Into Suez (18 page)

She did not say why what, and Ailsa did not ask.

‘I swam out to one of the rafts,’ Ailsa mentioned to Joe, within earshot of Irene.

‘Oh aye?’

He had a cigarette stuck behind each ear.

‘Fun was it, my beauty?’

‘Oh aye,’ she said, parodying him. She felt kindled and aroused.

‘Cheeky.’

‘Parrot.
Oh aye
means you aren’t listening to me, are you, Joe Roberts? You want to be careful what you say. Never know what you’re agreeing with.’ She pulled out one of the fags from behind his ear, said ‘Finders keepers’ and hung it from her lips, pouting forwards for a light. He supplied the flame, chuckling.

So there, you see, Irene, spoilsport, she thought childishly, he doesn’t mind, not a bit. Ailsa stroked Joe’s furry back as he sat smoking contentedly, and thought how lovely his body was, his flanks and wrists, she would have liked to have caressed the place there, between his legs, which was hers and hers alone, and which no one else might see, at least no woman, and make it stand up tight and when it did so, the blue in his eyes would ache, ache, so that she would have the impulse to comfort him for this joy that was power and also loss of power, and the rage of hunger that was its own satisfaction.

‘Can you read my thoughts?’ she asked him. 

They dragged the sacking off the Matchless, their pride and joy. The bike represented a friendship dearer to Joe’s heart than any since childhood, formed in the Desert War where they’d literally shared their last drop of water. Something so innocent and likeable about Chalkie, with just a dash of mischief that Joe delighted to bring out of him. They’d give the Tiger an overhaul, polish it up and ride off into the desert with the rest of the boys who’d managed a day’s leave. They’d imagine themselves back at Cyrenaica or on the never-to-be-forgotten coastal run from Tobruk to Alamein and Alexandria, the desert sand
bone-white
, the glimpsed Mediterranean bluer than any ocean he’d seen or imagined. Tomorrow would be Chalkie’s thirty-third birthday. After their jaunt they’d fetch up at the Victoria Bar in Ish to celebrate with a couple of drinks.

Marriage is one thing, Joe thought, and the men’s world another. Immediately he was beset by a bewildered sense of his own treachery. Ailsa was the air he breathed.
Closeness grew with every day; sometimes he could read her thoughts without a word being said. And, fair play, she begrudged Joe nothing, agreeing with hardly any hesitation to the release of the better part of their savings as a payment for the Matchless. He’d seen Irene’s embarrassment and silent fury, when Ailsa engineered the transaction. The poor creature had flushed to the roots of her hair. She’d rather have Roy safe and sound than all the tea in China, she let them know.
Oh, but Joe is such a safe rider
, Ailsa had purred.
He will take the best care of Roy, he truly will. Won’t you, darling?
Ailsa was too clever for Irene. Too clever for him, come to that; she could wrap him round her little finger.

His wife was all in all. What in this world could compare with the joy of being taken in Ailsa’s arms, taking Ailsa in his?

Even so, Joe could hardly imagine a good life without the comradeship of men and their shared sense of purpose, knowing – even when they larked and joshed one another, cursing the bastard officers – the importance of their presence in the godforsaken, flyblown desert, keeping the oil flowing, the Soviets at bay.

Men needed adventure as women didn’t, a need Ailsa understood and respected. A bit of fun couldn’t come amiss, in the absence of the womenfolk in Ish for a lazy day’s shopping at the NAAFI and lunch at the services club. And the kiddies, for Nia and Christopher had gone on a mystery expedition. He’d been half proud, half sad, to see the little ones, hand-in-hand, clamber aboard the bus with scarcely a backward glance.

The Tiger was freed from its tin den. The metal scalded to their touch and the rubber stank, soft with heat. As if
it had been cooking in that furnace, the Tiger’s feral smells were released, pungent and exciting, a delicious reek of grease and petrol.

‘Tyger tyger,’ Joe recited. ‘How does that go on?’

‘Not the foggiest. What is it when it’s at home?’

‘A poem, boy. Burning bright, in the forest of the night.’

‘Burning’s the word, mate,’ Chalkie said. ‘Fry an egg on the bugger.’

They lubricated, then wiped the oily parts with rags. Finally they polished up the Tiger with soft dusters filched from Ailsa’s drawer.

‘What immortal da-de-da,’ Joe chanted, crouched at the axle. ‘Learned it at school. Never forget that stuff, do you? Fearful symmetry.’

Chalkie had found it easy to forget what he never knew. All above his head, apparently. He left all that sort of thing to the ladies. Ten, fifteen years younger today than their alleged age, Joe and Chalkie polished their gleaming darling to new heights of perfection. Nothing fascinated Joe more than machines, and it hardly mattered whether it was a pre-war can of junk like the Matchless or a sophisticated modern plane, the delight was the same. Chalkie was clearly enjoying his escape from captivity. Not that Irene’s husband, fiercely loyal, would ever admit that she sometimes gave him the pip.

