Читать книгу The Touch of Innocents - Michael Dobbs - Страница 6

Grubb rapped on the door, hesitating fractionally before he entered. Characteristically he was a man who pushed his way around life ignoring the sensibilities and wishes of others and wouldn’t think twice about barging into hospitals, funerals, bedrooms and even ladies’ washrooms in search of his prey, but the managing editor had only recently taken over and was something of an unknown quantity.

Hugo Hagi, of West Coast Japanese-American stock via Wharton Business School and IBM, knew relatively little about TV news and had the good sense not to pretend otherwise. Instead of constantly watching television on one of the half-dozen screens which hid his office wall he would embalm himself in front of the computer screen which sat on the end of his desk. He was not, as Grubb would complain after a couple of beers, ‘batting from the same dugout’. The whole industry was being taken over by accountants who cared nothing for the professional pride of a world scoop and the exhilaration of dumping all over rival channels but who got their rocks off by studying bottom lines. Maybe they didn’t reproduce, didn’t know how to, just split in two like amoebae.

The new man had the frustrating habit of switching off the screen every time someone entered his room, as if he were protecting some great secret with which others couldn’t be trusted. Hell, there were no secrets in an open-plan newsroom where you had to raise your voice even to proposition one of the graduate researchers, but Hagi’s office was alien turf. Behind his back they called him ET on account of the unnatural green glow of the computer screen which normally lit his sallow features, and because everyone wished he would go home.

‘Hugi, got a minute?’ Grubb enquired, using the foreshortened soubriquet the Japanese-American hated only marginally less than ET.

The switch was thrown and the green glow subsided. The alien emerged in human form with a thin smile on his well-groomed features. He was considerably the younger, a three-hour marathon man, lacking the rough edges and dusty aura which hung around the foreign editor. There were no family photographs on the wall, only his framed MBA and a signed photograph of Wilbur Burns. It left Grubb feeling both resentful and nervous.

‘How can I help, Eldred?’ Hagi emphasized the name, retaliating in kind, insisting on the formal version of the foreign editor’s name rather than the more familiar Ed. How could you run a news room with people calling you ‘Eldred’, Chrissake?

‘Thought you’d like to know … Hugo,’ Grubb added, withdrawing from the field of battle under cover of a smile. ‘Problem solved. We’ve just heard from Izzy Dean, seems she’s been in a mother of a car smash and got herself stuck in a coma in some hospital in the West of England. She’s gonna be OK. Bad news about the kid, though. The young ‘un didn’t make it.’

Hagi seemed to be taking his time digesting the information, and by the vinegary expression on his face it seemed to have given him wind. ‘Did you say the problem was solved?’

It was the turn of the foreign editor to wrinkle his brow. ‘Sure. I mean, we know where she is. She hasn’t disappeared.’

‘But is she back working? Is she gracing our screens, pulling in the viewers?’

‘Hell, Hugo. She just lost a kid. Nearly killed herself, too. What’s the friggin’ problem?’

‘The problem, Eldred, is that Izzy Dean is once more not doing the job we pay her for.’

The screen flickered back to life as Hagi checked the details. He always checked details.

‘In May and June she was off the air for more than six weeks.’

‘That was maternity leave. She was entitled. Hugo, she worked right up to the wire. Even had the baby induced so’s she could get back in time to take the Paris posting. What more do you want?’

‘And two years ago it was another six weeks maternity leave. Makes me wonder where her priorities lie, making news or making babies,’ Hagi continued.

‘She’s a woman …’ Grubb began to splutter, but subsided; he could see the direction in which his superior was headed. His tone grew suddenly more practical. ‘She is one of the best.’

‘Not if she’s off screen, she’s not.’

Vivid language came drifting through the door as a young female production assistant exchanged views with a supplier who had thus far failed to deliver the promised portable satcom system to a correspondent on the point of leaving for the civil war in South Africa. Newsrooms could produce as many casualties as a civil war, except in civil wars they were less likely to bayonet the wounded.

‘Izzy’s in line for a presenter’s job,’ Grubb continued, ‘maybe even her own show. That’s what …’ He was about to say that’s what Ira Weiss, ET’s predecessor, had hinted, but Ira was yesterday’s man and his name now dirt. ‘That’s what … was thought.’

ET raised an eyebrow at the green screen. ‘She’s pushing forty.’

In fact she was thirty-seven, but Grubb wasn’t going to contest the point.

‘Let me put this on the table, Eldred. I think the strategy should be to present the younger face of news, not to be worrying whether our presenter is going to come out in a hot flush all of a sudden. Don’t you agree?’

It was time for the foreign editor to join the game. He had considerable admiration for Izzy, it was impossible not to, but there was no shared personal chemistry. He found her prissy, and she didn’t fuck. Not him, at least. And if someone’s job was going to be on the line under the new management, sure wasn’t going to be his. He rubbed his razor burn thoughtfully.

‘You know, Hugo, there’s no denying that this motherhood thing gets in the way. Not that she’s complained. Apart from the maternity leave, she’s never missed a day for mumps and measles and the rest.’

He wanted to be fair. It would make the betrayal so much more effective.

‘She’s very professional.’ Pause. ‘For a woman. But you know, Hugo, it’s not easy. For us, I mean, you and me. We need to send our people into some of the toughest spots in the world, into the middle of wars, revolutions, natural disasters, you name it. She’s never backed off, not that you’d know it. We even gave her some of the most difficult assignments, Gaza, Bosnia, the Colombia drug cartels – that’s where they shot up her car and she got winged – just to test her, to see if she was tough enough, had the balls for the job.’

He looked hard into ET’s eyes, trying to calculate the mood.

‘But that was before she got herself elected to the club. What are we gonna feel like now if we send her into some war zone, she gets her fanny shot away and we’re responsible for two motherless brats?’ He corrected himself immediately. ‘One motherless brat. We’ve got to live with that. It just …’ – he waved his hands – ‘complicates things.’

‘Getting pregnant once you could put down as an accident, one of those hormonal things. But twice looks like she’s making a career out of it. Not, of course, that I’m against equal opportunities,’ Hagi insisted, covering the legal niceties as if some federal agency had his office bugged, ‘but going into battle with babies clinging round your neck inevitably …’ – he nodded in deference to the foreign editor’s own phrase – ‘… complicates things.’

There was a brief silence.

‘So what d’you want me to do?’ the foreign editor enquired.

‘Why, Eldred, I want you to send her our best wishes for a speedy recovery and get our star foreign correspondent back to work, pronto. Doing what she’s paid to do.’

‘And if not?’

ET tapped a couple of buttons and the screen flickered. ‘I see you’re already over budget this quarter. There’s no money to provide additional cover, nor to run a nursing service, either.’ He turned from the screen, bathed in its eerie glow. ‘If not, Eldred, as foreign editor you will have a sad and very painful decision to reach.’

