Jasmine Nights (55 page)

‘Crikey!
Tempus fugit
. I expect you’ll want to dash off now. I can’t give you a lift, I’m afraid, I’m wanted in another part of town. Here’s the address. Tell him from me he’s a lucky man.’

As he scribbled down words on a piece of paper, the news began to percolate through her brain and into her blood and down her spine to her nerve endings.

‘Dermot,’ she smiled at him radiantly, ‘is it true?’

He held two fingers up. ‘Scout’s honour.’

‘Really true?’

‘Yep.’

She stared at him.

‘Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.’ She would forgive him, had already, for delaying the news until after the concert. It wasn’t as if Ozan hadn’t warned her what his priorities were.

‘And if it all goes wrong,’ he put some soiled notes on the table for the waiter, and tucked a piece of paper in her hand, ‘give your old Uncle Dermot a ring.’ He picked up his hat. ‘It’s my sister’s address in England – shouldn’t really give it to you, but what the hell. I doubt you’ll use it.’

Alive! As she stepped out into the street again and looked at the address, she didn’t know whether to laugh or scream or cry. Dom was alive! and in Alexandria. All around her the streets pulsated with crowds and street musicians, dancing, singing, shouting. A bonfire burned in one of the city gardens, its sparks flying into the night. No possible chance of a taxi now. She dashed up the street, propelled by a starry elation, and terror too. What if she’d missed her chance? Or he had another girl now and didn’t want to see her.

When she stopped near the statue of Muhammad Ali Pasha, her chest was heaving.

Hotel Waterloo
, she read from the note Cleeve had thrust into her hand.
Off Rue Nebi Daniel, near railway station
.

After half an hour of frantic searching, she found the hotel in a dilapidated street, wedged between a barber’s shop and a Syrian bakery.

Inside the deserted lobby, the night porter was reading the evening paper.

‘Where is he?’ she said when she had caught her breath. ‘Dominic Benson. He’s staying here.’

The man looked at her in amazement. A goddess in a silver dress, her sandals filled with dirt and litter, and then he recognised her.

‘Madame, madame?’ His eyes lit up. ‘Your singing was very good. Write your name,
merci
.’ He thrust a piece of paper at her. ‘Special for me.’

She wrote her name wildly.

‘Help me,’ she said. ‘Please help me. I’m looking for someone.’

‘Who?’ He was confused.

‘Dominic Benson. He’s a guest here.’

He opened a drawer under the desk, and pulling out a dusty ledger, took an agonising time locating the page, the day.

‘No, madame,’ he shook his head regretfully, ‘no here. Not now. Tonight . . .’ he mimed the carrying of suitcases, ‘he’s gone to Cairo.’

‘When, when?’ She grabbed his wrist, pointed at his watch. ‘When train?’

He shrugged. ‘One hour.’ He shrugged again. ‘Two hours, maybe. Train special for concert. Sorry.’

The city’s main railway station, the Misr, was roughly a mile away from her. She took a taxi, abandoned it when it got stuck in traffic, ran flat out towards the station, her feet sinking into rubbish and horse manure, broken pavements, stones.

When she got to the station, a line of carriage horses stood in a row outside it munching grain from hoods that made them look like prisoners about to be executed. Gasping for air, she ran in and out of them, into a station heaving with people. Searching the crowd for European faces she saw a group of Scottish soldiers standing near the ticket desk.

‘Cairo train,’ she blurted out.

‘Don’t break a leg, love,’ a kilted soldier warned her. ‘The train’s gone, it’s just left . . . Hang on . . . hang on.’ He swayed around, looking at her. ‘Were ye not at the—’

‘Where? Where?’ she shouted.

‘Platform two,’ they replied in unison.

She ran towards it, past bundles of sleeping beggars, and drunken partygoers, young lovers, soldiers, a peasant farmer carrying his bed on his back, and saw the backside of the train steaming down a long track into a tangle of wires and shattered suburbs, and then on to nowhere.

She stood on the platform in her beautiful wrecked silver dress, her white stole floating wildly in the updraught.

‘Stop the bloody train!’ she shouted in a Welsh roar designed to carry from valley to valley. ‘
Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!
Right now!’ She tripped and almost fell as she pounded down the platform after it. The train kept going, out of the gloom of the station and into the night, until at the very last minute a porter standing outside the final carriage saw her: a screaming houri in a white robe leaping through smoke.

