The Consequence of Love

by Sandra Howard

  ‘He even talked about you,’ Hugo confessed, looking sheepish, ‘he prodded that deep. He droned on and on about putting his faith in me . . . God, it was hard. I was screaming for a hit.’

  ‘But you did it,’ she said. ‘Brady’s faith wasn’t misplaced.’

  Nattie leaned over the cot – provided by the rental agency – whose acid-drop yellow hideousness caused her to wonder; the pink and blue dancing teddies covered both bases at least. Tubsy was stirring, grizzling, drawing up his knees, raising his bottom high into the air; his buttery curls were damp and plastered close to his head. ‘Time to wake up, little love,’ she murmured.

  He was heavy with sleep as she lifted him out, lighter when cuddled, hot and sweaty, smelling of cot bedding, his baby self and a very wet nappy. Her heart swelled. Was any woman luckier? Two beautiful children and a husband – who could turn heads – who truly loved her. A job she enjoyed, cool, fun friends, Hugo’s friends too. She had a good home, a full life, so much to be grateful for . . .

  ‘My precious little Tubs,’ she whispered, settling him on the changing mat.

  He was wide-awake now, saying, ‘Dad, dad, dad . . .’ with a smiley grin.

  ‘Mum, mum, mum,’ she said, smiling too, ‘and Dad, dad, dad. Daddy and Lily will be back soon, we’d better go down and make tea.’

  2

  Ahmed

  Twenty minutes to landing. After a long overnight flight the cabin staff were collecting up rubbish and bringing the Business Class passengers their jackets and coats. Ahmed Khan took delivery of his linen jacket. He had a window seat and gazed down as the plane flew in low over a long-missed, long-remembered landscape. It was mid-morning, a cloudless late-summer’s day; he could see the harvested fields – squares of yellow and bronze – copses, villages and southern towns. England. His homeland.

  Was it a good omen to be arriving back in sunshine? His skin pricked with fear and anticipation. He hadn’t set foot on British soil for seven years.

  The moment of leaving was still starkly resonant, the agony of the parting on that cold January day in 2010. Nattie’s beautiful face had been wet with silent tears. Saying goodbye to his family too, seeing them for what could be the last ever time.

  They had come to London the week before, his father, mother and sisters, his little nephews and nieces, all formally dressed – the girls in coloured abayas, the boys in salwar kameezes – and dragooned into silence. His family had stood round his hospital bed looking awkward and ill at ease, regretting his actions that were going to make life so difficult for them back in Leeds. Actions that were bringing the loss of him too: his parents’ only son, their boy.

  His head had been so full of Nattie. He’d felt claustrophobic, coping with his family in that stifling, ammonia-smelling cubicle room, in pain from his gunshot wound, stressed out and deeply resentful of their muted accusations while he tried to make stunted chat. They’d been out of context in that London hospital with a police protection officer in the passage outside. Ahmed had almost wanted them gone. Until they had gone. And then the reality had set in.

  His father had stayed in London overnight and met Nattie at the hospital next day. His tension had showed and he’d transmitted a wrongly held suspicion that she was the cause of his son’s wretched plight. Yet when his father warmed to her, despite all, Ahmed’s heart had overflowed.

  Thinking of him as landing neared brought fresh twists of the dagger; his father was dead now and the pain never lessened. It got worse.

  Seven years. Ahmed had total recall of his emotions as the plane had lifted off, bearing him away with a great surge of power and setting course for New York. He’d felt a surge of his own, not of power but self-belief, fiery determination to succeed in his new identity in a new world, and be worthy of Nattie. Everything he achieved would be for her.

  He’d never been west before. A stimulating new job had been lined up. His editor on the Post, William Osborne, had arranged a transfer to the New York desk for him, and his pulse had been racing like it was set to win Olympic gold. The authorities had tried to veto the job – too obvious and easy to trace, they said – but Ahmed had argued that his enemies would instinctively look further afield. A knot of fear had been tightening all the same. Staying alive had mattered; he was in love.

  One day, he remembered dreaming, he would return to marry her . . .

