Jasmine Nights Read online

  Her ‘Archontissa’, performed with much wailing and fluttery arm movements, reduced strong Greeks to tears. He’d even taken her to talent contests – she remembered the choking sound he’d made when she won – and afterwards they’d walk home together high as kites and stop at the Pleeze café on Angelina Street for ice cream.

  But then, aged about thirteen, she’d started to grow breasts. Little buds, nothing really, but the first soft wolf whistles down at the YMCA had been her swansong as far as he was concerned. His eyes had glowered at her from the front row.

  ‘Men are animals.’ He’d all but dragged her home down the street. ‘For some men, one woman is like another.’ His lips had twisted in disgust, as if she’d already fatally let him down. ‘They will lie down with whoever is around.’

  Horrified, embarrassed, she’d said nothing, not understanding that those whistles marked the beginning of her own dual life. When he was at sea, she did a few concerts – although there was hell to pay if he found out; apart from that, nothing but respectable events such as eisteddfods, and recitals down at the Methodist Hall, which frankly, as she often complained to Joyce, had become a deadly bore.

  Her father had grown up on the outskirts of the village of Üvezli, not far from the Black Sea coast. She’d loved hearing him talk about it once. There were donkeys on the farm, plane trees, a pump, and chickens. On feast days, he told her, twenty people would sit down for lunch, and his mother would cook, roasted chickens and stuffed tomatoes and milk puddings with nuts in them. When he told her about these lovely things, his eyes filled with tears.

  Once when she’d said, only half attending, ‘Don’t you miss it, Baba?’ he’d turned his hooded eyes on her and said savagely,

  ‘I think about my village every day. I remember every stone in our house, every tree in the orchard,’ and she’d felt a darkness fall around them, and that she must never ask him about this place again.

  Nowadays, with the ships he worked on carrying nothing but coal for the war, and his little girl disturbingly grown, her father seemed in a permanent sulk, and Saba was fed up with it. He hated Joyce working full time at Curran’s, resented the fact that the three women seemed perfectly capable of running the house without him, and at home behaved like a permanent defensive guest. The way he sat brooding beside the fire in the front room reminded Saba of the new cock they had once introduced in the chicken house in the back yard, who’d sat frozen and alone on his perch amid a babble of companionable and clucking hens. She watched how Tan, who adored him, made hectic efforts to cheer him up. How she’d hover at mealtimes by his chair, ready to spring into the kitchen for any tasty morsel that took his fancy, and shake her head approvingly at almost everything he said, like a ventriloquist. She saw too how her mother, normally so confident and funny, changed into an entirely different person when he was home: the anxious, darting looks, the way her voice seemed to rise an octave, how she would often shoo Saba upstairs as if she was a nothing, to get his slippers, or some book he wanted. It broke her heart to see Tan and Mum working so hard; why couldn’t he try harder too?

  It was time to drop the bombshell. The ENSA letter had burned a hole in her pocket all week, and the pilot’s letter had given her an extra boost of confidence. Her father’s kitbag was in the front hall. He’d come home on Wednesday from Portsmouth, had a bath in the front room and retired since then in virtual silence to his shed out the back, only appearing for meals.

  Her mother, pale at the row that must come, begged Saba not to show him the ENSA letter until the day before he went to sea again. ‘He’s already got the hump,’ she said. ‘Tell him now and he’ll sulk for the whole ten days.’

  ‘Why do you let him, Mum?’ Saba blazed. ‘It must be torture for you.’

  She’d lost patience with the lot of them, and decided in a few hours’ time to step into the lion’s den. Saturday night was the time when custom dictated that the family gathered around the little plush-covered table in the front room, got the best china out and Joyce and Tan cooked favourite dishes. When Saba thought back to the best of these times, she remembered the fire crackling in the grate, glasses winking on the table, little dishes Tan used to make: hummus and Caucasian chicken – cold shredded chicken with walnuts. Her father even danced sometimes, clicking his fingers and showing his excellent teeth.

