A Foreign Affair

by Stella Russell

  ‘You have a golden tongue, Ms Flashman!’ he remarked drily. He’d begun stretching and sighing in a manner that suggested I should be winding up my oration. I imagine he deemed homosexuality an indecent topic for a woman to be tackling. Undeterred, I ploughed straight on however because I’d barely started: ‘To outlaw a practice that is natural is plain dangerous, Mr President. In what way “dangerous”? I hear you ask…’

  ‘I have asked nothing, Ms Flashman.’

  Ignoring this mild protest too, I proceeded to an account of precisely how Aziz’s homosexuality had rendered him susceptible to blackmail by his father and led to his betrayal of his best friend and the cause he believed in. ‘Can you see now, Mr President, how having to deny his true nature forced him down a dishonourable, dishonest and despicable path towards damnation? Do you really want a part of your population to be condemned to a life of cheating, lying and double-crossing? These men will be frightened and weak and miserable, and I won’t begin to tell you how their wives will suffer…’

  ‘Are you homosexual, Ms Flashman? You take a very passionate interest in the subject..’

  ‘I am very, very far from being homosexual, Mr. President, ‘I answered him, summoning up one of my throatiest giggles and a flirty flutter of my eyelids, ‘But it may have escaped your notice, that the twelfth and final charge against me on a list compiled by General al-Majid is an entirely false one of homosexuality.’

  Clearly relieved to be spared another chapter of my lecture, he listened attentively to my version of my prison cell encounter with Mrs Rev, his eyes widening with surprise at my mention of my ancestor’s binoculars and Mrs Rev’s bullying effort to re-baptise me in the Lord, and then with sympathetic amusement at my vivid re-enactment of the pounding I’d given her.

  ‘Have no fear, Ms Flashman! I will give you a medal, not a bullet on your chest for resisting such wickedness!’ he declared with a chuckle. ‘Furthermore, your enemy will not be permitted to leave Yemen with your ancestral binoculars. It will be my great pleasure to see to this matter personally!’

  ‘Thank you! I knew you would understand!’ I gushed.

  ‘Are we to understand that Ms Flashman no longer faces the death penalty, sir,’ asked the anxious ambassador. ‘I know my government, but also the White House, will be sincerely pleased to receive this news. As you may be aware, Ms Flashman’s plight is already exciting a great deal of negative interest in both Britain and the United States…’

  ‘Yes, yes! Am I an evil tyrant? How could I see this beautiful woman put to death for a crime she obviously never contemplated committing? However,’ and he paused briefly for a shrewd, sharp look at us – the sort of look a trader in a market might employ to assess a customer’s means before naming his price - ‘I see here,’ he plucked a familiar sheaf of multi-coloured papers from the drift of documents that surrounded him, ‘that Ms Flashman has also been charged with spying, inciting dissent and separatism, causing a disturbance, attacking a state official, and so on. These are all serious infringements of our laws, but there is worse. She provoked a riot which led to many casualties. Are the lives of twelve of my people and all the widows and the 82 orphans she has created, to count for nothing in the scales of justice? Tell me, is this just?’

  For this I had no answer. I could only hang my head in sincere penitence. Fortunately, our Scot on the spot was better prepared to counter this assault. He kicked off by conveying not only our regrets but those of the entire Blair government and even the British nation for the devastating tragedy that had taken place in Seiyun, in a country so importantly and closely allied to our own. ‘I know I speak for all Britons everywhere when I say that our thoughts and prayers are with those widows and orphans…’

  ‘You describe what happened as a “tragedy” ambassador,’ snapped the president, ‘but every schoolboy knows that a tragedy is something unavoidable. No one can call this a tragedy. No one! As a simple visitor to Yemen – you have reassured me, Your Excellency, that she is not a spy or employee of your foreign department - it was perfectly possible for a woman as mature and intelligent as Ms Flashman to resist an impulse to, as I believe you say ‘poke her nose’, into our private political business! For this stupid error my people will expect her to pay the ultimate price! Do you understand me?’

