Tree of Pearls

‘I thought you were. I thought that’s what parents did. Adjoa’s parents are going to get married. She’s going to be a bridesmaid. And lots of parents are already married. You know. Like yours. Were you a bridesmaid for them? You and Mummy? Dead mummy? Not you and you. You couldn’t be two bridesmaids. And anyway Mummy would have felt left out. Dead mummy.’ She was asleep.

Dead mummy. She accepts stuff now. How will we explain Harry having shagged Janie though?

Well we will.

We. That is such an alarming word.

*

Harry had waited for me. He wanted to talk about Eddie. I stopped him.

‘Do babysit,’ I said. ‘For an hour or so. I want to clear my head.’

And I jumped in my car and went down to Hammersmith, where I bought half a pint of cider from the Blue Anchor and climbed over the river wall on to the pontoon, stranded on the mud at low tide, and sat, looking across to the playing fields in Barnes, down river to the bridge, spangled with lights, and up river towards Brentford where the gryphon lives, and the herons, past the curve of Chiswick, as Turner a view as you can find now in London, over the roofs of the house boats, their paint tins and geranium pots wonky as their hulls settled diagonally on the Thames sludge, their little portholes throwing gleaming coins of yellow electricity out on to the dark slimy mud surface. It was shiveringly cold, and I sat huddled in my coat. Artificial light and natural dark, water and late birds. You get more night on the river than anywhere else in the city. The largest expanse of dark without a light of its own. In Upper Egypt the trees are full of egrets, who hang at dusk like handkerchiefs, and say buggle buggle da, buggle da, burbling like shishas. Written down the words even look like Arabic. And the sky is striped, green and rose and gold, the colours of alabaster, and the moon lies on its back.

A couple of late scullers called across the pewter water. Mad people.

I hadn’t intended to think of the night on the Corniche el Nil when Sa’id and I began to fall apart, but sitting by one river you can’t but think of others you have known. It made me too sad and the soothing effect of the night river, which has been a favourite of mine since I was old enough to stay out late, stopped working, so I went home.

On the way back I stopped at a phone box and rang Sarah. My fingers moving independently of my will. Unable to stop myself. It’s for her to decide if she doesn’t want to talk to me.

‘Sarah?’

‘Yes?’

‘Angeline.’

‘Oh. Hello.’

‘Hello.’

The trouble with the spur of the moment is that unless some fluke leaps to your aid, you don’t know what to say. I didn’t. The irresistible urge which had guided my fingers had no interest in helping my voicebox now that I had got through. Plus I had developed this habit of discretion. I am constantly aware that I might say something that will get Harry into trouble.

‘How’s Sa’id?’ I asked. What else could I say? There’s nothing else I want to know.

There was a silence. The line breathed, from London down to the sea where she lives.

‘Fine,’ she said. In that English way which could mean anything. That cold way.

‘Is he back from Greece?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Don’t be …’ I started to say, and stopped.

‘Don’t tell me what to be,’ she said.

‘Are you …’

I couldn’t talk to her.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘You’ve forfeited your right to know. I’m not unsympathetic. I forfeited my right too once. I’m working on getting it back. You are not popular in that family. I want to know my sons now. I’m not taking you up.’

I winced, even down the phone.

‘Everyone is all right. The police have gone. For now. I dare say you feel the burden of what you brought on the family but again … I’m working on getting my children back. They don’t want you.’

And I didn’t believe her. Her excuse made sense – that if she tried to rehabilitate me at the same time as herself it would be too much. But I didn’t believe her. They may not want me – I don’t want them either. But they wouldn’t object to my expressing concern, to my wanting to know that the problems I introduced them to are passing, to my sympathetic interest in how Hakim, for example, who had found Eddie quite without my involvement after all, was dealing with the fallout from our shared psychopath.

She doesn’t want them to want me. She’s still confused – oh, say it. She’s jealous because Sa’id loved me and didn’t want to love her. And because I told him he had to, because she’s his mother, she resents me. And because she loved an Egyptian and it failed, and she wanted us to fail. And we did! So what’s the problem?

‘Please convey my affection and respect to Abu Sa’id and to Madame Amina,’ I said. ‘If my name should be mentioned. I mean the family nothing but well, and I greatly regret that my misfortunes have overflowed on to them.’ I don’t know why I bothered saying all this to her. But sometimes you just need to say things. It doesn’t matter if they’re heard.

‘OK. Well,’ she said.

‘Yeah. Goodbye.’

But he’s OK. She said so.

*

Back in the kitchen Harry was drinking a beer that he had brought in a plastic bag, and reading the paper, with his feet up on the table. He looked deeply at home. I tried to remember him in the kitchens of our shared past. Sitting on the draining board in Clerkenwell. Bike boots steaming on the boiler. Those huge woolly council-issue socks we all wore: cream-coloured, ribbed, up over your knee before you rolled them down. Not wearing them when I was going to work because they left red marks on my calves and ankles: no good for my beautiful dancing feet. Harry climbing in the bath with me that time with all his gear on; he’d just come in from despatching all day and said he was soaked through anyway. His leathers smelt of my bath oil for weeks. Ylang-ylang and WD-40.

The past is blurry.

He looked up, hesitating, before folding away the expanse of newspaper, elbows wide like a pelican’s wingspan.

‘Beer?’ he said, and reached out to give me a bottle. I took it and sat down across from him.

‘I’ve been talking to Oliver,’ he said. ‘Trying to.’

‘And?’

‘He doesn’t want to talk to me. He’s been avoiding me all week.’

‘Oh. Does that mean—’

‘It means he wants me out of the way. I was a little insistent with him. He said – well, he confirmed what he’d told you, that Eddie has absconded from the scheme, that Interpol are upset about it, the Egyptians are doing what they can but they’re very taken up with the anti-terrorist stuff since the massacre at Luxor, and as it appears that he’s left the country they are quite pleased not to be bothered. He said your boys seem to be in the clear. Everybody in Luxor knows they’re OK, and they’re all in shock there anyway and not knowing where their next crust is coming from because the tourists have just disappeared. And he said I was not to worry my pretty little head about it, but get on with this insurance fraud like a good boy.’

I pictured Luxor, empty of visitors. How we put ourselves in other people’s hands. How we suffer when they leave.

‘What insurance fraud?’ I asked, absently.

‘My job. You know. What I do. This complicated boring bloody insurance thing. You don’t want to know.’

It’s true. I didn’t.

‘But if you were working all that time on Eddie, why are you off it now?’