Secrets and Sins

скачать книгу бесплатно


Keeping her voice calm, Susan shouted upstairs again and this time heard Joe’s muffled voice as he emerged from the bathroom.

‘I’m off now,’ she called, before picking up her bag and shutting the door behind her. She was managing to impress herself with all this calm, poised behaviour. Of course, everyone at school had probably always seen her as impossible to ruffle, whatever the crisis at hand. Even that time when little Patrick Hoolihan had badly cut his arm and blood had gushed out of the wound in a jet that flew across the art room, it was Susan who had kept her head, stemming the flow with a tourniquet and silencing the child’s screams with a swiftly made-up story involving an ambulance that was too polite to flash its lights and scream its way through the traffic.

It was only once Susan was in the car, driving down her leafy Wimbledon road, that the magnitude of what she was so coolly coping with hit her. A social worker had once told her that cars did that to people – something about their rocking, womb-like environment making children suddenly disclose abuse and other horrors kept hidden from the world. More effective, the social worker had said, than a hundred carefully controlled psychotherapy sessions. So that was it, then. All it took was sliding into the front seat of her little blue Mini and, suddenly, Susan could feel everything magically well up inside her: a huge wave of anger and sorrow and pain that she could not hold at bay any more and that now threatened to drown her as she drove along the A23. She would have to pull in somewhere, she thought in panic as the tears started to slide uncontrolled down her face, blurring her vision. But the traffic was heavy and moving along in brisk single file on this busy Friday morning.

She tried to stem her tears. It would be shameful to walk into the school with her face all red and blotchy; what would the poor children think! But, for now, it was such sweet relief to simply let go. Susan drove on, feeling the tears roll down her cheeks and drip off her chin onto the woollen fabric of her skirt.

Somehow she made it from the car park to the school toilets without bumping into anyone. Once she had washed her face, Susan felt calmer and took out her phone. She had to talk to someone, to help restore that terrible lost sense of reality that was overwhelming her, as though she had somehow managed to wander into one of her worst nightmares.

Riva. Her best friend was the only person who could possibly help sort this tangle out.

Chapter Nine (#ulink_b99caeb2-8c3f-5997-afbb-0b70a83eb7c8)

The phone started to ring just as Riva jabbed with relief on the full-stop key. Chapter Nine done, hallelujah. More importantly, her main character had reached the crossroads she had spent five chapters propelling him towards and had finally decided which way to go. The rest of the book would be a freewheeling exercise downhill, Riva knew. With one successful book under her belt, she was starting to get familiar with the routine.

Her mind still miles away in a fictional town in the Peak District, Riva said ‘Hello?’ absently into her phone, her eyes still scanning the screen of her laptop. Instead of an answer, she got a strange muffled snuffling at the other end of the line. Just as she was contemplating hanging up, she heard the sound of Susan’s voice suddenly emerge, not bubbling with laughter as usual, but drowning in a flood of tears.

‘Sooz?’ Riva called out in alarm. ‘Is that you?’

The snuffling gave way to a horrible low wail. ‘It’s me, Riva. The most terrible thing’s happened,’ Susan said, her voice suffused with tears. ‘Joe…he’s…oh Riva!’

‘What is it, Susan? What’s happened to Joe, for God’s sake?’

How many conflicting possibilities was it possible to have racing simultaneously through the mind in the space of a few seconds? Riva’s brain collected them all: accident, heart attack, cerebral thrombosis, serious domestic spat…until it stopped short at the one possibility that Susan was now blurting out through distraught tears.

‘Affair…Riva, he’s having an affair!’

‘What?’

‘I said, Joe’s having an affair.’

‘Joe! An affair?’ Riva asked, unable to match up those two words, even have them occupy the same sentence. Nevertheless, she repeated the words slowly and blankly, trying to digest them. ‘Joe’s having an affair.’

