Into Suez (32 page)

They sat down together at the table. The relief made Ailsa feel weak; her limbs were jelly. They’d get through this after all and perhaps they’d both be wiser for it and work out a better balance between them. Through it all they’d continued to love one another, hadn’t they? That was paramount now. She reached for his hand and threaded her fingers with Joe’s in the old familiar way. Now was the time to let him know she had a fall-back plan.

She’d never been going anyway, Ailsa told him.

Joe stared, stunned.

‘What do you mean, not going anyway?’

‘I couldn’t accept, Joe – I can’t accept –’

‘Can’t accept
what
? You mean, you let me book the seats on the plane and you never intended to go at all?’

‘I didn’t
let
you, did I? You did it against my will. You can’t do that to a grown up person. You haven’t the right to send me anywhere. I told you that, Joe. I’m not
impedimenta.’

‘What might that be when it’s at home?’

‘Baggage. In the Roman Army. And the womenfolk were baggage too, just so much of an impediment.’

‘Ta for letting me in on that, Ailsa. Thank you so much for enlightening me about the Ancient Romans. So where did you think you were going?’

‘Well, to friends, for the time being.’

He saw it all now, his face said. And he wasn’t seeing the spirit of compromise in which she meant to offer a way through the maze, a second chance for them both. Joe was rapidly checking back through their days together to ascertain the extent of her calculated betrayal.

‘Do as you bloody well like,’ he said. ‘Go west. I don’t care. I wash my hands of you. But my daughter –
my
daughter
, Ailsa – she is not going anywhere.’

His lips were white. She saw how he was inside. A layer of skin was ripped away. His hands shook.

‘
Our
daughter. And don’t speak to me like that.’

‘I’ll speak to you any way I want to speak, woman. You got that? Any way I fucking like.’ He was on his feet and looming over her. ‘Just fucking do as you’re told.’

‘Sit down.’

He did sit down, to her surprise, with a look of confusion. He was flying above himself like a kite in a gale. She was too. If she could find the right words, Ailsa could earth them both. But the words that came out of her mouth were harsh and bitter.

‘Nia will be coming with me, Joe. That’s the end of it.’

‘Oh and you think your precious Jacobs pals will tolerate having a brat bawling in the middle of the night and getting under their feet all day?’

‘I’m only going to them
pro tem
. Obviously I can’t presume on them. After that another friend has found me a room in the house of a widow.’

‘A
widow
?’

‘A lady who lives in the Greek quarter.’

‘A Greek “lady”?’

‘An Egyptian – and, yes, a
lady
, Joe. She lives downstairs from Nobby. She’s his sister-in-law. She has a lovely little girl, about Nia’s age.’

‘Nobby Bowen?’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t make me laugh! You and that pathetic twit of a slob of a dreamer!’

Ailsa said nothing but she knew her face told him how disgusting, coarse, moronic he was. What a Taffy, what
an illiterate! Love him? Love that ugly monkey of a man? She didn’t even like him, her face said.

He could read her like a book, Joe told her. Ailsa was so transparent, it was laughable. She thought he was too much of a dimwit to see what she was up to. Her and her
secret diary
. In code! Did she think he couldn’t work it out?

How dared he read her diary? Flaring up, Ailsa got to her feet and shrieked at him like a fishwife. How dared he? A diary was private.

Had she ever heard the word
degenerate
? he asked her. Did she know the meaning? Joe could tell her one thing. She was not taking his daughter to live with the wogs. Never. Nia would be dead of typhoid in the year. She’d be in Fayid Cemetery with Chalkie.

‘Oh, so you’re going to take care of her, Joe, are you? How are you going to manage that then?’

Joe was going to hit her now, wasn’t he? The knowledge flashed through Ailsa. She saw the fist, the punch landing with a crack, herself staggering and crashing against the table edge, the blood-gush from her temple. The premonition was so vivid that she leapt to her feet, hand at her temple.

‘That’s it now! That’s
it
, Joe!’ she shouted. ‘You’ve had it now. You’ve had your chips. And to think I’d hoped this would give us another chance.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That I’d be nearby. We could have cooled down a bit, and seen each other, and you’d have come to see Nia – well, of course you would, Joe! I never thought of parting her from you. But if you’re going to hit me, forget it. You’ll never see either of us again.’

‘Just hang on a minute, Ailsa. Steady down. I haven’t hit you.’

‘No, but you were going to.’

‘No. No, I wasn’t.’

