By Monday morning; life at the flat was rapidly going back to normal. It occurred to Bridget that they had probably been over-reacting to the situation. The discovery of a hand-gun in a flower-bed in a suburban garden had certainly struck them as a remarkable event, and somewhat sinister; but perhaps the police wouldn’t see it like that at all. This sort of thing was probably all in a day’s work to them; maybe dozens of guns turned up in odd places every week and were merely added to an existing list of similar findings, only to re-surface if some crime of violence in the neighbourhood made one or other of these abandoned guns seem relevant.
Bridget felt relieved, for her own sake as well as Norah’s, that no new crisis seemed to be imminent. Other people’s troubles are time-consuming, and Bridget was exceptionally busy this week. She had two international conferences outside London to prepare for and, more immediately, a session of unpredictable length with a Polish philosopher who was querying a number of points in her translation of his article on Linguistic Analysis and the Falsification Principle. Her English version did not seem to him to do justice to the force and vigour of the prose with which he was demolishing the arguments of his philosophical opponents in all parts of Europe as well as in Poland.
And indeed he might have a point. She had been aware at the time of translating his sentences rather over-literally, and without a proper grasp of what he was driving at. Perhaps she should do a bit more background reading – Wittgenstein and Popper and so forth – before embarking on a re-draft. A long and concentrated evening’s work would be needed, anyway, and she hoped there would be no interruptions. Surely she was entitled to a bit of peace and quiet after having devoted almost the whole weekend to Norah and her problems? She realised, of course, that the ebb and flow of a person’s problems couldn’t be expected to dovetail precisely with the amount of leisure her friends had for hearing about them, but surely something could be worked out? Shouldn’t there be some sort of unwritten rule about it, she wondered? If I’ve got an important deadline to meet by Tuesday midday, then you must keep your broken heart on ice until Tuesday after lunch. Ideally, you must arrange not to break up with your lover until Tuesday. Or let your cat get run over, or whatever. That way, friendship can flourish, and we all get on with earning a living. That’s how it would be, in an ideal world.
And Bridget could create a temporarily ideal world of this kind, by retiring to her own room, shutting the door, and letting the others answer the telephone. Diana was good about this, she quite enjoyed telling effortless white lies about Bridget being out, confident that Bridget would do the same for her, should the occasion (such as Alistair turning up unexpectedly) arise. They were well-practised, too, in taking messages for each other, with commendable accuracy and discretion.
It was unfortunate, though, that on this particular evening Professor Brzozowski should choose to call. His message, conserning his article for the Journal of Linguistic Analysis, delivered in a heavy East European accent, defeated even Diana; and the desperate urgency of it, which he managed to convey despite the language barrier, was such as to force her to summon Bridget from her seclusion.
A question about the nature of Reality and its relationship to human thought-processes might strike some as not being particularly urgent, the question having been debated continuously for at least three thousand years, but this was not how it struck Professor Brzozowski. For had he not solved the problem once and for all in his Linguistic Analysis article? Was it not a tragic loss to mankind that this once-and-for-all solution should not be laid before them in its perfect clarity? Properly translated, it would provide irrefutable arguments in favour of this interpretation of the Universe and mankind’s place in it, provided it reached the Editorial Department of the Linguistic Analysis Journal by 9.00 on Friday morning.
The conversation was a protracted one, as might have been expected, and in the course of it Bridget suffered the additional annoyance of registering, out of the corner of her eye, the arrival of Alistair. He was carrying a bottle of red wine and an evening paper, but all the same managed to have a hand free to tweak her hair as he passed; managed too to murmur “What-ho, Smarty-pants?” into her ear, just as she was trying to make out the title of an abstruse Polish journal from which the professor was quoting.
By the time the laborious interchange was over a meal was ready. Roast chicken, with all the trimmings. Diana (whose turn it was to cook) must have known that Alistair would be coming, though she hadn’t warned any of them. No reason why she should, of course, but all the same … Bridget saw her evening of concentrated work fast vanishing as she found herself drawn into the after-dinner conversation. Norah had retired to her room almost as soon as the meal was over, which left Diana a free hand to make a colourful story, for Alistair’s benefit, of Sunday’s alarms and excursions.
He listened, as always, with a judicious mixture of scorn for female gossip and an avid lust for every last detail. His eager questioning elicited from Diana more, perhaps, than a strict regard for confidentiality should have allowed her to divulge; but it couldn’t really do any harm, could it? – especially as her every revelation was conscientiously prefaced by “Don’t let it go any further, will you …?”
He was fascinated by the story of the gun in the flower-bed, and expressed surprise that they weren’t all three of them in prison already.
“Because it’s in the paper tonight,” he informed them, gesturing towards the copy of the Standard, which by now lay around dismembered on the carpet, as papers were liable to do when Alistair had been reading them, “It’s in the paper that there has been a murder in this benighted Medfield of yours. Well, on Medfield Common, anyway. I suppose that must be somewhere near. A body’s been found in some undergrowth, and a hand-gun near it. Your cock-and-bull story about a gun in a flower-bed will be on the front page of every newspaper tomorrow. It’ll be on the police computer already, and they’ll …”
“Oh, but darling, it was in the flower-bed!” cried Diana. “We all saw Mervyn picking it up, didn’t we, Bridget? It’s not a cock-and-bull story. It’s the truth!”
