The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher (2 page)

The trouble was, Ijaz knew I was at home; how would I be going anywhere? One afternoon I left him standing in the hall, while he pressed and pressed the doorbell, and next time, when I let him in, he asked me where I had been; when I said, “Ah, sorry, I must have been with my neighbor,” I could see he did not believe me, and he looked at me so sorrowfully that my heart went out to him. Jeddah fretted him, it galled him, and he missed, he said, America, he missed his visits to London, he must go soon, take a break; when was our leave, perhaps we might meet up? I explained I did not live in London, which surprised him; he seemed to suspect it was an evasion, like my failure to answer the door. “Because I could get an exit visa,” he said again. “Meet up there. Without all this…” he gestured at the coffin-lid doors, the heavy, willful furniture.

He made me laugh that day, telling me about his first girlfriend, his American girlfriend whose nickname was Patches. It was easy to picture her, sassy and suntanned, astonishing him one day by pulling off her top, bouncing her bare breasts at him and putting an end to his wan virginity. The fear he felt, the terror of touching her … his shameful performance … recalling it, he knuckled his forehead. I was charmed, I suppose. How often does a man tell you these things? I told my husband, hoping to make him laugh, but he didn’t. Often, to be helpful, I hoovered up the cockroaches before his return from the Ministry. He shed his clothes and headed off. I heard the splash of the shower. Nineteenth Lesson:
Are you married? Yes, my wife is with me, she’s standing there in the corner of the room.
I imagined the cockroaches, dark and flailing in the dust bag.

I went back to the dining table, on which I was writing a comic novel. It was a secret activity I never mentioned to the company wives, and barely mentioned to myself. I scribbled under the strip light, until it was time to drive out for food shopping. You had to shop between sunset prayers and night prayers; if you mistimed it, then at the first prayer call the shops slammed down their shutters, trapping you inside, or outside in the wet heat of the car park. The malls were patrolled by volunteers from the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Elimination of Vice.

At the end of July Ijaz brought his family for tea. Mary-Beth was a small woman but seemed swollen beneath the skin; spiritless, freckled, limp, she was a faded redhead who seemed huddled into herself, unused to conversation. A silent daughter with eyes like dark stars had been trussed up for the visit in a frilly white dress. At six, steeple-headed Saleem had lost his baby fat, and his movements were tentative, as if his limbs were snappable. His eyes were watchful; Mary-Beth hardly met my gaze at all. What had Ijaz told her? That he was taking her to see a woman who was something like he’d like her to be? It was an unhappy afternoon. I can only have got through it because I was buoyed by an uprush of anticipation; my bags were packed for our flight home. A day earlier, when I had gone into the spare room where I kept my clothes, I had met another dismaying sight. The doors of the fitted wardrobe, which were large and solid like the other coffin lids, had been removed from their hinges; they had been replaced, but hung by the lower hinges only, so that their upper halves flapped like the wings of some ramshackle flying machine.

On August 1st we left King Abdulaziz International Airport in an electrical storm, and had a bumpy flight. I was curious about Mary-Beth’s situation and hoped to see her again, though another part of me hoped that she and Ijaz would simply vanish.

*   *   *

I
DIDN’T RETURN
to Jeddah till the very end of November, having left my book with an agent. Just before our leave I had met my Saudi neighbor, a young mother taking a part-time literature course at the women’s university. Education for women was regarded as a luxury, an ornament, a way for a husband to boast of his broadmindedness; Munira couldn’t even begin to do her assignments, and I took to going up to her flat in the late mornings and doing them for her, while she sat on the floor in her négligée, watching Egyptian soaps on TV and eating sunflower seeds. We three women, Yasmin and Munira and I, had become midmorning friends; all the better for them to watch me, I thought, and discuss me when I’m gone. It was easier for Yasmin and me to go upstairs, because to come down Munira had to get kitted out in full veil and abaya; again, that treacherous, hovering moment on the public territory of the staircase, where a man might burst through from the street and shout “Hi!” Yasmin was a delicate woman, like a princess in a Persian miniature; younger than myself, she was impeccably soignée, finished with a flawless glaze of good manners and restraint. Munira was nineteen, with coarse, eager good looks, a pale skin, and a mane of hair that crackled with static and seemed to lead a vital, separate life; her laugh was a raucous cackle. She and Yasmin sat on cushions but gave me a chair; they insisted. They served Nescafé in my honor, though I would have preferred a sludgy local brew. I had learned the crude effectiveness of caffeine against migraine; some nights, sleepless, pacing, I careened off the walls, and only the dawn prayer call sent me to bed, still thinking furiously of books I might write.

