Jasmine Nights (26 page)

‘So! Last night.’ Arleta abandoned her laundry. ‘What on earth was going on?’

‘Well, the show seemed to go well.’ Saba felt wary – the rule in the company was tell one tell all.

‘Oh don’t be ridiculous. The beautiful man, who was he?’

‘Well . . . he came unexpectedly to see me.’

‘I saw that, stupid.’

‘And he’s . . .’ Saba closed her eyes. ‘Look, I don’t know, I don’t know . . . oh.’ Her happiness spilled out; it was very hard to keep things from Arleta, it felt like meanness. ‘I met him before in London, and before that in hospital – and yes, he’s a fighter pilot!’ She curled her fingers into a pair of devil horns. ‘And please don’t tell me what you think about them, because I already know.’ She tickled Arleta under the arm.

‘If you have beans to spill,’ Arleta’s eyes were glowing, ‘spill them now. It’s only fair.’

Saba couldn’t resist. As she sketched out briefly how Dom had come to the audition, how they’d walked the streets of London that evening, how he’d driven her across the desert last night, she felt a rising elation.

‘I mean, he’s just so beautiful, and we have such interesting conversations together already, and he makes me laugh and . . . oh bugger, in a way it feels so simple and uncomplicated, as if he’s been there waiting . . . Does that sound daft?’

‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.’ Arleta dried her hands properly and sat down on the bed. She pulled Saba into the camp chair beside it. ‘She’s got it bad. And, by the way, it’s never simple and uncomplicated. Did you sleep together?’

‘No, but last night, I wanted to so badly. I’ve never felt so . . .’ she gazed around her wildly, ‘completely out of control.’

‘Gosh.’ Even Arleta was impressed. She did a stage fall on to her camp bed and then sat up and hugged Saba. ‘Oh little lamb,’ she murmured into her hair. ‘Do be careful. It’s so exciting, but he
is
a fighter pilot, enough said, or should be.’

‘But all of our lives are dangerous here,’ Saba said passionately. ‘And I know I’m definitely going to see him again.’ Oh God, she thought, what a hopeless spy she was going to be; she’d already said more about him than Cleeve would probably approve of.

‘Of course they are and of course you will.’ Arleta patted her on the knee. ‘Of course you will.’

She blew out air and jumped to her feet. She tied a piece of string across the tent and pegged out the blue silk nightdress and a pair of frothy matching knickers.

‘And your night?’ Saba poked her in the side.

Arleta narrowed her cat’s eyes.

‘Well . . . I was doing my bit for the Anglo-American alliance,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you all about him later.’

‘Sounds interesting.’

‘It was, and a little bit alarming too. I’m too tired to give it full throttle now, I’ll tell you later.’

Lunch was bully-beef sandwiches and prunes. After it, Saba, Arleta, Janine, Willie and the acrobats were rounded up and put into what Willie called a wog wagon, a small converted lorry with scalding metal seats shaped like bedpans arranged one behind the other.

They were followed by another truck carrying rolled scenery, the stage, their kitbags, and Willie’s fez, chicken feet and Hitler moustache, accompanied by Max Bagley, Captain Crowley and two soldiers with pistols in their holsters. The only information they’d been given was they were bound for a field hospital approximately fifty miles into the Western Desert.

The sun shrank their eyeballs as it swept across the cloudless sky, and the desert was so full of glassy mirages that it looked like a flat sea. The temperature rose to 125 degrees in the non-existent shade, and everyone in the lorry felt ratty and disinclined to talk.

After two hours’ travelling they stopped at a settlement where the only visible signs of life were a scattering of flat-roofed houses and a rust-coloured watering hole by the side of the road. A house made of red mud was open to the street and a few wooden tables were scattered outside. A barefoot man served them flatbread, a tiny piece of white chewy cheese and hot, sweet mint tea which Willie told them in a cheerful whisper tasted like camel’s pee. This annoyed Janine, who hated coarseness. ‘Oh touchy, touchy,’ he said as she removed herself to another table and fell asleep, her delicate head like a drooping flower in her hands.

Their host was refilling their glasses when shouts came from outside: some trouble with the chassis of their lorry, parts of which now hung down like sheep udders. Crowley, who liked to show off about all the countries he had served in, was shouting at two bewildered-looking men in oily robes in the language they had all started to imitate and call Lingo Bingo. ‘Come on, you bastards,
jaldi jow
, chop, chop. Under lorry bang bang.’

