The Darkening Hour

by Penny Hancock

  In the kitchen I notice that she’s left the floor grimy. It looks as it used to before I employed her. She’s been slacking, just when I need the house to look its best for Max.

  I get out a bowl, bleach, and a small, worn washing-up brush that I no longer use for the dishes. I hold out the brush and point at the tiles.

  ‘But your supper . . . Your father . . .’ she begins.

  ‘You are my maid,’ I remind her. ‘You don’t decide what you do and when. I do. You will clean this floor once you have put Daddy to bed.’

  She stares at me.

  ‘This is my house, Mona. I make the rules. It’s not your house. Not your street. Not your home. Mine.’

  I hear her scrubbing the kitchen tiles until well into the evening. I consider saying she can stop now, but the thought of her in the shop laughing and making plans with Sayed stops me.

  When Mona’s finished, when the kitchen floor is to my liking, I tell her, ‘Tomorrow I want the drawing room tidied, and the ironing done. Oh, and by the way, you must press the creases in the sheets when they’re folded. I want the house looking its best. Max is coming to stay.’

  When she’s gone to bed, I take the bottle from the fridge, mix myself a martini and make myself a pile of my special cheese sandwiches.

  Satisfied that I’ve dealt with Mona effectively, asserted my authority and put her back in her place, I take my drink through to the drawing room. The moment I sit down, however, I recall a conversation I had with Leo shortly before he went to his father’s for Christmas. A conversation I’d dismissed.

  He’d been sitting on the sofa eating a pizza out of the box and swigging at a can of Red Bull when I came in to help him wrap some gifts.

  He didn’t look up when I entered, but simply grunted, ‘You know she’s leaving.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  ‘What do you mean leaving?’ I demanded. ‘Where would she go?’

  ‘She wants to look for her husband.’

  ‘Leo, Mona is a widow.’

  My son shook his head. ‘One of her stories,’ he said. ‘He’s alive somewhere, she just doesn’t know where.’

  Are they all the same, these so-called maids? I thought. Wriggling their way into our houses to work under false pretences?

  Mona’s face came back to me, the day she arrived. How she hadn’t looked as I had pictured her. What else had she told me that wasn’t true?

  ‘How do you know she’s leaving?’ I still didn’t believe it.

  ‘She told me she’s going to find her husband.’

  ‘Whatever Mona thinks, leaving’s impossible without my permission. She’s illegal here without me. Her visa precludes changing employer. Anyway, she can’t leave. I can’t manage without her.’ I was taken aback by the desperation in my voice.

  ‘Find someone else?’ Leo shrugged.

  It was all right for him. He had no responsibilities whatsoever.

  ‘It isn’t that easy!’ I snapped.

  Leo was a mystery to me. Most of the time he didn’t speak to me, unless it was to ask for more beer or food or money. I assumed he didn’t notice what went on around him, that he was oblivious to everything except his computer games and his violent films. But every now and again, he would make a comment that surprised me, something acerbic or astute, as if he’d woken temporarily from a sort of coma with heightened perceptions.

  ‘What? Not easy to find someone Grandpa will put up with?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I suppose that is what I mean.’

  ‘It’s not surprising there aren’t people queuing up to clean big houses and change grumpy incontinent old people, is it?’ Leo said. ‘You’re right. You were lucky to find Mona. It won’t be easy to find anyone else. Anyone better.’

  But Mona’s lucky too, to have the job in the first place, I thought. I’d given her cupcakes, for goodness’ sake. I’d given her a comfy room with a garden view. And I was paying her!

  It occurred to me then that I did, in effect, own her. After all, Roger brought her here for me. She couldn’t have got into the country without him and couldn’t stay here without me. She wouldn’t last a minute away from my house. If she tried to get away, all I had to do was tell the police – and she’d be straight back. She belonged to me!

  ‘She has to stay.’ I tried to sound calm. ‘As you point out, Daddy’s become very attached to her. No one else will do, it’ll confuse him.’

