The Tenth Gift

by Jane Johnson

  Go, if not with my love, then with my care.

  Your erring husbande

  Robert Bolitho

  IDRISS STARED FROM THE LETTER TO ME. “SUCH A SAD END to a brave tale.”

  We were sitting overlooking the wide mouth of the Bou Regreg in the Café Maure in the Qasba des Oudaias, where the sun fell brightly through the fretted trelliswork and a breeze off the sea carried the scent of roses to us. I had been watching a small tabby cat chasing a leaf in between the table legs while Idriss read the letter for himself, for I could not bring myself to read it out to him. It felt laden with ill luck, and I had the sense that if I were to utter Robert Bolitho’s final words aloud, disaster would somehow fall on one or both of us.

  “Do you believe in ghosts, Idriss?” I asked suddenly.

  “Of course. Afrits and evil spirits walk beside us. We don’t like to talk about them, it encourages them too much.”

  I told him about Andrew Hoskin, about the miasma of despair that had settled itself upon the house, the sense of panic that had engulfed me in the attic when I retrieved the family Bible for Alison. The family Bible in which Robert Bolitho’s letters had been hidden.

  Then I remembered how I had found that Bible: in a box under layers of dust, a box that had clearly not been opened for a very long time. How, then, I wondered, had the wording of Andrew’s suicide note—Andrew, whose sensibility was in no way bookish or archaic— so clearly echoed that of Robert Bolitho? I shuddered, feeling the chill fingers of time on the back of my neck.

  “Khamsa oukhmiss.” Idriss touched the wood of the table. What a remarkably universal prophylaxis against bad things that was.

  “I am glad I let Anna take the book. I’m beginning to think the story cursed, as if history will just go on trapping people in its toils and squeezing the life out of them. Tregennas, Pengellys, Bolithos— all my Cornish family seem to be caught up in it.”

  “Habibi,” he said, taking my hand, “there are a thousand and one reasons why people take their own lives, just as there are a thousand and one types of people in the world. Patterns may repeat themselves, but we are not entirely fate’s slaves. In our culture we believe that every soul is asked of it only what is within its scope to deal with in life.”

  “That obviously didn’t work for poor Robert Bolitho, or for Andrew, either. Such anger, such disappointment.” I sat there with my head in my hands feeling sorrow for them both. After a while I said, “Do you think the sins of our ancestors are visited upon us?”

  Idriss turned my hand over in his and traced the lines on its palm. “In Islam there is no such thing as original sin. Each soul comes bright and pure to the world, bearing no burden of guilt. There was a Fall, but it was forgiven. Adam and Hawa were sent down from Heaven to the earthly paradise of Jenaa to be its guardians, and it was there that Satan tempted them to taste the forbidden fruit of the Tree, but in the Qu’ran the two of them together shared the blame, and when they repented for their transgression, God forgave them both and sent them out into the world as equals, to work the land. Their children carried with them no taint of the parents’ failure: No one died to save our souls. The past is past: Things happen, we suffer, and then we move on into the light.”

  I blew my nose. “That’s a remarkably humane view.”

  “Guilt and blame are corrosive, Julia. They destroy lives. I am sure that it is possible to make fresh starts, to find happiness. I know it to be so.”

  THAT AFTERNOON WE left the old city behind us and walked in the wide, sunlit modern boulevards of new Rabat. We visited bookstores and café s and at last a clothes shop, full of vibrantly colored scarves and kaftans.

  “You should have something to take back to London with you,” Idriss said. “To remind you of Morocco.”

  I touched one of the scarves. It was woven silk, all blues and greens and golds, like a summer sea. “Very pretty,” I said appreciatively.

  He held it up against me. “Very.”

  It was ridiculously cheap, but even so Idriss spent a long time haggling furiously with the poor woman who owned the shop until they both looked exhausted. At last she wrapped it in paper and held it out for me and I paid and thanked her and turned to leave.

  Idriss caught my arm. “No, no, there is something else.” He exchanged a smile with the woman behind the counter—they looked wickedly complicit.

