Into Suez (11 page)

‘Right you are. Let’s do that. Ailsa and Irene should see more of each other. Good pals they could be. Well, I’m off home, boy,’ Joe said and laughed, ‘to shufty bint.’

‘Right behind you, mate. Whoa, no. Guard duty.’

The thought of Ailsa doing or thinking things behind his back had stuck in Joe’s mind at an angle. He was discomposed but kept forgetting, as he made his way home, what the heck he was nettled about. He thought of
Habibi
kicking up his heels. This led back to the memory
of the wife passing Joe’s wife a package at Port Said, amid all that extravagant hugging and kissing and swearing eternal faith: where had Ailsa put that? What was in it? Why would she have hidden it? Looked like a box of some kind or a book.

But when he saw her at the window, the whole question was closed: Ailsa waved and jumped up and down, pleased to see him. Joe admired Nia’s castles and bridges in the yard. Works of engineering they were, so careful and precise. Clever little hands.

‘Oh,’ sighed Ailsa. ‘I’ve missed you.’

He held her delicate waist contained between his hands. Her solid, honourable and reassuring self. ‘Tell me you love me,’ he said.

‘I do love you. All and entirely and, oh, stop it, your tea’s so nearly cooked, Joe.’

Calamine-anointed Nia sat with her golly at the laid table, humming to herself. He stole up and placed his hands over her eyes: ‘Guess who?’

‘It’s you, it’s you, naughty!’

‘Come and see something, Nia.’

‘What?’ She scrambled down from her seat and put her hand in his. He drew her to the window.

‘Nia, someone’s been building fairy castles in our front yard! Who can it be? Was it Mami? What do you think, girlie?’

‘Me and Topher did it.’

‘Never! I don’t believe you!’

‘We did.’

He uncurled her fingers and laid them over the back of one of his hard hands: ‘Artist’s hands,’ he said, admiring the shape and length of her fingers.

Ailsa called them to the table. Braised chops, very tender, with carrots and onions cooked in the gravy, cauliflower and peas. As he poured a pyramid of salt on the edge of his plate, Joe told her all about the poor old Shufty Bint corporal, skipped the Wing Co and the riotous dancing and went on, when they got to the pears and custard, to the sock saga and the sale of the Tiger. He made the tale extravagantly comic, inflating it like a balloon, playing all the parts including the Tiger’s, giving over only when Ailsa begged him to: she had a stitch from laughing.

Joe tempted Nia’s slender appetite with teaspoonfuls of Daddy Bear’s custard. He poured a hill of salt on to the table cloth for her and, with intense concentration, she created a world of tiny dunes and lanes. Foreigners the size of pinheads would wander down its sculpted lanes admiring the peaks and slopes of her white invented world. Watching their quiet daughter, while Ailsa removed the pudding plates and made tea, Joe wondered if he could ever bear to have another child and dispossess Nia of the unrivalled love that embraced her.

‘I say, Aily!’ He leaned his chair back on two legs and called into the kitchen.

‘Hallo!’

‘Whatever happened to that package the woman – the
lady
, beg pardon – on the ship gave you? Did you open it? What was in it?’

Nia got out before the trouble broke. She picked up Little Yellow Man and removed herself from the unease that might or might not give way to hurt silence, raised voices, a burst of tears.

‘Oh, you never said,’ her father had said to her mother.

‘Didn’t I?’

The buzzing in the air was not caused by flies: there were no flies in the room.

Standing on her bed, Nia looked out of the window, her vision criss-crossed by wire netting. Behind her the voices ebbed, then eddied again. No one was shouting, in fact there was laughter, but still the sound was not quite right. Now one of them was turning on the wireless, saying the dreadful word ‘News’, which preluded shushings and ‘Keep still’. Probably they had switched it on to hide their row because it was clear that they were not listening. Nia wriggled. The wireless came down on her like a net, trapping her boredom in her head. She ignored it until it was nothing but a humming, tuneless murmur.

An Arab was walking, on his own, out and out into the desert. In a straight line. No camel. Wearing a pink
headdress
.

Today she and Topher had buried a doll. Hester had yellow hair and eyes that opened and shut. Joe had paid the earth for her. A baby for you, Nia! A
merch fach
of your very own to look after! Nia had no heart to explain how much Hester disgusted her; how she wanted to spit on her. Each night when her parents left the bedroom, after the story had been told and the Lovely Words had been spoken, she’d shoved Hester under the bed. But she’d wake in the night, disquiet. Smeary shadows roved the walls. A body under the bed.

