The Night Book Part 9

For the next hours he'd s.h.i.+vered his way through headache, muscle cramps and nausea, until, towards morning, he'd come through it, into a state of exhausted calm. He had arisen gingerly and gone to work late. The virus had left him feeling unreal and tender, as though a layer of skin had been stripped away. That afternoon, while talking to a patient, he'd been suddenly blindsided by weariness. He had paused and dipped his head and looked out at the rain, while she filled the silence (all his patients were women, and they always filled the silence). She'd said, 'Ebsolutely. You're so right. I totally agree,' and he'd given a grateful smile and sighed, and turned away from the rain.

'You'll just have to slip your things off,' he'd said, 'and pop up on the bed.'

He had whisked the drape around and s.h.i.+fted things about on the desk while she got herself ready, then ducked around the curtain and snapped on his gloves. When he'd angled the light he'd felt the ghost pangs of the virus along the muscles of his arm.

'Draw your legs up high,' he'd said, 'and let them ...'

She'd obeyed.

He'd bent his head and looked in. Looking into the centre of her.Neurosurgery was one thing the mystery of the living brain. This, his business, was all body, the female body at its essential, defining point. Simon knew all about the mind/body problem. He was at the forefront of it: labour and birth. On a daily basis he looked into their eyes, calmed their frightened minds, and told them what their body was doing to them. Disease was different, easy to explain: your body is breaking down, it is decaying, it is sick. But in labour physicality did its business, making life, while the mind was a terrified pa.s.senger, waiting for the body's next move.

'Just relax,' he'd said. 'Easy does it.'

Outside, the rain driving across the park, carried by a bullying wind. Inside, everything warm and bright, under the buzzing lights. How, he'd thought, does a mid-life crisis go when you're staring at women's bodies all day? When you're this far beyond dreaming or imagining, or sneaking looks at nude magazines. Within certain parameters, all the bodies were the same, the same dimensions, injuries, the insults of ageing and living. His half-brother Reid used to rib him crudely: 'Those rich chicks. Yummy mummies. You're up to your eyes in it, mate.' (But Reid was wrong, it wasn't like that.) Yes, all those bodies. So you yearned for the defining quality, the difference.

'Give me a cough,' he'd said, and she'd obliged.

He'd straightened, unrolling the gloves. 'It's healing perfectly. No, you'll be pleased with the result, you really will.'

And she would. It was one part of his job, repairing women who had been more or less rent asunder by bad births. This was what first-timers didn't know (and there was a conspiracy of silence about this - something about the needs of the many, and not putting off the few). They didn't antic.i.p.ate it, not properly, the amount of damage a birth could cause. But this was what Simon was for. He turned the babies around, he pulled them out and then later, when his patients had done with having kids, he fixed them up, made them good as new. It was a form of plastic surgery. The latest techniques were excellent. He often imagined what women must have suffered in the past. And then there was the Third World, where no one could get this kind of care. Fistulas and so on; they just sent them off to live behind a bush, in disgrace, for the rest of their lives.

'It's all fine,' he'd said. 'I'm very pleased.'

He'd waited while she got dressed. She came out, smoothing down her clothes, and sat down on the chair. She was tall and good-looking, svelte in her long black boots.

She'd said, 'I've got a work colleague who might need a gynaecologist. I told her, definitely. Go for it. I recommended you highly, Simon.'

They all called him Simon, these private patients. At the public clinic they called him Doctor, or Boss, or often just, defeatedly, Him.

Simon printed out a prescription and scrawled his signature. 'Oh, right. Good.'

'I'll give her your number.'

He'd pa.s.sed her the prescription and blandly smiled. 'She'll have to get a referral first. From her GP. And then ring for an appointment.'

He was looking at her properly now, trying to gauge her tone. She was stroking her throat and regarding him, as though weighing something up.

'Her name's Roza Hallwright. You know, married to the Hallwright.'

