Into Suez (26 page)

‘She doesn’t know she’s supposed to despise them, does she?’

‘Oh, come on. You know I didn’t mean that. Give me some credit, Ailsa.’ He changed direction, to shut her up: ‘Bowen was taken with you. Nearly had to knock the bloke down’

‘Don’t be silly. What did he say?’

‘Thought he knew you.’

‘Oh?’

‘Mind, he claims to know everyone in Egypt so why should you be an exception? Gone native he has. Thinks he’s Lawrence of Arabia. Knows a hell of a lot about Pharaohs though, so
chwarae teg
I don’t condemn him.’

Later, in the
souk
at Fayid Village, she made for the spice street. Tiny cupboard-like stores displayed pods, seeds, translucent resins and freakishly shaped knotted roots, fragments of edible bark. Roasted, pulped, pounded and crushed delicacies. The eye and nose – somehow the soul
– were drunk on spirituous plenty. Ailsa admired lemons preserved in salt and rose buds from Damascus. She haggled for and bought several cones of black cherry kernels, musk and ginger, bargaining in an ungainly mixture of Arabic and English.

Beyond the spice street she breathed in a hot stink of rottenness. The smell of everything. Compost and petrol and spices, sun on offal and ordure. The ferment penetrated Ailsa with a pang, not unpleasantly, reminding you that life was planted fair and square in mould. Like the goodness of manure or the intimate blood-smell on your sanitary towel, which you raised to your nose and sniffed without disgust. Curdled milk and crumbled Gorgonzola. The smell of Joe and Ailsa, their skins slick with sweat, attached at the root.

The passion of their nights would kill him, her husband swore! No more! Sleep, he absolutely must sleep! But if they decided to sleep, he’d turn to her again because whatever they had found must never be allowed to slip away. Never, never. Hold, enter, have me. Again. Their eyes did not close when they loved. Joe saw her and Ailsa revelled in Joe’s seeing. And that felt dangerous. Dangerous was exciting. This, she supposed, was marriage. But wasn’t it excessive? Would it go on like this, at this intensity, till one of them died? Was it that Joe had felt something elusive in her depart from him and he must have it back? And she in turn, having almost forsaken him for Mona, rushed in panic for home. Since Nia had nearly died, Ailsa had withdrawn from that other world. Mona had let her. She made no motion to reach in and try to claim Ailsa. Thank goodness Nobby had had his wits about him in Ish and managed to deflect Joe’s suspicion.
Good thing he’d been out and about without his ladies. They’d have mobbed Ailsa like brilliantly coloured butterflies.
Ailsa chérie! Comment va?
How would she have argued her way out of ambush?

Ailsa paused at a treasury of fruit. Piled melons, green and yellow, with a few gashed open to expose the glistening sunset-orange of the juicy inner flesh.

Carpets now. Their jewel colours sang in shafts of light. In the ruck of bodies, Ailsa’s eyes tasted the deep claret of her chosen carpet, against a pattern of ochre or gold, how would you describe it? Autumn trees on Wenlock Edge or walking with Archie under the bronze tree canopy at Pendlebury. Her mind felt faint with the colour’s sensual purity. It made her think of Mona’s carpets on the wall like tapestries. Ailsa reached out now and stroked the pile: unimaginable luxury. She wanted this. The carpet-seller had his genial eye on her. He sidled nearer, smiling.

She shook her head and took a step away from the stall, backing against a hot jostle of bodies. The noise took the top of your head off. Her memory reached for the sombre twilight of the public library at Shrewsbury, with its familiar chill. Recoiling from this heat and squalor, she imagined herself a cool vestal again, with a virgin page and a full fountain pen, in a high gallery of the library. The chaste enjoyment of working for university entrance. If she’d become a scholar, Ailsa could have lived unto herself, not given her body over to the passion of a man and the parasitical need of a child. They used you up. To them, what were you but an udder? They could never let you
be
. They were always nuzzling up to probe and taste you, and prying into your brain to try to handle what was
there. She thought of her green notebook; she’d write about the scent of the salted lemons.

Three weeks
, she thought,
I’ve three weeks of privacy.

And yet she didn’t want Joe to go, not for a moment. He’s my life, she thought: nothing less.

Traffic bellowed; men shouted
Pri-ee-mus! par-a-fin!;
wirelesses attached to lamp posts blared and an organ grinder with a tambourine in his free hand and half his face and one eye missing seemed to be following her around. There were flies sticking to pus on the good eye. Beyond or beneath this racket shimmered an echo, like a radio signal, a bass note to bedlam.

