Into Suez (31 page)

‘There’s just one thing,’ he said. ‘One thing to clear up before we put this behind us.’

‘What?’

‘I’m sending you and Nia home to England. That is final, Ailsa.’

‘What, and leave you here with Irene?’

Over her dead body, she blazed. Ailsa was not a parcel, to be trussed up and packed off across the world whenever Joe felt like it.

That hit home about Irene. There was nothing between him and Irene, he said, fear in his eyes, keeping his voice down. Nothing whatsoever, as Ailsa well knew. She of course saw her advantage as Joe flushed to the roots of his hair; yet felt impotent to press it. Too cheap. Joe was so obviously not that kind of man.

He was sending them home for their own good, he explained. This hellhole was perhaps the most dangerous place in the world – apart from Israel, where that madwoman had taken her.

‘You are the mother of my child,’ he said, taking her hand.

She thrust the hand away.

‘But you refuse to let yourself be taken care of. You are out of control. That is why you are being sent home.’

‘You don’t seem to get it, Joe. You can’t
send
me anywhere.’

‘Oh, I can.’

And suddenly he was not the soft, temperamental Joe any more but a sergeant who’d made his mind up, in accordance with regulations. That was how she described him to herself. He’d gone on to notify the Air Force that his wife was returning to Britain; that the quarter would be vacated at the end of the month. He’d booked two seats on the plane and a place in barracks for himself. It would not be long until his tour was finished, he’d said. Till then Ailsa and Nia could stay with his mam in Treforys. He’d apply for a posting to St Athan, somewhere near home, to avoid disrupting Nia’s life.

Nia is the important person in all this, he kept saying. Not you. Not me.

In Egypt, Ailsa had lived. Truly lived, with an expanded horizon. She must take her expanded world now and shrink it back into her allotted space. There was no help for it. It’s over, she thought, and relief mingled with the gravest disappointment she could remember sustaining since realising that university was closed to her. All her life – except twice – she’d been kept in a box with a few inadequate peepholes, amongst folk who took the inside of that box for the limits of the world.

Joe, who’d been packing, drifted out to tinker with the Tiger. Ailsa sat at the table and lit up. The family trunk lay open on the floor at her feet. She was the cargo that was to be crammed in the luggage, strapped and labelled with Joe’s number, Joe’s mother’s address. Where do I come
in? she demanded and in her mind Ailsa childishly hurled the contents out of the case. What would that kind of crazy behaviour do to Nia? She satisfied her rage by refraining from lifting a finger to help. She took a long drag on her cigarette. Ailsa had got out and seen the magnitude of things, the mighty complexities of the political world. The skies over the Holy Land full of thunder. Egypt in its beauty and pain. Even as Ailsa had revelled in her larger view, she’d been afraid. Simply terrified sometimes, she thought, as with this thing of
going to bed with Mona
. No wonder poor Joe was foxed by her action. Ailsa didn’t understand it herself. She’d been totally out of her depth.

What had that all been about? A conversation, going on round the clock. Holding Mona in her arms through that last strange night in Jordan, and being held, had seemed a continuation of conversation. Nothing sensual about it. She didn’t think so, no.

How could there be? But the memory bred unease. Moonlight had greyed the pillow through the curtainless window. What had they talked about? Chiefly not great issues but the magical years at the Old Brewery, reliving that time in the light of their later reunion. They’d been girls again, with the world before them. And for Mona it had been as if she’d enjoyed in that brief interim a delayed youth: the darkness of losing Jerusalem, losing Julie, had been put behind her by a world war. She’d slipped a leash or noose.
And to think that you were so close all the time! Behind the wall, Ailsa!
The bombs had made life apocalyptic: Mona and Gwen, Bobbie and Billie, Lalage and Anna had acted as if there were no commonplace yesterday and no dull tomorrow. In the great bombsite of London,
death burned all around them with a lurid flame that stained their world ruby-red. Ailsa had also sipped at a measure of qualified freedom. But with hindsight, the sobs and giggles of the girls – and their highfalutin’ conversation, their bohemianism and free love – could be made to seem an echo of a mad gaiety of which she’d been a part.

