by Nick Louth
However, one petite young woman in headscarf and glasses remained standing even as others sat, and called out shrilly: ‘The professor forgets that when the US wanted to throw the Russians out of Kabul in the 1980s it was happy to arm and train the same mujahideen fighters who became Taliban and Al Qaeda. They never hid their views, but America didn’t care so long as they killed Russians. So don’t pretend America cares about women’s rights!’
Wyrecliffe interjected: ‘You’ll have plenty of opportunity to make these points, later. I’m sure many other people have equally strong views and we should be able to hear a representative sample so long as you wait…’
‘What about the victims of American bombs, they can’t wait!’ she yelled, as two stewards in orange jackets approached her. ‘They were at a wedding! What about women’s rights not to be bombed?’
As the historian resumed his point the woman could be heard yelling as stewards attempted to eject her. There was a scuffle towards the back of the hall as audience members, including the tall besuited youth, tried to intervene to prevent them. For the remaining hour of the debate low-level heckling was almost continuous, and Wyrecliffe found his nerves strained. A Palestinian flag was unfurled towards the back of the auditorium, and a bearded man seized the roving boom mic just as an elderly lady was due to ask her question.
‘Please, give each other some respect’, Wyrecliffe said as the man launched a declamation in an impenetrable accent.
Nine o’clock found Wyrecliffe in the basement S’Wine bar of the Square Pig on Red Lion Square, buying a drink for his two exhausted speakers. Dr Steele was clearly the more distressed by the rowdy scene, even though the crowd had been on her side. Cummings, an affable rotund figure with a great sweep of silvery hair was making light of it. He was just starting an anecdote about how he suffered far worse after a British embassy ball in Lahore, when the hijabed female heckler walked up to the table and dropped some leaflets in front of Cummings.
‘Perhaps we can talk as equals now, Professor.’
‘The debate finished at 8.30 I’m afraid,’ Cummings responded.
Wyrecliffe reasserted his role as moderator. ‘I think you made your points well enough earlier, young lady.’
‘You think it’s about talk, don’t you? Afghanistan isn’t just something on the front page of the morning papers you read while you eat toast and marmalade. It’s life and death for some people.’
‘It’s a point well made, but come on now, my guests deserve some respite. I’m sure if you leave your e-mail address, they may be happy to continue some civilised discourse later.’ Wyrecliffe was aware that other diners were staring openly.
‘People like you do us no favours,’ Dr Steele said to the girl. ‘To stop the war you have to win an argument, not just shout loudest.’
‘How can you argue when bombs are being dropped on you!’ She gestured sharply at them, knocking over Dr Steele’s Campari and soda and sending leaflets spinning to the floor. Steele gave a little cry of alarm. The bar manager was over in a moment. ‘Is everything alright here?’
‘Yes it’s fine,’ Wyrecliffe said, turning to the woman he said. ‘Look, why don’t you sit down?’
Cummings looked at his watch. ‘Look, thanks for everything Chris. I’ve got to go. Catch you later, Helen.’
Two minutes later Dr Steele was gone too, after a brief goodbye to Wyrecliffe, a peck on the cheek and a promise of lunch. Wyrecliffe waved her off, sat down with a sigh, and looked at this young woman. Her large dark eyes and eyebrows gave her an intensity of gaze, and betrayed a Middle Eastern origin. Behind the cheap and unfashionable spectacles she was pretty in an elfin way. Her boyish figure was hidden beneath a shapeless fleece and scruffy jeans, but it didn’t stop Wyrecliffe speculating out of habit what it might be like.
‘Drink? I take it you are old enough.’
‘Yes, but I don’t.’
‘Ah, yes. Wish I didn’t, but I do,’ Wyrecliffe said, supping his remaining half pint. ‘I don’t like to see good drink spilled any more than I like to see food wasted.’
‘No comparison, is there?’
‘What’s your name?’
She paused to consider the request. ‘Cantara. And I’ll have a Coke, thanks.’
‘You don’t like the Americans, but you don’t mind them having your money then?’
‘I think it’s yours they’ll be having…’
‘Touché,’ Wyrecliffe said, as he gestured to a waitress and ordered.
