Into Suez (38 page)

‘Don’t you worry,
habibi
,’ he said. ‘Bahgat takes care of his family.
Habibi
means darling or sweetheart, you should know that. You are Bahgat’s darlings and he takes care of his own.’

The crumbling sepia stucco of great colonial houses rose high above the road’s pandemonium. Down dark, festering alleyways criss-crossed with washing lines, Nia could see old tyres, cinders and heaped garbage. The endless poverty of the Middle East.

She thought of Mona on the plane for Berlin. They’d parted calmly, with every sign of affection. Everything that needed to be said had been said. But Mona, it seemed, was not yet satisfied, not quite. At the last minute she had clung on, holding up the queue.

When can we meet again, Nia?

Oh, well, I’m not sure
.

Soon?

Once, staying with
Mam-gu
in her teens, Nia had been caught in a riptide at Langland Bay: she’d swum and swum against the peremptory current. She did not intend to repeat her mistake.

Mona, this has been amazing – and thank you
.

If I am spared,
insha’allah,
I shall see you again
.

Beyond the city centre, they hurtled on a straight highway past an oil refinery and lakes whose waters were blood-red
with minerals and mint-green with salt. The coast road led along the Mediterranean, seen by glimpses through
half-built
sites for holiday homes. Lush gardens were bursting with figs and date palms, and vast conical hives Bahgat said were for pigeons, kept for food –
as all you English keep chickens in your back gardens, habibi
. Topher sat back in his seat, uncharacteristically withdrawn, suffering from an upset tummy, he said, but that was not it. The banter had been temporarily knocked out of him. Nia understood without being told. It had all come too late. He’d waited till Irene’s death to enter the portal that led to his mother’s and father’s love. Nia had done the same. And perhaps that was natural. She placed her hand over Topher’s and kept it there. He smiled without turning his head and she saw quite clearly the boy in the man: a boy who’d built grand castles with her, shown her his willy behind the shed and accepted as a gift her loathed hair ribbon, expressing his devotion by tying it into his own mop of white-blond hair. She wondered what Irene had thought of
that
.

At El Alamein there was little to see but an immense plain of sand, white-beige, with scrub and outcrops of grey rocks as if someone had strewn cinders in every direction. Hot wind rushed across the plain and tossed dust in their faces as they wandered round three war memorials: British, Italian, German. A plane left a disintegrating trail of smoke. It seemed only yesterday that their fathers had endured in this desert and retired to their rest.

‘Mona told me everything, Topher,’ Nia said. ‘My first father was executed. He wasn’t a so-called hero at all.’

He was silent.

‘What is it?’

‘Sorry, Nia, but I know.’

‘What?’

‘Mum told me.’

Topher had known for over twenty years. His mother had blurted it out one Christmas after a sherry too many.
In strictest confidence, Christopher
, Irene had added, shocked at herself, making Topher promise on his honour not to breathe a word to Nia. She’d cast about for something sacred enough to make him keep his oath. The Bible? No, Topher was a heathen. On his father’s picture then. Ailsa would never speak to her again if he didn’t keep this to himself, his mother impressed upon Topher; it would be a betrayal. And Topher had kept the secret. But he’d written a poem about it for Nia, which she could see when they got home. And in any case, who was he to tell her this bad thing? They both began to cry, in one another’s arms, rocking to and fro.

‘My father wasn’t a hero either,’ Topher said, as Bahgat set off for Ish and the cemetery at Fayid. ‘My dad was a dad.’

She’d visit him one last time where he slept at Fayid – yes, and
Habibi
too, and Chalkie. They all slept there, where Africa met Asia, far from home and within thirty yards of one another. The time was ripe, for her mastectomy had not worked. Mortal illness was also a beginning of sorts and opened a road – though she’d infinitely rather (who in his right mind would not?) have been struck by a nice clean heart attack in her sleep and gone out like a light.

