She speaks with a kind of resonance – waves booming in a sea cave, and her accent is of a higher order, not belonging to any one country or time. I think the aristocratic Russians probably spoke French in this way. There is just a hint of her provenance in the word ‘acceptable’ which she pronounced harshly, as ‘accept-tibill’.
‘That’s very generous. Thanks. I do have business at the British Museum – they have an exhibition of works from the Scriptorium of the Holy Sepulchre and a reproduction of an icon from Bethlehem, which demonstrates that Latin and Byzantine art had integrated in the twelfth century. There are also many more Western influences in the rebuilding of the Holy Sepulchre, and some drawings to illustrate this. But you probably know more about it than I do.’
‘How is your project coming on?’
‘I put it aside for a while, but now I am trying to get it back on track.’
‘Noor tells me you are doing something on Richard the Lionheart.’
‘Yes, I am. It’s a sort of novel.’
‘Your father wrote a history of Richard.’
‘Yes, I’ve read it. It was more of a dream sequence than a novel.’
She smiles. We are affectionately complicit.
I understand why writers are reluctant to discuss work in progress. As Beckett replied when asked what his writing was about:
It’s about the writing.
In the night I think about what Haneen has told me. She seems to be saying that Noor is terribly damaged and that pinning her hopes on me would be disastrous. I can’t believe it. We will meet on a Greek island, for better or for worse. Haneen said there can be no true forgetting. Psychiatrists are bound to say that, because there would be a lot fewer of them in employment if the inexhaustible archive of doubtful memories was declared off-limits. And how would you prove that there is no such thing as true forgetting? Something that has been truly forgotten would be just that?
23
Dearest Noor
,
I spent last night in Haneen’s new flat in London. I am sure she told you about it. It’s pretty flash. Is that a term you know? Anyway, she said it was time. I think she feels she has been disloyal to Jerusalem. I read only a few days ago that some cities exist as much in the mind as in the material world, and the writer mentioned Jerusalem. I find myself thinking about Jerusalem, and Room 6, far too often. I have the feeling that I – and maybe you – will never be so happy again as we were in the pasha’s harem. I can see why Haneen would feel torn.
One thing she said disturbed me. She said that it is a fundamental belief of psychoanalysts that there is no such thing as ‘true forgetting’. She feels it would be disastrous for your recovery if we met again. What is untrue forgetting? A kind of willed amnesia? And would that be a bad thing? Anyway, enough pop psychology already. The simple question is,
will you see me again?
If you are sure that it is best for you to forget me, and everything that reminds you of me (true forgetting?), then I will accept that. Only a few weeks ago you told me that you would accept anything I decided; we seem to have exchanged roles. Will you tell me exactly – don’t spare me – how you feel about our future?
As for my plans, I have decided on an island for us in the Dodecanese. I went there once with my father – our father – on our one and only family holiday and I thought it was magical. I dreamed of it for years. It’s called Symi, and has an ancient stairway of three hundred and sixty-five stone steps between the port and the upper town. It is called Kallistrata – beautiful, or good, road. Donkeys carry the heavy stuff. There are almost no cars on the island because there is hardly anywhere to go that can’t be reached by boat. But in my memory there is also a small island just off-shore, with a chapel on it. I want to visit it again with you. (Does this sound like the plot of
Mamma Mia!
?) I was only about twelve at the time and I was probably passively inhaling my father’s dope, so I am anyway an unreliable witness.
We stopped off in Rhodes to see the Castle of the Knights Hospitallers, who set up shop there after the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1291. My father loved a castle. He thought he could read the stones. When you saw Kerak, as you reminded me in your letter, you saw corpses. Our father saw glory and mysticism. Oh, and in Symi he fell out with the patriarch of a huge monastery at the far end of the island. He believed that swimming naked was a human right, and he did it in full view of the monastery. I hid in a dark café as the recriminations started. The credulous had a habit of throwing bottles with prayers in them into the sea; our father wrote:
Let it all hang out for world peace
on the back of a menu, rolled it, and placed it in an ouzo bottle. I didn’t know what that meant. I was instructed to hurl the bottle off the boat as we cleared the bay. Outside the bay, he said, there were currents that might take the bottle anywhere.
The strange thing is that I have met a number of people recently who tell me what a wonderful person he was.
And finally, I would accept, if you told me yourself, that you believe we should not meet. For myself, I believe that we will meet on the Island of Symi one not-too-distant day. Write to me and tell me your thoughts.
All my love,
Richie xxxx
PS. I enjoy writing:
Moose Creek
on the package. In my mind’s eye I see a herd of moose knee-deep in snow eating bark. Close?
24
To my surprise
, Emily is at the lawyers’, in a small office next to a launderette, a few streets back from Hackney Town Hall. She says that the documents for the flat transfer have to be witnessed at the same time. She says this as a matter of universally known fact. Do I mind? Of course not. Can we have a coffee afterwards? OK. We sign the legal paper. Briefly I wonder if there is a warehouse or a limbo where this unloved stuff ends up. The lawyer, Derek Cocks, is wearing a brown suit with a blue shirt and a tie of the same blue so that the tie vanishes into the shirt. He has a cold and holds a handkerchief over his face; mostly all we see of him is his eyes. His voice is slightly muffled when he speaks.
‘Right, that was short and sweet. All done and dusted. Bye for now.’
