Jasmine Nights

by Julia Gregson

  ‘What happened?’ She felt the soft rasp of his teeth against her fingers while he thought.

  ‘I’ll tell you one day,’ he said at last. ‘I do trust you.’

  He felt he must tell her soon – he’d been on the verge of it several times – that he’d wanted to see her again so badly, he’d taken the train to Cardiff, had seen her house in Pomeroy Street. Something stopped him – pride maybe, or training, a sense that he might have trespassed on her secrets. Life wasn’t a childish game of show and tell, and easy confidences that made everything better before bed. It felt too early to take the risk.

  ‘I want you to trust you,’ he said. ‘Am I right to?’

  ‘Yes.’ She put her hand over her right eye. ‘I think so.’

  ‘You think so? Not know so?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘You’re looking very serious,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing. It’s the war sometimes.’

  ‘Well I can offer three possible cures,’ he said. ‘A, we could order an ice cream. B, drink another bottle of wine and sing some Arab songs. Or C, go back to the Rue Lepsius and make mad passionate love.’

  ‘I feel greedy tonight,’ she grinned at him, ‘so, ice cream at Rue Lepsius.’

  ‘And I feel greedy too,’ he said. ‘I want you to lie in my arms and sing to me.’

  ‘Any special requests?’

  ‘ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”.’

  She often sang to him in bed during the four days that followed; the days she counted as the happiest of her life, the most exquisitely painful, the most complete. The sounds of the war, filtered through shuttered windows, the occasional groans from ships in the harbour, the droning planes above, the whooping of the air-raid sirens, all of it made life feel almost unbearably precious. They would snatch every bit of it, take nothing for granted. They would be lovers; have a future, however short.

  They made a pact not to have any solemn war talks, but they knew what they were going back to now. Total amnesia no longer possible. But everything felt so clear here: in this room with its whitewashed walls, their rumpled bed with its mosquito net, the whirling fan above, the comforting clutter of domestic items behind the floral curtain – the kettle, the stove, their cups, the lapis-blue pen she’d bought him in the market. Their temporary room was home.

  There were sudden starvations after they’d made love that could only be sated by running down to Dilawar’s – their café now. At night, candles were lit in little glass jars and put deep inside the café where they would not draw any attention to themselves, and a group of old men with carved faces gathered in the dimmest recesses to smoke their narghiles or take falafel from Ismail, the owner’s son, a handsome, smiling boy who was teased because he wore a gas mask to cook falafels in, to stop the fumes going up his nose.

  When the falafel smoke had cleared, the scent of jasmine permeated the alleyway. The sturdy old vine grew and grew up the trellised walls. Ismail gathered its flowers after dark when the scent was more powerful; he sold them in long ropes which they took back to their room.

  In the mornings they drank tea in bed together like sensible old Darby and Joan types. ‘Here you are, Mrs Benson,’ Dom said in an old man’s whistle, doing a bandy walk to the bed to make her laugh. ‘There’s your cuppa.’

  He ran around the corner to get fresh rolls from the baker. They were warm still when he brought them, and they would eat them in bed together, or if it was too hot, they’d sit side by side on the floor.

  After breakfast Saba would wash and get dressed and on limbs that felt sunlit run to catch the tram down to the club. She and Faiza were making progress now: she had three Arabic songs she could sing with some fluency and Faiza had taught her how to ululate with her tongue vibrating behind her teeth; also the different ways she had to take her breath (more of a cat’s sip than a bellows breath) to accommodate the new rhythms. When she came back to Dom she would sing them for him, sometimes standing up, sometimes lying with him chest to chest, cheek to cheek. He’d pull her towards him without a word.

  ‘I like that “Ozkorini” best,’ he told her.

  ‘I only know a snatch of it,’ she said.

  Umm Kulthum had been sent away from Cairo now – both sides frightened she’d be used for propaganda purposes. Saba didn’t tell him that. She told him instead that Ozkorini meant ‘Think of me. Remember me.’ Faiza had told her it was one of the few Arabic love songs addressed directly to a woman, most dealt with the pain of longing.

