As the train hurtles heedlessly towards London, I feel again that Noor has left my world. A hatred for her kidnappers, even the two or three who were shot, consumes me. The presumption, the contempt, the callousness of seizing Noor and raping her and throwing her out on a dark street is not so different to what happened to Kafka’s family when the Germans reached Prague. These people would probably have killed Noor without a thought if the money had not been delivered.
When I first read that Richard the Lionheart took captive women for his enjoyment – for a little ravishing – it seemed to me like a jolly medieval romp;
bit of slap and tickle, know what I mean, guv’nor
? Now it seems to me a hateful expression of contempt for women, an unspeakably awful and deliberate defiling.
Haneen comes down to the lobby. She is very elegantly dressed; there is no trace of the rich orientalism she favoured in Jerusalem. She is in a black dress, with a shiny red belt around the middle. Her eyebrows have been thinned and she has a shortish, professional woman’s haircut. Her back, I see for the first time, is slightly hunched.
‘Richard my boy. How worried you look.’
We embrace. To my heightened senses she smells of Jerusalem – of almond and zatar.
We sit in a corner of the gloomy bar, dark wood and lighted cabinets of expensive whisky, and Eastern European waitresses and glass bowls of limes and maraschino cherries and olives and fancy cocktail sticks and chromed cocktail shakers and black-and-white pictures by Bailey: all those 1960 poses of empty self-importance. Just like my father. I loathe this kind of place; it suggests that the world of plush furniture and cocktails and trite sycophancy is what we all really want. These places, in my, admittedly limited, experience, are always inhabited by businessmen, making banal but upbeat conversation, and by slightly foxed Holly Golightlys and personal assistants and PR people drinking champagne in the hope of impressing their clients with their sophistication. I am at the same time aware that my teenage years were spent beside a river in the Scottish rain.
‘Dreadful hotel,’ Haneen says, as if she can read me. ‘Now I have some very important things to tell you. Would you like a drink first?’
‘Is it that bad?’
‘It’s not so good.’
‘I’ll have a glass of red wine.’
We order from a tall, pale girl from the Baltic. Her skin has the texture of plain yoghurt, and her hair is almost white, so that she looks like the Snow Queen.
‘Richard, you can never see Noor again.’
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘You can’t see her.’
‘Is she traumatised? What is the problem?’
‘I am her mother, not her aunt. She was born out of marriage. I was engaged to a boy, a good boy but boring and traditional. I went to Toronto, and Noor was adopted by my brother and his wife. It’s very complicated, but you must trust me it was all we could do at the time.’
‘I am sure that’s true.’
‘Your father is her father too.’
‘Oh, God.’
‘Yes, your dear father was her father.’
She lingers on the word ‘dear’, perhaps offering me some guidance to his true nature. I am gulping for air and my heart appears to be racing.
‘Are you my mother?’
‘No. Your mother died giving birth to you, because your father wanted to have some crazy natural birth in a cabin in the mountains miles from a doctor. There was a problem and she bled to death before help arrived. A few months before, your father wanted to see me on some urgent matter about world peace – he had a solution – and he came to Jerusalem. As I said, I was engaged to my first husband at the time, but Noor was your father’s child. To tell you the truth, my fiancé and I did not have sex before marriage.’
‘Is she all right?’
‘No. She was badly treated and raped. We raised the money and the Canadians did the negotiation. I couldn’t speak to you when you called me in Jerusalem. It broke my heart because I knew you were desperate, but we were in the middle of negotiation and certain that all our phones were being tapped. Then I left Jerusalem and went to Toronto to be with my brother. I also saw Noor in hospital in Ottawa, and she wanted to speak to you, but the Canadians vetoed it.’
‘Did you tell her that she is my half-sister?’
‘I had to. She was pregnant and wanted to keep the baby, because she was sure it was conceived before she went to Cairo. You can see why I had to tell her.’
I am breathing too fast. My blood is draining away somewhere.
