Making It Up

by Penelope Lively

  The parameters of her life were now the house in Zamalek, the Gezira Sporting Club to which she walked with Jean most afternoons, and the YWCA on her afternoon off. In the summers now they went to Alex, except for this year—this year was different, the Germans had put the kibosh on Alex for this year. And she hadn’t had her afternoon off for the last three weeks, what with the packing up and Mrs. Leech running round like a scalded cat getting the train reservation and visas and stocking up with all the things they’d need on the ship.

  Well, Shirley would make up for it in Cape Town, by all accounts. There was a YW there, people said, and lovely cinemas, better than the Cairo ones. She often went to the Kasr el Aini cinema with a bunch of other nannies; they’d seen all the Deanna Durbin films and Gone with the Wind and they never missed a Bob Hope, but it was a bit of a flea pit; you always felt you might pick something up. In Cape Town they didn’t let the natives in, apparently.

  Everyone was on board now who should be, and everyone off who shouldn’t, and the gangplank was being taken up, so there wasn’t anything much to watch on deck. She took Jean down below for a wash and found Mrs. Leech fussing that there wasn’t anywhere to hang her frocks. She was moving out of their cabin. She’d got round the Purser and wangled a two-berth cabin that she was going to share with Mrs. Clavering. The Clavering nanny and Jamie were going to come in with Shirley and Jean, which would be much better, according to Mrs. Leech, because the nannies could then take it in turns to stay with the children in the evenings, after they were in bed. And of course Mrs. Leech and Mrs. Clavering wouldn’t be woken up first thing or in the night, but that was passed over. The Purser was going to find somewhere else for the retired teacher; he was really terribly sweet and helpful, Mrs. Leech said.

  Sometime in the night they sailed. Jean woke up early and said, “Everything’s moving outside, Nanny,” and yes, there was blue water sliding past and you could feel the thump-thump of the ship’s engines. Shirley felt a little rush of excitement just as she used to before the war when they sailed from Port Said for home, and you saw the statue of the man who built the Canal, and then the Mediterranean beyond. Actually, the Red Sea looked much the same, except at the moment it was flatter, she could remember the Med tipping up horribly. Up on deck, she could see a long gold-brown line of land, but during the day that disappeared and there was just sea. A great bowl of sea and sky, with them in the middle.

  It was funny how quickly you settled down to being on board, as though there’d never been any other kind of life. There was a routine, right from the start. Mealtimes ruled—the bell for eight o’clock breakfast, and then later first- and second-sitting lunches and in the evening children’s high tea at six, which included nannies, and dinner for everyone else at seven. After dinner, there was always a bit of a party going on in the bar, and Mrs. Leech was in on that right away, of course, done up in one of her best frocks—oh, she was having a high old time, she’d always loved the trips home and back, prewar, and this might not be P&O but she was making the most of it, all the same. Shirley was much in demand with the mothers who hadn’t got nannies, she and Nanny Clavering, to keep an ear out for their children while they were up in the bar, or in the lounge where people played bridge: “Oh Nanny, would you be an angel—she’s fast asleep, but if you could just have a peep at her every now and then . . .”

  So she and Nanny Clavering played box and cox, one staying down with the children while the other had a bit of time off—joining a whist game with some of the NCOs or just sitting on deck where it got nice and cool after dark. Pretty dark, too, what with the blackout so there couldn’t be any lights on and you kept falling over things and you weren’t supposed to smoke, not that Shirley was a smoker anyway. But it was lovely up there, in the night, with just the sound of the engines and the sea, and when there was a moon you got these great paths of light over the water, rippling away into the distance. There were always quite a few people up there, leaning over the rail—smoking, unless one of the ship’s officers was around. Shirley liked to find a place on her own where she could just watch the sea and listen to it and feel the wind on her face. But she never stayed that long; Jean might wake, and while Nanny Clavering was there, of course, it would be Shirley she’d want, and no one else.

