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 down. 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.

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.

He looked at me under his sad eyebrows. ‘Have you ever heard of obstructing a police officer in the course of his duty?’ he said.

‘Have you ever heard of taking the trouble to gain a witness’s trust before expecting them to tell you all their business?’

He squinted at me.

‘Or aren’t I a witness?’ I said. The food mixer went again in my belly. ‘All I want to know,’ I said, tetchily, ‘is what this is about.’ Not quite true. What I really wanted was for it not to be happening.

‘How many things have you got going on in Cairo that might be of interest to the police then?’ he replied.

I wasn’t going to tell him anything. Not unless he told me first. As I can’t remember which country and western singer said, in big hair and blue eyeshadow: ‘I’ve been to the circus and I’ve seen the clowns, this ain’t my first rodeo.’

‘Nothing that I know of,’ I said. ‘That’s why I’m asking.’

He looked disappointed in me.

‘Eddie Bates,’ he said.

‘Eddie Bates is dead,’ I replied. That’s the official version and there is no reason for me to know any different. ‘He died in prison,’ I said. I even managed to look a little puzzled.

‘François du Berry, then,’ he said. ‘Could we just get on?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I lied. I knew exactly what he meant.

It was Harry who had told me that Eddie was not dead, but living in Cairo under an assumed name. What I didn’t know was whether Preston Oliver knew that Harry had told me – risking his career and maybe saving my life by doing so. I’m not telling any big policeman who I don’t know anything about this.

‘What were you doing in Egypt?’ he said.

‘I was on holiday,’ I said.

He just looked at me.

Sooner or later one of us was going to lose our temper, and I was afraid it was going to be me. I decided to do it the controlled way. Like the angry posh lady hectoring the Harrods shop assistant.

‘I think you’ll find,’ I said, ‘that asking the same question over and over is going to get you nowhere. I have no desire whatsoever to hamper you in the course of your duties, indeed I am happy to tell you anything that may be of use to you, but it is not unreasonable of me to want to know why. Do you think I am a witness to something? Do you suspect me of something? I have to insist that you be specific, because otherwise I’m afraid I can’t help you. You can think about it. I’ll be back in a moment.’

‘I think you’ll find.’ What a great phrase. And as for ‘I have to insist’ …

I found the public telephone, snatched up the receiver and rang Harry at work. Not there. Rang his mobile.

‘Harry?’

‘What is it?’ he said. He can smell urgency. Logically, I would be calling about our domestic and emotional situation, and he would have no business saying ‘What is it?’ to me in that tone. But he could tell.

‘Simon Preston Oliver – mean anything to you?’

‘Why?’ he said.

‘He’s here. Not right here – you know. He wants to know about Cairo.’

Harry knew about Cairo. Harry knows it all, pretty much. Well … most.

A moment passed.

‘Tell him,’ he said.

‘Everything?’

‘Everything you told me.’

‘Does he know you told me about Eddie?’

‘Not … not as such. I mean yes, he does, he must do. But we haven’t talked about it.’

‘So—’

‘I think he’s cool with it, but. But. Slide by it if you can.’

‘Do you think he’ll let me?’

‘He wouldn’t usually. He’s a snake – he’s brilliant. But in this case, yes – well, he loves me. I think. Shit.’

Well that was reassuring.

‘What’s it about, Harry?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. I’ve heard nothing since you’ve been back. Which may be because he’s put two and two together – you and me.’

The phrase hung between us. You and me. Its other context glowing slightly down the line.

I wrenched back on course. I’m going to have to get used to this. ‘Is he the bloke you talked to about me before I left?’ I asked. Harry had told me that a senior colleague, doubtful about the wisdom of putting Eddie on witness protection, had told Harry about it, specifically so that someone near to me could know, and remain aware.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He’s all right. He’s not Ben Cooper.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. Meaning it.

*

Back at the table, Preston Oliver greeted me with ‘And how’s Harry?’

I laughed.

‘You can’t blame me,’ I said.

‘I thought you would have spoken to him earlier,’ he said.

‘There’s a lot on my mind,’ I said.

‘So I would imagine,’ he said, eyeing me. He probably thinks I trust him now, I thought. Well … he’s not top of the list of people I don’t trust.

‘So,’ he said. ‘In your own words.’

I reckoned quickly. He knows a certain amount about me. There’s nothing to be lost by him knowing my version. And perhaps he will be nice and leave me alone if he feels that I am cooperating. So I briefly ran through for him some of the things that had been keeping me busy over the past few months.

‘A few months ago,’ I said, ‘I started to receive letters – anonymous letters, threatening. I worked out that they were from Chrissie Bates – Eddie’s wife. Then some purporting to be from Eddie. Who I knew to be dead. I’d been to his funeral.’ I had. And I’d met Chrissie for the first time, and it had been very mad, though not as mad as later when Eddie turned out to be not dead at all.

‘One said … let me get this right,’ I said. ‘One said that he had put money in an account for my daughter in Cairo, and I was to go and fetch it, and if I didn’t his lawyer was under instructions to give it to the BNP.’

He raised his eyebrows.

