Sleepless Nights

He lifted an eyebrow. ‘You surprise me. I would have guessed that you’d walked up the aisle very young and it hadn’t worked out.’

‘You would have guessed wrong. Like you I’m a dedicated single.’

‘With women who look the way you do that usually means a career conflict. You said you worked with computers. Was that a throwaway reference to something extremely high-powered? Are you a computer scientist at the cutting edge of research?’

Sarah laughed and shook her head. ‘I’m the computer equivalent of the man who comes to fix the washing machine or the dishwasher...except that I’m female and I fix personal computers. But I have no idea how to fix Rose’s problem. There has to be some way to contact her husband, surely?’

‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll look into it. Do you have the time to take her back to her hotel? What time are you leaving town?’

It pleased her that he thought her capable of being a computer scientist and that he hadn’t forgotten today was the day the group left.

‘Not till after lunch. We’re leaving for the airport at two and spending the night at Lukla to start the trek tomorrow.’

Neal leaned towards her, his forearms resting on his knees, his long fingers interlaced. ‘I wish you weren’t leaving so soon. I feel this is one of those times that “taken at the flood leads on to fortune”...at least in the sense of some memorable days, and possibly nights, together.’

She didn’t know how to respond but just then the waiter returned and saved her from saying anything.

She watched him unloading his tray, thinking it far more likely that a brief affair with Neal, rather than leading on to fortune, would fulfil the continuation of that famous quotation and, like so much of her life, be ‘bound in shallows and in miseries’.

‘When you were here before, did you go to Bhaktapur?’ he asked, as the waiter went away.

Sarah knew the moment of truth could not be put off any longer. ‘I haven’t been here before. This is my first visit. I’m sorry my T-shirt misled you. It was lent me by a friend. But I should have put you right.’

Her confession was followed by a long moment of silence. She could not read his expression. Had the lie by omission made him distrust her?

‘Why didn’t you?’ he asked.

‘It’s hard to explain. I’m not usually careless with the truth. I suppose I wanted you to see me as someone more interesting than I am. We were strangers on a plane and I thought you might be bored if I admitted to being a “newbie”.’

As a journalist, used to computer-speak, he would know that was the somewhat derogatory name given to the inexperienced by those who knew their way around.

‘Who makes you feel you’re not interesting?’ he asked.

‘No one...not in my own world. But your world is different. I’ve read enough to know that real travellers haven’ t much time for tourists. I’m not even much of a tourist. The truth is I’ve never been anywhere. This is my first time abroad, can you believe?’

‘Considering how comfortable you seem, I do find that hard to believe. When I saw you in the airport at Doha, I took you for someone who’d chalked up a lot of air miles.’

‘I wish I had. I always wanted to travel, but my life went another way.’ She glanced at her watch. Already it was fifteen minutes since they’d left the clinic. ‘We mustn’t be too long.’ She began to pour out the tea. ‘I’m glad I’ve got it off my chest. I didn’t like not being honest with you.’

‘As long as you promise not to do it again, I’ll forgive you. Only straight answers from now on...agreed?’

For a second or two she hesitated. If she agreed, would he want to open doors she would prefer to keep closed?

Another quotation from Shakespeare came into her head. This above all: to thine own self be true...thou canst not then be false to any man.

‘Agreed,’ she said firmly, handing him a cup of tea. ‘Tell me about this place you mentioned...Bhaktapur? What’s special about it? I don’t think Naomi has been there. She’s the friend who lent me the T-shirt and made me wear-in my boots.’

‘What’s special about Bhaktapur is that it’s still the way Khatmandu used to be when the only people who came here were mountaineers and hippies. I don’t think Bhaktapur will stay the way it is now. Tourism changes places... always for the worse unfortunately. But right now it’s still a magic place. You mustn’t go home without seeing it...especially the golden gate. It’s not as famous as San Francisco’s Golden Gate, but if someone could only see one of them, I’d recommend Bhaktapur’s.’

‘Having seen both presumably?’

‘Yes. I spent a year travelling before I switched careers.’

Sarah was silent, sipping the hot tea and thinking thoughts it would be tactless to disclose to him.

Disconcertingly, he read her mind. ‘You’re thinking that journalism is a trashy occupation compared with medicine. I’ve had lots of people put that to me. They forget that if it were not for investigative journalists, a lot of bad things would continue unchecked. Some forms of journalism are tacky, but a free press is still our main safeguard against bad governments and unscrupulous vested interests such as some of the drug manufacturers. Just recently I wrote an exposé of racketeering in cosmetic surgery. It carried more weight coming from a doctor and it certainly warned a lot more women to be careful who they trust their faces and bodies to than I could have done any other way.’

‘You’re right, of course,’ she conceded. ‘I hadn’t thought it through. My attitude to journalists is coloured by all the bad things we know they do...targeting public figures in the hope of catching them doing something they shouldn’t...hounding people at times when they need to be private...concentrating on the horrors and ignoring the good side of life.’