Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (26 page)

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Authors: Hilary Mantel

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“Oh, I see. Nothing wrong, Frances, is there?”
“Probably not.” She regretted beginning the conversation. “Daphne, please don’t tell everybody. Don’t go spreading rumors that I’m ill.”
Daphne sounded startled. “Of course not. I can assure you, my dear, that whatever you chose to confide in me would go no further.”
Liar, Frances thought. “What about the car then?”
“There’s a tiny problem—it’s still at the garage, and when it comes back this man Fairfax is borrowing it. You’ll have to get Andrew to take a couple of hours off during the day.”
“That doesn’t sound a very good idea. About Fairfax, I mean. He’ll get lost. He’s never been here before. Someone should drive him around.”
“I’m not best pleased myself,” Daphne said, thinking of the
batik workshop she would be forced to miss. “But Eric says he simply hasn’t the wherewithal to provide people with chauffeurs.”
“What’s Hasan for?”
“My dear, would you like to be entrusted to Hasan on your first visit to the Kingdom? That man’s only thought is to ditch you and sneak off to those smoking parlors they go to. Many’s the time I’ve been stranded—” Daphne’s voice ran on. Frances pictured her, teetering on the pavement outside the Pâtisserie Franco-Belge, a box of dissolving cream cakes balanced on her fingertips; helplessly scanning the traffic by the gold souk, while the morning sun burned, and her own ethnic trinkets seared her flesh. “Fairfax,” Daphne said, “will just have to shift for himself.”
 
 
Frances looked at her watch. Fairfax was due; dinner was cooking.
“I wonder what he will think of us?” Andrew said.
“Of you and me?”
“No, of the whole lot of us. The
khawwadjihs.
”
“I imagine,” Francis said, “that he’ll think we’re pathetic.”
As she set the table, she amplified the statement in her mind. The paychecks had not arrived yet. Full moon had come and gone. Alarm and despondency was the order of the day. “If only they’d be straight with us,” people said. They began to talk about “Saudi disinformation.” Companies were pulling out, writing off debts that they did not believe the government would repay. Now more than ever, the tone of expatriate conversation was callow, suspicious, a note of chronic complaint. Editorials appeared in the newspapers, alleging
khawwadjih
mismanagement, corruption; issuing threats.
“Having money makes people bad enough,” Frances said. “The threat of not having it seems to make them worse.”
“Don’t be such a prig,” Andrew said. “You are one of the people too.”
“I meant the Saudis. Although to be honest, the longer I am here, the more we seem to resemble them. We are both aspects of the same problem, I think.”
Everything in the flat—everything tangible—was dusted, sorted, put back to rights. So that they would have something to give Fairfax, they had borrowed some wine from Jeff Pollard. Jeff was in a bad mood over the loss of his mistress. Russel, he said, was persecuting him, and badmouthing him to the other compound dwellers, and fomenting quarrels around the swimming pool. He would have to move out, he said, and hope that Terrex Mining would give him one of their houses. “Take a case,” he said sulkily, when they called around for the wine. “I won’t be doing any entertaining.”
Fairfax was late. Frances turned the oven down, hoped for the best. She poured herself a glass of wine, and went to sit with Andrew. “Do you think,” she said, “that there is any chance of us going to live on the Terrex compound?”
“You want to follow Jeff about? It will start another rumor.”
“It’s not that. But Daphne did say that she would inquire.”
“I’ll talk to Eric. I could make out a case that you were especially miserable, after the burglary and everything.”
That burglar, she thought, may prove to be my friend. I shall pretend to a hopeless neurosis, about the sliding doors; I shall say I can’t settle, I shall say I can’t sleep at night; I will take all the burden of weakness on myself, the little woman: and in that way I will extricate us, I will get us out of here.
She got up to see to the food. It was nine o’clock. The gatebell rang. Soon she heard Andrew in the hall, saying, “You made it,” Fairfax saying, “Got hopelessly lost,” Andrew saying, “I should have come for you.”