Calm in the shadow of Mona’s hair, Ailsa had lain still while her friend slept. She knew she brought comfort in a way no one else ever had, even
Habibi
perhaps. No idea how she’d done it or what it all meant. But it touched Ailsa to the quick that Mona’s search for home had concluded in herself. Perhaps in years to come an older and wiser self might carefully take out the memory, when the shiver in her nerves had died, and examine it and understand.

We are like sisters: that is what sisters do
, she’d told her husband, acting surprised that he didn’t know this.

But she and Mona were not really like sisters and Joe was only obsessed with the difference of rank and with his imagined rival, the Wing Commander.

In Jordan, she and Mona had conspired to suck at the orange of nostalgia. You couldn’t help but enter into the illusion that you were made for each other. This was all meant to be. But where could it go? What house was built for them in this world? What certificate was issued? And, like all nostalgia, those memories were finite. The juice would not keep its bright taste forever.

Ailsa was tired with dispute and her own inner conflict, weary of the subject of Mona. Perhaps in the end a simple, clean, orderly life counted as the greatest good. She listened to the clink of tools as, just outside the back door, Joe tightened this, loosened that, tinkering with the Tiger. He sounded almost normal. When she’d come into the
kitchen, Joe had grinned at her, wagging his oily hands as if there were nothing wrong between them. He wasn’t even drinking excessively; kept everything as near to ordinary as he could, believing – as he had to believe – that they could still retreat to the crossroads and go on together hand in hand. It was as if another Ailsa altogether had carried her away to a cosmopolitan world beyond the bounds of the real Ailsa’s imagination and reach.

Yet how stifling it all was. How did one prepare for a lifetime of such dulness? She stubbed out the fag and drifted back to the window. Nia was rocking on the fence and shrieking with laughter of a particularly inauthentic and grating kind. Ailsa would have liked to smack her legs. Each of them had raised a hand against their daughter and punished her for their own shortcomings.

Another baby
, Joe had said last night.
A brother or sister for Nia. When we get back to Blighty. A fresh start.

Till now, he’d never wanted a second child, preferring to concentrate love and attention on their one-and-only. But Nia was becoming odd. She was a weathervane registering the turmoils between her parents. It was not that though, oh no, of course not. If Joe could burden Ailsa with a batch of kids like these poor Forces women old before their time, he would have grounded and controlled her. She’d be unable to fly. Ailsa would be
penned
in a
coop
like a
hen
.

Joe couldn’t force another baby on her. She thought of the contraceptive he had found amongst Nia’s things, and her face burned. She must be careful. Since he’d been back, she’d insisted she had a bad period and worn her sanitary belt every night. That couldn’t go on forever.

Nia hanging over the fence was fascinated by Mrs
Wintergreen’s recently acquired chickens. She kept them in nesting boxes in a run in her back garden, up against the Roberts’ fence. Ailsa could hear Mrs Wintergreen complain that Egyptian chickens were not a bit like English chickens! Oh no! For a start, they stood up to lay their eggs, she said! They had not the sense of an English sparrow! Consequently the eggs often cracked on impact. Arab hens appreciated neither the straw in the boxes, their potato peel mash in a home-made trough, nor the trough itself. They beaked the mash on to the sand and ate it there. They positively liked filth, said Mrs Wintergreen. They were squalid birds.

Still she got nine or ten eggs out of them per week, beautiful quality.

And there was Nia precariously balanced on the fence, exhorting the chick-chick-chickens to lay a little egg for her.

Ailsa felt ashamed. She could take no pleasure in Nia. She went through the motions. But it will come back, she thought, and, jumping up, began to wipe down all the surfaces with Dettol. For I love her. She is my Nia.

I’ve been drunk, she thought, drunk on Egypt. Joe is asking me to sober up. For quiet Ailsa, it had been a drug, an intoxicant, to be allowed into this bubbling crucible of change.

