Little White Lies

by Lesley Lokko

  As if on cue, her grandmother got up, not without difficulty – she was a large woman, almost as tall as Tash – and lumbered over towards her, holding out a light-blue shirt. ‘Davai, malysh, pomerei etu.’ Come on, little one, try this one on. Tash hurriedly wiped her cheeks. She looked at the shirt her grandmother was holding out and only just managed to hold onto her eyeballs. Topmark. Oh, God. Could there be anything worse?

  Hours later, Tash lay on the sitting-room sofa, tossing and turning in an attempt to fold her six-foot frame comfortably into a space that was considerably less. Quite why they had to spend their nights as well as their days in Krylatskoe was a mystery. It was an hour’s cab ride back to the splendour of the Ritz-Carlton and besides, people here went to sleep early, like chickens. She’d looked dubiously at the bath – a narrow, cold-looking affair with rusting taps – and thought longingly of the enormous wet room at the suite they’d just vacated. The entire flat would fit into the bathroom with bags of room to spare all round. She sighed and shifted uncomfortably, changing position for the umpteenth time. It was no bloody use.

  She got up quietly. Her bladder was full, the effect of far too much vodka and truly dreadful red wine. She tiptoed out into the corridor, heading for the toilet. The front door was ajar, she noticed as she went past. She stopped to close it and then heard two people talking outside. She peered through the crack. It was her mother and that friend of hers, Tatiana, after whom Tash was supposedly named. They were standing in the outside corridor, smoking. Blue cigarette smoke curled and rose lazily towards the overhead light.

  ‘It’s a pity,’ she heard Tatiana say. Her foot, encased in its high-heeled sandal, was just visible out of the corner of Tash’s eye. ‘A real pity. When I think of how beautiful you were, you know? You still are, Míla. Still beautiful.’

  ‘Oh, no, not anymore. I used to be beautiful, Tatia. Not anymore. It’s all finished now.’

  ‘No, I’m telling you. Compared to us?’ She gave a harsh, hoarse laugh. ‘You’ve kept your figure, no wrinkles. You’re still a very attractive woman, Míla. Lucky you. But it’s a pity about Tatiana. She’s done well for herself, yes, but she’s not beautiful. Not like you.’

  Tash felt a cool flush of embarrassment ripple lightly up her spine. Her shoulders hunched.

  ‘No, she’s not beautiful,’ Lyudmila sighed. She paused for a moment, presumably drawing on her cigarette. ‘And no boyfriend, can you believe it? Never. I used to think . . . well, I don’t need to spell it out. But you know what? It doesn’t matter. She’s rich.’

  Tash didn’t wait to hear the rest. Hot with embarrassment and shame, she tiptoed down the corridor to the bathroom. No boyfriend. Never. What did it matter how much money she had? In Lyudmila’s eyes – in everyone’s eyes – she was an object of pity, someone to cluck sympathetically over, not someone to admire.

  93

  REBECCA

  Jerusalem

  Immense washes of summer light spilled over the hills, bathing the city in a dusty luminosity, like the great, slow blinking of an eye. First this building, then that one – the red glare struck the sandy Jerusalem stone, turning the entire city blush-pink as the sun began to sink. Rebecca read the Hebrew and Arabic street names with difficulty as she negotiated her way slowly up Chopin Street and then turned left as the map directed. She turned into Pinsker Street. Just before the park at the end of the road, she saw the small brown sign. The Arabic Affairs Council. She pulled up opposite and cut the engine. A giant swathe of bougainvillea shaded the entrance to the house. In the dying light, the flowers looked as though they were on fire. She locked the car and hurried across. The wrought-iron gate creaked in protest as she pushed it open and stepped inside. A narrow flagstone path led from the gate towards the house, curving gracefully away from the road before opening out onto a dramatic view of terraced, manicured lawns sloping away down the hillside. The terraces were bordered by lush, semi-tropical plants and flowerbeds, bursting with blossoms of all shapes and colours. The effect was startling. She felt like Alice, stepping through the looking glass. A sprinkler on the second or third terrace twisted wildly, its soft ‘phut-phut’ tapping a rhythm to her steps as she walked along seeking the entrance. At last she found it, partially hidden from view by terracotta pots of olive trees and a climbing trellis of pale pink roses. She stopped, nervously twisting her hair into a ponytail, and smoothed down her skirt. She raised a hand and knocked lightly on the front door.

