Jasmine Nights

by Julia Gregson

  ‘Fuck off,’ Dom shouted.

  Back at the Waterloo Hotel, they walked up the dimly lit stairs like sleepwalkers. A new receptionist, half asleep at the desk, gave them a new key, a new room, no questions asked. Upstairs, Dom switched on a tasselled bedside light. There was only one wooden chair, next to a sink, so they sat side by side on the bed.

  ‘Saba, listen to me,’ he said. He took hold of both her wrists in his hands and looked into her eyes very seriously. ‘We’re here because it’s a quiet place to talk, but before you say a word, I saw you with a man earlier – if you’re otherwise engaged, don’t bother making up a story, because you see, at the risk of sounding dramatic, or a little bit theatrical myself, I don’t want to go through this again, and I’m not going to.’

  ‘Dom.’ The simple miracle of him being there was starting to break through.

  ‘Don’t.’ He stood up and walked to the chair, that was as far away from her as possible.

  So she told him what she could about Istanbul and Ozan, Cleeve.

  He listened with no change of expression, and then:

  ‘Saba, are you serious?’ he said. ‘Did they give you a toupee and false glasses?’

  ‘Deadly serious.’ She put her hand over his mouth. ‘There’s more.’

  She told him about the German parties, but not about Severin. She couldn’t, not yet, perhaps never.

  ‘I had an accident. A car accident.’ He sat beside her on the bed now. She drew back her hair and showed him the scar. ‘They were taking me away from the house.’

  ‘Oh God.’ He touched her for the first time, a light touch on the temple.

  ‘Why didn’t you trust me – tell me where you were going? I could have kept it secret.’

  ‘I couldn’t.’ Her face looked pinched in the lamplight. ‘I was told to avoid boyfriends because, if you were arrested, or captured, it might have been dangerous for you.’

  ‘What else happened?’ He searched her face intently. ‘Something else did, I feel it.’

  ‘A lot . . . I’ll tell you later . . . some good things too. Cleeve told me tonight that Jenke’s information had made a difference, but he wouldn’t be more specific. Even telling me where you were broke all the rules.’

  ‘You’ll probably end up with more medals than me.’

  ‘Probably.’

  He saw the flash of her white teeth, her dimples.

  ‘Incredible,’ he murmured gathering her in his arms. ‘Unbelievable. Ridiculous. You on the train,’ he started to laugh, ‘and before that . . . I went to the concert . . . it was torture listening to you.’

  He wiped tears from her face with his handerchief.

  ‘What happened to you?’ she said at last. ‘You’re not well.’

  ‘I had a prang,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you later. I don’t want to talk about it now.’

  And because the peace was new and precarious, she let him get away with this.

  ‘We thought you were dead,’ she said. ‘Barney gave me a letter from you; he found it in your locker. Didn’t he tell you?’

  ‘I haven’t seen Barney – he’s been away. I’ve hardly seen anyone since I was picked up, but what letter? Oh for heaven’s sake, no.’ It had suddenly dawned on him. ‘That stupid letter. I was so angry . . . I didn’t mean to send it.’

  ‘I got this too.’ She held up her wrist and showed it to him.

  ‘The bracelet. Do you wear it?’

  ‘All the time.’

  He leaned down and kissed her then. He touched her face there, and there; he held her hair in his hands. He led her over to the wooden chair near the sink, and washed the dirt off her feet, grumbling at the state they were in.

  ‘Thank you, Nursey,’ she said. He soaped them and dried them, kissed them gently toe by toe. When he was done, she stood up and he unhooked her dress and they got into the bed together, and she held him close and gave him the sweetest kiss of his life, and then they wept unashamedly. ‘I thought you were dead,’ she sobbed. ‘And I wanted to die with you.’ And he believed her because she was a truthful person; some part of him had known that from the beginning.

  Chapter 50

  Spring came in a rush of flowers – mallow and poppies, purple and white anemones, coltsfoot, marigolds and celandine. She picked handfuls of them from the back garden of the house Ozan had lent them at Muntazah Beach.