Fairfax stood in the doorway. He was young; he was a tall man, very tall and quite insubstantial. He had a transparent pallor, because he had come from England, and because he had come from England so recently, he had a transparent smile. Fairfax had dark red hair, unfashionably long, as fine as cobwebs, very straight: and guileless eyes. He wore a lightweight gray suit, the uniform of the traveling executive, and held something behind his back. He offered his other hand to Andrew. “I know we’ve met five times today,” he said. “But it’s the local custom, isn’t it?”
Andrew shook his hand. “How do you do?”
“Worse,” Fairfax said. “Much worse than when we parted at two o’clock. Since then I’ve suffered death by a thousand cuts. I shall become a cautionary tale in our company newsletter. He went out there to sell air-conditioning, and returned with scars on his soul.”
“Yes, I know,” Andrew said. “You must have been taken to meet the Minister. Come in, you’ll need a drink. This is Frances.”
Fairfax looked down at her. From behind his back he took a bouquet of white roses, and proffered it, diffidently.
Frances wiped her hands on her apron. “Roses in Jeddah,” she said. “Oh, Fairfax, these must have cost you the earth.”
Fairfax’s eyes opened wide, as if he were reliving the purchase. “I said to the man in the shop, surely you’re joking? He wasn’t. Never mind. Don’t you ever bring her flowers?”
“Oh, Andrew can’t afford to. He’s saving up for a posh flat in London.”
“That’s marvelous,” Fairfax said. “Get somewhere nice, and then I’ll come and stay with you when I’m down that way, I can’t stand hotels.” He seemed sure of his welcome; but Frances puzzled him. He gazed down at her. “I feel as if I know you from somewhere.”
Frances touched his elbow, drawing him into the room. “Sit down, Fairfax.”
Andrew said, “He’s called Adam. You mustn’t talk to him as if he were the butler.”
She was not surprised by his name. It seemed to suit him. Fairfax had an air of being impressed by the separate qualities of each moment, the air of one to whom the world was new, and unpredictable. He might be thirty perhaps, but it seemed that she had decided to think of the men around her as children; even though Eric said that they were accountable for her, and responsible for her thoughts.
“I shall still call you Fairfax,” she said. “You see, although we don’t know each other, I’ve been expecting you. Hasn’t Andrew explained?”
“We’ve been too busy talking shop,” Andrew said.
“Well, explain now. Excuse me, I must put the flowers in water.”
She went into the kitchen. She stood by the fridge and smiled, doing nothing, letting a moment pass. When she came back Fairfax had folded his spectacular height into a chair. He looked avian, but not predatory, both vulnerable and sharp: the best kind of salesman.
“As we never have flowers,” she said, “I haven’t a vase. You must drink up the contents of this carafe between you, and then I can put the flowers in it. The rest of the wine can come straight from the bottles. You must watch the sediment, Fairfax. This wine was made by Jeff Pollard.”
“Oh, Jeff,” Fairfax said. “What a man! Everybody’s talking about some poor girl he had an affair with, aren’t they? It’s beyond imagination. At least, it’s beyond mine. Do you know that poem? ‘Why have such scores of lovely gifted girls / Married impossible men?’ It’s just the same with affairs, isn’t it?”
“You shouldn’t waste your sympathy on Marion Smallbone,” Andrew said. “She wasn’t lovely. Or gifted.”
“Oh, but comparatively,” Fairfax insisted; he sat forward in his chair, and locked his long fingers together. “She must have been too good for Pollard. I’ve seen better things than Jeff in the Reptile House.”
“How does the rest of the poem go?” Frances said.
“Oh, it talks about idle men, illiterate men, dirty and sly, about men you have to make excuses for to casual passersby. Intolerable men, full of self-pity. But then the man who wrote it, he wonders if they can really be so bad after all, whether he overvalues women.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” Fairfax thought about it, seeming surprised. “Perhaps I do.”
“You would never last the pace in Jeddah. This is no place for men who like women.”
“We’re not all like the Saudis,” Andrew said.
