Those Whom the Gods Love

All the way back from Freshet yesterday, and every time she’d woken in the night, she had thought of more things her mother’s story explained. But every answer led her only to more questions. And more anger.

She’d tried to tell herself that it didn’t matter that she wasn’t Gunnar Schell’s daughter. Or that her real father had been a rapist. But of course it did.

‘Don’t be melodramatic, Ginty,’ Gunnar’s voice boomed in her mind as loud and foggy as it used to sound when she was about to be car sick as a child and already miles apart from reality.

He’d have said that the only sensible way of dealing with her mother’s revelation was to ignore it and get on with her life. But Ginty had discovered that she was not as sensible as either of them had thought. Maybe it was her real father who had endowed her with the drama queen tendencies Gunnar had been so concerned to stamp out. And maybe there was more, too, that she hadn’t yet uncovered. Maybe all Gunnar’s lectures about proper behaviour and self-control had had less to do with making sure she didn’t embarrass him in public, as she’d always assumed, and more to do with ensuring that whatever her nature might drive her to commit could be counteracted by learned behaviour. Maybe the iron suit he and her mother had been forging around her true character for as long as she could remember had been to keep in something horrifying.

Oh, stop it, she told herself. You know you’re neither evil nor dangerous. Grow up.

She opened the great red-leather volume, determined to find out the truth about herself and her father – and why he’d died and whose fault it had all been. She didn’t want to do anything to the guilty, but she wanted to know who they were. Only that, she thought, could completely free her from the iron suit.

The old newspapers smelled of biscuits. As she turned the fragile pages, trying not to tear them, she let herself be distracted by the price of houses for sale in the summer of 1970. One advertisement seemed particularly astonishing, asking eleven thousand pounds for a five-bedroomed listed house with a big garden in Berkshire. Her eyes moved and caught sight of a headline on the opposite page, announcing ‘Women’s Appointments’ at the top of advertisements for secretarial posts.

‘Prehistoric,’ she muttered, surprised that even in 1970 women looking for work had been assumed to be secretaries.

Apart from the price of property and attitudes to women, there was plenty in the paper that seemed positively familiar. Mr Jonathan Aitken had offered to resign his parliamentary seat because of his involvement in a case concerning the Official Secrets Act. An international ring had been smuggling in immigrants. Brian MacArthur was writing on ‘Firms Feeling the Pinch’; Philip Howard, on London. Mr David Irving had apologized in the High Court. No evidence had been found to suggest that television caused juvenile delinquency. There was new hope for the Northern Line. Deaths on two tube lines had brought big delays. A foetus bank providing material for scientific experiment had been discovered in an NHS hospital. Fears were expressed that new big district hospitals would turn out to be white elephants.

At last she found it, in a small headline on the far right of page 3, which read ‘Undergraduate suicide at Oxford.’ The paragraph beneath, only five short lines, told her that Steven Flyford had been found hanging in his room in Christ Church. The police were not looking for anyone in connection with the death.

She lifted the pages gently, holding them by the top right-hand corner and sliding her other hand along the bottom to make sure they didn’t rip, as she searched for the report of the inquest. Occasionally there was the sharp cracking sound when the edge of one sheet did split a millimetre or two, in spite of all her care. Each time she looked round guiltily, but there was no one watching, waiting to point out her failings and the damage they might cause.

There was a photograph at the top of a column reporting on the inquest. All her instincts pushed her to reject it. Her imagination had been full of violence and men like Rano, but here was just a boy, happy and slight and quite unthreatening. Ginty remembered Doctor Murphy’s views on rape, and wished she could believe them.

‘He held me down and forced my legs apart and raped me,’ her mother had said.

This boy did that? Ginty thought, pressing down on the paper with her index finger until the blood was forced away from the nail, leaving the whole top of her finger pale yellow and dead-looking. I don’t believe it.

The photograph must have been taken on a beach somewhere. There were cliffs in the background, and the boy was only half-dressed. His hair looked wet and thick with salt. His eyes, dark like hers, looked straight at her, trusting, affectionate and easy. But, apart from the eyes, there was nothing in his face to remind her of the one she saw in the mirror every day. So where did hers come from? And her character? What was it she might turn into, if Gunnar’s training ever failed completely? She forced herself to read on.

