If things were less tense, he’d have got Ailsa a jalopy. You could pick them up for a song. A car would have kept her from coveting the Tiger, which she now seemed to accept was off limits. Lately Ailsa had retreated into herself a bit. Didn’t venture out as much. She hadn’t wanted to come out shopping today in Ish; Joe sensed her concern as to how he’d be with the wogs. Irene had had more grasp of political reality, in her fears, than Ailsa in her grammar school idealism. That was odd: Irene had been afraid of wogs. But Ailsa feared her husband with the wogs. He knotted Chalkie’s sweater round his neck as the bus rounded the final corner. Irene had been right all along.
We’re here to prevent or fight World War III, he thought. And it will be an atomic war. The Ruskies are atheists. No more mosques and minarets for the poor old Arabs when the Ruskies fly in to this ready-made arsenal at the gateway to Africa and the Persian oil wells. And the flabby playboy King Farouk: no kings on the other side of the Iron Curtain, hadn’t the Gyppos noticed? But the obvious never struck them. We are your friends and protectors, he told them. So you murder us. And perhaps the simpletons were natural fascists. They’d welcomed Goebbels to Cairo in ’39. To the Gyppos, Hitler had been a heroic corporal who’d defied the British Empire to make his country great – a model for Arab officers. With his own eyes Joe had seen these asses swaggering through wartime Cairo sporting toothbrush moustaches, shaven heads and monocles.
Chalkie had been killed by fools who could not identify their true enemy. Thinking of Irene still upset him. He’d been speechless with relief when she’d gone. Joe felt (and it was a bit mad) that he owed her a life. Chalkie had been far and away the better man.
A peaceful, smoky Saturday atmosphere filled the bus, everyone in civvies, with shopping baskets on their laps; small girls flaunting best pink ribbons and boys in their Sunday shorts with low side partings. Two Military Policemen sat at the back, with holsters full and eyes vigilant. He didn’t like needlessly to frighten Ailsa by pointing them out. Perhaps (it was a light going on) she was more timid than she let on. And proud: she’d hate to show fear. After all, his wife was bright and kept up with the news: she could read the signs of growing tension. Joe laced his fingers with hers and stroked the back of her hand with his thumb. Every time they touched or looked, each knew that the other remembered. The passion of their nights. It ought to be more than enough to sate his longing and settle his jealousies. Too much, boy, come to that! He didn’t understand where the storm had come from. Was it normal to want your wife again as soon as you’d loved her? The moment your climax had exploded, an empty ache.
But did you ever reach a woman fully and finally? In each act of passion Joe possessed and lost Ailsa.
What did she write in that notebook? He knew where she hid it. One evening, he’d taken the pretty green notebook in his hands, turned it over, felt the texture, opened and closed its brass clasp. He’d not read a word. That would be a shameful intrusion.
But perhaps it was a journal of Ailsa’s fears. Women had terrors men couldn’t imagine. This might well be the truth of it. How stupid never to have guessed it. Such a clod he was.
They drew into the Place de la Gare. Joe carried Nia down the steps of the bus. Soldiers with guns strolled near the bus stop, with a casual, off-duty air. Under the surface, the Canal Zone seethed with unrest.
‘See you at the Club for lunch?’ he asked Dusty.
‘I’ve got a thirst on me already.’
‘Oh no you jolly well have not,’ said Dusty’s missus, a bird of a lady: petite Dusty loyally called her and Ailsa looked like two of the midget. She hated to be seen next to petite ladies.
‘Sah!’ said Dusty, saluting his other half.
‘See what I’ve got to put up with,’ Caroline chivvied, and led him off.
Joe handed Ailsa down the steps.
‘Hey! – Joe!’
Here, in civvies, was Nobby Bowen, a bloke perpetually off-side, chatting in some foreign gibberish with, oh no – a coal-black nigger wearing a suit, a trilby and a bow tie, carrying a string bag half full of packages. With his shiny skin and broad smile, he was the spitting image of Nia’s golliwog. Thicklips. Must be one of the officers’ saffragis. Nia looked up, fascinated.
As Ailsa turned, Joe saw Bowen’s face light up. Ailsa frowned, shook her head and strode away, head down, across the square.
