When I again reminded Ismael of my wish to be useful, he replied that there was an important party the following Saturday. “Adnam will be there. Maybe you can talk to him.”
“What sort of party?”
“A very nice one. In Pall Mall. Someone from Dubai asked for you especially.”
“I don’t know. I can’t talk to these men.”
“No, it’s all right. They like you anyway. It’s important, Marcella. I’ve promised him. It’s a good opportunity for you. And your friend Monique will be there.”
“Well, call me tomorrow.”
“Good! So it’s settled. And this is for a new dress. Something nice, you know.”
Indoors I counted the money and found it was a thousand pounds. I considered returning it, but Monique overruled me. “You want to give it back? Are you a crazy woman? Une folle? We must spend it!” She swept me off to spend five hundred on a purple silk slip of a dress that showed me for the first time what money could do for me.
On the way to the party, in the middle of a downpour, Ismael’s car had a puncture in Piccadilly Circus. It was a Saab this time; the cars changed all the time. The moving messages of the neon advertisments above us were garbled among the streams of water on the windscreen. Even in the rain the area was swarming with Saturday night people, so that they overflowed from the pavements onto the road. The mood was exuberant and loud in a way I had not seen in England before. “These people are all drunk,” Ismael stated, with disgust.
His response to our breakdown and the traffic chaos we were creating was to make a call on the car phone. “It’s not my car,” he explained unnecessarily while he dialled. I watched silently as his face become less pretty and his Arabic more furious. He put the phone down and, after a moment, turned to me, looking pale. “I have to change the wheel.” He turned up the collar of his jacket and opened the door like a man about to sacrifice his life. “You must get out too.”
I stood next to him, the rain flattening my hair. Ismael had no idea of how to go about jacking up a car and changing a wheel. I did; my taxis in Dar had thin tyres. “You should loosen the wheel nuts first,” I said.
“Just look out for the traffic!” he replied.
Buses and cars inched their way past and one taxi driver took the opportunity to shout something that drew more attention to us and made the people watching from the pavement laugh. No one offered to help. No policeman turned up. A crowd of young men was spreading out from the shelter of an awning, happily following our progress, oblivious to the rain. Some had no jackets and held beer cans to where their stomachs pressed against sopping shirts. I was caught between them and the traffic, which every now and then would insult me with a splash of dirty water. My new dress was sticking to me, my breasts and bottom, so that I felt I was naked and that all of London was giving me a physical examination.
“Magic carpet broken down, has it, Mohammed?” offered one of our audience. “Pray to Allah. Maybe he’ll change your wheel.” Ismael kept his head down, staging a fumbling, hopeless battle with the spanner and jack. “Better hurry up, Mohammed, your bint’s dress is shrinking. Come home with me, love. I’ve got a bus pass.”
Without so much as a glance at me, Ismael abruptly threw down the tools, bolted across the road and jumped into a taxi that was making a break for freedom in the direction of Trafalgar Square. I was dumbfounded. Gob- struck. I watched the back lights disappear. A cheer from the crowd was fading before I’d heard it, and a lone voice pointed out, “He’s left you, darling.” Another said, “I’ll give you a fiver for the night.”
I pulled at the car door. Locked. My handbag was right there on the front seat, completely unavailable to me. I was wet, cold, indecent and I had no money. Worst of all, everyone was looking at me. I moved towards the pavement and, as I did, a group of boys wheeled in my direction like a flock of sheep. I turned the other way, back into the streams of slow-moving traffic, realising only when I actually walked into the side of one that, money or not, I could do as Ismael did and get in a taxi.
I sat rigid. The eyes of the bulky, elderly driver kept wandering into his mirror and searching me out, and I kept moving mine away. “Please,” I said to myself. “Please let there be someone at home.”
“Six pounds and forty pence,” the driver announced. Carefully, to ensure there would be no room for doubt, even for a foreigner.
“I just have to go inside,” I said, reaching for the door handle. Locked. How could it be locked; he hadn’t touched it.
“I’ll have the fare now, if you don’t mind.”
“I haven’t got it now.”
I sat there, cold and small and captive while he shouted at me, an angry speech all about people who took taxis without money in their pockets and “bloody foreigners” who came to England and thought they owned the place. “I’ve a mind to take you straight to the police station,” he said.
I said, “Please, just let me go in.”
“I suppose I’ll have to, won’t I?”
He followed so close behind me that I could smell his old man’s smell on his cardigan. He was an old man but a big one.
There was no light. Of course, Monique was at the party—being stupid, with her stupid friends—and Gabrielle was working nights. But
