Frances brought the coffee. Another illuminating morning, she thought. She felt she was receiving a sentimental education; but that there was more to learn. The child, with tiny strong fingers like pincers, was pulling out her doll’s hair. Samira reached for the sugar bowl. Her mood of complaint had deepened.
“Abdul is never at home,” she said. “He goes out in the evening on men’s parties.”
“Did you know Abdul, before you were married?”
“No, it was arranged, of course.”
“So you didn’t know what to expect?”
“Well, if he is a little kind … It is not good to have too many expectations.”
“Yes, people say that.” Frances raised her cup to her lips. “But I didn’t know expectations were wrong. I never thought of it that way.”
“Afterward, after your marriage, then you get to know each other. We don’t have many conflicts. Do you have many?”
“Oh, a few.”
“Because we don’t talk all that much, you know. His life, my life—they are different. But that’s natural, isn’t it? Men and women, it has to be.”
“I don’t know. You could get an education. Get a job. If you lived somewhere else, that is. In another country.”
“Oh, but,” Samira said. “But. I have been to the Women’s University, Frances.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I have studied French. English poetry, the works of Robert Burns. Anthropology—that is people’s customs, you know. And biology.”
“Biology?”
“Helps one to run the home better. So you know how to take care of the children’s health. And of course, Frances, we have women who work. There is the staff at the ladies’ banks. And at some of the Ministries, they have women. They arrange it for them. They have a separate lift, and a floor by themselves.”
“But they must need to talk to the men sometimes. Consult them.”
“They can phone them up. And they have computers. They can send them a disk.”
“But what would happen … I mean, what would be so awful … if they did meet up?” “Why, it would be like the West,” Samira said. “There would be harassment. People would be all the time having love affair.”
How difficult it is, Frances thought, to fit it all together. Shabana told her that Adam and Eve were reconciled to God. The Arab News, which writes on these matters every Friday, says there is no original sin. People are naturally good, and they have free will, and Allah does not ask very much of them, certainly nothing unreasonable. The rules take account of human weaknesses; they are easy to keep. But the penal code does not reflect this optimism. Nor does the general tenor of society. It seems to expect depravity, the unreflective behavior of animals; man and woman together, five minutes, clothes off, carnal knowledge; rape, mayhem, murder. Oh come, she says to herself: don’t exaggerate. Drink your coffee. Be a good hostess and keep the conversation light. And she notices how Samira’s careful orthodoxy cracks sometimes, as if by nature she were a wishful, rebellious girl; as if, by deduction, she had discoered there was something wrong in her life. Now she put down her coffee cup. “Did you ever have an affair at your office?”
“Certainly not,” Frances said. “It never crossed my mind.” She thought, no one ever asked me.
Samira looked skeptical, and perhaps disappointed. “Also,” she went on, “we need women to work as doctors. Many girls are attracted to this, thank God. Because some Saudi men would kill any male doctor who looked at their wife.”
“So what happened before any women doctors were trained? There must have been a time.”
“Oh yes,” Samira said. “It is not so long ago that we got schools for girls, and even then many people didn’t agree with it, there were riots, you know, lots of shooting. As for the lady doctors, I am mystified. I think we must have got them from Egypt.”
“And so what if you don’t want to be a doctor, or work at the bank?”
“Home is best. You see, Frances, you women in the West, you think you are very free, but Islam has given us all the women’s rights. They are guaranteed to us. We can have our own money. In the home we are the rulers. Men must provide for us, that is their duty.”
“But if you are divorced?”
“Then our fathers and brothers must look after us. They give us their protection. You women in the West are just exploited by men. They drive you out to work in offices and factories, and then when you come home you must cook for them and look after the children.”
“You think we should be happy to let men support us?”
“Yes, because that is their responsibility, and ours is to bring up the next generation. Frances,” she said seriously, “you really must have some children. You will please Andrew. You cannot use contraception all your life.”
