Into Suez (13 page)

Within half a century, Ailsa thought, I don’t suppose there’ll be any more veils or head scarves in Egypt. Or in the world. Women will be full citizens, they’ll enjoy equal rights just as we do, she inwardly informed the patrons of the café. They’ll walk free and proud as I do, a citizen, the peer of any man. You can’t stop us.

The prow of the coffee pot appeared at her elbow. No, oh no more coffee, thank you! She ought to leave now. Well, just a smidgeon. And why not? The Air Force would do its best to prevent her straying again over the line into the real Egypt, if only in the persons of Joe and Nia, her beloved policemen. She’d linger just a little while. Nia was spending the whole day at the kindergarten: plenty of time. Ailsa felt, whether rightly or wrongly, that the European proprietor protected her, veiled her, with his impressive, civilised courtesy, against the insolence of the other diners.

The Britisher, scraping his chair back, took his leave of his Egyptian companions, who lavished on him many courtesies and insistences that he stay, repaid by promises on his part to return and enjoy their company longer next time,
Insh’Allah
. You could read it all in the extravagant gestures. She couldn’t help smiling. There was all the time in the world here and friendship between man and man was everything. Ailsa had seen young men walking hand in hand or with arms loosely embracing one another’s shoulders. As he neared Ailsa’s table, the Englishman smiled and paused. ‘Enjoying the coffee? Ah, and I see you’ve been trying the sweets. Frightfully good, aren’t they? What do you think of our Oum Koulsoum?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The singer. She’s a legend here. The voice of Egypt, they call her.‘

‘
That
is Oum Koulsoum? Isn’t she coming here soon? To the concert?’

‘She’ll be mobbed.’ He perched on the edge of a chair, offered a cigarette. ‘Oum Koulsoum is what the Arabs call
asil
– the real thing, authentic. Child of the
fellaheen
– a
bint il-riif
, daughter of the countryside – that means, true Egyptian, the deep Muslim values of Egypt, singing in the ancient, traditional music. It’s very intricate, technically difficult – no printed score, it’s all improvisation.’

It was a love song, he said:
Come here my darling and see what havoc your eyes have wrought
. That kind of thing. But more than that. What they were hearing was the slow burn of Egypt’s wrath with the West.

‘How, if it’s just a love song?’

‘Well, I suppose it’s
Egypt
that’s betrayed and scorned and enslaved.’

‘I thought Egyptian women were supposed to be not seen and not heard in public.’

Oum Koulsoum was the exception that proved the rule, he said. And sat down: ‘Nobby Bowen.’

Joe wouldn’t like this one bit.

Nobby had gone native. He lived in the Greek quarter, in a flat rented from his widowed sister-in-law, Leila, who with her little girl, Heba, occupied the ground floor. He’d married a Cairene, a Coptic Christian. A renegade toff with a social conscience, a yen for adventure and a distaste for protocol, Nobby had insisted on joining the lower ranks when he was called up, learning Arabic and following in the footsteps of his hero, Lawrence of
Arabia. He wanted to live amongst
real
people, in the
real
Egypt.

She couldn’t help herself. She said, ‘Oh, so do I.’ And immediately regretted it.

He was impressed and showed it.

So men could dodge the system, Ailsa thought, as he talked. A few were prepared to go their own way, in broad daylight, living in two worlds. Men could but not women. A big talker, Nobby hardly needed to be fed with questions. He was pals with several chaps who’d gone native: two older NCOs had been here since the end of the Great War. They’d married sisters – and there was Jim, a Guardsman.

‘But don’t the British authorities object? Doesn’t it breach their protocols?’

‘To tell you the truth, they’ve been jolly decent and
fair-minded
about it. Basically there’s a hands-off attitude. Of course it would be different for a woman. Unthinkable.’

‘Everything’s different for women. And what about your wife?’

He had six glamorous sisters-in-law. Imagine him stepping out with seven gorgeous ladies on his arm! And all but one in search of a British husband. He had to admit, it was sometimes a pleasure to escape to the RAF and his pals, and then escape back again to his family.

And the food! Out of this world! He advised her to try
Melokhia
, soup traditionally made by peasants but the Pharaohs had dined on it. The most fragrant bread in the world. Stuffed grape leaves – cold fried fish with anchovy sauce – roast pigeons with cumin and lime. Apricot pudding –
samak
and sherbert. Simple food made
mouth-watering
with spices. He mocked the British with their
condensed milk and canned peaches. For them food could only be wholesome if it was tasteless. Not that he looked down on his countrymen.

