‘You’ve said sorry already.’ She touched his hand gently. ‘You can stop now. What on earth did you say?’
‘Well, I know them pretty well, so the usual guff,’ Barney’s voice wobbled, ‘about how proud she should be, and how ghastly this bloody mess was, but what a good time he’d had out here until . . . well . . . It’s true, you know . . . he said they’d been the best days of his life.’
Rain had begun to fall on the Nile, dimpling the surface of the water, blurring and fading the coloured lights on the pleasure boats. On the far shore, a peasant family lay like sardines under a tarpaulin.
‘What’s she like?’ he said suddenly. ‘I mean really like. I’m not trying to be rude, but it’s awfully hard to tell with people like you.’
‘What do you mean?’ Arleta was laughing.
‘Well, don’t take this wrongly, but it’s part of your job to get people to fall for you. You’re the dream girls, but not really real, sort of like those pictures of country cottages with hollyhocks round the door and stuff that people buy to put on the walls of their flats when they live in London.’
Arleta was silent, just looking at him, and then she shook her head. ‘You are such a twerp, Barney,’ she said at last. ‘Saba’s lovely – she’s my friend. And she’s exciting because she’s good at something – really good.’
‘Well . . .’ His mouth turned down, he was not convinced.
‘And it’s not as much fun as you might think, the dream girl thing – men can feel very let down when they see how ordinary you are without your war paint on.’
Barney grunted.
‘Mind you, it took me a while to forgive her for being so good.’ Arleta stirred her coffee. ‘Not that she would have known.’
‘Really?’
‘If I’m honest, I was jealous of her when we first met. Well, you know, or you probably don’t, but when you’re a dancer or a singer, people tell you all the time that talent is seventy per cent hard work, thirty per cent talent, all that stuff, and it’s true, up to a point, until it’s so obviously a lot of old cobblers. Because here was this girl, this thing, this funny little thing from Wales – awful clothes, no real experience, certainly no West End experience, but with this terrific voice. Well, more than the voice, a real sparkle about her – what’s that word? Caramba? Charmisma? Anyway, the it thing. Everybody recognises it when they see it, and of course, she was younger than me. I’m thirty-two, you know – one foot in the grave in showbiz terms.’
‘Conceited too, I expect.’ Barney gave another deep sigh and put his elbows on the table.
‘No,’ Arleta took a swig of wine, ‘not particularly – no more than most of us – anyway, I got over it. She’s a good one, and we’ve had so many laughs on tour and I hate feeling jealous, it’s not me at all – I don’t know why men always think women are such bitches to each other, it’s mostly not true you know – it’s the girls who support you.’
‘What a saint. Strange she jilted my friend without so much as a by your leave.’
‘Now listen.’ Arleta gave him her tigress look. ‘And shut up. I’ve had enough of that, so stop it.’ There was a long pause.
‘Barney,’ Arleta lit a cigarette, ‘can you keep a secret? I’m serious now.’
‘Yes.’
So she told him, in a low voice, as much as she could safely say about Saba’s sudden departure from Alexandria and the Turkish assignment.
‘She was warned not to tell your friend Dom. She was protecting him.’
‘Protecting him?’ Barney was looking at her aslant, as if he didn’t believe a word of this.
‘Look, I honestly don’t give a big rat’s arse whether you believe me or not.’ Arleta’s eyes were flashing. ‘It just happens to be true.’
He stared at her, horrified, fascinated. He had no idea how to handle a woman like this.
‘Don’t bite my eye,’ he said softly. ‘This is quite unexpected, that’s all. Now please don’t take this wrongly again, but it’s just I never think of women doing work . . . I mean like this . . . so . . . Oh Lord . . . give me a second . . . let me think about this.’ Barney sat with his head in his hands. He shook it several times. ‘It’s possible I’ve been an idiot,’ he said at last. ‘And if I have, I’m sorry. I don’t think I’ve ever hated anyone as much, I may have got it wrong. How did you find out?’
