Into Suez (37 page)

Her mother winced away. ‘Don’t, Nia, don’t touch. That’s a cold sore. You might catch it.’

A nasty, life-like doll Nia didn’t like came into her mind. Its eyes opened and shut when you put it down and picked it up and it cried if you pressed its chest. It had long curly lashes and peroxide hair. Hester, who could do a wee wee if you liked, which you didn’t, reminded Nia of Mrs Webster’s smelly baby who had dirtied a nappy with yellow-brown poop. That doll was supposed to be the pride of Nia’s life.
Your own little baby, darling!
She’d buried the doll in the sand and built a castle over it. And had forgotten it.

‘Any passengers at present on deck may be interested in seeing a flight of flamingos on the starboard side!’ the Captain announced over the tannoy. Nia raised her eyes to the birds, luminous pink against the sky. Their necks and heads with the great dredger-like yellow and black bills were stretched out in front; their orange legs trailed behind. The flock wheeled and turned in the blue air, a sight full of wonder. As one mind, it veered towards the canal’s west bank. Presently the Captain announced that the flamingos could now be seen on the port side, flying back the way they had come: everyone galloped across to view them.

But he must warn passengers, added the Captain, that not all the wildlife they would meet in the area would be as acceptable to them. The Timsah area is abundant in flies, he said. I have warned you.

As soon as he had said this, a man in Nia’s head came down from a great height and crouched beside her. His
eyes were smily and pale blue; his grin lop-sided. The man was holding a lemon-yellow canister of spray decorated with a huge picture of a fly with multiple eyes; a pump was on one end and a puffer on the other. He said the flies must all be killed with DDT.
Germs on their feet, see. No, it’s not nice, my beauty, but we must keep you safe
. Fly paper hung from the top of the window. Coughing and sneezing, eyes streaming, Nia fled from room to room but all rooms alike were full of stinky chemicals and she was running over a carpet of twitching flies.

The
Terra Incognita
would shortly be entering the narrow canal leading to Lake Timsah. Soon be there: Nia’s heart beat up.

It was too early to form a judgement on the murdered man, for murdered he had been, by the British State. It all came out in a rush: Nia could hear the tremor in Mona’s voice as she delivered this news. And yet Nia had always known, hadn’t she, in some unconscious way? Mona pointed across the turquoise waters to the western shore, marked by a hazy line of trees, saying ‘Joe’s grave is in the Fayid Military Cemetery, over there. And my husband is there also.’

Joe Roberts had killed Ben Jacobs. And shot a little girl, an Arab child, who’d lost three fingers through the attack. He’d been court-martialled, found guilty and executed. One of the last executions by the British on Egyptian soil. The bastard, the bastard, Nia thought. Why was Mona excusing him? Heba had been in the corner with her mother, directly behind him, Mona insisted; Joe simply didn’t see her there. He said he’d felt something butting at the back of his legs and he thought he was shooting a cat. And he was completely drunk.

‘But what is hard to put across, Nia, is that he loved you dearly. You were the apple of his eye.’

How Mona could talk about his loving her in the same breath as apologising for his injuring a child turned Nia’s stomach; her scalp crawled. You couldn’t call that an accident, like a car collision. Why would anyone shoot a cat anyway? Her father sounded a vile man. A racist. A drunk. A thug. No wonder Ailsa had never spoken of him. What had brought her to marry such a bastard? No wonder she had found it hard to love the bastard’s daughter.

Not much of a war hero, were you, she inwardly sneered. The shame that had tainted the Copsey household issued from this deed like a revolting smell that had followed mother and daughter wherever they went. It slimed their hearth with invisible pollution and they had both lived as if they were guilty of having caused it, randomly accusing one another of unrelated offences. They weren’t guilty.
He
was. She thought of Ailsa coming in from endlessly polishing those vintage motor bikes she kept in the old barn and never rode; she’d scour specks of oil from her hands and forearms with a scrubbing brush, as if about to perform an operation. Slender hands with immaculate nails like ellipses. Clean as they were, she’d lather and rinse all over again, turning her hands this way and that in the light until she was satisfied. Having dried and creamed them, she’d gather up her rings from the window sill in that careful way she had: her wedding ring, the diamond engagement ring and one ring that was not Archie’s. Nia had known of course that it had belonged to her father, the war hero.

Nia recalled a characteristic action of her mother’s, long-forgotten. Ailsa would kiss the rings, with the mouth that was silent as the grave about the past, as she replaced them on her fingers. It had been a little ritual. Had she forgiven Nia’s father then, in her heart?
Oh poor Mami, what did you go through without any help?

