Читать книгу Those Whom the Gods Love - Clare Layton - Страница 7

The friendly smell of the flat greeted Ginty as soon as she unlocked the door, and she leaned against the jamb, breathing it in. The air was stuffy after her two-week absence, but the mixture of vanilla-scented soap, books, pot-pourri, washing powder, and something indefinably her, was so familiar that it made her feel hugged. She’d never be able to forget Rano and his men, but already they were twenty-four hours and a thousand miles away.

The six lemons she’d left on the sea-blue ceramic plate had survived the heat and still looked glossily yellow as they marked the boundary between the working and eating ends of the huge scrubbed oak table under the windows. She was home.

A messy heap of mail spread out in front of her. Even before she bent down to collect it, she could see cards from all the courier firms and postmen who’d tried to deliver parcels that wouldn’t go through the door. Books, probably, for review. She’d have to phone to make arrangements for another delivery, but that could wait until she’d had a bath.

There had been no hot water when she’d got back to the hotel yesterday, after Rano’s men had dropped her at the checkpoint. Some of the other journalists had been drinking in the lobby bar when she’d arrived and had tried to make her join them. She’d muttered something graceless about having to phone her editor and escaped. Upstairs, with the door locked on the lot of them, she’d wrenched off her clothes and blundered across her untidy room to the shower, longing to wash off the sweat and the sick, humiliating fear she’d felt at Rano’s hands. But the water had hardly even been tepid. Swearing, shivering, trying to hold back the absurd, unnecessary tears, she’d rolled herself first in the inadequate towel, then in the quilt, and tried to get warm.

She shivered again, in spite of the stuffiness and the knowledge that no one had actually done anything to her and she was perfectly safe now. More than that, she’d come home with tapes and photographs that might at last get her the kind of work she wanted.

It couldn’t come soon enough. She was so bored with writing frivolous articles about the loneliness of the longdistance singleton and the perils of falling in love that she could hardly make herself do it, and yet that was usually all she was offered. There was still a pile of stuff on her desk that she hadn’t been able to force herself to finish before she’d left for the refugee camps.

The relentlessness of the freelance life was beginning to get to her as badly as the repetitive silliness of so much of what she was asked to write. Every minute that wasn’t spent trying to finish work that had already been commissioned had to go into hustling for more, and she still had to take everything she was offered, however excruciating. As a teenager she’d fantasized about the perfect man; now all she wanted was the kind of important weekly column that would earn enough to pay her bills and leave her free to pick and choose among the rest.

No wonder I’m losing my touch with diets and dreams of Mr D’Arcy, she thought, hitting the ‘play’ button on her answering machine before opening the windows over her desk.

At the other end of the big room was a pair of french windows, leading to the narrow balcony that provided all the garden she had. Unlocking them, too, she was glad to see that all the herbs and lilies were flourishing in their big glazed pots. Her expensive new automatic watering system must have worked. She picked some basil and rubbed it between her fingers, breathing in the clean, aniseedy scent.

As she listened to the voices of her friends and clients, she looked out over the rooftops and the tiny cat-ridden plots below, glad she’d traded a real garden for this extra height. A police helicopter chugged low across the sky in front of her, then passed again and again, circling noisily overhead. She peered down, wondering whether its officers were monitoring some fugitive hiding in the gardens.

They were a well-known escape route for the area’s school-age burglars, who nearly always overestimated their own strength. When they found they couldn’t hump their stolen televisions and videos over the high fence at the far end of the row, they dumped them there. Ginty’s flat had been turned over twice in the three years she’d had it, and both times her not-very-valuable possessions had been found under the fence and returned to her, grubby and slightly battered.

Few of the phone messages needed answering straight away, which was lucky. She didn’t feel like talking to anyone yet. The boiler thundered in the background. It shouldn’t be too long before the water was hot.

A couple of journalists she didn’t know had called, telling her the names of the mutual friends who’d handed over her phone number and asking if she could help them with background on her father.

