Whether this was fair or not, Ailsa neither knew nor cared. It was probably an injustice. But this was a matter of survival.
Oddly enough she’d slept deeply, Nia in her arms, hopeful now of reconciliation with her husband. A stronger character than Joe, she had the power – if she used it tactfully, bit her tongue, acted weak, as she’d signally failed to do – to build peace between them. After a good night’s sleep, she’d awakened to the sound of this pandemonium of anger in the square.
Irene, padding round in her white quilted dressing gown, said, in a no-nonsense voice, not to worry, she’d barricade the door to the flat: they’d be safe as houses, no one could get in – and up here on the fourth floor they were well out of range of the mob. Ailsa, peeping through a chink in the shutters, wondered at Irene’s composure. She’d always been such a mouse. Chalkie’s temperate spirit seemed to live again in her.
The two women peered down on a choppy sea of countless heads. Demonstrators still poured out of the station, presumably from Cairo and Port Said, to swell the tide in the square. Their arrival had been timed to the hour after the mass departure of the husbands from the flats and Army Mansions for Moascar Garrison. Astounding numbers kept on arriving, greeting one another in an ecstasy of brotherhood. Young, excited faces raised from the crowd, looked up, straight into Ailsa’s eyes, or so it seemed, with glittering smiles. Many were in gallabiyyas; others were students in shirtsleeves. It fascinated Ailsa to be up here, out of harm’s way, at a point of vantage and able to study a crowd from above. A bird’s eye view. The mob was one organism; it flowed here and there, with no head and no tail, an elated creature of the moment.
Ailsa thought of the boy protester who’d run slap bang into her in Ish last year. They’d punched out his front teeth. The military police had carted him off to who knew what humiliation. British violence had been the hammer to his anvil. He’d been waiting for, praying for, planning for this day. He’d be one of these youngsters in the crowd beneath her. He’d have known beyond all doubt that this day would dawn, for Allahu Akbar! God is great! The crowd cried as one voice, raising fists to the infidel women in the flats. The individual was nothing; even the mob was nothing; their lives were nothing. God was great.
The crowd nearest to the flats began to direct its protest against the women and children inside and on the flat roof. Would they come flooding up the stairwell, assault and loot? Would they rape the women, exposed without their menfolk, torch the flats? Rage swelled from a hubbub to a baying chant in English. Filthy British Infidels Go Home! Unity of the Nile Delta! Aggressors Out of Misr! Women in the block who’d gone up to the flat roof with their Kodaks to get a view retreated as the hail of stones and bottles began.
‘Hallo there! Coo-ee! Don’t worry, it’s only Mrs Grey!’ a voice chirruped outside the barricaded flat door. How this petty official was enjoying herself. What a platform for the battle-axe’s officiousness. Learned, Ailsa guessed, in the war and always seeking a heroic outlet. ‘Come up to the fifth floor, please, ladies. We’ve set up an emergency committee. This may take a while and it will be nice for the kiddies to play together – and we’ll all keep one another’s spirits up.’
Community singsong, Ailsa mouthed, shaking her head with a grimace. Irene raised her eyebrows. No, they wouldn’t come – but thanks anyway.
There was a pause. Then Mrs Grey said, ‘Well, on your own head be it, Mrs Roberts. If you wish to come, Mrs White, do not let yourself be swayed.’
Doubtless the woman had recognised Ailsa’s voice, remembering her transgressions on the Empire Glory and keeping up with the gossip ever since. Odious to think one had been the centre of tattle amongst such women as that.
Nia, who had been making cats’ cradles, held up a string shape on spread fingers and thumbs, asking in a casual sort of voice, ‘What are those nasty men doing, Mami? Are they coming in here to kill us?’
Ailsa and Irene swooped on her with comfort and endearments. Perhaps they ought to have gone up with the others? They agreed to go at any sign of immediate danger.
‘I expect Daddy will be here soon,’ Nia said, glancing across at the door which Irene had barricaded with a table.
