The Long Fall (2 page)

PART ONE

BEFORE AND AFTER

EMMA

20 July 1980, 10 a.m. English Channel between Dover and Calais. Ferry.

So, Emma James: the new you begins! You’ve worked for this. Well done.

List 1

What you’ll be leaving behind:

A small town in the north of England.

The whole north of England, in fact.

Clammy attentions suffered as only child of ageing parents.

Stupid Ripon boys (good bloody riddance).

Thatcher’s Britain (at least for a short while) with all its mealy minded Me, Me, Me

(and good bloody riddance, too).

List 2

What you have to look forward to:

A new, glamorous life as a grown-up at Cambridge.

Books.

Intelligent discussion.

Writing.

A life as a writer!

Lovers.

Parties.

List 3

The in-between bit:

First time abroad.

First long time alone.

£300 in traveller’s cheques.

One month InterRailing around Europe.

Seeing art.

Meeting interesting people.

Cheap alcohol.

Defining yourself away from all the crap in List 1.

Writing every day.

Total freedom.

Total freedom.

Total freedom.

Filling up (at least) the two notebooks you’ve brought with you. This being the first.

Yeah!

KATE

2013

The African sun outlines the golden halo of her hair.

The two little girls – whose names she didn’t know at the time, but who she had since been told were Mariam and Bintu – smile up at her as she reads to them, the white of their teeth somehow reflecting light at her so that even she could see why she had been described as radiant. She has her right arm round Bintu and the tripartite curlicues of that damn tattoo, visible on the inner part, between wrist and elbow, seem to echo the arrangement of the image’s three subjects.

Objectively speaking, it was a beautiful picture. Iconic. Extremely useful. International Charity Image 2013, no less. But Kate felt uncomfortable about the whole thing. She hadn’t asked to be the Face of Kindness.

Whatever, though. It had happened, and Sophie the PR consultant said it was wonderful.

So that was why she was sitting there, smiling and nodding, her sweat clogging thick studio make-up, watching her own ‘iconic image’ on the studio monitor as
Hello UK!
Anchorwoman Sally Marshall reeled off her introduction and Camera Two pointed at her face like a gun.

She squirmed and tried to keep her nails away from her teeth.

The floor manager counted down from ten, silently flicking her fingers for the last five, four, three, two, one, and . . .

As Sally Marshall turned to her interviewee and beamed, she shifted her arm to increase the valley of her cleavage. Was this, Kate found herself wondering, intentional? A weapon in the quest for ratings? Kate was glad she had decided at the last minute to slip a camisole under the V of her own dress. Not that she had much going on down there to worry about, but still.

‘Kate Barratt, welcome.’

‘Good morning, Sally,’ she said, as brightly as she could manage.

Two days earlier, when her nerves had almost led Kate to cancel the interview, Sophie PR emailed her a bulleted briefing list:
Golden Rules for Addressing the Media
. The first was
Always greet your interviewer by name, if possible
.

‘That’s a
beautiful
image,’ Sally Marshall said. ‘Tell us the story behind it.’

Kate told her about the girls’ school that Martha’s Wish had just opened in an impoverished West African country – the charity’s thirtieth such project. She reeled off the impressive statistics she had learned by heart: how many girls currently received schooling in that country, the changes the Martha’s Wish programme would make to that statistic, and the projected resulting shift in the fortunes of women – and therefore of the whole country – in ten years’ time.

‘And tell us about the little girls in the photograph,’ Sally said, her smile bright, her eyes studiedly concerned.

Kate told the fictional but plausible story Sophie had worked up with her a couple of days ago.

‘Well. Mariam and Bintu are both six years old. Were it not for Martha’s Wish building our school in their village, they would not have access to education. Mariam says she wants to be a doctor, and Bintu a lawyer. With their schooling guaranteed at least till the age of sixteen, these dreams are no longer unattainable.’

‘And I believe the photographer just caught you unawares as you read to them?’

Kate nodded. At least that was wholly true. ‘Steve Mitchell documented our field trip last year.’

‘That’s the top American
Vogue
fashion photographer
Steve Mitchell?’

‘Um, yes. He donated his time to us.’ Kate felt herself reddening as she tried to pick up the thread of her interrupted story. ‘And – and this photo was just one in a series which we used for our annual report and website.’

‘And it’s caused quite a stir, hasn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Kate said and, for a moment, there was a pause. She had broken Sophie’s second Golden Rule:
Don’t give one-word answers
. But she didn’t want to sound as if she were trumpeting.

‘What happened?’ Sally leaned forward and smiled, attempting to raise her Botox-thwarted eyebrows.

Kate had no choice: she had to go for it. ‘Well, it was picked up by social media, where it became the most shared worldwide image of the year. And now it’s won International Charity Image 2013 . . .’

‘Which is why you’re here today!’

‘More than that,’ Kate said, keen to move on from what she considered to be a point of vanity, ‘the recognition has done wonders for Martha’s Wish. Donations have soared compared to last year, and we’re planning to dramatically increase our activity—’

She stopped mid-sentence, appalled to see her own talking head replaced on the monitor by a film of her and Mark in their finery stepping out of a taxi and onto a red carpet leading up to a Mayfair hotel. How on earth had the TV people got hold of that?