‘Excuse me, Haneen.’
I walk to the marbled men’s room, and fill a basin with warm water and hold my face under as long as I can go. My panic subsides. I dry my face and hair in the fierce blast of a Dyson Airblade.
When I come back to the bar, Haneen suggests we go up to her suite, where she will order some food. It is apparently obvious I need food. As it happens I haven’t eaten all day because of my anxiety.
‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier, Haneen?’
‘I couldn’t. It was a dilemma. I couldn’t tell you or Noor that you had the same father and,
évidemment
, I had no idea that you had become engaged just before Noor went to Egypt.’
‘How did she react when you told her you were her mother?’
‘Actually, we told her when she was old enough to understand: I couldn’t keep her in Jerusalem because my new husband would never have accepted her. But we were close, and after my divorce she came to see me every year, and I went to Toronto. But she didn’t know who her father was.’
She waits for me to say something. I am stunned.
‘My husband was a jealous man and he didn’t want any talk of your father. By the way, when he married me he knew that your father was the love of my life. Also, even then, having a baby with your father would have been regarded as a scandal, particularly in our community. My husband was not a bad person, but he had the idea that a man’s pride is very important, possibly even sacred. If I had kept Noor, the scandal would have been terrible. It was a bad time for us, from both sides.’
The regal, haughty woman I have come to know has suddenly begun to tremble. Her face, so patrician, looks older and in a state of flux.
‘I am so sorry, Richard, I am so sorry.’
‘I wish you were my mother.’
She smiles, as she wipes her tears with a napkin.
‘Do you really mean that?’
‘I do. My whole life I have wanted to know my mother and when I first met you I had a strange feeling that if I had a mother – sorry, I must be drunk – if I had a mother she would be someone like you. In Scotland I grew up with this sense of being cheated of my own life. It was only when I got to Oxford that I saw what was possible. Haneen, can I see Noor one day? We can’t get married, but she is my sister.’
‘She had a termination in Ottawa.’
‘Oh Jesus, is there anything else?’
‘No.’
There is a terrible pause; our breathing sounds unnaturally loud.
‘Could it have been mine?’
‘Noor was certain that it was yours. She went to Cairo knowing she was pregnant, she said. The gynaecologist said that the pregnancy was in the range of four to eight weeks. I had to tell her then that she was your sister, so either way a termination was the only option.’
‘Was she upset when she was told she couldn’t speak to me?’
‘Yes, very upset. Also, you must understand, my brother doesn’t know that you were sleeping with her and I decided that it would be better not to explain anything to him and his wife. Noor understands. Richard, I desperately wanted to speak to you earlier. I knew you must be suffering with the silence. But it was impossible.’
‘I have to speak to her.’
‘Give it some time. She’s having counselling and medical assessments and then she has to decide what she is going to do. You can imagine how shocked she was when I told her. It was awful. She loves you and of course that is terrible – terrible – for both of you. Sometimes I think we are
une famille maudite
. Cursed. As I get older, I believe that there is malevolence everywhere in the world. We thought it would get better. Your father was full of ideas about the new world. But look, look at the so-called Arab Spring: it’s turned vicious, it’s anarchy. With these people nothing has changed since the Crusades. The Enlightenment, which I studied so eagerly at the Sorbonne, passed the Muslim world by. Now girls are threatened if they don’t cover themselves, or killed if they want to go to school. You know why?’ (I do have theories, but she doesn’t stop.) ‘Because these bearded fanatics are frightened of the modern world. They don’t want their women to have ideas and they don’t want anyone to suggest that there could be more than one way of understanding the world. It’s absolutely absurd, but you can die for saying so. So now I am here to buy an apartment. It has come to this. I am buying a flat from some people called the Candy Brothers. As a family we have been in Jerusalem for more than a thousand years. We were already Christians long before your father’s friend, Richard the Lionheart, arrived there.
