Jasmine Nights

by Julia Gregson

  ‘Woo-hoo, get you.’ She’d made them laugh. ‘So where will you be?’ the other one insisted. Both men were jogging alongside their gharry now, much to the amusement of the driver, who made a playful attempt to touch one with his whip.

  ‘We haven’t got a single clue yet,’ Arleta said. ‘Watch for the posters.’

  ‘I’ll come, love,’ the taller man assured Arleta breathlessly, ‘but not him. He’s as mean as shit.’ More gasps from Janine. ‘He’s got snakes in his purse.’

  Their carriage shot off. Their delighted driver shouting, ‘Very naughty boys!’

  ‘For goodness’ sake!’ When Janine pulled her skirt down, Saba noticed that she bit her nails quite badly. ‘Why on earth encourage them?’

  When they arrived at the offices and the driver discovered they had no money, his cheerful expression turned into an incredulous snarl. Rolling his eyes and clawing at his mouth, he made it plain that they had now ruined his life. His horse would never eat again; neither would his wife and four children.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Saba explained in her pidgin Arabic. ‘No piastres, but if you wait, I will get.’

  An army officer, thin and red-headed, burst down the narrow stairs apologising profusely. He said his name was Captain Nigel Furness. His freckled hand pressed a bundle of notes into the waiting driver’s palm.

  ‘We were going to pick you up ourselves,’ he explained with a weary, insincere smile, ‘but we’re desperately short of transport. Four groups of talent arrived all at once, so a bit of a shambles.’

  Willie and the acrobats waited for them in a cramped office on the first floor. Beside them, two uniformed typists clattered away at their typewriters surrounded by teetering piles of manila folders, and baskets labelled Props. A large fan ground away in the corner.

  Furness sat down underneath a wall chart with a large map of Africa on it studded with pins. The sight of that map made Saba feel almost weak with excitement. She was here! This was it! God knows where they’d be going from now on!

  Arleta, who had a fabulous walk, stately and self-regarding and designed to show off her body, took her time entering the room.

  ‘Any chance of a cup of tea or a biscuit?’ she asked Furness as soon as they’d sat down. She smoothed her skirt over her knees and added huskily, ‘I’m starving, darling.’

  Saba heard one of the secretaries titter softly and Willie murmur, ‘Oh good girl.’

  ‘Less of the darling, thank you.’ Furness fought down a smirk, but his pale skin had flushed. ‘We’re in the army now.’

  ‘Oh heavens! Sorry!’ Arleta wiggled on her chair like a naughty schoolgirl and gave him her deadpan look. ‘I shan’t be bad again.’ She gave Saba a slight wink; Furness turned his back on them and got busy with his wall map. In a muffled voice he asked one of the secretaries to bring them all tea.

  Tea arrived in thick china cups stained with old brew-ups, with a plate of Garibaldi biscuits and they all fell on it. When Janine, sitting with her legs at an elegant slant, said only tea for her thank you, no sugar and no biscuit, they looked at her in amazement.

  ‘You haven’t eaten all day,’ said Arleta, forgetting the banana.

  ‘I may have some little thing tonight,’ Janine said faintly. ‘I eat like a bird even at the best of times.’

  Furness, looking at Arleta over the rim of his cup, said, ‘You should go out and have lunch after this. Can’t think on an empty stomach.’ He smiled, shy as a schoolboy.

  When Arleta whispered, ‘You’re an angel,’ and looked deeply into his eyes, one of the typists, a plain woman with hockey-player calves, rolled her eyes, but Saba was fascinated. Her own mother had once accused her of being a born flirt and she had found the remark confusing – it seemed to her that if you liked someone you let them know. It was not a thing you decided to do – well not always. But with Arleta it was like watching a flirting champion in action; there was a hot teasing energy about her performance that felt like a game, and she didn’t give a damn who saw her.

  Furness stood up quickly. ‘I think we’d better crack on.’ He moved purposefully towards his wall chart. ‘For obvious reasons,’ he picked up a pointed stick, ‘there’s only so much we can or want to tell you about the current situation in Egypt and the Mediterranean, except to say in the most general terms that what happens here in the next few months could be, in strategic and political terms, absolutely vital to the outcome of this war.’

