The terms of my contract stated that guides must not get involved with any of the clients. Group cohesion was important and a liaison would be likely to cause divisions. So I’d made absolutely sure I didn’t speak to Abe more than any of the others during the day. If anything, I spoke to him less.
But on the final evening, the day before we would return to Marrakesh and the airport, I was a little less cautious. ‘I can’t believe we’re going back tomorrow,’ Abe said, as we walked during the day. He’d been with Tim but when I fell back to speak to them both, Tim marched ahead.
‘This week has gone so quickly.’
‘Too quickly.’ Abe looked around, aware of the rest of the group.
‘We’ll have a bit of a feast tonight,’ I told him. ‘We always do on the final evening. Abdul gets a lamb from somewhere and they roast it over the fire. There’s dancing afterwards.’
‘Dancing? To what?’
Occasionally someone brought a radio with them but that was the only sound, apart from us, that ever punctured the peace of the surroundings. ‘Pots and pans mostly.’ I laughed. ‘When the guys have done the washing-up they bring everything out and play it. It’s surprisingly good.’
It was. The sounds they produced with whatever was to hand made instruments seem obsolete.
‘I look forward to it,’ he said. ‘But …’ He glanced around again, making sure the others were out of earshot. ‘I guess it rules out the chance of spending even the tiniest bit of time with you.’
‘The place we camp at tonight,’ I told him, ‘is in a kind of oasis on a riverbank. The tents tend to be more spread out. I’ll pitch mine at the edge. Maybe after the party …’
‘It’s a party now?’
‘It’s the closest we get here.’ I laughed. ‘But, anyway, maybe after.’
‘I could come to your tent and ask if you’ve got any Alka-Seltzer?’
‘Not that sort of party!’
This was an Arab country: none of the guides drank and most of the guests held back out of respect or because they didn’t want to carry it with them. After the first night in Marrakesh there was nowhere to buy alcohol.
‘Maybe you can just slip away when everyone else has gone to bed.’
‘Wild horses.’ He smiled. ‘But I don’t want to get you into any trouble.’
Without saying any more, I let Abe catch up with Tim and the first part of the group while I dropped back to join those at its rear.
After the lamb, the pots and pans came out and the muleteers performed a rousing rendition of a song that sounded like ‘housy housy’. The group mirrored their actions as they danced on the spot around the fire. When it had died down everyone said a slightly emotional goodnight to everyone else. Even the crew stepped across their self-imposed divide, embracing the people they’d helped look after for the week, then made their way back to their tents. I crawled into my mine, left the flap open and waited.
It wasn’t long before I heard footsteps, the sound of canvas being pulled aside, and Abe’s face appeared, silhouetted against the dark. He crawled through the flap and sat next to me on my sleeping bag. ‘Come here,’ he whispered.
Afterwards, before he went back to his own tent, we whispered in the dark.
‘This week,’ Abe said. ‘Meeting you, being here with you. I don’t want to say anything to scare you.’
‘Try me.’
‘I know you’re here and you will be for some time but I can’t imagine not seeing you again. To be honest, I can’t imagine …’ He paused. ‘I can’t imagine not being with you.’
I didn’t answer immediately because when I did I wanted to make sure I said the right thing. But I must have been silent a little too long.
‘I’m freaking you out, aren’t I?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re not. It seems a bit ridiculous. I hardly know anything about you but you’re familiar.’
‘I feel the same.’
‘So, can I write to you?’
‘Of course.’
‘And find a way to see you again?’
‘I’d like that.’
‘I don’t want to presume.’
‘You’re not.’
‘Because now that I’ve met you, I don’t want to let you go.’
He kissed me again and I knew, without being able to say why, that things would be different with Abe, that if they went the way I wanted them to, I wouldn’t be able to walk away from him as easily as I had from Chris.
