The clothes, the shave gave him a sense of being in slightly clearer focus. After two cups of coffee he returned to his hotel and phoned the squadron to tell them he was back.
‘That’s good news, sir,’ the voice at the end of the phone said with no notable surprise or emotion. When he was told that Barney was in Suez, training, and Rivers had gone, he felt relieved rather than sorry. He couldn’t face them yet. Too bloody feeble was how he put it to himself, furious at his weakness.
He was about to hang up when another, more authoritative voice came on the line. A hearty, rushed voice, saying he was Dom’s replacement, Tom Philips.
‘Wonderful news you’re back,’ the voice boomed. ‘I expect . . .’ The line filled with static, so he couldn’t hear the rest, but it sounded effusive. And then in a roar, ‘Do you need medical treatment? I repeat. Do. You. Need. Medical treatment? Over.’
Dom said no. After the burns hospital he couldn’t stand the thought of being incarcerated again.
‘I’d like to take a week’s leave,’ he shouted back. ‘I’ve got reasonable digs here.’ He gave his new address, received in another staticky roar.
Some version of the message must have got through. Two days later, the squadron’s padre came to see him, a whispery, sympathetic man with bad breath. He’d had a wretched bout of pneumonia himself last year, he confided in an eggy blast. He advised Dom not to overdo it. He’d had a word with the CO before coming to see him, he added, and with Tom Philips. They both thought Dom should take a couple of weeks’ leave. There had been a nasty outbreak of influenza at Wadi Natrun and several landing grounds, and it was pretty quiet here anyway now that the Germans had retreated to Tunis.
The padre brought a care package with him: some clean clothes, a month’s back pay and a copy of the Bugle, a forces newspaper that advertised local goings-on. Then he broke the wary silence that followed with what sounded like a warmed-up sermon.
‘I think Alexandria has something to teach all of us about resilience,’ he said. ‘Nothing but invasions since Alexander came in 332 BC. First him, then the Romans, then . . . well, I’ve forgotten who next, but now look at ’em. Back on their feet again. New buildings going up already, roads being built, concerts, music, marvellous. I brought you this in case you want some distraction.’
He pointed towards a line of advertisements in the Bugle’s entertainments section.
Dom skimmed his eyes down the page, desperate for the old bore to bugger off.
And saw her name.
Saba Tarcan.
The other names – Faiza Mushawar, Bagley, Arleta, Asmahan – scrambled in front of his eyes.
What a thing, he told himself, too shocked to feel angry. What a thing! She’d been here all along. Not posted, or gone home, or any of the other excuses he’d made for her. Here in Egypt all along, working and almost certainly with a new man.
He smiled and shook the padre’s hand.
‘Very good of you to come. Goodbye.’
When he was gone, Dom needed to walk. On the steps of the hotel, he turned right towards the tram station, watching people flowing in and out of it, from gloom to brilliant winter sunshine.
Not so bad, not so bad. He was testing himself like a man trying to walk on a badly broken leg. A train would carry him away soon – away from Alexandria, away from North Africa. He’d go back to England and start another kind of life.
He turned away from the station and walked down towards the sea. The padre was right, he noted pleasantly to himself, Alex was showing signs of speedy recovery. Although the blackout was still officially in place, some of the blue paint that had covered the streetlights had been scrubbed off. A team of gardeners were planting seedlings in the municipal gardens, workmen were banging their hammers again, restoring the charred buildings. He could fight it too – all the dying and the dead friends, the false hopes, the bogus emotions. He would not fall into the trap of useless nostalgia. When it was over, it was over.
At the corner of Rue Fuad a legless boy stretched out a hand to him.
‘Long live Mrs Queen and the Royal Dukes of England.’
Dom dropped a coin into his cup, and walked on.
If it did hurt, he had only himself to blame. After his desert prang, he’d come undone for a while, he could see that now. Lying in bed in Karim’s tent, he’d wanted to think his life out clearly, but all that time her songs had played underneath his conscious mind – like a bridge from one thought to the next, a way of talking, deeper than words. And he’d kept the songs playing because he knew he could not keep going without her.
