The noise level was low and dominated by the hissing and spluttering of the shining Gaggia coffee machine as if the early-morning privacy of the customers was not to be disturbed by unnecessary chatter nor their concentration on the sporting or financial pages of The Age broken by needless courtesy greetings. And being Australia it was usually the sporting pages that demanded first attention. Very few financial crises would have outweighed the need to know whether the Ashes series was going to go to the wire again. And, again, being Australia it was probably unnecessary to read the actual printed word to be in the know. The faces of those seeking their coffee fix after a Metro or car journey would readily have been able to tell you how things had gone.
All of which being said, the coffee shop was rather more crowded this day than Julie had ever yet observed it. She put this down to the total absence of customers sitting outside. The diehard smokers had been forced into abstinence and inside by the arctic blast whistling between the canyons of the office buildings that verged on Spring Street and filled the space behind it.
It was this unusual intensity of people, still discreet in their noise and movement, that attracted Julie’s attention to the figure temporarily blocking the shop doorway rather than his Greek-god good looks. Like the diehard smokers, he was obviously trying to escape the wind, or so Julie imagined, but unlike them it was equally obvious that this was the first time that he had set foot in the coffee shop. This gave her a fellow feeling.
Always alert to the needs of her customers and to the proximity of competing establishments, the waitress steered the man towards Julie’s table. Single occupancy, of necessity, was going to have to be foregone.
‘Do you mind?’
Julie was hardly going to say no!
The silence between them wasn’t going to last either.
‘You don’t like scrambled eggs, then?’
Julie took in the obvious humour in the man’s remark; the relish with which she was consuming her breakfast was clearly all too apparent. The sparkle in the clear blue eyes that met her more complex, almond-shaped brown ones lingered as she considered her reply. The muffled but persistent opening bars of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture emitting from her shoulder bag somewhere under the table cut off her half-formed response to be replaced by a distinctly unladylike curse under her breath. The blue eyes opposite sparkled even more.
The speed with which Julie untangled her mobile phone from her belongings impressed the man. Starting to lever himself to his feet in a question of whether she needed privacy, she flashed a negative in a quick, friendly smile. The displayed mobile phone number wasn’t immediately familiar to her; not that many numbers were after so short a sojourn in Melbourne, but that meant that she didn’t know whether she would mind being overheard or not.
‘Julie Kershawe.’
To the man sitting opposite Julie, the ensuing conversation must have seemed bizarre in the extreme. From time to time she glanced across at him, half embarrassed, all the time rather irrelevantly thinking that no man had the right to be quite that gorgeous.
‘Tariq, I don’t want to talk to you!’
‘I don’t care if you’ve been up half the night waiting to talk to me!’
‘I don’t care if you bought a new mobile phone especially to call me!’
She stabbed at the button to cut the call off.
Her companion focused on her more obviously as her silence seemed to demand filling.
But whatever he might have deduced from the one side of the conversation that he had heard, and despite the steady rumble of background noise he had heard, his face gave no sign that he was about to make conversation about it.
Nonetheless, he produced a knowing smile that seemed to invite a confidence from Julie. But, despite being very aware of the silence, she was not inclined to offer one. She was happy to wait for him to take the initiative.
The intrusion of Tariq into her new life was most unwelcome and something that she needed to think about; it wouldn’t just be about buying another mobile phone.
‘So what’s a Pom doing here in the winter then?’
It was so crass a question that they both laughed. Their amusement attracted the waitress and coffee top-ups. The atmosphere became almost light-hearted.
‘Have you really got time to hear my life story?’
Well, yes, he certainly had; but he was only actually going to be interested in the more recent part of it.
3
Tolpuddle. TUC Martyrs Museum.
Mid-afternoon, mid-May, the A35 Puddletown bypass was largely undisturbed by any significant traffic flows. The brown information signposts seemed to be the only things of interest to take notice of.
‘A Trades Union Museum devoted to the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Never knew that.’
Susie Peveral’s cut-glass accent suggested a background that might support such ignorance.
David Hutchinson, a well-known freelance journalist/photographer, was currently acting as guide and driver to Susie to a part of Britain that he particularly enjoyed being in.
‘They weren’t martyrs in the burned-at-the-stake sense,’ Hutchinson said. ‘That’s just a bit of Trades Union mythology. They were farm workers who were transported for forming a union. They were soon pardoned and shipped back, but they made convenient heroes to glamorise the rather dreary face of trades unionism.’
David Hutchinson completed the tale.
‘OK, so you’re not a union man, then?’
Susie’s question, a mixture of laughing mockery and sarcasm, went unanswered.
The mention of unions triggered other thoughts from their Oxford days.
