Daughters (28 page)

Robin stopped in front of a booth. Hanging around the doorway there were leather bags of every shape and description.

‘Wait.’ He disappeared inside and returned to say, ‘You don’t mind?’

She smiled at him. ‘How could I?’

A few minutes later, he beckoned to her. Space limited and at a premium, the shop was cluttered, very warm, and coffee had just been brewed. On the counter several bags had been laid out. Robin introduced her to the vendor. ‘Abdullah is expecting you to take your pick.’

She knew the leather would be as soft as cashmere.
And so it proved. Discussing the merits of each bag and making her choice was pleasurable and lengthy. So, too, was the bargaining over the price.

‘I nearly lost face,’ he said, as they emerged. ‘If you had insisted on paying, I don’t know how my reputation would have survived.’

‘Please let me pay you, Robin.’

He came to a halt. ‘You don’t understand, Lara. I’m giving you the bag.’

There was a pause while they digested the moment.

‘Thank you,’ she said eventually. ‘Thank you.’

Back outside the Souk Al-Hamadiye, she watched him flag down a yellow taxi and negotiate the fare. Fatigue had settled behind her eyes, but pleasantly so. As they drove slowly along the road, she was hit by a wave of warm, petrol-laden air … and relaxed.

Soon, they were driving through an urban sprawl – piles of concrete, unfinished buildings – towards the rocky outcrop of Jebel Qassioun where they were to have dinner.

Robin sat back against the seat. ‘It wasn’t so long ago you could ride a horse into Damascus from Qassioun and pass through gardens and orchards full of roses, citrus trees and jasmine,’ he said. ‘The travellers who wrote about it always commented on the beauty of the ride. Damascus was known as the Jasmine City.’

Lara closed her eyes. She, too, could have been picking her way over the stones on her horse, bathed in warmth and flower scents, the sun on her back, jogging peaceably as she rode past the ancient orchards and gardens.

‘What are you thinking?’ he asked.

She told him and he smiled and took her hand. ‘That’s good. Dream away, Lara.’

Over dinner, they discussed the trip to the Krak des Chevaliers. ‘Initially, I thought we might hire a car but …’ He glanced down at his left arm. ‘Probably not a good idea. The roads can be mad and congested and you need your wits about you. So, we’ll go white-van transport, which means there’ll probably be other tourists as well. But don’t worry, you don’t have to talk to them.’

‘What a strange picture you have of me,’ said Lara, thoughtfully. ‘I don’t mind talking to other people.’

‘I thought you might be tired. That’s all.’

It had grown dark, and the city lights were spattered across the horizon. One light in particular caught her eye. It had an unblinking and beautiful radiance. A mosque? A palace? Fixed on it, Lara experienced a freshness and intensity of response, the like of which she could only remember from childhood.

A few days ago, Bill had written something equivalent in an email: ‘Whenever I look at the garden at Membury, it is to look at it for the first time.’

She shared that sense of discovery. It was what she felt here.

‘Lara,’ Robin said eventually, ‘nothing is set in stone. Nothing is expected of you.’

She smiled and held out her glass for a refill. ‘That’s a good place to be.’

‘We’re tired,’ he said.

She nodded.

When she finally got to bed, it was to fall dreamlessly asleep, only to be woken by a knock on the door. This turned out to be a fully dressed and freshly shaved Robin.

‘Oh, my God. Time?’

‘Eight thirty. I let you sleep.’ He looked at his watch. ‘But we’re due to set off in an hour.’

Old grey T-shirt, mussed hair and the toothpaste yards away in the bathroom.

‘You look nice,’ he said. ‘Warm.’

She blushed. ‘Give me half an hour.’

‘I’ll get some pomegranate juice sent up.’

‘Rocket fuel would be better.’

Mist wreathed over the citadel as they approached. Looming through it were the castle ramparts, more massive than she had imagined.

‘It’s usually best to approach Krak from the west.’ Robin paused to listen to the driver. ‘But I think he’s in a hurry. You can either close your eyes as we go through Al-Husn or just accept it. The village used to be inside the walls but, during their mandate, the French forced it to move downhill which accounts for the sprawl.’

The van eased through the centre of Al-Husn and up towards the castle, stopping only for the driver to conduct altercations with people who had parked their cars with the purpose of causing maximum blockage.

