‘I haven’t been able to let him near me and he’s going to erupt sooner or later. He’s confused and suspicious already, unhappy about me coming to London. We can’t go on – well, not for long. Even if I wasn’t so scared for you.’ She bit her lip, looking up at Ahmed. He would be safer back out of the country, far from the hostile home shores, but how could she not see him again now?
Ahmed pulled her into his arms and kissed her. ‘It’s not my safety that matters, Nattie. I can take my chances; it’s yours. And your children’s. God, this is wretched, even to think of saying this, but I can’t let you take the risk of coming to see me here. Even if I stayed in the house twenty-four-seven I could arouse the suspicions of someone over the road. What I said at lunch in the bistro stands. I want to marry you and I’m going to one day, but being here now, back in South London, when I was given a new identity and expected to stay away . . .’
‘Why can’t you have full protection like Salman Rushdie?’ Nattie said, feeling the injustice of it all with bitter indignation.
‘He was known worldwide. It’s different with me. I’d given vital evidence, my identity was protected as far as possible and the authorities feel they’ve done their bit. Gratitude can be an ephemeral thing where the courts and officials are concerned.’
‘But that’s so unfair! Think of what you did!’
‘Life is unfair. Bomb disaster averted, job done. And, if we see each other often, Nattie darling, Hugo’s going to find out soon enough. You’d have to face that or be prepared to tell him with all that that means.’
‘I feel physically sick at the thought. He’s desperately easy to hurt, insecure and vulnerable at the best of times. I never told you the full scene in our coded messages that first year, since you knew I was trying to help him, but Hugo almost died. No more snorting office coke, it was snowballs and worse.’ Chilling to remember that lethal mix of heroin and cocaine, killer chemicals, used needles everywhere. ‘Most days I found him curled up in agony on the floor,’ she said.
‘And you nursed him back? He owes you a lot, Nattie, you shouldn’t forget that.’
It wasn’t easy to explain. It hadn’t been her dutiful nursing, Hugo had only found the immense reserves of will he’d needed to draw on for the detox and rehab because of his love for her. And her deepest, darkest fear now was that learning about Ahmed would cause Hugo to relapse.
‘Time for that cup of tea,’ Ahmed said, climbing off the bed, ‘and I’ve years to unload – if you really want to hear more about my loveless life.’
‘But not sexless?’
‘Well, not quite. Come downstairs, just as you are. I’ll get us a couple of wraps.’
She looked round the bedroom while he was gone. It still had the original fireplace with an antique ornamental fireguard and a fine bare mantelpiece, presumably cleared of Jake and Sylvia’s personal stuff. It was a handsome room decorated in neutral tones; the two full-length sash windows were draped with mud-coloured curtains and the offending nets.
‘I’ve ordered some shutter-blinds,’ Ahmed said, returning from the bathroom in a summer-weight white dressing gown, bringing one for her too. He held it out with a smile, his soft familiar smile that had always melted her into a liquid pool. The dressing gown with its raised basket-weave texture felt crisp and freshly laundered, cool and good against her skin. She thought about the fine-cotton blue check shirt he’d had on earlier, the discreet Rolex wristwatch; he could never look flash, but he had a quiet assurance about him now. There was so much she wanted to know.
She felt a kaleidoscope of emotions, staring at Ahmed, but her heart sang. She wanted to be with him every second of every day. She loved him. Was there a way? Coming here, just once in a while? Surely the risk of being seen was infinitesimal? She could take a long lunch-hour. Her office was south of the Thames, not far, and she could be doing an interview . . .
Some days she took Tubsy with her to see friends. Most, like Maudie, were still furthering careers – Nattie was young to have two children – but those on their first babies loved to chat over coffee and ask advice.
Tubsy usually slept from one to two-thirty, which was useful time to catch up with her reading. He wouldn’t need looking after if she brought him here at that time. No – she couldn’t let in such thoughts, they weren’t allowed. Ahmed was watching her – was he reading her mind? He had hold of her hand and linked fingers in an encouraging way then they went downstairs.
