Lovesong Read online

  She reached for the door handle but he gripped her arm and held her.

  ‘Sabiha! Without you I’m finished.’ His tone was quiet. He drew her close and held her against him. ‘I don’t care if I am mad,’ he murmured into her hair. ‘I don’t want you to be worried. They are nothing to me, Sabiha.’

  She was drained of will. She was exhausted. She rested her head against his chest and gave in, just for a moment. His broad chest, the smell of him, strange and familiar, so unlike John. ‘Bruno,’ she said, but could not go on. Had she been about to ask him for his forgiveness? What did he understand of her?

  They stood together in the dark, the sounds of the market outside.

  ‘That is not the worst of it,’ he said. Again he spoke so calmly, his tone so confiding they might have known each other since they were children, and this just another of their childhood escapades, him telling her his secrets.

  She waited.

  But he said no more.

  She withdrew from his arms and wiped her eyes with her handkerchief. ‘I’ll never love anyone but my John.’

  Bruno said, ‘The worst of it is, I can’t make love to Angela anymore. I think of you, and I can’t touch my wife.’ He made a sound of disbelief. ‘Angela is silenced by it. I was going to tell her about us. I was going to tell her everything. I prepared my thoughts, but when I saw the look in her eyes I couldn’t speak. She doesn’t know what to think. What can I say to her? My eldest son looks at me across the table while we are at our evening meal as if I have become a stranger to him and am no longer the father he loves. I ask myself, with the greatest anguish I have ever known, my Sabiha, has my dear son learned to hate his father? He sees his mother’s unhappiness and is shamed and bewildered. I am not able to decide whether I see in my son and my wife my own guilt looking back at me, or whether I see what they are truly feeling. I don’t know. I can no longer distinguish between what is real and what I fear to be real.’ He paused and expelled the air from his lungs. ‘Or that what I most fear will suddenly break out and become real. I live in two worlds, Sabiha. Theirs and ours. This is the truth. Talking to you here, now, I see this clearly. I understand it. When I am not with you I am confused and filled with doubt and uncertainty and I think of you all the time. At night and during the day. But now you have come back to me I see it clearly. In my heart I know I am faithful to Angela, and will be faithful to her until the day of my death. I know it must sound strange to you to hear me make such a claim. In this world of yours and mine I love only you.’ He fell silent, the faint creaking of the van’s springs. ‘When these two worlds meet, both will be destroyed.’ It was his conclusion. It was simple. It was real. It was not to be disputed. He might have been speaking of a surprising and impressive phenomenon of nature that he had happened on by chance.

  Sabiha had her eyes closed. She was waiting for him to finish.

  ‘Promise me you will come to me again next Friday.’ He stroked her cheek with his fingers.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘I have dreamed of this and now it has happened to me and I am glad. I can never go back to being who I was.’

  ‘I came to you to get with child,’ she said. ‘That’s all. Not because I love you. I love John.’

  He said nothing.

  His breath on her cheek. The sound of his breathing. His hand cupping her breast.

  ‘Why can’t you just be a man?’ she said. She removed his hand from her breast. He offered no resistance and placed his arm around her shoulder, lightly holding her against him. ‘Why can’t you accept what I’ve given you and go on being yourself? Other men would do that.’

  ‘What other men? Have there been other men?’

  ‘No! Of course not. You are the only one.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Yes, I believe you. But if I don’t know when I’m going to see you again,’ he said, his voice calm, as if their situation was commonplace and manageable, ‘it will be a torture for me. But if I know when I am going to see you again, I can dream of our meeting and count the hours.’

  ‘I’m going home,’ she said.

  There was a sudden stillness. An expectation of something. A little shock travelling between them. She did not pull away from him but waited for what was to come.

  He laughed. A soft laugh it was, gentle and filled with wonderment. ‘You have changed me. I am a man I hardly know.’ He laughed again at this, a low, private laugh of deep amusement, sharing his astonishment with her. ‘Just a little of this man I know. The new man, I call him. You saw him in me. You saw him waiting for you and you called to him and he came to you.’ He was silent for some time. His arm around her shoulder, holding her against him. He said quietly, ‘I think this new man is to have a very short life.’

  She said, ‘Don’t say that! Please! You mustn’t say things like that.’ She had a horror that his saying it would make it real.

  ‘I have seen it,’ he said simply. ‘I know where it will be. Now I am unable to go to my priest and make my confession faithfully. Now I am no longer faithful. I keep us secret in my heart. I lie to God.’ He said, ‘When I wept at your feet, it was from despair. He saw it then, the old Bruno, grieving for the loss of his virtue. He knew he was lost. The new Bruno, the man you have made of me, had not yet stood up. Now he knows there is no way back to the man he was.’ He was silent again, his fingers absently stroking her hair.

  She pulled away and straightened her coat. ‘I’m going,’ she said.

  ‘Will you come to see me?’

  ‘No. It’s finished.’

  ‘This will never be finished, my Sabiha.’ He spoke easily. ‘Until you and I are finished. It is everything else that is finished. My Angela. My family. I can never reclaim them now as they were for me. It is all lies and deceit at home when my children clamber on me in the evening and my wife looks at me across the room and fears to smile.’

