The Meeting Point

by Lucy Caldwell

  She turned and left the room; left him to his prayers.

  She had not told Farid about Euan’s trip, not even with the line Euan had given her: that he was going to a conference in Qatar for a few days. Over the course of the weekend she had managed to text him sporadically from the bathroom. But it was risky – turning on the phone, waiting for the signal, composing the message, sending it – and turning the phone off immediately afterwards, in case Euan should hear it beeping or see the flash of a new message and ask who it was from.

  Now, in the kitchen, she thought: I don’t care if Euan walks in and sees. In fact, some small, selfish part of her almost hoped he would, so that he could understand he was not the only one who suffered. She turned on her phone and wrote a message. E’s leaving tomorrow for 3 whole days. I’ll meet you at the usual time. When she tapped in her usual X, X, each one felt like a nail. She pressed the button to send the message. There: sent. It was done.

  4

  The Diary of Noor Hussain

  Monday, 14th April 2003

  Ruth said no. She said no. SHE SAID NO.

  5

  When the banging on the door came that morning, she immediately assumed the worst. Euan had left while it was still dark. The disruption had woken Anna, so she had taken her into their own bed, and the two of them had only just fallen back asleep. Ruth lurched out of bed, her heart thudding, and went to answer it.

  It was a shock to see Noor there. She was wild-eyed and jumpy, as if she had not slept, and Ruth noticed for the first time how unwell she looked, how thin she was getting. Anjali’s words rang ominously in her head.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ she said, relief jostling with annoyance.

  Noor took her glasses off and rubbed them on her stomach. ‘I know this isn’t a good time,’ she said. ‘But can we talk?’

  ‘Can we talk?’ Ruth said, incredulous. ‘It’s barely eight in the morning, Noor.’

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ Noor said. ‘The last few days, not seeing you, or Anna – and I wanted to go to church with you yesterday, I waited on the porch for you to pick me up, but you didn’t.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ruth said. ‘It’s been a busy few days, as you know’ – she had a moment of misgiving, but she had already started talking – ‘with Euan going to Qatar, we – well, we had lots of things to do beforehand.’

  ‘Oh,’ Noor said. ‘I thought – oh Ruth – I thought I’d done something, and you didn’t want to see me again.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Ruth said. ‘Why would I think something like that? In fact – I might need you to look after Anna again today, if that’s all right?’

  ‘Oh, of course, Ruth! Of course, any time, you don’t even need to ask!’

  ‘OK, then.’ Ruth went to step back and shut the door, but Noor did not move.

  ‘Ruth, when are you going – I mean for good? It’s soon, isn’t it? – Sampaguita said the villa was only rented until May.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well – there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you, Ruth. You and Euan. And – well – I think we’d better talk about it now, because there isn’t much time left, because today’s already the fourteenth of April. There’s less than two weeks, that means. Can I come in?’

  Bemused, Ruth held the door open and let Noor in. Noor stood there in the hallway for a moment, then took a breath and launched into a gabbled, rambling speech about a girl at school, and how it was all Noor’s fault, and how her mother hated her. Ruth could barely make head or tail of it.

  ‘Hang on—’ she tried a few times, but Noor was in full flow, unstoppable. And suddenly she was talking about Ireland, and Anna, and sleeping on the sofa, and Premium Bonds, and –

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ruth finally managed to interrupt, ‘but I’m not sure I understand—’

  ‘I’m not explaining properly, I know I’m not, but all I’m trying to say is that it won’t cost you a thing, not a penny. But it takes eight working days for the investment to be cashed in, and that’s once they receive the form, so you have to allow an extra five days in the post even if I send it this morning, and eight days and five days is almost two weeks and two weeks is May and that’s when you’re going so we have to plan it now.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Ruth said, not sure if she was hearing it right, ‘you want to come back to Ireland?’

  ‘Yes!’ Noor cried. ‘I’ve got it all planned, Ruth—’

  ‘You mean for a holiday, or …?’

  Noor blinked at her. ‘For ever,’ she said. Her voice faltered.

  ‘You want to come back to Ireland,’ Ruth said, not even trying to stifle her incredulity, ‘and live with us there?’