13
The Next Instalment
They took their tea into the sitting room and sat together on the sofa. ‘On with my lonely life then,’ Ahmed said, settling a hand between Nattie’s thighs.
‘The day I saw you’d got married, I flipped. I went straight out to get drunk – first alcohol for a year – which was all part of being so messed up and guilty,’ he added, not wanting her to think he was having a go. ‘And being flat broke as well. I’d been thinking of ways to make money, though – for when I could come back for you – but instead I stayed on with the charity, ARC.’
Ahmed kissed her mouth, wanting more and wishing there was time. ‘I did begin a relationship while I was at ARC,’ he admitted. ‘It was with a native Canadian girl whose brother had come to Vancouver and found no work. He was sleeping on the streets, spaced out. She and I helped him over the worst and she persuaded him to go back with her to their small home community in the forest up in north-east British Columbia. She’d worked in a hairdresser’s in Vancouver, but jacked it in. She and her brother were very close.
‘I went too. She’d fallen for me, I knew. It helped to have someone adoring and needing me, but she wasn’t you.’
‘What was her name?’
‘Alyana.’
‘I know I shouldn’t mind about her,’ Nattie said, looking like she did mind, very much. ‘Were you together a long time?’
‘About a year – I’d got sucked into all the problems and issues her people faced. It was weird, living in that community. I soon got mighty sick of acorn pancakes, buffalo and fish-head stew – which I can cook you any time, by the way. It’s made with various bits of a salmon, not only the head.’
‘No, thanks.’
‘The big issue for the aboriginals was fracking. It’s a real concern. They live by hunting and fishing, tourism, forest products, and if the fracking’s done by cowboys and the wells aren’t properly capped, bad greenhouse gases like methane can cause contamination. It’s a minimal risk and I won’t bore you with the detail, but it’s vital that everything’s regulated and tied up tight.
‘Quebec and Nova Scotia had imposed moratoriums and Alyana’s community wanted one for their province. Things were getting going, hearings underway, so I joined in and fought the aboriginal cause. I was living from hand to mouth, but still had my New York sharp suits, I could look the part at the hearings. Having worked on the Post I knew how the media works. I could maximise the coverage, feed stories to lazy reporters and punchier angles to the more serious press. I began to get noticed, which I didn’t really want. I’d become a bit of a liability, in fact, in terms of fighting the community’s cause. Trouble was, I could see both sides.’
‘And you were with Alyana all this time?’
‘Mostly. But I’d started to have itchy feet. Ideas come into your head when you’re sitting on a log in the forest or pathetically trying to fish. I’d reached the point of wanting to move on.’ He stroked her cheek. ‘Another cup of tea, or shall I keep going?’
Nattie was looking at her watch when her mobile rang. She paled. They’d both jumped, hearing the tone, and she shot out of the door as if her phone was a starting gun. ‘My bag’s in the hall,’ she called back. ‘I’ll never get to it in time.’
Ahmed cursed inwardly. It was sure to be Hugo, home early, or with some problem or other to cause stress. He went to the door to listen to her side of the conversation, tense to the tips of his fingernails.
‘Hi, darling! You okay?’ Nattie asked brightly, a bit artificially. ‘Sou
nds like you’re still there. You’re not still going with lunch, surely? . . . So when do you think you’ll leave?
‘No, I’m not actually there yet,’ she continued, after a long pause. ‘I, um, decided to come into town. I’m rather out of clothes and it’s always such a rush, trying to shop in my lunch hour or trailing Tubsy round in the buggy.’
Ahmed smiled to himself. He’d thought she might need an excuse and had taken care of it. He was burning to know how much time they had, though, and Hugo seemed to be talking for an age.
‘Okay,’ Nattie said, getting a word in at last, glancing his way with a hopeful smile in her eyes. ‘Yes, darling, me too. Drive safely. Kiss to Lils and Tubs.’
She clicked off and Ahmed, seeing the look in those beautiful amber eyes, felt ready to swoon. She was naked under the wrap. He went up close and took the phone, dropped it back into her handbag, which was on the floor by the door – they’d been oblivious, coming in. He slipped his arms inside the wrap and round her waist. ‘How long have we got?’ He found her mouth, not waiting for an answer
‘Couple of hours, max. I must be home first.’ She drew back and stared at him, her mood flipping, tears brimming in her eyes. He kissed each of them in turn.
