Into Suez (14 page)

‘Your mother was a pearl,’ said Mona. ‘That’s all we can say. A pearl.’

‘Yes.’

‘When I’d lost my confidence, she gave it back to me. I mean, in my music. But just tell me this, Nia, if you don’t mind. You have done so well in your life and professionally of course you’ve reached the top of the academic tree. But was your childhood a happy one? Your stepfather – was he kind to you?’

That was easy. ‘He’s always been good to me, Mona. More than good. I was an absolute pest and a brat, but Dad persevered and always saw that I had everything I needed. He’s still alive, you know. I’m very close to Dad – but not in a wordy sort of way. He just is. Like, you know, a landscape.’

‘I cannot tell you how glad I am – relieved – to hear it.’ Mona sat back in her chair and closed her eyes, a burden lifted.

‘Archie had been Mam’s childhood sweetheart, you know.’

Mona’s eyes opened wide. Evidently Ailsa had not told her friend everything. ‘That I … well, didn’t know. Well.
She never exactly said. I knew they were very close. And your mother – was she happy?’

Happy was hardly the word. Ailsa had appeared content with her husband, devoted to him. Eternally grateful to him, watchful over him. Archie wasn’t one for singing and dancing. Nia remembered Ailsa patiently explaining the jokes in Christmas crackers, the table heaving with the children’s laughter at their dad’s perplexity. And he was the best-ironed husband in Shropshire, Nia used to say. Even his farm clothes were in a state of outrageous laundering perfection. Nowadays he just slouched around in baggy old cords, content to be a comfortable old ragbag, as he said. Nothing of Archie’s ever seemed to wear out, at least according to him.

‘He was a good husband to her in every way,’ Nia said. ‘She liked the farm – and they had a market garden which she more or less took over. Green fingers she had.’

‘I didn’t know that. How lovely. Thank you for telling me.’ Mona was like a child being told some marvellous story. Sucking on the details like sweets. At the same time the lines of her face folded in fresh sorrow.

‘Dad doesn’t have much sense of humour.’

‘Ah, and Ailsa did, of course.’

‘Did she?’

‘Oh, she was a serious person, thoughtful and enquiring, but she could also be such a giggler, once she got going, couldn’t she?’

‘I never saw that side of her. I can’t honestly pretend we really got on. Sorry. We quarrelled a hell of a lot. Not at the end, when Poppy was born. But earlier. Well, when I say quarrelled, it was totally one-sided. I yelled; she just looked daggers.’

‘Well, of course. You were mother and daughter. What did you quarrel about?’

‘Politics, miniskirts, women’s rights, the lot. Her views were a bit fossilised, even to the point of claiming that she didn’t have political opinions. She left those to the menfolk. See what I mean? Politically incorrect to the n’th degree. She had this godawful friend, Irene, who came to live near us. Ghastly woman. I think they egged one another on. They’d always be in and out of one another’s houses and they’d complain over their knitting about their children going to the dogs.’

‘Ah, poor Irene White!’

‘I don’t know about
poor
. She was a complete tartar. She died only last month, in fact.’

‘Her son was named Christopher.’

‘Yes. Tôpher White the poet. He spells it with a circumflex to show he’s Celtic. He isn’t Celtic, as far as I know. Poor guy, he never had a chance with a mother like Irene. And this portrait of his saintly father smirking down on him from over the fireplace. Topher turned out a bit of a sociopath. Still, at least he has his very weird poetry. I get on with Topher. But Irene’s other boy, Tim, was the favourite: he could do no wrong. Except that he grew up a complete creep and he’d steal from Irene’s handbag to pay for the drug of choice.’

‘Irene’s husband was your Daddy’s closest friend. They’d fought in the Western Desert together – and then they were your next door neighbours in El-Marah.
Good-hearted
, decent people. I don’t know how much you know, my dear, about those times? I hope you could forgive your mother. Dear, lovely Ailsa – she was so deeply hurt.’

Deeply hurt. Suddenly Nia couldn’t go on.

‘No more, Mona. Don’t.’ She stumbled to her feet, clattering the crockery and toppling the chair back so that she had to pick it up, rummaging for the clothes and bag she’d hung on it.

