Creeping Ivy (13 page)

‘But most of them don’t think there’s any difference between gay and paedophile. They’ll come after me and and then probably you, too, and make our life hell. It’s not only me I’m worried about. It’s you too. You’ll hate it if they start accusing me and it gets in the papers. I’d do anything not to make trouble for you, Steve. You know that.’

Stephen sighed. He and Mike had lived together for nearly three years. He loved Mike beyond reason – and would have done almost anything for him – but there were times when the boy’s irrational terrors drove him to the brink of fury. Long experience had told him that any sign of anger would only make the panic – and his own impatience – worse. Breathing deeply to instil calm into his mind, he fetched them both more coffee and poured out a bowl of the special muesli Mike concocted from little bags of seeds and nuts he bought in secret health-food shops all over London, added cranberry juice and put a spoon in Mike’s hand.

‘Eat,’ he commanded as gently as the necessary firmness would allow. ‘And while you eat, listen. Carefully. For one thing I don’t suppose they will even bother to ask what this child was doing in a swimming pool on Saturday morning if she was lifted from a park in the afternoon. For another, I cannot imagine you were ever left alone with her at the pool, were you?’

Mike shook his head, a dripping spoonful of muesli halfway to his mouth.

‘Who was with you?’

‘She has individual lessons. The nanny brought her and stayed beside the pool all the time with the stepfather. He’s not always there through the lessons; sometimes he just comes to collect them at the end. This time he was there all the time.’

‘Did you see them leave the pool?’

‘Yes.’

‘All three of them together?’

‘Yes.’

‘There you are then. What on earth are you worrying about? Eat.’

Mike obediently chewed a mouthful of oats, pumpkin seeds and chopped hazelnuts doused in juice.

‘But what if the police come here and start asking questions?’ he asked when he had swallowed.

‘Even if they do, so what? We’re not doing anything illegal here. At least I’m not,’ said Stephen. He was an administrative civil servant in the Home Office and several times in the past had had to explain to Mike with as much ferocity as he thought the boy could bear that he would not have drugs of any kind in the flat. ‘Are you?’

Mike did not answer. After a moment, Stephen saw his cheeks begin to flush.

‘Mike?’ He did allow some of the heavily suppressed irritation into his voice at that point.

‘How can you ask?’ Mike said, looking desperately hurt. ‘I promised I wouldn’t, and I haven’t. Not here, not at the pool, not at the gym – not anywhere. I’m clean. I’ve told you.’

‘Good. Because I warn you, if you do – for whatever reason – it’s curtains.’

‘Oh don’t, please, Steve. Not now, not while there’s this horror hanging over me. I can’t take it now. I can’t.’

‘It’s not hanging over you,’ said his lover unmoved by the hysteria, ‘and your promises haven’t always been kept.’

‘I know, Steve. I’m sorry. I …’ He looked up at Stephen again like a wounded fox. Stephen was perfectly well aware that he was supposed to offer a forgiving hug. But foxes, wounded or otherwise, can bite; they can also disappear to lick their wounds in dangerous company. Stephen put down his coffee cup, fetched the jacket of his suit and his briefcase, and slipped
The Times
and the
Financial Times
into it.

‘I wish you’d let your lunatic terrors about things you couldn’t ever have done teach you a bit of sense about the misdemeanours you do commit,’ he said without much passion as he checked the contents of the case. ‘Are you at the pool today?’

‘Yes, all morning: group lessons. And then I’m training at the gym this afternoon. It’s adult non-swimmers at the pool this evening. OK?’

‘OK. Well, take care,’ Stephen started for the door and then relented. Mike leaned against him and Stephen felt his arms moving round the boy’s back in spite of himself.

‘You drive me mad sometimes, you fool,’ he said affectionately as he removed himself.

‘I know,’ said Mike, smiling at him once more with all the radiance that had been dimmed by fear and apology, ‘but you love me, don’t you?’

‘Don’t wheedle and don’t trade on it. Are you going to be all right now?’

