Eight Months on Ghazzah Street: A Novel

“Deportation, for the expats. I don’t know about the Saudis. Who knows what kind of trouble they have stored up for each other?”

It was slow to sink in. “So Marion and Jeff … ?”

“Are taking a risk.” He pulled up at a traffic light. “But then, it’s like drinking. Everybody does it. You have to take risks to live here at all.”

It often seemed to her now that it was only in the car they had their real conversations. She had become used to Andrew’s profile, which gave so little away; to the interjection of a curse, as someone cut in on them; to conversations that died when his concentration switched elsewhere, as he executed a U-turn under one of the dark bridges. The simplest task—like posting a letter—seemed to mean an hour in a traffic jam; but what would she do if she were left at home? She had started reading novels, crime stories. Sometimes she was distracted when he came in, her eyes distant, her mind unraveling the complexities of the plot. What he was saying—about the building, about politics at the Turadup office—seemed to have nothing to do with her. She would rather have talked to Hercule Poirot, or Commander Adam Dalgleish.

“Look, Andrew,” she said, sitting up. “Did you see that garden?”

He had turned off the main road, into a narrower, dimmer street; a gate stood open, a gate to a private villa, and for a second she glimpsed the house itself, ramshackle, with a tin roof. In front of the house there was a lawn; a moth-battered bulb, hanging from a wall on an iron bracket, cast a shivering light on to real grass. She wanted to catch at his arm and persuade him to turn the car around, so that she could see it again: a promise of greenness, turned to dappled monochrome by the onset of the night.

“Did you see? It must be the only lawn in Jeddah.”

“No, I missed it. I think the embassies have lawns. You ought to go along to those wives’ coffee mornings, if you’re yearning for gardens.”

“Maybe. But they make you do handicrafts. You have to make Christmas crackers, for their bazaar.”

“And then there’s that grass verge outside the airport, you know, where the Saudis go for picnics.”

“Yes, I remember it. They must spend millions of riyals on cultivating that grass verge. It gives a totally false impression of the country.”

They drove on in silence. She looked sideways at Andrew; a corner of the check he had got from the money changer protruded from the breast pocket of his shirt. He doesn’t like anything here, she thought, he doesn’t commend it, but he seems pleased with the way things are going. At the corner of Ahmed Lari Street she looked up automatically, to see if the laundryman was at work that night. But the curtains were drawn at the first-floor window, and the room behind was in darkness.

“Anyway,” Andrew said, as they pulled up outside Dunroamin, “why don’t you give it a go? Once you got down to it you’d probably be really good at making Christmas crackers.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Andrew let them in at the gate. He had an awesome proficiency with the locks and keys; she didn’t go out enough to get the practice. Something scurried away, in the shadow of the wall.

“Was that a rat, do you think?” Andrew said. “We have them on the site. We could put some poison down.” He unlocked the main door, with a scrape and a clank.

“The stray cats would eat it.”

“That would be no loss.”

The lights were on in the hall. There was a figure on the stairs, moving rapidly upward; a woman, hunch- shouldered, her abaya flapping. She gathered up her skirt, taking the stairs two at a time, yet seeming to make no headway; a thin yellow calf trailed after her, a calloused heel in a flapping sandal. Andrew stopped in the open doorway, his arm stretched across it, as if to keep out the night. Frances ducked underneath. She put her own arm around him, her hand against his solid ribcage, and her head, as if she needed comfort, briefly against his shoulder. “It’s Abdul’s maid,” she whispered. “Come in. Close the door.”

It clanged behind them, and the woman stopped in her tracks, as if a pistol shot had been aimed at her back. She turned, for an instant, and showed a dark oval face, wet with tears, and a mouth stretched wide with panic or grief. Andrew called out after her. She vanished at the bend in the stairs. He stood with his lips pressed together then; to call out had been a natural reaction, which already he regretted.

“I don’t know her name,” Frances said. “I’m not even sure where she comes from. Yasmin thinks maybe Indonesia. She doesn’t speak any English and only a few words of Arabic, so nobody knows much about her.”

“What do you think she’s crying about?”

“I don’t know.”

Andrew seemed upset. “Let’s have a drink,” he said, when they got inside the flat. “The wine should be ready. I’ll pour some off and see.”

He disappeared into the small second bathroom that they used for their home brewing. His voice carried to her in the kitchen, a muffled echo. “It’s a bit cloudy. But it’s distinctly alcoholic.”

“Hush,” she said. If sound carried down from the bathrooms, sound must carry up. A few weeks earlier a warm odor of yeast had pervaded the flat; frowning, Yasmin had asked, “What is that strange smell?”

Andrew met her in the hall, a brimming jug of red liquid in his hand. “Get some glasses,” he said. “I need this. Been a tough week. Do you know,” he followed her along the hall, “it always says in the papers that foreign servants are an immoral influence.”

“Well, so they are. Yasmin says that the educated Saudi women are starting to want to go out to work, so the government’s campaign against maids and nannies is a way of nipping that in the bud. Making sure they don’t delegate stewing the goat.”

“But they used to have slaves,” Andrew said. “They only abolished slavery in the sixties.”