Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel

Safar

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. Dryer 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.

She reported the conversation to Andrew; not to make trouble, but so that she could have his opinion. “He asked me if there was anything else I wanted.”

“He probably meant a new ironing board,” Andrew said.

“Do you think so?”

“You’re fussy about ironing boards, aren’t you?”

She trawled her memory for instances. Perhaps she had expressed an occasional opinion about them, over the last week or two. Hausfrau’s conversation, now. She felt that a change must be coming over her, but that Andrew took the change for granted.

“Yasmin said that she would teach me to do some of their cooking,” she said.

“Oh good. I like curries.”

From eleven each morning the smell of Yasmin’s cooking hung over the flats. Shams was useless in the kitchen, she complained, and there was a dinner party most nights, and soon Raji’s mother would be coming from Islamabad to stay for weeks and weeks, and she’d be asking all her Jeddah friends around. Yasmin stood in the kitchen, barefoot, chopping and frying, frying and chopping, dicing and stirring, her face shiny, the smell of ghee and herbs impregnating her clothes; tasting, muttering, licking her lips and frowning into the pans. Frances stood in the kitchen doorway, Selim straddling her hip. The air of formality between them had abated; the guest need no longer be entertained. One busy morning, when twenty people were expected, Frances washed the best dinner service, thin white china with the sheen of a pearl and a single chaste gold line, and then she polished the heavy crystal glasses that Shams was not allowed to touch, and set them out on the table, ready for the mineral water and orange juice they would contain that evening. “I’ve got nothing like this,” she said.

Yasmin said, “I’m sure you have very fine china, at your home in England. I’m sure you have beautiful things.”

“No, honestly. I haven’t got anything.”

Yasmin looked up momentarily from the pan she was stirring, where something bubbled gently, something venomously red.

“Did you not have wedding presents, you and Andrew?”

“No, not to speak of. We didn’t really have that kind of wedding. We just had a couple of witnesses down at the DC’s office, and then we went for a drink. We got married in a bit of a hurry.”

Yasmin’s wooden spoon hovered in the air for a moment. “I see. Well, I didn’t know that, Frances, you didn’t tell me.” She looked at her appraisingly. “Not to worry, I think most people have had some miscarriages.”

“Oh no … not that sort of hurry.”

“I thought you meant …” Yasmin broke off, and sighed. “You see, because of living in England, I know how some young girls act. But not you, I felt sure.”

“I was in Africa when I got married. I just meant, it was informal.”

“A pity for you. It is a big day in a young girl’s life.”

“I daresay. I wasn’t a young girl exactly.”

“You had … men friends? Before?”

“One or two.”

Yasmin wished to know more. She took a cucumber and a sharp knife and began to dice it very finely on to a wooden board. “When I was in St. John’s Wood …” she said.

“Yes?”

“They were going to pass a law that all young girls in England must not go out at night, except with their fiancés.”

“Oh, but Yasmin, they couldn’t. We could never have such a law.” Frances shifted Selim’s weight to her other hip. “You look hot,” she said crossly, “shall I get you a drink out of the fridge?”

“I will have Fanta,” Yasmin said. “Yes, because you see, most girls in the UK have lost their virginity by the age of twelve.”

“That’s rubbish. Who told you that?”

“You only have to read the newspapers. Naturally Parliament is concerned.”

“But you must have got it wrong. We don’t have those sort of laws. We don’t have laws to make people moral. We don’t think that’s what law is for.”

“You should try to make people more moral,” Yasmin said. She pushed back a long strand of her black hair, and leaned over the pans again. “The West is so decadent, and such behavior makes people unhappy. In the long run. I am telling you.”

“England’s not like that. Not really.”

“But I have seen it.”

“Then it must be a funny place, St. John’s Wood, that’s all I can say.”

Yasmin never raised her voice, never insisted; just plowed her lonely furrow. Almost every day she would unveil some new, astonishing viewpoint. Shams was on her knees in the hall, working on the carpets with a brush and pan, on red hand-knotted rugs whose seamless geometry recalled the unfathomable nature and eternal vigilance of Allah himself. The kitchen filled with steam.

When she was back in Flat 1 Frances found she could not follow Yasmin’s recipes. “Oh, you just take a handful of this,” Yasmin would say, “and take some of that—”

“How much?”

“Oh, just what you think you need …”

And to Frances’s objections, and queries, she would say, “It comes with practice. All English food,” she would say, “is boiled. That is why it has no taste.” She would tap her spoon against the side of the pan, and exhale with theatrical weariness, and hold out her hands so that Frances could pass her a towel to wipe them; the artistry was over, Shams would clear up the mess. “I will send you some of this, later,” she would say. “Shams will bring you a dish of it across.”

Frances got Andrew to take her uptown, to the lending library run by the British community. “I want to borrow some cookery books,” she said, “and get it all straight in my mind. Listen, Andrew, why doesn’t Yasmin distinguish … why doesn’t Yasmin distinguish … between private morality and public order?”

“Because Islam doesn’t,” he said, his voice toneless, his eyes on the moving traffic. “This country is governed by the Sharia law, which is Allah’s own sentiments as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. In Islam there are no private vices.”

“So there is no difference between sins and crimes.”

“Not that I can see.”

“So if you commit a crime—”

“You appear before a religious court. This is a theocracy. God rules, OKAY? Frances, shut up now, I’m driving.”

KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD AND AVOID DISTRACTION, a notice warned. The city passed: Shesh Mahal Restaurant, Electric Laundry, Wheels Balanced Here; a sculpture, twenty-five feet high, made of blue metal tubes like organ pipes. Small children swarmed loose in the speeding cars, scrambling over the seats, pulling at the drivers’ ghutras, while the women in charge of them sat like black pillars, their hands in their laps; in any given year, how many of these little mites must crash howling through the windscreen to death or mutilation? “Haven’t they heard of seat belts?” Frances inquired.

“Bit of a dodgy concept,” Andrew said. “Allah has appointed a term to every life.”

“Who tells you this stuff?”

“Oh, guys at work.”

It was sunset; oily colors mingled in the sky. An airplane hung low over Prince Abdullah Street, unmoving, its roar drowned out by the usual noises of the city. On their left was a private villa built to resemble one of the minor Loire châteaux. On their right was a big expatriate housing compound, where the apartments looked like packing cases, stacked one on top of the other. YOU ARE FAST, said a sign, BUT DANGER IS FASTER. Another sculpture; a human fist.

At the British Community Library there were several excellent cookery books. They enrolled, and were given tickets. It all seemed so normal; there was a lady volunteer behind the desk, who wore a nice white blouse with a tie neck, and behaved as if she were in Tunbridge Wells. There was a notice-board, giving details of forthcoming concerts, and offering cars and hi-fi sets for sale. “So many people are going home,” the nice lady said, “you’ve come in at the end of things really. We’ve done seven years, it’s passed in a flash. Well, yes, I’d say I’ve got a lot out of it really, I don’t think it’s right to moan all the time. We’ve learned scuba diving, it’s great fun, there are clubs if you’re interested.” And “Poor you,” she said, “stuck in a block of flats without any European neighbors, no, I really don’t envy you.”

It took them the best part of an hour to get home through the traffic. “Do we need any shopping?” Andrew asked. “Everywhere’s open till ten o’clock.”

“No. I’m sick of shopping. Yasmin is sending us some food tonight. Would you like to be here for seven years?”

“No. But think of the money they must have stashed away.”

“Do you think they’ve suffered for it?”

“Not really. It depends what you want out of life. I can’t think of anywhere better … for scuba diving.”

They pulled up in front of the flats. “Well, there you are,” Andrew said. “Dunroamin.”

“Yes, what a good name for it. Perhaps we could get one of those pokerwork signs made, and hang it on the gate.”

They went inside. “I’ve got work,” Andrew said. He wandered off. Frances sat down at the desk in the living room where she wrote her diary. She read the information sheet the library woman had given her, with its regulations and list of opening times. There was only one indication that life in Saudi had its tiny upsets. “PLEASE,” begged the handout, “make EVERY effort to return your books if you have to leave the Kingdom hurriedly and unexpectedly.”

