A Foreign Affair (14 page)

I decided that while my table did convey some important information, including my clear lead in the contest, it signally failed to communicate some essentials, which I gleaned by reading first between the lines and then the women’s body language.

Here are some rough notes I jotted down the same day:

Arwa and the sheikh have not had ‘a proper chat’ for three months, and she is menopausal, and strongly opposes independence for South Yemen. Her Saudi nationality means that she believes Saudi Arabia should annexe Hadramaut to gain direct access to the Indian Ocean. This would circumvent her country’s need to rely on either the Iranian-controlled Straits of Hormuz or the Egyptian-controlled Suez Canal to ship oil safely. (NB Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran are arch enemies).

Jammy loathes Bushara because, until a few months ago, she was Sheikh Ahmad’s intellectual companion. She hasn’t seen him alone since PARP was set up and Bushara began ‘giving him a hand’ when she should have been rearing her triplets, a task which has fallen to Iman, which both Arwa and Jammy think is unfair because Iman’s got twin baby girls of her own. According to the universal principle of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’, Jammy will do whatever it takes to stick it to Bushara, especially as she intends to give birth to another son before her eggs run out. She has managed to extract a promise from Sheikh Ahmad that he will ‘visit’ her this evening.

Iman is unable to verbalise it but she’s been feeling sexually neglected since the birth of PARP and her learning difficulties mean that she doesn’t understand that masturbating in public is ‘inappropriate behaviour’. The stress involved in looking after Bushara’s triplets has only exacerbated the problem. For all the children’s sake, Arwa and Jammy are keeping a very close eye on her.

Bushara despises the other three. The sheikh, South Yemeni independence and recycling are all she cares about. She obviously hates yours truly because, being British and influential as well as extremely attractive, I’m clearly of far more use to PARP than she can ever be.

Not bad for a day’s lounging about nibbling on fairy cakes!

Chapter Eighteen

‘Aziz!’

The sight of a homosexual in the atrium hall of that rigidly segregated Brighton Pavilion was as welcome to me as a first cold beer would have been, even if he did represent yet another rival for the sheikh’s affections. Never mind! I fell on my chubby chum, kissing him on both cheeks and clasping him so close to my bosom he was forced to thrust me away.

‘Please take care, Madam Roza, my nostril is not yet completely healed!’

‘Yes, Rozzer, please calm down!’ said Sheikh Ahmad, ‘You are not being liberated from a jail!’

‘Well, I have been cooped up inside all day!’

‘If we are all ready – Rozzer, my compliments, you look very beautiful! - let’s be off,’ he interrupted me.

It was good to see Aziz again and to be with Sheikh Ahmad for the first time since I’d arrived at his home and to be dressed in my favourite burgundy broderie anglaise coat, over a Chloe royal blue satin sheath dress cut on the cross. It was just as marvellous to be out and about, back on the road in the champagne LandCruiser, and to be headed somewhere I could expect a drink. My good mood was infectious. I had us all singing Ten Green Bottles at the tops of the voices by the time the psychedelic Buckingham Palace hove into view.

‘Now Rozzer, please listen carefully while I tell you what to expect. You will be the guest of honour and certainly the only female present which means you must behave with great decorum because all eyes will be upon you - ’

‘I should hope so, in this get-up!’

‘Second, the steering committee of the movement, that is myself, our vice president al-Afoudi, our host Wuqshan and Aziz will be doing most of the talking.’

‘In Arabic?’

‘Naturally.’

‘But you will expect me to say a few words, won’t you?’ I was hoping I wouldn’t regret going to all the trouble of dolling myself up for an occasion I’d mentally choreographed as my political debut, one at which I’d be required to stand on a raised platform and address a gathering of a few hundred, for no fewer than ten minutes. It was starting to sound as if I might be parked at the back of the room for the entire evening like some elderly relation, while the men yammered away in Arabic.

‘We will play it by ear, Rozzer’ he replied, helping me out of the car.

‘If there isn’t a glass of ice-cold vodka in my hand within two minutes of getting through that door,’ I half-joked, ‘I swear to you, I’ll be up at crack of dawn lecturing your wives on the subject of the male reproductive organ.’ He ignored the joke and the threat, already too busy kissing his host hello.

The Buckingham Palace was teeming with servants, one of whom I was relieved to see stationed with a tray of drinks by the double doors at the end of a long entrance hall. I must confess that I did rather barge my way straight between the parallel lines of men in their best futas who had gathered there for the purpose of welcoming us. Leaving it to the sheikh and Aziz to do the decent thing by all of them in their Arab fashion, I headed straight for that tray.

