by Colin Smith
The trouble with little sisters was that, even when they were almost grown up, they still had this amazing ability to get you into trouble. They were also maddeningly coy. Jessica had been the same age as Davina and a virgin, just about, when she married Bob. Somehow she doubted whether Davina was still intact. Things seem to have become very different since the start of the war. Nobody seemed to care any more. She couldn’t say she approved. It was different for ladies who had been married and grown accustomed to certain things. But despite her celebratory HUFOM Jessica’s sister still declined to reveal exactly what she got up to with Divine Dan or Cute Colin or was it Cautious Colin? Instead she wanted to know about Jessica.
“How are things with you?” her sister asked. “Have you met anybody yet or is it still too soon?”
Too soon? Jessica sighed. The first man she had slept with after Bob’s death had been the pilot who had followed his Hurricane down. It was his second visit to their married quarters, a house in Haifa not far from the airfield with an interesting garden and an elderly Sudanese butler who had his own quarters at the rear. Afterwards Jessica blamed Ahmed’s drinks. Nowadays the butler, having become a better Muslim, rarely drank himself but the strength of his cocktails was famous and Ahmed was always proud to show that age had not wearied his shaker.
By the time Maurice De Wet had come on the scene she was carrying her diaphragm in her handbag and had left Haifa for a job in the Secretariat and a ground floor flat near the YMCA. The Flight Lieutenant, who had landed in her bed on the wings of his condolences, was back in Egypt’s Western Desert along with the rest of Bob’s squadron. His replacement had been William, a yeomanry officer who arrived in Palestine on a horse only to see his regiment retrained as tank crews. Jessica had met William because the casualty clearing station that first treated his wounds had issued him with the wrong coloured pyjamas and he had started off in one of the Other Ranks’ ward where she was serving tea and sausage rolls. During the long convalescent leave that followed Jessica had become fond of William though sometimes a bit startled by his post-coital inquiry of, “All right old girl?” It made her feel like a hunter who had just made a tricky jump. When he had more or less recovered from his wounds, William had been posted to India and the last she had heard was that he had managed to attach himself to a tank unit he had known in Libya that was bound for Burma “to biff the Japs”.
Malley had been very different: so roguish, so obvious about his intention, none of that fumbling English pretence that you were really just a chum who did her buttons up the other way. They had first met when he came to the Secretariat to renew his press accreditation and she was introduced to him by the secretary of the civil servant in charge of this whose office she happened to be visiting at the time. After that he had dropped into her office a couple of times pretending he had lost his way to the pressroom.
The photographer was the first American she had met. When he had asked her if they could “make a date” it had sounded straight out of the kind of Hollywood film they had watched when she said yes. It was Tyrone Power in, A Yank in the RAF, and was showing at the Esther Cinema which had the new air conditioning that aggravated Jessica’s sinus trouble, or so she believed.
“I thought I’d show you how we’re winning the war for you,” Malley had said with a huge grin and on the way out he had bought them both an ice cream cornet which they had eat like children while walking up the Jaffa Road. Jessica couldn’t imagine any of the British officers she knew eating an ice cream in the street, including Bob and he had been relaxed enough. She had not even been allowed to do it as a small child except when Grandfather Ellis, that was her mother’s Daddy, close to Carson and as staunch an Orangeman who ever paraded on the Twelfth, took her to the seaside at Bangor. Gramps would have been horrified at the thought of any granddaughter of his walking out with a Fenian even of the diluted American kind. She had been looking forward to teasing Malley about her Ulster Loyalist connections but, in the end, she had not known him long enough.
The American did not put a hand out of place during that first date which ended with a peck on the cheek. The next one was the disastrous evening at the Europa. Malley had been drunk when he picked her up. If he had not been so charming the first time she would have refused to go out with him. Of course, she was jolly glad she had otherwise she would never have met Maurice.
After he had left her with his generous five pounds (her week’s wages!) for damages and slipped away she had not expected to see him again and certainly not quite as soon. Then there he had been holding the rear door of a taxi open for her. “Allow me to offer you a lift,” he had said in that slightly formal way the South Africans sometimes had about them.
At first she had been inclined to turn him down. She could still hear the funny little Jewish girl who so badly wanted to be Marlene Dietrich singing, “Falling in Love Again”. The words seemed to mock her. Malley had been about as loveable as an angry rhinoceros. Worse, he might have lost her the job she so badly needed. All it would have required was for that off-duty policeman to take names, press charges, inform the Secretariat that one of their staff had a couple of drunks fighting over her in a night spot. Well, one drunk. Maurice De Wet wasn’t drunk. And he danced like a dream. Without a word she had got into the back seat and he had slid in besides her.
“I’m very sorry, really I am,” he said and it was then that she had burst into tears. When he put his arm around her she had not pulled away but sobbed quietly into his shoulder all the way home where she found herself saying, “You’d better come up for a drink.”
William’s parting gift had been two of the six bottles of black market whisky he had acquired and Ahmed would have approved of her measures.
