‘What I did? What did I do, exactly?’
‘Why do you want to open this? You did not love me.’
‘That’s what I said, all right. I was sixteen years old. You’re the one who wrote the letter. You’re the one who decided that we were not after all married in our hearts and therefore I wasn’t pure enough for you!’
He narrowed his eyes at her. ‘Do you pretend still? You could not have gone to the bed of this old man if your love had been real. You know it.’
‘Old man? Bed? What are you talking about?’
‘You know. The one they called your agent. Why do you pretend with me?’
‘Leo?’ she screeched incredulously. ‘Three years later, Salah! How long did you expect me to wait for you to see the light?’
‘What?’ he whispered.
But she was in full flood.
‘Three years during which you never once tried to get in touch! What was I supposed to do? You rejected me in the most humiliating, shaming way possible! Was I supposed to beg? To promise to give up my too demeaning career? Grovel because I was weak and slept with you before we were bound in holy bloody matrimony?
‘I waited and waited in the hopes that when you wrote it you were delirious or something, but no! Your self-righteousness was fully conscious! I don’t know what the hell you think you had a right to expect…’
‘What do you mean, three years later?’ Salah finally found his voice, and it rasped like gravel against a screen.
‘I was nearly nineteen before Leo’s master plan came to fruition! Are you really presuming to blame me for that? You didn’t want me, but I should remain virgin forever? What was it, some kind of sanctity test? No one else got near me for three years, Salah. Did you wait that long? I’d like to know.’
His eyes were hollow with shock.
‘He was your lover from the beginning! You went from me to him.’
Her face convulsed with distaste. ‘No, he was not! I was sixteen, for God’s sake! He was forty-two!’
‘It wasn’t true?’ He was hoarse with horror.
‘What?’ Desi stared at him blankly. Then her eyes narrowed as suspicion took hold. ‘What do you mean? What wasn’t true?’
‘Sami sent me a magazine clipping. A picture of you with this old man. It said…’
Her head went back as if he had hit her. She stared at him, and for a moment they were frozen there, locked in mutual horror.
‘You believed it?’ She was open-mouthed with shock as the fact sank in. She stared, shook her head to try to clear it. ‘Is that why—?’ she whispered. ‘How could you believe it?’
‘Desi—’
‘You, of all people! Did you really imagine that within a few weeks I could—? With you on a battlefield, for Christ’s sake! You thought I had—’ Suddenly feeling came rushing in to fill the blankness and her voice found its feet.
‘You read something about me in a damned cheap-thrills sell-your-soul-for-a-dollar celebrity magazine, and you believed it?’ She drew in a shuddering breath. ‘My God, it was bad enough when I thought…’
She didn’t know where to look. She turned away from him, lifted her chin, breathing with her mouth open like a wounded animal, trying to get air. Chills rushed over her skin.
‘Oh, God!’ she moaned. ‘This can’t be true! This is a nightmare…’
She closed her eyes. Opened them again. Fury flooded her.
‘That was why you wrote that letter. Wasn’t it? You—you faithless…my love not strong enough? How dare you talk to me as if—You! What was your love worth, if you could believe that? Without asking, without even accusing—you just read some innuendo in a photo caption, and believed it? Leaving me to the mercy of those vultures who were surrounding me! Nothing! I had nothing to defend myself with, if you didn’t love me! Did you think of that?’
Salah looked like the survivor of an explosion. He stared at her, his eyes black with shock.
‘No,’ he said.
‘A caption under a picture! Not even a story! I wanted to deny it, but Leo told me if we made a fuss it would only confirm it in people’s minds. It was better to let it pass. Anyway, he said, this would make it easier for him to protect me from predatory men, the way he’d promised my father!
‘And it did give me protection—of sorts! I was sixteen and pretty and not engaged to you. If Leo hadn’t been in the background I’d never have had a moment’s peace!’
With an upsurge of the sick bitterness that Leo’s betrayal of trust had created, she added, ‘It didn’t protect me from Leo himself, of course. He was the most predatory of all, but he could play the long game.’
‘Ya Allah,’ Salah whispered. She had never seen his face the way it looked now.
‘I hated it all. I’d never wanted the life, never! I always felt I was living some other girl’s dream. But because it was so fantastic I somehow had to live it. I missed you so much! I wished and wished I’d never done that stupid ad. Then you’d never have said what you said, and we’d have been married and I wouldn’t ever have met Leo. But I was so nervous. Over and over I started a letter to you, but each time I thought…
‘And then you were wounded, and I knew none of that mattered, because I loved you and I would never love anyone else, and if you died, I died, too. I waited for you to answer my card, wondering if you would live, praying—God, how I begged for you to recover! And when I saw your letter lying there—!’ Her eyes squeezed shut. ‘I nearly died from joy. I thought my heart was going to burst out of me and fly.
‘Then I read it—and you know what? He may have waited three years before he physically climbed into my bed, but Leo got me in spirit the day I read your letter. I gave up that day. I gave up thinking what we had was special, that anything was special! I gave up what I’d believed about myself. I wasn’t good enough for you, Salah. I’d loved you and wanted you too much, and because of that you thought I—’
She began to sob helplessly, feeling as if all the tears of a lifetime were waiting to be shed.
‘I felt so cheap! I thought, well, if Salah can say such horrible, disgusting things…then it was all nothing. What I thought we had was nothing. It was never real. You betrayed your honour. It burned me like an iron. I’ll remember that feeling till the day I die. I’d have given up that life in a minute, if you’d asked, but that letter told me it was more than being a model. I’d demeaned myself in your eyes by making love with you, too, that’s what I believed. What we had wasn’t beautiful at all, it was cheap and dirty. That was the end of everything.’
He was silent, his eyes black, watching her, knowing without doubt that what she spoke was the truth.
