I
T
was the encroachments he resented, the invasions into personal time that seemed to go with the territory of parenthood. He would come home of an evening to find that Leila had other mothers in the cottage: there they were, sitting around drinking tea and discussing the awfulness of their leisured lives. Leila had long ago abandoned her plans for a higher degree, but in her case it didn’t matter: there was always the subsidy from Lebanon to eke out Colin’s income as a lecturer. The other mothers suffered a lot from their inability to find work of a kind and at a level commensurate with their undoubted middle-class abilities. Colin would stand in the hall, listening to their inane, chattery bitching, and he would quake with rage.
He knew Leila wanted a child; she had conceived on their honeymoon. He knew she wanted to devote the early years to Robbie, without the distraction of work; he had complied. But he had not bargained for her neglect of him. For the absence of meals on his return from work. For lack of sex. For coming a perpetual second in the daily race with his own son.
It was hard to find a word to describe what Leila felt for Robbie. Love? Worship? Adore? These verbs did not go far enough to describe the idolatrous devotion she lavished on their child. If they had come to her and said, “Either you or Robbie must die,” she would have seized a knife joyfully and plunged it into her own heart before she would let them touch a hair of that precious head.
Sometimes Colin found his wife’s passion for Robbie bordering on the sick. But maybe that was another kind of sickness—jealousy.
It was June 1974, Robbie was four years old, and Colin had been looking forward to a particular day, circled in red on the calendar, for months. Say rather, a particular moment: he had this vision of settling back in his seat on the red-and-white Middle East Airlines jumbo jet with a jumbo gin and tonic in his hand and four weeks of self-indulgent hedonism to look forward to. Tickets paid for by Feisal, Leila’s father; an apartment of their own in the center of Beirut; servants on call night and day; a car at their disposal… oh, there’d been no end to the blandishments, but all it had taken to persuade him was Leila’s assurance that buried somewhere in the package was the certainty of sometimes being together and alone.
She wanted that every bit as much as he did, she assured him. She’d missed the sex, the pleasure of a glass or two of wine by the fire, the weekend walk, hand in hand. Not to have to worry if Robbie woke in the night from a bad dream, because the girl could soothe him while Mummy and Daddy slept: oh, yes! Pure, unadulterated pleasure. To lie abed in the morning, smelling the bougainvillaea outside their window while they made love; to swim in a tiny bay only she and a handful of her friends knew about, with a bottle of champagne chilling two fathoms down … how these things had beckoned them on to June and that red-circled date in the diary.
How stupid, then, that they should quarrel on the eve of departure; and, bearing in mind their destination, how appropriate that, like all their quarrels, it should be over something utterly stupid.
Because his room in college was being redecorated he’d taken to giving his last tutorials of the term at home, during the mornings, while Robbie went to play school and Leila was usually out doing something, he didn’t know what, except that it wasn’t cooking or cleaning the house. The college that employed him was all-male, but because Colin had become rather fashionable in the academic world after his Ph.D. thesis, “The Element of Intention in Murder by Recklessness,” had been published in book form, a number of “undergraduettes” had been farmed out to him. One of them was a beautiful, sultry dimwit called Fiona Bolingbroke, who made scant secret of her desire to pick more of Colin than his brains. He ignored her, not because he didn’t fancy her but because the high road to ruin was clearly marked, in big letters,sex
WITH STUDENTS
. Also, because he yearned to believe in
something,
and the option of a stable, faithful marriage was at least handy even if it was no longer as attractive as of yore. And to round it off, students came to tutorials in pairs, almost as if they too realized where safety lay.
A week before the Raleighs were booked to fly to Beirut, Fiona’s partner fell sick, leaving her unchaperoned in Colin’s house the one day of the year Leila chose to come back early from whatever it was she did in the mornings that wasn’t cooking or cleaning. Leila took a long look at the dreamy expression on the face of the girl draped across the sofa she and her husband had chosen together at a Heal’s sale and walked out, banging the door behind her. The echoes lasted a long time.
