She has made her choice, she must uphold her side of the bargain. There is no other way. He will know that her silence – her failure to answer – is her answer, is all she can answer.
She must go back inside. She has been out here too long. She will say it was her mother on the phone, calling from home.
Home, she thinks again.
She must go back. She must go back now. She must. She will. It is over, she tells herself. Over.
V
Seven years pass. Ruth is the age Euan was; Farid Ruth’s: although she does not allow herself to think this, to think of him. She had loved him: that she now knows. It was real, what they had, and true, however brief it was. But it is Euan she loves now, faithfully; in mind and deed, as best she can. She has done so every day of the passing years, to the best of her ability, even through the difficult times. Especially through the difficult times. He is in charge, now, of a congregation on the outskirts of Belfast, and they live in the manse house nearby: an airy, elegant detached house with gardens front and rear, a garage, a cat. Anna is a skinny, anxious girl of nine, and they have two other children: Luke, who is six, and Joshua, four. She was pregnant with Luke when they left Bahrain, although she did not realise it then. And the months of her pregnancy were sleepless, hellish. She had slept with Euan only twice in Bahrain: the day of the storm, she remembered that, and on Maundy Thursday, when he returned. Neither time had they used contraception; but the baby, she was convinced, could not be his, because she had made love with Farid almost every day for weeks. Countless times she was on the verge of confessing to Euan, admitting – and wondering too if she could contact Farid and tell him. But every time, something stopped her: and when the baby was born with blue eyes and reddish hair, and unmistakably Euan’s nose, she made herself give thanks.
Her mother is delighted with her brood of grandchildren; her father, feeling the first signs of the rheumatoid arthritis that will slowly cripple and eventually kill him, talks increasingly about selling up, buying a house in Belfast to be nearer to them. With nobody to take over the farm, he has sold it off, in bits and pieces, to the neighbours; one a farmer, another a property developer. Little remains, now, but the farmhouse and barns; the sea-meadows and one or two fields kept for families who stable their horses there.
She is kept busy by her children, by her parents, by the demands of being a minister’s wife. There is grace, she has learned, in the most ordinary, the humblest of things. In the chopping of onions for a stew, in the deboning of fish and boiling of eggs for a fish pie. In the folding of warm, tumble-dried sheets in winter, or the pegging of washed sheets out on a breezy spring day, when they billow and swell in raptures. In such things, there is a certain grace, the keeping of these rituals of the ordinary.
This faith is not her husband’s, nor something she can ever say to him, or try to explain. But what she has come to understand is simpler, deeper than his: living itself is an act of faith.
It is only in the last few months, since Joshua started school, that she has had any time to herself, for idle thoughts. She has read the poem of Gilgamesh, slowly, laboriously, at first, for its words and rhythms were arcane to her, inhospitable. The slim yellow volume with its spotted and yellowing pages she found in Euan’s study, untouched by him, or by whoever owned it first, because several of the pages were joined together, and she slit them open with a knife. Now she knows the Sun God Shamash, just and benevolent, and the beautiful, terrifying Ishtar, goddess of Love. She can see the temple at Uruk, the outer wall shining copper, and the masonry burned brick. She can see the statue of Enkidu, its breast of lapis lazuli and gold, holding a bowl of carnelian filled with honey. Lapis lazuli: an azure blue semi-precious stone; carnelian: a reddish form of chalcedony; chalcedony: a type of quartz. At first, she had to chase the words through dictionaries, follow their threads, but they are hers, now. She does not feel the sense of outrage she might once have felt that the warrior Enlil, rather than Noah, should be warned of the deluge and told to build a boat, and take in the seed of all living creatures. Just as these words and this story are become hers, so her stories must be allowed to others. The serpent senses the sweetness of the flower, and rises to snatch it, and sinks back to the depths. This too is true. All things that happen have happened many times before; no love is lost; and all that dies comes again. The wind blows over us, but we are not gone; we are the places we have been, and the remembrance of them.