The doorbell rang; there was Shams on the threshold, her face stretched in the grim ghost of a smile, an oval stainless steel platter resting across her forearms. Legs and wings of chicken protruded from a great bed of rice. “Thank you, Shams.”

Shams stepped back a pace. From beneath her arm, like a conjuror, she produced a length of black cloth. “From Madam,” she said. “For the souk. Tomorrow.”

Balancing the dish on one arm, Frances put out her other hand, hesitantly. “A veil? She’s telling me I need a veil?”

“For the head only,” Shams said, in her gloomy mutter. “Leave open the face.”

“Damn right,” Frances said. She thrust the cloth back at Shams. Shams backed off another pace, and put her hands behind her back. The ghost of a smile had quite vanished. She rested her eyes on the dusty hall floor; thinking, perhaps, I shall have to clean this soon.

Frances closed the door on her. She carried the dish into the kitchen. Then she made for the bathroom, the cloth trailing from her hand. One edge of it had soaked up some of the fiery sauce which smothered the chicken. She turned on the bathroom light. On the floor, a party of ants, like pallbearers, were carrying a dead upturned cockroach. The cockroach influx had not been temporary; it was part of Jeddah life, she was told, a squalid corrective to luxury. She stepped over the funeral procession, which was making for the back of the bidet. Looking at herself in the mirror, she held up the material and draped it over her head. Outlined in black, she looked pale and tired. She pulled the folds down over her face. Now, together with the smell of pine disinfectant, she inhaled a faint odor of mothball. The outlines of the bathroom furniture were fuzzy; only the cold tiles under her hands told her that the world was solid and sharp.

She reached for the door handle, fumbled down the hall. “Hi, Andrew. I’m a headless monster.”

Andrew had plans spread out all over the desk and the big table. He looked up. “Where did you get that?”

“Yasmin sent it with the curry. She sent Shams to do the dirty work. She thinks I need it for the souk. She’s propagandizing me. Trying to make me into a good Eastern wife.”

“Take it off. I don’t like it.”

She spoke from beneath the layers. “This morning she told me that the Saudis didn’t mind seeing women’s legs, it’s their arms they mind. She said, since she is a Muslim, but she’s not a Saudi, she doesn’t feel she need cover her face, just her head, and her arms, and her legs. I can’t work it out, can you?”

“Please take it off. It’s sinister.”

She swept the veil off, and stood smiling at him. “You’ve got something on your forehead,” he said, “something red, what is it?”

It was very quiet in the flat; just the hum and rattle of the air-conditioners. She went back into the bathroom to wash away the red sauce. Perhaps Jeddah life is making me slightly deranged, she thought. It was strange how sound carried down the well at the center of the building, echoing around the plumbing and the sanitary fittings of Dunroamin. Quite distinctly, she could hear, from the floor above, the sound of a woman sobbing.

Tuesday. Mrs. Parsons’s driver parked in Ghazzah Street and blew his horn for Frances to come down. She picked up her bag from a chair in the hall, took the house keys in her hand. Andrew had locked her in again. You’re always asleep when I leave, he said, or half asleep, what else can I do? She turned the key to let herself out of the apartment—it was stiff, a poor fit—and found she had turned it the wrong way, and double-locked the door. She fumbled, felt her face flush, dropped the keys. How incompetent I am becoming, she thought, about even quite ordinary things.

She found the front-door key again, and again fitted it into the lock; she felt an irrational urge to hammer on the door, shout to whomever was listening, in the outside world, to come and spring her, get her out. The door opened. She stepped into the hall, closed the door, locked it behind her; double-locked it again, without meaning to. A long blast of the horn came from the street: Daphne and her driver, wondering where she was.

She looked over her shoulder, up the stairs. So far she had not even had a glimpse of Samira; though she had heard her, perhaps, last night. She glanced across at the closed front door of Flat 2. Was Yasmin standing behind it, her luminous long-tailed eye applied to the spyhole? I shall get you one of those spyholes, Andrew had said, and she had snapped at him, I’m not a child; if someone comes to the door I shall answer it, what do you think this is, Manhattan?

Now her sandals slapped against the hard marble floor. She wrenched open the heavy front door. It swung behind her on its stiff hinge, firmly ushering her out. Then the paving-stones, two paces, rank air, the gate in the wall; she drew back the metal bolts, swung it open, clattered it shut behind her. She chose another key. Wrong one. Another. Wrong one. She could feel the driver’s eyes on her back, and a blush spreading upward from her throat. When would she learn these keys? Locking in Yasmin, and Samira, and their children and maids; Parsons had told her to do it, told her she must remember, or her neighbors would be annoyed. Finally she dropped the bunch of keys into her handbag. Mrs. Parsons was waiting in the backseat of her car, and she smiled as she leaned over and flicked the door handle for Frances to get in beside her.

“Always in the back when you’re with a driver,” she said. “Give the door a good slam, dear. I was just going to come after you. Weren’t you ready?”

“Yes,” Frances said, “I’ve been ready for an hour. But there are a lot of doors to lock and unlock.”

“Funny old block,” Mrs. Parsons said. “Very Saudi.” She leaned forward and said distinctly, “Hasan, we want Queen’s Building, you understand me, Queen’s Building.”

“Yes, madam,” Hasan said.

“Because we don’t want some other souk,” Mrs. Parsons said, “we want the main souk.” Her pale eyes slid to Frances. “So how are you finding it?” she inquired.

Frances hesitated. Already she felt uncomfortable, her dress sticking to her under the arms. It would cool down toward Christmas, people said. She reached into her bag, checking that the keys were still there, not dropped in the gutter or down the car seat. She considered Mrs. Parsons’s question. “It’s … stultifying,” she said at last.

Mrs. Parsons made no answer to this; or no immediate answer. Frances felt she knew her already, from a former phase of life: a sagging, soft-fleshed woman, with flushed weathered skin, a Home Counties voice. She wore a flowing kaftan with a batik pattern, and her freckled arms were encircled by heavy antique bracelets of traditional design; around her neck on a long chain she wore another beaten silver ornament, which bore an unfortunate resemblance to a gym-mistress’s whistle. Her manner was benignly poisonous.

“I hope I’m properly dressed,” Frances said.

“You ought to get some kaftans really. Especially for the souk, you know, and for when you’re out without your husband. The shop people won’t serve you, if they don’t think you’re properly covered up.” Mrs. Parsons looked her over. “You don’t want to be pestered, do you? You’ve got that fairish hair, you see, fair hair’s always an attraction to them.”

“I thought I’d be all right if I covered my arms.”

“Well, of course, there aren’t any hard and fast rules.” Mrs. Parsons passed a hand over her own bare forearm. “It isn’t arms they mind, I understand, it’s legs. Or if you want to just go out in your ordinary clothes, what you should do is get an abaya, you know, those black cloak things the Saudi ladies wear, and then you can just fling it on over everything.”

“Yes, but I’m not going to do that,” Frances said. She was silent for a moment. She had seen European women with the black wraps shrugged on for half-concealment; they trailed and flapped, and slid off the shoulders, like a student’s or a barrister’s gown; as they stood at the supermarket checkouts the women twitched at them whenever they had a hand free. These women looked absurd, she thought, as if they had stopped off for some groceries on their way to a degree ceremony. “They’re just dressing up,” she said. “It’s an affectation.”

“Oh, well,” Mrs. Parsons said. “They’re only trying to keep out of trouble.”

“It’s selling out.”

“You’ll have to talk it over with your neighbors. Have you met your neighbors yet?”

“We’ve met the Pakistani couple, on the ground floor.”

“Yes, I thought old Raji’s wife would be asking you over for a cup of tea.” She gave a little knowing laugh. “Raji knows all the expats. Doesn’t mix though. Oh no. Can’t, in his position.”

“What exactly is his position?”

“He’s very close to Amir, Eric tells me. That’s the Minister, Amir. Does all his wheeling and dealing on the stock market. He’s always jetting off to London or Tokyo. They have private fortunes, you know, these people, that they keep outside the Kingdom.” Again the laugh, without humor. “Knows a lot, does old Raji. Met the Arab girl?”

“No.”

“I don’t know her,” Mrs. Parsons said, as if that settled the matter. “I don’t know her at all.”