Steven Flyford, 19, was so distressed by his relationship with his girlfriend, Virginia Callader, also 19, that he killed himself last week. Mr John Milk, whose room was beside the deceased’s, gave evidence of seeing the couple walking upstairs on the night Steven Flyford died. They had their arms around each other and at one moment stopped to kiss.

Later Mr Milk heard the unmistakable sound of lovemaking, followed by a woman’s weeping, then doors banging and the sound of footsteps running down the stone stairs. He did not look out of his room. Steven Flyford was found the next morning hanging from a noose made from his own gown.

His sister, Mrs Grove of London SW, gave evidence that he had always been a well-adjusted, happy boy, but said he had not had a steady girlfriend before Miss Callader. He was quite inexperienced sexually. She could only suppose that he was distressed by Miss Callader’s reaction to intercourse.

Miss Callader said that he had seemed quite untroubled when she left his room, but agreed that she had been crying. His tutor, Dr Oliver Bainton, said: ‘He had been depressed over his work for much of the term; perhaps the added stress of a new and difficult relationship was too much for him.’ His friends, Miss Sasha Munsley, Mr John Harbinger, Mr Dominic Mercot, Mr Fergus Swinmere and Mr Robert Kemmerton, also gave evidence of his low spirits all term, but said that they were unaware of any details of his relationship with Miss Callader.

After the inquest, John Harbinger said: ‘Steve was very kind, and he greatly admired Virginia. I can only suppose that seeing her in distress worried him so much that he took his own life.’ The dead boy’s mother, Mrs Flyford of London SW, commented that young women who lead men on and then change their minds at the last minute are a menace to themselves and their boyfriends. Miss Callader had no comment to make.

The coroner said: ‘As a result of many anxieties concerned with his work and his social life, Steven Flyford’s normal equilibrium was disturbed and he took his own life.’

So, Ginty thought, pushing down all thought of her unknown family until she felt safer, Harbinger practically oversaw my conception. Does he know that? Is that why he’s been giving me work? Is it why he sent me to meet a man involved in the mass rape of women?

She tried to remember what Janey Fergusson had said when she’d rung up with the invitation to dinner. She’d certainly mentioned Harbinger, but only because she’d thought he might help Ginty’s career. And he himself hadn’t shown any signs of knowing anything about her when they’d started to talk.

Her forehead rucked up as she tried to remember what they’d said. Harbinger had been funny about freelance journalists, and reasonably encouraging about her chances of changing direction. That was clear enough, and she was sure he’d been excited by the discovery that she was Gunnar’s daughter. It hadn’t surprised her; most people who knew anything about music were excited by any contact with him, even at one remove, and they all asked exactly the same kind of questions.

No. She was sure there had been nothing to suggest that Harbinger knew her real identity. That ought to make it possible to ask him all the questions she would never be able to put to her mother. A detached journalist, researching the rape story, might hear the real facts from the rapist’s friends. His child would almost certainly not.

Ginty made a note of everyone else who’d given evidence at the inquest. If Harbinger wouldn’t give her what she needed, she’d try them. Moving between the smaller volumes that held the index and the heavy piles of bound copies of the newspaper itself, she looked them up. The more she knew about them, the more likely she was to get them to talk.

Sasha Munsley, who had married a man called Henderson and had four daughters, had become an orthopaedic surgeon. There was an article about the rarity of female consultant surgeons when she was first appointed to a London teaching hospital in the 1980s. Only six months later came a brief comment about her resignation in a commentary opposite the leader page by a senior member of the Royal College of Surgeons on the unsuitability of women – and in particular mothers of young children – for high-pressured surgical positions.

Robert Kemmerton was now an MP, whose political career was easy to track from his first adoption for a hopeless seat through to his appearance on the front bench as a very junior minister in the Department of Social Security. He seemed to have bypassed all the sexual scandals of the era and had hung onto his seat in the landslide that had booted out the Tories.

