The sugar in the bowl in front of me has flecks of I don’t know what in it. I cross and uncross my ankles. The rain has made its way through all the layers of my clothes, leaving me shivery. I play with my saucer, spill sugar, I’m unsure quite how to be with him. I have just spent fourteen days in a fury in the Little Antiques at the Slade, I have artistic pretensions that I would like to share with dear Ihsan, but the vast gulf of time passed between us is both resolutely there and also diminishing with each tick of the Lyons wall clock. Are we close? Are we intimate? I can’t say. I have written to him, oh, I don’t know, lines such as: ‘I want to make art that captures the curve of light, that makes the person looking at it feel a sense of vertigo, and this is the one thing I feel to be true: imbalance, and the sense that life is always on the fine edge.’ What I want to say is: ‘I am trying to love and care for baby Lawrence, whom we call Skip, but the two things are incompatible. The child. The work.’ Of course, I say none of this; I should make light chitchat about his family, about his business concerns, but I just smile and he smiles back.
We are shy because, even though we have written to one another over the years, our letters have never particularly dealt with real life or practical concerns. I find I cannot bring myself to ask him certain questions about his private life, such as: does he want a wife? Is he lonely? Does he still write poetry? Nor do I say much about Piers, or motherhood, because how can I even begin? I find ways to cover my face, lock my hand over half of it to block out my mouth and teeth, or lean on my palm, covering up my cheek. I am exposed in the window-light, opposite him; it is too much after all these years. I would have preferred to meet him in the dark.
At the Russell Hotel the doormen who look like the hatter from Alice in Wonderland swing back the large golden doors for us, raise their eyebrows at Ihsan’s Arabness and the shimmer of his shoes. It is only four o’clock but, as it is London-winter, night is already coming. We walk into the lobby and Ihsan takes my arm.
‘Would it be inappropriate . . .?’ He looks shy.
‘What?’
‘To request that we go to your room, rather than sit in a public place. There is something I need to talk to you about. Is your husband there?’
‘No. But he may be back at any time. It’s fine, Ihsan, many people come and go through our room. Let’s go up.’
The staircase winds upwards, the music in the lobby hums. Everyone I know lives in these halfway homes. This person has a cottage, that person is giving up rooms in Kensington, do you want to take over this room in the hotel? Everyone tramps from one abode to another, I really don’t know why. Is it the nature of artists, or a lack of trust in buildings? Ihsan is chattering now as he did not do outside or in the tea room, ringing complimentary bells for every step: ‘I always knew you would be elegant.’ It isn’t until I unlock the door, push it open and we are engulfed in the musty smell of hotel room, surrounded by the scattered mess of my clothing and underwear everywhere, that I feel the chaos of my life exposed.
‘Forgive me, Ihsan.’ I rush around the room, trying to clear things away.
He stands near the bay windows, looking down at Russell Square, and then glances around our suite. There is a piano in the corner which neither Piers nor I can play. The bed is vast and four-postered, the wardrobe even larger. My dresses, many of them given to me one night by an American heiress who couldn’t be bothered to pack her bags to take them back to New York, lie in heaps about the room. As soon as the door swings and closes shut behind us there is an awkward electric jolt to the air. It is, after all, a hotel room and I find myself looking at Ihsan less as a person I have known for so long, more as a stranger. The age between us – once eleven and twenty, now twenty-four and thirty-seven – seems much less of a gap now.
‘Where is your husband?’ And I do not say with other women, dear Ihsan.
‘He’s working, I believe.’
He takes off his coat and walks over to the piano, putting his hand on it as if blessing it. ‘Why do you live in a hotel rather than a home?’
‘I don’t believe in homes,’ I say, hating myself for speaking like Piers, and walk out of habit immediately across to the drinks cabinet even though it is early. I turn, ‘Would you like something, Ihsan?’
And he lets out a small giggle which is almost girlish. ‘I would like a small red wine, perhaps?’
‘That I’ll have to ring for.’
‘Where is the child?’ He looks around, as if Skip might be hiding behind the curtains or under the sofa.
