The Darkening Hour (28 page)

This is worse – more personal and more insidious – than anything else she’s slipped from under my nose.

She wants to snatch my very identity.

Thoughts tumble about my head. Max is coming.

Without her, Daddy’ll be shouting for me. I won’t have time to make the house look presentable, to cook.

As I refill my glass for the third time, the truth hits me.

Without Mona, Max will see me for the person I really am. A nobody.

You’re the desperate one
, whispers a voice in my head.

I’m not sure, as I pick myself up off the floor, whether Dora deliberately kicked me while I was down. Everything happened so fast and she was stepping over me, perhaps
trying not to fall on top of me as she came through. But then Amina’s message on my Facebook page flashes back into my head, warning me that she treated Zidana badly. This incident, her foot
knocking me while I had fallen down, on top of what I’ve heard, alarms me.

By the time I’ve regained my breath, gathered the shopping that’s tumbled across the floor back into the bag, and stood up, I’ve resolved not to let Dora get to me. Whatever
happened to Zidana is not going to happen again.

I
will
take Sayed up on his offer, at least go and meet his mysterious Hamid at the statue. Find out if he has indeed seen Ali. Dora will be at work and won’t be able to stop me.
If Leo were here, he’d cover for me. He’d do anything for me these days, for the promise of a little bit of good cooking, a bit of maternal affection. It’s a shame he’s gone
away for Christmas.

In another mood, at another time or place, I might have shouted at Dora, objected. But I clamp my lips shut, screw up my eyes, and get to my feet. If what Sayed has told me is true, I could be
about to find Ali. I can’t afford to lose everything now.

I scrub the kitchen tiles as Dora tells me to, with the brush that is meant for dishes. If she wants it clean she can have it clean. I get down on my hands and knees, working away at the grime,
scrubbing until my elbows ache. Tomorrow, I will be closer to Ali. Dora can’t imprison me! When I’ve found Ali, we will be able to stay together. I don’t know how I’m going
to get him out if he’s being held as an illegal immigrant somewhere. I don’t think about the details. Instead, I let myself dream. Focus on what I want.

We’ll bring Ummu and Leila over, get Ummu the treatment she needs, and we’ll be a family again. Everything will be OK.

At one point Dora comes in. I can see that she feels uneasy, that she’s gone a little too far. I stand up and rub my back.

‘I don’t know what you were telling the man in the shop,’ she says, going to the kettle, plugging it in, ‘but you’re not here to chat to strangers.’

‘I’m not supposed to work in the evenings,’ I say. ‘I need time off like everyone.’

She shrugs, refuses to look at me.

At last, once she’s gone up to bed, I go to my room. I pick up Leila’s photo, the scrapbook of home and put them back in my bag. I’m on the move again; my bag
is coming with me. Containing me. I fold up the few clothes hanging on the back of the door – my T-shirts, my other tracksuit bottoms, the one nice dress. I put the overall Dora bought for me
on the bed, folded up.

Then I check that I still have some money, the notes I haven’t yet sent to Ummu, and tuck them inside my purse. Finally I push my hand down to the bottom of my bag, where I keep my phone
charger and where I’ve hidden my passport, and feel about.

There’s nothing there. I search frantically through the bag, around the room, lifting books and papers and the few things I’ve left on my bed.

Then the truth hits me fully. My passport and my visa and my phone charger. My access to the world. They’ve gone.

I stand up, leave my room – that anyway no longer feels like a haven now Dora has taken off the lock – and make my way down the hall, past the drawing room. I take
the stairs. All the way up. Three flights. Past Leo’s room and beyond the bathroom to Dora’s bedroom.

She’s in there. I can hear her moving about. I step forward, put my eye to the crack in the door.

Dora is framed, her hands caressing her sides, in front of the mirror. Dressed only in green and cream lace underwear, a bra and knickers, she twirls this way, and then that way. As I watch, she
puts her hands up above her head, lifts her hair high up off her face, tilts her head to one side, examines herself.

This woman, the one I see framed in the tiny gap in the door, is quite different from the Dora I know. Here in front of me is an anxious woman, frowning at her image in the mirror. As if a mask
has been taken off and a softer, more vulnerable – even frightened – person revealed beneath.

