Tree of Pearls Read online

  Copyright

  The Borough Press

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  Published by The Borough Press 2015

  First published by Flamingo, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2000

  Copyright © Louisa Young 2000

  Louisa Young asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  Cover images © Shutterstock.com

  Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780007578009

  Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007397020

  Version: 2015-09-15

  Praise for The Angeline Gower Trilogy:

  ‘Funny, sexy and tender’ ESTHER FREUD

  ‘Spectacularly worth reading’ The Times

  ‘A stylishly literate thriller’ Marie Claire

  ‘You will keep coming back to this book when you should be doing something else’ LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES

  ‘Exciting, compelling and tense’ Time Out

  ‘Funny and scary. In writing honestly and unsentimentally, Young celebrates the unequivocal nature of parental love with verve and style’ Mail on Sunday

  ‘Wry, perky, entertaining’ Observer

  ‘Engaging, wise-cracking, likeable, brilliantly sustained … funny, humane and utterly readable’ Good Housekeeping

  Dedication

  For Amira Ghazalla, the friend at the surface of the water

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Praise

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter One: Winning the peace

  Chapter Two: Beware policemen in pubs

  Chapter Three: I’m not Canute

  Chapter Four: Answering the phone to Chrissie Bates

  Chapter Five: Kicking

  Chapter Six: Yes, I am

  Chapter Seven: Making friends

  Chapter Eight: Yalla, let’s go

  Chapter Nine: The palaces

  Chapter Ten: Ya habibi, oh my darling

  Chapter Eleven: Convoy

  Chapter Twelve: Abydos

  Chapter Thirteen: The Winter Palace

  Chapter Fourteen: ‘Well, I woke up this morning,

  Chapter Fifteen: Ezwah

  Chapter Sixteen: I don’t think you understand

  Chapter Seventeen: A little touch of someone in the night

  Chapter Eighteen: Sekhmet

  Chapter Nineteen: Iftar, Eid, the end

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Louisa Young

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  I wrote these novels a long time ago. I spent my days correcting the grammar at the Sunday Times, and my nights writing. I could no longer travel the world doing features about born-again Christian bike gangs in New Jersey, or women salt-miners in Gujarat, or the Mr and Mrs Perfect Couple of America Pageant in Galveston, Texas, which was the sort of thing I had been doing up until then. I had to stay still. I had a baby. Babies focus the mind admirably: any speck of time free has to be made the most of.

  I had £300 saved up, so I put the baby and the manuscript in the back of a small car and drove to Italy, where we lived in some rooms attached to a tiny church in a village which was largely abandoned, other than for some horses and some aristocrats. A nice girl groom took the baby to the sea each day in my car while I stared at the pages thinking: ‘If I don’t demonstrate some belief in this whole notion of novels, and me as a novelist, then why should anyone else?’

  Re-reading these books now, I think, ‘Christ! Such energy!’ I was so young – so full of beans. I described the plot to my father, who wrote novels and was briefly, in his day, the new Virginia Woolf. After about five minutes he said, ‘Yes, that all sounds good’ – and I said, ‘Dad, that’s just chapter one’.

  It was only about twenty years ago, and a different world. Answerphones not mobiles, no internet. Tickets and conductors on the bus. And it was before 9/11, and the mass collapse of international innocence which 9/11 and George Bush’s reaction to it dragged in their miserable, brutalising wake. Could I write a story now, where an English girl and her Egyptian lover meet at the surface of the water? Yes, of course – but it could not be this story.

  Anyway, I have grown up too thoughtful to write like this now. I exhaust myself even reading it.

  I see too that these, my first novels, were the first pressing of thoughts and obsessions which have cropped up again and again in things I’ve written since. It seems I only really care about love and death and surgery and history and motorbikes and music and damage and babies, and the man I was in love with most of my life, who has appeared in various guises in every book I have ever written. I realise I continue to plagiarise myself all the time, emotionally and subject-wise. And I see the roots of other patterns – Baby Love, my first novel, turned into a trilogy all of its own accord. Since then, I’ve written another two novels that accidentally turned into trilogies – and one of those trilogies is showing signs of becoming a quartet.

  People ask, oh, are they autobiographical? I do see, in these pages, my old friends when we were younger, their jokes and habits, places I used to live, lives I used to live. I glimpse, with a slight shock, garments I owned, a bed, a phrase … To be honest I made myself cry once or twice.

  But, though much is undigested and autobiographical, in the way of a young person’s writing, I can say this: be careful what you write. When I started these novels I was not a single mother, I didn’t live in Shepherds Bush, I didn’t have a bad leg and I wasn’t going out with a policeman. By the time they were finished, all these things had come about. However as god is my witness to this day I never have never belly danced, nor hit anyone over the head with a poker.

  Louisa Young

  London 2015

  ONE

  Winning the peace

  I was in the bath when trouble came for me for the third and, pray god, the last time.