They had left behind the narrow streets around Dunroamin; the driver put his foot down. They shot through a red light. “Third one this morning,” Mrs. Parsons muttered. “Can’t you slow down, Hasan?”

Frances looked out of the window. The sheer face of a twenty-story bank building rose on their right. A National Guardsman in camouflage gear lounged in the gateway of a white-walled palace. He held a rifle; the wind, blowing in from the desert, whipped his red and white ghutra before his face. Mrs. Parsons half-turned in her seat. “Are you hoping to get a job?”

“I didn’t think one could.”

“Oh, there are ways around it. There are sometimes office jobs. Secretarial work.”

“I’m not a secretary.”

“No, well, you seem a smart enough little girl, you’d pick it up. You can answer the telephone, I suppose?”

They screeched to a halt. Hasan had stabbed his foot on the brake; they were flung forward against the front seat. Mrs. Parsons’s bracelets clashed together loudly. “Damn these women,” she said.

Ahead of them, a collection of black-veiled shapes had drifted into the road. They hovered for a moment, in the middle of the great highway, looking with their blind muffled faces into the car; then slowly, they began to bob across to the opposite curb.

“There you are,” Mrs. Parsons said sourly, as she rearranged herself in her seat and readjusted her jewelry. “That’s one of the few advantages of being female in this part of the world. They know that drivers will pull up for them.”

“Where are they going? Where have they come from?”

Mrs. Parsons gestured around her. “There are these little poor communities all along this road. It’s surprising where people live, in the middle of everything. They’ll be Yemenis, or something, like Hasan there.”

Between the palaces of commerce, small lock-up shops flourished, little metal boxes, metal shacks, selling cheap clothing and flat bread. Even under the glacial slopes of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, men lounged in the greasy doorways of cheap cafés, their eyes on the moving traffic. Frances felt an impulse of frustration. She put her hand, momentarily, against the glass of the window. Mrs. Parsons looked out at Jeddah, moving past them. “It’s called the Bride of the Red Sea,” she said. “You’ll find.”

A broken-down butcher’s shop went by, the windows draped with gray intestines. A thobe maker displayed bale after bale of identical white cloth. Then Sleep-hi Mattresses, and Red Sea Video, and The Pearl of the Orient Cafeteria. “Would the drivers stop for me?” Frances asked.

“I don’t know. It might depend how you were dressed.”

These are such major preoccupations, Frances thought, nearly all-consuming preoccupations: the dress rules, the accident rate.

“Of course, they’re not safety-conscious,” said Mrs. Parsons. “You know the worst thing? When there’s an accident, no one wants to get involved, because of the police, and the blood-money system. If you stop you’re a witness, and you might be held in jail. And if you give somebody first aid, you might be accused of making their injuries worse. Suppose you move someone, and they die? You might have to pay the blood-money yourself.”

“But that’s ridiculous.”

“So the injured just lie there. If something else comes along and hits them—oh, my dear girl, don’t look so alarmed. Everyone has accidents in Jeddah, but it’s mainly just a shunt and a scrape for us expats. It’s the Saudis that cause the havoc, all these twelve-year-olds in their sports cars, and all the Koreans and the Filipinos in those old wrecks they drive.”

“I wonder what the chances are, of getting out in one piece?”

“Oh, quite good, really. It’s on the freeways that you have to watch yourself. It’s not the roads in town that are dangerous. It’s the roads out.”

Frances thought, I do not like the tenor of her conversation, I do not like the tone of it, and yet I should listen to what she says, because it is probably true. When she had first gone to Africa, she had expressed discomfiture, to an old resident, at the state of the servants’ quarters of her bungalow. “Wait till you see how they live in the villages,” the woman had said. Her tone had implied, they want nothing better. Frances hadn’t liked her tone; but the woman had been right. Her houseboy had considered himself in luxurious circumstances, with his concrete-floored shower, and single whitewashed room. He put up pictures and curtains, and invited friends around. The burden of guilt had eased a little; had been easing, ever since.

“About this job,” she said. “I thought women weren’t allowed to have jobs that brought them into contact with men?”

“Not legally,” Daphne said. “It’s become more difficult now, but a little while ago you got a lot of British and American girls working in offices. The police would raid them every so often.”

“What, typist raids? Like drug raids?”

“The firm would just get a car to the back door and slip the girls out and they’d have to stay away for a few weeks. But then as I say, it’s not so easy now, several companies got heavy fines, and nobody nowadays feels their position in the Kingdom is too secure.”

“What do they do now for typists?”

“Oh, they get Pakistanis in.” Mrs. Parsons spoke as if she had said, they use robots, they’ve trained some apes. “I could probably put out feelers,” she said. “Eric knows a lot of people.”

Frances turned her face away, tilting up her chin a little. The shops crawled by: Prestige Autos, Modern Fashion, Elegant Man. Two elderly men in turbans sat on the sidewalk deep in conversation, crouched in the scant shade of a sapling, their flip-flops inches from the passing cars.

“There’s not much to office work,” Mrs. Parsons said. “Did you work before?”

“I’m a cartographer.”

“How unusual.” Mrs. Parsons thought for a moment. “Nursery teachers are always in demand,” she said. “You could have started a preschool playgroup. Pity you weren’t a nursery teacher.”

“I’m sure I would have been,” Frances said, “if I’d thought of the advantages.”

Around the souk area the traffic slowed almost to a standstill. The driver put them down on the pavement outside a hotel. Mrs. Parsons leaned through the window and spoke a few words of Arabic into the driver’s face. “An hour will be enough,” she said, over her shoulder to Frances. “It’s too hot for more than that.” She jerked her head back to Hasan, and as if doubting the power of her Arabic to do the job, she spat out the words “One hour, one,” and she jerked up a forefinger under Hasan’s nose, as if she were an umpire giving him out.

Hasan drove away. Frances looked around her. “Gabel Street,” Mrs. Parsons said, indicating with her head that they should make a dive through the traffic and enter a narrow street on the far side. She took Frances by the elbow. With her free hand Frances wiped her hair from her forehead, feeling it sticky and damp. “How do you find the heat?” Daphne inquired, above the rumble of the traffic.

“It’s the humidity I mind. It’s different from where we lived before.”

“We were in Zambia for a couple of years. Of course, it’s not what I call Africa.”

“Oh no?” They teetered on the curb.

“Now,” Daphne said. They began to thread their way through the crawling cars. “When I was first married, we were in Nigeria.” Frances stepped on to a traffic island. She saw Mrs. Parsons’s face, blotched and mottled already by the heat. “We had a lovely life. A lovely home. We had four gardeners.”

“Really?” They sallied out again, into the traffic.

“Then we were in Malaya.” A long black Pontiac braked to let them pass. Frances inclined her head in thanks, but the sun struck across the windscreen, hiding the driver’s face from view. They had reached the far side.

“And how many gardeners did you have in Malaya?” Frances asked.

Now it was for Mrs. Parsons to dislike her tone. But her mind was elsewhere; she wanted to get into the goldsmiths. The souk, Frances saw, was modern and paved, with streetlighting and the same metal-box shops she had seen uptown. But above and beyond the souk were the houses of old Jeddah, with their leaning faded pastel walls, their crumbling harem grills, the wood bleached out by sunlight and neglect to the color of ashes.

“What’s up there?” Frances said. Her spirits rose. All the time she had known that there was something more than she was seeing. “Can we go up there and look?”

“I don’t think Eric would like me to do that,” Mrs. Parsons said with dignity. They plunged into Gabel Street.

2

Frances Shore’s Diary: 7 Safar

You should come at night to get the flavor of it, Mrs. Parsons said, and this is what people do, apparently, they get up parties to go to the souk. I have to say that at 11 A.M., anyway, it’s disappointing. Mainly there are just rows and rows of the little metal shops, selling perfectly ordinary things—tea sets, and shock-absorbers, and lurid lengths of fabric with gold and silver threads running through. I did buy a set of orange nonstick saucepans, which seemed very cheap. I wondered if I should haggle over them, but Daphne said, no dear, just pay the price. I was relieved.

