COPYRIGHT

Fourth Estate

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First published in Great Britain by Flamingo 2001

Flamingo is a registered trade mark of HarperCollinsPublishers Limited

Copyright © Hugo Wilcken 2001

Hugo Wilcken asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007106479

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007396917

Version: 2016-02-15

DEDICATION

For my parents

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

Praise

About the Author

About the Publisher

I

Christian’s wife was killed in a car crash yesterday. Apparently her brakes failed and the car careered into a shop front. The shop was open at the time but there were no other victims, just her. She died from asphyxiation, the seat belt crushed her windpipe. If she hadn’t been wearing her seat belt, she might have survived.

I wouldn’t say I knew her. I’d met her twice, maybe three times, when she’d come into the office looking for Christian. We’d probably said no more than ‘hello’ to each other. She was around thirty-five I’d say and quite good-looking – I wondered how she’d ended up with someone like Christian. Once, about a year ago, Christian asked me whether I wanted to go for a drink with him and his wife, but I had something else on so I turned him down. The invitation surprised me, because although we’ve worked in the same office for the past eighteen months, I have no particular rapport with Christian and I’ve never socialised with him. I was with him yesterday though, when they called about his wife.

There’d been a department meeting in the morning. The news had just come in about Jarawa’s sentence and we’re launching a major campaign for him. Jamie’s appointed me team leader with Christian and Joanne working under me. It’s my first big campaign so it’s important to me. After the meeting I got cuttings and print-outs from the library and looked over them until lunchtime, making notes and thinking. Then I went with Christian to the Italian sandwich bar on the corner. It’s the first time I’ve had lunch with him alone. I’ve never directly worked with him either, until now. Straightaway he told me that he was pissed off I was leading the campaign and not him. I could understand his disappointment: he’s about forty and I’m only twenty-nine. Besides, West Africa is ‘his’ area. Anyway I didn’t want any trouble so I said I hoped we could work as equals on this one. I proposed we divide the responsibilities evenly, while Jo, being younger and fairly inexperienced, could look after paperwork and legwork and co-ordinate the volunteers. My idea was that Christian could liaise with contacts in Africa while I handled government officials and the other human rights agencies. I’d also put in a visa application for him, although it was of course unlikely to be granted. The proposal pleased him. He’d wanted to be frank about the fact that he was pissed off, he said, but he knew he could work with me.

After lunch we started to flesh out our campaign strategy, in his office. We’d hardly sat down though, when the phone rang and Christian answered. It was a very brief conversation. He put down the phone and didn’t say anything. He went very white and stared at me. I said, what’s up? He said, she’s dead, she’s been killed. I automatically assumed he meant his wife – perhaps because I knew they don’t have any children. But thinking about it now, it might just as well have been his mother, or someone completely different. I didn’t exactly know what to say. He just sat there, with his bloodless face. After a while he said, so what am I going to do now? and rocked a little in his chair. Then I spoke … We had some sort of conversation, which I can’t remember now. He must have told me it was his wife, that she’d had a car accident, that it had taken place in Oxford, where he and his wife lived. I hadn’t known they lived in Oxford. It seemed a pretty long way for Christian to commute every day.

He looked so completely helpless that I suggested I drive him down to Oxford, to the hospital. I had plenty of things to do that afternoon, and no doubt someone else in the office would have done a much better job of looking after Christian, but he’d been with me when he’d found out about his wife, so somehow it seemed like my responsibility. He sat there in complete silence, still rocking in his chair and hugging himself. So eventually I stood up and said: come on, we’ve got to go, you can’t sit here all day. I sort of got him up and took his jacket off the hanger on the back of the door and helped him into it. He was like a zombie.

We were caught up in a snarl at Marble Arch but got onto the motorway pretty quickly after that. We didn’t talk. While I’d been negotiating traffic on the way out of London the silence seemed normal, but then we were flying down the motorway and it felt like there was a void that needed to be filled. On several occasions I caught myself on the point of initiating small talk, more or less as a reflex action. But that would have been even less appropriate than the void. The car engine hummed so softly and evenly in the background that after a while I couldn’t hear it any more, and it seemed as if we were in total silence. At first I didn’t feel awkward but gradually an air of acute embarrassment invaded me. I thought of putting the radio on to break the spell, but in the end decided against it. It occurred to me that I’d been in a bit of a daze as we’d left the office, and that I’d forgotten to say to anyone where we were going or that we wouldn’t be back. I had my mobile phone with me though and I thought of calling, but then decided against that too. I couldn’t easily tell them about Christian’s wife over the phone – not as he sat there beside me, in any case.

I glanced over to Christian occasionally. He was as rigid as an Egyptian statue, hands symmetrically resting on his thighs, staring blankly at the number plate of the car ahead. He was sitting so still that he didn’t seem himself. Normally, Christian squirms in his seat and wrings his hands and agitates his body, like a schoolboy or a poor sleeper. It irritates me, that habit of his.

As I drove in silence, I thought about Christian. We’ve worked in the same department for a year and a half but he’s been at Africa Action much longer. I don’t dislike him, but on the other hand I don’t particularly get on with him either. Despite his age there’s something of the adolescent about him. With his lank, greasy hair, dirty jeans and John Lennon spectacles he looks like a seventies student. It’s as if he developed a look in his teens, then never changed it. He’s got a politically naïve outlook and he probably considers himself some kind of anarchist. That doesn’t stop him getting intensely involved in office politics – he thinks everyone’s always slighting him but ninety per cent of the time it’s not true. Then again, not to do him down too much, he does have his more positive side. He’s honest and friendly when he’s not being paranoid and generally you can reason with him. I suppose you could say he believes in the work as well.

Something’s happened to him over the past couple of months though, and everybody at the office has noticed it. He’s become more erratic. There’ve been days when he hasn’t turned up for work. Sometimes he looks like he’s been drinking or doing drugs. He’s been acting a bit weirdly with people too – the other day I heard him shouting at Fiona, when normally he’s the last person to raise his voice.

I missed the turnoff, but didn’t notice for a while. Eventually I turned round at a junction and joined the traffic going the other way. This business of overshooting the turnoff seemed to snap Christian out of his zombie phase. He started wriggling about in his seat. Then as we were hitting Oxford, he suddenly said: ‘They’re going to ask me to identify the body. But I don’t want to. As long as I don’t identify the body, she’s still alive.’ I didn’t really know what he was on about, but replied: ‘Don’t be stupid.’

He started looking around, glancing out the window, craning his neck strangely like a cat peering out of a cat-box. I also noticed that his hands were shaking quite a bit now. Just before we got to the hospital, he reached into a pocket of his suede jacket and pulled out a pack of rolling tobacco. Normally I’d have asked him if he could wait until we arrived, since I don’t like smoke in the car, but I let it pass. He was still peering out the window, and rolled the cigarette very quickly without even looking at his hands. His hands completely stopped shaking as he rolled the cigarette, then started shaking again immediately after, so that he had trouble lighting it. It reminded me of my dead grandmother, who’d had Parkinson’s but could still play the piano without fumbling a single note.

We got to the hospital. I told Christian to go into Casualty while I parked the car, but he wouldn’t. He just sat there, puffing away at his rolled cigarette – which kept going out, so he had to keep relighting it – and not saying a word. It annoyed me for some reason. I found a parking space, got out, and went round to his side to help him out. But still he wouldn’t budge. Finally he whimpered: ‘I can’t go in, I can’t go in.’ I said: ‘Of course you can,’ and tugged at his arm. At that he started to tremble, not just his hands, but his whole body, his face too. I thought he might cry as well, and I certainly wanted to avoid that. I didn’t want a scene, but on the other hand I could hardly force him into the hospital. I said: ‘Why don’t we just have a wander round, just take it easy?’ I’d noticed a small park in the hospital grounds, and my idea was to take a walk there. I thought it might sort of limber Christian up for the hospital.

Then I had another idea: ‘Listen, I’ve got a tiny bit of dope on me, enough for a joint. We could have a joint first, then go into the hospital after. What do you say?’ I had this scrap of dope left over from the bag Stephen Pusey had given me. It’d been sitting in the glove box for the past month or so and I’d almost forgotten it was there.

We walked over to the park. It was a depressing affair with weed-ridden flower beds, gravel, visitors pushing patients around in wheelchairs. Christian was walking very slowly and I had my hand under his armpit, as if he too were a patient. It must have looked ridiculous since he’s quite a bit taller than me. We sat down on the only free bench and I got out the bag and handed it to Christian: ‘Here, you roll it, you’re probably better at it than me.’ I watched with fascination as Christian’s twitching and trembling stopped once more during the few moments it took him to roll the joint. Then he lit up and drew heavily on it, before passing it on to me wordlessly. I took a small drag and hardly inhaled – I didn’t want to let Christian smoke by himself but I did have to drive back to London. Nonetheless I could feel my muscles relax from that one half-drag. It was having an instant effect on Christian as well. The trembling didn’t exactly stop, but it kind of slowed down and got less intense. I passed the joint back and he smoked the rest of it over the next few minutes, staring into the gravel and muttering ‘Ah well, ah well’ from time to time.

