The man grabbed him hard by the wrist. He was breathing hard. ‘You will see the Imam, but the Imam will not see you. Because, as it is written, hypocrite Wilson, the Imam sees not as we do! This, too, tells you you will be consumed in the fires of hell that do not cease!’
‘I’m sure,’ said Robert. ‘I’m sure!’
Everyone will burn in hell-fire when the day comes, he reflected, as he walked out into the glare of the street, but the day, for Jew, Christian and Muslim, has been a hell of a long time coming.
3
When he got home, he found his parents making a cassoulet. This was slightly better than finding them making love, or in the middle of an argument. They did all these things with a great deal of noise and enthusiasm.
‘What have you been up to today, Bobkins?’ said his father.
Robert stared out of the window at the featureless lawn. Badger, the family’s lurcher, was sitting in the middle of it, staring hungrily at passing flies.
‘I got a job,’ he said.
His father looked at his mother. They smirked at each other. Mr and Mrs Wilson were always convinced, each time their son took a new job, that this one would, in Mrs Wilson’s phrase, ‘lead to something.’ She was, in a sense, right. She had been positive that Renzo’s the Delicatessen was going to lead to something, although she could not have predicted that the ‘something’ was going to be the loss of Mr Renzo’s thumb in the slicing-machine. She had been positive that Bearman and Studde, the estate agents, were going to lead to something, and, although Mr Bearman’s suicide was not quite what she had had in mind, there was no doubt that Robert’s presence in the firm had, in Mr Bearman’s own words, ‘changed it, changed it utterly!’ Disaster had a way of following him. That was why for the last nine months he had stayed indoors as much as possible.
They beamed at him now from across the kitchen.
‘What . . . er . . . is the job, exactly?’ said his father.
Robert looked back at him cautiously. Both his mother and father encouraged him to use their Christian names, but calling them Norman and Sylvia had never helped him to feel more intimate with them. Nor had it helped to quell the guilt he felt every time he saw their eager little eyes brighten at the sight of their only son. He knew he was nothing to be proud of – why didn’t they?
‘I’m going to be a teacher,’ he said.
‘Great stuff!’ said Mr Wilson senior, as he chopped a red onion into a frying pan. ‘I’d give my right arm to be able to teach. They do such an important job! And they’re not really appreciated, are they?’
‘You would be a marvellous teacher, Robert,’ said his mother, ‘and it’s marvellous they’ve seen that without asking for all those stupid qualifications!’
‘Qualifications!’ said Mr Wilson senior, shaking the frying pan violently. ‘Who needs ’em?’
Norman Wilson, as he was fond of reminding people, had no qualifications. This could have been why the accountants for whom he had worked for twenty years had, early last year, asked him to leave. He did not seem worried about not having a job. ‘I’ve got the redundo, old son,’ he used to say, ‘and now I can get on with my writing.’ No one in the family knew what he was writing, apart from the occasional cheque.
Robert’s mother walked swiftly towards the fridge. For a moment he thought she was going to grab it by the handle and throw it over her left shoulder, judo style, but at the last moment she veered off to the left and, grabbing a tin of haricot beans, trotted towards the door that led to the garden. Out on the lawn, Badger reared up, his face wild with excitement.
‘No, no, no!’ screamed Mr and Mrs Wilson, in perfect synchronization. ‘Go away! Go away! Go away! Bad dog!’
Badger sat down again. He looked depressed.
‘What will you teach, exactly?’ said Robert’s mother.
‘English,’ said Robert, ‘Greek. That kind of thing.’
‘Do you know any Greek?’ said his father.
His mother was coming back, now, towards the sink. On the way she had acquired a corkscrew and a bag of potatoes. She threw the potatoes, viciously, on to the worktop. Out on the patio a small breeze stirred her geraniums.
‘I picked up a bit,’ said Robert, ‘when I worked at the kebab place.’
They both seemed impressed by this.
‘What kind of school is it?’ said his mother.
