Those Whom the Gods Love. Clare Layton
the sky in front of her, then passed again and again, circling noisily overhead. She peered down, wondering whether its officers were monitoring some fugitive hiding in the gardens.
They were a well-known escape route for the area’s school-age burglars, who nearly always overestimated their own strength. When they found they couldn’t hump their stolen televisions and videos over the high fence at the far end of the row, they dumped them there. Ginty’s flat had been turned over twice in the three years she’d had it, and both times her not-very-valuable possessions had been found under the fence and returned to her, grubby and slightly battered.
Few of the phone messages needed answering straight away, which was lucky. She didn’t feel like talking to anyone yet. The boiler thundered in the background. It shouldn’t be too long before the water was hot.
A couple of journalists she didn’t know had called, telling her the names of the mutual friends who’d handed over her phone number and asking if she could help them with background on her father.
‘You’ll be lucky,’ she muttered, assuming that the magazines must be gearing up for a big splash to coincide with his September South Bank concerts. Well, they could get their facts from the press releases or from his agent. She never commented publicly on either of her parents.
The crushed basil leaves were still in her hand when she went back inside, not quite sticky yet but already disintegrating. The smell made her think of holidays and tomatoes and Tuscan sunlight. And Julius. They’d been happy for a long time, until she’d screwed that up, too. A bleep signalled the end of one message, then a familiar voice said:
‘Ginty, it’s your mother. I got your card. Thank you, but I don’t think there is anything I need from you this weekend.’
So, what’s new? Ginty thought.
‘The caterers have everything under control. But if you had time to get hold of some Fru-Grains for your father, he would be grateful. The only shop round here that used to do them has just gone bust. He flew in yesterday and is well. The tour’s a success so far, and he’s pleased with the orchestra now. The strings have come together at last, he says. He can tell you all about it before the party. We are looking forward to seeing you.’
Ginty sighed, wishing her mother could occasionally sound as though she cared. She required her daughter’s presence at all the major family anniversaries, but that was all. From behind a mask of cool detachment, she made it quite clear that Ginty’s opinions were worthless, her friends inadequate, and her yearning for warmth as embarrassing as her lack of height and brains.
The machine bleeped again. Ginty rolled the remains of the basil leaves into a ball and dropped it in the bin, before stopping the messages and pressing the key for her parents’ phone number.
Waiting for the automatic dialling process to click through, she wondered how her mother would explain Rano. His justification of what he was doing still made Ginty feel sick. As an evolutionary psychologist, Doctor Louise Schell could take the heat out of the fieriest emotion and rationalize almost any human behaviour in terms of its survival value. Ginty hoped that organized rape would be too much even for her.
Her new housekeeper, Mrs Blain, answered the phone with the familiar announcement that both Ginty’s parents were at work and could not be disturbed. Trying to feel as cool and untouchable as they, Ginty left a message to say that she’d do her best to track down some Fru-Grains and that she expected to arrive at about eleven-thirty on Saturday.
The only other call she had to answer straight away was from Maisie Antony, the editor of Femina, who had sent her out to the refugee camps in the first place.
‘Ginty, it’s Maisie here,’ said her message. ‘Let me know as soon as you get in. The stories on the news have been ghastly, and I need to know you’re all right. Then we have to work out how you’re going to write the piece. OK? Ring me.’
Ginty rang, touched that Maisie cared enough to be so worried about her, and glad of the welcome, too. But she was in a meeting, so all Ginty got was her secretary and an appointment for Monday afternoon.
The last message came in a highly civilized voice, announcing that its owner was a friend of Ronald Lackton, who’d asked him to ring and offer his services in case she needed anything. He gave his name as Jeremy Hangdale, left a phone number, and said he’d be only too happy to help Ms Schell with any information she might want.
‘We have many friends still in London,’ Rano had told her, but she hadn’t expected them to get to her so fast. Funny how that one call could make her feel so exposed. Fresh air suddenly seemed less important than security, so she locked the french windows again.
Unzipping her bags where they were, she carried piles of dirty clothes straight across to the kitchen to load into the washing machine. When she slid a hand inside the insulation around the water cylinder, she was relieved to feel warmth against her palm. But it wasn’t hot enough for a bath yet, so she made a mug of strong tea, turned on her laptop, plugged in the modem and started to read her e-mails. The snail mail could wait till later.
An hour later, she was standing under the shower, letting the water drum down on her head and sluice over her body. Only when she felt properly clean again did she run a bath. She added lavender oil for serenity and rosemary for strength, without believing in either, lit a couple of orange-scented candles and put some Mozart on the CD player.
‘Always play Mozart, Ginty,’ her father had told her years earlier, ‘when you are feeling low or anxious. Your mood will lift.’
Much later, sitting clenched in front of her laptop, she read through the stiffly formal first draft of her interview with Rano and wrinkled her nose in self-disgust. The three thousand words seemed nearly as constipated as the first book review she’d written. That had taken days and been quite unpublishable. She should have known better by now, but she couldn’t see how to bring this piece to life.
Listening to the interview tape again might help. She rewound it and played it once more. The firmness of her own voice amazed her. No stranger hearing it would have guessed she was a scared amateur, who had to stretch to reach five-foot-three on any measuring stick. But when the tape spooled on to the moment when Rano had insisted that she admit his actions had been justified, she stopped it and decided she needed coffee.
Caffeine couldn’t give her courage, but boiling the kettle provided an excuse to leave her work for a few minutes. When she’d drunk half a mugful, she laid her fingers on the keyboard again, forced herself to remember what it had been like in the farmhouse, and had another crack at recreating Rano and his aura for the comfortable, highbrow, mainly middle-aged readers of the Sentinel.
She wished she could describe the blood under his nails, and the tortured man who’d been dragged away as she arrived, but those must have been exactly the kind of things he’d been warning her about. Maisie had once told her that until she risked getting off the fence and writing what she really believed, her work would always be bland and she’d never get anywhere, but this was different.
She’d just about got to the stage where she could face her mother’s distaste for what she wrote, but the possibility that Rano might send someone round to ‘remind’ her of what he wanted her to write was something else.
‘But would he?’ she asked aloud, hearing her father’s voice in her head as he warned her of the dangers of melodramatic fantasy. She told herself that she’d watched too many James Bond films. No one was going to come crashing through her french windows to beat her up, or fling her into a pool of piranhas. This was London at the end of the twentieth century, and she was – or wanted to be – a serious journalist. She had to take risks.
The first paragraph was too sycophantic even for her. She rewrote it, then deleted the angry new version without even re-reading it. When the phone began to ring she ignored it. The machine could deal with whoever wanted her. This piece had to go to Harbinger in twenty-four hours, whatever state it was in, so she couldn’t slack off now.