Into Suez (25 page)

‘Auntie Betsi, Auntie Gaynor, Auntie Mair, Auntie Magdalen and my Auntie
Mona
!’ she recited.

She felt her mother and father flinch, as they did sometimes when she showed them up in public and they had to whisper sharply. But they did not whisper.

Paddy the driver half turned and asked, over his shoulder, if she had ever floated in the Dead Sea.

‘She hasn’t actually,’ said Ailsa. ‘No.’

Well, he went on, you can’t really swim there, don’t expect to swim, but you can’t drown either. The water will buoy you up, he said. It’s thick with minerals. Bitter, he explained, that’s from
marah
, bitter waters, the waters of desolation.

‘Why can’t I say
Auntie Mona
?’ Nia burst forth.

‘Shush, dear.’

Not everyone knows this, the driver said, but the bottom is covered with millions of empty spiky shellfish, millions and millions! Napoleon saw them when he invaded. And these nasty spiky dead creatures have been there thousands of years, millions even! And no one knows how they got there. And if you tried to walk out, your soles would be cut to ribbons. And before the Canal was dug through – over there in the middle, marked by those buoys, can you see them? Before that, the Bitter Lakes were completely dry, did you know that? And down the middle was a vast bank of salt hard as brick, seven miles high, I’m not joking, I swear. Lot’s wife, you see – that must have been the origin of the story of Lot’s wife in the Bible.

Her mami was holding Nia’s hand in hers, a bit too tight. Pouting, Nia burst out,
‘Mona’s
wife!
Mona’s
wife!’

Mami bent her head and asked how was the poorly arm? There was jelly for tea, she said, and Golly was waiting at the window making funny faces for when Nia came home. And all the neighbours walking past (she bent lower, so that her lips were touching Nia’s forehead), well, they would see Golly peering out of the Roberts window waiting for Nia and her new chum, Penicillin, wouldn’t they?

Nia sighed with renewed contentment. She poked Penicillin’s head up to get a sight of the sails of the feluccas and dhows, plying to and fro, slow and magical. She had forgotten to be cross, enveloped in the blissful love that gathered its force again and radiated towards her from both sides. An ocean liner passed softly across the water, dwarfing the feluccas.

Up in a balloon? Yes, why jolly well not? Sign her up for the full junket, Mona insisted. Seize the hour! This would be a first!

It would mean an early start for the balloons must take advantage of the precious dawn breezes by the Nile. They’d see the Pyramids and the Sphinx from the air. Poppy said she might pass on the balloon ride as she had no head for heights. But she’d definitely want to see her mother and Mona sail up into the air.

And what were the other treats on offer? Mona wanted to know. She scanned tomorrow’s itinerary. Ah, lunch in the Mena House. Not been there for half a century. She wiped her lips with her serviette and sat back.

‘I’ve brought the photos,’ Nia ventured. ‘Of Mam with Poppy. If you’d like to see them.’

Mona turned over the photographs without comment. There was neither a tremor in her hands nor a change of expression until, replacing them in the envelope, Mona handed them back and rose to her feet. Stuffed them into Nia’s hands with rough impatience. She swayed, reaching down to steady herself on the table. She would rest now, Mona said gruffly. An octogenarian balloonist-to-be was wise to take siestas. She would lie down in her cabin. She’d be fine, don’t
fuss. Anno Domini
, it creeps up on you. Later, later. With a peremptory motion of her hand, Mona waved Nia and then the assiduous waiters away, using her stick to support herself to the lift.
Madame! Madame!
they pleaded. But no one dared intervene to help the old woman against her will. All eyes watched Dr Mona Serafin-Jacobs totter into the lift and a momentary hush fell on the surrounding tables in the lido.

‘She’ll be all right,’ said Poppy. ‘Don’t worry, Mum.
She must have loved Gran so much, mustn’t she?’

‘Yes. She did.’

Nia shuffled the photographs in her hands. Her mother’s dewy eyes glistened in the gaunt face as she cradled her grandchild. Ailsa had rarely bestowed such blissful looks on Nia. Not as far as she remembered. But then, why would she have? Nia was not proud of her theatrical adolescent rages. Storming around, crashing doors, denunciations. Ailsa had been made to represent everything Nia abhorred, a handy target. Antediluvian attitudes! You’re a fossil! Marriage is legalised prostitution! What’s this rubbish you’ve kept from my childhood? A fucking
golliwog
! You should be ashamed of yourself! Giving a little girl a
golliwog
! Racist filth! Whatever were you thinking of? What do you mean,
I loved my golly?
For Christ’s sake! What choice does a child have? Anyway what have you ever done with your life? Only Archie had known how to restrain Nia’s outbursts.

