And so, a casual face-saving letter back to Arleta:
Thanks for contacting me. Do let me know if you hear anything. For the foreseeable future I’ll be moving around with the DAF so safest to send letters to me either to the NAAFI in Wadi Natrun, or to the Wellington Club in Cairo. Good luck with your tour
.
Dominic Benson
And that was that.
On 1 September, as Saba walked into the Büyük Londra’s lobby, the desk clerk handed her an envelope with the sheet music to ‘Night and Day’ in it. Inside the front cover was a pencilled note:
Can we meet tomorrow at 43 Istiklal Caddesi. I’m directly opposite the French pastry shop on the first floor. Take the lift and turn right. I shall be there from 10.30 a.m. onwards
.
Cousin Bill
And she was relieved. She had been brought here for a reason, and would be back in North Africa soon where she could explain things properly to Dom. For that morning, lying in the scented luxury of her hotel room, she’d stopped breathing when she heard the calm voice of the BBC man announcing: ‘Today, there was more heavy bombing in the Western Desert where the Desert Air Force have been in action.’
The news as usual was deliberately vague, but her mind had raced to fill in the gaps. Dom could be anywhere now: desperate, suffering, and here she was in a room with a rose crystal chandelier above her bed, and Persian carpets, and thick white towels in her own bathroom. From the window she could see ferry boats crossing the Golden Horn, the mosques on the skyline behind it. She would drink fresh orange juice for breakfast with fresh coffee and buttery croissants, and all the time – no point in fibbing about it – excited in a queasy way about rehearsing with the new band.
Because the confusing thing was that if she could forget about the war, which of course she never could, and Dom, this had been, professionally speaking, one of the most interesting weeks of her life.
Felipe, notwithstanding the sleepy eyes, the spivvy moustache, the slightly drunken manner, was the most exciting musician she had ever sung with. He’d been discovered playing flamenco in a bar on the back streets of Barcelona, and could play just about anything – torch songs, jazz standards, sad old folk songs – with a sort of elegant insouciance which hid the precision and verve of his technique. The band worshipped him, longed to please him, and forgave his occasionally ferocious outbursts when they didn’t live up to his demands. Before the war, he’d told her in his voice cracked and glazed by the constant little cigarillos he smoked, he’d moved to Germany and raised a family there. Ozan had first heard him at the Grand Duc in Paris, and later pulled the necessary strings to get him out of Paris before the Germans arrived – hence their mutual love affair.
And it had given Saba a surge of confidence, particularly after her rough ride with Bagley, to find that Felipe seemed pleased with her, almost to accept her as an equal; someone capable of learning and going far. No words to this effect had been exchanged, but she’d seen it in his eyes when they duetted together, and the more she felt it, the better she sang.
At their last rehearsal, he’d accompanied her on piano for ‘Why Don’t You Do Right?’ and she’d had a very strange experience with him, a moment that probably only another musician would know or recognise. For four or five bars they’d slotted into a rhythm that was so perfect that it felt like sitting inside a faultlessly constructed puzzle, or like dancing together in perfect rhythm. Nothing you could fake or force, but Felipe, who was generally quite reserved, had closed his eyes and yelped with pleasure afterwards, and her blood had sung for hours. She was dying to try it again in concert that night.
After breakfast, she read Cleeve’s note again, memorised the street number on Istiklal Caddesi, and then, feeling faintly absurd, taken a box of matches up to her room and burned the note over the lavatory. As she watched its charred remains swirl away, her mood improved, but the stomach churning did not go away. The thought of seeing Cleeve again had made her unexpectedly nervous, and then in less than nine hours from now – she counted out the hours on her wristwatch – she’d be at Ozan’s house for the band’s first performance together. Even Felipe seemed het up about this. Yesterday, after their last rehearsal, she’d seen a look of strain in his eyes as he’d warned them that Ozan, for all his easygoing ways, was a perfectionist; if the band did not please him, they’d be sent away. When he’d tried to smile, his mouth had twitched – apart from Istanbul and Ozan, Felipe had no home and no job now.
