The yard would be transformed, he said. Into a garden! What did she think of that? Seeing Nia’s defiant pout, he explained that he and she would rake the earth and water it. They’d plant seeds and watch wonderful green plants come up and flowers of all colours, pink and purple and white. Jacaranda. Bougainvillaea. Just us, the two of us. You and me together, isn’t it? With your baby wheelbarrow.
‘And, you know, there’s plenty of sand,’ he added. ‘Out there. And most of it in my ears and nose and mouth.’
‘Orifices!’ said Nia.
‘Nia!’
‘What?’
‘Where did you get that? Say it again.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, cariad.’ He crouched down. ‘There are some words…’
‘Mami said it.’
‘Ah.’
He had no answer to that. She intuited his distress.
‘She meant horrid faces,’ she reassured him.
‘Anyway, I’ve got something for you, girlie. In the market. Couldn’t resist it. Just for Nia. Do you like it?’
‘Golly likes it,’ Nia said, and he had to be content with that. She reserved judgement, for the inside of the fez smelt funny and you had to balance your head to keep it on.
*
The black, open-topped sports car drew up at the kerb several houses down. Again. The secret lady behind the wheel had swaddled her head in a navy blue silk scarf covered in tiny silver stars, tied round her throat. She wore dark sunglasses and bright red lipstick. Her skin was like caramel. Nia stared at the lady, who pretended not to be staring back.
‘Come in and have your nap!’ Daddy called from inside the house.
She dragged in, whining that she didn’t want a nap. In her bedroom Nia stood on the bed and looked out through the wire netting. The lady had driven off. She’d come again. Nia knew who she was, although she was supposed to have forgotten. Her name was not supposed to be said. It was a secret between the two of them.
*
‘What’s that on your head?’ asked Topher. ‘It’s red.’
‘It’s a fez.’
‘It’s got a tassel.’ He fingered the silky tassel with reverence.
‘I know.’
‘Girls don’t wear fezes.’
‘They do.’
‘Don’t.’
‘English girls do.’
In Ish the Egyptian merchants walked down the spacious boulevard of rue Sultan Hussein with oiled black moustaches, flicking fly-whisks, their heads topped by a fez. How dignified they looked, how tall and impressive. Daddy said they were a big fat joke. She couldn’t see it.
‘I want a fez,’ Topher moaned.
‘Give it me back, all right, if I let you borrow it?’
The cake was nearly baked. She would cut it now. But where was the knife? She had lost it. Buried it somewhere.
It was boring digging around for a knife. Nia began to disbelieve in the knife. Instead they sloped round to the shady side of the house and Topher, still wearing the fez, said he would show her his if she would show him hers.
A chipolata sausage, she thought. Well. She raised her shirt and pulled down her knickers. They examined one another.
‘My botty,’ she said.
‘That’s your botty round there.’
‘No, it’s all my botty. Does yours sometimes itch?’
‘No.’
‘Mine does. Sand in the orifice,’ she confided.
They were married, according to Topher. They stared at one another. Nia did not know if he was right – but something had happened between the two of them, she wasn’t sure what. For once Topher was master of the situation. He poked his head forward and puckered his mouth, shutting his eyes; pecked at her mouth with his dry little beak. He seemed pleased and satisfied. Gravely removing the fez, Topher restored it to Nia’s head so that they could go in and see whether there were any cheese straws.
‘You are so sweet with Ali,’ her mother was saying to her father.
‘Of course I am, poor dab.’
‘How touching that he gave you his bread. His mother would have baked it.’
‘Oh aye.’
Nia heard her mother put on her teachy voice, telling her father that the villagers would think it wrong to sell their bread; they’d think it shameful. Bread was sacred and communal. And out of hospitality they kept water on their window sill, if they had a window sill, for the thirsty passer-by. And we called them greedy! Well. She bet the pita would have tasted delicious.
‘Great Scott…’
‘Keep your hair on, Joe, what there is of it! I know we couldn’t have eaten it. But – Joe, have you seen the bread knife?’ Mami was rummaging in a drawer.
‘In the drawer?’ came from the other room.
‘I’ve looked there.’
‘Well, don’t flap.’