He hadn’t; that was true. There was still time. They looked at each other abashed, embarrassed, trying to remember what it was they’d said. How to disown the squalor of what they’d said.

‘Well,’ Joe said, and patted his pockets for cigarettes. ‘Well now.’ He flashed her a blue glance, hurt and yet sharp; offered the box. ‘Got a point you have, Ailsa. How would I take care of her on my own?’

‘And don’t forget you were wanting us to go away to Wales where you’d never see us. This is the better way surely?’

But in the event he’d played dirty.

They were lying at anchor with thirty-three other ships at Port Tewfik, waiting for the convoy to enter the Suez Canal. The pilot would come aboard and they’d sail at 7 a.m., announced the Captain.

At 8 the pilot had not yet arrived, but,
insha’allah
he would do so at any moment. When a couple of hours later the pilot did come aboard, the immense convoy could move. Behind the
Terra Incognita
lay a luxury yacht, a floating gin palace, the Tannoy informed them, owned by some famous billionaire. Ahead sailed a rusty container ship belonging to the United Arab Shipping Company. They would reach the Bitter Lakes by around two in the afternoon. Nia went up to the forward deck and felt the familiar give in her stomach and a fizz of excitement as the cruiser crept forward over the green-blue water. The deck vibrated in the soles of her feet and the rail in the palms of her hands. A pleasant breeze rippled the flag, tossing her hair around.

Hardly expecting to sleep at all, Nia had slept instantly and deeply, her head a theatre of dreams, all colourful and adventurous. She’d awoken in the night with a sense of boundless relief, and in the ship’s soft throbbing she’d felt as if she were being carried by some force that meant no harm. She’d caught the tail of the dream. But all she could remember was a cornfield or desert, it might have been either, a great wash of ochre light over the whole field of vision. A place of boundless forgiveness. And yet the dead were there.

Nia’s dead slept here in Egypt with the Pharaohs, not just her father but in some real way, for all that her ashes had been scattered on the Long Mynd, Nia’s mother too. Something in Ailsa must have died and been left behind when Mrs Joseph Roberts had been flown home. Nia sensed, in some obscure way, the presence of her parents in the timeless landscape. And Topher’s parents too – and whatever wove the Whites and Roberts together. Topher had rung late the previous night, in an odd, hectic mood. What’s she like, what’s this Mona Serafin-Jacobs like? he’d wanted to know. Why haven’t you phoned, what has she told you? Since Nia had left for the Middle East, Topher complained, he’d been seeing his dead mum everywhere. Accusing him. What if I fly to Alex, he said, and meet you there? OK, Nia? I’ve got this feeling that we ought to go to El Alamein and see where our dads were war heroes together, what do you think?

The ship slipped forward. This is it, Nia thought, and excitement fizzed again. She’d be seeing the world inhabited by the spirits of her young parents. And the body of her father – where was he?

She hadn’t yet asked Mona where Joe was buried but
she would ask her now. Perhaps his remains had never been found.

The
Terra Incognita
slid beyond the wharf’s derricks and cranes, oil containers and concrete buildings, into the canal’s narrow strait, between the green, palm-shaded agricultural land of the west bank and the yellow dunes of the east, the Sinai Desert. Nothing lived in that wilderness. It was arid and always had been. She could imagine the desolation of the Chosen People wandering there for forty years. In the endless wars of modern times, the blood-soaked Sinai had been over-run by the Israelis, retaken by the Egyptians, a map of fluid boundaries from generation to generation. The
Terra Incognita
sailed between lush Africa and dry Asia, a contrast like a dream. Sinai was beautiful, its dunes like an Alpine
piste
before the skiers come out, glowing rose at sunrise.

The Suez veterans, white-haired men in shirtsleeves, flocked to the forward deck for this high point of their pilgrimage. They stood looking out through binoculars or focusing video cameras, as the ship made its stately way through the strait. They drew alongside their young conscript selves.

It’s always the poor foot slogger who has to get the politicians out of their mess…

Their animals live in the same house with them...

Dear old Ish…

Didn’t the Jewboys bomb it?

And another of the Gyppos’ stunts was to lay trip wires over the road to decapitate our motor cyclists…

Nia’s heart clamoured to visit the unknown Joe. But how could it be urgent? After all these years: he would never change. He’s fast asleep, she thought, and always will be
and doesn’t know I’ve come. He knows nothing whatever about me. Yet the steady sense of presence remained.