“Sweetie, whatever’s that got to do with it? You don’t really believe that the mere truth is going to be relevant, do you? You’ve been watching too much T.V.. Correction: you’ve been producing too much T.V., and it’s turned your little head. I’ve kept telling you all along that it was going to land you in trouble, now haven’t I? It stands to reason that anyone whose job it is to involve herself, day in and day out, in situations of on-going catastrophe – she’s bound to get the blame sooner or later. It’s like social workers: if some scoundrel beats his child to death, it’s not his fault, it’s the fault of the social worker who didn’t stop him. And it’s just the same with T.V. T.V. these days is simply a gigantic social worker who hasn’t had to go through any training. It not only has to remedy every known evil, but has to make evil amusing as well. Your trouble, Di dear, is that you’re too kind-hearted. Your actual job is to be the life and soul of every disaster, but you let your sympathies get in the way. You empathise. You worry about people’s feelings. Now, if it was our Bridget” – he threw a mocking glance in her direction – “a lady so clever and so highly educated that she understands nothing whatsoever about people’s feelings …”
“Oh, but darling, that’s not fair!” cried Diana. “Bridget does …”
“Oh, all right, all right! Alistair mimicked cringing terror, shutting his eyes and pressing himself deep into the sofa cushions, “I’ll withdraw the charge. Put it this way: Bridget understands other people’s feelings all right, she just doesn’t think they’re of any importance. Is that better?”
He half-opened his eyes, to see how Bridget was taking all this.
She wasn’t looking at him at all; seemed, indeed, not to be listening, busying herself with piecing together the maltreated evening paper, sorting the pages neatly into their original correct order
“I don’t see anything about the murder,” she remarked, when she’d finished. “Are you sure you didn’t dream it?”
“Dream it? Good God, when I dream, I dream of better things than that, I can tell you!” His attempt to meet Bridget’s eye with flirtatious innuendo was a failure, for she was still scanning the paper intently.
“It’s only the Stop Press, so far,” he pointed out. “It caught my eye when I was checking on the Stock Market, and I must say I chuckled a bit. Do you remember I moved the car round the corner because I didn’t want the whole neighbourhood noticing me sitting there in the same place for hours? “Supposing there’s a murder around here,” I said, and you thought I was joking. Well, to be honest, I thought I was joking, too. But I wasn’t, was I? It was probably happening right then, while I said it!”
He sounded pleased with hiself, rather proud, as people are when they turn out by chance to have been right about something.
By this time Bridget had tracked down the item.
“It doesn’t say much,” she remarked; “Just that enquiries are …” She broke off abruptly: “Why, Norah! We thought you’d gone to bed!”
For a moment, Bridget felt as guilty as a school-child caught cheating. How much had Norah heard? Did it matter how much she’d heard? In her present state of nerves, everything upset her, and so this would too. Unobtrusively, Bridget slipped the neatly-folded paper out of sight behind the sofa, and set herself, under Alistair’s cynical gaze, to change the subject. With deliberate perversity – or so it seemed – he tried to foil her every attempt at an innocuous topic. Holidays in the South of France? At once he had to remind them of the couple who had been shot dead there last summer. Recent proposed changes in Primary Education? Immediately he referred to primary schools in America where pupils were searched for knives and guns as they came in every morning. Autumn pruning of roses? Hadn’t there been a rose bush right there where they found the gun?
Bridget gave up; and was greatly relieved when Norah, after hovering uneasily around for a while, said goodnight for a second time and left the room.
In her absence it seemed opportune to switch on the news in case there was any mention of the murder; and sure enough there was. The police were conducting investigations, and would appreciate assistance from the public. If anyone had noticed anything unusual in the vicinity … had been walking in the wooded area of Common recently … had noticed anything suspicious. “Any clue, however seemingly trivial, may be just the one that we are looking for …”
The news came to an end, and the party broke up: Alistair and Diana went off to their king-size bed and Bridget returned to her desk, where she settled down to her much-interrupted studies.
So absorbed was she that she did not notice the faint, tiny sounds which Norah could not help making as she crept out of her bedroom and back into the sitting-room. She had waited, sleepless, staring into the dark, until she felt quite sure that the others were finally settled in their rooms: and now, at last, was her chance. Furtive as any burglar, she tiptoed barefoot across the landing, across the soft, pale sitting-room carpet that muffled her every step, and retrieved the evening paper from behind the sofa, where she had observed Bridget stowing it. She did not dare open it out straight away, but tiptoed back with it to the seclusion of her room; and even there she found herself taking obsessional care to avoid rustling the pages as she searched. Just in case anyone was still awake. Just in case anyone was listening through the wall.
As a result of all these precautions it took her some minutes to locate the item from which her friends had so obviously been trying to shield her: and when she did, she read it not once, but three or four times, short though it was.
“It doesn’t say much,” Bridget had remarked; and certainly, on the face of it, this was the case. But for Norah it said enough. She hadn’t really needed to read it over and over again like this, for she had known at once, after a single glance, what it was that had happened.