Andy had long known that his daughter's ambition in life was, simply expressed, never to go without. She'd seen the economies her parents had employed both to save towards the purchase of a country home and to channel funds to Andy's father, whose pension didn't cover his profligate ways. And more than once, especially when met with her parents’ refusal to accede to one of her demands, she'd announced that she would never find herself in a position of having to scrimp and save and deny herself life's simple pleasures, eschewing them for such barren activities as repairing sheets and pillowcases, turning collars on shirts, and darning socks. “You'd better not end up like Granddad, Dad,” she'd said to Andy on more than one occasion. “'cause I plan to spend all my money on me.”
Yet it really wasn't avarice that dominated her behaviour. Rather, it seemed to be a profound vacuity at the heart of her that she sought to fill with material possessions. How often he'd tried to explain to her mankind's essential dilemma: We are born of parents and into families, so we have connections, but we're ultimately alone. Our primitive sense of isolation creates a void within us. That void can be filled only through the nurturing of spirit. “Yes, but I want that motorbike,” she'd respond as if he hadn't just attempted to explain to her why the acquisition of a motorbike would not soothe a spirit whose singular needs were restless for acknowledgement. Or that guitar, she'd reply. Or that set of gold earrings, that trip to Spain, that flashy car. “And if there's money enough to buy it, I don't see why we shouldn't. What's spirit got to do with whether one has the money to buy a motorbike, Dad? Even if I wanted to, I can't spend money on my spirit, can I? So what am I supposed to do with money if I've ever got it? Throw it away?” And she'd list those individuals whose achievements or position garnered them vast reserves of cash: the Royal Family, erstwhile rock stars, business magnates, and entrepreneurs. “They've got houses and cars and boats and planes, Dad,” she would say. “And they're never alone either. And they don't look like they've got some big hollow in the pit of their stomachs, if you ask me.” Nicola was a persuasive supplicant when she wanted something, and nothing he could say was sufficient to make her see that she was merely observing the exterior lives of these people whose possessions she so admired. Who they were inside—and what they felt—was something that no one but them could know. And when she acquired what she had begged to possess, she wasn't able to see that it satisfied her only briefly. Her vision was occluded from this knowledge because what stood in the way was always the desire for the next object that she believed would soothe her soul.
And all of this—which would have made any child difficult to rear—was combined with Nicola's natural propensity for living life on the edge. She'd learned that from him, from watching him shift from persona to persona over the years of undercover work and from listening to the tales told by his colleagues over family dinners when they'd all drunk too much wine. Andy and his wife had kept from their daughter the other side of those acts of bravado that so regaled her. She never knew the personal price her father paid as his health crumbled beneath his mind's inability to divide itself into separate arenas serving who he was and who his work forced him to pretend to be. She was supposed to see her dad as strong, complete, and indomitable. Anything else would shake her foundations, they assumed.
Thus, it was natural that Nicola had thought nothing of it when it came to telling him the truth about her future plans. She'd phoned and asked him if he would come to London. “Let's have a chick-and-Dad date,” she'd said. Delighted to think that his beautiful daughter would want to spend special time with him, he'd gone to London. They'd have their date—whatever she wanted to do, he told her—and he'd cart some of her belongings back to Derbyshire for her summer's employment. It was when he'd looked round her neat bed-sit and rubbed his hands together and asked what she wanted him to load into the Land-Rover that she told him the truth.
She began with “I've changed my mind about working for Will. I've had another think about law as well. That's what I wanted to talk to you about, Dad. Although”—with a smile, and God how lovely she was when she smiled—“our date was wonderful. I've never been to the Planetarium before.”
She made them tea, sat him down with a plate of sandwiches that she took from a Marks & Spencer container, and said, “Did you ever get into the bondage scene when you were undercover, Dad?”
He'd thought at first that they were making polite conversation: an ageing father's reminiscences prompted by his daughter's fond questions. He hadn't done much in's & M, he told her. That would have been handled by another division at the Yard. Oh, he'd had to go into the S 8c M clubs and shops a few times, and there was that party where an idiotic bloke dressed as a schoolgirl was being whipped on a cross. But that had been the extent of it. And thank God for that, because there were some things in life that left one feeling too filthy for a simple bath to cure, and sado-masochism was at the top of his list.
“It's just a lifestyle, Dad,” Nicola told him, reaching for a ham sandwich and chewing it thoughtfully. “After all you've seen, I'm surprised you'd condemn it.”