“What?”
“Water,
water.”
She fetched water in a mug and steadied his arm while he drank. His teeth clattered against the mug. She took it from him and set it down on the table before wiping his mouth with another tissue that came away stained pink.
“Colin,” she said. “It’s me, Leila. All right?” And when he did not answer she asked him again, louder, “Are you all right?”
He nodded. “Ba …”
“What?”
“Bad … dream. Sorry.”
He looked sheepish. Leila climbed onto the bed and put her arms around his shoulders. He was ringing wet. She felt with her hand. The sheets and pillow were sodden.
“Come to my bed,” she murmured. “Come on.”
She propped him up against her own pillow and snuggled against him, massaging his chest with slow, circular movements. “Take it easy,” she said. “Tell me.”
He made a peculiar noise. She couldn’t decide if he had laughed or what. She didn’t know anything about him at all, she realized; she was sharing this grotty room with a stranger.
“I have this dream,” he forced out at last. “It goes back to my childhood. Something happened to me.”
She waited. “Do you … do you want to talk about it?” “All right.”
By the candle’s gleam she could just see his face, the eye sockets two black holes enlivened with pinpoints of white.
“My father died when I was seven,” he began suddenly. “We were traveling on a plane together. In the Far East. It was shot down.”
“You mean … your father was a pilot?”
“No. We were living in Hong Kong at the time. He was a banker out there. We were flying home together. Chinese fighters mistook us for somebody else, and they shot us out of the sky. Dad died. I didn’t.”
“And in the dream—”
“I relive it, yes. Is there anything to drink? Real drink, not water.” “Vodka. Do you want orange with it?” “No. Straight.”
She poured them both a drink and came back to bed. This time she sat up with her back against the wall and took his free hand in hers.
“When did these nightmares start?”
“After I got back to Hong Kong. We were rescued. My mother was waiting for me, in the crowd at the airport. It was horrible: flashbulbs popping, the works. They had this horrible flat, in the Mid-Levels. Dark, damp. When the typhoons came, I used to hide under the bed. I thought the windows were going to blow in.”
“How awful.”
“It was my mother who was the problem.” He took a long drink. “I hardly ever speak to her, now.” “Or about her.”
“No.”
Throughout this conversation he kept his eyes on the sheet, not looking at her. An image came into Leila’s mind: here was a man who’d been surprised by enemies while he slept and now was patrolling his campsite, gun in hand, on watch lest they come again.
“My mother couldn’t get over my father’s death. She blamed me for it.”
“Blamed you?”
“I got out, you see. He didn’t. She and I weren’t close, even before Father died. Afterward, she turned cold. Dead. That’s when the nightmares started.” He grimaced. “Bed-wetting too, if you want all the horrors at once.”
She remembered the soaking sheets of his bed. Sweat. Definitely sweat.
“Do you remember how it was when you were a child, Leila? It’s like you’ve got a peephole onto this whole different world, where the grown-ups live. Just a tiny hole. You look through it and you think that’s what being adult means. It doesn’t. But you can’t understand that, when you’re young. I used to overhear conversations. Mother talked on the phone for hours, to her friends. And of course there were lawyers, papers to sign.”
He’d run out of steam, but still he refused to look at her.
“What kind of things did you overhear?” she prompted gently.
“Oh"—he sighed—"what would be best for my schooling, where she should live, where
I
should live. And you know I got the feeling, I got it incredibly quickly, that she wanted to pack me off, out of the way. There wasn’t a funeral, as such: no body, you see. But there was a memorial service. I was crying, she was crying. And afterward, lots of men crowding around to say things in low voices, while I hung on to her sleeve and hid behind her, and I heard her say, ‘Colin will have to stay at boarding school in England. I’ve got relations in Buckinghamshire; they can take him in the holidays.’ You know, just like that—take Colin, take a message if someone rings…. ‘I can’t afford the airfares,’ she said, ‘not on what’s left of Malcolm’s pension.’ God, how the words come back! You think I’m fantasizing, don’t you, making it up. But I swear to God, Leila, I can remember every last word she said that day. And I’ll tell you something: it was a relief when I had to go back to school. Oh, yes, of course I cried at the airport, and Mother cried. But it wasn’t real. I hadn’t lost one parent, I’d lost two; that’s why
I
was crying.”
