Sheer Abandon

by Penny Vincenzi

  “Sorry we couldn’t have met before,” he said. “All been a bit of a rush. Look, they’re ready for you, looking forward to meeting you. They’re mustard-keen on the new party, even though they only represent about a third of the old committee. They’ve seen the three others already. Only one of them should cause you any concern. Young chap. Teacher. The other’s a woman, very good, very sound, but a bit of a wild card. Comes from the north.” Clearly coming from the north was tantamount to coming from Sodom and Gomorrah. “Anyway, nothing more for me to say except good luck. Chad will have briefed you on the form, no doubt.”

  Martha said he had, but added tactfully that she’d be grateful for any further advice. “Best I can give you is have as few notes as possible; speak from the heart. They can see through anything else.”

  “I won’t have any notes,” said Martha. “It’s all in my head.”

  “Jolly good. Well, best go. Good luck.”

  On the way her phone bleeped: it was a text from Ed. “Good luck. I love you xxx.”

  They arrived at two thirty at a large building in the old Market Square, where Martha had gone with her mother every Saturday morning to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, and went upstairs to a large room, where a rather tired-looking middle-aged woman was pulling chairs into a semicircle. Chad offered to help her. She was clearly dazzled by his presence. When Martha offered to help as well, she seemed rather disdainful and said she could get the small table out for her notes if she liked.

  The room filled up quite quickly with an equal number of men and women. They were mostly middle-aged, friendly in a rather distant way, smiled at her briefly and then carried on talking to one another. Only one very imposing woman even talked to Chad. They were clearly both being put in their place.

  At three o’clock exactly, the imposing woman, who proved to be Geraldine Curtis, the chairman, clapped her hands and said would everyone take their places; they all sat down in the semicircle, with Martha placed at her small table in the middle. She felt rather like the boy in the “When did you last see your father?” painting. Chad indicated to her to sit down, then stood beside her, smiled his brilliant smile, and made a brief speech thanking them for giving the party a chance, outlined their general policy, and said he was confident that, with the backing of people like the residents of Binsmow, they could radically cut Tony Blair’s majority at the next election. They continued to sit looking stone-faced.

  And then it was Martha’s turn. She started fairly confidently, she played the local card, threw in a couple of childhood reminiscences—the market shopping, the grammar school, and picnicking in the meadows on the edge of the town—hoping for some kind of reaction she could build on. She got none. They just sat and listened to her, fairly expressionless; they didn’t smile, nor did they frown. She had decided to be honest—no point pretending a lifelong passion for politics—simply said that she had felt her interest in the subject growing over the past year, along with her association with the Centre Forward Party. She said she had done some Citizens Advice work in Binsmow, and had some practical experience of people’s problems and how to solve them. She referred to Lina and her distress over the sink estates and poor schools that she and others like her had to endure, and said that had been the turning point that had led her into politics.

  She said how much she liked the Centre Forward philosophy of people before politics, that she felt that a revived sense of community could help solve many problems in society, and promised to run a fortnightly free legal advice service if she was selected.

  Still no reaction: increasing panic. What on earth was she doing here? The toughest argument in court was easier than this. Well, no way back now. Just keep going, Martha.

  Somehow she got to the end of her speech: “I would dearly love to work for the people of Binsmow and to give back something of what they gave me.”

  When she had finished and sat down, there was a silence in the room; it was unnerving. She hadn’t expected applause, but she had hoped for some reaction, some questions. Everyone looked down at the pads of paper on which they were scribbling notes.

  I was a disaster, she thought miserably, and looked at Chad; he winked at her.

  “Right,” he said, “well, I think you know a little about Martha and her—and our—philosophies now. Would you like to ask her some questions, find out some more?”

