The Touch of Innocents (11 page)

‘No, I’m fine, getting fitter every day. But there’s some things I need to take care of, Ed, after Bella’s death. And Benjy needs a little more time with me.’

‘Your employer needs a little more time with you, too, Izzy.’ He breathed deeply, inhaling the noxious smell of motherhood. ‘The big bad world out there ain’t gonna wait while you play nursemaid. Hell, if it were up to me, of course. But it’s not. Head office have got their own problems, and they’ve put it on the line. Come back in two weeks or … not at all.’

‘Generous bunch, our bosses.’

‘They think so. You stuck your rump in the air when you took off like that, and by rights they should have shot it off before now. Look, I know it’s
been hitting you from all sides; K.C. told me about the divorce. I’m sorry.’ It was an inadequate word but the only one he could find; he was notoriously bad at the personal touch. ‘But your disappearing act was damned unprofessional, Izzy, and you know it.’

It hurt. He was right and it hurt. How could she explain that she’d felt desperate for the chance to get away and clear her head, to escape from Grubb, from the phone, from Joe, from the deadlines, from the incessant pressure, and find out what really mattered to her? On a good day the foreign editor might understand, but he would never forgive. Pressure was part of the game, the stimulant, not the excuse.

She had always regarded herself as the ultimate professional who believed passionately in her duty to deliver news and to do it better than the next man. They had told her it wasn’t a job for a woman, but she refused to accept that her sex was of any material consequence. Except when she was pregnant, of course. A Muslim cameraman in Yugoslavia had declined to work with her when he discovered she was several months down the road and, in spite of her anger and insinuations that he was more afraid of mortars than a miscarriage, he’d stiffly maintained his refusal.

And she knew he had been right. It did make a difference; it had to.

There had been Bulgaria. The frantic trip to the nuclear power station which seemed to have been constructed of sandbags and old drainpipe and had blown almost as badly as Chernobyl. Twenty miles from the plant, as they had entered an infants school which the authorities had still not evacuated, their Geiger counter had started complaining like a stuck pig. They had stayed to film anyway, no more than twenty minutes, and within a week of her report
going on air the school and all its children had been moved to uncontaminated pastures many miles away. But it had given her a radiation dose equivalent to more than five times the recommended full year exposure.

No problem, the limits are deliberately cautious, the doctor had assured her – except when she missed her next period and they discovered she was pregnant.

‘Not what we would recommend, but I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about,’ he had told her with the fixed, insincere smile which doctors practise on nurses before turning on their patients. The smile had grown considerably more relaxed and genuine when, a few weeks later, she had miscarried what would have been her first child.

‘It’s for the best, you know. Didn’t want to worry you, but I was anxious about all those millisieverts you’d been hit with. Never can tell what will happen to a foetus after that sort of thing. Forget about it. Give yourself a rest for a couple of months and then start all over again.’

And she had, at the same time dispensing with the services of a condescending male doctor who couldn’t bring himself to trust a woman with the truth about her own body.

She had found it considerably less easy to deal with the pain which the miscarriage had brought. Not just the trickle of blood grown to searing physical pain that twisted and tore and tormented her inside, leaving her lathered with sweat and utterly exhausted in a heap on the bathroom floor, but the emotional wounds that would never heal. The guilt that could never be erased. The baby that could never be reborn.

She had compromised, thinking of today, of
herself, trying to balance dreams of professional success against those of motherhood. She told herself that her work had saved the lives of countless children – at the school in Bulgaria, in the besieged cities of Yugoslavia, in the camps of Southern Africa and on killing fields around the world.

But it had cost the life of her first baby. The miscarriage was her responsibility. Maybe.

Now she was responsible for the death of Bella.

Maybe.

There were beginning to be altogether too many maybes in her life.

There were no maybes with Grubb. He was unmistakably clear about her body. Have it parked back on location within two weeks, or not at all. Kiev or kids. Media star or motherhood. The balancing act was over, she was going to have to choose.

The ornate, hand-blocked wallpaper with its heavy Tudor motif gave the small room a gloomy aspect. Behind the palatial scrubbed stone exterior there were few Members’ offices in the House of Commons with any style or hint of magnificence, and certainly this was not one of them. A desk, a couple of chairs, a filing cabinet that doubled as a lock-up for bottles, an undernourished hide sofa. Even swift and fast-improving steeds like Devereux had to wait their turn behind the old parliamentary warhorses, long ago put out to grass and living off cobwebbed memories of when it had been
their
time.

They should be shot, put down, out of their misery, he had long ago concluded. Not for him the lingering death of an elder statesman, waiting in desperation for the telephone to ring, for someone to remember. Devereux would go up. Or out. Up to the very summit decreed by his talents and ambitions,
if his luck held; out to some new and well-grassed pasture if it did not.

He had made preparations. His diaries. Memoirs in the making and easy pickings at that. An advance of a hundred thousand in exchange for patronizing and poisonous reviews in the Sunday book sections, two hundred if he named names and times and treasons and revealed who screwed whom and how.

God knows, he needed the money after the destruction his father had wrought upon the family’s fortunes, but memoirs were one-off, unrepeatable. There were other, more incisive ways to catch the financial tide, particularly with his newly established credibility on matters of defence. A few well-placed consultancies. A splicing together of contracts. A facilitator’s fee of modest percentage paid into a bank account of indecipherable anonymity. Using what he was already learning and would continue to discover so long as he remained in post. Another reason for giving the Americans a damned hard time but, in the end, giving them what they wanted.

The Duster.

They would remember, and recognize his value, if the time ever came.

