‘Is there some particular person you have in mind, Justin?’
‘Yes, someone employed in my office. She might even be known to you, since her family are in Angel Towers. They have already made an attempt to kidnap her. She was managing to live a normal life as a normal modern girl. But she disappeared from the office last summer. I want to find her.’
‘And why do you want to find her?’
What was it about Iona that made him tell the truth? The calm, even voice, perhaps, the fact, decided tacitly between them, he didn’t know when or how, that sex was off the agenda, the knowledge that things had once gone badly for Iona as they had gone badly for him, and that she, like him, had entered a stage of lonely scepticism, encumbered by stale convictions that she could not quite discard. Whatever it was, he returned her friendly look and said
‘Because I love her.’
‘What a mistake,’ she replied.
‘It’s a mistake that many people make.’
‘But if she has made no effort to be in touch?’
‘Maybe she can’t.’
‘Or maybe she won’t.’
‘Well yes,’ he admitted, ‘there is that possibility.’
The thought was cold and cheerless. But Iona had earned the right to her cynicism, and he did not blame her. He told her the basic facts. He described his failed encounters with the police and with Muhibbah’s family and he learned that Iona knew a lot about the Shahin family, which was high up in the Afghan community and well connected with the mosque. He learned that Muhibbah had two difficult brothers, who had flunked school and entered the criminal underworld. Nobody in his right mind would mess with a family like that, certainly not Iona, who valued her reputation as an anti-racist and had a branch of her department to run. Once more Justin stared at the truth – that he alone had a motive to rescue Muhibbah.
‘But don’t you see what she has done to you, Justin?’ Iona said, with a measure of urgency.
‘What exactly has she done to me?’
‘She has captured you, used you, precisely because she could never belong to you. Even if she has run away from a forced marriage, she nevertheless sees marriage as Ahmed saw it when he chucked me – namely, as a contract between families, not a union of hearts. Meanwhile she has to bundle her sexuality into herself, so that it can exchange at the proper price. And that’s the bit you can’t resist: the call for total protection, and the box of secrets opened at last, just as the contract says.’
She said this not bitterly, but with a slight shaking of the head, to indicate a truth learned the hard way. And she stared down at her hands, wrapped around the glass on the table. Despite all the evidence, Justin rejected her verdict. His love was so pure and unwavering that he could not think of Muhibbah, except as a woman who had already locked his image into that box of secrets that she held against her heart.
‘You see,’ Iona went on, looking down at her glass, ‘we have tried to make a world without sexual difference, a world in which women and men do the same things, obey the same rules, mingle publicly on equal terms. And to do this we have had to suppress our feeling for the other sex. We give up on courtship; we stop trying to make men mysterious to women and women mysterious to men. And the urgency of our passions seeps away. With them it is entirely different. They hide the private from the public, the home from the world outside, the body from its clothes. So the mystery of sex remains. That’s why we have such trouble with the vulnerable kids that we take into care. Place a girl with a family of whites and she will immediately fall for the Muslim boy next door, hoping to enter that mysterious world as I did, and doomed to be chucked aside like a puppet when the passion has been spent.’
He recalled the lyrics of ‘Master of Puppets’: ‘Master, master, Where’s the dream that I’ve been after? Master, master promised only lies…’ And he became lost in thought.
‘Earlier this year,’ Iona was saying, ‘I had to deal with such a case, another problem festering in Angel Towers. It was a schoolteacher came to see me, adamant that one of his kids had been raped. And the proof? A fantasy story about the Asian boy next door, the same old story. And he begged me to intervene, to move the girl elsewhere, as though safe accommodation were to be had for the asking, when all the girl had to learn was the truth that you learn the hard way, as I learned it, namely that there can be a multicultural society, but never multicultural love. Still,’ she added, looking brightly up at him, ‘I like you so much, Justin, that I am going to help you find your Muhibbah. And who knows, she may be the exception that proves the rule.’
