Into Suez (19 page)

‘Excuse me,
ya Habibi
, but she’s burning,’ said the young woman with the toddler, in a resonant whisper. ‘She’s ill.’

Ben laid his big palm on the child’s forehead and, finding it hot, said they should put her to bed. ‘You can sponge her to cool her off, Yasmin.’

‘But I’ll miss my turn!’ the girl burst out. She was dressed in black, with a long white headscarf. When she spoke, Ailsa realised she was younger by far than she had appeared. Fourteen or fifteen at the most.

‘Of course you won’t. No, no. You must both stay here with us until we find a place for you. Our guests, no, don’t cry, shush, all will be well.’

Helping to put the sick child to bed, Ailsa thought with a pang of complicated guilt of Nia.
I hope it isn’t catching. Don’t breathe in her germs
. She was ashamed of her selfishness but you had to put your own children first, surely?

These children’s entire family had been murdered. The sisters had been out at the river drawing water when the soldiers came; they’d crouched in the reeds until the men had gone. Yasmin had walked all the way to the border
with Lebanon, carrying the younger child, who’d caught an infection in the camp. Not typhus,
Habibi
said, don’t worry. Ailsa’s guts knotted at the unspeakable word. No, no, typhus doesn’t present like this,
Habibi
reassured the elder sister: don’t panic, Yasmin. For there was typhus in the camps. It had gained a hold in the insanitary, crowded conditions. But this was not how typhus displayed itself.
Habibi
, to comfort his wife’s niece, had quit his genial role as everyone’s darling for a medic’s authoritative calm.

‘But are you sure, Ben – definitely not typhus?’ Ailsa whispered.

What if it had been herself and Nia? All comforts stripped away; everyone you loved slaughtered. Ailsa was used to thinking of the War as over; of extermination camps as an obscenity the Allies had cleaned up. But how could the survivors ever feel safe? Zionism had turned Jewish fears of a second Holocaust into the mother of fresh violence; fratricide had just moved on, a chain reaction that was never over. Arabs were paying for a European crime. Leaving Yasmin and her sister, Ailsa sat dismayed in an atmosphere steeped in absent hope, which contrasted strangely with the room’s opulence. In one corner stood a glossy concert grand, beneath a portrait of Julie Brandt-Simon. The red fire of Julie’s silk dress glowed against a dark green background. Such an interior, with its cultivation and taste, must bring home to this exiled Arab intelligentsia the extent of what had been lost.

Mona peered through the open door, wrinkled her nose and grinned. Ailsa pointed at her watch. Mona shut her remaining visitors in the living room for half an hour, leading Ailsa to her study.

A fan at the centre of the ceiling turned slow arms.
Between the slats of closed shutters, threads of light glowed, picking out the emerald and turquoise colour of carpets hung on three of four walls. A bed was covered in a white cotton counterpane woven with gold lettering: verses from a Sufi poem, Mona said, as they negotiated the sudden shyness between them. Very beautiful ones. When you next come, I’ll translate them for you. And you will come. You will, won’t you?

‘Yes,’ Ailsa said. ‘Yes I will. Of course I will.’

‘That’s all right then.’

‘It’s wonderful, what you’re doing, Mona.’

‘No. But better than nothing. Nobody wants to know.’

‘
I
know now. Or at least I’m beginning to understand.

I didn’t really, before, Mona.’

‘Dearest,’ Mona said and gazed wonderingly at Ailsa. ‘Dear Ailsa. Oh love, you came. At
last
. I came to your house. Several times. But I hadn’t the courage to … in case Joe … and I knew I hadn’t the right, no right at all, to disturb your peace. I thought perhaps you’d forgotten me?’

Ailsa shook her head. She let Mona take both her hands and turn them over, kissing the palms. She shivered. The thought of Mona spying was disquieting. And yet it seemed the most natural and inevitable thing in the world to be here with her friend.

‘Oh, I’ve missed you, Ailsa.’

‘I missed you too.’

