King of the World by Celia Fremlin Page B

retorted. “The whole thing is entirely his fault in the first place, and I’ll damn well make him see that …”
    “Oh, Bridget. Oh no! Don’t do that! He knows about it already, you see, he was here when it happened –we’d both just come in. But he thinks it’s funny ! ‘My dear girl, we’re all mad,’ he said. ‘The whole world’s mad, why should you expect Norah to be different?’ And off he went, laughing. I heard him laughing all the way down the stairs. No, Bridget, please don’t phone him. It’ll only make things worse.”
    It would, too. Alistair specialised in making things worse. Within this rather unpromising area of agreement , the discussion ground to a halt, with Bridget promising to return as early as possible the next morning . She’d made a few consoling remarks, of course, before ringing off. Such as that Norah might have been using the phone to tell a bedtime story to her absent child … Oh, all right, she hasn’t got a child: her small nephew, then – anything .
    “One thing you can be sure of, Diana, if you go around eavesdropping on other people’s telephone conversations you’re bound to get hold of the wrong end of the stick most of the time. Especially if you’ve only eavesdropped on one end of the conversation, the way you did. You say yourself that the woman’s behaving quite normally now. Well, you behave normally too, and stop panicking. We’ll sort it all out tomorrow – O.K.?”
    Not entirely O.K.; but nevertheless on this unsatisfactory note the phone call petered out, and Bridget was after all able to enjoy the roast chicken, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, brussels sprouts and the famous bread-sauce with a clear conscience.
    Well, fairly clear. Setting off next day into the mild, misty November morning, Bridget braced herself to face her parents’ reproachful sadness at her precipitate departure; and it was only at the very last moment,when she turned at the garden gate to wave to them, that she realised, with something very like shock, how happy they both looked. You could almost imagine them closing the front door and executing a little dance in the hallway, from sheer relief.
    Could it be – could it possibly be – that these duty visits were every bit as much of a burden to them as they were to her?
    Lovely to see you, darling, Come again as soon as you can. All that sort of thing. Was it just a pack of lies? Or was it, more mysteriously, a fixed and unstoppable ritual that was becoming more important, not less, as it deviated further and further from anyone’s real feelings?
    Suppose they all decided to be honest with each other? Suppose her parents were to say to her one day: “Look, Bridget, let’s face it: we all hate these visits of yours. You are bored to death by our humdrum ways, and we are terrified of this severe, high-powered person you’ve turned into. So let’s pack it in, shall we? Let’s decide not to see each other any more, ever.”
    How would she feel, if this were to come about?
    Shocked. Shocked to the very core, as by an earthquake or by the declaration of nuclear war.
    What price honesty, then?

Chapter 7
    Norah had had no idea, of course, that her phone call had been overheard. Bridget, she knew, was away for the weekend visiting her parents, and she’d supposed that Diana and Alistair were still out, not having heard them come in. Indeed, if she hadn’t thought herself to be safely alone in the flat, she would never have dared to make the phone call at all. It was a risky thing to do in any case, she’d known that all along, and had hovered for some time by the telephone table, wondering which was the most frightening – to phone or not to phone? She dreaded what she might hear; but, on the other hand, she must find out, somehow, what was going on in her absence. How were they managing? What, so far, had happened?
    Trying to control the trembling of her fingers, she finally dialled the dreaded number, and waited.
    What would