Though Daniel felt lonely and anxious, he raised a thumb and a loud humming noise began. He felt himself being carried slowly backwards. Once his head was in the cylinder he heard a loud clanging. He closed his eyes and felt a sensation of tightness around the temples. As he lay there, claustrophobia stole over him: a flashback to the air pocket on the plane.
In a blank-walled room in a glass and chrome office on the bank of the Thames, James Bloom, a thirty-eight-year-old, shavenheaded surveillance specialist on secondment from the CIA, clicked his mouse and froze the image on his screen. With a flick of his wrist and a second click, he zoomed in on a face in the crowd of Muslim demonstrators and simultaneously enlarged it so that it filled half his screen. He cocked his head and the blue glow of the screen reflected in his metal-framed glasses. ‘Geoff?’ he said without his eyes leaving the image. ‘Come and look at this one.’
A lean, older man with a buzz cut appeared at his side and stared at the screen. His weathered face was cross-hatched with lines. He was wearing a suit and open-necked shirt. Geoff Turner was Bloom’s liaison to the counter-terrorist section of the Metropolitan Police.
‘Haven’t seen him before. You?’
‘Can’t say I recognize him,’Turner said, chewing thoughtfully on the inside of his left cheek. ‘Don’t think he’s a player. Would have noticed the shirt and tie. But send him over to me and I’ll run a check.’
While Turner ran the image of the man in the shirt and tie against the hundreds of thousands in the database, Bloom tried to get audio on him.
Ten minutes later Turner said: ‘He’s a clean skin. The Passport Office have him. Second-generation British. Grandparents from Karbala. Not getting a criminal record. Doesn’t even have a driving endorsement. He’s a teacher. Should we do a nibble on him?’
‘Can’t hurt. One of the 7/7 virgin hunters was a teacher.’
Turner was studying the CCTV footage again. He tapped the screen. ‘See this bloke here, the one getting out of the car? I know him. His name is Daniel Kennedy. He’s the son of a friend of mine.’
That evening, feeling nervous and excited, Daniel laid three shirts out on the bed before settling on a blue one. He would wear it with an open neck, he decided, under a charcoal-grey suit. He checked his watch. Kate Johnson had still not rung to brief him. As the BBC car was not due to arrive for an hour, he flicked on to News 24. There was an item about the car bomb that the police thought had been detonated by accident. There was also footage of the demonstration. He scanned the faces of the protesters but could not see the young man he had recognized. The protest, according to the newsreader, was supposed to be a peaceful march by Muslim teachers but Islamist militants intent on provoking the police had hijacked it. It had also been co-ordinated with demonstrations in Damascus and Jakarta. And in Pakistan, the foreign ministry had called in ambassadors from Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Holland, Norway and the Czech Republic to explain that his government thought the sacking of the Muslim teacher an unjustifiable provocation against the Muslim world. In London meanwhile, the headmaster who had sacked the Muslim teacher had been receiving death threats and had been given twenty-four-hour police protection.
A reporter came on and spoke to camera: ‘Muslim fury over the sacking erupted on to the streets of London today as politicians and religious leaders argued that there must be limits to free speech. The extremist faction that infiltrated today’s protest is believed to be Hizb Ut-Tahrir, an Islamist splinter group. One of the protesters, originally from Pakistan but now living in London, said the sacking …’ he looked down at his notes: ‘“degraded Islam”.’ The item cut to the protester, a young man. He was waving a placard bearing the slogan: BEHEAD THE ONES WHO INSULT THE PROPHET.
‘The blasphemer who sacked this teacher should be punished!’ he was shouting. ‘If we had Sharia law in this country an insult like this would not happen.’The reporter turned to the chief rabbi, who said: ‘The only way to have both freedom of speech and freedom from religious hatred is to exercise restraint. Without that, we can have one freedom or the other but not both.’ He turned to a bearded spokesman for Lambeth Palace and asked if he thought the headmaster of the school could be prosecuted for unfair dismissal. ‘We believe there is no case for doing that,’ the spokesman said, nodding sympathetically. ‘What the headmaster did was not gratuitously inflammatory. That said, we are truly sorry if we have caused any offence to the Muslim community. We believe the right to freedom of thought and expression cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers, be they Muslim, Christian or Jewish.’
