The smell of un-English food wafting from the entrance of Amira’s block transported him back to Oman with its private houses and permanently drawn curtains, heavy and inert, as if made of concrete. Amira stood at the door dressed to kill: ludicrous lipstick, not helped by the smudge of it on her teeth, green eye-shadow to match the buttons of her suit, which threatened to burst apart each time she talked, and shiny bouffant hair.
’Have I come too early?’
’No. Not at all.’
She was wearing perfume that enveloped her like a garment.
Nicholas blinked. The room was decorated with prints in gold frames depicting scenes from romance and legend: a girl was carving her lover’s name on a tree trunk and wiping away her tears; a naked woman was lying face down with an eagle perched on her bottom, spreading its wings. ’A real find in Bayswater one Sunday,’ proclaimed Amira, when she saw where Nicholas was looking.
She went behind a small bar that occupied one corner of the room, and asked him what he’d like to drink.
’Do you have wine? Red or white. I don’t mind which.’
There were flowered curtains and fake gilded Louis XVI sofas; a couple had broken backs, revealing the plaster under the gilt. A glass tabletop rested on a giant metal scorpion, or was it a spider? Two black birds with gold eyes, beaks and claws, were fighting for possession of a large egg, like the ball in a lavatory cistern, mounted on a gold stand.
’Is it coriander or cumin that I can smell?’
’You must be hungry. Shall I order some food from the Lebanese restaurant now?’
’I’m not hungry, just curious.’ Nicholas asked, ’Did we arrange to meet at eight?’
’I’ve forgotten. Eight or nine, it doesn’t matter. Oh, Samir called and said he was still waiting for the monkey to go to the toilet! He won’t be able to get here.’
’Oh, he rang me ...’
’I gave him your number.’
’He was making me laugh. Then he hung up. I think it was turning out well enough. And Lamis, have you heard from her?’
’Lamis hasn’t called. I don’t know her number. Do you?’
’No.’
’She’s sure to come. We Arabs are always late.’
The telephone rang and Nicholas’s heart jumped. It was bound to be Lamis giving her apologies.
Amira spent ages looking for the phone, and Nicholas became annoyed, disappointed. It was over before it began. Lamis had vanished from his life. But he knew where she lived. He felt encouraged. He would write her a note. What would he say?
The phone was still ringing and Nicholas was tempted to join Amira’s search. ’Hello,’ she finally answered in a subdued tone and a slightly different accent. ’One moment, please, one moment.’
She winked at Nicholas. He jumped to his feet to talk to Lamis. Amira continued to talk into the phone.
’Hello. Yes, this is Amira. It’s lovely to hear from you. It doesn’t matter!’
’Is it Lamis? Get her number!’
’Tomorrow’s fine. Sleep well!’
Amira hung up and burst out laughing. ’Lamis must have bewitched you! No, it wasn’t Lamis.’
Nicholas laughed, wishing he could suggest that they go and fetch Lamis. He sat on a sofa that jutted out into the room.
Amira poured a glass of whisky, added ice and offered it to Nicholas.
’Thanks.’ Nicholas accepted the drink that he hadn’t asked for. ’What do you think it’s best to do?’ he asked.
’We’ll wait half an hour then order dinner here in case she comes late.’
’Do you suppose something’s happened to her? She was rather subdued on the drive into London.’
’Light-headed. She probably hadn’t eaten anything because she wanted to be a size zero. I’ll order some food. What do you think?’
’Shall we wait? I’m not really hungry, are you? So, do you live alone? Do you work?’
’My husband’s in Dubai and I work in precious stones. More whisky?’
But Amira wasn’t like the Arab women that Nicholas met in Oman at cocktail parties, who didn’t listen or concentrate on what was being said. Their eyes roamed over their surroundings, seeing nothing; they were scared of their husbands; sometimes they crouched, silent and catlike, afraid even to make their necklaces stir. Nor was she like the Arab women he’d seen on the beach, who lay under the palms in their smart bathing costumes, their varnished toenails like painted lips on the sand, indifferent to their surroundings and especially to foreign visitors. Was it their lack of curiosity or, as he’d wondered in a moment of vanity, did they consider him intrinsically uninteresting as a blond man with a hairless chest?
