Untold Story

by Monica Ali

  He said, “Would you trust me if you needed to? I’m not going to ask you anything else.”

  A swell that started inside her chest spread through her body. The tips of her fingers prickled. “Yes,” she said finally. “I would.”

  The next morning she swung out of Carson’s front door dressed in yesterday’s jeans and T-shirt and paused a moment on the stoop. Rufus ran back up the steps to see what was going on. She breathed in the air that was soft with the scent of pine trees. Most of the time it didn’t occur to her to appreciate the small things. Like going out in the same clothes as the previous day. Being free to do that.

  She wondered if it was the same if you’d been in prison. Years later maybe you’d be boiling a kettle or shopping for drain cleaner and start marveling at how you were allowed to do these things whenever you chose.

  “How daft is that?” she said, as she got in the Sport Trac. She had to start the engine three times before it caught. Then she clarified her question to Rufus. “Comparing myself to an ex-convict.”

  Rufus thumped his tail on the seat as if he couldn’t agree more. He lay down and started chewing surreptitiously on the seam.

  It wasn’t prison, but getting out was just as hard. Princesses were always locked in towers in fairy tales. In reality there wasn’t a tower and there were no locks. You stood at the top of a crystal staircase a mile high in glass slippers, and there was no way down without breaking your neck.

  Lydia chatted with Hank and Julia who were today’s volunteers at the shelter and made sure they knew which dogs they were going to exercise.

  Hank wrote everything down with his stubby pencil. He read back the list. “Thank you, Lydia,” he said. “You’ve got us all organized.”

  He was a regular volunteer, a retired embalmer who had worked at J. C. Dryden and Sons for nearly thirty years. Such extensive proximity to death had equipped him with a calmly accepting attitude to life. It was a quality that was useful when working with the trickier dogs. Sometimes he seemed to move in slow motion, but he never flapped and never fussed.

  Lydia went into the yard to find Esther.

  Esther was squatting by the kennel at the far end, the one where they put the snarliest dogs to try to keep them calm. She looked glum as she straightened up.

  “They should be shot,” she said.

  “Morning,” said Lydia. “Who?”

  “These damn breeders who do this to the dogs.” She looked down at the young pit bull who was pressed up to the wire, saliva hanging down from his jaw. “We can’t home him. There’s no way. They’re breeding these dogs to be killers. I’ve seen puppies attack each other at eight weeks old. It’s not natural.”

  “What are we going to do with him?”

  “I don’t know,” said Esther. “Look at this.” She kicked at the remains of something on the floor. “I was doing the adoptability test with him. I took his food away, no problem, passed that with flying colors. Then I put the cat in the kennel and he locked on immediately. You can see what he did to it. His prey drive is in overdrive.”

  “Couldn’t risk letting that happen to a real one,” said Lydia.

  “Nor to a child,” said Esther. She scraped the mechanical cat together with the toe of her boot. “I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

  “I could work with him,” said Lydia. “But even then . . .”

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do, period,” said Esther. “We’re going to be out of money soon. The bank’s not willing to extend the overdraft.”

  “Oh, I see. There’s got to be something we can do.”

  “We’ve had cake sales,” said Esther. “I’ve made three million jars of blueberry jelly, that’s what it felt like. We’ve been around with the collecting tins. I’d sell my body, but I don’t think we’d get any takers, do you?”

  “I’m going to think about it,” said Lydia, “while I exercise Topper and Zeus.”

  At lunchtime Hank and Julia went to the coffee shop and Lydia sat outside with Esther on the bench.

  “Chicken pasta salad,” said Esther, passing the Tupperware. “I’ve been adventurous today. Actually, I ran out of rice.”

  “I was never one for dogs when I was younger,” said Lydia.

  “A dog’s happy when you’re happy,” said Esther. “You come to appreciate that in time.”

