Other Countries

by Jo Bannister

  Common sense, Hazel thought in a flash of understanding that was almost an epiphany, would wait at a bus stop in the rain rather than accept a lift in a Ferrari. Sometimes you have to take a chance. If it all goes pear-shaped, you sort it out. But it would be sad to go to your grave regretting all the chances that came along and you were too sensible to grasp.

  ‘Yes, all right,’ she said.

  Ford wanted to be sure he hadn’t misunderstood. ‘I should take the house?’

  Hazel looked around. The leaded lights of the many windows were winking like diamonds in the sun. She nodded. ‘You should take the house.’

  TWENTY-ONE

  In twenty-seven years, Hazel remembered feeling like this only once before. That too had meant following her heart rather than her head: becoming a police officer instead of a teacher. She hadn’t been able to rationalise that either. She’d enjoyed teaching, had a certain talent for it, was beginning to enjoy the rewards that came with success. Friends had thought her mad to throw away the years of work that had brought her to that point in order to start afresh as a police trainee.

  Yet at some level she had known that it was right for her – that this was what she wanted to do. It was the same with Ford. She couldn’t have explained to anyone – she couldn’t explain it to herself – why she wanted what he was offering so much that she was willing to smother the sensible Hazel Best who had made a reasonable job of being her so far and become someone else entirely: less cautious, quicker to take risks, ready to act without even assessing the risks involved. It was a little like demonic possession, only in this case the imp taking control of her was herself. Herself as she had so often, if only fleetingly, wanted to be: braver, more spontaneous, free-spirited.

  And that, she realised, her eyes widening at the recognition, was precisely what Oliver Ford did for her. It wasn’t the trappings of wealth or celebrity that she was so enjoying. It was being that other Hazel whom he had somehow liberated. As if being cautious and sensible and rational was a guise that only now, with him, she was able to cast off. If he left her next week for someone prettier and with more hair, she would always be grateful to him for introducing her to that daring alter ego whose existence she had never before suspected. With or without Ford, she thought the two of them were going to have a whale of a time.

  She needed to collect her car, and she needed to collect her clothes. Her first thought was to go back to Railway Street that evening, when Saturday would be working, and leave him a note. But that was cheap and cowardly. She didn’t have to explain herself – not to Saturday, not to anyone – but nor did she have to avoid old friends as if she had something to be ashamed of. The least she owed them was to take a proper farewell, and promise to keep in touch, and promise always to be there for them if they needed her. She told herself that she really meant that, and ignored the knowing chuckle of the gleeful imp in the background.

  So she went back to Norbold the next morning, late enough to find Saturday awake, early enough that he would not yet have left the house.

  He was in the kitchen, yawning over his breakfast. The evidence of his supper, and quite a few meals before that, was stacked beside the sink. Hazel forbore to comment. He’d wash up when he ran out of plates. She didn’t think now, when she was effectively moving out, was the time to criticise his housekeeping.

  Saturday must have known who it was when he heard the front door open. No one else had a key. He had a few moments to swallow his surprise, or alarm, or whatever was his immediate reaction to the return of his landlady, so that the face that met her was – as well as slightly sticky with jam and in need of one of his still infrequent appointments with a razor – entirely without expression.

  ‘You’re back, then.’

  ‘Not really,’ said Hazel. ‘Just collecting some stuff.’

  The youth twitched one eyebrow in the least possible gesture of enquiry. ‘Another trip?’

  ‘No.’ She threw herself down on a kitchen chair. He was entitled to ask; he was owed an answer; but Hazel was damned if she was going to stand in front of him like an errant schoolgirl before the headmaster. ‘We’ve taken a house out past Wittering. Well, Oliver has. I’m moving in there.’

  Under the T-shirt, Saturday’s thin chest swelled with a deep breath. Hazel wasn’t sure whether to expect congratulations or a tirade. But it was simpler, more to the point than either. ‘You’re letting this place go.’ He said it as if he’d been expecting it, had got used to the idea of being homeless again.

