Tree of Pearls

He pushed back the blankets and swung his legs over the side of the sofa, squinting at his boots and shaking his head. He looked up at me. I had my face in my hand and was thinking about weeping. Or laughing. Something involuntary and physical, anyway.

‘Do you want some breakfast?’ he said to her.

‘First I go to the loo,’ said Lily, ‘and then I have breakfast.’ Ha ha! Letting him know how things are, how things work around here.

‘What do you have?’ he said, standing up, not knowing whether or not he was to go into the bathroom with her.

‘You can come in if you like,’ she said. In he went, and she started to explain about cereal, porridge, pancakes on highdays and holidays, melon that we had on holiday once and a naughty little horse came and tried to eat it.

I sat on the sofa. I had an image of a great big tiny girl’s little finger, with raggy nails and the remains of sparkly pink nail polish from a birthday party, and wrapped spiralled all around the length of it was long tall Harry. There could be worse ways for it to go, I knew. It was … all right. For them to be in love with each other.

The sofa was warm where he had been sleeping, but behind my neck there was a coldness. A sad little coldness, all the sadder for knowing it was absurd. But it was there. If you love each other then what about me? And they are blood. Blood closer than me. It’s Janie’s blood in there with them. Not mine.

I pulled the little feeling round from behind me and placed it square on my lap. ‘Don’t be daft,’ I said to it, not harshly, but it looked me square in the eyes and I knew it had a point, and that I would have to bear it in mind. Sitting there with his warmth under me, thinking about love, I wondered whether, if I had said yes, sex would have crowned us and saved us and thrown us to the top of the mountain whence we would have surveyed our glorious new future, clear-eyed and confident like Soviet youngsters saluting a five-year plan. Maybe. Maybe.

I could hear Lily instructing Harry in how to get her dressed and make her breakfast, and I felt very, very odd.

*

Harry went to work. As men do. Rise, kiss children, and go to work. God but it felt weird. A little version of normality suddenly and weirdly come to sit on my head. There hasn’t been a boyfriend in my life – my domestic life – for years. The last one, actually, was Harry. Then the years of travelling and running wild, then the years of just me and Lily.

Except Sa’id. But I’m not thinking about Sa’id.

And now here is Harry going to work.

As soon as he left, Lily and I looked each other and said, ‘well?’ At least I did. She didn’t. It was as if she knew everything, and didn’t need to talk to me about it. Didn’t need gossip, or discussion, or analysis, or reassurance.

‘Well, sweetheart?’ I asked.

‘What?’ she said.

Part of me yelled out, ‘Jesus fuck, five years of love and devotion and total non-verbal understanding gone, just like that, just because love has gone multilateral …’ A silent part, of course.

‘About the daddy?’ I said. The daddy we’ve been talking about so long, the daddy I promised you, the daddy you longed for and I wasn’t sure I could provide and now I have – what about him?

‘Why are you calling him the daddy? He’s just Daddy. Not the daddy.’

He’s just Daddy. She spoke as if she’s known him all her life.

‘Are you … is he OK? Are you pleased?’

‘Doesn’t matter if he’s OK,’ she said. ‘He’s my daddy so I love him.’

‘Oh,’ I said. How very easy this seems to be for her. How very misleading that impression might be.

‘You know, Mummy,’ she said. ‘Because it was his little sperm so he’s part of me and so we love each other.’

I don’t feel left out and I am not jealous. I’m really not. I can accept that I might feel these things briefly but they’re not … how I really feel. I really feel really happy that she is being so uncannily together about this. And I’m not sure I believe it. But she is looking at me, so straight and clear and young, and I find myself thinking, my god, maybe it is possible that she just is this well-balanced, maybe between her own natural self and my long devotion to her security she is capable of happily and harmoniously swanning into having a father after all.

But swans paddle furiously under the water.

No, go with it girl. Don’t look for grief. If there’s to be any you’ll notice soon enough.

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You’re still my mummy even if it wasn’t your little egg.’

I was ridiculously pleased to hear it, and we walked to school as if nothing had happened, as if it was still just us, and then I came home and got in the bath.

