He had been like this, more or less, since the photographs arrived. Since Sue had gone upstairs to find unwanted socks and he had torn the envelope half across in his eagerness to get at the contents.
At first, impossible as it might seem given the appallingly explicit clarity of the pictures, Brian had not understood quite what was going on. For just a microsecond he had stared at Edie’s face, which peered fearfully back at him over someone’s bare shoulder, without recognition. Her eyes were wide and staring and her teeth sank into her bottom lip as if to trap a cry. Brian, even while feeling touched that she should have sent him a likeness of herself, could not help feeling slightly disturbed at the dramatic intensity of the pose.
Explanation quickly followed. The next picture showed white buttocks mooning high, if a trifle flatly, in the air. A third displayed Brian’s profile grinning in an exultant, wolfish way as he apparently forced the thin, childish figure trapped beneath him. There were half a dozen more. The last was the worst. It showed Edie sitting on the very edge of the settee in an attitude of absolute despair, her face buried in her hands. Brian, naked in the attitude of a conqueror, stood over her.
He cried out then, awful, unclarified terrors confusing his mind, and dropped them all. Swept the photographs from the table on to the floor. He remembered that moment. He had been about to reach out and comfort her. How could such a gesture of compulsive consolation be made to look so threatening?
At that point Sue came clogging down the stairs. Galvanised by the fear of discovery, Brian scrabbled up the photographs, lifted the lid of the Aga and stuffed them inside. Knowing they must burn, he still stood there until they caught fire, blazed up, then folded softly into pale grey flaky layers. By the time Sue came in he was back in his chair and feeling as if a ten-ton truck had driven straight through him, leaving a jagged great hole behind.
Later, alone upstairs, Brian made some attempt to struggle out of the swamp of alarm and revulsion that was paralysing all coherent thought. It proved amazingly difficult, perhaps because he already had an inkling of the conclusion to which a rational assessment of the situation must inevitably lead.
All this while he was reliving the evening at Quarry Cottages. Kept seeing himself as through the camera’s eye, drinking, prancing about, disporting his body with amorous abandon. For all he knew they had photographed him writhing in agony during his riveting struggle with the jeans.
Which brought him to the all important question, who did he mean by ‘they’? Someone had been hiding with or without - oh God, please surely without - Edie’s knowledge. The pictures jumped gleefully to mind again. Untruthfully violent, unspeakably obscene. They had not been ordinary snapshots. There was something blurry and one-dimensional about them, rather as if someone had been photographing a television screen. The paper on which they were printed was different too.
Brian didn’t know whether to be more or less devastated by the fact that the envelope had contained no letter, directive or mention of further contact. In all the films he had seen featuring any sort of blackmail those on the receiving end had been given strict instructions to remain close to the phone and on no account to contact the police.
Brian’s tormentors need have no fear of that. At the very thought of an official interrogation his viscera, already jelly-soft, started sliding and slopping uncontrollably about. He felt sick and cold and also very angry. Schooled though he was in the repression of all emotion, but especially any of an anti-social nature, Brian wept with frustration.
Eventually he dried his face and beard. It was then nearly six o’clock. There was no way he could sit there and sit there then go down and have his supper and watch the television and go to bed and lie there and lie there. He would go mad. He had to do something. To take, however briefly and spuriously, the reins of his wretched existence back into his own hands. He dragged on an old jacket, the one he used to clean the car, and his hat with the let-down fleecy ear flaps, then ran downstairs, shouted something incomprehensible to Mandy through the sitting-room door and left the house.
Outside it was dark and foggy. Footsteps rang out on the hard ground some time before the walkers themselves loomed and melted away almost in the same instant. Commuters edged their cars homeward, searching in the foglamps’ glare for a familiar landmark or driveway. The lights around the Green were visible only as pale little smudges hovering in midair. The moon was a disc of dirty ice.
Brian was surprised afterwards with what a quick certainty his feet made their way to Quarry Cottages. Only once had he stumbled, falling into the gutter. A move which struck him as so symbolic of the whole sorry situation that he almost started to cry again.