  By Ozan’s standards the house was no more than a hut, but they were delighted by its long verandas, its sunny whitewashed rooms, and the small garden at the back, where acacia and jasmine were blooming, and oranges, tangerines and lemons burst from the trees. The house was private, and apart from a honking donkey tethered nearby and some morning birds, it was quiet – a rare luxury after living in camps and communal tents.

  In the mornings, Yusuf, one of Ozan’s servants, arrived on a bicycle with a basket full of wine and fresh bread, cheeses and whatever fish had been netted that day. In a sunny kitchen with blue and white tiles, Saba tried, with mixed success, to learn how to cook.

  But for the first two days, they lay in their whitewashed bedroom in each other’s arms and slept like exhausted animals, laughing when they were awake at what a waste of time this was. Then came the long, lazy days of making love and swimming, of sunbathing and eating barefoot meals by candlelight on their veranda, which overlooked the sea.

  ‘Look,’ she said one night, gazing up into the night sky. ‘That’s Berenice’s Hair.’ She pointed out a line of stars just above the dark. ‘No idea who Berenice was,’ she added. ‘My dad showed me them. In a book.’

  ‘She was the wife of a Macedonian king,’ he told her. ‘When the king went to war, she made a pact with Aphrodite, the goddess of love, that if she cut off her hair he would be protected. She took her hair to the temple, but it disappeared. A court astronomer claimed he’d found it again, as a new constellation, which was tactful otherwise all hell would have broken loose.’

  ‘How do you know these things?’

  ‘From flying and general brilliance.’ He was still peering at the stars, light years away himself for that moment.

  She liked him knowing things. It comforted her.

  He’d been reading Cavafy’s poems to her. He’d discovered the poet had once lived in the Rue Lepsius, four doors down from them.

  There’s no ship for you, there’s no road.

  Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,

  You’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

  ‘That was how I felt,’ Dom told her. ‘When you left and I couldn’t find you. It was the worst feeling in the world.’

  Sometimes you are happy without knowing it, and sometimes you are happy and completely aware of it – its preciousness, its fleetingness.

  And there were times when the almost mystical perfection of these days frightened Saba – everything felt right, nothing was lacking. It was so unlike the rest of life, with its uncertainties, its suffering and boredom, and all the other tragedies, large and small, she had witnessed. She wanted to make it last for ever, but was old enough now to know this was impossible. The world was changing and would change again. Dom was waiting to hear about his next posting – the Desert Air Force had mostly packed up its tents and gone home, its pilots flown to other squadrons in Sicily or Burma. Saba was rehearsing for Ozan’s next extravaganza in Cairo, and singing for what troops remained in Suez or Cairo. Out in the desert all the bric-a-brac of war – the hangars, temporary runways, fuel depots – were disappearing under heaps of sand.

  Halfway through their time at Muntazah, Arleta came to stay. She arrived with Saba’s mail, two packets of Turkish delight with pistachio nuts in it, a bottle of gin and a toy camel, found in a souvenir shop, with bulging crimson eyes that glowed horrifyingly when you plugged it in.

  She handed Saba a letter written in her mother’s round schoolgirl hand.

  Saba took it into the bedroom, locked the door behind her. Her hands were shaking as she opened it, thinking it brought
news of her father’s death – something she dreamed of regularly, always with a shocking feeling of loss.

  But here was good news: little sister Lou was back from the valleys, cheeky as ever, doing well in her exams, a proper little grown-up girl. Tan, fit as a flea and with a new friend, another Turkish lady who lived in their street. And in the last paragraph, her mother sounded an unusual note of treason.

  Don’t you dare not come to Pomeroy Street when you get back to Blighty, because this will always be your home, no matter what your father says. He has just signed on for another tour with Fyffes and is away even more than he used to be, so we’ll have plenty of time, and to be honest with you, Saba love, I’m glad you’ve made your decision. You have your own life to lead and I have mine, and I should have left him years ago – he’s always wanted things his way and I’m fed up to the back teeth with it.

  This was a shock.

  Up until now she’d seen her mother in a number of confusing, contradictory guises – good sport, loyal peacemaker, theatrical cheerleader, food maker – but that small snarl of underdog rage in the last sentence made her wonder if she’d ever truly known her at all, and the thought that the war might have changed Mum too was upsetting. She talked it over with Arleta during one of their long, lazy morning swims towards a raft, moored a hundred yards or so from the beach.

