Tree of Pearls Read online

‘Five hundred quid,’ he said.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I’m getting it estimated properly – there’s a proportion of my salary that is, umm, the proper amount. But in the meantime.’

  I hadn’t even thought about money. Jesus, he’s going to support us. Well, her.

  Ha ha. I’m being helped.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. There was a tiny voice inside that said, ‘What, you think I can’t do it alone? I’ve done it without you for years and I don’t need your bloody money thank you very much …’ but that was some other voice, nothing to do with anything. ‘Do you want to back-date it?’

  For a moment he looked worried. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Yeah. I mean – I don’t want to barge in. But whatever you need. Do you need more? Have you got debts? Because I can, absolutely. I mean, up to a point.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said, kindly. ‘I’m not telling you about my financial situation.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘But I mean it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. And meant it.

  If I’d ever imagined this scene I would have imagined that Harry would look sheepish. But he didn’t, not in the slightest. He looked everything a man should under such circumstances. Courteous, firm, a little proud. Decent. But the word made me laugh, because I remembered very clearly how very indecent he can be when he wants.

  FIVE

  Kicking

  I was kicking a rotten cauliflower in the middle of Portobello Road, shopping bags on one hand and Lily on the other, feeling weak, trying to get through the crowd to go down to Ladbroke Grove and catch the tube home. Serve me right for coming out on the Saturday before Christmas. Should’ve gone to Shepherd’s Bush Market, but Lily said she was bored of Shepherd’s Bush and wanted to eat prawns at the tapas bar on Golborne Road, so after I gave her a swift and sweet lecture on what a useless word (indeed concept) boring was, and feeling flush with child support, we came up here, even though I don’t really like to any more. Because before there was Agnès B and Paul Smith on Westbourne Grove, when the pubs were still called the Elgin and the Rose, not Tuscany or the Ferret and Foreskin or Phoney McPaddy’s, when the Italian restaurants were run by Italians, not by people called Alastair who charge ten quid for a plate of pasta and pesto in a room which ten years ago was a squat … before all that, I lived here.

  A gust of incense came from a shopfront hung about with paper lanterns. Indeed they all seemed to be hung about with paper lanterns, star-shaped with holes cut in like a child’s paper snowflakes, cut from white A4 on a rainy afternoon. Except that on rainy afternoons when I was a child I used to come up here and hang around with Fred the Flowerman (his name wasn’t Fred), who had a faceful of florescent broken veins, and let me think I was helping out on the stall. ‘Oh no, here comes trouble,’ he’d say when I appeared, and pretend to hide from me. I’d learn the prices of all the bunches and tell the customers, and I’d roll up what they bought in cheap printed paper. Five salmon-pink tulips in cellophane; daffs, the powdered yellowness of their petals, no leaves, milky stickiness from their short-cut stems. Rain or shine, when I was about eight. His son was a cabbie, and sometimes he would appear in his cab on the corner of Blenheim Crescent and yell down to his dad.

  The groovy stalls crawl further up into the vegetable market every year. Well, I don’t know, I haven’t lived around here for years now. I’ve been priced out of my childhood neighbourhood, like so many Londoners, by people who think they can buy what my neighbourhood was, and who, by their very arrival, change it. My neighbourhood was mixed, funny, bohemian, black, Irish, liberal intellectual, Greek, Polish, hippy, posh, full of cherry blossom and rotten cauliflowers; now it is full of bankers who go round moaning about the Carnival and congratulating each other on how mixed, liberal, intellectual, bohemian, funny etc. they are. But they’re not. It’s gone. It’s too fucking expensive for those things to survive.

  But I don’t care. I was there when it was good, and today we had been in a remnant of it, and we’d had our tapas, bought our vegetables, and fulfilled our purpose. Breaking away into Lancaster Road, losing the cauliflower, I sat down on someone’s stoop for a moment to rationalize the plastic bags that were garrotting my wrist. I felt odd. Lily was looking at me, her big intelligent eyes, her day-before-yesterday plaits with aureoles of fluff from the wind and damp. I must redo them.

  ‘Mum?’ she said.

  I couldn’t stand up. Neither my good leg nor my not-so-good leg wanted to. So I didn’t. Unbelievably weak. I felt as if I had some wasting disease. Maybe I’d caught something in Egypt. No. Too long ago, eight weeks or more.