They drove back to the city through the Edwardian suburbs, Iona chatting about the unprecedented demographic changes that had made her job so exciting and so difficult, Justin lost in sombre reflections on the meaning of what she had said. It was at the moment of waving goodbye to her, as she drove away from his flat, that his mobile telephone rang, and he fumbled for it in the raincoat that he carried over his arm, convinced that it would at last be a call from Muhibbah. When he finally extracted the phone it had ceased to ring. But there was a voice-message.
‘Justin. It’s Millie. Please ring me. It’s urgent.’
Chapter 16
Sharon broke away at last, hiding her face in her hands. Stephen stared at her in silence. And then, because she was shivering, he wrapped his coat around her shoulders.
He stood by the door of his flat, at the threshold between the outside and the inside of his life. For three months now he had not known to which of those sides Sharon belonged. All his feelings pleaded for her, and he held on to his shreds of reason with no confidence that they would save him. He watched his hand reach out to brush the hair from her forehead, and it was as though it were the hand of someone else, mocking him with a mimicry of his own desire.
‘Listen, Sharon,’ he said, ‘I can’t offer you a home. But if you need protection there are ways of obtaining it. I just need you to talk.’
‘I dunna ask for nowt, sir. I only says what I feel.’
‘So why can’t you talk to me?’
‘I only wanna say, sir, the bad things, sir, them things dunna happen to me, not the me what’s yours, sir. You inna crying, sir, are you?’
He turned away. In each of us, he thought, is a lake of tears, and a boat, always waiting, moored at its edge.
‘Only see, sir, you mustna tell no one nowt, and then I’ll be all right. It’s what I come to tell you, sir.’
From the corner of his eye he glimpsed her beseeching face, the face of a traumatised child, wrestling for the first time in her life with love and longing. If she would speak to him they might make a sensible plan for her rescue. But she was a girl of keen intelligence; her plan was to have no plans, so that when the crisis came – and surely it was coming soon – she would have no other refuge but him.
‘I’ll be all right, see. Mum’s on her own now. She’ll see I’m OK.’
‘That’s right, Sharon. That’s how it should be. I’ll walk you home.’
‘Like I said, sir…’
‘To the place where you live, Sharon.’
She took his coat from her shoulders and held it out for him. He wrapped it again around her and gently urged her down the steps towards the street. She went meekly, like a defeated thing.
Often at the weekends, tired of reading, tired of music, tired of beating his head against the unseen walls that surrounded him, he would walk in the neighbourhood. He enjoyed the firm stonework of the Victorian and Edwardian houses and sometimes sat in the small park behind the Anglican Church, built in stone by an apprentice of George Gilbert Scott. But he had never walked past Angel Towers, and a growing aversion prevented him from looking in that direction. He ushered the girl before him along the alley. They emerged into an arena of concrete, lit by orange sodium lamps that were flickering into reluctant life in the dusk. The two towers rose from a sea of rubbish, their lights glowing high above him behind curtains of grimy lace. Some boys were skateboarding on an improvised ramp of
wooden doors. Another was sitting on an old mattress in tears. The boarded-up windows of a ground-floor flat announced ‘Cal Gaffrey is a perv’ in orange spray-paint. The vista was forlorn beyond anything he had imagined, and he pressed his hand against the coat that covered the girl’s shoulder, overcome with protective emotion.
‘Which one’s yours, Sharon?’
‘Dunna matter, sir. You leave me here.’
With a sudden movement she broke away from him and thrust his coat into his hands. She stood for a moment, her pale skin translucent in the twilight, her eyes fixed on his. Then she ran to the door of Block A, disappearing through a pair of shopping trolleys like a will o’ the wisp through reeds. Stephen turned back the way he had come, recalling her provocative words: ‘home is where you are, sir.’