‘Did you? Well, that’s something,’ said Mona. ‘Nothing more lonely than missing someone who doesn’t miss you, is there? You wouldn’t know, of course, how could you, Angel Ailsa? It’s been, oh, just a bitter time. Apart from
Habibi
of course. Trying to do something for people but it’s so little. They have
nothing
, Ailsa. People from my
childhood in Qatamon, they stood all round me, they held up the sky, they were my rock and Mama’s rock, now look at them, destitute. And our neighbours here, what can I say? They are, oh my God, ghouls, gorgons. Apparently they object to the “bad foreign types”
Habibi
and I entertain. Our friends and family might be “Arab spies working for the Soviets” apparently. We had this high-up geezer with ginger moustaches come round to haul me over the coals.
Habibi
made me promise not to tell him where to get off so I was as nice as ninepence, nearly killed me. Oh sorry, I said, I’m so
frightfully
sorry, they are just a few relatives down on their luck. But hang on, here come the kids. Quick, Ailsa, come and look.’

Ailsa peered down from the window at schoolgirls scuffing along in uniform and cherry red sandals, speaking over one another in a high-pitched nasal drawl. The two in front, Mona explained, were the offspring of a Brigadier. The others, whose pa was only a Major, had been told to walk two paces behind. True. This was their mental level.

‘But tell me about you. How are
you
, my love? And Nia? And Joe? I saw him at the concert.’

‘Joe loves music, he was so moved.’

‘Was he? Does that mean…? My playing was your doing, it was your concert really, you know that, don’t you?’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘It was. Without you I doubt if I’d ever have risked going back to playing, Ailsa. Perhaps I would, ultimately, who knows? It was one of those godgiven moments when someone comes along and just changes the lights and shades without a second thought. The lousy Air Force has
forbidden me to give any more concerts for the so-called
native population
. The bastards will let me play in the Officers’ Mess to the Memsahibs. Can you believe those people?
Habibi
reckons we’d better toe the line or they’ll send us home. Anyway I want to play for you. With you, rather. Beautiful, amazing Ailsa. Look – stay for supper. You will, won’t you?’

‘You know I can’t.’

‘Then we’ll meet in Ish. When? Tomorrow morning? Please say yes. You can’t say no.’

The boys burst into the Vic. Not much doing in there, just a few lads who’d been propping up the bar for several weeks by the looks of them, slowly raising glass to lips, keeping themselves topped up, pickled boys who spoke little and slowly to the super-courteous barman, an oily foreigner capable of seeing no evil and hearing no evil, who would agree with whatever was put to him by a thirsty Briton on pay day. Pocketing the change, for like all his tribe he was a thief. And stab you in the back on your way out.

There was a battered joanna in the corner, like an old bloke with stained gnashers and not a full set at that – a seedy instrument with nicotine-brown keys, missing several. The innards had been fixed with elastic bands. Never seen a tuner. The boys positioned themselves around it and – one, two, three! – broke into song, Lofty Hill sketching a rough and ready melody on the piano while Joe let rip his powerful tenor.

Rounds of drinks. Not much in their stomachs. Toasts to the birthday boy. Speech by Chalkie, chiefly
erm erm
,
Joe filling in for his tongue-tied pal. Dancing. The Dashing White Sergeants. The Campbells Are Coming oh ho oh ho.

An influx of already inebriated Salford lads from the RAF Regiment. The racket so uproarious that you had to yell at the top of your voice to get heard.

Jokes. Blue jokes Joe didn’t generally appreciate which nevertheless struck him as being so bloody funny he bent double. Dusty Miller on top form. No ladies in the room to be upset, in any case. Joe was a shaken bottle of pop with the cork pulled out. Chalkie chuckled to himself, looking down into his beer, fishing out a fly. A winged creature, said Dusty, drowned and meant you no harm, boy. Not joking this time.

Another? Make that a brandy.

