A Week in December

by Sebastian Faulks

  ‘There was a tiny thing in the FT the other day about possible future bank mergers. Ask if he saw it. Talk about good fits. Remind him of Robert Fleming and the Chase Manhattan/J. P. Morgan sale: Old Empire and New America. Give him the reference of the chat room. Say there could be some corroboration there. Don’t start a rumour, you can’t do that, but point to what’s already there. These journalists get most of their stuff off the Internet these days – they haven’t got the time or the resources to do any research. Most of the paper’s written by kids on work experience and they’re just recycling one another’s material via the Web. But tell Darke to be careful how he phrases it. He should just pass it off as a thought that occurred to him as he was looking back on a difficult year. “Doesn’t it look a natural fit?” he might say. If the credit crisis gets worse there’s going to be pressure on all the banks and it’s natural that a lot of them will want to get extra security. Let him float it as a sort of positive, seasonal thing. Something good in your Christmas stocking. Got it?’

  ‘Yes. I think he’ll like it. It goes against the grain, against the doom and gloom. Good for the shareholders.’

  ‘Good for the pensioners,’ said John Veals.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Martin Ryman, tasting a bit of wasabi off the end of his chopstick, ‘I think people could mistake you for Father Christmas, John.’

  ‘Well, at this time of year,’ said Veals, not smiling at Ryman’s sarcasm, ‘all of us in our world try to put a bit back.’

  Gabriel Northwood spent Wednesday morning with his feet up on the desk reading the Koran.

  ‘What a bastard,’ he muttered under his breath from time to time. ‘What a bastard ...’

  He had always thought of the Old Testament as giving the most implacable and unsympathetic portrayal of a divinity. Jahweh, or Jehovah, the god of the Jews and their Exodus and their dietary laws and bloody battles against the other Semitic tribes; Jahweh the god of exile, punishment, bloodshed, plagues and slaying of the firstborn ... He had surely set a standard of intransigence. Yet compared to the Koranic divinity, he was beginning to feel, old Jahweh was almost avuncular.

  The god of the Koran brought with him neither the great stories of the Old Testament (though he referred back to them) nor the modern life-guide of the New. What he did offer was his own words, ipsissima verba, mouthed by the Angel Gabriel, remembered and transcribed verbatim by the Prophet. And over nearly 400 pages, the principal message seemed a simple one: believe in me or burn for all eternity. Page after page.

  Woeful punishment awaits the unbelievers. Shameful punishment awaits the unbelievers. For the unbelievers we have prepared chains and fetters, and a blazing Fire. Would that you knew what this is like. It is a scorching Fire. Woe betide every back-biting slanderer who amasses riches and sedulously hoards them, thinking his wealth will render him immortal! By no means! He shall be flung to the Destroying Flame. But if he is an erring disbeliever, his welcome will be scalding water, and he will burn in Hell. We shall sternly punish the unbelievers. The Fire shall for ever be their home.

  You could open the book at random. It was the same message on any page. ‘Consider the fate of the evildoers.’ The phrase tolled like a stuck muezzin.

  For the believers, on the other hand, there awaited ‘dark-eyed virgins in their tents whom neither man nor jinnee will have touched before ... Virgins as fair as corals and rubies ... They shall recline on couches ranged in rows. To dark-eyed houris we shall wed them.’

  The life choice laid down by the Prophet was what Delilah in the clerks’ room called, to Eustace Hutton’s irritation, a ‘nobrainer’. Anyone, Gabriel thought, would take the virgin option over hellfire – any man, at least; it wasn’t clear what was on offer to women. What the book lacked was any reasoning or evidence to support its depiction of this radically divided afterlife.

  Jehovah had parted the Red Sea. He had destroyed the cities of the plain. He had spoken in the ears of the prophets. He had visited plagues on the enemies of the Israelites. Jesus had performed miracles to demonstrate his own divinity; he had invented a revolutionary manner of behaving – kindly. He had walked on water. He had risen from the dead. Allah, on the other hand, had not condescended to intervene on earth or to argue his case. He didn’t bother to persuade; in his single apparition he had offered only warning. Believe in me or die.

