Jasmine Nights

by Julia Gregson

  Cleeve took two sugars and stirred them into his coffee.

  ‘So you speak Turkish?’ He pushed his floppy boy’s hair out of the way and squinted at her through the sun, amused and curious.

  ‘I can get by in it. We spoke it at home.’

  The two sparrows were back again, pecking furiously at the bread.

  ‘Cheeky blighters,’ he grinned. ‘They must be the fattest birds in Cairo – they probably have to rent that pitch.’

  There was a small commotion at the door to the restaurant. Arleta had arrived, her uniform tightly belted, hair gleaming in the sunlight.

  ‘Listen,’ he rose quickly, ‘I’m going to shove off and leave you to your friends. Bon appétit.

  ‘Oh, I meant to ask you.’ He picked up his hat, and turned. ‘Where are you rehearsing?’

  ‘At the old cinema in Mansour Street,’ she told him. ‘Today’s our first proper rehearsal with Max Bagley.’

  ‘Nervous?’ His smile was quizzical.

  ‘A little.’

  ‘I might pop by later,’ he said. ‘I’ve known Bagley since Oxford. We’ve done a few programmes together.’

  She hoped he’d add, ‘You must come and sing on one,’ but he didn’t.

  ‘Don’t be frightened of Bagley, by the way,’ were his last words. ‘He has a terrifying reputation but he’s actually a sheep in wolf’s clothing, and very, very talented. You’ll learn from him.’

  ‘Nice,’ Arleta said approvingly, watching Cleeve’s elegant back disappear. ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He said he runs the Forces broadcasts here,’ Saba said. ‘D’you know him?’

  ‘No, they change their producers all the time, but a bit dishy, I thought.’

  ‘He was charming too,’ said Saba. ‘Very friendly. I’ll be twenty stone if I go on like this,’ she added, putting butter on her second hot roll. ‘These are the best breakfasts I’ve ever had.’

  ‘All right today?’ Arleta took her hand and gazed at her kindly. When she’d caught Saba having a gasping, choking cry in the bathroom the night before, she’d put down her sponge bag and given her a huge hug.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Saba said. ‘You know, it’s just . . .’ The homesickness had pounced on her like a wild animal; she hadn’t expected it, still couldn’t talk about it with complete confidence. That look on her mother’s face as the train pulled out. Her last wave. She wished she hadn’t made that mean remark before she left about Mam never standing up for herself . . . Who would in her shoes? And now, what if a bomb dropped on her? On Tan, on all of them?

  Arleta patted her hand. ‘It’s like a kick in the guts sometimes – but you’re doing fine, kiddo, and we’ll be working soon.’

  ‘I’ll be better then.’ Correct. Work was a powerful anaesthetic as well as everything else, but she was starting to well up again, and was hoping Arleta would stop talking now and eat breakfast. Samir had just swooped with more coffee and a fresh basket of buttery croissants.

  ‘Ladies, please – more, more, more,’ he said, anticipating their pleasure. ‘You are too . . .’ He brought his hands in to show disapproval at their tiny waists, and turned his mouth down.

  ‘They do so love a pinger here,’ Arleta said when he’d gone.

  ‘And a pinger is?’ Saba put on her sunglasses.

  ‘The kind of fat lady who goes ping! when you do this.’ Arleta poked her finger in Saba’s side.

  They were laughing when Janine arrived looking pale and almost transparently thin in this bright sunshine. As she sat down, a plane thundering overhead made their table shudder. She’d slept badly, thank you very much: too many flies, too much noise from the street. When Samir arrived with his fruit platter, she waved him away saying it would give her a gippy tummy – she’d have black tea and a piece of toast instead.

  A mangy cat regarded her. It moved from its spot in the shade and rubbed its back against her legs.

  ‘Don’t touch it, don’t talk to it.’ Janine’s eyes were trained on her tea. ‘A friend of mine with Sadler’s Wells had to have twenty-eight injections in her tummy after being bitten by a cat in West Africa. She’s still not right. Shoo! Shoo! Away, you foul creature.’ She aimed an elegant kick at the cat. Another friend, poor woman, she continued, wiping her mouth carefully with her napkin, had got lost in a jeep in the Western Desert. A sand storm. She and the rest of the company had run out of water and had to drink their, you know, natural fluids, until they were rescued on the point of death.

