Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel

“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 converse 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 practiced 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 one-thirty already, and at two-thirty 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 color, 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 check, does a subtraction and enters the balance on the 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, facedown, 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 gray 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 semidarkness, because I had wanted it that way when my