Jasmine Nights

by Julia Gregson

  ‘What does that mean – most yourself? Do you think you have a self, I mean a proper self, not just a reflection of what other people want you to be?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ She felt in dangerous territory again. ‘But I have a lot to learn,’ she heard herself apologising. ‘Max Bagley, our musical director, thinks I get some songs wrong.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘He says I copy other people.’ The admission was still painful. She put her head close to his and sang a line softly. ‘When I sang it the other day, he said I was doing a Bessie Smith and trying to sound like some weary old black lady about to pick a bale of cotton, and I should sing it just like me.’

  ‘If you do that again, I’ll have to take that old cotton picker to bed,’ he breathed in her hair. They looked at each other with surprise and burst out laughing.

  ‘No, no, no,’ she was alarmed by how excited she felt and could feel the blush spreading from the roots of her hair. ‘This is serious! Talk to me!’ But it felt good, so good to laugh with him. When he picked up her hand and kissed the palm of it, she didn’t pull away.

  ‘To return to Mr Bagwash, or whatever his name is.’ Their hands were side by side on the table. ‘Surely what he said is partly rot. How do you learn anything without listening, copying, practising? Sorry, it’s definitely rubbish, ignore it altogether.’

  He talked passionately and seriously to her then about Picasso, who’d pinched from everyone; about T. S. Eliot, who he’d studied at Cambridge, the steady building up of technique, the learning from other people, the final drawing together of all these influences to make a whole. Charlie Parker, he added, was laughed off the stage the first time he performed.

  ‘Who he?’

  ‘Ah! So I have a discovery for you. I’m going to buy you a record. He had to practise for hours before he dared to play in public again. It doesn’t happen overnight, I’m sure it doesn’t; don’t let him stomp on your dream.’

  When the roast lamb came it was sweet and tender, and after it Henri’s boy, half asleep now, brought a home-made ice cream served in a glass and flavoured with rosewater, and then a bottle of sweet-tasting wine on the house.

  ‘Have some of this.’ Henri was smiling at them as if they delighted him. ‘It’s from Alexandria, it’s called zabib.’ He poured Saba half a glass. ‘It’s better than Beaumes de Venise.’

  ‘This is delicious,’ she said, and it was, sweet and flowery. ‘I’ll be drunk,’ she told Dom.

  ‘I’ll look after you,’ he said. ‘I have to see you again.’ He looked at her steadily. ‘I have an important package for you.’

  ‘A package?’ She narrowed her eyes, mock suspicious. ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Ah, you’ll have to wait.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Some things have to be earned.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes. It’s from your mother.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘You’ll see – and I want a full apology when you do.’

  Over coffee, Dom became serious again. He told her about his mother’s career as a pianist, and how angry it had made his father. One of the abiding memories of his childhood had been watching her come home alone after a concert – her first – that his father had been too busy, or too disapproving, to attend. He remembered her smart suit, the taxi, and her leather case with the music in it. How lonely she’d seemed to him, letting herself into the house that had gone to bed. Not long after that she’d given up. He’d been too young at the time to understand why, but it was wrong, he felt, to have a passion like that and to shut it down.

  ‘It’s almost as if everybody in life has a river running through them, let’s say like the Nile,’ his eyes were flashing now as he expounded his thesis, ‘a river that gives you your own particular life. You dam it up at your peril.’

  ‘All that water pouring out your ears,’ she teased him. But she liked him talking like this; he was by far and away the most interesting man she’d ever met.

  ‘What about you?’ she asked over a second glass of zabib. Earlier, when the candle had flared and she’d seen the scar on the side of his face she’d remembered the hospital, the other young men with their skin grafts like elephant’s trunks, their ruined faces. ‘Are you flying a lot?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it busy?’

  ‘Honest truth?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It is quite busy up there.’ He shifted in his seat.

  ‘Busier say than the Battle of Britain?’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘And none of that Boy Biggles landing like an angel’s kiss stuff.’

