It leaves me flustered. ‘I’d better get on.’ I busy myself.
‘I went out into the garden earlier.’ Hayden comes up behind me, searching, I think, for something to nibble on, but finds nothing to his taste. I hope it will all be more appealing when cooked. ‘It looks great out there.’
‘You should tell Joy. She’d be very pleased,’ I say.
‘I’ll do that.’ Then he says, ‘I saw you dancing. Through the open window.’
That makes me flush more.
‘It looked like you were all having fun.’
‘We were.’
It seems that I’ve slipped so easily into my new life. Cosseted within these walls, I feel as if I don’t have to look over my shoulder. Here I can pretend all that I’ve been through simply doesn’t exist. My thoughts have turned very little to my husband or what he might be feeling now, and perhaps that’s callous of me. My feeling is that if you do not love, then you will not be loved in return. I’m trying to change my ways – to be stronger, more assertive – and my husband must also change his or he’ll always be alone. I hope that I’m safe here. How would Suresh begin to find me? Surely there’s no way. If I live a quiet and anonymous life, then will I be free of him for ever?
‘Do you want to read some more later tonight?’ Hayden asks.
‘I’d like that. When I’ve put Sabina to bed?’
He nods. ‘I was teaching her to play “Chopsticks” today. On the piano.’
I’m surprised at that because, of course, she didn’t mention it.
‘Did she do well?’
‘Yes. She’s a bright child. A very quick learner.’
‘Thank you. It’s nice of you to take time with her.’
‘She’s a great kid.’ A flush colours Hayden’s cheeks, and when I gaze at him he quickly says, ‘Can I do anything? Set the table?’
‘That would be very kind.’ I return to my peeling and preparation.
‘You don’t have to cook every night,’ Hayden says. ‘We won’t expect it. As Crystal says, until you arrived, we all pretty much lived on ready-meals or toast.’
‘But you have cupboards full of lovely spices and a garden filled with fresh vegetables.’
‘And all wasted on us. Until now.’
‘I was a housewife,’ I tell Hayden. ‘I had very little to fill my days but cooking and cleaning. I tried to be the very best at it that I could.’
‘You never went out with friends?’
‘I wasn’t allowed.’
‘That must have been hard.’
‘I suppose that it’s something I got used to.’
Then we both run out of words and I return to my preparations. ‘You must tell me if you want me to stop cooking,’ I inform him. ‘I don’t wish to offend anyone.’
‘Ayesha,’ he says. ‘You’re fitting in here brilliantly. It’s as if you’ve been here for weeks already.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I hope you’ll be able to stay here for a long time.’
I smile at him. ‘I hope so too.’ With the cameras and the high walls, and the support of my new friends, I feel that nothing can touch us here.
Chapter Twenty-eight
In another house in another city, Suresh splashed whisky into glasses. It was a supermarket brand, better than nothing but all he could afford for now. All that was about to change though. The three men sitting with him downed the rough spirit in one and he instantly refilled the glasses.
Suresh spread his hands on the kitchen table. ‘So no one’s seen her?’
They all shook their heads.
Suresh breathed out through his nose. His parents were still insisting that they knew nothing too. He was sure they were lying to him. But what was he to do? Beat it out of them? Some days he was sorely tempted. It was maddening. Ayesha must be somewhere. You couldn’t simply fade from existence. ‘Smith, you’ve spoken to all your contacts in the city and there’s been no sightings of her or the kid?’
‘She’s not in Milton Keynes, Suresh. I’m sure of it,’ he said in reply. He was in his mid-forties, white and built like a brick outhouse. His face bore the marks of someone who had once been a boxer. Suresh had worked with him on many occasions. They’d turned over more than a few houses together in their time, stolen some tasty high-end cars to order. These boys were a good team to bring in when anyone needed money collecting or they wanted the frighteners put on people, and Smith was a useful man to have at your back when things got tricky. He also knew how to teach someone a lesson that they wouldn’t forget in a hurry.
