Sheer Abandon

by Penny Vincenzi

  She dropped in on the Morrises on her way home; they were both subdued and frightened, and their daughter hustled her out again as fast as she could.

  “They can’t cope,” she said, “and it’s no use turning a blind eye any longer. They need to be in a home for their own sake. Now I’m sorry, but I have to get them to bed. They’re very tired and being quite difficult.”

  She spoke of them as if they were naughty children. Clio left with a heavy heart.

  She was late home: Jeremy’s face was like thunder. “I thought you were going to be early tonight. We were supposed to be going to the cinema.”

  She had forgotten. “Jeremy, I’m really sorry. But I had a big surgery and then the Morrises, you remember, the poor old couple who—”

  “Clio, I’ve told you before, I really can’t be expected to remember details of all your patients.”

  “Of course not. But—Sorry,” she said again. “Is it really too late? It’s only seven—”

  “Much too late,” he said. “Can we eat soon, or shall I make a sandwich?”

  “Could we go out? I hadn’t planned on cooking, because of the cinema.”

  He hesitated, then said, “Yes, all right.”

  They went to the local Italian; he cheered up after a bit, telling her about a tricky knee operation he had performed that afternoon which had gone well.

  “Oh, and I forgot to tell you. I’ve been asked to do another session at the Princess Diana.”

  “Jeremy, that’s marvellous. I’m proud of you.” She meant it; she really was.

  It seemed a good moment to tell him her news. Not that it was news, of course. Just a bit of gossip really. She waited until he had filled the glasses, then said, “Anna rang me today. You remember, Anna Richardson? She and her husband are moving to Washington.”

  “Oh yes?”

  There was a silence; clearly he wasn’t finding the conversation very interesting.

  “Anna told me something quite…nice,” she said. “She said there were a couple of jobs going at the Bayswater. In geriatrics.”

  Suddenly she had his attention. “And?”

  “And—my name had come up, she said. Isn’t that nice?”

  “Your name had come up? For a job in London? You’re seriously considering a job in London?”

  “No. Of course I’m not. I was just pleased they’d thought of me. I thought you would be too. Obviously I was wrong.”

  “You are. Very wrong. I find the whole idea absurd.”

  “Absurd? Why?”

  “Well, that you should be thinking about your career at all.”

  “Why shouldn’t I think about my career? It’s important to me. Terribly important. I’ve trained for it, worked hard for it. Can’t you see that I want to do well?”

  “Not really,” he said. “And I hope you mean it when you say you have no intention of taking a job in London.”

  “Of course I mean it. I just was pleased I hadn’t been forgotten and that while I was there they valued me. It was nice to hear.”

  “Right. And what exactly do you mean by wanting to do well? I thought we had agreed that any work you did was temporary and a means to an end. I hope you won’t be working at all soon. As you very well know. Now, shall we order a pudding, or shall I get the bill?”

  “Get the bill.”

  She was silent all the way home, hurt beyond anything. And thinking this wasn’t a marriage at all: or not the kind she had looked for.

  She woke up the next day feeling dreadfully depressed. Apart from the row the night before, she was tired, and worried about the Morrises, who were being “assessed.” It was practice conference day, when they all met in the lunch hour to discuss patients and any problems, and it was a rather depressing meeting that day. Mark had a case even more heartbreaking than the Morrises, a young woman in her thirties with severe cerebral palsy. Her parents were elderly and could cope with her no longer; she had to be moved into a home, and the only suitable one locally was full of old people.

  “She’ll just sit there, rotting. With carers, the parents might have managed. But—”

  As Clio left the room, Mark asked her if she was all right. She managed a smile and an assurance that she was, then shut herself in the loo and had a good cry.

  At four o’clock, as she was settling down to some paperwork, Jeremy phoned.

  “Clio, I’m sorry. I’m going to be very late. Simmonds wants to have a meeting with me and suggested we have a meal afterwards. No idea when I’ll be back. Don’t wait up for me.”

  Angry, useless thoughts shot into her head: Why was he allowed to work late, without warning, when she was not?

  Margaret came in. “I’m off to the pictures tonight with a couple of girlfriends. Any chance of your coming? You look all-in, Clio.”

  In a flurry of what she knew was rather short-lived courage, she said, “I’d love to. Jeremy’s out, so—”

  “So good,” said Margaret.

  They saw Notting Hill which was wonderfully distracting, and then went for a curry. It was really fun. Clio felt much better about everything. Even Jeremy. She ought to do this more, fuss over him and his attitude to her less. He meant no harm, he was just a bit old-fashioned. She had to keep a sense of proportion, that was all. She’d have to be a bit firmer with him.

  As she turned into the drive, she tensed: Jeremy’s Audi was there and the house was a blaze of light. He always did that if she was home after him, went roaring round the house looking in every room, even the attic bedrooms, just to make the point.

  She swallowed hard, went in.

  “Hi.”

  He appeared from the kitchen, scowling. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “I’ve been—well, I’ve been at the cinema.”

  “The cinema? Who with, for God’s sake? And why couldn’t you have left a note? I’ve been worried sick.”

