He fiddled around for his keys. On the opposite side of the street, a driver opened the door of the black Mercedes. Mr Beg climbed in. No doubt he was off to another of his emporiums. The whole afternoon had such an air of unreality that Donald felt helpless.
‘The wife wants a child,
The wife wants a child,
Ey-aye, ee-aye, the wife wants a child.’
He sat in the car, limp. If somebody else were here, he might have smiled. He laid his head against the steering-wheel.
31
They drove Duke to the airport on a Saturday afternoon. Christine sat in the back, Pakistani-style, behind the men. She had always been fond of Duke, but in the ebb and flow of friendship they had only really come together this last couple of weeks. Since his overnight stay he had spent a good deal of time at their bungalow, bringing lavish gifts of food and bourbon from the Commissary. He was not a man for disguises; he did not hide his need. It must be losing his project like that. He had come to this country to change things and been defeated. She thought: why have I come? To be changed. And Donald? To find a lost, old order. For changelessness, in fact. Do any of the things we seek actually exist? They seem to lie only in our heads.
The last day or so Duke had worn the preoccupied air of the traveller, but you became used to this here. Amongst their sort of people, above the forever trapped and static poor, arrival and departure punctuated their daily life. Already several of their European acquaintances had left, to be replaced by others who arrived, pale from a tepid summer and alert to all the sights Christine and Donald now took for granted. This airport road was the most familiar in Karachi.
‘That’s Shamime’s house,’ said Christine, pointing it out to Duke. ‘We went there once for cocktails. Isn’t it huge.’
Duke nodded.
She leant forward. ‘Aziz is just off to New York, on some business thing of his father’s. He’s actually going to do some work.’
‘You’ve seen her?’ asked Duke.
‘Just at the office.’
‘Talking of whom,’ said Donald, ‘I forgot. I’ve got you a memento. Can you pass me my wallet, Christine? Just some snaps from that beach party.’
Duke thanked him and took them.
‘You look so startled in that one,’ said Christine. ‘It makes people look startled, flash. Like rabbits in the headlights.’
Duke studied the photos a moment, said thanks again and put them into his pocket.
‘Just think,’ said Donald, ‘only three months ago we arrived. Remember that camel cart, Chrissy, looming out of the dark? It seems like a year. I suppose it’s not the same for you, I mean you being here anyway.’
Duke mumbled something.
‘What?’ said Christine.
‘Pardon me. I said it seemed a long time too.’
‘Poor Duke. You must be dying to see Minnie again. And your enormous sons. She’s going to be amazed when she gets that present.’ Duke had bought his wife an extremely expensive set of gold and sapphire jewellery. He had gone off and done it by himself. Secretly Christine could not picture the necklace around the neck of Minnie, whose photo she had seen and who looked decent, but peaky and boyish, not that sort. She remained silent. She felt car-sick.
They drove in silence. There seemed nothing left to say. Donald and Christine could not repeat how sorry they were. After some months’ leave Duke would probably be going to Oman to set up the Muscat Translux.
They parked the car amidst the usual press of porters, and climbed out.
‘You okay?’
Christine swayed in the heat. Donald gripped her arm.
‘I seem to get less and less used to it,’ she said.
‘Guess what,’ said Donald as they followed the porter. ‘When Christine and I arrived that night, I thought we were standing in the Boeing heat outlet.’
They said goodbye. Christine kissed Duke’s tired, leathery face for the first time. Afterwards she could not face climbing to the roof to watch him take off.
She lolled in the passenger seat.
‘When did all the memsahibs come back?’
‘What?’
‘From Simla and places?’
‘Pretty soon now. September.’
‘God.’
‘Are you all right?’
She nodded. They drove down the dual carriageway. Flags were flying for some state visit or other. Donald told her it was Nigeria. Hoardings, facing the incoming trade, told them to book rooms at the Agha 3 Star Hotel and to rub their hair with Purinoor Pomade.
The car swerved and squealed to a halt. They faced wooden scaffolding. Donald grated the gear and reversed backwards at speed. Dust and exhaust fumes blew about in the windscreen.
