Into Suez (2 page)

‘That would be Mam’s journals. Always busy with her writing, bless her.’

That was all he said, level and apparently incurious.
Settling down in his usual armchair, he closed his eyes, stretching out socked feet as he had every evening for as long as she could remember. Archie at eighty was lean and spry, fit as a man two-thirds of his age. Only he had less stamina for the hours of arduous labour and lapsed into stillness at the end of the day. Of course Don took the bulk of the heavy work and all the farm business, which Archie had always found a chore. Nia looked over at him. Fairly obviously he did not want to examine the contents of the box. He preserves his inner balance, she thought; he is a spirit level.

Without opening his eyes, Archie made a loose fist of his hand and gently tapped his chest, in the region of his heart, as if knocking at a door.

The quiet sky buoyed Nia: she rode a thermal that came bouncing off the edge of the Mynd, circling so that she could look down on its spine at the sheer valleys deep in shadow dropping from Pole Bank. The homely irregularity of Archie’s farm was spot-lit, its quilt of fields green and tawny yellow; the stand of oaks like broccoli. The red spot that winked would be Don in the tractor. Turning west, the glider sighed its way over Caer Caradoc; then towards Wenlock Edge.

That passion should be so peaceful, she could never have imagined before taking to the skies twenty years earlier. Ripped veils of cloud travelled beneath her, hiding and revealing the vast presences of the hills.

At peace, Nia thought: Ailsa too is at peace. They’d scattered her ashes on the Mynd all those years ago. Now looking down on the volcanic rock of Caer Caradoc, the
sandstone Mynd, the rich soil of the flood plain, the coral reef of Wenlock Edge, Nia thought: those atoms of Ailsa might have drifted anywhere. Or everywhere. The whole of this is my mother.

Ailsa’s moment; the six hundred million years of the massif. The mind fainted at the time scale of that. When the tectonic plates buckled and the volcanoes were born, Shropshire had been south of the equator. So Ailsa belonged to the body of the round earth. Nowhere was she a foreigner.

Nia made a sweet landing. Les came down ten minutes later. More and more, sister and brother lived for this, the necessity to earn their crust being intervals in their dream. In midwinter, when the mountain was white and icebound and nearly impassable, they’d struggle up in the Land Rover if they heard the club was open. Her brother met her in the clubhouse, where they clinked their customary glasses of brown ale.

‘I thought of Mam up there,’ she said.

‘Oh, right? What in particular?’

‘Not sure. A sense of her. Do you ever feel you’re walking in her footsteps?’

Les shook his head and smiled. He was a literal, practical guy who managed a small chain of sports shops and called a spade a spade.

‘Do you remember the raindrop fossil she brought down from the Mynd?’ Nia asked him.

‘I do. Where is it now?’

‘She gave it to the museum at Carding Mill, didn’t she?’

‘That’s right. We ought to go and see it again.’

One person couldn’t claim ownership of such a treasure: so Ailsa had declared, though anyone could see
the avarice in her eyes. It was a fragment of telltale rock about the size of a brick, from a sandstone layer that had weathered out on the Mynd. The rock was imprinted with the marks of a passing shower that had fallen on to dried mud. The mud dried; a new layer of mud silted down, dried fast and locked the raindrops’ traces in. And one day six hundred million years later, Mrs Ailsa Copsey of Lyth Clee Farm, climbing an exposed edge, had become aware of that passing shower.

‘Yes,’ said Les. ‘We’ll definitely visit. Not today. We’re out to supper.’

‘Have you phoned Nicki?’

‘Yes, don’t worry.’

Nicole did not much like her husband’s fad for gliding and he was required to phone her whenever he was safely on
terra firma
again. Nia had shown him the photos and he’d begun to read Ailsa’s journals. But he’d broken off abruptly, blushing to the roots of his hair: face, throat, everything, brick red. Would not say why. It was not his history. And this woman was not, in any way he comprehended, his mam. Perhaps that was it. Nia perfectly understood why he should be shocked, though she didn’t share the reaction. Not at all. The Ailsa revealed in the journals was someone as nakedly close to Nia as a second skin.

Mother and daughter were alike, that was the thing, in ways Nia had rarely suspected. She’d had a couple of the tiny black and white pictures enlarged, so sharply had they affected her. They’d been taken on the voyage out to Egypt, obviously, since mother and child had been flown back in 1952. Enlarged, the prints looked strikingly modern. They might have been taken last week, except for the blanching
round the margins that turned them into arresting ghost photos. One was a group portrait of Ailsa, the young Irene and an unknown fair-haired woman. Topher and Tim, flaxen cherubs in collar and tie, were attached to their mother’s skirts, thumbs in mouths. Ailsa, the tallest member of the group, held Nia’s hand in both of hers and bent her head to speak to her. It was clear that the two of them were communing with their eyes in a bliss of secret and somehow subversive conversation. Telepathy, Nia thought: she’d once lived intuitively, able to enfold or suffuse herself in Ailsa’s inner space. They’d understood one another, without having to speak. Braiding their thoughts into the one plait. In the photo Nia was gazing up at her mother with an expression of melting tenderness.

