It was mid-day with the crowds pushing through the streets. On the bridge to Zamalek, she saw that soldiers were on duty directing people going east to walk on one pavement and the westward stream on the other. The taxi driver told her that this had been the king’s own idea and was being enforced on his orders.
She thought, ‘Silly, fat king.’
Coming in sight of the long, white hospital building, she felt she would be thankful to hand herself over to anyone who would accept responsibility for her tired and constantly ailing body.
Ten
The camp was on the move again. Allied forces had broken through the enemy front and Rommel was retreating.
Dawson told Simon: ‘When we catch up with the old fox, we’ll finish him for good and all.’
‘It’s been a great battle.’
‘And a killing battle. The Jocks and the Aussies have had the worst of it.’
Simon told Dawson how one night, when he was lost among the forward troops, he heard bagpipes playing as a Scottish regiment advanced under enemy fire. He felt a catch in his throat as he remembered the thin wail of music but Dawson was not impressed.
‘Foolhardy lot! That piper you heard was a boy with no more idea of modern warfare than his ancestors at Culloden. He walked at the head of the advance, unarmed, playing for dear life.’
‘But did he get through?’
‘Get through? Of course he didn’t get through. He was down in the first ten minutes with his pipes dying out under him. A kid, a mere boy! His CO should’ve known better. Hopeless, these heroics!’
‘Still, it was a pretty good show!’
‘Good enough, but who paid the price? D’you know that one division reached Kidney Ridge led by a corporal? Every officer and NCO killed and no one left to lead except a ruddy corporal! But they got there.’
‘Didn’t the Jocks?’
‘They got there all right, but not because they had a kid blowing bagpipes at the front.’
The forward troops advanced on Matruh and the camp followed them. Now there were only allied aircraft overhead, all travelling westwards to bomb the retreating enemy and the coast road jammed with Italian vehicles. Vast dust clouds on the horizon marked daily skirmishes but there was no major battle to finish Rommel ‘for good and all’.
Simon asked, ‘Where do you think the jerries are?’
Dawson could not say but it was his belief that 8th Army intended to cut the road ahead of the Afrika Korps. ‘And then we’ll have ‘em all in the bag.’
Simon admired Dawson’s prediction but nothing came of it. The Germans were retreating too rapidly to be overtaken and trapped.
Torrents of rain blotted out the ruins of Mersa Matruh and the yellow Matruh sand was spongy with yellow water. To make matters worse, the advance British tanks ran out of petrol and the reconnaissance planes reported: ‘No sign of Rommel in the next eighty miles.’
Simon asked Dawson, ‘Where do you think he’s got to?’
‘Seems like the desert fox has gone away.’
The rain stopped and the tarmac coast road gleamed and steamed in the afternoon sun. The sea, that had been leaden, regained colour and brilliance, and Simon, driving beside it, felt the excitement of the chase. During all his time in Egypt, the regions beyond the frontier had been enemy territory. Now he felt the whole of North Africa was opening to him.
The wire, great barbed rolls of it, put up by the Italians to keep the Senussi tribesmen out of Libya, was blasted with holes through which the allied armour and transports followed the defeated enemy out of Egypt. Simon, pursuing the pursuers, came to Sollum and Crosbie drove them up the escarpment through Halfaya Pass amidst a jam of military vehicles. This was the famous pass that the troops called Hellfire. The story was that a grounded airman was likely to be seized and held for ransom by the Bedu who would send his testicles to G H Q in proof of his sex and colour. Now it seemed petrol fumes rather than the risk of castration justified the nickname. At the top, they came on the white crenellated fortress of Capuzzo, much shot about, its ornamental gateway declaring itself to be: ‘The Gateway of the Italian Army’.
The camp leaguered behind the mud-brick remains of Upper Sollum and Simon, with nothing to do till supper-time, walked down the escarpment to the lower village. From the distance, it looked a pretty place. A collection of small villas had been built on pink rocks beside a curving bay of pink sand. It was early evening and a mist, like fine powder, overhung the translucent green of the sea.