‘Ailsa! Hang on, will you? Where the heck are you going? Nia!’
Without turning, his wife motioned impatiently with her arm, oh do come on! But Nia was not budging. She held out her hand to Black Sambo, to shake it. He crouched to her, smiling in her face, and Joe squirmed at the contrast between the golliwog’s shining blackness and Nia’s red-blonde hair. The two Military Policemen stood watching, po-faced.
‘You’ve met my wife, Nobby?’
‘Thought I had. Not so sure now. Must have seen her somewhere.’
‘At the concert?’ Joe helped him out. He called out again to Ailsa. Bowen was telling Nia that this gentleman was his very good friend and a prince in his own country. Nia’s eyes were quite round. Bowen was one of the toffs who’d gone native and married a duskily luscious girl, hourglass figure, sashaying along in a figure-hugging costume. Wearing pillbox hats with bits of veil.
‘Pleased to meet you, my dear little person,’ the black man said to Nia in polished, lah-de-dah English.
‘And what is your name?’
‘Nia Josephine Roberts.’ Nia put out her hand and stroked his shiny face, beaming. ‘What is yours?’
‘My name is Kassay.’
‘How do you do, Kassay.’
Ailsa stood with her back to them, way across the square, while a woman in black offered her something from a basket – figs perhaps – and an ambling squaddie paused to eye her. Joe dragged at Nia’s arm. She resisted, slipped her hand out of her father’s, slapped at him and ran round behind the golliwog’s legs. She danced from foot to foot, making naughty faces up at her father.
‘Now then, Joe,’ Bowen said. ‘We’ve been discussing the politics of oil. Which do you think is more important, oil or water?’
Nia thought water.
‘And where does water come from?’
‘Up there.’
‘No rain falls here though, does it? The water Egypt gets to drink comes from Ethiopia. Through the Sudan. And that, in the future, will be power for Kassay and his people.’
Aye, if and when they get the know-how, Joe thought. When the sky rains pears.
Kassay straightened up. He showed little of the obsequiousness of the Egyptian servants but looked Joe straight in the face, through eyes of extraordinary beauty, large and dark with long curling lashes. A melancholy look to him when he was not smiling. He must be well used to slights from the Arabs. Egypt laid claim to the Sudan. For them the black Africans were savages. Wogs, in other words. Every wog had to have another wog further down the ladder. Joe had seen the Gyppos follow the dapper black servants of the officers, wiggling their hips in mockery of their Europeanised fancy dress.
When he’d managed to tug Nia away, they caught up with Ailsa. Husband and wife linked arms.
‘The coloured chap comes from Ethiopia,’ Joe said, keeping his thoughts about golliwogs to himself. ‘Is that the same as Abyssinia, or another place?’
‘The same. I hope you were polite, Joe.’
‘Course I was polite! Honestly though! What a comedy!’ He laughed.
‘What is?’
‘Well, Nia and the coloured gentleman. She has a thing about them. Do they look lovable, you know, sweet, to a child?’
‘She doesn’t know she’s supposed to despise them, does she?’
‘Oh, come on. You know I didn’t mean that. Give me some credit, Ailsa.’ He changed direction, to shut her up: ‘Bowen was taken with you. Nearly had to knock the bloke down’
‘Don’t be silly. What did he say?’
‘Thought he knew you.’
‘Oh?’
‘Mind, he claims to know
everyone in Egypt so why should you be an exception? Gone native he has. Thinks he’s Lawrence of Arabia. Knows a hell of a lot about Pharaohs though, so chwarae teg I don’t condemn him.’
*
Later, in the souk at Fayid Village, she made for the spice street. Tiny cupboard-like stores displayed pods, seeds, translucent resins and freakishly shaped knotted roots, fragments of edible bark. Roasted, pulped, pounded and crushed delicacies. The eye and nose – somehow the soul – were drunk on spirituous plenty. Ailsa admired lemons preserved in salt and rose buds from Damascus. She haggled for and bought several cones of black cherry kernels, musk and ginger, bargaining in an ungainly mixture of Arabic and English.
