Lovesong Read online

  She wanted to tell him, I’m pregnant, darling. She wanted to say, The world has changed. A ball of fire has struck our house and devoured us. My dearest John, my good man, my quiet Australian, we have stood together for more than sixteen years you and I, and tonight we stand among the ruins of our lives. She wanted to say, I have betrayed you, and I love you. It was hurtling towards her now out of the silence. Nothing would prevent it. No power on earth could prevent it …

  He came over and held out his hand. She took it and he helped her up.

  They stood looking into each other’s eyes. Very gently then, as if he had never dared touch her before this moment, he put his arms around her and drew her close and kissed her on the lips. He drew away at last and looked into her eyes. He did not speak. Did he know?

  A scene presented itself to her mind. They were out there in the ungovernable future. She was at his bedside. He was old; the little girl in her womb today was already the young woman of the future standing by the door looking in at the scene. And he, John Patterner, the young woman’s beloved father, was dying. In this imaginary scene Sabiha held his hand and he looked up at her from the pillow of his deathbed.

  And in this imaginary future she told him quietly, ‘Your daughter, my darling man, is not your daughter.’

  He smiled, and squeezed her hand. ‘I’ve always known it.’

  How simple it was, through the lens of a radiant future time, to speak the truth and be forgiven.

  Here, now, in the terrible present moment, she said, ‘I love you, John Patterner.’

  He wiped her tears away with his fingers, and smiled and looked into her eyes. ‘And I love you.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

  He put his arm around her shoulders and led her from the room. ‘You’re tired. It’s past your bedtime. You and I have nothing to be sorry for, my darling. It has all been worth it.’

  Chapter Thirty-One

  John came into the kitchen from the back lane. He kissed her on the cheek and she flinched from the touch of his cold lips. ‘Everything’s there.’ He set the shopping bag on the bench beside her. ‘Sonja will be over on Monday morning and I’ll take you to the airport.’ He took off his overcoat and scarf and stepped across and hung them on the hook under the stairs.

  At the market Sonja had looked him in the eye and said, ‘You’re not cheating on Sabiha, are you?’ She was a short sturdy woman in her middle fifties. She looked as if she had always been this big solid woman of fifty-something, the mother of two grown-up daughters, both unmarried. Her skin was as youthful as her daughters’ skin, her cheeks and hands like those of a teenager, creamy and smooth.

  He had laughed.

  ‘It’s not a joke,’ she said. ‘Sabiha’s not herself. You should take better care of her. You’re not getting another one like that woman. So don’t go fancying you are.’ She was measuring out her blend of ras el hanout. Sabiha claimed it was the best in Paris. ‘You stay home and do the right thing,’ Sonja told him severely. She handed across the packets of spice, naming the contents of each packet as she handed it over, her eye going down Sabiha’s list. And last a big glass jar of the aromatic honey that could not be bought in the French shops.

  ‘You’re not a Tunisian,’ she said. He asked her what he was supposed to think of that, but she just repeated it. ‘You’re not a Tunisian.’ As if her meaning was self-evident. ‘I’ll see you Monday morning.’ She was a woman who could not absolve herself from motherly responsibility for almost everyone she knew. ‘Look after her!’

  Sabiha said, ‘Did you happen to see Bruno?’ The sound of his name on her lips startled her.

  John came over to the bench and stood beside her. ‘He wasn’t there. His stall was covered with a tarpaulin.’

  ‘What about his van?’

  ‘Not there.’ John shrugged. ‘Maybe I should call Angela? What do you reckon? Is it really any of our business?’

  She felt a sick stab of fear. She would have to make her confession to John. She could not keep it from him any longer. He must not hear it from someone else. That would be too horrible.

  Somehow the hours of the day passed and Sabiha did not make her confession. They were busy and her panic subsided. They both slid into the familiar routine, and before they knew it it was evening again and they were tired and ready for bed. By midday on Monday Sabiha would be in El Djem with her dying father and her sister.