‘What do you mean, don’t flap? It’s a sharp knife! Joe, will you come and help me look? Nia, you haven’t been touching…?’
‘No, Mami.’
‘Have you been baking at all, Mrs Roberts?’ asked Topher.
‘You’ll have to ask Irene if you can borrow hers,’ came Joe’s voice from the other room.’
‘You go, Joe. No, I haven’t been baking.’
‘I’m busy,’ called Joe, with a yawn that seemed to come from his belly.
‘Oh yes – doing what?’
‘Putting my feet up.’
‘Well put them down, my lad, and march them in to Irene. Will you two children get out from under my feet? Out! Both of you, vamoose until I call you in.’
‘I like your mince pies, Mrs Roberts,’ said Topher as they left. ‘They are savoury.’
Out by the sand-cake Nia fished around for the knife. Nothing. Joe went grumblingly in to Irene and didn’t come out for a while. They could hear laughing from in there. He came out waving a bread knife and Ailsa said, all very well, but where is ours?
‘Your daddy has shown my mummy his pork sausage,’ said Topher. ‘Probably.’
Nia did not reply. How could she know? Then all of a sudden Nia’s back and fezzed head were peppered with ping pong balls. From the sky, a thrill of ping pong balls. Whopping hailstones slammed down all around them. They rushed to gather them, never mind the pain, in a bucket and began to suck them. Sky ice. A wonder in a world of wonders.
Irene was out like a flash.
‘Chris! Come in this minute!’
And Topher was gone. Just like that. Nia placed one hail stone under each armpit and wriggled her entire body in complicated bliss and anguish as they melted.
A blade showed from the sand. Nia reached for it and could not grasp, once she had feathered it free with extreme caution, how this thread-thin line had appeared on her palm, seeping scarlet beads, a shock she greeted with a paroxysm of silence.
11
Joe lay spread-eagled, his arms and legs a star, in the shade of a wicker fence. Sabbath at Lake Timsah: everyone was on the beach. For the second week running he’d skipped chapel in the hut at Fanara provided for dissenters. Mam would not be pleased, but then Mam would not know. His face was draped with a month-old local paper she’d sent out, containing mention of a Morriston Orpheus concert at Libanus: if only you’d been there with us. Last night, reading the article over a few beers, it had come over Joe to sing ‘Cwm Rhondda, Bread of Heaven’, which had led to ‘O love that wilt not let me go’. Ailsa was left sobbing, until Nia flung her arms round her mother to comfort her, asking her father in a droll, rational way not to sing please if it upset Mami. They’d both burst out laughing and Ailsa had explained that she was not sad but moved, in her heart. But don’t sing any more, if you don’t mind, Nia had insisted.
That had been a strange affair at the concert in Ish, where the lady whose husband had kissed Ailsa had played so beautifully that it had been all Joe could do to restrain tears. And ever since that night he’d found himself breaking into song at the drop of a hat or whistling the tunes from Aïda and La Traviata he and Chalkie h
ad heard at the Rome Opera House during the war.
Just a sec: the woman’s husband had not kissed Ailsa! Joe had made that up in his own imagination. He’d have liked to though: any fool could see.
Or perhaps not, since the fellow was a queerboy with his poufter pal at his elbow.
Which should reassure Joe but somehow it didn’t. And whatever the reason for his revulsion, Joe felt sick to the stomach about any association between this shambles of a British officer and his Ailsa.
Yet the Wing Co had been nothing but kindness and courtesy to Hedwig Webster. Joe spoke to himself calmly: chwarae teg, let Ailsa see the friend if she wants to. His wife was well-spoken and educated, unlike himself, and the equal of any toff. Ailsa was a person to be trusted, whoever else was not. The love between them held tender and true. Thinking in these terms reassured Joe and restored balance. Still, he’d mull it over again before bringing it up with her.
Removing the paper, Joe peered to check that the kiddies were safe. Chalkie was with them at the water’s edge, directing an operation to empty Lake Timsah with their buckets into an irrigation system he’d helped Nia, Christopher and Timothy construct. Fine – and she was wearing her sun hat. Lovely bloke is Chalkie, Joe thought, leaning up on one elbow. Heart of gold, do anything for anyone. And they’d both benefited by Ailsa’s idea about the Tiger. She’d sort it with Irene later today and set the poor girl’s mind at rest. Ailsa had a head on her shoulders, that was for sure. He lay back in the Joe-shaped resting-place he’d hollowed out for himself in the hot sand.
