Terry, knowing the answer to that one, put his hands over his eyes and howled with laughter.
Simon, too, knew the answer to that one and it increased his nervous disgust with the people about him. Because of his youth and silence, he was ignored by most of them but that did not worry him. What did worry him was their strangeness and hilarity. There were only eight of them but for all the sense he could make of the party, there might have been a couple of dozen. Even the Cherrypickers, on leave as he was, seemed to him unreal in their ribald insolence. He had never known men behave so badly in company. He was shocked. And, he remembered, it was still the day on which Hugo had died.
There was a pause while a small boy put glasses on the table, and a Nubian safragi, dripping sweat on to the customers, brought champagne in a bucket. Breaking the wire with his hand, he let the cork fly away. The ice had melted and the champagne, a gritty, sweetish German brand, was warm. Food came with the same lack of ceremony. There was a plate of steak for everyone.
‘We didn’t order steak,’ Angela said.
‘Only this meat,’ said the safragi: ‘All persons same. Very busy this place, this time.’
Simon knew that coming to Cairo had been a mistake. The men spoke of it as though life here was a perpetual carousal but to him it seemed a mad-house. Even the waiters were mad. When he learnt that Hugo was dead, he should have foregone his leave and returned to his unit. There, if he had nothing else, he had the comfort of familiar routine. The men would have understood how he felt but here no one understood or cared. But, of course, only two of them — Harriet Pringle and that odd, excitable woman called Lady Hooper — knew of Hugo’s death. He looked at Harriet who, feeling his dejection, smiled at him and he smiled back, grateful that she had once had supper with Hugo and knew a little about him.
The table served, the Cherrypickers started up again. Discussing Queenie’s favourite flower, they decided that it was a pansy. But was it a yellow or a white pansy?
Harriet was bored by the Cherrypickers yet scarcely knew with whom to ally herself. They were fighting men and, unlike Jackman, they were ready to risk their lives for others. Their trousers were purple-red in colour because — so the story went — in some early engagement, they had fought till the blood from their wounds flowed down to their feet. They could claim to have earned their amusement, but Cookson was poor game.
Moved to his defence, she said, ‘Your jokes are so feeble. Can’t we talk of something else?’
They gaped at her, silenced by their own astonishment, and Mortimer, looking at Harriet, nodded her approval. Feeling they were in sympathetic agreement, the two women began to talk to each other. Mortimer, Harriet discovered, was drowsy not from alcohol but from lack of sleep. She and a co-driver had driven to Iraq and back, taking it in turns to cat-nap so they could keep going through the night. This, she explained, was against regulations but gave them twenty-four hours of freedom when they got back. The co-driver had taken herself to bed but Mortimer had gone to the Semiramis bar for a drink.
‘Where I met these two blighters,’ she said, yawning, damp-eyed with tiredness yet keeping awake from sheer cordiality.
‘I envy you,’ Harriet said: ‘I was about to join the Wrens but got married instead.’
They talked about the days immediately before the war when there was no longer caution or pretence that a show-down could be avoided. Realizing that war was inevitable, the English were united in a terrible excitement.
‘We were all doomed, or thought we were,’ said Harriet.
Mortimer asked, ‘How did you get out here?’ and Harriet explained that her husband, on leave, was ordered back to his lectureship in Bucharest. He and Harriet, having married in haste, travelled eastwards through countries mobilizing troops and reaching Bucharest on the day England entered the war.
Mortimer, at the same time, was embarking on a troopship for the Middle East. ‘And I might have been with her,’ Harriet thought, before she went on to explain how she and Guy had been evacuated to Greece and then to Egypt.
She asked, ‘What is your first name?’
Mortimer, laughing and yawning at the same time, said, ‘These days I have only one name, I’m Mortimer.’
The rich, red-brown of Mortimer’s round face was set off by the periwinkle blue of her scarf, the privileged wear of a service that had once been voluntary and still had a scapegrace distinction.
‘I suppose I wouldn’t be allowed to join out here?’ Harriet asked.
‘No, there are no training facilities here.’
