The Darkening Hour Read online

  ‘You were married to him.’

  ‘Yes. But it hit me then. Or maybe not even then. Perhaps . . . my memory is muddled. Perhaps it was after Max appeared that I knew our marriage had been an illusion.’

  ‘Illusion?’

  ‘A lie. Oh, Roger was from the right background. My parents loved him and I wanted to please them. But that evening, on the steps, for the first time I faced the truth. I had married Roger, for Daddy.’

  I pause for a moment, letting words I’ve never said sink in.

  ‘I wanted Daddy – Charles – to approve of the man to whom he gave me away. I was Daddy’s gift, you see, Mona – he always called me that, “God’s gift” – Theodora.’ I pat the chain round my neck. ‘It’s why I wear this. He bought it for me when I was born. I was always the closest to him.’

  ‘It’s very beautiful. Is it real gold?’

  ‘Oh yes. Daddy would never have bought fake. It’s eighteen carat.’

  ‘Precious.’

  ‘Yes. Anyway. I owed it to him to marry someone he liked and approved of. That’s what I thought.’

  ‘It’s important your family are happy with your husband. I think this is good,’ Mona says.

  ‘Yes, maybe. But it’s not the only reason to marry! Roger was wrong for me. He didn’t want a woman with a mind of her own and a career! He wanted the sort of wife who enjoys entertaining and making the house beautiful. I was bored living out there with him, bored and frustrated.’

  Mona frowns.

  ‘Sorry. I’m talking too fast. It was as though . . . I became invisible when I was with him. After I had Leo, I was content for a while. I felt such intense love for my son it enabled me to tolerate everything else. But once Leo started school I knew it wasn’t the life for me.’

  There’s a silence after this and I wonder what Mona’s thinking. I’m hardly concerned. She is an earpiece, nothing more, someone impartial who can’t possibly have any real influence or impact on my life. I don’t even know how much she understands, I’m simply relieved to talk.

  So I go on.

  ‘Admitting I’d never loved him was terrible. It meant either putting up with it, or acting on it. And I didn’t want to break up my marriage or tear Leo from the heart of his home. But then we returned to London for a few months. The BBC begged me to come back to work with them. I wanted to desperately, but knew Roger wouldn’t have it. It was while we were living back here, the day at the Proms, that I met Max. He had a week off to sightsee. He was looking for the Serpentine Gallery, he said. Was he anywhere near, did I know? Of course I knew! I knew the artist exhibiting there too, someone I loved – Chris Offili. I waved my arm in the right direction across the park, proud to be at home here, that I was a Londoner. “I guess you’re local?” he said. He was a doctor – a professor, in fact, over from the States for some conference. He had been to London before, but never alone, never with this time on his hands.’

  I’ve lost Mona now, I can see. She has a glazed look in her eyes, is thinking of something else. She probably doesn’t understand half what I’m saying.

  ‘He was handsome, tall with a beard . . .’

  ‘Ali had a beard,’ says Mona.

  I barely hear her, I’m so engrossed in my tale, in reminiscing. Max’s voice was deep and breathy – as if he had just finished making love and was preparing for a cigarette. I found it sexy immediately, wanted to sit and listen to him all afternoon. I almost wished Roger would never come back from wherever he’d gone. The power of the voice! How we underestimate it.

  I never thought I’d go for a man with a beard either, but on Max it was another thing that attracted me to him. A neat goatee that sprinkled his chin, greying, flecked, ginger hairs mixed in with black. Like Endymion, my cat, whose three colours are mingled. It was neatly trimmed and, before I could help it, I found myself imagining the texture of it against my skin.

  I explained that London had many hearts from which its inhabitants sort of fan out, and from which the energy pulses; that the Albert Memorial was one of those hearts. He looked as if he found me amusing. I recall our conversation.

  ‘You have to be careful,’ I said. ‘There are impostors. Places you might imagine were crucial to the city that aren’t.’

  ‘Fake hearts?’