A soldier with a rifle strolled through the throng. The crowd parted. She read the chill watchfulness on his face, the mute masks of the faces he passed.

Grief and guilt thrilled through her. She couldn’t stand it, the grasping hands, the reek, the need. How is it my fault? she asked them all. How can I help it if you live in mud huts and have bilharzia and your babies die and you can live on a tithe of a tithe of what I possess, and yet I think of myself as poor? For a moment she saw them – smelt them, rather – as presumably Joe did, a dirty, lousy, contagious rabble. They hated and resented her, for all they fawned and for all she tried to feel, and did feel, love and concern and contrition. The carpet-man came up too close, with his desperate eyes, big and brown and melting: ‘
Madame
Lady like the car-a-pet?’

Ailsa looked round for her husband. Beside a stall selling brass pyramids and camels, Nia on Joe’s shoulders cried out that she had spotted a goat, a real live goat, look there, Mami! It was going, Ailsa supposed, to have its throat cut. And oh! Nia cried, she had seen a rooster, a
lovely golden rooster with a big red crest, in a cage, over there. As the crowds parted, Ailsa beheld the creature in all its beauty, the coxcomb a plume of red flesh, the lens of its eye a flake of gold.

Joe’s watchful look. His gaze embraced her and all her longings. Is there something, anything you want? I will give it to you. I and only I will satisfy you. In the overpowering heat, she felt herself sway and jerk, as if on the edge of sleep. She had three weeks promised.

‘Seen something you like?’ he asked.

‘Too dear. Anyway where could it go? What could go with it? We’ve got nothing that won’t be made to look, well, a bit dull.’

‘No, but we shall have. One day we shall, shan’t we,
cariad
? When we’ve a home of our own.’

Joe quietly noted the carpet. Smiled with his eyes at the seller. Haggled a little.

Quais giddan car-a-pet, effendi!

Mafeesh faluk!
said Joe. ‘Not a bean!
Shufti
!’

He patted his pocket and shrugged. That endearing smile he gave to the carpet-man, Ailsa thought, was sincere. He forgot to hate Egyptians when they came one by one. Away from Mona’s influence, Ailsa too often slid on shit in the region of Joe’s prejudices. The communal prejudice, rather, the lawless prejudice that brought us here, self-righteous gangsters, and kept us here.

And there was reason in that, she thought:
I have to live with him. I can’t afford to be contemptuous of my husband
. And Joe was not as bad as his prejudices.

The carpet-man saw them depart. He let out a wailing cry over his lost sale. As if they had cheated him, stolen his livelihood.

‘Sorry, cariad
. Can’t possibly afford it unless he halves the price.’

‘Of course you can’t. I really didn’t expect it, Joe. I was just interested. You can read Egyptian carpets. They are legible.’

At home they bumped heads, reaching down for the blue air letter on the doormat.

‘You seem so frightfully far away, Joe,’ ran the letter, ‘and I wondered as soon as we arrived if I’d done right to come home and leave my Roy all on his own in the earth at Fayid, unvisited? But how could I have stayed, as things were? It buckets down with rain here, the rain is full of smuts, my mother-in-law is patient with us but I can’t help feeling in the way in such a cramped house, rationing is still dire, it’s so damp, we all came down with colds and Christopher is playing up, he wets his bed, the naughty boy. I feel he needs a man’s discipline.

‘But now, I want to put a plan to you and would you please advise? There may be a way I could return to Egypt, Joe, and I need to be completely practical about this, I have no one to advise me. I asked the RAF about a filing clerk’s job somewhere in Ish – I have secretarial training you know. And it seems they are desperate for the
right people
at the NAAFI – and, to cut a long story short, I expect to fly out in the near future. You were such a pal to me, I feel there is a little portion of my Roy wherever you are, is that mad? I feel I may be mad sometimes.’

‘It looks as though she’s angling to come back out,’ Ailsa said. ‘In fact she is coming back, look.’

He didn’t want Irene, it was as plain as a pikestaff.
He’d turned a corner into this new happiness: she could read it on Joe’s face. Their one ewe lamb was well again and their marriage restored. Irene was trouble.

‘That’s insane,’ he said, handing the letter back. ‘I mean, she loathed it here. Afraid for her life she was, every minute of every day.’

