Jasmine Nights (11 page)

He was thinking of Saba’s eyes now, dark brown or mid brown? They’d gazed at him like caged animals through the veil of that mad little hat; they’d glowed with life. And one of the songs she’d sung, about God blessing the child who’d got it’s own, was a plea for independence, for life, for dignity, but not, now he came to think of it, for a man.

She was pretty, no doubt about it, but he’d had plenty of time in hospital to mistrust mere attractiveness in another human being. He thought about the girls who’d run screaming from the ward when they’d seen the new faces of their former loves. Annabel had at least exited with some degree of decorum, assuring him over and over again it wasn’t him, it was what she’d termed vaguely, her pale blue eyes flickering as they did when she was being sincere, ‘the whole situation’. A thought which led him to Peter, a close friend from Cambridge, a man with a passion for girls, T. S. Eliot and cars. It was Peter who had sat on a bridge near the Cam and read to him aloud from the
Four Quartets: Teach us to care and not to care
was the line Dom suddenly recalled.

A year before his aircraft had been shot down over France, Peter had bought himself a dazzlingly green Austin 10 for £8 from a local mechanic. He was amazed by his good luck and they’d driven like the clappers through the Oxfordshire countryside in it on one glorious day in summer. The car exploded after a week, and the last time Dom had seen Peter, he was sitting on the grass, its remnants spread around him.

‘It’s my fault,’ Peter said. ‘I was a fool. I was taken in by the colour like a girl with beautiful eyes.’ After a short silence he’d added: ‘It’s a hopeless fucking machine.’

It was still dark in the tunnel. To give himself something to do, Dom read the mother’s letter again by torchlight. When he’d first read it, he’d felt the sting of disappointment – so Saba had definitely and defiantly gone – and he’d been longing in his impatient way to put the thing to rest. But then he’d felt something like relief.

Because what did he know about the girl? Only that she sang, and that he admired her courage, and that for that one moment, when he had told her where his skin graft had come from, they’d both roared with laughter like young people again.

There were moments like that in life, he thought, that you couldn’t really explain or understand but that had the perfect rightness of a billiard ball falling smoothly into a pocket, or of a mountain bend taken at high speed, but with a slowed-down perfection.

And the bird called, in response to the unheard music hidden in the shrubbery
. Oh what a perfect bloody fool he had become. He blamed the war.

A light rain was falling over Cardiff Bay as he walked towards Pomeroy Street. It fell softly over a pearly sea where there was barely a line between water and sky, and blurred the edges of a row of houses above which the seagulls cried. It splattered on the tarpaulins protecting the vegetables outside a Middle Eastern grocer’s shop on the edge of Loudon Square. This is where Saba lives, he thought.

He put up the collar of his greatcoat and checked his watch. He had a twenty-four-hour leave: three hours at the most between now and the return train.

A woman in a sari with a mackintosh over it smiled at him at the street corner. A boy went by on a bicycle: ‘Where’s your plane, mista?’ he said.

At the corner of the next street, a house sliced in half by a bomb stood shamefully exposed, like a girl with her knickers down, or a shabby stage set with its faded rose wallpaper, and green cooker, and sooty rafters. A poor house, in a struggling poor street.

Saba’s streets. ‘The notorious Tiger Bay.’ She’d warned and teased him with it.

Because she had a natural dignity and the stateless confidence of an artiste, he had not given much thought to her background, and was struggling now to hold those two images of her together in his mind. Annabel’s parents had owned a lovely old Tudor house in Wiltshire with a moat with swans and ducks floating on it, as well as an apartment at Lincoln’s Inn. His own mother had thoroughly approved of them, their cleverness, their impeccable furniture, their season ticket to Glyndebourne. She’d probably planned his wedding in their garden. He hadn’t had the heart to tell her yet.

The front door of the house in Pomeroy Street had a brass knocker shaped like a lion’s head. He took a deep breath and banged it.

An old lady appeared wearing a black dress and Wellington boots. Her eyes gleamed from the gloom of the hall – dark and inquisitive.

All the way here, walking down the sooty streets that led to the bay and to Pomeroy Street, he’d had a conversation with himself which had ended in an agreement. He was here simply to return the blue coat; if her mother wanted help, he would do what he could in a dignified way and then beat a discreet and hasty retreat. There must be no whiff of the stage-door Johnny about him; it was a simple act of kindness.

