Tree of Pearls

by Louisa Young

  No one was touching him.

  I remembered my leg when it seemed dead. The weight, the pain, the cold damp grey-yellowness of flesh. Broken. What a word that is.

  What had I said to Sa’id? Bind it up, and it will heal? Some things heal.

  Some things can’t.

  I found that I was crossing myself, which is not something I often do.

  When I returned Sa’id was in my position, holding Chrissie.

  ‘Did you see what happened?’ I asked him.

  ‘I wasn’t looking,’ he said. ‘I was following you.’

  I thought about that for a moment. I realized that I would have to think about it again.

  ‘We should take her down,’ I said.

  He carried her. Remembered Harry at the funeral, supporting her in her fur coat and stillettos. Oh Chrissie.

  *

  We gathered at the doorway of the hypostyle hall. Seventy-two vandalized faces of Hathor stared out and down and back and away. I wrapped my scarf round Chrissie as she was starting to shiver. Sat her on the step for a moment. The policemen were talking to each other. Radios crackling. Sa’id was talking to one of them. The policeman was saying that he didn’t understand.

  Sa’id, his face like a blade, came to where I was sitting with Chrissie. He looked down at us for a moment, then squatted down by me.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he said.

  ‘Capable,’ I said, but guardedly.

  ‘Capable of what?’ It was the same kind voice, but the blade was in it.

  I looked into his eyes. I still only want to kiss him; that is still, even here, even now, all I want.

  ‘You know everything I know,’ I said. ‘I didn’t see what happened.’

  ‘But you ran – you set off like a … you ran.’

  ‘We’re not going to give a judgement here,’ I said.

  He snorted. ‘What, wait until you have got your story straight?’

  Oh, no. No, Sa’id.

  ‘Is that what you think? Is that what you think?’

  ‘It could look like that,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what to think.’

  I tightened my arm around Chrissie, wooden doll beneath my embrace.

  ‘I think she had every reason to …’

  ‘So did you,’ he said.

  ‘Stop it! Stop it! I’m telling you …’ I was angry. Oh my god was I angry. This had not crossed my mind.

  ‘She may have. Maybe she did. Maybe he fell. Maybe she was going to and changed her mind. Maybe he was trying to push her. I didn’t see.’

  ‘You ran to her because you thought she would? Or because it would distract attention?’

  A dark and utter fury took my heart.

  ‘Sa’id,’ I said, ‘fuck off.’ And went to the policeman, who found the taxi driver, who, after some toing and froing and fussing and talking in quiet, intense voices, drove us, together with two police vans, back along the stripes of the land and the river and the sky to Luxor. I don’t know what Sa’id did. I held on to Chrissie all the way, and managed to ascertain that we were being taken to the hotel, where a doctor would come, not to the police station. So that was OK.

  THIRTEEN

  The Winter Palace

  When Amun Ra first got pissed off with humanity, as creator gods tend to sooner or later, he created a lioness called Sekhmet, and sent her into Egypt to eat everybody. Which she did, with great pleasure. After a while Amun Ra got over his pique, and told Sekhmet she could stop now, but she had acquired a taste for blood and didn’t want to stop. So Amun Ra sent his servants to make gallons and gallons of beer, and they stained it red with the red clay of Elephantine, the island at Aswan, and they went to where Sekhmet slept among the reeds and poured the beer into the fields around her. When she awoke, she thought the beer was blood left over from her previous rampages, and drank it greedily. Then, of course, she was drunk, and she lay down to sleep again and Amun Ra’s servants picked her up and carried her to their master.

  Sekhmet, he said, you may not eat people any more. But because you have been my loyal servant, I will give you a greater power over mankind: you will be Hathor, goddess of love, and all humanity will be your victims.

  Which was running through my mind in several directions at once as I sat with Chrissie under the huge red chandelier in the hall of the Winter Palace Hotel, waiting for the policemen to say it was all right for us to go upstairs.

  So far, no one had seen. Chrissie and Eddie had been by the south-west corner of the roof. The guides were mostly inside. The few visitors were inside. My panic and dash had distracted the people at the teashop. The guards and tourist police had been gathered at the front. Nero, Caesarion and Cleopatra were carved on the walls, what could they know? And Hathor stared out below, oblivious to what went on above her.

