When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he turned and called up to Maisie. ‘Coming!’ she replied.
Hasan was sitting up at the table, eating a large slice of toast. The butter was dribbling across that huge mark on his cheek. Mrs Wilson was sitting on the sofa, smiling foolishly at him.
Immediately he heard Robert’s footsteps, Hasan stopped. ‘Hello, Mr Wilson,’ he said, in his high, precise voice. ‘I dreamed last night that Badger turned into a hedgehog. Would you see if there is a hedgehog on the lawn?’
Hasan was always having prophetic dreams. They were modest, small-scale affairs, usually about very mundane subjects. But the events described in them – the loss of some ornament, or the visit of some old family friend – quite often turned out to happen just as the little boy had predicted. There was something uncanny about him, his high forehead and his big, sightless eyes.
Robert went to the French windows and looked out to see if he could see anything. There, in the middle of the lawn, was a hedgehog. Robert whirled round on his mother, suspecting her of some collusion with the child, but, with the wistful fondness of a woman who has finished with childbearing, Mrs Wilson was still gazing at the Twenty-fourth Imam of the Wimbledon Dharjees.
‘Is Badger around?’ said Robert, trying to keep the panic out of his voice, ‘because there’s a hedgehog on—’
At this moment Badger skulked into the kitchen, loped over to the pedal bin, and stood gazing mournfully at a piece of orange peel, just visible over the edge of the plastic rim.
‘Maisie!’ called Mrs Wilson. ‘Le petit déjeuner est servi, ma chérie!’
There was a grunt from upstairs. Robert’s father was awake.
Robert sat at a vacant space and put his head in his hands. His mother looked at him, briskly. ‘What’s the matter this morning?’ she said, in the voice she had used when he asked her for an offgames note.
‘Just the usual,’ said Robert, with heavy sarcasm. ‘I’ve been sentenced to death. Apart from that, everything is fine. Everything is a winner!’
Mrs Wilson snorted. ‘I do not think, Robert,’ she said, ‘that anyone takes this man very seriously. All you said was that the Koran wasn’t an easy read. Nobody kills anyone for saying something like that. It’s fair comment. I personally think—’
Before his mother could get started on the Koran, Robert held up his hand. You never knew who might be listening. She looked, however, as if she was fairly determined to give her views on the matter, but before she could start on the Why do they come over here if they don’t like it? speech or her I believe in respecting people’s religious feelings but would die to defend their right to disagree with me speech, Maisie came round the door.
She ate breakfast in a kind of compromise Islamic outfit. Just after her conversion – a moment of mystical submission she insisted on replaying several times a day – she had kept the veil on even at meals, and forked meat and potatoes in under her mask like a game-keeper baiting a trap. She also stored food in there like a hamster, and sometimes, when least expected, her head would snake back inside her covering and the crunch of crisps or the slurp of a boiled sweet could be heard. But now her outfit, although loose and flowing, was slightly closer to the kind of garment you might expect in SW19. It was more like a giant caftan than anything else.
It was Mr Malik who had persuaded her to soften her approach. ‘Even in Libya they don’t carry on like that,’ he had said. ‘You look like something out of a pantomime. What are you supposed to be?’
Her friendship with the headmaster remained a close one. While Mr Malik hardly ever discussed religion with Robert, he spent many evenings in the La Paesana restaurant, Mitcham, going over the finer points of Islamic doctrine with Maisie. ‘We always spend a lot of time with female converts, Wilson,’ he said, giving him a broad wink. ‘They are a lot more work, if you take my meaning!’
Robert was not exactly jealous of the headmaster – he could not remember meeting anyone less sexually threatening. But there were moments when he almost wished that what was happening between Maisie and Mr Malik did have a sexual connotation. At least he would then have been able to understand it.
‘Sports Day today!’ said Maisie brightly.
No one, as usual, wanted to discuss the fact that he had been sentenced to death. They were bored with it. At first, Robert’s father had got quite excited. He had even gone to the Wimbledon police, but they had not seemed very interested. They had said a Detective Constable McCabe, a community policeman, would ‘look in’, which, after a couple of weeks, he did. He seemed mainly interested in whether there were any locks on the windows.
