Into Suez

by Stevie Davies

  Now Roy White counted as a fallen warrior. Nia saw that his homely face had been turned to the wall among a stack of pictures the brothers had stripped from Irene’s world.

  ‘How are you doing, Topher?’

  ‘Oh – you know. Hits you a bit, doesn’t it? There was stuff I wanted to say to Ma and ask her – it was so sudden.’

  When the blow came that took a life, it changed all the lights and shades, as Nia knew too well. Topher could have said those crucial things to Irene any day for the past four decades. But he hadn’t. He’d begrudged the words that might have touched his mother’s speechless heart. Topher had nourished a rankling grudge that had knitted itself into his very flesh and become part of him. Ignorant of where it came from.

  ‘Better for her that way,’ Nia said. ‘Going in her sleep. A heart attack can be quite a merciful thing.’

  ‘For her, maybe.’ Tears seeped from his eyes. She saw again the boy in the man. A pale-haired child crouched with bucket and spade in the sand, his bare shoulders covered in calamine lotion, crying because – and surely she had made this up – enormous hail stones were being shot at them from the sapphire blue sky. But I was never a cry-baby, Nia thought: I picked one up, big as a ping pong ball, and sucked it. She saw all this in a flash, even as she said, ‘Yes, it’s a mercy for Irene. You will feel that later, Toph, when you’re less raw. You really will.’

  Tim stood in the doorway, carrying black bin bags. ‘Hi, Nia darling, good to see you. You’ve not changed one bit,’ he said insincerely. It seemed to be the only way he could speak. Yet she had a sense that sincerity was there under the surface, repressed. He was still, in middle age, a handsome-looking man, with his mother’s delicate features. He’d done a bit of acting in his time which had delighted Irene. Nia remembered being carted along by Ailsa and Irene to an open-air production of Hamlet in the grounds of Ludlow Castle. It had rained. She could see Irene, sitting forward in her seat under the umbrella, cowled in her gabardine, ecstatic. She’d mouthed every word of Tim’s hammed-up Guildenstern. He still trod the boards as an amateur.

  Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended rang through her mind. They were three over-age Hamlets picking over the funeral baked meats.

  ‘I’m really sorry for your loss, Tim.’

  ‘Thanks, Nia love. We’re devastated. What are you doing with yourself these days?’

  ‘Still teaching – and some advisory stuff.’

  ‘You were in the news – last year, was it? Quite a celebrity. Didn’t you help change the law on something or other?’

  ‘Young offenders. Only through a committee report.’

  ‘You were always the intellectual. Your mother was so proud of you.’

  ‘You think so?’ It was the kind of thing people said. Especially when it wasn’t true. But she half-recognised the implicit truth of it. Ailsa had been proud of Nia behind her back. Behind her own back. Nia’s heart gave a huge throb and then stopped dead. She wanted Ailsa back now, this minute, more than anything in the world. To embrace her, in every sense.

  ‘And how’s the lovely Poppy?’

  ‘Lovely,’ she said. ‘Got it in one.’ They’d been on another march against the invasion of Iraq last week, walking hand in hand. In her own time, your child circled back to you and linked arms as an equal. It was a miracle.

  ‘How’s the poetry going, Toph?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah.’

  Was that an answer? He seemed to think so. Topher nodded his head; started constructing a roll-up, pinching up the tobacco, daintily licking along the paper. His teeth were stained brown. He offered her the joint, between thumb and forefinger. She shook her head. Topher’s poetry, a wild and snarling animal in the sixties, had been tamed into a pussy cat of verbose affectation. But then, what did Nia know? She’d never seen the point of poetry.

  Tim said he’d bring down the box.

  He came crashing down the stairs two at a time and placed a cardboard crate on the table. They all three looked at it. Nia’s full name was printed in block capitals on each of the four sides. Once it had held Archie’s new-laid free range eggs: ‘Lyth Clee Farm, Best Salop Eggs’. They didn’t sell eggs any more: the few chickens laid enough for the household and friends in Wenlock. Why had Ailsa stored the box with her friend rather than leaving it with Archie? There it had remained in Irene’s attic gathering dust while Nia had aged to nearly her mother’s final age, fifty-seven.

