sky; and a solitary goat-faced Yemeni, his tartan skirts pulled up, putters on a clapped-out scooter in the direction of Obhur Creek. The horizon is a line of silver, and beyond it is the coast of the Sudan; enclosed within it is the smell of the city’s effluent, more indecipherable, more complicated than you would think. At the weekend the children are given balloons, heart-shaped and helium-filled, which bob over the rubble and shale. On the paving stones at your feet are scrawled crude chalk drawings of female genitalia. Inland, wrecked cars line the desert roads, like skeletons from some public and exemplary punishment.
Whatever time you set out for Jeddah, you always seem to arrive in the small hours; so that the waste of pale marble which is the arrivals hall, the rude and silent customs men turning over your baggage, seem to be a kind of dream; so that from each side of the airport road dark and silent spaces stretch away, and then comes the town, the string of streetlights dazzling you, the white shapes of high buildings penning you in; you are delivered, to some villa or apartment block, you stumble into a bathroom and then into bed—and when you wake up, jerked out of a stuporous doze by the dawn prayer call, the city has formed itself about you, highways, mosques, palaces, and souks; gray-faced, staggering a little, you stumble into the rooms you are going to inhabit, draw back the curtain or blind and—with a faint smell of insecticide in your nostrils— confront the wall, the street, the tree with its roots in concrete and six months’ accumulation of dun-colored dust on its leaves; wake up, wake up, you have arrived. The first night has passed now, the severance is complete; the journey is a phantom, the real world recedes.
Andrew brought coffee. To her surprise, she felt chilly. He had always been bothered by the heat, and so it was his habit now to sleep with the air-conditioners on, rattling and banging away all night. No wonder she hadn’t slept properly. She had dreamed she was in a railway siding, with the endless shunting, and the scrape of metal wheels.
Andrew was already dressed, buttoning his white shirt, plucking a tie from inside the wardrobe door. His muddy overalls and his safety helmet would be elsewhere, she supposed, although he had said in his letters that he would spend more time shuffling papers than he would at the site. “Pity you couldn’t come at a weekend,” he said. “I feel bad about going off and leaving you to it.”
“What time is it?” She shivered.
“Six-thirty. Back at three. Sometimes I have a siesta and go into the office for the early evening, but I’ll not do that today. We can go shopping. I’ll show you round. Are you hungry?”
“No. Yes, a bit.”
“There’s stuff in the fridge, you’ll find it. Steak for dinner.”
So everything was ready for her, as he had said it would be. When she had blundered through the rooms, an hour ago, she saw pale airy spaces, a vast expanse of beige and freshly hoovered carpet. Pieces of furniture, new, smelling of plastic sheeting, stood grouped here and there; a dozen armchairs, a gleaming polished expanse of tabletop, a white, antiseptic bathroom. Quite different from the old life: the donkey boiler at the back of the house, and the tin roof, and the sofas and beds which had gone from family to family.
“I may have been dreaming,” Andrew said, “but did you go on a predawn tour?”
“I’m sorry if I woke you.”
“The prayer call wakes me anyway. What do you think of the flat? There was a house, it was on a compound with some of the Ministry of Petroleum people, but Jeff lives there—you said you didn’t want him for a neighbor. It’s taken now anyway. You don’t get a lot of choice; Turadup has to rent what it’s told. It’s a big source of income for Saudi families, letting houses to expats.”
“Who owns these flats?”
“I think it’s the Deputy Minister’s uncle.”
“Who paid for all the stuff? The new furniture?”
“The company. They’ve redecorated the whole place as well.”
“They’re looking after us. It’s not like Africa.”
“Well, in Africa nobody cared whether you came or went. If you found it too tough you just drifted off.”
“But here they care?”
“They try to keep you comfortable. The thing is it’s not a very comfortable place. Still,” he said, recollecting himself, “the money’s the thing.”
Frances pushed back the sheets, swung her legs out of bed. “One thing that seems rather odd … last night when we arrived I saw those big front doors, I thought there’d be a shared hallway, but you brought me in through a side door, straight into our kitchen. I’ve found that side door, but where’s our front door? How do I get into the hall?”
“You don’t, at the moment. The front door’s been blocked off. Pollard says there was this Arab couple living here before, quite well-off, the woman was related to our Minister, and they were staying here while they had a villa built, they were just married, you see. The husband was very strictly religious, and he had the doorway bricked up.”
“What, you mean he bricked her up inside it?”
“No. Twit.”
“I thought you meant like a nun in the Dark Ages. So she could pray all day.”
“They don’t pray all day,” Andrew said, “just the statutory five times, dawn, noon, midafternoon, sunset, and at night.” He was full of information; wide-awake, which she couldn’t claim for herself “It’s amazing, you know. Everything stops. The shops shut. People stop work. You’re just stuck there.”
“This doorway, Andrew …”
“Yes, he bricked it up so that she couldn’t go out into the hall, where she might run into one of the male neighbors, you see, or a tradesman. She could go out of the side door, in her veil of course, and just round the side of the building by the wall, and then her driver would pull into that little alleyway, and she’d step straight out of the side gate and into the car. And the cars have these curtains on the back windows, did you notice last night?”
“I didn’t notice anything last night. You’re not teasing me?”
“No, it’s true. They have curtains, so once she’s inside the car she can put her veil back.”
“How eminently sensible.” She looked down at her bare white knees, at her bare feet on the new beige carpet.