  On Friday afternoon she went to the hospital. She waited two hours to see a woman doctor. The doctor confirmed for her that she was pregnant. On the way home on the métro she felt a sense of anticlimax. She told herself she was taking her baby home to El Djem but the claim didn’t ring true. There was a deadness about it. She and Zahira would say goodbye to their father. It was the end. She should have felt elated and happy, but instead she felt flat and sad and strangely empty, as if even her child could not possibly be all she had dreamed it would be. Was it possible, it occurred to her, that motherhood would be a disappointment?

  Back at Chez Dom she rolled out the pastry for a fresh batch of honey-dipped briouats for Saturday evening. It was the quiet triumph of a commonplace life that her tears mixed with her pastry. Before the samoom there is stillness. This stillness is so perfect it sucks the moisture from the air and from the lungs and from the mind. Her grandmother called this stillness the laughter of the gods. Sabiha had always wondered why. Now she understood. This was a day on which Sabiha knew with her grandmother the laughter of the gods. Whichever direction you decided to go, it could not be the right direction. For there was no right direction.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  That night a freezing wintry rain began to fall. It continued all through Saturday. There was talk on the radio of the rain turning to snow and of the roads becoming hazardous. By the time the men started arriving for their evening meal on Saturday night there was a touch of sleet in the air. John was behind the bar preparing the bread and the wine. He watched the men come in alone and together, each of them known to him by name, their clothes smelling of damp, lifting their hands to push back the hoods of their jackets as they came through the door and responded to his greeting, then going to their usual tables.

  By eight o’clock most of the tables were occupied and John was busy going back and forth from the dining room to the kitchen serving the meals, the window steamed up and the talk loud now, the crowded café warm and cosy, the icy rain outside forgotten.

  When the meal was over and John had cleared the plates and bowls and the cutlery from the tables, Sabiha came out from behind the bead curtain. She was wearing her dark plum gown, her hair coiled on top of her head, a necklace of her grandmother’s old silver coins glinting at her breasts. Nejib had already begun to finger his oud, beautiful sounds floating out among the cigarette smoke and the talk, his silent companion seated beside him.

  John saw how none of the men looked openly at Sabiha, and once again he knew the pleasure of this gentle place, the tact and quiet respect of these working men. There was something of home for him in the familiar dignity of this Saturday night gathering at Chez Dom, something for which he was grateful, something he would miss. He was reminded once again of the day he arrived there by mistake and heard Sabiha and her aunt singing in the kitchen behind the bead curtain. There were some nights when there was still for him a touch of the exotic magic of that first encounter. Some sense of having been admitted and made a part of their lives by the goodness and generosity of Houria and her beautiful niece. A sense that had never quite left him of being a guest in this place. And for this he felt grateful. He had never taken it for granted. He was smiling with this thought in his mind when he caught the eye of Nejib’s companion. Nejib’s companion did not change his expression, but looked away, his eyes sliding towards the door.

  It surprised John to see then that Sabiha was facing the men and waiting for their attention. He wondered what she could be up to. Usually she began to sing and the men fell silent. Tonight there was a restlessness am
ong them. And tonight she was standing beside the street door, closed against the cold night, and was having to wait for them to settle. When they realised she was waiting for them a hush fell over the room and Nejib’s fingers ceased to pluck the strings of his oud. The sound of the rain rattling against the windows came up through the silence.

  ‘Good evening to you all,’ Sabiha said. She spoke French, her manner formal, as if she was not the cook who had just prepared their meal, or the singer who was about to sing for them, but was some other woman who needed to approach them from a place that was not familiar. There was a perfect silence while they waited to hear what she had to say, every man’s gaze on her.

  She said, ‘My father is dying.’

  The men shifted uneasily and one or two murmured a word of sympathy.