‘Now,’ Sally said over the film, ‘this is you and your husband, the hedge fund manager Mark Barratt at a Martha’s Wish gala dinner last year.’

She made it sound as if all they ever did was hold gala dinners. Kate watched herself on the film, tiny and tense beside the formal solidity of Mark, who led her through the door of the hotel with his habitual air of being in a hurry to get the thing over and done with. The gala dinner had been Sophie PR’s idea, and, like the African photograph, it had raised a great deal of money.

‘And I understand that you and Mark give a major annual donation to the charity,’ Sally went on, as the film cut to an ageing rock star, renowned for his humanitarian work, stepping from a limousine onto the same carpet. Sophie had managed to get him on board because she did yoga in Primrose Hill with his new wife.

‘We do,’ Kate said, glad that her visible discomfort at all this flaunting was not on camera.

‘Whaddaya know?’ Sally said, winking into Camera One as she replaced the gala dinner on the broadcast monitor. ‘A banker with a heart!’

Kate winced.

‘And tell me,’ Sally said, turning again to face Kate, her voice serious once more, ‘what’s the story behind Martha’s Wish? That’s an interesting name.’

Kate’s eyes flicked to the monitor to check that her thick pancake of foundation hid the flush that had spread to her cheeks. She thought she had made it quite clear when the producer had visited her while they were trowelling it on in hair and make-up that she didn’t want to talk about this.

And now they had sprung it on her on live national breakfast TV.

Fighting the urge to run away, she closed her eyes and breathed. She tried to keep it factual.

‘Martha was our daughter. She loved reading, and one of her favourite books was called
Children of the World
, in which children from different countries talk about their lives. She was shocked that in some parts of the world girls weren’t expected to go to school. She said that when she grew up, she wanted to make sure that every girl in the world had a school place.’

She stopped and swallowed. The damn tears were stabbing at her eyes. It was no doubt TV gold, but she hadn’t asked to be part of it. The studio felt hot, stifling, and she was aware of the sour smell of something electrical near to burning point.

Sally nodded sympathetically and reached across the vast red studio sofa, placing a hand on her knee.

‘But you lost poor Martha, didn’t you, Kate?’ she said, her eyes glistening like a crocodile’s.

Kate slipped her hand inside her tailored jacket pocket and rubbed the pebble she had found long ago at
Gwel an Mor
, the beachside house she and Mark owned in Cornwall. It was a holey stone, supposed to ward off evil spirits, and she carried it with her always, in case of emergencies.

With enormous self-control she nodded, remembering Sophie’s third Golden Rule:
If you argue or appear flinty, you will only harm your cause
. Flinty was an understatement, though. At that moment, Kate felt murderous.

‘Martha died of an inoperable brain tumour. She was eight.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Sally said, as if it were somehow her own personal tragedy.

When she set up the charity, Kate had still been unmoored by Martha’s death. If she hadn’t been, she might have thought it through and called it something else. Mark had even suggested as much at the time. But she had wanted her girl to live on forever, and the charity’s promise of lasting goodness was an enormous comfort.

And back then, how was she, the grieving mother, to predict the moment when she would be called upon to explain? Or how she would feel about doing so? There was a brief outline of the story on the Martha’s Wish website. That should be enough for the world.

But no. It seemed like every last drop of pathos had to be wrung from her.

She told herself she had to do it, because of the girls like Mariam and Bintu who, without her dancing on a wire for them, would face that potently life-shortening combination of being poor, illiterate and having too many children, too young.

It wasn’t really too much to ask, given all that, was it? She needed to put herself aside. She should feel churlish for having allowed Sally’s questioning to stir up such rage.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Sally went on, ‘that Martha lives on.’

Kate nodded, blinking, examining her red, raw hands. It was. It was beautiful.

‘Let’s have another look at the photograph,’ Sally said, and, on the monitor, the image of the two of them on the studio sofa was replaced by that of Kate and the two girls.

‘The Face of Kindness,’ Sally cooed.

The picture was one of the rare shots of Kate that did her justice. In it, she looked at least a decade younger than her fifty years, and the golden light that surrounded her softened the sharp edges she knew she possessed after a lifetime of being too thin. Her beauty, which she had often heard about but never believed, was plain for all to see in this shot. There was nothing to suggest that she was anything other than a kind, wonderful, warm and loving person.

Of course, the image had its detractors, keen to troll anonymously on countless websites. Her paleness next to the black girls was a symbol of white Western imperialism, some said: of a certain patronising philanthropy. But, she would have argued, had she been able to see her opponents face to face, what alternatives were there? She put surplus wealth to good purpose, and the photograph had galvanised that process.

If that’s what it took, then so be it. Amendments had to be made.

And with that thought, her stomach contracted.

Had she lived, Martha would be fifteen. And Kate would have given anything in the world – she would have gone out to West Africa and knocked all the schools they had built down – to have her back.

That was also part of what she understood to be her sharp edges.

But it was only a small piece of the story. There was something far, far worse: Kate knew that she was utterly responsible for the death of her daughter. Through what she had done, she had brought it on them all.