  My habit in winter when I have nothing better to do is to lie in the bath, keeping warm, reading ancient novels, steamed fat from previous sessions. Comfort reading. I’ve done it since childhood: it makes me feel safe. Georgette Heyer, Catcher in the Rye, Raymond Chandler, Naguib Mahfouz, Madame Bovary. That’s where I was, one Tuesday morning in early December 1997, taking comfort after a time of turbulence; settling down and attending to the correct healing of wounds and to the immense and profound change which had come over my life. Out of all that the past months had thrown at me – and there was plenty, let me tell you – one thing stood out: I had discovered that my daughter had a father.

  You may think that unsurprising – that she has one. Or surprising – that I didn’t know. You may have a point. But in my life many things are inside out or upside d
own. Here in the bath, I lie safe and warm with my hair swirling round me and only the tip of my nose out of the water, and think about them, think about the shape and nature of our life to come.

  I raised my head from its underwater reverie because I could hear, through some strange relationship of vibrations between the telephone and the floorboards and the water, the ring of the telephone and the formal tones of a voice on the machine. Through the rush of water down from my hair and over my ears as I rose, I could hear that it was not a voice I knew. This made me a little nervous, because unexpected and unwelcome phone calls had been something of a feature of the recent … turbulence. Not the domestic turbulence. Another part. Anyway, I wouldn’t be getting out of the bath for whoever it was, so I turned on some more hot water, removed one of Lily’s sponge letters of the alphabet (G, purple) from under my arse where it had fallen, and resubsided, putting from my mind echoes of the dangers I had come through. It wasn’t Eddie Bates’s voice, and that’s all that mattered.

  I lie, actually. It wasn’t Sa’id el Araby’s either. But I wasn’t even entertaining that thought. (Hey, thought, please don’t go, I’ll put on a floorshow for you …)

  *

  Three quarters of an hour later I trailed into the study, wrapped in a bath towel, and listened to my messages. My message. Simon Preston Oliver, please could Evangeline Gower return his call without delay, phone number on which to do so. Formal, polite, authoritative. No explanation, no introduction beyond his name. He could have been a fitted-kitchen salesman, except that he obviously wasn’t. Or someone from the accounts department ringing to cut off my electricity. I sniffed and pulled my towel up and went to turn up the heating, and I forgot all about him. I don’t want anything new.

  First I’m just going to tell you what you need to know for any of the rest of it to make sense.

  I’ll start with Janie, my sister, because I did start with Janie. I only ever had eleven months of my life without her – we were true Irish twins – until she died, and since then I’ve had her memory, and her child. My child now, since her birth and her mother’s death, five years ago. Lily, the light of my life and the most beautiful, kind, intelligent, magical creature God ever made, bar none, and no, that’s not bias.

  Janie died in a crash. I used to think I killed her because I was riding the motorcycle she was on the back of, but I accept now that I didn’t. It’s taken a little while to realize that. In fact I’m still so … satisfied … with accepting it that I’ll say it again: I didn’t kill Janie.

  Before the crash ruined my leg I was a bellydancer. I loved four things: bellydancing, motorbikes, Harry Makins and Janie. A year or two ago, I found things out about Janie which I don’t so much hold against her any more, though I did then. There’s no reason to withhold it though it’s not my favourite subject.

  OK. She was a prostitute and a pornographer. I didn’t know until after she was dead. She lied to me. She used film of me dancing in her dirty movies. She wore my costumes while selling sex to my admirers, pretending to be me. Then she died, and left me alone with all that to deal with.

  I’ve put all that down and my heart is not beating faster, my belly is unclouded. I don’t hate her any more.

  Harry thought I knew about her … activities, and condoned them. This misunderstanding contributed to his throwing a chair out of the window at me, and me absconding to the Maghreb and Egypt for a couple of years to get over it. That was, oh, about ten years ago now.

  Then a year and a half ago Janie’s hitherto absent boyfriend appeared, wanting Lily. He didn’t get her (that’s another story) but in the middle of this – not a good time for my family – a mad bastard called Eddie Bates turned up, with a psychotic crush on me, which had first blossomed without my knowledge twelve years ago, when I was a table-hopping bellydancer in the Arab clubs and Levantine restaurants of the West End of London, and he was a diner, a stage-door Johnnie who never – as far as I knew – approached me. Eddie – I am being deliberately light here, just giving the facts – did me wrong in many ways, and ended up in prison, though not for anything to do with me. Just because he was a rather successful drug baron and vice lord. Harry helped put him away. Harry, who when I used to know him had been a wideboy biker, had grown up into a policeman. Not that I knew, until it was all over.

  I’m sorry if this is confusing. It confused me too.

  Then Harry told me that Eddie had died in gaol, and I thought I was free. As free as I could be.

  But then. Then I started getting curious and unpleasant letters and phone calls. I thought they were from Eddie’s wife, Chrissie. And then – well Eddie wasn’t dead, after all. He was alive, if you please, and in Cairo, having turned evidence on his nasty cronies and won himself in return a secret new life, from which he decided it would be fun to carry on tormenting me. By a peculiarly unpleasant and clever trick he got me out there. I went, and ended up saving him, maybe saving his life, by mistake I can assure you. I believed – and believe – sincerely and with good reason that as a result, he is granting me freedom from his attentions.