*

Dressed again after my bath, I was staring out of my study window, looking out over the grey and yellow mouldy plum December skies and the chilling, battening-down rows of west London winter roofs, not applying myself to some negligible piece of work, wondering about Harry. It had been a few weeks since he had produced the official certificate of his right and duty to be around. He leaves nothing here. No detritus for me to clear away, nothing to suggest he’s coming back. Physically, he might as well never have been here. But he does come back. He’s been coming back for a while.

So now we arrange a semi-detached homelife for Lily, from scratch. I was hugely alert to what we could slip into. We needed to talk, and yet when we did there was so little to say. Perhaps we just needed to do. Perhaps I should, as Fontella Bass recommends, ‘Leave it in the Hands of Love’.

The phone rang. I stared at it a bit dopily, then answered. A stranger’s voice, a man, asking for me by my full name. Something put my hackles up. I am a most defensive and protective person. But I was prepared to admit that I was me.

‘This is Simon Preston Oliver,’ he said.

I was none the wiser, and implied it. And then remembered his name from the message.

‘Scotland Yard,’ he said.

Immediately I had a flood of the feeling I get when the school rings: they know parents and their first words are always ‘don’t worry, nothing’s happened to Lily’. I wanted this man to say these words of Harry. Why would Scotland Yard ring me, if not …?

‘Why?’ I said, not very intelligently.

‘I need to talk to you, Ms Gower, and …’

‘Is Harry all right?’ I interrupted.

There was a pause. ‘DI Makins is fine,’ he said.

‘Of course,’ I said. Still hurtling up the wrong track. ‘Isn’t that …’

‘I’m not calling about him, no. I need to talk to you about another matter. I could call on you later this afternoon, or tomorrow …’

I’m not having him here. I had enough of that in the old days with Bent Copper Ben Cooper calling round at all hours trying to blackmail me and ruining my life, before I knew Janie’s secrets and before … oh, before so many things.

‘Why?’ I said again. If it wasn’t about Harry, if Harry was all right, then there was nothing I could possibly want to know about lurking anywhere down this line of talk. This means disruption and I am trying to settle.

‘In person would be better,’ he said, cajolingly, setting my hackles right on edge.

‘Why?’ I said again. Using the weapons of a three-year-old, and leaving him sitting in the silence.

After a while he said, ‘We want to ask you some questions.’

Well, that’s subtly and fundamentally different from wanting to talk to me. But it doesn’t answer my question.

‘What about?’

‘Angeline,’ he said – which was wrong of him, and set my hackles flying from the ramparts. I object to chumminess in people I don’t know, particularly if we are obviously not getting on. I also knew I would have to talk to him. I knew I was being obstructive and silly. But that’s how I felt. He would have to tell me sooner or later, why not now? Why this secretive big-willy stuff? He did remind me of Ben.

‘Just what’s it about?’ I said, interrupting.

I could hear him thinking for a moment, and I heard his decision the moment before the answer popped out.

‘Cairo,’ he said.

Cairo.

El-Qahira, the victorious. People who know it call it Kie-ear-oh, one long swooping melting of vowels in the middle. People who don’t call it Kie Roh. As he did. This was quietly reassuring. It meant that he didn’t know the city or, probably, anyone in it. But the reassurance was small next to my main reaction.

I have no desire to talk about Cairo. There is nothing about Cairo that bodes any joy for me and Lily.

‘I have nothing to say about Cairo,’ I said pompously. Breathing shallow.

‘Well let’s see, shall we? I’ll come to you at five tomorrow,’ he said, and the sod hung up.

I resolved to be in the park.

TWO

Beware policemen in pubs

By five the next day I had seen sense, though part of me still thought it a shame that I had. Lily had come out of school begging to be allowed to go home with her friend Adjoa, so that was easy, and I was free to lurk like Marlene under the streetlight at the bottom of my staircase until he appeared. He was not coming to my flat, whatever he might think. I had to see him, but I didn’t have to welcome him.

It was such a wintry evening that no one was hanging around the stairwells or the strips of park and path that lie between the blocks of the estate, which is rare, because the estate is a very sociable place, what with the teenagers and the crackheads and the men yelling up at the windows of the women who have thrown them out, and just as well because people round here have a strong sense of plod. Enough of my neighbours break the law on a regular basis to be able to smell it when it comes calling. (I prefer to associate myself with the mothers and the kids still too young to be running round with wraps of god knows what for their big brothers. You know, the three-year-olds.) But what with the weather and the dark, no one but me saw the dark car rolling up quietly through the dingy Shepherd’s Bush dusk, and stopping, and its passenger door swinging open.