A little later, I find myself in a kind of barn in a narrow lane where, Emily says, good coffee of origin is served. It is served by a cheery man with a ring in his nose and three more in each ear. I have nothing against the visual aspect of his cartilaginous bits, but I wonder about the delusion that they represent. There is a lounging area where two women are feeding their babies. They radiate a fecund sanctity. Not much money has been spent on creating this resource; I imagine the coffee guy and his friend going out in a clapped-out van to collect the assorted lumber from skips.
Emily and I sit on a battered leather sofa; for a table we have a large fruit box, labelled:
Weald of Kent Apples
. I see that, behind the counter, which rests on two barrels, they sell health-giving organic fruit and vegetables and they are all set up with a yellowed Magimix to make smoothies. Instead of thinking,
How wonderful
, I think of the conspiratorial beliefs that have led to this dump.
‘Great café,’ says Emily. ‘It’s really become popular with the locals since you left.’
The locals are invoked to lend some moral weight to the place. There also seems to be an implication that my departure encouraged them to take care of their health by downing pomegranate and celery smoothies.
Emily’s face has become thinner, even more Virginia Woolf-ish, her nose apparently longer and her eyes more distant from the action, so that she looks strangely like an icon. She has the aspect of a writer – serious, a little worried about where it’s going, but also – I am reading way too much into this – the comfort of belonging to a superior caste, the writing caste, people who write about funny domestic misunderstandings, people who make up history, people who write about detectives who drink too much while still able to solve crimes, people who see pathos in autism, people who write about how to overcome sex addiction, people who write the autobiographies of sportsmen and sportswomen, people who wrote their own
Bildungsroman
, retired politicians who rewrite their careers, people who write about tasty ten-minute recipes, people who write about the failings of men, people who write celebrity novels, people who write comic novels, people who write spy novels, people who write epistolatory novels. And so on. Writing is still highly esteemed, even more so than reading.
Emily seems to be in a very good mood, made all the better by having the opportunity to demonstrate to me what I am missing.
‘Where’s the wedding, Emily?’
‘Islington Town Hall in two weeks’ time. I discussed it with Freddie, but he felt it would be uncomfortable if you came. Sorry. Freddie is quite traditional; he’s Anglo-Indian, by the way.’
‘Good. No need to apologise. Mixed marriage is the future. How’s the writing going?’
‘Oh, it’s going quite well. I’ve written nearly fifteen thousand words of my first draft.’
‘Emily, on your climb up the greasy literary pole, are you finding that the precepts of your old chum from Sheffield, Edgar Gaylard, are helping?’
‘God, you are such a bastard.’
‘It wasn’t me who went off and shagged a beardy literary man. You said you needed your personal space, remember?’
‘Richie, I feel sorry for you. Are you OK?’
‘As a matter of fact, I do have one or two things on my mind, yes, but our comic interlude in this organic toilet has cheered me up enormously.’
Emily grabs my arm. She speaks quietly but urgently.
‘I brought you here because I wanted to tell you that two men appeared at the flat, saying they wanted to speak to you. They produced identity, which said they were from the Metropolitan Police, Special Operations. I told them that you hadn’t lived here for some time. They wouldn’t say what they wanted, but they said I should tell you if I saw you that you should contact them.’
‘Did they say what it was about?’
I am alarmed.
‘Just what I told you. Nothing more, but they seemed quite reasonable.’
‘Did you give them my details?’
‘I don’t know any details.’
‘My phone?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘I have to go, Em. I really do wish you all the best for your wedding. And I apologise.’
‘What for?’
‘For everything. Anything you can think of.’
‘They gave me a card, a number for you to call.’
She retrieves it from her bag. It has a name:
Detective Sergeant Alandale, SO15
. My first thought is that I need to speak to Lettie.
‘Bye, Em. Have a good one.’
‘Good luck, Rich.’
I wonder if this luck to which she is referring is specifically in relation to the fact that two Special Branch officers are apparently looking for me, or if it contains a general assessment of my future. I turn as I go out: she is sitting there, against a sombre still life of leathery, pocked apples.
The exhibition in the British Museum is demonstrating the degree of integration that took place in the art of Outremer, in architecture, painting, and craft. Among a display of elaborate reliquaries is a True Cross reliquary on loan from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Barletta, Puglia. This cross fragment – there are thousands – is contained within an ornate box, finished in gold and silver, highly sophisticated work. It suggests to me that the Holy Cross carried by the four knights may have been housed in something similar, perhaps even more grand, made by the local Frankish craftsmen, who had been working in the Holy Land for over a hundred years.
Fulcher of Chartres, the chronicler of the First Crusade, wrote in 1124:
For we who were Occidentals have now become Orientals. He who was a Roman or a Frank has in this land been made into a Galilean or a Palestinian. We have already forgotten the places of our birth; already these are unknown to many of us and not remembered to many more
.
The most important article from the Scriptorium of the Holy Sepulchre is on display. It is the psalter of Queen Melisende of Jerusalem, probably made in 1138. Seven craftsmen are believed to have worked on it and the intricately carved ivory covers and the silk spine of the book are thought to be distinctly Western. It is a beauiful object.
When Jerusalem was captured after the catastrophic defeat on the Horns of Hattin in 1187 – and the Holy Cross was lost – Imad ad-Dinad-Isfahani wrote:
Jerusalem was purified of the hellish Franks
. Saladin had the Haram purified with rose water before he would enter. It was the end of a long period of Crusader dominance and the end of the golden age of Crusader art.
I see, if I need to be reminded, that art and its creation are a kind of affirmation –
Look, we exist
. There, in the blazing summer heat and the winter chill, amongst the alien rocks and parched hills, the former citizens of Reims and Chartres were proclaiming that they too were engaged in the work of humanity, to rise above the material world.