Well, it cant be such a grand life, because hes just signed up with Turadup himself. Hes going to manage their Jeddah business; hes had experience out there, of course.
So you mean youll be working with him?
There is that tiny drawback.
I hope we dont end up living near him as well.
They do pay for your housing, so its probably a case of taking what youre given.
Thats fine, she said, but just try to ensure that what were given doesnt include Pollard. Do you think theyll all be like him?
Hes a type. You get them everywhere. But Parsons isnt like that.
I suppose hes another type.
Yes, youd know the one. Genial old duffer. Safari suit, doing the African bit. Two sons at medical school, showed me their photographs. His wifes called Daphne.
And did he show you a photograph of her?
He didnt, come to think of it.
Perhaps he thought it would over-excite you.
When he asks you what you want to drink, he says, Name your poison.
I see. Weybridge abroad.
Melbourne, I think. He keeps a place in the Cotswolds though. Hes been with Turadup for twenty years. Hes a shareholder. Pollard says hes a millionaire. Anyway, he seems very enthusiastic about this building. About the whole scene in Jeddah. He says its a very stimulating place to work if youre in the construction business. He paused. Ill tell you what he said exactly.
Go on.
Andrew bit his lip. He said, I have witnessed the biggest transportation of ready-mixed concrete in the history of the human race.
Id like to witness a large gin. Lets celebrate.
Were late, said the man across the aisle. She jerked out of her doze; shed not realized, at first, that he was speaking to her.
Are we? She consulted her watch.
Its always late, the man said tetchily. Of course, if you fly Saudia, theyre always late as well.
Do you go often to Jeddah?
Too often. The Saudia flights supposed to take off at twelve-thirty, but it never does. Not in my experience. I suppose the staff are having prayers. Bowing to Mecca, and so forth.
How long do prayers last?
As long as it takes to inconvenience you totally, the man said. I can tell youve never been in the Kingdom. Noon is movable, you see. Noon can very well be at twelve-thirty. Nothings what it says it is.
Oh dear, a philosopher, she thought. She might as well put on her Walkman. She leaned down to inch out her bag from under the seat in front, and as she groped for it she felt his eyes on the back of her neck. Nurse, are you? he inquired.
No.
What are you doing out there then?
Im going to join my husband. She filled in the details again, aware that she was more polite in the air than she was on the ground: the six years in Africa, and now Turadup, and the new ministry building; aware too that as soon as she had said husband, the slight interest he had taken in her had faded completely.
Pity, he said. We, he indicated his cohorts, are stopping at the Marriot. I thought if youd been a nurse we could have had dinner. Of course, Im not sure if they let them out nowadays. I think theyve got rules now that they all have to be locked in their own quarters by nine at night. Its after that Helen Smith business.
Oh, that.
It was a damn funny business, if you ask me. That Dr Arnott, the chap that lived in the flat she fell out ofand that wife of his, Penny wasnt itand the British Embassy? You cant tell me it wasnt a cover-up.
I wouldnt try, Im sure.
It stinks.
Im sure youre right.
You find a young girl dead outside a high-rise block, after a wild party you ask yourself, did she fall or was she pushed? Take it from me, its a funny place, Jeddah. Nobody knows the half of what goes on. You work?
Yes, she said. Im a cartographer.
Oh well, youre redundant. They dont have maps.
They must have.
Too bloody secretive to have maps. Besides, the streets are never in the same place for more than a few weeks together.
They move the streets?
Certainly do. Theyre always building, you see, money no object, but they dont think ahead. They build a hospital and then decide to put a road through it. Fancy a new palace? Out with the bulldozer. A map would be out of date as soon as it was made. It would be waste paper the day it was printed.
But in a way it must be quite exhilarating?
He gave her a withering look. If you like that sort of thing. He turned away, back to his companion. Have you got those end-of-year projections? he asked. I really do wonder how Fairfax is doing in Kowloon, dont you? I dont believe they should ever have sent him. Trouble with Fairfax, hes got no credibility. They treat him like some bit of a kid.