Two weeks later there was turmoil at St Catherine’s Academy. It was a turmoil that Stephen had seen coming since the beginning of term. Junior boys who attended early morning lessons at the madrasah of the mosque, and who failed to memorise their verses for the day, had been arriving in school beaten and tearful. Mrs Gawthrop, a middle-aged lady as Victorian as her name, who taught history and biology to the juniors, had made a point of protesting to the parents. It had become her personal stand against multiculturalism. She had even gone to the mosque in order to remind the imam that corporal punishment is illegal. The imam refused to talk to her, so she had complained to the police. The imam too had lodged a complaint, saying that it was offensive to his religion and his office to be addressed directly by a woman. Now the elders of the mosque had arranged a demonstration, which had been backed by the sociology department of the local university. The young and controversial Professor Rosebud, acting head of department and professor of social work, had even written to the local paper, denouncing Mrs Gawthrop as a racist and her school as a hotbed of Islamophobia.
Stephen did not accept Mrs Gawthrop’s view of things. Of course it was wrong that children should be beaten – though a few months as a schoolteacher had somewhat dented Stephen’s conviction in this matter. In any case the controversy was more about the subject of knowledge than the means for acquiring it. When parents regard their faith as their most precious possession, surely they were right to pass it on to their children? And since the school could not do it, the mosque had the right and the duty to do it instead.
So Stephen believed, and he arrived at school that morning half sympathising with the sparse crowd that had gathered in the forecourt. A few men with beards were dressed in the jalabiya and headscarf of the mujahidoun. But most wore English-style suits beneath raincoats and spread umbrellas. A placard declared that ‘Islam is the solution’ and another, neatly written out on a wooden board with a felt-tipped pen, and held by the polite Mr Ismail, owner of a corner store close to the school, announced that ‘the heart of knowledge is the knowledge of God’. Stephen greeted Mr Ismail, who stared for a moment in embarrassment but then smiled and said ‘Good Morning’.
In the drizzle of a cold March day the men strove to maintain their serious looks. But squinting and blinking endowed their damp faces with a theatrical appearance. It was as though they were rehearsing for the real event, which was to occur in better weather on another day. The driver of the bus they had hired preferred to stay in his vehicle, which was parked outside the school gates. He would occasionally lift vacant eyes from a heavily ornamented copy of the Holy Koran, look round him as though assessing the weather, and then return to his finger on the page.
In Stephen’s view of things, these people had other grievances than the one placed in their minds by Mrs Gawthrop. In countless ways they had seen their customs, their values, their family ties and their religion marginalised, despised and even spat upon. They had come to this country looking for material prosperity and moral dignity. And they found themselves without work, and surrounded by a corrosive nihilism. Surely their first concern must be to protect their children, to implant in them the respect for faith and custom that Stephen had witnessed in the Kassab brothers, but which was – let’s face it – absent from the average British child. Were they not right to cling to the tried and tested source of wisdom that they carried with them everywhere and which they would never trade?
As he greeted Mr Ismail, however, Stephen became aware of another contingent of demonstrators, who had emerged from a bus that was disappearing towards the city. Young people in jeans and donkey-jackets, led by a long-haired man in a duffle coat, were converging on the school in a serpentine phalanx. Among them were girls wearing headscarves, surrounding a figure covered from head to foot in a burqa – recruited, Stephen supposed, to show the commitment of the university sociologists to the fight against Islamophobia. Two of the boys held a placard saying ‘Don’t tolerate intolerance’; others had begun to shout ‘Gawthrop, Over the Top’ in a rhythmical chant. In matters of the greatest importance, Stephen believed, it was debate and not threat that was needed. And if one side to a dispute should begin to shout abuse, disqualifying all opposing views as a kind of ‘phobia’, Stephen’s instinct was to close his ears against the noise. He walked on quickly into the school, alarmed at the thought of how things might develop.
The Headmistress failed to awaken much interest from the police, who made a routine showing and then retired to a patrol car. She therefore decided to close the school, sending home any pupils who had made it past the blockade. The children were frightened, and Stephen spent the morning conducting them in groups through the shouting mêlée, reassuring them, as best he could, that the threats were in no way directed at them, and that there had been a misunderstanding which would soon be resolved. After an hour of this he returned to the staffroom with trembling legs and palpitating heart, unable to rid himself of the insults that had been crammed into his ears like corn into the gullet of a goose: racist, abuser, even ‘rapist’ from the person in the burqa who screamed at him through the cloth and who, to Stephen’s hearing, was almost certainly a man.
