Making It Up (3 page)

Of course, Jean was all eyes, staring at the men with amputated limbs, though goodness knows she was used enough to that sort of thing—plenty of the Cairo street beggars had bits missing, and there were blind people all over the place. It was these being English, and like that. What had happened? Did it hurt? Shirley had had to go a bit carefully. Jean knew about the war, of course, they had a little pray about it every night before she was put to bed: “Please, God, make the war end soon. Amen.” But she didn't know about death. A child can't take that in, at six, in Shirley's opinion. So when Mrs. Leech's spaniel died, Jean was just told that it had gone to sleep because it was very old and tired, and the same with Mr. Leech's father, and squashed dogs by the side of the road, and Jean's tortoise when the ants got it. A child that age isn't ready for death.

Goodness, it was hot. She should be used enough to heat by now, for heaven's sake, but the Red Sea was in a class of its own. All around was this glassy smooth water, and the heat seemed to whack back from it, and mostly there wasn't a breath of wind, except in the evenings when this hot breeze would get up. But the cabins were stifling; you lay there dripping all night, you didn't want even a sheet over you, indeed stark naked would have been best, but Shirley didn't fancy that with Nanny Clavering and the children there. Jean had a nasty bout of prickly heat, all red and raw, poor little soul. And up on deck you had to keep slapping on Nivea cream, but even so some of the children were getting dreadfully sunburnt. The crew had rigged up a sort of canvas swimming pool for them to splash around in, and there were endless deck games—quoits and skittles and so forth—so they didn't get too bored and bolshie, on the whole, though some of the bigger boys were starting to run wild a bit. Shirley blamed the mothers, frankly. If she'd had anything to do with it, they'd soon have been under control, she'd always been able to deal with badly behaved children.

In fact, one day she did step in. There were these ten-year-olds pestering one of the lascars. A lot of the crew were lascars—small wiry brown men who did all the donkey work, scrubbing the decks and that—and this one was climbing up the side of the ship doing something to the lifeboats that were slung above the promenade deck. The boys were yelling “Monkey! Monkey!”—the Garrick twins and a couple of others. “Look at the chimp!” they were saying, and Shirley felt herself flare up. I mean, all right, maybe he did look a bit monkey-like, climbing hand over hand, very athletic actually, but that was just plain rude, you don't talk like that to anyone. So she moved in and gave the boys a telling off. She'd thought they might answer back—the Garricks had that Greek girl for a nanny who let them get away with anything—but they just shuffled around and wouldn't look at her and then wandered away.

When she first came to Egypt she'd been shocked by the beggars and the droves of children asking for money—“Baksheesh! Baksheesh!”—and the sheer startling difference from anything she'd ever known. Men hawking and spitting in the street; women up to their elbows in cow muck and straw, making fuel; the babies with flies crawling all over their eyes. How could people live like this? But they did, and after a while you got used to it. You seemed to be shut away on the other side of a glass screen, where things were done in the way that you knew, and out there was their world, in which everything was otherwise, but it was none of your business.

And then she'd been differently shocked by the way people treated the natives. Especially since the troops arrived, at the beginning of the war. Some of them made her feel quite ashamed, the way they'd bawl them out, or take the mickey. You'd see a bunch of drunk tommies in Cairo snatching off a man's red fez, and throwing it under a gharry, or mobbing a woman, trying to get her to take her veil off. That was disgusting. All right, their ways weren't our ways, out here, but that didn't mean you had any right to interfere. She'd always made sure that Jean spoke politely to the servants, and had told her never to stare at them when they were saying their prayers, knees down on a mat in the garden. Not that Mr. and Mrs. Leech wouldn't be particular about that too, Mr. Leech especially; for the Consulate people there were all sorts of dos and don'ts and what Mr. Leech called a code of conduct.

The Garricks were Shell, which might account for the twins' behavior. Shell and the other businesspeople were definitely a peg or two down from the Consulate. Just as the Consulate was a step down from the Embassy. Embassy nannies tended to pull rank; that didn't bother Shirley, but she knew Mrs. Leech felt it when it came to Embassy wives. Still, Consulate meant you were on all the lists, for parties at the Embassy and so forth, and Mrs. Leech could usually get a cabin on Sidi Bishr for the summer, when they went to Alex, and she and Mr. Leech could join the Yacht Club, and got asked to everything, which frankly for Mrs. Leech was the be-all and end-all.