  ‘Were you always such a cock-eyed optimist?’ Arleta asked her when this was over, and Janine had called for more hot water and perhaps a slice of lemon.

  ‘It won’t be hot – the water,’ she said when Samir had gone. ‘They never get it right. I’m being a realist,’ she continued. ‘You heard what Captain Furness said, we shouldn’t even be here, most of the companies have been evacuated. There’s no point in being an ostrich.’

  And Saba felt momentarily out of focus. There was another world out there, as close as the dark kitchen behind the beaded curtain, a world that might hurt them.

  A dog appeared from the shade of a jasmine bush. It flopped down under their table and looked at her with its pale amber eyes. When she absent-mindedly patted its head, Janine almost shouted, ‘Don’t! I said don’t,’ and then apologised. ‘I’ll be better when we start working,’ she said. ‘I’m more highly strung than I look, you know.’

  Arleta sagged and rolled her eyes behind Janine’s back, but Saba, for the first time, felt sorry for her. Sometimes it seemed realistic to be scared.

  Their rehearsal studio at Mansour Street smelt strongly of Turkish cigarettes and faintly of urine. Once a cinema, none of the overhead fans worked and the poorly converted stage was rickety and inclined to give them splinters in their feet, but they were, as Furness impatiently explained to them, lucky to have it – there was a desperate shortage of accommodation in Cairo that month, with more and more troops flooding in.

  Max Bagley, their musical director, a small, plump, carelessly dressed man in a cravat, was standing at the door looking livid when they arrived. Behind him, the straggling notes of a trumpet warming up, a burst of violin music.

  ‘You’re late.’ He tapped the watch on his hairy wrist. ‘I said ten thirty, not ten forty-five. Do that again and I’ll dock your wages. I’ve got a band here ready to go.’

  They’d been told via Arleta, who knew a friend who knew a friend, that before the war Bagley, a one-time organ scholar at Gonville and Caius, Cambridge, had been a rising star in London in the world of sophisticated revues and musical comedies. According to Arleta’s friend, although he was a plain little man, half the women who worked with him ended up in love or in bed with him. Honest to the point of cruelty, his secret was to make you feel he had understood yours, and that he would do his level best to bring out the best in you, which, let’s face it, not many men did, Arleta had concluded.

  During their ticking-off, Janine flushed with rage. She travelled with two alarm clocks in case one malfunctioned and had wanted them to leave earlier, but Arleta had insisted there was masses of time, which there was until a car in front of them had broken down and the road ahead was blocked by shrieking men striking their foreheads.

  When Arleta blustered, ‘Darling, we’re absolutely mortificato, we—’ Bagley snapped, ‘My name is Mr Bagley; I’ll let you know when I want you to call me darling.’

  ‘Oops,’ said Arleta softly to Saba as they walked into their dressing room, ‘crosspatch.’ But Saba admired the way she didn’t make a big fuss about it, or look too mortified herself. Arleta, she was beginning to understand, had a core of pure steel.

  It was bone-meltingly hot. Saba’s fingers slipped as she fumbled with the hooks and eyes on her black skirt and wrestled on her leotard and tap shoes. She pulled her hair tightly behind her head, and put on a slick of lipstick. Janine, panicked by being late, did something out of character and stood by the window bare-bottomed, saying ‘Don’t look’ as she wrestled h
er pink tights on.

  ‘Absolutely nobody is looking at your bottom,’ Arleta said, running her tongue around scarlet lips.

  ‘So, ready, girls?’ she said when they were all dressed and standing by the door. ‘Into the mouth of the dragon.’

  They walked on to the stage where Bagley was talking to Willie and the Polish acrobats, also late, and a scruffy-looking six-piece band, The Joy Boys, who had been in Cairo for three months now. Willie was giving Arleta an elaborate eyes, mouth and chest salaam when Bagley said, ‘That’s enough of that, let’s get cracking.’

  He stood in front of them, sweating and fierce, and told them to regard themselves, at least for the next few weeks, as artistic sticking plaster and not really a fully fledged touring company. There were too few of them for that, and as they probably already knew, there was a distinct possibility all of them would soon have to be evacuated from Cairo. He warned them that this work was cumulatively exhausting, and if they went over the top too soon they’d be in trouble. A previous performer, he said, had got her knickers in such a twist about all the travelling and performing that she’d burst into an unscripted tirade at the end of a concert in Aswan which had crescendoed in ‘This is all bollocks’, before exiting stage left into the desert in full costume and make-up.

