The Heart Broke In (40 page)
The expression of pleading and cunning on Ritchie’s face, the hope in his eyes recognisable as hope but hope choked in the grasping fist of a bully who wouldn’t let it go, almost made Bec retch. ‘What have you done?’ she whispered.
‘You had sex when you were fourteen.’
‘Not with a forty-year-old married man!’
I must be dignified
, thought Ritchie. He said: ‘Since you insist, I’ll tell you. There was a girl who appeared on the show, pretty and clever but not very musical. She wasn’t quite sixteen, but she was extremely mature for her age, and a
very
experienced flirt. I knew it was wrong but she was persistent. It was stupid of me to give her my phone number. She wouldn’t stop calling. She took advantage of me.’
‘She took advantage of you?’ said Bec.
‘Yes. Repeatedly. Of course I ended it, but by that time …’
‘She was a child.’
‘She was no child. I wasn’t the first.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You just dropped her?’
‘She went off with a footballer.’
‘So she left you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Is she all right?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Were you in love with her?’
‘Of course not.’
‘So what you wanted was to have sex with a fifteen-year-old girl.’
‘You don’t understand. It’s not that simple. It’s not like that.’
‘So Val found out, and blackmailed you.’
‘He was clever. He made it seem like it wasn’t blackmail.’
‘You betrayed me to save yourself.’
‘Bec, Bec!’ Ritchie reached out to grab his sister’s legs and she stepped back. The movement caused him to yelp with
pain. ‘I do love you but there are priorities in love. I love Karin and my children first.’
‘So you sleep with under-age girls and lie to your wife about it.’
‘Are you so much better? You talk about how good Dad was, but when I try to forgive the man who killed him, you stop me.’
‘I didn’t stop you forgiving him. I stopped you boasting in public about it.’
‘You put your own children ahead of Alex’s brother when you slept with him and you don’t even have any.’
‘What does Karin think about what you’ve done?’
‘She doesn’t know.’
‘She doesn’t know anything?’
‘No.’
‘I’m going to tell her.’
‘You can’t.’
‘She needs to know what kind of man you really are.’
‘If you tell her about the girl, and about me telling the Moral Foundation about you, she’ll leave me. We’ll get divorced, the house will be sold and your niece and nephew’s parents will live apart.’
Bec marvelled at the earnestness with which he spoke.
‘If you tell Karin, it’ll get out, and I’ll be charged and tried and go to prison.
Teen Makeover
will be cancelled and the company will go bankrupt. If you want revenge, that’s it.’
‘That’s not revenge. It’s justice.’
‘You can have your justice. You can have a cruel, terrible justice that destroys families and livelihoods if you want. But that’s not the Bec I know.’
‘I think your family should be broken up. Karin and Dan
and Ruby would be better off without you if you’re going to lie and cheat behind their backs.’
‘You don’t mean that. I don’t do that any more. That was the last time.’
‘How can I believe anything you say?’
Good point
, thought Ritchie. He said quickly: ‘I know you think I’ve not behaved as a brother should.’
‘Do
you
think you have?’
‘You think I’m nasty and worthless. Doesn’t that make me exactly like the scumbag Dad was protecting when they killed him? Dad didn’t betray that worthless man, even when they tortured him. I’m asking you to do the same. Don’t betray me. And I know that because you’re a good person, a better person than me, because you love Dad, you won’t tell Karin, or Mum, or anyone.’
Bec folded her arms and looked down at the grass, awed by the vast, alien moral landscape Ritchie had taken her to the edge of. ‘You did me wrong, and I’m going to suffer for it, and you’re not?’ she said. She frowned. ‘It seems unfair.’
She was sad and tired, and the world was a heavy burden. To walk, she felt, to lift her feet, even to breathe, would be to struggle against the power of gravity and the crushing weight of the sky in an existence that was designed to do nothing but press people like olives till the last drop of joy was squeezed out of them.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘What’s the point? Why are we alive if we treat each other as badly as you treated me? What does love mean if my own brother betrays me? We should be better than this.’
‘We are!’ said Ritchie eagerly.