Robert wondered how much to tell them. He decided that they were not quite ready for the Wimbledon Boys’ Islamic Independent Day School. He would break it to them gently over the next few months.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it’s for boys. Small boys. Not big ones, as far as I can make out. And it’s new. I’m getting in on the ground floor.’
His father pulled hard at the cutlery drawer. The handle came away, easily and smoothly. The drawer stayed where it was.
‘Who built this kitchen?’ said Mr Wilson senior. Nobody answered this question. With a sigh, Robert’s father placed the handle in another drawer, picked up a carving knife and began to attempt to lever the drawer open. This activity seemed to calm him.
‘That girl of yours is waiting for you in your bedroom.’ He turned to his only son and gave a suggestive wink. ‘I wish I had young girls waiting for me in my bedroom!’ he said, squatting on his haunches in front of the drawer and driving the knife in deeper. There was a splintering sound from inside the kitchen unit.
Robert’s mother looked at him, a dreamy expression on her face. ‘It seems only yesterday,’ she said, ‘that you and Maisie and Philip Chung and that Schnitzler boy were working for your GCEs. In this very kitchen!’
Philip Chung and the Schnitzler boy had, of course, managed to get some GCEs. Philip Chung and the Schnitzler boy had moved away from Wimbledon. As had the Borrage brothers, Susie Parsons, Linda Haddock and Janet Fitzpierce who did it with anybody. Only he and Maisie were left. Was it really eight years since he had left Cranborne School?
As he clumped up to his room, he thought about Maisie.
Of all the projects he had started, none had been more enthusiastically taken up by his mother and father than Maisie. The daughter of local advertising man, Marco Pierrepoint, she was thought by many people in Wimbledon to be beautiful. There were those who said she was too plump. Gary Brisket, the music scholar, who had gone to Cambridge and never come back, always maintained that ‘she had the biggest jacksie in SW19,’ but, like many other boys in the neighbourhood, he had walked out with her for a while, and, when she told him she was in love with someone else, had cried, briefly, behind the pavilion at Cranborne School.
She was always falling in love. If not with people, then with things. One week she would be a vegetarian, the next a passionate student of the French troubadours. For months last year she had visited a gym in Putney every day, announcing her intention of ‘building up my pectoral muscles’. She had only just stopped in time, thought Robert, as he peered at her through a crack in the bedroom door – her breasts were already the size of Rugby balls.
We’re like brother and sister, Bobkins. That was what she always said, however much his mother winked, nodded and leered every time Maisie came to the house. If they were brother and sister, he said to himself, as he stood there on the landing, taking in that smell she had of pepper and vanilla and lily of the valley, he had been horribly close to incest for the last eight years. He stood for a moment outside his room, sniffing hard.
‘Is that you, darling?’ she said.
‘Afraid so,’ said Robert.
She had a flowery look about her too, he thought as he studied her through the crack in the door. He never really got the chance of a good look when he was in her presence. Maisie liked you to put in a great deal of work when talking to her; Robert was always too busy pulling funny faces or staring deep into her large, black eyes to appreciate what was on offer.
‘Are you peering at me again?’
‘Sorry.’
As he came into the room, Maisie rose and offered him her left cheek. Ro
bert swooped in. As his lips made contact, her scent exploded in his nose.
‘Mark’s left me.’
‘Oh no!’
‘He has.’
She sat back on the bed and began to cry.
Robert wondered whether to put his arm round her shoulder. It seemed a rather forward thing to do. He had, after all, been in the room for over a minute. Physical contact with Maisie was usually limited to arrivals and departures. Perhaps he could embrace her and then rush out of the room muttering something about a previous engagement.
Her shoulders were heaving. Her large breasts shook under her crisp, white blouse. Robert put his hand carefully round the back of her head and landed it, as tactfully as possible, on her right shoulder. When it was clear she wasn’t going to nut him or knee him in the groin, he gave the shoulder a little tug, and ten stone of Maisie fell against him, her long, black hair brushing against his face.
‘I loved him so much . . .’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Robert – ‘he was a really nice bloke.’
This didn’t sound quite right somehow. Which one was Mark anyway?