  “When I was a kid I had a nanny who brought her dog with her. She lived in the house. The nanny, I mean, and the dog as well. I remember being horrible to that dog. It was a poodle, a nervy little white poodle. I held it out of the window once and threatened to throw it. It was a long way down.”

  “Was it the dog you hated, or the nanny?”

  “I wasn’t going to do it,” said Lydia. “I would never have actually done it. But of course I got in such trouble. Which was what I wanted, instead of Daddy just drifting through the nursery and looking vague. I was horrible to all the nannies. After Mummy left. I thought they were trying to be her, and I couldn’t let them. I was six when she went off with another man. I used to think that if I really loved her then I’d have the courage to behave so badly that she’d just have to come back. So it was all my own fault that she didn’t, because I was cowardly. That’s six-year-old logic for you.”

  “Did you still see her? After she’d gone?”

  One of the dogs started barking. The others whipped up too, and Lydia waited as if for a train that hurtled through without stopping at the station, until she could speak again. “Yes, at weekends. It was miserable. She cried when we arrived, my brother and I, and she cried when we left and I felt guilty the whole time. Sometimes I wished that she’d died instead of gone away.”

  “And then you felt even guiltier.”

  “And how,” said Lydia.

  “You see,” said Esther, pointing at Rufus, who was tripping along with his tail low to the ground, “when it comes to dogs, only one of you is ever going to feel guilty, and you know it’s going to be your four-legged friend.”

  “Hey,” called Lydia, “Rufus, what have you done?”

  She didn’t find out until the drive home, when she discovered that he’d been in the car and chewed the seam off the upholstery on the passenger seat. The stuffing was coming out. “You bad puppy,” she told him, but he was playing the innocent by then.

  After swimming her lengths in the pool she soaked in the bath and tried to read the book she’d picked up at the drugstore. Before she got to the end of the first chapter she gave up on it. She dried off and put on her robe. There were a few books on the shelf in the bedroom, none of which she wanted to read again. She thought about the books she had read on Islamic art when she had dated an art dealer whose specialist area that was. When she was dating a doctor she read books about anatomy. Lawrence had given her some novels the last time she saw him, big fat books most of them, written long ago. He had so much faith in her; he thought she could tackle them. She’d wanted to prove him right but she’d been nervous about getting started, and then she’d moved from that first house in North Carolina and one of the boxes had got lost in the move. Reading for someone else’s sake wasn’t part of her life now, anyway. She wasn’t about to go to the library and take out some hefty volume about the insurance industry.

  She cut out the pages she’d found in the magazines and stowed them in the box she kept locked in the closet, with all her letters, her documents, her alternative documents, and everything else she needed to keep secure. Then she pottered around in the kitchen, listening to the radio, and thinking about her conversation with Esther. There had to be a way to keep Kensington Canine open. There wasn’t another rescue place in the area. If it closed down, what would happen to the dogs? What would happen to them without Esther, and what would happen to Esther without them?

  In the night she woke to find Rufus standing close to her pillow and quivering. “What is it?” she said. “What’s the matter? Did you hear something?” As she spoke she heard the shattering of glass downstairs. Her heart thumped
so hard that she put a hand to her chest as though to quiet it. She looked on the bedside table for her cell phone and remembered she’d left it downstairs. She slipped out of bed, trying not to make the floorboards creak. Standing still she listened again. Nothing. Perhaps she should stamp about to try to scare off whoever was downstairs. But if they’d been bold enough to break a window, surely they wouldn’t take fright that easily.

  She tiptoed over to the closet and unlocked it. It opened with an agonizing creak. Rooting to the bottom of the box, she found the gun. She’d bought it years ago when she’d thought she needed it because she lived alone. She’d never taken it out of the box before, except when she went to the shooting range to learn how to shoot it. She checked that it was loaded, as if the bullets might have mysteriously fled of their own accord.

