Louisa Young - Tree of Pearls

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by The Borough Press 2015

First published by Flamingo, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 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 © HarperCollins Publishers 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

‘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

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

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’.