Jasmine Nights (21 page)
There was a mad dash the next day to pack up the flat, and get their kit in order before their truck picked them up at 1600 hours. They were going, Furness had finally told them, to Abu Sueir, an airbase in the Canal Zone, about seventy-five miles north-east of Cairo.
Before they left, Saba wrote to her father.
Dear Baba
,
We’re leaving Cairo today to go on the road and start our proper work. I want you to know that if anything happens to me – which it won’t! – I have done what I felt I was meant to do here, and that I am sorry that what has made me happy has hurt you so. I hope one day we will understand each other better. Where is your ship now? Please tell me, and please write. You can send a letter to me here at ENSA, Sharia Kasr-el-Nil. The posts are terribly slow but it would be good to hear from you
.
Saba
There were other things she wanted to tell him, both trivial and large: how it had felt that night singing ‘Mazi’ in front of the Pyramids at the Mena House; how magical Cairo could be with its lurid sunsets, its feluccas sailing like giant moths down the Nile; the amazing shops – some far posher than any she’d seen in Cardiff; how awful too, with its heat and blare and noise and stinks – the drains and camel dung, the spices from the markets, the jasmine ropes sold at restaurants at night, the indefinable smell of dust. She wanted to say that she feared for him. (Janine, whose brother-in-law was in the merchant navy, had spelled out for her in grisly detail the carnage in the shipping lanes at home.) She wanted to say that she missed him, that she hated him too for being so childish. Such a muddle in her head about him, such a stupid waste of love.
Her sweaty fingers made the letters of the address run. Pomeroy Street, Butetown, Cardiff felt like a million miles away from here. Searching for moisture in her dry mouth, she licked the edges of a yellow aerogramme and wondered if she’d ever see him again.
They left Cairo a few hours later in a battle-scarred bus and headed north-east to Abu Sueir. Bagley and some soldiers had gone ahead of them to set up the portable stage.
Saba sat by herself – in this heat a body next to you felt like a furnace, and there were enough empty seats for them to have a row each. Arleta and Janine – still no-speakies – were at opposite ends of the bus; the acrobats at the back; Willie, dead to the world, snored percussively under a copy of the NAAFI newspaper and Captain Furness sat tensely behind the driver, his swagger stick on the seat beside him, ham-like knees stretched out in the aisle.
She made a pillow of her khaki jacket – it was too hot to rest your head against the glass – and though she already felt car sick from the fumes, tried to tell herself the adventure was beginning. Outside the window there was precious little to see but miles and miles of crinkled sand, a few dead trees, a heap of animal bones.
She was half asleep when Willie staggered towards her and dropped some paper in her lap.
‘For you, my love. They came from the NAAFI earlier but you was asleep.’
Two letters. For her! She woke up immediately. One was written in her mother’s slapdash hand, and postmarked South Wales. The other’s unfamiliar handwriting made her stomach clench. She turned it around in her hand and stuffed it in the canvas bag under her feet.
Dear Saba
, her mother wrote,
Everyone is fine on Pomeroy Street, apart from Mrs Prentice who went to Swansea to see her sister two weeks ago and got bombed. I’m still working all the hours God sends at you know where. Tansu was a bit mopey for a while without you but now is part of a knitting group at the Sailors’ Hall, which has cheered her up no end. Little Lou has started a new school in Ponty and she is happy there and still comes home at the weekends. Did you get her letter yet? Your father is away again, working for
. . . a crudely cut hole from the censor’s scissors here,
but I think he has written to you. I don’t know what to say about that, so I will leave it to him, but if he hasn’t written know that the posts are terrible and try not to worry too much, it may not mean anything
.
Your loving Mam xoxo
Post script
(it was Joyce’s habit to always write this in full)
I got a pattern off an old copy of
Woman’s Friend,
and I’ve made you a dress out of cream parachute silk. (They had a sale of it in Howell’s and the queues were round the block, I got there early.) I posted it with this letter
.
Mam. My mam. She held the letter to her cheek smiling and so glad to hear from her she could have wept.