  ‘Right then,’ Nia said. ‘Thanks for that, both of you. I’ll be on my way – leave you guys to get on.’

  ‘Don’t go, Nia,’ said Topher.

  But she made her excuses and left, eyes smarting with Topher’s smoke. She had the feeling she’d been smoked over in her crib, both parents pouring out their toxins.

  Starting the engine, relieved to be on the road, Nia remembered her mother’s intensely secret world. Ailsa lighting up, for instance: she could never kick the habit, though she pretended to have done so. Nia knew that Archie knew. Like a teenager, Ailsa would smoke out of the dormer window, looking over to the mountain, stubbing out the fags in an ashtray she kept in a shoe box. Did she really imagine it was a secret? Nia, prowling her mother’s terrain, would count the lipstick-stained butts in the ashtray, poke at them with her finger. Always a little apart, Mami was a figure in green wellies digging in her market garden. Or crouching in the small barn with the vintage motor bikes she collected and never rode but tinkered with and polished up, humming all the while. Happy with her head in a book, she was always, as Nia put it to herself, over there. Her mother would take off with no notice when the spirit took her, letting herself slyly out of the far gate where the ground began to sweep up towards the Long Mynd. Sometimes she’d let Les tag along, the younger brother who was ‘no trouble’ and did not disturb her reverie. Nia would see Ailsa framed in the lattice window, striding off to where the turf was emerald in the low western light, becoming a stick figure, as she began to climb the purple Mynd. Always at heart alone.

  Archie would know to let Ailsa be. When Mami went on one of her wanders, he’d lay a hand on Nia’s arm to detain her, diverting her attention to some project of his own, helping with the calves, cleaning Mami’s tools so they’d be shiny for her. Now, driving along the bridleway to Lyth Clee, Nia saw her mother as doubly recessive, walking away into the wilderness of death.

  And Nia, from her earliest days at the farm, would cycle off alone through the mighty landscape, singing at the top of her voice, on her own adventure. But this was a different matter, apparently. Going AWOL, normal for Ailsa, counted as incorrigible naughtiness in Nia.

  She set the box on the floor by the dead grate at Lyth Clee; cut through the tape and string and peered in. Coming from the yard, removing his boots at the door and going to wash his hands, her stepfather asked, ‘What have you got there, lovely?’

  ‘Don’t be upset, Dad,’ she said. ‘It’s some stuff of Mam’s. For some reason it was stored at Irene’s.’

  Wiping his hands, he peered inside; saw the neatly packed notebooks, letters in their original envelopes, an album.

  ‘That would be Mam’s journals. Always busy with her writing, bless her.’

  That was all he said, level and apparently incurious. Settling down in his usual armchair, he closed his eyes, stretching out socked feet as he had every evening for as long as she could remember. Archie at eighty was lean and spry, fit as a man two-thirds of his age. Only he had less stamina for the hours of arduous labour and lapsed into stillness at the end of the day. Of course Don took the bulk of the heavy work and all the farm business, which Archie had always found a chore. Nia looked over at him. Fairly obviously he did not want to examine the contents of the box. He preserves his inner balance, she thought; he is a spirit level.

  Without opening his eyes, Archie made a loose fist of his hand and gently tapped his chest, in the region of his heart, as if knocking at a door.

  *

  The quiet sky buoyed Nia: she rode a t
hermal that came bouncing off the edge of the Mynd, circling so that she could look down on its spine at the sheer valleys deep in shadow dropping from Pole Bank. The homely irregularity of Archie’s farm was spotlit, its quilt of fields green and tawny yellow; the stand of oaks like broccoli. The red spot that winked would be Don in the tractor. Turning west, the glider sighed its way over Caer Caradoc; then towards Wenlock Edge.

  That passion should be so peaceful, she could never have imagined before taking to the skies twenty years earlier. Ripped veils of cloud travelled beneath her, hiding and revealing the vast presences of the hills.

  At peace, Nia thought: Ailsa too is at peace. They’d scattered her ashes on the Mynd all those years ago. Now looking down on the volcanic rock of Caer Caradoc, the sandstone Mynd, the rich soil of the flood plain, the coral reef of Wenlock Edge, Nia thought: those atoms of Ailsa might have drifted anywhere. Or everywhere. The whole of this is my mother.

