Jasmine Nights Read online

  It was boiling hot as usual inside the Perspex and tin universe of the aircraft, but already he could feel the fears of the night and the petty worries of the day recede. He was flying again.

  ‘OK now, watch it now! Watch it! We’re coming over,’ Dom told the new boys through his radio transmission.

  And then boom! boom! boom! boom! Each aircraft had been given three rounds of ammunition to unleash. Dom could hear Scott laughing, and the taciturn American whooping and hollering as he emptied his guns into their black shadows.

  Once, such moments were the high points of Dom’s life, the times when he forgot everything – lovers, parents, home – to play the most dangerous and exhilarating game devised by man or devil. He’d loved all of it then: the feeling of mastery, the freedom from petty earth, the danger, the fear, but now a smear of shame was mixed into the exhilaration. Nothing he could talk about yet, to anyone – not to his parents, not to his living friends, certainly not to a woman – but always there.

  The first shadowings had come in the early days of the Battle of Britain. He’d gone up in a Spitfire, misread the altimeter, and the plane had plunged down at top speed towards the coast of Norfolk. The earth had come hurtling towards him. His stomach hit his brains. It was only at the last possible moment he’d managed to swerve and climb again.

  That was the day when he’d sworn to himself that if he got down in one piece, he’d go straight to his flight commander and say he would never fly again. He’d passed out for a few moments after landing and woke tasting his own vomit in his crash helmet. But on his way back to the mess, walking on jelly legs and staggering under the weight of his parachute, he’d changed his mind again. He simply couldn’t stop. It was what he needed to feel alive.

  And then, much later and much worse, he’d persuaded Jacko to go up again even though he knew Jacko was struggling with the mathematics of flight. There was something about coordinating hand, eye, foot, maps, controls and the altimeter that didn’t come naturally to him. He’d tried to tell Dom he was windy and Dom had teased him out of it, or tried – a moment of casual cruelty that would stay with him for the rest of his life.

  What happened next was the rock under the sunny surface of things. But he mustn’t dwell on it; they’d been warned about that. ‘Be economic with emotion,’ the wing commander had told them on day one at flying school. ‘Look at the chap on your right, and now at the one on your left; soon one of them will be dead.’

  He must forget his joke; forget Jacko’s face on fire, the plane spinning towards the sea like a pointless toy.

  His new priorities were clear: flying, fighting, and seeing Saba again.

  Chapter 22

  When Willie collapsed on stage, ten days later, it was Janine who saved his life. They were performing at a fuel depot close to an infantry camp near Burg el Arab; Arleta was pretending to be Josephine Baker dancing the famous banana dance that had enchanted tout Paris; Willie was the ravenous little boy eating her bananas while she leapt around blissfully unaware. It was very funny and Saba loved it. She was roaring with laughter in the wings when she saw Willie’s eyes go blank and float up into his lids. She thought it was a stunt, until he crashed heavily to the floor and the curtain came hurriedly down.

  He fell on a rusty nail in the wings that shot into a hand that instantly spurted blood. Janine whipped off her tights, twisted them into a makeshift tourniquet, and then ran on muscles of steel towards the much-derided panic bag for emergency iodine and bandages, all applied with ice-cool efficiency.

  The cause of his initial faint was diagnosed as jaundice, possibly contracted from food from one of the fly-blown street stalls he insisted were far safer than the jellied-eel stands in London. He was now in a military hospital on the base looking yellow and uncertain, but still alive. Saba and Arleta had gone to see him every day, with Janine, who was shyly the heroine of the hour, until Arleta had herself gone yellow and come down with jaundice. The eight-piece combo that was supposed to arrive from Malta hadn’t. Janine, who’d been offered a transfer to India, delayed her departure, and sometimes read to Willie in the afternoons. The last time Saba had arrived she’d been brushing his hair and blushed bright red at the sight of her.

  ‘Do you want to do this?’ Bagley asked when the official request came through for Saba to transfer to Alex and do a week of wireless broadcasts. ‘With Willie and Arleta off, there’s sod all to do here, and a couple of nights at the Cheval D’Or would be quite a feather in your cap.’ His forehead had wrinkled as he’d read the order again. ‘But I hear it’s pretty hot there – I mean you could probably go home now if you pushed it. I’d certainly help you.’