  ‘Perfectly, Mr. President,’ said the ambassador, and he paused for a nanosecond before going on, ‘Naturally, the question of appropriate compensation has been uppermost in the mind of my government for the last twenty-four -’

  ‘And?’ that shrewd, haggling look was back on the president’s face, his eyes like a wet raisins above his half-moons. I sat between the two men, well back in my cushions so that they could eyeball each other without impediment, as they haggled.

  ‘Our prime minister has informed me that he is very anxious that you should receive the tanks and other items of specialised defence equipment you reque–‘

  ‘When?’

  ‘In six weeks’

  ‘Three’

  ‘By the end of the month, Mr President.’

  ‘By the 28th Mr Ambassador. Everything must be in place for the annual Unification Day parade on the 31st.’

  ‘Agreed’

  They shook hands and somewhere in the corner of the room, where a soldier had been sitting at a small table, a recording machine clicked off. ‘I would like to wish you a pleasant and safe journey home to Britain, Ms Flashman,’ said the president, all charm and leisurely bonhomie again as the ambassador struggled heavily to his feet.

  ‘Hold it, lads!’ I commanded, all protocol forgotten, ‘Hold it right there! We’re not finished!’

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  ‘Eight minutes! – just give me eight more minutes of your time! Please, Mr President!’

  ‘What the hell are you up to now?’ spluttered the ambassador, gesturing me to stand up and get moving, ‘Are you out of your tiny mind?’ he hissed.

  ‘Ms Flashman, I have enjoyed our meeting but please understand that I am a busy man and it is almost midnight and I believe our business with each other has been satisfactorily concluded,’ said the president, removing his spectacles and rubbing his raisin eyes.

  ‘Five minutes! Please! I beg of you, sir!’

  No harm in slipping into a kneeling position in front of him and wringing my hands in supplication. The president relented. He said he’d give me five minutes by his watch, a Rolex Oyster which he unstrapped and placed on the bolster between us.

  I was to be a born-again Scheherazade, spinning tales to save my life, but with one small difference. It was not my life I had to save by delivering the speech of my life but Sheikh Ahmad’s, and the cards were stacked heavily against him. There was no denying the fact that my true love spearheaded a movement aimed at destroying Yemen’s unity by re-carving out an independent entity in the south of the country, which just happened to be home to the bulk of the nation’s natural wealth. From the president’s point of view Sheikh Ahmad was a thoroughgoing ‘douche-bag’, as a certain kind of American might say, or ‘a total mare’, as a young Briton might say. My best bet, I reckoned, possibly my only hope, would be to appeal to the president’s better nature, to be personal, direct and honest. Irritatingly, the first two lines of Portia’s speech from the Merchant of Venice – ‘The quality of mercy is not strained/ It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven….’ kept circling my mind, like a stuck record on a turntable. No help at all. Tick..tick..tick – best to plunge in and trust to the rhythm of my words to carry me on.

  ‘Mr President, you see before you a woman of a certain age – I don’t mind telling you that I’m the wrong side of thirty…’ When the minutest of pauses was not filled by any gratifying gasp of disbelief, I ploughed on bravely, ‘Nevertheless, I am a woman who did not know the meaning of true love until she set foot in your country a week ago, a woman whose heart is now in the safekeeping of one of your compatriots, a woman whom this precious gift of a late love has emboldened to ask for five minutes mor
e of your time.’ Tick…tick… ‘The man I love is presently languishing in the bowels of your CLIT, in considerable pain and anguish, facing the fate of a traitor for the crime of caring so much for southern Yemenis that he has been prepared to lay down his life in the cause of winning justice and freedom for them.’

  ‘Sheikh Ahmad al-Abrali…’

  ‘Quite so.’ I replied, and hurried on, ‘This person whom I love more dearly than life itself once explained to me the ways in which being a tribal sheikh differs from being a boss. He spoke to me of his role as a mediator and representative for the tribe, of never dictating, of fostering consensus, of respecting the personal liberty and autonomy of others, of serving instead of directing, of being a referee not a tyrant…’

  ‘Yes, yes, the good sheikh is the good father of all, but I must tell….’

