instructed Bunface must have known that the police would take no action. Was the complaint therefore in the nature of a feint, a vicious, probing dab in the air, such as a tiger will sometimes make with its paw?
I now thought it was. But there was more to it than that.
After a couple of gins and tonic and a sandwich for lunch I felt better, for luckily I have a sectionalised mind, and my thoughts were now on Juliet and her arrival. Indeed, I was cheerful and excited as I drove to London Airport.
But I forgot that as a secretary to the Minister she might be carrying a spare briefcase or two, and travelling with him, all the way, right back to the Ministry, with the rest of the cohort of civil servants who have to accompany Ministers when they move around these days.
So my trip to the airport was wasted. All I could do was wave, and follow in my car at a discreet distance. However, I picked her up in Whitehall in the end, and although she was deadly tired, the evening proceeded inexorably to its conclusion, as planned in all its details by Stanley Bristow.
For the first part of the evening my heart bled for poor little Juliet. Her father plied her with questions in his snuffly voice, and her mother posed supplementary questions in the energetic, bustling tones of a television interviewer. If she had answered them all, the entire confidential secrets of the Washington conferences would have been round the London clubs, and many other places, too, within forty-eight hours. But they were no match for her, tired though she was.
In the end, Stanley Bristow snuffled his way to a halt, with a plaintive protest that she never told them anything. By that time, I don’t think Juliet was even listening properly. She was picking at her fish in the murky candle light of the Charlotte Street restaurant. Once or twice she looked up and caught my eye, and gave one of her secretive little half-smiles, and then looked down again.
Stanley had bought champagne to celebrate her return. He was never mean with drinks. By the middle of the meal she looked a little better. So far, I had said nothing about the woman in the train from Brighton, the message, the police visit, or the telephone call.
Now I thought I might as well do so. I was banking on a lighthearted reaction from Stanley, mellow with drink. Lighthearted it certainly was. I hoped it would set the tone for the women. He gave one of the muffled guffaws which served him for a laugh.
“Somebody’s pulling your leg, old boy.”
“Probably.”
“Of course they are, old boy!”
“Why?”
“Why? I don’t know why, old boy. Why does anybody play a practical joke. Damn silly, if you ask me, old boy.”
I nodded.
“You’re probably right. It’s a bit elaborate, it’s spread over a wide area, and I don’t see the point of it, but-”
“There never is much point in a practical joke, old boy.”
I felt that at any moment he was going to tell me stories of practical jokers who had dug up holes in main thoroughfares, of undergraduates who had dressed up as visiting Indian potentates and inspected guards of honour, and other tales from the hoary old repertoire of practical jokers.
“There’s no end to some people’s childishness,” said Elaine Bristow brightly. “Even Stanley, when we were first married, used to tinker about with people’s cars when they came to dinner, and remove some bit of the engine, and then while they were ringing up for help he used to sneak out and put it back again, didn’t you Stanley?”
“I expect you’re both right,” I said quickly. “I expect it’s something like that.”
I felt instinctively that I had to tell them about it, in case it went on. I suppose I knew instinctively that it would go on. Now I had told them. Now I could change the subject.
“What’s going to win the November Handicap?” I asked.
He looked pleased. He began to tell me, at some length, going through the merits of the main equine contenders one by one, almost leg by leg. I lit a cigarette and settled back, nodding from time to time. His wife sat back, too, bored but resigned.
Juliet was fiddling about with her coffee cup. Her skin and dark hair looked paler and more exciting, in the subdued lighting of even that mediocre Soho restaurant. She wasn’t wearing her glasses.
Once or twice she looked at me without moving her head, moving her eyes only, using the shy secretive glance which hitherto had always excited me. Tonight her glance didn’t excite me. Her eyes were worried. She had caught my true mood.
Juliet said she would go straight to bed when we got back to her parents’ flat. The fatigue caused by the work of the Washington conference and the Atlantic flight had finally caught up with her. I would have been content to take the taxi on, back to my own flat, but Stanley insisted that I should come in for a final drink and paid off the driver.
One of Juliet’s two pieces of luggage still stood in the hall, and I followed her along the passage, carrying it for her. In her bedroom, I put it down, and saw she was staggering with exhaustion and although we had hardly had a moment to ourselves since her return, I just murmured a few words and kissed her, and gave her a warm hug, and said I would see her at lunchtime next day, and made for the bedroom door.
But as I drew away from her, she caught hold of me and I turned round. I thought she wanted me to kiss her again, and was rather touched, and I did, and she didn’t object, but it wasn’t why she had detained me. After I had kissed her again, she looked at me, and then away, in the withdrawn manner peculiar to her, and said quietly:
“You are worried. I mean, you really are a bit, aren’t you?”
“No, not really. No, I’m not worried. It’s a bit bewildering, and it’s all rather childish and melodramatic, and I don’t understand why they don’t want me to go on with this story, whoever they are. But I’m not worried, because I don’t see what there is to be worried about.”
“Isn’t that a reason to be worried?”
I laughed and said:
“Now don’t you try and scare me, darling.”
“I’m not trying to scare you.”
“Good.”
“It’s just that-these times we live in.”
“What about these times?”
“One feels there’s so much evil around one. So much hidden danger. You know? Bits and pieces appear in the papers. Killings and kidnappings, and inexplicable scandals, and treachery, and cold, cold hate, and those are only the bits you see, you never know where it’s going to erupt next, or why it happens.”
“There always have been these things.”
Suddenly she started to cry. I put my arm round her. I had never seen her cry before and I didn’t like it.
“Come along, darling, pop into bed, and forget these things.”
“How can I forget them, when they may be touching you and me? Clawing at what may be our only chance of happiness in this life, threatening our marriage.”
She dabbed her eyes with the handkerchief I offered her.
“Why not drop it, darling?” she said.
“Drop what?”
“Drop the story of Lucy Dawson.”
I stared at her, feeling the obstinacy which has done me so much good and harm in life almost literally congealing my mind.
“Good God, whose side are you on?” I muttered.
She began to sob in earnest now.
“Whose side are you on?” I said again.
“Yours, darling. Ours,” she whispered. “I just want to be happy, that’s all.”
“If I knew the reason why they want me to drop it, I might-or I might not. But I don’t. So I won’t.”
She turned away and murmured, “Men, men.”
