What Will Survive

by Joan Smith

  ‘I saw him this morning. I think he’s — embarrassed.’

  ‘Delusional, more like.’ Stephen threw back his coffee and put down the cup, rattling it against the saucer. A man and a woman, having lunch at the next table, looked across.

  Iris said, ‘There’s often a — when someone dies, people have different versions of history. It’s a common reaction.’

  Stephen rocked back. ‘Come on, Iris, don’t give me any of that New Age shit. Doesn’t the grieving widower act make you sick?’

  ‘Yes, actually, but it doesn’t mean he isn’t suffering. First Aisha tells him the marriage is over, then she dies in this absolutely dreadful way. I can’t help feeling sorry for him.’ A picture came into Iris’s mind, Tim standing in her hall that morning, asking a tactless question about Ginger, and she amended what she’d just said. ‘Well, I try to.’

  Stephen said shortly: ‘You’re obviously a nicer person than me.’

  ‘I know you had a — a difficult conversation before she went away.’

  He exhaled. ‘It was late, I’d had a couple of glasses of wine, I said things I shouldn’t have — not things I shouldn’t have, I said them in the wrong way. I thought about it while she was away, I thought about little else in fact — I was going to talk to her as soon as she got back. Face to face, not on the phone. She was absolutely right. We’d have worked something out.’ His face twisted. ‘She was braver than me. You always think you’ve got time —’

  ‘Stephen —’

  He made an impatient noise. ‘Anyway, enough of that.’ He sat up, reverting to what Iris thought of as his politician’s face. ‘I’m sure you’ve got things to do — sorry, you already said. And I’ve got a surgery this afternoon.’

  ‘This afternoon?’ Iris knew his constituency was in Surrey.

  ‘Well, this evening. All part of clambering back up the greasy pole.’ He stood up, feeling in his pocket and tossing a couple of pound coins on to the table. ‘Remind me how to get back to the main road?’

  ‘I — are you all right to drive?’

  He gave her a quizzical look, shading his eyes against the sun. ‘I’ve only had one glass of wine. And that coffee would keep an elephant awake.’

  ‘No, I meant —’

  Stephen was already turning away, checking his mobile phone. Iris seized her basket and hurried down the slope after him, feeling as she did on those rare occasions when a client walked out of a session.

  ‘Right out of the car park,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘and left over the bridge?’

  ‘Yes, the road winds a bit, then you come to a crossroads and turn left again. Are you sure —’

  ‘Keep turning left, in other words. Some people would say I’ve done too much of that already, but that’s not your problem.’

  Stephen stopped by a blue BMW and used a remote control to unlock the doors. Leaning forward, he gripped Iris’s arms and brushed her cheek with his lips. ‘Thanks, Iris. We’ll speak after the — the funeral.’ With a tight smile, he slid into the driver’s seat.

  Iris stepped back as Stephen started the engine and reversed out of the space. Should she have pressed him to stay longer? To talk about — what? Whatever he had intended by driving all this way, he seemed to have accomplished. Returning his wave — it was almost cheery, Iris thought — she turned and trudged the short distance to her own car.

  Tragic Aisha’s son in pizza punch-up

  by Mark Rowan

  Police released the son of tragic model Aisha Lincoln without charge last night after a fracas at an Italian restaurant in Minehead. Police were called to the Bella Pizza after Richard Lincoln, twenty-two, attacked a journalist who happened to be dining at a nearby table. Lincoln, whose mother was cremated at a private ceremony in the seaside town on Friday, apparently lost his temper when the reporter, a freelance based in Taunton, approached him and began asking questions about her death.

  Diana campaign

  Ms Lincoln died in Lebanon last month when the vehicle she was travelling in hit a landmine. Her death has led to renewed calls for a ban on the weapons, which have been the subject of a high-profile campaign by Diana, Princess of Wales. Friends tried to restrain the veterinary student when he lunged at the man, thirty-four-year-old Harris Edwards, who regularly supplies stories to the tabloids, including the Daily Star and the Daily Mirror.