‘I don’t think she would have ’fessed up at all except she was badly concussed,’ said Arleta, ‘and she’s still in quite a state and covered in bruises; she thinks it was a car crash, but there’s more to it than that, I think. And the one thing she goes on and on about is seeing Dom.’
Arleta’s eyes filled with tears.
‘Oh God, I’m going to have to tell her tomorrow, aren’t I? That’ll be fun.’
Chapter 41
The new nurse said her name was Enid; she whipped back the curtains on grey sky, grey rooftops, a glum-looking pigeon sitting on a chimneypot. Rain was good, said Enid: those gyppo farmers, poor blighters, were absolutely desperate for it after the summer droughts. She left a cup of tepid tea on Saba’s bedside table and said she would be back shortly.
‘Personally speaking . . .’ Enid returned with a carafe of cloudy red water in her hand; she couldn’t wait to go back home now. Sick of the flies, sick of the heat in summer, murder it had been, this one; sick of not enough leave and now sick of the rain. You never expected to be cold in Egypt, did you, but it was horrible out and the houses never seemed to have enough heating, they weren’t set up for cold, were they?
Enid snapped the coverlet taut and twinkled at her. ‘But you’re going to have a nice day anyway – your friend Arleta is coming to see you with a young man.’
Saba stopped breathing for a moment. ‘Who?’
‘Heavens. Hang on.’ The nurse put her finger under the rim of her starched hat and scratched.
‘Let me think . . . a Pilot Officer somebody or other . . . I’m not sure but I think his name was Barney.’
Fear shot through her veins like electricity. Dom’s friend. He was coming to tell her something, and it would not be good.
‘Thank you, Nurse,’ she said politely.
When Enid closed the frosted-glass door behind her, Saba lay perfectly still with her eyes closed. She’d lost him.
The door opened again. ‘Brekkie!’ Enid walking towards her with her nursey smile on.
‘I’m not hungry,’ Saba said. ‘You have it.’ She had seen Enid wolfing down leftovers in the ward late at night.
‘Oh don’t be so silly.’ The nurse put the tray down. ‘I won’t eat it. And you’ll never get better if you eat like a bird.’
Saba smiled blankly, not hearing a word. When the door closed again, she got up and hobbled to a basin in the corner of the room and stared at her reflection in the mirror. There was a large crêpe bandage around her head; both her eyes were still swollen like bad plums, with yellow and purple bruises extending from the lower lids to halfway down her cheekbones. On her way back to bed, the room swung so violently that she had to cling on to the child’s wicker wheelchair in the corner of the ward. When its wheels slid across the floor she nearly fell.
Back in bed again, she looked at the clock on the wall. Nine o’clock. Usual visiting hours were between eleven and twelve. Soon the frosted-glass door that stood between the ward and everything else would open.
She wished her mother was here – someone to wait with, someone who knew her well enough not to talk. She’d thought a lot about her recently, what it must have felt like with a husband at sea for most of her married life, the terror of waiting, the memory of her mother’s face frozen in concentration listening to the shipping forecast on the wireless every night, and then – click! – forecast over, jolly or angry depending on the mood, Mum again: shouting, cracking jokes, cooking, finding socks, always knowing she was one knock on the door away from disaster. Her cheerfulness felt heroic to Saba now; one more thing taken for granted.
Shortly before lunch, she
heard the clickety-clack of high-heeled shoes coming down the corridor – quite different from the cautious squeak of the nurses’ crêpe soles. The shoes stopped outside her door.
‘Darling?’ Arleta’s voice muffled through the frosted glass. ‘Are you decent?’
The handle half turned. When the door opened, Saba sat up in bed white-faced.
‘Yes. Say it quickly,’ she said when she saw Arleta’s face. ‘I know what you’re going to say.’ The dark silhouette of a man outside the glass door.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Arleta. She kicked off her heels, got on to the bed and they held each other tight.
‘Oh love,’ she said softly. ‘This is brutal.’