But mostly, she tries not to think of Bahrain. When she does, she always thinks of it as something that happened to her, an experience as well as a place, like the sort of lands in the fairy tales she read to Anna, and now reads to Luke and little Josh, that exist only at a certain time, given a certain convergence of shore and sea, a certain slant of light. She thinks of it, of her time there, of what happened there, as like a pebble, buried deep in her solar plexus. A smooth, round pebble; basalt, maybe, a not uncomfortable weight, the sort you might pick up on a shore and weigh in your hand, enjoying the solidity of it, the quiet certainty of it, calmed by the centuries and warmed by the sun. It is not a rough, jagged-edged sort of rock that causes you pain, a jabbing, shortness of breath. A scruple, Euan told her once (an amused, throwaway sort of comment, something he was reading, tossed like a bauble for her to catch), used to be the word for the insistent sort of stone that worked its way into your shoe and would not easily be shaken out. Hers is not that, not a scruple; not a misgiving, or regret. But it is there, nonetheless, deep inside of her, somewhere behind and below her heart, in the place her breath comes from. God, she hears Euan saying to Luke one day (quick, serious little Luke, already struggling to understand the world and his place in it), is closer than your next breath. She tries this out, makes herself conscious of her next breath, the moment before it happens, the moment before it comes. She imagines God in the breath, rushing up and through her body, around the pebble, around the hidden nicks and cuts and scar tissue of life, the wear and tear of living; and there is something deeply calming, deeply reassuring in the thought. She does not believe, these days – although of course she does not tell Euan this – in an interventionist God, one who restores your child to you, averts the tidal wave at the last possible moment. Why should He, when He takes the children of others, deaf or careless to their pleas, their anguish? But yet she does believe, in something she does – doubtingly, questioningly, it is true, but yet she does, she does believe. The act of trying, she sometimes thinks, is belief itself. There is no good (she reads this passage in the book of James often) in saying to a starving man outside in the cold, Go, I wish you well, I wish you warm and fed. You must work at faith. It never gets easier: but there is a grace, too, in this; for she would not want it easier, diminished.
*
When she saw the Bahraini stamp and postmark on the letter, she put it away in her handbag before Euan had a chance to notice. It was a dull morning, a chilly April day. She had taken the children to school, fed the cat, gone to do some errands – food shopping, renewing the tax disc on the car – and Euan was at home, working in his study. She was glad he had been too absorbed in his work to hear the postman come, to wander into the hallway and sift through the day’s letters. She called out to him that she had forgotten something at the shops, and she got back into the car and drove to the big supermarket nearby. As she drove up the hill, she saw the fields of the countryside beyond, dull green, and she remembered seeing Ireland from the plane, as they returned, as it banked and descended. The lurid green of the grass, and the grey-green tinge of the sea. She had felt numb, then, and empty, as if life was over. But it wasn’t, of course, that was just the exhaustion, the anticlimax of it all. As her mother said to her the next day, no wonder you’re a wee bit down in the dumps, sure haven’t you been living the life of Riley out there.
She parked at the far end of the car park. It was raining heavily now; nobody would see her sitting in the car, or wonder what she was doing. They would just think she was waiting for the rain to ease
off, to make a dash for it.
The envelope was stiff, thick – as if it contained a packet of photographs. She held it in her hands, turned it over, taking in the heft of it, the weight. There was no address or sender’s name on the back of the envelope. The writing was neat and slanting, black ink, fountain pen. It was not how she imagined his hand to look. It could be Anjali, she thought – it took her a moment to remember Anjali’s name – but although she visited Anjali once more in hospital before they left the country, and swapped email addresses, she had never heard from her since.
She noticed her fingers trembling as she slit open the envelope and took out the contents. There was one cream page, written on both sides, folded around a pamphlet of some sort. She unfolded the page and her vision blurred; it was a few moments before she could read the letter.