Perhaps her reaction wasn’t so obtuse. Of all the people in Riva’s very wide circle of friends and acquaintances, the one person who seemed furthest removed from the possibility of an extramarital dalliance was Joe. Goodnatured, serious, contented old Joe, who had loved no one but Susan since day one at uni, who had steered a steady course through their years of separation when he was at med school, and who had married his college sweetheart the moment he had started earning a pittance as a junior doctor because he had said he could wait no longer.

‘Susan, are you sure?’ Riva asked, knowing it was a stupid question but waiting, biting her lip, hoping that Susan was only joking. Not that Susan was given to puerile pranks, so it really was a very stupid hope. While her friend noisily blew her nose, Riva enquired more gently, ‘Where are you, Sooz? I just realised it’s a weekday – are you at school? Are you able to talk from where you are?’

Susan had recovered herself a bit by now. ‘Yes…I’m at school but I can talk for a bit. I desperately needed to speak to you, Riva.’

‘Okay, so tell me what happened.’ Riva tried to sound calm while quelling her own growing panic.

‘Oh, Riva, I’m as sure as I can be about it. The suspicion’s been growing for days now but I hadn’t mentioned it before because I wasn’t sure. But yesterday…yesterday I overheard Joe on the phone to someone, Riva. I wasn’t imagining it.’

‘What did you hear?’

‘Not a lot. But he had sneaked away from the crowd and he addressed her as “darling”…’ Susan broke off again in sobs.

‘Was that it?’ Riva asked, relief flooding through her.

‘What do you mean, was that it? Isn’t that enough? Pretty much confirmed it for me, I can tell you,’ Susan replied, reverting momentarily to her more spirited self.

‘Hang on,’ Riva replied. ‘People often get away from crowds to take calls, Susan. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re sneaking off…’

‘Yeah, right. In a freezing garden and without a coat. That’s why I followed him, actually, to tell him off for being outdoors without a coat…’ Susan’s voice was edging into tears again.

For want of anything else to say, Riva tried another tack. ‘Besides, addressing someone as “darling” means nothing in most circles, right?’

‘Joe doesn’t address anyone as darling, Riv, not even me!’ Susan was now sounding quite indignant.

‘His mum?’ Rev asked, clutching at straws.

‘Christ, no! How many men do you know who call their mums “darling”, Riva? For God’s sake!’

‘I don’t know…maybe I was thinking of Indian men and their mums…’ Riva trailed off. Then she added, ‘Where were you when you overheard him, Sooz?’

‘At the River Café. David’s birthday party. And it wasn’t just the fact that I’d overheard Joe, Riva. It was his reaction to seeing me appear suddenly behind him. He was guilty as hell. It was written all over his face.’

‘What did he do? Did he say anything?’

‘That was the other thing, Riv,’ Susan said, weeping again at the memory. ‘He lied…he…he…he looked me in the face and lied so idiotically. Said something about a patient who needed medical advice, for God’s sake. As if he would have ever given his private phone number out to a patient and as if they’d ever call him close to midnight. That was the really grubby bit, Riva, that he actually thought I’d be thick enough to buy such a fucking unlikely story.’

‘Oh, Susan,’ Riva whispered, recoiling at Susan’s uncharacteristic use of strong language. The import of what Susan was saying was only just starting to permeate her consciousness. ‘Did you tell him, Sooz? Tell him you didn’t believe his fib, that is?’

There was a small pause before Susan replied, ‘No I didn’t, Riva. And, before you ask me why not, it was because…because I just couldn’t bear to hear the truth. I…I preferred to have Joe stand there and lie through his teeth to me, rather than have him be honest and tell me he’s having an affair with someone.’

Riva felt her chest squeeze painfully as she heard her friend’s voice dissolve in tears again. In her confusion, she offered another stupid alternative. ‘Maybe he isn’t…sleeping with her, Sooz. I mean, maybe it’s not that sort of an affair but some kind of friendship thing…’ Riva trailed off, realising that an emotional attachment was perhaps worse than a physical affair.

