Sheer Abandon (35 page)

He looked down at his ankle. “OK,” he said finally. And then, reluctantly: “Thanks.”

“That’s OK. One thing in return. How do you get into the grounds? You must know a way.”

“I don’t.”

“Of course you do,” said Jocasta briskly, “don’t be silly.”

There was a long silence; then the boy said, “Follow this track right up to the wall. Follow round to your right. Few hundred yards along, there’s a big tree. One of the branches hangs over the wall.”

“Bit of a drop, isn’t it?” said Jocasta thoughtfully. “That wall’s twelve, maybe fifteen feet high. And then how do you get out again?”

“I’m not telling you any more,” he said. “I thought you just wanted to get in.”

She thought for a moment. It was quite true; she would find her own way out somehow.

“Right,” she said standing up, holding out her hand to pull him up. “Let’s get going.”

Twenty minutes later, she was back. She parked her car quite a lot further down the hill. She didn’t want any of the others getting on her trail. She pulled the torch out of the car, slung her rucksack onto her back, and then shut the car door very quietly. She pulled up the hood of her sweatshirt and started walking up the lane again, on the grass verge, looking out for the track. She’d better not get on the wrong one. Getting lost was all she needed.

Right. Here was the wall. To the right, he had said, a few hundred yards…Tree, tree, where was the bloody tree?

There! Right there, just in a curve of the wall. Not too bad to climb, either, until she was level with the top of the wall, standing on a very strong branch with a helpfully placed parallel one to hold on to.

Then it got worse. She could step onto the wall quite easily, but she then had to get down on the other side. And it was a good twelve-foot jump: onto grass to be sure, but nonetheless it looked like a long way down.

And there was absolutely no sign of the house; she had no real idea of the direction she should walk in. A mental calculation told her about ten o’clock from where she landed, but that was pure guesswork.

Shit, shit. She should have bought a map of some kind. And suppose Keeble had dogs roaming the grounds, or even an armed guard as it was rumoured the Barclay twins did?

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” she said aloud, unhitched her rucksack, threw it down, and then, wondering in the slow motion of fear if this would be the last thing she ever did, jumped after it.

Chapter 20

         Right. She’d made it. She hadn’t broken her leg; there were no dogs savaging her or guards standing over her with rifles. She hadn’t even lost her rucksack. She was safely inside the grounds of Dungarven House and all she had to do now was find the house. She hitched her rucksack onto her back, and following her hunch, set out in what she thought was the right direction.

With the moonlight and the light from her torch she could see quite easily. She came out of the thicket and looked around her—no sign of a house. Never mind. She’d find it. She’d done brilliantly so far. Chris Pollock would be proud of her. As for Nick—she hadn’t given Nick a thought, she realised, for hours. Good!

Suddenly she heard a dog barking. So he did have guard dogs. But the sound didn’t move. It stayed. Which could only mean that it either was tied up somewhere or was inside the house. She would follow the sound.

She wondered as she walked, slowly and carefully, keeping her torch shining low on the ground, what Fionnuala was like. She had looked her up in the cuttings: her mother, Aisling, Gideon’s second wife, had married Michael Carlingford a couple of years ago and spent half her time in Barbados, half in London. The divorce had been unpleasant and noisy and Fionnuala had obviously been shipped off to boarding school, so as to be the least possible bother to her parents. Jocasta knew what
that
felt like. If she’d had the chance to run off with a rock star, she would have done so, just to cause them the maximum trouble and embarrassment.

One of the few pieces of information available on Fionnuala was that she was a fine rider, and expensive horseflesh had been placed at her disposal almost from the moment she had been able to sit up. She rode in the occasional one-day event, and hunted from time to time, and those were the only occasions that yielded any photographs. Rather unsatisfactory ones for the gossip columns, of a rigid, unsmiling little face under her riding hat.

On the two occasions Jocasta had talked to him at any length, Gideon Keeble had not mentioned her; indeed, she would not have known he had a child. Another similarity between herself and Fionnuala.

The barking was getting louder; she was walking up a slight incline now into a group of trees—and through them she could see a light. Several lights, in fact. As she stepped out of the trees, yes, there it was. A large house, but not a huge one. She stayed close to the trees, worked her way towards the back of it: and as she did so, saw a great incline falling down again from the house itself, and below that a shimmer of light. The lake. Moonlight reflected in the lake.

Jocasta looked up at the sky, clear as it never was in the city, studded with myriad stars, and she would have stood there for a long time, just drinking it in, had not the dog started barking again, and, using the sound as a guide, she began to walk towards the house.

“You sound absolutely terrible, love.”

“I feel absolutely terrible. I don’t think I can stand it much longer.”

It was so unlike Helen to complain that there was a silence; everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at her.

Helen did feel appalling. She’d had bronchitis after Christmas, just as she did every year, but it appeared to have reignited; over the past few weeks, she had coughed repeatedly, night after night, went short of sleep, had a constant headache. “Have you been taking your antibiotics?” asked Jim severely.