There was a Scotchman, an Irishman – but no Welshman. Hammering of fists on tables. Beermats skimming to the four corners of the bar. The patient head waiter picking them up. The more he fielded the flying beermats, the more the lads felt bound to skim, perfecting their aim, for instance, at the chandelier. The head waiter’s bent back was turned; the
gallabiyya
rode up nearly to the back of his knees, exposing spindling and for some unknown reason hysterically comical calves. What does a Scotchman wear under his sporran?

What does an Arab wear under his skirt, hey? Hey? Give up?

Ailsa accepted a lift as far as the station. By the skin of her teeth she managed to catch the second bus of the day, which would get her home in time for tea. She sat panting and scarlet, collecting her scattered self. Too late to cook
for Joe and Nia but at least she’d be in time to meet the returning busload of little ones and to hear all the doings of the day. She hoped there’d been no cases of sunstroke or prickly heat, and no small boys throwing up on the back seat. Doubtless Babs, who had accompanied the trip wearing an armband, would have had it all in hand.

Ailsa wrestled to readjust to the world of El-Marah. To be interested in the doings of the menfolk and kiddies. And yet it all seemed tediously irrelevant, a theatre in which Ailsa Birch played a menial role as Mrs Joseph Roberts. Her arms had caught the sun in that dash through Ish. Her fair skin scalded easily and would need lashings of cold cream when she got home. They could just have Spam for tea, or corned beef, that would be best. Nia wouldn’t want much. The youngsters, who’d have feasted on fish paste and jam tarts, would probably be content with a long drink and a digestive. Joe, bless him, never grumbled about his food.

Where had the time gone? The bus was drawing in to El-Marah. The jewel colours of Mona’s carpets still glowed in her mind’s eye. The girl in the headscarf carrying her sick sister, saying,
No, Habibi, no, I’ll lose my place in the queue
. The soft kiss, lips brushing lips as Ailsa and Mona parted. My sister, my wife. But never mind all that. She must seal in all these fizzing thoughts and not pull out the stopper until she could be on her own, Nia in the land of nod, Joe asleep beside her. And when she was quite sure those two dear ones were completely out of it, she’d allow herself to think of Mona. Slip out of bed and sit close up to the fan in her nightie, to go over it all again and again. But blank it off now.

When Ailsa saw the Military Police Jeeps, she sprinted.

Nia! Something had happened to Nia!

Rushing in, she ran full tilt into Joe hurrying out of the back door. His face white to the gills.

‘Joe – is it Nia?’

‘No. No, my beauty, not Nia. She’s still on the bus.’

‘What then?’

Joe wrung his hands. She’d never seen a man wring his hands before but, she observed, this was what he did. She gripped his hands to hold them still, and tears brimmed before she had the least idea what she should cry about. Ailsa smelt the booze on his breath. But he wasn’t drunk.

Something had happened, he said hoarsely. In Ish.

Oh my God, she thought. I’ve been in Ish. He’s been in Ish. What if she’d been seen in the passenger seat of
Habibi
’s car?

A crowd of blokes had gone on bikes into the desert. Just for a laugh, Joe said with tears in his voice.

‘But I thought you said you were in Ish?’ she said stupidly.

Nia and Mona had taken to one another, no doubt about it. There seemed no avenue their conversation could take without intense interest. No avenue but one, and Mona made no further move in that direction. The bad thing, whatever that was, was unnamed. After dinner, Poppy interrogated Mona about her life – and she talked easily, comfortably, as they sauntered on the upper deck, the sea ink-black, moonlight trailing a path of mercury on the water. Nia felt the powerful attraction of the woman, the grandeur of her manner balanced by
self-deprecating
humour. And a hungry intensity that, if it set its sights on you, would never let you go. Whatever power it was she had exerted over Ailsa, she was now levelling at Ailsa’s daughter.

Mona had never remarried after Ben’s death and had no children of her own. She doubted if she’d have made even a ‘good enough’ mother, too selfish, too taken up with her own concerns. She couldn’t imagine summoning
interest in a small person’s socks. Whenever it had come over Mona to be broody, she’d tried the litmus test of sock-washing and the prospect held no magic for her.

