Those Whom the Gods Love

‘Gatwick?’ Her eyebrows were pressed up towards her neat hairline.

Harbinger wondered if she might be thicker than he could cope with. He put on an efficient briskness. ‘So, you’d better send me an outline of your piece. We don’t commission much these days from people who aren’t on our regular list of freelancers. With a synopsis, I’d be in a better position to give you a contract.’

‘Oh, no,’ she said, scooping her hair behind her ears in a gesture as old fashioned as the blush. He began to wonder if even he, with all his legendary editing skills, would be able to do much with her stuff. Still, he told himself, you can never tell. The oddest people do turn out to be able to write. Ginty Schell for one.

‘Then,’ he went on aloud, quelling his doubts, ‘you will at least get a kill fee. OK?’

‘That’s really, really kind of you. I never thought I’d … Well, you know. Thank you, John.’ Her lips parted, still a little wet from the wine she’d just drunk. She really was rather gorgeous. He felt his prick stiffen and for the first time in years had to drop a hand into his lap to smooth it down with his thumb. He hoped she hadn’t noticed. He wondered whether he might be able to get her to come back to the flat with him now for a quickie. She was infinitely shaggable. Oh, God! he thought, as he added a tip to the credit card slip, and signed it. Why had his subconscious thrown up that particular word? If he didn’t get a grip soon, he’d go completely nuts.

He could still see Sally’s wine-stained lips, but they didn’t do anything for him any more. It wouldn’t have made any difference if she’d taken her clothes off for him there and then.

‘Must get back to work,’ he said, as he flipped his wallet shut over the credit cards.

He kissed her cheek at the door of the restaurant and left her there, walking back along the south side of the Thames to his office. Bursts of reflected light hit his eyes from the river as he fought to keep the memories down, but he couldn’t fight hard enough. He was back in The Goat in Eynsham, in June 1970, waiting for Steve.

The Goat was crowded, as it always was on a summer Sunday with all the girlfriends up from London as well as the Oxford-based ones. But there was no sign of Steve. John had searched the place as soon as they arrived, while Dom and Robert got the drinks.

The Shaggee turned up about half an hour later, in a gaggle of other girls from St Hilda’s escorted by a bunch of braying rugger-buggers. She didn’t look too good, obviously hadn’t slept. In John’s experience (more limited than he’d admit except under torture) they didn’t sleep much after the great deflowering, so that could have been a plus – but she also looked as if she could have been crying. Which wasn’t so good.

Half-way through The Goat’s famous steak-and-kidney pie, the rumour began to filter through to John’s table: Virginia Callader’s been raped. Suddenly the bits of kidney seemed disgustingly smooth and the chunks of steak more fibre than anything else. They stuck in his throat. Memories of the old joke weren’t helping – Meet Virginia: Virgin for short but not for long. But if she had been raped, what on earth was she doing living it up in The Goat?

John took a good swig of beer. ‘I’ve been raped’ was the kind of thing girls said when they weren’t sure they should have given in and let you take their bra off. And they all – even Virginia – laughed like hyenas at the other joke, ‘What did the fieldmouse say to the combine harvester? I’ve been reaped! I’ve been reaped!’

But when John looked surreptitiously at The Shaggee and saw her red, swollen eyes and her pallid skin, with the lovebite flaming just under her left ear, his last bit of advice to Steve did begin to seem a bit off:

‘Give her plenty to drink. Don’t take “no” for an answer. If she protests, it only means she wants you to make the decision for her. Don’t forget that neverpublished poem by one of the Romantics: “There’s a no for a no, and a no for a yes, and a no for an I don’t know”. They never mean no when they say it. It’s their way of getting a good screw without taking responsibility for it. They all fantasize about that, you know.’

John saw his mates beginning to absorb the rumour and get ready to ask questions, so he dredged up a good filthy joke and got them all roaring with laughter. Robert’s latest girlfriend looked a bit po-faced, which didn’t help. And Dom blushed, but then he was always a bit otherworldly, like most Wykehamists. In a way it was a pity that Fergus wasn’t there – he could usually be relied on to cheer everyone up – but, given that the whole situation was his fault in the first place, no one had thought to invite him to the Post-Shagging Party.

A ham-like hand bore down on John’s shoulder. Turning, he saw one of The Shaggee’s rugger-buggers. He looked huge and dangerous. John was surprised to find himself faintly apprehensive.

‘Where’s that shit Steve?’