  ‘Please let me go!’ she pleaded. She was beginning to panic.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’ He reached past her and opened the van’s doors. Suddenly she was Madame Patterner again. The doors swung back, screeching on their hinges, letting in a blaze of light from the market.

  He stood to one side and held out his hand to help her step down.

  She hesitated, blinded for a moment, then thanked him, as if he were a stranger who had courteously opened a door for her in the course of an ordinary day. She took his hand and stepped to the ground.

  He released her hand. ‘Come on Friday,’ he said. ‘We can talk. There is no one else I can talk to.’

  ‘I can’t come,’ she said. She walked away. She could feel him watching her. As she was turning the corner of the last fruit counter she looked back. He was standing at the open doors of his van. What did he mean, I have seen it? She was afraid. If only there was a place where she could hide and never be found until it was over. He was like a man on the scaffold who has accepted his fate and turns to his executioner and smiles and says, It was worth it.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  On Tuesday, just after midday as usual, Bruno came in the back door of the café and set down their box of tomatoes. He said nothing but walked straight past Sabiha and through the bead curtain into the dining room. Sabiha and John looked through the curtain. Bruno was sitting at his usual place waiting for John to bring him his lunch. Sabiha thought of a little boy behaving himself. Not making any trouble. Being good. Being invisible. He sat there, still and silent, looking down at his hands in his lap, ignoring Nejib and his companion. The good Bruno.

  John took his meal out to him and set it in front of him and Bruno said, ‘Thank you, John.’

  John said, ‘No worries, Bruno. It’s a pleasure.’

  Bruno ate his meal and left at once, not lingering as he usually did.

  John said to Sabiha, ‘Whatever it was, he seems to be dealing with it.’

  She wasn’t so sure. Where was the bad Bruno hiding? The lost man?

  The following Friday she went to the market but
avoided Bruno’s area. On Tuesday he came again. The good little boy. Saying nothing. She longed to ask him what he was hoping to achieve, behaving like this. How long could he keep it up? It couldn’t possibly last, it was too unreal. If only he had been the real man she had mistaken him for, an ordinary immoral man, instead of this innocent. Was he waiting for a sign from her? Was he waiting to be told by her what he must do? Or was it a sign from his life he was waiting for? From his god, or his intuition? She had a horrible feeling he was going to come out of this ridiculous pose suddenly and do something violent. His physical beauty made him seem absurd to her now. A god pretending to be a good little boy. He had lost his dignity. She was deeply ashamed to think of what they had done together. Her child, if it were ever to exist, couldn’t possibly have anything to do with that Friday at the market in Bruno’s van.

  She was out shopping when John answered the telephone. It was Sabiha’s sister, Zahira. She said she was calling from the box outside the post office in El Djem. John found it hard to understand her. The line was not very clear and she spoke so softly and with such a strong accent he had to ask her to repeat herself several times.

  ‘Can you please speak a bit louder!’ He felt as if he were instructing a child.

  But she did not speak any louder. She just repeated her message in exactly the same murmur. In the end he asked her to call again later when Sabiha was home.

  When Sabiha came home he told her, ‘Your sister called. I couldn’t understand a word she said.’

  Sabiha was hanging up her coat and putting her apron on. The back door was open, André's cat watching them, as if it was also hoping for some news. Tolstoy stood off on his own looking down the lane.

  She was alert all day for the telephone, but her sister did not call back. She waited up in the evening, standing out in the empty dining room with the lights off, her arms folded under her breasts, looking into the street. There was a steady stream of people coming and going at the Kavi brothers’ store. It was becoming a new world out there. Houria would not have recognised the street these days. The Indian boys were the only ones who seemed to know what they were doing. André's and Arnoul’s shops were unvisited antiques from the old days. Nothing was French anymore.

  She turned around and looked at the telephone where it hung on the wall behind the bar, as if looking would make it ring. It stayed as silent as if its wires had been cut. She almost went over and checked that they had not been cut.

  At eleven she gave up and went out to the bathroom and had a wash then went upstairs. If her father had died, John would have understood that much from Zahira, or Zahira would have telephoned again. It wouldn’t be her father’s death, Sabiha was sure of it. His condition had probably deteriorated unexpectedly. It would have taken something like that to have made Zahira walk to the post office on her own and make the call. She would not have done it if she had not needed to. She must have woken this morning to find their father much worse. Or had he asked her to make the call on his behalf? At the thought of her father asking for her, a surge of emotion caught Sabiha in the throat and she gave a helpless little cry. She would not let herself weep, not yet. She prayed to someone’s god that she was pregnant this time. It had been almost two weeks but there was no sign yet. Nothing. There were moments when she truly believed she would kill herself if her period came again. She could hardly stand the suspense. Her body was silent. Unchanged. Empty. She wanted to scream, Give me my child!

  How much easier it would have been if Bruno had been an ordinary cynical man. What was he thinking? What was he waiting for? I have seen it. What did he mean? Her grandmother was no help to her. She had gone too. Into the silence. This emptiness of waiting day after day, night after night, without a sign.

