East of Wimbledon (17 page)

He had to get out of the school. But how could he do it? How could he ever admit to Maisie that the very thing that had brought them together was, like so much else in his life, a lie? He was tied to her and to Mr Malik in exactly the way he was tied to his own parents. He was also, he realized, as he went through to the hall to get Hasan’s coat, tied to the little boy in a way he could not have predicted. It wasn’t simply that he felt protective towards him. It was that he was beginning to understand why Aziz the janitor and his friends might be convinced he was no ordinary child.

He took Hasan’s hand and went out into the clear light of April.

‘Did Badger turn into a hedgehog, Mr Wilson?’ said the little boy. ‘I have special powers and can foresee things!’

Robert squeezed his charge’s hand. ‘In a way he did, Hasan,’ he said. ‘In a way he did.’

He was starting to believe this stuff. As he and Hasan and Maisie started out down Wimbledon Park Road, he remembered something the headmaster had said to him, quite soon after he had started teaching the reception class. ‘Islam means
surrender
, my dear Wilson. And so you must surrender. You may think you stand on your own, or have your own choices, or make your own fate, but you do not do so. You submit, and let your life take its course. The course that God has designed for it.’

The trees were out in Wimbledon Park. As the three of them started to climb the hill, Maisie, who no longer walked yards behind the men in her life, took Robert’s arm and started to sing. At first he did not recognize the tune, and then he caught its cadences. It wasn’t English. It had the swoop and the lilt of something one might have heard blaring out of a Turkish café. It was a song Mr Malik sang, and she was singing it to what must, surely, be his words.

Come to me,

My beautiful girl.

Don’t be shy now.

Leave your mother,

Leave your father,

Leave your people.

Don’t be shy now.

Come to me,

My beautiful girl.

You are one of mine now.

You are one of ours now.

Come to me, oh come to me,

Beautiful,

Beautiful,

Girl.

From time to time he wondered whether he had made a mistake in sleeping with her. It was something he had been wanting to do for over ten years, but, now that he had done it, he had destroyed something that had been between them – a mysterious, almost exquisite, promise of delight. He was starting to tell the truth – that was what it was. It was hard to keep lying when you were alone in bed with someone. If this went on much longer, the real Robert Wilson might emerge – that awful, jelly-like creature that he had been hiding from the world for the last twenty-four years.

Perhaps they had taken too long to get together. If only he had moved earlier. If only he had pushed his advantage home the night the Dorking brothers gave their party (‘The Night of the Hundred Cans’, as it was still known in Wimbledon). If only he had made his move six years earlier, during the rehearsed reading of Martin Finkelstein’s verse play
These Be Wasted Years, Brother!

Except he hadn’t. They were too like brother and sister, that was it.

If that was the case, incest had never been more fun. Sex with Maisie was about the most interesting thing Robert had ever done. It upstaged even Mr and Mrs Wilson, who had gone markedly quiet since Maisie entered the field. Maisie particularly enjoyed being spanked with a hairbrush, and liked to accompany this activity with a series of clear, confident expressions of her need to be disciplined. ‘Oh my arse!’ she would call in the still of the Wimbledon night. ‘Oh my fat
arse!
Spank it! Spank it, you bastard!’

At the moment of climax she quite often addressed him as Derek. Robert had not yet been able to fathom why this was the case. It was possible, of course, that she was referring, for purely symbolic reasons, to a specialized form of lifting gear.

Robert wasn’t sure that their sexual relations were in line with Islamic thinking – at least as formulated by Marwan Ibrahim Al-Kaysi. They did not pray two
rak’ahs
before making love, or perform
wudu
after intercourse (perhaps because neither of them had the faintest idea what
wudu
might be), and they were woefully deficient in the sacrifice and dowry departments. Maisie was also guilty of one of Al-Kaysi’s key errors,
leaving the house excessively
– a practice he quite clearly did not relish in women.

There were times when he thought Maisie was not much more of a Muslim than he was. The headmaster himself had accused her of only joining up for the uniform. But – and this was the real divide between them – she
thought
she was a Muslim. He knew he wasn’t. However absurd her convictions might seem, at least they were convictions.

‘Tell me,’ said Robert, as they walked up the High Street, ‘and I’m not going on about it, but exactly why did Ali sentence me to death?’

