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‘I hadn’t been to bed with anyone. But one night, when we’d been out to dinner and had gone back to his room for coffee as usual, he raped me. After I’d gone, he hanged himself.’
‘Because of you?’
Louise’s face could have been made from plaster of Paris. Her lips were so stiff they hardly moved. ‘It was not my fault he died.’
‘Of course not,’ Ginty said, slipping to her knees in front of her mother, longing to help. Louise moved back. Defeated all over again, Ginty returned to her chair, saying: ‘That’s not what I meant, either now or in what I said on the radio. I was only talking about terminology. You were a victim, whatever the offence is called.’
The stiffness eased very slightly. ‘No one thought that at the time.’
Ginty grabbed the wine bottle and slopped more into both glasses.
Louise shook her head, feeling for her handkerchief. There was no sweat to wipe off, but she passed the thin white square backwards and forwards across her lips.
‘Who was he?’ Ginty asked when the silence had become unbearable.
Back went the handkerchief, back and forth. Ginty’s mind began to crank slowly into gear. She did the sums.
‘And when exactly did it happen?’ She wished the question hadn’t sounded so harsh, but it was hard to speak ordinarily with what felt like a bird’s nest stuck in her throat.
Louise looked at her. ‘Nine months before you were born, Ginty. I’m sorry.’
A high, thin, buzzing sound filled Ginty’s head. Heat rushed through her body. A second later she was freezing, with sweat lying clammy in the crevices of her knees and elbows. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t think. She asked the first question that came into her head:
‘He was my father? This rapist? Not Gunnar?’
‘Yes.’
‘No wonder you’ve always hated me.’
‘Ginty, don’t be absurd.’ Even now, Louise sounded no more than mildly impatient.
Ginty drained her glass and refilled it, splashing wine over the side on to her hand. Seeing it drip on to the grass, she brought it up to her mouth and sucked loudly. The pain in her leg was dulling, but the swelling was as wide and pink as ever, with a dark red dot in the centre.
‘Who was he? I think I ought to be told that, at least, don’t you, since I owe half of everything I am to him?’
‘He was called Steven Flyford. Steve.’ Louise’s voice was as bleak as an empty room. ‘And he was the best friend of your new employer.’
Ginty felt as though there was a huge black cliff looming only metres in front of her. She wasn’t sure whether it was her own fury or the passion that must exist behind her mother’s perfect mask.
‘John Harbinger, the editor of the Sentinel,’ Louise added in case she hadn’t understood.
‘Yes, I’d got that much.’ The cliff loomed even bigger, decorated now with flags of humiliation. ‘Does he know who I am?’
‘I’ve no idea, but I doubt it. No one knew I was pregnant. My family sent me to France. Gunnar rescued me, decided to call me by my middle name, married me in Vienna, and so brought me back to England as Louise Schell. Who’s to know I was ever Virginia Callader, the girl who …?’ She choked, as though trying to bring up words that were buried somewhere deep in her guts.
Ginty’s head felt so tight it seemed about to crack open. All she could bear to think about were practicalities. ‘But there must be all sorts of official records. Your birth certificate for one.’
‘And my marriage certificate.’ That didn’t seem hard to say. ‘But why would anyone bother to look them up?’
Ginty thought of her own birth certificate. ‘So, how come I’m registered as your and Gunnar Schell’s daughter?’
‘Gunnar decided that would be best. He wanted you.’
And you didn’t? Ginty didn’t voice the question. There didn’t seem any point when the answer had always been so obvious. At least now she knew why. It was a small, cold satisfaction, but it was better than nothing.
‘And no one’s ever recognized you since?’ she said aloud. ‘I find that very hard to believe.’
‘Not as far as I know.’ Louise looked as though Ginty’s questions were almost unbearable, but she struggled to answer them. ‘We took a certain amount of trouble to make sure that didn’t happen. And in any case, people see what they expect; if they’re expecting Louise Schell then that’s who they recognize. But I’ve never felt particularly safe, which is why I don’t go about much or have my photograph on my book jackets.’
‘Don’t you think you – and everyone else – might have been happier if you’d told the truth?’ Ginty tried not to feel bitter and failed. ‘I certainly would have.’
Louise swung her legs up on the chair again. She stared up at the tree.
