The Meddlers (30 page)

He smiled again, with the same relaxed friendliness, and she looked at the redness of his cheek and thought confusedly, Why not? I’ve got to talk to someone, I told George that, and he wouldn’t understand. Why not?

“Let me observe the social niceties. My name is Michael Bridges. I am the science writer for the
Echo
and have rather more integrity than most of my colleagues—which isn’t difficult, I’ll admit. I have my B.Sc., albeit from an inferior university, and you will therefore find me less irritating to talk to than people with no scientific jargon at their disposal. I enjoy Dr. Briant’s cooperation—as you saw for yourself, I was seeing some of his early filmed material—which should reassure you. Do you need any other recommendations? Any further assurances that I am eminently respectable, and can be trusted not to rake too deeply?”

“Why do you want to talk to me? To write up some revolting sentimental claptrap?”

He produced a pained expression. “Oh, no, no! I wouldn’t be able to write sentimental claptrap if I tried from now till the millennium
arrived. Confidentially, I’m not a very good journalist. Really good ones can write anything, but me, I’m limited. Just straight science, that’s all I’m good for.”

“Bridges, you say? I think I might have seen some of your work. It’s not bad, I suppose—”

“Do you have to be so grudging? Ah, well. At least you’ll admit it wasn’t too… mucky?”

“Oh, stop that. And anyway, most journalists are—”

“Muckrakers? How do you know? I might as well suggest all scientists are ice cold fish who don’t give a damn for anything but their own work, and can’t see anything beyond it. That scientists are unfeeling—”

“I am such a scientist, and it would be a much better thing for science if all of them were like me.”

“Unfeeling, are you? Really? Now why are you at such pains to tell me that? I wouldn’t have thought—”

“If you wouldn’t have, then don’t do so now. I asked you, why do you want to talk to me? If you want scientific information about this project, you’d be better occupied going back to your films.”

“Ah, but you can give me better news. You’re here now, and those films will wait. I suspect you won’t. What do I want? That’s simple. I’d like to discuss”—he looked at her closely and then said slowly—“I’d like to discuss your own work, and your plans for your scientific future. Not personal future, I promise you. But at the press conference Dr. Briant said you were returning to your own biological work. And as I said before, I’d also be most interested to hear your views of the Briant project and its possible applications. Dr. Briant’s views are interesting, but those of his peers—other scientists like yourself—are equally as important.”

She laughed suddenly. “You really are too transparent for words. Do you think that suggesting I’m Dr. Briant’s peer will so flatter me that I’ll be putty in your hands? Come, Mr. Bridges, I’m not that malleable.”

“Touché.” He laughed too and turned toward the gate, taking her elbow in a light grasp to urge her along with him. “Really, talking to you will be as much pleasure as it will be work. Coffee, then?”

“Just a moment, for heaven’s sake. Are you always so precipitate? What about the message I asked you to deliver?”

“I’ll deliver it when I go back. I won’t keep you more than an hour or so! Anyway, he’ll get it, won’t he, when he sees you aren’t there? What was it Isaacs was to get for you?”

“That’s the first question I refuse to answer.”

“Oh, all right. It’s not a very important one, anyway. Shall we go then? Good. What’s your name, by the way?”

“Lawton.”

“What Lawton?”

“Mmm? Oh, my first name. Is that relevant?”

“No. What Lawton?”

“Miss.”

“Try again.”

“Oh, Miriam, damn you.”

“Excellent. Miriam. And I’m Mike. Now, coffee.”

  Marjorie’s head was aching abominably as she left the hospital, making her eyes feel hot and sandy, and she drove home with a recklessness that caused a narrow escape from a crash. I wish it had happened, she thought viciously as she wrenched the car clear of the oncoming lorry and just slid in under the bonnet of the furiously hooting van she was overtaking. Then he’d be sorry. And immediately she thought, Like hell. It would be just what would suit him, having me dead.

