Frances looked at her watch. Fairfax was due; dinner was cooking.
“I wonder what he will think of us?” Andrew said.
“Of you and me?”
“No, of the whole lot of us. The khawwadjihs.”
“I imagine,” Francis said, “that he’ll think we’re pathetic.”
As she set the table, she amplified the statement in her mind. The paychecks had not arrived yet. Full moon had come and gone. Alarm and despondency was the order of the day. “If only they’d be straight with us,” people said. They began to talk about “Saudi disinformation.” Companies were pulling out, writing off debts that they did not believe the government would repay. Now more than ever, the tone of expatriate conversation was callow, suspicious, a note of chronic complaint. Editorials appeared in the newspapers, alleging khawwadjih mismanagement, corruption; issuing threats.
“Having money makes people bad enough,” Frances said. “The threat of not having it seems to make them worse.”
“Don’t be such a prig,” Andrew said. “You are one of the people too.”
“I meant the Saudis. Although to be honest, the longer I am here, the more we seem to resemble them. We are both aspects of the same problem, I think.”
Everything in the flat—everything tangible—was dusted, sorted, put back to rights. So that they would have something to give Fairfax, they had borrowed some wine from Jeff Pollard. Jeff was in a bad mood over the loss of his mistress. Russel, he said, was persecuting him, and badmouthing him to the other compound dwellers, and fomenting quarrels around the swimming pool. He would have to move out, he said, and hope that Terrex Mining would give him one of their houses. “Take a case,” he said sulkily, when they called around for the wine. “I won’t be doing any entertaining.”
Fairfax was late. Frances turned the oven down, hoped for the best. She poured herself a glass of wine, and went to sit with Andrew. “Do you think,” she said, “that there is any chance of us going to live on the Terrex compound?”
“You want to follow Jeff about? It will start another rumor.”
“It’s not that. But Daphne did say that she would inquire.”
“I’ll talk to Eric. I could make out a case that you were especially miserable, after the burglary and everything.”
That burglar, she thought, may prove to be my friend. I shall pretend to a hopeless neurosis, about the sliding doors; I shall say I can’t settle, I shall say I can’t sleep at night; I will take all the burden of weakness on myself, the little woman: and in that way I will extricate us, I will get us out of here.
She got up to see to the food. It was nine o’clock. The gatebell rang. Soon she heard Andrew in the hall, saying, “You made it,” Fairfax saying, “Got hopelessly lost,” Andrew saying, “I should have come for you.”
Fairfax stood in the doorway. He was young; he was a tall man, very tall and quite insubstantial. He had a transparent pallor, because he had come from England, and because he had come from England so recently, he had a transparent smile. Fairfax had dark red hair, unfashionably long, as fine as cobwebs, very straight: and guileless eyes. He wore a lightweight gray suit, the uniform of the traveling executive, and held something behind his back. He offered his other hand to Andrew. “I know we’ve met five times today,” he said. “But it’s the local custom, isn’t it?”
Andrew shook his hand. “How do you do?”
“Worse,” Fairfax said. “Much worse than when we parted at two o’clock. Since then I’ve suffered death by a thousand cuts. I shall become a cautionary tale in our company newsletter. He went out there to sell air-conditioning, and returned with scars on his soul.”
“Yes, I know,” Andrew said. “You must have been taken to meet the Minister. Come in, you’ll need a drink. This is Frances.”
Fairfax looked down at her. From behind his back he took a bouquet of white roses, and proffered it, diffidently.
Frances wiped her hands on her apron. “Roses in Jeddah,” she said. “Oh, Fairfax, these must have cost you the earth.”
Fairfax’s eyes opened wide, as if he were reliving the purchase. “I said to the man in the shop, surely you’re joking? He wasn’t. Never mind. Don’t you ever bring her flowers?”
“Oh, Andrew can’t afford to. He’s saving up for a posh flat in London.”
“That’s marvelous,” Fairfax said. “Get somewhere nice, and then I’ll come and stay with you when I’m down that way, I can’t stand hotels.” He seemed sure of his welcome; but Frances puzzled him. He gazed down at her. “I feel as if I know you from somewhere.”
