And then a strange thought came to him. As he reached back into Sharon’s life, thinking of what she might have gained had faith and piety protected her, why, he asked himself, should that faith have been the Christian one? Suppose she had been adopted by a Muslim family: by the Kassabs, for instance. Wouldn’t her chances have been better? Protected by a code of honour and surrounded by an electric fire of prohibitions, she would have repelled her would-be abusers. This weird thought troubled Stephen greatly. He could not think of Sharon as other than the vulnerable, free-minded, poetic creature that she was; to imagine her wrapped and mummified in a spiritual burqa was to imagine another person entirely – and certainly not a person whom he could honestly love as he loved that girl.
He sat for an hour or more with those thoughts, hoping from time to time that some plan of action would emerge from them, but lapsing almost immediately into a corrosive doubt. To do nothing was impossible. But if Sharon kept strict omertà, and forbade him either to discuss her case with others or to know in detail what it was, there was nothing – nothing legitimate – that he could do. Maybe the social workers would step in to save her, but after his encounter with Iona Ferguson he had no confidence that such a thing could happen. And to wait for the police to take an interest would be to wait too long. Moreover, to discuss things with the cynical Jim Roberts was unthinkable. So the problem was Stephen’s, and the solution nowhere to be found.
The light was fading, and there was silence now outside. He lapsed into mental vacancy, his eyes resting on St Catherine, his hands folded as though in prayer. Gradually it dawned on him that there was another person in the chapel, breathing quietly at the back. He stood up, hesitated and then turned. The oak door was closing, and he watched the heavy keeper of the latch settle against the catch-plate with a clunk of wrought iron. He went out slowly, and took time in locking the door.
He found her crouched in a corner of the cloister that led to the main building of the school. She hid her face from him. Her slight form was pressed into a niche of stone, the knees drawn up, and the arms wrapped around the shins. He prayed that no one would see them like this. But he could not ignore her. When she looked up at last it was with a face rigid and white.
‘I werena spying on you, honest, sir. Only I saw you go in there and…’
‘And what, Sharon?’
‘It’s them, sir. Outside. I canna go past them, sir. I was waiting for you to take me. Only you dinna come. I had to find you.’
‘You can’t sit like that, Sharon. Get up and talk to me properly.’
She jumped immediately from her cocoon and stood to attention before him.
‘Sorry, sir.’
‘That wasn’t a reprimand. I just want us to speak to each other as equals.’
Sharon looked at him for a moment in silence.
‘I know that, sir.’
She straightened, fitting herself into her body as though for inspection.
‘Surely they have gone by now,’ he remarked.
‘Most of them, sir. Not all.’
Best not to enquire. Best to take her out now, catch sight of the ones that scare her. But then what? To track them down? To kill? Such thoughts frightened him. But they suggested a more honourable path than the one that she was urging.
‘OK, let’s go. We’ll walk together as far as my place, and you’ll go on from there to Angel Towers.’
She reached for her satchel, which she had stuffed into the niche out of sight, and went before him towards the front door of the school. Someone had sewn up the loose hem of her pullover and he noticed that her hair too was more tidy than usual, with the wisps that blew across her face held down with Kirby grips. Perhaps Mrs Williams had remembered her adopted daughter at last. Perhaps she was defending Sharon from the men who had targeted her. It was a comforting thought, but he did not pursue it since it was clear from her every gesture that Sharon was scared. As they approached the door she began to hold back; by the time they arrived there she was cowering behind him, emitting little moans of fear.
The door was on a Yale latch and swung shut when opened from inside. He turned the latch firmly and strode out onto the gravel forecourt. Sharon followed with little steps, clinging to his jacket.
The bus hired by the visitors had been driven away, and there was hardly a sign of the day’s demonstration: only a few crushed plastic bottles, a couple of Tesco shopping bags and a broken umbrella. The gravel had been scuffed into heaps and would need combing out by the gardener. A branch had been torn from the old hornbeam that was growing on one side of the forecourt, and Stephen was saddened by this, because the view of that tree from the staff-room was one of his consolations. Then he noticed a group of men dressed in Western clothes, loitering on the corner beyond the school gates. They were eying him curiously and one of them was holding what seemed to be a rolled up banner as though it were a sword, thrusting it from time to time into the air, and uttering a low guttural cry. Sharon was moaning and pressing against him. He thought with alarm of the possibility that some lingering member of staff might be watching their progress across the forecourt.
