During all this time the name Carl-Andrew was never uttered. Jeanine would not have known who Carl-Andrew (or Don Flexmore for that matter) was, what he looked like, or have had the slightest suspicion of the part that he had played in her parents' lives. Cheryl's refusal to mention him was a dam she had erected against her grief.
'Don't ask me why she didn't tell Jeanine about him. Maybe she was ashamed. Maybe she was disgusted by the rotten crayfish stink she knew she would have to smell if she dredged him up. Maybe her pain had radically altered her, and the drugs she had ingested, because she was quite ill by then - with liver damage. Or maybe there was another reason. Maybe she was, even now, diseased with hope that by not mentioning him, like the promise you make to yourself when you are a child - as I once made - he might come back. After all, had he not come back before? Maybe it was a mixture of all these things.'
17
T HE HOUSE FELT EMPTY . Just the two of them - and a kitten that pissed everywhere. She heard him shout in the night.
'Nothing can convey the misery I saw in his face. They become ghosts, those to whom it has happened. They exist in a different dimension. I'm talking about losing a child.'
Jeanine, her absence, infused every aspect of their daily life.
'I had cut her hair two days before and he upturned the dustbin and went through the garbage until he found a few strands that he kept in a frame by his bed.' Her clothes he sent on to Cheryl; plus her tooth plate. And recalled and dwelled upon the tightening pressure of her hand as they walked past Holland House.
He missed her with a physical pain. Sometimes it was obvious that he was thinking about her and tears would be running down his cheek, into the beard he had started to grow.
'I'm not blaming you, Maral,' his yellow cardigan pinched up at the back where the hook had left its impression: he was guilty, too.
But Maral blamed herself. 'Day and night, I carried around these feelings of remorse. I didn't sleep. My muscles hurt. Because of me he had been robbed of a daughter - no one could have known better what that felt like. I hated myself for the pain I had caused.'
'It was my fault,' she told him. 'If I hadn't insisted that Jeanine go with her mother when she had no wish to . . .'
'Please don't exaggerate. Cheryl would have found a way. No, it was wrong what I did. I should never have forbidden her access to Jeanine. I see that now. I see that.'
He would sink into a deep silence. Simmering in his own thoughts, his head going around in circles, trying to avoid the mines that the situation had laid. An orange felt pen at the back of a drawer. The shape of Jeanine's satchel.
Once, walking through Holland Park, he ran up to a girl and called her name and when she turned around he had to apologise.
The silence broken by the sound of wine replenishing his glass.
'Or he would change the subject. He'd say: "They say on the radio it's going to get warmer." I'd say: "That would be good." And he'd look at the carpet and say: "Is that a new stain?" And I'd say: "It's the cat." And he'd say: "That cat," shaking his head.
'If it had a name I don't remember, but one day the cat wasn't there any more. I didn't know if he'd got rid of it or if it had gone away of its own accord. I didn't ask. It wasn't as though the cat was sick of being fondled or anything.'
Overnight, happiness had slunk from the house.
'Sad. It was so sad. Sometimes all I could think of to do was to make him another cup of tea and take it along. Things weren't good.'
18
H E MARKS THE DAYS . He counts them like beads.
Three months go by and Makertich can tolerate it no longer. In the hiatus of his sheer desperation he writes her a letter. Cheryl, who has subtracted his daughter from the world. Asking that Jeanine spend half-term with him.
Cheryl sends back a curt note: Jeanine's state of mind is too delicate. Anyway, the girl is under the impression that her father has departed for Australia.
He writes again. If not half-term, a morning, an afternoon. They could tell her he had come back on business . . . No reply.
Then Cheryl's lawyer produces a letter. Skilling claims that his client's daughter has written it of her own volition:
Daddy, I don't want to go to your house again. I want to stay with Mummy.
19
'I T WAS HARD TO differentiate one day from another. If I describe a day, it will give you an idea of how we spent our time.