  He stuck a piece of blank paper on his wall chart.

  ‘So, potted history,’ he continued. ‘In the last three months, Allied troops have been pouring into Cairo from Canada, the US, Australia. Why have they come? Well, now France has fallen and large parts of the Mediterranean have been cut off, there aren’t many places where our lot and the Commonwealth troops can engage the Germans.’

  He drew a vast spider with legs on his sheet of paper. ‘We’re at the centre of this.’ He pointed to the body of the creature he had drawn, then scrawled a rough approximation of Egypt, with Libya on one side and the Suez Canal on the other. ‘Our boys are here to protect these areas.’ He pointed towards Suez, and the oil fields in Iraq and Iran. ‘Down here,’ he indicated an empty space below his map, ‘we have thousands of men in the desert. Some of them have been here since 1940, and they’ve had a pretty tough time of it. The heat, as you’ll find out, is merciless, food and ammunition often in short supply. They’re desperately in need of some light relief.’

  Janine was chewing the inside of her lip; she was staring at the map. Arleta wound a strand of hair round her index finger.

  ‘I’m telling you this,’ all vestiges of public-school bonhomie had gone as Furness let his gaze travel from one face to the next, ‘because some of the artistes who’ve been here recently have thought of Cairo as a kind of foxhole, or a rest cure. It’s not, and it’s important that you understand the gravity of the situation at this present point. As a matter of fact,’ he lowered his voice, ‘HQ were on the point of cancelling this tour, and it’s still entirely possible that you may have to be evacuated at a moment’s notice. I say this not to frighten you – we’ll do everything we can to keep you safe – but to warn you.’

  ‘Can’t you even tell us where we’re going?’ Janine asked in a strained voice. ‘No one’s said a thing yet.’

  ‘You’ll be moving quite a bit in the next few weeks,’ Furness said. ‘You’ll have to learn to be flexible about arrangements. At the moment,’ he sighed heavily and mopped his brow with a handkerchief, ‘I’m not sure whether you’ll be in a Sunderland Flying Boat, a lorry or a hearse, and I’m not joking.’

  Arleta and Saba laughed anyway; Janine’s left foot was tapping the floor, her eyes were closed as if she was praying.

  ‘I travelled in a pig lorry in Malta,’ Arleta told them. ‘The pong – indescribable. I had to wash my hair for days afterwards.’ She lifted it in her hands and let it fall in shining waves around her shoulders.

  ‘So, splendid, splendid.’ Furness looked at her with relief. ‘You know the score.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Some forms for you to fill in.’ He handed out seven buff-coloured cards. ‘Don’t bother with them now, do them over breakfast.’

  ‘What’s an N15?’ asked Janine.

  ‘If you’re captured,’ Furness said, ‘it’s to let the enemy know that you’re now members of the British Armed Forces. Let’s hope you don’t need it.

  ‘Couple more things: food – don’t eat from local stalls, or drink water without boiling it. The rule with fresh food is: can you boil it or peel it? If not, forget it. Locals: never walk around on your own here, not around the camps and never, never in the native areas. Some of their men have the wrong idea about our women.’ He cleared his throat. ‘They think you’re, how shall I put this . . .?’

  ‘Pushovers,’ Arleta said helpfully. ‘A man once offered two thousand sheep for me in West Africa. I probably should have taken it.’

  ‘That sort of thing.’ Furness’s thin skin had flushed faintl
y again. He ripped his spider diagram from the chart and seemed anxious to be rid of them.

  ‘So, what about pay?’ Arleta prompted. ‘Or did I miss that bit?’

  ‘Ah. Sorry.’ Furness unlocked his desk and handed each one of them a small manila envelope. ‘Here’s your first week’s salary: ten pounds each in advance. From now on you’ll be collecting it from the NAAFI. But by the looks of you, you could do with a good meal today. Also, while you’re on tour you have officer status and are entitled to use the mess.’

  On their way down the clattery stairs he told them they would start rehearsing the next day and do a couple of concerts before the end of the week. ‘We’re hoping Max Bagley will get here tonight,’ he said. ‘He’s your tour director.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘As long as you do what he says, I don’t think you’ll have any problems with him. He’s certainly experienced. That’s all for now. Dismissed.’ Their brief conversation had ended.