Peering out at Nia’s antics with the chickens, Ailsa thought: Mona has no children. She knows nothing. And sometimes, for all her experience and intellectualism, Mona had seemed to her younger. Ignorant of how we are hobbled, gelded. We are brood mares, Ailsa thought, and always will be. How could it be otherwise? Some of the radical young women exiled from Palestine who were Mona’s friends had insisted, in their peerless English:
Once we achieve equality and a share in power – and once education delivers men’s minds from their ancient chains – the world will be transformed
. Like Mona, they were Christians and deplored the veiling of their Muslim sisters that contaminated all relations between men and women in the Middle East.
The veil must be abolished! It must and it will!
This had been how they spoke, rhetorically. Ailsa had felt privileged to share their speculations, though she’d rarely spoken up. All that was irrevocably over. She must make a life for herself and for her family in a drab place.

I have stepped over the pale, Ailsa thought, and it won’t be easy to go back. Even if I never see Mona again, she’ll be in my mind. I shall only have to hear a recording of Oum Koulsoum singing of her passion –
What havoc your eyes have wrought
– and I’ll be back there in Mona’s and my Egypt, holding hands under the table. And no doubt Joe sees this. He sometimes looked violent. But that time at their lodgings in Bristol Joe hadn’t even been able to drown their landlady’s kittens in the stream. He’d returned with the mewing box, sick to the stomach and in tears, ashamed. Taking the box from her husband, Ailsa had forced herself to drown them.

For some reason this brought tears to Ailsa’s eyes and her throat swelled:
Me, I killed the kittens
, she thought. He couldn’t bring himself to, so I did.

So finish this thing, Ailsa told herself, before you are one hour older. Grovel to him. Cry. Show him the letter. Ask his pardon, you will never do it again, you want to stay with him, you can’t bear to be apart. The letter had been written; she shook it loose from the pages of the
Inferno
, the cantos about Francesca da Rimini, with whom
she’d so identified. (And you will still have your books, she reminded herself, for the rest of your life. Goethe and Dante will be your comrades. And that inner world of the mind and spirit that burns so bright. You’ll have your journal. He can’t take that away.)

Joe was her husband. The right and sensible thing would be to share her inner world with Joe.

‘Would you post this for me, please, Joe?’ she asked as he came through the door in his shirt sleeves. He went to wash his hands. Ailsa had written a subdued, formal statement that she could not meet Mona any more, she was sorry, she wished her and her husband well. ‘But read it first.’

‘What is it? Irene not here?’

‘Gone to work.’

He took the letter, glancing at the address. Startled, he looked up. Then he ran his eyes over the text.

‘I’m glad you’ve done the right thing,’ he said. ‘But, Ailsa, sorry, so sorry, but it doesn’t change anything. I’ll miss you like hell but I’ve got to send you home.’

‘You’re not! You’re bloody not, Joe!’

Snatching it back, she began to rip the letter into confetti.

‘You are going home,’ he said. ‘Whether you like it or not. And you never used to swear. It doesn’t suit you.’

‘Just listen to me, Joe, and stop parroting. I said, listen.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘If you
send me home,
that’s it.’

She spoke the word
divorce
.

Joe sat at the kitchen table, stirring his tea, an untouched jam tart on his plate, his eyes on a newspaper
folded open at some stale news of doings in South Wales a fortnight ago.

‘You don’t mean that,’ he said.

There was an Arab in a stained blue
gallabiyya
at the door, nervously asking for Taffy Effendi.

‘Mafishfaluk,’
Joe said. ‘No money. Off you go.’

‘Votre mari
…
n’a pas payé le tapis, madame. Il n’en a payé que la moitié.’

Of course, it was the man who’d sold them the carpet. ‘He says you owe him for the carpet, Joe. You’ve only paid half. Is that right?’

‘Go in,’ Joe ordered his wife and daughter. ‘I said, go in.’

Through the upstairs window, Ailsa watched them confer. The carpet-vendor handed Joe some notes, rather than the other way round. Then her husband ushered him in through the side door. When Ailsa came downstairs the carpet was gone. Neither of them mentioned it.

‘Where will you go, Irene?’ she asked their guest when she returned from work.

‘I’ve found a dear little flat in Ish. Just the ticket. Two bedrooms. Overlooking the NAAFI. I can move in at the end of the month.’

At the eleventh hour Joe changed his mind. A colossal qualm came over him. He was physically sick. He sobbed; tried to get the whole thing reversed.

But the RAF was having none of it. The quarter had been reallocated. The quartermaster would be round to check the inventory. Every trace of the Roberts presence at the house in El-Marah must be wiped away.