Robert’s father appeared. His hair was matted and uncombed, and his face, as usual in the mornings, was a rather shocking blend of inflamed pink and seasick white. He was wearing a dressing-gown.
‘What do you do for Sports Day?’ he said. ‘Stone one of the junior ticks to death?’
A lot of Mr Wilson senior’s liberal attitudes had not stood the test of having two converted Muslims living in the house. He was often to be found slumped in front of the television, muttering about nignogs. At Christmas he had insisted on hanging up Robert’s stocking on the end of his bed, and had suggested the two of them visit the Cranborne School carol service. He peered across at Maisie now, as he groped his way to the table, his face showing the strain of his forty-eight years in Wimbledon. ‘You used to have nice legs, Maisie,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with our getting a look at them?’
Mrs Wilson had told him he should get out of the house more. This he achieved by getting along to the Frog and Ferret at about eleven each morning, where he spent hours in conversation with George ‘This is My Coronary’ Parker.
Maisie giggled. Underneath the Islamic garments she was still an English convent girl. With her veil pushed back and her black hood shading her face, she looked rather like a nun.
Mrs Wilson rose and, folding her hands together, bowed in an Oriental manner. ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘for our meal.’ It was not clear whether this remark was addressed to Allah, Jehovah or the London Muffin Company. She had taken, this spring, to a sort of generalized reverence that looked as if it was planned to accommodate any new religion to which her son or his girlfriend might have become attached.
She had also given up all her domestic routines. She cleared the table as they were eating, following, as always now, her own weird domestic schedule. Sometimes she would start laying the table for breakfast at four in the afternoon; sometimes she would pursue Maisie and Robert out into the street with plates of hot food, begging them to eat more. And sometimes she would announce that she was doing no more in the house. ‘There it is!’ she would yell, pointing at the fridge. ‘It’s all in there! It’s every man for himself from now on in!’
Perhaps, thought Robert, she was worried about him. It would be nice to think that someone was. He pushed back his chair, and, after one more careful look round the garden, went to look for Class 1’s homework. At the top of the pile was a beautifully typed essay from Sheikh on the causes of the English Civil War. The little bastard, or his parents, or some hired professional historian, had written three thousand closely argued words. Robert had given him beta minus (query).
‘There you are, Mr Wilson,’ Maisie was saying, as she twirled her skirt above her legs like a cancan dancer – ‘knees!’
He had to get out of the school. But how could he do it? How could he ever admit to Maisie that the very thing that had brought them together was, like so much else in his life, a lie? He was tied to her and to Mr Malik in exactly the way he was tied to his own parents. He was also, he realized, as he went through to the hall to get Hasan’s coat, tied to the little boy in a way he could not have predicted. It wasn’t simply that he felt protective towards him. It was that he was beginning to understand why Aziz the janitor and his friends might be convinced he was no ordinary child.
He took Hasan’s hand and went out into the clear light of April.
‘Did
Badger turn into a hedgehog, Mr Wilson?’ said the little boy. ‘I have special powers and can foresee things!’
Robert squeezed his charge’s hand. ‘In a way he did, Hasan,’ he said. ‘In a way he did.’
He was starting to believe this stuff. As he and Hasan and Maisie started out down Wimbledon Park Road, he remembered something the headmaster had said to him, quite soon after he had started teaching the reception class. ‘Islam means surrender, my dear Wilson. And so you must surrender. You may think you stand on your own, or have your own choices, or make your own fate, but you do not do so. You submit, and let your life take its course. The course that God has designed for it.’
The trees were out in Wimbledon Park. As the three of them started to climb the hill, Maisie, who no longer walked yards behind the men in her life, took Robert’s arm and started to sing. At first he did not recognize the tune, and then he caught its cadences. It wasn’t English. It had the swoop and the lilt of something one might have heard blaring out of a Turkish café. It was a song Mr Malik sang, and she was singing it to what must, surely, be his words.