We’d known each other less than a week but I was already affected by Abe in a way I’d not been affected by anyone before. I knew that if things didn’t work out, I’d be deeply hurt, and I knew that if they did, the thing I lived with would cause him to suffer in ways I did not want him to. But he felt so absolutely right that I had to give it a go. I had to expose myself to being hurt and to the possibility that I would cause him pain too. If I didn’t try I’d never know.
So we wrote. Every week.
He wrote to me and I wrote back. He told me what he was doing, about plans he was drawing up for a new office development in the East End, about how he was looking for a new housemate, as one of the girls he shared with was moving in with her boyfriend, about how he liked to put his bike on the train and head to the coast at weekends and cycle in Kent and Sussex, about films he’d been to see and bands he’d heard play.
I told him about the new clients who arrived every couple of weeks, about how the route I’d walked with him through the High Atlas was now blocked by snow. Instead we were trekking in Jebel Siroua. I wrote of how Abdul’s wife was about to have another baby, and each time we returned to Marrakesh he went home anxiously, wondering if there’d be news.
We kept up the correspondence for the next two months and then one day, when I returned to the hotel in Marrakesh after a ten-day trip in the mountains, there was a message for me. ‘Your father called and you need to phone home,’ the receptionist told me.
I knew him well, because we always came back to the same place. His name was Ibrahim and he was always warm, friendly and ready to share a joke. But he was serious.
‘Is everything all right, Ibrahim?’
‘You must phone home. You can use the telephone in the office.’
‘Thanks.’
‘And there’s a letter for you,’ he added, fishing out an airmail envelope from a pigeonhole.
I recognized Abe’s writing. I wanted to tear it open but first I had to make the call.
‘Miss Ivy?’ Ibrahim knocked on the door of the office and opened the door slowly.
I was sitting at the desk.
‘Can I bring you some tea?’
I nodded. I was in shock. ‘I have to book a flight home,’ I said.
‘Yes.’ He seemed to know. Dad must have told him when he called.
‘I will get you some tea and then we will phone the airline.’
‘Thank you.’
It was all so sudden, yet the timing was good. It had happened on the day I could be reached by telephone. If it had happened ten days earlier, there’d have been no way of letting me know. That added to the guilt I felt now for not being there.
But it wasn’t expected, not yet. It was too soon.
There was a flight that evening. I barely had time to get my things together or to worry about who would replace me. ‘We’ll sort it,’ my employer said, when I phoned London to tell them.
But I had a few moments, when I’d put everything into my suitcase and while I was waiting for the taxi to the airport. I took out a postcard I’d bought from the souk a while ago. The picture was of the Koutoubia Mosque, which towered over the Jemaa el-Fnaa and the city. No other buildings in the area were permitted to be taller than palm trees. ‘Allah is bigger than man,’ Abdul had explained.
On the reverse I wrote,
Dear Abe, Sooner than I planned, I’m coming home. I know this is probably not the best way to tell you but I feel very alone just now. I have to tell someone. Mum died today. She’d been ill for a
long time but we weren’t expecting her to die. Not yet. I know this comes out of the blue but I needed to tell you. I’m flying home tonight. Ivy xxx
I didn’t post it until a few days later when I was back home.
And when I saw him again it was in the midst of a period of turmoil and grief. I wasn’t myself. Or perhaps I was. Perhaps grief strips away everything else, all the outward signs of control and knowing what you want, and reveals the person underneath, exposing you in a way that you don’t want to be exposed, especially to someone you’ve only recently met.
I’d been home three days when the phone in the hall rang. I answered it because, although Jon had been fielding calls so that Dad did not have to speak to anyone, he wasn’t around just then.
‘Hello,’ a voice that was both familiar and strange said. ‘I’m really sorry to disturb you but I’m trying to get hold of Ivy Trent.’
‘Abe?’
‘Ivy, is that you? You sounded different. I thought maybe it was your sister.’
‘No, it’s me. How did you get the number?’
‘I looked it up in the phone book.’
