For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
What if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse –
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Easter 1916
William Butler Yeats.
Chapter 1
Scarlett set the alarm on her new cream Mini Cooper. It emitted a satisfying beep as she crossed the underground parking lot of the Examiner Building. She felt a surge of pure joy. For the first time in her whole life, everything was perfect. She looked great, an expensive new wardrobe saw to that, and she knew that she was unrecognisable from the insecure girl she had once been. The elevator doors opened and she stepped in. The young cub reporter from the sports desk nodded, and then stared at the floor. She smiled to herself. She didn’t intend to be intimidating but she was now senior staff so the kid probably didn’t know what to say to her.
As the elevator ascended to the fourteenth floor and the editorial suite, she had to remind herself once more that this was really happening. Her years slaving for Artie on the Yonkers Express were behind her and here she was, a senior political correspondent for the Examiner, one of the biggest nationals in the country.
She glanced at her iPhone. It was odd that Charlie hadn’t texted; he usually did, to check that she had gotten up. He was always gone by 5 a.m. on the nights he could stay, but last night he couldn’t make it. She understood. In his position, his time was rarely his own. She smiled as she thought of the private messages he was sending her on Facebook last night while he was supposed to be deep in discussion with the representative of a powerful lobby group for tax reform on a video conference call. Ron Waters was a crashing bore according to Charlie, and a Republican through and through, so he was never going to vote for Charlie or his party anyway, but he had to be seen to show willingness. He promised he was trying to get her some face time with the guy, though, for another high profile Examiner piece.
The elevator door opened and the bright, modern, busy Newsroom buzzed in front of her. Hundreds of screens flashed images, and lots of reporters, IT people and administration staff seemed to teem constantly from all directions. She breathed deeply, almost inhaling the atmosphere and didn’t miss Artie and his chain-smoking ways one little bit. She made her way with enthusiasm to the office of Carol Steinberg, the editor in chief.
Scarlett could hardly believe she was heading into her eighth month of working here, the time had flown by and her star was definitely on the rise. The piece she had done on the extremist Islamic mullah on the Lower East Side was garnering a lot of attention. Her pieces on Charlie were also getting her a lot of column inches, much to the chagrin of many of the other journalists in the city. Carol’s text saying ‘Get here ASAP’ had come through when she was driving into the office anyway. She was looking forward to the meeting. The urgency of the text suggested some exciting development. Scarlett knew that Carol had a reputation as ball-breaker, that she intimidated almost all of the staff, but Scarlett admired her. She had to be tough to get where she was and one day Scarlett intended to hold a similar position.
Was she imagining it or did the noise in the office, usually so deafening, suddenly drop to a murmur? The political team were standing together at their corner by the bank of flat screen plasma TVs. She wasn’t imagining it; they had all stopped talking and were staring at her. They must be really ticked off about the mullah story, she thought.
She pushed open the opaque glass door of Carol’s office and entered the sumptuous surroundings. The TV beside her desk was live paused, and Scarlett instantly recognised Charlie’s handsome features, stilled in mid-sentence.
‘I’m assuming you’ve seen this?’ Carol’s voice was quiet but lacked her usual warmth.
Scarlett was nonplussed, ‘No, is this from today? I haven’t seen…’
Carol interrupted her by pressing play on the remote. Charlie was unshaven and tired looking. He looked as if he’d slept in his shirt. His familiar voice filled the office.
‘Words can’t express my regret. I have offended my party, the good people of this city who elected me, and most painfully of all, I have let my family down. I feel deep shame and embarrassment at my reckless and unprofessional behavior, and though I don’t deserve any special favours, I would ask you, ladies and gentlemen of the press, to restrict your interest to me and to leave my family out of this. They are innocents in this whole thing and are suffering enough at this time. Thank you.’
Charlie turned away and went back into the offices behind him in a hail of questions and flashing cameras.
‘I don’t understand.’ Scarlett’s voice cracked. ‘What happened?’
Carol gazed at her with thinly veiled fury.
‘Last night Charlie Morgan was in a video conference meeting with Ron Waters, the Republican senator. Morgan was sending him some data to support a point he was making, but he inadvertently sent him a message of an explicit sexual nature, clearly intended for someone else. The message also mentioned this newspaper by name. To add insult to injury, the message went on to outline how boring and stupid Morgan thought Waters was. Waters immediately reacted and exposed Morgan, who has, about an hour ago, admitted that he is having an affair with a journalist, the person for whom the message was intended. In addition, he has told the world who that journalist is.’
