Her supporters thought the same. They went wild. Even wilder went the Trads – howling at them, howling at us, howling at Ludo and Levello, howling like furious dragons.
‘Get up Clip!’ she said, pulling me to my feet. Keeping my hands tight in hers she turned to Ludo and Levello. She raised her chin, and then one eyebrow, and do you know – you can check it, thanks to those cameras, it must be somewhere – just that was enough! They fell silent. All of them fell dead silent.
‘Here we are, my lords,’ she said.
Her voice was – was – music. Soft and humoured, without a shake or a single fear: low music which carried to every corner of the country. I could hardly stand I was shaking so much. She kept a steady grip of me.
‘Here we are, my lords,’ she said. ‘What would you have us say?’
I saw Ludo swallow and I thought here it comes, Ludo speaks now and it’s over. Who can command like her? He could talk typhoons now and it won’t save him or his brother. They’re finished. But Uzma continued.
‘Anything you bid us we will do. Right, Clip?’
‘Speak, then!’ Ludo cried, before I could answer. ‘Speak for your factions, your beliefs, for the grievances and for all those who follow you. Restrain nothing of your hearts and conclude with how you will be satisfied.’
You would never have known that he had sown everything up, from curtain up to call.
‘Who will begin?’
‘Uzma!’ I squeaked.
‘Clip!’ she said, in the same instant.
Anywhere else someone would have laughed. Ludo permitted himself a smile.
‘Clip?’
‘Uzma – the lady first.’
‘As the lady, Clip,’ Uzma smiled, ‘please, I beg you, say what you have come to say.’
Oh Lord! I thought, as she turned her cool face to me, Oh help me! And perhaps He did. Uzma did, I know that: she squeezed my hands suddenly, a pulse of a squeeze, like she was handing the thing to me because she trusted I would not drop it, as if I could not drop it. So – I just opened my mouth.
‘Uzma. I think they – I think we fear you. We fear your conviction. In our conception there are so few certain things. We love people, many or few. We love things, feelings. We are loyal to an idea of these peculiar islands and their particularities, as they have grown and changed and collected here in the thousands of years. Ours is not so much a country of convictions, Uzma. We have leanings, sympathies and tastes, even adorations. We have loathings. But if you could see all these things as colours, or currents, you would not see them arranged in ranks, in bright primaries, or flowing in one direction. If we are absolute for anything it is for the aberration, the less than absolute. The exception that proves the rule is something we cherish for both its sides. This archipelago of modest tones and sudden brightenings has known every darkness, Uzma. Our story is thick with bloody chapters. Religious war. Class war. Political civil war, and wars against invaders. Believers have burned believers at the stake here. We have made torn corpses of men, women and children too – here and abroad. We want no more of it. And when we look at your faith, Uzma, and the way it is followed, we fear. All I have seen of it is kindness and nobility – and beauty, true. But I know more than I have seen – we all do. We have seen Puritanism, here, and rejected it. We have seen the oppression of women and the enthronement of bigots. I spoke of loathing, and we loathe dogma. The most powerful religion in the old world came here, and touched and held people inspired, and for the basest reasons, perhaps, we made it make an exception for us. And still our exceptions and aberrations caused death and suffering – for hundreds of years. We want no more. Your vast rallies, your chanting thousands, the million minds made one, and most simple, in its prejudices: we entertain these things, but only when it comes to football – or rugby. But we cannot, we will not accept them in the realms of politics or religion – those potent and most mischievous powders we prefer unmixed. And perhaps your truth alarms us.
‘Perhaps we envy you your certainties, doubting our own powers, our ability to share them. Perhaps those tastes and weaknesses of ours for the commercial, the worldly, the junky and sleazy – perhaps our lacks of faith and our avarices are deep and secret shames for us. Perhaps we are subject to great doubt and sad confusion about how we have lost our way, and perhaps your upright and outright rejection of our more corrupt addictions fills us with an odd and uncertain envy of you. We are certain, though, that it is no religion, nor any ranking, nor dogma nor doctrined path that will lead us on from here. Though we have fallen steadily out of love with religion, we are still people of faith. We demand the right to find our own diverse ways, according to our own strange hearts.’
