Into Suez

by Stevie Davies

  Dear, lovely Ailsa. Deeply hurt. Something terrible and eerie was in the offing – knowledge Nia had been holding off for many years. It would not have been so bad if Mam were still alive. The terrible, smiting blow would have come as a relief. Nia could have made amends. She could have gone to Mam and said, I get it now. I do understand, oh please let me love you and try to love me back. Tell me your side of things. I’m with you every step of the way. But there was no way back.

  ‘It’s all right, Nia. It’s all right. Let’s talk again when you feel up to it. Or never. We don’t need to talk. I’m so sorry. I’m just very pleased to see you. I got ahead of myself. Just seeing you is so thrilling.’

  ‘Later, Mona. Not yet.’

  Her tears streamed down. It was the way the old woman had said your Daddy. The echoes rang round the emptying lido, where the band was packing up and the guests were removing themselves in twos and threes to shower and change for dinner. Mona had Nia in her arms and was rocking her, going shush, shush. Holding, rocking Nia, not now, of course, no. But at some time far in the past when the unthinkable thing had happened.

  ‘But don’t go away, Mona,’ she pleaded, blowing her nose, fiddling in her pocket for her cabin key. She was going nowhere, Mona said, unless ordered off the Terra Incognita by Nia. They both grinned. And after all, there was so much to be experienced of this almost colonial way of life they had on the ship. Mona was fascinated: it brought back the gracious living of the Shepheards Hotel and the dear old Mena House at Giza. And apart from all that, she’d been welcomed aboard by the Captain as a VIP and agreed to give an hour’s recital in, apparently, the Admiral Nelson Room, whereupon the cost of her journey had been waived.

  ‘You missed Remembrance Day,’ said Nia. They got into a conversational stride again. She told Mona of the veteran with the black beret and blazer displaying his row of medals, videoing the occasion. The junior officer dipping the flag, the padre, the vanishing pieties of her parents’ generation, remembered deeds and places that soon would all be gone. The ballroom dancing and the bridge. The deck quoits and the indoor golf championships. The final feast swallowed in the dark.

  *

  The pianist raised her hands slowly from the keys; held them suspended, head bent. Piano and pianist separated into two. There was silence. Her hands returned to her lap, head still bent, in a posture that quenched the glow of her pearls in the darkness of her hair and her black high-necked evening dress, fashioned like an Arab gallabiyya. The silence in the auditorium lengthened out like a long-held breath. Not a cough or a rustle. From the passionate intensities of its centre, the subtle minor key had led the sonata to the verge of the grave, the music laying down its life to eternity. There was no more to say. Fertile land gave way to the desert.

  Silence, stillness.

  Then the storm of applause. The Egyptian orchestra raised its hands to the pianist, clapped and cheered. Mona got to her feet, her balance unsteady for a moment, looking oddly shy and unnerved. Standing by the piano under the spotlights, she bowed. The audience rose. More, more. But Mona would give no more. This was all she had to say. It was her first public performance since her hands had got their music back. Ailsa, sitting three rows back from the stage, understood that Mona could not supply an encore. She tried not to look at Mona’s husband and Alex at the end of the front row, clapping wildly, but saw them anyway out of the corner of her eye. She breathed shallow, carried by Beethoven’s music into the aching recognition of another and higher world altogether, for which she was homesick. A perspective from which one saw the larger picture, the earth from the air, where the banal doings of everyday were inconsequential. It was a feeling Ailsa had experienced on the one occasion she’d flown; when she walked the Long Mynd massif, or saw the stars from the desert. She yearned to belong in this world of Mona’s. For Mona to take her there, fly with her high above it all, the stupidity, the trivia. Her heart twisted, to think she’d been the one to restore Mona’s power. I’m good for something then. And yet at the same time her husband’s hand stole across and cherishingly brushed her bare arm, so that the hairs stood up: the music also had to do with the love-without-end she shared with Joe.

  Hedwig, sitting next to her, wept without restraint, Norman concernedly clasping his wife’s hand in both of his, fearful perhaps for the baby, not understanding that these were good tears, art-tears. Ailsa glanced at Joe. His face looked, she thought, stricken, as if he’d seen something at once terrible and wonderful.

  Whatever was he thinking and feeling?

