Tree of Pearls

by Louisa Young

  Closed my eyes. What?

  ‘Why can’t I? Two children, two fathers, why can’t I have two husbands? Why not?’

  Knock that thought back. Think about it later.

  I opened my dopey eyes properly and tried to sit, and scratched my head with both hands, vigorously, and squinted. Brigid once said that trying to wake me is like trying to wake a haystack. I felt like a haystack. A hot and slightly winded haystack, a haystack confused by … I know I like Harry. But … I stared at the two of them.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I said. Meaning: with them, in the world. Thinking: to me, inside. Enough. Think about that later. It’s nothing. It’s just – of course Harry’s gorgeous and a good thing, I’ve known that for years. Nothing’s changed. Silly. Shut up.

  They looked at each other. What have they been up to, the two of them together without me?

  ‘You go,’ said Harry.

  In return Sa’id gestured Harry to sit. Omar appeared, and hovered. Sa’id told him to bring coffee. Harry sat gingerly, his long legs unaccustomed to folding as far as the low seat required. Here, out of hotel-land, in Egypt proper, he looked – not lost, but thoroughly … other. Other to Egypt. Though thoroughly himself. It made me think how other I must be, here. However at home I may feel. Remembered the scene when the ma’adeyyah landed.

  Harry kept glancing at Sa’id. Of course he hasn’t seen him in Egypt before. Let alone in this thoroughly Egyptian garb. I smiled. Harry will be going through that moment, when you see the person who was a cosmopolitan foreigner in London become utterly at home when they are at home, therefore more foreign to you, and you realize, suddenly, that you are the foreigner.

  I curled my feet up on to the divan and leant forward to hear.

  ‘I spoke this morning to Shezli,’ said Sa’id. ‘He … he has been with Chrissie. Chrissie has told him everything she could think of.’

  This was not particularly good news.

  ‘And what did she think of?’ I asked, quietly.

  ‘She told him that du Berry was Eddie,’ said Harry.

  ‘Which he already knew,’ said Sa’id.

  ‘And that she was his wife,’ said Harry.

  ‘Which he already knew,’ said Sa’id.

  ‘And that you knew him,’ said Harry.

  ‘Which he already knew,’ said Sa’id.

  Oh.

  ‘How … Well, where does that leave us?’ I asked. ‘Where the …’ It was too hot for this.

  ‘He knew du Berry was … wanted. The rest he got from Hafla,’ said Sa’id. ‘She danced here some seasons, before, I don’t know when. He spoke to her this morning and she told him du Berry was really an Englishman called Bates. She is heartbroken, apparently. And he was talking to colleagues in Cairo, and heard about the fight at the Semiramis, about Angeline – about me. So when Mrs Bates is up there with du Berry, and you are in the teashop with me, of course, soon he rings me.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I have invited him this afternoon. We will talk it through.’ I shook my head again, trying to loosen the tangle that was building up inside it.

  ‘And Chrissie?’ I said.

  ‘She’s back in her room, at the hotel. The doctor has seen her again, he will make a report. They think she may be mad with what has happened.’

  ‘Did you see her?’ I asked Harry.

  ‘I saw her,’ he said. ‘She didn’t see me.’ I smiled.

  ‘Did she say anything about …’

  ‘She didn’t confess, no.’

  I sat a moment, letting it sink in, waiting to see if any ramifications would float to the surface, wondering briefly if ramifications float. A ram probably wouldn’t, a fortification wouldn’t. Oh shut up.

  Sa’id was watching me. Harry was watching him.

  ‘So?’ I said.

  They exchanged glances again.

  ‘So it is up to Shezli, knowing what he knows, to decide whether anything happened which needs to be … taken further,’ said Harry. ‘He needs to decide whether to speak to his superiors, to the people in Cairo, to the British police. The embassy hasn’t been informed yet, though they’ll have to be. Du Berry had a British passport. He has to decide whether to keep you and Chrissie here in the meantime …’

  ‘I can’t stay,’ I said.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ said Harry.

  Sa’id looked at him.

  ‘Lily …’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ said Harry.

