Losing My Identity Page 13

  Ye gods. Another one who thought he deserved praise for having bred successfully. Leila was ninety per cent sure there wasn’t a damn thing wrong with the pony, but she ran her fingers over its legs while she tried to look knowledgeable and professional. ‘I can’t see much wrong. Get her to trot round a little for me.’

  The beast was in perfect shape.

  ‘I don’t see any cause for concern.’

  ‘That’s good. And how about the other one? He belongs to my son. Of course, the poor creature doesn’t get ridden nearly enough these days. Just for a week or so during the school hols. And he’s a tad too small for Andrew now. Sprouting like a ruddy docken, that boy. New school uniform every term.’

  She dutifully examined the black pony. ‘Nothing at all wrong with this one either – except he could afford to lose some weight.’

  Tarquin gave a theatrical sigh and patted his own stomach. ‘Couldn’t we all! Not you, I mean. But I could.’

  ‘Same advice for you as for the pony then – less rich feeding and a bit more exercise.’

  He guffawed as they walked back towards the gate. ‘I like your style, Miss Leila Ghazali. Such a small world, that we were both attached to the same college. What brought you to this part of the world – I think that’s a faintly Scottish accent I hear?’

  Bugger! Very few people detected that! ‘Work brought me. Are both your children at boarding school then?’

  He pushed away the black pony, which was following them. ‘They are. But they don’t live with me, except for a few visits. Their mother and I aren’t together any more. I thought Simon may have mentioned.’

  ‘My goodness! You live here all alone?’

  His smile made her stomach clench. ‘Yes, poor me. All alone. Do you ride, Leila?’

  ‘Not well. I’ve never been lucky enough to have a horse of my own.’ She was aware she sounded a real sour-puss.

  ‘I thought it might be in the blood. Ghazali,’ he put his head on one side and regarded her quizzically. ‘Unusual name. No relation to old Youssri El-Ghazali then, I suppose?’

  Leila stumbled on a tussock of grass and almost fell over. Tarquin gripped her arm to steady her.

  ‘That was certainly my father’s name. But I’m not sure he ever lived in this country…’

  ‘Of course he did. Owned a string of the most spectacular racehorses.’ His voice softened. ‘It was the horsey connection that occurred to me, since you specialise in equine medicine. I hope I haven’t put my foot in it – you sound upset?’

  ‘Just a little. I never knew my father.’ A name on her birth certificate. A footnote in her life.

  She detested self-pity, but although she fought it, she felt her eyes brim. He noticed. He stopped walking and drew her round into an embrace.

  ‘I’m sorry, dear girl. I didn’t mean to distress you.’ He produced a vaguely grubby hankie, and dabbed her eyes tenderly, then gave her an avuncular peck on the cheek. ‘Parents divorced?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Poor you. I’m trying to protect my kids from the worst effects of all that shenanigans,’ he added. ‘I thought maybe you’d gone to Cambridge because it’s so close to Newmarket. I didn’t know him well, you realise. I met him a few times, and I suppose he made a big impression on me. There was nothing about horses he didn’t know. Handsome man too. I see a definite family resemblance, my dear.’

  ‘This sounds like a silly question, Mr Buckley…’

  ‘Tarquin, please.’

  ‘Tarquin. Do you know what happened to my father? My mother never speaks about him.’

  ‘You poor lass! I’m not absolutely sure, but I think he died in a riding accident about a dozen years ago? You’d have been a child.’ She’d have been thirteen. ‘He’d lost a lot of money in some obscure business scheme, and he was down to a single horse, which he was training himself. He was thrown and hit his head. One of those freak things that happen.’

  A gambler then, in every way. ‘Oh, right. It’s good to know anyway.’

  ‘Poor fatherless lamb! That’s why I’ve been so keen to keep up a good connection with my two, even though my ex-wife has custody.’ They sauntered back towards the stables. ‘You certainly don’t look at all like your sister – though she must be a good ten years older than you. More like twenty, in fact.’

  ‘I don’t have a sister.’

