Louisa Young - Tree of Pearls

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.