She had just got to her favourite bit, where she always felt a tug of excitement even though she’d read it a hundred – well, possibly a dozen times, when the balloon is about to smash into the African mountain top and plunge the great adventure to disaster and death.

She had loved Jules Verne ever since she was a kid in bed with chicken pox and discovered that tearing round the world in eighty days with an intrepid Victorian explorer and his rag-bag of companions was far more fun than school. Somewhere at home she had a rumpled cloth-backed copy with her name written inside in careful, childhood letters, each individually and patiently crafted. ‘Isadora Dean. Age 10³/₄.’

They had encouraged her to go back a little, to the things which had stuck and were important, which her memory could embrace with comfort and certainty, to build from solid foundations so she might begin putting into their proper place the scrambled recollections that lay strewn about her mind.

Of the accident, and of a significant period both before and afterwards, there was nothing but a void penetrated by occasional flashes of light which had disappeared even before she could identify the elusive images they illuminated. Why had she come here, to Dorset? Perhaps because her grandfather had been born in this part of England, somewhere in the Wessex of Thomas Hardy, but she couldn’t be sure. Even memories of the days immediately after her recovery from coma were fitful and confused.

Most distressingly, much of the previous couple of years lay scattered like the shards of a mosaic attacked by vandals. Personal things, things of great value. The name of her godson. When she had last been back home. What she had given Benjamin for his birthday. Too much of the short time she had been given with Bella.

The process of recreating the mosaic was agonizing; she would reach for a piece only to find it had eluded her once more and she was grasping at thin, empty air. Often it was also humiliating. The previous day she had telephoned her producer in Paris, only to discover from his wife that he was no longer her producer. Had she forgotten they’d left both his legs behind on a mountain road above Sarajevo after he’d stepped on a Serbian mine while trying to take a piss, the trembling voice demanded in accusation.

Then it all came flooding back, the agony, the guilt, the shattered bones and screams, his own brave reasoning that he could have been knocked down crossing the Champs Elysées – a justification that somehow satisfied no one, not his wife, not even those who had shared the risks with him. Some memories she wished could remain hidden.

One image plagued her mind, lingering in its shadows, refusing to step into the light. She would attack, only for the image to recede deeper into the shadows; she would draw back in exhaustion and it would creep to the edge of the circle of light, tantalizing, mocking. Ghostly. Hollowed eyes. Shrunken lips.

Aged before its time.

The girl. With Bella. Always the two together. Inseparable. An image of death.

They had found a video player for her and every morning one of the nurses with access to satellite TV brought in tapes of the previous day’s WCN coverage. Even though it quickly glued back together much of the missing mosaic – she’d even forgotten who was Vice President, but then, she excused, so had half the American public – it was exhausting for her to watch. It reminded her there was a world out there which was working and warring and getting along perfectly adequately. Without her. The reassurances of her new producer that everything was under control and that she need not worry had precisely the opposite effect; she found it difficult to fight her way through the mist of depression which settled around her.

They told her it was normal, to be expected, part of the recovery process after brain damage, a frequent side effect of the drugs, but she was not convinced. It was more than the medication. It was the guilt.

‘You should call home,’ Weatherup told her. He was sitting on the end of the bed, no longer in ITU but a general recovery room. She needed to share the pain, not lock it up, he encouraged, she needed the support of family. Izzy had insisted that she be the one to break the news to her husband, but wasn’t it time?

‘I …’ she had begun, but shrank into the pillows. Something inside was holding her back. Made her uneasy.

‘Look, Izzy, I know it must be difficult, but think of what you still have. You have Benjamin. Your family. A fine career. So much to look forward to.’

Somehow the neurologist’s words didn’t gel.

‘Will … will I be able to continue?’

‘With a career or motherhood?’ he asked.

‘Both.’

He smiled and reached for her hand. ‘You’re making excellent progress. Just three days out of a coma and you’re reading, watching television, taking an interest, regaining your strength. You’ve nothing to worry about.’

‘Doctor.’ She beckoned him to lean closer so she could whisper directly in his ear. ‘Bullshit.’

He gave her a long, calculating stare. ‘OK, Izzy. If you want the full picture, I think you’re strong enough to take it. The truth is no one can yet be sure. Your brain took an almighty beating inside, and sometimes there are lingering after-effects. Some memories may never return. You’re bound to be emotionally unsettled for a while. It’s possible – not likely, you understand, but possible – you may be susceptible to epilepsy in later life, but we have drugs for that. You might find some areas of your brain don’t want to work as well as they did. We know there is some damage and brain cells don’t repair themselves, but the system has an amazing knack of compensating, finding another way of getting the job done. You’re in excellent physical shape, you’re recovering remarkably well. I can guarantee nothing, but if you were a horse personally I’d back you in the Grand National.’

‘If I were a horse you’d already have shot me.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ Weatherup insisted, laughing. ‘Climb Mount Everest. Have another ten babies. Just don’t attempt it all at the same time!’

‘Mothers don’t always get a choice,’ she replied, but the mist of depression had lifted a fraction.

‘Tell me, Izzy. It’s a personal question, do you mind?’ he asked hesitantly. ‘I’ve wondered about it ever since you were admitted. You have a remarkable scar, just …’ He glanced down as though trying to examine himself, suddenly uncomfortable.

‘Just here, on my breast.’ She ran her fingers over her nightdress just above her left nipple.

‘We had to examine you thoroughly, you understand,’ he explained hurriedly, not wishing to imply that his thoughts were focused on anything other than sound medical practice. Even so, she was a remarkably fine-looking woman …‘A strange injury. We couldn’t decide what it was.’

‘Bullet wound. Probably from a nine millimetre Uzi. Badly stitched. My car got shot up in Colombia by a drugs gang I was investigating. The head of the cartel promised me exclusive access for a week assuming I would sleep with him. When I didn’t he took exception, for some reason didn’t want either the tape or me getting to the airport. Wrecked the car but this hole was the only damage they managed to do to me or my crew. If only they were as pathetic with their other business operations.’

She made it sound matter-of-fact, as if she were reporting on someone else’s problem.

‘Good God,’ Weatherup muttered in astonishment, sounding very English. ‘We don’t get too much experience at this hospital with wounds from machine guns.’

‘Sub-machine guns,’ she corrected.

‘And that’s what you want to go back to? My dear girl, you must be quite crazy. But very brave.’

‘Not really. Screwing him would have been brave, but there are parts of me that even my editor doesn’t own. Anyway, I was five months pregnant.’

‘More crazy than I thought!’

‘Not at all. I used the bump to smuggle out a world exclusive in my knickers and underneath my sanitary wear. The good Catholic border guards just wriggled, far too embarrassed to look closely.’ She smiled, but his words had hurt. Had she been a man the doctor would have been not amazed but enthralled, excited by the challenge, relishing the danger, anxious to hear more. Instead, he had patronized her, unintentionally and nowhere near as badly as she was patronized in her own office, but still a grating reminder that already she was re-entering the world she had left, and all the contradictions and torments it held for her came flooding back.

