The Last Gift Page 11

  Maryam turned up at the Refugee Centre looking elegant and relaxed, more so than she realised because inside she was tensed with the expectation of being refused, not needed, superfluous. But her offer was accepted, and she hurried back to the Health Centre to collect Abbas, wondering how she could now fit it in. On the drive home she could not help herself and told Abbas what she had done. She glanced towards him to see if he had heard her, and she saw the beginnings of a tight little smile on his face. It was a tiny grotesque grimace, but it was a smile, his first since the stroke.

  ‘Abbas, you are smiling,’ she said quietly, smiling herself. ‘You can smile. It’s about time you did, Mr Boots. So you don’t think the Refugee Centre is a bad idea?’

  She rang Jamal later that evening (after she had tried Hanna first) and told him about the smile first of all. It was a tiny little thing but it was a smile all right. Then she told him about the Refugee Centre.

  ‘What will you do there?’ he asked.

  ‘I can help in a lot of ways,’ she said. ‘In the crèche, with the literacy classes, or with community events at the Centre.’ She wanted Jamal to be impressed but she could not be sure from his voice if he was holding something back. ‘It was what made your Ba smile, so he thinks it’s all right. Don’t you think it’s a good idea?’

  ‘If you want to do it . . . I mean if you want to do that kind of work. It might be quite ordinary, boring. Cleaning, making tea, skivvying work, not much different from what you did at the hospital or at home,’ he said.

  ‘So you don’t think it’s a good idea,’ she said, disappointed.

  ‘Yes, of course it’s a good idea,’ Jamal replied. ‘Especially if it made the invalid smile. It will be good for you to do something different, get a break from the caring, do something that you want to do. I just worry that they might not let you do anything interesting. You know, that it would just be more chores for you to do.’

  ‘Oh no, I don’t think it will be like that. I think there will be a lot to do,’ Maryam said, and she made sure that he heard the smile in her voice.

  The next day of their visit Nick borrowed Jill’s car and took Anna out to the country. They had slept in separate rooms, and Anna had not expected the luxury of a large comfortable bedroom with its own bathroom. When she shut the bedroom door, the carpet, the curtains, the wallpaper and the furniture absorbed all sound, and the room felt unattached to the rest of the house. It was like a hushed, sealed capsule floating free. When she opened the curtains in the morning, she looked over a large garden, which was so full and neat that she guessed it was looked after by a team of gardeners. The structure she had seen in the gloom was a pergola with a vine growing on it. Nick drove to a nearby village he wanted her to see, and they strolled through it while he told her about the ancient church, and about stories of the English Civil War in which it featured. He told the stories as if they belonged to him, as if he was present at their unfolding, standing at the edge of a nearby lane looking on these events happening in the open. They saw no one in the village until they entered the pottery, where the potter smiled at them ­without stopping work on his wheel. Nick explained in a whisper that the pottery was famous, and people came from far and wide to buy pots here. It was a small village, and soon they were out in a country lane where daffodils were still in bloom and which was shaded by huge budding trees.

  ‘Your mother does not talk very much,’ Anna said.

  Nick laughed: ‘You mean my father talks a lot. No one gets to say much when Dad is in the mood, which is when he is relaxed and comfortable with the company. I must say, he seemed very much in the mood last night. So that means he likes you. You’ll get used to it, you’ll have no choice,’ he said, laughing again at the thought. ‘Anyway, I heard you and Mum chattering away in the kitchen, so it looks as if everything is going well.’

  Late in the morning Nick said they would have to go back so he could attend the Easter service. Anna said she would like to go too. Nick said she should not feel she had to. He went because he did not know how to get out of it after all these years. The vicar of the church they went to was his Dad’s brother, his Uncle Digby, and for as long as he could remember, his parents had said that the Easter service was the most important ceremony in the Christian calendar. According to them you did not have the right to call yourself a Christian if you did not attend the service to rejoice in the saviour’s resurrection – even though they did not trouble themselves too much to exercise this right at other times of the year. Besides, the service and the late family lunch afterwards had become their own pleasant family tradition. ‘I’ll come,’ Anna said. ‘I’d like to.’ She wanted to feel that she had been invited into their warmth and intimacy, and she wanted to share it fully. She did not want to hold back and quibble.