  The audience rose to its feet. Mona held out her arms for a moment, with a sort of shrug; then returned to her place at the piano. Ah, she is going to give us an encore, the audience concluded. Murmuring and exclaiming, they settled down. They were mistaken. It was now time for the Egyptian singer. Closing the lid of the instrument, the pianist yielded place. She was to remain on-stage through the virtuoso’s performance.

  The Egyptian members of the audience, out of respect to the European custom of deferential silence to musicians, had applauded decorously. But for them, as Hedwig was now explaining to Joe, murmuring across Ailsa, silence implied dislike or lack of interest. Egyptian music was full of improvisation, it was participatory, she told him: it was something shared between the musician and the listeners – like love, she said. Their Kultur is so very different. They think we are cold eggs, Hedwig explained, no, cold fish. She had to raise her voice as the Arab audience took over the auditorium, calling out with passionate abandon for their singer to come on stage. Many of them were up on their feet.

  Ailsa stole a glance at Mona, gazing now towards the wings, along with the Arab orchestra, waving their violins and tabors, their drums and lutes. They all smiled and beckoned, in sign to the audience that the beloved was at hand. Not showing herself. Immanent.

  Joe’s head swivelled and he glowered across at the noise-makers. Pipe down, you wogs, for Pete’s sake, his look said. At this moment Mona’s eyes locked with Ailsa’s. Fingers at her lips, she blew Ailsa a kiss.

  ‘Joe, it’s all right,’ she whispered to her husband. ‘It’s not rudeness. It’s their own kind of courtesy.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  Expectation mounted; soared. The auditorium was a scene of uproar. Nothing happened on stage except that the orchestra beckoned the unseen singer with yet more flamboyant gestures. Hedwig, excited, grabbed Ailsa’s hand and squeezed. Her face looked exalted. Ailsa, for an unpleasant moment, had a vision of blonde Hedwig at some dreadful rally or other, in a crowd high on mass emotion. And always there came this query about Hedwig – but where it came from, from reason or prejudice, Ailsa did not know, for after all Hedwig was ready to embrace another culture, the antithesis of her own. She squeezed Hedwig’s hand in return.

  Embarrassed at the antics of their Egyptian counterparts, the Britons smiled and raised their eyebrows, tucking in their chins, nudged one another or pretended to ignore the whole thing.

  ‘All that’s part of the performance,’ Ailsa said to Joe, her hair soft on his cheek.

  ‘What, like a pantomime?’

  ‘Well. Oh – well, perhaps. In a way.’

  She heard what his tense posture said. Why can’t the wogs control themselves in a public place? They were making this exhibition of themselves just to nark us. She wished she hadn’t brought Joe. Why did he have to make these faces? But it had been preferable to invite him. Ailsa had kept quiet about the incident of the arrest in Ish and the Café Grec and Irene hadn’t said a word. Ailsa preferred to be straightforward. Was it actually true that any relationship with Mona must be carried on behind Joe’s back? Now that he’d heard her play and knew how serious – noble – Mona’s music was, perhaps he’d turn a blind eye to their meeting up occasionally, not too often and discreetly. What could possibly be wrong with such a friendship?

  The artist walked on to the stage, wearing a simple white dress, black hair parted in the middle and drawn back into a chignon, jewels hanging from ears and
neck. Oum Koulsoum was entering her middle years, inclining to plumpness, her features dramatically dark. She carried a decorative handkerchief. As they greeted one another, Mona looked slight and girlish, though she was the taller by six inches.

  It began. The desert gave way to fertile land.

  And this is ecstasy, Ailsa thought. She knew now what had roused the faces of the men in the Café Grec into rapture, dreaming awake as they listened to the wireless. The living voice was flagrant in its abandonment; it was nakedly powerful. The voice of Egypt, as Nobby Bowen had said. Ailsa grasped the principle now: the words of the poem to be sung were sacrosanct. The words drove the music. But the music was endlessly virtuosic and where they went together depended on the singer’s improvisations in response to the promptings of her audience, in mutual obedience to subtle and ancient rules of which Ailsa knew nothing. Over and over Oum Koulsoum repeated some phrase, evoking its meaning in variation, melisma, voice-breaking. She flirted her handkerchief at the audience, made love to it with long-lashed eyes. Ailsa lost all sense of time. There was no awareness of beginning, middle and end. She forgot to worry what Joe was thinking, or Mona. After each ascending phrase, the audience replied, urging the singer to repeat, shouting compliments.

