Jasmine Nights by Julia Gregson Page B

when he had told her where his skin graft had come from, they’d both roared with laughter like young people again.
    There were moments like that in life, he thought, that you couldn’t really explain or understand but that had the perfect rightness of a billiard ball falling smoothly into a pocket, or of a mountain bend taken at high speed, but with a slowed-down perfection.
    And the bird called, in response to the unheard music hidden in the shrubbery . Oh what a perfect bloody fool he had become. He blamed the war.
    A light rain was falling over Cardiff Bay as he walked towards Pomeroy Street. It fell softly over a pearly sea where there was barely a line between water and sky, and blurred the edges of a row of houses above which the seagulls cried. It splattered on the tarpaulins protecting the vegetables outside a Middle Eastern grocer’s shop on the edge of Loudon Square. This is where Saba lives, he thought.
    He put up the collar of his greatcoat and checked his watch. He had a twenty-four-hour leave: three hours at the most between now and the return train.
    A woman in a sari with a mackintosh over it smiled at him at the street corner. A boy went by on a bicycle: ‘Where’s your plane, mista?’ he said.
    At the corner of the next street, a house sliced in half by a bomb stood shamefully exposed, like a girl with her knickers down, or a shabby stage set with its faded rose wallpaper, and green cooker, and sooty rafters. A poor house, in a struggling poor street.
    Saba’s streets. ‘The notorious Tiger Bay.’ She’d warned and teased him with it.
    Because she had a natural dignity and the stateless confidence of an artiste, he had not given much thought to her background, and was struggling now to hold those two images of her together in his mind. Annabel’s parents had owned a lovely old Tudor house in Wiltshire with a moat with swans and ducks floating on it, as well as an apartment at Lincoln’s Inn. His own mother had thoroughly approved of them, their cleverness, their impeccable furniture, their season ticket to Glyndebourne. She’d probably planned his wedding in their garden. He hadn’t had the heart to tell her yet.
    The front door of the house in Pomeroy Street had a brass knocker shaped like a lion’s head. He took a deep breath and banged it.
    An old lady appeared wearing a black dress and Wellington boots. Her eyes gleamed from the gloom of the hall – dark and inquisitive.
    All the way here, walking down the sooty streets that led to the bay and to Pomeroy Street, he’d had a conversation with himself which had ended in an agreement. He was here simply to return the blue coat; if her mother wanted help, he would do what he could in a dignified way and then beat a discreet and hasty retreat. There must be no whiff of the stage-door Johnny about him; it was a simple act of kindness.
    But the old lady’s face lit up immediately when she saw him; she put her hand on his sleeve and became immensely animated.
    ‘Quick, Joyce!’ she shouted over her shoulder, as if he was the prodigal son. ‘Come! Come quickly. The boy is here!’
    A door at the end of the corridor burst open and a handsome woman, fortyish he guessed, came towards him. Her thick dark hair looked freshly waved and she was wearing lipstick. A woman who kept herself nicely, or who had dressed up especially for his visit.
    She led him into the parlour on the right of the hall – a cosy room with a small fire burning in the grate. In the corner was a piano with a sheet of music on the stand. The old lady saw him glance at it and smiled encouragingly.
    ‘I can play,’ she boasted. ‘Saba ma teach me. She like very much.’
    ‘Tansu,’ the younger woman said firmly, ‘go and take your boots off. I’ll make Mr Benson a cup of tea – or would you prefer coffee? We have both.’
    ‘Coffee, please,’ he said. ‘If you have enough,’ and then, embarrassed, ‘I mean, with rationing and everything.’
    ‘Turkish? English? My