His fingers were trailing her arm, he realised, and lifted his hand away self-consciously – only to take hold of hers and clench it. He needed physical contact.
‘Sorry,’ he said with a smile. ‘I’ve been trying to find the courage to begin. I guess I should start with my name. It’s Daniel Bashaar, which I’m still getting used to, even seven years on – and having a whole different backstory as well.’
‘Daniel Bashaar,’ Natttie smiled. ‘I like it. It has a nice biblical feel.’
‘I was Dan to everyone in the New York office, which was fine. I was keen to fit in.’
‘Was anyone else from the London office out there too?’ Nattie asked. ‘Wouldn’t that have been a bit of a problem?’
‘Good question.’ He tightened his hold on her hand, moved by her anxious gaze. ‘Only one who I knew and she never gave a hint of recognition. She’d have been a good recruit for MI6, William must have laid the ground well. So how about I start with New York, which you don’t really know very much about. I was missing you, which goes without saying, lonely, but on a high as well that first year, loving the new job and Manhattan. It’s such a frenetic, energising place. I went about with the two guys I worked with mainly, Matthew and Charley. They were fun, rowdy and out for a good time; keen to show me the city’s underside as well as the glitz. I’d thought I knew it all, working on the Post, but I was wrong. I wasn’t into dope, but they had me doing most else, certainly drinking and I’m not a great boozer, as you know, with that upbringing of mine.’
‘And girls?’ Nattie raised her eyebrows.
‘They featured. There was plenty of . . . availability.’ He grinned, hoping she’d handle that, though she could never hide a lack of coolness where girls were concerned. He had no wish to talk about the meaningless one-night stands with the brittle savvy girls he’d met in New York. And it had just been sex, a release, a man’s approach; a way of rounding off a boozy night out.
He carried on. ‘These two guys, Charley and Matthew, played the field, they had a kind of rota, but the girls I met through work and out drinking with the guys weren’t for me. They were tough pushy career girls, not into relationships. I used to wonder, in fact, if they’d be capable of falling in love. But then of course,’ he touched Nattie’s cheek, ‘I’d wondered about your true feelings at first. You hadn’t exactly held back. I can remember worrying a bit about that! It was the sweetest moment when it dawned on me that you were serious.’
‘Something tells me you’re being a touch evasive here,’ Nattie said.
‘I was in love with you, then and always. But you can’t imagine how isolating and bleak it feels, being someone else in another country. You weren’t alone, remember, you had Hugo.’
Nattie looked down. ‘I was trying to save him, that was different.’
She had eased away her hand, now slipped it back into his.
Ahmed held it tight. ‘I worked hard in New York,’ he said, ‘and did fine. The drinking helped actually, as it turned out. I met useful people, made contacts. I wrote articles for mags, a short story or two, made a bit of spending money. You need bucks on tap in Manhattan. Everything costs, and it’s like there’s a pall of go-getting hanging over the entire city, an atmosphere of obsessive money-making, whatever it takes.’
‘That’s not unique to New York.’
‘No, and I’m not being entirely fair. We all want to make money, but it seems so much the culture there.’
‘And the bit I have to know about, the crux, why you did a bunk and vanished and broke my heart?’
She was looking him straight in the eye and he flinched. He took a sip from his glass and put it down again; he rested his forehead on his hands. She’d never understand. ‘Bear with me,’ he said. ‘I will get there, but it’ll take a little time.
‘The CIA had a go at recruiting me while I was in New York. It was a direct approach – a cold one, they call it. Someone bumped into me in the subway and I found a card in my pocket. We had some meetings. They wanted me to infiltrate certain groups, people they suspected, and build up relationships much as I’d done in Leeds. I wasn’t having it. It’s one thing, saving the girl I love and her family, her Home Secretary mother, but I’d had enough of double-life deception and making enemies; I had no wish to live with any greater fear than I was feeling already. Fear had me in its clutches, you see, Nattie. It had a lot to do with why I went to ground.’ He stared hard at her, wanting his look to reach in. ‘Fear was at the heart of what it was all about.’
