Eight Months on Ghazzah Street
Hilary Mantel
From the two-time Man Booker Prize winner, a prescient and haunting novel of life in Saudi Arabia.Frances Shore is a cartographer by trade, a maker of maps, but when her husband's work takes her to Saudi Arabia she finds herself unable to map the Kingdom's areas of internal darkness. The regime is corrupt and harsh, the expatriates are hard-drinking money-grubbers, and her Muslim neighbours are secretive, watchful. The streets are not a woman's territory; confined in her flat, she finds her sense of self begin to dissolve. She hears whispers, sounds of distress from the 'empty' flat above her head. She has only rumours, no facts to hang on to, and no one with whom to share her creeping unease. As her days empty of certainty and purpose, her life becomes a blank – waiting to be filled by violence and disaster.
Eight Months on Ghazzah Street
Hilary Mantel
Copyright (#ulink_c3631012-90f6-57cb-8634-417e246233a6)
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Paperback edition published by Harper Perennial 2004
First published in Great Britain by Viking 1988
Copyright © Hilary Mantel 1988
The right of Hilary Mantel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
PS section copyright © Fanny Blake 2004
PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007172917
Ebook Edition © MAY 2010 ISBN: 9780007354955
Version: 2017-07-26
Dedication (#ulink_e7176c62-b824-59a5-a923-c1391507624f)
For Vic and Jeanie Camp
Contents
Cover Page (#u649536c4-9255-522c-8ca2-42c22c0f6cb2)
Title Page (#u3e407230-b9d8-5224-bf21-e4d1b567a089)
Copyright (#u62a2a594-a467-5a48-b89f-6e6729246f5d)
Dedication (#u959c81df-14ba-575b-b16f-262839bf2893)
Author’s Note (#ue24e6e40-88c3-56d4-8d63-00434e9c0a77)
Part One (#u593ac79e-796b-540e-a527-42359056ba8d)
September 1984 IN FLIGHT (#u90c911cf-aca8-5b23-85e6-36fcded9ff0d)
Muharram (#u2060e2aa-79ce-5b92-b6d1-8eee48930cb7)
Safar (#ud03fea58-918c-52a1-bdb2-b8d8e3cf6385)
Rabi al-awal (#litres_trial_promo)
Rabi al-thani (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Jamadi al-awal (#litres_trial_promo)
Jamadi al-thani (#litres_trial_promo)
Rajab (#litres_trial_promo)
Shaban (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
P.S. (#litres_trial_promo)
About the author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the book (#litres_trial_promo)
Read on (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Excerpt from Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Note (#ulink_b287fdf7-7a26-52a0-8ea4-b5ccfefd8f38)
Saudi Arabia employs the Hijra calendar, which starts from the year AD 622, when Muhammed left Mecca for Medina. It is a lunar calendar, and the Hijra year is eleven days shorter than the Gregorian year. The months (with many variations in transliteration) are as follows: Muharram, Safar, Rabi al-awal, Rabi al-thani, Jamadi al-awal, Jamadi al-thani, Rajab, Shaban, Ramadhan, Shawal, Dhu-al-qudah, Dhu-al-hijjah. By a recent Royal Decree, a 365-day year has been instituted for fiscal purposes, and 22 December 1986 became 1 Capricorn. The recalculations involved make the fiscal year some forty years behind the Hijra year. So, not the least surprising aspect of life in the Kingdom is that time can appear to run backwards.
Part One (#ulink_0803a904-4fd8-530d-a5d2-1b8152cd7962)
CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM
FROM: Director, Turadup, William and Schaper, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
TO: All expatriate staff
DATED: 15 Shawal/3 July 1985
I need not remind anyone of this week’s tragic events involving Turadup employees. In order to safeguard the company’s position in these very difficult times, I must request all staff and families about to depart on leave to behave as follows:
A. Refrain from talking to the press – whatever your holiday destination.
B: Refrain from public speculation about the recent deaths – remember that the matter is still under investigation by the Saudi police and Her Majesty’s representatives.
c. Exercise the utmost caution in personal conduct between now and your departure – dispose (carefully) of all items or substances which could attract the interest of the police, and do not leave your compound without your documents.
I feel sure that if these precautions are observed, we may expect a continuance of good relations with the Saudi authorities, and a smooth passage into the next Five-Year Plan.
May I take this opportunity to wish you, on behalf of Daphne and myself, a pleasant vacation and a safe return to the Kingdom after Haj. Sincerely –
ERIC PARSONS
September 1984 IN FLIGHT (#ulink_577b2df4-249b-5885-be5a-0caad0c67773)
‘Would you like champagne?’
This was the beginning; an hour or so out from Heathrow. Already it felt further; watches moved on, a day in a life condensed to a scramble at a check-in desk, a walk to a departure gate; a day cut short and eclipsed, hurtling on into advancing night. And now the steward leaned over her, putting this question.
‘I don’t think so.’ They had already eaten; dinner, she supposed. So much smoked salmon is consumed on aircraft that it is a wonder there is any left to eat at ground level. The steward had just now whisked her tray from under her nose. ‘You could give me some brandy,’ she said.
‘Two to get you started?’ Hand hovering over the trolley, he seemed to approve her choice; as if what lay ahead were something to brace yourself for, not to celebrate.
‘And one of those nice plastic glasses,’ Frances Shore said. ‘Please.’
Across the aisle grown men were getting drunk on Cointreau. One of them cocked an eyebrow at the steward. He leaned over them; his face, pale and seamy under the late-night lights, showed a kind of patient disgust. Drinks were free of course, but on the Saudi run this standard airline ploy had the status of charity work. His fingers, dispensing the miniature bottles, were as clean and careful as a bishop’s.
The businessmen had done their talking earlier; passed sales charts to each other. ‘I wonder how Fairfax is doing in Kowloon?’ one of them asked.
His companion dug his plastic fork into a millefeuille, and made no reply. ‘How long now?’ he asked after a while.
‘Three hours.’
‘Keep the drinks going then.’
‘Enjoy it, gentlemen,’ the steward said. The woman held up her coffee cup. He swayed towards her with the pot. ‘Non-dairy creamer, Madam?’
I always wonder about this stuff,’ she said, accepting the foil packet. ‘It says what it isn’t, but not what it is.’
‘That’s life,’ the steward said. He moved away again. Dull clunk of ice cubes against plastic. Flimsy cushions flatten under head and back. Onwards. The man with the tough millefeuille stares at the dial of his watch, as if he could make the time go faster. Or hold it back.
Left alone, she closed her eyes. She was apprehensive, yes. She turned over the steward’s comment in her mind, because she was not one to let flippancies go unexamined; it paid to examine them, as there was so little, she always thought, in what people said when they were trying to be serious. You could only describe the future by exclusion; say what will not occur. Say what you will not be: an ice dancer, a cosmonaut, a mother of twelve. Much less easy to make a single positive prediction even for the coming week; much less easy to say what, in a month’s time, you will have become.
Andrew’s letters had been short, practical. They told her to bring flat sandals, British postage stamps, a bottle of Bovril. His voice on the phone had been hesitant. There had been the odd, expensive silence. He didn’t know how to describe Jeddah. She must, he said, see for herself.
She picked up the half-cup of coffee: black, and almost cold now. When she moved her legs, newsprint rustled, a paperback slid from her lap on to the seat. She felt stiff, uncomfortable. She began to think of lurching along to the lavatory, braving the bleary stares.
When the steward came back she said to him, ‘There aren’t many women on this flight.’
‘It’s not the time of year. Christmas and Easter, the wives fly out.’
‘Why don’t they stay?’
‘They can’t stick it. More coffee?’ She shook her head. ‘It must be your first trip. Got a husband out there?’
She nodded.
‘Visa all in order?’
‘I hope so. But I don’t read Arabic.’
‘Be waiting for you, will he?’
Again: ‘I hope so.’
‘Been out there long?’
‘Six weeks.’
‘Quick work,’ the steward said. ‘To get you out so soon.’
‘It’s the company who organized it. He says it’s not that easy, but they’ve been in Saudi for a while and they know how things are done.’
‘We all know how things are done,’ the steward said; he rubbed finger and thumb together, rustling an imaginary wad of notes. ‘What’s his line of country?’
‘He’s a civil engineer. They’re putting up a big new building for one of the Ministries.’
‘Likes it all right, does he?’
‘I don’t really know.’ During those phone calls (direct dial, good clear line) she’d not inquired of Andrew, are you happy? It would have meant another expensive silence, because he did not deal in that sort of question. He’d have found it strange from three paces, never mind three thousand miles. Could the man be right, she wondered, had someone been bribed on her behalf? It seemed such a small thing, obtaining a visa for one unimportant woman to join her unimportant husband, but she had once been assured, by a man called Jeff Pollard, who understood these things, that when corruption took root in a country it spread in no time at all from monarchs to tea boys, from ministers to filing clerks. She believed him; but did not feel herself a better person for the belief. She had been round and about southern Africa for five years, in regions where, by and large, the possibilities of corruption had not been fully explored. Andrew thought that, once, someone might have offered him a bribe; but through the other party’s ineptitude and poor English, and Andrew’s naïvety, the occasion had passed without profit.
As this occasion will pass, she thought; and in time, this flight. ‘More brandy?’ the steward inquired.
‘No thanks.’
‘Lived abroad before?’
‘Yes.’ He had a boring job, she supposed, and a right to people’s life-stories. ‘Zambia for a bit, then Botswana.’
‘Oh, sweet Jesus,’ said the steward, animated now, but not impressed. ‘I’ve been to Botswana, the Holiday Inn, Gaborone. It’s a hole, Botswana. I went in the coffee shop and asked them for a toasted cheese sandwich, and do you know what they said?’
‘Cheese it is finished?’
‘Right on. You must have been there.’
‘Of course I’ve been there.’
‘But no cheese in the whole place? I ask you. They could have sent out for some.’
‘Look,’ Frances said, ‘there are two kinds of cheese in Botswana, Cheddar and Sweetmilk. They are imported from South Africa, which makes any number of kinds of cheese, but they only import two; they realize that people must have cheese, but to have too much of it might seem to condone apartheid. You’re with me?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Never mind. So what kind of sandwich did you have?’
‘I had ham.’
‘Lucky you.’
‘Where would the ham be from?’
‘Zimbabwe,’ she said. ‘Was it called that when you were there?’
‘I think it was still Rhodesia. They had sanctions.’
‘But the ham got through.’
‘Well, I take your word for it. But still, what a hole it is, Gaborone. Bunch of tarts sitting in the dust outside selling woolly hats. Sit by the pool, play the fruit machines, bugger all else to do.’ He paused, the tirade halted by a scruple of politeness. ‘Was that where you lived?’
‘Well no, actually, we lived in a much smaller place. We used to go up to Gaborone for a bit of excitement.’
‘You poor things, that’s all I can say. And you were in Zambia too? I’ve been to Lusaka, done a couple of stopovers. They’re thieves in Lusaka. They’ll take the wheels off your hire-car as soon as look at you. This friend of mine went into a pharmacy for a drop of penicillin, he was planning, you know, on being a bit naughty that night, and he believed in dosing himself first; and he came out, and no bloody wheels.’
She smiled. ‘My friend wasn’t amused,’ the steward said.
‘No, I’m sure. It was very trying when they took your wheels off. It was quite common though. You could never plan on being anywhere by a set time.’
‘And there was never any sugar. I take sugar, in coffee.’
‘It’s true, there were a lot of shortages.’
‘I’ve not been out that way for a while. They tell me it’s worse now.’
‘Oh, Africa’s always worse.’
‘Quite the cynic.’
‘No, not really,’ she said. ‘I think I was just there for too long. I liked it, in a way. At least, I’m glad I went there. I wouldn’t have missed it.’
‘I expect you’ll find your Saudi lifestyle very different.’
‘Yes, I expect I will.’
He was hovering, waiting to tell her some horror stories. There were always stories out of the Middle East, and no doubt Jeff Pollard would have told her some, if he had not been so anxious to recruit Andrew for his building project. But her tone wrapped up the conversation. ‘Sure on that brandy?’ the steward said; and moved away. The slightest encouragement, and he would have asked, ‘Do you remember that Helen Smith case?’
A dozen people had raised the question, in her two-month stay in England. It was strange how it had stuck in people’s minds, considering how little they usually remembered of what they read in the newspapers: young north-country girl, a nurse, found dead after an all-night party; nurse’s father, dogged ex-policeman, off out there to get at the truth. And then the inquests, and the coroner’s reports, and the hints of diplomatic cover-ups and skulduggery in high places; the pleasures of moral censure, the frisson of violent death in faraway places. The press reports had left an image in people’s minds, of lazy, glitzy, transient lives, of hard liquor and easy money, of amoral people turned scared and sour; so now when you were off to Jeddah, people said, ‘Don’t fall off any balconies, will you?’ It became monotonous. And their talk had left an image in her mind, which she did not like but could not now eradicate; the image of the broken body, still in its mortuary drawer.
A part of her, now, thought the persistence of the image sinister; a part of her said, things happen everywhere, and after all, she said, comforting herself, there’s only the world. Travel ends and routine begins and old habits which you thought you had left behind in one country catch up with you in the next, and old problems resurface, but if you are lucky you carry as part of your baggage the means of solving those problems and accommodating those habits, and you take with you an open mind, and discretion, and common sense; if you have those with you, you can manage anywhere. I make large claims for myself, she thought. She pushed up the window shade and looked out, into featureless darkness. There was no sensation of movement, no intimation that they were in flight. She closed her eyes. Sleep now, she coaxed herself. Tomorrow I will have people to meet and there will be a good deal to do. How pleased I will be, to do it; and to be there, at last.
It was at the Holiday Inn, Gaborone – but in the bar, not in the coffee shop – that Andrew had met Jeff Pollard. They had run into him once before, in Lusaka, and not liked him particularly; but now Pollard was offering a job, and Andrew needed one. His contract in Botswana was a month away from its termination date, and they were already packing and selling things off. The U K building trade had slumped into what seemed chronic recession; they didn’t know what they were going to do. They didn’t want to stay in Botswana, even if there had been the option. With the advent of the black-top road across the South African border, life had changed for the worse, their severe small-town isolation ended, the single street full of new faces. It was true that you could go as far as Johannesburg now without steeling yourself for the journey over dirt roads; it ought to have been an advantage, but in fact it made life too easy. They were a direct connection on the string of dorps that ran across the Transvaal and over the frontier; the day would come soon when they would feel like a suburb.
