Jasmine Nights Read online

  The front door of the house in Pomeroy Street had a brass knocker shaped like a lion’s head. He took a deep breath and banged it.

  An old lady appeared wearing a black dress and Wellington boots. Her eyes gleamed from the gloom of the hall – dark and inquisitive.

  All the way here, walking down the sooty streets that led to the bay and to Pomeroy Street, he’d had a conversation with himself which had ended in an agreement. He was here simply to return the blue coat; if her mother wanted help, he would do what he could in a dignified way and then beat a discreet and hasty retreat. There must be no whiff of the stage-door Johnny about him; it was a simple act of kindness.

  But the old lady’s face lit up immediately when she saw him; she put her hand on his sleeve and became immensely animated.

  ‘Quick, Joyce!’ she shouted over her shoulder, as if he was the prodigal son. ‘Come! Come quickly. The boy is here!’

  A door at the end of the corridor burst open and a handsome woman, fortyish he guessed, came towards him. Her thick dark hair looked freshly waved and she was wearing lipstick. A woman who kept herself nicely, or who had dressed up especially for his visit.

  She led him into the parlour on the right of the hall – a cosy room with a small fire burning in the grate. In the corner was a piano with a sheet of music on the stand. The old lady saw him glance at it and smiled encouragingly.

  ‘I can play,’ she boasted. ‘Saba ma teach me. She like very much.’

  ‘Tansu,’ the younger woman said firmly, ‘go and take your boots off. I’ll make Mr Benson a cup of tea – or would you prefer coffee? We have both.’

  ‘Coffee, please,’ he said. ‘If you have enough,’ and then, embarrassed, ‘I mean, with rationing and everything.’

  ‘Turkish? English? My husband works on the ships, that’s one thing we do have.’

  ‘Turkish, please.’ He’d never had it before, but why not? Everything was strange enough already.

  ‘Oh, and I’ve called you Mister.’ She gazed at him warily. ‘And forgotten your rank.’

  ‘Pilot officer,’ he said. His rapid commission had never felt quite real to him anyway; it felt unearned, like being alive again.

  He glanced quickly at the wall of books, and the gramophone, with a pile of records neatly stacked beside it. These were not what he thought of as normal working-class people.

  Above the gramophone there was a framed photograph of a stout-looking woman in sunglasses standing proudly in front of the Sphinx.

  ‘Umm Kulthum.’ The old lady had returned. She was wearing a pair of floral carpet slippers, and looked at the photograph with a look of extreme adoration on her face. ‘Very, very good.’ She gestured towards the records and touched one or two gently. ‘Beautiful,’ she said softly.

  While they waited for coffee, she brought him another photograph and put it down gently on his lap. It was Saba. She was standing in front of a band wearing a long dress of some satin shiny stuff; she had a flower in her hair and was smiling that reckless smile towards an audience of young men with short hair and boyish necks. Like sea anemones searching for light or food, they leaned towards her in the gloom of what looked like a large hangar. Knowing what terrible thoughts lurked inside them brought a moment of insecurity. This visit was ridiculous.

  ‘Saba and the Spring Tones,’ the old lady was proudly explaining to him. She held up two fingers. ‘Second concert . . .’ And she mimed boisterous clapping. Her carpet slippers did a little shuffling dance.

  ‘Tansu.’ Joyce came back with a tinkling tray. ‘Take the poor man’s coat, let him have his cup of coffee. Please.’

  ‘Thinking of coats . . .’ He handed her the bag at his feet. ‘Saba left hers – we were having a drink together.’

  ‘Ah, Lord.’ The mother put down the tray and snatched the coat out of the bag. ‘Goodness me, she’s careless. Typical. Look . . . I don’t want to be rude, but how long have you got?’ She fixed her eyes on him. ‘I’m on shift work. I’ve got less than an hour.’

  ‘My train leaves at four,’ he said. ‘I’m flying tomorrow.’ He said this to comfort himself, not to boast.

  ‘And do you fly Spitfires or Hurricanes?’ The polite hostess again, pouring his coffee from a small brass pot.

  ‘Harvards at the moment,’ he said. ‘I’m at a retraining unit. I actually met your daughter in hospital. I had a bit of a prang over France. I’m all right now.’

