The Forever Girl

11



Teddy’s father was arrested four days later. It was done with the maximum, and unnecessary, fuss, with two police cars, sirens wailing, arriving at the front of the house shortly after eight in the morning. Amanda was taking the dog for a walk round the block at the time, and saw what happened.

“They made a big thing of it,” she said to David that evening. “There were six or seven of them – one or two senior officers, I think, and the rest constables. It was totally over the top.”

He snorted. “Role playing.”

“Anyway, they bundled Gerry Arthur out of the house, put him into one of the cars, and then drove off, sirens going full tilt.”

“Ridiculous.”

“Then one of the constables came out carrying a computer, put that into the other car, and off they went.”

“A show – that’s what it was.”

She looked at her husband. He had a built-in antipathy to officials.

“What was it all about?” she asked. “Have you heard?”

“I met Jim Harris,” he said. “He told me that Gerry Arthur is being charged with being party to some fraud or other. Something to do with the scuttling of a ship to get the insurance payment. Apparently that sort of thing happens. You sink your boat and claim the insurance.”

“I’m surprised. They go to that Baptist church, don’t they?”

David laughed. “Baptists are every bit as capable of sinking ships as anybody else, I suspect. But I wouldn’t have thought that Gerry Arthur did that sort of thing anyway. He’s one of our clients. We audit his books, and they’re always scrupulously clean. This’ll be a put-up thing.”

She asked him to explain.

“You know what it’s like here. You make a remark that offends somebody high up in the political food-chain. All of a sudden, it’s discovered that there are problems with your work permit. Gerry has status, I think, which means they can’t chuck him out, even if he’s not an actual citizen. So the next best thing is to get him into trouble with the police.”

She pointed out that it would be difficult to set up the sinking of a ship.

“No,” he said. ‘The ship would have sunk anyway. So all you have to do is to create some evidence of an instruction to the captain that points to the thing being deliberate. You’ve got your case. You leak something to the police and they’re delighted to get the possibility of a high profile conviction. Off you go.”

“What will happen?”

He was not sure. “I heard that they’ve let him out on bail. They might drop the charges if he agrees to go off to the British Virgin Islands or somewhere like that. It’ll die down. It usually does.”

“It’s very unfair.”

“Of course it is.”

She looked at him. “To be accused of doing something you haven’t done. That must be very hard.”

He returned her gaze. “Yes. Certainly.” Then he said, “To be accused of doing something you have done – that must be hard as well, don’t you think?”

She caught her breath. “Yes, I suppose so.”

He was still watching her, and it was at that moment that she became certain that he knew.

Clover said to Teddy: “Your dad was taken off to jail, Teddy. The police came. Is he still in jail?”

The boy bit his lip. “They brought him back. They made a mistake.”

“Really? Why did they take him anyway? Was he spying?”

Teddy shook his head. “Don’t be stupid.”

“It’s not stupid. We know there are spies here.”

Teddy kicked at the ground in his frustration. “He hadn’t done anything. They said he’d sunk one of his boats, but he didn’t. You’d have to be stupid to sink one of your own boats.”

She nodded. The world of adults was opaque and sometimes difficult to fathom; but the proposition that one would not normally sink one of one’s own boats seemed reasonable enough. “I’m sorry for you, Teddy,” she said. “It must be awful having your dad taken away by the police.”

“Thank you. But he didn’t do anything.”

Later, she talked to James about it. He agreed with her that the sinking of the boat might just be a cover for the real charge of spying. Now that the police had become involved, though, he thought there was no need to continue with their observations. “It’s in their hands now,” he pronounced. “We can stop.”

He had lost interest, she sensed, and so the notebook, and the photographs they had collected, were filed away in a cupboard in James’s room. The photographs, of which there were about fifteen, had been printed on James’s computer and labelled with the date, time and place when they had been taken. At the tennis club, Saturday morning. Suspect 1 gets into the car with Suspect 2. And At the tennis club, Suspect 1 talks to Suspect 2. Details of conversation unknown.

She sensed that he was more concerned with other things. She invited him to the tree-house, but he rarely came now, and when he did, he seemed detached, as if he wanted to be somewhere else. He never stayed long.

She made suggestions. “We could fix the tree-house; I could get some wood. We could take more things up there. If you wanted, I could make you a shelf of your own for your stuff.”

He shrugged. “Maybe.”

She persisted. “We could take the walkie-talkies up there. I could leave one there and you could take the other to your house. We could speak to each other.”

He looked bored. “Out of range,” he said. “You have to be able to see the other person, or they don’t work. Those are useless walkie-talkies.”


He looked at his watch. “I can’t stay for long.”

She said, “You’re always saying that. You’re always saying you have to go and do something else.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. You do it all the time.”

He looked at his watch again.

“Well, it’s true,” he said. “I’ve got stuff to do.”

She felt frustrated at not being able to pin him down. She wanted to have his full attention, but he seemed now to be reluctant to give her that. It was as if he were holding back; as if he were away somewhere, in a different place – a place that she could not get to, or understand. And yet he was not rude to her. He was kind, and, unlike other boys, behaved gently, without any of the pushing or shoving that boys seemed to use. That was part of his appeal – that, and the way he looked. She thought nobody could ever look more beautiful. She had, hidden away, a photograph that she had taken of him without his knowledge.

Amanda sensed her daughter’s unhappiness.

“Something’s wrong, darling. I can tell.”

“Nothing.”

“No, you can’t just say nothing. If something’s wrong, you should tell me about it.”

“I told you: everything’s fine.”

Amanda put an arm about her. “James? Is that it? Has James been nasty to you?”

She shook her head. The denial was genuine. “He’s never nasty. He’s too nice for that.”

“Doesn’t want to play any more? Is that it?”

This was greeted with silence, which was an answer in itself. Amanda gave Clover a hug. “My darling, here’s something that you’re going to have to get used to. Boys are different – they have things that keep them busy and sometimes they don’t seem interested in the things that girls want to do. Boys can ignore you when you really want them to take notice. That can be really hard. They break our hearts, you see. Do you know what I’m talking about? They make us girls feel sad because they don’t want to be with us. There may be no special reason for that – they might just want to be by themselves. You’re just beginning to see this now; when you’re a teenager – a bit older, maybe – you’re going to see it all much more clearly. And there’s no easy answer, no magic wand. I can’t make James want to spend time with you. I can’t make him be your friend. I wish I could, but I can’t.”

She nestled into her mother. She just wanted to be James’s friend. She just wanted to be with him. He had been happy with that before, but now no longer.

Amanda kissed Clover’s forehead. So precious, she thought. She tried to remember what it had been like at that age. The problem was that we so quickly forgot that even young children have intense feelings for others. Passionate adoration does not suddenly arrive, ready made, when one is fifteen or sixteen – the stage of the first fumbling romance. Falling head over heels for another can occur years earlier, and we would understand these things better if only we bothered to remember. That intensity of feeling for a friend was usually not expressed in any physical way, but it represented a yearning that was already knocking on the door.