England.
Oh no, I couldn’t.
But is she safe here?
Joe, don’t suggest it again, don’t even think it. Where would we be without you?
Over there lay the Great Bitter Lake with a reed bed spiking up beside the road. A flat plain of silver water. Nia pressed her nose against the pane and thirsted to be in the water.
Paddy the driver was saying something about blue waters, purple hills and a crimson sun. He had a feeling for the Bitter Lakes, he said, a feeling as strong as his feeling for Ireland, and of course the blokes laughed at him but, you know, perhaps it was his feeling for Ireland that came out in the sadness of any glorious landscape. For this, he said, was the land of Exodus in the Bible, did they know that? Nia knew that something in what he said and the way he said it might have made people scoff. Her parents did not scoff. They listened attentively.
‘Is that Ireland over there?’ she asked.
‘No, my beauty – this is Egypt, isn’t it? Ireland’s just over the water from Wales.’
‘She doesn’t remember, Joe.’
‘Ah but she remembers her Mam-gu and Tad-cu in Treforys? And the aunties?’
Nia cast the net of her mind. There was Mam-gu hanging out clothes in a back yard with a dank smell containing black soil and shadow, with a wedge of sunlight in one corner, and a coal hole Nia relished. And four aunties, Betsi, Gaynor, Mair and Magdalen, with uncles to match. And beside Mam-gu and these aunties in the world of her memory, but along a corridor in another room, was a tall, dark lady wearing a silky emerald scarf and trousers that swished as she walked, who smelled of almonds and took Nia on her knee and she felt the generous give of breasts inside her sweater, and heard her low, strong voice, very close.
‘Auntie Betsi, Auntie Gaynor, Auntie Mair, Auntie Magdalen and my Auntie Mona!’ she recited.
She felt her mother and father flinch, as they did sometimes when she showed them up in public and they had to whisper sharply. But they did not whisper.
Paddy the driver half turned and asked, over his shoulder, if she had ever floated in the Dead Sea.
‘She hasn’t actually,’ said Ailsa. ‘No.’
Well, he went on, you can’t really swim there, don’t expect to swim, but you can’t drown either. The water will buoy you up, he said. It’s thick with minerals. Bitter, he explained, that’s from marah, bitter waters, the waters of desolation.
‘Why can’t I say Auntie Mona?’ Nia burst forth.
‘Shush, dear.’
Not everyone knows this, the driver said, but the bottom is covered with millions of empty spiky shellfish, millions and millions! Napoleon saw them when he invaded. And these nasty spiky dead creatures have been there thousands of years, millions even! And no one knows how they got there. And if you tried to walk out, your soles would be cut to ribbons. And before the Canal was dug through – over there in the middle, marked by those buoys, can you see them? Before that, the Bitter Lakes were completely dry, did you know that? And down the middle was a vast bank of salt hard as brick, seven miles high, I’m not joking, I swear. Lot’s wife, you see – that must have been the origin of the story of Lot’s wife in the Bible.
Her mami was holding Nia’s hand in hers, a bit too tight. Pouting, Nia burst out, ‘Mona’s wife! Mona’s wife!’
Mami bent her head and asked how was the poorly arm? There was jelly for tea, she said, and Golly was waiting at the window making funny faces for when Nia came home. And all the neighbours walking past (she bent lower, so that her lips were touching Nia’s forehead), well, they would see Golly peering out of the Roberts window waiting for Nia and her new chum, Penicillin, wouldn’t they?
Nia sighed with renewed contentment. She poked Penicillin’s head up to get a sight of the sails of the feluccas and dhows, plying to and fro, slow and magical. She had forgotten to be cross, enveloped in the blissful love that gathered its force again and radiated towards her from both sides. An ocean liner passed softly across the water, dwarfing the feluccas.
*
Up in a balloon? Yes, why jolly well not? Sign her up for the full junket, Mona insisted. Seize the hour! This would be a first!
It would mean an early start for the balloons must take advantage of the precious dawn breezes by the Nile. They’d see the Pyramids and the Sphinx from the air. Poppy said she might pass on the balloon ride as she had no head for heights. But she’d definitely want to see her mother and Mona sail up into the air.
And what were the other treats on offer? Mona wanted to know. She scanned tomorrow’s itinerary. Ah, lunch in the Mena House. Not been there for half a century. She wiped her lips with her serviette and sat back.
