Jasmine Nights (38 page)
Dom forced a smile. ‘Not a dicky bird.’ They finished the game in silence. He hadn’t meant to, but he’d told Barney a little about Saba after their meeting in Ismailia. He’d been high as a kite and unable to stop himself. Barney, who’d had a few, had immediately sung, ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Mistress’, and then had put his hand on Dom’s arm and added with the solemnness of the half-cut. ‘Now listen! Listen . . . listen, very important announcement to make, and I want you to listen very hard to me: everyone falls in love with those ENSA popsies, so be careful.’ He’d made it sound so trivial, so ordinary, Dom was furious with himself for telling him.
When the light faded, about eight p.m., they packed the chessmen away in silence and went to bed. Barney was exhausted, Dom too. He lay down on the damp camp bed, pulled up his blanket and before he closed his eyes felt her absence with a physical ache like a kick in the guts. He was too hurt to feel angry, too old to cry, but he wanted to. She was gone, just like that, and he had no idea where.
There was a briefing on the following morning. An important one: Air Commodore Bingley, a rangy man with a headmaster’s stoop, came from Advanced Air Headquarters to tell them the long wait was over. The training, the shadow fighting, the cross-country recces, the forced landings, the sitting in sweaty flying suits for take-offs cancelled at the last minute. They were on full squadron alert now.
Dom sat and listened in the middle of the dusty group of twenty-six young men. They lounged in their chairs in the boiling-hot dispersal hut without any visible display of interest or enthusiasm, but everyone’s heart was pounding.
Bingley told them sharply to pay attention now. British Intelligence had discovered a fact of singular significance. On the night of 30 August, a full moon, General Rommel planned a surprise attack on the southern section of the Allied front near El Alamein. He would attack by night, and as far as they knew, through a gap between Munassib and Qaret El Huneunat, a place he believed was lightly held and lightly mined. If the attack succeeded it would open up the road to Alexandria, and then God knows what would happen. ‘Our job, bluntly put, is to try and shatter the Luftwaffe in the next ten days.’
And Bingley, gazing at the young men, had a private moment of anguish as he said this, wondering who would be spared and who taken. He barked out that he sincerely hoped they’d all had their beauty sleep, because for the foreseeable future their job would be to fly as escorts to the Vickers Wellington bombers based at LG91. They would be on permanent call. All leave was cancelled for the foreseeable future, he added, and Dom, for complicated reasons, was relieved.
‘Any questions?’
‘How many days do you estimate it will take?’
‘Hopefully it will be a short mission,’ Bingley continued. ‘A few days and then out, but this could be the big one.’ His eye travelled up and down the lines of exhausted young men. ‘If Rommel manages to break through our lines and occupy Egypt, he’ll have the perfect launch pad for more attacks on the Mediterranean. If we stop him, I think we’ll have a very good chance of ending this war.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ Dom got up after this short speech was over. ‘We’ll do our best.’
Walking back to the mess together, Bingley confided that he’d heard a worrying rumour that some of the new Kittyhawks had an operational fault – their oxygen refurb system opened without warning and sometimes choked with sand. Also that they only had ten serviceable Spitfires left, six of these on the battle line, and a couple of them definitely approaching retirement age.
When he asked Dom if he would be prepared to fly back with him the next day and pick up a repaired Spit, Dom said yes immediately. It would be something to do, something to take his mind off things.
In Istanbul, another beautiful car throbbed away on the tarmac, waiting to carry them away. This one, Mr Ozan told her, was a 1934 Rolls Bentley, with an aluminium body, very rare, he said, his plump hand caressing its low, sleek sides. He suggested a brief tour of the city before they drove out to his summer house in Arnavutköy, which was some seven miles from the city and a lovely drive.
It was dusk, and as they drove towards the heart of the city, the Golden Horn was soaked in peach-coloured light. From the back seat of the Bentley, Saba saw ferry boats crinkling the waves, mosques, palaces, weird wooden buildings and felt as if she was part of some elaborate hallucination.
Passing through the Roman walls on the edge of the city, the potholed street made the car lurch from side to side for a few moments like a paper cup in the ocean. She stared out at two women sitting in a dim alleyway peeling vegetables, surrounded by scrawny cats; an old man selling sesame rings under a kerosene light.
