The Darkening Hour (31 page)

My foundations are subsiding and soon the whole edifice that is me will follow.

At last I unleash the fear that was there all along, a vague presence to which I haven’t dared give shape. A flash of panic rips through me, so violent I think I’m
going to be sick.

He has not, after all, been able to resist.

Max has gone to Mona.

The cushions are lumpy and narrow. I push them aside. Spread a blanket on the floor instead, and stretch out on this. Pull the quilt over my body. I could put it underneath,
but that would leave me with only one thin blanket on top to keep warm. I put a cushion under my head. It’s easier to stretch out with the hard surface beneath me. I desperately need to
sleep.

I started early this morning, before dawn. If Dora wanted the house to look good for Max then she would have it. I shut out all other thoughts. I took care of Charles. Washed, starched and
ironed Dora’s sheets. Made her bedroom seductive as I knew she would want it for her lover’s visit. In the back of my mind a new plan was hatching: if I could somehow impress this
doctor, if he had an influence on Dora, then he might, as Ummu suggested when I first arrived, help me to look for Ali. He might also persuade Dora to pay me more and to return my passport –
or at the very least, give me some time off.

Charles was irritable this evening.

‘You haven’t heated the plate. Now it’s cold. I can’t eat cold food!’

‘OK. Then I’ll heat it for you.’

‘It’s soup on a Thursday – I thought you knew the menu.’

‘But it’s Friday today, Charles.’

‘It’s Thursday!’

Sometimes he is so insistent I begin to doubt the reliability of my own memory.
Have
I got the day wrong?

‘OK, Charles, let’s say it’s Thursday. I’ll do you some soup.’

Finally I got him into his pyjamas, and he wet himself, and I had to begin all over again. And throughout all this, I thought of Ummu, sick in bed, Leila her little nurse, their waiting each
week for the money that would buy Ummu the operation she needed so that she would live.

And this kept me going, though my back ached, my knees complained, and I knew that even when I finally lay down it would be on Charles’s sitting-room floor to make way for Dora and her
lover upstairs.

Now, however, though I pray for it, sleep slips in and out like a thief at night, never giving me any peace. I flip over, stretch, curl up. And finally, just as I drift into a shallow slumber,
something awakens me.

Charles is calling, ‘Mona, Mona!’ And then an echo in the baby monitor next to me:
Mona, Mona
!

I sit up. An intense pain shoots down one leg as I straighten slowly. I place my feet on the floor. Pull my fleece over my T-shirt.

Charles is sitting up in bed, his eyes wide, his breath coming in short gasps, his puny chest beneath the loose pyjama top rising and falling. I put a hand on his forehead. He’s
clammy.

‘Charles, are you all right? What’s wrong?’

His eyes look up at me, unseeing. His breath rasps in and out. He doesn’t speak.

I’m frightened for the old man, but I’m frightened, too, for myself. I must do the right thing, if I’m not to enrage Dora. My mind is cloudy with fatigue. I go to
Charles’s phone that Dora has warned me not to use. ‘It costs money, Mona. It’s not for you. Only for emergencies.’

But this
is
an emergency. I search through a pile of pamphlets and discarded letters for the doctor’s number Dora showed me when I first arrived.

I finally find it and dial, my fingers clumsy. I have to wait for a list of options. I’m not sure I’ve understood. I dial again. Listen, my ears straining.
In an emergency
,
press one
. An automated voice gives me another number to ring. The emergency late-night number.

At last, after a long wait, a live voice tells me I will have to bring the patient in.

‘But,’ I begin, ‘I can’t – I have no car. Can the doctor come here?’

‘If it’s a real emergency you don’t need us, you’ll have to call the ambulance.’

‘But he’s very ill, he’s not breathing properly.’

‘Do you have a neighbour who could drive you to Accident and Emergency?’

And then I remember. Of course! There is a doctor here already. Dora’s boyfriend Max is a doctor!

I pull on my trainers, leaving the basement door open, and hurry up the frozen steps to the garden and round to the front door. I unlock it, and step inside.

I’m wary of going up to Dora’s room. I only ever go there now when she is out, to clean, to change the sheets, to prepare it for her.

But tonight is an exception.