  Max was coming soon: I needed Mona to take Daddy to Anita’s. As Leo took another swig of Red Bull, I said, ‘And it’s not as if you lift a finger to help. I can’t cope all on my own, not with Daddy the way he is. And not unless you, Leo, either get a job or you start to help a bit more.’

  ‘I’ve got a job,’ he said then, knocking me sideways. ‘Starting when I get back from Dad’s. In a bar. And I’m thinking of moving out.’

  ‘Well, that’s good,’ I say slowly, shocked. ‘Which bar? How did you . . .?’ but he’d gone.

  Now I go through to the kitchen, mix another martini, sit down and put my head in my hands. Why does Mona want to leave? Leo said she was looking for her husband. Then why did she tell me she was a widow?

  Doesn’t she realise that without me, she’ll be sent straight back where she came from? And I suspect – though I scarcely know what’s true and what isn’t about her any more – that she would have no work if she did so. Whatever the story is, she should be grateful for all I’ve done for her, not shoving it back in my face!

  She’s even planning to meet that shop man – and beside a statue! I don’t know why this detail bothers me so much, but it’s a fact that seems to mock me. She has stolen something intimate from me, even if it is just a silly romantic notion – meeting beside a statue. Where did she get the idea? I remember Max’s text again, the one she had looked at. Has she deliberately taken the idea and twisted it for her own amusement? It occurs to me she must have information on her mobile. I’ve taken her charger, so she can no longer use it. But I know where she keeps it. Within seconds I’m scanning down through all her contacts, looking for clues, ideas, Ali’s number maybe. It’s hopeless, all in Arabic script. But then I spot something and rage flares up in me. Max’s number! I look twice. Sure enough, she has Max’s mobile number on her phone. I think of the day of the dinner party when I found her in the kitchen, looking at his message. So this is what she was up to!

  This is worse – more personal and more insidious – than anything else she’s slipped from under my nose.

  She wants to snatch my very identity.

  Thoughts tumble about my head. Max is coming.

  Without her, Daddy’ll be shouting for me. I won’t have time to make the house look presentable, to cook.

  As I refill my glass for the third time, the truth hits me.

  Without Mona, Max will see me for the person I really am. A nobody.

  You’re the desperate one, whispers a voice in my head.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  I’m not sure, as I pick myself up off the floor, whether Dora deliberately kicked me while I was down. Everything happened so fast and she was stepping over me, perhaps trying not to fall on top of me as she came through. But then Amina’s message on my Facebook page flashes back into my head, warning me that she treated Zidana badly. This incident, her foot knocking me while I had fallen down, on top of what I’ve heard, alarms me.

  By the time I’ve regained my breath, gathered the shopping that’s tumbled across the floor back into the bag, and stood up, I’ve resolved not to let Dora get to me. Whatever happened to Zidana is not going to happen again.

  I will take Sayed up on his offer, at least go and meet his mysterious Hamid at the statue. Find out if he has indeed seen Ali. Dora will be at work and won’t be able to stop me. If Leo were here, he’d cover for me. He’d do anything for me these days, for the promise of a little bit of good cooking, a bit of maternal affection. It’s a shame he’s gone away for Christmas.

  In another mood, at another time or place, I mig
ht have shouted at Dora, objected. But I clamp my lips shut, screw up my eyes, and get to my feet. If what Sayed has told me is true, I could be about to find Ali. I can’t afford to lose everything now.

  I scrub the kitchen tiles as Dora tells me to, with the brush that is meant for dishes. If she wants it clean she can have it clean. I get down on my hands and knees, working away at the grime, scrubbing until my elbows ache. Tomorrow, I will be closer to Ali. Dora can’t imprison me! When I’ve found Ali, we will be able to stay together. I don’t know how I’m going to get him out if he’s being held as an illegal immigrant somewhere. I don’t think about the details. Instead, I let myself dream. Focus on what I want.

  We’ll bring Ummu and Leila over, get Ummu the treatment she needs, and we’ll be a family again. Everything will be OK.