He smoked the joint right down, then after a final drag he tried to throw the end onto the ground. But it stuck to his fingers and he couldn’t shake it off, so he rubbed his hands together and the remaining paper and crumbs of tobacco blew away in the wind: ‘Damn, I burnt my finger!’ and he put his finger in his mouth. That occupied him for a moment and then he looked up. I could see from his eyes that he was pretty out of it. He was gazing at the bench opposite us, which was next to a fountain that didn’t work. On the bench sat an extremely old woman with a blanket round her shoulders in spite of the warm weather, and a middle-aged woman, probably her daughter, who was shouting at her: ‘I said, Eileen and Jack are moving to America!’ But the old woman was paying no attention whatsoever – she was making a strange clicking sound with her teeth. Christian turned to me and said: ‘Look at those two women. The sick one’s not paying a blind bit of notice to what the other one’s saying. It’s pretty funny!’ He started laughing and then so did I. I said: ‘You’re right, she couldn’t give a damn!’ and we both laughed again. After we’d finished laughing, Christian put his hand on my shoulder and said: ‘You’re a friend. You know that?’ He seemed choked with emotion and looked again as though he might cry. I said: ‘Of course. Of course I’m a friend.’ He stared at me with his dilated eyes: ‘You know I have to tell you something very, very important. I have to tell you. It’s a terrible thing.’ I said: ‘No, you don’t have to tell me anything.’ He insisted: ‘Yes, there’s something I have to tell you. It’s very important.’ I repeated: ‘No, you don’t have to tell me anything.’

I walked him to Casualty. At the reception desk I filled in a form for him, then a nurse, an Irish woman, showed us to a dismal waiting room. I asked how long we would have to wait, she said she didn’t know. We sat there in silence for a moment, next to each other. The seats were made of orange plastic and the brown carpet had cigarette burns in it. I resisted the temptation to pick up and flick through one of the dog-eared women’s magazines that lay on a smoked-glass table, it didn’t seem the right thing to do. There was a young couple in the waiting room too, but then they left and we were alone. I was wondering when it would be opportune for me to leave too. Could I go now or should I wait until Christian had seen the doctor? Or should I drive him back home after he’d seen the doctor? Should I try to get hold of one of his relatives, his wife’s parents for example, or had the hospital already done that? It was a novel situation and I didn’t really know what was expected of me.

Suddenly Christian started talking. Not about his wife, and not about the ‘important thing’ I’d stopped him telling me in the park, but about Jarawa. He said he thought this new campaign for his reprieve was a total waste of time. There was a peculiar violence to his voice and I was a little taken aback by this sudden outburst.

I said: ‘I don’t agree, I don’t agree.’

He shook his head: ‘He’s a dead man. They won’t stop now. It’s in the logic of things. They’ll kill him like the ones before.’

‘No. This is different, because the others had as much blood on their hands as their executioners.’

Christian was watching me intensely as I spoke. My words seemed to ignite something in him: he started getting all excited and worked up. That’s not the issue, that’s not the issue, he said. Didn’t I see that it was no longer about saving one man or another? Didn’t I see that in the long term it was immaterial whether one man died or not, that the question wasn’t there, it was elsewhere? Not the death of one man … He ranted on for a while, stumbling over his words, but I didn’t really understand what he was driving at, or perhaps I simply wasn’t listening. I wondered why Jarawa’s fate suddenly seemed so important to Christian, when his wife had just died. Perhaps it was the dope, or maybe it had something to do with the shock.

The nurse came out. At first Christian didn’t notice, though. He’d got so involved in his tirade and was staring at me in this very intense way. Finally she interrupted to ask which one of us was Mr Tedeschi. Christian went silent and the blood drained from his face again. He made a feeble signal with his hand, then got up and shuffled along behind the nurse. He somehow looked absurd. He looked like he’d just been called up to the headmaster’s office or something. He certainly didn’t look like his wife had just been killed.

I glanced up at the ugly, functional clock hanging on the wall. It was ten to three. I wondered again whether I could go now. I wondered whether from here on, the hospital would deal with Christian, call his family, take him home, etc. But then the nurse came out again and asked me whether she could have a word with me. Without waiting for a reply, she sat down in Christian’s seat and leant towards me so that her knees almost touched mine. She had very dark blue eyes that were almost black, like Marianne’s. Was I a relative or perhaps a close friend of Mr Tedeschi’s, she asked me. I said I was a friend. Perhaps you’d like to know what exactly happened, she said. Then she started giving me all the details about Christian’s wife’s death – the failed brakes, the seat belt, and all the rest. I listened, then at one point said: ‘But should you be telling me all this?’ She looked at me with surprise. After a moment’s silence, she asked me if I knew Christian’s family at all, whether he had any brothers or sisters, were his parents still alive, and if so did I know how to get in contact with them, because ‘what Mr Tedeschi will need now is a lot of support from his family’. I told her I knew absolutely nothing about Christian’s family, only that he had no children. I see, she said, and looked at me sourly. I said I was sorry I couldn’t help her but she continued to frown. She was acting as if she’d been flirting with me and I’d rebuffed her or something. I almost felt like saying: ‘It wasn’t me who killed his wife.’ Finally she said thank you, then got up and left.

I waited. Through the ventilators I could hear a doctor murmuring: ‘It shouldn’t hurt,’ and the reply: ‘It hurts, Jesus!’ I picked up a magazine and flicked through it, then started reading an article about wartime experiments on concentration camp detainees. There were photos as well. It was quite interesting, but finally it repelled me and I put the magazine down. I was tired. I even started to doze a little but then I heard shouts. It sounded like Christian’s voice. I heard a woman trying to remonstrate with him, but he cut her off with more shouts. A door opened somewhere. I heard the woman say: ‘Mr Tedeschi, Mr Tedeschi!’ Christian was shouting: ‘I won’t let you do it to me, why do you want to do it to me?’ After that there were footsteps, and the intermingled voices of two men: ‘No one’s going to make you do anything, no one’s going to make you do anything.’ A door shut, then opened, then more footsteps, then silence.

A woman with an open white coat appeared in the waiting room. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, and had prematurely grey hair, which she made no effort to hide. Her face wore a vaguely troubled expression. Looking my way, she asked: ‘Are you Mr Tedeschi’s friend?’ I replied that I wasn’t exactly his friend, more his colleague. She appeared to think for a moment, then asked me to come into her office.

I followed her down a corridor, then into a windowless, airless room. As I sat down, she began to speak in those modulated, ‘reasonable’ tones that only priests and doctors use. The problem, she said, is that Mr Tedeschi is extremely upset, naturally, and he’s not acting very rationally. We’ve given him a sedative and he’s lying down at the moment … What we really need to do is inform his wife’s relatives … Unfortunately, Mr Tedeschi was too upset to help us. I said: ‘I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you as well, since I don’t know any of his wife’s relatives.’ I added that I didn’t even know if her parents were dead or alive. I see, I see, the woman said. She seemed to ignore me for a moment and I wondered whether the interview was over. All of a sudden she continued: ‘But you did know Susan Tedeschi?’ I said I’d met her on two or three occasions, yes. She got out something from a desk drawer and handed it to me. It was an international driving licence, in the name of Susan Tedeschi. I looked at the murky photograph. It certainly looked like Christian’s wife – a much younger version of her – but then again I don’t know if I’d have recognised it as her if her name hadn’t been on the licence. The doctor asked: ‘Is that her?’ I replied that I thought it was, adding that the driving licence was in her name, at any rate.

The doctor then introduced herself, which seemed odd because normally you either introduce yourself at the beginning of an encounter or not at all. After we’d exchanged names, she started talking about Christian’s wife again. She spoke very slowly, as if to a child or a foreigner. She said the problem was that as Mr Tedeschi was ‘incapacitated’ for the moment, they really needed someone to identify the body. Since Mrs Tedeschi’s maiden name was Smith, it was going to take a while to track down her family. Would I perhaps be prepared to ‘step in’? Before I had the chance to respond, she quickly added: ‘Perhaps I can get you a cup of coffee?’ I replied: ‘No, I never drink coffee in the afternoon.’