  I interrupted him. ‘No,’ I said. ‘She’s all that matters.’

  Harry raised an eyebrow.

  Sa’id said, ‘All?’ with a little smile.

  At that Harry stood up and enquired after the bathroom. And gave me just enough of a look. And went into the house.

  Sa’id took a moment or two after he left, and then said: ‘Perhaps this is not the right time … but quite apart from Chrissie and Eddie Bates, all you want is to go home to Lily. Is that it?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s not it.’

  ‘That is what it comes down to,’ he said. ‘It did before, it does now.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, there is more.’

  ‘No doubt,’ he said. ‘But what?’ Still cold. His beautiful pale eyes just looking, not giving a thing.

  Do I tell him now? Can I tell him now?

  I was going to. But what I said instead was: ‘Do you want me?’

  He looked at me a while longer.

  ‘That is several questions, none of which I can answer, though each has several answers,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, we should not be talking about this now. Not just because of Ramadan, but because it is pointless, until we know what will happen.’

  ‘I was meant to be leaving today,’ I said.

  ‘You come, you go,’ he said.

  ‘I came back again,’ I said.

  ‘You go again.’

  He caught my eye, and we giggled. Briefly.

  ‘I want to say to you, though,’ he said, ‘I cannot tell Shezli what to do. But if this goes wrong, if you are to be charged, or to be kept here for months while this is sorted out, while all these institutions deal with this disgusting mess that has been brought about around this wicked man, and if your life or liberty is to be sacrificed to the mess and the institutions, if you like, I will take you across the desert into Libya, and I will take you to Paris and bring Lily to you there; I will get you new passports and new lives if need be. You won’t be able to return to Egypt, maybe not to England either, I don’t know. I will take you to Argentina. There are places. I will stay with you or leave as you wish. As you wish,’ he said.

  I closed my eyes and all the shapes stood out against the sun inside my eyelids. An idea hurtled through my head, a little comet trailing possibilities. Did Harry tell him about the baby?

  ‘That’s not real,’ I said.

  ‘So far.’

  ‘Why do you say it?’ I said.

  Silence. Closed eyes. Heat. A donkey brayed in the distance.

  ‘Habibti,’ he said. ‘Ya habibti, it’s as real as anything else,’ he said.

  Ah. Harry didn’t say anything. A baby is as real as it gets.

  ‘What do you mean, my love?’ I asked gently.

  ‘Ah, my love,’ he said, teasing me a little, but even at this doubtful moment the words were beautful in his mouth.

  ‘Yes, my love,’ I said, firmly and luxuriously, offering him the word from my lips like a piece of fruit or a kiss. He’s circling me, and avoiding me, and diverting me. He is like sand under the wind. I’ll just wait.

  And then he said: ‘I am in love with you.’ He said it thoughtfully, confirmingly, not quite surprised, not quite convinced.

  I sighed, a long breath out.

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘Because you are fresh water to me, you are my skin, you are my own. For no reason. No proof. I tried to believe that I loved your blonde hair and your free ways, which would be easy, because they are not important things. But I don’t, not specially. I love your he
art. That’s all.’

  So there we have it. He loves. Confessed on the divan in his father’s courtyard. I shivered.

  Now, presumably, I should tell him.

  I looked at him. His face was unutterably sad. Something else was going on.

  ‘I fear for us, Angelina,’ he said.

  Why?’

  ‘Oh, we have plenty of problems, you and I. Where would we live?’

  ‘At the surface of the water,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  I quoted: ‘A bird and a fish may fall in love, but where would they live?’ I can’t remember where it’s from, but it had been on my mind. He smiled at that.

  ‘Would you ever stop romanticizing me?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t romanticize you!’ I squawked.

  ‘Yes, you do. You love me for my blonde hair and my free ways. I know you do.’

  ‘I do love your blonde hair and your free ways,’ I said, smiling at the thought of his black curls and the delicious arabesques of his mind, ‘but not only.’

  ‘I have seen you romanticize me. I’ve seen you admiring my otherness. Look, now – I see you wondering whether I am wearing this …’ he gestured his gallabeya with two hands, ‘to put the distance between us, to frighten you off, or to appeal to you, when you know in fact I am just wearing it. I must tell you: I am not other to myself and I will not be other to my wife.’