She didn’t blink, but she’d gone quite pale. ‘What sort of fear?’ she said. ‘What happened?’
‘My father died.’
Her face softened and she brought up their linked hands to her cheek. ‘I’m so sorry. I know how much he meant to you. Words are always inadequate.’
‘It came as a most terrible shock. I saw it on my sisters’ Facebook pages; I know their passwords. It was, still is, my only source of news of the family. Unknown to them, of course, and I can’t make contact even now. They’d never keep it secret and I’d be done for. But you’ll be wondering about the relevance . . .’
‘Yes, tell me about the fear.’
‘I’m dreading telling you. I’m very glad you’re here beside me and I can plead.’ Ahmed smiled and she gave him a melting look in return. Her scent was filling the space between them. He wanted her badly and tried not to squeeze her hand too tight.
She’d retreat after hearing him out, he thought, climb back into the hard protective shell of her marriage. How could he possibly expect her to understand why he’d made such a mess of his life if he couldn’t fathom it himself? He had to get on with it.
‘I was overwhelmed with grief over Dad, coping with the shock of not knowing and not being able to be at his side through his illness. My every instinct was to be on the first plane home and make the funeral – it’s always straight away, traditionally. And as well as my agony of loss, there was the family honour. It matters, being seen to be there, paying one’s respects, mourning for a prescribed length of time. It’s a ritual, however remote from the religion and unobservant you may be, of fundamental importance. Even if I hadn’t ached to be at the funeral and able to mourn my father, it was my duty to be there, especially as the only son. But I stayed in New York, too pathetically frightened to get on that plane and show my face at home.’
‘You can’t blame yourself,’ Nattie said. ‘You couldn’t have gone. There was no way. It would have been like taking your own life – and endangering others, don’t forget, people in the crossfire.’
He fought it, but his eyes misted. She really cared. He touched her sweet anxious face.
‘True. I doubt I’d have survived, turning up in Harehills only a year on. Everyone knows me there and word would have got round faster than a bullet out of a gun. Not everyone involved was rounded up and they want revenge – it’s justice in their eyes. It’s why I was given a new identity, after all. Someone would have “accidentally” pushed into me as a bus went by. I’d have been rubbed out one way or another, knifed in an alley, beaten to a pulp – there’s no shortage of ways to do people in.
‘But the point was, Nattie, I was shit-scared, awash with guilt and shame. Hating myself for the cowardice, fucked to bits frankly. I’d wanted to live, very badly. I was determined to marry you. Not for a while, you were still so young and I hadn’t made the money I felt was needed; I hadn’t saved a dime with all the drinking and sloshing round the bucks, out with Matthew and Charley in New York. That played into it. My revulsion at myself grew until it became a mammoth, the sense of failure and self-loathing.’
‘Your fear was a delayed reaction,’ Nattie said. ‘You’d been so incredibly brave, it was going to hit you sometime.’
‘But not to have been there for Dad . . . and I can’t tell you the hurt and shame my mother must have felt, the dishonour my absence had brought on the family. Her only son not there to support her, not praying for his father and being dutiful. She wouldn�
�t have been able to look a single person in that tight community in the eye.
‘I flipped, Nattie, I went into a complete decline. I could think of nothing but how saddened by my New York life my father would have been. It was irrational to say the least. My life in London before you were in it hadn’t been all that different. But most of all I felt unworthy of you. New York felt alien and brash. I just knew I had to get away and lick my wounds.’
‘Why couldn’t you have told me about your father and let me share your pain?’ Nattie had taken back her hand and she faced him square on with hurt eyes. ‘And nothing you’ve said really explains why you cut off contact. No word of where you went, what you did. I need to know. I need answers to the seven years of questions I’ve carried around in my heart and head.’
Ahmed looked over to the window, where the sunlight was pouring in.
‘You could have told the office you needed time to grieve,’ Nattie persisted. ‘You could have asked for a sabbatical. They wouldn’t have denied you that. Please, look at me.’ He turned towards her. Her lower lip was trembling. ‘I care about what happened to you,’ she said. ‘I’ve been pining and worrying all these years. You’ve never been out of my thoughts.’