For two hours they talked politics. Hers were a confused melange of left-wing idealism and Islam. She debated well around the collision of feminism and conservative Islam, but with grating earnestness. In turn, he challenged the simplicities of her view. She didn’t interrupt when he told her about his life, his foreign correspondent experience and wheeled out a few of the ‘battle-hardened veteran’ type anecdotes that normally went down well at dinner parties with his wife Imogen and her friends. Cantara had clearly calmed down, but through all of this declamation she had a curious smile playing around her lips. Perhaps he was finally getting through to her. It was nearly eleven, and three pints and two Cokes later when Wyrecliffe realised he knew nothing about her: ‘Where’s home?’
‘You know my home pretty well.’
‘Lebanon?’ he queried, with the intuition that sometimes comes with drink.
‘Maybe,’ she said, flashing a cheeky girlish grin that lit up her face. ‘Don’t you remember me?’
‘I’m sorry, have we met? The last time I was in Lebanon was twenty years ago. You’d have been a very young child.’ Wyrecliffe said.
‘I was. Wait a second.’ The woman bent down to undo a shoelace. She slid off a scuffed and unfashionable shoe, then pulled off a pink sock.
‘Still don’t remember?’ she said showing him a foot with purple nail varnish and a neat scar along one edge of the insole. ‘Look. When you met me I could barely walk.’ That smile again, charming.
Wyrecliffe gasped. ‘Are you Fouad’s daughter? The little girl at Ain al-Hilweh!’ he gazed at her in amazement. ‘So you had your operation?’
‘From the BBC life insurance money. As you saw, I can walk without difficulty now.’
‘That’s very gratifying. So what are you doing in London?’
‘I’m here with your foundation! Didn’t you know? I was in last year’s intake and have just finished my first year studying biology at Imperial College.’
‘But there were no Adwans on the list. I would have noticed.’
‘Fooled you, then. My name now is Cantara al-Mansoor, but I still remember you. I’ve still got the photograph and the crayons and paper you sent.’
Wyrecliffe felt a surge of pride, tempered by a guilt that he hadn’t in the last few years kept in touch with her family. ‘I’m so glad to see you here. We knew we were funding open-minded liberal education through the foundation, but I’m, well, thrilled to see that extends to some robust debating skills.’
‘I wish my grandfather had lived to see it.’ Her eyes lost focus for a moment. ‘He died in 1992.’
‘I’m sorry.’ There was a pause which Wyrecliffe felt compelled to break. ‘Did your brother get to university too?’
‘Hakim was killed in 1991. By a car bomb.’
‘Oh God.’ Wyrecliffe rubbed his face, exasperated by his own clumsiness.
‘He was twelve. He’d gone on an errand for my mother, to get painkillers for Abu Saleem’s throat cancer, from a doctor at the other end of the camp. We heard the explosion. But it was five days before we were sure he had been killed.’
‘That must have been hard for your mother.’
‘The final straw,’ Cantara said. ‘She lost her mind. Now she is in a mental institution, in the north, paid for by my uncle Walid. She doesn’t recognise anyone. To my shame, I’ve not seen her for years.’
‘So who looked after you?’
‘My aunt Fatima brought me up, with her own four children, while Uncle Walid was away. I’ve taken the
ir surname.’
‘What about your education prior to us?’
‘I have to thank my uncle for that. He lived in Kuwait City at the time you came to visit us, and ran a pharmacy. It did well and he sent us money, and my grandfather managed to save some, initially for Hakim to go to university. When Saddam invaded Kuwait, my uncle’s pharmacy was looted by Iraqi troops. Then a week after the Americans pushed Saddam out in 1991, a gang of Kuwaitis tried to lynch Uncle Walid.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the PLO had, unfortunately, publicly supported Saddam. Palestinians weren’t welcome in the Gulf anymore.’
‘I remember reading that thousands were expelled throughout the Gulf. They should never have cast in their lot with Saddam Hussein.’
‘A man with no friends cannot be choosy,’ Cantara said simply. ‘My uncle was beaten, but escaped. He paid all his savings to a smuggler and was taken over the border to Iraq in a metal box screwed underneath a truck. He went to live in Karbala…’
‘Oh God, in hindsight, he could hardly have picked a worse place.’