  Chance

  ‘It was pure coincidence that Harry happened to be in the same restaurant and recognised Aisha’s son,’ claimed Samantha Tang, a twenty-five-year-old nurse who was with Edwards and witnessed the incident. ‘He recognised him from the funeral on Friday and just wanted to ask him a few questions. You can’t help feeling sorry for the kid, but that doesn’t excuse him going mental.’ A police spokeswoman said Lincoln had been released after Mr Edwards agreed not to press charges. Staff at the restaurant, who did not want to be named, said Lincoln was a regular customer, although they had not been aware of his relationship to Ms Lincoln.

  Scene

  ‘If we had known, we would have asked Mr Edwards to leave,’ said an indignant member of the waiting staff. ‘It was a quiet Sunday evening until he approached the other table. Ricky was eating with a couple of friends, he always orders a quattro stagioni with a side order of garlic bread, and the last thing anyone expected was a scene.’ Mr Edwards, who went to hospital after Lincoln’s arrest, was allowed to leave after treatment for minor abrasions. He refused to talk to reporters and is believed to be negotiating with a tabloid newspaper over the rights to his story.

  Princess’s mercy flght to Africa, page 11

  Amanda sat in the lobby of a big international hotel, her eyelids drooping. She had been in Beirut for a couple of hours, just long enough to get a cab from the airport and deposit her things in a room on the ninth floor, but already her head was buzzing with images: huge billboards advertising underwear, whole blocks with their facades blown away, torn posters of Muslim clerics, shadowy bomb sites where thin dogs sniffed in the rubble. New buildings were under construction everywhere, rising in a mass of cranes and steel girders, and Amanda had wondered who was paying for it all. Nothing had prepared her for the awesome scale of the destruction and she had come down to the lobby with a guidebook, using the few minutes before Ingrid was due to arrive to read up on the civil war. The glossy book she’d read on the plane had devoted only a few paragraphs to it, treating the conflict as a minor interruption in the history of a city known as the Paris of the Mediterranean, but the journey from the airport had opened her eyes. From her suitcase, she’d pulled out another guide, which contained much more information, but she was so tired and overloaded with new impressions that the words seemed to be dancing before her eyes.

  ‘Hello? Excuse me?’

  Her head jerked upwards. A woman with long blonde hair tied back from her face was standing in front of her, breaking into a welcoming smile.

  ‘Ingrid?’ The guidebook slipped to the floor and she bent to retrieve it before shaking Ingrid’s outstretched hand.

  ‘I hope I didn’t keep you waiting.’ The Swedish journalist cocked her head. ‘What are you reading?’

  Amanda showed her.

  ‘I have a better one you can borrow. Are you ready? Do you need anything from your room?’

  ‘Thanks, no, I’m fine.’

  ‘How was your flight?’

  ‘OK. A bit bumpy.’

  ‘You must be hungry — let’s go.’ Ingrid turned towards the door. She was slender, in green combat trousers and a T-shirt which revealed muscular brown arms, and Amanda saw the reception staff regarding her warily.

  ‘Where are we going?’ She hurried to catch up, trying to match Ingrid’s long, easy strides.

  Over her shoulder, Ingrid said, ‘Achrafiye.’

  Amanda stuffed the guidebook into her shoulder bag as a doorman rushed to open the door for them.

  Ingrid glanced at him: ‘Choucran. A little way. Have you heard of the Green Line?’

  ‘Of course.’


  ‘OK, soon you will see...’ A car hooted as Ingrid stepped into the early-evening traffic, and she flipped her finger at the driver. Her car was parked on the other side of the street, as old and dented as most of the others Amanda had seen in this part of the city, but the air was thick with exhaust fumes and she was relieved when they were inside with the windows closed. Ingrid pressed a button, and an air-conditioning system rattled into operation.

  She turned to Amanda, one hand on the ignition: ‘Here we are in Hamra, which is West Beirut, and now I will show you East Beirut, where some of the nicest restaurants are.’

  Amanda fastened her safety belt. ‘Is that the Christian side?’

  Ingrid dipped her head. ‘You have been doing your homework.’

  ‘I’ve done some reading, yes.’ Amanda didn’t say that most of the cuttings in the newspaper library were about Terry Waite, John McCarthy and the other Western hostages. She had also found references to a terrorist arrack on the US marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 which had killed hundreds of people, but it had happened while she was at school and she had no memory of it. She had so much to ask Ingrid, she wasn’t sure where to start.