‘I don’t like the BNP,’ I said. Understating it rather. You don’t live my life, live where I do (where the premises on the main road go: Irish laundromat, Lebanese grocery, Turkish cab firm, Armenian deli, Irish snooker club, Syrian grocery, Trinidadian travel agent, Syrian butcher, Lebanese café, Jamaican take-away, Chinese take-away, Indian fabric store, Nepalese restaurant, Thai restaurant, Italian restaurant, Ghanaian fabric store, Nigerian telephone agency, Australian bar, Polish restaurant, Pakistani newsagent, Irish café which turns Thai in the evenings, mosque, Brazilian film-makers’ collective, Ukrainian cab firm, Serbian internet café, Greek restaurant and something called the Ay Turki Locali, which may well be Turkish but whatever else it is I’ve never worked out), without developing rather strong views about racism. Mine is that it’s both the most ludicrous and the most evil of injustices. ‘So I went out there, and got the money, and came back.’

He just looked at me. And then made a little gesture, a little twitching of the fingers: more.

‘Your turn,’ I said.

‘Did you meet François du Berry?’

Ah, very good. What a delicate way of doing it. Slipping from the ‘dead’ man to his new identity without a word.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And?’

It’s not just Harry. I have a couple of other people to protect here, none of whom have done anything wrong, but who could get in trouble, and who did it for me.

‘He, um, he was there to meet us when we collected the money, and then later I saw him at a show, in a hotel. Bellydancing.’

‘We?’ said Preston Oliver.

‘What?’

Oh bugger.

‘You said “we”.’

‘Oh … yes, a friend came with me.’ Please don’t drag him in. Please don’t drag him in. I could see him as he was that day: so cool, so beautiful, so protective, so funny. That fantastical scene in the foyer of the Nile Hilton, carrying £100,000 in a case, and Eddie eyeing him up with a view to group sex …

Preston Oliver was looking knowing. ‘And do you know two brothers called …’ Oh god ‘… Sa’id and Hakim el Araby?’ he was asking.

Just hearing his name said out loud in a stranger’s voice gave me a frisson. He exists! He’s real!

Yes, but his name is in the wrong mouth, the wrong context.

And anyway, you left him. So sharpen up.

Pointless not to.

Ha ha. Pointless.

Preston Oliver was looking at me.

I tried to think how to put it.

‘We know …’ he said, but I interrupted him.

‘They’re old friends of mine,’ I said. ‘I knew their father when I lived in Egypt before. They are from a good family.’ I realized I was justifying them as I might to an Egyptian policeman, rather than an English one. ‘Their mother is an English academic. They were staying with me in London before I went out to Cairo; Sa’id came with me to the bank that day …’

‘And where is the money now?’

I didn’t want to tell him. ‘Why, are you going to do me for tax evasion?’ It was a joke, but of course he could. Except that I don’t have the money. I hate the fucking money. To me that money means only manipulation and blackmail and Eddie Bates tweaking my chain. And god only knows how he made it in the first place. From mugged old ladies via ten-year-old junkies, probably.

‘Why, do you have it?’ he was asking.

I don’t have it. I left it with Sa’id.

‘I gave it to charity,’ I said. Which was more or less true. I gave it to Sa’id to give to a children’s charity in Cairo, because that was the only way I could think of to make dirty money clean again.

He looked disbelieving. As indeed you might. I’d be disbelieving myself – £100,000 given to charity by a semi-employed single mother from Shepherd’s Bush? But that’s what I did.

‘Why are you asking about them?’ I said.

He sniffed. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Cold.’

I said nothing.

‘Thing is,’ he said, ‘du Berry has gone awol.’

‘Awol?’ I said.

‘Absent without leave,’ he said.

‘I know what it means,’ I snapped. ‘I just … I don’t think I’m very interested.’

And I wasn’t. I had put Eddie away from me. He has been what he has been but he is no longer. He is nothing to do with me now. Yeah, and hasn’t been for seven whole weeks, said an inner voice. You think you’re getting off that lightly? He’s history, I told it. History. Don’t drag me into this.

‘He’s disappeared,’ said Preston Oliver. ‘The Egyptians don’t seem to give a damn, but they have been polite enough to mention the el Araby brothers.’

Of course history does have a way of affecting the present.

How very sinister they sound, described that way. Sweet young hothead Hakim, and beautiful Sa’id, alabaster merchant, economist, Sorbonne graduate, singer of love songs, speaker of five languages, Nile boatman, holder of my heart. Sa’id who I left.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Something about a fight in a hotel in Cairo,’ he said. ‘I believe you were there.’

Oh.

‘Well, they’re not criminals,’ I said. ‘It’s ridiculous. If Eddie’s decided to abscond, that’s his business … probably he just threw out some accusations to muddy the water.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ he said. I was pleased. ‘Now tell me about the fight.’

I love the way people throw out questions as if they were nothing. ‘How are you?’ is a good one. This was another. Six words. It sounds so easy. I was silent a moment, thinking, collating. Oh yes, the fight, that old thing. How will I choose to tell him about that? Given that I am telling him. And I was silent a moment longer, wondering if I could resist some more.

I could. But I wouldn’t, and I knew if I tried to I would be pretending.

