Tree of Pearls

‘What?’ she said.

Part of me yelled out, ‘Jesus fuck, five years of love and devotion and total non-verbal understanding gone, just like that, just because love has gone multilateral …’ A silent part, of course.

‘About the daddy?’ I said. The daddy we’ve been talking about so long, the daddy I promised you, the daddy you longed for and I wasn’t sure I could provide and now I have – what about him?

‘Why are you calling him the daddy? He’s just Daddy. Not the daddy.’

He’s just Daddy. She spoke as if she’s known him all her life.

‘Are you … is he OK? Are you pleased?’

‘Doesn’t matter if he’s OK,’ she said. ‘He’s my daddy so I love him.’

‘Oh,’ I said. How very easy this seems to be for her. How very misleading that impression might be.

‘You know, Mummy,’ she said. ‘Because it was his little sperm so he’s part of me and so we love each other.’

I don’t feel left out and I am not jealous. I’m really not. I can accept that I might feel these things briefly but they’re not … how I really feel. I really feel really happy that she is being so uncannily together about this. And I’m not sure I believe it. But she is looking at me, so straight and clear and young, and I find myself thinking, my god, maybe it is possible that she just is this well-balanced, maybe between her own natural self and my long devotion to her security she is capable of happily and harmoniously swanning into having a father after all.

But swans paddle furiously under the water.

No, go with it girl. Don’t look for grief. If there’s to be any you’ll notice soon enough.

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You’re still my mummy even if it wasn’t your little egg.’

I was ridiculously pleased to hear it, and we walked to school as if nothing had happened, as if it was still just us, and then I came home and got in the bath.

*

Dressed again after my bath, I was staring out of my study window, looking out over the grey and yellow mouldy plum December skies and the chilling, battening-down rows of west London winter roofs, not applying myself to some negligible piece of work, wondering about Harry. It had been a few weeks since he had produced the official certificate of his right and duty to be around. He leaves nothing here. No detritus for me to clear away, nothing to suggest he’s coming back. Physically, he might as well never have been here. But he does come back. He’s been coming back for a while.

So now we arrange a semi-detached homelife for Lily, from scratch. I was hugely alert to what we could slip into. We needed to talk, and yet when we did there was so little to say. Perhaps we just needed to do. Perhaps I should, as Fontella Bass recommends, ‘Leave it in the Hands of Love’.

The phone rang. I stared at it a bit dopily, then answered. A stranger’s voice, a man, asking for me by my full name. Something put my hackles up. I am a most defensive and protective person. But I was prepared to admit that I was me.

‘This is Simon Preston Oliver,’ he said.

I was none the wiser, and implied it. And then remembered his name from the message.

‘Scotland Yard,’ he said.

Immediately I had a flood of the feeling I get when the school rings: they know parents and their first words are always ‘don’t worry, nothing’s happened to Lily’. I wanted this man to say these words of Harry. Why would Scotland Yard ring me, if not …?

‘Why?’ I said, not very intelligently.

‘I need to talk to you, Ms Gower, and …’

‘Is Harry all right?’ I interrupted.

There was a pause. ‘DI Makins is fine,’ he said.

‘Of course,’ I said. Still hurtling up the wrong track. ‘Isn’t that …’

‘I’m not calling about him, no. I need to talk to you about another matter. I could call on you later this afternoon, or tomorrow …’

I’m not having him here. I had enough of that in the old days with Bent Copper Ben Cooper calling round at all hours trying to blackmail me and ruining my life, before I knew Janie’s secrets and before … oh, before so many things.

‘Why?’ I said again. If it wasn’t about Harry, if Harry was all right, then there was nothing I could possibly want to know about lurking anywhere down this line of talk. This means disruption and I am trying to settle.

‘In person would be better,’ he said, cajolingly, setting my hackles right on edge.

‘Why?’ I said again. Using the weapons of a three-year-old, and leaving him sitting in the silence.

After a while he said, ‘We want to ask you some questions.’

Well, that’s subtly and fundamentally different from wanting to talk to me. But it doesn’t answer my question.

‘What about?’

‘Angeline,’ he said – which was wrong of him, and set my hackles flying from the ramparts. I object to chumminess in people I don’t know, particularly if we are obviously not getting on. I also knew I would have to talk to him. I knew I was being obstructive and silly. But that’s how I felt. He would have to tell me sooner or later, why not now? Why this secretive big-willy stuff? He did remind me of Ben.

‘Just what’s it about?’ I said, interrupting.

I could hear him thinking for a moment, and I heard his decision the moment before the answer popped out.

‘Cairo,’ he said.

Cairo.

El-Qahira, the victorious. People who know it call it Kie-ear-oh, one long swooping melting of vowels in the middle. People who don’t call it Kie Roh. As he did. This was quietly reassuring. It meant that he didn’t know the city or, probably, anyone in it. But the reassurance was small next to my main reaction.

I have no desire to talk about Cairo. There is nothing about Cairo that bodes any joy for me and Lily.

‘I have nothing to say about Cairo,’ I said pompously. Breathing shallow.

‘Well let’s see, shall we? I’ll come to you at five tomorrow,’ he said, and the sod hung up.

I resolved to be in the park.

TWO (#u2b878954-a756-5c11-bf13-8a7b7c8c71a2)

Beware policemen in pubs (#u2b878954-a756-5c11-bf13-8a7b7c8c71a2)

By five the next day I had seen sense, though part of me still thought it a shame that I had. Lily had come out of school begging to be allowed to go home with her friend Adjoa, so that was easy, and I was free to lurk like Marlene under the streetlight at the bottom of my staircase until he appeared. He was not coming to my flat, whatever he might think. I had to see him, but I didn’t have to welcome him.

It was such a wintry evening that no one was hanging around the stairwells or the strips of park and path that lie between the blocks of the estate, which is rare, because the estate is a very sociable place, what with the teenagers and the crackheads and the men yelling up at the windows of the women who have thrown them out, and just as well because people round here have a strong sense of plod. Enough of my neighbours break the law on a regular basis to be able to smell it when it comes calling. (I prefer to associate myself with the mothers and the kids still too young to be running round with wraps of god knows what for their big brothers. You know, the three-year-olds.) But what with the weather and the dark, no one but me saw the dark car rolling up quietly through the dingy Shepherd’s Bush dusk, and stopping, and its passenger door swinging open.