There was an uncomfortable pause. I was starting to feel a little sticky on account of the heat and the stuffiness of the room. I was also wondering whether I should tell the doctor that Christian had already had a joint before they’d given him the sedative. But in the end I said nothing. The doctor continued: ‘It would only take a minute or two. We can go right now if you like, and get it over and done with immediately.’ I couldn’t think of a reply so I remained silent. I didn’t particularly want to identify the body, nor could I think of any reason why I shouldn’t. The doctor sensed my hesitancy: ‘I saw her myself when she came in. I can fully assure you she looks perfectly all right. You’ll just have to see her face for a couple of seconds, that’s all. Her eyes will be closed. She sustained no head injuries whatsoever.’ Then she stood up and said: ‘Really, we’ll get it over and done with right now, then you won’t have to worry about it any more,’ and she started moving towards the door.

We went down a lift and got out somewhere below ground level. We were in a harshly-lit corridor with no natural light at all. As we walked, I wondered whether morgues were always underground. If so, perhaps it was because it had been a means of keeping bodies cold, before the invention of refrigeration I mean. Or perhaps it was for a more metaphorical reason. In any case, it was a stupid thing to waste time thinking about, since I didn’t even know if morgues were always underground. The woman led me through more corridors. There seemed to be a maze of them and I quickly lost my sense of direction. Electrical wiring and water pipes hung down from the low, dusty ceiling. At one point, I said: ‘But really, I only knew her very slightly. Perhaps I won’t even recognise her.’ I really thought I might not. ‘That’s no problem,’ answered the woman, ‘all you say then is that you don’t recognise her, and that’s the end of it.’ I said: ‘Then what’s the point?’ – but we’d already arrived at the room.

She was lying on a trolley, with two white sheets draped over her. There was a morgue assistant there, a young guy with tied-back hair and a goatee beard, perhaps a student. We’d interrupted a game of solitaire he’d been playing at a desk on the far side of the room. He wheeled the body over to us, then removed the sheets from her face with great delicacy, as if he were a beautician about to give someone a facial. I stared. I’d never actually seen a dead body before. Alex once told me he’d been so anxious the first time he was confronted with a corpse in anatomy class that he’d gone to the toilet afterwards and thrown up. Staring at the face, I didn’t feel anything in particular. A long, faint scratch mark crossed her high forehead diagonally from left to right, like a line drawn across a page to strike it out.

It was her all right. It was Susan Tedeschi. Or perhaps she called herself Susan Smith. I hadn’t even remembered that her first name was Susan until the doctor reminded me. And I’d thought I might not recognise her face, but I did. It transfixed me momentarily. I probably only looked for a few seconds, but it seemed much longer. They must have hosed down the body or something because her hair was all wet and combed back. It made her look more lifelike, as if she’d only just this minute stepped out of the shower. In other ways too she appeared much as she’d been in life, but there were subtle differences. Her skin was grey rather than pink, although that might also have been the effect of the fluorescent lights, which seemed to drain the colour out of everything else in the morgue. Another difference was the expression on her face. On the two or three occasions I’d seen her previously, she’d seemed quite meek. About the only thing Christian had ever told me about his wife was that once he’d arranged to meet her at a party, but she’d never turned up. Then on leaving, he’d spotted their car in the street opposite the house where the party was being held, with his wife sitting inside. Apparently she’d had some kind of panic attack.

In death, though, she looked anything but meek. Her face wore a stern, implacable expression and she seemed almost powerful.

I turned to the doctor: ‘Yes, that’s her.’ She seemed visibly relieved. The morgue assistant flicked the two sheets perfectly back into place in one smooth action, which reminded me of Christian’s skill in rolling cigarettes. Then he wheeled the body away.

‘Wait here a moment please,’ the doctor said, ‘I’ll be back in a second.’ She disappeared and I was left alone with the morgue assistant. He stood around uneasily, obviously not wanting to go back to his game of solitaire while I was still in the room. It was difficult to know what kind of small talk to make to a morgue assistant, though.

‘So what happens now? To the body I mean.’

‘Umm, they’ll probably do an autopsy.’

‘Really? How do they decide that? I mean, how do they decide which bodies they’re going to do an autopsy on?’

‘Well there’s all these categories. I can’t remember offhand. Accidents, suicides, deaths in custody …’

‘That’s interesting. I mean I never thought about what happens to the bodies. It’s strange.’

I waved my hand vaguely to encompass the morgue, the morgue assistant and the enormous fridges with metal doors like prison cells.

‘Well it’s pretty weird at first, yeah. But then you get used to it.’

I thought he’d stopped and I was about to say something else when he abruptly continued: ‘It’s the babies that are the hardest. They haven’t been given a chance. You’re holding it in your arms, you know it’s dead but you can’t resist the impulse to support its head, not to let it drop back.’

I stared at him, momentarily lost for words. Just then the doctor appeared at the door. Sorry to leave you waiting like that, she said, without explaining where she’d been or what she’d been up to. She hustled me out of the morgue and we made our way back through the maze of corridors to the lift. Upstairs, I had to sign a declaration and then I was free to go. What with Christian under sedation, there didn’t seem to be any point in hanging around any longer.

I made it back to London in fifty minutes. At first I thought I’d go straight home, then I changed my mind and went into the West End and parked the car in the underground car park at work. I thought I might find Jo and get going on the Jarawa campaign, we could at least rough out an initial press release for the London papers. But as I waited for the lift, it occurred to me that if I went into the office I’d have to talk about Christian and I didn’t want to do that. So I left the car park on foot by the car exit and started to walk aimlessly towards Covent Garden. I wasn’t really thinking about Christian. But his wife’s face was still in front of me, in a way, with its single scratch on the forehead. Eventually I decided to go for a swim. The private swimming pool where I’m a member was five minutes’ walk away, just off Shaftesbury Avenue.

It was an odd pleasure to open my locker and see my swimming and shower gear there, just as I’d left it last time. I changed quickly: I wanted to get into the pool as fast as possible. It was still only five fifteen, which meant that there was hardly anyone around yet – the pool doesn’t usually fill up until six or six thirty, when people start knocking off work. There was one old man who was swimming extremely slowly, doing one lap to my three or four. He was very hairy, his body and prominent breasts were covered in fine silver hair like some aquatic animal, and it seemed a big struggle for him to keep his head above water. Finally he got out – taking ages to climb up the little ladder – and collapsed breathlessly onto a poolside bench. The afternoon light splashed in through the skylights overhead.

I felt much better after my swim. I felt cleansed. I looked at myself in the mirror and felt reassured by the healthy young man that stared back at me. In the changing room I bumped into Phil. He was looking for someone to play a few games of squash with, but I told him I’d just swum fifteen hundred metres and was feeling pretty whacked.

I walked back to the car park and picked up the car. As I drove, I noticed for the first time since the morning what a beautiful day it was, or had been. Soft blue sky, Dutch wisps of cloud, a hazy warmth. It felt more like July than May. I opened up the sunroof, partly to let the sun stream in, partly to rid the car of the smell from Christian’s cigarette. An old Golf convertible stood beside me at the lights, pumping out music. The three young guys inside were wearing sunglasses and had taken their shirts off. The driver looked my way and smiled at me. I slammed my foot down on the accelerator when the lights changed but the Golf was too quick. As the car sped off, the driver honked his horn at me and I honked back.

I passed by an art gallery in Mayfair and suddenly remembered Marianne’s opening at Joseph Kimberly. She’d been nervous about it all week. But I’d completely forgotten – this whole business with Christian’s wife had driven it from my mind. Now it occurred to me that there was no point in going back to Camberwell if I had to be at Primrose Hill by half past seven. As I passed Hyde Park I noticed a parking spot and pulled up without thinking about it too much. I just wanted to make the most of the vestiges of the warm afternoon. So I got out and wandered around on the south side of the park for a while near Rotten Row then sat down under a tree. Despite the hot weather, the grass still had that Astroturf sheen the spring rain had given it. It looked unripe, is what Marianne might have said.

There were quite a few people around, for a Monday evening. Rollerbladers criss-crossed the paths. A black guy came round selling drinks on ice. I bought a can of beer from him and knocked it back quickly. Then I moved out of the shade and lay down, with my eyes shut, to feel the warmth of the sun on my face. I could hear a riot of evening bird song, the good-humoured shouts of guys playing football, and the hum of traffic. The grass was prickly and smelt sweet.

It was about then that I first felt a surging sense of well-being, or perhaps contentment. It mystified me at first but what it was, it soon struck me, was that Christian’s wife had left me. She’d accompanied me all the way from Oxford but my long swim had slowly washed her all away. I was back to how I had been before the events of the day, only more so. I felt the grass under me and the sun above me and it seemed to me that I was exactly where I wanted to be in my life. I was with the woman I wanted to be with, doing what I wanted to do. There was the Jarawa campaign, which presented itself to me like a puzzle to be solved.

I thought about my first day at Africa Action, eighteen months ago. Oliver, the guy I was replacing, had spent the afternoon showing me the ropes and had taken me out for a drink after work. We’d discussed his last campaign – it was for a Syrian dissident who’d been sentenced to death for treason. Oliver had arranged a last-minute meeting with Syrian and European Union officials to secure the guy’s release. I remembered him saying to me: ‘It’s a strange feeling when you’ve played a part in saving someone’s life. Almost like you’ve saved your own.’

