Tree of Pearls. Louisa Young

      

      

       Copyright

      The Borough Press

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      Published by The Borough Press 2015

      First published by Flamingo, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2000

      Copyright © Louisa Young 2000

      Louisa Young asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      Cover images © Shutterstock.com

      Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780007578009

      Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007397020

      Version: 2015-09-15

       Praise for The Angeline Gower Trilogy:

      ‘Funny, sexy and tender’ ESTHER FREUD

      ‘Spectacularly worth reading’ The Times

      ‘A stylishly literate thriller’ Marie Claire

      ‘You will keep coming back to this book when you should be doing something else’ LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES

      ‘Exciting, compelling and tense’ Time Out

      ‘Funny and scary. In writing honestly and unsentimentally, Young celebrates the unequivocal nature of parental love with verve and style’ Mail on Sunday

      ‘Wry, perky, entertaining’ Observer

      ‘Engaging, wise-cracking, likeable, brilliantly sustained … funny, humane and utterly readable’ Good Housekeeping

       Dedication

       For Amira Ghazalla, the friend at the surface of the water

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Praise

      Dedication

      Introduction

      Chapter One: Winning the peace

      Chapter Two: Beware policemen in pubs

Chapter Three: I’m not Canute

Chapter Four: Answering the phone to Chrissie Bates

Chapter Five: Kicking

       Chapter Six: Yes, I am

       Chapter Seven: Making friends

       Chapter Eight: Yalla, let’s go

       Chapter Nine: The palaces

       Chapter Ten: Ya habibi, oh my darling

       Chapter Eleven: Convoy

       Chapter Twelve: Abydos

       Chapter Thirteen: The Winter Palace

       Chapter Fourteen: ‘Well, I woke up this morning,

       Chapter Fifteen: Ezwah

       Chapter Sixteen: I don’t think you understand

       Chapter Seventeen: A little touch of someone in the night

       Chapter Eighteen: Sekhmet

       Chapter Nineteen: Iftar, Eid, the end

       Acknowledgements

       About the Author

       Also by Louisa Young

       About the Publisher

       Introduction

      I wrote these novels a long time ago. I spent my days correcting the grammar at the Sunday Times, and my nights writing. I could no longer travel the world doing features about born-again Christian bike gangs in New Jersey, or women salt-miners in Gujarat, or the Mr and Mrs Perfect Couple of America Pageant in Galveston, Texas, which was the sort of thing I had been doing up until then. I had to stay still. I had a baby. Babies focus the mind admirably: any speck of time free has to be made the most of.

      I had £300 saved up, so I put the baby and the manuscript in the back of a small car and drove to Italy, where we lived in some rooms attached to a tiny church in a village which was largely abandoned, other than for some horses and some aristocrats. A nice girl groom took the baby to the sea each day in my car while I stared at the pages thinking: ‘If I don’t demonstrate some belief in this whole notion of novels, and me as a novelist, then why should anyone else?’

      Re-reading these books now, I think, ‘Christ! Such energy!’ I was so young – so full of beans. I described the plot to my father, who wrote novels and was briefly, in his day, the new Virginia Woolf. After about five minutes he said, ‘Yes, that all sounds good’ – and I said, ‘Dad, that’s just chapter one’.

      It was only about twenty years ago, and a different world. Answerphones not mobiles, no internet. Tickets and conductors on the bus. And it was before 9/11, and the mass collapse of international innocence which 9/11 and George Bush’s reaction to it dragged in their miserable, brutalising wake. Could I write a story now, where an English girl and her Egyptian lover meet at the surface of the water? Yes, of course – but it could not be this story.

      Anyway, I have grown up too thoughtful to write like this now. I exhaust myself even reading it.

      I see too that these, my first novels, were the first pressing of thoughts and obsessions which have cropped up again and again in things I’ve written since. It seems I only really care about love and death and surgery and history and motorbikes and music and damage