She declined the drink that Ellie offered, and the chance of breakfast; she was suddenly exhausted.
‘So, a lovely time was had by all?’ Ellie’s sly look made it clear she was waiting for girlish confidences.
‘Yes,’ Saba said. ‘A lovely time.’ Even if she’d wanted to she couldn’t describe how wonderful. Her body felt so light, her mind in a state of bliss.
Ellie’s eyebrow shot up. She wanted more.
‘A lovely time?’
‘Yes.’ Saba looked her straight in the eye. ‘Thank you. Look, I’m sorry you had to wait up for me, I hope you’re not too tired.’ She heard Ellie sigh and saw her sag, at which point she might have asked about her evening with Tariq, but she knew already this was not on the conscientious-chaperone script Ellie was reading from.
‘If you don’t mind,’ Saba said, ‘I’ll shoot up now, have a bath and change. Faiza’s expecting me at ten thirty; she has a hair appointment at lunch, I can’t be late.’
‘Shall I pick you up then?’ Ellie seemed to be testing the waters.
Is this too far? Is this?
It was clear she was longing to see Tariq again.
‘There’s really no need,’ said Saba. ‘I’ve made an arrangement to meet Dom for lunch. He only has five days here.’
‘And do you have any leave owing to you?’ Ellie was thinking hard.
‘None of us have had a holiday since we came.’
‘And so you’re insisting on this – making your own arrangements at the club,’ Ellie had her shrewd expression on again, ‘because you want to be on top form for the wireless broadcasts and for Mr Ozan’s party.’ They were back on the script again.
‘Exactly.’
‘Well.’ Ellie kicked her shoes off and walked around, her stockinged feet leaving pawprints on the floor. ‘As long as we’re discreet, I think both of us can be at ease for a few days, if you get my drift. You can stay here if you like. Both of you.’ She’d dropped her voice to a whisper.
‘Dom’s got an apartment on Rue Lepsius,’ Saba said. ‘He’ll look after me. It’s quiet and private and close to the club. We’re all trying to save petrol.’ They exchanged another look.
‘Yes – we’re all trying to save petrol, but you must promise not to say a word of this to Cleeve. Do you know that he forgot to pay me for the last two weeks; I don’t imagine he thinks I can live on air. If it wasn’t for Tariq, I’d be destitute, honestly destitute; if he ever finds out, you’re to tell him that.’
‘Don’t you get paid by the government like we do?’
‘For some jobs, yes . . . it depends . . . it’s complicated. Anyway, not a word to Cleeve, and if you see Tariq at this house, not a word about him either.’ Ellie winked. ‘He’ll be off again soon.’
She gave Saba some bath salts and a fresh towel; she hugged her. She said she would make it her business to sit in on some of Saba’s rehearsals at the club – this with an ostentatious protectiveness, as if it was now her sole aim in life. And by the way, it would be better not to say too much to Faiza about Dom – Egyptians were shocking gossips.
Saba, in the bath, puzzled again about Ellie. In some ways, her presence in the city was as mysterious as her own. And then she forgot her; she was in love and gloriously happy.
Dom was waiting in the flat at Rue Lepsius when she got back from her rehearsal. She bounded upstairs and into their room, thrilled to see him and a little shy. She’d never lived with a man for consecutive days before and it made her feel as if they were playing house together.
He saw the flush of her cheeks, her dark hair swinging as she walked into the room, and thought:
I’m sunk
. He’d missed her all morning and resented every second she’d been away. He wrapped his arms around her and said he could make her some tea – he’d discovered a tiny kerosene stove behind the floral curtain in the corner of the room. When he asked her if she was hungry, she said she was starving and had eaten neither breakfast nor lunch that day.
‘I’ll take you to Dilawar’s,’ he said, happy to feel more in control of things again. ‘It’s the best café around here, and it’s quiet.’
Hand in hand they went downstairs together, and out into the street and down a narrow alleyway with chairs on either side that spilled out from an almost hidden café where people were drinking tea and eating pastries as if the war had never come. The warm air was full of the scent of jasmine from an old vine planted against a trellis. There was a fountain. On the marble counter inside the café was a huge old Russian samovar.
He chose a seat behind a screen where they could not be seen. He said he didn’t want to talk to anyone but her.