  Those emotions had sat uncomfortably alongside an engulfing sense of loneliness. The homesickness had been immediate, attacking even before the plane was clear of England’s shores. He was exiled, denied the freedom to come and go or contact his family and friends; cut off from the girl he would have given his life for – and almost had.

  People wanted him dead. Going away was all for his own safety, but it had felt like being banished.

  Nattie had begged to come with him to America, but the danger had been immediate and immense. And she was young; he’d wanted her to finish her exams and be really sure. She’d still been in touch with her first love, Hugo, who had seemed beyond hope, a crack-heroin addict, and Ahmed had suggested she try to save him. Hugo had seemed a safe mission for her soft heart. Why had he done that? In a kind of reverse jealousy? Hoping to keep her out of non-junkie arms?

  It was a question he would go on asking till his dying day. Seeing a press photograph, Hugo and Nattie on their wedding day, had made him wonder if staying alive was worth the struggle. He’d felt broken, disbelieving, cut to his core, but still savagely in love.

  It was a lost cause, risking a return. She was married. She’d moved on.

  ‘Five minutes to landing. Cabin staff, take your seats.’

  Ahmed felt his gut tighten and he concentrated his mind on the instructions from his old flatmate, Jake Wright.

  ‘The keys are with my lawyer, Don Maxwell, in Holborn, the car keys too, and sheaves of crap about boilers and stopcocks. I’ll text the address. You can take a cab from Heathrow, since you seem so fucking flush these days, you old sod. At least you’ve saved me from having to sell or garage the car for the duration. It’s right outside the house in a permit bay. A black Mazda hardtop and my great, five-year-old love – just make the fuck sure you don’t lay a scratch.’

  Calling Jake, the years had melted away like snow on hot coals. Jake was his closest friend, close as a blood brother, yet they’d been out of contact until last month when Ahmed couldn’t stand his feeling of holding life at arm’s length, living outside all he cared about, a moment longer. Whatever the rights and wrongs, his guilt about the risk to Nattie, he’d had to return. It was high stakes, emotional life and death, but he’d picked up the phone to Jake that day and cast the die.

  Jake was married now, a qualified architect and going places. Literally. He’d just left for Australia, hoping to broaden his experience. It was a stroke of luck, sad as Ahmed felt at not seeing him, that Jake’s house in South London was sitting empty and he needed a private place to stay. Jake hadn’t given a thought to letting the house – nor had his wife, Sylvia, who sounded a bit of a depressive – and he’d even fought against accepting rent. ‘You’ll be keeping it warm; just pay for the upkeep, you bugger, that’ll do.’

  Ahmed smiled. It wasn’t often you had to argue the toss upwards, but he’d been determined to pay the going rate and not feel beholden. He’d taken the house for three months and paid upfront.

  Jake had never been into money. Art, architecture, music, poetry, anything but dosh; when sharing the flat, he’d always been strapped, moaning that his academic parents never factored in landlords and their poor student son’s need to eat.

  He and Jake had met conventionally enough at a party. One of those bring-a-bottle, sex-the-objective dos, with loud tuneless pop and stale crisps. Ahmed hadn’t known a soul there; only the guy from work – a colleague in his research department at the BBC – who’d asked in a slightly bored, patronising way whether he’d care to come along. Ahmed had got to the BBC via Manchester University and an internship, which had happily translated in
to a proper job.

  They’d been a cliquey crowd at the party, earnest young leftie graduates, talking politics, eyeing-up, trying to slough off their parents’ prejudices. But you never know what happens in life as that evening had proved. He’d got talking to a lanky architecture student, they’d hit it off and become firm friends.

  Jake had suggested the flat-share and Ahmed had leapt at the idea. He’d been going stir crazy, living with his mother’s cousin in Dagenham, putting up with her snooping, poking her long nose into his life and belongings. And he’d just landed a great new job on a national newspaper, the Post; he could afford the rent.

  He and Jake found a top and attic floor in a small Victorian terraced house in Brixton. They’d closed their minds to the peeling hall wallpaper and stink of stale beer, the mouldy carpet and lethal stair rods; they’d painted their new pad white and never looked back.