Ailsa was as excited as a child to board the plane for Cairo at Birmingham. Archie had encouraged her, bless
him, and here she was, flying over the Marches and the Welsh hills, feeling fit as a flea, as if a plane could lift you clean out of your skin. They levelled out and Ailsa looked down at the Severn floodplain, the rain-saturated patchwork of fields, the russet and ochre of autumn trees, and felt she was
herself
again, breasts or no breasts. An adventurer quitting her native soil for unknown territory.

Only Archie knew. All these years he’d lived with Joe’s ghost. Ailsa settled back in her seat, her mind on Poppy. She’d lived to see Joe’s grandchild and now it was as if she carried to her young husband gospel news.

Forsan Island proved a good choice of hotel, basic but clean and air-conditioned. It had its own sandy beach, palm leaf sunshades, a picturesque view of Ish and Timsah. What more could Ailsa have asked? The November weather was warm rather than hot, relaxing every fibre. Having rested on her bed for several hours, she arranged a flannel in the bra of her swimming costume, to pad it out decently, and went to sunbathe and swim. She tried out her Arabic on a young woman bathing in full hijab and veil. Ailsa watched and admired a young man, whose legs had been amputated in the October War, as he swam off like a fish on his own into deep waters.

She slept like a log, waking to the muezzin’s call to prayer, a haunting shimmer of sound through the clarity of the dawn light. Later she roamed Ish. It had changed: how could she have imagined otherwise? Bombed by Israel in ’67, the city had been rebuilt; all the street names had been altered after the Revolution. Ailsa savoured the scents of spice and petrol and coffee. In a pavement café, she ate fresh lute that had certainly been swimming in the lake hours previously: unbelievably tasty.

She wouldn’t risk El-Marah. No sense in that. There were corners of her mind she never visited: wisely, Ailsa was sure. But her feet found their way to the Jacobs bungalow.
Oh you were, in times gone by, my sister or my wife
. A strange delusion for which to forfeit everything. Ailsa had donated the volume of Goethe Mona had filched from the
Empire Glory
to some church bring-and-buy sale at Church Stretton, twenty years earlier. But you couldn’t censor words known by heart. Nor did she wish to. As Ailsa stood shielding her eyes from the dazzle that bounced off the white bungalow, it seemed impossible that her friend could fail to appear on the balcony in her sunglasses and sit down at the rickety trestle table with her book and a tall glass of lemonade. And
Habibi
would be somewhere inside listening to a record, the cat on his knee. His chair was next to the grand piano, in the shadow of its black wing, beneath the portrait of Julie Brandt-Simon.

She’d
hated
Mona when Joe died. That had gone on for years. But waiting here outside the bungalow, sun warm on her back and hair, Ailsa felt both Mona and
Habibi
all about her.
Habibi
in calm and clemency, the
andante
passages; Mona in the storm that powered the music. Ailsa had fled them both and she’d been right to run. But aren’t our ghosts, Ailsa thought, born of our love?

Faces peered from the window at the white woman. The door opened. Out came a child holding a brimming glass of water and offered it to Ailsa. Ice cubes and a slice of lime. From his mummy.
Shokrun
. Ailsa drank the deliciously cold water and smiled over the glass at the shy lad.

Later she bathed again with Leila. Her uncle had been killed in the siege of the police station in Ish in 1952. That had happened just after Ailsa’s and Nia’s repatriation.
They’d been staying in Treforys. She’d seen in the paper that we’d murdered fifty or sixty Egyptian auxiliary policemen when they refused to disarm. Of course, the way it was presented, there’d been no option: regrettably the British had been forced to shoot them, they were terrorists, criminal elements. That massacre had been the touch paper for the arson and killings in Cairo. And then the Revolution.

It had been snowing outside in Treforys; the kiddies were sledging on tea trays. Bent over the newspaper, shivering by an inadequate British coal fire, she’d heard Nia outside squealing with blissful but rather high-pitched excitement. Ailsa had closed the paper with a mental shrug. A few more Egyptians dead in Ish: oh well. What’s that to me? Shrugging on her coat, she’d stepped outside and, catching a gleam of Nia’s joy, had smiled a brief, wintry smile. But nothing had mattered, she didn’t care about anything. Cynical and black through and through, Ailsa could only fall back on civilised manners. Nia had been a torment: Ailsa had looked at her and seen his face.