  There was another noise from downstairs, too muffled to make out what it was. She was at the door of the bedroom before she remembered she was naked and had to creep back to the foot of the bed to pick up her robe. Rufus tried to go out of the door ahead of her but she shut him in and went to the top of the stairs.

  “Get out of my house,” she called, and could have kicked herself for that shake in her voice. “Get out. I’ve got a gun.” Should she have said that? What if the burglar had one too? “There’s nothing valuable in here,” she added as an afterthought.

  What was she waiting for? Should she go back to the bedroom and barricade herself in? Lock herself in the bathroom? Give him time to go away? It seemed like the best idea. That’s what she should have done straightaway. Let him take the television and the toaster. They could be replaced.

  She tiptoed back to the bedroom, although tiptoeing was pointless now, scooped up Rufus, and went to the bathroom and locked the door. Rufus licked her hand with great care and attention while she listened with every fiber and sinew for footsteps on the stairs.

  After she could bear it no longer, when the strain of waiting and listening seemed like it would kill her anyway, she unlocked the door and went gingerly down the stairs. She held the gun out in front of her but expected at every moment that the attack would come from behind.

  She could see across the open-plan sitting room through to the kitchen and the moonlight shone in on the culprit, sitting on the counter, bold as you please. Rufus raced ahead of her yapping gleefully and tried to jump up at the squirrel that flicked its tail in contempt and swished through the open window. The glass that it had knocked off the counter lay in silver streaks across the floor.

  Oh my God. Lydia heard Amber’s voice, what she would say when she told her the whole story.

  She went around the house and checked all the windows and then got back into bed, although now she was wide awake and reviewing the situation. If it had been an intruder would she have shot him? If there was no other way to defend herself ? Was there any point having a gun that you weren’t prepared to use?

  There wasn’t anything of value in the house, the usual electronic goods, none of them fancy. But an intruder wouldn’t know that. He might just keep searching and searching, getting more and more angry that he wasn’t finding anything, except a wallet with a few dollar bills and only one credit card.

  There was the bracelet. She’d forgotten about that. The one she’d been wearing when she slid down off the back of the yacht. In her old life it wasn’t an object of great value, more of a trinket, bought on a whim. She’d forgotten how much she’d paid for it but it was probably worth more than anything else she owned, apart from the house and the car.

  The bracelet. That was it. That’s what she could do. She could go into the city and find a jewelry store and sell it. She couldn’t wait to see Esther’s face when she brought in the cash.

  Chapter Thirteen

  11 February 1998

  I entertained a hope. I have never admitted it, not even to myself. But it is true. It was a long time ago. Perhaps the residue lingered longer than I wish to own even now.

  There have been women in my life I have cared for deeply. Maybe I should have married Gail. We discussed it. I said I was willing. Don’t do me any favors, she said. The whole thing fizzled out, but that doesn’t mean it had to be that way. I could have tried harder with her.

  I entertained a hope. How ridiculous. What could possibly have happened? An elopement, perhaps, of princess with palace aide?

  Now here was the crux of her problem. Leaving aside any of my personal inadequacies, a relationship with the likes of me would have been hardly less preposterous than any of those she actually pursued.

  One of her bodyguards, for instance. He was a likable enough fellow. Married, but hard to blame him for not resisting her charms. How would that have worked out if he hadn’t been swiftly excised from his post? A cavalry officer. He fitted the bill of dashing love interest, but impossible to imagine (although she did) a future in which their lives could align. It was no better after she divorced. Who could take her on? Not a humble and decent doctor, determined to live a quiet and serious life. Was there another royal house into which she could have married? The answer to that is no. She’d had her fill of royalty. A billionaire financier, in the footsteps of Jackie Onassis? She thought of that. Of course she was a glittering prize. But she was a shed-load of trouble and billionaires, it seems, fall into two camps: those who like expensive baubles and wish not to have their lives excessively disturbed by them, and those who prefer to partner with their intellectual equal, and also wish not to have their lives excessively disturbed. To find a man who was worthy of her affections meant finding someone who had a purpose in life, and anyone with a purpose in life was not prepared to be subsumed—or eaten alive—by her all-encompassing fame.

