Into Suez (23 page)

‘Please.’

When Mona came in, Hedwig took her hand and wouldn’t let go. She thanked her warmly and appeasingly for everything. Please sit down here beside me. I am so grateful, I cannot express my gratitude. Would you like to hold the baby? Mona was embarrassed. She’d been a hopeless duffer, she confessed. No earthly use at all. It was Ailsa who was the midwife. She gazed, fascinated, at the boy her friend had delivered, as if she could never gaze her fill. Ailsa used the last few pictures on the reel of film, to photograph mother and child, before Norman and the
medics arrived and the room was full of looming men, experts, taking over, ruling the roost.

The wee man was a good size, said the doctor from Fayid. He congratulated Ailsa on sterling work. She took him aside and told him about the dead foetus.

‘Often the way. Happens more frequently than people imagine. Mother didn’t see it? Good. Not trained, are you? No, then you did jolly well, Mrs Roberts. Good show, congratulations. Plenty of pluck, eh, and a dollop of good old female intuition?’

Ailsa simply could not resist it. She hitched her skirt over her thighs and straddled the Tiger. My turn now.

Sleepy Nia at the bedroom window nodded her sage head. Put up a finger to her lips:
Secret!

Ailsa wrapped her hands round the grips, breathing in the exciting scents of hot rubber and oil. The Tiger sat molten between her spread legs, despite having been parked in shadow. Joe’s pride and joy. With the Whites gone, he could display the beast openly, the guilty beast, without fear of upsetting poor mad Irene – not that anything Joe did could have disturbed Irene’s piteous attachment to himself. However was she coping back home in Birmingham without Ailsa’s husband to simper over?

I’m getting rather nasty, Ailsa thought. It’s because I’m champing at the bit.

‘Turn the key, Mami! Turn it!’ Nia shrieked. ‘Go on – roar!’

Joe would not be amused. He would say,
But Ailsa fach, 
it is too dangerous
. He’d mean (she’d wave her advanced licence in front of his eyes, he could hardly quarrel with that) it is so immodest, ladies don’t, and at the back of his mind would be the songs the men sang about getting your leg over.

‘I shan’t tell!’ Nia called, bouncing up and down.

You say that now, miss, but when you’ve extorted a sweet cigarette from him, and you’re cuddled up for a bedtime story….

Dismounting, Ailsa resentfully unpegged the
sun-stiffened
towels. Since Luxor she’d felt stalled and stale. Chores were irksome. Egypt had struck her senses a reeling blow: its colours, scents, tastes. For all that she had winced away from Mona on the night of Eric’s birth, now she dreamed of Thebes and Memnon, wandering there freely with a friend, the mind opening to wide vistas impossible in this cage. As they left Luxor, Mona had suggested a jaunt to Giza, to see the Sphinx and the Pyramid of Cheops. They could stay a night at Mena House, an old hunting lodge that had been turned into a hotel, at the very foot of the Pyramids. How would Ailsa like to wake up in the morning and pull back the curtains, to see old Cheops blazing in the sun? Wander the Mena gardens together? Ride camels or horses maybe, side by side, into the desert?

Ailsa had the impression that what happened there would change her life.

But how could it possibly be managed? Luxor had been a one-off. Joe was intuitive. His antennae had radar sensitivity. Already her husband seemed to have detected some shift in her, a change he couldn’t put a name to. Galled, Ailsa daily resorted to the meanness of using
Hedwig as an alibi. After sitting with her for half an hour, she’d skedaddle to Ish, under cover of an errand for Hedwig. Tempting the gods. It had got to stop. The baby Ailsa had delivered thrived but its mother sat listlessly peering out of the wire netting into the desert.
Which way is Luxor?
she’d asked that morning. She wanted to face towards it. Luxor was Hedwig’s Mecca, where, Ailsa intuited, the dead baby called her from the other world. And perhaps she seemed to hear it crying – along with all her other dead.

Baby blues, the MO reassured the anxious husband. Quite normal – and all the more to be expected in view of the difficult birth. The doctor was gentle and sympathetic, a youngish, sunburnt man in his thirties, with a surprising head of silver hair. Young mothers come out of it when they’re ready. Your wife is tired out, he said to Norman. Give her all the help you can; make much of her. As long as Hedwig was caring for the baby, not attacking it or anything? No? No cause to worry then. But keep an eye out. Give her Guinness for the milk. Does she seem to love her son? Norman was unable to admit that his wife showed no more than a dutiful affection.

If necessary, the doctor had said, we can speak to one of the consultants at Fayid: one of the psychologists. Very good, very humane people. Relating this to Ailsa, Norman had looked shaken, out of his depth. The doctor assured him there was no stigma associated with mental problems these days, nothing out of the ordinary. But
still
– the shame of it.

