‘Today you rehearse with them, but before that Leyla will take you shopping – she knows all the best shops in Beyoğlu. You can buy some dresses, I will pay.’
‘I have dresses,’ she said.
‘I know,’ he said. He removed his glasses and looked at her. A look that for the first time gleamed with possibilities. ‘But you can have some more if you want,’ he said softly. He adjusted his weight in his chair and carried on scribbling in his book. ‘There will be lots of parties. I want you to look good.’
‘I’m honestly fine, thank you,’ she said, thinking
damn you, Mr Cleeve, you said this wouldn’t happen
. ‘I brought my own clothes.’
‘Ahhh.’ With his chair at a precarious angle, he leaned back and appraised her, like a man at an auction deciding what to bid. ‘Are you one of those new women?’ He gave a quizzical smile. ‘What are they called, suffragettes?’
‘They’re not so new,’ she said. ‘We’ve all moved on a bit since then.’ She smiled to show him no hard feelings. ‘And by the way, you don’t have to be a suffragette to want to wear your own things.’
He ignored this. ‘Well, if you see anything you want, talk to Leyla, who will show you around. She is also a liberated woman,’ he added. ‘But happy here too.’ He opened his arms to include the room, the view, the glittering cabinets. From the room downstairs came the gurgling sound of a child laughing, its scampering feet.
‘I’m not surprised,’ she said. ‘It’s beautiful.’
Again that strange proud curve of his lip – almost a smirk. ‘And when the singing is over,’ his paternal look had returned, ‘it will be my great pleasure to take you to your family’s village. It’s not far from here – maybe you will find some of your people there.’ When he said that, she had a vision of herself as a tree – a tree like one of the ancient cedars that grew around the
yali
– that might grow another root in the ground. It was oddly comforting, but seemed unlikely too.
‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘I’d like that.’
Back in her room, she saw that a walnut-wood gramophone and wireless had been placed there – a monster of a thing with green lights shining from its control panel, and pleated material in its front. Beside it, Ozan had left a pile of the records he frequently alluded to that he’d collected from all over the world: Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Billie and Ella, Dinah Washington. Two by Turkish singers Saba had never heard of. When she turned on the radio, she heard the crackling of static like flames, and then a burst of tango music.
She twiddled some more, her heart in her mouth, and at last an English voice saying, ‘and this is Bela Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances’ bled into by the Arabic wailing. While she dressed, she kept the wireless tuned to the same station, hearing the sounds coming and going, and eventually, on the hour, the pips, and a calm Home Counties voice saying: ‘This is the BBC coming to you from North Africa. Today the Desert Air Force and five infantry units engaged with the Luftwaffe sixty miles west of Alexandria, on the edge of the Western Desert. We have no news yet of casualties.’
She almost stopped breathing, terrified of missing a single word. But that was it:
We have no news yet of casualties
. Loss of life was a foregone conclusion.
When the caterwauling music swept on again, she switched it off and lay on the bed, and felt, for the first time in her life, a powerful dislike of herself and her work. Being a singer had once felt so simple, so pure, so natural to her; now it felt like a cannibal that might eat her heart out. For there must be consequences, she saw that now. They would split her apart and cause other people pain, and it was stupid of her not to have thought of this before.
To stop herself thinking, she switched on the wireless again. Turkish tango music again – bounding and impertinent with its swooping rhythms, its stops and starts. Ozan said there was a craze for it in Istanbul and she’d soon be singing some. She turned it up, went into the bathroom and took off all her clothes.
In the shower, she laid her head against the cool tiled wall and closed her eyes as the water flowed over her. The bugger of it is, she thought, that what I most need now is to work. I’m no good to anyone without it.
Leyla drove her to her first rehearsal later that day.
They were early. In the elegant lobby of the Pera Palace Hotel, they sat drinking coffee and eating feather-light macaroons while a uniformed chauffeur waited patiently on the pavement outside.
Leyla, dressed today in a severely cut Chanel suit and a row of double pearls, was greeted by the head waiter with bows and twinkling smiles.
In the middle of a bland conversation about clothes and all the wonderful tourist attractions Saba should see, Leyla blurted out, ‘Do you like your life?’ She dabbed the corner of her mouth with a napkin and waited with watchful eyes for the answer.
‘My life?’ Saba was startled. Their conversation in the car hadn’t strayed much beyond the polite formalities. ‘Well, yes. I do – at least I think so.’