But the old lady’s face lit up immediately when she saw him; she put her hand on his sleeve and became immensely animated.

‘Quick, Joyce!’ she shouted over her shoulder, as if he was the prodigal son. ‘Come! Come quickly. The boy is here!’

A door at the end of the corridor burst open and a handsome woman, fortyish he guessed, came towards him. Her thick dark hair looked freshly waved and she was wearing lipstick. A woman who kept herself nicely, or who had dressed up especially for his visit.

She led him into the parlour on the right of the hall – a cosy room with a small fire burning in the grate. In the corner was a piano with a sheet of music on the stand. The old lady saw him glance at it and smiled encouragingly.

‘I can play,’ she boasted. ‘Saba ma teach me. She like very much.’

‘Tansu,’ the younger woman said firmly, ‘go and take your boots off. I’ll make Mr Benson a cup of tea – or would you prefer coffee? We have both.’

‘Coffee, please,’ he said. ‘If you have enough,’ and then, embarrassed, ‘I mean, with rationing and everything.’

‘Turkish? English? My husband works on the ships, that’s one thing we do have.’

‘Turkish, please.’ He’d never had it before, but why not? Everything was strange enough already.

‘Oh, and I’ve called you Mister.’ She gazed at him warily. ‘And forgotten your rank.’

‘Pilot officer,’ he said. His rapid commission had never felt quite real to him anyway; it felt unearned, like being alive again.

He glanced quickly at the wall of books, and the gramophone, with a pile of records neatly stacked beside it. These were not what he thought of as normal working-class people.

Above the gramophone there was a framed photograph of a stout-looking woman in sunglasses standing proudly in front of the Sphinx.

‘Umm Kulthum.’ The old lady had returned. She was wearing a pair of floral carpet slippers, and looked at the photograph with a look of extreme adoration on her face. ‘Very, very good.’ She gestured towards the records and touched one or two gently. ‘Beautiful,’ she said softly.

While they waited for coffee, she brought him another photograph and put it down gently on his lap. It was Saba. She was standing in front of a band wearing a long dress of some satin shiny stuff; she had a flower in her hair and was smiling that reckless smile towards an audience of young men with short hair and boyish necks. Like sea anemones searching for light or food, they leaned towards her in the gloom of what looked like a large hangar. Knowing what terrible thoughts lurked inside them brought a moment of insecurity. This visit was ridiculous.

‘Saba and the Spring Tones,’ the old lady was proudly explaining to him. She held up two fingers. ‘Second concert . . .’ And she mimed boisterous clapping. Her carpet slippers did a little shuffling dance.

‘Tansu.’ Joyce came back with a tinkling tray. ‘Take the poor man’s coat, let him have his cup of coffee. Please.’

‘Thinking of coats . . .’ He handed her the bag at his feet. ‘Saba left hers – we were having a drink together.’

‘Ah, Lord.’ The mother put down the tray and snatched the coat out of the bag. ‘Goodness me, she’s careless. Typical. Look . . . I don’t want to be rude, but how long have you got?’ She fixed her eyes on him. ‘I’m on shift work. I’ve got less than an hour.’

‘My train leaves at four,’ he said. ‘I’m flying tomorrow.’ He said this to comfort himself, not to boast.

‘And do you fly Spitfires or Hurricanes?’ The polite hostess again, pouring his coffee from a small brass pot.

‘Harvards at the moment,’ he said. ‘I’m at a retraining unit. I actually met your daughter in hospital. I had a bit of a prang over France. I’m all right now.’

‘I can see that.’ She smiled for the first time.

‘She came to sing for us.’

‘Yes, she did a bit of that before she left . . .’ Her expression was thin-lipped and guarded again. She took a sip of her own coffee, and then put it down and sighed sharply.

The old lady had returned, this time with a bowl of chickpeas on a wooden plate.

‘Please.’ She pointed towards them. ‘Eat. Come on.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Tarcan.’

‘Tansu,’ she said firmly. She put her hand over her somewhat magnificent bosom. ‘My name is Tansu.

‘Oh!’ She’d seen the blue coat, and her gnarled fingers touched the cloth tenderly, as if it was a holy relic.

‘Tell me more about where you met Saba,’ the mother said.

At the mention of her name, the grandmother let out a groan and fixed her anxious old eyes on Dom. Joyce fiddled with her cup; she hadn’t taken a sip yet.