‘Get in,’ came the voice, the figure leaning over from having opened the door. I ignored it. How did he know I was me, anyway? Presumably they had bothered to acquire a photograph of me, somewhere down the line. I don’t like the idea, but neither do I imagine there is anything I can do about it.

‘Get in!’ Louder.

I rubbed my mouth, and looked this way and that up and down the road, and then went round to the driver’s side. He wound down the window. Very pale face. Putty-coloured. Very dark brows, very arched.

I said: ‘How would you, as a police officer, encourage your wife or daughters to respond to a stranger in a car who shouts “get in” at them?’

For a moment I thought he was going to tell me to grow up, but he didn’t. He sighed, and said, ‘Where do you want to go?’ There was something so tired in it that I gave up. I got in the car, and directed him to a done-up pub down by Ravenscourt Park where they have a wood fire and nice food and good coffee. I yearn for comfort.

I chose an upright little table and ordered what Lily still calls a cup of chino. He had a lime juice cordial thing, and I realized he was an alcoholic. Don’t know how. It was just apparent. We sat in silence for few moments, and I thought: ‘I don’t want this to start up again. I don’t want any more of this. Not again.’ I know that I am strong, that I can deal with it. But.

‘Cairo,’ he said. I felt my insides begin to subside. Like all the lovely crunchy fluffy individual concrete ingredients in a food mixer – switch the button and they turn to low gloop. ‘You know more or less what this is about.’

I didn’t answer. A slow burning anger was running along a fuseline direct to my heart.

What, through the gloop? The absurdity of mixed metaphors always cheers me up, makes me sharpen up.

Cairo meant only two things to me now. Not the time I spent there in my previous life, nine or so years ago, though it seems like a lifetime (well, it is a lifetime – Lily’s lifetime, and more), living in the big block off Talat Haarb that we called Château Champollion, and dancing for my living in the clubs and on the Nile boats. When I saw every dawn and not a single midday. Not the friends I’d made then, the girls of all nations, the musicians of all Arab nations, the ex-pats and chatterboxes at the Grillon. Not the aromatic light and shade of the Old City, or the view from the roof of the mosque of Ibn Tulun, not the taste of cardamom in coffee or the flavour of dust. No … Cairo, now, only means Sa’id. And this could not be about Sa’id. So it had to be about Eddie Bates.

‘You flew to Cairo on Friday October 17th, on October 20th you continued to Luxor, and you returned to London via Cairo on October 24th. Is that right?’

He pronounced it Lux-Or. Not Looksr. Definitely not an Egyptophile. Well, why would he be?

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Can you tell me about your visit?’

‘Can you tell me why you want to know?’

It’s not that I don’t trust the police. I’d say not more than half of them are any worse than anyone else in life, which given their opportunities is probably a miracle. It’s just that last time I sat in a pub with a policeman he ended up blackmailing me into spying on Eddie Bates in a stupid effort to save his own corrupt arse, and that was the beginning of the whole hijacking of my life and Lily’s by these absurd people. So I am wary.

He looked at me under his sad eyebrows. ‘Have you ever heard of obstructing a police officer in the course of his duty?’ he said.

‘Have you ever heard of taking the trouble to gain a witness’s trust before expecting them to tell you all their business?’

He squinted at me.

‘Or aren’t I a witness?’ I said. The food mixer went again in my belly. ‘All I want to know,’ I said, tetchily, ‘is what this is about.’ Not quite true. What I really wanted was for it not to be happening.

‘How many things have you got going on in Cairo that might be of interest to the police then?’ he replied.

I wasn’t going to tell him anything. Not unless he told me first. As I can’t remember which country and western singer said, in big hair and blue eyeshadow: ‘I’ve been to the circus and I’ve seen the clowns, this ain’t my first rodeo.’

‘Nothing that I know of,’ I said. ‘That’s why I’m asking.’

He looked disappointed in me.

‘Eddie Bates,’ he said.

‘Eddie Bates is dead,’ I replied. That’s the official version and there is no reason for me to know any different. ‘He died in prison,’ I said. I even managed to look a little puzzled.

