Aruna sits in a cafe at Heathrow, and waits for her flight to be announced. She has been lucky to get a seat so soon; the cost was astronomical, so she put it on their joint credit card. She will pay Patrick back as soon as she can. She finds she can’t stop trembling, and when she told the airline assistant at the desk, ‘No, just hand luggage please,’ the woman gave her a long, searching look, and Aruna was embarrassed to see compassion under the woman’s rock-hard foundation, sticky black lashes and plump, plummy lips.
‘Are you all right, honey?’ the woman asked, and Aruna shook her head instinctively, before she realized what she was doing, and nodded emphatically instead.
‘Yes. I’m fine,’ she lied unconvincingly, aware of how her hand was shaking as she took back her passport from the counter. She thought how good it would feel to have that woman put her round, matronly arms around her, and say that it was OK to cry. To hand her a clean, white handkerchief and tell her to let it all out. Instead Aruna practically snatched her boarding pass, and stalked away.
She knows she shouldn’t have taken Jazz’s call; the phone call has given it all away; she has realized that he thought she was expecting him to rescue her, a damsel in unremitting distress, and is torn between being offended that he thinks her so weak and relieved that he still cares. Has he really been waiting for her, all this time, like some unfortunate prince in a fairy tale? She is not going back for him; the reason she left hasn’t changed, the clean nature of her departure from London will not be sullied by the cheap hope of rapprochement, a return to an unavailable ex-lover. Jazz was more to her than that; her best friend since school, closer to her than family, her self-appointed protector, someone who accepted and absorbed the lingering madness she felt, someone who possessed her, in both meanings of the word.
Aruna’s phone beeps while she listlessly drinks her coffee (more coffee! It won’t help her trembling, and it’ll make her even more clinically irritable than she already is, but she didn’t know what else to order when the tackily dressed waitress bore down on her, and she assumed she had to order something so she could sit), and she glances at it quickly, wondering whether it is Jazz. Instead it is a text message from Patrick. ‘Hospital manic. Have to stay for second shift – v sorry. Don’t wait up. Love P xxxx.’ Aruna looks at the message for a long time with acute bewilderment, as though as it is for someone else, and has been sent to her by mistake. She is embarrassed by the generosity with which he always signs himself off, four kisses, as though he has grossly overestimated her worth. She has already left Patrick, she has left him for three whole hours, and it seems absurd that he doesn’t yet know this. That he is working at the hospital, diagnosing and healing patients in curtain-partitioned wards, and is expecting his wife to be at home. She feels a coward for saying nothing, but now there is surely nothing that can be said; she can hardly call him at work and tell him that she’s gone, or text him back telling him that he’s the one who needn’t wait up, ever again. But if she doesn’t reply, she knows he’ll call her, to check she’s seen the message. After some hesitation, she sends a text back, ‘Gone to see a friend, so won’t be at the flat tonight. Aruna’, which isn’t quite a lie, but is just as cowardly.
Aruna has known Patrick for eighteen months, and been married to him for almost a year. When she left Singapore, she had ended up in London, visiting an old friend from university, toying with the idea of a research fellowship. She met Patrick at a lecture at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies; she noticed him straight away, as he was looking with miserable disinterest at the opening exhibit, and not hiding his boredom at his date’s detailed commentary. She guessed he was older than her, by four or five years, and he was so solid looking he seemed to be carved of wood; he was wearing a suit, a plain uniform which didn’t really do him justice, but which seemed to be appropriate for the event, as most other attendees were dressed similarly. He brightened up perceptibly when he saw her looking his way, and glanced back with a smile. ‘Think that big white bloke fancies you,’ scoffed her date, a snobby Indian academic whom her friend had set her up with. During the lecture she found herself looking around for the big white bloke, for the close hazel curls that disappeared into down at his strong, pale neck. She was mortified when she finally saw him, as she caught his eye too obviously, like some sluttish vamp; he grinned conspiratorially at her, with a comedy yawn while eyeballing his watch, and a puff of laughter erupted from her before she knew it, which she quickly disguised as a cough.
There were drinks following the lecture, and after a few too many, Aruna excused herself from her date to go to the ladies. When she came back out into the corridor, she found herself walking straight into a suited chest; it was as hard as rock. She knew it was him before she even looked up, his heroic build not quite concealed beneath the determined ordinariness of off-the-rack tailoring. What did the British middle class feed their kids, she thought with the mistiness of mild intoxication, to create someone so tall and wide and hard? Under the conventional suit, he was like something from fantasy or myth; he might have been nurtured on Ent water, his parents should have been trees or boulders. ‘God, I’m sorry,’ she sputtered. Her head barely reached his shoulder.
