East of Wimbledon (6 page)

‘Won’t you get involved in fatwas and things?’ Robert’s mother was saying. ‘They can get awfully steamed up can Muslims, can’t they?’

Robert found he had started to sweat. He rearranged his face, rather primly, and said, ‘People in the West are very ignorant about Islam.’

He certainly knew nothing about it whatsoever. Everyone at the table, he realized, was looking at him. People always seemed to want him to speak, and he tried to oblige in his usual manner – by saying the first thing that came into his head.

‘It isn’t just about going down to the mosque,’ he went on, in a stern, authoritarian voice.

‘What is it about?’ said Maisie, her eyes shining.

People certainly sat up and listened when you told them you were a Muslim. It was a talking point.

‘Well,’ said Robert weightily, ‘as far as I can make out – and it’s early days yet – it’s about . . .’

What
was
it about? His father was looking at him in that eager, doggy way in which he looked for exam results, sports results, girl results and all the other results Robert had not, so far, been able to deliver.

‘It’s about . . .’ he began again.

Perhaps if he waited long enough he would receive some kind of divine guidance on this essential point. It did not, however, seem to be forthcoming.

‘It’s about the fact that Allah is . . .’ he groped for the right word – ‘very important. He is absolutely crucial. He is a . . . well . . . er . . . God!’

His father nodded, keenly, anxious not to interrupt his son’s flow. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that Al-Lah is the Arabic word for “God”!’

‘Is that right?’ said Robert, trying not to sound too surprised by this fact. ‘Well, of course, I am rather new to it. You probably know as much as me. More, probably!’

Mr Wilson shook his head and gave a slightly superior smile. ‘Muslim . . . Christian . . .’ he said. ‘What’s the difference basically?’

This seemed to have brought them full circle. As Robert was not able to enlighten anyone on this point, he contented himself with a kind of shrug.

Mr Wilson, who was showing worrying signs of being well informed about the Islamic world, went on, ‘The thing Muslims are very hot on is the Koran. They look at it morning, noon and night. They can’t get enough of it. It is to them the
crucial
book!’

Robert’s mother clearly felt her son was being upstaged. She cleared her throat delicately, smoothed her greying hair, and looked at Robert, as she often did, as if he was a nervous dinner guest whom she was determined to encourage.

‘What’s the Koran
like
?’ said his mother. ‘And how did you get involved with it? Did someone give you a copy on a station or something? A sort of missionary? Or was it someone at the door?’

Robert paused. Then he said, ‘I just . . . er . . . picked it up,’ he said – ‘in a bookshop. And found it . . . you know . . . unputdownable!’

He didn’t think they looked ready to be told about the school. His mother was gulping air, rather fast, and patting down the back of her hair – something she did only when seriously concerned. And his father’s attempt at bluff, common-man-style interest in his son’s conversion could not conceal the rising panic in his eyes.

‘You should read it,’ said Robert.

He, too, should get around to reading it – preferably in the fairly near future.

‘They chant it,’ Mr Wilson senior was saying, ‘from the top of those high buildings they have. Will you be doing that? Do they have any of them in Wimbledon?’

‘Any what?’ said Robert’s mother, with a little sniff of disapproval as she rose from the table and started to clear away the plates.

‘Any of the tall things Muslims shout from in the mornings,’ said Mr Wilson. ‘I doubt they have any of them in Wimbledon.’

‘There are
masses
of Muslims in Wimbledon,’ said Robert’s mother, ‘but I’ve never seen them shouting from high buildings. At any time of the day. There were hundreds of them at Cranborne, and they were all very well behaved.’

She looked, darkly, at Robert. ‘They did very well in exams,’ she said, as she stacked the plates on the sideboard. Then she turned to the group at the table, and, putting a hand, rather theatrically, to her close-cropped hair, said, ‘Shall we have coffee on the
terrasse
and look at the garden?’

She was always saying things like this. She was never happier than when moving guests around her house in the interests of gentility. No sooner had you got comfortable than she was urging you to take
digestifs
in the conservatory, or
biscuits
on the lawn, or
gâteaux
on the roof. She pirouetted, briefly, in the middle of the wooden floor and waved a hand towards the upper part of the house.
‘En route, mes braves!’
she said.

