Jasmine Nights

by Julia Gregson

  As the band was packing up their instruments to go, he turned to her and said unsmiling, ‘Don’t be discouraged – we’ll find something for you to sing.’ Which made her feel even worse. ‘There are some songs,’ he said, ‘that have a natural flow more suitable for young girls. You’ll see where the sentences are going,’ as if she was some kind of halfwit.

  She gazed at him numb and miserable, wishing that he would stop now. The blond man from the BBC had beaten a hasty retreat too. He probably thought she was rotten as well. Awful, awful day.

  As she left the theatre, blinking in the sudden glare of the street outside, a truck full of GIs slowed down. The wolf-whistling sounded like an aviary of mad birds.

  ‘Well they certainly appreciate you, and so did I,’ said a soft voice behind her. Dermot Cleeve skipped a couple of paces to keep up with her. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he added, ‘I thought you were rather good.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, not believing him. If she’d known him better, she might have explained that she hadn’t minded Bagley’s criticisms – or not that much. She liked clever people. She enjoyed hard things. The most painful part had been their airing in front of the smug and unbearably delighted Janine.

  ‘So, can I tempt you with an ice cream in Groppi’s?’ Cleeve asked. ‘It’s not far from here.’

  She said no, she was too het up, and besides, she’d heard vague rumours of a dress-fitting appointment later that day.

  ‘Well, at least take my card.’ He shook one out of an elegant little silver holder and put it in the palm of her hand. ‘I’ll be seeing you,’ he sang softly, and then he tipped his hat, and to her relief disappeared into the crowd.

  Chapter 9

  That night, unable to sleep, and raw still from her strange and disappointing day, she wrote a letter to the one person who had once had the power to make everything feel better.

  Dear Baba,

  You may have heard this already from Mum, but I wanted to let you know that I have arrived in Cairo, and I am safe. Work is going not too badly. The other artistes in the company are very kind and we take good care of each other. We will be gone soon on tour, and I hope one day you might be proud of me. You can get a letter to me c/o the NAAFI. I hope you will write, but maybe you still find it hard to forgive me.

  Love Saba

  Next, after some debate with her internal censor she wrote to Dom, a protectively jaunty letter saying sorry she’d run away so quickly that night, but she had work to do and could see he’d met up with a friend, as she had herself later that night. She, by the way, was in Cairo now and hoped he was safe and had got the posting he wanted.

  Childish of her to add the imaginary friend, but she had been surprised and deflated by what happened. He’d seemed so intense before, so lively, so happy to be with her. It had felt like a night of celebration whose jarring ending had . . . well, it didn’t matter now.

  A carefully casual conversation with Arleta about it had been unsatisfactory. All those fighter-pilot boys were the same, she said, immature and stuck-up – they thought they were God’s gift to women.

  Two weeks after she sent the letters, she stood at the NAAFI counter.

  ‘Quite sure there’s nothing for me?’ she said to the soldier. He’d searched, twice, through the large blue canvas bag. ‘I’ve been here ages now.’

  ‘Quite sure, love.’ The soldier’s weary face was sympathetic. ‘We’ve lost a few mail planes recently, and it’s not called the Muddle East for nothing.’

  He handed Arleta three letters with SWALK and ITALY plastered all over them in a splashy purple writing. Janine had two aerogrammes, which she snatched and took off like a dog with a bone.

  They moved to a table behind a tattered rattan sunscreen. A thermometer strapped to a dusty palm tree registered 105 degrees. Arleta, pouring lemonade and tearing open her first letter, read it with little squeaks and moans, occasionally patting Saba’s hand saying she was not to worry, she was sure to get heaps on the next plane.

  But Saba felt ludicrously upset. She was abandoned, simple as that. Dom hadn’t replied and she felt a fool for writing at all.

  No letter from Mum, or her father either. Saba felt the sweat pour down the front of her blouse. The rehearsals had helped the homesickness quite a bit, but thoughts of her family played underneath her present life like a tune with the volume turned down low but always there. What if they all hated her now? Maybe her father destroyed her letters. He’d said he didn’t want to see her again. What if she could never go home?

  Hearing her sigh, Arleta gave her hand a squelchy squeeze.