  All these things seemed more or less resolved by November 1997. I had learnt something about Eddie, a realization and a resolution: I could ignore him. I could deal with him. I wouldn’t want to, but if I had to I could. I had done before. Twice. Three times – god, you see, I lose count. The time he pretended to have kidnapped Lily; the time he did kidnap me; and the time in Cairo. So now, if he wants to tweak my chain, as Sa’id said, so what? I have taken the chain off.

  And Janie’s secrets were known and settling in the slow, drifting, mumbling way that revealed secrets do settle, finally joining the pile of family history like autumn leaves. Mum and I had talked.

  And Lily, my little darling, my honey-gold curly-haired loud-mouthed sweetheart, had a father. And that was the future.

  The father?

  Oh.

  It’s Harry.

  He had slept with Janie, drunk, six years ago, under the impression she was me, apparently. Well after he and I broke up. She and I are (were?) very alike, physically. She’d been in his bed when he got home. Well, yes.

  He wasn’t altogether a surprise. He’d told me it might be him. In fact he was something of a relief, given the other contenders – Eddie Bates (one of her regulars); a pimp-cum-policeman called Ben Cooper … but even so, yes. My old love is my child’s father. Exactly.

  So all we had to do now was learn how to do it. How to have a father in our lives at all, our lives that had been just us for five years. In our flat. In our daily routines. In our priorities. He was keen, in a fairly tactful way, to do the right thing. The prospect was, quite frankly, terrifying.

  But there he was, and he was Harry. Decent, responsible, handsome, funny, long tall Harry. DI Makins. Who I’d known so long. Since he was louche, disreputable, handsome, funny long tall Harry, wideboy biker. The one I used to fight with all the time. The one with my name tattooed on his long, rope-muscled, milk-white right arm.

  Is any of this clear? To me it is. This is just the story of my life. I am so accustomed to melodramatic absurdity by now that I forget how strange it must sound to other people. One fruit of it, though, is that I am reluctant to take things at face value; reluctant to believe that every little thing is going to be all right, unless I personally make sure of it. Which is one reason why I am so interested in whether I can just let Harry be Dad in his own way. Trust him, is I think what I am talking about. Not so much whether he is trustworthy as whether I am capable of trust.

  The other question, of course, was Harry and me.

  Twice, since we parted, he has offered.

  Twelve years ago, in that bar in Soho, I’d said: ‘Yes, and then not for a month.’

  A year and a half ago after our last bout of chaos, I’d said no.

  Two weeks ago I managed maybe.

  ‘OK,’ he said, his face quite steady, untroubled. ‘OK.’ And ordered a curry instead. And the moment had passed.

  I wasn’t
even sure it had happened at all.

  Waiting for the curry to come he went and looked at Lily as she slept. Then when the silver-foil boxes were laid out on the kitchen table, we sat opposite each other to eat and I just stared at him. Letting it sink in. Lily’s father.

  ‘What do we do now then?’ he said. ‘If not fuck?’

  For a moment I thought I was getting a second chance, but I wasn’t. He was just being … humorous. Cheerful. Open. Sarky.

  It’s not that I turn him down because he’s not sexy. Sometimes, when we were together, I used to have to have words with girls who would become irrational in his presence. It was the combination of the cheekbones and the louche cockiness that did it. The cheekbones are, if anything, better, older; the cynical trickster boy has retreated though, in the face of something, as a grown man, which – well, he thinks it’s to do with Gary Cooper. Which side you are on. He decided, at some stage during the time when we weren’t seeing each other, that the villain’s black hat was all very well but he preferred a kind of lonesome maverick white hat. It suits him.

  ‘We … oh god,’ I said.

  You’d think after my adventures I could deal with all sorts of things, but sitting at my kitchen table eating a prawn dhansak with this man I’d known a third of my life was proving to be too much.

  He leant across the table and put his cool and gnarled hand on my temple, saying, ‘Sorry, darling. Impossible question.’ His ‘darling’ is more cabbie than Harvey Nichols. Harry’s not posh. He’s from Acton.

  ‘We eat,’ he said. ‘Let’s just eat.’

  So we ate. Then we watched telly. For a while I shot him little sideways looks, to see if he’d changed in the course of the evening. Father of the child. Here and present. Sticking around, one way or another. He had changed, actually. He looked happier.

  Then I fell asleep. Later he put me to bed, barefoot but clothed.

  Lily came into my bed in the small hours, the child who for five years had been mine and now, suddenly, was his. She talks in her sleep; tonight she wanted me to help her because there were too many bananas. I murmured, ‘Of course I will, honey,’ and she rolled over and wrapped her arms round my neck and put her feet between my knees, and then woke up complaining that my hair was tickling her nose.