It was all small-fry stuff, though, and they needed to move up on to a bigger stage. If they were going to make some serious cash they needed to start playing in the first division. Now was their time. Trust Ayesha to put a spanner in the works by going missing. He could well do without the aggro of getting her back.
Suresh clenched his fists. How could she and the girl simply disappear? He’d offered bribes, he’d dealt out threats and still there’d been no news of her. ‘What about you?’
The man next to him pushed Ayesha’s picture on to the table. Even looking at her made Suresh’s blood boil. Flynn was also a long-standing associate. He could get hold of anything you needed, no matter how hot. ‘I took this down to the station and showed it around,’ Flynn said. ‘Nothing. No one had seen hide nor hair of her.’
Suresh’s younger brother, Arunja, piped up. ‘You should never have let a woman give you the runaround, Suresh,’ he taunted. ‘You must be going soft in your old age.’
Suresh fumed inside. Normally Suresh was top dog, and his brother was enjoying his discomfort. His wife had made him a laughing stock in the heart of his own community. That was unforgivable. When he got her back – and he would – he’d make her life a misery.
‘I did do better at the Coachway though,’ Flynn said. ‘One of the staff reckoned she’d been in there. Couldn’t be certain, but he thought she’d got the first bus out to Victoria.’
Suresh raised his eyebrows. ‘London? She knows no one in London.’
The man shrugged. ‘That’s what he said. Thought she looked shit-scared, and there can’t be many women on their own with a kid catching a bus at half-four in the morning.’
He chewed at his fingernail. So it appeared she might have taken a bus to London.
‘What do you want us to do now, Suresh?’
‘I’m thinking.’
Smith helped himself to more whisky and passed the bottle to Flynn. ‘We could put some feelers out there. Send a few lads down to look around.’
‘It’s a tough call,’ Flynn said. ‘You could just let her go.’
‘Never.’ Suresh took his turn with the whisky. It burned his throat, but not as much as his heart burned with hatred for his wife and what she’d done to him.
‘It’s going to be a hell of a lot of expense, Suresh. Had to bung a twenty to the bloke at the Coachway to get a peep out of him.’
People always knew the value of information. Suresh opened his wallet, peeled off a note and slid it across the table to him. ‘No one will be out of pocket.’
‘Thanks, mate.’ Flynn palmed the cash and pocketed it. ‘It’s not just the money though. If you want to get her back, it’s going to be a lot of trouble too.’
‘There’ll be a way,’ Suresh countered. ‘And I’ll find it.’
Arunja tipped his chair back and put his hands behind his head. ‘London is a very big place.’
Suresh narrowed his eyes. ‘Not big enough.’
Chapter Twenty-nine
‘What’s a dildo?’ I look up from Bridget Jones’s Diary.
‘Good grief,’ Hayden says. ‘Don’t ask me that. What page are we on?’
Hayden and I are sitting on the sofa together in the living room. Sabina’s already tucked up in bed and the night is drawing in. I tell him the page number.
‘Oh.’ He looks slightly pale. ‘Long way to go yet.’ He rubs at his chin and I see pink spots bloom on his cheek.
> ‘I’ve embarrassed you.’
‘No. Yes.’ He laughs. ‘It’s a girl thing. You need to ask Crystal.’
‘Or Joy.’
‘Not Joy.’ Hayden shakes his head vigorously. ‘Definitely not Joy.’ He points at my page. ‘Move on.’
‘It’s a bad word?’
‘It’s a word that I think, I hope, you don’t need to know.’
Something about his discomfort makes me want to smile.
‘No laughing at me,’ he teases. ‘The next book we read is going to be a classic. Jane Austen or something. We’ll be on much safer ground with Austen. I’m pretty sure she didn’t have… those things.’
I’m secretly pleased to hear that Hayden is already thinking about a ‘next’ book.
‘We’ll skip that bit for now. Pick it up here.’ He points to a line and obediently I continue reading.
My reading is slow but I’m very much enjoying it. Bridget is a funny lady, and already I can see why Hayden’s girlfriend would have liked to read it over and over.