‘No problems within your family?’
‘How do you mean?’ Saba had already been conscious of Leyla’s confusion about her, the darting looks as if she was a puzzle she was working on.
‘Well . . . so . . . well . . . they don’t mind you singing or anything like that?’ Leyla took a black Sobranie from a pearl cigarette case. ‘Or travelling alone. Here, have one of these, please!’ She pushed the cigarettes towards her.
‘No thanks.’ She’d given it up because they made her cough. ‘We live in Wales.’ Saba made a quick decision not to tell Leyla about her father; she didn’t know her well enough and it would make her feel too vulnerable. ‘People like a bit of a sing-song there.’
‘And we like it too.’ Leyla’s manicured hand patted hers reassuringly. ‘It was only before Atatürk that women were silenced.’ Atatürk, who’d died four years ago, was, she said, their leader and pro-democracy, the great moderniser of Turkey. Before him, women could only really sing and dance for each other, in the
hamam
, the Turkish baths, but at a stroke he had let them out of their cages – they could sing and dance in public after centuries of it being forbidden. What relief! What joy! Except that in some poorer villages, ‘sorry for this – and no rudeness intended – but a singing girl is still a great disgrace. Some girls are beaten by their fathers if they do. In Anatolia there are whole villages still where only men are allowed to sing.’
‘Goodness!’ Saba felt the surge of a blush spread over her face. Her father seemed to have missed this revolution, but what Leyla had said explained so much.
‘And how did you meet Mr Ozan?’ she asked to break the awkward silence that followed.
‘In London, before the war.’ Leyla stretched out her legs and studied her impeccable shoes. ‘Actually, I was studying to be a doctor.’
Saba tried not to look surprised.
‘A doctor! How wonderful – do you do it now?’
‘No – I never did.’
They glanced at each other warily.
‘So, did you like London?’ Saba asked after a while.
‘No, forgive me. Not at all.’ Leyla smiled and shook her head. ‘I was very, very lonely, and I felt so sorry for the wife of the man I lived with. An English woman, a friend of my father’s, but so busy all the time! Flowers, servants, cooking – no peace! And she was lonely too, I think, with no aunties at home, and her children at boarding school, her husband working all the time. I don’t think she knew what to do with me.’
‘So you must have been happy to meet Mr Ozan?’
‘It was like a miracle. He was over there going to the theatre, the music, doing a hundred and one business things exactly like now.’ She smiled fondly. ‘I was at St Thomas’s Hospital for my first year. The first person in my family to do something like that. My grandfather was very unhappy about it, he hardly ever spoke to me again, but my father was progressive.’
It made Saba feel queasy to remember that she should probably be paying close attention to these confidences: writing them down, pinning notes to her knickers. Part of her knew already she wasn’t a natural spy.
‘Zafer and I met at a party with some other Turkish people, friends of my family in London. We fell in love, we married the next year.’ Leyla’s voice had become somewhat mechanical. ‘No, no thank you,’ she snapped at a simpering waiter who had appeared with a new tray of pastries.
‘Did you mind? Not finishing your studies, I mean.’
‘Not at all.’ Leyla said it so quickly Saba was frightened she’d overstepped the mark. They both drew in a breath and looked at their shoes.
‘Well . . . sometimes . . . maybe . . . not so much.’ Leyla laughed without rancour at her own contradictions. ‘I did enjoy medicine but my parents were very pleased, he is a very good man, very successful too. I have my children, my family.’ Her eyes were sparkling. ‘Never a dull moment as you would say. Now please, a bit more coffee, or shall we look at the shops before your rehearsal? By the way,’ she murmured while they were picking up their things, ‘I don’t think you should tell Mr Ozan I have talked to you of such things.’
The two of them exchanged a look.
‘I don’t think he would exactly mind,’ Leyla shook the crumbs from her skirt, ‘but we have never spoken of these things, and I hardly think of them – it’s almost as if it never happened.’
After coffee, they went to the Londra hotel, where Felipe Ortiz, the bandleader, stood waiting for her beside an enormous potted palm tree near the front desk. Ortiz, a small, neat man with brilliantined slicked-back hair and a thin moustache, explained as they walked up the marble stairs that he was half Spanish and half Jewish, and had, like many Jews, fled to Istanbul two years ago. Before that he’d played all over Europe – France, Berlin, Italy, Spain. Hearing the sounds of a saxophone in an upstairs room, her steps quickened.
