‘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. He’s been with Turadup for twenty years. He’s a shareholder. Pollard says he’s a millionaire. Anyway, he seems very enthusiastic about this building. About the whole scene in Jeddah. He says it’s a very stimulating place to work if you’re in the construction business.’ He paused. ‘I’ll 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.”’
‘I’d like to witness a large gin. Let’s celebrate.’
‘We’re late,’ said the man across the aisle. She jerked out of her doze; she’d not realized, at first, that he was speaking to her.
‘Are we?’ She consulted her watch.
‘It’s always late,’ the man said tetchily. ‘Of course, if you fly Saudia, they’re always late as well.’
‘Do you go often to Jeddah?’
‘Too often. The Saudia flight’s 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 you’ve never been in the Kingdom. Noon is movable, you see. Noon can very well be at twelve-thirty. Nothing’s 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?’
‘I’m 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 you’d been a nurse we could have had dinner. Of course, I’m not sure if they let them out nowadays. I think they’ve got rules now that they all have to be locked in their own quarters by nine at night. It’s 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 of…and that wife of his, Penny wasn’t it…and the British Embassy? You can’t tell me it wasn’t a cover-up.’
‘I wouldn’t try, I’m sure.’
‘It stinks.’
‘I’m sure you’re 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, it’s a funny place, Jeddah. Nobody knows the half of what goes on. You work?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m a cartographer.’
‘Oh well, you’re redundant. They don’t 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. They’re always building, you see, money no object, but they don’t 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, 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