They would be calling in at Aden soon, and that would be the end of the Red Sea, thank goodness; people said it wouldn't be so hot once you were out on the Indian Ocean. Back in Cairo, in the Zamalek house, there was a big map of the world on the wall in Mr. Leech's study; Shirley had sometimes looked at this, pinpointing Cairo up at the top of Africa, with the fan of the Delta reaching up to the Mediterranean. So she had the shape of Africa in her head now, and could see the funnel of the Red Sea, and then the bit called the Horn of Africa sticking out and up, round which they had to go, and then it would be down and down past Africa until at last they got to Cape Town. Quite exciting, really, to think you were going all that way, crawling across the world.

They would be allowed to go ashore while the ship was berthed at Aden. Everyone was looking forward to that. There would be hotels where they could have a decent meal, Mrs. Leech said, and a chance to stock up with the sort of things they would soon run out of—toilet paper, and Nivea, and cigarettes and gin. Oh, and of course they would have to see the mermaid; she and Mrs. Clavering went into fits of laughter about this.

Apparently there was a mermaid in a glass case in one of the Aden hotels. It was famous.

In fact, Aden was a bit of a letdown, Shirley thought, when at last they were tied up at Steamer Point. A scruffy sort of place—the shops nothing to write home about, the hotels not a patch on Cairo or Alex, the streets awash with men selling Turkish delight or dirty postcards. They disembarked with the Claverings, and had to fight their way through the scrum on the quayside—Arabs who were mostly half-naked, and some of them with knives tucked into their waists, pi dogs, beggars, mangy camels that looked like they were about to mow you down. Mrs. Leech had found out which was the hotel with the mermaid and they were going to have lunch there.

Jean was so thrilled with the mermaid. She knew about mermaids; one of her books had a picture of a mermaid sitting on a rock and looking at herself in a mirror. Shirley knew what she was imagining—this beautiful girl with long yellow hair and a delicate green fishy tail. She guessed the child was going to be let down; whatever it was that they'd got in a glass case here, she couldn't think that it was going to be quite like that. But Mrs. Leech kept on getting Jean more and more worked up: “Isn't it exciting, darling—we're going to see a
mermaid
. Do you think the mermaid will be singing a song?” Shirley felt like hitting her.

When they found the hotel, it turned out that you had to pay to see the mermaid, even if you were coming in to have lunch. There was this case with a cloth on it in the passage outside the dining room, and the proprietor wasn't going to take the cloth off unless you paid, and he was asking what Mrs. Leech and Mrs. Clavering thought was an exorbitant amount, so there was the usual haggling. All the time, Jean just stood there, stiff and tense, her fist clenched to her mouth, staring at the case with enormous eyes.

At last the cloth came off, and there in the case was this brown leathery-looking thing, like the mummies in the Cairo Museum. It was obviously some kind of animal, or had been, though it did have what you could imagine as a sort of bosom. Mrs. Leech and Mrs. Clavering started laughing hysterically; Shirley could hear the stories they'd be telling in the ship's bar that evening: “My dear, it was just too ridiculous for words . . .”

And Jean just gazed. Then she turned and looked up at Shirley with this awful disappointment in her face. Really, it's too bad what children have to go through, and there's nothing you can do about it.

They had lunch, which was roast lamb with all the trimmings, just like being back in England, and afterward treacle pudding, one of Jean's favorites, but even that didn't help. She stayed very quiet all through, and honestly, Shirley's heart bled for her. Mermaid, indeed.

So what with that, and the heat, she wasn't sorry when they left Aden. And yes, once they were out of sight of land it did begin to get cooler, and the sea had a lift to it, with even little choppy waves. On the first afternoon out she got talking to the medical orderly again, or rather, he came over while she was watching Jean, who was playing in the canvas pool. His name was Alan. Alan Baker. He had a brother serving in the Far East, and a sister in a munitions factory, he played the mouth organ, what he missed most out here were cricket and Saturday night in the village pub and his dog Trigger. He was due a week's leave in Cape Town and he couldn't wait. You find out quite a bit about a person in just a short chat, it's surprising.