‘After the inquest, I overheard a man say that I was “a nasty little cock-tease who drove a man to death.” I don’t think either you or I would have been particularly content if I’d had that embroidered on my bosom for the rest of my life.’
Ginty felt as though her blood had been poisoned and was clotting in her veins, slowing her down, making her legs ache unbearably, threatening to stop her heart beating.
‘Even my father told me I’d as good as killed Steve by the fuss I made. I’d asked for it, after all, and should’ve kept my mouth shut. Men can’t stop, you know. If a girl goes back to a chap’s room and lets him kiss her, she can’t start crying “rape” when he does what comes naturally.’ Louise’s voice had taken on a bluff male severity; now it sharpened with her own bitterness. ‘Just the sort of thing you said on the radio, Ginty.’
Ginty couldn’t take any more. As she stood up, her right trouser leg unrolled, tickling her skin. She ignored it as she walked away.
The river seemed to be in spate, which was odd in this heat. Water rushed down it, bubbling in the shallows and pouring over the few rocks Gunnar had had put in it to make it more interesting. Ginty leaned on the edge of the bridge.
Through the roaring of the river, or perhaps the roaring in her own head, she heard Louise’s voice calling her. She took a step back, then stopped, remembering the powerlessness, the terror, she’d felt in the Jeep. Nothing had happened to her at the hands of Rano’s men, and she’d been terrified. Louise had been raped. Or believed she had.
Ginty turned back, to see her coming down through the yew walk, a slim swaying figure, immaculately dressed in white against the darkness of the trees, fragile but determined. Trying to see her as a victim who needed sympathy, Ginty could only remember the years she’d spent struggling to be good enough to be loved. Now she knew that she’d been running up an escalator that was going down. Every time she might have got near the top, the downward pull had been increased. All that effort, she thought, all that misery, and I was clobbered before I started.
Louise stopped. Her hands were in her pockets, but she didn’t bring out the handkerchief this time.
‘Try to understand, Ginty. He terrified me,’ she said in her most matter-of-fact voice. ‘He seemed so gentle that I’d always trusted him. But that night he used his strength to hold me down and force my legs apart. He raped me.’
And I came from that, Ginty thought. She should have told me. She should.
She looked at her mother and saw that she was about to say something else.
‘No,’ Ginty said. ‘Not now. I can’t take any more.’
Chapter 6 (#ulink_872f03f8-71df-560d-9386-119971913073)
The huge red-bound volumes of back copies of The Times were too heavy for Ginty to carry comfortably. After the weekend’s revelations, she felt like a sock plastered to the drum of a washing machine at the end of its cycle: beaten, limp, slightly ragged, and good for nothing. But even in normal times she’d have had trouble with these. They were nearly half her height.
It hadn’t helped to get back last night to read outpourings of hate in her e-mail from people who’d heard her on the radio. There had been thirty separate messages, accusing her of betrayal, cruelty, stupidity, and every kind of sexual perversion. Now, it seemed, she was a frigid cunt and a sado-masochistic bitch, as well as the incubus who’d ruined her mother’s life.
When she’d identified the right volume, she put her shoulder to the others on the same shelf to heave them upright so that she could tug out the one she wanted. She broke a nail on the four-inch strap across its spine, but managed to haul the vast leather-bound book up on to the metal table. Who needs a gym, she thought, still fighting to keep the tattered remains of her sense of humour, when they can have this?
Fluorescent lights made the library’s basement uncomfortably bright, but at least it was peaceful. No one could get at her here. The only sounds were the occasional wheeze and ping of the lift and her own breathing. Outside in the hot bustle of Piccadilly there had been revving engines and a cacophony of mobile phones and burglar alarms that had sharpened her headache so much that she’d been tempted to abort her mission and go home.
Abort. The word sent her mind lurching round the questions she’d been asking herself all night: Why didn’t she have an abortion? It was legal by then. Why did she let me go on existing if she was going to hate me so?
‘It wasn’t my fault you were raped,’ she said in her head, keeping up the imaginary conversation that had hardly stopped since she’d left Freshet. She had to provide both sides of it, but at least now she knew what she was talking about. That was a first. ‘Or that you were accused of driving your boyfriend to death.’
‘Someone has to be punished for it,’ came the answer. ‘There isn’t anyone else.’
‘There must be,’ Ginty said aloud, in her own voice.
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.’
