‘They say one of them comes to visit you at the house. A woman. A Turk.’
‘Who told you that?’ Not Bill, he thinks, please. He would not have thought that Bill, even with his disapproval of the arrangement, would stoop so low as telling a man like Calvert.
‘Rawlings. You remember – you treated him.’
‘I remember his pipe. My ward still smells of it.’
‘Well, we’re in the same digs now. Sly old fox, I said. Wouldn’t have thought you were the sort, Munroe.’
‘It is not at all like that. Rawlings, typically, has got entirely the wrong idea about something that should be extremely clear.’
‘He said it was extremely clear.’
‘Well then I can only say that he has chosen to see precisely what he wanted to see.’
‘I should say that whatever you tell me, Munroe, I’m fairly certain I’m not going to be convinced.’
He wishes that he did not feel the need to explain himself to a man like Calvert. He tells himself that it is not merely a matter of pride. A man like Calvert could prove dangerous.
‘She came to me because her son needed treatment – very urgently, one of the worst cases of cerebral malaria I have seen since Mesapotamia. I had little choice other than to treat the child. It is what I do.’
‘I suppose it doesn’t hurt that she is … how did Rawlings put it? A “looker”?’
‘I had not noticed.’ Even to his own ears, even though he means it – or at least thinks he means it – it does not ring true.
When he leaves the bar he feels an urgent need for a cigarette. His hands are clumsy with the tobacco, the papers, he makes a mess of the first and has to give up on it. He is quite literally shaking with anger. Partly at Calvert – though mainly at himself. He should not have stooped to trying to explain himself. That is what it is: damaged pride. Not, definitely not, because Calvert’s questions came too close to a truth he has worked hard not to acknowledge.
Nur
‘An utter disgrace,’ her grandmother is saying. ‘Gül hanım, you know, from downstairs, tells me that there are Ottoman women taking their refreshments in the Pera Palace hotel these days, surrounded by the most unsavoury elements. And,’ – a scandalised undertone – ‘one hears of even worse. One hears the most despicable rumours. They say there are those who have married the occupiers. Women from the very oldest families.’
They may not be mere rumours. On perhaps three or four occasions, Nur has seen an Ottoman woman walking with a foreign officer. The first time she saw it she stared for so long and so hard that the woman must have felt her gaze: she looked across at Nur with something like defiance, and Nur was first to drop her eyes. Walking through the old quarter of Fatih, where some of the most illustrious families have lived for centuries, she sees a French officer watering a flowerbed. A woman leans from the shutters above, calling out instructions: a little more for the yellow tulips, which were particularly thirsty. She watches them, realising as she does that what she feels is a sense of trespass, a quiet outrage. Yes: she disapproves.
She had thought little would shock her, in this new reality – in which transgression is now the normal state of affairs. Yet this does. What do these alliances mean? Are they born of convenience, of pragmatism? Matches here have frequently been made on the basis of little more. Yet these, across language, culture, religion, are something new. They are occurring in full defiance of belief, too: a Muslim woman is forbidden from marrying a man of another religion. True, for one from a background such as Nur’s this would not necessarily prove an obstacle: her family has never been particularly strict about such dictates of the faith. Her father and mother drank wine, none of them save her long-dead grandfather have ever fully observed Ramazan.
How might her life – all of their lives – be different, bettered, if she were to do the same? It would not be so difficult. On every excursion through the busier parts of town she has felt herself observed by the foreign men as an object of curiosity, even of desire. They would have access to better food, better living arrangements; they might even reclaim the old house. She is certain that her mother’s condition might be improved by a return to her beloved home. Surely it would be worth being despised for such gains? When she thinks of it like this it seems almost a kind of selfishness that she has not sought out such an arrangement.
And yet she could no more do so than she could walk into one of the new Pera establishments and offer herself up for a more nakedly transactional agreement. She knows that it is not her grandmother’s inevitable wrath that would prevent her – or not just, though it is a convenient excuse. It is her own pride.
George
The boy has the book open in front of him.
‘Are you enjoying it?’
‘I understand the pictures better than the words. There are many I do not know.’
‘Of course. But I am impressed that you can read any of it. Where did you learn your English?’
‘Nur hanım.’
He finds it odd, the way the boy refers to his mother like this. An Ottoman tradition, perhaps, just as the fact that there are no surnames. ‘Of course. She is a school-teacher?’
‘Yes. Though there are not as many lessons now. Most of the pupils have left.’
‘Ah. Well, I am sorry to hear it.’ He is; he cannot imagine her, somehow, as a person who would enjoy idleness.
‘Now she embroiders linens. For money.’
‘I see.’ He knows little of this woman, but for some reason the image of her sitting for painstaking hours over an embroidery is an incongruous one. He cannot imagine her being still. He sees that
