‘Where have you been?’
‘Can’t talk!’ He clutched his throat like an expiring man. ‘Parched.’
Once, he thought, watching Barney slope off to get a beer, he would have made a funny story out of the row with Saba the night before – her spitting rage, his own stupidity – but the walls had shifted again.
In the middle of the night, at around three, he’d got up for a glass of water, and when he’d got back into bed, he’d lain propped up on his elbow and looked at her. And watching her like this – the candlelight flickering over her face as she’d slept, unguarded as a child – what he’d most felt was a humbling of himself. He loved her – he knew that now without a shadow of doubt. Her fierceness, her talent, her vitality. He wanted to be loyal to her, to keep her safe. His own sharp tongue, his quick temper, his impatience must be curbed. He must not hurt her.
‘Sorry, old cock, they’ve run out of Beechers, they’ve only got Guinness.’ Barney put the drinks down between them and grinned. ‘God, I’m glad to see you.’
He took a long, noisy swig. Most of the wing, he said, when his glass was mostly froth, had opted to go to Cairo for their last leave, it was safer there. He’d been bored shitless, reduced to playing bridge with some brigadier and the matron from the local hospital.
He opened a second bottle and poured it. ‘Cheers!’ They touched glasses. ‘Enjoy it while you can,’ Barney told him. He’d been at LG39 the day before to see if there was any news; the signals had been coming and going like tart’s knickers.
‘I saw some planes flying over the harbour this morning,’ Dom said. ‘I wondered if they were for us.’
‘Let’s hope,’ Barney said tersely. ‘I was talking to a fitter the day before yesterday – quite a few of ours are kaput, something about sand bunging up their backsides.’
While they were talking, four Australian pilots strolled into the bar wearing new uniforms with ironed arm creases that showed how scruffy the rest of them looked in their dusty khakis. Drinks were bought, they sprawled in the leather chairs exchanging names, squadrons, brief biographies, all affecting a nonchalant indifference that none of them felt now. Theirs was a stick insect’s reaction: camouflage, fear, prudence. More and more men were being drafted in now, according to one of the Aussie pilots; they’d heard the big one would come in less than ten days. The man sighed after this announcement as though telling them nothing more thrilling than a railway timetable.
This news went straight to Dom’s brain like a drug of delight and confusion. Only an hour ago, sitting in the jeweller’s shop, captivated by the goddess talk and with her present in his hand, he’d felt so changed, so pure, and yet this urge to fight, to fly, he felt he couldn’t control it, any more than he could control wanting her, or his growing sense of wanting to be her protector.
He ate a horrible cheese sandwich, drank another beer. In some ways, yes, it was a definite relief after the exhausting heights of the last few days to be back, so to speak, at base camp and in the company of men – to be laughing about Buster Cartwright’s hairy landing, so close to the hangar it had swept the turban off a nearby Indian fitter, or even listening to a long-winded account from one of the Aussies, a tall red-headed man with white eyebrows, about why he always attached his own car wing mirror to his own aircraft to give him an extra pair of eyes.
But halfway through his second beer, Dom thought with a rush of emotion about Saba in the bath: her body gleaming, the swirling mass of her hair underwater. She’d be singing now, focused and happy. In spite of her tears last night, she had a strong centre, and he was glad. She would need it.
A couple of beers later, he put the jewellery box in his top pocket and decided to go down to the Cheval D’Or and surprise her after her rehearsal. When Saba had warned him with a firmness that surprised him not to go there again without an invitation, he’d felt both amused and resentful. He wasn’t used to a woman giving him orders. But today, their last together, was surely different. The important thing, he reasoned as he walked towards the Corniche, was not to spoil it all by getting too morbid or sad, for he had felt dangerously close to tears himself when she’d cried the night before, and that wouldn’t do.
A swim, he thought, seeing the dazzling turquoise sea ahead of him. The perfect thing. They could go down to Stanley Beach, hire costumes from the club and drink afterwards at one of the beachside stalls; a taxi back to the flat would leave her time to wash and get dressed and get to wherever she was going to do the wireless bloody thing. Although he’d bent over backwards to make amends for his rant about the programme, the lizard-brain part of him was still thinking damn and blast it. Tonight, he wanted her for himself.
