The Disappeared Page 3

  ‘Yes. Why not? I can look after myself.’

  He studied her for a moment, and saw that she was blushing.

  ‘You don’t have to look at me like that,’ she said. ‘I thought you were my friend.’

  ‘That’s why I am looking at you,’ he said, with sudden boldness. ‘More than a friend, if you allow it.’

  She flung back her hair and turned her face to him. She looked through him for a full five seconds, before dropping her eyes and saying ‘I don’t allow it’.

  ‘Then I’m sorry for the suggestion,’ he said, falteringly.

  ‘Look, Justin. You’ve been good to me. Very good. One day I’ll repay you. But you have to help me now.’

  ‘I understand,’ he said, downcast.

  ‘You see,’ she went on, ‘I need a qualification and a career, and I need them soon. Tell me which of those courses I should apply for.’

  He looked again at the brochures, with their cheerful promise of success. Gowned graduates clutched their rolled certificates, and in the neat interiors of modern buildings smart young people smiled above their desks. He envisaged Muhibbah among them, the target of covetous glances, alone and unprotected. And he felt a stab of jealousy. The feeling was new to Justin, who had moved easily from girlfriend to girlfriend, avoiding commitment, and rarely distressed when things drew to a close. Never before had it seemed imperative to take a woman under his wing, to protect her now and forever. Muhibbah’s jewel-like physical perfection would not in itself have given rise to such a feeling. But displayed behind unbreachable defences her beauty spelled his doom.

  Muhibbah told him that she had been taken away from St Catherine’s Academy aged 16, but had been able to acquire A level maths and English through a correspondence course. She was good with numbers and could write clear English. Because of her childhood in Yemen and her roots in Afghanistan she knew Arabic, which was useful, and a bit of Pashto, which wasn’t. And she was willing to work. Eventually they settled on the accountancy course. This promised to put students within reach of the Association of Accountancy Technicians’ qualification after three years of part-time study.

  ‘And how will you afford it?’ he asked.

  ‘I will work part-time. And maybe you can help me.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Your firm. It sounds really interesting. And perhaps I could work there too.’

  The idea had already occurred to him. His standing in the office was high; the CEO, a Dutch entrepreneur who seldom visited, had absolute trust in him, and as a rule Justin’s suggestions were approved. Hadn’t he recently acquired 50 acres of moorland for the business, and wasn’t he working on a scheme for energy-saving houses, built from wooden sheeting, which promised to bring in profits long after the wind farms had given way to the next innovation? Surely he could make the case for an assistant, a student in accounting who would cover that side of his deals. He promised to look into it, and she smiled.

  ‘Meanwhile,’ he added, ‘we must fill out some forms.’

  ‘I can do that,’ she said. ‘But you must give me a reference.’

  And in the box that asked for a reference she wrote down ‘Justin Fellowes, Copley Solutions PLC’, followed by the address of the firm.

  ‘You see,’ she said, ‘I looked you up. I even walked past your office, to check it out.’

  And she laughed her clear, crisp self-centred laugh.

  Next morning Justin sent an e-mail to the CEO, asking permission to hire a part-time assistant. Permission was granted, and within a few weeks Muhibbah had enrolled for her accountancy course. Jobs in that city were hard enough to find, and Copley Solutions PLC received nine applicants, all of them better qualified than Muhibbah, including one who had already passed the first set of accountancy exams. Still, Justin finessed the interviews, wrote painstaking memoranda about each candidate with a view to explaining why he or she was too old, too experienced, too advanced in the profession to provide the kind of undemanding and flexible assistant he was looking for, and finally, after two days of carefully faked indecision, in which he communicated to everyone in the office his doubts whether Muhibbah Shahin should get the job, or whether Julian Hepworth, the only other candidate with just two A levels and no accountancy experience, would be a safer bet, he wrote a formal letter of acceptance to Muhibbah. He greeted with relief the e-mail that came next day from Julian Hepworth, withdrawing from the race. And he spent a pleased half hour in Muhibbah’s flat, dictating from his place in the window, the formal letter of acceptance that he could open with a show of impatience in a day or two’s time and pass to his secretary to answer.