‘Vodka?’ I asked the flunky, but couldn’t make him understand me. ‘
Maa
...
maa’
he bleated back at me. I ended up taking a sip from each of the glasses, only to find they were all filled with water. Oblivious to thirty or more curious stares boring into my back, I was on the last glass when Sheikh Ahmad arrived at my side.

‘Rozzer, can you please wait just five minutes until everyone is settled inside?’ he said, ‘Our tradition is to offer a glass of water first, as refreshment after the dust of the journey. Drink that glassful and then we will go inside.’ His firm hand on my elbow and that stern voice of his brought me to my senses. Another thing about being in love: one worries terribly about letting one’s beloved down. I was uncomfortably close to tears by the time he’d shepherded me into the main room.

‘Are you all right?’ he inquired gently, walking me across the thickest pile carpet I had ever trodden on towards the furthest corner of the room before gesturing me to be seated on the moss-green velvet divan which lined every wall.

‘Fine,’ I answered him with a hint of a sniff, ‘Actually, I didn’t really want anything to drink – anything alcoholic I mean – because I’ve got a bit of a headache.’

His forbearing smile only made me love him more and long to be back on that camel with him. Gone again from my side, he soon returned with Aziz whom he firmly directed to a space to the right of me.

I began chatting to al-Afoudi, a thoroughly pleasant English speaking Hadrami seated on my left who behaved towards me rather in the way Sheikh Ahmad always had: respectful, interested, appreciative and solicitous but lacking any clear sexual agenda. In these Arab men’s presence it was almost as if, as a non-Moslem white woman, I was a rare but unsexed creature and I was finding I deeply regretted that state of affairs, especially where Sheikh Ahmad was concerned. Some respect for the fairer sex is a very fine thing, of course, but too much of it makes a girl feel like a unicorn. I have since discovered that I probably have a handful of ferociously bossy British women, characters like Lady Hester Stanhope and Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark, who preceded me into the quick-sands of Arabian politics, to thank for my lack of sexual traction in the region.

Determined that Sheikh Ahmad should at least be proud of my interpersonal skills, I politely asked my host why none of his guests was chewing
qat
. He explained that Hadramis have never been as addicted to the vile stuff as other Yemenis, adding that during the Communist era the evil weed had been completely banned in the region. ‘Alcohol is really much more our thing here in Hadramaut, and very, very much mine after three years in Moscow!’ he said with a conspiratorial wink, ‘Oh good, here it comes! I hope you enjoy vodka?’

‘
Kanyeshna
!
Zamechatelnaya
! Thanks to my own six months in Moscow, I certainly do!’

‘
Stolichnaya
suit you?’

‘
Da
! It certainly does!’

I was soon in seventh heaven, glass in hand, chatting about Russian Orthodox church music, Aziz on one side of me and Sheikh Ahmad in my line of vision, all my cares melting away like snow in Moscow in March. The vodka flowed without my noticing but before very long I was finding the sight of hundreds of toes on dozens of pairs of bare brown feet, all playing in the pile of the luxury carpet, oddly mesmerising. The conversation ricocheted to and fro in an uneven series of burps and shouts. From time to time all eyes turned to me and I recognised the odd word –
Britanniya
...
Tonny
Bla
...
London
...
Brezidunt
Bash
– and there was smiling and nodding to respond to with a gracious tilt of my head and a raised glass.

It was my host who at last suggested that I say a few words to the assembled company which, with my kind permission, he would translate for the others. Here, finally, was my chance to shine and I wasn’t about to pass it up, even if Sheikh Ahmad was nervously semaphoring to the effect that I should keep it short. He needn’t have worried. I only wanted to say a few words on Britain’s behalf, the sort of thing a British ambassador spouts at the start of any function, before handing over to Aziz whose campaign strategy I was impatient to learn more about.

‘A very good evening to you gentlemen! I bring you warm greetings from my country, and I can assure you that I am speaking for my Queen and fellow country people when I tell you how honoured I am to be here tonight supporting South Yemen’s righteous struggle for liberty and self-determination. In the half century since we English abandoned you so disgracefully to your Marxist fate we have never stopped regretting our perfidious cowardice, never given up mourning our loss of Queen Victoria’s first and favourite colony, never stopped caring about you – no, not one of us, not for one minute! - and never stopped wanting the very best for you... because you’re worth it,’ I added as a mechanical afterthought, momentarily distracted as I was, my heart skipping a beat, at the sight of Sheikh Ahmad’s oddly strained smile. ‘And I can tell you a secret tonight,’ I continued nevertheless, ‘One of our Tudor queens had the French port of Calais engraved on her heart, but our Windsor Queen Elizabeth II has South Yemen engraved on hers – and the words Aden and Hadramaut too, in a smaller font...’

