Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (2 page)

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Authors: Hilary Mantel

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Turadup had got a toehold in Zambia before the bottom dropped out of copper, putting up expatriate housing in Kabwe, the mining town that had once been known as Broken Hill; then when Zambia went down the drain they moved south a bit, putting in an unsuccessful tender for work on the new international airport at Gaborone; then picking up work around that city, piping water and building a clinic for a shanty town that had become permanent
faute de mieux.
They operated over the South African border too, putting up a much-needed casino in a bantustan. But since the early 1970s the Middle East had been what they called their major theater of operations. It happened that at the time when Andrew Shore was ready to move on, Turadup’s Saudi Arabian manager, a man called Eric Parsons, was in Johannesburg trawling for expertise. And on that day—always described by Andrew as “the day I ran slap-bang into Pollard”—the relevant phone number was handed over, and their future was set in train. “Give old Eric a call,” Jeff said. “You can’t lose by it.”
Andrew first poured himself a brandy; then he sat for some time and regarded the phone in their bungalow, like a man in a trance, or a man praying. Then he picked up the receiver; the lines were not down that day, and it was a mere ten minutes before he got an answer from the operator in Gaborone. He told her what he wanted: Johannesburg. There seemed to be a party going on in the background. He could hear women laughing, and what was perhaps crockery being smashed. The operator came back once or twice, bellowing in his ear, but she didn’t forget him entirely; in time she came up with what might be her best offer, a line to Mafeking. He took it. A guttural voice answered him in Afrikaans. Seconds later he was speaking to Eric Parsons, at his hotel. It was the Carlton, he noted; Turadup did not penny-pinch.
He did not suggest making the drive to Johannesburg, but waited until Parsons said, “I’ll come to you then, shall I?” He knew how he would employ the time, as he drove to Gaborone to meet Parsons: he pictured himself at the wheel of his truck, the empty road and the low brown hills unwinding before him, while his practiced eye was half alert for cattle and children, and his inner will concentrated, mile after mile, upon making Parsons offer him more money than he had ever dreamed of earning in his life. This, in due course, Parsons did.
The details were fixed up, at the President Hotel this time (there being, in Gaborone, a choice of two) over a tough T-bone steak and a glass of Lion lager. Andrew Shore shook hands with Eric Parsons, the Saudi man; Jeff Pollard, talking, conducted him down from the terrace and out into the street. Across the road, the nation’s only cinema was showing a double bill: a kung fu drama, and
Mary Poppins
. Andrew stood in the dusty thoroughfare known as the Mall, gazing into the window of the President Hotel’s gift shop: crocodile handbags, skin rugs, complete bushmen kits with arrows and ostrich shells, direct from the small factory in Palapye which had recently started turning them out. “I can hardly believe I’m finished in Africa,” he said.
When he arrived home late that afternoon, Frances was on the
porch packing a tea chest, wrapping up their dinner service in pieces of the
Mafeking Mail
. “Well, did you do it?” she said. She straightened up and kissed his cheek.
“Yes, I did it, it’s all fixed. But we can’t go together—I have to be in the Kingdom before they’ll grant you a visa. When we finish up here I’m to fly to Nairobi, and pick up a businessman’s entry permit—then once I’m in, Turadup will fix it for me to stay. They’re in a hurry.”
“Why? Has someone quit without notice?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“I would have asked.”
“I didn’t think of it.”
“So you won’t even be coming to England first?”
“And stay with your mother?”
“It looks as if I’ll have to.”
“Well listen, Fran, we won’t be apart for long. And by the time you get out to Jeddah, we’ll be fixed up with a house, and everything will be ready for you.”
“I’d rather go with you. But I suppose they have their rules. Oh, look, am I to pack these?” She held out a candlestick, one of a pair from a local pottery, rough, heavy, unglazed.
“Sure,” he said. “Souvenir. Take those funny baskets as well, the ones that fall over.”
She began to wrap the candlestick, rolling it in her hands. “Are you sure that this is the right thing to do?” she said. “Is this what you want?”
“They’re doubling my salary,” he said flatly.
“What?”
“You heard.”
She turned away and bent over the tea chest again, cleanly stabbed by avarice, like a peach with a silver knife.
“We could be in and out within three years,” he said. “Your salary is paid in riyals, tax-free. All you need out of it is your day-to-day living expenses and you can bank the rest where you like, in any currency you like. Turadup are offering free housing, a car
allowance, paid utilities, yearly leave ticket, school fees—though of course—”
“That would be plain greedy,” she said, “having children so that you could get their school fees paid.”
“Pollard did say—” He looked at her in slight anxiety. “He said that his only reservation was how you’d settle in. As you’ve been a working woman.”
“I won’t be able to work?”
“Unlikely, he thinks.”
“Well, if you’re going to earn all that money, I’m sure I can occupy myself. After all, it’s not forever, is it?”
“No, it’s not for ever. We should think of it as a chance for us, to build up some security—”
“Will you pass me those salad bowls?”
Andrew was silent. He passed them, one by one. Why, really, should she share his vision of their future? She had come to Africa at her own behest, a single woman, one of the few recruited for her line of work. She had lived alone before they met; for three nights in succession, he had sat by himself, seemingly disconsolate, on a corner stool in the bar of an expatriate club, not even looking her way, but concentrating hard; until she had asked him to go home with her. She had fed her dog, and then cooked eggs for them, and asked him what he wanted out of life. Later, in the sagging double bed with which her government bungalow was furnished, he had lain awake while she slept, wishing furiously for her to act and understand; and although it had taken a little time to work, within a matter of weeks she had turned to him and said, “We could get married if that’s what you want.”
So perhaps, too, he should have wished her into suggesting Saudi Arabia; then she would have known it was her own decision. But from what he had heard it was a part of the world in which women’s decisions did not operate. He made a leap of faith: it will be all right, I know it will. “Frances,” he said, “we won’t go unless you want to.”
She slotted a wrapped teacup into place. “I want to.”
It had been raining, earlier that day, and there was a heavy, animal scent of drenched earth and crushed flowers. In the kitchen their housemaid, Elizabeth, was washing glasses—pointless really as they would soon be crated up—and they could hear the separate clink that each one made as she put it down on the drain board. The dogs and cats were coming in to be fed, wandering to the back door to wait around, like the Victorian poor. “I really think we ought,” Andrew said.
“In point of fact, I don’t think we’ve anywhere else to go.” She picked up a broad felt marker and daubed their name on the side of the tea chest. SHORE. FRAGILE. GABORONE—LONDON.
“No,” Andrew said. “No point.”
She crossed out LONDON, wrote JEDDAH. Another pang stabbed her, as sharp as the first. She imagined herself already in Saudi, a discreet teetotal housewife, homesick for this place that was not home in another place that was not home. It was almost dark now; the air was cooling, the sun dipping behind the hill. “What was Jeff Pollard doing, recruiting you? I thought he was trying to persuade everybody what a grand life it was as a freelance consultant?”
“Well, it can’t be such a grand life, because he’s just signed up with Turadup himself. He’s going to manage their Jeddah business; he’s had experience out there, of course.”
“So you mean you’ll be working with him?”
“There is that tiny drawback.”
“I hope we don’t end up living near him as well.”
“They do pay for your housing, so it’s probably a case of taking what you’re given.”
“That’s fine,” she said, “but just try to ensure that what we’re given doesn’t include Pollard. Do you think they’ll all be like him?”
“He’s a type. You get them everywhere. But Parsons isn’t like that.”
“I suppose he’s another type.”
“Yes, you’d know the one. Genial old duffer. Safari suit, doing the African bit. Two sons at medical school, showed me their photographs. His wife’s called Daphne.”
“And did he show you a photograph of her?”
“He didn’t, come to think of it.”
“Perhaps he thought it would overexcite you.”
“When he asks you what you want to drink, he says, ‘Name your poison.’”
“I see. Weybridge abroad.”
“Melbourne, I think. He keeps a place in the Cotswolds though. He’s been with Turadup for twenty years. He’s a shareholder. Pollard says he’s a millionaire. Anyway, he seems very enthusiastic about this building. About the whole scene in Jeddah. He says it’s a very stimulating place to work if you’re in the construction business.” He paused. “I’ll tell you what he said exactly.”
“Go on.”
Andrew bit his lip. “He said, ‘I have witnessed the biggest transportation of ready-mixed concrete in the history of the human race.
“I’d like to witness a large gin. Let’s celebrate.”
 