Closer to the centre of the city, it surprised her how elegant and Westernised these Stamboulis looked: the women in their smart hats and silk stockings, the men in sober dark suits and white shirts. She’d imagined this place would be full of unsophisticated Tan-type people, but this was much posher than Cardiff. Ozan watched her reactions playfully. ‘So what is your verdict on our town?’ he said.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she answered in a low voice, thinking
Stay calm, stay calm
. She had not prepared herself for the shock of being back in her father’s world again. There were so many men here that had the same erect bearing, his dark intense eyes. When they looked at her, part of her shrivelled, as if he’d found her here and would shortly snatch her away.
They drove back towards the Bosphorus and left along the coast road. The moon was high and so bright it darted ahead of them through the trees, shedding light over branches and occasional gleams of water.
His summer house at Arnavutköy, Ozan said, was the relic of a life that was gone now. The year after Turkey had become a republic, in 1923, all members of the Ottoman Imperial Dynasty – the princes, the princesses, spouses, children – had been booted out. Many of his rich neighbours who were related to them had fled to Nice, to Egypt, to Beirut. A relative of his – he said with that proud little twitch of his mouth that came when he was boasting – had married into the Egyptian royal family; a few like him had been allowed to stay on and run successful businesses. She didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but one thing was clear: he was a man who enjoyed an audience, and she for the time being was it.
She was woken by a gentle pat on her arm.
‘We’re here,’ he said. ‘My house.’
She looked out of the car window at one of the most beautiful houses she had ever seen. Bathed in silvery moonlight, it stood right at the water’s edge, and was made of interlocking panels of exquisitely carved wood. High windows gave back the shifting patterns of the sea, and with its many dips and crevices and elaborate mouldings it had the look of a carved wooden puzzle or a magic ship in a child’s fairy-tale book.
Ozan gave a deep sigh. He stepped out of the car and loosened his tie.
‘Pretty, no?’ The night air smelt of lemon trees and jasmine and the faint salty tang of the sea. He inhaled it with a satisfied snort. Such houses, he told her proudly, were called
yalis
by Stamboulis and were much prized because of their position right on the edge of the Bosphorus. Underneath his balcony – he pointed towards the water – his boats were moored.
He said she would sleep here for two nights and then move to a room at the Büyük Londra Hotel, close to the club where she would rehearse.
‘But don’t think about that tonight.’ He’d seen her try to stifle a yawn with her hand. ‘Tonight is for a good night’s sleep – we have put you in one of the front rooms, where you can hear the waves.’
Leyla was waiting in the marbled hall to greet them. Her face lit up when she saw her husband, and although she didn’t kiss him, the atmosphere between them was charged as she placed a gentle hand on his arm. The three young children who peeped out behind her skirts had Ozan’s dark-rimmed eyes, and the beginnings of important noses. They beamed at Saba shyly and hugged their father.
‘So, Miss Tarcan, this is a great pleasure for me to meet you again,’ Leyla said, extending a cool hand. ‘I hope you will be very happy with us here. My husband,’ she said with a humorous look in his direction, ‘says he is going to make you a star.’
It was Leyla who showed her around the gardens and the house on the following day. These were the moments Saba longed to share with her mother, so unpredictable in so many ways, but constant in her wistful, indignant love of luxury. ‘Never!’ she would have muttered, examining the glorious house that seemed to float this morning on calm waters. ‘Oh for God’s sake – look at that!’ at the solid marble in its hall. Saba, absorbing this place, its sunlit rugs, its exquisite walls and windows open to the sea, hoped she could take some of it back – a small bone to comfort her mother’s large hungers, but something.
What struck her later, as she followed her hostess down the sun-warmed paths, was the extreme neatness of the very rich, their attention to detail. The beautifully planted terraced gardens were a chessboard of sweetly scented herbs and shrubs; the small vineyard was laid out with mathematical precision; the immaculate stables where Ozan kept ponies for the children, and his own pure-bred Arabs with their pretty turned-up noses and long-lashed flirty eyes, had identically knotted ropes hanging outside each door, each one attached to scarlet halters on brass hooks.
