A Foreign Affair (2 page)

‘As you wish Madam!’

‘Thank you, and please call me Roza’

‘You must not thank me, Madam Roza. It is I who must thank you,’ he replied ‘You must understand that for many years now, due to that cursed bin Laden and his bomb here in 2000, we have had no visitors to this port – no navy ships, no oil tankers, no cruise ships and certainly no British tourists. We have been forgotten by all the world -’

‘We’re still in Crater, aren’t we?’ I asked briskly, irked by his plaintive tone.

‘Yes, you are right, and you can recognise these British-style houses with two storeys, all in a line?’ he said, as we sped down a thronging terraced back-street that reminded me of some depressed Midlands town with a burgeoning Moslem population – Oldham or Burnley or Leicester, say – though built of stone instead of brick. ‘If you look hard you may also see some old 1960s graffiti from the time we fought you British – there, look, floozy.’

I wondered whom he thought he was insulting until I realised that he was reading FLOSY in capital letters scrawled on the side of a building, FLOSY, he explained, had been one of the groups terrorising the British into abandoning their Aden Colony in the mid 1960s.

‘I was just a baby at that time,’ he continued, ‘but my uncles were all members of FLOSY and ran around town in the very early morning putting Tate & Lyle sugar in the petrol tanks of the British Land Rovers.’ He giggled and then sighed, ‘They behaved like naughty children then but they are wiser now. Now all south Yemenis, of every age, wish the British would return here. Not one of us is happy to be under the boot of those robber tribesmen from the north – better to live in a British colony than an independent Yemen when those barbarians are in control of everything! Look up there, you see that hooligan?’ He was pointing up at the giant billboard photograph of the grinning man I’d spotted while still at sea and taken for a toothpaste advert, ‘that’s our northern tribesman president – curses be upon the chief of all the robbers!’

I was more interested in noting the number of women wearing the all-enveloping black rig – baltos as Aziz called them – than in his bellyaching about the northern Yemeni who’d apparently been making a poor fist of ruling united north and south Yemen for almost the past two decades. While taking in the sights of Aden on that first afternoon I was far less worried by the state of the Yemeni nation under that lord of misrule whose name I kept forgetting than by how I would get my hands on one. One might well come in handy as a useful disguise at some stage in my sojourn; I could certainly conceal a weapon or a valuable in its folds, I fantasised, idly wondering if my famously misadventuring ancestor had ever had recourse to one. How much could a
balto
to call my own cost?

The more I saw of the old port city with its chipped custard-yellow post boxes and strange abundance of roundabouts, the harder I was finding it to sympathise with Aziz’s nostalgia for the British Empire. What bizarre things we Brits left behind us! Post boxes, random Big Bens, those thick yellow lines at the sides of the roads. None of it was very stylish or even particularly useful when one came to think about it, but our first destination that afternoon reassured me that we Brits were hardly the worst offenders in this respect.

Although spotless and as deliciously cool as the interior of Aziz’s car, the Aden Hotel reeked of a ramshackle sleaze that harked back Aden’s brief incarnation as the capital of the Moscow-backed People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, South Yemen. A solitary Arab cuckoo in the Communist nest for a quarter of a century after the British pull-out in1967, with this pig-ugly hotel as its Dorchester presumably, the PDRY had been ‘a bad joke’ according to Aziz.

‘Take me straight to the Sheraton, please,’ I said, as soon as we’d stepped into the Aden’s revolving door.

Back in the sanctuary of the LandCruiser, we sped past a small park in the making – still strewn with paving stones and unplanted flower beds – in the middle of which was the dumpy form of the widowed Queen Victoria. ‘During all the black night of the Marxist years, Her Majesty the Empress of India was lying in the cellar of the old British consulate,’ Aziz told me, ‘but recently we resurrected her in memory of the happy one hundred and twenty-eight years we Adenis enjoyed under British rule, which every one of us prays will come again soon.’

‘
Inshallah
!
’
I murmured politely, but I wasn’t really listening to him. I was recalling having read somewhere that Queen Victoria rejoiced in the luxury of a new pair of knickers every day of her life, and was therefore startled when Aziz swerved off the road suddenly and gently rammed the car into a lamp post, ‘Madam Roza, you really hope that the British will return to rule over Aden?’ he said, switching off the ignition.

‘Need you ask?’ I joked, ‘I’m expecting our redcoats here by sundown!’