  ‘Yes. Pacemakers!’

  He laughed. ‘London’s quite a riddle then? I certainly find it hard to navigate. No blocks. It’s a maze.’

  ‘Would you like me to show you?’ I asked him before I knew what I was doing.

  I was overcome by pride in the city I loved. The attraction I felt for Max was instant and so powerful I was practically knocked sideways. My unconscious knew it before I did. I was ensuring we would meet again, before I’d told myself what was happening. I, too, had a week off. Now I knew I was going to spend it with him.

  Later, in my fanciful state I imagined that Queen Victoria’s feelings for Albert had somehow transmitted themselves to Max and me. That we were caught in its metaphysical force. Before Roger returned, I had arranged to take Max to an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery the next day. And we’d exchanged mobile numbers. I had already, even before Roger and I crossed Kensington Gore to the Prom we were about to attend, fallen in love with him.

  Later, when Max had gone back to the States, and I to Morocco, he started to send me photos of the statues he thought we should meet beside whenever we were both in London. We’d met first by Albert’s statue, so he wanted it to become our thing.

  Max tried to find erotic ones – the naked bronze of Psyche on Chelsea Bridge. Achilles at Hyde Park Corner, wearing nothing but his little fig leaf. Then the stone mermaids on one of the pediments over the eastern entrance to Victoria Station, and the lady wearing nothing but a headscarf draped seductively around her, atop the Palace Theatre in Cambridge Circus – a sexy vision that I would never have noticed were it not for Max, opening my eyes to the secrets of my own city.

  When we ran out of erotic statues we moved on. We met at Nelson’s Column one night, of course, and on another occasion squished ourselves between Roosevelt and Churchill in Bond Street. We kissed passionately beneath the bronze Angel of Peace at Wellington Arch and had a romantic late-summer rendezvous beside the Goatherd’s Daughter in Regent’s Park where Max read out to me the inscription To all the Protectors of the Defenceless.

  ‘The only drawback,’ I say out loud now to Mona, ‘was that Max was married, with three children, and was not about to smash up his family to be with me.’

  ‘But you left Roger for this man,’ Mona says.

  ‘It wasn’t as simple as that.’

  Leo was still a child then. I had no intention of breaking up his home. Neither did I want to let Daddy down. I tried to keep my love for Max secret – I even tried to kill it, to stifle my feelings. Roger and I returned to Morocco and carried on as before. But each time I came back to London – I’d got a little work on the radio with the World Service and had to come for meetings at the BBC – Max and I would meet, returning to our respective families after each liaison. Roger need never find out. I thought that I could lead a double life and get away with it, without hurting anyone.

  One day, the inevitable happened. Roger found my phone, the erotic texts.

  ‘You must promise not to see him again, or else you can get out of here and I’ll file for divorce,’ he told me. He was so used to me doing as he said, I think he believed I’d agree never to see Max again.

  I left.

  ‘It broke my heart, of course, leaving Leo. But they’d offered me work if I came back to London. We were in the fortunate position of owning a house here. And it meant I could see Max without guilt.’

  ‘So this Max, you love very much?’ says Mona.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, I think I do.’

  ‘But he is married. To another woman. He is not your husband. And a husband is good – he makes money, for you, for your child. Lovers don’t do this.’

  I look at her. Remind myself again that she is
widowed and must only feel the absence of a husband. I know how people elevate the dead in their imaginations.

  ‘I fell in love, Mona. You don’t behave rationally when you’re in love! Anyway, I’m telling you all this because I’m going to see Max on Friday. Now,’ I say at last, realising I’ve gone on far too long. ‘Tell me more about yourself. Where did Roger find you?’

  A closed look. A look that would begin to frustrate me. A discreet, polite smile.

  ‘There is not so much to tell,’ she begins. ‘I used to work in a garment factory, before I married. But I gave it up later because Ali was earning money. So when he died, I had nothing. The factory had cut back on their employees. I couldn’t find work.’

  ‘Oh, that’s terrible.’

