Losing My Identity Page 19

  Hari went out to tend to the bunnies and bed them down for the night. By the time he came back, Leila was almost sleepy. He slid in beside her, and she lay with her head on his chest, revelling in the feeling of safety. She listened to the quiet, solid rhythm of his heart-beat.

  ‘You don’t mind that I’m on the hirsute side?’ he said.

  ‘Except for your head! No, I don’t mind. It’s just you, as you’re meant to be. I quite like it.’

  She had a sudden, unbidden mental picture of herself nosying one day in a chest of drawers in Tarquin’s bedroom, early in the relationship, and finding a roll of what she’d thought at first was double-sided carpet tape. An unopened roll beside it still had its label: wig tape. And she’d never suspected. How naive! All she’d registered was that he didn’t like her to run her fingers through his hair. Everything about him had been fake, from that lock of black hair that flopped over his forehead to his divorce. She smirked to herself at the memory.

  Hari sighed. ‘Some women hate it. I think you and I are very well-suited physically, Leila. As well as mentally. We’re even the right height for each other.’

  Now an image of elfin, bird-frail Anita rose in her mind. Damn! Her radio and ear-buds were in the car.

  ‘Hari – what would have happened if we’d met five years ago? Or ten?’

  He sighed. ‘I’d have had to do something proactive, wouldn’t I? But I would have done, whenever we’d met.’

  So would I, she thought as she tried to fall asleep.

  Sam had never feared death. She derived some comfort from that.

  They made it to the cottage next day, to a weekend of perfect late summer weather. Now that they’d fitted draught-proofing round all the windows, Leila fell to thinking that maybe they could use it over the winter. It had been years since she was there after the end of October. When Greer was in her prime (and her prime lasted until well into her eighties), they’d gone for Christmas most years – though until the 1970s they spent Christmas Eve and the day itself up at the big house with Sir John. Funny how she always thought of him with the title, as if it was part of his name. He’d been her mother’s lover. He might have been Leila’s stepfather, had they ever got round to regularising it.

  Her fondest memories of Greer were from Ardvreckie. She could visualise her mother, hair blowing around her face, wearing one of her wide, hippie-style kaftans, painting like a fury, her easel sand-bagged against the wind.

  She slept eventually, and dreamed about Sam.

  It had been June 1985, when Leila was in Cambridge visiting Catherine (she was working in a practice in Huntingdon by then, so they met up fairly regularly). Her friend had tugged at her arm suddenly as they walked past the front of King’s. ‘Isn’t that…?’

  Sam spotted Leila at the same moment. ‘I knew I’d find you if I hung around here long enough,’ he said calmly. He kissed her on the cheek. ‘How are you, old girl? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘Is it any wonder? I thought you were dead, Sam.’

  ‘Well, as you can see, I’m not. Let’s all go for a drink,’ he’d said, sliding one arm through hers and one through Catherine’s, and guiding them round the corner to the Eagle pub. He installed them at a corner table and brought back glasses and a bottle of whisky.

  She’d been furious. ‘All these years, never any word, then you turn up as if nothing had happened. I tried asking about you via the university, you know. There were so many stories in the press here, so many bodies never found, or thrown into the sea because there was nowhere safe to bury them…’

  ‘Take more than a war to kill me, sweetheart. You’d have loved it there. It was exciting. One of the militias had pink uniforms.’

  He moved on to entertaining anecdotes about the war; about being at a dinner party in a block of flats close to where bombs started falling, and of guests carrying their plates and glasses down to the dusty basement, to continue their meal there; about watching a couple dancing a tango in another basement-cum-bomb-shelter while the mortar-fire brought clouds of plaster down on their heads… Then he’d leaned forward and kissed Leila, full on the lips. She hadn’t drawn away, even though she could smell the tobacco on his breath.

  ‘You still use the same cologne,’ she’d said, burying her nose against his neck for the briefest moment.

  ‘Of course I do. I’m a creature of habit.’