The second picture showed Ailsa and another woman, of equal height but strikingly dark, wearing loose, silky trousers and a white, sleeveless blouse. She recognised her, of course:
that
woman, Mona, the pursuer of Ailsa’s ghost. Arms round one another’s waists, the two of them seemed about to burst out laughing at some mad private joke to do with the young man in uniform on their left. And Ailsa looked – there were no other words for it – radiantly beautiful.

‘Poppy and I are off to Egypt,’ she told Les. ‘On a cruise.’

‘I know – Dad said. Are you sure it’s safe to go?’

‘Why shouldn’t it be?’

‘Well, terrorism, for a start. Nowhere’s safe in the Middle East any longer.’

‘Not since Bush and B.Liar went into Iraq all guns blazing, you mean?’

Her Tory brother hated it when Nia went off on one of
her political rants. He’d been a member of the territorials in his youth, playing the cornet in the regimental band. She saw him swallow a sharp retort.

‘I was thinking more of 9/11,’ Les said gently. And then, to defuse things, ‘Well, really I was just thinking of your health. You’ll come down with something gastric and I’ll have to come and fetch you home.’

‘Oh, don’t be so stuffy. It’ll be fine.’

They’d just left their moorings at Southampton when Nia, holding Ailsa’s skirts bunched in both fists, said she would get off now. She wasn’t sailing on this nasty sea, said Nia. She was going home. Home she was going.

Go home Mami!
she bellowed. And letting go of the skirts, Nia struggled to make a break for it. Ailsa gripped the child’s wrist, shushing her. The wives and kiddies thronged the rail as the brass band played the
Empire Glory
out of harbour. It oompahed through ‘Colonel Bogey’ and many of the women sang along, their fear lifted, and the conscripts further down the ship whistled.

‘Can you see Uncle Archie?’ Ailsa cajoled the hysterical Nia.

‘See him! See my lovely Archie!’ the child shrieked, waving at the receding crowd on the quay.

‘We’re going to be with Daddy though, aren’t we?’ Ailsa encouraged her.

Dull old England receded with every moment.
Sailing to
 
Joe!
Ailsa thought. Goodbye to Church Stretton, Archie and everyone. Once she was out of the way, perhaps he’d find himself a nice girl, have children and be happy. Her cousin – once her
kissing cousin
– had shaken his head at the news of their departure and raised one hand as if to brush a moth away. The cryptic gesture said that he was content with his lot.
Knowing you are in the world. So take care of yourself, Ailsa, you are precious to us all
. She gripped the rail tight. She’d always loved Archie. But it would never have worked. Joe of course had no idea. She’d never breathed a word. Her husband could be jealous of his own shadow and, when she’d allowed him to kiss her after that first dance, he sulked at the thought that she might be
fast
.

At home they’d begged Ailsa not to go to Egypt: did she want to take Nia to her death? Consider the germs, the flies, the heat, the filthy habits of the natives. Not to mention terrorists. What was Ailsa thinking of? Archie’s parents, socialist to the bone, had mildly pointed out that we had no earthly right to be there: the so-called
Anglo-
Egyptian
Treaty was illegal, the Empire an expensive farce. Attlee knew that, if Bevin didn’t. We’d scuttled out of India and Palestine and we’d have to scuttle out of the rest of the Middle East. Scuttling was all we were good for. The War had beggared and bankrupted Britain. Rationing, which they’d largely escaped on the farm, was getting worse, not better.

Ailsa’s mother’s people, Shrewsbury Tories, said Suez was the Empire’s jugular vein; it made us safe in our beds. Protection against the Commies.
The point you have to remember is that Egypt’s on Uncle Joe Stalin’s doorstep
. And by that token, no place for wives and kiddies.

Go home, Mami, now! Going now!

Nia bolted along the deck to where she thought she remembered the gangplank was. She squirmed through the jam of bodies.

No gangplank. Nia frowned down at the churning grey waters. The brass band drew off and the waving folk on the harbour were getting smaller: to Nia it seemed that the jetty moved away like a ferry, while the great troopship stood still. The lines of weeping families on shore waved Union Jacks and pocket hankies, leaving Nia high and dry.

Oompah, went the band.

Twin khaki men hunkered either side of the child.

‘What’s the trouble now, dearie? Lost your mum, have you?’

‘Mami!’ shrieked Nia. ‘Lost! My! Mami!’

Nia and her mother were one lovely weave, like a plait. Nia could sense Ailsa’s emotions through her skin, and think in her mother’s mind. Mostly. But the plait was beginning to become unbraided. It had been coming to pieces for some time. Her mouth squared up and quivered.

