Jasmine Nights Read online

  ‘So, will you stay after the war?’ Saba asked.

  ‘If a certain someone wants me to,’ Ellie said with a cat-that-got-the-cream smile, ‘I’d definitely stay.’ She added softly, ‘I love it here, I really do.’

  The bombing had stopped. The doors were double-locked; the servants dismissed. Saba took the plunge.

  ‘Ellie,’ she said, ‘you know in Cairo you asked us about . . . you know . . . men friends?’ She used the phrase shyly, but ‘boyfriend’ sounded wrong, too. ‘Well there is someone I’d like to see while I’m here. He’s in the Desert Air Force, and he has some leave coming up.’

  ‘Does Dermot know about him?’ Ellie asked pleasantly. She pushed a box of Turkish delight towards her. ‘Have one – they’re delish.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ummm.’ Ellie put her sweet down on a saucer, her teeth marks clearly imprinted. ‘Gosh.’ Her thoughtful expression had changed. She leaned forward and clasped Saba’s hand. ‘So funny you asked me this,’ she said quietly.

  She got up and poured them both a small brandy even though Saba had not asked for one. She paced around for a bit with her drink in her hand taking small excited sips, and then she sat down.

  ‘Saba,’ she said. ‘Listen.’ She drained her glass and then explained in a low voice that her new boyfriend mentioned earlier, whose name was Tariq, was actually in Alexandria that week and she was absolutely longing to see him. Not that she had minded, of course, but she’d had to cancel a weekend away with him to be Saba’s chaperone. He was a very passionate man, and they’d had rather a bust-up about this, but now, well maybe . . .

  ‘Saba,’ she added, in an urgent whisper, ‘will you promise me not to breathe a word of this to Captain Furness or Dermot Cleeve or any of the ENSA gang for that matter. But I don’t want to lose this man and I wasn’t sure I’d have time to see him. He’s off himself next week to Beirut.’ She looked carefully at Saba. ‘Tell me your friend’s name again.’

  ‘His name is Dom. Pilot Officer Dominic Benson.’

  ‘Shall I see what I can do?’

  Saba sank to her knees, and clasped her hands together in mock prayer. ‘Please.’

  Ellie chewed her bottom lip and stared thoughtfully at Saba.

  ‘If I do this, you must keep schtum. People are frightful gossips here – it’s very easy to lose your reputation, so the fewer people we tell the better,’ by which Saba assumed she meant they would tell no one. Which was fine with her.

  Chapter 23

  The following day, a uniformed chauffeur drove up to the house in a Bugatti, the most beautiful car Saba had ever seen, with a blue china evil eye swinging from its front mirror.

  The chauffer delivered a note on elaborately engraved paper requesting the pleasure of Miss Saba Tarcan’s company at Mr Zafer Ozan’s house near Montazah at one o’clock. He hoped that she would honour him by staying for lunch.

  If Ellie was miffed at not being asked she hid her disappointment generously. After breakfast, she took Saba up to her bedroom and told her to take her pick from the row of beautiful and expensive dresses hanging like highly scented corpses in white cotton bags in her wardrobe. After some consideration, they chose an exquisitely simple blue silk that Ellie said she’d picked up in Paris, at a Christian Dior sample sale. She insisted Saba take the matching bag as well – a bright blue feathery thing that lay like a dead bird at the bottom of the wardrobe in a shoebox lined with tissue paper.

  During these procedures, Ellie became electric with excitement. She insisted on a ladylike waspy corset, and a stole; she darted towards her jewellery case and produced a pair of pearl earrings, which she clipped on Saba’s ears, murmuring of course, of course as if she had reached the end of some daunting religious crisis; she grabbed a brush and pulled it through Saba’s hair, saying she had fabulous hair and should thank her lucky stars for it. Fat chance anyone had of finding a decent hairdresser in Alex at the moment.

  Saba forgot to answer. She was thinking about her songs again and found Ellie’s bright stream of chat distracting. She also disliked being prodded and poked like this. It made her feel like a doll.