Susie Peveral was the Student Union representative, and later President, touting for members at the Freshers’ Day gathering at their Oxford college. Barely eighteen and sensitive about both his age and his presence at such an illustrious seat of learning on a bursary and scholarship, David wasn’t at first very responsive to young Susie approaching him as a union representative. The son of a miner whose childhood had been blighted by the sort of suicidal industrial action that eventually brought the ire of Mrs Thatcher down on the trades unions, he could never really relate to his father because David senior was immune to normal social and economic logic. Perhaps presaging his future intellectual capabilities, his rather damning rejoinder to his father as he approached his tenth birthday that ‘you couldn’t eat industrial solidarity’ set the tone for a fractured relationship that was never quite repaired.
He emerged from his reminiscences.
‘Thought we might stop off at Dorchester and get a bite to eat. If we head for Poundbury, you can see what the daydreams of our illustrious heir to the throne can look like in hard concrete and brick.
‘OK, so you’re not a monarchist either then!’
The mockery was there again.
‘Susie! Lunch!’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Lunch, if Poundbury can boast a decent restaurant.’
It could and did, and they were back on the A35 heading on towards Honiton and Exeter after a lunch that satisfied Susie’s delicate vegetarian tastes as well as David’s appetite for red meat.
Being an alpha male, and having the added attraction of a colourful and exciting professional life, made David Hutchinson attractive to women generally. But taking up with the erst-while Student Union President was as much a surprise to him as it was to her. She simply wasn’t his type. But as the relationship grew, it became as much gastronomic and alcoholic as sexual, and seemed to give Susie a vicarious satisfaction that David found hard to understand. But then his uncle wasn’t an earl.
It was after they had had that session in London in 2003. David had met her in the street, literally. In Whitehall. She was a high-flying Foreign Office Assistant Secretary. With only his university experience to draw on at that point, she had still seemed the arrogant upper-class tart he had always characterised her as. She, in her turn, obviously still thought that he was somehow beneath her but was happy to know that he was
off to the O2 Arena for a photo-shoot with her favourite pop star.
‘We’ll take the coast road rather than the main road. Burton Bradstock. You can see the famous “Jurassic Coastline”. More to the point, we can stretch our legs and walk along the cliffs.’
‘OK. You’re the boss of this expedition.’
The mockery was replaced by affection. Despite her inability to express the thought, Susie was clearly enjoying herself.
Parking at the National Trust car park at Burton Bradstock and making their way along and up the more tortuous first part of the cliff-top walk stalled any conversation. Not that that bothered either of them. One of the deeper attractions between them was their relaxed tolerance of each other’s silence.
The grandeur of the scenery put any thoughts of the show that Susie had put on at the O2 Arena out of his mind. Her sudden and unexpected grab at him, in a storeroom backstage, took David so much by surprise that it almost inhibited his ability to give satisfaction. But satisfied Susie was, and to his further amazement anxious to have more at a later date.
‘Jesus, David!’
They were now very much back in the present.
As freelance journalist-photographer, in a whole variety of locations around the world, David Hutchinson had seen plenty of dead bodies.
From the moment that he realised that what Susie was pointing at was a body floating in the sea about a hundred metres offshore, they both dropped instinctively into professional mode. Hutchinson immediately unshipped his Black-Berry and began to make notes in the Notebook application but soon stopped. They were on holiday and it had been a clear decision to leave the tools of their trade at home; if you don’t count the multi-capabilities of a Black-Berry mobile phone as a tool of trade. Susie used hers to call the emergency services.
‘Stay where you are – we’ll get someone over to you.’
The instruction from the police was clear, and, in any event, neither of them was very keen to make their way back down to the shingle beach since all they would be able to do was stand and stare while others did the work. And standing and staring wasn’t something that either of them was very good at.
‘Ms Peveral?’
The conversation with the police officer was brief and confirmatory. She could see for herself what they could see and knew as well as they did that the next actions would involve neither them nor her. They both very readily dropped out of professional mode again.
An inshore lifeboat was quickly launched from the beach. With two police divers in lieu of the normal crew, it didn’t take them long to recover the body and to do an extensive, if futile, search of the surrounding waters. The massive cliff overhang ensured that the action on the beach, when the lifeboat returned, was invisible to the two friends, and soon the police officer cleared them to leave if they so wished.
They did so wish. This was an unlooked-for intrusion into the calm relaxation of their holiday.
Later ensconced in a small hotel at Seaton and in pursuance of their plans to leave the real world to one side, neither Susie nor David wanted to watch the early TV reports of the events on the Dorset beach. It wasn’t until two days later that either of them read anything about the incident in the papers.
What David Hutchinson then saw caused him some surprise.
The dead man had a face that he recognised. He’d taken the photos from which the newspapers had culled the one that they had printed. He’d also been given a list of the names of the people who had been wanted to be included in the pictures; and in his business you had to have a good memory for names and faces.
