Into Suez (24 page)

‘Nag, nag.’

‘Oh now, come on. That’s not fair, Joe. I don’t nag.’

‘That a fact?’ He locked his teeth over the mouth of the bottle and jerked the top off, against the enamel. Ailsa winced. He would do that once too often and crack a tooth. Then he’d be sorry. That was what louts did, bite tops off beer bottles, men without even a veneer of civilisation or manners. Joe bore the bottle and a glass into the living room. Ailsa remained at the table, quietly gathering together the pastry edges left over from the apple pie and moulding them into a ball to make cheese straws.

‘You don’t know what nagging is, Joe Roberts, if you think I nag. So don’t you dare say so.’

‘All right, I won’t
say
it.’
But it’s still true
, he murmured.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Didn’t speak.’

‘I distinctly heard you.’

‘Not a blinking word, mate.’

‘I did.’

‘Couldn’t have done.’

‘Joe,’ she said, and put her head round the door, ‘please put the beer away. It’s not four o’clock.’

‘So?’

‘Too early.’

‘Or too damn late,’ he said, meaning nothing in particular. ‘Wrap up, Ailsa, for God’s sake.’

As she went out again, tutting with exasperation, Joe
switched the wireless on high. She heard him kick off his slippers, so that one flopped against the wall and the other landed on the mat. Now he’d be raising his feet and resting them on a coffee table they had agreed in a more temperate hour was too slight to bear the weight of a man’s size nines. He drank deeply and smacked his lips in an idiotic way he knew jangled her nerves.

‘Any crisps going, Ailsa? Too early is it for crisps?’

She sent a packet of crisps flying through the air at him and again she disappeared.

‘Are you not speaking to me?’ he roared.

Silence. She heard him open the crisp bag and rummage out the blue screw of salt. He shook the bag up and down.

‘
Why
are you not speaking to me?’

‘Don’t yell, darling,’ she said, putting the cheese straws in the Belling with the nearly cooked pie and washing flour off her hands. She came in to him, wiping her wet hands. ‘I can hear you without your yelling.’

Joe put out a hand to her and she took it gladly. He pulled her towards him and sat her on his lap, offering a crisp.

‘No thanks. Spoil my tea. It’s all right,’ she said, kissing the top of his forehead where it met the curly black hairline. ‘You’re upset. Only don’t blame me, Joe.’

‘Blame you for what?’

‘For … I don’t know, Chalkie, I suppose. And don’t blame yourself either.’

He knew, he bellowed, who to blame! The fucking bastard Gyppos! Want someone to geld? Geld them!

Ailsa leapt free of him, staggered and stood with her back to him, quivering from head to foot. It was like watching a man vomit.

Geld the dirty bastards! he bawled and Ailsa’s whole body gave a start, as if on the verge of sleep.

He brought his fist slamming down on the chair-arm. The deep qualm Joe was suffering clearly did not abate. He could not shout it away. The louder and more grating his voice was, the more she saw that he sickened himself.

Nia, she mentioned Nia. Not good for Nia to hear her father losing his temper.

‘Then don’t set me off, woman,’ he growled.

‘I don’t need to. You set yourself off. And don’t call me
woman
. I’ll not be called
woman
by some illiterate bloody Welshman! Listen to yourself. You have so little – dignity, I’m ashamed.’

She stood up, a schoolmarm, with folded arms, looking down upon her husband, as he upended the bottle into his mouth. Leaving for the kitchen, Ailsa was ready to storm out of the door, but paused to open the oven door with steady hands, remove the tart and twiddle the knob of the Primus.

Never heard Ailsa lose her temper before. Joe wanted to say,
You shouted at me, Aily!
With a kind of wonder, almost hilarity, because, ah ha!
illiterate bloody Welshman!
she gave herself away there. Gutter talk if ever he heard it. What would her plummy-voiced pals from the other side of the track think of that?

He could not get out of his mind the photographs she’d brought back from her trip. Who’d taken them all? Someone completely obsessed with Joe Roberts’ wife, that was for sure. Joe’s wife starred in every one except the three of Hedwig Webster with the newborn baby. The
Websters had no camera so he’d given the snaps to Norman. Next to the proud, weary mother sat a
bare-armed
female, wearing a very expensive watch, with a tiny black face and a gold strap. You could only see a portion of the face but he would know the Jacobs woman anywhere. And this morning Norman Webster had confirmed it. Yes, the officer’s lady had been a great support. She’d been staying there then, at the hotel? And the Wing Co with her? Not as far as Norm knew. Mrs Jacobs had been touring in a Jeep apparently. On her own? No idea, mate. And just happened to be at Luxor when the wives fetched up there? Bit of a funny coincidence. Why do you ask? Oh nothing.