Mike nodded and apologised again, as he always did. Stephen patted his cheek, well aware of the aspects of his own character that allowed – or perhaps even encouraged – Mike’s chosen games and left the exquisitely appointed flat. As he walked towards South Kensington tube station, he was considering whether it would be worth asking around at the office in case anyone had heard anything about the kidnapped child. In spite of the reassurance he had given Mike, Stephen knew that there were in fact still plenty of people ignorant enough to make just the kind of idiotic assumptions that had frightened the boy.

It was not the police that bothered Stephen as much as the journalists. They could be much worse, and the last thing in the world he needed at that moment was any publicity. Certain people in the office knew about him, of course; it was stupid to lie about your sexual orientation when you were being vetted. But provided there was no scandal, nobody seemed to mind too much these days. Photographs in sleazy newspapers and tabloid taunts would be something else entirely, and would completely scupper any hope of promotion. He’d probably be offered early retirement or – worse – be moved to MAFF.

Chapter Ten

Trish was reading her way through a whole heap of newspapers in case there was anything helpful in any of them, and trying not to look at the photographs of herself apparently rushing furtively out of Antonia’s house with an astonishingly unpleasant expression on her face. She could not stop staring at one photograph and hoped it was a bad likeness. She was sure that she did not have such sneering, hooded eyes, such a beaky nose or such a cruel-looking mouth. Having checked in the nearest mirror and seen only her vulnerabilities, she returned to the paper, wondering whether the editor had taken a dislike to her and decided to ‘improve’ her portrait, as some had done to other notorious women in the past.

The different papers’ articles ran the whole gamut, from a sober analysis of the chances of Charlotte’s being found alive to liplicking excitement and a barely disguised outpouring of satisfaction that a rich working mother should have been so adequately punished.

Becoming aware that the sun was blazing in through the huge windows of her flat and that the atmosphere was fuggy, Trish pushed the offending tabloid away from her and opened every single one of the windows, letting in comparatively cool, fresh air.

‘There are compensations to working at home,’ she said aloud as she went back to the papers. In the old days she had never been able to air the flat fully because she was rarely there in daylight and Southwark was not an area in which anyone would want to leave open windows after dark.

She was still wearing last night’s T-shirt, inviting the reader to dip her in honey and throw her to the lesbians, her teeth were unbrushed and her long legs were bare and more bristly than they should have been. When the front-door bell rang, she made sure the shirt, which almost reached her knees, was not rucked up and opened the door cautiously.

The postman handed her a package that was too large to go through the letter box.

‘Thanks,’ she said, daring him to comment. His face split into a delighted smile between the dreadlocks.

‘Great shirt, man.’

‘Thanks,’ she said again, but in a quite different voice. ‘Good, isn’t it? Bye.’

He was already halfway down the iron steps and raised a hand in casual acknowledgment. She took the heavy package back to the table and began to pick the brown tape off it. Inside the well-used Jiffy bag, there was a letter from her publisher on top of a heap of laser-printed paper.

Dear Trish,

How’s it going? I know you’ve been trawling the Net, too, but I wasn’t sure you’d have come across this lot. Don’t worry; I haven’t lost my marbles printing it off for you. I know it would have been quicker and cheaper to send you an E-mail, but I hit the wrong key by mistake and before I could stop it, half this stuff was already spewing out of the printer. At that stage I thought I might as well finish the job.

I don’t want to nag, but have you any idea when you can let me see some material? We’ve got the sales conference coming up next month and I’d like to give the reps something. With a book this difficult, I shall need to get a real buzz going if we’re to get it into the non-specialist trade.

The design department have come up with a few sketches for the cover. Could we make a date for you to come and see what you think about the ideas? I want you to be happy with whatever we do decide to put on the cover, really happy. Authors are so often bamboozled into accepting something they feel misrepresents their work and I don’t want that happening to you on this one.

I know you hate the telephone, but will you ring me? Christopher.

‘How do you know I hate the telephone?’ asked Trish aloud. ‘I’ve never told you. I’ve never told anyone. And I’ve rung you as often as I had to.’