Like the missed birthdays and broken promises which she hoped Benjamin was yet too young to understand or be hurt by. The searing pain when he seemed to treat the nanny as more of a mother than her. The games and rhymes she had so much wanted to teach him but which he’d already learned. From someone else.

The insanity of arriving back from the death camps of civil war scarcely three hours in almost any direction from Charles de Gaulle, in time to wash for Sunday lunch.

The anxiety when she discovered that from her ‘happy box’ of essential travelling supplies were missing the dozen clean syringes she carried to avoid the infected needles of a war zone, and the blind fit of anger with a two-year-old when she discovered Benjamin had taken from it the tiny compass without which she couldn’t guarantee locking onto the satellite. On such small things might hang her life and the story, although she did not care to ask which her editor valued more highly. Gambling her own wits against snipers from Beirut to Bosnia for an audience she knew was so jaded by nightly overkill they might just as well be watching their laundry spin and who thought the Golan Heights were a suburb of Cleveland.

Waiting on the sandy beach outside Mogadishu as the execution by machine gun of two army deserters was held up, even as they stood blindfolded and bound tight against empty oil drums, trousers fouled. Held up, not by God or a quixotic judge, but by a BBC cameraman while he changed his clapped-out battery.

Returning to receive not accolades or understanding but a relentless demand for more, more, more, knowing they were pushing her harder than anyone else, waiting for the little woman to plead cramps or hormones or simply to break down and make a mess of her make-up. The pigs.

Balancing the lust for a story against the demands of self-preservation, conquering your own fear and crawling that extra exclusive maggot-infested mile before remembering you were a mother with responsibilities back home.

Home. It was time to call her husband. Her nervousness, for which she had no explanation – or, at least, none she could remember – came flooding back.

A ring. An answer.

‘Joe?’

A silence. A long silence.

‘Joe, it’s me. How are you, darling? Have I interrupted you?’ God, it was pathetic. Sunday morning, what could she have interrupted?

Another long silence.

‘Where are you?’ he muttered.

‘In England, Joe.’

‘I thought you’d disappeared to Mars.’

‘Joe, please. I’m in hospital. There was a car crash. Did you hear me?’

He didn’t seem to have made the connection. His mind was blocked, struggling to find the things he wanted to say. ‘You gonna be there long?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe another two weeks …’

‘Anything broken?’

‘No, but …’

‘Give me the address.’

‘You’re coming over?’

A silence.

‘No, I can’t. I’m up beyond my butt in work. Just give me the address, will you?’

‘Joe, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.’

‘I’ve got something for you, too. Didn’t want to do it like this, but …’

A pause while he struggled for the long-practised words and failed.

‘Hell. I’ve had enough. Of you disappearing, of being left on my own, knowing that I come about as low on your list of priorities as root-canal work. I’m out, Izzy. Out. I want a divorce. I just hope we can make it quick and clean. Be mature, eh? For the sake of the kids?’

Perhaps he might have expected the silence that followed, but he showed no sign of it. ‘Come on, Izzy, it can’t have come as that much of a shock to you. Christ, it’s not as if there’s anything left between us. Let’s just formalize it so we can both get on with our own lives. I’ve got all the details prepared for you to look at. Just give me the address.’

‘You’re trying to deliver divorce papers to me while I’m lying in hospital?’ she gasped. There was a sudden avalanche of memories, of pain, exposing the hard rock-face that had become their relationship. She recalled it clearly now. The rows, his growing frustration turning to bitterness, a marriage that had become no more than an accommodation.

‘What do you expect me to do?’ he continued. ‘You left me with no option; I haven’t known where you’ve been for more than a month. Did you expect me to wait until you finished playing Marco Polo in your own sweet time?’

‘Joe!’ she pleaded, all the carefully considered phrases swept away. ‘For God’s sake, listen to me. Please. Bella. Our baby. She’s dead.’

There was nothing from the other end of the phone. The scalding of a man’s heart makes no sound.

‘Joe, she was in the back of my car when we went off the road. Benjy’s fine but … Bella’s gone, Joe. I’m sorry.’

The voice at the other end, when at last it came, had a strained, unnatural quality.

‘You killed Bella?’

‘Don’t, Joe, please.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘I can’t remember, I just don’t know. Joe, come see me. Grab a plane. Let’s not talk about this on the phone.’

‘Where are you?’

She gave him the details. ‘You’re coming to see me, then?’

The voice on the phone was like the hissing of a serpent. ‘The only thing you’ll get from me are divorce papers. You killed Bella, you irresponsible … selfish … bitch!’

She did not know how long she lay back on her pillow, eyes closed, the tears forming twin cascades that soaked into her hair. She did not cry for her lost marriage; even with her scrambled memories she could not persuade herself she had lost something of irredeemable value. The tears were for the loneliness and sudden sense of vulnerability which settled around her like a marsh fog of autumn, for the frustration and anger as thoughts and memories collided within her head to undermine her sense of self-control, for the lack of familiar landscape in a world which in a few weeks had been shattered almost beyond recognition. But most of all she cried from aching guilt. The guilt which insisted that she might, after all, have been responsible for the crash. Her fault that Bella was dead.

Her eyes opened. She could look back no longer, not when it meant grappling with memories filled with so much pain. There was only one way – forward, no matter what, and build something new and brighter for herself and Benjamin, if she could.

She picked up Jules Verne. Her long-loved friends were still unrescued, on the very edge of disaster as they clung precariously to the balloon’s basket. She threw them in the wastebin.

Devereux sat in the corner of the New York bar and watched with a practised eye. The bar was on the lower West Side on one of those blocks where the street language was Spanish and sunlight never reached the pavement. He liked these type of places, where he could get away from it all, the officials, the papers, the constant flow of formality and urgent business which dominated his other world. This was so different: classless, outgoing, utterly un-English. A challenge. And he enjoyed a challenge.

He’d flown to Washington on his first overseas trip to flex his muscles on the Duster. The US Administration wanted this project, wanted it badly. The hot breath of Congressional concern was gusting through the basements of the Pentagon; the project’s proponents were anxious to embrace any good friend they could find and Devereux was one of the few. The deal was not yet done, there was still more juice to squeeze from the lemon, but already he had made his mark in the capital of the most powerful country on earth.

And now he had escaped. Some shopping in New York before he flew home, he had explained, letting slip the shackles, sliding away from the pathways of power to this bar, where he was no longer Minister but Man, where there were no middle class moralizers, Protection Squad heavies or Fleet Street hacks. Nothing but a good, old-fashioned challenge.

He watched as an elderly and hugely overweight woman entered the bar, dragging a plastic sack behind her and jangling a large bunch of keys suspended around her waist. She had come to restock the vending machines, wheezing as she crossed the room, pausing only to take a long pull at her cigarillo. Her jaw dropped like a fish as she gulped for breath before taking yet another pull.