  ‘Well . . .’ He lit a cigarette. ‘It is quite hot,’ he said softly. He didn’t expand, except to say their aerodrome was out in the desert, not far from enemy lines. That he shared a tent with a chap called Barney, someone he knew from school, who had got him the transfer in the first place.

  ‘But what do you do?’

  He said they were flying missions, sometimes as escorts for bombers or supply trucks, and sometimes in direct combat. He looked at her, and was about to say something else when she interrupted him.

  ‘Why did you come to Egypt? Did you have to?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘I had to. This awful girl stood me up in London.’

  ‘Be serious. Why?’

  Several expressions seemed to move across his face.

  ‘It’s complicated. I’ll tell you some other time.’

  ‘Tell me one,’ she urged. While they’d been talking, the restaurant had emptied. The boy was curled on the sofa asleep with his thumb in his mouth; Henri, folding napkins, closing the shutters. Dom put a cork back on the bottle of zabib.

  ‘All right then,’ he said. ‘Just one: flying. You know what you said earlier about feeling most yourself when you were singing. That’s how I feel in a plane. Free.’

  She pictured him spinning in space miles above earth, and felt sick. If she hadn’t been to the hospital she would never have known what could so easily come next. There were other things to ask, but she was frightened she’d jinx him.

  ‘So, both misfits,’ she joked instead. ‘No feet on the ground here.’

  ‘Anti-gravity,’ he said. ‘Well, that’s always a risk. Oh God!’

  Henri was blowing the candles out. He put the bill on the table and shrugged regretfully. Their supper was over.

  As he drove her home across the desert, she fell into that kind of dark and dreamless sleep that feels like falling into a pit. When she opened her eyes again, she could see his brown fingers on the wheel, the dark outline of his hair, his straight nose, and felt glad in a way to be going home. She longed for him in a way that frightened her: it was too much, it had happened too quickly, she would have to give it some sort of more serious attention later.

  While she’d been sleeping, her body had scooted up against his as if to a magnet; her head was resting against his shoulder, and she could smell him again, the same woody smell, but this time mingled with the faint aroma of petrol and dust. When she moved herself back to a respectable distance, she opened her eyes wide and looked out at the stars. High above her, like a cluster of sapphires, was the brilliant blue of the Seven Sisters, and there, the cloudy Milky Way. Her father, who knew them like old friends, had taught her their names when she was a girl. Five minutes later she saw the faint glimmer of red-brick buildings, the tracer lights around the transit camp, leaking out into the night.

  ‘Saba.’ His voice came to her out of the dark. ‘We’re nearly back. I’ve been thinking. I have some leave at the end of the month. Do you know where you’ll be?’

  A convoy of British army lorries trundled past them – a long glow-worm drowning out her reply. In their taillights she saw a thorn bush, a mound of rocks. ‘I can show you fear in a handful of dust’: he’d said that earlier. The fact that he knew such poems, and about Charlie Parker and other things, was already part of his attraction for her: they were young, they could learn together. Over supper, he’d told
her that he hoped to be a writer when the war was over, and to keep flying.

  Half a mile from the transit camp, he stopped the jeep and turned to her. He took her hair in both hands and held it behind her neck as he kissed her.

  ‘We could meet in Alexandria,’ he said. ‘Or Cairo.’

  ‘Oh God,’ she murmured into his hair, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t be frightened,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not frightened,’ she said, which wasn’t true. ‘I don’t know where I’ll be,’ she gasped. Her whole body felt soft and yielding – it was terrifying to feel it leap towards him. ‘That’s what I meant. We never seem to know.’

  Dom glanced at her and drew back.

  ‘You can write to me. You can write to me and let me know.’

  ‘It’s not that . . .’ She could hear her voice faltering. ‘Of course I’ll do that . . . but . . .’ Thinking of Cleeve, his warnings about boyfriends.

  ‘If there’s someone else,’ he moved away from her and looked in her eyes, ‘tell me straight away. I shall have him killed, of course, but at least I’ll know.’

  ‘It’s not that.’ She felt overwhelmed by everything. The nearness of him, and all that lay ahead.