  Catherine made her excuses, and within minutes, Sam and Leila were in conversation as if he’d never been away. And boy, had he been away. He’d stayed in Beirut, lecturing at an increasingly fragmented university, until 1980, and since then he had been all over the world, before settling for two years in Brazil, with relatives who’d emigrated when he was still a child. He’d found time to get married, and divorced. He’d been back in Britain, in London, for several months. Now he was headed for a job in Paris, at the Sorbonne. She had known he was going to ask her to go with him. She knew she was going to say yes that time.

  Ancestry will out, Leila told herself. I was responding to some sort of atavistic imperative. Besides which, I realised as soon as I saw him again that day: I still loved him, deep down. The Tarquin thing was merely a rebound.

  Sam had lifted her left hand and examined the ring finger closely, then done the same with her right hand.

  ‘What?’ she couldn’t help laughing.

  ‘I needed to be sure. After all, you might have married a Norwegian.’ He was still holding her right hand in both of his.

  ‘I haven’t married anyone. I don’t mean to marry anyone.’

  ‘Don’t say that! We should have got married back then,’ he’d said calmly. ‘We need to rectify that.’

  ‘Rectify?’

  ‘Stop arguing, woman. We’ll get married now, right away.’

  ‘Today?’

  ‘Today. This minute would be good.’

  ‘I don’t get married on the spur of the moment, you idiot! You said you’d married someone else anyway.’

  ‘I did. I divorced her very quickly though.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she wasn’t you. Come on, Leila. We should have got wed a decade ago and had about eight kids by now.’

  ‘Great. I’d really have wanted eight kids.’

  ‘We still have time to have one.’

  Her mind had flipped to the conversation with her mother, back in the ’70s, when she’d announced that she meant to marry a Lebanese man: ‘Hah! Another mediaeval society where women are chattels rather than partners,’ Greer had shrieked triumphantly. ‘I don’t perceive you as being cut out to be an Arab wife, Leila, any more than I was.’ ‘Why did you marry an Egyptian then?’ ‘Because I didn’t know, did I? I’m giving you the benefit of my experience. I had no one to counsel me not to do it.’ ‘You had Grannie.’ And Greer had tossed her head. ‘Grannie! What did she know about Arabs!’ ‘Sam’s not an Arab.’ She’d been treated to the full-beam ice glare. ‘You said he’s from Lebanon?’ ‘Yes, but his parents have a mixed marriage. His mother’s some sort of Catholic. It’s his father that’s Muslim. Apparently that’s not at all uncommon, in Beirut. It’s a very modern place. Not like Glasgow.’ She’d been, truth to tell, vague about it, because although she’d tried to concentrate on Sam’s explanations of how things were in Lebanon, it was all terribly complicated. Like Northern Ireland, only worse.

  Greer had thrown back her head and guffawed. ‘My, talk about being a glutton for punishment! If you are mad enough to give up your course at this stage for him, you’re even less rational than I thought. If he’s serious, he’ll wait for you. And if he doesn’t, you’re well out of it.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s the clincher,’ Sam had said, that day in 1985, leaning close to gaze into her eyes. ‘I’ve learnt to cook. I’m good. I could have been a chef. I’ll teach you.’

  She had protested that she didn’t need lessons, thank you very much.

  But she was still sufficiently taken in by the charm, the boyish good looks (hair s
tarting to turn grey – but he retained that almost simian attractiveness) that they were married indeed, not that day, obviously, but within weeks rather than months. The ceremony was in Kensington Register Office (the same place Greer had married Youssri El-Ghazali), and they didn’t tell anyone. Not her mother, not Catherine, not any of her other friends. No one from Sam’s family attended. They perpetuated the old cliché of persuading two strangers from the street to act as witnesses. Leila wore a plain ivory linen sheath dress, and her grandmother’s necklace. (The dress was hanging in her wardrobe, carefully stored in a moth-proof carrier. It still fitted her, almost, though she had to breathe in hard to get the zip to fasten.)