‘I was in hospital. East Grinstead,’ he said. ‘She came to sing – she said she was a last-minute replacement.’

He looked at Joyce, who was sitting on the edge of her chair.
Go, go, go, said the bird
.

‘I thought she was wonderful.’ For a moment they looked straight at each other.

‘Yes,’ said Joyce. She shook her head and gave a deep sigh. ‘And
selfish
.’

Her voice shuddered with suppressed fury.

‘Selfish?’

‘Yes.’ She swallowed hard and put her cup down. ‘We haven’t had a night’s sleep since she left.’

‘Where is she?’

‘That’s the point, we don’t know.’

The old lady had been following their conversation with her eyes, she let out an almost inaudible squeak and covered her face with her apron.

‘Tansu, would you get cake. Get
cake
from the kitchen.’ When she was gone Joyce said, ‘She doesn’t understand everything, but I don’t want her to hear this. She cries herself to sleep every night.’

Dom saw she had blue circles under her eyes, the numb look of panic barely held in check.

‘You have no idea where she is?’

‘We had an aerogramme a week or so ago saying she was in Egypt. In Cairo and leaving soon. We were not to worry. Since then – nothing.’

He saw the effort it took to control herself, and felt for the first time in his life the desolation of those left behind. He hadn’t allowed himself to think like this before – of his own mother, in her cold sitting room, stitching and waiting, or lying in the dark listening for the slow rumble overhead of a plane that might be his.

‘A week isn’t long,’ he reminded her gently. ‘The posts are terrible. Where is . . . is there . . .?’ He asked this delicately. You couldn’t assume anything nowadays.

‘Her father?’

‘Yes.’

She directed his gaze towards the mantelpiece. The man in the photograph had a strong-jawed, handsome face, piercing dark eyes, thick black hair – he didn’t look English.

‘His name is Remzi,’ she said. ‘He’s an engineer with Fyffes. He hasn’t spoken to me since this happened.’ She shuddered. ‘He blames me for everything.’

The old lady had returned with the cake tin in one hand and a lute-like instrument in the other.

‘This mine. Tambur.’ She held the thing up proudly.

‘Ah, a household of musicians,’ he said politely.

‘She doesn’t play it; her husband did,’ the mother said. ‘But there’s lots of music down here in the Bay – we actually had Hoagy Carmichael come here before the war broke out.’

The old lady put the cake down on the table. She held out a new photograph.

‘My son,’ she said. ‘I have four sons: three finish.’ Her face twisted. ‘He no here now. When he—’

‘Tan, leave it to me,’ Joyce almost shouted. ‘Please!’

‘When she go,’ the old lady ignored her, ‘when she go,’ she pointed towards Saba’s photograph, ‘he . . .’ She picked up an imaginary stick and mimed a beating, then she shook her head violently. ‘Very very bad,’ she said.

In the short silence that fell, Joyce fiddled with the coffee cups.

‘It’s true,’ she said at last. ‘He’s not a violent man, but he was furious with her when he found out she’d been performing. ENSA was the last blimmin’ straw. But what could she do?’ she asked him, her eyes naked. ‘Singing’s like breathing for her, she needed to do it, and all of us encouraged her at first – he was as proud as Punch himself. You’ve heard her.’

‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I really do.’

The old woman’s eyes fixed on them again, and then she leapt up and fumbled with the lid of the gramophone, as if she wanted to play them something.

‘Not now, Tan,’ Joyce said. ‘I don’t have time. I need to say this quickly.

‘Look at me running on.’ She smiled suddenly, ‘I haven’t a clue why you’re here.’

‘Well . . . really to . . .’ He looked at the blue coat, ashamed of the flimsy lie already.

‘But can you help, now you know the situation?’ Her eyes brightened at the thought of it.

‘Maybe, I don’t know. Is there anything else you’re worried about?’

‘Well . . . it sounds a bit silly, but my husband thinks there’s something fishy going on.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, normally, you have to be twenty-five to get into ENSA; she’s twenty-three, and she was gone in a flash; normally, he says, they’d leave a few months for the jabs against yellow fever, the forms, and the other stuff. Where was the rush?’

‘Maybe they just needed entertainers there fast – I think something like three and a half thousand Allied troops have moved to North Africa to be with the Eighth Army.’ His mind was racing furiously. The desert war was where the action was now.