At this point – one morning over breakfast – Andrew had said, ‘What about the Middle East?’
‘Oh no,’ she’d said. ‘I’d have to go around with a headscarf on all day. I couldn’t put up with that.’
‘Fran,’ he said, ‘we have to make some money. We haven’t made any here. I thought we would, but it’s not worked out. We have to get something behind us.’
‘Yes. I suppose so.’
She had known he was serious; because he addressed her by her name. It had not escaped her notice that women were always using men’s christian names, but that men only did it when there was something in the offing: a rebuke, a plea. Andrew had never been communicative, so it had been necessary to notice these things. He was a silent man, who never asked for anything, or set arrangements in train, or egged life on; instead he waited for what he wanted, with a powerful, active patience which seemed to surround him, like an aura: an aura of forbearance, of self-control. His patience was not like other people’s, a rather feeble virtue, which had, by its nature, to be its own reward; it was a virtue like a strong magnet, which drew solutions to problems. And now drew Jeff Pollard.
Jeff Pollard was a sometime employee of Turadup, William and Schaper, a firm known throughout the construction business as Throw’em Up, Bill’em, and Scarper. Since the European Development Fund had decided to finance the building of the black-top road, he had been in and out of southern Africa, weighing up prospects and buying people drinks. He was a man of thirty-five, unmarried, with a loose and dusty appearance and shifting eyes; he had a grey-white skin, but the back of his neck was at all times mysteriously and painfully sunburned. He had an unsparing fund of anecdote, a knowing, dirty laugh; a British passport, and a vaguely Australian accent. He wore his shirt open, and around his neck on a chain a small block of gold incised with the legend CREDIT SUISSE. When the Shores were leaving Africa there had been a lot of people like Jeff around, doing their recruiting in golf-club bars. They were cowboys, headhunters, entrepreneurs; anywhere they hung their hat was their domicile, for fiscal purposes.
Turadup had got a toe-hold in Zambia before the bottom dropped out of copper, putting up expatriate housing in Kabwe, the mining town that had once been known as Broken Hill; then when Zambia went down the drain they moved south a bit, putting in an unsuccessful tender for work on the new international airport at Gaborone; then picking up work around that city, piping water and building a clinic for a shanty town that had become permanent faute de mieux. They operated over the South African border too, putting up a much-needed casino in a bantustan. But since the early 1970s the Middle East had been what they called their major theatre of operations. It happened that at the time when Andrew Shore was ready to move on, Turadup’s Saudi Arabian manager, a man called Eric Parsons, was in Johannesburg trawling for expertise; and on that day – always described by Andrew as ‘the day I ran slap-bang into Pollard’ – the relevant phone number was handed over, and their future was set in train. ‘Give old Eric a call,’ Jeff said. ‘You can’t lose by it.’
Andrew first poured himself a brandy; then he sat for some time, and regarded the phone in their bungalow, like a man in a trance, or a man praying. Then he picked up the receiver; the lines were not down that day, and it was a mere ten minutes before he got an answer from the operator in Gaborone. He told her what he wanted: Johannesburg. There seemed to be a party going on in the background. He could hear women laughing, and what was perhaps crockery being smashed. The operator came back once or twice, bellowing in his ear, but she didn’t forget him entirely; in time she came up with what might be her best offer, a line to Mafeking. He took it. A guttural voice answered him in Afrikaans. Seconds later he was speaking to Eric Parsons, at his hotel. It was the Carlton, he noted; Turadup did not penny-pinch.
He did not suggest making the drive to Johannesburg, but waited until Parsons said, ‘I’ll come to you then, shall I?’ He knew how he would employ the time, as he drove to Gaborone to meet Parsons; he pictured himself at the wheel of his truck, the empty road and the low brown hills unwinding before him, while his practised eye was half-alert for cattle and children, and his inner will concentrated, mile after mile, upon making Parsons offer him more money than he had ever dreamed of earning in his life. This, in due course, Parsons did.
The details were fixed up, at the President Hotel this time (there being, in Gaborone, a choice of two) over a tough T-bone steak and a glass of Lion lager. Andrew Shore shook hands with Eric Parsons, the Saudi man; Jeff Pollard, talking, conducted him down from the terrace and out into the street. Across the road, the nation’s only cinema was showing a double bill: a kung fu drama, and Mary Poppins. Andrew stood in the dusty thoroughfare known as the Mall, gazing into the window of the President Hotel’s gift shop; crocodile handbags, skin rugs, complete bushmen kits with arrows and ostrich shells, direct from the small factory in Palapye which had recently started turning them out. ‘I can hardly believe I’m finished in Africa,’ he said.
When he arrived home late that afternoon, Frances was on the stoep packing a tea-chest, wrapping up their dinner service in pieces of the Mafeking Mail. ‘Well, did you do it?’ she said. She straightened up and kissed his cheek.
‘Yes, I did it, it’s all fixed. But we can’t go together – I have to be in the Kingdom before they’ll grant you a visa. When we finish up here I’m to fly to Nairobi, and pick up a businessman’s entry permit – then once I’m in, Turadup will fix it for me to stay. They’re in a hurry.’
‘Why? Has someone quit without notice?’
‘I didn’t ask.’
‘I would have asked.’
‘I didn’t think of it.’
‘So you won’t even be coming to England first?’
‘And stay with your mother?’
‘It looks as if I’ll have to.’
‘Well listen, Fran, we won’t be apart for long. And by the time you get out to Jeddah, we’ll be fixed up with a house, and everything will be ready for you.’
‘I’d rather go with you. But I suppose they have their rules. Oh, look, am I to pack these?’ She held out a candlestick, one of a pair from a local pottery, rough, heavy, unglazed.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Souvenir. Take those funny baskets as well, the ones that fall over.’
She began to wrap the candlestick, rolling it in her hands. ‘Are you sure that this is the right thing to do?’ she said. ‘Is this what you want?’
‘They’re doubling my salary,’ he said flatly.
‘What?’
‘You heard.’
She turned away and bent over the tea-chest again, cleanly stabbed by avarice, like a peach with a silver knife.
‘We could be in and out within three years,’ he said. ‘Your salary is paid in riyals, tax-free. All you need out of it is your day-to-day living expenses and you can bank the rest where you like, in any currency you like. Turadup are offering free housing, a car allowance, paid utilities, yearly leave ticket, school fees – though of course –’
‘That would be plain greedy,’ she said, ‘having children so that you could get their school fees paid.’
‘Pollard did say –’ He looked at her in slight anxiety. ‘He said that his only reservation was how you’d settle in. As you’ve been a working woman.’
‘I won’t be able to work?’
‘Unlikely, he thinks.’
‘Well, if you’re going to earn all that money, I’m sure I can occupy myself. After all, it’s not for ever, is it?’
‘No, it’s not for ever. We should think of it as a chance for us, to build up some security—’
‘Will you pass me those salad bowls?’
Andrew was silent. He passed them, one by one. Why, really, should she share his vision of their future? She had come to Africa at her own behest, a single woman, one of the few recruited for her line of work. She had lived alone before they met; for three nights in succession, he had sat by himself, seemingly disconsolate, on a corner stool in the bar of an expatriate club, not even looking her way, but concentrating hard; until she had asked him to go home with her. She had fed her dog, and then cooked eggs for them, and asked him what he wanted out of life. Later, in the sagging double bed with which her government bungalow was furnished, he had lain awake while she slept, wishing furiously for her to act and understand; and although it had taken a little time to work, within a matter of weeks she had turned to him and said, ‘We could get married if that’s what you want.’
So perhaps, too, he should have wished her into suggesting Saudi Arabia; then she would have known it was her own decision. But from what he had heard it was a part of the world in which women’s decisions did not operate. He made a leap of faith: it will be all right, I know it will. ‘Frances,’ he said, ‘we won’t go unless you want to.’
She slotted a wrapped teacup into place. ‘I want to.’
It had been raining, earlier that day, and there was a heavy, animal scent of drenched earth and crushed flowers. In the kitchen their housemaid, Elizabeth, was washing glasses – pointless really as they would soon be crated up – and they could hear the separate clink that each one made as she put it down on the draining-board. The dogs and cats were coming in to be fed, wandering to the back door to wait around, like the Victorian poor. ‘I really think we ought,’ Andrew said.
‘In point of fact, I don’t think we’ve anywhere else to go.’ She picked up a broad felt marker and daubed their name on the side of the tea-chest, SHORE, FRAGILE. GABORONE – LONDON.
‘No,’ Andrew said. ‘No point.’
She crossed out LONDON, wrote JEDDAH. Another pang stabbed her, as sharp as the first. She imagined herself already in Saudi, a discreet teetotal housewife, homesick for this place that was not home in another place that was not home. It was almost dark now; the air was cooling, the sun dipping behind the hill. ‘What was Jeff Pollard doing, recruiting you? I thought he was trying to persuade everybody what a grand life it was as a freelance consultant?’
‘Well, it can’t be such a grand life, because he’s just signed up with Turadup himself. He’s going to manage their Jeddah business; he’s had experience out there, of course.’
‘So you mean you’ll be working with him?’
‘There is that tiny drawback.’
‘I hope we don’t end up living near him as well.’
‘They do pay for your housing, so it’s probably a case of taking what you’re given.’
‘That’s fine,’ she said, ‘but just try to ensure that what we’re given doesn’t include Pollard. Do you think they’ll all be like him?’
‘He’s a type. You get them everywhere. But Parsons isn’t like that.’
‘I suppose he’s another type.’
‘Yes, you’d know the one. Genial old duffer. Safari suit, doing the African bit. Two sons at medical school, showed me their photographs. His wife’s called Daphne.’
‘And did he show you a photograph of her?’
‘He didn’t, come to think of it.’
‘Perhaps he thought it would over-excite you.’
‘When he asks you what you want to drink, he says, “Name your poison.”’
‘I see. Weybridge abroad.’
‘Melbourne, I think. He keeps a place in the Cotswolds though. He’s been with Turadup for twenty years. He’s a shareholder. Pollard says he’s a millionaire. Anyway, he seems very enthusiastic about this building. About the whole scene in Jeddah. He says it’s a very stimulating place to work if you’re in the construction business.’ He paused. ‘I’ll tell you what he said exactly.’
‘Go on.’
Andrew bit his lip. ‘He said, “I have witnessed the biggest transportation of ready-mixed concrete in the history of the human race.”’
‘I’d like to witness a large gin. Let’s celebrate.’
‘We’re late,’ said the man across the aisle. She jerked out of her doze; she’d not realized, at first, that he was speaking to her.
‘Are we?’ She consulted her watch.
‘It’s always late,’ the man said tetchily. ‘Of course, if you fly Saudia, they’re always late as well.’
‘Do you go often to Jeddah?’
‘Too often. The Saudia flight’s supposed to take off at twelve-thirty, but it never does. Not in my experience. I suppose the staff are having prayers. Bowing to Mecca, and so forth.’
‘How long do prayers last?’
‘As long as it takes to inconvenience you totally,’ the man said. ‘I can tell you’ve never been in the Kingdom. Noon is movable, you see. Noon can very well be at twelve-thirty. Nothing’s what it says it is.’
Oh dear, a philosopher, she thought. She might as well put on her Walkman. She leaned down to inch out her bag from under the seat in front, and as she groped for it she felt his eyes on the back of her neck. ‘Nurse, are you?’ he inquired.
‘No.’
‘What are you doing out there then?’
‘I’m going to join my husband.’ She filled in the details again, aware that she was more polite in the air than she was on the ground: the six years in Africa, and now Turadup, and the new ministry building; aware too that as soon as she had said ‘husband’, the slight interest he had taken in her had faded completely.
‘Pity,’ he said. ‘We,’ he indicated his cohorts, ‘are stopping at the Marriot. I thought if you’d been a nurse we could have had dinner. Of course, I’m not sure if they let them out nowadays. I think they’ve got rules now that they all have to be locked in their own quarters by nine at night. It’s after that Helen Smith business.’
‘Oh, that.’
‘It was a damn funny business, if you ask me. That Dr Arnott, the chap that lived in the flat she fell out of…and that wife of his, Penny wasn’t it…and the British Embassy? You can’t tell me it wasn’t a cover-up.’
‘I wouldn’t try, I’m sure.’
‘It stinks.’
‘I’m sure you’re right.’
‘You find a young girl dead outside a high-rise block, after a wild party – you ask yourself, did she fall or was she pushed? Take it from me, it’s a funny place, Jeddah. Nobody knows the half of what goes on. You work?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m a cartographer.’
‘Oh well, you’re redundant. They don’t have maps.’
‘They must have.’
‘Too bloody secretive to have maps. Besides, the streets are never in the same place for more than a few weeks together.’
‘They move the streets?’
‘Certainly do. They’re always building, you see, money no object, but they don’t think ahead. They build a hospital and then decide to put a road through it. Fancy a new palace? Out with the bulldozer. A map would be out of date as soon as it was made. It would be waste paper the day it was printed.’
‘But in a way it must be quite – exhilarating?’
He gave her a withering look. ‘If you like that sort of thing.’ He turned away, back to his companion. ‘Have you got those end-of-year projections?’ he asked. ‘I really do wonder how Fairfax is doing in Kowloon, don’t you? I don’t believe they should ever have sent him. Trouble with Fairfax, he’s got no credibility. They treat him like some bit of a kid.’
Frances closed her eyes again. Drifting, she caught bits of their conversation: jargon, catchphrases. At home, at her widowed mother’s house in York, she had been reading books about her destination. Despite her scepticism, her better knowledge, their contrived images lingered in her mind: black tents at sunset, the call of the muezzin in clear desert air: the tang of cardamom, the burnish of sharp-snouted coffee-pots, the heat of the sand. ‘We’re building up the infrastructure,’ said the man who despised Fairfax. Infrastructure was a word she had heard on Andrew’s lips; he had grown fond of it. It seemed that when oil was discovered in the Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia had no infrastructure, but that it had one now: roads, schools, hospitals, factories, mines, market-gardens and chicken farms, airports and squash courts, telephones and filling stations, cold-stores and police stations, take-away food shops, and the ten-pin bowling facilities at the Albilad Hotel. All this she knew from her reading, because after the romantic travellers’ tales came Jeddah: A Businessman’s Guide. The black tents of the Bedu have been replaced by aluminium shacks. Air-conditioning is universal. Gazelles are hunted from the backs of pick-up trucks.
