The Touch of Innocents by Michael Dobbs Read Free Book Online

with an intrepid Victorian explorer and his rag-bag of companions was far more fun than school. Somewhere at home she had a rumpled cloth-backed copy with her name written inside in careful, childhood letters, each individually and patiently crafted. ‘Isadora Dean. Age 10 3 / 4 .’
    They had encouraged her to go back a little, to the things which had stuck and were important, which her memory could embrace with comfort and certainty, to build from solid foundations so she might begin putting into their proper place the scrambled recollections that lay strewn about her mind.
    Of the accident, and of a significant period both before and afterwards, there was nothing but a void penetrated by occasional flashes of light which had disappeared even before she could identify the elusive images they illuminated. Why had she come here, to Dorset? Perhaps because her grandfather had been born in this part of England, somewhere in the Wessex of Thomas Hardy, but she couldn’t be sure. Even memories of the days immediately after her recovery from coma were fitful and confused.
    Most distressingly, much of the previous couple of years lay scattered like the shards of a mosaic attacked by vandals. Personal things, things of great value. The name of her godson. When she had last been back home. What she had given Benjamin forhis birthday. Too much of the short time she had been given with Bella.
    The process of recreating the mosaic was agonizing; she would reach for a piece only to find it had eluded her once more and she was grasping at thin, empty air. Often it was also humiliating. The previous day she had telephoned her producer in Paris, only to discover from his wife that he was no longer her producer. Had she forgotten they’d left both his legs behind on a mountain road above Sarajevo after he’d stepped on a Serbian mine while trying to take a piss, the trembling voice demanded in accusation.
    Then it all came flooding back, the agony, the guilt, the shattered bones and screams, his own brave reasoning that he could have been knocked down crossing the Champs Elysées – a justification that somehow satisfied no one, not his wife, not even those who had shared the risks with him. Some memories she wished could remain hidden.
    One image plagued her mind, lingering in its shadows, refusing to step into the light. She would attack, only for the image to recede deeper into the shadows; she would draw back in exhaustion and it would creep to the edge of the circle of light, tantalizing, mocking. Ghostly. Hollowed eyes. Shrunken lips.
    Aged before its time.
    The girl. With Bella. Always the two together. Inseparable. An image of death.
    They had found a video player for her and every morning one of the nurses with access to satellite TV brought in tapes of the previous day’s WCN coverage. Even though it quickly glued back together much of the missing mosaic – she’d even forgotten who was Vice President, but then, she excused, sohad half the American public – it was exhausting for her to watch. It reminded her there was a world out there which was working and warring and getting along perfectly adequately. Without her. The reassurances of her new producer that everything was under control and that she need not worry had precisely the opposite effect; she found it difficult to fight her way through the mist of depression which settled around her.
    They told her it was normal, to be expected, part of the recovery process after brain damage, a frequent side effect of the drugs, but she was not convinced. It was more than the medication. It was the guilt.
    ‘You should call home,’ Weatherup told her. He was sitting on the end of the bed, no longer in ITU but a general recovery room. She needed to share the pain, not lock it up, he encouraged, she needed the support of family. Izzy had insisted that she be the one to break the news to her husband, but wasn’t it time?
    ‘I …’ she had begun, but shrank into the pillows.