Coming down into it, he saw that the place was deserted and in ruins. The villas were collapsing into heaps of raw clay but plant life had sprung up after the rain. Bougainvillaea mantled the broken walls and the garden areas were furred over with new grass. During the five months’ lull, while the contestants faced each other at Alamein, the splintered trees had regained themselves and the bougainvillaea had flowered. In one pit, that had once held a house, poinsettias covered the ground so thickly, they formed a counterpane of scarlet lace.
The town was a small, seaside town and the fact made Simon think of Crosbie. He was beginning to like Crosbie better and had even learnt something about him. Crosbie’s parents kept a shop in a small seaside town on the Lincolnshire coast. It was some time before Crosbie was brought to reveal that the shop was a fish shop and when the war started, he was just beginning to learn the trade.
‘Did you like being a fishmonger?’ Simon asked.
‘Well, it’s a job, isn’t it?’
‘You wouldn’t rather do something else?’
‘I did do something else. Sometimes, I drove the van.’
That, so far, was all Simon had learnt about Crosbie but it had roused his curiosity. Somewhere behind his blunt, blank face Crosbie had memories of another life lived before the war brought him here. In spite of his determination to avoid emotional relationships, Simon was becoming attached to Crosbie because, like Ridley, he felt the need for an attachment of some sort.
He wandered down to a small central square where a jacaranda, earliest of flowering trees, had covered itself with blue rosettes as though to hide its own desecration. He came to a café where a single chair had been left standing on a mosaic floor. The mosaic surprised him, then he realized this must have been an Italian town, an Italian seaside town.
He tried to imagine Crosbie’s small town shattered as this place was shattered, and he said to himself, ‘Lord, the things we do to other people’s countries!’
Eleven
The American Hospital had one of the most pleasing aspects in Cairo. Harriet, put to bed in a white, air-conditioned room with a balcony, lay for a long time with her eyes shut, waiting for someone to come and investigate her condition. When no one came, she opened her eyes and staring out at the empty sky, she thought of her death in a foreign place. The poet Mangan had died of cholera and that death seemed nearer than all the deaths in Upper Egypt. Like Yakimov, who had died in Greece, she would be buried in dry, alien earth where her body would quickly turn to dust and she would never see England again. The prospect did not greatly upset her, she felt too tired. She thought of Aidan crawling into the canvas shelter to die and could not see that she, herself, had much more reason to go on living.
She was roused by the Armenian nurse who told her in an awed whisper: ‘Doctor come.’
The doctor was not, as she had expected, an American, but an Egyptian who spoke with an American accent. He announced himself: ‘Shafik,’ and bowed slightly.
‘You have thrown up, yes?’
‘No.’
‘But your insides are upset? For how long?’
‘A long time, on and off.’
‘And now worse?’
‘Yes.’
Dr Shafik examined her critically, without sympathy, almost resentfully, as though annoyed that she should be there. She found his manner disconcerting and his appearance more disconcerting. Most Egyptians put on weight and looked middle-aged when they were thirty. Dr Shafik, who was thirty or more, had preserv
ed his facial good looks as well as the slim elegance she had occasionally noted among young officers at the Officers’ Club. He picked up her hand and examined it as though it were an entity all on its own.
‘How much do you weigh?’
‘Seven stone. That’s one hundred pounds.’
‘I think not. I think you weigh not even eighty pounds, but we shall see. One thing I can say: you haven’t cholera.’ He obviously thought her a fool for choosing such a sickness: ‘There is no cholera in this part of Egypt.’
‘I’ve just come from Upper Egypt where people are dying in hundreds.’
‘Not of cholera. Malaria, more likely. Upper Egypt is malaria country.’
‘Is there an epidemic form of malaria?’
Harriet’s spirit broke the severe calm of Shafik’s face. His long, firm mouth twitched slightly but he turned away before the twitch could become a smile. Leaving the room, he said, ‘Tomorrow we will make tests, then we can see if you are ill or not.’
