Lion Heart Page 7

  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-Mowb
ray, 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.

  Now I think that being sent down from Oxford encouraged my father in the belief that he had a spiritual rather than an intellectual destiny. He went out into the world to join what Timothy Leary called a new species, a young race of laughing freemen.

  7

  Back in London

  The day I arrived back in London, I saw a disturbing sight. Across the road is a small grocer and supply store. It is one of those places that stays open late and sells stuff that is often way past its shelf life. There is always a profusion of fast-drying baklava sinking into a small swamp of honey and there are small packets of mouldering nuts. Outside there are rows of plastic tubs in racks, containing fruit and vegetables, some of them almost at pavement level. As I looked across the road I saw a dog peeing on the lowest rack, which housed the cabbages and carrots. It was a big dog with that malevolent squashed face, bred to fight, a walking advertisement for canine eugenics. Its eyes were vacantly looking for trouble: I thought it was considering the merits of an unprovoked attack.

  I went across the road, bypassing the dog carefully: ‘Never show fear,’ my father had said, moments before a dog bit me. ‘I warned you,’ he said.

  I told the proprietor what I had seen. He turned out to be the owner of the dog, so I spoke more calmly than I had intended. He went inside and fetched some water in a plastic bottle and poured it over the carrots and cabbages. The dog watched.

  ‘The kids roun’ ’ere steal everyfink. That’s why I gotta ’ave the dog, and I am Muslim.’ The word ‘Muslim’ is pronounced ‘mooselimb’.

  Personally I thought that having a dog that pees on vegetables was worse than a little shoplifting.

  I felt a sort of deadening of the spirits. In Jerusalem under the golden clear evening light, I have dined with Haneen, looking down to the Dead Sea. In a pasha’s room, flagged and luxurious, I have made love with Noor and I have walked with her through Crusader castles with all their grandeur and folly and longing. I have seen the old city of Acre, already ancient when Richard the Lionheart captured it from Saladin within a few days of landing. I have looked at the remains of the city’s Templar church; underneath it was the charnel, where the skulls and the bones of Crusaders and pilgrims were piled. I have seen the chapel where early Christians had arrived in Jerusalem from far away, and I have seen their proud and heart-breaking incision in the rock: Domine ibimus: Lord, we have come. I have been in the depths of the Holy Sepulchre, and seen the hundreds of small crosses, some still with faint traces of red paint, incised neatly by the pilgrims on the stone columns beside the stairway leading down to the crypts. I have learned from Father Prosper about the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Essenes, the Maccabees, the use of Aramaic, the True Cross, Jewish settlements on the West Bank, which Father Prosper – who understands realpolitik, and finds it thrilling – says will never be given back because of the political balance in the Israeli Knesset. I have heard about the irreconcilable claims to the Temple Mount and I have seen Al-Aqsa; I have visited the tomb of Absalom and the Sons of Hegir in the Kidron Valley, and I have crawled into rock tombs and looked at the inscriptions on ossuaries. I have seen the oldest known synagogue in Israel.

  I was looking, in fact, at the doomed struggle to make sense of the human chaos. And I felt encouraged, licensed to think expansive thoughts about life and death and love. And now, back in London, I have seen a mastiff with frightful shark’s eyes peeing on vegetables. This same dog, I am sure, reissues onto the pavement, as large, moist piles of shit, the farinaceous dog food that its owner keeps in the back of the shop.

  I am very worried about Noor. I have called her number at least ten times. Her phone no longer takes messages. It is dead. In Jerusalem, before I left, I told Haneen that she hadn’t called me for four days. I hoped that Haneen had received a call. Now seven more days have gone by. I have delivered her message to Noor’s father in Toronto. I gave him his sister’s warning as instructed. He was guarded and a little impatient. Perhaps he had reimagined himself as a North American, free of ancient preoccupations and prejudices of the sort I was milling cheerfully. He didn’t ask me what my relationship to his daughter was. But I felt the need to explain that I had been speaking to his sister on academic matters – I cited the École Biblique – and that his sister had asked me to pass on the message that Noor could be in danger and should go home to Canada.