Habibi
, thought Ailsa.
Habibi
would help her. She’d ask Mona if something could be arranged.

Hedwig took Eric out in the pram only when it was
unavoidable, and then always within school hours. Otherwise a rabble of kids would follow her, chanting,
Adolf! Adolf!

‘Which is not his name and never could be. So why do they do this cruelty?’

‘Pig-ignorance. Our “superior” culture,’ said Ailsa. ‘Try not to take it to heart. Now then, Hedwig, what can I do for you? I’ve got half an hour. Why don’t I wash the nappies?’

‘You will do no such thing. I am perfectly capable of my duties.’

‘Of course you are, but we could all do with a hand from time to time.’

‘You are so good to me, Ailsa.’ Hedwig had relaxed her rigidly watchful gaze. ‘I know I’m a most frightful bore.’

‘Nonsense. It’s natural. You had a rotten time in Luxor. Bound to take a while to settle your mind.’

‘May I confide to you something?’

An assimilated Jewish girl, her name was Gudrun, had been in Hedwig’s class at school, before the Jewish children were expelled. A clever, original girl. She’d been in hiding right under everyone’s nose throughout the war, sheltered, as it turned out, by a Christian group called the
Bund
. She’d moved between their homes, not just around Hamburg but all over the place. Gudrun had been conspicuous, a redhead with such terrific cheek: she’d ride the trams around the city and flirt with the SS-men bold as brass. Towards the end, she’d dropped out of sight.

On the night of the fire-bombing, Hedwig ran for her life, she was on fire, her hair was on fire, look, there is the bald patch, it never grew back, you have seen the scars on my legs. Running between towers of flame, choking with
smoke, Hedwig sees this girl streaking past. Gudrun, having kept alive for six years, escaping every deportation, breaks out under cover of the fire.

‘And did you ever see her again?’

‘I don’t know if she got away. You have to hope. But then I wonder if I was seeing things.’

In favour of the story was its absurd implausibility, although Ailsa knew that a few Jews had survived even in Berlin. Gudrun was hardly a Jewish name. If Hedwig had been making it up, she’d surely have called her Sara or Rachel.

‘That’s all behind us now, Hedwig.’

But Hedwig had bleakly replied, ‘Penalties are required. To the twentieth generation.’

‘No,’ Ailsa had insisted. ‘No, they’re not.’

Eric’s crying had interrupted them. He’d batted his arms around, trussed up in hand-knitted blue woollies. Picking up the bulbous boy and handing him to his mother for feeding, Ailsa had thought, What a weight! And far too hot in all that clobber. She felt a singular interest in him. The mother, glancing at her watch and unbuttoning her blouse, had put him to the breast. Her heart was elsewhere. It was with the dead. Eric’s unblinking violet eyes were fixed on her face but she rarely looked at him when he fed. The most natural thing in the world and yet Hedwig could not do it. From Eric’s angle his mother’s face must have looked featureless as a third udder, a planet beyond his ken. She performed all her tasks because she was
verpflichtet
. Duty was a great comfort, she’d explained, looking past Ailsa out of the window to where sand pelted like hail against the glass.

‘For goodness’ sake!’ Ailsa, who found not a crumb of
comfort in duty, had burst out. ‘Honestly, Hedwig. That’s absolutely Prussian!’

‘My father is Prussian! Of the highest integrity.’

‘Well, sorry, but
Pflicht
is piffle. Look where it’s got us. You’re bloody lucky, you know, to have Norman and Eric. They love you. Why can’t you just be happy with what you’ve got? Nothing else is real.’

For a moment, Hedwig’s canny expression and indrawn breath had suggested something about the pot calling the kettle black. She knew very well that Ailsa was no more satisfied with her lot than she was with hers. Less, perhaps. But she’d said nothing of that.

A pause. Hedwig had patted the baby’s back, holding him against her neck, where he bubbled posset into her hair. Then she’d let out an odd little giggle and said, ‘Thank you, Ailsa. You are a tonic. Norm does not like to cross me. And I am a bit of a wallower.’

Ailsa had missed the bus to Ish. Mona would have waited at the
Café Grec
. She’d have watched the door, biting her lip. Giving up, she’d have called it a day. Mona had worked after the war with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Germany, hadn’t she, resettling displaced persons? She might know how to trace German soldiers who’d disappeared in Russia. That would be something. But Ailsa hadn’t spoken of this to Hedwig. She’d walked home thinking, I’ll ride that bike if it’s the last thing I do.

Nia screamed, ‘Get back on! I won’t tell!’

‘Lie down now, my beauty,’ Ailsa called up to her daughter. ‘Siesta!’