By the time they were deposited at the bridge that had replaced the original drawbridge, the sun had ripped the mist to shreds.

‘There’s no need to hurry.’ Robin shielded his eyes. ‘Welcome to the stronghold of the Knights Hospitallers.’

Above them, the buildings squatted monumentally. Faith. Arrogance. Power. All were invested in the stones.

‘The castle was never taken.’ He bought the tickets at the booth and handed her one. ‘In all its long history. Except at the end.’

‘I read that. It was a trick.’ Lara followed him through a long, vaulted passage into the inner
enceinte.
‘It had to be a trick. With walls
this
thick, surely no one could take it in the conventional way.’ They emerged in bright sunlight into the area between the ramparts and the inner keep.

‘“But in 1271 the Mamelukes laid siege,”’ she read from her guidebook.

‘You sound about seven,’ he said, amused.

‘Some of us,’ she said, ‘need to catch up. Do not mock.’

Robin jabbed a finger towards the ramparts. ‘At that point there weren’t many Crusaders left to man the garrison. It was going downhill. A letter arrived from the Crusader chief in the Lebanon informing the commander that there were no reinforcements and instructing him to surrender. It was a forgery.’

The towers shimmered in the sun, turning the stone ramparts to grey silk. Up here, there was not much in the way of vegetation. Nothing distracted the eye from the business of defence and no one could move without being tracked.

‘Totally totalitarian and grimly efficient,’ Lara commented.

‘But what a construction.’

‘It is,’ she said, ‘but it’s the belief in what they were doing that’s the fascinating bit. OK, they had will-power and these defences … but what mattered was their belief that
they would conquer here. Surely, unless that was intact, nothing was going to work.’

They were mounting the ramp to the inner castle through the main gateway, which opened into the inner keep, an area with several staircases leading to terraces. Robin pointed out the places where boiling oil could be hurled down on invaders. Nasty. (Dead efficient.)

Lara walked over to inspect a colonnaded room opposite. She consulted her guide. This was the main meeting room, used when the citadel housed its full complement of two thousand or so Crusaders and their horses.

Robin said in her ear, ‘They discovered three tombs in this bit. Skeletons, swords and shields. The whole deal.’

An arcaded loggia ran alongside the meeting room. It reminded her of the cloister she had once seen in southern France. Perhaps that was its point. A little bit of home. Perhaps these iron knights had suffered homesickness and permitted themselves a glancing reminder in stone of what they had left behind. Perhaps they hadn’t been so sure of everything after all. She pointed to an inscription on a stone lintel. ‘And?’

‘I think it says something about enjoying grace, wisdom and beauty but to beware of pride.’

‘Good principle,’ she said lightly.

How had this place worked? Answer: assemble the monastic ideals of self-restraint, obedience and celibacy, and fuse them with aggressive military discipline. The
result? One of the most formidable fighting machines ever known.

Robin was checking an inscription. As a soldier, those criteria had been his, too. Thank God he had come home. Droves of Knights Hospitallers had died in battle in a place that was not their home or, crippled by wounds and disease, had been forced to remain here until they did.

Watching him, her thoughts went this way and that.

Turning to look down over the plain, she tried to empathize with the imperatives that had kept the garrison intact and operational. She failed. The sun beat on her shoulders, and the stones had a harsh gleam. This was an alien place.

Afterwards they wandered at will around the castle’s huge circumference. The air was fresh. Wild flowers bloomed in yellow, orange and blue and the sun beat on her back as she bent down to examine a speedwell growing on the sward.

She turned to Robin. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you so much for bringing me here.’

For dinner Robin took her to Leila’s, a restaurant in the Old City. ‘This is the best roof terrace in town but because it’s so near to the mosque there’s no alcohol. Do you mind?’

More or less as he spoke, the floodlights were switched on and the shape of the mosque emerged out of the darkness. Lara stared at it.

‘Do I mind?’ She gestured to it. ‘What do you think?’

They ate
mezze
and lamb kebabs, accompanied by flat
Arab bread and tomato sauce. Afterwards, a dish of plain fruit – grapes, cherries and oranges – was brought to the table.

Lara couldn’t stop smiling. Her body had developed an ache – a good, happy ache.

Robin selected a handful of cherries and put them on her plate. ‘When did you decide to train?’

‘I thought we weren’t going to talk about our lives.’

He ignored her. ‘When did you?’

