Into Suez (35 page)

‘Does Mam know,
cariad
?’

‘I spoke to her last night.’

Joe flinched and turned his head aside. The calm, even tenor of their conversation faltered only a fraction before their tearless eyes met and held one another again. Husband and wife held steady. They stilled the moment by pure willpower, not looking back, not looking forward.

‘What did she say?’

‘She’s coming. She’ll be flown out, darling. Don’t worry, it will be in time.’

‘Ah. And what about Dad?’

‘He’s not so well. She’ll maybe come on her own. She’s a strong woman, remember, your mam.’

The Military Policeman in the corner of the room peered straight ahead, quite detached, as if he’d caught sight of something fascinating on the wall opposite him. Everyone had been kind, gentle, tactful with the two of them. Ailsa felt ringed round with human decency. No moments in her
life could ever be more precious or important than these, in which she and her husband shared quiet meetings, seated across the table from one another, keeping their balance. Three hours they had left after today, one hour on each of three consecutive days. They were not supposed to touch but in practice nobody objected to their holding hands. They were allowed to embrace and kiss at arrival and departure and they both looked forward to these moments, like teenagers at the cinema.

Human decency, yes, but not from the British Government. Dusty, who was to be hanged with Joe, had no one capable of fending for him. His wife had completely gone to pieces, leaving Dusty in the pitiful condition of having to notify his own parents, for it was War Office practice not to inform relatives of any trouble or problems regarding their kin. It was up to the airman to let his parents know, ‘if he wished to do so’. Ailsa and Irene had visited Dusty and rung his mother in Widnes. But Mrs Miller already knew. She had read the news in the paper two hours previously. Dusty was the third of fourteen children. But Mrs Miller would fly to Cairo to say goodbye. Neighbours would take care of the little ones. There was a neighbourhood collection towards her flight.

For the War Office had refused to fly the condemned men’s parents out. Ailsa had kept this information from Joe. She was glad now that she had beside her the refunded money from the carpet, a sum which would amply cover Joe’s mother’s ticket. It had been difficult to arrange the telephone conversations with Mam, none of the Treforys family being on the phone. In the end Ailsa was able to arrange calls for Mam every couple of days at the minister’s house; the expense of these calls also came out of the
carpet. After her first whimpering cries and rush of tears for her beloved boy, Gwenllian had taken the news of her son’s crime and sentence with extraordinary resolution, her voice sounding so close that it had startled Ailsa.

Had Ailsa initiated an appeal? had been Mam’s first thought. But incredibly there existed no right of appeal from a court martial sentence. And the court had made no recommendation of mercy for either man.

‘What’s wrong with Dad then?’ Joe asked carefully. Every subject they broached had to be considered and phrased with care, in case the spirit level of their balance should shift.

‘Oh, his chest. You know, Joe, the usual. But he’ll come if he possibly can. Of course he will.’

Joe’s father was in a bad way. Ailsa had not burdened Joe with this knowledge. But he knew anyway. She saw it in his eyes. They were going to their graves together.

She’d copied out a poem for him, Donne’s ‘Valediction Forbidding Mourning’:

So let us melt and make no noise
–

‘I’d actually rather Dad didn’t come, Ailsa, if he’s not so good.’

‘Of course. Don’t worry about that.’

No tear floods nor sigh tempests move
–

Ailsa had launched a petition to the War Minister. She had written to King George with all the eloquence at her command, begging him to intervene. Joe’s mother’s MP had also written to the King, pleading extenuating circumstances. It was no good. The murder of a British officer at any moment counted as treason, the most heinous crime. The arbitrary wounding of an Egyptian child at such a sensitive moment was political dynamite.

Joe had aimed his revolver not at an individual but at the edifice of Empire. At deference. At rank. How utterly ironic this was, Ailsa thought. For Joe believed in and lived by duty and hierarchy. At Port Said he’d saluted
Habibi
and Alex, cleaving the Roberts and the Jacobs families asunder. His salute had reminded them:
this is not a suitable or proper relationship
.

Ailsa’s deviance had brought him to this. But he would not hear of it.

Now everyone seemed to want Joe and Dusty gone – shrouded, buried, covered over – as rapidly as possible. Joe himself did not for a moment question the justice of his punishment.