  But Sam’s time in Lebanon had changed him. The old Sam had died in the war. He had a slight tremor in his right hand. He was drinking far more than he used to, and chain-smoking. He had also lost that facility he’d had, to make Leila feel like the only other person in the world; special. She’d worried at first that it was a result of the broken marriage. It wasn’t. It was the broken city.

  And he’d lost none of the rootlessness that had driven her mad when she was first with him. She was mature enough by then to realise that he wasn’t so much from a dysfunctional family (though that too; his parents had separated long before she knew him) as from a dysfunctional society, a dysfunctional country. Neither one thing nor the other. One half of his DNA at war with the other.

  He was still just as besotted with Beirut. He saw the gracious old houses with their walls unscarred by shrapnel, and their windows still intact, the street trees in full bloom rather than shredded, dilapidated stumps.

  It was a disaster. Because of commuting, they saw each other at weekends, and little more. In less than two years, he was off again. This time, he didn’t invite her to accompany him. He didn’t even tell her he was going; merely a note left on the hall table. She missed his cooking far more than she missed him in bed.

  If they’d been able to spend more of their time making food and very little time making love, they might have stayed together.

  We are shaped as much by the decisions we didn’t make as the ones we did.

  Fifteen

  Hari had only been called out at night a handful of times while Leila was staying with him (or he with her). There were half a dozen pathologists in the team the CPS contracted from Glasgow University, but he was by far the most senior and experienced. It was always something ultra-unpleasant if it was urgent. But he had never broken his rule of leaving his official persona behind when he left work. He certainly didn’t strike her as a candidate for the Monday morning heart attack, because he genuinely didn’t let the stress of his job penetrate that calm shell of his.

  She heard him come back in at about half-five. He normally came straight back to bed, and she’d cuddle him till he fell asleep again. When he hadn’t appeared within a few minutes, she went to investigate, thinking she must have been dreaming.

  She found him in one of the armchairs in the sitting room, in semi-darkness – the curtains were still drawn.

  ‘Are you OK? I wondered why you hadn’t come back to bed.’

  ‘I didn’t want to wake you.’

  ‘I wasn’t asleep.’

  There was something in his voice that sounded odd. Leila perched on the arm of the chair, and he drew her down into his lap and buried his face against her. He’d been crying. The tears soaked through her dressing gown within seconds.

  ‘What’s wrong, Hari?’

  He shook his head and burrowed closer against her breast.

  ‘Was it something awful? Tell me. It’ll make you feel better.’

  ‘It won’t. I don’t want to soil you with it.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  Then it all spilled out. A baby’s body from a ferocious house-fire, where both parents had got out more or less unscathed. The police suspected they’d murdered the child and set the fire to conceal it. They’d wanted the autopsy carried out as soon as possible, so that they could continue to hold the pair in custody.

  After telling her, Hari shook his head vigorously, as if flies were buzzing there, then said, ‘You’re right. It helps to talk. I never let it get to me, but this…’

  ‘Were you able to give the police what they wanted?’

  ‘I was. That’s what took so long. There are some truly evil people in this world, Leila.’

  ‘I know.’ She wondered if that was partly why he’d bought the flat so early in his career? Maybe the wife wouldn’t cope with a man who was, even occasionally, traumatised by the work he had to do, the things he’d seen? ‘Come and rest for a while.’

  ‘I want to brush my teeth again first. I can’t get the smell out of my nostrils, it’s almost like a taste…’

  ‘I know.’

  When he’d done that, she took his hand and led him through to the bedroom, undressed him like a child, tucked him into bed, then slid in beside him.

  ‘You’re cold.’

  He snuggled closer, while the sky grew lighter. Neither of them would sleep any more. Leila couldn’t recall having comforted another human being, in all her adult years. Just animals. She’d always believed she was no use at comforting humans. But it seemed she was doing OK this time…

  She knew she’d seen a side of him that night that no one else ever got to see. It was a privilege.

  She also knew she had to be out by eight.