Maisie started to laugh and groped for a handkerchief in her bag. ‘He was a bastard, you idiot,’ she said. ‘He was a complete sod!’
‘Why?’
Her voice had a note of genuine irritation as she said, ‘Because he left me, stupid.’
Robert remembered Mark now.
‘He was in the Air Force, wasn’t he?’
Maisie was giving him a peculiar look.
‘Or was it the Territorial Army?’
She started to laugh again. To try to prolong her mood, Robert took from his jacket pocket the parcel intended for Mr Malik.
‘What’s that?’
Maisie’s eager, greedy eyes had begun to sparkle.
‘Is it a present? Is it for me?’
‘Of course,’ said Robert. ‘Of course it’s for you.’
‘Oh, Robert,’ said Maisie, ‘you are sweet!’
Robert wondered whether to take his hand off her shoulder. He did not trust himself to do so. The area between armpit and thigh, smelling as it did of soap, perfume and clean linen, was not one where he felt able to sustain the fiction of a brotherly embrace.
‘Can I open it?’
‘Of course, darling.’
She gave a little squeak and grabbed the box.
Maisie was experienced at unwrapping presents. She crooked her index finger under the string and yanked hard. As the string broke, the green paper fell away and the two of them found they were looking at a beautifully inlaid box, about the size of a packet of Kleenex. It was decorated with whorls and loops in what looked like ivory, but the material of which it was made, though it felt like polished wood, was probably something more valuable.
‘Oooh, it looks valuable!’ said Maisie. ‘Is it onyx or something? Is it a valuable box, Bobkins?’
‘It is a very valuable box.’
He coughed nervously.
‘And what’s in it, Bobkins? Is it just the box, or is there a bracelet in it? Is there a lovely bracelet in it?’
Robert wiped his forehead. ‘There might be,’ he said in paternal tones. ‘Let’s see, shall we?’
There might, of course, given the nature of the man who had given it to him, be animal excrement in there . . . or a poisonous tarantula . . . or . . .
‘It’s precious stones!’ gasped Maisie as she slid her long, polished nails between the lid and the case, trying to force it up. ‘It’s joolery! Say it’s joolery, Bobkins!’
‘It might,’ said Robert, ‘be jewellery.’
There were those in Wimbledon who said that Maisie was spoilt. Her father was always giving her things. When he had been made creative director of Swan & Jenkins, he had bought her a car. She had run it into a wall after two weeks and had never driven again. There were those who said that, now she was in her twenties, her father should stop addressing her as ‘the sexiest little princess in Wimbledon Park Road’. It was widely agreed that she should not sit in Pierrepoint’s lap quite so much. There were those who said that she had been given too much, too often, too young. But it was impossible not to give her things – her pleasure in them was so fierce and childish.
Suddenly the lid sprang up. They found themselves looking at a silver locket, face down, wreathed in the same designs as the cover of the box. Underneath it was a roll of paper. At first Robert thought this must be wrapping, but, as they leaned their heads into the box, he saw that it looked more like medieval vellum than anything else. It was covered with writing.
‘Oooh,’ squeaked Maisie, ‘is that Arabic?’
‘It is,’ said Robert in an authoritative voice. ‘That is actual Arabic writing.’
It certainly looked like the stuff you saw outside halal meat shops in the Shepherd’s Bush Road. And if it wasn’t, Maisie would not be likely to know. Her father had managed to find her a job in the rare prints section of Sotheby’s, but, although she had been there nearly a year, she still seemed invincibly ignorant about all forms of calligraphy.
‘What does it say?’ said Maisie, clearly under the illusion that the early stages of conversion gave one unusual facility with the language of the Koran.
‘It says,’ said Robert, trying to look as if he was familiar with the incomprehensible squiggles, ‘that you are more beautiful than rubies and that the dawn is not equal to your eyes. And your breasts are like . . . er . . . sand dunes.’
Maisie looked suspiciously from the manuscript to Robert. ‘I’m not sure I like the sound of that. Is that all it says?’
‘It’s a poem by a well known Arabic poet,’ went on Robert.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Hoj!’ said Robert, after a long pause.