He shrieked over and over again, dashed inside, pulled the red emergency cord. The train came to a creaking halt.

Under normal circumstances, it might have been a punishable offence, but the mood in the city that night was defiantly playful. People hung from the windows laughing, cheering as she jumped on to a train still wheezing and protesting at its reversal. She ran down cramped corridors calling his name, and through the glass carriage doors peered at strangers: men in tarbooshes and bowler hats and turbans; families tucking down for the night; a group of soldiers who waved and cheered at her.

When she found him, he was sitting by the window in the last carriage but one. She wasn’t even sure it was him at first. He looked older, thinner. Before he turned and saw her there, she saw him sigh.

‘Dom.’ She walked up to him and touched his face. She could hear the grumble of the engine about to start again. The guards shouting. ‘Get off the train.’

‘Saba.’ When he looked at her, there was nothing but pain and confusion in his eyes. ‘What’s this? What’s going on?’

‘For God’s sake, Dom, get off the train – it’s moving.’ She felt it throbbing underneath her feet.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not like this.’

She stood on the seat, stretched above him, tore down his case and threw it through the window on to the platform.

‘I can explain, Dom,’ she shouted, as the platform moved away. ‘
Get off the train!
’

Three soldiers leaned from their carriages as they stepped from the train, and stared goggle-eyed at the girl on the platform in the sensational dress having a humdinger of a row with her boyfriend.

‘There’s no point,’ Dom yelled over the noise of the engine. ‘Because it’s not a stupid game for me.’

‘Dom, please,’ she said. ‘Shut up and walk with me.’

It was too noisy to talk in the station. They stomped off down the street and towards his hotel, she still holding his suitcase.

On the corner of the street, he stopped.

‘Saba, listen,’ he said, his eyes very black under the street lamp. ‘I’ve made up my mind, I don’t want it like this . . . it’s not possible. I waited for you, it nearly killed me. Where for Christ’s sake did you go? Honest answer for once.’

‘Fine.’ She slammed his suitcase down. ‘Honest answer. I went to a party.’

‘A party?’

They looked at each other in hysterical disbelief.

‘Oh for pity’s sake,’ he said. ‘Well everything’s perfectly clear now. Thank you for at least being straight with me.’

‘Dom.’ The strap of her sandal had loosened and she had to hobble to keep up with him. ‘The party was in Turkey.’

‘Oh fine.’ He set his jaw and stepped up the pace. ‘Fantastic. Terrific. The party was in Turkey. I feel much better already.’

‘Listen, you blasted nitwit,’ she yelled. They were passing a backstreet bar where some young naval officers were drinking. ‘Take me back to your room,’ she shouted, ‘and I’ll tell you what happened.’

‘
Woo-hoo
,’ came from the direction of the naval boys, who were spilling on to the pavement, and from one: ‘I wouldn’t turn that one down, mate!’

‘Fuck off,’ Dom shouted.

Back at the Waterloo Hotel, they walked up the dimly lit stairs like sleepwalkers. A new receptionist, half asleep at the desk, gave them a new key, a new room, no questions asked. Upstairs, Dom switched on a tasselled bedside light. There was only one wooden chair, next to a sink, so they sat side by side on the bed.

‘Saba, listen to me,’ he said. He took hold of both her wrists in his hands and looked into her eyes very seriously. ‘We’re here because it’s a quiet place to talk, but before you say a word, I saw you with a man earlier – if you’re otherwise engaged, don’t bother making up a story, because you see, at the risk of sounding dramatic, or a little bit theatrical myself, I don’t want to go through this again, and I’m not going to.’

‘Dom.’ The simple miracle of him being there was starting to break through.

‘Don’t.’ He stood up and walked to the chair, that was as far away from her as possible.

So she told him what she could about Istanbul and Ozan, Cleeve.

He listened with no change of expression, and then:

‘Saba, are you serious?’ he said. ‘Did they give you a toupee and false glasses?’

‘Deadly serious.’ She put her hand over his mouth. ‘There’s more.’

She told him about the German parties, but not about Severin. She couldn’t, not yet, perhaps never.

‘I had an accident. A car accident.’ He sat beside her on the bed now. She drew back her hair and showed him the scar. ‘They were taking me away from the house.’