They turned in early. Nia, lounging on her bed with a final glass of wine, thought how close Mona’s bed was to hers, through the membrane of the party wall. When she turned over, Mona turned over on the other side and when they lay face to face, their thoughts of one another flew into the partition like birds. The comfortable thrumming of the engine blanked off any sound from an adjacent cabin.

Red wine did funny things to Nia’s mind and didn’t agree with her, for she’d inherited a tendency to migraine. She had the sudden idea that it was snowing outside the porthole. But of course that was in another country. In Wales, where she remembered the winter of their return from Egypt, staying with
Mam-gu
. Nia in a green snowsuit, mittened and scarfed, was chucking snowballs with the other kids in Pleasant Street. Never seen the stuff before. Ignorant of what it was, but feeling that it was very like the desert, she’d crouched to pick up a mittenful and suck it; leapt along from boot to boot making a pattern; bent to study a robin’s footprints. Nia had been in heaven. The big boys and girls, whooping and squealing, had rolled a snowball all the way from the top to the bottom of the steep street. When it had reached the bottom, the ball was as big as Nia, thrillingly bigger even. They’d given him eyes of coal and a stick for a nose. He had a coal sack for a greatcoat and held a wrecked umbrella under his arm. Nia was in awe of him, in love with him. She’d stood still beside him, her face scalding, hands chilled in their sodden mittens. Then Mami had
come out of
Mam-gu
’s house, with folded arms, looking down at the children’s excitement.

And she’d smiled.

That had been something lovely and miraculous: Mami had smiled. Waved. And Nia, beside herself, had legged it towards her, whereupon something a bit funny happened.

She could not say what this had been.

This was Nia’s first winter memory. She’d never understood why it ended in that peculiar way that still made her tummy squirm and tickle. And feel she’d spoilt something good and sweet. But how? She saw now: they must have been just back from Egypt, where the Terrible Thing had happened. Ailsa’s face had become a mask from enduring the Terrible Thing. She had become a
machine-mother
who performed numb, necessary tasks and no more.

But then Mami had smiled. Which showed she could smile. Which released tension like an elastic band snapping. Which meant Nia could be forgiven for something very bad she had done in Egypt. Which could not be named.

But thereupon, when Mami smiled, Nia had done or said something that wiped the smile from Ailsa’s face. Whatever this had been, it was unintentional. But bad. She’d brought her badness home with her from Egypt to Wales.

Still, she was and remained used to being bad; Nia had put a brave face on it and returned to her game. She and her cousins raced in full cry out on to Trewyddfa Hill and tobogganed on tea trays or made angels by falling backwards in the drifts, flapping their arms up and down.

Having showered, Nia switched on the bedside lamp; picked up her book. She put it down again. Slowly Nia got
up and put her face up to the black porthole. She stood motionless. Nothing to see: no light, no land.

Where is my Daddy, Mami?

Those words, or others like them, were what Nia had unforgivably said.

In the night she awakened after weird dreams, feeling an infinitely comforting and at the same time threatening presence. I could just reach out, she thought. I could say, come in to me, Mona; talk to me. Please be with me. I could do that now. This recapitulated something very far back when, turning over in her crib, the child had seen through the bars two women in one another’s arms, swaying to and fro, to and fro. Such a solacing but at the same time anxious sight.

Nia sat up and found herself in tears, knocking on the party wall.

She waited. After a while, she seemed to hear tapping coming back. But the
Terra Incognita
was bucking and racing along like a mad thing. You couldn’t be sure that any sound wasn’t the engine.

The tapping came again. Immediately Nia cringed back into herself. Why did I do that? For goodness’ sake.

There was a pause. She heard, or thought she heard, Mona Serafin-Jacobs’s door opening. And her own door being knocked on.

Nia didn’t answer. But she slid out of the narrow bed and went to the door, listening to the other listening for her on the other side. The terrifying comforter breathing through the door, one who could not be heard, only intuited. If I just wait, Nia thought, she will go away. She mustn’t be let in. Whatever the Terrible Thing might have been, now after all these years Nia could not yet bring herself to ask.

