‘Can we come up here again?’ she asked.
‘Of course. This is my house. It is my only house.’
‘Next time, I’ll bring my paints,’ said Leila. She spoke to the view, aware that something important was happening in Salem’s mind. She stood on tiptoe and raised her arms as high as they would go, like an Indian saluting the sunrise. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that this must be the most beautiful place in the whole world.’
‘If you like ruins,’ he said, seeing only the desolation around them.
‘I like this one.’ Leila spun round and walked into the house. Salem followed her from one roofless room into another and another. ‘It’s a house crying out to be lived in,’ she announced at the end of the brief tour. She turned and took both his hands in hers, adding on an impulse, ‘You asked me last night what you could do for me, in return for the help I’ve given you these last few weeks. Well, there is something. Let me buy this place from you, Salem.’
‘It’s not worth anything.’
‘Then give it to me. I’d like to do it up and live here.’
‘You live in France.’
‘I never belonged there.’
‘And do you belong in Lebanon?’ he asked.
‘Who knows?’ Leila shook her dark curly hair and sucked in a deep breath of the pine-scented air. ‘My mother was Armenian, my father a Jew. One of my grandfathers was a Kurd. So what does that make me? Wherever they came from, it wasn’t far from here, that’s for sure.’
She led him outside and back onto the terrace with its view over the city now coming to life again.
‘That,’ said Leila, ‘is the view I need to see when I wake up in the morning.’
Salem took his eyes away from the city below with all its memories and looked at the woman beside him who was unlike any other he had ever known. He had thought that all desire was dead, crushed forever in the ruins with the crumpled bodies of his wife and children. Never again, he had vowed. Never again will I love, because of the pain it brings. Never will I feel desire, for the memories it calls back. Yet Leila had somehow melted all those deathbound resolutions with her smile, her heavy-lidded eyes, her soft olive-complexioned skin, her voice, the way she walked, her capacity to enjoy every second of the day for its own sake. Everything urged him to let the dead bury the dead.
‘You could never live here, a woman on her own.’ he heard himself say. It was a voice from the past trying to convince her.
‘I’ve managed pretty well, so far.’
‘In Europe, maybe.’
‘And in the States.’
‘This is different.’
‘You think I need a man to protect me?’ Leila teased him.
Her nearness was disturbing him. ‘In an Arab country, every woman needs a man.’
She stepped close, so that he smelt the perspiration on her neck and between her breasts. With a wrench in his bowels he thought, I want this woman.
Forgive me, he said to the ghosts, but I am a man of flesh, and flesh needs flesh. And I need her for a thousand other reasons too.
Leila parted her lips. She could feel what her closeness was doing to Salem. She wondered why he didn’t touch her or kiss her like a European or American man would have done. To bridge the last narrow gap between them, she touched first one of his eyebrows and then the other. She drew her finger down his nose and traced the outline of his lips. And still Salem kept the last few millimetres of distance from her.
‘I’d like to paint you,’ she said huskily. ‘You’re a beautiful man.’
Salem moistened his lips. ‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘Stay in Lebanon with me.’
‘Is that an offer?’
They stood looking into each other’s eyes. In the slight breeze came a rustle of leaves in the aged olive tree that shaded the bomb-blasted courtyard, as though the ghosts were whispering goodbye.
‘I need you,’ Salem said solemnly.
A spark kindled behind his eyes that Leila had not seen before. He was no longer the broken man who could not meet her gaze, but a strong man who had suffered much and was going to be strong again.
‘You’ve come back to life,’ she said wonderingly. A great ball of warmth grew within her belly at what she had done.
Salem took a deep breath. It felt good to be alive in his home and holding this beautiful creature in his arms.
‘Make love to me,’ she whispered.
He stepped backwards, shocked that a woman had voiced his own desire. ‘Not before we are married.’
‘Then kiss me!’ Leila’s eyes, her whole body invited him.
Salem took her hands in his and held them firmly to stop them touching him. ‘With a woman like you, an embrace could never end in one kiss.’