The new woman in Chalkie’s flat was whacking the mats. Ever since she’d arrived, Mrs Wintergreen had
given those mats hell. Not that they’d needed beating, for Irene had kept everything immaculate. But nobody trusted her predecessor’s cleaning. A Warrant Officer’s wife, condemned to slum it amongst sergeants, would naturally assert superior cleanliness. On arrival she’d said – brayed, rather – that after Singapore and Aden, this posting was a doddle, her name was Hilda Wintergreen and was there a Guide troop on camp? She’d do her bit as Arkela. Something of a Memsahib Hilda seemed: everything wilting Irene had not been.

Poor soul, Irene was wandering like a displaced ghost, so her frequent letters testified. Ailsa felt nothing but relief that the unnatural closeness of the two families had been severed. And not only because Irene wanted what Ailsa had got – Joe – but because she did no good to Joe. Something in Ailsa’s husband was coarser, harsher. Irene reinforced a ranting prejudice in him that Ailsa could not melt away. It reminded her of his crude dad in Treforys going on about the Paddies and bred moments of sheer abhorrence. Her husband saw it, and was hurt and soured.

The Khamsin season hardly helped. Sand in the bud of your eye, up your nostrils, between your teeth. The Egyptians thought the hot desert wind commemorated the fifty days Cain carried the murdered body of his brother Abel on his back, looking for a place to hide it. A sand blizzard cast Ailsa and Nia down and whipped their faces, so that her daughter cried out in pain before Ailsa could fumble her into a kangaroo pouch made out of her full skirts. A wretched, turbulent season.

Dumping the washing on the kitchen table, Ailsa marched straight back out. Climbed on to the Tiger; started up the engine and rode down the path, on to the waste
patch behind the buildings where the kiddies played, which was now deserted. The knack returned, as long as you didn’t think about it, in a rush of reverberation that shuddered through your frame. Ailsa’s back remembered how to lean and balance. Her shoulders reasserted their strength. The Tiger told her exactly what to do.

Just one lap. For a lark.

She roared off. Was Ailsa Birch again in tunic and trousers, with a bag of letters strapped to her shoulder, a heavy belt around her middle. Ailsa Birch dodging and weaving through London traffic, as she had at nineteen, when you were invulnerable. All dazzling, charismatic ego. Young men had been dying all over the world. Death was the dark angel Ailsa had given a run for his money. She gave him a run now, slewing up sand as she cornered, and picking up speed in the return.

She could fetch Mona and clear off with her into the desert, leaving behind these contemptible barracks. Sauce for the gander was sauce for the goose, why the hell shouldn’t it be? And why should Joe be
narked
, as he sometimes illiterately complained, with his wife? In that mood he’d twist everything round until she, who bent over backwards to avoid blaming him, must be the scapegoat for the evil his tomfoolery had unleashed upon his friend.

Enough. Checking herself, Ailsa brought the Tiger stammering home. Joe would spot the tyre marks at once, of course, and know his darling had been tampered with. Too bad. She ran upstairs to check on Nia. The child lay asleep under the mosquito net, flushed, thumb half in, half out of her mouth, tongue intermittently lapping it. Ailsa sat and flicked through a magazine. Nia beneath the
net looked like a little white bride, the golliwog a comical wide-eyed groom, whose black moon-face peeped sidelong at Nia with a simpleton’s smile. A swelling on the inner part of her daughter’s elbow caught Ailsa’s attention: a mosquito bite presumably. She must remember to dab it with disinfectant when Nia woke up. No sense in disturbing her now.

Ailsa’s world had finally burst out of the frame of Joe’s narrow picture. There was so much she could never broach with him. She kept her mouth shut. Yet not one of these concealments could count as a guilty secret, not in any halfway decent world. No, Ailsa didn’t think so. Not at all! What was she guilty of? Just getting out of line. Being, not even a black sheep, but a piebald sort of sheep in a field of whitish fleeces.

It’s not
me
, she thought, should feel ashamed. It’s you lot.
Baa
, she thought,
baa
to the bleating lot of you.

The apple tart was safely in the Belling. Ailsa saw, twisting round, her hands covered in flour, that Joe had let in the makings of a colony of flies and was swatting at them with the door still ajar. He didn’t kiss her. She crossed the kitchen and nudged the door shut with her hip.

‘A parcel came,’ she said. ‘For you. I didn’t open it.’

The sweater had been immaculately pressed and packed in tissue paper. Ailsa heard him rustle the leaves apart and glance in briefly; then replace the lid and leave it where it was. Presumably Irene’s devotion embarrassed him, although he had lapped it up, as far as she could see. Was that fair? Obscurely, she wanted him to be in the wrong.

She smelt beer on his breath. She didn’t like that. The
sky was filmed with a dusty pall and the sand looked grey and shifted around in the desultory breeze.

‘Don’t start drinking at this time of day, Joe,’ Ailsa said. ‘I wish you wouldn’t.’