  Wife.

  ‘Yes, you will,’ I said. ‘You’re a man. She’s a woman.’ She.

  And then he turned his face away and he said: ‘Habibti, do you want to hear this? Do you want to know my heart?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Gung-ho westerner that I am, I’m all for knowledge. He took my hand for a moment. The touch of him ran up my veins like salmon racing up river, quicksilver direct to my heart. And he put it down again.

  ‘I don’t want to love you,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to leave Egypt, my father, my brother. I don’t want my children to be what we have been, not one, and certainly not the other. And, and …’ He turned back to me. For a second I remembered him sitting in the cloud of my white duvet at home, waking up after we had first made love, looking so happy, so golden, so young. He looked ten years older now. ‘Do I sound sulky now? I am not sulking. I am torn … And there is something else, I don’t know if you will understand this. I don’t want to give myself and my life to a woman who …’

  ‘Who what?’

  ‘Who sleeps with a man and then leaves.’

  There was something apologetic in his face. He didn’t want to offend me. Or hurt me. There was something more. ‘Who sleeps with a man,’ he said.

  ‘With you?’

  ‘Yes. Not only.’

  ‘Are you saying I shouldn’t have slept with you?’ I was steady. My voice was steady. Saying these unspeakable things.

  ‘How could I say that?’ he said, and in his eyes now I saw what I had seen the first time I saw him in London: the knowledge, the naked understanding we shared. The unavoidable, that is ours. Nemesis: that which is unavoidable, which is yours.

  ‘But you’re saying it.’

  ‘I’m saying, you slept with Harry; you slept with Eddie; you slept with me …’

  ‘I wouldn’t say sleeping with is exactly what I did with Eddie. You can’t compare those things …’

  ‘I would like to say that I respect a woman’s freedom, her freedom to do these things. But it doesn’t matter – if I do or if I don’t. My heart does not accept it. It is not the same for you as it is for us. You will do it again. It is your freedom. I don’t judge it but I would not be able to bear it.’

  ‘No woman should have the freedom to do what I did to Eddie. And …’ my brain and heart were jostling each other here. Looking so steadily at that which makes me shake ‘… no woman should be in that position.’

  ‘I know it is different,’ he said. And there was a silence.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Harry?’

  ‘Abl ma teshoufak enaya,’ I murmured. What I saw before my eyes saw you. I seemed to have forgotten the wild thought I had had when they were standing together above me. ‘And you know,’ I said, gathering my argument, as if argument was likely to do any good, ‘you slept with me too,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t leave,’ he said.

  ‘You let me leave. And I came back. And I’m here now. And if you want a virgin, you know, you can have one, but it won’t be me. I am me.’

  He clasped his hands gently, his head low, as if in prayer. He shrugged.

  ‘You’re doing it again. You’re leading me into danger, and then making it all right. You’re doing it again.’

  That’s what he said after the fight at the Semiramis. I still don’t know if it’s meant to be good or bad.

  ‘You said,’ he said, and thought for a moment. ‘You said: Bind it up and let it heal.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘It doesn’t heal.’

  ‘You haven’t tried.’

  ‘It doesn’t heal.’

  ‘Why not? Because your parents didn’t? Are you afraid that I am like your mother? I’m not. I’ve healed before, I’ll heal again.’

  ‘Not what?’ he said. ‘Not what, of my mother? In what way are you different from any … free-wayed – I’m sorry, I don’t like that phrase but now it has stuck … any free-wayed northern woman who comes here and leaves again?’

  ‘And in what way are you different from any handsome man who fucks a tourist girl and waves bye bye? If we’re pretending not to know each other, then how do I know you didn’t, oh, fuck me for revenge on Englishwomen, because of Sarah? Please, Sa’id, we were beyond this before, why are we going backwards?’

  ‘We weren’t so serious before,’ he said.

  ‘I was serious. I was very serious.’

  He looked at me again, thoughtfully.

