Eight Months on Ghazzah Street

2

When Andrew Shore went to Jeddah he was thirty-three years old: a heavy, deliberate young man, bearded, with a professional expatriate’s workaday suntan, and untidy clothes with many evident pockets; rather like the popular image of a war photographer. He had a flat blue eye, and a sceptical expression, and a capacity for sitting out any situation; this latter attribute had stood him in good stead in his professional life. In Africa it was always counter-productive to lose your temper. It made the local people laugh at you, and gave you high blood pressure. If you wanted to get anything done, the best way was to pretend that you were not interested in doing it at all; that you would, in fact, be happy to sit under this tree all day, and perhaps drink a can of beer. If you put pressure on people they cracked very quickly; then they pretended that what you were asking for was impossible, and that anyway there was no petrol, and that the labourers had injured their backs, and that they were urgently called away now because their grandmother had died in another town. It was better to leave people loopholes, and assume a studied casualness, and then, sometimes, things got done. Or not.

When he arrived in Jeddah, Eric Parsons said to him, ‘We’ll have to take you and introduce you to the Deputy Minister. It’s only a formality.’ When they arrived at the Deputy Minister’s office suite Andrew looked around and wondered why the Ministry thought it needed a new building; but he did not say anything, because the new building was his livelihood. They were shown in, and served mint tea, very sweet, in small glasses. The Deputy Minister had waved them each to a chair without looking at them, and now he continued not to look, but to turn over papers on his desk, and to talk on his special gold and onyx telephone; he conversed loudly in Arabic with men who came in and out.

‘This is Mr Shore,’ Parsons said after they had been there for some time unheeded. ‘I told you about him, do you remember, he’s going to be in charge of the new building. He’s very anxious to set his targets and keep everything on schedule.’

The Deputy Minister did not reply, but picked up his Cartier pen and signed a few papers, with an air at once listless and grim. A Yemeni boy came in with a tray, and served cardamom coffee. Ten minutes passed; the coffee boy stood at the Deputy Minister’s elbow, and when the Deputy Minister had taken three or four refills, he shook his cup to indicate that he wanted no more. The coffee boy collected his tray and went out, and the Deputy Minister reached for his telephone again, and grunted into it, then put it down and stared deliberately out of the window. One hand absently stroked his blotting pad, which was bound in dark green leather and embossed with the crossed scimitars and single palm tree of the House of Saud.

Then very slowly, his dark eyes, rather full like plums, but rather jaundiced like Victoria plums, travelled around the room, and came to rest for the briefest moment on the two men; and he nodded, almost imperceptibly. Parsons seemed to take this as some sort of signal. He rose, with a smooth air of accomplishment, and for just a second gripped Andrew Shore by the elbow; the bland smile he gave the Deputy Minister was quite at odds with the near-painful pressure of his finger and thumb. By the time they reached the office door the Deputy Minister was talking on the telephone again.

‘Is that it?’ Andrew said, in the corridor. Parsons did not reply; but persisted, to Andrew’s annoyance, with his pseudo-mysterious smile. He was a company man, he knew the system and he played it; you would not find him muttering under his breath, or making V-signs outside closed office doors. They walked downstairs and out into the sun.

They were in the car-park, and it seemed that the Deputy Minister had made it before them; he must have come down in his private lift. As he strode across to his Daimler, his white thobe flapping about his legs, and his white ghutra fanning out around his head, a dozen people appeared as if from nowhere and mobbed him. They were identically dressed, except that some wore white headcloths, and others wore the red and white ghutra of tea-towel check. A stiff breeze got up, blowing in from the sea, and billowed out the men’s thobes. With the thrusting arms, and the weaving bodies, it was soon impossible to distinguish the Deputy Minister from the mill of petitioners; and the whole resembled nothing so much as a basket of laundry animated by a poltergeist.

Andrew stopped to watch. ‘What’s happening?’

‘They’re just saying hello,’ Parsons said. ‘After all, he doesn’t get to the Ministry very often, he’s too busy for that.’

‘Busy doing what?’

‘Running his businesses.’

‘It’s not a full-time pursuit then, being a minister?’

‘Oh my goodness, no. After all, he’s not one of the royal family, you know. Why should he neglect his own business to run theirs?’

