Jasmine Nights
For Barry and Vicki
JASMINE NIGHTS
JULIA GREGSON
Contents
My thanks to all at Orion, especially my editor Kate Mills, and to Clare Alexander my gold standard agent.
I needed a lot of expert advice while writing this book and many people gave generously of their time and knowledge. Any mistakes are entirely mine.
I am hugely indebted to John Rodenbeck for his editing skills and fascinating emails on Egypt and the Middle East. To Tom Brosnahan and John Dyson for showing me around Turkey and sharing their knowledge of the country.
Sema Moritz and, Vanessa Dodd, Leda Glyptis and Virginia Danielson helped me greatly with information about singing Özgü Ötünç was my guide in Istanbul.
Anthony Rowell for his amusing and invaluable help. Historian, Dillip Sarkar, for his vast knowledge of aircraft, squadrons and Battle of Britain pilots.
For lending a precious family diary, my thanks to Sheila Must.
Grateful thanks to: Cordelia Slater, Brian Shakespeare, Jerome Kass, Pam Enderby; to Owen Sheers, Michael Haag, Peter Sommer, Ibrahim Abd Elmedguid; to Phyllis Chappell for her knowledge of the Bay area in Cardiff during the war and her book
A Tiger Bay Childhood
; to Tara Maginnis for make-up in the forties.
For reading early drafts and general hand holding, thanks to my sister Caroline, Delia, Sadie, Annie Powell, and all the shedettes and the entire Gregson clan.
If I’ve forgotten to thank anyone who helped in the early days my apologies.
Finally, there aren’t words enough to thank Richard who has been my champion through thick and thin and my dearest travelling companion.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
‘From Blossoms’ by Li-Young Lee
QUEEN VICTORIA HOSPITAL,
EAST GRINSTEAD, 1942
It was only a song. That was what he thought when she’d put her hat on and gone, leaving the faint smell of fresh apples behind. Nothing but a song; a pretty girl.
But the very least he could say about the best thing to have happened to him in a long time was that she’d stopped him having the dreams.
In the first, he was at the end of a parachute with about three and a half miles between the soles of his feet and the Suffolk countryside. He was screaming because he couldn’t land. He was rushing through the air, a light, insubstantial thing, like thistledown or a dead moth. The bright green grass, so familiar and so dear, swooped towards him, only to jerk away again. Sometimes a woman stood and gaped at him, waving as he floated down, and then was gone on a gust of wind.
In the second dream, he was in his Spitfire again. Jacko’s aircraft was alongside him. At first it felt good up there in the cold, clear sunlight, but then, in a moment of nauseous panic, he felt his eyelids had been sewn together, and he could not see.
He told no one. He was one of the lucky ones – about to go home after four months here. There were plenty worse off than him in this place of dark corridors and stifled screams. Every day he heard the rumble of ambulances with new burns victims, picked up from shattered aircraft up and down the east coast.
The ward, an overspill from the hospital, was housed in a long, narrow hut with twenty beds on either side of it, and in the middle a pot-bellied stove, a table and a piano with two brass candlesticks arranged festively on top.
The ward smelled of soiled dressings, of bedpans, of dying and living flesh: old men’s smells, although most of the fighter pilots in here were in their early twenties. Stourton, at the end of the ward, who had been flying Hurricanes from North Weald, had been a blind man for two weeks now. His girlfriend came in every day to teach him Braille. Squeak Townsend, the red-faced boy in the next bed with the hearty, unconvincing laugh, was a fighter pilot who’d broken his spine when his parachute had failed, and who’d confessed to Dom a few days ago that he was too windy to ever want to fly again.
Dom knew he was lucky. He’d been flying a Spitfire at 20,000 feet over a patchwork of fields when his cockpit was transformed into a blowtorch by the explosion of the petrol tank that sat in front of his instrument panel. His hands and face were burned – typical fighter-pilot injuries, the surgeon said – and in the excruciating moments between the flames and the ground, he’d opened the plane’s canopy, fumbled for the bright green tag that opened his parachute, swooned through space for what felt like an eternity, and finally landed, babbling and screaming, on top of a farmer’s haystack on the Suffolk coast.
Last week, Dr Kilverton, the jaunty new plastic surgeon who now travelled from hospital to hospital, had come to the Queen Victoria and examined the burn on the right side of his face.
‘Beautiful.’ Kilverton’s bloodshot eye had peered through a microscope at the point where the new skin graft taken from Dom’s buttock had been patchworked over his burns. ‘That’ll take about six or seven weeks to heal; then you should be fully operational. Good skin,’ he added. ‘Mediterranean?’
‘My mother,’ Dom explained through clenched teeth. Kilverton was peeling off old skin at the time, probing the graft. ‘French.’
‘Your father?’
Dom wanted him to shut up. It was easier to go inside the pain and not do the cocktail-party stuff.
‘British.’
‘Where did you learn to fly? Tilt your head this way, please.’ The snub nose loomed towards him.
‘Cambridge. The University Air Squadron.’