‘Oh God!’ Leila closed her eyes and squeezed her thighs together. ‘How can you do this to me?’
‘Have you always satisfied your desires immediately?’ he wondered.
‘Since the day I started being me, I guess I have.’
‘Then we will never make a good Arab woman out of you,’ said Salem mock-seriously. The small joke was his first essay in humour for a long while. He pulled her closer. ‘There is obviously no point in trying to do the impossible.’
‘Does that mean what I think it does?’ She let him close her lips with his. She felt his hands exploring her body through the thin fabric of the dress, tracing her vertebrae, the cleft between her buttocks, her rounded hips.
A final sob for all the memories escaped him and he clung to her more tightly.
‘Oh God!’ Leila broke free to breathe. ‘You’re so damned strong.’
‘What are you looking for?’ he asked.
‘A bed.’
‘There is none here. We will have to wait.’
‘No.’ Leila pulled her arms free and took his head in her hands. ‘This is too important to wait, Salem. Grab those old clothes you tried to throw away. Spread them out on the ground. They’ll do.’
On my dead brother’s clothes? What will God make of that? Salem wondered. Reflected in Leila’s dark eyes, he saw himself nod approval of her outlandish suggestion, then smile. He lifted his face to heaven and roared with laughter until he felt weak and subsided to his knees by the bundle of clothes.
‘What did I say so funny?’ she asked.
Salem was spreading the clothes on the tiles. He tore off his jacket and shirt, heedless of the buttons, to add them to the rough couch.
‘Old ideas,’ he said, ‘are like old clothes. They should all be thrown away.’ He knelt up and held out a hand to her. Solemnly he said, ‘My house is your house. Come, share my bed.’
Chapter 14
Five months later Merlin drove into the parking lot of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He took the lift to the top floor with a bunch of long-stemmed roses in one hand and a piece of paper in the other. Jay had been practising the flute, eyes closed so that she could concentrate on the quality of sound to the exclusion of everything else. Merlin stood in the doorway of her room, watching. When she had finished playing there was a ripple of applause from the small crowd of nurses and patients who had been listening in the corridor.
Merlin closed the door behind him and asked quietly: ‘What was that music?’
‘Hi!’ She was happy to see him.
Those green eyes, he thought. Will I ever forget them?
Jay felt good; the last operations were over, the grafts had all taken. She could begin life again. And the amazing truth was that her flute-playing was better than it had ever been, with an indefinable quality and power that had not been there before when Eleanor was sucking her energy, drawing off each day a tithe of life-force and using it against her. At last, with Eleanor’s spirit finally laid to rest, all Jay’s health and vitality were her own.
‘It’s called Syrinx.’ She put her arms around Merlin’s neck and kissed him on the lips. ‘By Debussy. Isn’t it beautiful?’
‘And sad.’ His embrace was perfunctory and passionless.
/> Jay put down her flute and took the flowers, inhaling the perfume. ‘Thank you.’
His silence made her ask: ‘What is it?’
‘It’s time for waving hankies on the platform. The schmaltzy shot from every showbiz film.’ Merlin felt stilted and awkward, handing her the fax message. ‘I’ve been sitting on this for three days. It’s your travel arrangements, from Sir Ewan himself. He’s done a good job with the publicity angle. Star Fights Adversity. Should get you good audiences.’
Jay scanned the list of dates and venues. ‘Is that sarcasm?’ she asked.
‘Professional admiration,’ said Merlin. ‘Sir Ewan is also giving you that nice guy Carl Moritz as tour manager. He’ll look after you.’
Jay had done a lot of thinking about this moment, but it was one thing to work out what ought to be said and done, and quite another to say and do it. She turned away so that Merlin could not read her inner feelings. In the window-glass her face was almost back to normal; there was still a shiny pink area of skin near her right ear where the burns had been deepest, but it was hidden by the hair which had re-grown and was brushed further forward than before. By the unpredictable nature of explosions, the hottest gas from the ruptured breech had by-passed most of her face and the damage to her hands had been on the back, not the sensitive tips of her fingers.