The firmness makes my circle just
–

‘Do you get any sleep at all,
cariad
?’ he asked.

‘I don’t want all that much sleep. Waste of time.’

And makes me end where I begun
–

Ailsa had fitfully drowsed last night, awakening at the point in her recurrent dream where she stood outside a door. She seemed able to wake up in the nick of time before the door opened. What lay beyond it Ailsa did not ask. She and Nia had been moved to a Nissen hut in Fanara, away from the terrorist dangers of Ismailia, for no white person was safe now beyond the barbed wire, the watch towers and the tanks. Each day brought fresh murders, strikes, gun battles, ambushes and bombing. British atrocities multiplied: bulldozers and Centurion tanks had demolished fifty Egyptian mud houses that had been built in the way of a source of water to which the British must have access. We seemed to be a nation that could not learn. Its brain was primitive. It could only repeat the misdeeds of yesterday. Yet this customary
thought came to Ailsa dispassionately; her sympathies had shrunk to the horizons of one plight. The war, for it was a war, though no one said so, between Egypt and its occupiers, held no intimate reality for her. Six thousand troops had been flown in to the Canal Zone and a thousand families, including the Websters and the Breans, evacuated. The Roberts family could have been amongst them, disembarking at Southampton from the
Empire Sunderland
. Home.

Hedwig and her son had been amongst the evacuees. That Joe had shot her beloved
Habibi
– who had seen her through a bad time – Hedwig could hardly credit.
Habibi
had led her back to the country of sanity and given Eric a mother. She’d jounced the bundled baby in her arms, smiling into his face as she spoke to Ailsa, while he crowed, flailing at her face as if to snatch the smile. Then he’d crammed his fingers in his mouth as if to taste and drink the delicious smile.
Ailsa, I pity you from the bottom of my heart that you have such a husband
. Ailsa had flared up:
J
oe is still my Joe. Whatever he’s done
. She’d wanted to say that Joe hadn’t gone to Masurah with the intention of killing
Habibi
or hurting a child; it had been a mistake. But how could you apologise for such heinous offences? The words went to ash on Ailsa’s tongue. Hedwig had understood that one has to remain loyal to one’s husband, right or wrong; a wife’s binding duty. But in that case, should one not have chosen more wisely? She hadn’t put these formulae – these Prussian platitudes – into words. But Ailsa had heard the message. And all the while, the weather in Hedwig’s face had altered with every breath, melting for her boy, clouding for Ailsa. Eric had battened lips on his mother’s cheek and blown a raspberry.
Involuntarily, both women had laughed aloud.
Habibi was the best kind of Jew, exceptional
, Hedwig had said.
He had the warmest heart. Mind you, it’s always the best that are taken
. Ailsa had not replied. She’d thought, yes, six million of the best. Hedwig was nothing to her. She lived in a different world. The two would not meet again.

This morning Ailsa had awoken sensing snow on the ground: muted sound and an eerie quality to the light. Her mind’s eye had hallucinated snow mounds on dustbin lids; thick coils on washing lines; the purification of dark spaces by a freezing grace of whiteness. She’d slipped out of bed and opened the curtains to find no such thing, but an apricot dawn, of a colour so tender that she’d gone outside into the winter air to bless her eyes with it.

Holding at bay the obscene thing.

January here could be as sharp as Shropshire. Time and the seasons had taken leave of their senses. Ailsa had hardly noticed the year’s turning. Three months had gone by since the crime: it was 1952 already. The authorities had rushed through the court martial and the executions. Archie had written to her every day. He would be on the next plane if she wanted him.
Do not under any circumstances come
, she’d telegraphed.
On no account
. For she was all Joe’s now. The two of them were all in all to one another. Grafted into the one stock. Ailsa could not be doing with well-meaning outsiders, even a cousin, weakening her with kindness, diluting the passionate outpouring of her heart’s best blood to her husband. Looking back through the window, she’d seen Nia lying asleep on her camp bed, bathed in a flush of rosy light, up to the neck in a grey military blanket. One of Nia’s arms was flung above her head, her body skewed, as if she’d
been casually dropped like a rag doll. The blankets were rough and scratchy, their hairs piercing sheets and nightie. Nia’s skin was a tormented mass of eczema, where the insidious fibres rubbed it; there were open sores and scars, for Nia couldn’t help but scratch in the night. She never asked after her father. Not a word.