‘It’s all right, Sharon,’ he said. ‘Just walk normally. Nobody will hurt you.’
‘Canna, sir. Canna walk past them. You gotta take me another way.’
So those were the men, the ones whom he had come to hate, as he had hated no human being in his life before. He looked at them. They were two hundred yards away, four men in their twenties, two with Asian features. They were scowling now, from dark eyes that contained no flicker of friendliness. One of them, taller than the rest, had a squint, and wore a black woollen overcoat; he lounged against a lamppost, his hands in his pockets in gangster pose. Sharon’s fear communicated itself to Stephen. He steered her away from the men, towards the old canal that passed under the street a quarter of a mile beyond the entrance to the school, and which was now silted up and clogged with weeds. Alongside this canal there was a towpath, by which they could re-join the road that led to the network of warehouses behind Stephen’s flat.
Conscious of the eyes that followed them he walked with awkward steps, veering from side to side and beginning to push against Sharon as heavily as she pushed against him. Reaching the canal, they dropped down some wooden steps off the road-bridge. When her feet hit the towpath Sharon broke into a run. She pulled at his jacket and he began to run beside her. At the next bridge they mounted the wooden steps on to a road that ran parallel to the one they had left. Stephen paused to look behind.
‘There’s no need to run, Sharon. No one’s following.’
She stopped to look at him and in her eyes he read both fear and elation: fear of the others, elation at being in danger with him. Things constantly happened to deepen the intimacy between them, and he wondered how much she intended this. There was no doubt that her fear was real, but had it been necessary to run in that way, side by side, as though in flight from an invading army? He wondered.
They walked slowly now. He asked who the men were and why she was afraid of them. As expected, he received no reply. But when they entered the car park behind the flats she suddenly began to speak, whispering between tight lips so that he had to bend to hear the words.
‘Bogdan’s away now, gone to sea, collecting the goods. It’s OK with mum when Bogdan’s away. Only today she dunna come home till six. I could sit in your place, sir. I wunna disturb you, just sit there, read your books. Please, sir. Nobody will know.’
‘Look Sharon, all this is very irregular.’
Once again she had trapped him into using the wrong words, the truthful words. For ‘all this’ meant so much more than ‘this’.
‘Yes, sir. But there canna be nowt harm in it.’
Sharon was true to her word. She sat down at the dining table that he never used and took out the folders from her satchel. For half an hour she bent over her work. Then she took a couple of books from the bookcase across to her place at the table. She read in complete silence, sometimes pa
using to write on a piece of paper, while he sat at his desk pretending to work, striving to think of something other than the quiet presence behind him. When he turned at last he saw that she was nodding to herself. She seemed to have recovered from her fear. He asked what she was reading.
‘Yeats, sir. ‘Byzantium’, what you told us to read.’
‘How do you find it?’
‘It’s huge, sir. But it gives me words. Unpurged images of day: that’s just how it is, sir. But with me they dunna recede: those images that yet fresh images beget.’
‘I know that, Sharon. It is why you should talk.’
‘Canna, sir. Better go now.’
She rose quickly and had packed her satchel and reached the door before he could get up from his desk. The fear had returned and she stood looking at him with rigid features.
‘I’ll see you home, Sharon.’
‘No, sir. This is home.’
‘As you wish, Sharon.’
‘I do wish it, sir.’
‘I didn’t mean…’
But what did he mean? To take her back to the place of destruction, when she was his, a thousand times his? He stood with one hand on the desk, fighting himself. And he remembered the man with a squint, who leaned in his overcoat against a lamppost, eyeing him like an enemy. Suddenly it came home to Stephen that he was engaged with this man in a mortal struggle, that if he lived this man must be destroyed. And with that thought came a great surge of relief. It was as though he had made a decision, and at last was free.
