Jasmine Nights (31 page)
‘Is there anything else?’
‘My, what a terrier.’ He looked at her in mock alarm. ‘I wouldn’t like to be interrogated by you.’
Patronising twit. She felt like thwacking him over the head.
‘Radar,’ he said simply.
‘The British want to make use of Turkish airbases. Strategically, they are absolutely vital, and it so happens that Ozan’s family own the land around one of them, about fourteen miles from Ankara. It would be helpful to know which way he’s going to jump.’
She heard the drone of distant aircraft, and from upstairs the faint splashes of Ellie performing her evening toilette.
‘Listen, Saba,’ he said. He opened his arms as if he were freeing a bird. ‘If you don’t feel like doing any of this, you can go home now. Right back to England if you like.’
She sat in silence, a million conflicting thoughts going through her head. There was a kindly, understanding look in Cleeve’s eyes when she looked up – the usual look of amused curiosity.
‘I’ll do it,’ she said.
As soon as the front door clicked behind him, Saba raced upstairs.
‘Ellie,’ she whispered urgently through the keyhole of her bedroom. ‘He’s gone. What did you want to tell me?’
‘Come in and close the door behind you.
‘Well now,’ Ellie’s kidney-shaped dressing table gave back three smug reflections of herself, ‘I think you’re going to be rather pleased with me. You see, I’ve found him.’ She powdered her nose in a spirited way. ‘Your Pilot Officer Benson.’
Saba sank to the floor beside her.
‘Is this a joke?’
‘No.’ Ellie swivelled around and looked at her seriously. ‘But it’s a secret, and you’ve got to swear to keep it.’
Saba saw her own flushed face in the mirror.
‘How did you find him?’
‘I’d like to claim some great victory,’ Ellie said. ‘But I can’t. I was having a drink this afternoon in Pastroudis, a group of pilots were there on leave, I asked if they knew him and of course they did. Easy-peasy.’
‘And?’ Saba’s body was literally vibrating with excitement.
‘They said they’d get a message to him, that, as far as they knew, he was in town. If all goes to plan, he’ll be down at the Cheval D’Or tonight. Tariq’s sending a taxi for us at around nine thirty, which just about gives you time to have a bath and get dressed.’
‘Did you tell Mr Cleeve? He mustn’t know.’
‘Of course not, you twit.’ Ellie stood up and smoothed her dress down. ‘Listen, Saba,’ she said, ‘I am supposed to be your chaperone – but don’t you ever get sick of the boys making all the rules?’ She gave a little wink. ‘But we don’t have much time, so let’s discuss this later,’ she’d gone back to her chaperone voice, ‘over a drink at the club. I’d have a bath now if I was you; it’s been an awfully long day, and who knows what the night may bring?’
She stood up and opened her wardrobe door. While she rummaged, she told Saba that she’d meet Faiza Mushawar that night too – the singing teacher. Faiza, although as old as God, would be dressed up to the nines, probably even to the tens, that was the Egyptian way.
‘What about this little number?’ She put a black sequinned cocktail dress on the bed. ‘Or this?’ A green satin skirt was flung beside it.
‘No,’ said Saba. She was quite clear about this – if Dom was coming, she wanted to feel like herself.
She stood in her half-slip and looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was below her shoulders now, and she was thinner than she had been; her arms had grown brown in the sun. When she tried to put on her favourite silver bracelet, her hands were trembling too much to do up its fiddly catch.
After some deliberation, she chose the red silk dress that she had worn that night in Ismailia. It was a bit creased but she loved it; it meant something to her now.
A taxi drew up outside the house; Ellie’s boyfriend, Tariq, had arrived, a short, powerfully built man whose wire-rimmed glasses and impeccable clothes gave him a serious, even scholastic air. He’d brought a string of jasmine for Ellie, whom he was clearly mad about. ‘Jasmine,’ he explained, ‘was the flower of love in Egypt.’
Earlier, Ellie had seemed anxious to explain to Saba that her boyfriend was not, as she put it, ‘a typical native’, but half French and half Egyptian; a civilised man of the world whose four passions in life were wine (he’d spent his childhood on a small vineyard near Bordeaux), music, women and Egyptology. He’d first come to this city in search of buried bones, but when archaeology had proved an expensive occupation, he’d financed it by importing fine wines, which he’d done with some success.
