In a Kingdom by the Sea

by Sara MacDonald

  I hold my hand up to stop him. ‘No, Mike, you killed it stone dead. You made absolutely sure it came to an end. Did you think I would just go on loving you no matter what you did …?’

  I choke on my words. ‘The irony is you could have left me in London, had an affair and I would never have known. Or, you could have come back and announced the end of our marriage. But it seems you were willing to sacrifice me to cover your fling with Zakia.’

  Mike closes his eyes. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking. I never meant to fall in love. I’m so sorry I’ve treated you so badly. I really didn’t mean the things I said last night. Look, Gabby, we’ll get through this. I’ll make the split as easy as possible. I won’t rant and rave. I’ll try to be a good friend, something I haven’t been for a long time …’

  ‘Have you thought of the boys? How they will take it, you leaving us all for a Pakistani woman?’

  Mike looks wretched. ‘Not well. It will be the worst thing.’

  I slide down the bed and turn away. ‘I must sleep, Mike.’

  ‘Yes. Me too. You will be okay, Gabby?’

  I don’t answer.

  ‘Darling, I know you want to be home but don’t get on the first plane out. Don’t make a sudden, dramatic exit …’ He gets up from the bed. ‘For once, I’m not being selfish. I want you to take something positive away with you from Karachi. Something unrelated to me. You’ve spent time with people who have become important to you and you to them. That’s special. See your friends before you leave …’

  I won’t let Mike see I’m crying.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Karachi, August 2010

  I sit at traffic lights next to Massima watching the manic lorries and buses hurl across the junction. On the motorbike next to us there is a young woman riding pillion wrapped in a hijab. She is dangling a tiny baby out into the traffic on one arm, as if he is not precious or fragile. I have a horrible thought that she does not care if her baby is hurt or if she loses her grip and drops him.

  The lights change and the traffic moves again, horns blaring, as everything nudges and dodges and weaves in Karachi’s endless terrifying, death-defying ballet.

  Massima says, ‘Close your eyes. I’m going to do a swift change of lanes to get to the other side of …’

  She sticks her hand on the horn as a brightly painted bus charges us from the right. I clamp my eyes shut. I don’t want to leave Karachi. I don’t want to leave this chaotic, mad city. I don’t want to leave my friends.

  We turn abruptly into a pitted wide road full of trees with thick, twisted roots pushing up the earth. It looks familiar. There are large houses with balconies and guards at the gates.

  ‘Are we near the Mohatta Palace?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes. Same area. The houses here belonged to the wealthy or became various foreign residencies at one time …’

  Massima parks. The road is dark. The area seems deserted, in the middle of nowhere. Massima loves finding odd places to bring me. In one of these neglected-looking houses, there will be a wonderful restaurant.

  Our footsteps echo on the dusty road as we make our way to a large shabby house. We turn a corner and there is a drive that is alight with small flickering candles and another courtyard with glossy young waiters in smart uniforms. Massima hands over her car keys. ‘He will park my car where it can be watched.’

  We are in a garden of fairy lights threaded through trees. There are small tables full of the beautiful young. I smile with pleasure.

  ‘Is it still too hot for you to eat outside?’ Massima asks.

  It is but I don’t want to go inside. ‘No. It’s lovely out here.’

  We are shown to a table and Massima hands over her raffia bag with the wine inside. She lights up a cigarette as soon as we sit down and offers me one. I shake my head. I rarely smoke and the last two days with Mike have proved good aversion therapy.

  ‘Afia wanted to come,’ Massima says, not meeting my eyes, ‘but she and Raif had a meeting with Mike and another director, so it was difficult …’

  ‘Of course. Will you give her my love?’

  She digs in her bag and brings out a card for me. ‘Afia asked me to give you this. She says she will email you. She is upset about not seeing you tonight.’

  ‘She mustn’t be. I can see it’s awkward for you all and I’m sorry.’