She spent the day wandering alone in and out of the narrow passages of Beyoğlu. She loved this old part of town: the dim alleyways where vegetables, tomatoes, aubergines, fat bunches of parsley were laid out as lovingly as flowers, the butchers’ shops with sheep’s heads in the window, their entrails neatly plaited beside them, the shop where preserved fruits lay like fat shining jewels in big glass jars.
She lingered for a while watching two old ladies prod potatoes and glare at apples with the same severe and forensic attention that Tan gave hers in the Cardiff market, and then moved on to Istiklal Caddesi, a wide thoroughfare filled with fashionably dressed people, where she hopped on to a tram. She got off at the wrong stop, walked for half a mile, then found it: Cleeve’s temporary house – a narrow, ramshackle old Ottoman building with stained-glass windows between a shoe shop and an elegant French patisserie. She had no idea what she would tell him tomorrow, or what he wanted from her; this part of her life seemed precarious, unreal. I don’t like being whatever it is I am to Cleeve, she thought suddenly. It doesn’t suit me – I don’t like shades of grey.
She ate lunch at one of the more modest establishments on the street, which served only
börek
– soft envelopes of pastry stuffed with either meat or cheese or vegetables – her father’s favourite meal. She often saw faces like his now, in the streets, on trams – darkly handsome features with heavy beards that needed to be shaved twice a day. Yesterday she’d watched one man chasing his little boy in the street, and felt a sharp pang of regret. She and Baba had had good times once; the sing-songs, the secret trips to buy ice creams on Angelina Street, all ending with that groaning shameful tussle in the bedroom. Her slap – she’d hit him! – when he’d torn the ENSA letter, still so shocking even when she thought of it now, would not be forgiven, not in this lifetime, and not by her now. She was fed up to the back teeth of waiting for his approval, for letters from him that would not come. Sometimes it seemed you just had to stop yourself going down an old mousehole where there was no cheese.
Istanbul, whether she liked it or not, had brought him into sharp focus again, raising questions. Why had he left this beautiful place with its mosques and scented bazaars, its bright glimpses of blue seas and distant shores, for the cold grey streets of Cardiff, where once, no one spoke his language? Why had he never come back? What was the source of the simmering anger she’d felt in him that had driven her away?
Later, back in her hotel room, alone, a singer again, her father was banished. She stood in front of a mirror in the blue dress Ellie had loaned her, shaking with nerves at the thought of Ozan’s party a matter of hours away now. This is horrible! she thought. Why put myself through this?
A kaleidoscope of thoughts flashed through her mind as she spread panstick over her cheeks and stretched her mouth for lipstick. Tonight would be a humiliating failure, she was sure of it now, under-rehearsed, embarrassing, a jumble of mismatched songs that would bewilder an audience whose tastes she had no clear idea of. Tonight would be a triumph, Ozan would love her, Paris and New York would follow. Dom would surprise her – he’d suddenly show up.
Later, in the back of the chauffeur-driven car Mr Ozan sent for her, her eyes were closed and she was entirely oblivious to the moon rising over the Golden Horn or the fishermen dropping their lines over shadowy bridges, to men going to the mosque to pray, the shoe cleaner outside the gates of the British Consulate packing his things to go home. She was tuned to her songs.
At Taksim Square, Felipe and the rest of the band got in. Smart dinner suits, fresh white shirts and lashings of brilliantine. Felipe kissed her hand and said she looked sensational. The car headed down the steep hill and then turned again, following the sea and the dying day. On the left-hand side of them were the dark shadowed woods, where Felipe told her there were wolves; on their right the gleam of the sea metallic as beaten copper in the dusk, the lights of ferry boats cutting through the waves.
Ozan’s house at dusk was a marvellous sight; with light pouring out from every window, it seemed to float in the moonlit waters of the Bosphorus, ethereal and glittering like some outlandish ocean liner. Walking towards it, Saba heard the steady pump of tango music coming from inside.
Leyla – ravishing tonight in emeralds and pale green silk – stood at the door to greet them. Ozan, she said, had been roaring around the house all day overseeing everything, the food, the stage, the guest list. She rolled her big black eyes behind her husband’s back – what a man! A monster!
She led them to a small room on the first floor where they could store their instruments, then down to a kitchen where five extra cooks and fourteen waiters had been drafted in to pluck quail and chop coriander and dill and pound walnuts and make up the dozens of delicious little mezes for the guests to nibble at.