  ‘Gorgeous. Beautiful!’ Ellie squinted at her in the mirror. ‘Now.’ She opened a glass bottle with a tassel on it, and dabbed Saba’s wrist. ‘It’s called Joy and the occasional free bottle was one of the perks of working with Patou, and now of course I’m addicted to the ruddy stuff. If you like it, I can give you some.’

  Saba sniffed her wrist and wrinkled her nose. Ellie’s eyes had closed and her expression become stagily ecstatic. ‘Let it settle,’ she commanded. ‘Every ounce of its essence is made with twenty-eight dozen roses and ten thousand six hundred jasmine flowers. Can you imagine!’

  In the same reverent voice she said that after the stock market had crashed in America, Patou had made the perfume for women who could no longer afford his clothes. ‘He called it the gift of memory,’ she said. ‘So sweet of him. It’s supposed to be the most expensive scent in the world.’

  Saba was beginning to find Ellie’s world confusing. A present to cheer poor women up that was the most expensive scent in the world. It had cost the lives of twenty-eight dozen roses and ten thousand six hundred jasmine flowers; that seemed quite a high price to pay for some decent pong.

  Later that morning, Ozan’s extraordinary car stopped outside their house again and Saba felt as if she had taken up residence in another life, and not one she was sure she wanted. While she and Arleta had had some good laughs at the expense of the ENSA uniform, with its laughable knickers and khaki brassieres, it had given her a comforting sense of doing the right thing, of belonging. Now, standing in the dusty street outside the Pattersons’ house – powdered, scented, silk-covered and with the bird bag – she felt like a made-up thing, a toy.

  Her driver, a handsome Egyptian, was separated from her by a glass partition. As they moved off, she noticed him glance at her sharply through his rear-view mirror – a hard sexual stare after the earlier smiles and bows. In his own world, she imagined, few women would travel alone like this.

  The mainly European suburb of Ramleh came with smart houses, green lawns, carefully tended borders and roads that led down to the beach that were tarmacked and well maintained. But then she saw opposite them in a scruffy native quarter a sandy street covered in the footprints of mules and donkeys, like a road breaching two centuries.

  Out of town, their beautiful car purred past white-robed men riding bicycles or donkeys and, at one crossroad, a Bedouin family with camels tied nose to tail. To the left of them the Mediterranean dazzled like smashed pieces of blue glass; to the right was a wilderness of sand studded with the wrecks of jeeps and the occasional aeroplane.

  A group of English soldiers, bare-chested and standing by a broken-down tank, shaded their eyes and goggled at the magnificent car as it drove past. When one of them blew her a kiss, the driver’s eyes narrowed to murderous slits in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘We are nearly there, madame.’ He spoke for the first time. He put his foot down on the accelerator. She glanced in the direction he was looking at, at the bright sea and a ring of green vegetation where she imagined the house to be.

  Over a supper the night before she’d asked Ellie what she knew about Mr Ozan, because she didn’t really know a thing. Nerves had taken away her appetite and her rice and chicken fell like a stone in her stomach.

  ‘Well that makes two of us.’ Ellie had carried on eating. ‘I know nothing, apart from what Tariq tells me.’

  ‘What does he say?’

  ‘Well, he only supplies him with wine, he’s hardly a bosom friend.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, all I really know is common knowledge: that the man owns lots of different businesses and nightclubs and that he’s extraordinarily rich and well connected. I’d love to see his house.’ Ellie tucked her feet up and grew conspiratorial in the lamplight. ‘Apparently he has houses everywhere – Beirut, Istanbul, Cairo. Funny to think of a little Turkish ma
n doing so well, although he may well be half Egyptian too, I’m not sure. Can I get you another drink, darling?’

  Ellie had walked towards the sideboard and poured herself one. ‘I can’t wait to hear what you make of it all.’ She sat down again and swirled her ice around with her finger. ‘Tariq says that his parties are quite spectacular. He says Ozan has a rival in Cairo, another impresario, and the two of them are like children – always trying to outdo each other.’

  Ozan, Ellie continued, was one of the biggest collectors of Islamic art in the world. She imagined that the most valuable stuff would be locked away at the moment, but even so . . . ‘God, how I’d love to spend a day looking through it.’