When Sharon turned quickly and slipped with a whispered ‘goodbye’ on to the stairs, Stephen waited for a moment and then took his coat and followed her. He had to walk quickly to keep her in sight, and by the time she reached Angel Towers, where she melted through the abandoned trolleys into the foyer of Block A, he was out of breath.
He stood by the lift, which was occupied. The illuminated panel showed the carriage stopping at the fifteenth floor. He pressed the button, and studied the ranks of bell pushes on the graffiti-covered wall to his left. Most of the name-tabs were blank or illegible, and he could see no ‘Williams’ on the fifteenth floor. He entered the lift nevertheless, propelled by a reckless desire to move in her shadow, to find her as she truly was, to trap her and to cut off her flight.
The lift smelled of sweat and urine, and its walls were covered in obscenities scrawled in black with a felt-tipped pen. On the fifteenth floor two large flats faced three smaller ones across a corridor. The walls seemed to have been freshly painted in bright yellow, but had already been sprayed here and there with illegible squiggles of graffiti. There was music and someone was shouting at a child. Two of the smaller flats had nameplates beside their doors, and one of them said ‘Williams’ in Sharon’s neat handwriting. Underneath, pasted to the wall, was a lozenge of white cardboard with the name ‘Krupnik’ scrawled in biro.
Stephen lingered outside the door, not knowing what his next step should be. There was a sound of television, and two of the Williams boys were arguing about the programme. Pots and plates were being moved about. Then a woman, Mrs Williams he assumed, raised her voice above the noise, saying ‘turn that thing off, I’m on the phone.’ Stephen walked quietly away. Someone had called the lift, so he decided to take the stairs, which were lit by fluorescent lights set in walls of greenish concrete. All the surfaces were covered with the same black graffiti, a repeated pattern that, in its meaninglessness, seemed to exude a bestial anger. It was as though worms had been spat on this wall, spoiling its unclaimed spaces, and preventing any human thought from breeding there. The sight infected Stephen with a chill. To be a teacher of literature now: what a picture of futility. And yet there was Sharon.
He came across her on the eleventh floor. She was crumpled in a corner of the stairs, crying silently. The books from her satchel were spilled on the concrete landing. There were two folders, a battered edition of The Tempest, and his own copy of Yeats, which she must have smuggled from his bookcase.
‘Sharon!’
He was on his knees beside her. She held her hands close to her face, shaking her head and refusing to allow him to prise her hands away. There was blood between her fingers and the sleeve of her jacket was torn at the wrist.
‘Listen, Sharon. I’ll not allow this to happen to you. You must tell me who did this and why.’
She dropped her hands suddenly. The blood was flowing from her cheek, which was red from a sidelong blow and cut against the cheekbone. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed the blood away.
‘Why are you here, sir? Dunna let them see you.’
She was moaning again and struggling to her feet. In order to hide his pity he began to gather up her books. She was leaning on the wall, holding the handkerchief to her cheek, and reaching out with her free hand for the satchel. He took the hand in his and led her towards the lift.
‘No, sir. I’ll walk up.’
She was shaking, and he held her beneath the arm to steady her. She spoke in a whisper.
‘Take me to the fifteenth floor, sir.’
He took the weight of her body on his arm and helped her step by step on the staircase. At the fifteenth floor she turned to him.
‘You dinna ought to have followed me, sir,’ she whispered. ‘It was because of you he hit me. And dunna you never go in that lift.’
‘Why is the lift so dangerous, Sharon?’
‘You go now. Please.’
He stared at her, confused and wretched. She walked alone to her door, where she turned and pointed to the stairs. He hesitated, and then descended with a bleak sense of having intruded without right into Sharon’s life. Why did his attempts to respect her end like this, as though the presumption were his? Maybe it was always like that with a precocious child. But it was too late to back off, too late by far. Sharon was his and would be his forever.
