Bird Summons

stables. Further inwards towards the sea and beyond the bowling green were the living quarters, the suites, dining and drawing rooms. Salma wandered around, the grass a bright green beneath her, the derelict buildings humble in their simplicity, solemn in their inner darkness. From the tourists around her, she caught the tones of foreign languages, a softness surrounded the place and the wind blew gently. From a porthole of stone, she looked down over the water. It was more purple than the sky, the waves uneven frills. To the left were high fields where bales of rolled hay looked like barrels laid down on their sides. This was the same view the inhabitants of the castle had gazed at long ago. The workers and ladies; the gardeners and stable boys. It struck her that Lady Evelyn must have come here as a girl in the late nineteenth century, as an adult in the twentieth. The woman who travelled in the Sahara and in Kenya would not have failed to visit the east coast of her own country. Once again Salma felt a closeness to her, an awareness that was more than curiosity.

In the chapel, she stood on consecrated ground, the sky above her withholding rain. In 1276, people knelt here and worshipped. They were not her ancestors and she did not share their religion, but she understood them because she herself believed and she herself lived each day knowing she would, after she died, be held to account. It suddenly dawned on her that this chapel perched on the edge of the sea was facing south-east, the direction of Mecca. It was parallel to every purpose-built mosque in the country! Lady Evelyn, who left instructions to be buried facing Mecca, would have delighted in this coincidence. Salma smiled, imagining bringing it to Lady Evelyn’s notice. The one to hear back, ‘Really?’ in a posh Scottish accent.

In the nearby kitchen, indicated by the wide arch of the fireplace, she heard the word ‘Really?’ in Arabic. Clear and intimate, a snap into her consciousness, coming after a lag in the conversation she had been imagining, a delay in reply like on a poor long-distance line. There was no one near Salma and she was sure, as she could ever be sure, that it was Lady Evelyn’s voice speaking to her in the Arabic she learnt from her nannies when she was a child growing up in Cairo and Algiers. Hearing the dead? Imagining, more likely. She knew what Lady Evelyn looked like from the photos – like Gertrude Bell, someone had described her, slim, active, snobbish and chatty with scrunched-up hair under a desert hat – and now Salma had her voice too. She looked up and saw a formation of grey clouds surrounding a sky-blue body of water. The loch was in her mind, where they were heading. How odd it had been to organise and reorganise this trip. The way it evolved from a day trip for the whole of the women’s group, to only the three of them but with the addition of the stay at the loch. She could not give up the visit to Lady Evelyn just because the majority were against it. Many of these women lulled themselves into believing they were in Britain temporarily; that somehow, someday, they would return ‘home’. Moni and Iman were different; they wanted to be here for the long haul. And Salma was the one with the Scottish husband, she was the one who must always be making the effort to belong. Digging deeper all the time, craving connections, self-conscious that her roots, despite the children, might not be strong enough.

Sometimes she would walk into a room to find them with David and she would have no clue what they were saying even though she could understand every single word. She would then feel that they were his children and not hers. She was the outsider, the foreign wife, and they were one unit. She had believed foolishly that they would be born with a hard drive of her memories. That they would know Egypt as she had known it, the crowded bus to Saint Catherine on the trip she had organised for the student club – Egypt, the Beloved – and how they stopped on the way for breakfast. Foul and tamiyah and tea with mint, Amir shouting at the waiters, in truth abusing them to make everyone laugh. And she had laughed too though she wouldn’t now, but still she noted with bitterness that her children lived in a world where it was okay to be rude to their parents but to a waiter they must be very polite.

She used to love a good argument but not with them. Despite all their bravado and independence, children growing up here needed to be handled delicately. One thwack with the hairbrush, only one, but the teacher saw the bruise and she and David were called in. The child was sticking a pencil in her ear and refusing to listen to warnings that she could puncture her eardrum. But no matter. Salma felt that she was embarrassing David in front of his own people, though he never reproached her except to say that when he was growing up plenty of children were given a good hiding, but no one did that any more. She didn’t want him to be ashamed of her, to feel that he had picked her up from the back of beyond, and so she became more careful, often not at ease. No matter how many clients she massaged and no matter that she had given birth to children with Scottish blood, deep down his people would think that she was not really one of them, that she was not British enough.

A message flashed on her phone. It was from Amir: I am listening. If he was listening, what should she be saying? Complaints and the luxury of regrets. She did not reply and instead wandered back to