 
“We’re late,” said the man across the aisle. She jerked out of her doze; she’d not realized, at first, that he was speaking to her.
“Are we?” She consulted her watch.
“It’s always late,” the man said tetchily. “Of course, if you fly Saudia, they’re always late as well.”
“Do you go often to Jeddah?”
“Too often. The Saudia flight’s supposed to take off at twelve-thirty, but it never does. Not in my experience. I suppose the staff are having prayers. Bowing to Mecca, and so forth.”
“How long do prayers last?”
“As long as it takes to inconvenience you totally,” the man said. “I can tell you’ve never been in the Kingdom. Noon is movable, you see. Noon can very well be at twelve-thirty. Nothing’s what it says it is.”
Oh dear, a philosopher, she thought. She might as well put on her Walkman. She leaned down to inch out her bag from under the seat in front, and as she groped for it she felt his eyes on the back of her neck. “Nurse, are you?” he inquired.
“No.”
“What are you doing out there then?”
“I’m going to join my husband.” She filled in the details again, aware that she was more polite in the air than she was on the ground: the six years in Africa, and now Turadup, and the new Ministry building; aware too that as soon as she had said “husband,” the slight interest he had taken in her had faded completely.
“Pity,” he said. “We,” he indicated his cohorts, “are stopping at the Marriot. I thought if you’d been a nurse we could have had dinner. Of course, I’m not sure if they let them out nowadays. I think they’ve got rules now that they all have to be locked in their own quarters by nine at night. It’s after that Helen Smith business.”
“Oh, that.”
“It was a damn funny business, if you ask me. That Dr. Arnott, the chap that lived in the flat she fell out of … and that wife of his, Penny wasn’t it … and the British Embassy? You can’t tell me it wasn’t a cover-up.”
“I wouldn’t try, I’m sure.”
“It stinks.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“You find a young girl dead outside a high-rise block, after a wild party—you ask yourself, did she fall or was she pushed? Take it from me, it’s a funny place, Jeddah. Nobody knows the half of what goes on. You work?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m a cartographer.”
“Oh well, you’re redundant. They don’t have maps.”
“They must have.”
“Too bloody secretive to have maps. Besides, the streets are never in the same place for more than a few weeks together.”
“They move the streets?”
“Certainly do. They’re always building, you see, money no object, but they don’t think ahead. They build a hospital and then decide to put a road through it. Fancy a new palace? Out with the bulldozer. A map would be out of date as soon as it was made. It would be wastepaper the day it was printed.”
“But in a way it must be quite … exhilarating?”
He gave her a withering look. “If you like that sort of thing.” He turned away, back to his companion. “Have you got those end-of-year projections?” he asked. “I really do wonder how Fairfax is doing in Kowloon, don’t you? I don’t believe they should ever have sent him. Trouble with Fairfax, he’s got no credibility. They treat him like some bit of a kid.”

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