They wore earphones, listened to Walkmans; Western pop singers caressed their eardrums, and Hollywood movie stars their eyes, creatures like the constellations in the sky, of different clay from ordinary mortals.
Amira stood up. Nicholas heard the ice clinking in her glass as she put it down somewhere behind the sofa. Suddenly he felt her take hold of his shoulders. It was warm in the flat and he had removed his jacket. Her nails dug into him, scraped over his shirt. Surely she was not trying to seduce him? She was pressing her chest against the back of his neck and he felt the heat of her breath. She slipped her hand down his shirt and he bent forward away from her, although he was reluctant to hurt her feelings.
’I’m sorry, Amira,’ he said. ’You gave me a shock. You’re an Arab woman, and I don’t know what...’
’However hard they try, they can’t imprison my body. I can be myself with you. I knew that even if I threw myself at you you wouldn’t judge me too harshly.’
He was tongue-tied, conscience-stricken.
’I’m sorry I ...’
’I know. I know. A man isn’t an umbrella. Press the button and up it goes.’
Although he was utterly embarrassed, Nicholas had to laugh at Amira’s way of expressing herself. This defused the situation and, as Nicholas left, she leaned forward and kissed him on his right cheek, then his left, then his right again. ’Three times, that’s how we do it,’ she pronounced.
On the way back to his car, Nicholas noticed an Arab man negotiating a price with an Arab prostitute, in English, and Edgware Road seemed suddenly very much part of London after all.
Chapter Two
I
It was a cat that met Lamis when she pressed the buzzer at the arranged time and the entrance door opened. She followed the cat up the stairs to the attic, where the English teacher was drinking coffee and looking out over Primrose Hill.
’Do come in, Lamis. Have I pronounced your name correctly? I hope you don’t mind me not coming downstairs. Please. Sit down. Tea? Coffee?’
’Nothing, thank you.’
The cat circled Lamis, rubbing against her dress, her shoes, her bag.
’She wants to get to know you. Is she bothering you?’
’Not at all.’
’So you want to perfect your English?’
’Yes.’
’May I ask why?’
’I want to live in London.’
’Where are you living now?’
’In London.’
’When did you arrive?’
’Thirteen years ago. But I don’t feel as if I’ve been living here. I’ve stayed within a completely Arab environment.’
’Of course. You needed your Arab community, especially if you had to leave because of a war ... the Gulf War?’
’I left before that.’
’Yes, of course. The Gulf War already seems so distant.’
The teacher sat in an armchair, and asked Lamis to sit too.
’I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind,’ she continued. ’This is important because, if you take lessons with me, it’s not only your way of speaking that will change. The movements of your tongue, everything related to your voice and larynx will have to change their habits radically. But it’s not just your pronunciation - it goes deeper than that. Arabic is your mother t
ongue - altering the way you speak affects your personality inside.’
’I understand.’
’I’d like to know why, after living here for thirteen years, you’ve decided you want to acquire an English accent. And why did you choose to come here, to England, rather than some other country in Europe?’
’I came to London because I was going to marry an Iraqi, and he was already living here. But we’re divorced now. I have a son here, who’s still at school, and I’ve realised I want to assimilate. I need to look for work. I think having an English accent could be the key.’
’In other words, you’ve taken England as your second home.’
’No, as my first home. I left Iraq when I was twelve years old. I don’t think I’ll ever live there again.’
’So, you’re pretty determined. That’s good. Right.’
The teacher talked so much that Lamis began to feel sleepy. That’s the English, she thought, always dissecting everything and looking on the black side. Surely it’s not impossible to learn to speak English like the English, without all these dire warnings.
