“Now,” Daphne said. They began to thread their way through the crawling cars. “When I was first married, we were in Nigeria.” Frances stepped on to a traffic island. She saw Mrs. Parsons’s face, blotched and mottled already by the heat. “We had a lovely life. A lovely home. We had four gardeners.”
“Really?” They sallied out again, into the traffic.
“Then we were in Malaya.” A long black Pontiac braked to let them pass. Frances inclined her head in thanks, but the sun struck across the windscreen, hiding the driver’s face from view. They had reached the far side.
“And how many gardeners did you have in Malaya?” Frances asked.
Now it was for Mrs. Parsons to dislike her tone. But her mind was elsewhere; she wanted to get into the goldsmiths. The souk, Frances saw, was modern and paved, with streetlighting and the same metal-box shops she had seen uptown. But above and beyond the souk were the houses of old Jeddah, with their leaning faded pastel walls, their crumbling harem grills, the wood bleached out by sunlight and neglect to the color of ashes.
“What’s up there?” Frances said. Her spirits rose. All the time she had known that there was something more than she was seeing. “Can we go up there and look?”
“I don’t think Eric would like me to do that,” Mrs. Parsons said with dignity. They plunged into Gabel Street.
2
Frances Shore’s Diary: 7 Safar
You should come at night to get the flavor of it, Mrs. Parsons said, and this is what people do, apparently, they get up parties to go to the souk. I have to say that at 11 A.M., anyway, it’s disappointing. Mainly there are just rows and rows of the little metal shops, selling perfectly ordinary things— tea sets, and shock-absorbers, and lurid lengths of fabric with gold and silver threads running through. I did buy a set of orange nonstick saucepans, which seemed very cheap. I wondered if I should haggle over them, but Daphne said, no dear, just pay the price. I was relieved.
The goldsmiths are quite spectacular. The shops look so poverty-stricken and dreary, compared to the new places uptown, and it’s hard to take in the value—thousands of riyals, millions of riyals—of what’s in their windows. They go by weight here, they don’t regard workmanship, and they certainly don’t regard taste. Mrs. Parsons walked into one of these shacks and peered around, nobody taking very much notice of her—as she said, they know that Europeans aren’t going to buy, or not much more than a trinket, but if you shuffled in there in a veil they’d spring to attention all right. She said to the man behind the counter, what is today’s price? Just as if she were after salad tomatoes. From some fold of her flowing garments she produced a pocket calculator, converted grams to ounces, then got him to weigh her a few bracelets. After she had done some more sums she said to him, thank you, sucran, and walked out. Then we went into a couple of shops selling Indian clothes, and she tossed the stock about a bit and said, trashy stuff. No one tried to sell us anything particularly, except that one shopkeeper pulled out a cardboard box from under a counter, which seemed to have in it the kind of dresses that get left behind at jumble sales. He held one or two up and said, viscose very smart, 100 percent polyester, madam you love it. It was obvious we didn’t, and he wasn’t very interested anyway—his heart wasn’t in it. Mrs. Parsons told me not to smile at people too much, they might run away with the wrong idea. The souk smells quite a lot, and this seems an affectation in it. There are drains and street cleaners, so why should it smell?
After we had walked about aimlessly for half an hour, I noticed a few tables and chairs set out in front of a doorway, and just inside there was a very ancient decrepit man tending one of those rotating plastic bubbles of orange juice, the kind you get in British Home Stores cafeterias. Can we get a drink? I said. Daphne said, I wonder, or is it men only? She said, it’s not what you’d call a reliable cafe, I have got a drink here once or twice, but it depends if the religious police have been around lately. I said, what, you mean we can’t sit down, because we’re women, we can’t have a drink? She looked around, and said better not risk it.
I was enraged, because I was so hot, and my nonstick pans were so heavy, and I was so tired of carrying them—perhaps I shouldn’t have bought them, but every so often a woman must have a wild impulse, mustn’t she? I said, my God, it’s exactly like South Africa. Mrs. Parsons smiled. She seemed pleased. Why, so it is, she said.
All the way home Mrs. Parsons talked about something she called Entertaining. I gather that I am expected to give dinner parties. I am not quite sure how I am going to do this. In Africa people would come round and you would give them what you had by you, which was exactly what they had in their fridge at home. There was no place for one-upmanship, and spag. bog. was on the whole considered quite exotic. But I gather that spag. bog. will not do here.
Mrs. Parsons goes to the British Wives’ coffee morning at the Embassy on the first Monday of every month. They do handicrafts and good works and have lectures with slides about the wonders of the coral reef. She talked about this, and also about her Magimix, which she says is the Rolls-Royce of food processors.
When I got home I took my box into the kitchen and unpacked it, and when I examined my pans closely and read the labels on the bottom, I found that they were not what I thought and not such a bargain after all, as the nonstick coating is made of something called Saudiflon. It was quite a blow. I lay on the bed for half an hour. I tried to compose some phrases about the souk which I could use in letters home. People talk so much about going to the souk that I feel I must be missing something. Perhaps I am blinkered.
No doubt.
The architect who had designed the Ministry’s new building had been given a commission to excel all the other strange and wonderful buildings of modern Jeddah. The building was to defy, for scale and cunning, the green giant of the Petroline building, and the Ministry of Labour’s silver-and-chrome fantasy on Al Hamra Street. It was to exceed in strangeness, in denial of gravity, the flying tented roofs of the airport’s Haj Terminal; it was to induce wonder and reverence, even greater awe than the pure white 3-D triangle of the National Commercial Bank, which floats above Bagdadia lagoon.
The Ministerial HQ was to suggest to the beholder a miracle compound of all the elements, of earth, air, water, and fire; as if to convey the mysterious grandeur of the Ministry’s activities, the transcendent quality of its paper shuffling. It must be better than anything the West could do; but it must also be Islamic. Glorifying God was part of the brief.
In the architect’s imagination, the Ministry’s new building seemed lighter than the air around it; it was a shimmering iceberg, soaring above the hot pavements and the jungle of greenery that would root it to earth. At the time of Maghreb prayer, when the sun dipped into the ocean in a great flaring gaseous ball, its glass walls would melt and grow liquid. It would glow on the darkening skyline, a terror and a portent, a Koranic column of fire.
When this conception had to be put on paper, reduced to an artist’s impression of color and line, a more prosaic quality was sure to enter: still, the drawings in Andrew’s paper folder were highly impressive. Tiny figures in thobes and ghutras rode the escalators, which looped smoothly behind the glass walls. Giant scarlet flowers bloomed in the foreground, a crystal fountain scored the summer air,
