Into Suez (4 page)

In the reassuring hubbub of women’s and children’s voices, she chatted to an Irene and a Hedwig, one of the German brides the boys had brought home after the war. The Allies had been forbidden to fraternise with the defeated enemy in his – and her – misery. But how could they fail to fraternise? A word too sexless for what was bound to happen. The boy-soldiers were young and human, and once the killing had ceased, how could they be otherwise than on the side of life and sex and birth – and of pity? Ailsa dreaded to think what Hedwig’s married life had been like, stranded amongst the insular, Jerry-hating English. She itched to try out some of her German.

‘Chopsticks’ echoed from the piano, an out-of-tune grand of all things. Mona craned and said it was a Blüthner, concert grand, the real thing, taken over presumably with the vessel from the German
Kriegsmarine
.

‘Do you play?’ Ailsa asked her.

‘Not nowadays, no, I don’t,’Mona said dismissively, and without asking whether Ailsa played. Ailsa didn’t like to boast. She smiled down at Nia, who was being good as gold.

Nia snuggled against her mother’s arm, thumb in mouth, her admiration and pride unreserved. No one else had this mother, only Nia. And she didn’t have to share her. This soft-haired lady, willowy and tall, with the special clean smell even under her arms, the shirt-waisted blue dress decorated with flowers in white circles. This one and only. Nia’s, forever.

‘We’ll have singsongs on the voyage, I’ve no doubt,’ Babs said. ‘Look at your daughter, Mrs Roberts. She’s
eaten up half her bread while you weren’t looking. There’s a good girl, dear. You see, you
were
hungry, after all!’

Nia glared. She’d been playing a game of pinching the triangles of bread into moist particles between thumb and finger. The rhythm of the game had been soothing and she was put out at the interruption. Having unconsciously fed herself the bread, Nia was annoyed to have her conformity exposed.
Spoilt brat
, women’s expressions said. Babs proposed to make tracks: tombola and a drinkie later for the grown-ups. Her daughters whined and thumped off flat-footedly in her wake. Nia’s face said,
Bossy
. Then she could be seen to think,
Big Bum
, as Mrs Brean turned to shepherd her flock to the cabin. She grinned over her cocoa. Love for Ailsa brimmed.

‘You got cocoa all round your mouth, Mami,’ she said, and with a forefinger gently drew a mirroring outline round her own lips. ‘A moustache.’ She added, thoughtfully, ‘
Darling
.’

‘You have a pearl, Ailsa,’ said Mona. ‘A little pearl. I’m so glad we caught up with one another.’

Eyebrows twitched as the ragamuffin received this fulsome praise. Ailsa dabbed cocoa away from Nia’s mouth, proud that Mona saw her daughter’s quality. Not everyone did. To be frank, she didn’t always. Nia could be so odd. But in Mona’s world, ‘odd’ was good, or likely to be. ‘Even’ was dull and despicable. Ailsa prepared to tell Joe what Mona had said.
You know the lady on the troopship, Joe? She told me Nia was a pearl
.

The pearl was put to bed with the others in the cabin. She settled down happily after their whispered prayers, the
mothers taking turns to babysit. The released women applied lipstick and left for the deck.

Ailsa watched the pale wake ploughed by the ship in the blackness of the sea. The quiet, nervous Irene stood with Ailsa at the rail, wringing lilac gloved hands as she stared homeward. Ailsa asked how her boys were: two white-blond seraphs who kept close to their mother, attached wherever she went, impeding progress. What an immaculate family they were, all appearing just-ironed. Irene White seemed a woman created out of fear, detecting germs on cup lips, kiddies’ fingers, taps. She gazed plaintively at Ailsa and spoke of the worrying state of the lavatories. Christopher and Timothy had gone off to sleep,
rather against their better judgement
, she said, with a small reserved smile. When Mona appeared with her husband, Irene shrank from the towering officer and could scarcely speak.

Ailsa smiled into dark, diffident eyes: the Wing Commander stooped and slouched as if in pathological apology for his outlandish height. Older than Mona, fortyish perhaps? In love with her from the crown of her head to her toes. He deferred unashamedly to his wife. Ailsa liked him for that. Dark rippling hair, very thick and bushy: she could just hear Joe murmuring,
Hair cut, you!
He looked Jewish. Of course, that would be it: Mona must be Jewish too.
Call me Ben
. How did a high ranking officer not know that she couldn’t possibly? The Wing Commander was a medic, a psychologist. His
unkemptness
was truly breathtaking: shirt button open at the neck, a general air of unruly sweetness. Something to do with status, no doubt; no one could call a high-ranking officer to account and demand that he adopt a military bearing.