Cantara shrugged. ‘He had a cousin there. But was not allowed to open a pharmacy. So he built a car from parts, then drove it as a taxi. He didn’t forget us or his wife. He continued to send us money when he could. For more than ten years he sent money, only visiting Fatima once a year at Ramadan. Then came 2003 and the next American war against Saddam. For Walid, as an outsider, as a Palestinian, the next four years were a living nightmare. There were bodies in the street every day, helicopters overhead every night. His cousin disappeared. The money stopped, and we heard nothing for three years. Then my uncle re-emerged in Syria, at a refugee camp. He practices as a pharmacist, from a tent. He is saving, and hopes to get a permit to open a shop in Homs. I hope so, he would be more safe in a Syrian city than at the border camps. We haven’t seen him, but still, somehow he sends money. Only small amounts. He also sends money to his cousin’s widow in Karbala. That money paid for me to learn English, to take exams, and to get to the level where the foundation could consider me.’
‘What an extraordinary man.’
‘Of course! A Palestinian cannot be ordinary,’ she fixed him with determined eyes ‘That isn’t enough to survive. My mother was ordinary, and she could not cope. The extraordinary will of my uncle Walid to protect us is the same will that is in the hearts of our martyrs and those you journalists call ‘militants’. They too are trying to look after their families. But what you admire in him you condemn in them.’
Wyrecliffe choked back an urge to argue. A young woman who had seen suffering on a scale he couldn’t even guess at earned her moment of moral superiority.
Cantara opened her purse and removed a single large key, and offered it to him. ‘This is the key to my grandfather’s house in Jaffa. The house he always wanted to return to, but never could. When he died he was clutching it to his chest. It was his dream, and now it is my memento.’
‘Your grandfather seemed a good man. Though I do recall that he didn’t think it was worthwhile getting an operation for your foot.’
She looked down at her glass, twisting it to watch the ice swill around. ‘He was a man of his time, frozen in the world of 1948,’ Cantara said eventually. ‘He wanted justice and never got it. His dreams were in one direction only, I forgave him for not helping me live my dreams.’ She looked up. ‘But others have helped. Including you.’
‘And what now are your dreams?’ he asked.
‘An end to hypocrisy, an end to injustice and an end to occupation. Not only in Palestine, but in Iraq, Afghanistan and all across the Middle East.’
Wyrecliffe smiled gently, as they started to leave. ‘That’s what I wanted at your age. Well, still do, of course. But there’s little chance of getting it,’ he said. ‘The world was never run for the benefit of the majority. It was always about the few...’
‘And you are one of the few, aren’t you?’
‘Well hardly,’ Wyrecliffe protested, as he walked her to the bus stop.
‘All this power, all this influence, rubbing shoulders with ministers and millionaires. There is so much you could do.’
‘So you think I’m not doing anything?’ Wyrecliffe said.
‘Look, I’m grateful for the scholarship grant of course. The foundation is very good. It has been wonderful for me, I mean that. But it takes just one in a hundred thousand. It makes no difference to a life in the camps. That hasn’t improved in decades.’ A bus arrived, and its doors wheezed open. She stepped on, and turned to him ‘It was good to meet you again. You have to realise that in the end the Arab peoples must find their own voice,’ she said.
The doors closed and the red double decker, destined for Mile End Road, pulled away.
‘Well, Cantara, you’ve certainly found yours,’ he muttered. ‘And good luck with it.’
* * *
London
May 2009
Imogen Wyrecliffe was running late. It was 11.45am, she’d just finished the supermarket run, and she was due in South Kensington for lunch at 12.30pm. As she put on her coat she checked the answering machine. Three new messages since last night. Hurriedly she pressed the button, and looked in the hall mirror to apply her lipstick. The first message, left at 9.04am clicked in with background traffic noise, and some vague human sounds. No words, more like a tut of disappointment before the final click. The second message forty minutes later was exactly the same. In this case whoever it was clearly lacked the confidence to leave a message after hearing the message cue from her. Chris had always wanted the cue to be the standard and anonymous ‘please leave a message after the tone’ but now they were separated she had stamped her own identity there. ‘Please leave a message for Imogen Wyrecliffe after the tone.’ Imogen dialled 1471, but received the automated message: ‘You were called, today, at 11.41am. We do not have the caller’s number.’ The third, just five minutes ago had no background noise, but this time an expressive sigh.