She must have gone straight to the recording, he thought. He had arranged himself casually against a lamp post across the road from the Cheval D’Or, waiting for the door to open. Either that, or it had been an exceptionally long rehearsal. In the harsh sunlight of early afternoon, the club with its faded awnings and dusty shutters looked spectacularly unglamorous. When he strained his ears to hear her singing, all he heard were the ordinary sounds of the Corniche, the clip-clopping of a few exhausted gharry horses, the faraway babble of foreign voices melting in the heat. Watching a pi-dog sitting in the gutter, absorbed in a fierce hunt for fleas, Dom’s delight at the prospect of seeing her went away and he felt unpleasantly furtive – this was her territory and he was encroaching on it. He stood in the blistering sun and then grew disgusted – stick to the plan, he told himself, it was undignified to stay like this, skulking now behind sandbags like some sort of cut-price spy. Walk back to the Rue Lepsius and wait for her there. It would give him time to pack.
Walking back, the houses seemed to jump and blur. From now on, he warned himself, feeling sweat trickle down his back like an insect, he must close down his emotions. It was a near cert, when he got back, that he would be promoted to flight commander. Paul Rivers – exhausted now and longing to get home – had told him that, and now the lives of many men would depend on him; he couldn’t afford to behave like a hysterical girl.
Also, Alexandria was now, officially, the most dangerous city in Egypt. The evidence was around him – the scared-looking people, the charred houses, the wild cats and dogs roaming the streets. True, a few diehards had refused to leave and were still swimming at Cleopatra Beach, or drinking Singapore Slings in deserted hotels, but it wasn’t all that long ago that lines of panicky people had queued outside embassies and banks, desperate to leave. It had been madness to meet her here, with Rommel planning to take over the city any day now. He would advise her, more forcibly than ever, to leave.
Some street children swarmed towards him shouting, ‘Any gum, chum?’ in excruciating American accents, begging him to relieve them of cigarettes and ‘first-quality whisks’.
‘Meet my sister, mister,’ said one with an unpleasant leer and the beginnings of a moustache on his top lip.
At the next street corner he watched a peasant farmer and his donkey pass, the beast piled high with bundles of sugar cane, the man shouting.
In their room on the Rue Lepsius, he sat for the first hour smoking, listening for the light skim of her tread running upstairs, the burst of song, but all he heard was a muddle of foreign voices from the street outside.
He started to pack his kit: his desert boots, his pistol, a couple of shirts; he took his socks down from the hanger where she’d left them. He smoked another cigarette, and when he got hungry, left her a note, dashing down the stairs to buy a foul-tasting falafel from a street vendor. It was then, standing in the street and seeing a large yolk-coloured sun beginning to set, that he started to panic. What if she hadn’t gone to the recording studio? Or had been held up there and not able to contact him, or been caught by a stray hand grenade and was lost and bleeding in some dusty street somewhere; maybe their stupid row had upset her more than she’d admitted and she was punishing him by making him wait.
He walked around for hours trying to find her. First to the ENSA o
ffices, where a note on the padlocked door said they had moved to Cairo, then to Dilawar’s, empty except for the three old men who were regulars there.
He walked up shuttered alleyways, where blue lights shone eerily from wrought-iron lamp posts. As he walked, he wondered if jealousy had driven him a little mad. (For he was jealous, had been almost from the moment he’d first met her, without really understanding why.) And he thought about mirages. It was part of a pilot’s training to understand how a mirage could conjure up lakes and rivers, whole mountains out of nothing but desert sands. A confusion of perspective, a longing for something that wasn’t there. He’d seen her work the same kind of magic on the men she sang for – their tired faces lit up with hope and happiness; her songs the mirror that gave them back their life. God help him if he’d mistaken four days of blissful lovemaking for something solid and real.
He was certain now she was gone. At six o’clock, he ran wildly down the street in the direction of the club again. Someone must know where she was.
