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She responded to his expression of unashamed lust, lying back on the carpet and drawing him on top of her, between her parted legs.
There’d been none of the hesitancy or self-consciousness of first-time sex, but all of its breathless edge. Unable to resist his urgency, his driving demand for satiation, Judith had been crazy with passion. Their rising cries became noisy and unrestrained, as their rhythm grew faster and faster. She had urged him hoarsely on, through territory so well known and so loved – and yet so utterly exhilarating.
And afterwards, when they had both been to the edge and over it, they lay together in front of the fire, flooded with bliss. As she basked in the afterglow, a silent tear trickled down Judith’s cheek. Wrapped up in him, she hadn’t felt so safe, so sure of herself, for years. For Chris, holding her folded into his body, it had been like coming home.
Tonight, as they opened the front door of the cottage, after another day of country walks and fire-lit passion, they were both stirred by an anticipation of a different kind. Chris walked across the sitting room and switched on the TV. Glancing at his watch he saw it was half-past eight – Claude Bonning was doing an exclusive, pre-ceremony interview live on the balcony of the Great Room, while behind him GlobeWatch’s high-profile guests were dining.
Turning to Judith, he slipped his arm around her waist. ‘So,’ he murmured, ‘we’re on countdown.’
Making chit-chat with captains of industry was not generally something that came easily to Ellen Kennedy, and that night was no exception. She found herself at a table of corporate warriors with a combined net worth greater than that of the continent of Africa, and whose sole obsession, it seemed, was the latest activity of international stock markets. Usually, she would have seen this as a networking opportunity, a chance to broaden her professional horizons and, who knows, maybe stimulate interest in the research work she did. But not tonight. To begin with, she was feeling daunted by the task she faced. And besides, after tonight, she realised, she would have no shortage of opportunity to explain to people what she did outside the lecture theatre.
The mood in the Great Room, which had started out as one of high spirits, moved up a key as guests began dinner. Wine flowed freely, as first the hors d’oeuvres were consumed, then the entrées, a detectable buzz of anticipation developing as waiters swooped and fluttered about the tables and the minutes ticked closer to the main event. In front of each guest was an Order of Ceremonies card, bearing the GlobeWatch logo, and outlining how, after coffee had been served following the main course, the awards ceremony would begin. Up at the front of the room, on stage behind a podium, a massive, wall-to-wall screen flanked by faux Doric columns and towering flower arrangements, bore the GlobeWatch logo projected in blue and green. All very theatrical, Ellen Kennedy couldn’t help observing. Around the room, as the noise level steadily increased, there was one table in particular that seemed to be enjoying itself. Seeing her looking over, the businessman to her left followed her gaze.
‘Jacob Strauss,’ he noted, ‘and that Lombard guy, what’s his name? Mike Cullen.’
‘You know them?’ she asked.
‘Know of them.’
‘Hmm.’
It wouldn’t be long, she mused, before very few people couldn’t make the same claim.
Finally, coffee had been served, the lights dimmed, and after a hush of anticipation had descended, came a blast of ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ from massive speakers in all four corners of the room, together with a spectacular display of projected computer graphics on the front screen. Then, across to the podium strode Claude Bonning. His opening address was upbeat and assured. Despite a few nervous glances in the direction of Ellen’s table, he explained bravely what GlobeWatch was, and why it had been created, before welcoming the first celebrity speaker of the evening to present the first award. He was, pronounced Claude, the world’s leading motivational guru, a man who closely advised the US President, who had helped BMW achieve fifteen percent performance increases, and who had coached British swimming champion Chris Parry, who went on to win five gold medals at the Olympics.
‘Your majesties, my lords, ladies and gentlemen,’ Claude drove up the excitement, ‘will you please welcome to the GlobeWatch Awards Ceremony this evening, Dr Anthony Black.’
There was more music and a tumult of applause. This whole thing, thought Ellen, had all the razzmatazz of an Oscars ceremony. On her Order of Ceremonies card she’d noted that a production company had been brought in to ensure the evening’s flawless progress. In fact, before sitting down for dinner, she’d been approached by a young man bristling with mobile phones, to be asked about her preference for the height of the podium, and did she have any other needs. She’d surprised him by handing over a series of photographic slides she wished to use. He hadn’t expected them, he said, but would ensure they were all set up ready for use.
