The phone call had come late yesterday evening, just as Nia was getting ready for bed. The Terra Incognita had berthed for two days at Sharm al Sheikh, where Poppy and Nia sunbathed on the private beach of a luxury hotel, taking countless dips in the warm water of the Red Sea. Most of the recliners were vacant, the war in Iraq having emptied hotels of tourists and hoteliers’ pockets of profit. Monumental hotel blocks stood empty, their dark windows facing the turquoise water. Impoverished staff mobbed the few guests, competing to offer service likely to attract baksheesh. Sharm, which would be empty of tourists for as long as convulsions lasted, felt like the end of the world. Armed soldiers patrolled the beach perimeters, where barbed wire had been laid to protect the bathers.
By and by, despite the apocalyptic desolation of the place, Nia had allowed herself to lie back, drowse and dream. All too soon they were rounded up and bussed back to the Terra Incognita. Nia had promised herself another such soporific day tomorrow and perhaps a cruise in one of the glass-bottomed boats that took you to view the exotic fish and corals.
After supper, she’d stretched out on her bunk. Lassitude from the heat and relaxation had been broken by the phone call. An elderly, grating voice over a poor line. Mona Serafin-Jacobs here. How are you? (No pause for an answer.) Let’s keep this short. No point in waiting around to join you in Alex when I can board at Sharm. All arranged. Expect me tomorrow latish afternoon. Suit you?
It had to be all right, didn’t it? The peremptoriness of Stalking Mona’s manner had put Nia’s back up at once. No time had been granted for response, for the caller hung up abruptly, leaving Nia silenced, ears ringing, receiver in hand. Little chance of sleep after that.
By morning she’d all but blanked the whole thing. Nia was good at that: sand sifted down over memory and threat, while she affected the neutral public persona Poppy called her po-face and didn’t like one little bit. The carapace, which had stood her in good stead in all sorts of painful situations, was the legacy of her mother. Not the Ailsa of the diaries, whose skin was scarily thin and whose heart lay nakedly open, but the older woman who’d taken unspecified deadly blows and been forced to build a fortress on the instability of her losses, sinking her soul down into herself.
Passengers came and went with coffee and tea. Nia vanished into her book.
She’d missed the arrival of a woman in sunglasses under the sunshade at a neighbouring table. Is this you? Nia’s heart beat hard.
But no, too young surely even for a vigorous old age. The stranger’s build was monumental, her face craggy and striking; her cropped dark hair (dyed, surely) was oiled close to her head. She wore three-quarter trousers and an embroidered and beaded tunic, tawny coloured. Pushing her sunglasses up on to her head, she took a sip of coffee, looking over the cup to where Poppy lay becalmed in the water. Her eyelashes were thick and curly, with kohl round her eyes, strong eyebrows pencilled in. And yes, dashing and distinguished if frail (for she walked with the aid of the stick Nia saw resting against her chair), here was their guest, Mona Serafin-Jacobs.
Mona’s eyes in the light filtering through the sun roof were just as Ailsa had described them and as one saw on her record sleeves: deep liquid brown, troubling. Nia stared, then swivelled her head away, but looked back again. It was up to the visitor to say the first word. Nia felt paralysed.
Going to take another sip of coffee, the stranger caught Nia observing her. For a long moment they held one another’s eyes without smiling. Mona was the first to rise. She advanced without the aid of her stick, holding out her hand to take Nia’s in a firm grip. Nia caught a waft of expensive perfume.
‘I knew you at once,’ said Mona, choking on the words. ‘Believe it or not. How are you, Nia?’
Nervous agitation gripped and shook Nia; she was a quailing child. She summoned hypocritical pleasantries, polite formulae. So glad to meet you after all this time. How are you? Is your cabin comfortable?
‘Yes, yes, fine, it’s fine.’
Was the woman going to cry?
Poppy’s head appeared over the parapet of the pool. Beaming. ‘Mona!’ she cried. ‘Hey, it’s Mona, isn’t it?’
Dark hair plastered down her head and back, Poppy scrambled out and rushed to their visitor, stopping just short.
