Tree of Pearls Read online

  I couldn’t get back to sleep. I disentangled myself from my five-year-old octopus of love and wandered into the kitchen. There was Harry asleep on the sofa, all six foot four of him, oddly folded and sprawled, his arms crossed across his chest like an Egyptian mummy clutching his flail. His face was impassive, showing his age. He manages – even his face – to be both scrawny and muscular at the same time. What’s the word? Lean. He has those lines that cowboys have, the deep ones around the mouth, the ones that women take to indicate humour, natural intelligence and the ability to make a woman feel good. Of course he has those qualities too.

  We have no streetlights up here, but by the light from the hall I could see, just visible where the sleeve of his ancient t-shirt ended, part of the curling tattooed wave that broke under the prow of the fully rigged HMS Victory on his left bicep, with the guiding compass-point star above it and the name in a furling banner beneath. Every eldest Makins son had had the Victory on his bicep since an early-eighteenth-century Harry Makins had served on board, as powder monkey or something, no one could quite remember what. Harry’s dad had wanted to break the tradition, and forbade all his sons from having any tattoos at all. Harry, with his historical loyalties and his rebellious nature, had celebrated his eighteenth birthday with Victory on his left arm and his twenty-first with the opening line of The Rights of Man like a bracelet round his right. For his twenty-eighth I had given him a tattoo of his choice. He had said he wanted a rose as he was getting soft, but he wouldn’t let me come with him to the parlour and he had come out with my name, damn him, in a curled tattooed banner wrapped around his arm beneath the bracelet of Thomas Paine.

  I looked at him for a while as he slept. I used to kiss him, I thought. And shook my head violently, and went back to the child.

  *

  Lily, god bless her, took it entirely in her stride. As daddies are the men that live with children, so if Harry is her daddy of course he would be there for breakfast. Her logic is simple.

  Mine isn’t. The reality of sitting round the breakfast table with them shook me about. Will she want him here for breakfast every day? My sole purpose in life is to look after her, to love her and save her from fear and shock, of which she had quite enough at her birth. She is innocence walking, and I am her minder. I make good. That’s my purpose. I make good for Lily. But for all the time Harry and I have had to wonder about how Harry As Dad, Us With Dad would be – before deciding to do the DNA test, since waiting for the results – for some things there is no possibility of preparation. We can’t know. We have no role models. No instructions. No guidance. Even less than people usually do. But this morning we have a masquerade of domesticity. (I put from my mind an image of a version of man woman child that was briefly here a few weeks before: Sa’id, Lily and I. Sitting about the breakfast table during the tiny moment when it seemed that anything could happen, and be all right.)

  Now, here is Harry, having to go to work.

  He had woken early and calling my name.

  ‘I’m here,’ I called, trying to call quietly not to wake her just as I realized she wasn’t in with me. I got up and went through to the kitchen.

  Lily was there beside the sofa, blinking and smiling, with her curls all ruffled up and her eyes gleaming. She didn’t even look at me. ‘Dada,’ she said, in the sweetest little voice.

  ‘Oh god, hello,’ he said, with his hair all ruffled up too and confused amazement in his normally so steady green eyes. He looked back at me, and back at her, and shook his head as if in disbelief and said ‘oh god’ again. I thought Lily would make one of her clever comments about God, like why are you talking to God when you’ve only just met me, or something, but she didn’t. She just stood there in the puddle of her too-long pyjama legs and looked up at him with the sweetest little expression on her face. ‘Dada,’ she said again. Where the hell did she get ‘Dada’ from?

  Harry wanted to hug her. He was embarrassed to because he was horizontal, in yesterday’s clothes, and half asleep. His limbs are so long and he didn’t know what to do with them. He is unaccustomed to hugging children. She reached over to him and patted his cheek. He looked at her, staring at her eyes. He sat up and leaned forward, his long back arching. He looked as if he might be going to howl with amazement and tenderness.

  ‘Hello, you little darling,’ he said. As he said it I realized how he had been holding himself back from her until now, now that his role is accredited.

  She curled into herself. ‘Dada,’ she said. Coy as cherry pie. Inarticulate as a two-year-old. But getting her message across just fine.

  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.