A Foreign Affair

by Stella Russell

  ‘I perfectly understand that you must consider such a serious matter very well,’ he was saying, ‘but let me assure you that everything will be sensible and professional and that the independence of south Yemen will bring great benefit to Britain. We can, for example, greatly assist you in the matter of eradicating both al-Qaeda and Somali piracy from this region by guaranteeing that the southern approach to the Red Sea and Suez Canal is kept safe and open to western shipping at all times. A little support from London in the form of patrol boats, weapons and communications equipment would enable us to carry out our side of the agreement…,’ he continued, as we ascended the marble stairs together, servants trailing behind us bearing my silver suitcase.

  Constant, uninterrupted access to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, must have something to do with the transport of oil, I guessed. Almost everything in the Middle East had to do with oil as far as I could see, except for Israel-Palestine which, for reasons I’ve never been able to fathom since there are no major power’s vital interests directly at stake in that conflict, demands more of everyone’s time and energy than all the world’s oil business put together.

  My grasp of the region’s geo-strategic affairs was only semi-solid but I was finding it piquantly empowering to be spoken to national power to national power. Sheikh Ahmad’s words recalled for me aspects of 19th century British foreign policy I’d had to study for O level history; gunboat diplomacy, spheres of influence, buffer states, access to the Mediterranean, ententes cordiales and not so cordiales. What with that sound academic grounding and a good dose of commonsense I imagined I could make myself extremely useful and thoroughly live up to my Flashman calling, all the while promoting Britain’s best interests in the area.

  It would be my pleasure, I decided, to start remedying the grievous situation at the foot of the Arabian Peninsula. British support for an independent south Yemen was surely an excellent and eminently sensible strategy to implement. What better way of making amends for our past imperial sins than a bit of mutual back-scratching now?

  But Sheikh Ahmad didn’t need to know quite how fired with enthusiasm for doing good and being useful I was suddenly feeling so, ‘Let’s leave it at that for the time being, shall we?’ I suggested coolly, ‘Kick a few ideas around in the morning?’ I added, with the sort of tight smile I imagined an MI6 operative on secondment to the Foreign Office might affect.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course.’

  The pavilion’s gigantic iron-studded wooden doors were buzzing open to admit us.

  Chapter Sixteen

  No sooner were we inside a vast and cool atrium space prettily lit by a stained-glass skylight, than Sheikh Ahmad abandoned me, leaving only a lingering hint of his scent.

  In that football pitch-sized vacancy with its white marble floor, stained glass skylight and what looked like a copy of Rome’s Trevi fountain at its centre, I found myself in the presence of four women. Mercifully, none of them was veiled. I still can’t help wondering how many Yemeni infants mislay their mummies in markets, malls, stations and airports every year. Does every Yemeni matron exude a scent peculiar to her, which her babies can easily detect?

  ‘Ahlan wa sahlan!’ the women chorused in unison.

  ‘Shukran!’ I politely solo-ed back.

  One by one, the four lovers of the man I loved approached to kiss me hello. An understandably painful procedure to a fervently Orthodox Christian such as me, it sharply recalled the treacherous kiss Judas planted on Jesus.

  First came tiny, fragile Arwa, clearly the oldest, but with a good three years on me to judge by her wrinkle coverage. Number two seemed to speak excellent English and chummily introduced herself as Jammy – short for Jamila, I supposed – but she was bespectacled and a stone or two overweight. Numbers three and four were the ones I was going to have to reckon with, I decided. A ravishingly comely creature of approximately my own height and build, wife number three was Iman from Oman who, I soon learned to my great relief, had what people refer to these days as ‘learning difficulties’. It was left to Wife Four, the aforementioned young Bushara, to put the wind up me; she alone was a worthy rival and had the advantage because she was, so to speak, playing at home.

  I was going to have to sharpen up, act smarter and tougher. If I was serious about getting my man while promoting Britain’s geo-political interests on the Arabian peninsula, there was no strategy too devious or trick too dirty to resort to. I was giving myself carte blanche to play for the highest stakes and risk everything, in much the same way as Roza Flashman the First, a keen gambler, was reported often to do at Vienna’s Prater horse races.