‘For God’s sake, Riv!’ Susan cried. ‘Even if he isn’t fucking her now, he obviously wants to, doesn’t he? I mean, why the fuck would a man sneak away from his wife and call another woman and address her as “darling”? Why the fuck, if it isn’t to shag her…’

Riva nodded, her head reeling from Susan’s uncustomary flurry of f-words. Even ‘shag’ seemed too strong for someone so well brought up. The strongest language Susan normally used went no further than ‘damn’ and ‘bloody’. Riva gathered her thoughts together again, trying to stay calm for Susan’s sake. ‘Have you any idea who he might have been talking to, Sooz?’

‘You know, I haven’t even got as far as that, Riva. Because what I still can’t cope with is that Joe’s been lying to me. It’s almost as if it doesn’t matter who she is. You know?’ Before Riva could respond, Susan added angrily,’But when I do find out who she is, I swear I’ll kill her.’

Kaaya eased herself into the leather seat of her Lotus Elise and, after turning on the ignition, pressed the electronic buzzer for the garage doors to open. Usually the deep throb of the engine filled her with a sense of well-being but this morning Kaaya was in a bad, bad mood. Bloody Joe! First he had abandoned her last night, leaving her to spend a boring evening watching reruns on TV, and then he’d woken her in the morning babbling on about how worried he was that Susan may have overheard their conversation last night. Before even asking her what sort of an evening she’d had all by herself.

Apparently, Susan had walked up behind him when he had been kootchie-kooing her from outside the River Café. Susan hadn’t made any accusations yet but Joe was quite sure she’d smelt a rat. It was written all over her face, she was real quiet this morning, she left for work barely saying goodbye…blah di blah di blah…

‘Pathetic,’ Kaaya muttered under her breath as the garage doors swung open and she reversed her car out onto the quiet cobbled mews. What the fuck had Joe expected would happen when he embarked on an extramarital affair – that he could blithely carry on and never be found out? The way he had bleated this morning, it was as if he’d never even considered the possibility. Married men were such morons sometimes, imagining they could live different parts of their lives in convenient little bubbles that, if they ever collided, would simply cheerfully bounce off each other and float away!

When the traffic lights on Holland Park Avenue turned green, Kaaya pressed her foot on the accelerator, hearing the wheels of her car squeal against the road. She had half a mind to call off this whole stupid thing with Joe. Affairs were meant to be fun and uplifting, not a bloody millstone around the neck, pulling you down. It was piteous, the way Joe had gone on this morning, blithering on about how he really, really didn’t want Susan to know. How he couldn’t bear to hurt her. It wasn’t that Kaaya wanted him to leave Susan for her – that was the last thing on her mind, for heaven’s sake! Nor, for that matter, did she particularly want to hurt the bloody woman. She had nothing against her and Susan was, after all, her sister’s best friend. But Kaaya certainly wanted Susan kept well away from the fun she was having and Joe’s insistence this morning on shoving his wife’s pain down her throat was such a drag.

Stopping at the next set of traffic lights, Kaaya sensed someone’s gaze on her. She glanced out of her car window and felt the familiar old frisson as she saw a man – oh, and a pleasant-looking man in a silver Ferrari – eye her appreciatively. As their eyes met, he smiled and nodded his short-cropped grey head. It could have been at her sports car or it could have been at her lustrous brown hair, tousled by the breeze. It certainly fitted her mood to decide it must be the latter and Kaaya slowly smiled back at him, her enigmatic I-could-be-interested-in-you-depending smile. Then the lights turned green and she shot ahead of him, leaving the faint smell of burning rubber in her wake.

Kaaya was feeling calmer by the time she wafted into her office half an hour later, the man in the silver Ferrari having provided further entertainment by racing her down Great Western Road before finally disappearing in the direction of Regent’s Park.

