The Touch of Innocents. Michael Dobbs

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