Angela said: ‘You wouldn’t qualify, darling. To get into Mortimer’s outfit you have to be a lizzie or a drunk or an Irish-woman.’
Looking at Mortimer with her cropped hair, crumpled shirt and dirty cotton slacks, Harriet asked: ‘Which are you?’
‘Me? I drink.’
A small man had come on to the stage wearing white tie and tails. Clasping his hands before him like an opera singer, he opened his mouth but before he could make a sound, a man in the audience bawled: ‘Russian.’ This was immediately taken up and from all over the audience came a clamour of: ‘Russian, Russian, Russian. We want Russian.’ The performer threw out his hands, in a despairing gesture, and Tony asked, ‘What’s all this about?’
Angela told him that the performer sang a gibberish which he could make sound like any language the audience chose, but he could not do Russian. The Cherrypickers, with expressions of concern, looked at each other and Terry said, ‘Can’t do Russian? M’deah, how queah!’
Jackman who had been silent, having no interest in any conversation but his own, now lost patience and said to Castlebar: ‘A tedious lot, our wooden-headed soldiery!’
Apparently not relating this remark to himself, Terry asked him: ‘And what are you doing out here?’
‘War correspondent.’
The Cherrypickers looked him over, noted his expression of baleful belligerency, and realizing that picking on him would be much like picking on a hedgehog, they shifted their attention on to Castlebar who appeared less formidable.
‘What do you do?’
‘I-I-I’m a poet.’
The Cherrypickers collapsed together, clutching each other in an agony of mirth, while Castlebar, his threatening eye-tooth showing on his lower lip, watched them from behind lowered lids. He was gathering himself to speak but Jackman got in first.
‘I’m surprised two priceless specimens like you haven’t come under the protection of BHPA.’ He ran the letters together with an explosive spit that stopped the Cherrypickers in mid-laugh.
‘Come again?’ Terry said.
‘B-P-H-A: Bureau for the Preservation of Hereditary Aristocracy. All the dukes, lords and what-have-yous are being brought back to base for their own safety. Too many of them wiped out in the First War. Can’t let it happen again, can we?’
Terry looked perplexed: ‘Is this true?’
‘Of course it’s true,’ Jackman looked at Harriet: ‘Your friend Lisdoonvarna’s one of them.’
‘Peter? He’s moving heaven and earth to get back to the front.’
‘Well, he won’t get back. He’ll be preserved whether he likes it or not.’
Having impressed everyone at the table, Jackman, slapping his hand down on his knee, sang at the top of his voice:
‘Queen Farida, Queen Farida,
How the boys would like to ride her. . .’
The song had only three traditional verses but Jackman and Castlebar had added to them and as they increased in obscenity, people at neighbouring tables moved their chairs to stare at the singer and his companions. Then the Levantine manager, making a swift journey across the club floor, put a bill down in front of Jackman who came to an indignant stop.
The manager said, ‘You pay. You go.’
‘Go? Go where?’
‘You go away. Iggri.’
‘Like hell I will.’
Angela, picking up the bill, said, ‘Yes, I think we will go.’ As she took out her not
e-case, Jackman raged at her: ‘Don’t give them a cent. We’ll miss the belly dance. If they turn us out, they can’t make us pay. . .’
Angela, speaking with unusual quiet, said, ‘Shut up. This isn’t the first time we’ve been thrown out because of you. I’m getting tired of your behaviour.’
Jackman was thunderstruck by her severity and said nothing while she counted notes in a heap on to the bill. She let the Cherrypickers pay their share but when Simon tried to contribute, she put a hand over his and gently pushed the money away.
‘Where now?’ asked Castlebar.
Angela whispered in his ear. He grinned. ‘Mystery tour,’ she said. ‘Come along,’ and they all followed her out to the road. A row of taxis waited at the club entrance and Angela signalled to the first two. When they were seated, the others saw that Cookson had been left standing on the pavement. Angela beckoned to him but he shook his head and sadly wandered away.
She said: ‘He’s guessed where we’re going. Not his cuppa.’
‘Where are we going?’ Mortimer asked.