  ‘Honestly,’ murmured Janine, who hated swearing.

  ‘That was Elsa Valentine,’ Arleta whispered to Saba. ‘Your predecessor.’

  The show he’d been writing, Bagley continued, resting his leg athletically on a chair as he spoke, was provisionally called On the Razzle. The plan was that they would open it for one night at the Gezira Sporting Club in Cairo, and then take it out on the road to all the random desert spots and aircraft bases and hospitals that were on the itinerary, most of which they would never know the name of.

  ‘How does that sound?’ He suddenly smiled at all of them, an infectious boyish grin.

  ‘Lovely, Mr Bagley sir,’ Arleta said.

  Saba felt Janine shudder beside her, and although she couldn’t stand the woman, she felt some sympathy for her. Sometimes Arleta could seem a little overconfident, and the truth was that she was scared too.

  From ten to one, they worked solidly on new routines, new songs, entrances and exits. First on came the acrobats, flinging themselves across the stage in soft thumps and complaining about the splinters.

  Lev, the oldest, had the wiry body of a young boy, and Saba thought the saddest eyes she’d ever seen. He stopped suddenly at the end of a dazzling row of cartwheels and addressed Bagley over the footlights as if he’d only just thought of something.

  ‘Are there any more solo acts coming? They said in London we are joining another company.’

  ‘Well they may come and they may not,’ was all Max would say about this. ‘We may all be gone soon.’

  The faint whiff of that rumour again, that Rommel’s troops were advancing, that soon Cairo would have the same blackout restrictions and air-raid drills as London.

  ‘But no war talk during rehearsals,’ Bagley shouted to them. ‘If I’ve only got you lot to work with, I’ve a mountain to climb.’ He raised his arms, the sharp smell of his sweat filling Saba’s nostrils.

  Now Arleta was under one weak spotlight, her khakis tightly belted, a jaunty naval cap on her head.

  ‘Right, ducky, off you go,’ Max shouted.

  She sang a mildly suggestive number called ‘Naval Boys’, much saucy grinning, flapping hands, and then, ‘Let Yourself Go’.

  ‘That’s all fine,’ Bagley jumped athletically on to the stage, ‘but I’m thinking a kind of hornpipe flavour, a hip, hop, change, when you sing “the sea”. He held Arleta’s arm and pushed her towards the flats. ‘Then a step ball change before you go la la la.’ He sang the notes confidently. ‘Otherwise, all moving in the right direction.’

  Willie – paunch already soaked with sweat, a handkerchief knotted over his bald pate – sang ‘As soon as I touched me seaweed, I knew it was going to be wet’, and rattled off a few gags in his deadpan style. He put on a fez and did a belly dance, his hand pointing like a unicorn’s horn from his head.

  ‘I’m off now,’ he said at the end with a ghastly leer, ‘to pop me weasel.’

  Max said it would do for now, but when they got back from the tour they’d work up some new stuff together.

  ‘Happy to oblige.’ Willie sat down on a chair on the stage and stared gloomily at his feet.

  ‘And let’s not make the jokes any bluer,’ Max added. ‘The snake-charmer one might have had its day.’

  ‘Blimey.’ Willie’s voice was weak and fluttery. ‘I go much bluer than that.’

  ‘Well don’t,’ warned Max. ‘There are spies in ENSA who swoon like a bunch of virgins at anything even vaguely smutty,’ he said. ‘We can’t afford to offend them.’

  Willie had stopped listening.

  ‘Are you all right, old man?’

  ‘Never better,’ Willie wheezed. ‘How about you?’ His breathing sounded laboured, there was a heat rash all over his face.

  Saba’s turn now. As she jumped on to the stage, the door at the back of the theatre opened in a flash of sunshine. The blond man who had talked to her at breakfast walked in and took a seat by himself at the back. He gave her a pleasant smile when she glanced at him and put his palms up as if to say ignore me, which she did. She was concentrating now, one hundred per cent, on trying to sing well and impress Max Bagley who stood next to her.