  She filled in time with her doe-eyed playboy. But she wanted something real.

  12 February 1998

  Gloria was here again this morning. After she took my blood pressure she circled my arm with her meaty fingers. “Now,” she said, “you look like you could do with a bit of feeding up.” I do like her cheerful brutality. I said I was merely fashionably slim. (In truth I know I am on the downhill slide.) “Tell you what I’m going to do for you,” she said. But she didn’t tell. She put her coat on and went out. I thought perhaps she was shopping for ingredients and would spend an hour or so in the kitchen making hearty, nourishing soups. She returned with a plastic bag full of tinned shakes, the kind that bodybuilders drink. “Two a day,” she said, “on top of your meals. Do not let me down.”

  The funny thing is, I don’t want to let her down. The last thing I want to see in her eyes is disappointment.

  While she was sorting the meds and making her notes I sat by the window watching a dog chase the waves off the beach. “Penny for them,” said Gloria. I said I wasn’t thinking about anything. “I’ll keep my nose out,” she said. I told her I’d let her into a secret. When a woman asks a man what he is thinking and he says, “Nothing,” the woman is frustrated, and the man is rather pleased to be thought so deep. In truth he was probably blank, a condition quite alien to women, unless in the pits of despair.

  What I was thinking about was an evening about ten years ago at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. It was a VIP evening with celebrity guests, singers, and dancers. There was going to be one top-secret special surprise performance. I knew she’d been rehearsing the dance—balletic but set to a pop tune—for weeks. When she slipped out of the royal box to get changed I couldn’t look at the stage any longer. I kept watching the prince and as she received a standing ovation, a curtain call, another curtain call, and then another, his face turned to stone. She was twenty-eight years old and in love with her husband and the more the audience loved her, the more he cut her out of his heart.

  The next day I accompanied her on a visit to an old people’s home. Earlier, she had been in tears. “Everyone loved it, didn’t they? Everyone apart from my bloody husband.” No doubt I said something horribly unctuous, because then she tore me apart. I had missed the point. The point had not escaped me, I was evading it.
The dance had been for him.

  The retirement home was just outside London, the oldies gathered in a semicircle in the sitting room. They broke out in a smattering of applause and “oohs” and “aahs” as she entered, and I remember thinking how terribly destabilizing it must be to win the adoration of strangers, and earn a cold shoulder at home. She chatted away and showed no sign of her earlier distress. Truly, I don’t believe she was hiding it. She became absorbed in their stories and ailments. When one woman spoke of losing her husband of nearly fifty years and started to cry, she reached out and stroked her face. Another inmate, wheelchair-bound but chafing against confinement, began to sing aggressively, stymieing the conversation. The ladies clucked with embarrassment but their glamorous visitor was unperturbed. She took up the tune. The room filled with crackly voices belting out “The White Cliffs of Dover,” followed up with a rendition of “Some Enchanted Evening.” There wasn’t a dry eye, including my own.

  She is a star in more ways than one. Her intuition rarely lets her down. Except, of course, when it comes to the men in her life.

  13 February 1998

  Three weeks and two days to go until I board the plane and see her again. What is she doing with her days? What am I doing with my days? I haven’t touched the book.

  Three weeks and two days to go. I’m like a six-year-old counting down to my next birthday.

  14 February 1998

  Today I asked Dr. Patel if she believes in an afterlife. “I’m a Hindu,” she said. “I believe in reincarnation.” I admired the way she challenged me with those molasses eyes. Strange how I failed to notice her beauty before. She waited for me to take up my intellectual cudgels. We are quite the debating club at times.

  Me too, I said, I believe in reincarnation. I didn’t elaborate. I think I may have offended her; she thought I was poking fun. Maybe what I should have said is, I believe in another chance.