‘They must be out for a walk. I’m not sure.’ I have in fact instructed Nanny to stay away as long as possible. I didn’t want Ihsan to see how clumsy I am with my son. I order the drinks whilst he is in the lavatory and glance in the bedroom mirror to see how I must appear to him. My teeth look big. I am tired. Piers is sleeping with a student called Camilla and it upsets my every waking moment. He walks around with large eyes as if always on the verge of a confession. Whenever he ‘wanders’ in this way, it is always me he eventually looks to for solace. I guessed about this new woman – or rather, girl, I imagine – but when he got round to the moment of telling me, transforming an anxiety in his mouth into words which I saw dissolving before they were fully formed, the confession was not what I had been expecting. Instead, it was resentment: for me spending all my time in the studio, for the focus I can achieve, for the buyers who come to pluck what they can out of my mind. Piers cannot make art himself. He can critique it, sell it, he has the most divine taste, he can talk about it, he is steeped in it, he wants nothing else than to think about it, be it, absorb it, understand it, but sadly, he cannot produce it. The night he fully realised this he cried on my knee like a baby. Why? he kept repeating. Why? I could think of nothing to say. ‘Perhaps you are not prepared to expose yourself?’ I remembered his nights of locking me in hotel rooms to extract ‘material’. Those years. Bruised years.
To come to terms with his difficult struggle involved him going to bed with other women to help him navigate his way. Did I understand? Perhaps I do, but Ihsan does not need to know one jot of this.
I powder my nose, attempt to hide the shadows beneath my eyes, go back into the main room and pour myself a finger’s width of whisky, knocking it straight back before Ihsan returns.
We settle at either end of the long green sofa with a reassuring distance between us, but he keeps glancing around the room; something about it disturbs him.
‘Do you have anything here, of your own?’
‘Of course.’ I look about me. ‘My sculpting materials. A few books.’ There is on the table a book called Unit One. It has just been published by Cassell and sent to me. There is an entire chapter devoted to my work. I am between Wells Coates and Colin Lucas.
‘I am in this, look,’ I say, ashamed of myself. I was rather cajoled to be in there, but I realise that to a man like Ihsan, from a city full of stones and a family reaching back in time, the idea of living in a hotel is disturbing and I want to distract him. He opens the book. The illustration plates are black and white. Duennas, 1931. Interior, by Nash. Ihsan reads: ‘Unit One is the name of a new group of English artists – painters, sculptors and architects . . .’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘They all like to form clubs.’ I force him to put the book down. ‘I have a trunk and a suitcase of bits and pieces, nothing much.’
Ihsan puts his hand into the black leather briefcase he has been carrying around with him and I realise that it is so lovely to see his face, after all these years. It has a sadness to it, of course, as faces do over time, corroding, no longer fresh, but it is a sorrowfulness that doesn’t need to draw in other people to exist. It is self-contained. I admire that.
He rummages about in the briefcase. I imagine myself touching his cheek; could I have loved Ihsan? I mean, married him? I have never articulated that thought before – how odd? – and as if I’ve flicked on a projector I can see a different life: living with him in a house in Jerusalem surrounded by pots of figs and ger
aniums. A scurrilous fancy flitters through my mind: this is why he is here? I am full of tenderness for him, but then it occurs to me that he has always held something back. His letters, yes, they have been full of yearning, but who does he spend his days with? What does he do? I think he is going to bring out poetry, and then my cheeks are red and my breath is short in my throat, because it comes to me: a declaration of love, of course. That is it. Ihsan. The curve of a different life shows itself to me, but it seems it is his job that is preoccupying him most. He takes out what he was looking for – papers – puts a package on his knee, folds hands over it.
‘You know, Prue, that I am a clerk in the German Consulate in Jerusalem, working for this new consul, Heinrich Wolff?’
I compose myself. ‘Yes, you mentioned it briefly in a letter, I think.’ I smile at him. I am an idiot, of course. What was I thinking, a marriage proposal? I am already married. This is Ihsan.
