They ended up in a perfumery whose owner, a willowy-chic young woman who only spoke French, insisted they sample all her wares. Robbie wanted to get Leila a present.
“I think we should buy
everything,”
he said solemnly.
Colin smiled. “Mummy says we men always think like that,” he said. “We go to the supermarket and buy what we want when we should really buy only what we need. So men make rotten shoppers.” And rotten lovers, he remembered glumly: “You men screw like you shop” had been the context of Leila’s defiant remark.
“But we can’t buy
any
of these smells at home.” Robbie’s brow wrinkled in a frown. “Actually, I wouldn’t ever want to go home, not really.” He held a glass stopper to his nose and sniffed cautiously. “Except for one thing.”
Colin was learning how to listen to his son’s silences. He knew he would get to hear about the “one thing” much quicker if he left it dangling.
“Does Grandfather Feisal have a wife?”
“Not now. She died, when she was still quite young.”
“Oh.” A long silence. Robbie was scowling at the glass Stopper while simultaneously continuing to hold it under his nostrils; he looked cross-eyed. “I don’t like Grandfather Feisal,” he said suddenly.
“Please don’t let Mummy hear you say that. It’d upset her. After all, he
is
your grandfather.”
But that was the moment when Colin first acknowledged to himself that he didn’t like Feisal either.
He used to watch his father-in-law do the rounds at parties and wonder what precisely it was about him that gave off such an air of having been programmed. Feisal never looked at his wristwatch. He employed other people to worry about the time. And part of Colin’s unease related to a sense that this inner clock of Feisal’s was counting down to Armageddon.
For him, time ran out on the night of the
raqs sharqi.
“There’s no such thing as belly dancing!” Leila had said playfully.
“Raqs sharqi
is an art form, my dearest, one you’ll never understand.”
“I still want to see it.”
“You men!”
They were sitting on the balcony of the main penthouse room, drinking Pimms.
“Belly dancing is a con,” Leila said. “All those greedy-eyed lechers sitting hunched over drinks while some tart pokes her pelvis at them. Honestly, a Soho strip show’s better value.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been.”
“Such a namby-pamby. Anyway, you don’t take your wife to
raqs sharqi,
you take your pals. Ask Halib, he’s bound to know of somewhere.”
“But I want you to explain this art form to me. Surely it takes a woman to do that?”
Leila pouted. Later on, however, after dinner, when Robbie had been put to bed with Alf, his stuffed crocodile, she asked, “Do you still want to see the dance?” He nodded. She detailed one of the maids to baby-sit Robbie, took Colin down in the elevator and hailed a cab. She gave an address on the eastern, Christian side of the city in which the word Karantina figured, so Colin knew they were going into the port district.
It was everything he’d ever dreamed about when deep in the guidebooks: pure distillation of Beirut. A neon sign above a basement, a door with a sliding panel at eye height through which the swarthy bouncer assessed the strength of your character and the thickness of your wallet before admitting you to a smoke-filled cellar lined with low tables. As Colin sipped scotch by candlelight he felt his heartbeat quicken with the kind of nervous excitement that tells us when we’re going to do something deliciously regrettable.
He lay back and placed an arm around Leila’s shoulders. After a pause she allowed some of her weight to rest against him; then, as if suddenly reaching a decision, folded herself into a proper embrace. Colin felt happy, although nothing much seemed to be happening, just a lot of noisy chatter competing with tinny recorded music. He was very aware of Leila’s hair, the scent of it, the wonderful texture of a handful of locks twisted through his fingers. Her scalp was cool and moist. Tonight was like their first night—a sensation not easy to find when you’d been married nearly five years and had a child.
The spotlight flared into life at the same moment as the orchestra struck up. The room erupted with applause and confusion. Colin tried to make sense of a cacophony of accordion, flute, zither, double bass, violin, guitar, and drums while they coalesced into a “Play, Gypsy, Play!” style prelude. But then, as the music settled down into rhythmic harmony, a figure floated through the shaft of light and he caught his breath.
