1
The man on the plane—Fairfax’s colleague—had been quite wrong. There was a map of Jeddah. Andrew brought it home. “Now I can begin to make sense of it,” Frances said.
She spread out the map on the dining room table. Five minutes later she looked up, disappointed. “It’s useless. It’s too old. The shape of the coastline is different now. This road appears to end in the sea. And look where they’ve put Jeddah Shops. They’re five blocks out.” She traced the length of Medina Road. “How old would you say these flats are?”
“Five years.”
“On this map we’re a vacant lot.”
“Sorry,” Andrew said. “Only trying to help. Thought bad maps were better than no maps.”
“That’s not so.” She picked up her pen and wrote on the map CARTOGRAPHY BY KAFKA. “We don’t exist,” she said.
Pollard called her on the new telephone. “Daphne Parsons will come for you with a driver on Tuesday morning,” he said, “and take you to the souk.”
“Oh, will she?”
“Ten o’clock.”
“Well … thank you for arranging that for me.” Though I could hardly claim, she thought, that I was doing something else. Everyone knows what my life is like; I’m at their disposal.
“That’s okay,” Pollard said. “Any time. Dryer all right?”
“Yes.”
“Happy with it?”
“Yes.”
There was a pause. He said, “Is there anything else you want?”
“Yes, let me see … how about some flock wallpaper for the bathroom? And a half tester bed?”
“Joking, are you?” Pollard said. She got rid of him. Only later she realized, with a kind of sick shame that she knew was unwarranted, that he might have been making her a sexual proposition.
She reported the conversation to Andrew; not to make trouble, but so that she could have his opinion. “He asked me if there was anything else I wanted.”
“He probably meant a new ironing board,” Andrew said.
“Do you think so?”
“You’re fussy about ironing boards, aren’t you?”
She trawled her memory for instances. Perhaps she had expressed an occasional opinion about them, over the last week or two. Hausfrau’s conversation, now. She felt that a change must be coming over her, but that Andrew took the change for granted.
“Yasmin said that she would teach me to do some of their cooking,” she said.
“Oh good. I like curries.”
From eleven each morning the smell of Yasmin’s cooking hung over the flats. Shams was useless in the kitchen, she complained, and there was a dinner party most nights, and soon Raji’s mother would be coming from Islamabad to stay for weeks and weeks, and she’d be asking all her Jeddah friends around. Yasmin stood in the kitchen, barefoot, chopping and frying, frying and chopping, dicing and stirring, her face shiny, the smell of ghee and herbs impregnating her clothes; tasting, muttering, licking her lips and frowning into the pans. Frances stood in the kitchen doorway, Selim straddling her hip. The air of formality between them had abated; the guest need no longer be entertained. One busy morning, when twenty people were expected, Frances washed the best dinner service, thin white china with the sheen of a pearl and a single chaste gold line, and then she polished the heavy crystal glasses that Shams was not allowed to touch, and set them out on the table, ready for the mineral water and orange juice they would contain that evening. “I’ve got nothing like this,” she said.
Yasmin said, “I’m sure you have very fine china, at your home in England. I’m sure you have beautiful things.”
“No, honestly. I haven’t got anything.”
Yasmin looked up momentarily from the pan she was stirring, where something bubbled gently, something venomously red.
“Did you not have wedding presents, you and Andrew?”
“No, not to speak of. We didn’t really have that kind of wedding. We just had a couple of witnesses down at the DC’s office, and then we went for a drink. We got married in a bit of a hurry.”
Yasmin’s wooden spoon hovered in the air for a moment. “I see. Well, I didn’t know that, Frances, you didn’t tell me.” She looked at her appraisingly. “Not to worry, I think most people have had some miscarriages.”