  ‘Yes, but then Amina, my friend – she works for your husband and Claudia – found me work near their house with their neighbours. A Saudi family. Very wealthy, with a big house. I thought I was lucky when I got this job, cleaning for Madame Sherif, looking after her children.’

  ‘Where did you learn your English, Mona?’

  ‘From this work. I learned to speak, but I can’t write or read English very well. This is something I’d like to learn.’

  She looks at me as if she expects me to say something.

  When I don’t, she continues, ‘But then I had to leave.’

  ‘Yes. Roger says the family were going back to Saudi.’

  ‘That’s not the truth,’ she says. She turns, her eyes are full.

  The light’s gone, and the bench underneath us is cold. I want to get home now, we’ve been here long enough. But she goes on.

  ‘She and her husband were not going back to Saudi. But her husband, he touched me, he tried to . . .’ She stops.

  ‘That’s terrible,’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Very terrible for me.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to tell Madame. But one day she saw me in her room, her husband behind me. His hands were on me. She called me bad names. She said I made him do these things.’

  ‘You poor woman.’

  ‘She said I had to go. She said it was all my fault.’

  ‘It’s disgraceful that he took advantage of you being in the house, in that vulnerable position where you couldn’t object.’

  ‘Yes. If I complained, nobody believed me.’

  I gaze at her. She doesn’t look like the kind of woman a man would try to take advantage of – although, of course, men are unfathomable. She doesn’t look as if she would let him get away with it. She’s not a young innocent thing, as Zidana was, though I’m beginning to see that Mona has a certain allure. She’s more rested these days, and her hair, now she’s washed it, is thicker, glossier. Yes, I can see with a little makeover and the right clothes, she could have her own kind of beauty.

  ‘I said to Madame, “But I am married – why do I want your husband?” And she said, “Your husband is dead. You are trying to get a new one. You see he is rich, and you try to steal him from me. Now you get out of my house.” She was a very bad employer.’

  Mona begins to cry.

  Tears, I think, are useful things. Therapeutic, yes, when one is overwhelmed by emotions, but they can also be turned on easily when someone’s desperate to prove something to you. I see it every day on the phone-in.

  She wipes her eyes on the back of a wrist. Sniffs loudly.

  ‘You can see it is hard to work for a bad man who is unfaithful to his wife. And for a woman who won’t see what’s happening under her nose. I wanted to help her. To make her see the man she was with. But Madame, she shouted, she said, “You are wasting my time, my money! I am not paying you to steal my husband.” She told me to leave!’

  ‘Awful for you.’

  ‘I told my friend Amina. Amina was working for Roger. She asked Roger to help. So Roger told me about you. And now I’m here.’

  ‘Yes. You’re with me now, Mona, and no one will take advantage of you.’ I stand up and brush the creases out of my coat. ‘Time to go home,’ I say. ‘It’s cold.’ And as I start to walk back along the river path, I notice she falls naturally behind, in my shadow as if, in spite of our recent intimacies, she knows her place, after all.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I’m busy tidying my room, after our walk by the river, when my door swings open. Startled, I look up.

  Dora’s standing there.

  For a moment I’m afraid that she’s going to accuse me of stealing. Her face is stern. But when she speaks she’s as polite as anything.

  ‘Excuse me, Mona, I’m sorry to interrupt you,’ she says, ‘but I want to pay you. I’ve taken off the first instalment of the cost of your passport and ticket, for Roger, but here’s the month’s money that I owe you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  When she’s gone, I fold the banknotes, put them into an envelope and write Ummu’s address on the front.

  In the morning, early, I phone home.

  ‘I’m sending money, Ummu. Look out for it. It’s not as much as I’d have liked, but I have to pay off the passport and the ticket first. Tell me some news from home.’

  ‘You missed a spectacle yesterday,’ my mother says. ‘Fahida found her employer knocked out on the floor. He’d been climbing out of his bath and collapsed. You know him? The old English teacher. There was a gas leak. She got the whole medina up to help her move him. She covered him up with a towel, she said, because he was stark naked – his little thing curled up like a dried date.’ She laughs her rough rasping laugh, then starts to cough.