  Maybe Tan was trying to lighten the dreadful atmosphere in the house by reviving these happier times. For two days now she’d been in and out of the kitchen. She’d gone to Jamal’s, the Arab greengrocer on Angelina Street, and wheedled cracked wheat and preserved lemons from the owner. She’d saved up her meat ration for two weeks to make the little meatballs that Remzi loved. As she cooked, the wailing sounds of Umm Kulthum, the famous Egyptian singer, burst from the gramophone and majestic sorrows swept through the house – like a funeral cortège drawn by big black horses. Remzi had collected her records during his Mediterranean tours.

  While Tan was cooking, Saba rehearsed the best words to use.

  It’s a perfectly respectable organisation, Baba, it’s part of the army now. We’ll be well protected . . .

  There’s even a uniform, it’s not just a band of actors and singers . . .

  They do so much good for the troops. It keeps everybody’s spirits up . . .

  It will give me a proper future in singing, I can learn from this . . .

  She watched the clock all day, every bone in her body rigid with nervous tension. When six o’clock came, she took her place quietly at the table in the front room. A few moments later, her father walked in erect, unsmiling. He’d changed into the long dressing gown he wore at home, which made him look, with his short, well-trimmed beard and his dark hooded eyes, like an Old Testament prophet. Peeping out from underneath it were the English gentleman’s brogues he wore, which Joyce cleaned every morning before she went to the factory.

  During supper they discussed only safe topics: the weather, dreadful; the war, showing no sign of getting better; Mrs Orestes next door, everyone agreeing that sad as it was about her son Jim, killed in France a few months ago, it was time she pulled her socks up (Joyce said she hadn’t been out of her dressing gown since, and still wouldn’t answer the door, not even to take the cake she’d baked for her). When the plates had been emptied, her father thrilled them all by producing from the folds of his robe some toffees he’d bought in Amsterdam. Tan crept mouse-like to the kitchen to get his glass of sage tea. When Joyce left too, Saba took a deep breath and said to her father:

  ‘Do you want me to give her a hand, or can we talk?’

  ‘Sit down, Shooba,’ he said, using his pet name for her. He pointed to a footstool near his chair.

  She sat, careful not to block the heat of the fire from his legs. She could hear her own heart thumping as she sipped her water and tried to look calm.

  ‘I haven’t spoken to you properly for a long time,’ he said in his deep voice.

  True – she’d circled warily around him since he came home.

  The sage tea arrived; Tan scuttled out again. He took a sip and she felt his hand rest softly on her head.

  She handed him the letter. ‘I’d like you to read this.’

  ‘Is this for me?’

  ‘Yes.’ Thinking no, it’s for me.

  A deep line developed between his eyebrows as he read it, and when he had finished, he snatched at the paper and read it again.

  ‘I don’t understand this.’ His expression darkened. ‘How do these people know about you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Her voice was wobbly. ‘They must have heard me somewhere.’

  Her father put his glass down. He shook his head in disgust. There was a long silence.

  ‘You’re lying to me,’ he said at last. ‘You’ve been out again, haven’t you? You’ve been performing in public.’

  He made it sound as if she’d been in a strip show. She felt like a cowering dog at his feet, so she stood up.

  ‘Only a couple of times,’ she said. ‘At a hospi
tal, and a church.’

  He read the letter again, and then scratched his head furiously. Joyce, who must have been listening behind the door, appeared, a tea towel in her hand. She looked drawn.

  ‘Have you seen this?’ His voice a whip crack.

  A look of complete panic crossed Joyce’s face. They’d reached the end of something and it felt terrible.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘Nothing.’ It was rare to see her mother trembling, but she was. ‘They must have seen her at the Methodist Hall,’ she faltered.

  ‘Yaa, eşek!’ he yelled. The Turkish word for donkey. ‘Don’t tell me lies.’

  The whoop of an air-raid siren stopped them all in their tracks for a moment, and then went away. They were used to false alarms in those days.

  ‘You said she should have her voice trained,’ her mother ventured bravely. ‘She can’t stay home for ever.’