  Chapter 7

  Dear Saba, he’d written to her,

  I am so sorry about the other night. It must have looked very strange to you, but that girl was not a girlfriend, but someone who has recently lost a chap I flew with, a friend. When you are cleared for security, let me know where you are.

  He couldn’t bring himself to go into more detail about Jacko; it felt cheap to use him as an excuse.

  Jilly had kept her hand on his arm while they were talking. Saba had seen it all. When that other chap had left the table to claim her, Jilly had given Dom a guilty smile and he’d probably returned it. How strange that grief might look so like lust.

  Dear Pilot Officer Benson, her mother had replied,

  I wonder if you can help me? I happened to open, in error, the letter you sent to my daughter. She’s gone away to . . . the censor had cut a large hole here, and we’ve not heard a word since. Have you? I wonder if, being in the services, you might find out more information for us. My husband and I are very worried about her.

  Yours sincerely,

  Joyce Tarcan

  He was stationed at Brize Norton when he got the letter, training young pilots, champing at the bit because it was so much quieter now than the Battle of Britain days, and when they weren’t flying, the air in the mess was stale with boredom, endless games of cribbage, cigarette smoke. He’d gone as soon as he could get a day’s leave, grateful for a semi-legitimate reason for doing so.

  As the train entered the Severn Tunnel, Dom felt a denser darkness outside him. He heard the hissing of steam as the brakes went on, and then the vague announcement from a sleepy guard that they might be here for quite a long time.

  This was greeted by jeering and good-natured laughter from the other passengers in the stuffy carriage – delays were an inevitable part of life now. But Dom, sweating in his greatcoat, felt both feverish and furious with himself. Since the crash, he’d suffered from a form of claustrophobia, which he knew he had to fight if he was to fly in combat again. These attacks leapt at him with no warning, the first sign a crushing in the throat, a sense that his whole body had been transformed into a violently overworking pump that would explode if he didn’t breathe properly, or run somewhere. He was dismayed that even a train stuck in a tunnel could affect him this way.

  He sat breathing heavily with his head down, sweating, terrified, and when the feeling passed, as it usually did, he asked himself what he was doing on this wild goose chase anyhow. The girl had gone to North Africa, or so the doorman had hinted, she’d have no use for the blue overcoat which he’d placed in the luggage rack above his head. In the right-hand pocket of the coat, he’d found a delicate filigree gold charm shaped like the palm of a hand. He’d put it in the pocket of his greatcoat. It was new.

  He touched the charm now. As a boy, he’d been obsessed by magic amulets, and he recognised this one as a Hamsa hand, which was supposed to ward off the evil eye, the envy of others, the kind of envy that could kill a person’s dreams and wishes stone dead. The reason why peasant Egyptian mothers dirtied up the faces of their children, why English children were taught not to boast.

  Cambridge and the RAF had trained him out of magic-thinking guff, but nevertheless his fingers had clutched the gold charm during his fear attack as if the tiny hand would help him. And when his heartbeat had slowed to normal, and the prickling sweat on his body had dried, he mocked himself: Dom, the great cynic, was on a train going nowhere – oh the potency, et cetera of cheap music.

  A pretty WAAF sat opposite him, stockinged legs gracefully aslant, clumpy shoes carefully arranged. She unwrapped a packet of sandwiches and asked if he would care for one. When he said no thank you, she ate hers daintily, and, after wiping her mouth with a handkerchief, asked what squadron he was flying with now.

  When he said none as yet, she began a tentative conversation about some friend of hers in 55 Squadron who was flying night fighters over France. Her eyes were questing: Are you enjoying this? Am I going too far? She had a heart-shaped face and auburn hair. Good legs, too. On another day, in another mood, he might have answered her properly. They might have had a drink together later that night, exchanged telephone numbers, gone at some point to bed. That was the way of it now: you took comfort where you could, and she looked like a nice girl, a good sport. He sensed her smile fading as he glanced at his newspaper again.

