Into Suez

by Stevie Davies

  The Wing Commander, taking over, thundered out fistfuls of notes in a boogie woogie, standing with a fag hanging from his mouth, swaying from hip to hip, and Alex jived with Mona, then with Ailsa. Then Mona played and the men danced together, a sultry smooching tango that made Ailsa’s stomach ache with laughter. Now she was in the Wing Commander’s arms. He curled her up, unfurled her, and Ailsa, loose and pliant as a rag doll, fell wherever she was thrown. She twisted and turned, her skirts belled, until she became conscious of women in the back of the room and a scatter of clapping. The room was required for tombola. Sweating and exhilarated, Ailsa sensed the women’s eyes on stalks and all the stalks pointing in her direction. So what?

  *

  Through the pale grid of her lashes, Nia watched her mother and the new dark auntie. She rubbed with one finger the patch of Teddy’s hair that had gone bald with kissing. The ventilator went Ooh-Ah.

  The two women were sitting knee to knee on the next bunk. Whispering. Nia heard the blessed names Archie and Joe. Saw them touch glasses of yellow stuff like egg shampoo smelling of cough mixture. Cheers! Iechyd da! Prost! Mona’s big strong hand seemed like her own daddy’s hand on the end of a lady’s arm. Odd as this appeared, it was also good, and she allowed it. Call him Habibi, everyone does, it means Sweetheart. Nia dropped off again, under the spell of the rhythm of the whispering, to and fro, to and fro, until the two voices vanished into the Ooh-Ah of the ventilator and became one voice.

  4

  Mona Serafin-Jacobs, Nia thought. Stalking Mona. Her stomach turned over. She looked across the aisle to check on her daughter: fast asleep, thank goodness. Poppy, who hated flying, had gone green as the plane took off from Manchester for Aqaba; her magazine lay unread in her lap.

  Now Nia was free to gnaw on the bone of Dr Mona Serafin-Jacobs.

  Twenty-odd years ago, after mother’s death, cards from Stalking Mona kept on coming. She never gave up. She’d apparently written many times every year after they’d gone their separate ways. Ailsa had kept the lot in the box. It had not deterred Mona that Ailsa never responded with a proper letter, contenting herself with a polite annual card. From each card Stalking Mona had sucked all the juice and manufactured extra from her own imagination. She’d reminisced copiously about London in the Blitz. Mona’s handwriting was an assertive and characterful italic script, which chased itself across the page, each word linked by a threadlike tie to the next, loops like nooses. It didn’t take no for an answer.

  Well, it had bloody well had to.

  Scanning the latest letter on her stepfather’s behalf, a couple of months after her mother’s death, Nia had resented the tone of insinuating intimacy with a black dislike that was out of proportion really, but then everything was out of proportion where Nia and Ailsa were concerned. Sometimes Nia had wished her mother dead. But when your mother dies, the sun sets behind the mountain and never rises; the eternal dies that day. Poppy, at eighteen months old, had given Nia the will to live. Against the tide of a profound reluctance whose origin she took care not to examine, and because Archie seemed saddened beyond measure when the letters kept coming, Nia had eventually got round to informing the creature of Ailsa’s death.

  The creature was a concert pianist of world stature. On her record sleeves one saw a strong, melancholy face with full lips and striking eyebrows. Her dark hair was coloured with henna and kohl rimmed her nearly black eyes. It turned out that Ailsa hadn’t kept Stalking Mona informed about her life: she’d not bothered to mention her remarriage to Nia’s step-dad and the two boys. So Mona Serafin-Jacobs had addressed her mam all those years as ‘Mrs Ailsa Roberts’. How typical of Ailsa to withhold vital information.

  Dear Dr Serafin-Jacobs, Nia had written. I am sorry to have to tell you … Something like that.

  Dear Nia – came the reply, I am more grieved than I can say to hear of your mother’s death. I had learned (though not directly from Ailsa) of her remarriage and her two sons. May I ask you, Nia: how has your life been? You see, although it is a quarter of a century since I saw you, I recall you so well – you are etched upon my memory. If there is anything I can ever do for you and yours – anything – please let me know. And I would love to see you again.

  She had signed herself: Ever, Mona.

  Visceral inertia had stayed Nia’s hand. Nia had neither replied with a letter nor responded to the request that she phone, nor, God forbid, that they meet. She’d left it till now to get properly in touch. But cards had kept flocking in to herself, every birthday and Christmas, with a handwritten note enclosed, as if Nia had somehow or other been doomed to inherit the burden of her mother’s adorer.