  They were down, landed. The Business Class passengers were off first. Ahmed was swiftly through Passport Control and into the baggage hall. He’d planned ahead, anxious not to linger in taxi queues, and ordered a car to meet him. He soon spotted a man holding up a card with Mr Bashaar written on it.

  He was Daniel Bashaar on his passport now. Ahmed Khan was lost to the mists of time – along with so much else. He’d acquired a new backstory, which he’d had to memorise before leaving the country, a dispiriting, hurtful process. He was born in Lahore, not Leeds; his father was now an Islamabad bureaucrat, not the civil engineer from Peshawar, a Pashtun who’d immigrated to the UK in the sixties, who’d ended up jobless, reduced to driving a minicab – the father he’d loved. Ahmed felt a renewed stab of pain.

  He’d changed his appearance too. Crewed his hair and taken to wearing glasses – a non-prescription pair he’d been allocated that didn’t look like plain glass. He’d swapped his jeans, sweatshirts and scuffed leather jacket for button-down white shirts and a dark suit, shiny black shoes with discreetly raised heels; a look that had seemed more appropriate for Mr Bashaar.

  Nattie had seen the crew cut in the days before he left – she’d hated it.

  He’d kept his hair short for the first few months in New York before growing it back, thinking of Nattie, missing her as wretchedly as he did. He was seven years older now, but felt he looked much as he had done, much as she would remember him.

  He knew the wrongness of returning, even without all the risks. But just to see her again, to have the chance to explain . . . And if it didn’t happen? How would he feel, alone here in London? But he would see her, he was certain of it.

  Ahmed followed the card-holding driver out of the airport feeling travel-worn and sweaty in the hot, late-August sun, and as he climbed into the car his nerves were raw. The car was a smooth-running Lexus. He was glad of its darkened windows, the backseat privacy, and forgave the driver his sickly aftershave, which smelled like coconut-oil sun cream, for his ability to know not to chat.

  The M4, Cromwell Road, everything was so familiar. Ahmed stared out, but introspection soon had hold and he sank further back into the seat. What was he doing, making this journey, renting Jake’s house, staking his emotional all?

  Nattie had two children, Lily and Thomas. Lily had been born five months into the marriage . . . Easy research, he’d been a journalist, but whatever the circumstances, however she felt in her heart about Hugo, she was married. And Hugo cared – he loved her deeply, he always had – whether or not his love was returned.

  Nattie wouldn’t want to see him. The thought of how he’d messed up plagued Ahmed night and day. He imagined how bitterly resentful she must feel after the years of non-contact, not even knowing whether he was still alive. She wouldn’t realise that he’d known she was married either; he’d been incapable of getting in touch after that, hurting to the marrow of his bones.

  They were outside the Holborn office. Don, Jake’s lawyer, was cautious, asking to see his passport, but was soon twinkling away behind his red-leather-topped desk, saying he was always there to help. A useful contact.

  Arriving in Lambeth, Ahmed soon spotted Jake’s car. It was a mean machine, but covered in sticky from an over-hanging lime tree and attracting layers of dust – not looking its best. The house, by contrast, looked beautiful; early Victorian at a guess, with a charming yellow-brick front wall topped with trellis and a tumbling rose.

  It wasn’t that far from their old Brixton flat, closer into town, quite close to where Nattie’s mother and William lived. Ahmed, like everyone else on the Post, had lived in fear of his editor, but he and William had been on first-name terms by the time he’d had to leave the country with his new identity.

  He opened an elegant wrought-iron gate onto a small paved area with camellia bushes, lavender and some grey-leafed shrubs. He wasn’t good on plants. He hefted his two bags up several steep steps to a porch set with exquisite little chequered black and white tiles, and was relieved when one of the keys in the envelope he’d been given fitted the lock on the discreet black-painted front door.

  Jake had described the house as typical South London, four-storey and terraced, and Ahmed had checked out the market rate for similar properties. He could see at once that he’d underdone Jake and felt a warm rush. Jake was a hopeless case.