  “What?” I asked, frowning.

  “Imane will show you.”

  The woman ushered me into a curtained area at the back of the shop and left me stranded there with the fluorescent light shining down on me in front of a vast, unforgiving mirror. In it I looked washed out and ghostly, my skin and hair white-pale, my eyes as dark as pits. It was a relief to have something else to look at when she returned a minute later with a bundle of turquoise fabric in her arms.

  She shook it out. It was a silk kaftan in traditional style, floor length and with long, wide sleeves. Buttons ran from neck to hem, each worked into a perfect Turkish knot, which fitted into a corresponding chain-stitched loop. The facings on either side were hand-embroidered with crescent moons and stars in gold and silver thread. More stars and moons adorned the cuffs and hem.

  I gasped. “It’s beautiful. Fabuleuse”

  Imane smiled and helped me into it. Then we stood there together, admiring the transformation in the mirror.

  “Ça vouz vraiment convenir, madame. C’est votre couleur. Allez montrer votre mari!”

  “He’s not—” I started. But really, what was the point of making a complicated and clumsy explanation? I grinned. “Okay.”

  Idriss was standing by the door, looking very much like a man who wanted a cigarette. When he heard the curtain rings rattling, he turned, and his eyes widened.

  He had, it transpired, already paid for it; hence the haggling.

  “I want you to wear it and think of Morocco.”

  “How could I ever forget Morocco?”

  It was a generous gesture and it made me uncomfortable. I didn’t know what to say to him. There was already something unspoken in the air between us, an edge of tension that clouded our afternoon. I was flying back to London the next evening. In some ways I did not want to go—but I also needed space to myself, to weigh up my choices and make some decisions.

  We walked through some pretty ornamental gardens where men played chess at little tables outside a café and children played on the pavement beside them, some complicated game involving bottle tops and stones. I watched the café owner come out and put down a bowl, and three rangy cats immediately detached themselves from the shade in which they had been lying and ringed the dish, making a swift end to the scraps of chicken with silent, focused greed.

  “It is said the Prophet once sat in contemplation in his garden,” Idriss told me while we watched them eat, “but when it came time for him to leave to attend his prayers, he found his cat Muezza had fallen asleep on his sleeve. Now, this was the very cat that had once saved him from a serpent, so instead of disturbing it, he cut off the sleeve of his garment and went about his business.”

  I smiled, watching the three cats finish licking out the bowl and wander away, tails high. It was a very charming tale. How nice to be a cat and confident that the world would always provide.

  At that moment, Idriss’s mobile sounded. He opened it and spoke loudly into it, laughing and gleeful. When he finished, his eyes were shining. “Jeddah is back from the mountains. She is waiting to meet you.”

  I DON’T KNOW what I expected Idriss’s grandmother to be like, but when I first saw her standing there in the salon, I thought she was some other visitor to the family home. But: “This is Lalla Mariam,” Idriss told me proudly, and then exchanged an embrace with her and a great rush of Berber in which I heard my name—Julia—twice, isolated like islands in a sea of incomprehensible sound.

  The next thing I knew I was enfolded in her arms. No frail old lady, this, I thought, feeling corded muscle and strong bones press against me. She bade me welcome—marh
aban, marhaban—and there followed a torrent of Berber of which I understood not a word, and then she flew off across the room and I heard her footsteps clatter swift and sure as the hooves of a mountain goat on the tiling of the stairs.

  I stared at Idriss. “She’s a force of nature, your grandmother! How old is she?”

  He shrugged. “No one knows. It’s not something we speak of much, and they didn’t have birth certificates or documentation where she was born. Even Jeddah probably has no idea how old she is. We don’t count away our days the way you Westerners do.”

  “How old is your mother, then? She is your mother’s mother?” I persisted.

  He nodded, but he had to think about that for a while, too. While I waited I thought what a very different culture this was to mine, in which every newspaper article would identify the age of its subject alongside the name no matter how irrelevant such a detail might be.

  “I … think, sixty-three.”