  The name Mona in Ailsa’s journal carried a sickening resonance. Nia had no memories of that woman. But in the act of reading the name, she seemed to see a dark, dramatic face emerge from a mist, nothing like the forbidding mask on the record sleeve: vivacious, reckless. Forcing itself up too close. Swooping down, snatching her up, breathing on her face with a licorice scent. Nia had a sense of – whatever was it? – something she could only think of as boundless cruelty. Even so, Nia had never realised Mona’s importance until Ailsa’s journal came into her hands. The existence of the green notebooks gave her no peace. She read in fragments: shards that penetrated her heart and stuck there festering.

  The young Ailsa was not the mam she knew. Nia recognised herself all right, a horrid, boisterous, attention-seeking little madam. Deep down she was still the only child she’d been then, proclaiming and defending the unique bond that attached her to her mother’s heart, for it could so easily be forfeit. Had she detected that danger so young? The leaves of the green journal with its neatly forward-sloping handwriting imprinted on Nia a fresh signature of loss. She’d rarely felt secure in a relationship. No sooner had she begun to love, truly love, Poppy’s father than she’d gone cold on him. He will change. Something namelessly bad will happen. If I love him. If I let myself. Yet Jude and she had become excellent friends over the years and that meant something to her and everything to Poppy.

  The journal paper had scarcely aged: it might have been written last week. Nia struggled in the web of handwriting. It was like falling in love, she thought, with a thousand misgivings, in love with a fresh Ailsa, hungry for life and craving adventure. More akin to a sister than to the mother she remembered. Actually, Nia thought, as the window whitened with cloud and the plane entered a phase of turbulence, the young Ailsa really was rather like me, wasn’t she? She must have understood. And, if so, she’d have feared for me in my wild days.

  There’d been no question, when the chance of the cruise came up, but that Nia must follow her young mother into Egypt, leaving the older Ailsa in the green shires of the Marches. I’m coming, she’d promised her. Wait for me.

  Mona Serafin-Jacobs was still, at eighty-something, giving rare recitals; she was scheduled to play Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto with SOPH, the Symphony Orchestra of Palestinian Harmony. Nia had written to her care of her agent: My daughter Poppy and I expect to be in Ismailia on 6th October. She’d trembled as she typed the invitation and dropped it in the post box at Craven Arms. No going back. She’d brought the journals to show to Poppy and perhaps to Mona, for there were questions only this woman could answer. This thought filled Nia with exquisite disquiet. Already she understood things about Mona that Ailsa had totally missed. Politically, the young Ailsa was a complete simpleton. How could her mother have been so naïve? I was born in Jerusalem, Mona had said. What does that tell you? Ailsa hadn’t a clue what she was getting into. Only a year before the Empire Glory docked, the struggle between East and West had exploded. The Israeli state had risen at the heart of the Arab Muslim world, and that world could not abide it, not then, not now, not ever. Our modern reality was being born in fratricidal carnage, Nia thought, while you sailed blithely into the eye of the storm, Ailsa, innocent as a babe, your picture-book Bible as your guidebook, as witness your answer to Mona’s question, What does that tell you? Not a clue.


  Poppy opened her eyes and stretched. ‘Are we there yet?’ she yawned, in parody of her plaintive childhood question. She reached out to touch Nia’s hand, across the aisle, and smiled.

  ‘Nearly there, cariad,’ lied Nia. Through the porthole, she could see the papier maché mountains of Italy, silver with snow. They’d be boarding a cruise ship at Aqaba, the Terra Incognita, to sail through the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal to Port Said and thence Alexandria.

  *

  ‘I was born in Jerusalem. What does that tell you?’

  That you’re Jewish, Ailsa thought. Obviously. I’ve worked that out already.

  The two of them rested cwtched-up, as Joe would have said, on the bunk, drinking gin like old friends. Unused to spirits, Ailsa grew squiffy, then dozy. Her head lolled against the pillow and Mona’s shoulder. At her throat Mona had a chain with a silver ornament attached; her fingers constantly played with it.

  ‘What’s that round your neck?’

  ‘The key to our house in Qatamon. The side entrance.’

  ‘It’s pretty. Where is Qatamon, Mona?’

