Apple Blossom Time (11 page)

He loves me.

I see the laughing, crying, kissing group outside Shepheard’s, hurrying us into the taxi in case we miss the train to Alexandria, at the same time holding us back for more kisses and handshakes. I lean out of the window and throw my bouquet. Pansy catches it – just a reflex action – and for a moment everyone else is filled with embarrassment. Her face is very white, but she goes on smiling the tight little smile she has worn all day. She looks as though she will go on smiling it in her sleep, just in case someone is still watching. Then James pulls me back into my seat and kisses me, very deliberately, to cheers from the onlookers.

We have three days – three days to pretend to be grown-up, married people.

He loves me.

I see all these things now, but did I really see them then?

*   *   *

James pulled down the blinds, blanking out the lush, damp greenness of the Delta. No sand here. The earth was black, seamed with ditches, quilted with straight, green, growing lines, patterned with patient, black buffalo, knee-deep in mud, with white egrets and scarlet ibis and bent-backed
fellahin.
James went round the carriage, shutting them from view.

He put his hand on my hair, left it there for a second, long enough for me to feel it fluttering, then ran his fingers down my cheek, my neck, down to my breast, where they trembled again, feather-light, scarcely daring to be there. I covered his hand with my own, holding it in place, showing him that he had a right to do this, so that he could feel the softness and the swell. Beneath his touch, the nipple contracted, soft no longer, and peaked, startling us both. I didn’t know it could do that.

‘Let me look,’ he said, ‘please let me look.’

I undid the top button of my blouse. ‘You don’t have to say please to me,’ I whispered.

His hands felt hot and damp, even through the cotton, as he undid the remaining buttons with clumsy fingers. The air in the carriage was still and humid. It smelt of smoke and steam and cracked varnish. The seats were prickly. I felt a trickle of sweat run down my backbone. He pushed the blouse back off my shoulders and fumbled behind me to unfasten my brassière.

‘Let me,’ I offered, but he gave it a wrench and it parted. My breasts were cupped in his waiting hands.

James gave a long, shuddering sigh. ‘How lovely.’

The carriage heeled slightly, as the train began a long curve. James laid his cheek on my breasts. ‘How lovely,’ he whispered again. The curve deepened, wedging us into a corner. There was a film of sweat between his skin and mine. With a grinding of wheels, the train slowed, juddering and jerking round the bend. His lips fastened round a nipple, sending a pang like a hot wire down through my belly. His mouth was voracious and I arched my back with the sweet, unexpected pain of it. James opened his mouth in a soundless cry as a shudder ran through him, then another and another. Then he was still.

‘Oh, God … I’m so sorry,’ he said, as I gathered my clothes, and his voice was raw with shame. ‘I didn’t … I couldn’t…’

I touched his cheek. It was damp. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

He didn’t look at me as I dressed. There was an emptiness within me, a hollow where none had been before. A sense of expectation still hung round us, of promises unfulfilled. I felt as though I had been robbed, but I didn’t know why.

When my last button had been fastened, James pulled up the blinds. The train drew into a station and we sat in opposite corner seats looking at the crowd, a blameless married couple.

*   *   *

If Cairo is Arab, then Alexandria is Mediterranean, a Greek city of peeling stucco built around a sweeping bay, cooled by sea breezes, a holiday town with beach huts and barrage balloons.

And just as one might expect in Sidmouth or Ilfracombe, there were genteel maiden ladies of uncertain age running boarding-houses with sheets of rules pinned up on the backs of bedroom doors. Where do they come from, these stiff-lipped ladies in corsets, pillars of the Church? Who has brought them to such unlikely places? Who has left them there, colonial driftwood, to support themselves as well as they are able? Miss Howell pointed out her rules to us, as she showed us to our room.

NO more than ONE bath per week.

Apply to management for bathroom KEY.

Front door will be locked at 11 p.m. SHARP

NO noise after 10.30 p.m.

NO eating or drinking in rooms.

Use of CRUET – 6d per week.

NO sand in the bedrooms.

‘Does she think we’re going to make sand castles on the floor?’ asked James with a giggle as he flung himself backwards on to the bed. The springs twanged.

‘Sssh. She’ll hear you.’