In all the fuss generated by the discovery that the LandCruiser wouldn’t start again and my threat to abandon Aziz by flagging down another vehicle to transport me safely on to the Sheraton, I failed to notice a pale, unmistakably English man wearing tomato red Crocs emerge from a nearby building. How far did one have to go these days to be shot of one’s fellow Brit?

‘Can I be of any assistance?’ this red-Croc inquired mildly, ‘I’m the vicar here at Holy Trinity...’

An Anglican church in Yemen! Another vestige of the British empire, of about as much use as a human tonsil, I was thinking, until I learned that the Rev and his wife not only ran an eye-clinic but also a guesthouse, whose largest apartment he wasted no time in offering to me. Once having ascertained that it boasted overhead fans, I accepted an invitation to dine with them that evening. I’d be saving myself the cost of a 5* hotel, I calculated, while gaining a free background briefing on the lie of the land I’d landed myself in.

‘I’ll be back here at seven tomorrow morning,’ promised Aziz as he and one of the eye clinic drivers set out to push the LandCruiser back up the road to a mechanic’s.

Chapter Two

If only...

If only I’d been listening to what Aziz was saying instead of pondering Queen Victoria’s knickers. If only Aziz hadn’t over-reacted to my
Inshallah
and banjaxed the car. If only the Rev had ignored the commotion at his gate and the call to be a Good Samaritan and got on with writing his sermon instead. If only I’d been able to refuse his invitation on the grounds that the guesthouse lacked any form of air-conditioning. If only he’d married someone else... If I’d never come within a hundred miles of the Revs, I might never have acquired a criminal record. Not strictly true, actually. Still, to say the very least, Mrs Rev was a seriously aggravating factor.

An aggressively amplified recording of the call to prayer from a nearby mosque woke me at around the 5.30 am on my first morning in Yemen. Sweating between my yellow poly-cotton sheets, nerves all a-jangle, I began to feel queasy as I recalled the events of the previous evening.

After a blissful hour or two of exfoliating and moisturising, I’d begun to feel myself again and cheerfully raided my wheelie case for something decent to wear for dinner: a halter-neck paisley silk cat-suit by Stella McCartney, secured for a song off Ebay, and a matching pair of espadrille wedges. Skin all a-glow and cool as a cucumber, I’d at last descended from my spacious apartment in the rear eaves of the church to the Revs’ living quarters behind the altar, banking on an invitation to join them for a stiff sun-downer.

But Mrs Rev was not half as welcoming as her husband had been. The trouble is my tendency to scrub up so nicely very often disjoints the noses of older women like Mrs Rev and my sister-in-law Fiona. After giving me a top to toe glance of pursed disapproval and grumbling something about it being ‘just a kitchen supper, nothing special’, Mrs Rev had turned her back, in its outsize beige tent, to me in order to attend to whatever was on the stove. That left Mr Rev and me to make small talk, which inevitably required me to answer the question: ‘What brings you to Aden?’

‘I wanted a break from my job at the
Daily
Register
– I was very stressed...’ I told him. How much better the word ‘stressed’ sounds than ‘bored’!

Why would I go into detail? The last thing I wanted was the Rev Googling me and finding no trace of anything I’d ever written for the paper. He didn’t need to know that I’d spent months telephoning purveyors of fine hearing aids, stair lifts and corduroy trousers to solicit their advertising for the Register’s Saturday magazine before my efforts to get myself noticed by editorial resulted in my relocation, to the terminally stagnant backwater of the paper’s letters page.

But I needn’t have bothered to say anything at all because, ‘Quite so...quite so,’ he was answering vaguely, too busy hunting down old bottles of gin and tonic to a hiding place in a broom cupboard, in a duster bag hanging behind the vacuum cleaner, to listen to me. Not so his missus though: ‘People don’t tend to come to Aden for a break, dear,’ she interjected, her back still turned to me, ‘I would have thought Dubai or Abu Dhabi would be more up your street, so much more - what’s the word one hears everywhere these days? - aspirational.’

‘Horses for courses!’ I replied mildly, ignoring her insult.

No. I decided that I certainly wouldn’t be treating that pair to the tale of Sheikh al-Abrali’s letter. The Revs were patently not the kind of people to understand how, on a putty grey morning a month before, every last corpuscle of my Flashman blood had thrilled to that summons from afar. For the life of them they wouldn’t be able to understand how instantly and powerfully my genetic programming had persuaded me of a need to remove myself to a land I knew nothing about, to do I knew not what, in the service of I knew not whom, for how long I could not say.