  Ingrid found a narrow gap in the traffic. Amanda sat back, trying to memorise street names near the hotel, watching as the narrow roads of Hamra gave way to broader avenues and fly-overs. From time to time Ingrid pointed out something of note: the site of a gun battle between rival militias, a house where an American hostage was rumoured to have been held in a cellar, a hoarding which bore a portrait of the leader of Hezbollah.

  ‘You know Hezbollah?’

  ‘Terrorists,’ Amanda said without thinking.

  Ingrid glanced towards her. ‘They are very popular in Beirut, not just with the Shia.’

  About twenty minutes from the hotel, she turned into a narrow street lined by tall buildings with ornate facades. Amanda knew that Achrafiye had survived the civil war relatively intact, compared with the rest of Beirut, where many of the old landmarks had been pulled down — even the old fish market, according to something she’d read. It was hard to imagine that the rest of the city, with its bomb sites and shiny new skyscrapers, had once looked like this — enclosed, private and mysterious, much more like Amanda’s idea of the Middle East. She got out of the car, which was parked with its wheels on the pavement, and squeezed round it to join Ingrid.

  Inside the restaurant, water tinkled in a pool in a small vestibule. A waiter greeted Ingrid and she replied in fluent Arabic, shepherding Amanda to an open courtyard. Tables were set in the middle, covered by cloths with gleaming silver threads, and luxuriant shrubs in Ali Baba jars gave it the feel of a garden. The restaurant was full and Amanda had seldom seen such ostentatious jewellery and expensive Western clothes — she almost laughed aloud as she sat down, suddenly understanding Ingrid’s puzzled reaction when she had asked what she should pack for the trip. Not wanting to admit she’d been worried about whether she would have to cover her head, Amanda assessed the glamorous quartet on the next table, thinking that their earrings and chains looked like solid gold.

  Ingrid leaned forward and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper: ‘You will see this all the time in Beirut — among people with money, I mean.’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘Facelifts,’ she said, misunderstanding Amanda’s curiosity. ‘Facelifts and what do you call them?’ She cupped her breasts for a few seconds. ‘Boob jobs?’

  Amanda glanced to her right again, seeing big hair and unlined faces.

  ‘In Beirut you can have anything done, if you are willing to pay,’ Ingrid confirmed, shaking out her napkin. She smoothed it over her knees and beamed at Amanda. ‘You are lucky, you do not need it.’

  ‘Well, maybe in a few years.’ She wasn’t as hostile to the idea as Aisha, but then Aisha was one of those fortunate women who didn’t need it. Amanda studied Ingrid properly for the first time, noting the fan of lines radiating from the outside edges of her eyes; she looked as though she’d spent a lot of time in the sun, without looking after her skin properly, and she wasn’t wearing make-up. But she was still striking; her long hair, honey blonde with lighter streaks, and her easy Arabic suggested she had spent a long time in the Middle East.

  Ingrid said, ‘Do you eat meat?’

  ‘I eat just about everything.’ Glancing at the menu, Amanda added, ‘Apart from brains, that is.’

  Ingrid ordered half a dozen dishes, laughing over something with the waiter.

  ‘Where did you learn Arabic?’

  ‘Ramallah. Before that, Horns.’

  ‘Is that in Lebanon?’

  ‘Syria. In Horns there is a Mameluke palace — you know about the Mamelukes?’

  Amanda shook her head.

  ‘The Mamelukes were the sultan’s slave bodyguards, until they rebelled and became sultans themselves. This was a long time ago. I had a friend who worked for a Swedish NGO and he asked me to film the restoration. I was between projects so I came for a month.’ Ingrid’s smile was wistful. ‘I stayed for nearly a year.’

  The food arrived and she pointed to each plate as the waiter set it down. ‘Foole, which is beans in English. Baba ghannouj, which is eggplant. This is kibbeh.’ She pushed a plate of ground meat towards Amanda. ‘And of course tabbouleh.’

  As soon as she started eating, Amanda realised how hungry she was. She let Ingrid talk about Lebanese food as she filled her plate, saying little until she had scooped up the last of the baba ghannouj with a strip of flat bread.

