Little White Lies (57 page)

It was her turn to shrug. ‘Another week, perhaps. My husband . . . well,
he
follows the work. I just follow him.’ It was difficult
not
to mention Julian. She glanced at him, then at his hands. Was he married?

He noticed her surreptitious glance. He answered her unspoken question. ‘Yes. She lives in Connecticut. Two kids. All-American. Anything else you want to know?’

She drew in her breath sharply. ‘Wh-what are we doing here?’ she asked, hoping her voice was steady.

He turned on his stool so that they were facing one another. His knee bumped hers. He put out a hand, the same hand that had clasped her forearm the night before, and lightly drew a line down the middle of her thigh, all the way down to her knee. She felt her thighs begin to shake uncontrollably. ‘I don’t know,’ he said slowly. He shook his head. ‘When you came into the office yesterday, I wasn’t expecting you. It threw me, to be honest. I guess I always knew I’d run into you again someday. I know you don’t remember any of it. You were so young and when Maryam died . . . well, I guess you blocked it all out. But our histories are so intertwined. As soon as I saw you, I knew.’

‘Knew wh-what?’

‘That something was going to happen. Between us.’

She swallowed. ‘I’m married,’ she said hesitantly.

‘So’m I.’

‘So what is this? An affair?’

He made the same gesture of dismissal he’d made to his assistant the night before. An almost silent ‘tut’, the faint shake of the head, neither a ‘yes’ nor a ‘no’, a gesture from a language and culture she didn’t know and couldn’t place. She hardly knew him. He was a compelling mixture of something powerfully familiar and yet equally powerfully strange. He had within him the same quality that fascinated her about both Tash and Annick. One minute they were the friends she’d known all her life, as powerfully familiar to her as family. The next, speaking French or Russian, they stepped out of themselves and out of her reach. When they were all much younger, she’d bitterly resented their ability to slip like chameleons into a place she couldn’t follow. Now, sitting opposite Tariq, that same irrational fear resurfaced. She had to stop herself from reaching out to grab hold of him.

‘Does it matter?’ he asked slowly. ‘Does it matter what we call it?’

She looked at him closely, her eyes searching his face for some sign that this was all a huge joke, that he wasn’t taking it as seriously as she was. There was none. He lifted his hand from her thigh and swallowed the last of his wine.

‘Come,’ he said, sliding off the stool. He picked up his jacket, fished in his pocket for his wallet and peeled off a note, sliding it across the bar. ‘Let’s go.’

She slid off her own stool with legs that trembled at every step. She walked out after him into the summer night air, every nerve in her body attuned to the figure of the man in front of her.

She raised herself carefully on one elbow to look at him as he slept, gazing at his profile as though to commit every line to a memory that couldn’t be erased. Seen sideways, the red, rosy scroll of his lips parted fractionally as he drew breath, in and out. She studied the hollow of his cheek beneath the bridge of his long, delicately etched nose, noticing the dark shadow of a beard already pushing through the smooth skin of the shelf of his jaw. He was the most deeply sensual man she had ever seen.

He stirred, turning towards her and opening one eye. The dark, black lashes swept back and forth as he focused on her. At this range, his eyes were green, flecked with gold. Lion’s eyes. She caught her breath and pushed her face into the heat of his neck. Ecstasy, coupled with remorse and fear – a heightened state of being like no other. Bare skin touching, sticking, she took in great mouthfuls of the warm, male-scented air, taking him deep down into her lungs, stomach, legs. Once, when she was a teenager, on holiday with her parents in Cavezzana, Adam had taken her for a ride in a convertible Alfa Romeo that he’d hired for a couple of weeks. She was fourteen, fifteen at the most. The road from Pontremoli, the nearest village, was full of twists and turns, hairpin bends and steep, narrow inclines. He drove the little sports car hard, the engine screaming in protest and in time with her own squeals of delight and fear. She lifted her arms into the air during one particularly steep drop and felt like a child on a fairground ride with the warm summer air rushing past, her cousin’s tanned and capable arm beside her, her stomach still hanging somewhere up there at the start of the drop. It was the headiest combination of sexual tension and excitement and sheer, unadulterated fear. She felt it now, her tongue darting out between parched lips to touch and taste the saltiness at his neck, nibble at his earlobe, her hands already busy down below, stroking, teasing. In the wide, double bed of the apartment he’d brought her to, not far from the bar on Ha’Yarkon Street, they made love for the third time that night, fiercely, passionately, in almost total silence, achingly aware of the solemnity of the moment. Why was this different from all the others?
It will not last. It cannot possibly last
.