‘Of course.’ I wasn’t thinking straight about anything.
‘I’m so sorry about your mum, Ivy. I should probably have just written but I wanted to talk to you. Is this a good time?’
‘As good as any.’ I picked up the phone from the table and moved with it so I could sit on the bottom stair. It was no longer the cosy place it had once been to take a phone call. The stair lift was in the way and knowledge of the part the stairs had played in Mum’s death. I shifted, wishing I could take the phone elsewhere. ‘It’s so nice to hear from you,’ I said to Abe, sounding like Jon had sounded so often over the past few days.
‘No, it’s Jonathan,’ we’d hear him saying to whoever had called after seeing the notice in the paper, assuming the mantle of eldest child, dealing with things Dad hadn’t the strength to face. ‘It’s very good of you to call … We’re expecting the funeral to be sometime next week … I’ll let him know you’re thinking of him.’
‘It’s really good to hear your voice,’ Abe said. ‘But I wish it was in other circumstances. Do you want to tell me what happened? You said your mum had been ill but you weren’t expecting her to …’
‘Not yet. She had a degenerative condition and we knew she wasn’t going to get better. We thought she’d get a lot worse but she had a fall and hit her head. It was much sooner than any of us expected.’
‘God, I’m so sorry.’
‘In a way, I suppose it spared her from the worst of it. And Dad. It was going to get harder for him to look after her. At least she was still at home and …’ It wasn’t the right time to go into all the details, not on the phone. I hadn’t told him anything about it yet. I’d been wanting to avoid the subject for as long as possible, until I had some idea of whether it might become an issue or not.
‘Listen, Ivy,’ he said. ‘I know you’ve probably got a huge amount to do and you’ll be tied up with your family and the funeral arrangements, but if you need anyone to talk to, you know I’m here. I’d like to think you could call me. Or I could come down to Sussex for an hour or so. I’d love to see you but I realize this isn’t a great time.’
‘I’d like to see you too. But I can’t ask you to come down here and I can’t leave Dad for long, not at the moment.’
‘If I got the train to where you live, maybe we could go for a walk or something. Just for an hour or so. Think about it.’
I didn’t need to. ‘If you’re sure you don’t mind. When could you come?’
It was several days after the funeral when I made my first foray out of the village. Abe had been down two or three times in the intervening period. It was strange the way my family assumed he was my boyfriend and how at ease Abe seemed to be with them in the midst of all the madness. And I was grateful to him, for letting me cling to him.
On his first visit I told him all there was to know about Mum’s condition and how it hung over the rest of us too. I told him it might affect me and that it seemed to scare people off.
‘I’m here,’ he kept saying, as if none of it mattered. But the fear was there, and I think it was probably just the sequence of events that led him to suppress it until much later, when it emerged in a way that would damage us both.
Three days after Mum’s funeral I went up to London.
‘Are you sure you don’t mind my going?’ I was worried about leaving Dad, even though Cathy was still staying and Jon lived nearby.
‘It’s only for a night or so, Ivy. You need to catch up with your young man.’
I was still raw with grief when I went back with Abe to his London flat and, desperate to feel someone’s warm, living body next to mine, to make love as if my life depended on it. A part of me felt as if it had died with Mum. I needed someone to make me feel alive again.
Perhaps if Abe hadn’t been around, I’d have found someone else to go to bed with, to ease the pain of loss and the fear of what my future might hold. But Abe was there. He didn’t appear to have any qualms about entering a relationship in the midst of such intensity. I felt as if we were being fast-forwarded to a place that, had things been different, might have taken us months or years to get to.
And then we were catapulted to another place altogether.
The travel company I’d been with in Morocco had given me work in their head office and an old friend of Cathy’s had offered me a room in her flat. I wasn’t sure how long I wanted to stay in either but I was occupied.
One evening after work Abe took me out for dinner. He said it was six months since the day I’d gone to wash my hair by the river.