Dear Ruth Armstrong,
I hope that my writing out of the blue and after all these years is not an unwelcome intrusion.
I thought it would be difficult to find you, but it was not, after all. The chaplain gave me the phone number of the secretary of the Bishop of Down and Dromore, and he was able to find the Reverend Armstrong’s parish and address, all within a few minutes.
I have thought of you often over the years.
I have wanted to apologise to you, for a start. In fact I have apologised to you so many times, Ruth, that you would not be able to count them. I hope I am forgiven for what I did.
I have often wanted to let you know, too, that somehow, the spark of faith you gave me stayed with me for a long time. I am ashamed to admit that I am less and less sure of it now, these days – but it got me through a lot over the next couple of years. In fact, I think it is no exaggeration to say that it got me through the last few years. I was in a very bad place, Ruth, a very, very bad place. After everything that – shall we say, ‘happened’, I finally confessed to my parents all that had gone on at school, and the rest of it. I think I had been too humiliated to admit what had really been going on: I was very badly bullied myself, for years. It took a good year of counselling for me to accept this, and to forgive myself, and learn to like myself again. And with this, God – Jesus – faith – whatever the right term might be – it helped. It even made me friends in the next school I went to, back in England, because I was able to join the Scripture Union Society and a couple of other bible study groups. I think that the fact that I was Muslim – or that my father was, at least, and my name – made me even more of a coup as a convert, and everyone went out of their way to be nice to me, and include me in things, which believe me was a first.
I have often wanted to make contact with you and tell you this. I still – can you believe this? – have the little old Gospel of Matthew you gave me. After all these years! It is pretty battered now …
I hope that you and the Reverend Armstrong and Anna are all well. Anna must be almost ten by now? And maybe you have other children too? I send you all my best wishes and hope that everything in your life is wonderful.
Things are good with me. You will see I am writing this from Bahrain: I am here, visiting my father and his family for my Easter holidays, before going back to university to take my finals. I have not yet decided what to do afterwards. I might do a Masters, I might travel for a while – who knows … I write poetry. That was something I started during my time in Bahrain, at the suggestion of my counsellor, in fact, but I have kept up the habit, over the years, and have started to make something of it. A few of my poems have just been published, and I hope it’s not too much of a liberty to be sending you a copy.
Ruth felt for the pamphlet, which had fallen into her lap. Dilmun, it was called, and underneath, Noor Fairbridge Hussain. Dilmun: in Dilmun the raven does not croak, the lion does not kill. The lines flashed through her mind as clear and sharp as if she was there, now, reading them, back in the museum, back in that day, that moment.
She forced herself to open the booklet, skim through it. ‘The Life-Tree’, the first long poem was called; ‘Locusts’, another; ‘On Grace’; ‘Dilmun’.
Slowly, her heart stilled.
Do you remember the day we visited the Tree of Life,
Noor’s letter went on,
and how disappointed you were at the mess and the graffiti? For some reason that made a great impression on me, and that’s the title poem and theme of the collection.
I hope, once more, that my sending this is not unwanted, or an imposition, and if it is then please accept my sincerest apologies.
I hope you understand everything I have been trying to say. If I do not hear from you, I will not contact you again.
The letter finished there, with an address printed at the bottom.
Noor.
Noor at university, Noor a poet.
She had never wondered what happened to Noor. Ashamed was the word Noor used in her letter. Well, Ruth too had always been ashamed to think of Noor, ashamed of how she treated the girl, how she disliked her, but used her nonetheless. Noor was not to blame, really, for what she had done. It had been Ruth: everything had been Ruth.
She wondered if she would write back to Noor; if she would ever be able to say any of this, or if thinking it – knowing it – was enough.
She reread the letter, then folded it back around the pamphlet and slid them back into the envelope. As she did so, something stuck, jammed; they would not go. She tried again, more carefully: and this time noticed another piece of paper. It was lined and punched, taken from a file pad, and the writing was not in neat black ink but biro. She took it out and smoothed it open. It was Noor again: but this time no dear, no preamble, just a few scrawled lines.