John shrugged. ‘Haven’t seen him today.’

‘When you do, tell him I’m going to kill him. OK? Got that?’

John nodded and turned away, but not before he’d caught sight of Virginia Callader, leaning against a friend’s shoulder, sobbing into a great white handkerchief. What could Steve have done to her? Steve, of all men, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, couldn’t. Too sensitive, that was his trouble: it was what came of having only older sisters and going to the sort of arty-farty co-ed day school his weird parents had chosen.

After Fergus’s intervention, they’d needed to make a man of Steve – at least show him he was one – and screwing Virginia Callader had seemed the best way of doing that. She was gorgeous, and by all accounts adored him. It wasn’t as though they’d sent Steve off after a complete stranger. She’d told all sorts of people that she was in love with him. What could he have done to her? And why hadn’t he opened his door that morning? And what the hell was she doing in the pub?

John pushed away his plate, smeared still with a good half of the best steak-and-kidney around Oxford. He didn’t go in for the kind of worry that kept Steve busy all day and night wondering what other people were thinking and whether he might have upset them (a man like that: how could he have raped anyone?), but something wasn’t right.

‘You’ll have to get yourselves back under your own steam,’ he said abruptly, pushing back his chair. They looked surprised, particularly Robert’s girlfriend, but John knew that Sasha would get them all back safely. She always looked after everyone, even when they were pissed out of their skulls. ‘I’m going to find out what’s happened to Steve.’

Every single traffic light was red and there were jams at all the bottlenecks. John was all for the Ring Road, whatever they said. A few grotty little Oxford houses knocked down was a small price to pay for better traffic flow.

He parked and ran to Steve’s staircase with what felt like a stone in his gut. Steve’s door was still shut. John banged loudly and for a long time. When one of the Northern Chemists emerged from the next room, his greasy hair adorned with liberal quantities of ink to show what a swot he was, John asked if he’d seen Steve that morning.

He hadn’t, and agreed it was odd since Steve had slopped across the quad in his dressing gown on his way to the bathroom before eleven every morning, rain or shine, hungover or sober. John summoned up all his natural authority and sent the Northern Chemist to the Porter’s Lodge, while he stayed, alternately banging and yelling encouragement to Steve to open the door.

By the time the porter produced the necessary master key, John was pretty sure of the sort of thing they were going to find. Even so, the sight of Steve swinging from a noose made from ripped-up pieces of his own gown was enough to turn anyone up. The porter didn’t appreciate the vomit and thought John should pull himself together and fetch the Dean, but he didn’t think he could move. In the end the Northern Chemist went.

Harbinger wrenched himself back from the past. He could still feel the cold weight of Steve’s body against his hand, as it swung away from him. Wiping his hands on his handkerchief, he wondered why he hadn’t realized then that you could never get away from anything you’d done. You might think it had gone, but it just sat there in disguise, like Kate’s anger, waiting to pop up every time you were feeling a tad pathetic. It was her fault, of course. If she hadn’t banged on about how ghastly he was, he’d have been fine. In the days when she’d still thought of him as an OK bloke, Steve had stayed safely in the past. Unlike now.

He’d had a drink with Fergus only a couple of weeks ago, and had tugged the conversation round to Steve and the so-called rape, but it hadn’t got him anywhere. Fergus had turned chilly – very much the grand QC – and pretended he could barely remember Steve. He clearly wasn’t going to take any responsibility for what had happened, which left it all on Harbinger.

Dom was useless these days, far too tied up in Cabinet Office secrecy to react honestly to anyone else’s problems, and when they’d last had lunch in the Athenaeum, he’d refused all attempts to talk about Oxford. Robert was a busted flush, now that his party was out of office and everyone knew he’d never get back on the front bench. He’d see any call from Harbinger as a PR opportunity, or a chance to moan on about how awful it was to lose everything you’d worked for since university. Harbinger had had more than enough of that the only time he’d been rash enough to agree to meet Robert. He’d drunk far too much and practically wept into his whisky before Harbinger had been able to get away. Creepy.

He wondered where Sasha was working now. She’d always been sensible. And she’d never have forgotten Steve. She’d remember every detail of what had happened, just as Harbinger did. It could be worth looking her up. He might get hold of her number and give her a ring tonight.

Chapter 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what’s new? Ginty thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You OK, John?’

‘Why?’

‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

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

‘Much.’

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

‘OK.’

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

Dear John,

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