  There were several. Would she move down to Binsmow? Did she, as a single and clearly well-off young woman, really understand the financial pressures and problems faced by families? If she did marry and had a family, would she see herself continuing as an MP? What had drawn her to the Centre Forward Party, what had she against the traditional Tories? (Careful on this one, Chad had said, there are sure to be at least a couple of doubters on the committee who will be opposed to you on principle: don’t knock the others, just say you feel instinctively, as a young, ambitious person, that this is the party for you.) What were her views on primary education? How would she go about re-creating the sense of community she spoke so emotively of? What did she think about the bypass? At this point, Geraldine Curtis clearly felt the questions were becoming too specific and she rose rather majestically and clapped her hands.

  “I think that will do for now. I wonder if we could have tea, Betty, and then we can talk to Miss Hartley more informally? I would personally love to hear about her childhood in Binsmow and her education at the grammar school.”

  Betty, the downtrodden placer of chairs, disappeared into the back of the hall, followed by a couple more members; they returned with a trolley laden with cups of tea, and plates of biscuits. Martha decided that this was the one time in her life when calories wouldn’t count, except in her favour, and ate several biscuits. They were all very soggy. She stood there, smiling endlessly, answering questions, charming the men with ease and the women, particularly the younger ones, with more difficulty, expressing huge interest in housing schemes, playgroups, the possibility of a local radio station, youth clubs, and realised, with a sudden thud of excitement, that everything Chad had said was true, that it really wasn’t rocket science and that she could—if they gave her the chance—probably do it. And she realised she wanted that chance—very, very badly.

  The worst thing, Clio thought, was the feeling she had nowhere to go. That she was, temporarily in any case, homeless. After some thought, she had driven herself to a motel on the edge of the town and booked herself in for the night. Settling herself into the anonymity of her small beige cell, she had felt it was extraordinarily suited to her situation, a place with no past and no future, only the present. To her great surprise, she slept for a few hours, and woke at six, with a sense of dreadful panic and loneliness.

  Now what?

  She realised that she had very few close friends. Actually, she had no close friends. Not anymore. Couples, yes, halves of couples, even, but only on a rather superficial level. Jeremy had most effectively driven a wedge between her and her previous girlfriends, expressing first hurt and later irritation if she wanted to spend time with them rather than with him. And she had never had a soul-baring kind of friendship with anyone; she supposed it was all to do with her emotionally starved childhood, her sense of failure, her comparison of herself with her brilliant sisters. She could certainly never go to them for help; her major ambition, from the moment she left to go travelling on that fateful August day, had been to show them that she could manage on her own. She would starve to death before admitting she had failed. Her father, too, would never be a source of comfort or strength; he had always made it clear that she was a worry to him, more demanding and distracting than her sisters, and clearly destined to be less successful. She was simply an anxiety that he didn’t want.

  What she couldn’t understand was that she didn’t feel more unhappy. Scared, yes; lonely, yes; and desperately worried, yes. But not actually unhappy. She supposed that would come; she was still anaesthetised by shock.

  She got into her car and drove—for some reason—along
the A3 towards London. It seemed as good a route as any. She felt a need for coffee and turned her car into a Little Chef; the coffee was good and she suddenly wanted some toast as well. She was biting into the second slice when her mobile rang.

  Jeremy? Worrying about her, wondering where she was?

  “Clio? Hi, it’s Jocasta. I just wondered how you were, hoped that story hadn’t done you too much damage.”

  “Oh,” said Clio lightly, and was astonished to find she could be honest, indeed wanted to be, “not really. I’ve left my husband, as a result, don’t have a home anymore, that sort of thing. But don’t worry about it, Jocasta, not your fault.”

  “Oh my God! You are joking, aren’t you?”

  “No, actually. I’m in a Little Chef on the A3 with no home, and nowhere to go, and only the clothes I’m standing up in. Oh, and no job, either.”

  “My God! Oh, Clio, I’m so, so sorry. And how inadequate is that? Jesus. What happened, was it really my fault?”

  “No, not really,” said Clio with a sigh. “I mean, you might have been the catalyst—well, the story might—but it was all there, really.”