There was no roar of approval from the Trads, then. I saw some heads shaking, some nodding. There were winces. Jaws were stroked; people shifted in their seats. There was a rumbling buzz, like bees. Perhaps they felt I had stated our position with too much sympathy, with insufficient rambunctiousness. Their heads now turned to Uzma. She surely knew I had left her two open paths, and that a single step down the wrong one would bring riot and open hell.
Uzma had no need to draw herself up. She always stood straight. Her bright gaze lay kindly on me, and there was a smile in it, though not in her tone as she answered.
‘It was kindly spoken, Clip,’ she said. ‘I don’t doubt your sincerity. You describe a tribe that some would say is lost and loitering in a wilderness. You can imagine how we feel, people of my faith, when we see you as you have described. The hordes who seem in love with oblivion, with alcohol and lust. The lives wasted in front of screens which preach so much materialism. So much trash! How many relationships, how many families are shattered by one too many? Who can count the vows forgotten or drowned in the beat of the clubs, by the fights and the fucks? How much havoc is sown by the flash of a pair of pins in a short skirt, by the swell of thrust breasts? I am not condemning!’ she shouted, as an angered growl rose from the packed ranks, and another answered it from her supporters. ‘Your own vocabulary is honest. Don’t you call your nightclubs meat markets? Don’t you call your women slappers, slags and sluts? Don’t your young go out fighting and shagging and drugging because they lack the intense centre which holds us steady? Can you blame us that we turn our faces from these things? Does it offend you that we have another way with our liberty than getting hammered on Brains and cider? Don’t you agree, secretly, that it is better, kinder and healthier in all ways to abstain? I don’t expect you to admit it. Maybe I am wrong. I am just trying to show you how we see it – how our religion sees it. And don’t you think we don’t want to share the good news with you? Don’t you think we would rejoice if you turned your faces from that emptiness towards the fullness we experience? And don’t you know that our religion obliges us to share this perspective with you? To hold it up and say – look. There is light and calm this way.’
They rumbled and they roared, both sides now, and young braves in each camp gestured derision and challenge to each other.
‘Hold before you damn me!’ she shouted, and there was a flash of her, the warrior queen she had never allowed herself to be – had never been allowed to be, in her place as Levello’s wife.
‘I have not finished. Clip speaks of faith without religion. Clip speaks of freedom to demur, to swim against the tide, to make exception. Clip speaks of history. Of your land. Of your peculiar traditions. Clip speaks of something, some lodestar, some hazy God or science, which you follow in your own ways. And the question Ludo asks us to answer is – how do we live together? Can we not devise a system of respects? For example, we Muslims can abstain from mass rallies, if you – non-Muslims – can refrain from confronting us with so much that offends us. Refrain from judging, from criticising, from feeling threatened, most of all. Can’t both sides be quiet in our convictions? I am not willing to hide my faith, but I am not ashamed to practise it modestly. Can’t we join in contemplation and experience? What’s all that matters, in the end? Love above hate, above all.
Listen! I have proof. I love my husband, I love my God, I love this earth, this land, its ruler, Ludo, and I love Clip – it’s true! Don’t ask me, any of you, to turn from any of them. I can only live if I can love all these things. I won’t fight any of them. I won’t fight but for them. And for them I will fight to my last breath.’
And with that she took my hands.
‘We will not fight,’ I heard my voice say, my croak, so spitty and mangled.
‘Anything, but we will not fight, ever.’
We embraced.
‘I love you,’ I whispered, as a rush of wonder went through the crowd, a rush of confusion, cowed, something like jealousy or fear.
