The Touch of Innocents. Michael Dobbs

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