He seemed to bring out a more kittenish, excitable side of Ellie’s nature. They bounded together towards the waiting car and jumped inside it as if they couldn’t wait for the evening to begin, and soon the air was full of everybody’s combined scents: sandalwood from Tariq’s side, Joy on all Ellie’s pulse points; even their driver with his brass box of ambergris and frankincense on his dashboard added to the rich and frankly overpowering air.
Tariq, sitting close to Ellie on the back seat, apologised for the scruffiness of the car and also for the brevity of the trip he was about to take them on. ‘It would have been fun to show you Alexandria by night,’ he said, ‘but there’s bad shortage of petrol here, so we must do it some other time.’
Saba, drawing aside a blackout curtain, saw a city half in hiding. Empty roads bathed in shrouded street lights; an empty tram sliding down potholed streets towards the sea, and, in dark cafés between burned-out buildings, the silhouettes of male figures drinking coffee or arak by candlelight. Tariq said, with a smile to hide the bitterness of his words, that the people of Alexandria had got nothing out of the war except inflation and darkness. ‘You are seeing Alex in her widow’s weeds,’ he said protectively. ‘The bombings have been horrible, but it will pass. She will recover.’
He told Saba that this city that he loved had been planned by Alexander the Great and laid out like a gigantic chessboard. It was called the pearl of the Mediterranean. Before the war, he said, there were taverns everywhere, and some of the smartest clothes shops in the Middle East.
‘Here is for your antiques, some wonderful shops, very expensive some of them, and just as good as Paris; here,’ he pointed towards the sea, ‘for your fish markets. There for your banking. Up there in the alleyways,’ he made a vague gesture out of the taxi window, ‘is where all the bad girls live.’
‘Of which there are plenty,’ Ellie added.
Tariq wondered if it was possible to have a city that was really a city that didn’t have the promise of something sinful there. Otherwise why would young men bother to leave home?
‘Don’t listen to him.’ When Ellie covered Saba’s ears, she heard the boom of laughter. ‘He’s wicked and depraved. She’s a nice young girl,’ she told him.
‘My favourite streets,’ Tariq explained, ‘are down by the sea. Normally it has shops and cafés and peanut sellers and all kinds of fun, but the people are very nervous to be out too late after dark now.’
‘I’m not.’ Ellie’s scented presence stirred beside her. Saba saw her squeeze Tariq’s hand. She heard her breath quicken.
‘I’m not either,’ he said. ‘Everywhere in the Middle East is dangerous now, so let me be in Alexandria with two beautiful women.’
‘Flatterer!’ Saba heard the huskiness in Ellie’s voice, then the light sipping of kisses, like cats drinking milk, a rustling, a deep sigh. Tariq stopped talking for a while, and Saba, so close to them, felt both embarrassed and aroused and slightly shocked. Wasn’t Ellie too old for this?
Ten minutes later, their taxi slowed down. Tariq came up for air and said they’d reached the Corniche; it was a shame that she couldn’t see it in all its glory, on summer evenings glittering like an enormous necklace, and full of people, not just soldiers. Winding down her window, Saba caught the fresh smell of the sea and heard its slap.
A black horse clip-clopped beside her, making her start. The only light came from a small charcoal brazier underneath the carriage that moved like a ruby through the darkness. Behind its half-drawn curtains two figures embraced.
A small boy ran beside them, a tray around his neck.
‘Big welcome for you, Mrs Queen.’ He thrust a tray of cheap pens and bracelets through their moving window. ‘English good.’ Skinny little fingers covered in cheap rings made the ‘V’ sign. ‘German no good. Churcheeel good. Hitler very bad boy. Please have a look.’ He gazed at them winsomely, head on one side.
Tariq laughed, gave him a coin. ‘The perfect diplomat meets the real world economy.’
‘Very sensible too,’ Ellie said. ‘When you have absolutely no idea what side your bread is buttered on.
‘Now, darling, can you see it?’ Ellie gave Saba a sly pinch. ‘It’s over there. The club,’ she whispered. She pointed towards a faint strip of light in the middle of a row of dark houses.
‘I try never to look at the ships,’ she said as they walked towards it. ‘Too depressing. Men and their fucking wars.’ Her curse word leapt out of the darkness, startling Saba. It seemed so out of character with Ellie’s meticulous make-up, her reverence for Patou.
‘ ’Scuse the French.’ Ellie gave her elbow a little wiggle. ‘It slipped out. What I really meant was let’s have as much fun as we can while we can. There’s nothing wrong with that.’