Wheeze, gasp, puff, jangle, wheeze; the sounds punctuated her slow progress. In a querulous voice she announced that she had to have her back operated on again. She appeared to invite a general conversation but only the barman responded, and that after a delay of several seconds.

‘Your back again, eh?’

Another delay. Like Ground Control to Mars.

‘Not until New Year.’ She began attacking the cigarette machine. Wheeze. Puff. Jangle. ‘Not getting laid up over Christmas.’

The barman offered no response, forcing her to continue the conversation on her own. ‘I guess I’m gonna go one of three ways. Lung cancer, cirrhosis of the liver or a broken heart.’ She paused to catch her breath. ‘Think I’ll give up men. Too damn dangerous. Hell, I’m only sixty-four. Lotta life left in me yet.’ The guppy jaw dropped several times while she hitched up her sagging support tights through the folds of her woollen cardigan. The barman polished glasses.

‘They better have a cigarette waiting for me at the door of the hospital. And a drink. Going in and coming out.’

The barman raised an eyebrow; she heaved her sack and her tights slipped once more. She paused to light another cigarette from a second pack in her pocket, not a cigarillo this time but menthol. Her attempt at safe smoking, cutting the risks. Then she dragged her sack in the direction of the condom machines in the men’s toilet, barging through the door without knocking.

As her sagging frame disappeared, Devereux laughed inside. Not at her, but with her. She knew she was ludicrous, spicing her nicotine with the occasional menthol in the pretence of delaying or avoiding the inevitable process of consumption inside her lungs, but she was doing it her way and would go out on her own terms. Unlike most politicians. Unlike his father.

Know thyself, and thy weaknesses, the better to understand and if necessary to exploit the weaknesses of others, he muttered. The old woman was a hag, but no broken reed. His father, at his bitter end, would have envied her.

Devereux turned the whisky around in his glass. Life was full of challenges and risks; it took an exceptional man to confront and vanquish them and, in vanquishing, to become great. He was an exceptional man, and would become great. He wouldn’t be his failed father’s son forever.

But one challenge at a time. He finished off his drink, ordered another, and gazed with interest and anticipation at the two women who were arranging themselves at the next table.

Izzy was pissed off. Deeply pissed off, in the way that gets you out of bed in the morning in spite of hospital routine.

Every day she would find herself waiting with growing anticipation for the videotapes of yesterday’s WCN newscasts, and this morning she’d set it up, punched the appropriate buttons and settled back in her chair.

And seethed. The tape had included a major slot from the new Mafia corruption trials in Palermo, the one involving a cardinal, an actress and two former prime ministers. Her territory. Now being squatted by that testicularly challenged little jerk of a producer.

She was jealous, hacked off with the producer, but mostly with herself, surprised that even from a hospital bed it could matter so much.

The door to her old world was beginning to open a fraction. Then K.C. Craven arrived and kicked the bloody thing off its hinges.

K.C. was black, doe-eyed and had flown in that morning from Washington DC. She was Eldred Grubb’s assistant, by far the finest of his few redeeming features. In her first week at WCN, with innuendo sweeping the newsroom as to why the foreign editor had hired an attractive mahogany-skinned assistant who was both taller and graduated from a far better university than he, she had been asked to explain her name.

‘Katherine? Connie?’ a colleague had enquired.

‘Why, bless you child. No,’ K.C. had responded in a mock Southern drawl, lashes fluttering. She enjoyed being theatrical; the entire newsroom was listening. ‘I was named K.C. ‘cause my mamma said she conceived me during an unscheduled time-out with a basketball player during play-offs in Kansas City. Best time of her life, she said. So even if she forgets who, ain’t never gonna forget where.’

Later Izzy discovered that K.C.’s father was a much-respected doctor in Minneapolis and her librarian mother had never been to Kansas City in her life, but Izzy was sworn to silence. K.C. was a good friend and the first enjoyable recollection to come alive for Izzy from what seemed like another, distant life.

‘It’s great you could come,’ Izzy said, not for the first time, as they walked arm-in-arm through the gardens.

She was making her first trip outside the hospital walls and Izzy had found the air unexpectedly damp, her mind still unadjusted to the lost weeks and changing seasons. The last few days had been frozen crisp, clean, the leaves on the old oak guarding the hospital entrance hung limp in the still air. But a storm was on the way, heralded by a tumultuous sky that seemed as though Turner had thrown his entire palette of paints across the heavens.

K.C. wrapped herself more tightly in her cloak. She had been careful to explain that Grubb had sent her, she couldn’t stay more than a few hours, yet to Izzy it was as though her friend had trekked alone across the Antarctic.

‘You’re the first thing from my life before the accident which hasn’t brought me pain. The divorce. Bella. Watching Fido pretend he can do my job.’ Even as she spoke she realized that her life was still a jumble of conflicting priorities. That, at least, had not changed.

‘What do you feel about the divorce?’

Izzy shook her head. ‘What’s to feel? Not angry, just – empty. I’ve always known he was unfaithful, got his brain in his boxers and his privates forever on parade, but funny thing is I’m finding it hard to be bitter. The marriage was a mistake, I think I can see that now.’

‘How a mistake?’

‘I was feeling pressured. Well into my thirties. The clock was ticking, the tubes beginning to get tired. Time was running out on me. I didn’t know how to handle it; everything else in my life had been planned, set into neat periods. College, grad school, internship, climb the ladder, PA, producer, correspondent … but this wasn’t going to be so tidy. The hormones were nagging away: do your bit for posterity, time to stretch the flesh. The job meant everything to me, yet suddenly … it wasn’t enough. I wanted the job and the kids. After Gaza it became something of an obsession.’

‘What happened in Gaza?’ K.C. pressed, wrapping the cloak still more tightly around her. As the day and its more spectacular hues began to fade, the wind was creeping in to claim its place. The storm was gathering.

‘It was during the Intifada, just before your time. The Palestinian riots had flared up again and I was over there with Dan Morrison from NBC to get an Arab’s-eye view. Interviews with local leaders, mullahs, the teenagers who were causing the trouble, that sort of thing. Lots of pictures of the rioting from behind Arab lines as they were throwing stones, petrol bombs. Nothing we hadn’t done a thousand times before.’

‘Dan Morrison?’ K.C. puckered her brows. ‘Was he one of us?’

‘That’s one hell of an epitaph,’ Izzy rebuked. ‘But you’re right. What do any of us leave behind? That’s really my point. Dan was like a big brother to me, we’d covered so many stories together. Never once got out of hand, the closest I got to his bed was the times I laid him out on it when he’d got blind drunk. Which was pretty often.’

She tried to smile at the memory, but there was no joy in her face.

‘Dan and I were shooting from pretty much the same location, great position where the camera could see it all over our shoulders, the Arab kids throwing stones and burning barricades right up to the Israeli lines beyond. Someone had to go first, we tossed a coin and he cheated. The sonofabitch was always cheating me, but only on silly things. Said he liked getting me riled, best entertainment he could find in a foxhole.’

