The Consequence of Love

by Sandra Howard

  Victoria sighed. ‘You know, I never believed he’d come back. I felt sure he would carve out a new future for himself in the States. If I’d ever thought he would, I’d have tried to stop you marrying Hugo.’

  ‘What you mean,’ Nattie said angrily, ‘is you didn’t want Ahmed to come back. You didn’t want me to marry him, deep down. You never felt he was suitable, did you? Be honest! You had smiles of relief the day I married Hugo. Sorry,’ she mumbled, feeling ashamed. ‘Water under the bridge.’

  ‘But you’re wrong anyway. Ahmed is exceptional.’ Victoria looked at her watch and looked up again, squarely at Nattie. ‘I should go, but there’s something I really have to say before I do. I hope it makes you understand better and see why I felt as I did. Any relief or happiness you saw on my face on your wedding day had nothing whatever to do with suitability. I knew you loved Ahmed and the conflict you must have been feeling that day. You were pregnant, there was that, but my relief had been entirely about your safety.

  ‘You must understand, surely, that had it been Ahmed you were marrying, how desperately worried I’d have been, the panic I’d have felt about the risk to you and any future grandchildren? Surely you can understand how concerned I’m feeling for all the same reasons now.’

  Nattie felt put on the defensive. What could she say? She was about to bring the children into contact with Ahmed. He’d been reassuring about Jake’s house, which had the feel of a protective bubble, but they wouldn’t always be able to be so sheltered and shielded and not seen together. If they were married and living a proper life, they’d want to be out and about, going places as a family. They’d have to live abroad.

  ‘I’m well aware of the risks, Mum,’ she said, more humbly. ‘It’s a trial separation, nothing final. I just badly need some space, time to think, to see the way ahead. Living as Hugo and I are, in this limbo land . . . my whole world feels like it’s a blur.’

  ‘I can understand that, darling, but never forget that the threat would always be hanging over you. As Home Secretary I saw all the intelligence, I knew what went on, how Ahmed’s enemies’ minds work and the lengths they’ll go to.’

  Her mother had tears in her eyes. Nattie felt in despair, wretched but unbowed, however deeply chastened.

  Victoria stood up and managed a smile. ‘There, I’ve said all I can, got that off my chest. I’d better make a move. It’s late – William will be back. Promise, though, you’ll always remember your happiness is everything to me, yours and the children’s. I’m here for you always.’

  21

  Meeting Lily

  Meeting Thomas had been one thing, but Lily . . . Ahmed felt more nervous than he could remember. Meeting Lily was a minefield, with all the potential for getting it wrong, and he wanted to make a good first impression. Fixed in his head was Nattie saying that Lily could be a right little madam. She looked angelic in her photograph . . . Being natural and normal was best, but it wasn’t an entirely natural situation.

  Her school finished at twelve on Fridays; they’d be with him in half an hour. It was time to order in something for lunch. Pizzas, he decided, should be fine. Nattie hadn’t mentioned food. If she brought it all with her they’d have a feast. Ahmed clicked onto an online delivery service. He’d been living on takeaways for weeks. He was no cook – did Nattie know that? Did Hugo regularly share the load and knock up trendy foody meals?

  His phone pinged with a text from her. Shall I pick up some lunch?

  Pizzas on the way. I’m scared I’ll look like an ogre to Lily.

  Ogres have a certain fascination. Pizza, spot on!

  ‘Hello, Lily. I’m Dan, your mummy’s friend. It’s good to meet you. Mummy’s told me lots, so I know you’re a clever, precocious girl and you’ve got a guinea pig called Moppet.’

  ‘I know what precoshus means,’ she said suspiciously, fixing Ahmed with uncertain eyes. She was absorbing, wondering – probably where he fitted in.

  ‘That’s a smart red puffa,’ he said. ‘Shall I hang it up? Is it your school uniform colour?’ She nodded solemnly. ‘Lucky you. I remember ours being a sort of muddy brown and we had horrible orange-and-brown-striped ties.’

  The pizzas were warming in the oven, a cheesy smell coming up from the kitchen.

  ‘What are we having for lunch?’ Lily asked, looking hopeful, glancing back at her mother for reassurance.

  ‘I got in some pizzas, Margherita, quattro formaggi and pepperoni. The Margherita ones have basil leaves on them, but you can pick them off.’

