Into Suez (33 page)

Habibi
said it was a pity Clem Attlee hadn’t had his way. We’d have been long gone if Clem’s view had prevailed. Attlee had seen quite clearly that Britain couldn’t afford an empire
and
a welfare system.

‘Are you all right, sweetheart?’ Mona asked Ailsa.

‘Oh, fine, thank you. A bit tired.’

Whatever do I look like? Ailsa wondered. Do I look as mad and empty as I feel? She throbbed with longing for Nia. Incommunicably. Mona loved Nia too, of course she did. But it was not the same. You brought a sword, Mona, she thought. You were the agent of separation. Your need is predatory. Look at you sitting there in your Sloppy Joe pullover with your hair soaking from the shower, your feet tucked up and your soles all dirty, your dirt on display. And
that
look on your face:
who can I gobble next?
How in God’s name did I not see through you? And
Habibi
, lovable idealist as he is, has dislodged the barriers we need for safety; he does it every minute of every day, he can’t help it. He’s a loose cannon. Ah yes but he was also and undeniably a healer:
Habibi
had healed Hedwig, talking to her in her depression not as psychiatrist to patient, not even as man to woman, but person to person. This human equality was what the gods could not countenance, it seemed. It threatened their stranglehold on mortals. Norman’s raving about
Habibi
to Joe, praising him to the skies, had tipped the balance in the end and soured him irretrievably, at the moment he might perhaps have been reconciled to his wife.

‘Ailsa,’ Mona pleaded. ‘We can go round to Irene’s flat.
Just say the word. We can confront the woman – and Joe, if he’s with her. Take Nia home. I’ll run you there – any time. Shall we go now?’

‘How would that be right though, Mona?’ Ailsa asked. ‘We can’t just snatch her.’

It was the judgement of Solomon all over again. Cut the child in two! The real mother automatically renounces the child. How can she do otherwise? Then the wise king intervenes to return the child. The true mother has powerful allies on the throne and in the Heavens. What allies did Ailsa have? The RAF?
Habibi
had pressed her to report Joe to the Commanding Officer. But he would surely have rather larger issues on his mind than a domestic tiff between a sergeant and his renegade wife. And the deeper Joe got into trouble, the deeper his rancour.

‘Well, perhaps tomorrow,’ Ailsa said uneasily. ‘Thank you, both. I think, if you don’t mind, I’ll just go and lie down.’

But she didn’t move. Her limbs and eyelids were heavy with booze. Not used to it. She looked at Mona without the least feeling and Mona flinched. She withdrew to the grand piano, beneath the portrait of Julie Brandt-Simon, and began to play a bright, flamboyant piece by Hummel or Dittersdorf. She played with glittering clarity, and with the emotional reserve appropriate to the music. The sonata had been composed in a more elegant age, when elite culture and a dream of reason had gone hand in hand. The figure of Julie Brandt-Simon in a brilliant red gown towered over the luxurious room, her expression severe, like a judge in scarlet. Once Nia had played with the cat under that piano, bursting out in terror when a
fortissimo
storm thundered down into her lair. As they’d
moved towards this bitter climax, Nia had caught all the bad notes. She’d detected her enemy and taken measures to expel her, beating Mona with her fists and butting her with her head when they’d swanned back from Palestine. Too late. Ailsa ought to have listened to Nia. The child was a divining rod.

What was Mona thinking and feeling? Lonely probably. But why should the queen of such a castle and courtiers be lonely? Ailsa shrank back into herself, buried in her own anguish and the cynicism it brought with it.

Habibi’s
military uniform was a disguise. He’d kept it on after the War because Mona wished to go east. It didn’t suit him, he didn’t suit it and he was wrong to wear it. Cadging a lift to the Orient, the Jacobs had said on the
Empire Glory
. Now he bent over Mona at the piano, reading her disturbance; stroked her hair. Mona turned her head, looked up. The two exchanged a look so private and nakedly intimate that Ailsa had to turn her head away. A door closed softly in her face. Good, let it close. That’s that then, she thought, standing as far outside their home as if she’d been in the desert.

It struck Ailsa that the Jacobs always seemed to have a third party in tow, whether Alex or herself. What was it all about? For a long while, mesmerised by Mona’s spell, Ailsa had been content that nothing be labelled. She’d never made much of Alex, so quiet and (was this the word?) insipid. An echo or shadow to
Habibi
. Arms draped round one another’s shoulders; private jokes; a conspiracy of rueful smiles and intent looks. Had it all been some sordid game between them, stemming from the romantic goings on at the Old Brewery, a game which she, in her naïveté, had not understood – but which her
husband, in his coarser way, had smelt out? Had she, Ailsa, been brought in for the purposes of symmetry?