  Chrissie wasn’t saying anything. She hadn’t said a word since I had taken her in my arms on the roof of the temple, under the huge sky. I didn’t even know if she had gathered that he was dead. And I didn’t know what had happened up there.

  I didn’t know. I just remembered the look in her eye when she said, ‘Oh is he now’, to the news that he was alive.

  When we went upstairs to our rooms the doctor came, and gave her something, I don’t know what. I wasn’t, despite my best attempts to be strong and capable, fit to judge or observe or have an opinion. I was only strong and capable at all because she wasn’t and someone had to be. We put her to bed, then when the doctor had gone I ran a bath in her bathroom, and put myself in the beautiful hot water to sing to my baby, and then I lay down on the other bed in her room, and if I slept I didn’t notice, but I didn’t notice anything else either. I think I slept. I may have cried.

  I came to myself around eleven, wide awake, frightened, hungry. Chrissie was sleeping, breathing shallow. Face calm. What is she going through now? I didn’t want to leave her but I couldn’t stay. The balcony called me to come and look at the river, and across the river, to the layers of purple and silver that make up the Nile night. I wouldn’t go. I didn’t want to look.

  I wanted to go to the bar and drink vodka martinis and listen to the terrible piano player. I wanted, a little of me wanted, now that he was dead, to think about him. Just for a bit. I wondered, briefly, where they had taken him.

  In the end I left a note for Chrissie, went to my room and got dressed, and went down through the chill of the evening to the garden behind the hotel, where 100-foot palms and fluffy dollops of mimosa stood around on the green smooth lawns like English people at a garden party. Glass globe lights like beached moons hung along the edges of the winding paths: way down at the bottom the swimming pool gleamed silent and blue. Orion above, and the moon, filling out, and every other star. Orion is Osiris. I sat on a bench near the small aviary, and listened to the rustling, murmuring sounds of sleeping pigeons.

  From beyond this visitors’ oasis came the sound of the town, lively with the inverted timetable of Ramadan. I had never before this trip stayed in such separatist institutions. How come, on a Ramadan night, I can’t smell frankincense? I am cut off from an Egypt united in Ramadan, and I am cut off from Sa’id.

  ‘Fuck off’is a fairly ambivalent message.

  And I had left. Which I think I had promised I would never do. Maybe I hadn’t promised him, but …

  I suppose, because his mother left, it is all that much worse.

  Oh, well done, Angeline. Well spotted. Deep psychological insight there.

  A young man emerged out of the dusk, as they do. Did I want anything, he wondered. Yes, I said, I want food. The restaurant has only just closed … but then he said, you wait, madame, and I just sat, as I had been sitting, and in fifteen minutes or so he came back with a plate of beef and vegetables. Food. Bloody marvellous. He waited until I had finished, and then took my plate away again, saying as he left that there was a man asking for me, should he tell him where I am?

  A quick clutch in my heart as I feared and then realized – yes! – that it could not be Eddie
. Followed by the slow clutch, that it can only be Sa’id.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  I’d tell him. That was all. I can’t carry on trying to control this situation. If he thinks I planned with Chrissie to kill Eddie, then fuck it. I can’t help what he thinks. I can just tell him: that I didn’t. And that I’m pregnant.

  How could he think it? How could he?

  Ha ha. My outrage was just not taking off. I was simply incapable of being angry with Sa’id for thinking so badly of me – why? Because he was right, up to a point. I probably would have been capable of killing Eddie. Certainly anyone could have died in the chaos that surrounded and informed him and me. After all, I hit him over the head with a poker. I could very well have killed him then. And Sa’id knows it, and actually he probably doesn’t think the worse of me for it. This is still a land of blood revenge, after all.

  What I wouldn’t be capable of was planning it, of doing it on purpose: plotting with Chrissie that she should lure him up there, and I should panic and divert attention just at the right moment. Nor was I capable of trusting her enough, even if I was inclined to plotting murder – and anyway we didn’t know Eddie was here, and it was pure coincidence Chrissie meeting people who knew him, and anyway why would I have dragged Sa’id along?