Come to me,
My beautiful girl.
Don’t be shy now.
Leave your mother,
Leave your father,
Leave your people.
Don’t be shy now.
Come to me,
My beautiful girl.
You are one of mine now.
You are one of ours now.
Come to me, oh come to me,
Beautiful,
Beautiful,
Girl.
14
From time to time he wondered whether he had made a mistake in sleeping with her. It was something he had been wanting to do for over ten years, but, now that he had done it, he had destroyed something that had been between them – a mysterious, almost exquisite, promise of delight. He was starting to tell the truth – that was what it was. It was hard to keep lying when you were alone in bed with someone. If this went on much longer, the real Robert Wilson might emerge – that awful, jelly-like creature that he had been hiding from the world for the last twenty-four years.
Perhaps they had taken too long to get together. If only he had moved earlier. If only he had pushed his advantage home the night the Dorking brothers gave their party (‘The Night of the Hundred Cans’, as it was still known in Wimbledon). If only he had made his move six years earlier, during the rehearsed reading of Martin Finkelstein’s verse play These Be Wasted Years, Brother!
Except he hadn’t. They were too like brother and sister, that was it.
If that was the case, incest had never been more fun. Sex with Maisie was about the most interesting thing Robert had ever done. It upstaged even Mr and Mrs Wilson, who had gone markedly quiet since Maisie entered the field. Maisie particularly enjoyed being spanked with a hairbrush, and liked to accompany this activity with a series of clear, confident expressions of her need to be disciplined. ‘Oh my arse!’ she would call in the still of the Wimbledon night. ‘Oh my fat arse! Spank it! Spank it, you bastard!’
At the moment of climax she quite often addressed him as Derek. Robert had not yet been able to fathom why this was the case. It was possible, of course, that she was referring, for purely symbolic reasons, to a specialized form of lifting gear.
Robert wasn’t sure that their sexual relations were in line with Islamic thinking – at least as formulated by Marwan Ibrahim Al-Kaysi. They did not pray two rak’ahs before making love, or perform wudu after intercourse (perhaps because neither of them had the faintest idea what wudu might be), and they were woefully deficient in the sacrifice and dowry departments. Maisie was also guilty of one of Al-Kaysi’s key errors, leaving the house excessively – a practice he quite clearly did not relish in women.
There were times when he thought Maisie was not much more of a Muslim than he was. The headmaster himself had accused her of only joining up for the uniform. But – and this was the real divide between them – she thought she was a Muslim. He knew he wasn’t. However absurd her convictions might seem, at least they were convictions.
‘Tell me,’ said Robert, as they walked up the High Street, ‘and I’m not going on about it, but exactly why did Ali sentence me to death?’
‘Because you said Enid Blyton sold more copies than the Koran,’ said Maisie, ‘and said that pigs were terrific and Muslims had to learn to deal with them.’
‘I did not say any of those things,’ said Robert, ‘and, even if I did, I don’t think they merit the death penalty. I mean, this is a free country – isn’t it?’
Maisie tightened her lips. ‘You’re not free to offend people,’ she said. ‘It’s a very fine line!’
It was, thought Robert, a very fine line. You never knew these days when a casual remark was going to provide the justification for someone stalking you with an automatic rifle. He looked nervously over his shoulder, but saw nothing.
‘Dr Ali said that you said bad things about Muhammad,’ Maisie went on. ‘Apparently he heard you.’
‘When did he hear? Who was I talking to?’
‘You were walking along muttering them to yourself. He said they were so shocking he couldn’t even bear to repeat them.’
She seemed almost prepared to take the good doctor’s part in this dispute, thought Robert. Why couldn’t Ali forget the pig business? Why couldn’t the guy loosen up? Robert had not even mentioned pigs in three months.
‘The worse thing you can do to a Muslim is insult Muhammad.’
She was always showing off her superior knowledge these days, thought Robert. And the more she found out about Islam, the more she seemed to like it. His trouble was, he realized, that he was simply not able to grasp any religion, let alone a faith where his only spiritual mentor was a book from Wimbledon Public Library.
