by Jessica Mann
Ian walked across to shuffle his papers and put them back in his case. ‘If she isn’t hiding from the authorities, then where is she?’
‘For all you know she’s doing something quite ordinary and innocent. Visiting a friend. Attending a weekend conference. A health farm. A convent.’
‘She did run away.’
‘Are you quite sure,’ Tamara said slowly, ‘that you aren’t looking at all this back to front? I mean, why should she run away? You have been told that she ran because Britton taxed her with her involvement with the IRA, and she was panicked into getting out while she could. What did she think he was going to do about it? Hand her over to the Swiss police? Tie her up? Brainwash her?’
Ian said, a little stiffly, ‘The matter wasn’t discussed with me. We were just told that she was ill. Mentally ill.’
‘Try turning it upside down. Suppose she is not a threat to the Minister or anyone else, but he is a threat to her. Suppose she has some hold over him?’
Ian was shocked. His obedience was not blind, nor was his loyalty unthinking, but he was sure that his service, his boss, would not be conned. He said that Tamara shouldn’t be frivolous just because she happened to disagree with Aidan Britton’s politics. He was a privy councillor, a legitimately elected and appointed minister of the crown. Ian was not sure whether he should be discussing this with Tamara at all. Not that he doubted her discretion of course, but in such a delicate matter … they slept on opposite sides of the wide mattress; and over breakfast, Tamara did not try to continue the previous evening’s discussion.
Chapter Thirteen
Rosamund had never been quite without money before. Even when ‘broke’ and skimping on meals or walking to save fares, she had always been certain of rescue at the end of a transferred-charge telephone call. None of Rosamund’s cheques had ever bounced, for like herself, the bank manager had always known that there would be more money to come.
This was a new experience. No money, no cheque book, no credit card, no passport. Or rather, no money, and the rest of modern life’s little bits of paper unusable. Rosamund had had one day’s worth out of Miss Esmeé Stoughton’s credit with American Express, but it would have been reported stolen by now, and it was not as easy as it might have seemed to get hold of another. To try ‘dipping’ for the first time in present circumstances would be foolhardy, although Rosamund did know professional pickpockets and had been shown some tricks of their trade. Often in the past she had seen women’s handbags and purses carelessly carried, almost inviting theft; but none today. Yet it must be easy to pinch some cash or credit. In the old days one could simply run up a bill and default, but the possibilities of doing that had diminished in a cannier age.
She would go to a hotel. She needed to hang around in Cambridge anyway. She chose The Pillars carefully, an establishment neither too large, where there would be observant bustle, nor so small that they would ask her to pay an advance deposit. She would take a room at this two star hotel and live like a respectable lady, and put all her meals, cigarettes, drinks and telephone calls ‘on the bill’. It should be easy enough to go out as though for a walk, bill unpaid, and never come back.
It was easy enough: for Rosamund Sholto. The proprietor recognised her at first glance. ‘No need to sign the book now, Miss Sholto,’ and offered her the best room in the house. ‘We are honoured to entertain you,’ he said.
‘It’s fine,’ Rosamund said. ‘Just right. But it’s not actually for me. I’m on my way to … Newcastle. It’s for my cousin who will be here later on. Miss Esmée Stoughton.’
‘I’ll make sure that it’s all nice and ready for her. Flowers and all. It’s a real pleasure to have met you though.’ The woman held out her hand and Rosamund shook it warmly. She remembered how his admirers’ faces would be transformed when Sholto touched their hands, and how he was at once amused and moved. When an American visitor had laughed at the politician’s trick of ‘touching the flesh,’ he had been furious, for though he must have done many things for no other purpose than vote-catching, Rosamund had never been aware of it.
Rosamund retreated from The Pillars, and walked in the direction of a shopping precinct new since her time in Cambridge. Even in her present anxiety she found time to disapprove of its design. She went to sit in a launderette, between other men and women slumped on spindly metal chairs, glumly hypnotised by their swirling linen. Rosamund’s thoughts tossed and whirled and ended up in tangles, like the loads of washing.