'The house smelled like us, like two middle-aged Armenians who had put away their country and talked to each other in a different language.
'I prepared him breakfast - tea, two slices of toast, marmalade, a bowl of muesli and in winter porridge. I would leave it on the landing outside his door. In the evening he ate early, at seven. I would cook him his meal - he liked watercress soup, roast beef and rhubarb crumble - and bring it to him in the dining room.'
He looked out of the windows of that autumn, that winter. His still eye like the eyes of paintings in the hall, like the eyes of a stuffed creature.
'I don't know how many months went by like this. Neither of us slept.'
Before, Makertich had been private. His reclusive persona a suit and tie that he put on to conceal his passionate nature. Now, he withdrew altogether. He went underground and thrust his feelings down into his core. Submerged into a waiting game.
'He kept his promise to Cheryl and did not contact Jeanine, not once in eleven years. It wasn't simply that he had given his word: he was too afraid of Cheryl taking Jeanine off as she threatened. Rather than his daughter disappear forever, preferable in his mind was that Jeanine should regard him as the one who had gone away. Cheryl understood that much about him. Even if he didn't get to see Jeanine, it was better to know that she was well and being looked after, in a fixed address in St John's Wood, where he was able to send funds. Better that than never to be knowing where she was. And Don would be out of her life. That was one consolation.
'But for now, the best thing he could do was to affirm Jeanine's relationship with her mother.'
Cheryl having spent her divorce settlement, he arranged for his lawyers to wire her a monthly allowance, ample for mother and daughter to live on well. 'And whenever Cheryl had to go into a clinic he paid her medical expenses. She never wanted for anything.'
Spring came. He watched it arrive with a fixed expression. In the garden, the sparrows sang. Purple-black buds sprouted on the copper beech, the crocuses bloomed, the needle on the face of the sundial cast a stronger shadow. Only, he could not associate himself with what was taking place outside his window. The world carrying on as though nothing had happened to Jeanine.
It was detestable, but he saw no option other than to sit it out until her twenty-first birthday, when she came into the trust fund that he had set up for her. Administered by Bennett, its terms dictated that upon Jeanine's coming of age she was to receive PS5,000,000.
Maral said: 'Krikor fastened on the hope that if he left Jeanine alone she would return to him of her own accord.'
Exactly as a cicada buries itself for years in the ground, he would not give up; he would keep faith; he would endure until she came home. His obstinacy kept him going.
20
J ULY AND THE TEMPERATURE had risen.
It was not all misery. He had some small enjoyments. He owned a quarter share of a racehorse and would go to Epsom and watch it run, and afterwards sit around discussing form with the trainer. Or fling a coat over his shoulder and walk to his club in St James or to a wine-tasting. Or to dinner with one of his girlfriends.
The summer after Cheryl took Jeanine away, he began a relationship with a Swiss diplomat's wife. Early one morning a high-breasted woman stepped out of his bedroom, just a towel on, and looked at Maral, who stood there, holding the breakfast tray, in the awkward radiant silence of a mistress at a funeral, and when she went back into the room Maral heard her talking in a low voice, 'You never told me she was attractive,' and the rest was lost in play.
'Then he met someo
ne else in a travel bookshop. That didn't last long, either. They were casual affairs. He said he didn't have it in him to fall in love again. He was over fifty.'
Only on one occasion was he dancing by himself to a song on the radio - Charles Aznavour singing ' A T'regarder ' - and he saw Maral enter the drawing room and he came up and put his arm on her shoulder and another around her waist, and he looked at her as if he was about to say something, and stopped and shook his head.
'He said I was free to go. Go where? I should have left him. I wish I had. Because it was depressing to be in that house, and by then I was almost forty-five. But I felt sorry for him. Responsible, too.'
She was serving dinner soon after when he said: 'Where did you get that cardigan?'
'I knitted it.'
'Perhaps you could knit me one?'
He asked her to pull up a chair and sit beside him.