Beyond the spice street she breathed in a hot stink of rottenness. The smell of everything. Compost and petrol and spices, sun on offal and ordure. The ferment penetrated Ailsa with a pang, not unpleasantly, reminding you that life was planted fair and square in mould. Like the goodness of manure or the intimate blood-smell on your sanitary towel, which you raised to your nose and sniffed without disgust. Curdled milk and crumbled Gorgonzola. The smell of Joe and Ailsa, their skins slick with sweat, attached at the root.
The passion of their nights would kill him, her husband swore! No more! Sleep, he absolutely must sleep! But if they decided to sleep, he’d turn to her again because whatever they had found must never be allowed to slip away. Never, never. Hold, enter, have me. Again. Their eyes did not close when they loved. Joe saw her and Ailsa revelled in Joe’s seeing. And that felt dangerous. Dangerous was exciting. This, she supposed, was marriage. But wasn’t it excessive? Would it go on like this, at this intensity, till one of them died? Was it that Joe had felt something elusive in her depart from him and he must have it back? And she in turn, having almost forsaken him for Mona, rushed in panic for home. Since Nia had nearly died, Ailsa had withdrawn from that other world. Mona had let her. She made no motion to reach in and try to claim Ailsa. Thank goodness Nobby had had his wits about him in Ish and managed to deflect Joe’s suspicion. Good thing he’d been out and about without his ladies. They’d have mobbed Ailsa like brilliantly coloured butterflies. Ailsa chérie! Comment va? How would she have argued her way out of ambush?
Ailsa paused at a treasury of fruit. Piled melons, green and yellow, with a few gashed open to expose the glistening sunset-orange of the juicy inner flesh.
Carpets now. Their jewel colours sang in shafts of light. In the ruck of bodies, Ailsa’s eyes tasted the deep claret of her chosen carpet, against a pattern of ochre or gold, how would you describe it? Autumn trees on Wenlock Edge or walking with Archie under the bronze tree canopy at Pendlebury. Her mind felt faint with the colour’s sensual purity. It made her think of Mona’s carpets on the wall like tapestries. Ailsa reached out now and stroked the pile: unimaginable luxury. She wanted this. The carpet-seller had his genial eye on her. He sidled nearer, smiling.
She shook her head and took a step away from the stall, backing against a hot jostle of bodies. The noise took the top of your head off. Her memory reached for the sombre twilight of the public library at Shrewsbury, with its familiar chill. Recoiling from this heat and squalor, she imagined herself a cool vestal again, with a virgin page and a full fountain pen, in a high gallery of the library. The chaste enjoyment of working for university entrance. If she’d become a scholar, Ailsa could have lived unto herself, not given her body over to the passion of a man and the parasitical need of a child. They used you up. To them, what were you but an udder? They could never let you be. They were always nuzzling up to probe and taste you, and prying into your brain to try to handle what was there. She thought of her green notebook; she’d write about the scent of the salted lemons.
Three weeks, she thought, I’ve three weeks of privacy.
And yet she didn’t want Joe to go, not for a moment. He’s my life, she thought: nothing less.
Traffic bellowed; men shouted Pri-ee-mus! par-a-fin!; wirelesses attached to lamp posts blared and an organ grinder with a tambourine in his free hand and half his face and one eye missing seemed to be following her around. There were flies sticking to pus on the good eye. Beyond or beneath this racket shimmered an echo, like a radio signal, a bass note to bedlam.
A soldier with a rifle strolled through the throng. The crowd parted. She read the chill watchfulness on his face, the mute masks of the faces he passed.
Grief and guilt thrilled through her. She couldn’t stand it, the grasping hands, the reek, the need. How is it my fault? she asked them all. How can I help it if you live in mud huts and have bilharzia and your babies die and you can live on a tithe of a tithe of what I possess, and yet I think of myself as poor? For a moment she saw them – smelt them, rather – as presumably Joe did, a dirty, lousy, contagious rabble. They hated and resented her, for all they fawned and for all she tried to feel, and did feel, love and concern and contrition. The carpet-man came up too close, with his desperate eyes, big and brown and melting: ‘Madame Lady like the car-a-pet?’
Ailsa looked round for her husband. Beside a stall selling brass pyramids and camels, Nia on Joe’s shoulders cried out that she had spotted a goat, a real live goat, look there, Mami! It was going, Ailsa supposed, to have its throat cut. And oh! Nia cried, she had seen a rooster, a lovely golden rooster with a big red crest, in a cage, over there. As the crowds parted, Ailsa beheld the creature in all its beauty, the coxcomb a plume of red flesh, the lens of its eye a flake of gold.
