Jasmine Nights

by Julia Gregson

  ‘Bravo, Boggers,’ Saba said. She blew him a kiss. ‘Magnificato.’

  Some of the stretcher cases were laughing now, their faces crimson-washed from the lights of the ambulances that would take them home. The able-bodied men sitting on uncomfortable tin seats were clapping wildly, the air thick with their blue cigarette smoke. Willie came back for a bit and rattled off a few gags, then Janine appeared, and he dashed after her with his butterfly net as she fluttered against the desert sky like a green moth, dashing hither and yon as if in frantic pursuit of another moth to mate with to the opening chorus from Scheherazade. The men looked wistful.

  Saba, hearing the dying chords of violins, felt her own heart plucked hard. From where she stood, hidden by the curtain, she could see Janine waving and leaping as she flew off the stage, another person altogether. Her name was rubbed off the blackboard.

  ‘Ah nooooowa, the verrrra beautiful . . .’ Willie appeared in a huge baggy suit, clutching his throat and staggering. He glanced at her briefly in the wings to see if she was there, ‘. . . the verrray alllarmingly charming, our own little desert song birdaa, Missa Saba Tarcaaaaan.’

  Arleta stood with her in the wings. She squeezed her hand, and gave her a push. ‘Knock ’em dead, girl,’ she whispered.

  Saba felt a sluggish breeze as Bog and Lev lifted her through the red and yellow lights and placed her down in the centre of the stage. They jutted their arms towards her like stamens towards a flower. Bagley appeared behind a battered-looking piano – the spotlight on him illuminating a fresh cloud of dark insects. He raised his hand, played a few notes and they leapt together into ‘Get Happy’.

  You could see so much from the stage: the faces of the nut-brown men softening, a soldier, raised up from his stretcher, beaming and waving. She flung herself into the song, loving the syncopated rhythms that Bagley slyly threw in so as not to make it too ordinary and corny, and loving too her own wide-throated ending when she threw her head back into a cloud of stars and gave it all she could. By the end of the song she was steaming with heat, the audience roaring and stamping, and when she glanced at Bagley and saw him put his thumbs up, she felt a hot surge of triumph. Not so bad, hey?

  When Bagley swung into a larky version of ‘You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby’ the men moaned and hollered and stamped as she danced and sang about driving young girls mad. Bagley, in spite of a personal dislike of the saccharine, constantly reminded them to sing sweet.

  ‘These men don’t fight for democracy, freedom, or any of that guff. They fight for their mum or for their girl, and as far as they’re concerned, you’re it for the ten minutes you’re on stage.’

  The night air felt still and soft around Saba’s face. Max had told her if things were going well to sing a third song, and they were, so she could relax now. She waited for the low rumble of a plane to pass high above the stars, and then felt a deep silence descend on the men as she told them she was going to sing her favourite song, ‘All the Things You Are’.

  Insects obscured Bagley now. He played the opening bars, and when she sang, part of her could hear she was too soft. Bagley had warned her that when she was singing outdoors in a large space she would have to learn to throw her voice differently. Also, technically, it was harder to hold a line in a slow song than in one of the perky little numbers she’d started with. But she loved this song so much, she stopped caring, and after a few tentative notes hit her stride, remembering to use her microphone, as Bagley had taught her, as the confidential friend you told your secrets to, and as she and the song joined up, she felt a deep and creamy kind of contentment move through her veins. It was almost a shock at the end of it to remember where she was, to look out and see tears sparkling like diamonds in some of the men’s eyes. As she left the stage, the men roared and whistled and stamped.

  ‘Oh you little lamb. Well done, darling.’ Arleta, slick with sweat and scent, hugged her as she came off stage. ‘Brilliant, brilliant girl! You were nervous and you did it.’

  She added something else that Saba couldn’t hear because the crowd were still clapping and shouting. She pointed towards the dark desert, the tin huts.

  ‘Darling, do me a huge, huge favour,’ she said. ‘Go to our tent and get me some face powder. I’m sweating like a pig. Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! I’m on next.’