  ‘So,’ Bagley said narrowing his eyes, ‘let me tell you what I want from you. Are you frightened of heights?’

  ‘No.’ She stared back at him.

  For the important opening number, he said, he wanted her and Arleta to appear down a golden rope in the middle of the stage. He sketched this out with his plump hands. Saba would sing a song he’d written called ‘The Sphinx is a Minx’, Arleta and Janine would cavort around her. The lyrics to this song would be presented by Arleta, dressed as Cleopatra, as hieroglyphics drawn on ancient tablets; that way the soldiers could sing along.

  ‘But I’m searching for a big song to end the show with,’ he was staring at Saba and talking to himself, ‘What I really need to do today is test you.’

  ‘Test me?’ She gave him a quizzical look.

  ‘To know your vocal limits. Once you’re out there singing two concerts, sometimes more, a day, it’s going to really count.’

  She could hear Janine making agreeing noises in the wings. She took a deep breath and looked back.

  ‘Don’t you think you should listen to me before you test me?’

  He pinched his nose between his fingers. ‘Fair comment. I don’t know what I want from you yet. Look, you lot clear off now,’ he said to Arleta and Janine who were waiting.

  ‘Can’t we stay?’ said Janine. ‘We all came in a taxi together.’

  ‘Don’t care. Do what you like.’ His eyes were trained on Saba again. ‘It’s just that this may take a while. There’s something I need to know I can get from this young lady.’

  Saba felt her heart thump. The blond man at the back was sitting with his legs stretched out as if this was some kind of spectator sport.

  The band was dismissed, apart from the pianist, Stanley Mare, an aggrieved-looking man with smoke-stained fingers, who lit another cigarette and left it smouldering in an ashtray on top of the piano.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘Not sure.’ Bagley retreated inside his own circle of smoke; he was thinking hard.

  Saba was conscious of the rest of the cast staring at her from the wings, an unpleasant current of excitement in the room. She was under pressure and they were enjoying it.

  ‘Let’s start with “Strange Fruit”, Max said at last. ‘Do you know it?’

  ‘Yes, I know it, and the other side, “Fine and Mellow”.’ She’d played the record obsessively when it first came out, made Tan laugh by using the bottom of a milk bottle as her microphone pretending to be Billie Holiday.

  ‘OK. Then go,’ Max sai
d softly. ‘Start her off in D, Stan.’

  Stanley rippled his hands softly over the opening bars. If he was confused at Bagley’s choice of this dark song about lynchings and death, he didn’t show it, and nor did Saba, who closed her eyes, relieved he’d chosen something she knew and determined to give it her all.

  She sang her heart out, and when she’d finished she heard a smattering of applause from the rest of the company.

  ‘Well that’ll wipe the smile off their faces,’ Willie said loudly. ‘I thought we was supposed to be jolly.’

  Max said nothing. He’d put a pair of dark glasses on and it was hard to see what he was thinking.

  ‘It’s not going to be in the show.’ He’d heard what Willie said. ‘I’m listening for . . .’ He sighed heavily. ‘Doesn’t matter. Next song. How about “Over the Rainbow”, but not like Judy does it.’

  ‘I don’t do it like Judy does it, I do it like I do it!’ He was beginning to get her goat.

  She was halfway through it, enjoying her own voice soaring, sad and flung like bright streamers against the sky, when he held his hand up.

  ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’

  He took his dark glasses off and looked at her very coldly.

  ‘It’s early days, but let me try and explain what it is that I think I’m not getting from you.’ He thought for a while.

  ‘Are you familiar with that line of poetry – Coleridge, I think – that talks about how I see, not feel how beautiful the stars are. I want you to feel it more and sing it less. No need to be operatic.’

  ‘I am feeling it.’ She was stung to the quick by his words. She’d wanted to show everyone how good she was, not get a public dressing-down.

  ‘So, let me put it another way,’ he said in his soft, well-educated voice. ‘You’re just a shade too chirpy for my taste.’ When Saba saw Janine close her eyes in agreement, she wanted to knock her sanctimonious block off. ‘Feel it to the maximum, and then pull it back a little.’

  She opened her mouth to start again, but he was looking at his watch.

  ‘Damn, time’s up – we’ll have another run at it tomorrow.’