She remembered she was kneeling on her bed pulling her dress over her head and he was helping to remove her underwear. She remembered the thwack of sticky bodies, the commingling of sweat for this was July, her bedroom did not have a fan and though the wooden shutters were open there was not much of a breeze. She remembered at one point she couldn’t quite remember who it was and then didn’t care anyway. She was turned firmly one way and the other in a way that had never happened to her before and she would have resisted but it was really rather nice. Once he muttered something guttural, something she didn’t understand and later, when she thought of it again, she realised it must have been Afrikaans. Just before she fell asleep Jessica remembered that her diaphragm was not where it should be.
She had woken shortly before sunrise, head throbbing, not an unfamiliar feeling since Bob had been killed. She couldn’t believe she had been such a tart again. Perhaps she’d dreamed it? She had been pretty drunk. Jessica lay very still and kept her eyes closed tight in the hope that sleep would return and she would wake up feeling refreshed and at peace with herself and everything would be alright and she would be ready to go to work in a nice, newly ironed frock. A vision of the bleeding Malley presented itself and for a short moment Jessica had persuaded herself that she had come home alone and put herself to bed after a couple of stiff drinks.
When the body next to her began to stir she had continue to feign sleep. Then she felt the weight removed from that side of the bed then heard the faint rustling that told her clothes were being retrieved from the wooden floor. There had been a soft click as the bedroom door was opened and then the sound of her lavatory being flushed. Jessica had continued to lie there, wondering whether he would leave a note. When she heard the rattle of pans and the gush of a tap from the kitchen she recalled her sink’s layered detritus awaiting the bi-weekly attentions of her Arab maid. She doubted whether he would find as much as a clean cup. A slut as well as a tart. She lay there thinking she would return to England, work down a mine, do something where she would be too tired to misbehave. Then De Wet poked his head around her bedroom door and asked, “How do you like your coffee?”
“I’d like a Wasum please?” she said, beginning to feel some faint stirrings of hope. It was a good head staring in at
her: white, even teeth, blue eyes, tanned, slightly creased features and ash blond hair cut a little shorter on the top than most English officers, more like the en brosse style favoured by the Free French or the Poles.
“A what?”
“A Wasum. You don’t know what a Wasum is? It’s ‘was um cup of coffee’ - black with a splash of whisky and lots of sugar. Only a splash mind.” It was her favourite hangover cure. William had taught her about Wasums. Sometimes she felt as though she was undergoing an intensive training course in sin.
Wasum delivered he had sat on the edge of her bed and said, “In case you’ve forgotten my name is Maurice De Wet. And yours is Jessica and you’d better get up or you will be late for your new job at the Secretariat. By the way, do you think I could use that safety razor in the bathroom?”
“I think you’ll find some new blades in the cupboard.” My God, meet the harlot of Jerusalem. “It was my husband’s.”
“And where is he?”
“At the bottom of the Mediterranean.” Another Wasum.
“Was he a sailor?”
“RAF. The bloody Frogs shot him down.”
“The who?”
“The French. The Vichy French.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So were they. His squadron caught the planes that did it on the ground and strafed them to bits.” Or so they told her. The razor was not Bob’s. She had given it to Ahmed as a keepsake along with the ivory handled shaving brush that went with it. This one had belonged to William.
It was while her guest was shaving that she had remembered the note and envelope she had typed out for Inspector Calderwell the night before passing on the High Commissioner’s suggestion that he came a bit later and continued their conversation in his car to and from Sarafand. Of course, a suggestion from the High Commissioner was as good as an order. Calderwell would need a very good reason not to fall in with it. She had intended to drop it in at the police headquarters in the Russian Compound before reporting for work at the King David. But where the hell was it? She slipped on a kaftan, though not before he saw she really was a redhead, and looked in the sitting room but it wasn’t on the tiled coffee table with the two empty whisky glasses. Nor was it among the wrecked cushions on the sofa where they began their tryst. At one point he emerged from bathroom and asked her what she was looking for. She told him: long blue envelope with a Crown on the back and typewritten addressed to an Inspector Calderwell. “It’s very important.” She was positive she had put in her handbag when she left the office. Had it fallen out on the way home? My God, she would have really been for the high jump if that had happened. Anybody could pick it up. Then he was beside her, refolding the letter, putting it back in the envelope and tapping her gently on the nose with it. Found it in the bathroom he had, on top of the wall cupboard where she kept her toothbrush, makeup, gentlemen’s razor and (last resort) douche bag. What on earth was it doing there? It had been in her handbag. That was it. She had been in the bathroom when she changed handbags for a smaller evening one to go out with Malley, swapping most of the contents – scent, handkerchief, lipstick, cigarettes, lighter, money – from one to the other but leaving the letter behind. In the other handbag she thought but probably on top of the cupboard because she wanted to make sure it stayed dry. God she kissed him for it. They almost started all over again but she had to get off.
“Thank you,” she gasped, tearing herself apart.
“No. Thank you. But tell me, why didn’t you just make a telephone call to Calderwell?”
“Security. They think people might be listening in. They don’t trust the switchboards.”
“Can’t be too careful I suppose. Can I see you this evening? I’ll bring the supper and the wine.”