When a person had gone, it was forever; a forever lived from hour to hour, day to day. Looking back, it was hard to credit how much time Nia had disdainfully wasted. She’d chosen Cambridge University partly for its distance from Ailsa’s twinsets and pearls and the visits of the abominable Irene; and when she’d embarked on her postgraduate degree, visits home had been rare and phone conversations difficult. Ailsa had been aghast, in her subdued way, at what she called Nia’s antics and especially when she’d been in prison for her CND protests.
You fucking well ought to be proud of me that I stand up to these murderous bastards!
Silence. But the birth of the illegitimate Poppy eighteen months before Ailsa’s death had altered the balance between them.

Into Nia’s mind swam the memory of that day she’d had always seen as set in silver. After Poppy’s birth, she’d been gripped by a needy, weeping compulsion to be with her mother, whatever the cost to either of them. She’d driven up from London to Shropshire with her daughter and the further north-west they got, the greater the purity of frost and mist on the landscape. Uninvited and unannounced, she’d driven into the snowbound farmyard of her childhood. Poppy had been six weeks old when Nia crossed the threshold carrying Ailsa’s grandchild.

The light in the Copsey home had been blanched, a sap-spitting log fire in the grate. Archie had been off in the far field with Les, freeing the stranded ewes. A clean smell of heated linen lingered in the kitchen, mingling with a scent of fried onions. The ironing board was still up and a pile of folded towels lay on the kitchen table. Everything was exactly as it had always been, as if waiting with held breath for just this moment. Taken by storm, Ailsa’s eyes had brimmed with tears. She had not known about a grandchild.

How heartless of me, Nia thought now, not to have shared it with her. Despicable, outrageous. And she never reproached me.

When Nia had passed her mother the little one in her holding blanket, saying,
Her name is Poppy
, Ailsa had looked down with tremulous wonder and joy into the speedwell blue eyes and turned away, the bundle in her arms. Nia had thought:
oh yes, you’ve got what you want now all right. And it isn’t me.
Ailsa had bent down with her light burden. She’d straightened up without it. For she’d turned aside only to lay the child on the couch. Her mother had reached out her arms to Nia, in the most
expressive gesture Nia could remember. She’d rushed into Ailsa’s tenderness, weeping. They’d both sobbed wildly.

The intensity hadn’t lasted. How could it? No, but it had happened. A window between worlds had opened, never fully to close. Perhaps if Ailsa had not been ill – and Nia hadn’t realised how ill her mother had been. Archie had not let on. Tall and willowy, with only a sprinkling of grey hairs, Ailsa with her peachy complexion, perfect teeth and beautiful blue-green eyes had seemed robust enough. But even then she had been dying. In truth the photographs they’d taken of grandmother and granddaughter betrayed gauntness and frailty. Mona must have seen both the melancholy remnant of Ailsa’s beauty and the signs of death in her face.

The truth of it was that some eternally tender mutual wound had lain between mother and daughter – if you touched it, it would bleed and never be stanched. Obviously this was to do with her father, lost in action. A war hero but the government had for long denied that the violence in the Suez Canal Zone after the War constituted a war at all. And here was an odd thing: learning of the successful campaign for a medal for the Canal Zone veterans, Nia had found herself cynically applying for a posthumous gong for Joe Roberts. If there was one going, why shouldn’t she have it? Nia’s motive had been subversive: she had in mind to wear the thing on anti-Iraq War demos with his row of World War II gongs. Back had come the answer: regrettably her late father was ineligible for this medal.

Now Nia startled herself with the thought: Ailsa’s silence was meant to protect me. Her silence was a curtain of love.

Nia and Mona hung lighter than air beneath a house-high bubble of blue silk. They rose together, to float beside a stand of palms. Nia reached out to the rustling fronds of the treetops, cool to the touch and emerald in the red disc of the sun. Stillness and motion seemed the one state.

The scarlet peony blossoms by the trees were veiled girls in red robes, seated cross-legged as they baked early morning bread in a brick oven. You could see that one batch of bread was already baking; dough for the next was being pummeled. Suspended in a yeasty cloud, Nia breathed in the scent of fresh bread mingled with the bitter smoke of a dung fire.

Salaam aleicum,
the balloonists called down.

Aleicum salaam
. Smiling faces tilted up; the girls got to their feet and waved to the folk above.

By imperceptible degrees Mona and Nia drew away, making their weightless way fifty feet into a dream of blue air; they were birds or clouds, silently euphoric. The minarets of Cairo’s many mosques pierced a blue-grey fog, the Nile curving its green ribbon through the city.

