Only in London

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  ’But that wasn’t because he liked the blondes, Amira. He was just looking after all the money he’d spent getting them there in the first place. He was making sure of his investment. And remember, he’s desperate to prove his virility, that he can still perform.’

  ’He told me I’d put on too much weight. He even left instructions that the hotel clerk should ask me for a deposit if I decided to stay for a few extra days. To put it bluntly, he abused me and paid me peanuts.’

  ’Then what happened?’

  ’I left the hotel and went straight to the airport, but not before I wrote him a note: "Dear Muhammad, I now realise why you like to make love in the jacuzzi - it’s so no one’ll know you are impotent. " ’

  ’Good girl, Amira. But come to think of it, why didn’t you pretend to be pregnant, like before?’

  ’Not only pregant, but expecting twins,’ Amira laughed ruefully. ’But the trick backfired. He started to give me advice and tell me off, saying what I was doing was wrong, I was bad. He turned into a preacher all of a sudden.’

  ’I don’t believe it! How bizarre! I told Stanley the other day that he’d turned into a preacher!’

  ’Did you say Stanley?’

  ’Yes, Stanley in flesh and blood. I bumped into him in Edgware Road and he started lecturing me about my future!’

  ’How funny. Though I don’t blame old Stanley. I’m thinking of my future, Nahid. And yours, too. I’m thirty-eight years old. I’ve become used to silk and jewellery and good food. I can’t stop doing what I do and try to live the decent life now.’

  ’And don’t leave out the hot running water, and taking taxis everywhere, and Harley Street doctors.’

  Amira and Nahid reached Oxford Street and turned down Duke Street but instead of entering the famous fabric shop esteemed by Indian and Arab women, they chose to sit in a café and eat pastries. Amira gave Nahid the present she had bought for her in Dubai, a pair of gold earrings each in the shape of a birdcage containing a miniature bird. The birds made them smile. If Nahid had been with her in Dubai, thought Amira, everything would have been much lighter, and all the serious stuff would have become farcical. What they did and where they went together united them, brought them closer. It made their friendship stronger. They were like two batteries charging each other up.

  They joked and gossiped just like in the old days, when they had been at the peak of their vitality and youthful desirability, not needing to try so hard to make sure their customers wanted them. They laughed about when they’d taken the tissues they’d used for wiping up punters’ sperm and burned them, imagining that the smoke made a magical incense to entice the men back again. And each assured the other she looked beautiful and sexy and, of course, far prettier than Bahia, and they agreed to meet the next day, when they’d have a serious discussion about their future.

  IV

  Nicholas opened his case and scattered his clothes about desperately as if he were a diabetic seeking his insulin fix. He saw the towel and his features relaxed as he unwrapped from it the gold and silver Omani dagger he’d had his eye on for months, picturing it on the wall beside his desk, complementing the wooden chest from India and the straw fezzes from Sri Lanka.

  ’Fantastic!’ He stood back, congratulating himself on his purchase - now his flat was complete.

  He went around the flat welcoming himself home. Everything was just as he had left it. He watered the plants, although there was no need to since Julia, the cleaner, watered them diligently once a week. He hated the unfamiliarity and loneliness that confronted him every time he returned to London or went away to Oman. Did he want the couch to open its arms and hug him, or the cushions to clap their hands in greeting? He went into the kitchen and filled the kettle. Instead of walking away as usual, he stood and waited for the water to boil. He sat on the couch with his mug of coffee and noticed the stain where he’d rubbed the upholstery to remove some chocolate. Then remembering the dates he’d brought back from Oman he tipped them into a bowl and ate five, then took the stones into the kitchen and fetched his mail. There was a letter from Anita and, at the sight of her pretty sloping script, he was prompted to be ruthless; he sorted through the rest of the post and threw out everything that looked uninteresting before he read her letter.

  Anita wanted to know if he’d lend her his Indian wall hanging - she wanted to use it in a photo. Was this one of her schemes or a genuine request? He glanced at the Rajasthani cotton hanging embroidered with gazelles, snakes, lions, flowers, and huntsmen on horseback blowing horns. Anita had passionately wanted to make love on it.