I felt angry with Christian for saying that the Jarawa campaign was a waste of time. I felt angry that he’d said this to me after his wife’s death, and not before, during the morning’s department meeting. But in any case, he was quite wrong about it. He was wrong about many things. The pieces seemed to slot into place: I would save Jarawa’s life, I decided. His existence would depend on me. Of course I was making wild claims for myself, but it was the way I felt momentarily, like a minor god.

The sun was setting and I dragged myself to my feet, a little drugged with this feeling that was washing through and out of me.

II

The gallery was already starting to fill up as I got there. Marianne had brought Jessica along as well, because Jane’s away and Marianne’s fussy about other babysitters. Jessica was in an unmanageable state of excitement and was shouting and pulling at the dresses and trouser legs of the people who’d already arrived. She’s going through a really hyperactive phase at the moment. I was wondering what to do with her when all of a sudden she sat down, curled up, and went straight to sleep, in the middle of the gallery space, right under everyone’s feet. I tried to wake her up and get her to come with me but she wouldn’t – you can’t wake a child that wants to sleep. But she couldn’t stay there so I picked her up, took her into the office, and laid her down on the couch. She curled up again then started snoring, very gently. I sat down beside her for a moment and put my arm across her. Messily stacked up against the office walls were paintings, twenty or thirty of them. Opposite the couch was an enormous piece of slate which must have weighed a ton. On it had been painted a picture of a naked woman, in a primitive style. She was asleep on the ground.

I went back into the gallery and had a beer, then another. After an hour or so the place started to get pretty crowded and it was getting difficult to move around. I lost track of Marianne, and for a while I just stood in a corner and watched the other people. Broadly speaking they divided into two categories. There were older, conservatively elegant white couples or single men, who stood around talking in slightly tired voices, drinking white wine and generally not smoking. Then there was a younger crowd in their twenties who drank beer and smoked and were louder. Some of these were artists, some were students, others were friends of Marianne and a few were all three. I knew only one or two of them – I keep clear of that side of Marianne’s life – but they all seemed to know each other. Fragments of conversation strayed my way … to my left, a couple discussed a mutual acquaintance, dumped by her husband for a younger woman. She was in hospital now after a last-ditch facelift gone wrong. To my right, I heard someone remark of one of Marianne’s larger works: ‘There’s something very extreme about it.’ I glanced over to the painting in question. It was very colourful. I couldn’t see what was extreme about it but I wondered nonetheless if the person had a point. It’s not something Marianne and I ever talk about.

A woman in her early thirties came up to me: ‘Remember me?’ I said no, I’m sorry I don’t. ‘You don’t remember a big argument about South Africa at a dinner party? Ages ago, at Nick Tate’s place.’ Then I remembered. Her name’s Charlotte Fisher. She’s South African and she used to go out with Nick. She’s quite pushy and good-looking in an American sitcom kind of way. I remembered the dinner party – it was a long time ago, maybe even before Marianne. She’d taken violent exception to some comment of mine. She’d launched into a great polemic about how her mother’s maid back in Johannesburg was like part of the family and if she wasn’t working for them she’d be on the streets and her children wouldn’t have enough to eat. And how could I possibly know what it’s like when I’d never been to South Africa, how did I dare comment?

I didn’t particularly want to talk to her but since it didn’t look like I had an option I asked her what she was up to nowadays. She said she’d gone back to South Africa for a while, but had recently come back to set up her own PR business, promoting artists. She dropped a few names of artists she’d recently signed up, including one I’d vaguely heard of, a German woman who’s been getting a lot of publicity lately for her blown-up photos of dead people. I said I thought the photos were pretty sensationalist. That’s more or less the point, replied Charlotte. We chatted and jousted about that for a while. I looked around for Marianne, but she seemed to be involved in a very earnest conversation with a middle-aged man. So Charlotte and I continued drinking and talking. She asked me how I met Marianne and I told her about the beach in Portugal. Then she asked me about Marianne’s work. French artists are very in vogue at the moment, she said. She seemed very interested in Marianne.

I asked if she was still with Nick. She laughed sourly: ‘God no, we split up a couple of years ago.’ She didn’t seem embarrassed I’d asked though, just as she hadn’t been embarrassed that I’d initially forgotten who she was. Then she recounted the story of her break-up – telling it as if it were a funny joke, with climaxes, anticlimaxes and a punch line. She’d gone home late one evening, when Nick thought she was out of town, and she’d literally found him in bed with another woman. She immediately moved out – it was Nick’s house after all. She thought she’d get over the relationship quickly but found herself doing obsessive things like taking time off work to spy on Nick. To make matters worse, the other woman had moved straight in with Nick. So she decided that what she really wanted was revenge. But it had to be the right kind: ‘Nasty, but not too nasty’. Eventually she hit upon the solution. One day she happened on a newspaper article about a private detective who used call-girls to entrap wayward husbands. So she went to see him, posing as a worried wife, and ended up paying him a lot of money to get a call-girl to entice Nick up to a hotel room. The whole encounter was captured on video, which she then sent to Nick’s new girlfriend. Later she’d found out through a mutual friend that the couple had split up not long after.

‘And you didn’t feel guilty about it afterwards?’

‘Well, he might have lost his girlfriend, but at least I gave him a good time!’

I laughed for quite a while. We laughed together. I was reasonably drunk by this stage. There were a lot of people in the gallery and we had to stand very close to each other with our shoulders almost touching. I wondered whether the story Charlotte had just told me was true or whether it was a sort of party piece. In the end I decided it didn’t matter much. She was wearing a black dress made of a light gauze-like material, and I noticed that her breasts were almost visible beneath it. As I looked up from her décolleté I caught her eyes. She smiled at me and said nothing.

We continued talking for another ten minutes and then finally she spotted someone else she knew and drifted off. I thought of catching up with Marianne and looked about for her, but she was still talking to the middle-aged man. I watched them for a moment. The man seemed somehow out of place at a gallery opening. He looked more earnest than elegant. He and Marianne seemed to be staring at each other quite intensely as they spoke, and at one moment I thought I saw the man’s hand slip down and gently brush Marianne’s buttocks. I might have been wrong, of course, or maybe in the crush his hand had been pushed that way. It annoyed me anyway.

Then at some point, fairly late on in the evening I think, when quite a few people had already left, Jessica came out. She looked terrified. I supposed that she’d simply woken up disorientated, not recognising where she was, and that’s what had frightened her. She ran up to me immediately, which was strange, because normally if anything’s the matter she goes straight to Marianne and not me. Anyway she hugged my legs and I picked her up and asked her what was wrong.

‘Daddy, there’s a dead lady in the other room.’

‘Don’t be silly, of course there isn’t!’

But she just kept on repeating: ‘Yes there is, there’s a dead lady in the other room.’

Eventually I said: ‘Well, let’s go and have a look then,’ but she buried her head in my shoulder and started to whimper. Just then I spotted Marianne: she was talking to somebody else now and her eyes were sort of glazed over which meant she was drunk and happy. I offloaded Jessica onto her because I wanted to go and have a look in the office. What I thought might have happened was that perhaps some woman had drunk too much and had crawled off to the office and fallen asleep on the floor.

But there was no one in the office. Jessica must have been making it all up after all. She makes things up sometimes, as a way of attracting attention. Kids do. Nonetheless, something about this ‘dead lady’ business disturbed me, and I sat down on the couch for a few minutes. That was when I noticed the huge slate slab again, with the picture of the sleeping woman painted on it. It’s what must have frightened her. I felt momentarily relieved, but still perplexed.

It had seemed a little odd to hear Jessica say the word ‘dead’. In fact I’d never heard her say it before. I wondered what exactly she’d meant by it. Maybe she meant the same as sleeping. Then again, that didn’t seem to be the case, because she’d seen Marianne asleep often enough, and that didn’t scare her. I sat on the couch for about ten minutes, thinking about that. Then my mind switched to Jarawa and the campaign: there was his appeal to plan and I started thinking through the details. We needed someone else to liaise with people on the ground, now that Christian was out of action.

For some reason I’d closed the door to the office. Now it opened. It was Charlotte, the South African woman. She’d been looking for me to say goodbye. Well here I am, I said, and got up off the couch. She was quite red-faced. She said she was glad to have bumped into me again and maybe we could have lunch sometime – maybe she, Marianne and I could all get together. I said I’d like that and got out one of the cards I’d just had printed up, while she rummaged about in her handbag for one of hers. I leaned down to kiss her goodbye, because she’s quite a bit shorter than me. Then I put my hand round her waist and she put hers under my shirt and we started kissing again. We stayed like that for a moment, then we sort of collapsed onto the couch and she slipped her arms out of her dress and we continued to kiss. She was stretched out on top of me, I could feel her breathing and trembling. The rumbling noise from the gallery came and went in waves, punctuated by bursts of laughter. The door was open now and there was a real danger of someone coming in – in a way that merely heightened the sense of pleasure. I hooked my arms round her but she seemed to be in her own world and quite unaware of anything, almost unaware of me as well.