She drew in a deep breath full of sorrow. ‘So, he stepped out half a pace to give his cameraman the full perspective and started to roll. He was talking about religion, about how both sides invoked divine justice and from their knees proclaimed their devout interest in peace. So long as it was their peace, of course. Then, they shot him. Through the back of the head. A single bullet; he was still talking as he fell. I helped drag him back and he died right there in my lap.’

‘Who were ‘they”? Who shot him?’

‘Who knows? It was an Israeli rifle but the army said the bullet was fired from a stolen weapon, intentionally to stir up anti-Israeli feeling in America. Either way, didn’t matter much to Dan.’

She sighed, there were no tears, she was too professional for that. Although sometimes tears help.

‘OK, so it’s the risk we all take. Could have been anyone. Would have been me, if Dan hadn’t cheated. But it got me thinking, what do you leave behind? What did Dan leave behind after all those years of screwing and drinking his way around the world? Of finding the back doubles to every airport and putting his neck on the line so some armchair producer back in the States can fill in the airtime between the sponsor’s messages? What? A better world? All Dan left behind was a grieving mother, a busted Chevvy and an empty apartment in Greenwich Village on which he still owed fifteen years’ payments. And I didn’t even have a mother to grieve, K.C., so I knew I had to get on and have those kids or I’d end up just like Dan. Does that make sense?’

‘Does the sun rise, stupid?’

She shook her head wistfully. ‘So I panicked. Married Joe. I’d known him for more than two years, although I realized later that in all that time we’d spent less than three months physically together. And I understand why he wants out. It’s an occupational hazard in my job and his. And men change after kids, you know. The first one is a mystery to them, a mixture of fascination and terror; by the second it’s simply a matter of mechanics. Your plumbing gets torn and twisted, you end up running on a damaged undercarriage and you find that once-passionate lover starts approaching you with all the sensitivity of a mechanical shovel.’

‘And only one gear.’

‘Joe was lousy about pregnancy. Resentful, jealous even. The baby had taken my body and his place beside it, and the more I swelled and the baby wriggled the more he simply moved away from it. From me. Like his life had been invaded. With Benjy he was bad, with Bella even worse.’

A silence hung between them. For the first time, as she found the words to describe her husband’s reaction, she knew without doubt that it was over. A chapter now closed, one she had never dared read out loud before.

‘But somehow I can’t find the energy to be angry. Hell, I’m almost relieved. I’ve been trying to balance Joe and the kids and the job for so long I was feeling like a bridge too far, slowly cracking in a hurricane; this simplifies things, one less weight to carry.’

The frost-dried leaves were beginning to chatter on the trees like the dying rattle of the day, falling around the women like the tears Isadora had been unable to shed.

‘How long are you going to be here?’ K.C. enquired.

‘Everyone seems delighted with my progress. Maybe just another two weeks. Then perhaps I’ll take a month off to get Benjy straight, sort things out with Joe. He’s bitter at the moment, but he’s not a bad man, he’ll come round. I need time for myself, too. I haven’t even been able to say goodbye properly to Bella.’ The voice, so used to talking of death, was steady but very quiet. ‘No tears yet, no mourning. They cremated her, did you know that? An unidentified little baby, no claimants, so they cremated her. I can’t even bury my baby.’

‘That’s … barbaric,’ K.C. shook her head in disbelief.

‘No. Just bureaucracy. Mindless bloody bureaucracy, as it is all over the world.’ She fashioned a smile of defiance. ‘Don’t worry, Izzy Dean will be back, I shall insist on it. I need just a little time for the bruises to heal. New Year.’

K.C.’s eyes grew large and swam with tears. ‘Oh, shit,’ she stammered. Leaves rustled round their ankles like rattling leg chains.

‘I’ve had a crack on the skull, K.C., but I haven’t lost all command of my senses. The Great Grubb doesn’t hand out trans-Atlantic air tickets like cups of coffee. You’re here to do a job, his job, I’ve known that ever since you arrived and I’m sure you’ve come bearing more than our beloved foreign editor’s best wishes. But you are also my friend, I won’t forget that. What is it?’

K.C.’s eyes begged apology. ‘You know the pressure he’s under. The money people have moved in, they’ve laid off another fifty staffers, the newsroom looks like the Alamo.’

‘Before or after Santa Anna arrived?’

‘Izzy, you’re the best we’ve got, even Grubby has to admit that, but it also means you’ve got one of the best foreign postings we have and there are fifty people sniffing around to see if they can take it from you.’

‘That’s a compliment.’

‘Even your little pimp of a producer has put in an official request to join the reporting staff, based on what he’s done in the weeks he’s been filling in for you.’

‘How long is it now?’ She furrowed her brow and tapped her forehead. ‘God, there are still things in here which simply don’t connect.’

‘We’re into December, Izzy. Nearly six weeks since you last had anything on air. And they’re building up for a civil war in Ukraine. Grubby wants you in Kiev not …’

‘Not flat on my back with my feet up in some part of the world he’s never heard of.’

‘You’ve got it.’ She hesitated. ‘You’ve also got this letter, Izzy.’ She reached inside her shoulder bag and retrieved an envelope. ‘It says three weeks. It says be back in three weeks, by Christmas, or they are terminating your contract. That taking off without letting anyone know where you were going was a hanging offence. That in the last three years you’ve clocked up more sick leave than anyone in the office.’

‘Being pregnant is not an illness,’ she replied testily.

‘Izzy, I’m sorry.’

‘I know you are.’

‘You’ll be back. Please say you’ll be back. Don’t let those miserable men with the clammy hands push you out.’

The night was silent. The wind had dropped as the rain began to make itself known, the storm was almost upon them. They were back beneath the great oak, but the leaves had stopped falling. They were all gone. The tree stood stark and bare. Winter had arrived.

‘My baby. My husband. And now my job?’ Izzy replied at last. She shook her head. The words of her award-winning report from Gaza, unscripted, the camera no more than a blur through the tears, the blood of her friend still damp on her hands, were forcing their way back into her memory.

‘In this land there are no victors, only victims. No children who are not soldiers, no difference of view which does not make enemies, no freedom which does not mean the persecution of others, no justice. In this land the utmost barbarities are committed in the name of God and love by extremists on all sides. And tonight they have claimed one more innocent victim. His name was Dan Morrison. He was my friend.’

In a green and pleasant land many miles away from Gaza, the tide of personal injustice seemed to have become a flood and about to carry her away as just another helpless victim. The rain began to fall, heavily, trickling down her face.

‘I’ll let Benjy decide. I’ve still got him. I’ll let Benjy decide.’

But it was not to be.