‘I won’t hug you,’ she said. ‘Unless you want to be drenched.’ So much more naturally than Nia, Poppy reached across and kissed Mona with her cold mouth on both cheeks. And watching Poppy chattering away, wrapping a towel around herself, Nia felt as if she were observing her own self – herself as she ought to be. She was conscious of her own profound reserve.
They would go into the pool! cried Mona. Now! What about it? Why not? They could all be wet together! And really the sun was so roasting! What was it Milton called clothes? These troublesome disguises which we wear!
Mona began to peel off down to her dark underwear.
And this too was just as it ought to be. One should live without stiffness and self-consciousness. But Nia’s face flamed with embarrassment as she followed suit. And this stripper-off of wrappings was Mam’s bosom friend? It was unimaginable.
But how much easier it was bobbing about together in the cool lassitude of salty green water. Poppy was telling Mona about Aqaba – how it had been a ghost town, no visitors at the hotels; echoing space between the bare red hills and the premonition they’d had there of catastrophe, at the borders of Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Men with guns.
Mona lay on her back and basked, dark hair raying around her head. ‘Plus ça change,’ she said. And now the West had brought another wave of Shock and Awe, not just to Iraq, but to the Middle East and the world as a whole.
‘It’s the Suez crisis all over again,’ Nia said. ‘But on an incomparably vaster scale – apocalyptic. It’s as if we can’t learn.’
‘You surely don’t remember Suez?’
‘I remember it clearly. It politicised me. My Welsh grandparents sitting more or less on top of the radio, ears glued to the Nine O’clock News. Nasser nationalises the Canal. Eden plots with France and Israel. Our glorious troops sent in murdering and bombing. Plot detected. We all run home with our tails between our legs when the Americans tell us to. Suez was probably the first time I realised our leaders were asses.’
‘But you can only have been about ten.’
‘Age of reason. It’s all downhill from there.’
Mona laughed. A sense of what the two of them had in common slackened the tension. They spoke of Clem Attlee, the postwar Labour Prime Minister, and how, if he’d had his way, Britain would have pulled out of its colonies before we could make further mischief.
‘Might have beens,’ Nia sighed. ‘Counterfactuals. Silly game really.’
It occurred to her that, if the Brits had packed up their guns and gone home after the war, she and Topher might still have their fathers. And Mona might have her husband. What had happened to the Wing Commander of the diaries, the lovable Habibi who’d so upset Joe Roberts by his friendliness with his wife – the anti-Zionist Jew who’d married a Palestinian refugee? The desire not to know had been nearly as sharp as the yen to know. Whenever Nia opened the diaries she’d reread what she already knew, unable to bring herself to read on. Her mother was young again, complex, radicalised and reckless – and her father, well, Joe was no saint but she felt a sweetness in him. He’d loved Ailsa, he’d loved Nia. But had Joe loved her as dearly as Archie did? She doubted it. If Attlee had had his way, Joe and Chalkie and Ben Jacobs would have come safely home. There’d have been no stepfather. Archie would be nothing but a distant second cousin – unbearable thought. Of course you wouldn’t know what you’d missed.
And Chalkie, who seemed a lovely guy, might have saved the world from the prolixities of Topher’s poetry.
‘So what else did you see in Jordan?’ Mona asked Poppy. They floated on their backs, bodies swirling with green water, rippling with sunlight.
‘Oh, the ruins of the original Aqaba. The Citadel where the British ships
lobbed cannon balls at the Turks, wasn’t it, in the First World War and jolly old Lawrence of Arabia stormed down from the mountains.’
‘And an aquarium,’ said Nia. ‘We were the fish – or rather Poppy was. She was mobbed by guys with their eyes on stalks.’
‘Well, if you will look like Nefertiti, what can you expect?’
‘That’s a rather nice compliment,’ said Poppy. ‘I’ll buy you a drink for that.’
‘I speak as I find, my dear, as you will no doubt discover.’
It was a rather quenching remark, though delivered in jest. Nia could feel the power in Mona to annihilate you if she chose – or if the cause she espoused, or the agenda she favoured, seemed to require this.