  I’d always mocked the sort of women who will go to any lengths – cookery lessons, fraud, extreme personal grooming, perjury, even murder – to clinch the mating deal, but now I recognised it as a primal urge. When the right mix of genes comes along, when one’s womb is calling ‘Time!’, one doesn’t hang around fretting about how many and whose toes one might be stepping on, any more than a nation state stands on ceremony when it perceives its vital interests to be at stake.

  ‘I’m so pleased to meet you all!’ was how I launched my campaign to start dividing the sheikh from his wives: ‘I’ve heard so much about you all that I feel as if I already know you! Sheikh Ahmad’s always talking about you!’

  Bullseye! As Jammy translated, their faces registered both shock and distaste. Arwa would doubtless be taking her husband to task for being so uncouth as to mention them to a stranger, and would then refuse to listen to his astonished protests, preferring to trust instead in the bond of the femaleness we shared. He, of course, would assume I’d innocently recited a western formula greeting, so I was completely off the hook. All in all, a very fine start I thought as I followed their lead, out of that atrium towards what I trusted would be a large bedroom with en suite, air-con, satellite TV and a well-stocked maxi-bar.

  The gracious Arwa engaged me in light conversation, via Jammy:

  ‘Your husband must be a very special kind of man to allow you to travel the world on your own,’ she began, plainly fishing for information.

  ‘My husband died – what I mean actually, is that he’s as good as dead to me because the love in our hearts is dead,’ I explained, after pausing for a nanosecond to concoct a story that would serve three functions: explain my solitary voyaging, secure their respect for me as a woman of equal status to them, and more or less fit with the facts as Aziz knew them, in case any of it got back to him. ‘Peter and I were on a luxury cruise around the Indian Ocean together, our second wedding anniversary treat, when I decided to abandon ship at Aden because he’d begun to beat me – awful in the confined space of a ship’s cabin, I can’t tell you how humiliating it was – night after night – to be making so much noise that people complained and the ship’s purser came knocking!’ Eight dark eyes widened in shocked surprise. ‘I can show you the bruises if you like,’ I offered, making as if to pull down my harem pants, knowing perfectly well they wouldn’t want me parading a bare haunch there, in the corridor, where any passing servant could see.

  ‘May Allah punish your husband!’ said the ravishing Iman from Oman haltingly, as if proud to have grasped the simple moral of my tale.

  ‘Quite right!’ I said gratefully, as Arwa flung open a pair of high doors to reveal a bedroom such as I had never dreamed of, let alone seen before.

  I don’t want to bore you all with a recital of luxury furnishings that risks sounding like something out of Hello magazine but indulge me just this once, please? First imagine a room of the same size as the lobby of the Victoria & Albert Museum from the centre of whose richly moulded ceiling hung a chandelier approximately ten feet in diameter, fashioned entirely of Swarovski crystals. Beneath this miracle of delicately refracted light glittered an octagonal swimming pool perhaps 18 metres wide, tricked out in the prettiest gold and silver mosaic, whose thermally controlled glass bottom doubled as the window of a fish-tank stocked with a whole shoal of koi-carp. An emperor-size bed, slightly raised
on a lushly carpeted dais and covered in a cloth of gold and silver damask, with headboard and valance to match, occupied only about a quarter of the length of the right-hand wall of the room. There were a couple of deep-pile silk Persian carpets placed at angles to the pool. Parked on one, I was pleased to see, was my silver suitcase, shrunken to the size of Easyjet hand baggage by those surroundings.

  If no good with words, Iman from Oman was a wizard when it came to gizmos, eagerly demonstrating the pool’s special effects; the water could be hot or cold, bubbly or choppy, according to which button I pressed on a discreetly positioned control panel. Next, Arwa claimed my attention by throwing open a cupboard piled with fluffy towels of all sizes and so many colours I could have fancied myself in Selfridges’s bathroom department and I squealed with greed when she opened a drawer to reveal the full range of Jo Malone’s products. But Oman was already seizing my arm and dragging me back across the room in the direction of what I could only pray was a well-stocked bar. Unfortunately not. It was what shops like Curry’s call a ‘home entertainment centre’ comprising private cinema, computer game consoles and other shiny, wired gadgets I didn’t care about. Jammy claimed me back again, marching me over to a low sofa and coffee table that looked ideally suited for relaxing with a drink. A concealed fridge crammed with gin, tonic and ice-cold beers? No such luck. A cupboard contained a few shelves of books, most of them of the hard-back historical variety that Fiona claims to love reading, while actually much preferring her Jilly Coopers and Catherine Alliotts.