By the time she reached home and screeched to a stop in the narrow driveway, she had mentally reviewed her own violent death, attended the inquest and her funeral, observed George’s remarriage to that cow of a woman, Ian’s suicide because of it all, and George’s own remorseful death to finish it off. Her eyes were wet with self-pity as well as aching when she flung into the house.

Ian was sprawled in the untidy sitting room when she came in, and he looked up at her lazily as she threw her bag onto the floor and then collapsed on the sofa.

“Well? Did he confess all? And did you find out where the lolly is coming from? And above all, my love, is he going to shell out?”

“He’s a bastard. A complete bastard. Couldn’t care less about
anything, anything at all, apart from that goddamned work of his. Didn’t deny a thing—not a bloody thing! Do you know what he said? It was as much my fault as his! As much my fault! They make me sick, sick, do you hear me? Men like him. All I was good for was sex, that’s all, and because I wasn’t available, it was my fault! As if—”

“
Tous les chats sont gris
—hmm? Well, there’s nothing new in that, darling, is there? Come on, Rusty! You’ve been around long enough to know that! Surely you realized he’d shack up with some-one, under the circumstances? What did you expect?”

He looked up at her with a sharply avid look on his face. “What sort of man is he, anyway, Rusty? Randy type? I’ve often wondered.”

“Ian, don’t be coarse! It’s nothing to do with you.”

He shrugged. “Well, you started the subject. Anyway, the important thing is, what about the folding stuff, the lettuce, the lolly? As far as I’m concerned, that’s all that matters—hey, it’s a bit early for that, isn’t it?”

She refilled the glass she had already emptied in one swift gulp and came back to the sofa from the sideboard, holding it between both hands.

“I need it,” she said. “Christ, I do. Here I am, with you and now Hilary to worry about, all on my own, and there he is, wrapped up in his bloody project with that woman falling flat on her back for him.”

“Who’s being coarse now? Listen, Rusty, just cool it, will you? Make yourself some coffee—it’ll do you more good than gin at this hour of the morning—and let’s think this thing through properly. He owes us a lot, right? He owes you the respect due to a wife”— he smirked slightly—“whether you really want it or not. He owes me a hell of a lot, since he buggered up that job for me, and any others that turn up. As long as he refuses to sign contracts, I’m hamstrung—till I’m old enough to sign my own, or you divorce him and get control of us and the right to sign contracts for me.”

“I’m not divorcing him. Why the hell should I? And put that woman just where she wants to be? I’d have to be out of my mind.

I don’t deny I thought of it, but why should I? Apart from anything else, it may be he’s right, and this project’ll make him. Maybe there’ll be some real money coming in, and why should she get what I’m entitled to?”

“And that’s the real point. Where’s he getting the lolly
from
? Hilary said all of a sudden there’s money to play with. Where’s it coming from? And where’s our share?”

“He wouldn’t care if we starved, I tell you, he’d see us in the gutter and—”

“That gin’s making you maudlin. Do leave it alone. And
listen
to me! Where’s he getting it from?”

“I don’t know! I tried to find out, and he just shrugged it off. Wouldn’t answer.”

“The thing is, is he getting it the straight way? With all the opposition to what he’s doing there, you can’t tell me some civil servant sat up in Whitehall and said, ‘Ah! Here’s a good chappie, let’s ladle some of the ready into his lap.’ It must be coming from somewhere a bit shady. There isn’t an official body’d touch him with a bargepole, let alone give him a ha’penny to fly with. There must be some way to find out.”

“Well, I tried, Ian, really I did. If you’d have come with me this morning, as I asked you—”

“Oh, no! Not on your sweet nelly. Talking to him’d be a waste of time. But, I wonder—”

He got to his feet and stretched, scratching his bare chest and yawning in a faintly theatrical way. “I wonder. There’s more than one way to paddle through this mud pool.”

She was lying full length on the sofa now, the glass on the floor beside her, and she turned her head and squinted painfully at him.

“What are you thinking of? Darling, do get me some aspirin, will you? I’ve a swine of a headache.”