  ‘What are they longing for?’ she’d asked Faiza.

  ‘For God,’ came the simple reply. ‘Or another country, or to be a happy again. Life is hard for many bipples here.’ As she was saying this, it flashed through her mind that ‘Ozkorini’ was one of Ozan’s favourite song too, and wished it wasn’t. She wanted it to be her and Dom’s song. She loved him. It was such a simple shock to know this. It wasn’t just that he was so beautiful to her; there were other things more difficult to name: a particular sympathy they shared, as though they were tuned to the same frequency. The way they laughed at the same things, the way they’d listened to each other as though on tenterhooks as each laid out for the other the important events of their lives, and the trivial: she knew now, for instance, that he had once in a fit of rage thrown a lamp at his sister’s head after she’d put his teddy down the lavatory; that he felt guilty about frightening his mother, and sorry for her too, feeling her loneliness and isolation; that he and his friends at school had once teased a boy because a girl had written a poem to him saying ‘and I love your long white neck’; how it felt to go night flying for the first time: the terror and the magic of flying half blind beyond the earth’s crust.

  And that was about all he’d said to her so far about flying; some unspoken agreement had been reached that the subject would not be discussed. There was no wireless in their room, and they didn’t want one. They had shut down the outside world for a few precious days. But every morning, as she made her way down the Rue Lepsius, down the Rue Massalla and towards the innocently glistening blue sea, she saw more sandbags stacked on half-ruined streets, more aeroplanes making marks on the clear blue sky.

  One afternoon, while he was cheerfully splashing in the bath, she went to the cupboard, opened it as quietly as she could and took a closer look at his things. There was a pair of desert boots in the corner, the suede scuffed at the toes and covered in dust. In the toe of the left foot, she found a map of North Africa; in the right foot she felt the cold steel of a revolver. Underneath the boots, a pair of khaki overalls covered in dust and oil. They belonged to another world and made her stomach somersault.

  ‘What are you doing?’ His voice came from behind the curtain; the slap of water as he moved.

  ‘Looking in the cupboard.’

  ‘My stuff’s normally in my locker,’ he said, as if that would make them safer. ‘I came here straight from the aerodrome.’

  When he walked into the room again, there was a towel around his waist and his hair was wet. He looked so alive, she felt, for one moment, almost crazed with fear for him.

  When he saw her face, he took her to bed without words and they made love. Later that night, over dinner at their café, he told her that she was easily the most interesting, the most wonderful girl he’d ever met, that when the war was over, he was going to learn to smoke a pipe and they’d buy a cottage with roses around it, and they were going to make lots of babies together, in between her doing concerts all over the world.

  ‘There’s ambitious,’ she teased him in order to hide her intense pleasure. This was the first time he’d talked like this. ‘So what are you going to be: a kept man?’

  ‘I want to fly and write,’ he said it quickly, ‘but I can’t think that far ahead.’

  ‘Superstitious?’

  ‘No. Maybe.’

  The white bed, the purple sky, visible through the shutters before the blackout curtain was drawn. The ruddy glow of two candles b
efore the last breath of day was blown on them. His miraculous brown body beside her in the mornings. His heat, his gaiety, his clever mind. She had not known you could have all this at once.

  Four days, then three, and a terrible last day when everything that had seemed so wonderful went wrong. It began with a signal from the duty officer saying Dom was to report to Wadi Natrun. They would be flying again next week.

  Chapter 28

  On their last but one day, Ellie turned up unannounced at the club. She looked pale and out of sorts. She wore flat shoes and no jewellery, and had left the back of her hair unbrushed.

  ‘Darling, listen,’ she said. ‘I have an urgent message for you. A man called Adrian McFarlane from ENSA has just phoned and left a message. He’s staying at the Cecil Hotel. You won’t say anything, will you, about our arrangement?’ Her lip was trembling with nerves. ‘They want you to take the train back to Cairo. Apparently the company are re-forming there. They’ve sent a ticket.’