‘It is an awful profession, it should not exist.’ He crosses his legs.
‘It can’t be that bad.’
‘It is indeed that bad.’ He flaps a piece of paper towards me. ‘For instance, I have to copy out a page, and then record it, make sure there is a duplicated letter, make sure that is filed, make sure I know what is coming in and out, make sure it is in the correct place, labelled, dated.’
‘There are worse jobs, Ihsan. Imagine if you work in a factory, making eyelets for soldiers’ boots. That would be terrible. All day long punching the little holes for laces on boots.’ I feel I can say this with authority because one of Marguerite’s friends did a job like this, during the war, and her fingers were damaged and she almost went blind. So the story goes.
He leans forward. ‘There is much strangeness.’ He frowns. ‘Things are very difficult.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The new consul has to follow orders from Berlin. He has to check whether the German academics now taking the posts in Jerusalem are either Jewish, half-Jewish, a quarter-Jewish or, as they call it, Aryan.’
‘Well, why does this bother you, dear Ihsan?’
‘Because I am the clerk. I have to do the checking. You have no idea of the madness. I will describe it for you. Imagine this: Frau Lang is shouting at me. Wolfgang Lang is saying to me that his wife is Jewish-blood free. I say, I believe you, I believe you, but the consul says it has to be proved, these are the instructions from Berlin.’
‘Well, how can it be proved? Is she Jewish?’
‘It doesn’t matter what you practise, it is who you are descended from: Herr Wolff is very clear on this.’
‘It seems a lot of bother for what reason?’
‘Who knows the answer to that, dear Prue? I certainly do not. Here is Frau Lang and her parents are Slovene, Izmirian, French and some unidentified Roman Catholic origin. So, you know what I must spend my mornings doing?’
‘What, Ihsan? I am beginning to think you are right, this is a terrible job.’
‘I must contact the officials in each of the cities that Frau Lang’s grandparents supposedly lived in; I must attempt to collect documents from each town relating to these grandparents. I must send a telegram to each city, and then follow with a letter and, following that, a phone call.’
‘Oh stop, Ihsan. You are giving me a headache.’
‘My life is a headache.’
‘But why do you work for the Germans?’
‘They employed me because I am secular and I speak the languages.’ He leans further in and lowers his voice. ‘I have heard it is possible that soon all the German Jews in Jerusalem will have to change their name to Sara or Isaac and guess who will have to formalise the paperwork for each and every one of them?’
What he is saying is too fantastical; I do not believe him. ‘That cannot be true.’
‘It is.’ He pauses.
‘Did you know the pilot, William Harrington, was a fluent German speaker?’
This, a name from another time, and it is important that Ihsan thinks I am doing well. That I do not dissolve, like dust blown about in the wind. I want him to think of me as substantial, not silk. Not like a sliver of light. I am listening to his stories but the words aren’t sticking to me, they are falling like leaves, other lifetimes and other people’s problems, and none of it makes any sense. I want to make art and not think of the troubles of the world that only involve men in coats with shiny buttons, taking people to other rooms, taking them away, hurting children.
‘He returned to Jerusalem this year,’ Ihsan says. ‘He is doing something for the British Consulate.’ Ihsan holds his hands above the package on his knee and spreads them as if looking at his fingernails. They are immaculate.
‘Oh? What was he doing?’ I am trying to remember him. The Englishman who loved Eleanora, the photographer’s wife. Of course, I hadn’t forgotten him; I simply hadn’t thought about him, specifically, for some time.
‘Elspeth – Frau Baum – and I have become friends. She does wonderful work at the School of Archaeology and helps with some of the legation around houses. Who is entitled to make a home in a place, who owns a piece of land? Sometimes it is difficult to say. Everybody is arguing about property, but she told me, and I will tell you, what he is doing. He is working for Wolff.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He is based at the Fast, and this is agreed by his office in London, and he is overseeing the exchange of information regarding transfers of money via the Palestine-Anglo Bank. In other words, my dear, the British and the Germans have a fruitful co-operation and many agreements via Jerusalem on behalf of these people in Berlin we are now calling the Nazis.’