He stopped the car. The dust dispersed. They gazed up at the hoarding.
The painter had altered her. The giant curls were now a brassy yellow. Her face, despite creamy skin and scarlet cheeks, was softened and sensual, with the thickened pouting lips of an Indian film star. Her eyes were lined with black paint and there was a black beauty spot on her cheek.
Underneath this oriental blonde, so horribly recognizable to the thousands of people driving past, was written: Join Me with Tahira Protection. So Safe. So Sure.
She pushed open the car door, struggled out on to the verge and was sick. Donald hurried around the car and held her shoulders.
‘Good Lord, Christine.’
She moved back to the car and sat, wedged sideways in the passenger seat. She did not meet his eye, but gazed at the dust.
‘Look, I know it’s frightful . . .’ he began.
She raised her head. ‘And actually, I think I’m pregnant.’
32
Not long after the announcement under the billboard they found a beach hut. Reckitts Rosemary and her husband were posted back to London and they passed the lease of their hut over to the Manleys. No estate agent, no Sultan. In this place things did not happen as you expected, one logical step after another. You took these steps and what resulted? It all dissolved away.
‘Viz Duke,’ said Donald, ‘at Ginntho Pir.’
He was doing the crossword and raised his head. ‘I’ve just realized. Know what Ginntho’s an anagram of? Nothing. N-O-T-H-I-N-G’. He shook his head. ‘Nothing ever came to anything there, did it.’
She could not speak, thinking of that empty, littered tomb. Thinking that nothing might have indeed come to something there. He did not remark upon her lack of response; any curious behaviour he put down to her condition.
During that strange autumn she wondered if in the future she would remember this as their Beach Hut Period, the last, elegaic phase of their marriage when they sat on the sand together and gazed at the waves. They spent a good deal of time there. During the first three months she was almost continually ill. Donald fetched her book, which she pretended to read. Anxious and proud, he fetched her towel when the evening wind blew and laid it around the shoulders of his lethargic wife, for the first time helpless. They were so gentle with each other – he because she was pregnant, she because she had betrayed him.
He talked lyrically of their early days at Brinton. ‘Remember when you twisted your ankle and I carried you all the way to the bus stop? All heavy and sandy?’ His arm tightened around her shoulders. ‘When will it show?’
It was agony to hear. She felt so painfully loving towards him; she had never loved him like this. How dominating she had been before; selfish and self-righteous with her untried opinions. Now she was humbled. Many times she rehearsed the words with which she would tell him about Sultan. On one or two occasions she almost started to speak, but she could not begin. She could not bear to ruin his pleasure. She kept saying to herself: Sultan might not be the father. One scrambled five minutes. What was that compared to the many times with Donald, lying afterwards so careful and still, a vessel filled with precious liquid that must not be spilt? Once she had a niggling feeling: how unfair this is, that a woman’s moment of weakness must have such a result. If
a man had done what I did, nobody would ever know. Once she might have said this to Roz, but Roz seemed far away now; tinny and shrill, the complaints they had discussed decades ago. She wrote to her mother, putting in exclamation marks with her false biro.
Just as Donald put down her strange moods to her condition, so did everyone else. Her pregnancy gave her a place; overnight she was accepted by Europeans and Pakistanis, for the first time they knew what to talk to her about. At last she had done the right thing. They included her. Once when they were discussing names – Emily, Jonathan, what was Donald’s middle name, Frederick, why not Frederick? – she had broken down and cried. She’s pregnant, they murmured; had not they all had babies? It was bad superstition to talk about names, like buying clothes before it was born. Oh yes, they all understood. ‘We understand,’ they said, and she sobbed more violently.
Mohammed appeared pleased too. His own wife grew plumper in his quarters. Christine could sense his achievement, having two swelling ladies under his care. Perhaps, though it was never mentioned, he assumed his own hot water man had given fertile blessings to his memsahib. Perhaps indeed he had. She could not face curries; Mohammed cooked her the English food he had always wished her to prefer. She ate the mounds of mashed potato.
