John saw it in her eyes, and squeezed shut his own and turned his head away.
“God,” he said bitterly, and then, “Laddy, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.... Laddy, say you forgive me for it!”
“I can forgive you for stealing my papers, John,” she said tonelessly, “but not for the damage you caused by it. I can’t ever forgive you for that. You made him think I betrayed him, and that made him betray me. Nothing can ever fix that, and I won’t forgive you for it as long as I live.”
John was white to the lips. “Laddy!” he whispered hoarsely. “Laddy, don’t look at me like that. Laddy, listen to me—I was crazy, I was insane with jealousy! I’ve never done anything like that in my life before, I swear it!”
It was an impassioned plea, and his handsome blue eyes were imploringly apologetic. If she had known less, she might have been moved.
“No?” she said, looking at him from what seemed a great distance. “But you have since, haven’t you? Or don’t you consider taking an undeserved photo credit to be theft? No, please don’t say anything. Just go. I don’t want to listen to you anymore.”
When it was all over and she had seen John’s car drive away, she phoned Harry at home.
“Harry,” she said. “You originally gave me most of this week off, remember? I came back today because it seemed stupid not to, but would you mind if I stayed off tomorrow and Wednesday after all?”
“And whose trail are you on now?” Harry joked.
“My own,” she said. “I’m exhausted, Harry. Do you mind?”
“No, dear girl,” he said. “You looked like death warmed over today. Why don’t you take the rest of the week off, since you can hardly be said to have had a holiday? And I’ll see you next Monday looking more like the Laddy we all know and love, hmm?”
“Thanks, Harry,” she said. She hung up and sat without moving for a long time.
* * *
Ben Smiley had been a union man all his life. He had fought for the workers in the plant where he worked for thirty years. He had fought for the promotion of workers through the ranks into management and then refused such advancement himself in order to stay in the union. Ben Smiley had been a fighter, and he had won many of his battles.
One day a young man who, thanks to Ben’s efforts, had been able to cross the line from worker to management had done what management had not previously been able to do: he had engineered Ben Smiley’s dismissal. From that day, Ben Smiley was a broken man. He refused to fight the dismissal and refused to look for another job, and he gave up on life.
Three years ago, forced to sell their home by the loss of Ben’s income, the Smileys had rented the converted upper story of Laddy’s house, and shortly afterward Ben had begun to take an interest in the garden. He was perfectly willing, when she asked him, to share his interest with Laddy.
She knew that the garden was Ben’s therapy, but although Laddy had worked hard there the whole of yesterday, all she achieved was enough fatigue and soreness to put her soundly to sleep for the entire night. The peace that Ben seemed to find there she had not found.
Laddy sat back on her heels now and stretched the tired muscles of her back, then twisted round till she caught sight of Ben’s stocky figure by the rose trellis on the garden wall. He was wearing old grey trousers and a V-neck sleeveless pullover over a casual shirt left open at the neck. The column of his throat was thick and brown, and with the new awareness that love had given her, Laddy realised that Ben Smiley was a very virile man. His workman’s hands moved among the delicate rosebuds with a gentle strength, an expertise that, for the first time, Laddy recognised as sensitive. She didn’t know Ben very well; he was a silent man, though he had been a vociferous fighter once, and she had always been a little afraid of pushing conversation on him.
Yet when she had asked him if he could use her help in the garden for a few days, saying that she needed some exercise, he had looked at her as though he understood that what she really needed was a measure of the peace he had found.
“Ben,” she said now, wiping the back of her hand across her forehead. He turned to look at her, and suddenly it was simple.
“Ben, how do you learn to live with betrayal?” she asked quietly.
He was silent, working among the rosebuds, and Laddy watched her trowel turn over fresh damp earth onto the grey surface soil.
“You become accustomed to being less of a person than you were,” Ben’s voice came at last, and she knew that it was the first time he had said it, perhaps even understood it in this way. “When someone betrays you, they kill a part of you, the part that knows, that feels the betrayal. Or perhaps you kill off that part because it knows too much. The worse the betrayal, the larger the part of you that knows it, that must die.”
There was perfect silence around them now, inside and outside the garden. No noise of traffic or distant voices reached her ears, only the wind in the flowers, the insects in the summer sun, framing the quiet deep-toned voice that came to her from across the garden.
“The first pain of betrayal, awful though it may be, you overcome almost automatically. And you’re grateful; you think it wasn’t so bad after all. But sooner or later you understand the price you paid to overcome it—you understand that part of you has died, that you are no longer a full human being. The most difficult thing to live with is not the betrayal but the awful bitterness you feel at not being a whole person. It’s like learning to live with being crippled, I’ve sometimes thought.”
Laddy sat facing him, her arms around her drawn-up knees. When the sob welled up inside her, she didn’t fight it, but dropped her head forward and wept openly, unashamedly, wildly, like a wounded animal.
Ben let her weep. He didn’t console her, or touch her, or look distressed. He merely stood and let her weep.
“Thank you,” she said, wiping her face on her sleeve, when the storm had passed.