“Yes. Of course. He might as well have told me to eat sugar lumps.”

“Might have been better, love. You’re skin and bone. It’s all this worry, I’m sure. Your mother, the publicity, all that. It’s been a big strain on you. I’m sure you’ll feel better soon.”

“Dad!” said Juliet. “Is that the best you can do? Poor Mum. You ought to—well, what about taking her away for a few days? See she has a bit of sunshine.”

“Juliet,” said Jim, “you sound like your sister. Where do you suggest I take her, the south of France or something?”

“Yes. Why not? It’d be lovely down there now.”

“I daresay it would. And my name’s Midas. Do you realise what it would cost just to get down there?”

“Forty-five pounds each,” said Juliet firmly. “Look, it says so here in the newspaper: easy Jet to Nice, forty-five pounds.”

“Catch me on one of those things,” said Jim, “tied together with bits of string.”

“Oh Dad, honestly. Charlotte Smith’s parents did it last week, and they’re (a) not rich and (b) not exactly reckless,” said Kate.

“It does sound a lovely idea, Jim,” said Helen. “And a bit of sun would be so nice.”

They all stared at her; she so seldom asked for anything for herself.

“And it’s half term next week,” said Juliet. “Go on, Dad, give poor Mum a break.”

“And who’s going to look after you two?”

“We could go to Gran. Or she could come here.”

“Yes, or I could go to Charlotte,” said Juliet. “Oh go on, Dad. Live dangerously.”

Helen giggled, which triggered a spasm of coughing.

Jim looked at her, then at Juliet. Then he said, “I’ll look into it. Give me that paper. I might look on the Web as well.”

Jocasta found herself at the back of the house. It was very beautiful indeed, classic Georgian, with wonderful tall windows also reflecting the moonlight, and a terrace running its full length. Jocasta walked towards the terrace, wondering for the first time what on earth she was going to do next. Did she knock on the door, tell the elderly retainer who would surely answer it that she had come to see Mr. Keeble? Did she try to get into the house—she remembered Gideon himself telling her doors in rural Ireland were never locked—or did she stand peering through the windows, rather like Peter Pan, observing the household as it went about its business?

She suddenly felt almost embarrassed. She walked quietly along the terrace, looking into a series of rooms: a drawing room dimly lit: what appeared to be a library, in semidarkness, the walls lined with books; a couple more rooms in total darkness; and then—then what was obviously a study. The light in there was quite bright. Very traditional, it too was book-lined, two leather chairs either side of a fireplace and a huge wooden desk—housing incongruously a large computer, a laptop, a fax machine, several telephones. And as she watched, Gideon came into the room, talking into a mobile; he sat down at the desk, and suddenly switched it off and sat staring at it as if he had never seen anything like it before. Then he put it down, very slowly and gently, on the desk, and almost as if he was rehearsing for a play, he folded his arms on the desk and buried his great head in them.

Jocasta watched him, paralysed, feeling like the worst kind of voyeur, probing into an intensely private grief. How could she have done this, how could she have broken into this self-contained world where Gideon felt himself safe? Better to return to London with no story, a failure, than confront him with her crass curiosity, her crude questioning.

She was actually contemplating stealing away, when a door further along the terrace opened and an Irish setter puppy, about six months old, bounded up to her, leapt up and licked her face, as if she was a long-lost member of its own family. It was followed by an older dog, its mother, she guessed, barking too, almost sternly, and after that she heard a woman’s voice calling their names: “Sheba! Pebble! Will you come along back in at once, and stop that noise!”

The noise ceased briefly as the puppy continued to greet her ecstatically, and then started again. After a moment or two, as she patted and stroked and tried to hush the dogs, she saw Gideon stand up and walk to the door, clearly calling someone, and then he disappeared. As she stood petrified, both dogs now barking loudly and relentlessly, he came out through the side door. He was carrying a flashlight, which he shone around the lawns and then along the terrace in a great wide beam. She stood there, frozen like a rabbit in the headlights of a car, braced for abuse, for fury, for outrage, watching him walking towards her, very slowly. But as he reached her, he said, in tones of absolute good nature, as if she had just wandered into a restaurant or an airport lounge or some other very public place where he happened to be, “Why, Jocasta—what a pleasant surprise. You decided to come after all.”

“And you found her where?”

“In a restaurant.”

“Jesus. I can’t believe nobody got there first.”

It was late in the evening; Marc Jones had just returned with the test shots of Kate. Carla was waiting for him with a bottle of wine.

“I know. It was just lucky,” she said modestly. “So, how are the shots?”

“Sensational.”

He flung a sheet of black-and-white contacts down on the desk. Carla pulled a magnifier out of her desk and bent over them. They were remarkable. Despite having been in the studio herself when they were taken, she saw something else now, something that had not been there, the strange alchemy between subject and lens that occasionally takes place, an extra dimension, almost another person indeed. A stroppy, nervous schoolgirl had walked into the studio; and there in front of them now was a gangly, wild-haired beauty, with an absolute knowledge of her own sexuality and how to confront the camera with it.