  ‘Mummy says they’re like salad, but I don’t like the taste.’

  Thomas was holding up a chubby palm, jigging up and down on Nattie’s hip.

  ‘High-five!’ Ahmed met palms with an upward swipe and a smile.

  ‘ ’Gain,’ Thomas said, more than once. He didn’t do things by halves.

  ‘Lunchtime now,’ Ahmed said crisply, calling a halt, ‘and I know a young man who likes his food. I hope you’re hungry too, Lily, they’re big pizzas.’ She’d been looking a bit huffy, peeved at Thomas’s show-stealing. ‘Would you like apple juice to drink?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, adding, ‘thank you’, with a prompt. ‘Margherita is my best pizza and I like apple juice too. Mummy puts water in it.’

  She held on to Nattie’s hand and Ahmed led the way down, taking over Thomas and carrying him in his arms. He set him down at the foot of the stairs. The kitchen, despite its supra-modernity, looked welcoming, he felt. The light was streaming in through the sky-lit extension, even on a cold dull windy day.

  Tubsy made straight for the toy box, tipped it up and extracted the blue car.

  ‘You’ve got toys here,’ Lily stated, gazing up at Ahmed accusingly. She had a delicate face with a high forehead and meltingly appealing gold-brown eyes. Her hair, which was primrose pale, silky fine, she tossed about like a young colt shaking his mane. She was, as Nattie said, quite a little madam, but completely irresistible.

  She stayed beside her mother, watching while Thomas pulled out various toys. She was unrelaxed, treading with care.

  ‘Yes, it’s nice to have a few toys when people come. Are you into books, Lily? There’s one or two over on that chair you might like, and a puzzle peg-board that’s quite fun.’

  ‘I’m doing well in my reading at school.’

  ‘Have a look at what’s there. We can read one after lunch if you like and you can show me all the words you know.’

  Lily went over and stood in front of the chair, picking out one of the easy-read books. Ahmed touched Nattie’s hand unobserved and raised his eyebrows, lusting for her as always. He had a job to hide it. She slipped him a teasing smile.

  ‘It’s time to wash hands, Lily,’ she said, sharpening up, ‘time for lunch.’

  ‘I’ll see to Tubsy,’ Ahmed suggested, ‘and strap him into his chair.’

  Nattie took Lily off to the loo and she was bouncier coming back, beginning to relax. ‘Tubsy should have tidied away the toys,’ she announced bossily. ‘He has to at home. Mummy and Jasmine make him.’

  ‘He is meant to,’ Nattie said, fitting round his blue plastic bib. ‘He’s good at doing it all by himself too, he makes lots of little trips to the toy box.’

  Ahmed put up a hand. ‘Mea culpa! But I’m learning, I’ll see he does next time.’

  ‘What does mayaculpa mean?’

  ‘That I’m the one to blame. It’s Latin, which is a very old language. It would be good to learn it when you’re older, Lily. Lots of words we use come from Latin.’

  ‘What like?’ She bit into a wedge of Margherita pizza.

  He had to think for a moment. ‘Did you stay in a villa on holiday, Lily? Villa is Latin for house. There, that’s your first Latin word. What did you do in school today?’

  ‘We learned the capital of France. And we did writing and stories.’

  ‘Let me see, does the capital of France begin with P?’ He said the P phonetically.

  ‘It’s Paris! And in America it’s, um . . ..
Mummy, Tubsy’s dribbling bits of pizza out of his mouth, it’s disgusting!’

  ‘That’ll do, Lily, none of that.’

  After lunch Nattie wiped Thomas’s mouth and lifted him out of his chair. ‘Tubsy’s off for his nap now. Will you and Lily sort out some pudding between you?’

  ‘Where does Tubsy sleep?’

  Lily wasn’t quite ready to be left alone with him, Ahmed sensed, and it seemed a good chance to show her round the house. If all went to plan – and it had to, it must – she’d be sleeping in the room he’d got ready for her as soon as Monday night.

  ‘Come and see,’ he said. ‘He’s got a cot in a very small room on a half-landing.’