‘What’s wrong? Tell me,’ he said, fondling her hair. ‘What did Hugo talk about for so long?’
‘Two of his aunts who’d come to lunch, which slowed things up to our advantage.’ She gave a forlorn half-smile. ‘His aunts still resent his being left the house; they feel entitled to use it as a pit stop on London visits. One’s coming tomorrow. I’ll have to do lunch, but it’s not that. It’s just . . .’ Nattie looked away and back again. ‘He’d called the house phone first, you see. He knew I wasn’t home. I can’t bear this deception and lies.’
‘But you managed a neat little sidestep.’ Ahmed smiled, touching her face. ‘It was hardly an outright lie. “I’m rather out of clothes”! Quite accurate, really.’
She pulled away. ‘Don’t make light of it,’ she said huffily. ‘I can’t cope.’
‘It’s no good getting too heavy either,’ he said, leading her back to the sofa where she sat stiffly forwards with her head bent. ‘It’s not going to help. I swore to myself this morning I was going to say – even if there hadn’t been Hugo to worry about – that I couldn’t let you take even a minimal risk. But God, it’s hard!’
She lifted her head and stared, wide-eyed. ‘I don’t rate this business about the house opposite,’ she said, with a determined expression. ‘I can’t not see you again, I just can’t.’ She started to cry, shoulders heaving.
‘Suppose we take it very slowly,’ Ahmed said, gathering her up, feeling the full weight of responsibility – and the weight of his guilt. ‘I’ll try to check out the house opposite, get the measure of who’s going in and out. There’s a family next door on one side, with twin girls who have lots of giggling friends, and an elderly couple on the other. The immediate neighbours seem fine,’ he said, releasing her, ‘but, Nattie darling, suppose Hugo found out? He could do, you’d have to be prepared for that. I want to be with you now, tomorrow, for life, but as well as the risk of word getting back to my enemies and anyone tracking me down, you do have to face up to what coming here would mean. Skirting round things, evasion, even telling outright lies . . .’
‘Do you think I haven’t been facing up to what it means – every which way, every second since you got in touch?’
She was staring at him, tight with tension, and Ahmed held her gaze. ‘We had to have this conversation,’ he said. ‘I’ve been planning to touch base with Tom, now I’m back – if you’d be happy for me to do so. He’s a good friend, the best, along with Jake, and I’d trust him with my life. Tom’s this side of London, so you could always have been seeing him if you needed somewhere to have been. He’d be prepared to help, I’m sure, and cover for us if need be.’ Ahmed knew how much Nattie adored her stepbrother and he didn’t believe Tom would let anything slip to his father – nor to Victoria, which was more to the point.
‘It would help hugely to share it with Tom,’ Nattie said. ‘He’ll understand more than anyone. He knows what it’s like – he’s still in love with Maudie. Will you tell him, though, and explain?’ She gave a shy smile. ‘I’d find it a bit hard.’
‘Why don’t I ask him round at a time you can be here – a detour on your way home from the office. We can tell him together.’
Nattie leaned against him. ‘I love you so very much,’ she sighed. ‘You know what’s best, you do it right.’
He kissed her purposefully, laying her backwards, and his hand that had gravitated back between her thighs after Hugo’s call began stroking her, feeling its way to a point where she couldn’t hold in her moans. ‘There’re no nets on these windows,’ she mumbled, making space for him on the narrow sofa, ‘somebody might look in.’
‘They’d need to be very tall. Of all our worries . . .’
14
A Fuller Picture
Ahmed made more tea. Nattie ate three pieces of shortbread as she’d had no food all day, but now that they were settled on the sofa again, she was impatient to know more.
‘We’ve got less than an hour,’ she said, ‘and there’s so much I still need to know. About other loves, for instance, and how you got from being skint in Canada to being this new groomed you. You must have either swum with the sharks or done something very clever.’