Henry from accounts was doing his customary hangaround reception, waiting for her. His crush on her had got so bad since the last Christmas party, he no longer even bothered hiding it from everyone. Sarah, the girl behind the reception desk, gave Kaaya a quick smile of relief as she walked in. The poor girl was probably quite exhausted from Henry’s stubbornly clinging presence – half an hour extra today owing to Kaaya’s lateness.

‘Hello, Sarah, sorry I’m late. Any messages for me? Oh, hello, Henry,’ Kaaya said, stopping by the reception desk and casting glowing smiles all round. Greeting Henry with more warmth than usual would only refuel his cloying adoration but, after Joe’s behaviour this morning, Kaaya would be willing to charm Idi Amin himself.

‘Oh, Kaaya, Pamela was looking for you a few minutes ago. And these people called,’ Sarah replied, shoving a small pile of notes towards Kaaya.

‘All well, Henry?’ Kaaya asked, collecting her messages and turning the full blast of her 100-kilowatt smile on the hapless Henry. Henry gulped and nodded, a virulent pink creeping up from under his collar at the vibrant presence of Kaaya in a swishing purple miniskirt and fishnet tights within touching distance of him.

‘H-hello, Kaaya,’ he whispered, unable to look her in the eye. Kaaya decided to spare him further agony and spoke over his shoulder to Sarah. ‘Tell Pam I’ve just got in, Sarah, sweetie, and I’ll pop upstairs soon as I can.’

She riffled through her notes as she walked into her office. Aha, two from Joe. Evidently he’d gathered she wasn’t too pleased with his panic attack this morning and was trying to make amends. She’d keep him waiting a bit before calling him back. Kaaya really didn’t like clingy love-sick dimwits, so perhaps she would keep Joe at bay for a while. She did, after all, have a job to attend to.

Chapter Ten (#ulink_d3358b5f-1342-52da-95f6-7aa8d8d71c42)

It wasn’t working. Riva closed her laptop and leant back in her chair, suddenly exhausted. It had been a messy writing day, starting off with a couple of extremely productive hours first thing in the morning. But, after that phone call from Susan, her work had been patchy, thoughts swinging wildly from what suddenly seemed like trivial fictional diversions to the terrible earth-shattering stuff of reality. In her time as a fiction writer, Riva had discovered that, usually, it was real life that was the crucible for the most powerful dramas. Poor Susan. Riva hadn’t heard her friend sound so distraught in years. In fact, she probably hadn’t heard Susan sound so distraught ever – Susan being the kind of placid soul who had steadfastly done nothing wrong all her life. Suddenly the carefully made-up problems of Riva’s protagonist seemed so very inconsequential in comparison to what Susan was facing at the moment. Riva clicked shut the Word document that was the growing manuscript of her third book. There was no point. Whatever she wrote on a day like this was bound to be complete rubbish and guaranteed to be trashed when she returned to it later.

Riva looked at the kitchen clock as she slipped her laptop back into its case. Three pm. Enough time to grab a shower before heading out to Susan’s school. They had agreed to meet at the Portuguese café down the road from the school so that Susan would not be interrupted by her colleagues or students. She seemed to want Riva’s help in preparing a strategy before Joe got home that night but, although Riva had given it extended thought, she had not come up with any ideas beyond boxing Joe’s ears if indeed he had been cheating on Susan. She still couldn’t believe it though. Not Joe, ideal-boyfriend-then-ideal-husband Joe Holmes, the kind of guy all their single female friends were looking for.

Riva shoved her computer case onto the bottom shelf of the bookcase with some force. Then she sprinted up the stairs, gathered her towel from the airing cupboard and disappeared into the shower.

Towelling herself dry a few minutes later, Riva wondered where her own husband had gone. Ben had left the house first thing in the morning to go to the British Library and certainly had not said he wouldn’t be home for lunch. The ham sandwich Riva had made for him when she stopped for a bite at midday now lay in the microwave with its edges curling. She sighed. No doubt Ben would be expecting a hot meal when he got back, seeing as she’d been in the house all day, and would not be amused at the sight of a dried-up sandwich awaiting him instead. Riva sighed again, more deeply. The business of both of them being full-time writers did rather complicate the domestic arrangements sometimes. Never mind that Ben found more excuses to leave the house than she did, the nonfiction he wrote apparently requiring more trips to the library than fiction writing, which Ben always seemed to imply required less hard graft. Never mind the fact that she was the only one of the two of them with an actual publishing contract!

