The Touch of Innocents Read Online Free PDF Page B

tone left no doubt as to the desires of the MoD bureaucracy. The Duster was their virility symbol, the project which would redeem them in the eyes of their Whitehall colleagues after years of being squeezed dry by Governments in search of another billion or so with which to build a reelection platform.
    Mentally he ticked off the three alternatives. He could refuse to back the project, thereby earning the gratitude of his hard-pressed Cabinet colleagues. Yet it would also earn him the relentless opposition of those powerful and privileged men within the defence establishment who had killed off more thanone of his predecessors. Anyway, political gratitude, Devereux had learned, could be exhausted more quickly than a soda siphon.
    On the other hand he could fight for the project in a public battle which would inevitably be bloody. But whose blood? In victory he would be cast as the most dynamic and successful Minister in the Government, an international figure of stature, a skilled negotiator, visionary politician and ever-rising star, the man most likely to. He could write his own accolade.
    Yet if he fought, and lost, it would be a personal disaster. The successor shorn of success. The defence chief who retreated. Who came, who saw, who surrendered.
    What would his father have done? Got drunk. Then beaten his wretched wife and disappeared to that end of the manor house where the housekeeper lived. The young housekeeper. There had been a steady stream of housekeepers passing through the manor house, all of them young, and all chosen by his father.
    Devereux bit his lip. His father would have fought, and failed. But Devereux wasn’t like his father. He wouldn’t fail.
    And, anyway, he had no need for young housekeepers.
    In the blackness of her mind there was life.
    She couldn’t identify it as such, it kept changing shape, colour, intensity. But it was there. It was as though she and her senses were floating in the vacuum of space, approaching each other, recognizing each other, almost touching, with only the slightest nudge needed to bring them together but unable to find that final extra adjustment.
    Frustration. Anger. I feel, therefore I am. More frustration.
    The bundles of stimuli which were her inchoate thoughts passed by and were lost in the blackness or burned up like a lost body re-entering the earth’s atmosphere.
    She preferred those which burned. She took comfort in the light, and all the time there seemed to be more brilliance entering her world.
    Then came the moment when the light turned into the recognizable colours of a rainbow and the dark veil began to lift.
    ‘Mummie-e-e-e-e!’
    The first time she had comprehended any sound, the first time Benjy had uttered any word, since the accident. Her eyes opened, were assaulted by the light but struggled and blinked and gradually found focus until she could see those around her – the diminutive consultant neurologist, Weatherup, with a constrained smile of professional triumph; Primrose, the student nurse, whose smiles showed no restraint at all; McBean, who radiated a quiet sense of privilege at having been party to another of life’s minor miracles, and on whose ample blue-cottoned bosom wriggled the animated form of a young, dark-haired boy.
    ‘B … Ben … Benjamin?’ She formed the sound in the way a foal attempts its first step. Quickly they took away the cuffs and clips of the monitoring equipment so that mother and son could be reunited in an uninhibited and uninterrupted embrace. Soon Benjamin, overwhelmed, had fashioned a face like that of a latex troll and was tearfully expressing his pleasure and relief. Tears began to form in the corner of his mother’s eyes, too, but as yet she had not found the strength or understanding to express her emotions.
    ‘Where am I? What happened?’ she whispered eventually, her hand reaching out instinctively to straighten the young boy’s hair, but the effort proved too much.
    ‘Och, so you’re from across