I put my ear to the door. Silence. I push it open gently. It rustles over the soft carpet. The room is dark. Smells faintly of the incense I lit earlier, and of sleep, and of intimacy – a
smell that I don’t want to inhale for it feels like intrusion. For a second I’m a small girl, awake in the night, walking through to the alcove where I believed Papa slept alone. I see
them, my mother and father together on the banquette, smelling something like this, something like sweat, and body heat and secrets. And I know I am not meant to be here.

Tonight there’s no choice.

Dora and Max’s two heads rest on my starched pillowcases, Max the doctor’s nearest to me. I shake his shoulder. He moves a couple of centimetres, looks up, his eyes blinking open,
confused. I put my mouth to his ear, whisper that Charles is ill, needs a doctor.

Max doesn’t hesitate. He’s up and coming through the door grabbing a dressing-gown but without even bothering to pull his trousers on over his boxer shorts.

Down in the basement I stand in Charles’s bedroom doorway while Max listens to the old man’s chest, feels his forehead, checks his pulse.

He turns to me.

‘Upstairs, does Dora have a medical kit? A first-aid box, something like that?’

I run back up the steps to fetch Leo’s zip-up case, the one he showed me in his room, the one he often raids when he thinks he’s got something that needs treatment.

I find the case. Pause, wonder if there’s time to check my Facebook page. But the computer’s switched off. I take the medical case down, and stand at the end of the bed while Max
asks Charles questions.

‘Can you tell me your name, your date of birth?’ He looks into Charles’s eyes. Takes his pulse. He puts his ear to the man’s pale concave chest and listens.

I stand, shivering. It’s that pit of night long before dawn. A dreadful silent time, when even the traffic in London is still, when no bird sings – the time, they say, when people
are most likely to die.

‘Oh please, Allah, let him be OK,’ I pray. ‘Do not take him from us yet.’

And I realise that I want Charles to live not only because I’m afraid of what Dora will do to me if he dies, but also because he is my friend and I have grown, in a certain way, to love
him.

‘It’s nothing serious,’ Max says at last, straightening up, coming over to me. ‘I think he’s woken suddenly with a panic attack – most probably. And he may
have caught a cold. I’m giving him something to soothe him. But you must go back to bed, Mona.’

I move over to my heap of cushions and quilt on the floor.

‘Hey,’ says Max. ‘You have a room to go to, don’t you? It’s cold. You can’t sleep there.’

He nods at the rough bed I’ve made.

‘But Dora. She says—’

‘I’ll tell Dora. I’ll look after her, you need to sleep. In fact, go to the room next to ours. There’s a nice bed made up there.’

‘But Charles, what if he’s sick again . . .’

‘You use this, don’t you?’ he says, picking up the monitor.

I nod.

‘I’ll take it tonight, up to our room so I will hear if he wakens again.’

I look at this man. He is kind and gentle, I can see that in his eyes. And what’s more, he’s a doctor – like Ali! I remember the text I saw on Dora’s phone from him, from
America, and I see my one last chance flit before me.

I fish in my tracksuit pocket, bring out my photo of Ali and I say, ‘Please, Doctor Max, I’m looking for this man. Ali. Ali Chokran. It’s possible he’s working in a
hospital, or has been looking for work. It’s possible he’s in an immigration centre. But I know he’s in this country.’

I hand him a slip of paper. ‘If you find him, you tell me?’

Doctor Max takes the photo, looks at it, nods and gives it back to me.

‘Doctor,’ I say, and I open my eyes wide. I know how to make a plea to a good man like this. ‘I told Dora he’s dead. It was to get work. I thought, They’ll employ
me if they think I’m a widow. I couldn’t change my story.’

He smiles. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll see what I can do. Now you go back to bed.’

I start to go. And he calls me back.

‘Mona. Listen, you told me a secret. Can you keep one for me? Just until the morning?’

I nod. ‘Of course.’

He pulls something out of his pocket. A small box – the kind they sell expensive jewelry in. I’ve seen them in Madame’s house, and on Dora’s dressing-table before she
locked everything away.

He opens it. Whatever it is gleams in Charles’s lamplight. It’s something precious. More precious, I can see, than the chain she wears. Worth hundreds, if he were to sell it on the
High Street . . .