  Tarquin stopped again. ‘El-Ghazali had another daughter – you’ve surely met her?’

  ‘I had no idea she existed. Have you met her too?’

  He looked vaguely into the distance. ‘Possibly, once. Yasmin, I seem to recall. Not nearly so striking-looking as you.’

  But obviously a nicer personality, if her father had taken her around with him on his travels. Tarquin had met her, for God’s sake!

  He laid a comforting arm round her shoulders once more. ‘All right? That must have come as a bit of a shock to you. I put my foot in it as usual. Should have broken it to you more gently. You genuinely have no memory of him?’

  ‘As far as I know, I never set eyes on him, nor he on me. And my mother seems to have destroyed any photographs there were.’

  And of course, Leila had only her mother’s word for it that he took no interest in his child. She determined to tax Greer with this the next time she was home.

  Tarquin laughed ruefully. ‘Probably my ex has burned all the photos of me. But at least I see my kids, during school vacations at any rate. They’re both here in a couple of weeks’ time. Maybe you’d be good enough to come back, give Andrew some advice about getting weight off that pony of his. If you have time, let’s book an appointment?’

  Leila walked off briskly to find Simon. He was already pulling off his boiler-suit. ‘I’ve given her an injection of anti-inflammatory, stitched it and bandaged it,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Shouldn’t need any further attention. I’ll send Leila back in a week to check it – but of course, if you’re concerned in the meantime, just call.’

  And, naturally, it didn’t stop at an appointment to give dietary advice on ponies. She simply couldn’t resist Tarquin, that had been the truth of it. Not only physically attractive, but clever and witty and debonair, and all the things she wasn’t. And passionate. An antidote to Sam.

  She had moved in with Tarquin by the time the school holidays were over. She’d turned twenty-five. She was a big girl. Because she’d not been on horseback in earnest for at least ten years, she had persuaded Catherine to give her emergency lessons. She fell into the country-living routine like a pig in clover.

  Leila had questioned Greer the first time she’d paid a flying visit home.

  ‘Did you know my father was dead?’

  ‘Of course I knew. He didn’t leave a single penny to either of us, by the way.’

  ‘And did you know he had another daughter? My half-sister. Where does she live?’

  ‘How the hell would I know? You’re probably his only legitimate daughter.’

  ‘How did you meet him anyway? I didn’t know you were interested in racehorses.’

  A hollow laugh. ‘He came to one of my shows. He bought two paintings.’

  Years later, once the internet was available, she searched for her father’s name, and found an old grainy photograph. Tall, like her. And yes, he was a handsome man. As an afterthought, sometime after Greer died she had traced Yasmin too. She was in fact almost twenty years older, and she’d lived in London until her death in 2010. So near, and yet so far. Leila had a few moments of deep regret at never having tried to find her before. Yasmin had kept the ‘El’ in her name. And either she had never married, or she’d kept her own name, like Leila herself.

  It had been around six months into the affair when Simon observed casually one forenoon, ‘You watch yourself, Leila. Enough complications in your life without adding that family to them, I imagine. I take it you know he’s still banging his wife?’

  She choked on her coffee. ‘His ex-wife. And he’s not.’

  ‘Ex-wife be damned. They’re not d
ivorced. And the entire neighbourhood knows he’s still porking her. Why do you think he’s away for such a long time every time he drops the kids off? Giving her one, then doing the same for you when he gets back, no doubt. He has stamina, I’ll say that for him. But a dangerous liaison, honey-pie. I’d get out of it while you’re still in one piece, if I were you.’

  Leila had started to cry, cursing herself for being so weak.

  ‘I thought you knew? Everyone knows. I must say, I was surprised. I didn’t have you down as happy to play the second fiddle. You could do so much better than that for yourself. A word to the wise: I suspect you have a bit of a father fixation, my dear.’ And he’d slid his arm round her shoulders in what he imagined she’d perceive as a fatherly embrace.

  As if she was going to let him comfort her!