They’d pick up Dusty from the mess, and whoever else fancied a run out in the desert. Then roar back to Ish to quench their thirst.

Sauce for the goose, my boy
, Ailsa thought.

Escape had been child’s play. When Babs Brean had appeared at the club and wrapped herself loudly around Irene and Hedwig, Ailsa abandoned her knife and fork and half-drunk shandy and made for the lavatory.
I’m off
, she’d mouthed to Hedwig and liberated herself smartly from the building, as she’d got used to doing.

Sauntering along the
Belle Époque
boulevards, Ailsa relished the sweet taste of freedom, knowing exactly where she was going, along eucalyptus-lined avenues, where palatial colonial houses with flaking stucco glowed white. Easy to imagine herself back a century to the canal’s ceremonious opening: the flotilla at anchor, the Empress Eugénie and the Khedive Ismail, pennants waving, guns saluting, the brand-new city festively decked out with freshly cut greenery. Escaping the British enclave, Ailsa always had the impression of entering another time-zone, where, beyond clocks and barbed wire, the ancient people and their gods had only just that minute vanished round a corner.

Insh’alla
, she thought, we’ll all meet and talk across the great gulf fixed between us, Egypt and England. Why not?

Without hesitation, Ailsa took the path indicated on the British sign: Masurah Village. This morning Joe had set the seal upon her quest by informing her that he and Chalkie were going to tinker with the Tiger and head off for a little jaunt. OK by you, cariad?

Quite OK, she’d said, and meant it. Go ahead. Fine by me. But a thirst and an itch of resentment had come over her when she imagined the two men on the bike. Why not Ailsa with a pal of her own riding pillion? Why the hell not? It had never been suggested that she take a turn. Joe
had quietly forgotten that she’d ridden a bike twice as powerful as their puny Matchless during the war. Never had a prang. A trained mechanic.

She found herself in a square of white bungalows encircled with verandas whose slender columns formed a rhythm of Roman arches. Jacaranda, bougainvillaea, and flowers whose names Ailsa didn’t know – purple, orange, a pulse of white – starred the bushes of lush gardens. The children were presumably all at school or indoors for the mid-day siesta and the only person visible was an
indigo-robed
Arab saffragi watering flowers, releasing a scent of almost excessive sweetness.
Salaam aleicum!
The gardener bowed, smiled and returned her greeting across lawns and bushes saturated with rich greenness unknown in dusty El-Marah.

It was like stepping into a dream. Mona sat hunched over a trestle table in the shade of her balcony, a fan blowing back the hair from her forehead. A burble of wireless noise spilled through the open glass door. Her head was down; she was writing. Latching the gate behind her, Ailsa advanced until she stood under the balustrade, close enough to hear the page rustle as it turned.
I can still go back
. The saffragi leaning on his rake next door observed her silently.

Breeze from the whirring fan, rocking on a wobbly base, caught Ailsa’s hot forehead. But the sound from within was not the wireless: no, it was the murmur of people talking with lowered voices. Visitors. Idiotic not to have foreseen that Mona might not be alone. As Ailsa hesitated, Mona sensed her presence.

‘Oh my God, it’s you!
Habibi
– look who it is – come out!’

The trestle table and papers went flying, the chair tumbled back.

‘Where’ve you
been
? I swear I’d given up.’ Mona’s arms were round Ailsa, rocking her back and forth. The urgent expressiveness of her oval face seemed to spring at Ailsa, pouncing forward out of memory into the sensuous world. ‘How are you? How is Nia?’ and without waiting for an answer, Mona hollered through the door to her husband, ‘
Habibi
! Come out! She’s here.’

‘Now she’ll be happy.’
Habibi
’s hug lifted Ailsa off her feet. She was dragged indoors.

The Jacobs bungalow had been converted to a giant waiting room. Waiting for what? Pallid faces massed in dim indoor light, fixing suspicious eyes on the newcomer. Every space seemed accounted for, chairs and chair-arms, a long sofa with a crammed row of elderly women and one elderly man. Sombre cross-legged children had to be stepped over and a toddler slept in her mother’s arms, flushed head thrown back, hair raying out.

Palestinian refugees. Of course. Mona was trying to find them lodgings and jobs.
Al-Naqba
: the Catastrophe. It was Mona’s Thursday At Home, she said. Please wait. Ben, she’s come, she’s here at last, I knew she’d come, give her a drink, keep her here, you swear not to go, don’t you, I won’t be long, make her wait.

They sped over the burning plain, out into the Sinai, eleven boys on six bikes. All of them high as kites as they drove abreast over primrose-yellow sand, as if flying in formation. An illusion of take-off as speed generated a cool wind.