‘You mean that the Kingdom is a family business?’

‘If you like,’ Parsons said. ‘You could put it that way.’ The Deputy Minister had almost reached his car now, but delayed further while the petitioners kissed him on the cheek. ‘They’re the Ministry’s suppliers, I imagine.’

‘They seem unnecessarily matey. For suppliers.’

‘Most of them are probably his relatives as well. It’s their tradition. Accessibility. You wouldn’t want them walled off, would you, behind their civil service?’

Andrew looked sideways at Parsons, his expression incredulous. Parsons took his pipe out of the top pocket of his bush shirt and stuck it in his mouth. It seemed an odd time to choose; unless it was a tic, which expressed his real feelings, like the pinch on the elbow he had delivered earlier. ‘I have to remark,’ Andrew said, ‘that he didn’t seem very accessible to me.’

‘There are different rules for us,’ Parsons said, barely removing the pipe from his lips. ‘Never forget, Andrew, that as individuals we are very unimportant in the Saudi scheme of things. We are only here on sufferance. They do need Western experts, but of course they are a very rich and proud people and it goes against the grain to admit that they need anyone.’

It had the air of a speech that had been made before. Andrew said, ‘Do you mean that they are rich and proud, or are they just proud because they are rich?’

Parsons did not answer. Andrew was surprised at himself. It was more the question that his wife would have asked. The Deputy Minister had gained his Daimler now, and put the electric window down to convene further with his hangers-on. Andrew felt slightly nauseated from the cups of cardamom coffee which he had not known how to refuse. He felt exasperated by his inability to draw any proper human response from Parsons, anything that was not practised and emollient. ‘Is Turadup very unimportant as well?’ he asked.

Parsons took out his pipe again, and made the sort of movement with his mouth, a twitch of the lip, which in some Englishmen replaces a shrug. ‘We have the contract for the building,’ he said, ‘and for the silos at the missile base, and for a few billion riyals’ worth of work in Riyadh, but of course if they go off us they can always run us out of the place and hand out the work elsewhere. I mean they don’t have the constraints, you see, that you find in the rest of the world. But then on the other hand the company has its Saudi sponsor, and that sponsor gets his percentage, and is of course an even more highly placed gent than that gent you see over there; and think of the incidental profits we bring in, the rents and so on. I suppose you could say that as a company we are not entirely unimportant. But as individuals we are not expected to make our mark. The best we can do, as individuals, is to keep out of trouble.’

The Deputy Minister had put his window up now, and driven away. Almost as soon as the Daimler drew out of the gate a straggle of Saudi staff members emerged from the Ministry’s main door and began to head for their cars; it was 1.30 already, and at 2.30 government offices shut down for the day.

‘Ah, homeward bound,’ Parsons said pleasantly, ‘as we should be, I think, or at least, back to the old Portakabin, eh? I tell you what, Andrew, the best thing is, get into your own little routine. It isn’t easy to get things done but I’ve found over the years that there’s a certain satisfaction in achieving against the odds. Now of course you’ll hear chaps like Pollard sounding off about the Saudis, that’s their privilege, but what good does it do? You may as well learn to take the rough with the smooth.’

They had walked together to Eric Parsons’s car. Parsons wound down the window for a moment, to let out the hot wet air trapped inside, and then wound it up again as the air-conditioner cut in. ‘Bought a little Japanese motor, didn’t you?’ Parsons said. ‘How’s she running?’

‘Fine,’ Andrew said absently. ‘Fine.’

He still felt sick. I was in that bloke’s office for twenty minutes, he thought, and he didn’t speak to me once.

Parsons said, ‘You seem a steady type, Andrew, to me. You’ll feel less strange when your wife comes out, there’s nothing like family life to keep you going in this place. Keep your head down, you’ll be all right.’

Later that night he tried to write to Frances. He struggled to get the words on to the page. He imagined her, in her red dressing-gown perhaps, picking up the morning post in her mother’s hall. He felt that he had not succeeded in describing the incident at the Ministry in any terms that would make sense to her. Was he sending her the right information at all? It was almost as if there was something desperately important that he should be telling her; and yet he had no idea what it was.

