Sheer Abandon (6 page)

It had been one of the most glorious days in Helen’s life—her wedding day and that of Juliet’s birth being the others—when Mrs. Forster from the adoption agency had telephoned to say that there was a baby who they might like to consider adopting. “She’s a foundling,” Mrs. Forster had said, “so there could be no question of her ever going back to her birth family.” Helen had actually been reading about the baby in the papers—she had made front-page news, as such babies always did—and there had been photographs of her being held by a phalanx of nurses at the South Middlesex Hospital, her small face almost invisible within the folds of a blanket.

BABY BIANCA
the caption had said. “So called by the nurses because she was found in a cleaning cupboard at Heathrow airport (Bianca is Italian for ‘white’), now five days old.” It went on to say that the social services were hoping to contact her mother who might be in need of medical attention, and appealed for anyone who had noticed anything untoward at terminal three at Heathrow airport, on the night of August 16, to contact their nearest police station.

“How could anyone do that?” Helen had said to Jim, and when Baby Bianca was finally handed to her by the foster mother, Helen felt that, to a degree, she already knew her.

Helen had been very nervous, driving to meet Bianca for the first time; what if she didn’t feel anything for her? What if the baby started screaming the minute she saw her, sensing her complete inexperience and incompetence? What if she just proved to be totally unmaternal? But it was love at first sight; Bianca (shortly to become Kate) opened large blue eyes (shortly to become deep, dark brown) and stared up at her, waving one tiny, frondlike fist, making little pouting shapes with her small mouth, and Helen knew, quite simply, that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with her.

Today had not been one of the happiest days of her life, though. She poured herself a second cup of coffee and tried to face the reality of that small, dependent creature, who had become in some strange way as surely her own flesh and blood as her natural daughter, seeking out the woman who had actually given birth to her and perceiving her as her mother.

Whoever that woman was, Helen thought, and whatever she was like, she would undoubtedly want to kill her.

Chapter 3

         “Jocasta! Attempted suicide. Village near Hay Tor, Dartmoor. Go!” God, this was terrible, this foot-and-mouth epidemic, she thought, turning her car onto the A303. Every day there were more cases, hundreds of them; the shocked face of Nick Brown, the agriculture minister, appeared every day on the television, usually followed by shots of Tony Blair looking carefully ill at ease; they both spoke (also every day) the same platitudes, the fact that it was being contained, the outbreaks were being carefully monitored, if everyone obeyed the strict regulations laid down by the government it would shortly be under control. It hardly seemed like that. Farmers were in despair, their farms under siege, the dreadful pall of smoke drifting from the funeral pyres of cattle, large tracts of the countryside silent, the fields empty of livestock. The royal parks, Richmond and Hampton Court, were shut, and even the Peak District and the Yorkshire Dales were closed to walkers; the land itself seemed dark and despairing.

Jocasta had done a few stories already, but none as desperate as this—although Nick had said half the farmers in the country would be found hanged in their barns if the government didn’t do something soon. There were terrible stories of bungled shootings of animals by the police, of huge heaps of unburied cattle in once-lovely meadows, of a dreadful stench drifting across a five-mile radius of each one.

“They should get the army in at least,” Nick said. “Do the job properly. What do these idiots think they’re doing, messing about with volunteers?”

Jocasta felt half afraid of what she might find at Watersmeet Farm on the southern edge of Dartmoor.

It was after two when she reached the farm. The gates were barred, disinfectant buckets and beds of straw on either side of them. There were at least half a dozen reporters standing around, and as many photographers, and several police cars as well. She jumped out and asked one of the reporters she recognised what was happening.

“The chap’s all right, apparently. But the wife’s desperate. Whole herd slaughtered yesterday, over there, behind the farmhouse. It’s horrible. Poor people. Children in there, too. Anyway, you won’t get in, Jocasta. Not even you.
Daily News
has just got very short shrift. Offered money as usual.”