The goldsmiths are quite spectacular. The shops look so poverty-stricken and dreary, compared to the new places uptown, and it’s hard to take in the value—thousands of riyals, millions of riyals—of what’s in their windows. They go by weight here, they don’t regard workmanship, and they certainly don’t regard taste. Mrs. Parsons walked into one of these shacks and peered around, nobody taking very much notice of her—as she said, they know that Europeans aren’t going to buy, or not much more than a trinket, but if you shuffled in there in a veil they’d spring to attention all right. She said to the man behind the counter, what is today’s price? Just as if she were after salad tomatoes. From some fold of her flowing garments she produced a pocket calculator, converted grams to ounces, then got him to weigh her a few bracelets. After she had done some more sums she said to him, thank you, sucran, and walked out. Then we went into a couple of shops selling Indian clothes, and she tossed the stock about a bit and said, trashy stuff. No one tried to sell us anything particularly, except that one shopkeeper pulled out a cardboard box from under a counter, which seemed to have in it the kind of dresses that get left behind at jumble sales. He held one or two up and said, viscose very smart, 100 percent polyester, madam you love it. It was obvious we didn’t, and he wasn’t very interested anyway—his heart wasn’t in it. Mrs. Parsons told me not to smile at people too much, they might run away with the wrong idea. The souk smells quite a lot, and this seems an affectation in it. There are drains and street cleaners, so why should it smell?

After we had walked about aimlessly for half an hour, I noticed a few tables and chairs set out in front of a doorway, and just inside there was a very ancient decrepit man tending one of those rotating plastic bubbles of orange juice, the kind you get in British Home Stores cafeterias. Can we get a drink? I said. Daphne said, I wonder, or is it men only? She said, it’s not what you’d call a reliable café, I have got a drink here once or twice, but it depends if the religious police have been around lately. I said, what, you mean we can’t sit down, because we’re women, we can’t have a drink? She looked around, and said better not risk it.

I was enraged, because I was so hot, and my nonstick pans were so heavy, and I was so tired of carrying them—perhaps I shouldn’t have bought them, but every so often a woman must have a wild impulse, mustn’t she? I said, my God, it’s exactly like South Africa. Mrs. Parsons smiled. She seemed pleased. Why, so it is, she said.

All the way home Mrs. Parsons talked about something she called Entertaining. I gather that I am expected to give dinner parties. I am not quite sure how I am going to do this. In Africa people would come round and you would give them what you had by you, which was exactly what they had in their fridge at home. There was no place for one-upmanship, and spag. bog. was on the whole considered quite exotic. But I gather that spag. bog. will not do here.

Mrs. Parsons goes to the British Wives’ coffee morning at the Embassy on the first Monday of every month. They do handicrafts and good works and have lectures with slides about the wonders of the coral reef. She talked about this, and also about her Magimix, which she says is the Rolls-Royce of food processors.

When I got home I took my box into the kitchen and unpacked it, and when I examined my pans closely and read the labels on the bottom, I found that they were not what I thought and not such a bargain after all, as the nonstick coating is made of something called Saudiflon. It was quite a blow. I lay on the bed for half an hour. I tried to compose some phrases about the souk which I could use in letters home. People talk so much about going to the souk that I feel I must be missing something. Perhaps I am blinkered.

No doubt.

The architect who had designed the Ministry’s new building had been given a commission to excel all the other strange and wonderful buildings of modern Jeddah. The building was to defy, for scale and cunning, the green giant of the Petroline building, and the Ministry of Labour’s silver-and-chrome fantasy on Al Hamra Street. It was to exceed in strangeness, in denial of gravity, the flying tented roofs of the airport’s Haj Terminal; it was to induce wonder and reverence, even greater awe than the pure white 3-D triangle of the National Commercial Bank, which floats above Bagdadia lagoon.

The Ministerial HQ was to suggest to the beholder a miracle compound of all the elements, of earth, air, water, and fire; as if to convey the mysterious grandeur of the Ministry’s activities, the transcendent quality of its paper shuffling. It must be better than anything the West could do; but it must also be Islamic. Glorifying God was part of the brief.

In the architect’s imagination, the Ministry’s new building seemed lighter than the air around it; it was a shimmering iceberg, soaring above the hot pavements and the jungle of greenery that would root it to earth. At the time of Maghreb prayer, when the sun dipped into the ocean in a great flaring gaseous ball, its glass walls would melt and grow liquid. It would glow on the darkening skyline, a terror and a portent, a Koranic column of fire.

When this conception had to be put on paper, reduced to an artist’s impression of color and line, a more prosaic quality was sure to enter: still, the drawings in Andrew’s paper folder were highly impressive. Tiny figures in thobes and ghutras rode the escalators, which looped smoothly behind the glass walls. Giant scarlet flowers bloomed in the foreground, a crystal fountain scored the summer air, and above all, a fluffy cloud sailed through a wash of cerulean blue.

When Frances went to see the building it was a humid, gray, and overcast day. The air was laden with dust; it was a Friday, and the site was deserted. The project had reached that stage in the life of a building when it presents a picture less of construction than destruction; her first impression was of a bomb site. The brick looked raw; a confusion of pointless-looking wires snaked out of holes in walls. Some parts seemed almost finished; others were just foundations.

“You have to try to imagine what it will look like when we get the marble cladding,” Andrew said. “It’s supposed to be white, translucent, a sort of sheen, that’s the idea, so that it looks less solid than it is. But I haven’t seen the marble yet. I hope we don’t end up with the kind that looks like old paint with brown cracks. The kind, you know, that they’ve got on the Bugshan hospital.”

“Yes, I know.” Frances threaded her fingers into the mesh of the security fence. “I may be wrong, but isn’t there a lot more actual wall than in the artist’s impression? It seemed to be made entirely of glass.”

“Mm.” Andrew frowned. “There were certain impracticalities in the basic design.” He cheered up. “The mosque will be over there.”

“It’s going to have its own mosque?”

“Oh yes. Every public building needs one. And there’s going to be a heliport on top. At the center will be a courtyard, with a fountain rising out of a base shaped like an incense burner. There are sixty-four fountains in Jeddah, and this will be the biggest. If you come here—”

Her loose sandals full of grit and dust, she skittered toward him over the clawed-up ground. He touched her shoulder lightly, turning her to see. “If you look over there, that’s going to be the Minister’s private entrance.”

“Can’t he go through an ordinary door?”

“No, he doesn’t seem able to.”

“What about trees, are you having trees?”

“There are ten thousand flowering shrubs on order. They’re going to be planted out along the street frontage, approximately where we’re standing now. You don’t know what a treat it is, to work without the penny-pinching you get everywhere else. This architect, he’s an Egyptian, I did think at first that he’d got carried away, but they’re prepared to back it, they’ll put the resources in. You have this confidence, you see Fran, that when it’s done it’ll be absolutely right.”

“What about sculptures? Are you having sculptures?”

“Yes, there’s a big one planned for the south side. It’s a model of the solar system.”

“Working, is it?”

He squeezed her arm. “It’s going to be great. You’ll see. The architects in Cairo have ordered this scale model, about tabletop size—they’re having it built specially in Los Angeles. I can’t wait to have it, it should have been here before I came. Then, you see, I’ll be able to get it over to people what it’s going to look like.”

“I wish I could see it, when it comes. But I can’t go to your office, can I?”

“I’ll try to sneak you in, some weekend. During Friday prayers is the best time, when everybody’s at the mosque.”

What a lot this building meant to him. She looked up into his face. “It will be splendid. I’m sure.”

“Yes … but even so, I wish I’d been here a few years back, when it was really boom conditions. They’re not building so much now, and not the space-age stuff, all those novel shapes. It’s all socalled Islamic architecture now. There’s no challenge in it, anybody can build some piffling little archways round a courtyard. Now this Egyptian, he’s the right stuff; he’s got all the little nods to the religious element, but he’s got a sense of adventure as well.”

“Andrew—” she swiveled a glance over her shoulder, uneasy—“there’s a policeman across the road, he’s staring at us.”

“Yes, better go, I suppose.” Andrew seemed unable to tear his eyes from the stacked-up pipes, the piles of builders’ rubble.

“Do you know something, Fran—this will be the last of the best. Now the oil price is coming down they won’t build on this scale again. I should have come here years ago.”