Oh, but you do, Ailsa thought. Especially on the women. You can’t help it. Your public school arrogance. His face was boyishly eager, with china-blue eyes that darted here and there to make sure he missed nothing of the life around him. ‘Yes, well,’ she said primly, ‘we’re conservative because we don’t want dysentery, or worse.’ He caught the mild reproof in her voice. But in her heart Ailsa was thinking she’d go to the market in Ish: sample these luscious foods.

They spoke of the boy demonstrator. The British would be chased out sooner rather than later for we’d made common cause with the Pashas who bled the
fellaheen
dry, Nobby said. Bevin counted on the Egyptian factions cancelling each other out – the Wafd government and the Islamic Egyptian brotherhood, the Commies and army officers and the pashas. But the writing was on the wall. And the reason for that – the precipitant – was Israel. Wave after wave of upheaval had hit the Arab world with the creation of Israel. It was reinforced by the Palestinian refugees flooding the Middle East. They made the injustice impossible to ignore. Nobby had a friend in Ish, a remarkable woman, who’d made it her business to find jobs and digs for them. These exiles had nothing. They’d been driven out of Haifa and Jaffa and from hundreds of villages liquidated by the Israeli army. Their families had been murdered or dispersed. The refugees spoke to their brother Arabs without need of words. At the same time, the British were keeping bloodsuckers in feudal power in Egypt – those same leeches who’d profiteered from the
war against Israel and ensured that the army had useless out-of-date weapons. The treaty Britain had forced on Egypt would be torn up. If not this year, next.

Ailsa told him what Nia called the Treaty Road: the Cheaty Road. He laughed aloud.

‘Well well,’ he said, ‘it’s good to meet a free spirit, Mrs Roberts. I hope we meet again.
Bukra fil mish-mish
. Have you met that phrase?
Mish-mish
means apricot. Or apricot-tree.
When the apricot comes into flower
. Which it never does, of course. So: tomorrow never comes. A relaxed attitude to time is taken here. Europeans need to adjust. But I’d best be on my way even so.’

Ailsa let Nobby escort her to the French Square, where he met his sister-in-law and her daughter, about the same age as Nia. No time to speak to them. No time to ask Nobby,
Do you know Mona Jacobs?
Ailsa caught the next bus back to El-Marah by the skin of her teeth.

Irene came haring out of her house. There’d been an incident, she said, taking Ailsa’s arm. They’d been so worried. Had Ailsa been caught up in it?

She shook her head; smiled.

Irene yelped: ‘What’s that blood on your blouse? Have you hurt yourself?’

‘No, I’m fine. Just a tiny graze on my finger but it
kind-of
got everywhere. Would you mind picking up Nia, Irene, when you fetch Christopher from kindergarten? I need to … wash my blouse. And would you mind perhaps not mentioning to Joe that I went off by myself? He’d only worry, quite needlessly.’

Irene smelt a rat, of course she did. Luckily Chalkie had gone off to the camp as soon as he’d put Irene and Hedwig on the bus, so he’d have no idea how long Ailsa had been
absent without leave. Irene knew far more than she let on and one felt her disapproval though her face maintained its politely neutral expression. Disapproval, or was it fearfulness? Irene had never misbehaved in her life, not out of integrity, Ailsa thought, for the woman was an awful coward, but from fear of consequences. But she surprised Ailsa by saying, just before she went off with Tim in his pushchair, to fetch the other children, ‘Did you catch up with the lady? Was it the person you thought?’ There was some itch in Irene that made her curious to know about deviancy. A gossipy streak that gave her insight.

‘It wasn’t Mrs Jacobs, was it?’ she said. ‘No, I thought not.’

The first thing Ailsa did when she escaped was to pull off the blouse. The boy’s blood had dried brown. The armpits were drenched in sweat. Ailsa stood in her petticoat and washed the garment out, rubbing and rinsing till the stains didn’t show. She hung it on the line, where in the furnace heat of mid-afternoon it would dry in ten minutes. All the while she cudgeled her brain for ways to get to the concert either with or without Joe’s knowledge and permission. Why not just come out with it straight; take him along? Tell him the Websters were going: make it a foursome? Joe had a passionate reverence for classical music. She could explain that it was for the music that she was going, not for the musician. I’ll see you, Mona, she said aloud, and that’s that. 