  When he put his arm around her and kissed her again, she could feel him thinking; a slight chill of separation between them.

  At the high wire fence on the outskirts of the camp, they stopped at the guard’s hut. A soldier checked Dom’s papers.

  ‘Lovely concert, Miss Tarcan,’ the soldier said, not bothering to check hers. ‘Our first for over a year. Would it be cheeky to ask for your autograph here?’

  She scribbled her signature on a torn piece of paper. The guard folded it carefully and put it in his top pocket.

  ‘Will you be on tomorrow?’ he asked.

  ‘We don’t have a clue yet,’ she said. Everything was so up in the air. ‘But they’ll probably put a sign up near the NAAFI.’

  The soldier thanked her again; he said he had only been married for three weeks when he came here, his first kiddy had been born while he was away. His wife was finding it hard. ‘I hope she’s still there when I get back,’ he said in a jocular voice.

  ‘Oh, hang about.’ They were driving off when the guard called them back. ‘Forgot to tell you: Captain Ball, dropped by to see if you were back. Something about a party at the officers’ mess tonight. He seemed very keen for all you ENSA girls to go.’ He twitched the corner of his eye, a modified wink, out of respect for Dom maybe.

  Ludicrous to feel so immediately flustered, but she did. ‘It’s part of the job,’ she told Dom with a shrug. ‘The party.’

  His expression didn’t change. ‘You don’t have to explain yourself to me,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’ve got lots of admirers.’

  And then he left her, after a quick peck on the cheek, a ruffling of her hair that made her feel like a younger sister or something. He said he’d write, and then he floored the accelerator and sped away in a ball of dust.

  Later, lying in her canvas bed, she went through every detail of the evening, raging at herself for the awkward way she had ended it. Her rushed goodbye, her evasive answer when he’d asked when they could meet again – it sounded so furtive, jarring. She didn’t want to start by having secrets from him.

  Chapter 18

  He took off at dusk in the Spitfire he’d been asked to deliver to LG39, the squadron’s temporary base in the desert. Before he left, he went through the usual instrument and safety checks: oil, air pressure, oxygen feed, parachute stowed securely under his seat. The petrol gauge registered almost full, easily enough for the one-hour hop.

  It was growing dark as the plane lifted off. The dust storm that had grounded all planes earlier had cleared, leaving a shimmering coppery patina in the air. At 20,000 feet, flying down a corridor of cloud, he heard himself singing and then laughing. It was mad, it was crazy and impossible, but he was completely and utterly in love for the first time.

  When he pictured her standing in her red dress in the pool of light singing ‘All the Things You Are’, he felt with alarm all the carefully suppressed emotions of the last year burst into life again like a desert landscape after rain. She’d felt like the magnetic centre of the night. Later, when she’d confided in him in the restaurant how much she had to learn, he’d felt like her protector already – there were too many old farts in life who couldn’t wait to slap you down, and she didn’t deserve it. She was too original, too free. He increased the engine speed, felt the little plane lift, flew above and then through a few cottony clouds and when he came out the other side he was still thinking of her. Saba, asleep in the jeep, curled up like a child, her flood of dark hair over his knee.

  And then, in the middle of all this euphoria, as sudden as an engine cutting out, he located a new feeling for him in connection with a woman: she frightened him. He felt like someone who’d been given some strange, beautiful, semi-tamed animal with no idea yet of how to handle it. She was powerful. If emotions were weather, she could stir up a tornado.

  He’d felt it the first night he’d met her at the hospital, and even more intensely this time. He’d almost stopped breathing when she walked on the stage for fear something would go wrong. She’d stood in the spotlight owning the night with a reckless bravado he found both touching and admirable. When she was singing, the men on either side of him had leaned towards her and exhaled a kind of group sigh. One or two of them had groaned softly, a few muttered obscenities. He understood it – of course he did: strip away all the bravado and the false cheer, and they were all lonely men stuck in the middle of nowhere, bored or scared shitless most of the time, hungry for wives or sweethearts. But it disturbed him already that they should think of her like that. In fact, face it, he was already having to wrestle with a feeling of deep dismay about her – a feeling that disturbed and weakened him. He was jealous.