I must like it, she thought. I shall try to like it. When everyone is so negative about a place you begin to suspect it must have some virtues after all. ‘No alcohol!’ people say, as if you’d die without it. ‘And women aren’t allowed to drive? That’s terrible.’ There are lots of things more terrible, she thought, and even I have seen some of them. She dozed.
A touch on her arm woke her. It was the steward. ‘We’ll be beginning our descent in half an hour. I’m just doing a final drinks round. Another cognac?’
‘Keep the young lady sober,’ the businessman advised. ‘She’s got the customs to face, and it’s her first time. They go through everything,’ he told her. ‘I hope you haven’t got anything in your suitcase that you shouldn’t have?’
‘I haven’t got a bottle of whisky or a shoulder of pork. What else will they be looking for?’
‘Where do you buy your underwear?’
‘What?’
‘Marks & Spencer, you see, they call them Zionists. You have to cut the labels out. Didn’t anybody tell you that? And they look at your books. This colleague of mine, when he was last in the Kingdom, he had his book of limericks confiscated. It had this drawing on the cover, a woman, you know.’ He gestured in the air, describing half-circles. ‘Naked, just a line-drawing. Chap said he hadn’t noticed.’
‘That seems unlikely,’ she said. She added, to herself, ‘a friend of yours’.
‘It’s all unlikely. Even when you’ve been coming in and out for years, you never know what they’re going to be looking for. Our rep in Riyadh, he lives there, he should know. But then last year when he was coming back after his summer holidays they took away his Test Match videos. All his recorded highlights. Oh, they said he could have them back, when the customs had had a careful look. But he never went for them. He couldn’t take the hassle.’
‘Poor man.’
‘You’ve not got any art books, have you? Rubens or anything? Because they can be very funny about art.’
‘It’s unIslamic,’ Frances said, ‘to worship the human form. It’s idolatry.’ The man stared at her.
‘So I can’t tempt you?’ the steward asked. He peered into his empty ice-bucket. ‘Gentlemen, don’t leave any miniatures down the seat pockets, please, we don’t want our ground-staff flogged.’ He looked down at Frances. ‘We’re relinquishing this route next year,’ he said. ‘Give it to British Caledonian and welcome, that’s what I say. No more to drink then?’ He prepared to abandon her, move away. Sleeping executives stirred now, dribbling a little on to their airline blankets. There was a sound of subdued laughter; briefcases intruded into the aisles. The steward relented. He leaned over her seat. ‘Listen, if anything goes wrong, if by some mischance hubby’s not there, don’t hang about, don’t speak to anybody, get straight in our airline bus and come downtown with us to the Hyatt Regency. You check in, and I’ll look after you, and he can come and find you in the morning.’
‘Oh, I’m sure he’ll be there,’ she said. Or someone will. Jeff Pollard. At least he’d be a familiar face. ‘I’ve got numbers to ring, in case anything goes wrong. And I could take a taxi.’
‘You can’t take a taxi. They won’t carry you.’
She thought of that cheese, that people say French taxi-drivers won’t let in their cabs. ‘What, really not?’
‘It’s bad news, a man picking up a strange woman in a car. They can gaol you for it.’
‘But he’s a taxi-driver,’ she said. ‘That’s his job, picking up strange people.’
‘But you’re a woman,’ the steward said. ‘You’re a woman, aren’t you? You’re not a person any more.’ Doggedly, courteously, as if their conversation had never occurred, he reached for a glass from his trolley: ‘Would you like champagne?’
Soon, the crackle from the P/A system: Ladies and gentlemen, we are now beginning our descent to King Abdul Aziz International Airport. Those seated on the left-hand side of the aircraft will see below you the lights of Jeddah. Kindly fasten…kindly extinguish…(And to the right, blackness, tilting, and a glow of red, the slow fires that seem to ring cities at night.) We hope you have enjoyed, we hope to have the pleasure…we hope…we hope…and please to remain seated until the aircraft is stationary…
Half an hour later she is inside the terminal building. The date is 2 Muharram, by the Hijra calendar, and the evening temperature is 88°F; the year is 1405.
Muharram (#ulink_9de26251-544d-563c-834a-41bdb34163c5)
1
Ghazzah Street is situated to the east of Medina Road, behind the King’s New Palace, and in the district of Al Aziziyya; it is a small street, which got its name quite recently when street names came into vogue, and a narrow street, made narrower by the big American cars, some of them falling to pieces, which its residents leave parked outside their apartment blocks. On one side is a stretch of waste ground, full of potholes; water collects in them when, three or four times a year, rain falls on the city. The residents complain about the mosquitoes which breed in the standing pools, but none of them can remember whether there was ever a building on the waste ground; no one has been in the area for more than a couple of years. Many of the tenants of Ghazzah Street still keep some of their possessions in cardboard boxes, or in shipper’s crates bearing the names of the removal and transport companies of the subcontinent and the Near East. They are from Pakistan or Egypt, salesmen and clerical workers, or engaged in a mysterious line of work called Import-Export; or they are Palestinians perhaps, or they are picking up a family business that has been bombed out of Beirut.
The district is not opulent, not sleazy either; the small apartment blocks, two and three storeys high, are walled off from the street, so that you seldom catch sight of the residents, or know if there is anyone at home; women and babies are bundled from kerb to car, and sometimes schoolchildren, with grave dark faces, trail upstairs with their books in the late afternoon. No one ever stands and chats in Ghazzah Street. Neighbours know each other by sight, from glimpses on balconies and rooftops; the women speak by phone. There are a couple of offices, one of them a small forgotten offshoot of the Ministry of Pilgrimages, and one of them belonging to a firm which imports and distributes Scandinavian mineral water. Just around the corner on Al-Suror Street, there is a mosque, its dome illuminated at dusk with a green neon light; at the other end of the street, in the direction of the palace of Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, there is a small shop which sells computer supplies and spare parts.
At the moment Ghazzah Street is about a mile and a half from the Red Sea, but in this place land and sea are in flux, they are negotiable. So much land has been reclaimed, that villas built a few years ago with sea views now look out on the usual cityscape of blank white walls, moving traffic, building sites. On every vacant lot in time appears the jumble of brownish brick, the metal spines of scaffolding, the sheets of plate glass; then last of all the marble, the most popular facing material, held on to the plain walls behind it with some sort of adhesive. From a distance it lends a spurious air of antiquity to the scene. When the Jeddah earthquake comes – and it will come – all-seeing Allah will observe that the buildings are held together with glue; and he will peel the city apart like an onion.
The sea itself, sometimes cobalt in colour and sometimes turquoise, has a flat, domestic, well-used appearance. Small white-collared waves trip primly up to the precincts of the desalination plant, like a party of vicars on an industrial tour. The lights of the royal yacht wink in the dusty evenings; veiled ladies splash on the foreshore in the heat of the day. Benches, placed by the municipality, look out to sea. Around the bay sweeps an ambitious highway, designated The Corniche; now known as Al Kournaich, or the Cornish Road. Public monuments line the sea-front, and crown the intersections of the endless, straight and eight-lane public highways; bizarre forms in twisted alloys, their planes glistening in the salt and smog air.
On Fridays, which are days for rest and prayer, families picnic around these monuments, black figures in a tundra of marble; stray cats breed on their slopes. The sun strikes from their metal spokes and fins; towering images of water-jugs, sea-horses, steel flowers; of a human hand, pointing to the sky. Vendors sell, from roadside vans, inflatable plastic camels in purple, orange and cerise.
If you walk, suitably dressed, along the Corniche, you can hear the sea-wind howl and sigh through the sewers beneath the pavements. It is an unceasing wail, modulated like the human voice, but trapped and far-away, like the mutinous cries of the damned. ‘The people in hell remain alive,’ says a Muslim commentator. ‘They think, remember and quarrel; their skins are not burned, but cooked, and every time they are fully cooked, new skins are substituted for them to start the suffering afresh.’ And if you pick your way, with muttered apologies, through the families ensconced on the ground, on the carpets they have unloaded from their cars, you will see the men and women sitting separately, one hunched group garbed in black and one in white, and the children playing under a servant’s eye; the whole family turned to the sea, but the adults rapt, enthralled, by the American cartoons they are watching on their portable TV. A skin-diver, European, lobster-skinned, strikes out from an unfrequented part of the coastline for the coral reef.
Back on the road the teenaged children of the Arab families catcall and cruise, wrecking their Ferraris. Hotrodding, the newspapers call it; the penalty is flogging. A single seabird hovers, etched sharp and white against the sky; and a solitary goat-faced Yemeni, his tartan skirts pulled up, putters on a clapped-out scooter in the direction of Obhur Creek. The horizon is a line of silver, and beyond it is the coast of the Sudan; enclosed within it is the smell of the city’s effluent, more indecipherable, more complicated than you would think. At the weekend the children are given balloons, heart-shaped and helium-filled, which bob over the rubble and shale. On the paving stones at your feet are scrawled crude chalk drawings of female genitalia. Inland, wrecked cars line the desert roads, like skeletons from some public and exemplary punishment.
Whatever time you set out for Jeddah, you always seem to arrive in the small hours; so that the waste of pale marble which is the arrivals hall, the rude and silent customs men turning over your baggage, seem to be a kind of dream; so that from each side of the airport road dark and silent spaces stretch away, and then comes the town, the string of streetlights dazzling you, the white shapes of high buildings penning you in; you are delivered, to some villa or apartment block, you stumble into a bathroom and then into bed – and when you wake up, jerked out of a stuporous doze by the dawn prayer-call, the city has formed itself about you, highways, mosques, palaces and souks; grey-faced, staggering a little, you stumble into the rooms you are going to inhabit, draw back the curtain or blind and – with a faint smell of insecticide in your nostrils – confront the wall, the street, the tree with its roots in concrete and six months’ accumulation of dun-coloured dust on its leaves; wake up, wake up, you have arrived. The first night has passed now, the severance is complete; the journey is a phantom, the real world recedes.
Andrew brought coffee. To her surprise, she felt chilly. He had always been bothered by the heat, and so it was his habit now to sleep with the air conditioners on, rattling and banging away all night. No wonder she hadn’t slept properly. She had dreamt she was in a railway siding, with the endless shunting, and the scrape of metal wheels.
Andrew was already dressed, buttoning his white shirt, plucking a tie from inside the wardrobe door. His muddy overalls and his safety helmet would be elsewhere, she supposed, although he had said in his letters that he would spend more time shuffling papers than he would at the site; ‘Pity you couldn’t come at a weekend,’ he said. ‘I feel bad about going off and leaving you to it.’
‘What time is it?’ She shivered.
‘Six-thirty. Back at three. Sometimes I have a siesta and go into the office for the early evening, but I’ll not do that today. We can go shopping. I’ll show you round. Are you hungry?’
‘No. Yes, a bit.’
‘There’s stuff in the fridge, you’ll find it. Steak for dinner.’
So everything was ready for her, as he had said it would be. When she had blundered through the rooms, an hour ago, she saw pale airy spaces, a vast expanse of beige and freshly hoovered carpet. Pieces of furniture, new, smelling of plastic sheeting, stood grouped here and there; a dozen armchairs, a gleaming polished expanse of table-top, a white, antiseptic bathroom. Quite different from the old life: the donkey boiler at the back of the house, and the tin roof, and the sofas and beds which had gone from family to family.
‘I may have been dreaming,’ Andrew said, ‘but did you go on a pre-dawn tour?’
‘I’m sorry if I woke you.’
‘The prayer call wakes me anyway. What do you think of the flat? There was a house, it was on a compound with some of the Ministry of Petroleum people, but Jeff lives there – you said you didn’t want him for a neighbour. It’s taken now anyway. You don’t get a lot of choice, Turadup has to rent what it’s told. It’s a big source of income for Saudi families, letting houses to expats.’
‘Who owns these flats?’
‘I think it’s the Deputy Minister’s uncle.’
‘Who paid for all the stuff? The new furniture?’
‘The company. They’ve redecorated the whole place as well.’
‘They’re looking after us. It’s not like Africa.’
‘Well, in Africa nobody cared whether you came or went. If you found it too tough you just drifted off.’
‘But here they care?’
‘They try to keep you comfortable. The thing is it’s not a very comfortable place. Still,’ he said, recollecting himself, ‘the money’s the thing.’
Frances pushed back the sheets, swung her legs out of bed. ‘One thing that seems rather odd…last night when we arrived I saw those big front doors, I thought there’d be a shared hallway, but you brought me in through a side door, straight into our kitchen. I’ve found that side door, but where’s our front door? How do I get into the hall?’
‘You don’t, at the moment. The front door’s been blocked off. Pollard says there was this Arab couple living here before, quite well-off, the woman was related to our Minister, and they were staying here while they had a villa built, they were just married, you see. The husband was very strictly religious, and he had the doorway bricked up.’
‘What, you mean he bricked her up inside it?’
‘No. Twit.’
‘I thought you meant like a nun in the Dark Ages. So she could pray all day.’
‘They don’t pray all day,’ Andrew said, ‘just the statutory five times, dawn, noon, mid-afternoon, sunset, and at night.’ He was full of information; wide-awake, which she couldn’t claim for herself. ‘It’s amazing, you know. Everything stops. The shops shut. People stop work. You’re just stuck there.’
‘This doorway, Andrew…’
‘Yes, he bricked it up so that she couldn’t go out into the hall, where she might run into one of the male neighbours, you see, or a tradesman. She could go out of the side door, in her veil of course, and just round the side of the building by the wall, and then her driver would pull into that little alleyway, and she’d step straight out of the side gate and into the car. And the cars have these curtains on the back windows, did you notice last night?’
‘I didn’t notice anything last night. You’re not teasing me?’
‘No, it’s true. They have curtains, so once she’s inside the car she can put her veil back.’
‘How eminently sensible.’ She looked down at her bare white knees, at her bare feet on the new beige carpet. Andrew had made love to her last night. She remembered nothing about it.