  ’But it’s lasted for two centuries. I have to take great care of it,’ he had protested.

  That only made her want it more and she had finally persuaded him to take it down off the wall.

  The last time he saw Anita he told her as gently as he could that, if they continued to share a bed, it would have to be as friends only. She didn’t seem upset or embarrassed, and didn’t try to make him change his mind. She smiled her wide-eyed smile and said, ’OK, sister and brother.’ But then she looked at him fearfully. ’My brother,’ she said softly, ’we must breathe fast so the spaceman thinks we’re plants. The plants in space breathe out loud, you know. Look! See him? He’s coming towards us.’

  Her playful fantasy aroused him and distracted him from his resolution that he wouldn’t take his trousers off again for a woman unless he was in love with her. Sex was becoming boring, routine.

  He was lying on his back, the covers drawn up to his chin, and he reached out for Anita and she pulled him on top of her. Her panting breath entered his mouth and snaked along his backbone and Anita was no longer pretending. ’Promise me, brother, promise me, that you won’t desert your sister who lives in eternal darkness. Do you know how awful it is to be blind?’

  He dialled her number. He missed her friendship and the company of a woman who offered more than small talk and social niceties, which were all he’d exchanged with any woman during the last six weeks in Oman. But there was only her answering machine. ’Anita. It’s Nicholas, I’ve just got back.’ He repeated this a couple of times, knowing that Anita sometimes put on an answerphone voice.

  A letter from his father asked if he’d delivered the copy of the Bible translated into Arabic to Sayf in Oman. (It lay with its three thousand pages on the table in front of him.)

  Your mother hardly moves these days. When she went to see the specialist the other day, a nurse took her down to be weighed on the scales in the hospital kitchen, just as if she was a sack of potatoes! She says it’s my fault, and if I’d had a different occupation she’d have kept her figure. You know how generous people are round here. They bring homemade cakes and biscuits every time they visit, and she says she can’t refuse them but, between you and me, she likes making cakes herself too!

  Nicholas laughed at the final paragraph of his father’s letter:

  Anyway, she’ll find that if we visit you in Oman eating dates isn’t quite as simple as eating cake, I’m afraid. There are all those obstacles - the stones and sometimes the skins. The doctor’s told her three dates equals on average a small spoon of sugar. Never mind! Never mind!

  Hampshire’s so damp, Nicholas. I do hope your mother will agree to come to Oman with me, especially as it is a treat from our favourite son. I’ve told her we deserve the break, and she should think of it as a holiday. No more, no less. She wouldn’t have to put up with the appalling conditions we found in Palma de Mallorca two years ago, when we stayed in that place belonging to a friend of a friend, with no kitchen. All those thousands of German tourists, literally baking themselves in the sun. She’s so vexed about the fact that we can’t really afford a holiday, and she doesn’t want to complain, but she can’t stop herself. I’ve told her it seems a suitable place for travelling to in the winter months. It wouldn’t be that difficult and, in any case, a visit to Oman would have its advantages. As well as getting us away from the daily frustration that we personally, and the Church as a
whole, suffer, of trying to drum up funds, it’ll give the local youth a different view of us - show that even the Vicar and his wife can enjoy adventure and travel to far-flung places.

  There was a letter from Liz, too. Her handwriting was etched on his memory. Nicholas was reluctant to open it but went ahead out of loyalty. She’d sent him a newspaper cutting about a Byzantine exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and a postcard on which she’d written that she welcomed him back to London and hoped to see him soon. A wave of displeasure hit him, occasioned not only by the message but by the card: an unflattering picture that made the Sultan Mahmut’s throne in the Topkapi in Istanbul look rather like a frog.

  Over the last few months, ever since Nicholas had started to work in Oman on his secondment from Sotheby’s, Liz had hounded him with stories relating to the Arab world: an article about Saddam Hussein, another about Arab belly dancers hiring bodyguards because they feared Islamic fundamentalists, news of Hafez al-Asad’s illness, an item about Egyptian boys who were paid a few pounds for lizards that sold in the West for a hundred dollars apiece.