  Saba, seeing Ellie’s body go slack with pleasure at the thought of this, remembered the conversation she and Dom had had that night about people and their passions; how they flowed through you like some secret river that you dammed at your peril. For Ellie, dresses, bits of china, jewellery; for Dom, flying; for his mother, her piano. Her passion for it had not died, he thought, but been diverted, unsuccessfully, into a search for some unattainable domestic perfection that was exhausting, ridiculous. For instance, if the tray of roast potatoes she was cooking weren’t the right shade of brown, she would chuck the whole lot away and start again. Her photo albums were so rigorously maintained that the family were filed and labelled almost before the camera had been clicked.

  Saba, thinking about her own mother’s wonky efforts with the sewing machine, the box of unsorted photos under the bed near the potty, had felt an unexpected surge of gratitude for her. There was something sad and unsettling about the wrong kind of high standards.

  She was deeply into this train of thought when the driver had to tap on the window between them. They had arrived at Mr Ozan’s and he didn’t want her to miss a moment of it.

  In fact she was disappointed. From a distance, there seemed nothing special here – just a sprawling flat-roofed house with iron grilles over its windows. The windows, partly camouflaged by palm leaves, gave the house a sneaky eye-patched look.

  An armed sentry waved them through iron gates and up an imposing avenue of trees with well-tended gardens on either side. There was a high wall around the garden with bunches of barbed wire on top of it. The driver’s back was sweating now; he drove up a strip of gravel towards the front door, pulled aside the glass partition and said gruffly, ‘We stop.’

  A servant wearing a uniform of no recognisable country opened the door. He led her into a large marble hall which had a chokingly rich smell, somewhere between perfume and charcoal. It was only when she was standing inside the hall that Saba saw that the house was like biting into an expensive chocolate, and far more spectacular inside than out. In a magnificent reception room with a gold-leaf ceiling and marbled floors, gorgeous low velvet sofas were arranged, Arabic-style, around the edges of the room, and piled high with jewelled cushions. One wall was entirely covered by painted cabinets, lit with soft lights and stuffed with what looked to Saba like all the treasures of the Orient: marbled eggs, masks, exquisitely inlaid boxes.

  She was sitting on the edge of a sofa, trying not to goggle too obviously at all this, when another servant appeared to announce that Mr Ozan could see her now. He was waiting for her in the garden.

  The servant led her towards a heavily carved door at the end of the marbled corridor. Before he opened it, he smiled at her, almost furtively, as if to say don’t miss this – it’s special. And it was. When he stepped aside, she stepped over the threshold and into a garden like a vision of Eden in an old-fashioned Bible print. In the foreground was a series of maze-like water channels that led to beds of roses and lilacs, and then to trees which filled the air with the scents of almond, cypress and Arabian jasmine.

  In the middle of this vision, both artless-seeming and brilliantly contrived, the eye was drawn towards a huge and beautiful alabaster fountain carved with birds and fishes. The water flung so recklessly into the air seemed to laugh at the desert in the distance, at the huge blue sky above it and at the distant sea sparkling like an amethyst.

  She sat down on a stone bench near the fountain. It was baking hot here after the dim coolness of the house. A noisy bird was singing extravagantly in the jasmine bush and, in the distance, she heard a telephone ringing, the scattering of feet, what seemed like a world away.

  ‘Miss Tarcan.’ Mr Ozan burst from the house, plump, bustling, beautifully groomed in his well-cut European suit and expensive shoes. He bounced down the path, hand extended, beaming at her like a favourite uncle. ‘Great pleasure for me.’ She caught a whiff of some pungent perfume as he shook her hand. ‘I am very happy to see you again. But bad news for me too.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Something unexpected has come up. I have to fly to Beirut this afternoon, but you are in my house now, I can explain some things to you – my hope is you will stay for lunch then I must go.’ His smile was protective and warm.

  At a table near the fountain, a tray had been laid out for them: tea served in little glasses, small dishes of dates and pastries.