  She’d looked at him in amazement. Stop now! Was he completely mad?

  But four days later, stepping off the plane in Alexandria, she felt a complicated mix of emotions: orphanish to be sure at leaving the company (both Willie and Arleta had cried; Bog had offered to marry her), excited about the possibility of performing at the Cheval D’Or, desperate to get some kind of safe message to Dom. If they were ever to have a chance of meeting, it would have to be here.

  ‘Darling.’ Madame Eloise stepped out of a sea of dun-coloured soldiers to meet her, looking like some cool and exotic flower in her white linen dress and pale primrose hat.

  ‘Madame.’ Saba tried to sidestep the little groaning kisses on both cheeks. She’d been sick again on the plane, and Madame smelled delicious – a tart fragrance like grapefruits and sweet roses.

  ‘Oh don’t bother with all that Madame business.’ Madame’s voice had a faint cockney twang Saba hadn’t noticed before. ‘That’s for my shop customers. Call me Ellie.’

  As they walked across the road, Ellie explained the fortunate coincidence that had led her here.

  ‘I happened to be here on business,’ she said, ‘when Captain Furness, an old friend, asked me to step in. The other chaperone got stuck in Cairo, where all the wretched trains have stopped. So we’re orphans together. Doing what, I’m not entirely sure.’ She stopped smiling and frowned; it made her look older – Saba guessed at least forty.

  ‘To be honest with you, Ellie,’ Saba said, ‘I haven’t got a flipping clue either. I was whisked out of the desert this morning and told I’d get my orders when I arrived here.’

  ‘Well, all to be revealed soon.’ Ellie put up a parasol. ‘I hope.’

  A taxi took them down a desert road littered on both sides with wrecked tanks and burned-out jeeps, and when they turned towards the city Saba was shocked. Arleta, who’d once done a three-week tour here, had waxed eloquent about its fabulous beaches, and shops as good as London, and cosmopolitan street cafés, and perfect climate, but as they drove closer, Saba saw shattered pavements and charred houses, an old woman with a bandage around her head scavenging for food.

  ‘This looks like a dangerous place to live,’ she said. She found it hard to imagine that there would be a nightclub open here.

  ‘Don’t worry, pet.’ Ellie patted her hand. ‘We’re staying in a staff house that belonged to a Colonel Patterson, in Ramleh, in the eastern part of town, away from all this. God it’s bright outside.’

  The black shadows of flowers moved across her face as she pulled the taxi’s home-made blackout curtains.

  ‘People are on edge here naturally after the flap,’ she continued breezily, ‘but life goes on, people are swimming again and partying, and most of them say the Germans will bypass Alexandria.’

  ‘We’ve been living inside a bit of a bubble lately,’ Saba said, thinking how easily this battered town could be circled by a line of German tanks, ‘and travelling so much.’ When she peered around the curtain she saw a group of men staring helplessly at a collapsed shop window in which a few stained dresses and cardboard boxes remained. ‘It’s hard to know who to trust.’

  ‘Keep that closed.’ Ellie jerked the fabric and made it dark again. She patted Saba’s hand and crossed her legs with a sucking sound. ‘I hear you girls have done heroic work in the desert,
and if I may say so, you look absolutely done in,’ she said. ‘Look at you!’ A circle of dust had formed around Saba’s feet; the laces in her shoes were clogged with it. ‘A bath first, I think, then a decent lunch. Tomorrow you’ve been asked out to lunch with Zafer Ozan which should be fun. Have you seen his house?’

  ‘I met him once. He heard me sing in Cairo.’

  ‘Oh well, glory, you are in for a treat. I hear it’s stunning.’

  ‘Are you coming?’ Saba hoped she was.

  Ellie hesitated. ‘Not sure yet – let’s wait and see.’

  The charming villa they were staying in had iron grilles on its windows and blackout curtains inside. When the taxi stopped outside it, a suffragi took Saba’s dusty kitbag from the back of the car and led them towards the house.

  ‘The house is lovely and cool, you’ll be happy to hear,’ Ellie said. They had stepped into a tiled hall. Her heels clattered emptily into a sitting room smelling of furniture polish which looked like a dentist’s waiting room with its half-empty bookshelves and old copies of Country Life. ‘We keep all the shutters closed during the day, and use the fans at night.’