The cooks made a big fuss of Saba as she poked her head around the door. They smiled and bowed and offered her little bits to taste, but she ate only a tiny bowl of rice and some kind of divine-tasting chicken stew. She was nervous again and very rarely ate before singing.
‘Come! Come.’ Leyla was excited too. She led Saba by the hand upstairs where they peeped around the door and saw a large handsome panelled room crammed with people talking and laughing. The light from dozens of small candles poured down like golden honey on silks and satins and long-necked women with diamonds around their throats. Through open windows a full moon shone over the dark sea.
Inside, food and much male laughter, the clink of glasses and piles of pink Sobranie cigarettes lying in crystal bowls for anyone to smoke. It was, thought Saba, the kind of party you dreamed about when you were young. Mum would have fainted at it.
‘Who are they?’ she whispered to Felipe.
‘All kinds,’ he whispered back, his moustache tickling her ear. ‘Ozan’s business friends, film people, writers and traders, embassy staff, journalists – nearly a hundred and fifty of them, or so Leyla says.’
Mr Ozan hove into view, portly and suave in a ruby-coloured velvet dinner jacket with braid around the cuffs, moving like a giant whale through the glowing room, eyes skimming the crowd, smiling, kissing, patting arms, pinching cheeks, accepting many compliments with a dignified and neutral dip of his head, as if to say
what did you expect?
He’d given them strict instructions not to start to play until the guests had settled in and had time to chat and have a couple of drinks. And then, at nine o’clock precisely, he looked significantly in their direction, tapped his watch and the roar of the partygoers fell to an expectant hush. The curtain opened, a spotlight fell on the stage. ‘Ready,’ Felipe said quietly, checking them all. He raised his beautifully plucked eyebrows at Saba.
Deep breath, shoulders back
. Crepi il lupo!
And they were off. Their first song, ‘Zu Zu Gazoo’, was a nonsense thing composed by Felipe as an icebreaker. Carlos set its rapid pulse, Felipe’s hands raced over his guitar, Saba leapt in singing, scatting, dancing, losing herself in a feeling of almost ecstasy that didn’t feel conscious until the song ended and she heard the audience roar and clap. Felipe’s smile said
it’s working
. All the small incremental moments of practice, of building technique, of making mistakes, of learning when to hold and when to let go had made the song feel effortless and the night magical, and Saba knew that if she was a billionaire, she could never, ever replace this feeling of satisfaction and delight.
Next, ‘That Old Black Magic’, with Felipe furling his lip now and doing his Satchmo imitation and doowapbababbing on the chorus. Then a beautiful Turkish song, ‘Veda Bûsesi’, ‘the parting kiss’, and finally ‘J’ai Deux Amours’. It was pure fun and she loved it.
The candles burned down, leaving a hazy glow in the room; outside, the moon sank like a giant ripe peach in the sea, and the fishermen who had lingered in their boats outside to enjoy the music went home. Sounds of muffled laughter came from an upstairs room where Felipe had told her the narghiles and the lines of cocaine were laid out. He’d gone up there once or twice himself during their breaks. After midnight, the band, purring along now like some well-oiled engine, began to play all the schmoozy old favourites: ‘Blue Moon’, ‘The Way You Look Tonight’.
And Saba, watching the dancers drawing closer, and stealing kisses, felt her moment of happiness change in a heartbeat to one of shocking anxiety. Every cell in her body longed to dance with him, to feel his soft shining hair, his cheek on hers.
Please God, keep him safe. Don’t let him die
.
‘ “These Foolish Things”,’ Felipe whispered. She loved this song. In an earlier rehearsal he’d shown her a way of holding back some of the notes by half a beat. ‘Sometimes in order to make them cry you need to make them wait,’ he’d said.
When the song ended, one or two of the dancers turned towards her entranced. They clapped their hands softly. She blew a kiss towards them from the palm of her hand.
‘
Mashallah
!’ Mr Ozan shouted as he clambered on to the stage. Felipe raised his thumbs and smiled at her.
‘Miss Saba Tarcan, my half-Turkish songbird,’ Mr Ozan said in a muffled voice in the microphone; the audience gave her a loud ovation, they whistled and clapped. For that moment, at least, she could do no wrong.