The Touch of Innocents

Encouragement? Or threat? While there was no recommendation contained within the briefing, its positive tone left no doubt as to the desires of the MoD bureaucracy. The Duster was their virility symbol, the project which would redeem them in the eyes of their Whitehall colleagues after years of being squeezed dry by Governments in search of another billion or so with which to build a reelection platform.

Mentally he ticked off the three alternatives. He could refuse to back the project, thereby earning the gratitude of his hard-pressed Cabinet colleagues. Yet it would also earn him the relentless opposition of those powerful and privileged men within the defence establishment who had killed off more than one of his predecessors. Anyway, political gratitude, Devereux had learned, could be exhausted more quickly than a soda siphon.

On the other hand he could fight for the project in a public battle which would inevitably be bloody. But whose blood? In victory he would be cast as the most dynamic and successful Minister in the Government, an international figure of stature, a skilled negotiator, visionary politician and ever-rising star, the man most likely to. He could write his own accolade.

Yet if he fought, and lost, it would be a personal disaster. The successor shorn of success. The defence chief who retreated. Who came, who saw, who surrendered.

What would his father have done? Got drunk. Then beaten his wretched wife and disappeared to that end of the manor house where the housekeeper lived. The young housekeeper. There had been a steady stream of housekeepers passing through the manor house, all of them young, and all chosen by his father.

Devereux bit his lip. His father would have fought, and failed. But Devereux wasn’t like his father. He wouldn’t fail.

And, anyway, he had no need for young housekeepers.

In the blackness of her mind there was life.

She couldn’t identify it as such, it kept changing shape, colour, intensity. But it was there. It was as though she and her senses were floating in the vacuum of space, approaching each other, recognizing each other, almost touching, with only the slightest nudge needed to bring them together but unable to find that final extra adjustment.

Frustration. Anger. I feel, therefore I am. More frustration.

The bundles of stimuli which were her inchoate thoughts passed by and were lost in the blackness or burned up like a lost body re-entering the earth’s atmosphere.

She preferred those which burned. She took comfort in the light, and all the time there seemed to be more brilliance entering her world.

Then came the moment when the light turned into the recognizable colours of a rainbow and the dark veil began to lift.

‘Mummie-e-e-e-e!’

The first time she had comprehended any sound, the first time Benjy had uttered any word, since the accident. Her eyes opened, were assaulted by the light but struggled and blinked and gradually found focus until she could see those around her – the diminutive consultant neurologist, Weatherup, with a constrained smile of professional triumph; Primrose, the student nurse, whose smiles showed no restraint at all; McBean, who radiated a quiet sense of privilege at having been party to another of life’s minor miracles, and on whose ample blue-cottoned bosom wriggled the animated form of a young, dark-haired boy.

‘B … Ben … Benjamin?’ She formed the sound in the way a foal attempts its first step. Quickly they took away the cuffs and clips of the monitoring equipment so that mother and son could be reunited in an uninhibited and uninterrupted embrace. Soon Benjamin, overwhelmed, had fashioned a face like that of a latex troll and was tearfully expressing his pleasure and relief. Tears began to form in the corner of his mother’s eyes, too, but as yet she had not found the strength or understanding to express her emotions.

‘Where am I? What happened?’ she whispered eventually, her hand reaching out instinctively to straighten the young boy’s hair, but the effort proved too much.

‘Och, so you’re from across the water. American, are you?’ McBean responded to the noticeable accent. ‘And tell me. What’s your name?’

‘Is … Isadora Dean. Izzy.’ The reply was tentative, sounding almost a question. But a start. ‘My fath …’ She started upon her habitual self-conscious explanation that she had been named after Isadora Duncan, the avant-garde dancer and teenage idol of her father, a Wisconsin dentist who hid a number of unpredictable passions behind the crisp formality of his dental mask, but the excuse was absurd and the attempt exhausting. She subsided and concentrated on trying to engage her thumb against her son’s cheek to push away his tears.

‘You’ve had an accident, lassie. Been in a wee bit of a coma. But you’re a strapping girl, you’ll pull through it fine. Won’t she, Mr Weatherup?’

The consultant, who was gently checking the pulse in her wrist, nodded. ‘Your spleen was giving you a little trouble, Mrs Dean, so we had to take it out. But that’s not a problem. You won’t even notice it’s gone, apart from a very small scar on the left side of your abdomen. And you’ve been asleep quite a while, but I think you’re going to be absolutely fine after a good period of rest. So long as young Benjamin here lets you breathe. Steady on, young man,’ he protested with a chuckle, turning to Benjamin whose arms had locked around his mother’s neck in a gesture which defied anyone to take her away again.

‘He’s … all right, doctor. Seems he’s got a lot of hugging to make up for,’ she countered.

‘You led us a merry dance, Izzy,’ McBean said. ‘Until this moment we had no idea who you were. You are American, aren’t you?’

Izzy nodded.

‘Your son has been through quite a shock, too, was unable to talk,’ Weatherup continued. ‘It was something of a risk, bringing the two of you together. We hoped it might be just the thing to snap the both of you back into form yet we couldn’t be certain how he would respond, if it might drive him deeper within himself. But I’m delighted …’

‘My baby? Where’s Isabella?’ The voice, until now weak and hesitant, had taken on new strength.

‘Mrs Dean, you mustn’t excite yourse …’

The question came again, slow, precise, unavoidable. ‘Doctor, where is my baby?’

The neurologist appeared suddenly uncomfortable, couldn’t meet her gaze, buried his hands deep in the pockets of his white coat and cast his eyes towards Sister McBean. She sat on the edge of the bed, placing a hand on both mother and son. Her words were slow, softly formed, trying to wrap the hammer in velvet.

‘I’m so desperately sorry, Izzy, my love.’ McBean paused, fighting her own emotions. There was no easy way. ‘I’m afraid your baby’s gone. She didn’t survive the accident.’

Hammer fall. Destruction. Inside something fractured, forever beyond repair.

Her face did not move, betrayed no pain, but in the flicker of an eyelid it had lost its flexibility and returning life, become a mask. With agonizing care, the lips sought for a response.

‘Didn’t deserve that. Not my poor Bella,’ she whispered, then nothing more. Her eyes went to McBean, beseeching some form of denial, but there was only compassion. A noise began to grow inside her, from deeper within than seemed imaginable, torn out by its roots, which was to burst forth in a sickening wail of grief. And of dismay. Of lost love. Of recrimination. Of guilt. Particularly of guilt.

A cry for an innocent lost.

TWO

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.