Jasmine Nights (27 page)
Saba clutched his hand. He must have seen Arleta leave with her blond American the night before.
‘But Willie, has she ever given you any reason to think . . .?’
‘Well, you tell me. She’s always telling me I’m wonderful and she loves me and I’m the funniest man she’s ever met. She’s so beautiful . . .’ he ended brokenly.
‘Yes, but Willie . . .’
‘I know, I know, we all go on like that in the business, and I’m the silliest old man that ever lived for thinking she really meant it.’ He stopped suddenly. More tears rolling down his face, and a large
whoomph
into his handkerchief. ‘Sorry, love, I’m not much fun, am I?’
‘No, no, no, no, it’s all right, Willie, but not being nosy or anything, I thought you had a wife and that she passed away a few months before we went on tour. That’s what Arleta told me.’
‘Well that’s another can of worms,’ he said. ‘So to speak. Arleta puts a lovely slant on it, but the truth is, we were married for over thirty-four years, and I hardly knew her, and that was my fault too. I love all this,’ he gestured around the dusty lorry, ‘the touring, the performing, I can’t seem to stop.’ He added that he had two girls, now grown up, and he hardly knew a thing about them either.
‘My dad’s a bit like that,’ Saba said.
‘Performer?’ he asked, picking up a bit. ‘If he is, he should be very, very proud of you.’
‘No, to both parts. He hates me doing this. We didn’t even say goodbye.’
‘Oh blimey – that’s a bit serious, can’t you make up?’
‘Can’t,’ she said. ‘He’s at sea.’
‘Well send a letter home,’ he said. ‘He must go home sometimes.’
‘Umm, maybe.’ She hated to talk about it – it felt so shameful.
To cheer them both up, Willie got a couple of melted peppermints from his pocket, which seemed to have a calming effect.
He said she was young enough to take a bit of advice from him, because, in his opinion, there was good and bad excitement in life, and the excitement of performing could turn around sometimes, and bite you on the you-know-what. It was too much, it was unwise, and it skewed other things in your life.
‘I’ll tell you a little story,’ he said. ‘One time I went home to our house in Crouch End – I’d been away for ages doing a wonderful panto in Blackpool and I was as high as a flaming kite and very taken with myself. But when I got home the missus was livid. I hadn’t seen her for two months and I hadn’t even remembered to tell her what time I was coming home, so she leaves a note on the doorstep saying “Baked beans and bread in the cupboard, I’m out.”
‘But she’d forgotten to leave the key under the mat, so I tried to climb through the cloakroom, and I’m so fat, I got wedged in the window, and looking at my house from this angle I thought,
I can’t do this any more, it’s too small and too cramped. I can’t do it
. But you have to do it sometimes, don’t you . . . you have to be ordinary and learn to like it.’
He was so het up he had to look out of the window where light was draining from the day and the desert sand was drenched in a brilliant geranium red.
‘You all right now, love?’ Willie asked. ‘Arleta says you were homesick at first.’
‘I’m getting a bit addicted myself, Willie,’ she said, mesmerised by the sunset, and upset to have seen Willie crying, ‘but I do miss home. It’s the first time I’ve been further than Cardiff on my own, so a bit of a step.’
He patted her hand softly. ‘I’m here if you ever need me – don’t forget that, gel.’
‘Thank you, Willie.’
‘Two concerts tonight, then. A bit of shut-eye in order.’
‘You all right now, Willie?’ She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek.
‘Course I am.’ He tried to wink at her. ‘That’ll learn you to sing songs to silly old men.’ He held his Adam’s apple between his fingers, wobbled it and warbled: ‘
Because I love yoooouuuuuuu
.’
When he extended the last note into a dog’s trembling howl everyone in the bus burst out laughing, except Arleta who was still asleep and Crowley who was frowning over the maps again.
Dom had never known that love could feel so like fear. But that night as he lay in his camp bed and conjured up her image, he recognised fear’s physical sensations – the powdery limbs, the pounding heart. He pictured her glossy hair, the playful twist to her smile when she teased him. How in the restaurant, when they’d been talking, she’d fixed her big brown eyes on him and seemed to drink him in.