  Stop it. You’re not being called on to defend yourself. If Sa’id accuses you, then defend yourself. Don’t leap up to greet your misfortunes. I just have to talk to him, and then … OK things aren’t so great. But they’re not as bad as they might be.

  And Eddie is dead.

  Having been through it before, when he wasn’t dead, my reaction this time was muted in comparison. Muted, but deep. I opened my eyes wide to the cool night and put my hands to my face. So he’s dead. Good.

  At that moment the lad reappeared, leading a taller figure behind him. Why is he leading him? As if Sa’id needed showing around.

  I turned my face away. I didn’t know where to look, how to look. My face didn’t know what shape to take.

  But at least he had come.

  So when I did look up at the figure in moonshadow before me, I was kind of smiling. But it wasn’t Sa’id. It was Harry.

  Curiously, this was almost the most shocking thing to have happened. Harry, in Egypt? Does not compute. It was as if he had walked in on me naked, or –

  ‘Where’s Lily!’ I cried.

  ‘With Brigid,’ he said. ‘I told her I was coming to get you and she was fine, she was pleased.’

  I stared at him. Confused, on several levels.

  ‘How?’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘How did you tell her? How did you get here?’

  ‘I flew.’

  ‘But I talked to you this morning.’

  ‘Wonders of modern technology,’ he said. ‘I flew. It happens.’

  It seemed too quick. I felt that Luxor was farther away than that. It somehow threatened the integrity of this other life, my Egyptian dream. (There’s a song that they play on the plane, called ‘My Egyptian Dream’. Patriotism and handsome young people, shots of the pyramids in the video.) I didn’t like Harry being here in Egypt.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I said.

  ‘You needed me.’

  That shut me up for a moment.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘Oh bollocks,’ I said.

  ‘Would you leave you alone and pregnant in the same town as Eddie Bates, bent on saving a madwoman?’ he asked.

  ‘Shut up with this pregnant thing,’ I snapped. ‘I’m fine.’

  He sat down beside me on the bench. ‘It’s nice here, isn’t it?’ he said. I turned my head to look at him. What’s he playing at?

  ‘I saw my mum pregnant five times, Angel,’ he said. ‘I have nephews and nieces and I know where they came from. I know that pregnancy exists and that a pregnant woman, being busy on another level, needs stuff from those around her. I’m not casting aspersions on your ability to deal with stuff, I’m just accepting reality.’ He breathed the night air. ‘I recommend it,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t need you,’ I said. ‘Anyway, Sa’id’s looking after me.’

  Harry said nothing. Just glanced around him, noting absence. A movement which spoke volumes.

  We sat in that loud silence for a few moments.

  ‘Will you come inside? I’m getting cold,’ he said. I assumed that he said he was getting cold rather than wasn’t I getting cold in the same way that I would use that trick with Lily. But I was getting cold, and we went in, leaving the cold night scent of mimosa on the air behind us.

  *

  The bar was still open. The pianist was playing ‘New York, New York’. Harry took one look around, ordered a martini, and then laughed at it when it came because it was so bad (90 per cent vermouth and full of ice). I had hot chocolate, which came tasting of cinnamon and cardamom and almonds. We went to the other end of the room, to an overstuffed leather sofa under a shelf full of Edwardian entomological encyclopaedias and volumes by E. Wallis Budge, by a dark wood fireplace. Green baize and low lighting. It could have been a library in an English country house, except that it so obviously wasn’t. Memories of colonialism crept through the walls like rot.

  ‘So?’ said Harry.

  ‘What?’ said I. If Sa’id and I can’t help understanding each other, Harry and I can’t help misunderstanding. And if we don’t, we pretend to.

  Oh no, that’s not true. That’s the past. Don’t fall into it again. The difference is that Harry and I, having mislaid our initial God-given understanding and passed through a period of incomprehension and lies, have learned to understand each other again. The truth is, we have healed, Harry and I.