‘Wait and see.’
Harriet, too, guessed where they were going and had Simon showed any inclination to leave the party, she would have asked him to see her home; but he seemed bemused by everything about him and she did not wish to leave him alone among a crowd of indifferent strangers.
They seated themselves in the first taxi. Jackman, pushing in beside Mortimer, eyed her with lewd amusement: ‘So you run around in a little lorry? And how do you spend your spare time?’
‘We scrub out the ambulances that bring in the dead and wounded.’
‘Nice work, eh?’
‘Not very nice. The other day one of the girls, who had a cut in her hand, got gas gangrene.’
Scenting a story, Jackman sat up: ‘What happened to her?’
‘She died.’
Jackman sniffed and pulled at his nose while Harriet thought enviously: ‘They belong to a world at war. They have a part in it: they even die,’ but Harriet had no part in anything. She asked Mortimer which route they took to Iraq.
They tried to vary it, Mortimer said, but however they went, they had to cross the Syrian desert. Sometimes they headed straight for Damascus then turned east. Once they went to Homs so they could visit Palmyra but it had been a rough trip and they had broken a spring. Another time they went by the Allenby Bridge over the Jordan so they could see Krak de Chevalier.
‘The Levant sounds wonderful. I’d love to go to Damascus.’
‘We’d give you a lift. We’re not supposed to, of course, but we often pick up people on the roads. The matron says it’s dangerous but women alone are safer here than they are in England. We can thank Lady Hester Stanhope for that. She impressed the Arab world so every Englishwoman has a special status in those parts.’
‘I wish I could go with you.’
Mortimer smiled at her enthusiasm: ‘Any time.’
The taxis had taken them past the Esbekiyah into Clot Bey where women stood in the shadows beneath the Italianate arches. From there they passed into streets so narrow that the pedestrians moved to the walls to enable the taxis to pass. No one, it seemed, needed sleep in this part of the city. Women looked out from every doorway. It was here that the squaddies came in search of entertainment and every café was alight to entice them in. Loudspeakers, hung over entrances, gave out the endless sagas relayed by Egyptian radio, while from indoors came the blare of nikolodeons or player pianos thumping out popular songs.
As the taxis slowed down in the crowded lanes, beggars thrust their hands into the windows and small boys, leaping up and clinging to the framework, shouted: ‘You wan’ my sister? My sister very good, very cheap.’
Jake, putting his face close to them and mimicking their infant voices, shouted back: ‘My sister all pink inside like white lady,’ and the boys screamed with laughter.
The taxis reached a wider street where the women put their heads out of upper windows to importune the new arrivals. Some of them, leaning out too far, betrayed the fact that, richly dressed and bejewelled from the waist up, they were naked below. Jake began to sing: ‘Greek bints and gyppo bints, all around I see, Singing “Young artillery man abide with me”.’ He gave Simon a sharp slap on the knee: ‘You a young artillery man?’
Simon, bewildered, shook his head.
Angela asked him: ‘Do you know where you are?’
Simon, who had been startled by the blow, looked out and asked, ‘Is it the Berka?’
She laughed. ‘The very place!’ The taxis came to a stop in front of a house that looked like a small old-fashioned cinema. ‘If there’s anything to be seen, we’ll see it here.’
The house front was bright with red and yellow neon and there was the usual uproar of Oriental and western music from inside and out; it suggested pleasure, but the pleasure-seekers, queuing outside, were an abject and seedy lot. A doorman controlled the queue and Castlebar was summoned from the second taxi by Angela to negotiate with him.
The English visitors watched as Castlebar and the doorman went down the line, the doorman speaking to each man in turn. Whatever he was trying to arrange did not meet with much response. At last a young man in trousers and crumpled cotton jacket, offered himself and was led away, downcast and down-at-heel, as though to his execution. Castlebar, returning, opened the door of Angela’s taxi: ‘All fixed up,’ he said with satisfaction.
‘What are they going to do with him?’ Mortimer asked.
‘He’s the performer. In return, he’ll get it for nothing.’