Dear, lovely Ailsa. Deeply hurt. Something terrible and eerie was in the offing – knowledge Nia had been holding off for many years. It would not have been so bad if Mam were still alive. The terrible, smiting blow would have come as a relief. Nia could have made amends. She could have gone to Mam and said,
I get it now. I do understand, oh please let me love you and try to love me back. Tell me your side of things. I’m with you every step of the way
. But there was no way back.

‘It’s all right, Nia. It’s all right. Let’s talk again when you feel up to it. Or never. We don’t need to talk. I’m so sorry. I’m just very pleased to see you. I got ahead of myself. Just seeing you is so thrilling.’

‘Later, Mona. Not yet.’

Her tears streamed down. It was the way the old woman had said
your Daddy
. The echoes rang round the emptying lido, where the band was packing up and the guests were removing themselves in twos and threes to shower and change for dinner. Mona had Nia in her arms and was rocking her, going
shush, shush
. Holding, rocking Nia, not now, of course, no. But at some time far in the past when the unthinkable thing had happened.

‘But don’t go away, Mona,’ she pleaded, blowing her nose, fiddling in her pocket for her cabin key. She was going nowhere, Mona said, unless ordered off the
Terra Incognita
by Nia. They both grinned. And after all, there was so much to be experienced of this almost colonial way of life they had on the ship. Mona was fascinated: it
brought back the gracious living of the Shepheards Hotel and the dear old Mena House at Giza. And apart from all that, she’d been welcomed aboard by the Captain as a VIP and agreed to give an hour’s recital in, apparently, the Admiral Nelson Room, whereupon the cost of her journey had been waived.

‘You missed Remembrance Day,’ said Nia. They got into a conversational stride again. She told Mona of the veteran with the black beret and blazer displaying his row of medals, videoing the occasion. The junior officer dipping the flag, the padre, the vanishing pieties of her parents’ generation, remembered deeds and places that soon would all be gone. The ballroom dancing and the bridge. The deck quoits and the indoor golf championships. The final feast swallowed in the dark.

The pianist raised her hands slowly from the keys; held them suspended, head bent. Piano and pianist separated into two. There was silence. Her hands returned to her lap, head still bent, in a posture that quenched the glow of her pearls in the darkness of her hair and her black high-necked evening dress, fashioned like an Arab
gallabiyya
. The silence in the auditorium lengthened out like a long-held breath. Not a cough or a rustle. From the passionate intensities of its centre, the subtle minor key had led the sonata to the verge of the grave, the music laying down its life to eternity. There was no more to say. Fertile land gave way to the desert.

Silence, stillness.

Then the storm of applause. The Egyptian orchestra raised its hands to the pianist, clapped and cheered. Mona
got to her feet, her balance unsteady for a moment, looking oddly shy and unnerved. Standing by the piano under the spotlights, she bowed. The audience rose. More, more. But Mona would give no more. This was all she had to say. It was her first public performance since her hands had got their music back. Ailsa, sitting three rows back from the stage, understood that Mona could not supply an encore. She tried not to look at Mona’s husband and Alex at the end of the front row, clapping wildly, but saw them anyway out of the corner of her eye. She breathed shallow, carried by Beethoven’s music into the aching recognition of another and higher world altogether, for which she was homesick. A perspective from which one saw the larger picture, the earth from the air, where the banal doings of everyday were inconsequential. It was a feeling Ailsa had experienced on the one occasion she’d flown; when she walked the Long Mynd massif, or saw the stars from the desert. She yearned to belong in this world of Mona’s. For Mona to take her there, fly with her high above it all, the stupidity, the trivia. Her heart twisted, to think she’d been the one to restore Mona’s power.
I’m good for something then
. And yet at the same time her husband’s hand stole across and cherishingly brushed her bare arm, so that the hairs stood up: the music also had to do with the love-without-end she shared with Joe.

Hedwig, sitting next to her, wept without restraint, Norman concernedly clasping his wife’s hand in both of his, fearful perhaps for the baby, not understanding that these were good tears, art-tears. Ailsa glanced at Joe. His face looked, she thought, stricken, as if he’d seen something at once terrible and wonderful.

Whatever was he thinking and feeling?

The audience rose to its feet. Mona held out her arms for a moment, with a sort of shrug; then returned to her place at the piano. Ah, she is going to give us an encore, the audience concluded. Murmuring and exclaiming, they settled down. They were mistaken. It was now time for the Egyptian singer. Closing the lid of the instrument, the pianist yielded place. She was to remain on-stage through the virtuoso’s performance.