Michelini slammed full into the wall, the impact driving the breath from his lungs and forcing the taste of bile into the back of his throat. His heart hammered against his aching ribs, a searing pain like a razor-cut stretched from his left ankle all the way up to the back of his knee. He thought he might vomit. He was about to slump to his knees but knew that in doing so he would concede not only the game and the ten dollars but also his sense of virility. He would die standing up, not on his back. On second thoughts, dying on his back offered amusing prospects, but not during a game of squash. Instead of expiring, he settled for a slow and methodical retightening of his shoe lace. He had found himself retying his shoe laces a lot recently.

‘Can’t you afford new laces, Joe?’ his opponent enquired with a knowing smirk.

‘With what you lawyers charge? Gimme a break.’

‘OK. Last game. You win and I’ll buy lunch and new laces.’

‘Yeah. And charge it back to me in your bill with a goddamned mark-up. Creep.’

‘You’re the one who’s been creeping. You put on more weight or something?’

‘Screw you.’

‘We aim to please. But you know I charge by the full hour. Way out of your endurance league.’

Michelini decided to save his breath and responded with a gesture involving his little finger and its pinky ring before retrieving the ball from a far corner of the court. So he was a pace slower today; he was as fit as ever – well, would be if he gave up smoking once again – but he’d not been in the mood since he had heard about Bella. He’d been home most evenings alone, brooding, trying to work out the anger which had been growing within.

He felt cheated. He had scarcely seen Bella for more than a few weeks during her short life and then only at nights when he wasn’t travelling or working late. There had always seemed to be plenty of tomorrows for catching up. He was too used to not seeing her; he scarcely knew her, his own baby. Couldn’t even focus on what she looked like. And because he also felt ashamed that he did not feel her loss so very much more, he turned the sense of shame into anger aimed at his wife.

Then, last night, there had been a knock at his apartment door. A neighbour, a woman newly arrived in the Watergate complex with whom he’d exchanged pleasantries in the elevator about the turning of the leaves and the previous weekend had lent a hand with some bulky shopping. She had knocked about half eight, thanked him once again for his help and asked if he’d had dinner, would he fancy a hamburger and bottle of wine? He was about to explain that he’d already eaten and anyway was on a diet and didn’t want to be disturbed when he noticed she was already carrying the McDonald’s and Montrachet. She meant business.

He had stuffed two quarter-pounders and finished most of the bottle himself while, in between hamburgers, she had satisfied some of her own appetites. They hadn’t even left the sitting-room floor and he could still feel the carpet burns. When it became apparent that she’d be going for more, both before and after apple pie dessert, he’d had to fake it, and he wasn’t as good at that as he used to be.

This morning he’d felt like one of last night’s french fries; no wonder he was a pace slower. And he still didn’t know her name. Better ask the concierge.

It had been the first time he’d done it in the family home. He had a sense of family ethics that you didn’t cheat on your wife in her bed or on her living-room rug, you kept that for elsewhere, separate from the family. But he felt that she – it was ‘she’, not ‘Izzy’, he’d already embarked upon the mental process of divorce – that she had cheated him far more fundamentally than he had ever cheated on her. He was not even two full generations away from the old country concepts of family and vendetta; somehow it passed through the blood that there were no situations in which no one was to blame. This had to be someone’s fault. Her fault.

Usually he’d announce some of the more adventurous details of his conquests to his lawyer, Antonini, just before they played an important point so as to consume his opponent with titillation and second-hand lust just when he needed all his powers of concentration. He decided against it this time; it might seem inappropriate and even incriminating on the day they’d agreed to extend the game into lunch in order to discuss his matrimonial problems. In any event, he felt invigorated by the memory and once again set about persuading himself that he looked, felt and played younger than he was. He pummelled the ball and started the new game.

They were towelling themselves dry when Antonini got down to business.

‘You sure, Joe? About this divorce?’

‘I’m sure. The marriage is going nowhere, doesn’t really exist. She’s never here, always off with God knows who doing God knows what.’

‘Double values, Joe? You’ve been no saint, either.’

‘All that counts is it’s over. One big, fat zero.’

‘Pity. I thought you two had such a good thing going. I’d hate to think you were – you know, simply going through one of those phases.’ He’d meant to say ‘patches’, but now it was out. ‘A lot of men do, Joe, and regret it like hell after.’

Michelini’s eyes flared. ‘What? You think I’m going through the male menopause?’ His tone was aggressive; he was naked, suffering that feeling of inadequacy borne by many men in the locker room, and covered that inadequacy with belligerence. ‘Thanks, Toni, but my hormones are working great – good enough to give you another thrashing on the court any time you want. No, I’m not going through one of those phases, it simply that my marriage is down the pan and I want you to help me clean the mess up.’

Antonini backed off, waving his hands. ‘Fine, Joe. I hear you loud and clear.’

But Michelini was in gear, wanted to get it out of his system. ‘It’s never been much of a marriage. All she wanted was kids so she chose me as some form of farmyard stud. Rent-a-dick. “Is it your fertile time of the month, dear, or shall I roll over and reread yesterday’s newspaper?” I’ve felt like I’ve been drowning in her hormones. She goes on about motherhood yet there she is every day trying to prove to the entire fucking world she’s got bigger balls than the next man. I wanted a wife, a real woman, Toni, not some flak-jacketed Amazon who travels the world with a camera lens poking out of her knickers.’

He threw his damp towel bitterly across the room where it flopped into a large hamper. ‘She wouldn’t even call herself Mrs Joe Michelini. What’s wrong with that, for Chrissake?’

The lawyer’s tone was smooth, professional, but pressing. And once more inappropriate. ‘Have you thought about the kids?’

‘Kid, Toni. Kid. We’ve only got one now. She killed Bella, remember?’

Michelini, completely naked, squared up to the lawyer with his arms hanging stiffly at his side and his fists clenched. He felt guilty about Bella, wanted to take a swing at someone. He was beginning to attract the attention of others in the locker room.

‘Easy, Joe. I’m only doing my job, I have to ask these questions. You’ll thank me for it later.’

‘The kids should never have been dragged halfway round the world by a mother who even then would take off at the drop of a hat and disappear for a week or more. Kids need a mother, not to be dumped with a string of agency nannies who don’t even speak proper English.’ His chest heaved as he fought to control his own passion. ‘They also need a father, yet because of her I scarcely knew them. Now with Bella I’m never going to get the chance.’ He jammed a college ring back on his finger with a violence that must have hurt, but he did not flinch. Rather his voice grew quieter, more disciplined, the words like ice.

‘She is a completely irresponsible mother, Toni, and in a million years I’ll never forgive her.’

‘Try not to make it all too bitter, Joe. That’s the way things get messy. Expensive.’

‘No worries. My company’s backing me on this one, it’s agreed to pay every cent of my legal costs. No expense spared this time around. Don’t let it go to your head, you bastard. Just make sure I win.’

‘If it can’t be done neatly and cleanly, she’ll fight. She’s got to protect her professional image as Miss Clean, won’t accept being pilloried as an unfit mother.’

‘But she is an unfit mother. That’s the whole point. And she may find it more difficult to contest than she thought.’