Leila tried to imagine how he must have felt on that lonely flight back to England, how his first day at school must have seemed. She reached out for his wrist, gripping it so hard that at last he was forced to turn and look into her eyes.
“My grandfather,” she said abruptly, “was shot. I was nine. It was 1957. An assassin came to our home. He shot Ibrahim, my grandfather, killed him underneath a tree where he was sitting. I saw it. I know.” She gripped his wrist even harder.
“I know,”
she choked out.
His arms closed around her, the stubble on his chin grazed her cheek, and she allowed herself to fall over against his body. She began to cry, softly, for her grandfather, but in a way she had not cried before: she mourned him, yes, but without the self-spite that had poisoned the grief of childhood and adolescence.
Colin nuzzled her neck. First his hands, then his lips were on her breasts. Her own fingers began to stroke his back, farther and farther down they went, until at last both of them were aroused and all the pain and sorrow of youth could be put to rest.
Later, when they lay molded together like one person and the first light of a brilliant dawn was peeping through the shutter vents, she whispered, “There’s one thing.”
He was on the threshold of sleep, but he raised his head enough to see her eyes, and smile. “Tell me.”
“Your mother … why did she blame you for your father’s death?”
His eyes slid away from hers, and for a second the alert hunter once again stood on the boundary of his campsite, Colin against the world. Then he lowered his head back onto the pillow, but before he slept he said something and what she thought he said was this: “I’ll tell you on our wedding night.”
At first she wanted to laugh, then to cry, because it was such a beautiful thing to say, and then she didn’t know what she wanted to do, because although it would have been magical to have him confirm that he had indeed said those wonderful words, suppose he hadn’t really?
She spent the rest of the vacation chewing over her memories of the night that had begun with summer thunder and ended with a proposal of marriage that might have been nothing of the kind.
Her constant preoccupation through the Peloponnesus, across Austria, into Germany and Belgium, the thing
was:
her family would never agree. A tragedy, because she wanted it so much. She adored Colin, Oxford, and England, in that order: by marrying him, she could obtain them all. A fresh start, away from Beirut, far away from the memories of poor dead Grandfather Ibrahim, away from Yusif.
At last the time came for them to board the Dover ferry and she could stand it no longer.
The brilliant razzle-dazzle of the holiday was dissipating fast, despite all their efforts to retain it. It was a cool gray day in late September, and what there was of sun, so far away from being a Greek sun, no longer hurt their eyes. Dense clouds formed themselves into layers, scudding across the sky. The white cliffs loomed ever closer through a thin veil of rain. Colin and Leila sat huddled close together on a bench at the prow, holding hands, silent.
“Well,” he said suddenly. He lifted her hand and bumped it gently down on his knee. “Home again. Look, see those clouds?”
She followed the direction of his pointing finger and shrugged.
“Don’t they look like a couple screwing? She’s on her stomach, and he’s ramming it in from behind.”
“Is that all you ever think about?” she wailed, but quietly, not wanting others to hear.
“Sorry. Look, I’m sorry, okay? I was trying to cheer us both up. It’s just … I’m fed up because it’s over. We’re home.”
She turned her face away, not trusting herself to speak.
“Only I suppose you don’t think of England as home.” He waited for a response, but there was none. “I mean, the idea of living in England all the time wouldn’t appeal to you.” Another pause. “Would it?”
She looked down at the hand on his knee and thought, Why do clever men always have to be so thick?
“Because I was thinking, when you go back to Beirut, I’m really going to miss you.”
“I’m not going back yet.”
“But you will go back, won’t you? One day soon?”
“Maybe not. I like it in England.”
He could not make up his mind; she recognized the signs with a depression that bordered on despair. He was dithering around, avoiding the core, coming in for the kill and shying away again, and it drove her mad. Perhaps she was wrong to fall in love with him. A lifetime of this—
“Leila. Leila, will you marry—?”
“Oh, yes. Of course.”
