suppose you could go to the Planetarium.’
‘Not necessary. In London you don’t look up to see the stars. You look down.’ He frowned and she laughed. ‘Didn’t you know that the streets of London aren’t paved with gold, they’re paved with stars.’
‘They are?’
He looked down and then sideways, at her. ‘Obviously I’m missing something.’
‘We’re in Berkeley Square?’ she prompted.
‘And?’
‘You’ve never heard the song?’ She shook her head. ‘Why would you? It’s ancient.’
Berkeley Square…Something snagged in his memory, a scratchy old record his grandfather used to play. ‘I thought it was about a nightingale.’
‘You do know it!
‘I remember the tune.’ He hummed a snatch of it and she smiled.
‘Almost,’ she said, laughing. ‘But it’s not just the nightingale. There’s a line in there about stars too.’ She lifted her shoulders in an awkward little shrug. ‘My dad used to sing it to my mum,’ she said, as if she felt she had to explain how she knew. ‘They used to dance around the kitchen…’
‘Really?’ He found the idea enchanting. ‘Like this?’ And as he turned his arm went naturally to her waist. ‘Well, what are you waiting for? Sing…’ he commanded.
Diana could not believe this was happening. There were still people about-Zahir’s kind of people, men in dinner jackets, women in evening clothes-heading towards the fashionable nightclubs in the area to celebrate some special occasion. Laughing, joking, posing as someone took photographs with a camera phone.
Maybe if she’d been dressed in a glamorous gown she wouldn’t have felt so foolish. But in her uniform…
‘Don’t!’ she begged, but Zahir caught her hand and, humming, began to spin her along the footpath. ‘Zahir…’ Then, ‘For heaven’s sake, that’s not even the right tune!’
‘No? How does it go?’
Maybe his excitement, his joy, were infectious, but somehow, before she knew it, she was singing it to him, filling gaps in the words with ‘da-da-de-dum’s and he was humming and they were dancing around Berkeley Square to a song that was old when her parents had first danced to it. A song in which the magic of falling in love made the impossible happen. Made London a place where angels dined, where nightingales sang and where the streets were paved with stars.
Dancing as if they were alone in the universe and the streets truly were paved with stars.
It was only when she came to the end of the song that she realised they had stopped dancing, that they were standing by the car. That Zahir was simply holding her.
That what she wanted more than anything in the world was for him to kiss her again.
And as if reading her thoughts, he raised her hand to his lips, before tilting his head as if listening to something very faint.
‘Can you hear it?’ he murmured. ‘The nightingale.’
It was a question that asked more than whether she could, impossibly, hear a shy woodland bird singing in a London square.
It took every atom of common sense to ignore the soft touch of his breath against her cheek, his fingers still wrapped about hers, his hand warm against her waist. To ignore the magic of the nightingale’s sweet song filling her heart.
It took Freddy’s voice saying, ‘Will you be home before I go to bed, Mummy?’ The memory of her promise, ‘I’ll be there when you wake up.’
‘No, sir,’ she managed, her voice not quite her own. ‘I think you’ll find that’s a sparrow.’
And with that she shattered the fragile beauty of the moment and the danger passed. He took a step back and said, with the gravest of smiles, ‘I forgot, Metcalfe. You don’t believe in fairy stories.’
For a moment she wanted to deny it. Instead, she said, ‘Neither, sir, do you.’
‘No.’ He repeated the touch of his lips to her finger and, without a word, turned and began to walk away.
‘Sir!’ He did not seem to hear her. ‘Where are you going?’ Then, in desperation, ‘Zahir!’
Without stopping, without turning, he said, ‘Go home, Metcalfe. I’ll walk back to the hotel.’
‘But…’
He stopped. Looked up to a sky fogged with neon.
As if in answer to her unspoken question, he turned and, as their eyes met, she knew ‘what’.
She’d always known.
She’d been here before and the raw power of the heat-charged look that passed between them scared her witless.
She’d had the sense to take a step back and then, as if seized by a determination to destroy herself all over again, she’d undone it all with that ‘but’.
And she had no excuse. She wasn’t an eighteen-year-old with her head in the clouds and her brains in cold storage. At eighteen there was some excuse. At twenty-three, with her reputation rebuilt, responsibilities…
She was fooling herself.
This was desire at its most primitive. The atavistic urge that powered all of creation. Age, experience, counted for nothing. There was no immunity…
‘But?’ Zahir finally prompted, his voice as soft as thistledown.
Without thought she’d reached out to him. Her hand was still extended, as if imploring him to come back. Finish what he’d started.
Slowly, deliberately, she closed her hand, but somehow it stayed there and he took a step towards her.
Maybe the movement broke the spell. Maybe age did help, because she swung her arm wildly towards the far corner of the square. ‘You’re going the wrong way,’ she said. ‘You need Charles Street. Then, um, Queen Street. Then Curzon Street.’
‘That’s out of the taxi drivers’ handbook, is it?’
‘Yes. No…’ Her eyes were still locked on to his. She could scarcely breathe. ‘Queen Street is one-way. I’d…a taxi…would have to cut along Erfield Street.’
Zahir gently took her arm, opened the driver’s door of the car and said, ‘I’ll see you in the morning, Diana. Ten o’clock.’
Zahir stood back as she climbed into the limo, fumbled to get the key in the ignition and, after what seemed like an age, drove away. Only then did he let loose the breath he seemed to have been holding for ever.
He’d only met the woman a few hours ago and yet it was as if he’d been waiting for her all his life. She was the one who made him laugh, made him dance. Made him want to sing.
Walking through the quiet streets, he should have been concentrating on the future, plans that had been a year in the making. Instead it was Diana Metcalfe who filled his head, heated him to the heart, made nightingales sing in the heart of London.
Her father was dozing in front of the television, not conspicuously waiting for his little girl to come home, but he never went to bed until he knew she was safely in. As a teenager it had driven her mad. It still did but, a mother herself, these days Diana understood the need to know that your family was safe before you could rest.
‘Busy day?’ he asked.
‘Above average,’ she said, managing a grin as she peeled off her jacket. ‘An outbreak of food poisoning meant that I had the number one car and a sheikh.’ About whom the least said the better. Her father could read her like a book. ‘Did you manage okay?’ she asked, by way of diversion. ‘Freddy wasn’t too much for you?’
‘He was as good as gold. He’s spark out, bless him.’ He eased himself to his feet, limped into the kitchen, turning on the tap with his left hand, then holding the kettle beneath it. She wanted to say, Sit down…let me…but understood that his self-esteem was involved. Knew that the more he did, the better it was for his mobility. Her need, his determination, to look after Freddy for her had done more for his recovery from the stroke than all the months of phsyio. Had given him a reason to push himself to be mobile. ‘What’ll you have? Tea, chocolate?’
All she wanted was to get to her room, shut the door, be on her own so that she could unravel the emotional tangle she’d got herself in, get her head around it, but her father looked forward to hearing about her day. ‘Chocolate, if you’ll have some with me. Has Mum gone up?’