As Nia looked up, anticipating her father’s arrival, the expression in her green eyes, somewhere between trust and bewilderment, so reminded Ailsa of Joe that she ached to hold him close and be held by him. Joe and she were mutually present in their daughter, almost as a haunting. They were married in the bone structure of Nia’s face, her build, the shapes of hands and feet. The inheritance of Joe and herself intricately braided, intimately dissolved together in the chemistry of Nia. She sat Nia on her lap and prompted her to a new cat’s cradle.
She picked the web off Nia’s fingers; Nia plucked it off hers. Soon, Ailsa and Nia and Joe would be back together. All they needed for the road was a bit of decency and tact. And this Ailsa must supply, she saw, because at those times when he saw red, Joe probably couldn’t.
‘Oh yes, the daddies will be here in two ticks,’ Irene promised. And it was surprising how she rose to the occasion. ‘You won’t see those nasty men for dust then!’
‘We shall see Daddy very soon, sweetheart,’ Ailsa said. ‘And we shall all be lovely and together again.’ She would eat a fair-sized portion of humble pie if that was what it took – and the rest they would talk through like sensible folk.
The mob hurled itself against the NAAFI. Setting the perimeter fence on fire with torches, it stampeded the entrance, breaking through by sheer pressure of numbers, aided by several Egyptian policeman. Out the men staggered with loot. Crates of food. Carrier bags of cigarettes. Taking back a token share of what was due to them. Flames burst from the store and smoke billowed high in the air. Two cars had been overturned and torched.
Gunfire. The sound of lorries and Jeeps from Moascar. A cry went up from the top floor: ‘The Lancashire Fusiliers!’ Cheers and applause upstairs, Rule Britannia, wild whooping and stamping as the women swarmed up to the roof.
Now the darkie devils were for it! a lady shrieked. By God those stinking savages had it coming!
Bren guns were set up. Lorries with a platoon of troops from Moascar made for the store, shooting presumably over the mob’s heads or down at its feet, till the crowd wavered and fell back, spilling into the surrounding streets. A blanket of near-silence lay over the square, like a fog that mutes all sound. The two women tremblingly smiled, thumbs-upped at one another. They clasped hands briefly. Tying on her pinafore and bustling out into the kitchen, Irene put the kettle on and promised bacon and eggs.
‘That’s enough excitement for one day,’ she said.
The deafening report and echo of Sten-guns from the nearby streets came with such sudden violence that it seemed to erupt just outside their rattling window-pane. Irene rushed back in. They peered out into the square: soldiers with fixed bayonets were haring along. The shattering echo of the guns in Ailsa’s skull triggered a storm. The shots went on and on. She reeled away from the excessive light. Ergot, she must have ergot.
Order had resumed, with the installation of barbed wire; the carting off of corpses. The firing that had sounded so near was actually coming from side-roads. ‘For they are jolly good fellows!’ sang the British women on the roof. Men in gallabiyyas were herded across the Place de la Gare, hands bound behind their backs, Irene reported. Now they were being loaded into trucks. ‘Off with the velvet gloves!’ cried a woman on the roof. The disorder in Ailsa’s head gathered force. Fragments of light whirled in her right eye; her stomach turned over.
She slumped down in a chair, shading her eyes. There was an impression of being back at the Old Brewery. The girls next door had flown. Ailsa was alone in the eerie silence between doodlebug explosions. Joe was in the Western Desert, far beyond summoning, there was no Nia at all, and Ailsa was left cowering, imminent death suspended above her head. She was going to die. She’d had it. Now. The bomb fell – elsewhere. The partition between the flats, with its flaking, bile-green ski
n of paint, shook convulsively. Windows rattled; crockery jangled on the shelf; a naked light bulb swung around on its lead.
‘Mrs White! Mrs Roberts!’ Rapping on the door. ‘Open up, please!’
The door was opened. A whispering took place.
‘She’s not very well.’
Ailsa looked up between one bolt of lightning and the next. What was the word for what she’d got? She pointed to her temple to try to alert Irene. Meanings were there but not the words for them. But when she’d searched around and the words reappeared, they’d been deserted by their meanings and fell away into limbo. She saw Irene usher the two RAF policemen into the flat. Hats in hands, they looked at her with anxious, compassionate eyes, holding back from whatever message they had come to deliver.
24
‘Does Mam know, cariad?’
‘I spoke to her last night.’