As they left the stables, three peacocks picking their way through cypress trees made Saba jump when they squawked like a bunch of cats whose tails had been stamped on.
When Leyla laughed, it seemed to Saba to be their first natural moment together. Though faultlessly polite, in a hostessy way, Leyla had been more constrained today, so much so that Saba wondered if she longed to be alone with her husband, who, it seemed, was rarely in one place for longer than a few days; or maybe it was the thought of all the parties he had planned in the coming weeks, and she was tired of his habit of collecting people, which she alluded to very gently. ‘We’ve had lots of singers staying here,’ she told Saba. ‘From all over the world,’ she added – like Ozan, keen to emphasise their cosmopolitan credentials.
After lunch, Saba was told she could rest in her bedroom, which overlooked the Bosphorus and was large, light and airy. The high brass bed, covered in an exquisitely worked silk and gold bedspread, was placed so she could see the sea without moving from her pillows – it felt like being inside a sumptuous barge. Above the bed was a rose-tinted glass chandelier, and at the end of the room, all for her, a wonderful bathroom made of Carrera marble, with a shower and brass taps. Ozan had boasted at lunch that he’d employed a French architect ‘of the highest quality’ to modernise the house and install the plumbing, and that it was far more up to date than most of the now crumbling but still beautiful houses where the other grandees of the Ottoman Empire had once lived.
Lying half dazed in this room, propped up on her elbow and looking at the sea, Saba felt as if she’d wandered into the pages of
One Thousand and One Nights
. It was so far away from Pomeroy Street with its lino floor, and chenille bedspread, and Baba’s suitcases stored above her one narrow wardrobe. For a brief moment a song felt like a magic carpet, one that could land you splat for sure, but also take you to places never dreamed of.
The only bad thing was Dom – her stomach was in knots about it.
She slept for two hours. When she woke, the moon was shedding its light on black water, in the distance, pinpricks of light from houses on the dark shoreline of Asia. She heard the splashing waves, and snatches of music from the ferries going back to the Galata Bridge. She was so far away from anything that could be considered normal that she felt she was dangling on a fine thread between dreams and nightmares. She thought of the stories Tan had told her once, of the bodies of murdered harem girls smuggled out to the Golden Horn and drowned. She thought about Dom and the miles and miles of sea that separated them now. He was flying again, in danger.
She almost couldn’t bear to think of the house on Rue Lepsius now. On the morning she’d gone, she’d opened her eyes first and felt him beside her, awake. She’d felt his hand on the nape of her neck, his mouth on her hair. When she’d turned to face him, they’d looked at each other with wonder – a steady look, no jokes this time, no evasions. And then a long, slow kiss.
What must he think of her now?
On the next day, after a fine breakfast of fresh fruits, yoghurt, croissants, eggs and hot coffee, she was taken upstairs to Ozan’s study for their first meeting. The large marble desk he sat at commanded a magnificent view of the sea. The smell of his sharp lemony aftershave filled the room.
‘Sit down,’ he said. In Alexandria, her impression had been of an ebullient, hospitable man: a back-slapper, a topper-up of drinks, a pincher of babies’ cheeks. Now, with his black eyes magnified by a large pair of horn-rimmed glasses, he was all business and keen to get on.
He opened his diary. ‘We are moving you today,’ he said, not unkindly, but not waiting for her answer either. ‘To a hotel in Beyoğlu, a lively part of Istanbul. In three days’ time, we make a party at this house for business friends of mine and maybe some of their girlfriends.’ He looked at her briefly. ‘I’d like you to sing some songs for them. Cheerful things.
‘After that, you will sing at the club called the Moulin Rouge, and after that maybe Ankara – I have some businesses there. I will check all the dates today.’ He started to scribble in his diary with a gold pen.
So not the week
at the absolute most
that Cleeve had predicted. She had that uneasy feeling of slippage again, of being out of control.
‘How many rehearsals?’ she asked. She didn’t care for him rapping out orders to her as if she was some sort of mechanical toy. ‘I can’t just sing cold for your friends. I want it to be good.’
‘I know, I know.’ His stern expression softened as if to convey he understood and respected that art had its own rules. ‘There is no need for you to worry about that; the band, as you will see, is top class, so let me see . . .’ He pursed his lips and consulted his diary again.