She read it again – it hurt thinking about her mother standing like Switzerland now between Dad and her, also to picture her queuing for hours for parachute silk, her hopeful whirlings on the Singer sewing machine she was so proud of. The Schiaparelli of Pomeroy Street. Saba wished she’d make something beautiful for herself for a change. The dress had not arrived, and even if it had, she probably wouldn’t want to wear it anyway, except out of sentiment or loyalty. How frightening it was how quickly things changed – even things you wanted to stay the same. All Saba wanted now was for them to stay alive, and for her mother to be happy while she was away – was that so terrible? Probably, she sighed, and looked out the window – she’d turned out to be a rotten daughter.
The other letter now. The buff-coloured envelope poked out from the bag. She put her nail under the flap and had it half open when Willie appeared.
‘Mind if I join you for a bit?’ He sat down heavily beside her. ‘Sorry about the get-up,’ he’d changed from his khakis into a dubious-looking green striped pyjama top, ‘but I’m baking. You’ve lost your little friend, I see.’ He pointed towards Arleta, who was fast asleep four seats ahead of them.
‘Yes, well . . .’ She showed him the letter. ‘I’ve just got these, my first, and I think she thought . . .’ She hoped he’d take the hint, but Willie was not famous for subtlety.
‘I hear there was a right old dust-up earlier.’ He pointed at Janine, sitting close to the driver, as upright as a startled ostrich, and drew so close that the hairs from his ears tickled Saba’s chin. ‘That stuck-up madame needs a bit of a seeing-to,’ he said, ‘if you know what I mean. One of the acrobats said he’d do it. Lev, I think. Lovely job.’
‘Willie!’ She sprang away. ‘That’s naughty.’
‘It would help her dancing and all. I mean it. Arleta almost lost her hair.’ Willie grabbed his own bald pate and looked anguished. ‘I hear she nearly went mad.’ He gave a wheezy laugh and looked back at Arleta. ‘Very spirited, that one,’ he said softly, and then he sighed.
‘I hope they make up,’ said Saba. ‘It’s so boring if no one’s speaking.’
‘Arleta’s as good as gold,’ Willie said. ‘She’ll get her out of it. It’s bad for the company,’ he added self-righteously, ‘if people can’t get along, we’ve got to stick together.’ He mopped his damp face. ‘None of us have a clue what’s round the next corner now, do we, girl?’
‘No we don’t, Willie,’ she said. Both of them stopped. The bus suddenly swerved to avoid a team of camels crossing the road. The men who led them looked up at them – their eyes expressionless, faces swathed against the dust. Behind them stretched miles and miles of sand shimmering and dissolving in a heat haze. ‘We certainly don’t. Thank you for pointing that out to me.’
When Willie went back to his seat, she pulled the buff-coloured envelope from her bag again. The heat inside the bus was now 120 degrees; her wet hand had dissolved part of her address.
. . . ear . . . aba
. Damn it! The censor’s vigilance meant the letter hung like a paper chain in her hands – she couldn’t even work out the date. She put the flimsy aerogramme against the window and in daylight so bright her eyeballs flinched, made out part of a word at the top of the letter:
une
and then
42
. A hole above the date where the address might have been. His address, or her crazy thinking? All she knew was part of her had leapt into life like a flame when she’d seen the letter, and that now she was shocked at how disappointed she felt, and annoyed with herself too. Why would he write to her now?
Some food came round in a cardboard box: bully-beef sandwiches and warm water, a sickly-smelling banana turning black and wilting in its own skin. After it, to block out the heat, they tried to sleep again, and when she woke, the dust had cleared and she saw more sand stretching out to the horizon like a limitless sea. If you were not in a good state of mind, the scale of it could make everything look stunningly pointless; their little lorry a piece of thistledown blown by any random wind.
When Furness stood up to brief them on what to expect, dried saliva had caked in the corners of his mouth, and his face streamed with sweat. For the next ten days, he said, they would be whisked from place to place to perform at RAF camps, field units and hospitals in what he described vaguely as the Canal Zone; after that they’d be moving west to follow in the footsteps of the Eighth Army. Some of these camps would be secret, or too small even to have proper names. Sometimes, Arleta had whispered, they didn’t even tell you where you were, especially if you were near enemy lines.