Mrs Wilson would have been happier in Versailles than in Wimbledon Park Road. But she was making the best of it.

‘
Ça sera superbe, Chérie!’
said Mr Wilson, rising bravely to the challenge of her French. ‘That was absolutely
delicious!’

Her food was always delicious. Her judgements always sound. Her dress sense always impeccable.

How did people manage to be happily married?
thought Robert, as they trooped up the stairs. What was the trick of it? A dedicated cultivation of a certain kind of insensitivity, presumably. Years and years and years of managing not to notice things that might annoy you.

The Wilsons’
terrasse
was a wrought-iron balcony, jutting out from the back of their corner house. It afforded a view not only of the garden but also of a large group of communal dustbins belonging to the flats that overlooked their house. It also, as Robert’s father was fond of saying, offered an unlimited chance to enjoy the advantages of a burnt-out car, a large concrete shed with the words
CHELSEA WANKERS
written on it and the street that led away from all this, up the hill to a part of Wimbledon the Wilsons had never been able to afford. Not that it had stopped them dreaming – Mr Wilson had expected promotion right up until the moment he had been made redundant.

They had only just sat down when a car screeched round the corner, climbed on to the pavement, and stopped a matter of inches from a neighbour’s garden wall. It was a silver Mercedes, about the size of a small swimming-pool, but its bodywork was badly rusted, and the engine sounded as if it was trying to absorb a few kilos of iron filings. It roared ambitiously, then died. The driver’s door opened to reveal the headmaster of the Wimbledon Islamic Independent Day School (Boys).

He looked anxious. He almost ran towards the Wilsons’ house, then stopped, with a theatrical flourish, just short of it and, shading his eyes with his hand, looked up at the balcony.

‘Wilson!’ he said, in deep, urgent tones. ‘Wilson! You must come! You must come now, Wilson! Urgent school business! Wilson!’

Robert found he was getting to his feet. Maisie, for some reason, was doing the same. She moved to the iron railing at the edge of the balcony and peered down at Mr Malik like a keen student of aquatic life who has just spotted a new species of tropical fish.

‘Bring your wife, Wilson,’ said Mr Malik, ‘and also your children if necessary. But come! I beseech you! I beg and implore you! Come!’

Mr Malik was stretching out his arms. He looked like a man about to fish out a small guitar and continue this conversation to musical accompaniment.

Robert’s father and mother were both, in different ways, narrowing the distance between chin and neck, a gesture that, like tortoises, they often used when threatened. His father was making rapid, worried clicking noises at the back of his throat as he too rose and moved – in a racially tolerant manner – towards the edge of the balcony.

‘Is he . . . one of . . .
them?’
whispered Mrs Wilson, with the kind of clarity actors affect when playing a deathbed scene to a large theatre.

Robert, as he made his way down to Mr Malik’s car, followed by Maisie, did not attempt to answer the question. He would have described Mr Malik, to almost anyone, without being quite sure why he was doing so, as
‘one of us’
.

Mr Malik beamed at Maisie, and rubbed his hands together briskly. ‘You have a beautiful wife, Wilson!’ he said.

‘Oh, we’re not married,’ said Maisie, swiftly. ‘I’m just a very, very old friend of his. Are you Robert’s spiritual mentor? You see Robert needs help, because he’s—’

Before she had the chance to say anything more about their sex life, Robert grabbed her arm and steered her towards the car.

‘What’s the problem, Headmaster?’

‘We are going to collect a pupil!’ said Malik.

This, Robert felt, was somewhat alarming news. It was, after all, the middle of August. He had assumed, from the deserted look of the school, that, like every other educational establishment in England, they were on holiday. Perhaps, he thought, as he and Maisie got into the back seat, the Islamic school year was different.

‘We have to go to them if they won’t come to us, Wilson,’ said Mr Malik, who was watching Maisie with some interest. ‘We have to get out there and pitch!’

Robert felt nervous. For some reason he did not like the idea of Mr Malik being so close to his territory. And he liked even less the fact that his employer seemed prepared to adopt Maisie. He found himself wondering where the headmaster might live. Did he, perhaps, live above the school? He gave the impression of a man who had simply appeared in the middle of Wimbledon, like a djinn in a fairy story.