Her heart beat high, riding in a taxi along the
coast-road
to Fayid, in her cream skirt and jacket, clasping in her lap a foaming bouquet of white and purple flowers. I’m coming to you now,
cariad
. The silent driver’s mournful brown eyes met hers in the mirror. He said nothing and that suited her well enough. A bridal day, Ailsa thought, the white wedding we never had. The road forked to the left; they drove down the bumpy track, more slowly now. The immaculately tended cemetery was an oasis of green, pearled with water-drops from the sprinklers; behind it the Bitter Lake. Eucalyptus trees towered, casting pools of shadow.

Here at the perimeter she found him: Joseph Elwyn
Roberts. First his name and dates; then ‘Husband of Ailsa, father of Nia’. He had been buried at an angle to all the others, to signal his shame. Ailsa dropped to her knees and laid the flowers across the breast of the grave. She sat back and gazed at the stone.

But she felt nothing. She tried to speak to Joe. But where was Joe? Not here, surely. Ailsa had no sense of his presence. It had all been over a very long time ago. Nothing left. Or nothing significant. She could not cry.

Unease deepened. The hum in Ailsa’s ears grew. Am I ill? Am I going to die out here, so far from home?

Six months at the most, the consultant had said. She had made him tell her the truth. The ashes had fallen, cold in the grate.

Her entire thought now was to get back to the driver before she collapsed. She made herself walk. But which way? The world spun slowly on its axis and the stand of eucalyptus by which she had set her course seemed mirrored by another in the wrong direction. Righting herself, she walked until she was within calling-distance of the driver, dozing at his wheel.

Do what you came to do. Turning, Ailsa retraced her steps to Joe and sank down, the full skirt belling, settling softly around her, around them both. Nobody was looking. And if they were, who cared? She obeyed her heart and threw herself on her front over the earth that covered him, face in the flowers. Tears came as they would, and words too, about their daughter and their granddaughter.

Ailsa’s skirt was stained with green; her hair wild. Never mind.

The driver started the engine and they made their way along the sandy track to the main road. A convoy of army
lorries passed the taxi and then the road was clear until a motorbike tore hell-for-leather into view behind. A heap of old junk if ever Ailsa had seen one, a pre-war German model, by the looks of it, held together with spit and elastic bands. Two teenagers were joy-riding, in jeans and t-shirts. They buzzed the taxi, fell back; swept out to ride alongside and, grinning, waved in to her. Ailsa laughed and waved back. Her driver spoke for the first time, in his lugubrious way: he would show those jokers; young people were the living end; they had no respect. He put his foot down to throw them off.

With a mock-salute from the boy riding pillion, the bikers overtook and vanished in a gale of exhaust up the road to Ismailia.

I owe my thanks to the generous friends and correspondents who allowed me access to their memories, thoughts and knowledge of Egypt in the period running up to the Suez Crisis, 1948–56. Successive governments denied that the violence of those years amounted to a war: Suez veterans campaigning for this recognition achieved in 2003 the award of the General Service Medal 1918–62 with ‘Canal Zone’ Clasp, for those who had served in the zone during the terrible years, 1951–54.

I owe a vast debt to Suez veterans who helped me to research this book. Foremost amongst these is Geoffrey Richards, whose
Queen Farida’s Gone Away: Canal Zone Memories
is an unpublished autobiography of his Egypt service. Geoff was a remarkable volunteer to an army that included so many cultured, serious and thoughtful young men, whose mentalities stood in striking contrast to the casual racism endemic in the British military. Deeply interested in Arabic culture and haunted by Lawrence of Arabia, Geoff made Egyptian friends, learned Arabic and entered into Arab culture and religion. In recent years he has edited a newsletter,
Suez Canal News
, culled from news articles of the period, documenting the imperialist adventure that exploded in the ‘Suez Crisis’ of 1956, when Britain (in conspiracy with France and Israel) invented a pretext to invade Egypt and retreated ignominiously in response to American pressure. In 2003 Geoff entered into a generous correspondence with me, answering my questions about everything from Arabic
music to motorcycles. He supplied me with maps, scanned documents and little-known photographs of the aftermath of violent actions by the British in Egypt and read the manuscript, pointing out errors.

