Jasmine Nights (37 page)

He started to pack his kit: his desert boots, his pistol, a couple of shirts; he took his socks down from the hanger where she’d left them. He smoked another cigarette, and when he got hungry, left her a note, dashing down the stairs to buy a foul-tasting falafel from a street vendor. It was then, standing in the street and seeing a large yolk-coloured sun beginning to set, that he started to panic. What if she hadn’t gone to the recording studio? Or had been held up there and not able to contact him, or been caught by a stray hand grenade and was lost and bleeding in some dusty street somewhere; maybe their stupid row had upset her more than she’d admitted and she was punishing him by making him wait.

He walked around for hours trying to find her. First to the ENSA offices, where a note on the padlocked door said they had moved to Cairo, then to Dilawar’s, empty except for the three old men who were regulars there.

He walked up shuttered alleyways, where blue lights shone eerily from wrought-iron lamp posts. As he walked, he wondered if jealousy had driven him a little mad. (For he was jealous, had been almost from the moment he’d first met her, without really understanding why.) And he thought about mirages. It was part of a pilot’s training to understand how a mirage could conjure up lakes and rivers, whole mountains out of nothing but desert sands. A confusion of perspective, a longing for something that wasn’t there. He’d seen her work the same kind of magic on the men she sang for – their tired faces lit up with hope and happiness; her songs the mirror that gave them back their life. God help him if he’d mistaken four days of blissful lovemaking for something solid and real.

He was certain now she was gone. At six o’clock, he ran wildly down the street in the direction of the club again. Someone must know where she was.

Late afternoon was fading as he ran into dusk: the sun setting over the harbour in a molten furnace of ochre and peach-coloured clouds that seemed to mock him. Fool, fool, fool for thinking you could contain her. When he got to the club, he stood gasping for breath on the pavement outside it. He banged on the locked door for five minutes and then he kicked it. An upstairs window opened; an old lady scowled down, he saw the pink of her scalp through wet hair.

‘Where is she?’ he shouted up. ‘Where is Saba?’

She told him to wait, ran downstairs and after an interminable scraping of locks opened the door. It took him a few seconds to see that this was Faiza Mushawar minus make-up. In the yellow light of sunset, her skin looked jaundiced. The line of her eyebrows had been drawn artificially high with a wobbly brown pencil.

‘What is it?’ she said crossly. ‘Who are you?’

‘Dominic Benson,’ he said. ‘You must remember, I was here with Saba. We met in your room.’

She stared at him, her brown eyes bulging. ‘No.’ A green-eyed cat was trying to force its way around her. She blocked its way with a slippered foot. ‘Many men come here.’

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Where is she?’

He told her he had to leave in the morning, that he was going back to the desert, that he and Saba had arranged to meet for lunch, that he’d waited all afternoon for her. While he talked, she sucked in her mouth and shook her head.

‘I don’t know where she’s gone.’ She glanced over his shoulder. ‘Another city, another concert. People don’t stay long.’ Her shrug indicating
what do you expect? She’s a singer, there’s a war on. Things happen for no meaning
.

‘Do you have any idea when she is coming back?’ he asked as gently as he could.

She shrugged again – ‘She is working, is never sure’ – it seemed to him her accent grew thicker by the moment. ‘Ask British peoples, I don’t know.’ Soon he felt she would be denying even knowing her all.

‘Can you tell me the names of the people she has been staying with in Alex?’

This had driven him mad all afternoon: Palmerston? Petersen? Mathieson? In all the excitement of meeting her again, he hadn’t paid proper attention. The old lady’s eyes rolled a little.

‘No.’

Stop messing about, you bloody old fool, I know you speak English
.

‘Listen.’ He heard his voice pleading, when he wanted to shout. The cat blinked at him, the red glow of sun reflected in its eyes. ‘Mrs Mushawar, please help me. You taught her. She respected you. You must know.’ In a matter of hours, the truck would come, it would take him back to the desert; he might never see her again. ‘Please.’

Her skinny eyebrows rose. It seemed she might be on the verge of some sort of explanation or apology when she drew back and said, ‘Sorry for this, but I don’t know. She here this morning, very nice, she not here now.’ She closed the door in his face.