‘Who is he?’ hissed Maisie. ‘Is he a mullah?’

‘I don’t think so,’ whispered Robert, in reply – ‘or if he is he keeps very quiet about it!’

It was also, thought Robert, a bit late in the day to be starting lessons. Perhaps the Islamic Wimbledon Boys’ Day Independent School was going to be working a night shift.

Maisie turned to Robert. ‘I think he’s
sweet
!’ she shrieked quietly.

Malik ignored the remark, but put one large, well-manicured hand up to his hair. The back of his tropical suit, Robert noted, was powdered with dandruff.

‘Are we going to pick all the children up ourselves,’ said Robert, ‘or will some of them get to school by public transport?’

‘A school,’ said the headmaster, giving him a curious glance, ‘can develop in various ways. The majority of the boys will obviously arrive under their own steam – although, Wilson, I have to say that at this particular point in time we do not have any boys!’

He gave a rather mad laugh as they drove, at some speed, up Wimbledon Park Road towards the Village. To their right was the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. As they passed its steel gates Robert felt the usual surprise that such a monument should be there at all. Although its windows caught the sun, and behind the barbed-wire-crested wall you could see the military green of its oval stands, it had the air of some sinister scientific research establishment – a place designed for something darker than tennis.

‘Although the school is not fully operational,’ said Mr Malik, ‘we will collect this boy now.’

He turned round and looked Maisie full in the face, as he accelerated towards an oncoming lorry.

‘His parents wish us to “hang on” to him until we are ready to go. He has fallen under harmful influences and needs the support of a typically stable “UK” background. He can stay with you, Wilson!’

This seemed a slightly unusual way of proceeding. Robert had never heard of a school in which pupils were acquired on a door-to-door basis. But, of course, education, like so much else these days, was a business.

‘He is a very intelligent boy,’ said the headmaster, as if in answer to Robert’s unvoiced doubts, ‘which is why I want to get my hands on him at double-quick speed. I think I am going to give him a scholarship.’

‘Oooh!’ said Maisie, who seemed to have no problems adapting to the curious pace of life in the Boys’ Wimbledon Independent Day Islamic School. ‘What in?’

They had somehow survived the lorry. They were now headed, at about fifty miles an hour, for someone’s front garden. Malik bashed the horn two or three times, took his hands off the wheel, and waved his arms expressively. He braked hard, and the car hit the kerb and bucked across the road like an angry horse.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘physics, Greek, Latin, French. That sort of thing. A general scholarship. He is a first-class boy.’

‘How did you find him?’ said Robert. ‘Did you advertise?’

Malik laughed in an open, friendly manner. He rapped on the horn as if to emphasize his good humour.

‘Precisely, Wilson!’ he said. ‘I advertised. I put an advert in
Exchange and Mart
!’

He seemed to find this thought very amusing. When he had reasserted control over the Mercedes, he said, in a suddenly sober voice, ‘Actually, Wilson, that is not at all a bad idea.’

He paused, as if considering something.

‘I must tell you something, my dear Wilson,’ he went on, ‘about the extraordinary history and traditions of our Wimbledon Dharjees. I am sure you have seen them about the place.’

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

‘They are a very fine bunch of chaps,’ said Mr Malik thoughtfully – ‘not unlike the Bombay Khojas. But of course based in Wimbledon as opposed to Bombay. They are distantly connected to the Nizari Ismailis, of whom I am sure you have heard.’

Robert tried to look as if he had heard of at least some of the people Malik had mentioned.

‘But,’ went on the headmaster, ‘there are bad eggs amongst them, as there are everywhere. Strange secrets and stories from the dawn of the Islamic era!’

Robert nodded.

‘That,’ said Malik, ‘is all you really need to know. Some of the Dharjees are first-class chaps and others are really awful ticks. I will tell you which ones are which.’

When they reached Wimbledon Village Malik drove north, towards the large houses that face the Common. About half a mile further on, he turned right through a pair of huge iron gates. As they came in to the front drive, the gates closed, silently, behind them. Something made Robert look up at the window above the front door.