‘I would never say anything bad about Muhammad,’ said Robert. ‘Even I know better than that.’
‘Why would you want to?’ said Maisie. ‘You’re a Muslim, aren’t you?’
She had probably rumbled him. Even when he was being particularly careful not to offend, he seemed to manage to say the wrong thing. He had noticed, for example, that Dr Ali always accompanied the Prophet’s name with the formula ‘may God bless him and grant him peace!’ and, often, in the doctor’s presence, Robert would work Muhammad’s name into the conversation precisely so that he, too, could repeat the traditional blessing. He often went one better. ‘Muhammad – may God bless him and grant him peace – who was, I don’t need to remind you, quite a guy – once said – and what he said was, on the whole earth, listening to – on several occasions – not that he was a man given to repeating himself – once, anyway, said – and he had a beautiful speaking voice . . .’ etc. etc. This cut no ice with the doctor. He watched Robert from under his hooded eyes, a slight smile playing around his lips.
‘I have to get the bread for lunch,’ said Maisie. ‘Do you want to come in? You’ll probably be safer in the shop. You could hide under the counter.’
‘I don’t see what’s so funny,’ said Robert, who was looking nervously down the street. ‘There are some funny things going on around here.’
As he said this, he caught sight of Mr Malik, who was walking towards the school. Robert held Hasan’s hand tightly. The little boy showed no sign of rising vertically into the air or of summoning seven hundred fiery horsemen from out of the sky.
Robert was sweating. He wiped his brow. From the other side of the road, Aziz the janitor, on his way to school, a sinister smile on his face, started to wave his mop in greeting. For some reason Aziz always took his mop home with him. ‘How is the boy?’ he said, in his cracked voice.
‘He’s fine!’ said Robert.
‘I would like a cake please,’ said Hasan, ‘with some jam on it!’
Eager to get him away from Aziz, Robert handed him over to Maisie and peered, once more, carefully around him. He was seeing men with one shoe in his sleep these days. He had been sure one was following him round
Sainsbury’s the other day.
Apart from the headmaster, who had now gone into the school, the place seemed clear. Robert stayed on the pavement while Maisie went in to buy the school’s bread. Suddenly a heavy hand whacked him in the shoulder blades. Robert wheeled round to see the beaming face of Mr Mafouz. Next to him, his round face straining towards the cakes in the shop window, was his favourite son.
‘That’s enough cakes, Anwar!’ said Mr Mafouz, and, placing his broad hand on his son’s backside, he propelled the boy towards the school.
‘How’s things?’ said Mr Mafouz.
‘Not too bad,’ said Robert.
The sun picked up the colours of a girl’s dress. It sparkled in her hair as she swayed past the grocer’s opposite. Clasped into themselves like baby’s fists, new shoots were hung along the branches of each tree in the High Street. It was spring. Spring and Wimbledon were still here, even if at times he felt he had landed in a foreign country. As he made the conventional response, Robert felt a curious exaltation, as if the phrase had made such unpleasant things as Dr Ali melt away. He liked Mr Mafouz.
Perhaps, as Mr Malik had suggested, he was slowly learning to surrender, and, by surrendering, to enjoy the sun, the blue sky and the sweetness of having, at long last, a girl to share his bed.
‘In fact,’ said Robert, ‘I feel great.’
‘Malik declared the cricket season three months early,’ said Mr Mafouz. ‘Did you know one is not supposed to play cricket in April? We have been playing since February. He wishes us to get into training for thrashing Cranborne.’
On the other side of the road, Anwar was playing cricket strokes. Robert tried to remember whether the Egyptians had a cricket team and, if so, whether they were any good. Inside the baker’s, Maisie had got involved in a complicated negotiation with the shopkeeper. Hasan had pressed his face to the glass in front of the cakes and was sniffing the fresh bread, a look of ecstasy on his face. Mr Mafouz and Robert idled along the pavement.
East of Wimbledon Page 13