He smiled and set down the chipped Leeds Football Club mug he’d been nursing in both hands. Had he carried that mug everywhere with him over all that time? Nattie felt moved. She imagined how much he must have needed tangible reminders, though, banished from his homeland and everything comforting and familiar.
‘I’m not sure what you’re going to think about it all.’ Ahmed looked sheepish, almost shy.
She gazed at him, treasuring every short-lived moment. In less than an hour she’d be a wife and mother again, smiling at Hugo and dissembling, shedding her cloak of happiness and dressing herself in shame. How long would it be before he suspected something and asked her outright? She was already causing him pain. How could she bear the far greater agony he’d feel when he discovered about Ahmed’s return? As he surely would. How could she bear to lose Ahmed, now that they’d found each other again?
She thought of his strength of character and the exceptional bravery that had cost him his family, his identity, his peace of mind. She thought of his shock and grief on hearing the news of his father’s death, and she tried to imagine the fear he’d described. She was beginning to understand the insidiousness of its iron grip, how it could have eaten into him the way it had and taken such obsessive hold, depriving him of reason, filling his head with crazy notions of cowardice, impotence and self-loathing. The sadness of it all carved a notch in her heart.
It explained so much. His flight to Canada, his need to do good works; it wasn’t difficult to understand his bitterness, desperate loneliness – and Alyana.
‘Tell me more. You admitted to some questionable ambivalence about fracking when you were in Canada . . .’
Ahmed wrinkled his forehead. ‘Yes, well, that was rather awkward. I didn’t change sides, just rode two horses – and only as far as saying I could see the pros before punching in with the cons. I didn’t hold back with those. There’s a real gold rush on the province’s water; fracking gobbles up billions of litres and there’s always the fear of some disaster, bad old human error. The aboriginals are understandably terrified of water contamination. There’d been a recent small gas leak into the Peace River; it was easy to push their case.
‘Away from the hearings I tried to explain the remoteness of any really dramatic risk. The wells are drilled so deep, you see, that the chemicals would have to seep through two metres of solid rock—’
‘Can we shelve the fine detail? We’re not getting on very fast.’
Ahmed kissed her. ‘Sorry! Anyway I persevered at the hearings, making clear that I wasn’t opposed to fracking at any price – u
nlike the loons who never stopped yelling “Frack off”. Some of these environmentalists are off the wall, so radical and extreme – this is leading somewhere, I promise!
‘My ambivalence got noticed eventually, and after an interminably long meeting one day, a guy from one of the smaller chemical companies asked me out for a drink. I needed one, I was back drinking by then and I liked this guy, Jeff. He was fair-minded, even prepared to admit there were minimal risks. We got quite friendly over time and Jeff picked up that I was ready to move on. He said I should think of heading back to Vancouver, get myself some temporary job and tag along with him to a few events and parties. In other words put myself about.’ Nattie’s thoughts flitted to Hugo, longing for him to do a bit more of that.
‘I knew Jeff was right,’ Ahmed continued. ‘You were married, but it was impossible to shake off my dreams of being with you again and somehow making something of myself. They spurred me on.
‘It wasn’t easy, being back in Vancouver. I was fresh out of money and on borrowed time too; my Canadian visa was up. No one had come after me or seemed to give much of a toss, but I went to see the authorities just in case. I told a small lie about being “in negotiations” with an American sponsor and asked to stay a few more months, doing volunteer work for ARC. The charity backed me up; they were glad to have me back, and I was granted a six-month extension.
‘I needed a bit more going for me than working with homeless aboriginals, though, if I was to make any sort of mark at Jeff’s parties. No one rates worthy do-gooders, I’m afraid, when it comes to getting yourself noticed.’
‘How did you make your mark?’ Nattie was fascinated to know. ‘And where was Alyana in all this? Did she return to Vancouver with you?’
‘Yes, she insisted on coming. I’d tried to stop her, said it was time, that happy as I’d been . . . that sort of thing, but she clung on. It was awful. In the end all I could do was to tell Alyana I was in love with someone in England and always had been. That rang as true as it was and I had to live through her pain. I felt brutal, abject. There’s nothing worse than the bodies that love can leave strewn in its path.’
The Consequence of Love Page 13