  ‘Thinking too much.’ Arleta was frowning. ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘That I’ll go mad if we don’t get on the road soon,’ she replied without thinking. ‘I really will.’ Once they were out there, performing in hospitals, army camps, it would shock her out of this fear she carried around now like an extra skin, and why else would she be here unless she was the stupidest person in the world?

  On their way back to their digs they bumped into Captain Furness walking in a self-important, head-down, arm-pumping sort of way towards the office, swagger stick under his arm.

  ‘Splendid, splendid,’ he said when he saw them. ‘I’ve been looking for you lot.’ He burrowed in his briefcase saying he had an invitation somewhere for them for an evening reception at Mena House Hotel on the following night. He added, ‘If it’s not cancelled, of course; at the moment, we’re assessing the military situation day by day.’

  ‘Has it changed?’ Janine asked.

  ‘We’ll brief you on that when necessary,’ he said. ‘All you need to think about at the moment is getting ready for the party tonight – this kind of socialising is jolly important out here.’

  ‘I’m starting to hate that patronising little prat,’ Arleta said as she watched his stiff back disappear into the crowd. ‘Won’t tell us when we’re touring, won’t tell us what’s happening with the war, and now he behaves as if a party was a form of water torture. The Mena House is divine – wait till you see it. Maximum dog, I’m thinking.’

  Maximum dog in Arleta-speak meant posh frocks, full make-up, lashings of Shalimar, and her mannequin-on-castors walk.

  ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ she added. ‘We’ll soon be suffering, enjoy it while you can.’

  The next day Max Bagley pushed a letter under their door telling them to report to the props and wardrobe department on Sharia Maarouf and borrow clothes for the evening reception. They were to look as glam as possible.

  ‘This is a fabulous opportunity for us.’ Arleta snatched the note from Saba’s hand. ‘Because I happen to know the man who decides on all the talent at the Mena. His name is Zafer Ozan, he’s an absolutely sweetie, and very, very rich, and if he likes you, your future is pretty much assured.’

  ‘How do you know him?’ Janine asked suspiciously.

  ‘We had a steaming affair,’ said Arleta, who would stop at nothing in her game of shocking Janine. ‘He was heaven. We went to his tent in the desert. He smelled of sandalwood and was incredibly generous. He was the one who gave me a necklace,’ she added to Saba.

  ‘Oh honestly.’ Janine closed her eyes. ‘She’s joking, you know,’ she warned Saba. ‘She doesn’t mean it.’

  Later that morning, a severely elegant woman called Madame Eloise met them at the door of the props department, a dim and shuttered building three blocks from the Nile.

  Madame had once been a model for Lanvin, the famous Parisian designer. Her commanding height and the baked-in-the-oven perfection of her chignon was intimidating at first, but her smile was warm. She sped them through a room lined with racks of clothes and meticulously organised shelves covered in wigs and boxes. ‘Oh, this is fun,’ she said, ‘three gorgeous girls. I must put my thinking cap on.’

  At the end of the room she stood them next to a floor-length mirror, and went into a light trance.

  ‘Dresses.’ She tapped her teeth with her finger and regarded them imperso
nally. The blackboard beside her was covered with mysterious messages: ‘Ten wigs, Tobruk, rolled scenery and portable generator Ismailia. Ten Tahitian skirts, base number 32. Five pink hats, “On Your Toes”.’

  And Saba, hearing the faint drone of an aeroplane moving overhead and seeing their three drab khaki reflections in the mirror merge and separate again, thought, this is a mad, mad world I’m in now. Three girls in hot pursuit of the perfect dress, at a time when Cairo, so the rumour mills went, was about to be bombed to smithereens or invaded by Rommel. Furness had promised them earlier they’d be gone soon from the city, with its neon lights and nightclubs and dress shops. Picked up from the fairy ring and dropped into the desert like brightly wrapped sweeties; the kind grown-ups hand out to frightened children to distract them from the dentist, or some other alarming operation. She stood in the clammy air and shivered.

  ‘You.’ Madame was looking at Saba. Her manicured finger tapped her teeth. ‘Dark hair, olive skin,’ she muttered. ‘Got it!’ She darted into the racks and produced a white garment bag. ‘Something quite fantastic. This dress was made originally from the most divine sari fabric. I copied an old Schiaparelli design and it’s . . .’ She stopped modestly. ‘Well, see for yourself.’

  She whisked out the dress.