He'd thought, how fantastically indiscreet. This was Mrs Hallwright's business, surely; she wouldn't want her private plans discussed. And then he thought, it's the name. People love to be close to a name.

He'd fixed her with a disapproving look, 'I see. Yes, the ... As I say, she'll need the referral, and then make an appointment.'

But something had risen up in him as he said this, a small, sharp protest. He had ushered the patient from his office, shaken her hand, turning away from her a fraction too soon.

He'd closed his office door, sat down and swivelled the chair towards the window. Out in the park the trees were all bending the same way. He didn't want Roza Hallwright to make an appointment, no, he really didn't. Why, he'd wondered, placing his hands on his knees. Why this sudden feeling?

Me doctor you patient. He did not want this at all.

Roza Hallwright sat at her desk, turning the pages of a ma.n.u.script. In her hand the red biro, beside her the cooling cup of instant coffee. She was not supposed to be reading this ma.n.u.script; it had been rejected, and had sat in a pile, waiting to be put into the recycling bin. She had gone looking for it, and by some miracle it was still in the office. It was the autobiography of Ray Marden, a former senior policeman who had resigned in disgrace after an inquiry that resulted in his being charged with, and acquitted of, a historic s.e.x charge. The publishers she worked for didn't want the book, particularly since they had published the life story of Marden's alleged victim.

This is just a bit of detective work, Roza thought, glancing up furtively, embarra.s.sed by what she was doing. She had been repelled by the idea of Marden's alleged crime. At work they'd all expressed amazement, Roza included, when he'd had the nerve to send them his ma.n.u.script. Her colleague Ellen had tossed it aside with a light, scandalised laugh. As if.

She went on reading, and editing out of habit, shaking her head and frowning. There it was again, the phrase Marden was so fond of: 'Once again, I had to bite my lip ...'

Tongue, she wrote. I had to bite my tongue.

Although lip made more sense, she thought. He would have had to do a lot of lip and tongue biting, as his life was picked over in the media and his career went down the toilet. As the result of an inquiry ten policemen had lost their jobs, charged with abuses of power, mostly offences against women, in small towns. Marden had strongly denied any wrongdoing and had been acquitted on his charge, but that hadn't done him any good. Everyone, including the hysterically hostile press, thought the jury in his trial had got it wrong.

Roza hadn't followed the inquiry and the court cases with much attention but she'd noted the roar of outrage when Marden was acquitted. The local paper had come out with the headline: Guilty! And followed it up with editorials and features on his accuser.

She read on. 'This spoke volumes to me,' Marden wrote. 'Once again, with this biased inquiry, the prime minister and her feminist cronies had seen to it that I would not get a fair deal.'

Roza sat back and sipped her coffee, putting a hand to her brow. The ma.n.u.script was a disaster. It was a train wreck. If anyone got hold of it, studded as it was with suicidal phrasings, it would do him nothing but damage. 'Feminist cronies' was a public relations debacle all on its own. And there were plenty more. But the navety of it, she thought. The navety of thinking you could express yourself like this, and not be torn to shreds. His simplicity, his lack of guile, made her go towards him rather than away. Because if he was that simple, if he was that much of a failure at managing his own image, you had to start suspecting ... What? That he was telling the truth? It was a puzzle. People could be extraordinarily competent in life, and on the page, toddlers. Babies.

'Myself and my family were gutted,' Marden scowlingly wrote. 'No way was this incompetent woman going to stop there.' The incompetent woman, in this case, was the police minister, Sonya Kingsley (BCom, LLM).

'Coming for a coffee?'

Placing a protective arm across the page, Roza looked up at Cheryl, the marketing a.s.sistant.

'I was just looking at this Marden thing. For a laugh,' she added.

'Oh him. Why isn't it in the bin?'

'It's fairly ... illiterate.'

'Yeah. Well. I don't know why he thought we'd be interested.'

'Has anyone here actually read it? Has Ellen?' Roza asked.