And now he saw her – it almost made him furious to do so – with that tiny band of performers racketing around desert outposts and transit camps and aerodromes, all of them sitting ducks for the Germans, who were circling closer and closer. There were landmines in the desert – one of their aircrew had had his leg blown off the week before – and serious supply shortages already. What if a truck they were on broke down in the wrong place? There was always now the distinct possibility of a sudden air-raid attack by the Germans, and lately, the Italians.
Saba had told him a German Stuka had hit part of the stage before the ack-ack could get it during another ENSA group’s performance near Suez. They’d got to the chorus of ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ when
boooom!!!!
It had shot through part of a comedian’s baggy trousers – she’d made a funny story out of it.
They’d kept on singing of course – well bully for them – but he didn’t want her to have to take part in these kinds of heroics, and he was furious at the authorities for not sending them away to safety, although he would never have dared tell her that.
And so, on the borderlines of sleep, when you’re free to think anything, he pleaded,
Send her home; let the troops do without music. She’s too young for this
.
Six o’clock the next morning. A field telephone woke him. The usual instant boggle-eyed awakeness.
Paul Rivers wanted Dom and Barney to report to the crew room after breakfast. Four new pilots had arrived for retraining before the big push. They were to take them shadow flying that afternoon.
After breakfast, it was overcast and humid and they waited until the last possible moment to climb into the flight suits that made you sweat like a pig. Six of them made their way to the sand airstrip where the ground crew were preparing their aircraft.
The new boys were Scott, an awkwardly hearty Canadian whose hand squelched with sweat and made whoopee-cushion noises as it pumped Dom’s, and his friend Cliff, a silent Midwesterner, whose massive, impassive face looked like a rock carving. Scott said he’d learned to fly as a crop duster in the States. The other two would join them after lunch.
They were waiting for take-off in a tin hut at the end of the runway when Scott said, ‘So, what’s the situation here, fellows? Do we have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning this thing?’
‘Well, on the whole, snowballs don’t have much of a life expectancy out here,’ Barney said pleasantly.
‘Oh very English, pip-pip and all that.’ The Canadian scowled and looked at Dom now. ‘But what’s the score?’
Not an unreasonable question.
‘Well, the Hun have aerodromes now in Tunisia, in Libya, and scattered around the Western Desert, and they’re moving east, or at least trying to. If they can capture Alexandria and Cairo we’re stuffed, so the next bit is not to let them do that.’
When he stopped to spit some sand out of his mouth, Barney took over.
‘The fighting here is not the old Battle of Britain man-against-man stuff,’ he said. ‘We’re mostly covering bomber patrols, escorting tanks, protecting supply lines. We haven’t had any major offensives yet, but that could change at a moment’s notice.
‘One of their main problems, ours too, is running out of water. You may have noticed,’ he rubbed his bristling chin, ‘it’s not in plentiful supply here.’ He screwed up his eyes against the sun and they followed his gaze towards the miles and miles and miles of desert behind him. He was getting irritable; it was time to fly and stop talking.
Dom felt it too, a craving to leave the ground.
Half an hour later, he climbed into the tight mouth of the Kittyhawk, put the parachute under his seat, plugged in the oxygen, turned it on full and then squeezed tubes to see if it was coming through. At the RT command of
all right, chaps, off we go
, they rose into the air.
The new pilots had been briefed about shadow shooting. Now Dom and Barney flew in formation together, elegant as Ginger and Fred and showing off to the new boys just a bit as they dipped and spun and glided across the desert, letting their shadows drop like giant ink spots.
It was boiling hot as usual inside the Perspex and tin universe of the aircraft, but already he could feel the fears of the night and the petty worries of the day recede. He was flying again.
‘OK now, watch it now! Watch it! We’re coming over,’ Dom told the new boys through his radio transmission.
And then
boom! boom! boom! boom!
Each aircraft had been given three rounds of ammunition to unleash. Dom could hear Scott laughing, and the taciturn American whooping and hollering as he emptied his guns into their black shadows.
Once, such moments were the high points of Dom’s life, the times when he forgot everything – lovers, parents, home – to play the most dangerous and exhilarating game devised by man or devil. He’d loved all of it then: the feeling of mastery, the freedom from petty earth, the danger, the fear, but now a smear of shame was mixed into the exhilaration. Nothing he could talk about yet, to anyone – not to his parents, not to his living friends, certainly not to a woman – but always there.