‘Nor you out of mine. But I couldn’t have borne to talk to anyone in the New York office about my father dying. No one would have understood. Anyone else would have been on the first plane home, after all. I could have lied about the timing, asked to go home for the funeral, but that could have led to complicated questions, which would have got me in deep. The last thing I wanted anyway was casual commiserations and meaningless sympathy.
‘My father was dead and I felt beneath contempt. It was all about you, which is the hard bit. I couldn’t face getting in touch. I needed to get away, see what I could salvage of myself. And the other thing was, you see, I was as certain of anything in my own heart that I wouldn’t have given my safety a second’s thought had I not passionately wanted to stay alive for you. I knew I’d have found the courage, gone home and taken my chances.’
‘Then I’m selfishly very glad you didn’t, very glad indeed.’ She rested her hand on his arm.
‘But having not flown home, I was completely fucked up, feeling a snivelling coward, hating myself with a vengeance. And constantly scared, scurrying past dark entrances and alleys, heart thudding. America wasn’t so far away, people could track me down . . . It wasn’t exactly a breakdown, but I was in that sort of paranoid state where I could have persuaded myself of almost anything – like that it was almost more your fault than mine, my need to stay alive for you.’
He looked at her, feeling gutted; she’d never understand. ‘And having wrapped myself up in a scratchy blanket of blame-gaming I kept putting off getting in touch. It’s beyond my comprehension now,’ he said wryly, managing a small helpless smile. ‘In the pantheon of screwing-up I did pretty good.’
Nattie didn’t know what to think. She felt deep sympathy, yet Ahmed hadn’t fully explained, all he’d said was like the first wash of a watercolour and she wanted the whole painting. She could understand his desperate state, but a single word or message from him and her life would have been so different; she wouldn’t be married to Hugo.
She was feeling too hurt and confused to get her head round any of it and in her misery and frustration she couldn’t help a spurt of rage.
‘So you packed up your apartment and cut loose? You were together enough for that?’ She faced him quivering, seeing the pain in his eyes and hating to hear her own bitter tone. She didn’t feel bitter. She was straining for contact, as in love with him as ever. The years had melted away.
‘Where did you go?’ she asked in a level tone.
The tension was intolerable. Nattie gazed distractedly around the room. The light was streaming in through the far window, dust motes dancing in the beams. The fight went out of her and she spilled over with tears.
She felt her head being turned. Ahmed held her face, wiping away the tears with the back of his hand, leaning in to kiss the wetness. He picked up her hand again, rubbing with his fingers, with his thumb on her palm. It was as though there’d been no absence, she was feeling it ever more acutely, no missing seven years. His nearness, his smell, clean and natural, like her grandfather’s fresh-cut logs, was vividly recalling for her past togetherness, lying in his arms with her face pressed close to his skin.
He brought her hand to his lips. ‘If only you knew what I went through. The longer I left it, the harder it got. I kept funking it, drafting messages, deleting them; I didn’t know how to explain. William, the New York office, everyone was looking for me. I knew the trouble I’d caused by going to ground and I’d felt somehow that getting in touch with you would start a whole chain of events. You’d naturally have wanted to know where I was; I could have kept shtoom, but I wasn’t seeing straight, had this nonsensical notion that it would have led to the paper finding me. It seemed so . . . complicated.’
‘I don’t see how a message in Drafts could have led to the paper finding you. You could have explained. I’d have understood the torment you were feeling.’
‘You don’t know what it was like, the guilt, the fear, my mental confusion. I’d thought somehow, you see, darling Nattie, that I didn’t have to do anything, that you’d believe in me, wait for me, be there for me – that I could work through my agonies and feel strong again. But it couldn’t have gone more wrong.’ He smiled, his eyes full of contrition.
She touched his face and felt a charge, felt it travel all through her body. She had to go. She should be out of the door, running to the tube station, thinking of Hugo and her children . . .
‘I need to know more,’ she said. ‘Where were you – where had you gone?’
