Faiza stopped talking to listen too. As the plane passed, she shrugged eloquently, as if to say
who cares
.
‘So,’ she resumed, ‘Mr Ozan wants me to teach you.’ Her expression brightened.
‘Do you mind?’ Saba said. ‘I know your own training took you ages.’
‘No.’ Faiza looked surprised. ‘Of course not. I am very happy to try. Mr Ozan is a wonderful man. We make lovely parties for him whenever he wants them.’
‘You see, I don’t have very long here,’ Saba explained. ‘I’m with an ENSA company.’ Faiza looked confused. ‘We sing songs for soldiers in the desert. I’m in the army.’
‘Our songs are not easy to learn.’ The old lady had not understood her. ‘They are very beautiful, but you will have to learn a new technique.’ She pointed to her nose, her chest. ‘We sing from here too.’
‘I know one or two songs,’ Saba said. ‘My grandmother, she’s Turkish, loves the old songs.’
She sang a snatch of ‘Yah Mustapha’; the old lady laughed and sang along.
‘Ya Allah!’ she called out softly. ‘I will teach you. Come tomorrow, here? Tea first, and then our first lesson.’
‘I’d love that,’ Saba said, and she meant it. ‘Tariq says you’re famous.’ The old lady inclined her head modestly to one side, but did not deny it. ‘I love learning new songs.’
‘I’m old now, and my voice . . .’ Faiza mimed herself being strangled. ‘But we will have some fun. Come tomorrow at ten thirty here. Don’t be late, I have a hair appointment at lunchtime.’
She glanced at the clock; Saba half rose. The time was ten to ten.
‘Wait! Wait, wait.’ Faiza took both of Saba’s hands in hers. ‘Come with me. I have something to show you.’
As they walked across the room, Saba felt tango rhythms vibrate through the soles of her feet. The hoarse cries, the clapping, the stamp of shoes. She followed the old woman into a small room lit by a kerosene light in its corner. There was a sequinned costume hung on a hook; a dressing table littered with make-up. And sitting on a chair near the window, there was Dom.
‘Saba.’ He stepped out of the darkness and put his arms around her.
‘Oh my God!’ Both of them were close to tears.
Faiza stood at the door. She was smiling.
‘I will leave you now,’ she said. ‘If you want me, I am singing downstairs.’
When the door closed, they kissed each other savagely, and then she cried with joy. She’d had no idea until then how frightened she’d been.
She stepped back and looked at him. It seemed that they had already gone beyond a place of self-control and she didn’t care.
He was wearing a scruffy khaki shirt and trousers. His hair needed cutting. His skin had turned a deep nut brown since she saw him last. He was beautiful. After a long, slow kiss, a kind of claiming, he pushed her away.
‘Let me look at you.’ He pulled her down on the sofa beside him. ‘What in hell are you doing here?’ He couldn’t stop smiling. ‘Do you understand this?’
‘You first,’ she said, playing for time. How much was it safe to tell him?
He ran his hands through her hair as he spoke.
‘Did you get my message, my letter I mean, I wrote it over a week ago?’
‘No. Did you get mine?’
‘No. I got a message from your friend Madame whatever-her-name-is; she said you’d be here tonight. That was all.’
They kissed again. These details were trivial. There was a war on, messages got lost all the time.
When they stopped, he put both arms around her and hugged her tight, and she felt his heart beating against her and happiness ran through her like a river, as if every cell in her body was saying thank you for the miracle of him – here, and alive.
He told her that for the past ten days they’d been out in the desert south of Alex training. He didn’t tell her what the training involved, or what it was for, only that it was over now, at least for the time being, and that the whole squadron had been given a week off because it had been pretty flat out and they wanted them rested. For the next month, all leave was cancelled.
He gathered her hair in his hands, smoothed it back from her face and looked her straight in the eyes.
‘I can’t believe this,’ he said.
She stroked his face. ‘Guess what?’ she said. The tip of his finger was exploring her dimple. ‘No, really,
guess what
? As far as I know, I’m here for at least a week, and pretty much on my own. I have to do some work, but we can see each other.’
‘What work?’ She saw a look of confusion in his eyes. ‘I don’t understand. Where are the others? Your friend Arleta? The acrobats?’