“Well, I’m going to try my luck,” said Jocasta.

“If you crack this one, Jocasta, I’ll eat my notebook.”

Two hours later she called and told him to start munching. She had gone to the village shop, where she had spent an enormous amount of money on things she didn’t want and listened sympathetically to the woman talking about the misery the entire area was enduring, how her own trade had dropped by half, how the whole of the countryside seemed to be dying along with the cattle. “I’d so love to talk to the poor farmer’s wife,” Jocasta said.

“Well, I don’t know as she’d talk to you, but I could ask her sister what she thinks. She lives next door to me. Angela Goss her name is.”

“Do you think she’d mind? I’d only want a very short time with her.”

Angela Goss said she’d see her, but only for a minute. “And don’t think I can get you into the farm, because I can’t.”

“Of course not,” said Jocasta. What Angela Goss did arrange was for Jocasta to speak to her sister on the phone.

It had been the noise at first, she said, the endless firing of the rifles and the cattle bellowing. They had tried not to listen, had put loud music on, but they couldn’t help it. And then the silence, it had been awful, that dead, heavy silence, and watching the ewes leading their lambs, some only a couple of days old, into the meadow to be slaughtered.

“They say there’s no sentiment in farming, but Geoff was crying, same as me. Course they promised they’d dig trenches, but they didn’t have the equipment, so they’re piled up there, these beautiful animals in a great horrible heap, starting to smell. It’s criminal, it really is.”

Her husband had been very quiet the day of the slaughter, she said, hardly speaking; it was the following morning quite early that she’d realised he was missing. “I found him in the cowshed; he’d driven his car in, and put the hosepipe through the window. I got him out, just in time. But what for, I’m wondering? What’s he got now? Just this ghost of a place. And what’s it done to the children, all of it, I’d like to know? What a memory to carry through their lives. I—I must go now,” she said, her voice breaking. “You’ll have to excuse me. But you’ll tell them, won’t you, your paper, what it’s really like, the loss of a future. It’s like some terrible bad dream. Only we’re not going to wake up.”

Jocasta filed her story and then drove back to London, wondering how many of the farms she passed were living in the same nightmare.

“I can’t tell you how awful it was,” she said to Nick on the phone. “It’s a kind of living death they’re all in. Poor, poor people. They feel so let down and so ignored.”

“You sound tired, sweetie.”

“I
am
tired,” said Jocasta irritably. “I’ve just driven three hundred miles. I feel about a hundred years old.”

“Poor old thing. Would you like me to tuck you up in bed with some hot milk?”

“Well, you can tuck me up in bed with yourself. That’d be nice. But I’m going into the office. Chris wants to see me. Not sure why.”

“Good luck. I’ll see you later. I’ll be at the House. If I’m not in Annie’s, I’ll be up in the press dining room.”

Chris Pollock was young for an editor—only forty-one—and was famously easygoing until he wasn’t, as one of the reporters had told Jocasta on her first day. He would remain calm and patient in the face of quite considerable crises, leaving his staff to work without too much interference from him—until they either made a mistake or missed a strong story that another newspaper, most notably the
Mail
, had got. Upon which he became incandescent with rage and the unfortunate reporter—or section editor—was first bawled out and then left to stew for several days before being summoned again, either to be fired or told they were to be given another chance. This was an inescapable process and there was absolutely no knowing which way it would go.

He had his philosophy of the paper—“soft news with a hard centre”—and expected all the journalists to know what he meant. What it did mean was the human stuff on the front page, “and I don’t mean bloody soaps, I mean people-slanted stories”; an adherence to the paper’s politics, “right with a dash of left, just like New Labour”; and fairly hefty, well-written slugs of news on pages three, four, five, and six. The
Sketch
was also very strong on its female coverage and ran ongoing campaigns about things like health, child care, and education.

As Jocasta went in, Chris was sitting with his back to the window, the lights of London spread out beneath him; he smiled at her. He was an attractive man—short and heavily built, with brilliant blue eyes and close-cropped dark hair—and he had an energy that was like a physical blow. He had a great deal of success with women.