  Still high as a kite from her performance, Saba took the torch and ran along the forty yards or so of dirt road that led to their tent. From a distance, the portable stage glowed like a huge lit-up butterfly wing and felt like the magnetic centre of the night. She could hear the boom of Willie’s voice; he was on fire now:

  ‘Are you all alllllllll rigggghhhhhht?’ And the answer: ‘Yyeeeeesssssssss!’

  The desert night was bright with stars. When she got to the tent, there was a dim light shining inside the canvas, a dark silhouette. She pulled back the flap; Dom was sitting on a chair waiting for her. When she first saw him, she tripped on the guy rope and almost fell into his arms.

  Chapter 17

  As he stood up, a shock of dark hair fell over his eyes.

  ‘You!’ she said. ‘How on earth . . .?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later.’ His smile was mischievous.

  ‘Do you know Arleta?’ Her mind was struggling with this; her heart bounding.

  ‘I do now.’

  ‘Oh God,’ she suddenly remembered. ‘She’s on—’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ he said. ‘That was a put-up job – we’re both guilty.’

  ‘I’ve got to go back in a minute for my curtain call.’

  ‘You must.’ His lips had a beautiful curve to them. After months of telling herself he was out of bounds now, she was shocked by how much she wanted to kiss them.

  ‘I’ve borrowed a jeep,’ he said. ‘Can I take you out for supper after the show?’

  ‘Yes.’ She was so relieved. ‘But I must dash back.’

  He said that he would wait here. He asked if she would get into trouble if she left the camp.

  ‘No,’ she said, although she wasn’t sure.

  She flew down the dusty path and onto the stage, into a shrill blast of whistles, beaming and waving and blowing kisses. Arleta was waiting in the wings when she came off.

  ‘He’s here,’ she whispered.

  ‘I know,’ Arleta’s hug enveloped her in greasepaint and Shalimar, ‘and quite a dish if I may say so.’

  ‘Can I leave the camp tonight without permission?’

  ‘No one’s said we can’t.’ Arleta’s expression was perfectly bland. ‘No curfew I know of yet. And honey bun, if I may say so, you’ve kept him under wraps.’

  ‘He’s a fighter pilot,’ Saba whispered, pulling her finger across her throat. Arleta had warned her to avoid them like the plague. They were conceited, she’d said, and unreliable, also a bad bet, because most of them didn’t come back.

  ‘Well, you old dark horse!’ Arleta tugged a strand of her hair and gave her a kiss on her forehead. ‘Don’t say you haven’t been warned.’

  As they raced across the desert in a battered jeep, the risen moon was so bright it seemed to have turned the night into a photographic negative of day, and she was dazzled by it.

  ‘What happened to you in London that night?’ he said immediately. ‘When I got back to our table, you were gone, and this was a heck of a long way to come to find you.’

  ‘Oh, I had a ton of things to do.’ She couldn’t bear the thought of him knowing how much it had hurt; how foolish it had made her feel. ‘I needed an early night, and you . . . you seemed to have your hands full.’ She glanced up at him.

  ‘It wasn’t what you thought.’ His voice was neutral, his eyes on the road. ‘She was the girlfriend of a chap from our squadron. It was the first time I’d seen her since he died. The timing wasn’t brilliant. I’m sorry about that.’

  She stared at him, cringing at the memory of herself stomping out like a child, grateful he hadn’t seen her, but there was another feeling too, of sweet release.

  ‘I
was in a bit of a state myself,’ she said. ‘There was too much going on.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said softly. ‘Much too much.’

  ‘Was he a friend? The chap who died, I mean.’

  ‘Yep. We were at school together, and at university.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Twenty-two.’

  He gunned the accelerator. The faint pinprick of the jeep’s lights picked up nothing but sand and rock. Saba shivered and hugged herself – the vastness of the desert around them felt like a warning of how tiny they were and how quickly snuffed out.

  ‘This feels like blind man’s buff,’ she said, thinking one may as well be brave; it could all be over for all of them in a flash. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Alish Barbour. I’m a white-slave trader. I’ve already lost the map.’ She was relieved to see him smiling again.

  He drove easily and fast, one hand draped over the wheel.