As he watched, Daniel muttered the word ‘tosser’ under his breath. How typical of the Church of England to be so inclusive they employed a Muslim teacher in the first place – then so woolly they apologize for sacking him after he offended them. He reached for a notepad and began jotting down some ideas in preparation for his appearance on Forum, circling keywords and linking them with arrows. He would begin by arguing that it was up to Muslim leaders to caution their followers not to allow themselves to be provoked. Through their silence they were allowing extremists to hijack the controversy. He would argue that the government, as usual, was trying to deal with Muslim radicals by aiming its measures at the rest of us – religious hatred legislation, banning crosses because of concerns about veils, attacking all faith schools because they couldn’t single out the madrassas. The present laws, he would argue, were aimed at a symptom of Muslim disaffection, not the malady itself. The problem was not that some excitable young men had set fire to the Union Jack – sorry, Union flag – but that they were defying the normal pattern of evolution by becoming less assimilated than their parents. This, he would conclude, was to do with changes within Islam. The 1979 Iranian Revolution was an epochal event that began to replicate itself across the world through a process of mimetic natural selection. This would bring the debate back to the biological ground where Daniel felt safest. He was feeling a rush of adrenalin at the prospect of his television appearance.
He checked his watch with a double tap of its face, got dressed and stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. His nose and forehead looked shiny. Would they use face powder in the studio? Where was Nancy’s? He found her brush and dusted himself with it before taking several deep breaths to steady his nerves. He went downstairs, opened the fridge and took out some cooked sausages in a bowl covered with clingfilm and a bottle of HP sauce. He was running over some arguments in his head when his iPhone rang.
‘Hi Daniel, it’s Kate. Look, sorry I didn’t get back to you earlier but you’ll be relieved to hear you can stand down.’
‘The debate is cancelled?’
‘Um, actually we’ve got Richard Dawkins coming in now. We double-booked because we didn’t think he would be available.’ Daniel closed his eyes. ‘No worries.’
‘Sorry to mess you about. Let’s get you on soon.’
Daniel sat at the kitchen table and began picking at the label of the HP bottle.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Northern France. Last Wednesday of April, 1918
THREE DAYS PASS BEFORE ANDREW AND MADAME CAMIER TOUCH again. It is evening. They are sitting with their chairs facing the fire, though he keeps shifting position so that he can cast a sideways glance at her, without her noticing. She is too present. The atmosphere around her too charged. It is as if her molecules extend towards him, spilling out, disturbing the air. The ticking of the longcase clock is excessively loud tonight. Each pulse fills the room, as if thickening the particles of dust. ‘It is slow,’ Madame Camier says, rising to her feet in one liquid movement. She adjusts the time by a fraction, and, as she closes the glass face, Andrew’s hand covers hers. They are standing so close to one another he can smell her hair. His heart is hammering with such force it is rocking his whole body. She must be able to feel it. He wants to put his arm around her waist but its heaviness prevents him. She is breathing through her nose again – rapid, shallow breaths. Is
she nervous? She yawns, frees her hand and stretches. If she turns and smiles, he thinks, it will be my permission to kiss her. She turns and smiles. He does not move. Cannot speak. The silence is raw. It is Madame Camier who breaks it. ‘Goodnight,’ she says.
‘Bonne nuit,’ he says.
*
A thick, steel gramophone needle is scratching against a 78-rpm disk. Major Peter Morris VC, MC & bar, DSO & bar, DFC, Mons Star, BWM, VM, does not notice it as he sharpens his razor on a strop of smooth leather hanging from the coat hook on the back of the door. After testing the blade with the side of his thumb he works his shaving brush up into lather and, eyeing his reflection in a small mirror, begins applying the white foam to his brokenveined cheeks. The act of tilting back his head to shave under his chin makes him wince and, once he has splashed his face with cold water and dabbed it with a thin khaki towel, he stares at the deep weal that follows his jaw line from chin to ear. This is his morning ritual. The scar has taken on a totemic significance for him, a savage reminder whenever he looks in the mirror of who he is now and what he stands for. The German who tried to cut his throat had not lived long. Morris had hacked his head off with an entrenching tool and tossed it, helmet still attached, over the parapet.