“Yes,” Frances said. “I’m thinking about it.” The child, at her feet, was twisting off the doll’s head. What had the Arab News said, only last week? Every woman is a born mother. “And so what will you do with your education?” she asked. “Your university education?”
“We have a saying,” Samira smiled. “‘We will hang our certificates in the kitchen.’”
She bent down, and pulled the doll from her daughter’s grasp. She straightened its tortured limbs, and sat holding it by one leg, looking into its plastic face of pink and white. “Tell me,” she said dreamily, “have you ever met Princess Diana?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t. I don’t exactly move in those circles.”
“You don’t know anyone in your royal family?”
“Ours is not as big as yours. They keep to themselves.”
“A pity. I would like to meet her. She is very beautiful, I think. Very fair.”
Diana looks out of all the magazines, peeping from under her fringe; blackish sapphires, like lacquered beetles, cling to her ears, and her coy expression is looped and scored with Arabic script. She is a heroine, a glamorous royal bride. Her décolletage, because it is a royal one, is somehow less indecent than others; the censor’s felt-tip spares it.
“You know, with this one,” Samira gestured toward her child, “I wanted to call her Diana. But Abdul Nasr does not agree. He says it is foreign custom.” Samira was suddenly indignant; her indignation broke down her English. “Just when I wanted to have birthday party, he says that’s foreign custom too. This time, if it is another girl … though I hope,” she added hastily, “it will be a boy … I must get my choice over the name. I said to him, why not? My sister has got Diana, my cousin has got it, all these babies … he says, this sounds uncanny to my ears.”
“So you settled for Fat’ma?”
“Well, it is just a starter name. It is just what you call the baby while you are thinking what to call her. So I said to him, for me it can stay at Fat’ma, what do I care?” She looked down at her daughter, with her corkscrew curls, her flat nose and round eyes. Her face was disgusted. She laughed a little. “White nigger, isn’t it? Must be from his family. Not mine.”
“Perhaps you should have a holiday in England,” Frances said. You could buy Fat’ma some dungarees, she thought, then she wouldn’t look like a boxer in drag. “Perhaps you might see Princess Diana.”
“Oh, but Frances, I have been in England. Did you not know? I have been there for six months.”
“I see. So that’s how you learned such good English.”
“No, not really. That was at the university. Also, of course, the Berlitz tapes. When I am in England I don’t really have much chance to learn.”
“Why was that?”
“Well, mainly of course I have to stay inside with my brother-in-law’s wife. One day we went to London. Harrods.”
“You weren’t in London?”
“No, in Brighton. That is where my brother-in-law lives. He stays out of London because London is dangerous.”
“It corrupts him?” Frances suggested.
“No, not that. Dangerous for his life.” She stopped, and blushed. “You know what it is,
” she said hurriedly. All her transparency had darkened; she was thinking furiously. “Well, you know, Frances, that where there are some Arabs together your police think they are bombing, or something. Really they are only going to their own clubs, reading the newspapers, so on. Discussing their home countries.”
“I don’t think the police would shoot him, if they didn’t like his social life.”
Though perhaps it is not only the police that worry him, Frances thought. Have we a political militant in the family? A terrorist? Surely not. We are just at cross-purposes.
“Anyway, he will be home soon, thank God,” Samira said piously. She tossed her denim legs over the arm of the chair, and looked as if she wanted a change of subject. It seemed dark, suddenly, inside the circle of chairs. But it was midday, a blazing sun outside, and perhaps Eric Parsons would be driving somewhere, across the city’s harsh grid plan, with this same sun a diffuse yellow flare in the artificial sky of his windscreen. And Andrew would be bending over a site plan, or stumping through the mud, the noonday heat on the exposed nape of his neck. Frances leaned across Samira, with a murmured apology, and switched on a small lamp with a pink shade. It cast a soft circle of light up on to the girl’s face; her expression said, have I been simpleminded? Frances had already decided what to report to Andrew. Certificates in kitchens, yes. Terrorists in Brighton, no. You’ve got nothing to do, he would say; you sit around the house confabulating, making plots, and making your dull life brighter.