  The wine comes in an ice bucket and Massima orders some starters. When the waiter has gone she looks at me and says, fiercely, ‘Please, don’t you apologize, Gabby. Afia planned to come tonight but Raif would not allow it. Pakistani men see intrigue behind every tree. Raif still believes he can win a contract on merit with PAA and he is terrified of losing it …’

  She grinds her cigarette out. ‘Despite the fact he thinks Mike is an idiot to risk everything for an affair with a Muslim woman …’ She hesitates and then goes on. ‘Shahid thinks that if anyone from the head office in Canada finds out about his affair Mike could be fired. Someone in the Karachi office could make a complaint. Zakia Rafi’s father or uncles could go looking for Mike. Zakia could disappear. Worst of all, he has opened himself to blackmail.’

  I stare at her. ‘Has anyone spelled this out in graphic detail to Mike?’

  ‘Everyone has, Gabby. For an ambitious man he is being pretty stupid … Do not look so worried. It is actually not so serious. No one knows what the future holds for Pakistan and the Rafi family are wealthy and ambitious for their children. They have houses and money outside this country …’

  She pours the wine and the glass clouds in the heat.

  ‘Zakia, the beautiful, wears a severe hijab to work to please her mother. But the rest of the family are not devout. It would not be unhelpful for their many business interests if their daughter obtained a British passport …’

  The starters arrive in beautiful little dishes. When the waiter has gone, Massima says, ‘So … they will not be entirely opposed to Zakia meeting a foreigner with useful business interests, as long as family honour is not compromised. It is lucky for Mike that the Rafi family are progressive and fairly westernized …’

  She pushes little bowls of food my way.

  ‘Zakia’s parents have two older children in America. If Zakia can somehow appease family honour by a barter system, marriage to a westerner could bring opportunities and her father may overlook her behaviour. She will no doubt break her mother’s heart by her relationship with a gora and a married one at that …’

  She stops. ‘Gabby, I am sorry, this must be hurtful and not what you wish to hear. I am being direct. Mike should be more cautious because of the job he is doing with PAA. He is uncovering corruption and making enemies. Having an affair makes him vulnerable, especially here in Karachi. It affects his ability to do his job effectively …’

  She pauses again and says gently, ‘I am saying all the things that Shahid would like to say to you but dare not, because his loyalty has to be with Mike and his job. He is worried about you both, Gabby.’

  Poor, kind Shahid. I look at her anxious face. ‘It does hurt, but you are right, I need to know …’

  I eat some food. ‘I’m leaving Mike, but that does not mean I don’t care what happens to him.’

  ‘Zakia Rafi will have been quite clear what she wants from Mike, Gabby.’

  ‘Could she just be using him?’

  Massima shrugs. ‘Who knows? She may love Mike. Pakistani gossip does not relate.’

  ‘Mike is besotted with her. I can’t remember him ever feeling like that with me,’ I say suddenly.

  ‘Were you besotted with him?’ Massima asks.

  ‘Yes. From the moment I saw him at fourteen years old I was determined to have him …’ I smile. ‘My father tried to put me off. He told me Mike would break my heart, but I think we were pretty happy, until he came to Pakistan.’

  ‘I am sad for you, Gabby.’

  ‘I’m sad too, but I am no longer besotted, Massima.’

  With a flourish two waiters bring our main course, much too much.
Massima makes me try every tempting dish in small mouthfuls. Out of the corner of my eye I watch expensively dressed young women glide in and sit at the delicate tables with their husbands. They pout and toss their hair and flick their fingers at the waiters like spoilt little moths caught in candlelight.

  Can Mike really know what he is doing? If I ever felt threatened by Mike’s attraction to someone else it was because they were clever rather than beautiful. Will Mike wake up one day in the middle of another country and another culture and wonder how on earth he lost a wife and two sons who loved him? Perhaps he will simply never look back.

  I say to Massima, ‘Mike wanted me to stay on in Pakistan as a sort of decoy, to protect him from himself, to stop him doing something irrevocable.’

  ‘Were you tempted to stay?’ Massima sounds surprised. ‘A Pakistani woman would have done so.’

  ‘Would you?’ I ask.

  Massima snorts. ‘Play Nana to a grown man who is in love with another woman? No way, Gabby.’