The summer of 1974 still witnessed an uneasy peace in Lebanon, although anyone arriving in the bullet-pocked terminal building of Beirut airport that June could have read the signs and known that civil war was not far off. Colin kept a tight grip on Robbie’s hand until they were out in the sunlight, and there, in front of them, stood parked the two BMWs that were to form an indispensable part of life over the next few weeks.
The speed and efficiency of the operation took his breath away. Hands reached for his luggage, his son, his wife, himself; they were in the car with the closing of doors and rapid acceleration taking place simultaneously; then they were racing along a dead-straight road as if they were either royalty or escaping from the police. The Raleigh family traveled in the back of the first car, with a man who kept shouting into a walkie-talkie sitting next to the driver. The interior was deliciously air-conditioned and Colin at last sat back, allowing himself to relax, while he tried to get some feel for Beirut.
“Corniche Mazraa.”
He started. Leila had said very little to him for the past seven days, and it was longer than that since he’d heard her employ such soft tones. They were speeding along a broad boulevard, heading for the sea. He saw endless palm trees, the occasional square with people sitting out beneath sunshades, red tiled roofs, attractive villas interspersed with hideous concrete monstrosities, some half built, many more half destroyed. The place it reminded him of most was Yugoslavia, with its mini-skyscrapers: predominantly Mediterranean, like Italy or Spain, but with a hint of something heavier, more sensual in the architecture: a Serbian influence, or Turkish maybe. Then they were turning right into a broad street where imposing pillared façades announced plush shops, the best kind of restaurants, secretive banks, opulent homes. The sense of being “east” was quite gone; everybody he saw looked European.
“Hamra Street,” Leila said. “Beirut’s Bond Street.”
Colin felt her take his hand. The sight of their two hands nestling together in Robbie’s lap after so long a separation filled him with happiness. Suddenly she said, in an artificially high voice, “Welcome.”
He leaned over Robbie to kiss her cheek. “Thank you,” he said quietly.
Robbie threw himself onto his mother, burying his head in her breast, and Colin and Leila shared their first rueful smile in many days, once again parents instead of merely two people who shared responsibility for a child. Colin knew all the fashionable theories about “bonding,” knew that he and Robbie had yet to forge that vital, metaphysical link between father and son. But here, in Beirut, anything was possible.
The car turned off Hamra Street—everywhere he looked the signs seemed to be in French—and threaded its way through a web of narrower residential streets until at last it descended a ramp beneath a high, modern apartment building. They rode to the top floor in a fast elevator. The doors slid open to reveal four men standing by a huge picture window half a football field away, but the quartet was already moving quickly forward; speed, Colin realized, was the watchword in Beirut, and before he knew it the leader of the four, a tall, slim Arab, was staring into his eyes; then he reached out to embrace Colin, patting his back affectionately while he kissed him first on the left cheek and then on the right. No token salutations, these, but warm, solid pressures of the lips, flesh to flesh, man to man, before the Arab stepped back enough to be able to hold Colin at arm’s length and say, “I am Feisal Hanif.
Ahlan wa sahlan;
my home is your home; welcome to
our
home.”
He dropped Colin with the swift deftness that characterized everything he did and turned to Leila, enfolding her in his arms for twice as long as he had devoted to Colin. “Darling,” he murmured over and over again. Colin stepped to one side, curious to see how her face hardened into a mold of politeness as she returned her father’s softly spoken greetings. Last, Feisal swept Robbie off his feet and held him close. The boy struggled for a few seconds before seeming to realize that resistance here was useless, for he went as rigid as a rabbit awaiting the snake’s fang. When Feisal put Robbie down, the boy immediately burst into tears.
“We have so much to discuss,” Feisal said. “But now I must leave you. This apartment"—he waved his arms—"is at your disposal for as long as you want it. We are having a party on Saturday, Halib will be back from the States by then; not many guests, just the president, premier, one or two people it might be interesting for a lawyer like yourself to meet. But now you must excuse me.” He tousled Robbie’s hair and made a face that was meant to be friendly, though the little boy merely cowered away. “Business—here in Beirut, always business! So long, little guy.”
The entourage vanished with something of the effect produced on smoke by a powerful fan, bodyguards, secretaries, and assorted henchmen all being sucked out of the room in their leader’s turbulent wake.