  He was still in the process of escaping from Liz’s famous ’eye’, the very thing that attracted him when they first met at Sotheby’s five years ago. He had been astonished by the discernment of Liz’s ’eye’. It was like some independent entity, a magician finding solutions to riddles, interpreting the movement of a feather, a faded colour, an equation, a tale from history. Its retina was a website of information stored in different languages; its iris focused unlike any other, distinctive and individual as a fingerprint. Nicholas became enslaved by this eye, which was so superior to his in its knowledge of art and its passionate intensity. He listened and the eye revealed all, and it favoured him with a look that was never bestowed on the other employees of Sotheby’s or its clients or even the works of art themselves.

  Nicholas lost his head when he realised that this eye, admired by so many, was at his service, sleeping, smiling, moaning in pleasure, smitten with jealousy, and he fell passionately in love with Liz. Her eye drew him in, made him feel that he belonged, that he was at the centre of things; it schooled him in London: through Liz he learned its streets and lanes, its neighbourhoods, went to its clubs and restaurants and parties. But then she wanted to marry, and he didn’t, and she left him.

  After a period of confusion and a few fleeting relationships, however, she came back to him, making no mention of marriage. His happiness at her return was indescribable; he felt at the time that London was not big enough, and to celebrate, they went together to Florence, but instead of reconciliation, Nicholas found he wanted to end their relationship. As they climbed the walled road in Fiesole, he remarked that it must feel like this on the Great Wall of China, the hard stone underfoot, the fields spreading below, and Liz immediately retorted that his comparison was misplaced. ’I was only talking about the feeling, Liz,’ he protested.

  They wandered through the gloom of the tiny church at Fiesole and the monastery’s dark wood-panelled rooms. They both loved the Fra Angelico painting and frescos. After a while Nicholas was drawn to the bright courtyard outside, leaving Liz with her guide-books and art papers. He stood by an arch and looked out on to the yard, where a monk was moving among the humble plants and flowers with a watering can, murmuring softly. There were birds in a cage built against the near wall: eating, splashing in a water bowl, swinging in a little basket in the centre, and twittering at the entrances to their houses. Nicholas watched the flow of their constant movement and the jumping, changing colours; the occasional bright feather fell as one bird groomed another. Liz came over to him and asked what he was doing there.

  ’This little courtyard is really lovely. Let’s sit out here for a bit.’

  ’Come back inside. I want to show you something in these frescos.’

  ’I want to show you this courtyard.’

  ’It’s pretty.’ She hadn’t looked at it. ’But come with me.’

  After a few days Nicholas felt completely alone.

  As soon as they returned to London, he left Liz to her own devices. He felt he’d escaped from her clutches; that he no longer had to take refuge from the coldness of her eyes while she tried out all her intellectual, sexual and psychological remedies for their failing relationship. However, she didn’t finally leave him alone until he said to her that he was no longer interested in a relationship with anyone.

  He found himself throwing her card in the bin. He went to fetch more coffee and dates, then took out his diary and a few sheets of paper and sat down to make calls. He pounced on the telephone as if he had only just discovered its existence. He noted down the dates of public auctions; he rang the Royal Academy, Leighton House, and a few galleries. The enthusiastic responses to his calls restored his sense of well-being - this was ideal, a life shared between the two places: London and Oman. He rang Sotheby’s. ’Nicholas here. I came back this morning.’

  The more calls he made, the more he felt he’d not left London at all. As life streamed back into his flat he became increasingly pleased with the Omani dagger, but he was tired from the journey and decided to catch a couple of hours’ sleep before doing any serious work. As soon as he put his head on the pillow he had a vision of Lamis and the way she’d accepted her passport, as if he’d been handing her something rare and precious. He recalled the pleasant intimacy of the journey from Heathrow in the minibus with the other three Arab passengers. He sat up, checked the time, and called his secretary in Oman. When he answered, he asked what the name ’Lamis’ meant, and held the line, waiting, until the secretary came back to him and said, ’Lamis - it means ’soft to the touch".’