He looked wistful as he said it, as if a golden age had passed. Construction sites were the pleasure gardens of his mind. As she picked her way over the ruts and gullies he put out a hand to help her, despite the policeman’s presence. There was a great ditch between the site and the road. She teetered over it across a plank; Andrew followed.

Frances Shore’s Diary: 15 Safar

The last of our air freight arrived today. There were things in the tea chests I’d forgotten I’d packed. Those straw baskets we used to buy from boys on the streets, and those candlesticks from the pottery at Thamaga. And my soapstone tortoise, I’d missed him. I got him from a young boy who was selling them on the platform at Francistown station, when we were on our way to Victoria Falls. We went while the war was still on. The hotels were cheap. People on the sunset river cruise were getting shot out of the water.

Unpacking our stuff gave me a funny feeling. I was imagining myself when I packed the crates, thinking about the exciting future, which is now the dull present. I found places for the things around the flat. I imagined they’d make it seem more like home. But they didn’t look right. They seemed to come from another life.

I have met a woman called Marion, who lives on Jeff Pollard’s compound. She’s the wife of one of the people at Mineral Resources, and they’ve got two little girls. They used to be in Zambia, so we have quite a lot to talk about, and I’ve found that I can actually walk round to her compound and get there before I expire from the heat or am accosted by curb-crawlers more than a few times. There are twelve houses in the compound, which is where we would have been living if things had gone otherwise. I wonder what it would have been like to have Marion for a neighbor. But chance has made our life quite different.

The houses are all prefabs, quite big, but shabby. They were built to last five years, but they’re now in their ninth. I’m sure that people at home think we lead glamorous lives here, bronzing ourselves by palm-fringed pools, and sipping “illicit liquor,” which always sounds more exciting than the normal kind, doesn’t it? There are not quite so many cockroaches at Marion’s place, but on the other hand their baths are held to the walls with sticky tape, and they have rats running about in their roofs.

Marion complains about the compound a lot, it’s falling down and they can’t get maintenance, etc., and they have distressing episodes with their drains, but she seems to be happy here in a way. She’s been in Jeddah for two years and perhaps when we have been around that long I’ll be used to it and see it in the same light. After all, she said yesterday, you can get anything you want in the shops. Now in Zambia there was no soap, we had no sugar for months, the eggs were always stale, we had to eat stringy chicken all the time and some weeks we had to live on spaghetti. So if somebody locked you in your local Sainsbury’s, I asked her, would you be happy? She stared at me. She’s an easygoing woman, too lethargic to be offended. It was meant to be a joke, but I think something is happening to my sense of humor.

The Brits here are all earning far more than they would anywhere else in the world. They talk about how their shares are doing, and about their next leave, which is usually going to be a round-the-world trip by air, taking in really boring places like Miami and Hong Kong, where they can spend their time in shopping malls, just in case they get homesick for Jeddah. Some people, though, are parsimonious. They stash away everything they can and treat their time here like a prison sentence, or a stint in an up-country field camp. They intend to stay on until they get a certain sum of money in the bank, but as they get toward their target, they decide they need more. They want to buy a house but house prices are rising so fast. They’ve put their children in boarding school so that they could come abroad, but now the children are settled and it’s unfair to take them away, so they’ve got to stay abroad to pay the fees. They’ve put Mother in a nursing home because they weren’t around to look after her and now she’s got older and sicker and got ideas above her station. They always say, we’ll just do another year. It’s called the golden handcuffs.

No matter how much they complain about life here, they hate the thought of leaving. They see some gigantic insecurity staring them in the face, as if their lives would fall apart when they got their final exit visa, as if it would be instant ruin—as if it had to be straight from the Heathrow baggage hall and down to the welfare department. They just get too old to leave. They have to stay, if they’re allowed—war, revolution, come what may. They don’t know how to behave anywhere else.

The Americans are different. Usually they don’t stay long. They don’t know how to behave anywhere at all.

Marion’s topic of conversation is her husband. Russel won’t take her shopping. He doesn’t think that’s a man’s job, bothering with groceries. His office sends her a car once a week, for a couple of hours, but she has to account for everything she spends, and he’s not too keen on the idea of her shopping alone; she gets carried away, he says, and buys things like prawns. His idea is that they go out once a month and do everything, we’ve got a freezer, he says, so use it. But at the same time, he expects her to have everything on hand that he might want to eat. You’re doing nothing else all day, he says, so why can’t you organize the household? The other night he was going on, haven’t we got any beetroot, why isn’t there any beetroot?

Plus her Magimix has broken down.

When it gets a bit cooler, she says, we can sit outside and have coffee.

Men don’t come very well out of this diary. On the other hand, women don’t come very well out of it either. I said when I was writing before that the sexes live here in a state of deep mutual suspicion, but now I’m beginning to think it’s more like a state of mutual terror. I wasn’t sure before I came here if people were really executed for adultery. But since I’ve been here the Saudi Gazette has carried two or three reports of double executions. If you miss one, somebody will have cut it out, and will give you a photocopy. We’re fascinated, we can’t help it.

There was an execution in Mecca a little while ago. The woman of the house was having an affair with her driver. The husband got suspicious, and sacked him. The following night the woman let the driver into the house. Her husband was asleep. Her lover stabbed him to death. They put the body in a sack and tipped it down a well. Then they took off to Taif, posing as husband and wife. When they were caught they confessed. The man was publicly beheaded, for adultery and murder, and the woman was stoned to death for adultery.

I suppose there is no call to jeel cultural superiority. The murder, anyway, is the same as crimes in the West. The punishment is not so different from what we have had until recently. But what chills my blood is the pious last paragraph that the newspaper tags on. “While giving out details of the offense and punishment, the Interior Minister made it clear that the government would vigorously implement the Sharia laws to maintain the security of the land and to deter criminals … The executions were carried out after Friday prayers.”

I really must talk to Yasmin. When I read things like this it’s beyond me how people like Marion can say, “Oh, I don’t mind it here really”—because you see, there are these nightmare occurrences. Probably I spend too much time on my own in the flat, reading the newspapers and trying to work things out. When Andrew came home yesterday he told me something very disturbing about the empty flat upstairs. I don’t know if I should write it down. What if somebody gets hold of my diary, and reads it?

3

What she remembered now was the sound of sobbing she had heard, echoing through the bathroom pipes. She was not sure any longer which flat it had come from. Best to assume that it was Samira. Did people cry a lot, in arranged marriages? Marion’s complaints nagged at her. People seemed to cry enough in the marriages they fixed up for themselves.

Perhaps Abdul Nasr had been exercising the right the Koran gave him to beat his wife. She saw him once more, midmorning, striding out to his car. His sandals skidded over the marble, and the ends of his ghutra whiplashed out behind him. Yet Andrew said you never saw a Saudi in a hurry. She had time to notice only his frown, and the flash of his wristwatch. The contrast stuck in her mind—the clean Cartier lines, and the cloying odor of goatflesh which floated day after day down the stairs.

Frances had a headache. Perhaps, she thought, it was the effect of living with the air-conditioning; it couldn’t be healthy, could it? Or perhaps it was the tension which was building up at the back of her neck.

She mentioned it to Andrew. “What have you got to be tense about?” he asked. Then, “Guess what, I’ve been paid. I’m going to the money changer’s. Want to come?”

He would have to drive downtown to the bank first, and turn the Ministry’s check into cash. Riyal notes are what work here—not personal checks, not credit cards. He would extract a bundle of notes which would be their housekeeping money; and later they would subdivide it into smaller bundles, and stow it about the flat in cunning hiding places.

Then he would need to take the cash that was left over, and exchange it for a sterling check. The money changer’s sounded interesting: as if there might be a table in the open air, with people standing about in biblical attitudes. But it was just an ordinary office, in an ordinary street. She sat in the car, waiting for Andrew, watching the passersby. Jeddah is a cosmopolitan city, it is said. All languages are heard, all colors of people mingle in the souks and squares. But they do not merge. Ghettos are formed, even on the pavement; garments are twitched aside. The stranger you see today will be stranger still tomorrow. People fall into their national stereotypes; you note the beef-red complexion, the kinked hair, the epicanthic fold.