  The Pattersons, it seemed, had gone for longer than a holiday. There were gaps on the wall where pictures had disappeared; the teak floor had a pale square in the middle of it where the rug had been. When a servant took Saba to the guest room on the first floor where she felt a dizzying wave of tiredness at the sight of the clean white sheets, the mosquito net, the soft-looking bed. All of the company were exhausted now and she hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep for what felt like a long time. In a saucer beside her bed, someone had lit a Moon Tiger – its green coils of insect repellent gently smouldering, dropping ash on the floor.

  ‘Bath first, then bed.’ Ellie padded into the room in her stockinged feet. She had a jar of violet-coloured bath salts in one hand, towels in the other. She followed Saba into the bathroom where the water was already flowing. She handed Saba a green silk kimono and said she must use it while she was here.

  ‘You’re very kind,’ said Saba. Her limbs were aching for her first proper bath in a month.

  ‘Not kind, happy to see you.’ Ellie opened her mouth to say something else, but left it at that. ‘Hop in,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you at supper.’

  The water was hot and smelled so good. Saba, scrubbing herself with soap, was astounded at how much dust and sand had stuck to her skin. The day before, they’d all been caught in a dust storm as they’d left the rehearsal tent. For ten minutes the sand had lashed and stung them; when they got back to their tents they laughed at each other – they were so coated in dust that Saba said they should be on a plinth at the Cairo museum. The pint of water they’d shared to wash it off had left them all with grit in their underwear, their teeth, their hair and made them feel irritable and out of sorts.

  Sunlight bounced off the water. Bliss! A whole bath to herself without Janine’s wretched egg-timer or her damp sighs behind the door. It was only when Saba was washing her hair with the shampoo thoughtfully provided that she felt a wiggle of loneliness. Arleta usually rinsed her hair for her, and helped her dry it in a way that made her feel like a cherished baby. Before she left, Arleta had hugged her tight; she’d pinched Saba’s cheeks and said she wanted her back soon: they were family now. Even Janine had pecked her on the cheek.

  When she’d gone to see Willie in hospital, he’d pretended to bawl his eyes out like a fat baby. Arleta said she didn’t think he’d last long.

  The water was almost cold when she woke. She heard the grumble of aeroplanes overhead, the gurgle of pipes from the kitchens below and, for a moment, had no idea where she was.

  She dressed and went downstairs. ‘Well, you had a good one,’ Ellie said. She’d changed into a pair of pale grey silk lounging pyjamas and knotted a long rope of pearls around her neck. She was drinking a gin and tonic. She went over to the window and checked that the dark blue blackout curtains were fully drawn, and told Saba that after supper they would have some fun trying on clothes.

  ‘Ozan throws a great party, or so I’ve heard.’ She closed her eyes ecstatically. ‘Marvellous music, rivers of Bollinger – wish I’d kept up with my singing lessons.’

  ‘What did you do before the war?’ Saba asked quickly. Ellie’s hints made her uneasy – she still wasn’t sure what she was doing here, or whether it was safe for her to go to the party. She wished Cleeve was around to brief her again.

  ‘A long story.’ Ellie took a sip of her gin. There was a taut perkiness about her tonight that Saba hadn’t noticed before that made her wonder if she was more nervous than she was letting on. ‘Which I’ll nutshell: went to Paris when I was young, instantly fell in love with the city – an absolute coup de foudre. In those days, no interest in clothes whatsoever – lived in jodhpurs and twinsets – but one day, shopping in a local market, a man saw me, great gawky thing that I was. He asked me to be a house model for Jean Patou. They made me lose half a stone, taught me how to make up and then I did three of their collections.’

  She stood up and walked in a haughty way towards the blackout curtain: ‘Feather on the head, tail on the derriere, that’s how they taught us to walk.’

  ‘Numéro un – une robe blanche,’ she imitated the gloomy voice of a vendeuse, and then pring pring she played an imaginary piano. ‘Numéro deux – une robe noire. Dead boring, but suppose it was a start. The main thing was, I lived independently for the first time. That was wonderful.’

  They ate supper together in a sparsely furnished dining room, where the only light came from a fringed lamp on the sideboard.