She hung on to the railing to get a grip on the haunted feeling. Mona in denims, looking half her age, came to stand alongside Nia, resting her elbows on the rail. The hairs on Nia’s arm rose as if the two of them had touched.

‘What are you thinking, Nia?’ asked Mona, not looking into her eyes.

‘We’re together, after all. I’m truly glad to be here with you.’

For the first time Nia reached out of her own accord to take Mona’s hand. The two were of nearly equal height, Nia an inch or so the taller. And Ailsa formed a ghostly third, joining them, joined by them. For a moment Nia’s face rested against Mona’s dark hair, as her mother’s must have done. This was the woman Ailsa had loved. Had loved beyond reason perhaps and without understanding the nature of that love. It had cost them both everything.

‘I wish I’d known the Ailsa you knew,’ Nia said. ‘If only I could tell her I’ve seen you – that I understand… I feel I’m much more like her, more in tune with her, than I ever realised.’

‘Oh, you are, make no mistake. You are very like her. But you’re also like the little girl I got to know on the
Empire Glory
. And I feel … haunted.’

It was as if Mona softly collapsed, like the last of the sand pouring through the waist of an hourglass. Her face was grey.

‘Do you want to go down to your own cabin? Are you all right?’

‘No, I’ll just sit here with you.’

The canal widened as they slid into the Little Bitter
Lake, on whose west bank Egyptian military depots had taken over British bases, with hangars and barracks. Water towers and watch-towers commanded the horizon. Cars tiny as Dinky Toys bounced along the paths. Nia heard herself ask, ‘What exactly happened to my father, Mona?’

‘Ah. What did she tell you?’

‘Nothing directly. She’d clam up if I asked about him. I’ve always had the impression that he’d been killed by terrorists in the guerrilla war in the run-up to Suez – but I can’t remember anyone ever saying so. He was some kind of hero, I know. I’ve never had much time for heroes.’

Mona’s face told her at once that whatever had happened to her father was indeed the worst thing one could imagine. Nia had always thought of him as a heroic
murdered man
like Topher’s dad. In her mind’s eye she’d seen him lying in a gutter in his own blood. Her mother would waken from nightmares clutching her throat, unable to breathe. Screaming in the early hours of the morning, so that the boys and Nia had also awoken shrieking, and the only sane person in the house of hysterics had been Archie, making Mam Horlicks, bringing her inhaler, padding across the kitchen in his bare feet, with tousled hair, saying in his calm way,
It’s only one of her dreams, go back to sleep.

Wer reitet
so spät durch Nacht und Wind?
… Who rides so late through night and wind?…

‘He was murdered, wasn’t he?’

The stately and imperturbable voice of the newsreader announced that the Egyptian government had fulfilled its
threat to abrogate the Treaty. British forces would henceforth constitute an enemy army on Egypt’s sovereign territory. All cooperation had been withdrawn from the British: fresh water and food, means of transport, communication and electricity. Local workers were ordered to cease employment with their foreign occupiers and find alternative work. Violent rioting, arson and looting in Cairo and Port Said had escalated. The announcer reassured listeners that, although destabilisation would give comfort to the USSR, and the situation was undeniably both tense and dangerous, British forces in the Canal Zone stood more than equal to the challenge. Within easy flying distance, the Sixteenth British Airborne Brigade awaited orders in Cyprus, troops who could reinforce the Canal Zone garrison at short notice.

So there was to be revolution. Egypt was about to explode. The group sitting round the Jacobs wireless set wore sombre but calm and unsurprised expressions.

More murders, thought Ailsa. Chalkie, though nobody had guessed this, was just one of the first. This was the beginning of some holocaust. The Middle East was sliding into war.

She could hardly bring herself to care. When Joe had taken Nia, the Jacobs held out their arms to her:
This is your home, Ailsa. For as long as you need it. Isn’t it, Habibi?
But they were strangers. Only Nia mattered. Ailsa’s breasts ached, as they’d done when she was ready to feed Nia. Not so very long ago. It had been as if the sleeping baby had intuited that the milk for her had come in, opening her clear green smiling eyes as Ailsa lifted her from the crib. Easing me, thought Ailsa, by taking what I was placed on this earth to give her – and only I could give.

Where was Nia now? Egypt was about to explode – and mother and child were apart.

A charming Palestinian professor of politics, displaced and working in a tobacconist’s shop in Ish, was holding forth. His education at Eton and Cambridge had made him more pukka than the English.

