‘Oh, was it!’ It was clear from Pinkrose’s tone that this was not the result he had intended. A gleam of satirical contempt for Guy’s simplicity came into his stone-grey eyes but he had nothing to lose by accepting gratitude, so nodded and said, ‘Is that so?’
‘There are some letters for Gracey in the office. I would forward them if I knew where he was. I was wondering if you could let me have his present address?’
‘Present address? Present address?’ Pinkrose, eager to be at the cakes, was losing patience with this conversation. ‘I really can’t say. I heard . . . indeed, I was told, the Director in Jerusalem told me, that Gracey is trying to get himself shipped down to the Cape. How and when I cannot say. I fear I cannot help you, Pringle. No, no, I cannot help you.’ He twitched all over in his desire to shake off the Pringles, then he remembered that Harriet had once been a source of information and he raised his head slightly to ask her, ‘The desert situation has settled down, eh? The Germans have outrun their strength. No bite left in them, eh? No bite. No bite.’
Harriet, never unwilling to disquiet Pinkrose, did not resist this opportunity. ‘I don’t know about the desert. No one is giving it much thought these days. The chief worry now is the Ukraine. The High Command expects it to collapse before the end of the month. When that happens, the enemy will come down on us like the wolf on the fold.’
Pinkrose, his grey colour becoming more grey, looked stunned, then falteringly asked, ‘Haven’t we got troops in Iraq?’
‘A handful. What could they do against twenty panzer divisions?’
‘Twenty? Did you say twenty? No one told me they were likely to come that way.’
‘People here are living in a fool’s paradise. They think if the desert situation’s all right, they’re all right. They forget we’re threatened on another front.’
Pinkrose was sunken in his seat, gazing at the cakes as though they had failed him, then a laugh jerked out of him. ‘Now, I understand. Yes, yes . . . You wish to frighten me. Well, I will not be frightened. No, I will not be frightened. So you can take yourselves off. If you wish to spread alarm and despondency, you can spread it elsewhere.’
‘Why should I wish to frighten you, Lord Pinkrose?’
‘That is easily answered,’ Pinkrose’s voice was shrill with triumph. ‘I was one of those whom the major invited on to his ship — you were not. You pushed your way on board. Yes, yes, you pushed on board. It would have been a pleasant trip — a very pleasant trip, indeed — but a crowd of you pushed on board and spoilt it all. Four people settled themselves in my cabin. Four of them. They made things very uncomfortable for me, and for the major’s other guests. You young people think only of yourselves. So, take yourselves off . . .’ Pinkrose lifted his cake fork and waved them away.
As Harriet drew breath to protest, Guy gave her a little push and they both went to a vacant table. Out of Pinkrose’s hearing, Guy said, ‘Why try and frighten the poor old thing?’
‘I said nothing that wasn’t true. He may be a great deal more frightened before this war is over. If we’re cut off here, what will happen to him or to us? Or anyone else? Who would repatriate us? Who would care if we lived or died? We’d be lost, the dregs of the wartime hierarchy, beggars, dependent on Moslem charity. And we can be thankful that the Moslems are charitable. We’ll have no other friends.’
‘Darling,’ Guy lifted her right hand and put it to his lips. ‘Little monkey’s paw. The Russians won’t give in so easily. The Ukraine will hold, you wait and see.’
‘How do you know? What makes you so sure?’
‘I am sure.’ He did not explain his certainty but squeezed her fingers, conveying his confidence by the pressure and warmth of his flesh. He looked at her hand before putting it down and said, ‘Thin little hand!’
‘Too thin. I keep getting these stomach upsets.’
‘That won’t do,’ he said and quickly changed to a subject that disturbed him less. ‘Who do you think came into the office this morning? Toby Lush. He came, ostensibly, to congratulate me on my appointment but they want work, the pair of them. They had a pretty dreary time in camp while Gracey and Pinkrose were living it up at the King David Hotel. They said that Gracey never bothered to contact them and when they bumped into Pinkrose, he pretended not to know them.’
‘You surely won’t employ them, will you?’
‘Why not? What are they but poor derelicts of war? I’ll find a use for them.’