“Those are marigolds,” Ben said, gesturing to a row of potted bits of green that were sitting on the grass. “You can plant them along the border there. Space them out to run the whole length between the roses.”
After a few moments, Laddy laid the trowel down and began to dig with her bare hands. The sun burned on her back and head, and the earth was rich and moist under her fingers. Her nose caught the pungent odour of fresh, fertile earth and growing things. At least the plants were alive. It was comforting to know that something was fully alive in the world....Laddy turned her head and glanced at Ben over her shoulder.
“They don’t ask questions, do they?” she said softly.
“No, they just grow,” said Ben.
* * *
On Friday morning Richard Digby called her.
“Are you ill, Laddy?” he asked in concern. “I tried you at the Herald and they said you’d been off all week.”
“No, but I needed a rest after my hectic holiday.” She meant to say it jokingly, but somehow her voice sounded bright with pain.
“Yes, I see,” said Richard after a moment. “Are you interested in news about Mischa, then?”
Her heart began to hammer. “Of course,” she said. “He’s always good copy.” She knew what was coming, and she squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for it.
“We came up from Trefelin last night—he’s catching a British Airways flight at noon. He’s flying to New York and then to Denver.”
If Mischa Busnetsky had been on his way to the moon he couldn’t be more distant from her than he was right now, yet Laddy knew by the sudden wrenching inside, that somehow a tiny seed of hope had been sprouting undetected in her heart. “He...he didn’t ask you to give me this item, by any chance, did he?” she asked, her voice rising high and hoarse on the last word.
“Well, I...” Richard began hesitantly.
“No, never mind,” said Laddy. “Why is he going to Denver?”
“From there he’ll be going to a health clinic for a month or two, mostly for rest, supervised diet and exercise,” Richard said. “He’s considering several l
ecture dates after that but hasn’t agreed to anything yet.”
“Any chance for pictures at the airport?” Laddy asked. “Or a few comments?”
“Well, in fact, we’d prefer to have you hold this till the noon edition so he can get away without fuss,” Richard said.
“No one else knows?” she asked, wrinkling her brow. “Are there no media people in Trefelin keeping an eye on Busnetsky?”
“If there are we managed to avoid them, we think.”
“Someone’s bound to be staking out the airport,” Laddy said. “They must realise by now that you’ve left Trefelin.”
“Perhaps,” Richard said. “Brigit is a rather able conspirator, though, you know.”
Laddy smiled. “I believe you,” she said. “How did you leave them, Richard? How’s Rhodri?”
“Well, the archaeological team is all set up, but I suppose you knew that.”
“Yes,” said Laddy. She had kept in regular touch with Roger Smith by phoning him at Trefelin’s pub every night when he went in for dinner.
“Rhodri, if you want the truth,” Richard said with a chuckle, “is playing the twelve-year-old Christ in the temple among the rabbis. And they are all enjoying themselves hugely.”
Laddy laughed aloud for the first time since she had left Trefelin.
“I can just see him,” she said, conjuring up the memory of his dark eyes, his wide grin....They chatted for a while and then Richard said he must go.
“Will you be telling Mischa you called me?” she asked, driven by a need that overthrew reason.
“Oh, yes, I think I must.”
Her heart began to beat painfully and she felt it through her whole being. She could not let him go without a word, not while there was still a chance. She had to keep the possibility open, even if the pain destroyed her. Pride didn’t matter, nor did pain—nor, in the end, did betrayal. All that mattered was that she loved him. Laddy swallowed.
“Tell him...tell him I hope to see him again sometime, would you?” she asked.
“My dear Laddy, of course you will. He’ll be coming back, you know,” Richard said heartily.
“I suppose so,” said Laddy. “Will you tell him, though?”
Chapter 14
It was a clear, hot summer in London. Wimbledon was rained out nearly every day in a chilly two-week stretch of bad weather, but thereafter the sun scarcely set on the British Isles. Each day was hot and golden and, it seemed, even more so on weekends. Every Londoner who owned so much as a four-foot-square plot of grass either gardened it or sunbathed on it, until by mid-August the entire population of the city appeared to have had a holiday on the Costa del Sol.
There was rain too but, astoundingly, only after sundown or in a brief afternoon shower that left everything refreshed and the sun shining brighter and warmer than before.
In a troubled economy, seeds at least were cheap, and overnight window boxes began to appear on office buildings and in front of shops and boutiques, so that throughout central London, she was constantly catching sight of fresh-growing flowers and odd spots of bright greenery.
The garden behind the house in Highgate flourished like a jungle under the constant attention of Ben and Laddy. By late July, the August plants were flowering already, and all the earlier plants were refusing to die. In August they stopped thinking about what should be blooming when: it seemed as though everything was going to bloom at once and forever. The climbing roses ran wildly along the high garden wall, a thick blanket of pink that expanded its territory every day and perfumed the air of the whole garden.
“There hasn’t been a summer to equal it since before the war,” Ben said.
“Do you suppose England’s drifting downstream?” Margaret asked in a sudden brainstorm. “That by now we’re off the coast of Spain, and no one’s noticed?”
“It’s a thought,” said Laddy.
