The safe house

I couldn’t see his expression. Was he remorseful? Defiant?

‘Knowing this, and the police knowing this, I can’t believe you thought it was a good idea to stick Finn in the middle of nowhere with me and Elsie.’

‘We wouldn’t have considered it if we didn’t think it was safe.’

‘That’s easy for you to say, Michael.’

‘Perhaps I should say that I was first told about this edition of the magazine by Philip Carrier, one of the detectives running the animal rights investigation. It wasn’t the publication of Leo’s address that he rang me about.’

‘No? What was it then? My address, presumably. That’s all I need.’

‘No, they printed my name and address.’

‘Yours?’ I felt a flush of embarrassment. ‘God, I’m so sorry.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘What are you doing about it?’

Michael started the car and we moved off once more.

‘I double-lock the door at night, that’s about all. Don’t worry, I’m strong.’

‘All that riding to hounds.’

‘I do other things as well. I must show you my boat. We should go out on it for a day. Get away from all of this.’

I mumbled something.

‘What are you doing on Saturday?’

I mumbled something else.

‘I’ll pick you up after breakfast.’

That night I couldn’t sleep. I put on my dressing gown – Danny’s, full of his smell in its towelly folds – and sat by my window and listened to the sea. I think that I cried. If Danny had come into the room then I would have laid him on the bed without a word. And I would have undressed him slowly and kissed him tenderly and covered his nakedness with my body, pulling apart my gown and sinking on to him, drawing him into me, watching his face all the while. I would have asked him to take us away, live with us, to marry me, to give me a child.

At dawn I fell asleep.

Seventeen

‘A cash cow?’

Geoff Marsh looked amused, almost nattered by the suggestion.

‘That’s what the man said to me.’

‘You shouldn’t believe everything that strange men say to you at parties. Who was it?’

‘A man called Frank Laroue, an academic.’ Geoff Marsh’s face broke into a knowing smile. ‘A friend of yours?’

‘I know Laroue. He probably believes that the whole of western medicine is a capitalist plot to keep the workers unhealthy, but in this case he has a point. Post-traumatic stress is a growth area, no doubt about it.’

It was the Monday after the party, and Geoff and I were in the middle of a working breakfast of coffee and croissants. I had mischievously quoted Laroue at Geoff and was surprised to find it taken seriously.

‘There can’t be much money in trauma,’ I said.

Marsh shook his head vigorously and swallowed a mouthful of pastry.

‘You’d be surprised. You saw the judgment last week in favour of the trauma suffered by the Northwick firemen. What were the damages and the costs? Five million and change?’

‘Good for the firemen.’

‘Good for us. I suspect we will now be finding insurance companies insisting on a pre-emptive policy of stress counselling to safeguard them against future litigation. And we are in a position to be ahead of the market in supplying that counselling.’

‘I thought the purpose of this unit was to fill a therapeutic need, not to protect the investment of insurance companies.’

‘The two go together, Sam. You should be proud of this potential. After all, the unit is your baby.’

‘I sometimes feel that my baby isn’t turning out the way I had planned.’

Geoff drained his coffee-cup and his face assumed a sententious expression.

‘Well, you know, you have to allow your children to go their own way.’

‘Thank you, Dr Spock,’ I said sourly. ‘The baby hasn’t even been born yet.’

Geoff got up and wiped his lips with a napkin.

‘Sam, I want to show you something. Come over here.’

He led me to one window of his large, high, corner office. He pointed down to a corner of the hospital grounds where a few men in orange helmets were standing disconsolately outside a Portakabin.

‘We’re expanding,’ he said. ‘Stamford is expanding. We’re in the right place. Close to London, close to Europe, green-field sites. I have a dream, Sam. Imagine this hospital trust realizing its full potential and being floated on the Stock Exchange. We could be the Microsoft of primary healthcare.’

I followed his gaze, aghast.

‘I suppose now you’re going to ask me to turn the stones into bread. Unfortunately I can’t stay the full forty days here in the wilderness because I’ve got to get back to making so-called progress on my book.’

Geoff looked confused.

‘What are you talking about, Sam?’

‘Nothing much, Geoff. I’ll see you next week, back in the real world.’

‘This is the real world, Sam.’

As I drove on the now-familiar route out of Stamford I reflected gloomily that he was probably right, and then I considered the rest of my world – Elsie, Danny, Finn, my book – and felt even worse. Elsie was at school, Danny was God knows where, and when I arrived home Finn was sitting on a sofa holding a magazine but not reading it. I looked with a pang towards my office, then took a deep breath and walked over to her.

‘Walk?’ I suggested.

We set off in silence, turning left and walking parallel with the sea for a mile or so and then turning off sharply to the left again. We were walking along the edge of a ploughed field by a ditch so wide as to be almost a canal. All we could see ahead of us were flimsy lines of trees ranged as straight as the posts of a fence – defences against the wind, I supposed.

I was thinking hard. It was the nineteenth of February. Finn had been with us for four weeks. There were two, maybe three, weeks to go before I called a halt. But for Elsie, a temporary expediency had become her life. She loved coming downstairs each morning to find us both (Finn in my old dressing gown, me in clothes that were not office ones) sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee, chatting. She loved me to drive her to school each morning and stand at the classroom door with the other parents and kiss her quickly on her cold cheek when the bell rang and say, ‘I’ll collect you this afternoon.’ And each day, when the bell sounded again at three-forty, she would run out with her coat and her pack folder and usually a piece of stiff paper with colourful daubs on it, and I could see that she was very happy to be like the other children. I was even careful to wear my least exotic clothes when I collected her. I tried to chat to the other mothers about head-lice lotion and the next school jumble sale. For a bit I, too, wanted us to blend in with the scenery. At teatime Finn would make Elsie toast and honey; it became a kind of ritual. At bedtime she’d pad silently into Elsie’s room to say good-night while I read her books. I realized one day that she had made us feel like a real family, rather than a mother and daughter, in a way that Danny had never done. And I knew, too, that that was because I’d never allowed Danny to.

But for Finn as well as for me it was a false, fairy-tale existence. Soon she would have to return to a world of