The concert obsessed him. The piano had transported Joe to a world so intensely pure that he’d forgiven the musician for her madman of a husband. He’d perfectly understood why Ailsa should have been drawn to her. How could she not be? This lady was exceptional: he’d experienced a reverence which only grew when she rose from the piano at the end of the piece, shy, childlike, infinitely touching.
But then when the Egyptian, whom he nicknamed The Oom, had begun to sing – howl, rather, a cat on heat – Joe had found himself seething with unease, shocked. I want, I desire, The Oom had warbled. Good grief, you didn’t need a translation. He’d twitched around in his seat, leaning one way, then the next, sighing, with a rhubarb blush. Tweaked his trousers to conceal his erection. Rasped his palm up his chin, until Ailsa’s eyes signalled to him, please stop that fidgeting. The wogs had got to their feet and brayed at The Oom: a brothel audience. Ailsa hadn’t had a clue of course, in her innocence, that the place was a bristling forest of pricks, all pointing one way.
Strait-laced? Aye, but the chapel boy was not sorry for that. He’d never joined in with his mates’ blue jokes and filthy songs.
The Oom had not even been a good-looking woman, but greasy and plump, past her prime. The whole sordid act had reminded Joe of the belly-dancers in Cairo in the war, prostitutes, girls in their teens. Of the smutty postcards sold by leering vendors at Port Said showing sluts displaying childishly half-developed breasts and grubby tangles of hair, smirking at the camera. Which made you sad for them in point of fact. Their flesh was cheap; little choice but to sell it. But it was in their blood, the hot lack of control.
Oh, and the bird-brained little Jerry woman yapping about Kultur! Solemnly explaining in her know-all way that the Orientals had a different Kultur, which we Occidentals must study and respect. She’d sat back with a ‘now-I’ve-enlightened-him’ nod, ringed fingers cradling her pregnant belly. The baby might so easily have been lost when the wogs stampeded, obeying the dictates of their sickening Kultur.
Ailsa waved from the beehive bathing huts, her face a pattern of sun-stencils through the straw of her broad-brimmed hat. He waved back. Bad thoughts ebbed. She was pleased with his behaviour to Ali and with the way he’d helped sort things out at the De Lesseps House. Good: for he was not putting it on. As individuals the Egyptians were easy to love, especially the kiddies, who had nothing but their smiles – and the gift of bread that shamed us. Joe had not intended Ali to think that he was offering to pay for the bread. How did you take such a gift from such a giver?
He could learn from Ailsa about so many things. He saw that clearly.
Just think, she’d exclaimed, we’re pitching camp where the Children of Israel pitched theirs. He’d thought about it. Sunday School at Libanus came into focus with RAF El-Marah and the desert. Yesterday Ailsa had stopped in her tracks and looked out over the sand towards a stand of date palms in a circle of green. It might be a well, she said. Angels met humans at wells. In those days.
He’d looked along her eye line, for the intensity of her gaze had created the illusion that Ailsa had spied something out of the ordinary. The heat had created the usual reflective haze you’d swear was a lake in the middle distance and the mirage of a shimmering castle with towers and battlements hovering near the horizon. He’d told her then about the Wells of Moses, twenty miles or so north of Suez City. A dozen wells in one oasis, supposed to be filled with water shed from the rock Moses struck with his staff.
‘Oh Joe, I should so love to see them.’
He determined that she should see the wells, even if they turned out only to be a few mosquito-ridden mud-holes. She should visit the Pyramids. Even Jerusalem, if that became safely possible in these dangerous days. Ailsa should drink her fill of knowledge. He kept his trap shut when she hesitantly aired the lefty, liberal views she’d picked up about our having no right to be here.
We would always be needed in the East. If the Gyppos knew what was good for them.