Dominic Mercot appeared only once in the index, when he was appointed Companion of the Bath in the New Year’s Honours List. That gave the information that he was now an Under Secretary in the Cabinet Office. Fergus Swinmere had more entries than all the others put together. Having been called to the Bar in the early seventies, he’d taken silk in 1989 and was now mentioned in the Law Reports practically every other week. Ginty ignored them, but she did follow up a reference to an article about barristers’ earnings and read that he was thought to be one of the few Queen’s Counsel pulling in more than a million pounds a year.

That definitely made him the star of the group. It also made Ginty curious enough to stop thinking about her own story for a moment. You had to be brilliantly clever, of course, to achieve that kind of success, but you also had to be driven. Might this man’s obsessive hard work have come from watching a friend destroy himself before he’d achieved anything?

Looking back towards the beginning of Fergus’s career for answers, she found the obituary of another Swinmere, a General Arthur George, who had died four months after Fergus’s first marriage, leaving a widow, two daughters and a son. It didn’t take Ginty long to nip upstairs to check Who’s Who and confirm that Fergus had been the son.

Back in the basement, she read the rest of the obituary. General Swinmere had served with distinction in North Africa and Italy during the Second World War, going on to become a regular soldier after VE Day, and eventually taking up a post at the Ministry of Defence in London. At the end of his list of achievements, Ginty found an even better reason for his only son’s drive to succeed:

It was a tragedy for this gallant and respected officer that his house was burgled one night when he had classified documents in his possession. They were taken with the rest of the contents of his safe. The thieves were never caught. Honourable to the last, he resigned at once, even though there was never any suggestion of fault on his part. He was greatly missed by colleagues, all of whom had tried to persuade him to stay on. He died four years later.

That seemed to explain pretty much everything. Watching your father’s heroic career spoiled by a stray burglar, you’d probably be prepared to do just about anything to make the kind of money and reputation that would let you say ‘sod off’ to anyone in the world. A top-earning Queen’s Counsel was one of the few who could.

The pile of huge volumes on the table was unmanageable now, and so she moved seats to give herself room to search the index for clues about her Flyford relations. As she moved, she caught sight of the clock on the far wall and swore. She was supposed to have been at the Femina offices ten minutes ago.

There was a phone box on the ground floor of the library, near the lift. Knowing how slow that was, she took the stairs, feeling in her purse for change as she ran.

Twenty minutes later, she was standing breathless by the lift in a tall glass building north of Marble Arch, having run all the way from Bond Street tube station. There hadn’t been any taxis either in Piccadilly or Oxford Street.

‘I’m sorry, Maisie,’ she said when she was admitted to the editor’s office.

‘I told you on the phone there was no rush. Coffee?’

‘Great. Thanks.’

It came in another bendy plastic cup from a machine, but it tasted better than it looked. After a few minutes, Ginty’s heart stopped banging, and her breathing returned to normal, but her mind was still skittering about her own concerns. For a time she was afraid she wasn’t making much sense. But Maisie liked talking, so that didn’t matter too much.

Ginty calmed down eventually as they discussed the ways she might frame the rape victims’ stories and settled most of the editorial questions. When Maisie was satisfied with what she said she was going to write, Ginty added:

‘There is one other thing. I want to use a pseudonym.’

‘Why?’

Ginty told her about the threats Rano had made as he tied the blindfold round her head and sent her back down to the valley with his men. Maisie wasn’t impressed. She lit another cigarette and sucked in a lavish mouthful of smoke.

‘I sent you out there,’ she said as she exhaled and tapped some ash into the overflowing saucer on her desk. ‘I paid your expenses. And I want the Ginty Schell article I’ve commissioned, with a photograph of you at the top; not some virtually anonymous piece that won’t carry any weight with anyone. Why not do Harbinger’s piece as Jane Bloggs? He’s had a free ride on me so far.’

‘Because Rano knows it was me he sent.’ Ginty assumed Maisie was being deliberately obtuse. ‘Come on. I’m not nearly famous enough for you to mind whether it’s my name at the top of the column or not.’

‘Don’t sell yourself short. You’re not exactly unknown. After all, you were on the radio, talking about rape, only the other day.’