‘Oh.’ A pigeon lands on the balcony rail for a moment, bobbing its head and looking at me, and then it is gone. Ihsan’s words curl around me, but all I really hear is that he is not telling me that he loves me and the skin on my chest is itching with embarrassment and the shock of what I had imagined. He looks a little disappointed in me. I haven’t really risen to the occasion, and I try to concentrate.
‘I’m not quite sure what this all means.’
‘Well. Last month, he contacted me. He wanted to meet.’
He takes my hands, both of them, and pulls me towards him. His eyes are very strange; they are full of an unidentifiable emotion, as if there are secrets, but at the same time everything inside him is transposed outside and that causes him pain. I feel full of shame: I have done everything wrong. I am an awful mother. A terrible wife. A useless artist. An unimpressive being. I want to tell him all of this.
‘We met at one of the Arab cafés. He was agitated, in a state of anxiety.’
I try to listen, I really do. I haven’t eaten for a long time, it might be days, and my stomach is flipping, turning, drowning, and an odd thing happens: the light, a dazzle on the floor, clatters from Russell Square, a crystallisation in my vision. I push my palms together to stop the flapping.
‘What was wrong with him?’
‘He talked about you. He was remembering you. I did not tell him that we write to each other, that we have always stayed in touch.’ Pages and pages of letters I have sent to Ihsan over the years. All the strains of thoughts, and a horrible urge came through me, not to move, not to speak, but to pull back all the words I had offered Ihsan, all the crossings-over of intimacies. Sometimes I wrote in shifra, I was entirely uncensored, I spilled it all. There was a creeping flurry inside my stomach. He was, of course, such a gentleman in person that he would never refer to the transgressions, the tiny exposures which seem, now, like cuts made with a knife into the skin and blood offered up. His hands in mine felt like dry, crisp paper.
‘He was convinced that someone at the Consulate, someone working for the British Government, was trying to assassinate him. He was paranoid, he looked very unwell. It was an extremely uncomfortable meeting.’
Willie Harrington in Jerusalem: the smell of burning, and a dog near a foot, sniffing it. Once you have begun to remember it is difficult to stop; one day from the past collapses into
another. Memory is not a stream of photographic images, it is flightier than that. It is the sinew along the edge of a bird’s wing. It is a dangling bird’s foot, the startling touch of feather-fur. The smell of burning again.
‘He mentioned a day, with your father, and you. A trip to a village called Lifta.’
I stand up. I remember this: a long time before my father came back into my life and I was sent to Jerusalem to be drawn and ignored. A trip to the seashore with bucket and spade, an ‘amusing summer day’ with a neighbour boy whom I didn’t like. He sat with his bottom in the dank wet sand, the sea so far out that it was hardly worth the effort of tramping that far. Sent off together with the boy I didn’t like, or know. I am wearing an emerald-green dress. Go to the horizon, keep walking, walking and at the shore toes in, too cold, the boy scratching his head saying, ‘Eggs in the hair.’ I turn and look back, and they have gone, the mothers, gone. My mother gone. They don’t come back to get us until the sun is dying.
Ihsan is looking at me. ‘You don’t want me to continue?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘Do you remember the day?’
‘I remember dogs, burning. Feet?’
Ihsan nods. I think of the sea: of drowning, in large swimming pools in great hotels. The hotels I stayed in with my father, in those years after Jerusalem, always had swimming pools, on the roof, or in the garden, or sometimes deep in the bowels of the building, and I would walk down the long hotel corridors in the complimentary hotel gowns, almost naked under the robe, feeling both intimate and exposed. The pools were invariably empty and I would slip in, and as soon as I floated, buoyed by water, blinking up at the sky or the dripping wet ceiling, I would hear a voice. Always calm, sane, perfectly integrated with the flickering light reflections on the tiles and the sound of lapping water. Go down, it said, and so I did, swimming underwater with eyes closed until I nudged the edge of the pool, just as I imagine a shark might nose against the side of a boat. An unambiguous sweet voice that terrified me.
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