The Consequence of Love

by Sandra Howard

  ‘You’re not sharing anything right now, not a bloody thing,’ he muttered, though her back was turned as she made for the bathroom and she either didn’t or chose not to hear. ‘And anyway,’ he said, catching up and swinging her round. She looked shocked and he let go of her arms. Her scent was reaching him, which ignited hot rods of need. His body strained, he ached for her. ‘You’d sprung this Sunday plan of yours,’ he went on. ‘You were full of that. It hardly seemed like a good time.’

  ‘I’m truly sorry, love. It’s been full on at work. And you did say you were okay about Sunday.’

  She looked away, she’d sounded agonised. He stood by as she brushed her teeth, head bent, not wanting to look him in the eye. What was going on in her life? It was as though she was on the far bank of a fast-flowing river, a distant figure, walking away. Was it anything to do with Jake? Had they been seeing each other and now he’d gone to Australia? Had she been attracted by the link to Ahmed? She’d anyway always said how much she liked Jake. Surely not Jake, Hugo couldn’t seriously believe it. And the gulf between them was recent – wouldn’t he have sensed an affair from day one? He felt angry, disorientated, broken and alone.

  Nattie cleaned off her face with lotion and covered herself in night cream. The smell, like custard and marshmallows, masked her own intoxicating scent. She gave another coy awkward smile and left the bathroom. The night cream lived on her bedside table at home; she put it on after sex.

  Hugo burned with frustrated need; all he craved was a little togetherness, was that so much to ask? Was she going to let him near her? He tried to calm down. Better give it a few minutes if there was to be any hope of making up. He looked round the new ensuite, grey-tiled bathroom that his mother had shown off earlier with such pride. ‘Finished just in time for you!’ He’d admired the use of space; it was cool and spare, typical architect’s style.

  He went into the bedroom. Nattie was out of the red dress she’d been wearing, a demure, in-law-appropriate number with rounded collars and little pearl buttons. He wasn’t mad on it, but it came out every year.

  ‘Pity about the weather,’ she said, draping the dress over a chair; why couldn’t she ever use a hanger? ‘Your mum suggested the Museum of Natural History, which Lily would love, of course – remember her saying she wanted to be a “pallyotogist”! Or there’s Oxford Castle if the rain holds off. Be good to get out if we can.’

  She was in a black bra and pants, her nightie ready on the bed. He wanted to hold her, reach for the bra clasp, bury himself in her magnificent boobs. He felt knotted up with desire, hungering to make love to the woman he’d married, to feel her warm and responsive in his arms, his Nattie, all the tension and distance forgotten.

  He went close up to her, wanting her eyes, and felt badly jolted, seeing the nervous, almost hunted look they held. She glanced away, sending a signal. It brought an icy sense of rejection – she’d been finding excuses all week. He longed for even a kiss and turned her face back, smiling, bending to kiss her mouth, gently, cautiously. His need was overwhelming, hot and coursing, yet it was as much a need for togetherness, to be reunited again in bed. Nattie flinched visibly; she backed away, putting up her hands in smiling apology, repulsed by even a kiss.

  He stared at her in disbelief. Nattie’s remoteness was unbearable; she’d always been warm, genuine and caring, loving in her own way. They had good sex too. The times she didn’t want it, she’d always tell him in a friendly, happy-to-be-kissed sort of way. She’d never once, in all their five years, shuddered and shrunk back from his touch.

  Hugo undressed in silence. Nattie was already in bed, the alien, guest-room bed, watching as he climbed in on the other side, stiff and ungainly with tension.

  She touched his bare shoulder. He hadn’t brought pyjamas and wished he had. A cold anger was building up within; he wanted love, warmth, sex, not empty guilty gestures. He felt strung up and chilled, unloved. Sick about SleepSweet too, useless as ever.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ Nattie said, ‘about the chief executive at SleepSweet – Brian, the one who was headhunted and who you got on so well with. Would it be a good idea to ask him to supper – with his wife or whatever, if he’s got one? You said he had a great new job with a furniture chain, and I’m sure he’ll have heard about the turnaround at SleepSweet. He’d probably like to have the lowdown on his shit replacement and it would put you back in his mind. It’s always good to keep in touch with people who know your worth.’