Riva sighed and gave herself a reproachful look in the bathroom mirror. She knew she shouldn’t be uncharitable to poor Ben, even if it was only in her thoughts. It was downright mean to regard his writing plans as dubious merely because he hadn’t been published yet. She, more than anyone else, ought to understand how much determination it took to spend hours working on a manuscript, completely uncertain of whether it would ever get published or even read.

Shivering in her underwear, Riva sprinted to the pair of tall mahogany wardrobes in the bedroom. She cast a glance out at the steely sky. It had remained a stubborn grey all day, reluctantly leaking meagre sunshine through leaden clouds like an afterthought. And now it was barely three o’clock and the day was already resolutely darkening into night! She hurriedly pulled on a thick jumper over a T-shirt and dragged on her Levi’s, feeling altogether miserable. She had always hated these short February days, when night and day were barely discernible from each other. Something to do with her Indian birth, she reckoned, or the two sunny years she had spent in the Punjab before her parents had emigrated to England. Despite all these years, she had never grown used to the unrelenting greyness of the English winter and never would.

Of course, today everything was made infinitely worse by the misery of her best friend, but something had been palpably infecting her feelings for Ben of late, even though today, of all days, she should have been appreciative of her faithful husband. Perhaps it was something to do with her beloved father’s recent death, which had rather curiously brought into focus Ben’s own shortcomings as a husband.

‘Well, Ben,’ Riva muttered, sitting on the edge of her bed to yank on a pair of fleecy boots, ‘I could have roused myself to rustle up a pulao or a soup, just to keep you feeling like a man who’s just come in from a hard day’s work. But, you know what? My best friend, Susan, has just found that the man she’s lavished every ounce of love she’s had to give since she was eighteen may be having an affair. As though he were just another dick and not the fine, intelligent, upstanding man we always thought he was. Maybe, just maybe, she needs me a tiny bit more than you do tonight, Ben.’

That was the other thing about a writer’s life: these ridiculous monologues that had recently become a habit, everyone assuming that a writer’s life was easy simply because you could hang around in your pyjamas while doing your day’s work. Would anyone stop to consider, Riva wondered, that she hadn’t spoken to another soul all day? Except for Susan this morning, which was a most unusual event. Even the routine trip to the newsagents had been dumped in favour of finishing Chapter Ten because there was every danger of being sucked into reading something in the papers that would gobble up a precious couple of hours. Deadlines, deadlines, did publishers know how sapping of creativity these bloody deadlines could be? Ben certainly didn’t.

Riva looked at herself in the mirror to dab a bit of powder over her face and run a kohl pencil over her eyes. That would do. She really ought to wipe this unseemly frown off her face before she got to Wimbledon. For Susan’s sake. God knows she needed some cheering up, although Riva didn’t feel terribly well qualified to be that person tonight.

She picked out a small leather satchel and slipped her travel card into it, making her way downstairs. It was only as Riva was pulling on her coat in the hallway that she saw the letter sticking out of the postbox. The envelope was creamy and expensive looking, and had a French postage stamp bearing a Cannes postmark. Riva ripped it open and nearly dropped it in her excitement. She reread it to be sure it wasn’t a mistake. This was incredible! She, Riva Walia, was invited to be a jury member at the sixty-third Cannes Film Festival this summer!

In disbelief, she ran her eye once again over the details, savouring every word…At the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès…Nine jury members…Chaired by Isabelle Huppert…

Then she sucked in her breath sharply as she read the names of the other eight judges and came to the fourth on the list…Mr Aman Khan from India.