‘Vancouver. I’d met a man once, in one of the Manhattan clubs I used to drink in, a Californian, he was in the film business. He’d talked about Canada – Hollywood makes quite a few films there. I remembered him describing the plight of the native Canadians – aboriginals or First Nation they’re called there – saying it was particularly acute in Vancouver. I thought that was somewhere to lose myself. I could work for a charity helping those people.
‘It was easy to get into Canada as a visitor with my UK passport and I didn’t need a permit to work as a volunteer. The charity paid my day-to-day expenses; it was virtually nothing, but I got by.’
Nattie was thankful his disappearance had nothing to do with the FBI or CIA, or Islamist extremists tracking him down, but found it hard to digest everything, to handle her bruised feelings, and her list of questions kept growing. What else had he done? How long had he stayed?
‘What was the charity? What did it do?’ she asked, worrying about how late it was getting. She’d told Jasmine she’d be back by seven. How could she leave with one rushed goodbye, never to see him again? It was impossible. She had to go.
‘It was a charity for homeless aboriginals called ARC, the Aboriginal Relief Centre. The city draws them down south from British Columbia’s boreal forests, but the jobs aren’t there. The drug, alcohol and homelessness problems are huge. Down in the Gastown area of the city you’ll see all the people settled into cardboard-box houses on the streets. Groups of tough-man cops circling round.’
Ahmed’s smile arrowed itself straight into Nattie’s heart; it would stay there, she knew, leaving her bleeding. She had to go home . . .
‘I was Daniel in Canada. Nobody persisted with questions and I gradually eased up on furtive looks over my shoulder and expecting to be left dying in a ditch. It was a rewarding, restoring year, that year in Vancouver. But then, seeing those photographs of your wedding, it turned out to have been nothing short of catastrophic. I didn’t go into another decline once I knew. I was too bitter. I stewed in my own juice for a few months, cursing the world. Eventually, though, I calmed down and my life took another turn. But there’s no time for that now, you have to go, I know. And we need to find times and make plans.’
‘No. I can’t – we can’t. We�
��re where we are and there’s nothing to be done. We can’t undo it. I got pregnant, I took an impulsive wrong turn, but Hugo’s a good kind man and I can’t—’
‘See me again? Don’t say it, Nattie, not that.’ She was on her feet, trying to find the strength to leave him, and made a move towards the door. Ahmed had risen too. He stopped her going, turning her to face him, holding her arms. ‘There’s so much more to explain. I’d been living in limbo for so long, then a few weeks ago I snapped, gave in, persuaded myself that enough time had gone by for any risk to you to be minimal. And now I’m here I can hardly bear to look at you, for the need I feel. Don’t say you can’t see me again. You can, there’ll be times. Tomorrow? Lily will be in school. Can you bring Thomas here?’
Nattie shook her head. They were standing close. His hands were on her bare arms which made her shiver. She knew there was no not-seeing him again, no pure, sane, sensible course of action, not the way she felt. ‘Tomorrow’s not possible.’ The words seemed to stick in her throat. ‘Hugo’s taken the afternoon off. We’re going to his parents in Oxford for the weekend.’
‘When? Monday? Can you come with Thomas on Monday?’
He held her arms more tightly; they were both shaking. ‘My grandparents are going to be in London this weekend, seeing my uncle,’ Nattie said slowly. ‘I’d be so sad to miss them, you know what they mean to me.’
‘And to me,’ Ahmed said. ‘I owe John and Bridget so much. Think what could have happened if I hadn’t been able to hide out with them in Worcestershire. Fahad might have tracked me down before I’d worked out where he’d planted the bomb.’
‘I’d been thinking of coming back early Sunday morning, leaving Hugo with the children.’ Nattie smiled hesitantly. ‘I’m sure his parents won’t mind. They’d love a day of having him to themselves.’
‘You’d see your grandparents first then come here?’
‘It may not work out. Mum only told me today they were coming. I don’t know how it will go down with Hugo, but I’ll try.’
The Consequence of Love Page 10