  Tubsy’s box room, which Sylvia seemed to have used as an ironing room, was hardly bigger than the cot. Ahmed and Lily watched from the doorway while Nattie changed Tubsy’s nappy on the mat on top of a tall white stack of drawers. When he was snug in his sleeping bag, murmuring quietly to himself and about to drop off, Ahmed turned to Lily. ‘Would you like to see round a bit?’ She lifted her head slowly up and down and reached for her mother’s hand.

  The master bedroom looked out to the front and a very pretty bedroom at the rear overlooked the back garden. Lily stood looking into the room, taking it all in, taking her time. Ahmed had sought Nattie’s advice and bought a child-size bed, little and low to the ground. He’d also bought a small blackboard on an easel, a mini-armchair, navy blinds decorated with moons and stars, a doll’s house and more easy-read books that he’d arranged on a low shelf beside the bed.

  ‘Whose room is this?’ Lily asked. ‘Does a little girl live here?’

  ‘No, it’s for you. Mummy may possibly come to stay here for a bit, you see, so I thought you’d like a room of your own.’

  Lily looked at her mother. ‘Would Daddy come too? What about Moppet?’ She looked worried, uncertain – not very happy while loving the room.

  It was never going to be easy, but it was a starting point. Nattie had looked a bit panicky, but he’d had to pave the way.

  ‘We’d bring Moppet, of course,’ Nattie said, skipping the Daddy question, ‘he can come too. Let’s go down now and we must try to be quiet and let Tubsy sleep or he’ll be all whingey. There are the books and the peg-board, but Dan had an idea. He writes stories for television, Lily, and he said he’d help you write a story of your own while Tubsy had his sleep.’

  ‘Would you like that, Lily? We can do it on the computer downstairs in the kitchen. I’ve got a way to draw pictures on the screen too. It’s a graphic design app,’ he said, for Nattie’s benefit. ‘So we can do a story with pictures and print it out afterwards for you to keep. You can colour in the pictures then too.’

  ‘What can the story be about? Can it be about a guinea pig?’

  ‘That’s just what I was thinking myself!’

  Nattie told Lily to go to the bathroom before settling in and Ahmed grabbed the moment for a kiss. ‘I got the car,’ he said. ‘It’s right outside, a Ford Focus. Baby seats are in and I’ve seen to the parking permit. It’s all ready for you on Monday. Have a peek at it as you leave. It’s blue!’ Nattie gave him an alarmed smile, which got him worried. ‘You’ll get through the weekend,’ he urged, ‘as long as your mind’s made up and you’re really sure. But you’ll need some steel and bravery. There’ll be no worse agony than breaking it to Hugo – you do want to go ahead?’ Ahmed wished he felt more certain of that. She cared about Hugo, dreaded how he’d cope, and she had the worry of the children, even without the enormity of the risk. And he, Ahmed thought, had to bear the guilt of being prepared to let her take it.

  ‘It helps me to face telling him, saying it’s a trial separation, nothing final, and he can see the children plenty, every other weekend. I’m—’

  Lily danced back into the kitchen and Nattie broke off. Ahmed got the show on the road. He pulled up a second chair at the far end of the long table, where he had his laptop, found a cushion to make Lily higher and lifted her up onto it. He knocked out the start of a story about a guinea pig escaping from his hutch and ending up in a cage in a zoo.

  ‘What’s going to happen next?’ Lily’s eyes were round and wide, full of anxiety. ‘Wouldn’t his family be very upset and looking for him everywhere? I love how he looks in the drawing!’

  ‘His owner is a little girl who’s five, called Poppy, and she is very upset. She thinks he’s lost and cries for days, but she goes to the zoo one day and sees him. The zookeeper’s a very nice man with a kind heart, though, and he says she can take him home again.’

  Lily was full of excitement when the story was finished, holding on to the pages as they printed off. She clutched the three pages tight and was still clutching them saying goodbye. ‘Can we do another story soon?’ she said on the doorstep.

  ‘Suppose you try to think up what it could be about.’ Ahmed gave a grin, squatting down to her level. ‘Then it would be your very own story.’

  Her eyes were starry and she even gave him a little kiss. ‘Bye, Dan,’ she said, adding, ‘thank you,’ with a look from her mother. ‘I want it to be my very own, I’m so ’cited about that.’