  ‘Precisely, the good father of all, Mr President! What I want to say – please don’t interrupt me again – is that if a minor sheikh must be a good father, how much more so must a president be. Am I right in believing he must be the best father of the whole nation?’ The president nodded his assent but said nothing. ‘Well then, isn’t it right that a president hear the legitimate grievances of all his people? Isn’t it also right that a president respect the freedom and personal will of his people where that will is non-violently expressed? Isn’t the role of a president in your culture therefore to preside in wisdom and justice over what we in the West would term a democracy, never favouring one child above another, never oppressing or persecuting?’

  I noticed the president removing his half-moon spectacles, as if to wipe their lenses clean but, in fact, wiping away a tear. ‘There is Allah’s truth in what you say, and this has been the work of my life!’ he sobbed, ‘but -…’

  ‘How much longer have I got?’ I hissed at the Scot.

  ‘Just under two minutes.’

  ‘Mr President, I can understand that you have dreamed of your life’s work being to unite your family of Yemenis – northerners and southerners – in one great happy family. Yet, in spite of all your noble efforts, after seventeen years under your roof it is clear that you have not succeeded. Your southerner children no longer trust you to be their father because for so long now they have been experiencing great injustice from your northerner children, officials whom you have appointed. Is it so surprising that in their helpless suffering they begin to look to another father - the old colonial power, Britain - for support? So please understand how and why the man I love came to organise his PARP and do not shoot yourself in the foot by making him a martyr of his cause. Instead, free him from your prison and invite him to hold constructive talks with you about granting the south some more autonomy at least, if not independence…’

  ‘Ms Flashman, it’s too late – I have to…’ To my surprise, the president’s shoulders were shaking with sobs now, his face such a rictus of wet grief I felt pity for him.

  ‘It’s never too late, Mr President, to try to put a wrong right,’ I lied soothingly, stroking his forearm. My eloquent speechifying had reduced him to be jibbering wreck. I hadn’t meant to induce a nervous breakdown!

  ‘Ms Flashman,’ he wailed, incoherent in his distress, ‘I wanted to tell you earlier but you asked me not to interrupt…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sheikh Ahmad al-Abrali passed away a few minutes before you arrived here - about an hour ago, of his internal injuries.’

  Chapter Thirty

  Less than twenty-four hours later, I was on a British Airways flight back to London, in handcuffs. In the aisle seat beside me – hogging the armrest and too much leg space - sat my old nemesis, the ambassador’s security man who’d been tasked with delivering me safely to Paddington Green police station for further questioning. We were maintaining a stiff silence when my gin and tonic arrived.

  ‘Get your laughing tackle round that, love!’ he said, administering a first tantalisingly ladylike sip. Had he failed to notice that I’d been in tears for the last twenty hours? And I was horribly dehydrated, in need of a good glug, not a sip. ‘Easy, tiger!’ he said, snatching the plastic cup away, spilling some of that nectar down my cleavage in the process.

  Producing a used tissue from his trouser pocket, he leaned over with a grunt to aim it at my bosom.

  ‘Don’t you dare! That’s my personal space you’re invading!’

  ‘Only trying to be of assistance – a G and T’s a ladylike drink – no need to swig at it.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! Order me a Carlsberg then, will you?’

  Our first skirmish, back at Silent Valley, was barely a week in the past but already felt like a decade ago. A sudden bright memory of Sheikh Ahmad and I, fresh from our camel-canter escape, strolling happily among the graves of British servicemen, precipitated a fresh flood of tears. Tone, as my nemesis had invited me to address him, sighed and began attacking my eyes with one of those coasters cum eye make-up remover pads which airlines dispense with their drinks.

  ‘Dab, don’t stab!’ I sobbed helplessly.

  I needed anaesthetising, putting out of my misery, at least for the six-hour duration of the flight. But it was not to be. The instant I closed my eyes colourful fragments of footage from the past week clamoured for a futile re-viewing: Rev in his red Crocs at his gate; Aziz’s pink shirt; the blue and white striped plastic sheeting that had narrowly escaped being splattered with my blood; the neon orange bungee ropes securing my wheelie case to the third camel; the knife-edge creases of Sheikh Ahmad’s Egyptian cotton shirt; a Cath Kidston oven glove; Jammy’s magenta and yellow-trimmed nylon bodice; a koi carp; a plate of Abu Walad biscuits, my Rose Shocking lipstick. From time to time among all those harmless images, there were others of a far more lurid and sinister hue: the riderless third camel; Mrs Rev at Mukalla airport with my ancestral binoculars in her plastic bag; a body in a blanket in Seiyun. And there was one more that, try as I might, I could not erase: Sheikh Ahmad as I had last seen him, on his knees in the lobby of CLIT, blood pouring down his face, keeling over sideways like a giant redwood. Harrowed, I was terrified of wailing out loud and causing a disturbance in that already pressurised cabin.