  Ailsa’s moment; the six hundred million years of the massif. The mind fainted at the time scale of that. When the tectonic plates buckled and the volcanoes were born, Shropshire had been south of the equator. So Ailsa belonged to the body of the round earth. Nowhere was she a foreigner.

  Nia made a sweet landing. Les came down ten minutes later. More and more, sister and brother lived for this, the necessity to earn their crust being intervals in their dream. In midwinter, when the mountain was white and icebound and nearly impassable, they’d struggle up in the Land Rover if they heard the club was open. Her brother met her in the clubhouse, where they clinked their customary glasses of brown ale.

  ‘I thought of Mam up there,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, right? What in particular?’

  ‘Not sure. A sense of her. Do you ever feel you’re walking in her footsteps?’

  Les shook his head and smiled. He was a literal, practical guy who managed a small chain of sports shops and called a spade a spade.

  ‘Do you remember the raindrop fossil she brought down from the Mynd?’ Nia asked him.

  ‘I do. Where is it now?’

  ‘She gave it to the museum at Carding Mill, didn’t she?’

  ‘That’s right. We ought to go and see it again.’

  One person couldn’t claim ownership of such a treasure: so Ailsa had declared, though anyone could see the avarice in her eyes. It was a fragment of telltale rock about the size of a brick, from a sandstone layer that had weathered out on the Mynd. The rock was imprinted with the marks of a passing shower that had fallen on to dried mud. The mud dried; a new layer of mud silted down, dried fast and locked the raindrops’ traces in. And one day six hundred million years later, Mrs Ailsa Copsey of Lyth Clee Farm, climbing an exposed edge, had become aware of that passing shower.

  ‘Yes,’ said Les. ‘We’ll definitely visit. Not today. We’re out to supper.’

  ‘Have you phoned Nicki?’

  ‘Yes, don’t worry.’

  Nicole did not much like her husband’s fad for gliding and he was required to phone her whenever he was safely on terra firma again. Nia had shown him the photos and he’d begun to read Ailsa’s journals. But he’d broken off abruptly, blushing to the roots of his hair: face, throat, everything, brick red. Would not say why. It was not his history. And this woman was not, in any way he comprehended, his mam. Perhaps that was it. Nia perfectly understood why he should be shocked, though she didn’t share the reaction. Not at all. The Ailsa revealed in the journals was someone as nakedly close to Nia as a second skin.

  Mother and daughter were alike, that was the thing, in ways Nia had rarely suspected. She’d had a couple of the tiny black and white pictures enlarged, so sharply had they affected her. They’d been taken on the voyage out to Egypt, obviously, since mother and child had been flown back in 1952. Enlarged, the prints looked strikingly modern. They might have been taken last week, except for the blanching round the margins that turned them into arresting ghost photos. One was a group portrait of Ailsa, the young Irene and an unknown fair-haired woman. Topher and Tim, flaxen cherubs in collar and tie, were attached to their mother’s skirts, thumbs in mouths. Ailsa, the tallest member of the group, held Nia’s hand in both of hers and bent her head to speak to her. It was clear that the two of them were communing with their eyes in a bliss of secret and somehow subversive conversation. Telepathy, Nia thought: she’d once lived intuitively, able to enfold or suffuse herself in Ailsa’s inner space. They’d understood one another, without having to speak. Braiding their thoughts into the one plait. In the photo Nia was gazing up at her mother with an expression of melting tenderness.

  The second picture showed Ailsa and another woman, of equal height but strikingly dark, wearing loose, silky trousers and a white, sleeveless blouse. She recognised her, of course: that woman, Mona, the pursuer of Ailsa’s ghost. Arms round one another’s waists, the two of them seemed about to burst out laughing at some mad private joke to do with the young man in uniform on their left. And Ailsa looked – there were no other words for it – radiantly beautiful.

  ‘Poppy and I are off to Egypt,’ she told Les. ‘On a cruise.’

  ‘I know – Dad said. Are you sure it’s safe to go?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t it be?’

  ‘Well, terrorism, for a start. Nowhere’s safe in the Middle East any longer.’

  ‘Not since Bush and B.Liar went into Iraq all guns blazing, you mean?’