Her gratitude for his percipience faded as she reread the letter and understood that in spite of its friendliness, it was in fact a demand for the three chapters she had said she would deliver by the beginning of May. They were still in draft form, heavily edited, rewritten about sixteen times, but still not right. Writing for publication was so different from planning opening and closing arguments for court that Trish was amazed any author ever managed to let a page out of her sight. At least in a trial, on your feet, you could tailor what you had written to the reactions you saw in the jury’s faces – or the judge’s. You could correct and embellish as you went.

With the book, she had only one chance to say everything as she meant it and, which was even more difficult, to work out exactly what it was she
did
mean. All the questions she hoped she would have been able to answer as she researched other people’s cases and drew on her own seemed to get more difficult with every extra hour she spent on them.

Would it have been better for a maltreated child to have been aborted? Were there some people who were so inadequate or perverse that they should never be allowed to have children? And if so, who should decide? The courts, obviously, but who should bring the cases and would there ever be enough court time to deal with them? And how could the prospective parents be prevented from having children, short of forcible sterilisation, which was not an option in a civilised state?

What should you do with a woman in her very early twenties who had five children already, none of whom she fed properly or was able to control? Would they be better off in so-called care? Should they be taken by social workers for adoption by intelligent, well-meaning, wholesome infertile couples who longed for children and would give them everything the more fortunate took for granted? Was parental love (and in that particular case, it had been very clear that the mother did love her children even though she could not look after them) better than clean clothes and regular meals? And were any adopted children truly happy?

Should children who had been physically or sexually abused by a parent be removed from the family home or should the abuser be exiled? And if you forcibly removed a parent, how could you make the child believe that it was not his or her fault that the family had been smashed and probably driven into poverty?

How could you stop parents resenting their children, ill-treating them, corrupting them, exploiting them, or simply hurting them? Who should draw the lines between what was unpleasant but no business of the state’s and what was intolerable in any civilised society? And how should the lines be policed? And how could you ensure that children taken into care were given absolute safety as well as all the things their families had not been able to provide, and later sent gently into the world instead of being hurled without resources into a jobless, hopeless, homeless existence, in which they were prey to the worst sort of exploiters?

Trish knew by then that the questions were not answerable. Very few of the suggestions thrown up by what had happened to her clients or by her own memories, needs and ideas were usable. However much her instincts might scream at her that no woman should be allowed to give birth unless she was self-aware and intelligent enough to avoid punishing the child for her own frustrations and shortcomings, or that all men should have their fertility controlled until they were in an emotional and financial position to be adequate fathers to their children, she knew they were wrong.

Trish was going to have to come to terms with that if she were ever to produce a book that would be worth anything to anyone. If she did not get down to it soon, she would have to give up and get back to her real work. Perhaps Christopher’s letter would force her to finish the sixty-odd pages she had chewed over for so long. Or perhaps it would not. Until Charlotte was found, it was going to be hard to concentrate on anything else.

Even so, Trish leafed through the pile of printout Christopher had sent and saw that it was the report of a particularly difficult Australian case, which only confirmed her own doubts about allowing the inadequate to bear and care for children.

Pushing the printout to one side and trying not to think about the two maltreated children it described, she went back to her newspapers. One of them had a large photograph of Antonia and Charlotte on the front. Antonia was wearing a severely tailored black suit, with her hair newly highlighted, and her makeup discreet. Charlotte was wearing dungarees; there seemed to be chocolate around her mouth, and she was brandishing a sticky-looking spoon.

Trish recognised the photograph as one that had originally been published in an article about high-flying businesswomen who manage to keep their humanity and care deeply for their children. To anyone who knew Antonia it was obvious that the photograph had been carefully posed. In ordinary circumstances she would never have risked holding such a messy child anywhere near her suit – or allowed the child to eat chocolate in the first place. Antonia had always had unrealistically high standards of both cleanliness and nutrition where Charlotte was concerned.