The Daughters of Mars
Page 26
Dankworth was wounded?
He had an ear shot off. His hearing’s intact.
As narrated by Honora, it sounded less than threatening. She did not seem tormented by the quarter inch which dictated Dankworth had lost an ear rather than a head.
Mudros was gone and there seemed too much life at the Heliopolis for anyone to be wistful. The huge rooms pulsed with it—the strident outnumbered the shy and the convalescent the sick.
It turned out that Lionel Dankworth had been enchanted with Honora Slattery to the extent that he had accompanied her to mass in the chapel of the Heliopolis Palace. Catholics were like that, people said—ruthless with using love as a lever to shift people.
Sally knew that—unless it was for a purely ceremonial event—no one could inveigle her to church. God had left the earth by now and was hidden amidst stars. Good for him! A first-class choice, the way things were. Yet she also knew that even in her disappointment with the deity, behind her failure to believe any further, lay a soul designed for belief. Under different stars she could have been a dour votary. It was Honora who seemed designed for raucousness and fun and a kind of frank sensuality. The tension in Honora between jokiness and devotion seemed to hold Dankworth in wonderment. He’d never met it before.
There were the tents of a new camp beyond the town of Heliopolis and in the desert. The streets were full of new boys—reinforcements. They were as amazed by where they’d ended up as their forerunners had been a year ago. They caught the tram outside the Palace to go into the center of Cairo. There they would repeat—as if they were newly discovered and their own invention—the japes of those who were now too mangled for levity and whose sportive pulse had been quelled on Gallipoli.
There was little to make Sally go to town. One night Lionel Dankworth and another officer took Honora and her to dinner in the piazza on the Nile embankment outside Shepheard’s—the hotel having now been elevated to the status of Allied headquarters. Dankworth’s ear wound was barely visible and well healed. Honora’s clear hope was that Sally and the other officer would take—as Lionel Dankworth and Honora had taken. Though she was not against the idea of infatuation and the life it might give to banal hours, she could not seem to achieve it when a specific man was presented.
As for the antiquities . . . well, the idea of looking again at the pyramids was painful when so many of the company she had visited them with were gone. It was a good time of year for it though, Lieutenant Dankworth said. You could get to the top of the pyramid of Cheops without any heat exhaustion and see forever in all directions in a clear atmosphere. So Honora and Lionel went—scooting diagonally across the length of Cairo and even visiting the army camp at Giza for drinks with some other Gallipoli chaps.
Time to toast 1916, said Honora—extending her invitation for New Year drinks. It has to be better than this because it couldn’t be worse.
May we, or at least some of us, said Lionel—making his toast that night—punish John Turk in Palestine for anything he might have done to us in Gallipoli.
There was quite a crowd of men and nurses present. One of them had visited an aerodrome in Sinai and, seeing the airmen take off over the desert, had decided that was what he would dearly love to do. There were so many fellows applying, but the infantry and even the light horse lost their shine when compared to climbing into the air like that.
You see, he said, we’ve never had an eagle-eye view. Napoleon didn’t. Imagine if Wellington at Waterloo is wondering what to do, how long to hold out before retreating, say, and Napoleon is pouring the Imperial Guards in and the future all depends on Blücher’s Prussians turning up in time. Just imagine if Wellington had been able to say, “Lieutenant Fortescue, can you hop in your B.E. and go up four thousand feet and tell me if Marshal Blücher is on his way?” Now I’d say that’s true power. An ordinary soldier with greater power to see—to get a grasp of things—than any general.
All right, said Lionel, but then you’ve got to come down. Remember that bloke Icarus?
The men were drinking whisky and ale, the women champagne and orange and—for those who had not essayed liquor yet—fruit juice with chipped ice. And a quiet voice speaking not of vast pictures of desert or sky-highs but of earthbound things asked, Excuse me, aren’t you one of the Durance girls?
Sally had been talking to some of Lionel’s friends and saw the face of a grown boy when she turned—the features in the suntanned face had a delicate neatness a mother and aunts would cherish. A choirboy face, people said, and also, in common wisdom, that they were the most dangerous.
Charlie Condon, said the young man. East Kempsey.
Your father was the solicitor? she asked.
Yes. That’s it.
The Condons were part of the ruling class of the town in reputedly classless Australia. The gentry were the solicitors and the accountants and the bank managers whose children played together and whose wives spoke to each other. Yet this young man was shy about talking to her. She thought he did not look like a veteran. He lacked that dark pulse in the eyes.
Didn’t you go away to Sydney to study? she asked.
He said he had.
One of the boarding schools, she surmised. Then . . . was it the law?
Heavens no, he said. A stab at law maybe. But other things interest me. By the way, you were a year ahead of me at school. To a bit of a kid, that’s an age.
Thank you, she said and was willing to smile. You make me sound like a maiden aunt.
I’m so pleased I saw you. It’s ridiculous, but we spend all our time looking for faces from home, our part of home. And I don’t even like the place.
But we want to know, don’t we? Like it or not.