The first shadowings had come in the early days of the Battle of Britain. He’d gone up in a Spitfire, misread the altimeter, and the plane had plunged down at top speed towards the coast of Norfolk. The earth had come hurtling towards him. His stomach hit his brains. It was only at the last possible moment he’d managed to swerve and climb again.
That was the day when he’d sworn to himself that if he got down in one piece, he’d go straight to his flight commander and say he would never fly again. He’d passed out for a few moments after landing and woke tasting his own vomit in his crash helmet. But on his way back to the mess, walking on jelly legs and staggering under the weight of his parachute, he’d changed his mind again. He simply couldn’t stop. It was what he needed to feel alive.
And then, much later and much worse, he’d persuaded Jacko to go up again even though he knew Jacko was struggling with the mathematics of flight. There was something about coordinating hand, eye, foot, maps, controls and the altimeter that didn’t come naturally to him. He’d tried to tell Dom he was windy and Dom had teased him out of it, or tried – a moment of casual cruelty that would stay with him for the rest of his life.
What happened next was the rock under the sunny surface of things. But he mustn’t dwell on it; they’d been warned about that. ‘Be economic with emotion,’ the wing commander had told them on day one at flying school. ‘Look at the chap on your right, and now at the one on your left; soon one of them will be dead.’
He must forget his joke; forget Jacko’s face on fire, the plane spinning towards the sea like a pointless toy.
His new priorities were clear: flying, fighting, and seeing Saba again.
When Willie collapsed on stage, ten days later, it was Janine who saved his life. They were performing at a fuel depot close to an infantry camp near Burg el Arab; Arleta was pretending to be Josephine Baker dancing the famous banana dance that had enchanted
tout
Paris; Willie was the ravenous little boy eating her bananas while she leapt around blissfully unaware. It was very funny and Saba loved it. She was roaring with laughter in the wings when she saw Willie’s eyes go blank and float up into his lids. She thought it was a stunt, until he crashed heavily to the floor and the curtain came hurriedly down.
He fell on a rusty nail in the wings that shot into a hand that instantly spurted blood. Janine whipped off her tights, twisted them into a makeshift tourniquet, and then ran on muscles of steel towards the much-derided panic bag for emergency iodine and bandages, all applied with ice-cool efficiency.
The cause of his initial faint was diagnosed as jaundice, possibly contracted from food from one of the fly-blown street stalls he insisted were far safer than the jellied-eel stands in London. He was now in a military hospital on the base looking yellow and uncertain, but still alive. Saba and Arleta had gone to see him every day, with Janine, who was shyly the heroine of the hour, until Arleta had herself gone yellow and come down with jaundice. The eight-piece combo that was supposed to arrive from Malta hadn’t. Janine, who’d been offered a transfer to India, delayed her departure, and sometimes read to Willie in the afternoons. The last time Saba had arrived she’d been brushing his hair and blushed bright red at the sight of her.
‘Do you want to do this?’ Bagley asked when the official request came through for Saba to transfer to Alex and do a week of wireless broadcasts. ‘With Willie and Arleta off, there’s sod all to do here, and a couple of nights at the Cheval D’Or would be quite a feather in your cap.’ His forehead had wrinkled as he’d read the order again. ‘But I hear it’s pretty hot there – I mean you could probably go home now if you pushed it. I’d certainly help you.’
She’d looked at him in amazement. Stop now! Was he completely mad?
But four days later, stepping off the plane in Alexandria, she felt a complicated mix of emotions: orphanish to be sure at leaving the company (both Willie and Arleta had cried; Bog had offered to marry her), excited about the possibility of performing at the Cheval D’Or, desperate to get some kind of safe message to Dom. If they were ever to have a chance of meeting, it would have to be here.
‘Darling.’ Madame Eloise stepped out of a sea of dun-coloured soldiers to meet her, looking like some cool and exotic flower in her white linen dress and pale primrose hat.
‘Madame.’ Saba tried to sidestep the little groaning kisses on both cheeks. She’d been sick again on the plane, and Madame smelled delicious – a tart fragrance like grapefruits and sweet roses.