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 neighbour,’ 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, wilful 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, which 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 red-head 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 neighbour, 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 mid-morning 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 honour, 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 neighbour 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, unsavoury 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