Other People's Houses

by Hilary McPhee

  I tried not to quiz Lyndall a few days later, when we visited the Bagno Vignoni to soak in the mineral baths and read in the sun. She was discreet, naturally, and only told me she thought the Prince was charming and that he said he was sorry I wasn’t there—and that Nella was in her element.

  7

  Banishment

  PEOPLE ARE ‘REMOVED’ from Jordan. Sent back to where they came from. I first saw it happen to a talented young gardener, good looking, with a liking for white straw hats, which set him apart in that world, where men covered their heads in red- or black-check keffiyas, or if they were poor, tied any old cloth around them, so they weren’t bareheaded in the ferocious summer sun.

  He told me later how he had been headhunted and interviewed in London, where his qualifications, and experience in managing large gardens and teams of skilled or unskilled gardeners, boded well for him. He had been employed with much fanfare, to start the slow process of redesigning one of the old Palace lawns, which stretched as far as the eye could see beneath ancient jacarandas, cypresses and Lebanese cedars, and reducing the amount of water the gardens required.

  At parties in the early evenings, in the best suburbs and in Palace gardens, princesses, ambassadors’ wives and young beauties stepped out of their Manolo Blahniks, making little noises, like doves, at the feel of the dark green velvet on their bare toes. But some murmured that the time was fast approaching where such lavishness would be disapproved of—even in this part of the world, where displays of wealth were appreciated. The roses and hydrangeas would have to be replaced with hardier species from Australia and South Africa. Foreign consultants would arrive from Dubai or Bahrain, to design cactus gardens, and lawns with coarser grass, and even discuss mulching with woodchips. This young man was flown in from New Zealand, I think it was, to take charge of all this.

  He was popular from the start. His gaze from under his hat was direct, and his manner charming, rather than servile, which endeared him to everyone. He knew his plants. He admired the antiquity of the Lebanese cedars. He asked intelligent questions about the original plantings and design by the wife of the British high commissioner, in the late 1920s, in the days when Jordan was a few years old and a British protectorate.

  From the window of the pavilion where I was working, I could see the new head gardener early in the mornings, talking earnestly about relocating shrubs, and perhaps opening up vistas across to the stables. He had taught himself some Arabic salutations, in order to enquire about the families of his work team, as was expected, and he listened to their answers, which was not. He gave orders in Arabic, which was also unusual. The housekeeper, who was British, always spoke English to the ousters, raising her voice a little and speaking slowly. The Australian PA spoke many phrases after fifteen years, and she, too, always listened to the answers, and looked sad if the answer was muffi quais. The colonials were kinder than the English or the Arabs, or the Pakistanis; or so it seemed to me. The Princess—Pakistani, clever and beautiful beyond compare—made no attempt to hide her impatience with Arabs, even though her husband was a sharif and a Hashemite, and part of forty-two generations in a direct line to the Prophet.

  It did not seem to occur to the young head gardener to keep an autocratic, or even a managerial, distance from the Egyptian crew, who worked from early morning to late afternoon, then retreated to concrete bunkers out of sight behind the outer walls, where there were no gardens. I imagined them lying on their bunks, watching television under the fluorescent light I could see flickering from my balcony, smoking their Egyptian cigarettes and thinking about the families they were sending most of their wages to each month. The head gardener, it was said, visited the bunkhouse and played cards with them once or twice. That may have counted against him.

  After he disappeared, word was put about that he had been too close to someone whose cousin worked in the kitchen and who had told this someone’s father about it. The alarm was sounded and he was gone. Those of us who had grown fond of him, and sometimes had a mint tea with him at the end of the day, were told nothing. When I enquired, it was made clear what had happened was no business of mine.

  He had no rights. Like me, he had no visa. He was officially ‘a guest of the Palace’, which sounded impressive, and even privileged, until I really thought about it. Persona non grata truly meant something there.