  During which time.

  I hadn’t menstruated.

  Now I come to think of it.

  So perhaps I am ill.

  Or perhaps not.

  ‘Mum?’ she said.

  Yes, I thought.

  ‘OK,’ I said. OK Lily, my love, my darling, I’m still here. I’m just sitting down having a little rest.

  Was it possible?

  Sa’id was the king of condoms – the most elegant, efficient user of condoms that woman has ever witnessed. We had had no noticeable leakages or spillages or splits. We had had no … I looked back up the road to the market.

  We had, of course, had that moment when he had thought that I had thought that he was becoming caught up in his traditional, formal conventionality, and had decided to disabuse me of the notion by fucking me swiftly and beautifully in a doorway in the alley beside Mahmoud’s Fancy Dresses, in the heart of Khan el-Khalili, under the wooden scaffolding, behind the braid seller and left at the oil drums, wrapped in his big scarf, with a scrawny cat looking on and the bazaar chuntering along within feet of us. We had.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Come on, honey, we must go to the chemist,’ I said, and dragged my legs back to themselves.

  *

  I loved Lily that afternoon. Fed her, read to her, bathed with her, talked to her, held her, tickled her, loved her. Stared at her. Flesh not quite of my flesh, child but not of my loins. My child. In the bath she blew bubbles on my belly, and scrubbed my back, and sang a song about broad beans sleeping in their blankety beds. She used to have an imaginary baby brother called Nippyhead.

  She wanted The Happy Prince so I read her The Happy Prince. ‘I am waited for in Egypt,’ said the Swallow, describing the cataracts of the Nile, the hippos and crocodiles, the gods and mummies, things that exist no longer, that never existed, that exist still, unchanged after all.

  ‘Mama wants to go to Egypt,’ she said, half asleep. ‘I’ll come with you. We’ll be swallows and then I won’t die and be put on the rubbish dump.’

  Bloody story always makes me cry at the best of times.

  ‘Tell me about Egypt,’ she said. ‘Tell me about cataracts.’

  Sitting on an island, on a mass of pink granite, the Nile the liquid child of obsidian and malachite lapping twenty feet beneath us. It moves like oil. Granite gleams up from beneath the surface of the water before disappearing into the depths – are the rocky outcrops knee deep, or ankle deep, or up to their necks? We can’t tell. The sails of feluccas glide by, in front, behind, sliding like theatre flats. Tips of sails appear and disappear behind low islands, Elephantine, Ile d’Amoun. Date palms arch and wave. Turtle doves – hamam in Arabic, minneh in that Nubian language whose name I never remember. A gentle cooing and chattering of birds carries from one island to the next: wagtails, ibis, egrets, herons, kingfishers, swallows. There is eucalyptus, bougainvillaea – pink, scarlet, crimson and purple – high shaggy pampas grass, and sixty-foot pebbles, sitting there. A primeval landscape. It is easy to see the hippopotami and crocodiles wallowing by the banks, beneath hieroglyphs carved in the rock. Pink granite, very like every statue of Ramses you see. We could be sitting on his massive knee, this vast and trunkless leg of stone. The rock looks as if it were melting, and you couldn’t blame it if it did. Hard sun. The swirls of water against the rock beneath us make patterns like Greek friezes, like mosaic sea,
folding over and over itself. Where it’s calm, amber-green weed floats like Ophelia’s hair. Above, the clouds are a stippled pattern, a melting mashrabiyya screen between us and the pale lapis sky; beneath it the leaves and branches of eucalyptus make another screen, foliate like a beautiful script, the curved blades of the leaves like each ligature and flourish, bismillah. Behind us, low-swaying branches of mimosa like soft yellow pearls. Patterns in repetition and constant movement. Beyond, ranges of apricot-yellow Sahara, layer upon layer shaped by the winds into lagoons and plateaus, baboon’s brows and natural sphinxes.

  But the cataracts have been drowned by the High Dam. What I am remembering is a different thing. Half real, half dreamed. Oh lordy, Sa’id.

  I lay with her until she fell asleep, and then I lay there a while longer, and then I got up and went and pissed on the stick, and then I waited, and then I looked.

  Blue dot or no blue dot?

  Oh – which means which?

  Look at the instructions again.

  Ah.