Felipe, though small in stature, was a man who gave off confidence like a lamp gives light. He told Saba they would rehearse for two hours each day in the morning. They had a lot to get through. The clientele at Ozan’s parties and clubs were varied: Spanish, Jewish, Greeks, White Russians and the Free French. The Turks, who were tango mad, tended not to like the new jazz; the French adored it; the Germans were sentimental and loved oompah music and of course, and here Felipe had an unsuccessful stab at a cockney accent, ‘blooming old “Lili Marleen” ’. He gave Saba a stack of sheet music to study later, and then they briefly discussed tempos and keys, the songs they liked, and Saba sang a few songs a cappella for him.
A fat drummer with a bulging paunch and sleepy eyes shambled into the room. His name was Carlos. Saba was briefly introduced, the band tuned to an up-tempo version of ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ and they were off.
When the song was ended, Felipe looked pleased – pretty good, his immaculate eyebrows indicated. Next came a jolly bouncing Turkish tango song called ‘Mehtaph Bir Gecede’, which Carlos said meant ‘on a moonlit night’. Saba tried to follow it but couldn’t. For her, the highlight came after a break, when Felipe, fiddling quietly with his guitar, resolved the notes into a jazz version of ‘Stormy Weather’.
‘You.’ He looked at Saba, who sang along with him. Claude, the piano player, added a few soft touches.
And not for the first time, Saba was shocked at the sense of relief that singing brought to her. Nothing else would do sometimes. ‘At the end of the song,’ Felipe instructed the pianist, ‘I think when she sings about it raining all the time, you must,’ he put his finger to his lips, ‘bring it up on the last bit.’ He demonstrated on his own guitar – a silky progression of notes that gave Saba goose bumps. The band was good. Ozan was right about that. Felipe was pleased with her. For that moment, nothing else mattered.
After the rehearsal, they went down to the heavily ornate bar and drank Turkish tea in small glasses, and laughed at the two ancient parrots that sat in a cage in between the heavy drapes, like old and bitchy women muttering Turkish threats together. Felipe told her that when the war was over, the band hoped to tour again and would be looking for a vocalist. North Africa, Europe, maybe America; they’d had an offer from the Tropicana in Cuba where he’d played before the war, a magical time, he’d said with his sad, sweet smile. The names affected her like a drug. ‘Mr Ozan is keen to help us,’ he’d added. And now to complete the complications of the day, she felt herself shiver with excitement; she couldn’t wait for the concerts to begin.
He read the letter again, tore it in half, and burned both halves in his lighter flame.
Dear Dom
, Arleta had written in her slapdash hand,
I hope you don’t mind me calling you this. No, not a word have I heard from Saba either since she left us, so I’ve been worried too. I think she must have joined another tour, or gone away, maybe gone back to England. She was sent to Alex to do some wireless broadcasts. I wrote to her, she didn’t reply to me, and our little lot has broken up anyway, because of illness, accidents, etc. I don’t think she even knows that our poor old comedian, Willie, died suddenly on stage, poor love, which is how he’d have wished to go. I tried to contact Janine, a dancer on our tour, but she went off, I believe to India. It’s hard to keep in touch at the mo as you yourself probably know
.
Sorry can’t be more helpful. If I do here from her I will definitely let her know. I miss her dreadfully, she was great fun and really talented. If you here from her, please do contact me
.
All the best
,
Arleta Samson
He’d taken a comfort he knew was both unpleasant and snobbish in the schoolgirl handwriting, the poor spelling. Performers were superficial, uneducated, unreliable and forgettable. He’d got himself lost like a man in a room of funfair mirrors. It would never have worked.
As a pilot he’d been trained to see that human beings had one big design fault in their brains. They saw fragments of reality and tried to build a whole world from them. When he, Barney and Jacko had sat down to learn the first rules of navigation, their instructor had roared five words at them – compass, deviation, magnetic, variation, true – and they’d bellowed back the mnemonic Cadbury’s Dairy Milk very tasty. But the principle was sound: what seemed real could trick you. The mountain, hiding behind those gorgeous fluffy clouds you were flying into, could shatter you into a million pieces. That line of stars on your starboard side masquerading as the welcoming lights of a runway or dancing like native girls waving strings of white flowers. Never mistake what you wanted for what was there – as she so clearly wasn’t.