Scarlett felt nauseous. Blood thundered in her ears. This wasn’t happening, it couldn’t be. Charlie would never do anything like that to her. He couldn’t, he loved her.
‘I took a chance on you, Scarlett. You are only twenty-six, very young to hold the position you did.’ Scarlett heard her use of the past tense and every fibre of her being prayed that this wasn’t happening.
Carol went on, her voice icy, ‘I appointed you over others who have more experience, and who felt they deserved it more than you. I thought you had something, that’s why I convinced the board to take you on. I’m at a loss for words. How could you throw everything away, everything you’ve worked for, and more to the point, how could you have dragged us into this mess with you? We pride ourselves on the highest standards of journalistic integrity here at the Examiner. You have let us down, very badly. To have an affair with a politician for someone in your position is to relinquish all moral and professional authority.’
Carol’s tone conveyed nothing but disgust. ’Your in-depth interviews with him that we printed have made us look as foolish and corrupt as you are. But to be involved with a married politician, especially one whose unique selling point is his position as a family man, something you wrote about with such empathy… words escape me, Scarlett. I’m so disappointed in you. I thought you were so much better than this. Get your things now, rather than coming back for them, and try to get away without the gathering press outside seeing you leave, though they are already circling the wagons.’
She paused, and then added coldly, ‘And Scarlett, if you give any interviews about this I’ll drag you through every court in the country. Do I make myself clear?’
Carol got up and without a backward glance left the room.
‘There she is! Scarlett! Scarlett, over here! Just turn around! C’mon Scarlett …’
Scarlett emerged from the car and pushed her way up the steps to the front door of her brownstone, blinded by the incessant flashing of cameras as she pushed through the heaving mass of bodies. Every hack in New York was out in force, circling like vultures. News anchors smugly did their pieces on camera down the street. The fact that the target was one of their own had obviously made it even more tantalising for them. Many of them resented her growing profile, and felt she was too young and had come out of nowhere, so they were thrilled to see her crumble. No such thing as loyalty in this business, she thought, while trying to keep her face immobile.
She fumbled for her keys in the bottom of her new Prada handbag as the reporters jostled and pushed to get closer to her. Her red hair was escaping from the chignon she had hastily tied in the car, and she could feel the make-up slide from her face as she began to sweat. Despite her best efforts to look calm and collected, she was cracking. She couldn’t find the damn key, and her hands began to shake badly as she gritted her teeth, determined not to cry, refusing to show any weakness. They’d love that. Not that anything could make this situation any worse, but to have her tear stained face splashed all over every tabloid and gossip show in town would be the final straw.
‘Come on Scarlett, just one shot. At least this way you get to look good!’ There was a collective cackle.
Would she have been any different if it was one of them? If she was to be honest, probably not, except that salacious sex scandals were not really her thing. Mercifully, she finally found the key, and despite her shaking hands, managed on the third attempt to get it into the lock. She quickly slipped inside and slammed the heavy door shut, leaning her back against it, adjusting her eyes to the relative gloom of the hallway. Relief flooded through her. Everything was as she’d left it this morning. The highly polished mahogany staircase gleamed, its snow white carpet runner fluffily breaking the austerity of the architecture. The house smelled exactly as it had done, of lilies and cleanliness, an oasis of serenity.
She went into the kitchen at the end of the hallway and immediately shut the blinds. Alone, in her new beautiful home, she disintegrated into wracking sobs. The strength that held her together for the past two hours suddenly drained out of her. The paintings, mirrors and everything else she had gathered so lovingly over the years were invisible to her now. That was it, it was all over. Her life was over. This just couldn’t be happening. That press conference playing over and over in her head.
How could Charlie have hung her out to dry like that?
Dreading what she was about to see, she typed ‘Charlie Morgan confesses all’ into YouTube. She watched in horror as he explained that he was a weak, foolish man who loved his family, and he deeply regretted his inappropriate liaison with the political correspondent Scarlett O’Hara.
