Joseph Anton: A Memoir (40 page)

By the end of their first evening he knew he wanted to see her again as soon as possible. Was she free the next day, he asked her, and she said yes, she was. They would meet at Liz’s apartment again at 8
P.M.
and he was shocked by how deep his feelings for her already were. She had long, rich chestnut hair and a brilliant and carefree smile and she bicycled into his life as if there were nothing to it, as if the whole smothering apparatus of fear and protection and restraint simply didn’t exist. This was true and exceptional courage: the ability to act normally in an abnormal situation. She was fourteen years younger than he but there was a seriousness beneath the freewheeling exterior that spoke of experience, hinting at the kind of knowledge that comes only from pain. It would have been absurd not to be smitten by her. They quickly discovered a strange coincidence: that he had arrived in England for the first time, accompanied by his father, on his way to Rugby School, on the day that she was born. So in fact they had both arrived on the same day. It felt like an omen, though obviously he did not believe in the ominous. “It was a sunny day,” he told her. “And cold.” He told her about the Cumberland Hotel and watching television for the first time—
The Flintstones
and then the incomprehensible-to-him northern soap opera
Coronation Street
featuring the ferocious busybody Ena Sharples glowering in her hairnet. He described the chocolate milk shakes at Lyons Corner House and the rotisserie chicken at the Kardomah takeout and he told her what the advertising billboards said,
UNZIP A BANANA
for Fyffes, and, for Schweppes,
TONIC WATER BY SCHHH
 … 
YOU-KNOW-WHO
. She said, “Can you come back again on Monday? I’ll cook dinner.”

The police were concerned about a third visit in four days to the same address but he put his foot down and they gave in. That evening she told him something about her life though she was guarded about much of it and he sensed again the pain of her childhood, the lost
mother, the aging father, the strange Cinderella life with the relatives who took her in. There was a woman she would not name, who had been unkind to her, whom she referred to only as
the woman who looked after me then
. In the end she had found happiness with an older cousin named Carol Knibb, who had become a second mother to her. She had gone to Warwick University and studied literature. And she liked his books. There were long hours of talk and then they were holding hands and then kissing. When he looked at his watch it was three-thirty in the morning, long past pumpkin time, he told her, and in the other room were some extremely grouchy and tired policemen. “Very interested,” he wrote in his journal. “She’s bright, gentle, vulnerable, beautiful and loving.” Her interest in him was unfathomable and mysterious. It was always women who chose, he thought, and men’s role was to thank their lucky stars.

She had to go to see her cousin Carol in Derbyshire and then there was a long-planned holiday with a girlfriend, so they couldn’t meet again for a couple of weeks. She called from the airport to say goodbye and he wished she wasn’t going. He began to tell his friends—Bill Buford, Gillon Aitken—about her, and he told the prot officer Dick Billington that he wanted her added to “the list” so that she could visit him in Wimbledon. As he said the words he knew he had made a big decision about her. “She will have to be vetted, Joe,” Dick Billington said.
Negative vetting
was a quicker procedure than
positive vetting
. Checks would be run on her background and as long as no red flags came up she would be cleared.
Positive vetting
took much longer; people had to be interviewed. Legwork was involved. “That won’t be necessary in this case,” Dick said. Twenty-four hours later Elizabeth had passed the test; there were, apparently, no shady types, no Iranian or Mossad agents, in her past. He called her to tell her. “I want this,” he said. “That’s wonderful,” she replied, and so it began. Two days later she had a drink with Liz Calder (who was back from holiday) to tell her what had happened and then rode her bike up to the front door of the Wimbledon house and stayed the night. That weekend she stayed for two nights. They went to Angela Carter and Mark Pearce’s house in Clapham for dinner and Angela, not an easy woman to please, also approved. Zafar was back in London too and he came to stay and he and Elizabeth seemed to hit it off easily.

There was so much to talk about. On her third night at the Wimbledon house they stayed awake until five in the morning, telling each other stories, snoozing, making love. He couldn’t remember ever having had a night like it. Something good had begun. His heart was full. Elizabeth had filled it up.

Haroun
was going over well among its early readers. This little book, written to keep a promise to a child, might prove to be perhaps his most well-loved work of fiction. Both his emotional and working life had turned a corner, he felt; which made the ridiculous way he was obliged to live feel somehow worse. Zafar said he wanted to go skiing. “Maybe you could go with your mum and I’ll pay for it,” he said. “But I want to go with you,” said his son. The words tore at his heart.

The mail arrived. In it were the first finished copies of
Haroun
. That cheered things up. He signed a dozen personalized copies for Zafar’s friends. In Elizabeth’s copy he wrote, “Thank you for the return of joy.”

It was becoming increasingly acceptable to believe that the “Rushdie case” wasn’t worth the trouble it had caused, because the man himself was an unworthy specimen. Norman Tebbit, one of Margaret Thatcher’s closest political allies, wrote in
The Independent
that the author of
The Satanic Verses
was “an outstanding villain … [whose] public life has been a record of despicable acts of betrayal of his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality.” The celebrated historian, Tory peer and “authenticator” of the fraudulent “Hitler Diaries,” Lord Dacre (Hugh Trevor-Roper) had wiped the egg off his face and declared, also in the
Indy
, “I wonder how Salman Rushdie is faring these days under the benevolent protection of British law and British police, about whom he has been so rude. Not too comfortably I hope.… I would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring his manners, should waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them. If that should cause him thereafter to control his pen, society would benefit and literature would not suffer.”

