flower.
A boy puts our luggage on a trolley and then heads for the lifts.
‘It’s good to be back,’ Mike calls to the two women as he guides me after him. ‘Thank you both for a lovely welcome …’
‘Please, to let us know if anything is missing for the comfort of your wife, Mr Michael …’ Rana calls after us as the lift doors open.
In the lift, Mike starts to laugh. ‘Rana and Pansy are usually off-duty by this time. They were obviously determined to catch a glimpse of you before they went home. Rana can seem a bit overwhelming in her desire to help, but it is the hospitable Pakistani way. She genuinely wants everyone in the hotel to feel at home …’
On the third floor we walk down a long empty corridor. Mike puts his card in the lock of a door and pushes it open. He waves me inside with a little flourish and tips the boy with the luggage.
The main room is huge, with picture windows from floor to ceiling that frame the reddening city below. There are dusty crimson drapes everywhere, even around the double bed that lies in state at one end.
It is as if time has stopped. The rooms are full of dust motes caught in the last swirling rays of the sun. Everything is faded by sunlight. A defunct old fan is still attached to the ceiling. I can almost feel the colonial swish of it displacing the air.
The shabby drapes hold a hint of tobacco smoke deep in their folds. I turn round in the middle of the room, captivated by a feeling of other lives, other tongues, lost worlds.
In the shadows lies a disappeared Pakistan, filled with dignitaries who drank and smoked and partied with impunity. There is a little smoking room with sagging sofas and two bathrooms with yellowing cracked baths.
There is such an evocative, dilapidated glamour in Mike’s new home. A place frozen in time; a place of ghosts, a place to paint, to write books or dream.
Mike is watching me. ‘I know it’s a bit shabby …’
I turn and stare at him. ‘Shabby? It’s wonderful, Mike. Apart from the bathrooms.’
His eyes light up. ‘It is of its time, isn’t it? Just shower, don’t bath. Kamla, the cleaner, comes each day but something else just falls off in the bathrooms …’
Mike fiddles with the air-conditioning. ‘Gabby, would you mind if I ordered supper up here, tonight? I’ve been away for a week and I need to ring Shahid to bring myself up to speed. If we eat in it means I don’t have to change. Eating in the dining room is quite a long drawn-out process as the waiters will want to try to tempt us with new dishes.’
I don’t mind at all. In fact it is lovely. Two young waiters roll in a trolley full of silver dishes, then set up a table with a white cloth and starched napkins.
I glance at my watch. How strange. Here I am, in a world of pink drapes and armed guards, and Will and Matteo will still be in the air, somewhere, heading for London.
As we lie curled in the huge, draped bed, I have a stab of pure contentment. I don’t think either of us was entirely relaxed in Oman. Maybe there was too much pressure to have a fantastic Christmas together. I wish Mike could have been as easy as this with the boys.
I lie listening to the noisy air-conditioning. It sounds like the roar of the surf in a storm, a sound so familiar it lulls me to sleep in seconds.
Cornwall, 1967
Maman rarely talked about her childhood. If Dominique and I asked questions she would evade them. If we persisted, her face would close and she would walk away from us and remain distant for the rest of the day.
It was as if her life started from the time she met Papa. We heard that story enough times. Dominique especially loved it because she featured in it.
Papa, moored in a Brittany harbour on his father’s fishing boat, caught sight of a lovely woman and a pretty little girl dancing at a festival.
‘Love at first sight!’ Papa declared; for both Marianne and Dominique, aged three.
The rest is history. Well, not quite. He could not carry them both home to Cornwall in a fishing boat. Women were not allowed on the boats in those days and in any case Maman took some persuading. She was wary of men and did not want to leave France. But of course, Maman was never going to lose her handsome Cornishman. When she came over to visit Papa she realized that living in Cornwall would not be very different from living in Brittany.
Maman was connected to the earth in a very French way. Gardening mainly meant food and I loved watching her grow a huge array of fruit and vegetables in the kitchen garden. Papa dug out a small allotment for her out of the corner of the small field behind the orchard.
She planted sweet peas and flowers between the fruit and veg and she fed half the village. When she got chickens Dominique and I hastily gave them all names so that she could not cook and eat them. Tilly, Misty, Hetti, Susan, Agnes …
Maman capitulated and grew to love all her chickens. She would pick them up and stroke them like cats. She cried as hard as the rest of us when the fox did his worst, which he often did.
Neither Maman nor our aunt Laura ever talked about their childhood or our grandparents. It was a mystery, a closed book. Aunt Laura once told Dominique and me that it was the kind of childhood you left behind as soon as you could and tried never to revisit.
Maman was an enigma. She loved to help people yet there was a core of steeliness in her that sometimes shocked. I hoped that when she grew old she would tell me about her childhood, about my grandparents, but she never did. Her paternal grandmother had been Moroccan but we only knew this from Aunt Laura.
She was also unforthcoming about her life before she met Papa. As Dom grew older she was naturally curious about her biological father. She wanted to know how she came to be born. Maman was unnecessarily truthful and evasive at the same time. She always said the same thing: Dominique’s father had just been someone she had gone out with a few times. He was a student. She knew little about him. He had disappeared before she even knew she was pregnant. She was sorry, but there was nothing more she could tell Dominique about him.
How old was he? What was he studying? Was he good looking? Was he nice? What had they talked about? Dominique would not let it go. Was she like him? Had Maman got a photo of him?
The stories our parents tell us of our birth root us in family life. How hard would it have been for Maman to make up a little comforting fairy story for Dominique? But she never did. As I got older, I realized there must have been shame and trauma attached. Maman simply could not bear to talk about him.
If Dominique appealed to Papa for more information he would look uncomfortable. He was loyal to Maman and, I think, embarrassed about how little he knew of her life before he met her. Maman must have told him something about Dominique’s father before she married him, but Papa was never going to talk to us behind her back.
He would beg Dominique and me not to upset Maman, to respect her wishes and her right not to talk about her past.
‘Don’t I have a right to know who my own father