ANNICK
London

Pregnancy didn’t blunt her. On the contrary, moving about the flat and her office with the unsteady gait of a sailor, she was fired up with an energy that catapulted her straight out of sleep each morning into wakefulness. She raced from home to work, work to home, alternately alarming and amusing Yves, who feared for the child growing inside her. ‘Slow down,’ he begged her. ‘It’s not a race.’ He was away a lot during the first few months. He’d found a job as an engineering consultant that seemed to take him everywhere – Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Johannesburg and Lagos. There didn’t seem to be a far-flung capital that he hadn’t visited. She had grown used to his many absences and in the beginning, at least, it suited her. She could ‘get on with things,’ she told him earnestly. ‘After the baby’s born, it’ll be different.’ Frances, openly devastated by the news of her marriage, followed by the announcement of an impending maternity leave, seemed determined to squeeze a year’s worth of work into whatever time Annick had left.

‘Hmm. Pregnant. I knew it. Well, I knew someone who worked right up until her due date,’ she muttered as soon as Annick announced the news. ‘She went straight from here to the delivery room. Didn’t slow her down in the
slightest
.’

Annick held her tongue. She had no intention of working until her due date but the burst of energy that the first few months brought her spilled over naturally into her work. With Yves away so much, it was easy enough to work long days and evenings, unencumbered by a dinner waiting to be cooked or company waiting to be kept. After three years at Clifton Crabbe, she’d made a name for herself as a conscientious, meticulous solicitor who left no stone unturned, no date unchecked and no fact un-referenced. And cross-referenced again. She and Frances made an exceptionally good team. Frances was the public front, the solicitor on whom all the clerks and barristers depended to pull in the really big cases. She loved the high-profile hustle, the posturing, the after-work drinks and the socialising. Behind the scenes, paddling furiously, was her team of hard-working, methodical and meticulous solicitors who did the bulk of the legwork, none quite so methodical and meticulous as Annick Pasqual. Against her advice, Annick had changed her name as soon as she legally could.

‘But
why
?’ Frances would no sooner have changed her own name than grown a beard.

Annick shrugged. It was hard to explain how thoroughly she wanted to be rid of the past. ‘I like Pasqual better. It’s less of a mouthful.’

‘Only if you’re thick,’ Frances snorted. ‘Betancourt’s got a certain ring to it. It’s classy. Foreign.’

‘Not where I’m from.’

‘Which is?’

‘Doesn’t matter. I’ve changed it.’

Frances narrowed her eyes but said no more. Annick’s name was duly recorded and changed.
[email protected]
. Easy as that.

Seven weeks to go
. She lumbered heavily up the road towards home, the flat she and Yves had just bought opposite Morley College, just south of the river. It wasn’t the sort of neighbourhood either Tash or Rebecca would have chosen, but it was what she and Yves could afford. Yves was absolutely firm on the topic. It was fine for Tash or Rebecca to have lent Annick a helping hand when she needed it, but she was his wife now, and no such hands were needed. He’d finally found a suitable position with a small engineering consultancy with projects in places with unpronounceable names, like Kyrgyzstan and Baluchistan. Places where they spoke money, English and French – in that order. Annick joked with him sometimes that the job was just a front and that he was secretly off to see a mistress or someone else when he said he was going to work. But she saw after a while that there was a sensitivity there that meant he didn’t like it. Perhaps he was embarrassed that she earned more than he did? She stopped. After all, he’d been the one to give up his entire life to be with her.

‘It’s still a period property,’ Annick pointed out when she took Tash to see it.

‘Yeah. Just. Clearly the fag end,’ Tash sniffed. ‘And what the hell’s
that
next door?’

‘It’s . . . it’s a council estate.’

‘I don’t mean
that
. I practically grew up on a council estate. No, what’s that yellow stuff on the façade?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Annick confessed, looking dubiously at it. ‘Scaffolding?’