  After 200 pages, Gabriel found a great weariness come over him. And there was also something in the self-grounded and unargued certainty of the Koran that reminded him of something else, of someone he knew. A voice. He couldn’t at that moment put a name to it.

  He had read somewhere that the Arabs had felt excluded from monotheism because, several hundred years into it, they had still had no directly instructed prophet of their own; it appeared that their Jewish and Christian trading partners even taunted them for this lack. When the Prophet finally arrived, it was 600 years after second-placed Jesus Christ had been and gone: a lapse of time as great as 1400 to the present day. That was an awfully long time in the short history of monotheism, Gabriel thought, to be viewed by your neighbours as backward. And sometimes the fierce iterations of the book seemed to show the effect of those pent-up centuries of hope and silence. Here is the god at last. And after all this time, he’d better be emphatic.

  But perhaps, Gabriel thought, his view of the book was too legalistic or pedantic. After all, there was a lot of rubbish in Deuteronomy and Leviticus: ‘A man who has had his testicles cut off cannot be admitted to the presence of Jahweh ...’ But the Jews had moved on. They and the Christians accepted that their holy books had been written by humans, albeit inspired by God, and the great majority were happy to see the words in the context of their time and had little trouble in squaring them with modern knowledge, provided they could just be left with a comforting sense of a higher power who took an interest in their affairs before and after death.

  But as far as Gabriel understood it, Islam had never yielded that ground. Once an early theological debate had decided for all time that the Koran was literally and in every syllable the unmediated word of God, then all Muslims became by definition ‘fundamentalist’. It was by its nature unlike Judaism or Christianity; it was intrinsically, and quite unapologetically, a fundamentalist religion. There was, of course, a world of difference between ‘fundamental’ and ‘militant’ – let alone ‘aggressive’; but the intractable truth remained: that by being so pure, so high-minded and so uncompromising, Islam had limited the kind of believer it could claim.

  After lunch, Gabriel went to meet Jenni Fortune for a ride on the Circle Line.

  He’d been once before, when he was preparing the case for the first trial, but felt it would be helpful for him to do it again, so he had a true feeling for her work. The supervisor was waiting for him at the barrier and took him down to the platform to wait for Jenni’s train.

  When she pressed the button to open the door for him, Jenni’s face came as close as Gabriel had seen it to a smile.

  ‘Hop in,’ she said. Because they’d done this once before, he thought, perhaps she felt more confident; there was nothing new for her to fear.

  Gabriel folded out the dicky and sat down. The interior of the cab was painted sky blue, and in front of Gabriel on the dashboard was an instructor’s emergency brake. Jenni checked her rear-view mirror, pressed the two buttons to close the passenger doors, depressed the driver’s handle in front of her and turned it slowly anticlockwise. The train moved off.

  ‘How have you been, Jenni?’

  ‘Not bad, thanks. You?’

  ‘Fine, thanks.’ Was that mascara on her lashes? It was hard to tell in the darkness.

  ‘What do you want me to tell you?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh ... Well, let’s just have a chat, shall we?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Do you feel cut off from things down here?’

  ‘Yeah, I s’pose so. But I like it.’

  ‘It’s your own world.’

  ‘Yeah.’

/>   ‘What do you do in the evenings?’

  ‘Go home. Look after Tony. He’s my half-brother. Watch telly. Play Parallax.’

  ‘Is that the alternative-reality game?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s brilliant. My maquette’s called Amanda. She’s a beautician.’ She pronounced the word ‘mack-wet’ and it took Gabriel a moment to understand what she meant.

  Jenni moved the lever back to six o’clock, then round to about four to bring the brakes on hard, then back to five to let the train decelerate more gently as it ran into the station. When it had stopped, she let the lever rise up on its spring.

  ‘And what about reading?’ said Gabriel, as they moved off again. ‘You like reading, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, I do.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Dunno. I s’pose it’s an escape from the real world.’