‘What’s happened to your other instruments?’ Merlin asked, to fill the silence. ‘There was a whole pile of them here yesterday.’
‘The recorders?’ Jay kept her back to him. ‘I’ve had enough of medieval music to last me several lifetimes so I gave them away to one of the nurses. She does music therapy with a group of handicapped kids.’
There was another awkward pause broken by Merlin. ‘It’s a helluva tour Sir Ewan has set up for you,’ he said. ‘He’s got you into just about every major hall between the Atlantic and the Pacific.’
‘I guess I’ll need the money to pay back the medical loan.’
Merlin took another piece of paper out of his pocket. ‘Your bill’s been settled. There’s the receipt. I picked it up in the office downstairs. And don’t thank me. I wouldn’t have that kind of cash. It’s a wedding present from Leila and Salem. Apparently they got married last week.’
Jay took the receipted account from him. ‘They can’t do this!’
‘They already did. I guess they can spare it.’
‘Then it’s really happening.’ She turned away again, thinking of Leila.
Merlin thought she meant the tour. He came close and put his arms around Jay’s waist. ‘It’s what you wanted, honey. You fought every inch of the way. That kind of courage deserves a great success.’
‘It’s what I want,’ she agreed, ‘but I’m going to miss you terribly. I’ve gotten used to seeing your face each morning. And I’m even learning your language: words like gotten and in back of.’
He buried his face in her hair. ‘I’ll miss you too. But it’s time I got back to work as well. Matty’s been hustling me for several weeks now to agree a date for the shooting of my network series and I can’t put them off any longer.’
‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘I figured my place was here until the day you walked out of that door without a date for another visit.’
Jay twisted round to face him. ‘That sounds kind of final, Merlin.’
‘You’ve got your life and I’ve got mine.’
‘And never the twain shall meet again?’
He pulled away from her. ‘We’ve lived a wonderful fantasy in between your stays in hospital. We’ve lain on the beaches of the Cape and made love all summer, pretending that a beautiful dream was real life. The chill reality of fall is that I’m not made to be a toyboy that hangs around a showbiz star.’
He put as much space between them as the room allowed. ‘You, on the other hand, are hardly going to follow me round the world to – as Leila once put it so neatly – sit in rented apartments, waiting for the phone to ring and tell you I’ve got my ass blown away at last.’
Jay settled the flute in its case on the dressing table, beside the roses. In the mirror, she saw her face, her hands and the flute. She had everything back, despite Eleanor. But in the out of focus background behind her was Merlin and she wanted him too.
She felt a choking sensation in her throat. ‘I love you,’ she said. ‘And I need you near me.’
She willed him to walk across the room and put his arms around her again.
‘Ain’t possible,’ Merlin said with a twisted grin. His voice was strained. ‘I’d like it too, but how could it ever work out?’
‘We’ve talked about it. We planned it.’
‘Plans?’ he snorted. ‘You mean dreams. Which one of us would end up saying first: you’re never there when I’m free? I don’t want to wait for that scene.’
There was a pause until Jay could talk. ‘When are you going?’ she asked.
‘I’ve got a flight out of Logan International in a couple of hours.’
‘Where to?’
‘Lebanon. We start shooting the series in two days’ time. I’ll give your regards to Leila and Salem when I pass through Beirut.’
Jay watched the blurred image in the mirror as he blew a kiss and closed the door behind him.
The telephone rang. Merlin stood in the corridor with his back against the door, half hoping that Jay would run after him, but knowing she wouldn’t. On the other side of the door, the phone rang again and he heard her pick it up. The call was one he had booked to London for her. He listened for a moment to Jay talking with Sir Ewan about dates and halls and photo calls, then pulled himself together and walked fast through the corridors and reception areas without meeting anyone’s eyes.