At the port of Suez she woke early after a reverberating night in which the ship’s speed had risen. She’d been carried bareback on a racing horse like the child in
Erlkönig: Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?
…
Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind
. The stench of petrol permeated Nia’s cabin and, when she looked out of the porthole, she could see little but a pea soup fog over the port of Suez.
Who is riding so late through night and wind?
Ghostly cranes, derricks and towers rose out of this murk.
It is the father with his child
. Far too early: five in the morning. She’d go and grab a cup of tea at the lido, bring it down and read.

An elderly man by the tea and coffee urns turned and asked anxiously, ‘Was it happening before this?’

‘Sorry, was what happening?’

‘Exactly. What was?’

‘I’m not with you.’

‘Were there cups of tea?’

‘I think cups of tea are available all night, aren’t they?’

Confused as his words were, they resonated oddly with Nia.

‘But how do you know?’

‘Oh, the tea-making things are put out on this table for us, don’t worry. We can have as much as we want, any time we want.’

‘You do surprise me.’ His face was venerable, worn, with deep folds and wrinkles which suggested weary bafflement. ‘How do you know that you know?’ Without waiting for an answer to his increasingly abstruse questions, he smiled and said, ‘Hot chocolate is my favourite.’

‘Come on then, let me make you a cup.’

‘Oh, can you do that?’

‘I’d be delighted. How do you like it?’

Nia took his cup to a table and was just refusing a tip when his family appeared, chivvying gently: ‘Oh, there you are, Dad.’

A few wan folk sat in the lido, in grey-violet light, chatting over cups of tea. Sea mist was burning off, leaving a pink haze on the horizon. Liners lay at anchor just beyond the mole and yellow buoy markers bobbed like toy ducks. Dockers bent to their work on the quay, loading and unloading sacks in an unhurried rhythm, calling to one another, joking and chatting.

Nia sat and watched as low light gilded her fellow insomniacs’ faces into transient blessedness – half the face, rather, for the other lay in shadow.

Bit of fun, nothing out of the ordinary. No call to give him the evil eye. Dusty Miller, Lofty Hill, Chalkie, Taf Thomas and the boys, the usual culprits. Just riding up and down really over the canal in the desert. Pretty damn fast, letting off steam. Good God, no – no danger, boy. You only fall on sand, after all, like a pillow. They’d had a race or two. Got a thirst up.

Then off into Ish and a singsong round the joanna in the Victoria with the boys and a drink or few, there was, well, a bit of a shindig. And Joe seemed ashamed. What kind of a shindig? Ailsa asked, as lightly as possible, so that he wouldn’t clam up. Oh, you know, bach. All in fun, mind. High spirits. There were some lads from Abu Sueir, plastered, well away, been there all day, they got into a bit of a rough and tumble, our gang just sat on the sidelines and laughed. Honestly, Ailsa. Honour bright. Came out of
there a bit the worse for wear and got on the bikes and suddenly Chalkie wasn’t there. He didn’t come. I waited around a bit. Went back into the bar. Completely empty. The whole bastard lot had scarpered, except the wog with a fez behind the bar polishing glasses.

Joe has done something in Ish, Ailsa thought, that he’s ashamed of. Something violent. And maybe Chalkie had been disgusted and just took himself off.

Perhaps Joe was more drunk than he seemed. For he sat slouched forward looking at his hands, turning them first one way, then the other. He began to pick at the dirty nails of his right hand with those of the left one.

So where was Chalkie now? she asked Joe. ‘Joe! Where is he? Stop picking your nails. Use a file if you need to.’

Two Military Policemen were coming out of Irene’s. She was in there on her own, with her worst fears confirmed. But it would probably be all right, Joe assured Ailsa. Chalkie would turn up. Most likely he’d passed out and was lying in his own vomit down some sordid alley way, or perhaps he’d wandered off into the foreign quarter, Ailsa imagined, and got himself thoroughly lost, and even now was sitting in some pavement café … except that Chalkie was totally unadventurous and incurious, as far as she knew. A timorous man, who stuck with his own type.