He had come to the end of anything that could be called a plan. He spent the next few hours visiting the usual watering holes for the English, hoping by some miracle that she might be there. The Cecil bar was full of ATS girls. One or two of them crossed their legs and smiled hopefully as he walked in. Another said, if this Saba was still in Alex, she needed her head read. It was a deadly dump, give her Beirut any day.

It was dark by the time he got back to their room. From the harbour he heard the long, mournful blast of a foghorn. He sat on the chair, his head in his hands. He was meeting Barney outside the Officers’ Club at seven o’clock the next morning. Barney had arranged a lift back to the aerodrome in a supply truck. He had to go, he wanted to. On the following day, the whole squadron would be briefed on what they jocularly called the big one. This would be their last leave for a long time; from now on the fighting would be fierce and relentless. He could die without saying goodbye to her.

He felt mad with frustration at wasting this precious time. He told himself to calm down. He shaved, he made the bed, and he put the rest of his stuff, his khaki drills, his map, and the socks she’d washed, into his kitbag. It was then he saw her note.

Gone away suddenly for more concerts. So sorry. I love you. I hope to be back soon
.

Love Saba

He read it several times, unable to believe his eyes – so brief, so offhand. No address, no proper information, almost a brush-off. And she’d been back, he could see that now, her hairbrush and soap gone, clothes too, apart from her red dress, which she’d left in the cupboard. He took the dress from its hanger and lay on the bed with it. He inhaled its faint scent of roses and jasmine, and gave an anguished cry. He’d never imagined love could hurt this much – he felt winded, wounded, as if he’d been kicked hard in the stomach.

Chapter 31

As their plane roared through the night towards Istanbul, Saba had the nightmarish feeling of slippage, of things happening too fast and out of sequence. Ozan lay asleep three seats ahead of her, with his usual air of plump contentment, but she had not envisaged being on her own with him like this. Where was his wife? His entourage? What was Dom doing now? She hated the thought of hurting him like this.

She and Ellie had had a fierce row about it before she’d left Alexandria.

‘I can’t go without telling him,’ she’d told Ellie. ‘He’s waiting for me – he’s going back to his squadron tomorrow . . . I’m going to run down there straight away.’

Ellie had been doing what she called Hollywood packing – hurling clothes into an open suitcase, with none of her usual tissue-paper-and-folding malarkey. At the end of it, she opened her arms wide in a curiously wild gesture.

‘There
is
no time,’ she said. ‘I know it’s mad-making, but they’re picking you up in twenty minutes, and your plane leaves tonight and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.’ Her eyes looked nakedly red without their usual careful coating of mascara. ‘I’m not happy about this either,’ she said, ‘because now I have no job, and nowhere to live. And I’m sick of other people making all the decisions . . . and Tariq’s furious and I was hoping he’d propose this week, so it’s all a real mess, isn’t it?’

In the end, they’d compromised.

‘Listen, darling,’ Ellie had coaxed. ‘Write him a letter – I’ll take it down to him the minute you’ve gone, and then at least he’ll know.’

Saba had gone blank with alarm – given Cleeve’s warnings, what could be safely said? So in the end, a hopeless, scrappy, heartless-seeming note – her mind lurched with shame when she thought of him reading it. What would he think of her now?

‘May I join you for one moment?’ Mr Ozan, dressed superbly today in a pale suit and pearl-grey tie, had woken and decided to be sociable. He came swaying down the aisle and wedged himself beside her. His powerful, fat little body felt oppressively close – she was starting to feel airsick as well as everything else.

‘Are you happy about our change of plan?’ he roared over the engine noise. ‘Have you been to Turkey before?’ He half turned to gauge her reaction to what he obviously felt would be a great treat. ‘You were telling me your father was born there.’

‘They left when he was young,’ she had to shout back. ‘My father wanted to travel . . .
wanted to travel
.’ She hoped he’d shut up now.

‘And, remind me, what town . . .
what town
did he hail from?’ He was relentless.

‘A small village called Üvezli,’ she said. ‘They didn’t talk about it much.’

‘I know it, I think – it’s on the way from Üsküdar to the Black Sea coast,’ he said. ‘A pretty place, we can show you when we get there. Don’t look worried,’ he added gaily, ‘you are going to have the life of your time.’ He corrected himself: ‘The time of your life.’