He took the key from the staff-room and let himself into the chapel. He would sit it out there until the noise had subsided and the crowd dispersed.
The Christian religion was a fleeting and uncertain visitor in Stephen’s life. He was the only child in a family of atheists, who viewed worship as a hobby of simple people, like stamp collecting, clay pigeon shooting or model railways. At the time of his parents’ divorce, when he was studying for his A-levels in a North-London grammar school, he had read the New Testament and taken to visiting a Roman Catholic church. Later, at Oxford, he had attended evensong in the college chapel, partly to enjoy the singing of the choir, but also in search of a peace that he needed and which always seemed to lie just out of reach: the peace that passeth understanding, as he learned from St Paul and the Book of Common Prayer.
By then he had acquired, from Bach and Haydn as much as from the study of English literature, an acquaintance with the Christian faith and its cultural meaning. He had joined the extensive crowd of believers in belief. The Christian religion, he decided, was the heart of our civilisation. This heart had grown old and weak, and culture had been put in the place of it. But the heart transplant didn’t take, and our civilisation, after gasping for a while, had died.
In the opinion of Harry Fisher, the long-haired expert on Virginia Woolf who had been appointed as Stephen’s tutor, Stephen was busy with the work of mourning. He was conducting the spiritual exercise through which the grief over one loved thing becomes a welcome extended to the next. ‘And that’s great, Steve,’ Harry had said, ‘but after religion what next can there be?’ Stephen had no idea. Along with the millions of civilisation’s orphans, he was waiting for a revelation that he knew would never come. Yet, in the real troubles nothing else, he believed, had ever offered consolation. For in the real troubles it is not the body but the soul that is threatened. Such, if it deserved the name, was Stephen’s faith.
There had been few real troubles in Stephen’s life: his parents’ divorce, yes, which left him bruised and guilty, belie
ving himself to have played an obscure part in causing it; a love affair at Oxford, which ended in bitterness and jealousy when a rival appeared; his father’s sudden death during his final Oxford year; but otherwise only the routine difficulties that lie across the path of a poetic but indolent bachelor. Sharon, however, was different. Here desire wore a mask of duty, and duty forbade desire. Sharon needed help, and refused all other ways of obtaining it: he alone could protect her. But she also wanted him, with an urgency that her situation fully justified, and which tore through the rules like a hornet through a spider’s web.
He had begun to imagine himself alone with her, escaped from their situation, able to plant his kisses on that adorable adoring face, and to drive all her demons away. But imagining this he also summoned the jealousy that she did not deserve, the pain of what they had done to her, which was a sword passing through her body into his. And then the tears would flow: tears of anger and humiliation, and an urgent desire to place all this before her, to beg her forgiveness and to show the respect that she longed for, and which was, he knew, the only salve for her hurt.
He looked up at the solemn face of St Catherine, a face expressing another kind of love, in which neither sex nor selfishness had a voice. Humans, he thought, could not rise to such a love by their own efforts but would always need the help of prayer. ‘Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers/ Whose loves in higher love endure.’ So Tennyson wrote. But prayer is effective only for those who believe in it. He wondered if Sharon prayed, if she had ever been taught the words that would break those ‘chains of enchantment’ that had been thrown around her.
The image came of himself in the role of father, the father she never had, putting her to bed with a prayer. He rehearsed the words of the Hail Mary, imagining that he spoke them above her tired form, that she felt the warmth of his protection and that she fell into a dreamless sleep from which she awoke fresh, pure, to ‘a life that leads melodious days’, like the girl she wanted to be and whom she tried to create in her beautiful essays. And this image, which seemed to justify all that he felt for her, accused him too of an illicit desire, told him he must find another way of loving her than the one she had slapped down before him as a challenge.
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