Lion Heart

by Justin Cartwright

  Noor is staring fixedly at the sea now. She prises her gaze from the sea and turns to me.

  ‘Richie, I haven’t come to try to relive what we had. I know that’s not possible.’

  Her face, the map of her torments, is fully exposed to the weak, yellowish light. She wants me to say something but I cannot speak: I feel shame and despair. Here she is, helpless, crippled by her memories, and I . . . I have been cavorting cheerfully in bed with Cathérine. (Who looks like my father’s lover.)

  ‘I have come to say goodbye, Richie.’

  ‘No, Noor, please. The whole point of this holiday is to make it work. To see how we can keep close for ever. I won’t desert you.’

  But I know I am not convincing her, even if that were possible.

  ‘I am here to say goodbye, Richie. Haneen was right all along: it would have been better not to have had hopes.’

  ‘Why? Why?’

  I am deeply hurt, despite my treachery.

  ‘Because even just seeing you, and knowing what we could have had, gives me too much pain. More than I can bear.’

  ‘Come with me to Agia Marina tomorrow. We will take our little boat. And then tell me afterwards what you want to do. Please give me that time. I love you, Noor.’

  ‘It may be true that you love the idea of me, but I am not the same person you loved. You know that, Rich, you know it.’

  ‘You are down; it will change. Tell me how you feel tomorrow. And practise your Mamma Mia! songs. Will you give it a chance?’

  ‘OK. But I would like to go to bed now, by myself. It’s not fair on you to have to sleep in a room with me. I’ll have the back room, it’s quieter, and I will take a sleeping pill. Goodnight, Richie.’

  I help her move her things out of the big bedroom, and I tuck her up, kiss her, and go out to sit on the balcony in the cooler air. I finish the wine and the salami. Noor is quiet, and I am pleased she is getting some rest.

  43

  Aftermath

  In the morning she was dead. She had brought many sleeping pills and tranquillisers with her. It turned out that she had come to say goodbye, just as she had said. She had removed her turquoise ring from Sinai, and put it beside the bed for me.

  As I picked up my phone, I had the feeling that it was going to be the most difficult telephone call I had ever made.

  ‘Haneen, it’s Richie.’

  ‘Oh, Richard, morning. How is she? She called me last night very late, and left a message, whispering, saying goodbye. I was very worried. I tried to call her but her phone was off and so was yours.’

  ‘Oh God, Haneen, this is awful, dreadful: all I can do is tell you that she is dead. I don’t know how to tell you any other way. When I went in to see her in the morning – she went to bed early – she was absolutely still. Our landlady called the ambulance, and they declared her dead. She left a note reading: Goodbye, Richie, my lover and my brother for ever. I’m so, so sorry, Haneen.’

  She is crying, and gasping.

  ‘It’s terrible. Terrible. But I don’t blame you, Richard; I should have told you I was worried that she would try to take her life. She tried twice in Toronto, but I didn’t want to tell you. Do you want me to come?’

  ‘Please come, I can’t do this alone. Thank you, Haneen. Thank you.’

  I give her some details of how to get to Symi and she says she will ring back when she has a flight from Tel Aviv Ben Gurion.

  The rest of the day is harrowing. The police ask a lot of questions, with the help of an Englishwoman who runs a local estate agency. I explain that Noor has been ill in Toronto, and that we had made a plan to go on a holiday together when she recovered; she was my half-sister, raised separately in Canada. I have to fill out ten pages of statements. Many of the questions seem to me to be misguided, ignoring entirely the human nature of what has gone on, as if suicide were a wilful nuisance that mostly requires assurances about payments as a redress. The questions are offensively practical. Was she a citizen of the EU? If not there is no repatriation allowance. And so it goes on.

  The doctors confirm late in the day that she had swallowed a mixture of anti-depressants and sleeping pills; as she translates the doctors’ report, the Englishwoman smiles and nods, as if to say she has been on my side all along. Later she tells me that the Greeks in these parts abhor suicide; they are superstitious about it. I don’t know if this is true.