Not strictly true. For Archie had been there: it always seemed to Nia that Archie had been there from the beginning. Certainly he knew it all. He was the kind of man made happy almost exclusively by having power to create happiness in the other. Well, he had not been able to do that for Ailsa but he’d known himself necessary to his wife. How quietly he’d kept watch, patrolling her borders. When she got home, Nia could talk it all through with him. Archie would break the silence now. The thought of this conversation rolled the stone from the tomb. She could have wept now but, from long practice, held back the tears.

‘What are you thinking?’ Mona asked.

‘I don’t know what to think. If only she’d told me. I deserved to know. I could have helped her. She must have destroyed the goodbye letters Joe wrote in prison. Tell me everything you can remember, Mona. Please.’

Nia learned that there’d been a debate about whether such a criminal could or should be buried in consecrated ground. In those days the laws against witchcraft had still been on the statute books. There had been all sorts of links back to the remote and superstitious Middle Ages: codes of shame and deference were more medieval than democratic. So Mona said and Nia believed her. In the end the Air Force had agreed to bury Joe Roberts in consecrated ground but lying at an angle to the other
bodies. It was this detail that lacerated Nia and opened her to Joe, turning her emotion in its tracks.

Well then, you paid your debt. The more they abandoned you, the more I turn to you, she told her father in her heart.

The bank slipped past as they moved through the Great Bitter Lake, leaving Joe’s resting place at Fayid far behind; they passed the Big Flea, a far-off ochre mound shining in golden air, the only feature you could call a hill on this level landscape.

Strange scenes floated before Nia’s eyes. Herself and that wretched golliwog standing on a bed at a wire netting window looking through a mesh grid at an Arab walking deeper and deeper into the desert. The Arab was a grave and dignified figure. He moved without hurry. And whether it had just been just the once that she watched him, or repeatedly, or whether there had been just the one man, or she had made him up, Nia could not tell. She saw him now as if in a film, moving with a certain slow and impressive dignity, until he vanished into the horizon. But where was he going? What was out there for him that he could see and she could not? Nia leaned forward till she was looking straight down into the canal, to where it heaved and slid back against the side of the ship.

For a moment, Nia had drawn level with the dead on this ship, whose forward motion was imperceptible and mimed stasis. We do come abreast of our dead, she thought, and then we overtake you. I am older than you ever were, Joe.

Ahead the container ship led them forward at a snail’s pace. Morning was turning into afternoon. Nia fetched sandwiches and tea from the Lido, where Poppy had been sunbathing. As they ate, Nia tried to turn the conversation. She’d heard enough for the moment: it had to sink in. But
Mona would not let the topic drop. For decades she’d been waiting to get this off her chest and would not be gainsaid.

‘Joe was not a vile man. Get that out of your head at once, do. Joe was a lovely man. Your mother loved him dearly. He deeply loved her.’

‘You say that in spite of everything?’

‘I do. You need to understand the times, to judge him.’

‘You’ll have to convince me of that.’

Mona had gone to visit Joe in prison – the first and last real talk she ever had with him. Mona had put out her hands to Nia’s father and it had felt strange to touch the hands of Ailsa’s husband – whom she’d injured, she’d wronged. She’d told him:
It was an accident, Joe, when it came to it. You did not mean to shoot Ben. I saw that
.

‘So why the hell did he bring a gun then? If he wasn’t thinking of shooting anyone?’

‘To threaten us. He was drunk. Your father was not a killer.’

‘But what made you visit him? My father had killed your husband.’

‘Because I saw it all. I saw exactly what happened. The truth is no less the truth because one is personally involved. I testified for your father at the court martial. I believed well of Joe, Nia. And perhaps less well of myself. You know,’ she said arrogantly, ‘I have always had charisma. I eclipsed him.’

Presumably Mona had borne witness for Ailsa’s sake. All very well to act high-minded and talk about abstract Truth. But was Mona, with her vaunted
charisma
and presumably a life-time of making people fall in love with her, really so very high-minded? Perhaps she had not loved her own husband. Clearly she was reluctant to talk about him. What
had been the nature of the bond between Ailsa and Mona? What was the power Mona had exercised over Nia’s mother? A form of coercion it must have been, the coercion exercised by a powerful intellect and will, allied to a quality of attraction one still felt radiating from the woman. Displaced in every possible world, Mona was insecure and insecuring. Impossible to imagine the diligently correct Ailsa ever stepping out of line. For, yes, she believed in class, didn’t she? Slavishly, as Nia had taunted her. But presumably Ailsa had fallen back on this belief after her challenge had not only failed but led to carnage.