  ‘Sheikh Ahmad and I are the only ones who can read English,’ Jammy informed me, ‘but luckily we have the same taste – anything he enjoys he passes straight on to me and then we discuss it, and at last it ends up in here, for guests.’

  ‘How strange, there are only a couple of things here I haven’t read…’ I said, pretending to be scanning the spines. ‘Niall Ferguson – don’t you just love his take on the British Empire?’

  ‘I certainly do, and so does Sheikh Ahmad,’ replied Jammy, but Iman from Oman was back again, tugging at the sleeve of my linen coat: ‘Yella, yella Roza! – Come! Come!’ she said, dragging me off to the other side of the room again to show me how the air-con worked. From there, I was hauled off by Arwa again to view the marble and gilt en suite. Cunningly hidden from view behind a false panel near the bed, it’s door’s smooth sliding mechanism was activated by a wishbone of a lever on the bedside table. ‘Yella, yella Rozzer!’ Iman from Oman kept saying, grabbing my hand to kiss it, pulling at my arm. I finally shoved her away, perhaps a bit too roughly, because she slunk off like a lightly whipped cur.

  Suddenly, I heartily wished they’d all just leave me alone. I felt as if I’d just arrived at a new school where every girl wanted to be my new best friend. Actually, I’m exaggerating slightly because the sexy Bushara was giving me a wide berth. Seated, pouting by the edge of my pool, she was listening to everything and watching the fish, with one slipper dangling off her foot. I needed a stiff drink and a long soak and a think about my new political career, and to know where on earth Sheikh Ahmad had got to. At that moment, a phone buzzed over by the sofa somewhere and Arwa picked up:

  ‘Nam…La…Nam….La….Nam…Nam…La.’ she said monosyllabically, before hanging up. ‘Yella!’ she commanded the others, asking Jammy to inform me that I should bathe and rest and that food would be brought to me in one hour, before shooing them out of the door, almost before I had a chance to interject: ‘Was that Sheikh Ahmad by any chance?’

  ‘Nam’ said Arwa; ‘yes’ translated Jammy.

  ‘I need to speak to him. Can I have the number?’ I asked.

  ‘La’ said Arwa; ‘no’ translated Jammy, flatly.

  ‘Jammy, I really need a pick-me-up! You couldn’t find me something to drink, could you? Anything alcoholic at all? Please?’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said quietly closing the door behind them, leaving me feeling like a druggie in rehab.

  The temptation to fling open my silver suitcase, seize that trusty old can of baked beans and hurl it up at the chandelier was overwhelming but the beans and mustard had been confiscated from me at Mukalla airport. If I’d still had that tin of Colman’s I would certainly have vented my frustration by tipping its contents down the koi carps’ feeding funnel…

  Chapter Seventeen

  Smells can be pro-as well as e-vocative, can’t they?

  I lay the blame for my nightmares on that first night in the wadi – only my fourth in Yemen - at the door of the bottle of Jo Malone’s lime, basil and mandarin-flavoured bath oil which I’d emptied into my swimming pool. Half-woken by a loud buzzing and instantly sniffing my sister-in-law’s favourite scent in the air, I assumed I was back at Widderton with Fiona hoovering outside my bedroom door, something she likes to do whenever she wants me to know I’ve outstayed my welcome.

  Furious, I wrapped a pillow around my ears and ignored that buzzing until it became so loud – doubtless remotely controlled from somewhere in the bowels of that Brighton Pavilion – that I was forced to wake up, disentangle myself from my silk sheets, step off the dais, and pad the length of first one Persian carpet and then another until I reached the infernal instrument.

