Jasmine Nights by Julia Gregson Read Free Book Online Page A

too.’ Well, it was true: all the lessons, the dreaming, the fish and chips at the Pleeze as a treat when she’d won the singing competitions, and seeing Joyce so magically transported.
    Inside the train station, they’d looked at each other like shipwrecked strangers.
    ‘Well, bye then, Mum,’ as the train drew in.
    ‘Bye, love.’ But at the very last minute, Saba had buried her face in her mother’s shoulder and they’d held each other’s shuddering bodies.
    ‘Don’t hate me, Mum,’ she murmured.
    ‘I don’t hate you,’ Joyce said, her face working violently.
    ‘Good luck,’ she said at last. The guards were slamming the doors. When Saba stepped inside, her mother turned and walked away. Her thin back, the green turban, her jaunty attempt at a wave at the mouth of the station had broken Saba’s heart. She was a monster after all.
    There was a gas heater in the bed and breakfast. The landlady had explained how to turn on its brass spigot and where to apply the match, but Saba had avoided it, frightened it would explode. Instead she wrapped herself in the eiderdown and tried to concentrate on the audition. She was convinced at this low point that it would be a disaster, and regretted making the date to meet the pilot after it. He’d got her letter, and written back that, by coincidence, he would be up in London that week staying at his sister’s house, not far from the Theatre Royal. Perhaps they could either meet for tea or maybe a drink at the Cavour Club. His telephone number was Tate 678.
    At around three thirty, someone had pulled a lavatory chain in the corridor outside. Saba sat up in bed and decided to phone him in the morning and cancel the appointment. The audition was enough worry for one day, and he’d probably thought her cheap to have accepted in the first place.
    Before dawn, the rumbling of bombers going over London woke her again. Forty thousand people had died here in the Blitz, or near enough; that was one of Mum’s last cheery messages for her. Shivering in the inky black of her room, she put the bedside light on, moved the Bible out of the way, took her diary from her suitcase and wrote LONDON on top of a new page.
    I have either made the stupidest and worst decision of my life, or the best. Either way, I must write it down, I may need it (ha ha!) for my autobiography .
    She gazed in disgust at the false bravado of the ha, ha , as if some other crass creature had written it.
    Dear Baba , she wrote next. Please try and forgive me for what . . .
    She scrumpled it, dropped it in the waste-paper basket. It was his fault too; she would not crawl and she would not be forgiven, she knew that now. It was the first plan she had ever made in her life without anybody else’s permission, and she must stick to it even if the whole bloody thing ended in disaster.
    Her breakfast of toast and powdered eggs was a solitary affair, eaten in a freezing front parlour with the gas fire unlit and only her new landlady’s collection of pink and white china dolls for company. After it, she walked the two streets to the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, amazed at the crush of vans and shouting people.
    In a telephone box on the corner of the street, she dropped coins into the slot, put the cloth bag which held her dress over one arm, and phoned Dominic Benson’s number.
    ‘Hello?’ A woman’s voice – charming, amused.
    ‘Look, this is Saba Tarcan speaking. I have a message for Pilot Officer Benson. Can you give it to him?’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘I’m very sorry, we had a sort of arrangement to meet today, but I can’t make it – I don’t know where I’ll be.’
    ‘Ah.’ The woman sounded disappointed.
    ‘Can I ask who you are?’
    ‘Yes, of course, it’s Freya, his sister. I’ll make sure he gets the message.’
    ‘Thank you.’ She was about to say she would phone later, but it was too late. The receiver clicked, the line went dead.
    She stepped out into the street again, breathing rapidly.