She looked at her friend, the corners of her mouth quivering, her eyes dancing with laughter. Alison stared back, still gaping stupidly. The silence seemed to go on for ever.
Then Alison, too, put her head in her hands and her laughter became so violent that it made no sound, just shook her body like an earthquake, an earthquake that was never going to stop, and when it finally died down and she was able to sit up straight and look towards Rachel directly again, she was smiling the widest, loveliest smile, a smile that was full of warmth and affection but also relief. Enormous relief. She got up and leaned across the table and folded her in a long, passionate hug. ‘Oh Rache,’ she said, ‘you don’t know how good it is to see you.’
‘You too,’ said Rachel.
‘So shall we never, ever do that again?’
‘Do what?’
‘Use social media, when we could be talking to each other.’
‘Yes,’ Rachel said, feelingly. ‘I think that would be a good idea.’
Alison withdrew to her own side of the table, laughed some more and then looked around her, taking in these drab, institutional surroundings as if she was seeing them for the first time, with a kind of wild despair.
‘I hate it in here,’ she said. ‘Thanks so much for coming. I’ve been so lonely. I know I’ve only got a couple of weeks to go, but it’s been horrible. So horrible. When I get out I’m going to find that bitch and I swear to God I’m going to tear her apart …’
‘Josephine, you mean?’ Rachel dropped her voice. ‘How did it happen, Alison? How did you end up in here?’
‘I had this girlfriend,’ Alison began. ‘Called Selena. We were together a couple of years. A lovely girl, but a bit … well, not so bright, sometimes. She was waitressing one night at a big do in Birmingham where Josephine was one of the guests, and somehow they got talking. About me. Josephine heard I was an artist, and she offered to set up a private show for me in London. Selena didn’t tell me who was doing it, she just said there was some benefactor who’d taken a shine to my work. I should really have been a bit more sensible, asked a few more questions. But it seemed like a such a break, you know? I couldn’t believe my luck.
‘I’d been doing a lot of portraits of homeless people, getting them in off the streets and painting them as if they were princes or emperors. A sort of parody of the kind of art that celebrates power and which never gets called “political” even though it obviously is. I’d started doing them when I was at college. Bit of a simple idea, really, but I thought it worked. Anyway, this gallery was hired for the night and all sorts of celebs and bigwigs turned up. It was pretty exciting, to be honest, though I didn’t make much money from it in the end. Most of the pictures were priced at five hundred quid or so and I only sold two. Most of the guests just drank the champagne and then fucked off.
‘Anyway, I know I did the wrong thing. I should have told the benefits office what I’d made. I suppose I thought I could get away with it: I’d been paid in cash and anyway … you know, it was only nine hundred quid. Not such a huge deal, in the scheme of things, I thought. I gave half the money to Mum because she really needed a new cooker: hers hadn’t been working properly all winter. Still, it was enough for Josephine. She wrote a piece about it for her paper …’
‘I know — I saw it. Your mum sent me the link.’
‘… and then the judge decided to make a big example out of it and give me the maximum sentence. So here I am.’
Once the story was told, neither of them spoke for a while. There was nothing Rachel could do to make things better: nothing she could do at all, at that moment, other than reach across and squeeze Alison’s hand again. Alison didn’t respond at first; and her words, when they came, were slow and faltering.
‘One thing about being in here: you get time to think. Especially during those bloody weekends. I mean, there are only so many episodes of Casualty and Pointless Celebrities you can watch. So I’ve been thinking a lot about Josephine, and why she decided to do that to me.’
Rachel shrugged. ‘To sell papers, I suppose.’
‘Sure. And it’s done her no harm at all — Mum told me she’s got her own column now. Weekly slot. So somebody must have liked it. But you know, why me? I know I ticked all her little hate boxes. Black? Yes. Lesbian? Yes. Disabled? Yes. On benefits? Yes. I was getting Disability Living Allowance, Housing Benefit, all sorts … But what had I actually done, to make her hate me so much?’
‘She’s probably just … fucked up herself. Had a crap childhood or something.’
Alison paused, considering this, and said: ‘I got a lot of letters, after the story ran.’
‘Letters of support, you mean?’
‘A couple of those, but mostly they were … well, horrible. Agreeing with Josephine. Blaming me. I mean, I don’t really think anyone saw the fraud itself as that big a deal, so they weren’t blaming me for what I’d done, so much. It was for … It was for being what I am. Who I am.’ She smiled, took a Kleenex out of her pocket and blew her nose violently. ‘But there’s not much I can do about that, is there?’
*
If Rachel wanted to know how her day could become more upsetting, she was about to find out, on her journey home.
The train had just pulled into Didcot Parkway, and she was staring out of the window at the towers of the power station, remembering the village of Little Calverton, and the picturebook thatched cottage Laura and Roger had bought there, with their dream of creating an idyllic childhood for their son. And while she was lost in this memory, her phone rang, tugging her out of it. She answered the calclass="underline" it was Faustina, and she was dreadfully upset, almost unable to speak through her tears.
‘An accident,’ she seemed to be saying. ‘At home.’
It took Rachel a while to realize that by ‘home’ she was referring to the Marshall Islands. It took her even longer to understand what had happened.
‘A bomb? In her garden? Oh Faustina, that’s terrible … unbelievable.’
It seemed that Faustina’s granddaughter, one of her six or seven grandchildren, had been playing in the back garden when she had come across a seventy-year-old hand grenade. These islands had been used as an American military base in the Second World War, as part of the campaign against the Japanese, and there was still, incredibly, a large amount of unexploded ordnance lying around. Faustina’s granddaughter — her second daughter’s daughter, only seven years old — had picked up the grenade and was tossing it around like a tennis ball when it exploded and killed her instantly.
Rachel’s immediate impulse was to advise Faustina and Jules to fly home at once. Only as an afterthought did she ask: ‘What does Lady Gunn say?’
‘She’s not answering her phone. I think she’s on a plane. New York. She’s gone for two weeks. She’ll organize some charity ball, she said.’
‘Well, I’m sure she’d agree.’
Faustina explained that the journey back home was a long and difficult one, involving at least two changes of plane and stopovers in Seoul or Kuala Lumpar or Manila. Even if they flew out of Heathrow this evening, it would take them about thirty-six hours to get there. The cost was enormous: it would eat up most of their savings. But Rachel could see that they had no choice.
‘And the children,’ Faustina said. ‘Somebody has to look after Grace and Sophia.’
‘That’s OK,’ said Rachel. ‘I can look after them. Really. I mean, it’s just a question of feeding them and making sure they’re clean and putting them to bed. I can do that. Don’t worry about it. You go and pack, Faustina. Get ready and go.’