  “What was all there?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Jocasta. Sorry.”

  And then her calm and her bravado suddenly left her and she started to cry, huge heavy sobs; the three other people in the Little Chef stared at her. She cut Jocasta off and fled to the ladies’, where she shut herself in one of the stalls and sat on the loo, her head buried in her arms, weeping endlessly.

  Every so often, her phone rang; she ignored it. After about half an hour, she couldn’t cry any longer; she felt strangely calm. She washed her face, combed her hair, and walked as nonchalantly as she could manage back to the restaurant, where she paid her bill and then went out to the car.

  “She was marvellous. Really marvellous.” Chad smiled at Grace Hartley. They were, inevitably, in the vicarage drawing room, using the best china, with enough cakes on the tiered wooden cake stand to feed the entire Centre Forward Party. “Thank you so much, Mrs. Hartley, that lemon cake looks wonderful. Go on, Martha, have a piece.”

  “Martha never eats anything,” said Grace with a sigh, “and certainly not cakes.”

  “She was tucking into the committee’s biscuits. Weren’t you, Martha?”

  “Well, I thought I should.”

  “And so you should eat your mother’s lemon cake. Go on.”

  Martha held her plate out resignedly; she could see that politics could make her fat.

  Chad was saying how well she’d done, even better than he’d hoped, that they wouldn’t know for a while, probably not for a week, “Just to show us at Westminster who’s really in charge.”

  His phone rang and they all jumped. He went out of the room, closing the door. It was obviously someone from the committee: so swift a decision must mean bad news, Martha thought miserably. It felt very bad. She had failed at something important. Something she really wanted. And very publicly. Everyone would be so disappointed in her. She was even more disappointed in herself. It was going to take a long time to—

  The door opened; Chad was smiling. “Well,” he said, “very good news. That was Norman Brampton. It’s unofficial but—Martha, they want you! Geraldine Curtis called him. They were very impressed indeed. They accept your inexperience, but they feel you’ll appeal to young people, which is important to us. And there’s the local card, of course, which you played so well.”

  “Oh my God!” said Martha. She felt extraordinary. In that moment she could have flown. She felt completely inviolate. She hadn’t failed. Hadn’t made a fool of herself. She’d done it. She had succeeded. She—

  “Oh, that’s wonderful, darling,” said Grace. “Well done. Let me give you a kiss.”

  “Marvellous,” said Peter Hartley. “What a clever girl you are. It’s absolutely wonderful. We’re so proud of you, Martha. And how lovely it will be to have you down here—”

  “Now, you must keep this under your collective hats,” said Chad. “Norman really shouldn’t have told me. But he was quite certain—you’ve definitely done it!”

  She went back to the pub with Chad to collect her car and realised that it was practically out of petrol; she’d fill it up on her way back to her parents’, maybe even go for a little drive. She needed to unwind.

  There was something wrong with one of the pumps; it required a lot of jiggling about to get the petrol running and then it suddenly spurted out. Damn! That wouldn’t do her suit any good. And she was going to be wearing it a lot, it seemed. She finished filling the car, paid for the petrol, and then went to the lavatory to wash her hands.

  It was predictably filthy, paper towels and some fag ends littered the floor, there was an oily rag in the washbasin, and a tabloid newspaper balanced on top of the hand dryer. As she switched the dryer on, the paper slithered onto the floor. Martha, deciding it was in its rightful place, was about to unlock the door to leave when her mobile rang; as she fumbled for it in her bag, one of the neat leather gloves that she had brought to complete her new persona fell onto the floor.

  She swore, checked her mobile—it was Ed, wanting to know how she had got on—and bent down to pick up the glove. And there it was: the photograph. A very ordinary photograph, really, taking up about a quarter of the page; it showed a middle-aged woman, apparently in a hospital bed, and a young girl. The woman was dressed in a bed jacket and some rather incongruously large pearl earrings. The girl, who had a great deal of curly blond hair, was wearing a denim jacket and several studs in one of her ears. She had an arm round the woman’s shoulders, and was smiling radiantly at the camera.