She fiddled with the radio dial, trying to get some news from the World Service. It was the usual news when she found it, sliced through with a static crackle: bombs in Belfast, bombs in Beirut. But everything that concerned her seemed to be happening close to home. You see, she had said to Andrew, I was right; I did hear footsteps in the empty flat.

It was hot in the car; with the window open the dust blew in. A litter of ginger kittens ran like spiders up the side of a rubbish skip. Some larger cats, covered in scabs and scars, dragged a chicken carcass down the street. Old residents say that stray dogs used to be a menace, roaming in packs around the building sites. But they were rounded up by the municipality; and we hear no more of them.

Behind her sunglasses she could watch the Saudi men, and say to herself that if they returned her glance they would see a blank face, no expression, nothing more revealing than they would see if she were veiled. What an unflattering garment the thobe is, she thought. Before she came she imagined that they would wear flowing robes, not these stiff elongated white shirts. The late afternoon light shone through them. She saw spindly legs, and string vests.

But why should they dress like the cast of a nativity play, just to please her?

She looked at her watch. Go after him, why not? They have separate “ladies’ banks,” but she has never heard of a ladies’ money changer. Nobody seems to know exactly where women are allowed and where they are not. At least the South Africans put up notices: NIE BLANKES.

Once she was inside the money changer’s, no one took the least notice of her. The place was crowded; she threaded her way through to Andrew and touched his arm. He jumped, and gave her a blank, dazed look, as if at first he hadn’t recognized her. “You’re here,” he said.

It was down-at-heel: far from the pleasure domes. As if this was where the serious business of the Kingdom was transacted, and comfort for once did not matter; the stuffing was coming out of the vinyl chairs. The customers shuffled from one disorderly queue to the next, thrusting banknotes at one grill, flourishing forms at the next; collecting signatures, amassing stamps, their eyes flickering constantly to the wall clock, to see if prayer time was imminent, and they were going to be locked in—locked in and left to mill and shout for thirty minutes, sweating, their clothes adhering to their backs and their earnings to their hands. Even the air-conditioning didn’t seem to work properly. There were cheap carpet tiles on the floor, cigarette butts spilling out of ashtrays. Torn scraps of carbon paper lay where they fell.

The manager and his assistant sat behind their desks, in full view; the manager’s desk had a black mirror surface on which the dust lay thick. His assistant’s desk was metallic, less imposing, shorter by a foot and with fewer drawers; its dust lay even thicker. Sometimes the assistant, and after him the manager, would stretch out a careless hand, and sign with a flourish what the frantic queue pushed at them. But they seemed, on the whole, detached; like lords of the manor looking in at a villeins’ feast. They grinned, talked on the telephone, scratched their chins. A contingent of Thai cleaning workers, still in their scarlet overalls, revolved from counter to counter in a fatigued minuet. An American, in a baseball cap and sneakers, waved his papers above his head; his eyes were bright, his belly swamped his belt. Three Brits, temporarily hors de combat, leaned against the wall. They were blue-chinned and balding, they sported sagging chain-store trousers, the polish had long worn from their shoes. They had an air of purposeful frailty, like Jarrow marchers. The hot burnt stench of money was in the air.

Andrew had no time to talk. He brushed her touch off his arm. Outside the traffic swarmed by, and the sun was setting over the sea. A little wooden cupboard disgorged yen, and thousands and thousands of Swiss francs. Two cheap suitcases stood casually under the stairs, as if for the use of more ambitious customers, and as Andrew, his face gleaming with aggression and sweat, signaled that they were finished, a rotund Arab descended the staircase, and picked them up; as he flexed his arms his cuff buttons strained, and his Rolex Oyster gleamed fatly. Outside, at the bottom of the steps, a vendor had spread out a tablecloth on the ground and was selling pocket calculators. Andrew took a deep breath of cooler air. The heat inside the office was increasing; the glass front doors were opaque with greasy smudges, the desperate palm prints of the patrons hurrying in.

“The pound’s fallen,” Andrew said, as they climbed back into the car. “Shall we go and get something for the headache?”

“Have you got one too?”

They were turning under the flyover by the Pepsi-Cola plant when the wail of the muezzin broke over the racetracks. The cars kept speeding; the Prophet said that travelers need not pray. “Bugger,” Andrew said, hearing the prayer call. “You always lose a half hour somewhere.”

The night, now, in long purple swathes, in soft gradations of lemon and pink, hung over a vast car park; a sky like ruffled silk. SANYO SANYO said a neon sign, beginning to wink. “Why are Jeddah sunsets so beautiful?”

“It’s all the dust in the air.”

“There’s no wind today. It’s not coming in from the desert.”

“No. It’s from the cement works.”

“Andrew, what you told me … about the empty flat—”

He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Don’t go on about it, Fran.”

I was wondering, how often … ?”

“How should I know?” They sat in silence for a moment. The spaces around them began to fill up, as the end of prayers approached. Black shapes were disgorged from cars. Maids, and a few blond nannies, clutched the hands of the small children. Little girls too young for the veil, with saucer eyes and beribboned topknots, wore sequined dresses with bouffant skirts, sewn over with scratchy lace. Charm bracelets clinked around their thin brown wrists; and sometimes a mother’s abaya would drift a little, and you would see that she was draped and weighted with gold, with mayoral chains of it, from which hung gemstones the size and color of boiled sweets.

“Just the average Saudi housewife, having a casual evening out,” Frances said. “They look like … I can’t think what they look like.”

“Prussian empresses … on coronation day.”

“The little girls look like a formation dancing team.”

“Women aren’t allowed to dance.”

“I know, Yasmin told me that. Men dance. When they have a get-together.” She turned her head away, and caught sight of her face in the wing mirror; her obstinate mouth. “Andrew, about the flat, the point is …”

“The one thing I have never understood,” Andrew said angrily, “is this way you have, of suddenly developing concern about complete strangers.”

“Why? Don’t you think I care about people, as a general rule?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know whether you do or not. But you’re very down on people, aren’t you? You take them apart.”

“Is that what I do?”

“You have your own ideas, about how people should live. And God help anybody who doesn’t come up to your standards.”

“Oh well then, I’ll stop.” She seemed spiritless, withdrawn; she licked her lips, dry from dust. “I’ll try just to have everyone else’s ideas, shall I?”

“That might be better, for the while. And everybody’s idea about the empty flat is that it’s a bit of a joke. And none of our concern.”

“Okay,” she said meekly.

He squeezed her hand. “Come on. Prayers must be over now.”

These monotonous marble halls again. The supermarkets are all well stocked, but there is always some elusive item; this breeds the desire to go to more supermarkets. Shopping is the highest good in Saudi life. Every need and whim under one roof—Lebanese pastries, a Mont Blanc pen, a diamond snake with emerald eyes; a pound of pistachio nuts, two tickets to Bermuda, a nylon prayer rug with built-in compass. Perhaps some blueberry cheesecake ice cream, and Louis Quinze fauteuil; a new Toyota, and a portrait of the King. The car parks consume acres, the facades glitter like knives. Glass-fronted lifts whisk the shoppers from floor to floor; grooves of dark green plants drip costly moisture, and dusky armies, with a slavelike motion, polish the marble at your feet.

They made for the pharmacy. There was a young Indian behind the counter. “Could I have a bottle of paracetamol?” Frances said.

The man looked down at the glass-topped counter. He heard. His face, impassive, was dimly reflected; his black mustache, his melancholy eyes. “Or aspirin? Something for a headache?”

She felt Andrew’s presence behind her. The pharmacist looked up, over her left shoulder. “Sir?” he said. “Large bottle, sir, or small?”

They stood outside by a goldsmith’s shop. “Am I visible?” she asked.

“Perhaps too visible,” Andrew said. “Shall we get some takeaway pizza, and save you cooking?”

She seemed to have come to a dead halt—mulish, the bottle of pills in its blue plastic bag held between her hands.

“There’s Marion,” Andrew said. “Hi there, Marion.”

There was a small fountain, greenish water against mosaic tiles: THESE SEATS FOR FAMILY ONLY said a notice. Saudi youths occupied them, stick-thin, aquiline, blank-eyed, and watched Marion advance, puffing a little, pushing her shopping cart, her thin Indian smock pulled tight across the bolster of her bosom.