'G.o.d, no.'

'I'll pop it in the recycling,' Roza said.

Cheryl drifted off to the foyer and Roza waited for a moment before putting the ma.n.u.script in her bag.

Roza loved her work. It was another reason why she didn't want to move to Wellington. Most of the staff were women and it was a companionable atmosphere. Most were Labour voters, Roza knew, but they didn't hold politics against her. There seemed to be a comradely understanding that a lot of husbands were horrible, and if hers was the leader of the National Party it was a cross for her to bear, not a reason to dislike her. Or perhaps it was that they liked her enough to forgive her this detail. Or, she thought, perhaps it was because they sensed that she didn't revel in David's position, that she was not only apolitical but somehow tentative, reluctant even. Anyway, she loved her work and her colleagues, and she didn't want to give them up. When she was in the office she felt surrounded and warm.

Now, as she joined the group for a coffee, she thought about the ma.n.u.script in her bag. All at work had helped with the publication of Small Town Girl, the ghosted autobiography of Marden's accuser, Sh.e.l.ley O'Nione. Small Town Girl had been a hit, and Sh.e.l.ley O'Nione had travelled to readings up and down the country, where fans had come forward to tell their own stories of rape and s.e.xual abuse.

Marden had obviously decided to respond to O'Nione's accusation with a book of his own, but he was considered toxic: no journalist, ghost writer or biographer would go near him. Even hardened PR agents had turned up their noses. He'd had no help and so, painfully, hopelessly, he had ground out his own life story, and there was no one to warn him, no one to say, Tell your story if you must, but not in this way. They will crucify you if you tell it this way.

If Roza had mentioned she was reading Marden's book, everyone at work would have been loudly sickened. And she never would have looked at it, but for a chance discovery a couple of days earlier when she had been reading some publicity about the O'Nione book. There was a long article about the police s.e.x crimes inquiry, and attached to it were clippings, reviews, photos and a profile by the Herald feature interviewer Emily Svensson about one of the other accused policemen, a Reid Harris, who had also been acquitted. And it had caught her eye, by chance, that this Harris had a half-brother whose surname was Lampton.

It was not a common name. She had paused, thinking about Simon Lampton. It seemed impossible that he could be connected to something so squalid. But then, no one could choose their family.

She had been curious. A bit of detective work. She had tried to find out whether Simon Lampton was related to Reid Harris. She had got on the internet and found a picture of the aftermath of his trial. Walking next to the acquitted Harris, holding his arm, was a man so strikingly like Simon Lampton that he had to be his brother. She Googled 'Lampton' and found a picture of the same man on a university website: Professor Ford Lampton, of the History Department at Auckland. Finally, she had found an article on the internet about a funeral, and a picture of Ford and Simon Lampton together. Small town. Small world.

Her detective work finished, she'd forgotten about Lampton for a couple of days. She was too busy at work to think about anything else, but then, one lunchtime, she'd remembered Ray Marden's ma.n.u.script and felt curious again, because of the chance connection to Lampton.

Marden's prose was excruciating, and yet she could picture him, jobless, alone, hated, laboriously grappling with his thoughts, and something in her nature a.s.sented, acknowledged his pain. She knew what it was to be the misfit, the odd one out. It was part of her history: she was the product of all that secret abuse she had inflicted on herself.

He had been accused of raping O'Nione when she was eighteen and he was a twenty-four-year-old constable. He said it was consensual. After fifteen years she had come forward to accuse him, and her complaint had triggered the inquiry that had brought other accusers forward, drawing in Reid Harris, and the other policemen. You'd never unravel the truth after all that time. But, Roza reasoned, the juries had believed Marden, not O'Nione, and he'd been acquitted, having consistently denied the charge in the strongest terms. And Roza had never been sure about O'Nione, the celebrity victim with her frown of public pain. O'Nione had made s.e.xual complaints about six other policemen too. All her life she had been preyed on by cops. She seemed to have been extraordinarily unlucky.