I thank my friend, William Travers, who served in Egypt as a national serviceman from 1950 to 1952. A young postman in civilian life, Bill was conscripted as a sapper into the Army Postal Service. As a member of the Army Emergency Reserve, he was called up again in 1956, as he has detailed in his unpublished memoir,
A Soldier’s Story: Recalled to the Colours, 1956
. Here Bill records his verdict on the British Suez intervention: ‘I hope to prove that … Dulles and Eisenhower were, throughout the Crisis, the only Western voices of reason…. They responded logically to a legitimate claim by a legitimate power, and Britain and France must shoulder responsibility for the debacle known as the Suez Crisis of 1956.’ Bill’s narrative is a detailed account of the experiences of the soldier on the ground in Port Said in the mayhem of an unequal battle and of his sympathetic concern for Egyptian citizens, deprived of water supplies and suffering the horrors of bombing. In a generous and moving correspondence over nearly a decade, Bill has shared with me his memories and thoughts about his experiences.

Other Suez veteran correspondents were Ken Brock, Peter Evans and John Grant: I thank them with all my heart.

I should also like to thank John Carey, Merton Professor of English at Oxford (retired), for sharing with me his memories of National Service in Egypt in a memorable and
illuminating conversation. Gordon Campbell, Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Leicester and expert on the Islamic world, has in a generous correspondence shared the wisdom gleaned from his travels in the cause of education and women’s equality in the Middle East.

Since I have been the recipient of so much personal information and help from these sources, I must emphasise that any mistakes and bendings of historical fact are my own. The novel’s political perspectives and its iconoclastic spirit are attributable solely to the author.

The Suez Crisis, with its lies and pretexts, may be read as a palimpsest for the ruinous and self-destructive
neo-colonialist
Middle Eastern policies of modern governments, evoking the question phrased by Doris Lessing:
What if we are a people who cannot learn?
It is no accident that the roots of this novel lie in 2003. The words of Aneurin Bevan at a peace rally in Trafalgar Square in November 1956 echo eerily with government claims made in 2003 that the Allied intervention in Iraq was necessary police work: ‘Sir Anthony Eden has been pretending that he is now invading Egypt in order to strengthen the United Nations. Every burglar of course could say the same thing, he could argue that he was entering the house in order to train the police.’

I thank Helen Williams, Menna Elfyn, Barbara
Prys-Williams
and Nigel Jenkins, for comradeship in protesting against the Iraq War.

In my programme of reading, I came upon choice spirits with whom I have felt a human meeting, taking place on
the page between us. One such book is the Palestinian Raja Shehadeh’s
Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape
(2007); another is
Who Knows Better Must Say So
(1955) by the American anti-Zionist Jew, Elmer Berger. Ghada Karmi’s
In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story
(2002) is the memoir of a refugee driven out of Qatamon as a child. Ali Salem, humorist and humanist, is an Egyptian writer, a sharp observer of the modern world whose refusal of prejudice would render him a one-off job in any society. His
A Drive to Israel: An Egyptian Meets His Neighbors
(2001) recounts a journey of recognition for which he took a lot of stick in his own country. His wisdom is a salutary but caustic eye-salve: ‘There is no end to the pain felt by most people when you suddenly raise their curtain of illusions and lies.’

My daughter, Emily Brooks-Davies, acted as my secretary in the early stages of research, meticulously filing documents and compiling chronologies. Grace, her sister, was my travelling companion on two research trips to Jordan and Egypt. I owe them and Robin so much. My greatest debt in the writing of this book is to my dear partner, Frank Regan, who died before it could be published. Frank, who had spent some years serving in Egypt as a conscript, shared with me his memories, wisdom and experience. He was my rock and remains my guiding star.

Stevie Davies