The Nanny (33 page)

I remember the irritating assistant telling me about Clare’s daughter last time I came in. Jackson had meningitis at fourteen. Lolly and I thought we’d lose him; it was the longest
forty-eight hours of my life. Even the doctors were amazed at the speed of his recovery.

I fumble over the words. ‘How’s your daughter? Poppy, isn’t it?’

She smiles. I’d give my right arm for that smile to be for me. ‘She’s much better. How did you—’

‘Your colleague. Craig.’

‘How kind of you to remember. She had us terribly worried for a few days, but she seems over it now. She had so much salt in her body, they thought I must have given it to her.’
Suddenly, her voice cracks. ‘The police came . . . it was so dreadful—’

I don’t know what to say. The police in this Godforsaken country must be fucking idiots. It has to be obvious to anyone with half a brain that this woman would never poison her own
child.

She rubs at her eyes like a child and hands me Ella’s zinnias.
Ella
. One of the top paediatricians in London. I can do something for Clare, I realize. Finally.

I bolt for the door, already dialling Ella’s number on my cell. (‘She’s the one, isn’t she, Cooper?’ Ella says, surprising me. ‘The one you’ve stayed
here for?’) It doesn’t occur to me that I’m changing everything. I’m crossing the line, breaking my own cast-iron rule: never get involved.

‘Lunch,’ I suggest to Clare, seizing my chance when I come back a few days later. ‘You can thank me then’.

I don’t for one minute expect her to say yes.

I feel like a fox in a henhouse in that flashy restaurant. I take her instead to the park – or to what passes for green space in this miserable, overcrowded island
– and she slips off her shoes and walks in her bare feet on the browned grass. I tell her I’ve been assigned to chase down a Taliban story in the North West Frontier Province; though I
don’t add that I called
Time
magazine that morning and volunteered. It’s time to get my head straight. I can’t sit around London for the rest of my life, mooning over
Clare like a lovesick teenager.

I tell her, though not quite in so many words, that I love her.

I’m not made of fucking stone. I can’t go off and risk my neck with Clare thinking I’m in love with Ella. I’ll probably never get this chance again; I want to lay down my
marker now, just in case. Life’s uncertain. If nothing else, Jackson’s death taught me that.

How did my brother bear it, knowing his wife was in love with another man?
I couldn’t share
, I realize. If Clare was mine, I couldn’t share her.

Through the next three brutal weeks in Afghanistan, I think of her, often. She gave me no encouragement, made no promises; I didn’t expect it. But her image is like a talisman in my
pocket, a stone to touch when I need to experience something honest and real. I don’t bother to explore the implications for the future of my love for her. I don’t overdramatize it, or
make the mistake of thinking it means anything cataclysmic. It just
is
.

I return to London thinner, browner and calmer. In an hour’s time, I’ll be on a plane back to the US. Jackson’s death is still raw, but the shock has passed; I’m no
longer raging at the world. Ella has slid painlessly into the past. Clare . . . Clare I will always carry with me. Surprisingly, the thought is comforting.

My plane has barely touched down at Heathrow before my phone starts buzzing with texts and messages that have floated around the ether, unread and unheard, while I’ve been skulking in damp
caves. I listen to the first one, and don’t bother with the rest.

Before Ella has finished explaining to me about Rowan, I’m collecting my bag from the luggage carousel at Terminal One, slinging it over my shoulder and taking the subway straight to
Terminal Four. Screw
Time
. Their story can wait.

‘Cooper, this is crazy,’ Ella exclaims. ‘You can’t just get on a plane to Beirut!’

‘Why? Think they’ll be overbooked?’

‘I left you a message because I thought you’d want to know about Clare and Marc, not so you could drop everything and disappear off on a wild-goose chase. Don’t you think there
are already people out there looking for Rowan? I’ve had the police interview
me
twice. No one even knows if Marc’s still in Beirut. He could be anywhere with Rowan by
now.’

I slap my credit card on the British Airways ticket desk.

‘I’ll find him.’

‘You don’t even know where to start!’

‘I’ll find him,’ I repeat.

The plane to Beirut is empty. I stretch out on three seats, balling my coat under my head. I’ve worked the Lebanese story for twenty-five years: the pitiless civil war, the Western
hostage-taking, and the fragile renaissance – before the car bombs and assassinations started again – of the last decade. I know how easy it is to disappear here. Ask Terry Anderson,
held hostage in plain sight for seven years. To the West, it was as if he’d vanished off the face of the Earth. No one knew if he was dead or alive until he was released.

