Lion Heart

by Justin Cartwright

  Dad.

  42

  Symi

  Haneen is against the holiday in Symi. She tells me that Noor is not ready for it just yet. But Noor emails me to say she is keen to leave Toronto, where it is still cold, to head for the Mediterranean. It will speed her recuperation. I suspect that Haneen, shrewd and very human, sees difficulties ahead. I see difficulties ahead. I speak to Haneen in Jerusalem, trying to reassure her that we will just swim and take it easy and spend time together, as brother and sister.

  ‘Richard, be very careful with her. She is not right in any way. She needs peace and quiet and reassurance. Are you sure you can provide those?’

  ‘I will try, I promise.’

  She isn’t convinced, but she gives her reluctant blessing. She has natural authority; you are obliged to seek her blessing, even if you find it irksome. I promise to call her immediately if anything goes wrong.

  Lord Huntingdon is very pleased with the speech I have written for him about abuse of the financial allowances by les grands fromages. While I am away on holiday he wants me to work on another speech, about fishing rights and quotas. Only the British obey the laws, he says. He is particularly exercised by the diminished stocks of mackerel. He sees the mackerel as a peculiarly British fish, a plucky, unpretentious little creature that has become the object of a piscine holocaust. I advise him against using the word ‘holocaust’ in this context. Perhaps we could say ‘dangerous over-fishing’. He sends me pages of fishing statistics. He proposes to call this speech ‘Fishy goings-on in the EU’. I suggest ‘The Need for an Urgent Enquiry into EU Fishing Policy’. If I can think of a more catchy title, he would welcome it.

  I have been thinking about my aunt’s dismal funeral and my father’s letter, as if they are linked, which in a way they are. Only five people attended the funeral. It was the sort of wet, cold day that figures in novels when a funeral is involved. The Church of Scotland minister gave a plausible account of my aunt’s virtues – patience and stoicism; as he said, not particularly contemporary values. I had the feeling that the minister was something of a philosopher: he had travelled the world in Deeside.

  Two of the estate workers I knew were there, as well as a man I had never seen before who had the chafed cheeks of someone who spent a lot of time in the great outdoors. The minister told me that he was a gamekeeper who had worked with Sandy and had been very fond of him, but had moved to another estate when Sandy married. By implication, he had not been very fond of my aunt. The owner of the estate, Gunther von Schwerin, sent flowers for the brief ceremony and these flowers took a free ride on a coffin into the dank pit. Von Schwerin had also paid for a gravestone, and asked me to come up with an inscription.

  In the end I wrote:

  Phoebe McAllan, née Carter, born in Wimbledon, England, who has found peace at last, aged seventy-three, in this beautiful place.

  I could not think of another thing to say about her or another person to invoke as a witness of her life. Her first husband sent me a note of condolence on expensive embossed paper. His vindictive days, after my aunt left him for the monarch of the glen, were apparently behind him. He hoped to meet me one day; he had read in a newspaper that I had made a discovery which shed new light on Richard the Lionheart and his relationship with Saladin: ‘Sounds jolly interesting.’ Sadly, he and his second wife had separated. Amicably.

  I had struggled for some time to include Sandy in the inscription, but it was impossible:

  Devoted wife of Sandy McAllan, who died so tragically. Wife and devoted helpmeet of Sandy McAllan, who died prematurely and tragically.

  There were more drafts, all equally hollow, all travesties of a life. Everyone in the district knew that Sandy had become suspicious of my aunt – this silent man talked about it in the pub – and that he had convinced himself that she was having an affair, and also they all knew that he had shot himself in the game room, producing a truly appalling still life of human and stag carnage, intermingled.

  I could have written: Phoebe McAllan, devoted aunt and teacher of Richard Cathar MA (Hons) Oxford. That would have been true. The funeral was Pinteresque, in the sense that a whole lot was left unspoken.

