Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel

by Hilary Mantel

  “You think he has a lot of enemies?”

  “Oh yes. Yes indeed.” Shabana gathered up her abaya. “But now I must go. And I will give you my phone number. Then if you think that there is some crisis with them, if you hear quarrels, perhaps, then you may please telephone me.” She smiled brightly as she swathed herself in black. “And I will try to do the marriage guidance, before it is too late.”

  Frances got up. “Here.” She proffered a pen. “Write it in my book.”

  Shabana did so. “Do you know,” she said, “what will do her good? If she can move from here. Get away from these walls and doors, and being shut up with other women. Our own culture does not demand that. She is always with the Arab girl, I think she is a bad influence. You know what is the life of the Arab girl, Frances. Not like you or I.”

  “She said she might like to move.”

  “Did she? Well, that is an advance. Perhaps there is hope then.” Shabana arranged a flimsy token veil over her hair. “I know he has asked her many times to move to a nice villa in Al Hamra, that is more suitable for their station in life. But she would not. She has always said, No, I want to stay in these apartments.”

  There was a time, Frances thought, when I didn’t want to move. I would like to move, now. But the herb, mehti, has shriveled in its pot. Andrew says she has overwatered it.

  “Frances,” Shabana said, “would you go out, please, and see if my driver is at the gate? That man has the bad habit of going shopping. And it is not the right thing to hang about on the street.”

  She went out on to Ghazzah Street; the driver was waiting, his eyes closed, his window down, his radio playing. She returned, took Shabana through the hall, and let her out. “I don’t care for these tiles at all,” Shabana said. “Saudi taste. Like eyes watching you. Thank you for the coffee.”

  Each morning now the dawn prayer call wakes her from a doze. The morning sounds of the city—the early traffic, the first planes into the airport—remind her of a giant vacuum cleaner suddenly switched on. The weather is warming up, and the days seem long if you go without a siesta. But if she sleeps in the afternoon, she wakes up in the twilight with a start, her mouth full of saliva and a sick, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  By nine in the evening she is wretchedly tired. She goes to bed, but can’t sleep. Her body feels cramped, her hair irritates the skin of her neck, the pillow seems to have been filled with marbles. She dozes, dreams, wakes again, listening to the night sounds of the apartment, and perhaps for something more. “If you think there is some crisis with them, if you hear quarrels …” After the dawn prayer call, she falls into a heavy sleep. Andrew gets up at six. He takes a shower, brings her coffee. It goes cold by her bedside. They hardly speak; she mutters something, incoherent fragments from a dream. He tiptoes out. Sometimes, absentmindedly, he locks her into the apartment, as he did in the early days. It is as if she does not exist anymore as definitely, as firmly as she used to. And it is true that she is going thin.

  It is about nine o’clock when she surfaces. In a hot climate, this is late; the morning is half over. She feels guilty. People confuse early rising with moral worth; she is someone in whom this confusion is marked. She goes into the bathroom, and standing on the threshold, inspects the floor for cockroaches; then she inspects her own swollen face.

  She feels shaky; each day a degree worse. She takes herself into the kitchen, washes Andrew’s breakfast dishes, picks at something from the fridge—fruit, or a carton of yogurt. She has no way of knowing what has happened in the three hours between six and nine, while she lay in that oblivious state, that trancelike, paralyzing sleep. Anything might have happened, in other apartments, other rooms; but she has abdicated control. She feels that she once had a grip on the situation, but that now she has lost it.

  On almost the last day of the month, Frances went to see the doctor. For the occasion, she borrowed Hasan and his car. She wondered at getting them so easily, for Daphne could seldom be parted from her transport. But when Hasan arrived, he put her in the picture. “Garage this afternoon, Mrs. Andrew.” He made alarming signs to indicate a fault in the steering; then added, as if it were a technical term, “Is fucked-up.”

