Hilary Bonner
The Cruelty of Morning
FOR MY MOTHER, with love and gratitude.
FOR MY FATHER, in memory always.
AND FOR CLIVE, for never doubting...
Part One
The Cruelty of Morning
It is just before dawn
and the street
beneath my feet
is colder
than the air.
I have left you behind
darling
Left you in the night
where you belong
In the warm sticky darkness
of my bed
In the raging sweet madness
of my head.
I have left you behind
darling
Bathed in the glory
moonlight creates
Cursed eternally
when daylight breaks.
There is no place for you
darling
in the chill of dawning
No room for you
darling
In the cruelty of morning.
Prologue
Jenny Stone was away with the fishes. Her powerful crawl had taken her right out to sea beyond the last of the rocks that stretched jaggedly away from the cliffs to the south of Pelham Bay. She paused for a while in her strenuous swimming, and floated, arms outstretched, eyes shut, basking in the hot sunshine like a contented whale. It was the first Sunday in August 1970, another gorgeous day in an unusually hot summer. A day Jenny, then only seventeen, would never forget.
A piece of seaweed brushed against her face and she flicked it idly away. A large lump of wood bumped her right shoulder, and Jenny, eyes still closed, reached out with the fingertips of her right hand.
She touched something very cold and clammy. Suddenly her sense of smell was overcome with a stench she had never experienced before — yet she recognised it. And before her eyes were properly open, Jenny knew what she was going to see.
Next to her in the water was the body of a young woman. She was naked to the waist. Her bright red skirt, torn and ragged, billowed with the rhythmic roll of the ocean. It was this material, hanging on the body in shreds, that Jenny had mistaken for seaweed. The dead woman’s legs and arms floated stiff and angular as wood. Her face was turned to one side, eyes open and bulging, looking at Jenny in sightless horror. For a brief terrible instant the two faces, one full of life and vitality and hope for the future, the other distorted by violent death, were pressed together by the currents.
One
It had been just another row in a newspaper office. Her reaction had been way over the top and she already knew it. She had very nearly broken down and wept.
The tears pricked persistently against the back of her eyes. She just succeeded in keeping them back. Only once before, in twenty years, had Fleet Street made her cry.
Then she had been a young reporter of twenty-four, and following a particularly virulent, although not that unusual, attack from her news editor, had fled from the newsroom to the ladies’ loo, desperately biting her bottom lip until, with relief, she could thrust shut the door of a cubicle. And there, alone with a lavatory pan, the floods of despair had overcome her. She had been two years into her first job on a national daily at the time, and already hardened enough to be angry at her own weakness. She had indulged in a good cry and then gone back to work. What else?
On her return to the newsroom, tear damage repaired as much as possible, the old-hand reporter whom she sat alongside had not looked up from his typewriter.
‘I’m surprised at you, Jen,’ he said quietly. ‘Letting the old bugger get to you. Thought you knew better.’
Now she was forty-two. Of course she knew better. She had coped with the toughest of jobs for twenty years, she had travelled around the world on the biggest and best stories, she had loved almost every minute of it, and she had finally made it to assistant editor of one of the top tabloid papers, The Globe. Well — until a few minutes previously she had been. So perhaps she didn’t know better, after all.
It was May 1995. Early afternoon on an unseasonably hot day. She realised suddenly that she had been almost running through the streets. The silk shirt beneath the jacket of her linen suit was damp with sweat. The sleeves had started to wrinkle seriously under the arms and around the elbows. In the middle of everything else some small distant part of her brain sent a sharp reminder that she really must never buy linen again, however attractive the stuff looked on a hanger in a shop window.
She put a hand up to flick ineffectively at the fringe of her thick brown hair — it was stuck to her forehead. Her hand, she noticed in a detached sort of way, was shaking.
She paused and stepped to one side of the throng of people hurrying along the pavement. Typical London. Everyone rushing about trance-like. You could strip naked and stand screaming and nobody would notice. If they did they would quickly look away.
She stepped into the welcome shadow of a towering office block and leaned heavily against the wall. She was breathing in quick gasps, like a panting dog. Ridiculous.
‘Come on Jen, pull yourself together,’ she told herself.
Two passing young girls in micro-skirts fleetingly caught her eye and quickly looked away. True to London form.
What was left of her beleaguered brain shot off at a tangent again. ‘I dressed like that once, several million years ago,’ she thought to herself. This time her lips did not move. Definitely no more talking to herself in the street. Whatever next?
She fished in her shoulder bag for her mobile phone and dialled a number.
‘Yo,’ said a voice at the other end of the phone. She felt immediately more cheerful. A little light relief beckoned.
‘Yo? What the hell does that mean? Have you joined the American marines?’
The man’s voice became weary. ‘Jennifer, how lovely to hear from you.’
‘You’re a liar, Dominic. What are you doing at home in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon anyway?’
‘I’m resting.’
‘You’re what?’
‘I’m resting. I have been suffering from exhaustion. Miles and I discussed it sensibly and I now take two afternoons’ rest a week.’
‘God, Dominic, you are a wimp.’
‘No doubt by your Amazonian standards I am, Jennifer. But we can’t all be that butch, can we? Would you like to speak to my wife?’
‘Yes, I would like to speak to Anna. But you know, try as I do, I still can’t think of her as your wife, Dominic. I just can’t.’
Anna McDonald, her oldest and best friend, came on the line.
‘Have you really got nothing better to do with your day than bait poor Dominic?’
‘Not entirely one-sided, Anna. He’s improving. And, actually, from now on I may indeed have nothing better to do with my day.’
‘What?’
‘Come to Joe Allen for supper and I’ll tell you all about it.’
‘Tell me now. I can’t come to supper. It’s Dominic’s half day.’
‘No supper, no story. All will be told only over many large margaritas. Incidentally, how does Dominic get to fix himself two afternoons off a week?’
‘Because he’s brilliant. He’s the best computer scientist in Britain. At least, he’s convinced his bosses he is. And that’s real brilliance.’
‘It’s obscene.’
‘And you’re jealous.’
‘True. I’ll pick you up seven-thirty.’
‘If you are driving I’m definitely not coming. I remember the last time... just. And you insisted you were on the wagon...’
‘OK. I’ll get a taxi... Christ, you’ve reminded me! Brain death is setting in. I stormed off like a half-wit and left the car in the office car park. I’d better get it out of there before somebody else does that for me.’