‘I used to do this when I was a little boy,’ said Donald. He flattened the potato with his fork, lifted a knife-full of peas and sprinkled them on the top. ‘We plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land,’ he sang.
And it was such beautiful weather. Now that winter approached people emerged into the climate. The rain that had threatened in August never arrived, though there was flooding up in the Punjab. Each morning dawned fresh, deepening into the blue of a perfect English summer’s day, one of those summers before our time, Donald said, in those old photos; a golden age. She sat in the veranda, mocked by the sunshine. Looking back later she could not imagine how she passed the time. She read little. Donald said she looked broody. Once a pariah dog limped past the gate, her dugs dragging in the dirt.
Out on the airport road the hoarding, advertising the product she no longer needed, grew shabbier. Dust was thrown into her face by the passing taxis; her complexion blistered. Donald laughed at the painting. There was a gaiety about him nowadays, he had loosened up. As if his stiff anxieties had melted in the face of their own shared miracle. One day he told her about his half-uncle; in fact they went together to collect the suit. In the car afterwards he said: ‘I’m never going to keep any secrets from you.’ He touched her knee; she burst into tears.
He wanted to talk about hospitals. She kept putting off a decision. Did she want to have the baby in England? he asked. It was so much safer. On the other hand Dr Farooq had his own private rooms in the Jinnah Hospital. Several English women had had their babies there, it was not like his grandmother’s day. He had phoned Muriel Landsbury and she had nothing to complain of, all the latest stuff imported from the West, all mod cons. Christine herself made no inquiries; she did not want to put the birth into words. He presumed this to be a natural fear. ‘I’ll be with you, of course,’ he said, ‘I’ll rub your back.’ Then he had seen her face. ‘Darling, I won’t if you don’t want me to.’
In the end she decided to have the baby in Karachi. Her mother would be flying out. She could see the relief on his face, that he would not lose her for several months and that he did not have to fly to England himself. She thought: but will he send me back there when he finds out? He bought a book and they looked at foetuses, growing larger each page they turned. ‘He’s like that now,’ he exclaimed, pointing to one, pale and curled. ‘Or she is.’ He laid his head against her belly. Inside lay the baby, thrilling them with its thuds. She thought of it: part of her, forever hers, curled and brown.
Donald was so lighthearted, but awed too. She did not want the months to pass. He made jokes for joy. She grew large. Her fuzzy perm was growing out. She had to buy a loose dress for Shamime’s wedding – Shainime had decided with surprising suddenness to marry her cousin’s business partner, it must have been an arranged union, even Shamime seemed to have succumbed to the society around her. As they left for the ceremony, their bearer stood beside the door of the car. ‘Look,’ said Donald, ‘I’m bringing the mountain to Mohammed.’
It was a charmed time. Unbearably so. She was a secret sufferer who has been told she has only a few more weeks to live. But for her these strange, heightened days would be ending not with death, but with birth.
33
Shamime heard the click of the bathroom switch. She lay still. Across the floor she heard the tap of his slippers. Fancy embroidered things, he had picked them up in Bangkok (‘along with something else’, she had heard him laugh in the Gymkhana Club Card Room).
The bed creaked. He eased himself down beside her. He did it purposefully, but not quite loud enough to waken her should she really be asleep; already she knew these movements so well. Eyes closed, she lay facing the wall. She kept her breathing regular.
‘Sammy-ammy,’ he whispered, not too loud; he was still doubtful. And he did not want to actually wake her up; he was decent enough.
He ran his finger over her shoulder. He was pressed gently against her nightdress, cupped around her back. His breath smelt of whisky and toothpaste.
‘Sam the sham,’ he murmured. It saddened her, that he already suspected. He was moderately witty really, considering the company he kept. She should be grateful that he had turned out such a generally pleasant surprise. Girls adored him. With his looks he must never have had trouble like this before.
He touched her hip. There was a pause of some minutes. He did not try to push closer. He was gentler than he appeared in public.
‘Darling?’ he murmured.
There was a long silence. A minute must have passed. She did not move, her cheek pressed into the sodden pillow.