  ‘I am going home to El Djem on Monday to say goodbye to my father. I shall not be singing for you next Saturday, and I will not be cooking your meals during the week.’ She waited, her features softened now by a smile, and she looked from one man to another. ‘My good friend Sonja, whose spices you all enjoy, will be cooking for you. But she will not sing for you.’ There was laughter. ‘Sonja is a better cook than I am.’ There was a murmur of disbelief. ‘But I am a better singer. I ask you, friends of Chez Dom, please don’t desert us while I’m away.’ They turned to each other and said how impossible such an idea was, to even suggest they would ever desert Chez Dom! ‘Sonja and John will take good care of you until I come back.’ She turned to Nejib and he took her signal and began to caress the strings of his instrument.

  John watched Sabiha turn at the door and look at Nejib, their eyes clinging to each other. She began to sing, singer and musician animated by the other’s perfect register of the music. It was this place in her heart to which John knew he would never be admitted. He felt a little tug of envy for Nejib’s perfect favour with her. It was not something that could ever be learned. One had to be born with it. To know it in one’s heart as a child, the way he knew the bush and the sounds and smells of his own childhood home. Nothing would ever replace it. And it could never be shared. Except with another born to it.

  The men watched her openly now, for as a woman she was masked to them by her singing. They smoked their cigarettes and sipped their wine or their mint tea, the lament of Sabiha’s song holding them in thrall to their dreams of family and their fathers’ sacred stony fields.

  The street door crashed open, catching Sabiha on the shoulder and spinning her around, then smashing back against the wall, sending flecks of paint flicking into the air, the window glass trembling, a gust of icy air and a stutter of rain on the boards.

  A man at the table nearest the door stood up.

  Bruno stumbled into the café. He stood swaying unsteadily and looking around, his eyes fierce and bewildered, like an animal that has been hunted and does not know where to turn to escape its tormentors. He was soaking wet and cast around him as if he was trying to locate his tormentors so that he would know which way to face.

  Nejib made a small gesture with his hand to the man by the door who had stood up. The man sat down again.

  John carefully set the jug of wine on the bar and stepped across and took Bruno by the arm.

  Bruno woke from his trance and flung John away from him violently and stepped forward and stopped at the table he regularly occupied for his midday meal. At a gesture from Nejib the two men sitting at the table stood up and moved away.

  John recovered himself. He was alert now to the whole room. He felt calm and knew he would deal with this. He noticed that Nejib’s companion had the same expression of faint bored contempt on his face that he always wore, and he had a sudden intuition that the man was not surprised by Bruno’s violent arrival, but had been expecting it. No one had ever seen the Italian either drunk or in Chez Dom on a Saturday night.

  When the two Arabs stepped away from his table, Bruno grasped the back of his usual chair. The chair tipped and he took an unsteady step backwards, still holding the chair, then lurched forward again, the chair describing a wild arc behind him. In one long movement, neither quite falling nor quite sitting, Bruno managed to bring the chair down on two legs behind him and get his backside onto it. Someone laughed. Bruno sat perfectly still, his weight dangerously forward, his head sunk on his chest, as if the effort had exhausted him. Then he slowly eased back and set the two back legs of the chair on the boards and he lifted his gaze to Sabiha.

  Sabiha had closed the door and was standing with her back to it.

  Slowly Bruno spread his large hands on the table in front of him, as if he meant to rise from the chair and go to her, or as if he was about to deliver a judgment.

  In the perfect stillness there was the light tap of the oud’s staved body touching the floorboards as Nejib set down his beloved instrument with infinite care. Two of the men turned and looked at him, then quickly looked back at Bruno. Bruno had swung around at Nejib’s movement and he kept looking at him now.

  John saw Nejib’s companion shift his chair a fraction to the left, not enough to make anything of it, but enough to free his knees from being encumbered by the table should he need to get up quickly. The man was now facing at an angle slightly away from the table and directly towards Bruno. John decided to watch him closely and be prepared for something. He was surprised to find that he was not nervous but was cool and perfectly ready for whatever was to happen; his decision to protect Bruno from harm was simple and clear in his mind. He knew he was going to look after Bruno. He was not afraid of drunks.