  At one point Dora comes in. I can see that she feels uneasy, that she’s gone a little too far. I stand up and rub my back.

  ‘I don’t know what you were telling the man in the shop,’ she says, going to the kettle, plugging it in, ‘but you’re not here to chat to strangers.’

  ‘I’m not supposed to work in the evenings,’ I say. ‘I need time off like everyone.’

  She shrugs, refuses to look at me.

  At last, once she’s gone up to bed, I go to my room. I pick up Leila’s photo, the scrapbook of home and put them back in my bag. I’m on the move again; my bag is coming with me. Containing me. I fold up the few clothes hanging on the back of the door – my T-shirts, my other tracksuit bottoms, the one nice dress. I put the overall Dora bought for me on the bed, folded up.

  Then I check that I still have some money, the notes I haven’t yet sent to Ummu, and tuck them inside my purse. Finally I push my hand down to the bottom of my bag, where I keep my phone charger and where I’ve hidden my passport, and feel about.

  There’s nothing there. I search frantically through the bag, around the room, lifting books and papers and the few things I’ve left on my bed.

  Then the truth hits me fully. My passport and my visa and my phone charger. My access to the world. They’ve gone.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  I stand up, leave my room – that anyway no longer feels like a haven now Dora has taken off the lock – and make my way down the hall, past the drawing room. I take the stairs. All the way up. Three flights. Past Leo’s room and beyond the bathroom to Dora’s bedroom.

  She’s in there. I can hear her moving about. I step forward, put my eye to the crack in the door.

  Dora is framed, her hands caressing her sides, in front of the mirror. Dressed only in green and cream lace underwear, a bra and knickers, she twirls this way, and then that way. As I watch, she puts her hands up above her head, lifts her hair high up off her face, tilts her head to one side, examines herself.

  This woman, the one I see framed in the tiny gap in the door, is quite different from the Dora I know. Here in front of me is an anxious woman, frowning at her image in the mirror. As if a mask has been taken off and a softer, more vulnerable – even frightened – person revealed beneath.

  That’s when Dora turns, startled by some tiny sound or movement I’ve made without realising. The mask snaps back on.

  I back away. Tiptoe down a flight of stairs to the bathroom. I wait a few minutes, to check she doesn’t come out and chastise me for spying on her. When I’m certain she hasn’t heard me, I creep back, knock.

  She opens her door a chink. She’s in her nightgown now, more satin and lace. It’s clear to me she has no idea I’ve seen her.

  ‘My papers are missing,’ I say.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘I have them,’ she says. ‘They belong to me now.’

  ‘I cannot live in this country without them.’

  ‘You can live here with me. You are fine as long as you stay here with me.’

  ‘I need my passport, my visa. Without them, they can send me to a detention centre, or out of this country.’

  ‘Don’t worry so, Mona,’ she says, smiling. ‘No one can send you to a centre as long as you are my employee. No one can take you away from me.’

  ‘You took them from my room?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘That’s stealing!’

  She looks at me, a smile still playing on her lips. ‘I think we know who the thief is in this house. No, Mona, I didn’t steal. It’s the rules. I should have taken them straight away, when you moved into my house. It’s normal. Your papers are quite safe with me, you really don’t have to be afraid. When it’s time for you to leave, I’ll give them back to you. Right now, they are mine, because you belong to me.’

  I pray that my tears will not fall. She must not see me weaken.

  She stares back, and I see her waver. Is she going to take pity on me? She has a good side – I’ve seen it when I first arrived and she offered me money to buy credit. When she told me her secrets and I told her some of mine.

  ‘Mona,’ she says, ‘if you try and leave without your passport, I’ll give your photo to the police and I’ll tell them about the things you’ve taken from me.’

  Police. She knows if there is one word that frightens me more than any other, it is ‘police’.

  ‘Have you finished the ironing?’

  I bow my head, walk down the stairs feeling her watch me as I go. And as I walk I feel my future, the one I had so brightly drawn in my head, with me and Ali and Leila together, recede behind me.