Call it a Flashmanic basic instinct, or just ‘manic’ if you like. I’d call it a reckless courage born of acute despair and advanced boredom. If I outclass and surpass my great great great grandsire in any respect it’s in my appetite for risk, and never more so than when I am bored. Ralph and I have discussed it at length; I probably have my great-grandmother, youngest daughter-in-law of Sir Harry Flashman’s youngest grand-daughter, the first Roza Flashman, who became lady-in-waiting to the unlucky wife of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, to thank for my daredevil ‘act now, worry later’ streak. Anyway, on that dismal morn, I was in the office, scrolling up and down the sheikh’s letter to the editor, stone deaf to a colleague who’d pronounced it ‘a pile of poo’ that would be sure to land its author in jail in his country if it were ever printed. No, no; I would not hit the ‘delete’ button.

A time and tide in my affairs had come at last, I’d felt. Shaking myself free of the shackles of water-cooler spite, Pret a Manger sandwiches, swipe card entrances and strip lighting, I’d felt the
ennui
of the past year evaporating like dew off an Alpine meadow. I was damned if I was going to squander another second of my allotted lifespan at the
Daily
Register
. Galvanised by one last glance at the sheikh’s mention of it being the 50th anniversary of the British pull-out and his
gracious
,
just
Albion
,
will
you
be
deaf
to
your
southern
Arabian
foster
children’s
cries
? I logged off, tossed an empty paper cup and half a Danish in the bin, grabbed my handbag and Nicole Farhi coat off the coat stand and made a dash for the lift.

That was how it was, but I dared say that given half a chance Mrs Rev would decide, just as my sister-in-law Fiona had, that I’d been fired and had headed out to Yemen on a quest for my ‘next fix of kicks’. I’d overheard Fiona saying as much to a friend of hers on the phone on the eve of my departure from Widderton: ‘Yes, Yemen...Aden, I think...No, I’m not joking... do anything for a thrill ... hoping she’ll be gone some time...bin Laden’s lot....I’d never say this to Ralph, you know how he dotes on her, I wouldn’t exactly pay them to kidnap her but...’

After mixing me a repellently weak gin and tonic - no ice, no slice - the Rev had poured himself and his wife a glass of water each. He and I then repaired to either end of a squeaky wicker sofa where he regaled me with a long and winding tale about how their church compound had suffered three attacks by al-Qaeda. In the past year, I learned, the Revs had passed no fewer than a hundred and twenty sleepless nights, worrying over finding funds for round- the-clock security guards, panic buttons and the embellishment of those high compound walls with barbed wire and shards of broken glass.

Yawning through discreetly flared nostrils I exclaimed at their plucky Blitz spirit, politely cursing religious extremism and all its works. But frankly, I strongly suspected them of over-egging their tale, of fishing for donations for some search-lights or watchtowers for their church. My powers of empathy had been fatally weakened, I think, by a suspicion that parking oneself in a church on the Moslem Arabian peninsula, so close to Islam’s Holy Places, was asking for trouble. However, gasping for another drink in the hope that it might keep me awake, I didn’t want to offend my hosts so confined myself to answering ‘You’re always going to get a few youngsters who overstep the mark, aren’t you? I think how the Welsh welcomed English second-homers....’

‘You can’t compare it with that, dear,’ said Mrs Rev, impatiently clicking her fingers at me to get me to pass her my glass for washing up and indicating I should go and sit at the table: ‘You might be interested to know that there’s been an Anglican church on this spot in Aden for well over a hundred years, since the 1850s.’

‘Really?’ I countered, noting her testy tone, ‘Actually, I find I don’t take much pride in our colonial past, but that might just be an age thing...’ I’d be giving as good as I got, I’d decided.

I took my place at table on a plastic stool, noting the absence of wine glasses. I placed a hand around the plastic water cup that had been set for me, glancing around me in such a way as to leave no room for doubt that I’d appreciate a second gin and tonic. With Mrs Rev busy under the sluggish stir of the overhead fan, ladling out bowls of gluey rice and pulpy vegetables, the Rev stirred himself to fix me one, measuring out the alcohol as laboriously as if he were slaving over an in vitro fertilisation.

Two sips later, and half way through that first course, I felt strong enough to broach a new subject. ‘I’m wondering whether I need to wear the full black rig all the time...’

‘I shouldn’t have thought so – up in the north, in Sanaa, yes, - baltos are pretty much de rigueur, I gather - but not here in Aden. You can more or less wear what you like here...’ he began and was immediately slapped down by his wife; ‘Rubbish Keith! Take it from me, dear,’ she said, eyeing my already almost empty glass disapprovingly, ‘You’ll feel much more comfortable if you cover up – long sleeves, no cleavage or crotch area on show, headscarf, legs covered. I doubt you’ll be getting any more wear out of that particular outfit! What a pity! More stew?’

