by Liz Fielding
‘The UN?’ New York? That was so far away… ‘And Ameerah?’ she managed.
Milly smiled. ‘He’s taking her with him.’
Relief swept through her. It would have been so easy for him to leave her behind. ‘She must be so happy.’
‘Yes.’ Milly’s smile faded. ‘Noor was brought up in an old-fashioned household where girls were not valued. She didn’t understand that our father, our brothers…’ She shook her head. ‘Every time that Hanif looked at Ameerah he remembered that Noor had lied to him, that she couldn’t bring herself to totally trust him. We are all so grateful for what you’ve done, Lucy.’
‘It was nothing. He saved my life.’
Milly reached out, took her hand, squeezed it.
‘I think the honours are about even.’ She turned at the sound of footsteps crossing the hall, ‘It’s time to go. Have you got everything?’
‘Yes…’ And without warning she found herself looking at Hanif for the first time since they’d parted in anger. ‘I’m just leaving,’ she said stupidly.
‘I know. Ameerah and I have come to take you to the airport.’
‘Oh.’
Of course. How foolish to think that he had come to ask her to stay. He was leaving too. Reclaiming his life, as she must reclaim hers.
The little girl grabbed her attention in the car, chatting all the way to the airport, telling her about going to New York.
It was only after they had been ushered through to the luxury of a private lounge, when Ameerah had been distracted by the planes, that they had a chance to speak.
‘You are still angry with me, Lucy?’
‘Angry?’
‘You believe I treated Mason harshly?’ She gave an awkward little shrug. ‘He has to learn that his actions have consequences, Lucy.’
‘Then maybe I should be in prison too.’ She turned and regarded him levelly. ‘I wanted the fantasy. To be the kind of girl that a boy like Steve Mason would notice. If I hadn’t been so needy, so pathetic, he wouldn’t have been able to fool me. He wouldn’t be in jail.’
‘You are not needy, Lucy. No one has a more giving or warmer nature than you.’ He took her hands. ‘Too good for the world, maybe. I do not think I should let you go back to the world. I should keep you in my garden with the other flowers, where you will be safe.’
She shook her head, tried to pull away, but he would not let her go.
Han wanted to hold her, keep her safe, offer her all the fantasies she’d ever dreamed of. But she had taught him that when you loved someone, you had to let them fly. Take the risk that they might not ever return.
‘I’m not a flower,’ she said.
‘Are you sure? You have all the attributes of the rose, including the thorns.’
‘What will happen to that poor woman and her baby?’
‘Jenny Sanderson? Why do you care more about her than yourself?’ he demanded. He did not want to talk about them, or the past. He wanted to talk about the future.
‘It could have been me,’ she said desperately, wanting him to understand. ‘I feel responsible.’
‘No, Lucy. They are responsible for what they did. They must face the consequences of their actions, as we all must.’
‘You once said that you could refuse me nothing.’
And, God help him, he had meant it.
‘Not this. On this I am adamant.’ Then, because he could not help himself. ‘Do you have to go?’
‘I have to sell the house, Han. Settle my debts. Find a life that’s my own. Not a prison, not some fantasy, but something real.’
This is real, he wanted to say. What I feel, what I know you feel…
She lifted her head a little. ‘I’m going to try and get a university place as a mature student.’
‘You want to take your degree in French literature?’
‘No, I’m not that girl any more. I’ve been thinking about what I’ll do…’
She seemed about to say something, but changed her mind about sharing it with him. He didn’t press her, but said, ‘What about your mother? Will you look for her?’
She nodded, apparently unable to speak.
‘If there is anything I can do to help, Lucy…’ Before he could say what was in his heart, a steward arrived to inform them that Lucy’s flight was boarding.
‘One moment.’
But Lucy had already detached herself, was on her feet, burying her face in Ameerah’s hair. ‘Goodbye, my darling. Have a lovely life.’
Then, having composed herself, she turned to him.
‘Thank you, Han.’ She offered him her hand. ‘For my life. For everything. I will never forget you.’
He recognised the gesture for what it was. It was how the British said goodbye. Not just goodbye for now, but goodbye for ever.
He ignored it, taking not one, but both of her hands, holding them against his chest, willing her to understand that while he’d learned the lesson about letting go, for him this was not goodbye, only a necessary pause while they put what had happened into the perspective of their everyday lives. Time for him to rebuild his life, for her to reach out for the life she’d never had.
There were a thousand things he wanted to say to her, but he recognised that she wasn’t ready to trust herself with the kind of decisions, commitments, such declarations would demand. Instead he kissed both of her cheeks before raising her hands to his lips.
‘Ma’as salamah, Lucy. Go, in the safety of Allah.’
‘Ma’as salamah, Han…’
Lucy wanted to say more. To let him see that she understood that this was an end. That they came from different worlds and that whatever he’d said, done, she understood that once he had returned to his real life she would become nothing more than a memory. A sweet memory, she hoped, a memory to raise a smile long after he’d forgotten what she looked like, struggled to remember her name.