‘Because you said Enid Blyton sold more copies than the Koran,’ said Maisie, ‘and said that pigs were terrific and Muslims had to learn to deal with them.’

‘I did not say any of those things,’ said Robert, ‘and, even if I did, I don’t think they merit the death penalty. I mean, this is a free country – isn’t it?’

Maisie tightened her lips. ‘You’re not free to offend people,’ she said. ‘It’s a very fine line!’

It was, thought Robert, a
very
fine line. You never knew these days when a casual remark was going to provide the justification for someone stalking you with an automatic rifle. He looked nervously over his shoulder, but saw nothing.

‘Dr Ali said that you said bad things about Muhammad,’ Maisie went on. ‘Apparently he heard you.’

‘When did he hear? Who was I talking to?’

‘You were walking along muttering them to yourself. He said they were so shocking he couldn’t even bear to repeat them.’

She seemed almost prepared to take the good doctor’s part in this dispute, thought Robert. Why couldn’t Ali forget the pig business? Why couldn’t the guy loosen up? Robert had not even mentioned pigs in three months.

‘The worse thing you can do to a Muslim is insult Muhammad.’

She was always showing off her superior knowledge these days, thought Robert. And the more she found out about Islam, the more she seemed to like it. His trouble was, he realized, that he was simply not able to grasp any religion, let alone a faith where his only spiritual mentor was a book from Wimbledon Public Library.

‘I would never say anything bad about Muhammad,’ said Robert. ‘Even I know better than that.’

‘Why would you want to?’ said Maisie. ‘You’re a Muslim, aren’t you?’

She had probably rumbled him. Even when he was being particularly careful not to offend, he seemed to manage to say the wrong thing. He had noticed, for example, that Dr Ali always accompanied the Prophet’s name with the formula ‘
may God bless him and grant him peace
!’ and, often, in the doctor’s presence, Robert would work Muhammad’s name into the conversation precisely so that he, too, could repeat the traditional blessing. He often went one better. ‘Muhammad –
may God bless him and grant him peace
– who was, I don’t need to remind you,
quite a guy
– once said –
and what he said was, on the whole earth, listening to
– on several occasions –
not that he was a man given to repeating himself
– once, anyway, said –
and he had a beautiful speaking voice . . .’
etc. etc. This cut no ice with the doctor. He watched Robert from under his hooded eyes, a slight smile playing around his lips.

‘I have to get the bread for lunch,’ said Maisie. ‘Do you want to come in? You’ll probably be safer in the shop. You could hide under the counter.’

‘I don’t see what’s so funny,’ said Robert, who was looking nervously down the street. ‘There are some funny things going on around here.’

As he said this, he caught sight of Mr Malik, who was walking towards the school. Robert held Hasan’s hand tightly. The little boy showed no sign of rising vertically into the air or of summoning seven hundred fiery horsemen from out of the sky.

Robert was sweating. He wiped his brow. From the other side of the road, Aziz the janitor, on his way to school, a sinister smile on his face, started to wave his mop in greeting. For some reason Aziz always took his mop home with him. ‘How is the boy?’ he said, in his cracked voice.

‘He’s fine!’ said Robert.

‘I would like a cake please,’ said Hasan, ‘with some jam on it!’

Eager to get him away from Aziz, Robert handed him over to Maisie and peered, once more, carefully around him. He was seeing men with one shoe in his sleep these days. He had been sure one was following him round Sainsbury’s the other day.

Apart from the headmaster, who had now gone into the school, the place seemed clear. Robert stayed on the pavement while Maisie went in to buy the school’s bread. Suddenly a heavy hand whacked him in the shoulder blades. Robert wheeled round to see the beaming face of Mr Mafouz. Next to him, his round face straining towards the cakes in the shop window, was his favourite son.

‘That’s enough cakes, Anwar!’ said Mr Mafouz, and, placing his broad hand on his son’s backside, he propelled the boy towards the school.

‘How’s things?’ said Mr Mafouz.

‘Not too bad,’ said Robert.

The sun picked up the colours of a girl’s dress. It sparkled in her hair as she swayed past the grocer’s opposite. Clasped into themselves like baby’s fists, new shoots were hung along the branches of each tree in the High Street. It was spring. Spring and Wimbledon were still here, even if at times he felt he had landed in a foreign country. As he made the conventional response, Robert felt a curious exaltation, as if the phrase had made such unpleasant things as Dr Ali melt away. He liked Mr Mafouz.

