Sheer Abandon

by Penny Vincenzi

  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 drag
ged 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.

  Beatrice was not beautiful, but there were things about her that were: her eyes, large, dark, and warm (distracting from a heavy nose and jaw); her hair, long, thick, and glossy; and her legs, longer even than Jocasta’s and as slender. She was, at the time she and Josh met, already making an awesome reputation for herself as a criminal barrister. Josh was drifting through life, ostensibly being groomed to take over the family company. He had given up law even before leaving university, and had read philosophy instead. He had then spent a year auditioning for various drama schools, all of which rejected him, and, finding himself unemployed and unable to finance his fairly expensive lifestyle, had finally gone to his father expressing a rather unlikely and sudden interest in the Forbes business.

  Ronald Forbes had not greeted this news with the enthusiasm Josh had hoped for, but he said he’d give him a taste of it and see how he liked it. The taste was not too sweet; on the first day Josh was not given the plush room he expected in the London office, but a lesson in driving a forklift in the factory at Slough. After a month, he progressed to the assembly line and thence to the sales office, where he learnt to use the company computer. He had perversely quite enjoyed the factory period, but this was mind-numbing; he stopped trying, kept calling in sick and taking longer and longer lunch hours around the pubs of Slough. His father sent for him and told him if he didn’t pull himself together he’d be fired; Josh told him that would be a happy release.

  That had been the day of the dinner party at which he’d met Beatrice.

  Less than a year later they were married. People who didn’t know them very well could never quite understand their relationship, why it worked; the simple fact was that they needed each other. Josh needed order and direction; and Beatrice, who had been born ordered and self-motivated, needed the emotional and social support of a husband who also had plenty of money, criminal litigation being the least financially rewarding branch of the law.

  She was hugely attracted to Josh, she found him surprisingly interesting, and he was potentially very rich. Josh had discovered that Beatrice was a great deal less confident than she seemed, that she had a sexual appetite which was quite surprising given her rather stern personality, and also that she was the first person he had met for a long time who seemed to think he had any real potential for anything.

  “I think you could do wonderful things with that firm,” she said (by the Monday evening she had looked it up on the Internet and assessed its potential), and sent him to his father to apologise and to ask for his job back; a month after that, when he was working genuinely hard, she invited Ronald Forbes to dinner with her and Josh. They impressed each other equally.

  “I can see he’s difficult and incredibly authoritarian,” she said to Josh afterwards, “but he’s got so much drive and energy. And I love the way he talks about the company, as if it was someone he’s in love with.”

  “It is,” said Josh gloomily.

  Ronald Forbes in his turn found Beatrice’s intellect, clear ambition, and intense manner engaging; he told her she was exactly what Josh needed and said he hoped he would be seeing a great deal more of her in the future. Beatrice told him she hoped so too.

  Six months later Josh was appointed deputy sales manager for the south of England and given the longed-for London office, and Beatrice told him she thought they should get married. Josh panicked, and said maybe one day, but what was the rush, things seemed fine to him as they were, and Beatrice said not really, as she was pregnant.

  “As if,” Jocasta had said to her mother, who deeply disliked Beatrice, “a girl like her would get pregnant by accident. I bet she decides exactly when she ovulates as well as everything else. God, he’s an idiot.”

  But Josh surprised everyone—including Beatrice—by acknowledging his responsibilities and agreeing that they should marry. They had a small but beautifully organised wedding at Beatrice’s home in Wiltshire, and a honeymoon in Tuscany. Ronald Forbes was as delighted as his ex-wife was not.

  Beatrice had worked until she was eight months pregnant and returned to her chambers two weeks after the birth of Harriet—known as Harry. Two years to the day after Harry’s birth, Charlotte—inevitably called Charlie—was born.

  That had been two years ago. Josh was now deputy managing director of Forbes Furniture, and working just hard enough to keep both Beatrice and his father satisfied. Beatrice had switched from criminal to family law, as being more compatible with family life and running their large Clapham house and hectic social life with apparent ease. The fact remained that domestic abuse cases were funded by legal aid and therefore still not especially lucrative; Josh paid most of the
bills.

  Jocasta wanted to dislike Beatrice, but she never managed it; she was, for all her bossy manner and workaholism, surprisingly kind and genuinely interested in Jocasta’s life and career. Nick adored her, he said she was the sexiest sort—“I bet she puts on a gym slip and sets about old Josh with the cane”—and was charmed by the way she always read his column, and discussed whatever story she had most recently read with great seriousness, as indeed she did Jocasta’s. There was absolutely no doubt in anyone’s mind, both within and outside the family, that Beatrice was the perfect wife for Josh.

  “Why did I do it, Jocasta?” he moaned now, between sips of coffee. “Why am I such an idiot?”

  “No idea,” said Jocasta. “But I have to say, it’s Beatrice I feel sorry for. I’d have slung you out the last time. And you realise Dad will be on her side, don’t you? He won’t let her starve.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t thought of that, either,” said Josh. “I don’t hold a single card, do I? What can I do?”

  “You can’t actually do anything. Except wait for a while. And keep telling her how sorry you are. You’ve got one wonderful thing in your favour. And it just might be enough.”

  “Jesus, I hope so. I’d do anything, anything at all, if I thought there was a chance she’d forgive me.”

  “I suspect she’s heard that before.”

  “Yes, all right. Don’t kick a man when he’s down. So—what is this one wonderful thing?”

  “I think,” said Jocasta, and her voice was slightly sad, “that she loves you.”

  Martha raised her lips to the silver chalice and took a sip of wine, struggling to concentrate on the moment, on the fact that she was taking the Blessed Sacrament. She never could, of course. Not completely. She had moved so far from her father’s church, her parents’ faith, that she only went to church when she was staying for the weekend in Binsmow. It pleased them, and it charmed the parishioners; the fact that she felt an absolute hypocrite was immaterial. And in a way she enjoyed it, savouring the peace, the reassurance that nothing had changed.