‘Radfan!’...’Yaffa!’...’Shabwa!’... ‘Lahej!’...’Abyan!’... Names of places I’d never heard before were being hurled out at random from every part of the room. The idea of our grandmotherly monarch’s bosom hiding a heart graffiti-ed over with the name of every region of South Yemen, had an instant and powerful appeal it seemed.

Emboldened by all the enthusiasm, I smiled modestly and gestured for silence, preparing to forge on in much the same vein by recycling a few sentiments from my Silent Valley address. But Sheikh Ahmad was suddenly on his feet and loudly applauding, firmly thanking me for my kind words before inviting Aziz to lay out the campaign strategy. I didn’t mind; in fact, he was quite right, it was high time we all turned our attention to practicalities; the moment for tables, charts and power-point presentations had arrived.

Relaxing after my exertions, another tot of vodka to hand, I found myself feeling exceptionally warm towards all those freedom-loving Hadramis, even if their futas – most of them horridly embellished in the local style with neon pink bobbles and tassels and gold and silver threads – did make them look like Chinese holiday decorations. The sense of being joined with others in a selfless and noble endeavour was an extremely pleasant one. I began thinking about how much we in our over-individualised western civilisation have forgotten about the joy of engaging in a common endeavour for a common ideal. What’s become of all the brass bands, am dram societies and local party associations of old? I suppose Weightwatchers and AA meetings count as collective endeavours of a kind but they’re all ‘me, me, me’ too when you come to think about it – it’s all self- rather than others’- improvement, isn’t it?

Aziz proved a let-down from the point of view of visual aids. He had no photocopied hand-outs of printed tables, pie-charts and bar-graphs, no power-point presentation to offer us, or even a flip-chart to hand. But he had something else, some very exciting ideas, many of which he’d already begun to implement.

What follows is a page of bullet-pointed notes I made the following morning, a run-down of Aziz’s plans for publicising the cause:

Daily
text messages of the party slogan .’Freedom for free’. The owner of Yemen’s largest mobile phone network is half–Adeni, a party sympathiser and multi-millionaire donor who has promised to offer those who join PARP free text messages for three months.

Print a million head-cloths with my face on them for distribution at rallies I address. T shirts are not much worn by Yemenis and would excite too much attention from the security police, whereas head-cloths have to be tied in such a way that my image would not be clearly displayed anywhere but on the crown of the head, invisible except from above. Photographs of me must be taken without delay; the bales of head-cloths have already arrived from India.

Hire
a light aircraft to trail a banner with the party slogan and symbol – a mini Big Ben - up and down each of Hadramaut’s wadis. Our host, Wuqshan, owns two suitable aircraft. Sheikh Ahmad reports that Bushara has already stitched the banners. (Grrrr!)

Purchase
2-3 million pink hydrogen balloons emblazoned with the party slogan and symbol – a Big Ben - for release at rallies, at Sanaa airport when the president is departing on a trip, etc. Sheikh Ahmad reports that the boxes of Chinese balloons have already reached Mukalla.

Sheikh
Ahmad will be filmed standing to attention while a Union Jack is run up a flag-pole erected in the courtyard of his home and a recording of God Save the Queen is played at top volume. The footage should be downloaded onto YouTube – proof that a love of and loyalty towards Britain runs deep in a part of the world regarded as al-Qaeda central.

Capture
the educated young female vote with printed slogans slipped in tins of baby food: eg. ‘Feed your baby freedom’, ‘Give your baby independence’ and ‘Breast is good but secession is better’. The owner of Yemen’s leading brand of baby food happens to be a northern tribesman who opposes the president because the regime is bad for his business. He has already agreed to put a slogan inside each tin.

Target
the illiterate – luckily not as many in south Yemen as in north Yemen thanks to the Marxists’ drive for education , but growing in number – by ensuring that I am recognised as the face of the movement. Stickers of me for cars, bicycles, fridges, wheelbarrows, shop shutters, schoolbags, qat bags etc. should be free.

By the time he’d reached the last item on his agenda, Aziz looked exhausted but thrilled by the reception his ideas had been getting. However, he’d saved the best news until last:

‘Tomorrow, we will test the public support for our ideas by holding a first rally in Seiyun at which Madam Roza will be the honoured speaker – other engagements have been booked for Zingibar, Ataq and Hawta – from there
Inshallah
we will progress to large centres such as Mukalla and Aden...’