‘What do you mean?’

Michelini turned to look into the mirror as he adjusted his silk tie. He was all control now. ‘Because she’s away so much she left it to me to sort out the bills and family finances, that sort of thing. Gave me power of attorney in case anything happened to her.’ He finished the knot with a flourish and turned to face the lawyer. ‘I have control of her bank accounts.’ He paused. ‘Sadly, we hit a lot of unusual family expenses recently. When she gets round to looking into her accounts, she’ll find nothing but a rainstorm of red ink.’

‘You cleaned her out? But she can sue the pants off you for that.’

‘If she wants all her dirty underwear spread out in public, sure. And if she can find a lawyer to work for her for love and no money. So I’ll be reasonable, we’ll compromise. I shall let her have a clean and quiet divorce. I won’t drag her reputation through the mud. I’ll even replenish her bank accounts. All on one condition.’

‘Which is?’

‘She killed my baby girl. I’m not going to let her have that chance with my only son, Toni, not if I have to fight her in every court in the land.’ He slipped into his jacket, flexing his shoulders as though the well-tailored suit was his armour and he was once again ready to do war with the world. ‘I want custody.’

She stared without comprehension at the face at the foot of the bed. Too much had collided in her mind that day and it had left her drained and disorientated. Shortly after breakfast she’d heard he was looking not just for a divorce but custody. War, with Benjy as the battlefield and her fresh out of ammunition.

There was physical pain, as though someone were wrenching out a tree which had its roots growing deep within her. She saw life through a haze of unreality, the sterile and polite conversations around her bed echoing like the hollow laughter of a cocktail bar, the walls drawing in, closing down her world, stifling her. While she was there, idle, they would be plotting to grab Benjy. She had to get out.

When she had raised her intention of discharging herself, they had not been unsympathetic. Her physical progress was excellent, her neurological signs improving, as long as she didn’t overdo it the change of scene and stimuli might do both her and the child good. They had suggested – firmly, to the point of insistence – that she spend ten days as an out-patient in the neurology department and then, with fortune and continued progress, she would be free. Another check-up in three months, again six months after that, and they could pronounce her recovered. A minor miracle of the medical profession on which they could congratulate themselves.

It was only at the point when she began to focus on escape as reality rather than theory that she came to realize what a huge step it entailed. She was a woman in a strange land, penniless, with neither possessions nor friends, and a young child in her charge, lacking even a means of proving her identity. Such practicalities had seemed so unimportant – up to now. Where did she start trying to pull it all back together?

She was stumbling through an undergrowth of tangled personal details when out of the blue he was there, waiting to catch her as she fell.

‘Hello. How are you getting on?’

She gazed at him in some bewilderment. ‘I know you but …’

A hand reached out. ‘Paul Devereux. Remember? You interviewed me, a few months ago.’

‘Of course …’ The soft, watery pale blue eyes, the clipped sentences. ‘I’m sorry. It’s as though you’ve stepped out of a past life. I don’t associate you with this world.’ She waved her hands around her, extending one to meet his greeting. The lights were beginning to switch on. ‘You gave me an exclusive.’

‘And you gave me a bloody hard time.’ His expression implied no hard feelings.

‘If I remember correctly,’ she replied, tenaciously but not unkindly, ‘you played the male politician and expected me to play the little lady. Foreigner, too. Easy meat, you thought.’

He took the challenge in his stride. ‘Indeed, it hadn’t passed my attention that you were both a foreigner and an attractive woman – if one is allowed to remark on such things in these politically correct days of ours.’ He shrugged to indicate he was a hopeless case. ‘And by the time you’d finished I felt in need of a visit to one of my own casualty departments.’

‘Something like that,’ she nodded approvingly.

‘No need to worry. The scars have almost healed.’

‘I wasn’t worried, Mr Devereux,’ she assured him, rejecting with a smile his appeal for the sympathy vote.

‘No, I didn’t suppose you were. I see you are regaining your strength. Practically fighting fit, I’d say.’ He was enjoying the banter. ‘I’m delighted.’

‘Why?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Sorry. I mean, why are you here? It’s not every day a Government Minister drops in to check my vital signs.’

He chuckled. ‘As Secretary of State for Health, hospitals were very much part of my world, and this hospital in particular. This is Weschester, my constituency, you see, and I make a point of dropping by every month.’

‘I don’t have a vote, I’m afraid.’

‘Voters hold sway perhaps once every four or five years, Miss Dean. Chickenfeed compared with the power wielded by you and your colleagues in the media. But this is merely a social call. Heard what a remarkable recovery you’ve staged. Wanted merely to find out how you were progressing.’

She told him she was leaving hospital. He seemed dutifully concerned. She admitted that it was going to prove rather more complicated than she had realized. Should’ve asked K.C. for help, but hadn’t thought …

‘As your local Member of Parliament ad interim, perhaps I can help.’ His smile was warm, well practised. A political smile. To be ignored. Yet in those remarkable blue eyes, where feelings can rarely be hidden, she thought she could detect more than a merely professional interest. Not entirely avuncular, either.

‘I have nothing, absolutely nothing, but the hospital gown I am wearing.’

Aware for the first time that she was a shade underdressed, she moved across the room to her dressing gown.

As she put it on she couldn’t help but feel self-conscious. She hadn’t lost weight as quickly as she would have liked after the second birth, her breasts were heavier and she wasn’t wearing a bra, and the muscle tone she’d been building to lift and tuck everything back to its former shape had largely dissolved with the extended bed rest. It bothered her that he was looking, but only because she wasn’t at her best. The style in her dark red hair was gone and she felt dowdy, unattractive. Very post-maternity. Once again she was left wondering if there could be life after birth.

By contrast he saw a handsome woman of above average height who, although still frail, moved with grace across the room and who even in her anonymous hospital cotton was unquestionably feminine. The skin was clear, fresh, the hair brushed lustrous and her green eyes bright, active, questioning, eyes that were not made up but which scarcely needed artificial highlights, eyes he had seen many times on reports from the danger zones of the world where make-up would have looked faintly ludicrous. Green eyes, his favourite. Eyes that had danced in the midst of a room crowded with grizzled correspondents and that had helped him pick her out for the benefit of an exclusive interview.

It was the first time a man had stared at her like that since she came to hospital, and he made no attempt to hide his appreciation; self-consciously her mind brushed over the tiny root-like veins on her leg which had erupted during pregnancy and which she had resolved to have cosmetically removed. When she had the time.

Suddenly her thoughts struck her as strange. She had been faithful to her husband throughout their marriage yet here she was already worrying about what other men might think of her, and she of them. Such sensations were smudged with sadness, yet she could not deny the kernel of excitement that was also there. At least she was starting to feel something again.

‘And technically I have trouble in proving I exist. All my identification was lost in the crash.’

‘No problem. If you’ll allow me I’ll kick some backsides at the US Embassy. Get someone down to see you.’