A flash of pain went like forked lightning through her head when Arleta said it. She sobbed without sound for a while. He’d gone; she knew it. Enid, hovering sympathetically, handed her a sick bowl in case she needed it, a warm flannel and one of her own mints to suck.
A uniformed man walked in – a big red-faced blank to Saba, a noise, standing over the bed.
‘Do you want me to leave?’ he said immediately. ‘I could come back later.’
She nodded her head. She wanted to hide like a sick animal and howl. The roar of sound in her head was almost unbearable. The nurse said she could have a pill soon, a phenobarbital, if she wanted to sleep.
‘It’s nothing personal.’ Her words bounced off the walls. ‘Thank you for coming.’
The man twisted his hat in his hands. He touched her arm.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said before he left. He put a package on her bedside table and said something about Dom’s locker, but she wasn’t listening properly.
When Arleta left, a new nurse came in. She said how chilly it was getting now that the nights were drawing in; she left two painkillers for Saba’s head, which was full of forked lightning again. ‘Night-night, then, love.’ The nurse drew the curtains; she switched off the overhead lights and closed the frosted door.
She’d been longing for everyone to leave, but now that she was alone, the night seemed to stretch out all around her like a dark sea in which she might easily drown.
She woke after midnight, parched from crying, and reached for the water carafe. When she turned on the light, her hand touched the parcel the tall man had left for her. She sat up in bed and opened it clumsily. Inside the wrappings there was a box filled with tissue paper, and in it a blue enamel bracelet with the outlines of Egyptian gods and goddesses carved in silver. She turned it in her hand and saw engraved on its back Ozkorini.
Think of me.
It was beautiful. It must have cost him every last penny of his pay packet. Tucked inside the box was a card engraved with the address of a jeweller in Alexandria.
She was throwing away the wrapping paper when she found the remains of a letter written on a torn and crumpled bit of paper. Adjusting the lamp, she saw that it wasn’t a proper letter, more like a draft with words crossed out, in two spots so violently that the pen had pierced the paper. A letter written in high emotion, something he’d never meant to send.
The words floated senselessly in front of her eyes like cinders. She smoothed the paper out, pieced the torn bits together and still couldn’t take them in, until one sentence leapt out: Maybe in the end, life is shoddier than songs.
Her hands trembled as she pieced together the two bits of paper with numbers on them: August 2nd. 1942.
She moaned softly. So, no escape from it now – he’d bought the bracelet, his first proper present for her, full of hope and excitement; and died bewildered and disappointed, maybe even hating her. She would not forgive herself for this.
Chapter 42
After she left hospital, Saba moved in with Arleta, who had found a sublet on Antikhana Street. The flat with its pentagon-shaped rooms and round windows gave the charming illusion of living on the top deck of an ocean liner, and it was cheap too.
Arleta insisted on paying Saba’s half-share of the rent, and even cooked for her from her eccentric and limited repertoire: Mess number one was rice, beans and meat, boiled on a small gas ring in the kitchen. Mess number two was rice, beans, fish and whatever fresh vegetables were available. Sometimes there was a salad with a dash of gin added to the dressing. And Arleta was a firm believer in daily treats too – a bringer of buns and cream cakes from Groppi’s, the buyer of a lurid lime-green nightie with tassels on it from the souk with a twist of pistachio halva tucked inside it.
But best of all, Arleta was furiously busy for most of the day, with rehearsals, hair appointments, dates, parties (Cairo was crammed that month with young officers back from the desert with plenty of pay to spend), and for Saba it was easier to be alone when she felt such wretched company. There were whole days now when she felt so awful she could hardly be bothered to get out of her nightdress, when grief felt like a kind of flu of the soul which made quite ordinary activities such as eating and walking insurmountable. At other times, her feelings were so extreme it was as if someone had poured petrol on her and set her alight.
Grief had also rendered her dithery and weak and incapable of making a decision: sometimes the thought of leaving Cairo without knowing what had happened to Dom felt like an appalling act of betrayal; at other times, it felt pointless to stay and she longed for home.