And so he did: lamb chops and a bottle of Lebanese red that Jessica sipped cautiously. Gin was her favourite tipple, whisky before bed. It had been a busy end to the day at the Secretariat. Something had happened at Sarafand she told him as they eat by candlelight on her little balcony where there was just enough breeze not to blow the candles out. Some kind of explosion. People had been hurt. Just before she left she heard an auxiliary nurse had been killed. The High Commissioner was alright though thank God.
“But what caused it?” he asked.
“I don’t think they know yet. The army were letting things off. Perhaps they set off a fuel tank.”
“Do you think it could have been a bomb, terrorism?”
“Some people were saying it might be but how on earth would they have got into the middle of Sarafand? It’s the biggest base in Palestine. It would be like trying to get into the south wing of the King David.”
“Doesn’t seem very likely does it. About as likely as us really.” And he picked up her hand.
De Wet was easily the oldest man Jessica had ever slept with. He had made no secret about his age. He was forty-six and had heard his first shots fired in anger when he was seventeen. That, he said, had been in East Africa fighting von Lettow. Afterwards he had gone to France where he had been wounded several times. His body was hard and sinewy and, Jessica thought, in better shape than many men half his age. It bore several interesting scars. Sometimes, after their lovemaking, Jessica liked to kneel besides him on the bed and make him tell her the history of each one.
“Mortar bomb at Passchendaele,” he would say when she traced the nine inches of shiny dead skin that started on his right shoulder and went down his arm. “The mud absorbed most of the explosion. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here to tell you.”
“And this one?” There was a bluish scar on the inside of his left thigh, quite high up.
“Shrapnel, Amiens, August eighteen. Surprise barrage.”
Giggles. “That could have been an awful tragedy.”
“Yes, at the time it was very demoralising. All I could see was blood in my lap. I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life singing soprano.”
“And how did this one get here?” Just above his right hip there was a grooved furrow about three inches that could have easily accommodated a pencil.
“Bullet,” he said. “I was looking into a dugout in a trench we’d captured when somebody fired. Ruined a very good belt.”
“What did you do?”
“Fired back with my pistol and then somebody threw a grenade in.”
“None from this war?”
“No, not really. But be careful of my ribs. A couple of them have only just mended.”
“How did you do that?”
“Blast. I was thrown down some cellar steps in Alexandria during a raid on the port. I thought the raid was over, popped my head up for a look when they dropped a big one right on the quay. Blew me over. Felt like a feather in a gale. It overturned an American tank that had just been unloaded.”
“I suppose this war might take a bit longer to win than the last one, even with a bit of help from the Americans and the Russians,” said Jessica. In her more honest moments she was not entirely sure she ever wanted it to end, have to come to terms with Afterwards.
“I’m pleased to hear your confidence in final victory remains unshaken.”
“Isn’t yours?”
“Absolutely,” he said.
Although he was officially on convalescent leave for the jaundice he had caught in the hospital in Alexandria where his ribs were mending, De Wet told her he had volunteered to supervise work at the Haifa docks when the need arose. Jessica found herself worrying about the air raids on the port but he had assured her they were nowhere near as bad as those on Alexandria. “Besides, got an old pal up there and he’s snowed under. Can’t let him down.”
He usually telephoned her twenty-four hours before his return, wondering if she might be free for dinner. And Jessica had discovered that she always was even if it meant cancelling some previous arrangement. She told herself he could not possibly be a father figure, the physical side was too intense for that, but she did find herself pouring out her troubles to him in a way she had not done since Bob. And, unl
ike William, the South African was a good listener who never seemed to tire of her tales of life at the Secretariat. “God busy?” he would ask. Sir Harold was always God to Maurice.
***
The first of that day’s supply of notes had already been dropped by the cheeky Arab post boy because the staff at government house took a fierce pride in working longer hours than the minions at the Secretariat. Consequently, the dispatch rider from Government House often continued to arrive at the Secretariat long after the only people left was a night duty officer to deal with emergencies.
Some of these notes were simply written invitations with yes or no scrawled across the top in pencil. Others concerned events that Government House had initiated: appointments with Jewish and Arab community leaders, conferences with service chiefs, his forthcoming meeting with Auchinleck in Egypt which had already twice been postponed, once by the High Commissioner and once by the General.
Among the latest batch was an invitation Lady MacMichael had accepted to open a Wizo bazaar at the Café Europa that included a stall for some of the cuddly toys made by illegal Jewish immigrants interned at Athlit. Jewish ladies at liberty in the Mandate would also have the opportunity to buy Soldiers’ Comfort Boxes for those of their menfolk who had volunteered for the British services. The boxes contained razors, toothpaste, hankies, a small torch, cigarettes and a vest. A report in a Hebrew newspaper that they also included condoms had led to an outcry, and not only among the more Orthodox Jews. Quite unfounded of course. They didn’t want them to be that comfortable. Lady MacMichael’s acceptance should have been ample proof of the purity of their contents but the Orthodox were not the only ones on the alert for any suggestion of moral laxity.