On Sunday morning Ahmed paced the kitchen slowly, one foot in front of the other, as though gauging the room’s dimensions. He was marking time and his thoughts were all over the place, skittering about like hailstones on a pavement. He was wildly impatient and sexually hyped-up, but also brooding and deeply concerned. He thought of the day he’d looked down the barrel of Fahad’s gun. He’d known the rightness of what he was doing then – unlike today.
He’d had to come back. He was going against the strongest advice: the chance of a reprisal was shorter odds than Russian roulette, so the authorities had said, laying it on. Leaving England hadn’t been from choice.
He tried to rationalise, genuinely believing that slipping into London, taking every precaution, in fact made the risk pretty slight. It didn’t lessen the guilt, but all that time away, those seven long years, he’d been obsessed with his love of Nattie, unable to cut loose and get on with his life, certainly not marry and settle down. Was it really so surprising that he’d reached a point where he could stand it no longer?
He dreaded any sound from his phone. Her plans would go wrong; she wouldn’t come. Hugo would be deeply disbelieving – and let her know it, most likely. He’d try to touch her conscience, and who could really blame him? Nattie was soft-hearted and serious-natured, she’d care about hurting Hugo and wouldn’t be able to hide her guilt either. There was no shortage of girls who would play it cool and lie with ease, but Nattie wasn’t one of them.
Ahmed tried to blot out his images of her lovemaking with Hugo. He had no right to such feelings of jealousy, yet his skin crawled and his fists were clenched. He couldn’t expect her to turn away, but now that he believed she still loved him, he passionately wanted her to have avoided any weekend sex. They’d both known why she was coming to London. There’d been no prevaricating, no misgivings; nothing needed to be said. He couldn’t quite imagine her sleeping with two men in the space of hours, but could hardly ask about that. He just had to suffer the thought.
The morning stretched ahead. He felt caged, pacing Jake’s kitchen, and decided to go out for the Sunday papers. They weren’t the best online, too weighty, and he needed milk and a few staples too. The nearest shops were the ones most likely to be open on Sundays, but it was risky, getting too known in the area. Still, wearing his glasses helped and different people worked the mini-mart tills at weekends; it should be okay.
It was a relief to be out of the house. The weather had turned. No more sunshine and clear skies, it was almost tropically hot, oppressively humid and with heavy, threatening clouds. Were the gods trying to tell him something? Ahmed thought about his route, which he regularly varied, and set off, chancing the rain, glancing casually up and down the street, trying not to look furtive. A man in beige chinos, he looked like a barrister or City type – a number of them lived locally – was coming towards him, walking a yappy terrier and with his pooper-scooper ostentatiously on display. He nodded civilly as they passed.
Ahmed walked on, fretting guiltily about the risk to Nattie. If she were with him she wouldn’t be spared; the thought made him draw in his stomach. Suppose his movements were being watched. The house opposite seemed to be multi-occupancy, not well maintained. Anyone living there could have absorbed that the owners over the road were away and there was a new arrival.
Suppose someone renting one of those bedsits was from Leeds, Manchester University, any of the places where he was known – someone who suspected him and spread the word that a man who looked like Ahmed Khan was living locally. He was a hero to the majority of British Muslims, most of whom hadn’t known his identity, but as well as those directly involved in the bomb plot there was a hard core of sympathisers and extremists who would go to any lengths.
Nattie had been to the house once already. If she started being seen here more often . . . He felt fear pricking, lifting the hairs at the back of his neck. To have to part again now would corrode his soul. His small achievements would lose all meaning, his life feel like a dead-end street, going nowhere. But she’d probably find the resistance and say she couldn’t see him again after today. She had Hugo, her children, their safety to worry about. And her feelings couldn’t be as powerful as his after an absence of seven years – could they?
He was back at the house without mishap, unpacked his shopping and prepared a tray with tea things. He read the Sunday papers, which were full of another terrorist atrocity and calls for ‘moderate’ Muslims to show a lead. He resented the tag ‘moderate’. What did it mean – moderately violent? There were extremists and sympathisers and the rest. Muslims should show a lead.