‘Ah, my father was there too; sounded like jolly good fun.’
‘Yes.’
Kilverton talked some more about corpuscles and muscle tone and youth still being on his side; he’d repeated how lucky Dom was. ‘Soon have your old face and your old smile back,’ as if a smile was a plastered-on thing.
While he was listening, Dom had that nightmare sensation again of floating above himself, of seeing kind faces below and not being able to reach them. Since the accident, a new person had taken up residence inside the old face, and the old smile. A put-together self who smoked and ate, who joked and was still capable of cynical wisecracks, but who felt essentially dead. Last week, encouraged by the doctors to take his first spin on his motorbike, he’d sat on a grass verge outside the Mucky Duck, on what was supposed to be a red-letter day, and looked at his hand around the beer glass as if it belonged to someone else.
During his first weeks in hospital, now a blur of drips and ambulance rides and acid baths, his sole aim in life had been to not let the side down by blubbing or screaming. Blind at first, he’d managed to quip, ‘Are you pretty?’ to the nurse who’d sat with him in the ambulance that took him away from the smouldering haystack.
Later, in the wards, he made a bargain with himself: he would not deny the physical pain, which was constant, searing, and so bad at times it was almost funny, but emotionally he would own up to nothing. If anyone asked him how he was, he was fine.
It was only in the relative quiet of the night, in the lucid moments when he emerged from the morphine haze, that he thought about the nature of pain. What was it for? How was one to deal with it? Why had he been saved and the others were gone?
And only months later, when his hands had sufficiently healed, had he started to write in the diary his mother had sent him. Reams of stuff about Jacko and Cowbridge, both killed that day. A letter to Jacko’s fiancée, Jill, not sent. Letters to his own parents, ditto, warning them that when he was better, he was determined to fly again.
And then the girl.
When she walked into the ward that night, what struck him most was how young she looked: young and spirited and hopeful. From his bed, he drank in every detail of her.
She was wearing a red polka-dot dress, nipped in at the waist, and a black hat with an absurd little veil that was too old for her and made her look a little like a four-year-old who had raided her mother’s dressing-up box. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-two.
He saw a roll of glossy dark hair under her hat. Generous lips, large brown eyes.
She stood next to the piano, close to the trolley that held dressings and rolled bandages. Half imp, half angel. She was smiling as if this was where she wanted to be. A real professional, he thought, trying to keep a cynical distance. A pro.
She explained in her lightly accented voice – Welsh? Italian? Hard to say – that her name was Saba Tarcan, and that she was a last-minute replacement for a torch singer called Janice Sophia. She hoped they wouldn’t be disappointed, and then threw a bold look in Dom’s direction – or so he imagined – as if to say
you won’t be
.
A fat man in khaki uniform, her accompanist, sat down heavily at the piano, began to play. She listened, swaying slightly; a look of calm settled on her face as she sang about deep purple nights, and flickering stars, and a girl breathing a boy’s name whilst she sighed.
He’d tried every trick in his book to keep her at arm’s length, but the song came out of the darkness like a wild thing, and her voice was so husky, so sad, and it had been such a long time since he’d desired a woman that the relief was overwhelming.
Through the mist of a memory you wander back to me
. So much to conceal now: his fear of being ugly, his shame that he was alive with the others gone. And then he’d felt a wild desire to laugh, for ‘Deep Purple’ was perhaps not the most tactful of songs to sing: many of the men in the ward had purple faces, Gentian violet being the thing they painted over the burns victims, after they’d been bathed in tannic acid.
Halfway through the song, she’d looked startled, as if realising her mistake, but she’d kept on singing, and said nothing by way of apology at the end of it. He approved of that: the last thing any of them needed was sympathy and special songs.
When she’d finished, Dom saw that beads of perspiration had formed on her upper lip and rings of sweat around the arms of her dress. The ward was kept stiflingly hot.
When she sang ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’, Curtis, ignorant bastard, called out: ‘Well, you know where to look, my lovely.’
Dom frowned.
Saba Tarcan
: he said the name to himself.
‘Two more songs,’ said Staff Nurse Morrison, tapping her watch. ‘And then it’s night-night time.’
And he was relieved – it was too much. Like eating a ten-course meal after starving for a year.
But Saba Tarcan paid no attention to the big fat nurse, and this he approved of too. She took off her hat and laid it on the piano, as if to say
I shall stay until I’ve finished
. She pushed back a tendril of hair from her flushed cheek, talked briefly to the pianist, and took Dom to the edge of what was bearable as she began to sing ‘They Didn’t Believe Me’. The song Annabel had loved, singing it softly to him as they walked one night hand in hand beside the Cam, in the days when he felt he had everything: flying, Cambridge, her, other girls too. As the tears dashed through the purple dye, he turned his head away, furious and ashamed.
Annabel was considered a catch: a tall, pale, ethereal girl with long, curly fair hair, a sweet smile, and clever parents: her father a High Court judge, her mother a don. She’d come to see him religiously at first, forehead gleaming in the stifling ward, reading to him with nervous glances around her at some of the other freaks.