Today Topher and she had dug a pit and buried Hester with all her grave-goods: feeding bottle, change of clothes. They’d erected a complex fortress on the site.

Nia’s Arab man was still walking with measured pace,
on and on, in a straight line. She closed her eyes. Each time she peeped through her lashes he was tinier. Who was the Arab? Who? Where could he be going? As she stared, the dazzling heat-haze troubled her obscurely. Her mind swung and her tummy felt sicky. She was surrounded by something huge of which she could only say that it was not herself.

Later they would enquire about Hester’s whereabouts. They’d never guess and she wouldn’t tell. One day Nia knew she would forget. The forgetting went on always, and you had to hold on to anything you wanted to be sure of, in your hands where you could see it, like Little Yellow Man and her rag of cot-sheet: that she knew. She could already feel forgetfulness nudging in towards the doll.

Nia jumped down, opened the door a few inches and listened.

‘Thought is free!’ she heard her mother exclaim, apparently in fun but with an undercurrent of unease.

The Arab was now as big and small as one segment of Nia’s thumb. As she pondered him, flies batted against the grid of thin wire mesh and fell back. Fat they were and well-fed. Flies fed on donkey-turds and dog-turds and every kind of Egyptian filth. Then they flew to English houses to try to make you blind like Egyptian children. Mami chased them with a swatter in a frenzy of hygiene. Flies’ graveyards hung from the window: sticky ribbons blobbed with black. And yet you could see them altogether differently. Nia watched a bluebottle, perched on the sill to soak in sun. A visitor like a jewel, its surfaces emerald and sapphire. A creature of jet-black light.

Oh how tedious, he’s in one of his moods, Ailsa thought.
Unless I’m very careful, we are going to have a blow-up.

She was parched. ‘Let’s top our carburettors up!’ she said playfully, pouring glasses of water for herself and for him. ‘There you are, my lovely.’ He didn’t drink. He looked, she thought, using words not in Joe’s vocabulary,
lugubrious, lachrymose
. Ailsa turned her mind away. Once at the Wrekin after rainfall she and Archie had drunk rain from a leaf. She thought of grass blades bent back and beaded with pearls. She drank off a whole glass of water but it failed to slake her thirst. And still Joe was maundering. Telling her about how wretched poor Irene was in the desert. What had that feeble-minded female to do with Ailsa Birch?

‘But, darling,’ she broke in, ‘I don’t feel lonely. I honestly don’t. I’m very self-contained.’

He met that with silence. Did not know what to make of it. She watched him swallow the word ‘self-contained’ and have trouble digesting it. I should not think of myself as Ailsa Birch, she thought. Why did I think that?

‘Don’t you miss me then?’

‘Of course. But I know you’ll be back at a certain time and I suppose I look forward to it rather than lamenting. Frankly, that’s not my way.’

She spoke coolly and robustly, and made herself think of starch. Petticoats that stood up like a white tent that didn’t need tent-poles. That crackled when you tried to sit down. But I don’t want to turn into a starched petticoat, Ailsa thought. She made herself speak more lightly and tenderly. ‘Joe, sweetheart, you wouldn’t want me to be unhappy in my little corner of the world, would you?’

‘Of course not. But. Doesn’t the day seem long? Do you find it frightening to be here on your own?’

‘Frightening? There is Nia to look after and the cockroaches to whack with a broom. And, well, masses to think about.’

‘Like what? What are you thinking?’

‘For goodness’ sake! I mean: thought is free!’

‘What the dickens do you mean by that, woman?’

She rounded on him. ‘Nothing. Stop being childish. And don’t call me woman. I won’t be called that. Don’t you think things and then forget what it was you thought? Do you tell me absolutely everything that goes through your mind?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t,’ she flashed. ‘Everyone needs to call his soul his own.’

Joe flinched as if struck. His face darkened. He got like this and it was so silly: he had to be jealous of someone and, if she did not see anyone outside the family and the NAAFI girls for a whole day, he had to be jealous of her own relationship with her
self
, for heaven’s sake. What did he want her to be: a puppet?

‘I can only be me. Can’t I?’ she pressed.