  So I went and lay down with Lily again, and hugged her to me and remembered how she had felt as a tiny baby in my arms, her hair then, her face, changing shape every time you looked at it; her little boneless arms, her growing strength, her words, her tongue, her belly button and the creases of her neck, her sweet greedy mouth, her lengthening limbs. This long girl-child, whose feet now kick my knees when we lie down together, where once they only reached my ribs. She had learned to walk at the same time as I had learned to walk again after breaking myself in the accident, hobbling and wobbling together at Mum and Dad’s when we were staying there, stumbling together, seeing each other through. Coming back to the flat together for the first time, on our own four feet. Not now my only child.

  I didn’t think that I could love this new thing as much as I love Lily. I didn’t think it was entirely right to grow my own-flesh-child when I had Lily. It might make her sad. She might feel left out.

  And at the same time, despite that, I was very profoundly happy.

  *

  On Sunday I sat very still. Lily played around me, my satellite. I was actually in a trance of some kind. I stared a lot. Lily was gentle with me. Brigid called with the children and took her to the park. I declined, in favour of sleep. Brigid gave me a long look but I said nothing. Brigid, my friend and neighbour, mother of four, knows me well. I was afraid to speak to her because she would guess. Zeinab, my Egyptian friend from our schooldays, rang to see if we wanted to go and play. I let the machine take it.

  While they were out, Chrissie turned up on my doorstep, standing on the communal balcony looking like a rich person who has strayed from her red carpet by mistake into some grubby area of reality, beyond the limelight of money.

  ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  She was carrying a handbag and wearing big hair and sunglasses, which she took off immediately I answered the door. I could see she had been crying.

  ‘Are you drunk?’ I said.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ she replied. ‘Still clean and planning to remain so but, please, I need your help.’

  Oh no. No no no.

  ‘What?’ I said. Now why did I say that? Something in her face made me. Something in my heart. I didn’t say fuck off, madwoman. I said, ‘What?’

  ‘I want to tell you something because I can’t think of anyone else to tell. I don’t know what to do. I am going out of my mind. I terribly don’t want to. I want to be normal and I – can I come in?’

  I let her in. I don’t have much truck with words like normal – either we’re all normal or we’re all strange. In which case it’s perfectly normal to be strange – indeed it might be strange to be normal. None of which is any help to anything – so why bother to mention it? But I knew what she meant. I knew about desiring the safety you perceive other people’s lives to contain. We went through to the kitchen.

  ‘I see in you that you like to be normal too,’ she said. ‘But you’re not. So I thought you might understand. And you might tell me if I’m crazy. Which I might be anyway because of the drying out but I cannot tell the people at the clinic about this because it is the kind of thing they section you for. I would, if I was them.’

  ‘What.’ I said.

  I was still standing.

  ‘I’ve been visiting Eddie’s grave,’ she said.

  I said nothing.

  ‘Well his – filing cabinet. Like they have in Italy. Little cupboard, for his urn.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘A few times.’

  I let her breathe for a while.

  ‘Quite often actually.’

  Fair enough.

  ‘Can I sit down?’

  You can’t say no.

  She sat on my old sofa, her knees together and her ankles splayed and taut with their high-heeled shoes.

  ‘To begin with, I was drunk – well, I’d go up there and drink. I miss him, you know. In a way. In a funny way.’ She didn’t start crying again. ‘And I’d sit, and drink. Then later I’d go up sober and sit and think. Trying to work things out, and talking to him and so on. And …’

  I didn’t like this.

  ‘There’s a gravedigger up there, George. We got chatting – he’s nice. Well accustomed to widows, he says. Sympathetic. Likes a drink too. So we’d drink together. On Eddie’s doorstep. And then. Oh god.’

  I was sure I didn’t like it.

  ‘Angeline, he says there’s nothing in Eddie’s grave.’

  She looked at me, mascara wide as sunrays round her eyes. Like a picture by a child who has just noticed eyelashes.