‘Surely you recognize Ailsa,
Habibi
?’ Mona said. ‘The gorgeous girl on the motorbike. You do, of course you do.’

He didn’t and neither did the blond conscript officer, Alex, although both had been frequent visitors at the Old Brewery, among the young men tumbling in and out of love with Ailsa’s neighbours. Free love, Ailsa had supposed, fascinated, mildly scandalised. For in those days she’d half expected to settle for poor Archie in the end and go home to her cousin, the Quaker Meeting and the warmly humdrum farm. The patrician young men at the Old Brewery had fascinated Ailsa: they all seemed to upset each other terribly, and to need to discuss it and make it worse. Disturbance rolled round like
thunderstorms
. It was always the end of the world – or the dawn of a new age. Occasionally a couple of sensitive but combative young philosophers would be heard in passionate debate through the open window, about Plato, as they claimed, but really about some girl they both loved. Their friendships with one another also seemed lived on the level of romance: an eros presumably without sensuality, as in Shakespeare’s sonnets to his Young Man.

The bombs fell and the skyline glowed with fire. Houses were reduced to rubble or left standing like shattered obelisks, landmarks on which, as years between the Blitz and the doodlebugs passed, grass and purple fireweed rooted. The high-ranking boy officers went off to be maimed or die in Libya or Albania. And their poetry went with them.

‘We’re taking turns to keep watch over the kiddies,’ Mona told her husband. ‘It’s first watch now. Then we’ve got second. So we can’t stick around later than nine.’

‘Oh but
you
don’t have to, Mona,’ Ailsa said.

‘Maybe, but I want to.’

Winy gaiety sparkled. It was an adventure, a lark, after all, going East. It pepped Ailsa up as if a route had opened up back to the daredevil despatch girl, licensed to break the Highway Code and mount the pavement if necessary. Back then any evening might have been your last. The ruins stank of rotting flesh; teemed with fresh ghosts. So you’d give life a run for its money. What wouldn’t Ailsa Birch have given for a chance to sail to the Orient, in the wake of all the Memsahibs and diplomats, civil servants and engineers, pukka worthies and unworthies?

An odd little scene took place in the women’s mess, around the concert grand. The Wing Commander coaxed his wife to sit on the piano stool and try out the instrument.
Go on, darling. Just for me
. Mona’s face closed up. She sat stiffly and rested her fingers on the keys. Ailsa, aware of a painful pause, saw her lip quivering and thought:
Oh no, she’s going to cry
. She slid on to the stool beside Mona.

‘Squeeze up,
cariad
,’ she said, as easily as if the obscurely suffering girl had been a large-scale version of Nia. ‘Let’s try a duet.’

Not to shine in the company of a concert pianist, however rusty, came as no dishonour to the star pupil, Grade 8, of Mr Ernest Beaver at the Abbey Grammar School, Shrewsbury. They romped through a bagatelle and tangled fingers over a Mozart duet with impromptu syncopations. By and by Ailsa withdrew and let Mona storm into Beethoven’s
Hammerklavier
: a stunning parody of it, rather, for the out-of-tune instrument boomed and jangled. Through soft passages throbbed the engine of the
Empire Glory
.

The Wing Commander, taking over, thundered out fistfuls of notes in a boogie woogie, standing with a fag hanging from his mouth, swaying from hip to hip, and Alex jived with Mona, then with Ailsa. Then Mona played and the men danced together, a sultry smooching tango that made Ailsa’s stomach ache with laughter. Now she was in the Wing Commander’s arms. He curled her up, unfurled her, and Ailsa, loose and pliant as a rag doll, fell wherever she was thrown. She twisted and turned, her skirts belled, until she became conscious of women in the back of the room and a scatter of clapping. The room was required for tombola. Sweating and exhilarated, Ailsa sensed the women’s eyes on stalks and all the stalks pointing in her direction. So what?

Through the pale grid of her lashes, Nia watched her mother and the new dark auntie. She rubbed with one finger the patch of Teddy’s hair that had gone bald with kissing. The ventilator went Ooh-Ah.

