скачать книгу бесплатно
‘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.’