  Remorse made Hazel hurry out an answer. ‘No, Saturday, of course I’m not. At least, not in the foreseeable future. I have no idea, right now, how long I’ll be with Oliver, and I’m certainly not giving up my bolt-hole on the strength of a holiday romance! If it turns into something else, maybe. But I won’t leave you in the lurch, whatever happens. You can stay on here if you can find the rent. If not, we’ll find you a bed-sit somewhere. I’ll make sure you’re all right before I give the keys back. You’re my friend, Saturday. Nothing that happens between me and Oliver Ford will alter that.’

  He looked slightly mollified, and slightly relieved. Hazel knew him well enough by now to know that much the greater part of his feelings remained, like an iceberg, hidden from sight. ‘All right.’

  He’d made his tea in the mug, the little string from the tea-bag still hanging over the rim like the tail of a drowned mouse. If he’d made a pot she’d have helped herself, but she didn’t want to boil the kettle again. She’d hoped to be in and out of here in no more time than it took to pack a couple of bags.

  But she couldn’t rush away now, leaving Saturday to wonder how much of what she’d said was sincere and how much mere lip-service, designed to placate. She caught his eye and held it. ‘Is that what you thought? That I was going to chuck you back on the street because it suited me to sow some wild oats with Oliver Ford?’

  Saturday shrugged negligently. ‘You’re a free agent. I’m not your responsibility. I’m nothing to you. I’ve always known you might want me out at some point, and if I got a week’s notice I’d have nothing to complain about.’ A tiny spark of annoyance sounded in his voice. ‘I’m not helpless, Hazel. I got by before I knew you, and after I leave here I’ll get by again. Don’t worry about me. You learn a lot living on the streets. The first thing you learn is, if you can survive there, you can survive anywhere. When you can’t fall any lower, the only way is up.’

  ‘“We are all in the gutter,”’ Hazel quoted softly, ‘“but some of us are looking at the stars”.’ The boy frowned, uncertainly. ‘You’re wrong about one thing. You are not nothing to me. You are my friend, and I care what happens to you. I will never, ever not worry about you.’

  He blinked and looked away quickly, which is what he did if he was afraid he was about to show some weakness. ‘You’d better leave a forwarding address. For your post.’

  Hazel didn’t actually know the address of the house she was about to move into. ‘I’ll have to call you. Just hold onto the post. I’m going back to work as soon as I can organise it, so I’ll call in every few days. Leave it on the hall table.’

  He was looking at her again. ‘Have you seen Gabriel?’

  She hesitated for a moment. ‘Not since I saw him in London.’

  ‘Are you going to see him?’

  Hazel didn’t understand the reluctance she felt. She and Ash were good friends, but not that kind of friends – there was no reason for her to feel embarrassed about her relationship with Ford. A part of Gabriel Ash was still in love with the wife who’d betrayed him. If Hazel had found someone to love too, Ash would be happy for her. And yet … and yet … Only the fact that she’d promised stopped her from leaving Norbold without seeing him.

  ‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘Of course.’

  In the mornings, after she’d walked the boys to school, Frankie took a few hours for herself. Sometimes she sat in her room, reading, sewing, or writing letters to her family in the far Philippines, but often she stayed in
town and Ash never asked what she did there. He didn’t want to give the impression that he resented her absence, and they hadn’t known one another long enough that he could ask out of mere curiosity.

  Perhaps his reticence was due in part to the fact that he did rather miss her when she was out. The big house in Highfield Road seemed to slip back into the dusty quiet that had enveloped it since he returned there after his illness. The first chink of light had appeared when Patience arrived; a great wave of activity had swept through the slumbering rooms when the boys came, shouting and laughing and arguing and losing things and throwing things; but the advent of Frankie Kelly had been the catalyst that turned the man, the boys, the dog and the big old house into more than they had been. She’d taken them all in her small, capable hands and fashioned a family out of them.