  Joe fidgeted, crossing and recrossing his legs. He sighed. Ailsa glanced at her watch. An hour and a quarter had passed.

  ‘And now Ahmad Shawqi’s Salu Qalbi.’

  Sudden silence. Which became a mounting roar as Oum Koulsoum moved into the song’s climax.

  Later Ailsa would be told that the phrases that lit the touch paper were ‘Demands are not met by wishing; the world can only be taken by struggle.’ A revolutionary message. The Palestinian Arabs had been slaughtered and driven out by the Zionists; Islam violated; Allah ridiculed. Egypt had been trampled. By its own corrupt rulers. By the hated British occupation. By Israel. Egypt would rise. Ailsa felt she had understood this in the moment of hearing the uncomprehended Arabic. Shared the impulse to be carried up on the music’s religious passion and erotic, revolutionary abandonment.

  The European audience shuffled from its seats, stiff and yawning, but in disagreement on the merits of the evening.

  ‘Bit of a racket.’

  ‘Mais sa voix, c’est si belle.’

  ‘Thought it was never going to end, didn’t you?’

  ‘Meeting of East and West.’

  ‘The old girl’s got a bit of meat on her.’

  ‘Herrliche Musik, oder? Aber was bedeutete …?’

  ‘Thank God that’s over, I thought I’d pass out. The hysteria. The smell.’

  Europeans and Egyptians filed out through two separate doors but were forced to mingle in the hall, under brilliant chandeliers. They hit a bottleneck at the exit, where a group of young men chanted, Salu Qalbi, Salu Qalbi!

  The Europeans pushed forwards. The Egyptians withstood them. Minor officials, excitable and voluble, tried to usher individuals into gaps that weren’t there or to steer them back against the press into the auditorium. As the mass of people swayed to and fro in this bedlam, a lady in a blue silk evening gown stumbled and fell. Screams: someone’s being trampled underfoot!

  A flash photograph was taken.

  Someone was laying into the Egyptians with his fists.

  ‘Back! Back!’

  Ailsa called to the people behind her, still struggling to leave the auditorium, to give way, move back for pity’s sake. They took no notice. Ailsa put her arms round the pregnant Hedwig to shield her from the crush.

  Orders were barked by a voice of authority – some Major in civvies, to judge by the handlebar moustache. The crowd began to shuffle back into the hall, relieving the crush. Joe and Norman Webster pressed forward to a scrum of Britons and Egyptians blocking the entrance. Wrenching the men apart, they cleared a space round the fallen woman: Dusty, whoa! Not worth it, boy. Ailsa had heard tales of Joe’s hot-tempered pal, Dusty Miller, a pigeon-chested pugilist with a brick-red face and the light of God in his eyes.

  ‘My specs! I’ve lost my specs!’

  Ailsa heard the wail. Bruised and shocked, her gown torn at the bodice, the lady in blue stared round with the naked eyes of the myopic. Joe’s head disappeared from Ailsa’s view. He groped round for the spectacles; fished them up wrecked.

  The panicked woman struggled to fit on her mangled spectacles – one lens missing, the bridge cracked. Her husband appeared. Order was restored. Military Police materialised and marched the demonstrators away. Balked of battle, Dusty disappeared into the crowd.

  ‘You did well there, Joe,’ Ailsa said. Her husband had kept the peace. He’d restrained the wog-haters, showing the decency that in the end was the core of his character.

  Norman, beside himself about the fright his wife had suffered, wanted her to see a doctor. She was not so weak as to faint in such a trivial situation, Hedwig said. This is nothing, nothing. A small scuffle. But, yes, she would sit down for a moment.

  The Wing Commander crouched beside Hedwig, taking her pulse, asking how she felt, speaking reassuring words to her and her husband. Habibi’s big, plain face, not glimpsed by Ailsa for months, seemed ridiculously familiar. He smiled and greeted her affectionately. She resisted the impulse to hug him hallo, wanting to say something about how wonderful Mona had been tonight, share some of the magic with him before it drained away.

  But when she saw the look on Joe’s face, Ailsa said nothing of the sort. Taking her husband’s arm, she leaned heavily on him, pretending to feel faint. ‘I’ve come over a bit funny,’ she said. ‘Oh gosh, I’m queasy. Could you take me home now, Joe? I need to go home.’