Joe kept going over and over it. Ailsa had never mentioned her. Be fair though: she knew he’d hit the roof if she did and opted for a quiet life. Lighting up a fag, he observed the tremor in his fingers. What had he said to her just now? Oh aye, that and that. Well, but she should know he didn’t mean it. And she should be careful what she said.

How could he make things right? Small Joe felt, and humiliated. And as ever the heat that had flared up in him had so completely dispersed that he was at a loss to know what had ignited it. He’d been caught up in some stupid pranks that had left Chalkie dead and Irene gone and two boys fatherless. The cigarette jittered in his hand. The world had opened up and swallowed them, without warning. Lovely, decent folk. The best. What was to be said about that? He sat and stared at the whitewashed wall.

Presumably Ailsa was seeing to the tea and giving him a chance to calm down and sober up, not that he was not sober. She at least had a bit of sense in her noddle. It took
more than a few pints of Stella to make him tipsy. Still, he would not drink any more. She didn’t like it and she was right not to like it.

Illiterate Welshman!

You asked for it, boy, he told himself, and by Jove you got it! In the cinnamon-scented kitchen, an apple tart had been removed from the oven and left to cool on its enamel plate, covered by a sieve in case of insects. He looked at the clove sticking out of the crust in the centre. The
sugar-sprinkle
. One of her works of art. Ailsa’s blue apron lay neatly folded over a chair-back.

Some crazy bugger was out there roaring round on a motorbike on the waste ground.

Nia perched on the table in her knickers, beside a basin of water, milky with Dettol. She swung her legs, cradled in the murmur of concern that passed between her mother and father, to and fro, until it was woven of both their voices, a hummed hymn of anxious cherishing.

The explosions and rampages were all over now. They would not come again as long as Nia held the two in thrall to her bad arm.

‘I blame myself,’ said Mami.

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘But I do. I should have acted as
soon
as I saw the mark. She looked so peaceful in the land of nod, didn’t you, Piccaninny? I didn’t want to wake her. Oh
dear
, Joe.’

Ailsa’s face appealed: lost child and old woman, for, with her forehead furrowed into deep lines, she looked to Nia like her
Mam-gu
, mapped with many wrinkles.

‘It’s quite all right, Mami,’ Nia said in a grown-up way. ‘It’s only a mozzy-bite after all.’

‘There you are,’ said Joe. ‘Babes and sucklings.’

As they continued to dab with cotton wool and to discuss her, Nia sat content to queen it, settling and centring her world around her. She craned to get a look at the spot, which was angry and inflamed, weeping green nastiness. She murmured the words
Illiterate Welshman!
bubbling them on her lips and rolling them round her mouth. The festering wound on her arm did not bother her. They would take care of it, even though she knew from their contrite whispers that a girl of nine in Fayid Cemetery had died of an insect bite. One day she was right as rain. Three days later she was dead. But Nia’s parents had the power of life and death. Her eyes followed their faces, one speaking, then the other, like a game of ping pong.

‘So much pus,’ said Ailsa.

‘Iodine?’

‘Yes, maybe. Definitely.’

‘The MO?’

‘I think if it’s no better tomorrow…’

Topher had had iodine on his cut shin. It had been purple, he’d said, and stung like heck, but Topher’s dad had told him he was a brave little soldier. The iodine had dried brownish-yellow and it killed the germs stone dead, he said, like this, and he fell down on his back to show her how dead the germs were, his tongue lolling out of his mouth and his eyes rolling. Topher had shown her his chipolata.

From the sky a large hand came down on Nia’s forehead. It was hard and cool. It took the heat from her forehead in its cool span. Daddy’s face came down and asked her how she felt. And Mami’s face came too.

Mami had hit her once, towering above her, when
Topher was there. Hit her hard! Slap! Smack! Nia had curled into a ball like a spider in her bed. Daddy had never hit her, he was good. Another Mami did that. Her face in a red rage had been dark as sausage, her cheeks meaty slabs.

Now the good Mami’s fingers were tender on her shoulder. Both of them were here together, balancing the world.

The pus had death in it. They both saw that. The greenness of death. And Nia was not eating. Her arms and legs were thin. There was no weight to lose. Sharp shoulder-blades jutted from her ribby back. What was more important than to keep her healthy and happy? How had she been allowed to get so skinny? Father and mother wove back in together, a single seamless mind that braided the little girl into its weft.

He would simmer the plaice for her in evaporated milk, Joe said to Ailsa. Of course he knew how to do it! He’d watched her often enough, hadn’t he? And the two of them were
cwtch
ed up so cosy and nice in the lamplight.