  Haneen arrived from Tel Aviv, via Rhodes, on Aegli, the following day. I met her at the mooring. She came off first, with the fat man carrying her luggage: noblesse oblige. She hugged me. We stood for a while against the background of the harbour, rocking gently but insistently like ships at anchor. She took my arm so that we could stand out of the sun next to the butane gas depot to talk.

  ‘Richard, the first thing to understand is that it is absolutely not your fault. I should have told you that she was suicidal, and had tried to kill herself before. But she said how much she was looking forward to this holiday and she said she was sure she would recover. I only half believed it, but I had to give her the chance. And I didn’t want to be the one who told you how depressed she was. I am to blame, if any of us is. But of course those who are most to blame are those monsters in Cairo. By the way I have spoken to my brother and his wife. They are hysterical. It’s terrible. Can we go to see her now?’

  ‘Yes, it is all arranged. It’s not far but a car is waiting.’

  I can’t go into the clinic again with Haneen. I stand outside and I call Cathérine. She is in Paris, at the book fair. I tell her that my half-sister has died, suicide, that this wasn’t her first attempt and that I want to come to France to see her.

  ‘Of course. I’m so sorry for you. Life is very cruel, I know. When will you be arriving?’

  ‘I could meet you in Paris, day after tomorrow, and maybe we could travel to your house together?’

  ‘Perfect. Forgive me, Richard, I was a little bit worried that you were really going away with a girlfriend. So in one way I am relieved. That sounds terrible; it came out wrong in English: I feel very, very concerned for you. It must have been awful. But I love you – I think you know this already. Is that a good thing?’

  ‘It’s everything to me. Everything.’

  It takes me a few moments to compose myself.

  I want to tell her that I love her too, but a few yards away Noor is lying dead, in a thin mortuary gown that reveals, mercilessly, her fragile body, and at the same time her humiliation and despair. Her bridge, replacing the teeth she has lost, is lying with her clothes in a wire basket. I just can’t utter the word ‘love’.

  When Haneen emerges, she is silent. I hold her around the waist. She is rocking slowly.

  ‘Haneen, are you all right?’

  Her haughty eyes, her paprika eyelids, her arched eyebrows, her flared nostrils, her shrewd mouth, her long neck – they are all struggling for meaning in the chaos of life.

  ‘She looked happy for the first time in months,’ she says. ‘That at least is a blessing.’

  The cicadas on the hill are screaming. Haneen and I are bound together; only we know the full story.

  44

  Six Months Later

  Before I left Symi, I took the little boat moored in front of the house, and set off to the monastery of Panormitis. After leaving the harbour I kept close to the coast. Thoughts of buying land – I was looking at a small bay with one or two deserted stone houses – seized me. Perhaps I could live here, with a boat for transport, and write what I know. I think it is true to say that I have enough material. Parched hills and small islands went by to my left; the landscape was absolutely free of life, although out to sea, in the direction of Kos, a low blue-grey form on the near horizon to the east, I could see small fishing boats. The entrance to the bay of Panormitis is narrow. After travelling for nearly two hours I wondered if I had missed it. But suddenly, as if looking through a narrow doorway to a painting beyond, I saw the bell tower of Panormitis, rising like a rocket at Cape Canaveral above the much
lower, white buildings of the monastery. I had forgotten how wide and how nearly perfectly circular the bay was.

  I moored the boat at the quayside and went straight to the bakery, through an archway. I remembered some pastries my father had bought for us. Particularly, I recalled the scent of a lemon cake. It’s of course a truism that childhood scents can be evocative. I was dehydrated after my long boat trip, and bought two large bottles of water to go with the cake. I had brought some writing paper and a pen. I wrote a message just as my father had done, and I threw it overboard in one of the bottles as I passed through the entrance to the bay on the voyage homewards, followed by the diminishing tones of bells. I kept on going beyond the harbour of Chorio and anchored near the chapel of Agia Marina on its small island. It was dusk, the tangible, gilded, classical dusk. I stripped off and swam right round the island. I sang Mamma Mia! tunes untunefully, and mostly under water, to fulfil at least part of my promise to Noor.