He was watching, eyebrows tragically calm. He looked as if he had heard a thousand and one stories.

‘Eddie and I had a disagreement in a hotel corridor,’ I said. ‘Hakim had followed us because he feared for my safety, and when Eddie … attacked me, Hakim pulled him off.’

The ‘more’ gesture again, the eyebrows in repose at once calm, tragic and receptive.

‘That’s it, really.’ I don’t need to mention the knife, or say that Hakim had been working for Eddie, naif little fool that he is, nor that Eddie had been attacking me with a sexual purpose. I don’t think he needs to know that. And I felt the shameful ripples of Eddie and sex run over my shoulders and down my back.

‘What was the disagreement about?’

I didn’t answer. He didn’t push it, but he didn’t retreat either. All I wanted was to know that Sa’id and Hakkim were all right. But Sa’id and Hakim are not my business any more.

‘Are you in touch with the el Arabys?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘Hakim el Araby has been questioned. He’s not a problem. But Sa’id has not made himself available. Do you know where he is?’

‘No.’

I was thinking about Sa’id’s family: Abu Sa’id, Mariam, Madame Amina. Oh god, all these decent people. Caught up. I told him I shouldn’t have gone to stay at his aunt’s while I was dealing with Eddie.

‘He took a flight to Athens ten days ago. Have you heard from him?’

‘No.’

‘Despite their being such good friends of yours? Staying with you and all that?’

My heart was falling, slowly, gently. I am just at the beginning of my days of healing and rebuilding. What’s it to me if Sa’id goes to Athens? If Eddie moves on? Leave me alone. My old enemy and my old lover. They’re not mine.

‘We were hoping you could help. If either of them gets in touch with you,’ he went on, ‘you must let us know.’

I gave him a long low look. Does he have the slightest idea what he is asking of me here? What he is doing to me? What either of these men has been to me? How Eddie, despite the quick, spontaneous, devilish pact we made that night when I prevented Hakim from knifing him, has never been anything but my enemy, my complex enemy, on many many levels? The serious enemy – the one who brings out from your own depths your own worst faults, your weaknesses? It was to Eddie that I did the worst thing I have ever done, and I hate him for it.

It’s part of the story. There’s no avoiding it. A year and half ago, when he kidnapped me in London … I’ll put it simply – he was trying to fuck me, I resisting. I hit him with a poker, knocked him out. Then as he lay unconcious and, due to the workings of the autonomic nervous system (I looked it up later), still hard, I fucked him back. Did to him the bad thing he had been trying to do to me. Out of anger and revenge, I gave him what he wanted in a way he could never enjoy. And my worst self enjoyed it very much. So I hate him.

There. Very simple.

And Sa’id? Sa’id taught me to leave the dead alone, showed me how forgiveness works, made me capable, in myself, of seeing off Eddie and his frightful attachment. And, if I am honest, mine. My frightful … not attachment. My … interest. Something.

‘I don’t imagine,’ I said, staring at him, ‘that either of them will.’ Don’t you stir this up, you. I’m trying to win the peace here. I have a child to look after. Leave me alone.

‘If they do,’ said Preston Oliver.

‘Sure,’ I said. Easily, because they wouldn’t, and if they did – well, I lied.

*

Then it was time for me to fetch Lily. She and I ambled home in the dark, unable to hear each other speak for the traffic heading west on the Uxbridge Road. We cut into the small streets as soon as we could, and admired other people’s lives glowing through their bay windows: their televisions and their teas. Lily wondered why we don’t live in a house.

‘Because we live in a flat,’ I said, interestingly. I was tired.

She said she’d like to live in a house. I concurred in a non-committal grunting fashion.

Then felt bad about my lack of interest. ‘Why?’ I asked.

‘So that when you die I can bury you in the garden and you’ll still be near me.’

‘Oh sweetheart,’ I said. ‘Oh.’

‘I know it won’t really be you,’ she said. ‘I know it’ll just be your body, and worms will eat it, even your eyes, and your lovely little nose.’

I looked down at her, and she reached up, and touched the tip of my nose tenderly.

Oh sweetheart,’ I said.

‘But what I really want is a leopard that can read my mind, and knows where to go.’

Oh my god, I thought. And said: ‘So do I.’

THREE
I’m not Canute

It was seven by the time we got home – time Lily should be getting ready for bed. Harry was sitting on the doorstep, up at the end of the long red-brick balcony that leads to my flat, reading the Independent and ignoring the cold. He looked to Lily first. She seemed to have forgotten all about him – and then remembered.

‘Dada!’ she trilled, blinking at him. He stood – unfolding himself as he does, like a camel or a telescope – and picked her up, and her legs hung down as if she were a puppet on his hand. Long dangly big-girl legs. She’s five now. A creature of playgrounds and reading books and the girls’ gang, no more the plump little dimpled thing I used to know. My girl.

He smiled at me over her shoulder. As you see dads do. Dads in coats carrying big girls in coats. In the park, at the playground. Girls climb up on their dads. My girl, her dad.