‘So long? How can you remember?’
‘I can’t, really. But it must be about six months. I just wanted to do something nice. That felt like an excuse.’
‘You don’t have to find an excuse. I’m always up for doing something nice.’
‘Can I say something, Ivy?’ he asked, pouring us both a glass of red wine.
It always made me anxious when something about to be said needed flagging up.
‘I just wanted to say you’re amazing,’ he said. ‘I mean, I thought that anyway, when I met you, but the way you’re coping now.’
‘I’m just muddling through.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘You’ve been really strong. You are really strong.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, but I was unnerved by the speech. Had he had enough? Had he been there for me when I needed him to be and now wanted to beat a retreat?
When we went back to his flat that night, I was scared of losing him for the first time since I’d been with him. I’m not sure what had alarmed me but there was something about the way he’d spoken earlier, something about the way he looked at me when he was undressing me, something about the way he stressed the ‘do’ when he said, ‘I do love you,’ as he made love to me, something about the intensity of the way we made love that night, and something about the way he seemed quieter the next day and over the next few weeks – more reserved, as if he was thinking hard, too hard.
I didn’t want him to think. I wanted him to go with the flow. But I had no idea until a few weeks later which way the flow was taking us.
‘Are you all right, Ivy?’ Louise, a work colleague, caught me holding on to the edge of the washbasin in the Ladies.
‘Yes,’ I said, looking at her reflection in the mirror. ‘I suddenly felt a bit dizzy and queasy.’
‘Do you want to go home?’ she asked. ‘You do look a bit pale.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll be fine. I just feel a bit weird. You haven’t got any toothpaste, have you?’
‘I’ve got some in my desk,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to get it?’
‘If you don’t mind.’ I peered at myself in the mirror and saw someone who looked slightly different gazing back at me. ‘I’ve had this weird metallic taste in my mouth, which I can’t seem to get rid of.’
‘You’re not …’ Louise hesitated
.
‘What?’
‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’
The most difficult part of my pregnancy was telling Abe about it. I believed that he loved me. I’d never been so sure that anyone did, but I knew he was afraid of that. I could see the fear written all over his face when I told him, and the way he had to steel himself to ask me what I wanted to do.
I understood the enormous range of emotions it must have triggered when I said I wanted to keep the baby. God knows what I’d have done if, at that point, he’d run away. He had every right. I could have forgiven him for that, as I would forgive him for things that hurt me later. I loved him enough not to want to screw up his life.
‘I won’t blame you if you don’t want to be a part of it,’ I said, wondering how the hell I would find the strength to do it on my own. How could I possibly cope with a baby – or a child – especially if I started to show the symptoms my mother had shown when I was still a child?
But I also knew that asking anyone to stand by a newly pregnant newish girlfriend was a huge thing, especially when her mother had just died of a disease she might also be carrying and might pass on to their child.
I loved Abe so much for putting aside his fear, or trying to. And he really did try over the next nine months and after Minnie was born. When she was three months old, he asked me to marry him.
But Charlie, and the way he arrived, seemed to bring it all back to the fore, to magnify the risk of being part of a family with me.
Everything about Minnie was easy, from her conception and my pregnancy to her birth and early years. Abe couldn’t help but be happy. She brought with her an air of possibility. She was a living, breathing embodiment of ‘life goes on’, arriving just over a year after Mum’s death and bringing with her an unexpected legacy.
The night before she was born, Abe’s father, Greg, telephoned. When I heard the phone I was expecting it to be his wife, Pam, and was all ready to tell her that, no, there was no sign of the baby yet, then mouth to Abe, ‘It’s your mum,’ and smile, as he crept out of the room while I made excuses.
‘He’s just gone to buy milk’; ‘He had to go into work for a couple of hours’. Anything other than ‘He hasn’t got anything to add to whatever he told you when you called this morning!’
Ivy and Abe Page 17