  Half asleep, he heard another soldier talking to her. The scrape of matches as they lit up fresh cigarettes. The pleasant burr of the man’s Gloucestershire accent was telling the girl that this same train had been chased only a few weeks ago by a German fighter plane, and how the engine driver had put his foot down to ninety miles an hour. She replied, pleasantly, ‘Gosh, I hope that doesn’t happen again today,’ with a mildly discouraging conversation-closed thread running through her voice. Who could ever fathom the randomness of human desire? Why him, now feigning sleep behind his newspaper; why not her?

  He was thinking of Saba’s eyes now, dark brown or mid brown? They’d gazed at him like caged animals through the veil of that mad little hat; they’d glowed with life. And one of the songs she’d sung, about God blessing the child who’d got it’s own, was a plea for independence, for life, for dignity, but not, now he came to think of it, for a man.

  She was pretty, no doubt about it, but he’d had plenty of time in hospital to mistrust mere attractiveness in another human being. He thought about the girls who’d run screaming from the ward when they’d seen the new faces of their former loves. Annabel had at least exited with some degree of decorum, assuring him over and over again it wasn’t him, it was what she’d termed vaguely, her pale blue eyes flickering as they did when she was being sincere, ‘the whole situation’. A thought which led him to Peter, a close friend from Cambridge, a man with a passion for girls, T. S. Eliot and cars. It was Peter who had sat on a bridge near the Cam and read to him aloud from the Four Quartets: Teach us to care and not to care was the line Dom suddenly recalled.

  A year before his aircraft had been shot down over France, Peter had bought himself a dazzlingly green Austin 10 for £8 from a local mechanic. He was amazed by his good luck and they’d driven like the clappers through the Oxfordshire countryside in it on one glorious day in summer. The car exploded after a week, and the last time Dom had seen Peter, he was sitting on the grass, its remnants spread around him.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ Peter said. ‘I was a fool. I was taken in by the colour like a girl with beautiful eyes.’ After a short silence he’d added: ‘It’s a hopeless fucking machine.’

  It was still dark in the tunnel. To give himself something to do, Dom read the mother’s letter again by torchlight. When he’d first read it, he’d felt the sting of disappointment – so Saba had definitely and defiantly gone – and he’d been longing in his impatient way to put the thing to rest. But then he’d felt something like relief.

  Because what did he know about the girl? Only that she sang, and that he admired her courage, and that for that one moment, when he had told her where his skin graft had come from, th
ey’d both roared with laughter like young people again.

  There were moments like that in life, he thought, that you couldn’t really explain or understand but that had the perfect rightness of a billiard ball falling smoothly into a pocket, or of a mountain bend taken at high speed, but with a slowed-down perfection.

  And the bird called, in response to the unheard music hidden in the shrubbery. Oh what a perfect bloody fool he had become. He blamed the war.

  A light rain was falling over Cardiff Bay as he walked towards Pomeroy Street. It fell softly over a pearly sea where there was barely a line between water and sky, and blurred the edges of a row of houses above which the seagulls cried. It splattered on the tarpaulins protecting the vegetables outside a Middle Eastern grocer’s shop on the edge of Loudon Square. This is where Saba lives, he thought.

  He put up the collar of his greatcoat and checked his watch. He had a twenty-four-hour leave: three hours at the most between now and the return train.

  A woman in a sari with a mackintosh over it smiled at him at the street corner. A boy went by on a bicycle: ‘Where’s your plane, mista?’ he said.

  At the corner of the next street, a house sliced in half by a bomb stood shamefully exposed, like a girl with her knickers down, or a shabby stage set with its faded rose wallpaper, and green cooker, and sooty rafters. A poor house, in a struggling poor street.

  Saba’s streets. ‘The notorious Tiger Bay.’ She’d warned and teased him with it.

  Because she had a natural dignity and the stateless confidence of an artiste, he had not given much thought to her background, and was struggling now to hold those two images of her together in his mind. Annabel’s parents had owned a lovely old Tudor house in Wiltshire with a moat with swans and ducks floating on it, as well as an apartment at Lincoln’s Inn. His own mother had thoroughly approved of them, their cleverness, their impeccable furniture, their season ticket to Glyndebourne. She’d probably planned his wedding in their garden. He hadn’t had the heart to tell her yet.