Tree of Pearls

by Louisa Young

  ‘Yes.’

  Eyebrows very low; mouth thoughtful.

  She whispered. ‘Did you want him to?’

  ‘Yes,’ I whispered back.

  More consideration.

  Kissed me a few times on my cheeks.

  ‘You’ll still be my mummy,’ she said.

  ‘Forever.’

  ‘And Harry will be my daddy.’

  ‘Forever.’

  ‘And a baby.’

  I was waiting for her to ask whose little sperm it was. But she didn’t. Just drifted off to sleep in my arms, and half murmured, ‘I suppose it’s Nippyhead, hello little Nippyhead,’ which made me so happy I wept, and I couldn’t stop weeping, but it wasn’t like last time I came back from Egypt and couldn’t stop weeping. As soon as she was asleep I went and rang Harry, and we talked for three hours.

  *

  I didn’t say anything to anyone about Harry. For all it was so old and so strong there was something very new and delicate going on. Anyway I hardly saw him. I was just with myself, and with Lily. Very calm and quiet. Towards the end of January I told my mum I was pregnant. And who by. ‘You do like things complicated,’ she said, which I felt was less than helpful as remarks go, so I ignored it. Dad kissed me and said he was glad because he could see that that was what I wanted, and he found it simplest to take my lead.

  Brigid said: ‘That will be one hell of a nice-looking baby.’

  Zeinab kissed the tips of each set of her own fingers in turn, and said: ‘Life is long, insha’Allah. He’ll be back, but you’ll already be happy and it will be too late. And then it will all be all right anyway, because it has to be, insha’Allah. I’ll be the Egyptian auntie for you in the meantime. I’ll sing to it.’

  Lily made a little bed out of a matchbox lined with tissue paper, and put it in a shoebox and wrote Nippyhead on the lid in wobbly five-year-old’s handwriting. She said: ‘This is good because now there will be someone to come with me to your funeral.’

  *

  A few weeks later, a gloomy no-light English winter day, I was in the Syrian grocer’s on the Uxbridge Road, buying a chicken for dinner, and salad and spuds and bread and olives and a kind of Lebanese broad bean salad for which I had developed a passion. There were biscuits and cakes everywhere, sugar and apricot, pistachio and syrup. ‘Eid Mubarak!’ the boys and the Arab customers were saying to each other. ‘Eid Mubarak’ on a sign up on the wall behind the cash register. Mubarak from the same root as baraka – blessing. It was a Friday. There was a lot of toing and froing at the mosque across the road too. (No dome or minaret here. Just a big old Shepherd’s Bush house, turned into the house of god.) Eid el Fitr. January 30th. End of Ramadan. Lily told me all about it on the way home from school. Her class had all drawn Eid cards for each other. She’d kept hers for me. Happy Eid.

  Harry arrived late, bearing roses, a pound of sugar almonds and two bottles of Pinot Noir.

  ‘Full of iron,’ he said. ‘Very good for you. Is she asleep?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank Christ for that,’ he said, and dumped his gifts on the table. ‘Come on.’ He reached for my hand. That long lean arm with my name on it.

  ‘Come on what?’ I said. Amused by his urgency.

  ‘Come on and –’ Then he sat down suddenly.‘Oh lord I’m scared,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be scared,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’ Gave me one of those little grins. ‘Makes it sexier.’

  ‘We don’t need anything to make it sexier.’

  ‘Nor we do,’ he said. Calming down. ‘Nor we do.’ Leaning back in his chair. And he looked over at me, that slow, insolent, cocky look.

  ‘Anyway I’m not scared,’ he said. ‘I’m incredibly fucking happy.’

  ‘So am I,’ I said.

  ‘Get your kit off then.’

  I snorted. ‘Harry!’

  He fixed me with his eyes. God, he was laughing.

  ‘Get your kit off, you gorgeous beautiful fucking angel woman of my life,’ he said.

  ‘Steady on,’ I said, trying to stand, wanting to get near him, falling over my own feet.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Won’t. I will not steady on. OK. Yes, I will. OK. If that’s what you want. We have plenty of time after all. Steady on, right now. Look. Steady.’ He opened one of the bottles of wine to prove it.

