Lethal White

Not now. Not now.
He was talking to her, but she couldn’t understand a word. The world was
fragmenting again, full of terror and danger, and he was a blur as he handed her
eyeliner and a bottle of drops to moisten her contact lenses.
“Oh,” Robin gasped at random. “Great. Excuse me. Bathroom.”
She stumbled to the door. Two people were coming towards her down the
corridor, their voices fuzzy and indistinct as they greeted her. Hardly knowing
what she responded, she half-ran past them towards the Ladies.
A woman from the Secretary for Health’s office greeted her from the sink
where she was applying lipstick. Robin blundered blindly past, locking the
cubicle door with fumbling fingers.
It was no use trying to suppress the panic: that only made it fight back, trying
to bend her to its will. She must ride it out, as though the fear was a bolting
horse, easing it onto a more manageable course. So she stood motionless, palms
pressed against the partition walls, speaking to herself inside her head as though
she were an animal handler, and her body, in its irrational terror, a frantic prey
creature.
You’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe…
Slowly, the panic began to ebb, though her heart was still leaping erratically.
At last, Robin removed her numb hands from the walls of the cubicle and
opened her eyes, blinking in the harsh lights. The bathroom was quiet.
Robin peered out of the cubicle. The woman had left. There was nobody
there except her own pale reflection in the mirror. After splashing cold water on
her face and patting it dry with paper towels, she readjusted her clear-lensed

---

glasses and left the bathroom.
An argument seemed to be in progress in the office she had just left. Taking a
deep breath, she re-entered the room.
Jasper Chiswell turned to glare at her, his wiry mass of gray hair sticking out
around his pink face. Izzy was standing behind her desk. The stranger was still
there. In her shaken state, Robin would have preferred not to be the focus of
three pairs of curious eyes.
“What just happened?” Chiswell demanded of Robin.
“Nothing,” said Robin, feeling cold sweat erupting again under her dress.
“You ran out of the room. Did he—” Chiswell pointed at the dark man, “—
do something to you? Make a pass?”
“Wha—? No! I didn’t realize he was in here, that’s all—he spoke and I
jumped. And,” she could feel herself blushing harder than ever, “then I needed
the loo.”
Chiswell rounded on the dark man.
“So why are you here so early, eh?”
Now, at last, Robin realized that this was Raphael. She had known from the
pictures she had found online that this half-Italian was an exotic in a family that
was otherwise uniformly blond and very English in appearance, but had been
wholly unprepared for how handsome he was in the flesh. His charcoal-gray suit,
white shirt and a conventional dark blue spotted tie were worn with an air that
none of the other men along the corridor could muster. So dark-skinned as to
appear swarthy, he had high cheekbones, almost black eyes, dark hair worn long
and floppy, and a wide mouth that, unlike his father’s, had a full upper lip that
added vulnerability to his face.
“I thought you liked punctuality, Dad,” he said, raising his arms and letting
them fall in a slightly hopeless gesture.
His father turned to Izzy. “Give him something to do.”
Chiswell marched out. Mortified, Robin headed for her desk. Nobody spoke
until Chiswell’s footsteps had died away, then Izzy spoke.
“He’s under all kinds of stress just now, Raff, babes. It isn’t you. He’s
honestly going berserk about the smallest things.”
“I’m so sorry,” Robin forced herself to say to Raphael. “I completely
overreacted.”
“No problem,” he replied, in the kind of accent that is routinely described as
“public school.” “For the record, I’m not, in fact, a sex offender.”
Robin laughed nervously.
“You’re the goddaughter I didn’t know about? Nobody tells me anything.
Venetia, yeah? I’m Raff.”