‘And I love you, darling Clip,’ she said softly, her lips against my ear. We squeezed tight. Perhaps our speeches had intoxicated us. It was as if we had both been taken somewhere where no one else was. And – Lord forgive me! – all I wanted then was her, I wanted her, and she knew it and did not draw away. Only she leaned her head back and gazed into my eyes.
She smiled. She nodded. I turned to the kings, still holding her, and saw, in that instant, how the trick had worked. And I was a fool, a holy fool, because the looks on their two faces were so knowing, and their eyes triumphant, though they kept their expressions still – while her face was merely beautiful, alight with some simple thing.
Ludo stood up. We drew apart, still holding hands.
‘That is good,’ he said. ‘And almost good enough. You know what you have done, and here undone. You have brought this country into the very mouth of destruction. It was gravely wrong. Innocents have died for your vanity, for your rabbling and your lust for power. All that must end. We cannot allow you to return to your strongholds. Nothing can be as it was. Some may say you deserve punishment, but you are not to be punished. You are banished, banished from each other and from the madness you inspired. Uzma. Will you go with your husband?’
She was still looking at me, at me! And still she held my hands.
‘I will,’ she said, without the tiniest hesitation.
‘Clip, you will go with me.’
‘Yes,’ I said, and I never took my eyes from her while they led us apart, not until they took us out through different doors.
It took people a while to work it out, and I was one of them. Levello’s summer house in the skirts of Snowdon had been massively enlarged, a low castle complex now filled half that high away valley. There they buried Uzma, in comfort, in freedom, with anyone she chose to see, free to come and go, but buried there, still. She still made speeches, and still supported causes and endowed foundations and sponsored mosques, but even if she had wanted to shake it again, well, her staff had been broken that day in Oxford, when the world saw the way she held my hands, and took me to her.
Ludo took no risks with me, either. Reda flew us straight over the mountain where I lived and kept going, west and further west. We passed over my first home. There was Pembroke – there was Castle Terrace!
‘Where are you taking me? Ireland?’
‘Not quite,’ said Ludo. ‘Very like it, though, and it’s right for you, Clip, I hope you’ll love it,’ he said, and grabbed my hand and shook it in an awkward way.
Reda did a fine job with the wind and the cliffs, holding the machine just over the tips of the turf, just long enough for me to jump out and for Ludo to shout, ‘It’s all there for you, Clip!’
He gave me a salute, which was strange, the only time I ever saw him do that, then Reda had the thing up and over, diving down to hammer away again, low across the water, back towards the land. I was left shivering like a stray, abandoned to my first twilight on the island. It was cold and wild. Under all that sky, behind a cloud of screaming birds there was a hunched-up little house, and so I stumbled in.
Oh, they worked it beautifully. They worked us like fighting beasts, lathered all ashiver, dragged into the pit, turned loose – and then! Let us and the whole world see we loved each other, that we would sooner die than harm each other, that everything else was nothing at all. Nations could sink, mosques and churches burn, people hang, castles and kings collapse and we would not blink if we could only see each other and hold one another’s hands. Drunk in love like two silly pigeons, and caught and thrown away.
I lay in a cold bed thinking these things. It’s all there for you, he had said. A file on the kitchen table gave instructions about how the catchment tank worked and so on, and said that the boat would come monthly with stores. It would take orders for whatever I wanted. It was indeed all there for me, but that is not what he meant. He meant that the memories, the thoughts and the longing were all there, in the wind and every bird’s cry, and that they were all mine for as long I lived. I writhed in shame, in wanting and in love.
Part Three
Gulls’ eggs: I thought I would grow flipping wings. April was stormy; one blew for three days. You couldn’t stand up in the wind. No boat came and I thought that was why, but then there was no boat in May either, for no reason I could fathom. I had only rice and what fish I could catch. Depending on a rod and line for your supper is not sport so much as anxiety.
In June it came. They would not even come ashore. They could have tied up at the little dock but they stood off, loaded a small boat and had a boy row it to and fro.
‘Anything else you want?’