The plane’s engine had settled into an easy hum. Through the small windows she saw clouds, and miles and miles below, the desert quietly filling up with the pinks and golds of the setting sun.

‘I forgot to ask,’ Mr Ozan said. ‘Your lessons with Faiza – did you like them?’

‘Very much – I’d only sung a few Turkish baby songs before, but never in Arabic.’

Ozan shifted in his seat. He shook his head.

‘You won’t need those songs now – Arabic is the official language in Beirut and my friends there are very sensitive about it being the language of song. In Istanbul,’ a proud curve came to his lips, ‘people are more Western-looking. We don’t care so much.’

She felt an odd mixture of relief and anticlimax – like a pupil who’s worked hard only to find their exam has been cancelled at the last moment. He’d been so passionate about the songs before; now they sounded about as important as whether to have cheese straws or peanuts at his party.

‘So is there a band in Istanbul?’

She warned herself,
keep your mouth shut
. She was here for a reason, with a job to do. She mustn’t mess it up. If she didn’t keep this firmly in mind, she would lose her centre and start to feel completely out of her depth; also, she would miss Dom more than was bearable.

‘Yes, and they are first rate,’ Ozan assured her. ‘Every time any good new record has come out in Paris or in London, I have collected it for them, so they are bang up to the minute too.’

He grinned at her. ‘I am excited, are you?’ And in a way she was – a sick kind of excitement that seemed to have bunched every muscle in her body.

‘And of course, the other thing is . . .’ Ozan stared down at the now dark and crinkled sea beneath them, ‘it will be nice to be away from this ghastly business for a while. Things are really hotting up. We are the lucky ones.’

Dom, waking the following morning, reached into an empty space beside him. A phone was ringing in the hall downstairs, half dressed, he sprinted down and got the usual mild electric shock as he grabbed it. His face in the mirror above it looked so fraught he hardly recognised himself.

‘Oh good, still there.’ A faint voice at last through the crackles. ‘Well, it’s Saba’s friend, Madame Eloise, here. Damn, dreadful line, sorry.’ More static, the faint hootings of her voice.

‘Did you get the letter from Saba? Yes . . . good, she had to shoot off rather suddenly. But anyway . . . I understand you’re off tomorrow, or is it today? Anyway . . . yes. No . . . sorry, what? Oh blast this . . .’ The line cleared for a few seconds.

‘She was in too much of a rush to give me any details – something about a party somewhere, or another concert – but she wants you to know she’s safe and well and that she’ll contact you as soon as she knows where she’s going, if that doesn’t sound too Alice in Wonderland. An address for her? No, sorry, no clue. I’m just the wardrobe lady. I think the best thing to do is to send letters to ENSA in Cairo; they’ll . . . oh blast this awful line . . . they’ll send them on. I didn’t get the impression she’d be gone long. Goodbye then. Good luck! Sorry about this.’

Barney’s lift had fallen through, so he thumbed a ride back to the aerodrome in a supply truck. He sat on his own in the back and gave himself a severe talking-to. A fighter pilot, Barney had told him once, only half facetiously, was good for three things: eating, flying and killing, and that was the way it had to be now. With things hotting up, he must simply close her down, seal her off like an engine that wouldn’t function, otherwise, she would kill him.

When he got back, he played a game of football with the lads in the dust, and for several hours felt a consoling and enveloping blankness.

Next he had a beer with his flight commander, Rivers, who as expected, said he’d completed his two hundred hours’ flying time, and was now tour-expired. His weary face, swollen with desert sores and pink circles of calamine, could not hide its relief.

‘So, Dom, they want you to take over, at least for the time being, so whizzo,’ he added flatly, ‘tons of fun ahead.’

A feeling of something that might under other circumstances have been called pride in his accomplishment struggled through the humiliations of the day, like a bright fish in an ocean of grime. It was an honour, something solid and worth fighting for, something which under other circumstances he would have felt proud to tell her about.

It was Barney who handed Dom a warm Worthington’s to celebrate, and Barney who later, during a game of chess, held a queen in his silvered hand and said, ‘I’ve been meaning to ask: did you hear from that ENSA girl again?’ wrecking his small moment of pleasure.