But her throat was constricted and the words wouldn’t come. It didn’t matter. A week, a month, from now and he would discover it for himself.
All she could do was grab her crutches and follow the steward assigned to take her to her seat, but as she reached the door Ameerah raced after her to give her a last hug, clutching at her legs, holding her there.
Han said something to the child and she let go, ran back to him, lifted her arms. There was no hesitation now as he bent, picked her up. No uncertainty as Ameerah wrapped her arms about his neck and buried her head in his shoulder.
She had done that.
If she did nothing else in her life, Lucy would always cherish the thought that she had once managed to unite a little girl with her father.
Their eyes met one last time over Ameerah’s head. His lips moved but a tannoy announcement drowned out his words. It didn’t matter, there was nothing left to say, and with a brief nod she turned, boarded the truck that was waiting to carry her to the aircraft.
She’d had a lifetime of keeping her feelings hidden, kept tightly locked away. Her throat was tight, aching, she could barely speak to thank the steward after he’d carried her flight bag upstairs, installed her in the luxury of the royal suite on the upper deck of the Ramal Hamrah airliner.
It was the last word in luxury. It had armchairs, a fully functioning office with every communications device known to man, even a bedroom, should she choose to sleep.
But it was the book waiting by her seat that really undid her.
Han’s own volume of the poems of Hafiz, inscribed on the flyleaf—‘So that you will not forget’. He had signed it, not in English, but in looping Arabic script.
Any girl would cry.
As Han watched the airliner lift off from the runway, he felt for one desperate moment as if he was losing his heart for the second time.
‘Where has Lucy gone, Daddy?’
He looked down at the child in his arms.
No.
It wasn’t like that. A heart that was fully functioning, beating soundly, had an infinite capacity to expand, to fill many places,
many time zones.
It might be lifting at that moment with Lucy, being torn from him as the plane lifted her six miles above the earth, but it was here too, on the ground with his daughter.
It resided, he realised in a sudden flash of insight, with everyone one had ever loved.
In the past with those who had gone to paradise. In the present with family, friends, all those who cared for you, who you cared for in return. With all the possibilities of the future.
Lucy, whose boundless love had been constrained and cramped in a joyless life, had nevertheless endless compassion for a woman who had not loved her as she deserved. Empathy for two people who would have stolen her life if she had not had the courage to come and take it back.
She’d had love to spare for a small motherless child and even a little left over for a lonely, half-dead man.
Now she was going to find the mother who’d abandoned her and he had no doubt that she would find it in her heart to forgive her, love her too if she had the courage to cherish the gift of a daughter.
‘Where has she gone, Daddy?’ Ameerah persisted.
‘She’s gone to a place called England. It’s very green. Very beautiful.’
‘Why has she gone there?’
‘She has some things she has to do.’ As he did. A life to resurrect, a family to spend time with, a country that needed him. He owed his father three years of duty. He’d asked only for three months.
‘Will she come and see us soon?’
‘In sha’Allah, my sweet.’ If God wills.
Life, Lucy quickly discovered, was not as difficult as she’d imagined.
For the best part of twenty-eight years she’d clung to a small core of resistance, keeping a part of herself inviolate from the buffeting of a life that hadn’t handed her any easy options. At school she’d learned to keep her head down, avoid trouble and reach the goals she’d set herself. Since then, she’d had ten years of dealing with Social Services, the medical profession, her increasingly frail grandmother.
Steve had caught her at the one moment when she’d had her guard down; when she’d stopped fighting; when it had seemed that, finally, it was to be her turn and he’d taken pitiless advantage of her at a vulnerable moment. Han had been right; once he’d realised just how easy it was he’d do it again in a heartbeat.
She wished she could tell him.
Explain that once she was back in England and faced with sorting out the mess, confronting the true horror of what Steve had done, she’d understood why he’d acted the way he had.
As for Jenny Sanderson, Zahir had forwarded a letter from her, telling her how sorry she was for what she’d done. That she felt as if she’d been woken up from some drugged dream in which she’d been sleepwalking into danger. How grateful she was to be back home with parents who loved her, were eagerly looking forward to the arrival of a grandchild. The chance to make a fresh start.
It was a fresh start all round, it seemed. Having put the house back on the market, she’d wasted no time in taking herself to an employment agency to see what kind of job she might get. A bit of an eye-opener, that one.
‘What qualifications do you have, Lucy?’
‘None. I’m not expecting anything more than the basic wage,’ she admitted. ‘I’ve no experience, you see. I’ve never had anything but holiday jobs. I’ve been caring for my grandmother for the last ten years…’
Even as she said the words she realised that she was simply repeating what Steve had told her, using her insecurities to bind her to him.
‘Scrub that. I’ve got twelve O levels, four A levels, I’ve spent the last ten years running a house on a pittance and dealing with Social Services in all its forms. I speak passable French, can get by in Italian and I’m learning Arabic. Oh, and I can drive.’
‘French?’ The woman smiled. ‘How are your computer skills?’
