Tree of Pearls. Louisa Young
intended to think of the night on the Corniche el Nil when Sa’id and I began to fall apart, but sitting by one river you can’t but think of others you have known. It made me too sad and the soothing effect of the night river, which has been a favourite of mine since I was old enough to stay out late, stopped working, so I went home.
On the way back I stopped at a phone box and rang Sarah. My fingers moving independently of my will. Unable to stop myself. It’s for her to decide if she doesn’t want to talk to me.
‘Sarah?’
‘Yes?’
‘Angeline.’
‘Oh. Hello.’
‘Hello.’
The trouble with the spur of the moment is that unless some fluke leaps to your aid, you don’t know what to say. I didn’t. The irresistible urge which had guided my fingers had no interest in helping my voicebox now that I had got through. Plus I had developed this habit of discretion. I am constantly aware that I might say something that will get Harry into trouble.
‘How’s Sa’id?’ I asked. What else could I say? There’s nothing else I want to know.
There was a silence. The line breathed, from London down to the sea where she lives.
‘Fine,’ she said. In that English way which could mean anything. That cold way.
‘Is he back from Greece?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Don’t be …’ I started to say, and stopped.
‘Don’t tell me what to be,’ she said.
‘Are you …’
I couldn’t talk to her.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘You’ve forfeited your right to know. I’m not unsympathetic. I forfeited my right too once. I’m working on getting it back. You are not popular in that family. I want to know my sons now. I’m not taking you up.’
I winced, even down the phone.
‘Everyone is all right. The police have gone. For now. I dare say you feel the burden of what you brought on the family but again … I’m working on getting my children back. They don’t want you.’
And I didn’t believe her. Her excuse made sense – that if she tried to rehabilitate me at the same time as herself it would be too much. But I didn’t believe her. They may not want me – I don’t want them either. But they wouldn’t object to my expressing concern, to my wanting to know that the problems I introduced them to are passing, to my sympathetic interest in how Hakim, for example, who had found Eddie quite without my involvement after all, was dealing with the fallout from our shared psychopath.
She doesn’t want them to want me. She’s still confused – oh, say it. She’s jealous because Sa’id loved me and didn’t want to love her. And because I told him he had to, because she’s his mother, she resents me. And because she loved an Egyptian and it failed, and she wanted us to fail. And we did! So what’s the problem?
‘Please convey my affection and respect to Abu Sa’id and to Madame Amina,’ I said. ‘If my name should be mentioned. I mean the family nothing but well, and I greatly regret that my misfortunes have overflowed on to them.’ I don’t know why I bothered saying all this to her. But sometimes you just need to say things. It doesn’t matter if they’re heard.
‘OK. Well,’ she said.
‘Yeah. Goodbye.’
But he’s OK. She said so.
*
Back in the kitchen Harry was drinking a beer that he had brought in a plastic bag, and reading the paper, with his feet up on the table. He looked deeply at home. I tried to remember him in the kitchens of our shared past. Sitting on the draining board in Clerkenwell. Bike boots steaming on the boiler. Those huge woolly council-issue socks we all wore: cream-coloured, ribbed, up over your knee before you rolled them down. Not wearing them when I was going to work because they left red marks on my calves and ankles: no good for my beautiful dancing feet. Harry climbing in the bath with me that time with all his gear on; he’d just come in from despatching all day and said he was soaked through anyway. His leathers smelt of my bath oil for weeks. Ylang-ylang and WD-40.
The past is blurry.
He looked up, hesitating, before folding away the expanse of newspaper, elbows wide like a pelican’s wingspan.
‘Beer?’ he said, and reached out to give me a bottle. I took it and sat down across from him.
‘I’ve been talking to Oliver,’ he said. ‘Trying to.’
‘And?’
‘He doesn’t want to talk to me. He’s been avoiding me all week.’
‘Oh. Does that mean—’
‘It means he wants me out of the way. I was a little insistent with him. He said – well, he confirmed what he’d told you, that Eddie has absconded from the scheme, that Interpol are upset about it, the Egyptians are doing what they can but they’re very taken up with the anti-terrorist stuff since the massacre at Luxor, and as it appears that he’s left the country they are quite pleased not to be bothered. He said your boys seem to be in the clear. Everybody in Luxor knows they’re OK, and they’re all in shock there anyway and not knowing where their next crust is coming from because the tourists have just disappeared. And he said I was not to worry my pretty little head about it, but get on with this insurance fraud like a good boy.’
I pictured Luxor, empty of visitors. How we put ourselves in other people’s hands. How we suffer when they leave.
‘What insurance fraud?’ I asked, absently.
‘My job. You know. What I do. This complicated boring bloody insurance thing. You don’t want to know.’
It’s true. I didn’t.
‘But if you were working all that time on Eddie, why are you off it now?’
‘Because it’s out of our hands, anyway – we’re the regional crime squad. Witness protection is nothing to do with us. Oliver’s just keeping track of it. It’s bureaucracy. And pride. No one can quite let go of a catch like Eddie. And resentment. It was a fucking insult when he got cut this deal, actually. Those who knew – Oliver, and me – were insulted on behalf of the other lads, too, because a lot of work went into this, as well as a lot of taxpayers’ money. Though of course I shouldn’t know anyway. So I can’t complain, or have an opinion. Except to Oliver.’
‘But why is he cutting you out?’
‘That I don’t know. That I don’t know.’
We sat in silence for a moment.
Big bony hands wrapped round the beer bottle. I spend half my life round this table.
‘Does he … does he think that you’re too closely involved with me, and I’m too closely involved with it, if you see what I mean?’
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Could be.’
I would be sorry if that were the case. I don’t like to see Harry feeling sidelined; I wouldn’t want it to be because of me. And I want to be uninvolved. I was becoming uninvolved. I thought I had done so well. But now it’s back, but it’s all so intangible, I don’t know what to do. Live with it? Is that the moral of the story? Learn to live with it?
‘I rang Sarah,’ I said.
‘I thought you weren’t going to,’ he said. Not unkindly.
‘I wasn’t.’
‘What did she say?’
‘That everyone’s fine and the police have gone. But she didn’t want to talk to me.’
‘Do you mind?’
‘No.