As soon as Andrew and Catherine had finally climbed into their taxi at Euston, he erupted into furious and useless questioning. While they’d been waiting in the queue, he’d managed to keep his anxiety more or less under control but now he let rip.
‘All that way, all on their own,’ he raged. ‘I’ve never heard anything to equal it. Anything could have happened. They could have got on the wrong train and ended up at the back of beyond and how would we have found them then? They could have been run over, crossing some God-awful road somewhere. Why didn’t someone stop them? They’ve got a nanny, for God’s sake. Where was she? I hope they sling her out on her stupid ear, damned stupid girl. I never did hold with nannies. And Susan ill.’
‘We don’t know she’s ill,’ Catherine pointed out.
‘Of course she’s ill. Why else would the children have run off like that? It was because she was too ill to notice. It’s obvious.’
‘It could be something else.’
‘Like what?’
Catherine was remembering. ‘Work, perhaps.’
He wouldn’t consider it. ‘You don’t get into a state about work.’
‘She got in a state when she failed her exams,’ Catherine reminded him. ‘She locked herself in the bedroom and wouldn’t come out.’
He dismissed that as youthful dramatics. ‘She was a child. This is different. She’s ill. She must be. Or she’s had an accident. She should have called a doctor. Got things organised.’
‘Perhaps she has.’
‘Then why hasn’t somebody phoned to tell us? And where’s Rob, for Christ’s sake? The whole thing’s bloody ridiculous.’
‘Well at least Gemma was there to take them in.’
‘And what if she hadn’t been?’ he said, his face a storm of anxiety. ‘Tell me that.’
‘But she was.’
‘And what if she saw the broadcast or read that bloody awful paper? What am I going to say to her, Kate?’
‘Nothing,’ Catherine advised. ‘It’s late. We’ll just pick up the girls and go home. We can deal with everything else in the morning.’
The taxi edged towards Putney through the impatient traffic of the evening. They seemed to be moving through a blizzard of harsh lights and very very slowly. ‘Can’t he go any bloody faster?’
‘When we get there,’ Catherine said, ‘no scolding the girls.’ It was midway between an instruction and a suggestion. ‘I know they deserve it but they’ve probably given themselves fright enough and we’d only be rubbing it in.’
‘No scolding,’ he agreed. It would be more appropriate coming from their parents. And she was right. It must have frightened them terribly.
‘No questioning either.’
‘We must find out what’s the matter with Susan.’
‘Let them tell us, eh?’
‘They’d better. We need to know. It’s all perfectly bloody ridiculous.’
But once they were in St Mary’s Court and the girls were standing in Gemma’s hall, waiting to greet him, he took one look at their poor little faces and the dark shadows under their poor little eyes and was filled with such pity that he simply scooped them up into his arms and gave them a bear hug. And Gemma didn’t say anything.
‘You should be tucked up in bed, the pair of you,’ he said, leading them off at once to the waiting taxi, before anything could be said. ‘I prescribe a warm bath, a hot drink and plenty of sleep. Come on!’
Catherine stayed behind to thank Gemma for looking after them. ‘We do appreciate it,’ she said. ‘What a good job you were here.’
‘Yes,’ Gemma agreed, wryly, watching as Andrew led the girls away. The sight of him looking so handsome and self-assured made her feel angry. You open your mouth, she was thinking, and I get bloody burgled and you just walk away as if nothing had happened. ‘Wasn’t it.’
‘I don’t know what we should have done if you hadn’t been. What news of Susan? You said she was locked in her room.’
Gemma told her what little she knew, warned her that it upset the girls to be questioned and added that Rob was on his way.
Then it is work, Catherine thought. I knew it.
‘Come on, Kate!’ Andrew called from the taxi. ‘You can talk tomorrow.’
The two women kissed before Catherine ran to the taxi, where Andrew was waiting at the door.