  We laugh and drink more wine. I don’t want to talk about or think about Mike any more. He’s not the only thing on my mind. The day after tomorrow, I catch the ten o’clock flight out of Karachi. I dread limping back to my house in London and having to face Emily, Kate and Hugh. I dread having to tell Will and Matt.

  Emily knows I am coming but she thinks I am just delivering Isabella’s book to her editor. I told her that I would use the boys’ rooms on the top floor. There is a strange, numb place that keeps me practical. My focus has to be limiting the damage to my sons.

  Massima says, in an echo of Birjees, ‘This is not our last evening together, Gabby. You will come back to Karachi. I don’t know how or when, but you will. Your journey here is unfinished. Friendships made in Pakistan last forever, you know.’

  I smile. ‘Inshallah!’

  ‘Inshallah!’ she echoes and calls for the bill.

  We go out of the garden of flickering candles to find the car. I am a little drunk and presumably Massima is too. She drives me to the beach. It is Saturday night and crowds of families mill about the food stalls enjoying themselves.

  Camels sit on the sand in their colourful bridles and saddles. In the distance the sea glints away in the dark. The overwhelming smell of sewage and spices and barbecues comes floating in across the dark.

  ‘You see that block of smart flats across the road?’ Massima points. ‘That is where Pakistani men keep their mistresses hidden away from their families. The men lead a happy family life with their wives and children and a quite separate social life with their mistress … One life is never mentioned to the other. It is never acknowledged …’

  A small girl starts to dance in circles on the sand to music from a radio. She has a scarlet dress and gold bracelets and nose rings. The sea behind her is a thin white line breaking in the distance. She is dancing just for herself. Whirling, flashing, red twirls into the darkness against black sea and sky.

  Suddenly, words start to pour out of me. I tell Massima everything. I tell her about Dominique, my parents, my shock. How I slowly and painfully have begun to understand that a long marriage does not necessarily nurture you when you are desperate. I tell her that for the first time in my life I was lost and Mike, knowingly, turned his back on me. In place of my once lovely life there is a hole so big, so deep and black I need to run.

  We sit on sand littered with crisp packets and Coke bottles. Laughter punctuates the dark. We sit close, Massima and I, in a cool evening breeze that has sprung from nowhere. She tells me about the married man she loves in Lahore, a good man who loves her too, but will never leave the wife his parents chose for him. We sit leaning together, feeling the warmth of one another on the damp sand. Our shalwar kameez blow gently over our thin trousers in little rippling movements like the noise of small flags.

  We bend our heads closer to hear each other and her hair brushes my cheek. Her arm creeps around me as I shiver. I draw a little nearer so the heat of her body shields the chill inside me. I might never see her again.

  The music and the noise begin to fade. Families pile into lorries and vans, trucks head home with sleepy children drunk with a long day in the sun and sea. Many people surround us in the dark but it feels as if there is only Massima and me, the camel drivers and a young child, still dancing, dancing in flashes of red and yellow and gold against the sea that inexorably moves and slides in a gleaming line in the distance. There is just my friend, the daughter I never had, sharing my last night in Karachi in the dark.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Karachi, 2010

  Mike is sitting at his computer in his bathrobe. ‘Where on earth have you been?’ he asks. ‘I’ve been worried sick. It’s late, Gabby. You shouldn’t be out in Karachi at this time of night. You know the score, for God’s sake. Do you want to get kidnapped? Who were you with?’

  I want to laugh. It’s a little bizarre for Mike to suddenly play the worried husband, but he does have a point. ‘I was fine,’ I say. ‘I was with Massima.’

  ‘Massima is a wild card. I just hope you were somewhere sensible.’

  I don’t answer. The beach at night is not sensible. Nothing is. I look at my cases littering the floor. Anxious, adulterous husband in bathrobe stays up worrying about his departing wife.

  In the night I am aware of the telephone ringing more than once but I am so emotionally drained I don’t surface. When I wake in the morning Mike is pacing up and down. He brings me a cup of tea.

  ‘Gabby, I’m afraid you won’t be flying today. Some official wants to check your passport and visitor visa.’

  ‘What do you mean? Who does?’

