East of Wimbledon (11 page)

Robert went next door to the headmaster’s study and tapped at it nervously. Inside he could hear Malik’s voice. The headmaster sounded tense. ‘You are welcome to come and inspect us any time you like,’ he was saying. ‘Come and have a look over the gymnasium. Have lunch in the canteen. Sit in on one of my lessons. I am an Oxford graduate. You may learn something.’

Robert opened the door. Mr Malik waved him in. As Robert closed the door behind him, the headmaster put his hand over the telephone. ‘Spies,’ he mouthed. ‘Government spies!’ This meant he was on the line to the local education authority.

Beckoning Robert to a seat, he continued to talk into the mouthpiece about the school, about its playing fields, its concert hall and several other items that, so far at any rate, existed only in his imagination. He seemed to be making some impression on the person at the other end of the phone.

Robert looked round the headmaster’s study. It was decorated with photographs of his relatives. Mr Malik had relatives everywhere. He had aunts in Bombay and brothers in Edinburgh, cousins in North Africa and sisters-in-law in Australia. The only place they did not appear to have penetrated was Wimbledon – which was perhaps as well, since it left Mr Malik as the sole source of information on the Malik family history. This left him an enormous amount of scope for demonstrating the kind of narrative energy that most English fiction writers would have given a great deal to acquire.

‘My mother,’ he would sometimes say, ‘was an Englishwoman called Perkins. She married my father for sex. Purely for sex. And he was never quite sure why he had married her at all.’

His mother wasn’t always called Perkins. She wasn’t always an Englishwoman either, although more often than not the headmaster gave one of his parents British nationality. Not that it mattered. Mr Malik, Robert reflected, as he sat watching the headmaster discuss the school’s proposal to take boarders, build an indoor tennis court and a hard playing area and organize a Community Service scheme, was a creature of his own imagination. He needed far more than the normal ration of two parents, each with only one identity apiece.

‘We’ll do that,’ Malik was saying. ‘We’ll have a pint! We will! Absolutely, my dear boy! We will!’

He put the phone down. He looked at Robert. He did not smile. When he spoke, his voice was trembling. ‘You have deceived me, Wilson!’ he said. ‘Why have you deceived me?’

Suddenly, to Robert’s consternation, the headmaster burst into tears. This was not what he had expected him to do. The headmaster of Cranborne School had made it his business, during Robert’s nine years in the place, to make sure that other people did the crying.

Unsure of what to do, Robert started round the desk. He had a strong urge to put his arms round the man, and indeed was about to do so, when Malik thrust him away, sobbing.

‘Don’t touch me! Ai’sha has told me about your proclivities!’

Robert backed away towards his chair, trying to work out whether this was the deception to which the headmaster was referring. Even if he had been a screaming queen, he thought, it wasn’t something he was bound to mention on the application form for a boy’s public school. What did the man expect?

‘What proclivities?’ said Robert, who was not entirely sure what the word meant.

Malik raised a tear-stained face towards him. ‘What you do in your spare time, Wilson,’ he said, ‘is absolutely your affair. There is, I am glad to say, no direct allusion to the activities in which you engage in the Koran or in the Hadith of the Prophet, although from what I know of the blessed Muhammad – may God rest him and grant him peace – it is not something of which he would approve. He was a man’s man, Wilson.’

Robert coughed. ‘I want to stress, Headmaster,’ he said, ‘that . . . er . . . the . . . proclivities referred to were . . . er . . . a phase!’

Why was he so incapable of truth that he wasn’t able to deny something that was patently false? Perhaps because denial seemed such a crude affair, and truth so lamentably one-dimensional.

‘I am through it, Headmaster,’ he said, ‘and out the other side.’

This, somehow, did not seem quite enough.

‘It is an unspeakable thing,’ went on Robert. ‘It is the loneliest thing in the world to wake up in the middle of the night and realize you are one of . . . them!’

Mr Malik seemed to find the lack of political correctness in this remark reassuring. He held out his hand to his junior master and composed his face into a solemn expression of trust. ‘Very well, Wilson,’ he said. ‘And now, I beg you, I beseech you, to reassure me that you are not also one of those unspeakables of which I think we both know the name only too well.’

