‘No. I haven’t.’
‘Well in 2001 an academic, Barbara Frale, a palaeographer working in the Vatican Secret Archives, found parchments which had never been catalogued, or a copy of the originals anyway, which gave new information about Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Templars, who, as you know, were very prominent in Jerusalem and particularly in Acre. The Templars were actually founded to aid the pilgrims but became knights and fought with the Crusaders. They were very popular in France. De Molay was excommunicated and burnt at the stake on the grounds of heresy and sodomy and many of his people were killed in the power struggle. It led, really, to the end of the Templars in France. There is still a rue du Temple in the Marais in Paris. This parchment, Frale says, proves that in 1308 Pope Clement V pardoned de Molay in Chinon, and refuted all the charges against him brought by the inquisition. The Vatican has an authenticated copy of this document, and I can even give you the document number if you want it. This is the sort of thing you must look for. You may just find a hint here or a misunderstood letter there, which will lead you to the lost art. I hear that you were in Jordan looking for documents. Forget it. They are all forged. If you are looking for something unusual, the best start is to look at the collections. Some of these are wrongly assigned or catalogued, or not catalogued at all. You have to look in the records for the sort of thing you want.’
‘Do you know everything that is going on?’
‘I do my best.’
I recognise Haneen as a prototype that I have only read about: the strong-minded, grand, intelligent woman who has outlived, and outdone, the men in her life. Richard the Lionheart’s mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was one of these too.
‘Who are you writing this paper for?’
‘I have a postgraduate grant from my college in Oxford.’
As I speak it – Oxford helps my cause – my project sounds sonorous and important when in fact it may be flim-flam, just like my father’s endeavours.
The lands dropping away down to the Dead Sea are achingly beautiful now; in the deepening darkness the folds in the hills and the clefts of the wadis have turned this landscape into a chiaroscuro. Above, as on a painter’s palette, there are smears of pink, of sherbet and of burnt umber in the sky.
‘Your dear father was always looking for revelation. He was convinced that there was secret stuff out there that the powers above didn’t want us to see. And here we are plagued by this kind of thing.’
‘Yes, I had a conversation with a taxi driver who told me that there was incontrovertible, but secret, evidence that Mossad bombed the Twin Towers.’
‘Oh, we all believe that. That’s a given. The one I love is the story that Mossad released trained Great White sharks to kill tourists in Sharm el-Sheikh. Absolutely true.’
She laughs, apparently forgetting her earlier caution.
‘You should try to find out where the Patriarch Heraclius took the treasures in 1187. There were caravans of them. I would guess Tyre or Antioch. It’s even possible that the Templars took charge of them, or that your father’s beloved Richard the Lionheart found them.’
Now her mood changes: as the last traces of dusk fade, she becomes anxious.
‘You should go now. My driver is waiting.’
She doesn’t come down to see me off. At the door a servant is standing with a gift of dates, hummus in a small brown bowl, covered with cling film, pistachios, almonds and beautiful peaches, grown somewhere on the ancestral lands, which are fed from a Roman aqueduct. The driver looks around once before opening the door of the Mercedes. I can’t make up my mind whether Haneen is a figure to be admired in her grandeur or to be pitied in her isolation, stranded on a barren hillside of half-built houses and uncleared rubbish, of cats with three legs and gummy eyes and a slinking, wary demeanour. They lurk near some randomly placed drainage pipes. I look up and Haneen is standing on the balcony. I wave, and she turns away.
The driver is silent. He has some beads hanging from the rear-view mirror. The lights of Jerusalem have a particular brightness, a kind of chemical intensity like some fireworks. The walls of the Old City are floodlit; they are glowing warmly below the Ottoman crenellations. I try a date. As dates go, they are luscious and sweet, but at the same time powdery as though the dust of the Negev has infiltrated them.