'If you're going to stay, we ought to learn more about each other.'
Up until then he had kept a formal distance from her; they were strangers who had no knowledge of one another's lives.
Maral said: 'In a way, we did not have to talk for him to know my history. But now he wanted to find out more.'
Urged on by him, she revealed that when he first met her in Vienna, a woman of thirty-three, she was returning from the Cemetery of the Nameless, where she had buried her child. She was delirious, a taxi-driver gave her a lift, she walked to the city centre, not wanting to go back to the Traiskirchen camp, the doctor's warning in her head: 'They'll deport you.'
'Where to?'
'Your country of origin.'
And her giggle: 'It's not there any more.'
She told Makertich of her immediate thought when she saw him walk towards her in the Schweizerhof arcade: he had come to seize her - until she saw his upside-down face.
'Help me,' she said. So weak that she spoke in Armenian. ' Okne inzi .'
A few nights after getting Maral to speak about herself, it became Makertich's turn. 'He didn't look as though he wanted to talk, but as he went on he grew more emotional, savouring his wine. He had not known about wine in Australia. He had discovered it in London. Wine was all he trusted - and me, I suppose. That was what he said. But he must have trusted me, otherwise he would not have told me about his grandmother and about what happened in Australia.'
Two or three evenings a week they ate together, and over the meal that she had prepared - and a bottle that he fetched from the cellar - they talked.
'We talked about a lot of things. I had plenty of opportunity to watch him. I didn't find him intimidating; more timid than intimidating. He could have had a lot of friends. He was funny and clever.'
She told him about her upbringing in Ceuta, where her grandfather peeled potatoes in the bus depot; her passage to Gibraltar, smuggled in the bottom of a sardine boat; her years in Paguera, Mallorca, where she cleaned for an eccentric deaf widow, and in Austria, as a waitress in the Cafe Western, where she met the musician with the brandy-swollen eyes, the folk part of an itinerant folk-rock duo from Ottakring - who would never be aware that he had had a daughter. In return, Makertich wound her back to the souk in Aleppo, the courtyards like Oxford colleges; the voyage out on the converted refrigeration ship, and the displacement camp where his family were interned, on a hill next to public gardens, an ex-compound for Italian POWs, two rooms for forty people, so that there was always a great deal of noise; and his first lessons in English, from a Latvian doctor, a gentle man who was President of the Pacifist Club, and how everyone teased him at his first school in Perth - so that he became a gang leader, a kicker and spitter, fighting and meeting at a certain rendezvous to argue things out - but not at the next school.
'That's how I learned about Cheryl and black swans. And about the gold mine and the houseboat and Don Flexmore.'
The image of Flexmore persisted, like the outline of a crayfish in muddy water. He tried to stop his thoughts of him, but his memory was not obedient.
Any mention of him, and sadness cut into his face.
'He never stopped trying to work out why fate had arranged this revenge by a man who didn't have the muscle that most of us are damned with, that makes us behave well. It was incomprehensible to him and frustrating. But good men never learn to figure out bad ones. They don't understand evil and never will.'
One November evening, Maral brought up Flexmore's name and it dislodged something in Makertich and carried him, struggling and resisting, to a low-ceilinged room in Aleppo and the awful coliseum of his boyhood. To the moment when he became aware that his father's gambling had passed out of control.
In a slow but unstoppable pageant his childhood in Aleppo with his grandmother and parents came tottering past.
He was nine years old. He was pouring a glass of water in the kitchen, when his grandmother's voice blazed from the next room. Her defensive fury so raw and fierce that Makertich, overhearing it, felt that he was committing a transgression. But he stood there, gripping the jug that he slowly lowered and held to his ribs, listening.
'I won't let you sell this, Nazareth. Look, see how old it is. How old do you think?'
His father mumbled a reply.
'No, you fool - centuries earlier!'