The teacher scolded the cat for knocking a pen and a sheet of paper to the floor, and trying to do the same to a big dictionary. She apologised to Lamis for the interruption - there was nothing the cat liked better than to see things fall. ’I’m sometimes afraid she’d enjoy watching herself falling from the attic window.’
Fifty minutes later Lamis left holding an exercise sheet with instructions to practise the top two lines. The teacher’s final words of advice rang in her head like a bell: ’Turn on the television. Go to the theatre or the cinema every night if you can, and talk to your English friends. Keep away from anything Arab, even in your mind. You should stop eating Arab dishes, because subconsciously you’ll be saying their names.’
’All right. I’ll try.’
Lamis congratulated herself on having ventured out to see the English teacher. Earlier that morning she’d been on the point of ringing up to cancel; she’d stood paralysed in front of her bedroom window, having woken up with her heart palpitating, dreaming she was still in Dubai. She opened the curtains - curtains made all cities the same, hiding the outside from view and leaving you alone with your fears - and gazed out at the BT tower in the distance. She looked down at the yard on the other side of the street, dotted with tubs of flowers, and at a woman changing a child’s nappy in the flat opposite. Turning round, she could see the cardboard boxes and suitcases heaped up in the hall. She left the room and stood over them for a moment, like a fox watching its prey, uncertain whether to strike. She went to call her son’s school, but put the receiver down as soon as someone answered - what could she say to him? That although he was her son and she was his mother they were going to live apart and just meet from time to time? She looked surreptitiously through the window again. There were the office workers already crouched over their desks in the opposite block, and the comical-looking pipes resembling metallic plants that belched out smoke from the office roof.
In the morning the BT tower changed from a Disneyland creation studded with coloured lights to a dismal grey watch-tower. From the bedroom window she could also see expanses of cement with grass breaking through the surface, a church dome in a beautiful verdigris green that seemed out of place, and a single tree trying its best to survive in the midst of all the bricks and mortar.
In Najaf, the holy city of Iraq where Lamis was born and raised, she had had to steal looks through closed window shutters; the tiny bathroom window was deliberately designed to be too high for anyone to see out of or into. The furtive, youthful exchange of glances reached its peak during the religious celebrations of Ashoura, when the young women peeped out from under their black veils, and the young men peered through the blood running down their cheeks while they struck their heads with swords, and called out the names of the martyrs, dead for over a thousand years: ’Haydar, Haydar, Haydar, Abbas, Abbas, Abbas.’
That woman who was arranging her child’s clothes in the flat opposite would have no idea a city like Najaf even existed.
Lamis saw her neighbour close the curtain, move it aside a fraction. She had her son in her arms. Did she think Lamis was spying on her?
After she had left the English teacher, Lamis had continued to walk, confident that she would not run into her mother-in-law or her husband in the streets of Primrose Hill, and hopeful that the speech lessons would enable her to discover the other London - or Londons - that the native Londoners knew and lived in. She thought of Elissa, the Phoenician princess who founded Carthage in spite of her brother’s opposition. Like her, she wanted to stretch the boundaries. When Elissa’s brother grudgingly granted Elissa a piece of land no bigger than an oxhide, Elissa asked her followers to stretch the fibres of the skin lengthways and widthways, widthways and lengthways, until she’d finally outwitted her brother: her kingdom reached right to the seashore.
Lamis moved between cafés and streets. Looking around her, she studied the little front gardens planted with flowers and shrubs: she glanced into the front windows of houses and flats where the occupants had placed a bouquet in a vase or a rocking horse to gladden the eyes of the passers-by. Previously Lamis assumed that anyone who lived in these places must be happy. With an unpleasant twinge of misery and irritation, she remembered the curtains and the bunch of flowers on the table in her own flat, the one she’d shared with her husband and Khalid; right now her husband would be clutching his mobile phone, his mother would be sipping coffee and, at half-term, playing with her grandson, the television blaring on and on.