I think that these gifts have symbolic content: Haneen wants to demonstrate that she is generous, and perhaps also that I am part of the family. Gifts have always been big in this part of the world. When Saladin heard from the Byzantine Emperor, Isaac Angelus, that Richard the Lionheart, the German Emperor Frederick, and the King of France were all making their way to the Holy Land, he wanted to forge an alliance with the Emperor in double quick time; he gave him twenty Latin chargers, boxes of gems and balsam, three hundred strings of jewels, a chest filled with aloes, one hundred musk sacs, twenty thousand bezants, a baby elephant, a musk deer, an ostrich, five leopards (surely cheetahs?), a silver jar of poisoned wine and large amounts of poisoned flour, presumably for Isaac to give to Richard and the German Emperor and their knights when they passed through Constantinople.
Despite all these gifts, Isaac could not halt the Crusaders’ progress. Richard travelled by ship via Cyprus, which he conquered, and Frederick never arrived in Constantinople; he died trying to cross a river in Seeucia. He was bored with the slowness of the crossing and decided to swim across, but drowned. Some say he had a heart attack in midstream. His flesh was boiled, stripped off the bones and buried in Tyre right next to the lance which Longinus, the Roman soldier, used to pierce Christ’s body on the cross. Sadly, Frederick’s remains never made it to Jerusalem. To be buried in Jerusalem was a guarantee of eternal rest.
As we drive down the Nablus Road, I am thinking now of what Haneen said: she was warning me about Noor’s naivety but her words were also applied to me. She was saying that this world that we know so little about isn’t going to change. What the fundamentalists say now about facing death is more or less what the Crusaders said then:
Dieu lo vult – God wills it. Caelem denique – Heaven at last
. I think of the Hospitallers offering their necks willingly to Saladin’s Sufis, guaranteeing themselves eternal rest.
My father, of course, also believed that life had many sacred mysteries to be discovered. He wasn’t one of the plodders. Haneen told me that he quoted Shakespeare to her:
Dear Kate, you and I cannot be confined within the weak list of a country’s fashion: we are the makers of manners, Kate, and the liberty that follows our places stops the mouth of all find-faults
. . .
My father was going to show the way to a better life; he was a follower of Timothy Leary who imagined a paradise, peopled, of course, by nubile young women, their minds released from tyranny – and sexual inhibition – by LSD.
As we approach the École Biblique, I realise with guilt that I have not even sent my aunt a card in the last month or six weeks, and this is the woman who harboured me as a bitter and surly adolescent and taught me to read deeply. The gravel crunches under the tyres as we slow. I thank the driver; he nods briefly and makes a neutral sound that contains no vowels.
I remember, with something like nostalgia, a large jar of powder on my aunt’s dressing table, which she applied according to some arcane female etiquette; most days her face would be scrubbed and nun-like, but for mundane excursions – a trip to Mr Reid the butcher – it would be dusted like the surface of her Victoria sponge.
In my narrow room, under the olive-wood cross, I wonder what exactly Noor is doing in Egypt. There are no messages from her. It’s a strange silence from a fiancée. Also I wonder if I haven’t been unnecessarily cruel to Emily. I have barely thought of her because my jealousy and antipathies have been obliterated by having sex – of a very high order – with Noor. Maybe Emily can fend for herself. Maybe she has the inner strength to get over these setbacks. Creative writing courses are, I am guessing, more about self-worth than literature. Fat-arse beardy, Edgar Gaylard, delivered the first blows to her self-worth and I have added my own, mainly because I was hurt. Now, cocooned in the knowledge that Noor loves me – confirmed by Haneen – I am the pasha of magnanimity.
Father Prosper is waiting for me. In his quiet, ascetic way he wants to know how it went. I think that Haneen’s beautiful haughty face with its paprika-sprinkled eyelids, sheltering the dark, sensitive, moist and alert eyes, represents to Father Prosper another world. One which perhaps he wishes he were a part of. Maybe he wonders what it would have been like to have children and the love of women. I have seen that his duties in relation to the Church are now not very onerous. He was a bright, small-town boy from Perpignan, more or less dragooned into the Church. Scholarship and archaeology are his life, but I have the feeling that in his heart he believes that Haneen represents a more glamorous and exciting world.
I tell him what I can.
‘Did you speak of your father?’
‘Yes. She said she had loved him.’
‘He was a very charming young man, as of course you know.’
I wonder what this charm they speak of entailed.
‘Did she talk at all about the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem? She has a great knowledge.’