  ‘I know a place we can eat in Ismailia – about a twenty-minute drive from here.’

  The gleam of his white teeth in the moonlight as he turned and smiled at her.

  ‘Hungry?’ he said. He put his foot down on the accelerator.

  ‘Starving.’ Though she was too excited for real hunger. She could feel his heat beside her, a sense of heightened awareness that was almost unbearable. Calm down, calm down, she told herself.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she said, hoping to sound sensible. ‘I mean before you came here.’

  He said he’d been in Abu Sueir himself, a couple of weeks before she’d arrived. They’d been on a training exercise, on the new Kittyhawks, the fighter planes they’d be using from now on. Afterwards, they’d flown south to Luxor and spent a couple of days going up the Nile on an old steamer.

  ‘You could have come with me,’ he said with a swift glance in her direction.

  ‘I could,’ she said, ‘but I was working.’

  On the outskirts of Ismailia, rackety music burst from a street that smelled of roasted sweet potatoes, and charcoal and old drains. There was a café on the corner where a group of men sat in the glow of an acetylene light smoking and drinking and playing board games.

  He drove down another narrow street and parked the jeep there. He held her hand as he led her down a crumbling pavement to the restaurant he knew called Chez Henri. He stopped outside a heavily carved wooden door with a grille above it. When the door opened it was on to a simply furnished candlelit room where no more than six or seven tables were covered in white cloths. On each table there was a jam jar with a spray of jasmine in it.

  ‘Ismailia is a town full of prisoners now,’ he told her, ‘Germans, thousands of Italians, but fortunately not Henri – he escaped from Paris. He had a restaurant there before the war.’

  ‘It’s lovely.’ She closed her eyes, terribly happy suddenly, and inhaled the room – its smell of roasting meat, of jasmine, of cigarette smoke.

  Henri appeared between them, portly and suave in his long white apron and wreathed in smiles.

  ‘Monsieur, madame, good evening!’ If they’d been babies he would have kissed them and pinched their cheeks. He led them to a table in the corner. He lit the wicks of two cork candles.

  When the flames glowed, Saba saw this was not a proper restaurant at all, more like an ordinary sitting room with its simple furnishings and comfortable sofa and family pictures on the wall. Its door was open to the night; from the window of the shabby house opposite came the croak of a sleepy child, the silhouette of a woman staring down at them. The woman pulled behind the curtain when Saba looked up.

  Henri brought a carafe of wine, and after her first sip she said to Dom, ‘How did you get here? How did you find me?’

  ‘Elementary, my dear Watson. I went to Cairo and asked the girl at the ENSA office where you were.’ He smiled with the innocent confidence of a man women tell things to. ‘And I sent you a letter.’

  ‘This?’ She took her purse out of her bag and showed him its tattered remains. ‘I didn’t know it was you.’

  ‘Ah, well the mystery is solved. Did you hope it was?’ He raised his eyes and looked at her.

  She looked at the menu. They think they’re God’s gift to women, Arleta had warned her – girls literally lie down at their approach.

  ‘Maybe. I’ll let you know. I still don’t understand,’ she said. His hand on the menu was brown and beautiful. He had long fingers. ‘What are you doing in North Africa?’

  ‘Oh, that part was easy,’ he said. ‘They’re very short of pilots and a friend of mine is with the Desert Air Force. He fixed it. We’re based between Cairo and Alexandria.’

  ‘Were you pleased – after what happened to you, I mean.’ She felt his slight move away from her. He was looking towards the door.

  ‘Yes.’ He turned back with a polite social look. She had definitely strayed into enemy territory. ‘I was pleased – it was becoming a bore in England. There are only so many games of chess you can play in the mess.’

  And then a sudden shyness seemed to overtake them. Dom drew a pattern with his hand on the tablecloth and she, overwhelmed by the concert and the shock of seeing him, warned herself to slow down.

  ‘Where are you staying tonight?’

  ‘There are rooms upstairs,’ Dom said. ‘I’ll stay here, after I’ve dropped you back of course.’ He slid his eyes towards her.