‘Goodbye! Ta ta! Write!’ shouted the women, leaning over the rails, arms outstretched.

The band swung into ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’.

Nia hung high in the air, in the powerful arms of a khaki man with a beret, who might possibly have been her father, although he usually wore blue. But he had this same tobacco smell mixed with hair oil and petrol.

‘Are you my daddy?’

‘I don’t think so, Gingernut. Not unless there was a big mistake made.’

He and his pal winked.

‘We’ll call your mum over the tannoy. What’s your name?’

‘What’s yours anyway, mister?’

‘Cheeky. Yours first.’

‘Nia Josephine Roberts.’

‘Comical little miss, aren’t you? Best get them to call for Mrs Roberts.’

But Ailsa was here already. Fierce, protective Ailsa, who snatched her lamb from the arms of the military, and then remembered to be grateful to the friendly-eyed private, who said, ‘There you are, Mrs Roberts. No harm done. Gave you a dickens of a turn, I should think.’

Ailsa felt fit to faint in the uproar, and Nia, clamped to her with arms and legs, chin hooked over her shoulder, suddenly weighed like lead, causing her mother to stagger. The band music drifted away, leaving only the frail filament of the women’s singing, until they too gave up and watched in silence as their ship drew out.

‘Saw my dada,’ Nia told her mother, speaking around the thumb she had wedged between her lips.

‘You can’t have. He’s in Egypt. Waiting for us.’

‘Did so see him.’

‘There you are – get down now. You’re too big for Mami to carry.’

Ailsa crouched to straighten the green velvet coat that Nia wore with matching leggings and a darker green bonnet that made her look like a miniature Robin Hood. From the bonnet, excitable tendrils of ginger hair curled.

Now the tugs had led them out into the centre of the harbour. The wives turned away from the rails, drying their eyes, blowing their noses. It was an adventure, after
all, leaving behind the stint and dreariness and fog. Something new. No rationing in Egypt: cans of peaches in the NAAFI, as many as you could eat. Sunshine and beaches: almost a holiday camp, they’d been assured. Ailsa winced at the jolly bellowing that passed for conversation as these sensible souls girded up their loins and began to knit the bondings that would make life livable on the
Empire Glory
. She held Nia to her side, watching another troopship, the
Empire Sunderland
, move into port. The troops were all on deck, sailing home from the Far East, cheering themselves into harbour and home.

The women of the
Empire Glory
waved to the men of the Sunderland. Five hundred raw conscripts and regulars kept segregated on a forward deck of the
Empire Glory
called out to the tanned and euphoric homeward-bound men, who taunted them about their pale and pasty skin.
White knees! White knees!
they bawled, among other catcalls, more obscene. The ships slid past one another so closely that Ailsa made out individual boyish faces. If they were returning from tours of duty in the Far East, they would have come through the Suez Canal, from the panting humidity of Singapore or Malaya, postings Joe dreaded. No place for kiddies, he’d said. I couldn’t have my Nia exposed to that.

Nia stared. The world was too big. Too grey, the sea and the cloud. Her brain swelled, trying to take it in. On the bus the conductor would dingdong the bell and let you off at your stop. Trains, smelling tastily of egg-sandwich, opened friendly doors at stations. In silence Nia laid hold on Mami’s body and wrapped her arms round its solidity.

The womenfolk drifted down to nest in their cabins; the troops were tannoyed to their muster. When a white-coated
official reminded Ailsa that the time had come to go below decks, she nodded but lingered, taking deep lungfuls of salty air. The ship’s engine throbbed up through the one creature that she and Nia made together. The coarse camaraderie of her fellow wives in the bowels of the troopship held no appeal. But they were all right: good sorts. What a frightful snob I’ve become since my marriage, Ailsa thought, and quailed. Folk who wouldn’t read a book to save their lives: what did she have to say to them or they to her? The irony was that it had been
because
Ailsa had read books that she’d disdained the petty and artificial distinctions of class that made Britain what it was – and voted Labour, what’s more, in the first election of her life.

Not quite got round to telling Joe yet, she thought, and smiled. Buck up, she told herself. Only a fortnight and you’ll be with him. You’ll see the Pyramids and other wonders beyond your wildest dreams. ‘Go down
now
, Mami,’ Nia moaned.

Only two bunks were left: upper and lower beds next to the rasping air conditioning. And when the queasiness came over her, Ailsa was forced to swap with her daughter to take the lower bunk, throwing Nia into hysterics until a Nice Lady in uniform came in and forced another woman to swap her coveted bed with a porthole.

‘We shall see the flying fishes, dearie,’ the Nice Lady told Nia, as Ailsa lay languishing.

Nia glanced away from the powdered, fragrant face to the porthole. In her mind, goldfish swam across the sky.