‘I think I’ve heard of him,’ said Maisie, as she reached for the locket and started to scratch her nails into its side. Maybe, thought Robert, there was something nasty in the locket.
‘It’s a love poem. Written in the tenth century, and it compares the beloved to the stars in the sky and the . . . er . . . Zaqqum tree and says her thighs are like . . . pistons!’
‘Did they have pistons in the tenth century?’ said Maisie, who was having no luck in her attempts to open the locket.
Robert, who was now getting quite involved with Hoj’s love poetry, ignored her. He was about to give her the details of Hoj’s brief and unsatisfactory life in and around Baghdad a thousand years ago, when she gave a quiet shriek. The locket had flown open to reveal a black and white photograph of a boy of about ten years old. He had a thin, sensitive face, with black hair brushed neatly in a parting, such as you saw above the faces of British children of the fifties. On his right cheek was a huge strawberry mark. He was wearing a neat white shirt and, rather oddly, considering the rest of his appearance, a pair of dark glasses.
Maisie did not seem to like him being in her locket.
‘Who’s he?’ she said, accusingly. ‘Did you get it in an antique shop?’
The simple thing would have been to answer ‘Yes.’ But Robert was unable to resist a more complex response.
‘It’s a traditional Arab gift,’ he said. ‘When you’re fond of someone, you give them a picture of a little child.’
Maisie looked at him oddly. ‘For luck, sort of thing . . .’ she said.
‘That’s it,’ said Robert.
‘Like Joan the Wad the Cornish Pixie?’
‘Exactly like Joan the Wad the Cornish Pixie!’
She was still not happy about this. Her voice was anxious as she said, ‘And he’s just . . . any child. He isn’t someone you know, is he, Bobkins?’
‘It’s just a custom,’ said Robert – ‘like . . . kissing under the mistletoe.’
‘Oh, you are sweet. I don’t want to know what it is. I just want to know it’s from you and it’s because we’re friends and that in spite of all your problems we love each other. How much was it?’
Robert winced slightly and put his fingers to his lips. Ma
isie flung both her arms round him and kissed him full on the mouth. She looked up into his eyes. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I wish you weren’t gay.’
Robert wondered whether this was the moment to tell her he wasn’t. The only trouble with this would be explaining why he had said he was in the first place. He could not, for the life of him, remember why he had told Maisie he was a practising homosexual. Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe it had been her idea.
Thinking about it now, as she sprawled across his pink duvet, her black hair in an artful pool beside her, he decided it was probably Maisie’s idea. She had most of the ideas in their relationship. If you could call it a relationship.
‘Is it still just casual sex?’ she said – ‘in parks and so on?’
Robert shook his head vigorously. ‘I’m through with all that. I want a serious relationship now.’
Who with? her expression seemed to say. Her eyes narrowed slightly as she moved down the bed.
‘This boy in the photograph . . .’ she began, rather sharply.
‘Absolutely not!’ said Robert, primly. He just managed to suppress an urge to tell her that he went in for older men. Especially those involved in the outdoor life. Lumberjacks, he almost heard himself say – anything with broad shoulders and hairy legs!
A year or so ago, just after she had broken up with Guy Hamilton-Barley, he had planned a spectacular conversion to the opposite sex. They had had dinner in an Italian restaurant in Wimbledon Village, and Robert had told her he had been having erotic thoughts about women. She had replied, rather briskly, that although they looked like women they probably weren’t.
There was another of those silences between them. Maisie put her head to one side and watched him carefully. She clearly expected him to say something interesting. ‘I love Robert,’ she would say to mutual friends – ‘he’s so funny!’ Robert had never thought of himself as funny. When people laughed at things he said, which they quite often did, he usually took it as a personal insult.
What could he say to interest her?
‘I’m thinking,’ he said, eventually, ‘of becoming a Muslim.’
She seemed to like this idea. ‘I think that’s wonderful, Bobkins,’ she said. ‘I think that’s absolutely wonderful. Will it involve travel?’
East of Wimbledon Page 3