Driving out of the parking lot, he took a wrong turning and found himself passing the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He remembered taking Jay there and how she had wept in front of Renoir’s painting of the girl dancing in a white dress and red bonnet. Merlin had been wearing a blue denim suit that day and she had insisted on buying him a yellow hat, to match that of the man in the picture.
Back in her room, Jay was trying to sound normal. Sir Ewan was pleased with himself. ‘Isn’t life wonderful?’ he said. ‘Though I say it myself, that’s a tour list to be proud of.’
‘It is,’ Jay swallowed the tears. ‘I’m looking forward to playing again, Ewan. It’s going to be wonderful. It’s everything I could dream of.’
Merlin turned the car around and headed for the expressway but missed another turn and found himself in Chinatown, driving past a restaurant where they had eaten dim sum together. Boston was full of memories of Jay.
He had shut up the rented house on Cape Cod that morning and handed back the key, driving into the city unable to rid his head of the words of the song: Why did summer go so quickly? Was it something that I said?
To distract himself from the tune that still would not go away, Merlin tried to remember what Bret Harte said about Bostonians. Something about a stern-eyed Puritan being the perfect Boston man. So? Beside him on the passenger seat lay the thick shooting script for the first programme in the network series The Forgotten Wars, on which he had spent the summer working. And on the back seat lay two leather holdalls, covered in stickers that contained all his clothes.
In the road tunnel under the harbour, heading for Logan Airport, he could not see clearly. Each flashing brake-light triggered another image from the magical summer they had spent together. There was Jay tasting her first clam chowder in Provincetown, Jay running through the Atlantic surf with a mongrel dog that had adopted them on the beach several days running, Jay stepping off the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, Jay at Woods Hole, Jay at Hyannisport, Jay by the Kennedy compound.
He drove out of the tunnel into daylight, checked the car into the Hertz lot and threw his bags into the courtesy bus. Dreams were dangerous, he thought. Reality was a pair of well-worn bags and a shooting script. He didn’t need anything else.
Epilogue
‘I think this
is the most beautiful hotel I ever stayed in.’ Jay raised her glass in a toast to Leila who was sitting on the low wall that surrounded the swimming pool of the Chakrouty el-Sultan Hotel. There was a new telescope for guests who wanted to enjoy the view of the city that was slowly rebuilding itself on the plain below. Swimming in the pool was a young couple, talking to each other in a language Jay could not identify.
‘Greek honeymooners,’ commented Leila sotto voce. ‘He owns a hundred ships at anchor in the Bay of Piraeus and her father owns the rest, as far as I can make out.’
The hotel had been made by converting the old house and several other ruined dwellings of what had been Tel el-Sultan. The result was a sprawling single-storey Arab-style hotel, with little whitewashed bungalows for the guests instead of bedrooms, each set in its own garden. Below the terrace the lights of Beirut were coming on. Beyond the city, the sea was as blind Homer had envisioned it – wine dark against the sunset.
‘Won’t you have a drink?’ Jay asked.
Leila made a grimace. ‘Fizzy water for me,’ she told the white-coated waiter.
They clinked glasses as the waiter left.
‘You on the wagon?’ Jay asked. ‘Is that really necessary?’
Leila patted her swollen belly. ‘No cigarettes either, would you believe?’
‘Doctor’s orders?’
‘Salem’s. He’s far stricter than the doctor.’
‘How long to go?’
‘Three weeks or so.’
‘Happy?’
‘Like I was born here.’ Leila took hold of Jay’s hand and squeezed it. ‘Can you understand that?’
‘Not really. It’s so un-European.’
Leila laughed. ‘And that should worry me, of all people?’
They chatted with the same easy familiarity they had always shared about Jay’s life and travels, of St Denis and mutual acquaintances. Then they sat silently enjoying the sunset as the red orb changed shape to that of an hourglass, distorted by the atmosphere as it plunged beneath the sea with an almost audible sizzle.
The Spirit and the Flesh Page 35