  ‘Of course,’ she said demurely. His brown fingers were on the table playing with the salt pot. She could feel her own heart beating and took a quick breath.

  Henri appeared again, followed by a plump child of about five wearing pyjamas. Henri put a menu on the table, some flat bread, and two water glasses. The little boy put down their side plates with the fastidious air of an altar boy placing a chalice and was rewarded by a noisy kiss from his father.

  ‘What would you like to eat?’ Henri smiled at them.

  ‘She’s starving,’ Dom told him. ‘What’s good tonight?’

  ‘I propose roast duck served with honey, lavender and thyme. It is delicious,’ their host said simply. ‘We have lamb cooked with preserved lemons, that’s good too.’

  They chose the lamb, and while they were waiting, Dom half filled Saba’s glass and pushed it towards her. ‘How long have we got?’ he said. He looked young in that moment, anxious too.

  ‘There’s no rush,’ she said. It was already too late and she didn’t care.

  He touched her lightly on the hand.

  ‘I want to say something . . . you were so good tonight.’

  ‘When?’ She was confused.

  ‘The concert.’

  ‘You heard me?’ She hadn’t expected that.

  ‘Yes.’ His eyes had the large pupils of a child. There were tortoiseshell lights in them. He took her hand and this time kept it in his. ‘Tell me something. What does it feel like?’

  ‘What does what feel like?’ She thought for a moment he meant being with him, and was trying to compose an answer.

  ‘Singing like that?’

  She let his hand go. No one had ever asked her this before.

  ‘Well . . . I don’t know . . . it’s hard to explain. Panic at first, especially tonight. We were so late, and it was our first proper concert, and all those men waiting, and then one of those beetles almost flew into my mouth, and then the music sounded so strange, that piano was a bit flat, but then . . . I don’t know. There was a moment when I was singing “All the Things You Are”, when I . . . well, it’s hard to describe how good it feels, it’s like a wave that travels through you.’

  She’d given up trying to make it sound hard; the truth was she’d loved almost every minute of it, the sense of being part of the war effort, of being allowed to do regularly what she’d practised for so long, of living way beyond her natural limits, of doing well at what she most wanted to do – it felt so good. Her entire body, her spine, the tips of her toes, her belly, her head, was still in the glow of it.

  ‘A wave that you catch.’


  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ooh, that does sound good.’

  ‘You’re teasing me.’ She caught his wrists in her hands.

  ‘No. I promise I’m not.’ He was watching her closely.

  ‘For that moment, you feel complete, as if there’s nothing missing. Does that sound batty to you?

  ‘No.’ He took a sip of wine. ‘It feels like flying.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Yes, but carry on, you first.’

  They gazed at each other almost warily.

  ‘And all those men, crying out in the night for you,’ he continued in a lighter tone. ‘I could hear them from the tent. How does that feel?’

  ‘That’s not why I do it,’ she said. The truth was that what she’d felt most earlier that night was not the thrill of being admired, but something more difficult to put into words without sounding too what her mum would call stuck on yourself – the pain of the men coming towards her, the pain of homesickness, of lost friends, of exhaustion and prolonged fright, changing as if by magic into delight and relief, and how that felt like turning water into wine, but of course you couldn’t say that without sounding like a complete prat.

  ‘You seemed very confident.’

  She felt exposed, as if she had said it.

  ‘It’s all right.’ His dark intelligent eyes gazed at her steadily. ‘I thought . . .’ he seemed to choose his words carefully, ‘I thought you were tremendous . . . really.’ He was about to say something else, but stopped.

  Henri was back flourishing a tray above his head. He’d brought them a selection of doll-sized dishes he called mizzi’at, filled with spicy vegetables and hummus and some olives; the olives he said were smuggled out of France.

  ‘Tell me the honest truth,’ Dom said when they were alone again. He drew closer to her across the table, his gaze intense. ‘Is it the best thing in your life?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Had he read her blasphemous mind? ‘I do,’ she added. ‘Love it, I mean.’ She tore a piece of bread in half, and dipped it in oil. ‘I don’t know yet if it’s the best thing in my life, but it’s where I feel most myself.’ She watched the expression in his eyes sharpen.