me the details, Hattie. The only way I could have got your attention in the last few days would have been to turn up at one of those soup kitchens with a sign round my neck saying “Homeless and hungry”. That way you might have offered me a little sympathy and I’d have got a hot meal …’
It wasn’t difficult for Toby to make Hattie feel guilty and inadequate. And even though it did flash through her mind that Toby himself might have nipped into M&S on his way home from work, she turned to him with a remorseful expression and put her arms round him in a placatory way.
‘I’m sorry, Toby.’
‘Look, Hattie, I’m going through a bad time myself at the moment. Saturday night’s very important to me and I want you to help me with it—’
‘Saturday night?’ Hattie asked blankly.
‘The dinner, darling. For the Chairman of UCO and all those involved in the case. You know how important it is to me – the first time I’ve hosted something for business at home. Surely you haven’t forgotten?’
‘Of course not. I’m sorry,’ Hattie said, although, in fact, the events of the last week had put his dinner completely out of her mind.
‘I want you to be the perfect hostess on Saturday, Hattie. In the morning we’ll have to go shopping – flowers, candles, a dress that will fit the occasion. You will be co-operative, won’t you?’
‘Of course,’ she said, offering him her most radiant smile.
Toby ordered a takeaway and they ate it whilst he gave her brief biographical details of the guests he had invited to the dinner and offered her – in a ten-point note he had carefully written out – various suitable topics of conversation. Hattie looked at the list with growing alarm. She knew very little about any of things Toby had deemed acceptable – the Millennium Dome, the redevelopment of the Opera House, EU economic policy, cars, Bill Gates, cricket, rugby, shooting (hadn’t they banned shooting?), skiing and trout fishing.
‘I’m not sure I’ll be able to say a great deal, Toby,’ she said.
‘Well, try and read up on those things. The Chairman is a member of Lords and heavily into field sports,’ he said commandingly.
He was very relieved that Claire was going to be there, in her capacity as the corporate PR for UCO, to help him keep an eye on Hattie. He had also invited Jon, not as a partner for Claire (heaven forbid) but because he had, of late, become something of a celebrity in business circles. He was the current enfant terrible of advertising, responsible for a series of shocking campaigns – most famously the nineties relaunch of a fifties-style uplift bra that had featured a number of provocative posters that had been outrageously successful. His presence round the table would impress the Chairman (who would probably also be happy to talk about uplift bras).
Toby was a little worried that Hattie might get into some awful philosophical debate with Jon that might cause problems but he felt sure that Claire would be able to deflect any trouble.
Hattie was so keen to make amends for her behaviour that week that she offered, when they had finished their meal, to run him a hot bath and give him a massage. Whilst he sat in the bath she warmed some aromatherapy oil and turned down the lights in their bedroom.
Sensuality did not come easily to Hattie. She had been, her mother had always said, a late bloomer sexually. Her periods had not started until she was nearly sixteen and she had never had the kind of teen crushes enjoyed by her female peers. Toby had been her first serious boyfriend. Her obvious lack of experience and confidence – she had grown up in the shadow of her mother’s legendary beauty – had never really left her, and at times like these – massaging her man as an obvious prelude to sex – she felt as if she were only playing at being grown-up. She was doing – out of a sense of duty really – what she had read women should do in the women’s magazines she occasionally, rather furtively, bought. It didn’t give her any sense of pleasure. In fact she felt rather absurd, sitting astride Toby’s back, working warm oil into his well-toned body. But even though she doubted the skill of her touch he seemed to like it and within a very few minutes he had turned over and grabbed her so that, feeling even more awkward and ill at ease, she was sitting astride Toby’s front working his cock into her pale, slender body.
Because of the seriousness of the crime that Lisa had committed – the actual charge was attempted murder – Hattie was seeing her three times a week. It was, she thought, probably the most difficult case of her career. Generally her patients tended to be either adolescents involved in less severe criminal cases (referred on by juvenile courts) or young children who were the victims of some kind of abuse. It was unusual to encounter a child of Lisa’s age – she was just nine – who had been involved in a violent crime.
They had already fallen into a routine in their sessions. The first half an hour or so they would sit together on the little sofa in Hattie’s office and look at the books. Lisa loved books, probably because they had been denied her by her parents. Each time she came she would pick a book for Hattie to read. And then, if it was progressing well and Lisa was relaxed, they would try to talk about those things that might have a bearing on her behaviour – her parents, her siblings, their Church, her isolation at her school.
Today she had picked out a Roald Dahl book for Hattie to read – The BFG – and, as she had opened the first page, Lisa had crept up and sat on her lap looking uncertainly at Hattie, fearful that she might – like so many other people who knew the details of her crime – recoil from her.
Hattie smiled at her, eager to encourage the trust she was building up with the child. She had come to see Lisa as she might any other patient – as damaged, vulnerable and in desperate need of affection and acceptance. She put one arm around her as she read and Lisa laid her head against Hattie’s shoulder.
She seemed genuinely absorbed in The BFG, smiling at the funny bits, looking a little concerned about the frightening moment when the heroine, Sophie, was snatched from her bed by a twenty-four-foot giant.
‘He’s like Goliath …’ she said.
‘Who, Lisa?’
‘The BFG,’ she said eagerly, ‘and Sophie is like David.’
Lisa’s allusion to the story of David and Goliath was the only indication in her reaction to Roald Dahl’s sometimes sinister story that gave Hattie any inkling that she was at all different from any other child of her age. Most nine-year-olds had a fascination for the macabre, the gruesome and the grotesque. It was just that for Lisa the bloodcurdling stories that had ruled her early life had not been taken from the fairy tales of regular children’s fiction. They had come from the Bible.
‘I’ll have to finish there, Lisa, because we have run out of time. But we’ll read some more next time.’
‘Oh please,’ said Lisa, giving Hattie such a sweet smile that she was suddenly moved to hug her.
‘Are they being kind to you at Linton House?’ Hattie said gently.
Lisa looked down at the floor.
‘Don’t you like it there?’
‘They don’t let me play with the other children …’ she said, tears falling down her face, ‘and when Mummy comes to see me I don’t want her to go.’
It was the first time that Lisa had cried and Hattie leant down and held her, and attempted to offer her comfort. After Lisa had left, led reluctantly away by a social worker, Hattie replayed the tape she had recorded of that afternoon’s session.
Some days, and this was one of them, Hattie found her work emotionally exhausting. God knows, she thought as she prepared to leave the office later that evening, how she was going to cope with Toby’s dinner party. As she put Lisa’s notes in her briefcase to take home to study further, she wondered if she would be able to put aside her work – the fate of this little girl – in order to be that weekend the woman Toby wanted her to be.
Hattie emerged from the changing room wearing the dress Toby had