  The families were all together, at one end of the main deck, in cabins at either side of the long passage. There were bathrooms in the middle, and you had to queue up, and then it was a saltwater bath you got, so not much joy there. Shirley preferred to stick with the hand basin in the cabin, and give Jean an all-over wash out of that. A terrible run on the toilets, all the time.

  At the far end of the accommodation deck there were people who were going home, right the way round the Cape and into the Atlantic—six weeks it would take and they said it would get really rough once you were round the Cape, and there were lots of U-boats in the Atlantic. There was a chance of them off the east coast of Africa, apparently, on the way to Cape Town, which was why there had to be lifeboat drill, and life jackets, and blackout, just in case, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the Atlantic, they said, and nothing like the Mediterranean, which the convoys hadn’t been able to use since 1940. Thank goodness they’d be getting off at the Cape; two weeks of this would be quite enough, thank you very much. The ship was jam-packed, you were cheek by jowl all the time, which made the heat even worse, and the food left much to be desired. Powdered milk, and the tea wasn’t made with boiling water, you got the leaves floating on top. No, she wouldn’t want to be going home, to be honest. And anyway it was pretty wretched there by all accounts, what with rationing and shortages and the Blitz. Shirley’s letters from her parents and her sisters were just one long moan.

  There was a handful of families who were going home, and some military personnel—a few officers who were being retired or sent back for some reason, and very popular they were with Mrs. Leech and her friends, seeing as how this was such an all-women party. Of course there were the naval officers too—Mrs. Leech and Mrs. Clavering were always having a drink in the bar with one or another of them. And on the lower decks there were the other ranks, who of course didn’t count so far as Mrs. Leech was concerned. Actually, there was a medical orderly who was ever so nice; Shirley had got talking to him when he was helping with the organized games they had on deck for the children every morning. He was in charge of some soldiers who were being invalided down to hospitals in the Cape, men who’d lost arms or legs in the desert battles, or been blinded, poor things—horrible, you didn’t like to think about it. They were brought up on deck and you saw them lying around and some of the children would go and talk to them—the men seemed to like that. That was how Shirley had met the orderly. He had asked Jean to come over and say hello to this soldier who’d had his foot blown off, and then they chatted a bit, Shirley and the orderly. He’d been in Egypt since 1940, at the military hospital in Cairo, he was an ambulance driver in civilian life, he came from Devon. He had a country sort of voice, but actually Shirley rather liked that. It made her think of holidays by the sea when she was a little girl. He gave Jean a Cadbury’s chocolate bar from the NAAFI, which was a real treat, and he told them there’d been flying fish that landed on the deck yesterday, which they’d missed, so he promised to come and find them next time it happened.

  Of course, Jean was all eyes, staring at the men with amputated limbs, though goodness knows she was used enough to that sort of thing—plenty of the Cairo street beggars had bits missing, and there were blind people all over the place. It was these being English, and like that. What had happened? Did it hurt? Shirley had had to go a bit carefully. Jean knew about the war, of course, they had a little pray about it every night before she was put to bed: “Please, God, make the war end soon. Amen.” But she didn’t know about death. A child can’t take that in, at six, in Shirley’s opinion. So when Mrs. Leech’s spaniel died, Jean was just told that it had gone to sleep because it was very old and tired, and the same with Mr. Leech’s father, and squashed
dogs by the side of the road, and Jean’s tortoise when the ants got it. A child that age isn’t ready for death.

  Goodness, it was hot. She should be used enough to heat by now, for heaven’s sake, but the Red Sea was in a class of its own. All around was this glassy smooth water, and the heat seemed to whack back from it, and mostly there wasn’t a breath of wind, except in the evenings when this hot breeze would get up. But the cabins were stifling; you lay there dripping all night, you didn’t want even a sheet over you, indeed stark naked would have been best, but Shirley didn’t fancy that with Nanny Clavering and the children there. Jean had a nasty bout of prickly heat, all red and raw, poor little soul. And up on deck you had to keep slapping on Nivea cream, but even so some of the children were getting dreadfully sunburnt. The crew had rigged up a sort of canvas swimming pool for them to splash around in, and there were endless deck games—quoits and skittles and so forth—so they didn’t get too bored and bolshie, on the whole, though some of the bigger boys were starting to run wild a bit. Shirley blamed the mothers, frankly. If she’d had anything to do with it, they’d soon have been under control, she’d always been able to deal with badly behaved children.

