Free Dangerous Thoughts by Celia Fremlin

asking, his gimlet eyes under their sleepy lids watching for Edwin to get rattled.
    Which he did, of course, poor Edwin.
    “Oh — I say …! No, I mean, look here, it wasn’t like that!”
    “Not like what?” His tormentor was smiling now, an easy victor. “You mean you didn’t leave them? But you told us just a moment ago that …”
    “Yes, yes, of course I — Well, I mean, there was nothing else I could do. I did try to — well, like I told you … but I didn’t know where they … and soon it would begin to get light. I’d have been recaptured instantly if …”
    “Yes, yes, of course, we all understand. I expect I’d have done the same myself; I don’t pretend to be a hero. Relax, Eddie!” (Yes, he was ‘Eddie’ by now to all the world except for his family and friends.) “Just relax, calm down, nobody’s blaming you, not for one minute. We just want to get the sequence straight, OK? You were scared of being recaptured, and so off you went. On your own. While it was still dark. Right? That would be the Tuesday, I take it?”
    I saw Edwin give a tiny start. Tuesday ?he was thinking; and then he nodded.
    “Yes, Tuesday.”
    “So, OK, you walked across the desert all through Tuesday and into the next night — Wednesday night. Right? How was it Eddie, alone in the desert at night? How did you feel?”
    Edwin had recovered himself. You could see him feeling that he had successfully hauled himself back on to firm ground; and now here he was, describing to millions of viewers the scene that he had described to Jason and me, using almost the same words, waxing eloquent about the velvet blackness of the sky, the brilliance of the stars.
    Casually, the interviewer glanced down at some kind of document that happened to be conveniently to hand.
    “It seems it was full moon on that Tuesday night,” he drawled. “Funny the sky was so black and the stars so brilliant. You’d have thought …”
    Now what? Oh, poor Edwin …!
    For a moment he just stared, his mouth opening and shutting soundlessly. Then:
    “You forget, I was two thousand miles east of here,” he countered. “It may have been full moon here in England, but where I was …”
    I covered my face with my hands, not wanting to witness the humiliation that would follow on this idiot remark. Poor Edwin! Poor, baffled Edwin …!
    But when I cautiously uncovered my eyes and ventured to glance again at the screen, I saw, to my amazement that it was the interviewer, not Edwin, who was floundering. I watched this highly paid professional, glossy with success, frantically trying to work out whether the moon is, or is not, at the same phase in every part of the world. One had to feel sorry for the man. After all, it must be many a long year since teacher had explained about tides, and the phases of the moon, patiently tapping and prodding at the wall-charts with her long stick. And naturally, once out of primary school, he had never had occasion to think about the moon ever again, or even look at it, why should he? After all, he wasn’t on the Sky at Night team, was he, he was on Current Affairs, for God’s sake! In fact, the whole thing was a bit below the belt — it was as if Edwin had committed a foul and got away with it.
    Good old Edwin! So I would be siding with a winner, after all!
    Siding? Taking sides? About what? Against whom?
    It’s strange the way unwelcome suspicions can float unacknowledged around one’s skull, like a boatload of refugees, unwanted, not allowed to land anywhere, yet all the time becoming more insistent, more inescapable. Thus it is that when the moment of revelation comes it isn’t a shock at all, because by then you realise that you’ve known it all along.
    Not that this was the final revelation, this about the full moon; it was just one more thing on top of all the other small discrepancies in Edwin’s account of his adventures; the gaps in it, the bits that didn’t quite add up; not least of which was Edwin’s