  ‘I can see that.’ She smiled for the first time.

  ‘She came to sing for us.’

  ‘Yes, she did a bit of that before she left . . .’ Her expression was thin-lipped and guarded again. She took a sip of her own coffee, and then put it down and sighed sharply.

  The old lady had returned, this time with a bowl of chickpeas on a wooden plate.

  ‘Please.’ She pointed towards them. ‘Eat. Come on.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Tarcan.’

  ‘Tansu,’ she said firmly. She put her hand over her somewhat magnificent bosom. ‘My name is Tansu.

  ‘Oh!’ She’d seen the blue coat, and her gnarled fingers touched the cloth tenderly, as if it was a holy relic.

  ‘Tell me more about where you met Saba,’ the mother said.

  At the mention of her name, the grandmother let out a groan and fixed her anxious old eyes on Dom. Joyce fiddled with her cup; she hadn’t taken a sip yet.

  ‘I was in hospital. East Grinstead,’ he said. ‘She came to sing – she said she was a last-minute replacement.’

  He looked at Joyce, who was sitting on the edge of her chair. Go, go, go, said the bird.

  ‘I thought she was wonderful.’ For a moment they looked straight at each other.

  ‘Yes,’ said Joyce. She shook her head and gave a deep sigh. ‘And selfish.’

  Her voice shuddered with suppressed fury.

  ‘Selfish?’

  ‘Yes.’ She swallowed hard and put her cup down. ‘We haven’t had a night’s sleep since she left.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘That’s the point, we don’t know.’

  The old lady had been following their conversation with her eyes, she let out an almost inaudible squeak and covered her face with her apron.

  ‘Tansu, would you get cake. Get cake from the kitchen.’ When she was gone Joyce said, ‘She doesn’t understand everything, but I don’t want her to hear this. She cries herself to sleep every night.’

  Dom saw she had blue circles under her eyes, the numb look of panic barely held in check.

  ‘You have no idea where she is?’

  ‘We had an aerogramme a week or so ago saying she was in Egypt. In Cairo and leaving soon. We were not to worry. Since then – nothing.’

  He saw the effort it took to control herself, and felt for the first time in his life the desolation of those left behind. He hadn’t allowed himself to think like this before – of his own mother, in her cold sitting room, stitching and waiting, or lying in the dark listening for the slow rumble overhead of a plane that might be his.

  ‘A week isn’t long,’ he reminded her gently. ‘The posts are terrible. Where is . . . is there . . .?’ He asked this delicately. You couldn’t assume anything nowadays.

  ‘Her father?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She directed his gaze towards the mantelpiece. The man in the photograph had a strong-jawed, handsome face, piercing dark eyes, thick black hair – he didn’t look English.

  ‘His name is Remzi,’ she said. ‘He’s an engineer with Fyffes. He hasn’t spoken to me since this happened.’ She shuddered. ‘He blames me for everything.’

  The old lady had returned with the cake tin in one hand and a lute-like instrument in the other.

  ‘This mine. Tambur.’ She held the thing up proudly.

  ‘Ah, a household of musicians,’ he said politely.

  ‘She doesn’t play it; her husband did,’ the mother said. ‘But there’s lots of music down here in the Bay – we actually had Hoagy Carmichael come here before the war
broke out.’

  The old lady put the cake down on the table. She held out a new photograph.

  ‘My son,’ she said. ‘I have four sons: three finish.’ Her face twisted. ‘He no here now. When he—’

  ‘Tan, leave it to me,’ Joyce almost shouted. ‘Please!’

  ‘When she go,’ the old lady ignored her, ‘when she go,’ she pointed towards Saba’s photograph, ‘he . . .’ She picked up an imaginary stick and mimed a beating, then she shook her head violently. ‘Very very bad,’ she said.

  In the short silence that fell, Joyce fiddled with the coffee cups.

  ‘It’s true,’ she said at last. ‘He’s not a violent man, but he was furious with her when he found out she’d been performing. ENSA was the last blimmin’ straw. But what could she do?’ she asked him, her eyes naked. ‘Singing’s like breathing for her, she needed to do it, and all of us encouraged her at first – he was as proud as Punch himself. You’ve heard her.’

  ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I really do.’

  The old woman’s eyes fixed on them again, and then she leapt up and fumbled with the lid of the gramophone, as if she wanted to play them something.

  ‘Not now, Tan,’ Joyce said. ‘I don’t have time. I need to say this quickly.

  ‘Look at me running on.’ She smiled suddenly, ‘I haven’t a clue why you’re here.’

  ‘Well . . . really to . . .’ He looked at the blue coat, ashamed of the flimsy lie already.

  ‘But can you help, now you know the situation?’ Her eyes brightened at the thought of it.

  ‘Maybe, I don’t know. Is there anything else you’re worried about?’

  ‘Well . . . it sounds a bit silly, but my husband thinks there’s something fishy going on.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, normally, you have to be twenty-five to get into ENSA; she’s twenty-three, and she was gone in a flash; normally, he says, they’d leave a few months for the jabs against yellow fever, the forms, and the other stuff. Where was the rush?’

  ‘Maybe they just needed entertainers there fast – I think something like three and a half thousand Allied troops have moved to North Africa to be with the Eighth Army.’ His mind was racing furiously. The desert war was where the action was now.

  ‘I don’t even understand what we’re doing in Africa,’ she said mournfully. ‘It seems such a long way away.’

  ‘It is,’ he said gently. He briefly thought of explaining its strategic importance, but this was not the time for a history lesson, and half his mind anyway was thinking about 89 Squadron’s wing in North Africa. He’d been there once on a training run, two weeks waiting in the desert, mostly drinking bad gin by a wadi waiting for a fight.

  ‘It’s not impossible,’ he said out loud. Flying through the vast emptiness of it, the huge blue skies, the closest he’d ever come to being a bird.

  ‘Do you know anyone there?’ she said.

  ‘Not many – a few.’ It felt wrong to raise her hopes. ‘But to go back to what you were saying. Why does your husband think they want her there?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, her expression closed. ‘You’d have to ask him. He could be exaggerating it all. He has terrible memories of Turkey and that part of the world. Lots of people disappeared from his village during the First World War. He was away at sea. He thinks his brothers were executed. Poor bugger.’ She sighed heavily. ‘No wonder he’s frightened.’

  ‘Does Saba know this?’

  ‘No. She’s his little ray of sunshine – or was. He wanted to keep her like that.’

  ‘What was she like?’ The question popped out. ‘As a child, I mean.’

  ‘Naughty, wonderful! My auntie once said, “I’ve never known a child light up a room like she does.” Headstrong. We used to go up to the valleys to see my parents; they had this horse and cart, and she always wanted to take over the reins, even when she was four years old. “Give them to me, Mam! I can do it! You’re not the boss of this horse and cart.” When the horse ran away with us one day she loved it, said it was the best day of her life!’

  She was a pretty woman when she laughed like that.

  ‘She was mad keen on all kinds of singers: Billie Holiday, Dinah Shore, Helen Forrest. When we got her the record of “Deep Purple”, she must have played the thing five million times, it drove us mad, and she’d be up there in her bedroom hour after hour, learning the phrasing.

  ‘But careless.’ She glared at the coat again. ‘Half the time she’s thinking of songs, so . . .’ She looked up suddenly. ‘Look, will you help if you can?’

  ‘I don’t know. She’s probably fine. The posts are famously slow there – you’ll probably get a letter as soon as I leave.’

  ‘I’m torn,’ Joyce said. ‘She did sound happy, she’s always happy when she’s working, but she’s much too gullible.’

  ‘If I should find myself there,’ he was thinking hard, ‘what should I say to her? I can’t just turn up a perfect stranger, or almost, and order her home.’ The absurdity of this had suddenly struck him.

  ‘No! No! No! Don’t do that.’ Joyce’s face had suddenly lit up, and she’d shed ten years. ‘It’s a wonderful experience for her. Just go and see her. I don’t know, tell her I do understand but . . . I just want to know she’s safe.’

  She glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was four twenty.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘If you like, we can walk down together.’

