‘THAT’S good, Jaime. Well done!’
Portia leant over the young boy’s rickety desk, reading what he had written.
‘Thank you, miss!’
A flashing white grin came her way, splitting the dark face looking up at her.
She smiled back. ‘Now, copy the next sentence,’ she said encouragingly, hoping she had got it right in her tentative Spanish. ‘Maria, let’s see what you’ve done so far.’
She moved on to the next child.
It was hot in the classroom, with not a trace of air-conditioning, not even an electric fan. But the children were used to the heat, and the money that keeping cool would cost was better spent on other things.
There was an ever-present need for money. For, however many
children the refuge could take in, there were always more. They came from the punishingly poor slums of the city, where poverty and ill-health made their parents—if they had any—indifferent or incapable of caring for them. The refuge, Portia now knew, offered them the only chance most of them would ever have of getting off the streets, giving them some kind of education—some kind of hope for the future.
It had been a photo that had brought her here. An illustration in a charity fundraising leaflet that had arrived in the mail. It wasn’t a charity she subscribed to, but mailing lists were passed around. This one had been from some kind of third world orphanage, or so it had seemed. She’d placed it in her in-tray. She would write out a cheque some time.
She had picked up the next envelope in the day’s post, ready to slice it open with her paper knife. Her movements had been mechanical, unthinking, but doing something as banal as opening the post had kept her going.
It had been a week then, since she had confronted Diego Saez. A week since the venom had been drained from her in that maelstrom of emotion that had poured so unstoppably from her.
But it had not brought her any peace. How could it?
The old life she’d lived had gone for ever. She could not go back to it as if nothing had happened.
Diego Saez, what he had done to her, had changed her for ever.
Hugh, when he had received her painfully worded resignation, had been on the phone immediately, trying to argue her out of it. She had been terse, uncommunicative about her reasons, merely insisting that she would not be coming back to her job. The very idea of spending her days tracking down the identities of long-dead sitters for minor portraitists had seemed pointless.
But everything had seemed pointless. Nothing had had meaning.
Tom had taken Felicity off on holiday, and somehow she had bade them farewell. Somehow she had endured the other girl’s open happiness, somehow she had reassured a still anxious Tom that she was perfectly all right and did not need to go to the doctor, despite being as thin as a rake.
But though her hands had not shaken any more, though she’d been functioning perfectly well, had been quite capable of going to the shops, cooking for herself, getting through the days, still she had been surrounded by that strange, muffling layer that kept the rest of the world very far away.
Until that charity brochure had arrived. As she’d slid her paper knife into the back of the next envelope in her hand her eyes had dropped to the photo on the leaflet again.
It had been a photo of a boy. Not more than twelve or thirteen. Wearing a ragged pair of trousers, no shoes, a torn shirt. He was lying in a doorway, legs drawn up, head tucked in, arms wrapped around his body, asleep.
There had been something about it. Something that had made her want to stare. The photograph was grainy, she could not see the boy’s face, only the long dark hair of his head. But there had been something about seeing him sleeping in that doorway that had made her look at the photo for a long time.
Then, putting down the envelope in her hands, and her paper knife, she had picked up the leaflet and opened it up.
It had been about a street children’s charity in Latin America. An organisation dedicated to providing a home, shelter and safety for children who had none of those things. There had been more photos inside. Tiny children, dirty and barefoot, picking over a rubbish heap. A family cooking a meal outside a shanty, the mother’s eyes dead, the children all painfully thin, staring blank-faced at the camera..
She had started to read. At the end there’d been a heading: How you can help. She’d placed the leaflet on her desk and opened the drawer to reach for her chequebook. She wouldn’t be able to give now the way she’d used to, but she would still give something.
She had thought of the money she’d paid to Diego Saez. It had come from her private income and her shares, sold off despite the shocked protests of her broker, who had advised her strongly that this was not a good time to sell, and in such quantities, subject to such punitive taxation.
‘I want to raise a million pounds cash, immediately,’ she had told him, and hung up.
A million pounds for sex.
An obscene amount to pay.
But it had been the only way to lance the poison in her veins.