Yet Mona, when they’d hauled themselves out and dressed, was clearly overwhelmed with fatigue. She sat quietly with tea and a scone under the turquoise shade, sipping and nibbling, and failed to look particularly formidable. When from time to time their eyes caught and held, for no more than a moment, Nia was conscious of a search going on that cost their guest dear. Mona sat as if collapsed into herself, looking like an old lady. No different from the humming throng around her. She’s searching for my mother in me, Nia thought, but she’ll have her work cut out to find her. Ailsa Roberts had been a young woman in her heyday; Nia was getting on in years. And Mam had been astoundingly beautiful, with that heart-shaped face, high cheek bones and green-blue eyes. The nearest Nia had ever got to that was an expressive and eccentric feyness that had made people stare. Years ago.
She in her turn searched out Ailsa in Mona. The two survivors had come through life looking for the one elusive love. And if Ailsa did not somehow endure within both these women, she was nowhere.
Poppy seemed to see it all, without the need of words. She kept the two older women balanced with her naturalness and warmth, until she judged the time right to leave them in one another’s company. If it was OK, she said, she’d go and chill out in the jacuzzi. She bent and kissed each on the cheek. Taking Poppy’s hand, Mona looked into her face with a beautifully soft expression.
‘I’ve got all your CDs,’ Nia told Mona. ‘Every single one. I inherited Mam’s collection of your records, of course. And everything since. And there’s a DVD of a concert in Ismailia with Oum Koulsoum. That was amazing.’
The concert had been filmed by the Egyptian television service, focusing on the legendary singer, with Mona Jacobs on the margins. People had fainted with emotion at that concert – and then the fight or scuffle had broken out later. None of this was explicitly shown on the black and white DVD. Nia had watched again before coming on the voyage, frame by frame, pausing and staring, after learning of Ailsa’s presence in the audience. The cameras panned the packed auditorium during the intervals when the Egyptian men got to their feet to applaud their heroine, weeping, calling out her name, reaching out their hands. The young Mona stood tall and willowy in a simple, closely fitting black gown with pearls at her neck. A most poignant look on her face as she rose from the piano stool and held out her hand to the Egyptian singer. A shyness no longer remotely apparent. Pianist and singer had come forward and bowed together, over and over, while the Egyptian half of the crowd went wild, to the buttoned-up consternation of the British auditors. In one frame, you could see tears gleaming on both women’s eyes. The concert had been in aid of the Palestinians, the refugees of al-Naqba, the Catastrophe of 1948, some of whom were in the audience.
The pianist’s publicity photo on Mona’s record sleeves had changed over the decades, as hairstyles and outfits altered, until with the early 1980s there’d been no portrait of the artist, just a frozen Alp or a view of the Sahara. Nia had listened intently to Mona’s interpretations of Beethoven’s late sonatas, hailed by critics as powerful, with ‘colossal intellectual grasp’ but a suspect reckless virtuosity. A subtext occasionally appeared to the effect that Mona Serafin-Jacobs was too formidable for a woman. The pianist was on record as distrusting what she derided as mere beauty. The Dvorak piano quintet she had condemned as ‘too beautiful and sensual for me’, as if such music were a temptation to an aesthetic of sybaritic surrender. All art was political. Nia herself had grasped that easily and early. She could share the underlying puritanism of a Palestinian exile who’d seen too much too young, ever to forsake the political forum. And yet here they were on the Terra Incognita, in the lap of postcolonial luxury.
Nia had also inherited her mother’s collection of Julie Brandt-Simon’s records. Two women had laid their hands over Mona’s musical life, passing on power and inspiration. She blurted, ‘My mother was in your music, Mona, wasn’t she?’
It was the presence of the longing the Welsh call hiraeth. A sense that someone vital has just been present, but now is absent. Someone Mam-gu would have called werth y byd. Nia had heard this quite clearly as she tracked the pianist through her recordings. The search for a woman worth the world.
‘Your mother was remarkable. Once known, never forgotten. She restored my music, Nia. Ailsa was a great person, a great human being. You should be so proud to be her daughter.’
How could that electrifying spirit have dwindled into mere Mam? The increasingly dowdy and correct bourgeois Hausfrau, as Nia had once called her to her face – and Ailsa, turning, had lost her footing, as if slapped. She’d steadied herself with one hand on the sideboard; then she’d realigned the ornaments and vases and left the room without reprisal. Nia’s unsparing tirades had demanded: come out and face me, show yourself, show you care about me. Ailsa would rarely riposte, never raise her voice. Infuriating, guilt-inducing.