The Egyptian members of the audience, out of respect to the European custom of deferential silence to musicians, had applauded decorously. But for them, as Hedwig was now explaining to Joe, murmuring across Ailsa, silence implied dislike or lack of interest. Egyptian music was full of improvisation, it was participatory, she told him: it was something shared between the musician and the listeners – like love, she said. Their
Kultur
is so very different. They think we are cold eggs, Hedwig explained, no, cold
fish
. She had to raise her voice as the Arab audience took over the auditorium, calling out with passionate abandon for their singer to come on stage. Many of them were up on their feet.

Ailsa stole a glance at Mona, gazing now towards the wings, along with the Arab orchestra, waving their violins and tabors, their drums and lutes. They all smiled and beckoned, in sign to the audience that the beloved was at hand. Not showing herself. Immanent.

Joe’s head swivelled and he glowered across at the noise-makers.
Pipe down, you wogs, for Pete’s sake
, his look said. At this moment Mona’s eyes locked with Ailsa’s. Fingers at her lips, she blew Ailsa a kiss.

‘Joe, it’s all right,’ she whispered to her husband. ‘It’s
not rudeness. It’s their own kind of courtesy.’

‘If you say so.’

Expectation mounted; soared. The auditorium was a scene of uproar. Nothing happened on stage except that the orchestra beckoned the unseen singer with yet more flamboyant gestures. Hedwig, excited, grabbed Ailsa’s hand and squeezed. Her face looked exalted. Ailsa, for an unpleasant moment, had a vision of blonde Hedwig at some dreadful rally or other, in a crowd high on mass emotion. And always there came this query about Hedwig – but where it came from, from reason or prejudice, Ailsa did not know, for after all Hedwig was ready to embrace another culture, the antithesis of her own. She squeezed Hedwig’s hand in return.

Embarrassed at the antics of their Egyptian counterparts, the Britons smiled and raised their eyebrows, tucking in their chins, nudged one another or pretended to ignore the whole thing.

‘All that’s part of the performance,’ Ailsa said to Joe, her hair soft on his cheek.

‘What, like a pantomime?’

‘Well. Oh – well, perhaps. In a way.’

She heard what his tense posture said. Why can’t the wogs control themselves in a public place? They were making this exhibition of themselves just to nark us. She wished she hadn’t brought Joe. Why did he have to make these faces? But it had been preferable to invite him. Ailsa had kept quiet about the incident of the arrest in Ish and the
Café Grec
and Irene hadn’t said a word. Ailsa preferred to be straightforward. Was it actually true that any relationship with Mona must be carried on behind Joe’s back? Now that he’d heard her play and knew how serious
– noble – Mona’s music was, perhaps he’d turn a blind eye to their meeting up occasionally, not too often and discreetly. What could possibly be wrong with such a friendship?

The artist walked on to the stage, wearing a simple white dress, black hair parted in the middle and drawn back into a chignon, jewels hanging from ears and neck. Oum Koulsoum was entering her middle years, inclining to plumpness, her features dramatically dark. She carried a decorative handkerchief. As they greeted one another, Mona looked slight and girlish, though she was the taller by six inches.

It began. The desert gave way to fertile land.

And this is ecstasy, Ailsa thought. She knew now what had roused the faces of the men in the
Café Grec
into rapture, dreaming awake as they listened to the wireless. The living voice was flagrant in its abandonment; it was nakedly powerful. The voice of Egypt, as Nobby Bowen had said. Ailsa grasped the principle now: the words of the poem to be sung were sacrosanct. The words drove the music. But the music was endlessly virtuosic and where they went together depended on the singer’s improvisations in response to the promptings of her audience, in mutual obedience to subtle and ancient rules of which Ailsa knew nothing. Over and over Oum Koulsoum repeated some phrase, evoking its meaning in variation, melisma, voice-breaking. She flirted her handkerchief at the audience, made love to it with
long-lashed
eyes. Ailsa lost all sense of time. There was no awareness of beginning, middle and end. She forgot to worry what Joe was thinking, or Mona. After each ascending phrase, the audience replied, urging the singer to repeat, shouting compliments.

Joe fidgeted, crossing and recrossing his legs. He sighed. Ailsa glanced at her watch. An hour and a quarter had passed.