Into Suez (9 page)

‘
Are
they?’ she demanded.

‘Are who what?’

‘Those Arabs. Have we got to watch them?’

‘Those are nice, harmless Arabs,’ he assured her. ‘Not nasty ones.’

‘How can you tell?’

He was stymied. ‘Oh, well, they look nice and peaceful, don’t they?’

‘Yes.’ Nia craned round and said, ‘Daddy.’

‘Yes, my beauty.’

‘Where is my Auntie Mona?’

‘Well, I expect she had to go to her own home, didn’t she, with her husband.’

‘My Uncle Ben.’ They get fond of people, he thought. A fortnight at sea and any kind face seems like blood-kin: how could it not? But they forget quickly. He slipped a sweetie to each of the children indefatigably fanning Ailsa. A flock of six now, he saw, including Chalkie’s ash-blond boys, two and four years old. Dear little chaps, burly and solemn. Sweet and touching it was to see their solemn industriousness as it was to see how happy Chalkie was, hand in hand with his quiet Irene, his thin face wreathed in smiles, putting his hand up to his mouth as if to wipe away the grin.

The
fellaheen
stood in full sunlight on the plinths of shadows equally majestic and seemed to say: in what way have we provoked or offended you? Please enlighten us. What precisely was the reception you expected when you came to our country? They were looking up the line with patience, as if waiting was nothing; they had been born to wait; had been waiting now for centuries, for millennia. They’d have a long wait yet if they were expecting a train
to come down that line, Joe thought. Your terrorist brothers have cut it.

One of the black-clad women looked up and smiled. A ravishing smile. Smiling for me? Joe wondered, reddening. They didn’t generally. And you didn’t look at them for fear of causing an international incident. But no, he had intercepted a smile meant for Nia, who was waving.

Here came a punkah-wallah, to join in the epic fanning of Ailsa. His large fan and the breeze it made dwarfed the children’s. They speeded up, arms beating like insect wings.

‘Is he a nice Arab, that one?’ Nia asked.

‘Shush, Nia. No need to keep asking that. Yes, he’s cooling down Mami’s face lovely, isn’t he?’

He put Nia in the way of benefiting from the breeze and gave her and Ailsa some sips of water. She was reviving; thanked the punkah-wallah apologetically. The old man nodded and his face crinkled up into a map of wrinkles. Ailsa said, ‘It is so kind.’

‘You don’t have to thank the punkah-wallah, dearie,’ Paul Brean’s wife explained. ‘That’s what he’s for.’

‘Hallo, lady,’ said Nia. She hunkered down to be on a level and became chatty and pleasant. ‘How are you today? Where do you live?’

The dark liquid eyes looked back with a small smile. The lady was beautiful, very young, like a pearl on a black velvet cushion.

Nia reached out and touched the curve of the lady’s cheek. The lady seemed astonished, almost shaken. She put up her hand and touched the spot the white girl had
caressed and, as she did so, the sleeve of the black robe fell back to reveal slender metal bangles that chinked and gleamed a secret song as they slid up her arm.

What had they got in their baskets? Nia asked them, and pointed one at a time to the good things they had no larder for. Bread, she told them: say after me. Bray-eed. Well done! Melon. Cheese. Very good! You can speak English, can’t you, now? Flies cruised and landed on the good things, and were seen off by the women’s indefatigable hands flapping. Nia contemplated the bare feet they had no shoes for. She asked the old granny next to her lady where her teeth were. Had she lost them? And she peeked at a silent baby shrouded in a black shawl that engulfed both its mother and itself. Was it dead? It didn’t move or cry.

A basket was piled with melons like green footballs. One had been cut open: the succulent pink flesh of its insides gleamed in the sun. Nia’s mouth watered. She put out one finger to touch the gash where the juice shone.

‘Great Scott!’ came a chorus of voices, and ‘Come away this minute!’ and ‘Don’t put that filth anywhere near your mouth!’

That dreamy moment when the helicopter vaulted into the air recalled the childhood passion for flight, when
tree-climbing
was not enough. You craved more. Wanted it so badly that swan wings branched their quills from your shoulder blades and you rose with a thunderclap above your friends in the street, their envious faces uptilted to marvel at the power of the bird boy, above the slate-roofed terrace, until Trewyddfa Hill spread out beneath Joe and the gleaming Tawe and the belching steelwork chimneys.