  He gunned the engine, glanced at the darkening sky beneath him and the few faint stars winking on his starboard side, and then at the wavering lights below. One of the many dangers of night flying was that it was possible to get distracted by random stars and mistake them for airport lights, the perfect metaphor, he suddenly thought, for falling for the wrong girl.

  Half an hour from the landing ground, he stopped thinking of her altogether as he tapped the altimeter and glanced down again. This was a tricky little runway, lit only by feeble gas flares and deliberately concealed. Concentrate!

  One of the many things he loved about flying was that it did stop you thinking in an everyday way. Up here, miles away from the hectic, scurrying earth, you became as alive as any wild animal to its moods and changes: what clouds were forming, the shape and texture of rain, the dips of valleys. That fluffy grey cloud that had just sailed by might, on another continent, hide a mountain wall that could kill you, or the wingtip of one of the Messerschmitt 109s that flew in regularly from nearby Sicily and Italy.

  He was looking for them now as he descended. Before he’d flown east, three days ago, he’d been warned by his flight commander, Paul Rivers, that if he became tangled up in a ‘show’ on the way home, he was to get himself down as quickly as possible.

  ‘The planes are more important than you mate,’ he’d joked. ‘We can’t afford to lose any more, and besides, I want to go home now.’ He’d stuck his finger in his mouth like a baby. ‘I miss my mummy.’

  Rivers, like Dom, had flown in the Battle of Britain. The plan was that as soon as Dom had got his bearings he would replace him.

  On their brief tour of the airfield a few weeks ago, Rivers, his blunt, pug-nosed face covered in dots of calamine lotion from his desert sores, had told Dom that things had got pretty hot out here recently, and that he was bloody grateful that he was tour-expired. He’d had enough sand in his bloody underpants and his bloody coffee and his fucking ears to last him a lifetime. He also had a wife and a new baby waiting for him on his parents’ property in Queensland.

  ‘Yeh, it will be quite nice to see the
little tyke,’ he agreed with an unconvincing show of reluctance, which made Dom smile. For a brief moment he’d envied him his settled future and guaranteed life.

  Rivers had told him over a disgusting cup of chlorine coffee that the Germans now outnumbered them by four to one. They were well supplied with bases in Greece and Sicily, had better and more numerous planes. Young pilots like Dom had flown in from all over the world to help the Allies with this final push. ‘We reckon,’ the Aussie had drawled, ‘it’s going to be like a second Battle of Britain here soon, only hotter and longer and harder.’

  That was another thing Dom hadn’t told her. Another major offensive, in five days? A month? Two months? The whole place seethed with rumours, no one ever really knew.

  From the air the small runway looked as insignificant as a toenail. He steered down gently, and after he’d landed, reached under his seat and grabbed his kitbag. An hour or so later, as he walked towards his tent, a young man with the broad shoulders and easy lope of an athlete stood up and walked towards him smiling. ‘Dom, you old bastard. Where’ve you been?’

  Barney got a Stella beer for Dom from the sandpit where the ice had melted hours ago. He didn’t have to ask. They’d been part of the same gang at school. Barney was the captain of the cricket team and about to get an England trial before the war bounced that one. It was Barney who helped him get the transfer to the Desert Air Force. They’d done their basic training together at Brize Norton what seemed like a lifetime ago.

  On the day they’d both flown solo from Coggershill to Thame, a feeble hop in retrospect, they had gone out together and got royally plastered at their local pub, the Queen’s Head. If either of them then had declared over a pint that they were fighting for England or for their fellow men, they would have died laughing. Flying was the thing. It still was, but different now. There was a new wariness, a hardness that Dom saw in Barney’s eyes that he recognised in his own. They had both been shot down and hurt badly, they had both killed and wanted to kill again. Most of the pilots in the squadron were like this: fiercely competitive in a languid, don’t-give-a-damn way. Parts of them frozen in shock. They had lost half their friends – Jacko the worst for both of them. They never talked about him except in a kind of distancing code.