Dangerous Thoughts Read Free Page A

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 aboutmoney — 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