Nia sat beneath a sunshade in the lido, a glass covered area with tables and chairs on bare wooden decking at the top of the ship. A combo played old-time melodies on a raised area – a silver-haired Perry Como look-alike slackening the passion in songs that had always struck Nia as scintillating: ‘Under my Skin’, ‘Making Whoopee’. Poppy, with a tranquil, dreamy expression, swam round a small pool sunk in the deck. A kitschy green statue of a mournful nymph drooped over the water.

Poppy looked up: ‘What time is she coming? Should I be getting out?’

‘Oh, not for ages. Go on basking.’

The phone call had come late yesterday evening, just as Nia was getting ready for bed. The
Terra Incognita
had berthed for two days at Sharm al Sheikh, where Poppy and Nia sunbathed on the private beach of a luxury hotel, taking countless dips in the warm water of the Red Sea. Most of the recliners were vacant, the war in Iraq having
emptied hotels of tourists and hoteliers’ pockets of profit. Monumental hotel blocks stood empty, their dark windows facing the turquoise water. Impoverished staff mobbed the few guests, competing to offer service likely to attract
baksheesh
. Sharm, which would be empty of tourists for as long as convulsions lasted, felt like the end of the world. Armed soldiers patrolled the beach perimeters, where barbed wire had been laid to protect the bathers.

By and by, despite the apocalyptic desolation of the place, Nia had allowed herself to lie back, drowse and dream. All too soon they were rounded up and bussed back to the
Terra Incognita
. Nia had promised herself another such soporific day tomorrow and perhaps a cruise in one of the glass-bottomed boats that took you to view the exotic fish and corals.

After supper, she’d stretched out on her bunk. Lassitude from the heat and relaxation had been broken by the phone call. An elderly, grating voice over a poor line. Mona Serafin-Jacobs here. How are you? (No pause for an answer.) Let’s keep this short. No point in waiting around to join you in Alex when I can board at Sharm. All arranged. Expect me tomorrow latish afternoon. Suit you?

It had to be all right, didn’t it? The peremptoriness of Stalking Mona’s manner had put Nia’s back up at once. No time had been granted for response, for the caller hung up abruptly, leaving Nia silenced, ears ringing, receiver in hand. Little chance of sleep after that.

By morning she’d all but blanked the whole thing. Nia was good at that: sand sifted down over memory and threat, while she affected the neutral public persona Poppy called her po-face and didn’t like one little bit. The
carapace, which had stood her in good stead in all sorts of painful situations, was the legacy of her mother. Not the Ailsa of the diaries, whose skin was scarily thin and whose heart lay nakedly open, but the older woman who’d taken unspecified deadly blows and been forced to build a fortress on the instability of her losses, sinking her soul down into herself.

Passengers came and went with coffee and tea. Nia vanished into her book.

She’d missed the arrival of a woman in sunglasses under the sunshade at a neighbouring table.
Is this you?
Nia’s heart beat hard.

But no, too young surely even for a vigorous old age. The stranger’s build was monumental, her face craggy and striking; her cropped dark hair (dyed, surely) was oiled close to her head. She wore three-quarter trousers and an embroidered and beaded tunic, tawny coloured. Pushing her sunglasses up on to her head, she took a sip of coffee, looking over the cup to where Poppy lay becalmed in the water. Her eyelashes were thick and curly, with kohl round her eyes, strong eyebrows pencilled in. And yes, dashing and distinguished if frail (for she walked with the aid of the stick Nia saw resting against her chair), here was their guest, Mona Serafin-Jacobs.

Mona’s eyes in the light filtering through the sun roof were just as Ailsa had described them and as one saw on her record sleeves: deep liquid brown, troubling. Nia stared, then swivelled her head away, but looked back again. It was up to the visitor to say the first word. Nia felt paralysed.

Going to take another sip of coffee, the stranger caught Nia observing her. For a long moment they held one
another’s eyes without smiling. Mona was the first to rise. She advanced without the aid of her stick, holding out her hand to take Nia’s in a firm grip. Nia caught a waft of expensive perfume.

‘I knew you at once,’ said Mona, choking on the words. ‘Believe it or not. How are you, Nia?’

Nervous agitation gripped and shook Nia; she was a quailing child. She summoned hypocritical pleasantries, polite formulae. So glad to meet you after all this time. How are you? Is your cabin comfortable?

‘Yes, yes, fine, it’s fine.’

Was the woman going to cry?