‘She told me that if there was anything to be found now it would be in libraries.’
‘I think she is correct. The Bodleian in your Oxford has some documents that relate to Saladin. That would be a good start. The material is now being properly identified at last.’
I see a slight pinch of reproach around the mouth as he says this. It’s the sort of involuntary tic some people have in response to lemon juice or the skin of a peach or ignorance.
Before I go to bed I write my aunt a letter on École Biblique notepaper. I tell her of my adventures, adopting the tone of an enthusiastic tourist in the Holy Land. I try to picture her reading this letter in the listless air of her cottage. I want to cheer her up. I certainly owe it to her. My arrival on her doorstep twenty years ago only added to her accumulation of disillusion. She was fifty-two then, but she seemed older. At first she never spoke of her husband Sandy’s death, but it was clear that she took his suicide as a reproach. An oppressive nullity hung over the place. Even the butterflies Sandy collected and placed under glass-fronted frames seemed to reproach her with their stillness. There was no one to reason with, no one to blame; the suicide was a statement to which there could be no riposte. Perhaps the purpose of many suicides is to have the final word. She was living, isolated, in this cottage at the mercy of the landowner, a wealthy German, Gunther Graf von Schwerin. If he turfed her out, she would have to go to the local council for help. She told me that my father ‘wasn’t to be relied upon’. She appeared to resent him. This rresentment wasn’t expressed directly, but in little hints. When I asked about him, she would say, ‘Oh, Alaric was always a little fey.’ I remembered something I had read: ‘He’s got that fey look as though he’s had breakfast with a leprechaun.’ In old Scottish, ‘fey’ means fated to die soon.
I didn’t know anything then: I didn’t know she had left her husband in Fulham to move in with this Sandy, apparently a russet, strapping man, with limited conversation which she mistook for profundity of the elemental variety. She had met him accompanying her husband and his financial friends when they were stalking. In this limited world he was a prince. But what he knew was stags – preferably with a twelve point rack – trout, salmon, dogs and guns.
My aunt could not go back to London after his suicide, she said, because she would feel utterly humiliated. Also, her first husband had quickly and smoothly married a younger woman in his office. She had been his personal assistant. He had told everyone who would listen – quite a lot of people, as it turned out – that she was the laughing stock of London SW6. His remarks were cheerfully redirected to my aunt by her former friends. True or not, she chose to live out her penance for her folly in this moist cottage, whose Victorian Gothic was far from comforting. Not far from her back door, the blue-grey Dee ran strongly, unconcerned. Once, she said to me that her heart was not in Deeside. She said it as though it was a profound statement of fact. I was not certain she had a heart; I guessed that disappointment had withered it.
Richard I’s heart is in Rouen, probably beneath his effigy. In his day the heart was believed to be the lodging of courage and emotion. Then, this was a medical fact, not a metaphor. I have seen in the Holy Land how easy it is for the figure of speech to be mistaken for the reality.
I visit my aunt occasionally. She takes – rightly – a lot of credit for my acclaimed first class degree. She is very well read in her quiet fashion. She pointed me in the right direction and helped me with my homework. She told me that Oxford was the Holy City, although that precept was delivered partly as a reminder of my father’s failings; his sending down was a disgrace.
Much later I discovered the facts of this disgrace: he had supplied the drugs that killed a friend in Balliol. This boy was found dead one morning by his scout – college servant – who looked after his staircase. (Oh, how self-congratulatory are the archaic terms.) This boy was the son of the Foreign Secretary, The Rt. Hon. Sir Alan Gordon-Mowbray, Bart. The story was all over the papers in 1963. My father was told to pack his bags and take the down train. He was questioned by the police, tried, fined and given a ten-month sentence, suspended because he was not selling the drugs. And because the young aristo was shown to have been an avid drug user in his own right. I have seen the cuttings. As his barrister argued, my father had no intention of harming his friend: however misguidedly, he was just sharing his drugs. Although my father was keen to make a statement from the dock, his barrister advised him not to. Perhaps he feared a dissertation on the deep and potentially world-changing importance of the philosophy of
turn on, tune in, drop out
.