She'd been feeling rather on her own, actually, ever since they came on board. She had some good friends in Cairo among the Cairo nannies, but none of them were here. Nanny Clavering was much older and always laying down the law about this and that, Shirley couldn't abide the Stannards' Irish girl, and Nanny Peter-son was slapdash to a degree, in her opinion. There were the Greek and Lebanese girls, who were nice enough, but you didn't have all that much in common, did you? Oh, they all sat around together on deck during the day, keeping an eye on the children, but Shirley didn't really feel what you might call at home.

But who could feel at home anyway, perched there on a ship that was just a dot on hundreds of miles of water? Day after day, now, that was all they saw—just the sea. And you thought about the depth of it—a mile down to the bottom, she'd heard someone say. Sometimes there were porpoises—sleek black shapes dashing along beside the ship—and everyone rushed to the rails to watch. And flying fish, skimming along the surface. They said there were sharks, plenty of those. And once one of the ship's officers spotted a great turtle, and people took it in turns to have a look through his binoculars.

The second night out they ran into a storm. The ship was pitching about, everything slid off the washstand, Jean was starting to feel sick and so was Jamie Clavering, Nanny Clavering was yammering away about how what you had to do was lie absolutely flat and look at the ceiling, or drink Epsom salts, or suck barley sugar. Or shut up, thought Shirley. Then Jamie was sick all over his bunk and after that there was no sleep for anyone until at last around dawn it began to calm down and by breakfast there was just a bit of a heave still, not that many wanted anything to eat—the dining room was half empty. In fact, Shirley felt fine; she'd always had good sea legs. Mrs. Leech was prostrated, of course, laid up in her cabin with the Purser bringing her lime juice.

It was cooler that day, after the storm, really nice up on deck. People were talking about how there would be a crossing-the-line ceremony when they got to the equator—not a full-scale do, the officers said, seeing as it's wartime, just a bit of fun for the children. One of them would dress up as Neptune, apparently. They would need a costume. “You'll have to get Film Star on to that,” someone said. “She's the dressmaker.”

He must have heard. Alan. Alan Baker. Later, he came over to her again, made a paper airplane for Jean, asked how they'd been in the storm. Then he said, “Why do they call you that? Film Star?”

She felt herself blushing. A great rich red blush. Thank goodness she was leaning over the rail, and no one else very near. “Well . . .”

He laughed. “I can guess. Quite right, too. Except that a Hollywood type would be all covered with makeup, and you're not, so you're prettier by far.”

She didn't know where to look. Was he being cheeky? Should she make an excuse and move away? You met soldiers sometimes in the YW who tried it on, and she knew how to give them the brush-off when they were getting a bit too fresh, she didn't stand any nonsense. But he wasn't that sort. She knew he wasn't. And what he'd said was said perfectly nicely—straightforward, an opinion, and that was that.

She said, “Well, thank you.”

And then Jean came running up, wanting him to make another airplane, which he did, and now the other children were wanting them too, so he was kept busy. He was good with children—one of those people who are naturally at ease with them.

Shirley had been that way too, right from when she was not much more than a child herself. She used to be asked in to mind the little ones while their mums went shopping, up and down their street. So when she left school, it seemed the obvious thing to train as a nursery nurse. Her mother was all for it; a nicer sort of job than working in a shop, or office work, even if it did mean living in other people's houses, but if you had good qualifications you could pick and choose, by all accounts. Some of Shirley's schoolfriends weren't so enthusiastic: “Like a servant,” they said. “Catch me . . .” Which really made Shirley see red. She'd never thought of it like that; the whole point was working with children, doing what you were good at.

Nowadays, she wasn't so sure, sometimes. It wasn't that she'd gone off children—goodness no. She loved Jean, and she was proud of her. But there was a sense in which she had come to feel that she belonged nowhere now. She lived in the world of the Leeches and their friends, but it wasn't really her world; when she visited her parents, before the war, she walked down their familiar street like a stranger, seeing and hearing things she had never noticed back when she was younger. The milk bottles on the doorsteps, the net curtains at the windows, chiming doorbells, wireless music spilling from kitchen windows. She thought of the way Mrs. Leech said “suburban,” which made it a different word from the one she had always known, that was simply to do with railways: London and Suburban. She was conscious of her parents' speech, of the way they pronounced words; what had been entirely known and usual had become discomforting.