‘François du Berry, then,’ he said. ‘Could we just get on?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I lied. I knew exactly what he meant.

It was Harry who had told me that Eddie was not dead, but living in Cairo under an assumed name. What I didn’t know was whether Preston Oliver knew that Harry had told me – risking his career and maybe saving my life by doing so. I’m not telling any big policeman who I don’t know anything about this.

‘What were you doing in Egypt?’ he said.

‘I was on holiday,’ I said.

He just looked at me.

Sooner or later one of us was going to lose our temper, and I was afraid it was going to be me. I decided to do it the controlled way. Like the angry posh lady hectoring the Harrods shop assistant.

‘I think you’ll find,’ I said, ‘that asking the same question over and over is going to get you nowhere. I have no desire whatsoever to hamper you in the course of your duties, indeed I am happy to tell you anything that may be of use to you, but it is not unreasonable of me to want to know why. Do you think I am a witness to something? Do you suspect me of something? I have to insist that you be specific, because otherwise I’m afraid I can’t help you. You can think about it. I’ll be back in a moment.’

‘I think you’ll find.’ What a great phrase. And as for ‘I have to insist’ …

I found the public telephone, snatched up the receiver and rang Harry at work. Not there. Rang his mobile.

‘Harry?’

‘What is it?’ he said. He can smell urgency. Logically, I would be calling about our domestic and emotional situation, and he would have no business saying ‘What is it?’ to me in that tone. But he could tell.

‘Simon Preston Oliver – mean anything to you?’

‘Why?’ he said.

‘He’s here. Not right here – you know. He wants to know about Cairo.’

Harry knew about Cairo. Harry knows it all, pretty much. Well … most.

A moment passed.

‘Tell him,’ he said.

‘Everything?’

‘Everything you told me.’

‘Does he know you told me about Eddie?’

‘Not … not as such. I mean yes, he does, he must do. But we haven’t talked about it.’

‘So—’

‘I think he’s cool with it, but. But. Slide by it if you can.’

‘Do you think he’ll let me?’

‘He wouldn’t usually. He’s a snake – he’s brilliant. But in this case, yes – well, he loves me. I think. Shit.’

Well that was reassuring.

‘What’s it about, Harry?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. I’ve heard nothing since you’ve been back. Which may be because he’s put two and two together – you and me.’

The phrase hung between us. You and me. Its other context glowing slightly down the line.

I wrenched back on course. I’m going to have to get used to this. ‘Is he the bloke you talked to about me before I left?’ I asked. Harry had told me that a senior colleague, doubtful about the wisdom of putting Eddie on witness protection, had told Harry about it, specifically so that someone near to me could know, and remain aware.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He’s all right. He’s not Ben Cooper.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. Meaning it.

*

Back at the table, Preston Oliver greeted me with ‘And how’s Harry?’

I laughed.

‘You can’t blame me,’ I said.

‘I thought you would have spoken to him earlier,’ he said.

‘There’s a lot on my mind,’ I said.

‘So I would imagine,’ he said, eyeing me. He probably thinks I trust him now, I thought. Well … he’s not top of the list of people I don’t trust.

‘So,’ he said. ‘In your own words.’

I reckoned quickly. He knows a certain amount about me. There’s nothing to be lost by him knowing my version. And perhaps he will be nice and leave me alone if he feels that I am cooperating. So I briefly ran through for him some of the things that had been keeping me busy over the past few months.

‘A few months ago,’ I said, ‘I started to receive letters – anonymous letters, threatening. I worked out that they were from Chrissie Bates – Eddie’s wife. Then some purporting to be from Eddie. Who I knew to be dead. I’d been to his funeral.’ I had. And I’d met Chrissie for the first time, and it had been very mad, though not as mad as later when Eddie turned out to be not dead at all.

‘One said … let me get this right,’ I said. ‘One said that he had put money in an account for my daughter in Cairo, and I was to go and fetch it, and if I didn’t his lawyer was under instructions to give it to the BNP.’

He raised his eyebrows.