---

“Um—yes—hi.”
They shook hands and Robin retook her seat, busying herself with some
pointless paper shuffling. She could feel her color fluctuating.
“It’s just crazy at the moment,” Izzy said, and Robin knew that she was
trying, for not entirely unselfish reasons, to persuade Raphael that their father
wasn’t as bad to work with as he might appear. “We’re understaffed, we’ve got
the Olympics coming up, TTS is constantly going off on Papa—”
“What’s going off on him?” asked Raphael, dropping down into the sagging
armchair, loosening his tie and crossing his long legs.
“TTS,” Izzy repeated. “Lean over and put on the kettle while you’re there,
Raff, I’m dying for a coffee. TTS. It stands for Tinky the Second. It’s what Fizz
and I call Kinvara.”
The many nicknames of the Chiswell family had been explained to Robin
during her office interludes with Izzy. Izzy’s older sister Sophia was “Fizzy,”
while Sophia’s three children rejoiced in the pet names of “Pringle,” “Flopsy”
and “Pong.”
“Why ‘Tinky the Second’?” asked Raff, unscrewing a jar of instant coffee
with long fingers. Robin was still very aware of all his movements, though
keeping her eyes on her supposed work. “What was Tinky the First?”
“Oh, come on, Raff, you must have heard about Tinky,” said Izzy. “That
ghastly Australian nurse Grampy married last time round, when he was getting
senile. He blew most of the money on her. He was the second silly old codger
she’d married. Grampy bought her a dud racehorse and loads of horrible jewelry.
Papa nearly had to go to court to get her out of the house when Grampy died.
She dropped dead of breast cancer before it got really expensive, thank God.”
Startled by this sudden callousness, Robin looked up.
“How d’you take it, Venetia?” Raphael asked as he spooned coffee into
mugs.
“White, no sugar, please,” said Robin. She thought it best if she maintained a
low profile for a while, after her recent incursion into Winn’s office.
“TTS married Papa for his dosh,” Izzy plowed on, “and she’s horse-mad like
Tinky. You know she’s got nine now? Nine!”
“Nine what?” said Raphael.
“Horses, Raff!” said Izzy impatiently. “Bloody uncontrollable, bad-
mannered, hot-blooded horses that she mollycoddles and keeps as child
substitutes and spends all the money on! God, I wish Papa would leave her,” said
Izzy. “Pass the biscuit tin, babes.”
He did so. Robin, who could feel him looking at her, maintained the pretense
of absorption in her work.

---

The telephone rang.
“Jasper Chiswell’s office,” said Izzy, trying to prize off the lid of the biscuit
tin one-handed, the receiver under her chin. “Oh,” she said, suddenly cool.
“Hello, Kinvara. You’ve just missed Papa…”
Grinning at his half-sister’s expression, Raphael took the biscuits from her,
opened them and offered the tin to Robin, who shook her head. A torrent of
indistinguishable words was pouring from Izzy’s earpiece.
“No… no, he’s gone… he only came over to say hello to Raff…”
The voice at the end of the phone seemed to become more strident.
“Back at DCMS, he’s got a meeting at ten,” said Izzy. “I can’t—well,
because he’s very busy, you know, the Olymp—yes… goodbye.”
Izzy slammed the receiver down and struggled out of her jacket.
“She should take another rest cure. The last one doesn’t seem to have done
her much good.”
“Izzy doesn’t believe in mental illness,” Raphael told Robin.
He was contemplating her, still slightly curious and, she guessed, trying to
draw her out.
“Of course I believe in mental illness, Raff!” said Izzy, apparently stung. “Of
course I do! I was sorry for her when it happened—I was, Raff—Kinvara had a
stillbirth two years ago,” Izzy explained, “and of course that’s sad, of course it is,
and it was quite understandable that she was a bit, you know, afterwards, but—
no, I’m sorry,” she said crossly, addressing Raphael, “but she uses it. She does,
Raff. She thinks it entitles her to everything she wants and—well, she’d have
been a dreadful mother, anyway,” said Izzy defiantly. “She can’t stand not being
the center of attention. When she’s not getting enough she starts her little girl act
—don’t leave me alone, Jasper, I get scared when you’re not here at night.
Telling stupid lies… funny phone calls to the house, men hiding in the
flowerbeds, fiddling with the horses.”
“What?” said Raphael, half-laughing, but Izzy cut him short.
“Oh, Christ, look, Papa’s left his briefing papers.”
She hurried out from behind her desk, snatched a leather folder off the top of
the radiator and called over her shoulder, “Raff, you can listen to the phone
messages and transcribe them for me while I’m gone, OK?”
The heavy wooden door thudded shut behind her, leaving Robin and Raphael
alone. If she had been hyperaware of Raphael before Izzy had gone, now he
seemed to Robin to fill the entire room, his olive dark eyes on her.