He watched from the doorway as Ailsa read their daughter her bedtime story. Two stories she was having tonight, two! Ailsa said – because of the nasty iodine. Mother and daughter sat like one being, Nia’s eyes huge in wondering concentration on the page, her bud-mouth slack as she breathed deeply. It was Mrs Rabbit, her daughters, Flopsy, Mopsy and Cotton-tail, that Ailsa was reading about, and her naughty son, Peter. They turned a page. Joe watched Nia’s engrossed eyes move to the top of the page, follow the words one by one, for Nia was clever,
no doubt about it, she could read, she was destined for great things, university, the law, medicine.

Joe tried not to think of the infected wound. There was so much you could do for this kind of thing nowadays. Jabs you could have.

He went back to the kitchen and checked on the plaice. Simmering gently, the juices flowing out into the milk. Just two mouthfuls, if he could get her to swallow them, three even: strength for her body as it tried to heal itself.

The story was finished. After a scolding, Peter Rabbit had eaten blackberry jam for his tea, round the fire. Nia drew a deep sigh of satisfaction. She stretched and squirmed on her mother’s knee; then settled again for the second story, reaching up with her good arm to stroke Ailsa’s neck and chin just under the ear, where a dewdrop earring hung.

‘Open wide, my beauty!’ Joe said, crouching, eyes crinkling. ‘Look what Daddy has cooked you.’

On a teaspoon, he inserted two or three tender flakes of fish into her mouth. Watched for her to chew. She did. And swallowed. Not looking at him but gazing rapt at the first picture in the next story.

‘There,’ he said.

‘Isn’t that wonderful?’ Ailsa fetched Joe such a smile that his heart clutched itself as it had on the dance floor in Peckham, when she’d swept by him in uniform,
fox-trotting
with another airman, whom he’d lost no time in tapping on the shoulder to claim her, for it had been a gentlemen’s excuse-me. Ailsa was saying to Nia, ‘Well! What a treat! We didn’t know Daddy could cook, did we? Watch out, Joe, or you’ll have to be our cook and we’ll be ladies of leisure.’

‘Mami have some, go on,’ Nia insisted.

‘I don’t mind if I do. Delicious! Mmn.’

When every scrap was gone, Joe whirled round the room with an imaginary Ailsa in his arms, singing ‘Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree’. Then he jitterbugged, hurling the phantom partner here and there. And finally when Nia had calmed down from her giggling fits and consented to go to bed, he took Ailsa in his arms for real and they danced their way through the rooms, her hand open on his open hand, his fingers lightly resting on her waist.

He can turn, she thought, her face against his face, moving slow-slow to the music he sang. And then he can turn again. Without any warning. This is how he is.

For she had been sure, stopping the Tiger on the common, as he careered towards her, red in the face and shouting something she couldn’t catch, that he would strike her, in front of the windows of all the neighbours. He would deal her a dreadful blow. The panes held the flame of the setting sun like bloodshot eyes. And in the moment before he reached her, where she straddled his bike, she had time to imagine the new Warrant Officer’s wife catching sight of those Roberts ruffians next door brawling on the common. Gutter people, low and brutal.

No time to dismount: it had been as if Ailsa were pinned to the bike. But in those seconds she’d conjured a scene of wives in aprons feasting on the shameful spectacle of a drunken Taffy beating his hoity toity wife. Time to ask: why have I done this? Provoked him when it would have been prudent to coax and cajole? Lied to him and gone behind his back, held him cheap, judging and
blaming him? Joe’s rushing figure seemed to pause in
midstride
to give Ailsa time to take in her situation.

There he’d been, face too close to her face. She’d thought,
Oh Joe, your hair does need brushing
. She’d been aware of the wristwatch and the dark fur on the arm he had raised. Holding on tight to the Tiger’s handlebars, Ailsa’s body had thrust forward, skirt riding way above her knees. After the roar of the engine, the silence had been intense.

Ailsa had heard in advance the crack of Joe’s fist on his wife’s jaw. That was where it was aimed. And he was a powerfully built fellow, he would down her with one blow, she was helpless, would bruise, and bleed maybe, her nose might be broken as he slammed his fist into it and he’d have robbed her at one stroke of her good looks, and what about Nia? Nothing in the world would ever be the same again.

But instead of flinching and cowering, Ailsa had grinned and said, ‘What ho, Joe. Coming for a ride?’

He’d wavered. Knots had slipped undone in slackening ropes. His eyes had melted. There’d been a soft, brushing kiss on her lips. For, yes, he had turned again. The violence was all gone, the threat, if there had ever been any threat, and perhaps there had been none, she’d imagined it. For Joe would never hit Ailsa, she saw that now. He would and could not do so, and still be Joe.

He’d mounted the Tiger behind her. Placed his hands lightly either side of her waist and all he’d said was, ‘Right you are.’

Don’t sit under the apple tree,
Joe crooned.
With anyone else but me.