But I also know that if you ask questions in the right places, eventually answers find their way back. No one ever truly disappears. There are always ripples.

Marc Elias may have been born in Lebanon, but he’s a foreigner by all but blood. The ripples he makes will be noticed more than he realizes. Sooner or later, I’ll find him.

I refuse to allow myself to think of Clare, grief-stricken and desperate for her child; Clare, newly separated from her husband. I can’t afford any distractions. What matters now is
finding Rowan. Everything else can wait.

It takes me six days.

Josef, my driver, comes to me. ‘
Habibi
,’ he says, ‘I have a friend.’

It works the way it always does. His friend, Mehdi, has a friend. Zahir has a brother, whose wife has a cousin. Cousin Antoine meets me at a seafront café for coffee and
man’oushi zaatar
. We smoke cigarettes and stare companion-ably over the Mediterranean. I have a friend, says Antoine, in perfect English, who lives in Jounieh, a few miles from here.
More of an acquaintance, really. This acquaintance was recently asked to find a babysitter for an uncle. A widower, newly arrived from America. Or London. Perhaps Canada? His friend, or
acquaintance, recommended his sixteen-year-old sister, who came home that night with stories of a sad baby with big blue eyes. Antoine shrugs. It could be nothing. It could be something.
He’ll arrange for me to meet the sister. It will be expensive, he warns.

I meet Rania the next day. Yes, she says, folding three hundred-dollar bills into her pocket. A blond, blue-eyed boy who cries all the time for his mother.

Rowan.

But we have to be sure. So Josef takes me to Jounieh, a high-rise sprawl across the slopes of a large bay north of Beirut. During the civil war, this was the Christian East. You took your life
in your hands crossing the Green Line, the no man’s land in downtown Beirut that divided it from the Muslim West. Josef risked his life for me a dozen times. I can count the number of men I
trust on the fingers of one hand. Josef is among them.

A new American-style six-lane highway cuts through the mountains from Beirut to Jounieh. The Lebanese drive as if it’s still a dirt free-for-all. Neon signs blink fitfully on all sides.
Washing is draped between apartment buildings still pock-marked with bullet holes from the war. Somewhere, hidden in this concrete jungle, is Clare’s son.

Josef takes me deep into an unfamiliar neighbourhood. We stop at a café on the corner of two narrow, gritty city streets with old movie posters peeling from the walls. We drink thick,
burnt coffee, and we wait. An hour passes, then two. We smoke filterless cigarettes. Every now and then, a small man with gold teeth comes over to our table and mutters in Arabic to Josef.
I’m patient. This is the way it is in the Middle East. We share more coffee, sweet pastries, cigarettes.

Suddenly there’s a commotion outside. A silver car with a badly painted green passenger door pulls up. Two youths get out, and the gold-toothed café owner goes out to talk to them.
After a few minutes, he beckons. As soon as we get outside, Josef and I are hustled towards the vehicle. I would never get into a strange car in Lebanon without Josef. Even so, I’m alert to
the tension in his shoulders. I have a bad feeling about this.

After fifteen minutes’ uphill drive, we arrive in front of an elegant, faded apartment building high over the bay. We sit in the hot car, waiting. A young woman comes out, glancing
nervously at the car and twisting her hands. The two youths go over to her. There is gesticulating, shouting; one of the boys shoves the woman in the shoulder. I put my hand on the door handle, and
Josef holds me back with a warning arm across my chest.

Without explanation, the youths climb back in and we’re driven back to the café. Josef huddles in a corner with the gold-toothed owner, who smiles at me and shrugs:
Shit
happens.

‘The man with the child left,’ Josef explains in low tones. ‘Someone warned him an American was looking for him. He was there until twenty minutes before we arrived.’

Josef and I wait down the street in our own car until the youths have gone, and the café owner comes out alone. We follow him as he walks through the town, keeping well back, but he
doesn’t look round. He turns a corner and stops to hawk on the ground and scratch his ass. I grab Josef’s jacket from the back seat and leap out of the car, throwing it over the
man’s head and bodily tossing him on to the back seat of the vehicle. He weighs perhaps a hundred pounds soaking wet. Josef guns the engine and races up into the hills. I pin the man,
who’s screaming in terror, flat against the seat. No one has even noticed us.