‘She’s just lost, isn’t she, Joe. Shall I answer?’

‘Aye, you answer, that’s best. Look, I need to go out.’

‘What, right away? I thought you were cleaning your kit? Do you want me to do it?’

‘No, it’s fine. Leave it there. I’ll just tell Nia where I’m going.’

He leapt upstairs three at a time and she heard him talking to Nia, who was supposed to be asleep.

‘Dear Irene,’ Ailsa wrote, ‘Joe has asked me to reply for both of us...’

She suspended her pen above the paper. Imagine if it had been the other way round, she thought, and Joe had been killed. Imagine that the hole at Fayid had been dug for
my
husband and that Roy White had helped lower a coffin containing the remains of Joe into the earth. And in some way been accessory to that death. How come Irene not only withheld blame from Joe but turned to him as her mentor? Mad was the word. ‘We both feel your loss acutely,’ she wrote. ‘Never a day goes by but we think of dear Roy and you. How we hope that the dear boys ease your pain in some measure.’

She felt almost guilty at having Joe, while Irene had nobody, in a stricken world where rain fell full of soot and you were on your own.

Irene would come: she would come and try to take Joe away. She hadn’t a chance in hell. Too intense, their
sensuality. Joe unpeeled Ailsa; Ailsa opened to Joe. But what were they trying to do, consume each other? As she pictured him rearing there above her, and herself moving on his sex, dragging her softness against his hardness, awakening now the secret sensation between her legs, she wondered if this could possibly be normal and right?

Perhaps it was not normal. But how could it not be right? They were married, weren’t they? Everything they did was sanctioned. Their bed felt anything but chaste. Something was waiting to happen between them, a breaking open, a rupture. Something violent and obscene that did not happen to nice girls from Church Stretton. She would not be able to avert it, for she liked Joe’s licking tongue, his stumbling fingers on slick places; enjoyed the smell of their salt and sweat among the rucked sheets in the morning. But her abraded body was beginning to feel as if it were enduring an assault.

A couple of hours later, cooking smells filled the house. She’d flavoured the chicken with ginger from the
souk
.

‘I’m back!’ Joe yelled and bounced in. ‘Shut your eyes! Shut them! Go on.’ Something was being unloaded from a van parked outside; it was hefted into the quarter.

‘You naughty thing! Honestly!’

A magic carpet, Ailsa cried, and burst into tears bcause it was too heavenly; the kind of thing Ailsa Birch could never have owned. They took off their shoes and stepped on to it. She crouched and paddled her fingers in its colour.

‘But, how can we afford this, Joe?’

‘How can we not? When we have our own home, all our things will be as good as this.’

She was afraid to step on it, shy of its glory. All afternoon her carpet glowed at Ailsa, as she walked round
it or just came in to stare, absorbing colour, like light through stained glass.

Later when Nia was sound asleep, Joe laid Ailsa down on the carpet in her slip. She didn’t want to. One day she would wince and twist in his arms:
Oh for God’s sake! Leave me alone! Yallah! Imshi!
The moment she gave way to her need to be herself, and love became a duty, Joe would detect it instantly and interpret it as desertion. And what then? The stress of it all, the strain of it, the bother, she thought, and tears squeezed through the edges of her screwed-up eyes.

He began to tune her, relieving her of choice. She went along with that. Instead of tearing herself away, she let the knots loosen.

‘Wait a tick,
bach
,’ he said. ‘We’d better put a towel under you.’

She groaned as he left. Was soon back. She lifted her hips for the towel to be spread beneath them. The lifting of her body was sensationally exciting. Their eyes were open. She allowed her spine to arch, splay-legged. Joe delayed and delayed. Sprawled on the carpet, with Joe kneeling above Ailsa, the pads of his fingers skidding on her secret places, there was a building, bittersweet ache. Too like pain. She opened wide her eyes. Failed to say
Joe, you’re hurting me
. Reared, shuddered and let out an ugly cry which, as she pulsed, went on and on, filling her with shame.

Could this be right? Ailsa lay quivering. She did not know the word for the sensation. Normal? How could it be? What would he think of her, now he knew she was
that kind of woman
? He slipped inside her and climaxed at once, his cheek against her cheek, his palms flat against her palms, both of them weeping.

When he’d gone, the house was still and quiet. Ailsa hardly knew what to think. She missed him immediately, and yet she embraced the peace.