Fortunes of War

by Olivia Manning

  The few officers and nurses at the other tables seemed unaffected by the conditions outside the train. Seeing that one of the men wore the insignia of a medical officer, Angela called to him, ‘Doctor, what’s the matter here? The whole place is a graveyard.’

  The doctor, looking out, appeared to see the graves for the first time. ‘Rum go,’ he said and shouted for the head waiter. Why, he wanted to know, had the epidemic not been reported to the army?

  ‘Hotels want people to come,’ the head waiter earnestly explained.

  ‘They do, do they? And what have they got here? Plague, smallpox, spotted fever? — some little thing like that?’

  The head waiter grinned. Taking the doctor’s angry humour for facetiousness, he tried to make light of the trouble: ‘It is nothing. It is a thing they have here.’

  The doctor’s tone changed: ‘Come on, what is it?’

  Challenged by this important-sounding officer, the head waiter went back to his subordinates and they conferred together. He returned to say: ‘Malaria, effendi. Not too bad. You take quinine, you all very well.’

  The doctor rejected malaria and made his own decision. He told his fellow diners: ‘It’s probably cholera. Nothing to worry about if you’re careful. Eat only cooked food, and eat it hot. Avoid tap water, salads, fresh fruit. Drink bottled spring water. French, if you can get it.’

  Reassured, Harriet and Angela began to discuss the dangers of life in the Middle East. Harriet told how she had danced at the Turf Club with an officer who was sickening for smallpox. Angela, becoming more animated, said she had been to a dinner-party where a certain Major Beamish was expected but did not arrive: ‘Then another guest, an MO, said, “I did a PM on a chap called Beamish this morning” and the host said “It couldn’t be our Beamish. He was alive and well when we saw him last night.” But it was their Beamish. While we waited for him, he was in his grave, dead in the night of poliomyelitis.’

  Harriet had never heard of poliomyelitis. Angela said, ‘If you get it here, it hits you hard. You’re gone in no time.’ Though she essayed this information herself, it had a dire effect upon her. She sat silent, staring out at the graves and the palm fronds that were drying and turning yellow. Soon they would be blown away and the graves with them. They would be sifted by the wind, one into the other, until the ground was flat again and the dead forgotten. She whispered, ‘People can die so suddenly,’ and she was distraught by her own fancies.

  They drew into Luxor. Outside the station, a funeral was passing: a flimsy, open coffin, held aloft by four men, was followed by the family and professional mourners who enacted grief by howling and throwing dust over their heads.

  Angela, about to call a gharry, stopped and said, ‘Harriet, I can’t stay. I must go back.’

  ‘Oh, Angela, surely you’re not afraid?’

  ‘Not for myself — of course not. I just can’t bear being so far from Bill. Anything might happen to him. Suppose he died in the night as Beamish did?’

  ‘It’s not very likely. And even if you went back: what could you do? What difference would it make?’

  ‘Only that I was there. I would be near him, not four hundred miles away.’

  Harriet tried to reason with her: ‘Be sensible, Angela. Beamish was only one person. Think of all the English people who haven’t died here, so why should Bill be in peculiar danger?’

  ‘In this place, we’re all in peculiar danger. Any one of us might die any minute.’ Angela’s face, with its delicate, dry skin, was taut with fear, and Harriet saw that reasoning was useless. Even if she could be persuaded to stay, she would be miserable. Persuading her against her will would be a cruelty.

  Harriet, reconciling herself to their return, said, ‘Very well. If we must go back, we must. Let’s find when the train goes.’

  ‘No, not you. You must stay. I’ll go alone. It doesn’t matter about me, I’ve seen all the sights, I know the place inside and out. But it’s all new to you. You must stay and enjoy it.’

  Harriet, who had no wish to enjoy it alone, tried to argue but Angela insisted that Harriet remain in Luxor while she went back to Cairo. Finding that the train would not return until late in the evening, she decided to go to the hotel with Harriet. She must wait for time to pass.

  Angela had booked them into the old Winter Palace, a pleasant building beside the Nile, its portico heavily embowered with verdure, its terrace overhung by palms.

