‘Are you all right?’
‘I trusted you!’ he shouted furiously. He was brandishing something; he’d obviously expected to see her. ‘I trusted you with the biggest … I trusted you with my entire life. My life and my family’s life in your hands. And …’
Lorna felt her heart drop to her stomach, that awful way when you begin to suspect that you have made a terrible, terrible mistake.
‘What?’ she said, trying to sound breezy but hearing the tremor in her voice.
‘You tell everyone! You tell everyone on this island now and they know!’
‘I didn’t!’ said Lorna, panicking. She’d told Flora, but she’d sworn her to secrecy, hadn’t she? ‘I didn’t!’
‘Joel! He knows!’ He showed her the email. Lorna read it in silence.
‘Flora guessed!’ said Lorna. ‘I didn’t tell her.’
‘And now she tells everyone!’
‘It will only be Joel.’
Surely, thought Lorna to herself. Please. But she could understand the impulse completely – the joy of spreading good news, for once, was powerfully strong. Of course Flora wanted to make people happy and rejoice in something good happening – for Saif, for the island, for the world – out of the desperately awful situation.
‘There is no such thing as “only” here,’ said Saif, who found the tight-knit community very like the world he had left behind in Damascus with its extraordinary combination of it being both delightful and infuriating that everyone knew about every step of your life before you’d even taken it half the time. ‘It will be in the papers and in the grocer shop and whispered round my surgery and you will turn my children into zoo animals before they even arrive and you will give me no chance to prepare and we will be overrun …’
‘Overrun by people who mean well – who care,’ said Lorna, stung. ‘Who want to do the best for you and your family. Why is that a problem? Joel is offering you free legal advice! I want to make the school ready and appropriate for the boys. Everyone will want to help!’
Saif shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Everyone wants to gossip and be nosy and find out what it was like and poke at the little brown boys. And take pictures and talk about them.’
He turned his face to the sand.
‘What if they are injured, Lorenah? What if one of them has lost a hand, an arm … You still want everyone looking, asking? Huh?’
Lorna didn’t say anything for a long time.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said eventually. ‘I’m sure Flora hasn’t told anyone else.’
Saif shook the paper furiously. ‘Are you?’ he said. ‘I … I am not sure.’
And he turned round and stalked off down the beach and Lorna watched him go in absolute dismay, wanting to be cross with Flora but knowing full well deep down that the fault was entirely her own.
It was odd. Saif was to remember every second of the next two weeks in the same way as he remembered the very first night of his eldest son Ibrahim’s life: in the house, every second weighing upon him with the enormity of how his world had changed for ever as he gazed down at this tiny, tiny being, while Amena slept in the back room, torn and utterly wearied.
That first night had been quiet. He remembered every sound the cicadas made in the courtyard; the distant rumble of Damascus traffic that didn’t permeate into their pleasant suburb; the little bundle, with bright red cheeks, tiny fists, a wobble of black hair. It wasn’t crying exactly, just snuffling and twisting slightly crossly. Saif had been a doctor for long enough to know that he should of course leave him to settle and on absolutely no account lift him up. He lifted him up.
In that tiny yet huge new world and new dawn, he had walked Ibrahim up and down, out into the blessed cool of the courtyard, where the heavy scent of the hibiscus petals opening up in the night lay upon the gathering dew and mingled with the dusty smell of the city streets and the last remnants of the delicate scent of evening meals passing on the breeze. They had paced up and down, Saif and his baby, as Saif pointed out the moon and the stars above and told him how he’d love him to there and beyond, and the little thing had snuffled and nuzzled into him and fallen asleep on his shoulder and Saif had promised to protect him with his life.
He had not done that. He had failed. The world Ibrahim had been born into – and Ash too – had slowly, then to their mounting disbelief very suddenly, crumbled around their ears. And worse: it had crumbled as the rest of the world had stood by, wrung its hands, prevaricated, wobbled.
But that first night. The heavy scents, the quiet rumbling; the tiny, snuffling, incessantly alive creature in his arms; where it had all begun. And now, did he have the chance to begin again?
‘I’m sure he’ll be fine,’ said Flora. ‘I am so, so sorry.’
Flora had closed the shop on the Monday. Partly because she was just so exhausted after the wedding and partly because they had literally nothing to sell and she was going to have to wait for supplies to be replenished – flour, and milk for more butter to be churned. There was a real problem when you promised to make everything locally. You couldn’t just nip to the cash and carry and stick everything back in the cupboard.
‘Oh, don’t worry about it,’ said Lorna. ‘I shouldn’t have told you.’
‘You didn’t tell me! I guessed!’
Flora had gone to fetch Lorna from school, where she had nervously covered over a book she was reading in her office.
‘What’s that?’ Flora had said suspiciously, but Lorna had shaken her head and refused to answer. ‘If it’s How to Leave Teaching, I will kill you,’ said Flora.
Lorna shook her head. ‘God, no,’ she said, waving at the collection of pupils who liked to stay behind in the playground for some fairly competitive inter-form football matches. It was easy to have inter-form matches in a school with only two classes, and sometimes the bigger ones would make up the numbers in the littler class.
The little school sat at the top of the hill overlooking Mure Town. Made of red sandstone, it still had the original carved letters over the doors for ‘Boys’ and ‘Girls’. It was a windy spot in the wintertime, but in the summer the high vista with water on two sides of the hilltop, the town down in the sheltered harbour below, the boats steaming off to far-distant lands and the oil rigs on the horizon was a beautiful sight. Of course, the view was entirely unappreciated by the children who ran freely back and forth there, blithely unaware of their unfettered childhood – unconstrained by helicopter parents. Everyone knew all the other parents and the children roamed at will – the few cars on the island rarely travelled at more than twenty miles an hour anyway – up and down the lanes and in and out of each other’s houses.
There was danger on Mure – in unattended burns; in climbing the fell in bad weather; or jumping in the sea on a day when the rip tide wanted to pull you out, and regardless of how warm the summer’s day might be, the water was never going to be warm. But the normal dangers – of heavy traffic, of abduction and strangers and muggings – were not present. Children were free to play. In the long winter months, they had to hunker down, like everyone else, with books or video games. But as soon as the light returned, desperate to be free, they were outside as late and as long as possible. It was not unusual, in the height of the summer when the sun never set, to see children playing in broad daylight at ten o’clock in the evening.
‘No,’ said Lorna again. ‘Actually, I want to do more of it. I just need more people to have some damn children.’
‘Probably starting with us,’ said Flora gloomily as they headed down to the Harbour’s Rest. There was a pretty beer garden there, as long as you were wearing a fleece, and they sat outside, smiling happily at other friends coming past.
‘Hahaha,’ said Lorna. ‘God, there’s more chance of Mure getting the Olympics.’
‘Tell me about it,’ said Flora. ‘Oh God, can you imagine? All those rowers?’