Back there, with the desert stretching all around him, the vast sky above, he’d seen something so clearly. That all human beings were lonely and separated creatures who needed each other, as he’d needed her – whether a mirage or real hadn’t seemed to matter.
At night, before he went to sleep, he’d focused the whole thing in his mind like a series of scenes in a film – Saba lying in the bath singing ‘Louisville Lou’ to him; the sight of her inexpertly washing his socks and putting them on hangers; the sudden breathless joy of catching her eye across a room and seeing her face light up. Oh, and it had gone on – dreams about the twins again, a cottage in the country, friends round a table for dinner, the whole thing played forward, not backwards, so they could have a future together.
Complete balls. He must stop that now. In the real world, mirages could kill you, they could eat up a life.
A light rain began to fall. He turned his collar up and, fixing his eyes on the sea, set off at a brisk pace, thinking he must build up his strength and go back to the squadron soon, but inside he was like a man stumbling from bog to bog, because everywhere reminded him of her. There was the shop where he’d bought the blue bracelet from the fat jeweller with the glass eye who’d told him about the goddesses, and there the café where they’d drunk wine one night, where the old man had played an oud and then, as a special treat for her, a record by Asmahan, and she’d listened, enchanted. And there was the corner of the street where they’d hugged each other before she’d disappeared into the crowd, as it turned out for ever. And around the next corner, the house on Rue Lepsius where he’d sobbed uncontrollably on the night she left – a memory that made him wince with shame. It must not happen again.
Take it! he told himself. Take it, take it, take it! The hour had passed.
Chapter 48
When Mr Ozan got permission to hold his gala concert in the grounds of the Montazah Palace, he let out a bellow of delight like a young bull let loose in a field of cows. The Royal Summer Palace with its fairy-tale turrets and towers, its panoramic views of the Mediterranean and its fabulous Turko-Florentine-style gardens, was the perfect setting for what was to be the concert of the year – no, the decade. Tickets would be free – this was his present to Alexandria. Interviewed by the Egyptian Gazette, Ozan’s black eyes had filled with tears when he quoted the old Arabian proverb: ‘ “If you have much, give of your wealth, if you have little, give of your heart.” I am giving of both,’ he’d said, omitting to add that the concert would also be the perfect knockout blow against Ya’qub Halabi, the Cairo impresario with whom he competed fiercely.
Preparations began immediately: Luc Lefevre, a well-known Parisian artist, designed a superb art-nouveau-style poster, with the Pharos lighthouse beaming out again, and the caption: Dance Alexandria Dance.
A Cairo tent-maker made an elaborate outdoor stage designed to look like the interior of an exotic Bedouin tent; sewing machines whirred in the souks to fill it with sumptuous embroidered drapes and cushions, and in the Attarine souk, three glass-blowers worked around the clock to make over two thousand specially designed glass lights to be filled with candles and hung like fireflies from the trees.
For the party afterwards, crates of Haut-Brion 1924 and Fonseca 1912, and raki and cognac were ordered for the guests. Madame Eloise, who was promoted to chief costume designer, hired in five extra seamstresses, and became grandly French again an
d prone to soliloquies about Patou.
And in the streets, the souks and the coffee shops of Manshiya and Karmuz people talked of little else: after three years of being bombed, and often hungry and afraid, Alexandria was ready for a party.
I can do this, Dom thought on the day of the concert: I can go back to the squadron – or to Cairo for the few days’ leave still owing. That morning, wandering through the Palace Gardens, he’d watched a team of excitable workmen slotting together the steel struts that formed the frame of the tented stage. Yards of embroidered fabrics were flung to hide the ugly skeleton underneath, then long skeins of coloured lights were threaded in and out of the trees, and bit by bit an empty patch of grass was filled by a magical and illusory world, a patch which, he reminded himself, would be empty again when they took it all down.