Ground staff had all too few chances to fly. Joe, and the young naval pilot sat in the cockpit of the wartime two-seater helicopter, a baby of a creature, the first of the Dragonfly models, beautiful workmanship. Skimming and manoeuvring low above water, you felt how it earned its name. All flight was learned from birds and insects. They were the marvels of creation, not us.
A reward for your night’s work, Taf
: a helicopter recce was a joy like no other. A bubble blown into the air, windows all around
you, transparent. Thirty-six hours Joe had been awake, testing and tuning the engines of the four Dragonflies they’d grounded for inspection at Shallufa. Checks made, the engine roared sweetly, the rotors spun. Away they sped over the desert sands, tawny brightening to amber.

Dawn painted the Bitter Lake violet and flamingo pink. Travelling north, Joe skimmed RAF Kabrit, where
pale-skinned
airmen in vests were pounding the runway perimeter in the merciful dawn cool, one-two, one-two; a Lancaster bomber was refuelling on the tarmac and you could see, not just the upturned faces of the guards with their rifles on the command tower, but their grins as they waved. The Dragonfly’s shadow billowed to immense proportions in the early light, a crazily comic insect of mighty dimensions.

From a jetty at Fanara a Gyppo was fishing and as they passed, Joe watched the gleaming line twitch as the fisherman hauled in a handsome lute. It thrashed in his hands. And was stilled as the fisherman stunned it on the jetty. Blood-red eyes, silver scales. A beauty that would feed a family for a week.

The Pharaohs had understood the principles of flight, Joe was convinced. At Sakkara he’d spotted what was surely a scale model of a glider, mislabelled a bird (but what bird has a notch for a tail-plane?), made of sycamore light as the balsa models of his childhood, his pride and joy. If you’d launched the Pharaoh’s model as Nia threw the paper gliders they made together, the ancient model would have flown yards. For sure. Their engineers knew things we hadn’t caught up with for thousands of years. Like us they’d observed birds in flight and studied the principles. Perhaps they’d got off the ground themselves:
who could say? And yet the Gyppos had settled for backwardness and mud. Mushrooms of black smoke rose from the dung fires of a village which was no more than a jumble of mud huts roofed with reeds.

Boats were out, practically a fleet. The white triangles of their sails caught the calm breezes of dawn in gracious curves, stained with carmine from the rising sun. Joe had a sense of the eternity of it all down there: nothing had changed for thousands of years. Nothing would change. The desert kept everything pristine – buried trucks from the Great War that, with some minor repairs, could be fuelled and driven; oil cans with the faintest gold sheen of rust after forty years. Bedouin with their camels and their ancient, secret knowledge: something eternal about them. In his bubble of freedom, he saw poverty obscured by distance, conflict disguised as peace. The lake was a mass of ripples as dawn released the thermals. The Big Flea and the Little Flea, the only features you could call hills in a landscape flat as a pancake, blazed an extraordinary redgold.

They flew on over the hospital and camp of Fayid and the bright turf of the military cemetery, where regiments of pale stone lozenges and banks of carefully tended flowers marked the resting places of soldiers and airmen from two wars and too many British children whose dads (so Joe put it to himself) had failed to keep the eggs in a basin of vinegar. Germs coated every surface you hadn’t attacked with Dettol. In the heat, the filth, the flies, the merest graze went septic in an hour.

The Dragonfly crossed the colossal arms dump at Abu Sultan. Suez was the greatest military installation in the entire world. The sheer scale of it all: the centre of the
empire. You had to be proud. Near Deversoir with its great hangars and tented encampment, the Dragonfly lingered over the swimming hole of jewel-clear water, thirty feet deep, where he and Chalkie had once dived, finding the sea horses and baby octopi. Never would Joe have expected sea horses to be so tiny. And the males carried the young, a detail that tickled him. For wherever he was, he carried Nia, cradled to his heart. As Chalkie did his boys – and that was part of the bond between him and his pal: the unashamed tenderness for their little ones, that rippled out in reverence for the creatures of the earth. Both Joe and Chalkie had been filled with wonder that such animals as the sea horses and octopi should exist and that they – common boys from the pits and steelworks – should be privileged to see them. The water was a gleaming oval of turquoise: a cyclops eye staring back up at him.

