across to the opposite curb.
“There you are,” Mrs. Parsons said sourly, as she rearranged herself in her seat and readjusted her jewelry. “That’s one of the few advantages of being female in this part of the world. They know that drivers will pull up for them.”
“Where are they going? Where have they come from?”
Mrs. Parsons gestured around her. “There are these little poor communities all along this road. It’s surprising where people live, in the middle of everything. They’ll be Yemenis, or something, like Hasan there.”
Between the palaces of commerce, small lock-up shops flourished, little metal boxes, metal shacks, selling cheap clothing and flat bread. Even under the glacial slopes of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, men lounged in the greasy doorways of cheap cafes, their eyes on the moving traffic. Frances felt an impulse of frustration. She put her hand, momentarily, against the glass of the window. Mrs. Parsons looked out at Jeddah, moving past them. “It’s called the Bride of the Red Sea,” she said. “You’ll find.”
A broken-down butcher’s shop went by, the windows draped with gray intestines. A
“I don’t know. It might depend how you were dressed.”
These are such major preoccupations, Frances thought, nearly all-consuming preoccupations: the dress rules, the accident rate.
“Of course, they’re not safety-conscious,” said Mrs. Parsons. “You know the worst thing? When there’s an accident, no one wants to get involved, because of the police, and the blood-money system. If you stop you’re a witness, and you might be held in jail. And if you give somebody first aid, you might be accused of making their injuries worse. Suppose you move someone, and they die? You might have to pay the blood-money yourself.”
“But that’s ridiculous.”
“So the injured just lie there. If something else comes along and hits them—oh, my dear girl, don’t look so alarmed. Everyone has accidents in Jeddah, but it’s mainly just a shunt and a scrape for us expats. It’s the Saudis that cause the havoc, all these twelve-year-olds in their sports cars, and all the Koreans and the Filipinos in those old wrecks they drive.”
“I wonder what the chances are, of getting out in one piece?”
“Oh, quite good, really. It’s on the freeways that you have to watch yourself. It’s not the roads in town that are dangerous. It’s the roads out.”
Frances thought, I do not like the tenor of her conversation, I do not like the tone of it, and yet I should listen to what she says, because it is probably true. When she had first gone to Africa, she had expressed discomfiture, to an old resident, at the state of the servants’ quarters of her bungalow. “Wait till you see how they live in the villages,” the woman had said. Her tone had implied, they want nothing better. Frances hadn’t liked her tone; but the woman had been right. Her houseboy had considered himself in luxurious circumstances, with his concrete- floored shower, and single whitewashed room. He put up pictures and curtains, and invited friends around. The burden of guilt had eased a little; had been easing, ever since.
“About this job,” she said. “I thought women weren’t allowed to have jobs that brought them into contact with men?”
“Not legally,” Daphne said. “It’s become more difficult now, but a little while ago you got a lot of British and American girls working in offices. The police would raid them every so often.”
“What, typist raids? Like drug raids?”
“The firm would just get a car to the back door and slip the girls out and they’d have to stay away for a few weeks. But then as I say, it’s not so easy now, several companies got heavy fines, and nobody nowadays feels their position in the Kingdom is too secure.”
“What do they do now for typists?”
“Oh, they get Pakistanis in.” Mrs. Parsons spoke as if she had said, they use robots, they’ve trained some apes. “I could probably put out feelers,” she said. “Eric knows a lot of people.”
Frances turned her face away, tilting up her chin a little. The shops crawled by: Prestige Autos, Modern Fashion, Elegant Man. Two elderly men in turbans sat on the sidewalk deep in conversation, crouched in the scant shade of a sapling, their flip-flops inches from the passing cars.
“There’s not much to office work,” Mrs. Parsons said. “Did you work before?”
“I’m a cartographer.”
“How unusual.” Mrs. Parsons thought for a moment. “Nursery teachers are always in demand,” she said. “You could have started a preschool playgroup. Pity you weren’t a nursery teacher.”
“I’m sure I would have been,” Frances said, “if I’d thought of the advantages.”
Around the souk area the traffic slowed almost to a standstill. The driver put them down on the pavement outside a hotel. Mrs. Parsons leaned through the window and spoke a few words of Arabic into the driver’s face. “An hour will be enough,” she said, over her shoulder to Frances. “It’s too hot for more than that.” She jerked her head back to Hasan, and as if doubting the power of her Arabic to do the job, she spat out the words “One hour, one,” and she jerked up a forefinger under Hasan’s nose, as if she were an umpire giving him out.
Hasan drove away. Frances looked around her. “Gabel Street,” Mrs. Parsons said, indicating with her head that they should make a dive through the traffic and enter a narrow street on the far side. She took Frances by the elbow. With her free hand Frances wiped her hair from her forehead, feeling it sticky and damp. “How do you find the heat?” Daphne inquired, above the rumble of the traffic.
“It’s the humidity I mind. It’s different from where we lived before.”
“We were in Zambia for a couple of years. Of course, it’s not what I call Africa.”
“Oh no?” They teetered on the curb.