  Someone answered, in Arabic, then in Hebrew. She pushed open the door cautiously. A young woman in a headscarf and veil came out of one of the rooms, a pile of files in her arms. ‘Can I help you?’ she asked, again in Arabic first, then in Hebrew.

  ‘I . . . I’m sorry,’ Rebecca said apologetically. ‘English?’

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I . . . I was just wondering . . . I’m looking for Tariq. Tariq Malouf?’

  The girl looked at her, her expression difficult to read. Then she beckoned to Rebecca. ‘Come.’

  She followed her into the office. Tariq was sitting at a desk by the window. He looked up as they entered. For a second she and Tariq looked at one other in mutual incomprehension.

  ‘I . . . I . . . was just passing,’ Rebecca stammered, unable to take her eyes off Tariq’s face. ‘And I saw the sign outside. I thought I’d just drop in and . . . and say hello. After the other night, at the concert, I mean.’ She stopped, aware she was babbling.

  The girl looked uncertainly at Tariq. He shook his head, murmuring something to her in Arabic. She withdrew, quietly closing the door behind her.

  ‘Won’t you sit down?’ Tariq suddenly got to his feet. He pulled a chair out for her, placing it opposite him.

  ‘Th-thanks,’ Rebecca stammered, grateful for the chance to sit down. Her legs were feeling distinctly wobbly.

  ‘So,’ he said, walking back to his own chair. ‘To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?’

  ‘I was just passing by,’ Rebecca began again, flustered. ‘I was in the city for the afternoon. I . . . I went to see my aunt the other day, Aunt Bettina . . .’ Her voice trailed off. She was painfully aware of the hot blush spreading up her neck and face.

  He leaned back in his chair, his fingers peaked in front of his face, his expression carefully neutral. An awkward silence followed. Rebecca looked at her own hands: ridiculous – they were trembling. ‘How is your aunt?’ he asked after a moment.

  She lifted her eyes to meet his. What colour were his eyes? Hazel, brown, green? She couldn’t tell, not from that distance. ‘She’s . . . fine.’ There was another awkward pause. ‘I wish I’d spent more time with her when . . . when I was younger,’ she added lamely.

  ‘It’s a common wish.’ He looked at her closely, as if trying to figure something out, but gave little away. The faintly amused air he’d carried the other night was gone; in its place was a grave solemnity that made her regret her silly decision to get in the car and drive to Jerusalem. What had she come here for? She could feel her blush deepening.

  She swallowed nervously. ‘Look, I didn’t mean to disturb you,’ she said quickly, wondering whether she ought to get up now and save herself any further embarrassment or try and talk her way out of what was rapidly turning into her most humiliating half hour since Dr Jeremy Garrick. At the thought of Garrick, she almost choked. ‘Aunt Bettina said we used to . . . to play together, when we were kids. It’s strange, I don’t remember any of it, so I thought . . . well, I just thought I’d stop by and ask you, you know, if—’

  ‘You were very young,’ he interrupted her gently. He seemed to be weighing her up, deciding which way, in his mind, she might fall. Good or bad, friend or foe, desirable or not. A childish urge to please came over her. She suddenly wished she were better looking, more beautiful.

  ‘I saw a picture,’ she said hesitantly. ‘In one of her albums. It was of the four of us. My cousin Adam, you, your sister and me. Adam had his arm round you.’ She looked at him. He was listening to her wi
th polite attention. ‘Aunt Bettina told me about Maryam, your sister . . . I wish . . . I wish I could remember her.’

  He took a deep breath suddenly, pulling his lower lip into his mouth, the soft, full lip disappearing underneath the row of white, even teeth. She watched as he brought up a hand to his face, fingers stroking the dark stubble beneath the skin. It was almost dark in his office. Dusk had come upon them suddenly, the light withdrawing so slowly that neither had noticed. He reached out to switch on a small desk lamp; greenish light suddenly flooded the room. Then, without any transition from the formality with which he’d received her, he placed a hand on her forearm. She stared at it for a second, her heartbeat accelerating. ‘Will you come and see me?’ he asked, his eyes locked on hers. ‘Tomorrow evening. I’ll be in Tel Aviv.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said simply. His grip on her forearm tightened. And so, right there in his office, sitting across from each other in the rather formal manner of two people who might have come together for an official meeting, there was suddenly between them the unexpected covenant of desire.