Colin fixed Leila with his eyes. “The president?”
“Franjieh?” She shrugged. “I expect so. He goes out Saturdays, but ours won’t be his only party, oh, no. He’ll do twenty, maybe more. Come here, darling…. Robbie, come to Mummy, love.” She picked the boy up and laughed, unexpectedly. “They call Franjieh the Sphinx. Know why? Because he can’t bear small talk. And yet he goes to all those parties, because he’s terrified of missing anything. What do you think of this place?”
Colin took his first proper look around. The apartment was enormous. As you stepped out of the elevator you at once found yourself in the main living room, with its picture windows giving onto a view of the Mediterranean and a sunken, white-tiled balcony, complete with gaily colored umbrellas, chairs, and tables. This room was filled with light. All the soft furnishings were pastel in shade and contemporary in style, as if everything the room contained had been purchased on the same day and quite probably from the same exquisite shop. Colin was greatly taken with the ashtrays. He counted twelve of them before giving up.
“It’s lovely,” he said, conscious of sounding lame. “But I’m worried about all these glass ornaments and lamps. Won’t Robbie—”
“He’ll be good, won’t you, darling?” Leila carried Robbie around the room, pointing out things she remembered from the old days, so evidently this apartment hadn’t been conjured out of the air for their arrival after all. “Anyway,” she said over her shoulder, “if he breaks anything, too bad. The servants will pick up the pieces; that’s what they’re for.”
He laughed. Only later did it occur to him that he could not recall her ever having said anything so brutal, so uncaring, before.
That night she insisted they take Robbie with them to one of the famous fish restaurants of Raouche, even though the boy was dog-tired. At first Colin thought this was hard on their son. But afterward, when the child had fallen into a sleep so deep he scarcely seemed alive, Leila took Colin by the hand and led him to their huge bed in the master suite, and he came to realize the reason for her determination to keep Robbie up: she wanted to exhaust him so that he slept around the clock. But Leila did not want to sleep and, after a while, no more did he.
Looking back on it afterward, he acknowledged Beirut in the summer of 74 to have been the best holiday ever, right up until the final hours. And the lovely thing was that while it was going on he almost seized the moment, almost succeeded in realizing each day’s joys as they occurred.
Robbie came into bloom, like a flower lifting its head to the sun.
He liked the beach, of course—he used to beg to be taken to the Pigeon Rocks, because there water-skiers skimmed through the naturally formed arches and he could watch them for hours with his wide, unblinking stare—and he tolerated the lunchtime visits to the Hotel St. Georges or the Commodore; but often he seemed happiest just mooching through the “old town,” that web of streets around Rome-elegant Riyad el-Solh Square, with his father.
One morning Leila had business matters to attend to, “family, darling, dreadfully boring,” and he was pleased, because it meant he could be alone with Robbie. It was not the first time she had left them to their own devices. Sometimes he wondered where she went on those “business” mornings, but really he did not care too much. Nights belonged to the grown-ups; he could afford to give Robbie the days.
The first thing, they agreed, was breakfast. They found a café near the offices of
L’Orient-Le Jour,
where Colin ordered croissants for himself and an extravagant cheese
manouche
for Robbie. Afterward Robbie counted out luridly colored
liraat
for the benefit of the waiter, who tweaked his ear in return for a cheeky smile, and then they sauntered off hand-in-hand, searching for that special part of Beirut which was at its best before the sun beefed itself up into a huge disk of white flame: the souk.
Assaulted on every side by spice aromas and other, less attractive, smells, their ears bombarded now by the ubiquitous singer Farouz, now by Beethoven, and now by an Indian raga, they found a little bit of everything: covered fruit and vegetable markets, craftsmen huddled together in their narrow stone-fronted little shops: here coffin makers, there glassblowers, in the next alley, manufacturers of
gidawa,
or “hubble-bubbles” as Robbie called them. There were narrow cobbled streets with a single gutter running their length and stone arches at either end, where it felt deliciously cool, even dank; there were sudden twists and turnings that brought them out where they didn’t want to be, vexed and alarmed, until they noticed the charming Ottoman fountain in the square or the jeweler’s window glittering with all the stones of Asia.