Joe flinched and turned his head aside. The calm, even tenor of their conversation faltered only a fraction before their tearless eyes met and held one another again. Husband and wife held steady. They stilled the moment by pure willpower, not looking back, not looking forward.
‘What did she say?’
‘She’s coming. She’ll be flown out, darling. Don’t worry, it will be in time.’
‘Ah. And what about Dad?’
‘He’s not so well. She’ll maybe come on her own. She’s a strong woman, remember, your mam.’
The Military Policeman in the corner of the room peered straight ahead, quite detached, as if he’d caught sight of something fascinating on the wall opposite him. Everyone had been kind, gentle, tactful with the two of them. Ailsa felt ringed round with human decency. No moments in her life could ever be more precious or important than these, in which she and her husband shared quiet meetings, seated across the table from one another, keeping their balance. Three hours they had left after today, one hour on each of three consecutive days. They were not supposed to touch but in practice nobody objected to their holding hands. They were allowed to embrace and kiss at arrival and departure and they both looked forward to these moments, like teenagers at the cinema.
Human decency, yes, but not from the British Government. Dusty, who was to be hanged with Joe, had no one capable of fending for him. His wife had completely gone to pieces, leaving Dusty in the pitiful condition of having to notify his own parents, for it was War Office practice not to inform relatives of any trouble or problems regarding their kin. It was up to the airman to let his parents know, ‘if he wished to do so’. Ailsa and Irene had visited Dusty and rung his mother in Widnes. But Mrs Miller already knew. She had read the news in the paper two hours previously. Dusty was the third of fourteen children. But Mrs Miller would fly to Cairo to say goodbye. Neighbours would take care of the little ones. There was a neighbourhood collection towards her flight.
For the War Office had refused to fly the condemned men’s parents out. Ailsa had kept this information from Joe. She was glad now that she had beside her the refunded money from the carpet, a sum which would amply cover Joe’s mother’s ticket. It had been difficult to arrange the telephone conversations with Mam, none of the Treforys family being on the phone. In the end Ailsa was able to arrange calls for Mam every couple of days at the minister’s house; the expense of these calls also came out of the carpet. After her first whimpering cries and rush of tears for her beloved boy, Gwenllian had taken the news of her son’s crime and sentence with extraordinary resolution, her voice sounding so close that it had startled Ailsa.
Had Ailsa initiated an appeal? had been Mam’s first thought. But incredibly there existed no right of appeal from a court martial sentence. And the court had made no recommendation of mercy for either man.
‘What’s wrong with Dad then?’ Joe asked carefully. Every subject they broached had to be considered and phrased with care, in case the spirit level of their balance should shift.
‘Oh, his chest. You know, Joe, the usual. But he’ll come if he possibly can. Of course he will.’
Joe’s father was in a bad way. Ailsa had not burdened Joe with this knowledge. But he knew anyway. She saw it in his eyes. They were going to their graves together.
She’d copied out a poem for him, Donne’s ‘Valediction Forbidding Mourning’:
So let us melt and make no noise –
‘I’d actually rather Dad didn’t come, Ailsa, if he’s not so good.’
‘Of course. Don’t worry about that.’
No tear floods nor sigh tempests move –
Ailsa had launched a petition to the War Minister. She had written to King George with all the eloquence at her command, begging him to intervene. Joe’s mother’s MP had also written to the King, pleading extenuating circumstances. It was no good. The murder of a British officer at any moment counted as treason, the most heinous crime. The arbitrary wounding of an Egyptian child at such a sensitive moment was political dynamite.
Joe had aimed his revolver not at an individual but at the edifice of Empire. At deference. At rank. How utterly ironic this was, Ailsa thought. For Joe believed in and lived by duty and hierarchy. At Port Said he’d saluted Habibi and Alex, cleaving the Roberts and the Jacobs families asunder. His salute had reminded them: this is not a suitable or proper relationship.
Ailsa’s deviance had brought him to this. But he would not hear of it.
Now everyone seemed to want Joe and Dusty gone – shrouded, buried, covered over – as rapidly as possible. Joe himself did not for a moment question the justice of his punishment.
The firmness makes my circle just –
‘Do you get any sleep at all, cariad?’ he asked.