When Furness had stopped talking and gone back to his seat, Saba lay stretched out over two seats, feeling the juddering desert road beneath her, thinking about Dom and their exciting, painful evening together. It annoyed her to still think of him, but that evening, its disappointing ending, had got stuck in her mind like the pieces of a mismatched puzzle she needed to solve.
She thought about the gentleness of his hand holding her foot when she’d sat down with the blister from those blasted shoes. He’d rubbed her toes between his fingers, and even though she’d been embarrassed, hoping her feet weren’t sweaty from the audition and the dancing, she’d honestly wanted to purr like a kitten because it was so sudden and shockingly intimate. The wet pavement; him kneeling, his brown eyes looking at her under a lock of dark hair, the light in them tender, that was what she thought of. It was so unexpected after their wisecracking, it had seemed to iron out all the sharp angles of the day, and she’d believed in it.
And the next bit ruined everything. She’d definitely seen him kiss that girl in the club. Their heads had stayed together for a long time, talking intensely like lovers do, and all of it had made her think her own instincts were hopelessly wrong, and it got her goat to think of how she had let him spoil what had been such a marvellous day.
Oh God, she woke enraged and breathing heavily and with a raging thirst, having already drunk her pint of chemical-tasting water. Sweat trickled down between her breasts as the bus was rocked down a rough bit of road. Opening her eyes, all she could see was flipping sand and a skinny goat, eating a thorn bush, that leapt away in terror at the sight of them.
‘Please, I am sitting?’ A pair of well-muscled thighs slid into the empty seat beside her. Boguslaw the acrobat.
Bog, Boggers, Bog Brush – he answered to all of them – brought nerve-racking news. While she’d been dreaming, the plans had changed: tonight, instead of the small first concert planned, they would perform for up to a thousand troops, RAF personnel and medics at a transit camp near Abu Sueir. The portable stage, the piano, the props and the costumes had gone ahead; they were setting up now.
‘Please Gods, they don’t expect a big company and a big show,’ Bog grimaced. Max Bagley had made no secret of the fact that they were spectacularly under-rehearsed, and they’d all hoped for a day’s rest first.
Saba hadn’t seen Bog for the past few days. The acrobats had been billeted in another part of town, and Arleta – the girls’ expert on the dark side of life – had whispered that the boys had been out on the razz.
‘I’m not trying to shock you,’ she’d said in her husky, thrilling voice, ‘but the boys like to play, and there’s this street they go to in Cairo called Wagh-al-Birkat that caters for all tastes: young girls, dogs, sheep, chickens. And I’ll tell you a true story,’ she added, her eyes green slits, ‘early this year, a young naval officer was caught stark naked in the Shepheard Hotel. He was had up for indecent exposure and got off by quoting from the rulebook: “an officer is deemed to be in uniform if he is appropriately dressed for the port in which he is engaged”. Ha, ha, ha, isn’t that wonderful?’
Janine’s beautifully plucked eyebrows shot up to her hairline. ‘Well you see,’ she’d said, ‘I don’t find that even remotely funny,’ and up they’d shot again when Arleta said that she personally thought that the British army should do what the French and the Italians did and set up legal brothels for soldiers. They were young and lusty – it was inhuman to expect them to do without creature comforts for so long. At which point Janine had removed a damp flannel she kept in her handbag, and wiped her hands very deliberately.
‘I am watching you earlier.’ Boguslaw cosied up to Saba, his left leg so close she could feel the tickle of the hairs against her leg. ‘Does your letter make you sad?’ He gave a deep sigh.
‘A little,’ she said.
His leg moved closer.
‘You’re too pretty to be sad,’ he said. ‘Is a man?’
‘Yes. No.’
‘A strong man?’ A biceps appeared like a giant cobra in his arm. ‘Strong like this.’
‘Very, very strong.’ It was much too hot for flirting. When the bus slowed down, in an effort to divert him, she pointed to a fruit stand on the side of the road. A man, his donkey; a veiled wife sat passive beside a pile of dried beans, some sugar-beet stalks, some dates. The woman was swatting flies from a sleeping baby on her lap. Two other children played in the dirt beside them.
‘Are you married, Bog?’ she asked him – she’d teased him and taught him songs but they hadn’t talked properly yet.