More Than You Can Say (22 page)

She was pleased.

After a while, I couldn’t eat any more. Adeena cleared the plates from the table and then said, ‘Now I will make some tea for you and we will sit and drink it. If we were in Kabul you could smoke a narghile. Do you know the narghile?’

‘What is a narghile? Oh, I know – a water pipe.’

‘You should smoke, you know. It is very good for men. It relaxes them and helps their digestion.’

After she’d made some black tea we went into the sitting room and sat on the sofa.

‘What other skills do you have, apart from cooking?’ I asked.

‘I am very good with languages. Some languages.’

‘Good English.’

‘Yes, English and French, of course. I also speak some Pashto and Dari. I speak Arabic, my mother’s tongue.’

‘You are a very talented girl.’

‘Yes, I had a good education in France. My mother taught me Arabic when we lived in Qatar. I learned Pashto and Dari when we moved to Waziristan.’

‘You could easily get a job here in London with all those languages.’

‘Maybe, if they let me stay. When I worked for the aid agency in Kabul I did most of the translation work.’

‘They will let you stay, Adeena.’

‘They won’t. They will think I am bad because Aseeb brought me here. They will never stop watching me. Or they will put me in prison. Or they will send me back to Afghanistan.’

‘Not if I can help it. I think Nick Davies might do a deal.
Let me talk to him tomorrow. He might agree to leave you alone if you tell him whatever you know about Aseeb.’

‘But I know nothing about that man.’

‘You must know something,’ I said. ‘You probably know more than you think. You might have heard him say something, or seen something that means nothing to you but might mean something to Nick Davies. Help me do this, Adeena, and I swear I’ll do my best to get Nick to allow you to stay. I’m sure he can agree our marriage was legal, and not a sham.’

I wasn’t sure, but I knew that co-operation with Nick Davies was our best chance.

‘Even if they let me stay here for a while, where shall I live?’ asked Adeena. ‘I know nobody. I have no friends in this country. You have been so kind to me, Richard, but I cannot ask you to look after me. You have your own life to live. I am lost.’

‘You aren’t lost,’ I told her. ‘You’re with me. I will take care of you.’

‘Yes, tonight you will take care of me.’ Suddenly her eyes were wet. ‘But later you will become bored. You will find me too strange; too different to all the English girls you have known. You will want to marry an English girl, not a mongrel half-French, half-Arab like me. And what will I do then? I can never go back to Kabul.’

I put my arm around her and pulled her to me.

‘I’ll look after you,’ I promised. As I said it, I meant it. A feeling so profound I could not identify it swept through me. ‘I’ll look after you. Don’t worry.’

She leaned her head against my shoulder.

I kissed her on the eyelids and then on her cheeks and forehead, and finally on her lips. She kissed me back. In a moment we were in a tight embrace. Then she broke free,
saying: ‘I am going to bed now. I am very tired. I have been frightened for too long.’

‘I will sleep in here,’ I said, indicating the sofa with my hand. She heard the lack of conviction in my voice.

‘No, you will sleep next to me. I don’t want to be alone.’

I waited until she had gone next door and got into bed. Then, very quietly, I opened the bedroom door and went in. I looked down at her as she lay there. She was asleep already, her face exhausted, but peaceful. At least I had put her fears to rest for the moment. I took off my shirt and jeans and lay down chastely on top of the bedspread. After a while I too went to sleep.

In the middle of the night I was awoken by a sound. I was glad to be awoken. I had been dreaming again. In the dream I was by the side of the road outside Musa Qala, noise and screaming and shouting coming at me from every direction. At first I couldn’t make out why I was awake. Then I heard Adeena mumbling in a language that sounded familiar but which at first I didn’t recognise. I realised she was speaking in French again.

‘Je suis aux fonds du désespoir.’
She sounded so anguished. I grasped her by the shoulder and she turned and blinked, then shook her head.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘Why did you wake me?’

‘You were having a bad dream. You were talking in your sleep.’

She raised herself a little from the pillow, pulling the blankets around her.

‘What did I say?’

‘You spoke in French again. You said you were in the depths of despair. Why did you say that?’