He is distracted from his staring by the specks of blood appearing on his cheek, watching as they grow in size, drip down over his chin into the sink, and mix sickeningly with the water. After splashing his face again, he looks around for a sheet of paper and tears off tiny strips that he uses as plasters. There is a further minute of staring before he becomes aware of the scratching being amplified through the gramophone horn. He raises the gooseneck, lifts the record off the box and snaps it across his knee. It breaks neatly in two. One half of the label reads, ‘I’m Henery The’. The other half reads, ‘Eighth, I Am’. Perhaps this is part of my punishment, Morris reflects. In my own circle of hell the only recordings available are from the music hall.
Standing in his vest and braces, with the towel draped around his neck, Morris takes from his wallet a tattered score of the first movement of Mahler’s last completed symphony. He smoothes it out on the desk before him and contemplates it. It had been presented to him by the composer himself – the two had met for dinner in Leipzig in 1910 – and it is annotated in Mahler’s own pencil marks: ‘das Lied’, ‘2×3, 3×2’, ‘der Abschied’, ‘mit höchster Gewalt’. It includes words in English, too. ‘Like a shadow’. ‘Love and hate’. ‘Youth and death’. It is signed ‘Gustav’.
In the restaurant that day, a young woman had come to their table asking for an autograph. After that, an excited chatter had run between the tables like an electric current, and the quartet playing waltzes in the background increased their volume and tempo. Mahler, awkward in wing collar and pince-nez, looked discomfited by the attention and when, at a murmured signal, three waiters simultaneously lifted the silver dish covers and an expectant hush fell on the restaurant, he looked as if he might be sick. Gradually, other diners lost interest and got on with their own meals. Morris was hungry and made short work of his braised duck with port wine, but Mahler barely touched his, instead pushing mushrooms around his plate with his fork. He was agitated. Morris, having heard the rumours about the composer’s failing health, asked if he was unwell. Mahler shook his head and, in a subdued voice, confided his terror of writing a ninth numbered symphony – ‘the curse of the Ninth’, he called it. Beethoven and Bruckner had died soon after writing their ninth symphonies. So had Dvoák and Schubert. Mahler was afraid the same would happen to him. ‘The ninth is a limit,’ he said. ‘The ninth circle of hell is the last. You can go no farther.’ This, he explained, was why he had not given a number to the symphonic work – Das Lied von der Erde – which followed his Eighth, but instead described it merely as Eine Symphonie für eine Tenor- und eine Alt- (oder Bariton-) Stimme und Orchester (nach Hans Bethges ‘Die chinesische Flöte’ ).
This confession brought him to the point of their meeting. He had written two versions of the opening and this, he said, handing over a score, was the more contemplative. No one knew about it and no one was to know, not while he was alive at least. The composer felt that for as long as it remained a secret, the symphony would remain uncompleted and he could go on living. Mahler wanted Morris to conduct it in London, but only after his death. A conductor himself, he had long admired Morris’s integrity, as well as his light hand. He was convinced that only Morris could do it justice. Only Morris would understand the melancholy beneath the anger: the composer looking back over his life and saying goodbye.
Mahler’s terror had been prescient. Shortly after completing the symphony he discovered he was dying. The doctors hadn’t told him this in so many words, but he knew. He fell ill with a streptococcal blood infection and conducted Das Lied in a fever. He died soon after. And before Morris had a chance to conduct the alternative version, the war began.
Now, as his dove-grey eyes flit over the notes in front of him, Morris feels a tingling in his brow, as if some soothing balm has been applied there. His spirit is being raised to some higher metaphysical plane and an invisible hand is leading him to some inner world, the resting place of Mahler’s soul. This version of the first movement seems to be more sublime, tender and full of hope than the original. Although he has memorized it, he cannot quite hear it in his head, yet. The prospect of conducting it in public one day is, he knows, his only bulwark against insanity, his only defence against the hounds baying at the door.
