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, don’t you? I don’t believe they should ever have sent him. Trouble with Fairfax, he’s 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 mother’s 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. ‘We’re building up the infrastructure,’ said the man who despised Fairfax. Infrastructure was a word she had heard on Andrew’s 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 Businessman’s 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 The black tents of the Bedu have been replaced by aluminium shacks.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 you’d die without it. ‘And women aren’t allowed to drive? That’s 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. ‘We’ll be beginning our descent in half an hour. I’m just doing a final drinks round. Another cognac?’
‘Keep the young lady sober,’ the businessman advised. ‘She’s got the customs to face, and it’s her first time. They go through everything,’ he told her. ‘I hope you haven’t got anything in your suitcase that you shouldn’t have?’
‘I haven’t 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. Didn’t 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 hadn’t noticed.’
‘That seems unlikely,’ she said. She added, to herself, ‘a friend of yours’.
‘It’s all unlikely. Even when you’ve been coming in and out for years, you never know what they’re 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 couldn’t take the hassle.’
‘Poor man.’
‘You’ve not got any art books, have you? Rubens or anything? Because they can be very funny about art.’
‘It’s unIslamic,’ Frances said, ‘to worship the human form. It’s idolatry.’ The man stared at her.
‘So I can’t tempt you?’ the steward asked. He peered into his empty ice-bucket. ‘Gentlemen, don’t leave any miniatures down the seat pockets, please, we don’t want our ground-staff flogged.’ He looked down at Frances. ‘We’re relinquishing this route next year,’ he said. ‘Give it to British Caledonian and welcome, that’s 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 hubby’s not there, don’t hang about, don’t speak to anybody, get straight in our airline bus and come downtown with us to the Hyatt Regency. You check in, and I’ll look after you, and he can come and find you in the morning.’
‘Oh, I’m sure he’ll be there,’ she said. Or someone will. Jeff Pollard. At least he’d be a familiar face. ‘I’ve got numbers to ring, in case anything goes wrong. And I could take a taxi.’
‘You can’t take a taxi. They won’t carry you.’
She thought of that cheese, that people say French taxi-drivers won’t let in their cabs. ‘What, really not?’
‘It’s bad news, a man picking up a strange woman in a car. They can gaol you for it.’
‘But he’s a taxi-driver,’ she said. ‘That’s his job, picking up strange people.’
‘But you’re a woman,’ the steward said. ‘You’re a woman, aren’t you? You’re 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 fasten…kindly 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 pleasure…we hope…we hope…and 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.
1
Ghazzah Street is situated to the east of Medina Road, behind the King’s 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 shipper’s 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