‘God, what a rude sod he is,’ Arleta murmured. ‘One day he’s going to get himself shot.’

But the men smiled. They lay down under the lorry with their spanners while the cast rested. They had two performances ahead of them that night.

The acrobats took their bedrolls, did a bit of play wrestling and then fell asleep under a thorn tree beside the waterhole. Janine, who hated putting her fair skin in the sun, stayed inside the restaurant asleep at the table. Arleta and Saba lay under a juniper tree looking up at the patterned sky through its branches. Beside them, a donkey was lashed to another tree and hee hawed at the sight of them.

‘Poor little thing.’ When Saba offered it bread, it nibbled her hands with velvet lips and gazed at her with kindly eyes. ‘Why do they treat their animals so badly here?’ she asked Arleta. ‘No water, no food, no shade.’

Arleta said that life was hard on these people too: on her last tour of Egypt, she’d seen men walking round and round and round in the blazing sun all day pushing a wheel just to get the water out of a well. ‘They probably think that donkey has a whale of a time.’

‘Well, I don’t think so.’ Saba jumped up. ‘The poor little thing can hardly move its head. I don’t think the owner would mind if I lengthened the rope.’

‘I wouldn’t interfere if I was you,’ advised Arleta, but Saba ignored her. She jumped up, loosened the rope, patted the donkey’s neck and gave it another piece of flatbread. ‘There you are, dear little man.’

‘You’re a shocking softie,’ Arleta said drowsily. ‘You’ll get yourself hurt one day, and you’ll be crawling with fleas tonight.’

When Arleta fell asleep, Saba, watched with mild curiosity by the donkey, got a writing pad out of her kitbag. She shook the sand out of its creases.

Dear Dom
, she wrote,

I’m going to Alex in August. Any chance we could meet there?

Now she must think of a safe way of getting the message to him – one that Cleeve would approve of.

Closing her eyes, she had an almost photographic image of Dom flying alone over the desert, with its tanks and hidden aerodromes and landmines.

She shook her head. He would live, she must believe he would, else there would be no peace from now on.

A fly woke Arleta up.

‘Sod off.’ She brushed it away. ‘How long have I been asleep?’

‘Twenty minutes.’

‘
Yalla yalla
, girls.’ Crowley was waving his swagger stick in their direction. He made a cone of his hands and bellowed, ‘Truck fixed, get mobile in ten minutes. Don’t leave anything behind. Got that, Willie boy?’ he roared at Willie, who he treated like a halfwit. ‘Ten minutes. Don’t forget your hat.’ Willie was dozing on the veranda; his knotted handkerchief had fallen into the dust.

‘Sabs,’ Arleta said quickly, ‘before we get on the truck, I want to tell you something about last night. I wouldn’t feel right without passing it on.’

It seemed that while Saba had been out with Dom, Arleta and Janine had gone to the officers’ mess to have a drink with some of the bigger wigs on the base. These included an air commodore who had flown in from Tunisia, an army doctor with the worst case of desert sores that Arleta had ever seen and a padre who banged on a bit about Willie’s rude jokes, so it was no contest at all really, she continued, when her eye lit on an American colonel: a full colonel, mind, and awfully handsome with blond, blond hair, broad shoulders, honey-coloured skin; a real Southern gentleman in spite of his striking good looks. Arleta’s voice grew low and husky.

‘And I do so like Americans.’ When she threw back her hair, Saba saw a bruise on her neck. ‘We had a lovely talk and then he smuggled me into his rooms and we made love. I think he thought all his Christmases and Thanksgivings had come at once.’

Arleta, as always, was strikingly unrepentant about such matters, and if she felt guilty about betraying her Bill, she showed little sign of it. Once, when Saba had asked about this, she’d said they had an arrangement – she’d said it in the French way, which made it sound more fun – he’d written to her saying she should take her pleasures where she might, because he was going to.

‘Oh grow up, darling,’ she had said to Saba’s shocked face. ‘There’s a war on. I don’t want him to live like a monk and he knows I’m not cut out for nun-dom or whatever you call it. This way is much more sensible.’

‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘shut up for a moment because this is what I want to tell you. Later, much later, when we were having a brandy and a cigarette, the lovely Wentworth Junior the Third – that was his name – told me something that he said he shouldn’t have. He has some kind of intelligence job, and in his opinion the war here will be over very, very soon.’ Arleta took a deep breath and shook her head vigorously.

‘Over! Are you sure?’ Saba was shocked to find herself a little disappointed.