The woman was not old, but neither was she young, and her face might have been borrowed from a frieze beneath the pyramids, proclaiming her an expert in dances that had been ancient when Great Pharaoh was alive. For a moment she stayed rooted to the center of the floor, impassive; then her arms seemed to float up above her head, crossed at the wrists; her feet moved, a step to the right, a step to the left, scarcely causing her filmy skirt to flutter.
“Watch the geometry,” a voice breathed in his ear, and he started, realizing with a twinge of guilt that he had totally forgotten Leila in the surprise and excitement of the moment. “This is the Egyptian Walk. Everything she does now revolves around a figure eight: watch!”
The dancer had begun a convoluted progress around the edge of the floor. Colin began to absorb details of hercostume: a golden belt securing the diaphanous greenskirt, and a gold bra, a Romany headscarf, a scattering ofsequins. The candlelight made of her a fairy-like, phantasmal figure, a djinn from some child’s storybook; onlythere was nothing childlike about the performance, forher pelvis had begun to move independently of the rest of her body
“Watch how her spine floats,” Leila hissed. She was resting both arms on his shoulder, while he leaned forward, entranced, unwilling to lose the tiniest detail; she hung over her husband with the mischievous smile of a devil sent to tempt. “It must come from within, no one can teach that. See her hands entwine. She has no fear. She has no shame…. ”
The music had settled into a series of long-drawn-out sets, each played a little faster than the last. The room was alive with clapping hands, swaying bodies, cries of approval and encouragement.
“The audience,” Leila whispered, “makes the dance live. They make it happen.”
Colin sat there, his lips parted to reveal a line of wetness glistening faintly in the soft, reflected light. When Leila nibbled his ear he laid a hand on her knee and began, at first almost absentmindedly and then with increasing urgency, to caress her thigh. He felt liquid inside: shapeless, no longer restricted by the uncompromising demands of his skeleton. The woman’s hips fluttered close to his face and he leaned farther forward, for all the world like a dog aroused by some hitherto unknown scent.
Leila slipped her fingers inside Colin’s shirt. His own hand squeezed her thigh, hard. Her other hand crawled up the cushion and, concealed by the table, descended onto the bulge inside his pants. He was scarcely aware of it. All Colin knew was the jerking, twisting, fluttering, floating hips, navel, and breasts of the dancer: sensuous and erotic beyond his power of imagination. As set succeeded set with mounting tempo, he felt himself drawn into the dance—part of the audience, the composite beast that growled encouragement, while at the same time separate from it—until he was alone on the floor with this vision of sexuality made woman that moved with the sultry fluidity of cream swirling around its churn.
The dancer hung suspended by invisible strings, hands plaited high above her head, quivering, while the music rushed to a crescendo and sudden death.
Lights came on. Leila’s hands withdrew. For a second of silence Colin felt himself falling as from a great height. Then the basement became a storm of noise. The dancer floated slowly around and around, one arm extended, her face a mask of triumph, while her world paid homage. People stood up to clap. The room was congested with a snowstorm of paper; Colin, still dazed, took a while to comprehend that this was money. The dancer swayed and knelt, siphoning up the paper … and was gone.
Colin lay back against the cushion. The near silence that had descended on the room was pregnant with heavily charged emotions, predominant among which was shame. Faces that previously had been concealed in shadow now lay exposed: Mr. Punch faces, with sharp pointed chins, shifty eyes, thin-lipped mouths. Leila seemed to sense his unease, for she quickly stroked the nape of his neck before darting down to kiss him and say huskily, “Let’s go.”
He had no recollection of paying the bill or climbing thestairs to the street. He was aware of holding Leila around the waist and of an all-obliterating sexual desire that would have to be satisfied soon if he wasn’t to die, but he only came to himself when a black BMW glided up and suddenly there seemed to be a lot of men about. Two of them he recognized: they’d ridden in the front of the car that had brought the Raleighs from the airport. And Halib
Afterward, he couldn’t quite see how it had happened, but somehow he was edged away from Leila while still remaining with her. One man spoke Arabic. Leila replied abruptly in the same language.
“What’s going on?” Colin demanded to know.
“You stay out of this,” Halib snapped.