  “You could have called me,” she said, “on my mobile. And I haven’t been home, I stayed in the surgery working until I went out—”

  “And you went to the cinema?”

  “Yes. Why shouldn’t I?” She faced him, angry suddenly. “You were out with your cronies. Anyway, what happened, why are you home so early?”

  “Simmonds cancelled dinner. I foolishly thought you’d be pleased to see me, that we could have a nice evening together. But, as usual, you weren’t here. I just don’t understand you going out, when there is so much to see to here. Incidentally, that wretched cleaner didn’t come again, the breakfast things were still sitting on the sink.”

  Something snapped in Clio. “Stop it, Jeremy! Stop it. I’m not here just to run the house, and do what you tell me. You constantly diminish my job, you have no real interest in what I do, what I’m about.”

  He was silent for a moment; then he said, “Clio, I’ve had enough of this, quite enough. I want you to stop working.”

  “Jeremy—”

  “No, Clio, I mean it. I want you to give up your job. You say we need the money, but it seems to bring in precious little to me, once you’ve paid the cleaner and so on, and bought expensive clothes that you tell me you need. And I shall be getting more from my private work. So tell Salter tomorrow, please.”

  Clio fought to stay calm. “Jeremy, please! You’re talking nonsense. And besides, what on earth would I do all day, it’s not as if—”

  She stopped; she had walked into a trap. He slammed it shut; she felt the steel bite into her as harshly as if it was physical.

  “As if what? As if you had a baby? I was coming to that, Clio. I really think the time has come. You’re not getting any younger, you’re thirty-five—”

  “Thirty-four,” she said automatically.

  “Thirty-five next birthday. You of all people should know the risks involved in leaving it too late. And I would like to have a child before I’m forty. Which doesn’t leave much time. About two years, in fact.”

  “But, Jeremy—”

  “Yes? What are you about to tell me? That you
don’t want one?”

  “No,” she said quietly, “no, I do. I’d love to have a child. But—”

  “But what? Is there something you haven’t told me, Clio? Something I ought to know?”

  “No. No, of course not.”

  But there was. And he was going to have to know sooner or later. It was incredibly wrong of her not to have told him before. She stood there, staring at him, willing up the courage to say it—and failed totally.

  “I agree,” she said, quietly. “Yes. Yes, we should. Let’s—let’s try to have a baby. Before it’s too late.”

  Chapter 9

  What was she doing, even thinking about it? For God’s sake, was she completely mad? How had this even begun to happen, let alone managed to sweep her along on this huge, breaking wave that had left her fighting for breath, absolutely terrified—and yet desperately, wildly excited?

  Actually, of course, Martha knew very well. It was a congruence of everything that mattered to her: her own ambition, an infinitesimal but dangerous boredom with the law, a sense of emptiness in her personal life; and the sheer irresistible force of four very powerful people all telling her they needed her. Just the same, it still seemed a very scary thing for her to do, to consider actually moving into politics.

  It had begun—well, when and where had it actually begun? In that hospital ward with poor Lina dying? In the House of Commons that night, when she had found the atmosphere so beguiling? Or when Paul Quenell, the senior partner, had asked if she would like to become part of his team working on a new client of his, the Centre Forward Party: “It’s a new political party, might interest you, breakaway from the Right—”

  “Ah,” she had said, “Chad Lawrence, Janet Frean, that lot,” and he had been so impressed by her knowledge of them that it had given her an almost physical excitement to be so carelessly close to the corridors of power. That had been a very big factor.

  She had gone to the House of Commons several times to meet them, had grown familiar with its complex geography, had listened to debates from the public gallery, had slowly begun to understand how it worked. She had got to know Chad and Janet rather well, even Jack Kirkland a little. Kirkland fascinated her, his passionate idealism, his scowling intensity, his gift for oratory, and the way, just occasionally, he would suddenly and visibly relax, start listening rather than talking, and even laughing when something amused him: a great bearlike infectious laugh. They were so hard to resist, these people, possessed of a quality she could only rather feebly call charisma, that made you want to impress and please them. And then when you did, you felt absolutely fantastic, clever and starry and—God, it was all so schoolgirly!

  It was madness, total madness, and she knew it, with her life already so overstretched, her time so limited, her commitment to her work so necessarily intense. It helped that the party was officially a client, but she found herself proofreading their policy documents, suggesting likely supporters, and attending schmoozy lunches or dinners, or even—occasionally—drafting press releases on their behalf. It was partly vanity, she knew, vanity and excitement that she, Martha Hartley, had become someone in at the centre—or near the centre—of something so important, so high profile, in however modest a capacity.

  But there was a serious side to it too, of course, in that she believed in them; she felt she was involved in something that could actually help the likes of Lina and her family, trapped in a cycle of deprivation. It was the kind of thing that she thought she could be proud of—and that her parents could be proud of too.

  And there was also the fact that she seemed to have tumbled into her natural habitat. She loved the way politics was a world of its own, loved the villagey atmosphere of the House, the way everyone knew everyone else, the way people could be screaming at one another across the Chamber one minute and sharing a bottle of claret the next; she loved the way it ran on gossip and inside knowledge and deals and what she had once described to Marcus as a live game of chess.