‘Quite delicious, but no thanks!’ I said, passing her my empty plate for removal, before changing the subject again. What did they advise in the matter of travelling outside the confines of Aden? Would I be safe? Mrs Rev answered me while quarrying at a jumbo tub of ice-cream: ‘I should jolly well hope so! I regularly drive myself out to the British war cemetery, past Sheikh Othman to Silent Valley, which is about twenty kilometres out of town – my father died out here in the 50s, so naturally, while we’re here, I do what I can to keep the grave tidy - and I’ve never encountered any problems...’

Her mention of the Silent Valley cemetery reminded me of something that old club bore had requested just as I was making my getaway. ‘If it’s not too much to ask, my dear, and you have a moment, you might go and pay your respects to some old RAF chums of mine in Silent Valley – here’s a list of their names, just four of them – if you were able to take a few photographs...’ I’d taken the list, of course, and promised him I’d do as he asked. Now it seemed to me that a quick excursion to Silent Valley with Aziz on my first morning in Yemen and the efficient discharge of that small favour might be a good plan. Once the Rev had finished wincing at the effect a first spoonful of ice-cream was having on one of his molars he mentioned something about how, as a non-resident, I should take care to secure myself a permit from the Tourist Police to produce at the checkpoint on the edge of town. I thanked him for the tip, deciding to let Aziz take care of that.

Mrs Rev was now waving her metal scoop in my direction.

‘No ice-cream for me thanks, but you won’t mind if I fix myself to another little G&T instead, will you?’ I risked, reaching over to the sideboard behind me to help myself to the bottles. I couldn’t endure the fine torture of watching the Rev fertilise my glass all over again.

‘You may have noticed dear, that Keith and I have drunk only water all evening,’ said Mrs Rev, watching me splash half the remaining contents of the gin bottle into my glass

‘Recovering alcoholics?’ I murmured, as sympathetically as I could manage.

It so happened, I’d been heartily relieved to see that Mrs Rev wasn’t drinking. Rather like Fiona, she looked to me like the sort who’d turn first trenchant and then tyrannical when in her cups. I, on the other hand, tend to have any rough edges rubbed off me by alcohol. I cry and laugh a lot; social occasions go with more of an emotional swing when I’ve had a few.

Mrs Rev was keen to set me straight: ‘Neither of us has ever had a drink problem, thank you very much, dear.’ Her flair for turning a ‘dear’ to a sneer was remarkable. She continued ‘- we don’t touch the stuff because we’d hate to offend our Moslem neighbours, wouldn’t we Keith?’

The Rev, who was busy scooping the last trace of ice-cream from the sides of his bowl, went red and nodded. I guessed that he’d enjoyed the odd tipple until hen-pecked out of the habit; otherwise, why had the gin been so well hidden away?

At that point my risk-taking daredevil took over: ‘But don’t you think one can bend so far over backwards not to offend anyone that one ends up flat on one’s back, asking to be walked on,’ I queried, ‘ I may be wrong but it seems a bit strange to be sitting here in a church a mere hop, skip and jump down the coast from their holy places, angst-ing about whether you can risk offending Moslems by having the odd sip of alcohol!’ A long, cold silence greeted this sally, but I had the bit between my teeth and plenty more to say, ‘More to the point,’ I continued, ‘didn’t our saviour himself perform a quick miracle to sort out an alcohol supply problem at a wedding? Chin, chin!’ I left them no choice but to clink their plastic water cups with my glass, ‘Lovely to meet you both and thanks for supper. I’m only rather sorry,’ I couldn’t resist adding, because I’d suddenly noticed a pale, wet stain to the left of my right nipple, ‘that you’ve managed to splash ice-cream on one of my favourite garments – “for behold how clumsy is the handmaiden of the Lord”, I joked, wagging my finger at my hostess in mock admonition.

The Rev’s pale face turned a shade alarmingly near to burgundy as he leaped to his feet and began swabbing at my breast with his napkin. ‘You’re making it worse, Keith!’ barked Mrs Rev, in the tone of voice dog-owners use to say ‘Down boy!’ Then she turned her back on us both, to set about the washing up. No sooner was she done then it was ‘Well, time to turn in – 6 o’clock start tomorrow, communion service at 7. I imagine you’ll be joining us, dear?’