I opened the door and they followed me in. The hallway seemed smaller than usual. So did the kitchen. What with this new identity spreading out all over the place. Of course Harry’s been there many a time before, but Lily’s father hasn’t. And he seems to take up space.

I’m not complaining.

I started to make an omelette, automatically. It wouldn’t be a very nice one because I was rather too weary to whisk it up properly the way she likes. I tried to do a little yoga breathing as I whisked. Just because a policeman asks you some questions it doesn’t mean your life has to be upended again. It came out as a sigh.

‘Can I do it?’ Harry said.

I just stared at him.

‘Why not?’ he said.

No reason at all.

‘Make up for lost time,’ I said. I have cooked tea for his child seven nights a week for five years; he has never.

‘Can I put her to bed too?’ he said.

‘You don’t have to ask,’ I said. ‘At least you don’t have to ask me.’

‘No you can’t,’ said Lily. ‘But you can read me a story.’

Harry eyed her.

‘You know what?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You don’t boss your father.’

She thought about it. I observed, interested.

She changed the subject. Enquired about the omelette, wanted milk, carried on with normal business. Much like I’m doing myself, now I come to think of it. My normal business of my family. Of Lily. Of incorporating Harry. And this is going to be such an interesting business. I must keep my mouth shut and let them work it out for themselves even though I know everything much better than they do. She can tell him what she wants; he can learn. I’ll just stand by. Or lie in wait. Or bite my tongue. Or something.

But I won’t be thinking about Cairo.

*

When she was asleep we sat at the kitchen table. Again. This could be turning into a routine.

‘Was it OK with Oliver?’ he said.

I could feel my face falling back into itself. When the child is awake and with you, you tend to the child. And then the moment she crosses the school gate, or sleeps, everything else floods back.

Of course you can’t keep things in boxes. Of course they must be dealt with.

‘Waah – he was OK,’ I said. ‘I think.’ I didn’t want to talk about it. Talking about it affirms it, makes it truer. And me talking about it makes it my business. But Harry has a right to know. I could feel it getting more tangible by the second. And I added, ‘But it isn’t OK.’

‘How so?’

‘Eddie’s left Cairo. Well, gone off. Disappeared.’

‘Off the scheme?’ cried Harry.

‘Think so. Assume so. Don’t know how it works.’

Harry stared at me. Not aghast, but –

‘Why didn’t he tell me?’ he said.

‘Don’t know,’ I said. Why did he tell me?

‘But I’m meant to be … fuck,’ he said. ‘Oh fuck.’ I could see what he was thinking. Not informed equals left out. Why? To what end? Fearing.

‘Do you think it’s because of me?’ I said.

‘Could be,’ he replied. ‘I don’t know. But to tell you and not me – Jesus. How long ago?’

‘I don’t know.’

He was rubbing his forehead, adding information to what he already knew, computing visibly. Suddenly he snorted an angry noise and started to walk about.

So it’s true, it’s happening, it’s affecting things. Am I Canute to try to hold back the tide?

‘Apart from what it means for your career,’ I said, ‘and your position on the case, what does it mean?’

‘It means he’s a fucking lunatic …’

‘We already know that,’ I pointed out.

‘… because when he was there, he was safe. He had his ID and a few of the Egyptians keeping an eye on him. But if he goes off, he’s at risk. And he is a risk. Fuck! How did it happen? Do you know any … fucking Oliver. Fuck him.’

I could understand that he was pissed off at having to ask me. But I wanted his opinion of the situation as a whole – well I did. An idea had occurred to me – ‘Eddie’s done this on purpose to wind me up’. But you see if I entertain thoughts like that, I’m doing Eddie’s job for him. Nurturing seeds of mindfuck. I need Harry to remind me that Eddie is in the past and that none of this means anything to me.

Yes. And bears shit in the Vatican. What I promised myself, what Sa’id told me, was that if Eddie reappeared I could deal with it. Nobody said deny it, we said deal with it. So deal. Eddie’s actions are touching those who touch me. So.

It hadn’t been a long respite, had it? What? Six, seven weeks off from him?

Harry was looking at me. ‘So?’ he said.

‘Would you understand,’ I said, ‘if I were to say that I want nothing, ever, to do with Eddie again, to such a degree that I don’t even want to talk to you about this now? Because it’s not me he’s having a go at … Would you understand if I just backed off completely, and said look, you and Oliver do what you have to do but this is not my business? Would you think me disloyal? Would you …?’

He kept on looking. His eyes took on a narrowed flatness. Thinking.

‘You put yourself at risk going to Cairo to face him off for the sake of multicultural society, to stop the BNP getting that money,’ he said, fairly mildly. ‘All I’m asking is a question or two.’

‘I’m very keen on multiculturalism,’ I said.

‘I would have thought you might also be quite keen on our … friendship.’

‘And I would have thought you would be quite keen on my safety and preservation.’

Stop it, stop it. This is the kind of argument we used to have. We don’t do this any more.

‘I am,’ he said. ‘But I think you’re probably up to thinking about him for five minutes. For my sake. For the sake of my career, and stuff, if that means anything to you.’

‘It does,’ I said.

‘I understand your reluctance,’ he said, ‘but don’t hide. Hiding won’t help.’