An idea formed in Roza's mind. She pushed it away, then came back to it: I could correct the ma.n.u.script for Marden and send him a note. Let him know the mistakes he's making. She would have to make sure he understood that was all she was giving him, nothing else - just a little bit of editorial advice, since no one else would give it. But she had to think of David - she wasn't even going to mention Marden at home; David would sensibly run a mile. Perhaps she could send the ma.n.u.script and note to Marden anonymously. But maybe even that was taking a risk, being careless and selfish when David needed her to be steady and reliable, especially just before an election.

At staff drinks, Cheryl was giving a rundown of her recent medical adventures.

'Yeah, Simon's very easy. Relaxed,' she said.

Roza said slowly, 'Simon Lampton. I think I've met him. We were at some dinner.'

'He's really good,' Cheryl said. 'You can see him on the private. He did both my births, but he does all the gynae stuff too.'

'Oh yes,' Roza said.

'You know you were saying you and David might have a baby.'

'I don't know, it's probably not the best timing. But David's keen.'

'You definitely should, Roza,' Cheryl said. 'You'd be such a good mother. I've got his numbers here.'

Roza stepped back a fraction, holding up her hands. 'Don't worry, he'll be in the phonebook. And I'd have to get pregnant first, wouldn't I.'

Cheryl said, 'You've got to get on with it, darling. Your biological clock's ticking. Here, I don't need this now.'

She handed Roza a piece of paper with Dr Lampton's details, listed for patients: after-hours numbers, a cellphone. Roza felt a wave of heat rising up her neck and into her cheeks. She smiled vaguely and sipped her orange juice. She could smell alcohol all around her; it seemed to hang like a vapour in the air. It was definitely time to go home.

Before they all left she crumpled the bit of paper with Lampton's numbers on it and put it in the bin. Then, in the lift, she said she'd left something on her desk, nipped back, fished the paper out of the bin and put it in her bag.

Roza lay on the bed upstairs. Outside the window the clouds had seams of pure white, like ice, as they moved slowly across the sky. She was drinking tomato juice with copious amounts of pepper. The house was quiet. She narrowed her eyes and listened, and the ice in her gla.s.s let out a tiny, tortured crack.

David was out with his team, being photographed in front of billboards. Roza had felt a twinge of panic, something spinning inside her, when she'd seen the first billboard on Quay Street. From a background of sky blue her husband gazed ma.s.sively down, his jaw set: Resolve. The future. Hope. Command. Stopped in her car at the lights, nursing a cup of takeaway coffee, she'd peered up at him, allowing herself a small twitch of mirth. h.e.l.lo, darling. You had to laugh.

But she wasn't laughing now. Beside her on the bed lay the pages of Ray Marden's ma.n.u.script, now covered with jottings, markings, underlinings in red. She put down a page and picked up Simon Lampton's phone numbers. Did she want a baby? As she considered this she took a long sip of her fiery drink, and felt it go burning down. Meet like with like. Nerves with nerves. Pain with pain.

David was keen for her to have a baby, she knew he was. And she loved him for it. Added to her customary sense of unease was a weird excitement, a restlessness that flattened her one minute and sent her prowling round the house the next. The looming election, obviously, but the excitement and agitation in her body, the nerves - this wasn't to do with David or the crazy predicament of being the wife of the next prime minister. Or Ray Marden. It was all to do with herself, and, now that she'd met him, the question that involved Simon Lampton. She was wary of agitation and excitement: any strong emotion was dangerous, as were hunger and fatigue. It was stressed at AA meetings: you had to look after yourself, stay on an even keel. She lay on the bed and looked for calm. The tiny crack of the ice cube. The clouds that seemed to be throwing themselves ma.s.sively forward, and yet to move so slowly across the sky. But there was even something disturbing about that vast build-up of cloud ...

She picked up the TV remote. The screen revealed the American Republican vice-presidential candidate speaking from a podium.

