Chapter 1

August 2000

She always felt exactly the same. It surprised her. Relieved. Excited. And a bit ashamed. Walking away, knowing she'd done it, resisting the temptation to look back, carefully subdued--she could still remember old Bob at the news agency telling her one of the prime qualities for a good reporter was acting ability. Of course, the shame was pretty rare, but if it was a real tragedy, then it did lurk about, the feeling that she was a parasite, making capital out of someone else's unhappiness.

This had been a horror to do; a baby in its pushchair, hit by a stolen car; the driver hadn't stopped, had been caught by the police fifty miles away. The baby was in intensive care and it was touch and go whether he would live; the parents had been angry as well as grief--stricken, sitting, clutching each other's hands on the bench just outside the hospital door.

"He'll get what--three years?" the young father had said, lighting his ninth cigarette of the interview--Jocasta always counted things like that, it helped add colour. "And then get on with his life. Our little chap's only had eight months and he could be gone forever. It makes me sick. I tell you, they should lock them up forever for this sort of thing, lock them up and throw away the key--"

She could see her headline then, and hated herself for seeing it.


***

While she was in the middle of writing her story, she got an e--mail from the office: could she do a quick piece on Pauline Prescott's hair (a hot topic ever since her husband had made it his excuse for taking the car out to drive a hundred yards); they would send a picture down the line to her. Jocasta, wrenching her mind off the desperately injured baby, wondered if any other job in the world imposed such extraordinarily diverse stress at such short notice. She filed that copy via her mobile and had just returned to the baby when her phone rang.

"Is that you, Miss--"

"Jocasta, yes," she said, recognising the voice of the baby's father. "Yes, Dave, it's me. Any news?"

"Yes," he said. "Yes, he's going to be all right, he's going to pull through, we just saw him, he actually managed a smile!"

"Dave, I'm so glad, so very glad," said Jocasta, hugely relieved, not only that the baby was going to live but that she was so touched by it, looking at her screen through a blur of tears.

Not a granite--hearted reporter yet, then.

She filed the story, and checked her e--mails; there was an assortment of junk, one from her brother telling her their mother was missing her and to phone her, a couple from friends--and one that made her smile. "Hello, Heavenly Creature. Meet me at the House when you're back. Nick."

She mailed Nick back, telling him she'd be there by nine, then, rather reluctantly, dialled her mother's number. And flicking through her diary, knowing her mother would want to make some arrangement for the week, realised it was exactly fifteen years to the day since she had set off for Thailand, in search of adventure. She always remembered it. Well, of course she would. Always. She wondered if the other two did. And what they might be doing. They'd never had their promised reunion. She thought that every year as well, how they had promised one another--and never kept the promise. Probably just as well, though. Given everything that had happened...

Nick Marshall was the political editor on the Sketch, Jocasta's paper; he worked not in the glossy building on Canary Wharf but in one of the shabby offices above the press galleries at the House of Commons. "More like what newsrooms used to be," one of the old--timers had told...

 

"It's time Americans caught Vincenzi fever, because it's almost a crime she's not better known here . . . Everything is outsized in Vincenzi's fiction: sex, money, personality, emotions, plot. And yet she gets all the details--about human behavior and women's conflicted lives--just right. It's perfect escapism."

 

"She's the plot-twist queen."

 

"Vincenzi pulls out all the stops in this orchestral saga. . . . The mystery of who [Baby Bianca's] mother is serves as the spine of this fat, satisfying novel . . . The various narrative themes crescendo through several all-hands-on-deck scenes . . . the women are, without exception, multifaceted, smart and brave, and their happiness is hard won. A U.K. bestseller, the book offers major escape and abandon for summer."

 

Sheer Abandon by Penny Vincenzi
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