It was too early for dinner and too late for lunch, so they ordered cheese and flatbreads which came with doll-sized bowls of hummus and spicy vegetables. While they were waiting, he took both her hands in his, and kissed them softly.
‘Did you miss me?’ He put his fingertips inside her dimples. ‘I love these things.’
‘Didn’t give you a thought,’ when she was aching to kiss him. ‘My day was really exciting.’
‘Even more exciting than the night before?’ His voice was husky. She felt a huge surge of sexual desire leap through her.
‘Almost.’
He gave her a questioning look. ‘Really?’
‘Really.’ She kissed the palm of his hand. ‘Almost.’
In truth, it had been a wonderful day for her in every way: the memory of their lovemaking, in her body all day like a melody underneath the surface of things, had made a fascinating lesson with Faiza even better.
‘Tell me what you did.’ He leaned towards her. ‘Tell me everything about you.’
‘Why should I?’
‘Because you want to.’ When he narrowed his eyes like that, she felt another jolt of desire, and thought,
slow down, be careful, anything could happen in the next few weeks
.
She took a deep breath, ‘Well . . . she’s a funny old bird, but wonderful. You saw her last night, like a little Christmas pudding: huge earrings, great big sparkly dress, no, don’t laugh, that’s how she was, but today she was plainly dressed, quite strict – she’s so passionate about what she does.’
I don’t want you to be passionate about anything but me
. The thought was so instinctive it shamed him.
He watched her eyes sparkling as she described how Faiza spoke fluent French, English, Arabic and Greek, and before the war had worked in Paris at the Le Gemy Club on the Champs-Elysées. She’d been booked by a man called Monsieur Leplée, who’d discovered Piaf on the street, and done her first recordings with her. Mr Leplée had been murdered. There was another bit to this story that Saba kept to herself even though it was interesting. Apparently – Faiza had told her this with much flashing of her kohled eyes and clutchings on the arm for emphasis – the rumour was that Piaf was a frequent performer for the German forces’ social gatherings, but that she really worked for the Resistance.
‘Do you believe this?’ Saba had asked.
Faiza’s shrug had been immense; everybody’s at it, it seemed to imply. ‘And then what?’ Dom tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
‘Well, she started to sing for me, and it was wonderful. She sang this . . .’ She put her mouth to his ear and sang a phrase of ‘Ya Nar Fouadi’, the song they’d been working on with much laughter and some difficulty that morning. ‘But she’s a jazz singer too, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington. She’s brilliant, Dom, so alive. I can really learn from her.’
‘What did she say? What did she say that was different?’ He had stopped teasing; he was excited for her.
‘She told me that when she was a girl she had a flawless voice, a gift from God that could span five octaves quite easily, and it was wonderful. Now, technically, she’s diminished, she has to change the keys to make it easier.’
‘How sad. To know you once did it so much better.’ He wasn’t jealous now, this was quite interesting.
‘She wasn’t sad – that was her point. She said that if you listen to your true voice you get better with age, but to find your true voice you have to really work to find the space inside you. Is this boring?’
‘No, no, no.’ He threaded his fingers through hers. ‘Keep going, I like it.’
‘She says her voice is better now because she’s less keen to please everyone, because she’s suffered more: her husband is dead, two of her children have died, one in a bombing only nine months ago. Even having a baby, she said, lowered her voice by an octave.
‘Also, she is a follower of Sufism; she explained all this to me first, she said it was very important that I understood this about her because everybody has their song: it’s like a message from God that speaks directly to them and that part of the singer’s job is to find their song. Does that sound ridiculous?’
‘No,’ even though it was the kind of talk he would have scoffed at during his Cambridge days, ‘not at all, but do you believe that? Here, come, eat.’ He had made a sandwich for her with the flatbread while she talked.
‘I do.’ She held the bread in her hand, gazing directly at him. ‘I never quite understand it, but there are songs which go through you like a rocket. They’re frightening.’
‘Ah, now that I do believe,’ he said quietly.
‘At home, I used to listen to Tansu singing her Turkish songs; she’d have a cigarette clamped between her teeth, and then she’d put it down on the hearth and sing her heart out. She was back home then, completely connected with who she was.’