  The note in the bottle read: It is not about something. It is the thing itself.

  I am home now with Cathérine as I write. She is pregnant. For the past few months I have been helping her in Parola, her bookshop, and my French is pretty good.

  In my mind, she and Noor have merged. I haven’t been able to tell Cathérine that Noor was my lover. It seems my life, which has been marked by deception, is continuing along that path. Cathérine does not know that we had planned to be married. She knows only that Noor was kidnapped and abused in Cairo and committed suicide. Unknowingly, Cathérine colludes in this deception because she is well up on the subject of rape, and embraces sympathetically evidence of its awfulness. She sees it as a rebuff to the rational mind. Like Haneen, she studied at the Sorbonne and those beautiful courtyards – where young students sit with their lovers, kissing carnivorously, and where the spirits of Diderot and Voltaire and Rousseau keep watch – have formed her. I could say something similar about Oxford’s effect on me; it’s the sense that there exists something ultimately worthwhile, something that will overcome obstacles and outlive all the madness and depravity.

  Cathérine is very happy to be pregnant. Harry didn’t feel they were ready for parenthood. It was possibly their only major disagreement. I see that Harry and I are becoming fused in Cathérine’s eyes. She sometimes calls me Harry by mistake, but I don’t mind, although I feel a little guilty that I am living his life and spending his money. And also because I love his Cathérine so profoundly. She has suggested that, if our baby is a girl, she should be called Noor, and if it is a boy, he should be called Harry. I think it is a wonderful idea.

  My discovery of the missing portion of the True Cross has led to many invitations to speak all over the world. In a small way I have become known. Some people want to believe that this is the cross on which Jesus was actually crucified. It suggests to me that the longing to escape death and to make sense of a life will always be with us.

  I enjoy being in the bookshop and I make a good cup of coffee or a pot of Dammann Frères tea for the customers. I have learned how to do latte art, and my favourite motif is of a lion couchant, although sometimes I do an open book. An increasing number of the customers emerging from the old houses they have bought in the nearby towns and deserted villages in the hills are British. Some of them know of me and my find. They don’t say it, but I get the impression that coming for a chat and a latte, or an exotic tea, is the most exciting thing that happens to them on any given day.

  Every second week I take the train to London for meetings with Lord Huntingdon. He has twice had Cathérine and me to stay in the country. The first time, Venetia looked appraisingly at Cathérine for a long moment, but they got on well. Despite his Europhobia, Huntingdon says he finds her very charming. I think he means sexy. It is true that she has a very natural and evident sensuality.

  From home I provide content for Huntingdon’s website and I write speeches for him. (We have brought much needed attention to the plight of the plucky little mackerel.) I see that our meetings are important to Huntingdon; he is increasingly fond of me. I told him recently of my father’s letter and what he had said.

  ‘I believe he meant it, Richard. He struggled with his problems for those last ten years, but he told me often that he had wasted his life. He was a dear man. He never really got over the drugs business in college. He was a lovely man, very human. You are very like him in some ways.’

  I wonder what it is about me that so many people have seen qualities in me I am not sure I possess. Although I am well on the way to finishing my book, it will be too late for Stephen Feuchtwanger. He died a few months ago, and was buried in Wolvercote, not far from his friend Isaiah Berlin. A thousand people came for the funeral. I was one of them.

  For myself I have two ambitions: one is to be a good father and the second is to live by writing. Both are forms of immortality. Perhaps the only two that are available.