  Much later, I heard the head gardener was given twenty-four hours to leave Amman. The deal was that guests of the Palace had to return to where they’d come from: Wellington, in his case, I believe. His protestations that he had had offers of work he wished to pursue in Dubai, where gardens were being invested in in a big way, were of no avail. His bags were searched, and he had no chance to speak to anyone; not even me, who had the apartment below his and was not part of the Diwan. A soldier sat outside his door all night, and his phone was disconnected, his mobile number blocked; he had no right of reply. The next morning, a driver was instructed to hand him over to airport security.

  No one spoke out in his defence. The foreigners said to each other, when they gathered in the evenings, Poor man, how unjust. The PA rang his mother in New Zealand, which I thought was very decent of her, to say how sorry she was. But soon he became the foolish head gardener, then the rumours began spreading, until the foreigners were telling each other they probably didn’t know the whole story. Within a few weeks, he was no longer mentioned and had been replaced.

  He sent me an email after I had left Jordan. I had written him a couple of references that may have helped get him an interview for a job as a gardener for someone who hadn’t read the initial publicity that had followed his appointment to the royal court. It was okay to be headhunted and praised, but not to seek personal publicity after taking up the job—a mother speaking excitedly to her local paper, maybe, with an old photograph of Prince Hassan found on Google; Local lad to transform royal gardens. Any transformation had to be the inspiration of a Princess, who might summon her head gardener to move the privet hedge to make room for a croquet lawn. The article would have been sent to the Diwan by some friend of the Royal Family or former employee with faintly malicious intent.

  The Princess and her head of the Diwan would have had the young gardener vetted before he’d arrived. She prided herself on her modernity, and may even have thought the elegant young man in the white panama hat would be an asset at a garden party. As, indeed, he would have been.

  We were told later the reason for his disappearance would have been something to do with the tribes, meaning he’d overstepped some line in the sand, or offended someone’s brother or cousin. Perhaps also, it later occurred to me, he had not been obsequious enough to a daughter or a gun-toting son. Foreigners keep the household, the garden and the office running smoothly. This means they are relied upon, confided in, but not respected. Entering Jordan as guests of the Royal Palace, they hand over their passports when they are met at the arrivals gate, and ushered through a Crowne Classe VIP entrance to a silent, empty lounge where they sit on a velvet banquette and drink a glass of tea while their bags arrive. No visa, no stamps in their passport, no customs, no delays.

  The first few times, you sit composing faintly surprised stories for family and friends. The work you’ve been summoned to do must indeed be valued. Only later does it start to dawn on you that you’ve been thoroughly investigated, and fast-tracked into a world where an eye will be kept on your every move, and from which you will be removed without explanation if you are no longer required, or have committed an offence of which you are only dimly aware.

  At the end of my first week in Jordan, I was taken to an orange grove; a lovely place for a picnic. The Prince drove me in a huge black SUV with guns in the back. There were guards in other SUVs behind us, coming alongside our SUV wherever the road was wide enough, or we came to a crossroads where danger might lurk.

  I was being taken to see the Palace’s farm, and something of the countryside in the north near the Syrian border, which was, of course, patrolled. Later,
as more SUVs pulled up and small children spilled out, with their Filippina nannies and their beautiful young mothers, and a young Prince arrived in an army jeep, with a gun mounted on the back, I realised I was to meet the family—or they were to meet and vet me. The small princelings were charming and greeted me solemnly. The three daughters and the son were formal and slightly distant. What is Baba up to now?

  Oriental rugs were laid on the ground and strewn with cushions. We sat among the trees laden with oranges, at small tables in a little open tent with a pointy top, like the ones in paintings of medieval jousts. It all enchanted me: the wicker picnic baskets; the china; the safari chair for the Prince, who surveyed the family from a small hillock and puffed his hookah, while his wife arranged the lunch of flatbread and olives, mezze, cold roast chicken legs and drumsticks.

  After we’d eaten, the small children seemed to like it when I told them stories of kangaroos, which they knew how to imitate from television. And I demonstrated a kookaburra laugh I learned to do as a schoolgirl. It sounded lost in the orange grove with the Golan Heights only a few kilometres away.