  She told her how Mum – a woman who once wouldn’t leave the house unless hair and make-up were band-box fresh – had happily gone off for her daily shifts at Curran’s factory in her dreadful overalls and turban, and how she’d told Saba it was a lot more fun than being in the house all day, particularly if your husband was at sea.

  ‘Fair comment.’ Arleta took this calmly. ‘It would drive me mad being home all day – and you. Boring.’

  Arleta, who was trying not to get her hair wet, had the look of a startled Afghan hound being forced to swim for the first time.

  ‘I mean, look at all this,’ she panted. She waved her hand at the wide horizon. ‘We got it through work, and we’ll miss it, won’t we?’

  Saba looked around her: at the dazzling blue sea, the cloudless sky, the shore with its fine white sand, the house on the cliff where she and Dom had been so happy.

  ‘Do we have to leave?’ A pointless question.

  ‘Don’t be a prat,’ said her friend. ‘England will be horrible, but it’s our kind of horrible.’

  They’d reached the raft. Arleta, trimmer than ever after weeks of dancing, sprang from the water like a glamorous Aphrodite; she shook her hair out and flopped down beside Saba, then lifted each leg in the air, profoundly pleased by what she saw.

  They lay for a while, side by side, arms touching, soaking up the sun, and then Arleta asked:

  ‘Have you thought about the India tour yet?’ She slid her eyes towards her.

  Saba sighed – this was tricky. They’d both been offered a three-week ENSA tour in India, but she hadn’t yet found the moment to mention it to Dom.

  ‘I honestly can’t decide at the moment; it depends on Dom’s posting too, and other things.’

  ‘Saba.’ Arleta sat up and looked at her very seriously. ‘Can I say something, and don’t misunderstand me.’

  ‘If you like.’ Saba sensed a warning she didn’t want.

  ‘Well, it’s just this . . . not saying that you and Dom don’t seem blissfully happy together – you do, and not saying he doesn’t adore you and that you’re not mad about him, and that it’s not all very romantic.’ Arleta clutched her bosom and swirled her eyes. ‘Just . . . don’t give him everything; keep something for yourself.’

  ‘I know that, Arleta,’ she said, even though she was struggling with it. At this moment, all she wanted was to have his babies, to learn to cook, to carry on feeling this honeyed contentment day after day after day. ‘One of the best things about being in ENSA has been doing what I was trained to do, and it’s been tremendous – I really do know that.’

  Arleta’s eyebrow was still raised. ‘When you thought he was dead,’ she persisted, ‘you stopped singing, or at least you wanted to, and take it from your Auntie Arl, no man is worth that.’

  There was a thread of unhappiness in Arleta’s voice. It wasn’t the first time Saba had noticed it since she’d arrived.

  ‘Arl, don’t say a word if you don’t want to, but what happened to Barney? You’ve hardly mentioned him.’

  Arleta’s voice sounded hazy. ‘Barney?’ she said. ‘Oh, finished. Completely. I meant to tell you. It’s fine, darling, honestly – you don’t have to say anything. He’s going back to England and I knew it would happen. I didn’t want to tell you in front of Dom in case I said bitter and twisted things and Dom felt forced to defend him.’

  ‘So good, not upset then?’ Saba trod cautiously – Arleta loathed people feeling sorry for her.

  ‘Not at all,’ Arleta said firmly. ‘I knew it would happen. It did. End of story, and besides, I need to see my little boy again and to at least try and stop messing around for a few years, but oh God, I shall miss it here too – it’s been heavenly.’ She sang heavenly like an opera singer.

  ‘What will you miss most, Arlie: the scorpions? The dead dog under the stage in Suez? Sand in your knickers? Sharing a canvas sink with Janine?’

  ‘Ha, ha, ha – hard to tell, smartypants. Well, all that too. Let’s not get too sentimental.’

  They were quiet for a while. Arleta sighed deeply.

  ‘I’ll miss you,’ she said, the way she came out with things sometimes, simple and clean.

  ‘You’ve been a good friend.’