  ‘Yes?’ I snapped, promising myself that if any one of my rivals for the sheikh’s affections was on the other end I’d hang up immediately and unplug the wretched thing. The only voice I wanted to hear was Sheikh Ahmad’s, and I was in luck.

  ‘Sabakh al-khair Rozzer! Did you sleep well?’

  ‘Sabakh al-nur Sheikh Ahmad!’ I returned competently, before asking whether he thought it polite or fair to invite a westerner to his home and fail to offer them any alcoholic refreshment.

  ‘I suppose you would offer me some qat if I came to stay with you in London? I believe there are places in the Edgware Road?’ he countered reasonably enough, before kindly adding, ‘Never mind. Please accept my personal apology for failing in my duty of hospitality but Arwa is a very devout Moslem, Rozzer, and she has refused to have a drop of liquor in her home, so I must respect that.’

  ‘But I thought the point of having so many wives was that you don’t have to worry too much about their individual wishes. I thought dividing and ruling them all with a rod of erect penis was the order of the day.’

  ‘More or less as the British did their imperial subjects,’ he chuckled, impervious to my sarcasm, ‘No, Rozzer you are very wrong in thinking that, but I can only apologise again about the alcohol, and please, promise me something: do not use words like “penis” in the presence of any of my wives.’

  ‘”Willy” or “todger” allowed?’

  ‘Rozzer! It is clear to me that you slept very badly…’ he laughed again.

  ‘All right! I promise I’ll treat your wives like a bunch of convent schoolgirls, but in return you must make a choice: either you indulge Arwa’s neurotic piety and see your excellent plan to make me the British face of your movement go up in smoke,’ I boldly bluffed, ‘or you accept that you must provide me with some alcoholic refreshment – a cold beer a day on the campaign trail and perhaps a stiff vodka and tonic otherwise - would do the trick. Which is it to be?’

  ‘My friend, do I understand you right? Are you telling me that you have decided to join the struggle for a free South Yemen?’

  Although I objected to him relegating me to the ‘friend’ division, I bit my tongue and resigned myself to playing a long game. Nightly campaign trail tete a tetes over our beers would be perfectly conducive to seduction. ‘Which is it to be?’ I challenged him.

  ‘Rozzer, you will have your drinks,’ he answered after a long pause, ‘but we may have to disguise it as a portable defibrillator with a first aid red crescent on it and a false bottom, I think. We must be very careful; although everyone knows that our president loves his Johnny Walker Black Label, the majority of Yemenis hate this vice almost as much as westerners hate paedophiles.’

  ‘I do understand the need for discretion,’ I said gently. It seemed to me that shar
ing such a secret could only do our relationship good, but it was as if the sheikh could read my mind.

  ‘We will have to let Aziz in on the secret,’ he said, ‘He’ll be here by this evening. As the movement’s director of communications and public relations he will be wherever we are and therefore able to attend in person to this special need of yours – it’s a matter of knowing the right people and places.’

  I supposed Aziz didn’t really count. ‘But how long will it take to prepare this defibrillator gear?’ If Sheikh Ahmad thought I was going another 24 hours without a drink he had another thing coming.

  ‘Listen Rozzer, tonight my friend Saeed al-Afoudi who is the vice-president of the party and director of the Aden oil refinery, happens to be visiting Bashar Wuqshan who owns that multi-coloured mansion we passed yesterday. I would like to present you to the north Hadramaut branch of the movement this evening in order to start discussing tactics and targets. I happen to know that al-Afoudi studied with our fraternal Marxists in Moscow for five years and that his favourite drink remains ice-cold Stolichnaya .’

  ‘Perfect!’

  ‘Mumtaz! Excellent! Now today I’m afraid I must attend to some urgent tribal affairs, but my wives are very anxious to get to know you better; they’re hoping you will spend the day with them.’

  A whole day of frolicking with the merry wives of the wadi was the last thing I felt like. That Iman from Oman had already tried my patience, as had Arwa’s aura of holy command. Jammy wasn’t too bad, but Bushara I didn’t trust as far as I could see her. ‘Actually, I’d really prefer to hang out with you talking politics, or by myself relaxing, swimming and watching TV – I’m just getting my period…’