Oh, you ... Roza thought, looking at the screen.

The vice-presidential candidate: anti-abortion (even in cases of rape or incest), an advocate of teaching creationism in schools. The crowd whooped and stomped and shouted.

Roza half-closed her eyes, took another blazing slug of tomato and pepper and watched a Republican campaigner being interviewed at the rally, a plump, tiny-eyed individual toting an enormous photo of a foetus. 'We must protect life, all life.' 'As the Lord Jesus tells us.'

Oh, you f.u.c.king stupid ... Roza thought.

She looked at the piece of paper again. She wanted to cry, but no tears came. But tears were dangerous. But everything was dangerous. Even the sky had menace, with its crystal curtains, its mountains of ice, so beautiful calm and cold. She looked at the cellphone number, and thought about ringing it, looked at the chest of drawers, where her own cellphone lay. And as she saw herself picking it up and dialling Lampton's number, she felt it: the terrible pull. How can I do what I want without succ.u.mbing to what I don't? How can I look for life when the fear of drinking pulls me the other way?

'You'll be all right,' David had said, when she'd agreed about wanting a baby. He believed it, or he believed he could make it so; he thought he could keep her all right, because he thought he could do anything, just by working hard. She loved him for believing this. Darling, it's the thought that counts. He knew she was vulnerable - she'd told him about her problem as soon as they'd met, and he'd insisted on driving her to her AA meeting and made her laugh (and shed a tear) with his cheery reply: 'But that's great. You can drive us home from parties.'

He had been slightly desperate when they met, scarred by the death of his wife and struggling to do the best for his kids. They'd come together out of the ruins of their former lives. It fitted, it suited them that they were both escaping from something. The baby was the next logical step.

What she felt now was incredulity. That she had been introduced to Simon Lampton, and that, after all her thinking around the subject in the last year, someone had put his numbers in her hands. And now, thanks to Lampton's big donation to the party, she would be seeing him again very soon. She looked at the TV. The Republican candidate would say G.o.d was pus.h.i.+ng her towards Lampton.

You f.u.c.king stupid ... c.u.n.t, Roza thought. And she lay on the bed, remembering.

She remembered the long ago hot summer after she'd sat her school exams, when she and Myron Jannides had loaded up their backpacks and zoomed out of the city on his motorbike. They'd holed up at his parents' bach at Karekare, a little two-bedroom wooden house in the bush above Lone Kauri Road, about a kilometre up the dirt road from the beach. The water came from a big corrugated-iron rainwater barrel, and there was no flush toilet, only a little outhouse with a long-drop hole in the ground, set away from the house. From the balcony you could look down the valley, over the s.h.i.+ning bush to the sea. She remembered the afternoon light on the hills, the way the shadows in the gullies deepened to black as the sun crossed the sky, how she and Myron had bush-crashed down the hillside to the stream, where the water moved through the striped shadows and big eels came up from the deep pools, p.r.i.c.king the surface with their horned snouts. They had followed the stream all the way down to the beach, fighting their way through the bush or swimming where it was deep enough, and had come out by the waterfall, where they'd hunted for freshwater crayfish. They had spent their days at the beach, lying on the hot black dunes or body-surfing in the waves. Roza was a strong swimmer; she could get out the back with the boys and body-surf the biggest waves, not the way most people did, face-down in the water with their arms rigid, like learners in a kids' pool. If the wave was a good one you could surf down it with half your body out of the water, your arms spread out and your head up, watching the boiling foam come smacking up towards you. She and Myron had competed, surfing next to each other. It was like flying. She was so sunburned the skin blistered off her face. She was covered in freckles and her hair was dry and tangled with salt. Myron's blond frizz was bleached nearly white and his back was scaly with burn marks.