‘It must be hot,’ Andrew said, ‘under those veils.’ He put his empty coffee mug down on the dressing-table. ‘Oh, there’s yoghurt,’ he said, ‘if you feel like yoghurt for breakfast. There’s cornflakes. Must go, I’m late.’
‘Will you ring me?’
‘No phone. Next week, ins’allah.’ He paused in the doorway. ‘I hate it when I hear myself say that, but everybody says it. If God wills this, and if God wills that. It seems so defeatist. I love you, Fran.’
‘Yes.’ She looked up to meet his eyes. What has God to do with the telephone company, she wondered. Andrew had gone. She heard a door slam and his key turn in the lock. For a second she was frozen with surprise. He had locked her in.
It’s just habit, she said to herself; he’d been living here alone. Somewhere, lying around, there would be a bunch of keys for her own use. Not that she would be going out this morning. There didn’t seem much to do in the flat, but she must unpack. On her first morning in her first house in Zambia, she had scrubbed a floor in the steamy heat. At eleven o’clock the neighbours came calling, to take her shopping list away with them and do it, and to issue dinner invitations, and ask if she wanted a kitten to keep snakes away; and then in the afternoon a procession of young men had come up the path, looking for work.
She sipped her coffee, listening to the distant hum of traffic. When she had finished it she sat for a long time, looking into the cup. In the end, with a small sigh, she put it down on the teak laminated bedside cabinet. Then she took a Kleenex from the box by the bed, and wiped up the ring it had made. She sat for a little longer, with the crumpled tissue in her hand. Later she would remember quite clearly these first few minutes alone on Ghazzah Street, these tired, half-automatic actions; how her first, her original response to Jeddah had been boredom, inertia, a disinclination to move from the bed or look out of the window to see what was going on outside. With hindsight she would think, if I had known then what I know now, I would have moved, I would have looked, I would have noticed everything and written it down; and my response would not have been boredom, but fear.
2
When Andrew Shore went to Jeddah he was thirty-three years old: a heavy, deliberate young man, bearded, with a professional expatriate’s workaday suntan, and untidy clothes with many evident pockets; rather like the popular image of a war photographer. He had a flat blue eye, and a sceptical expression, and a capacity for sitting out any situation; this latter attribute had stood him in good stead in his professional life. In Africa it was always counter-productive to lose your temper. It made the local people laugh at you, and gave you high blood pressure. If you wanted to get anything done, the best way was to pretend that you were not interested in doing it at all; that you would, in fact, be happy to sit under this tree all day, and perhaps drink a can of beer. If you put pressure on people they cracked very quickly; then they pretended that what you were asking for was impossible, and that anyway there was no petrol, and that the labourers had injured their backs, and that they were urgently called away now because their grandmother had died in another town. It was better to leave people loopholes, and assume a studied casualness, and then, sometimes, things got done. Or not.
When he arrived in Jeddah, Eric Parsons said to him, ‘We’ll have to take you and introduce you to the Deputy Minister. It’s only a formality.’ When they arrived at the Deputy Minister’s office suite Andrew looked around and wondered why the Ministry thought it needed a new building; but he did not say anything, because the new building was his livelihood. They were shown in, and served mint tea, very sweet, in small glasses. The Deputy Minister had waved them each to a chair without looking at them, and now he continued not to look, but to turn over papers on his desk, and to talk on his special gold and onyx telephone; he conversed loudly in Arabic with men who came in and out.
‘This is Mr Shore,’ Parsons said after they had been there for some time unheeded. ‘I told you about him, do you remember, he’s going to be in charge of the new building. He’s very anxious to set his targets and keep everything on schedule.’
The Deputy Minister did not reply, but picked up his Cartier pen and signed a few papers, with an air at once listless and grim. A Yemeni boy came in with a tray, and served cardamom coffee. Ten minutes passed; the coffee boy stood at the Deputy Minister’s elbow, and when the Deputy Minister had taken three or four refills, he shook his cup to indicate that he wanted no more. The coffee boy collected his tray and went out, and the Deputy Minister reached for his telephone again, and grunted into it, then put it down and stared deliberately out of the window. One hand absently stroked his blotting pad, which was bound in dark green leather and embossed with the crossed scimitars and single palm tree of the House of Saud.
Then very slowly, his dark eyes, rather full like plums, but rather jaundiced like Victoria plums, travelled around the room, and came to rest for the briefest moment on the two men; and he nodded, almost imperceptibly. Parsons seemed to take this as some sort of signal. He rose, with a smooth air of accomplishment, and for just a second gripped Andrew Shore by the elbow; the bland smile he gave the Deputy Minister was quite at odds with the near-painful pressure of his finger and thumb. By the time they reached the office door the Deputy Minister was talking on the telephone again.
‘Is that it?’ Andrew said, in the corridor. Parsons did not reply; but persisted, to Andrew’s annoyance, with his pseudo-mysterious smile. He was a company man, he knew the system and he played it; you would not find him muttering under his breath, or making V-signs outside closed office doors. They walked downstairs and out into the sun.
They were in the car-park, and it seemed that the Deputy Minister had made it before them; he must have come down in his private lift. As he strode across to his Daimler, his white thobe flapping about his legs, and his white ghutra fanning out around his head, a dozen people appeared as if from nowhere and mobbed him. They were identically dressed, except that some wore white headcloths, and others wore the red and white ghutra of tea-towel check. A stiff breeze got up, blowing in from the sea, and billowed out the men’s thobes. With the thrusting arms, and the weaving bodies, it was soon impossible to distinguish the Deputy Minister from the mill of petitioners; and the whole resembled nothing so much as a basket of laundry animated by a poltergeist.
Andrew stopped to watch. ‘What’s happening?’
‘They’re just saying hello,’ Parsons said. ‘After all, he doesn’t get to the Ministry very often, he’s too busy for that.’
‘Busy doing what?’
‘Running his businesses.’
‘It’s not a full-time pursuit then, being a minister?’
‘Oh my goodness, no. After all, he’s not one of the royal family, you know. Why should he neglect his own business to run theirs?’
‘You mean that the Kingdom is a family business?’
‘If you like,’ Parsons said. ‘You could put it that way.’ The Deputy Minister had almost reached his car now, but delayed further while the petitioners kissed him on the cheek. ‘They’re the Ministry’s suppliers, I imagine.’
‘They seem unnecessarily matey. For suppliers.’
‘Most of them are probably his relatives as well. It’s their tradition. Accessibility. You wouldn’t want them walled off, would you, behind their civil service?’
Andrew looked sideways at Parsons, his expression incredulous. Parsons took his pipe out of the top pocket of his bush shirt and stuck it in his mouth. It seemed an odd time to choose; unless it was a tic, which expressed his real feelings, like the pinch on the elbow he had delivered earlier. ‘I have to remark,’ Andrew said, ‘that he didn’t seem very accessible to me.’
‘There are different rules for us,’ Parsons said, barely removing the pipe from his lips. ‘Never forget, Andrew, that as individuals we are very unimportant in the Saudi scheme of things. We are only here on sufferance. They do need Western experts, but of course they are a very rich and proud people and it goes against the grain to admit that they need anyone.’
It had the air of a speech that had been made before. Andrew said, ‘Do you mean that they are rich and proud, or are they just proud because they are rich?’
Parsons did not answer. Andrew was surprised at himself. It was more the question that his wife would have asked. The Deputy Minister had gained his Daimler now, and put the electric window down to convene further with his hangers-on. Andrew felt slightly nauseated from the cups of cardamom coffee which he had not known how to refuse. He felt exasperated by his inability to draw any proper human response from Parsons, anything that was not practised and emollient. ‘Is Turadup very unimportant as well?’ he asked.
Parsons took out his pipe again, and made the sort of movement with his mouth, a twitch of the lip, which in some Englishmen replaces a shrug. ‘We have the contract for the building,’ he said, ‘and for the silos at the missile base, and for a few billion riyals’ worth of work in Riyadh, but of course if they go off us they can always run us out of the place and hand out the work elsewhere. I mean they don’t have the constraints, you see, that you find in the rest of the world. But then on the other hand the company has its Saudi sponsor, and that sponsor gets his percentage, and is of course an even more highly placed gent than that gent you see over there; and think of the incidental profits we bring in, the rents and so on. I suppose you could say that as a company we are not entirely unimportant. But as individuals we are not expected to make our mark. The best we can do, as individuals, is to keep out of trouble.’
The Deputy Minister had put his window up now, and driven away. Almost as soon as the Daimler drew out of the gate a straggle of Saudi staff members emerged from the Ministry’s main door and began to head for their cars; it was 1.30 already, and at 2.30 government offices shut down for the day.
‘Ah, homeward bound,’ Parsons said pleasantly, ‘as we should be, I think, or at least, back to the old Portakabin, eh? I tell you what, Andrew, the best thing is, get into your own little routine. It isn’t easy to get things done but I’ve found over the years that there’s a certain satisfaction in achieving against the odds. Now of course you’ll hear chaps like Pollard sounding off about the Saudis, that’s their privilege, but what good does it do? You may as well learn to take the rough with the smooth.’
They had walked together to Eric Parsons’s car. Parsons wound down the window for a moment, to let out the hot wet air trapped inside, and then wound it up again as the air-conditioner cut in. ‘Bought a little Japanese motor, didn’t you?’ Parsons said. ‘How’s she running?’
‘Fine,’ Andrew said absently. ‘Fine.’
He still felt sick. I was in that bloke’s office for twenty minutes, he thought, and he didn’t speak to me once.
Parsons said, ‘You seem a steady type, Andrew, to me. You’ll feel less strange when your wife comes out, there’s nothing like family life to keep you going in this place. Keep your head down, you’ll be all right.’
Later that night he tried to write to Frances. He struggled to get the words on to the page. He imagined her, in her red dressing-gown perhaps, picking up the morning post in her mother’s hall. He felt that he had not succeeded in describing the incident at the Ministry in any terms that would make sense to her. Was he sending her the right information at all? It was almost as if there was something desperately important that he should be telling her; and yet he had no idea what it was.
He had been carrying around, since they parted at Jan Smuts Airport, a small photograph of his wife. It was necessary to get a couple of dozen, passport size, for all the formalities that taking up residence in the Kingdom entailed, and he had clipped one off, and put it in his, wallet. He took it out and looked at it. Frances was thirty years old, perhaps looked and seemed younger, looked younger in this photograph: five feet tall, slight, neat. That is how I would describe her, he thought, how I suppose I have described her to Daphne Parsons, who asked in her condescending way, ‘And what is your little wife like?’ She had (but he did not go into such detail for Daphne) a freckled skin, and light brown hair, which formed a frizzy nimbus around her head, the result of an unfortunate perm; a small mouth, and light, curious eyes: of no particular colour, perhaps hazel. He had said to Mrs Parsons, ‘Frances will be here soon, you can see for yourself.’ Why should she think he would have a little wife?
Frances will be here soon, with her precise inquiries and her meticulous habits. She is the sort of person who rings dates on calendars, and does not trust to memory; who, when she writes a cheque, does a subtraction and writes a balance on the cheque stub. She knows where all their possessions are, everything that belongs to her and everything that belongs to him; she remembers people’s birthdays, and retains telephone numbers in her head. She likes to make sense of the world by making lists, and writing things down. Perhaps, he thought, she will keep a diary. He picked up his pen to add another sentence, laboriously, to the letter: I am really missing you, Fran. He felt weak from missing her, and ashamed of his weakness, so he took her photograph and laid it, face down, on the table.
FRANCES SHORE’S DIARY: 4 Muharram
The first thing I did was to go around the flat drawing back the curtains. This does not seem to me to be a particularly good way to start a diary, but it seems necessary to put down everything I did the first morning, so that I can be sure that I really did as little as I thought, and yet time did pass and I got through it. It reminded me of a particular day in Africa, when I was in our house alone, at home because I had been ill, and I was lying in bed. I’d had tick-bite fever but I was over it, still weak and full of aches and pains, and with no energy to do anything. The house was very quiet, because the maid was having her holidays and the dogs were asleep, and outside rain was falling steadily, that grey carpet of rain that used to come down sometimes for days on end. I remember that morning creeping by, in self-pity and looking at my watch every few minutes, and I couldn’t imagine how time could move so slowly. Our bedroom was in semi-darkness, because I had wanted it that way when my head hurt so badly, and now although the pain had gone I didn’t have the strength or initiative to get out of bed and let in what little light there was from outside. I felt utterly unreal on that day, and utterly alone, as if I were drifting on some tideless grey sea.
Feeling this on my first morning in Jeddah, I blamed fatigue, and the upset of flying, and self-pity again, because I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to be here. But although flying does sap the energy it isn’t as bad as tick-bite fever, and besides, years have passed since then, and I have taken myself more in hand. So this time I did go and open the curtains.
The curtains are the kind that look as if they are made out of knitted porridge. The carpet is beige and the wallpaper is beige and so is most of the furniture.
When I drew back the curtains I couldn’t see out. There are blinds on the outside made of wooden slats, and hidden behind the curtains is a mechanism for raising them. In the living-room the blinds were not down, and when I drew back the curtains I realized that this was the view I had treated myself to on what Andrew called my pre-dawn tour. It was a wall.
I felt that I was getting frustrated now – first blinds, then wall. I walked around the flat and looked out of each window in turn: bedroom one, wall, bedroom two, wall, bedroom three, wall. And into the kitchen, but the kitchen doesn’t have a window, though it does have the side door with a frosted glass panel. But that door was locked and I hadn’t found any keys. I went into the bathroom, which has a small frosted window which slides. So I slid it. And there was the wall.
I suppose I hadn’t realized last night that it ran right round the apartment block. But I don’t think I’d expected a garden. There is one tree, the tree that I saw at dawn. It has a brown trunk and brown leaves.
I am keeping this diary so that I can write letters home. People expect you to have something exciting to tell them, though the truth is that once you have been in a place for a few weeks it is not exciting, or if it is, then it is not exciting in a way that the people at home understand or care for. By and large people at home are not interested in hearing about your experiences. They feel bound to put you in your place, as if by going away at all you were offering some sort of criticism of their own lives.