  Noor arrives at Terminal Five. I have been standing outside anxiously for some time. She comes through the doors fearfully, like a forest creature breaking cover. Her hair is short and even at a distance I can see that her face is slightly distorted, in a way that unsettles me; her features seem to have moved without purpose in unexpected directions. She catches sight of me and scuttles towards the barrier. I seize her and hug her. She is crying.

  ‘I am sorry, I have missed you so much,’ she says, wiping her eyes. Her voice is strained as though it is playing at the wrong speed. I climb over the barrier.

  ‘Noor, it’s wonderful to see you.’

  I kiss her, but she turns her face away. Now her body is racked by waves of sobs that roll through her like breakers. I feel desperately inadequate.

  ‘Come, let’s get a taxi.’

  In the cab she holds my hand; her grip is cold and insistent. Like a baby’s. I think she feels the need to be attached to receive some warming charge from me.

  ‘Are we going to be all right?’ she asks.

  Her apprehension is poignantly evident.

  ‘Of course we are. Of course we are. Your hair is lovely short, by the way.’

  ‘Do you think so, really? It was cut in hospital before my last operation. I felt that I was being punished for something.’

  ‘No, it’s great. You’ve had a bad time. But we’ll put it all behind you in Symi. I checked the weather; it’s almost thirty degrees and the sea is warming fast.’

  A little desperate, I show her on my phone pictures of the house I have rented, with a small boat moored out front. I tell her that it is in a perfect position – the agent assured me it was – with a view over the bay; all day the boats come by. I tell her, again, about the Kallistrata, the ancient stairway that leads to the upper town. She looks at me – her mouth is puckered as though she is struggling for breath – and then turns to stare out of the window as we slow in the traffic on the M4.

  I have put flowers in Haneen’s flat. Noor says she loves the place.

  ‘Do you want to bath and rest?’

  ‘I have been resting for months, but yes, I do want a bath.’

  I remember how we shared our huge marble bath at the American Colony and argued about who would have the tap end. Through the door I hear her crying quietly now. It’s a world away. I feel sick with distress. When she comes out she is wearing a white towelling dressing gown; she sits on the sofa, legs crossed.

  ‘Haneen tells me that you have made the great discovery of the cross you were looking for.’

  ‘Yuh well, maybe she was exaggerating a little. But yes, in Limoges I found the True Cross, not the actual cross on which Christ was crucified of course, but the cross that Richard the Lionheart wanted from Saladin. As I told you, I think, I was lucky to find a letter in the Bodleian Library that seemed to confirm that Richard had struck a deal with Saladin, and I went on from there. The historians and palaeographers are not overly impressed – not yet – because they think that the piece of the cross in Santa Croce in Rome is a medieval fake, and already some experts have said that the letter from Richard to Saladin is also a fake, a palimpsest, done in the nineteenth century. But what I found in Limoges – I had lots of help – is clearly part of the cross Richard wanted so desperately, and the fact that it matches exactly the piece in Rome makes it more or less conclusive. Dendrochronology and other tests are being done, both in Rome and in Paris. I’ve started to write a book about the whole experience.’

  I tell her about our father’s letter to me, and how I have regretted the fact that I turned my back on him. I tell her about my mother, Moonchild Gemstone – it’s impossible not to smile – and our father’s drug problem and – most moving of all – how he stood outside the Sheldonian Theatre when my degree was awarded, proud that I had done so
well, and hoping, after eight years, to speak to me. I paraded right by without seeing him. I tell Noor that this has troubled me in case he thought it was deliberate.

  I talk non-stop because I don’t want Noor to feel that she is obliged to talk about her experiences. Also, I have been dreading hearing the detail of what happened to her.

  We walk to the park to see the Household Cavalry practising for a parade. Noor thinks the Mounties are just as impressive. There is talk of the Household Cavalry being moved to the suburbs. Huntingdon is against it. He believes that Britain has a unique talent for pageantry, absolutely unrivalled anywhere in the world.

  In the evening, sitting together on the sofa, I ask Noor if she wants to tell me her whole story and to explain, if she can, why I was interviewed by SO15.