Time was awry. The
Terra Incognita
was sailing far too slowly. Suspicions of grey mist settled on both banks and the sun began to dip and redden. As the light seeped away, it was unclear whether the convoy would complete its transit by daylight after all. Nia kept on hoping, willing the ship forward. Hints of twilight darkened the water and shrouded the banks in smoky purple and pink. Only the Sinai on the east bank still shone, a bleached primrose yellow fading to silver-white as the cruiser inched forward.

Lake Timsah, when they reached it, was bruise-blue; the light just about held, illuminating Ismailia on the northern bank. The delicate structures of mosques, tall towers of apartment blocks, advertisement hoardings and the green beauty of the garden city slid nearer.

The
Terra Incognita
glided across the lake, and in the gloaming the war memorial on the east bank appeared, a giant scimitar commemorating the heroic Egyptian dead of the October War of 1973. On a concrete plinth stood a host of Egyptian visitors, eking out the dying light to look out across the Sinai –
their
Sinai, for which so much blood had been shed. A giant scimitar rose into the air,
encircled by palm trees and a captured Israeli tank. The scimitar marked the moment when Egypt, humiliated by Israel’s occupation of the Sinai, struck back at its enemy. The October War. Egypt had crossed the supposedly uncrossable canal with assault craft, commandos and bombardments, and demolished the hated Bar-Lev Line, fortified observation posts on sand ramparts along the canal. How calm the city looked as they neared it, the fishermen standing up in their boats to wave and call out to the Europeans. Family groups wandering beneath palm and eucalyptus trees or seated at round tables waved to the liner from the green shores of Ish. Off-duty soldiers idled along the bank in couples, rifles slung casually over their shoulders. Many-coloured washing hung like bunting from a thousand tower block windows. The passengers on the
Terra Incognita
were out photographing the welcoming Egyptians, who in turn were photographing them.

Two men, one white, one Arab, jumped up and down on a jetty, waving and obviously yelling. The large, paunchy white guy in a forget-me-not blue shirt and a red baseball cap was positively bouncing. The passengers laughed and pointed. Poppy put her binoculars to her eyes.

‘Oh my God,’ she said.

It could not be, but was, Topher.

They waved back. The whole ship waved back. As they drew away, Nia’s mobile rang.

‘Ha! Gave you a surprise there. This is Bahgat, my driver. He’s from Istanbul but he’s lived here for yonks. Wave, Bahgat. The lanky lady with ginger hair is my old pal, Nia. The dark beauty is her daughter.’ Bahgat waved exuberantly. They waved back. ‘But is
she
with you, Nia? I can’t see an old lady.’

‘Shush, Topher … Mona is standing beside me here. What on earth are you doing? I thought you said you were coming aboard in Alex?’

‘I am. Aren’t you pleased to see me? I’m touring. Seeing for myself. Listen, Bahgat is going to take me to Alex and then he’s at our disposal. I thought we might nip over to El Alamein – and then, what do you think about staying on for a week in the land of our fathers, Nia?’

‘What –
Wales
?’

‘No, you clown. Ish. I’ll spirit you away to the real Egypt,’ he said rather grandly. ‘You’re not going to see anything from that imperialist colonialist hedonist heap of junk. Are you? Bahgat will bring us back here and pay our respects to our dads. About time, eh? I’m going to do this for mum. My driver – my good
friend
rather, aren’t you Bahgat?’ and he whispered,
‘comes very cheap.’

The ship eased its way past the harbour and into the canal. Past the president’s holiday villa they sailed towards El Ferdan and the famous swing bridge. Dark swooped down. They could not see the bridge. It was cold and pitch black. Disappointed, the veterans went below for supper and when they reappeared, the ship was far out on the moonlit Mediterranean, past Port Said.

Bahgat drove like a man possessed through the streets of Alex, his palm thumping the horn, cheerful and theatrical. He dodged and wove through vehicles laden with humans, livestock and baggage, all jostling bumper to bumper. Pedestrians wandered blindly and at their leisure into this blaring chaos. Riding up on the pavement, Bahgat engineered a moment’s cunning advantage, just missing a
donkey cart as he dismounted and headed with squealing tyres for an invisible break in the traffic. Presumably he knew what he was doing, Nia thought, looking out of the window at the squalid, rubbish-strewn streets that were alive with shoppers and sellers and old men seated outside shops in the midst of the throng.