A red-gold flush burnished the desert to its horizons. But from moment to moment colour altered, until, when the women looked down at the complex geometry of the Sphinx and the Pyramids, the sands had turned
yellowish-brown
, like the quartzite-tinged colour and texture of female skin in the statues of the Pharaoh’s wives. The desert itself seemed to Nia like the skin of a face, too great for its features to be made out or its expression guessed.

‘Where were you in the night, my sweetheart?’ Ailsa asked Joe, once they’d settled on the Liberty bus for the Saturday shopping trip.

Last night they’d made love but it had left Joe wide awake, as if someone had taken a can opener to his ribcage and exposed the throbbing heart of him. Throwing on some clothes, he’d gone out and hauled the ground sheet off the Tiger, walking the bike up the moonlit road before he mounted, so as not to disturb Ailsa.

‘Couldn’t sleep. I thought you hadn’t heard. I tried to be quiet. Sorry, love.’

‘It’s all right. What was the trouble,
cariad
?’

He liked to hear the Welsh endearments in her mouth. The love in her voice assured him that she was his home, he hers, wherever they lived; no quarrel was final and no bad words unforgivable.

‘Oh, you know. This and that.’

‘Chalkie, was it?’

‘Aye.’

Ailsa said nothing but he felt her sympathising care mantling him. She no longer blamed him, thank the Lord. But he blamed himself. The grief and remorse did not abate. With every day his friend seemed more present, not buried safely in the cemetery at Fayid but burrowing like a maggot in Joe’s body. He clutched his pounding chest and wondered, should he see the MO? Was he building up to a heart attack? Perhaps it was some physical illness he was mistaking for grief. Fingers plucked his emotion like a catgut string; adrenalin rushed in his belly and exploded in spasms, as if to warn of some ambush about to be sprung. But the calamity was in the past. And he was fighting fit.

‘Where did you go?’ Ailsa asked gently. She enclosed his hand in both of hers.

Joe had ridden towards Ish, looking over the canal towards the black world of the Sinai, qualified by moon and starlight, where there were no electric lights, no people, nothing human. Icy cold. The sterile realm of death where nothing changed. Bodies buried there thousands of years ago had desiccated in the sand that leached their liquids and purified them of bacteria and rot. They’d work their way up again with mummified faces recognisable.

In Ish, he’d ridden through glimmering, nearly empty streets. At the Vic no lights had been showing. Back to the Sweet Water Canal where Chalkie’s mutilated body had been tossed by assassins into the filthy flux. Back to the wall of darkness surrounding Fayid Cemetery. Nothing to see, nothing to feel. Weary now, hearing wild dogs howl, wondering what the heck he was doing here, Joe
had turned for home but paused beside Lake Timsah. Leaning the Tiger against a tree, the cone of its light trained on the bank, he’d crouched beside the water, lighting up a fag. Insects had sparked in the nimbus of the Tiger’s single eye. Turning away, Joe had gazed out over the inky water, taking a deep, satisfying drag.

Pure peace out there. Beckoning.

The lake had lapped softly at his feet. The triangular sail of an Arab boat sliding silently past, like a great pale bird, had carved a white wake in the moonlight. A man’s dark head showed against the sail. So close had the vessel passed that moonlight was visible on the lens of the sailor’s eye. In a dream the two men had observed one another, from their separate worlds. No sound except the ripple against the vessel’s bows – and across the still sheet of water the call of night fishermen.

He’d felt, for want of better words, obscurely blessed. Momentarily he’d heard a sigh breathed out and sensed, as if in a dream, the presence of his pal at his shoulder, saying, in his friendly way,
Steady on, mate.

‘I went out for a ride.’

‘Did it help, Joe?’

‘It did, in a way.’ She knew, of course. She read him like a book, as he could never read her.

He took her hand. ‘You weren’t scared without me, were you?’ Soon he’d have to go into the desert for three weeks’ exercises, leaving her alone. The situation was worsening, everyone was aware of it. Endless student demonstrations in Cairo, lynchings, theft and strikes. Anyone could have lynched him last night, Joe reflected. Idiot. What had he been thinking of?

‘Course not.’

Nia nestled on his lap, Penicillin on Ailsa’s and Golly on Nia’s, as the bus nosed its way through heavy traffic. Breeze through the opened window played on their foreheads and fanned Ailsa’s newly washed hair. I nearly struck her, Joe thought.

Aye but, fair play, I didn’t.

He’d promised himself, bargaining with God, to keep a tight rein on his anger. Nia’s illness had unnerved them both. Clinging to one another in an ecstasy of fear, they’d wept and Ailsa had said,
My fault, all my fault.