  “And how many brothers and sisters does your mother have?” He counted them off on his fingers. “Twelve. My mother was the seventh.”

  I made a rough calculation. I had read that women in the mountain regions often married very young, but even given that and any possible gaps between births, that made her …“Good grief. Eighty-five, at least!”

  “She’s remarkable, isn’t she? Come upstairs—she’s brought the thing I wanted you to see.” He held his hand out to me and together we went up the stairs.

  At the top of the house, on the other side of the stairs from Idriss’s room, the door was ajar, and inside someone was singing. I stopped on the landing to listen, not wanting to interrupt. A moment later, Idriss joined in without any hint of self-consciousness, surprising me by raising a melodious light tenor as a counterpoint to the old woman’s shriller notes. I thought of the birds we had heard in the medina, singing across the ancient walls to one another.

  “Tell me the words,” I begged when he finished.

  God divided beauty and gave it to the ten:

  Henna, soap, and silk—those are the first three.

  The plough, the livestock, and the hives of bees—

  That makes six.

  The sun when it rises over the mountains—

  That makes seven.

  The crescent moon, as thin as a Christian’s blade—

  That makes eight.

  With horses and with books we come to ten.

  He raised my hand to his lips. “You shall be loaded up with beauty before leaving us for your gray old city,” he promised, pushing the door open. “You have your silk, Jeddah has brought argan soap from the south, and my cousin Hasna will henna your hands for you later….”

  I hardly heard what he was saying. The light from the unshuttered window fell upon Lalla Mariam, who stood there, straight as a reed, examining a length of shining cloth. But it was not the item in her hands that caught my attention, it was her face as she looked out at me. Downstairs in the semi-gloom of the salon I had formed an impression of a stately old woman with silver hair framing long bones and smooth, dark planes. Now the sun fell squarely upon her and I caught my breath.

  “Yes, it’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Idriss was saying. “I knew you’d love it, it’s so craftily made. Jeddah is very proud of it, she loves to show it off to people….”

  I tore my gaze from his grandmother’s face and looked down at the thing she had brought from the mountains. It was a great swath of brocaded white silk, and along all its yards of selvage, both top and bottom, someone had embroidered the most exquisite design. Hundreds of ferns and stylized curls of bracken fronds uncoiling toward an unseen sun, adorned here and there by tiny pink blossoms and rich golden flowers. The ferns and fronds were orderly, almost geometric in the exactitude of their execution; they formed a framework through which the rambling roses twined. But it was the tiny golden flowers on their spiky stems that made my knees go to water.

  “It’s gorse,” I said, remembering the crown Robert Bolitho had made for the girl he loved. The buds and blossoms were embroidered with such unusual realism that I could almost smell their rich confectionary aroma—like warm marzipan—unfurling from the cloth.

  “Gorse?”

  “This flower here. It grows all over the hills and cliffs of Cornwall. It’s a wild and thorny thing—a very unlikely flower to find depicted in embroidery.”

  Idriss translated this for his grandmother, who through it all stood there calmly watching me with her unblinking bright regard. Then she started to speak quickly and Idriss answered her, then he asked a question, to which she responded, and then the flow of words went back and forth like the chatter of magpies.

  At last he turned to me. “Jeddah says three things. Firstly, that this flower—this bush—is also found here on the Atlantic coast. Secondly, that this veil—it’s a bridal veil—has been in the family for generations, but no one knows where it came from or who made it, though there have always been handy women in our family, expert with a needle. Thirdly, that the style of the piece is known as aleuj. It is a mé lange of traditional Berber skills—very dense and precise and geometric—with a more fluid and realistic European style. Aleuj in classical Arabic means ‘alien’ or ‘foreign,’ or even ‘foreigner,’ but it can also mean ‘one who has converted to Islam.’ And the earliest known examples are from the seventeenth century.”

  The old woman added something very distinctly then, repeating it three times so that Idriss understood.

  “She says that here in Rabat there was once a woman who was a master embroiderer, and she was known as Zahrat Chamal.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “It’s a given name, not a born name,” he said. “It means Flower from the North.”

