Crossed Bones (23 page)

Alison knocked on the door. ‘Are you OK? It’s late: gone ten.’

‘Damn!’

I had meant to take the first train home out of Penzance, but in the end we didn’t make it to the station until lunchtime. As we stood on the platform, watching the passengers from the just-arrived London train disembark and make their way through the throng of friends and relatives waiting to meet them, Alison said suddenly, ‘Isn’t that Anna?’

My heart fell like a stone into the pit of my stomach. Out of the first-class carriage stepped a dark-haired woman in an expensively tailored jacket and straight-legged jeans which slid seamlessly into a pair of glossy, high-heeled brown boots. Despite the looming horror of the social situation about to explode around me, I found myself admiring her effortless style.

I turned to run, but Alison caught my arm. ‘Look, you’re just going to have to brazen it out. What’s worse, saying hello for five minutes on a station platform with your escape ready to chug off into the distance, or dodging around for the rest of your life trying to avoid her?’

She had a point, though I couldn’t see why we couldn’t just nip into the station café and hide while she walked past, and said so. Alison pulled a face. ‘Don’t be stupid: she’s bound to spot you, and then it’d be obvious you were trying to avoid her. Besides, if she thinks I’m playing the same game, she’s hardly going to trust me to do up her cottage, is she?’

So there I was, waiting like a sacrificial lamb, knowing that my execution came ever closer, watching my ex-lover’s wife tow her dinky little silver suitcase down the platform towards us, her perfectly made-up face showing no sign of having registered our presence.

I had seen Anna only intermittently in the last seven years; enough to witness her changing fortunes and style, and in some way to envy them. But, as she approached, her eyes fixed on the tarmac in case it was booby-trapped, I realized with a shock that she had aged. Dye and clever cosmetics can hide a lot, but what they cannot hide are the erosions caused by catastrophic life experience. Lines were deeply incised on either side of her beautifully painted but downturned mouth. She walked right past us and out into the sunlight without seeing us at all; and it struck me that I was watching the passage of a deeply unhappy woman.

I pondered that for some time on my return journey. I knew in my gut that the depth of grief I had seen etched into her face was that of a woman who has known for a very long time that her husband is unfaithful to her, a woman who has borne his infidelity silently and let the mask slip only in private, or in an unguarded moment such as the one I had just witnessed. I sat for three hours – through Exeter, through Taunton, as the train crossed the ancient landscapes of the Salisbury Plain – remembering my times with Michael. I revisited his body, every inch of it, clothed and naked, in repose and aroused. I cried, very quietly, with my face pressed against the window so that no one could see. The train rushed through Hungerford; by the time we stopped at Reading, I had put Michael away from me, shut all my memories up in a box and stowed it away in a dark attic corner of my mind.

It was with some relief that I closed my own front door behind me after the weeks in someone else’s house, and felt its familiar shades and contours enfold me.

I dumped my suitcase in the bedroom and went to make myself a mug of tea. Then I wandered from room to room, reacquainting myself with my home. Perhaps I was tired and fraught, or perhaps my mind was playing tricks with me, but little details of the flat kept catching my eye. Had I really left the Sunday papers so untidy under the desk? Had the books on the shelves to either side of the fireplace always been so higgledy-piggledy? I didn’t remember leaving the cardboard box full of files out where it was now, nor the bureau lid open. I frowned.

In the bedroom I found that the drawer of my bedside table had not been properly shut, the faulty catch not engaged. There was a knack to it, and only I had it. Someone had been here. Someone had broken into my flat.

In sudden panic I raced back into the front room, but the entertainment centre appeared untouched, all its little silver hi-tech boxes still wired in place. My paintings still hung on the walls, my old laptop still sat on the desk, and no one had bothered to steal the few pieces of jewellery my mother had left me.

I frowned. Not a very successful burglary, all in all.

When I finally realized what must have happened, my knees gave way and I suddenly found myself sitting firmly on my Afghan rug.