A shiver of anticipation ran through Saba like electricity. Ellie was right: nothing wrong with that at all. The fear would come back soon enough.
A Nubian doorman smiled at her as she walked through the door of the club, his teeth lit blue by the painted-over lamps. She could hear the wail of a jazz trumpet, the clink of glasses, the solid blare of conversation just out of reach. She checked her watch. Nine thirty-five.
‘He’s coming at ten,’ Ellie whispered. ‘At least, he said he would.’
‘Who?’ It was childish to pretend she didn’t know, but the thought of being stood up now was unbearable.
‘Don’t be daft.’ Ellie play-pinched her. ‘
Him
.’
‘Oh
him
. Well that would be nice.’ As if he was just an ordinary man, and this an ordinary day, but some things felt too overwhelming to be shared. Particularly now, and maybe never with Ellie. She didn’t know enough about her yet, or for that matter about him.
Tariq walked ahead of them, parting cigarette smoke with his hands like waves. Inside, there were many tables lit by tiny candles in glass jars. The tables were crammed with soldiers, some with girls on their laps. A babble of voices: French, Greek, Australian, American.
There was a bar in the corner. Beside it, a small stage where an overwrought Egyptian singer lassoing his microphone cord about him sobbed his way through ‘Fools Rush In’ in an accent so heavy it might have been another language. An old lady sat behind the stage, her face half lit by the spotlight. She watched the singer closely, with an expression of deep disdain.
‘Faiza,’ whispered Tariq.
Faiza wore a brilliant purple evening dress. Her hair was brightly hennaed, her lips a red slash. On her lap there was a splendid grey Persian cat, as impeccably groomed as its owner and wearing a jewelled lead. It watched the couples dancing cheek to cheek with a look of faintly nauseous contempt.
In the car coming over, Tariq had been keen to impress on Saba that Faiza was almost as famous as Umm Kulthum, a singer he worshipped. Like Umm, she was the daughter of a poor family, and when young, she’d disguised herself as a boy to sing. Faiza was, he said, a proper artist, not a common crooner: she sang verses from the Koran, her training had been long and arduous; she was also a great friend of Mr Ozan.
When the song had reached its last wail of agony, Faiza looked around her. When she saw them she beckoned them towards her with a regal wave.
‘I know who you are,’ she said to Saba. She stared at her intently – her huge black eyes were ringed with kohl, a little smudged in the heat – and then she shook her hand with a great rattle of bracelets. ‘You, come upstairs. You go and dance,’ she told Tariq and Ellie.
She took a kerosene lamp from the corner of the stage and made her imperious way through the packed club.
‘I have apartments upstairs,’ she said. ‘We can talk there.’
The cat dashed in front of Saba as she followed the old woman up the steps. She felt the shiver of its fur on her calf. At the top of the stairs, Faiza put a key in the lock and opened the door, on to a candlelit room where there was a piano, and a number of comfortable-looking sofas, covered in silk cushions.
‘This is where we have our proper parties now,’ she said. ‘Please, sit down. Something to drink?’
‘No. No thank you.’ There was a clock on the wall behind the old lady’s head. It was already nine forty-five.
The cat purred like a little motor as Faiza moved her fingers up and down its spine.
‘We don’t have much time before I sing again,’ she said, ‘so I will start right away. Mr Ozan cannot be here tonight, but he tells me that you are a very good singer. The authorities have forbidden any of us to employ foreign singers for the past two years, and honestly, it’s very, very boring for all of us.’ She smiled warmly. ‘We are artistes, we want to hear everything, see everything,’ her bracelets jangled as she sketched out the world, ‘so the curfew is one great big bloody bore. Sorry for the word.’ They beamed at each other like people who shared a secret.
‘And you want me to sing here?’
Faiza shrugged. A shrewd expression came into her face.
‘Not impossible. We cannot make a living without new people,’ she pronounced it
bipple
too, ‘but now we must be more discreet.
‘Before the war, my husband worked with Mr Ozan, we go everywhere to find the best people. We have here Argentinian dancers, French singers, Germans, Italians, such a wonderful place. Now . . .’ The old girl’s shrug was dismissive.
‘And your husband?’
‘Dead. A heart attack last year.’ She scooped the cat up and held it against her breast.
Downstairs, Saba could hear the sound of the band playing Arab music: drums, violin, oud, tabla, their wild, bounding rhythms ripping through the night. Also, the sound of a plane, close enough for the rotations of its propellers to be heard quite distinctly.