Riva leant heavily on the sideboard, suddenly dizzy. Perhaps she had wished for this somewhere in her deepest subconscious, in some kind of stupid yearning fan-like dream. Without an author carefully plotting events on a timeline and playing God with a bunch of helpless characters, choreographing their every move, how else could such an astonishing thing possibly happen?

Riva slid the letter under a pile of newspapers and left the house, resolving to contain her excitement until after she had met poor Susan.

Chapter Eleven (#ulink_d4d41060-e754-5e88-95eb-9de53ec5fc08)

Aman was met at Dubai airport by a small posse of dangerous-looking men who whisked him into a fleet of cars. Although he enjoyed relative anonymity in this city, like London, it was too full of Indians for him to hope to pass completely unnoticed.

He looked out of his darkened windows at the other opulent cars passing by, imagining how excited he would have been as a boy to see a Bugatti, a McLaren and a Maybach all in the space of ten minutes. Now everything seemed so lacklustre.

It was not long before Aman saw the tall mast-shape of the Burj Al Arab rise from the waters of the Arabian Gulf as the chauffeur steered his Rolls-Royce expertly through Dubai’s lunchtime traffic. The car swept along a freeway that was flanked by palm-fringed emerald lawns on one side, the ocean glittering blue-gold on the other. Soon his car was rolling up the hotel’s vast drive, the ocean on either side giving Aman the illusion that they were wafting all the way up the gangplank to a massive ship.

The Indian doorman gave Aman a delighted smile as he disembarked. After a polite exchange of words with the man, who seemed quite overcome by a film star paying him so much attention, Aman sprinted up a set of sweeping marble stairs to the entrance. No matter how many times he walked through the doors of the Burj, Aman couldn’t help being dazzled all over again by the quantities of gold leaf that seemed to cover everything; the walls, the floor, the ceiling were brighter than ever as the afternoon sun poured in. This was his fourth or fifth visit but Aman reckoned he would never entirely cope with the garish opulence of the Burj. It was Salma who insisted on staying at this hotel when she was in Dubai, mostly for the privacy they guaranteed all their guests, but also, Aman knew, because she simply would not settle for anything less. If there was a seven-star hotel in a city, it would be unthinkable that Salma Khan should stay anywhere else!

‘Has my wife arrived yet?’ Aman asked the butler, who was walking a few respectful paces behind him down a gilded maroon corridor towards the lift.

‘Mrs Khan arrives in an hour’s time,’ the man replied in soothing tones. As if he understood already that soothing was what Aman really needed with the imminent arrival of Mrs Khan. Aman smiled wryly. Salma would appear, as she always did, in a whirl of secretaries and beauticians and hair stylists, barking orders into a phone that was permanently glued to her left ear. The habit had grown worse with her recent acquisition of a cricket team that was playing in the Indian Premier League, the long-distance negotiating and strategising seeming to give her a special buzz. It was as if she thrived on the power of being in charge of things, no matter how far away she was. She certainly had a strange way of robbing not just Aman, but the very air around her, of peace and tranquillity.

Aman sighed as he was escorted up to the Royal Suite on the twenty-fifth floor. He’d suggested going for one of the smaller suites this time, given that this was not a personal visit but one organised and paid for by the Khalili brothers. But Salma would never agree to anything but the very best, of course, and the ever-courteous Khalili family had been quick to respond.

‘Least they can do, Aman,’ Salma had urged. ‘After all, you are charging only half what you normally get to attend their function.’ She was right but, typically, she was overlooking the fact that the discounted rate was because the Khalilis were known for their philanthropic work and the function was a fundraiser for Autism Awareness, a cause the oil tycoons were committed to because of the autistic twin sons born to the elder of the two brothers.

Aman entered the mustard and gold expanse of the Royal Suite, wondering how the hell he would cope with leopard-print carpets for three whole days. The two bedrooms upstairs were a necessary requirement, as he’d asked Salma to bring Ashfaq along on this trip and she would no doubt turn up with his regular entourage of nanny, governess and playmate. But a living room this size, a dining room and a private cinema was definitely overkill for such a short stay, much of which would be spent in the Khalilis’ ocean-view mansion anyway.