Facebook, Twitter and bloggers were already on the puns. Torturing herself, she scrolled through, “Charlie’s Scarlett Woman,” “Morgan really has Gone with the Wind,” “Frankly my dear.” It went on and on and on.
Scarlett hated her name. She used to dread meeting new people and enduring their shocked expressions, the attempts to hide a smirk, or the all too common ‘did you know there was a movie...?’ When she met Charlie, he told her he wanted to be her Rhett Butler. She felt a sharp stab of pain at the memory. Normally anyone who would have said such a thing would have felt the sharp end of her tongue, but he was different. Even though he constantly joked and teased her about it, she forgave him. She forgave him everything, and then he betrayed her.
Chapter 2
Scarlett sat on her Roche-Dobois oatmeal sofa that had cost almost a month’s salary. She fought back the panic at the thought of her mortgage and credit card bills now that she was unemployed. She could hear the raucous laughter of the journalists outside the door. She longed for someone to help her, somewhere to go, but she realised that in recent years she had had no time to keep up friendships. She avoided her mother, and she had no other family. Charlie took up any spare time she had, waiting for him to call, or grasping precious moments with him. Without him and her job she had nothing, absolutely nothing. A feeling of hopelessness, something she had not felt for so long, came creeping back.
She was drawn back to another time, another sofa, in a dingy run-down apartment in Yonkers. The familiar feelings of terror threatened to choke her as she remembered sitting on her mother’s lap, in the calm after the cops had picked her father up yet again. She could only have been four or five, trying with her little hands to stem the blood from a cut on her mother’s face or holding frozen peas to a swelling injury. She would say prayers to the many Catholic saints represented on the damp walls of the room, that her mother wouldn’t die. Lorena took her faith seriously, and the only thing that equalled her faith was her love of movies. She would tell Scarlett how she was named after the most beautiful woman in the world, and then, when she knew it was safe, her mother would draw out her old cookie tin from under the table and show her the pictures from her old movie magazines. To Scarlett, the names of Vivien Leigh, Fred Astaire and James Dean were as real as her mother and father. It was one of the many things about his wife that drove Dan O’Hara mad, and when he was mad he was terrifying.
She remembered the titters from the other children and the outrage from Sister Teresita in St. Peter and Paul’s Elementary when she announced that she was not, as was Catholic tradition, named after a saint, but instead after the most beautiful woman in the world.
As she became a teenager, though, she learned to hate her name. The childhood innocence was laughed out of existence by bullies and teachers who jeered and mocked. She tried several times to shorten it and did everything she could to get a nickname, but nothing would stick. She was born Scarlett O’Hara and Scarlett O’Hara she was going to stay. She was teased mercilessly.
Dan O’Hara, Scarlett’s father, was regularly to be seen staggering drunk around the streets of Yonkers, bellowing abuse at passers-by and scaring kids. He was from County Mayo in Ireland and had come over to the United States as a young man full of dreams and ambition. Life was going well for a time, and he met and married Lorena, a fragile hot house flower from Georgia, whose southern charm beguiled the young Irishman. But things soon turned sour. Dan was a charmer, good looking and smart, but work-shy. He always wanted to make a fast buck but never did any actual work. He had a friend who worked in construction who offered him job after job, but Dan would scoff, claiming that manual labour was for ‘fellas too thick to do anything else.’ He always had a scheme going, some kind of a scam to get rich quick. He convinced several people to invest in his so-called business opportunities, and to a man they lost their shirts on them. Eventually, he was untouchable and started drinking. He was unwelcome in the more respectable establishments, so he hung out in grotty, smelly bars, and over time, he was even barred from them.
The blame for his failure was never his own. No, it was Lorena and Scarlett’s fault. They were holding him back, he used to snarl. If he didn’t have them hanging on to him, he’d be making a fortune out west. His disappointment with life was expressed by using his beautiful young wife as a punch-bag. Scarlett had hated him.
When Lorena opened the door to the police, the winter Scarlett was fifteen, they told her Dan had walked in front of a truck. She tried her best to compose her face into that of a grief-stricken widow. Scarlett remembered Sergeant Kane, who’d been coming to arrest Dan for all sorts of offences over the years, not the least battering his family, sending the other officer to wait in the car. He sat down in the tiny living room and said, ‘That’s it Lorena. You and Scarlett are safe now. It’s over.’