  Where was St Serafim when I needed him? This was surely another WWFHD situation, but my illustrious ancestor’s emotional life had always been a closed book to me. What would great granny Roza Flashman have done in my shoes? She’d have searched high and low for silver linings, I guessed, recalling hearing somewhere that her first reaction to the deaths of both Franz Ferdinand and his wife in 1914 had been an arguably glib ‘Well, it’s probably better they’re both dead because neither could have lived without the other.’ Her second reaction, on hearing of the part she herself turned out to have played in bringing about not just their untimely demises but, by extension, World War One, was apparently only slightly less sanguine…

  But that’s another story entirely and anyway, it may not be true.

  If not silver ones, I was able to discern some linings. Yemen’s pint-sized president proved as good as his word. Mrs Rev had been tracked down and my heirloom binoculars confiscated from her. They were safely stored now in the overhead locker above my seat. I was also much cheered to learn that she, if not her husband, was about to be declared persona non grata in Yemen on account of her heavy-handed proselytising. There were a few more crumbs of comfort to be drawn from the news, thoughtfully passed on to me by our ambassador at Sanaa airport; that General al-Majid was already behind bars.

  Within a couple of days I would learn that images of my beloved in his CLIT cell, complete with gory close-ups of his cuts and bruises, were scoring so many millions of hits on YouTube that the Irish Tines – quickest off the mark, for some reason – had dubbed him ‘Yemen’s Michael Collins’. A fortnight or so later, on remand in a Paddington police cell, I would be hugely heartened to hear of moves afoot to legalise homosexuality in Yemen and even to amend the constitution with a provision of greater autonomy for the south of the country. Here at last was the proof I yearned fo
r that I had not completely wasted my time on the Arabian Peninsula and, much more importantly, that Sheikh Ahmad had not died in vain.

  Ralph did the decent brotherly thing by me, finding me a decent lawyer and visiting me frequently. I begged him not to let Fiona anywhere near me, fearing lest I be tempted to administer the same sort of ‘massage’ I’d inflicted on Mrs Rev the instant she said anything along the lines of ‘I told you so’. But she insisted on sending me packets of mixed nuts in the faddy belief that I’d be bucked up by their serotonin-boosting properties. ‘I’m not an endangered red squirrel!’ I grumbled to Ralph when the third jumbo bag appeared.

  The nuts,sadly, did a thing for my serotonin levels; throughout those six weeks in Holloway I felt as hollowed and fragile as a sloughed-off snake-skin and even fantasised about topping myself, incapable of imagining an existence without the sheikh and our joint commitment to the restoration of south Yemen. I had lost not just the love of my life but my only recently identified purpose in life. Like a deflated party balloon, my Flashman soul had shrunk to a withered nothing again. It was not until after Christmas, shortly before the case came to trial, that I turned a corner and, in a Downton Abbey-esque manner of speaking, chose life over death.

  I would, I decided, atone for my sins in Yemen with an auction sale of my ancestral binoculars whose proceeds would go straight to the widows and orphans of Seiyun I’d so unwittingly created. Ralph protested at the idea, but I was adamant and Fiona agreed with me for a change. And, naturally enough, Bonham’s were as keen as Colman’s to handle the business. On the great day of the grand sale of antique optical instruments lot 16 – cracked and scratched in a rotting leather case - fetched the astronomical sum of £66,800. A young Russian oligarch, a distant descendant of Horatio Nelson’s who, according to an article in the Daily Register , already rejoiced in ‘an eye-poppingly valuable collection of antique optical items that included his own forebear’s famous telescope, had seen off a rival bid from the British Museum.