‘You’re very kind. Should have done that myself but, before today, I hadn’t really given it a thought. Such things seem irrelevant when you’re lying in hospital with your memory rattled to pieces. I suppose I’d better get hold of my bank and find some means of living and dressing; social services are finding a boarding house in the town for Benjy and me to stay while I sort things out.’

She was thinking out loud, not beseeching help, but he responded without hesitation.

‘Look, you’re trying to get well, not bury yourself in problems. Allow me to cut through all this for you. Please. Not often a politician can do anything about real problems, we’re always too busy pretending we’re saving the world.’

She was amused by his modesty.

‘I have a house in Bowminster, about fifteen miles from here. Stacks of room, empty during the week while I’m in London. You and your son would be very comfortable, and very welcome. There’s thatch and plenty of land and a gardener who can be your chauffeur and run any errands. Give you the time and freedom to sort everything out.’

‘That’s far too generous …’

‘Don’t make me out to be something I’m not, Miss Dean.’

God, how incredibly modest and English he was, she thought. For a brief moment she looked into his moist eyes, flecked with the strange upper-class confection of authority and inbred decay, and wondered if all those stories were true and he was an archetypal English fag, before she realized she was being revoltingly cynical. Still, if he were, it meant she had nothing to worry about by staying in his house …

‘Since I have no family living with me any longer …’

OK, a closet fag. Christ, Izzy, the guy’s trying to help you!

‘… I hate the thought of the house standing empty for so much of the time. I’d be very happy. Telephone bill’s already enormous so don’t worry about that. And as for clothing and the rest, that’s easy.’ He plunged into his jacket pocket for his wallet. ‘You have to be a good credit risk. Here’s two hundred pounds to get you going. Give it back when you’re on your feet.’

‘But I can’t accept money from …’ – she was about to say a strange man but it sounded too pathetic – ‘… from a politician. The Secretary of State for Health.’

‘Oh, but I’m not!’ He clapped his hands, delighted to be able to overwhelm her argument. Unlike last time. ‘You missed it. The reshuffle. I’m now Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State for Defence. And you, Miss Dean, are a foreign correspondent. If my attempt to help bothers you, simply treat it as a bribe.’

They both laughed; she felt desperately vulnerable, it was time to stop fighting. She thanked him, and he arranged for his gardener to pick her up at two that afternoon.

Only later did the realization dawn that this was the man in whose hands were now held the future of the Duster and with it her vengeful husband’s fortunes.

A sense of well-being began to build inside Izzy as she collected Benjy and began to gather up the few items of clothing and second-hand soft toys that had appeared from the various streams of helpers and benefactors which trickle through any hospital. She had her son, whatever his father planned, and at last she was making a start on piecing her life back together again. She was no longer alone; things couldn’t get any worse, she told herself.

The Devereux driver would be arriving soon and it was time to bid her goodbyes. She made the round between ITU and the neurology department and up to the toddlers’ ward, all the places which had been her world for the last few weeks, shaking hands, receiving wishes, congratulations and gratuitous advice, offering her thanks.

It was in the toddlers’ ward amidst the muddle of bright colours and overstuffed animals, at the cot next to Benjy’s, that she came across preparations for another departure.

‘Time for us to go, sweetheart,’ a young black woman was instructing a small and very white child. The child, a girl, was scarcely a year old and protesting vigorously; the woman was of West African origin by her heavy accent.

Izzy felt a tug towards the girl, vigorously red-haired like Bella had been and not much larger, and her gaze wandered back and forth between woman and child.

The woman, noting Izzy’s interest and confusion, let forth an amused whoop. ‘No, I’m not her mother,’ she beamed.

Izzy returned the good humour. ‘Somehow I didn’t think so …’

‘I take her to meet new parents,’ she explained, before realizing this was scarcely an explanation at all. ‘I am from the social services. My name is Katti. This little thing is being adopted.’

‘Poor thing,’ was Izzy’s instinctive response, but she was immediately contradicted.

‘No, no, dear. She is lucky. Nice new home. Two cars. Loving parents.’ Katti lowered her voice to offer a confidence. ‘See, the natural mother is a single lady, only fifteen, from some place around Birmingham. Come here to have her baby. Lot of these girls come here, it’s quiet, by the sea, away from friends and parents, you know. Very private. First she says she wants to give the child for adoption, then the silly thing changes her mind. But her parents won’t let her back, see?’

‘I see. But I find it difficult to understand.’

‘Right. So the girl gets scared, thinking the baby be taken from her. Runs off and lives for months in squats, hiding, caring for the baby all by herself.’ Katti’s eyes, huge and encircled with dramatic dark rings, rolled in pain. ‘And she starts thieving and doing God knows what else for food and baby clothing. By the time we find her, the little baby is like a scrap of paper, so underweight, sleeping in a cardboard box.’

‘So you have taken the baby away from its mother?’

‘Goodness, no. We talk with the girl, and talk and talk. No rush. We never do anything in rush down here.’ She laughed at what was obviously a standard Dorset line. ‘In the end she agrees it’s best for her and for baby that she stick to the first plan and let the little one be adopted. No way she can cope. We don’t blame her, poor thing, she tries so hard.’

At this point the baby, indignant at having ceased to be the centre of her minder’s attention, threw up over the clothes in which only moments before she had been dressed. Izzy smiled and the black woman scowled in mock offence, but Benjamin pointed at the baby and gave a whoop of laughter.

‘Baby thdick, baby thdick,’ he gurgled. His eyes shone with impish joy. It was the first time he had laughed since the accident.

Still a month short of his third birthday, Benjy’s speech had been in any event rudimentary and the trauma of the accident had initially destroyed his willingness to persevere, yet since Izzy’s reawakening she had spent much of every day teaching him once again the basic lessons which fear had forced from his mind. For Benjy, and even more so for Izzy, every lisping phrase represented a major victory.

Now he was laughing, too. Fighting back. Growing again. Izzy’s eyes brimmed with pride.

‘Baby’s leaving hospital, Benjy,’ Izzy told him, straightening his collar. ‘You and I are going to leave hospital, too.’

‘Dake baby wid us.’

‘No, Benjy, this little baby’s going to go to a new mummy and daddy,’ she started explaining, but Benjy’s humour had instantly turned to petulance and childish frustration. Since the accident and her traumatic albeit temporary ‘desertion’ his emotions had become fragile, more clinging, impatient.

‘Not dat baby. Dake our baby wid us. Baby Bella.’

She gathered him in her arms and smothered him in kisses, clutching him possessively as though someone were about to snatch him from her, hiding within the curls of his hair the tears that were beginning to form.

‘Baby Bella can’t come with us, darling.’ The words hung bittersweet on her breath. ‘Baby’s dead and gone to Heaven.’

‘No!’

‘I’m sorry, Benjy …’

‘No, no, Mummy. Bella nod dead,’ he responded indignantly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Lady came an took Bella away.’