‘Oh God.’ He touched her for the first time, a light touch on the temple.

‘Why didn’t you trust me – tell me where you were going? I could have kept it secret.’

‘I couldn’t.’ Her face looked pinched in the lamplight. ‘I was told to avoid boyfriends because, if you were arrested, or captured, it might have been dangerous for you.’

‘What else happened?’ He searched her face intently. ‘Something else did, I feel it.’

‘A lot . . . I’ll tell you later . . . some good things too. Cleeve told me tonight that Jenke’s information had made a difference, but he wouldn’t be more specific. Even telling me where you were broke all the rules.’

‘You’ll probably end up with more medals than me.’

‘Probably.’

He saw the flash of her white teeth, her dimples.

‘Incredible,’ he murmured gathering her in his arms. ‘Unbelievable. Ridiculous. You on the train,’ he started to laugh, ‘and before that . . . I went to the concert . . . it was torture listening to you.’

He wiped tears from her face with his handerchief.

‘What happened to you?’ she said at last. ‘You’re not well.’

‘I had a prang,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you later. I don’t want to talk about it now.’

And because the peace was new and precarious, she let him get away with this.

‘We thought you were dead,’ she said. ‘Barney gave me a letter from you; he found it in your locker. Didn’t he tell you?’

‘I haven’t seen Barney – he’s been away. I’ve hardly seen anyone since I was picked up, but what letter? Oh for heaven’s sake, no.’ It had suddenly dawned on him. ‘That stupid letter. I was so angry . . . I didn’t mean to send it.’

‘I got this too.’ She held up her wrist and showed it to him.

‘The bracelet. Do you wear it?’

‘All the time.’

He leaned down and kissed her then. He touched her face there, and there; he held her hair in his hands. He led her over to the wooden chair near the sink, and washed the dirt off her feet, grumbling at the state they were in.

‘Thank you, Nursey,’ she said. He soaped them and dried them, kissed them gently toe by toe. When he was done, she stood up and he unhooked her dress and they got into the bed together, and she held him close and gave him the sweetest kiss of his life, and then they wept unashamedly. ‘I thought you were dead,’ she sobbed. ‘And I wanted to die with you.’ And he believed her because she was a truthful person; some part of him had known that from the beginning.

Chapter 50

Spring came in a rush of flowers – mallow and poppies, purple and white anemones, coltsfoot, marigolds and celandine. She picked handfuls of them from the back garden of the house Ozan had lent them at Muntazah Beach.

By Ozan’s standards the house was no more than a hut, but they were delighted by its long verandas, its sunny whitewashed rooms, and the small garden at the back, where acacia and jasmine were blooming, and oranges, tangerines and lemons burst from the trees. The house was private, and apart from a honking donkey tethered nearby and some morning birds, it was quiet – a rare luxury after living in camps and communal tents.

In the mornings, Yusuf, one of Ozan’s servants, arrived on a bicycle with a basket full of wine and fresh bread, cheeses and whatever fish had been netted that day. In a sunny kitchen with blue and white tiles, Saba tried, with mixed success, to learn how to cook.

But for the first two days, they lay in their whitewashed bedroom in each other’s arms and slept like exhausted animals, laughing when they were awake at what a waste of time this was. Then came the long, lazy days of making love and swimming, of sunbathing and eating barefoot meals by candlelight on their veranda, which overlooked the sea.

‘Look,’ she said one night, gazing up into the night sky. ‘That’s Berenice’s Hair.’ She pointed out a line of stars just above the dark. ‘No idea who Berenice was,’ she added. ‘My dad showed me them. In a book.’

‘She was the wife of a Macedonian king,’ he told her. ‘When the king went to war, she made a pact with Aphrodite, the goddess of love, that if she cut off her hair he would be protected. She took her hair to the temple, but it disappeared. A court astronomer claimed he’d found it again, as a new constellation, which was tactful otherwise all hell would have broken loose.’

‘How do you know these things?’

‘From flying and general brilliance.’ He was still peering at the stars, light years away himself for that moment.

She liked him knowing things. It comforted her.

He’d been reading Cavafy’s poems to her. He’d discovered the poet had once lived in the Rue Lepsius, four doors down from them.

There’s no ship for you, there’s no road
.

Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner
,