The two women were sitting knee to knee on the next bunk. Whispering. Nia heard the blessed names
Archie
and
Joe
. Saw them touch glasses of yellow stuff like egg shampoo smelling of cough mixture.
Cheers! Iechyd da!
Prost!
Mona’s big strong hand seemed like her own daddy’s hand on the end of a lady’s arm. Odd as this appeared, it was also good, and she allowed it.
Call him
Habibi, everyone does, it means Sweetheart
. Nia dropped off again, under the spell of the rhythm of the whispering, to and fro, to and fro, until the two voices vanished into the Ooh-Ah of the ventilator and became one voice. 

Mona Serafin-Jacobs, Nia thought. Stalking Mona. Her stomach turned over. She looked across the aisle to check on her daughter: fast asleep, thank goodness. Poppy, who hated flying, had gone green as the plane took off from Manchester for Aqaba; her magazine lay unread in her lap.

Now Nia was free to gnaw on the bone of Dr Mona Serafin-Jacobs.

Twenty-odd years ago, after mother’s death, cards from Stalking Mona kept on coming. She never gave up. She’d apparently written many times every year after they’d gone their separate ways. Ailsa had kept the lot in the box. It had not deterred Mona that Ailsa never responded with a proper letter, contenting herself with a polite annual card. From each card Stalking Mona had sucked all the juice and manufactured extra from her own imagination. She’d reminisced copiously about London in the Blitz. Mona’s handwriting was an assertive and characterful italic script, which chased itself across the page, each
word linked by a threadlike tie to the next, loops like nooses. It didn’t take no for an answer.

Well, it had bloody well had to.

Scanning the latest letter on her stepfather’s behalf, a couple of months after her mother’s death, Nia had resented the tone of insinuating intimacy with a black dislike that was out of proportion really, but then everything was out of proportion where Nia and Ailsa were concerned. Sometimes Nia had wished her mother dead. But when your mother dies, the sun sets behind the mountain and never rises; the eternal dies that day. Poppy, at eighteen months old, had given Nia the will to live. Against the tide of a profound reluctance whose origin she took care not to examine, and because Archie seemed saddened beyond measure when the letters kept coming, Nia had eventually got round to informing the creature of Ailsa’s death.

The creature was a concert pianist of world stature. On her record sleeves one saw a strong, melancholy face with full lips and striking eyebrows. Her dark hair was coloured with henna and kohl rimmed her nearly black eyes. It turned out that Ailsa hadn’t kept Stalking Mona informed about her life: she’d not bothered to mention her remarriage to Nia’s step-dad and the two boys. So Mona Serafin-Jacobs had addressed her mam all those years as ‘Mrs Ailsa Roberts’. How typical of Ailsa to withhold vital information.

Dear Dr Serafin-Jacobs
, Nia had written.
I am sorry to have to tell you … Something like that
.

Dear Nia
– came the reply,
I am more grieved than I can say to hear of your mother’s death. I had learned (though not directly from Ailsa) of her remarriage and her two sons
.
May I ask you, Nia: how has your life been? You see, although it is a quarter of a century since I saw you, I recall you so well – you are etched upon my memory. If there is anything I can ever do for you and yours – anything – please let me know. And I would love to see you again
.

She had signed herself:
Ever, Mona.

Visceral inertia had stayed Nia’s hand. Nia had neither replied with a letter nor responded to the request that she phone, nor, God forbid, that they meet. She’d left it till now to get properly in touch. But cards had kept flocking in to herself, every birthday and Christmas, with a handwritten note enclosed, as if Nia had somehow or other been doomed to inherit the burden of her mother’s adorer.

The name
Mona
in Ailsa’s journal carried a sickening resonance. Nia had no memories of that woman. But in the act of reading the name, she seemed to see a dark, dramatic face emerge from a mist, nothing like the forbidding mask on the record sleeve: vivacious, reckless. Forcing itself up too close. Swooping down, snatching her up, breathing on her face with a licorice scent. Nia had a sense of – whatever was it? – something she could only think of as
boundless cruelty
. Even so, Nia had never realised Mona’s importance until Ailsa’s journal came into her hands. The existence of the green notebooks gave her no peace. She read in fragments: shards that penetrated her heart and stuck there festering.

The young Ailsa was not the mam she knew. Nia recognised herself all right, a horrid, boisterous,
attention-seeking
little madam. Deep down she was still the only child she’d been then, proclaiming and defending the unique bond that attached her to her mother’s heart, for
it could so easily be forfeit. Had she detected that danger so young? The leaves of the green journal with its neatly forward-sloping handwriting imprinted on Nia a fresh signature of loss. She’d rarely felt secure in a relationship. No sooner had she begun to love, truly love, Poppy’s father than she’d gone cold on him. He will change. Something namelessly bad will happen. If I love him. If I let myself. Yet Jude and she had become excellent friends over the years and that meant something to her and everything to Poppy.