I’m trying to form each word carefully, in the same way I used to show Sabina. Now she reads her books silently and I don’t know what goes on in her head or how she’s progressing. At her last school, her teachers always assured me that her schoolwork wasn’t suffering, and I can only hope that they were right. I pray, for the millionth time, that one day my beloved daughter will come back to me.
Crystal has already left for work this evening and Joy has retired to her bed. I know that she likes to go upstairs early and watch her own television. It’s a lonely life for her, I feel, despite her love of the garden and her trips to the day centre. I’m sure she’d be less grumbly if her family were around her to bring love into her life.
The evening is warm still and the French doors are open in the living room. There’s so little air that it doesn’t even stir the gauzy curtains. I lift my loose, heavy hair from my neck. Sometimes a plait is a very practical style.
‘You hair looks lovely when it’s down,’ Hayden says shyly.
‘Thank you.’ I stare fixedly at the page in front of me.
‘Now I’ve embarrassed you,’ he says, ‘when I didn’t mean to.’
‘I’m not accustomed to compliments.’
‘That’s a shame.’ He lets out a shaky breath. ‘Laura had long blonde hair. She was very beautiful. I used to tell her as often as I could.’
‘I believe that’s her photograph on the piano?’
He nods. ‘It’s the only one I can bear to look at. The others make me too sad. There are so many stored on the office computer. Hundreds and hundreds of photographs of me and Laura together, lying somewhere between reality and cyberspace.’
‘One day you’ll be happy to look at them.’
‘I hope so.’ There’s darkness in his eyes, but somehow I don’t think he looks quite as bleak as the day when we arrived.
‘It’s nice having a kid here,’ he says, as if he has read my mind. ‘Even though Sabina doesn’t talk, she brightens the place up.’
‘I’m glad to hear it.’
‘Laura and I wanted to have children together,’ he confides.
‘I’m very sorry that it never happened for you.’ I want to lay my hand on his arm, but I’m afraid to touch him.
‘Shall we get back to Bridget?’ he says brusquely. ‘It’s getting late.’
Happily, I read on. The more I practise, the easier I find the words. The chapters are short and I turn the pages quickly until I stumble over a word. ‘I don’t know this one.’
‘Fuckwittage,’ Hayden says, clearing his throat. ‘That’s another one we might well skip over. Don’t use it when the vicar comes to tea.’ He takes the book off me and closes it. ‘I’m beginning to think we should have gone for something altogether more wholesome than Bridget.’
I laugh. ‘I think she’s fun.’
‘I’m sure you do.’
‘She’s like Crystal,’ I say. ‘Fearless. I’d like to be more like her.’
‘I think you’re fine exactly as you are,’ Hayden says. Then he laughs. ‘Sorry, that sounded like something Daniel Cleaver would say.’
‘I think he sounds like a lot of trouble already. Bridget should only go out with nice Mark Darcy.’
‘But women don’t always choose the nice guy. They like the bastard.’
‘Do they? Then they don’t know what it’s really like to be with a… a… bastard.’
‘No,’ Hayden says. ‘I’m sure you’re right. Sorry to raise it. I didn’t mean to make you think of home.’
‘I didn’t choose a bad man,’ I tell him. ‘My mummy and daddy arranged the marriage for me. They thought that they were doing the right thing. Suresh’s parents were distant cousins and they’d been told that the family were well connected.’
‘But they weren’t?’
‘No.’ I take a deep breath. ‘Not really. I think they gave my parents a false picture of their wealth and standing. They had much by my parents’ standards, but, as I was to discover, little in Western terms.’
‘That must have been tough.’
‘Not so,’ I say. ‘I could have borne that. I’m not a person for whom money is a god.’
‘Me neither,’ Hayden says. He glances at the grand room. ‘Despite all this. So what went wrong?’