‘Are you absolutely, positively,
completely
sure you won’t just take a teeny, weeny little loan from me? You could get something . . . well,
nice
. Something a bit closer.’

‘This
is
close. To my work, at any rate.’

‘Yes, but you’re south of the river, darling. I wouldn’t mind if you were somewhere like . . . like, well, even
Camden
, or something—’

Annick burst out laughing. ‘Listen to you! When did you become such a snob?’ She chuckled. ‘No, this is perfect. It’s what we can afford and . . . it’s
ours
. Mine and Yves’ . . . and the baby’s, of course. Look, we’ll probably move when we have another one. Maybe somewhere with a garden.’

‘Another one? You haven’t even pushed this one out yet,’ Tash said in alarm.

Annick smiled. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to be godmother twice,’ she said drily.

‘That’s not what I meant,’ Tash said quickly, looking guilty. ‘I just meant . . . oh, never mind. Well, if you’re one hundred per cent sure . . . ?’

‘We are.’

And so they were. The ground floor, one-
and-a-half
bedroom flat (Yves argued that the tiny box room off the hallway could hardly be considered a bedroom) was perfect for their needs.

She pushed open the front door and dropped her shopping on the floor with relief. The hallway was painted a pretty, dusky-pink colour, a nice contrast to the black-and-white floor tiles. At one end of the corridor, looking out over the garden belonging to the flat below, was the kitchen. On either side were the combined living and dining room and the two bedrooms. The master (and only, Yves reminded her) bedroom also looked out over the garden. She’d recently upholstered the box window so she could sit there with the baby. On a sunny day she could open the sash windows and look out over the garden.

There was a small pile of letters lying on the floor; she bent down, not without difficulty, and retrieved them. She picked up the bag again and took everything down the corridor to the kitchen. Baked beans, cannelloni beans, chickpeas, lentils . . . she put away the tins tidily in the cupboard. Skimmed milk and yogurt in the fridge, fruit in the large wooden bowl on the dining-room table. The baby kicked and turned; she put a hand on her stomach, humming to herself. She boiled the kettle, made herself a cup of tea and took it through to the living room, settling herself on the sofa. She picked up the remote. It was nearly eight. She ought to make herself something to eat – a salad, perhaps, or a piece of grilled fish – but first the news. At the thought of dinner, the baby kicked again. She smiled to herself. Greedy little thing.

It was only as she was tidying away the last of the dishes an hour later that she remembered the letters. She’d stuck them next to the toaster. Yves hadn’t yet rung; he was in New York and they were at least six or seven hours behind. She made a mental note
not
to switch her phone onto silent as she usually did before bed, and picked up the letters on her way out. She flicked through them idly: two bills, a neighbourhood flyer, a wrongly addressed envelope and one addressed to a
M. Yves Guillaume Ameyaw
. She looked at it and frowned. She turned it over. A plain white window envelope, computer-generated typeface, no indication as to whom it was from. She stared at it. Yves’ middle name was indeed Guillaume so it was unlikely it was wrongly addressed, but where had she heard the name ‘Ameyaw’ before? It was a Togolese name. She looked down at the envelope again. It was clearly an official letter of some sort. The postmark was Parisian. She hesitated, and then slid her fingernail underneath the flap. It opened up easily. She scanned it quickly, her heart suddenly accelerating. It was from the
Maître des Requêtes
at the
Conseil d’État
. It referred to a request made in July 2010 to formally register a change of name from
Yves Guillaume Kofi Ameyaw
to
Yves Guillaume Pasqual
on grounds of national security.
Nous avons le regret de vous infomer que malgré notre attention sincère aux récents événements survenus dans votre pays, la République du Togo, nous ne pouvons porter assistance à un citoyen français qui aurait renouncéa sa nationalitiéanté – rieurement
. ‘The minister regretted to inform M. Yves
Ameyaw
that, whilst he was sympathetic to recent events in the Republic of Togo, no credible case could be made in the case of a French citizen who had voluntarily renounced his former citizenship.’ She put it down carefully. It took her a few minutes to compose herself. Swallowing hard, she left the other letters on the sideboard and carried it through to the bedroom.