Perhaps, as Mr Malik had suggested, he was slowly learning to surrender, and, by surrendering, to enjoy the sun, the blue sky and the sweetness of having, at long last, a girl to share his bed.

‘In fact,’ said Robert, ‘I feel great.’

‘Malik declared the cricket season three months early,’ said Mr Mafouz. ‘Did you know one is not supposed to play cricket in April? We have been playing since February. He wishes us to get into training for thrashing Cranborne.’

On the other side of the road, Anwar was playing cricket strokes. Robert tried to remember whether the Egyptians had a cricket team and, if so, whether they were any good. Inside the baker’s, Maisie had got involved in a complicated negotiation with the shopkeeper. Hasan had pressed his face to the glass in front of the cakes and was sniffing the fresh bread, a look of ecstasy on his face. Mr Mafouz and Robert idled along the pavement.

‘How is Anwar’s schoolwork?’ said Mr Mafouz.

‘He is a genius,’ said Robert swiftly.

Mr Mafouz grinned. He put his right hand in his jacket pocket and produced a bulky envelope. Robert did not have to ask what it contained. Over the last months Mr Mafouz had given him two free tickets to Paris, a pineapple, six copies of the
Illutrated Tourist Guide to London
and a pair of bright green trousers. Recently, as the summer exams grew closer, he had started to offer money.

‘I really couldn’t, Mr Mafouz,’ said Robert.

‘Listen,’ said Mr Mafouz, clapping Robert on the back, hard, ‘there’s more where that came from. If he passes his GCSEs, who knows what I might come up with?’

He leaned his face into Robert’s. ‘How does a week in Luxor grab you?’ he said.

‘Sounds fun!’ said Robert.

Last week the ever amiable travel agent had asked him ‘how much’ the Oxford entrance exam was ‘compared with what they’re asking in Sussex or Cambridge’.

The two men came level with the school gates. From the bakery, Maisie emerged with Hasan, carrying a pile of loaves, and walked into the road, narrowly avoiding an oncoming lorry.

‘Tell me,’ said Mr Mafouz, ‘about “A” levels. Are those people reachable?’

It was impossible to refuse Mr Mafouz’s gifts. Robert had done the decent thing and given Anwar alpha double plus for an essay entitled ‘My Cat’. He shuddered now, as he recalled the essay:
‘I have a cat. It was hit on the head with a spade by my brother. It was in agony . . .

From the Common came more parents. Mr Sheikh and Mr Akhtar walked slowly and seriously towards the gates. Mr Mafouz’s face darkened. ‘The Sheikh boy,’ he said, ‘is not up to much, I think.’

Robert thought of Sheikh’s seventy-page project on ‘Irrigation in the Third World’, his groundbreaking work in chemistry and physics, and the long short story, in French, he had recently submitted, successfully, to an avant-garde magazine. ‘He is thin on the ground,’ said Robert. ‘There is something . . . shifty about the boy!’

Mr Mafouz grinned.

Mr and Mrs Mahmud joined the rest of the crowd at the gates. An elegant BMW drew up over the road and Fatimah Bankhead, the chain-smoking Islamic feminist, stepped out. She gave the assembled group of men a contemptuous sweep of her fine, grey eyes, and marched up the path. Another expensive car pulled in behind her, and Robert recognized Mr Shah, the man from whom they had collected Hasan last summer. He was still wearing the elegantly tailored suit he had worn on that occasion. His name was now inscribed above the door in the Great Hall, with the words
OUR BENEFACTOR
next to it.

‘We’d better go through to the sports field,’ said Robert.

He could hear the whoops of small boys from the garden. Up at the first-floor window, the curtains parted and Mr Malik peered out. Robert looked back at Maisie and Hasan. As they came up to the gates, Aziz sidled up to the little boy with his mop, an ingratiating smile on his face.

‘Well, well, Hasan!’ he began.

But before he could get any further, Mr Malik thrust his head out of the window. ‘Clean!’ he barked. ‘This is Sports Day! I want everything sparkling clean!’

With a resentful grunt, Aziz shambled off into the school.

Mr Malik was wearing cricket whites and a large floppy hat; a dirty white jersey was folded about his neck. If what Robert had seen, to date, of the school’s cricket was anything to go by, today was going to be an exhausting experience.