Dangerous Thoughts Read Free

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 answerthem. 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,