Then at one point I heard a male voice, I don’t know whose, and it seemed almost next to me, quite separate from the indistinct hum of conversation from beyond the door. It was enough to snap me out of my mesmeric state. I sat up abruptly, put one hand over Charlotte’s mouth, the other over her breasts – I don’t know why – and looked around. But there was no one there; the voice must have been some kind of acoustic trick. Charlotte smiled at me and started kissing me again. She wanted to have sex right there in the office but I said no, we couldn’t. I said I’d give her a ring tomorrow though, if she wanted, and she nodded as I helped her put her bra and dress back on. She got a little mirror out of her bag and mouthed: ‘Oh God.’ It was true her make-up was a bit of a mess now. Instead of fixing it up though, she just wiped it all off with a tissue. Then she wiped the lipstick off my lips and cheeks with another tissue and that felt intimate, more so than our kisses. She reapplied her lipstick, combed her hair back into place, and asked me: ‘Do I look all right?’ I said she looked great. I meant it, because she’d been wearing too much make-up before and somehow looked more real now. She looked quite a bit like Susan Tedeschi, it occurred to me. Physically they’re the same type, in any case. They have the same long, streaky blonde hair, the same high forehead, they’re the same height. This disturbed me for a moment or two, but I dismissed it easily enough.

Charlotte left. I went out into the gallery about five minutes later. The crowd of people had thinned out considerably. I looked about for Jessica. She’d climbed out of Marianne’s arms and had captured the attention of a young woman in a smart emerald dress. The woman had crouched down to her level, and Jessica was carefully explaining something to her. Then the woman laughed, and Jessica giggled as well. The strange terror had gone from her face.

We ended up taking a cab home around eleven, since we were both too drunk to drive – although I might have driven anyway, if we hadn’t had Jessica with us. Marianne was flushed with excitement, because the evening had gone really well and she’d sold nine paintings, which is the most she’s ever sold. In the cab, I surprised myself by saying: ‘Who was that guy you were talking to? The middle-aged looking guy. You talked to him for ages.’ I hadn’t realised I was so annoyed by that. ‘Oh him,’ she said, ‘I think he’s a don or a professor or something. He’s just moved to London.’ I said: ‘He certainly seemed very interested in you. I saw him rub against you in a pretty indiscreet way.’ Marianne replied: ‘Really? I don’t think so. He’s more the gentleman type.’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say on the matter, so I let it drop. Marianne hadn’t seemed to notice my annoyance; her exuberance bubbled over into a stream of talk and gossip.

We got home and while I was putting Jessica to bed, Marianne poured herself a glass of wine, although she was pretty drunk already. She got some cheese and salad stuff out of the fridge for us as well, because we hadn’t had dinner but it was too late to cook now. Then when we’d finished eating, she took off all her clothes and started wandering about the house with her glass of wine, vaguely tidying up, reading bits of newspaper or letters that were lying about, readying herself for bed, taking make-up off, humming, all at the same time. She quite often goes through this routine when she’s drunk. I watched her as she wandered about. I found her beautiful and told her so. She smiled with pleasure and went into the bedroom, while I turned on the TV and watched mindless pop videos. I could hear Jessica talking in her sleep but she seemed quite calm, for a change – lately she’s been assailed by a dream monster most nights. Then finally I went to bed. Marianne was awake and started massaging my back. She was still drunk and excited by the evening’s success and wanted to make love. But I didn’t feel like it for some reason. Jarawa and Jessica’s dead lady kept wandering in and out of my thoughts, which were gradually, seamlessly metamorphosing into dreams.

Then just before I definitively drifted off to sleep, Marianne said something. It sounded important but I didn’t hear what it was, so with a tremendous effort I turned round and asked her. She said: ‘I’m pregnant again.’ I said I was glad and put my arm round her. I could smell the wine on her breath. We haven’t been trying to have another child, we’ve been using condoms. But I’m pretty sure I know when she conceived. There was one time not so long ago when we were making love and the condom broke. It’s happened once or twice before and I’ve always stopped and put another one on. But this one time I didn’t – I don’t know why. Anyway, Marianne said she’d had a blood test last week and then on Thursday she’d found out she was pregnant. I asked her why she hadn’t told me then, but she said she’d wanted to wait until after the opening. I couldn’t see what that had to do with anything, but it didn’t really matter.

III

I spent an hour or two in the library yesterday morning, going through the Jarawa clippings. At the same time I was making notes on my laptop, organising details from the news articles into a life story – almost as if I were writing an obituary. After I’d finished, I looked through what I’d written. His childhood, the Sorbonne scholarship, the volumes of poetry, the 1968 events, the political career, the UN posting, the business empire … a feeling of boredom set in as I scrolled down. Then after a while I realised it wasn’t so much boredom but frustration.

I looked at the exploded image of my face reflected in the cellophane cover of a book the librarian had got out for me. It was a compilation of profiles of African writers, published by some Canadian university. I turned to the interview with Jarawa, largely a self-serving mix of anecdotes about his early struggles. They struck a more personal note than anything in the newspaper clippings, though. There was even an apocryphal-sounding nativity story – his birth had been a difficult one and his father had supposedly remarked to the midwife: ‘If it’s a choice between the mother and child, save the mother.’ That was what a malevolent uncle had told Jarawa when he was five or six. It had marked him for life and had underpinned his determination to succeed, he said.

Another of these anecdotes caught my eye. It was about a poem Jarawa had written in the sixties. The subject is a kid with Down’s syndrome. He’d lived in the village where Jarawa had grown up. He wasn’t allowed to come out of the house. So his whole world was the house to the garden wall. Years later Jarawa returned to his native village for a visit, and he happened to see this kid. Jarawa had grown from a child to an adult, but the kid still looked exactly the same. Jarawa had travelled around Europe and yet this kid’s world was still the same house and garden.

This story reminded me of something but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. As I photocopied the pages I wondered for the first time whether I would ever get to meet Jarawa.

When I got back to my office I checked my voice mail. There was a long, garbled message from Christian – he didn’t say who he was but I recognised the slightly whining quality of his voice immediately. He sounded distraught and repeated several times that he had to talk to me about something, that it was urgent. After that there was a pause of about a minute or so and I could hear him breathing unevenly into the receiver. Finally he said he’d never forget what I’d done for him the day his wife died and then hung up. I’d been meaning to ring Christian to see how he was but what with all the work on the Jarawa campaign I hadn’t got round to it. He’s on compassionate leave and no one’s replacing him so the Jarawa team’s just me, Jo and a few volunteers. I have to admit that I prefer it that way because to be frank I hadn’t been looking forward to working with Christian.

I listened to the message again. I knew I should ring him back now but somehow I just didn’t feel in the mood for it. So I called Marianne instead to see if she wanted to meet for lunch, but she wasn’t at the gallery. She wasn’t at home either. Then flipping idly through my Filofax I noticed the card Charlotte Fisher had given me at the gallery. I’d forgotten about her. I’d forgotten that I’d said I’d call. The phone rang for ages and just as I was about to hang up she finally answered: ‘Oh hi it’s you – I didn’t think I’d hear from you again.’

‘Why not? I said I’d call.’

We small-talked our way cautiously around each other then finally she said she was going home to cook some pasta, why didn’t I come round? I replied: ‘It’s such a nice day though, why don’t we go for a picnic instead?’ It’s true that it was a nice day, but I also wanted to be on neutral ground – I wasn’t yet sure what exactly I wanted from Charlotte.

Outside it was warm, peculiarly warm for London for this time of the year. A lot of pubs and cafés had put chairs on the pavement, dance music blared out from the open doors of clothes shops and hairdressers. People were hanging about on street corners, talking and flirting – everyone was dressed for summer and there was a sort of sexual buzz in the air. As I walked up Camden High Street to Charlotte’s flat that curious sense of well-being began to surge through me again. It was like a feeling of infinite possibilities, maybe even immortality.

Charlotte had had her hair cut into a summery-looking bob and was wearing an orange cotton dress that really showed off her legs, which were lightly tanned. I’d forgotten how good-looking she was and complimented her on her appearance. I kept looking at her as we walked down the street – I could see she was getting a lot of pleasure out of my reaction to her and I knew she was still interested in me.

