Dangerous Thoughts Read Free Page B

since. Edwin had been really excited over it, and so had I — though it had been frustrating that he’d been able to tell me so very little about it.
    “It’s an out-and-out hush-hush thing, you see, Clare,” he’d boasted, his eyes bright and boyish with importance and intrigue, just as they’d been all those years ago, in the early stages of his career, when things were still on the up-and-up for him, or at least hadn’t started on the down-and-down. I remembered how I’d once loved that look, in the days before I’d realised how consistently it was a prelude to some sort of disaster or disappointment; to some sort of unfairness; to some touchy git having taken umbrage at some perfectly innocent remark of his.
    But one never learns; not really. There is something inside one that defies evidence, and which has, I’ll swear, been implanted by evolution for that very purpose; as a vital survival mechanismto keep one going when there is nowhere to go; when all the observable evidence says Stop.
    Something like that. How else can I explain how my heart still leaped (though a trifle wearily) in response to this long-suspect look? This time it’s going to be all right, I found myself thinking, my evidence-defying mechanisms springing into automatic action, so that I found myself responding as if for the first time ever to this doomed euphoria.
    “If I bring it off — and I will bring it off, I know I will — it’ll be the biggest scoop of the season. How long …? As long as it takes, is all I can tell you. I’m sorry, Clare, I’d tell you more if I could, but … well … there’s top-level stuff involved. Just don’t ask me about it.”
    I hadn’t asked him about it, actually; I’m not such a fool, but I knew he liked to feel as if I had, so I didn’t argue. I didn’t argue about anything , in fact, during that final day or two — not even the fact that we should have started for the airport a good hour earlier than we did, to allow for the hold-up of traffic. Edwin loved starting late for things, working himself up, cursing the lumbering lines of vehicles ahead, hurling shafts of vindictive will-power at the traffic lights which only resulted (it seemed to me) in making the green one red. He loved the sense of battling through, of getting there by the skin of his teeth — my teeth on this occasion, since I was the one driving — and then, once at the airport, he would create a tight cocoon of urgency around him, pushing through queues, grabbing at luggage-trolleys, barking questions at passing airline staff, glaring suspiciously at announcement boards, checking them against his watch, and finally racing and pushing to beat the Last Call to Gate Something-or-other. He loved the feeling of having just made it, of having come off best in a battle with Time itself; of having caught the plane just before it managed to take off without him. A tycoonish, film star kind of a feeling, I suppose.
    Of course, these days, more often than not, the ploy was frustrated by the plane being two or three hours late: and difficultthough it may be for any of us to get through these frustrating hours, it is even more difficult to hurry through them, which is what Edwin was always trying to do.
    Can you wonder, then, that I was almost dancing towards the car park after seeing him off? Singing, too, as I wove my way among the snarls of traffic in blessed solitude — singing in my heart, and even aloud occasionally, as the sheer joy of Edwin not being there overcame me. Not there now, and not for days and days to come — a fortnight at least, from the look of things. A whole fortnight of not being nagged and criticised; of being able to do the hoovering without complaints about the bloody noise; of being able to not do the hoovering without remarks about crumbs on the carpet and the place looking like a pigsty!
    And Jason, too, able to come and go at will, to bring friends in or not bring friends in … to invite them to