  Her Tory brother hated it when Nia went off on one of her political rants. He’d been a member of the territorials in his youth, playing the cornet in the regimental band. She saw him swallow a sharp retort.

  ‘I was thinking more of 9/11,’ Les said gently. And then, to defuse things, ‘Well, really I was just thinking of your health. You’ll come down with something gastric and I’ll have to come and fetch you home.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so stuffy. It’ll be fine.’

  2

  They’d just left their moorings at Southampton when Nia, holding Ailsa’s skirts bunched in both fists, said she would get off now. She wasn’t sailing on this nasty sea, said Nia. She was going home. Home she was going.

  Go home Mami! she bellowed. And letting go of the skirts, Nia struggled to make a break for it. Ailsa gripped the child’s wrist, shushing her. The wives and kiddies thronged the rail as the brass band played the Empire Glory out of harbour. It oompahed through ‘Colonel Bogey’ and many of the women sang along, their fear lifted, and the conscripts further down the ship whistled.

  ‘Can you see Uncle Archie?’ Ailsa cajoled the hysterical Nia.

  ‘See him! See my lovely Archie!’ the child shrieked, waving at the receding crowd on the quay.

  ‘We’re going to be with Daddy though, aren’t we?’ Ailsa encouraged her.

  Dull old England receded with every moment. Sailing to Joe! Ailsa thought. Goodbye to Church Stretton, Archie and everyone. Once she was out of the way, perhaps he’d find himself a nice girl, have children and be happy. Her cousin – once her kissing cousin – had shaken his head at the news of their departure and raised one hand as if to brush a moth away. The cryptic gesture said that he was content with his lot. Knowing you are in the world. So take care of yourself, Ailsa, you are precious to us all. She gripped the rail tight. She’d always loved Archie. But it would never have worked. Joe of course had no idea. She’d never breathed a word. Her husband could be jealous of his own shadow and, when she’d allowed him to kiss her after that first dance, he sulked at the thought that she might be fast.

  At home they’d begged Ailsa not to go to Egypt: did she want to take Nia to her death? Consider the germs, the flies, the heat, the filthy habits of the natives. Not to mention terrorists. What was Ailsa thinking of? Archie’s parents, socialist to the bone, had mildly pointed out that we had no earthly right to be there: the so-called Anglo-Egyptian Treaty was illegal, the Empire an expensive farce. Attlee knew that, if Bevin didn’t. We’d scuttled out of India and Palestine and we’d have to scuttle out of the rest of the Middle East. Scuttling was all we
were good for. The War had beggared and bankrupted Britain. Rationing, which they’d largely escaped on the farm, was getting worse, not better.

  Ailsa’s mother’s people, Shrewsbury Tories, said Suez was the Empire’s jugular vein; it made us safe in our beds. Protection against the Commies. The point you have to remember is that Egypt’s on Uncle Joe Stalin’s doorstep. And by that token, no place for wives and kiddies.

  Go home, Mami, now! Going now!

  Nia bolted along the deck to where she thought she remembered the gangplank was. She squirmed through the jam of bodies.

  No gangplank. Nia frowned down at the churning grey waters. The brass band drew off and the waving folk on the harbour were getting smaller: to Nia it seemed that the jetty moved away like a ferry, while the great troopship stood still. The lines of weeping families on shore waved Union Jacks and pocket hankies, leaving Nia high and dry.

  Oompah, went the band.

  Twin khaki men hunkered either side of the child.

  ‘What’s the trouble now, dearie? Lost your mum, have you?’

  ‘Mami!’ shrieked Nia. ‘Lost! My! Mami!’

  Nia and her mother were one lovely weave, like a plait. Nia could sense Ailsa’s emotions through her skin, and think in her mother’s mind. Mostly. But the plait was beginning to become unbraided. It had been coming to pieces for some time. Her mouth squared up and quivered.

  ‘Goodbye! Ta ta! Write!’ shouted the women, leaning over the rails, arms outstretched.

  The band swung into ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’.

  Nia hung high in the air, in the powerful arms of a khaki man with a beret, who might possibly have been her father, although he usually wore blue. But he had this same tobacco smell mixed with hair oil and petrol.