The journal paper had scarcely aged: it might have been written last week. Nia struggled in the web of handwriting. It was like falling in love, she thought, with a thousand misgivings, in love with a fresh Ailsa, hungry for life and craving adventure. More akin to a sister than to the mother she remembered. Actually, Nia thought, as the window whitened with cloud and the plane entered a phase of turbulence, the young Ailsa really was rather like me, wasn’t she? She must have understood. And, if so, she’d have feared for me in my wild days.

There’d been no question, when the chance of the cruise came up, but that Nia must follow her young mother into Egypt, leaving the older Ailsa in the green shires of the Marches.
I’m coming
, she’d promised her.
Wait for me
.

Mona Serafin-Jacobs was still, at eighty-something, giving rare recitals; she was scheduled to play Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto with SOPH, the Symphony Orchestra of Palestinian Harmony. Nia had written to her care of her agent:
My daughter Poppy and I expect to be in Ismailia on 6th October
. She’d trembled as she typed the invitation and dropped it in the post box at Craven Arms. No going back.
She’d brought the journals to show to Poppy and perhaps to Mona, for there were questions only this woman could answer. This thought filled Nia with exquisite disquiet. Already she understood things about Mona that Ailsa had totally missed. Politically, the young Ailsa was a complete simpleton. How could her mother have been so naïve?
I was born in Jerusalem
, Mona had said.
What does that tell you?
Ailsa hadn’t a clue what she was getting into. Only a year before the
Empire Glory
docked, the struggle between East and West had exploded. The Israeli state had risen at the heart of the Arab Muslim world, and that world could not abide it, not then, not now, not ever. Our modern reality was being born in fratricidal carnage, Nia thought, while you sailed blithely into the eye of the storm, Ailsa, innocent as a babe, your picture-book Bible as your
guidebook
, as witness your answer to Mona’s question,
What does that tell you?
Not a clue.

Poppy opened her eyes and stretched. ‘Are we there yet?’ she yawned, in parody of her plaintive childhood question. She reached out to touch Nia’s hand, across the aisle, and smiled.

‘Nearly there,
cariad
,’ lied Nia. Through the porthole, she could see the
papier maché
mountains of Italy, silver with snow. They’d be boarding a cruise ship at Aqaba, the
Terra Incognita,
to sail through the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal to Port Said and thence Alexandria.

‘I was born in Jerusalem. What does that tell you?’

That you’re Jewish
, Ailsa thought.
Obviously. I’ve worked
that out already.

The two of them rested
cwtched-up
, as Joe would have
said, on the bunk, drinking gin like old friends. Unused to spirits, Ailsa grew squiffy, then dozy. Her head lolled against the pillow and Mona’s shoulder. At her throat Mona had a chain with a silver ornament attached; her fingers constantly played with it.

‘What’s that round your neck?’

‘The key to our house in Qatamon. The side entrance.’

‘It’s pretty. Where is Qatamon, Mona?’

‘A suburb of Jerusalem. I was two and a bit when we were driven out.’

‘Driven out?’

‘In the run-up to the so-called Arab Revolt. Between the Wars, during the British Mandate. I don’t remember any of the violence. But I do remember our house, at least I think I do. Do you think Nia will remember things that are happening now? Will she remember this ship? Perhaps it’s not my own memory but some sort of composite family memory. Anyway I wouldn’t lose it for the world.’

Ailsa learned that Mona’s father had been murdered by mistake for another Serafin. Her mother had fled with Mona and her brother. First to Lebanon, then to Cairo, and from there to relatives in London.

‘I never speak about this. Even to myself.’

‘Don’t if it’s painful.’

‘No, I want to, Ailsa. So you’ll know.’

In her teens Mona had been sent to Brussels to study piano, while her brother, the violinist, had emigrated to America. She’d come back to London eighteen months or so before the war, tail between her legs. It had not been a success. But then life had looked up! In a very big way. A year at Cambridge reading Greats, then Brewers’ Green and the girls and Ben. And now
you
, Ailsa!

Ashamed of her ignorance, Ailsa let the moment go by when she could have asked why the Serafins, Jews in Jerusalem, had been driven out of their own city. And why, now that the state of Israel existed, they couldn’t return. Israel had opened the gates for massive immigration, Ailsa knew
that
: a thousand Jews a day were flocking home to the Holy Land. From the ends of the earth. The ancient Exodus was at last reversed. The remnant of Europe’s persecuted Jews could find a place to lay their heads. So why not the Serafins?