We bought some picnic stuff from Safeway and went to Regent’s Park. For a while we ate in silence, watching the joggers – middle-aged men with tortured faces – and the mothers and au pairs with their babies. Then after a few minutes Charlotte put me through a kind of interrogation. First she wanted to know how many times I’d been unfaithful to Marianne. Only once, I replied, a few years ago, before Jessica was born. As I said the word ‘born’, I remembered how Marianne had told me the other day that she was pregnant again. I’ve been so busy that we’ve barely talked about it since and it hasn’t really sunk in – it struck me now that having a second child would in some ways mean an even more radical change than having the first: a couple with a child is still a couple with a child, but two children means a proper family.

Charlotte asked me lots of questions about my infidelity. But it was so long ago and had been so brief that I could hardly remember anything about it. She was Australian – she’d had that Australian habit of ending sentences on a rising note. She was about nineteen or twenty and on her year out from college, doing a stint in London at Bryant Allen. We’d slept together a few times in her cramped South Kensington bedsit which she shared with another Australian girl, who was sent to stay on a friend’s floor while I was there.

Charlotte wanted to know whether Marianne had ever found out about the ‘affair’. I said I didn’t think so. She asked if I thought Marianne would have left me if she’d found out and I answered, ‘How would I know?’ But didn’t you feel guilty, she pursued. I said no. Why not, she asked, didn’t I have any obligations towards Marianne, didn’t I want to make her happy?

I thought about that for a moment. Finally I answered that yes, certainly I have obligations, certainly I want to make Marianne happy, and that means that if I’m unfaithful I should keep it separate from our life together.

‘In other words, if you lie about it, it’s all right.’

Again I thought.

‘No, because if she ever confronted me outright, I’d tell her the truth.’

She was about to interrupt me but I wanted to pursue my line of reasoning. I told her it’s more subtle than that. Marianne essentially knows who I am, she probably realises I’m capable of infidelity but in the end she doesn’t want to know the details, because as long as it’s an abstract and not a concrete reality, she doesn’t really care one way or the other. Charlotte said she didn’t believe that. She said she didn’t believe there was a woman in the world who didn’t care one way or the other. And she said she didn’t believe either that deep down everyone knows what their partners are really like. She, for one, had never suspected that Nick was being unfaithful.

I didn’t answer her. Then after a pause she said she didn’t quite know what to make of me, but I was probably some kind of bastard. She said it half-jokingly, half-seriously. We both laughed and after that we didn’t talk any more. We looked at each other quite intensely and I noticed that her eyes were purple-blue, like a bruise. We kissed. The lunch had made me drowsy and I lay down on the grass. The sun slid behind a streak of clouds, but it was still warm … I stared up into the sky and thought I could make out the shadow of the moon, then I closed my eyes. Charlotte was resting her head against my chest. The weight of it had the effect of making me aware of my own breathing. I felt the air enter my lungs. I put my arm round Charlotte and could feel her chest rise up and down as well. I was so relaxed and it felt so good to have Charlotte’s head against my chest that for a bizarre moment I felt I almost loved her.

I walked Charlotte back to her flat, and while we walked she asked me a lot of questions about Marianne and her painting. She wanted to know how she was represented and did I think she might be interested in signing up for a better financial package. The trouble with a lot of the more thoughtful artists, she said, was that they were so show-orientated they tended to miss ‘the bigger picture’. They didn’t understand the need to ‘cultivate themselves more generally in the media’. I said I didn’t know, but Marianne seemed quite happy with Joseph Kimberly. He’s a charming man, of course, but totally incompetent, said Charlotte.

Outside her door we kissed for a while, clumsily. Eventually Charlotte asked me in and got a bottle of champagne out of the fridge. We didn’t drink it though, because we started kissing again then went to the bedroom and undressed each other. We lay down on the bed and Charlotte ran her fingers across my shoulders. Your body’s so nice and taut, she said, how do you keep it like that? I stay in shape, I said, I swim, I play squash. The curtains were drawn and the room was dark like some seedy boudoir. For a long time we made love in silence, then at some point I said wait a second, I’ve got a condom. But Charlotte said no, let’s not bother with that.

Afterwards we dozed for half an hour then Charlotte got up and went into the sitting room. I could hear her speaking to someone on the phone but couldn’t make out what she was saying. The tone sounded intimate though. I heard her go into the bathroom and I opened my eyes and looked around the room. It was a mess of clothes and open drawers, with various pots, lotions and lipsticks lying on every available surface. It was the exact opposite of our bedroom back at home – Marianne has a mania for tidiness. In amongst the heap of clothes on the floor I noticed a discarded pair of men’s underpants that were not my own. It annoyed me. Not because Charlotte had a lover, but because she couldn’t be bothered to take the most elementary steps to hide the fact.

Charlotte came back with two glasses of champagne but I didn’t really feel like drinking. I watched her with curiosity as she walked about, sipped the champagne, brushed her hair out of her eyes with her hand. The way she did these things was so different to Marianne. Charlotte said: Why are you looking at me like that? Like what, I asked. Like your eyes are following my every movement. I said I like the way you move. Well don’t look at me like that, she replied, it makes me feel self-conscious. It gives me the creeps. OK, I murmured, and I closed my eyes. I could feel her getting back into bed and we made love again, then dozed a little more in each other’s arms. Eventually I got up though. I had to get back to work.

I bought the Guardian to read on the tube as I travelled back into the West End. They’d put Jarawa on the bottom of the front page. The headline read: AFRICAN WRITER AND DIPLOMAT RECEIVES DEATH SENTENCE. Inside, there was more coverage and a potted biography as well, with the usual stuff about his political career and the books he’d written. A right-wing Cambridge professor was quoted as saying he considered Jarawa’s poetry ‘dreadful doggerel’, rated only because of the colour of the author’s skin.

A photo of Jarawa accompanied the article. I’d already seen it that morning, while going through the clippings. It must be over thirty years old, taken when he was a student in France. He looks quite striking with his extremely dark skin and fine bone structure, like a Nubian. He’s posed very stiffly and he’s wearing a three-piece suit which makes him look more like a thirties poet than a sixties student. There’s an intense expression on his face. It’s as if he were furious about something. I also noticed a watch chain dangling from his waistcoat pocket – a dandyish touch that sat strangely with his fearsome face.

When I’d left for lunch it had been strangely quiet at work; now it was bustling with people. I went back to my office and wrote out the protest letter for the ambassador, the one all the academics are signing. As I was picking up a copy from the printer to fax to the signatories for approval, I bumped into Jo and congratulated her on the Guardian spread. She sort of grunted in reply and refused to meet my eyes. I said: ‘What’s up with you?’ but she just walked off. I followed her down the corridor and caught up with her: ‘Listen, if I’ve done something to offend you we may as well have it out now rather than later.’

‘Well where the hell do you think everyone was this morning?’

‘I wouldn’t have a clue.’

‘You should have.’

Then it occurred to me. It was Susan Tedeschi’s funeral that morning. Jamie had sent round a memo with the time and place of the funeral. He’d written that he hoped everyone who’d worked with Christian would come and show solidarity at this tragic moment of his life. I’d meant to write down the details in my diary but I’d been talking to someone on the phone when whoever it was had passed me the memo, and I’d glanced over it, then put it down and continued with my conversation. After that it must have got lost in a pile of papers or something and I’d just forgotten about it. I felt bad about it but it didn’t entirely account for Jo’s anger. She and Christian are friends of a sort, but then so are Jo and I, and I’ve never had much to do with Christian.

‘That’s terrible of me. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not me you should be apologising to, it’s Christian.’

Christian had apparently asked after me and had wanted to see me. I remembered the strange message on the voice mail. I told Jo I’d write him a letter, and ring him too. In a way it didn’t matter. But Jo can be touchy and it’s important for us not to fall out. What I mean is, it’s important for the Jarawa campaign.

IV

I was in my car, on the way to a meeting in a Park Lane hotel. As I rounded Marble Arch the traffic slowly ground to a halt. It was hot; I wound down the window and gazed out at the arch. The air shimmered with the heat rising off the cars, like trees trembling in the breeze. I was thinking about that last time I’d been caught up at this same spot, a week ago, with Christian beside me – silent and stiff as he stared ahead in some kind of trance. I recalled reading somewhere that Marble Arch was where people used to be hanged, back in the seventeenth or eighteenth century.

A hotel porter showed me to a top-floor suite with sweeping views over Hyde Park. Three black guys were sitting around a conference table. Two of them were dressed in identical black suits, as if they’d just come back from a funeral. They were members of Renouveau National, Jarawa’s party. They fled the country at the time of Jarawa’s arrest. Now they’re on a tour of world capitals, to drum up support. The third, a gaunt-looking man, was in an ill-fitting jacket without a tie. A white woman was there as well. She was on her feet, talking animatedly and gesticulating, then she abruptly fell silent as I was shown in. A couple of mobile phones lay ostentatiously on the table; beside them was a shiny brochure. I recognised the name on the cover: it was a company Jamie had been looking into, in relation to the African arms trade. One of the Renouveau National guys waved his hand and without looking up said: ‘Later, later. I told you not to disturb us.’