  ‘In his cupboard,’ she said. ‘He says he was the one who sealed it up, and that the urn in there was empty, and he swears it. He said he wasn’t meant to know, but that the urn was too light and he checked in case he had the wrong one, but the undertaker said to him, yes, he’d been given that one sealed up, even though it was usually his job to get the ashes together and put them in, and he could tell by the weight that it was empty, so he’d checked it, and there were a few ashes but not, you know, human ashes, and he thought it was really odd but didn’t say anything. The gravedigger was drunk when he said it and later he tried to say he didn’t mean it but he did, I know he did because why else would he say it? Why would he say it if he didn’t mean it? And how could he mean it? So I shouted at him not to lie, and he said yes it was true, and then I didn’t believe him, but later I was sober and I could see he was telling the truth. He was so upset. He said he couldn’t bear the sight of me weeping day after day at an empty grave. He’s a nice man. Kind. And he said, he said: “You ask around. You ask some of those people. Someone’ll tell you.” But I daren’t because I don’t know what it means. I wanted to ask the undertaker but the gravedigger wouldn’t tell me his name; he didn’t want anyone getting into trouble. What can it mean, Angeline? Do you know?’

  ‘No,’ I said. Without a flicker. ‘I haven’t: a clue. It sounds like nonsense.’

  Her shoulders went down a little. They must have been up. Tension. Not that she looked relaxed now. More – disappointed.

  ‘But why would he say—?’

  ‘I don’t know. People are strange. I don’t know.’ I was very blank with her. Very Teflon. This is nothing to do with me.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked suddenly. Her head went to one side for a moment and for that moment I could see what she must have looked like as a girl. Gymkhanas, Fergus had said. County military girl. Boarding school, and gone wild at an early age. I could see her, fifteen and boy-crazy, full of semi-educated English self-confidence. In a previous generation she would have been the backbone-of-the-empire’s wife, until she had a nervous breakdown on a verandah in Malaya. She had a very English profile. Pretty little nose. Fine fine lines on dry dry skin telling of late late nights and a lot of gin and tonics.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. In that English way.

  ‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’ she demanded.

  Teflon slid off me. I was
totally confused. Why was she asking me that? What the hell do I say? I can lie about Eddie’s death but I can’t –

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘You look it.’

  Don’t say, ‘How can you tell?’

  I didn’t have to.

  ‘It shows,’ she said, and I looked to my belly and gave it away.

  ‘Not there,’ she said. ‘In your face.’ She was smiling at me, a warm, lovely smile.

  I couldn’t look at my face. But my face looked at her, and she knew.

  ‘How marvellous,’ she said, with complete sincerity and kindness, and she was the first person to say so, the first person to know, and even though she was her, I kind of loved her for it. Then she jumped up and hugged me. Taken aback? Yes I was.

  ‘How many weeks are you?’ she asked.

  The phrase confused me for a moment. What does it mean? Then I worked it out. ‘Nine,’ I said. ‘Or … no, nine.’

  ‘Oh wow,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t usually show at all so early. Maybe it’s twins. How long have you known? Oh …’ And I thought she was going to cry again.

  I remembered her in the back of the ambulance that Harry and I called to take her away after Eddie’s funeral, in her big fur and stilettos, her over-sized black sunglasses, shouting and calling about abortions that he’d made her have. No children, wanted children, had children, had children taken from her.

  What does she mean, twins?

  I don’t know about pregnant. Pregnant is new to me.

  Oh god, Sa’id.

  *

  Chrissie and I were still talking when Brigid came back with Lily. I didn’t want to. But I didn’t not want to. She told me what I didn’t know – that after the abortions (four) she had got pregnant again, which she considered something of a miracle, and gone away on a cruise, and not come back till she was eight months gone, and produced a daughter, for whom he hired full-time nannies, and who he had sent to boarding school from the age of four. She’s sixteen now, and Chrissie was going to see her at Christmas though she was spending the holidays with a schoolfriend because she (Chrissie) didn’t trust herself yet. Eddie hadn’t seen her for three years when he … died. She told me about scans and Braxton Hicks, about evening primrose and pethidine, about yoga and pools and the perineum, about hot curry to bring on labour. About clary sage and pre-eclampsia and BabyGap and Kamillosan and the Natural Childbirth Trust and the importance of letting the umbilical cord stop pulsing before it is cut. I didn’t mind. I told her that I had only known for twenty-four hours. I told her that I was amazed and terrified. She said that was normal. She made me laugh several times, and didn’t ask who the father was. She told me about foetal alcohol syndrome. I didn’t tell her her husband was still alive. She left when Lily came back, and ruffled her hair as she went.