  Muhibbah came in for three days a week, and she accompanied him on his trips to the moors. He showed her the contracts with suppliers and contractors, and saw that she understood them at once. It became obvious to his colleagues that the decision to employ her had been the right one. And for six months he had the joy of working beside her, knowing that she needed him, believing that she had incorporated him into her plans, though without knowing where those plans were taking him.

  He no longer escorted her in the mornings. If they worked late and were alone together, then they would walk back to her place, and often he was invited in for a cup of mint tea. He gave her a mobile telephone and explained how to use it, and she laughed at him for assuming that she did not already know.

  ‘For us immigrants it is the iftaH ya samsam – it opens all the doors.’

  ‘So you have one already?’

  ‘I couldn’t afford the subscription, and anyway, when it rang it was them. So after a while I threw it away.’

  But she took the phone and thanked him, and promised she would not chatter on it uselessly. Besides, to whom could she chatter?

  Some evenings she left early, having made plain to him that he should not accompany her. One day in the spring, walking alone from work to his flat in the city centre, he caught sight of her in an alleyway between two office blocks. She was with a man, whose dark hair and olive complexion matched her own. He was young, talking to her volubly and quietly. His features were small, regular and severe, and he tilted his head towards her as he spoke, raising his hand as though to adjust a necktie, though his neck was bare. The expression on her face was one of alarm. And something about the raised hand and tilted head of her companion filled Justin with apprehension. Thinking that Muhibbah might catch sight of him he entered a pub. He knew then, as he sat at an empty table with a glass of whisky in a trembling hand, that he loved her and that nothing would be right for him if she didn’t return his love.

  Until that moment Justin had been pleased with his routine. Entering his flat in a modern block in the city centre his eyes would sweep the room with a pleased recognition of his independence. He saw his college books neatly stacked in a bookcase, supplemented by the cult novels and modern poetry that friends recommended. He saw the computer at which he sat in his spare moments, sending and receiving e-mails, downloading videos, and driving away all thought of loneliness. He saw the bass guitar and amplifier, and the acoustic guitar on which he practised, reminding him of the clubs where he had met in the past with his fellow metallurgists. They reminded him too of the girls these instruments had hooked, and especially of the flaxen-haired Caitlin, who had shared his passion for ecology and who would have married him had he agreed to move with her to the country and take up organic farming.

  Everything in the flat, from the white lambs-wool carpet on the floor to the flush metal lights in the ceiling, from the framed prints of birds by Fuertes on one wall to the stills from Blade Runner on the other, had symbolised the self-completeness of his bachelor life. And when, after two more whiskies and a troubled walk around the city centre, he once again climbed the three stories and turned the key in the lock, he saw at once that it would never be the same, that loneliness had crept in behind his back and taken up residence, exactly there, in the place from which he had excluded it.

  After this moment everything changed. He f
ound more and more work for Muhibbah, in order to keep her beside him in the office after the others had left. He several times invited her to dine with him in a restaurant. But when she at last accepted Muhibbah sat in silence opposite him, hardly eating and leaving the glass of wine that he poured for her untouched. An avant-garde theatre company from London brought The Tempest to the new City Theatre, and she agreed to accompany him to a performance. But half way through she started in her seat and whispered that she must leave. They crept to the aisle like guilty lovers, and in the foyer she told him only that there was a girl there, a neighbour from Angel Towers, and she didn’t want this girl to see her, least of all to see her with a man.

  Eventually it became clear to him that he could have no part of Muhibbah, save what he contrived for her at work. He put her in charge of his project for carbon-neutral houses: she was to find a suitable site, obtain outline permission from the planners, negotiate for supplies of timber and building materials, and assist the architect, a friend of Justin’s from university days, to draw up believable plans. It was a huge project and Muhibbah addressed it with sharp intelligence, composing letters in crisp grammatical English, and laughing when he read them back to her.