Frances touched his elbow, drawing him into the room. “Sit down, Fairfax.”
Andrew said, “He’s called Adam. You mustn’t talk to him as if he were the butler.”
She was not surprised by his name. It seemed to suit him. Fairfax had an air of being impressed by the separate qualities of each moment, the air of one to whom the world was new, and unpredictable. He might be thirty perhaps, but it seemed that she had decided to think of the men around her as children; even though Eric said that they were accountable for her, and responsible for her thoughts.
“I shall still call you Fairfax,” she said. “You see, although we don’t know each other, I’ve been expecting you. Hasn’t Andrew explained?”
“We’ve been too busy talking shop,” Andrew said.
“Well, explain now. Excuse me, I must put the flowers in water.”
She went into the kitchen. She stood by the fridge and smiled, doing nothing, letting a moment pass. When she came back Fairfax had folded his spectacular height into a chair. He looked avian, but not predatory, both vulnerable and sharp: the best kind of salesman.
“As we never have flowers,” she said, “I haven’t a vase. You must drink up the contents of this carafe between you, and then I can put the flowers in it. The rest of the wine can come straight from the bottles. You must watch the sediment, Fairfax. This wine was made by Jeff Pollard.”
“Oh, Jeff,” Fairfax said. “What a man! Everybody’s talking about some poor girl he had an affair with, aren’t they? It’s beyond imagination. At least, it’s beyond mine. Do you know that poem? ‘Why have such scores of lovely gifted girls / Married impossible men?’ It’s just the same with affairs, isn’t it?”
“You shouldn’t waste your sympathy on Marion Smallbone,” Andrew said. “She wasn’t lovely. Or gifted.”
“Oh, but comparatively,” Fairfax insisted; he sat forward in his chair, and locked his long fingers together. “She must have been too good for Pollard. I’ve seen better things than Jeff in the Reptile House.”
“How does the rest of the poem go?” Frances said.
“Oh, it talks about idle men, illiterate men, dirty and sly, about men you have to make excuses for to casual passersby. Intolerable men, full of self-pity. But then the man who wrote it, he wonders if they can really be so bad after all, whether he overvalues women.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” Fairfax thought about it, seeming surprised. “Perhaps I do.”
“You would never last the pace in Jeddah. This is no place for men who like women.”
“We’re not all like the Saudis,” Andrew said.
“No, but you seem to collaborate with them.” She had not known she thought it, until she heard it pop out of her mouth. “I had a letter from Marion, did you read it, Andrew? She’s taken the children back to her mother, who is elderly and has a small flat in Nottingham. Russel’s divorcing her, and she’s going to live on social security. The origin of the romance,” she explained to Fairfax, “was that he used to go round and unblock her lavatory. Oh well, I mustn’t get bitter about it. There’s probably no hope for people like that, separately or together. Do you know many poems, Fairfax?”
“I know a lot for an air-conditioning expert.”
“Why did you get lost? I sent you a map. Didn’t Andrew give it to you?”
“Yes, but I’m afraid I just can’t make any sense of this place. The
traffic signs kept sending me places that I didn’t want to go.”
“You ignore them,” Andrew said.
“Do you? Is that right?”
“I used to be good at maps,” Frances said. “They were my living. I must be losing my touch.”
She went out, to bring the food to the table. The meat had dried out, and the vegetables were soggy, but Fairfax ate quite happily, his jacket slung over the back of his chair; he complimented her on her cooking. Andrew thought he was a groveler; you could see that by his expression. You could see that he wondered why a man who was in air-conditioning should have pretensions to charm. But Frances paid attention to her guest. In his presence she breathed more easily. The tension eased from her shoulders; Jeff’s wine was sweet, syrupy, harmless, quite unlike his usual acid brew. It was soothing, like warm black currant juice, and yet it had a certain potency; she felt languid, as if she would sleep well, and wake up somewhere better. She put her elbow on the table, and rested her cheek on her open hand. “I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you.”
Fairfax looked modest about it, putting back a strand of his featherlike hair. “People always say I’m a breath of fresh air. But that is our trade joke. We only have one. We are a somber lot, in air-conditioning.”