He swallowed. Ailsa quite clearly saw the moment when whatever switch it was that turned on this mood flicked it off again. She observed it every time but could never predict the moment or locate the form of words that would do the trick.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. Oh heck, Ailsa, what a bloody ass I am.’

And the best of it was, Joe soon got over it. Sorries and kisses. A walk, arms round one another’s waist, into the yard, to see the stars hanging like lamps near to the earth. Or, contrite, he’d go out to bring in the washing, stiff with sand and sun.

It was true, she’d kept Mona’s precious book to herself, feeling she had the right to open it, in her own time, when he’d gone off to work and Nia was lying down for a nap. It was a volume of Goethe’s poetry stolen from the library of the
Empire Glory
, with an italic inscription on the title page.
Ach, du warst in abgelebten Zeiten / Meine Schwester oder meine Frau
. In some other world, you were my sister or my wife. Light-fingered Mona had pinched it from the Allies, who’d commandeered it from the German Navy, who’d thieved it from the world. Hardly a legacy to share with Joe.

In it Mona had enclosed the final version of
Habibi
’s poem:
Her hands on the keys, your hands on her hands
… The poem unlocked his heart for Ailsa: his love for Mona was infinitely tender, unassuageably needy. He identified with Mona as a mother with her child. A strange comparison, Ailsa knew, but, yes, that must be it.
Habibi
’s need to cherish was more powerful than his desire to be cherished. He’d willingly share Mona with anyone able to bring her peace.
He loves me
, Ailsa thought. But such love conferred a burden. Only if his wife was happy could he be happy and how, in such a world as the one in which Mona Serafin had grown up, could that ever be the case? Once she had the poem by heart, Ailsa had ripped the draft into confetti scraps and thrown it away.

Well, Joe’s rages were only ever hiccups. Over now. Ailsa heard Nia speed from her room, telling Joe off, saying that he must be spanked, driving him before her into the sitting room with a rolled up newspaper.

The air cooled suddenly here. When Ailsa went out into the back yard, her arms came over all gooseflesh. The quarrel had left her, as always, off kilter, with a sense of
being obscurely in the wrong. Yet how had she offended? She knew Joe couldn’t condone any relationship with the Jacobs family. The humiliation of watching him salute his superiors on the dock at Port Said stayed with her, making her own cheeks burn when she thought of it. Knowing his sensitivity, she shared the quick of his embarrassment, and in the moment of seeing how … what was it? …
small
he looked, she’d broken the tie with Mona like a zip wrenched undone.

Now that he’d raised the whole thing, Mona rushed vividly to mind, rousing a wistful sense of loss. And a stir of impatience with the narrowness, the strait limits of this so-called married quarter. Never having a proper conversation with anyone. Ailsa knew where the toffs’ bungalows were at Masurah. She’d bloody well go and see Mona, if he went on like this. Why not? Ring the doorbell. Here I am, Mona. Remember me? If Joe only knew how he provoked her to do the thing he feared. Standing in the lozenge of light outside the kitchen, Ailsa became conscious of silence around her. It rang in her ears like the tacit messages in phone lines strung from pylon to pylon. So quiet that the barking of wild dogs and the roar of planes hardly impinged. The stars hung large and close, like lanterns.

Joe came and mantled her shoulders with a cardigan, reminding her of the mosquitoes. He’d rolled down his sleeves and buttoned them, to set her a good example.

‘Listen, Joe. You can’t hear a thing, can you? It’s totally silent. Haunting really, isn’t it? So lovely. And the moon.’

They listened together to the silence of the desert. Then they sauntered to the end of their yard. He’d wondered, he said, whether it was very selfish of him to have wanted
them out here, where life was not easy. And his mam would gladly have kept them with her.

‘I’d have died, Joe,
died
, if you’d left me behind.’

His jealousy was appeased. As she spoke these words, which were nothing less than the truth, Ailsa was aware of yielding her husband total reassurance. At some level she knew quite well that Joe’s jealousy somehow
preempted
hers. Sensual love exposed the quivering heart of you. She could have been jealous of every woman on the camp, except that he, the more openly emotional character, got in first and made it unnecessary.

‘Joe,’ she said. ‘I
ought
have shown you. I’m at fault. Mona Jacobs gave me a book of German poetry. I just put it away. Would you like to see it?’