Myron's mates John and Gav had come out and stayed in the bach too. One evening they'd smoked a couple of joints and the three boys climbed up the cliff above the beach and couldn't get down. They'd gone up stoned and sure-footed, but by the time they'd realised what they'd done they were twenty metres up the cliff, stuck on top of a difficult outcrop and panicking. Roza had lazed around below, laughing at first, thinking their shouts were melodrama. Eventually she'd got up, wondering if she should go for the ranger. They'd managed to climb down in the end; they were scared and shaky, and then stupid with relief, and had gone tearing over the dunes in the evening light, exhilarated, yelling and carrying on. Roza had stopped running and stood on the cooling black sand, looking at the flaming sky, the surf tumbling in silver lines against it, and the earth rolling back and away, until the horizon was just a black line against the moving ma.s.s of the sea. She used to think, there is nothing so pure white as sea foam against the black ironsand. She was sixteen, and in love with Myron to the point where it felt like madness.

One day Roza and Myron had walked around the rocks to the tunnel track, and crossed the great desert of black sand, all the way to Whatipu. The sun was relentless and silver mirages bubbled on the horizon, rippling in the heat haze. They'd gone in under the cliffs and listened to the roaring echo of the sea bouncing off the rocks. They'd taken off their togs and he lay on top of her and she felt the sand sliding down the dune and curving hot around their bodies, burning her legs. It made it more exciting, lying on that hot, s.h.i.+fting surface, holding Myron's back, her fingers on the rough scales of his blistered skin and the scorching in her legs as the hot sand trickled down. She'd hung onto him. The sky above her was so blue it was like enamel, and blueness danced in it, and the heat of the sand became unbearable on the sides of her knees. He came and she was burned.

Myron didn't talk much. He didn't fill silences like she did. He didn't try to explain things. She loved his body and his face and his toughness. There was a kind of dignity about him, he never whinged or had doubts, and he faced any dramas she created with a perplexed, boyish stoicism that made her break out in giggles, ashamed of her own lack of control. He was funny, dry, a rebel; he had pale blue eyes.

On those long days when they'd walked through the black desert she'd felt like a savage, a creature moving across the face of the planet. There was animal happiness in the heat and the sweat and the burning light in your eyes. The grey cliffs stretched up into the bush and far above you could see the pohutukawa clinging to the rocks by their gnarled networks of roots, and birds floating way up there against the fierce blue. Sometimes they met fishermen and trampers; mostly the vast landscape was empty. They'd crossed the stream that ran out of the Pararaha Gorge and hunted for the native frogs that hid in the raupo stalks. They'd swum in the pool below the giant black dune, and Roza had got out and run screaming when a huge spider came skittering towards her across the surface of the water. On the stream there were floating islands of gra.s.s and reeds, and the reeds grew in a bright green line.

When they'd got to Whatipu they'd bought c.o.kes at the store and lounged in the shade. They'd picked mussels off the rocks if the tide was low enough, and slung them in a bag to steam open for dinner. It was usually late by the time they'd raised the energy to move again, and they'd end up trudging home with the sky all in flames, rounding the rocks at Karekare and walking up the last steep incline of the metalled road in a stupor of tiredness.

They'd had a kerosene lantern hung out on the balcony. Roza remembered the stink of it, the way it swung in the breeze, the flame leaving a fiery trail against the black night, the smell mixing with the rich scent of Myron's joint. She was stupid with dope and happiness.

She couldn't remember how long they were out there in the bush. It must have been a few weeks. They hitchhiked to Piha and bought food from the store, and a couple of times, after their money started running out, they'd gone to the phone box down at the beach and had rung Gav, and got him to bring out supplies. She could have stayed forever, but of course it came to an end.