  ‘I don’t think it’s a verb,’ I said. ‘To steady on.’ I took the bottle to pour him a glass but the glass was upside down and the wine poured on the floor. ‘Oh fuck.’

  ‘It’s that word again …’ he said. ‘There’s that word …’

  ‘I love you,’ I said. Surprising myself. ‘I love him but I love you …’

  He was up and his arms were around me. ‘Shhh, shhh,’ he said, holding my head on, not quieting me but comforting me, just comforting me. ‘I know. I know. It’s so simple for us. I know everything. It makes it so much easier … Oh. By the way. Happy Eid.’

  I opened my eyes to look at him.

  ‘Everything,’ he said.

  I love you. I kept saying it. He was kissing me. Kissing me, kissing me, kissing me.

  After a while: ‘Oh my god,’ he said, ‘you smell the same. Ten years and you smell the same.’

  ‘It’s more than ten years,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t give a fuck how long ago it was. Oh! Do you remember the last time?’

  I thought a second.

  ‘It was the night before you threw the chair at me,’ I said.

  ‘Nope. That morning.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘Definitely. I remember.’

  I drew away from him.

  ‘Was it good?’

  ‘It was extremely fucking good. It was always extremely fucking good.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t extremely fucking good that time you …’

  ‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘Shut up and kiss me.’

  ‘Oh! Macho!’

  ‘Shut up and fuck me.’

  ‘You fuck me!’ I retorted.

  Silence.

  Hanging there.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I will.’

  *

  There’s a way of telling when your girlfriend’s relationship is going to last: for the first time in all the time you’ve known her, she doesn’t tell you how the sex was.

  *

  In the morning Lily woke us with hands full of sugar almonds, and climbed into bed between us. ‘This is nice,’ she said.

  *

  Five months less a day later, on June 30th, Harry and Lily and I were watching England versus Argentina when just as David Beckham kicked Simeone in the back of the knee an audible pop popped through the room, and I began to flood. And continued. They both took me to the hospital in the Pontiac, ruining the white leather upholstery, and I was four days in labour. Harry stayed with me throughout, and Mum came and took Lily home to our flat, and brought her twice to visit me as I cavorted around on gas and air and pethidine. There was a tape machine in the labour room, and I played Khaled, Hank Williams, Aretha Franklin, La Bohème, the Bach cello suites, and Nirvana Unplugged. No Umm Khalthoum. At one point though I found myself singing ‘Enta ’Omri’, and translated it for the midwives and they giggled; I pulled on the gas and air as if it were a recalcitrant shisha, I saw Sa’id’s face and heard his voice and felt his hands in my hair … and while I was sad that he missed this I knew he would not miss everything, that I had done what I could, that I would continue to do so, and that I would do better than I had done. If he wanted to be a father to her we could work it out. Work something out. Strange to divide in half the roles a man has in a woman’s life, strange to have two men play the same role, albeit in very different ways (and play it I knew he would). Strange, necessary and possible.

  Harry’s phrase was in my mind: ‘For you to be safe, and for all to be well.’

  In the end I had an emergency caesarian, and thought of Cleopatra as a surgeon whose name I will never remember rummaged inside me and pul
led a dark golden girl out of the slice across my belly, black hair plastered across her head, pale eyes gazing serenely. Harry was there, all scrubbed up in green, with a mask. He and Lily wrapped her in a big white scarf when she came home with us five days later. I wanted to call her Sekhmet but everyone told me this was a temporary madness. OK, Shagaratt ad Durr, I said, but they laughed in my face. I didn’t like her much at first: I just looked at her and thought, ‘What are you? What the hell are you?’ Harry spent a lot of time with her then. He liked her from the moment she appeared. It took me until I was starting to walk again. Not long, in the scheme of things. ‘Family man,’ he said. ‘It’s good. I like it.’ He took to playing Sly Stone on his car stereo.

