Into Suez (17 page)

‘Do you know what their slogan is?
Evacuation with Blood
. They come up behind with knives,’ Irene said, ‘and cut your throat. I know they do. No one tell me they don’t, because they do.’

‘Well now, dear,’ said Joe in a gentle voice, ‘I can’t deny it has happened in the past. But it is not a regular thing. If it were, and if we were really in danger, you know, the Forces would never allow the women and children out here in the first place. Would they?’

‘Wouldn’t they?’

How did Chalkie put up with this perpetual bleating? It got on his wick. After half an hour of the sorrows of Irene, Joe was glad to leave her to Ailsa and go and call the children for a siesta in the hive. He did feel for her, of course he did, and she was an excellent sort of woman. Look at how she’d admired his music. But what a
misery-guts
. He felt damn sorry for Chalkie. The bloke should put his foot down. And wouldn’t that be more reassuring for Irene in the long run?

The water of Timsah lapped around his ankles, tranquil and homely. The green woodlands that fringed the shore could easily have been growing in the Gower. Arms crossed, fists in armpits, he waited for Chalkie to hire a skiff and bring it round. He glanced down at what Ailsa called his
pelt
, the forest of dark fur that covered his chest and arms, which he had once been afraid (knowing nothing of women) would revolt her smoothness.
For Esau thy brother is an hairy man!
she’d said, taking delight in what he deplored as crude. Even now it was sometimes hard to believe she could love the physical specimen he was, child of steelmen and miners, and looking and sounding every bit the part.

In the beehive, the kiddies were now in their shorts. He watched Nia wind her arms round Ailsa’s neck and give her cheek a tender kiss. Then, not to leave Irene out, she did the same for her, and Christopher followed suit because he would always do what Nia did, even act like a girl. Although Ailsa always said,
Ah Joe, she gets these winning ways from you
.

Chalkie paddled the skiff in close to shore and leaned over to balance Joe as he climbed on. Joe settled behind him, holding one of the double paddles.

Chalkie asked, ‘Did you bring it up about the Tiger?’

‘Ailsa did. Leave it to her, I would, she’s clever like that. She used to ride a bike herself, you know. Courier in the war.’

They paddled sleekly out towards the centre of the lake, taking it easy, leaving the shore chatter and activity behind. Chalkie had had a bit of a turn on guards last night. Dusty Miller going on about shooting a Gyppo. Sick of the velvet gloves approach to the wogs.

‘
Shoot me a wog! Is what I want!
’ A moderate dose of Dusty went a fair old way. Joe privately thought it was the wartime desk job that had left the chip on his shoulder. But, fair play, Dusty was an uproarious drinking companion.

Chalkie lamented the weary work of sharing a duty with a bloke like Dusty, when you just wanted a smoke and a brew. ‘And he’s looking out for wogs the way normal blokes sniff for skirt. Come three in the morning, Dusty hears a suspicious noise behind the wire and a sort of cracking sound – and he’s up with his revolver – fires two or three times and we both hear a snort and a thump – dead body falling, Dusty’s first kill. Nothing else. So we
both spend the rest of the night three feet from a corpse – and Dusty’s ecstatic, died and gone to heaven:
I’ve got my first wog!
Going on about being blooded. Kissing his revolver. At first light we see the body lying just beyond the fence, and Dusty’s going,
A donkey! I’ve shot a fucking donkey!
’

‘Jesus Christ!’

Chalkie stopped paddling and turned to Joe. The boat rocked slightly in the water. Odd look on his face.

‘Taf, he was inconsolable.
Oh my God, mate, what am I going to do, I’ve killed a poor donkey!
Yes, and he’s over there with the donkey, and the donkey’s throwing this whacking great shadow, and, you know, the flies are out in squadrons, and there’s already a stink, and Dusty’s got his head down with the donkey’s head … and blood all over his hands … and he’s on his feet and throwing up.’

‘Not told Irene about it, have you, Chalkie?’

‘Best not, eh?’

‘Best not.’

Joe wondered if Dusty would have thrown up if the donkey had turned out to be an Arab after all. You didn’t know how people would react when it came down to it. Thinking of bullnecked, loudmouthed Dusty, he smelt fear, the kind of fear that screws itself up into aggression, aggression that must get a climax somehow, and the moment it does, turns to a shambles of squeamishness. Death is real then? Half-baked, slow-witted recognition. Oh, I never imagined.