She wondered how many people were actually hunting her. It was easy to grow obsessed, and assume that every man’s hand was against her. Perhaps she should have stayed at The Pillars. But it was not neurosis that told her the Press was lying in wait, and either directly or indirectly, Aidan Britton would trace her if a reporter found her first. Apart from reporters, how many more dangerous enemies should she fear? Aidan had acquired a retinue of male attendants over the years, some originally employed as executives when he was the king of a grocery chain, others as his personal assistants in other spheres, for the Britton organisation had diversified in unrelated directions. As he rose in party politics, other employees had joined the entourage, as research assistants or political advisers. Phoebe had said that he always travelled with about half a dozen of them, and thought they were better protection than the special branch detective, or the secret agent who was assigned to him when he was in Office. And then, Aidan would have enlisted the security services against her, and if he could convince James, Anne and Harriet that she was dangerous, it would be simple to convince an anti-terrorist squad. Perhaps every man’s hand was indeed against her.
Twenty years ago, in this town, they had concealed Maria Czernin in Newnham College for a fortnight. ‘Look as though you belong,’ Rosamund had told her, and Thea Wade said, ‘Look as though everything you do is on purpose.’ At that very time, a future candidate for the Presidency of the United States was paying a cleverer student to impersonate him at the final examinations. The moral was that one could get away with such things.
But Rosamund would not get away with lying low in a college. She was the wrong age group now. However she wanted to wait in Cambridge until Steven Courtney, Stefan Czernin, got home.
She glanced around, careful not to catch anyone’s eye. Even here there were no handy purses unguarded – far from it. With their eyes fixed on the frothing portholes, or, this being a university town, on a book, the customers clutched their money to them.
What I need, Rosamund thought, is a place where people dress up; where they wear uniforms, or hats and veils, to conceal at least part of the face; somewhere milling with people who don’t expect to know each other; somewhere with food available. A polytechnic, perhaps, or a convent; or what about a conference centre? Could she pretend to be a delegate? Perhaps she should have stayed in the Railway Hotel and discussed chlorine levels and algae with the bathing pool managers.
A hospital. The hospital she had helped to design, where she had been assistant to the clerk of works during her training. She knew every corridor there, every wall plug, heating duct and sewer. There was a place to eat, even to rest. Rosamund left the launderette. First things first, she thought, pushing one foot in front of the other. It was exhausting to be a fugitive. She found herself giggling at her own situation. It’s ridiculous, she thought, and stopped, and turned to walk a few paces in the direction of the police station. This is all too silly. I’m mad. Enough is enough.
But she wheeled around and carried on. If her behaviour was silly, then the world was sillier. A society which enabled Aidan to trace her every legal movement, and enabled him illegally to obstruct her, was madder than its victim. She tried to think what Sholto would have said, but it would be beyond him to imagine that his daughter could be hunted down in his country.
The hospital had grown since she last saw it. A new wing had been added, and the grounds were full of pre-fabricated buildings which were called, in the trade, re-locatables, but which, as Rosamund knew from
her reading of British professional journals, were certain to stay where they were until they collapsed. However the central block of the hospital was as she had last seen it, merely shabbier, dirtier, and in need of running repairs. Rosamund had time to spare for an ashamed thought at having been at all concerned with erecting a building which appeared so degraded in so few years. When she was learning her trade, it had been the era of planned obsolescence. The materials here had worn badly because it was intended to replace them.
At least the lawns and flower beds were groomed, hospitals and public parks being the last home of bedding plants and herbaceous borders. The traditional flower beds, so neatly edged, so carefully weeded, had a charm that lifted even a fugitive’s heart.
Much of the hospital’s ground floor consisted of ‘circulation area’. Rosamund remembered the plans, with their stick men, pictures of potted plants, and the kind of low tables and chairs which filled the public buildings of the 1960s. The furniture was still there; but no plants.
‘Good afternoon. Are you to be admitted? Name, please, and initials.’
‘No, no, I am not a patient.’