The words were out before she could even be absolutely sure that he intended to finish the sentence with “me"; perhaps he’d merely wanted to ask her if she
ever
meant to marry. But when he smothered her in a hug that squeezed all the breath out of her she knew he really was proposing, and she sought out his mouth with her own as the best way of cementing their betrothal, because as long as they were locked together like that he couldn’t tell her if he changed his mind.
At last Colin held her at arm’s length. His eyes shone with laughter. “When did you first know you loved me?” he cried.
How to answer that, she wondered, when he could never understand? Of course, her love dated back to that moment in the car park, when his resourcefulness had saved her from Feisal’s thugs; that was when her love began, but he didn’t mean that.
“In Ios,” she said.
“But when
exactly?”
“The night you had your bad dream, remember?”
He slapped his thigh, laughing out loud. “I knew it!”
She was laughing too, by this time. “Why? How?”
“Oh, because you saw me weak and helpless and you still felt the same about me, and I realized it.”
Not bad, she thought, for a man. He might have added something about her maternal instincts coming to the fore, and she wouldn’t have minded even that. But then the raw emotion that had been building up inside her ever since Ios broke through the dam, and she allowed herself the contemplation of joy.
She’d wanted things, so many things, and they’d all fallen into her lap. She laid her head on his chest, meaning it to be a gesture of prostration and worship, and while she held on to him as if for salvation she burst into tears of utter breakdown.
“I love you,” she said, over and over again. “Oh, dear God, Colin, I do love you so!” And she would pound his chest with her fist, softly, softly, as if seeking admittance to his life, and a sanctuary there.
Leila had come home.
But it did not feel like home when she presented herself at the Lancaster Gate penthouse, with its much vaunted views of Hyde Park, two days later. Halib had that effect on her. He made anywhere outside Lebanon, or, more accurately, Beirut, seem a temporary and decidedly inferior lodging.
One of his girls admitted Leila to the apartment. Another sat with her legs curled up on the sofa, leafing through
Vanity Fair.
Leila recognized the expression on her face as the product of the kind of boredom that made you feel frantic. A third girl was in the black-and-white tiled bathroom, giving Halib a facial.
All three women were in their early twenties, had long blond hair, and wore sheath dresses, the facial expert’s being made of scarlet leather. Halib never deviated from his ideal of feminine beauty. He wore these interchangeable, fully compatible girls to parties as other men wore gemstones on their fingers.
“You’re not seriously telling me,” Leila heard the face girl coo, “that you put
soap
on that lovely skin of yours?”
“Hi,” Leila said. “I hope I don’t interrupt anything important.” She went forward to kiss his cheek but Halib, anticipating her intention, swung the chair around on its stalk so that he had his back to her, and said, “Liquid soap only, Roxanne; the results are as you see. My sister and I have a lot to discuss; go now.”
Roxanne wiped his face with a towel and stalked out, her heels beating a somehow ominous tattoo on the marble floor. As she passed Leila she gave a scarcely perceptible shrug. Leila leaned against the wall and said, “She’s new.”
It took all her courage to do that. She knew she was in the wrong, that she would never be forgiven for going away with Colin, that she had brought disgrace and grief in equal measure down upon her family. It was scarcely tactful of her to bring up the subject of Halib’s latest acquisition. Leila didn’t know why she took the risk. Perhaps it was something to do with her upbringing, which had taught her that attack was the only form of defense.
Halib swung himself out of the chair. His linen shirt set off his handsome features to perfection. For a moment he regarded her without expression, almost as if he were trying to remember who the hell she was. Then his mustache lifted, his face creased into those gorgeously sexy concentric laughter lines, and to her astonishment she registered that he was happy to see her.
“Welcome,” he said, coming forward to embrace her. “Welcome home, angel. You look fabulous.” He kissed both her cheeks: the token gesture of international diplomacy made warm, compelling. “Greece was fun, huh? I’ll bet. Come, tell me about it.”
As if in a dream she allowed herself to be led into his bedroom, his inviolable sanctuary, where he seated himself in an armchair by the window. Sitting there with the translucent floor-length drapes waving gently in the breeze, he looked every inch the merchant prince: debonair, charming, rich as clotted cream.