King of the World by Celia Fremlin Page A

parents than the present arrangement; that she should go back first thing in the morning instead of staying for the whole weekend as planned.
    “Of course, dear, if it’s an emergency,” her mother had said with a lack of reproach which made Bridget feel even more guilty than she had in the first place. “The only thing is, dear, I don’t like to ask your father to get the car out again, at this time of night. He’s just getting over this cold, you see, and …”
    And our whole evening will be disrupted, she could have added, and the special meal I’d planned will be spoiled. The chicken is in the oven already – it’s a free-range chicken, I got it specially …
    It was this latter, unspoken, part of the protest thathad decided Bridget. Her mother was a wonderful cook, the bread-sauce would be out of this world. It would indeed be a shame to miss one of the delicious meals which were the sole bright spots of these visits home. And Diana did tend to exaggerate things, didn’t she? Surely the morning would be time enough to sort out whatever had been happening?
    Bridget turned her head on the pillow to peer at the old-fashioned tin alarm-clock, with its phosphorescent hands, which had been a birthday present when she was eleven. Her mother always set it going for these visits, quite superfluously, because Bridget’s digital watch was always on her wrist, guaranteed to keep perfect time for just about as long as it would take the world’s population to double. But of course her mother could not be expected to realise this – or, rather, to take any notice of it – and thus deprive herself of the silly little ritual.
    The insistently ticking little anachronism could be useful on occasions like this, when insomnia had taken its hold, and you wanted to watch time passing without having to raise your wrist to the level of your eyes.
    Quarter past one. By now, presumably, the crisis at the flat would have been resolved, in one way or another. It couldn’t have been that much of a crisis actually, not when you thought about it rationally.
    Fixing her eyes on the dim square of her bedroom window – through which she had once imagined herself climbing, like the girls in the school-stories, to take part in some midnight feast – Bridget went over, in as much detail as she could recall, exactly what it was that Diana had told her about this brain-storm of Norah’s – if that’s what it could be called. What it had all amounted to, asfar as Bridget could make out, was that Diana, from the hallway, had been eavesdropping on a phone call of Norah’s which had sounded “completely mad”.
    “No, Bridget, I don’t know who she was talking to, but that’s not the point. For all I know, she wasn’t talking to anybody. The point is, she was hallucinating, talking about centipedes crawling out of the telephone into her ear. They were giving her messages for the King of the World – tapping out Morse code with their hundreds of legs – that sort of thing. She’s mad, Bridget, she’s absolutely mad. I’m terrified of being alone with her for the whole weekend.”
    Alone? What about beastly old Alistair? Couldn’t he make himself useful just for once? Come around when he’s actually wanted, instead of endlessly coming when he isn’t?
    “Oh, but Bridget, you don’t understand! He’s got all sorts of things to do this weekend, he told me. I can’t ask him to come round specially … not after last Sunday. You see …”
    Bridget did see. She saw all too well that Alistair’s convenience must ever have absolute priority over anyone else’s. It all added up to just one more illustration of the speciousness of that damaging proverb: “To understand all is to forgive all.” On the contrary, the more clearly you understood your friend’s silly reasons for doing the silly thing she is doing, the more impatient you felt with her; not in the least more forgiving.
    “Well, I’ll phone him, then,” Bridget had