  They were silent for a moment, and then Arleta stood up and muttered, ‘Last swim, to hell with it.’ She flung herself into the air and wildly bicycling her legs, broke the surface of the water with a splash. With her wet hair plastered around her face, she looked ten years younger.

  ‘Oh God, that’s wonderful,’ she spluttered. ‘That’s the way to have a proper swim,’ and they headed side by side towards the shore.

  Arleta left the next day on the back of Dom’s motorbike – he’d offered to drop her at the train station in Alexandria. They were standing on the doorstep when she appeared, a film star today in dark glasses, hair swathed in chiffon. She turned to Saba.

  ‘Give me a hug, you mad little creature.’ She put her arms around her, and enveloped her in Shalimar. Tears poured down her face. She brushed them away and got on the bike with a chorus girl’s high kick. Shortly before she disappeared in a cloud of dust, she kissed her fingers, flung them passionately towards Saba shouting, ‘Crepi il lupo,’ a dramatic gesture that almost derailed the motorbike.

  And Saba, standing in the dust listening to the fading roar of the motorbike, wondered if she would see her again. Arleta had said it might not be for ages, maybe for never – that was how it was in show business.

  When Dom got back at lunchtime he was covered in dust. He was carrying a package in one hand and an envelope in the other.

  Saba was in the kitchen inexpertly hacking up some bread, and trying to remember how long Mum had done her hard-boiled eggs for. One of the many pleasures of this time was feeding him – the laying out of cheese and ripe tomatoes, early melons and bread on a plate filled her with a tender protectiveness never felt before.

  She stood at the window smiling. She heard the motorbike cut out. He came into the kitchen and kissed the back of her neck.

  ‘My girl.’ He put his arms around her. ‘My beautiful girl. Are you sad?’

  ‘A bit.’ But glad too that it was just them again.

  He slid his hand around her waist and inhaled her hair.

  ‘Come and have a drink with me. I’ve got a surprise.’

  He led her to the veranda. They sat down together on a wicker chair. He handed her the envelope, watching her closely while she opened it.

  Two tickets.

  She read them, put her hand over her mouth and gasped.

  ‘A cruise up the Nile. Oh Dom! How fantastic!’ She squealed and jumped into his lap. />
  ‘The timing,’ he said excitedly, ‘is perfect. The AOC has given us a fortnight’s leave, and who knows when we’ll have to leave Egypt now, and I thought, what the hell, I’ll go ahead and book it. It’s a beautiful old-fashioned boat, the Philae, and we can call in on all those old pharaohs in their pyramids, they’re all opening again now the war’s over. We can go to the Valley of the Kings.’ His eyes gleamed with excitement.

  ‘Hang on, hang on, Dom.’ She examined the tickets more closely. She’d stopped listening.

  ‘The first week, that should be fine shouldn’t it?’

  ‘No, Dom,’ she said with a sinking feeling. ‘No. I absolutely can’t. No chance. It leaves on the twenty-third of March – the week of Ozan’s Cairo concert.’

  ‘Oh fuck.’ He made no attempt to hide his disappointment.

  ‘Didn’t you remember that? And do you mind not swearing in front of me like that,’ even though she didn’t mind all that much.

  ‘No,’ he said flatly, although she had told him. ‘No, I didn’t remember. So, is it always going to be like this?’ he said. There was a steely note in his voice she hadn’t heard before.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like this.’

  ‘Probably,’ thinking blast it, you should have remembered – it’s important to me.

  She slammed down her glass, stood up and glared at him.

  ‘Dammit, Saba, don’t look at me like that.’

  ‘Look at you like what?’ she bellowed. ‘I’m not looking like anything.’

  And so on until they were shouting so loudly that the donkey in the next door field started honking with alarm.

  He flung open the veranda gate and went down to the beach, and sat down with his head in his hands, childishly crushed. He’d pictured the whole thing on the way home – the boat drifting up the Nile; waking up in her arms; seeing feluccas and little villages, and then the wonderful drama of the Valley of the Kings, with her by his side. He’d waited for so long.

  After a few moments of intense self-pity, he stood up and, walking to the edge of the sea, chose a flat stone and hurled it, making it hop four times across the water before it sank.