“But he is not so bad,” Samira said. “I mean my husband. Perhaps this time he will let me have my way on the name. After all, we do not have many conflicts really. Not like Yasmin and her husband.”
“Do they have many?”
Samira laughed. “I hear her side of the story. She says he likes to enjoy himself too much, and this worries her. But I think when he wants her she is always praying.”
She wouldn’t enlarge on it; swept up her child and her abaya, dressed herself for the journey up the stairs. “Come and visit me soon,” she said. “I want to know more about your life. Yasmin tells me you have married your husband very suddenly, when you are traveling in Africa. I think that’s very romantic. I want to know about it.” She secured the child’s wrist. They clung together, a diminishing female chain: mother, daughter, doll. At the door, Samira put out a hand from her wrappings, and touched Frances’s cheek. “Dear Frances,” she said. “I am going to bring you a lipstick.”
Frances watched her go, and then, on an impulse, picked up her keys, closed her apartment door, and followed Samira up the stairs. Samira didn’t hear her; she scuttled ahead, keeping close to the wall. She looked as if she had no right to be out. You could put a Western woman under all those layers, Frances thought, but she’d never achieve that apologetic gait. She’d never fool anyone; the way the Saudi woman walks is quite unique.
As Frances rounded the bend in the stairs she heard Samira’s front door click shut. She stopped for a moment between the two closed doors, then mounted the half-flight, and unbolted the door that led onto the roof. At once the noon light leaped into the gap, and she stepped into a whiteout, a featureless, silent glare. She craved just a moment’s daylight, just a breath of air; but there was no wind, and a dizzying heat. And this, she thought, is winter. The walls and roofs of the apartment blocks around her shimmered, like towers of water. She saw the black outline of the waist-high wall which bounded the roof, and the abandoned clotheslines scored against the air; stretched taut between their poles, they seemed to quiver and throb with some private energy, like telegraph wires.
Frances Shore’s Diary: 19 Rabi al-awal
Damn right Raji likes to have a good time. Last night at about ten o’clock, when we were bringing in YET ANOTHER load of shopping for the dinner party (dear God I wish I had never started this)—we met Raji in the hall. He came up behind us, and propped himself against the wall, and began to talk about the stock market, holding himself upright with one hand. He thinks he has to make this conversation with Andrew. He thinks Andrew is interested in stocks and bonds. Raji was drunk.
He reeled across the hall and rang his own doorbell. We got ourselves inside. A few minutes later, when we were putting the shopping away, we heard his engine revving and his tires squealing, and he was off again.
He must have been at the Minister’s, Andrew said. That’s where they do the serious drinking in this town. I suppose if he’s stopped by the police, he’s got influence.
But what will Yasmin say, I wondered.
Yasmin rang the doorbell next day, at about twelve-thirty. She had brought a bowl of clear chicken soup, from which wafted a thin peppery aroma. It was a pretext. Usually she sent Shams with the food.
“Here,” she said. “You ought to eat at midday, Frances. I know you are busy with your cooking so I brought you this.”
Yasmin’s face looked bruised, bluish, as if she had not slept. “I can’t stay,” she said. “Raji says he ran into you last night?”
“That’s right,” Frances said.
Yasmin shifted her weight, from one slippered foot to the other. “He had been at His Highness’s house. The Minister.”
“Yes. We thought so.”
There was a pause.
“He was kept so late, working. I think he was very tired when you saw him.”
“That must have been it,” Frances said.
Yasmin nodded. She withdrew, into the shadows of the hallway.
“He was not singing a little?” she asked tentatively.
“Not that we heard.”
“Oh good, good. I see you soon now. Don’t work too hard.”
“I wouldn’t worry,” Frances said. “Lots of men sing when they’re tired.”
She went back to cutting up the vegetables. How bored I am, she said to herself. Matchstick carrots, bitter thoughts: it’s wonderful how travel narrows the mind.
Andrew said, “Get one ahead?” He put down the glass he was polishing, and reached into the fridge for a carafe of white wine.