If there was another moaning, drivelling word out of Irene, Ailsa would grab her knitting needles and plunge
them into her heart. There was no excuse for it. Someone should tell her. Instead of that, the husbands were polite – and then sloped off, down to the boats and the inviting water. She got to her feet and brushed the sand off her shorts, slapping it away.

Looking down at Irene’s nest of light brown curls, Ailsa thought: oh but she’s a good sort, she really is. She has been keeping it all in and now she’s allowing herself to let it out.

But what am I: a sick-bag? Was this all her life amounted to? Torpor of tedium in a horror of heat?

The water gave a shout. It called.

Nia and the boys had attached themselves to a vast Irish family that had taken over two of the neighbouring beehives. The kiddies played leapfrog. Nia was joining in beautifully, nobody could say:
spoilt only child
. Nia went flying over the back of a big bendy boy. She was taking very little notice of Ailsa. The vaulting girl, in mid-air, seemed the picture of happiness.

Irene had turned the topic of conversation to the difference between shortcrust and flaky pastry.

‘Sorry, but I want to go in,’ Ailsa interrupted her.

‘In?’

‘In the water. You don’t mind just keeping your eye on Nia for a few minutes?’

Irene’s mouth gaped. Ailsa skedaddled without waiting for the answer. Had Irene cast a veto, she’d have slapped her, hard, across the anxious mask of her face that refused life, refused life itself! Ailsa ran down the searing sand, glimpsing her daughter look up as her mother mutinied. Inwardly Ailsa begged Nia to let her be, let her go, just this once let her hop, skip and jump into her own world.
I can’t stand it. Don’t ask me to. This is me now. Cheerio!

Not a bleat out of Nia. Oh good girl.

Ailsa waded past squealing small fry in the shallows. Past men in boats. She freestyled out beyond the reach of all but the strongest swimmers. Timsah grew colder as its depth increased beneath her; she couldn’t tell exactly where she’d come from. The lake, spinning on its axis, had come to rest in a new alignment with the woods and sky. Matchstick folk along the sands were indistinguishable: which was the officers’, which the men’s beach?

The rafts were nearer at hand than the shore. Using the wet ropes strung round the base, she dragged herself to the edge of the nearest, kneeing and squirming her way up. The raft rocked slightly and a shrimp-pink young man who’d been sunbathing took fright and, mumbling an apology, slid off the side into the water. Ailsa sat down on the edge. The bone-dry, bleached boards took no more than a second to absorb footprints. The salt water drying on Ailsa’s skin in the suspicion of a breeze gave cool sensuality beneath a veil of godsent cloud.

A mile across the water, near the eastern shore, ocean liners and trading vessels paused in patient convoy, waiting to pass north from Africa, India, the Far East. The queue would stretch back through the Bitter Lakes, until the pilots allowed passage into the canal’s last leg before the Mediterranean. Great silver birds. She watched in fascination. Their stillness, power, direction. Behind the picturesque serenity lay the endless, disputed deserts. Sinai, bleached yellow, the prettiest honey-colour, stretched into shimmering distances towards Nazareth and Galilee. Places where Jesus’s feet once trod; places now of murder.
O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see
 
thee lie
, Nia had lisped last Christmas. No village or town in Israel remained untouched by the slaughter and evictions. Over there, across the canal and the picturesque sands. Ailsa saw in imagination Mona’s violated home at Qatamon. The abandoned apricot and orange trees in the garden of Mona’s childhood,
our cat
with her kittens basking abandoned in the shadow forever. Mona had belonged to an earlier wave of refugees, Christian Arabs caught up in the so-called Arab Rebellion of the 1930s. If she were to venture back now, she’d find a Jewish family in her home.

Ailsa hadn’t understood, hadn’t wanted to understand, what Mona was telling her about the crime against her people. Jewish suffering; Zionist crimes: the mind staggered before the twistedness and treacheries of the postwar world. How did you gain a true perspective? Ailsa had spent her life so far cocooned in the sticky threads of received opinion whilst flattering herself she was free.

Invisible guns ensured the dreamlike passage of ships through Suez – guns held by us, the folk larking on the western shore of Timsah. The leading vessel had evidently been given the go-ahead. It slid forward slow-motion towards Ish, where it would carefully penetrate the narrow opening of the canal. Smoke poured from the funnels; from this distance one could not hear the engines. Its gliding motion was soft as a swan’s.