Well, he was right.

‘We’re getting there, Harry, aren’t we?’ I said.

‘What? Where?’ He looked very slightly irritated.

‘Not arguing,’ I said.

He frowned and wished I’d shut up, though he didn’t say so, so I did for a moment, to be kind.

‘The Egyptian police put Oliver on to Hakim and Sa’id,’ I said after the moment was over. I said Hakim’s name first in case Harry felt delicate about Sa’id. Which he has done on occasion.

‘Why?’

‘Because of the fight – the hotel thing I told you about – when Hakim was defending me.’ (Sa’id had not been defending me. He’d been on the loo. When he had reappeared and realized what was going on he’d been angry.)

‘What about the money?’

‘I told Oliver about it. That I’d given it to charity.’

I’d told Harry what I had done with the money. He had thought I was mad. He had said, ‘What reason do you have to trust him? There’s plenty of poverty in Egypt, you know. Jesus.’ I saw in his eyes now that he was thinking the same thing now. I didn’t mind him thinking it. He didn’t know that Sa’id was not like that. It’s very much to Harry’s credit that he has any faith in human nature at all – he spends so much time dealing with crime, and he knows too well what poverty does even to people who were decent in the first place. And yes, poverty is strong in Egypt. I may be in love with the place but I’m not blind. I may have a weakness for minarets but that doesn’t mean I don’t see the flies.

I think Harry had feared that Eddie would want the money back. He underestimated quite how batty Eddie actually is. Eddie got a kick out of giving me money. He had a big psychological confusion around dancing and whoring. I’d refused everything he had ever offered me and he was happy as pie to be able to force me to accept something. Made him feel big. Bigger than me. The more money it cost him to do it, the bigger that made me, and the bigger he’d feel about vanquishing me. He would only want his money back if he thought he hadn’t got his money’s worth. Which he had, because the more it cost him the more he valued it. If I’d just let him pick me up all those years ago when he used to come and watch me dance in the restaurants on Charlotte Street he would never have got so obsessive about me and none of this would have happened.

So it is all my fault. All my fault for having some virtue.

‘So what’s happening now?’ Harry was asking.

‘Now I’m stopping pretending that this hasn’t happened, and that it doesn’t mean anything, and anyway it’s nothing to do with me.’

He smiled.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m really fucking sorry.’

‘So am I,’ I said, and I was glad he was there.

‘Well,’ I went on. ‘I assume there are people looking for Eddie. And the Egyptians have questioned Hakim. And Sa’id has left the country.’ I don’t know why he should have gone to Athens. Business, perhaps. The family is in alabaster. Always has been. So perhaps he has been selling alabaster. Or buying marble, or arranging for malachite and lapis lazuli to traverse the world. But that is not my business. My business has been to put distance between us.

But I want to know he’s OK.

I could ring Sarah. Their mother. Two months ago, when Hakim had been staying with me in London, Sa’id had sent him back to Cairo, and neither Sarah nor I knew where he was. We had been worried.

Sarah is English. She lives in Brighton – she’s an academic. I like her but she … has reservations. She was married to Abu Sa’id for some years. Lived in Luxor with him. Bore his sons. Walked out when Sa’id was ten and Hakim five. Couldn’t take it – I don’t know, we’ve never talked about it in detail. I know a little about the complexities of an Englishwoman married to a man in a provincial Egyptian town. Expectations, confusions, culture, religion, habit, communication … but she and I never got close enough for me to know the details of her own story, because Sa’id didn’t forgive her and when she realized what was happening with him and me her past came down over her in clouds of disapproval and irresolution.

The plan was, she and Sa’id were going to make up. I left them all in Egypt, and that seemed to be the next step. But by then I was out of the picture. Out out out. No Angeline in that family. I had just exposed them to all the mayhem with which Eddie is so generous, and then jumped ship. Though it’s true Hakim had managed to find Eddie on his own, and make his own mayhem.

But I could call Sarah. I supposed she would be back in Brighton. And I could call Madame Amina, the aunt, Abu Sa’id’s sister-in-law. Abu Sa’id is the father. It’s a village custom – you’re called after your first-born. His actual name is Ismail. He’s not particularly a village man but he prefers simplicity; he stayed in Luxor while the boys went to school in Cairo, spending time with Madame Amina, and becoming cosmopolitan.

If the police have been round they might, of course, be angry with me about it.

‘Left the country,’ Harry was saying, slowly. ‘Where’s he gone?’

Harry knows I was in love with Sa’id. Harry told me I was a life-avoiding coward for leaving him. Harry told me I’d been a life-avoiding coward ever since I came so near alongside death with Janie. Harry thought I should get a grip. Harry was right.

‘Athens, apparently,’ I said.

‘You haven’t heard from him?’ he asked.

‘Not since I left Luxor,’ I said. Not since he wrapped me in his big white scarf at dusk on the dusty landing stage on the west bank of the Nile, and didn’t try to stop me going.

I’d rung when the news came through of the massacre at the Temple of Hatshepsut. Only weeks before we’d looked down on it by moonlight when we snuck out at night on to the flank of the great sphinx-shaped desert mountain behind his village. Sixty-two people killed, practically on his doorstep. Sarah had said he looked like death. (He doesn’t look like death. He looks like life.) But that’s all I knew.