  Had Catherine become Zahrat when she converted and married her raïs? Did Chamal mean from the north of Morocco, or from further beyond? Was Zahrat Chamal the Muslim name she adopted when she changed her faith, like Will Martin becoming Ashab Ibrahim? Perhaps the gypsy fortune-teller had told true, that she would never be married as Catherine, after all. I looked at the stitching on the bridal veil: fine and precise, a delicate slanting satin stitch, just like the one on the Countess of Salisbury’s altar frontal. Not that that was any proof—everyone used satin stitch, even me. I pictured Cat wound from head to toe in this lovely veil, like the women in the pictures I had seen, with a silver Berber crown set on her head, its jeweled teardrops framing her pale face, her fiery hair hidden beneath a colored scarf, her blue eyes blazing proudly out at a man clad from head to foot in scarlet and gold. And I saw him take her by the hand and lead her to the throne beneath the spectacular bridal curtains the women of the embroidery class had made as their gift to Sidi Qasem bin Hamed bin Moussa Dib and his foreign wife.

  And when I looked back at Lalla Mariam, I found that she, like me, had tears glittering in her blue eyes.

  CHAPTER 33

  ALISON TURNED MY HANDS OVER IN HERS, THE BETTER to examine my palms. “And this?” she asked.

  “A rose, I think—an old variety, like a rambling rose— one of the flat-petaled roses. But the plant on the left hand—I don’t know what it is.”

  She traced the pattern of leaves like a chain of hearts that ran from the palm to the tip of my forefinger. “So pretty. And what about this—did you buy it in Rabat?” She touched the antique ring I wore on the third finger of my right hand, where Idriss had placed it when he said good-bye to me outside the airport. “It belongs to Jeddah,” he had told me solemnly. “She says it’s a loan and she wanted me to give it to you because it will bring you back to Morocco.” Then he closed my fingers over it and kissed me gravely and thoroughly, hidden from prying official eyes by the sun curtains of his taxi. My knees had still felt weak by the time I reached the security gate. Since then we had spoken every night on the phone, so that a holiday romance had turned into a charming and old-fashioned courtship. In that time we had discussed everything from French poetry to the failings of our respective national football teams, and
now I felt I knew more about him than I had ever known about Michael in all the time I’d known him.

  “How long will it last?”

  I looked up, startled. “Pardon?”

  “The tattoo, dope. How long will it last?”

  Already the henna had faded from the fiery burnt orange that had surprised me when the dried paste came away under the shower on the morning of my departure. Now it was the same shade of brown as my freckles, and like them it felt a part of me. I did not want it to fade. “Idriss said about a month.”

  “He’s marked you as his property, this Idriss,” she teased.

  “He has not! It’s traditional: Women wear henna tattoos as a form of protection against evil influences,” I said hotly, and at that we both fell silent.

  I had returned from Morocco two weeks before and the time had passed in a whirl of activity. There were three offers on my flat waiting for me as well as a new and potentially lucrative commission. The neatness and speed with which all this came together had rather astonished me—it was as if fate were pushing me in a specific direction. And I had spent a lot of time with Anna. Together we had visited her friend in the publications department at the V&A, an elegantly turned out and smartly spoken woman in her late fifties, who in turn had taken us to meet someone in English Textiles. Seeing their unalloyed delight at Cat’s work and hearing their gasps of excitement as they viewed the sketches she had made in The Needle-Woman’s Glorie was almost reward enough in itself. They asked—of course—whether they might have the book to display alongside the altar frontal, and I told them honestly that I had not yet decided what I was going to do with my book. Their faces fell, but soon they were discussing how to make fine facsimile copies and perhaps having the book on loan for a time, and we all parted in good spirits. Anna looked radiant, and I told her so. “I am just so very happy to be able to do this for the family and, well, posterity, if that doesn’t sound too pompous.” I assured her it did not. “And, thank God, I’ve stopped throwing up, and I’m past the dangerous stage, and the scan was normal….”