  ‘Why did she ask you?’

  ‘I think she was worried about phone tapping. And because I was going home to London. She knew my father.’

  ‘Who is your father?’

  ‘He is dead.’

  I feel closer to my father these days. Perhaps I have taken on board Haneen’s advice to attempt to make peace with his memory, even if I don’t know precisely how you do that. The least I can do is to share some of his experiences.

  I am in Oxford to work in the Bodleian Library. The Keeper of Western Manuscripts himself confirmed, as Father Prosper had told me, that the documents relating to the Crusades and Saladin are being examined and will be scanned. It may be here or in another library somewhere, he said, that there will be something unnoticed that points to a letter from Richard to Saladin, or even to Robin Hood. And there may be clues about the lost art of Jerusalem. He directed me to a book by Jaroslav Folda, The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1098–1187, which he described as definitive.

  Libraries have always eased my mind. Because I loved the libraries in Oxford, it was no hardship for me to work. I wanted desperately to do well, possibly to reproach my father. But also when I arrived in Oxford, I had begun to think that the only reality was the one we create of our own thoughts. This theory had a large element of self-justification because I was lonely and I was not fully socialised when I wandered overcome that first October day into my college. It wasn’t Brideshead, but there were a lot of confident and loudly articulate people everywhere. In libraries I made myself, for better or for worse: I taught myself freestyle. I had been exiled for four years from interesting people, apart from those in books. At first I tried to be contemptuous of the Etonians and the other self-assured undergraduates who practised what was said to be an Oxford manner, a playful and caressing suavity. Nobody on Deeside had a playful and caressing manner. Instead they went in for a harsh and taciturn manner, a bullying kindness, which was maintained only if you didn’t get too big for your boots. The world in general would always let you down. Burns wrote:

  But pleasures are like poppies spread,

  You seize the flow’r, its bloom is shed.

  I was grateful for my aunt’s instruction when I discovered that, thanks to her, I had read many more books than most of my contemporaries. They had been surrounded all their lives by an awareness of culture; their parents knew people who were musicians and authors and painters and actors. My information came from books. I wasn’t a good conversationalist, and it took me a while to understand the nature of close reading, then required by English tutors.

  Now I am back in the Bodleian reading Folda. It’s twelve years on and I am keenly aware that I am not fully part of this: the undergraduates in the streets and in the Upper Reading Room seem to be children. We too must have looked like them. I had read somewhere that in Oxford the scenery stays the same, but the cast moves on, year by year; only the academics remain in place and grow old. The years between twenty and thirty have accelerated out of control, a
nd here I am, almost thirty-three, without ever having had a proper job, sitting down like a student again.

  I am staying with my friend Ed who has a small house in Jericho just up the road from Worcester College; after six years in an investment bank, he is working on a doctorate on Adam Smith, which will emphasise the social and moral concerns of his Theory of Moral Sentiments, rather than the trickle-down benefits of capitalism of The Wealth of Nations. In the bank he was involved with a hedge fund called Lion Fortress, which went disastrously wrong and now he has left banking and gone straight. I see, although I don’t say it, that both of us are taking refuge. Life has given him a few whacks. He has also put on weight, so that he looks as if he is trying on his middle-aged self for size. He has quite a lot of money in severance pay and bonuses and is happy to let me live rent-free until I have found somewhere permanent, here or in London. He’s lonely; his wife left him when he was fired. At times he is jumpy. In truth we are both a little bruised.

  In my small bedroom I have a selection of my father’s manuscripts and letters. There is a strangely naive quality to them, a sort of Dalai Lama innocence. He seems to imagine he has access to channels of understanding not granted to many, certainly not to academics. His papers are alarmingly random. I also see that he bought a collection of old silver fish knives at Christie’s in 1969: the handwritten receipt fell out of a folder labelled ‘Healing crystals’.