When she belatedly realized that Janet was quite serious, Harriet said: “That’s absurd: absolutely absurd.”
“Why?”
“Jesus Christ, darling! For every reason!”
“I’m going to do it,” said Janet, feeling positively excited.
“What if John dies?”
Janet gazed for several moments across the dinner table at her friend and then said: “That’s almost inevitable, the way it’s being handled so far. Which is what I’m trying to prevent. The last time there wasn’t anything I could even try to do to prevent the inevitable, remember?”
“Darling!” exclaimed her mother, when Janet telephoned five minutes later. “It would be wonderful to have you home!”
“Not for long, Mother,” warned Janet. “Not for long.”
11
I t was an overnight flight from America, landing in London early in the morning. Janet had been unable to sleep at all and arrived feeling unwashed and gritty-eyed. It was not until she got through Immigration and was waiting by the carousel for her luggage that Janet remembered the original plan: to be here with John, for the wedding. She half turned, as if expecting him to be by her side, an unthinking reaction of tiredness. She blinked, feeling stupid, relieved that her bag came up almost at once so she could grab it and move away.
Her parents were waiting right by the exit, behind the barrier, and the moment Janet emerged her mother waved to attract attention. The woman hugged her and released her and hugged her again while her father waited patiently for his turn and just hugged her and kissed her once when it came.
From the first kiss her mother began a non-stop jabber of questions without ever waiting for answers and over the woman’s head her father smiled and Janet smiled back. Janet thought her mother twittered and decided the word was apposite: she was a thin, small-boned woman with jerky movements, like a twittering bird. Her father was a complete contrast, a quiet, unemotional man who she doubted had ever done anything or said anything without considering it first. From their time on postings together Janet always thought of him as someone in black because he really had worn a kind of uniform, dark subdued suits when it had not been striped trousers with black formal jacket. Now the suit was a retired country tweed but the sharp trouser crease and the waistcoat still gave a vague formality to it. He seemed fuller in the face than Janet remembered from her last visit, but it was his hair that registered with her most. Although he had to be twenty-five years older than John, her father’s hair was still almost completely black: from those awful pictures that remained so vivid in her mind Janet decided it was John who could be this man’s father rather than the other way around.
Responding minimally to her mother’s back-seat chatter Janet agreed that she was tired and that it was nice to be back and that it had been a reasonable flight-although already she could scarcely recall it-and that it was awful what had happened to John and that she was managing to cope and that Harriet had been wonderful and that everyone else had been wonderful, too. Her mother proudly announced she had kept a scrapbook of all the newspaper stories and features, knowing Janet would want one. Janet, who considered it the last thing she wanted, thanked the other woman and said it was a kind thought.
Her father picked the orbital motorway and as they drove south he looked sideways across the car and said: “You all right?”
“I don’t know, not really. I suppose so.”
“Was the pressure bad in Washington?”
“Not after I moved in with Harriet.”
“We had the press camped at the bottom of the lane for a week.”
“I’m sorry,” said Janet, not sure what she was apologizing for.
“They wanted photographs of you when you were a child,” intruded her mother from the back seat. “I let them have that one of you at the Necropolis of Thebes, on a camel.”
She’d been terrified and it had shown, Janet remembered. She said: “I don’t mind, whatever you did.”
“One or two papers have kept in touch, but we haven’t said anything about your coming home,” assured her father.
“I’m glad you haven’t.”
“I’m sure everything is going to work out all right,” said her mother.
Janet was surprised it had taken so long: it had usually been her mother’s second or third remark in every conversation since the kidnap. She said she hoped so, wanting her mother to stop talking. It was a gray, pressed-down day with the clouds low against the beginning of the Sussex hills. An uncertain mist kept the windows damp and the tires sounded sticky on the road beneath them. The motorway was jammed, far more crowded than the Washington Beltway, and dirt sprayed up from the stream of cars ahead of them. The traffic did not improve when they left the motorway to head further south, into Sussex, on a lesser-used road. Although it was not cold inside the car Janet shivered and guessed it was another reaction to her tiredness.
Her parents lived in a hamlet just outside Cuckfield and it was still only midmorning when they arrived. Her father carried her case and her mother ran a bath and turned down her bed. When she went into the bedroom Janet was sorry for the impatience she appeared constantly to feel towards the woman. It was, she acknowledged, quite unfair: her mother was doing her best, in her way, to help and to be supportive. Janet further acknowledged that impatience had been her predominant feeling about everything and towards everybody since John had been taken hostage. And that it wasn’t, either, a constructive or useful attitude, whatever that might be.
Janet wanted to sleep and tried hard to do so but it was not the proper sort of rest, more a submission to exhaustion. She was suspended in a conscious sort of a dream, one she knew to be a dream, from which she would awaken: mental images of John Sheridan and William Buckley kept being confused and she could recall whole tracts of commentary from television and newspaper coverage. Willsher featured prominently although not in the Franklin Park office but in the sort of lecture hall she used at the university, and he was at the podium in the manner of an instructor, admonishing her for not listening or understanding and making mistakes through lack of concentration.
When she did awake Janet lay in bed, although not balled up as she had when Hank died, but fully outstretched and reflective, with her hands cupped behind her head. So what the hell did she imagine she was doing by coming here and intending to go on, as she did intend to go on! What could she do that wasn’t already being done, with more expertise and more resources than she could ever have? Unanswerable questions. So she stopped trying to answer them. Janet accepted that a lot of the rationale-if rationale were the right word-lay in her response to Harriet, that night of the decision in the Georgetown house. She had felt-and still felt-guilt at not being able to do anything to combat Hank’s cancer. She knew it to be an illogical-even absurd-feeling because she wasn’t a doctor or a surgeon or a specialist and so there was nothing she could have done, during those last few months. But it still remained an impression that she could not lose: would never lose. She was determined that she would not feel guilty about John. Now there was something she believed she could do, some physical movement it was possible for her to make. Was that all it would be, just moving around to give herself the impression of some sort of useful activity? Janet closed her mind against the inrush of questions: she was going to do, not think.
Janet got up in the late afternoon and agreed to tea she didn’t want and looked at the cuttings book her mother had assembled. She was surprised at the British media coverage engendered by the kidnap and hoped it would help. She wished her mother hadn’t given away the photograph of herself on a camel.
It was not until the early evening, when her mother was busying herself over supper, that Janet was alone with her father. It was he who initiated the conversation.