‘I’ve brought the photos,’ Nia ventured. ‘Of Mam with Poppy. If you’d like to see them.’
Mona turned over the photographs without comment. There was neither a tremor in her hands nor a change of expression until, replacing them in the envelope, Mona handed them back and rose to her feet. Stuffed them into Nia’s hands with rough impatience. She swayed, reaching down to steady herself on the table. She would rest now, Mona said gruffly. An octogenarian balloonist-to-be was wise to take siestas. She would lie down in her cabin. She’d be fine, don’t fuss. Anno Domini, it creeps up on you. Later, later. With a peremptory motion of her hand, Mona waved Nia and then the assiduous waiters away, using her stick to support herself to the lift. Madame! Madame! they pleaded. But no one dared intervene to help the old woman against her will. All eyes watched Dr Mona Serafin-Jacobs totter into the lift and a momentary hush fell on the surrounding tables in the lido.
‘She’ll be all right,’ said Poppy. ‘Don’t worry, Mum. She must have loved Gran so much, mustn’t she?’
‘Yes. She did.’
Nia shuffled the photographs in her hands. Her mother’s dewy eyes glistened in the gaunt face as she cradled her grandchild. Ailsa had rarely bestowed such blissful looks on Nia. Not as far as she remembered. But then, why would she have? Nia was not proud of her theatrical adolescent rages. Storming around, crashing doors, denunciations. Ailsa had been made to represent everything Nia abhorred, a handy target. Antediluvian attitudes! You’re a fossil! Marriage is legalised prostitution! What’s this rubbish you’ve kept from my childhood? A fucking golliwog! You should be ashamed of yourself! Giving a little girl a golliwog! Racist filth! Whatever were you thinking of? What do you mean, I loved my golly? For Christ’s sake! What choice does a child have? Anyway what have you ever done with your life? Only Archie had known how to restrain Nia’s outbursts.
When a person had gone, it was forever; a forever lived from hour to hour, day to day. Looking back, it was hard to credit how much time Nia had disdainfully wasted. She’d chosen Cambridge University partly for its distance from Ailsa’s twinsets and pearls and the visits of the abominable Irene; and when she’d embarked on her postgraduate degree, visits home had been rare and phone conversations difficult. Ailsa had been aghast, in her subdued way, at what she called Nia’s antics and especially when she’d been in prison for her CND protests. You fucking well ought to be proud of me that I stand up to these murderous bastards! Silence. But the birth of the illegitimate Poppy eighteen months before Ailsa’s death had altered the balance between them.
Into Nia’s mind swam the memory of that day she’d had always seen as set in silver. After Poppy’s birth, she’d been gripped by a needy, weeping compulsion to be with her mother, whatever the cost to either of them. She’d driven up from London to Shropshire with her daughter and the further north-west they got, the greater the purity of frost and mist on the landscape. Uninvited and unannounced, she’d driven into the snowbound farmyard of her childhood. Poppy had been six weeks old when Nia crossed the threshold carrying Ailsa’s grandchild.
The light in the Copsey home had been blanched, a sap-spitting log fire in the grate. Archie had been off in the far field with Les, freeing the stranded ewes. A clean smell of heated linen lingered in the kitchen, mingling with a scent of fried onions. The ironing board was st
ill up and a pile of folded towels lay on the kitchen table. Everything was exactly as it had always been, as if waiting with held breath for just this moment. Taken by storm, Ailsa’s eyes had brimmed with tears. She had not known about a grandchild.
How heartless of me, Nia thought now, not to have shared it with her. Despicable, outrageous. And she never reproached me.
When Nia had passed her mother the little one in her holding blanket, saying, Her name is Poppy, Ailsa had looked down with tremulous wonder and joy into the speedwell blue eyes and turned away, the bundle in her arms. Nia had thought: oh yes, you’ve got what you want now all right. And it isn’t me. Ailsa had bent down with her light burden. She’d straightened up without it. For she’d turned aside only to lay the child on the couch. Her mother had reached out her arms to Nia, in the most expressive gesture Nia could remember. She’d rushed into Ailsa’s tenderness, weeping. They’d both sobbed wildly.