Computer skills… Her confidence ebbed. ‘I haven’t used a computer since I was at school.’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll give you a crash course on the latest software this afternoon. That’s if you’re free to start a temp job tomorrow?’ She smiled. ‘At considerably more than the basic rate.’
After a couple of days, when she discovered that common sense and the ability to knuckle down and get the work done were just as valuable as her ability to answer the telephone confidently in French—and not panic when the caller replied in the same language—made her a very valuable commodity indeed. The only thing that she lacked was someone to tell.
There was, she discovered, a great big Han-shaped void at the centre of her life. Just how big a hole that was she’d only discovered when she got home from work one day and turned on the little television set she’d bought herself, to catch the end of the evening news.
She’d switched on in the middle of a report from the UN on international aid and, without warning, she was looking at the impressive figure of Sheikh Hanif al-Khatib as he addressed the Assembly. He looked, she thought, like a man who had the world by the throat. Strong. Passionate. Alive in every sense of the word.
Alive and so far away.
She’d pressed her hand against the screen, faint with longing to be near him. In the same room as him. In the same country…
She relived every moment of the time they’d spent together, her anger, that last moment when his words had been drowned out by the speaker system. And suddenly she knew what he’d said. ‘Call me…’
And say what? I miss you. I love you…
Or was that simply I need you?
Was she still looking for a prop?
She did miss him, she did love him, but she had to prove to them both that the only person she needed was herself.
She applied for a place at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. The temporary job at the international finance company had become permanent but she had bigger ambitions. With her languages and a degree in Arabic Cultural Studies she could aspire to a post at the Foreign Office, join the Diplomatic Service. Get a job at the United Nations…
That would be a Life.
Then, to stop herself thinking about Han, she turned to the one thing she’d been putting off and searched out the name of the agency where she could register to find her mother.
‘I’ll take the details, Lucy,’ the counsellor told her. ‘But I don’t hold out much hope that we can help. You weren’t adopted so there won’t be any records.’
‘No. I understand.’ And she understood the unspoken subtext—that if her mother had wanted to find her, all she had to do was go back to where she’d left her.
‘Maybe you could try an Internet search? There is a website where families can get in touch. It’s basically for genealogy, but it would be a start and if that doesn’t come up with anything, well, you could just type her name into a search engine and see what you come up with.’
She did both. The Internet came back with 654,000 hits for Elizabeth Forrester.
After a quick look at some of them, she realised that she’d got every Elizabeth and every Forrester in the entire world. And that the Elizabeths were not necessarily connected to the Forresters.
She refined her search details and tried again. And again. When she’d reduced the number of hits to three, she sent each of them the same email.
Are you Elizabeth Forrester, the daughter of Jessica Forrester, who once lived in Maybridge? Lucy.
She didn’t give a street address. Her mother would know it. A fake would not.
Her job, the discovery that she had skills people were willing to pay for, that she could make friends—Deena, the Jordanian student she’d found through the university who was teaching her Arabic script, people she worked with—was giving her confidence.
Life was teaching her caution.
Parties, concerts, diplomatic functions… Han stripped off and stood beneath the shower to wash away the latest round of polite and meaningless conversation.
Three months…
After yet another receptio
n fending off the attentions of women who hoped to bag themselves a sheikh to add to the notches on their bedposts, of forcing himself to be polite to the front men of dictators who let their people starve while they lined their pockets at the expense of the poor, a day without Lucy was beginning to feel like a lifetime.
If she had been with him to share the horrors, make him laugh at the foolishness of it all, make it all go away with the sweetness of her mouth, the tenderness of her touch…
He wrapped a towel around his waist, crossed the bedroom to the telephone, picked up the receiver, wanting more than anything in the world to hear her voice.
He held it for a moment, then quietly replaced it. He had told her to call him. When she was ready, when nothing else was possible, he had to believe she would, trust her to do that.
Lucy heard from her solicitor that her marriage had been officially annulled. Was as if it had never happened. Which, in every way that counted, it never had.
To celebrate she took her nails, growing strongly now, to have them manicured in a new nail bar in town and after that, she paid a long delayed visit to the hairdresser.
‘How much do you want me to take off?’ the girl asked.
Lucy thought about it. Thought about all the times she’d dreamed of this moment, then, realising that she had nothing to prove, no one to please but herself, said, ‘Just as much as it takes to straighten up the ends, please.’
The family genealogy Internet site, on which she’d carefully entered her limited family tree, had not produced any results. She’d two negative replies to her emails, both of them wishing her luck with her search, which left just one Elizabeth Forrester to answer. Was it her mother? Was she some respectable woman who had wiped out the past and was even now living in fear and trembling that her daughter was about to turn up and destroy her neatly ordered life?
She wrote again.
If you are Elizabeth Forrester, formerly of Maybridge, if you are my mother, all I want is…
She stopped. She didn’t know what she wanted. Everything. Nothing. To hear her voice. Look her in the eyes and see… What?
She deleted the message.
A month passed and still there was no answer from Elizabeth Forrester number three.