‘What’s the real issue? The corrupt Pashas of the Wafd government are hiding behind the British occupation. When you lot have been sent packing, the Wafd will be the next to go. They will all fight one another – the Commies, the fascist Young Egypt, the Free Officers, the Wafd, the bloated king. But, mark my words, the Muslim Brotherhood will be the beneficiaries of this bloodbath.’

Ailsa listened in a dream, not quite sober. Her mind was full of crackly chatter like sweeping waves of interference in an ill-tuned radio. Her glass was perpetually charged with wine but she didn’t notice the taste; her stomach was a sink. What the hell am I doing here amongst these people? None of it seemed real. For all the sincerity and sympathy of her welcome, Ailsa felt unhinged and all the fight had gone out of her since Nia had been removed. If only, when Joe had ordered her to go home, she’d gone quietly, taken Nia and boarded the aircraft for Brize Norton. They would be together. There’d have been some sort of a chance for herself and Joe. She missed her husband, home and child. Missed them till she burned with longing. Not Joe as he was now. The Joe he’d been before she defied him. It was so strange to know he’d finally handed over the quarter at El-Marah; that some other couple was sleeping and waking in their bed, eating at the well-scrubbed table and looking out through the windows that had framed the view for her family. Yet she
had seen it as a chicken coop and likened herself to one of the birds penned by Mrs Wintergreen.

Awakening in the night, Ailsa had for a moment imagined herself there in El-Marah, only to find herself in these fine cotton sheets, soft as silk, single in a narrow bed, the pillow damp with tears. Her face lay up against a wall. She’d switched on the lamp, feeling her husband’s absence. Missing the close intimate embrace that went on all night in your sleep, so that your soul did not need to patrol its perimeter.

She would go to Joe and ask his pardon.

But then surely the rage would well up again in herself. It wasn’t Joe’s anger she feared but her own. Only mourning was strong enough to suppress it – mourning for Nia as if her daughter had died.

Nobby Bowen took his leave. His wife and two of his sisters in law would be round later on that evening, one of them being Ailsa’s landlady-to-be with her little girl. The thought of lodging with a mother and child was a dagger in Ailsa’s heart. Struggling to appear involved in the conversation, she automatically accepted but did not drink a glass of brandy and water. Mona, why do you carpet your walls? she wondered. Ailsa had neither walls nor carpets, and how odd that lack seemed when you had never expected to feel the want of either. I possessed everything I needed, she thought, and I went and chucked it away. Oh well done, Ailsa. You’ve really surpassed yourself. She’d stranded herself in a strange country where at the best of times there were few obvious safety nets.

Mona was a displaced person. That was her constant theme, on which she harped day and night. But look at me, Ailsa silently told her. Are you worse off than I am?

He’d played dirty.

Ailsa could never have imagined or predicted that of Joe. Of
her
– Irene – of course one could believe anything. Irene was a besotted creature of loss. She could hardly be considered responsible for herself.

Joe had appeased Ailsa with emollient words; seemed reluctantly to concede to her plan to stay in Ish. He’d run the bath for her and even crumbled last Christmas’s bath salts in for a treat.
Now you have a nice long soak, cariad. Take your time
. Ailsa had steeped herself languorously in soft water and fragrance. She’d hummed to herself. She’d heard the house go silent, so perhaps father and child had taken a nap. When she’d finally emerged, swathed in a towel, a turban round her head, Ailsa knew at once there was no one in the house. So perhaps they’d gone out for a walk?

‘And not just mobs on the street either,’ the professor was still lecturing them. Egypt now had
jihad
battalions, trained in the Arab–Israeli War and determined not to repeat the fiasco of their easy defeat in the Sinai Desert. There’d be guerrilla freedom fighters in the Canal Zone, backed no doubt by the Soviets and armed with Kalashnikovs. It wasn’t just the British who’d have to look out. He predicted a reckoning day for all Europeans and outsiders: Greeks, Albanians, Levantines and of course the Jews who’d been not only tolerated but accepted as brothers through all these centuries. And even the Coptic Christians.

Ailsa thought again of Chalkie’s murder. That death had been the harbinger. And look what it had done to Irene. It had turned her into a parasite on another woman’s husband. It had caused her to abandon two little boys in
the Midlands and replace them with a girl she didn’t even particularly like, as far as Ailsa could see. What was there between Joe and Irene? Ailsa was unsure now.