She’s led you wrong, that woman. You don’t want to live like that, Ailsa. You’re too good for the likes of her.

Ailsa could go to her husband and confess that she’d seen through Mona. She had never intended to blow their family apart. It was not too late. She pulled herself together and began to gather up handbag and cardigan. Joe would take her back. Or at least patch up some practical solution. As she got to her feet, the doorbell sounded. Alex went off to answer it. Ailsa heard his heels clicking over the floor; the front door opening; an exclamation, then a wild cry of pain or of joy. A whirlwind of a child was entering the house.

Ailsa raced barefoot out of the living room. Through the hall, Nia in her green bonnet and velvet suit, cheeks fiery red, came hurtling towards her mother. Ailsa snatched her up. Nia clamped both legs round Ailsa’s thighs. The child’s cheek and forehead burned against her mother’s face.

‘It was wrong,’ Irene said. ‘Nia knew it was wrong. Even
he
knew it was wrong.’

‘But is she all right, Irene? Is she ill?’

‘No. No, don’t worry,’ Irene stroked the back of the limpet child who was silently glued to Ailsa so that they formed one creature. ‘Bless her, she couldn’t eat much – or drink, that was the thing that worried me. Perhaps if you have some fruit juice, Mrs Jacobs?’

Somehow Ailsa managed to prise the limpet off to the degree that Nia could drink. She sat on her mother’s lap and fished out the ice cubes with her fingers.

‘You’re not thinking of taking her away again, are you,
Irene? Because she is going nowhere,’ Ailsa said.
‘Nowhere
without me. Do you understand? How
dare
you take her away? Does Joe know you’ve brought her round?’

Irene shook her head. Never for one moment had she intended to keep Ailsa’s daughter from her mother, or so she said. But Joe had been beside himself. He’d arrived at her flat with Nia, wanting Irene to babysit her in her own flat. She’d agreed to take the child for a night.

‘I don’t regard that as an excuse, Irene. You should be ashamed,’ Ailsa hissed.

In stalked the cat, Isis. With a cry of joy, Nia greeted her, cuddling the heavy body in both arms, nuzzling Isis’s head and looking into the green lamps of her eyes. The two of them curled up together on the sofa and fell asleep. Irene explained in whispers that Joe had forced Nia on her. It had been no picnic. Irene had taken her into her own bed but Nia had just sat bolt upright, sucking at her sheet, and all she’d say was,
What are you wearing a hair net for in bed, Missus? Did you knit it? Where’s Topher? Where’s Uncle Archie?

‘Eventually she dropped off,’ said Irene. ‘Oh, thanks, Mrs Jacobs, I’d love a cup of tea. Do you mind – English tea, real tea? I think we need to speak to Joe. And, Ailsa, I know I’ve been impossible. I came back here and plonked myself on you… But when I saw Joe like that…’

‘Like what?’

‘Off his rocker really, Ailsa. When he arrived at my flat with Nia, he was crying his eyes out. Quite incoherent. He seemed to be saying that there was something wrong with you, you couldn’t look after Nia, would I babysit in my own flat? At first I took it that you must be ill. But then I thought:
he’s drunk
. It seemed best to take her for
a night. No idea where you were, to telephone. Actually, Nia was terribly well-behaved, bless her. She sat and played with my jewel box and we went through my photo album of Roy and the boys. It was very unsettling. Nia was so polite. Not like her at all. Then yesterday Joe arrived again and I’m afraid he’d had more than a few, Ailsa, he was tight.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Oh – he wasn’t all that nice.’

Whatever had gone on, Irene was not saying, except that she’d had to order him off. She blushed and patted the back of her hair, fingering rapidly round the edges of it to make sure that every strand was tucked in. She didn’t meet Ailsa’s eyes.

‘The fact is, I’m in a false position out here. The scales have just fallen from my eyes. As it says in the Bible. Sounds jolly melodramatic, I know, but that was how it was. I came back here to be close to Roy.’

She frowned; her fingers twisted a handkerchief in her lap.

‘But I had
left
everything I had of Roy in Britain. Timothy and Christopher. What was I thinking of? There is
nothing
of Roy here. Nothing. But Joe, you know, is a lovely warm man. He is, really. At heart. I’m afraid I rather – fell for him, Ailsa. Very wrong of me.’