  Mr Ozan took a sip of tea. ‘So, do you actually remember me?’ He looked at her teasingly over the rim of his cup, his eyes so thickly lashed they looked as though they were ringed with kohl. ‘We met before at the Mena House.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right.’ He snorted with laughter at the memory. ‘And you sang some Umm Kulthum. I thought that was very brave of you. She is our national treasure.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Saba grinned. ‘I learned bits of it from my father. He’s an engineer on ships. Lots of crew were Egyptian. I don’t think I got all the words right. Did I?’

  He shook his head fondly. ‘Not all of them, but it was very charming,’ he said. ‘So I wanted to meet you. And now, here is the thing – forgive me for coming so quickly to the point, but my plane won’t wait. I have some big parties coming up soon. Some important people: we make good food, we have dancers, singers, some of the best musicians we can find.’ His eyes sparkled at the thought of it. ‘And I would like you to sing for me. Would you do that? If it works well, I can prepare for you a proper booking at one of my clubs.’

  She was flattered. How could she not be? Arleta had told her that Ozan, before the war, went to a famous nightclub called Le Grand Duc where he had talent-spotted great artistes – Ellie called it a rich man’s hobby. But there was something else about him that stirred her on a deeper level – the sight of his dark eyes twinkling at her reminded her of her father. Not her recent furiously disapproving dad, but the baba from earlier days who’d chased her round the back yard laughing.

  ‘I know some other Turkish songs,’ she announced eagerly, for that moment the child who’d stood on the table singing. ‘I’m half Turkish.’

  His expression softened. ‘Me too, with a bit of Greek and Egyptian thrown into the pot, but what part of you is Turkish?’ he said gently.

  Without thinking, she put her hand over her heart.

  ‘This part.’

  Mr Ozan burst out laughing, showing beautiful white teeth.

  ‘I meant your mother or your father.’ His English was excellent, but he had a way of adding a soft purr to the end of motherrrr, fatherrrr, just as her father did.

  ‘My father.’

  ‘And where does he hail from?’

  She told him briefly about the farm, the plane trees, about his father the schoolteacher – surprised all over again at how little she knew – Ozan listened raptly. He closed his eyes as if in pain.

  ‘Did they have to leave their farm?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you know what happened?’

  ‘No.’ She felt tears come to her eyes. ‘He didn’t talk about it.’

  ‘It’s hard to leave your land.’ He looked at her sadly. ‘But we can talk more about this later. This is not forrr the idle chat.’ Again he purred his r’s like a cat.

  She watched him crumble a sticky pastry between his fingers. He told her that
he had been educated at a Jesuit school in Cairo, and also in London for one year. He said that although he was a successful businessman, ‘I am in here,’ he’d clutched his chest, ‘a musician – but one, I am sad to say, who cannot play for toffees or sing.’ What he’d most enjoyed before the war he told her, his eyes gleaming, was to go to a big city like Paris or London and listen to the best singers there. ‘Everybody thinks that people in this part of the world only like the aaaahhhhh,’ he twisted his wrists around and wailed like an Arab singer, ‘but I have heard Piaf and Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Jacques Brel, all of the great ones – I like them as much as Umm Kulthum.’

  One of the pleasures of his life, he said, was to discover the good young singers. He mentioned a few names, none of them familiar to her, and talked tantalisingly of the tours he arranged for them across the Mediterranean in the nightclubs he owned: in Istanbul, in Cairo, Beirut and Alexandria. ‘I have learned that all great singers need practice,’ he said. ‘Not just practice to sing, but practice to perform. And we make the perfect place to learn, for many of these people,’ which he pronounced bipple.

  ‘But now,’ he gave an eloquent shrug, ‘there is a big drought on talented artistes in Egypt, so when I heard you sing, it made me very happy. I saw something in you, something exciting. In our language we would call you a Mutriba, she is one who creates tarab – literally enchantment – with her songs.’

  The blue silk dress had made her feel all cool and sophisticated, but now she could feel herself grinning.

  ‘What kind of songs do you want me to sing at your parties?’ She knew she would do it now. ‘I need to practise.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that.’ He gave a powerful snort. ‘We need tact. The parties will be in Beirut, where some of my clients dislike Western music very much indeed. They must be happy too. So two, maybe three Arabic songs. Can you do this?’