‘You’re
better. You can rise
above it. You’ll never get a better chance to show me how people aren’t just out for ourselves. I’m giving you the chance to show how real human goodness is by forgiving me.’
He felt a sharp sting on the side of his cheek. Bec had slapped him.
‘Why does everyone feel they have the right to hit me?’ he roared.
Bec, who’d struck Ritchie instinctively in the way she’d try to make broken machinery work by striking it with the flat of her hand, said: ‘If I keep quiet you’ll never be punished.’
‘Don’t you think this proof of how morally superior you are will make me suffer for the rest of my life?’
‘No.’
‘I know you better than you know me. You won’t tell anyone. You can’t help yourself. You’re too kind.’
‘You’re contemptible,’ said Bec. ‘I put so much trust in you, for all my life.’
‘If you had children of your own, you’d understand,’ said Ritchie.
‘I will,’ said Bec. She began walking off down the hill.
‘Wait,’ said Ritchie, raising his voice as his sister moved further away. ‘I can’t walk.’
Bec didn’t turn round or slow down. Ritchie began to crawl after her on his hands and knees. Using one of the gravestones he propped himself upright.
‘Which one’s the father?’ he shouted.
‘I don’t know!’ His sister’s voice rose from the road. She was getting into her car. ‘Both!’
Alex was at home in the evening when Bec got back. They reported on their brothers. Alex had bought some cooked chicken and made a salad and they ate quietly together. Bec was surprised at how easily the conversation slid away at a tangent from the things they needed to talk about and how cheerfully they spoke of the steps to childbirth, maternity leave and whether it was time for Alex to write a book. They were gentle and patient with each other. There were none of the usual interruptions from her or driftings-off from him. And yet when they were filling the dishwasher together he touched her wrist with the side of his hand and said ‘Sorry’, and blushed, as if they were strangers.
They were afraid of the night. They feared what the Moral Foundation would say next day and they feared the bedroom, the renegotiation of the terms of intimacy.
After supper Alex went to his study and Bec tried to watch a film. She felt alone. In the past she would have called Ritchie. She didn’t want to talk to her friends, let alone her mother, until she knew what the MF would say.
Pressed into the corner of the sofa, staring at the blur of faces on the screen and mashing the soundtrack into white noise, Bec could think of nothing except Alex in the kitchen
the previous day, shrinking away from her onto the floor. He was wrong, she thought: she hadn’t wanted him to be angry with her and he shouldn’t have been. She did what she did for him. She took the pain on herself, for his sake, yet his greatest concern wasn’t about her, or about their family; it was about himself, and whether he was fit to be a member of the human race. What was it about the Comries? She thought of Alex’s father, looking out of his attic window and seeing his wife and Harry together and blacking out the skylight instead of going outside and breaking them up. Dougie, too, was filled with a selfish self-loathing, and couldn’t be trusted, but he wouldn’t have left her alone like this, hidden himself in a study or an attic.
Bec went to bed with a book, assuming she would be awake when Alex came. But although he wasn’t late – in fact, he went around the house looking for her, and feared she’d left – she was asleep when he checked the bedroom.
He brushed his teeth, took off his clothes and stood next to the bed, looking at Bec’s face on the pillow.
Here in the shared bed
, he thought,
this is where it all changes, or doesn’t change
. The sex was the least of it, as far as sharing was concerned. These days even kings and billionaires lived like the purest Communists where the bed was concerned. You shared the sheet, the quilt, the mattress, the air. You cooperated or bickered over lighting. You woke each other with your thrashing, your snoring, your nightmares, your needy bladder. If one spoke, the other had to answer. You were naked. You were vulnerable. But if you were frightened, there was someone to hold.
And the worst of it was, the two of you were never alone. Even before the children turned up and even after the children
left there was someone else in the room – an entity. You never knew. It might be Excitement, capering all over the bed in a spangled leotard, it might be the corpse of Love lying on the floor in a pool of blood, it might be the matronly Domesticity clacking her knitting needles in the corner, it might be the pale clerk of Boredom examining his nails by the window. Tonight Love, shabby and bruised, was pushing him towards Bec, but in order to lie down beside her, he had to get into bed with Infidelity.