  “Oh, Hasan, what have you done to it?” He was on his third clutch, Andrew had told her; there were dents in the sides, and hardly a week went by without a smashed indicator light and a fresh scrape. But if the office car died, would Eric find funds for another? “Can it be fixed?” she asked him. “I mean, is this car finished?”

  Hasan regarded her irritably. He spoke the lingua franca of drivers, mechanics, and maintenance men, left over from when Europeans did these jobs. “Not finished, I told you. This car is just fucked-up, madam—not totally buggered.”

  The doctor was an Englishman; he had a modern clinic near the Pepsi-Cola factory.

  “We haven’t met, Mrs. Shore,” he said, rising from behind his desk and offering his hand.

  “I’ve never been ill.”

  The doctor had American colleagues; he had picked up their turn of phrase. “How may I help you?” he said.

  “My period is late.”

  “How late?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ah, you don’t keep a diary.”

  “Well, I do, but not that sort.”

  “Anything else? A little nausea in the mornings?”

  “Yes. As you mention it.”

  He wanted details. Her gynecological history. “We’ll do a little test,” he promised.

  “But I don’t think I can be pregnant,” she said. “I’m losing weight.”

  “Mrs. Shore,” he asked her, “are you under some sort of strain?”

  Hasan dropped her off at the gate. It had been a futile excursion. The pregnancy test would prove negative, and the doctor would call her in, puzzle over her, order blood tests; in the end, no doubt, he would offer her a little bottle of tranquilizing pills. What is wrong with you, Mrs. Shore? Doctor, I have a neurotic imagination.

  Someone was in the hall, moving ahead of her—a veiled figure, going upstairs. I no longer believe in the veiled lady, she thought; I know she is a fiction, a lie. Has Samira a visitor? The figure moves, not at a visitor’s pace, but headlong: not furtive, decisive; and the momentary glimpse she caught seemed to contradict some observation that she had once made. She heard the weighty, the unapologetic tread. She turned out the hall light.

  It was true what the doctor said; she needed a holiday. She needed a little trip, an excursion, and she would take it now; from the circumspect habits of a lifetime. She waited. She stood in shadow by her front door, the picture of patience; she stood listening to her own shallow breathing, her face tilted upward to the stairwell.

  Ten minutes passed. She heard the click of a front door: Flat 4. With the same hasty but deliberate tread, the figure came back down the stairs. Frances stepped forward, out of the shadow of the gleaming tiles with their multiple insect eyes. She blocked the foot of the stairs.

  The visitor stopped dead. An outline of features beneath black cloth, no surprise discernible, no fear, no challenge, no expression at all. The visitor was tall; a strapping lass. Frances raised her hand. The visitor pulled back, but she had made contact. She tugged at the concealing abaya, felt it part, felt something cold, metallic, under her hand. She reached up, with her other hand, and clawed at the veil. But a veil is not something you can pull off. You can dream of doing it, but you cannot just accomplish it, because the black cloth is wound around the head. The head strains back; and then she is pushed away with all the visitor’s ungirlish strength, sent flying against the wall. Her neck snaps backward, her head hits the tiles, two long strides and the visitor has crossed the hall, and while she is recovering herself is already out of the front door, and out of the gate, and onto Ghazzah Street.

  Frances stood up shakily. Surprisingly, she felt no pain; no evidence of the encounter, except the chilly bar of flesh in the palm of her hand, where she had touched the metal of the
gun’s barrel. She held her hand open for a moment, the fingers splayed to rid herself of the invisible stigmata. Cure this, doctor. Take my pain away.

  Rajab

  1

  The temperature had been moving upward for a week; and suddenly, the approaching summer moved into a new dimension. All night, while they had been insensibly dreaming together under a flowered sheet, the heat had been abroad, gathering its forces in other rooms to hang in dense clots from the walls; there was a white, scaly sky, diseased and enfeebled by its own heat. Frances went about her own house like a charwoman, lugging the vacuum cleaner and the washing basket, her head bowed and her hair pushed behind her ears. On Saturday the temperature was 97°. Today it is 106°. In Riyadh it is 118°. Every day it is rising. There is a leaden sky and a hot wind; the dust, blowing continuously, lends a lunar aspect to the vacant lots. You expect to see comets and portents, rabid alien life-forms scuttling at your feet.