Frances closed her eyes again. Drifting, she caught bits of their conversation: jargon, catchphrases. At home, at her widowed mothers house in York, she had been reading books about her destination. Despite her scepticism, her better knowledge, their contrived images lingered in her mind: black tents at sunset, the call of the muezzin in clear desert air: the tang of cardamom, the burnish of sharp-snouted coffee-pots, the heat of the sand. Were building up the infrastructure, said the man who despised Fairfax. Infrastructure was a word she had heard on Andrews lips; he had grown fond of it. It seemed that when oil was discovered in the Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia had no infrastructure, but that it had one now: roads, schools, hospitals, factories, mines, market-gardens and chicken farms, airports and squash courts, telephones and filling stations, cold-stores and police stations, take-away food shops, and the ten-pin bowling facilities at the Albilad Hotel. All this she knew from her reading, because after the romantic travellers tales came Jeddah: A Businessmans Guide. The black tents of the Bedu have been replaced by aluminium shacks. Air-conditioning is universal. Gazelles are hunted from the backs of pick-up trucks.
I must like it, she thought. I shall try to like it. When everyone is so negative about a place you begin to suspect it must have some virtues after all. No alcohol! people say, as if youd die without it. And women arent allowed to drive? Thats terrible. There are lots of things more terrible, she thought, and even I have seen some of them. She dozed.
A touch on her arm woke her. It was the steward. Well be beginning our descent in half an hour. Im just doing a final drinks round. Another cognac?
Keep the young lady sober, the businessman advised. Shes got the customs to face, and its her first time. They go through everything, he told her. I hope you havent got anything in your suitcase that you shouldnt have?
I havent got a bottle of whisky or a shoulder of pork. What else will they be looking for?
Where do you buy your underwear?
What?
Marks & Spencer, you see, they call them Zionists. You have to cut the labels out. Didnt anybody tell you that? And they look at your books. This colleague of mine, when he was last in the Kingdom, he had his book of limericks confiscated. It had this drawing on the cover, a woman, you know. He gestured in the air, describing half-circles. Naked, just a line-drawing. Chap said he hadnt noticed.
That seems unlikely, she said. She added, to herself, a friend of yours.
Its all unlikely. Even when youve been coming in and out for years, you never know what theyre going to be looking for. Our rep in Riyadh, he lives there, he should know. But then last year when he was coming back after his summer holidays they took away his Test Match videos. All his recorded highlights. Oh, they said he could have them back, when the customs had had a careful look. But he never went for them. He couldnt take the hassle.
Poor man.
Youve not got any art books, have you? Rubens or anything? Because they can be very funny about art.
Its unIslamic, Frances said, to worship the human form. Its idolatry. The man stared at her.
So I cant tempt you? the steward asked. He peered into his empty ice-bucket. Gentlemen, dont leave any miniatures down the seat pockets, please, we dont want our ground-staff flogged. He looked down at Frances. Were relinquishing this route next year, he said. Give it to British Caledonian and welcome, thats what I say. No more to drink then? He prepared to abandon her, move away. Sleeping executives stirred now, dribbling a little on to their airline blankets. There was a sound of subdued laughter; briefcases intruded into the aisles. The steward relented. He leaned over her seat. Listen, if anything goes wrong, if by some mischance hubbys not there, dont hang about, dont speak to anybody, get straight in our airline bus and come downtown with us to the Hyatt Regency. You check in, and Ill look after you, and he can come and find you in the morning.
Oh, Im sure hell be there, she said. Or someone will. Jeff Pollard. At least hed be a familiar face. Ive got numbers to ring, in case anything goes wrong. And I could take a taxi.
You cant take a taxi. They wont carry you.
She thought of that cheese, that people say French taxi-drivers wont let in their cabs. What, really not?
Its bad news, a man picking up a strange woman in a car. They can gaol you for it.
But hes a taxi-driver, she said. Thats his job, picking up strange people.
But youre a woman, the steward said. Youre a woman, arent you? Youre not a person any more. Doggedly, courteously, as if their conversation had never occurred, he reached for a glass from his trolley: Would you like champagne?
Soon, the crackle from the P/A system: Ladies and gentlemen, we are now beginning our descent to King Abdul Aziz International Airport. Those seated on the left-hand side of the aircraft will see below you the lights of Jeddah. Kindly fastenkindly extinguish(And to the right, blackness, tilting, and a glow of red, the slow fires that seem to ring cities at night.) We hope you have enjoyed, we hope to have the pleasurewe hopewe hopeand please to remain seated until the aircraft is stationary
Half an hour later she is inside the terminal building. The date is 2 Muharram, by the Hijra calendar, and the evening temperature is 88°F; the year is 1405.