‘No, I’m sorry. I should have stalked you with a bit more subtlety. At least given you enough space to leave the loo,’ he said. His voice was as clear as glass, unclouded by artifice or insincerity; she liked his accent, the pan-British kind which betrayed no Home Counties horsiness, no gritty London edge, no regional musicality in tone. It was an Anywhere Accent. A fittable-in accent, the sort which might be developed by someone who had been moved around a lot as a child, an accent that worked everywhere. ‘I’m Patrick,’ he said. ‘Dr Patrick Jones.’
‘I’m Aruna. Dr Aruna Ahmed,’ she replied, holding out her hand to shake his.
Patrick laughed, ‘The trouble with these academic places is that everyone’s a doctor. I lose my advantage.’ He took her hand, but just held it, rather than shaking it, as though unaware of this most obvious custom.
‘So you’re a real doctor, I guess,’ said Aruna.
Patrick nodded. ‘I work at the Whittington Hospital, up in Archway.’ He realized that he was still holding her hand, and let it go. ‘So you’re a fake doctor, then?’ he asked lightly.
‘Yes, that’s it exactly. I’m a fake. It’s like you know me already,’ Aruna replied.
Patrick missed any darkness in what Aruna was saying; he continued to look at her with undisguised admiration, and Aruna, for a moment, looking back into his grave green-brown eyes, saw herself as he saw her, an attractive foreigner, a little mysterious, carelessly glamorous, with long, wild hair and carved pert lips. Her slim brownness, so typical in Singapore (where she was arguably a bit hippy, compared to some of the Chinese girls of her acquaintance), was exotic over here. If he was from Anywhere, she was quite clearly from Somewhere Else; if he fitted in, she stood out. She liked what she saw in his eyes; she thought perhaps she could be this person after all.
‘Thank God,’ he said eventually. ‘I hate real doctors, we’re all up our own arses and bitter because we don’t have time for a personal life, because the hospital has to come first. There’s always someone dying when I’ve got a date.’
Aruna couldn’t stop herself laughing again. ‘I see you don’t believe in saving the best for last. Is that why you’re reduced to stalking women in the corridor outside the cloakrooms?’
‘Obviously,’ said Patrick. ‘See, now you know me already, too.’ He looked over his shoulder with the first sign of anxiety he’d shown, ‘Are you here on your own?’
‘Sort of,’ said Aruna, feeling a delicious, cruel freedom in denying the officious blind date.
‘I’m sort of here on my own too,’ said Patrick. ‘Maybe we should escape before the sort-ofs catch up with us.’ He said it as a joke, without any serious intent.
‘Maybe we should,’ agreed Aruna and, taking his arm, walked him smartly out of the building; he was too surprised to do anything but go along with her. It was no longer summer, so it was fortunate that it was still warm, she thought, as if she’d had to collect her coat, she might never have had the nerve to do it.
‘There’s a great bar not far from here,’ he said, regaining the initiative as they walked down the street. He glanced down towards her, then stopped and said, ‘I’m sorry, I know I should wait until we say goodbye for this, but I can’t,’ and taking her suddenly in his arms, against the ornate railings, he kissed her impetuously. ‘I think you must be the sexiest woman I’ve ever met.’ He pulled back to see Aruna’s dark eyes blazing like coals, her lithe body trembling just slightly; it was like holding a flame. ‘OK, you can slap me now,’ he said with resignation.
‘What an invitation,’ said Aruna, breathing slowly, trying to control the treacherous flapping of her heartbeat. ‘Maybe later,’ she finally suggested, and sliding her arms up around his neck, pulled him down so she could kiss him back, feeling the reckless, sexy, Somewhere Else stranger that Patrick saw in her, take her over. She felt tiny in his embrace, against his absurdly firm chest, she felt as safe as a songbird caught in the cage of his arms, safe in his delusion that she was someone else entirely. She slept with him that night in his flat in Bethnal Green, she moved in with him three months later, and married him three months after that at a riverside registry office. She tumbled into marriage in the way that leaves tumble from autumnal trees to the musty earth below, with just a breath of wind needed to persuade her to drift away from her flickering past, and settle on solid ground.