‘Quite right, Dr Quennell!’ Gemma called to him bitterly. ‘There’s been far too much talking in the last few days, if you ask me.’ And she went back inside the flat before she was tempted to say anything else.
‘She saw the broadcast,’ Andrew said, as the taxi edged out of the compound. ‘I knew there’d be trouble.’
But Catherine hadn’t got time to think about the broadcast now. She was concerned for her granddaughters, asking whether they’d had anything to eat and whether they’d brought their pyjamas.
‘We’ll find some for you,’ she said, when they shook their heads. ‘I’ve got some old ones of your mother’s hidden away somewhere. And then we’ll ring your mummy and daddy to tell them where you are.’
‘She won’t answer,’ Helen said, bleakly. ‘She hasn’t been answering all evening. And Daddy won’t either because he’s on the train. He said he was coming straight here.’
Catherine could see that talk of phoning distressed them. ‘Well we’ll see,’ she temporised. ‘The first thing is to get you bathed and to bed. There’ll be time enough for phoning in the morning.’
But when they got in, the answerphone was flashing and had to be dealt with.
‘I’ll see to it,’ Andrew said. ‘You take them up to bed. They’ve had enough for one day, haven’t you girls? I’ll come up and tell you if there’s any news.’ He waited until they were out of earshot before he switched on the machine.
There were five messages from reporters, which was predictable, all saying much the same thing. Would he care to comment on the allegations made on Friday Forum? No he would not. At least not now and not to them. That could wait for his column and would have to be thought about very carefully, when he had the time and energy for it. The sixth message was Gemma’s, now out of date. The seventh and last was from Chris: ‘I’ve just had a call from Susan. Please call me back as soon as you can.’
Heart thudding with alarm, he dialled the number.
When Catherine came downstairs more than half an hour later, she found him slumped in his armchair staring at the blank television screen. It was such an uncharacteristic position that she was very alarmed.
‘Oh Drew!’ she said. ‘What is it?’
‘You were right,’ he sighed. ‘It is work and it’s all my fault, according to Chris.’ And he told her what he’d heard. ‘I didn’t realise this job was so important to her.’
‘She knew there was a price to pay for it,’ Catherine told him. ‘Right from the beginning. She said she had a choice. To tell them you were her father and be turned down there and then, or to keep quiet about it and risk losing the job when they found out.’
‘Which is what’s happened, according to Chris. She couldn’t phone me and tell me herself. She had to phone Chris, all the way across the Atlantic. It’s very hurtful.’
‘Ring her now,’ Catherine suggested.
‘I have,’ he sighed. ‘Twice. She doesn’t answer.’
I knew this would happen, Catherine thought. I ought to have warned you. But you wouldn’t have listened to me if I had. You’d have told me not to imagine things. There was no point in saying anything about it now. Fortunately they had a better language for comfort. She knelt between his knees, put her arms round his neck and kissed him.
‘I’ve hurt her, Kate,’ he said. ‘I’ve cost her her job. It’s the one thing in the world I should never have done to her – and I’ve done it.’
‘Not intentionally,’ she said. But he wasn’t comforted.
‘Intentions are irrelevant,’ he said. ‘It’s the end result that counts.’ He took her hands and held them. ‘That broadcast was a nightmare, Kate. I knew it would make trouble. I’m not complaining. I went into this with my eyes open. I always knew I’d have to face the opposition, and I knew I’d have mud slung at me, sooner or later. That’s the way the system works. But not like that, not through Gemma and Susan. Not through my daughter. That was below the belt.’
She kissed his hand and held it against her cheek. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was. But that’s the way the system works too. If you go around telling people the emperor’s got no clothes on, they’ll nobble you in any way they can, through the people you care about, or your job or your pension. You can’t expect to tell the truth about politics and not get punished for it. Not in the 1990s.’
‘When I started all this,’ he said. ‘I thought I could. That was the object of the exercise. Tell the truth and shame the politicians. Stand up for the NHS. Shed light on murky places. I can remember saying I was the only one around who could tell the truth and get away with it. The arrogance of it. Well, I was wrong.’