  I picture her there, shouting into the phone, her friends in the room behind her, slapping their thighs.

  When she’s quiet again I speak. ‘Did you get my gift?’

  ‘The hand cream?’

  ‘I thought you deserved it. Your hands get so sore, immersed in water every day.’

  ‘It’s very nice, thank you, Mona. But you mustn’t go spending your money on luxuries. Things aren’t any easier here.’

  ‘It didn’t cost much, Ummu. Only the postage, in fact.’ I don’t tell her that I hadn’t bought it at all, or how I paid for the postage – out of a little bit of Charles’s shopping money he’ll never miss.

  ‘Last time we spoke, you sounded as if you needed a little bit of pampering. When you get the money, please do see the doctor about your cough. You can’t look after Leila if you’re unwell.’

  ‘Stop your fussing, Mona. I’m perfectly well.’

  I’d believe her if she didn’t break off every two minutes to hack and splutter.

  ‘I know you don’t want me to ask, but I need to know if you’ve heard from Ali. Or if anyone has – Yousseff, maybe.’

  ‘Not a word.’

  ‘I’m afraid he must be trying to get in touch. Something’s stopping him.’

  ‘You know what I think.’

  ‘You’re wrong.’

  ‘A man who doesn’t get in touch doesn’t want to.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘You must give up on Ali. If people find out you have a husband who’s vanished – especially one with his record . . .’

  ‘Don’t, Ummu!’

  ‘They won’t want you in the house. Careful what you say, Mona, the walls have ears.’

  ‘It’s OK. She believes I’m a widow.’

  ‘Good. Let it stay that way. You should be looking about for a proper husband with a nice well-paid job. Surely this Dora can introduce you to an Englishman with a bit of spare cash.’

  ‘Stop this, Ummu.’

  ‘And there’s no husband, who might have friends, colleagues?’

  ‘No, but she has a lover.’

  ‘Ooh. Interesting. What’s he like?’

  ‘A doctor, she tells me. Max.’

  ‘Rich?’

  ‘What difference would that make?’

  ‘Well, you won’t get much out of a man with nothing.’

  I laugh. My mother’s determination is amazing.

&
nbsp; ‘Since you ask, he’s a doctor. A professor. Of course he’s rich!’

  ‘Have you met him?’

  ‘Not yet. He’s American, she told me.’

  ‘Oooh!’

  ‘I’ll let you know all about him if and when I do meet him. But no, as yet, I’ve only seen a picture.’

  ‘Is he handsome?’

  ‘You are unbelievable!’

  ‘Mona! You are a woman in need. A man with money is useful. If you keep your wits about you, you may find he can help you. Citizenship, for example. He might have connections. That’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘OK. I’ve got the message.’

  ‘You’re not in a position to turn down help.’

  ‘OK. Now, hand me to Leila.’

  Leila seems better, tells me she’s been playing out on the alley with Ahmed and some other children, that they’ve invented a new hiding game. Judging from her happy chattering I guess she’s beginning to get used to me not being there. What a mixture of remorse and relief this brings.

  But when I’m about to finish the call, she whispers, ‘I miss you, Ummu,’ and I wonder just how much she’s having to put on a brave face for my mother’s benefit.

  I also think about Ummu’s words: Things aren’t any easier here – and I wonder what she means.

  It’s time to go to Charles, to get him up.

  Dora’s in the kitchen already. We greet each other and I go down the hallway to the front door and round to the back steps.

  ‘Mona!’ Charles is calling me from the depths of the house. ‘Mona! Where are you! I need you! Mona!’

  I stand for a few more seconds at the top of the steps, my hand resting on the stone head of the woman, thinking about Leila at home wanting me too, knowing that however loudly she shouts, I won’t come.

  I wait for my tears to subside.

  And then I go down.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN