Only in London Page 2

  How much is that doggy in the window?

  Woof woof

  The one with the waggly tail

  Woof woof.

  Lamis started crying again. When she’d agreed to give up custody of Khalid - as the one walking away from the marriage - she did it on condition that she would be able to see him whenever she wanted to. She couldn’t have imagined how painful it was going to be. It was like a hand being betrayed by the beauty of a rose, unaware of the thorns that surround it. She’d learned that song with her son. She thought again of calling him at school. She could just picture his room, and yearned for her old home. Was it possible that she was never going to see the other flat again, although she’d spent a year furnishing it? She longed to roam around it, look into its cupboards, delight in its colours, gaze out at the park and at the lake where the birds ducked and dived in the morning mist, and sometimes in the sunshine, instead of gazing at the BT tower with its girdle of frying pans and casseroles.

  She hurried to the telephone and dialled Belquis’s number, but stopped before she reached the end. Was Belquis still her friend? Didn’t friends of newly divorced couples become like footballs, not knowing which team’s net they were going to land in? She should contact her ex-husband directly and tell him she wanted to go back to him. She dialled his mobile, but stopped before she pressed the final digit.

  What was she thinking of? That was the world she’d run away from. She reminded herself she’d hated life in her marital home so much that she’d begun to see it as a figment of someone else’s imagination, like the Addams Family living their Frankensteinish life in the heart of an ordinary town in America. She reminded herself of her mother-in-law’s hard face with its scolding expression telling Lamis: Slow down, don’t go out too much, and her crude references to her marital duties.

  Go to Soho this afternoon, she encouraged herself. You can be there in ten minutes. No guilty conscience, no feeling that you’re letting people down any more. You’re free, free.

  She made herself think of the London she once saw, and how she had wanted to live in it unattached when she’d walked one day on her own to take a Venetian candelabra to a shop called Stitch for repair, and felt so carefree, envious of the people of her own age she saw sitting in a café, and of a young man arranging flowers in a shop window. Her mother-in-law had tried to stop her going, saying no one had heard of Stitch, it wasn’t well known, and Lamis’s husband joined in, volunteering that the streets of Soho were full of sexual deviants, the place was synonymous with drugs and alcohol. But Lamis went, and she’d not been in any hurry to go home. She’d had an orange juice in a pub, and gone downstairs to the Ladies where an English song over the speakers made her heart beat more quickly. But now the possibility of being able to live like that was as distant as the sun from the earth.

  After her divorce came through she did not run barefoot through the park shouting ’I’m free’, as she’d promised herself. It was the night before she left for Dubai and she had sat in the hotel room, chin in hand, confronting a bottle of champagne in a bucket and watching the ice melt. She’d thought of a friend of her father’s who’d been arrested at Athens Airport for possessing a piece of hashish. When they let him go after a few months he immediately missed the prison routine. He’d liked sitting with his fellow prisoners under a fig tree playing chess.

  The empty flat was managing to defeat her. She lay down on her stomach, thinking that perhaps she ought to expose the backs of her knees to the light; she’d read in a magazine that this was good for jet lag.

  ’You’ve ruined yourself and us, just like your father did,’ her mother wailed over the telephone from Dubai on learning that Lamis was asking for a divorce. ’What about your son? Have you no heart? Did you forget you gave birth to Khalid? If you wanted a divorce you should have made his life hell so that he’d have been the one to ask for it, not you!’ she screamed in a deranged voice. ’Or ... or ... made him fall in love with another woman, even if you had to find her for him. Why don’t you learn to play these tricks? By asking him for a divorce, you idiot, you aren’t even entitled to a loaf of bread, let alone your child. Oh God. Everything will be lost - two buildings in Beirut, two flats in London - all that wealth will be down the drain. But now, listen, you have a British passport, you can sue him and get half of everything ... even more. You can get custody of your son. Just listen to me.’ Before this, her mother had been floating on air, revelling in the gossip going around London and even in her home city of Najaf, saying that Lamis was living like a princess, in the same building as a lord whom the Queen once visited: Her Majesty had gone up in the lift Lamis used and had dinner in the room directly below her sitting room.

  All these memories made Lamis tremble like a feather. She stood up, opened the window, leaned out and screamed, but everything beyond the flat looked still and lifeless. She lay on the bed again, embarrassed at what she’d done. As the seconds passed and she heard no sound at the door of the flat - no call from the porter asking her what had happened, no police car or ambulance screeching to a halt, sirens wailing - she became convinced she was suffering from the same loneliness as Eleanor Rigby in the Beatles song. She’d been fourteen years old when she first heard that song drifting out of the Officers’ Club in Damascus, her family’s first stop after leaving Iraq. She’d looked in and seen the soldiers dancing the tango. At the chorus, ’All the lonely people, where do they all come from?’, the men switched to an Arab dance, and shook their hips to the beat. She always thought that ’Eleanor Rigby’ was a cheerful, funny song until she heard it again in London.

  Now Lamis’s head was pounding, her insides churning. She wondered whom she could call. The only people she knew well were her in-laws and their friends. Other than that there were acquaintances: her son’s Arabic teacher, who thought Lamis was superficial - a lady who lunches - or Fifi, the Arab employee at Selfridges, who’d asked Lamis over the telephone if she were Arab, like her, because she ordered lots of olive oil. Her gaze fastened on a nail the singer had knocked into the wall to hold a picture: the ghost of a Beverley Sister, was that the only person she could think of?

  How is it that I don’t know a single English person to invite for a cup of tea, or a beer? They’re out of bounds to me, just like the city. The only people that I’ve had direct contact with are the Beverley Sisters, a few doctors, and of course the General.

  She used to see the General with a nurse, who would force him to walk, pulling him by the hand like a big dog, and he would resist and complain, and occasionally shout, but nobody listened to him under the towering trees around the square, where the houses resembled army barracks. The General had fought in the Second World War, in the Libyan Desert at El Alamein, and he had been with his regiment on leave when it put in at Beirut, Port Said, Haifa and Cyprus, before returning to the front. The General had been different from the London taxi drivers who talked to Lamis about their exploits with the services in Aden or at Suez.

  One day the General heard Lamis calling her son. ’Khalid, Khalid. Come along, darling.’

  Her son was playing with a small powerboat on the pond in the square, changing its direction with a remote, when the nurse approached. Lamis was sure that the woman was going to tell her off for shouting at her son to keep away from the fountain, which had already drenched Khalid’s hair and clothes. That’s what they were like, the English, poking their noses in to criticise. ’Look, bicycles are forbidden,’ a stranger had said to her, pointing to a notice by the entrance to the square, before going up to a woman who was walking a small dog, and saying, ’Read the notice. It’s forbidden to let it off the lead.’

  ’Excuse me. The General wants to know if you’re an Arab, and, if so, from what country?’

  But the General did not let the nurse finish her polite smile. He tried to explain to Lamis, speaking with difficulty because his mouth was partly paralysed, that he’d been in Palestine during the Second World War, and it was the most wonderful period of his life.
While he was there he’d met a Lebanese woman called Nadia Haddad whose husband worked in a bank. They’d corresponded for many years, even after she’d returned to Lebanon. But then he’d lost touch with her at the start of the war in Lebanon.

  He signalled to the nurse to give Lamis his card.

  ’But I don’t carry them about with me, General. In any case, your card would be of no use to the lady.’

  The General mustered all his strength to speak, but his sentences were disjointed and mostly incomprehensible, except for one: ’Please, I wonder if you could find Mrs Haddad for me?’

  The nurse spoke to him rationally, as if she were talking to a normal person. ’But this lady isn’t Lebanese. She says she is Iraqi and she lived in Beirut for a while, that’s all.’

  The nurse tried to get through to the General, who seized Lamis’s hand and bent to kiss it, murmuring, ’Ava Gardner.’

  The next time Lamis saw her, the nurse was on her own. ’At last we’ve found you!’the nurse sighed with relief. ’I was beginning to be afraid you weren’t coming to the square any more!’

  ’My son wasn’t well.’

  ’Oh dear. Is he feeling better?’

  ’Yes, much, thank you.’

  The nurse handed Lamis four envelopes containing letters dictated by the General and addressed to Nadia Haddad.

  ’But I don’t know Nadia Haddad.’

  ’It doesn’t matter. The main thing is the General’s doing something he enjoys. He’s full of optimism now. He doesn’t give me trouble when it’s time for our walk. He’s eager to see you and it seems remembering Nadia Haddad has done him a lot of good. I’m pleased for him.’

  ’What shall I do with these?’

  ’Nothing. But I promised the General I’d give them to you. It will please him to know you’ve got them.’

  Lamis was struck by the care the nurse took to carry out her patient’s wishes, and decided that this was a particularly English kind of sincerity.

  The General’s telephone number was still in Lamis’s little address book. There were only a few names there, and next to them, phone numbers, although she knew, even as she wrote them down, that she’d never call these people. All the same, in her mind she was afraid to lose their names: the actress she met when Khalid trod on her dog’s tail, the stallholder in Kensington Market who asked her to bring him amber rice from Iraq before the Gulf War, the American woman in Harvey Nichols, and the mother of a child who’d been at nursery with her son.

  ’Is the General there?’

  ’Who’s speaking?’ another voice interrupted. ’The General’s been dead five years. Can I help?’

  ’No thank you.’

  She replaced the receiver. ’He’s died and left me.’ Instead of laughing at her own absurdity, she felt a momentary shock. She redialled the General’s number.

  ’Hello. I called a few seconds ago about the General. I’ve got some letters that he wrote to Nadia Haddad, but because of the war in Lebanon ...’

  The voice intervened. ’I’m sorry. I don’t understand. What do you want me to do?’

  ’I wondered if you’d like to have these letters?’

  ’What do I want with letters written by an imbecile at the end of his life?’

  Lamis remembered the nurse showing her a photo. ’That’s the General. See how handsome he was!’

  ’Oh, and that must be Nadia Haddad. He’s right. She does look like Ava Gardner. Who do you think that is? Her husband?’ Lamis had turned the photo over and read, ’King David Hotel, Palestine 1946’.

  It would only take one invitation from an English person for her to have a way in: one ant leads the whole column to a grain of sugar. She heard many stories about men Arab women fell in love with simply because they were English: a butcher brimming with virility as he cut the meat with an air of skilful deliberation, a house painter who read philosophy in his coffee break, a bursar at the children’s school, a male nurse in the emergency room, a newsreader who appeared every evening, inaccessible behind the television screen.

  When they were applying for British nationality, Lamis said to her husband, ’Who shall we ask? Is it possible that the only English people we know are doctors?’ In the end their papers were signed by her son’s riding instructor and an Iraqi who’d acquired British nationality after he had emigrated following the 1958 revolution.

  Should she contact Mr Collins?

  Mr Collins was the gynaecologist. He was the one who knew she’d remained a virgin after her husband’s early attempts at making love, and he knew when she lost her virginity, and when she became pregnant. He witnessed her stomach swelling month by month, and he learned where she came from and who her family were, and he guided another Arab out of her; an English hand plunging inside her, acting as a mediator between her, her offspring and her husband. He was very gentle and sensitive. ’I’m heating up the instrument so that it’s nice and warm.’

  He let her know the results of her smear test on a formal card, white with decorative print like an invitation to a party. ’We are extremely happy to inform you that ...’

  A special relationship grew up between Arab women and their doctors, the only British who came into contact with their bodies.

  Lamis knew of one Arab woman who found some comfort in going to see Mr Collins week after week to ask for a pill to make her want to have sex with her husband, or at least to be able to bear it.

  ’There’s no such pill! How about a glass of wine?’

  ’No, no. I don’t drink.’

  ’Tell your husband you don’t feel like it.’

  ’No. No, I can’t. Poor man, I don’t want to hurt his feelings.’