He wondered what she would remember. What was her name? – Rosalinde. The tall, elegant, tight-breasted wife of the Transport Secretary. Or, rather, the former Transport Secretary. She was a Westminster wife, more ambitious than he and infinitely more corruptible, utterly unforgiving that he, and therefore she, was now numbered amongst the living dead. ‘Like wandering through the catacombs of Rome,’ as she had put it, ‘and never being able to find the door.’

Devereux had brushed into her along the Library
Corridor. She had been reeking of Givenchy and gin, drifting between receptions and anxious once again to be touched by the trappings of power. And he had touched her, there, on his parliamentary sofa as, in that grating Sloane voice of hers, she had whispered venomous disloyalties about inadequacies, political and physical, of her husband.

She had approached sex like an election-night count, rushing through the initial tally more rapidly than seemed possible only to demand an immediate recount. Incredibly dominant female, constantly wittering about his massive majority. It had been all but beyond him.

It was only after sex that her true seduction began, building from vows to be rid of her encumbrance of a husband through outpourings of her long-standing admiration for her new lover and climaxing in protestations of her desire to see more, much more, of Devereux.

He had told her of his suspicions that her tits were as false as her loyalties and had thrown her out. Almost invariably he had humiliated and discarded every woman he’d ever known. Yet still they came back; or, at least, a certain type of woman did. Those attracted to power, who could only reach orgasm on a front page.

He took little pride in such sterile passion, the adulation and easy conquests. He recognized his trait for what it was. Failure. His failure, though not his fault. Like father, like son, he heard himself mutter, tasting bile. He washed it away with a mouthful of Scotch.

He looked across the room to the dark oil painting behind his desk, the portrait of his father that had hung in every office he’d occupied since entering Parliament. It lied, like all portraits. The face was
imposing, as was his father’s, even if the artist had shaded the most unkind ravages of time and alcohol which had spattered his father’s cheeks. But the eyes were not those of his father. The eyes depicted in the painting were clear, forthright, staring directly at Devereux in a way his father had never done. His father had never been able to hold his gaze or return the affection offered by the child. At first Devereux had imagined it was because his father had no love for him; only later did he realize that his father was too ashamed to face his only son and look him in the eye.

Perhaps it was because of the dog. Scarcely more than a puppy. A token – as it turned out, the final token – from his dying mother. And it had fouled the rug. His father had been looking for a target, that afternoon it was the dog, and the father’s hunting boot had driven into the animal several times before Devereux’s desperate lunge had placed his own body between boot and dog. And for a while the father had seemed not to notice the difference.

There had been damage to the dog, perhaps a dislocated hind leg, and the boy had been instructed to leave his whimpering dog in the stables. That cold night, in defiance of his father’s explicit instruction, the young Devereux had crept out to comfort it.

Discovery had perhaps been inevitable; the consequences less so. As the child cowered amongst soiled straw, clutching his pet, pleading with his father, the animal had been wrenched from his terrified arms. Towering above him, the father had dangled the dog by the scruff of its neck. Then, accompanied by a savage snapping sound, the neck had been broken. A stifled yelp of innocence, a twitch. And a relentless, unforgiving anger that would wash away any future
moment on which his father might be tempted to offer trust or love.

It had not been the only cruelty, but it had been more than enough.

The father disgusted even himself with his increasingly frequent and irrational outbursts of wrath that would send the son scurrying in terror from the sound of his approaching footsteps, but the rages proved to be beyond anyone’s control. Particularly after the mother’s death.

Living with an alcoholic father created many wounds, even a father who climbed so high. And fell so far. It had condemned Devereux to a life spent taunting his father’s ghost, yet at the same time trying to escape from it. He hated his father with a fixity of purpose which, otherwise directed, might have built empires. He hated his father for not being what he might have been, someone to respect, to honour, to teach him love. There had never been love in the Devereux family, not after his mother had deserted him, opted out, by dying. After that it had been an expensive school, all male, where the only regular female contact was with matrons and cleaning women. Servants. Nothing to teach him respect for women, only for power.

Devereux knew his ill-formed emotions were a grievous fault, even as he indulged them. He had built a life in the mirror-image of his father. He drank, sometimes to excess, but not to dependency, and every time he put away a half-empty bottle was another little victory over his father’s weakness. He had entered Parliament, where his every political victory mocked his father’s failure. He had achieved his father’s ministerial position. And now he would surpass it.

And he had his own family. Devereux had sworn
protection to his family with the intensity with which his father had offered only abuse. A childhood of fear, of being betrayed, was not what Devereux would inflict on his own child. His love might be imperfect but unlike his own father’s it would be given without question, the new generation contemptuously rejecting the old.

Yet, as he had come to know, even in a father’s unquestioning love there could be danger. And dishonour.

As he looked up, his father’s lips seemed to sneer.

The bass guitarist stank. But to be truthful so did the entire band, a desperately fashionable post-heavy metal funk ’n’ fuck affair which tried to drown its deficit of talent in an excess of volume. The bass guitarist was the worst. He had completely lost it in the middle of a complicated riff and, fumbling, had attempted to cover his ineptitude with the visual extravagance of throwing his guitar high above his head.

Perhaps it had been the glare of the lights, or the sweat in his eyes, or simply the head full of smack. In any event his coordination was way off. The tumbling instrument had evaded his flailing hands and struck him directly on the bridge of the nose. Practically killed the bastard. The audience screamed hysterically as the cameramen closed in for the full effect.

Michelini laughed, for the first time that day, a sound that implied no humour. He’d been flicking idly through the cable channels and picking at slices of belly pork from the Cantonese take-away, trying to fill the hole in his life. It had been one of those days. A cancelled meeting on the Hill, stood up by his date for dinner, time to brood and to remember.
It was one of those empty evenings when he could no longer hide behind the macho male frontage, and he felt very much alone.