  This time, Noor just looked at her.

  ‘I’m sorry, Noor,’ Ruth said, ‘but – I mean, I just don’t think that’s feasible, do you?’

  Noor whispered something that Ruth did not catch.

  ‘Beg your pardon?’

  But Noor would not repeat it.

  ‘Listen, Noor,’ Ruth said, making her voice jovial. ‘I think, somehow, you must have gotten the wrong end of the stick. Because—’

  ‘But the way I’ve looked after Anna,’ Noor interrupted, ‘and the way you’ve prayed with me, and taken me to church – and taken me out with you, to Al Bander that day, and all of our suppers and talks – I thought you liked me, I thought’ – her voice was breaking down, now – ‘I thought you might – you might—’

  ‘We might what?’

  ‘Adopt me,’ Noor finished.

  The absurdity of it almost made her laugh aloud. ‘Adopt you?’ she said. ‘Us, adopt you, and bring you back to Ireland?’

  They stared at each other.

  ‘Noor,’ she tried again. ‘But Noor—’

  Before she could continue, Noor had turned and was gone, her sandals slapping as she ran, banging the door behind her.

  *

  After that, Ruth could not leave Anna with Noor – and with both of the maids there that morning, Farid could not come to the villa. She walked with Anna to the cold-store car park, and when she saw him, she realised with a rush how much she had been wanting to see him, how much she had missed him. Despite what had happened outside the beauty parlour and with Trudy, and at the hospital. Euan was going away and perhaps – she had told herself – perhaps they could have three whole days, three blissful days of being together, as it had been at Al Bander, at the beginning. But when she tried to kiss him, he pulled away from her.

  ‘I want to talk,’ he said.

  ‘I know you do,’ she said, ‘but please, not now. We have three days, Farid – three whole days. Let’s just try and enjoy them, forget about – everything.’ But even as she was speaking, she knew how hollow her words sounded.

  They drove to the Adhari Amusement Park. The gardens there were deserted during the day: it was one of the few places they had found where, on certain days of the week, they could almost be alone. They bought Anna an ice cream, then walked down past the Log Flume and the Pedal Boats, huge swan shapes, bleached yellow in the sun, bobbing on the artificial lake. They walked past the Dodgems and the Flying Carousel, its spiderlike arms contracted and stilled. Ruth had never noticed, before, how faded and sorry for themselves the rides looked in the glare of the mid-morning sun. At the far end of the complex were the Pleasure Gardens, where you could talk in privacy, in the shade of a few gnarled banyan trees. They found a bench and sat. And Farid started talking.

  He was glad that this had happened, he said, that things were being brought to a head, discussed. He was not happy with the way things were – snatched afternoons in car parks, or on the outskirts of deserted villages, hasty lovemaking on the divan when the villa was empty. At first it felt secret and sexy, he said, but now it was just base. He wanted them to be really together, truly. He knew Ruth was not happy with her husband. He knew she no longer believed what her husband believed. He wanted her to leave her husband, ask for a divorce, and be with him, Farid.

 
; ‘Divorce?’ she said.

  He grabbed her hands, his eyes imploring and earnest. He knew he was younger than her, he knew he had no home for her at present – but he would work, he would get a job, any job, provide for her. He would build a house for her – his family would help him build a house. He had never had reason to work before, to work or study, he had just drifted. But now he had met her, she was his reason. He wanted to work so hard that he would be too exhausted to stand up any more, and all of it would be for her.

  ‘Please, Ruth!’ He was on the verge of tears. ‘I love you. I know it will be hard, but if we love each other we can do it.’

  ‘Farid,’ she said, helplessly. She had been expecting goodbyes, expecting them to lay things to rest, to kiss or make love one final time. She should have known, she thought, when he said he loved her in the car. She should have known then, but she had dismissed it as spontaneous, hot-headed.

  Suddenly, she started to laugh. Farid drew back from her, appalled. ‘Your cousin came to see me this morning,’ she managed, through gulps of laughter. ‘She wanted us to adopt her, and take her back to Ireland.’

  ‘Us to adopt her?’ Farid said. ‘But I don’t understand.’