  The day was still early, the light pale and the soft, cool air scented by some flowering tree. Harriet said, ‘What a delightful place,’ and driving in the gharry, silent on the sandy roads, she longed for Angela to remain with her. But the funerals, passing one after the other, aggravated Angela’s nervous condition. She explained to Harriet that only the bodies were buried, the coffins were kept to be used again. Some of them, padded, draped and fringed, denoted victims from affluent families but others had been too poor even to hire a coffin. The bodies, closely wrapped in cloth, were carried on a board with a symbol to denote the sex: a fez for the male and a flow of hair for the female. But each, whether rich or poor, male or female, had its dusty crew of women mourners, the wails of one procession scarcely fading before those of another could be heard.

  The piercing ululations followed Harriet and Angela even into the haven of the hotel. As they sat under the palms, watching the traffic on the narrow waterway between the quay and the island opposite, Angela was too distracted even to order a drink. Seeing her with her face set in a mask of suffering, Harriet knew she was thinking of her son, a beautiful boy for whose death she had, in a way, been responsible. In those days she had painted pictures and while she was too intent on her work to notice, he had picked up a live grenade which had exploded in his hand.

  As she remembered this, Harriet could understand Angela’s state of mind. After such a tragedy, how could she trust anyone to remain alive? — least of all Castlebar whom she loved and longed for.

  They went in to luncheon where, for a while, she discussed the question of what they should or should not eat, but this did not last long. Throwing the menu aside, she said, ‘What does it matter? If I could die, it would be the easiest way out.’

  Somehow they got through the day. After supper, the gharry called as arranged and Harriet, glad of something to do, went with Angela to the station. At the station, she made a last appeal: ‘Don’t you think you could stay for a couple of days?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry, Harriet. I know it’s mean to leave you alone here. But I must go back.’

  There was no one else in the first-class compartment. Angela was given a berth in a long row of empty berths and, standing in the doorway, she said, ‘Don’t wait, Harriet. Goodbye,’ then shut herself in to suffer through the night.

  As she returned in the gharry to the hotel, an intense loneliness came down on Harriet. At that time of night, the streets were empty, the river empty of shipping. The gharry driver, and the horse plodding silently through silence, seemed to be the only other creatures in a deserted world.

  Above the low houses the sky appeared vast and its great staring but indifferent expanse enhanced the solitude. Her bedroom, when she reached it, looked as void as the town. It was very large and her bed, shrouded in a sand-fly net, was islanded in the middle of the floor. Getting into it and covering herself with a sheet and a single blanket, she closed the net against the dangers of the night. Angela’s flight had reduced her to a sense of friendlessness but as she lay down to sleep, she, too, said, ‘What does it matter?’ though she did not intend to die. Instead, she said, ‘I’ve survived other things. I’ll survive this,’ and so went to sleep.

  The desk clerk offered her a number of sight-seeing trips and she accepted them all. The first started immediately after breakfast. The tourists gathered beneath the riverside palms in air so cool, it seemed to blow off the sea. Harriet thought, ‘Paradise must be like this,’ then the funerals started again. Those who had died during the night must be buried before the heat of mid-day.
r />   A string of gharries stood outside the hotel. Harriet, seated alone in the first of them, found funerals passing beside her. She could look into the open coffins and see the dark, peaked faces of people who appeared to have died of starvation. This went on until the dragoman, appearing to take charge of the tourists, ordered the mourners to the other side of the road. They shifted ground without protest and without a pause in their lamentations.

  The dragoman, complacent in his authority, was a large Nubian, his size enhanced by a full, dark blue kaftan, lavishly trimmed with gold. His stick was taller and heavier than those usually carried and it was topped by an ivory head as big as a skull. He chose to ride in Harriet’s gharry and though he sat beside the driver, it was evident he saw himself as superior to the members of the party.

  The gharries went from hotel to hotel, picking up nurses and army officers. At the last hotel there was only one person waiting, an officer, and as he, too, was alone, he was directed by the dragoman to the leading gharry. He paused, his foot on the step, and staring at Harriet, asked, ‘Are you real? — or have I conjured you out of a dream?’