“No, but you seem to collaborate with them.” She had not known she thought it, until she heard it pop out of her mouth. “I had a letter from Marion, did you read it, Andrew? She’s taken the
children back to her mother, who is elderly and has a small flat in Nottingham. Russel’s divorcing her, and she’s going to live on social security. The origin of the romance,” she explained to Fairfax, “was that he used to go round and unblock her lavatory. Oh well, I mustn’t get bitter about it. There’s probably no hope for people like that, separately or together. Do you know many poems, Fairfax?”
“I know a lot for an air-conditioning expert.”
“Why did you get lost? I sent you a map. Didn’t Andrew give it to you?”
“Yes, but I’m afraid I just can’t make any sense of this place. The traffic signs kept sending me places that I didn’t want to go.”
“You ignore them,” Andrew said.
“Do you? Is that right?”
“I used to be good at maps,” Frances said. “They were my living. I must be losing my touch.”
She went out, to bring the food to the table. The meat had dried out, and the vegetables were soggy, but Fairfax ate quite happily, his jacket slung over the back of his chair; he complimented her on her cooking. Andrew thought he was a groveler; you could see that by his expression. You could see that he wondered why a man who was in air-conditioning should have pretensions to charm. But Frances paid attention to her guest. In his presence she breathed more easily. The tension eased from her shoulders; Jeff’s wine was sweet, syrupy, harmless, quite unlike his usual acid brew. It was soothing, like warm black currant juice, and yet it had a certain potency; she felt languid, as if she would sleep well, and wake up somewhere better. She put her elbow on the table, and rested her cheek on her open hand. “I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you.”
Fairfax looked modest about it, putting back a strand of his featherlike hair. “People always say I’m a breath of fresh air. But that is our trade joke. We only have one. We are a somber lot, in air-conditioning.”
Then Fairfax talked about his work; about the central air-conditioning plant for Andrew’s building. A sort of ersatz reverence took
him over, a weightless gravity; he looked like a schoolboy who had been given the task of imitating, in a pantomime, a governor of the Bank of England. Andrew was impressed, in spite of himself. He sat over the cheese and coffee, and pictured his building finished, its fountains of fire, its indoor forests deep and lush, its model of the solar system, its iceberg walls; he reached forward, his eyes blank and inward-looking, and refilled Fairfax’s glass; he breathed the silent, circulating air that Fairfax would create—dust-free, perfumed, Alpine. Fairfax broke off. “Are we boring you?” he said to Frances. “We could talk about this in the morning.”
“That’s all right.”
“I bet I know what they were saying, those blokes on the plane. Around our office I’m regarded as the resident imbecile.”
“I’m regarded as the errand boy,” Andrew said. He opened another bottle of wine. “Ribena, Fairfax?” He said, “This isn’t like Jeff’s wine. He must have stolen it from somebody.”
“Anyway, I’m only here at all because the chap who should have come is more incompetent still. He filled in the form for his visa, and where it said RELIGION he put LATTER-DAY SAINT. The Saudis thought it was some kind of piss-take, I suppose. Now he’ll never get in. You’re supposed to put CHRISTIAN, is that right?”
“Yes. They’re not interested in any finer distinctions,” Andrew said. “They ban atheists as well.”
“They told me all sorts of stories about this place before I came. ‘You’ll like it, Fairfax,’ they said. ‘It’s just like the
Arabian Nights.’”
“And now you’re here?”
His smile died. He put down his glass, briefly. “You must be mad to live here, Andrew. I haven’t felt safe for a single minute.”
“The Saudis seem very tense just now. They’re trying to keep out news from abroad. I bought a copy of
The Times
this morning, and when I held it up it had holes in it.”
“It was like a paper doily,” Frances said. “What’s bothering you, Fairfax? What’s bothering you specifically?”
Fairfax ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know … I keep accusing myself of racialism or something. I don’t know what’s
worrying me, I suppose it isn’t anything rational. The men on the streets, in those white
thobes
and headdresses … I can’t keep my eyes off them. They’re like some obscene tribe of nuns. Like thuggish nuns.”

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