  ‘Shall I get more? Maybe you would like some chicken?’

  Amanda put her hand on her stomach. ‘God, no. I’m just being greedy. And you’re not supposed to eat too much with jet lag.’ She pushed the plate aside, cleared a space in front of her and drew a brown envelope from her bag. ‘Shall we get to work?’

  Sliding out a sheet of contact prints, she pointed to a strip showing Aisha laughing as she balanced on a fallen column in a desert landscape. The bleached stone had broken into sections and everything, except her clothes, was the colour of sand. Her hair was tied up in a scarf, escaping in long tendrils round her face, and Amanda wondered, when she first looked at the contacts, whether Aisha ever looked less than perfect.

  ‘Is this Palmyra? We know she went there—’

  Ingrid nodded. ‘Tadmur, in Arabic. It is an amazing place — it is a pity they do not get more tourists.’

  Amanda remembered that Syria was on a list, compiled by the American government, of countries accused of supporting terrorism. ‘Is that because of the Americans?’

  Ingrid frowned and lowered her voice. ‘We should not talk about such things here. At Tadmur there is a big prison, a very bad place, where President Assad puts people he does not like. A friend of mine—’ She stopped: ‘I will tell you another time. Let me see the other pictures.’

  Amanda passed across more contact sheets. Ingrid flipped through them, eyes narrowing. ‘Who is this?’

  Amanda twisted her head to see what Ingrid was looking at. ‘Oh — that’s Fabio. Don’t you recognise him?’

  ‘Fabio Terzano?’

  ‘Yes. Haven’t you seen pictures of him before?’

  ‘Only an old one, from his passport. Then he was —’ She gestured towards her chin.

  ‘Clean-shaven? He didn’t have a beard?’

  ‘Yes.’ Ingrid put it to one side.

  ‘Well? You’re being very mysterious.’

  Ingrid started to say something, but changed her mind. ‘It’s nothing. He reminds me of someone, that is all. Amanda, you look exhausted. I think we should do this tomorrow. Tea?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  While they waited, Ingrid rested her crossed arms on the table. ‘So here you are at last, in Beirut. I was beginning to think you would not come.’

  Amanda rolled her eyes. ‘So was I! The editor’s been getting cold feet — he’s worried in case people are losing interest in Aisha.’

  The trip had nearly been called off altogether when
Ingrid rang to say that groups of Hezbollah fighters had ambushed Israeli patrols in the occupied zone and the Israelis were shelling the valleys between Haris and Kafra, two towns south-west of the mountainous area where Aisha and Fabio had been killed. It was too dangerous to go there while the fighting continued — in any case, the roads were temporarily closed to foreigners — and the editor was unimpressed with Ingrid’s assurance that the skirmishes would be over in a few days. The project was salvaged only when the features editor said he’d heard that a film company was planning to make a movie about Aisha, which might or might not be true — Amanda thought it could be a garbled reference to a dreadful documentary which had already gone out on Channel Four — but the rumour was enough to revive the editor’s flagging enthusiasm.

  Ingrid said, ‘I have heard about this editor from Dermot.’

  Amanda frowned. ‘I’ve left messages for him but he hasn’t returned my calls. Did you know he’s resigned?’

  Ingrid nodded. ‘I think maybe he is in Afghanistan. There is a rumour that he will go to work for Time magazine. I know he had a chance to interview Shah Massoud in the Panjshir Valley, but he told me he is too old to take such risks for so little money.’

  Amanda grimaced, realising that the paper’s legendary meanness was known about even in Lebanon.

  ‘He knows more about this country than anyone, anyone who is not Lebanese that is. Does your editor not care about losing him?’

  A waiter arrived with a metal teapot and poured two cups of mint tea. Amanda inhaled the fragrance of crushed fresh leaves and tried to answer Ingrid’s question tactfully. ‘He doesn’t — he’s not really interested in the Middle East. If Aisha had been killed in Angola or wherever, that’s where I’d be tonight. He’s keen on local colour, where Aisha went and who she met, but politics —’ She shook her head apologetically.

  Ingrid sat back. ‘But Amanda, why do you think it happened, this accident? Where did they come from, these landmines? Lebanon is occupied —’