Andrew is whittling a stick in the garden, filling the hours until his next call-out in the afternoon. Four days have passed since he missed his moment to kiss Madame Camier, and he has been able to think of little else. She has been behaving as if it never happened. He begins to doubt himself. Perhaps nothing did happen. The sharp sky is empty and the warmth of the morning sun, after the cool interior of the house, is melting through to his bones. He rolls up his sleeves and plucks a blowzy white rose from the garden. It loses a couple of its petals as he removes its thorns.
‘Is that for me?’
Andrew turns to see Madame Camier standing directly behind him.
‘Have you no work today?’
‘Not until this afternoon.’
Madame Camier considers this. ‘Would you join me for a walk?’
‘Where to?’ He doesn’t mean to say this. He should have said yes, of course he would.
‘There is a river half a mile away. We could have … We say déjeuner sur l’herbe. What do you call it?’
‘A picnic?’
‘Yes, a picnic.’ She gathers her skirt and walks inside the house. Ten minutes later she emerges carrying a small hamper under her arm. She puts it down as Andrew, having regained his composure, presents the rose to her with a half-bow. She holds it to her nose and tucks it behind the ribbon in her hair before reaching for the hamper again. There is fluency to her movements drawn from habit. Since her amputation, her simplest actions take on a three-stage complexity.
‘Let me carry that,’ Andrew says.
‘I am fine,’ Madame Camier says, putting the hamper down and lifting one side of it so that Andrew can lift the other. ‘I am strong, you know.’
They walk slowly, following a path that skirts woodland, swinging the hamper between them, crackling beechmast underfoot. When they come to a stile, Madame Camier hands the hamper to Andrew, gathers her skirt up and climbs over. As she leaves the path to stroll in an arc, Andrew stays on it – and when Madame Camier catches up with him she begins treading on his heels deliberately. Smiling, he pretends he hasn’t noticed. She overtakes, plucks a long feathery wild grass and, walking backwards, begins swishing at his face. It tickles. He tries not to laugh. They walk over a carpet of wood anemones, savouring the mushroomy, pine-woody smells, and reach a meander in the river where the water is sluggish and damselflies are skimming the surface with their gauzy wings. They lay the hamper down and break off chunks of bread. Madame Camier pats the ground beside her. Andrew shuffles over, avoiding a b
ed of nettles, enjoying the warmth of the soil under him.
Madame Camier throws a pebble and they watch the ripples slap and plunge against the reed-fringed bank.
Andrew uncorks a bottle of red wine, takes a swig from it and shudders at its warm and bitter taste before handing it over. Madame Camier takes a sip, lights two cigarettes and inhales quick jabs of smoke before handing one over to him. They both lie on their backs, staring at a single fleecy cloud that has appeared. It is motionless. They blow languorous smoke rings to keep it company. When they finish they toss the butts in the river and listen to them hiss.
I can’t stop thinking about you, Madame Camier.
Andrew wants to say this but the words will not come. Instead he lies on his front and studies her eyes. The colour changes according to the light, sometimes grey, sometimes blue. Now they appear green. When she closes them, he wants to kiss the lids. She raises her chin. His own eyes are closed. When he opens them again he can see her cheeks are flushed. She holds his hand.
Five minutes pass before Madame Camier sits up and reaches for some cheese, breaks off a piece and chews on it in silence. Andrew does the same. Knowing that the taste he is experiencing is the same as that which she is experiencing makes him feel an almost claustrophobic intimacy with her. They eat small rations of cold tongue and ham that Madame Camier has saved and both drink again from the neck of the bottle. Andrew thinks he has never felt happier and knows that he can never be as happy again – it would be impossible – a sweetly melancholic thought. He swallows and looks inside the hamper for a knife. When he finds one he uses it to try to cut off a small lock of Madame Camier’s hair. It takes several attempts and only works when he makes the lock smaller.
‘Pourquoi?’ she asks.
‘Proof.’
‘Of what?’
‘That you were here with me. The two of us alone.’ He lies on his back with one hand pillowing his head and touches her lips with the tip of his finger. A moment later, when an old man appears on the opposite bank following the river path, Madame Camier smiles but Andrew turns pale. Strangers make him nervous. The old man looks across at them in puzzlement before becoming distracted by a smell that has reached his nose. He inspects the sole of each shoe in turn then continues on his way.
The Blasphemer Page 17