‘Your mother was a pearl,’ said Mona. ‘That’s all we can say. A pearl.’
‘Yes.’
‘When I’d lost my confidence, she gave it back to me. I mean, in my music. But just tell me this, Nia, if you don’t mind. You have done so well in your life and professionally of course you’ve reached the top of the academic tree. But was your childhood a happy one? Your stepfather – was he kind to you?’
That was easy. ‘He’s always been good to me, Mona. More than good. I was an absolute pest and a brat, but Dad persevered and always saw that I had everything I needed. He’s still alive, you know. I’m very close to Dad – but not in a wordy sort of way. He just is. Like, you know, a landscape.’
‘I cannot tell you how glad I am – relieved – to hear it.’ Mona sat back in her chair and closed her eyes, a burden lifted.
‘Archie had been Mam’s childhood sweetheart, you know.’
Mona’s eyes opened wide. Evidently Ailsa had not told her friend everything. ‘That I … well, didn’t know. Well. She never exactly said. I knew they were very close. And your mother – was she happy?’
Happy was hardly the word. Ailsa had appeared content with her husband, devoted to him. Eternally grateful to him, watchful over him. Archie wasn’t one for singing and dancing. Nia remembered Ailsa patiently explaining the jokes in Christmas crackers, the table heaving with the children’s laughter at their dad’s perplexity. And he was the best-ironed husband in Shropshire, Nia used to say. Even his farm clothes were in a state of outrageous laundering perfection. Nowadays he just slouched around in baggy old cords, content to be a comfortable old ragbag, as he said. Nothing of Archie’s ever seemed to wear out, at least according to him.
‘He was a good husband to her in every way,’ Nia said. ‘She liked the farm – and they had a market garden which she more or less took over. Green fingers she had.’
‘I didn’t know that. How lovely. Thank you for telling me.’ Mona was like a child being told some marvellous story. Sucking on the details like sweets. At the same time the lines of her face folded in fresh sorrow.
‘Dad doesn’t have much sense of humour.’
‘Ah, and Ailsa did, of course.’
‘Did she?’
‘Oh, she was a serious person, thoughtful and enquiring, but she could also be such a giggler, once she got going, couldn’t she?’
‘I never saw that side of her. I can’t
honestly pretend we really got on. Sorry. We quarrelled a hell of a lot. Not at the end, when Poppy was born. But earlier. Well, when I say quarrelled, it was totally one-sided. I yelled; she just looked daggers.’
‘Well, of course. You were mother and daughter. What did you quarrel about?’
‘Politics, miniskirts, women’s rights, the lot. Her views were a bit fossilised, even to the point of claiming that she didn’t have political opinions. She left those to the menfolk. See what I mean? Politically incorrect to the n’th degree. She had this godawful friend, Irene, who came to live near us. Ghastly woman. I think they egged one another on. They’d always be in and out of one another’s houses and they’d complain over their knitting about their children going to the dogs.’
‘Ah, poor Irene White!’
‘I don’t know about poor. She was a complete tartar. She died only last month, in fact.’
‘Her son was named Christopher.’
‘Yes. Tôpher White the poet. He spells it with a circumflex to show he’s Celtic. He isn’t Celtic, as far as I know. Poor guy, he never had a chance with a mother like Irene. And this portrait of his saintly father smirking down on him from over the fireplace. Topher turned out a bit of a sociopath. Still, at least he has his very weird poetry. I get on with Topher. But Irene’s other boy, Tim, was the favourite: he could do no wrong. Except that he grew up a complete creep and he’d steal from Irene’s handbag to pay for the drug of choice.’
‘Irene’s husband was your Daddy’s closest friend. They’d fought in the Western Desert together – and then they were your next door neighbours in El-Marah. Good-hearted, decent people. I don’t know how much you know, my dear, about those times? I hope you could forgive your mother. Dear, lovely Ailsa – she was so deeply hurt.’
Deeply hurt. Suddenly Nia couldn’t go on.
‘No more, Mona. Don’t.’ She stumbled to her feet, clattering the crockery and toppling the chair back so that she had to pick it up, rummaging for the clothes and bag she’d hung on it.
Into Suez Page 13