Aidan Pratt, on what he called ‘a brief assignment’, had tried to ring Guy in Alexandria and, not finding him there, had traced the Pringles to Dobson’s flat. Getting Harriet on the telephone, he asked her to come with him to the Muski. He wanted to buy a gift for his mother. When she agreed, he said as an afterthought, ‘I suppose Guy wouldn’t come?’
Harriet had once persuaded Guy to go with her to the Muski but at the entrance to the narrow, half-lit Muski lanes, he had turned back saying that nothing would get him in there. He felt, she realized, as she had felt inside the ruined pyramid. Though she said, ‘I’ll ask him,’ she knew Aidan would be disappointed.
Seeing him coming towards them as though half-fearing rebuff, she whispered to Guy, ‘Do come with us . . .’
Guy was quite decided against the Muski. ‘I couldn’t possibly,’ and Aidan, sensing his refusal, said with humorous humility, ‘Not coming? I suppose you have more important things to do?’
‘I wouldn’t say important. I’ve work to do.’ Guy greeted Aidan with his usual amiability but he could not stay long. They talked for a few minutes but there was no lingering over the wine in his glass. Draining it in one long draught, he said, ‘I’ll see you later,’ and went without arranging time or place.
‘Is he always so engagé? I’m not likely to see him later — my train goes at six.’
Harriet said to excuse Guy, ‘He’s more than usually busy at the moment, getting the Institute back on its feet.’
Aidan gave a baffled laugh and agreed that they set out for the Muski straight away. They found a gharry waiting outside Groppi’s and took it to Esbekiya Gardens. Aidan, Harriet realized, had recovered from the first pain of his friend’s death and she found him easier company. Moving through the afternoon heat as through a tangible fume that smelt of sand and the old gharry horse, she tried to compensate for Guy’s absence. She told him what she knew about the places they passed. The Esbekiya, she said, still had the sunken look of a lake bed and in the old days, when the Nile rose, it used to be filled with water. Now the square was a turn-around for the tramcars but a few of the old houses remained with trees dipping over the garden wall as though to reach the water that was no longer there. Napoleon had lodged in the mansion that had been turned into Shepherd’s Hotel. She thought there was still a hint of the oriental, pre-Napoleonic richness about the square but it had become a centre for raffish life and raffish medicine. On the seedy terrace houses that had displaced most of the mansions, there were advertisements for doctors who cured ‘all the diseases of love’ and promised to the impotent ‘horse-like vigour’. Gigantic wooden teeth, bloody at the roots, were hung out as a sign that cheap dentists were at work.
Aidan, his dark and sombre eyes turning from side to side, asked, ‘Why has it become so run-down?’
Harriet pointed to the small, dry garden in the centre and told him that the assassin of General Kléber had been impaled there, taking three days to die. ‘After that, who would want to live here?’
The Muski ran from the top of the square and Harriet said they should pay off the gharry because now it would be more fun to walk. Alerted by the word ‘fun’, Aidan jumped down to the road as though making an effort to enjoy himself.
Asked what he thought of buying, he was unsure: ‘Jewellery, or a piece of silverware or perhaps a length of silk.’
The Muski offered such things in plenty and Harriet, who knew the shops, thought Aidan would quickly find what he wanted. There she was wrong.
The lanes were quiet under the heat
. The shopkeepers lay indolently in the shade at the back of their open-fronted shops, sleeping or passing amber beads through their hands. Most of them ignored the visitors, knowing who came to buy and who came merely from curiosity, and Harriet saw they had little or no faith in Aidan’s intentions. She began to feel they were right.
He fingered the bales of silk and rayons and put them contemptuously aside. They did not compare, he said, with the Damascus silks. Harriet took him into a small, glazed-in shop where scent was sold. The scent could be put into plain bottles or phials of Venetian glass decorated with gold. He agreed the phials were pretty but the scents — rose, musk, jasmin or sandal-wood — were too sweet for Aidan’s taste. Then Harriet thought she knew the very place to interest him: it was a large shop without windows, like a great tent. Here, in the half-light, the shelves and floors were packed with old silver and plate, engraved glass, Victorian ornaments, Indian toys, Burmese temple birds, Staffordshire dogs, horses, swans and human figures. Harriet particularly liked some iron trays painted with flowers and buildings and fanciful scenes that could be set on legs to serve as coffee tables, but Aidan shook his head. He turned over some rugs and said, ‘Not the best of their kind.’ In the middle of the shop there was a glass case filled with antique jewellery made of pink gold and rose diamonds. Harriet, who could not afford to buy them herself, handled the elaborate brooches, rings and pendants, and admired the large diamonds that looked more valuable than they were. ‘I’m sure your mother would like these.’