“What? Oh, all right. What do you expect, getting yourself half pissed at this time of the morning?”

“I do wish you wouldn’t talk in that vulgar fashion, Ian.” She spoke in a plaintive whine now. “You know I hate it, and I’ve suffered enough for one day, darling, really I have.”

“Oh, all right.” He looked down at her for a moment, a faint sneer on his face. “Don’t go getting yourself worked up into one of your fancy sick spells, for God’s sake.”

“You sound like him when you talk that way. Please don’t. Oh, I do feel awful.”

“I’m sure you do. All right, I’ll bring them when I’m dressed.” But he didn’t come back to the sitting room when he had shaved and showered and carefully dressed himself in his cream corduroy jacket and black polo-necked shirt and tight trousers. Instead, he roughly shook Hilary awake and told her shortly, “Rusty’s under the weather. You’d better take her some aspirin and see if you can get the place cleaned up a bit. Do you more good than lying here feeling sorry for yourself. Come on.”

He took with him twenty pounds in cash from his secret store, which he kept hidden beneath his mattress. What Rusty didn’t know about his private financial arrangements wouldn’t hurt her, and he’d seen no need to tell her of his source of income from Sefton. Though I might, he thought magnanimously as he hailed a taxi at the corner of the road, I might give her a few quid after this morning, if it works out right. And it had better. That lousy bastard. He had a lot to pay for, one way and another, and Ian wasn’t the man to sit about waiting for debts like that to be paid. Some-one somewhere was going to shell out, and if in doing so his father copped it, so much the better.

“House of Commons,” he said to the taxi driver in a lordly fashion and settled back in the cab with his booted feet on the tip-up seat in front. He thought with great satisfaction of the brilliance of the idea that had come to him, quite forgetting that it had been Marjorie who had first thought of getting at George through the MP who was gunning for him. But then, Ian had a great gift for forgetting things it was not convenient to remember.

“I am not prepared to discuss it,” George said flatly. “Not now or ever. I want only to forget the whole episode occurred. I was stupid enough to let my private needs come between me and my work, and the results of that stupidity are my problem. Mine and no one else’s.”

“You can’t say that!” Barbara said almost despairingly. “You can’t! I’m part of it too! It was my fault Hilary was so distressed, my fault she found out and told your wife. Of course we’ve got to talk about it. You can’t shut me out like that. Please, George, you can’t.”

“I can and I will. All I want now is to forget it and concentrate on work—
work
, do you hear me?”

“You don’t have to tell me how important work is. I care as much about it as… as I care about you as a person. George, please! I love you, and—”

“For Christ’s sake! Haven’t I put up with enough? All my adult life I’ve been trying to escape it. Love! I never want to hear of it again! I want no more mewing about love, and relationships, or anything remotely connected with such emotional garbage. I’ve cluttered up eighteen years with it, eighteen years of fretting waste-fully about a wife and two children who… who should not have meant anything, who should never have happened. All right. I’ve learned at last where my mistakes lay. Let it go at that. Leave me alone about it! You’re a good worker, Barbara, a very good worker, and I’d be hard put to it to replace you, after all the time you’ve put into the project. But by God, if you can’t control these ludicrous sentimental yearnings, you’ll have to go. I can’t be doing with any more. Can’t you get that into your head? I’ve had enough!”

She was whey-faced and had to swallow hard before she could speak. “You wouldn’t send me away. You couldn’t.”

“If I had to, indeed I could. You are not irreplaceable. I could train Isaacs to take over your work. Very easily.”

“There’ll be no need,” she said swiftly. “None at all. I… I won’t mention it again. But let me say one thing more, before… before we finish this conversation.”

“If it has anything to do with your emotional needs, I don’t want—”

“No, it has not. It has to do with something more basic. Sexual needs.”

“I’ve told you—” He shouted it, and she shrank from him slightly, but then went on desperately, driven almost against her will to persist in an attempt to salvage some small fragment from the mess.