On the day before she left hospital she’d been struck by another blow. Enid had waddled in with her nice nursey smile on, and placed an airmail letter on her bed saying that this would cheer her up anyway, which was unintentionally comical in its way. It was from her father, who knew nothing of her accident. He wrote:
Dear Saba,
It is with great pain and after much suffering that I send this to you, but your mother tells me that I cannot carry on not answering your letters. You have caused a great rift in our family and brought shame to all of us by disrespecting my wishes and going away. It is an insult to my honour, and one I cannot find it in my heart to forgive you for. Now it would be better, for your mother and me if you stay with your choice and don’t come home. You have made your decision, and I have made mine. You are no longer a daughter to me. I am at sea at the moment, moving between . . . and . . . so I have not told your mother yet, but I will inform her of my decision when I get home. It would be better for us all if you did not see your mother and grandmother either.
I am sorry it is like this.
Followed by his careful signature: Remzi Tarcan.
Her first reaction after reading this was one of boiling rage. Hypocrite, liar, jailer. Why could you choose a travelling life and not me? She’d been part of the war effort too. She knew now what a difference they had made to the men’s morale: this was not flannel, it was true, and how dare he make it sound so trivial, so wrong. When the anger wore off, she wanted to bury her head in her mother’s lap and say, ‘Forgive me.’ Her mother, she knew, would be in turmoil about this: longing to write, not daring to, in case it got her into a fight with her husband, who was perfectly capable of using his fists on her when he was roused.
And so it was that all the happiness about singing, and Dom, and travelling, and even the thought of home and Pomeroy Street, the simple marvel of being alive, now felt not wrong exactly, but like a form of extreme naivety that deserved punishment. How could she not have seen the world’s traps; nor felt the cruelty and randomness of war; nor seen that people were almost never who you thought they were? The hard truth was she’d broken up her family by coming here.
During the long days of convalescence in the flat, lonely and cut adrift from work, she began to hate the talents that had led her here. She’d gone around in this stupid bubble of self-regard and now the bubble had burst and she deserved everything she’d got.
After a few days’ rest, she went to see Furness at the ENSA office at the Kasr-el-Nil to ask about a flight home to England. She’d more or less decided, when the war was over, to go back to Wales and get a sensible job, in an office, or perhaps as a nanny to some family. There was a peculiar atmosphere about this meeting �
�� Furness had given her a sort of deaf smile before he’d said he was sorry to hear she’d been unwell. He’d fiddled irritably during their interview with the files on his desk as if he couldn’t wait for her to leave. He’d do what he could, he said at last, with a shuddering sigh, but there were now vast numbers of ENSA entertainers stuck here with no exit visas, plus the flipping king was coming out for a royal visit soon – so anything else she’d like him to do for her?
And then Cleeve turned up. Cleeve who was usually so careful about meeting in anonymous places. Their first meeting since he’d lifted her out of the smashed car beside the road to Istanbul.
He strolled into her apartment, a civilised man again in his nice-looking raincoat and trilby. She was trying to light a fire with green wood, and the apartment was choking with smoke.
‘Good God, Saba,’ he said, batting the fumes away with his hand. ‘What on earth are you trying to do – commit suttee?’
‘What are you talking about?’ She stared at him; she’d forgotten to lock the door and was thrown to see him in the middle of her sitting room.
‘You know, those Hindu widows who throw themselves on the burning pyre.’
He’d looked mortified.
‘Oh God, how tactless! I came to say I was sorry to hear about your chap. Not a good start. Sorry.’
‘How did you hear?’ She was staring at him.
‘Well, you know – all part of the job? Look, can we go out for a cup of tea or something? I shouldn’t really be here.’
In the coffee shop he changed places twice and fiddled with his spoon. ‘Saba,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to come and see you – I was desperately upset about what happened in Turkey, but it wasn’t safe for me to hang around.’
She saw a new look in his eye, a crumpled look of hurt and what may or may not have been intense concern; who knew who to trust now? He cleared his throat.
Jasmine Nights Page 38