  Acknowledgements

  John Gillingham is the master biographer of Richard I, and his books and papers have been my guide. Any mistakes in my book are certainly not his. The Bodleian Library has been more than helpful, and I particularly want to thank Christopher Fletcher, Keeper of Western Manuscripts. I would also like to thank Professor Robert Taylor of the University of Toronto who helped me cheerfully with some translations from and to Occitan. Selina Hastings was generous with her knowledge.

  At Bloomsbury I have been helped and warmly encouraged by my editor, Michael Fishwick. Anna Simpson has been gently but firmly effective in putting this book together and Mary Tomlinson has read and corrected my manuscript with great diligence, as she has done for at least four of my novels. I am now something of a Bloomsbury veteran, and I am ever grateful to Katie Bond, Nigel Newton, Alexandra Pringle, David Ward, Kathleen Farrar and Trâm-Anh Doan, as well as to more recent arrivals, especially Laura Brooke, publicist.

  My agent, James Gill, is way more than an agent: he has a frighteningly complete knowledge of European languages and is a fierce ally. I owe him a great deal.

  A Note on the Author

  Justin Cartwright’s novels include the Booker-shortlisted In Every Face I Meet, the Whitbread Novel Award-winner Leading the Cheers, the acclaimed White Lightning, shortlisted for the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award, The Promise of Happiness, selected for the Richard & Judy Book Club and winner of the 2005 Hawthornden Prize, The Song Before It Is Sung, To Heaven By Water and, most recently, Other People’s Money, winner of the Spears novel of the year. Justin Cartwright was born in South Africa and lives in London.

  @justincartwrig1

  By the Same Author

  Interior

  In Every Face I Meet

  Masai Dreaming

  Leading the Cheers

  Half in Love

  White Lightning

  The Promise of Happiness

  This Secret Garden

  The Song Before It Is Sung

  To Heaven by Water

  Other People’s Money

  Also available by Justin Cartwright

  Other People’s Money

  ‘Urgently topical fiction with its finger on the pulse of earth-shaking events ... Cartwright’s fiction has an uncanny habit of catching the zeitgeist in nets of fine-meshed tragi-comic steel’ Independent

  The Trevelyan family is in grave trouble. Their private bank of Tubal & Co. is in on the verge of collapsing. It’s not the first time in its three-hundred-and-forty-year history, but it may be the last. A sale is under way, and a number of important facts need to be kept hidden, not only from the public, but also from Julian Trevelyan-Tubal’s deeply traditional father, Sir Harry, who is incapacitated in the family villa in Antibes. Great families, great fortunes and even greater secrets collide in this gripping, satirical and acutely observed story of our time.

  ‘Wise, droll and beautiful fiction’ David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas

  ‘Composed with a superb eye and supremely well written’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘What a great read this is. Cartwright assemble
s a wonderful cast of characters in this masterpiece ... A treat from start to triumphant finish’ Observer

  ‘Cartwright’s subtle and pacy comedy of manners finds its humour and humanity in the shades of moral grey that define all its main characters’ Daily Mail

  To Heaven By Water

  A BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime

  David Cross is surrounded by secrets. When his wife Nancy was alive he kept secrets from her and now that she is dead, he must hide his new happiness from his children, Lucy and Ed. But they too have their troubles: Ed’s marriage is in trouble, Lucy is being stalked by her ex-boyfriend, and both worry that their father will find a new partner.

  To Heaven by Water is a touching and hilarious portrait of a family trying to come to terms with loss in their own way.

  ‘His storytelling powers are so fluent and persuasive,

  the quality of his observation so fine’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘A delicately patterned novel about the heroic search for happiness and its ultimate fragility. The comfortable middle-class setting and faintly fairytale ending belie a portrait of family life in which concealment and compromise are never far away. Quietly moving’

  Financial Times

  ‘A high-class piece of literary entertainment’

  Spectator

  The Promise of Happiness

  The Richard & Judy bestseller

  Winner of the Hawthornden Prize 2005