She'd woken up one morning, sick. She was feverish, and threw up so much she could hardly stay on her feet. Myron said she must have eaten a dud mussel and to lie down and sleep it off, but she'd got worse, and in the end Myron had given in, and had run down to the phone box to ring his mother, Roza having croaked that he wasn't under any circ.u.mstances to ring hers. Myron's mother had driven out in her old Hillman Hunter, and transported them back to town, stopping on the way so Roza could chunder out the window into the bush at the side of the dirt road. It hadn't rained for weeks and the bush was pale with road dust, and ribbons of dust hung in the air like smoke, stirred up by the surfies careering out to the beach in their old bombs, probably stoned already and taking crazy risks on the narrow bends. Myron's mum's car had ripped old vinyl seats and smelled of mint and herbal cigarettes. She was a bit of a hippy. She hadn't said much, just swerved to avoid the old vans and surfboard-laden station wagons, had clashed the gears, sworn in a breathy, apologetic, half-laughing voice and driven like a fiend in high gear all the way down the Waitakere Ranges.

Back in the city she'd parked outside the Danielewiczs' big Remuera house, dragged out Roza's backpack and asked her if she wanted company going inside. Roza had said no, with the sense that Myron's mother would be relieved to see the back of her. You could tell she adored Myron: he was her only child and she was a solo mother, and although she'd known where they were, she'd made a big thing of having missed him and having been worried about him. Roza had registered the possessive, suspicious edge in Mrs Jannides's voice, and been stung by it.

So they'd driven away and she'd walked slowly up the front path. Her own mother's face at the window.

Roza listened. The cleaner had arrived and was barging about downstairs, talking to Jung Ha. JH was denouncing the dog again and the cleaner was chiming in. 'That dog bad. But all dogs very bad. So dirty!' A door banged, and the vacuum cleaner roared vindictively into life.

She picked up the next page of Marden's ma.n.u.script and frowned, trying to concentrate. Several chapters in, he had got onto his childhood: the son of ordinary working-cla.s.s parents, he had run a mile barefoot to school every day, winter and summer. It reminded her of the Frank Sargeson story about the boy who put his feet in cow pats to keep them warm. From bare feet to high office, and now out in the cold again.

She clicked her tongue and crossed out a line, sighing deeply. What fascinated her was Marden's catastrophic fall from grace. To be exposed and vilified, brought down and down, until there was nowhere further to fall, was the very thing she feared. Not so much for herself but for David. She must not let him down. She was anxious and she felt trapped, and she thought how strange it was that there were so many things you simply could not do, people you couldn't a.s.sociate with, places you couldn't go. She couldn't just ring Simon Lampton - she would have to make an appointment first. You couldn't be seen dead with Ray Marden. For her and David, the restrictions were absolute. At first, with David, she'd been attracted by the idea that she would be surrounded by money and respectability, but his success had built and built, he had tied himself to public life, and now the walls were larger and also more precarious, more susceptible to risk. She felt the scrutiny on her. So far she was known only as the undercover wife - the one who didn't contribute enough to her husband's campaign. If she got pregnant some of the pressure would ease; she could retreat into her 'delicate condition', and people would have to leave her alone. And again came the thrill of uneasiness and pain. Pregnancy - the mere thought of it made her want to get drunk.

'It was sickening and disappointing ...' Marden wrote. Roza's pen hovered over the page and she wrote in her small neat hand, 'Perhaps strike a more detached tone?'

'No way was that hypocritical woman and her cabinet of cronies ...'

Roza laughed. She would have liked to get Marden over to the house, sit him down and give him a tutorial. Let me give you a few lessons in PR and spin. She despaired of his sentences, and yet each clanger made him seem more helpless, inept and - although David would call this nave - more honest. David would say, just because the guy can't write doesn't mean he's not a liar. This was true, and yet she hadn't found anything in the ma.n.u.script so far that struck a mendacious or implausible note. You can't entirely dismiss instinct.

She heard the gate opening below. It would be David coming back from his photo session. She gathered up the pages and slipped the ma.n.u.script into a bottom drawer, along with Simon Lampton's phone numbers.

'Where's Roza?' she heard him say. He limped slowly up the stairs.

She propped herself on one elbow. 'Nice hair.'