  But maybe he was right. Tarquin was twenty years older, after all…

  Her first reaction? Heartbreak? No. Fury that her boss knew she was being strung along. Humiliation that she was being made to look like a naive idiot. She knew why Simon was being such a pig; his own marriage was far from perfect.

  And of course, in that moment she also understood why Angela Buckley-Ford’s reaction had been so strange a few weeks previously, when she’d walked into the house to find a scene of domestic bliss. Leila had been stationed at the cooker, trying to grill salmon steaks so they were exactly the way Simon preferred them – charred on the outside, still soft and pink on the inside – rather than incinerated, as per her usual culinary protocol with fish. (Leila had always hated fish. Nothing you could do to it stopped it tasting of: fish.)

  But even all those years later, she distinctly remembered thinking, ‘Fuck it, I’m in this woman’s kitchen, although it isn’t really hers any more. I know how I’d feel…’ Angela had been clinically polite; Leila had noted that the older woman’s vowels were even more clipped than her ex-husband’s. She had almost decided there and then to leave him. She knew she had never been cut out to be ‘the other woman’.

  Simon’s revelation clinched it, because she knew instinctively he was telling the truth. Tarquin was no better than a prize ram. Just an animal, going from one to the next. He should have had a blue ink-pad strapped to his chest. And although animals were Leila’s thing, she’d never wanted to be a sheep.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid Leila! She had racked her brains. She was sure he had said he was divorced. She should have demanded to see the decree absolute.

  ‘Don’t blame yourself, Leila,’ Simon had said patronisingly. ‘You’re not the first woman to be taken in by his blarney. Not by a long chalk. Why do you think Angela left him in the first place?’

  ‘Why didn’t you warn me?’

  And he’d merely shrugged. ‘I thought you had more sense. I assumed you knew the score.’

  Perhaps, with hindsight, she hadn’t been as naive as she’d blamed herself for being. People like Tarquin had never worn wedding rings, just a discreet gold signet ring, emblazoned with a crest, on the pinkie. No giveaway mark.

  Leila had left that practice in double-quick time. Simon hadn’t been above flirting with her himself at every chance. It was long before the days when sexual harassment at work was a thing, and she had really wanted that job (if only to prove to herself that letting Sam go had been the right thing to do). Even then, there was a perennial shortage of vets in Britain, but it was always difficult to find a good pitch when you were newly qualified. However, she gave in her notice anyway, and was off to Cumbria within a month, to a less well-paid post – but one that allowed her to get home to visit Greer more often, and in a practice where there was more chance of becoming a partner before she was thirty.

  Beatrice, who was the receptionist there, was the one she’d found herself confiding in; after all, the last person she could have spilled the beans to was her mother; she’d as soon have aired her humiliation in public on The Jeremy Kyle Show, had such a farce existed in 1976.

  Tarquin found out where she was; of course he did. He arrived outside the house she was renting, at midnight, three days after she had moved in. He made such a racket that she opened the door.

  He pressed huge bunches of freesias into her arms. He knelt on the stone floor and clung to her legs. He wept. He said he’d not meant to deceive her, but that he’d realised from the off she’d never have agreed to sleep with him if she’d suspected he was still married. He said the divorce proceedings had started. He said his kids were distraught; they loved her as much as he did. (Possibly true; because she had accepted that he didn’t love her at all; you don’t lie to people you love.)

  Then he pled with her. ‘One more time, then, if you won’t come back to me, darling. We can’t let it finish like this. One more time, Leila.’

  Pleading had moved quickly to manhandling. Thus it had ended on the note of beating off a potential rape. Leila had grabbed a heavy brass candlestick (her landlady hadn’t understood the term “unfurnished”). She marked him, as he’d marked her. She knew she should have gone to the police, let them photograph the bruises on her arms and her throat. But Kendal’s a small town. She would have found herself all over the local press. She had moved to a different address as soon as she could get out of her lease.