When I was back in England waiting for my visa, I went over to Scarborough to see my cousin, Clare. We used to get on pretty well before I went abroad. I took some photographs with me, of our house and garden in Botswana, which was probably a mistake and a boring thing to do, but it wasn’t a bad enough thing to account for those whiffs of hostility I kept getting from Clare. She said, I can’t think what induces you to live in such places, I never would. And then she said, I suppose Andrew can’t get a job at home? So I said, not at his new salary. I told her what it was, and that shut her up.
It doesn’t matter, though, how uninterested people are, you still have to write them letters. And I have a feeling that very little will happen here. I couldn’t, for instance, write much on The View From Our Front Window. Andrew says that your first impression of the Kingdom is that it is a stable and orderly place where the telephones work (when you can get one) and the household rubbish is collected every morning from your front gate. I know Clare will not want to read that. But I thought that if I write my diary every few days – I know I can’t manage every day – then if anything happens at all, I can make more of it in my letters home.
This is a new departure for me. In Africa there was no need to keep a diary to convince yourself you had an interesting life. Things were always happening. The garden boy would get syphilis, for instance. Perhaps it is a relief not to have household help.
I found myself looking around the flat that first morning, thinking rather desperately, I wish this would get dirty, then I could clean it. Which is not at all my usual sort of wish.
I went into the kitchen and moved the food around in the fridge. I looked in the cupboards to see if I could make a list of what we needed, but we didn’t seem to need anything. I went into an empty bedroom and moved a packing-case into it, so that it looked more occupied. But I did not feel at all in possession of the ground.
Then I unpacked my cases. The customs men had churned everything into a knot, and I found that one of my shoes was missing. Only one, and there I was with the other shoe in my hand, new and unworn, and although I knew that my feelings were out of proportion I felt overwhelmed by a terrible sense of waste, and I thought damn them, damn those customs men, who do they think they are, and I said out loud, damn, damn, damn. Then I put most of my clothes in the washing-machine and ironed the rest, and hung them in the wardrobes, and it was still only half-past eleven.
I walked around the flat, thinking dire kinds of thoughts, such as, here I am, here I stay. I went into the bathroom and there, sitting in the washbasin, was the biggest cockroach I have ever seen. I looked at it for some time in a kind of admiring revulsion. Then the thought came to me that there were other people in the building, other lives going on around mine. I heard the distant ring of a telephone, and footsteps in the flat above. It seemed to wake me out of a dream. I can’t go on like this, I thought, just wandering round aimlessly.
I went into the living-room. There aren’t, as I’d thought earlier, a dozen armchairs, but there are eight, scattered here and there, and two long overstuffed oatmeal-coloured sofas. When there are so many choices there doesn’t seem to be any reason for sitting in one chair and not another, so I stood there for a while thinking about it. Eventually I took the chair nearest the window, and sat in it rather stiffly, as though someone were watching me, and read the paperback I’d been reading on the flight. This made me feel as if in fact I hadn’t arrived at all, as if I were still in transit, with my passport in my handbag, waiting for it all to begin.
After a few minutes I got up and put on the overhead light, and I thought, that will always be necessary, how depressing, because I hate the lights on during the day. It was very quiet. I heard the prayer call at noon. It seemed strange not to speak to another person all morning, and yet to know that people were there, in the flat next door, and up above my head, and in the street beyond the wall, and that there was a whole country out there which I had not yet seen.
At about two o’clock the cockroach entered the room. It strolled across the huge expanse of carpet and began to climb up one of the curtains. Somehow I was quite glad to see it.
On that first day, Andrew came home at half-past three. She followed him around the flat. ‘Will it always be like this?’ she asked.
Preoccupied, he dumped his briefcase on the table. ‘I’m sorry I locked you in.’
‘What about going out? How do I get around?’
‘I’ll have to talk to Jeff Pollard to see if the office can let you have a car to go shopping sometimes.’
‘I’m not that fond of shopping, you know?’ she said mildly. Andrew flipped the briefcase open and took a sheaf of papers out. He began to flick through them. ‘Well, I don’t know that besides shopping there’s much else to do.’
‘How do people get to see their friends?’
‘I suppose they must come to some arrangement. Some of the women hire their own drivers. I don’t think we can afford that.’
‘Are there buses? Can I go on the bus?’
‘There are buses.’ He had found the piece of paper he wanted and was reading it. ‘But I don’t think it’s advisable to take them.’
‘What’s wrong?’ she said. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Oh, nothing. Just a bad day.’
‘Can’t you tell me?’
‘No, I don’t think I could begin to explain.’ He tossed the papers back into his briefcase and snapped it shut. Need we sound so much like a husband and wife? she wondered. We have never had this conversation before. It is as if it came from some central scripting unit.
Andrew crossed the room and threw himself into an armchair. She followed him. This big decision again; none of the chairs was so placed that they suited two people who wished to sit companionably, and talk to each other. It would seem unreasonably portentous to start moving the furniture now; although it was true that he had been in the house for ten minutes, and had not looked at her once, and this in itself seemed unreasonable. She chose a chair, rather at an angle from his own, and leaned back in it, trying consciously to relax; or at least to capture the appearance of it.
‘I was tidying up,’ she said, ‘filing papers away. I couldn’t find your passport.’
‘It’s in the safe at the office. Turadup keep it. I’ve got this identity document, it’s called an iqama.’ He produced it from his pocket and tossed it to her. ‘I have to carry my driving licence too. If the police stop you and you haven’t got your documents they take you off to gaol till it’s sorted out. They’re very keen on establishing who people are, you see, because of illegal immigrants. People come in at the end of the summer to do their pilgrimage to Mecca and then they try to get a job. I think there’s some kind of black market in servants. They try to make a few bucks and get back to Kerala or wherever before the police catch up with them.’
‘I can’t think that the police would mistake you for somebody’s illegal houseboy.’
‘Well, what are you saying? That they should only stop people with certain colours of skin?’
‘That would be the practical recommendation.’
‘Oh, there’s no colour prejudice in Saudi Arabia. At least, that’s the theory. Somebody told me that when marriage settlements are negotiated the girl’s skin is a major consideration. If the bloke’s never seen her without her veil, I suppose he has to weigh up her brothers’ pigmentation and take it on trust…What were we talking about?’
‘Your passport. Can’t you bring it home? You never know…suppose something went wrong and we had to leave suddenly?’
‘Having a passport wouldn’t be any use. You can’t go out of the country just like that. You have to apply for an exit visa. You need signatures. An official stamp.’ Andrew pushed his iqama back into his pocket. He didn’t mean to be parted from it. ‘If you want to leave you need permission from your sponsor. My sponsor’s His Royal Highness the Minister. Your sponsor is me. If you wanted to go to another city even, I’d have to give you a letter.’
‘Would you? And that would be true if I were a Saudi woman?’
‘Oh yes. You can’t just move around as you like.’
‘It reminds me of something,’ she said. ‘The pass laws.’
‘It’s not that bad. A lot of countries have these rules. It’s just that we’ve spent most of our lives subject to a different set. This isn’t a free society. They haven’t had any practice at being free.’
‘Freedom isn’t a thing that needs practice,’ she said. ‘If you have it, you know how to use it.’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps.’ He sounded very tired. ‘We’re not quarrelling, are we? I can’t do anything about the system, we’ll have to make the best of it, and most of it needn’t bother us and is no concern of ours.’ They sat in silence for a moment. ‘The first thing is to find out,’ he said at last, ‘how to make daily life tolerable for you. I shall go and see Pollard and insist that he gets on to the telephone company. And we’ll have to have that doorway unblocked, so you can talk to the neighbours.’
‘Do we need to have those blinds down?’
‘We do at night. They’re a security precaution. Against burglars.’
‘I didn’t think there’d be burglars. I thought they cut people’s hands off.’
‘They do. You get reports of it in the papers.’
‘And isn’t it a sufficient deterrent?’
‘It can’t be, can it? I have noticed that the papers don’t carry reports of crimes, just reports of punishments. But if there are punishments, there must be crimes.’
He had been upset by something today, she saw, made angry, or very surprised. ‘I’ll make some tea, shall I?’ she said. Because all I can do is be a good practical housewife, and offer a housewife’s cliches. The fact is that he has come here and he knew it wouldn’t be easy, he said that; and now he thinks that he has contracted for his problems, and deserves what he gets, and that he shouldn’t be shocked, or baffled, or put into a rage.
‘The truth is that you can’t know if there are burglaries or not,’ Andrew said. ‘Except you hear that there are. You hear rumours.’ He looked up. ‘Everything is rumours. You can’t ever, ever, find out what’s going on in this bloody place.’
She got up. He followed her out to the kitchen. ‘Frances,’ he said, ‘you must give it a chance. You’ll make friends. People will start to call on you…people’s wives. If there is anywhere you want to go I’ll always take you.’ She took a packet of milk out of the fridge. She waited. ‘There’s this man at the office,’ he said, ‘a kind of clerk, his name’s Hasan. I thought he was mainly there for making the tea, and driving Daphne about, but it turns out that his speciality is bribing people. No wonder you can never find him when you want somebody to put the kettle on, he’s out slipping baksheesh to some prince’s factotum. He only bribes the lower officials, though, not the high-ups.’
‘Who bribes the high-ups?’
‘I don’t know yet. Eric, maybe? They paid to get you your visa, and they paid to get me my driving licence, and you just go on paying out at every turn, you have to bribe people’s clerks to get them even to pick up the telephone and speak to you. But it’s a funny thing, because officially there is no bribery in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And that again is a damn funny thing, because bribery in Saudi Arabia is a very serious crime, and people are charged with it and put in gaol and deported for it. Though of course it never happens, because it just doesn’t exist.’
She took cups out of the cupboard. She was locating everything; this was home. ‘Well, what did you expect?’
‘I didn’t know it would be quite like this. I didn’t know there would be so many layers to the situation.’ He paused. ‘Do you think I’m naive?’
‘You are, a bit, if you need to ask the question. I expect you’ll get used to it.’
‘You’d think it would be a sort of abstract problem,’ Andrew said, ‘a matter of conscience. But then about once a day I realize what’s happening in some particular situation, and I realize what I’ve let myself in for…’ He put a hand to his ribs. ‘It’s like being kicked.’
Turadup, William and Schaper first came to Saudi Arabia in late 1974, a few months before King Faisal was shot by his nephew, when oil revenues were riding high, property prices in Riyadh had doubled in a month, and so urgent was the need to build that the Jeddah sky was black with helicopters ferrying bags of cement from the ships that packed the harbour. Since then they had expanded to Kuwait and the Emirates, been chucked out of Iran when the Shah fell, and accommodated themselves to Saudi labour law and the rise of Islamic architecture. They had a contract for a shopping mall in Riyadh, several schools in the Eastern Province, a military hospital, warehousing in Yanbu; there was the military project they did not talk about much, and there was the marble and gold-leaf ministerial HQ…Turadup and William are dead and forgotten now, but the son of Schaper is still around, and the company’s recent success is due in no small part to his ready and willing adaptation to Middle Eastern business practices: tardiness, doublespeak, and graft.
Throughout the seventies, Schaper flew in and out, disbursing great wads of used notes. His briefcase became a legend, for what came out of it. Conscious of his role, he took to clenching Havanas between his rubbery lips, and to wearing eccentric hats, as if he were a Texan. ‘Buccaneering’ was a word he liked to hear applied to himself.
Turadup flew in teams of construction workers from Britain, and housed them in temporary camps outside the cities, giving them a makeshift supermarket selling fizzy drinks, a mess serving American frozen beefburgers, a lecture on sunstroke, an anti-tetanus shot, a dartboard, and three leave tickets a year to see the families they had left behind. The physical stress was crushing, their hours were ruinous, their pay packets enormous. Off-duty hours they spent lying on their beds, watching mosquitoes circling the cubicle rooms; unused to letter-writing, they became like long-term prisoners, subject to paranoia; to fears that were sometimes not paranoid, but perfectly well-grounded, that their wives were preparing to leave them for other men. When letters reached them they were full of news about burst pipes and minor car accidents, and vandalism on the housing estates where they lived; and seemed to conceal much else, lying between the blue-biro lines on the Basildon Bond Airmail.
They began to occupy themselves in brewing up liquor. They wandered off towards the desert looking for a bit of privacy, and caused search-parties. Their skins, after every precaution, turned scarlet and blistered in the sun. Strange rashes and chest complaints broke out. When they were released for leave they sat at the back of the plane and got sodden drunk within an hour of take-off; they squirted each other with duty-free Nina Ricci, and laid hands on the stewardesses, and threw their dinners about, and vomited on the saris of dignified Indian ladies who were seated on their path to the lavatories. At Heathrow they vanished, sucked into the rain, an allowed-for percentage never to be seen again; this was part of the company’s calculations, for they were cannon-fodder, quick and easy to recruit and cheap to replace. Cheap, that is, by the standards of what Turadup was making in those years; and cheap compared to what skilled men of other nationalities might have taken as their due.
Then again, a certain number would be deported for misbehaviour, for offending against the tenets of Islam; run out of the country, sometimes flogged beforehand and sometimes not, or beaten on the streets by the ‘religious police’ for lighting up a cigarette during the Ramadhan fast. They were all informed of the risks upon arrival, and Turadup took no responsibility in such cases; they were adults after all, and they knew the rules. There came a point when these men became more trouble than they were worth, and so now only a few foremen and site managers were British. The labour was recruited from Korea, yellow, tractable men, reeling through a desert landscape: indentured coolies, expecting nothing.
On the other hand, Turadup had always prided itself on how it had treated its professional staff. Plush if prefabricated villas were erected, with fitted carpets and icy air-conditioning, and instant gardens of potted shrubs. School fees would be paid for the older children left behind, and there would be Yemeni drivers to run the wives about, and a swimming-pool for each compound (carefully fenced from local eyes) and perhaps a squash court. And perhaps a weekly film show, as TV in the Kingdom is in its infancy, and mainly confined to Tom and Jerry cartoons, and Prayer Call from Mecca, and expositions of the Holy Koran; and certainly, soft furnishings coordinated in person, down to the last fringed lampshade, by Daphne Parsons herself. Turadup picked up the medical bills, and gave its professionals and their families a splendid yearly bonus and ten weeks off every summer; so that they would say, ‘We only have to last out till Ramadhan, and we don’t come back till after Haj.’ It was important that their lives should be made as smooth as possible, that they should not be ground down by the deprivations and the falsity of life in the Kingdom. They must be comforted and cossetted, because Turadup’s professionals were responsible, discreet men, who could Deal With The Saudis; and they do not come ten-a-penny.