‘Visiting hours six to seven,’ the girl said, bored, and gesturing to a notice behind her.
‘They rang and asked me to bring in some things for Mr Smith. Ward Three. I know the way.’
‘Sure? Oh well, then … so I said to him, I’m not having any of that, thank you very much indeed …’ She was speaking to another girl who was answering the telephone and working the switchboard, but seemed able all the same to spare some attention to an everyday story of hospital folk.
The turnover in this kind of hospital was very quick. The staff left almost before they had found their way around, certainly before the other workers could put a name to them. Nobody would pay any attention to another preoccupied ancillary worker in a white coat. Rosamund found the cloakroom on the ground floor. There were three overalls hanging on pegs and Rosamund chose the longest. In its pocket she found a pair of scissors, and bent over the basin to see clearly as she cut her hair into a long fringe. She damped and smoothed it down. Two women in similar white coats came in and hardly glanced at her, but went on discussing the newly posted duty roster. ‘I had already made a date. I promised Keith.’
‘You can always refuse.’
‘I can’t face the fuss. It will have to be a migraine again.’ They smiled at Rosamund, reflected eye to eye, and she shrugged and grimaced back.
‘It’s a bugger, isn’t it?’ one said, and they left the room again. Neither was carrying a bag. What did hospital staff do with their bags? Rosamund’s shoulder bag contained little of use to her now, but she felt unable to abandon the evidence of an identity she was trying so hard to hide. She took her documents and the miniature of Sholto and found that they fitted comfortably into her overall pocket. She hung her bag, which, cashless, was not worth the stealing, under her coat, and left the case on the floor. A gamble; but not an important one. Miss Esmée Stoughton’s American Express card, and the other useless trash with which her bag had been filled, were flushed down the lavatory.
This part of the hospital seemed now to be a postgraduate medical centre; Rosamund went into what the plans had called a seminar room, and found that it was furnished with coffee tables, a pile of medical journals, another pile of soft pornography magazines, one daily paper open at the picture of a naked girl, and a stainless steel coffee machine. A hand printed notice read ‘One cup 25p’ and beside it was a bowl of coins. Rosamund poured herself a cupful and put some of the coins in her pocket. She sat down with a medical periodical, and looked at an article about strategic planning in the Health Service. She decided to be a statistician, which must be, she thought, one of the professions peripheral to the care of the patient, and one whose function was so obscure to all except its practitioners, that only very bad luck would expose her ignorance. She memorised some jargon: The interactive process will result in quantifying the orders of magnitude, rather than of demonstrating precise estimates, consistent with the specified pattern of service provision in the process of redistricting the area. That ought to make any listener switch off his attention.
A bell rang through the hospital. Visiting time. It must be getting late. It had taken a long time, since waking in the Railway Hotel, to get herself to Cambridge and to find that Steven Courtney was not home yet. The house had obviously been empty for some time. Through the front door’s glass panels she could see a pile of envelopes and leaflets on the mat. Then she had wandered back down the suburban street, shuffling her feet in the fallen plane leaves which reminded her of autumn afternoons in that other provincial town where she had been educated. Cheltenham girls boarded in converted houses in the once domestic streets around the Ladies’ College; they were not allowed to walk in the streets alone, and groups of four were the rule. Whenever Rosamund smelt rotting leaves and autumn bonfires, she was momentarily back in her sage green uniform, pervaded with the schoolgirl’s unfocussed guilt.
That afternoon, Rosamund had felt the uneasy whiff of being in the wrong, and projected the feeling onto her present occupation. What, she had thought, could there be in Phoebe’s unwelcome legacy to make all this worth while? It is evidence against your new brother-in-law, Stefan had written, back in 1957. I do not wish to make your sister suffer when your family has been so good to me. I do not wish to have blackened the name of a girl who did nobody but herself harm. I pass you the buck.
Half a lifetime away, in a quick change world, it was only Aidan’s reaction to it that convinced Rosamund the story could do him much harm. Would anyone care today? Did any of it matter, beside the massive issues Aidan was now concerned with?