  ‘Euan-and-me us, not us us. She wanted’ – Ruth was doubled over now, laughing so hard she thought her stomach might rip – ‘she wanted—’

  Farid beside her, and Anna playing in the dirt at their feet, both watched her until her fit had passed.

  Then she said, ‘So I would spend the rest of my life in Bahrain? And what about Anna – she would be brought up here?’

  ‘Why not?’ he said.

  ‘Why not? Her father, for a start. He would never allow—’

  Farid cut her off. ‘Her father,’ he scoffed. ‘Her father never sees her. Even I see that much. He is gone first thing in the morning, back when she is going to bed – if that. What does he do, say a prayer and pat her forehead?’

  ‘Stop it,’ Ruth said, ‘it’s not like that.’ But it was not untrue, what Farid said. And she thought back to the night they arrived, the realisation that Euan was ready to sacrifice not only her, but Anna too. He had been prepared to lose her, then.

  Farid was watching her closely, the expressions chasing each other across her face.

  ‘You see?’ he said, softly. ‘I do not mean to be unkind, Ruth, but you know I am right.’

  ‘But—’ Her words failed, at the enormity of it, the impossibility. She threw her hands up. ‘Farid—’

  ‘Bahrain, or anywhere,’ he interrupted. ‘We could go back to Ireland.’

  ‘We couldn’t go to Ireland. Everyone would know, it would be a scandal. It would be unbearable.’

  ‘Dubai, then, we could go to Dubai. Or Europe, or anywhere. Anywhere in the world, Ruth.’ He was getting frantic now. Anna would be with them, no problem, and go to her father for holidays, if he insisted on seeing her. And they would have children of their own, in time.

  For the first time in the weeks they had been together, she felt the weight of the age difference, every day of it.

  ‘You’re not even twenty,’ she said.

  ‘I knew you’d say that,’ he said, almost triumphantly. ‘But it hasn’t been a problem so far, and it won’t be, once I am working and providing for you.’

  There was nothing she could say that he had not already thought of, had not already got an answer for. And when he said, ‘So what is the alternative, Ruth? You go back to Ireland, with a man you don’t love, to a life you don’t believe in?’ she had no reply.

  *

  It was getting too hot to stay outside. They drove to a hookah bar, one they had been to before, a cavernous mass of lounges and corridors, all draped in bright fabrics. It was usually crammed with young people, but at midday on a Monday, few others were there. They had a lounge to themselves.

  They ordered soft drinks.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ Farid said. ‘These last few days, when I couldn’t see you – I didn’t know what to do with myself, Ruth. I realised how much you mean to me. I realised I am in love with you.’

  ‘It’s only been a few weeks,’ she tried. But he replied: ‘Don’t pretend these few weeks haven’t changed your life, too.’ Then he said, ‘I understand you can’t say you love me back. That would be a commitment. But I know you feel it, Ruth. I know you feel the same.’

  They stayed in the hookah bar until lunchtime, when it began to fill with young people from the nearby college, and two girls asked to share their sofas. They got back in the car, then, and drove to the Marina Mall for lunch. Neither of them ate much. They wandered about the mall for an hour or so, until the maids would be gone. Every other person, Ruth thought, seemed to be someone from church, or someone she knew. At one point, she was convinced she saw Rosa’s head, in the queue for the ladies’ room. She turned and hurried back out, so abruptly she almost knocked over the woman behind her.

  Back home, she insisted that once he had dropped them off, Farid park the car by the cold store and come back in through the alleyway. Even with Anjali in hospital, and Trudy gone, she did not want the Camaro in front of her villa.

  It was barely six o’clock, too early for Anna’s bedtime. But she had not had a nap, and so Ruth tried to get her down, hoping she would be tired enough to sleep anyway. Anna did not want to go to sleep. She screamed and flailed, throwing such a tantrum that Ruth eventually gave up and set her down in front of the television set to get some peace. She was not being a very good mother today, she thought. They had smoked in front of Anna in the hookah bar – she had not dared to ask Farid not to, and she had felt that she needed it herself – and now this. Then the irony of the thought hit her: she was sleeping with a man not her daughter’s father, practically in front of her daughter, and allowing him to discuss divorce, and she was worried about smoke and Nickelodeon? She almost laughed; but then she thought, instead, Who have I become?