  For a long time, she loathed Simon for being right, and for being the one to shatter the illusion. It was decades before she could accept that he’d done her a good turn. Since then, she had been careful not to fall for anyone so completely. Tarquin could so easily have been ‘the one’. But he was, in the end, nothing more than another lying, two-timing bastard.

  Simon came to a sticky end. Managed to shoot himself in the throat with a crossbow he was supposedly adjusting. Leila would not have wished that on him, whatever he’d done.

  She was unwise enough to attend his funeral. One of the other vets told her Simon’s wife had dumped him shortly after Leila had left. She’d been convinced he’d been having an affair with her. ‘One affair too many,’ said her colleague. She was doubly mortified to think everyone had believed that of her.

  It soured her. For years afterwards, nothing much seemed to matter. Not career or clothes or where she lived. She felt as if her life was over at twenty-six. She’d got into the relationship with Tarquin far too easily. Her answer was to eschew close relationships altogether.

  And she was fairly successful with that.

  Until 1985.

  Leila could appreciate, from the vantage-point of nearly forty years on, that Tarquin didn’t so much break her heart as dent her vanity. He’d made her feel stupid.

  Where it had affected her more was in her work. She never found it particularly fulfilling, after that time. Not that she altogether regretted her choice of career. But it had never defined her. Not the way Hari’s work defined him, or the magical, esoteric world of numbers had defined Sam.

  All this, in severely paraphrased form, she poured out to Hari. She left out the attempted rape.

  ‘That’s why you were so hung up on the ring thing? You thought I was another married man hitting on you?’ Hari groaned a little, and struck his forehead with his palm. ‘I’m sorry. I handled all that very clumsily. It’s just that when I saw you that first night, I knew. If I’d had any sense, I’d have had the ring off there and then, in the first five minutes, so you never saw it. I think I hate this Tarquin guy,’ he added. ‘He scarred your soul. Shall I find him and have him done away with? I know people, you understand. And I’m very well-placed to plan the perfect, undetectable crime…’

  ‘No need. He managed to do that himself.’

  Hari was taken aback. ‘What – another suicide?’

  ‘Car crash. He drove like a madman. It was only a matter of time.’

  ‘While you were still in touch with him?’

  ‘No! I come from a long line of proud, independent single women,’ Leila added after a moment of silence. Hari did his eyebrow-flash thing. ‘They’d been married. But they’d been let down. They didn’t need a man to define them, and they were perfectly
happy.’ Eva’s voice was in her head. A woman needs a man the way a cobra needs a concertina, pet.

  ‘But you weren’t happy, on your own.’ A statement, not a question.

  ‘I was perfectly content.’

  ‘So was I. But content’s different from happy. Aren’t you happier now?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘You see? You weren’t perfectly happy.’

  Leila wasn’t so sure. It was like saying loving is better than liking. She liked Hari, and trusted him. Didn’t that mean she was being greedy if she loved him too?

  They walked on without speaking for a few moments.

  ‘Tarquin had met my father, funnily enough. Small world. And he told me I had a half-sister.’

  ‘Did you ever meet her?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Don’t you want to?’

  When she had worked with the practice in Cumbria, she had a client who used to get Leila to go to horse sales with her – all the important ones around the UK. She’d scan the faces in the crowd, wondering if she would have recognised Yasmin if she’d been there…

  ‘Too late. She’s gone too. Four years ago. She was a lot older than me. But I regret not trying to find her. Blood’s thicker than water, and all that.’

  Hari guffawed. ‘You’re more likely to be murdered by a family member than by a stranger. I’ve seen enough matricides and patricides and fratricides to be sure of that. No one can hate another person so much as a blood relative. Hate’s thicker than blood. So, Leila Ghazali. We’re two poor singletons, all alone in the world. I think that means we should stick together, don’t you?’

  They snuggled together – rather uncomfortably, because there wasn’t really enough space – on the chesterfield sofa after supper. Leila stroked his left eyebrow, where there was a small scar under the flaw. ‘What caused that?’

  ‘Fell off a wall when I was a kid. I was mildly concussed.’

  ‘Poor Hari.’