‘You’ll be lucky,’ she muttered, assuming that the magazines must be gearing up for a big splash to coincide with his September South Bank concerts. Well, they could get their facts from the press releases or from his agent. She never commented publicly on either of her parents.

The crushed basil leaves were still in her hand when she went back inside, not quite sticky yet but already disintegrating. The smell made her think of holidays and tomatoes and Tuscan sunlight. And Julius. They’d been happy for a long time, until she’d screwed that up, too. A bleep signalled the end of one message, then a familiar voice said:

‘Ginty, it’s your mother. I got your card. Thank you, but I don’t think there is anything I need from you this weekend.’

So, what’s new? Ginty thought.

‘The caterers have everything under control. But if you had time to get hold of some Fru-Grains for your father, he would be grateful. The only shop round here that used to do them has just gone bust. He flew in yesterday and is well. The tour’s a success so far, and he’s pleased with the orchestra now. The strings have come together at last, he says. He can tell you all about it before the party. We are looking forward to seeing you.’

Ginty sighed, wishing her mother could occasionally sound as though she cared. She required her daughter’s presence at all the major family anniversaries, but that was all. From behind a mask of cool detachment, she made it quite clear that Ginty’s opinions were worthless, her friends inadequate, and her yearning for warmth as embarrassing as her lack of height and brains.

The machine bleeped again. Ginty rolled the remains of the basil leaves into a ball and dropped it in the bin, before stopping the messages and pressing the key for her parents’ phone number.

Waiting for the automatic dialling process to click through, she wondered how her mother would explain Rano. His justification of what he was doing still made Ginty feel sick. As an evolutionary psychologist, Doctor Louise Schell could take the heat out of the fieriest emotion and rationalize almost any human behaviour in terms of its survival value. Ginty hoped that organized rape would be too much even for her.

Her new housekeeper, Mrs Blain, answered the phone with the familiar announcement that both Ginty’s parents were at work and could not be disturbed. Trying to feel as cool and untouchable as they, Ginty left a message to say that she’d do her best to track down some Fru-Grains and that she expected to arrive at about eleven-thirty on Saturday.

The only other call she had to answer straight away was from Maisie Antony, the editor of Femina, who had sent her out to the refugee camps in the first place.

‘Ginty, it’s Maisie here,’ said her message. ‘Let me know as soon as you get in. The stories on the news have been ghastly, and I need to know you’re all right. Then we have to work out how you’re going to write the piece. OK? Ring me.’

Ginty rang, touched that Maisie cared enough to be so worried about her, and glad of the welcome, too. But she was in a meeting, so all Ginty got was her secretary and an appointment for Monday afternoon.

The last message came in a highly civilized voice, announcing that its owner was a friend of Ronald Lackton, who’d asked him to ring and offer his services in case she needed anything. He gave his name as Jeremy Hangdale, left a phone number, and said he’d be only too happy to help Ms Schell with any information she might want.

‘We have many friends still in London,’ Rano had told her, but she hadn’t expected them to get to her so fast. Funny how that one call could make her feel so exposed. Fresh air suddenly seemed less important than security, so she locked the french windows again.

Unzipping her bags where they were, she carried piles of dirty clothes straight across to the kitchen to load into the washing machine. When she slid a hand inside the insulation around the water cylinder, she was relieved to feel warmth against her palm. But it wasn’t hot enough for a bath yet, so she made a mug of strong tea, turned on her laptop, plugged in the modem and started to read her e-mails. The snail mail could wait till later.

An hour later, she was standing under the shower, letting the water drum down on her head and sluice over her body. Only when she felt properly clean again did she run a bath. She added lavender oil for serenity and rosemary for strength, without believing in either, lit a couple of orange-scented candles and put some Mozart on the CD player.

‘Always play Mozart, Ginty,’ her father had told her years earlier, ‘when you are feeling low or anxious. Your mood will lift.’