Now Joe could see the officers’ houses at Kensington Village, brick bungalows with corrugated iron roofs, the saffragi out with brooms, their white robes pink-tinged as they levelled the Memsahibs’ sandy compounds. Over Red Flannel Alley the helicopter passed, the mansions of the top brass, with their emerald lawns and trees.

As the lake narrowed and the Dragonfly hovered above the canal, the bloody sun popped out of the horizon like a sac from an egg-yolk. Now the furnace heat would get up. Poor Ailsa would be melting. Joe looked down on the split world: Asia on one bank, Africa on the other. On the canal’s eastern shore lay the Sinai Desert, a bleached universe of sand where nothing could live; the west, irrigated by the Sweet Water Canal, throbbed with a lustrous green that saturated date palms and pastures. Wales might be equally green but the homely grey skies
dulled it. In Egypt colour was reborn in wild intensities of ruby and gold, emerald and topaz.

The canal opened out into the dazzle of Lake Timsah, Nia’s heaven. Joe made out the north-western beaches with their demarcations: the officers’ beach being the most southerly from Ish, then the French Beach, and finally the troops’ beach, nearest to the point where that open sewer, the Sweet Water Canal, emptied its obscenities. Nearly home now. Passing over the vast army garrison at Moascar, the Dragonfly arced east above Ish, whose white tiered houses resembled wedding cakes with sugar icing, each flat roof an intimate world of parasols, chairs and tables beside roof gardens. On the harbour front built by de Lesseps for the Canal Company administration were the mansions and ateliers of the very rich, surrounded by French ornamental gardens. Yachts flew colourful flags. Beyond the mansions Joe could pick out the geometry of the city’s sectors, as if in a diagram: the French and Greek quarters to the east, and the old Khedive’s palace, and the dark squalor of Wogtown to the west. And the canal flowing onward to the Mediterranean at Port Said.

Looping south-west, they hovered above El-Marah, where new quarters had been thrown up by Egyptian workmen in two months flat. Lazy he had always called them, downing tools at eleven and picking them up again at four, but Joe had to admit they did the job and did it well, and to time. He pointed out his little world to the pilot: Palmerston Row where Ailsa’s pals the Websters were quartered; and branching from it Disraeli Street. He gave the pilot a thumbs-up as they hovered over his own roof amongst brick-built semis that could have been
anywhere in Britain except that they were surrounded by a sea of sand and builders’ rubble.

A woman who must be Irene White was out in the garden already, pegging up at crack of dawn bleached and starched sheets, immaculate flags of surrender.

Planes droned as they circled above the houses. Ailsa didn’t bother to look up, standing at the window peeling a potato and dreaming of Shropshire rain. Part of her mind floated far away, to where the heavens had opened on herself and Archie Copsey as they peddled their bikes like billy-o in their sou’westers, water pouring off their yellow waxed capes on to soil that drank till it could drink no more. She thanked her stars to have grown up mantled in a fine net of drizzle under rain clouds that acted as an umbrella against the sun. She recalled the water-logged fields along the Severn in the great flood of ’47. Rowing boats navigating the aisle of Shrewsbury Abbey between drowned marble knights and bishops. Such rain – any rain at all – seemed a fantasy.

The window framed Nia crouching to play in what you could hardly call a garden. Sand pit, maybe: Nia’s Eden. She was as good as gold these days, having settled beautifully with her parents in El-Marah. It had only been Joe’s absence that had made Nia so cranky and wayward on the crossing. Now Ailsa could be proud of her daughter, modelling sand castles with Christopher. She smiled to see Nia wearing a halo – the disc of her yellow sun hat – beside the next-door-but-one neighbour, in thrall of course to little Miss Roberts, doing as he was told, she did not doubt, and now trundling the miniature wheelbarrow to –
over
there
, Nia was pointing,
that
sand there, Topher! To the children their new home was nothing but a
bucket-and
-spade playground. The heat hardly bothered them, slathered from top to toe in calamine. It had been good for Nia, in every way, coming to Egypt.