Each night she lay here talking to Duke. You can’t reach me, not now. Did you ever feel you could? You reached me all right. But see? Nothing’s changed.
He moved back. The sheet moved with him but she did not dare pull it back. She heard the rasp of the match as he lit a cigarette.
34
She turned her head to and fro against the soaked pillow. Her insides were being dragged out.
‘We must push.’ Dr Farooq’s voice boomed, as if spoken through a metal tunnel.
‘More gas,’ she grunted.
‘Just a little. We must push now.’
She grabbed the rubber mask and clamped it against her face, snorting it in. Deeply, but not deep enough. Voices echoed. Reddened shapes burst inside her head. She sucked into the mask. A hand tried to pull it away.
‘No,’ said the voice, far off.
She gripped it greedily. Someone got it away this time.
‘Push, darling.’ Donald’s echoing voice. ‘Nearly there. Dr Farooq, is she okay?’
‘She’s doing fine, just fine.’
Crimson explosions. Blackness, and burning pain. She was breaking.
‘One more push.’
‘A big one this time, darling.’
‘Now.’
She pushed. She was splitting. She yelled.
‘Now. Again. Hold her back, Mr Manley.’
She pushed. Between her legs the head pushed out; then a slippery gush.
There was a rustle of movement. She lay emptied and the others got busy. They had cut the cord so quickly. She could not see it, the doctor was in the way.
A faint creak, then a cry. Her heart kicked against her ribs.
‘Can I see?’ She tried to sit up.
‘Mrs Manley, it’s a beautiful girl.’
Her mother seemed to be there too, in a mask. How long had she been there? She and Donald could see the baby.
‘Oh quick,’ cried Christine.
They pulled down their masks. They were smiling.
‘Bring Mrs Manley her daughter, nurse.’
Christine held out her arms. Tucked in a towel, her baby was given to her. Enough wa
s showing to know.
Tears ran down Christine’s cheeks.
‘What’s the matter?’ Donald’s face swam in front of her. He turned to her mother.
‘Everyone does this,’ said her mother. ‘I did. It’s the great happiness and the relief. Am I right?’ She looked at Christine, who nodded.
Read on for the first chapter of Deborah Moggach’s brilliant new novel Something to Hide
Pimlico, London
I’ll tell you how the last one ended. I was watching the news and eating supper off a tray. There was an item about a methane explosion, somewhere in Lincolnshire. A barn full of cows had blown up, killing several animals and injuring a stockman. It’s the farting, apparently.
I missed someone with me to laugh at this. To laugh, and shake our heads about factory farming. To share the bottle of wine I was steadily emptying. I wondered if Alan would ever move in. This was hard to imagine. What did he feel about factory farming? I hadn’t a clue.
And then, there he was. On the TV screen. A reporter was standing outside the Eurostar terminal, something about an incident in the tunnel. Passengers were milling around behind him. Amongst them was Alan.
He was with a woman. Just a glimpse and he was gone.
I’m off to see me bruv down in Somerset. Look after yourself, love, see you Tuesday.
Just a glimpse but I checked later, on iPlayer. I reran the news and stopped it at that moment. Alan turning towards the woman and mouthing something at her. She was young, needless to say, much younger than me, and wearing a red padded jacket. Chavvy, his sort. Her stilled face, eyebrows raised. Then they were gone, swallowed up in the crowd.
See you Tuesday and I’ll get that plastering done by the end of the week.
Don’t fuck the help. For when it ends, and it will, you’ll find yourself staring at a half-plastered wall with wires dangling like entrails and a heap of rubble in the corner. And he nicked my power drill.
Before him, and the others, I was married. I have two grown-up children but they live in Melbourne and Seattle, as far away as they could go. Of course there’s scar tissue but I miss them with a physical pain of which they are hopefully unaware. Neediness is even more unattractive in the old than in the young. Their father has long since remarried. He has a corporate Japanese wife who thinks I’m a flake. Neurotic, needy, borderline alcoholic. I can see it in the swing of her shiny black hair. For obvious reasons, I keep my disastrous love-life to myself.