  On her birth certificate it says Aisha Jane el Araby Gower. Lily got her new birth certificate at the same time: Lily Makins Gower. We had a birth certificate party on the balcony: Harry, Chrissie, Zeinab, her husband Larry and the boys, Brigid and Caitlin and their boys and Maraidh and Aisling and Reuben, Adjoa and her mother, Mum and Dad, Fergus, Liam from the Winfield, Dizzy Ansah, who’d passed on the message to Harry two years ago that I was looking for him, because Harry ran into him in Portobello. Not Preston Oliver.

  Harry said: ‘You paid for my child, I’ll pay for yours. Shut up. You know it’s fair. Anyway they don’t pay us badly.’

  Lily would glare at her and say: ‘She’s my mummy, you know. My mummy.’ One time when she was saying that I said to her: ‘Do you know who her daddy is?’

  ‘Harry?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, stupid me,’ she said. ‘Sa’id, because you got her in Egypt.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I said.

  Later I asked her what she thought of that.

  ‘Will Sa’id come back?’ she asked, after some thought.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘But not to live with us.’

  ‘She can borrow my daddy,’ she said. ‘Do you remember when I was about two or something I wanted to borrow the baby’s daddy if you had a baby? Well, she can borrow mine.’

  That was a good moment.

  ‘But if we have two daddies now, shouldn’t you marry one?’ she asked. ‘You could you know. They’re both very nice. But Sa’id doesn’t have to come back to stay. Harry is nearer. Then me and Aisha could be bridesmaids and we could have another baby.’

  Another! Harry’s and Janie’s, Sa’id’s and mine, Harry’s and mine. The mathematics of the biology pleased me.

  Mother of three! Jesus fuck.

  *

  She was lying in her Moses basket by Lily’s bedside, both of them asleep, as I wrote this letter on the kitchen table. Harry was not there that night.

  (He’d said, as he left for work that morning, ‘I’ll give you a ring later.’ ‘Yippee yippee!’ Lily had yelled. We’d looked at her quizzically. (You see how easily I use ‘we’.) ‘You’re going to marry my mummy at last! You are you are, you said you’d give her a ring!’ We laughed and laughed.)

  This is the letter:

  Sa’id habibi,

  Don’t say a word. I’m not coming back. But sweetheart, sweetest of hearts:

  This is neither an invitation, nor a rejection. It is something I tried to tell you, but time and circumstance – and you – forbade. Forgive me, if forgiveness is needed. Your daughter may come. I’ll tell her who you are. I will bring her up to love you, and to love Egypt. Lily says: she can borrow my daddy. She is proud to have a daddy to share, so proud to have a sister. I think of you every day, not only because her eyes are the colour of palm-tree tips at dawn. She is beautiful, and loved. She smells like ornali. She is yours.

  I am sorry you have not had this time with her.

  I close no doors, I send love. I am not wasting away for you.

  Looking at it now, it seems, what, sentimental? Self-indulgent? But it was part of the process.

  NINETEEN

  Iftar, Eid, the end

  Simon Preston Oliver accepted the Luxori police’s version of Eddie’s death. François du Berry had fallen from a high place; nobody had seen. Why shouldn’t he accept it? He never learnt that Harry had been there.

  Chrissie’s still dry, still precarious. She went to a clinic for a while. Still not saying what happened on the roof. I don’t give a toot. Why would I?

  Eddie was buried at the Protestant church in Cairo. I don’t think anybody went. After all, he was already dead.

  Janie’s money is still in the box. As Aisha gets older I may try and buy a house. With Harry’s income and my deposit we could have a garden, a bedroom each for the girls.

  In the interstices of motherhood I am reading a lot. My brain, curiously, has come back to life. I am reading Jung, Frances Yates on The Art of Memory and a lot of archaeology reviews and journals. I think I may be going to do a PhD. Not on anything Egyptian. That’s not what it’s about.

  I don’t see Sarah, why should I? Or perhaps, how could I? I don’t rule it out though.

  I love having a girl in each arm. I love having both of them in bed, feeding one, reading to the other, Harry cooking dinner. It has actually happened, once or twice.

  A month after I wrote to Sa’id, a letter came, with a package.