‘I don’t know.’ She rubbed her eyes with one hand. ‘I can’t
control what I dream about. I can’t even remember my dream. Why are you so angry?’

‘I’m not angry,’ I said. ‘I just don’t understand you at all. I don’t know why you’re here.’

‘Then why did you take me away from Aseeb? You could have left me there.’

‘Because I care about you,’ I said angrily. ‘And I need you, and I don’t know who you are or what you want.’ I hadn’t known I was going to use those words, and as soon as I spoke them I knew that they were true. What the hell am I doing? I thought. I have no control over my life at all.

She was sitting up straight now. The sheet barely covered her breasts and her hair fell over her bare shoulders. I wanted her so badly at that moment I could hardly stop myself from taking her in my arms again.

‘Don’t talk any more, Richard,’ she said. She looked straight at me. She was so much stronger than me. She could face anything, bear anything. All my courage had been used up a long time ago.

‘You ask all these questions,’ she told me. ‘Why ask?
Inshallah
. You think too much.’

‘I don’t want to lose you. I want you to stay,’ I said.

‘Come here.’ She let go of the sheet and reached out across the bed and gently pulled me towards her. Her skin felt like silk. I was lost.

We made love and then we talked and then we made love again. I said lots of things to her, and made many promises I knew that, even as I gave them, I would never be able to keep. And I called her ‘darling’. She held me tight and said: ‘I like that word. I have never heard it spoken before. Call me by that word again.’

Afterwards we slept.

I remember Emma waking me up in the middle of the night.

‘Dick?’ She tugged at my shoulder. I pushed her away and groaned, still half asleep.

‘Dick, are you all right?’

I sat up in bed. She had switched on her bedside lamp.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

‘You’re soaking – you’re absolutely dripping with sweat.’

It was true. I suddenly felt chilled to the bone.

‘I’ll go and have a shower.’

‘It’s half past three in the morning,’ Emma pointed out.

‘I can’t go back to sleep like this.’

The hot water woke me up, and the cobweb of dreams vanished beneath it. I had been dreaming about a man we had found when I was working in Baghdad. He was a Swiss electrical engineer who had been kidnapped by insurgents. They had decided he was an American spy and had hidden him in a spider hole, a space that would have been cramped even for a large dog, with a tiny aperture which let in just enough air to stop him suffocating and light for about five minutes a day. When we found him, he had been gone for two weeks and was barely alive, but he was no longer sane. I often dreamed about being in that spider hole myself, slowly suffocating, trying to claw my way back to the daylight. I
stepped out of the shower and towelled myself dry. Then I went and lay down next to Emma.

‘You should see someone about that,’ she murmured into her pillow.

‘See someone about what?’

‘About these nightmares you keep having. It’s every other night.’

‘I think we probably ate too late,’ I said. ‘It’s going to sleep on a full stomach that does it. I’m sorry I woke you.’

The next morning she either didn’t remember, or chose not to talk about my nightmares. Of course, I did nothing about them. Emma kept telling me I ought to talk to someone. I knew, if I was being rational, that it was good advice. But it was easier said than done: to whom could I talk? Any normal person would conclude I was a fantasist if I told them half of the things that had happened to me, the places I had been, the things I had seen. If Sergeant Hawke had still been around I would have gladly talked to him. But he was a long way away.

The restaurant had settled into a rhythm. We weren’t full every night, but at weekends people who hadn’t booked a table were usually turned away. We had a good chef: Mary, who had helped us at first, had not wanted a full-time job so we had recruited a young man called Michael who had trained at one of the top London restaurants. He was fond of classical French cookery: lots of cassoulets and confits and regional French dishes that filled the restaurant with a delicious savoury smell and made you feel hungry even if you had just eaten. When he came, he brought new customers with him.

Charlie the barman doubled up as the wine waiter.
Although rather too fond of filling his tasting cup from almost every bottle he opened, he was popular and had that nice ability to appear astonished at the foresight and sophistication of his customers in choosing their wine, even if it was the house red. He improved our list, got rid of some of the overpriced New World wines and concentrated on good-quality, middle-of-the-range Bordeaux and burgundies. And he mixed excellent cocktails.