  She was wrong to think that she was sick with knowledge. While it is contained within her own head, and her own body—the memory of that metal chill, of that dizzying reel from the foot of the stairs—the knowledge can do no harm. It is not the knowledge, but the potential of knowledge, that makes her so dangerous. She is germinating a disaster; she has a communicable disease.

  Therefore she says nothing. Therefore she begins each morning as if it were the first on Ghazzah Street. Therefore she declines serious conversation. Listens without hearing. Looks without seeing. Andrew had forgotten to get her a new exercise book for her diary; and she had not asked him again. Better not to write things down. Anyway, the diary’s original purpose seems to have dissolved. She couldn’t write to Clare, or to any of her correspondents, the sort of thing she had been putting in her diary recently. She imagined their replies, which seldom even acknowledged the content of her own letters: “Well, I haven’t much to tell you really. We haven’t been doing much. The weather is still very cold …” No doubt they mislaid her letters, found them tiresome, put them in a drawer where they would not nag for replies.

  Jeff Pollard, shopping at the Jeddah International Market, had his Credit Suisse token removed from his neck by a religious policeman. It was only a moderate amount of gold, in truth, but in this matter, as in others, there are different rules for men and women. He should have spent the money on a watch. He could have worn a Patek Philippe, and no one would have quarreled. But in these stringent times it is not only the vigilantes who think it is in bad taste to wear your salary around your neck.

  Russel has arrived back from the Yemen.

  All over town people are purveying to each other rumors of sackings and redundancies. Wherever the expatriates get together they talk about their grievances, and about how badly the Saudis have treated them: fear and loathing at the St. Patrick’s Day barbecue.

  It was getting too hot for the walk to Marion’s house. But Marion didn’t seem able to organize herself to come to Dunroamin. Marion’s conversation had never been rewarding, but just to be at her house was a pleasure, to sit in a room with normal daylight, and to feel, for an hour, no curiosity and no threat.

  The gateboy came out of his hut when Frances rang the bell, and let her into the compound. But Marion did not answer her doorbell. Frances peered through the front window. The living room seemed strangely tidy. She went back to the gateboy, and pointed, inquiringly. He shook his head, and at the same time seemed consumed by some private joke.

  So she set off home. There was a main road to negotiate, but it was midmorning, fairly quiet, and she never had trouble crossing at the lights. A boy in a Mercedes pulled up, waved her in front of him. As she stepped out from the curb, he revved his engine, the car sprang forward, and she had to leap from under its wheels. She heard the brakes applied; caught herself up, heart racing, and looked back at the driver of the car; understood that it had not been an accident. “You are my darling, madam, you are my baby …” Saw on his face laughter and contempt.

  When she got home she phoned Carla. “Look,” Carla said, “it’s happened to me. Don’t take everything so personally.”

  “But why?” she insisted. She felt on the verge of tears. “I just wanted to cross. I would have waited. I would have let him go by.”

  Carla said tiredly, “They don’t want us on the streets. It’s just a thing they do.”

  “I went around to Marion’s this morning,” she said to Andrew.

  He looked at her in amazement. “Didn’t you know? Did nobody tell you? Russel’s packed her off home. He’s found out about her and Jeff.”

  She stared at him, and a slow and unwelcome realization dawned on her face. “Do you mean they’ve been having an affair?” She sat down, as people do, to take in the bad news. “I didn’t realize.”

  Andrew looked at her in exasperation. “Everybody else knew.”

  “How long has it been going on?”

  “Months.”

  “I didn’t know. I was always saying how foul he was.”

  “Yes, I noticed, but I thought you knew about them and you were doing that anyway. I mean, I didn’t think a consideration like that would hamper you.”