  ‘A suburb of Jerusalem. I was two and a bit when we were driven out.’

  ‘Driven out?’

  ‘In the run-up to the so-called Arab Revolt. Between the Wars, during the British Mandate. I don’t remember any of the violence. But I do remember our house, at least I think I do. Do you think Nia will remember things that are happening now? Will she remember this ship? Perhaps it’s not my own memory but some sort of composite family memory. Anyway I wouldn’t lose it for the world.’

  Ailsa learned that Mona’s father had been murdered by mistake for another Serafin. Her mother had fled with Mona and her brother. First to Lebanon, then to Cairo, and from there to relatives in London.

  ‘I never speak about this. Even to myself.’

  ‘Don’t if it’s painful.’

  ‘No, I want to, Ailsa. So you’ll know.’

  In her teens Mona had been sent to Brussels to study piano, while her brother, the violinist, had emigrated to America. She’d come back to London eighteen months or so before the war, tail between her legs. It had not been a success. But then life had looked up! In a very big way. A year at Cambridge reading Greats, then Brewers’ Green and the girls and Ben. And now you, Ailsa!

  Ashamed of her ignorance, Ailsa let the moment go by when she could have asked why the Serafins, Jews in Jerusalem, had been driven out of their own city. And why, now that the state of Israel existed, they couldn’t return. Israel had opened the gates for massive immigration, Ailsa knew that: a thousand Jews a day were flocking home to the Holy Land. From the ends of the earth. The ancient Exodus was at last reversed. The remnant of Europe’s persecuted Jews could find a place to lay their heads. So why not the Serafins?

  Mona was describing a white veranda: when you stepped out in the morning before the heat got up, its cool tiles were delicious under your bare feet. Her window at Qatamon had looked out on an apricot tree and an orange tree. Our tabby and her kittens basked in their shade. Ailsa felt saturated with the light and colour of Mona’s memories and with their sadness, as if they constituted a dream of her own.

  The cat had been called Petra. A fat, overfed creature, purring like a motor.

  We had to leave her there. Under the tree. But I never speak about this.

  That meant: don’t ask questions. I will tell you what I can. Mona said the women of her family had been strong people. Obliged to be. Resourceful and flexible and inventive. They’d had to learn other languages and customs, transplanting themselves in different soils. Every new language clashed against the others until you absorbed it and each in turn seemed to be Mona’s first language, or equal first. Or they bled confusingly into one another. Tower of Babel in here, she said, tapping her head, confusion of tongues. That’s how it is with nomads. Never a dull moment. All the borders in the world seemed to run through her like rivers.

  But Mona was happy now again. Radiantly happy. She had a pal from a golden time. No mention was made of the piano. What had that been about? Something to do with being a refugee, Ailsa thought. She was squiffy and had to be helped into her bunk.

  Next day Mona’s bunk was empty. They’d all been sick as dogs in the Bay of Biscay but things were calmer now. Ailsa, with a pounding headache, went over to Mona’s bunk and turned down the sheet. Nightie gone. Wash-bag gone. She’d been taken. Who had taken her? Don’t be silly, of course she hadn’t. Ailsa slowly began to dress and made her way up on deck.

  Sky and sea were dazzlingly blue, the breezy sun warm on her face and arms. A handful of hardy folk had already clambered out of the misery in the ship’s belly and lay on deck chairs soaking up the sun. It was another world, a holiday place. One could dimly see grey-green land over the sea-shimmer. And a white-coated waiter approaching with tea and biscuits.

  The German woman lay fast asleep on a deck chair, pale hair tucked under a scarf, a cardigan draped round her shoulders. Ailsa sat down beside her, sipped sweet tea, nibbled a sugary biscuit. The quiet was bliss; the fresh air tonic. A book lay open on Hedwig’s lap, its pages whispering as the breeze turned them over one by one, unread.

  When Hedwig yawningly awoke, Ailsa couldn’t resist exercising her beloved German: ‘Guten Morgen, Frau Webster. Ein richtig schöner Tag, nicht wahr?’ Hedwig’s eyes were puffy. You’ve been crying, Ailsa thought, as her neighbour hoisted herself up in the chair and removed her sun glasses for a moment, to rub her eyes.

  ‘Guten Morgen, Frau Roberts. Sie sprechen also Deutsch?’

  ‘Kleines Bißchen.’

  Hedwig came from Hamburg. Her husband had met her in the ruins. He had saved her from bad things. Taken her to safety.

