the lounge. Christos, twelve, their eldest by four years, was pointing to something on the TV and making a comment to Katine, who was just out of view.
Elena shook her head. ‘I mean, my God, she’s only eighteen months older than our Katine. If anything is happening, she must feel so… so helpless. And vulnerable.’
Gordon reached across the table and clasped her hand. ‘Maybe they’ll hit on something through her school or GP.’
Elena smiled back tightly. Gordon had aimed to re-assure, but it had back-fired as a sharp reminder that those were their only hopes. If nothing came to light, Lorena would be quickly forgotten, consigned to some Social Services ‘dead-file’ cabinet — no doubt larger than any others.
After a second, Gordon asked, ‘What was it with Shelley?’
Elena faltered slightly with the shift in topic before re-focusing. ‘Oh… it was about the next supply consignment. It’s almost ready — five or six days. I’ll ride with it to Bucharest, stay maybe a week between the two orphanages, then catch a flight to Sarajevo.’
Gordon nodded. Europe’s child-neglect hot-spots that had been Elena’s roster the past four years: Romania, Bosnia, Chechenya — where they’d adopted Katine eighteen months before Elena joined the agency. In fact, the main driving force behind her joining:
‘How are things now at the Cerneit?’ Gordon asked. He knew from Elena’s recent conversations that the Cerneit was one of their most troubled orphanages.
‘We’ve managed to cut down on the two or three to a bed sharing — but now every inch of floor space is littered with mattresses. You can hardly get a foot between. And just when we got the hepatitis under control, there was an outbreak of scurvy.’
‘What from?’
‘We sent over a large consignment of oats porridge last time. But they went mad with it, gave it to the children for breakfast, lunch and dinner — weren’t sensible enough to balance it out with fresh fruit and veg.’ She shook her head, half smiling in disbelief. ‘The said they didn’t realize and, besides, they claimed to be short the last couple of months on cash for food: a problem with the heating boiler had forced them to spend more on building maintenance and take it out of the food budget.’
Gordon looked down for a second — the point he’d been circling towards was now within grasp — before looking back up meaningfully. ‘That’s the other thing with this now. If there is a problem with Lorena — what do you do? Just turn your back on all those hundreds of other children who need your help?’
‘That’s unfair, and you know it,’ Elena protested. ‘This is just a one-off. It’s not as if it’s the sort of thing that happens every day.’
‘The point I’m trying to make, Elena, is where do you draw the line? You’ve become a surrogate mother to a lot of these children, and it’s great that you’ve become so close to so many of them. But you can’t be a mother to the world. At some stage you’ve got to let go, let someone else take the responsibility. You can only stretch yourself so far.’
‘This is different. And, as I said, unlikely to happen again.’ Elena flickered her eyes to one side, towards the children in the next room. Gordon was right, but she didn’t want him to see he’d hit a painful raw nerve. Feeling his eyes still on her, she added, ‘This isn’t just about my past closeness to Lorena, or perhaps me reading too much into the worried look in her eyes. It’s also the atmosphere in the house and with the Ryalls that tells me something is wrong.’
‘In what way?’
‘Well…’ She grappled for the right words. ‘Tense to say the least — which perhaps you’d expect given the nature of our visit. But I couldn’t help feeling that something was being hidden. And Cameron Ryall came across as a complete control guru.’
‘Isn’t that also what you’d expect from someone in his position.’ Cameron Ryall’s status warranted only sidebars in the financial pages of the national press, but locally he was big news: Chelborne’s Bill Gates.
Elena shook her head. ‘No, it went beyond that. Nicola Ryall had obviously been primed, but I got the strong feeling that she was actually afraid of him. As she sat there, hardly daring to answer or interject, all I got was a picture of my mother sat there in a similar position.’
‘Oh, right.’ Gordon exhaled, a slightly defeated sigh. So now finally they were getting to the root of the problem: her father.
Gordon looked down awkwardly, toying with the rim of his wine glass. Just when he thought that finally her father’s shadow had gone from her life, inevitably it would rise again, like a phantom. The all-controlling figurehead who had guided — or would a better word be destroyed — so much of her life. Whose hand could be seen in practically every major step or decision she’d ever made: forcing her to have an abortion when she became pregnant at sixteen, and then the growing gap between them finally leading to years of rebellion — leaving home early, the bed-sits and hippie communes, the protest marches and ‘discovery’ trips to India and Marrakech, where she’d ended up living for two years: days where the edges became increasingly blurred in a euphoric haze of dope and dabbling with LSD — before she woke up to the fact that she wasn’t just rebelling against everything her father stood for, she was also punishing herself.
Eleven years she’d spent pursuing ‘alternative’ lifestyles; they’d met three years after her return from Marrakech when she was working in her Uncle Christos’s import business, and they’d married ten months later. Their adopted boy they’d named after her Uncle, who — though Elena would be reluctant to admit it — everyone else saw as partly filling her need for a father figure; but one that understood her, loved her. Christos was also what she would have named her aborted child had it been a boy. Then later her desire for another adopted child, a girl, and the resultant urge for her to do more for other orphaned children.
But hers wasn’t the only life she’d felt had been scarred by her father’s over-dominance. She blamed him also for the suicide of her younger brother, Andreos, who had knuckled under her father’s influence, yet in the end felt he’d not only betrayed what he truly wanted to do but, regardless, would never have been able to live up to his father’s demanding expectations. Andreos opted out in the most dramatic way possible.
Her father had died five years ago, but the scars still ran so deep that she’d refused to attend the funeral. But more than anyone else in her family, Gordon felt that she’d kept her father’s memory alive with her every action through the years, and now his ghost was back again in the shape of Cameron Ryall’s dominance over Nicola Ryall and Lorena.
Certainly, on the surface at least, there were similarities with Ryall: her father had parlayed a 1950s Cypriot-Greek trading company into Britain’s ninth largest merchant bank. But any link between them, real or imagined, only returned Gordon full circle to one of his first concerns.
‘Has it struck you that the reminder of your father might be making you read too much into it all, seeing demons where they don’t exist? You see the surface signs with Ryall, then fill in the gaps to suit.’
Elena shook her head vigorously. ‘No, no. It’s more than that with Ryall.’
‘Like what?’
Elena stared back levelly. As much as she’d carefully skirted around the issue, it was back squarely in her lap. But she could never tell Gordon what had really happened with her father: too many years now she’d spent not only telling the lie, but living it. She reached across and touched Gordon’s hand.
‘There were a lot of things I never talked about with my father. Nothing significant, just small things, which is probably why they hardly seemed worth mentioning. You know, it’s like you when know someone’s unbalanced way before they start wildly swinging an axe.’ She looked down briefly at the table for inspiration. ‘You see it first in the tense way they grip a coffee cup, or their reaction to someone saying something out of place or wearing something they don’t like. Small things. And it’s things like that I see now between Ryall and his wife. It’s… it’s hard to put my finger on. Maybe no more than a hunch. And maybe you’re right — that hunch could well be wrong.’
Gordon held her gaze for a moment before she glanced away. He could tell that she was deeply troubled, and while the analogy made sense, her finishing on the note of so casually casting off her previous concerns made him suspicious. He took a fresh sip of wine, and suddenly the uneasy thought hit him like a thunderbolt.
‘My God… don’t tell me your father was molesting you?’