‘Amin Maalouf wrote: “The Arabs feel like exiles in the contemporary world, strangers everywhere. They feel defeated and humiliated. They are always thinking about how to reverse the direction of history and they always refer to past history to explain their problems.’’ Amin Maalouf, by the way, is a Christian from Lebanon, and he left Beirut for ever many years ago.’
‘You told me in Jerusalem that you had warned your brother that Noor was in danger. I tried to speak to him.’
‘I know.’
‘But you didn’t tell him about me?’
‘No. He asked me who you were after you called him. I told him you were a friend, that’s all. He must never know the facts.’
Haneen and I talk into the night. She tells me about my mother, another seeker after enlightenment. Her name was Moonchild Gemstone and she was mostly whacked. She worked in a shop in the King’s Road. I see my father wandering in one day, his long – already outdated – Indian scarf wrapped in loose folds around his neck, and seeing Moonchild Gemstone dancing to sitar music, which fills the shop, the
boutique
, as I am sure it was called. He starts to dance too, his scarf unravelling and floating behind him. Their eyes eventually manage to lock onto each other’s, after an initial period of poor focus. Maybe they go a little later into the back room where they keep the good stuff and question each other about their star signs to see if it’s an auspicious moment to have sex.
Eventually Haneen says she must go to sleep and she gets the spare duvet from a cupboard and makes up a bed for me on a sofa.
I have the unexpected but comforting feeling that I have come to rest. Maybe I am regressing, tucked up under this huge, pristine duvet, which has a remarkable lightness, as though the down in it has been harvested from delicate hummingbirds.
In the morning when I wake, Haneen has gone. She has left a sealed envelope for me. Inside it is a single sheet of paper.
Dear, dear, darling Richie,
Auntie Haneen has told you what happened. It was awful, but I am going to be alright in time. When Haneen told me about our father, I was shocked, but I still love you. We have done nothing wrong. If anything, I feel closer to you than before. I can’t see you for a few months, but when we meet we will talk about everything. In the meanwhile try not to worry too much about me. I am stronger than they think. Dearest Richie – I need you. Your Noor for ever and a day xxxxx
I am sobbing. I haven’t wept so often since I was eight years old. I can’t bear the thought of her in agony. There is no address to reply to. Anyway, what would I say? That we should marry in secret? That we should be sterilised? That our father was a dangerously irresponsible and selfish person who took drugs? I have no hinterland: I am adrift in the world and now, implausibly, the woman I love turns out to be my half-sister. As Haneen said, we are a cursed family. Yet the sense of being at rest has not gone: Haneen is fond of me, Noor loves me. Things have changed: we are bound together by blood and secrecy. The complications and the intrigues are age-old.
13
Richard was within
three days sailing of Marseilles, when he heard that Raymond of Toulouse was on the lookout for him. Richard had made many enemies, and he was the object of vilification by Philip and his allies. The wintry weather and the strong prevailing winds ruled out a passage through the Straits of Gilbraltar, which were anyway overlooked by Muslim powers. His plan was probably to travel to the lands of his brother-in-law, Henry the Lion, in Saxony. He turned back towards Corfu, where he abandoned his great ship and set off in two galleys with a few of his most trusted knights and their squires, among them William de l’Étang, Philip of Poitiers and Baldwin of Bethune. They were blown ashore in the Adriatic.
There is no record of his great ship, which was transporting the True Cross. This ship came to be known to scholars as the
Frankenef
, but it has recently been shown by an alert German academic that this was a confusion: ‘Frankenef’, it turns out, was an early name for ‘Frankfurt’, close to where Richard was to be held for some months. A charter to be granted to the church at Chichester was signed by Richard and reads:
Apud Frankenef
, which was taken to mean ‘on board the
Frankenef
’, but in fact means ‘at Frankfurt’. Richard would anyway not have been likely to have signed a charter on board ship in the middle of the Mediterranean. The only witness was Philip of Poitiers, one of Richard’s companions in the Holy Land.