‘It’s a locket – for Dora,’ he says. ‘Tomorrow, I want to ask her if she’ll let me come and try living over here. With her. If she’ll have me. And Leo,
of course, and you too, I suppose! So, in the morning, I want you to make a good breakfast of coffee and can you get croissants?’

I nod.

‘Croissants and maybe some flowers. Here.’ He gives me a twenty-pound note. ‘Keep the change for yourself.’

‘Thank you,’ I say.

I smile at him, happy for him, happy that he will make Dora happy.

As I go back up the steps to the front door, I feel a lightness of heart, the kind that comes after you’ve been lost in the labyrinth of a strange medina and suddenly you see a landmark
and know you’ll get home again. The American doctor is going to help me.

It comes to me like an eruption of all the fears and doubts I have felt since Mona came breezing into my home.

She’s taken my daddy’s affections from me, and Leo’s, and now she’s taking Max.

Things I’ve suspected come back to me. What she told me about Madame Sherif and her husband. All the time, Mona has been building up to this. I’ve let her off, when my instincts told
me otherwise, when she deceived me over the roses and the soup spoons, duping me with her ‘goodness’ and with her concern for Daddy and Leo.

Stories from my ex-pat friends echo in my ears. That you have to keep domestic workers from your husband. That they lack moral awareness and see anything of yours as theirs as well. That
they’re uneducated and lack sophistication. Why else would they choose this sort of work?

I think of the way Mona flaunted her golden thighs at me – was that a deliberate attempt to undermine the confidence I’ve always had in my own body? Her lies about being widowed
– were they to gain my sympathy, and make me believe she’s still mowning her husband so is no threat?

Mona’s strange defiance earlier, in the kitchen when she was making the bread, gave away what she was really thinking. It was a way of communicating to Max that she was not happy with
me.

That she wanted him?

I’m out of bed and down the first flight of stairs, nausea rising with each piece of evidence. The bathroom light is off, it’s empty. The house is silent.

Down the next flight, hoping that maybe, just maybe, I’ll find Max making a cup of tea in the kitchen, that he’ll simply say he couldn’t sleep, his body clock is all skewed
after his flight.

But he is neither in the bathroom nor in the kitchen. In a panic, half-hoping to find him in there, perhaps reading, perhaps needing somewhere to deal with his insomnia, I push open the door to
the back room, my study, where Mona usually sleeps.

Empty.

He’s not here at all. He’s gone to Mona down in the basement!

The irony hits me – that I told her to stay down there tonight, expressly to ensure she was out of our way!

I turn to face the hallway. And then I know.

The front door is on the latch, someone has gone out.

Max.

I try to stop the images marching into my head. Max biting her thighs, telling her how much he desires her, for she is softly rounded and bronzed. For the skin on her thighs is still smooth and
not uneven as mine has become. For she is hard-working and clever while I am ageing, and no longer visible, and unable to command power over anything, or anyone.

A ghastly image comes to me, the stone faces outside my door jeering, as they witness Max passing beneath them on his way to her.

Your lover and your maid
, they whisper.

I brought him here! I led him to her! Of all the people he might choose to be unfaithful with, he has chosen Mona. My housemaid. My subordinate.

I pull my faux fur coat over my satin nightie, chosen for my lover’s first visit to my home. A pair of boots over bare feet. Through the front door, round to the back of the house. Over
the frosted grass to the top of the stairs.

The door is open at the bottom, a pale lozenge of yellow light thrown onto the first two steps. My heart pounds at the realisation of my worst fears. Max has gone in, left the door ajar in his
haste. I stand at the top and listen.

Sure enough, I can hear voices, soft voices – Max’s breathy lovemaker’s voice, the voice that makes me think of Tom Waits and smoky late-night blues bars. He’s using it
on her! In Daddy’s flat while he sleeps!

The rage, the hurt makes me tremble so much I’m afraid I’m going to collapse.

Between them, Max and Mona have made the ultimate fool of me.

The shadow of a figure in a skirt looms out of the basement doorway. I move to the side, into the dark.

My hand strokes the top of Mummy’s stone head. If only she had never died! If only you’d never left me, Mummy. If only it wasn’t for Anita and Simon and Terence’s selfish
behaviour. If only Daddy hadn’t duped me into believing I was his favourite!