  Going up the stairs she felt like an old woman. She paused halfway, one hand on the banister, her eyes closed, gathering her courage to face John. She had the feeling he knew.

  He was in bed with the lamp on. He had a new book. Benvenuto was still on the chair beside him, as if he could not bear to part with his old friend just yet. She got undressed. She didn’t look up but knew he was watching her. She was careful not to catch his eye. If she caught his eye she would be required to smile, and then he would expect to have sex when she got into bed. She couldn’t bear the thought of making love. No one but herself could see the ruin she had brought on them. She would never tell him. He must never know what she had done. She put on her nightdress and went around to her side of the bed and climbed in.

  ‘Goodnight, darling,’ she said. She tried to put some gentleness and warmth into her voice. She closed her eyes.

  John reached over and put his hand on the rise of her hip. ‘I love you,’ he said quietly.

  ‘And I love you too.’ Bruno was right: she was never going to find a way back to herself. Her old self was lost in this labyrinth.

  John’s hand remained resting on her hip, his thumb and fingers massaging her lightly.

  She kept her eyes closed and willed him not to ask her anything. If he asked her now she knew she would not be able to make up a lie. One minute she was vowing never to tell him, and the next she was ready to tell it all. There was no certainty anymore, no solid ground for her to stand on. She didn’t know what she was thinking. To lie to John now seemed almost a greater evil than betraying him with Bruno. To lie to the one you love! The one who trusts you! How terrible! Her chest felt thick and heavy.

  The weight of his hand through the blankets. At last he patted her and took his hand away and she heard him turn a page of his book. He cleared his throat. It was something familiar that he always did whenever there was an awkwardness between them. A little clearing of his throat. A quiet reassurance to himself that all was well, or that things could be mended at least. That much of him she was certain of. He was not going to press her for explanations. He was going to let her decide when it was time to let him back into the intimacy of her life. How would it be if he did insist? If he took her by the shoulders and turned her towards him and told her he was putting up with no more of her mysterious nonsense. But he would never do that. He would respect her feelings and not question her, until she invited him to. She was safe with John. John would wait. She could rely on him to wait. For how long would he wait? For a year? Forever? Yes, she knew it was quite possible that John would wait forever. That he would be prepared to go to his grave in ignorance, rather than hurt her in any way. They still slept in the same bed, but she had abandoned him.

  There was a loud crack downstairs and she jumped.

  John said, ‘It’s just the stairs, darling. Go to sleep.’

  A cat somewhere gave a distressed yowl.

  The street outside was deeply quiet.

  She listened. There was not a sound. It was as if everyone had crept away, she and John were the only ones left in the neighbourhood, the only ones not to have heard the warning, To stay is certain death. If she slept now she would have a nightmare, she could feel it waiting for her. She remembered when she was a child forcing herself to stay awake in case a strange creature came in the night and took her away. The creature had come. She had been taken away. She was beyond help. She was afraid of the good boy Bruno.

  John said gently, ‘Are you crying, darling?’

  She sniffed. ‘No.’

  A minute later he turned a page.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Sabiha woke into the night stillness. She lay listening to the silence. Had an urgent shout called her out of sleep? Everything was quiet. The thin light around the edges of the curtains from the solitary streetlamp on the corner. John snoring steadily beside her. No disturbance on the street. No dogs howling. Nothing. Just the steady hum of the night. Had her father died and called to her as he left this world? She felt a chill at the thought of it. Calling to his favourite daughter, so far away from him, his daughter lost to him, blaming himself for the loss of her, regretting sending her to help his sister all those years ago. Her father breathing his last sorrowing for her,
longing for the clasp of her hand in his, her lips against his forehead. Her sweet breath in his face. Her dear father. Why hadn’t Zahira called? Sabiha felt a terrible regret that she had not gone home to see her father. Now she would never see him again.

  Then the truth suddenly struck her. It wasn’t her father who had called to her at all. It was her grandmother! She slipped her hands under her nightdress and felt her breasts. They were tender, as if lightly bruised, her nipples hard. This was not the fleeting tenderness she often felt a day or two before her period was due—her period was due on Friday—but was something else, something more lasting, something far more substantial. She was certain of it. It was a feeling that was entirely new to her. It was a feeling she had never experienced before. She knew it, she was pregnant!

  She gasped, emotion flooding through her, a rush of warmth sweeping through her brain and her body. It was the warmth of another being inside her. She had conceived. The child was with her. She caught her breath and wept. If only she could have woken John and told him her news! She was to have her little girl beside her! She could feel her grandmother smiling on her. She had risked everything and had rescued her child from oblivion. There could be no regrets now, no loss of faith, no uncertainty. No matter what she was called on to confront now, she would be strong for her daughter’s sake. She wept, with relief, with gratitude, with the astonishment of disbelief. At last she was to be a mother. She thought of that summer night years ago with John, when she believed she had conceived. In her mind now this child was that same child. It had always been the same child. Her child.