That’s when Dora turns, startled by some tiny sound or movement I’ve made without realising. The mask snaps back on.

I back away. Tiptoe down a flight of stairs to the bathroom. I wait a few minutes, to check she doesn’t come out and chastise me for spying on her. When I’m certain she hasn’t
heard me, I creep back, knock.

She opens her door a chink. She’s in her nightgown now, more satin and lace. It’s clear to me she has no idea I’ve seen her.

‘My papers are missing,’ I say.

‘Yes.’

‘You know?’

‘Of course.’

‘Where are they?’

‘I have them,’ she says. ‘They belong to me now.’

‘I cannot live in this country without them.’

‘You can live here with me. You are fine as long as you stay here with me.’

‘I need my passport, my visa. Without them, they can send me to a detention centre, or out of this country.’

‘Don’t worry so, Mona,’ she says, smiling. ‘No one can send you to a centre as long as you are my employee. No one can take you away from me.’

‘You took them from my room?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘That’s stealing!’

She looks at me, a smile still playing on her lips. ‘I think we know who the thief is in this house. No, Mona, I didn’t steal. It’s the rules. I should have taken them straight
away, when you moved into my house. It’s normal. Your papers are quite safe with me, you really don’t have to be afraid. When it’s time for you to leave, I’ll give them back
to you. Right now, they are mine, because you belong to me.’

I pray that my tears will not fall. She must not see me weaken.

She stares back, and I see her waver. Is she going to take pity on me? She has a good side – I’ve seen it when I first arrived and she offered me money to buy credit. When she told
me her secrets and I told her some of mine.

‘Mona,’ she says, ‘if you try and leave without your passport, I’ll give your photo to the police and I’ll tell them about the things you’ve taken from
me.’

Police. She knows if there is one word that frightens me more than any other, it is ‘police’.

‘Have you finished the ironing?’

I bow my head, walk down the stairs feeling her watch me as I go. And as I walk I feel my future, the one I had so brightly drawn in my head, with me and Ali and Leila together, recede behind
me.

Rage and fury, and a horrible sense of impotence, take hold of me. There’s nothing I can do.

Later, I lie in bed, and from somewhere an image comes, blossoming out until it’s a memory and then a story, a story with a message that has come to me when I need it
most.

I’m very small. Running up the narrow alley to the bakery with Ali. We both have unbaked loaves shrouded in white muslin cloth, balanced on trays on our heads. After delivering the bread
to the bakery, Ali doesn’t take the usual route home but leads me on a detour up steps along streets between whitewashed walls, bright in the sunshine, then through blue shadows, places
I’ve never ventured into before, round corners and along tiny hidden passages until we come to a small patch of orchard at the top of a little cliff-edge. The trees both above and beneath are
laden with white almond blossom. We crawl to the edge, encased in this cloud of white petals. I imagine I’m dressed in swathes of intricately embroidered lace. A bride maybe. A princess.

At the edge we gaze down through branches.

Two things happen to me that day. The first is a dizzying sense of wonder at the beauty of the white blossoms, whose petals I can now see are etched with fine veins. The vision does something to
my mind, lifts it up as if to new realms of awareness. The structure of nature is made plain to me, a coordination that has struck me time and again since then, in the movement of waves on the
shore, in the patterns in the sand, in the melodies of birdsong, in the symmetry of butterflies’ wings.

The second is an awareness of the absurdity of human sexual desire. What I see that day stays in my mind forever afterwards and has been aroused again by the sight of Dora swirling in her silk
underwear in her room. The texts from her lover with those photos of statues!

Between the lacy boughs I see a man’s bottom, rising up and down. Two pairs of legs intertwined. This vision stirs something within me, something disturbing and faintly alluring. I know
from the henna patterns that the uppermost soles belong to a woman.

Ali turns, looks at me, his bright blue eyes set in his smooth, dark-skinned face. He scrapes together a handful of almond husks from the ground and tosses one over the edge onto the couple
below. The shell catches for a second in the branches of one of the almond trees, then falls onto the man beneath.