Harry put his hand across and lifted my chin. I’m always amazed by how far he can reach. ‘Eddie won’t come to Britain. He can’t …’

‘He can do any mad thing he likes …’ I said, but Harry cut in.

‘He can’t. Immigration or customs would have him in two seconds. François du Berry is a man with a very circumscribed life. Are you scared?’

‘No. I just want to get on with my life.’

‘What do you want to do about Sa’id?’

‘Just know he’s ok.’ I had brought trouble to their family. Remember when Hakim had first arrived in London, out of the blue, claiming that he was bringing trouble to my family. Little did he know. I was ashamed to ring them. Would they curse me and throw down the telephone?

I left him. Why unleave him now?

‘Would you like me to find out?’ Harry said at last. ‘If you don’t want to be involved … what with everything. I could see what’s happening for you. Even if I’m out of favour. I mean – as far as I knew it wasn’t an active case anyway. But there we go – let me see what I can see. Shall I?’

‘So you spend your days looking for my lover and your nights looking after my child?’ I asked with a smile.

‘Our child,’ he said. ‘And ex-lover.’

Uncomfortable phrases – but absolutely the shape of my world. Absolutely. I laid my head on the table, and after a while the mists of Egypt retreated from my mind. I got out the vodka, and proved my strength against Eddie by turning resolutely to my life and asking Harry if he thought we needed to make any plans or decisions or anything about Lily. And how it was going to be. He said no. ‘Let it roll,’ he said. ‘We’re doing all right, aren’t we? Am I behaving? And we can tell each other anything we don’t like.’

‘Do me a favour,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Tell us what you do like as well.’

He grinned.

‘No, I’m serious. It’s a root of good childcare. Love and reward their goodness, and pay as little attention as possible to badness. And make sure they know that you love them however bad they might be. You have to tell them. They’re always thinking that everything is their fault, because they think they’re the centre of the world. So you have to reassure them a lot, and …’

He was looking at me.

‘It’s important,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to tell you how to do it, I promise you, but there are a couple of things …’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I like you telling me. And I’ll tell you if I don’t.’

It made me happy. Thinking about Lily and her family life. Happy, in the heart of what matters.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Umm – Lily’s invited me for Christmas.’ He paused. ‘She says you’re going to cook a turkey.’

It’s a logical development. It’s bound to happen. It’s cool.

‘We go to Mum and Dad’s usually,’ I said. ‘Oh. Would you …’

‘I probably should,’ he said. ‘I mean, if you …’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Of course.’

‘OK then,’ he said.

‘Right,’ I said.

We smiled at each other. Family Christmas. Crikey.

‘I hate Christmas,’ he said, musingly.

‘I remember,’ I said.

Soon after, he left, and as he left he kissed me unlingeringly on the mouth, which seemed to me to be both firm and ambiguous, an interesting combination. For a moment I wondered what he meant by it, then shook off the thought. It was too brief to touch me but … But nothing.

FOUR
Answering the phone to Chrissie Bates

For the next week or so I behaved completely normally. Lily and I opened the doors of our advent calendar each morning, and at the weekend we went to the market and bought a tiny Christmas tree, which she covered with hairclips and doll’s clothes; while she was at school I copyedited most of an Iranian carpet magazine, which included re-translating someone else’s translation (from Farsi into nonsense) into decent English, hurrying to get it done before the school holidays. I got so involved with to-and-fro clarificatory telephone conversations with the translator that I forgot to screen my calls. And that is how on Friday afternoon I found myself answering the phone to Chrissie Bates.

‘Don’t hang up,’ she said. ‘Please. Please don’t. Please do this for me – oh lord. I’m not calling to ask you for anything. I just want to say something to you. Oh!’ And then she hung up on me.

Well, I didn’t like it one bit. Her previous phone calls had been … unpleasant, to say the least. So had the razorblade in the post, and the screaming heebie-jeebies when she had burst into my bathroom that time. Admittedly even now it was a little hard to work out which of the unsolicited letters and calls and acts of aggression had been from her and which from Eddie, but overall my view of Chrissie was that she was a nasty little thing who had been married to an even nastier one. Either way I didn’t want her around. Plus … there was the minor item that she had at one stage seemed very pissed off that Eddie was trying to give me so much money, and I had rung her and left a message saying she could have the bloody stuff, and stick it up her arse for all I cared, or words to that effect.

So maybe she wants it.

But she didn’t sound angry, or aggressive. For a moment I hadn’t been sure it was her, because I have only ever heard her voice drunk and furious before, unless you count the funeral where she was drunk, furious and tragic.

And anyway, she can’t have it, because Sa’id has fed it to the hungry children and bought them all new shoes so nyaaah.

The phone rang again.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ Chrissie said. ‘I’m not very good at this but I really want to do it and get it right. I’m sorry. There. I’m sorry.’

‘What?’ I said.

‘Sorry,’ she said again.

‘You’re ringing to say sorry for ringing?’