‘So what? We’re respectable married people and we can twang the bedsprings as much as we like.’

‘There’ll probably be another rule handwritten at the bottom of the list tomorrow. NO bouncing on the beds! Did you see how suspiciously she glared at us when you registered us as Mr and Mrs Kenton?’

‘Silly old spinster!’

James lay on his back with his arms behind his head, watching me unpack the few things we’d brought. I put my hairbrush on the lace mat on the dressing table and our two toothbrushes together in a mug on the washstand.

‘There,’ I said, pretending to arrange them like flowers, ‘they look just right together.’

‘Perfect. As though they’ve known each other all their lives.’ Then, suddenly serious, he said, ‘I wish I could take you somewhere smart instead of this dump. I wish I could take you somewhere where you could dress for dinner. I’d like to see other men admiring you across a restaurant. I’d like them to envy me.’

‘Silly.’ I made a little kissing motion towards him. ‘Alexandria’s packed to the rafters. I’m just surprised we found a room at all. Anyway, I don’t care about dressing for dinner. I’m happy just as we are.’

‘But we’ll have three whole days to pretend there isn’t a war. We can swim and lie in the sun and just do – whatever we want to do, whatever makes you happy. Shall you like that?’

‘It sounds wonderful.’

‘I love you, Laura,’ he said, quietly.

The answer came easily to my lips. ‘I love you, too.’

*   *   *

Hand in hand, we walked through blacked-out streets – Alexandria was far more vulnerable to bombing raids than Cairo – to the Cecil for dinner. The air from the sea was salty-sweet and refreshing. I felt more energetic than I’d felt in Cairo, bubbling with a sense of expectation, like a child on a trip to the beach.

The Cecil was packed, like the rest of Alexandria, with men and women in uniform, mostly naval personnel in white duck, so much less oppressive than the acres of khaki I was used to. We had a drink in the bar while our table was being prepared. James had a whisky and then, because our table still wasn’t ready, he had another, both doubles.

Noticeable, like ourselves, amongst the white duck, a group of soldiers came in, mixed officers and NCOs, an unusual combination in a social setting. I looked across at them, squinting as I tried to read their shoulder flashes at such a distance. I couldn’t make them out.

I don’t know what made me pause and look again. Some memory, some tightening of old cords that had loosened with time. There was just something …

On his way back from the bar with another whisky, James stopped to talk to the group in khaki. They were sloppier than one would expect soldiers to be. In fact, now I looked at them closely, they were very scruffy indeed – hair too long, buttons missing, cuffs undone, boots that looked as though they didn’t know what a polish tin was for. They all had their backs to me, but there was something about one of them … Brown hair, rough battledress with three chevrons on the sleeve, nothing special, giving the impression of being tall, although he was sitting, no different from a thousand and one soldiers. Yet I found myself staring, frowning, trying to recapture something almost forgotten, something I wasn’t quite sure if I wanted to remember at all.

James made a gesture to me to come over and join in. When I reached him, he put his arm around my shoulder. He was swaying very slightly and there were beads of sweat on his top lip. The other men all politely stood up.

‘Gentlemen,’ James said, ‘this is my wife.’

‘Hello, Martin,’ I said.

You came too late, Martin. Where have you been? I waited and waited. Since I was twelve years old, I’ve been waiting for you to come back. But you stayed away too long. I couldn’t wait for you any longer. What did you expect? How was I to know? I had a life of my own to lead. And then –
then
– you decided to come back. Too late. It would have been better for both of us if you’d never come at all.

*   *   *

‘Congratulations, Laura.’ Taller, browner, thinner, older – when he smiled, he was just the same. And his crooked nose would never change. That’s my fault, I thought, he got that fighting for me. ‘And congratulations to you, too, sir. I hope you’ll both be very happy.’

Martin put out his hand. First he shook James’s hand, formal and correct, then he shook mine – a copy of the day he went away. Only this time, we were both older. He leaned forward and kissed my cheek. Something shafted through me, fierce and jolting, pleasure and pain. His lips were cool and firm. I felt his dark stubble graze my skin. When he stepped back, I found that I was staring, wide-eyed and embarrassed.

‘We’ve waited far too long for a table in this Godforsaken hole,’ James declared. ‘The place is crawling with wet-bobs. Why don’t we all go out together and take pot luck in town?’

