Twice Shy

I was listening to the noise a computer produced when its programs were recorded onto ordinary cassette tape.

Cassettes were convenient and widely used, especially with smaller computers. One could store a whole host of different programs on casette tapes, and simply pick out whichever was needed, and use it: but the cassettes were still, all the same, just ordinary cassettes, and if one played the tape straightforwardly in the normal way on a cassette player, as I had done, one heard the vibrating whine.

Peter had given me three sixty-minute tapes of computer programs: and it wasn't so very difficult to guess what those programs would be about.

I wondered why he had given them to me in such an indirect way. I wondered, in fact, why he had given them to me at all. With a mental shrug I shovelled the tapes and their misleading boxes onto the glove shelf and switched on the radio instead.

School on Monday was a holiday after the green-house emotions in Norfolk, and Louisa-the-technician's problems seemed moths' wings beside Donna's.

On Monday evening, while I was watching my own choice on the television and eating cornflakes and cream with my feet on the coffee table, Peter telephoned.

'How's Donna?' I said.

'I don't know where she'd be without Sarah.'

'And you?'

'Oh, pretty fair. Look, Jonathan, did you play any of those tapes?' His voice sounded tentative and half apologetic.

'A bit of all of them,' I said.

'Oh. Well, I expect you'll know what they are?'

'Your horse-handicapping programs?'

'Yes… er… Will you keep them for me for now?' He gave me no chance to answer and rushed on, 'You see, we're hoping to go off to the boat straight after the hearing on Friday. Well, we do have to believe Donna will get probation, even the nastiest of those officials said it would be so in such a case, but obviously she'll be terribly upset with having to go to court and everything and so we'll go away as soon as we can, and I didn't like the thought of leaving those cassettes lying around in the office, which they were, so I went over to fetch them yesterday morning, so I could give them to you. I mean, I didn't really think it out. I could have put them in the bank, or anywhere. I suppose what I really wanted was to get those tapes right out of my life so that if those two brutes carne back asking for the programs I'd be able to say I hadn't got them and that they'd have to get them from the person I made them for.'

It occurred to me not for the first time that for a computer programmer Peter was no great shakes as a logical thinker, but maybe the circumstances were jamming the circuits.

'Have you heard from those men again?' I asked.

'No, thank God.'

'They probably haven't found out yet.'

'Thanks very much,' he said bitterly.

'I'll keep the tapes safe,' I said. 'As long as you like.'

'Probably nothing else will happen. After all, I haven't done anything illegal. Or even faintly wrong.'

The 'if-we-don't-look-at-the-monster-he'll-go-away' syndrome, I thought. But maybe he was right.

'Why didn't you tell me what you were giving me?' I enquired. 'Why The King and I dressing, and all that?'

'What?' His voice sounded almost puzzled, and then cleared to understanding, 'Oh, it was just that when I got home from the office, you were all sitting down to lunch, and I didn't get a single chance to catch you away from the girls, and I didn't want to have to start explaining in front of them, so I just shoved them into those cases to give to you.'

The faintest twitch of unease crossed my mind, but I smothered it. Peter's world since Donna took the baby had hardly been one of general common sense and normal behaviour. He had acted pretty well, all in all, for someome hammered from all directions at once, and over the weekend I had felt an increase of respect for him, quite apart from liking.

'If you want to play those programs,' he said, 'you'll need a Grantley computer.'

'I don't suppose…' I began.

'They might amuse William. He's mad on racing, isn't he?'

'Yes, he is.'

'I spent so much time on them. I'd really like to know how they work out in practice. I mean, from someone who knows horses.'

'All right,' I said. But Grantley computers weren't scattered freely round the landscape and William had his exams ahead, and the prospect of actually using the programs seemed a long way off.

'I wish you were still here,' he said. 'All the telephone calls, they're really getting me down. And did you have any of those poisonous abusive beastly voices spitting out hate against Donna, when you were answering?'

'Yes, several.'

'But they've never even met her.'

'They're unbalanced. Just don't listen.'

'What did you say to them?'

'I told them to take their problems to a doctor.'

There was a slightly uncomfortable pause, then he said explosively, 'I wish to God Donna had gone to a doctor.' A gulp. 'I didn't even know… I mean, I knew she'd wanted children, but I thought, well, we couldn't have them, so that was that. I never dreamed… I mean, she's always so quiet and wouldn't hurt a fly. She never showed any signs… We're pretty fond of each other, you know. Or at least I thought…'

'Peter, stop it.'

'Yes…'A pause.'Of course, you're right. But it's difficult to think of anything else.'

We talked a bit more, but only covering the same old ground, and we disconnected with me feeling that somehow I could have done more for him than I had.

Two evenings later, he went down to the river to work on his two-berth cabin cruiser, filling its tanks with water and fuel, installing new cooking-gas cylinders and checking that everything was in working order for his trip with Donna.

He had been telling me earlier that he was afraid the ship's battery was wearing out and that if he didn't get a new one they would run it down flat with their lights at night and in the morning find themselves unable to start the engine. It had happened once before, he said.

He wanted to check that the battery still had enough life in it.

It had.

When he raised the first spark, the rear half of the boat exploded.

CHAPTER 3

Sarah told me.

Sarah on the telephone with the stark over-controlled voice of exhaustion.

'They think it was gas, or petrol vapour. They don't know yet.'

'Peter

'He's dead,' she said. There were people around. They saw him moving… with his clothes on fire. He went over the side into the water… but when they got him out…' A sudden silence, then, slowly, 'We weren't there. Thank God Donna and I weren't there.'

I felt shaky and slightly sick. 'Do you want me to come?' I said.

'No. What time is it?'

'Eleven.'I had undressed, in fact, to go to bed.

'Donna's asleep. Knock-out drops.'

'And how… how is she?'

'Christ, how would you expect?' Sarah seldom spoke in that way: a true measure of the general awfulness. 'And Friday,' she said, 'the day after tomorrow, she's due in court.'

'They'll be kind to her.'

'There's already been one call, just now, with some beastly woman telling me it served her right.'

'I'd better come,' I said.

'You can't. There's school. No, don't worry. I can cope. The doctor at least said he'd keep Donna heavily sedated for several days.'

'Let me know, then, if I can help.'

'Yes,' she said. 'Goodnight, now. I'm going to bed. There's a lot to do tomorrow. Goodnight.'

I lay long awake in bed and thought of Peter and the unfairness of death: and in the morning I went to school and found him flicking in and out of my mind all day.

Driving home I saw that his cassettes were still lying in a jumble on the glove shelf. Once parked in the garage, I put the tapes back into their boxes, slipped them in my jacket pocket, and carried my usual burden of books indoors.