Stuck out in the Western Desert in ’42, Joe had never expected to find himself back in peacetime. Although he’d thought seriously of demob into Civvy Street at the end of the war, Joe loved Forces life: the comradeship, the safe hierarchy, travel. Even the war-torn desert. The strange glamour of the Western Desert had mesmerised him: starlight haunting a moonscape made ghostly by the clawing shadows of tamarisk and saltbush. One day, out on salvage operations in graveyards of Allied planes, they’d come across an ambushed Great War patrol car, half-buried, bullet-riddled, its rubber and metal preserved as new. It was a converted Ford, stripped long ago of its Lewis machine gun. A skeleton wearing rags of uniform had remained in the passenger seat, all but his skull, which lay in the back. The boys had clustered round, fascinated by this relic of the Light Car Patrols of the Great War, in which their dads had fought. With a bit of tinkering, the vehicle could have been driven off. Frederick Ash, aged twenty, the lad’s service book had said. Fred, Joe had thought, or Freddie.
Rubbing off the fine golden glaze of rust from the steel of the antique Jeep – rust that acted in the desert as a preservative – Joe had thought with an intense pang of his young dad. You came here. Now I’ve come here. A breath in between.
While the boys brewed chai, Joe had scanned the endless sand, violently white and shadowless in the high sun, littered with silica glass, shards of Roman pots and ancient flints. An acre of relics. Turning over fragments in his palm, Joe had imagined his young dad crouching here before him, fiddling with the jigsaw of remains. Time and space were a knot: no decay, a queering of distances. Beside the car, orange peel dropped thirty years back had dried to a dark brown, nut-hard curl. Sniffing the peel, Joe had been penetrated by its thin, original scent.
Dad had come home murderous, alcoholic and silent from what he’d seen, what he’d done out here. The children lying in bed had trembled hearing Dad lay into Mam. Mam who was the bread of life. Once Joe had rushed between man and wife, a slight boy of seven: You don’t do that to my mam. He’d shrunk before the certainty of a punch that would knock him into kingdom come. Dad, turning away without a word, had slunk off. But, cariad, don’t cross him, Mam had said later. I will deal with him, have no fear. And she had. Something in her contemptuous, pale blue stare had gradually quelled him. Dad had become a beaten, coughing man, afraid of his shadow, minding his manners at table, except when he relaxed with his pals in the womb-like fug of the Duke’s Arms.
Yet once they had cycle
d down from Treforys together, singing and laughing, for Dad had been quite a comedian in his time, the boy perched on sacking tied round the crossbar, the man’s arms guarding him either side, his iron hands on the handlebar grips. Out across the brown mud of the bay they’d padded with a sack for cockles and winkles. How did it happen, that change? No one knew. First you had one dad. Then a stranger wearing his mask.
Sabbath on the French Beach: this was the life. Families picnicked, splashed around, rowed in kayaks, swam out to rafts anchored in the lake. Some looked like darkies, tanned earth-coloured. Ailsa was keeping cool in one of the beehives, being chatted to by Irene. He heard a great deal more of Irene’s voice than of his wife’s. All the men on the beach must be aching with envy of me, Joe thought. Ha!
He loped over the sand to join them in the hive, playing the fool as he went, high-stepping, the sand burning his insteps. Parking himself, Joe laid his arm lightly round Ailsa’s waist. The lightness of his touch secretly reminded her of last night. What we did then we shall do again, it promised. She rested her bare, sandy back against his chest, and almost imperceptibly pushed back against him.
‘What’s that you’re knitting, Irene?’ he asked.
‘A three-ply jersey for my Roy,’ she said fondly, passing him the pattern. He found himself turning over a single sheet containing a list of instructions to k. this and p. that. ‘It’s for when the winter comes,’ she said. ‘We can’t be too careful when there are sudden changes in temperature. And the nights can be simply freezing, don’t you find, Ailsa? The temperature plunges. It’s not normal.’
‘Well, it’s normal for here.’
‘Yes. But.’ Irene paused. ‘Here is not normal. Roy says I shall get used to it. But I don’t think, between ourselves, that I ever will.’
The burden of what Irene had to say was a prolonged wail. And yet the tenor of the knitting needles, click-clicking, was rather calming.
‘I heard you singing hymns,’ she said to Joe. ‘It was lovely.’
‘Dreadful racket,’ Joe said. ‘Nia told me off.’
Into Suez Page 15