The Roberts had spent a couple of months in a temporary home in Fanara, by the Great Bitter Lake, waiting for new quarters to be built. So this was Ailsa’s first real married home, at the edge of the desert. From the back windows stretched a plain of sand. It played strange rainbow tricks under the rising or setting sun, turning into pistes of mauve or orange; reared up on itself in the midday heat haze that foreshortened distances and made you see a milky pool rising into the air. The desert filled Irene with fear, imagining terrorists on camels galloping up with blades and pistols; it lured Ailsa like a magnet. Open spaces always had. She hankered to walk out into that splendour of emptiness. Come winter’s cool, she’d give freer rein to her wanderlust.

Yet Ailsa was content with her lot, patient with her limits. When had she been as happy?

From the kitchen window she could just see the fascinating pale silhouette of Ismailia, dominated by water tower, mosque and Coptic church, with blocks of modern flats painted in pastel shades. She and Joe delighted in exploring the lakeside city. At the eastern side the town glistened, its French and Greek quarters maintaining a grandiose nineteenth-century dream of heroic commerce. All drenched in luxuriant greenery. Westward lay the filthy huddle of the so-called native quarter, known to the troops as Wogtown. It stank. The townsfolk had neither plumbing, sewerage nor running water. How come then
that the women were able to hang a bunting of freshly washed laundry from their windows? How come the men’s
gallabiyyas
were so white and crisp? The people rose proudly above their conditions: she could see that even from this distance, God knew how the poor souls managed it.

Ailsa had given Joe a straight look on the one occasion he’d referred to ‘Wogtown’. He’d apologised immediately: women were entitled to their nice sensibility, was the thought she read in his eyes. But he was gentle with the Egyptian vendors, as long as they kept their distance. He made sure to put out leftover food for the Egyptian dustmen and their malnourished families. He’d stand aside, respectfully averting his gaze, from an Arab lady hurrying along the road in her black shroud.

Ailsa started on the second tatty. She’d carve the peel off in one loop again, so help her. It had been the letter from her aunt, with a postscript from Archie, no doubt, that had set her hallucinating rain. She kissed the precious air-letter whenever one was put in her hand. These blue wafers said:
we are here; you are there: not so very far is it, from there to here?
And it’s just pouring here, wrote Archie, tipping it down, and I have to put on my galoshes just to go down the path.

The
Empire Glory
seemed another world. Passing the signpost to the officers’ exclusive bungalows at Masurah near the
Bois des Fontaines
in Ish, she’d peer down the boulevard: no Mona. But they might bump into one another. Leave it to chance.

Ailsa tapped on the window for Nia to see that she had nearly, oh so nearly, got the peel off whole!

Nia turned her head, busy palms still patting the fortress
under construction, and grinned approval. Ailsa finished the potato, halved it and dropped it in the saucepan, then picked up the twin tails of peel and held them either side of her head as ear rings, bouncing up and down like springs. Nia and Christopher ran to the window and stood craning and giggling through the wire netting. In they rushed to claim the peelings and out they ran again.

And in the wood at the Wrekin with Archie, Ailsa, a girl of sixteen, had sauntered through green gloom over the spongy give of beach mast and held his hand as rain pattered through the branches. Would Archie ever marry? She thought of him working the family farm under the Long Mynd. Drops had fallen coldly on their heads as they kissed. It was odd how, separated from her cousin by a continent, Ailsa thought of him more than she’d ever done at home. For ‘home’ was what Archie represented. She turned on the Baby Belling and crowded the saucepans on to its single hot plate. ‘Miracle-worker, you,’ Joe always said in wonderment. Today they had fresh cauliflower from the Egyptian market; she had the knack of simmering it till it was just this side of soft. Not the king himself feasted on better meat and three veg, Joe said: that was for sure. Well,

Ailsa had replied, it is not likely we’ll find out. She would not say that the Primus was her enemy, though it smoked and stank and exerted a senseless will of its own. Knowing its temperamental ways, she kept a lookout for a tongue of flame to flare up and scorch her eyebrows. The creature’s square head accumulated soot. Ailsa had to pull this off and clean the clogged hole in its black neck with a pipe cleaner. But she made little of all this and spoke back to the treacherous Primus with hilarity. She rigged up a grill for Welsh rarebit by
upturning a two-bar electric fire on a row of bricks.