  ‘Ooh!’ They gasped like children. The dress fluttered like a butterfly in the breeze from the fan, its bodice inlaid with filaments of silver so fine they looked like gossamer thread; its long silk skirt so delicate that it shivered in the wind, and then they stood wincing as the aeroplane noise outside rose to an intolerable level.

  ‘Not fair, not fair at all.’ Arleta pretended to bat Saba about the head. ‘I want it, and I’m older than her.’

  ‘It’s been on tour with Scheherazade.’ Madame held it against Saba. ‘I made it out of a shawl that belonged to a maharajah’s daughter; that’s real silver in the bodice by the way. What is your waist size?’

  ‘Twenty-four inches.’

  ‘Perfect, try it on. Wash your hands first, please.’ She indicated a bowl and a piece of soap in the corner of the room.

  Saba slipped out of her dusty uniform. She peeled the shirt from her back. A sluggish breeze came from the window tinged with the smell of petrol.

  ‘There.’ Madame squirted her quickly with a tasselled bottle of scent; the dress surged over her head. ‘Stand here.’ She was pulled in front of the mirror. ‘Hold in there.’ Madame lashed a delicate silver rope around her waist. ‘Hair down.’ She tucked Saba’s hair behind her ears.

  ‘Now look.’ She scrambled through a glass-fronted cupboard with many drawers in it, and came out with a tiny diamanté brooch, that she pinned on to the bodice of the dress. ‘No jewellery apart from that,’ she ordered. ‘The hair waved, the pin and the dress, ça suffit.’

  ‘Oh Lord.’ A band of gauzy sunlight fell diagonally across Saba and she stood in shock. The dress had changed her into a marvellous mythical creature and her eyes filled with tears because she’d just pictured her mother, who was poignantly susceptible to luxury, standing next to her gasping.

  But then she remembered the slant-eyed, ciggie-smoking aspect of her mother, who might have ruined this outing altogether. They’d had a shocking bust-up once when Saba had refused to wear a hideous dress her mother had made on her sewing machine. Lots of swearing, lots of shouting, Saba storming off to bed, shaking the house with her slamming door, Mum shouting upstairs very sarky: ‘Oh little Miss Know-it-all upset, is she? Oh dear! Dear! Dear!’

  The dawning sense that quite a few of Mum’s creations hadn’t quite hit the mark had crept up over the last few years. That polka-dot dress, for instance, though conceived with dash, did have quite an uneven hem, and hasty bits of bias binding over the neckline. Things changed whether you wanted them to or not. Just as Mum changed like a weathervane whenever her father was around.

  ‘Can I really wear this?’ she asked Madame Eloise.

  ‘Of course. But if you spoil it, you pay for it.’ They were talking to each other’s reflection, so it was hard to see if this was a joke or not. ‘How much do they pay you now?’

  ‘Ten pounds a week!’ Saba still couldn’t quite believe it. ‘Four pounds for the chorus, it’s a fixed salary for all the artistes. And you?’ she asked back. ‘Fair’s fair.’

  ‘None of your beeswax.’ Madame made the gesture of a geisha hiding behind a fan. ‘Not enough money to stay here if the war gets too hot, which I hear . . . Oh, never mind.’ She pretended to smack her face. ‘Concentrate on important things. A dress for you now, Arleta.’

  Arleta, stripped to her peach underwear, was combing her hair luxuriously by the window, enjoying the play of sunlight on its gold and red tints. When Madame asked if she’d ever helped the colour along, Arleta said Coty’s Tahitian Sunset had been used once or twice, but mostly God did all. She flicked it dramatically over her shoulder.

  Madame said they were a riot and turned confidential. She also ran a service, she said, that tailored men’s uniforms, and the men were every bit as vain as women; the way they carried on about fitting a trouser, or the exact positioning of scrambled egg on the shoulder of a senior officer, was a caution. She offered them coffee and a piece of halva and warned them to watch out for the serving men here, who were sex-starved and like wild animals. The stories she’d heard she would not repeat. She promised that when they got back from their tour, she would take them to a bazaar shop that sold the finest silks in Cairo. She asked them whether they had boyfriends here.

  ‘We’ve been told not to go into the native quarter.’ Janine interrupted her. She’d been sitting by the window, deep in thought, her hands folded in her lap.