He had been carrying around, since they parted at Jan Smuts Airport, a small photograph of his wife. It was necessary to get a couple of dozen, passport size, for all the formalities that taking up residence in the Kingdom entailed, and he had clipped one off, and put it in his, wallet. He took it out and looked at it. Frances was thirty years old, perhaps looked and seemed younger, looked younger in this photograph: five feet tall, slight, neat. That is how I would describe her, he thought, how I suppose I have described her to Daphne Parsons, who asked in her condescending way, ‘And what is your little wife like?’ She had (but he did not go into such detail for Daphne) a freckled skin, and light brown hair, which formed a frizzy nimbus around her head, the result of an unfortunate perm; a small mouth, and light, curious eyes: of no particular colour, perhaps hazel. He had said to Mrs Parsons, ‘Frances will be here soon, you can see for yourself.’ Why should she think he would have a little wife?

Frances will be here soon, with her precise inquiries and her meticulous habits. She is the sort of person who rings dates on calendars, and does not trust to memory; who, when she writes a cheque, does a subtraction and writes a balance on the cheque stub. She knows where all their possessions are, everything that belongs to her and everything that belongs to him; she remembers people’s birthdays, and retains telephone numbers in her head. She likes to make sense of the world by making lists, and writing things down. Perhaps, he thought, she will keep a diary. He picked up his pen to add another sentence, laboriously, to the letter: I am really missing you, Fran. He felt weak from missing her, and ashamed of his weakness, so he took her photograph and laid it, face down, on the table.

FRANCES SHORE’S DIARY: 4 Muharram

The first thing I did was to go around the flat drawing back the curtains. This does not seem to me to be a particularly good way to start a diary, but it seems necessary to put down everything I did the first morning, so that I can be sure that I really did as little as I thought, and yet time did pass and I got through it. It reminded me of a particular day in Africa, when I was in our house alone, at home because I had been ill, and I was lying in bed. I’d had tick-bite fever but I was over it, still weak and full of aches and pains, and with no energy to do anything. The house was very quiet, because the maid was having her holidays and the dogs were asleep, and outside rain was falling steadily, that grey carpet of rain that used to come down sometimes for days on end. I remember that morning creeping by, in self-pity and looking at my watch every few minutes, and I couldn’t imagine how time could move so slowly. Our bedroom was in semi-darkness, because I had wanted it that way when my head hurt so badly, and now although the pain had gone I didn’t have the strength or initiative to get out of bed and let in what little light there was from outside. I felt utterly unreal on that day, and utterly alone, as if I were drifting on some tideless grey sea.

Feeling this on my first morning in Jeddah, I blamed fatigue, and the upset of flying, and self-pity again, because I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to be here. But although flying does sap the energy it isn’t as bad as tick-bite fever, and besides, years have passed since then, and I have taken myself more in hand. So this time I did go and open the curtains.

The curtains are the kind that look as if they are made out of knitted porridge. The carpet is beige and the wallpaper is beige and so is most of the furniture.

When I drew back the curtains I couldn’t see out. There are blinds on the outside made of wooden slats, and hidden behind the curtains is a mechanism for raising them. In the living-room the blinds were not down, and when I drew back the curtains I realized that this was the view I had treated myself to on what Andrew called my pre-dawn tour. It was a wall.

I felt that I was getting frustrated now – first blinds, then wall. I walked around the flat and looked out of each window in turn: bedroom one, wall, bedroom two, wall, bedroom three, wall. And into the kitchen, but the kitchen doesn’t have a window, though it does have the side door with a frosted glass panel. But that door was locked and I hadn’t found any keys. I went into the bathroom, which has a small frosted window which slides. So I slid it. And there was the wall.

I suppose I hadn’t realized last night that it ran right round the apartment block. But I don’t think I’d expected a garden. There is one tree, the tree that I saw at dawn. It has a brown trunk and brown leaves.

I am keeping this diary so that I can write letters home. People expect you to have something exciting to tell them, though the truth is that once you have been in a place for a few weeks it is not exciting, or if it is, then it is not exciting in a way that the people at home understand or care for. By and large people at home are not interested in hearing about your experiences. They feel bound to put you in your place, as if by going away at all you were offering some sort of criticism of their own lives.