Robert could not think what he meant by this. What else was he supposed to have been up to? Cross-dressing, perhaps? Where did Islam stand on that one? He tried to recall some of Marwan Ibrahim Al-Kaysi’s dos and donts.
‘It is indecent for a Muslim to look at his private parts and his excretion
.’ Was that it? He was always looking at his private parts. Or had Maisie invented even more ghastly crimes for him.
‘Dogs are not allowed in the dwellings
.’ Maybe she had accused him of doing appalling things with Badger.

‘What do you . . . think I . . . er . . . might be, Headmaster?’ said Robert.

Malik looked puzzled by this remark. ‘Why, Wilson,’ he said – ‘a
Twenty-fourther
, of course. What did you think I meant?’

This, thought Robert, had a definitely sexual ring to it. Was it some ghastly anal version of
soixante-neuf?

‘A Twenty-fourther,’ went on Mr Malik, ‘like that damned Aziz and his friend! A group that threatens to split the Wimbledon Dharjees
right down the middle
! That endangers the security of this school, Wilson!’

‘Do you mean,’ said Robert, ‘those people who wear peculiar shoes on their right feet?’

The head seemed amused by Robert’s obvious ignorance of the subject. ‘They do indeed wear “peculiar shoes”, my dear Wilson! They do indeed! And you know why?’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t a clue,’ said Robert.

Mr Malik leaned forward. The muscles in his neck were quivering. Robert could not remember seeing him as disturbed as this. ‘
So as they can whip them off at a moment’s notice!
’ he hissed. ‘So
as they can get their damned toes out and waggle them at people!
’

Robert’s expression had obviously convinced him of his innocence.

‘The Prophet said, “Don’t walk with only one shoe. Either go barefoot or wear shoes on both feet.” ’

‘Did he?’ said Robert brightly. Muhammad had certainly covered the ground as far as etiquette was concerned. It was, in a way, rather restful to have a series of instructions covering almost every area of one’s life.

‘Long ago,’ continued the headmaster, ‘before the Dharjees came to Wimbledon, they shared a common history with the Ismailis. The Nizari Ismailis. Are these people familiar to you? They are an old, old sect in Islam.’

He grabbed Robert’s arm and squeezed it. ‘They are after Hasan!’ he said. ‘They won’t move yet, but when they do . . . watch out! You must watch him every minute of every day! And when we come near to the time of his Occultation you must never let him out of your sight.’

‘When is that?’ said Robert. ‘Is it in the school holidays?’

Mr Malik laughed wildly. ‘My dear Wilson,’ he said, ‘all you need to know is that it is not yet come. But it will. There are secrets of the Nizari Ismailis that are never spoken of – never spoken of! Like the Golden Calf of the Druze, my friend, they are a real and living mystery!’

But, before Robert had the chance to ask him about the Golden Calf of the Druze, or what a Nizari Ismaili might be, or how many of either group might be lurking around Wimbledon, the bell sounded for the end of break, and, below them, in the Great Hall, he heard the sounds of the whole school assembling for nature, recreation and Islamic dancing.

Malik strode towards his study door, flung it open, and turned to Robert with a firm, manly smile. ‘We will discuss this later,’ he said, ‘and we will think of a way to build trust between us. I like you, Wilson. I worked with you on the brochure. I want there to be trust between us. I want to feel that I have entrusted Hasan to a gentleman. You understand my meaning?’

Without waiting for an answer to this, he turned on his heel and went down to his waiting pupils.

It was not difficult to see how he had converted Maisie. After a few minutes with Mr Malik, Robert himself quite often felt like making the frighteningly short journey from doubt to belief. Islam, as the headmaster was always reminding him, meant
surrender.
Maybe he should surrender. Waggling his arms and legs in preparation for Islamic dancing, Robert started down the stairs after Rafiq and Dr Ali.
If things get too complicated
, he told himself, not for the first time in the last few months,
I can always make a run for it.

Mr Malik was very fond of nature. He used it, freely, in argument. ‘Look at the birds!’ he would say. ‘Look at the frogs! Are not they an example to us? We hang around shuffling our feet and making phone calls and they just
get on with it
!’

Whenever he had the chance he got the whole school out on to the Common. When they weren’t running across it, cheered on by the headmaster, they were snipping bits off it and bringing them back to school to put in jars. Once Malik had cut down a small tree, dragged it across the grass, and cut it up in the back garden, with the help of two large boys in the third year. Flora Strachan, the ecology-conscious pensioner, had chased after him, waving a copy of her pamphlet
An Uncommon Common
and threatening to report him to the police.