No self-pity, he thought, walking back to his hotel. No looking back. This was her world and he was well out of it, and he thoroughly disliked himself like this – desiring and undesired, indecisive. He wanted his old self back. In the distance he could still hear music playing, and the boom and retreat of a voice testing a microphone: ‘Wahd, athnan, thlathh, rb’h, khmsh . . .’ Thanks to Ibrahim, he could count up to twenty fluently now.
And hearing the music, his mind changed again: he could do this, he could stay – but why go through it? another part of him argued. What he most needed now was to get back to the squadron, to fly again, to talk to what friends remained, to bed down again in his own reality. A different kind of longing, but just as fierce in its way.
When he went to the railway station to check on train times to Cairo, a smiling ticket clerk told him not to bother to book. Who in their right mind, his wry expression signalled, would want to leave Alex on a night like this?
When twilight fell, he stood on his own at the edge of a jostling and excited crowd, wanting to die of misery.
At the last possible moment, he’d stepped off the train. He wanted to hear her sing one more time; it felt like a vital necessity. The sensible side of him had tried to fashion this into a rational decision. Why not? The clerk was right, it was an historical event; he could go as a disinterested observer, not speak to her, not make his presence known, be simply one of the anonymous crowd already flowing like a river towards the trams and the gharries that would take them to the Palace Gardens.
He knew where she was staying. Earlier that afternoon, he’d followed her in a taxi from the gardens to the small smart private hotel on the Corniche. She’d come up in the world, he noted wryly, remembering her humorous description of that grim little London bed and breakfast before her first audition.
It would have been fun to share these things with her. Now it felt squalid following her, like a private detective, and he’d disliked himself exceedingly for doing so. With his collar up, and camouflaged by a crowd in a holiday mood, he’d watched her leave the hotel, half an hour later, cross the road and sit down by herself on a bench overlooking the bay. She was wearing a dark crimson coat, a velvet hat. She’d looked small sitting against the vast sweep of the sky. She’d shielded her eyes with her hand and looked out to the sea, which was choppy. You shouldn’t be here on your own. It’s still dangerous in Alexandria, he’d told her. All of us think we lead charmed lives but we don’t.
And then, in a flood of bitterness: If you’d really wanted to find me, it would have been so easy: you could have phoned the squadron, left a proper letter, left a message with one of your friends.
He’d almost crossed the road. He might have tapped her on the shoulder and said lightly: ‘What a coincidence – fancy meeting you here again.’ Banter might have followed, shrieks of embarrassed laughter. It would not seem at all extraordinary him being in Alex on a night like tonight. He would tell her he was here with the squadron, tell the heart-wrenching tale of being shot down again and rescued in the desert, show her what dangerous and important things took place in the real world.
He took a deep breath, put his toe over the kerb and pulled it back again. He imagined her polite double-take, the look of panic in her eyes – damn, trapped – a muddled explanation, insincere concern for him – theatricals were good at that. Darling sweetie pie, what happened? Gosh, so thin! Poor little pet! et cetera. Except, of course, she’d never really been like that, and what he’d liked about her at first was how straight she’d seemed, which made the trap all the more cleverly disguised.
This was all going through his head when a new agony presented itself. A youngish man – twenty-five, thirty? Hard to tell from this distance – had approached her from the western end of the Corniche. A blond, long-legged fellow, walking towards her – a civilian arty type by the looks of his pale linen suit and lolloping gait. She turned and looked at him – Dom was almost certain she smiled. He’d sat down on the bench beside her. They talked intently, heads together, a stream of words for what felt like a long, long time. A lovers’ quarrel? An insistent fan? A new admirer pressing his suit? Impossible to tell. The only thing he must get into his big fat head now was that there would always be men, and they would want to get close to her.
The man stood up; a small boy, a Corniche hawker, approached them, head winningly on one side, offering souvenirs. She shook her head. The man bowed at her slightly, raised his hat. He walked off briskly in the direction he’d come from.
