Mrs F was in a fierce mood when we worked together in her kitchen making cakes for the Christmas Eve carol party. “What sort of Christmas can this be? This flour is terrible. No butter. These are our last tins of margarine. Nothing is coming in. Everyone is at everyone’s throat. You have a foreign boyfriend who people want to kill because he makes so much trouble. Your friend the passport officer is telling everyone that the Goans are behind the sackings. Wonderful, Marcella. You are so clever. Yau don’t need any advice from your foolish aunt. Please, the baking tin. And Isabella, give me that. You think you can mix batter by dreaming at it? You know the Danes are coming. Lars’ son is going to play for us. What sort of people are they going to think we are? Christmas without the proper ingredients. Christmas nineteen eighty-three. I’ll remember it.”
On my twenty-yard walk between Mrs F’s house and my house, a boy in a side alley hissed at me. I went over to him and he gave me a note, then ran away.
“I’m home,” said the note. “Just for three days. Can you visit me at my brother’s house? Can you come back to Oman with me?” It was signed, “Your fiance.”
When I tracked my reaction to this message, I noted that my stomach had dropped when my heart should have risen.
Somehow, with little basis, I had connected my newly possessed passport with London. And, with little basis, I had connected my travel to London with Geoffrey. We had not talked since he left the hospital and went to convalesce at Lars’ house. Now Ali was here and his long-standing promise to ask me to join him was real. This was a basis. I had told people for years that he was my fiance. This was a basis. He was in business in Oman and there would be work for me to do. Another basis. Each time I reached one of the landings on the stairs up to our fourth floor flat, I discovered a new basis. I decided to sleep on it, hoping that sleep would turn base bases into gold. I made myself think of Ali when we first made love, when we were both sixteen. It was a sweet, foalish lovemaking: his lithe boy’s body, the amazing number of times he could come. Five times in a session. My first lover. Nearly ten years ago. How perfect to marry the man to whom you gave your virginity. We looked well together, him an Arab and me a Goan, both of us outsiders on socialist Zanzibar, both annoyances to our families, both of us with business in our blood, knowing where the other came from.
The next day I decided to go to the four o’clock carol party first, then visit Ali afterwards. I just felt like doing it in that order. Mrs F had set up twenty or thirty chairs like a schoolroom. On each chair was a piece of tissue paper, crowded with the words of Christmas carols. A bowl of punch was on a table, along with trays of fairy cakes and a trifle. The iced Christmas cake without its proper ingredients was held back in the kitchen. At the front of the room the upright piano had its lid open, like a threat. “We’re as ready as we’ll ever be,” declared Mrs F.
Her house was old, the walls two feet thick, the windows high and narrow, shaded outside by shutters that opened upwards and inside by curtains. Even so, Zanzibar could not be excluded. The afternoon heat insinuated itself and chinks of daylight burned the eyes. From this top floor room the view was all Moslem: Arab architecture, narrow alleyways, dhows on the water, the tower of a mosque. Inside there were ceiling streamers and old Christmas cards with snow, holly and robins on them. Some plastic mistletoe was pinned above the doorway to the kitchen where Mrs F could keep a cold eye on it.
The Danes were on time, seven of them and Geoffrey too. Mrs F led Lars to the seat she had specially reserved for him and took his ten-year-old son to the kitchen for a treat. Geoffrey came over to me and, before he could speak, I said, “Geoffrey, I’ve got my passport. I could kiss you.”
He looked around, as if considering how we should do this.
“I said ‘could,’ not will. Mrs F would have a fit.”
“Of course.” He went back to his awkward self.
Mrs F started to play and the room filled with people and song. “Good King Wenceslas looked out on the feast of Stephen ...” The Danish men boomed and the Goan women shrilled. “... deep and crisp and even.”
None of us thought anything strange in all this, though we had never seen snow, and I doubt if any of we Goans could have said what King Wenceslas had to do with Christmas, or who he was, or where he lived. King of the Czechs would have been a surprise. Instead, there was reassurance for us in brazenly broadcasting our voices to the scorching rooftops of a silent Zanzibar afternoon. The Europeans were with us. Mrs F was looking radiant. She was even polite to Geoffrey.
Between the carols, drinks flowed. The punch was finished and bottles of spirits were found. “So, your English Boy is leaving tomorrow,” Mrs F said as we cut the cake and transferred the pieces onto little plates. “Has he told you?”
I leaned over the cake to hide my face. “I haven’t had the chance to talk to him.”
“I hope he’s thanked you for helping him.”
“He helped me. He helped me get my passport.”
She stopped working. “You