  Bruno lifted his right hand and pointed at Nejib. ‘Now you sing for this black stronzo!’ he said with contempt. He swivelled and looked at Sabiha. ‘You do it for this black turd!’

  Sabiha pleaded softly, ‘Please, Bruno! Please don’t do this! I beg you.’

  John looked at her. She held both hands clasped under her chin, as if she was praying.

  She could not know it, but Sabiha’s pose at this moment was a perfect mirror of her mother’s pose when she had watched the bus taking her daughter away from her forever. John motioned to Sabiha to stay out of it, but she either did not see him or was prepared to ignore him.

  Bruno looked at Nejib. ‘Get up!’ he shouted. ‘Get up, you black bastard!’

  John saw there was no fear in Nejib’s eyes.

  Nejib’s companion stood first, taking a step clear of his chair and to one side of the table. Slowly, with reluctance, Nejib also got up. He made no move to stand free of the table.

  Bruno pushed himself away from his table and stood up. His chair fell backwards with a crash. He stepped unsteadily out into the open space between his and Nejib’s table. Bruno and Nejib’s companion were now facing each other across a space of less than two metres. Nejib’s companion looked slight compared to Bruno, whose boxer’s frame seemed to be an impenetrable barrier to any possible assault by the smaller man. It was scarcely to be a fair contest.

  The sound of the rain hitting the windows was loud and the front door rattled as it was hit by a gust of wind. Nejib’s companion stepped towards Bruno. He did not appear to hurry, his small frame relaxed, his expression giving the impression that he considered this encounter of little consequence. Everyone was silent, astonished by the little man’s daring, their attention glued to him. As he closed with Bruno he lifted his left arm and put it around Bruno’s shoulders, placing the side of his head against the side of Bruno’s head, as if he embraced Bruno and would kiss him on the cheek.

  John had been on the point of stepping between them, but he hesitated, feeling an enormous relief and glad he had not intervened, believing that what he was looking at was a generous gesture of reconciliation from Nejib’s companion.

  Bruno was evidently so surprised by the man’s confident approach and easy embrace that he did not react with violence. As if he imagined he was going to have plenty of time to react later.

  Bruno flinched and gave a strange grunt.

  Nejib’s companion stepped away and walked to the do
or and opened it. He went out, closing the door behind him.

  Bruno stood a moment, his face bloodless, then crashed to his knees. He knelt a moment, a man intending prayer, the room registering the impact of his fall, then he toppled forward onto the boards and lay still.

  Sabiha was the first to move. She cried, ‘Bruno!', and ran forward and knelt by him and took his head in her hands and tried to turn him over. ‘Bruno!’ she pleaded.

  John realised the café had cleared. The last man leaving the street door swinging, the rush of freezing wind and rain. The only one who had not moved was Nejib.

  John looked at him. ‘For God’s sake, Nejib! Who is he?’

  Nejib stood looking down at Bruno and Sabiha. He said with infinite sadness, ‘He is my brother.’

  The autopsy would show that the knife concealed in Nejib’s brother’s right hand had expertly sliced through Bruno’s abdominal aorta. Death had been almost instantaneous. Just as it had been for Dom Pakos all those years ago.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  John had just returned from the Préfecture and was still wearing his old brown overcoat and scarf. He was standing side-on to the bedroom window looking down into the street. The street was quiet now, the flashing lights of the police cars and the ambulance and the trampling of people in and out of the café had ceased hours ago. He was still seeing them down there. He turned from the window and looked across at Sabiha. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her pale nightdress and bare feet, her old blue blanket clutched around her shoulders. She looked like a woman who had been rescued from the sea, only to be told her loved ones had drowned.

  She lifted her head and looked at him. ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘They just wanted to know what happened. They didn’t want my opinion of why it happened. I told them exactly what I’d seen.’

  There was a long silence between them.