  ‘Rich, do you think this apartment is bugged?’

  ‘I doubt it, but I don’t know. I don’t see why it would be.’

  ‘Let’s talk on the balcony.’

  We sit outside. I can hear music from the Royal Albert Hall; it sounds like the Mass in B Minor.

  ‘Richie, this is difficult. My job was to get inside information, the sort of thing journalists hear on assignment. But it seems that in Egypt someone knew about my other life. We now know who tipped them off – I can’t tell you the name – but you were put on a watch list in the beginning, just in case. You have a friend in Oxford – I didn’t know her name – and she kept her contacts at MI5 briefed about you. To be fair to her, she did send a dispatch saying that, in her judgement, you had no involvement. But it was her contacts who put you on a watch list. I am sure it all sounds very underhand to you, but actually what she did is kinda according to the manual. There was a report that the kidnap was all set up for the money. I didn’t know any of this until months later, when I was being debriefed in hospital.’

  Her voice is oddly thin and strained.

  ‘Who is Mr Macdonald?’

  ‘Oh, that is just any delegated intelligence officer at any embassy. Mr Macdonald is named for our first prime minister. On another year it will be another prime minister.’

  ‘Noor, tell me if you can, what happened to you in Cairo. I think we should discuss it, even though neither of us wants to, I am sure.’

  She is silent for a moment, her mouth is very mobile, searching for words, sucking them. ‘You know what I was thinking over the last months? I was thinking about you and me in Jerusalem before all this terrible stuff and my heart was breaking. I don’t want to remember what happened after. To see you and to know that we will never have children, and to have to accept that we can never marry, that’s too much for me to bear. Terrible things happened to me, Richie – sick, awful things, which seemed to be aimed at women in general. I can’t speak about it. Just hold me, Richie, please.’

  Her tortured face is frightened and defensive as if she has seen the worst that the human race is capable of. And maybe she has. I have an awful image of those survivors of Belsen and Auschwitz, with the vacant, stunned look. Noor appears in the same way to have had some of her human essences leached out. I know now that she will never forget. She will never recover.

  She sees me looking at her, concerned.

  ‘Is it obvious?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That I am broken, crushed.’

  ‘Noor, don’t say that, please. I was just thinking as I looked at you how beautiful you are and how much we are going to enjoy Symi. Day by day. Take it day by day.’

  ‘I have never known what that means. You have no choice, unless . . . Quite a lot of doctors said that.’

  ‘You just look subdued, which is totally understandable. Have faith in Symi.’

  ‘Please hold me, Rich. I want to feel I can breathe again.’

  In Rhodes we avoided the Crusader castles, those necropoleis. My father had shown me what he said was the Street of the Knights. I wish we could have gone to see them, because I imagined the Templar castle would have looked much like the Templar commanderie in Marseilles from where Huntingdon’s knights set out with the cross.

  We are in the comical hydrofoil from Rhodes, Aegli. Aegli was one of the three nymphs of the evening. This one looks as though it was made for an early James Bond movie, from discarded galvanised-iron water tanks.

  I can see the castle as Aegli starts out of harbour slowly and clumsily, low in the sea, but soon the engines roar and she is speeding improbably, rising to the surface of the water to achieve a state of grace, while passing with élan alarmingly close to rocky islets. I remember it from my trip with my father, our only holiday together.

  Now the man who took our tickets is slumped plumply over what looks like a kitchen table, reading a newspaper, Proodos. He has an intimate relationship with the paper; he is hunched, almost incubating it. Noor stares out over the sea. I do not know what she is thinking.

  In the night at Haneen’s flat we slept in separate rooms, but later she crept into my bed and begged me to hold her. She was alarmingly thin, with sharply protruding bones. I had a glimpse of small, drained breasts. I felt immeasurable sadness on her account, and perhaps also on mine. It was all I could do not to weep.

  I knew it was true: she has been crushed.