I can’t decide if you’d want to know or not, and I’d decided not, but here at the post office I’ve changed my mind again and unsealed the envelope to include this. Because I know it’s none of my business, and it never was, and probably it means nothing to you, but if it was me I think I’d want to know.
Farid. Noor’s hand was loose and messy, hard to decipher in parts, but the name leapt out. Ruth thought, fleetingly, of tearing the paper up, turning away right then: but it was too late, she was already reading on.
Farid has stayed in Esfahan. He doesn’t keep in touch with any of us, much, apart from my brother Jamal, who he emails occasionally. For the past couple of years he’s been working for Irancell, the mobile phone company, and he is married, with two small daughters. My uncle wants him to leave the country, with the American talk of war and the rioting, but he says he’ll never come back to Bahrain. I know this only because Jamie tells me.
Anyway, I’m running out of room, and the post office is closing for lunch, so I have to go. It isn’t much to report, but I thought you’d like to know, and if you didn’t, please rip this up and forget I ever wrote it.
Time has stopped. She feels a hard, bright sense of loss for him, then, and is momentarily unable to breathe.
But she is used to this now. The first time it came, a few days back in Ireland, she had thought she would die. The pain had risen until it was almost unbearable, a noise rather than a sensation, a howling, hopeless shriek. But like the swells and contractions of childbirth, it had ebbed and gone, expelled from her body, just when she thought she had reached the peak, the precipice. We are capable, in our bodies, of surviving more than we can imagine. This pain, she fights to tell herself, it too will pass, and seeing Euan, her children, will be a balm, a salve.
She struggles back into herself. It is not a real wound: just the ghost of an old one.
*
It is almost midday: time to collect Josh from school, and half an hour later, Luke. Before she starts the engine again, she tries to form her mind into a prayer. An unbeliever, she tells herself, struggling to wrap her mind around the words, to make her thoughts the words, to the exclusion of all else, an unbeliever watches a flower unfolding in a garden.
Acknowledgements
My deepest thanks to Peter Straus – reader, advocate, agent extraordinaire – and to Jenny Hewson an
d all at RCW. Thank you to Rowan Routh for her insightful readings of the manuscript at every incarnation. Thank you to Natalie Abrahami, Mike Brett and Nick Harrop for reading early drafts; to Maureen Caldwell for reading every draft; to Peter Caldwell for so many extra-literary matters.
To Roopesh Ravindran, Mohammed Abdulla Awadi and the Awadi family, also Yasmin, Charly, Paaresh, Habiba, Sonali, Jason and all those who showed me such wonderful Bahraini hospitality: thank you, shukran, khayli mamnoon, nanni, dhanyawaad.
Thank you also to Alice and the Careys for Mill Farm; to Ronnie Hetherington of the Union Theological College; to the Alpha Course at Christchurch, Spitalfields; to Steve King and Frank King; to Julia Shepherd. Thank you to Damon Wake (formerly of the Press Association); to Kevin Bakhurst and Nick Marcus of BBC News 24; to Faisal Bodi (formerly of Al Jazeera).
I thank Gemma Seltzer and Arts Council England for a grant which bought the time and space to finish the novel.
Thank you to the most sensitive and brilliant of editors, Angus Cargill, and to the fantastic team – family – at Faber.
And finally, Tom, to whom this book is dedicated: without your support, strength, and the surety of your belief in me, I couldn’t have written it. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
About the Author
Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She read English at Queens’ College, Cambridge and is a graduate of Goldsmith’s MA in Creative & Life Writing. Her debut novel Where They Were Missed (2006) was described in the Independent as ‘beautifully paced, evocative and unfaltering … an object lesson in balancing the personal and the political’. An award-winning playwright, she is currently under commission to write for the main stage of the Royal Court Theatre.
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