Much later, sitting clenched in front of her laptop, she read through the stiffly formal first draft of her interview with Rano and wrinkled her nose in self-disgust. The three thousand words seemed nearly as constipated as the first book review she’d written. That had taken days and been quite unpublishable. She should have known better by now, but she couldn’t see how to bring this piece to life.

Listening to the interview tape again might help. She rewound it and played it once more. The firmness of her own voice amazed her. No stranger hearing it would have guessed she was a scared amateur, who had to stretch to reach five-foot-three on any measuring stick. But when the tape spooled on to the moment when Rano had insisted that she admit his actions had been justified, she stopped it and decided she needed coffee.

Caffeine couldn’t give her courage, but boiling the kettle provided an excuse to leave her work for a few minutes. When she’d drunk half a mugful, she laid her fingers on the keyboard again, forced herself to remember what it had been like in the farmhouse, and had another crack at recreating Rano and his aura for the comfortable, highbrow, mainly middle-aged readers of the Sentinel.

She wished she could describe the blood under his nails, and the tortured man who’d been dragged away as she arrived, but those must have been exactly the kind of things he’d been warning her about. Maisie had once told her that until she risked getting off the fence and writing what she really believed, her work would always be bland and she’d never get anywhere, but this was different.

She’d just about got to the stage where she could face her mother’s distaste for what she wrote, but the possibility that Rano might send someone round to ‘remind’ her of what he wanted her to write was something else.

‘But would he?’ she asked aloud, hearing her father’s voice in her head as he warned her of the dangers of melodramatic fantasy. She told herself that she’d watched too many James Bond films. No one was going to come crashing through her french windows to beat her up, or fling her into a pool of piranhas. This was London at the end of the twentieth century, and she was – or wanted to be – a serious journalist. She had to take risks.

The first paragraph was too sycophantic even for her. She rewrote it, then deleted the angry new version without even re-reading it. When the phone began to ring she ignored it. The machine could deal with whoever wanted her. This piece had to go to Harbinger in twenty-four hours, whatever state it was in, so she couldn’t slack off now.

Harbinger put Sally Grayling’s faxed outline in his pending tray. It was dire. Nothing about it suggested that she had any talent whatsoever. There wasn’t even a hint of rhythm in her clunky sentences, and she had no idea of basic grammar; even the proper use of the apostrophe was a mystery to her. Worse than that, her banal ideas bored the pants off him. He pushed back his chair until the back of his head nearly touched the late 18th-century bureau bookcase behind him. He still took pleasure in this converted Soho house, with its perfect proportions and panelling, and the glorious furniture the Sentinel’s original owners had provided for their editor. He might be paid only a fraction of what he’d have got as editor of The Times, but at least he didn’t have to work in poxy Wapping and he was surrounded by pieces that would have graced most museums.

Were the likely benefits of pulling Sally Grayling worth a crash course in basic journalism? Basic English even? Bellowing for a cup of tea, he decided to think about it later and do some real work before the end of the day. The week’s copy deadline was still two days away, so all the pros were hanging on to their stuff. But Ginty Schell had sent hers through.

His assistant brought in the tea, strong and dark orange as he liked it.

‘You OK, John?’

‘Why?’

‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

‘Worse than usual?’ He held back his usual lecture on the deadening effect of cliché.

‘Much.’

He grunted. ‘Nothing tea won’t cure. Bugger off now, will you? I’ve got work to do.’

‘OK.’

He waited, finger on the mouse, until she had gone, then he let Ginty Schell’s formally arranged e-mail reveal itself on the screen again.

Dear John,

Here, cut and pasted into the e-mail as you asked, is my piece on Rano. He was quite firm about what he wanted me to include, but it seems important to offer something of the opposite point of view, too. Anyway, I hope I haven’t made it too even-handed, too bland. Let me know what you think,

Ginty Schell.

Harbinger sighed for her lack of self-protection. He really was going to have to take her in hand. Didn’t she know yet that you shouldn’t express doubts about your own work when you submitted it? Or that you should wait until the deadline to make sure what you’d written didn’t seem stale when the final decision on the week’s contents was made?

