Lovesong by Alex Miller Page A

their youth Arnoul and his wife Monique had known by name everyone in the district. Now the old man knew scarcely anyone who passed his door. It was to Arnoul that Houria had sent Sabiha long ago to find a matching thread with which to repair the leather patch on the sleeve of John’s jacket. Sabiha had wanted her repairs to be perfect. Although he had not worn the old brown jacket for many years, John had not thrown it away and it still hung on his side of the wardrobe upstairs in their bedroom; the bedroom that had once been Dom and Houria’s, and then Houria’s alone.
    For the past three years Bruno Fiorentino had been delivering a box of his hothouse tomatoes to Chez Dom regularly every Tuesday. After he delivered the tomatoes Bruno stayed for the midday meal, which John insisted was on the house. On Tuesdays Bruno was invariably the last customer to leave the café. Today, as usual, just after John and Sabiha began their own meal, Bruno drove past the window in his van hooting his horn and waving his arm to them.
    As Bruno’s familiar green and orange van swept past the café, its horn blaring, John looked up from his plate and gestured with his fork out the window. ‘Did you know Bruno’s got eleven kids?’ he said.
    Even as he said it, John couldn’t understand why he didn’t resist the impulse to utter these words. How could he be so insensitive? Dismayed, he reached across the table and put his hand over Sabiha’s, apologising to her and expecting to see tears gathering in her beautiful dark eyes.
    But instead of weeping, Sabiha withdrew her hand and laughed. It was a loud laugh, more like a cry of dismay and anger than a laugh.
    John flinched and stared at her in astonishment.
    His timing could hardly have been worse. Since celebrating her thirty-seventh birthday in June, Sabiha had been finding it difficult to accept that she was awoman nearing forty. It was late September now and another year was already nearly gone. Last Friday morning when she was at the market, she found herself standing stock still murmuring incredulously,
Can this really be me?
She had felt, suddenly, that she was trapped inside the body of an older woman. Inside, where it really mattered, Sabiha knew herself to be the young woman who had fallen in love with John all those years ago. Standing there in the market on Friday, a gust of panic had swept over her and she had seen herself—the young woman, that is—running wildly among the stalls, knocking people aside and tipping over piles of apples and cabbages and … And
what
? There was nothing to be done. Nothing.
    Her panic lasted only a moment, but the question remained with her: where had the years gone? For some time she had been feeling haunted by the passing years. She was nearing forty and had only a few years left before the onset of that time that is known, with good reason, as the change of life. What then? It would be the end of her hopes of motherhood. It brought tears to her eyes whenever she thought of the night when she and John first made love. Since then she had learned to live with constant doubt.
    When her childlessness persisted, and no cause for it could be found, Sabiha had begun to feel as if a wallof indifference was being erected around her, cruelly cutting her off from the purpose of her existence, and she asked herself if she was being punished for a crime she had not committed. The injustice of her childlessness burned in her every day. What had she done to deserve it? Her life had surely been blameless. Eventually they had stopped talking with each other about their childlessness. It was too painful. But although she never spoke of it, Sabiha’s determination to bring her little girl into the world had remained as strong as ever. She had never lost hope. One day, she was sure, she would hold her little daughter in her arms. The same child whose existence she had felt fluttering in her belly that summer day as she lay in John’s arms on the bank of the