The intensity hadn’t lasted. How could it? No, but it had happened. A window between worlds had opened, never fully to close. Perhaps if Ailsa had not been ill – and Nia hadn’t realised how ill her mother had been. Archie had not let on. Tall and willowy, with only a sprinkling of grey hairs, Ailsa with her peachy complexion, perfect teeth and beautiful blue-green eyes had seemed robust enough. But even then she had been dying. In truth the photographs they’d taken of grandmother and granddaughter betrayed gauntness and frailty. Mona must have seen both the melancholy remnant of Ailsa’s beauty and the signs of death in her face.
The truth of it was that some eternally tender mutual wound had lain between mother and daughter – if you touched it, it would bleed and never be stanched. Obviously this was to do with her father, lost in action. A war hero but the government had for long denied that the violence in the Suez Canal Zone after the War constituted a war at all. And here was an odd thing: learning of the successful campaign for a medal for the Canal Zone veterans, Nia had found herself cynically applying for a posthumous gong for Joe Roberts. If there was one going, why shouldn’t she have it? Nia’s motive had been subversive: she had in mind to wear the thing on anti-Iraq War demos with his row of World War II gongs. Back had come the answer: regrettably her late father was ineligible for this medal.
Now Nia startled herself with the thought: Ailsa’s silence was meant to protect me. Her silence was a curtain of love.
*
Nia and Mona hung lighter than air beneath a house-high bubble of blue silk. They rose together, to float beside a stand of palms. Nia reached out to the rustling fronds of the treetops, cool to the touch and emerald in the red disc of the sun. Stillness and motion seemed the one state.
The scarlet peony blossoms by the trees were veiled girls in red robes, seated cross-legged as they baked early morning bread in a brick oven. You could see that one batch of bread was already baking; dough for the next was being pummeled. Suspended in a yeasty cloud, Nia breathed in the scent of fresh bread mingled with the bitter smoke of a dung fire.
Salaam aleicum, the balloonists called down.
Aleicum salaam. Smiling faces tilted up; the girls got to their feet and waved to the folk above.
By imperceptible degrees Mona and Nia drew away, making their weightless way fifty feet into a dream of blue air; they were birds or clouds, silently euphoric. The minarets of Cairo’s many mosques pierced a blue-grey fog, the Nile curving its green ribbon through the city.
A redgold flush burnished the desert to its horizons. But from moment to moment colour altered, until, when the women looked down at the complex geometry of the Sphinx and the Pyramids, the sands had turned yellowish-brown, like the quartzite-tinged colour and texture of female skin in the statues of the Pharaoh’s wives. The desert itself seemed to Nia like the skin of a face, too great for its features to be made out or its expression guessed.
18
‘Where were you in the night, my sweetheart?’ Ailsa asked Joe, once they’d settled on the Liberty bus for the Saturday shopping trip.
Last night they’d made love but it had left Joe wide awake, as if someone had taken a can opener to his ribcage and exposed the throbbing heart of him. Throwing on some clothes, he’d gone out and hauled the ground sheet off the Tiger, walking the bike up the moonlit road before he mounted, so as not to disturb Ailsa.
‘Couldn’t sleep. I thought you hadn’t heard. I tried to be quiet. Sorry, love.’
‘It’s all right. What was the trouble, cariad?’
He liked to hear the Welsh endearments in her mouth. The love in her voice assured him that she was his home, he hers, wherever they lived; no quarrel was final and no bad words unforgivable.
‘Oh, you know. This and that.’
‘Chalkie, was it?’
‘Aye.’
Ailsa said nothing but he felt her sympathising care mantling him. She no longer blamed him, thank the Lord. But he blamed himself. The grief and remorse did not abate. With every day his friend seemed more present, not buried safely in the cemetery at Fayid but burrowing like a maggot in Joe’s body. He clutched his pounding chest and wondered, should he see the MO? Was he building up to a heart attack? Perhaps it was some physical illness he was mistaking for grief. Fingers plucked his emotion like a catgut string; adrenalin rushed in his belly and exploded in spasms, as if to warn of some ambush about to be sprung. But the calamity was in the past. And he was fighting fit.
‘Where did you go?’ Ailsa asked gently. She enclosed his hand in both of hers.
Joe had ridden towards Ish, looking over the canal towards the black world of the Sinai, qualified by moon and starlight, where there were no electric lights, no people, nothing human. Icy cold. The sterile realm of death where nothing changed. Bodies buried there thousands of years ago had desiccated in the sand that leached their liquids and purified them of bacteria and rot. They’d work their way up again with mummified faces recognisable.