  ‘She’s been ill,’ her father shouted. Saba had had tonsillitis six months ago.

  ‘No, she’s not flipping well ill, and if you were at home more, you’d know that!’ her mother shrieked.

  He threw his tea against the wall, the glass shattered and they all shrieked, thinking it was a bomb.

  ‘Don’t you talk back to me!’ Her father on his feet, hand raised.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ Her mother’s little spark of bravery went out; she was stammering again. She’d dropped her tea towel and was scrabbling under the table, picking up shards of glass with her bare hands, and when she crawled up from under the tablecloth, scarlet in the face, she turned the full force of her rage on Saba.

  ‘You stupid girl,’ she said, her mouth all twisted with rage. ‘You have to do it your way, don’t you?’

  Later, Saba heard them going at it hammer and tongs through the thin partition wall that separated her bedroom from theirs. His voice rising as he told Joyce it was her fault, that Saba was spoilt and stupid; his thump, her rabbit-like squeal and thin wail; his footsteps going downstairs. He slammed the front door so hard the whole house trembled.

  The next day, Saba took her leather suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe and laid it on the bed. At the bottom of it she placed her red tap shoes, then her polka-dot dress, stockings, wash bag. She put the khaki-coloured ENSA letter on top of the clothes, and was just folding the piece of paper with directions to the Drury Lane Theatre when she heard the sound of the front door click.

  Apart from Tan, she was alone. Joyce was at the factory. She sat down on the floral eiderdown, every muscle straining as she listened to the squeak of his shoes on the stairs, the uneven sound of the cracked floorboard on the landing.

  He came into her room carrying an instrument in his hand that they had often joked about when she was a child. It was a short whip with two leather lashes at the end of it. He’d told her once that his own father had thrashed him with it regularly. For her, it had only ever been a prop in a deliciously frightening childhood game they’d played together. Remzi, growling ferociously, would race around the back yard brandishing the thing, she squealing with delight as she got away.

  But today he put the martinet down on the bed, on top of her sheet music. He looked at her with no expression in his eyes whatsoever.

  ‘Daddy!’ she said. ‘No! Please don’t do this.’ As if she could save him from himself.

  ‘I cannot let you go on disobeying me,’ he said at last. ‘Not in front of your mother, your grandmother. You bring shame on our house.’

  ‘Shame on our house! Shame on our house!’ It was like someone in a panto. Someone with a Sinbad beard, a cutlass. But the time when she could have joked with him about that had gone. As she moved away from him, the ENSA letter fell on the floor. He swooped on it and held it in his hand.

  ‘You’re not going,’ he said. ‘Bad enough that your mother has to work in a factory now.’

  She looked at him and heard a kind of shrilling sound in her ears.

  ‘I am going, Daddy,’ she said. ‘Because I’ll never get another chance like this again.’

  His eyes went black; he shook his head.

  ‘No.’

  If he hadn’t torn up the letter then and there, everything might have stayed the same. But he tore it and scattered it like confetti over the lino, and then all hell let loose because that letter was living proof that something you wanted really badly to happen could happen.

  And to be fair, she hit him first: a glancing blow on the arm, and then he rushed at her, groaning like an animal, smacking her hard around the head and shoulders with his fists. For a few breathless moments they roared and grunted, then Tansu rushed in shrieking like a banshee and throwing her apron over her head and shrieking, ‘Durun! Yapmayin!’ Stop it, don’t!

  He left Saba sitting on the bed, trembling and bleeding from her nose. She felt horribly ashamed of both of them.

  Her father had always been a strict, even a terrifying parent – your father runs a dictatorship not a democracy, her mother had told her once with a certain pride – but never, at least to her, a violent man. She’d thought him too intelligent for that. But on this day, she felt as if she’d never known him, or perhaps only experienced him in bits and pieces, and that this bit of him was pure evil.

  ‘If you go,’ his voice went all shuddery with rage, ‘I never want to see your face again.’

  ‘I feel the same,’ she said quietly, ‘so that’s good.’