The possibility that she was not ill heartened Harriet and, seeing no reason to stay in bed, she rose, put on her dressing-gown and went out on to the balcony. The balcony overlooked the Gezira sports grounds. A grove of blue gums lined the hospital drive and looking down on them, she could see the crowns of blue-grey leaves moving and glittering in the wind. A couple of long cane chairs were on the balcony and sitting out in the brief splendour of the evening light, she was less inclined to contemplate death in Egypt. Instead she reflected on the recent news: the fact that Tobruk had been recaptured and Montgomery’s claim that he had smashed the German and Italian armies, and she began to think of the war ending and a normal life beginning again. They could go back to England. With all that before her, why should she think of dying?
The crickets, brought out by the cooling air, were noisy in the grass below. As the sun sank, the different playing-fields — the polo ground, the golf course, the cricket field, the race course — merged into a greensward so spacious, it was like an English parkland. The club servants came out with lengths of hose and began to spray the grass with Nile water. As the light failed and mist rose from the ground, the white robes of the men glimmered through the twilight. The haze deepened over the acres of green but even when it had turned to dark, the servants were still visible, drifting about in their dilatory way, an assembly of shadows.
The nurse, who called herself Sister Metrebian, came looking for Harriet. Speaking in a small, gentle voice, she said, ‘You should not be out here in the cold, Mrs Pringle,’ but she left it for Harriet to decide whether she would go in or not. She was a yellow-skinned, plain, very thin, little woman with a solemn expression that, whatever her emotions might be, never altered. She simply stood and watched Harriet until Harriet rose from the chair and returned to bed. She was sitting up, her supper finished, when Guy entered amid his usual clutter of books and papers, and with his usual air of having made a temporary landing during a flight round the earth.
He kissed her, sat on the bed and said he could not stay long. Pushing his glasses up into his hair, he gazed quizzically at her and asked, ‘What are you doing here? What’s the matter?’
‘I don’t know, but it isn’t cholera.’
‘No one thought it was, did they?’
‘Yes. Dobson couldn’t get me out of the flat quickly enough.’
He shook his head, smiling with a frown between his brows. Worried by her loss of weight, he had wanted her to apply for a passage on the ship taking women and children to England, but that did not mean that, here and now, he could believe she was really ill.
‘How long will they keep you here?’
‘If there is nothing much wrong, I might be out tomorrow.’
This sensible reply cheered him and at once convinced that there was no cause for concern, he lifted her hand and said, ‘Little monkey’s paw! You won’t be here long.’
That settled, he put aside the question of her health and talked of other things. It was not simply that he wished her to be well. Sickness of any sort was an embarrassment to him because he did not believe in it. Forced to accept that whether he believed or not, it existed, he saw it as a self-imposed condition, a mental aberration related to witchcraft, religion, belief in the super-natural and similar follies. So far as Harriet herself was concerned, he suspected a deep-seated discontent but as this could not relate to him or his behaviour, he preferred to forget about it.
‘What happened in Luxor? Why did Angela come back so soon?’
Harriet told him of Angela’s sudden anxiety and need to return and assure herself that Castlebar was alive and well.
‘She’s crazy,’ Guy said. ‘You do realize that, don’t you? The woman’s mad.’
Harriet laughed and went on to the subject of Aidan Pratt, describing their meeting and dinner at his hotel.
‘He told me how he had been torpedoed in mid-Atlantic . . .’
‘Yes, he told me, too. When we first met in Alexandria.’
So the confidence had not been, after all, a confidence. She could not doubt Aidan still suffered from the experience but she suspected that now he preserved his suffering and, relating it, felt himself enhanced by it.
She said, ‘He tells it very well,’ but Guy had lost interest in Aidan and would not discuss him or his misadventure.
‘I’ve a lot on at the moment: not only the entertainment for the troops but Pinkrose’s lecture is in the offing. He’s fussing a lot. My idea had been a reasonably sized audience in the Institute hall but he thinks we should hire the ballroom at the Semiramis or the Continental-Savoy.’