  Now the whole house was in use, not just the kitchen and the small back bedroom. After organising the boys’ rooms and his study, Frankie had moved Ash from the room where he’d slept as a child into the master bedroom. She’d arranged for a decorator to scrape off his mother’s faded roses, and consulted him as to what should replace them. The back bedroom she meant to occupy herself, to free up the guest room. Knowing Ash as she was coming to, she accepted that it could be a while before he needed it for visitors; still, in her opinion every household of consequence required a guest room, and guests could not be expected to share with the help.

  For years Ash had asked nothing more of a house than that it keep the rain off him. He was amazed how much satisfaction the new arrangements afforded him, and in particular the comfortable study, a sanctuary where no one would disturb him unless in a real emergency. Admittedly, opinions varied as to what constituted an emergency. Frankie set the bar fairly high: fire, flood or imminent structural failure. The boys were more liberal in their definition, and included wanting ice-cream when Frankie was only offering fruit, and disagreeing over the relative merits of competing channels on the playroom television.

  Patience, of course, came and went as the mood and her own purposes took her, just as she always had. She liked the new study, but she liked the new bedroom more. The double bed gave her space to stretch out.

  In all, Frankie Kelly had been an unmitigated success, and Ash couldn’t imagine how he’d managed without her. He was unreservedly glad that the nanny recommended by Hazel had been unavailable. If Frankie had demanded an Aston Martin as a perk of the job, he’d have bought her one, if it had meant selling a kidney to fund it.

  And yes, when she was out he missed her. He missed her quiet, cheerful efficiency. He missed hearing her hum the little songs of her home as she tidied the playroom and loaded the dishwasher. (She was taking on more and more of the housework as the days passed. So, when she went into town, Ash would wander round for half an hour looking for something to do, defeated in the end by the fact that she’d left him nothing.)

  He found himself considering again the alarming, but at the same time seductive, possibility of getting back to work. Caring for the boys was no longer an issue. The obstacle that remained was the one that had stood in his way for the last four years: what possible work was he fit for? Not his old job as a security analyst. The government liked its advisers to be more or less sane. Before that he’d worked as an insurance investigator. But that was a long time ago: the skills he’d honed were now a decade out of date.

  There must be other jobs, he thought. Lots of people, even those without many skills, had a job. There ought to be something he could do. He didn’t actually need the money, but there are other reasons for working. Self-respect is one, feeling useful another. Perhaps he could start by volunteering somewhere. A charity, a good cause of some kind. It was a pity he wasn’t better with people …

  He heard the back door and thought, with a sudden lift of the heart, that Frankie had returned early. He’d make her sit down – tie her to a chair if necessary – while he made her some lunch for a change. He left the book he’d been reading open on the arm of his chair and headed through to the kitchen.

  It wasn’t Frankie. It was Hazel.

  It was only for a fleeting moment, but she saw disappointment flicker across Ash’s expression. Something deep inside her curled up and moaned. Then he smiled warmly and ushered her inside. ‘You’re back, then. Come in, sit down. Tell me where you got to, what you saw.’ For the first time ever in this house, she didn’t have to tidy something away before she could take a seat.

  She made herself return his smile. ‘I can’t stay long. I’ve just been to Railway Street to gather up some belongings. Oliver and I have taken a house out beyond Wittering.’ She’d put it that way, she realised, because – although it wasn’t strictly accurate – it sounded better than saying she was moving in with Ford.

  ‘Ah.’

  She couldn’t tell if she’d surprised him. No one she knew, not even Saturday, could hide his feelings like Ash. It was as if a gauze curtain dropped between them, filtering the information that normally passes between people engaged in a conversation. Hazel understood where it came from. For years, revealing what was going on in his head would have put him at the mercy of men in white coats. Though both his life and his mind were more stable now, protecting himself from scrutiny had become a habit.

  ‘Well?’ The lightness of her tone might have fooled someone else; she doubted if it would deceive Ash. ‘Aren’t you going to give me a lecture?’

  ‘What about?’

  Hazel felt the stirrings of exasperation. He could still do this to her: provoke her to anger by refusing to argue. ‘Behaving like a groupie.’

  ‘Is that what you’re doing?’