The novelist John le Carré had said, “I don’t think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity,” and, on another occasion, “Again and again, it has been within his power to save the faces of his publishers and, with dignity, withdraw his book
until a calmer time has come. It seems to me he has nothing more to prove except his own insensitivity.” Le Carré also disapproved of the “literary merit” argument: “Are we to believe that those who write literature have a greater right to free speech than those who write pulp? Such elitism does not help Rushdie’s cause, whatever that cause has now become.” He did not say whether he would also have been against the use of “literary merit” in defense of, say, James Joyce’s
Ulysses
or D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
.

Douglas Hurd, the British foreign secretary and “novelist,” was asked in the
Evening Standard:
“What was your most painful moment in government?” He replied, “Reading
The Satanic Verses
.”

In early September he met Duncan Slater at Slater’s Knightsbridge home. The many Indian pictures and artifacts revealed Slater as an unsuspected Indophile, which perhaps explained his sympathy for the invisible man. “You should use all your media connections,” Slater said. “You need positive pieces.” Nadine Gordimer had amassed an impressive list of signatories to her appeal to Iran, including Václav Havel, the French minister of culture and many other writers, academics and politicians, and Slater suggested this could be used to prompt a sympathetic editorial in, say,
The Times
. The Gordimer letter was published and made a small stir. Nothing changed.
The Independent
reported that it had received 160 letters criticizing the Tebbit statement, and two in support of it. That was something, at least.

A few days later the Italian foreign minister, Gianni de Michelis, announced that Europe and Iran were “close” to an exchange of letters that would “lift the
fatwa
” and make it possible to normalize relations. Slater said that the report was “a little ahead of the news,” but yes, the European Community “troika” of foreign ministers was planning to talk to Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Velayati, in the next few days.

Elizabeth had begun to tell her closest friends about her new relationship. For his part, he spoke to Isabel Fonseca and told her about Elizabeth. Then he heard that Marianne was returning to London.

On the publication day of
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
, September 27, 1990, Iran and the United Kingdom renewed partial diplomatic relations. Duncan Slater called from New York to say that “assurances had been received.” Iran would do nothing to implement the
fatwa
. However it would not be canceled and the offer of millions of dollars in bounty money (Ayatollah Sanei, who had made the original offer, kept raising the figure) would remain in place because it was “nothing to do with the government.” Slater tried to present this as a positive step but it felt like a sellout. Any deal made on his behalf by Douglas Hurd was not a deal he could trust.

The intelligence services and the Special Branch seemed to feel the same way. There was no change in the threat assessment. He would remain at level two, one step behind the queen. There would be no change in the protection arrangements. The house on St. Peter’s Street would remain locked and shuttered. He would not be
allowed
to go home again.

But he had made a new beginning. Just then, that was what counted most.
Haroun
was doing well and Sonny Mehta’s nightmare scenario remained firmly in the country of his bad dreams. Kashmiris did not rise up, incensed by the name of a talking mechanical hoopoe. There was no trace of blood in the streets. Sonny had been running from shadows and now that daylight had come his bogeymen were exposed as the empty night terrors they were.

He was
allowed
to surface briefly, and unannounced, at a London bookstore, Waterstone’s in Hampstead, to sign copies of
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
. Zafar came too and “helped,” passing him the books to be signed, and Bill Buford was a benign, grinning presence. For an hour he felt like an author of books again. But there was no escaping the nervousness in the eyes of the protection team. Not for the first time he understood that they, too, were afraid.

At home there was Elizabeth. They were becoming closer by the day. “I’m scared,” she told him, “because I’ve become too vulnerable to you.” He did his best to reassure her.
I love you like mad and I’m not going to let you go
. She feared that he was only with her
faute de mieux
, that when the threats ended he would go to America and abandon her. He had told her of his love of New York City and his dream of living
there in freedom one day. He, whose life had been a series of uprootings (which he would try to redefine as “multiple rootings”), did not understand how profoundly English she was, how deep her roots went. From those earliest days she felt she was in competition with New York.
You’ll bugger off there and leave me behind
. When they had a few glasses of wine this kind of scratchiness developed between them. Neither of them thought these occasional irritations were important. Most of the time they were happy with each other.
I am deeply in love
, he wrote, conscious of how astonishing it was to be able to write those words. His was a heavily guarded life and he himself would not have expected love to find a way past the border controls of his strange internal exile. Yet here it was, most evenings and weekends, bicycling gaily toward him across the Thames.

Hatred was still in the air as well as love. The Muslim Institute’s loquacious garden gnome was still ranting, and was being given every opportunity to do so. Here he was on BBC Radio saying that Salman Rushdie “had been found guilty of a capital offense in the eyes of the highest legal authority in Islam and what is left is the application of that punishment.” In a Sunday newspaper Siddiqui clarified his thinking. “He should pay with his life.” There had been no executions in Britain for a quarter of a century but now the discussion of “legal” killing had been made acceptable again by the “rage of Islam.” Siddiqui’s views were echoed in Lebanon by the Hezbollah leader Hussein Musawi.
He must die
. Simon Lee, author of
The Cost of Free Speech
, suggested he should be sent to Northern Ireland for the rest of his days, because there was already so much security in place there. The
Sun
columnist Garry Bushell described him as a greater traitor to his country than George Blake. Blake, a Soviet double agent, had been sentenced to forty-two years in prison for espionage, but had escaped from jail and fled to the Soviet Union. Writing a novel could now be described with a straight face as a more heinous offense than high treason.