But as he read he began to smile. Beginner though she was, she hadn’t done badly. The piece could do with tightening here and there, hardening up once or twice too, and it needed the few telling personal touches that would lift it out of the good-exercise category and into something the Sentinel could publish. But he was reasonably pleased. And he was dead pleased to know she was safely back. That might let him sleep tonight. He reached for the phone.

‘Ginty? John Harbinger here. How are you?’

‘Fine. Did you get my e-mail?’

‘Yes. You’ve done a good job so far. It needs work, but for a first draft, it’s not too bad. I thought we might go through it over dinner.’

‘This evening?’ She sounded suspicious. Almost like bloody Kate. He wondered who’d been talking to her.

‘Yes. I need the finished version by Monday evening, as you know, so that would give you the weekend to knock it into shape.’

She was knackered, she told him, and needed an early night. After a second, she added in a rush that she wasn’t trying to avoid him, only making sure she got enough sleep.

‘Enough for what?’ he said with a suggestion of a laugh.

‘I’ve just been phoned to ask if I’ll go on Annie Kent’s Saturday radio show tomorrow morning – to discuss rape. Radio always makes me nervous and if I’m too tired, I’ll make a fool of myself and my voice will be all croaky.’

‘Good for you,’ said Harbinger, seeing the opportunity for a little publicity. ‘You will say something about the Sentinel, won’t you? After all, it’s not the BBC, so there are no rules against advertising.’

‘If I’m allowed to,’ Ginty said, adding more briskly: ‘And if you e-mail me with the changes you want to the interview, I’ll get you a revised version by the end of Monday. And by then I should have prints of the photographs Rano’s men took – and some of my own – in case you want illustrations.’

‘Good. That’ll help. Now, are you sure about dinner? Editing is always more satisfactory face to face than via e-mail. You sound like a woman who needs food.’

‘Honestly, I think I’d fall over if I tried to go out tonight. Like I said, I need to get my head down. I’ve got a hell of a lot of work on, and it’s my mother’s fiftieth birthday tomorrow. I’ve got to drive straight down to Hampshire after Annie Kent’s show, which means I’ll lose most of the rest of the weekend. But I’ll do your rewrite on Monday. I promise.’

‘What about having dinner with me then, as a celebration?’

‘All right. Fine. Yes, thank you. I’ll look forward to it. Bye.’

‘Me too. Before you go, Ginty: how was it? I mean, face to face with Rano? It sounds as though it might have been pretty rough.’

There was a high-pitched gasp down the phone as though she was about to giggle. Damn! It would be a bugger if she turned into another silly girl after all the trouble he was taking for her. But it turned out that she wasn’t laughing.

‘It was vile, while it lasted, but they didn’t actually do anything to me. And I got back in one piece, so I’m filing it under “useful experience”. That should deal with the nightmares.’

‘Great,’ he said as casually as he could with the word ‘nightmares’ sticking in his mind. ‘I’ll see you Monday. Have a good weekend.’

Putting down the receiver, he wondered what she was really like. The first time they’d met, she’d reminded him of those East European gymnasts, with her childish body and the big hurt eyes. She was pretty enough, and rather sweet, but not his type, so he’d been surprised Janey Fergusson had thought he might fancy her. Then, glancing around the room, he’d seen a long-legged blonde with big tits and a taut torso stretching her skimpy black dress and realized Ginty had been invited for someone else.

But the blonde had turned out to be a self-obsessed vacuous pain, in spite of her amazing body, so he’d started to pay more attention to Ginty and been reluctantly impressed. She’d laughed when he said he’d seen some of her work. Most wannabes were left gasping – or grasping – by the mildest of compliments from anyone in his position. And once she’d got over her evident surprise that he wanted to listen to her, she’d talked well. But there’d been nothing in what she’d said, or how she’d looked, to justify the conviction that had been growing in him ever since, that she had something he needed.

If so, he was clearly going to have to work hard to get it. There weren’t many young, female, freelance journalists who turned him down when he offered them dinner, even when they were doing some radio the next day. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might refuse, so he hadn’t set up anything else. Still, there’d be plenty of parties; there always were.

