Jasmine Nights

by Julia Gregson

  The acrobats took their bedrolls, did a bit of play wrestling and then fell asleep under a thorn tree beside the waterhole. Janine, who hated putting her fair skin in the sun, stayed inside the restaurant asleep at the table. Arleta and Saba lay under a juniper tree looking up at the patterned sky through its branches. Beside them, a donkey was lashed to another tree and hee hawed at the sight of them.

  ‘Poor little thing.’ When Saba offered it bread, it nibbled her hands with velvet lips and gazed at her with kindly eyes. ‘Why do they treat their animals so badly here?’ she asked Arleta. ‘No water, no food, no shade.’

  Arleta said that life was hard on these people too: on her last tour of Egypt, she’d seen men walking round and round and round in the blazing sun all day pushing a wheel just to get the water out of a well. ‘They probably think that donkey has a whale of a time.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think so.’ Saba jumped up. ‘The poor little thing can hardly move its head. I don’t think the owner would mind if I lengthened the rope.’

  ‘I wouldn’t interfere if I was you,’ advised Arleta, but Saba ignored her. She jumped up, loosened the rope, patted the donkey’s neck and gave it another piece of flatbread. ‘There you are, dear little man.’

  ‘You’re a shocking softie,’ Arleta said drowsily. ‘You’ll get yourself hurt one day, and you’ll be crawling with fleas tonight.’

  When Arleta fell asleep, Saba, watched with mild curiosity by the donkey, got a writing pad out of her kitbag. She shook the sand out of its creases.

  Dear Dom, she wrote,

  I’m going to Alex in August. Any chance we could meet there?

  Now she must think of a safe way of getting the message to him – one that Cleeve would approve of.

  Closing her eyes, she had an almost photographic image of Dom flying alone over the desert, with its tanks and hidden aerodromes and landmines.

  She shook her head. He would live, she must believe he would, else there would be no peace from now on.

  A fly woke Arleta up.

  ‘Sod off.’ She brushed it away. ‘How long have I been asleep?’

  ‘Twenty minutes.’

  ‘Yalla yalla, girls.’ Crowley was waving his swagger stick in their direction. He made a cone of his hands and bellowed, ‘Truck fixed, get mobile in ten minutes. Don’t leave anything behind. Got that, Willie boy?’ he roared at Willie, who he treated like a halfwit. ‘Ten minutes. Don’t forget your hat.’ Willie was dozing on the veranda; his knotted handkerchief had fallen into the dust.

  ‘Sabs,’ Arleta said quickly, ‘before we get on the truck, I want to tell you something about last night. I wouldn’t feel right without passing it on.’

  It seemed that while Saba had been out with Dom, Arleta and Janine had gone to the officers’ mess to have a drink with some of the bigger wigs on the base. These included an air commodore who had flown in from Tunisia, an army doctor with the worst case of desert sores that Arleta had ever seen and a padre who banged on a bit about Willie’s rude jokes, so it was no contest at all really, she continued, when her eye lit on an American colonel: a full colonel, mind, and awfully handsome with blond, blond hair, broad shoulders, honey-coloured skin; a real Southern gentleman in spite of his striking good looks. Arleta’s voice grew low and husky.

  ‘And I do so like Americans.’ When she threw back her hair, Saba saw a bruise on her neck. ‘We had a lovely talk and then he smuggled me into his rooms and we made love. I think he thought all his Christmases and Thanksgivings had come at once.’

  Arleta, as always, was strikingly unrepentant about such matters, and if she felt guilty about betraying her Bill, she showed little sign of it. Once, when Saba had asked about this, she’d said they had an arrangement – she’d said it in the French way, which made it sound more fun – he’d written to her saying she should take her pleasures where she might, because he was going to.

  ‘Oh grow up, darling,’ she had said to Saba’s shocked face. ‘There’s a war on. I don’t want him to live like a monk and he knows I’m not cut out for nun-dom or whatever you call it. This way is much more sensible.’

  ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘shut up for a moment because this is what I want to tell you. Later, much later, when we were having a brandy and a cigarette, the lovely Wentworth Junior the Third – that was his name – told me something that he said he shouldn’t have. He has some kind of intelligence job, and in his opinion the war here will be over very, very soon.’ Arleta took a deep breath and shook her head vigorously.