Laddy was losing weight. She had always been slim but rounded, and she had a shape that would not become angular no matter how thin she was. But over the course of the summer the effects of long hours working in the garden combined with an almost unconscious loss of interest in food combined to make her very slim indeed.
She was not sleeping well in the warm summer nights. She dreamed constantly of Mischa, and she awoke to find the bed empty beside her with a sense of loss as deep and tortured as though he had left her yesterday.
You have slept alone for twenty-five years, she told herself as she lay wakeful, as usual, at five o’clock one morning. Only one morning in all those years did you wake up at the side of Mischa Busnetsky. A man doesn’t become a habit after one night.
But that was her mind talking: her arms and her heart knew better.
That summer she began a series of interviews with a beautiful young woman named Beth who had become a prostitute to support her heroin habit. Laddy spent hours with the woman, who was bright, intelligent and articulate—as long as she had had her fix. Twice during the summer Laddy watched Beth change from a confident, with-it lady into a sweating, anxious spitfire who had not got home on time. On one of these occasions a traffic jam held them up for over an hour, and for the last ten minutes of that hour Laddy piloted her little red car with an unrecognizable woman beside her blaming and cursing her in the repetitious but pithy vocabulary of the streets, which gained immediacy from the barely controlled violence behind it.
Laddy wrote of that experience from two points of view: her own and Beth’s. “And Don’t Be Late,” she called the article.
“You’re not going to the extreme of trying it yourself to get a story, are you, Laddy?” Harry asked when he read it. “This description of being late for a fix is almost too good. How do you know so much about it?”
Laddy smiled and shook her head. I’m cold turkeying from Mischa Busnetsky, that’s how, Harry, she could have said. And believe me, he was some habit.
It was not the sort of series that the Herald generally printed. Normally such things were the province of the Sunday broadsheets. But Laddy’s interview articles with Mischa Busnetsky had been a prestige item for the paper and had been picked up by syndicates all over the Commonwealth and the States. When Laddy had argued with Harry for the right to do this series, he had privately thought it was the sort of violent switch that was needed to counteract the gently falling standards of the Herald. He had gone to battle with the Herald editor for the series, and no one was more surprised than Harry when he won.
“I can’t let you use all your time on it, Laddy. I’m still going to have to see you around here,” he had said. “I’ve been informed that the Herald ‘can’t afford the luxury’—so you’re going to have to earn your keep in the regular way.”
They had laughed together and shaken their heads over it.
“There’s foresight for you,” said Laddy.
So a great deal of her own time was spent with Beth, whose identity she kept secret even from Harry. Laddy was glad of the involvement. The harder she worked and the more time she spent with people, the less time she had to herself to think. Thinking was the enemy. She avoided it religiously, working hard and late till she was too exhausted to do anything except fall into bed and sleep.
By the end of August she was operating on five hours’ sleep a night.
In mid-September she spent three days on a visit to Wales to get a follow-up story on Rhodri’s Cave, as the media were now unanimously calling it. She spent the three days with Rhodri’s family—Mairi and her husband Alun, and Brigit.
Rhodri Lewis had become a minor celebrity, Laddy learned without surprise on her first evening, as she sat with the family around the table in the homey kitchen looking through his collection of clippings. It soon became evident that his pride and joy was the coverage he had been given in the international edition of Time magazine: an article and a two-page colour spread of the now-famous photos Laddy had taken so many months ago in the cavern. There was also a photo of Rhodri himself, standing in the cave mouth with an air of being lord of all he sur
veyed. Underneath this photo was the caption, Not looking for a lost sheep.
Laddy threw back her head and laughed. “Rhodri,” she said, “you are a journalist’s dream! You’re so newsworthy—I’m surprised you haven’t been approached to do a chat show!”
Brigit clapped her hands and let out a yelp of joy. “He has!” she whooped, and Rhodri’s face broadened in an ear-to-ear grin.
“An American show,” he bubbled happily. “I am flying to New York in two weeks, and Brigit, too. She is coming to look after me. I am a little nervous, you know, but I will be very interested to see the Americans.”
Laddy hugged him, laughing, congratulating him. “I guarantee you they’ll return the interest,” she said.
The cave art almost without doubt was thought to be Magdalenian, she found when she visited the team on the site. The pigments matched, the medium matched; there were many points of comparison.
There were odd differences, too, not least of which was the predominance of the now-famous reindeer. But the archaeological team was taking its time, and the real item gleaned from her visit to Wales was Rhodri’s impending visit to New York.
“How is Mischa?” the young boy asked her Sunday afternoon as she climbed into her car for the trip back to London, and she bit her lip at the look in his eyes.
“I don’t know, Rhodri,” she said. “I haven’t heard from him since he left for the States. I suppose he’s still in the clinic, getting well.”
“I wish we could see him,” Rhodri said.
Laddy replied softly, “So do I.”
It gave her the courage, when she got back to London, to ring up Dr. Edmund Bear, who was connected with the Colorado clinic, and to ask him for news of Mischa.
“Well, as far as I know, he’s still in the clinic,” Ned Bear said. “I can’t imagine them keeping him much longer, though, unless....”
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