Professor Lord Pinkrose had been sent out from England to give an important lecture in Bucharest but had arrived amidst political disorder so no lecture was possible. He had hoped to make up for this in Athens where there had been the same difficulty in finding a hall. In the end he had lectured at a garden luncheon given in Major Cookson’s Phaleron villa. ‘A glittering party’, he had described it: ‘A sumptuous affair’. He clearly expected the Cairo lecture to be something of the same sort.
Harriet laughed: ‘Why not get the ambassador to lend the Embassy ballroom?’
‘Yes, he thought of that, too, and made me speak to Dobson who said it’s been shut up for the duration. Pinkrose says if I don’t make it a big social occasion, he won’t give the lecture. I’ve got to humour him because the university people are impressed by him. He’s a bigger name than any of us realized.’
As Guy lifted his wrist to look at his watch, Harriet said, ‘Don’t go. When your evening begins, mine will end. So stay a little longer.’
Guy settled back on his chair but it was evident he would go soon. ‘I’ve a rehearsal with Edwina this evening. I promised I’d pick her up.’
Remembering the interlude she had overheard that afternoon, Harriet said, ‘I’m not sure she’ll feel like going.’
‘Yes, of course she will.’ Guy spoke with easy certainty, having found that people usually did what he wanted them to do.
‘I suppose you’re right.’
She had seen that, caught in the radiance of his enthusiasm, everyone proved to be a player at heart. Everyone, that was, except Harriet. She had been cast for the main part in his first production but after a couple of rehearsals, he had put her out of it. He said she was too involved with him but the truth was, she suspected, he felt she was not impressed, as the others were, by his personal magnetism. She was inclined to be critical.
For her part, she not only resented the time spent on the productions but she dreaded their possible failure. He had managed well enough so far. In Bucharest he had drawn in the whole of the British colony: a ready-made audience. In Athens, where every serviceman was a hero, he had had almost too much help and support. But here, in this big heterogeneous and indifferent city, where the soldiers were provided for and entertained till they were tired of entertainment, who would care?
She made a last appeal to him: ‘Must you go on with this show? Haven’t you enough to do?’
<
br /> ‘I never have enough to do.’ He jumped up, enlivened by the thought of the evening ahead: ‘You wouldn’t want my energy to go to waste, would you?’
She saw that only his constant activity enabled him to live with himself and she felt helpless against it. She began to see their differences as irreconcilable. He was never ill and did not understand illness. She wanted a union of mutual devotion while he saw marriage merely as a frame to hold an indiscriminate medley of relationships that, as often as not, were too capacious to be contained. She sighed and closed her eyes and this gave him excuse to go.
‘It won’t hurt you to have a rest in bed. I expect you overdid it, sight-seeing in Luxor.’
As he was leaving, Sister Metrebian came in with sleeping-tablets for Harriet. The sight of her with her plain face, her small chocolate-brown eyes, her reticence and air of enclosed sadness, brought Guy to a stop.
She offered the tablets to Harriet who said she did not need them. Sister Metrebian gently persisted: ‘I am sorry, but you must take them. Dr Shafik wants you to sleep very well so tomorrow you will be fresh for the tests.’
Feeling he must make a gesture towards the nurse, Guy said cheerfully: ‘I can see the patient is in good hands,’ and as he smiled admiringly on her, Sister Metrebian’s sallow cheeks were tinged with pink. Although she was by nature quiet, conveying her requests by movements rather than words, she said when Guy had gone: ‘What a nice man!’
Growing drowsy, Harriet, lying in darkness, drifted in memory till she seemed back again in the haunted strangeness of childhood. She had had pneumonia when she was a little girl. At first it was thought to be merely influenza and she had been put to rest on the living-room sofa, facing the fire. She remembered how the fire and the fireplace and the clock above it and the ornaments had become insubstantial, as though made of some glowing, shifting, magical stuff that enhanced the luxury of lying there, wrapped in warmth and comfort, drifting in and out of consciousness.
Fortunes of War Page 37