  ‘Oh pouf, boring!’ said Madame. ‘Go. It’s exciting. You’re in much more danger near the British barracks, and besides, I like the Egyptians, they are so funny, and so intelligent – I mean, please! They built the Pyramids, wonderful art, the first telescope, and we treat them like . . .’ she turned her mouth down in comical disgust and waggled her hand, ‘wogs, gyppos! So stupid!’

  ‘Hmm.’ Janine was not convinced.

  ‘So you!’ Madame looked at Arleta. ‘For you, something sensational.’ She returned with a dress coiled over her arm and covered in sequins the colour of old gold.

  ‘Oh ding dong!’ said Arleta when it was on. She stared at herself in the mirror and shimmied her hips. She kissed Madame and said she said she felt like a mermaid in it, and who would have thought you’d have to go to Cairo to find a decent dress. ‘Would it be entirely impossible,’ she asked winningly, ‘for me to take it on tour when we leave? I’ll look after it.’

  Saba knew this was not true. Arleta stepped out of her dresses at night and left them where they lay on the floor, much to Janine’s disgust. Janine said it only took an extra five minutes to put things back on their hangers.

  Janine got a pale green chiffon dress with silver shoes, and a long rope of fake pearls, which Madame knotted dramatically at her waist.

  ‘Voilà.’ She lined them all up side by side in the mirror. ‘Let me see you all together. Not there, there.’ She changed the angle of Saba’s brooch. ‘Beautiful, beautiful girls,’ she purred. ‘One more thing.’ She darted towards a velvet pincushion and pulled out three hatpins. ‘In your handbags, just in case.’

  ‘In case of what?’ Saba said.

  ‘Attack,’ said Madame. ‘I’ve told you already, the men are a long way from home, and some of them are very fresh. I don’t think they mean to be,’ she said, hearing Janine’s squeak. ‘It’s just that out here, particularly in the desert, men get lonely – the kind of loneliness that nothing but a woman can drive away. Simple as that, and who can blame them.

  ‘You’re looking very shocked, dear.’ She gave Janine’s arm a little pat. ‘But you’re a dancer, you must know these things. There are certain professions that excite men more than others.

  ‘Speaking of which,’ she said quietly to Saba as Janine disappeared behind the curtain, ‘your taxi is waiting outsid
e. You’re running late.’

  ‘Just for me?’ she said, surprised.

  ‘Just for you,’ she answered. ‘The message came from the ENSA headquarters, so it must be right – off you go.’

  Chapter 10

  An unmarked taxi picked her up outside the props department and sped her across town towards the recording studio for the British Forces Overseas. But then to her confusion the car veered from the main road, Sharia Port Said, bumped down a nondescript street and stopped outside a block of grey flats with washing hanging from their windows. When they arrived, the taxi driver handed her a typed note: Go up to the third floor; you’ll be picked up in an hour.

  Inside the ancient clanking lift, she looked around nervously at the filthy glass light on the ceiling half full of dead flies and sand, and at her own wavery reflection in a wall mirror. This didn’t look like a recording studio.

  Dermot Cleeve was standing on the landing of the third floor. He pulled back the wire door.

  ‘Lovely,’ he cupped her hand, ‘what a treat. It’s very sweet of you to come.’ Today he was smartly dressed in a tropical suit and wearing a spotted bow tie. The fine blond hair that flopped over his eyes and his broad artless smile gave him the air of a bouncy schoolboy.

  He led her into a small, dark flat that smelled faintly of fenugreek – a spice she recognised from Tan, who loved to cook with it, and whose dresses smelt of it.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind meeting here,’ he said, ‘rather than at the studio – it’s easier to talk.’

  She felt herself relaxing as she sat down on the edge of a sofa scattered at one end with records and sheet music. The untidy room, with its shelves crammed with books and tapes, its bottles of Gordon’s gin, its gramophone, felt homely and familiar if not exactly what she’d expected.

  The small kitchen at the end of the room had no door; while he bustled around making tea on a gas ring, he chatted as if they were old friends, first about tea which he said he drank too much of, but you could get some delicious blends out here if you knew where to look, and then about cooking. His suffragi, Badr, he said, did the cleaning and the errands, but got cross with him for wanting to do his own cooking, but he hated people bowing and scraping to him and it was easier, particularly with the hours they worked.