If she simply got herself home to New York now, would Aidan leave her alone? He had been all prepared to muzzle her, long before she even arrived at St Jean, yet he could not know through her that she even remembered the Czernin affair. Phoebe must have told him. He had the whole story out of the poor girl, she thought, and knew from tapping my telephone what she had said to me. That’s why I seemed dangerous. That’s why he will never think himself safe from me. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t stop now.
The bell rang again for the end of visiting time. The outsiders in this clean and regimented world, uneasy in its strangeness, would leave the embarrassing bedside with relief, and crowd along the corridors, out into a more comfortable air. Nurses would hasten to restore order. Nobody so much as glanced at Rosamund. She walked firmly but not too fast towards the stairs and down to the basement in which the kitchens and dining rooms must still be. When the foundations were excavated, there had been a problem with surface water, and Rosamund had spent days crawling around in evil smelling mud, where now white tiles and cromium shone.
Rosamund stood in a queue at the canteen between a black man wearing a photographic radiation recorder on his lapel, and a girl with a stethoscope hanging from her pocket. Rosamund was prepared with an excuse if any check was made on meal vouchers or entitlement, but the meals were served smoothly, and she was given a plateful of meat and two veg, without any trouble. The coins she had taken from the coffee fund paid easily for her meal. She carried her tray to a table where two juvenile nurses were giggling and gossiping, and safely assumed that she, middle-aged and female, would not register upon their minds.
Rosamund felt much better for the changeless, institutional food of her youth, and went off to prowl the corridors until she found a telephone. Stefan first. She dialled the number which was listed in the local directory. It was answered after three rings, by a man. He’s lost his accent, she thought, and said, ‘Stefan? It’s Rosamund. Rosamund Sholto.’
‘Hold on a moment …’ There was noise in the background, other voices, talking, conferring, sharply cut off when, presumably, a hand was clapped over the receiver. Then, ‘Miss Sholto? I am afraid Mr Courtney is not available at present. Can I take your number?’
That voice had the toneless authority of – authority. Rosamund clapped the receiver
onto its rest and moved away from it in a panic. His calls were being intercepted. They wanted to keep her talking to trace her.
She went up some stairs and down others, until she found herself in a lobby where there was one single telephone booth. A man, laughing and gesticulating, was ringing up a series of people. Odd words came through the glass. ‘Very easy, thank goodness. Isn’t it marvellous. We’re over the moon. We always wanted a girl.’ A sad woman, clutching an apathetic child by the hand, was waiting her turn. ‘We have to tell your Dad,’ she mumbled in a monotone. ‘Have to tell Dad they are keeping her in.’ When the happy father burst out of the cubicle she pushed her way in. ‘Takes all sorts,’ he said to Rosamund as he bounded by. From half way up the stairs he looked over his shoulder and called back, ‘We’re going to call her Tracy.’
At last Thea Crawford’s home telephone was answered. And Sylvester was away. That was a blow. Not only might his help and advice have been practical, but the knowledge that he had Rosamund’s information, and was in a position to disseminate it, might have meant that it would not be worth Aidan’s while to silence Rosamund.
Kenneth Hardman was now the last hope, for he must have a message from Phoebe. But it was too late to reach him this evening.
The article on medical statistics had given Rosamund an idea. It seemed that medical records showed an almost nil return for diseases needing isolation, except in large urban hospitals and those specialising in tropical illnesses. Rosamund had been reminded of the inclusion here of a suite built in conformity to nationally imposed standards, germ-proof and therefore sound-proof; she had never been told for what diseases the planners were preparing. Now she made several false starts, being muddled by alterations and additions, but the amiable uninterest she met on her way was cheering.
It seemed to be a visiting time again, and the corridors were full of people made either meek or aggressive by the regulated atmosphere. One of the visitors, clutching a bunch of home grown flowers, asked her where his wife might have been moved to. ‘Bloody little Hitlers in here. You’d think you all run it for your own benefit.’