  But a highly talented architect. Ahmed dealt with the alarm and looked about him. The hall was opened up and the living room had the run of the whole ground floor. It was a brilliant use of space and when he folded back the front window shutters and sunlight streamed in, the light, easy-living feel of the room lifted his heart and spirits.

  He sat down on a long grey sofa that had its back to what remained of the hall wall and put his feet up on a sturdy glass coffee table. He took in a classy rug in shades of corn and barley, tall china reading lamps on either side of the sofa. He imagined Nattie sitting with him here while he held her hand and tried to explain. He wanted her to know that he’d never stopped loving her, through his disasters and failings, her marriage, his bitterness; he’d loved her obsessively through it all.

  He had to decide the best way to get in touch. He could email her at her office. He knew she edited the book pages of Girl Talk; the blurb with the wedding picture had mentioned her working on the magazine. He could call her there, but hearing his voice would unnerve her, he feared, and if she put the phone down in a fluster, to call her back would seem like pestering.

  What gave him a ray of hope was that she’d never closed their joint email account. The authorities had warned against keeping in email contact, but he’d hit on the idea of opening a joint account in a fake name. He and Nattie could save messages to Drafts, since they both had access, and no email ever need be sent. They’d decided to write in code as well, although they’d chosen one that a child could have worked out.

  He got his laptop from the hall, sat with it on his knees and clicked onto the account. His heart gave a lurch as he brought up a few of their old messages and read the coded words of love and caring, longing and missing. Nattie had written briefly of Hugo’s condition while Ahmed himself had avoided any mention of his job and life in New York; it was safer that way.

  Would she ever understand why he’d cut off all contact? Her messages had kept coming. Where are you? What’s happened? Oh God, please say you’re alive. I’m here for you – always. Love you for ever – ever and always.

  She’d sent messages for months, though they’d all gone unanswered. Ahmed hadn’t seen them at the time, he’d been incapable of looking. He clenched his fists; he was finding it hard not to cry.

  He fought the bleakness and worked out what to say. Using their old code seemed a bit silly and unnecessary, laborious too, but he decided to end with a sentence in code. It felt a better way to put across his feelings.

  Hello, Nattie,

  I’m in London! Very much hoping we can meet, and that you still look in our old account once in a while. I’ve put the sentence below in code just for old times’ sake, but don’t you bother with that. Any word back from you in any form would
be wonderful.

  In Namibia elephants exercise, dippy things, otherwise sane, expressive, engaging. Young ones uppity – babies are darling little yawners.

  Please, please see this. I’m holding my breath. Love, as ever, Ahmed.

  The number beside Drafts in the mailbox list was 267. That had been the last message she’d written, five and a half years ago. Would she notice the new number? Did she ever look any more? Was there the slightest chance he was still in her thoughts? Unlikely. Keeping the account open was probably an oversight on her part and didn’t mean a thing.

  He would give it two days and if there had been no word by end of play on Thursday, he would email her at the office. But a return message in their account would speak volumes. It would be connection and fill his heart with hope.

  3

  Hugo

  Hugo was lingering by the door in Lily’s darkened room. She’d fallen asleep instantly and he was in need of a drink, but hesitating to go down in his present mood. He felt on the edge of a row. Seeing the misty, distant look in Nattie’s eyes that afternoon, all too familiar in her unguarded moments, had got to him more than usual, really touched him on the raw. He knew there was nothing to be gained by bringing up the past; even talking around it would be upsetting and counter-productive – but the way he was feeling, something had to give.

  Nattie cared and she understood him, probably better than he did himself. She genuinely wanted him to feel loved and central to her life, but he wasn’t central to her heart – that was the truth of it. Down by the pool, seeing her distracted gaze . . . she hadn’t been thinking and caring about him then.

  The last thing she wanted to do was to hurt him, he was sure, but did she have any idea of the torment within him, the loneliness, even sense of rejection? Hugo felt a cruel alien need for her to have a taste of the pain. They were living in the now, for God’s sake, married, with a home, jobs, children. Wasn’t it about fucking time she binned the past, kicked it out of touch and moved on? Christ, how many years was it – seven, eight?