When I was back in England waiting for my visa, I went over to Scarborough to see my cousin, Clare. We used to get on pretty well before I went abroad. I took some photographs with me, of our house and garden in Botswana, which was probably a mistake and a boring thing to do, but it wasn’t a bad enough thing to account for those whiffs of hostility I kept getting from Clare. She said, I can’t think what induces you to live in such places, I never would. And then she said, I suppose Andrew can’t get a job at home? So I said, not at his new salary. I told her what it was, and that shut her up.

It doesn’t matter, though, how uninterested people are, you still have to write them letters. And I have a feeling that very little will happen here. I couldn’t, for instance, write much on The View From Our Front Window. Andrew says that your first impression of the Kingdom is that it is a stable and orderly place where the telephones work (when you can get one) and the household rubbish is collected every morning from your front gate. I know Clare will not want to read that. But I thought that if I write my diary every few days – I know I can’t manage every day – then if anything happens at all, I can make more of it in my letters home.

This is a new departure for me. In Africa there was no need to keep a diary to convince yourself you had an interesting life. Things were always happening. The garden boy would get syphilis, for instance. Perhaps it is a relief not to have household help.

I found myself looking around the flat that first morning, thinking rather desperately, I wish this would get dirty, then I could clean it. Which is not at all my usual sort of wish.

I went into the kitchen and moved the food around in the fridge. I looked in the cupboards to see if I could make a list of what we needed, but we didn’t seem to need anything. I went into an empty bedroom and moved a packing-case into it, so that it looked more occupied. But I did not feel at all in possession of the ground.

Then I unpacked my cases. The customs men had churned everything into a knot, and I found that one of my shoes was missing. Only one, and there I was with the other shoe in my hand, new and unworn, and although I knew that my feelings were out of proportion I felt overwhelmed by a terrible sense of waste, and I thought damn them, damn those customs men, who do they think they are, and I said out loud, damn, damn, damn. Then I put most of my clothes in the washing-machine and ironed the rest, and hung them in the wardrobes, and it was still only half-past eleven.

I walked around the flat, thinking dire kinds of thoughts, such as, here I am, here I stay. I went into the bathroom and there, sitting in the washbasin, was the biggest cockroach I have ever seen. I looked at it for some time in a kind of admiring revulsion. Then the thought came to me that there were other people in the building, other lives going on around mine. I heard the distant ring of a telephone, and footsteps in the flat above. It seemed to wake me out of a dream. I can’t go on like this, I thought, just wandering round aimlessly.

I went into the living-room. There aren’t, as I’d thought earlier, a dozen armchairs, but there are eight, scattered here and there, and two long overstuffed oatmeal-coloured sofas. When there are so many choices there doesn’t seem to be any reason for sitting in one chair and not another, so I stood there for a while thinking about it. Eventually I took the chair nearest the window, and sat in it rather stiffly, as though someone were watching me, and read the paperback I’d been reading on the flight. This made me feel as if in fact I hadn’t arrived at all, as if I were still in transit, with my passport in my handbag, waiting for it all to begin.

After a few minutes I got up and put on the overhead light, and I thought, that will always be necessary, how depressing, because I hate the lights on during the day. It was very quiet. I heard the prayer call at noon. It seemed strange not to speak to another person all morning, and yet to know that people were there, in the flat next door, and up above my head, and in the street beyond the wall, and that there was a whole country out there which I had not yet seen.

At about two o’clock the cockroach entered the room. It strolled across the huge expanse of carpet and began to climb up one of the curtains. Somehow I was quite glad to see it.

On that first day, Andrew came home at half-past three. She followed him around the flat. ‘Will it always be like this?’ she asked.

Preoccupied, he dumped his briefcase on the table. ‘I’m sorry I locked you in.’

‘What about going out? How do I get around?’

‘I’ll have to talk to Jeff Pollard to see if the office can let you have a car to go shopping sometimes.’

‘I’m not that fond of shopping, you know?’ she said mildly. Andrew flipped the briefcase open and took a sheaf of papers out. He began to flick through them. ‘Well, I don’t know that besides shopping there’s much else to do.’

‘How do people get to see their friends?’

‘I suppose they must come to some arrangement. Some of the women hire their own drivers. I don’t think we can afford that.’

‘Are there buses? Can I go on the bus?’