Alex lifted the quilt and slid in next to Bec, who stirred but didn’t wake up. He lay straight, not touching her, feeling her warmth but feeling too the almost corporeal presence between them. While he was wondering what that presence was – his own construct, some hormonal taboo, a prejudice of social conditioning – Bec rolled over and wrapped herself around him, and he yielded to her embrace, her human heat and fullness, gratefully.
They woke up at five and at six sat in front of Bec’s laptop, looking at the home page of the Moral Foundation. It was still showing the previous week’s exposé. Bec pressed refresh on the browser and the page changed to show a new story.
It read:
Top scientist gives uncle illegal shot of mutant cells just WEEKS before he dies – then gets his house
One of Britain’s best known medical researchers broke the rules of the institute he runs to give a relative who later died a shot of highly experimental ‘fountain of youth’ cells, the MF can reveal.
Dr Alexander Comrie, 42, became head of London’s prestigious Belford Institute for Cancer Research last year after the previous director, his uncle, Professor Harold Comrie, retired through ill health.
Harold Comrie, 64, had terminal cancer – but not one of the cancers that the so-called ‘fountain of youth’ cells, also known as ‘expert cells’, can cure.
Under the terms of his uncle’s will Alexander Comrie, rather than Harold Comrie’s son Matthew,
effectively inherits the dead man’s luxury London home.
Sources at the Belford Institute say that Alexander Comrie used his privileged access, bypassing normal procedures, to take the cells out of the freezers where they were stored.
An agency nurse who cared for Harold Comrie in his final weeks, Judith Tembo, said that Alexander Comrie brought the cells to his uncle’s house in an orange Sainsbury’s bag and that she helped him infuse them. She said: ‘I did not think at the time that I was doing anything wrong.’
Matthew Comrie told the MF that he gave verbal permission for his father to be given the cells, but that the implications were never properly explained.
‘My cousin mentioned the cells to me, but I assumed what he was doing was above board,’ said Matthew Comrie. ‘Now I want answers.’
It had been assumed that Harold Comrie would leave the house to Matthew, his only child, when he died.
But in a highly unusual move, Harold Comrie bequeathed the
house to the institute as a free perk for its director.
‘I know my cousin knew about the will when he administered the cells. I don’t know whether the cells had anything to do with the speed of my father’s death,’ said Matthew Comrie, who is one of Lancashire’s assistant education directors.
‘But now I know that he should never have been given them. It’s all very troubling.’
Alexander Comrie shot to fame last year with a paper in the journal
Nature
claiming that expert cells, which his uncle first discovered, could make humans immortal.
The claim has attracted increasing controversy. Sources say there was already concern that appointing Alexander Comrie as his uncle’s successor could expose the institute to accusations of nepotism.
Soon after Harold Comrie died Alexander Comrie and his girlfriend, Rebecca Shepherd, moved into the late director’s house, a £1.5 million terraced property on Islington’s exclusive Citron Square.
Dr Ben Norridge, a specialist in medical ethics at Oswestry University, said: ‘Expert cell therapy
is a highly experimental treatment that should only be administered to patients under strict protocols and only when the patient is suffering from a very specific kind of cancer.
‘What the junior Comrie did is an astonishing breach of elementary medical ethics. It breaks all the rules. I expect they’ll throw the book at him.’
Alexander Comrie’s actions put the BBC in a dilemma over his role as presenter of the organisation’s soon to be released documentary about ageing,
Why Not Live Forever?
Last year Shepherd and Alexander Comrie were hailed in the media as ‘science’s golden couple’.
Before becoming the head of a global malaria prevention campaign recently, Shepherd, daughter of murdered Special Boat Service hero Captain Gregory Shepherd, led a successful effort to develop a vaccine for the disease.
She is the sister of
Teen Makeover
producer and ex-Lazygods front man Ritchie Shepherd.
Since moving into his late uncle’s house Alexander Comrie and Shepherd are understood to have
made inroads into the former director’s extensive cellar of vintage wines, which he bequeathed to them personally.
Neighbours describe a series of late, noisy parties at the house. Comrie and Shepherd are reported to have been seen cycling round the square late at night singing drunkenly in the company of Alexander Comrie’s brother Douglas, a postal worker.