At one thirty, excessively early, he left the house without setting the alarm, wanting no distractions on the return, and drove Jake’s throaty car to South Kensington. He parked up by the side entrance to the tube station as planned. He waited with butterflies in his stomach, lust on his mind, and when Nattie finally came out of the station, saw the car and her face lit up, he was done for. He switched on the engine and revved it, hardly able to contain his impatience. She ran across the street and climbed in. ‘Let’s go, quick,’ she said, and he roared off with hardly a kiss. No lingering. Not till they were behind a latched and locked door.
‘I died with every ping on my phone,’ he said, putting the back of his hand to her cheek as the traffic slowed them down. ‘No one knows I’m here, but with all the calls and emails I’ve done a lot of dying! And I’ve shared the strain, worried endlessly about how things were with you and Hugo. I actually dreamed of him last night; he was sitting at a kitchen table with us and wiped at his eyes with a hankie that came away covered in blood.’
‘That’s hardly sharing the strain, making me handle that image. It’s cruel.’
‘I needed to tell you. It’s what I’ve yearned for most of all, being able to tell you things, every needling little aggro, the good bits and all the rest.’
Nattie smoothed his hand on the wheel and his blood raced. ‘What are we going to do?’ she said. ‘I feel in despair.’ Ahmed glanced and her eyes on him were helpless, as though willing him to whistle up some magic solution. She smiled wanly. ‘You used to be so jealous of Hugo, even knowing how I felt about you. The trouble is he’s always known it too, that’s what’s so infinitely sad. We have to talk seriously. You do know that?’
‘I’ve been psyching myself up all morning to say the same thing, hard as it will be. But just for now, this afternoon . . .’
She gave him a sideways look. ‘Everything on hold?’
He couldn’t contain the lust he was feeling. God, why wouldn’t the traffic move?
‘I know you as well as if I were married to you,’ he said, struggling to hold on, shifting about in his seat. ‘I know you’d have dressed in that pink shirt and jeans so as not to give Hugo cause for concern and suspicion.’
‘No black lacy bras today,’ she said.
She was looking straight ahead, lips twitching, and Ahmed stopped the car abruptly. They were almost opposite the Imperial War Museum. Her mother and William lived just up the road. Nattie turned and they stared at each other unflinchingly. It was lust in its purest form, making love in a look. He was the first to look away; the air in the car was hazy with lust and the dust from it was blurring his eyes.
Outside the house with its protective wall and rose-covered trellis he switched off the engine. ‘We’re here, Nattie. The bedroom’s a flight and a half up, at the front of the house; twee net curtains, not Sylvia’s finest, but they’ll keep out the world.’
‘No sipping tea in the sitting room?’
‘Not first off.’
They stumbled up the couple of front steps, his arm round her, seaming her to his side while he fumbled urgently, one-handedly, with the key, stabbing at the lock. She took the key from him and turned it the right way up. The door closed behind them and he shot home an enormous white-painted bolt. No more lusting, only a frenzy of passion, seven lost years of it, where they stood in the narrow hall. Were they even going to make it upstairs?
Nattie had been living for this moment ever since the shock of seeing his message in the account she had been about to close. In some subconscious corner of her frenzied brain she felt the pain of having failed in her resolve, the first time of coming here, to have made it her last – though any hope of that had been a deep self-deception, she knew. It hadn’t been in her to stay loyal to Hugo and resist. Her feelings were too powerful; they were too long held.
Climbing the stairs she felt weightless. There was no gravity, no world, no thoughts, only the giving of herself to the man she loved.
‘This won’t be the best,’ Ahmed mumbled, mouths locked as he reached for her bra clasp. ‘I’m out of control.’
He stared at her body and kept staring as she rode him. ‘Two babies later,’ she mumbled self-consciously, before her breath was taken away and her consciousness floated up to another level. She was in another life, an old familiar country, swept along on an avalanche of undisciplined sensations, whole squads of them. Could any living, feeling human being have called them to order? Two people in love, in their own private bubble of oblivion. Hard landings were for later.
‘How long have we got?’ Ahmed’s head was buried in her neck, his arm loosely flung over her breasts. She could feel and hear his heart beat, still at a great rate.
She turned on her side to be facing him. ‘Another hour or so, not much more. I must be back by four, just in case.’