‘Much too showy for her.’
They set out again. Passing a window that displayed a broken Grecian head and some small Egyptian tomb finds, he stopped. ‘There might be something in here.’
‘Those things are terribly expensive.’
‘I’ll just have a look.’
Harriet stayed outside, feeling he was by nature secretive and more likely to make up his mind if left alone. When he was slow in returning, she wandered to the end of the lane where the bazaar opened out into an ordinary shopping street. Between lane and street there was an Arab café with three wooden tables and benches set out on the road. The proprietor, in a grimy galabiah, sat with one leg under him and his back to the house wall. Harriet asked if she might sit down while awaiting a friend. He did not ask her what she would drink but waved her to a bench, mumbling the conventional courtesy that everything in his house was hers.
Weary from her long walk in the heat, Harriet sat down gladly and watched the street beginning to fill with the early evening shoppers. Somewhere nearby there was a dry goods shop and the whole area was filled with a scent of pulse and spices, the scent of every back street in Egypt. A loudspeaker, fastened to the wall above her head, was telling one of the endless sagas of the Arab world. She heard the name Akbar and knew it was about the great hero whose father was a king and whose mother was Sudanese. Being blacker than his fellows, he felt he must do courageous deeds to prove himself, but being also lazy, he often lay in his tent and could be roused only by the gentle persuasions of his mistress who was the most perfect of womankind.
There was a mosque among the shops, its minaret intricately carved and rising ochre-coloured against the deep cerulean of the sky. She could not tell whether it was made of sandstone or merely encrusted with sand. When she first arrived, she had meant to visit all the main mosques of Cairo but soon found that here it was easier to make plans than to carry them out. If one waited till tomorrow, or the next day, or next week, it might be less hot and one’s body might be more willing to exert itself.
As Aidan came towards her, smiling his success, she said, ‘So you’ve found something!’
He did not show her what it was but, sitting down, suggested they take mint tea. He did not speak while they drank it but, putting his cup down, he hesitantly asked, ‘Tell me about Guy. Can he possibly be as artless and warm-hearted as he seems. He must have his terra incognita—his complexes, hang-ups, impediments? What should one call them? Megrims?’
Realizing he wanted nothing more than to talk about Guy, she said, ‘He’s probably more simple than you think. I’ll tell you something that happened in Bucharest just after we were married. I was about to step on a bus when Guy pulled me aside so that another woman — a woman of my own age — could step on in front of me. I was thunderstruck. And what annoyed me most was the simpering amusement of the woman when she saw Guy hold me back. I was furious and he was bewildered by me. He explained, as though to a child, that one had to be courteous to other people. I said, “What you did was damned discourteous to me,” and he said, “But you’re part of me — I don’t have to be courteous to you.” ’
Aidan seemed at a loss as he imbibed this story but eventually said, ‘Yet, because of Guy’s intrinsic goodness, you were able to overlook what happened?’
‘I didn’t overlook it. I’m still angry when I think about it.’
‘But he did not mean to offend you. Such intrinsic simplicity has its admirable side.’
‘Yes, if you’re not married to it.’
‘I understand.’ Aidan smiled as though the story had brought them into sympathy and putting his hand into his side pocket, he took out a small green box. He pushed it towards her and said, ‘See what I bought.’ She opened the box and found inside, packed in cotton wool, a cat, less than two inches high, made of iron, sitting upright on a block of cornelian. Harriet realized why Aidan had taken so long to find what he wanted. The gift he sought must be unique, and he found the one thing she would, if she had the money, have chosen herself. She replaced the lid and pushed the box back again. He held it and looked at her, then put the box before her. ‘Keep it for me.’
‘But isn’t it for your mother?’
‘Yes. I will tell her I have it but I can’t risk the posts. You must look after it till I can take it home.’
‘I’d rather not. It’s much to valuable to have around.’
‘Please. I can’t hold on to things. If I keep it, I’ll put it down somewhere and forget it. I’ve lost the sense that anything’s worth keeping.’