  WHAT KATY DID, said the caption.

  And Martha, crouching there on the floor, strangely compelled to read on, discovered precisely what Katy had done, which was care for her “beloved grandmother” as she became desperately ill, after spending twenty hours in Casualty on a hospital trolley.

  But there was a very happy ending. Mrs. Jilly Bradford is now recovering fast and has nothing but praise for her granddaughter’s courage, as she battled with NHS staff to secure attention and treatment for her. Fifteen-year-old Kate Bianca—as she likes to be known—has ambitions to be a model. Why not a career in hospital management, Kate?

  Martha leant over the filthy lavatory bowl and was violently sick.

  Chapter 15

  “Of course I won’t tell anyone. Of course. My dear, if you knew how many confidences I have kept over the years, you wouldn’t even ask. But look—do you have anywhere to go?”

  “Oh…yes.” Clio wasn’t going to tell Barbara Salter, so orderly, so nice, that she had nothing of the sort, no refuge of any kind; it was too humiliating. “I’m on my way to friends in London now. But, well, thank you so much for listening to me.”

  “I’m only sorry I couldn’t do more. I’ll get Mark to call you as soon as he gets in. On your mobile, yes? Try not to worry, my dear. These things often blow over. It’s all part of the fun and games of being married.”

  “Yes, well maybe.”

  As if Barbara and Mark could possibly have had arguments over anything more serious than his tea being too strong. Everyone at the surgery hated making it for him.

  “Yes,” she said again, trying to sound more cheerful, “yes, I expect it is.”

  She had been surprised to find herself calling Mark; it was just that out of the panic and loneliness that had taken her over, she had suddenly realised that her work, her job, was the one stable thing that she could cling to and find comfort in. And yes, she had left the practice, but they had no replacement for her, only a locum for a couple of weeks and then another one, and neither had really pleased Mark at all. So maybe, just maybe, he would allow her back.

  She had spent the second night in another anonymous motel-style place by the river in Battersea. When she got up to her room, she found herself with a breathtaking view of the river, and when she opened the window, she could hear tugs hooting and seagulls crying, and it was l
ike stepping into another country. She had happened upon it completely by chance, driving listlessly into London, but it had seemed a happy accident. She wondered if Jeremy would ever phone her and see if she was all right; after a while, she got into bed and then lay awake fearful and tearful. In the morning she phoned Jeremy, simply to say she was all right. There was no answer except the answering machine. “It’s me, Clio,” she said, and then stopped, for what could she say? “I hope you’re not worried” or “I’m fine, don’t try and find me”? He was so clearly not worried, had no intention of trying to find her…She fell foolishly silent and then just said, “I’m fine,” and rang off.

  She put the phone down and felt the tears welling again. It was at this point that her mobile rang and she answered it without checking: it was Jocasta. Yet again.

  Clio stood on the doorstep, looking at Jocasta’s pretty little house and trying to pluck up the courage to ring the bell. What on earth was she doing here, at the worst hour of her life, paying a call on someone who was virtually a stranger? It made her feel more pathetic than ever. It was just that at this precise moment, in her acute loneliness, Jocasta had called. And had been so kind, so friendly, so genuinely concerned, it suddenly seemed quite a good idea.

  She was considering running away when the door opened and a very tall, thin man dressed in running gear appeared, smiled at her and said, “You must be Clio. Go along in. I’m going for a run, so you and Jocasta can enjoy some girly talk. I’m Nick,” he added, holding out a bony hand. “Nick Marshall. Friend of Jocasta’s. See you later.”

  Clio smiled up at him. “Thank you,” she said, and then worried that it might sound rude, to be thanking someone for going away from their own house. Or their girlfriend’s house.