Then Fairfax talked about his work; about the central air-conditioning plant for Andrew’s building. A sort of ersatz reverence took him over, a weightless gravity; he looked like a schoolboy who had been given the task of imitating, in a pantomime, a governor of the Bank of England. Andrew was impressed, in spite of himself. He sat over the cheese and coffee, and pictured his building finished, its fountains of fire, its indoor forests deep and lush, its model of the solar system, its iceberg walls; he reached forward, his eyes blank and inward-looking, and refilled Fairfax’s glass; he breathed the silent, circulating air that Fairfax would create—dust-free, perfumed, Alpine. Fairfax broke off. “Are we boring you?” he said to Frances. “We could talk about this in the morning.”
“That’s all right.”
“I bet I know what they were saying, those blokes on the plane. Around our office I’m regarded as the resident imbecile.”
“I’m regarded as the errand boy,” Andrew said. He opened another bottle of wine. “Ribena, Fairfax?” He said, “This isn’t like Jeff’s wine. He must have stolen it from somebody.”
“Anyway, I’m only here at all because the chap who should have come is more incompetent still. He filled in the form for his visa, and where it said RELIGION he put LATTER-DAY SAINT. The Saudis thought it was some kind of piss-take, I suppose. Now he’ll never get in. You’re supposed to put CHRISTIAN, is that right?”
“Yes. They’re not interested in any finer distinctions,” Andrew said. “They ban atheists as well.”
“They told me all sorts of stories about this place before I came. ‘You’ll like it, Fairfax,’ they said. ‘It’s just like the Arabian Nights.’”
“And now you’re here?”
His smile died. He put down his glass, briefly. “You must be mad to live here, Andrew. I haven’t felt safe for a single minute.”
“The Saudis seem very tense just now. They’re trying to keep out news from abroad. I bought a copy of The Times this morning, and when I held it up it had holes in it.”
“It was like a paper doily,” Frances said. “What’s bothering you, Fairfax? What’s bothering you specifically?”
Fairfax ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know … I keep accusing myself of racialism or something. I don’t know what’s worrying me, I suppose it isn’t anything rational. The men on the streets, in those white thobes and headdresses … I can’t keep my eyes off them. They’re like some obscene tribe of nuns. Like thuggish nuns.”
“Oh, you’re like us,” Andrew said, “you’ve got too much imagination. But we’re on edge at the moment, it isn’t always as bad as this. Or if it is … you get used to it.”
She took the coffee cups out to the kitchen. You never get used to it, she wanted to say, if you think you have got used to it that is the beginning of disaster; and she felt again, as she stacked the dishes, as she ran the tap, that cold bar of metal across her hand, and felt the Visitor’s fist against her shoulder, fending her off, spinning her away from him. He could quite easily have knocked her unconscious, one blow would have done it; she had never been so conscious before of her physical frailty, it had never really mattered. Her flesh shrank when she thought of it—the Visitor’s strength, and her own thin skin and snappable bones.
And here she is, getting a little dinner together, listening to men talk about thermostats. What else is there to be done? Dunroamin was very quiet; in four days she had not seen Yasmin or Samira, not even a glimpse. Until Fairfax came—if you did not count the phone call from Daphne—she had spoken to no one since the burglary. How could she begin, now, to unravel her thought processes for Andrew? How would she explain to him the hierarchy of suspicions, the discrete tiers of insight, the violent shock of fantasy confirmed? “I watched it go up, the Visitor … I thought to myself, Saudi women don’t move like that … then, no, I did not hide, I did not go inside and lock the door and double-lock the door, I waited for the Visitor, and I did a thing of unbelievable foolishness, of such horrible and frightening implications …” No, she can’t tell him this.
Perhaps, she thought suddenly, I could tell Fairfax. Fairfax is not part of any of this. In three or four days’ time he will take a plane, and disembark in London. Perhaps he could carry a message for me, like a message in a bottle, from me to the real world.
At once she discounted the idea. She pictured her guest’s face: dawning incomprehension. But while it lasted, the notion had offered a few seconds’ hope; and that was not to be despised.