  94

  He came into the bar at the appointed hour. She watched him come down the steps, duck under the doorway and look quickly around. She’d been there for all of twenty minutes, a half-finished glass of wine in front of her, an unlit cigarette in the clean ashtray at her elbow. She had to have something to do with her hands. Her freshly washed hair curled loosely about her face. Jeans, high-heeled black boots, a midnight-blue silk shirt open to the third button, showing a sliver of her silver chains between her breasts – she was indistinguishable from the well-dressed, elegant men and women who were sitting at the long marble bar. The restaurant was his choice. Hamra, on Ha’Yarkon Street. He’d written down the address for her in his office.

  ‘You’re here.’ He was beside her, looking down at her as he unwound his scarf.

  She nodded, her heart in her mouth. ‘I left the kids with Julian,’ she murmured, then stopped, kicking herself. Why on earth had she mentioned her husband and children in the first breath?

  ‘What’re you drinking?’ He ignored her obvious discomfort and slid onto the stool next to her. He was dressed casually: a navy jacket, light-blue shirt, jeans . . . she didn’t dare look any further or closer.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she confessed. ‘I just needed . . . something.’

  ‘Well, I’ll share the “something” with you. May I?’ She nodded vigorously. He lifted the glass to those full, red lips. ‘Not bad.’ He signalled to the waiter. ‘Another one,’ he said, in perfect, fluent Hebrew. She watched him, transfixed.

  ‘I read you’d studied at Julliard,’ she began hesitantly.

  He nodded. ‘Studied there, taught there for a while.’

  ‘Where do you live now?’

  He shrugged. ‘Like you, some months here, some months there. You go where the work takes you.’

  ‘Not like me, then,’ she gave a rueful smile.

  ‘Perhaps not.’ He lifted his glass. ‘And you? How long are you here for?’

  It was her turn to shrug. ‘Another week, perhaps. My husband . . . well, he follows the work. I just follow him.’ It was difficult not to mention Julian. She glanced at him, then at his hands. Was he married?

  He noticed her surreptitious glance. He answered her unspoken question. ‘Yes. She lives in Connecticut. Two kids. All-American. Anything else you want to know?’

  She drew in her breath sharply. ‘Wh-what are we doing here?’ she asked, hoping her voice was steady.

  He turned on his stool so that they were facing one another. His knee bumped hers. He put out a hand, the same hand that had clasped her forearm the night before, and lightly drew a line down the middle of her thigh, all the way down to her knee. She felt her thighs begin to shake uncontrollably. ‘I don’t know,’ he said slowly. He shook his head. ‘When you came into the office yesterday, I wasn’t expecting you. It threw me, to be honest. I guess I always knew I’d run into you again someday. I know you don’t remember any of it. You were so young and when Maryam died . . . well, I guess you blocked it all out. But our histories are so intertwined. As soon as I saw you, I knew.’

  ‘Knew wh-what?’

  ‘That something was going to happen. Between us.’

  She swallowed. ‘I’m married,’ she said hesitantly.

  ‘So’m I.’

  ‘So what is this? An affair?’

  He made the same gesture of dismissal he’d made to his assistant the night before. An almost silent ‘tut’, the faint shake of the head, neither a ‘yes’ nor a ‘no’, a gesture from a language and culture she didn’t know and couldn’t place. She hardly knew him. He was a compelling mixture of something powerfully familiar and yet equally powerfully strange. He had within him the same quality that fascinated her about both Tash and Annick. One minute they were the friends she’d known all her life, as powerfully familiar to her as family. The next, speaking French or Russian, they stepped out of themselves and out of her reach. When they were all much younger, she’d bitterly resented their ability to slip like chameleons into a place she couldn’t follow. Now, sitting opposite Tariq, that same irrational fear resurfaced. She had to stop herself from reaching out to grab hold of him.

  ‘Does it matter?’ he asked slowly. ‘Does it matter what we call it?’

  She looked at him closely, her eyes searching his face for some sign that this was all a huge joke, that he wasn’t taking it as seriously as she was. There was none. He lifted his hand from her thigh and swallowed the last of his wine.