The photograph wasn’t the best he had ever produced. Blown up from the group photograph, however, the man’s features were clear enough. And the photo-shoot was definitely of the sort that would have stuck in his memory.
4
Tariq’s telephone call unsettled and depressed Julie Kershawe. All her angst, wretchedness and sense of violation at the collapse of her relationship and the deception that it represented instantly resurfaced in her mind. She could still offer herself no explanation for why he had behaved as he had done; nor could she understand the Muslim mind-set to which everybody else attributed his contemptuous treatment of her.
Her companion watched her face as it mirrored her thoughts and her struggle to repress her hurt and allow her anger to predominate. Isolated in the frenetic morning activity of the coffee shop, Julie and her Greek god presented two totally different pictures of humanity. She was suddenly agitated. He had a calm about him that Julie would have seen as entirely in keeping with his celestial presence had she been in the mood to analyse the situation. She wasn’t.
Julie wanted to hate Tariq but she couldn’t. At least, as she sat there she couldn’t. Nonetheless, she was sure that another feeling was struggling for life. Revenge is said to be a feminine feeling; Julie wouldn’t have believed that but she would have acknowledged a growing desire to pay Tariq back for his treachery and for her loss of years of life.
The desire for revenge was a reading of her character that would not have surprised those of her early schoolgirl friends who had kept in touch with her. As a teenager, if Julie was considered to have had any fault, it was her unforgiving attitude to anyone whom she felt had slighted her. It was a trait that lost her friends but it was one that was recognised by those who valued her other inherent characteristics.
It was these other inherent characteristics that were the topic of interest that chilly, steamy coffee-bar morning. Not that Julie would have supposed that the man sitting opposite her was there as a result of anything more than a chance encounter.
And as if he had nothing else in the world to interest him her companion watched her body language change as her face settled. From slumping slightly forward she straightened up, her breasts pressing out against her well-fitting deep-mauve sweater, her barely made-up face returning to animation and her carefully manicured hands returning from her lap to rest on the table. She wore no rings. Not given to too much introspection, Julie simply looked across the table at the man and appraised him without much consideration of him beyond his obvious good looks.
A positive, if neutral grin, signalled that she was ready to resume the more light-hearted interaction of earlier. In response, he seemed to come more alive himself and to be more ready to engage in conversation.
‘OK, Julie?’
His accompanying grin was infectious and openly questioning.
‘OK, Julie, so what is a Pom doing here in Melbourne in the winter then?’
The question had been lodged in her mind even before he asked it for the second time. She had come to recognise it as a fairly regular conversational opener. Her subconscious had already been working on a response, or, at least, the tone of a response.
Bred to a rigid set of parental morals, Julie had been disappointed in herself at the weakness that she had shown in her teenage and early adult life. If her tendency to be unforgiving was regretted by her friends, her tendency to be weak when confronted with an attractive and powerful male was undoubtedly a matter of regret to her. That the regret at her weakness was inevitably linked with her late partner, Tariq al Hussaini, she was ready to admit. That that same weakness had allowed rather more young women of Chinese origin to take up British citizenship, when certainly not entitled to do so, was something that she found hard to admit.
Not that it mattered: her superiors, without too much evidence, appeared to have also felt that she had behaved badly, which was why she had been eased out of her post and was now a free agent in Australia. And eased out her subconscious told her she had been. But it was always a feeling coupled with a sense that her removal was somehow contrived.
‘Shit,’ she told herself, ‘that’s all behind me.’
Preoccupied with the immediate and short-term, Julie had no way of knowing whether this optimistic assessment was going to be true or not.
What was in front of her was a tall suntanned young man, whose age she was having problems fixing. A
ge accompanied with good looks that no ordinary mortal ought to have been entitled to was a combination that had now fully got her attention. The man was clearly expecting an answer to his twice-posed question.
Come on, girl, be truthful; it really is all behind you.
‘I’m on the run,’ she said, with a delighted grin that challenged him to ask from what.
He asked.
‘I used to be a sort of policewoman…’
She paused; she wasn’t sure whether the amused raised eyebrow signalled disbelief or not.
‘UK Border Agency,’ she said. ‘Stopping undesirables getting into Britain, or at least trying to.’
He didn’t challenge her statement. He seemed to know what the UK Border Agency was and accepted what she had said.
‘And did you stop all the undesirables?’
What she had jokingly said she was running away from never got an airing. The tone of seriousness in his question didn’t register with Julie. She just picked up on the emphasis on ‘all’.
‘No… No, that’s never possible.’
The next pause came where a name would normally have come into the conversation, but she didn’t have a name for him.
‘Alan,’ he said.
She was impressed by his speed of perception.
‘No, Alan, you never can stop all of the undesirables, even from entering an island. Not if they want to get in, or…’
China Wife Page 2