  Saba’s heart sank. ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I may have to go with you.’ Ellie looked glum. ‘Promise not to say a word about Tariq?’

  Saba promised. ‘But what about Ozan’s party?’

  ‘He asked me to lend you a couple of evening dresses, so I assume it’s still on. I thought I’d pack the blue dress, and that gold and silver sari dress that you wore at the Mena House. Does that sound right to you?’

  ‘Well . . . but . . . they’re yours . . . I can’t just take them.’ Her mind was racing. What about Dom, how to explain this to him.

  ‘Don’t worry about that. I won’t be out of pocket.’ Ellie seemed quite sure about this. ‘Let’s just do exactly what they say.’

  ‘Is that all?’ Saba said.

  ‘All that I know. Don’t forget,’ she almost snapped, ‘I’m just the wardrobe lady.’

  Half an hour later, she came back with another new message. The man from ENSA wanted Saba to report to a recording studio on Mahmoud Street at seven p.m. the following night for a Forces’ Favourites programme called Alexandria Calling.

  ‘Well, you’re a very popular girl,’ Faiza beamed.

  ‘Yes.’ Her heart sank to her boots. The timing could not have been more terrible.

  He thought it was a joke at first.

  ‘A recording?’ he said. ‘On our last night? Surely you can change it?’

  She went silent, then said she couldn’t.

  And looking at her he believed her, and thought: this will drive you mad – leave her now while you can.

  ‘Well thanks for letting me know.’ He heard the coldness in his own voice.

  ‘I didn’t know myself until a few hours ago.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  It was mid-afternoon. They were lying in bed in each other’s arms at the time, sated and slick with sweat. He’d just run a bath. A moment or two before, they’d been joking about his socks, which she’d insisted on washing the day before and hung on a hanger. Watching her rinse them so inexpertly, he’d felt sadness close over him like dark water – a sense that they were trying to cram a future that might never come into a few short days. And this was the problem: everything seemed so heightened and raw.

  He disengaged himself from her arms.

  ‘Can’t you change it?’ How hard would it be? he asked himself indignantly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’ He leapt out of bed and faced her. ‘It’s a wireless programme. You’ll be singing a song. It’s not like opening night at La Scala blooming Milan.’

  ‘Yes, a song.’ She got up on her elbow and glared at him. ‘Nothing but a bloody song, very unimportant. Candy floss. Let’s cancel everything to suit Dom’s arrangements.’

  ‘My arrangements?’ He scowled. Oh the things he could have frightened her with had he chosen to.

  ‘Yes, your arrangements.’

  They both had quick tempers, had already made each other laugh with cheerful warnings of the bad behaviour that would inevitably come. He confessed to kicking his mother once when he was six years old and she’d made him practise too long at the piano. She’d kicked him smartly back; Saba had inspected the scar on his knee and said he’d deserved it. Saba owned up to several dramatic exits from Pomeroy Street with a packed bag dating back to when she was a toddler.

  Now he watched the bomb he’d ignited explode. She stormed around the room like a clockwork toy, telling him he was selfish and thoughtless and mean and overbearing too, and she was fed up to the back teeth with men telling her what to do. She stamped her foot and, after a few moments of this, collapsed into the bath behind the floral curtain in a flood of tears.

  He’d run that bath for himself. His last bath before going back to the desert again; possibly his last bath ever. The sound of her thoughtless splashings had enraged him.

  ‘Overbearing, me?’ he bellowed through the curtain. ‘That’s a bit rich coming from you.’

  ‘I am not overbearing,’ she yelled.

  And then, he could hardly believe the words were coming out of a mouth twisted with rage. ‘I mean, I let you go off and sing for hundreds and thousands of men who don’t even know you.’

  ‘You. Let. Me. Go. Off!’ The voice behind the curtain was low and incredulous. ‘What a bloody cheek! You don’t own me. You hardly even know me.’