There was no more strolling round Ish on shopping trips: so Irene told Ailsa. Ish was out of bounds. They hate us, Irene said. Well, of course they’ve always hated us, but they couldn’t afford to show it openly, could they? The servants have all downed tools and stopped working for us. Poor souls, they and their families will starve. I knew of course, Irene said, all along. I foresaw it. Even before Roy was taken. Standing at the sink, Irene had paused, her sudsy hands suspended as she washed a vest of Nia’s. Then she’d said:
we shouldn’t be here at all, we should never have come in the first place, you were right. It isn’t their fault. It’s ours. We should stay at home and mind our own blooming business
.

Ailsa could not express her gratitude to Irene for remaining with her. So she said nothing about it. She reserved all emotion to herself, permitting it to collect behind a huge dam forever in the building. Irene could easily have gone home with the evacuees but had chosen to stand beside and behind Ailsa and Joe, who had crossed into another world, another time zone altogether. A place of greater stillness.

‘I sleep OK,’ Joe told her. ‘Odd, really.’

‘Oh do you, darling? I’m so glad. Mind, you’ve always been a good sleeper.’

‘Aye. I try not to drop off and then I do.’

Everything was simple now. Ailsa lit cigarettes for both of them; slipped her husband’s from her mouth between her fingers; passed the lipstick-stained end between his lips and smiled with her eyes into his eyes in an ordinary way that heartened him.

She had removed her watch and hidden it in the deep pocket of her skirt. In the windowless room there was no sun to shift the angle of shadow and tell tales about time passing.

‘Time, I’m afraid, Mrs Roberts.’

They rose to their feet as one, with a scraping of chairs. The policeman turned away. A bear hug. The softness of Joe’s clean-shaven jaw on her throat and the scent of soap; his chest against her breast; his arms powerful around her. She clasped his head between her palms as they kissed and, as they drew apart, brought them down to cup Joe’s face in a gesture reminiscent of Nia’s. A gesture Nia had caught from Joe.

So Dusty sang, tunelessly on and on, in his cell. The poor bloke had cracked. A shambles of a man, he’d been cracked for a long, long time. He was sand-happy and should have been repatriated some time back. Dusty had not killed anyone at the Jacobs house: all he’d done was to shoot a chandelier to pieces. Did he deserve to die? But the request of Dusty’s counsel that he be tried separately
from Joe had been denied. The prosecutor had told the court that although Roberts had killed the British officer and wounded the Egyptian child, Miller was equally guilty of murder because he had brought and fired a stolen service revolver in the house.

Pour encourager les autres
Dusty was to die. That was what it came down to. Joe surprised himself by minding about this very much. When they were first brought to the condemned cells, Joe had heard his pal weeping, shrieking, banging his head against the cell door. The medics must have given him something to knock him out as he’d quietened down since and only, occasionally, sang. Joe wished Dusty would change the record.

Day and night, eyes peered at Joe through the judas hole. The light was never switched off.

He kept his mind fixed on Ailsa. The compass point quivered but held true. Quiet and still, she held him in the palm of her hand.

A good smell of egg and bacon wafted into the cell. His mouth watered. When his breakfast arrived, Joe was pleased to see fried bread, mushroom and tomato heaped on the tin plate in addition to the egg and bacon. An enamel mug of strong, scalding tea washed the meal down a treat. His body surprised him by its stubborn power to eat heartily and sleep deeply. Joe put the greasy plate down on the floor, with the empty mug on it.

There was a small creature, an insect whose name he did not know, striving to climb upwards towards the small, high window. Joe had at first taken it for a fleck on the wall, whose random mottlings and blemishes his eyes had got to know in the past months, as they absentmindedly roved the walls. He watched in fascination as
the living speck journeyed over the blank surface past other specks that were not alive. Sitting on his bed, resting his forearms on spread knees, hands hanging loosely, he continued to track the creature’s odyssey. When he lit up a cigarette, he lost sight of it. No, there it was, having made half an inch of progress.