Imogen had a feeling deep in her stomach that these calls were for Chris, and were from a woman. Women had always wanted to reach him, that had been true for years. There had been fan mail, which at first had been quite amusing, until some of it was leaked to the press. Then it became hurtful. Some of these were borderline stalkers, and were very resourceful. There was that awful woman from animal rights, all of seventy, who had bombarded the BBC switchboard, written him reams in green ink, and kept posting him strange parcels of newspaper cuttings. All because of some interview about badger culls. She had waited for him outside Broadcasting House on several occasions, and somehow – appallingly – had managed to get their home phone number. It had taken a court injunction to fix her.
Of course the real trouble, the stuff that had sunk any chance of reconciliation, were the women he worked with. Smart, confident, ambitious, pretty and young. Above all, young. They wouldn’t have to leave messages, because they could reach his mobile, his e-mail and sit on his desk, waving their long legs at him. They had always had more of him than she ever did. The trust she had had in him on all those overseas assignments, the love she had felt for him over all those years, the two children she had brought into the world with him. Everything was tarnished when he had run off with that Arab girl. That hateful Taseena.
Imogen played each message again. And each she fiercely deleted.
Chapter Eight
BBC Broadcasting House, London
June 2009
Wyrecliffe thundered along the corridor to a door marked ‘HR’ rapped sharply and walked straight in. He didn’t bother to hide his impatience. ‘Is this really necessary, Melanie?’
‘Hello Chris, take a seat.’ Melanie Ferris, the BBC’s head of HR gave him a wan smile. ‘This is Pieter Hoek, staff security consultant.’
‘Hi.’ Hoek was a balding craggy man in a crumpled suit. He made no effort to get up.
Wyrecliffe nodded a greeting. ‘Staff security consultant? I didn’t realise we even had such a post.’
‘On
ly since Ms Dindo,’ Hoek said. Wyrecliffe took a moment to translate the thick South African accent. TV presenter Jill Dando had been gunned down on her doorstep in West London in 1999, a shock from which many BBC staff had yet to recover. A local man, Barry Bulsara, had been jailed and then freed on appeal. The real assailant was still unknown.
‘You guys are high profile,’ Hoek said. ‘Lots of loons and nutters about. Can’t be too careful, you know?’
‘My face isn’t as well known as Jill’s,’ Wyrecliffe said, sitting down heavily.
‘A good face for radio, right?’ Hoek added with a lopsided grin. ‘Being a radio star isn’t much protection. I got a list of the American DJs murdered since 1960. It isn’t as short as you might guess,’ he said, pushing a sheet of paper towards Wyrecliffe.
Wyrecliffe ignored it. ‘Look, I just e-mailed Melanie for the record because I’ve been followed back to my house. Again.’
‘Wood Lane, this time. When I finished my radio stint yesterday…’
‘What time?’ Hoek was making notes in a looping scrawl.
‘Maybe half-eleven, twenty to twelve.’
‘At night?’
‘At night?’ Wyrecliffe stared at Hoek. ‘You don’t listen to Today, do you?’
Ferris leaned forward to mediate: ‘It’s the flagship radio news breakfast programme of the Beeb, goes out every morning…’
‘Look, I don’t listen to radio, OK? So it’s 11.40am. When did you notice you were being followed?’
‘When we stopped at lights near Dulwich, the driver said that the same black cab had been following us for a while.’
‘When he said that, did you look round?’
He hesitated. ‘I presume I must have done.’
‘So, if you were being followed, he knows you are on to him.’
Wyrecliffe shrugged.
‘Mr Wyrecliffe, if you are being tailed it isn’t smart to make it obvious you are aware of it.’
‘I’m sorry but it’s human nature to look. I didn’t keep looking though, after the first time.’