‘They weren’t to know that their son had a dark side.’ I can’t bring myself to look at Hayden as I speak. ‘Suresh was handsome and quite kind when I first met him on his one and only visit to Sri Lanka. I thought he’d be a good husband. I had no experience of men – how could I think otherwise? My mummy and daddy thought that his family would look after me and embrace me as a daughter. But the truth was that Suresh’s mother and father couldn’t do that either. Though they did try, at first. All they could do, eventually, was cope in very difficult circumstances.’ I hear myself sigh sadly. Perhaps I’m telling Hayden too much, but I cannot help myself. I’ve never spoken like this to anyone before and the words are tumbling out of me. ‘By then it was too late. I was married and in England. How could I ever tell my mummy and daddy that they’d made a terrible mistake? That we all had. There would be no end to their weeping. They only ever wanted my happiness and, somehow, they’d failed me. I’d failed myself. Perhaps they’d been too trusting, too naïve. Perhaps I was too taken by the stranger that came to court me.’
‘You’ve been here a long time?’
‘Ten years. Which have flown by.’
‘What do you miss most about Sri Lanka?’
‘The sea,’ I say, and I can hear the longing in my voice. ‘Our home was right by the beach. Beautiful white sand, swaying palm trees, the Indian Ocean.’ I lower my lashes. ‘My troubles lift when I think of it. One day I hope that I may see it again.’
‘Not quite like the seaside in England,’ Hayden laughs.
‘I’ve never been to the seaside here.’
He rocks back at that. ‘Never?’
‘No.’ I shake my head. I don’t like to say that my life revolved around my home or rare trips to the shopping centre. All the time I was married I’d never even been on a holiday. ‘I’d very much like for Sabina to see it.’
He grins at me. ‘Then we’ll have to see what we can do.’
Chapter Thirty
A week goes by and Sabina is, I’m very relieved to say, given a place at the local school. Crystal and I take her to the supermarket to buy her new uniform.
That night, after our dinner, she tries it all on and comes down to show us. There are tears in my eyes as she parades up and down the kitchen, holding out her skirt and smiling proudly. My child is growing up before my very eyes and I’m powerless to stop it. Like myself, I see Joy and Crystal wipe away a surreptitious tear. As she does her last twirl we all give her a round of applause and, now bashful, she flees upstairs.
I follow her and, in the privacy of our own room, I wrap my arms round her and hold her to me. ‘This is our new life, my dear daughter. I hope you’re pleased with it.??
?
There’s anxiety in her eyes and I’m sure she’s worried about her first day at her new school. Of course she would be.
‘They know what you’re like and I hope they’ll help you, but it would be so much better to help yourself and speak out, Sabina. There’s no need to be frightened now. We’re safe here. Our troubles are all behind us.’ I don’t say that I hope she’ll never have to see her daddy again. Every child should have a good father figure in their life, and it makes me sad to think that Sabina doesn’t. ‘This is a nice home. Hayden, Auntie Crystal and Joy, all are very fond of you already. That should make you happy.’ I step back and appraise her. ‘You look so grown-up.’
She clings to me again and I stroke her back. I feel as if I can’t bear to let her go, that I want to sit next to her in all of her lessons. But, as much as I want to cosset her and never let her out of my sight, if she’s going to learn to speak again then she must surely have to face her new school alone. It’s hard, but Sabina will have to learn to stand on her own two feet.
‘I’m sorry that it took me so long to leave,’ I tell her. ‘I promise that I’ll always do my very best for you. You’re my only child and I love you very much.’
I look at her face and memorise every contour of it, my heart tightening. I stroke her cheeks, her eyelids, her lips that stay sealed, and know that I love her more than life itself. Whatever happens in our future, she’ll always be my priority.
‘Take off your school clothes now,’ I tell her. ‘You must have your bath and an early night. I want you to sleep well so that you’ll be rested.’
Unpeeling her from me, I tug off her white shirt and grey pleated skirt. She has white socks and new black shoes. Tomorrow I’ll buy her an official sweatshirt from the school which is a pretty blue colour.
I stay with her while she bathes. I soap the sponge and caress her tiny back, watching the suds run over her skin. Then I wash her hair, which is as long and as dark as mine, but more unruly. Tomorrow I’ll plait it so that she’s neat and doesn’t look like a ragamuffin. Soon, very soon, she’ll be too old for me to care for her in this way.