Free Lovesong by Alex Miller Page B

she replace it with? It went deep. It was the bedrock of her being. Her sense of her worth, the meaning of her life, these sheltered within it. Without this belief her existence would be pointless. Until she became a mother, as a woman she was only marking time. Waiting for reality to begin. The past two years had been more difficult for her than either John or Houria understood. There was loneliness for her in knowing this. It was a loneliness she shared silently with her yet-to-be-conceived child, the dependable companion of her secret interior life.

Chapter Ten
    S abiha had been closer to her grandmother than she had been to her own mother, and had not doubted it when her grandmother whispered to her as she lay dying, ‘I will always be with you.’ These last words meant a great deal to Sabiha. They embodied a promise that she considered sacred, a promise that when she finally needed to call on her grandmother, her grandmother would be there to provide her with the strength to meet the great challenges of her life. Sabiha was not alone, but felt herself to be accompanied through life by her grandmother and her unborn daughter. Her own promise to herself was that one day she would place her baby daughter in the arms of her beloved father.
    Sabiha would never accept a life without her child. She and Houria were different. The old simplicitybetween them was gone. She still loved Houria, more than she could ever say, but things had changed for them. Her life was no longer as straightforward as it had been before she was married to John.
    To sit with her father and her little daughter in the courtyard under the pomegranate tree, the three of them together, this was the beautiful dream Sabiha carried with her everywhere. It was her comforter. She was sure the day would come when it would become a reality. Without hope of this dream coming true, her life would be too sad to bear. To take this dream from her would be to take everything from her. John did not realise how cruel it was of him to insist she go to Australia with him, for if she went to Australia she would have to give up her dream. It was difficult for her to explain the importance of this to him. She had tried several times, but whenever she spoke of it, it sounded as if she was speaking of a small and childishly selfish thing compared to the big facts of their reality.
    Sabiha noticed that the rain and wind had eased and the people on the street no longer looked as if they were being blown along. The light had come on downstairs in the back of old Arnoul Fort’s shop. He would be making coffee and toast for his wife.
    Houria said, ‘Do you still love him?’
    Sabiha came out of her reverie and for a second thought Houria was referring to her father. ‘My father?’
    ‘John,
for God’s sake,’ Houria said.
    ‘Of course I still love him! You know I do. That’s not fair.’
    ‘John’s a good man. He’s done everything he can to make you happy. He worships you. You’ll never find another one like him.’ Houria was impatient with the conversation now and didn’t want to take it any further. She pushed her chair back and collected their empty coffee bowls and got up. She stood a moment looking down at Sabiha. ‘I’d better get on with things,’ she said, then turned and walked across the dining room and went through the bead curtain into the kitchen.
    It was true what Houria said. Sabiha did not disagree with any of it. There would never be another man for her but John. But there were also things Houria could not understand. For some reason Houria’s question—
Do you still love him?
—made Sabiha think of the day John took her up the Eiffel Tower. It was in the early days, when they were going out almost every Sunday to see the famous sights of Paris. He was so confident that day. So busy, so eager to be the one in charge of the excursion. It was only later that she realised he had in those days been trying to see everything before they went to