We had a good lot of waitresses. They were competent and welcoming. Giulia, the Italian girl, was almost too friendly, verging on the flirtatious. But that did no harm. I thought she was easy on the eye and good for business.

Lunchtimes were busy, too, and we started to receive group bookings. The biggest struggle was recruiting staff to keep up with the volume of business we were getting. For the first few months we exceeded our forecasts, and managed to pay off a slice of the bank loan ahead of schedule. The staff seemed quite settled too. That was Emma. She enthused people, and led by example: no one worked harder than she did, and she would pick up the phone to take a booking, or serve drinks, or even help with the washing up if necessary. Our employees were wary of me, however. They couldn’t really understand what I was doing there. Nor could I, if I was honest. I met people at the door, and tried to make them feel welcome. I took their drinks orders, handed out menus, and then my job was done. Sometimes Emma tried to coach me.

‘Dick, darling, try not to give the customers your thousand-yard stare when they come in.’

‘What thousand-yard stare?’

‘As if you are sighting your rifle on them. Remember the warm and friendly smile?’

I practised my warm and friendly smile in the mirror. I thought it made me look deranged. If Emma noticed any change in my demeanour she did not comment. Now and then I would catch her giving me an anxious glance as I chatted to customers. Sometimes I know I was a bit abrupt. I didn’t mean to be, I just lost it.

One evening Emma took me by the elbow and steered me into the little vestibule where we hung up people’s coats.

‘Darling heart, one of the customers has just complained that you spoke to him a little sharply.’

Whenever Emma was really worried about me, or annoyed with me, or both, she spoke to me in a particular way, as if I were made of glass and might shatter if she talked too loudly.

‘I just told someone to be patient.’

‘He says you told him to ‘‘wait his bloody turn’’.’

Oh, that man. He had come in with a party of three. Spectacles, a pinstriped suit, and a pompous manner. He had called me ‘waiter’, and asked me how much longer they would have to wait for their table.

‘Sorry. I probably did say that. Shall I go and apologise?’

‘They’ve left now.’

‘Oh dear. Well, I’m sure the table will be taken by someone else once it’s free.’

‘That isn’t the point, darling. We need to talk, but not right now. Please try to keep your temper. For me?’

But we finished work late that night. By the time we got back to Emma’s flat it was after midnight. I switched on the television in the sitting room and poured myself a large whisky. I could hear Emma moving about in the bathroom, getting ready for bed, and waited for her to come back in and challenge me about my behaviour earlier in the evening. I frowned at the television and poured myself another drink.
Then I heard her shut the bedroom door and knew that she had gone to bed.

A couple of weeks later, I attended a memorial service for someone I had met a few times in Baghdad. He had been working at the Coalition headquarters in the International Zone. I didn’t know him very well, but had liked him enough to want to see him off. The poor sod had died at the age of thirty-four of a heart attack in his house in Guildford, having survived God knows what in Iraq. Maybe the war had been responsible for his heart condition, but it was probably just one of those things.

After the service I bumped into a couple of people – well, four of them – I had met out there and one of them asked me what I did for a living now. When I told them I was a restaurateur, there was a lot of laughter.

‘Do they make you wear a pinny and a chef’s hat?’ asked one.

‘Always thought you would make a good waiter,’ said another.

‘It’s a bloody good restaurant,’ I said indignantly. ‘You won’t find many better places in London.’

‘We’ll come and try it,’ said the person who had spoken first, a captain who had been well known for the size of his mess bills, which often included quite a few breakages.

‘Be my guests,’ I suggested, not really thinking they would accept. The captain, in civilian life Ned Taylor, was not going to pass up an invitation like that. He took out a diary, and after consulting with the others, named an evening when they would all come. I felt apprehensive for a moment, and wondered what I would say to Emma. Then I promptly forgot all about it.

They turned up at the restaurant just over a week later.

‘Oh God, Em,’ I said. ‘It’s some old army friends of mine. I forgot to tell you. I offered them dinner on the house. I never thought they’d come.’