Joe revved; shot forward, hands hot on rubber, knees clenched to the body of the Tiger which, like a woman, responded with all she could give, so that they hurtled madly in the general direction of Israel. They passed relics of military materiel presumably left behind as the remnant of the Egyptian troops and tanks had limped home beaten and humiliated from last year’s assault on Israel. Litter everywhere: personal items like fag packets, a water bottle, as well as webbing and cartridges. The bikes headed for the only landmark, a clapped-out joke of a tank, a mammoth that looked as if it dated back to the Great War. The beast had evidently given up the ghost on the retreat, almost within sight of home – the only puzzle being how it had ever succeeded in shuffling along in the first place. Joe began to circle the crock, which lay atilt in the shallow hollow of a dune and resembled nothing so much as a ditched tin can whose contents had long ago been extracted. Its hatch was open, just as it had been when vacated by the fleeing soldiers. It would still be there in a hundred years.

Joe picked up speed, spraying sand; Chalkie’s hands rested lightly on his waist, their two bodies leaning in, balanced as one. The six bikes now described a circle, equidistant as spokes on the hub of a giant wheel.

The wheel slowed and came to rest. Bottles of Stella appeared from panniers. Laughing and joshing, they swallowed the tepid Egyptian beer, distilled from onions, yellow as urine and potent as death. The superannuated tank had its gun trained in the general direction of Ish, as if to signal yet another own goal for the local team. Sun inflamed the men’s faces to a fiery red. In roaring high
spirits, Joe swigged back the last of his bottle and tossed it away.

Back for a quick one. Your birthday tomorrow, Chalkie. She’ll never know. Joe kept peppermints in his pocket for every eventuality.

A mood of estranged sorrow filled the room, palpable, as if the air were viscous. Not sorrow: despair. Horror. Something that could not be spoken. Each one in his private prison.
Habibi
chivvied a silent youth out of an armchair. Ailsa must sit. What could he get for her? Oh, nothing. Please don’t let her interrupt. She shouldn’t be here; why didn’t she come back another day? Mona’s husband perched on the arm of the chair and looked at Ailsa with affection so frank that, had Joe come in at that moment, he’d have known for sure that the man was in love with his wife, and wanted to knock him down.

‘My life wouldn’t be worth living if I let you go. Really, you’ll buck her up no end. She’s been so stretched. A
one-person
bureau. It takes it out of her and she’s missed you horribly. She cries a lot.’

Ailsa gathered that Mona held these consultations on a Thursday, spending the rest of the week wheedling and bullying people sympathetic to the victims of the Palestinian exodus, for rooms and jobs.

‘She’s a force of nature,’ Ben said with pride. ‘Isn’t she?’ Mona’s voice could be heard from the veranda, where she conducted the interviews.

‘You understand,’ Ailsa heard Mona caution an elderly couple. ‘I can promise nothing.’

‘Oh no, we recognise that. But dentists are always in
demand. You can surely see that. People’s teeth don’t stop decaying, do they? I know you can do something for us, dear. I have every faith in you,’ the wife insisted.

‘Huda, it won’t be the kind of work Uncle is used to. Portering. Hospital orderly. At best, office work. That kind of thing. If I can get it. You have to accept that.’

‘I will do anything,’ said her husband. ‘Anything at all.’ His hand patted his wife’s knee, as if to say,
do not grumble. Don’t upset Mona. She’s our lifeline. We only have this one chance
.

‘But what about the British? Surely they require skilled dentists? The young soldiers I see in town, their teeth are a disgrace. Some of them have lost all their front teeth. Eating sweets and smoking, and not brushing.’

‘Auntie, their dentists are in uniform. They don’t use civilians.’

‘Or
foreigners
, is that it? Tell your niece where you were trained, remind her. Edinburgh and Washington DC: does that count for nothing, Mona? Do they imagine we will saboutage their teeth? My husband is a consultant back home.’

‘Please, Huda. I have been retired for seven years. Our niece is doing all she can. There are so many of us. You can see that,
habiba
.’ Small-boned, birdlike, he sat bolt upright in the folding chair; his shabby suit hung loose on his shoulders.

‘Very well. Then I shall go out cleaning,’ the wife said. ‘Don’t look at me like that.
I
am not ashamed of honest work, whoever else is. I still have use of my hands and knees.’

Mona was on the phone. Ailsa heard her voice
syrup-sweet
, requesting a clerical position in the Stores.
Manipulating someone to do something against his will. In the nicest possible way not brooking refusal. Pulling rank. Part-time? Then part-time it must be. Thanks. You will not be sorry.

Ailsa watched as Ben escorted the couple into the blaze outside. Oh no, they didn’t want a lift; they would walk, she heard the lady say, gallantly flourishing her stick like a baton: they liked to walk, walking was so healthy – and, lucky as they were to have the room all to themselves in town, there was no point in shutting themselves in before they had to. The Jacobs lounge began slowly to empty.