Holding her glass, Frances went to survey her table, laid for nine.
“I suppose you always get spare men in Jeddah,” Andrew said.
“I wouldn’t call Pollard a spare man. I’d call him surplus.” She held her glass up to the light. “At least it’s clear. It’s a bit sweet. I expect they’ll drink it.”
“I think Eric and Daphne are homebrew snobs.”
“Don’t make me nervous. I’m afraid it will poison someone.”
“They’ve all been here a long time. They’ve built up resistance.”
He followed her back to the kitchen. “What do you think about Yasmin?” she said. “Can she really not know that he drinks?”
“She must know.”
“Why pretend then? Why raise the topic?”
“That woman’s conning you.”
She looked up at him, paring knife poised over slices of lemon. So Andrew didn’t like Yasmin. But that seemed ridiculous. Yasmin was just a fact of her life, and touched only peripherally on Andrew’s. Why should he like or dislike her?
“I don’t really know what I mean,” he said, unhelpfully. “But I’ve always had this feeling about her, that she’s not what she seems.”
The guests were late. “It shortens the agony,” Andrew said.
It was half past eight when the Zussmans arrived. “Roadblock,” Rickie grunted, without preamble. He ran a hand through his shorn brown hair; he was a silent, observant, professorial man, with metal-rimmed glasses, a bleak, bony face; he dressed for dinner in bush-shirt and jeans. Carla wore her usual no-nonsense cotton kaftan, with a string of wooden beads as a concession to festivity. She was a tiny woman, with a strongly Jewish face; though if she had been Jewish, of course, she would not have been admitted to the Kingdom. I must ask her sometime, Frances thought.
“Do you have any beer?” Rickie said.
“We haven’t got round to making beer yet.”
“Give you my recipe.” He accepted a glass of wine, an
d proffered something, diffidently. Andrew unwrapped, from the sports pages of the Saudi Gazette, a flat plain bottle. “Half of Scotch,” Rickie said. “That all right for you?”
Andrew was overwhelmed. “It should improve the evening.”
“Put it away,” Rickie said. “Carla and I can get this stuff anytime. We get it through the Embassy. Anyway, we drink bourbon. Keep it for you and Frannie.”
“Okay. Won’t waste it on Eric.” Andrew hurried off with it.
“Where was the roadblock?” Frances asked.
“Palestine Road.”
“What were they looking for?”
“Who can tell? Maybe just trouble.”
“And what did you do with the Scotch?”
“I put it,” Carla said, “down the neck of my kaftan. They’d never dare.”
Jeff Pollard came next. “Bloody boot search,” he said, in lieu of apology. “Been to change my films.” He dumped his briefcase, with the videocassettes inside, by the front door. Film exchange was a shady business, dubiously legal, and gave the most innocent viewer a plain-paper-wrapper air. Jeff wore a tie, ancient and unsavory. He looked uncomfortable.
“You shouldn’t have bothered,” Frances said. “To dress up.”
Then the Parsons; graciously resigned, Daphne saying, “They weren’t interested in the khawwadjihs. They waved us through.” Then the Smallbones, who had only come around the corner, with Marion walking in the gutter, because the pavements were unsuitable for her high heels. Marion was wearing her abaya. She shrugged it off to reveal a strappy, backless dress, and a flamboyant pattern of scarlet mosquito bites sprayed across her tender pale shoulders. The party had begun.
Andrew had said once, when he was in a morose mood, that you should always expect the worst, so that if in the event you got something better, you’d be surprised. But why is it that if you expect the worst, and get the worst, you’re still surprised? Frances wondered about it, idly. She noticed, in the dribble of garlic butter in which her prawns lay, a suspicious, unpleasant fleck of something black. Eric Parsons was talking about his iniquitous tax position, and Russel encouraged him, with grunts and nods. “Of course I’m attracted to the Australian way of life,” Russel said. “I’m thinking about Perth. But I suppose it’s the same old story as everywhere else. The Communists have taken over.”