‘I don’t like the BNP,’ I said. Understating it rather. You don’t live my life, live where I do (where the premises on the main road go: Irish laundromat, Lebanese grocery, Turkish cab firm, Armenian deli, Irish snooker club, Syrian grocery, Trinidadian travel agent, Syrian butcher, Lebanese café, Jamaican take-away, Chinese take-away, Indian fabric store, Nepalese restaurant, Thai restaurant, Italian restaurant, Ghanaian fabric store, Nigerian telephone agency, Australian bar, Polish restaurant, Pakistani newsagent, Irish café which turns Thai in the evenings, mosque, Brazilian film-makers’ collective, Ukrainian cab firm, Serbian internet café, Greek restaurant and something called the Ay Turki Locali, which may well be Turkish but whatever else it is I’ve never worked out), without developing rather strong views about racism. Mine is that it’s both the most ludicrous and the most evil of injustices. ‘So I went out there, and got the money, and came back.’

He just looked at me. And then made a little gesture, a little twitching of the fingers: more.

‘Your turn,’ I said.

‘Did you meet François du Berry?’

Ah, very good. What a delicate way of doing it. Slipping from the ‘dead’ man to his new identity without a word.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And?’

It’s not just Harry. I have a couple of other people to protect here, none of whom have done anything wrong, but who could get in trouble, and who did it for me.

‘He, um, he was there to meet us when we collected the money, and then later I saw him at a show, in a hotel. Bellydancing.’

‘We?’ said Preston Oliver.

‘What?’

Oh bugger.

‘You said “we”.’

‘Oh … yes, a friend came with me.’ Please don’t drag him in. Please don’t drag him in. I could see him as he was that day: so cool, so beautiful, so protective, so funny. That fantastical scene in the foyer of the Nile Hilton, carrying £100,000 in a case, and Eddie eyeing him up with a view to group sex …

Preston Oliver was looking knowing. ‘And do you know two brothers called …’ Oh god ‘… Sa’id and Hakim el Araby?’ he was asking.

Just hearing his name said out loud in a stranger’s voice gave me a frisson. He exists! He’s real!

Yes, but his name is in the wrong mouth, the wrong context.

And anyway, you left him. So sharpen up.

Pointless not to.

Ha ha. Pointless.

Preston Oliver was looking at me.

I tried to think how to put it.

‘We know …’ he said, but I interrupted him.

‘They’re old friends of mine,’ I said. ‘I knew their father when I lived in Egypt before. They are from a good family.’ I realized I was justifying them as I might to an Egyptian policeman, rather than an English one. ‘Their mother is an English academic. They were staying with me in London before I went out to Cairo; Sa’id came with me to the bank that day …’

‘And where is the money now?’

I didn’t want to tell him. ‘Why, are you going to do me for tax evasion?’ It was a joke, but of course he could. Except that I don’t have the money. I hate the fucking money. To me that money means only manipulation and blackmail and Eddie Bates tweaking my chain. And god only knows how he made it in the first place. From mugged old ladies via ten-year-old junkies, probably.

‘Why, do you have it?’ he was asking.

I don’t have it. I left it with Sa’id.

‘I gave it to charity,’ I said. Which was more or less true. I gave it to Sa’id to give to a children’s charity in Cairo, because that was the only way I could think of to make dirty money clean again.

He looked disbelieving. As indeed you might. I’d be disbelieving myself – £100,000 given to charity by a semi-employed single mother from Shepherd’s Bush? But that’s what I did.

‘Why are you asking about them?’ I said.

He sniffed. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Cold.’

I said nothing.

‘Thing is,’ he said, ‘du Berry has gone awol.’

‘Awol?’ I said.

‘Absent without leave,’ he said.

‘I know what it means,’ I snapped. ‘I just … I don’t think I’m very interested.’

And I wasn’t. I had put Eddie away from me. He has been what he has been but he is no longer. He is nothing to do with me now. Yeah, and hasn’t been for seven whole weeks, said an inner voice. You think you’re getting off that lightly? He’s history, I told it. History. Don’t drag me into this.

‘He’s disappeared,’ said Preston Oliver. ‘The Egyptians don’t seem to give a damn, but they have been polite enough to mention the el Araby brothers.’

Of course history does have a way of affecting the present.

How very sinister they sound, described that way. Sweet young hothead Hakim, and beautiful Sa’id, alabaster merchant, economist, Sorbonne graduate, singer of love songs, speaker of five languages, Nile boatman, holder of my heart. Sa’id who I left.