In Ish, he’d ridden through glimmering, nearly empty streets. At the Vic no lights had been showing. Back to the Sweet Water Canal where Chalkie’s mutilated body had been tossed by assassins into the filthy flux. Back to the wall of darkness surrounding Fayid Cemetery. Nothing to see, nothing to feel. Weary now, hearing wild dogs howl, wondering what the heck he was doing here, Joe had turned for home but paused beside Lake Timsah. Leaning the Tiger against a tree, the cone of its light trained on the bank, he’d crouched beside the water, lighting up a fag. Insects had sparked in the nimbus of the Tiger’s single eye. Turning away, Joe had gazed out over the inky water, taking a deep, satisfying drag.
Pure peace out there. Beckoning.
The lake had lapped softly at his feet. The triangular sail of an Arab boat sliding silently past, like a great pale bird, had carved a white wake in the moonlight. A man’s dark head showed against the sail. So close had the vessel passed that moonlight was visible on the lens of the sailor’s eye. In a dream the two men had observed one another, from their separate worlds. No sound except the ripple against the vessel’s bows – and across the still sheet of water the call of night fishermen.
He’d felt, for want of better words, obscurely blessed. Momentarily he’d heard a sigh breathed out and sensed, as if in a dream, the presence of his pal at his shoulder, saying, in his friendly way, Steady on, mate.
‘I went out for a ride.’
‘Did it help, Joe?’
‘It did, in a way.’ She knew, of course. She read him like a book, as he could never read her.
He took her hand. ‘You weren’t scared without me, were you?’ Soon he’d have to go into the desert for three weeks’ exercises, leaving her alone. The situation was worsening, everyone was aware of it. Endless student demonstrations in Cairo, lynchings, theft and strikes. Anyone could have lynched him last night, Joe reflected. Idiot. What had he been thinking of?
‘Course not.’
Nia nestled on his lap, Penicillin on Ailsa’s and Golly on Nia’s, as the bus nosed its way through heavy traffic. Breeze through the opened window played on their fo
reheads and fanned Ailsa’s newly washed hair. I nearly struck her, Joe thought.
Aye but, fair play, I didn’t.
He’d promised himself, bargaining with God, to keep a tight rein on his anger. Nia’s illness had unnerved them both. Clinging to one another in an ecstasy of fear, they’d wept and Ailsa had said, My fault, all my fault.
In his imagination Joe kept seeing the bastard mosquito on his daughter’s arm, rear legs and posterior raised, head lowered, plunging its dirty needle into Nia. A child’s life was frail. And she’d called out ‘Auntie Mona! Auntie Mona!’ in the car on the way home from hospital, making Joe realise he’d cut off not only his wife but his daughter from something that meant one hell of a lot to them. Of course that couldn’t have been helped. But had he needed to be so brutal about it?
Joe had not struck his wife.
Instead we’ve got this tempest of passion, night after night, he thought. It was a new thing for them. Joe’s chapel upbringing had never prepared him for this rapture of desire, whose satisfaction only increased desire. He didn’t want to be away from her, he told Ailsa, and she smiled, no, not for a minute. Though it would be a rest from you-know-what!
Nia piped up: ‘I don’t know what!’
‘Quite true, you don’t,’ said Joe.
‘I want to know what.’
‘Too bad. Don’t go sulking now. Think about what we’ll buy for Mami in the market.’
‘Where are you going anyway?’ Nia asked sternly.
‘On manoeuvres, girlie. In the desert. That is what daddies do, isn’t it?’
He watched Ailsa’s fingers stray to the love-bite on her throat. She caught his glance and turned to look out of the bus window, tweaking up her collar to hide the mark. He’d have liked to lower the collar and put his lips to the place.
‘BRITTISH OUT! UNITTY OF THE NILE DELTA! AL-GALA BI-L-DIMA!’ some illiterate clown had written on a wall. A ragged boy with a bucket and brush was earning a few piastres by scouring off the graffiti. So-called ‘spontaneous’ mobs were rioting in Cairo and Port Said. The Egyptian so-called government was threatening to abrogate the Treaty and declare war on the British as an enemy army on its soil. They’d promised to cut off the supply of drinking water, fresh food and labour. They’d be cutting their own throats – as the new Tory government at home would show them.
Into Suez Page 24