  “But you never said anything! You never discussed it with me!”

  “Why should I? It’s no concern of mine.”

  “And all the time you thought I knew about it … do you ever wonder, Andrew, whether you’re missing things yourself?”

  “I don’t think I’m missing anything that matters.”

  Frances crossed the room, and picked up the telephone receiver. She didn’t dial; listened to the crackles and blips on the line. She handed him the receiver. “Listen to that.”

  He listened.

  “When I rang Carla I got that. I rang Turadup—”

  “What for?”

  “What for doesn’t matter. I’m explaining to you, it buzzes, it clicks—what do you think?”

  “I think,” Andrew said, “that what you have there is a typical Third World telephone.”

  “It wasn’t always like that. It’s just started happening.”

  “Oh, Frances.” He looked at her in disappointment. “You’re not going to be one of those people who believes that the phones are tapped?”

  “Maybe they are.”

  “Yes, maybe they are, there’s a respectable body of opinion that says so. But the people who are always going on about it are the sort who—”

  “Yes, I know. They’re in Phase Three. They’ve cracked up. They have blue-tinted windscreens in their cars.”

  “Even if they are tapped, what have we got to hide? We don’t exchange brewing hints on the telephone.”

  “That’s not the point, is it?”

  “To me, the point is that there are things that might be true … but you can’t afford to believe them.” He struggled to explain it; as if she needed it explained. “Because if you believe them you’re really screwed up, you can’t function. I have to function. I mean, I only want another year, but I have to stay here at any price.” “What do you mean, at any price?”

  But Andrew was thinking about the flat he was going to buy. A price, to him, was paid in money. To conversations like these, there are no sensible conclusions.

  Earlier, she had talked to Eric Parsons. He had been jocular when he answered the phone to her, thinking it was social chitchat. Daphne was out and about so much that her friends often left their messages with him. This was why Frances said, “Eric, please don’t talk to me as if I had asked to borrow the Magimix.”

  “What is it then, my dear?”

  Soon Eric was stupefied; hearing what he did not want to hear. And how can she put it delicately—I think that maybe upstairs there is an arms cache, a hideout, a torture chamber, a mortuary? That I have exhausted my imagination on what there may not be? “I think,” she said, “that there is a conspiracy, to which I have become a party, not a willing party …”

  “But of course there is.” Eric cut in on her. He sounded angry. “We shouldn’t be talking about this over the
phone. You know, you were told, about the empty flat. And you were told to be careful.”

  “It isn’t at all what you have been led to believe. Can I correct what I said? I don’t think there is a conspiracy. I know.”

  “Let me stop you there, Frances.” She heard heavy, exasperated breathing. “Does Andrew know that you’re speaking to me?”

  “No.”

  “No. I thought not. Do bear in mind, my love, that for anything you do in this place, your husband is responsible. I can understand it, of course—all you women together in the flats, you’ve got to know each other, that’s nice, and you’re sure to talk amongst yourselves. What do they say, women are the same the whole world over? But you see if you involve yourself—if you are thought, Frances, to be making a nuisance of yourself, to have come into possession of any information that you shouldn’t have—then it will be Andrew who bears the brunt of any indiscretion.”

  “But I think a crime has been committed.”

  “Then do remember that the Saudi way with the witness of a crime is to hold the witness in jail.” Eric’s voice took on an official tone, a sort of stony rectitude. “And if you persist in interfering, against all advice, then you have to take the consequences. The Embassy and the Foreign Office can do nothing for you. They will do nothing for you. There are trading agreements at stake, there are diplomatic agreements, and those agreements are far more important than you.”

  There was a pause. She said, “Won’t you even listen to me?”

  “No,” Eric said; pleasantly enough, courteously enough. “I am first in the firing line, my dear, and there are some things I cannot afford to know. Once past a certain point, you see, you become an undesirable person, and then who knows what happens? Because there comes a certain point where they don’t want you here, and if you see what I mean, they don’t want you to leave either.”