  When, in the minibus, he’d asked how to pronounce her name, she’d stressed the ’m’ and the ’s’, showing even white teeth. She had beautiful, delicate hands and, like most Arab women, her hair was coal black, a long river held in at the nape of her neck.

  He had noticed that when she replied to the stinging questioning of the Moroccan woman, she spoke softly, with a hesitant manner, and he remembered that he’d thought she could have stepped down from the temple walls in Khajuraho. Her dark wide eyes looked newborn, as if she were staring around trying to comprehend everything for the first time, and they betrayed her. It was erotic. So was her big smile, her long hair. As she took her sweater off he couldn’t help but notice her firm breasts. She seemed vulnerable, uneasy, not composed as he’d first thought. He wondered if she were ill, although she looked healthy enough. He couldn’t bring himself to ask her if anything was wrong. Even though most of the Arab women living in London insisted they were modern and didn’t conform to the Oriental stereotype, he felt that an invisible barrier separated him from them once he began to work at Sotheby’s. There he met Arab women who wore smart, expensive clothes and had elaborately styled hair. Did they set themselves apart, or feel superior? He never looked at them for too long or too directly. Whether they were art students or prospective buyers, he never dared do more than glance in their direction, even though he was often in the more powerful position as he explained the details of this or that antique.

  He was also confused by the way their entire personalities seemed to change, chameleon-like, so swiftly. Despite their well-groomed appearance, their mild way of talking, the Arab women who arrived at Sotheby’s showed sudden bursts of ferocity and equivocated as they tried to pump him for information about the prices he expected certain articles to reach at auction or what sums the other Arabs might bid. When he discovered that these women were fasting during Ramadan he was completely lost. He tried to enquire, without giving offence, how it was that they were fasting and yet didn’t wear the veil, only to become more perplexed by their response: ’How are the two things connected?’ But Lamis had seemed somehow different. With a small stab of excitement, he remembered that he’d overheard her mention that she was divorced.

  The phone rang. It was David, an ex-colleague from Sotheby’s, asking whether the Omanis were interested in the gazelle. A te
nth-century gazelle that had stood in a pool for hundreds of years in the gardens of the Umayyad Madinat al-Zahra near Cordoba - a palace with about five hundred rooms for men, two hundred for women, and fifty servants who fed leftovers to the peacocks, scattered seed for the birds and tore up twelve hundred loaves of bread a day to feed the fish in the palace ponds - before ending up in an Austrian castle. Had Nicholas returned to London to bid for it? The gazelle was a rare piece. It would fetch one of the highest prices paid up until now in an auction of Islamic artefacts.

  ’Can I ring you back, David ... later this evening, or tomorrow morning? I have to dash.’

  Nicholas left his flat and went down a side street to his car which he had left in residents’ parking just off Eccleston Square. A neighbour opened the window to tell him that he’d chased away some youngsters the other day. ’They probably assumed the car was abandoned, you know. Next time you go away, perhaps you could get somebody to drive it for you from time to time. That would help.’

  Nicholas thanked him, feeling both a little annoyed and grateful. London was less anonymous than he’d assumed. But perhaps he should sell his car, or give it to his parents.

  He drove along Park Lane up to Marble Arch then towards Edgware Road where Amira lived. He parked around a corner and walked, observing the familiarity of the surroundings. The word ’halal’ appeared on all the restaurants and supermarkets. The Arabs used it for women and for meat - why? Perhaps if he understood more of their language, he would be able to solve the enigma of their personalities, their customs and culture. A man accompanied by his wife was looking at every woman who passed; the wife meanwhile was muffled from head to toe, her face masked. A Filipina maid was with them, dragging a child along with one hand; the wife held on to the other, and both women carried shopping bags full of bananas and melons. He suddenly wondered whether Lamis shopped here for Arab food. Two men were discussing some important topic, each touching his prick in turn, as if pressing a button to make his voice come out of his stomach, and they wore boots festooned with silver circles and buckles which struck the street’s surface as they walked.