‘No, silly, course I’m not sure, nobody is, but here’s the point: he said there is going to be the mother and father of all battles soon.’

‘But they’re always saying that.’

‘He was convinced this was the one. He was actually shocked that we hadn’t been sent home already.’

‘Where will they be fighting?’

‘Didn’t say, wouldn’t, but it’s bound to be near the coastline, that’s where all the Germans are, and the various supply lines; that’s where they’re bombing mostly.’

‘Near Alexandria? Near Cairo?’

‘Alexandria. He says it’s an open secret among the men that the battle will happen in the next few weeks there. And if we’re sent there, we should jump ship, it’s just too dangerous.’

Arleta went on to say that she knew for a fact that they’d just moved another ENSA company, The Live Wires, out from Alex to Palestine. ‘I actually worked with one of the girls in it – Beryl Knight, a dancer, awful frizzy hair but a very nice girl,’ she added loyally.

‘So, will we have to go soon?’

‘No, this is the point. Wentworth’s good buddy,’ Arleta slipped into an unconvincing American twang, ‘is Captain Furness. I swore to him this morning I wouldn’t say anything, but apparently we’re not going to be sent away – we’ll be following the Eighth Army into the desert.’

‘Heavens.’

They exchanged a strange look.

‘Do you want to do that?’ Saba asked.

‘Girls, come on!
Jaldi jow
.’ Captain Crowley, red-faced and shouting now.

‘Do you mean keep going?’

‘Yes.’

‘I do. You?’

‘Yes,’ said Saba. ‘I couldn’t bear to go home now.’

Arleta just looked at her.

‘We must be mad,’ she said. She squeezed Saba’s hand and they laughed shakily.

For the next leg of their journey, Bagley got on the bus with them and said they were going to have another rehearsal of the doo-wop song. He’d explained to them before that doo-wop was a kind of African music he’d heard in a club in Harlem before the war began. The song was called ‘My Prayer’, he said. He couldn’t remember the exact lyrics but it was about the kind of sacred promises you make when you’re in love.

‘The chorus is fabulous, come on, Bog, you try it, and Arleta. The melody goes like this,
Umbadumba umbadumb ummmmbbbuumm
. You should see the negro men who sing this stuff – they beam, they strut, they shoot their cuffs.’ He did a bit of portly strutting up the centre of the bus to demonstrate. ‘So: you sing the line, Saba, and the rest of you do the
umbas
.

‘What’s so fascinating about this new kind of music,’ Bagley continued, ‘is that it has distinct echoes of the madrigal.
Now is the month of maying, when merry lads are playing
,’ he sang in his clear, high voice. ‘
Fa la la la la la la
– you get it –
de wop de wahhhh
,’ he ended in a black voice.

Beside him, Crowley sat rigid with alarm and embarrassment. He never knew where to look when they were messing around like this.

But Bagley was on fire, and so were the rest of them, magically transformed by a song which ended in a roar of laughter. Bagley told them to shut up now and save their voices for that night. Saba, who had slipped into the seat beside Willie, was shocked when she glanced at him to see two great tears running down his cheeks like marrowfat peas. She looked at him more closely – the whites of his eyes were red with crying; with his knotted hankie on his head again he looked like a sad fat baby.

‘What’s the matter, Willie, is it your ticker?’ she whispered. When she put her hand in his, he gripped it hard. Usually he hated being asked about his health – he was terrified of being sent home – but this felt different.

He gave a small snort and a shuddering sigh.

‘In a way,’ he said at last, ‘your fault – you’d better not sing that “My Prayer” to the troops; you’ll have them in floods.’

‘Willie, come on – there must be something else.’

He glanced around to check it was safe to talk.

‘Tell me.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘I won’t blab.’

He looked across at Arleta, who was fast asleep, her blonde hair spilling into the aisle.

‘It is my ticker, but it’s not in a medical way.’ He swallowed noisily. ‘It’s her.’ As he spoke, Arleta’s tumbling waves shifted from side to side, picking up reflections from the sun.

‘Arleta?’

‘Yes.’

There was a long, fraught silence.

‘D’you remember,’ Willie said at the end of it, ‘what a wonderful surprise it was seeing me at the auditions in London that day and how we’d worked together in Malta and Brighton? Well it’s no coincidence. I’ve tried to get on every tour she’s been on, but she’s killing me, Saba.’ As he said this, the faded irises of his eyes floated under their lids and another tear rolled down the side of his face.