  ‘No, I don’t, and thank God for that. Spoilt and self-centred,’ he’d muttered. ‘An idiot.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He’d heard her gulp. She filled the bath with more water and thrashed around in it like a netted fish. Breathing heavily, he put on his shorts and sat down near the window with his head in his hands. After a few moments of savage self-pity his temper went out as quickly as a summer storm, but the splashing in the bath continued, and then low gasping sounds.

  ‘Saba.’ He felt stranded, and wanted a way back. He lit a cigarette.

  ‘Sorry, can’t hear,’ she said. ‘I’m too self-centred.’

  ‘A very grown-up thing to say.’ His voice softened.

  And then he scribbled a note to her that read: Ben bir eşeğim, the Turkish for ‘I am a donkey’. She’d written the phrase on a napkin a few days before, when he’d asked for instruction in curse words. He wrapped the note around a piece of Turkish delight – the kind she liked, pale pink and full of pistachio nuts. The kind she normally ate with a sensual, eye-rolling relish that made him laugh. He lowered it on a string over the curtain and into the bath.

  The splashing stopped as she read the note. When he heard her chuckle, his eyes filled with tears of gratitude.

  ‘Come here,’ she said – the sweetest sound he’d ever heard.

  When he drew back the curtain, he couldn’t believe how cruel he had been, how selfish. She looked so young lying there, hair wet, eyes swollen with weeping. So beautiful too with her brown skin gleaming, her black hair shifting like seaweed in the water. He took a flannel and washed her face and her shoulders, her belly; he gathered her in his arms and they went to bed together, mingling their tears and telling each other they were stupid and sorry and had never meant to hurt one another and never would again.

  The following day, while she was asleep in the crook of his arm, he lay tense and watchful as he listened to the unmistakable roar of a Spitfire engine moving overhead; for the first time, he recoiled from it.

  When he opened the shutter, a flock of birds flew through the vaporous air the aircraft had left behind, and Alexandria, battered, abandoned, came into focus again, and he was frightened for it. Nobody could say with any certainty how much of it would remain next month, next week even. All the talk now was of one final push.

  ‘Are there a lot of them?’ She’d been watching him.

  ‘A lot of what?’ he said cautiously. He combed her hair with his fingers.

  ‘Aeroplanes.’

  ‘A few.’ It was unusual, he thought, to see aircraft moving so flagrantly over the city, and wondere
d if some were being delivered to LG39. They were desperately short now.

  ‘Are you worried?’

  ‘No.’ He hesitated, knowing what he said might stay with her for a long time. ‘Please don’t worry about me. I’ve had a wonderful time. I’m sorry I nearly spoilt it last night.’ He got up, closed the shutter, and got back into bed with her.

  ‘Saba, no!’ He put his arms around her; she was howling, but without much sound, just deep breaths and swallows, a look of vivid distress in her eyes as she tried to control herself.

  He dried her eyes on the corner of the sheet.

  ‘This has been the best week of my life,’ he said. He buried his face in her hair and they clung together as if it was their last moment on earth.

  Their breakfast on the following day was curiously formal, as if part of them had already gone. They went to Dilawar’s and ordered coffee and croissants which she toyed with and half ate. They arranged to meet between her rehearsal and what she now called ‘the blasted broadcast’.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll enjoy it once you’re there,’ he said, diplomatic today. ‘It’ll cheer the troops up.’

  ‘I hope so,’ she said softly. ‘I’ll be back as soon as it’s over.’ She looked at her watch and said she’d better go.

  Before she left, they said goodbye to Ismail together – the handsome youth often stared at them from behind the beaded curtain that separated the café from the kitchen. A hungry, unabashed stare. A few nights earlier, during a general conversation with him about the war and Egypt and his life, he’d told them he thought they were lucky. He could never afford to get married; he lived with his mother.

  They’d glanced at each other shyly during this outburst, pleased that he thought they were husband and wife.

  They shook his hand, gathered their things, and walked out into the blare and glare of the street. As Saba’s tram moved off, Dom stood and waved at her from the street corner. He had no fixed plan yet for the rest of the morning – he’d hoped he would spend it with her. He felt sick with fear as he watched her go.