His father began to say something, but she interjected. She had never sounded so coruscating. 'This is only a band of silver to you, something to pay off a debt - No, listen to me!' flaring up like the head of a matchstick. 'You do not have any idea why I wear it, do you? All you know is Aleppo. You do not know where we come from. You do not know about our desert fathers, our Church. Yes, our Church, Nazareth. Your father may have been a Turk, but you, my son - look at me, damn you! - are Armenian - that is how I brought you up. And for us Armenians, to worship is as natural as gambling is for you. I wear this bracelet to guard the mystery that you are in such a hurry to have explained. I wear it to guard against people like you asking: "What is the Trinity, what is the relationship between Father and Son? What is going on here?" You must not try to explain it, Nazareth. This mystery you can't abide is the very essence of us. This bracelet that you were about to pawn is my taproot into the faith we have lost.' A pause and the sound of a cigarette being lit. Then, in a steadier voice: 'You ask me what He is. I can only say what He is not. He is not a burning bush. Not an angel. Not a Father Christmas for grown-ups. Let me spell it out. What is at the jagged end of definition when you have finished trying to define everything is the outline of a mysterious space. He is the shape of that hole, Nazareth, and each one of us is proof of His presence - even your own father.'
Makertich overheard his grandmother inhaling on her Gitane, reflecting. 'Maybe this empty space lies at the heart of Satan too.'
21
'D ID YOU UNDERSTAND D ON Flexmore?' Andy asked Maral after dinner one evening.
Her mouth drew into a taut line of concentration and she thought. She was not in any degree intellectual. But her answer when it came, in her flat, dry Bell's School accent, surprised him.
'Do you know the saying perfect love casteth out fear ? I know that Krikor's grandmother believed this. Well, shouldn't the opposite also be true? Fear casteth out love . If you ask me, that explains Don Flexmore.'
'Why fear?'
Her head bent forward and there was an expression ferocious and painful both, on her face. 'Fear is terribly controlling, Mr Larkham, and very closely related to selfishness. You have only to look at addiction. I don't know your experience of addiction, but if you're addicted to drink or drugs or power - it makes you utterly selfish. The father of my child was like this. Nothing else matters apart from you, apart from getting your fix. You cut out other people and focus on your need only, so that it becomes more important to your life than any other person, until one day you look around and all you have left in your life is despair. And that was Don Flexmore. He never stopped behaving like a newborn baby who needed the breast, who carried on being the sun, the moon and the stars of his own world. There can be something very appealing abou
t a need that admits no reason, and also something very frightening. But it's not appealing as you grow older and despair creeps in. Despair is where you come to when fear has run its course, when you're routed. And now I'm sounding like a nun.'
'No, no, go on.'
She shook her head emphatically. 'You mustn't imagine I'm religious. A lot of this comes from the books that Krikor gave me to read and from what we talked about. As far as I understand it, and even now I'm not sure that I have got this right, the so-called glory and agony of God's love is that we are free to reject it. God - I'm talking here, you understand, about the God that Krikor's grandmother believed in - gives us the freedom to retreat from all that is beautiful. He gives us the potential to feed on addiction. The problem is, God is hampered by the fact that he is truth. He can't use the powers available to the Devil. He can't deceive.
'The Devil, on the other hand, is a comedian whose stock-in-trade is deception. He makes things appear as they aren't. If love is about shedding power, deception is about stealing it. The Devil's agenda is to destroy love, to take people away from God, to sow doubt and despair. What he's peddling is very similar to truth and hovers on the perimeter of what is good and godly. He tempts with a relationship that is precious to people, which can exist, for example, between an adolescent boy and an old man - and which, if it goes right, is marvellous. But if it feeds the needs of the adult and not the boy, then it's the opposite. When the Devil comes harnessing his talents, there's always a hair's breadth between what is positive and beautiful and what is pernicious and destructive. Once you cross that distance, you are on a road that has no end. Because evil is never sated. It gobbles up what you give it - as Krikor found out. When he denied who he was, he was colluding in deception.
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