Ijaz rang the doorbell on December 6th. He was so very pleased to see me after my long leave; beaming, he said, “Now you are more like Patches than ever.” I felt a flare of alarm; nothing, nothing had been said about this before. I was slimmer, he said, and looked well—my prescription drugs had been cut down, and I had been exposed to some daylight, I supposed that was what was doing it. But, “No, there is something different about you,” he said. One of the company wives had said the same. She thought, no doubt, that I had conceived my baby at last.

I led Ijaz into the sitting room, while he trailed me with compliments, and made the coffee. “Maybe it’s my book,” I said, sitting down. “You see, I’ve written a book…” My voice tailed off. This was not his world. No one read books in Jeddah. You could buy anything in the shops except alcohol or a bookcase. My neighbor Yasmin, though she was an English graduate, said she had never read a book since her marriage; she was too busy making supper parties every night. I have had a little success, I explained, or I hope for a little success, I have written a novel you see, and an agent has taken it on.

“It is a storybook? For children?”

“For adults.”

“You did this during your vacation?”

“No, I was always writing it.” I felt deceitful. I was writing it when I didn’t answer the doorbell.

“Your husband will pay to have it published for you.”

“No, with luck someone will pay me. A publisher. The agent hopes he can sell it.”

“This agent, where did you meet him?”

I could hardly say, in the
Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook
. “In London. At his office.”

“But you do not live in London,” Ijaz said, as if laying down an ace. He was out to find something wrong with my story. “Probably he is no good. He may steal your money.”

I saw of course that in his world, the term
agent
would cover some broad, unsavory categories. But what about “Import-Export,” as written on his business cards? That didn’t sound to me like the essence of probity. I wanted to argue; I was still upset about Patches; without warning, Ijaz seemed to have changed the terms of engagement between us. “I don’t think so. I haven’t given him money. His firm, it’s well known.” Their office is where? Ijaz sniffed, and I pressed on, trying to make my case; though why did I think that an office in William IV Street was a guarantee of moral worth? Ijaz knew London well. “Charing Cross tube?” He still looked affronted. “Near Trafalgar Square?”

Ijaz grunted. “You went to this premises alone?”

I couldn’t placate him. I gave him a biscuit. I didn’t expect him to understand what I was up to, but he seemed aggrieved that another man had entered my life. “How is Mary-Beth?” I asked.

“She has some kidney disease.”

I was shocked. “Is it serious?”

He raised his shoulders; not a shrug, more a rotation of the joints, as if easing some old ache. “She must go back to America for treatment. It’s okay. I’m getting rid of her anyway.”

I looked away. I hadn’t imagined this. “I’m sorry you’re unhappy.”

“You see really I don’t know what’s the matter with her,” he said testily. “She is always miserable and moping.”

“You know, this is not the easiest place for a woman to live.”

But did he know? Irritated, he said, “She wanted a big car. So I got a big car. What more does she want me to do?”

December 6th: “Ijaz stayed too long,” the diary says. Next day he was back. After the way he had spoken of his wife—and the way he had compared me to dear old Patches from his Miami days—I didn’t think I should see him again. But he had hatched a scheme and he wasn’t going to let it go. I should come to a dinner party with my husband and meet his family and some of his business contacts. He had been talking about this project before my leave and I knew he set great store by it. I wanted, if I could, to do him some good; he would appear to his customers to be more a man of the world if he could arrange an international gathering, if—let’s be blunt—he could produce some white friends. Now the time had come. His sister-in-law was already cooking, he said. I wanted to meet her; I admired these diaspora Asians, their polyglot enterprise, the way they withstood rebuffs, and I wanted to see if she was more Western or Eastern or what. “We have to arrange the transportation,” Ijaz said. “I shall come Thursday, when your husband is here. Four o’clock. To give him directions.” I nodded. No use drawing a map. They might move the streets again.

