Louisa Young - Tree of Pearls

‘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.