Michael had been here. He had let himself in using the key I had given him six years ago. He had made this unforgivable invasion, failed to find what he was looking for, and then had the gall to follow me to Cornwall. The complete and utter bastard.

I felt sick. Was Catherine’s book really that valuable? If it was, why had he given it to me in the first place? And what would he do next once he found that I had returned to London? Was I in danger? Would he hurt me to get hold of it? In that moment, I realized I didn’t really know the man I had been sleeping with for seven years at all.

I called Alison.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll keep them down here. They’re planning to stay for a couple of weeks, anyway: it’ll give you some breathing space. If Michael leaves, I’ll call you.’

For the next fortnight I devoted myself to cleaning my flat thoroughly, for the first time since I had bought it. I threw out fifteen black sacks of rubbish and felt oddly cleansed myself: catharized. And after I had done that, I put it on the market and handed the key to the agent. I didn’t want to live there any more.

I moved into a rented flat in Chiswick, sold the lease on the shop to a girl who’d just graduated from St Martin’s and wanted somewhere from which to sell a line of gorgeously silly clothes, and my stock (what little there was of it) to a woman I’d met at a craft fair the previous year.

Then, feeling absurdly rootless and light-headed, I took myself to Stanfords on Long Acre and bought all the guidebooks they had for Morocco.

∗

The night before I flew, I had misgivings. I called Alison.

‘Look, I’m going to Morocco tomorrow. I thought someone ought to know, just in case anything happens to me.’

There was a shocked silence at the other end of the phone. ‘You’re going
alone
?’ she said at last, disbelieving.

‘Um, yes. But I’ll be staying at a lovely place, a
riad
– an old merchant’s house in the capital, Rabat.’ I gave her the address and contact details. I had had a long conversation with the woman who ran it, who spoke beautiful fluent French, which stretched my stuttering schoolgirl French to the limits and beyond. But Madame Rachidi had been reassuring and helpful. There was a guide who would walk with me around the city, she said, a cousin called Idriss who was well educated and knowledgeable about the history of the area and who spoke excellent English. This would mean I’d be safely chaperoned from any ‘unwanted attention’, as she put it. I didn’t really know what she meant.

‘But Julia, it’s a Muslim country. You can’t go alone.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘It’s dangerous. The men over there, well, if they see a Western woman on her own, they’ll think she’s fair game, that she’s asking for it. It’s a very sexually repressed culture, with the women all covered up and sex before marriage illegal – Western women must seem like prostitutes to them, flaunting everything they’ve got. And you’re blonde –’

‘Oh, come off it!’ I snapped. ‘You’re sounding like the
Daily Mail
. It says in the guidebooks that you just have to cover up a bit more than usual and be sensible. Madame Rachidi says I’ll be fine.’

‘Well, she would, wouldn’t she? She wants your lovely English money.’

‘Anyway I’ll have her cousin Idriss with me.’

‘Julia, you’ve got to be joking. You don’t even know him – he might be the problem personified!’

‘Look, I only called to let you know,’ I said crossly. ‘And to give you my new mobile number. I’ll call you when I get to the riad, OK?’

I heard her sigh. ‘Well, if I can’t deter you.’

‘I fly tomorrow at ten, I should get there mid afternoon.’

‘
Inch’allah
.’

‘Oh, very funny.’

The days were long and empty once Al-Andalusi was sufficiently recovered to resume his duties as captain. Each morning the raïs would rise at dawn with the first call of the prayer leader, wash himself with ritual care using the cold water in the bowl behind the traceried mahogany screen and, taking up a stick his men had fashioned for him, limp down the companionway and up on to the deck. Cat would not see him again until sundown.