“Hi,” Frances said. “The man in the pharmacy’s just ignored me. He gave me what I wanted but he pretended that Andrew had asked for it. As if I were a ventriloquist’s doll.”

“Oh, well, yes.” Marion scraped her foot along the floor, as if in embarrassment; her baby-blue eyes were downcast. “That’s what they do.”

“They’re afraid,” Andrew said. His voice seemed unnecessarily loud. “They’re afraid of looking at strange women. In case they’re accused of something. Where’s Russel?”

“He’s at his field-camp. I’m with Jeff. He’s buying a newspaper. Jeffs very good,” she said to Frances. Her soft, toneless voice, if it had expression, would have been defensive. “He takes me shopping. You know Russel never will.”

Frances too shuffled her feet; looked at her watch not too surreptitiously, to indicate, let’s not wait around for Jeff.

“What have you been buying?” Marion asked.

“Headache pills.”

“Oh.” Marion sounded disappointed, as if she would have been just as happy to take part in someone else’s spending. She indicated the pharmacy. “Only they’ve got an offer on Chanel No. 5.”

They made for the nearest exit. The indoor streets were kept icy cold; as they stepped outside, the door held open for them by an overalled Filipino, the hot air would drop over their heads like a blanket. A dozen TV sets, in the shop windows, showed Prince Sultan arriving at an airport; the screen flickered, the scene changed, and there Prince Abdullah was arriving at another. Between the bursts of commentary the national anthem played; it was a frisky, unmemorable tune. Before the Pierre Cardin boutique, turtles swam in gritty pools.

“Of course, you know what they do?” Andrew said.

“What who do?”

“The police—they seal this place off from time to time, wait until it’s really crowded after night prayers, and then they block all the exits. They separate the men from the women and everybody has to show their identification. Then they match up the men with the women. And if the person you’re shopping with isn’t your wife or near relation—you’re in trouble.”

They drove out of the car park. “What sort of trouble?”

“Deportation, for the expats. I don’t know about the Saudis. Who knows what kind of trouble they have stored up for each other?”

It was slow to sink in. “So Marion and Jeff … ?”

“Are taking a risk.” He pulled up at a traffic light. “But then, it’s like drinking. Everybody does it. You have to take risks to live here at all.”

It often seemed to her now that it was only in the car they had their real conversations. She had become used to Andrew’s profile, which gave so little away; to the interjection of a curse, as someone cut in on them; to conversations that died when his concentration switched elsewhere, as he executed a U-turn under one of the dark bridges. The simplest task—like posting a letter—seemed to mean an hour in a traffic jam; but what would she do if she were left at home? She had started reading novels, crime stories. Sometimes she was distracted when he came in, her eyes distant, her mind unraveling the complexities of the plot. What he was saying—about the building, about politics at the Turadup office—seemed to have nothing to do with her. She would rather have talked to Hercule Poirot, or Commander Adam Dalgleish.

“Look, Andrew,” she said, sitting up. “Did you see that garden?”

He had turned off the main road, into a narrower, dimmer street; a gate stood open, a gate to a private villa, and for a second she glimpsed the house itself, ramshackle, with a tin roof. In front of the house there was a lawn; a moth-battered bulb, hanging from a wall on an iron bracket, cast a shivering light on to real grass. She wanted to catch at his arm and persuade him to turn the car around, so that she could see it again: a promise of greenness, turned to dappled monochrome by the onset of the night.

“Did you see? It must be the only lawn in Jeddah.”

“No, I missed it. I think the embassies have lawns. You ought to go along to those wives’ coffee mornings, if you’re yearning for gardens.”

“Maybe. But they make you do handicrafts. You have to make Christmas crackers, for their bazaar.”

“And then there’s that grass verge outside the airport, you know, where the Saudis go for picnics.”

“Yes, I remember it. They must spend millions of riyals on cultivating that grass verge. It gives a totally false impression of the country.”

They drove on in silence. She looked sideways at Andrew; a corner of the check he had got from the money changer protruded from the breast pocket of his shirt. He doesn’t like anything here, she thought, he doesn’t commend it, but he seems pleased with the way things are going. At the corner of Ahmed Lari Street she looked up automatically, to see if the laundryman was at work that night. But the curtains were drawn at the first-floor window, and the room behind was in darkness.

“Anyway,” Andrew said, as they pulled up outside Dunroamin, “why don’t you give it a go? Once you got down to it you’d probably be really good at making Christmas crackers.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Andrew let them in at the gate. He had an awesome proficiency with the locks and keys; she didn’t go out enough to get the practice. Something scurried away, in the shadow of the wall.

“Was that a rat, do you think?” Andrew said. “We have them on the site. We could put some poison down.” He unlocked the main door, with a scrape and a clank.

“The stray cats would eat it.”

“That would be no loss.”

The lights were on in the hall. There was a figure on the stairs, moving rapidly upward; a woman, hunch-shouldered, her abaya flapping. She gathered up her skirt, taking the stairs two at a time, yet seeming to make no headway; a thin yellow calf trailed after her, a calloused heel in a flapping sandal. Andrew stopped in the open doorway, his arm stretched across it, as if to keep out the night. Frances ducked underneath. She put her own arm around him, her hand against his solid ribcage, and her head, as if she needed comfort, briefly against his shoulder. “It’s Abdul’s maid,” she whispered. “Come in. Close the door.”

It clanged behind them, and the woman stopped in her tracks, as if a pistol shot had been aimed at her back. She turned, for an instant, and showed a dark oval face, wet with tears, and a mouth stretched wide with panic or grief. Andrew called out after her. She vanished at the bend in the stairs. He stood with his lips pressed together then; to call out had been a natural reaction, which already he regretted.

“I don’t know her name,” Frances said. “I’m not even sure where she comes from. Yasmin thinks maybe Indonesia. She doesn’t speak any English and only a few words of Arabic, so nobody knows much about her.”

“What do you think she’s crying about?”

“I don’t know.”

Andrew seemed upset. “Let’s have a drink,” he said, when they got inside the flat. “The wine should be ready. I’ll pour some off and see.”

He disappeared into the small second bathroom that they used for their home brewing. His voice carried to her in the kitchen, a muffled echo. “It’s a bit cloudy. But it’s distinctly alcoholic.”

“Hush,” she said. If sound carried down from the bathrooms, sound must carry up. A few weeks earlier a warm odor of yeast had pervaded the flat; frowning, Yasmin had asked, “What is that strange smell?”

Andrew met her in the hall, a brimming jug of red liquid in his hand. “Get some glasses,” he said. “I need this. Been a tough week. Do you know,” he followed her along the hall, “it always says in the papers that foreign servants are an immoral influence.”

“Well, so they are. Yasmin says that the educated Saudi women are starting to want to go out to work, so the government’s campaign against maids and nannies is a way of nipping that in the bud. Making sure they don’t delegate stewing the goat.”

“But they used to have slaves,” Andrew said. “They only abolished slavery in the sixties.”

“Yes, but I expect that was when they had to herd camels and make their own tents.”

“Yeah,” Andrew said. “In the days when all the Arabs were happy and God-fearing, when every desert day was mini-paradise and there was no crime and no disease, before the wicked West came along and drilled for oil and gave them all that rotten rotten money.” He entered the living room and threw himself into one of the many chairs. Even the experimental draft seemed to have gone to his head. He looked restless, reckless. A friend in Africa had once said, “Whenever I see Andrew and he’s had a drink, I can always tell. He reminds me of that expression ‘a bull in a china shop.’”

She handed him her glass.

The wine, poured out, was a soft raspberry red; a sediment was appearing at the bottom of the jug.

Yasmin said, “You are looking pale.”

“Oh … I’m always pale.”

“Late nights?”

“Not really. We’re usually in bed by eleven. Andrew gets up at six, he’s out of the house by six-thirty.”

“Our guests don’t disturb you, I hope? Leaving so late?” Yasmin sighed. It was becoming a habit with her. “You think I’m a slave to the kitchen now, but wait till Raji’s mother comes. Go through, Frances, sit down, I will make us some herb tea.”