‘No. For … for everything. Look, can I visit you? I’d like to do this face to face, it gives it more …’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Oh. All right.’

She sounded very small. Very accepting. Completely different.

Actually she didn’t sound drunk either.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Then I’d like to say this. Oh. Bother. I dropped the piece of paper.’ She rustled around a bit, and I held on, waiting.

‘What is this?’ I said.

‘Hang on – I’m nearly there. OK. Right. Angeline, It’s Chrissie.’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘And you haven’t hung up. Oh thank you!’

‘No, but I might yet. What is it?’

‘I have to apologize to you,’ she said. ‘Want to, sorry. Not have to. I did some terrible things and I have a list here and I want to apologize for each one.’

Each one?

‘Please, don’t,’ I said. ‘Please.’

‘Please,’ she said.

So we pleaded with each other a little. Then ‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Just let me do it then I’ll explain. Please?’

Don’t plead. Please.

I let her.

‘Angeline, this is Chrissie. I am apologizing to you. I am sorry for the letters. For the phone calls. For the scene at the funeral – I think. I’m not sure what happened but I think I probably should apologize. And for coming in on your bath and passing out on your bath mat and upsetting your friend. And for all the shouting and everything and for thinking what I did about you and Eddie. I want you to know that I am very very sorry.’

I was gobsmacked.

‘And I would like to apologize to your friend in the bathroom who got me the taxi.’ (That was Sarah.) ‘And if you know where Harry can be found now because I haven’t seen him since Eddie … passed away … since he went to gaol, actually, and nobody knows where he is now but I know you and he were friends and I have a lot to apologize to him for too.’

Whoa.

Of course she would think Eddie was dead. But going back suddenly to the days when Harry was Eddie’s employee, running his fancy garage for him … Chrissie doesn’t know Harry’s a cop. Of course not. Unless Eddie told her, when she visited him in prison. If Eddie knows, that is.

Does Eddie know? No, of course not. Eddie is the main man Harry was undercover from, for god’s sake.

Oh, fuck the lot of them. I only want a quiet life.

Not a helpful declaration. I am one of them. In my quiet way.

‘Why, Chrissie?’ I asked.

‘Oh!’ She has this slightly breathy squeak. She must be going on fifty but she still wears what Fergus the crime correspondent calls her heyday hairdo, which is sub-Bardot, and very high heels. ‘I can tell you. You know I was drunk – well I was. Now I’m not. My name is Chrissie and I’m an alcoholic. And I’m not a criminal’s wife any more. I’m – something else. I don’t know what yet.’

‘So?’ I said, not quite so unkindly.

‘Do you want to know? No, of course not. I’ll give you the short version. You probably know about it. It’s the twelve steps. One of the steps is that you apologize to everybody you did wrong to while you were drunk. You were quite high up my list actually. I had to go through people a lot because I kept thinking I should be apologizing for stuff which was Eddie’s. Couldn’t tell whose was whose, if you see what I mean. But with you it was quite clear, and recent, and so you were a good person to start with. I did my mother first. But I’m going to have to go back to her. Several times, actually, I should think. But I thought I could get you under my belt – sorry! I know that sounds rather … because of course you don’t want to have anything to do with me, and that’s absolutely fair and right. But you know it’s terribly embarrassing. Thank you for not, you know, laughing or anything.’

‘That’s OK,’ I found myself saying.

‘So that’s what I’m doing and thank you for listening and … if you wanted to talk about any of it I’m here. I know that might sound rather mad. But you see I’m trying to think of myself as a normal person now and that’s the kind of thing I would want to say if I was a normal person – you know, if Eddie hadn’t hijacked me and I hadn’t turned to the booze to protect myself from him. If I’d just met some nice man. Or if Eddie had been ugly or something, or poor, then I wouldn’t have fallen for him. Because I wouldn’t have, I don’t think. I was so stupid when I was young. But I’m not going to be any more. And it’s quite a challenge. Anyway I don’t want to go on and bore you. Well I do, but I don’t want you to be bored. I want you to forgive me, and if you do, you know, in your own time, I’d really like it if you could let me know, because it will just make all the difference. It will be like fuel for my redemption rocket, you know? And it would be awfully good karma for you. Not that I mean to try to bribe you or anything. But forgiveness is good, isn’t it? And I know my husband caused you grief, and while I know that’s not my fault, if I had been a different woman, not so weak, everything might have been different, even that, so I don’t feel responsible for you but I do feel for you. I’m sorry, they do feed us an awful lot of rubbish at this place but it’s terribly good. I do hope I’m not talking like a Californian. Oh look. I’m peeing in your ear and you’ve got better things to do – but I would like to talk to you. Any time. You’ve got my number, haven’t you. Here it is again. Or e-mail me – Chrissie@newchris.demon.com. Are you on e-mail? It is fabulous … sorry I’m going on. Look. Any time.’

‘Chrissie,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘A word.’

‘Yes?’

‘While reinventing yourself, it might be worth putting in the gene that lets other people get a word in edgeways.’

‘Nervous,’ she said. ‘Very nervous. Not a drop for six weeks. Sorry.’

‘OK. Listen. I am all for redemption. I wish you well. I hope you succeed but I don’t want to talk to you.’