The porter showed me into a side room just off the suite. I could still hear the white woman speaking, with occasional interjections from one of the African guys, but it was hard to make out the words. After a while I gave up trying. Scattered over the floor of the room I was in were piles of new clothes and shopping bags from Knightsbridge boutiques. As I stared at an expensive-looking suit hanging up behind the door, a dream I’d had the night before came back to me. It was about Jarawa. He was at my door in his three-piece suit, pleading with me to pardon him and let him go. I explained that it wasn’t me who’d sentenced him but he wouldn’t believe me. A horrible sense of guilt had begun to take hold as it dawned on me that perhaps he was right …

A door opened. There was the sound of laughter. The woman was saying: ‘Well you know, we’ll talk about this again,’ then I could hear the soft ping of the lift doors. I got up and walked through to the main suite. The two guys in suits were in a huddle, talking in low voices. The other man sat apart, staring blankly out the window. There was something about his long face but what it was didn’t click at first, not until we’d finished with the introductions. The man had remained wordless as he shook my hand but his eyes had that same uncomfortable ferocity as his cousin’s.

I quickly ran through the campaign presentation. It started with what Jamie termed ‘our coup’ – the agreement with the other human rights agencies to co-ordinate efforts under my supervision. I’d already given this same presentation to a group of Labour MPs that morning and a feeling of disengagement invaded me as I mechanically repeated the words. I talked about our media strategy before moving on to lobbying, intelligence then finally Jarawa’s appeal.

I noticed that no one was really paying any attention to me. One guy sat fiddling with his mobile phone and looking at his watch while the other flicked through the brochure the woman had left. Jarawa’s cousin still sat apart, not looking at me, not looking at the others, just staring out over a Hyde Park already drenched in summer colours. I stopped speaking for a moment and the two guys in suits glanced up at me almost for the first time. I said I thought the best thing would be to organise a press briefing as soon as possible, for tomorrow afternoon perhaps, with all three of them present. Maybe it would make the greatest impact if Jarawa’s cousin spoke …

One of the other guys let out a huge guffaw: ‘He doesn’t speak English! He hardly even speaks French!’

Jarawa’s cousin looked briefly to the other two men as they sniggered then turned back to the window. It was obvious that he knew he was being talked about but his face exuded a prisoner’s passivity. There was something of Christian’s hangdog look about him too. I remembered the interview with Jarawa I’d read in the library the other day, with that story about the mongol kid. It had stuck in the back of my mind for some reason. Did Jarawa’s cousin know this story as well? Did he too remember the child? I would have liked to ask him, if there was any way I could.

That evening the phone rang while I was reading Jessica a bedtime story. Marianne was in the garden so I got up to answer it, with Jessica pulling at my shirt. Before I even picked up the receiver though, somehow I knew it was Christian and I had this visceral desire not to talk to him. I just felt it wouldn’t be good for me.

He sounded pretty desperate, even more so than the other day when he left that message for me at work. I could hear pub sounds in the background and his speech was slurred. I can’t understand a word you’re saying, I said, just calm down and speak slowly. I have to see you tonight, he said, there’s something I have to tell you.

‘I don’t know. It’s not really practical right now. Maybe we can see each other later on in the week.’

‘Later on in the week? I have to see you tonight. I’m in London. I can come round and see you at home. You won’t have to move, I’ll come to your house.’

‘No, where are you? I’ll come and meet you.’

I didn’t want to see Christian but on the other hand he couldn’t come round here. For a start, I’d have to explain to Marianne about that day – the day I identified Susan Tedeschi’s body I mean. I never told her about it. I never told anybody, I don’t know why.

He gave me the name of a pub in Camden so I said I’d be there in an hour or so. I hung up and went back to Jessica’s room. She was sort of dozing, lying crosswise on the bed, so I straightened her out, tucked her in, switched on the lamp on the chest of drawers and turned out the main light. But she woke up and called out to me tearfully. I sat down on the bed and put her on my knee. ‘What’s up,’ I said, ‘is it that monster again?’

‘It’s not a monster. It’s a man, I told you before, the man with the mask … Look what he’s done to Teddy!’

She reached down and picked up the teddy bear off the floor, I had to hold her round the waist so she didn’t fall off my knee. She was getting all worked up.

‘See? See?’

The teddy bear’s head is stitched onto its body, and the stitching had come loose and undone in parts. The head crooked to one side in a slightly macabre way. ‘See? Look what he’s trying to do to me too!’ She proffered her neck to me. I examined it carefully. ‘A mark,’ she said, ‘a red mark. Can’t you see it?’

I couldn’t see it. Jessica was making it up. I put her back to bed and tucked her in: ‘If that’s all the man with the mask can do then I wouldn’t worry too much about him.’

I was hungry and I’d thought about taking Christian out to dinner, but as soon as I caught sight of him in the pub I realised there was no chance of that. His face had undergone a remarkable transformation since I’d last seen him. It looked sunken, wrecked, as if it were about to slide off his skull or something. He’d always seemed younger than his age and all of a sudden he looked older, much older. His eyes were drowned and glassy. He’d obviously been drinking for some time and he stared up at me in puzzlement: ‘You’re here!’

I bought a beer and when I got back to the table Christian had pulled himself together a little. He was grinning strangely and putting on a show of small-talk normality: ‘And how are things going on the Jarawa campaign?’

‘It’s moving along … had a strange meeting today … I’m seeing the ambassador tomorrow … some military guy. I’m amazed he agreed to meet me … Jo’s doing well – did you see her on Newsnight?’

‘No. I don’t watch too much TV these days.’

‘She’s doing a fantastic job.’

‘Great. Fantastic.’

I sipped at my beer and gazed around the pub. There wasn’t a single woman in it. It was one of those depressing places with dark wood, worn varnish and greasy green carpets that give off an odour of beer, cigarettes and urine – exactly the kind of place solitary men go to get drunk.

‘You weren’t at the funeral.’

‘No, I wasn’t. I’m sorry.’

‘No need to apologise. I’m no fan of graveyard scenes either.’ He laughed bleakly and stared at his pint glass. I wondered momentarily if he’d gone mad but didn’t say anything. His mind seemed to drift off: ‘You know when I was young, six or seven years old, we had a little house in the country and it was on the road to a graveyard … I’ll never forget the sight of those coffins being hauled along. It was like a scene from the Middle Ages …’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

There was a long pause while I tried to think of something to say, but I couldn’t. Christian seemed lost in his memories: ‘I remember that house in the country. I remember a forest behind it where I once found a hedgehog. I caught it and stuck it in a box. I didn’t really know what to do with it though so I just left it there, in the box under my bed – for weeks maybe – until Mum started complaining about the smell. So one evening I opened the lid. Inside was this horrible greenish brown slime. Just the slime and the spines. I can still remember the smell.’

A raucous laugh broke out from a table at the other side of the pub and several of the solitary drinkers standing at the bar glanced up from their drinks.

‘Listen Christian. For Christ’s sake. You’ve got to pull yourself together.’

Christian stared at me wildly: ‘Well I can’t just pull myself together. I can’t just pull myself together. Jesus!’

I forced myself to continue: ‘Look … you need help, you need to open yourself up to help, a doctor, a counsellor, whatever …’

He cut me off: ‘You don’t know the half of it. Not the half of it.’ He sat musing and playing with the beer mat. ‘I have no means of escape. I have to confront myself at every moment. My life is a mirror I’m not allowed to look away from. If I was an alcoholic I could drink my way through it. Drink my way to the other end. I forced myself to drink tonight because I knew I was meeting you but normally I can’t do it.’

I shook my head: ‘This is getting you absolutely nowhere. I’ll get a cab down to Paddington with you. I’ll put you on a train home.’

He didn’t seem to hear me though: ‘The worst is not what you think. The worst is not even that we loved each other. It was that Susan … Susan and me …’

‘Susan was being unfaithful to you.’

Christian looked up at me, genuinely surprised: ‘How did you know?’

‘I didn’t know. I guessed. Is that what you got me up here to tell me?’

‘No.’ We drank in silence for a while, then Christian started rambling on about his wife: ‘She met a guy, a younger guy, your age. It was absurd. I didn’t know at first, I didn’t have a clue. Anyway Susan got careless, or maybe she wanted me to find out … I heard her talking on the phone one day when she must have known I was there. Later I looked through her things and found a letter, just lying there, not hidden or anything. I couldn’t believe it. So I confronted her with the letter and she admitted it. I still couldn’t believe it. She said she loved me but that things had got stale. She needed to get this out of her system and all that crap. She didn’t want to leave me, not at that point anyway. I should’ve left her there and then but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I didn’t have the strength.