Josef doesn’t stop till he reaches a deserted car park high over the city. I press my knee into the café owner’s back, shoving his face into the leather seat.

‘Now imagine you’re seven months old,’ I snarl.

‘Please,
habibi
!’ the man cries, his voice muffled. ‘He said he’d kill me!’

‘He’s not here. I am.’ I tighten my grip. ‘
Talk
.’

Ever since Ella broke the news, I’ve refused to permit myself to think about Clare in any other context than as Rowan’s mother. I haven’t dared to wonder what
might happen now that she’s free. She made no promises.

But now that I’m with her, separated by a few inches of charged, electrified air, it’s impossible to maintain my resolve. We sit next to each other on the plane to Beirut, my second
such journey in a week; almost, but not quite, touching. Occasionally, our elbows brush on the armrest, and we both jump as if burned. Neither of us can look the other in the eye.

Jenna leans across the aisle and taps my shoulder, breaking the spell. ‘Are you
sure
it was Rowan?’

I nod curtly. Wissam Ghanour, the gold-toothed café owner, was surprisingly helpful once we persuaded him to our point of view. He took us to the ‘safe house’ Marc had
pre-arranged with him, a two-storey building off the main road back to Beirut. The three of us waited in the car until it got dark, and we were able to see movement through the uncurtained windows.
One blond baby looks much like another, especially one you’ve never seen in person; but I’d studied the photograph of Marc until it was burned on my retina. I recognized him the moment
he walked into view. We had the right place.

Yesterday, Josef arranged a brief vacation for Ghanour in the Bekaa Valley with some of his relatives, while I flew back to Britain for Clare. I hated to involve her, but I had no choice.
Besides, she’s his mother. How much more involved could she be?

‘How do you know Marc won’t have vanished again since yesterday?’ Jenna presses. ‘Why didn’t you just take Rowan when you had the chance?’

‘I don’t have his passport, in case you’d forgotten,’ I say tersely. ‘Even if I had, I’d never have got him back into Britain without Clare. An American man,
travelling alone with a British child who has a different name? Alarm bells would’ve gone off in all directions.’

‘So why didn’t you go to the Lebanese police? They do
have
police here, right?’

‘Don’t be damn ridiculous—’

‘Jenna, if Rowan gets caught up in the Lebanese legal system, I might never get him back,’ Clare interrupts. She leans across me, her white shirt pulling tight across her breasts.
‘Nicholas warned us: fathers nearly always get custody of children in Beirut, especially if they’re boys. It could take years for an appeal to be heard, and even then I probably
wouldn’t win. It’s too risky.’

‘But you—’

‘Please, Jenna,’ Clare sighs. ‘Listen to Cooper.’

Jenna shrugs, and picks up her magazine.

Clare sinks back into her seat, closing her eyes. I glare at Jenna. The girl’s a real pill; I wouldn’t have brought her, but we need to get close to Rowan, and a woman is less likely
to attract attention. Clare’s far too blonde and recognizable. She stands out like a sore thumb. With her dark hair, Jenna could pass for European Lebanese. She may be a pain in the ass, but
the girl’s our best shot.

We land at Beirut Airport, a vast new marble concourse very different from the crowded, sweltering concrete shoe-box of the civil war days. Jenna and Clare collect their visas and we hurry
outside. The humidity is smothering. Even this late at night, we’re all sweating by the time Josef pulls up to the kerb to collect us.

He drops us at an anonymous small hotel in Hamra, the busy downtown shopping and commercial district of Beirut. It’s full of tourists: an easy place to blend in. Plus, the manager owes me.
Anyone starts asking about us, I’ll be the first to know.

‘I think I’ll call Davina,’ Clare says anxiously. ‘I know it’s late, but she’s never looked after Poppy before. She’s really not very good with
babies—’

Jenna snorts. ‘Mrs Lampard’s the one who’ll be changing the shitty nappies. Stop worrying. Poppy will be fine.’

‘I know, but . . . honestly, I won’t be long. I’ll see you in a few minutes.’

‘Don’t get gung-ho on me,’ I warn Jenna as we find a discreet corner in the bar. ‘This isn’t going to be easy. Clare’s entitled to have access to her child.
Whereas you—’