  ‘Of course not!’ She heard her voice rising and reined it back. ‘I thought – you give the impression – you think I’m behaving badly. Well, I’m not prepared to feel guilty about this. Oliver and I are both adults, we’re neither of us cheating on anyone else, and I’m sorry if I’ve shocked you but right now this is what I want to do with my life. I don’t need your permission, or your blessing. I would like to think you’d wish me well.’

  For a split second Ash wanted to throw his arms around her. He managed to stop himself, but the thought went all the way. Hazel felt it as a wave of warmth sweeping over her, and her skin flushed in response.

  Ash too had more colour to his cheek than usual. ‘Of course I wish you well! Hazel, I want everything for you that you want for yourself. I want you to be happy, and I want you to be safe. If this is what you want to do, I hope it’ll work out for you.

  ‘Why would I be shocked? You’re not a child. You’re the most grown-up person I know. You’ve been a rock for me. It’s thanks to you that I have a life worth living. Nothing would please me more than to see you settled with someone who deserves you.’

  Through the glow of pleasure, Hazel sensed a but. ‘But?’

  His broad, heavy-browed face flinched as if with a momentary pain. ‘I worry about you. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you. When you left the country with him, and no one could tell me where you were, I was scared to death that …’ The sentence faltered.

  Hazel tipped her blonde cropped head to one side. ‘What?’

  ‘That something had happened to you,’ Ash finished lamely.

  Hazel blinked. ‘You mean, you thought Oliver had sold me to white slavers? Cut my throat and buried me under a convenient sand-dune?’

  Here, in dull predictable safe Norbold, the very idea seemed absurd. But that was only because she’d come home unharmed. It hadn’t seemed absurd at the time. ‘You could have let us know you were all right …’

  ‘What are you, my mother?’ Then memory threw up the image of him outside the airport, paying off the taxi, looking lost amid the noise and bustle of a world he hadn’t ventured into for years. ‘Gabriel – when we bumped into one another at Heathrow – were you coming to look for me?’

  He could have lied. He didn’t think he could have lied convincingly. ‘Yes,’ he said simply.

  All the irritation she fe
lt for him – not just now but at regular intervals – vanished as if someone had pulled a plug. Circumstances had thrown them together, mutual regard had made them friends. But that was something else. You’d only do that for someone you really cared about. Someone you loved. And there are different kinds of love – Hazel didn’t suppose for a minute that he felt about her the way he had once felt about Cathy – but all kinds of love have this in common: they change the world. Knowing that Gabriel Ash valued their friendship that highly changed the world for Hazel.

  She blew out her cheeks in a quiet pant of amazement. ‘But whatever made you think I was in trouble? So much trouble that I needed someone to come and bring me home?’

  It was decision time. Now he had either to tell her the truth or to lie to her. And he wasn’t going to lie to her.

  ‘The boy at the museum,’ he said quietly. ‘Rachid Iqbal. He wasn’t a terrorist. He had a grudge against Oliver Ford. I don’t know why, but he hated Ford enough to travel fifteen hundred miles to try to kill him. And I wondered if you were safe with a man who could inspire that kind of hatred.’

  Men, Hazel thought in amazement: men and their sudden furies and their festering grievances and their willingness to wage war over a line in the sand. And their great hearts, and their generosity, and the way they wouldn’t let cold facts ruin a good emotion. Women were supposed to be the emotional ones, but that hadn’t been her experience.

  She marshalled some words to reassure him. ‘Oliver’s done a lot of work in the Middle East – he must have caused some offence to someone. Perhaps someone was angry because what Oliver called treasure turned out only to be old bones and old stones. Maybe he took the wrong side in a local dispute. He’s not the most tactful man in the world: he may well have ruffled feathers.

  ‘I don’t believe he did anything you and I would consider dishonourable. He can be thoughtless sometimes, he can be pompous, but that’s the television thing – it goes to people’s heads. I think it’s turned Oliver’s head a little. He needs someone to remind him not to take himself so seriously. But I can’t imagine he’s ever done anything that would earn a justifiable hatred. That isn’t who he is.’