  ‘Come,’ he said, sliding off the stool. He picked up his jacket, fished in his pocket for his wallet and peeled off a note, sliding it across the bar. ‘Let’s go.’

  She slid off her own stool with legs that trembled at every step. She walked out after him into the summer night air, every nerve in her body attuned to the figure of the man in front of her.

  She raised herself carefully on one elbow to look at him as he slept, gazing at his profile as though to commit every line to a memory that couldn’t be erased. Seen sideways, the red, rosy scroll of his lips parted fractionally as he drew breath, in and out. She studied the hollow of his cheek beneath the bridge of his long, delicately etched nose, noticing the dark shadow of a beard already pushing through the smooth skin of the shelf of his jaw. He was the most deeply sensual man she had ever seen.

  He stirred, turning towards her and opening one eye. The dark, black lashes swept back and forth as he focused on her. At this range, his eyes were green, flecked with gold. Lion’s eyes. She caught her breath and pushed her face into the heat of his neck. Ecstasy, coupled with remorse and fear – a heightened state of being like no other. Bare skin touching, sticking, she took in great mouthfuls of the warm, male-scented air, taking him deep down into her lungs, stomach, legs. Once, when she was a teenager, on holiday with her parents in Cavezzana, Adam had taken her for a ride in a convertible Alfa Romeo that he’d hired for a couple of weeks. She was fourteen, fifteen at the most. The road from Pontremoli, the nearest village, was full of twists and turns, hairpin bends and steep, narrow inclines. He drove the little sports car hard, the engine screaming in protest and in time with her own squeals of delight and fear. She lifted her arms into the air during one particularly steep drop and felt like a child on a fairground ride with the warm summer air rushing past, her cousin’s tanned and capable arm beside her, her stomach still hanging somewhere up there at the start of the drop. It was the headiest combination of sexual tension and excitement and sheer, unadulterated fear. She felt it now, her tongue darting out between parched lips to touch and taste the saltiness at his neck, nibble at his earlobe, her hands already busy down below, stroking, teasing. In the wide, double bed of the apartment he’d brought her to, not far from the bar on Ha’Yarkon Street, they made love for the third time that night, fiercely, passionately, in almost total silence, achingly aware of the solemnity of the moment. Why was this different from all the others? It will not last. It cannot possibly l
ast.

  95

  ANNICK

  London

  Pregnancy didn’t blunt her. On the contrary, moving about the flat and her office with the unsteady gait of a sailor, she was fired up with an energy that catapulted her straight out of sleep each morning into wakefulness. She raced from home to work, work to home, alternately alarming and amusing Yves, who feared for the child growing inside her. ‘Slow down,’ he begged her. ‘It’s not a race.’ He was away a lot during the first few months. He’d found a job as an engineering consultant that seemed to take him everywhere – Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Johannesburg and Lagos. There didn’t seem to be a far-flung capital that he hadn’t visited. She had grown used to his many absences and in the beginning, at least, it suited her. She could ‘get on with things,’ she told him earnestly. ‘After the baby’s born, it’ll be different.’ Frances, openly devastated by the news of her marriage, followed by the announcement of an impending maternity leave, seemed determined to squeeze a year’s worth of work into whatever time Annick had left.

  ‘Hmm. Pregnant. I knew it. Well, I knew someone who worked right up until her due date,’ she muttered as soon as Annick announced the news. ‘She went straight from here to the delivery room. Didn’t slow her down in the slightest.’

  Annick held her tongue. She had no intention of working until her due date but the burst of energy that the first few months brought her spilled over naturally into her work. With Yves away so much, it was easy enough to work long days and evenings, unencumbered by a dinner waiting to be cooked or company waiting to be kept. After three years at Clifton Crabbe, she’d made a name for herself as a conscientious, meticulous solicitor who left no stone unturned, no date unchecked and no fact un-referenced. And cross-referenced again. She and Frances made an exceptionally good team. Frances was the public front, the solicitor on whom all the clerks and barristers depended to pull in the really big cases. She loved the high-profile hustle, the posturing, the after-work drinks and the socialising. Behind the scenes, paddling furiously, was her team of hard-working, methodical and meticulous solicitors who did the bulk of the legwork, none quite so methodical and meticulous as Annick Pasqual. Against her advice, Annick had changed her name as soon as she legally could.