Poppy’s head appeared over the parapet of the pool. Beaming. ‘Mona!’ she cried. ‘Hey, it’s Mona, isn’t it?’

Dark hair plastered down her head and back, Poppy scrambled out and rushed to their visitor, stopping just short.

‘I won’t hug you,’ she said. ‘Unless you want to be drenched.’ So much more naturally than Nia, Poppy reached across and kissed Mona with her cold mouth on both cheeks. And watching Poppy chattering away, wrapping a towel around herself, Nia felt as if she were observing her own self – herself as she ought to be. She was conscious of her own profound reserve.

They would go into the pool! cried Mona. Now! What about it? Why not? They could all be wet together! And really the sun was so roasting! What was it Milton called clothes?
These troublesome disguises which we wear!

Mona began to peel off down to her dark underwear.

And this too was just as it ought to be. One should live without stiffness and self-consciousness. But Nia’s face flamed with embarrassment as she followed suit. And this
stripper-off of wrappings was Mam’s bosom friend? It was unimaginable.

But how much easier it was bobbing about together in the cool lassitude of salty green water. Poppy was telling Mona about Aqaba – how it had been a ghost town, no visitors at the hotels; echoing space between the bare red hills and the premonition they’d had there of catastrophe, at the borders of Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Men with guns.

Mona lay on her back and basked, dark hair raying around her head. ‘
Plus ça change
,’ she said. And now the West had brought another wave of
Shock and Awe
, not just to Iraq, but to the Middle East and the world as a whole.

‘It’s the Suez crisis all over again,’ Nia said. ‘But on an incomparably vaster scale – apocalyptic. It’s as if we can’t learn.’

‘You surely don’t remember Suez?’

‘I remember it clearly. It politicised me. My Welsh grandparents sitting more or less on top of the radio, ears glued to the Nine O’clock News. Nasser nationalises the Canal. Eden plots with France and Israel. Our glorious troops sent in murdering and bombing. Plot detected. We all run home with our tails between our legs when the Americans tell us to. Suez was probably the first time I realised our leaders were asses.’

‘But you can only have been about ten.’

‘Age of reason. It’s all downhill from there.’

Mona laughed. A sense of what the two of them had in common slackened the tension. They spoke of Clem Attlee, the postwar Labour Prime Minister, and how, if he’d had his way, Britain would have pulled out of its colonies before we could make further mischief.

‘Might have beens,’ Nia sighed. ‘Counterfactuals. Silly game really.’

It occurred to her that, if the Brits had packed up their guns and gone home after the war, she and Topher might still have their fathers. And Mona might have her husband. What had happened to the Wing Commander of the diaries, the lovable
Habibi
who’d so upset Joe Roberts by his friendliness with his wife – the anti-Zionist Jew who’d married a Palestinian refugee? The desire not to know had been nearly as sharp as the yen to know. Whenever Nia opened the diaries she’d reread what she already knew, unable to bring herself to read on. Her mother was young again, complex, radicalised and reckless – and her father, well, Joe was no saint but she felt a sweetness in him. He’d loved Ailsa, he’d loved Nia. But had Joe loved her as dearly as Archie did? She doubted it. If Attlee had had his way, Joe and Chalkie and Ben Jacobs would have come safely home. There’d have been no stepfather. Archie would be nothing but a distant second cousin – unbearable thought. Of course you wouldn’t know what you’d missed.

And Chalkie, who seemed a lovely guy, might have saved the world from the prolixities of Topher’s poetry.

‘So what else did you see in Jordan?’ Mona asked Poppy. They floated on their backs, bodies swirling with green water, rippling with sunlight.

‘Oh, the ruins of the original Aqaba. The Citadel where the British ships lobbed cannon balls at the Turks, wasn’t it, in the First World War and jolly old Lawrence of Arabia stormed down from the mountains.’

‘And an aquarium,’ said Nia. ‘We were the fish – or rather Poppy was. She was mobbed by guys with their eyes on stalks.’

‘Well, if you will look like Nefertiti, what can you expect?’

‘That’s a rather nice compliment,’ said Poppy. ‘I’ll buy you a drink for that.’

‘I speak as I find, my dear, as you will no doubt discover.’

It was a rather quenching remark, though delivered in jest. Nia could feel the power in Mona to annihilate you if she chose – or if the cause she espoused, or the agenda she favoured, seemed to require this.

