Into Suez (36 page)

It was a spider. He would tell Nia about the spider.

When they came to collect his plate, Joe asked for pen and paper. He began to write to his daughter, doodling a cartoon of Incy Wincy Spider climbing up the spout, going on to tell Nia he loved her and her Mami more than anything in the world.

Ti’n werth y byd, cariad
, he wrote: you’re the world to me. But somehow in his rage and jealousy he’d lost sight of this simple fact. That Nia was a pearl beyond price, entrusted to him and Ailsa who was also
werth y byd
.

When Nia had cried in the night as a baby, Joe was always the first to leap out of bed, to run to her crib, lift her, lullaby her, give milk. It was quite comical, his brothers had said, how he adored that child. They’d roared with laughter to see him kneel and roll up his shirtsleeve to test the temperature of Nia’s bath water with his elbow. If Nia was sick, Joe cleared the mess. If she fell down, he’d clean and kiss and bind the wound. He’d sit her on his shoulders and take her round Hendrefoilan Park. They’d laughed because they thought they’d found their brother’s weak spot and because as yet they had no children of their own to wring their hearts. But Nia was not his weak spot. She was his strength. He’d always understood that and ought to have set his course by that knowledge. Every hair of her head was numbered. Simple as that. He owed Nia boundless love and
protection. What would her life be like, her father and protector a hanged criminal? He was unstrung to think this thought, he wanted to howl: the
terrible thing
that stalked him and which he and Ailsa together held off in their common vigil, advanced.

He was no good with words. But Ailsa would certainly tell Nia the right thing. He could trust her to find appropriate words. Or to judge if it would be better for Nia to forget him altogether. To say nothing. How would she be at ten years old, at twenty? If she found out?

The breakfast all came up, into the bucket. He blew the vileness from his nose, wiped his mouth. Joe crushed the
unfinished
letter into the envelope, writing Nia’s name on it.

All done in a mist, he thought.
Making whoopee
. Widowed the woman Ailsa loved. Shot a cat but the cat was a child; and he’d thought upon bursting out of his drunken stupor that it was Nia he’d shot.

Mona Jacobs had spoken up for Joe at the court martial. He’d hardly been able to believe his ears.

She’d testified that Sergeant Roberts had been upset, understandably upset, and he’d clearly been drinking hard. It had been obvious to her that Sergeant Roberts had come to her house with a view to frightening herself and her guests, throwing his weight about, no more than that. When he’d threatened Flight Lieutenant Ince, he’d made a conspicuous point of firing wide, aiming at a gramophone. And her husband had most unfortunately moved – almost dived – sideways straight into the path of the bullet. Why he had made that move she had no idea: he’d always tended to be clumsy. Perhaps, as Ince also testified, Wing Commander Jacobs was trying to get between Sergeant Roberts and his friend.

And when his gun had gone off at the little Egyptian girl, Sergeant Roberts had thought he was shooting a cat.

A cat? Sergeant Roberts has something against cats?

He deflected his anger from myself and my guests to the house cat.

A man in His Majesty’s Royal Air Force breaks into a senior officer’s home armed with a loaded service revolver and ‘accidentally’ kills one person, your husband, and wounds a child of five?

He wanted to teach me a lesson. He disapproved of my friendship with his wife
.

Mrs Jacobs had failed to make a good impression, showing none of the natural emotion to be expected of the newly widowed. She had taken the trouble to dress up in a square-shouldered navy jacket and skirt – smart enough but, with her hair cropped so close to her head, the outfit had given her a mannish look. Mrs Jacobs hadn’t blamed her husband’s murderer. Had shed no tears. Instead she’d opened the door on an unsavoury corner of the world of the British officer class – parties, loose morals, Commie sympathies, perverse friendships with foreigners and lower ranks, indiscretions and breaches of taste. Swanning round in Arab robes. And she was herself a foreigner. A constant procession of coloured persons had been coming and going, according to the neighbours, who’d been sure that the Jacobs were spies. Mrs Jacobs had admitted to taking Sergeant Robert’s wife to the Israeli border during his absence. Joe’s defence painted Mrs Jacobs pitch-black, presenting her husband’s death as a crime of passion. But what good was that, when a child had also been attacked? Joe was visited by flashing pictures of the little girl’s blood on his hands, on his clothes as he’d bent to her. He had
to die for this. He couldn’t bear to live with it.