  ‘But surely it’s just the opposite,’ said Gabriel. ‘Books explain the real world. They bring you close to it in a way you could never manage in the course of the day.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘People never explain to you exactly what they think and feel and how their thoughts and feelings work, do they? They don’t have time. Or the right words. But that’s what books do. It’s as though your daily life is a film in the cinema. It can be fun, looking at those pictures. But if you want to know what lies behind the flat screen you have to read a book. That explains it all.’

  ‘Even if the people in the book are invented?’

  ‘Sure. Because they’re based on what’s real, but with the boring bits stripped out. In good books anyway. Of my total understanding of human beings, which is perhaps not very great ... I’d say half of it is from just guessing that other people must feel much the same as I would in their place. But of the other half, ninety per cent of it has come from reading books. Less than ten per cent from reality – from watching and talking and listening – from living.’

  ‘You’re funny.’

  ‘Thank you, Jenni. Why are you waving?’

  ‘Driver coming the other way waved at me. They always do. Unless they’re District. They just turn the cab light off.’

  ‘What? Is there a rivalry between Circle and District?’

  ‘You bet. The five-a-side footie’s a bloodbath.’

  ‘All right. We’d better talk about your work. Tell me about the stations. Are they all the same to you, or do they have different characters?’

  He watched Jenni while she answered. She had quite delicate hands, not really right for a manual job, he thought, even though working the lever and the door buttons was not demanding. The palm was paler than the back of the hand, and the fingers were long, with neatly trimmed nails; that much at least must be necessary for the job, he thought.

  ‘... and Baker Street’s a nice station. Always busy with Madame Tussaud’s and that. And the brickwork’s just like when it was built all those years ago. Embankment’s always busy with the theatres and the Strand. Temple’s quiet, usually.’

  ‘I know.’

  Gabriel noticed the care with which Jenni checked the mirrors at the station even as she was talking to him. She was wearing her black hair tied back with a ribbon; the lamp on the platform threw a shaft of light across her face, over the pale brown skin, across her mouth where the pigment changed in her lip from blackish-brown to pink. She seemed to sense him staring at her and turned her head suddenly to look at him.

  He looked back into her deep, dark eyes. She held his gaze and said nothing. He felt he mustn’t look away, that while their eyes were locked he could transmit belief to her. She didn’t blink or move her head, but the light of fear and challenge slowly dimmed in her eyes. She pressed the door-close buttons, her eyes still on his, leant on the lever and pushed it away to the left. It was not until the clattering train had reached twenty miles per hour that she finally looked ahead of her, through the windscreen, and Gabriel thought he could see in her face the beginnings, or possibly the remnants, of a smile.

  ‘And Aldgate, since you ask,’ Jenni said. ‘There’s the ghost of a woman there. But it’s a friendly one. One of the P. Way guys, he touched the live rail and—’

  ‘P. Way?’

  ‘Permanent Way. The people who maintain the track. He touched the live rail by mistake but the other guys saw this woman put her hand on his shoulder and move him away. He was completely unhurt. He should have fried.’

  The train hurtled on through the darkness, slowing and speeding at Jenni’s simple left-hand command. She was standing up, as she did every other circuit, she explained, to ease her back from the brutally uncomfortable seat. Gabriel was silent. There was something he found harshly poignant about this gruff girl at her work; you didn’t need to have read very many books or to be much of an observer to see that she was someone who’d been rebuffed or bruised and now relied on her job as a measure of her own value. He was torn by a desire to lead her into a more ambitious way of looking at her life, and a simple admiration for the pride she took in doing something useful. In any case, what could he offer, broke and alone as he was? What did he know from his precious books that he could teach this busy, thoughtful woman? And what if she was hiding from something underground? Wasn’t he, really, doing the same with his crossword puzzle and his French novels?

  ‘We’re coming to the end of the circle,’ said Jenni.

  ‘That was quick. How long’s it been?’

  Jenni looked at her watch. ‘Fifty-six minutes.’

  ‘Right. I suppose I’d better—’

  ‘I’m going round again, though.’

  ‘So I could stay and ...’

  ‘Yes, you can come round again. If you like. I mean—’

  ‘Yes, I’d like to. I think there are more things I should know. We talked too much about books and stuff that time round.’