  Ellie had organised a local dish called kushari, a cumin-scented mix of lentils and onions and vegetables smothered in a spicy sauce. She apologised for serving peasant food. ‘The Egyptians call it a messy mix,’ she said, ‘but I adore it, much better than ghastly tinned sausages and all that bully-beef rubbish.’ They washed it down with a glass of French wine. Ellie said it was a present from a new boyfriend, a French-Egyptian wine merchant.

  ‘He’s Free French and I’m quite taken,’ she said, her eyes lighting up. Saba was surprised; surely forty was too old for passion?

  Saba ate heartily; she loved the food and said so. It reminded her of the dishes Tansu used to make. She told Ellie, a good listener, about Tan: how they used to lie in bed listening to music on the wireless together, how brave Tan had been arriving in Wales from Turkey with nothing but her suitcase. Ellie smiled at her as if she was her own child.

  ‘I’m feeling quite nervous actually, Ellie,’ Saba said when they were eating tiny pastries and drinking Turkish coffee. ‘I’ve never sung at a proper nightclub before, or at a really posh party like Mr Ozan’s. I don’t know what songs they’ll like even.’

  Ellie leaned forward; she grabbed both of Saba’s hands and held them between hers. She looked her intently in the eyes. ‘They’ll love you,’ she said. ‘Dermot Cleeve says you’re a real find.’

  Saba looked at her. So she did know Cleeve.

  ‘I thought he might be here tonight,’ said Saba. She was aware of how her voice bounced in the empty, rugless room. It almost felt as if they were on a stage.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Ellie. ‘Everything is falling into place. While you were in the bath I got a telephone call from Furness. You’re to rehearse with a woman called Faiza Mushawar; her husband used to own the Café de Paris, not the real one of course, but the one on the Corniche. She is a fine singer herself, although more in that moany, waily Arab style than is to my taste – have you ever been to one of their concerts, darling? Well don’t. Hideous. They go on for absolutely days. Anyway, anyway, I hear they have a first-class band there.’ Her diamond ring flashed as she patted Saba’s hand. ‘A lovely change from singing in the desert. That must have been so depressing.’

  ‘It’s not,’ Saba said. How to explain how shockingly alive it had made her feel, and proud too to be doing her bit. ‘When do we start?’ She wanted Ellie to say immediately so she could stop fe
eling nervous.

  ‘The day after tomorrow at ten.’

  The business part of their conversation seemed over, and now, as darkness deepened outside the house, Ellie babbled on amiably – about the dresses she’d brought, how she’d help with make-up if necessary. She’d done the models at Patou and still had her kit with all the old favourites in it. Tangee’s Red Red was fabulous under lights. Saba tuned her out. She was thinking about her songs. ‘Stormy Weather’, her head nodded as she silently sang it; the doo-wop maybe for a bit of light relief; ‘My Funny Valentine’ definitely, she loved singing that. It would be a treat, she thought, not to sing the relentlessly chirpy songs ENSA insisted on even to men who looked half dead.

  The tray of coffee cups rattled as the servant left the room. There was a distant boom, followed by the rat-tat-tat of anti-aircraft guns. The servant stopped and waited expectantly. Ellie listened hard, her eyes wide open, her nostrils flared.

  ‘There’s an air-raid shelter behind the courtyard,’ she said, ‘if we need it. Personally, I can’t be bothered to run out at every single thing. It’s nothing like as bad as London was, I can assure you.’ The flame of her match caught her tense smile, and Saba felt fearful and dislocated again. In Cardiff, when the bombs were this close and she and Tan couldn’t be fagged to go to the shelter, they’d lie under the table in the front room together. They’d hug each other and sing songs, the mountainous upholstered bulk of her gran as solid as a sofa or a building.

  The anti-aircraft guns stopped; she heard the shrill sound of a rocket. To distract herself she picked up the photograph on the sideboard of the sensibly departed Pattersons, they stood in front of a large grey slab of a building next to a flag at what looked like a passing-out parade. Grey English sky above them. The colonel’s pleasant long-jawed face bent towards a Mrs Patterson smiling rigidly at the camera.

  ‘Amazing, isn’t it.’ Ellie took the photo from her. ‘How scared some people get at the slightest thing. Ever since I’ve been in Egypt,’ she stretched her feet and admired her toes, ‘they’ve gone on about the big push. I’d have been gone eight or nine times if I believed them, and to what? Some awful little flat in London, where thousands and thousands of people have been killed already.’