The Touch of Innocents

‘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.’

THREE