  22

  Hugo’s Return

  It was a full plane, going back to London. Hugo shrank deeper into his Club Class seat, relieved to be beside a window and able to look out, look away, and that Brady was at last lost to a complimentary copy of the Financial Times. His boss had just delivered the most excruciating pep talk to Hugo while the plane had been stationary on the runway. God, the longing for take-off; bloody Doomsday could have come sooner. Between Brady putting the shits up, his wretchedness, his gargantuan hangover – he’d thrown up last night and felt close to it again now – Hugo longed for oblivion, a pill to knock him out at the least. He was ice cold and clammy, his whole body damp with sweat.

  ‘Don’t get on Brady’s wrong side,’ people in the office often warned. ‘He’s steel. A fucking JCB fork-lift truck when he chooses, he’ll turn you over and dump you in the dung.’ Brady had stopped short of that, but the steel had glinted all right.

  ‘I know you’ve got emotional problems, Hugo,’ he’d said, ‘they’re showing. Don’t let them. I gave you a chance when many wouldn’t and you pulled through, but don’t expect me to do so again. If we win out on Bosphor Air, it’ll be no credit to you. Maybe your opaque glaze passed those guys by yesterday, but it didn’t me. You’re on borrowed time, I warn you. You need to shape up and sort yourself out.’

  Hugo said he was sorry, bad patch and all that, but he’d got the message, and would pull himself up fast. He refrained from saying he could never have pulled through without Nattie. If she let go now, how long would his ‘borrowed time’ last?

  They landed at five-twenty. He had his bag with him and with luck should just be home in time to see the children. He badly wished he’d called Nattie; he hadn’t once, felt too devastated the whole time to speak to her. It had also had something to do with Amber and her obsessive come-ons, wrestling with whether a fuck with her would be a release. He was so strung up. If she wanted it that badly, he’d figured, why the hell not?

  Last night’s dinner, entertaining their contacts in Istanbul who’d helped get them in through the door, had been his undoing. He’d sat brooding, drinking himself into a coma deliberately; he could never have faced Amber without being tanked out of his skull. Such lunacy, imagining she could remotely ease the pain. Hugo sighed. He’d known how fake and false and sordid it would be, as squalid as it got.

  Even in his drunken haze he’d been repulsed, even with the room spinning, seeing four flabby boobs instead of two. He hadn’t backed off, he’d made it – just – before staggering to the bathroom and throwing up. What kind of sex was that? Had he ever felt dirtier in his life?

  Hugo shuffled through Passport Control and joined the taxi queue feeling maggoty and rotten to the core. He climbed into the back of a cab with relief. He was stuck with Amber too now, with her lovey texts and those knowing looks at the airport that ha
d made his innards crawl; he’d never get her off his back. He felt a failure in every direction. Nattie had married him out of affectionate pity, still in love with another man. Was he about to pay the price, for hoping and praying all those years that Ahmed Khan was six feet under the ground?

  The taxi made good progress; the traffic was all going the other way. Hugo ached to see Lily and Thomas, dreaded arriving home. His head pounded and bile rose in his throat even as he forced it down. The nausea was stress-induced, he knew; he couldn’t shake it off. It hung around like the smell of a dead rat, feeding on his acid terror, welling up at the slightest provocation – and never more so than when he imagined Nattie with her lover.

  Ahmed must have returned, she must be seeing him, Victoria had hinted as much. Was she about to tell him so, that very night? Suppose Ahmed was only back for a short time, too worried about the risk to stick around. It would fit with Nattie having a secret affair. She’d want to see Ahmed, no question, be swept up and unable to resist or even be especially discreet, however much she wanted to keep it from her husband. She might have tried to, Hugo told himself bitterly, but she was a useless liar.

  Suppose he’d gone along with the ‘marital sabbatical’ she’d wanted, stood obligingly by, been accommodating and agreed to it all. He groaned out loud in the back of the cab; he couldn’t have done it. It had been all he could do to live with Ahmed’s ghost.

  Couldn’t he just try? Wasn’t anything better than finality? He knew in his gut, though, that if Ahmed was back for however long, his marriage was in pieces.

  He was almost home. He tapped on the partition window. ‘Over on the right, just past the lamp-post.’ He paid off the cab, fished out his door key and carried his bag up the front path. He hoped the children were still awake and wished so much that he’d called. But to hear Nattie’s voice, soft and familiar as the feel of her skin, the lump in his throat would have choked him.