‘Life went on. The only difference was that I knew everything now, I knew that when she wasn’t home with me she was fucking this other guy. In a way it made it much easier for Susan, everything being out in the open like that. She didn’t have to hide anything any more, she didn’t have to go through the hassle of secret rendezvous. She could even sleep over at this guy’s place now, when before she had to come home every night.

‘I should’ve left her as soon as I found out. If I’d left her then, she’d have come banging at my door. She’d have come back to me eventually and I could have made my choice. She wasn’t in love with this other guy. She thought she wanted me but when I didn’t dump her, when she saw what I was willing to put up with, she knew I was weak. Then near the end, I could see I’d lost her. Not because of the other guy, but I’d lost her anyway. She became dismissive of me. She’d grown stronger. I couldn’t contemplate her leaving me though. I couldn’t contemplate her being alive and not being with me …’

Christian was speaking in a low, robotic voice. I shook my head again: ‘I don’t want to hear any more. I don’t want to know these personal things.’ He stopped, looked quizzically up at me, then continued talking. I interrupted: ‘I said I didn’t want to hear. I don’t want to hear it!’ I was almost shouting. I was upset, I don’t know why. Christian just stared at me in amazement and there was an uneasy minute or two of silence.

Eventually I said: ‘Look, I’m sorry. I’d like to help out but I honestly can’t see what I can do.’

‘You do know what you can do.’ His stare was unnervingly direct: ‘You’re scared of me. Why are you scared of me?’

‘I’m not scared of you, for Christ’s sake.’ I looked away in irritation. ‘I’ll get a cab with you to the station.’

‘There aren’t any more trains tonight. They’re doing work on the line. The last one went at nine.’

‘To the coach station then.’

Christian put his hand to his chin and kind of slumped in his chair. In the intensity of the encounter I’d forgotten how drunk he actually was. Suddenly, whatever menace he might have posed to me seemed to vanish, to disappear so completely that I wondered just what it was that had upset me in the first place.

Outside, the drizzle had cleared and the wet city glistened in the street light. Christian seemed to have developed a stoop since I’d last seen him, or perhaps it was the drink. He kept up a wandering monologue as we walked down Camden High Street: ‘There’d been a chance maybe … we’d shared a bed but I couldn’t … I hadn’t …’

I’d changed my mind about the coach station. I remembered a hotel nearby. I’d once spent a night there with a Brazilian woman I’d met in a Soho bar, years ago. In the morning she’d packed her bags and I’d driven her to Heathrow to catch her plane to São Paulo. I could still remember her face and the nakedness of her smile, so different from an Englishwoman’s smile.

The reception area was grimly functional and deserted, except for an unshaven Indian-looking guy behind the desk, watching football on a tiny black-and-white television. I got out my wallet but Christian waved his hand: ‘Don’t be absurd.’ He went through his pockets and fished out a ten-pound note: ‘What the hell have I done with my Visa?’

‘Don’t worry about it.’

I paid for the room and gave Christian some money for breakfast and to get home with in the morning. Then just as I was about to leave, he seemed to sober up a bit and suddenly came over all apologetic. He said he was really sorry for doing this to me, that he felt humiliated. It’s all right, I said, ring me when you’ve sorted things out a bit.

‘Yes, I’ll ring you. I need to talk to you. I’ll send you a cheque.’ Then when I’d already left and was on the footpath he appeared at the hotel window and shouted out again: ‘I’ll ring you! I’ll ring you!’

People were spilling out of pubs, talking loudly about where they were going next or how they were getting home. In a way I felt bad about leaving Christian in a hotel, but then on the other hand I was also relieved to be rid of him. I remembered that I hadn’t eaten yet and I was still hungry: it was getting on though, and I wondered whether restaurant kitchens would still be open. Then I had another idea. Charlotte lived just around the corner.

I found the art deco block Charlotte’s flat is in and pressed her button on the intercom: the door buzzed open before I had time to say who I was. I could see her peering down at me as I climbed the stairs, sizing me up like a club bouncer: ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ She’d messily pulled a jumper over her underwear and a television blared in the background.

Charlotte let me in then disappeared into the bedroom. I poured some wine and helped myself to the cold pasta salad on the dinner table. As I ate, my mind drifted back to the meeting I’d had with the people from Renouveau National. I remembered one of the men smiling at me and saying: ‘Well you know, politics in our country is a dangerous business.’ I’d replied: ‘But what’s at issue is not the death of one man … not one man, do you see?’ It was only now that I realised I’d unconsciously used Christian’s words, from the day his wife had died.

Charlotte was talking to someone on the phone in the bedroom but I could only catch snippets of what she was saying: ‘… no, really, I’m tired tonight … I wouldn’t be any fun … yeah I’ll see you tomorrow night … you too.’ She threw open the bedroom door. She’d put on some make-up and a pretty pink shirt with a flower pattern: ‘It’s good to see you and everything but don’t ever just turn up here again unannounced. OK?’

We had some wine and a late supper and chatted idly. After a while we started kissing across the table, then we lay down on the sofa and continued talking, laughing, kissing, joking around. At the same time I was kind of playing with the buttons of her shirt, undoing them slowly, waiting for the conversation to dissolve.

We’d been talking about our jobs and at one point Charlotte said: ‘What’s your real ambition in life? What’s the one thing you want to do before you die?’

‘I’m aiming for immortality.’

‘No seriously, what’s your ambition? What do you want to do with your life?’

I stopped messing about for a moment and sat up. ‘I don’t know … an international posting … the UN, maybe Paris, maybe UNESCO … I want to move on, move up, pretty soon.’

‘So does everyone. What I mean is, isn’t there something that engrosses you, something you must achieve?’

‘I don’t have that kind of ambition.’ I thought again. ‘There are things … there’s the campaign I told you about …’

‘You mean the guy they’re going to execute?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So it’s your job after all. That’s your real interest, your job.’

‘No. I couldn’t give a damn about my job.’

We were silent for a moment. Somehow the atmosphere had changed.

Eventually I said: ‘I had this strange encounter just now,’ and then I found myself telling Charlotte about meeting up with Christian.

When I finished, Charlotte lit a cigarette and said: ‘Let me get this straight. A friend rings you up. He wants to talk to you about his wife’s death, presumably he wants a bit of emotional support. So you end up dumping him in a hotel round the corner?’

‘He’s not a friend. He’s just a colleague.’

‘So what? He’s a human being, isn’t he?’

‘I didn’t want the sordid details. I didn’t want to know about his wife screwing some other guy.’

‘Why not? Too close to home?’

I didn’t say anything for a while. Charlotte stared at me defiantly.

I said: ‘Why are you seeing me? What’s in it for you?’

‘Why am I fucking you, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does it matter? I like the way you look. I like your face. I like your body.’

‘That’s all there is to it? I’m some kind of sex object?’

‘Why not?’

She looked at me with amusement as she did up the buttons I’d undone on her shirt. I got up off the couch.

‘I’ve got to go. Thanks for dinner. Shall I give you a call sometime during the week?’

‘Why not?’

I kissed her on the forehead and she said: ‘Give my regards to Marianne.’ I could hear her switching the TV back on as I walked down the stairs to the main entrance.

I got a cab home. It was Monday night and apart from a few other cabs there was hardly any traffic on the streets. London looked shabby and beautiful in its enormous emptiness, like a vast illuminated scrubland. I thought about Charlotte then I thought about Christian and his dead hedgehog. A childhood memory returned to me of a summer in the country. My cousin Peter had constructed a crossbow and we’d gone to the nearby woods and killed a rabbit – I can still recall its jerky, struggling death. I hadn’t thought about my childhood for a long time. I had the sensation it was something that had in fact happened to someone else, and not to me at all.

The bedroom door was shut but the light was still on. I didn’t go in immediately, though. Instead I went to the little room we use as an office, on the other side of the house. We’ve got a filing cabinet in there, for documents to do with the house, tax returns, birth certificates, that kind of stuff. There are also files full of Marianne’s personal stuff, although I’d never looked at them before. That’s what I wanted to look at now. Seeing Christian had given me stupid ideas.

Everything was arranged tidily: a file for old letters, a file for exhibition programmes, a file for this, a file for that. There were essays she’d written as a student in that typically rounded French handwriting. There were notebooks too, clearly labelled 1998, 1999, 2000, etc. They looked like diaries. I’d never known she’d kept a diary, never seen one about the house. I flicked through the one for last year. Some of the entries were in French, some in English, some a mix of the two. I read a few at random. Mostly they were about her work: ‘Big canvas. Thought I might move on to love but no it seems I’m stuck with this fear.’ There were notes about Jessica’s development: ‘Her linguistic skills different in French and English. English vocabulary wider but grasp of grammatical structure not as good as in French.’ I skimmed through to find any mention of me but in vain. I noticed that she’d marked every third or fourth entry with an asterisk. I wondered what that meant.

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