Aman flung his shades down on a console table and kicked off his shoes, enjoying the cool of the Carrara marble underfoot. Running up the stairs, he entered one of the two bathrooms and washed his face vigorously under water as cold as he could stand. After towelling his face dry, he picked up a bottle and splashed something that smelt faintly like citrus fruit on his face – Eau de Hermès, the lettering on the bottle discreetly pronounced. Salma would be pleased.

Aman wandered out into a bedroom whose centrepiece was a huge circular and canopied four-poster bed. He remembered this bed from an earlier visit four or five years ago – a time when he and Salma had been getting on better, for he could recall how they’d laughed while experimenting with its various spinning and vibrating functions. It was hard to imagine such a time now, given the frostiness that had crept into their marriage in the past few years. Looking back, the surprising bit hadn’t been that he’d married Salma in the first place. She had been a beauty, after all, daughter of the legendary Noor, India’s top actress in the sixties. Aman had spotted Salma at one of his first film parties – a lavish affair celebrating twenty-five years of Rajshri Studios – and had found himself unable to take his eyes off the fair-skinned, svelte beauty that Salma had been then. She was, in fact, the spitting image of her mother, as Noor had been in her prime, and Aman was overwhelmed by a feeling of déjà vu, imagining he was watching an old Noor film (and he had seen them all in his misspent schooldays) as he watched Salma, clad in a sparkling white gharara, sitting demurely by her father, the powerful and influential Abdullah Miandad, then Bollywood’s top director.

Aman had managed to inveigle an introduction to Salma at the party and they had spent some time chatting about inconsequential things. But Aman had picked up a sense of an ambitious girl trapped in a traditional setup and had felt a rush of sympathy that only added to the sensation of being quite smitten. Old Miandad had been pleased as punch when, a month later, Aman made a tentative enquiry regarding the possibility of seeking his daughter’s hand in marriage. The positive response had surprised Aman at first, but he realised later that Salma’s canny father had probably already had some inkling of Aman’s star potential with Krodh having by then catapulted him to hero status. Aman’s parents had been nonplussed by the Bollywood princess they had suddenly been landed with as a daughter-in-law, but Aman’s new-found money and status was by then bringing them a life of substance too, so it hadn’t been a totally unequal union. In the early heady flush of that youthful marriage, Aman had for a short while genuinely believed he was happy and in love.

That was then, Aman mused, staring out at the waters of the Persian Gulf sparkling into the distance. He had certainly never bargained for Salma turning into a lazy, complaining wife who considered it his duty to keep her in comfort. Even his tentative suggestion that she try taking up the acting career she had seemed to so desire was met by a disbelieving look.

The blazing blue of sky and sea was broken only by the occasional boat or aircraft and, as Aman watched a helicopter approach the hotel, he guessed that it was making for the helipad on its roof. He grinned, remembering a tennis match he had witnessed on the helipad a few years ago – a Roger Federer–Andre Agassi tournament that the smooth British MC had described as ‘strawberries and cream meeting the mile-high club’. Aman watched the helicopter progress slowly in the direction of the Burj and it slowly dawned on him that Salma had taken the option of using a helicopter transfer from the airport, despite his firm instructions not to do so. He felt bile and fury rise in his stomach as he thought of how heedlessly she had taken to ignoring his every request. She would, doubtless, accuse him of being tight-fisted but it wasn’t that at all. It was not just Aman’s fear of small aircraft but also his ever-present terror that something bad would happen to Ashfaq when he wasn’t near enough to help; an anxiety born from being forced to spend so much time away from his son. Salma would have been fully aware that a helicopter journey with Ashfaq would make him deeply unhappy – and yet she had chosen to do exactly that. Aman watched the small distant dot of the helicopter and felt his jaw clench in helplessness and fear.