The Touch of Innocents. Michael Dobbs

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      The senses were stunned, literally. A blast of sheer white light had entered the eye, which had been unable to cope. The pupil struggled to exclude the glare but had found it an impossible task; the light beams felt as though they were tearing around the skull, harassing the brain like a pack of mongrels let loose in a school yard. The olfactory nerve, under assault from a powerful and nauseatingly pungent odour, jammed in revolt; the nostrils flared in disgust, but found it impossible to escape. A sharp pain shot up through the nerve tendrils of the left arm from somewhere near its extremity, travelling through the brain stem like an angry, malevolent wind, blowing away cerebral cobwebs, rattling closed doors and throwing open the windows of the mind as it passed. The sensation it created was intense and unpleasant, yet in response her body could manage nothing but a slight, almost contemptuous curling of the little finger.

      Around the bed, the reaction to pain generated smiles. ‘You were right, Sister,’ the consultant neurologist, Arnold Weatherup, sighed. ‘Once again,’ he added with feigned reluctance. ‘I thought this one had passed us by, but it would seem the main problem was a leaky spleen all along. You have a sixth sense about these things; not so long ago women like you would have been burned at the stake.’

      ‘And no’ so long ago, Mr Weatherup, doctors like you were robbing graves for anatomy specimens.’

      The consultant laughed. There was always much laughter in this ward; it helped to ease the distress of frequent failure.

      ‘The medical profession has always required its sacrifices,’ the anaesthetist joined in, staring intently at Primrose.

      ‘I don’t think we need to prod or poke around any longer, Sister McBean,’ Weatherup concluded, examining the fresh scar on the upper left abdomen through which the leaky spleen had been removed. ‘I shall leave it to you to weave your charms and spells and hope that this recovery might continue.’ He smiled. ‘By the way, Burke and Hare, the grave robbers – Scots, weren’t they?’

      ‘No, doctor. Only the corpses they sold. Nothing but the best for the medical profession.’

      None of this banter registered within the damaged brain, which was still dazzled and largely blinded by the unaccustomed light. The tar pit, although drying out, still delayed and frustrated the reawakening army of neurological messengers. They leapt from stepping stone to stepping stone, trying to find a way through. Most still failed and some, like those bearing short-term memories, would perish entirely, but others were more persistent, reinvigorated by the blood’s fresh supplies of oxygen, trying first one route, then another, until slowly they came nearer their goal. The stepping stones were growing larger, more messengers were getting through, yet many still arrived out of sequence, jumbling their messages and confusing the brain.

      Of the several hours before the accident and all the many days since there would be no coherent memory, nothing but a dark void. Only through dreams, which have their own unscrambling process for memories, would she be able to revisit any fragment of the torment she had endured, and one fragment she would touch only in her nightmares. A meaningless, unconnected and untranslatable memory but one which was insistent.

      The memory of a face.

      Pale. Gaunt. A young woman with exhausted eyes and drained spirit. A face of parchment skin and the pallor of an aged, extinguished candle. Split across by chapped and shrunken lips. A haunted demeanour squeezed dry of humour, of hope. Trembling.

      The face spoke only of despair, a despair that was to haunt every one of the nightmares which recurred both during the period of wakening and after Isadora Dean had woken from her coma.

      For in every one of those nightmares, the girl was running off with Izzy’s baby.

      

      Michelini couldn’t identify the precise moment he had made up his mind. Perhaps it was because the decision hadn’t been made by him at all; others had made it for him. Maybe it was that weekend in San Francisco spent humping the chief policy adviser to the Californian Congressman who occupied the chair of the House Science, Space & Technology Committee. No sooner had she seen him off at the airport with the promise of the Congressman’s ear – she seemed to control most parts of his anatomy – than he had caught the eye of a United stewardess as she kneeled down to retrieve the linen napkin he had dropped from his dinner tray. It was one of those looks practised by world-weary adults which leaves nothing unspoken. When she returned with a fresh napkin, it had her telephone number on it.

      He knew he had only a few years left before he fell firmly into the category of middle age, when stewardesses would regard his appetites as primarily gastronomic, when they would see only the sagging flesh beneath his eyes instead of the suggestiveness within them and start asking him if he took medication rather than home phone numbers. He couldn’t deny – didn’t want to – that he was fascinated by sex, new conquests; it had been inculcated upon him at his father’s knee and in those days the women simply turned a blind eye and got on with housework and motherhood. At least in first-generation Italian-American families.

      Times changed, women changed. And he, too, had changed. He was no longer the bandito, the sexual athlete of his twenties, yet what he nowadays lacked in stamina he made up for in technique. He loved women. Not just one woman, many women. And he was on a roll, maybe the last one he’d get. Marriage, at least to a wife like his, had just been one of those rotten ideas.

      At the start they had seemed so compatible. She was no innocent maiden but a professional woman in her thirties who knew what it was all about when he had invited her back to his apartment in the Watergate. He had learnt as much as he had taught. As she had mentioned later, it was not the view outside the window that had drawn her there, she’d seen that many times before.

      They had seemed to share similar interests: a defence contractor and a television correspondent both headquartered in the American capital, both used to the frequent travelling and separations of business, both physically relishing their reunions. Marriage had been the great mistake. It was a commitment she seemed incapable of honouring. She had promised to settle down, stop the globetrotting, the foreign adventures, assignment after successful assignment.

      ‘Just one more year,’ she would ask. ‘It’s going too well to walk away from it right now. Just one more year and I’ll get a Stateside editor’s job. Or maybe a slot anchoring my own programme.’

      Then a year had turned to eighteen months, the promises had fallen like last year’s leaves and she had been posted to the European bureau in Paris as their top foreign correspondent, taking the kids with her, flying back every three weeks. Vowing this would be the last time.

      And he realized he was burned up with it all. Not just the absences, although that was difficult enough to deal with. ‘How’s the wife?’ they would ask. ‘How the fuck would I know?’ he had begun to respond. Now she had been out of contact for more than two weeks.

      It was more than the absences. More even than the frustration of reunion when she would arrive back exhausted, emotionally drained, too tired even to cook a proper meal let alone light fires in his bed. It had hit him at the cocktail party in Georgetown the other night. As her professional success had grown, increasingly he came to feel as no more than an appendage.

      ‘Oh, you’re married to Isadora Dean. How wonderful!’ yet another breathless matron had exclaimed. Not ‘Joe Michelini, how nice to meet you and tell me all about yourself’ but ‘Mr Izzy Dean’ all over again and twenty minutes discussing her career before he could break away and grab another Scotch.

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