  At lunchtime she did not leave for the downstairs sandwich bar, as was the custom at Copley Solutions. Instead she hid away in the room next to Justin’s office, kept for the reception of visitors and containing a table, two armchairs and a couch. Justin stayed at his desk, playing CDs of R.E.M. and AC/DC, which he thought to be appropriate office fodder, neither seriously demanding nor entirely banal. His aim was to drown the intimate small sounds of Muhibbah’s privacy, and also to make it known that he was there, protecting her. For he was touched that she felt safe in his territory and always, when she returned, she gave him a grateful smile.

  After the lunch break she would engage him in conversation about the books she was reading and about the meaning of difficult words. She was like an inquisitive child, except for her habit of pursuing each topic to the very edge of his desire for her. Reaching that point, when words of love gathered behind his lips in readiness to rush at her, she would veer away like an antelope at the scent of a leopard. There would be a moment of silence, and then they would both go back to their work.

  Once she did not reappear as usual on the dot of two. After knocking quietly he entered the room to find her asleep on the couch, her head fallen into one of the corners, her legs bent at the knee. One hand trailed on the floor, beside the paperback edition of Yeats that he had given her two weeks before. Her face, whose waking eyes were always on guard against unwanted looks, lay before him undefended. Her dark lashes sat quiet under pale eyelids, her sand-coloured lips touched each other softly the length of her mouth, and her delicate nose breathed above them, rhythmical like a sleeping animal. His eyes roamed across her face, brushing every part of it until he could see his love reflected in her features.

  A strange feeling came over him. It was as though he stood outside the present moment, powerless to alter it but summoned to absorb its truth. He recalled the sensation that occurs when the train in which you are travelling stops for no reason at an unvisited spot: you see grass gently stirring in a breeze beyond the window, and hear the faint rustles that come to you by no design and which will continue unheard when the train moves on. He had arrived at such a pause in his journey, his thoughts and sensations magnetised by the untouchable life before him. To wake her would be to lose her. Yet in her remoteness, asleep in her being like an unopened flower, she was more fully his than in any of her waking moments. No echo from Justin’s world of easy-going attachments had reached the heart within that sleeping form. But no other man had looked on Muhibbah as he now looked on her, with a desire that was not accepted yet also not refused. She was waiting behind her beauty for the spark that would set her alight and that spark would come from Justin, he was sure of it.

  He withdrew, gently closing the door. And for a long moment he sat at his desk, overcome with astonishment and awe – astonishment at himself, for being so lost in her, and awe at her, for refusing to be lost in anyone. When she entered a short while later Muhibbah looked at him curiously, as though she had sensed his vigil above her sleeping form and wondered whether to allow it. Then she smiled, sat at her desk, and asked him to explain the meaning of Easter 1914. Who were the people mentioned at the end, what are harriers, how do you ride to them and why was a terrible beauty born at Easter 1914? And no, you don’t have to explain what Easter is, it is ‘eid al-fasH.

  While she was with him in the office, working on shared tasks, and especially when they were alone there and conversing in that way about the many things she wished to know, he could almost believe that she might love him. But in other contexts she was cold, enigmatic, and sometimes – looking across to where she worked with pert concentration in the corner assigned to her – he felt a stab of fear: fear for her, fear for himself, fear for a situation that had deprived him of his independence for no clear reward.

  And then there was the young man. Once or twice Justin caught sight of him, lingering at the end of the working day in the street below the offices of Copley Solutions. Almost certainly he was one of her relatives: a brother perhaps, or a cousin, appointed to keep watch on her. His close-cropped black hair, narrow eyes and unsmiling mouth gave him a look of soldierly determination, as though he were under orders. He did not linger in the street, nor did there seem to be any communication between him and Muhibbah. But often she arrived for work in a state of tension, her features clamped together as though in an effort to withdraw from some insult, her lips tight, straight and unsmiling like those of the young man, who must surely have accosted her.