  Hugo kept silent. He got what she was saying. PYA, Putting Yourself About, being pro-active. He heaved a sigh and turned on his back, hands behind his head, staring out into the darkness. He felt defeated, inadequate and pathetic. PYA just happened to be yet another of the endless things he was fucking useless at.

  The anger in his system burned and he felt a need to go on the attack, to wound and fight. How could she start talking about such mundane things at such a time, when she’d just rejected him in the cruellest way imaginable?

  ‘Why did you blush bright red when my mother talked about Jake and Australia? Did you know already and not let on? Have you been seeing him without me? A few cosy lunches?’

  ‘You don’t seriously think that? I blush the whole time, as you well know – and how much I hate it. The last time I saw Jake was with you. It was just a bit embarrassing, your mother telling us and her surprise that we didn’t know.’

  Hugo brooded in silence. He was stressed-out with testosterone tension and had the acid taste of rejection on his tongue. Did he keep up a freeze? Try to get some sleep? Some hope. ‘I think you should tell me what’s going on,’ he said finally. ‘You’re on a knife-edge, you wouldn’t even let me kiss you. Do you know what that’s like?’ he raged. ‘Do you? Do I smell? Not make enough money for you?’

  He heard Nattie’s intake of breath. ‘That’s a shocking thing to say. Have I ever moaned to you about money? We’re doing fine – if you had to go on the dole we’d cut our cloth and sort it. You should never, ever undersell yourself the way you do. I’m intensely proud of you. Sorry if I’m edgy. I hate that it’s upsetting you, more than words can say, and I love you just as much as always.’

  Something didn’t add up. Hugo couldn’t get a handle on it and stayed silent.

  ‘I think what’s best, darling,’ Nattie continued, speaking so slowly and quietly that he had to turn to hear. He could see her profile in the dark, achingly beautiful; he felt shrunken now, though, no pumping organs, heart drained, blood frozen. ‘I know it’s not what you want to hear,’ she said, ‘but if you could just give me a little space, just a week or two. I’ve been doing my head in, I’ve had so much to think about at work, Ian being bitchy as well . . . It’s impossible to explain, but there can come a point – with a woman certainly, and I’m sure men too – when you yearn to be alone with your thoughts and less pressured. It’s not fair on a partner, I know, but I need to sift out what’s good and what’s bad with myself to try to find some calm and know where I’m going.’

  She moved closer, close enough for him to see the gentle look on her face. He longed to pull her into his arms then, a fresh coil of desire overtaking him, held down and compressed like a spring. It had to stay that way. He’d lose her if he lost control; lose everything.

  ‘I know you’re pressured too,’ Nattie said, ‘but can you understand? Can you live with allowing me a little space?’

  ‘You’re not giving me much option, are you?’ What the hell did she expect him to say? That he wanted to fuck her then and there if he had any choice in the matter? ‘I hate this,’ he burst out. ‘I want to hold you and be close, just as always. I’ve got a lot on my plate as well, but it doesn’t change any of that. But if it’s what you feel you need . . .’

  He stared into her eyes and his anger drained with the way she was looking at him. He was always putty in her hands.

  Her smile became teasing, more of a grin. ‘But I’ll say one thing, my love, you don’t smell. You never have, no bad breath . . .’ She
leaned and kissed him chastely. ‘Sweet as roses. Night then, sleep well.’ She was already turning on her side.

  Hugo turned away too. They were back to back and he was an unhappy man – the unhappiest, he thought, he’d ever been.

  12

  A Brixton Reunion

  On Sunday morning Ahmed paced the kitchen slowly, one foot in front of the other, as though gauging the room’s dimensions. He was marking time and his thoughts were all over the place, skittering about like hailstones on a pavement. He was wildly impatient and sexually hyped-up, but also brooding and deeply concerned. He thought of the day he’d looked down the barrel of Fahad’s gun. He’d known the rightness of what he was doing then – unlike today.