“This is a great story.” He thumped a page on his desk. “Brilliant. You did very, very well. See what we’ve done with it.”

Jocasta looked: it was a whole page, and there was the photograph Angela Goss had given her of Geoff Hocking and over it a headline that read
THEY KILLED HIS CATTLE
.
HE TRIED TO KILL HIMSELF
, and underneath as a caption, “The idle farmer on the silent farm.”

“That’s great,” she said. “I’m so pleased you kept that in. About the silent farm.”

“It’s a good quote. Anyone else get in?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Good girl. Anyway, nice big display for you.”

“Yes. Thanks, Chris.”

He sat in silence for a moment, looking at her, then he said, “This is the front page, you know. Did you realise that?”

Jocasta, already overwrought and upset, burst into tears.

“The front page!” she said to Nick. She had found him in the press dining room and had dragged him out onto the corridor. “I got the front page.” And she was actually jumping up and down. “Isn’t that great? Isn’t that fantastic?”

“Bloody fantastic,” he said and gave her a hug. “You’re a genius. How on earth did you do it? I’ve been watching the news, it looked impenetrable.”

“Let’s just say I boldly went where none had gone before.”

“Very boldly. Clever girl.”

“Actually,” she said, “I have to tell you it wasn’t all that difficult. Come on, you can buy me some champagne. I can’t believe it! My very own, very first front page.”

Her phone rang endlessly next day. Everyone had seen the story, wanted to congratulate her. Her mother called, Josh called, and even Beatrice, her rather daunting barrister sister-in-law.

“I think it’s thrilling,” she said, her clear-cut voice warmer than usual. “And it’s such a very good piece of reporting. I’m extremely impressed. Those poor, wretched people. Well done, Jocasta. Very well done.”

“Thank you,” said Jocasta. “And thank you for calling.”

“My dear girl, anyone would call. It’s a great achievement.”

But not anyone would call. The one call she had been waiting for, longing for, did not come. Her father as always had chosen to ignore her. And it hurt: dreadfully.

The doorbell ringing endlessly broke into her heavy first sleep; she’d had a very long and tedious evening and hadn’t filed the story she’d been on until midnight. Nick was working late and going home to Hampstead and she had been looking forward to a long, uninterrupted sleep. She stumbled down the stairs, shouting curses at Nick—he forgot his keys at least once a week—and opened the door to a dishevelled and wretched-looking Josh.

“Can I come in?” he said. “Beatrice has turned me out.”

It was a wonder she hadn’t done it before, Jocasta thought, sitting him down on her sofa, going into the kitchen to make him some coffee. He’d had his first affair a year into their marriage, and six months after the birth of their second child, he had done it again. A year after that he had what he swore was a one-night stand with his secretary; Beatrice had said then that the next time would be the last. Now she had discovered an affair that had been going on for five months with an English girl working for the Forbes Parisian office and, true to her word, had literally locked him out of the house.

“I’m such a fool,” Josh kept saying, “such a bloody fucking idiot.”

“Yes you are,” Jocasta said, looking at him as he sat there, tousled head in his hands, tears dripping rather unromantically onto his trousers. At thirty-three he still had some vestiges of the beautiful boy he had been, with his blond hair, his high forehead, his rather full, curvy mouth. He was distinctly overweight now and his colour was too high, but he was attractive, and he had a slightly helpless, self-deprecating charm which made women want to take care of him. He was always late, very untidy, and endlessly good-natured; everyone loved Josh. He wasn’t exactly witty, but he was a very funny raconteur, he lit up a room or a dinner table, and had that most priceless social gift of making others feel amusing too.

Jocasta had always thought that Beatrice, less naturally charming and attractive than he, must find it trying, but her attitude towards Josh was one of slightly amused indulgence, and she tolerated much of his bad behaviour with immense good nature.