  In the kitchen, they opened a bottle of wine, and Farid repeated, almost to the word, everything he had said earlier, going over and over each argument. Sometimes, for a moment – a shard of a moment – she wanted to believe him, wanted to believe that it was possible. But she knew it was not.

  When the wine was finished, she went to check on Anna. She was sprawled asleep on her pile of cushions, lurid shapes and colours flickering across her bare skin. Ruth scooped her up and laid her in her cot. Farid as Anna’s father? That was the sticking point, she thought. If it were not for Anna—

  She was immediately ashamed at having such a thought, even just for a moment.

  She went back to the kitchen, where Farid had opened a bottle of whiskey – the gift-wrapped Bushmills that Euan had brought over from Ireland. Half of the bottle was gone, and it was long past midnight, when Farid finally accepted that this was it: that this was the end.

  Now that there was no more to say, they made love – wordlessly, almost violently – on the divan, and afterwards they were both sobbing. He, because he did not want to lose her. She, for everything she had lost.

  *

  She makes up the camp bed in the spare room for them to sleep in. He has refused to sleep in her bed – her and Euan’s bed – and he is in no fit state to drive. The spare room is clean – the maids mop and wipe it down weekly – but it smells sterile, unlived-in. Once the metal frame of the bed is wrested into place, the thin mattress flattened out and bedding found, he strips off his clothes and gets in, and she gets in with him. The bed is too small for both of them to lie comfortably. If one turns, the other must, too. Farid lies facing the wall, and she holds him. She feels him crying, silently, his shoulders quivering. She fits her body to his – how odd, that it can so easily take on the contours of another – and thinks: she has loved him, after all, in a way.

  The final hours of the night pass, minute by minute. She drifts off, somewhere not asleep, but not quite awake, and wakes now and then with a jolt. Farid is asleep, breathing heavily, through an open mouth, like a child. He does not wake until the sun slant
s in through the window, sharp and white. It is even more intimate, Ruth realises, to wake with someone than it is to sleep with them. She watches him wake and feels the tug again, the helplessness, the love.

  ‘I do love you,’ she says. ‘It’s not a commitment, and it doesn’t change anything, but I do love you, Farid.’

  When he has gone, she crawls back into her own bed, stiff and exhausted. The sheets are flat and icy, unwelcoming. She cannot get comfortable, cannot get warm. She wonders if she should have said yes, after all. She knows it’s impossible – but she can’t help wondering what life with him would have been like, could have been.

  6

  When Noor saw her cousin emerge from the Armstrongs’ villa at just after six in the morning, she finally knew.

  She sat there for a long time after he had gone, her legs chilled numb, incapable of motion. The sun rolled up, but she could not feel its heat. She had been sitting out all night, outside the empty villa, watching, waiting. She did not even have a blanket, just her cold-store cigarettes to keep her warm, and they had been smoked hours ago, one after the other, in a grim, mechanical sort of pleasurelessness. Her mouth was dry; her tongue fibrous; there was a strange, slow shrieking in her head. The teachers from number seven left for work, and then Dr Maarlen. Her father would be up soon: she had to go in before he saw her outside. She swayed to her feet, steadying herself against the rough wall. She turned to look one last time at the Armstrongs’. Its blank face stared back at her. Chevrons of pain were darting up and down her legs. Each movement was like walking on knives. Keeping one hand on the wall, she rounded the corner and made her way back to her own villa.

  Her diary lay on the floor of her bedroom, its cover snapped in half. It had borne the brunt of yesterday’s shame and rage. She picked it up, laid it on the bed. Pages fluttered from it, ripped, mutilated. She had torn handfuls from it, gouged her pen through particularly humiliating passages. On Sunday 13th, the penultimate entry, she had copied out from the church service sheet the words from one of the hymns they had sung, underlining the phrase ‘the lovelight of Jesus’ face’. Underneath, she had written: Ruth’s face. The lovelight of Ruth’s face. It had seemed, as she wrote it, a perfect word, a perfect description. The lovelight of Ruth’s face! How could she ever, ever have written such a thing?