  It was a rhetorical question, expressively spoken, and Harriet laughed at it: ‘Get in, Aidan. If I’d never seen you before, I would have known you were an actor.’

  ‘Was an actor,’ the officer corrected her as he sat down beside her. On the London stage he had taken the name of Aidan Sheridan but in the army had reverted to his real name which was Pratt. He was a captain in the Pay Corps, based in Syria but as often as he could, came to Egypt on duty or pleasure. In the past, Harriet had heard him speak bitterly of his broken career but that morning his tone was one of humorous resignation to his present position.

  As soon as he could without appearing precipitant, he asked, ‘I suppose Guy isn’t with you?’

  It was the question Harriet expected. When he came to Cairo, it was in hope of seeing Guy, and though she pitied him, she could only say, ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘So you’re here alone?’

  ‘I didn’t come alone, but I’m alone now. I was abandoned.’

  He gave her a startled glance, suspecting some interrupted liaison, and she laughed again: ‘A woman friend came with me, but at the sight of the funerals, she went straight back to Cairo.’

  ‘I can’t say I blame her. I, too, felt scared when I realized what was going on here.’

  ‘Oh, Angela wasn’t scared, at least not for herself. She began thinking of death — someone else’s death — and she couldn’t bear to stay.’

  Aidan, aware that the only death he had thought of was his own, grew red and, taking her words for a reprimand, turned away. She had forgotten how easy it was to upset him and regretted what she had said. He was morbidly sensitive but, more than that, he had been marked by some experience that he promised one day to reveal to her. He was a young man, still in his mid-twenties, but his large, dark eyes were set in hollows of dark skin and their expression suggested a rooted unhappiness. They had seldom met yet they had become friends. She had taken him to the Muski where he had bought a small votive cat made of iron and mounted on a block of cornelian. It was a gift for his mother but he had asked Harriet to keep it for him, saying he lost things because he no longer had the sense that anything was worth keeping. Speaking of the experience that had so terribly impaired him, he had said, ‘There are some memories that are beyond bearing, except that we have to bear them.’

  Now, meeting him again in this delectable place, she saw he was still burdened by a memory beyond bearing.

  A long, riverside road was leading them to the site of Karnac. The gharries stopped outside the walls and the dragoman, walking impressively, led his party into a compound and, making a circular movement with his stick, required its members to stand about him at a respectful distance. He pointed to the temple of Ammon.

  ‘This am very great place. Biggest building in the world. This avenue is sphinxes, only not sphinxes. They is sheep.’

  ‘Rams, surely?’ Aidan murmured.

  Ignoring him, the dragoman swept round like a whirling dervish and strode towards the main complex of buildings: ‘You alls follow me.’

  In the Hypostyle Hall, while the others were held by a rigmarole about Ramses XII, Harriet slid behind the group and made her way among the crowded pillars that stood, calm but watchful, like trees in a forest. She felt that their number and closeness were designed to puzzle, for apart from puzzlement she could see little point in congestion simply for congestion’s sake. As for the puzzle: she had the curious illusion that she had, at one time, solved it but had forgotten the solution. Gazing up at the capitals, she saw that only some of them were bud capitals, the others were decorated with the papyrus calyx, and she imagined that in the irregular placing of these two designs there was a clue to the mystery. But the heat was growing and as she wandered about, all she could feel was wonderment without hope of understanding.

  Aidan, coming to look for her, said, ‘Our dragoman’s a mine of misinformation. I’m not surprised you made off. Come with me. The sun’s almost overhead — there’s something I want to show you.’

  She followed him out to the courtyard and across to a small building that was lit by a hagioscope in the front wall. Putting his eye to the hole, Aidan smiled his satisfaction then gestured to her to come and look for herself. She, too, put her eye to the hole and saw inside, lit by a shaft of sunlight from the roof, the head of a cat. It was the same cat whose image Aidan had bought in the Muski but this was more than life-size, a black basalt head on top of a column, gazing with remote, mild gaze into its own eternal seclusion.