In his imagination Joe kept seeing the bastard mosquito on his daughter’s arm, rear legs and posterior raised, head lowered, plunging its dirty needle into Nia. A child’s life was frail. And she’d called out ‘Auntie Mona! Auntie Mona!’ in the car on the way home from hospital, making Joe realise he’d cut off not only his wife but his daughter from something that meant one hell of a lot to them. Of course that couldn’t have been helped. But had he needed to be so brutal about it?

Joe had not struck his wife.

Instead we’ve got this tempest of passion, night after night, he thought. It was a new thing for them. Joe’s chapel upbringing had never prepared him for this rapture of desire, whose satisfaction only increased desire. He didn’t want to be away from her, he told Ailsa, and she smiled, no, not for a minute. Though it would be a rest from you-know-what!

Nia piped up: ‘I don’t know what!’

‘Quite true, you don’t,’ said Joe.

‘I want to know what.’

‘Too bad. Don’t go sulking now. Think about what we’ll buy for Mami in the market.’

‘Where are you going anyway?’ Nia asked sternly.

‘On manoeuvres, girlie. In the desert. That is what daddies do, isn’t it?’

He watched Ailsa’s fingers stray to the love-bite on her throat. She caught his glance and turned to look out of the bus window, tweaking up her collar to hide the mark. He’d have liked to lower the collar and put his lips to the place.

‘BRITTISH OUT! UNITTY OF THE NILE DELTA!
AL-GALA
BI-L-DIMA!’ some illiterate clown had written on a wall. A ragged boy with a bucket and brush was earning a few piastres by scouring off the graffiti. So-called ‘spontaneous’ mobs were rioting in Cairo and Port Said. The Egyptian so-called government was threatening to abrogate the Treaty and declare war on the British as an enemy army on its soil. They’d promised to cut off the supply of drinking water, fresh food and labour. They’d be cutting their own throats – as the new Tory government at home would show them.

If things were less tense, he’d have got Ailsa a jalopy. You could pick them up for a song. A car would have kept her from coveting the Tiger, which she now seemed to accept was off limits. Lately Ailsa had retreated into herself a bit. Didn’t venture out as much. She hadn’t wanted to come out shopping today in Ish; Joe sensed her concern as to how he’d be with the wogs. Irene had had more grasp of political reality, in her fears, than Ailsa in her grammar school idealism. That was odd: Irene had been afraid of wogs. But Ailsa feared
her husband
with the wogs. He knotted Chalkie’s sweater round his neck as the bus rounded the final corner. Irene had been right all along.

We’re here to prevent or fight World War III, he thought. And it will be an atomic war. The Ruskies are atheists. No
more mosques and minarets for the poor old Arabs when the Ruskies fly in to this ready-made arsenal at the gateway to Africa and the Persian oil wells. And the flabby playboy King Farouk: no kings on the other side of the Iron Curtain, hadn’t the Gyppos noticed? But the obvious never struck them. We are your friends and protectors, he told them. So you murder us. And perhaps the simpletons were natural fascists. They’d welcomed Goebbels to Cairo in ’39. To the Gyppos, Hitler had been a heroic corporal who’d defied the British Empire to make his country great – a model for Arab officers. With his own eyes Joe had seen these asses swaggering through wartime Cairo sporting toothbrush moustaches, shaven heads and monocles.

Chalkie had been killed by fools who could not identify their true enemy. Thinking of Irene still upset him. He’d been speechless with relief when she’d gone. Joe felt (and it was a bit mad) that he owed her a life. Chalkie had been far and away the better man.

A peaceful, smoky Saturday atmosphere filled the bus, everyone in civvies, with shopping baskets on their laps; small girls flaunting best pink ribbons and boys in their Sunday shorts with low side partings. Two Military Policemen sat at the back, with holsters full and eyes vigilant. He didn’t like needlessly to frighten Ailsa by pointing them out. Perhaps (it was a light going on) she was more timid than she let on. And proud: she’d hate to show fear. After all, his wife was bright and kept up with the news: she could read the signs of growing tension. Joe laced his fingers with hers and stroked the back of her hand with his thumb. Every time they touched or looked, each knew that the other remembered. The passion of their nights. It ought to be more than enough to sate his longing and settle
his jealousies. Too much, boy, come to that! He didn’t understand where the storm had come from. Was it normal to want your wife again as soon as you’d loved her? The moment your climax had exploded, an empty ache.

But did you ever reach a woman fully and finally? In each act of passion Joe possessed and lost Ailsa.