At first she found it hard to fill her hours. She would lie in the semi-dark, waiting for the knock at the door which signalled the arrival of the food with which she every morning broke her fast – a little hard bread, some oil, honey rather less dark and pungent than that with which she had cleansed the raïs’s wounds, and from time to time a strange hot drink flavoured with some herb and a great deal of sugar, which she would drink down greedily. The call to prayer came again at mid morning and once more as the sun climbed high, and still he would not return. After a few days she realized that she missed his company, and that gave her concern. Surely she should hate her captor and wish death upon him? She thought about her family and compatriots in the stinking hold below, how astonished they would be to see her living in such luxury, and felt more guilty than ever. A few days before she had plucked up enough courage to ask the raïs to allow her mother to join her in the cabin, but he had turned his hawk’s face away from her without saying a word, and she was not sure he had even understood her request. Something hung in the air between them, awkward and unspoken, some tension she could put no name to. At times she thought it was because she had seen him at his weakest and most unguarded, and he was ashamed; at others he seemed obscurely angry with her and would sit moodily, staring into a candle flame, or reading a small leatherbound book, his lips moving silently, as if she did not exist.

She would wander about the cabin, intrigued by the exotic objects he had collected there – running her hands over the intricately carved little tables with patterns of brass and mother-of-pearl and ivory inset into their polished tops, the lanterns with their star designs punched out of the metal, the gorgeously coloured fabrics of the wall hangings. There was a pair of sturdy silver bracelets, set with studs and stones, their surfaces etched with swirling lines, which opened on a hinge and closed with a long pin on a chain. They were so large she could slip them on without moving the pin; they settled comfortably over her bicep, though the raïs wore them at his wrist. She examined the odd crystalline substance in a little brass dish set over coals which he often heated after his evening prayer; its powerful scent still perfumed the cabin the next morning. It infused her clothes, and she could smell it in her hair even after she had washed it, which she did occasionally merely to pass the long and solitary hours. She wrote in her little book, taking the opportunity to fill the tiniest spaces with writing even she could barely read; she lay among the cushions and wondered at the strangeness of people who would sew pearls and gems into an object created for comfort; she picked at the smoked meat and dried fruits left for her midday repasts; she even managed to develop a taste for olives.

Today, when the knock came at the door, she opened it to find not only food for her lunch but also some squares of fresh white linen lying on the ground outside. Placed carefully upon them were a spool of fine black wool and a ship’s needle.

Astonished, she gazed up the companionway, but whoever had brought these treasures had departed post-haste, barefoot and silent. She gathered them up, took them in and spent the afternoon amusing herself with some blackwork designs of her own making: a decorative cross-stitched band of zigzags and circles. Then, with the plumbago stick, she sketched twining leaf motifs, to which she added two birds. She was still stitching the last of these when the raïs returned to his cabin, but she was so absorbed in her task that she did not hear him arrive. She looked up to find him framed in the doorway, the candlelight throwing his features into relief, exaggerating his high cheekbones and full lips. His expression was unreadable, his eyes in shadow, the whites visible as a thin line beneath the iris. How long he had been there, standing with his hands pressed against the jamb, watching her, she did not know. Flustered, she put the sampler aside, covering
The Needle-Woman’s Glorie
.

‘May I see?’

‘It isn’t finished.’

He held out his hand. Reluctantly, she passed it to him, watched as he examined it, turned the fabric over, handed it back. ‘We believe it is wrong to show realistic representations of living things.’

He watched as her face fell and went on more kindly, ‘There is story, a hadith. According to Ayesha, who was Prophet’s favourite wife, Mohammed came home one day from expedition and found in one corner of room a hanging she had ornamented with embroidered human figures. At once he pull it down, saying: “On Day of Resurrection worst punishment shall be reserved for those who seek to imitate beings created by God.” And so chastened, Ayesha took down hangings and cut them apart, avoiding human figures, to make pair of cushions.’

Cat felt quite sorry for Ayesha: her husband sounded a fearsomely pious man. She frowned. ‘But I’m not really seeking to re-create these things, just to show a simple version of them, interpreted in my own way.’

‘Is that which is presumptuous.’

She thought for a moment. ‘But isn’t it just another way to appreciate God’s works? To think about them for yourself?’

The raïs closed his eyes, considering. After a while he said slowly, ‘In the south of my country, in the mountains where my father’s tribe comes from, the women weave images of camels and sheep into their carpets; but they are peasant women: they know no better.’