The meeting of December 8th was not a success. Ijaz was late, but didn’t seem to know it. My husband dispensed the briefest host’s courtesies, then sat down firmly in his armchair, which was the one that had tried to levitate. He seemed, by his watchful silence, ready to put an end to any nonsense, from furniture or guests or any other quarter. Sitting on the edge of the sofa, Ijaz flaked his baklava over his lap, he juggled with his fork and jiggled his coffee cup. After our dinner party, he said, almost the next day, he was flying to America on business. “I shall route via London. Just for some recreation. Just to relax, three–four days.”

My husband must have stirred himself to ask if he had friends there. “Very old friend,” Ijaz said, brushing crumbs to the carpet. “Living at Trafalgar Square. A good district. You know it?”

My heart sank; it was a physical feeling, of the months falling away from me, months in which I’d had little natural light. When Ijaz left—and he kept hovering on the threshold, giving further and better street directions—I didn’t know what to say, so I went into the bathroom, kicked out the cockroaches and cowered under the stream of tepid water. Wrapped in a towel, I lay on the bed in the dark. I could hear my husband—I hoped it was he, and not the armchair—moving around in the sitting room. Sometimes in those days when I closed my eyes I felt that I was looking back into my own skull. I could see the hemispheres of my brain. They were convoluted and the color of putty.

*   *   *

T
HE FAMILY APARTMENT
down by the port was filled with cooking smells and crammed with furniture. There were photographs on every surface, carpets laid on carpets. It was a hot night, and the air conditioners labored and hacked, spitting out water, coughing up lungfuls of mold spores, blights. The table linen was limp and heavily fringed, and I kept fingering these fringes, which felt like nylon fur, like the ears of a teddy bear; they comforted me, though I felt electric with tension. At the table a vast lumpen elder presided, a woman with a long chomping jaw; she was like Quentin Matsys’s Ugly Duchess, except in a spangled sari. The sister-in-law was a bright, brittle woman, who gave a sarcastic lilt to all her phrases. I could see why; it was evident, from her knowing looks, that Ijaz had talked about me, and set me up in some way; if he was proposing me as his next wife, I offered little improvement on the original. Her scorn became complete when she saw I barely touched the food at my elbow; I kept smiling and nodding, demurring and deferring, nibbling a parsley leaf and sipping my Fanta. I wanted to eat, but she might as well have offered me stones on a doily. Did Ijaz think, as the Saudis did, that Western marriages meant nothing? That they were entered impulsively and on impulse broken? Did he assume my husband was as keen to offload me as he was to lose Mary-Beth? From his point of view the evening was not going well. He had expected two supermarket managers, he told us, important men with spending power; now night prayers were over, the traffic was on the move again, all down Palestine Road and along the Corniche the traffic lights were turning green, from Thumb Street to the Pepsi flyover the city was humming, but where were they? Sweat dripped from his face. Fingers jabbed the buttons of the telephone. “Okay, he is delayed? He has left? He is coming now?” He rapped down the receiver, then gazed at the phone as if willing it to chirp back at him, like some pet fowl. “Time means nothing here,” he joked, pulling at his collar. The sister-in-law shrugged and turned down her mouth. She never rested, but passed airily through the room in peach chiffon, each time returning from the kitchen with another laden tray; out of sight, presumably, some oily skivvy was weeping into the dishes. The silent elder put away a large part of the food, pulling the plates toward her and working through them systematically till the pattern showed beneath her questing fingers; you looked away, and when you looked back the plate was clean. Sometimes, the phone rang: “Okay, they’re nearly here,” Ijaz called. Ten minutes, and his brow furrowed again. “Maybe they’re lost.”

“Sure they’re lost,” sister-in-law sang. She sniggered; she was enjoying herself. Nineteenth Lesson, translate these sentences:
So long as he holds the map the wrong way up, he will never find the house. They started traveling this morning, but have still not arrived.
It seemed a hopeless business, trying to get anywhere, and the textbook confessed it. I was not really learning Arabic, of course, I was too impatient; I was leafing through the lessons, looking for phrases that might be useful if I could say them. We stayed long, long into the evening, waiting for the men who had never intended to come; in the end, wounded and surly, Ijaz escorted us to the door. I heard my husband take in a breath of wet air. “We’ll never have to do it again,” I consoled him. In the car, “You have to feel for him,” I said. No answer.