What did she write in that notebook? He knew where she hid it. One evening, he’d taken the pretty green notebook in his hands, turned it over, felt the texture, opened and closed its brass clasp. He’d not read a word. That would be a shameful intrusion.

But perhaps it was a journal of Ailsa’s fears. Women had terrors men couldn’t imagine. This might well be the truth of it. How stupid never to have guessed it. Such a clod he was.

They drew into the
Place de la Gare
. Joe carried Nia down the steps of the bus. Soldiers with guns strolled near the bus stop, with a casual, off-duty air. Under the surface, the Canal Zone seethed with unrest.

‘See you at the Club for lunch?’ he asked Dusty.

‘I’ve got a thirst on me already.’

‘Oh no you jolly well have not,’ said Dusty’s missus, a bird of a lady:
petite
Dusty loyally called her and Ailsa looked like two of the midget. She hated to be seen next to
petite
ladies.

‘Sah!’ said Dusty, saluting his other half.

‘See what I’ve got to put up with,’ Caroline chivvied, and led him off.

Joe handed Ailsa down the steps.

‘Hey! – Joe!’

Here, in civvies, was Nobby Bowen, a bloke perpetually off-side, chatting in some foreign gibberish with, oh no –
a coal-black nigger wearing a suit, a trilby and a bow tie, carrying a string bag half full of packages. With his shiny skin and broad smile, he was the spitting image of Nia’s golliwog.
Thicklips
. Must be one of the officers’ saffragis. Nia looked up, fascinated.

As Ailsa turned, Joe saw Bowen’s face light up. Ailsa frowned, shook her head and strode away, head down, across the square.

‘Ailsa! Hang on, will you? Where the heck are you going? Nia!’

Without turning, his wife motioned impatiently with her arm,
oh do come on!
But Nia was not budging. She held out her hand to Black Sambo, to shake it. He crouched to her, smiling in her face, and Joe squirmed at the contrast between the golliwog’s shining blackness and Nia’s red-blonde hair. The two Military Policemen stood watching, po-faced.

‘You’ve met my wife, Nobby?’

‘Thought I had. Not so sure now. Must have seen her somewhere.’

‘At the concert?’ Joe helped him out. He called out again to Ailsa. Bowen was telling Nia that this gentleman was his very good friend and a prince in his own country. Nia’s eyes were quite round. Bowen was one of the toffs who’d gone native and married a duskily luscious girl, hourglass figure, sashaying along in a figure-hugging costume. Wearing pillbox hats with bits of veil.

‘Pleased to meet you, my dear little person,’ the black man said to Nia in polished, lah-de-dah English.

‘And what is your name?’

‘Nia Josephine Roberts.’ Nia put out her hand and stroked his shiny face, beaming. ‘What is yours?’

‘My name is Kassay.’

‘How do you do, Kassay.’

Ailsa stood with her back to them, way across the square, while a woman in black offered her something from a basket – figs perhaps – and an ambling squaddie paused to eye her. Joe dragged at Nia’s arm. She resisted, slipped her hand out of her father’s, slapped at him and ran round behind the golliwog’s legs. She danced from foot to foot, making naughty faces up at her father.

‘Now then, Joe,’ Bowen said. ‘We’ve been discussing the politics of oil. Which do you think is more important, oil or water?’

Nia thought water.

‘And where does water come from?’

‘Up there.’

‘No rain falls here though, does it? The water Egypt gets to drink comes from Ethiopia. Through the Sudan. And that, in the future, will be power for Kassay and his people.’

Aye, if and when they get the know-how
, Joe thought.
When the sky rains pears
.

Kassay straightened up. He showed little of the obsequiousness of the Egyptian servants but looked Joe straight in the face, through eyes of extraordinary beauty, large and dark with long curling lashes. A melancholy look to him when he was not smiling. He must be well used to slights from the Arabs. Egypt laid claim to the Sudan. For them the black Africans were savages. Wogs, in other words. Every wog had to have another wog further down the ladder. Joe had seen the Gyppos follow the dapper black servants of the officers, wiggling their hips in mockery of their Europeanised fancy dress.

When he’d managed to tug Nia away, they caught up with Ailsa. Husband and wife linked arms.

‘The coloured chap comes from Ethiopia,’ Joe said, keeping his thoughts about golliwogs to himself. ‘Is that the same as Abyssinia, or another place?’

‘The same. I hope you were polite, Joe.’

‘Course I was polite! Honestly though! What a comedy!’ He laughed.

‘What is?’

‘Well, Nia and the coloured gentleman. She has a
thing
about them. Do they look lovable, you know, sweet, to a child?’