  She told him that she wanted to go to the Easter service because she had never been to one before, or been to any kind of church service for that matter.

  ‘No!’ he said, gratifying her with his disbelieving surprise.

  It was true: not a service, nor a christening, nor a church wedding, nor any of those things. She had seen these events in films and on TV, that’s all. Everything she knew about Christianity was entirely theoretical, mostly things she had read when she was doing her literature degree and bits and pieces you cannot avoid picking up.

  Nick said his lineage teemed with vicars and lay preachers. Hearing Anna say that about the Church was like meeting someone who said he had never seen the moon.

  It was another one of those things her Ba had made sure they were ignorant about. When Anna started school, some of the Muslim parents began a campaign to have their children excluded from events that had anything to do with Christian practices. The parents were staff and postgraduate students at the university in Norwich, not many, but they knew how to campaign. It was a Church of England school, although that had nothing to do with her and her brother being there. It just happened to be near them and had a good reputation. When the exclusion campaign started, the headmaster thought a principle was involved, namely that children attending a school such as his had to participate in all its practices otherwise the school’s esprit de corps would be in jeopardy. In addition, he did not like having the school’s style cramped and tempered with in this way by a handful of people who did not value the ethos it held dear. But the parents organised petitions, threatened appeals and in the end the headmaster agreed to allow the children of Muslim parents to exclude themselves from certain school events. He would much rather they had taken their children elsewhere, but the local council office advised him not to allow the protest to become a scandal. And because her name was Hanna Abbas and her record said she was a Muslim, her parents were offered the option of excluding her and they took it. Hanna was excused from any Christian events, and so was her brother Jamal when his turn came. The teachers did little to make it easy for the Muslim children, keeping them together in one class while the Nativity play or the harvest festival went on in the hall. They were the awkward squad, and the school did not mind them knowing that they were.

  It was her father who was the Muslim, although there was nothing particularly Muslim about what he did or the way they lived. Sometimes he told them what it meant to be a Muslim, the Pillars of Islam, as he called them, praying, fasting, giving alms, going on the pilgrimage to Mecca, although he never did any of those things himself. He told them the story of Muhammad, and of Muslim conquests of most of the known world, from China to the gates of Vienna, and of its scholarship and learning. The stories were like great adventures, that was how he told them, tales of when men were giants and it was still possible to stumble on a treasure chest of emeralds and diamonds when searching for firewood in the forest. What their mother Maryam knew about religion was what she had picked up along the way, and it was the lightest of burdens. She probably would not have thought to exclude her children from anything, but their father saw it as a small reprieve from the overwhelming corruption of his children, so he insisted the
y be excluded. The campaigning parents, of whom he was not one, kept a watchful eye on the school, and her dad did not want it said that he had neglected to care for his children. Then after a while Hanna and Jamal became used to being excused from any Christian activity, and insisted on it themselves, because they knew that was what they were expected to do. That it was what their dad wanted them to do. That was how she could grow up in England and not go to a church once. If their dad was a proper Muslim, he would have committed a great sin by keeping them in ignorance about their religion, instead of which he kept them in ignorance about everything, or tried to anyway. There was so much more he should have told them, a great deal more about a great many things.

  Nick did not say anything when Anna told him this, but Anna could see the look of distaste on his face, and she assumed it was distaste for her Ba. She felt a moment’s brief regret, but nothing that she had said was untrue. It was sad if her description made him sound like a bigoted immigrant, but that was what he had laid himself open to, and she resisted the impulse to say something in his defence.

