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‘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.
Then Harry came to put Lily to bed. ‘I was thinking I’d like to have her for weekends sometimes,’ he said, ‘but actually I’d rather be with both of you.’
‘You’ll be wanting parental responsibility, anyway,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I will. Better write to the court. When we get back the new birth certificate.’
New birth certificate.
I didn’t tell him.
That night I lay in bed thinking of the tiny Egyptian inside me, and I dreamt of a painting I’d seen in one of the tombs outside Cairo, where the occupant – Ptah Hotep – is portrayed with a tiny adult-proportioned daughter, just tall enough to reach his knee, holding on to his calf with one outstretched hand and striding along with him, between his knees, as he strides that Egyptian tomb-carving stride. If I remember rightly he was the Pharoah’s Official Keeper of Secrets, and hairdresser. Or maybe that was Ti. Anyway, plus ça change.
*
On Monday Preston Oliver rang during breakfast: well, while Lily was letting her porridge get cold and I was wondering why I didn’t feel like drinking coffee.
‘Can you make it down here for 9.45?’ he said.
‘No,’ I said, on principle.
‘Try,’ he suggested.
‘I’m not available,’ I said.
‘Make yourself available,’ he said. ‘Seventh floor. They’ll tell you at reception.’
So I rang Zeinab and took Lily round there to play with Hassan and Omar, school having broken up, and climbed on a number 94 from the Green, changed at Oxford Circus and read the paper all the way in self-defence against Christmas shopping and rucksacks and loden coats and swinging cameras and Selfridges bags and all the rest of the battery of the tourist in London. And got off at Westminster, and ambled down Victoria Street, and approached our national centre of law enforcement at about five to ten. I was glad to be late. It made me feel free.
I’d never been inside before. It just looks like an office. Computer screens everywhere. Could have been a newspaper office, or an insurance office, or anything. Noticeboards, big rooms divided into little ones by unconvincing screens. Photocopiers. Someone had put up some half-arsed paper-chains. I hate offices more than almost anything. My sweat smells different in office buildings. I come over all metallic.
Oliver’s office was not big, not small. I know people set store by this stuff. Status and so on. But I wouldn’t know where to begin. He had a window, though, so he can’t be that lowdown. And a desk of his own.
‘Glad you could make it,’ he said.
‘Yes, well,’ I replied.
He looked at me.
‘Coffee?’
Visions of Nescafe floated up on the smell of central heating. ‘No thanks,’ I said. I haven’t been sick at all, I realized. Aren’t you meant to be sick? Maybe I wasn’t pregnant. I was going to the doctor that afternoon.
‘Harry will be joining us in a moment,’ he said, ‘but before he does I want to talk to you.’
I grunted.
‘You’re going to have to help us, Angeline.’
Bollocks I am, I thought. And just gazed at him, as a cow might. A nice fat pretty cow called Bluebell.
‘You’re a freelance, aren’t you? Consultations and what-have-you? I’m hiring you.’
Oh yes? I almost laughed.
‘I’ll give it to you straight. We have to find him. And we can’t. The Egyptians have lost him. And there’s no point us sending anyone there, unless they know something more than we do at present. And you have been volunteered.’
I blinked. Slowly. As if I had very long, very heavy lashes. Hard to lift up again.
‘You can pick up where he left off in Cairo. You know the city, you know people who knew him as du Berry, you know where he went when he was there, you speak Arabic. And you won’t be going for long …’
‘I won’t be going at all,’ I said.
‘Yes you will,’ he replied. Very straight, very sure of himself.
‘No I won’t.’ What I should have said when Ben Cooper first lured me into Eddie’s orbit in the first place. No.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’ I said.
‘Because it is your civic duty.’
I didn’t laugh. Funnily enough if there had been one reason why I might have gone, that would have been it. Because I do have this honourable brave and public-minded streak. But no.
‘It is not my civic duty to put myself in the line of a maniac who has threatened me, attacked me, kidnapped me, tried to rape me, pretended to kidnap my daughter. It is my civic duty to go nowhere near him.’
‘You won’t be going anywhere near him,’ he said. ‘That’s the whole point. He’s not there. All you will be doing is looking for footsteps. Then when you find some, you come home. No harm done.’
‘I don’t think you have a clue what you’re suggesting,’ I said. ‘I have no training for this, not a clue how to do it, I don’t want to do it, it would be dangerous – it’s a completely stupid idea. Dangerously stupid.’
‘What is?’ said Harry’s voice behind me. Cold. I hadn’t heard him come in.
‘Sending me to Cairo to find out where Eddie’s gone,’ I said.
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