Muharram
1
Ghazzah Street is situated to the east of Medina Road, behind the Kings New Palace, and in the district of Al Aziziyya; it is a small street, which got its name quite recently when street names came into vogue, and a narrow street, made narrower by the big American cars, some of them falling to pieces, which its residents leave parked outside their apartment blocks. On one side is a stretch of waste ground, full of potholes; water collects in them when, three or four times a year, rain falls on the city. The residents complain about the mosquitoes which breed in the standing pools, but none of them can remember whether there was ever a building on the waste ground; no one has been in the area for more than a couple of years. Many of the tenants of Ghazzah Street still keep some of their possessions in cardboard boxes, or in shippers crates bearing the names of the removal and transport companies of the subcontinent and the Near East. They are from Pakistan or Egypt, salesmen and clerical workers, or engaged in a mysterious line of work called Import-Export; or they are Palestinians perhaps, or they are picking up a family business that has been bombed out of Beirut.
The district is not opulent, not sleazy either; the small apartment blocks, two and three storeys high, are walled off from the street, so that you seldom catch sight of the residents, or know if there is anyone at home; women and babies are bundled from kerb to car, and sometimes schoolchildren, with grave dark faces, trail upstairs with their books in the late afternoon. No one ever stands and chats in Ghazzah Street. Neighbours know each other by sight, from glimpses on balconies and rooftops; the women speak by phone. There are a couple of offices, one of them a small forgotten offshoot of the Ministry of Pilgrimages, and one of them belonging to a firm which imports and distributes Scandinavian mineral water. Just around the corner on Al-Suror Street, there is a mosque, its dome illuminated at dusk with a green neon light; at the other end of the street, in the direction of the palace of Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, there is a small shop which sells computer supplies and spare parts.
At the moment Ghazzah Street is about a mile and a half from the Red Sea, but in this place land and sea are in flux, they are negotiable. So much land has been reclaimed, that villas built a few years ago with sea views now look out on the usual cityscape of blank white walls, moving traffic, building sites. On every vacant lot in time appears the jumble of brownish brick, the metal spines of scaffolding, the sheets of plate glass; then last of all the marble, the most popular facing material, held on to the plain walls behind it with some sort of adhesive. From a distance it lends a spurious air of antiquity to the scene. When the Jeddah earthquake comes and it will come all-seeing Allah will observe that the buildings are held together with glue; and he will peel the city apart like an onion.
The sea itself, sometimes cobalt in colour and sometimes turquoise, has a flat, domestic, well-used appearance. Small white-collared waves trip primly up to the precincts of the desalination plant, like a party of vicars on an industrial tour. The lights of the royal yacht wink in the dusty evenings; veiled ladies splash on the foreshore in the heat of the day. Benches, placed by the municipality, look out to sea. Around the bay sweeps an ambitious highway, designated The Corniche; now known as Al Kournaich, or the Cornish Road. Public monuments line the sea-front, and crown the intersections of the endless, straight and eight-lane public highways; bizarre forms in twisted alloys, their planes glistening in the salt and smog air.
On Fridays, which are days for rest and prayer, families picnic around these monuments, black figures in a tundra of marble; stray cats breed on their slopes. The sun strikes from their metal spokes and fins; towering images of water-jugs, sea-horses, steel flowers; of a human hand, pointing to the sky. Vendors sell, from roadside vans, inflatable plastic camels in purple, orange and cerise.
If you walk, suitably dressed, along the Corniche, you can hear the sea-wind howl and sigh through the sewers beneath the pavements. It is an unceasing wail, modulated like the human voice, but trapped and far-away, like the mutinous cries of the damned. The people in hell remain alive, says a Muslim commentator. They think, remember and quarrel; their skins are not burned, but cooked, and every time they are fully cooked, new skins are substituted for them to start the suffering afresh. And if you pick your way, with muttered apologies, through the families ensconced on the ground, on the carpets they have unloaded from their cars, you will see the men and women sitting separately, one hunched group garbed in black and one in white, and the children playing under a servants eye; the whole family turned to the sea, but the adults rapt, enthralled, by the American cartoons they are watching on their portable TV. A skin-diver, European, lobster-skinned, strikes out from an unfrequented part of the coastline for the coral reef.