  In fact, one day she did step in. There were these ten-year-olds pestering one of the lascars. A lot of the crew were lascars—small wiry brown men who did all the donkey work, scrubbing the decks and that—and this one was climbing up the side of the ship doing something to the lifeboats that were slung above the promenade deck. The boys were yelling “Monkey! Monkey!”—the Garrick twins and a couple of others. “Look at the chimp!” they were saying, and Shirley felt herself flare up. I mean, all right, maybe he did look a bit monkey-like, climbing hand over hand, very athletic actually, but that was just plain rude, you don’t talk like that to anyone. So she moved in and gave the boys a telling off. She’d thought they might answer back—the Garricks had that Greek girl for a nanny who let them get away with anything—but they just shuffled around and wouldn’t look at her and then wandered away.

  When she first came to Egypt she’d been shocked by the beggars and the droves of children asking for money—“Baksheesh! Baksheesh!”—and the sheer startling difference from anything she’d ever known. Men hawking and spitting in the street; women up to their elbows in cow muck and straw, making fuel; the babies with flies crawling all over their eyes. How could people live like this? But they did, and after a while you got used to it. You seemed to be shut away on the other side of a glass screen, where things were done in the way that you knew, and out there was their world, in which everything was otherwise, but it was none of your business.

  And then she’d been differently shocked by the way people treated the natives. Especially since the troops arrived, at the beginning of the war. Some of them made her feel quite ashamed, the way they’d bawl them out, or take the mickey. You’d see a bunch of drunk tommies in Cairo snatching off a man’s red fez, and throwing it under a gharry, or mobbing a woman, trying to get her to take her veil off. That was disgusting. All right, their ways weren’t our ways, out here, but that didn’t mean you had any right to interfere. She’d always made sure that Jean spoke politely to the servants, and had told her never to stare at them when they were saying their prayers, knees down on a mat in the garden. Not that Mr. and Mrs. Leech wouldn’t be particular about that too, Mr. Leech especially; for the Consulate people there were all sorts of dos and don’ts and what Mr. Leech called a code of conduct.

  The Garricks were Shell, which might account for the twins’ behavior. Shell and the other businesspeople were definitely a peg or two down from the Consulate. Just as the Consulate was a step down from the Embassy. Embassy nannies tended to pull rank; that didn’t bother Shirley, but she knew Mrs. Leech felt it when it came to Embassy wives. Still, Consulate meant you were on all the lists, for parties at the Embassy and so forth, and Mrs. Leech could usually get a cabin on Sidi Bishr for the summer, when they went to Alex, and she and Mr. Leech could join the Yacht Club, and got asked to everything, which frankly for Mrs. Leech was the be-all and end-all.

  They would be calling in at Aden soon, and that would be the end of the Red Sea, thank goodness; people said it wouldn’t be so hot once you were out on the Indian Ocean. Back in Cairo, in the Zamalek house, there was a big map of the world on the wall in Mr. Leech’s study; Shirley had sometimes looked at this, pinpointing Cairo up at the top of Africa, with the fan of the Delta reaching up to the Mediterranean. So she had the shape of Africa in her head now, and could see the funnel of the Red Sea, and then the bit called the Horn of Africa sticking out and up, round which they had to go, and then it would be down and down past Africa until at last they got to Cape Town. Quite exciting, really, to think you were going all that way, crawling across the world.