  ’There’s no such pill. Trust me.’

  ’And trust me, I don’t feel like it any more.’

  ’Have you thought about divorce?’

  ’I love him. We’ve been married ten years. But I can’t stand sleeping with him.’

  ’I can’t help you. Sorry.’

  ’You’re the only person who can.’

  ’OK. Get up on the bed and I’ll have a look at you.’

  ’No thank you. Bye, doctor, bye.’

  Lamis picked up the phone and dialled the gynaecologist’s number. The secretary answered. ’Would you like an appointment?’ she asked.

  ’Yes, yes,’ said Lamis hurriedly.

  ’The first one’s in three weeks’ time. Mr Collins is extremely busy.’

  Lamis remembered the man at the opera who’d asked her if she liked Aida. Where was he? He’d seemed to be on the point of inviting her to go with him to Aida. It was during a performance of Carmen, but Belquis was there and she’d listened disapprovingly to every word he said.

  The man sighed from time to time and Lamis questioned him raptly about the plot.

  ’Why did Carmen do that? I don’t understand. Even though she loves him?’

  ’They should have a translation. The thing is Carmen no longer loves José!’

  ’But what did he do to make her stop loving him?’

  ’Nothing. She’s bohemian. She likes having a lot of different lovers,’ the man whispered.

  Lamis listened avidly. ’Carmen warned him from the beginning that, for her, falling in love was like a bird alighting for a moment then flying off. She tells José quite clearly that she’s gone off him.’

  Lamis was feeling guilty about sitting in the opera house all dressed up while her husband and son waited at home. She was as restless as a lizard’s severed tail until suddenly it seemed that Carmen herself had rejoined her to herself, body and mind. By the end of the performance she was so relaxed that she could hardly stand up, and when she returned home she wished that she could make herself invisible and collapse into bed alone.

  Reverberations from other worlds used to linger with her after she went to the opera, the cinema, the theatre, the ICA, where she saw how people viewed life differently, and at home she would take comfort even from a ticket stub buried in her jacket pocket. These activities
used to give her the strength to survive the constant presence of her mother-in-law, and the smoke-filled mornings and evenings when her husband’s friends ate, discussed politics and played cards.

  Lamis opened her case and smelled Dubai, the mingled scents of air-conditioning, dust, spices and government offices. She felt afraid and slammed the case shut again and sat down on the bed. She was not going to put off sorting out her new life. Procrastination was the thief of time. She thought of calling Amira and apologising for not being able to join her with the Englishman and Samir for dinner, especially after having assured the Englishman that she would when he’d asked in the minibus. She put some music on to cheer herself up but stopped it again after the first few bars. She didn’t want the music to lull her into a false sense of well-being. She took a notebook and pen out of her bag and wrote:

  This is going to become my country. I’ve stopped living a temporary life.

  I’ve just arrived in London and this is a hotel.

  Look for a flat to rent.

  She crossed out the second line and wrote:

  Learn English properly.

  Look for a job, any job. Start to save money. Take the tube or the bus. No taxis, unless it’s an emergency.

  Make friends with some English people.

  Find somewhere else to live as soon as possible.

  Stop eating Arab food - not because the garlic and coriander make my breath smell, but because this kind of food makes me feel safe and secure and reminds me of childhood and home.

  She reached out to put the phone on the bed, and happened to glance in the mirror. Hurriedly she added point number seven:

  Stop wearing black kohl on my eyes.

  She stood up and began to wipe the kohl away with cotton wool and cleanser. Without kohl her eyes were naked. She was reminded of a snake shedding its skin, discarding it among the cacti. Once as a child she saw a snakeskin, dried and crackling in the wasteland on the outskirts of Najaf, looking like a plastic bag patterned with shapes of light and dark brown. She didn’t dare touch it, and her father explained that the snake had taken off its dress to change into a more elegant one for a wedding. ’The snake took off her dress out of doors,’ Lamis exclaimed. ’Wasn’t she afraid of going to hell?’