‘Irene,’ Ailsa reached across to take Irene’s hand, thinking,
You are not the enemy, you never have been
. ‘I knew that.’

‘You did?’ Irene cringed into herself, blushing profusely.

‘Joe reminds you of Roy, that’s all.’

‘Do you forgive me then, Ailsa?’

There was nothing to forgive, Ailsa said. They understood one another. Irene would work out notice at
the NAAFI and then go home to England and try to make a life for the boys. Years it would take, she said, decades, finally to believe that there was no Roy on this earth. But she had begun to believe it. She would never see him again. But so it was. There was no replacement. And she might as well get used to it.

‘You will marry again perhaps,’ Ailsa said. ‘I think you will. When the time is right.’

‘Who would want to marry me?’

‘Plenty of men. They’ll be queuing up.’

‘Well, he would have to be a very special man.’

‘Of course.’

Irene smiled. ‘Will you come back with me, Ailsa? Oh, thank you, Mrs Jacobs. What lovely looking biscuits, so unusual. Are they foreign?’

This was the answer: to move in with Irene until something could be sorted out. Ailsa put her belongings together; lifted the sleeping Nia on to her shoulder. She allowed herself to meet Mona’s eyes only at the last minute. They were red and swollen with crying. How did you say goodbye to someone for whom you felt opposite extremes of emotion? Did you promise to keep in touch? Or not acknowledge the moment? They would not see one another again, not if Ailsa had any say in the matter.

‘Toodle-oo,’ said Irene as they climbed into the taxi. Mona and
Habibi
turned together on the dark drive and went back into the yellow light of the bungalow. No parting kiss; Ailsa was glad Mona had made no motion to kiss her.

Dusty, propping up the bar in the Mess at Fayid, had reached the maudlin stage. He was off on his hobbyhorse
about how the A-rabs maltreated their animals because they were subhuman. The A-rabs, not the animals. Animals were superior to humans any day.
Sacred bleeding trust
, he kept saying, his language slurred,
that’s what it is, mate
. He’d beat up any A-rab he saw hitting or kicking his donkey. He repeated the story Chalkie had told Joe about how, on guard duty with Roy White, Dusty had fired to kill a marauding wog, only to find when the sun came up that he’d assassinated a poor old Eeyore.

‘Oh aye?’ said Joe. He wished Chalkie had not been mentioned. It was like a hellish toothache you’d temporarily forgotten about. Then someone mentions teeth and the evil that sleeps in your mouth wakes up, screaming blue murder.

Dusty said that the Ancient Egyptians were a far cry from the modern Gyppos. They were a different race, see. Superior. The Pharaohs worshipped animals. Their gods were hawks and cows and jackals, even dung beetles.

‘Oh aye? Another?’ Joe was pissed and his head muzzy, except for the memory of his pal, clear as day, which he tried to deaden by drowning it in another beer. But Chalkie would not be chased away. Joe saw his friend’s light, wiry frame. His ready grin. Five foot four in his socks but like the miners in the pits at home, Chalkie had as much strength in him as many broad-chested six footers. No side. Boy of few words. The genuine article.

What about going on the town? someone suggested. A couple of other boys joined them. Merry they were. Looking for a bit of fun, a bint or a spot of trouble.
Target practice!
someone yelled. The bastard wogs had torn up the Treaty. That made them fair game.

They spilled out on to the forecourt, ready for anything.
Somehow or other the four airmen fetched up at the ammo dump. Fancy that, look where we are! Well, now that we’re here… They helped themselves to Service revolvers and ammunition. In civvies rather than uniform they were but the sergeant, seeming a bit skew-whiff himself or perhaps just a simpleton, didn’t turn a hair. He signed out the firearms just like that. Then they borrowed a Land Rover for transportation. Singing at the tops of their voices.

And sang all the way to Ish, Joe yodelling a descant. He’d been drinking steadily all day. Now he bellowed: ‘We’ll keep a welcome in the hillside!’

Far, far gone he was. Not a care in the world.

They staggered out of the Vic. The fucking Jeep had been stolen by a fucking arse of a wog. Which was the kind of underhand thing fucking wogs did. No scruples, see? That meant the boys had the fucking obligation to steal a fucking wog’s car in reprisal. Smashing the window of a battered old Austin, they broke in and shot off racing round Wogtown, tyres squealing, hands on hooter, driving at anything that stepped into the road.