*   *   *

Chet’s Circus, they called them, otherwise known as a part of the Army Film and Photographic Unit, a roving band of newspaper and film photographers loosely bound together in uniform, in case they were captured, but acknowledging no military authority. Spit and polish didn’t seem very important to Fleet Street.

Have you seen any of those classic pictures of the Western Desert? There’s the one of a bayonet charge across rubble-strewn sand, a tense and vibrant image of desert warfare. Actually, it’s a picture of Australian cooks well behind the line, attacking the cookhouse, with a well-placed tame explosion creating the dust of battle. A fake, but a brilliant one and the newspaper proprietors loved it.

Then there’s the one of infantrymen taking cover behind a damaged tank, its tracks blown off, slewed across the sand. Another fake. It’s a picture of an already disabled tank that had been brought into the workshops for repair. The explosion that gives the whole scene its credibility is again a dummy one.

‘Well, what do they expect?’ argued the newsreel photographer they called Terry. He shoved aside the plates with the fatty bits of meat that none of us could stomach and the skewers that had once held
souvlaki.
He leaned forward with his elbows on the greasy tablecloth of the harbour
taverna.
‘There’s our lords and masters at home shouting out for bigger and better pictures of war and there’s us in the desert – pointing our lenses at thousands of square miles of bloody sand. We might just turn up where the action is – but then again, we’re just as likely to go pissing off in the wrong direction.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ said Martin slowly. ‘I don’t like deceiving the public. We’re here to show them what’s actually happening – not to make it happen. What do we think we are – gods or something?’

Bill passed round the retsina bottle again and all the glasses were refilled. The turpentine taste seemed to dry all the moisture from my mouth. The more we drank, the thirstier I became.

‘But we are showing them,’ argued Terry. ‘We’re not making things up. We’re not deceiving anyone. War actually looks like that – only we’re probably not around to snap it at the time. All we might see is a puff on the horizon. Is that going to hit the front page? The public needs to know, has a right to know. So we make it happen. But those pictures aren’t lies.’

‘I just don’t like it. Christ, there are men up there in the blue getting killed, while we’re down here remaking
War and Peace,
’ Martin maintained. There was a stubborn set to his chin that I remembered well. I could have told the others that there was no point in arguing with him when he looked like that. ‘We owe it to the men who are fighting and to their families at home to show things as they really are – warts and all. And if the propagandists don’t like it, that’s too bloody bad. Sidi Rezegh isn’t Hollywood and there’s not much glamour in a desert war.’

‘If you don’t like it, Martin, then maybe you should move on,’ Bill suggested, with some pique. ‘Bugger off up the sharp end. Salve your conscience. I bet your pictures won’t be as good, though.’

‘Maybe I will.’

‘Well, I think they’re all terrific,’ put in James, ‘and I think you’re all terrific chaps, barnstorming around without weapons, making newsreels.’ He turned to me with a sweet, fuzzy smile. ‘Aren’t they terrific chaps, darling?’

‘Yes,’ I said, quietly.

They sat, swapping stories of desert life – a life that I couldn’t share. These strangers had more in common with my husband than I had. They talked about setting the hand throttle on a truck and sitting in the back playing cards while the driverless vehicle bowled along for mile after mile, along hard-packed sand. They talked about the difficulties of navigating, of tying a string from the bonnet to a row of nails along the top of the cab and, every hour, shifting the string one notch along. They talked about the way a sandstorm swoops across the desert, drawing everything after it, sucking all the oxygen out of the air with a roar like an express train. They talked about catching flies in jam-smeared cans, dowsing them with petrol and tossing in a match. The smell was like burning flesh, a flavour, even, like the taste that lingers around a burnt-out tank for days afterwards.

The bare light bulb was making my head ache. It swung to and fro from a long wire speckled with grease and dead flies, throwing giant shadows on to a bare wall. The blackout curtains didn’t allow any of the heat to escape. The bead curtain over the door clicked like knitting needles, but no air passed through. The puddle left on my plate looked more like engine oil than olive oil. The ugly, glass ashtray, with
METAXA
written in blue round its edge, spilled crushed butts on to the table. James put his arm around me and drew me in closer to his body.