  She wanted to hit him again, to spit on him. It was only later she collapsed in a flood of tears, but before she did, she wrote her first letter to Dominic Benson, an act of defiance that changed everything.

  Dear Pilot Officer Benson,

  I expect to be in London, at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, on 17 March for an audition at ENSA. Perhaps we could meet after that?

  With best wishes,

  Saba Tarcan

  Chapter 4

  Alone for the first time, and in London, when she swung her feet on to the cold lino and sat on the edge of her bed, her hands shook so much it was hard to do up her dress.

  She’d been awake for most of the night in the nasty little bed and breakfast in Bow Street that ENSA had recommended. On top of the bedside table scarred with old cigarette burns, there was a Gideon Bible and an empty water carafe with a dead fly in it. She’d lain with her eyes open under a slim green damp-smelling eiderdown, listening for bombs and trying not to think about home, and Mum.

  Her mother had taken an hour off work to walk her down to the railway station.

  ‘When will you be back, then?’ she’d asked, her face white as death under the green turban.

  ‘I don’t know, Mum – it depends. I may not get it.’

  ‘You’ll get it,’ her mother said grimly. ‘So what shall I tell Lou?’

  ‘Tell her what you like.’

  ‘It’ll break her heart if you go.’

  ‘Mum, be fair – you started this too.’ Well, it was true: all the lessons, the dreaming, the fish and chips at the Pleeze as a treat when she’d won the singing competitions, and seeing Joyce so magically transported.

  Inside the train station, they’d looked at each other like shipwrecked strangers.

  ‘Well, bye then, Mum,’ as the train drew in.

  ‘Bye, love.’ But at the very last minute, Saba had buried her face in her mother’s shoulder and they’d held each other’s shuddering bodies.

  ‘Don’t hate me, Mum,’ she murmured.

  ‘I don’t hate you,’ Joyce said, her face working violently.

  ‘Good luck,’ she said at last. The guards were slamming the doors. When Saba stepped inside, her mother turned and walked away. Her thin back, the green turban, her jaunty attempt at a wave at the mouth of the station had broken Saba’s heart. She was a monster after all.

  There was a gas heater in the bed and breakfast. The landlady had explained how to turn on its brass spigot and where to apply the match, but Saba had avoided it, frightened it would explode. Instead s
he wrapped herself in the eiderdown and tried to concentrate on the audition. She was convinced at this low point that it would be a disaster, and regretted making the date to meet the pilot after it. He’d got her letter, and written back that, by coincidence, he would be up in London that week staying at his sister’s house, not far from the Theatre Royal. Perhaps they could either meet for tea or maybe a drink at the Cavour Club. His telephone number was Tate 678.

  At around three thirty, someone had pulled a lavatory chain in the corridor outside. Saba sat up in bed and decided to phone him in the morning and cancel the appointment. The audition was enough worry for one day, and he’d probably thought her cheap to have accepted in the first place.

  Before dawn, the rumbling of bombers going over London woke her again. Forty thousand people had died here in the Blitz, or near enough; that was one of Mum’s last cheery messages for her. Shivering in the inky black of her room, she put the bedside light on, moved the Bible out of the way, took her diary from her suitcase and wrote LONDON on top of a new page.

  I have either made the stupidest and worst decision of my life, or the best. Either way, I must write it down, I may need it (ha ha!) for my autobiography.

  She gazed in disgust at the false bravado of the ha, ha, as if some other crass creature had written it.

  Dear Baba, she wrote next. Please try and forgive me for what . . .

  She scrumpled it, dropped it in the waste-paper basket. It was his fault too; she would not crawl and she would not be forgiven, she knew that now. It was the first plan she had ever made in her life without anybody else’s permission, and she must stick to it even if the whole bloody thing ended in disaster.

  Her breakfast of toast and powdered eggs was a solitary affair, eaten in a freezing front parlour with the gas fire unlit and only her new landlady’s collection of pink and white china dolls for company. After it, she walked the two streets to the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, amazed at the crush of vans and shouting people.