‘So, you heard that, too, did you?’

‘Of course. I always listen to Annie Kent. Her guests give me a lot of ideas. You don’t have to look sick, Ginty: you were great. I don’t happen to agree with you, but that doesn’t matter.’

‘A lot of people think it does.’

‘Ah,’ said Maisie, grinning as she stubbed out her cigarette with the force of someone squashing a cockroach. ‘Now I understand. You’ve been getting hate mail already, have you?’

Ginty nodded. ‘Well, hate e-mail anyway. I left this morning before the post arrived.’

‘That’s the price of being successful. As a journalist, you will always piss someone off. I’ve told you before that you have to learn to take it. So, no: you can’t use a pseudonym.’

‘This isn’t about taking flak from readers, Maisie. I loathe that, but I’m learning to cope with it. What scares me is what Rano might do to me if I write too sympathetically about his victims.’

‘Oh, don’t be absurd. He might conceivably read your Sentinel interview, but he’s not going to open a women’s mag like Femina. Even if he did, he’s not going to worry about it. Ginty, for Christ’s sake! He’s fighting a war out there. Risking his life. That’s rather more important, you know.’

‘Of course I do. But you’re underestimating him. He went out of his way to tell me he had plenty of friends and supporters in London.’ Ginty shivered. ‘One of them’s even rung me up. Already.’

‘You’re making far too much of this.’ Maisie sounded brisk. She lit another cigarette. ‘Look here, I want the piquancy of a cosy makeup-and-boyfriend writer tackling a subject that really matters to women. It’ll show the world what Femina is about.’ Maisie blew out another thin stream of smoke, watching Ginty through it. ‘Besides, Gunnar Schell is famous, and so is your mother.’

‘That’s not fair.’

Maisie laughed, tapping off the ash. ‘Come on, Ginty, get real. You want a career in serious journalism. You may get it. You’re beginning to show signs of writing well enough and, through your parents, you’ve got access to some good contacts. But at the moment it’s their celebrity getting you read. Don’t get so cocky you forget that.’

Cocky! Ginty thought. If only.

For years she’d been trying to teach herself to operate without approval, but she hadn’t got very far. She still couldn’t stop herself believing that all criticism was real and justified, even though compliments were never more than kind lies.

‘Listen, Ginty, I know you had a tough time out there, and I was worried about you every time I saw the news. But you’re home now, and safe. That bastard Harbinger should never have involved you with a man like Rano, but the experience will help you. Use what you felt – all that fear – and write me a blinder about his real victims. You’ve got two weeks. OK?’

Why did I ever start this? Ginty asked herself. ‘I don’t know that I can, Maisie. Not if you insist on having my name on it.’

‘That’s your choice.’ Maisie got to her feet. ‘Go away, and think about whether you want real work. If you do, write up the article as we’ve agreed. If you don’t, send me a cheque to repay your expenses and go on your way. But don’t come back wanting me to publish anything else in the future because I won’t. OK?’

‘You’re all heart, aren’t you, Maisie?’ The friendly message on the answering machine might never have existed.

‘It’s a tough business. I’m prepared to help you. But I won’t be messed about. You’ve already chucked photography. Think very carefully before you chuck journalism, too. Now, I must get on. Can you find your own way out?’

Ginty opened the heavy glass door that led out into the maelstrom of the editorial floor. Against the clatter of talk, phones, printers and photocopiers, Maisie’s voice was very quiet, but Ginty heard every word.

‘And don’t forget those women you interviewed. If you don’t write this piece, their voices won’t be heard. I’m not sending anyone else out there. Don’t you think you owe them anything, all those rape victims you persuaded to talk?’ Maisie’s voice was like a rasp. ‘And the children – the survivors anyway – who are going to grow up hated by their mothers. Don’t you owe those children anything?’

Chapter 7

Ginty was changing for dinner with Harbinger. She’d had a shower and was standing in front of the long mirror at the back of the wardrobe door, surprised to find that she looked exactly the same as usual. Her eyes were a little bigger and her mouth a little tighter, but that was all. It was peculiar. Here she was, fighting her way out of the iron suit, expanding with every moment of freedom, and looking like the same gentle midget she’d always been.