‘Shall I go in to her?’ she asked Joe. ‘I should really, shouldn’t I? Joe, what is it? Are you tight, or what?’

‘Course not,
bach
. I’m a bit shocked.’

She could see now that he was quivering from head to foot. Ailsa knelt uncertainly, stroked his forearm; he was out in a cold sweat. She brought him sweet tea and coaxed him to drink. His blue, baffled eyes met her gaze and she forced
herself to smile encouragingly. Joe bucked up. They would go, he said, go and talk to Irene. She’d need them with her.

But it was clear when they knocked that Irene wanted a man with her. Joe might stay, if he didn’t mind, and if that was all right with Ailsa. Irene made a coy joke of the borrowing of Ailsa’s husband. Oh, and would Ailsa mind taking Timothy and picking up Christopher from the bus stop, and perhaps keep them with her until Roy came home? She had not been crying, Ailsa saw. Hadn’t given way at all but preserved an uncharacteristic calm, her pale eyebrows raised and forehead furrowed, peering over their shoulders the whole time, so as to spot Roy the minute he came into view. She looked and sounded a bit mad.

Ailsa bedded down the exhausted children in her and Joe’s big bed, pulling the balding blue candlewick bedspread up to their chins. They thrashed their limbs about in excitement at the strange linen and sleeping companions. She heard Topher whispering to Nia that now they were
married
, weren’t they, they had had a
wedding
actually, and Tim was their
best man
, that was why he was allowed to share. Then they all three slipped their thumbs in their mouths and dropped off. Easy as that.

Several hours later Joe came home for his shaving tackle. He’d stay over, kip down in the chair. No news, he said. No, nothing yet,
cariad
. He’d tell her the minute they heard anything.

‘How is she?’ Ailsa asked.

‘Fast asleep. The MO came and gave her a sedative.’

‘How are you managing?’

‘Fine. It’s the least I can do. I’ll kip down in

Christopher’s room if I need to. If that’s all right by you? How are the little ones?’

‘Good as gold. Out like lights.’

Why did he say that,
the least I can do?
Did he blame himself? The atmosphere between them was stiff and polite, as if some mutual concealment were being practised. Which it was not in Joe to do for long (it is in me, Ailsa thought, oh yes, but it is not in him, he is so open and emotional).

When she came back downstairs, Joe was sitting hunched with his back to the front window, by the open curtains. From the blind darkness beyond the window, a barrage of insects butted against the pane. The moon was up, a blade-like crescent, the stars pouring phosphorescent light on the sands. Joe rocked himself, his dark curly head in his hands. She went and crouched beside him, briefly fondled his hair. She should not believe the worst of him. Give him a chance.

‘Joe. Sweetheart. What?’

‘It was my idea.’

‘What was?’

‘The Tiger-ride. If I hadn’t egged him on, he’d still be here. I don’t think!’ he said. ‘I just don’t
think
, do I? I never
think
!’ And he struck the side of his head with the knuckles of his fist.

‘How could you have known how things would turn out?

‘I know now.’

‘No, you don’t, Joe. He may be back any minute.’

‘That’s what she says.’

‘Well, she’s right.’

‘You’ve caught the sun,’ he said, meeting her eyes and drawing tender fingers up her arms to the hot skin at the top. ‘Whatever have you been up to?’

‘Nothing important. Oh, the sunburn – yes, I’ll put on some calamine.’

‘Let me do it for you. Do be careful, Ailsa. You’re so fair. You’re going to peel.’

‘I’ll not do it again,’ she promised, touching the smarting skin with her fingertips. The
Habibi
household, like Brewers’ Green and the
Empire Glory
, seemed a theatre of illusion. Nothing that happened there had weight or relevance. ‘And don’t you reproach yourself about the Tiger, Joe. Chalkie’s a grown man, after all. You didn’t make him go with you.’