  Soldiers from Moascar had cleared the hundreds who’d assembled to greet and celebrate their adored singer. Ailsa, supported by Joe, walked through an Ismailia emptied of native inhabitants by summary curfew, its mansions lit into creamy glamour by a three-quarters moon. She was fine now, she assured him. Honestly, fine. Just needed a breath of air. The two of them walked dreamily, arms round one another’s waists, heads tilted inwards. The silence was broken only by the muezzin’s call to prayer.

  10

  Something in Nia’s yard had been forgotten. She rested back on her heels and looked round. What could it be and where? Sand drifted into the yard from outside, compromising her castles. Whenever Nia turned her back, the desert reached out its hands. It enlarged her monuments but blurred their outlines and finally all her empires slid away into its softness.

  Good! Because you could begin all over again.

  Nia forgot to look round for traces of whatever it was she’d forgotten. She couldn’t keep her eye on everything.

  Ali, the bony boy who collected bottles and cans, stopped outside the garden with his handcart. He waved to Nia and pointed to her door: would she get her mother? Ali had lost one eye and yet he was one of the most beautiful children Mami had ever seen, so she said. The remaining eye was green, like Nia’s but with thick, curly lashes. The dead eye was nearly closed. His hair was a mass of dark curls. Ali stood at the gate, in a short, ragged nightgown. His skin was very dark, almost black. He wore no shoes.

  Nia’s father came out rather than her mother. ‘What is it, girlie?’

  ‘It’s Ali for bottles.’

  Nia knew what he would say: ‘Imshi! Yallah!’ with that look on his face. Ali would be sent packing with no bottles, guilty of germs and dirt.

  Her father paused.

  ‘Bot-dee-lee-yay, Mr Effendi Taffy sir?’

  Her father frowned. Bobbing back into the kitchen, he returned with two lemonade bottles and a plate of scraps left over from lunch. He bent and smiled into the boy’s eyes. At once Nia, jealous of the boy, scowled. Ali took the bottles and added them to his collection: thank you, thank you, Effendi. He emptied the scraps into a hemp bag and signed to Nia’s father to wait. Rummaging in the same bag, he brought out a piece of bread.

  ‘Pita. For you, Effendi.’

  Nia trailed her spade over to the gate and stood watching to see what her father w
ould do now.

  The boy wanted to give the man his lunch.

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘I-wah. Yes yes, qaiis. Take.’

  Nia could smell the bread’s deliciousness. It had just been baked. But she could see the germs from the flies’ feet wriggling on the crust.

  Her father accepted the bread. She knew he‘d chuck it away once he got indoors. He’d go, Ugh! Filth! For a moment Joe seemed lost for words. He held the bread in one hand, slightly away from his body, and thanked the boy as politely as if he had been an English boy. Feeling in his pocket amongst the jingling change, he brought out a few piastres, which he handed to the child. Ali lived in a mud house with mud furniture, so Mami had told Irene, who’d murmured, ‘Poor things, they don’t know any better.’

  But Ali refused the money. He looked shocked; took several paces back, shaking his head. Baffled, Joe also shook his head. Nia watched her father into the house. Ali waved goodbye to Nia and pushed his cart round the corner. He was a stunted twelve-or thirteen-year-old, Mami had said.

  Irene had wondered if the natives ought to be encouraged to come round the Married Quarters scrounging; wasn’t it dangerous? They might take advantage of our kindness and rob us, the menfolk being on duty.

  Nia returned to sifting the caramel sand for a cake. She would pour water on this delicious flour and harden it in her bucket like bricks. The sun would bake the cake. She’d cut it into slices with the bread knife, which she had hidden, and share it out equally.

  Daddy cast his shadow over her, creeping up behind.

  ‘Wotcher, Joe bach,’ she said without turning.

  ‘You little monkey.’

  ‘Wotcher cock.’

  ‘Now now. You can be clever but you mustn’t be rude. How did you know it was me?’

  ‘I just do.’

  ‘What are you making?’

  ‘A cake. What did you do with that bread?’

  ‘Oh well, we couldn’t eat it, could we?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Make the most of your sand pit, cariad. We’re having topsoil delivered.’