‘They’re not here.’ She hated having to start like this. ‘They’ll probably come soon.’ Her right hand was covering her eye. ‘I’m going to do a couple of broadcasts. I didn’t write to you because I didn’t know I’d do them here, it was a very sudden thing.’ Too much, she was talking too much.
He took her hand down from her face, turned it palm upwards and kissed it.
‘Whom does it depend on?’ he said. ‘Your staying, I mean.’
‘I honestly don’t know.’
‘You don’t know!’ Oh, not a good thing to say, more confusion. ‘But it’s bloody dangerous here, most people have been evacuated. I don’t want you to get hurt.’
He was about to say something else when the music from downstairs reached a straggling halt, and then the woop-woop-woop of an air-raid siren broke through.
A muddle of voices out on the street below them now, the patter of feet on their way to the air-raid shelter. They decided to stay.
‘At home, my gran wouldn’t go to the shelters,’ she told him, ‘so I used to lie under the dining-room table with her. She’s thirteen stone. I’ve still got the dents.’ When he laughed, she felt his breath on her cheek. ‘And afterwards, we’d lie in bed together listening to the wireless.’
‘Well now I’m insane with jealousy.’ He tightened his arms around her. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘There’ll be no gran and no wireless in our bed.’
Our bed
: he’d said it.
A wonderful laughter bubbled through them: the laughter of being young, of knowing something you’d longed for was happening.
Our bed
. It would happen tonight, she knew it. She stood beside him at the window, shimmering with happiness. She loved how he just assumed it would. No holding back, no false coquetry; the wave had caught them and they would ride it.
When he pulled back half an inch of blackout curtain she saw his profile etched on the wall, clear and distinct like a silhouette – the straight nose, the tousled hair, the shadow of his arm around her. A wash of light moved over the bay and the dark blue sea, and then the rat-tat-tat of anti-aircraft guns. In the heartbeat of silence he pulled her closer, and then from downstairs she heard the music again, jolly and impertinent, two fingers to the war.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.
There are rooms you know you won’t forget; they are like songs that are part of you.
Number 12, Rue Lepsius was such a place: an old apartment building with an elaborate balcony, which overlooked the street. Walking towards it, she saw, by the light of the moon, animal heads – lions, dolphins, griffins – carved into its walls.
As they drove there, Dom explained that the Desert Air Force rented three rooms here for overnight stays in Alexandria. ‘It’s nothing special,’ he told her, helping her out, ‘but it’s quiet, and as safe as anywhere. Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘Not frightened?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll look after you.’
‘Yes.’
The ground floor was deserted and dark.
‘Here.’ He clicked open a lighter and led her upstairs. On the first-floor landing he kissed her softly, and unlocked a door and led her by the hand into a whitewashed room with high ceilings. When he lit two candles; she saw a white bed in the middle of the room, a mosquito net draped around it. There was a washstand, a chest of drawers, a half-drawn curtain with a bath behind it. The sight of his clothes – desert boots, shirt, trousers – flung carelessly on a wicker chair alarmed and delighted her.
He put the candles into two red glass bowls attached to the wall by an iron sconce and closed the wooden shutters. The window glass behind the shutters was criss-crossed with strips of tape in case of bomb blasts. The breeze from an overhead fan ruffled her hair as she stepped out of her clothes. There were no words, no preliminaries. She got into bed and waited for him in the dark like a hungry young animal. The brown gleam of his chest was lit by the candlelight as he lay down beside her.
‘Here.’ He pulled her to him, and the kissing began again, and when he entered her swiftly all she could think was
thank God, thank God at last
. It was like riding the curve of a wave; nothing in her life had felt so absolutely right and unstoppable.
They laughed when it was over. A laugh of triumph and possession.
He lay gasping, one hand on her breast, one tanned leg over the sheets.
‘At long bloody last,’ he said, and they laughed again.
When she was a girl, she’d read other people’s descriptions of falling in love: the tears, the madness, the irrational laughter, the melting, the raging, the burning, and she’d worried because she’d never felt even remotely like that. But when she woke the following morning, her first thought was:
It’s happened. My first miracle
.