Holding to Simon as though fearing he would run away, Angela pushed him towards the door: ‘Now, Sugar, out you get. What lots you’ll have to tell the boys back in the desert.’ She led the way into the house and the rest of the party, too befuddled to ask what was about to happen, followed. Harriet, knowing she would be safer inside than alone in the street with pimps, prostitutes and beggars, went with them. They were shown by a safragi into a downstair room where they stood close together, not speaking, transfixed by nervous curiosity. The room was hot and a smell of carbolic overlaid the resident smells of garlic and ancient sweat.
A half-negro woman, in a dirty pink wrapper, came in through a side door. Fat, elderly, bored and indifferent to the audience, she threw off the wrapper and lay on a bunk, legs apart.
One of the Cherrypickers whispered hoarsely: ‘God, let’s get out of here,’ but he did not move.
The young man from the queue entered, wearing his shirt. He held his trousers in his hand and, giving the audience a sheepish glance, stood as though he did not know what to do next. The woman, having no time to waste, muttered, ‘Tala hinna,’ and held up her arms in a caricature of amorous invitation. The young man looked at her, then fell upon her. The union was brief. As he sank down, spent, she pushed him aside and, throwing the wrapper round her shoulders, made off on flat, grimy feet.
‘Is that all?’ Angela asked. She sounded defrauded but Simon felt they had more reason to feel ashamed.
The young man, left alone, was concerned to get back into his trousers. This done, he crossed to Castlebar, smiling his relief that the show was over. He said: ‘Professor, sir, you do not know me, but I know you. At times I am attending your lectures.’
Castlebar began to stammer his consternation but unable to get a word out, offered the young man a cigarette.
Everyone, from a sense of chivalry, waited while cigarettes were smoked, then Angela, having given undue praise for the young man’s performance, offered him a thousand piastre note.
‘Oh, no, no,’ he took a step back: ‘I do not want. If it pleased you, that is enough.’
Castlebar, at last able to speak, asked him. ‘Do you often give these performances?’
‘No.’ The young man looked dismayed by the question then, fearing he might seem impolite, excused himself: ‘You see, we Egyptians are not like you Europeans. We are liking to do such things in private.’
‘I think it’s time to go,’ Angela said. As t
hey filed out, they each took the young man by the hand and murmured congratulations in an attempt to compensate him for the humiliation they had put upon him.
Two
The taxis, taking them back, stopped first outside Shepherd’s where the Cherrypickers alighted, and Simon said: ‘This will do for me, too.’ As he thanked Angela and said his goodnights, Harriet asked if he would come to supper before his leave was up. He agreed to telephone her but it was a long time before she heard from him again.
The Cherrypickers were standing in front of the hotel. Imagining they would have no use for him he was turning to cross the road when Terry said, ‘Come and have a last one.’
Surprised, taking it more as an order than an invitation, he went with them towards the hotel steps. Even at that hour, the life of the Esbekiyah went on. Dragomen, in important dark robes, carrying heavy sticks, pursued the three officers, offering them: ‘Special for you, many delights.’
‘Thanks, we’ve just had them,’ Terry said, raising a laugh among the people still sitting out at the terrace tables.
Inside, Simon saw by the hotel clock that it was past midnight and he felt himself delivered from the day that had passed. No other day, ever, at any time, could be as black as that day had been. He even felt reconciled to the Cherrypickers, realizing they were not, as he had supposed, insufferably arrogant. Despite their splendid regiment and the advantage it gave them, they had, in fact, been challenged by the civilians and now, alone with him, they became simple and friendly.
He said to Terry, ‘What did you think of the show, sir?’
‘You mean that poor devil with the tart? I thought it pretty poor.’
Tony and Simon joined in agreeing with him and the three were united in their dislike for the exhibition. Simon was also reassured by the hotel interior which reminded him of the Putney Odeon. It was, no doubt, beyond his pocket but was not, as he had feared, beyond his dreams. The atmosphere, however, was disturbed, as though some catastrophe had taken place. Senior officers stood in the hall amid heaps of military baggage, drinking, but with an air of waiting expectancy.
Fortunes of War Page 26