‘It would be a wonderful bonus for me if you did, very good for my recovery,’ she said, ‘though of course I know that recovery is within the individual, you can’t look to anyone else to do it for you.’

‘I owe you no bonus,’ I said.

‘No, nor any £100,000!’ she cried. ‘I’m living off what he left me because I have to eat but I tell you, this is genuine. I’m going to be redeeming left right and centre. I won’t bother you. If you wish me luck that’s all I need. Thank you. But if you forgive me, let me know. God bless you.’

God bless me.

Blimey.

And that was it.

I sat back, rather exhausted, after she rang off. I didn’t know what to make of it so I left it lying on the side of my mind like an unanswered letter. At least Preston Oliver hadn’t rung me. Nor anybody else.

*

Harry came round that night to put Lily to bed. He’d rung during the day to say was it all right. And to say maybe I might like to go out, or something – should he babysit? I was pleased, but I didn’t want to go out. I watched the news, amazed to have the hours between six and eight to myself. There were TV programmes I’d never heard of that had presumably been going on all this time between six and eight, never watched by mothers of young children.

I must get a job. I don’t know anything about the real world any more. I just sit here and pretend things aren’t happening.

I could hear them giggling in Lily’s bedroom. He was telling her the wide-mouth frog joke. Doing voices. It squeezed my heart.

Lily dismissed Harry, and I went to read to her. Climbed into bed with her.

‘Does he stay forever?’ she asked.

‘Who, Paddington Bear?’ I asked, because that was who I was reading about.

‘No. Daddy.’

‘He’s your dad forever, yes,’ I said.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘When are you getting married?’

Blank. Help!

‘We’re not,’ I said. Have I led her to believe that we were?

‘Oh, all right,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘I thought you were. I thought that’s what parents did. Adjoa’s parents are going to get married. She’s going to be a bridesmaid. And lots of parents are already married. You know. Like yours. Were you a bridesmaid for them? You and Mummy? Dead mummy? Not you and you. You couldn’t be two bridesmaids. And anyway Mummy would have felt left out. Dead mummy.’ She was asleep.

Dead mummy. She accepts stuff now. How will we explain Harry having shagged Janie though?

Well we will.

We. That is such an alarming word.

*

Harry had waited for me. He wanted to talk about Eddie. I stopped him.

‘Do babysit,’ I said. ‘For an hour or so. I want to clear my head.’

And I jumped in my car and went down to Hammersmith, where I bought half a pint of cider from the Blue Anchor and climbed over the river wall on to the pontoon, stranded on the mud at low tide, and sat, looking across to the playing fields in Barnes, down river to the bridge, spangled with lights, and up river towards Brentford where the gryphon lives, and the herons, past the curve of Chiswick, as Turner a view as you can find now in London, over the roofs of the house boats, their paint tins and geranium pots wonky as their hulls settled diagonally on the Thames sludge, their little portholes throwing gleaming coins of yellow electricity out on to the dark slimy mud surface. It was shiveringly cold, and I sat huddled in my coat. Artificial light and natural dark, water and late birds. You get more night on the river than anywhere else in the city. The largest expanse of dark without a light of its own. In Upper Egypt the trees are full of egrets, who hang at dusk like handkerchiefs, and say buggle buggle da, buggle da, burbling like shishas. Written down the words even look like Arabic. And the sky is striped, green and rose and gold, the colours of alabaster, and the moon lies on its back.

A couple of late scullers called across the pewter water. Mad people.

I hadn’t 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. I don’t need to talk to her. She says they’re OK, Oliver says they’re ok, so I don’t need to worry. It’s only them I felt bad about.’

So why do I still feel bad?

Because I’m disappointed. Because if Sa’id had been in trouble I could have gone and rescued him and …

Oh shut up.

And because I can feel Eddie tweaking. He may not be tweaking me directly, the chain may not be round my neck, but it’s on the floor beside me, I can hear it tripping up people I love. He’s still out there.

‘Chrissie rang me,’ I said.

‘Yikes,’ said Harry. ‘The mad lady. How is she?’

I told him. He laughed. ‘Oliver did that too. But he’s too proud to admit that that’s what he was doing. Just went round saying to everybody: “I haven’t always been very … well anyway sorry.”’

‘She was kind of sweet,’ I said.

‘Well, off the booze, away from Eddie, who knows.’

‘Still mad though. Wanted me to confide in her.’

He laughed and laughed. ‘Doesn’t know you very well then,’ he said.

‘What’s that meant to mean?’

‘Oh, you know.’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Mrs Do-it-Yourself,’ he said.

‘Well who the hell else is going to do it?’ I said, crossly. It pisses me off, when people castigate my naturally independent cast of mind, when they should know full well that I have nothing else to depend on anyway.

‘Yeah. Anyway you’re getting better.’

Then I got a bit crosser, because I don’t like to be judged, specially not by an emotional fuck-up like Harry (though actually he is getting better too). But we cheered up again, then it was time for him to go, and as he stood up he put an envelope on the table, and looked at it, and looked up at me.

‘What’s that?’ I said.

‘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.

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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