  Anna was surprised by the service. It seemed such a fake. She so much wanted to be moved by the evocation of the drama of the resurrection, to witness an affirmation of faith, to feel the solemnity of the moment, but Nick’s Uncle Digby made the words seem exaggerated, and his delivery had a practised piety that gave them a hectoring tone. Anna even wondered if Uncle Digby was a believer, despite his pious words and his clerical costume. She thought a believer would have a certain stare – ardent, manic, furious, or even just kindly – but Uncle Digby’s eyes, even from a distance, were blank and irritably preoccupied. She did not think Uncle Digby was a good advertisement for his vocation.

  It was nearly three by the time they all sat down to eat lunch. Anna sat with Nick on one side of her and Anthony, the boyfriend of Nick’s sister Laura, on the other, silently chewing his food for the most part. Laura, who had met them at the church, and Anthony, who had pointedly spent the service in the pub, had both greeted Anna with the same hard, unabashed look, as if weighing up a judgement for later. It made her shiver. They both worked in an architect’s practice where Anthony was a senior partner. Anthony spoke in a loud impatient voice, his manner that of someone who would not hesitate to lose his temper if things did not go his way.

  Uncle Digby the vicar, when she met him at close quarters, was a soft-looking man with lush dark hair sprinkled with grey. He no longer looked irritable, and was already a little mellow. Initially Uncle Digby and Ralph shared command of the conversation, but Uncle Digby soon gained the upper hand, especially as his wife Florence seemed in the middle of a long story, which she was telling to Ralph in a lowered voice. Uncle Digby asked, in his ceremonially kindly voice, to hear more about what everyone was doing, and how remarkable that was, and just the other day he had heard something interesting about that on the radio. It was clear that he had frequently refilled his wine glass while waiting for lunch. Anna caught Jill’s eye, and Jill, her face shiny with rushing to get the food on the table, smiled with just a touch of mischief, as if something slightly comic was going on, and she guessed that Uncle Digby was going to make a fool of himself before too long.

  At some point Uncle Digby, who was sitting across from her, turned towards her with a pungently benign smile and asked her, ‘And where do you come from?’

  ‘Anna’s British,’ Nick said curtly, answering for her. Anthony made a soft snorting noise.

  ‘Yes, of course Anna’s British,’ Uncle Digby said. ‘But what was she before she was British?’

  They were all looking at her, waiting for her to speak, to tell them what her real nation was. She wished she could get up and leave, and walk quickly to the train station and travel to wherever her real nation was. She wished she had more panache and knew how to charm people she did not like.

  ‘Where are your parents from, Anna?’ Uncle Digby asked, still kindly but smiling less fully, perhaps made suspicious by Anna’s silence.

  ‘My father is from East Africa,’ Anna said, hating Uncle Digby for being an oily old fake and hating herself for being intimidated into a disclosure that she had no faith in. She had almost said I think but she had managed to suppress that. It turned out that Uncle Digby had lived in Kenya for several years, and that Anthony had been born there, and everyone perked up to engage in this new development. They had a beach house on the south coast, Anthony said, smiling and suddenly eager to talk. He had an old photo of the beach house at home.

  ‘To look at you, I’d say your father was from the coast,’ Uncle Digby said, announcing her origins with authority.

  ‘We left when I was quite young, but I still remember it,’ Anthony said, cheered by his childhood memories, his clean-shaven head glowing.

  ‘Where on the coast was he from?’ Uncle Digby asked, raising his voice a little to force Anthony into retreat.

  She noticed that the tempo and the drift of the conversation was making everyone smile, anticipating a little biographical sketch of distant but not unfamiliar origins. ‘I don’t know,’ Anna said.

  After a puzzled silence, Uncle Digby said, ‘You don’t know where your father comes from! Well, I find this hard to believe.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Anna repeated, unable to think of anything else to say.

  ‘I’m shocked. Do you mean you don’t know, or you don’t want to know? It makes me sad to hear you speak with such little interest about your home, Anna,’ Uncle Digby said, his eyes lowered and his mouth turned down wretchedly.

  ‘I am British,’ Anna said, and heard the strain in her own voice as she spoke.