  ‘Last question.’ He felt he had to know. ‘Do you open all her letters? I mean, the ones other people send to her.’

  ‘Most of them.’ She looked at him defiantly. ‘I don’t want her father to be any angrier than he is already, and nor would you if you knew him.’

  ‘And has anyone else written to her?’

  ‘Only young men like yourself.’

  The stab of envy he felt was sharp and took him by surprise. He had no right to feel like that about her, but he did.

  ‘You mean, men who’ve heard her sing?’

  ‘Yes, and Paul, of course.’

  ‘Paul?’

  ‘Her fiancé, for a second,’ Joyce said bitterly. ‘Fine young man, training to be a schoolteacher, lovely family. He would have married her like a shot. She left him shortly before she went to London, got out of the car one night and ran off in a paddy. I still don’t really know what happened, but he’s broken-hearted. People like her are a bit like electricity, on a different wattage – they don’t realise how badly they can hurt people.’

  A warning, this, or a threat? He couldn’t be sure.

  But later, as they walked together down Pomeroy Street, he found himself filled with a tremendous, impatient unexpected excitement.

  He needed a new challenge – he wanted to fly and fight again for complicated reasons, not all of them to do with Jacko. Saba’s presence would add to the adventure; provided he could approach it all in a light-hearted, cautious way, he was pretty sure he would not get his fingers burned.

  Chapter 8

  CAIRO

  The girls had started to breakfast in the courtyard restaurant of the Minerva, a small hotel around the corner from their flat. It was a pretty spot, with jasmine and bougainvillea scrambling up its walls, and a small fountain in the middle splashing water with a gentle, silky sighing sound that was hypnotic. A couple of weeks after they’d arrived, Saba was sitting there on her own when a lanky Englishman sauntered over.

  He introduced himself with a charming smile. ‘My name’s Dermot Cleeve. I do some of the Forces recordings for the BBC. I’m hoping to meet you all soon.’ As if to reassure her this wasn’t a pick-up.

  He was young, good-looking, with his long aquiline nose and very intelligent blue eyes. She took off her sunglasses. They were the first pair she’d ever owned, and she was ridiculously pleased with them. She slid them into their pigskin sheath.

  ‘The other girls have been held up,’ she said, in fact by a fierce squabbl
e over the bathroom. She toyed with the idea of lighting up a cigarette, another new habit, but was worried it would make her cough.

  ‘Would it be a frightful bore if I joined you for coffee?’ Cleeve asked. ‘I’ll shove off when the others come.’

  ‘Of course not,’ she answered. There was a small pause while he sat down and placed his panama hat carefully on the chair beside him.

  Samir, her favourite waiter, bounced through the beaded curtain brandishing a silver platter above his head piled with fresh peaches, melons and bananas. He’d been delighted to find that Saba was half-Turkish, and already made a fuss of her.

  ‘Your usual breakfast, madame?’ he said. Every morning so far they’d indulged in real coffee and real eggs and real butter and eaten the small Moza cavendishii bananas, which they declared the best and tastiest in the world.

  ‘I’ll wait for the others,’ she said, putting on her sunglasses and putting a cigarette in her holder. ‘I can’t believe the food here,’ she told Cleeve. ‘It makes me feel such a heel after rationing.’

  ‘Oh, you mustn’t feel like that.’ He clicked his lighter and held the flame towards her. ‘Enjoy it while you can; it’ll be hard tack and bully beef once you get on the road. Do you know when you’re leaving, by the way?’

  ‘No, not yet.’

  ‘It won’t be long,’ he said. When he stretched out his legs, the two small birds that had been tussling over a bread roll under the table flew away.

  Samir fussed around them for a while, adjusting napkins and pouring coffee. When she asked him how he was that morning, he turned his radiant smile on her and said, ‘Il-hamdu li-llah,’ and Cleeve smiled at her lazily, approving.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Il-hamdu li-llah means God be thanked – it covers everything from “fine” to “I’m at death’s door but mustn’t grumble”.’

  ‘And do you always speak to waiters in their own language?’

  ‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Only a few words. My father taught me – he’s actually Turkish.’ She stubbed out her cigarette: ugh! It would take a while to learn to like it.