  Rage and fury, and a horrible sense of impotence, take hold of me. There’s nothing I can do.

  Later, I lie in bed, and from somewhere an image comes, blossoming out until it’s a memory and then a story, a story with a message that has come to me when I need it most.

  I’m very small. Running up the narrow alley to the bakery with Ali. We both have unbaked loaves shrouded in white muslin cloth, balanced on trays on our heads. After delivering the bread to the bakery, Ali doesn’t take the usual route home but leads me on a detour up steps along streets between whitewashed walls, bright in the sunshine, then through blue shadows, places I’ve never ventured into before, round corners and along tiny hidden passages until we come to a small patch of orchard at the top of a little cliff-edge. The trees both above and beneath are laden with white almond blossom. We crawl to the edge, encased in this cloud of white petals. I imagine I’m dressed in swathes of intricately embroidered lace. A bride maybe. A princess.

  At the edge we gaze down through branches.

  Two things happen to me that day. The first is a dizzying sense of wonder at the beauty of the white blossoms, whose petals I can now see are etched with fine veins. The vision does something to my mind, lifts it up as if to new realms of awareness. The structure of nature is made plain to me, a coordination that has struck me time and again since then, in the movement of waves on the shore, in the patterns in the sand, in the melodies of birdsong, in the symmetry of butterflies’ wings.

  The second is an awareness of the absurdity of human sexual desire. What I see that day stays in my mind forever afterwards and has been aroused again by the sight of Dora swirling in her silk underwear in her room. The texts from her lover with those photos of statues!

  Between the lacy boughs I see a man’s bottom, rising up and down. Two pairs of legs intertwined. This vision stirs something within me, something disturbing and faintly alluring. I know from the henna patterns that the uppermost soles belong to a woman.

  Ali turns, looks at me, his bright blue eyes set in his smooth, dark-skinned face. He scrapes together a handful of almond husks from the ground and tosses one over the edge onto the couple below. The shell catches for a second in the branches of one of the almond trees, then falls onto the man beneath.

  ‘Bull’s-eye!’ Ali whispers. All the impact seems to do, however, is accelerate the man’s humping. Ali urges me to throw an almond husk. Mine misses the man’s bottom, catching instead in the folds of his djellab
a that is rucked up around his neck. Emboldened by our success, we rain almond husks down upon the couple until suddenly the man shudders, growls, and throws himself aside, revealing the woman beneath him who looks straight up at us.

  Madame Le Bon! Our terrible schoolteacher. I shrink back. Too late.

  Ali and I run screaming back down the alley to our street.

  Afterwards when we’re back at school, Ali and I behave as if the incident never happened. But I have seen my teacher’s true self. And every time our eyes meet, a knowledge passes between us that gives me a little shudder of triumph. My teacher might threaten or humiliate me. But I know, and the teacher knows I know, that she is just another woman, who likes to make love in an almond orchard with a fat man who isn’t her husband.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  The next day, I get the Clipper to the South Bank. Terence has decreed that we all need to meet, in order to talk about Daddy.

  I’ve got Mona’s passport with me. I remind her that if she disobeys me, or attempts to run away, she’ll be picked up immediately by the immigration police. I’ll phone them, say she’s absconded undocumented.

  The sun’s almost white, sinking directly in front of us as we plough westwards, casting its glow onto the water, which throws it back up so it dazzles me. The tide’s out, rubbish rolling about in the shallows. The plane trees along the Embankment throw mottled shadows onto the path. It seems to me that the sky is thinning out. Like ageing skin, I think. Like being tired of life.

  Simon and Anita are in the foyer, sitting with glasses of white wine, leaning towards each other talking avidly. They stop the minute I arrive.

  ‘We were just saying,’ it’s Anita who speaks, ‘that it would be good to bring Daddy here one day. He’d love the music, the life.’

  ‘You could try,’ I say. ‘But he may object. He’s so taken with Mona that no one else will do these days.’

  ‘That’s a blessed relief,’ Simon comments. ‘It’s worked out well then.’