  ‘The god in the sanctuary.’

  ‘Yes,’ Aidan looked pleased: ‘I thought you would recognize it.’

  The afternoon excursion was to the tombs on the other side of the river. Crossing in a boat, Harriet felt on her bare head a pressure that was almost painful, and she realized how soon the respite of winter would be over and this paradisal little town would become an inferno for those not born to it.

  On the opposite bank, in a field that had once been inundated by the Nile, two ruined figures sat enthroned among the sugar beet. Their dark colour, their immense height, their worn and featureless faces looking towards Karnac, imparted such an impression of regal dignity, Harriet would have chosen to contemplate them in silence. The dragoman was not permitting that.

  ‘Them, all two, is Memnon, not singing any more. Memnon very brave Greek man killed in battle. Him buried here.’

  Aidan said, ‘Nonsense.’

  A nurse with a guide book, agreed. ‘It says here they’re statues of Amenophis III.’

  The dragoman stood in front of nurse and book as though to obliterate them and pushed his face towards Aidan. His eyes, brown, in balls of glossy white, started in anger from their sockets. He shouted, ‘You is guide, then, Mister Officer? OK. You go guide your own self. I finish. I go.’

  He swept off and went at a furious pace back to the river’s edge but there had to stop. The ferry had returned to Luxor.

  The nurse, dismayed by his departure, said to the others, ‘Oh dear! I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings. Should I go and tell him I’m sorry? I might persuade him to come back.’

  Before anyone else could speak, Aidan, assuming an ironical air of authority, said, ‘Certainly not. He doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. We’re better off without him,’ and the others, impressed by the act, let themselves be conducted to where some donkeys and old taxis stood ready to take them into the Valley of the Kings. The drivers, seeing the dragoman dismissed, were jubilant while the dragoman himself, realizing what was happening, came running back, bawling at the top of his voice, ‘You no go without guide. Law says no one go without guide,’ but the tourists were already in the taxis and the drivers, gleefully starting up, were away before he reached them. While he raged behind them, they went bumping and swaying up the rocky track to the valley where the kings and queens of Upper and Lower Egypt had left their earthly remains.
/>   On the quay, when they returned there, Aidan asked Harriet if she would have dinner with him that evening. It was arranged that she should go to his hotel by gharry but the evening was so pleasant, she decided to walk. The sun was setting in a lustre of crimson and gold and the Nile, small compared with the great river of Cairo, ran in loops of coloured light under the brilliant sky. She paused to look down into the walled hollow that held the Temple of Luxor. There was a mosque among the jumble of remains and a man, probably the attendant, looked up, grinning, and said, ‘Ghost, ghost.’ He seemed to expect her to run and was disconcerted when she leant over the wall and asked, ‘Is there really a ghost?’ but he could only repeat, ‘Ghost, ghost,’ and she laughed and went down to the quayside to walk under the palms.

  The terrace of Aidan’s hotel was built out over the water and served as a dining-room. It was roofed with greenery but closely netted against flying creatures and insects. One end was open to reveal the evening colours of the river but the inner area was shadowed and candles, their flames motionless inside tulip shades of engraved glass, were on the tables. There were less than a dozen diners, senior officers and their women, but the menu that Aidan held in front of his face was of a size that might have catered for a hundred. Hearing Harriet arrive beside him, he looked suspiciously round it, then reassured by the sight of her, he put it down. He had placed a lily beside her plate, a white blaze bigger than the evening star, its central petals tied into a cone with thread. She knew he was trying to be gallant, but it was not easy for him. Yet they were oddly in sympathy, both wanting the same person and wishing he were here.

  Aidan said, ‘How about lobster? The waiter tells me it was flown in this morning from Aqaba.’

  The lobster, when it came, was cold under a mayonnaise sauce and Harriet thought it delicious until she realized the danger of eating it. She put her fork down, her appetite gone, and Aidan asked with concern, ‘Are you all right? I thought you looked strained, and you’ve lost weight, haven’t you? How do you feel?’