He was still asleep, lying on his back, one arm flung in an arc above his head. She looked at him, her body still singing from the night before: at the tuft of dark hair under his arm; at his lips which were soft and clearly carved; there was a small scar underneath them. She must ask him where he got it. He breathed out, his lips slightly parted, teeth white against tanned skin. There was a faint depression under his eyes where the skin was paler than the rest of his face, maybe where his flying goggles had been. His left ear was slightly bigger than his right ear, and below it, when she examined the miraculous skin graft, she saw that it was now almost imperceptible: that the scar which ran from the bottom of his left ear down to the hollow of his neck had faded but you could see, if you looked closely, the raised skin of the surgeon’s neat stitches. Gazing at those stitches, thinking about the hospital, she heard her breath come jaggedly. How could she bear it if it happened again? She ran her hand down the side of his ribs. She stroked the curve of his hip bone, saw the point beneath the rumpled sheet where his suntan ended and his whiter skin began.
‘Umm.’ His eyelashes flickered as he stirred. ‘Lovely,’ he murmured, and went back to sleep again, and slept, and slept. He was exhausted, she could see that; they’d hardly slept a wink the night before, and before that, endless nights on call in the desert.
When he woke up, he looked at the clock and groaned.
‘What a waste, come back to bed.’ She was half dressed and about to leave a note.
‘Can’t,’ she said, ‘I’m busy.’
‘I’m starving.’ His voice was sleepy; his hair stood on end. ‘You’re dressed. Do you want breakfast? There’s a hotel next door: eggs, coffee, falafel, omelette. I’ll get up in a tick.’
‘Told you, I can’t.’ She sat down beside him on the bed. ‘I’m off to work.’ She watched his expression change to one of confusion.
‘To work?’ He dropped her hand. ‘I don’t understand. Where? Why? You said there were no concerts here.’
She sat down on the wicker chair and put one hand over her eye.
‘Down at the club. I’m learning new songs.’
‘Can’t that wait?’
‘No. I’m supposed to be doing a broadcast soon.’
‘Oh. So, will you come back? Can we have dinner tonight?’ Their voices stilted now.
‘Of course.’ She got down on her hands and knees and buried her head into his chest. ‘I’m sorry.’
She copied down the number from the telephone in the hall, so she could phone him as soon as she got there. She told him to promise not to move until she was back.
‘I’m going to move.’ He’d got out of bed like a fluid whip. ‘I’m going to find you a taxi so you’re safe; I’m going to pay the driver so he returns. Saba,’ he looked at her, ‘I don’t want to sound like your Great-Uncle Sid, but I’m not sure you really understand how dangerous this city is at the moment.’
She said that she did, but she didn’t, not really. She was becoming more and more aware of the innocent and isolated bubble that she had been moving in. To be sure, she’d seen the victims of this war, the haggard faces of the men, the hospital stretchers lying in the aisles, but they had been kept apart from any concrete news. And that morning, before Dom woke, the door of the wardrobe that held his clothes had swung open. She’d got up, gone towards it like a sleepwalker, and stared inside it, at his dusty kitbag stained with oil, at a streak of what looked like rust-coloured blood on his overalls.
She laid her head against his chest.
‘Let me take you to the club.’ He stroked her hair. ‘Please. We can come back here afterwards.’
‘No,’ she said, ruffling his hair. ‘I’m a big girl now.’ The risk that Cleeve had missed the Cairo train, or that Ozan might appear, seemed too great. ‘I’ll only be a couple of hours. I’ll rehearse then I’ll come back in a taxi and you can take me to lunch.’
He smiled at her, thinking
damn, damn, damn!
A whole day eaten up – what a waste.
Please God, she thought, hearing her own voice assert all this so confidently, don’t let there be any complications, or hold-ups, or extra events that nobody has bothered to tell me about. I don’t think I could bear it now.
‘Oh thank heavens! You’re back, you’re safe.’ When Saba walked through the door of Colonel Patterson’s house an hour later, Ellie sprang from her chair. She was in the living room, still dressed in evening dress; in the early-morning light her face looked gaunt, and there were dark circles under her eyes.
‘I tried to find you last night, but I think the air raid confused everyone. It was bedlam, wasn’t it? And I knew you were with your young man, so I assumed you were safe. I mean we both took a bit of a risk last night.’ Her eyes anxious as the words tumbled out.
‘I was safe.’ Saba felt herself grinning, almost in spite of herself. ‘I was fine.’