The court had stared with avid eyes at the Wing Commander’s widow and they’d sized up the sergeant’s wife.
Lesbians?
The word had never once occurred to him: how odd. In the war, he and the boys had passed through Siwa, a byword for Arab moral decline, where the women they passed in scarlet robes, hair matted with chicken grease, were said to practise inversion. In Siwa they’d turned to it because their men were all homos. Joe didn’t see how lesbianism was anatomically possible in any case.

Ailsa had hardly looked at her one-time friend. Her blue-green eyes had rested on her husband throughout the three days of the trial. She’d sat unflinchingly upright in her seat, wearing a dark costume and a blouse fastened at the neck with a cameo brooch. Her face pale, she’d looked sombrely beautiful, entirely collected. Superior. Hearing of his jealousy and his wife’s equivocal carryings-on, the court’s sympathies had swung from Ailsa towards himself. But their sympathy could do him no good. Joe was going to swing, that had been a foregone conclusion. And he had nothing to urge against this, except that he was the father of Nia. When his own turn had come to speak, Joe told the squalid truth precisely as he remembered it, pleading guilty and acknowledging full responsibility for his actions.

According to the Commanding Officer, who visited Joe daily, the public executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, was not available for the task of executing the two airmen, for he was needed in Ulster. One of his assistants would be flown over in the garb of a Squadron Leader to despatch them. Naturally this official was highly trained and competent or he would not be employed to do the job.

Perhaps the man was here already?

Joe glanced over to the judas hole, through which the executioner might already have studied his physique and stature, assessing his neck muscles to ascertain the length of the drop. This assessment and calculation were essential to ensure instantaneous death rather than slow strangulation. The procedure had been explained in detail to Joe and he had listened attentively.

White cap on face; noose round neck; pin whipped out of catch; lever pushed; drop. Eight seconds flat. And off you went on your final posting into eternity. Easy as winking.

Joe, seasoned by the Western Desert, was stalwart about death. And somehow it helped that he happened to know exactly where he and Dusty would lose their lives – in a disused railway repair warehouse close to Fayid village. In the late summer of the year before last the shed had been converted for three army blokes who’d gone on a drunken spree in Cairo and shot a native watchman. Driving past on the Tiger, Joe had seen the shed with the gallows and hanging pit.

His thoughts roved back to Chalkie, not as he had been in the last months of his life at El-Marah, but seven years previously in the Western Desert. They’d entered Cyrenaica, an Italian colony on the Mediterranean. And this must have been early in the war when the boys were
grass-green
lads, a cocky swagger in their gait, contemptuous of an effeminate enemy. The Italians, in full flight, had left behind in their dugouts quaint little sewing kits with threads, thimbles and needles; cases of red wine and tins of tunny fish and tomatoes.

Chalkie, laughing his head off, had come rolling a whole Parmesan cheese, big as a cartwheel. Cutlery and
cruets littered the desert. The bodies of dead Italians lay about like trippers taken poorly on holiday, amongst chocolate wrappings and fag packets, their letters and postcards – of Naples, Milan, Rome – scattered around them for five miles over the wind-blown sands.
Mama carissima, dearest Mummy, I love you more than life,
the Flight Lieutenant who knew Italian translated aloud.
May the Blessed Virgin preserve you until the glorious Fascist army returns in triumph
. The officer had dropped the page into the general litter of letters. Spoke supercilious words about the enemy’s flamboyant emotionalism:
The Italian egg has been cracked and found to be rotten inside
.

They are just men like us, sir
, said Chalkie, in his broad northern accent.
That’s the long and the short of it
.

The Flight Lieutenant, hardly more than a boy, had had the grace to wince and bow his head. He’d blushed scarlet and said nothing.

The unsent letters of the dead had glowed for miles pink and peach under the falling sun. Homewarding bombers glided distantly across the bloody sunset and the next morning everything was buried in blown sand, as if it had never been: men, mules, stores, swords, letters.

Dusty was off again,
making whoopee
. Foghorn of a voice, no excuse for it. Joe stood up and challenged Dusty with ‘
Cwm Rhondda
, Bread of Heaven’. His chapel tenor soared up to
want no more
…
want no more
. Dusty, defeated, was silent. Then, as Joe began to tread the verge of Jordan, Dusty joined in:
Bid my anxious fears subside.