  Charming and disarming. A closed world you were invited to enter and, if you played the game, accepted it at its own estimate of itself, a magic circle for as long as it lasted. There were foreigners for whom it had lasted for nearly twenty years. Each of them said to me that they thought of leaving at the end of every month, when the demands had become unendurable. Each of them told me to write a book about it. Not the one I was there to write. Each of them was utterly loyal and devoted to Sidi and Sitti. I was told the next generation was the problem—whose sense of entitlement to the services of the extremely efficient foreign staff who had run the household and its grounds for most of their lifetimes, now felt free to issue orders, and express irritation, and even outrage, when tasks weren’t carried out to their satisfaction.

  Sometimes it seemed to us foreigners, who were permitted to witness aspects of the private lives, that the younger generation and their spouses were set on undermining their parents. This can happen in any family, but a monarchy is more than a family. This one had a mother who was a glamourous outsider. And a father who was the Crown Prince no longer, and a melancholy figure sometimes as he trudged across the lawn to spill his story to a hireling.

  The dramatics of everyday life kept everyone going. There was the ouster’s son who wanted to go to college, but the one he desired to go to had a higher entry score than he was capable of achieving, or he needed more wasta than the boy’s father could legitimately ask the Princess, who kept the purse, to supply. Then there was the able young woman dressed in hijab and jeans who had a degree in engineering and replaced the poor New Zealander in his white hat and managed a team of Egyptian labourers. When her wedding ring was lost, the entire family was out with torches, searching, the evening before one of the summer garden parties. The generosity and kindness of the House of Hashemites was legendary.

  Then banishment happened to me. Except that I removed myself, after many visits and months there, and several pleas to stay. I left because of a tone of voice angrily giving me orders. So trivial it seems from this distance, I am astonished. But then I unpack the events of that last couple of weeks—though ‘events’ is the wrong word. They were more rumours spreading from the Hashemites’ London household to their household in the Royal Palace in old Amman; mere descriptions of what was observed, through a window or a doorway, in a lovely summer garden. These observations were part of my life in Jordan. Rumours and gossip, second- and third-hand most of them, and impossible to check.

  Princes don’t answer mobile phones or emails; intermediaries do it on their behalf. Once, though, I was called to the phone in the Hotel Zenobia in Palmyra. The PA had insisted the Prince tell me what he thought about one of the earlier drafts of the book. He told me how much he liked it and how very pleased he was. Writers, editors, amanuenses—whatever I was—need feedback, and his words kept me going for weeks. Hearing from Sidi Hassan while in Palmyra meant something huge.

  The PA and I had taken ourselves to Syria for a few days. We went to Damascus, and explored the Old City; sat in the courtyard of the Umayyad mosque, watching the families and their beautiful children playing between the pillars. A stall holder and his mates, jewellers, in Bab Touma Street, told us how lucky we were to live in Jordan because it was a monarchy—which, of course, we reported back to Sidi Hassan. He couldn’t go into Syria because of the ‘bad blood between the governments’, the PA told me. Then we were driven east to Palmyra and the Roman ruins, to see the baths of Diocletian, his camp and the Temple of Al-Lat, as the sun set and the Turkish tourist buses filled up the car parks.

  Very soon after I left Jordan, word reached me from London that I was being badmouthed, my name blackened. I had let them down. I had spoken rudely to Princess Badiya. I told myself I didn’t care. Then I found I did care very much, and wondered how I would have felt if my daughter had been criticised for speaking angrily to an underling.

  Inconceivable. My Australian daughter, when I told her on the telephone that I had withdrawn from the project, didn’t know what an underling was.

  Nella had an apartment in Rome, ‘at the Vatican’, because, she told me, her uncle, Pier Giorgio Frassati, had been beatified in 1990. He had died of polio aged 24, caught while working for the poor in the slums of Torino. Soon after the Hashemites had visited her, and perhaps to make some kind of amends, Nella invited me for soup in her kitchen, and for advice on coffin handles ‘suitable for Australia’. Her uncle’s remains were to accompany Pope Benedict to Sydney for World Youth Day. I had nothing useful to say about coffin handles, but the body did go to Sydney, and crowds of young people followed his coffin.