“And this is my wife,” Fairfax said. He passed the photograph to Frances, and she held it under the lamp. “Judy is a giantess. Those are our three giant daughters, the eldest is five. Judy only married me so that she could wear high heels on her wedding day, instead of shuffling up the aisle in gym shoes with her knees bent.”
“Do you travel around much?”
“Oh yes. I go here and there. You see, the firm has moved to Cumbernauld, and we hardly sell much to the locals. I went to Kowloon. Of course, you know that.”
“Does Judy mind?”
“She always gets me back.” Fairfax’s conversation had become a little rambling; a hiatus between each thought, and the odd line of poetry. So she was asking him short, simple questions. He drained his glass, and said, “Strong stuff, this, Andrew. Not what I thought.”
Andrew had fallen asleep, sprawled on the sofa, his head flopped back against a cushion. Fairfax leaned across and touched his shoulder. “Andrew, what shall I do, I’m drunk.”
Andrew sat upright, as if in slow motion, shaking his head. An hour or two seemed to pass. “I think Jeff has conned us,” he said at last. “His last batch of wine only made you throw up.” He surveyed Fairfax—whose gray eyes had developed a blazing concentration, though they were focused on nothing at all. “I say,” Andrew said admiringly, “you are drunk.” He seemed to pull his thoughts together. “Fran, can you stagger into the kitchen and make us some black coffee?”
Frances stirred herself from the depth of her armchair. She did as he told her; and yet making for the kitchen she didn’t stagger, but seemed to float. She felt warm, and pleased with everything she saw; she acted without planning to act, spoke without calculation. She drifted a hand to her eyes, as if to dispel a mist. What did Jeff put in his wine? There must be a secret.
Andrew was standing in the doorway. “Fairfax must stay,” he said. “He’s not fit to drive.”
“Are you not fit to drive him?”
“Not remotely. And even if I were, I don’t want to be stopped by the police with someone in that state in my passenger seat.”
She didn’t comprehend. “Why should the police stop you?” she asked gently.
“For any reason.”
“Oh, f
or any reason. Yes, I see. For just existing, you mean.”
She seemed to have lost direction. She had ajar of instant coffee in her hand, and seemed to have forgotten what she was doing with it. She looked at the cups and saucers as if she had never seen them before. “Husband, please, can you take over?”
Andrew took the coffee jar from her limp hands. “You don’t usually get like this,” he said.
“I seem to be having an evening off from my life.”
“I thought for a little while that you were having an evening off from our marriage.”
“Oh, Andrew, are you jealous of Fairfax?”
“Yes,” Andrew said.
“But he’s a joy. He’s a delight.”
“For an air-conditioning expert.”
“Yes, for that.”
“Fairfax can sleep on the sofa,” he said. “In fact, he is sleeping on the sofa already.” He didn’t wait for his coffee. She heard him slam the bathroom door and run the taps. She took a cup of coffee into the living room, tiptoeing.
He was right; Fairfax was asleep. He looked as if he had slipped, suddenly and silently, into another dimension; ten years had vanished, and his precision, his expertise; he looked vacant, vulnerable, as if all his life were to come. She put down the coffee cup on the floor, and went to find a blanket. When she came back Fairfax had not moved; she had never seen anyone sleep so profoundly, so totally. She covered him with the blanket. His body had a velvet, animal warmth, which perhaps it never possessed in Cumbernauld.
But the night would get colder. It was already two o’clock. She knelt by the sofa for a moment, her eyes closed, her forehead resting on the padded arm. A flurry of eidetic images rushed behind her eyelids: walls, staircases, open doors. “In a courtyard is a tree on which there are fruits whose color is red.” A grassy lawn, a sunny day, with a light breeze blowing; she cupped her hands, and the fruit fell into them. The image darkened; gave way to the meaningless flickers and streaks, the white noise of sleep, a static crackle from the universe of her neurons. She drifted for a second or two, in a starless waste. Then she woke, roused herself, and went slowly toward the bedroom, feeling her way with a hand on the wall, as if she had suddenly become blind.
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel Page 25