Late afternoon was fading as he ran into dusk: the sun setting over the harbour in a molten furnace of ochre and peach-coloured clouds that seemed to mock him. Fool, fool, fool for thinking you could contain her. When he got to the club, he stood gasping for breath on the pavement outside it. He banged on the locked door for five minutes and then he kicked it. An upstairs window opened; an old lady scowled down, he saw the pink of her scalp through wet hair.
‘Where is she?’ he shouted up. ‘Where is Saba?’
She told him to wait, ran downstairs and after an interminable scraping of locks opened the door. It took him a few seconds to see that this was Faiza Mushawar minus make-up. In the yellow light of sunset, her skin looked jaundiced. The line of her eyebrows had been drawn artificially high with a wobbly brown pencil.
‘What is it?’ she said crossly. ‘Who are you?’
‘Dominic Benson,’ he said. ‘You must remember, I was here with Saba. We met in your room.’
She stared at him, her brown eyes bulging. ‘No.’ A green-eyed cat was trying to force its way around her. She blocked its way with a slippered foot. ‘Many men come here.’
‘Please,’ he said. ‘Where is she?’
He told her he had to leave in the morning, that he was going back to the desert, that he and Saba had arranged to meet for lunch, that he’d waited all afternoon for her. While he talked, she sucked in her mouth and shook her head.
‘I don’t know where she’s gone.’ She glanced over his shoulder. ‘Another city, another concert. People don’t stay long.’ Her shrug indicating what do you expect? She’s a singer, there’s a war on. Things happen for no meaning.
‘Do you have any idea when she is coming back?’ he asked as gently as he could.
She shrugged again – ‘She is working, is never sure’ – it seemed to him her accent grew thicker by the moment. ‘Ask British peoples, I don’t know.’ Soon he felt she would be denying even knowing her all.
‘Can you tell me the names of the people she has been staying with in Alex?’
This had driven him mad all afternoon: Palmerston? Petersen? Mathieson? In all the excitement of meeting her again, he hadn’t paid proper attention. The old lady’s eyes rolled a little.
‘No.’
Stop messing about, you bloody old fool, I know you speak English.
‘Listen.’ He heard his voice pleading, when he wanted to shout. The cat blinked at him, the red glow of sun reflected in its eyes. ‘Mrs Mushawar, please help me. You taught her. She respected you. You must know.’ In a matter of hours, the truck would come, it would take him back to the desert; he might never see her again. ‘Please.’
Her skinny eyebrows rose. It seemed she might be on the verge of some sort of explanation or apology when she drew back and said, ‘Sorry for this, but I don’t know. She here this morning, very nice, she not here now.’ She closed the door in his face.
He had come to the end of anything that could be called a plan. He spent the next few hours visiting the usual watering holes for the English, hoping by some miracle that she might be there. The Cecil bar was full of ATS girls. One or two of them crossed their legs and smiled hopefully as he walked in. Another said, if this Saba was still in Alex, she needed her head read. It was a deadly dump, give her Beirut any day.
It was dark by the time he got back to their room. From the harbour he heard the long, mournful blast of a foghorn. He sat on the chair, his head in his hands. He was meeting Barney outside the Officers’ Club at seven o’clock the next morning. Barney had arranged a lift back to the aerodrome in a supply truck. He had to go, he wanted to. On the following day, the whole squadron would be briefed on what they jocularly called the big one. This would be their last leave for a long time; from now on the fighting would be fierce and relentless. He could die without saying goodbye to her.
He felt mad with frustration at wasting this precious time. He told himself to calm down. He shaved, he made the bed, and he put the rest of his stuff, his khaki drills, his map, and the socks she’d washed, into his kitbag. It was then he saw her note.
Gone away suddenly for more concerts. So sorry. I love you. I hope to be back soon.
Love Saba
He read it several times, unable to believe his eyes – so brief, so offhand. No address, no proper information, almost a brush-off. And she’d been back, he could see that now, her hairbrush and soap gone, clothes too, apart from her red dress, which she’d left in the cupboard. He took the dress from its hanger and lay on the bed with it. He inhaled its faint scent of roses and jasmine, and gave an anguished cry. He’d never imagined love could hurt this much – he felt winded, wounded, as if he’d been kicked hard in the stomach.