But by the time the Shores arrived in Jeddah the great days of Turadup were over. They had sold off their big housing compound and let some of their staff go. The price of oil was falling and the construction boom was finished. It was true that buildings were still going up all over the city, but every stage of a project needed an infusion of money, and often it was delayed, or doubtful, or didn’t come at all. Eric Parsons got used to waiting on the Minister of Finance. He spent a lot of time in other people’s offices, sipping cardamom coffee, waiting for people to get around to him. He had a sense, at times, of things eluding his grasp; of the good years slipping away.
Daphne Parsons would tell you, if asked, that the Jeddah social scene was not what it had been. The Saudis, of course, had never really mixed with the expatriates. That was as it should be; it avoided mutual embarrassment, and the thorny question of illicit liquor. The odd groveller would ask a Saudi to dinner, a colleague or a boss; but the man would turn up two hours late and without his wife (one should have known) and a place-setting would hastily be removed, and a man you had thought was a liberal, a modern Saudi, would sit glowering at the tense, sober company, as if expecting something.
What was it he expected? Was it a drink? Normally there would be home-made wine on the table. Tonight you’ve left it out, in deference to Islam – and because of the risk if your Saudi friend should later turn against you. He may drop a hint that he would like a little something; you produce it, but you’re still afraid. Or he might not drop the hint, and let you suffer, on Perrier water, the drying up of the conversation and the covert glances at watches. And if you should so suffer, you will not know why; whether it is because he is really religious, or whether it is because he is as frightened as you; or whether it is simply that he has plenty of Glenfiddich at home.
Khawwadjihs, the Saudis call the white expatriates: light-haired ones. And nowadays the turnover in light-haired ones is so quick. Eighteen months is the average stay. There are people in Jeddah today, Mrs Parsons reflects, who didn’t even know the Arnotts, who weren’t here when Helen Smith died. People are scarcely around long enough to get involved in serious entertaining, or in the Hejaz Choral Society, or in running a Girl Guide troop. There are never enough helpers for the British Wives’ annual bazaar at the Embassy, and the British Community Library staggers on with too few volunteers for weekend evenings. There is almost no one around, nowadays, who remembers what it was like before the giant shopping malls were built, when people had to shop for groceries in the souk. And Mrs Parsons does not know anyone who attended that fabled party in 1951, when young Prince Mishari, eighteenth surviving son of the great King Abdul Aziz, turned up in a drunken rage, sprayed all the guests with bullets, and murdered the British Consul.
Those were the days.
That evening Andrew drove her downtown. Her sense of unreality was intensified by the slow-moving traffic, bumper to bumper, by the blaring of horns in the semi-darkness; by the prayer call, broadcast through megaphones to the hot still air. Neon signs rotated and flashed against the sunset; on Medina Road the skyscrapers were hung with coloured lights, trembling against the encroaching night.
They executed a U-turn, inched through the traffic, and swerved into a great sweep of white buildings. They edged forward, jostling for a parking space; with no anger in his face, but with a kind of violent intent, Andrew put his fist on his horn. Cadillacs disgorged men in their thobes and ghutras and hand-made Italian sandals; women, veiled in black from head to foot, flitted between the cars.
Andrew took her hand briefly and squeezed it, standing close to her, as if shielding her with his solid body from view. ‘I mustn’t hold your hand,’ he said, ‘we mustn’t touch in public. It causes offence.’ They moved apart, and into the crowds.
Inside the supermarket, on the wall where the wire trolleys were parked, there was a notice which said
THIS SHOP CLOSES FOR PRAYER. BY ORDER OF THE COMMITTEE FOR THE PROMULGATION OF VIRTUE, AND THE ELIMINATION OF VICE.
‘The religious police,’ Andrew said. ‘Vigilantes. You’ll see them around. They carry sticks.’
‘What do the secular police carry?’
‘Guns.’
Frances took a trolley. She manoeuvred it to a gigantic freezer cabinet. Pale chilled veal from France and black-frozen American steaks swept before her for fifty feet. ‘Do we need any of this?’
‘Not really. I brought you to show you that you can get everything. Come and look at the fruit.’
There were things she had never seen before in her life; things grown for novelty, not for eating, bred for their jewellike colours. ‘They don’t have seasons,’ Andrew said. ‘They fly this stuff in every morning.’ She bought mangoes. She put them in a plastic bag and handed them to a Filipino man who stood behind a scale. He weighed them, and twisted the bag closed and handed it back to her, but he did not look her in the face. Andrew took the trolley from her. ‘Don’t think about the prices,’ he advised. ‘Or you’d never eat.’
In Botswana, in the last town where they had lived, the vegetable truck came twice a week. Carrots were a rarity, mushrooms were exotic. In the garden, baboons stripped the fig trees. Fallen oranges rolled through the grass; the gardener collected them up in baskets. There were tiny peaches, hard as wood, and the cloying scent of guavas in the crisp early mornings. Around her, women plucked tins from shelves; women trussed up in their modesty like funereal laundry, women with layers of thick black cloth where their faces should be. Only their hands reached out, sallow hands heavy with gold.
She caught up with Andrew, laying her hand on the handle of the trolley beside his, carefully not touching. ‘Let me drive,’ he said.
‘I didn’t know the veil was like this,’ she whispered. ‘I thought you would see their eyes. How do they breathe? Don’t they feel stifled? Can they see where they’re going?’
Andrew said, ‘These are the liberated ones. They get to go shopping.’
They took their groceries to the car. ‘We’ll eat soon,’ Andrew said. They wove themselves into the crowds; each brilliant window collected its admirers. The buildings here looked new, perhaps a month old, perhaps a week; perhaps they had sprung from the desert that morning, gleaming and stainless, and some old-style genie, almost redundant now, had caused to appear in them by an instant’s magic all the luxury goods of the Western world. Cameras, television sets, Swiss watches, so crammed that they seemed to spill out on to the pavement; ancient silk carpets, and microwave ovens, and electric guitars. There was a furrier: fox, wild mink, sable. She wiped the sweat from her forehead. The smell of fried chicken mingled with the scent of Chanel and Armani. Between the Porsches, a fountain played in a marble basin. She stopped before a shoe shop; a window of tiny high-heeled sandals, green, lilac, red, gold. ‘Why these?’ she said. ‘Westerners have more sober shoes.’
‘I suppose that if you have to go out draped in black to your ankles, you want some way to express yourself.’
She followed Andrew. ‘Can’t they buy furs when they go abroad? They can’t need them in this climate.’
‘Money is a burden all the year round.’
They bought cassette tapes; cheap copies, pirated in Asia and imported by the shopful. All the latest stuff was on the shelves; rock music, and Vivaldi’s Greatest Hits. She didn’t buy the Vivaldi. She planned to fill the flat with noise. I am thirty years old, she thought, and I still buy this, whatever is current, whatever is loud. When they came out of the tape shop it was time for night prayers, and men were unrolling prayer carpets on the ground.
‘There is no God but Allah, and Muhammed is his Prophet,’ Andrew muttered. Grilles clashed down over the shop windows, doors were barred. In a space by the fountain – which now, unaccountably, had run dry – the worshippers jostled together in lines behind the imam, and then in time fell to their knees, and touched their foreheads to the ground, elevating their backsides. It was just as she had seen it in pictures; she was always surprised if anything was the same.
They stood watching, in the heat. Andrew looked as if he wished to speak; but perhaps he had no right to an opinion? She glanced at him sideways. ‘Oh go on,’ she muttered. ‘Spit it out. I know you hate religion.’
‘Oh, they must do as they like,’ he said. ‘It’s not my business, is it? It’s just the ablutions I mind. They have to wash before they pray, all sorts of inconvenient bits of themselves. When you go into the lavatories at the Ministry all the floor is flooded, and people are standing on one leg with their other foot in the handbasin. You can’t…you want to laugh.’ He took out his handkerchief from the pocket of his jeans and mopped his brow. ‘We timed this trip badly. But people are always getting caught like this. There’s only a couple of hours between sunset and night prayers.’
And then, she thought, eight hours till dawn. Her feet ached, still swollen perhaps from the flight. When prayers were over they went into a fast-food shop. Small Korean men in a uniform of check shirts and cowboy hats grilled hamburgers behind the counter, and stacked trays, and busily cleaned the tables. There was an all-male party of young Filipinos in one corner; and Saudi youths sprawled across the plastic benches, nourishing their puppy-fat and their incipient facial hair.
A sign said ‘FAMILY ROOM’, and an arrow pointed to a corner of the cafe marked off by a wooden lattice screen. Andrew steered her behind it. There were three tables, empty. They ate pizza and drank milk-shakes. Conversation between them died; but for a moment, over the comforting junk-food, she did feel real again, and uncalculating, whole, as though she were a child. But it is not really myself, she thought, as she pushed an olive around her plate, it is just an image I have been sold, in a film somewhere. A wide-eyed child of America; the innocent abroad.
The feeling did not last. They drove uptown, the roads packed and dangerous now that night prayers were over. ‘At this hour,’ Andrew said, ‘Saudi men go out to visit their friends.’
‘They drive like maniacs,’ she said.
‘Just think if they had alcohol.’ His face was grim and set. He was almost used to it now, the six near-misses a day.
Each highway was straight; the same neon signs flashing between the streetlamps, Nissan, Sanyo, Mitsubishi. On the central reservation saplings wilted in the exhaust fumes. ‘I don’t know where we are,’ she said.
‘It takes weeks to learn your way around. It comes in time.’ They turned off the main road. Now they were close to home, driving between apartment blocks. Subdued lights burned behind closed curtains. At just one first-floor window, at the corner of Ahmed Lari Street, the curtains were drawn back; on a balcony, brilliantly lit from the room behind, a small dark man in a singlet stooped over an ironing-board. Andrew slowed at the intersection; Frances looked up. The man swept a garment from the ironing-board, and held it aloft; it was a thobe, narrow, shirt-like, startling white against the shadows of the walls and the night sky. She imagined she could see the laundryman’s face, creased with the weariness of long standing; as they turned the corner he laid the garment down again, and began to arrange its limbs.
They were back at Ghazzah Street. She got out of the car. The laundryman seemed to her as clear and sharp and meaningless as a figure in a dream; she knew she would never forget him. As the metal gate clanged shut, and Andrew turned to lock it, the dream closed in on her; they walked around the side of the building and he let them in through the kitchen door, into the dark cold silence of the apartment.
3
FRANCES SHORE’S DIARY: 14 Muharram
At last the doorway has been unblocked, and I feel that I am going to end this rather peculiar isolation in which I have been living. When I began this diary I described my first morning in the flat as if it were going to be exceptional. When Andrew locked me in, I thought, it doesn’t matter, because I won’t be going out today. As if not going out would be unusual. I didn’t know that on that first day I was setting into a pattern, a routine, drifting around the flat alone, maybe reading for a bit, doing this and that, and daydreaming. I can see now that it will need a great effort not to let my whole life fall into this pattern.
Andrew thinks that perhaps after all we should have gone to live on a compound, where, he says, it is all bustle and sociability, and the wives run in and out of each other’s houses the whole time. I’m not sure if I’d like that. I still think of myself as a working woman. I’m not used to coffee mornings. I think of myself in my office at Local Government and Lands. I was run off my feet, or at least I like to think so. Being here is a sort of convalescence. Or some form of sheltered accommodation. You think that after a dose of the English summer, after the hassle of getting out here, you will need a recovery period. You need peace and quiet. Then suddenly, you don’t need it any more. Oh, but you have got it. It is like being under house arrest. Or a banned person.
After Andrew had spoken to Turadup, and they had spoken to the landlord, he sent some men around to unblock the doorway. Andrew had to stay at home for the event. It seems that workmen don’t like to enter a house where there is a woman alone. In theory this is to protect me, but really it is to protect them from any accusation I might choose to level against them. From what I have seen so far it seems to me that the sexes here live in a state of deep mutual suspicion.
I did not mind the terrible mess the workmen left behind, because I am so interested at the prospect of meeting my neighbours. On the ground floor there is a Pakistani couple. Andrew has met them briefly and says they are very pleasant. They have a small child, but he is vague about age and sex. The man’s name is Ashref Aziz Al Rahman, he is known as Raji, and he works for the Minister in some personal capacity. Andrew, who has become cynical in quite a short space of time, says that this means he organizes the importation of the Minister’s personal crates of Scotch.
Then there are two flats on the floor above. The one directly over our head is empty. In the other flat there is a young Saudi couple, also with a baby I think. The man’s name is Abdul Nasr, and Andrew says he is on the Ministry payroll, though not often seen there, and no one is sure what he does, if indeed he does anything, and this state of affairs is quite usual. I notice that this diary is full of ‘Andrew says’ but I have no other source of information yet. Every day he comes home with something else to tell me, usually something funny. Expatriates do have this habit of laughing at everything. I suppose it is the safest way of expressing dissent. Sometimes I think we should be more open-minded, and not think that we are the ones who are right, and that we should contrive to be more pious about other people’s cultures. But after all, as Andrew says, we’re not on Voluntary Service Overseas.
The company has given us a warning about our Arab neighbours. They say they are very religious, and like to keep to themselves, so we shouldn’t make overtures to them, just be quiet neighbours and polite, and if we meet on the stairs—which I’m sure we will now the doorway is unblocked—we shouldn’t strike up a conversation, but wait until we are spoken to, and meanwhile just nod and smile, but of course, if I am on my own and I meet the husband, better not smile too much. Eric Parsons came round one morning just to tell me this. I said, I know how to go on, in Africa I met the Queen. This is true, but the remark didn’t go down well.
Jeff Pollard has been round as well. He came to show us how to make wine. We are going to begin on our social life, it seems, dinner parties and barbecues, and you must be able to give people something to drink. It is true that brewing liquor is illegal, but there seems to be a concept of some things being more illegal than others. So although it’s very foolish to try to import proper stuff, you can make it in your home for your own consumption secure in the knowledge that the Saudi police do not enter private homes on a whim. They’ll come if you attract attention to yourself –by, for instance, having a violent death on the premises – but if you manage to avoid that you’ll probably get away with it.