Lorena looked as if a huge weight had been removed from her, though she was in a daze of disbelief. Scarlett remembered Sergeant Kane explaining how her father had been killed instantly; he would have known no pain. Witnesses said he seemed to be very unsteady on his feet as the truck approached.
‘What kind of truck was it?’ she asked, only mildly curious.
The sergeant tried his best to remain composed, professional, but he’d known this misfortunate family a long time. Though he normally hated bringing news of this nature, in this case it was a blessing. Fighting a smile, he said, ‘A Guinness truck.’
Scarlett’s abiding memory of her father’s untimely death was of her mother and Sergeant Kane weeping with uncontrolled gales of laughter.
Life got much easier after that, in lots of ways. Lorena, who was becoming even more zealous about her Catholic faith as the years progressed, gave the teenage Scarlett enough freedom to do as she wished. Lorena had been raised Baptist, but Catholicism appealed to her dramatic nature, so she had converted when she married Dan. She loved all the pomp and ceremony, and every spare wall of her house was adorned with icons and statues and holy pictures. She had a particular love of the more gruesome ones. In the hallway there was one of St. Stephen being stoned to death that really used to freak Scarlett out. The house was a source of cringing embarrassment, but since she wasn’t that close to anyone anyway, she didn’t have to endure kids from school seeing the macabre décor of her home.
School was fine. She loved English and had a great teacher who inspired her to think for herself. He often lent her books or printed out articles for her to read about world events. She wished she had blonde hair and tanned skin. Failing that, she would have really liked to look like Gloria Estefan, but her Irish heritage gave her flame red hair, alabaster skin and emerald green eyes. Boys tended to steer clear, their parents warning them off because of Dan, so she kept herself to herself. One guy had asked her to the prom, but she declined. He was good looking and seemed nice, but there was no way she was having him come to the house. Scarlett remembered her mother’s disappointment when she said she wouldn’t be going. Lorena had bought her a dress, but Scarlett couldn’t face going, nor could she explain to her mother why, so she sat in her room and read instead. She loved travel books, especially the books by the BBC World News Editor, John Simpson. He wrote with empathy and intelligence about places Scarlett could only dream of, Afghanistan, Iraq, Russia. She devoured his books and dreamed of one day visiting those places.
In her final year at school, she signed up for a trip with her political science class to hear a Bostonian congressman who was touring high schools in the tougher areas of New York. He was a noted self-server, and it looked good for the electorate that he cared about those less well off. He was part of a National Education Taskforce that was allegedly asking the students what they thought should be done to improve educational standards in disadvantaged school districts. He was a pompous ass, as she recalled, and patronised and flirted with the girls in her class. He tried to flatter her during the coffee break, asking her questions while all the time ogling her breasts. He repulsed her. At the end, the girls were given an opportunity to ask him any questions. The teacher, Miss Fletcher, was obviously a fan of the congressman and giggled and fawned whenever he addressed her. She’d prepared a long list of sycophantic questions and distributed them among the students, giving him ample opportunity to explain just how wonderful he was and how marvellous it was that he would ask their lowly opinions.
For no reason other than to knock him off his stupid perch, Scarlett raised her hand to ask a question. It was not the one on the card distributed by Miss Fletcher.
‘Where do you stand on the subject of Gay rights?’
It was 2007 and the St Patrick’s Day parade in the city was drawing the usual controversy by continuing to ban the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender groups from marching. She had read about it in the paper that morning over breakfast. Miss Fletcher went pink and stammered, ‘I…I’m sorry Congressman Bailey. That was not an authorised question…’ she glared with unconcealed horror at Scarlett.
The congressman gave a slimy grin and said, ‘That’s quite alright Deanna... I mean Miss Fletcher.’ The teacher had blushed and giggled again. ‘I’m sure this little lady didn’t mean any offence.’
He turned towards Scarlett. ‘Now then my dear, a nicely brought up girl such as yourself need not concern herself with such things. I’m sure that nobody at St. Peter and Paul’s wants its young ladies discussing a matter that is, after all, a mortal sin. The church is very clear on its position on that subject, and as a devout Catholic I would vote with my conscience.’ His smug self-satisfied smile made Scarlett want to punch him in his stupid fat face.
That was the day the Scarlett decided she would be a journalist.
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