  ‘I know you were. I know you think you were. But … “jada al-hawah bilfata wma la ‘iba”,’ he said. Love is a serious thing for a man, not a sport. I know that poem. Bassar, eighth century. What do I remember of the poem? It’s about a girl who leaves.

  ‘I don’t think it’s the same for you,’ he said. ‘I don’t think serious means to you what it means to me.’

  Is he patronizing me?

  ‘Why?’ I cried. ‘Simply because I’m a woman? Because I’m English? Are you telling me I don’t know love?’ He shook his head.

  ‘I know you know love,’ he said. Oh, I knew he knew I knew love. He knew it, too. He began to smile, a slow curling smile, the one which grows and grows until the tip of his tongue appears and curls to touch his upper lip, and he looks at me sideways.

  ‘Kiss me,’ I said.

  He snorted, quietly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Bite my neck then. Hold my hand. Nibble my ear. Love me. Adore me.’

  He started laughing. I laughed too. For a moment, we were just laughing. Then we stopped, and silence sat with us.

  After a while he said: ‘I know you weren’t involved in his death. I was willing to think you were because I would think almost anything that would put a distance between you and me. I’m sorry, it’s my protection against you. It was unkind. And I’m sorry I didn’t come to see you last night.’

  ‘Ya habibi,’ I said. Oh my love. This would make me sad, and I wasn’t interested in sadness. I had too much going on. This was just something to be got through because I knew he was wrong.

  ‘If it goes right for you,’ he said, ‘and Shezli says you can leave, you will go home to London, and you will think about it. You may think that you want to be with him.’

  ‘Who?’ I said stupidly.

  ‘He loves you. He is your child’s father. You loved him before. We are very cool, aren’t we, he and I, working together for your protection? But once you’re safe, you know, we might fight like dogs for you.’

  ‘But you don’t want me,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t want to want you,’ he said. ‘Different thing.’

  He shook his he
ad.

  ‘Stupid, stupid,’ he said. ‘Anyway, first we must save you.’

  We stared at each other a while. I couldn’t but smile at him.

  ‘This is too much talking,’ I said. If he is not going to have faith in our ability to love each other, then how can we love each other? And is that what he’s saying? Each thing we say has seven routes leading on from it, and as we converse we can only take one at a time. This conversation is a hydra. All I know is he is saying some terrible things and some wonderful things.

  He stared at me. He was still leaning back. You will lean forward, you bastard, you will, you will.

  And I still haven’t told him the important thing.

  *

  Harry came back with Shezli, who he had encountered in the shop, with Abu Sa’id, while lurking to give Sa’id and I our privacy. Sa’id and I untwisted our eyebeams just in time. I could tell by the way Harry prowled that he knew it was all happening.

  I moved over on the divan and Shezli sat beside me. Omar pulled over the other divan for Harry and Sa’id. Abu Sa’id positioned himself silently behind his son. I tried to gather up my self-possession, dignity, discretion and savoir-faire, which seemed to me to have been flung like lingerie around the courtyard floor by my conversation with Sa’id.

  Shezli started, in Arabic, with courtesies. Sa’id responded in the same Luxori dialect, soft and southern. Of course; you don’t speak with your own people in someone else’s dialect.

  Then Shezli stared at his shoes for a while. I was grateful for the time.

  ‘I am in the sad position,’ he began in English, ‘Of knowing more than I like to know. So now I must know everything. Madame Angelina.’

  ‘Sir,’ I said. Which surprised me too. I suppose I wanted him to know I was a goodie.

  ‘Are you married to Sa’id el Araby?’

  ‘No,’ I replied. Not, I think, giving anything away.

  ‘Why did they think in Cairo that you were?’

  I told him what I had told Mr Hamadi. He nodded.

  ‘And why did you know Mr Bates?’

  Keep it simple.

  ‘Through me,’ said Harry.

  ‘And who exactly are you, sir?’

  ‘Harry Makins,’ he said. ‘Detective Inspector. Metropolitan Police.’ Pulling his authority on over his body like a garment, a little reluctantly, but recognizing the necessity. Like a jumper he didn’t want to feel cold enough to need.