He hitched up and stared at her. ‘We’ve got a lot of talking to do. This weekend has been pure hell, Nattie, thinking of you and Hugo, living with images . . .’
‘I haven’t been able to let him near me and he’s going to erupt sooner or later. He’s confused and suspicious already, unhappy about me coming to London. We can’t go on – well, not for long. Even if I wasn’t so scared for you.’ She bit her lip, looking up at Ahmed. He would be safer back out of the country, far from the hostile home shores, but how could she not see him again now?
Ahmed pulled her into his arms and kissed her. ‘It’s not my safety that matters, Nattie. I can take my chances; it’s yours. And your children’s. God, this is wretched, even to think of saying this, but I can’t let you take the risk of coming to see me here. Even if I stayed in the house twenty-four-seven I could arouse the suspicions of someone over the road. What I said at lunch in the bistro stands. I want to marry you and I’m going to one day, but being here now, back in South London, when I was given a new identity and expected to stay away . . .’
‘Why can’t you have full protection like Salman Rushdie?’ Nattie said, feeling the injustice of it all with bitter indignation.
‘He was known worldwide. It’s different with me. I’d given vital evidence, my identity was protected as far as possible and the authorities feel they’ve done their bit. Gratitude can be an ephemeral thing where the courts and officials are concerned.’
‘But that’s so unfair! Think of what you did!’
‘Life is unfair. Bomb disaster averted, job done. And, if we see each other often, Nattie darling, Hugo’s going to find out soon enough. You’d have to face that or be prepared to tell him with all that that means.’
‘I feel physically sick at the thought. He’s desperately easy to hurt, insecure and vulnerable at the best of times. I never told you the full scene in our coded messages that first year, since you knew I was trying to help him, but Hugo almost died. No more snorting office coke, it was snowballs and worse.’ Chilling to remember that lethal mix of heroin and cocaine, killer chemicals, used needles everywhere. ‘Most days I found him curled up in agony on the floor,’ she said.
‘And you nursed him back? He owes you a lot, Nattie, you shouldn’t forget that.’
It wasn’t easy to explain. It hadn’t been her dutiful nursing, Hugo had only found the immense reserves of will he’d needed to draw on for the detox and rehab because of his love for her. And her deepest, darkest fear now was that learning about Ahmed would cause Hugo to relapse.
‘Time for that cup of tea,’ Ahmed said, climbing off the bed, ‘and I’ve years to unload – if you really want to hear more about my loveless life.’
‘But not sexless?’
‘Well, not quite. Come downstairs, just as you are. I’ll get us a couple of wraps.’
She looked round the bedroom while he was gone. It still had the original fireplace with an antique ornamental fireguard and a fine bare mantelpiece, presumably cleared of Jake and Sylvia’s personal stuff. It was a handsome room decorated in neutral tones; the two full-length sash windows were draped with mud-coloured curtains and the offending nets.
‘I’ve ordered some shutter-blinds,’ Ahmed said, returning from the bathroom in a summer-weight white dressing gown, bringing one for her too. He held it out with a smile, his soft familiar smile that had always melted her into a liquid pool. The dressing gown with its raised basket-weave texture felt crisp and freshly laundered, cool and good against her skin. She thought about the fine-cotton blue check shirt he’d had on earlier, the discreet Rolex wristwatch; he could never look flash, but he had a quiet assurance about him now. There was so much she wanted to know.
She felt a kaleidoscope of emotions, staring at Ahmed, but her heart sang. She wanted to be with him every second of every day. She loved him. Was there a way? Coming here, just once in a while? Surely the risk of being seen was infinitesimal? She could take a long lunch-hour. Her office was south of the Thames, not far, and she could be doing an interview . . .
Some days she took Tubsy with her to see friends. Most, like Maudie, were still furthering careers – Nattie was young to have two children – but those on their first babies loved to chat over coffee and ask advice.
Tubsy usually slept from one to two-thirty, which was useful time to catch up with her reading. He wouldn’t need looking after if she brought him here at that time. No – she couldn’t let in such thoughts, they weren’t allowed. Ahmed was watching her – was he reading her mind? He had hold of her hand and linked fingers in an encouraging way then they went downstairs.