She bit into a cherry, black-fleshed and sour-sweet, then another. ‘Bill had left. By and large, there wasn’t enough money and I had agreed to look after the three girls. But …’ she put the stones on to the rim of the plate ‘… tinker, tailor … I needed to do something about myself too.’ She added a third cherry stone.

He leaned over and flicked it into the line-up. ‘Don’t forget the soldier.’

‘Oh, the soldier. Him.’

‘Unless you prefer the sailor?’

She bit into a fourth cherry and added the stone to the rest. ‘Let me see. A sailor? Perhaps I do.’

He raised his eyes from contemplation of the cherry stones to hers. ‘Three girls. A lot.’

‘I had to keep them. It was mad. But I wanted to shield them, and I thought Jasmine and Eve’s lives couldn’t be shaken up again. Anyway, Violet – the woman Bill went off with – made it clear that children were not part of the package.’

Robin chose his words with care. She liked that more and more about him.

‘Carey wanted children but I wasn’t around. The marriage finished, so when I came home I thought I needed to make up for my lack of children by trying to work with them.’

There was silence.

‘And you, Lara?’

As ever, confession did not flow smoothly from her. ‘I needed to work. I needed to stop thinking. But I also needed to make sense of what had happened. It was one way. I had to make my world less narrow. I had to climb out of the box and do something. I didn’t want what had happened to me and Bill to be the only thing I thought about.’

He nodded. ‘And did you make sense of what had happened?’

‘Work in progress. And you?’

‘It helped me deal with the fallout … the demons … and the worry that I wasn’t up to life any more.’

After dinner, he took her to a typical coffee-house. Its walls were faced with striped marble to which had been fixed a large plasma television screen. Upstairs, where they sat side by side on a bench, an uneven wooden casement window opened on to the street. Opposite, underneath a street light, a plaque had been screwed into the wall that read, ‘Classical Route’.

She drank her coffee. ‘Robin, in the end, I tackled Eve about Andrew and the girl. I’m frightened I’ve done damage.’

Someone in the house opposite turned on music, which poured wildly and sweetly into the street.

‘You might have done.’

There was an ashtray on the marble-topped table and it was at moments like this that she wished she smoked. ‘Any mother would have done it.’ She twisted the coffee cup around and around. ‘But, equally, I torture myself that she didn’t have to know …’ The cup stilled. ‘Andrew made it clear that I didn’t understand the situation and maybe he was right.’

‘Lara, look at me.’ She obeyed. ‘Don’t.’

‘I
will
have done damage, even if it was the right thing for the right reasons.’

Robin folded his hands around his coffee. ‘I’m not going to tell you it doesn’t matter, or that I approve of what Andrew has done … but in our work we encourage people to take responsibility for their lives. He leaned towards her. ‘That’s what you were doing.’

Don’t interfere.
She had ignored the quiet inner voice.

‘Andrew ran a risk,’ he continued. ‘Usually it’s only a question of time before something like that gets back. You saw him, told Eve, and she has the chance to think it through and make a decision before the wedding. Not after.’

She sighed. ‘No fairy tale for Eve, then.’ The smell of jasmine was almost overpowering. ‘You so want them for the people you love. Even when you know so well … We hang on to our illusions, even at the worst of times.’

‘Precisely at the worst of times.’ His smile was tender. ‘It’s normal.’

After a moment, she smiled back at him.

A little later, he said, ‘You know your funny little
gesture? When you fold your arms so defensively? I haven’t seen you do it here. I claim the credit.’

It was ridiculous how happy she felt.

Silently, he asked the question. Silently, she answered it.

In her hotel room, Lara sluiced her face in water and immersed her body. That was what the knights would have done before the great battles around the citadel on the hill.

Afterwards she brushed her hair until it hung silkily down and trimmed her thumbnail, which she had snagged on the bed covering. She assessed the results in the mirror. The figure that looked back at her was familiar and unfamiliar.

Once, on a short trip to Rome with Jasmine, they had devoted an unconscionable time queuing to see Michelangelo’s
Pietà
in St Peter’s. To her, it had been of the utmost importance to see it. ‘
Should
you see it?’ Jasmine, ever mindful of Lara’s feelings, had asked. Rightly so. For the pain on viewing the marble mother holding her precious burden in her lap had rooted her to the spot.
This is my dead son
. Into Mary’s face was carved the suffering of every mother, including hers.