  It was at the end of a hot, dusty day in July, when they were alone together in the office, that matters came to a head. Muhibbah was putting files away in the box-room that served as their archive, and Justin was tinkering with the design for one of the carbon-neutral houses. He had seen the young man pass in the street an hour before, at five-thirty, when the staff normally left. The sound of traffic in the warm afternoon amplified the small quiet movements of the office. From time to time Justin glanced at Muhibbah. Her hands moved among files and papers with small quick movements, leaping from one poised stillness to another as lizards do. Light from the afternoon sun entered by one of the windows, casting the shadow of a disused brick kiln across Justin’s desk and playing on the smooth, closed lines of Muhibbah’s face. He wondered what she was thinking, wondered whether she thought at all when she was not taunting him with questions. For Muhibbah moved through the world with a kind of unhesitating need to make a path for herself. She seemed propelled by an instinct that dispensed with motives, avoided intimacy, and proceeded to its goal with a feline awareness of threats, and a virginal quickness in escaping them.

  He reflected on his years since graduation, and on the habit, so effortlessly acquired, of avoiding commitment to the women he had briefly loved. And never, he said to himself ruefully, had there been anything like this. He looked through the window for a while, at the old kiln, and the little Victorian alleys that hemmed it in, with their brick walls along tiny shadow-filled gardens. The lace curtains in the white sash windows were motionless as sleeping eyelids; the slate roofs shimmered in the heat. The scene was haunting, enigmatic, like a remembered dream.

  He got up and left the office for the bathroom. For a long moment he stared at his face in the mirror. Lines were forming around his eyes and mouth. The brown hair was receding from his forehead, and his blue eyes were losing some of the brightness that Caitlin had remarked on. He wondered where she was now, and what life would have been, had they married. He wondered too whether he would have found the words and the gestures to win the heart of Muhibbah, if he had not wasted so much love.

  Re-entering the office he knew at once that something was wrong. Muhibbah’s chair had swung round away from her desk, though that in itself was not unusual. She always sprang to her feet, and sometimes watched with
a secret smile as the chair spun round in search of her. The pencils on the drawings had been scattered, but then she never gathered them up until the end of the day, and always one by one with a gentle reach of her fingers that he recalled with a pang of helpless desire. Her thin grey sleeveless coat of cotton was still hanging on the back of the door, and the accountancy textbook she had been reading was where she had left it on the edge of her desk. But something was wrong, and as he called out her name he felt a sinking in his stomach. Even as he took in the fact that she did not answer he noticed that the computer had vanished from her desk. He called out again. Silence.

  Then he noticed that papers had been swept from one of the tables into a corner. There were scuff marks on the floor and an old filing cabinet had left its position and been pushed up against the wall. He started forward.

  ‘Muhibbah!’ he cried.

  On the floor were two hairpins and a torn piece of the ribbon that she had tied in her hair that day.

  Chapter 5

  You are surfacing now. The dark swirls are clearing. Points of light glimmer in the blue-grey vapour. There is a distant rumbling noise, and the world is shaking round about. You remember voices, a hot hand on your face, shouts in the distance. Your head hurts, and thirst burns in your throat. Images advance quickly like warrior hordes, throwing up dust clouds in their wake: a bus in flames, your mother screaming when you fell from the tree, your father unconscious at his desk, a spilled glass of whisky saturating his papers. You are fighting these images, refusing them permission to take root. Your eyes are glued shut; if you could open them the images would flee like ghosts before the dawn. But each effort of the eyelids makes the headache worse. For a moment you struggle, and then you sink back.

  Now you are fully awake. You are lying on a bed that rocks beneath you. Above, maybe six feet away, is a white ceiling. There is a white wall to the right, and a white wall to the left, separated from your bed by a space of a few feet. You are in a box and the whole box is rocking and trembling. You need air, water. You need out. You open your mouth, but no sound comes. You swing to the edge of the bed. In the wall facing you is a door, and you rush at it, turning the handle. It flies back and you stumble into darkness, barking your shin on something hard. There is a sink and a toilet, and you make use of them both, throwing water on your face and drinking in gulps. The water tastes of rust and chlorine.