He riffled through the clutch of invitations on his desk. They were all from PR girls, desperate to drum up some publicity for yet another ghastly new book or an artist no one had ever heard of. One, which he’d been avoiding ever since it arrived, made him wince as it reached the top of the pile again. A nephew of Steve’s had become a painter and was having a private view next week. Harbinger put that on one side, then dumped the rest in the bin. He was too tired to go on the pull anyway.

The first three mates he phoned were busy, so he rang the local takeaway for a curry instead. It ought to reach the flat pretty much at the same time as he did.

The moment he unlocked his front door, he was hit by a peculiar smell, sickly and rotten, like decomposing bodies.

Oh, Christ! he thought. I am going off my trolley.

A second later he realized something must have gone wrong with the drains and felt better, even though he had no idea what to do about getting hold of a plumber. That sort of thing had never been his job. Bloody Kate had always done that.

As far as he could see, he hadn’t got anything out of their twelve-year marriage in return for working his arse off to pay the mortgage. He’d had to put up with Kate’s ghastly family, her PMT, the sleepless nights, the babysick and nappies, and all he’d got back had been constant carping about the time he spent at work and his inadequate sexual technique. Bloody women.

He was sniffing round the bathroom, leaning down towards the basin’s plughole, which smelled only of the toothpaste he’d spat into it that morning. The bog was OK, too, and the bath, so maybe it wasn’t the plumbing. He sniffed his way all round the flat like a customs’ dog. The sheets could do with changing, but it wasn’t them; they were just a bit grubby. And there were no sweaty games clothes either. He hadn’t played squash for weeks. Perhaps that was why he’d been sleeping so badly.

He followed the stink round the flat, ending up in the kitchen, staring at a virtually clean saucepan. All it had in it was half an inch of vaguely green water, but it stank. He’d boiled some frozen peas in it a few days ago, just after the cleaner’s weekly visit. He hadn’t known water could turn rancid like this.

Pouring it down the sink, he thought he might throw up. A gush of cold water from the tap washed away the slime, but he couldn’t get the smell out of his mouth and nose. It really was like decomposing bodies. Oh, God! Somehow he had to stop thinking about dead bodies or he really would go bonkers.

A good slug of whisky would take away the memory of that smell, he thought, as the bell rang. It was his curry. Damn good, too. He ate it, watching his video of Cape Fear. That and the whisky got him through the evening until it was time to go to bed.

Hours later, he reared up off the pillow, sweat pouring from his skin. Choking, he flung back the duvet. This time the dream had had an added extra torture. As he’d advanced on the body and felt it swing against the flat of his hand, he’d looked up and seen that it had Ginty Schell’s face. This was ridiculous. He hadn’t done her any harm. Not yet anyway.

Harbinger got out of bed and staggered to the bathroom to get a glass of water. The taste of curry in his mouth made him feel gross, and the sight of his pouchy eyes and clammy grey-pink face in the mirror turned him up. He looked about a hundred-and-fifty. He’d be ill soon if he didn’t find a way to stop all this.

It must have been Kate’s loony accusations that had set off these dreams. He was a decent bloke, whatever she’d said. Look at Ginty Schell. He’d given her a leg up without any nefarious intentions. Her Rano interview was going to give her a much higher profile than she’d ever have got writing for Maisie Antony or any of the other women’s mag harpies.

He tried going back to sleep, but it didn’t work, so he poured some more whisky and put on another video. Sometimes now, he slept in front of them, waking with his back wrenched and his tongue bitten. But usually he watched until dawn, then went back to bed and managed to get another hour or two. He was so tired, he sometimes wondered how much longer he could go on. It was even worse than when the kids had been babies.

Perhaps all he needed was another girlfriend. He still wasn’t sure about Sally Grayling, but he could always give her a go. See how it went. She wasn’t the sort of hardfaced bitch Kate had turned into, and she might know a plumber.