  ‘Over! Are you sure?’ Saba was shocked to find herself a little disappointed.

  ‘No, silly, course I’m not sure, nobody is, but here’s the point: he said there is going to be the mother and father of all battles soon.’

  ‘But they’re always saying that.’

  ‘He was convinced this was the one. He was actually shocked that we hadn’t been sent home already.’

  ‘Where will they be fighting?’

  ‘Didn’t say, wouldn’t, but it’s bound to be near the coastline, that’s where all the Germans are, and the various supply lines; that’s where they’re bombing mostly.’

  ‘Near Alexandria? Near Cairo?’

  ‘Alexandria. He says it’s an open secret among the men that the battle will happen in the next few weeks there. And if we’re sent there, we should jump ship, it’s just too dangerous.’

  Arleta went on to say that she knew for a fact that they’d just moved another ENSA company, The Live Wires, out from Alex to Palestine. ‘I actually worked with one of the girls in it – Beryl Knight, a dancer, awful frizzy hair but a very nice girl,’ she added loyally.

  ‘So, will we have to go soon?’

  ‘No, this is the point. Wentworth’s good buddy,’ Arleta slipped into an unconvincing American twang, ‘is Captain Furness. I swore to him this morning I wouldn’t say anything, but apparently we’re not going to be sent away – we’ll be following the Eighth Army into the desert.’

  ‘Heavens.’

  They exchanged a strange look.

  ‘Do you want to do that?’ Saba asked.

  ‘Girls, come on! Jaldi jow.’ Captain Crowley, red-faced and shouting now.

  ‘Do you mean keep going?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I do. You?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Saba. ‘I couldn’t bear to go home now.’

  Arleta just looked at her.

  ‘We must be mad,’ she said. She squeezed Saba’s hand and they laughed shakily.

  For the next leg of their journey, Bagley got on the bus with them and said they were going to have another rehearsal of the doo-wop song. He’d explained to them before that doo-wop was a kind of African music he’d heard in a club in Harlem before the war began. The song was called ‘My Prayer’, he said. He couldn’t remember the exact lyrics but it was about the kind of sacred promises you make when you’re in love.

  ‘The chorus is fabulous, come on, Bog, you try it, and Arleta. The melody goes like this, Umbadumba umbadumb ummmmbbbuumm. You should see the negro men who sing this stuff – they beam, they strut, they shoot their cuffs.’ He did a bit of portly strutting up the centre of the bus to demonstrate. ‘So: you sing the line, Saba, and the rest of you do the umbas.

  ‘What’s so fascinating about this new kind of music,’ Bagley continued, ‘is that it has distinct echoes of the madrigal. Now is the month of maying, when merry lads are playing,’ he sang in his clear, high voice. ‘Fa la la la la la la – you get it – de wop de wahhhh,’ he ended in a black voice.

  Beside him, Crowley sat rigid with alarm and embarrassment. He never knew where to look when they were messing around like this.

  But Bagley was on fire, and so were the rest of them, magically transformed by a song which ended in a roar of laughter. Bagley told them to shut up now and save their voices for that night. Saba, who had slipped into the seat beside Willie, was shocked when she glanced at him to see two great tears running down his cheeks like marrowfat peas. She
looked at him more closely – the whites of his eyes were red with crying; with his knotted hankie on his head again he looked like a sad fat baby.

  ‘What’s the matter, Willie, is it your ticker?’ she whispered. When she put her hand in his, he gripped it hard. Usually he hated being asked about his health – he was terrified of being sent home – but this felt different.

  He gave a small snort and a shuddering sigh.

  ‘In a way,’ he said at last, ‘your fault – you’d better not sing that “My Prayer” to the troops; you’ll have them in floods.’

  ‘Willie, come on – there must be something else.’

  He glanced around to check it was safe to talk.

  ‘Tell me.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘I won’t blab.’

  He looked across at Arleta, who was fast asleep, her blonde hair spilling into the aisle.

  ‘It is my ticker, but it’s not in a medical way.’ He swallowed noisily. ‘It’s her.’ As he spoke, Arleta’s tumbling waves shifted from side to side, picking up reflections from the sun.