‘Yes, and you shall see the porpoises! What do you think of that? Nice pretty porpoises playing in the blue, blue Mediterranean Sea!’

The Nice Lady was clearly finding the sceptical Nia hard going. She straightened up, to Nia’s relief, for the heavy bosom and the perfume-waft filled her with inexplicable gloom. The Nice Lady asked the time but no one in the cabin owned a watch.

‘Well, never mind. The natives will trade you one for a few ciggies. Don’t let them swindle you.’

‘What else?’ asked Nia.

‘Pardon me?’

‘What else will we be seeing?’

‘Oh – well – let’s see. We shall see the apes on the Rock. At Gib, of course. Jolly old Gib.’

‘That’s a posting I would really like,’ said one of the women sharing the cabin, and sighed. ‘Brean,’ she added.

‘Babs. Bound for Fanara.’

‘And talking of rocks …’

The Nice Lady mentioned rock buns for tea, at which Ailsa retched.

‘I’m hardly ever icky,’ said Babs. ‘Seasoned vets us.’

Whereupon the ship gave an ironic lurch which had them all except Nia heaving over buckets. She pinched her nose between thumb and finger and wished for a peg. It frightened her to see Ailsa, grey and limp, float off beyond the power of tantrums to control her.

‘What’s to be done with Tiddler?’ asked Babs. ‘Aren’t you feeling umpty at all, dear?’ She spoke as if seasickness would be a convenient playpen into which Nia could be deposited for safekeeping.

The Nice Lady said there was no help for it, she’d take Nia with her and keep her occupied. She reassured the mother that she’d soon get her sea legs, in a tone that told Ailsa, Buck up, we’re not even in the Bay of Biscay yet,
you’ll wish yourself back in the English Channel before too long, my lass.

Going to eat rock-buns, they were, up there somewhere. Well, let them go then and leave Ailsa to die in peace.

The next time Ailsa opened her eyes, Nia was bustling out with her golly under her arm, without a backward glance. She’s punishing me, thought Ailsa, oh well. Once assured of quiet and privacy, she felt more herself and propped herself on a couple of pillows, taking sips of water.

But then the door opened again. The officious woman with the chins was back.

‘What language does she speak, Mrs Roberts?’

‘Well – English.’

‘What, all the time?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Just checking. Funny little character. Cheerio.’

Ailsa knew what she meant. Nia’s carroty hair and grey-green eyes gave her a fey look. Her eyebrows and lashes were so fair that they hardly showed except when she blushed. Blushes were explosions of blood into Nia’s pearl-pale face. She looked like an albino and talked back in a mixture of English and Welsh that sounded plain daft. Comical at her age, but Joe set great store by what he called ‘well-spokenness’. Even so, Ailsa took umbrage at the woman’s saying like that, ‘Funny little character’, inwardly denying that Nia was a pickle.

From the first Ailsa had melted at the intensities of Joe’s Valleys lilt. His first language was Welsh, a fact he seemed ashamed of.
But you’re bilingual, Joe!
Oh no, he’d said, blushing, Welsh doesn’t count, it’s low. She’d made him
teach her intimate words to share as the little language of their love.
Ti’n werth y byd, cariad
carried more emotion than ‘You’re the world to me.’ But in Joe’s mind his tongue betrayed the threadbare poverty in which he’d grown up and the use of the same tea leaves twice over.

They seemed to be entering, if not calmer waters, a more steady unease. Ailsa fished out Joe’s photograph and looked into the wartime face of Joe as he had been in the Western Desert, muscular arms folded, eyes crinkling, his funny buck teeth in that small mouth, a soft mop of hair that was licensed because they had no Brylcreme in the Western Desert.

Whatever was that black thing on the sheet? A dead spider? Ailsa flicked at it with her nails. No, it was not alive: just something embroidered on to the sheets, to stop you filching them presumably, as if you would want to go off with such linen – linen that carried ancient stains neither boiling nor bleach had been able to remove.

One more sip: that’s right, stay down. It did. She eased on to her left side and prepared to doze. The ventilator grid snored as if a fat man were sleeping there, some inveterate wife-waker; the ship’s engine thrummed through her entire body. Ailsa opened her eyes. Another black spot on the edge of the pillow. It could not be, but was, a swastika.

Nia, placed on a seat bolted to the floor and told to show good manners, picked up her bun and brought it down with a thump on the table. Soon a couple of big girls had joined in the din, whacking cakes on their plates. Nia slid down under the table and crawled to the end, face level
with a line of red sandals and white ankle-socks. Her cot sheet was clamped between her teeth and her golly was stuffed down the waistband of her skirt.

Bolting down a corridor, Nia felt the thrill of escape polluted by the shock of isolation. Through the tannoy came a male voice instructing all Other Ranks wives and children to attend for life boat drill on the deck aft.

The deck aft?