‘Bull’s-eye!’ Ali whispers. All the impact seems to do, however, is accelerate the man’s humping. Ali urges me to throw an almond husk. Mine misses the man’s
bottom, catching instead in the folds of his djellaba that is rucked up around his neck. Emboldened by our success, we rain almond husks down upon the couple until suddenly the man shudders,
growls, and throws himself aside, revealing the woman beneath him who looks straight up at us.

Madame Le Bon! Our terrible schoolteacher. I shrink back. Too late.

Ali and I run screaming back down the alley to our street.

Afterwards when we’re back at school, Ali and I behave as if the incident never happened. But I have seen my teacher’s true self. And every time our eyes meet, a knowledge passes
between us that gives me a little shudder of triumph. My teacher might threaten or humiliate me. But I know, and the teacher knows I know, that she is just another woman, who likes to make love in
an almond orchard with a fat man who isn’t her husband.

The next day, I get the Clipper to the South Bank. Terence has decreed that we all need to meet, in order to talk about Daddy.

I’ve got Mona’s passport with me. I remind her that if she disobeys me, or attempts to run away, she’ll be picked up immediately by the immigration police. I’ll phone
them, say she’s absconded undocumented.

The sun’s almost white, sinking directly in front of us as we plough westwards, casting its glow onto the water, which throws it back up so it dazzles me. The tide’s out, rubbish
rolling about in the shallows. The plane trees along the Embankment throw mottled shadows onto the path. It seems to me that the sky is thinning out. Like ageing skin, I think. Like being tired of
life.

Simon and Anita are in the foyer, sitting with glasses of white wine, leaning towards each other talking avidly. They stop the minute I arrive.

‘We were just saying,’ it’s Anita who speaks, ‘that it would be good to bring Daddy here one day. He’d love the music, the life.’

‘You could try,’ I say. ‘But he may object. He’s so taken with Mona that no one else will do these days.’

‘That’s a blessed relief,’ Simon comments. ‘It’s worked out well then.’

At that moment Terence sweeps in, in his dark suit; he’s clearly come straight from the City. He asks if anyone would like a drink and I ask for a martini.

‘How do you have it again?’

He’s known me all these years, but still hasn’t got it. Then I remember that Max is coming tomorrow, and my spirits rise. He would never forget how I have my drink.

‘Terence. It’s a double Tanqueray with 10 mils of Cointreau, shaken with ice and a twist of orange zest.’

‘We were just discussing whether a home is the best place for Daddy, if he gets worse,’ Anita says, when Terence returns. ‘The problem is, obviously, if he needs
twenty-four-hour care, Mona won’t be able to look after him. He’ll need nurses. Which means a care home.’

‘Well,’ says Terence, ‘if it comes to it, a care home is going to be problematic. I’ve been going through his accounts, and it’s all a bit disappointing.
Unfortunately, Dad couldn’t have foreseen that the recession would decrease the value of most of his savings. I’m not certain we could afford the kind of home we were thinking of. It
might be a question of looking into local authority care, though I suspect we wouldn’t be eligible for that either. It’s a bugger – financially, we seem to fall between two
stalls.’

‘What about the house?’ asks Simon. ‘What’s happening to the money from the sale of the house?’

There’s a tense pause. We’ve often, in recent years, agreed with one another that at least we have the security of the family home – if everything else goes pear-shaped. I
remember Anita hinting – and I cherish the notion – that since I was the one to have given up my time and part of my home to care for Daddy, I might even be treated favourably when it
came to dividing up the proceeds of his estate. It only seems fair. Whatever, we’d all agreed that when Daddy died we’d sell it for a killing – large detached houses in Blackheath
are worth millions these days – and share out the profit. None of us had bargained for the fact that we might have to use the proceeds to pay for his dementia care – but if it comes to
that, we are all realising glumly, it will have to be done.

But then Terence drops the real bombshell.

‘It seems Dad has left a portion of the money from the sale of the house to someone called Nancy Partridge.’

‘What the fuck . . .?’ says Simon, looking round at me and then Anita and back to Terence. ‘You’re joking. Tell me you’re joking, Terry.’

Terence wipes a drop of beer from his upper lip, looks down at the paper in his hands and says, ‘Apparently, Dad was seeing someone else while we were growing up.’