The old taboos died hard. 'The brain is part of the body,' I said. 'It's not separate. And it goes wrong sometimes, just like anything else. Like the liver. Or the kidneys. You wouldn't hesitate if it was her kidneys.'
He shook his head, however, and I didn't press it. Everyone had to decide things for themselves. I started the car and wheeled us back to the house, and Peter said as we turned into the short concrete driveway that Donna was unusually happy on their boat, and he would take her away on that.
The weekend dragged on. I tried surreptitiously now and then to mark the inexorable exercise books, but the telephone rang more or less continuously and, as answering it seemed to be the domestic chore I was best fitted for, I slid into a routine of chat. Relatives, friends, press, officials, busybodies, cranks and stinkers, I talked with the lot.
Sarah cared for Donna with extreme tenderness and devotion and was rewarded with wan smiles at first and, gradually, low-toned speech. After that came hysterical tears, a brushing of hair, a tentative meal, a change of clothes, and a growth of invalid behaviour.
When Peter talked to Donna it was in a miserable mixture of love, guilt and reproach, and he found many an opportunity of escaping into the garden. On Sunday morning he went off in his car at pub-opening time and returned late for lunch, and on Sunday afternoon I said with private relief that I would now have to go back home ready for school on Monday.
I'm staying here,' Sarah said. 'Donna needs me. I'll ring my boss and explain. He owes me a week's leave anyway.'
Donna gave her the by now ultra-dependent smile she had developed over the past two days, and Peter nodded with eager agreement.
'OK,' I said slowly, 'but take care.'
'What of?'Sarah said.
I glanced at Peter, who was agitatedly shaking his head. All the same, it seemed sensible to take simple precautions.
'Don't let Donna go out alone,' I said.
Donna blushed furiously and Sarah was instantly angry, and I said helplessly, 'I didn't mean… I meant keep her safe… from people who might want to be spiteful to her.'
Sarah saw the sense in that and calmed down, and a short while later I was ready to leave.
I said goodbye to them in the house because there seemed to be always people in the street staring at the windows with avid eyes, and right at the last minute Peter thrust into my hand three cassettes for playing in the car if I should get bored on the way home. I glanced at them briefly: The King and I, Oklahoma, and West Side Story. Hardly the latest rave, but I thanked him anyway, kissed Sarah for appearances, kissed Donna ditto, and with a regrettable lightening of spirits took myself off.
It was on the last third of the way home, when I tried Oklahoma for company, that I found that what Peter had given me wasn't music at all, but quite something else.
Instead of 'Oh What a Beautiful Morning', I got a loud vibrating scratchy whine interspersed with brief bits of one-note plain whine. Shrugging, I wound the tape forward a bit, and tried again.
Same thing.
I ejected the tape, turned it over, and tried again. Same thing. Tried The King and I and West Side Story. All the same.
I knew that sort of noise from way back. One couldn't forget it, once one knew. The scratchy whine was made by two tones alternating very fast so that the ear could scarcely distinguish the upper from the lower. The plain whine indicated simply an interval with nothing happening. On Oklahoma, fairly typically, the stretches of two-tone were lasting anywhere from ten seconds to three minutes.
I was listening to the noise a computer produced when its programs were recorded onto ordinary cassette tape.
Cassettes were convenient and widely used, especially with smaller computers. One could store a whole host of different programs on casette tapes, and simply pick out whichever was needed, and use it: but the cassettes were still, all the same, just ordinary cassettes, and if one played the tape straightforwardly in the normal way on a cassette player, as I had done, one heard the vibrating whine.
Peter had given me three sixty-minute tapes of computer programs: and it wasn't so very difficult to guess what those programs would be about.
I wondered why he had given them to me in such an indirect way. I wondered, in fact, why he had given them to me at all. With a mental shrug I shovelled the tapes and their misleading boxes onto the glove shelf and switched on the radio instead.
School on Monday was a holiday after the green-house emotions in Norfolk, and Louisa-the-technician's problems seemed moths' wings beside Donna's.
On Monday evening, while I was watching my own choice on the television and eating cornflakes and cream with my feet on the coffee table, Peter telephoned.
'How's Donna?' I said.
'I don't know where she'd be without Sarah.'
'And you?'
'Oh, pretty fair. Look, Jonathan, did you play any of those tapes?' His voice sounded tentative and half apologetic.
'A bit of all of them,' I said.
'Oh. Well, I expect you'll know what they are?'
'Your horse-handicapping programs?'
'Yes… er… Will you keep them for me for now?' He gave me no chance to answer and rushed on, 'You see, we're hoping to go off to the boat straight after the hearing on Friday. Well, we do have to believe Donna will get probation, even the nastiest of those officials said it would be so in such a case, but obviously she'll be terribly upset with having to go to court and everything and so we'll go away as soon as we can, and I didn't like the thought of leaving those cassettes lying around in the office, which they were, so I went over to fetch them yesterday morning, so I could give them to you. I mean, I didn't really think it out. I could have put them in the bank, or anywhere. I suppose what I really wanted was to get those tapes right out of my life so that if those two brutes carne back asking for the programs I'd be able to say I hadn't got them and that they'd have to get them from the person I made them for.'
It occurred to me not for the first time that for a computer programmer Peter was no great shakes as a logical thinker, but maybe the circumstances were jamming the circuits.
'Have you heard from those men again?' I asked.
'No, thank God.'
'They probably haven't found out yet.'
'Thanks very much,' he said bitterly.
'I'll keep the tapes safe,' I said. 'As long as you like.'
'Probably nothing else will happen. After all, I haven't done anything illegal. Or even faintly wrong.'
The 'if-we-don't-look-at-the-monster-he'll-go-away' syndrome, I thought. But maybe he was right.
'Why didn't you tell me what you were giving me?' I enquired. 'Why The King and I dressing, and all that?'
'What?' His voice sounded almost puzzled, and then cleared to understanding, 'Oh, it was just that when I got home from the office, you were all sitting down to lunch, and I didn't get a single chance to catch you away from the girls, and I didn't want to have to start explaining in front of them, so I just shoved them into those cases to give to you.'
The faintest twitch of unease crossed my mind, but I smothered it. Peter's world since Donna took the baby had hardly been one of general common sense and normal behaviour. He had acted pretty well, all in all, for someome hammered from all directions at once, and over the weekend I had felt an increase of respect for him, quite apart from liking.
'If you want to play those programs,' he said, 'you'll need a Grantley computer.'
'I don't suppose…' I began.
'They might amuse William. He's mad on racing, isn't he?'
'Yes, he is.'