  Jenni was smiling. ‘Go on then. Sit down. Fire away.’

  In the darkest section of the Circle, just before Victoria, Gabriel suddenly said, ‘Maybe I could come and play Parallax one evening at your house.’

  ‘Would that be right? If we was like, you know, clients?’

  ‘We could talk about work. I could take you out to dinner maybe. Somewhere local you like. Then I’d go home. We couldn’t talk about anything else until after the case comes on in January.’

  ‘So just work.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Gabriel was wondering how he was going to pay for dinner.

  ‘Well, that’d be fine then. Maybe tomorrow. I’m off by six.’

  ‘Tomorrow would be ... Perfect. OK.’ Where the hell was he going to get the money? ‘Tell me, Jenni. That woman’s voice. The recording that says, “We are now approaching King’s Cross. Change here for the Piccadilly Line” or whatever. Is that one of your colleagues? Or an actress, or what?’

  ‘I dunno,’ said Jenni. ‘We call her Sonia.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she get s-on-yer nerves.’

  ‘And how does she know when to come in? What cues the recording?’

  ‘The number of wheel revolutions. It’s different between each station. It works fine unless there’s been a lot of rain. Then you get wheelspin. Then she thinks you’re in Blackfriars when you’re only just pulling out of Mansion House.’

  ‘What do you do then?’

  ‘Turn the bugger off.’

  At 5.30, Knocker al-Rashid was waiting for his penultimate visit from R. Tranter. He had squeezed in one for Wednesday in addition to their regular Thursday morning slot, which would be the last one before his visit to the palace on Friday. They had agreed to put that aside for ‘revision’, so today’s was almost the last time they would cover new ground. Knocker looked at his watch. He had become impatient with his teacher lately. How different it had been at the start.

  Before Tranter’s first visit in the spring, Knocker had felt unpleasantly nervous.

  ‘Nasim,’ he said. ‘A distinguished literary man is going to arrive any minute. We’ll go to my office to discuss books and rea
ding. Could you bear to arrange for some fruit and tea to be served to us in about twenty minutes?’

  ‘Of course, love,’ said Nasim. She smiled at her husband’s way of speaking; the larger the successive houses they had lived in, the less Knocker had come to sound like a Bradford Paki, as she’d once heard him called, and the more like David Niven.

  In the course of her long and happy marriage to Farooq, Nasim herself had lost her Yorkshire accent and now spoke in a way she fancied was pretty close to the BBC – the old BBC, since nowadays so many people on the radio seemed to have come from Bradford.

  ‘What sort of man do you think he’ll be?’ she asked Knocker.

  ‘An old-style English gentleman, I think.’

  ‘A bit of a Prince Charles?’

  ‘I expect so. He was at Oxford University. Do you think my suit is smart enough?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Knocker. Don’t be shy of him. He’s just a tradesman who’s got something you need. Like the lime farmer in Mexico.’

  ‘Rodrigues! You promised never to mention him again.’

  The bell rang, and Knocker crossed the enormous tiled hall to open it, braced to see an intimidating guardsman in a Savile Row suit.

  ‘Hello? Mr al-Rashid, I presume.’

  The door had revealed a slight, gingery man in a blue anorak with a green tie, brown shoes and forty-eight hours of stubble on his chin. His eyes were a little pink.

  He held out his hand. ‘Ralph Tranter. Most people call me RT, though.’

  Knocker had not travelled to every continent of the world (bar Australasia) without concluding that the outer wrapping of a man was insignificant. Even so ...

  He rose to the occasion. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you. Please come this way, Mr Tranter.’

  They crossed the hall, then went through the giant drawing room with its views over open countryside, out through the double doors, down a panelled passageway and into Knocker al-Rashid’s study, whose long shelves were lined not with books but with Japanese ivory figures, porcelain boxes, framed photographs of Nasim and Hassan and a handful of work mementoes – a gold-plated lime, for instance, presented by his workforce and a drive wheel from his first production line mounted on oak with an inscribed plaque. There was a new thirty-six-inch-screen computer on the desk; it was of a make not available in the usual retail outlets.