What about you? Were you nursing there? In the Macleay, I mean.
Yes, she told him and then it recurred—that she’d nursed her mother to death. In his presence it was something she wanted to suppress—to the point of oblivion.
My sister left as soon as she could, she told him—as a matter of history and not grievance. She’s back there right now, but she says she’s coming back here. She’s visiting my father at Sherwood. And my stepmother. You remember a Mrs. Sorley?
I remember a boy called Sorley, Condon admitted. I remember the widow, but only dimly. Wasn’t her husband killed by a tree?
That’s right.
Oh, he said, a famous Macleay tragedy. I always thought she looked pretty jolly for a widow. Not that I’m saying . . .
No, she said, I know you’re not saying . . .
He developed an even smile. She had for some reason expected him to grin crooked and to show the devil beneath the pretty features.
A funny place, he told her confidentially. There are a lot of people in that valley who think they’re the ant’s pants—as if Kempsey and the Macleay were Paris or London or Moscow. And when you come back from Sydney everybody’s trying to land you with their daughter—as if it’s the only place you could possibly meet a girl. Crikey, I am being critical, aren’t I? You must have brought out the moaner in me.
That unblooded look emerged in his face again. It was still a serious matter for him—his boyish rebellion against the Macleay River and its valley and its principal town.
He didn’t give off that almost chemical mixture of fatalism and bloody remembrance and tired ruthlessness the survivors did. Some of the veterans were courtly and polite because it was a railing to cling to, and to save them from the pit. The new men were polite to and courtly towards women and the world because they thought they had a life to pursue and had not yet faced the force that so utterly overpowered politeness. It wasn’t his fault—after all, he was a year younger than her. It was simply obvious.
They spoke for the rest of the evening—she broke away only when she saw Honora smiling in her direction and presuming that her conversation with Lieutenant Condon stood for some outburst of magnetism. It would be useless later saying that she had found it pleasant talking to him, since because of Honora’s own infatuation with Li
onel Dankworth—deformed ear and all—she was geared up to read intense attachment everywhere and even in the mildest friendliness.
At three o’clock in the morning everyone went up on to the roof. There was a resolve to stay up there and see the first light of the year come out of Sinai—it would happen about half-past five. It must be seen—went the proposition—because this would be the year of victory and peace. Sally decided not to share the experience. As the party took to the stairs, Sally called from below, Honora, I’m going now. Thank you, it was very pleasant.
That pale word again.
Charlie Condon was already on the lower steps. Coming, Charlie? asked Honora, who obviously knew him.
Just a tick, Miss Slattery, he called, raising an arm and an index finger up the stairs to beg indulgence. The others ascended.
Well, he said, it was a fine thing somehow. Meeting you again in such altered circumstances. Look, Miss Durance, you’ve been to Giza, haven’t you? I bet you’re a veteran of Giza?
I was there earlier this year. No, it’s last year now.
Yes, well, it’s all new to me. You can’t believe it when you first see it, can you? You can’t believe you’re there, sharing the same air with it.
Yes, I think I felt exactly like that.
Now there’s another one I want to see. It’s up the river. Sakkara. The first pyramid of all—King Djoser. I wondered, would you do me the honor of visiting it with me? Not a huge distance. Hour or two on the truck. Or there’s a bus. We could take a picnic.
For the first time since she had come to Egypt, she had been asked to go somewhere she wanted to go and in the smallest party possible. The chance of an excursion without being swamped by conversation—after so many continuous nights of such conversation—was welcome.
If you will excuse me, he said, I will go up to the roof garden. I’m new here. This year is likely to be my initiation in military matters.
• • •
Condon suggested they try the adventure of an Egyptian bus to Sakkara. It was a novel idea since everyone else she knew tried to cadge lifts in army trucks or ambulances or commandeer a car when on a jaunt. People had told him they could get a truck back to Cairo or even Heliopolis without difficulty that afternoon. Sakkara was on the south–north road from Aswan. To her it counted for little that soldiers might smirk at picking up an officer and a nurse from the side of the road.
Catching the tram from Heliopolis and the bus from the railway station seemed a genuine adventure. It bemused the bus-traveling effendis—the Egyptian gentlemen in heavy European suits and tarbooshes—and the shy fellahin, laborers and small farmers, Nile cow-cockies as Condon would say, who frowned and stared as if the universal order had been upset.
As she watched unaccustomed quarters of the city sweep by, she realized that her elated feeling that the world had altered was because she and Condon had for a few hours moved beyond military reach. They rolled out into the irrigated countryside and its strips of cultivation and she assessed that the day was like a warmer autumn day at home and the sky wide open and vast. Occasional trucks going northwards showed unwelcome glimpses of khaki.
It’s a little mean of me, said Charlie as they sat and the bus engine whined and dragged them along at perhaps twenty miles an hour. I know all the travel guides at Sakkara try to make a living. But I think I’d rather not have a guide. I mean, some of them talk you blind and distract you when you see something marvelous and try to sell you rubbish.