  ‘Please stop bothering her, Digby,’ Jill said.

  Uncle Digby waved her words away. ‘We see families falling apart because children do not want to know about the world their parents came from. To keep communities together, host and stranger need to know each other, but we cannot know each other if we don’t know ourselves. We who care for the welfare of immigrants work as hard as we know how to get that message across, to encourage people to know. Those words I am British feel like a cold tragic blast to me sometimes.’

  ‘Hold on, Digby,’ Anthony said, grinning. ‘You are about to make our jungle bunny cry.’ Anna looked at him with a kind of wonder, taking in his grinning, thick-skinned muscular face and the mockery in his eyes. She could not think of anything to say and was afraid she was going to do something abject. She could already feel her eyes stinging. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, leaning forward, grinning and lightly touching her hand. ‘Digby didn’t mean anything. It’s all just words to him. He gets sanctimonious when he hits the bottle.’

  ‘Anna, please come and give a hand for a moment,’ Jill said, rising to her feet.

  Anna stood up and followed, but she walked past the kitchen door and into the bathroom instead. She stood at the sink for some seconds, staring at herself in the mirror, until she felt the stinging in her eyes recede. When she came out, she saw Jill standing by the kitchen door, waiting for her. She nodded at Anna and they went back to the table.

  She stopped her unpacking and stood suddenly still at the thought that she had been unkind to her father in what she had said to Nick that weekend. How could she speak about him like that? She knew that he struggled with the lives they lived, that not all of it was to his liking. Sometimes he talked bitterly about the ignorance of the people they lived among, about their wilful content with the wrong that was done and was being done in their name. He spoke about events at work, and the abuse he had to put up with there, but he was a tough, stubborn man and had somehow kept his balance and advanced himself. If his love was clumsy, it was also devoted. And he was not even the tragedy that she described. She should have remembered that and not spoken of him so slightingly. She wondered if it was to make Nick see that she was unlike them, that she was not one of those immigrants. At times she thought she understood how difficult it must be for her father, still a stranger after all these years, coping with that strangeness all his life, s
o much older than Ma and unable to share the enthusiasms of his children or to make them truly share in his. She stood still for a long moment, thinking about him and begging pardon.

  Anna sat down at the computer she had just switched on and typed: I am British. She waited for the Digby cold tragic blast to blow, and it did as always. A dog in breeches.

  On Wednesday evenings, Jamal stayed late at the university to attend an Islam Reading Group. On his way home, he stopped at the corner grocery store to get some milk. The store was poorly lit and cramped with shelves and merchandise. It was empty except for its owner, who remarkably enough was not a Pakistani but an Englishman of European ancestry. He was leaning against the counter, reading something he had there. He had a small Union Jack pennant beside him on the counter and another one on the notice board for messages and advertisements. When Jamal came in, the store owner twisted his upper body ostentatiously to look at the clock on the wall behind him. It was a few minutes before eight, and he usually shut at eight. Whenever he came to the store and was met by its owner’s hostility, Jamal was reminded in a small way how dangerous every day was. But he came anyway because the nearest other shop was some distance away, and he did not mind that pulse of danger. Lena from the flat across the landing had come with him once and was so surprised by the man’s silent rage at her that she swore never to return. He smiled at the angry man as he paid for the milk in silence, and left.

  Jamal had started attending the Islam Reading Group meetings soon after he began his PhD, to fulfil the need to understand more about a religion he was nominally part of. One of the students he shared a house with at the time persuaded him to attend. He was not sure what to expect when he went to the first seminar: prayers, sermons, prohibitions. He feared that there would be communal prayers and he would be shamed by his ignorance. He did not know the words and only had a vague idea of the sequence of the gestures. Ba never prayed, nor taught them anything about prayers. But when he went to his first group meeting, there were no prayers, and no one exposed him or hectored him. Several of the reading group were not even Muslims. Instead they listened to a paper on the inadmissability of apostasy in Islam. Jamal did not even know what apostasy meant, let alone its inadmissability in any religion.