Yet Mona, when they’d hauled themselves out and dressed, was clearly overwhelmed with fatigue. She sat quietly with tea and a scone under the turquoise shade, sipping and nibbling, and failed to look particularly formidable. When from time to time their eyes caught and held, for no more than a moment, Nia was conscious of a search going on that cost their guest dear. Mona sat as if collapsed into herself, looking like an old lady. No different from the humming throng around her. She’s searching for my mother in me, Nia thought, but she’ll have her work cut out to find her. Ailsa Roberts had been a young woman in her heyday; Nia was getting on in years. And Mam had been astoundingly beautiful, with that heart-shaped face, high cheek bones and green-blue eyes. The nearest Nia had ever got to that was an expressive and eccentric feyness that had made people stare. Years ago.

She in her turn searched out Ailsa in Mona. The two survivors had come through life looking for the one elusive love. And if Ailsa did not somehow endure within both these women, she was nowhere.

Poppy seemed to see it all, without the need of words. She kept the two older women balanced with her
naturalness and warmth, until she judged the time right to leave them in one another’s company. If it was OK, she said, she’d go and chill out in the jacuzzi. She bent and kissed each on the cheek. Taking Poppy’s hand, Mona looked into her face with a beautifully soft expression.

‘I’ve got all your CDs,’ Nia told Mona. ‘Every single one. I inherited Mam’s collection of your records, of course. And everything since. And there’s a DVD of a concert in Ismailia with Oum Koulsoum. That was amazing.’

The concert had been filmed by the Egyptian television service, focusing on the legendary singer, with Mona Jacobs on the margins. People had fainted with emotion at that concert – and then the fight or scuffle had broken out later. None of this was explicitly shown on the black and white DVD. Nia had watched again before coming on the voyage, frame by frame, pausing and staring, after learning of Ailsa’s presence in the audience. The cameras panned the packed auditorium during the intervals when the Egyptian men got to their feet to applaud their heroine, weeping, calling out her name, reaching out their hands. The young Mona stood tall and willowy in a simple, closely fitting black gown with pearls at her neck. A most poignant look on her face as she rose from the piano stool and held out her hand to the Egyptian singer. A shyness no longer remotely apparent. Pianist and singer had come forward and bowed together, over and over, while the Egyptian half of the crowd went wild, to the buttoned-up consternation of the British auditors. In one frame, you could see tears gleaming on both women’s eyes. The concert had been in aid of the Palestinians, the refugees of
al-Naqba
, the Catastrophe of 1948, some of whom were in the audience.

The pianist’s publicity photo on Mona’s record sleeves
had changed over the decades, as hairstyles and outfits altered, until with the early 1980s there’d been no portrait of the artist, just a frozen Alp or a view of the Sahara. Nia had listened intently to Mona’s interpretations of Beethoven’s late sonatas, hailed by critics as powerful, with ‘colossal intellectual grasp’ but a suspect reckless virtuosity. A subtext occasionally appeared to the effect that Mona Serafin-Jacobs was too formidable for a woman. The pianist was on record as distrusting what she derided as mere beauty. The Dvorak piano quintet she had condemned as ‘too beautiful and sensual for me’, as if such music were a temptation to an aesthetic of sybaritic surrender. All art was political. Nia herself had grasped that easily and early. She could share the underlying puritanism of a Palestinian exile who’d seen too much too young, ever to forsake the political forum. And yet here they were on the
Terra Incognita
, in the lap of postcolonial luxury.

Nia had also inherited her mother’s collection of Julie Brandt-Simon’s records. Two women had laid their hands over Mona’s musical life, passing on power and inspiration. She blurted, ‘My mother was in your music, Mona, wasn’t she?’

It was the presence of the longing the Welsh call
hiraeth
. A sense that someone vital has just been present, but now is absent. Someone
Mam-gu
would have called
werth y byd
. Nia had heard this quite clearly as she tracked the pianist through her recordings. The search for a woman worth the world.

‘Your mother was remarkable. Once known, never forgotten. She restored my music, Nia. Ailsa was a great person, a great human being. You should be so proud to be her daughter.’

How could that electrifying spirit have dwindled into mere Mam? The increasingly dowdy and correct bourgeois
Hausfrau
, as Nia had once called her to her face – and Ailsa, turning, had lost her footing, as if slapped. She’d steadied herself with one hand on the sideboard; then she’d realigned the ornaments and vases and left the room without reprisal. Nia’s unsparing tirades had demanded: come out and face me, show yourself, show you care about me. Ailsa would rarely riposte, never raise her voice. Infuriating, guilt-inducing.