‘If you kill a wall gecko at a single blow, a hundred merits will be credited to your account. To kill it with two blows is less meritorious!’ Malik would say, grabbing Robert’s sleeve as he did so. ‘Do you know who said that?’ And Robert, who was by now learning the basic rule that if anybody said anything interesting it was probably Muhammad, would ask if by any chance it just happened to be a saying of the Prophet, to which the headmaster would reply, his eyes shining, ‘That’s it! That’s it! What a man! He covers everything! Cats! Dogs! Wall geckos!’ And, rocking with laughter, he would clasp Robert to him – something, thought Class
I’s
form master, as he joined the throng in the hall, the headmaster would probably not be doing a lot of in future.

‘In a line, boys!’ Mr Malik was calling. ‘In a line! Let us show them that the Wimbledon Independent Boys’ Day Islamic School is the best behaved, the best organized and the best equipped in Wimbledon!’

Mahmud and Sheikh were on the floor. Mahmud was trying to strangle Sheikh. Sheikh was trying to jab a pencil in Mahmud’s eyes. Mr Malik beamed at them in a fatherly manner. ‘Nature,’ he beamed. ‘This too is an aspect of nature. It is natural for young men to try and kill each other. Absolutely natural!’ So saying, he aimed a kick at Sheikh’s ribs and lifted Mahmud clear of the ground by his collar, flinging him into the stew of boys gathered around the window that overlooked the front garden.

Through the doors at the back, from the kitchen area, came Maisie. She started, very cautiously, towards the assembled school. For a moment Robert thought she might have had her feet bound, and then he realized that her problem was simply that her face mask was now so in line with Islamic law that her field of vision was only about six inches to the left and right of her. She stopped, raised her head, and tracked it left and right, like a robot searching out its target. When she had located the headmaster she moved towards him.

Mr Malik, ignoring these manoeuvres, swept out towards the front door. Dr Ali, suddenly submissive, moved quickly in front of him and opened it. Rain and wind swirled in, scattering papers and banging the door to Class 2’s room.

‘I need to talk to you,’ said Robert to Maisie, as the school filed out towards the Village.

‘You can’t,’ hissed Maisie. ‘I’m a woman!’

‘That doesn’t mean I can’t talk to you, does it?’

As far as he could remember from Marwan Ibrahim Al-Kaysi, you were allowed to talk to women. There was a tricky thing called
the seminally defiled state
, and you had to make sure that when your old lady left the house she was doing so
for a specific purpose
, but on the whole even Marwan was pretty
laissez-faire
about a girl and a boy talking about subjects of mutual interest.

Maisie’s conversion wasn’t quite as much of a surprise as it should have been. And even her clothes, once you had got over the original shock, were part of a long tradition of home-made outfits dating back to her days at the Mother Theresa Convent, South Wimbledon. The see-through trouser suit she had designed herself had caused a sensation at Rachel Ansorge’s party.

Islam was the first project they had shared since the Cranborne/ Mother Theresa joint school production of
The Tempest
all those years ago. Perhaps that was why he was beginning to find her almost unbearably attractive. He had never, before, seriously thought that she would get beyond the occasional sisterly peck on the cheek, or allowing him the privilege of listening to her troubles. But since the school term had started they had spent hour after hour in intense, ill-informed conversations about who was who in seventh-century Medina. Robert merely had to drop a few
bon mots
from Marwan Ibrahim Al-Kaysi’s handbook into the conversation and Maisie’s eyes widened the way they did when you offered to take her out for a meal or when she was telling you how someone had told someone that she had a beautiful mouth.

Her costume made her more, rather than less, attractive to him. ‘
A Muslim woman’s dress consists of three items – a shift, a veil and a cloak
.’ So, according to Marwan anyway, underneath that long, black cloak was a shift. And underneath the shift . . . As the school filed across the High Street and up towards the Common, Robert found he was sweating. Was there anything underneath the shift? Assuming he did, one day, manage to get her into bed, what would happen after she had shimmied off the veil, let the cloak fall around her naked ankles, and then eased her white, sweet-smelling flesh out of the shift to reveal . . . What? What was ideologically correct Islamic underwear? Presumably an item so secret that they were even keeping it from Dr Al-Kaysi of the University of Yarmouk.