Chapter 31
As their plane roared through the night towards Istanbul, Saba had the nightmarish feeling of slippage, of things happening too fast and out of sequence. Ozan lay asleep three seats ahead of her, with his usual air of plump contentment, but she had not envisaged being on her own with him like this. Where was his wife? His entourage? What was Dom doing now? She hated the thought of hurting him like this.
She and Ellie had had a fierce row about it before she’d left Alexandria.
‘I can’t go without telling him,’ she’d told Ellie. ‘He’s waiting for me – he’s going back to his squadron tomorrow . . . I’m going to run down there straight away.’
Ellie had been doing what she called Hollywood packing – hurling clothes into an open suitcase, with none of her usual tissue-paper-and-folding malarkey. At the end of it, she opened her arms wide in a curiously wild gesture.
‘There is no time,’ she said. ‘I know it’s mad-making, but they’re picking you up in twenty minutes, and your plane leaves tonight and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.’ Her eyes looked nakedly red without their usual careful coating of mascara. ‘I’m not happy about this either,’ she said, ‘because now I have no job, and nowhere to live. And I’m sick of other people making all the decisions . . . and Tariq’s furious and I was hoping he’d propose this week, so it’s all a real mess, isn’t it?’
In the end, they’d compromised.
‘Listen, darling,’ Ellie had coaxed. ‘Write him a letter – I’ll take it down to him the minute you’ve gone, and then at least he’ll know.’
Saba had gone blank with alarm – given Cleeve’s warnings, what could be safely said? So in the end, a hopeless, scrappy, heartless-seeming note – her mind lurched with shame when she thought of him reading it. What would he think of her now?
‘May I join you for one moment?’ Mr Ozan, dressed superbly today in a pale suit and pearl-grey tie, had woken and decided to be sociable. He came swaying down the aisle and wedged himself beside her. His powerful, fat little body felt oppressively close – she was starting to feel airsick as well as everything else.
‘Are you happy about our change of plan?’ he roared over the engine noise. ‘Have you been to Turkey before?’ He half turned to gauge her reaction
to what he obviously felt would be a great treat. ‘You were telling me your father was born there.’
‘They left when he was young,’ she had to shout back. ‘My father wanted to travel . . . wanted to travel.’ She hoped he’d shut up now.
‘And, remind me, what town . . . what town did he hail from?’ He was relentless.
‘A small village called Üvezli,’ she said. ‘They didn’t talk about it much.’
‘I know it, I think – it’s on the way from Üsküdar to the Black Sea coast,’ he said. ‘A pretty place, we can show you when we get there. Don’t look worried,’ he added gaily, ‘you are going to have the life of your time.’ He corrected himself: ‘The time of your life.’
The plane’s engine had settled into an easy hum. Through the small windows she saw clouds, and miles and miles below, the desert quietly filling up with the pinks and golds of the setting sun.
‘I forgot to ask,’ Mr Ozan said. ‘Your lessons with Faiza – did you like them?’
‘Very much – I’d only sung a few Turkish baby songs before, but never in Arabic.’
Ozan shifted in his seat. He shook his head.
‘You won’t need those songs now – Arabic is the official language in Beirut and my friends there are very sensitive about it being the language of song. In Istanbul,’ a proud curve came to his lips, ‘people are more Western-looking. We don’t care so much.’
She felt an odd mixture of relief and anticlimax – like a pupil who’s worked hard only to find their exam has been cancelled at the last moment. He’d been so passionate about the songs before; now they sounded about as important as whether to have cheese straws or peanuts at his party.
‘So is there a band in Istanbul?’
She warned herself, keep your mouth shut. She was here for a reason, with a job to do. She mustn’t mess it up. If she didn’t keep this firmly in mind, she would lose her centre and start to feel completely out of her depth; also, she would miss Dom more than was bearable.
Jasmine Nights Page 29