Free Possession by Celia Fremlin

had heard through Mrs Redmayne’s closed door. ‘I meant it, Mervyn, I meant it!’—all night the words had wandered distorted through my dreams,had hammered in my half-waking thoughts, and in the fevered, sleepless darkness I began to feel certain that they referred in some sinister way to Sarah. Huge, swollen fears for her safety padded through my mind, shapeless as shadows, and even the coming of the morning did not dispel them. Yet here was Peggy, sane and sure, and without the smallest shred of evidence either way, dismissing the lot of them! Harold, her husband, is always telling Peggy to look at the facts before jumping to a conclusion; but how gloriously Peggy can jump without them!—an Olympic athlete in comparison with his halting, timorous progression: facts tangle round his legs like briars, obstructing all further movement, while Peggy soars like a winged goddess over the whole wretched jumble, and lands, sure-footed and triumphant , at her decisions. Facts are all very well in their place, she tells Harold, but you want to show them who is master; and while there are no doubt quite a lot of scientists who base their careers on just such a philosophy as hers, Harold is not one of them.
    So I watched now with awe, and with mounting confidence , as she swooped to the very heart of my anxiety, and gave me her verdict:
    “Look at it this way, Clare,” she said. “Let’s suppose, just for the moment, that it wasn’t just a phoney, hysterical suicide threat that you were listening to. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that she really was threatening blue murder against her son’s fiancée. Well, so what? It’s obvious that she’s made the same threat before, whatever it was. All that about ‘again’ and ‘last time’—obviously this is quite a familiar conversation to them both. Well, all right: but she hasn’t ever done what she’s threatened, has she? I mean, I take it that her past isn’t littered with the bodies of murdered damsels found on her doorstep?”
    I laughed. But even as I did so, a picture came into my mind—the picture of a man hanging by his neck in his own garage. Not a damsel, admittedly; a middle-aged man. And fourteen years ago at that. How could it have anything to dowith Mrs Redmayne’s current feelings about Sarah? Or could a woman’s whole personality be so distorted by the shock of her husband’s suicide that …?
    Suicide? Another thought came to me. Had it been proved to be suicide? Had the unhappy man left a note, or something? But even if he hadn’t … even if there was a suspicion of murder …? I wished desperately that I could tell Peggy the direction my thoughts had taken, but of course I had promised Sarah not to. “ Especially not Peggy.” She had said, well knowing where my greatest temptation would lie.
    “And do remember, Clare,” Peggy was continuing. “That I’ve met her. She struck me as exactly the kind of hysterical little egotist who would go in for threatening to kill herself every time she doesn’t get her own way. I expect she gets away with it, too. You know—all little and weak, and knowing just which knobs to press in her son’s guilt mechanisms! Ugh!”
    It did seem quite likely. There are mothers like that, even nowadays. Not that I had ever before met one myself—all the mothers of adult sons that I knew were counting the minutes to the time when the dear boy, and his tape-recorder , and his appetite, and his girl-friends, and his effect on the electricity bill, would all disappear together, leaving his parents with peace, space and leisure, for the first time in twenty-odd years. But as I say, possessive mothers do exist, they must, or how could so much be written about them, and how could we spend so many happy hours feeling superior to them? Many’s the time that Peggy and I have read smugly aloud to each other those gentle understanding articles that urge us not to cling to our children for companionship ; and at such