. And after that, if Donna needs me. I’ve told my boss, and he understands.”

  I wondered fleetingly whether I might not become too fond of living alone if she were away a whole month. I said, “I’d like to be there at the funeral.”

  “Yes. Well, I’ll let you know.”

  I got a tart and untender goodnight: but then my own to her hadn’t been loving. We wouldn’t be able to go on, I thoug
ht, if ever the politeness crumbled.

  The building had long been uninhabited, and we were only a short step from demolition.

  On Saturday I put the Mausers and the Enfield No. 4 in the car and drove to Bisley and let off a lot of bullets over the Surrey ranges.

  During the past few months my visits there had become less constant, partly, of course, because there was no delight in the winter in pressing one’s stomach to the cold earth, but mostly because my intense love of the sport seemed to be waning.

  I had been a member of the British rifle team for several years but now never wore any of the badges to prove it. I kept quiet in the bar after shooting and listened to others analyze their performances and spill the excitement out of their systems. I didn’t like talking of my own scores, present or past.

  A few years back I had taken the sideways jump of entering for the Olympics, which was a competition for individuals and quite different from my normal pursuits. Even the guns were different (at that time all small bore) and all the distances the same (300 meters). It was a world dominated by the Swiss, but I had shot luckily and well in the event and had finished high for a Briton in the placings. It had been marvelous. The day of a lifetime; but it had faded into memory, grown fuzzy with time passing.

  In the British team, which competed mostly against the old Commonwealth countries and often won, one shot 7.62mm guns at varying distances, 300, 500, 600, 900, and 1,000 yards. I had always taken immense delight in accuracy, in judging wind velocity and air temperature and getting the climatic variables exactly right. But now, both internally and externally, the point of such skill was fading.

  The smooth elegant Mausers that I cherished were already within sight of being obsolete. Only long-distance assassins, these days, seemed to need totally accurate rifles, and they used telescopic sights, which were banned and anathema to target shooters. Modern armies tended to spray out bullets regardless. None of the army rifles shot absolutely straight, and in addition, every advance in effective killing-power was a loss to aesthetics. The marksman’s special skill was drifting toward sport, as archery had, as swordplay had, as throwing the javelin and the hammer had; the commonplace weapon of one age becoming the Olympic medal of the next.