He wanted to know—of course—whether this was agreeable to her. She said it was. He assured her he had a Murray guidebook with him—people preferred them over the German Baedeker guides—and somehow she knew that he had absorbed it conscientiously and would reliably tell her everything she needed to know at Sakkara.
As they traveled he confessed he’d been studying in a Sydney art school which emphasized sketching as the building block of all art, and whose motto was that it was better to sketch well for a lifetime than to paint badly for twenty years. He didn’t like to bring out his pad when there were lots of people around. But the reason he liked sketching was not just that a sketchpad was so much more portable. It began to show you—as one of his teachers had argued—that light is everything. Color was a mere servant to light. Light is everything to everything, and in everything too. It was, of course, the first time she had heard a discourse on these matters. She was as impressed with this reflection as with the bus—which seemed in part Condon’s own conception.
When they got off in the flat-roofed oasis town of Sakkara, a dozen men came up and mobbed them and tried to rent them donkeys and offer themselves as guides. Children milled and plucked garments and called Charlie “effendi” and “sir.”
No guides, no guides, called Condon, right or wrong, just or unjust. No, no guides. Just ponies.
He went down the line of those available. He turned to Sally and said, These two look good, pointing to two beasts who looked to her little different from the other sinewy creatures. Their owner shook his head sadly as if his animals were too precious to him for lease. How many piastres? Condon began. Though new to the place, and inexperienced, he brought an air of casual worldliness to his transactions.
Sally and Condon—once atop the ponies—rode off. Children ran behind praising the bey (a term of praise above effendi) and lady for their horsemanship. This ferment of applause was the product of poverty, and she and Charlie had already committed the crime of depriving a local of a tour-guide fee. Yet they had all they wanted—Condon carried in his kitbag water, boiled eggs, and canned salmon, and some flatbread from a bakery stall in Cairo. Condon amiably telling them, Imshi, the tail of children faded beyond the edge of town. Their ponies scurried across gravel and left the last little irrigated green plot of Egyptian clover behind.
Very soon the pyramid began to rise in huge steps before them. It ascended to a blunt apex in the sky. She could sense and shared in Condon’s zeal to walk along the remaining colonnade in front of the pyramid. They tied up their ponies to rings embedded in a low stone wall for the purpose. Then they got down and were alone. No Scots in kilts. No slouch hats. No British officers in tropic-weight tailored uniforms. No one. Small gusts of wind sounded enormous as they turned over pebbles in the great, silent dome of the day.
Condon was carrying a battery torch. They might be able to visit the burial chamber, he said, and see the frescoes. He let go of his knowledge easily. He seemed no pedant. This ancient tumulus involved an architect named Imhotep, he said, who used limestone for the first time in history here—in Djoser’s stairway to heaven. Charlie Condon was more interested in the four-thousand-year-old cleverness of Imhotep—which had lasted—than in the power of Djoser, which was lost. This columned approach, he said, must have been crammed with people—image makers, butchers, money changers, wine sellers. For this was the great market of the necropolis of Memphis. One of the tombs was, in fact, said Condon, of Djoser’s butcher.
Charlie Condon populated the place without effort—a man who wanted to see the total present in the light of the entire then. But they found the entrance to the burial chamber padlocked—a guide would have no doubt fetched a key to open it. As a further exercise of his stylishness as a traveler, he picked the lock with a penknife. Sally laughed—but in part for fear of the winding chambers he was so keen to enter with her.
Do you know where I learned to pick locks? he asked her as they entered darkness and he switched on the torch. Newington College. It’s an excellent place to go if you want a criminal career.
There were vivid, graceful human figures painted on the walls, she saw as Condon’s torchbeam lit the way down the first dark passage. Some of the painted shapes had their faces chipped away as if by chisel. Condon wondered was this the work of Christian iconoclasts? No, he decided. I believe they really got to work in Greece and Turkey. Here it could only be the Muslim iconoclasts. Mohammed had approved of his iconoclastic brethren but had asked them to spare a painting of Jesus and Mary.
At last they reached the sunlight. We did excellently, he told her and shook his head. But this is an astounding trinity, when you think of it—the oldest remaining stone building. The most potent pharaoh of the Old Kingdom. And the oldest building of which we know the name of the architect.
To the side of the pyramid lay a lower, stepped building and Condon led her in there. It was not as disturbing as the long passages of the pyramid, and lit up a statue of Djoser. Someone had been at his nose with a chisel but the rest was so immediately human—including the tight, unhappy mouth and low forehead and braided hair.
They had absorbed and been absorbed sufficiently to need to seek a pause when they emerged again. Condon spent a little time reconnoitering for the stone floor of an early Coptic monastery, said to be near the pyramid, and complained that the man who’d discovered it had cleared out all sign of it and given or sold it to museums. So they found a fragment of wall which cast shade and sat on stones, Condon producing the food from his kitbag, Sally a tablecloth she had brought with her in her satchel. They sat on a stone surface and ate the fresh, appetizing flatbread.
They tell me, Charlie murmured, chewing, that you and Honora were on a ship that was sunk.