  He’d had to come back. He was going against the strongest advice: the chance of a reprisal was shorter odds than Russian roulette, so the authorities had said, laying it on. Leaving England hadn’t been from choice.

  He tried to rationalise, genuinely believing that slipping into London, taking every precaution, in fact made the risk pretty slight. It didn’t lessen the guilt, but all that time away, those seven long years, he’d been obsessed with his love of Nattie, unable to cut loose and get on with his life, certainly not marry and settle down. Was it really so surprising that he’d reached a point where he could stand it no longer?

  He dreaded any sound from his phone. Her plans would go wrong; she wouldn’t come. Hugo would be deeply disbelieving – and let her know it, most likely. He’d try to touch her conscience, and who could really blame him? Nattie was soft-hearted and serious-natured, she’d care about hurting Hugo and wouldn’t be able to hide her guilt either. There was no shortage of girls who would play it cool and lie with ease, but Nattie wasn’t one of them.

  Ahmed tried to blot out his images of her lovemaking with Hugo. He had no right to such feelings of jealousy, yet his skin crawled and his fists were clenched. He couldn’t expect her to turn away, but now that he believed she still loved him, he passionately wanted her to have avoided any weekend sex. They’d both known why she was coming to London. There’d been no prevaricating, no misgivings; nothing needed to be said. He couldn’t quite imagine her sleeping with two men in the space of hours, but could hardly ask about that. He just had to suffer the thought.

  The morning stretched ahead. He felt caged, pacing Jake’s kitchen, and decided to go out for the Sunday papers. They weren’t the best online, too weighty, and he needed milk and a few staples too. The nearest shops were the ones most likely to be open on Sundays, but it was risky, getting too known in the area. Still, wearing his glasses helped and different people worked the mini-mart tills at weekends; it should be okay.

  It was a relief to be out of the house. The weather had turned. No more sunshine and clear skies, it was almost tropically hot, oppressively humid and with heavy, threatening clouds. Were the gods trying to tell him something? Ahmed thought about his route, which he regularly varied, and set off, chancing the rain, glancing casually up and down the street, trying not to look furtive. A man in beige chinos, he looked like a barrister or City type – a number of them lived locally – was coming towards him, walking a yappy terrier and with his pooper-scooper ostentatiously on display. He nodded civilly as they passed.

  Ahmed walked on, fretting guiltily about the risk to Nattie. If she were with him she wouldn’t be spared; the thought made him draw in his stomach. Suppose his movements were being watched. The house opposite seemed to be multi-occupancy, not well maintained. Anyone living there could have absorbed that the owners over the road were away and there was a new arrival.

  Suppose someone renting one of those bedsits was from Leeds, Manchester University, any of the places where he was known – someone who suspected him and spread the word that a man who looked like Ahmed Khan was living locally. He was a hero to the majority of British Muslims, most of whom hadn’t known his identity, but as well as those directly involved in the bomb plot there was a hard core of sympathisers and extremists who would go to any lengths.

  Nattie had been to the house once already. If she started being seen here more often . . . He felt fear pricking, lifting the hairs at the back of his neck. To have to part again now would corrode his soul. His small achievements would lose all meaning, his life feel like a dead-end street, going nowhere. But she’d probably find the resistance and say she couldn’t see him again after today. She had Hugo, her children, their safety to worry about. And her feelings couldn’t be as powerful as his after an absence of seven years – could they?

  He was back at the house without mishap, unpacked his shopping and prepared a tray with tea things. He read the Sunday papers, which were full of another terrorist atrocity and calls for ‘moderate’ Muslims to show a lead. He resented the tag ‘moderate’. What did it mean – moderately violent? There were extremists and sympathisers and the rest. Muslims should show a lead.

  At one thirty, excessively early, he left the house without setting the alarm, wanting no distractions on the return, and drove Jake’s throaty car to South Kensington. He parked up by the side entrance to the tube station as planned. He waited with butterflies in his stomach, lust on his mind, and when Nattie finally came out of the station, saw the car and her face lit up, he was done for. He switched on the engine and revved it, hardly able to contain his impatience. She ran across the street and climbed in. ‘Let’s go, quick,’ she said, and he roared off with hardly a kiss. No lingering. Not till they were behind a latched and locked door.

