Chapter 71

Ivory Towers

Mark & Molly

2075

There was much that was making Mark feel guilty. Here he was—a married man with a devoted wife with whom he'd lived for fourteen years and a delightful nine-year old daughter—now living every day of the week in Oxford: a two hour train journey from Islington. And this was all because his employer, Sig Mu Inc., Korea, needed a representative in the university town and Mark was aware that he'd been considered to be the best man for the job. He also knew that if he showed any reluctance, his employer would soon conclude that he was no longer the best man for the job he currently held in Central London.

Not only did Mark feel guilt that he was abandoning his familial duties for reasons of economic necessity but, worse, that he'd allowed himself to succumb to sexual temptation. And this was something he'd sworn never to do. He was weak and fallible and terrified that his wife might find out about it. Mark didn't deserve Molly. He'd failed her. And he continued to fail her every moment that he spent with Salma.

It wasn't that Mark had gone out of his way to be unfaithful. Indeed, nothing could have been further from his mind. Salma was just the woman who worked next door to SM Incorporated's skeleton office of two men and one young secretary. The company that employed her had something vaguely to do with the manufacture of nanocarbon polymers. Salma was a scientist by profession with qualifications from Harvard and Shanghai and she was working in Oxford for reasons rather more of necessity than choice.

"My home in Damascus was a place where one of the Israeli missiles struck. My parents, my grandparents, my aunts, my young son: they all died that day. Damascus still hasn't recovered. Syria continues to suffer from the Israeli invasion and the puppet dictator they put on the throne. My country was once one of the most democratic and liberal republics in the Arab world and now it's nothing more than a vassal to the Jewish state."

Mark knew very little about Middle Eastern politics. It was all very confusing. He knew there were countries in that part of the world that were now nothing more than a nuclear wasteland such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkmenistan, although he wasn't sure whether they were strictly speaking even in the Middle East.

"They are mostly Muslim," Salma told him. "But if you come from Syria or any of its neighbours you don't think of yourself as Middle East. That's a sort of Western view of the world. But Israel, Jordan and Lebanon, like Syria, are definitely what you might call Middle East."

"And Arabia, Yemen, Iraq and all those others?"

"I guess anywhere within easy reach of Israeli missiles is in the Middle East."

"It's certainly hotting up over there, isn't it?" Mark remarked.

"It's always been bad," said Salma. "There's been a hundred and thirty years of Israeli threat, but now since all that's left of American support for Israel is rhetoric and evangelical volunteers rather than hard cash, there's a chance that the balance of power might swing elsewhere. It's not the only nation with nuclear weapons. Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and the Democratic Republics of Arabia could pack a punch if needed. Not to mention Turkey, Iran and Iraq."

"You don't think there will be another nuclear war, do you? Surely the last two were bad enough."

"They say things always come in threes," said Salma reflectively. "But I hope not. What hope would there be for Syria under the missile flight paths? My hope is that democracy will return to Israel and that the Israeli people will vote for peace."

"Is that likely?"

"There's not been a proper democracy in Israel for over fifty years," said Salma. "But stranger things have happened. Remember North Korea. Or for that matter, how things turned out in the Congo."

Mark nodded sagely. Things quite often didn't happen the way people expected, however much it sometimes seemed that history was playing itself out in a sort of pre-ordained way. The Anglo-Saxon economies were in disarray. The climate was getting steadily more unstable. And every day more and more things that were once affordable were becoming prohibitively expensive.

And that included accommodation.

Mark was now a tenant in two properties. He was paying rent for the two-bedroom flat near Holloway that he shared with his wife and daughter. That wasn't cheap, though Molly's job with Hackney Borough Council did help pay the bills. His other home where he slept five nights a week was a single room in a large house that he shared with a mixture of mostly young people who kept nothing like the same hours as he did. They never did the washing up and left the kitchen in a shocking state. The bathroom constantly stank as a result of the antique plumbing. And Mark didn't feel comfortable when he sat in the living room with the other housemates while they smoked dope, snorted lines and watched moronic quiz shows. After having lived as a husband and father for so long, he hated having to share a house. The only retreat his bedroom afforded him was when he pushed his ear-plugs as deep into his ears as he could and pulled a duvet over his shoulders to keep out the draught that whistled through the poorly-fitting windows.

Mark soon found that Salma's small bedsit was much more comfortable than either his Oxford or his Islington home. Her ex-husband had left her a regular stipend that was enough to supplement her income and to allow her to live relatively comfortably. Although her bedsit wasn't situated in the best part of Oxford, it was near enough to the city centre that she could walk to work and not have to squeeze into the crowded buses. Her neighbours were quiet, the flat was tastefully decorated and the bed was gloriously inviting.

Mark stood by the window of her apartment through which he could glimpse the city walls that kept gown and town apart. After all these months in Oxford, he'd not once ventured within the walls but he could see from Salma's window that there was much that would be worth visiting if he should purchase a tourist pass for the day. Perhaps that was something he could do together with Molly and Monica if they ever came to spend the weekend in Oxford.

Thinking of his wife brought a fresh spasm of guilt to Mark. He glanced back at Salma. She and Molly were both women in their thirties, although Salma was somewhat closer to the end of that decade than Molly. She was also a larger woman. Although not exactly fat or obese, she could best be described as chunky. She was taller, rounder and, in places, rather flabbier. But she was also, Mark had to shamefacedly admit, a rather more passionate lover than Molly who often seemed distracted during their lovemaking.