  The letter, in his small and elegant handwriting, that looks like Arabic even when it is in English, said:

  Dear Angelina,

  I am glad I didn’t leave you all day and all night on the Corniche, for if I had, all the felucca men in Luxor would have looked at our girl when she comes here and said ah, yes, her mother is that mad English woman who sat all day and all night on the Corniche … I am glad to have a child, in your city of all nations, and with such a mother. Part of me, you know, was sad that I couldn’t give myself to your multicultural life. I am glad in some way to give my child to it. I will be glad to come, when you invite me, not before. Four requests. One: I have set up a bank account. The bank will write to you. I know what you are like for not using money. Use it – don’t deny me this. Two: marry him (if you haven’t already). If he ever fails you, come back to me. Three: send a picture. Four: kiss her for me.

  Sa’id.

  Lovely man, I thought. But my heart did not lurch when I read it. I pictured him at forty, me fifty, the girls teenagers, meeting in a restaurant on the shores of an Italian lake, eating, talking, getting over a small nervousness, remembering a fundamental faith, not regretting what didn’t happen. Sharing an old knowledge, not having shared a life lived since then. Pictured myself helping Aisha to know the complexity of her history, as I have helped, and will continue to help, Lily. I didn’t picture him at thirty, or thirty-five, reappearing, wanting me after all. Nor did I picture myself wanting him.

  Inside the package, his hejeb. It smelt of him. Or maybe he had always smelt of it. I was about to put it to my nose, but then I felt very strongly that that would not be right. Instead I coiled the leather cord around it, and wrapped it up for her, to preserve what there was of him on it, so that if she ever needed it she could get that smell. It was not mine now, it was hers. I put it in a box with my Umm Khalthoum tapes, a curl of black hair and a very old sprig of mimosa.

  ‘You sentimental old cow,’ said Harry, disrespectfully.

  ‘Don’t mock,’ I said, ‘it’s her heritage.’

  ‘Her heritage is not dead in a box,’ he said. ‘Her heritage is going to crop up here one day realizing what a fucking romantic fool he’s been.’

  ‘Why romantic?’

  ‘Can’t square love and reality,’ he said.

  I smiled, because it was true, and I had already worked it out for myself. And oh my soul, I know why we came apart.

  ‘And if he does crop up?’

  ‘He’ll have to kill me,’ said Harry.

  I looked over to him. Thought for two seconds, then passed him the letter.

  He was impassive as he read it. Put it down.

  ‘Well, he’s a good bloke,’ he said. ‘I always said so.’

  ‘Stop it with that,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’ he
asked.

  I busied myself with the box. Refolded the letter. Put it in the box with the hejeb.

  ‘Can you handle it?’ I asked. ‘The fact of him?’

  He looked up.

  ‘Can you?’ he answered.

  ‘We have done so far,’ I said carefully. ‘One way or another.’

  ‘We have, haven’t we.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘We’re here now.’

  ‘We are.’ We were in the kitchen. Of course.

  He was smiling.

  ‘Angel,’ he said.

  Here we go.

  ‘Yes?’

  I looked over at him. He was slightly green.

  ‘About that decent interval.’

  I put the lid on the box. Let the past wash over me, and away. Raised my eyes to the future, and knew what I wanted. The age-old notion was there with us. Before Sa’id, after Sa’id: me and Harry. Harry and Angeline. The things that used to scare me didn’t scare me any more. Not one bit. The idea of a man and woman living together seemed to me charming, practical, full of possibilities. The idea – the reality – of his coming back, and being here, was – nice. Does this sound prosaic, compared to how things were with Sa’id? But Harry and I had been mad with love the first time round. Now we were sane with love. It’s not prosaic. It’s good.

  ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I knew one of us would.’

  He was looking at his hands.

  ‘So?’ he said, looking up.

  ‘This is,’ I said. ‘This is a decent interval.’

  He started laughing.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I just kind of have to do this. We don’t have to do it this way. But …’ He was laughing like a kid.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  He splatted his hand down on the table. Pushed something towards me. Small box. Inside, emerald ring. Dark like the green of his eyes. Yes, I have always had a thing for green eyes.

  Then he leapt up as I took it in my hand and stared at it, and he came round the table and took my hands, box and all, in his, and said, ‘If that’s how you’d like it, would you like that? Would you?’

  Would I?

  ‘How long have you been carrying this around?’ I asked him.