  ‘I died with every ping on my phone,’ he said, putting the back of his hand to her cheek as the traffic slowed them down. ‘No one knows I’m here, but with all the calls and emails I’ve done a lot of dying! And I’ve shared the strain, worried endlessly about how things were with you and Hugo. I actually dreamed of him last night; he was sitting at a kitchen table with us and wiped at his eyes with a hankie that came away covered in blood.’

  ‘That’s hardly sharing the strain, making me handle that image. It’s cruel.’

  ‘I needed to tell you. It’s what I’ve yearned for most of all, being able to tell you things, every needling little aggro, the good bits and all the rest.’

  Nattie smoothed his hand on the wheel and his blood raced. ‘What are we going to do?’ she said. ‘I feel in despair.’ Ahmed glanced and her eyes on him were helpless, as though willing him to whistle up some magic solution. She smiled wanly. ‘You used to be so jealous of Hugo, even knowing how I felt about you. The trouble is he’s always known it too, that’s what’s so infinitely sad. We have to talk seriously. You do know that?’

  ‘I’ve been psyching myself up all morning to say the same thing, hard as it will be. But just for now, this afternoon . . .’

  She gave him a sideways look. ‘Everything on hold?’

  He couldn’t contain the lust he was feeling. God, why wouldn’t the traffic move?

  ‘I know you as well as if I were married to you,’ he said, struggling to hold on, shifting about in his seat. ‘I know you’d have dressed in that pink shirt and jeans so as not to give Hugo cause for concern and suspicion.’

  ‘No black lacy bras today,’ she said.

  She was looking straight ahead, lips twitching, and Ahmed stopped the car abruptly. They were almost opposite the Imperial War Museum. Her mother and William lived just up the road. Nattie turned and they stared at each other unflinchingly. It was lust in its purest form, making love in a look. He was the first to look away; the air in the car was hazy with lust and the dust from it was blurring his eyes.

  Outside the house with its protective wall and rose-covered trellis he switched off the engine. ‘We’re here, Nattie. The bedroom’s a flight and a half up, at the front of the house; twee net curtains, not Sylvia’s finest, but they’ll keep out the world.’

  ‘No sipping tea in the sitting room?’

  ‘Not first off.’

  They stumbled up the couple of front steps, his arm round her, seaming her to his side while he fumbled urgently, one-hand
edly, with the key, stabbing at the lock. She took the key from him and turned it the right way up. The door closed behind them and he shot home an enormous white-painted bolt. No more lusting, only a frenzy of passion, seven lost years of it, where they stood in the narrow hall. Were they even going to make it upstairs?

  Nattie had been living for this moment ever since the shock of seeing his message in the account she had been about to close. In some subconscious corner of her frenzied brain she felt the pain of having failed in her resolve, the first time of coming here, to have made it her last – though any hope of that had been a deep self-deception, she knew. It hadn’t been in her to stay loyal to Hugo and resist. Her feelings were too powerful; they were too long held.

  Climbing the stairs she felt weightless. There was no gravity, no world, no thoughts, only the giving of herself to the man she loved.

  ‘This won’t be the best,’ Ahmed mumbled, mouths locked as he reached for her bra clasp. ‘I’m out of control.’

  He stared at her body and kept staring as she rode him. ‘Two babies later,’ she mumbled self-consciously, before her breath was taken away and her consciousness floated up to another level. She was in another life, an old familiar country, swept along on an avalanche of undisciplined sensations, whole squads of them. Could any living, feeling human being have called them to order? Two people in love, in their own private bubble of oblivion. Hard landings were for later.

  ‘How long have we got?’ Ahmed’s head was buried in her neck, his arm loosely flung over her breasts. She could feel and hear his heart beat, still at a great rate.

  She turned on her side to be facing him. ‘Another hour or so, not much more. I must be back by four, just in case.’

  He hitched up and stared at her. ‘We’ve got a lot of talking to do. This weekend has been pure hell, Nattie, thinking of you and Hugo, living with images . . .’