  ‘Fill me in,’ he said. ‘How come you’re hanging round in gardens in the middle of the night all alone, when the last I heard you’re scared to death, grabbing Chrissie and leaving on the next train? Where’s Chrissie? Where’s Eddie, for example? Where’s Sa’id, even, but perhaps we can come back to that.’

  He doesn’t know.

  ‘Have you talked to anybody?’ I asked him. ‘Since you got here?’

  ‘Like who?’ he said. ‘I came straight here and asked for you.’

  At that moment there was a movement at the bar. Where previously the barman had been lounging, half asleep, suspended in time, waiting for us to finish but not really caring either way, there was now a conversation. Unlikely, at this hour, in this quiet tourist season, in Ramadan. I looked up. It was the small policeman from years ago, from when Nadia and I went to Dendara, and we were being pointed out to him.

  ‘Eddie is dead,’ I murmured to Harry. ‘He fell from the roof of a temple out in the countryside. Chrissie was with him. It’s unclear exactly what happened. She’s upstairs, tranquillized.’

  He turned to me in astonishment. His eyes were alight.

  ‘You look happy,’ I said.

  ‘Jesus fuck,’ he said. ‘What the …’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I just want to go to bed. There’s a policeman coming to talk to us.’

  Harry looked up to see a small man wearing a suit and a polite expression. He made a respectful gesture towards Harry and introduced himself. Shezli.

  Harry introduced himself as DI Makins, slurring the DI slightly, neither hiding nor emphasizing his police identity. He’s covering himself, I thought. So that if they don’t pick it up he can remain anonymous, and then if they say later, ‘Why didn’t you tell us you were a policeman?’, he can say, ‘I did tell you.’ Keeping his options open.

  ‘And Madame Gower,’ said Shezli to me. I agreed that I was.

  ‘Is your friend sleeping?’ he asked.

  ‘I believe so,’ I said. ‘The hotel doctor gave her some pills. She was in shock, I think. I was just going to bed myself.’

  ‘I wished to say, we will wish to speak with Mrs Bates, and we will wish instruction for the body. We have no next of kin for Monsieur du Berry.’

&
nbsp; They don’t know she’s his wife.

  ‘Perhaps she will be able to speak to you in the morning,’ I said. Shall I disassociate us? We never knew him anyway, ask those Germans. Shit, and what about Hafla? The missing link – she knew him as both Eddie Bates and François du Berry. No, do nothing before you’ve thought about it. ‘I’m sure she will be better after a good night’s sleep.’

  ‘Tell me what happened, please,’ he said, but he didn’t sit down, so I gave him a short version. They were up there, I got worried, I ran, he was on the ground.

  Shezli had a thoughtful face at the best of times.

  ‘Do not leave Luxor, please,’ he said, politely. ‘I will wait on you in the morning.’ And he left.

  Harry’s eyes were narrow and I could see his brain ticking.

  ‘Eddie was here,’ I said, ‘had been for about a week. Hafla, this Turkish girl that he has known for ages, in London as well, a dancer – she was here with a German couple. Chrissie met Helmut, the German guy, here in the hotel. So she met Eddie – I don’t know when. Yesterday or today. Today they went on this day trip – Eddie and Chrissie. The Germans were meant to go but they didn’t show up. I don’t know where Hafla was. Sa’id and I were following them – honestly, it was the only thing we could do. I’d wanted to warn Chrissie that Eddie was here, or just take her away, or something, and the next thing there they were together. So we were waiting and wondering what to do while they visited this temple and the next thing they were on the roof, and I had a kind of a flash that something was going to happen, and I ran up, and when I got up there he was dead. Down below.’

  ‘Did she push him?’ he asked. Well of course he would. He’s not a fool.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Does anyone think she did?’

  I looked up at him.

  ‘You?’ I said.

  ‘I wasn’t there.’

  ‘Nor was I,’ I said.

  He gave me one of his looks. A kind of ‘don’t try that’ look.

  ‘I don’t know if she did,’ I said. And then, ‘I’m not sure it matters.’

  ‘Death of a bastard is still death, Angel,’ he said. ‘It’s still death.’