The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [11]
Twenty-four hours later I sat glued to the set again as she gave a press conference in Milan. It was a bravura performance which left me ashamed of my own inability to talk about what had happened to me. I didn’t have Adelina’s courage.
AS SOON AS ADELINA was released, I scoured websites for rented property in the West Country. Of course my mother was unhappy about it, particularly when I told her I planned to take a six-month lease and asked if I could use her maiden name again. Why did I want to do that? What about Reuters? How was I going to live? Why did I keep telling her I was fine when I so obviously wasn’t? What was wrong? And why was I going into hiding the minute Adelina was free?
Once again, my father stepped in. “Let her be,” he said firmly. “If she doesn’t know her own mind at thirty-six, then she never will. Some wounds only heal in fresh air.”
I could—probably should—have told them the truth, and I wonder now why I didn’t. I was their only child and we had a close and supportive relationship despite the often huge distances between us. But my father had so many regrets about abandoning the farm in Zimbabwe that I hesitated to burden him with mine. If he hadn’t been married, he’d have stayed put and barricaded the house out of bloody-mindedness, but my mother forced his hand after one of their neighbours was murdered by Mugabe’s Zanu-PF thugs.
My father never forgave himself for what he saw as capitulation. He felt he should have fought harder for what his family had bought and built, and what was rightfully his. He landed a reasonably paid job in London with a South African wine importer, but he hated the insularity of England, the claustrophobia of city life and the modest rented flat in Kentish Town that was a quarter the size of their farmhouse outside Bulawayo.
I take after my mother in looks, tall and blonde, and my father in character, determinedly independent. On the face of it, my mother appears the least secure of the three of us, yet I wonder if her willingness to admit fear shows that she’s the most self-assured. For my father, running away was an admission of defeat. He thought of himself as strong and resolute, and I realized in the summer of 2004 how humiliating it had been for him to cut and run. He hadn’t found the courage to confront Mugabe’s bullies any more than I could find the courage to confront mine…and we both felt diminished as a result.
The excuse I gave them of wanting time and space to write a book was partially true. I’d produced an outline while still in Baghdad (in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib revelations) and had been offered a publishing contract on the back of it. I saw how twitched I and my colleagues became when the West lost its sheen of moral respectability, and my idea had been to chart the world’s trouble-spots through the eyes of war correspondents. I particularly wanted to explore how constant exposure to danger affects the psyche.
The original advance offered was a pittance but I renegotiated it on the basis that the book would include a full and free account of my kidnapping. It was straightforward fraud, because I signed the contract knowing I would never reveal the truth. Indeed, I couldn’t see myself writing a book at all—I seized up every time I sat in front of a keyboard—but I had no conscience about persuading the publishers I was committed. It was the pretext I needed to take myself out of circulation while I stitched my tattered nerve together again.
I found Barton House on a Dorset agent’s website and chose it because it was the only property available on a six-month lease. It was far too big for one person but the weekly rent was the same as for a three-bedroomed holiday cottage. When I queried this, the agent told me that holiday lets were unreliable and the owner wanted a guaranteed regular income. Since I could afford it, I accepted his explanation and forwarded a money draft under the name I’d used in the hotel, which was my mother’s maiden name—Marianne Curran—but even if he’d told me the truth, that