Mona was describing a white veranda: when you stepped out in the morning before the heat got up, its cool tiles were delicious under your bare feet. Her window at Qatamon had looked out on an apricot tree and an orange tree.
Our
tabby and her kittens basked in their shade. Ailsa felt saturated with the light and colour of Mona’s memories and with their sadness, as if they constituted a dream of her own.

The cat had been called Petra. A fat, overfed creature, purring like a motor.

We had to leave her there. Under the tree. But I never speak about this
.

That meant: don’t ask questions. I will tell you what I can. Mona said the women of her family had been strong people. Obliged to be. Resourceful and flexible and inventive. They’d had to learn other languages and customs, transplanting themselves in different soils. Every new language clashed against the others until you absorbed it and each in turn seemed to be Mona’s first language, or equal first. Or they bled confusingly into one another. Tower of Babel in here, she said, tapping her head, confusion of tongues. That’s how it is with nomads.
Never a dull moment. All the borders in the world seemed to run through her like rivers.

But Mona was happy now again. Radiantly happy. She had a pal from a golden time. No mention was made of the piano. What had that been about? Something to do with being a refugee, Ailsa thought. She was squiffy and had to be helped into her bunk.

Next day Mona’s bunk was empty. They’d all been sick as dogs in the Bay of Biscay but things were calmer now. Ailsa, with a pounding headache, went over to Mona’s bunk and turned down the sheet. Nightie gone. Wash-bag gone. She’d been
taken
. Who had taken her? Don’t be silly, of course she hadn’t. Ailsa slowly began to dress and made her way up on deck.

Sky and sea were dazzlingly blue, the breezy sun warm on her face and arms. A handful of hardy folk had already clambered out of the misery in the ship’s belly and lay on deck chairs soaking up the sun. It was another world, a holiday place. One could dimly see grey-green land over the sea-shimmer. And a white-coated waiter approaching with tea and biscuits.

The German woman lay fast asleep on a deck chair, pale hair tucked under a scarf, a cardigan draped round her shoulders. Ailsa sat down beside her, sipped sweet tea, nibbled a sugary biscuit. The quiet was bliss; the fresh air tonic. A book lay open on Hedwig’s lap, its pages whispering as the breeze turned them over one by one, unread.

When Hedwig yawningly awoke, Ailsa couldn’t resist exercising her beloved German:
‘Guten Morgen, Frau Webster. Ein richtig schöner Tag, nicht wahr?’
Hedwig’s eyes were puffy. You’ve been crying, Ailsa thought, as her
neighbour hoisted herself up in the chair and removed her sun glasses for a moment, to rub her eyes.

‘Guten Morgen, Frau Roberts. Sie sprechen also Deutsch?’

‘Kleines Bißchen.’

Hedwig came from Hamburg. Her husband had met her in the ruins. He had saved her from bad things. Taken her to safety.

She did not look as though she felt safe. It came out that the ladies in her cabin, all but
Frau
Irene White, had treated Hedwig as if she were personally responsible for the swastikas on the sheets. Hedwig had never been one of
them
, she was blameless, surely that was clear? She was a British citizen, she said. She did not complain that her younger brothers and her best friend had been cremated in the firestorm. For this vile bombing might have been a necessary evil. But it should be known that her parents had been persecuted –
verfolgt
, she said – by the Gestapo.

That was what they all said, of course. Me a Nazi, an anti-Semite, an informer? Perish the thought! But in some cases – many – it must also be true. How could you know? Ailsa, embarrassed, murmured that she was sure no one really thought that, of course not, not in their heart of hearts.

They did, of course. The master race turns on the stranger in its midst. And who was the master race now?

Hedwig, encouraged by Ailsa’s mild sympathy, was soon in full spate. The way she talked, those swastikas described British bullying as well as Jerry’s. A
Reich
and an Empire: what’s the difference? Not that she said this in so many words – but Ailsa heard it. Steady on, whoa, she thought. That cap does
not
fit. We are pretty decent after
all. She was glad to break the contact when Irene and her two small sons came up on deck and Mrs Grey arrived with Nia, sucking her thumb and dangling her golliwog. Taking Ailsa aside, Mrs Grey explained that the Captain had had a discreet word with Wing Commander Jacobs. His
lady
had been persuaded to return to the officers’ deck, for the convenience of everyone. She felt Mrs Roberts would like to know this, for she had been placed in a situation that was simply invidious.