‘I don’t think you were arrogant. Or wrong. You’re too hard on yourself.’
‘What am I going to do?’ he asked. ‘I’ve had six reporters on the phone since the broadcast. What do I say to them?’
She gave him a wry smile. ‘Tell them the truth?’
‘You’re saying, fight on.’
‘I’m not sure what I’m saying,’ she told him, ‘except that I love you and I can’t bear to see you hurt.’
‘And then there’s Cyprus,’ he said.
She waited.
‘I thought it was over and done with,’ he said. ‘I’d almost forgotten it. And now they’re going to dig it all up again. Dear God!’
He was gazing into the middle distance, reliving it, feeling it, the sun warm on his shoulders, the mountain rising before him, covered with trees where gunmen could watch without being seen, the prickling sense that they were being watched, dust swirling back at them from the lorry ahead, the smell of sweat, his mouth dry with fear.
‘They’d shot one of our doctors the day before,’ he said. ‘He was driving through Nicosia and they shot him. In broad daylight. The one that took our lorry out was a “toffee tin bomb”. Blew it to bits.’
A spurt of bright red flame. A roar that filled his ears with pain and reverberated through his body, making his guts shake. Bits of an arm flung into the air. A hand, its fingers spread, frozen in the instant of surprise. Chunks of metal. And such fear and anger flooding his system. He was leaping from his own car, running to the debris even before it had finished falling. Something pinged against his tin hat as he ran. It was nothing. He didn’t stop to see what it was. His anger was so extreme even a bullet wouldn’t have stopped him. Fucking evil monsters! How dare they do this! A body sprawled on the road, another trying to crawl away. Still alive. Must get to him.
Then that dark figure dodging between the trees, running away. Bloody running away. His own voice screaming. There he is! Shoot him! Oh for Christ’s sake, don’t let the bugger get away. Kill him! Kill him!’
‘Oh Kate!’ he said. ‘I’ve never hated anyone in the whole of my life the way I hated that boy. I could have killed him with my bare hands.’
‘Did you shoot him?’ she asked. She was very calm, her face creased with sympathy.
‘I honestly can’t remember. I’m not even sure I had a gun. I was running to the lorry, you see. To pick up the injured. But I wanted him shot. I gave the order to fire,’
He heard the fusillade, the roar of triumph. Down on his knees trying to reassure the crawling soldier, trying to stem the bleeding, wishing he had more skill, afraid the poor kid would die, willing him to live …
‘It was crazy,’ he said to Kate. ‘There I was doing everything I could to save the life of one young man and screaming obscenities to kill the other one.’
‘War,’ she said.
Then there was a gentle silence between them. A soothing silence. She held his hand lovingly in both her own, caressing it with her thumb. ‘Why didn’t you tell me all this before?’ she asked. There was no criticism in her voice, just curiosity.
‘Because I’m a coward,’ he confessed, looking at her. ‘I thought I’d lose you if you knew how foul I could be. I couldn’t risk that.’
‘It wouldn’t have been a risk.’
‘It was to me,’ he said ruefully. ‘Well, there you are. You know now.’
It was the first time she’d seen a vulnerable expression on his face. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know now.’ And she smiled at him. ‘I’m very glad I know. It’s a weight off my shoulders too.’
That puzzled him.
‘It’s hard work being married to a good man,’ she said, the teasing note returning to her voice. ‘It’s a relief to know you’ve got clay feet. It levels us out.’
‘Oh come on!’ he said. ‘I’m not a good man.’
‘You are. You’re a very good man. An honest man. Ask your children. Or your patients.’
‘You’re the good one,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be anything without you.’
‘I had an illegitimate child,’ she pointed out.
‘That was love.’
‘That was stupidity.’
The terror of the memory was receding. They were in their own world again, at ease in their healing house, closer to one another than they had ever been. There were decisions to be made, difficulties to face. But weren’t there always?