After the concert Joe had not raised the subject of Mona and Ailsa hadn’t pushed him. But he’d been so moved by the piano music that she’d been half expecting him to withdraw his objections. They were balanced, the two of them, in a loving equanimity she shrank from disturbing.

Joe wasn’t going to budge though, was he? Ailsa swished her feet in the water. The silver forms of fish basked below in the clear green depths, water-ghosts.

Ailsa lumbered up from the lake, thigh muscles gone to jelly. And there they loitered, Nia, Christopher and Timothy, with Irene under a pink parasol, held by a tall black man in a pure white
gallabiyya
and a red cummerbund.

‘Oh you’re
here
. Thank heaven,’ Irene said. She waved the black man away. He bowed slightly and withdrew, shutting the parasol. Irene looked fit to faint. ‘Don’t worry, I shan’t say a word,’ she whispered.

‘Pardon?’

‘I won’t mention it. But I can’t keep doing this.’

‘Mention what? To whom?’ Ailsa, bridling, scooped Nia up and held the little body tight, feeling through the cotton the pit-a-pat of heart against heart. The woman was a policeman, a spy.

‘Mami, did you have a nice swim?’ Nia asked.

‘I did, lovely. I went for miles! I’m fit to drop. Thanks for keeping an eye on Nia for me, Irene. Perhaps you’d like a dip now and I’ll take care of the little ones?’

‘Oh no.’ Irene jumped back as if she’d seen a nasty stinging insect.

‘Fine but, if you change your mind, just say the word.’

‘Topher, your mami can’t swim, can she?’ Nia observed, looking down at him from Ailsa’s arms.

‘No.’

‘Mine can.’

‘Well, mine
can
if she
wanted
to,’ said Christopher, crestfallen. ‘But she doesn’t want to.’

‘Are you scared of water, Mrs White?’ asked Nia directly.

‘No, dear. Not as such.’

As the child turned her face back towards her mother, Ailsa saw with relief that she had rejected the impulse to call Topher’s mami a scaredy-cat. Her mind and Nia’s mind seemed to braid, beneath the level of words. Irene marched them all back to the beehives with such a glower on her face that Ailsa thought,
Poor soul, her day is wrecked
. Irene had thought she’d found a pal, but no such thing.

‘I’m ever so sorry,’ she said to Irene. ‘I didn’t think you’d mind.’

‘I looked for you everywhere and I couldn’t see you at all. And the lake looked enormous. Like a sea. I wondered if I should report you missing. And what if Joe had come back?’

‘Irene – it was just a dip.’

‘And I was looking for Roy and Joe and I couldn’t see them either. The last I saw of them they were sculling out in one of those green boats. And there wasn’t anyone. Only this big black man who insisted on holding a pink umbrella over me. Where did he come from?’

‘The Sudan probably. Or from Nubia – in Upper Egypt.’

‘The point is, poor dear Nia got into a bit of a panic while you were away.’

‘I didn’t
so
.’

‘Well, darling, you did, a funny sort of turn. She looked at me and went all shivery.’

Caught a whiff of your anxiety, no doubt, thought Ailsa. Because she’s fine, look at her. She lay down, salt-crusted, sand-coated, in a semicircle round her daughter, with their heads on a towel, in the grateful shade. Spoons they were,
she told Nia, one lovely darling spoon inside the other; and Little Yellow Man, Nia whispered to her, was also a spoon, the tiniest spoon of all in her hand, but who knows, Ailsa murmured, perhaps he has a minuscule spoon of his own which we can’t see, and within that spoon…

When they woke, Joe was back and Irene had been reunited with Roy. She kept her eyes on her husband, trailing his every move, and drinking reassurance from his presence. Roy was the kind of man who could not keep still. He busied himself building a sand crocodile for his boys, for Timsah, he said, meant ‘crocodile’, what about that then, lads? What if a daddy croc came waddling up out of the lake now this minute! Up and up the beach going
Araagh! Araagh!
looking for his dinner? Well, we’ll have a croc of our very own to defend us, won’t we?

And he tirelessly performed the drama of a croc-fight until a mob of kiddies had assembled, out of their minds with laughter, stuffing their fists in their mouths, falling down in the sand and popping up with a gnashing roar, until even Irene allowed her face to mist over with a wan smile.

‘Oh Irene, he’s such a sweetheart, isn’t he, your husband,’ Ailsa said.

Irene gave her a hands-off look. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘And that’s
why
.’