Joe’s watchful look. His gaze embraced her and all her longings. Is there something, anything you want? I will give it to you. I and only I will satisfy you. In the overpowering heat, she felt herself sway and jerk, as if on the edge of sleep. She had three weeks promised.
‘Seen something you like?’ he asked.
‘Too dear. Anyway where could it go? What could go with it? We’ve got nothing that won’t be made to look, well, a bit dull.’
‘No, but we shall have. One day we shall, shan’t we, cariad? When we’ve a home of our own.’
Joe quietly noted the carpet. Smiled with his eyes at the seller. Haggled a little.
Quais giddan car-a-pet, effendi!
Mafeesh faluk! said Joe. ‘Not a bean! Shufti!’
He patted his pocket and shrugged. That endearing smile he gave to the carpet-man, Ailsa thought, was sincere. He forgot to hate Egyptians when they came one by one. Away from Mona’s influence, Ailsa too often slid on shit in the region of Joe’s prejudices. The communal prejudice, rather, the lawless prejudice that brought us here, self-righteous gangsters, and kept us here.
And there was reason in that, she thought: I have to live with him. I can’t afford to be contemptuous of my husband. And Joe was not as bad as his prejudices.
The carpet-man saw them depart. He let out a wailing cry over his lost sale. As if they had cheated him, stolen his livelihood.
‘Sorry, cariad. Can’t possibly afford it unless he halves the price.’
‘Of course you can’t. I really didn’t expect it, Joe. I was just interested. You can read Egyptian carpets. They are legible.’
*
At home they bumped heads, reaching down for the blue air letter on the doormat.
‘You seem so frightfully far away, Joe,’ ran the letter, ‘and I wondered as soon as we arrived if I’d done right to come home and leave my Roy all on his own in the earth at Fayid, unvisited? But how could I have stayed, as things were? It buckets down with rain here, the rain is full of smuts, my mother-in-law is patient with us but I can’t help feeling in the way in such a cramped house, rationing is still dire, it’s so damp, we all came down with colds and Christopher is playing up, he wets his bed, the naughty boy. I feel he needs a man’s discipline.
‘But now, I want to put a plan to you and would you please advise? There may be a way I could return to Egypt, Joe, and I need to be completely practical about this, I have no one to advise me. I asked the RAF about a filing clerk’s job somewhere in Ish – I have secretarial training you know. And it seems t
hey are desperate for the right people at the NAAFI – and, to cut a long story short, I expect to fly out in the near future. You were such a pal to me, I feel there is a little portion of my Roy wherever you are, is that mad? I feel I may be mad sometimes.’
‘It looks as though she’s angling to come back out,’ Ailsa said. ‘In fact she is coming back, look.’
He didn’t want Irene, it was as plain as a pikestaff. He’d turned a corner into this new happiness: she could read it on Joe’s face. Their one ewe lamb was well again and their marriage restored. Irene was trouble.
‘That’s insane,’ he said, handing the letter back. ‘I mean, she loathed it here. Afraid for her life she was, every minute of every day.’
‘She’s just lost, isn’t she, Joe. Shall I answer?’
‘Aye, you answer, that’s best. Look, I need to go out.’
‘What, right away? I thought you were cleaning your kit? Do you want me to do it?’
‘No, it’s fine. Leave it there. I’ll just tell Nia where I’m going.’
He leapt upstairs three at a time and she heard him talking to Nia, who was supposed to be asleep.
‘Dear Irene,’ Ailsa wrote, ‘Joe has asked me to reply for both of us…’
She suspended her pen above the paper. Imagine if it had been the other way round, she thought, and Joe had been killed. Imagine that the hole at Fayid had been dug for my husband and that Roy White had helped lower a coffin containing the remains of Joe into the earth. And in some way been accessory to that death. How come Irene not only withheld blame from Joe but turned to him as her mentor? Mad was the word. ‘We both feel your loss acutely,’ she wrote. ‘Never a day goes by but we think of dear Roy and you. How we hope that the dear boys ease your pain in some measure.’
Into Suez Page 25