  ‘Arleta?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a long, fraught silence.

  ‘D’you remember,’ Willie said at the end of it, ‘what a wonderful surprise it was seeing me at the auditions in London that day and how we’d worked together in Malta and Brighton? Well it’s no coincidence. I’ve tried to get on every tour she’s been on, but she’s killing me, Saba.’ As he said this, the faded irises of his eyes floated under their lids and another tear rolled down the side of his face.

  Saba clutched his hand. He must have seen Arleta leave with her blond American the night before.

  ‘But Willie, has she ever given you any reason to think . . .?’

  ‘Well, you tell me. She’s always telling me I’m wonderful and she loves me and I’m the funniest man she’s ever met. She’s so beautiful . . .’ he ended brokenly.

  ‘Yes, but Willie . . .’

  ‘I know, I know, we all go on like that in the business, and I’m the silliest old man that ever lived for thinking she really meant it.’ He stopped suddenly. More tears rolling down his face, and a large whoomph into his handkerchief. ‘Sorry, love, I’m not much fun, am I?’

  ‘No, no, no, no, it’s all right, Willie, but not being nosy or anything, I thought you had a wife and that she passed away a few months before we went on tour. That’s what Arleta told me.’

  ‘Well that’s another can of worms,’ he said. ‘So to speak. Arleta puts a lovely slant on it, but the truth is, we were married for over thirty-four years, and I hardly knew her, and that was my fault too. I love all this,’ he gestured around the dusty lorry, ‘the touring, the performing, I can’t seem to stop.’ He added that he had two girls, now grown up, and he hardly knew a thing about them either.

  ‘My dad’s a bit like that,’ Saba said.

  ‘Performer?’ he asked, picking up a bit. ‘If he is, he should be very, very proud of you.’

  ‘No, to both parts. He hates me doing this. We didn’t even say goodbye.’

  ‘Oh blimey – that’s a bit serious, can’t you make up?’

  ‘Can’t,’ she said. ‘He’s at sea.’

  ‘Well send a letter home,’ he said. ‘He must go home sometimes.’

  ‘Umm, maybe.’ She hated to talk about it – it felt so shameful.

  To cheer them both up, Willie got a couple of melted peppermints from his pocket, which seemed to have a calming effect.

  He said she was young enough to take a bit of advice from him, because, in his opinion, there was good and bad excitement in life, and the excitement of performing could turn around sometimes, and bite you on the you-know-what. It was too much, it was unwise, and it skewed other things in your life.

  ‘I’ll tell you a little story,’ he said. ‘One time I went home to our house in Crouch End – I’d been away for ages doing a wonderful panto in Blackpool and I was as high as a flaming kite and very taken with myself. But when I got home the missus was livid. I hadn’t seen her for two months and I hadn’t even remembered to tell her what time I was coming home, so she leaves a note on the doorstep saying “Baked beans and bread in the cupboard, I’m out.”

  ‘But she’d forgotten to leave the key under the mat, so I tried to climb through the cloakroom, and I’m so fat, I got wedged in the window, and looking at my house from this angle I thought, I can’t do this any more, it’s too small and too cramped. I can’t do it. But you have to do it sometimes, don’t you . . . you have to be ordinary and learn to like it.’

  He was so het up he had to look out of the window where light was draining from the day and the desert sand was drenched in a brilliant geranium red.

  ‘You all right now, love?’ Willie asked. ‘Arleta says you were homesick at first.’

  ‘I’m getting a bit addicted myself, Willie,’ she said, mesmerised by the sunset, and upset to have seen Willie crying, ‘but I do miss home. It’s the first time I’ve been further than Cardiff on my own, so a bit of a step.’

  He patted her hand softly. ‘I’m here if you ever need me – don’t forget that, gel.’

  ‘Thank you, Willie.’

  ‘Two concerts tonight, then. A bit of shut-eye in order.’

  ‘You all right now, Willie?’ She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek.

  ‘Course I am.’ He tried to wink at her. ‘That’ll learn you to sing songs to silly old men.’ He held his Adam’s apple between his fingers, wobbled it and warbled: ‘Because I love yoooouuuuuuu.’

