him, nor had it been put to him by any of the experts on Middle Eastern affairs. But, in the grip of obsession, he had humbly taken himself to the nearest bookshop, the Owl in Kentish Town, and purchased a Penguin Classic: The Koran, translated with notes by N. J. Dawood, first published in 1956, many times reprinted. He attempted to open his mind, he attempted to make his way through it: Charles was not used to reading, he was accustomed to news flashes and teletext bulletins and telex reports and memoranda. He found the Koran heavy going, and was more than slightly put off to learn that the chapters of the version he was reading had been rearranged, their traditional sequence abandoned. The original editors of this sacred text had, apparently, arranged its chapters not chronologically but in order of length, ‘the longest coming first and the shortest last’. He complained about this narrative anarchy over the phone to Liz: Liz, not having read the Koran herself, was intrigued by this revelation. ‘You mean you can read them in any order, like the chapters of an experimental novel?’ she asked. ‘Like that novel in a box, by whoever it was in the sixties?’
Charles, who had never read an experimental novel, and very few traditional ones, cut the conversation short. ‘How can you understand the minds of people who don’t respect sequence?’ he wanted to know.
‘I’m sure there must be some kind of sequence,’ said Liz, vaguely. ‘Why don’t you read on, and see if one emerges?’
Charles read on, but not very far. He managed to find one or two pleasant passages about rich brocades and sherbet and fountains and young boys as fair as virgin pearls, but he found a great deal more about unbelievers and wrongdoers and the Hour of Doom and the Curse of Allah and thunderbolts and pitch and scalding water and the Pit of Hell. ‘Will they not ponder on the Koran? Are there locks upon their hearts?’ Charles decided that there was a lock upon his heart: was it because he had been seduced by Satan, as the Koran suggested? Surely not.
He even found himself thinking of the New Testament with some affection, and went so far as to open it, drunkenly, one night, to see what it had to say to him. He stabbed at his old school Bible with his finger, looking for a message. He lit on Matthew 6:25. ‘Behold the fowls of the air, for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them . . . Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’
The words glowed with a hesitant, radiant beauty, a beauty of remembered faith. Was there not something about God caring even for the sparrows? About each hair of our head being numbered? Inspired stuff, divine stuff, said Charles to himself, hunting for the text, but failing to find it. ‘Christ,’ thought Charles, at midnight, ‘the Koran has converted me back to Christianity.’
The effect of the New Testament did not last. Charles was not a reader, but a man of action. He had persuaded himself that the amateur video of the death of kidnapped Dirk Davis, which had been thrown over the embassy wall in Baldai, was a fake, and had been given enough hope by reported sightings and messages to build on this persuasion an elaborate structure of explanation. He was abetted in this by Dirk Davis’s wife. Dirk Davis’s wife also refused to believe that Dirk was dead. She and Charles encouraged one another, in speculation, in fantasy.
Dirk Davis’s wife was not quite what one might expect, from her brief grieving public appearances: but then Charles knew enough about television duplicity not to be surprised by the real Carla. Wives and widows are never quite what one might expect: what we see is a strange public construction of what we think we would like to see, what the news presenter decides would be suitable for us to see. We are all partly aware of this, and Charles knows it more than most. Nevertheless, the gulf between the public Mrs Davis and the real Carla was unusually wide. The public Mrs Davis was a woman of, say, fifty, dressed plainly and soberly in black, with a bruised, pale face, huge dark pained saucered eyes, long straggly black, limp, grief-unkempt hair, and a husky, pleading whisper of a voice: a woman of sorrows, a victim, worn down by prolonged misery and hopeless vigil. The real Carla was an animated, hard-drinking, loquacious, vitriolic, dangerous creature, aggressive, witty and only occasionally tearful: life had dealt her some hard blows, and Dirk’s disappearance was not the first of them, but she was a fighter, and would not surrender.
Carla Davis lived in Kentish Town, under half a mile from Charles Headleand’s flat.
Is Carla manipulating Charles, or is it the other way round? Is it folie à deux? Is Carla trying to send Charles off to his death, because she blames him for Dirk Davis’s death?
These are the questions that Jonathan and Alan Headleand ask themselves. They are of the opinion that the video of Dirk Davis’s death is genuine. Jonathan has reached this conclusion after many inspections of the tape, professional inspections (for he has followed in his father’s footsteps and now makes TV documentaries), Alan after two viewings through half-closed eyes, a barrier of fingers, and a natural blindness when confronted with the unacceptable. Jonathan ascribes Charles Headleand’s obsession to the financial problems of Global International and Charles’s loss of status. Alan thinks it is more closely linked to sex and the Zeitgeist, to the need for self-assertion and machismo so common in middle-aged men.
Charles and his third wife, Lady Henrietta, are now divorced. Charles lives on his own in Kentish Town. The divorce was expensive. Charles spends evenings drinking with Carla Davis in Carla’s dark terrace house, with Carla’s odd assortment of lodgers and teenage drop-outs. Some of these look a little like terrorists themselves, North London terrorists. Carla, witch-like, presides. She has an entourage. She is queen of a small dark world. She has a certain style. She hates Liz Headleand, who lives spaciously, in the light, in St John’s Wood: who has seduced and corrupted Charles Headleand’s three sons, and drawn them into her own orbit.
Charles plots to go to Baldai to track down Dirk Davis. Carla eggs him on. Liz is neutral. Jonathan and Alan are concerned, because they are the responsible members of the family. Aaron, the irresponsible son, rather admires his father’s late recklessness. Sally and Stella, the youngest, daughters of both Charles and Liz, do not know what to think. They have their own problems, both of them, and anyway nobody cares what they think. So why bother to think anything? This is Sally’s line. She is not interested in the ridiculous male world of plots and bombs and fanatics and hostages and warfare. She fights on another battlefront, and belongs to another plot, another story.
Stella weighs twelve stones, hates university, is very unhappy, does not get on with either Liz or Charles, and with some justification thinks herself neglected, the neglected runt of the family. She will be neglected by this narrative too, for thus is the injustice of life compounded. But it has to be said that none of the Headleand children will get much of an appearance here. They will serve only as occasional chorus. There are too many of them to be treated individually. And anyway, Charles himself is only a small subplot. This is not the Headleand saga. You do not have to retain these names, these relationships.
But nevertheless, Liz rocks her step-granddaughter Cornelia in her arms, as she sits in the cane-backed rocking chair in which she nursed her own babies. Alan and Jonathan plot against their father’s plots. The eagle clock ticks on the mantelshelf. Liz thinks Dirk Davis is a heap of crumbling bones.
It is a Friday lunch time in late January, and Tony Kettle and Sam Bowen are taking a short-cut through the Botanical Gardens. They are on their way to a talk at the old grammar school. They both attend a sixth form college downtown, and have struck up a friendship, as they are both new boys in Northam: Tony is newer here than Sam, but he has not travelled so far. Sam is from London, from Wandsworth, and spent his early years of secondary education in a mixed, noisy neighbourhood comprehensive. Tony Kettle spent those years in a quiet dull old-fashioned school in a small market town in the flat wastes near the Humber.
Tony and Sam have compared notes, over the past three months. On Northam, on the sixth form college, on their own past experiences of school, and, very circumspectly, very indirectly, on their parents and on the factors that have brought their parents to Northam.
They are talking, now, about racism, prompted by an incident reported at school that morning by Ramesh Bannerjee. Ramesh claimed that a pair of pig’s trotters had been suspended