His hands scarcely needed to guide her. Her body knew which way his body intended to move before he knew himself. So they had always been, from the first time he had taken her in his arms, so that he’d felt at ease with her before they had spoken half a dozen words.
Before I knew you, I knew you
, he thought, and they wheeled round together.

Joe had climbed on the pillion, in Chalkie’s place, behind his wife, and looked at her tapering back and the nape of her neck, taking her body softly between his legs. Ailsa’s back had been a field of blue flowers, her waist caught in a belt of the same fabric. He’d laid his hands gently on her waist and, looking at them there, thought,
I have not hurt her
. They had looked together over a cliff edge and seen the drop. Having taken it in, they’d drawn back, and not just a foot or two either, but a mile.

Her parents were the two wings of one dove that brooded over Nia deep into the night, as she lay scalding, the bad place on her arm swelling up so that if you looked at it you could see the abscess fester. Sometimes they murmured over her and sometimes their shadows danced together on the wall. Then the faces came down again resting over her but she had trouble sorting the muddle of four eyes and two mouths. A hand dipped a flannel in cold water and laid it smoothly across her forehead. There was a dark auntie on a boat. Cowboys were shooting porpoises. She cried out that they were shooting the creatures! Stop it! Topher ran away from the hailstones because he was only a boy. Custard had been poured for her into a Mickey Mouse bowl, deliciously, except that the surface began to churn and curdle.

The khaki doctors forced her down on the khaki camp bed. Nia roared out in terror and flailed at them. When the needle went in, the light went out.

‘All better,’ said Mami. She could not have sat closer without taking Nia into her pocket. ‘All the nasty’s gone now, isn’t it? Oh,’ she said to Joe, and yawned hugely, ‘thank
God
. Another day, the MO said, one more day, and it might have been too late. We must be so careful, Joe, mustn’t we?’

Nia was in her element with a new teddy named Penicillin, with a wide, soppy face, black button eyes and a sewn-on smile from the NAAFI. They were travelling in a
royal car
, as her father said, a black purring giant, a limousine fit for a king! And a chauffeur too, we’ve got our own chauffeur, shan’t we just swank?

‘You don’t mind being called a chauffeur, Paddy, do you?’

‘Course not,’ said the driver. ‘Honoured.’ He rummaged in the vanity cabinet with his free hand and found some Licorice Allsorts to treat the poor peaky little patient.

Sucking, Nia thought well of everything that had been laid on and the arm they had lanced throbbed hardly at all. It was covered in an important dressing that must not be picked at with your fingernails.

Their voices rustled like leaves in a bright tree canopy.

So much care, Joe.

We shall, don’t worry.

No diversions.

A warning to us, cariad.

Yes, a warning.

Not take our eyes off her.

Nia looked out of the window at the sprawl of sand and the bump of the Big Flea, the sole hill against the flat
horizons. The Flea was being climbed by tiny stick men. Above it black-winged birds hung. And there was wind up there, air currents, said her Mami. Nia turned away to the quiet ecstasy of the world inside the body of the car, a mass of human pillows and cushioning toys. Glutted with comfort, she smiled into Penicillin’s furry forehead. The world radiated out from Nia and around Nia it turned. And that was that.

No one else matters.

No one at all.

Do you want to take her home?

How do you mean, home?

England.

Oh no, I couldn’t.

But is she safe here?

Joe, don’t suggest it again, don’t even think it. Where would we be without you?

Over there lay the Great Bitter Lake with a reed bed spiking up beside the road. A flat plain of silver water. Nia pressed her nose against the pane and thirsted to be in the water.

Paddy the driver was saying something about blue waters, purple hills and a crimson sun. He had a feeling for the Bitter Lakes, he said, a feeling as strong as his feeling for Ireland, and of course the blokes laughed at him but, you know, perhaps it
was
his feeling for Ireland that came out in the sadness of any glorious landscape. For this, he said, was the land of Exodus in the Bible, did they know that? Nia knew that something in what he said and the way he said it might have made people scoff. Her parents did not scoff. They listened attentively.

‘Is that Ireland over there?’ she asked.

‘No, my beauty – this is Egypt, isn’t it? Ireland’s just over the water from Wales.’

‘She doesn’t remember, Joe.’

‘Ah but she remembers her
Mam-gu
and
Tad-cu
in Treforys? And the aunties?’

Nia cast the net of her mind. There was
Mam-gu
hanging out clothes in a back yard with a dank smell containing black soil and shadow, with a wedge of sunlight in one corner, and a coal hole Nia relished. And four aunties, Betsi, Gaynor, Mair and Magdalen, with uncles to match. And beside
Mam-gu
and these aunties in the world of her memory, but along a corridor in another room, was a tall, dark lady wearing a silky emerald scarf and trousers that swished as she walked, who smelled of almonds and took Nia on her knee and she felt the generous give of breasts inside her sweater, and heard her low, strong voice, very close.