‘I used to feel that about my mother,’ he told her. ‘At home, her piano was right under my bedroom, I’d lie in bed as a child and listen to her. She was good, very good, and for a child it was comforting too – I could feel her back in her own natural element; the strength she got from it.’
‘Did she really give up?’
‘She gave up,’ he said. ‘She used to sing all the time when I was a child, but she stopped that too. For years I didn’t understand why. When I asked her once she said that she never wanted to do anything that she was second rate at – that seems to me such a bad thing to say, cowardly and falsely grand. You have to be humble about these things, don’t you, to be prepared to live in suspense, maybe for a long time. But go on, what else did this Faiza say?’
He found that he was riveted – he’d never had a girl like this; usually you had to get the talking over before the fun part began.
‘So many things: how she had to fight to be a singer; how her family hated it – she had to dress as a boy at first. She also told me I must never worry about looking ugly when I sing.’
‘Ugly! What a strange thing to say. How could you?’ He looked at her in amazement. ‘When you walked into the ward that night, you were like a vision. Maybe she got the word wrong.’
‘No, no, no! That’s not what she meant. Yes, of course I must dress up and look nice, but it was more like . . .’ she squeezed up her face at the effort of getting the words right, ‘I must learn to forget myself and be the song.’
‘To forget yourself. That’s quite a tall order.’ He leaned across the table and took both of her hands in his. ‘At least for me.’
‘You’re teasing me.’
‘No. I was thinking how sweet you’d look in glasses.’
‘You are teasing me and I don’t care.’ She mock-biffed him round the ears. ‘I expect you think you’re too clever for me.’
‘No I don’t.’
‘Yes you do.’
And she was thinking how she didn’t usually go on like this. With Paul, her last boyfriend, conversation had felt like some sort of heavy chore, like housework, or a lever that had to be planned for and manipulated and got jammed on certain topics with agonising silences in between.
‘Let’s talk about you,’ she said when they’d settled down again. ‘I mean, how long, seriously, do you think it would take me to really get to know you?’
‘Ten minutes, fifteen maximum.’ He poured her a glass of wine. ‘You know what they say about the Brylcreem boys.’
‘No,’ she said, although Arleta had told her. Conceited, self-centred, God’s gift, et cetera. ‘Oh very cynical.’ She pulled one of his ears.
‘Well maybe, but there is a point to disguises,’ he told her. ‘Do you know that poem by Yeats called “The Mask”?’
‘No.’
‘A woman tells a man to
put off that mask of burning gold with emerald eyes
. She says she wants to find what’s behind it, love or deceit; the man tells her it was the mask that
set your heart to beat, not what’s behind
. I think your man has a point there.’
‘I don’t care about bloody old Yeats,’ she told him. ‘I want to know what happened to you.’
‘What do you mean?’ He blinked and looked away from her.
‘The hospital. We haven’t talked about it.’
‘Oh, the hospital.’ The smell of old meat was what he thought of when he thought of it, the smell of living and dying flesh, warm and sickly and sweet and cut with just enough Dettol to make it bearable; at other times he remembered Annabel’s
It’s not you, it’s all this
, her regretful smile, a damp, sympathetic hand on his brow. Nothing he could joke about yet, nothing he could share.
‘What a vision you were.’ He pretended to be lost in a reverie: ‘Red dress, dark hair. I wanted to take you to bed right there and then.’
‘I’m not talking about that.’ She put her hand over his mouth and said softly, ‘What happened to you?’
‘What happened?’ She felt the soft rasp of his teeth against her fingers while he thought.
‘I’ll tell you one day,’ he said at last. ‘I do trust you.’
He felt he must tell her soon – he’d been on the verge of it several times – that he’d wanted to see her again so badly, he’d taken the train to Cardiff, had seen her house in Pomeroy Street. Something stopped him – pride maybe, or training, a sense that he might have trespassed on her secrets. Life wasn’t a childish game of show and tell, and easy confidences that made everything better before bed. It felt too early to take the risk.
‘I want you to trust you,’ he said. ‘Am I right to?’
‘Yes.’ She put her hand over her right eye. ‘I think so.’
‘You think so? Not know so?’
‘Well . . .’
‘You’re looking very serious,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I don’t know. Nothing. It’s the war sometimes.’