The Touch of Innocents by Michael Dobbs Read Free Book Online Page B

relishing the danger, anxious to hear more. Instead, he had patronized her, unintentionally and nowhere near as badly as she was patronized in her own office, but still agrating reminder that already she was re-entering the world she had left, and all the contradictions and torments it held for her came flooding back.
    Like the missed birthdays and broken promises which she hoped Benjamin was yet too young to understand or be hurt by. The searing pain when he seemed to treat the nanny as more of a mother than her. The games and rhymes she had so much wanted to teach him but which he’d already learned. From someone else.
    The insanity of arriving back from the death camps of civil war scarcely three hours in almost any direction from Charles de Gaulle, in time to wash for Sunday lunch.
    The anxiety when she discovered that from her ‘happy box’ of essential travelling supplies were missing the dozen clean syringes she carried to avoid the infected needles of a war zone, and the blind fit of anger with a two-year-old when she discovered Benjamin had taken from it the tiny compass without which she couldn’t guarantee locking onto the satellite. On such small things might hang her life and the story, although she did not care to ask which her editor valued more highly. Gambling her own wits against snipers from Beirut to Bosnia for an audience she knew was so jaded by nightly overkill they might just as well be watching their laundry spin and who thought the Golan Heights were a suburb of Cleveland.
    Waiting on the sandy beach outside Mogadishu as the execution by machine gun of two army deserters was held up, even as they stood blindfolded and bound tight against empty oil drums, trousers fouled. Held up, not by God or a quixotic judge, but by a BBC cameraman while he changed his clapped-out battery.
    Returning to receive not accolades or understanding but a relentless demand for more, more, more, knowing they were pushing her harder than anyone else, waiting for the little woman to plead cramps or hormones or simply to break down and make a mess of her make-up. The pigs.
    Balancing the lust for a story against the demands of self-preservation, conquering your own fear and crawling that extra exclusive maggot-infested mile before remembering you were a mother with responsibilities back home.
    Home. It was time to call her husband. Her nervousness, for which she had no explanation – or, at least, none she could remember – came flooding back.
    A ring. An answer.
    ‘Joe?’
    A silence. A long silence.
    ‘Joe, it’s me. How are you, darling? Have I interrupted you?’ God, it was pathetic. Sunday morning, what could she have interrupted?
    Another long silence.
    ‘Where are you?’ he muttered.
    ‘In England, Joe.’
    ‘I thought you’d disappeared to Mars.’
    ‘Joe, please. I’m in hospital. There was a car crash. Did you hear me?’
    He didn’t seem to have made the connection. His mind was blocked, struggling to find the things he wanted to say. ‘You gonna be there long?’
    ‘I don’t know. Maybe another two weeks …’
    ‘Anything broken?’
    ‘No, but …’
    ‘Give me the address.’
    ‘You’re coming over?’
    A silence.
    ‘No, I can’t. I’m up beyond my butt in work. Just give me the address, will you?’
    ‘Joe, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.’
    ‘I’ve got something for you, too. Didn’t want to do it like this, but …’
    A pause while he struggled for the long-practised words and failed.
    ‘Hell. I’ve had enough. Of you disappearing, of being left on my own, knowing that I come about as low on your list of priorities as root-canal work. I’m out, Izzy. Out. I want a divorce. I just hope we can make it quick and clean. Be mature, eh? For the sake of the kids?’
    Perhaps he might have expected the silence that followed, but he showed no sign of it. ‘Come on, Izzy, it can’t have come as that much of a shock to you. Christ, it’s not as if there’s anything