There was a young WAAF at the door, a package in her arms. Ailsa received her husband’s personal effects, tied
up in a brown paper parcel. Oh, thank you. Sign for it? Right. Here? Sorry, said the girl, so sorry for your loss. Thank you. The door closed. Ailsa unpicked the knot. Three brown envelopes, one each for herself, Gwenllian and Nia. Joe’s watch. His reading glasses. His Bible and a copy of
The Reader’s Digest
. A half-finished bag of coconut mushrooms. His carpet slippers.

Your husband died dauntlessly, that is the word, the Welsh Congregationalist pastor had said. And with good humour.

She would be with him till the world ended, she’d told Joe on their last day. Every step, every breath of the way.

But don’t you be grieving. Marry again.

Every single breath. I’ll be with you.

His dad was near the end of the road; he could not last more than a few days: should she come or not? Joe’s mother had asked. Just say the word.

Stay with Dad. He’d want you to. I’ll be here for both of us. He knows that.

All that concerns me, Joe had said, is that you and Nia are safe and well. And if you marry again, cariad –

I shan’t. Don’t talk about that.

Aye, but bear with me.

Go on then – but I shan’t.

If you do remarry, and I hope you will, let it be someone who’ll be a good father to Nia.

Aye, he had such a voice, said the pastor, such a spirit. Any music in a condemned cell, you know, is extraordinary. Not the expected thing. Joking with his pal he was. Shook everyone’s hand. Thanked us all for our trouble.

Went off, I can truly say, as if catching a train.

Nobby would be here soon, to escort Ailsa and Irene to
the cemetery. Their request that Joe be buried next to Roy White had been refused. As an executed man, Joe had to be buried at the perimeter of the cemetery and at an angle to the other graves. Not so Dusty. For Dusty had not directly killed anyone. In this way the Air Force had expressed its private view of where blame lay. Nobby had gone to the Commanding Officer and protested vehemently at the insult to Joe’s family, in laying him at an angle. Precedent, he’d been informed. Not a matter for debate.

Never mind, said Ailsa. You tried. What does it matter? They are beneath contempt.

Mona, appearing out of nowhere, took Ailsa’s hand. Joe’s widow stood in the middle, between Irene and Mona. There was a stiff wind, dashing the palm leaves back and forth.

A kestrel banked on the wind. Sand streamed across the turf. Nobody wept. The three widows’ faces under the rippling of shadowy veils were stone.

The plane banked steeply and then throttled back, releasing the pressure on the passengers’ chests. Nia craned up to the window to see the yellow of the desert, the flashing blue-green of the Great Bitter Lake. Her mother did not want to look out: she clamped her eyes shut and seemed to be in a tense, grumpy mood. Was she going to be sick? Nia hoped she would use the sick bag if so. Nia pouted and glared, bringing her face as near to her mother’s as it would go. Crosspatch-Mami didn’t even blink though she was not asleep, only pretending. Then she opened her eyes, passed her hand over her forehead and let out a sighing breath. At the aerodrome, waiting
outside the hangar, Mami had lost her temper; she’d slapped Nia’s calf hard, for nothing! For nothing at all! Nia hadn’t been dawdling, she hadn’t been rude. It wasn’t fair. The place on her leg still smarted, not very much but it felt red.

Nia decided to pick her nose. She made a little drama out of it, waggling an imaginary bogey on her finger tip, causing the lady over the gangway to turn her face away in disgust. Even this had no effect on her mother. And anyway there was nothing in Nia’s nose worth picking. They’d be staying with
Mam-gu
in Treforys. Nia didn’t remember her. Auntie Mona was another person she didn’t remember. She remembered Auntie Mona’s cat, Isis. The plane had levelled out; a voice told them it was safe to unfasten their seat belts. Refreshments would be brought round by the staff. Nia entered into a tussle with the seat belts, thrashing her body to and fro. In the end Mami reached across and released it; although she said nothing, she smiled with her mouth. Awaiting Coca-Cola, Nia looked down at the world below, where sand met sea in a curving tongue of brilliant green.

Nia had soared far, far beyond the earth. Or rather, the world had fallen, was still falling. The sea spread beneath them, turquoise and formless. When Nia looked again, the plane was sailing through a gauze of white clouds that broke to reveal a dazzle of snow-capped mountains. Must be flying over Italy, her mother said: those were the Alps. Mami brought her face nearer to share the view. Mami’s face was white with powder, her lips were dry and flaky, she should put Nivea on them, Nia reflected, and there was a nasty purple crust at the corner of her mouth. Nia reached out to touch it.