Twice Shy

'Yeah. I was afraid so. Anyway, work on it, big brother. There's been a lot of guff going on this term about choosing a career, but I reckon it's the career that chooses you. I'm going to be a jockey. I can't help it.'

We said goodbyes and I put the receiver down thinking that it wasn't much good fighting to dissuade someone who at fifteen already felt that a vocation had him by the scruff of the neck.

He was slim and light: past puberty but still physically a boy, with the growth into man's stature just ahead. Perhaps nature, I thought hopefully, would take him to my height of six feet and break his heart.

Sarah rang almost immediately afterwards, speaking crisply with her dentist's-assistant voice. The shock had gone, and the exhaustion. She spoke to me with edgy bossiness, a left-over, I guessed, from a very demanding day.

'It seems that Peter should have been more careful,' she said. 'Everyone who owns a boat with an inboard engine is repeatedly told not to start up until they are sure that no gas or petrol or petrol vapour has accumulated in the bilge. Boats blow up every year. He must have known. You wouldn't think he would be so stupid.'

I said mildly, 'He had a great deal else on his mind.'

'I suppose he had, but all the same everyone says…'

If you could blame a man for his own death, I thought, it diminished the chore of sympathy. 'It was his own fault…' I could hear the sharp voice of my aunt over the death of her neighbour… 'He shouldn't have gone out with that cold.'

'The insurance company,' I said to Sarah, 'may be trying to wriggle out of paying all they might.'

'What?'

'Putting the blame onto the victim is a well-known ploy.'

'But he should have been more careful.'

'Oh sure. But for Donna's sake, I wouldn't go around saying so.'

There was a silence which came across as resentful. Then she said, 'Donna wanted me to tell you… She'd rather you didn't come here this weekend. She says she could bear things better if she's alone with me.'

'And you agree?'

'Well, yes, frankly, I do.'

'OK, then.'

'You don't mind?' She sounded surprised.

'No. I'm sure she's right. She relies on you.' And too much, I thought. 'Is she still drugged?'

'Sedated.' The word was a reproof.

'Sedated, then.'

'Yes, of course.'

'And for the court hearing tomorrow?' I asked.

'Tranquillisers,' Sarah said decisively. 'Sleeping pills after.'

'Good luck with it.'

'Yes,' she said.

She disconnected almost brusquely, leaving me with the easement of having been let off an unpleasant task. Once upon a time, I supposed, we would have clung together to help Donna. At the beginning our reactions would have been truer, less complicated, less distorted by our own depressions. I mourned for the dead days, but undoubtedly I was pleased not to be going to spend the weekend with my wife.

On the Friday I went to school still with the computer tapes in my jacket pocket and, feeling that I owed it to Peter at least to try to play them, sought out one of the maths masters in the common-room. Ted Pitts, short-sighted, clear-headed, bi-lingual in English and algebra.

'That computer you've got tucked away somewhere in a cubby hole in the maths department,' I said, 'it's your especial baby, isn't it?'

'We all use it. We teach the kids.'

'But it's you who plays it like Beethoven while the rest are still at chopsticks?'

He enjoyed the compliment in his quiet way. 'Maybe,' he said.

'Could you tell me what make it is?' I asked.

'Sure. It's a Harris.'

'I suppose,' I said unhopefully, 'that you couldn't run a tape on it that was recorded on a Grantley?'

'It depends,' he said. He-was earnest and thoughtful, twenty-six, short on humour, but full of good intentions and ideals of fair play. He suffered greatly under the sourly detestable Jenkins who was head of the maths department and extracted from his assistants the reverential attitude he never got from me.

'The Harris has no language built into it,' Ted said. 'You can feed it any computer language, Fortran, Cobol, Algol, Z-80, Basic, you name it, the Harris will take it. Then you can run any programs written in those languages. But the Grantley is a smaller affair which comes all ready pre-programmed with its own form of Basic. If you had a Grantley Basic language tape, you could feed it into our Harris's memory, and then you could run Grantley Basic programs.' He paused. 'Er, is that clear?'

'Sort of.' I reflected. 'How difficult would it be to get a Grantley Basic language tape?'

'Don't know. Best to write to the firm direct. They might send you one. And they might not.'

'Why might they not?'

He shrugged. 'They might say you'd have to buy one of their computers.'

'For heaven's sake,' I said.