  ‘I don’t know. I got an email from the office. I’m going to go in now and try to sort it out. I’m just waiting for Noor. He’s late.’

  I stare at him. ‘Mike, you’re not taking my passport? Don’t surrender my passport to anyone.’

  ‘I’m not even going to take your passport out of the safe, Gabby.’

  ‘What’s going on? If I didn’t have a valid passport I wouldn’t be here.’

  Mike hesitates. ‘I don’t know,’ he says again. ‘Someone is playing games. I had abusive phone calls in the night …’

  I sit up alarmed. ‘Saying what?’

  ‘You don’t want to know.’ I can hear the fear in his voice.

  ‘Have you any idea who’s doing this?’

  Before he can answer there is a ping-ping of incoming emails. Mike goes to look and comes back looking sick.

  ‘Vile stuff. It will be someone in PAA that I’ve crossed and bearing a grudge. Don’t answer the landline. In fact I’ll unplug it. Keep your mobile charged and I will ring you …’

  I stare at Mike’s white face. ‘Did you get any sleep?’

  ‘Not much. Stay here in the hotel. Don’t go out anywhere with anyone. Not even Massima or Birjees. I’ve rung Shahid. I’ve rung head office. I will be back as soon as I can. Don’t worry, we’ll sort it.’

  ‘What about you, Mike?’ I shiver. ‘I’m safe here in the hotel, but you’re going out there.’

  He smiles. ‘I’m safe enough with Noor. Try not to worry. I will be back as soon as I can …’

  He goes downstairs but in fifteen minutes he is back looking shaken.

  ‘They’ve withdrawn my driver. They’ve taken Noor away from me. He was so upset he rang to say he has been reallocated. I’ve just had a call from one of the other directors to tell me to stay in the hotel. They are sending a car to take me into a meeting.’

  ‘Did he say why?’

  ‘He said they had found some irregularity they wanted to clear up with me and were just following company guidelines. He denied any knowledge of online abuse and said he would look into it.’

  ‘But there has to be a connection, doesn’t there?’

  Mike smiles bleakly. ‘Yes, of course there does.’

  I feel sick. I remember Massima’s words and I am afraid.

  ‘If only I could have got you safely away on today’s flight. The
y are using you to get at me. Your passport is being waved at me as a warning. I should have let you fly home on Monday.’

  ‘You must have some idea who could be doing this?’

  ‘I can’t be sure, but I suspect Adeeb Syad, the absent Canadian-Pakistani director, is behind this. Shahid and I have got pretty close to proving he’s been defrauding the airline for years. He stands to lose a huge pension if he’s fired …’

  ‘But, surely he hasn’t got the power to discredit you on his own, has he?’

  ‘No, but he won’t be doing this alone. He has powerful and corrupt friends in the Pakistan government. He can say what he likes to discredit me …’

  Mike turns away. I say, to his back, ‘You mean an inappropriate relationship with a Muslim woman that makes you open to blackmail. Drop your corruption findings and your wife can go safely home …’

  Mike winces. ‘Something like that, but not quite that simple …’ He tries to smile. ‘It’s all bluster and threats. They can’t get away with this. Don’t worry. If you don’t fly today it will be tomorrow …’

  He takes me over to his desk. ‘Your passport is in the safe. Here are your papers with your flight number for today. If necessary, Charlie or Shahid will get you to the airport. I’ll keep my passport on me. You’re all packed, so if you get a call, don’t hesitate, you go with them straight away. Leave everything, except your hand luggage, and don’t wait for me. The hotel has its own airport security so you won’t be on your own … I’ll meet you there … Okay?’

  Numb, I nod. Mike tries to smile. ‘This is just a worst-case scenario …’

  But when the official car comes Mike is grey. We stare at each other.

  ‘I’m frightened, Mike.’

  He comes over and puts his arms around me. ‘I’m so sorry, Gabby … try not to worry. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

  When the sleek grey Mercedes comes for him I go down to swim. I have to do something. The garden is deserted and the sky overcast. It feels like an omen.

  As I swim, birds sing and chipmunks run across the grass, but the peace has vanished as suddenly as my safety.