  When he extended the last note into a dog’s trembling howl everyone in the bus burst out laughing, except Arleta who was still asleep and Crowley who was frowning over the maps again.

  Chapter 21

  Dom had never known that love could feel so like fear. But that night as he lay in his camp bed and conjured up her image, he recognised fear’s physical sensations – the powdery limbs, the pounding heart. He pictured her glossy hair, the playful twist to her smile when she teased him. How in the restaurant, when they’d been talking, she’d fixed her big brown eyes on him and seemed to drink him in.

  And now he saw her – it almost made him furious to do so – with that tiny band of performers racketing around desert outposts and transit camps and aerodromes, all of them sitting ducks for the Germans, who were circling closer and closer. There were landmines in the desert – one of their aircrew had had his leg blown off the week before – and serious supply shortages already. What if a truck they were on broke down in the wrong place? There was always now the distinct possibility of a sudden air-raid attack by the Germans, and lately, the Italians.

  Saba had told him a German Stuka had hit part of the stage before the ack-ack could get it during another ENSA group’s performance near Suez. They’d got to the chorus of ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ when boooom!!!! It had shot through part of a comedian’s baggy trousers – she’d made a funny story out of it.

  They’d kept on singing of course – well bully for them – but he didn’t want her to have to take part in these kinds of heroics, and he was furious at the authorities for not sending them away to safety, although he would never have dared tell her that.

  And so, on the borderlines of sleep, when you’re free to think anything, he pleaded, Send her home; let the troops do without music. She’s too young for this.

  Six o’clock the next morning. A field telephone woke him. The usual instant boggle-eyed awakeness.

  Paul Rivers wanted Dom and Barney to report to the crew room after breakfast. Four new pilots had arrived for retraining before the big push. They were to take them shadow flying that afternoon.

  After breakfast, it was overcast and humid and they waited until the last possible moment to climb into the flight suits that made you sweat like a pig. Six of them made their way to the sand airstrip where the ground crew were preparing their aircraft.

  The new boys were Scott, an awkwardly hearty Canadian whose hand squelched with sweat and made whoopee-cushion noises
as it pumped Dom’s, and his friend Cliff, a silent Midwesterner, whose massive, impassive face looked like a rock carving. Scott said he’d learned to fly as a crop duster in the States. The other two would join them after lunch.

  They were waiting for take-off in a tin hut at the end of the runway when Scott said, ‘So, what’s the situation here, fellows? Do we have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning this thing?’

  ‘Well, on the whole, snowballs don’t have much of a life expectancy out here,’ Barney said pleasantly.

  ‘Oh very English, pip-pip and all that.’ The Canadian scowled and looked at Dom now. ‘But what’s the score?’

  Not an unreasonable question.

  ‘Well, the Hun have aerodromes now in Tunisia, in Libya, and scattered around the Western Desert, and they’re moving east, or at least trying to. If they can capture Alexandria and Cairo we’re stuffed, so the next bit is not to let them do that.’

  When he stopped to spit some sand out of his mouth, Barney took over.

  ‘The fighting here is not the old Battle of Britain man-against-man stuff,’ he said. ‘We’re mostly covering bomber patrols, escorting tanks, protecting supply lines. We haven’t had any major offensives yet, but that could change at a moment’s notice.

  ‘One of their main problems, ours too, is running out of water. You may have noticed,’ he rubbed his bristling chin, ‘it’s not in plentiful supply here.’ He screwed up his eyes against the sun and they followed his gaze towards the miles and miles and miles of desert behind him. He was getting irritable; it was time to fly and stop talking.

  Dom felt it too, a craving to leave the ground.

  Half an hour later, he climbed into the tight mouth of the Kittyhawk, put the parachute under his seat, plugged in the oxygen, turned it on full and then squeezed tubes to see if it was coming through. At the RT command of all right, chaps, off we go, they rose into the air.

  The new pilots had been briefed about shadow shooting. Now Dom and Barney flew in formation together, elegant as Ginger and Fred and showing off to the new boys just a bit as they dipped and spun and glided across the desert, letting their shadows drop like giant ink spots.