  They would be allowed to go ashore while the ship was berthed at Aden. Everyone was looking forward to that. There would be hotels where they could have a decent meal, Mrs. Leech said, and a chance to stock up with the sort of things they would soon run out of—toilet paper, and Nivea, and cigarettes and gin. Oh, and of course they would have to see the mermaid; she and Mrs. Clavering went into fits of laughter about this.

  Apparently there was a mermaid in a glass case in one of the Aden hotels. It was famous.

  In fact, Aden was a bit of a letdown, Shirley thought, when at last they were tied up at Steamer Point. A scruffy sort of place—the shops nothing to write home about, the hotels not a patch on Cairo or Alex, the streets awash with men selling Turkish delight or dirty postcards. They disembarked with the Claverings, and had to fight their way through the scrum on the quayside—Arabs who were mostly half-naked, and some of them with knives tucked into their waists, pi dogs, beggars, mangy camels that looked like they were about to mow you down. Mrs. Leech had found out which was the hotel with the mermaid and they were going to have lunch there.

  Jean was so thrilled with the mermaid. She knew about mermaids; one of her books had a picture of a mermaid sitting on a rock and looking at herself in a mirror. Shirley knew what she was imagining—this beautiful girl with long yellow hair and a delicate green fishy tail. She guessed the child was going to be let down; whatever it was that they’d got in a glass case here, she couldn’t think that it was going to be quite like that. But Mrs. Leech kept on getting Jean more and more worked up: “Isn’t it exciting, darling—we’re going to see a mermaid. Do you think the mermaid will be singing a song?” Shirley felt like hitting her.

  When they found the hotel, it turned out that you had to pay to see the mermaid, even if you were coming in to have lunch. There was this case with a cloth on it in the passage outside the dining room, and the proprietor wasn’t going to take the cloth off unless you paid, and he was asking what Mrs. Leech and Mrs. Clavering thought was an exorbitant amount, so there was the usual haggling. All the time, Jean just stood there, stiff and tense, her fist clenched to her mouth, staring at the case with enormous eyes.

  At last the cloth came off, and there in the case was this brown leathery-looking thing, like the mummies in the Cairo Museum. It was obviously some kind of animal, or had been, though it did have what you could imagine as a sort of bosom. Mrs. Leech and Mrs. Clavering started laughing hysterically; Shirley could hear the stories they’d be telling in the ship’s bar that evening: “My dear, it was just too ridiculous for words . . .”

  And Jean just gazed. Then she turned and looked up at Shirley with this awful disappointment in her face. Really, it’s too bad what children have to go through, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

  They had lunch, which was roast lamb with all the trimmings, just like being back in England, and afterward treacle pudding, one of Jean’s favorites, but even that didn’t help. She stayed very quiet all through, and honestly, Shirley’s heart bled for her. Mermaid, indeed.

  So what with that, and the heat, she wasn’t sorry when they left Aden. And yes, once they were out of sight of land it did begin to get cooler, and the sea had a lift to it, with even li
ttle choppy waves. On the first afternoon out she got talking to the medical orderly again, or rather, he came over while she was watching Jean, who was playing in the canvas pool. His name was Alan. Alan Baker. He had a brother serving in the Far East, and a sister in a munitions factory, he played the mouth organ, what he missed most out here were cricket and Saturday night in the village pub and his dog Trigger. He was due a week’s leave in Cape Town and he couldn’t wait. You find out quite a bit about a person in just a short chat, it’s surprising.

  She’d been feeling rather on her own, actually, ever since they came on board. She had some good friends in Cairo among the Cairo nannies, but none of them were here. Nanny Clavering was much older and always laying down the law about this and that, Shirley couldn’t abide the Stannards’ Irish girl, and Nanny Peter-son was slapdash to a degree, in her opinion. There were the Greek and Lebanese girls, who were nice enough, but you didn’t have all that much in common, did you? Oh, they all sat around together on deck during the day, keeping an eye on the children, but Shirley didn’t really feel what you might call at home.