Everybody knows it goes on. The shops sell grape juice, white and red, by the case. You pick up your sugar and your yeast and your plastic jerry cans and off you go, some kind friend like Pollard comes round to instruct you, you brew the stuff up in your bathroom, say, or wherever you have room, and just watch it for a day or two to make sure the yeast hasn’t died, and then four or five weeks later you draw off some of the results and see if it’s fit to drink. There are some people who go into it very seriously, of course, and strain it and clarify it and bottle it and declare vintages, and compete with each other in undercover competitions, but most people are content with something clean and drinkable, with no offensively large bits floating around in it.
You can brew beer, too, from the cans of non-alcoholic malt drinks that you find in the supermarkets. A few years ago these were banned for a time, because the religious authorities were afraid that the smell and taste of them might make the faithful imagine that they were the real thing—and that would be a sin. There’s also a spirit called siddiqui which you can get expensively on the black market. It’s just sugar and water distilled but when people try to make their own they usually blow their apartments up. And if you want it, and know who to ask, and are prepared to pay about ten times the UK price, you can always lay your hands on whisky or gin.
I am glad I have got that down. It will be sure to fascinate my cousin Clare, and she can tell it to her pitiful suburban neighbours when they have their Beaujolais Nouveau parties this year.
As Pollard says, you have to drink something. Here you are amongst all these people with whom you don’t necessarily have anything in common, except that perhaps you work for the same outfit, and you’re drifting through each other’s lives, in transit, trying to make a go of your casual friendships so that even if you get bored you don’t get lonely. But it’s difficult to make conversation, difficult to keep each other entertained. The risk seems extraordinary—gaol, flogging, deportation (and who knows if this theory is true about how the police are supposed to behave) but I needed a drink really to get through the evening with Jeff – his silly sniggering jokes, and the way he seems to hate the Saudis and resent them because they have all the money and he (comparatively) hasn’t. Andrew got quite angry when he had gone, and said, what’s he complaining about, he’s coining it, he’s on the take; what’s he got to complain about, he’s working the system to suit himself. Then Andrew said more thoughtfully, he probably hates himself for doing that, for what he has become. And we were very quiet, thinking, perhaps we shall become it?
We felt rather miserable, sitting in that impossible room with all the unused chairs, so we drank the bottle of Jeff’s own wine that he had left behind for us, and next morning I was sick.
Now the prisoner is released. Frances could walk in the street; but to what purpose? You could not get anywhere. Only, after long hot miles, to Medina Road, where the traffic goes screaming by, out of town to the bypasses and motorways and on to the Holy City. Walking is pointless; but she can go out into the hall, where gritty dust blows continually under the big front door, and makes patterns on the mottled marble underfoot. She can go up to the flat roof, with her basket of washing, and hang it out, to bring it back an hour or two later, dry and stiff with heat, burnt-smelling, and covered in dust if the wind has veered round in the interim. There are washing lines for each of the flats, but she hasn’t seen her neighbours use them. Perhaps they have more sense, or tumble-dryers.
She likes to be on the roof, and to look down on to the street, and on to the big secluded balconies of the two upper flats, and into the branches of the brown tree with its brown leaves. It is a secret view, a private perspective, and she reminds herself of some lonely woman, her own mother perhaps, peeping at the doings of the neighbours through a lace curtain. Not that she has learned much. The Saudi woman does not come out to take the sun and air; the doors to her balcony—a solid affair, like an extra room – remain firmly closed.
And the fourth flat is empty. Curious, that, because on her very first morning she had heard footsteps above her head. She remembers it – she remembers every detail of her first day – as the incident which jerked her out of her maudlin state, and made her know that there were people around her, and a new life to be lived. But Andrew says she must be mistaken.
From the roof of the apartment block there are long views over the dusty street; over the big turquoise rubbish skips that stand at each street corner, the property of Arabian Cleaning Enterprises; over the rows of parked cars. Fierce cats spit and howl and limp in the purlieus of the building, their fur torn into holes or worn away by skin diseases. As the first week of comparative liberty passes, the view comes to seem less edifying, the reasons for the climb fewer, and she begins to resent the two closed doors she passes on the way up, before she negotiates the final turn in the stairs and the short flight to the roof: Abdul Nasr’s door, and the door of the fourth flat. And she begins to hate the stairs themselves, because they are made of that kind of marble patched with slabs of irregular rufus colour, flecked with black and a fatty cream, revoltingly edible, like some kind of Polish sausage. She avoids them. She phones up Eric Parsons and tells him that she is not happy and must have a tumble-dryer herself. A van arrives with one the following day. Nothing is too much trouble for Turadup.
So now she stays downstairs. From the living-room, a sliding door leads out on to the cracked pavement in the shadow of the wall. Beyond the wall, between the parked cars, boys play football in the street. Andrew is not happy about the sliding door. He no longer believes that the crime rate is low; he has heard some terrible stories. Someone he works with has advised him to block the track with a length of wood, so that it cannot be slid back from the outside, even if the handle is forced. He has done this.
If Frances is willing to prise out this piece of wood—not easy because he has made it fit so exactly – she can draw back the door and – careful to close it behind her, to keep the insects out and the cold air in – she can stand under the shabby tree, and the wall which is a foot higher than her head. She can hear car engines revving up, and the children’s shouts, and sometimes the soft thud of the football against the bricks. When she goes inside and shuts the door these sounds still come to her, muffled, very faint, as if they happened last year.
They have been out to dinner twice now, and to a party, and met a lot of people; they are becoming familiar with Jeddah cuisine, and with the strange but addictive taste of siddiqui and tonic. A telephone has been installed. The diary is kept less attentively, because her inner ear is attuned again to other people and the outside world. And yet, the first two weeks have changed her. Introspection has become her habit. There are things she was sure of, that she is not sure of now, and when her reverie is broken, and first unease and then fear become her habitual state of mind, she will have learned to distrust herself, to question her own perceptions, to be unsure – as she is unsure already – about the evidence of her own ears and the evidence of her own eyes.
Within a day or two the unblocking of the hallway brought Yasmin to the door, gesturing gracefully behind her; I am from Flat 2, I hope you will come and have a cup of tea with me. Frances followed her across the hall. She felt dull and badly dressed in her limp cotton skirt. Yasmin’s glossy hair hung to her waist, and a gauzy veil floated about her shoulders. One slender arm from wrist to elbow was sheathed in gold bangles.
She closed the door of Flat 2, swept off the veil and handed it to her maid, who stood inside the doorway. ‘Put on the kettle,’ she said to the woman. The maid scuttled away; a short, dark, low-browed woman, with a faintly pugilistic air.
‘She is from Sri Lanka,’ Yasmin said. ‘She is not much use, but thank goodness I have got her. Raji calls so many people for dinner every night that I have no time for the baby.’
‘People don’t seem to have much domestic help here. It surprises me.’
‘In the grander households, of course, you will find it. But the Saudis are discouraging it now. They don’t like the foreign influence. Of course, it is a good point, these young girls come to the Kingdom as housemaids, and then they cause trouble.’
‘Do they?’ Frances sat down, where she was bidden. ‘What sort of trouble?’
‘They get unhappy,’ Yasmin said. ‘Because they have left children behind them at home. Also the Saudi men, you know, they find that these girls are not very moral.’ The maid came in; put down the tea-tray. Yasmin dismissed her with a nod. ‘Then the poor things are trying to commit suicide. You would like some of this Crawford’s shortbread?’
‘Thank you,’ Frances said. She took a piece. Yasmin gave her another composed smile; poured tea. ‘How?’ Frances said. ‘How do they commit suicide?’
‘They throw themselves from the balconies. Silly girls. But this one, I have got a reference for her. She is all right, I think.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘It is Shams.’
Frances repeated it, tentatively. ‘I can’t quite get hold of it.’
‘Shams,’ Yasmin said. ‘As in Champs Elysees.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘Means sunny.’ She tittered. ‘I do not find her a little ray of sunshine about my house. But Raji was six months waiting for the work permit for her. He doesn’t like to ask the Minister for favours. You are used to a servant, Frances?’
‘I’m used to help. But it doesn’t bother me, either way.’
Yasmin sighed. ‘It is a problem,’ she said.
In Yasmin’s apartment, there was flowered wallpaper and patterned rugs, and little gilt tables with glass tops, and an enormous sideboard, crowned by family photographs. Yasmin with her new-born baby; earlier, Yasmin beneath a wedding veil of gold lace, her mouth painted emphatically red, and her delicate hand on the dark-suited arm of her plump husband. He looks older by some years; a handsome man, though, with a full expressive face, liquid eyes. Yasmin’s own age is not easy to determine; she sits swinging one slippered foot, a long-nosed, spindly young woman, with a flawless ivory skin, a festinate way of speaking, and large eyes which are lustrous and intractable, like the eyes of a jibbing horse.
‘So your husband’s building is coming along?’ she asked.
‘I haven’t been to see it yet.’
‘Your husband is shy, I think. He runs away.’
‘Really?’
Yasmin smiled. ‘Samira would like to meet you.’
‘The lady up above?’
‘You will be surprised. She speaks good English.’
‘I should like to meet some Saudi women.’
‘She is very young. Nineteen. Some more tea?’
‘Thank you.’
‘You will see Selim, my son, when he wakes up just now. You are thinking of starting your family soon?’
This question. Oh dear. ‘I’ve always worked,’ Frances said.
‘Jeddah is a good place for families.’
‘Is it?’
‘You have not been here long enough to see the advantages. You are still missing England, I expect. Your parents.’ Yasmin’s tone was encouraging. She proffered the biscuits again. ‘Do take another one, Frances. You are so slim. You have seen this film, Death of a Princess?’
She did rush straight at things, Frances thought. Suicidal housemaids, decapitation. She put her shortbread down on her plate. ‘I heard about it. But I didn’t see it. I wasn’t in England at the time.’
Relief showed on Yasmin’s face. Is she the custodian of Saudi culture then? ‘I remember the fuss it caused,’ Frances said. ‘Princess Misha, wasn’t that her name? She was married, and she took off with another man. They caught her and she was executed.’
‘This film has caused a lot of trouble between Saudi Arabia and Britain,’ Yasmin said. ‘They do not understand why it should be shown.’
‘Oh,’ Frances said, ‘we are interested in other parts of the world. Foreign customs.’
Their eyes met. ‘In any case, it is false,’ Yasmin said firmly.
‘False?’
‘Oh yes. These things do not happen. Princess Misha, this girl, she was extremely spoiled, always wanting her own way.’
‘So you think she deserved what she got?’
‘You must try to understand a little the Saudi viewpoint.’ She seemed to distance it from her own, by implication; and yet she seemed on edge. Her husband’s position, Frances thought. ‘She tried to go out of the country disguised as a man.’
‘Did she really?’
‘They caught her at the airport.’
‘Obviously you see these things differently.’
‘I am not a Saudi, of course. I am only giving…the Eastern viewpoint.’
‘To me it seems incredible, to kill a woman for something like that.’
‘But they did not, Frances. She is not dead. Her family have her in one of their houses.’
This is quite stupid, Frances thought. ‘But she was executed, Yasmin. Her death was reported.’
Yasmin smiled knowingly, as if to say, how simple you are. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘but it is nonsense. The execution was made up by the filming people.’
Frances was silent. Then she said, ‘Why should they do that?’
‘It is their mentality,’ Yasmin said. ‘It is the mentality of the West, to discredit the Eastern people.’
It was now that Shams came in, with the baby in her arms; a little boy like a doll, half asleep, his head drooping on the servant’s shoulder and his curved eyelashes resting on his cheeks. Frances stood up. She felt she was blushing, burning inwardly. Have I been rude to her? But what a topic! Why plunge straight into it like that?
Gratefully, she turned her flustered attention to the baby. ‘He’s beautiful, Yasmin.’ The beetle-browed housemaid put the child in her arms. ‘How old is he?’
‘So you think he is cute?’ Yasmin asked. She fluttered; her face yearned. The baby nuzzled his head into Frances’s shoulder. She is so anxious, Frances thought, that I don’t get the wrong impression. She knows we have prejudices. She wants me to hear her version, that’s all.
‘He walks a little,’ Yasmin said. ‘So active! Do you think he is forward?’
‘Very forward.’
‘Ah, what a lovely picture you make,’ Yasmin said fondly. She spoke as if she had known her neighbour for half a lifetime. ‘No, Selim, naughty.’ She untangled the baby’s fingers from Frances’s hair. ‘He is fascinated, your hair is so light, he just wants to grasp it.’
It was a leave-taking scene now. Yasmin touched Frances’s elbow timidly. ‘You will come again? Any morning.’
‘Yes, of course. Or come to me.’
‘If there is anything you need…or anything Raji can do for you. He knows this town so well.’
Yasmin took her to the door. Before she opened it she plucked the wisp of a veil from the hallstand and flicked it over her head. ‘I will watch you across the hallway,’ she said. Frances looked up into the stairwell. Those two closed doors at the top. She took her key out of the pocket of her skirt. Yasmin watched her until the door of Flat I clicked shut behind her; then gently drew herself inside, and closed her own door.
‘No introductory moves,’ Frances said. ‘Just, when are you going to start your family, and then – wham – Death of aPrincess. How the West gets us wrong. I don’t think I was super-tactful.’
‘No,’ Andrew said, ‘I don’t suppose you were.’
‘Did you bring the Saudi Gazette home?’
‘Yes, here it is.’
He had been kept late at the site, and she had been alone all afternoon. She followed him into the bedroom, the newspaper in her hand. He took off his shirt and dropped it on to the floor. She could see the muscles, knotted, at the back of his neck. He had just driven through the evening traffic; ‘They are mad,’ he breathed as he drove along, ‘they are mad.’ But he could see the day coming soon when he would be able to hold a normal conversation as he inched and swerved along. The drivers sit at traffic lights, reading magazines, their fists poised over their horns; when the lights change they bang down their fists together, the horns blare, and at the slightest sign of a delay, another lane will form; the cars roar forward, cutting each other out. Each intersection bears an accident that has just occurred.
‘I have to take a shower,’ Andrew said.
‘I hope I didn’t offend her. Yasmin.’
‘I shouldn’t worry.’
‘Only she seemed so much on the defensive. As if I were bound to be building up some bad impressions.’
‘You are, aren’t you? You’re not exactly seeing the country at its best.’