  ‘Surely you don’t have to go in again today, Hari, after pulling an all-nighter?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Take the day off then.’

  ‘Can you do the same?’

  ‘Not without a lot of hassle and rearranging. I have two farm visits set up. But neither is all that far. You said before you’d like to come with me. Do that today. If I drive, you can snooze in the car. I’ve one visit at Langholm, then another at Thornhill. We can find somewhere nice for lunch in between. But if you’re tired, maybe you’d prefer to stay in bed?’

  ‘I’d love to come with you.’

  ‘I won’t be terribly long at either farm. Maybe an hour? Take a book with you, and you can either have a nap or read?’

  He’d cheered up immensely. ‘Shall we take the Range Rover? If you’re happy to drive it, it’d be easier for me to snooze in.’

  Those long legs of his!

  ‘We’ll do that then.’

  ‘It means so much to me to have you here,’ he said as they set off. ‘I want you beside me every night. I know you sometimes have to be away for work, but apart from that, can’t we decide to stay together all the time? I promise we’ll spend more time at your place, until we get a place of our own.’

  ‘All right.’

  They could see how it went anyway.

  ‘I need you to need me,’ he said.

  ‘That sounds remarkably like self-pity.’

  ‘It’s not. It’s pragmatism. I want you to be as happy as I am. That’s not selfish, is it?’

  As they reached the outskirts of town, he called in to work. ‘Whatever comes in today, Morag can deal with it.’

  Hmmm. So his second-in-command was a woman?

  ‘And if it’s something she can’t deal with, put it in the freezer till tomorrow,’ he added.

  Hari dozed fitfully as Leila drove south.

  Some might have said hers was a lonely life, not having day-to-day work colleagues to pal around with. But she had been visiting the same group of farms for more than five years now, because she’d formerly worked on Scheiffers’ bovine TB vaccine trials. She knew the farmers, and their wives, and their children, and their sheepdogs. Every quarter, she had to attend scientific meetings at Scheiffers’ headquarters in The Hague. She got to meet country vets on a regular basis. But she certainly didn’t dare get friendly with any of them – too great a risk of a question of preferential treatment or fudging the results of tests. If she had lunch with them, she had to be very careful to pay for her own and let them pay their own way. The veterinary medicine testing protocols were every bit as str
ict as those for human drugs.

  And the nature of the work suited her. It was actually verging on the boring, since she had to be so meticulous in administering the vaccine, examining the teats of the cattle in the study group and the control group, taking swabs and blood samples, entering and interpreting data. No stress.

  Hari slept for several hours, and only woke when Leila parked in her usual place outside the second farmhouse.

  He was startled when he realised it was early afternoon. ‘Did you not get any lunch?’

  ‘I wasn’t hungry. You can go on snoozing here, but if the farmer’s wife sees I’ve someone in the car, you’ll be hauled in for a cup of tea at the very least. He’s Ian and she’s Christina.’

  He pulled a face.

  ‘And whatever kind of tea it is, you drink it, OK? Just for me.’

  For the next hour, she lost herself in her work. Recent research indicated that a change in activity level could be a precursor of the onset of bovine mastitis. She told Ian that a few dairy farms had started fitting pedometers to their milking cows, to monitor how active they were. Ian agreed that he’d like to try this, so she was elated by the time they walked back to the farmhouse.

  Predictably, Christina had inveigled Hari into the house within minutes, and by the time Ian and Leila joined them, they were chatting like old friends.

  ‘We didn’t realise our Leila had a boyfriend,’ said Ian, slapping Hari on the back. ‘Chris is forever worrying about her being on her own. “Don’t be daft, woman”, I’ve told her more than once. “A fine-looking girl like that’s probably got a dozen boyfriends”.’

  ‘Hopefully only the one, for now,’ said Hari.

  Leila could see at once that Christina was already planning her outfit for the wedding. Damn!

  ‘Nice people,’ Hari said as they drove off.

  She gave him a quick sideways look, to see if he was being facetious. He was serious.