  When I was no longer working on the book, I put the word out to literary editors that I was available to do occasional reviewing. Stephen Romei at the Australian asked me to review Alex Miller’s complete opus. He told me copies were on their way, but they were taking their time to arrive from the publisher in Sydney, to Cortona, high above the Valdichiana. First came a message from UPS that the town did not exist and I must have the name wrong. Then came phone calls from first Rome and then Milan, informing me that, as I lived in campagna, I must tell them how far I was from the nearest town. A week went by. Then from Arezzo, just 50 kilometres away, came a call from a delivery truck, asking for directions through Cortona’s one-way streets only wide enough for a motorino or an old Fiat. My suggestion that I meet the truck in the nearest piazza was refused. Delivery had to be to my door. Another week went by, then my name was shouted below my window and and I looked out to see a smiling delivery man holding a large box. Miracolo, he said. Alex Miller’s nine novels, his life’s work, had arrived.

  This part of Italy, near the border of Umbria and Tuscany, is covered in a glistening web of writers. Some of the greatest, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, were born around here. Then came the flag bearers of the canon in English: the Brownings, the Sitwells, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Edith Wharton. During the summer, English tourists walked through olive groves scattering the seeds of field flowers, exchanging writerly stories and literary gossip. Sometimes I joined them. They pointed out the house where Sonia Orwell stayed for a bit after George died, where one of his best biographers still lived, just down the hill. There was the table and the little chair Germaine Greer left behind in a farmhouse. Nobody approved of David Plante’s memoir Difficult Women, for his exposé of Jean Rhys and Sonia Orwell, but the verdict was that Germaine could look after herself. Cortona now offered creative writing classes and writers’ residencies in convents, a demand triggered no doubt by Frances Mayes, reputed to be part of a syndicate building a replica of a Tuscan village in California. Umberto Eco would approve.

  I sometimes mentioned Australian authors as I walked through the hills. No one had heard of Miles Franklin, whose huge biography by Jill Roe, I would be reviewing, or Alex Miller. Or Christina Stead. But Patrick White and Peter Carey cut the mustard. So did Al
an Moorehead, whose daughter’s family had a holiday house on the west coast, which I visited one long weekend. David Malouf and Germaine Greer had houses near Cortona for years. And Australians often stayed with Jeffrey Smart when he was in the neighbourhood. Barry Humphries visited Jeffrey often and everyone there knew both of them.

  Who is Alex Miller? asked Carmen, by far my best-read friend in London, when I mentioned I was waiting for his books. This produced in me a frisson of fear. Would Miller stand up? Would something have happened to me here to leach the life out of his words? Would they sound thin, his concerns provincial? Would I have to quietly back away from writing this piece?

  I first read Patrick White and Christina Stead on a beach in Greece; Márquez in a park in Rushcutters Bay; and Ismail Kadare while waiting for my daughter in an ashram in Tamil Nadu—but it was the writing that affected me, not where I read it. Alex Miller’s opus indeed still did—and what seemed to me his best, Journey to the Stone Country and Conditions of Faith I passed on to English friends who needed to read them. As I walked, I longed to describe Australian flowers that bloom after rain, the colours of coastal heath, the sand dunes, the long, empty surf beach where I swam as a child, and still do when I am at home. But words failed me—so I recommended books instead.

  It was summer and I’d hit the wall again. I’d had an array of visitors staying: couples, friends from my old shared life with my husband. No one mentioned that his book was out and making waves along with the US primaries. He hadn’t sent me a copy, which hurt, but the mail was slow. I sometimes listened to interviews on my iPod when I walked alone, including one where my husband mocked Tuscany as a place that doesn’t really challenge you like the backblocks of Amerika. Oh, really.