  She did not look as though she felt safe. It came out that the ladies in her cabin, all but Frau Irene White, had treated Hedwig as if she were personally responsible for the swastikas on the sheets. Hedwig had never been one of them, she was blameless, surely that was clear? She was a British citizen, she said. She did not complain that her younger brothers and her best friend had been cremated in the firestorm. For this vile bombing might have been a necessary evil. But it should be known that her parents had been persecuted – verfolgt, she said – by the Gestapo.

  That was what they all said, of course. Me a Nazi, an anti-Semite, an informer? Perish the thought! But in some cases – many – it must also be true. How could you know? Ailsa, embarrassed, murmured that she was sure no one really thought that, of course not, not in their heart of hearts.

  They did, of course. The master race turns on the stranger in its midst. And who was the master race now?

  Hedwig, encouraged by Ailsa’s mild sympathy, was soon in full spate. The way she talked, those swastikas described British bullying as well as Jerry’s. A Reich and an Empire: what’s the difference? Not that she said this in so many words – but Ailsa heard it. Steady on, whoa, she thought. That cap does not fit. We are pretty decent after all. She was glad to break the contact when Irene and her two small sons came up on deck and Mrs Grey arrived with Nia, sucking her thumb and dangling her golliwog. Taking Ailsa aside, Mrs Grey explained that the Captain had had a discreet word with Wing Commander Jacobs. His lady had been persuaded to return to the officers’ deck, for the convenience of everyone. She felt Mrs Roberts would like to know this, for she had been placed in a situation that was simply invidious.

  The women streamed up on deck wearing sun tops and straw hats; there were ice creams for the kiddies. A festive mood prevailed. Ailsa and Nia strolled, tasting the sweet air and so serene in one another’s company that they hardly needed to talk. Ailsa was lazily haunted by the thought of the deutsche Kriegsmarine sailing in this ship before them. Flaxen boys drilled on the sundeck; culture-loving Leutnants read in its opulent library.

  The barrier between the officers’ and lower ranks wives’ quarters turned out to be nothing but a faded red rope slung between two posts. Ailsa stepped over; Nia ducked under. On the officers’ deck, they made their
way to Wing Commander Jacobs’s cabin. It was hardly a conscious decision.

  Day by day Ailsa breached the red cord with a growing sense of entitlement. In turn, Mona sauntered into the lower world when she felt like it. Authority dozed in a deck chair, soaking up the sun. The Empire Glory became, with every passing hour, its own world. They forgot to look back or forward, moving deeper into warm sunshine over a lapidary sea of blue glass.

  Nearing Gibraltar, the tannoy pointed out the Pillars of Hercules, either side of the straits, and behind you, ladies, boys and girls, is Africa! Tugs led them into harbour; a layer of cloud burned away from the turquoise sky and the Rock rose up before them. Everyone cheered. Ailsa’s heart soared as the Empire Glory was coaxed through a huddle of rusted tankers to the landing stage. The Greek crew of the Aphrodite called to the women and waved their hats. Derricks were rigged; gangways swung out so that harbour officials and dock hands could board.

  ‘Restocking and refuelling,’ the tannoy informed them. ‘Military supplies to be landed and other material loaded for the Far East.’

  Crates, barrels and boxes were swung out of the holds. The tannoy assured the wives of its confidence that their on-shore behaviour would do credit to King and country. Rollicking troops on their deck received their own tannoy-lecture from the Padre, who cautioned them to exercise self-control, bearing in mind that the body was the temple of the Holy Spirit. Wild cheers at this. Ailsa watched the lads swarm down the gangplank in their khaki tropical kit, clowning like boys let out of school, which in a sense they were. They seemed incompletely fashioned, as if the potter’s clay had not had time to dry. The ghost of a song lingered in their wake: Roll me over in the clover, do it again!

  ‘Ladies, boys and girls, you may disembark!’

  As Ailsa took her first steps on foreign soil, she felt her new life begin. No going back. She and Mona, Ben and Alex sat at the table of a pavement café, breathing in the scents of lemons, coffee and spices. They passed the dreamy, exotic afternoon like two couples who’d known each other forever. They were stared at, talked about, of course they were. But how could Ailsa have passed up this chance to live beyond her class? In another, less visited part of her mind, she flinched at her own bravado. Saw Joe’s puzzled, kind, shocked face if he ever got to know.