  They had, from time to time, suggested she think about going into it at the sharp end herself. “You’re a natural, I’d say,” said Chad, looking at her one evening on his return from a protracted and fruitless struggle with a local constituency. “We should parachute you in somewhere. You’d love it, I know you would.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she had said, laughing. “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Rubbish. It’s not rocket science. Common sense and energy are the main ingredients. And being moderately articulate, I suppose. All of which you are. You should think about it.”

  How could she not respond to that? To one of the most famous politicians of his day, telling her he would like her to join his party?

  It was all extraordinarily exciting.

  Martha was sitting at her desk one morning in late January when her phone rang.

  “Hi,” said a voice, “this is Ed Forrest. I don’t suppose you remember me. You gave me a lift up to London, one night last year.”

  She did remember, of course: beautiful, charming Ed. “Ed,” she said, “how lovely to hear from you. I thought you were in Thailand or something.”

  “I was. But I’m back now. And I thought I should call you. Fix a date. I said I’d buy you a drink. I felt bad, never doing it, but I kind of ran out of time. Sorry.”

  “Ed, it’s quite all right. I haven’t been harbouring a grudge against you all this time.”

  “I didn’t think you had,” he said. “You don’t seem that sort of person. And anyway, I’d really like to see you again.”

  “Well, that’s a lovely idea,” she said, hesitating. But what was the harm? What on earth was the harm? “It—it would be nice,” she said. “Only it will have to be—let’s see—the end of the week. Like Friday.”

  Maybe he’d be busy. They always were busy on Fridays, people his age. It was the beginning of the weekend, it was for getting drunk, making a noise, planning the rest of the weekend.

  “Friday’d be cool,” he said. “Where should we go, do you think? Smiths? Or do you go there all the time?”

  “Why should I?”

  “I’m told lots of you city types do.”

  “Well, this one doesn’t. But I like it there.”

  Now, how stupid was that, she thought, putting the phone down. When she could hardly find the time even to breathe? Yes, she should cancel it. Or postpone it anyway.

  He was sitting at a table just inside the door, in the dim light and raucous noise of Smiths, and she felt a shock of pleasure just looking at him; she had forgotten how absurdly beautiful he was. He was very tanned, and his blond hair, shorter even than she remembered, was bleached with the sun and he was wearing a suit, a dark navy suit, with a pale blue open-necked shirt. The smile, the wonderful, heart-lurching smile, was as she remembered, and the intensely blue eyes, and ridiculously long blond eyelashes.

  He stood up, came forward to greet her. “Hi. You look great.”

  She wished she had worn something less severe than her black suit—although the white Donna Karan top she had changed into was quite sexy. “Sorry I’m late,” she said, feeling suddenly foolish.

  “That’s OK. I thought you probably would be, doing lots of high-powered things.”

  “Well, I wasn’t,” she said and laughed. “I was waiting for a cab and discovering my phone was very low. Which is why I didn’t call you.”

  “It’s cool. It’s good to see you. You look great. What do you want to drink?”

  “Oh…” She hesitated. “White wine?”

  “What do you like? Chardy?”

  “Um—yes, that’d be nice.” Actually, she hated Chardonnay.

  He loped off and came back with two glasses and a bottle of Sauvignon. “What happened to the Chardonnay?”

  “I could tell you didn’t like it. So I took a flier on the Sauvignon. Am I right?”

  “Absolutely right,” she said. She felt suddenly almost scared. How on earth did he read her so well? Already?

  Three-quart
ers of an hour later the bottle was empty; and to her infinite surprise she had told Ed about what he called “your life-changing changes.” His response had been predictably low-key and approving—and she heard herself agreeing, as the noise and smoke level in Smiths rose, to have a meal with him.

  “But I mustn’t be long,” she said. “I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “What, tonight? Why?”

  “Well—because it’s got to be done. Sorry, Ed. I really do have to be home by around ten.”

  “You must take time to eat,” he said. “If you don’t, you’ll get ill and you won’t be able to work. Anyway, we’ve still got lots of ground to cover.”

  “I know,” she said, suddenly remorseful that they had hardly discussed him, apart from his travelling experiences. “I want to know about your plans.”

  “I’ll tell you while we eat. Come on, where shall we go?” Martha considered his probable disposable income, and that he might not let her contribute.

  “There’s a very nice Thai place just down the road,” she said, “called the Bricklayers’ Arms.”

  “Doesn’t sound very Thai.”

  “I know. But trust me.”

  “OK. I’ll just go and pay for the wine.”

  “Can I—”

  “Of course not,” he said, and his blue eyes were genuinely shocked.

  She smiled at him. “Thank you,” she said. “It was the nicest Sauvignon I’ve had for a long time.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “I really wanted you to like it.”

  He had been for several interviews, since he got back. “And today, just today I got a second interview somewhere, and I think I got the job.”

  “Ed, that’s great! Where?”

  “With an independent television company; I want to be a researcher. And funnily enough,” he said, nibbling on a rice cracker, “the first programme I’d be working on is about politics. So knowing a politician myself would be a big help.”