Now, as she took in the music, the lighting, the dramatic setting, she realised it had all been designed to create maximum excitement. The first speaker, Dr Anthony Black, had no doubt been selected for the same reason. A highly effective speaker, he broke the ice with some well-directed humour, before seizing control of the audience with a few of his key motivational concepts. In a few spellbinding minutes he succeeded in communicating a vision of corporate success limited only by the imagination, of global interconnection bringing the human race closer together, and of a future of transformation and enlightenment. By the end of it his audience were, metaphorically, if not literally, on the edges of their chairs. When he announced the winner of the first category – Human Potential Development – the result was greeted with triumphal applause.
And so the evening went on. Speech after speech. Prize after prize. All building up to the grand finale. Jacob Strauss’s first appearance on stage to collect the prize for Best Developing Nations Employer was greeted with an applause so great it had the chandeliers clinking. On his second and third appearances, his reception seemed even more thunderous still. But Dr Ellen Kennedy was not one of those clapping. Ignoring the curious glances of her fellow diners, she sat watching the proceedings with an expression that was deliberately blank. All would very soon be revealed, she decided. Her time would come.
And come it did. The triumphal music leading up to the ultimate prize of the evening was even more extravagant than all that had preceded it. Claude Bonning once again took to the stage, pronouncing Dr Kennedy to be ‘One of the foremost thinkers of our time. A celebrated academic. A global leader in the field of corporate citizenship. Acclaimed internationally for her work in developing countries. Author of three important books …’
When she stepped up to the stage, a diminutive figure amid the massive floral bouquets and Doric columns and GlobeWatch logo, the applause was deafening.
Opening out her folder on the podium, she carefully donned her reading glasses and glanced about the cavernous room. After forty years of addressing large, and not always well-disciplined gatherings, she had an extremely well-developed instinct for ensuring the undivided attention of all present. And right now she used the power of the pause: a period of silence, longer than most speakers would feel comfortable with, standing with calm assurance for long enough so that when she spoke her first words, every single person there was desperate to hear what she had to say.
When, finally, she did begin, she started in a most unexpected fashion.
‘Yesterday I spoke to a young lad called Vishnu,’ she told her audience. ‘He was surprisingly cheerful for a boy living in circumstances which, I suspect, are a lot less fortunate than the average twelve-year-old in Britain. Vishnu has no idea where his parents are, or even if they are alive – he last saw them when he was seven. He lives with his aunt and uncle, and shares a cramped room with three cousins in a semi-detached house in London. The family can’t afford bus fares, so he has to walk three miles to school
every day. He has no spending money except for the £5 a week he makes on his paper round. So there’s no question of video games, or designer trainers, or trips to the movies – all of which are considered, these days, to be a normal part of growing up.
‘But Vishnu considers himself to be extremely fortunate. In fact, he thinks his life is one of luxury. All the more surprising, when you consider what terrible injuries he has suffered.’
As her first slide appeared, there was a massive, collective gasp from the audience, which had no idea where this speech was heading, but was utterly engrossed nonetheless. The slide showed the back of a naked child, horrific weals scorched across his back, buttocks and thighs, as though he’d been branded with a steel bar.
‘These burns were no accident,’ Ellen continued calmly, ‘they were deliberate burns inflicted by the man who owned Vishnu, so that he couldn’t sit down.’
Expressions of shock had turned into a rumble of outrage.
‘Vishnu’s crime was to complain, after working for fifteen hours, that he could no longer thread a needle because his hands were shaking. He wanted a rest. His owner decided to teach him a lesson he would never forget.
‘But Vishnu is quite right to consider himself one of the lucky ones,’ she continued. ‘He has relatives in Britain who came to the rescue. For the sum of just one hundred pounds, very much less than the cost of each of our meals here tonight, he was saved from another four years of slavery. The same can’t be said of the children he left behind.’
Her second slide had been taken from the roof of the building across from the Starwear shed in Jaipur. Blown up across the whole of the screen, it showed dozens of child slaves bent over benches, a scene of unimaginable horror. Children were clearly shackled to their benches,with scarred backs and bruised faces, it was an image of the most Dickensian squalor. This time, there was more than simply a gasp from the audience. Voices were raised in indignation, above a rising tide of disapproval.