Raji, like Abdul Nasr, never left for his office before midmorning; but then he would work through the early evening, and entertain his guests into the small hours. Most of the guests were official ones, people to whom he was obliged; or people to whom he was extending patronage. Then there were nights when he would be entertained elsewhere: all-male occasions. “We never sit down to dinner together,” Yasmin said. “I envy you, Frances. Our life is not so simple.”

Frances trailed into the living room and flopped into a brocade armchair. She knew that Yasmin did not envy her at all. She still felt weak and sick, the aftermath of their night’s drinking. Andrew said that perhaps they would have to change their recipe. Maybe there were people around who brought a little more finesse to the business than Jeff Pollard.

“Yasmin,” she said, as her neighbor brought in the tray, “I was reading this thing in the newspaper.”

“Oh yes?” Yasmin arranged the cups and saucers—a delicate clink of china, and the more decisive clink of her bracelets. Frances counted them: eight today. “Frances, remind me, I have got for you a translation of the Holy Koran. Perhaps this will answer some of your questions. You must understand that the very language of the Holy Koran is sacred, and so this Penguin Book is just a little lacking the nuances.”

“I’ll bear that in mind.”

“Now,” she passed a cup, “you wanted to ask me?”

“Well, I’m sorry to bring this up, I know it’s only what ignorant Westerners are always asking, but—”

“Oh yes.” Yasmin nodded, almost brusque. “I saw that dreadful case too. I thought it would be troubling you.”

“You’re a mind reader.”

“Not really.” Yasmin smiled faintly. She too looked tired and pale. “It’s just that, as you say, all Westerners want to know the same thing. I remember even when I lived in St. John’s Wood, I was asked questions on this point.”

“You see, I’ve been trying not to be self-righteous about it, because we had capital punishment in England until quite recently.” Yasmin nodded. She raised her cup to her lips. “But only for murder. The woman in Mecca wasn’t accused of murder. Only of adultery.”

“Don’t let the tea get cold,” Yasmin said. “You see, Frances, although we may feel pity for someone, no one can reduce the punishments that Allah has laid down.”

“But if there was a case where no one was harmed, and there was no violence? Yasmin, surely these things must happen, sometimes, and people aren’t found out?”

“I am sure they happen. When they come to light the punishment must be always the same, but it is much better if the need does not arise. The Prophet says that if you make some slip you should try to keep it secret, you see, so that it doesn’t scandalize other people, and then you should try to do better in the future, and hope Allah will forgive you.”

“I see, so it’s not a question of what you do, it’s whether you’re found out or not.”

“I think you are twisting my words just a little, Frances.”

“That’s not real religion, is it? It’s just law enforcement. Keeping people in a state of fear doesn’t make them good people. You’re just controlling their actions.”

“Surely controlling actions is enough,” Yasmin murmured. “Who can look into the heart? Let me tell you, there are safeguards. There must be four male witnesses to the crime …”

“Male?”

“You cannot have the testimony of women, when it is a question of adultery.”

“Why not?”

“Think what women will do to each other! Think what they will say! Four witnesses, Frances, and they must have seen with their own eyes.”

“That can’t happen very often.”

“This is what I am telling you.”

“And yet there are convictions?”

“There can be a confession, of course.”

“Ah, a confession.”

“It must be voluntary. The person must know what they are admitting. They must know the punishment.”

“Why should anyone confess then? Unless of course they were forced to?”

“You always think the worst, Frances.”

“It’s a reasonable question.”

Yasmin dropped her eyes. “Guilt. You know of guilt? Also, of course, if you take your punishment in this life you will not get it in the next.”

Frances took a sip of her herb tea. It had a bitter taste, which she couldn’t place. “What is it?”

“A family recipe.” Yasmin relaxed. “My mother should be here to make it for you. My poor mother. She has been on one short visit since I was married, but she has the family, she is kept very much occupied. Raji’s mother, of course, is a widow. He is always the favorite son.”

“I have the impression you don’t get on.”

“In Pakistan it is unknown for the wife and the husband’s mother to agree.” Yasmin made a minute rearrangement of the folds of her long skirt. “Whatever I do for him can never be enough. And that is only the starting point. That is the rule laid down before we begin.”

“You must stand up to her.”

Yasmin laughed shortly. “I cannot. That is not our culture.”

“Why do you let your culture make you suffer? Can’t you break out of it?”

“And besides, it is me, it is not just our culture, it is me, myself, Don’t you see that? I am not married until twenty-nine, an old maid as you say. Oh, my family is good, the best—in origin we are Persian, Frances, did you know? But then again I am tall and have a long nose and have got myself overeducated. Let me tell you, the fight for Raji was long and expensive. And only then because his fiancée died … So you see, I am lucky to be a daughter-in-law at all.”

“I thought education was valued in Pakistan.”

“So it is, but then there are certain things which go along with education, as you know yourself, that if they reach the ears of young men make your value slip a little.”

“Like what?”

“Like asking questions,” Yasmin said. “Like arguing. Like praying too much.”

“Do you pray too much?”

She shook her head, emphatically. “No. It is just a perversion of the Prophet’s real message to believe that women have a secondary kind of soul.” Frances put down her cup. “Some more?” Yasmin said politely.

“No thanks.”

“It’s nasty, but it’s good for you. You will soon feel better.” She smiled.

In the hall, seeing her out, Yasmin picked up her dupatta and draped it over her head. “My driver is coming,” she said. “There is a big party tonight and I am going, so I must be taken to the bank to get my jewels out.”

“Oh, women will be there?”

“Yes. But of course we will have our own party. In our own room.”

Crossing the hall, Frances was angry with herself. Yasmin made her feel clumsy; yet she seemed to want to explain things to her, and sometimes, in an obscure way, she seemed to be asking for help. But what way could that be? Of course she can’t break out of her culture, Frances thought. No more can I break out of mine. No more would I want to; no more does she.

Frances Shore’s Diary: 24 Safar

All right, so I will put down what Andrew told me about the empty flat. I suppose I was being stupid and paranoid last week. Who on earth would want to read my diary?

Andrew was told by someone at Turadup that the flat is kept empty for the use of the Deputy Minister’s brother. He is a married man, and meets a married woman here. It seems it’s a long-running affair.

Even Yasmin had to admit, it does go on. Even in the Kingdom people aren’t perfect. I don’t suppose they have much alternative to setting up an arrangement like this. As Andrew says, they can’t go to a hotel, can they? I suppose they can meet each other outside the Kingdom, but then even if they have their husband’s permission to go abroad, women here don’t travel without a retinue of relatives. Only it seems so risky.

I wonder if Yasmin knows? Or the people upstairs? Is it just gossip at Turadup (because Turadup pays the rent for the whole block) or is it gossip among the Saudi men as well, down at the Ministry? Is it a thing that happens so seldom that everybody’s terrified? Or so often that people just raise their eyebrows and giggle?

And where did they meet? How do a couple meet, and strike up a relationship in the first place, if Saudi social life is what people tell me? How do they get to the stage of having an affair?

I asked Andrew all this and he said he didn’t know. He said that people at Turadup don’t really talk about it. You’re told, but just so that you don’t put your foot in it. I said to him, is it true? He said, of course it’s true, why would anybody want to make it up?

Then I wondered if my questions were naïve. You have to understand that there’s a lot of hypocrisy, Andrew said. You mustn’t believe the picture you get from the newspapers.

When Yasmin got home from the bank with her jewels she phoned me up. She quite often phones me, it’s easier for her than getting dressed up to walk across the hall. She said there was something she’d forgotten to tell me. What is it? They don’t actually stone the woman to death, she said. Not nowadays. They just throw a few stones, as a ritual, and then somebody shoots her.

This cheered me enormously. I had to bite my tongue to stop myself saying, oh well that’s all right then, isn’t it, very merciful. Yasmin probably wonders why I’m pursuing the topic with such energy. What if this couple made enemies? I try to imagine the four male witnesses, swaying about on ladders outside Dunroamin. But the blinds are always down in the empty flat. There’s not even a chink you could peer through. You’d have to charge down the door. The more you think of it the more ludicrous it becomes.

But I wonder when they come here, at night or during the day? I wonder if they are in love? Perhaps one day I shall see a car draw up and the lady slip out, in her veil, and glide silently up the stairs. If I see her I shall press myself against the wall, as if I were a servant, and turn my face away. She has enough to worry her.