‘You’ve lost the sense? You weren’t born without it — you lost it?’
‘Yes, but at the time that was the least loss. 1 lost much more — everything I had, in fact, including the sense that anything left had value.’
‘What happened?’
‘Oh,’ he stared down at the table and made the gesture he had made when he spoke of the death of his friend. ‘It’s not easy to talk about . . . I may tell you another time.’
‘Have you told Guy?’
‘Not yet. When we went for our walk, he did most of the talking.’
‘Had it anything to do with the war?’
‘Yes, everything.’ He paused then said in a bitter half-whisper, ‘The war has destroyed my life.’
‘It hasn’t done any of us much good.’
‘I’m not so sure of that. There’s a chap in our unit — he used to be a bus driver and now he’s a major. He feels he’s found his feet at last. He’s enjoying every minute of the war. But for me, it was a disaster. My career had just started when war broke out. When it’s over — if it ever is over — I’ll be verging on middle-age. Just another not-so-young actor looking for work. In fact, a displaced person.’
‘We’re all displaced persons these days. Guy and I have accumulated more memories of loss and flight in two years than we could in a whole lifetime of peace. And, as you say, it’s not over yet. But we’re seeing the world. We might as well try and enjoy it.’
‘Yes, but there are some memories that are beyond human bearing, except that we have to bear them.’
‘You won’t tell me?’
‘Not now. Not now. I have to catch that train.’
They walked till they found a gharry. Harriet asked to be put down in the Esbekiya where she could find a tram-car to Kasr el Aini. The green box was still in her hand and unwilling to keep in temporary custody an object she so much coveted, she asked him to take it back.
‘No. One
day I’ll ask you for it.’
‘Very well.’ He wished to imply that their friendship would continue and she said, ‘I’ll keep it safe for you.’
‘Did you know that the line into Syria is open? If you and Guy could come to Beirut, I’d meet you with a car and we could drive to Damascus, visiting Baalbec on the way. There are some impressive sights up there. And the Damascus bazaars are more mysterious than the Cairo ones.’
Speaking, his face came alive with enticement intended, she felt, for Guy — and that was the trouble. Guy did not want to see impressive sights. He would rather pass his spare time, if he had any, talking and drinking in a basement bar.
‘Guy may come . . .’
‘If he doesn’t, you come without him.’
She smiled and said, ‘One day, perhaps I will.’
Nine
There was no work for Harriet in Cairo, not even voluntary work. In Athens the English women had organized a canteen for troops but in Cairo the ladies of the Red Cross jealously kept a hold on paramilitary work and the provision of comforts for the men. Outsiders were expected to remain outside.
Finding nothing to do, she wondered if she could take over the housekeeping at the flat She did not think that Edwina would willingly give it up but found her glad to be rid of it.
‘Darling, how sweet of you. It would be divine — and save me so much effort. I often don’t know how to get everything done.’
Harriet, when the accounts were handed to her, found that Edwina had merely muddled through them and the servants had bought where they pleased. Edwina said, ‘If you have trouble with Hassan, I’m always here to help,’ but Harriet thought she could manage Hassan. There would be a new regime and Edwina would be left free for her main occupation, her social life.
Edwina’s promise of friendship was frequently repeated but it developed no further. She would have a few words with Harriet while awaiting a telephone call or the arrival of the evening’s young man, but the talk was always brief and interrupted. Harriet who had been anticipating the pleasant, gossipy intimacy that can exist between women living in proximity, now knew that Edwina would never have time for it. Her afternoon break, between one o’clock and five, was spent at the Gezira swimming-pool. More often than not she was out for dinner and at breakfast time she came to the table exhausted by the effort of getting herself out of bed. Sitting opposite Harriet, hair over one eye, she would blink the other eye and grin in rueful acknowledgement of her frail condition. Sometimes the activities of the previous night prostrated her altogether. Dobson would say, ‘Poor Edwina has another migraine,’ but however badly she might feel in the morning, she would be up and dressed, her languors forgotten, by the time her evening escort arrived. They would go off with a great deal of laughter and Harriet could imagine that laughter served as conversation for most of the time. Edwina had once told her that she only wanted a good time, and the lost and deprived young men who came on leave — a leave that might be the last they would ever have — had nothing else to give her.
Fortunes of War Page 19