Further along Lamis noticed two pieces of tinfoil stuck on a branch: each had a black circle in the middle like an eye - they were eyes. They were attached to some bushes growing together, clipped into the shape of some kind of animal with a tail.
It was the first time she had laughed since returning to London from Dubai, apart from being amused by the Lebanese man with the monkey. I should apologise to the Moroccan woman for not going to dinner that evening we arrived back, she thought suddenly.
Whoever transformed those shrubs into the form of an animal must be creative, with a sense of humour; perhaps it was someone like her father. On a visit to London a few years before, her father had shown no interest in the exhibits at the Boat Show at Earls Court; instead he’d wanted to know about the unfamiliar flowers planted around the displays.
She glanced over the hedge into the front room of the house. She could see a packet of China tea on the kitchen table. Was it a woman who’d pruned the bushes this way? She walked on, then a sound made her stop, turn round. A short man carrying a shopping bag - an orange protruded from the top - was opening the gate.
’Excuse me,’ Lamis said.
He looked at her without speaking. He was middle-aged, nice-looking.
’Is that yours?’ she asked, pointing at the topiary. ’Is it a dragon?’
’Well, yes, it’s part of the garden. Actually, it’s a dinosaur.’
He turned away and went up the front path. He seemed to be in a hurry. Perhaps he didn’t want to talk to a woman who couldn’t tell a dinosaur from a dragon.
The infrequency of taxis in the street troubled Lamis. But why? What was the hurry? she asked herself. She could walk from here to her flat, even though it would take an hour. Why was she worried about finding a taxi? She could take a bus or go on the Underground. A taxi was not a security blanket, or a buoy to hitch up to in the city. She wouldn’t get lost. She had eyes and ears. She could read the names of the streets and understand directions. She could wander about, stop and eat somewhere. But she arrived at a main road and stood, feeling guilty, impatient, waiting to flag a taxi, just as she had in the past, when she’d imagined everyone anxiously waiting for her at home, and she only relaxed when she saw a taxi for hire and was safely inside it.
She entered her flat with a pang of regret; no one with whom to go over the events of her day: the English lesson, the walk that stretched the boundaries of the oxhide, the few
hours that were taking on the gloss of happiness.
The phone rang and she went to pick it up immediately. Belquis was on the line, reproaching her for not being in touch. ’Oh Lamis. I just rang your parents in Dubai, and they told me what happened. I didn’t know you’d come back, and it never crossed my mind that there’d be all that fuss about the poppies. I was really worried for you.’
Lamis tried to act naturally. She thought of explaining to Belquis that she’d taken a decision not to see anyone from her past, that her friendship with Belquis was mainly due to her marriage. But she couldn’t bring herself to say anything and, with a tearful sense of defeat, she agreed when Belquis suggested they meet at Leighton House where there was a performance and exhibition to celebrate Lord Leighton’s centenary. As soon as Lamis put the receiver down, however, the winds of normality blew over her, and she decided to ring her son’s school once more. The secretary told her to try again in two hours. Lamis hesitated then, on an impulse, left her name with a message for Khalid: ’This is his mother. I’ve just arrived back, and I miss him very much.’
It’s the truth, she told herself as she hung up. I’m his mother even if I have divorced his father. I’ll always be his mother and nobody can take that away from me.
With a burst of enthusiasm, she circled the boxes in the hall, and opened one of them and took out a package. As she began to undo the wrapping a pair of feet belonging to a small ivory statuette of a Japanese woman emerged. She had the feeling that those feet were going to trample on her fingers and she rewrapped the figurine and replaced it in the box. She had packed other items that she liked better, which her mother-in-law had criticised because they did not broadcast their price or because it was not immediately obvious where they had been bought. Her mother-in-law once told Lamis that the wife of an acquaintance had half a million pounds sterling on her back at a charity ball.
Only in London Page 6