He was only young. His captain peeked from the wheelhouse, like I was some sort of gorgon.
‘It’s all on the list! A radio, for God’s sake, I must have a radio. That’s the most important thing. Please try to get all the books and the tools, and the seeds. Pepper too, I need pepper.’
‘OK.’
‘And news – what’s the news?’
‘Wha’?’
‘The Trads, the Believers – Uzma?’
‘Don’t know. Don’t go in for it, like.’
‘But there’s peace?’
He looked blank.
‘No fighting, no riots?’
‘Don’t think so... I haven’t heard.’
‘Thank God. And Uzma?’
‘Don’t know. Haven’t really heard.’
‘Ludo?’
‘In London... isn’t he? Saw him on the telly. Yeah. London.’
‘What was he doing?’
‘Can’t remember. You know, talking. Like he does.’
‘OY!’ the captain shouted.
‘What’s your name?’ I cried, as the boy pulled on his oars.
‘Stephen.’
‘Thank you, Stephen!’
‘Alright.’
‘I’m Clip. My name’s Clip.’
The boy looked as though he might say something but he was almost at the boat. He might have smiled but then he was turning to catch the gunwale and the captain was on at him and that was that. I was back to watching ships, little slow bars crossing the horizon. My only human company was the crab potter who came some mornings, maybe twice every ten: once to sow his traps, and once to haul them in. He gave me one wave each time.
They came again in August. Every two months, I swore, as I ran down the path – every two bloody months!
‘Hello Stephen!’
‘Alright there.’
‘God it’s good to see you! How are you? You look well! Did you get the radio?’
‘No radio allowed, Clip.’
I cried like a little kid. It wasn’t the radio, it was the ‘allowed’, the thought that someone – that Ludo had done that to me, like that. Ludo... And because Stephen said my name. Just about pulled myself together by the time he came back with the second load.
‘Who says what’s allowed, Stephen? Who do you deal with? I like that pin in your nose! That’s the fashion is it? Where do you live? Have you got someone special?’
‘I’m not allowed to talk to you,’ he said, not with any relish.
‘Oh but these boxes are wonderfully heavy! Tell you what, I’m going to have a feast tonight. Do you fish?’
‘A bit, yeah.’
‘What’s your favourite?’<
br />
‘Mackerel.’
If he kept his back to the boat and the captain – and the captain’s friend, I noticed, along to gawp – and as long as I kept it very quiet...
‘Stephen, you’ve got to get a message to Ludo. Please, tell him I need to see him, it’s vital, I’ve got to see him, tell him, there’s something he needs to know.’
‘No messages,’ he said, shortly, flushing.
‘No! Sorry, sorry – right. No messages. Sorry Stephen, it just came out. Mackerel! I love them too. Lovely, delicious fish, and so many! How’s the world then? What’s the news?’
He shook his head and pulled away.
‘Is there another load?’
‘One more.’
He came back.
‘Have you heard of Uzma, Stephen, have you heard anything?’
‘Only the baby thing.’
‘What thing!’
‘They say she’s pregnant. They’re on about it.’
I burst into tears again, then.
‘I’m so sorry Stephen, to embarrass you. Will you tell them I am happy? So happy for her, so happy... send her my love, will you? All my love. Good lord, what a day! Quite a day for you too, all this crying, I am sorry. It’s so – strange, isn’t it? How are you Stephen, how’s life with you?’
‘Well, bit tight like.’
‘What do you mean, tight? Captain not paying you properly?’
‘No, well, it’s the money thing, isn’t it?’
‘What money thing?’
‘The thing with the banks. You know, the crash or whatever.’
‘Go on.’
‘Oh I don’t know. The economy. All the money’s been spent or something. Everyone losing their jobs. You’re well out of it. With all this...’ He waved a hand at the boxes, which now made quite a pile. ‘Tidy.’
‘You’re welcome to it! Here, I’ll have the boat. I’d give you a key but there isn’t one – be my guest!’
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