She pulled the clingy black dress over her head and rearranged her short brown hair with her fingers so that it lay in feathery points around her face. She outlined her brown eyes with smoky shadow and lengthened the lashes with mascara, but she left the rest as it was. It was too small to take much paint.

The dress seemed a bit too gloomy, so she dug out a beautifully made, very plain, silver torc Gunnar had given her years ago to replace a glittering diamanté choker he’d disliked. The choker had been a seventeenth birthday present from her first boyfriend, and she’d loved it until Gunnar explained why it wouldn’t do.

‘Flashy jewellery is vulgar, Ginty; it rarely shows a woman to good advantage. Particularly not one with freckles.’

She couldn’t remember what she’d done with the choker, but now she wished she’d kept it. Tonight would have been a good time to wear it. Catching herself wondering whether the laughing boy in the newspaper photograph would have liked it, she told herself to stop being so sentimental. Whatever he looked like, he was a rapist, and he’d killed himself rather than face the consequences of what he’d done and make it right.

‘Never give up, Ginty,’ Gunnar used to say at every opportunity. ‘Once you’ve taken something on, it’s cowardly to abandon it half-way through. Cowardly and irresponsible.’ Now, of course, she understood why he’d wanted to drum that lesson into her.

Time to go, she told herself, wondering whether to check her e-mails before she left the flat. No, she’d ignore them; the phone messages that had been waiting when she got back from Maisie’s office had been offensive enough. She bent down to check that she’d pulled out the iron’s plug from the wall socket.

Often in the past, usually when she’d got to the far side of the Hammersmith roundabout, she’d become convinced that she’d left the iron switched on and hot. She’d always rushed straight back to deal with smouldering cloth or gouts of flame, only to find the plug well away from the socket and the iron itself cold. These days she didn’t let herself come back, but it seemed mad not to make sure everything was safely off before she left the house.

‘Fear is a weakness, Ginty, and the weak are a burden to themselves and everyone around them.’

But perhaps, she said to Gunnar in her mind, answering back for the first time in her life, it’s the fearless who are really dangerous because they never think about what they’re risking – for themselves and everyone else – until too late. Perhaps Steve was like that.

She reached the restaurant without faltering once. Harbinger was already there, half-way through his first glass of wine. He hauled himself to his feet when he saw her.

‘You’ve done a terrific job on the rewrite, Ginty.’ He kissed her cheek. ‘So you deserve a celebration. And you look gorgeous. Come and sit down. Red all right for you? It’s proper French stuff; not this New World fruit juice.’

‘Great,’ she said, even though she liked the despised fruitiness. ‘Did you get the photographs?’

‘I did. And I must say they surprised me.’ He raised his glass in a corny toast. ‘You are a bundle of contradictions, aren’t you?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘A size-eight, bird-boned, terrified, war photographer.’

‘I’m not a war photographer.’ She’d never have admitted to terror, but denying it wasn’t likely to be convincing, so she didn’t even try.

‘Could’ve fooled me. I’ve been looking at some of your other pix today, which I found in the files, and I’m dead impressed.’

Ginty thought of the disheartening years when she had been trying to sell her work, sending off examples of it to people like Harbinger, who’d all ignored her. Spending a fortune on prints she never got back, forcing herself to write letters falsely confident enough to satisfy even Gunnar, had eventually worn out her patience. She’d hawked her portfolio around in person, too, only to be sent away with criticism of the sentimentality of her work and advice to think again about her career choices. Now it sounded as though yet more anguished effort had been unnecessary. She tried to ignore it and concentrate on Harbinger, who was looking at her with all the approval she could have wanted.

‘So, how would you describe yourself – in your photographic guise?’

‘A failure,’ she said with a laugh that was supposed to be cheerfully cynical but in fact sounded hard-edged and defensive.

‘Oh, come on. You know you’re not that. Now, what are you going to eat?’

‘I’ll have the roast veg, then the lamb.’ Ginty put down the menu, amazed to see that her hands weren’t even trembling. She felt as though her whole body should be shaking with the power of what she felt.