  As we approach Symi, Aegli sinks lower into the water again as it finds its way into the harbour; it’s not flying now; it’s more a case of butting its way through the water. Above us rise the strange classical houses of the town, built in a time of wealth from the export of sponges. The port is crowded with boats, but Aegli has her own mooring, and we head confidently there. From a distance, half submerged, I imagine she would look like a nuclear submarine.

  A man with a handcart meets us and loads up. He speaks some English. He is lame and it seems a little demeaning for him to be pushing this cart, but he refuses my help. He moves pretty fast, almost skipping along the quayside road. Outside a whitewashed wall, he hands us the keys and points to a blue door. He follows us in with the luggage. Our house is a joy, with a balcony overlooking the harbour, just a narrow track between us and the water and a little courtyard at the back, shaded by an old, knotted grape vine, a blue table and two blue chairs in the deep shade. Small birds are busy in the vine. They rustle and whistle. Down below, tied to the sea wall, is our boat. I feel good about having a boat, as though it will enable us to explore freely and to be happy.

  There are two bedrooms, one overlooking the sea and the other further back. The house is already stocked and a huge bowl of bursting figs rests on a table. The owner, who lives near by, comes to see us and asks if everything is OK. She speaks her small allocation of English confidently. She has strong, wiry hair. She looks at Noor, and says, ‘You must eat. Greek food makes strong.’

  Noor smiles. I think it is the first time I have seen her smile in two days.

  It’s evening. The port is busy as we walk towards the shops. In a long, straggling line, a flotilla of small dinghies, bearing children, is hurrying anxiously home, as small craft have done for millennia. Above us, high above, the bells of the church of the Virgin, Panaghia, ring around the bay. The sea is now golden and the hills beyond Emporios are being coated in a light wash of caramel so that their outlines melt.

  We buy more food – loukanica and wine, and a warm loaf of country bread, psomi. In another shop, close to the start of Kallistrata, I buy a canteloupe. The shopkeeper sniffs the melon to make sure it is ready; she tells us it’s good. When we get back to our house the riding lights on the working boats and the yachts and the grand palaces of the very rich and the very criminal are bright. The harbourmaster can just be seen gesticulating and blowing his whistle sharply and irritably, to indicate where the boats should wait their turn or where they should moor when their turn eventually comes. From the town, music drifts towards us. I think of Jerusalem. As the boats come in, we can hear singing and conversation. It’s true that voices carry across water.

  ‘This is a lovely place, thank you for bringing me here,’ says Noor as we sit, interested spectators, on the balcony
.

  I look at her. She doesn’t seem unhappy, but I am on edge.

  ‘Tomorrow, Agia Marina for the day.’

  I am speaking hopefully of tomorrow, but already I am dreading the night to come, when Noor will again be seized by her memories, which will cause her to convulse and moan, before waking up and clinging to me desperately, while I try to calm her. For now, we watch the last, late boats docking. Across the water there are strings of naked light bulbs on the quays and draped on the trees in front of the bars, and the music and laughter of carefree people reaches us. I hope that a few glasses of red wine will calm Noor – and me for that matter. She sips cautiously. Her legs are stretched out imploringly towards the sea. She turns to me.

  ‘Please don’t watch me all the time. You are making me nervous.’

  ‘Sorry, I want you to be happy, that’s all.’

  I watch instead a small gecko hovering around the outside light. It moves quickly to catch the moths that are drawn to the light. Its eyes roll happily as it swallows. Noor turns to me again, the side of her face caught in the light from inside the house. She looks ethereal. I think of African spirit children, who are believed to be at risk of being recalled at the whim of the spirits; they barely have a foothold in this world.

  ‘Richie, are you OK with being my brother?’

  I don’t know what she means. She may be asking if I am able to live as her brother rather than her lover, or she may be asking if I want – now that everything has changed – to move on. I can’t answer her question. We sit in silence.

  When I called Cathérine from London to tell her that my half-sister had been in hospital and I was taking her away for recuperation in the sunshine, she was a little surprised. She said she would go to a book fair in Paris for a week in that case; no problem.