‘No, but what do I do about it?’
‘Frances, stop following me!’ He turned on her, naked. ‘I told you, I have to go and have a shower.’
She went back into the bedroom and threw herself on the bed. Her throat ached with resentment. Talk to me, please, when you come home. I can’t live like this; this is not a natural sort of life. She heard the rushing and bubbling of water from next door; her eyes slid around to Andrew’s shirt, lying on the floor.
She sighed, and rolled over; opened the newspaper, propping it against the pillows. The correspondence column was what she mostly liked. She located it, folding the paper over. Here’s a letter from one Abdul Karim of Riyadh: The Kingdom’s social and cultural heritage does not allow women to mix with men either in life activities or in work. The right place for a woman is to look after her husband and children, prepare food, and manage the housework. But foreigners were coming into the Kingdom, Karim alleged, and saying there was more to life than this. When you work in another country, you should study its traditions and characteristics before you get in it.
She folded up the paper and turned on her back again, letting Abdul Karim slide to the floor. I knew the facts, she thought, but I didn’t know what impact they would make on me. I knew there were restrictions, but I didn’t know what it would feel like to live under them. And now here is Yasmin, an intelligent woman, telling me that things are different here and I must swallow my objections.
Andrew was back. Holding a bath towel, he sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t have shouted. Just another bloody day. The Turadup people who are working at the missile base won’t talk to me. They enjoy being secretive. You ask them a perfectly straightforward question about the best way to get something done, and they start tapping the side of their noses, you know what I mean? Americans run that base. They’re even in uniform. It’s no secret, but it is a secret. It’s supposed to be missiles for local defence, but that’s not what people say. They say it’s a base for intercontinental missiles. And yet the Saudis loathe the Americans. Because they support Zionism. They’ve banned Ford cars. They’ve banned Coca-Cola. They’ll just have weaponry, thank you.’
‘And hamburgers and Cadillacs.’ She reached for the newspaper. ‘Have you seen the cartoon?’ The President of the United States, a wizened mannikin in a Stars and Stripes waistcoat, balanced on the tip of a huge, hooked, disembodied nose. ‘That’s meant to be a Jew’s nose, not an Arab’s. You’re supposed to understand that. It says in the letters column that you should study the customs of a country before you get in it, but I think there’s nothing like studying them when you’re there. Much more enlightening.’
‘Perhaps we shouldn’t have come. If we are going to dislike all these things so much.’
‘It’s hard to take umbrage on a salary like yours.’
‘I expect we’ll survive it,’ Andrew said. ‘We’ll have leave in the summer. We can start planning it.’ He broke off. ‘Oh, look at that cockroach. There were five in the shower when I got up this morning. There were three in there just now. Where the hell do they come from? Where’s the spray?’
Swearing to himself, he padded out in his bare feet. Frances slid off the bed, rubbed her eyes, straightened the cover. She looked at Andrew’s discarded shirt on the floor, picked it up, and dropped it in the basket.
Ten o’clock. Like someone testing the water, Frances stepped out through the glass sliding doors, and stood on the paving stones in the shadow of the wall. I’m going to come to grips with this place, she thought. The heat of the sun struck her lifted face. Satisfied, she turned, stepped inside again, and drew the door behind her.
Five minutes later she went out of the front door. She wore her baggiest smock, flat sandals. She held up a bunch of keys, peered at them in the light of the hallway. First the door of Flat I. Then the main door. Then the iron gate. Perhaps I shall never get back in, she thought.
She was alone, out in the street. The stray cats fled away. A dark-faced boy in a car blew his horn at her. He cruised along the street. He put down his window. ‘Madam, I love you,’ he called. ‘I want to fuck you.’
She walked on to the corner of the block. Every few yards it was necessary to step down from the eighteen-inch kerb and into the gutter; the municipality had planted saplings, etiolated and ill-doing plants inside concrete rectangles, and it did not seem to have occurred to anyone that the saplings would block the pavements, and that pavements are for walking on. But clearly they are not for walking on, she thought. Men drive cars; women stay at home. Pavements are a buffer zone, to prevent the cars from running into the buildings.
By the time she reached the street corner she realized that it was far hotter than she had thought. The air felt wet, full of the clinging unsavoury fragrance of the sea. A trickle of sweat ran between her shoulder blades and down the backs of her legs. On her right stood a row of half-built shops, wires snaking from the brickwork. She stuck close to the wall; she had reached a main road. The dark fronds of shrubs spiked the air over the central reservation. A hot-dog van trundled past. A skip full of builder’s rubble forced her into the road again. From out of the dazzling sunlight, moving slowly towards her, came two fellow pedestrians, two women in long zigzagged gowns, in African headcloths of vivid stripes; their blue-black flesh rolled towards her, and she saw their large spread feet, pale grey with dust, planted on the hot concrete. Smiling dazedly, hardly seeming to know that she was there, they parted to let her slip between them. Yasmin had told her of the West African hajjis, the pilgrims on their way to Mecca, who dropped their garments on to the shingle of the Corniche and ran naked into the waves. These women had stayed on, washed up in the city. They left behind them the scent of their passage; onions, the hot pepper smell of their skin and hair.
Frances turned back into the smaller streets, between apartment blocks, to cut back on herself. Over to her right, cranes and derricks split the sky. On her left a wall had been built, enclosing nothing; a gate gave access to nothing but a tract of muddy churned-up ground and some stagnant pools.
She stopped for a moment, unsure of where she was. Her sense of direction had almost never failed her. She steadied herself, her hand against a burning wall. Her own block of flats was ahead of her, seeming to shimmer a little in the heat; in the two first-floor apartments the wooden blinds were drawn down securely over the balcony windows, and the building had a desolate, uninhabited air.
A man in a Mercedes truck slowed to a crawl beside her. ‘I give you lift, madam?’ She ignored him. Quickened her step. ‘Tell me where you want to go, madam. Just jump right in.’ He leaned across, as if to open the near door. Frances turned and stared into his face; her own face bony, white, suffused with a narrow European rage. The man laughed. He waved a hand, dismissively, as if he were knocking off a fly, and drove away.
Inside the hallway, Yasmin stood by her front door. Her face was agitated. ‘Frances, Frances, Shams was looking out and saw you just now in the street. Where have you been?’
‘I went for a walk.’
‘Come in, come in.’ With a flapping motion of her arm, Yasmin drew her inside. Her bracelets clanked together. ‘Sit, please sit. I will fetch you a cold drink.’
Frances perched on the edge of one of the heavy brocade armchairs. She felt dirty. She took a tissue from a box and wiped her hands. Yasmin hurried back with a little silver tray: a glass of Pepsi-Cola, a dish of ice, a saucer of sliced limes. She produced a spindle-legged table from its nest, placed the tray at Frances’s elbow. She hovered above her, speaking not out of curiosity, but in proprietorial wrath. ‘What made you do it?’
‘I just wanted to see how I would get on.’
‘But it is so hot, Frances. And men will shout at you from cars.’
‘Yes. I know that now.’
‘I could have told you and saved you the trouble. Frances, could not your husband’s company give you a driver?’
‘I think Mrs Parsons, the boss’s wife, has got a monopoly on them.’
‘I can get drivers. Raji’s office will send a car, if I call up, but I don’t like to ask too often.’ She pressed her hands together. ‘Just tell me where you want to go. I will arrange it. But don’t be walking the streets.’
‘It was only round the block,’ Frances murmured.
‘We can go to Al Mokhtar if you want anything for sewing. We can go to Happy Family Bakery. We can make an evening tour to the souk, Raji would be so happy. Just tell me where.’
‘The trouble is, I don’t know where. How can I find out about the city? How can I meet people? Can I learn Arabic?’
‘I can teach you a few phrases. It is enough.’
‘But what if I want to study it?’
‘You can get a teacher. I have a private teacher, but it is for classical Arabic, it wouldn’t interest you. Or perhaps, I don’t know, maybe there is a class somewhere. Don’t think about this now, Frances. You have to get your household in order. You will be meeting your husband’s colleagues and entertaining them. You will be busy, I think.’
Yasmin leaned forward, and brushed the back of her sticky hand with a long, opalescent fingernail. ‘Listen, Frances, I remember when I first got in Jeddah. I had come from Karachi, you see, where my family were all around me. I have been to Britain, fifteen months in St John’s Wood, you know, when Raji was working over that side. I am a modern woman, Frances. I have the British passport. I have not lived my life behind the veil. It is hard, I know.’ She paused, to let Frances feel her sympathy; took her hand. ‘Soon you will meet the colleagues’ wives,’ she said persuasively. ‘They will send their cars and carry you away to drink coffee every morning. Perhaps, who knows, you can have a baby soon. The Bakhsh hospital has very well-known and excellent maternity care.’
‘Yes, who knows,’ Frances said. She stood up.
Yasmin smiled, archly. ‘So no more wandering the roads? Promise me?’
Frances fitted the key into her front-door lock. Again Yasmin stood at the door, watching her across the hall. The taste of the sweet drink lingered in her mouth. She did not feel that she had conquered the street; but she did not feel, either, that the street had conquered her.
Later that day she asked Andrew, ‘Would you describe me as a timid person?’
‘Quite the reverse.’
‘Good,’ she said. She had not told him about her trip out. She was not sure why she had not told him. She had not done anything wrong, so why was she keeping it from him? They had been married for almost five years, and in that time they had never had any secrets at all.
The following evening Raji rang the doorbell. ‘I’m off downtown,’ he said. ‘What’s it to be?’
Raji: silver wing tips of hair, a wide white boyish grin; a dark expensive Western suit, gold rings; comfortably plump, gently mocking. ‘Well, Miss Frances? What is your desire right now? Box of Medina dates? Some nice sticky baklava? Large gin and tonic?’
‘We’ve already made one major foray tonight,’ Frances said. ‘We’ve been to Safeway for the greengrocery.’
‘Ah, a Safeway Superstore is streets ahead for iceberg lettuces. Say those who know.’
‘It’s such a major occupation, shopping.’
‘We have to keep the womenfolk happy.’ Raji spied Andrew, appearing behind her. ‘Hello, old boy,’ he said, his tone much more serious.
‘How’s tricks, Raji?’
Raji shook his head, smiling, and made a plummeting motion with one hand. ‘Oil is down,’ he said. ‘So our Minister’s temper not the best. We will be getting a cut in our funding for the department if this goes on, those fellows at the Ministry of Finance are so tight. They are having one mighty royal sheep-grab in Riyadh tonight, so that the Princes can talk it all over. That is how I come to be on the loose.’ He turned to Frances. ‘You’ve met Samira, from upstairs?’
‘Not yet. Yasmin promised—’
‘Me neither. I’ve seen her flitting shape, mark you. Yasmin chats with her every day, but I’ve never seen her face, you know, which I find somewhat bizarre. Abdul Nasr keeps her locked up, the old devil.’
‘That’s not unusual, is it?’
‘No, but that is one very religious man.’ Raji slapped his palms together. ‘Nothing, then, for you good people?’ Producing his car keys, he made for the front door. ‘I’ll get Yasmin to call you for dinner one night,’ he said over his shoulder.
Abdul Nasr was a young devil, in fact. Frances saw him striding down the stairs a couple of mornings later, about ten o’clock, when she was on her way out with a bag of rubbish. He was a lean young man, with a delicate bronze skin and a heavy black moustache. He nodded to her; did not look her in the face.
‘Eyes like coals,’ she said later to Andrew. ‘Now I’ve seen them. I thought they were a fiction.’
FRANCES SHORE’S DIARY: 28 Muharram
Wrote a batch of letters home today, Clare, my mother, Andrew’s lot. He never writes to them, they wouldn’t know if he was dead or alive. Strange to think that by the real calendar it’s nearly November and that people in England are boosting up their heating bills and settling into their winter dourness. It seems no cooler here, though it should be. Whenever you mention the heat the old residents say, ‘There’s worse to come.’ They enjoy telling you that.
When I look back on this diary it seems to be all about money. At least, it’s always there between the lines. Some of the writers in the newspapers take the line that Saudi Arabia has been spoiled by its wealth, that before the oil there was a golden age when everyone lived in tents and was simple and religious and kind to old people. I am suspicious of this, but certainly greed is not attractive in anybody, is it? I’m waiting to see what our humble wealth will do to me, and if I shall grow nastier and harsher in character, bank draft by bank draft. Andrew is quite right when he says that we must stay here and stick it out and make some money. We’ve spent our lives on living, not accumulating, and now it’s time to start trying to do both, and to grow up, and be far-sighted, and not spend time agonizing over ideals we might once have possessed. In other words, we must try to have the same concerns as other people.
Safar (#ulink_afd1e433-5bb4-5d0b-949b-7ec7c0a4df24)
1
The man on the plane – Fairfax’s colleague – had been quite wrong. There was a map of Jeddah. Andrew brought it home. ‘Now I can begin to make sense of it,’ Frances said.
She spread out the map on the dining-room table. Five minutes later she looked up, disappointed. ‘It’s useless. It’s too old. The shape of the coastline is different now. This road appears to end in the sea. And look where they’ve put Jeddah Shops. They’re five blocks out.’ She traced the length of Medina Road. ‘How old would you say these flats are?’
‘Five years.’
‘On this map we’re a vacant lot.’
‘Sorry,’ Andrew said. ‘Only trying to help. Thought bad maps were better than no maps.’
‘That’s not so.’ She picked up her pen and wrote on the map ‘CARTOGRAPHY BY KAFKA’. ‘We don’t exist,’ she said.
Pollard called her on the new telephone. ‘Daphne Parsons will come for you with a driver on Tuesday morning,’ he said, ‘and take you to the souk.’
‘Oh, will she?’
‘Ten o’clock.’
‘Well…thank you for arranging that for me.’ Though I could hardly claim, she thought, that I was doing something else. Everyone knows what my life is like; I’m at their disposal.
‘That’s okay,’ Pollard said. ‘Any time. Tumble-drier all right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Happy with it?’
‘Yes.’
There was a pause. He said, ‘Is there anything else you want?’
‘Yes, let me see…how about some flock wallpaper for the bathroom? And a half-tester bed?’
‘Joking, are you?’ Pollard said. She got rid of him. Only later she realized, with a kind of sick shame that she knew was unwarranted, that he might have been making her a sexual proposition.
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