By now Leila was engulfed in a full-blown argument. Colin thought he heard the word
hashish
several times, knew he must be mistaken. He wanted to get off the hot, sticky street, he longed for a cold beer in the sole and exclusive company of his wife, but more than anything he needed sex. If he didn’t get off soon, there was going to be an ugly incident.
“Look, I’ve had enough of this,” he shouted. “Come on, Leila, tell ‘em we’re leaving.” And with that he grabbed her hand before trying to thrust between two of the hoodlums who were in his way.
The street seemed to whirl and blur. He found himself forced against the car with his forearm halfway up his back and an excruciating pain in his right leg where someone had landed a vicious kick.
“All right,” he heard Leila say. “All right, hold it, listen. Let me talk to him,
all right?”
The grip on Colin’s arm slackened. He wheeled around. Maybe the scotch contributed, probably frustrated desire had most to do with it, but anyway he decided to take things out on his wife, because she was nearest and these were her people.
“What the fuck are you playing at?” he roared. “I’m beaten up, I’m insulted, and … what’s all this about
hashish?”
Silence. Then Halib threw up his hands and turned to the man who’d accosted Leila. “Okay, we’re leaving, take him home.”
Colin lashed out, but someone casually intercepted his arm, and next second he went sprawling in the road.
“Colin,” he heard Leila say, through a blood-red haze of pain and humiliation, “I’m sorry, okay? They’ll take you home; this is business, family business: I have to go talk with my father. Okay? I’m sorry…. ”
Then hands were lifting him into the back of the car and he was being driven away. The man beside him had a tight grip on his arm, but he managed to jerk it free. The man just laughed and lit a cigarette, knowing who posed a real threat and who was just bombastic trash.
Back home in the penthouse, Colin tore off his clothes and put himself under the shower. It didn’t help. He threw himself on the bed, stark naked, and tried to put a stop to the torment of rejection inside his head. He tried masturbating, couldn’t get a hard enough erection, got fed up with flogging unresponsive meat. He was angry, angry,
angry.
Round and round the words went inside his brain, the retorts and ripostes, the denunciations that now must wait for tomorrow, or whenever Leila chose to return.
He tried to convince himself that it was Halib he hated, not her, but that didn’t have any more effect than the shower. She was actually
part
of this unwholesome conspiracy to derail a marriage of which the family had always disapproved. They summoned, she went. Every day, she went somewhere. Every day Feisal called, she obeyed. And so it would always, always be
No, not every day; just some days. At other times she could be loving and warm and … oh,
shit!
He floated on the surface, sure he never slept a wink but sleeping enough to be disturbed by Leila’s eventual return. She laid a hand on his forehead, but he pretended to snore, even when she quietly slipped into bed beside him and arranged her body so that they were touching from ankle to neck, with that same cool hand gently caressing his stomach.
He knew she knew he was awake and cursed himself for being such a fool. Cutting off your nose to spite your face! He could have peace just by asking for it, but no, he wouldn’t sue for peace. That’s what Colin told himself. He wouldn’t crawl. Not to a bunch of bloody Arabs.
Shortly after dawn he roused himself from his dismal half-sleep, knowing what he wanted to do. Leila slumbered, her pale face twitching slightly as if in apprehension. He got up quietly and slipped into Robbie’s bedroom, kneeling down to wake the boy so that he could lay a finger across his mouth.
“An adventure,” he said quietly. “Today’s the day of our big adventure.”
He was going to take Robbie to visit
arz er-Rab,
the cedars of the Lord.
The morning was sultry. Lowering, heavy clouds wrapped the city in a blanket, like a fever patient left to sweat it out. Colin knew this weather to be the forerunner of the dreadful
khamsin
wind, which brought violence, and he was glad to escape to the hills.
After they’d been driving for a while Robbie asked, “Daddy, why do we have to see the trees?”
“Because they’re in the Bible, and they’re beautiful. A great man called Lamartine said that they’re the most famous natural monument in the world.”
“What’s a monument?”
“Something that records an event. Or anything beautiful that’s worth keeping as a relic of olden times, which is how Lamartine meant it, I think. Some of these trees we’re going to see could be fifteen hundred years old. Can you imagine that, Robbie?”
The boy thought hard. “No.”