‘I don’t want all that much sleep. Waste of time.’
And makes me end where I begun –
Ailsa had fitfully drowsed last night, awakening at the point in her recurrent dream where she stood outside a door. She seemed able to wake up in the nick of time before the door opened. What lay beyond it Ailsa did not ask. She and Nia had been moved to a Nissen hut in Fanara, away from the terrorist dangers of Ismailia, for no white person was safe now beyond the barbed wire, the watch towers and the tanks. Each day brought fresh murders, strikes, gun battles, ambushes and bombing. British atrocities multiplied: bulldozers and Centurion tanks had demolished fifty Egyptian mud houses that had been built in the way of a source of water to which the British must have access. We seemed to be a nation that could not learn. Its brain was primitive. It could only repeat the misdeeds of yesterday. Yet this customary thought came to Ailsa dispassionately; her sympathies had shrunk to the horizons of one plight. The war, for it was a war, though no one said so, between Egypt and its occupiers, held no intimate reality for her. Six thousand troops had been flown in to the Canal Zone and a thousand families, including the Websters and the Breans, evacuated. The Roberts family could have been amongst them, disembarking at Southampton from the Empire Sunderland. Home.
Hedwig and her son had been amongst the evacuees. That Joe had shot her beloved Habibi – who had seen her through a bad time – Hedwig could hardly credit. Habibi had led her back to the country of sanity and given Eric a mother. She’d jounced the bundled baby in her arms, smiling into his face as she spoke to Ailsa, while he crowed, flailing at her face as if to snatch the smile. Then he’d crammed his fingers in his mouth as if to taste and drink the delicious smile. Ailsa, I pity you from the bottom of my heart that you have such a husband. Ailsa had flared up: Joe is still my Joe. Whatever he’s done. She’d wanted to say that Joe hadn’t gone to Masurah with the intention of killing Habibi or hurting a child; it had been a mistake. But how could you apologise for such heinous offences? The words went to ash on Ailsa’s tongue. Hedwig had understood that one has to remain loyal to one’s husband, right or wrong; a wife’s binding duty. But in that case, should one not have chosen more wisely? She hadn’t put these formulae – these Prussian platitudes – into words. But Ailsa had heard the message. And all the while, the weather in Hedwig’s face had altered with every bre
ath, melting for her boy, clouding for Ailsa. Eric had battened lips on his mother’s cheek and blown a raspberry.Involuntarily, both women had laughed aloud. Habibi was the best kind of Jew, exceptional, Hedwig had said. He had the warmest heart. Mind you, it’s always the best that are taken. Ailsa had not replied. She’d thought, yes, six million of the best. Hedwig was nothing to her. She lived in a different world. The two would not meet again.
This morning Ailsa had awoken sensing snow on the ground: muted sound and an eerie quality to the light. Her mind’s eye had hallucinated snow mounds on dustbin lids; thick coils on washing lines; the purification of dark spaces by a freezing grace of whiteness. She’d slipped out of bed and opened the curtains to find no such thing, but an apricot dawn, of a colour so tender that she’d gone outside into the winter air to bless her eyes with it.
Holding at bay the obscene thing.
January here could be as sharp as Shropshire. Time and the seasons had taken leave of their senses. Ailsa had hardly noticed the year’s turning. Three months had gone by since the crime: it was 1952 already. The authorities had rushed through the court martial and the executions. Archie had written to her every day. He would be on the next plane if she wanted him. Do not under any circumstances come, she’d telegraphed. On no account. For she was all Joe’s now. The two of them were all in all to one another. Grafted into the one stock. Ailsa could not be doing with well-meaning outsiders, even a cousin, weakening her with kindness, diluting the passionate outpouring of her heart’s best blood to her husband. Looking back through the window, she’d seen Nia lying asleep on her camp bed, bathed in a flush of rosy light, up to the neck in a grey military blanket. One of Nia’s arms was flung above her head, her body skewed, as if she’d been casually dropped like a rag doll. The blankets were rough and scratchy, their hairs piercing sheets and nightie. Nia’s skin was a tormented mass of eczema, where the insidious fibres rubbed it; there were open sores and scars, for Nia couldn’t help but scratch in the night. She never asked after her father. Not a word.
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