Alone again, she’d stood up and looked towards the sea, and then turned her back to it. He’d winced as he watched her fling herself into the busy traffic to cross the road. He’d hidden in a dark alleyway beside the hotel as she climbed its stairs and closed the big brass doors behind her.
She’s gone, he’d told himself trembling. Nothing to do with me now.
One or two of the local newspapers had questioned the wisdom of having an outdoor concert in Alex in the middle of winter, and in truth, before the war, and the blackout, had properly ended, but Ozan’s confident prediction that the gods would smile on them was correct (oh, how Ya’qub Halabi would gnash his teeth!) because on the night he’d planned, 17 January, the sun set in a molten lava flow of pinks, golds and oranges, followed by a calm, cold night and a sky full of stars.
By the time it grew dark, the streets were jammed with people making their way down the Corniche, by tram, donkey, gharry and taxi to the Palace Gardens.
The stones surrounding the statues of Muhammad Ali Pasha were taken down, garlands of flowers left in their place. By eight o’clock, the air in the Palace Gardens was full of the smells of roasting meat and fried chickpeas. Sleepy black-eyed children were hoisted on to their parents’ shoulders and given sweets and dates to eat. Old grandpas in djellabas were propped up by their young. Crowds of English and New Zealanders, Indian soldiers, a Scottish piper with his bagpipes were there, and the ATS girls, nurses bussed in from local field and military hospitals. And whatever hard feelings (and there were many) remained between the British, the Egyptians, the Jews, the Greeks, the Arabs who were there, they were put off for this one night. Tonight the whole city was breathing a collective sigh of relief: with luck and a fair wind it looked like they’d come through. Tonight was for singing and dancing.
Ten minutes before the curtain went up, the jugglers who’d wandered through the crowd stopped juggling and the lutists who’d been singing the old Arabic songs put away their instruments, and a rapt silence fell over the crowd.
Ozan, working on the principle of nothing succeeds like excess, had gone magnificently overboard, and when the curtain slowly rose on the stage, it appeared to open a fantastic jewellery box. When dancers rose up from the cushions, and the stage began to pulsate with colour and glitter and noise, the crowd gasped and groaned with delight. This was living; this was what they’d come for. An orchestra of twenty-five hand-picked musicians playing ouds and lutes and violins burst into a frenzy of notes. The crowd yelled, some of the women made strange wild sounds with their tongues.
At the back of the stage, the spotlight suddenly fell on a large mother-of-pearl Aladdin’s chest, and there were dru
m rolls and the shimmering of tambourines as Ozan stepped out. He was wearing one of the beautiful dinner suits his Parisian tailor had made before the war, and a purple cummerbund. He bounded towards the front of the stage, held his hands up to quell the madly cheering crowd, issued a torrent of Arabic words which made them cheer and clap and wave their flags, and then he roared out into the night:
‘Dance, Alexandria, dance, Hitler has no chance.’
Longing to leave, rooted to the spot, Dom waited for her. There was no programme, or none that he had been able to understand, and he had stayed away from the groups of European people. He sat through the fireworks, the acrobats, the incomprehensible Arabic comedian who had the audience howling with laughter; Faiza Mushawar, exuding a kind of haughty self-confidence; Arleta, singing and wiggling and making the Tommies hoot and yell.
When Saba came on stage after the first interval, he almost stopped breathing. She was wearing a new red dress, her hair was loose. In spite of all the nonsense that had gone on between them, his guts twisted for her. The crowd seemed enormous and she looked so small. There were only three Europeans in her backing group: a pianist, a guitarist and a double bassist.
The crowd hushed as they began to tune up. She turned and smiled at the pianist, gave him a nod of her head. He felt the surprise of the crowd around him as she sang what sounded like an Arabic song, but he couldn’t be sure. He was so hurt, and helplessly admiring too. She seemed so foreign, so focused, so sure of herself and the night. Around him the fairy lights shivered in the dark trees which swayed and sighed, and the crowd moved with them, the guitarist threw soft notes at her, the pianist looked quietly ecstatic and so did she. What could I possibly have added to that? he thought.
Jasmine Nights Page 42