Chapter 17
Abdul Kassab had written a letter to the local paper supporting Mrs Gawthrop and St Catherine’s Academy. Following threats from local Islamists, he had warned his sons to stay away from school on the day of the demonstration. But Farid’s curiosity had proved too great. From the gardener’s shed where he was hiding he had a good view of the front of the school, and a sidelong perspective on the crowd.
He accepted Abdul’s view, that religious education is not a matter of learning the Koran by rote, but a matter of opening the heart and the mind to illumination. And he acknowledged that the divine light enters through many pathways, the Christian Gospels being one of them, the poems of Rumi another. But how, he wondered, can you convey this tolerant vision to people who believe that faith lies in recitation, ritual and the five times daily utterance of words that Allah must surely be fed up with hearing by now? He did not despise the crowd of protestors, though he found it hard to believe that Islam meant anything very much to the belligerent young people who had joined them. And as for that woman in a burqa, his blood boiled to see her, as she shouted disgraceful words that no woman should use, while hiding her mouth behind a screen.
Abdul viewed the burqa and the niqab as forms of unforgiveable rudeness and he approved the French law that banned them from the public realm. In the society that has offered us protection, he told his sons, people are face to face, confessing to their faults, meeting each other’s eyes, and in general showing that they are free, fair and accountable. We commit a terrible offence by hiding our faces when others so openly expose themselves to judgment. The headscarf, yes, but not the veil. Farid thought of Muhibbah Shahin, who had worn neither garment, but nevertheless held her face away from the world, as though she would return your look only in some private sphere to which you were not – yet – invited. That, in Farid’s eyes, was purity – a quality instilled in the flesh, and not worn in a strip of cotton.
There was a commotion, and the noise increased to a roar. The door of the school had opened and Mr Haycraft was standing on the steps, four frightened children in the St Catherine’s uniform clinging to his jacket. His fa
ce was pale, and he put his hands out in front of him as though to soothe a pack of dogs. Then, holding his head high, he walked towards the gates of the school. Farid had not entirely recovered his feelings for his teacher. Given the opportunity to enter the sacred sphere where Muhibbah Shahin was sovereign Mr Haycraft had decided instead to desecrate it, and Farid had found it hard to forgive him. Nevertheless it had been tacitly decided – by whom Farid was not sure – that their readings of the Koran would continue, and Mr Haycraft had even, on one occasion, volunteered some comments on Farid’s poems, suggesting that florid imagery of the Persian kind is not enough to lift a mortal human subject into the realm of spiritual perfection. Being a fair-minded person Farid took this criticism to heart, and set about improving his style.
As Mr Haycraft led the children past the crowd, therefore, receiving the insults as though leaning against a storm, Farid was able to look on his teacher objectively, as an imperfect but in many ways admirable human being, a gentleman who lived by the rule of kindness, and who was now exhibiting a rare dignity and courage. For a moment he was tempted to come out of hiding and walk beside Mr Haycraft, just to show these hooligans the contempt in which he held them. But, unlike his teacher, he would be the legitimate target of revenge, and revenge, he knew from his Basra years, was both a way of life and a pact with the Devil – the Devil from whom Colonel Matthews had rescued them.
The teacher left the children at the bus stop. Seeing him return the crowd abandoned the small amount of restraint that the children had inspired in them. The woman in the burqa had somehow got the word ‘rapist’ into her head, and was shouting it through the cloth in a rhythmical chant. Others were hurling more cogent insults. One smooth-shaven man in a two piece suit and tie repeated la illah ila allah in a tone almost too soft to be heard, but with a constant admonitory wagging of his finger in Mr Haycraft’s face. The teacher entered the school, returning instantly with another six children. He was visibly flustered now, and ushered the children before him as though they might protect him from the worst. After five trips to the bus stop Mr Haycraft returned through the crowd with bowed head and shaking hands, and Farid’s heart went out to him. He cursed the tormentors of this innocent man and for a moment meditated revenge against them. But his father’s strictures against revenge again took up their habitual place in his thoughts, and he sat on the gardener’s pile of hessian sacks in a fit of melancholy, dreading what this conflict might mean for the school and for his own hopes of a solid English education.
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