‘Yes, of course I’m coming,’ Harriet said and sighed.
She wondered now how long Marion would require her support. Angela had planned a life for herself and Harriet but neither thought to ask what Marion would do in England. Harriet, who often heard Marion sobbing behind the closed door of her room, had decided to find out.
She asked her, ‘When you get to England, where will you go?’ and was dismayed when Marion, her voice breaking, replied, ‘I don’t know.’ She told Harriet that her parents were in India and her husband was expecting her to stay with his mother: ‘But I know she doesn’t want me. She’s only got a small flat and there’ll be nowhere for Richard to play. I keep asking myself, “Where will I go?” and I don’t know. I don’t know.’
‘Why are you going at all?’
‘It was Jim’s idea. Richard’s always unwell in Iraq and he gets on Jim’s nerves. The truth is, Jim wanted me to go.’
This confession had a fatal ring for Harriet who, remembering it as she walked round the paths among the captive animals, thought, ‘They want to get rid of us.’ The friend who had made all possible, had deserted her. Left with an ailing woman, a complete stranger, who clung to her simply because there was no one else, she wondered, ‘What on earth will I do with Marion all the way round the Cape and perhaps in England as well?’
She paused before one cage and another. The animals, comatose in the afternoon heat, seemed content enough. Then she came to a polar bear and stopped, appalled at finding an arctic animal in this climate. The bear was in a circular cage, not very big, an island of concrete surrounded by bars that rose up to a central dome from which water trickled constantly. The bear, sitting motionless under the stream, hung its head, torpid in its heavy white coat. Harriet felt it was in despair and leaning towards it, she whispered, ‘Bear,’ but it did not move. She was about to move on but, unwilling to leave the creature unaided, she went closer to the cage and stood for a long time, trying to contact the animal’s senses through the medium of her intense pity for it. It did not move. She knew she could not stand there for ever but before she went, she said aloud, ‘If I could do anything for you, I would do it with my whole heart. But the world is against us. All I can do, is go away.’
As Dobson had predicted, word came that the ship would sail on 28 December. The passengers were to board the boat train for Suez at ten a.m. on the sailing date.
‘I’m sure you’re thankful,’ Guy said: ‘You must be tired of all this hanging about.’
‘I’m tired of the whole situation, but it’s too late to argue about it. I suppose you’ll come with me to Suez?’
‘Come to Suez?’ Guy was abashed by the very suggestion: ‘How could I possibly come to Suez? You know the show is on New Year’s Eve, and I’ll be rehearsing day and night till it goes on.’
Harriet, expecting no other reply, was not even disappointed by it but said, ‘The train is at ten a.m. tomorrow. I suppose you will come to the station to see me off?’
‘Of course.’ Guy, stung by the ironical inexpectancy of Harriet’s tone, became apologetic: ‘I’m sorry I can’t come to Suez, darling. It never entered my head you would want me to, but I will be at the station. I’ll dash into the office first thing then, when I’ve looked through my letters, I’ll go straight to the station. I’ll get there before you arrive.’
Next morning, left alone in the flat, Harriet and Marion sat in the living-room, waiting to depart. The flat was silent; even Richard, tensed by the unusual atmosphere, had ceased to cry. Hassan had been sent out to find two taxis, the extra one to take the excess luggage.
The others had said their goodbyes after breakfast. Edwina, flinging her arms round Harriet, burst into tears: ‘What shall I do without you?’ and Harriet, remembering Peter’s answer to the same question, breathed in Edwina’s gardenia scent and wondered what would become of her.
Its sweet redolence still hung in the air. The curtains and shutters were closed for the day and the two women, seeing each other, shadowy across the room, were on edge, facing the change from a known world to one where everything would be different.
Hassan returned. The taxis had been brought to the door and now the travellers could start on their journey. It was the congested hour of the morning and as the taxis were held up in traffic, Harriet became perturbed, imagining Guy losing patience at the station and perhaps going away. But they arrived in good time and he was nowhere to be seen. She put Marion into a carriage then ran from one end of the platform to the other, searching among groups of people, unable to find him. The guard, coming towards her, shutting the carriage doors and unfurling his green flag, called to the passengers to get on board.
The train was full of young mothers and children and Harriet, finding her carriage, was greeted with unusual buoyancy by Marion, happy at being in the company of others like herself.
Hanging from the window, feeling the train about to start, Harriet saw Guy making his way along the platform, searching short-sightedly for her face among the faces at the windows. She shouted to him and he came running, his glasses sliding down his nose, already beginning a lengthy excuse for failing to be there sooner. Someone had come into the office just as he was about to leave.
‘Had to have a word with him . . . Didn’t realize . . . So sorry . . .’
The little time left to them was taken up by these excuses, yet what else was there to be said? Harriet stretched her hand down to him and he was able to hold it for a second or two before the train moved and drew it from his grasp. He followed the carriage at a jog-trot, still trying to tell her something but, whatever it was, it was lost in noise as the train gathered speed.
Leaning out further, waving to him, she could see him pushing his glasses up to his brow and straining to see her, but almost at once she was too far away to see or be seen.
Marion had kept a seat for her and she sank into it, unaware of the people about her, still holding to a vision of Guy standing, peering after the train, looking perplexed because he had lost sight of her. She did not suppose he would be perplexed for long. She could imagine, as he turned back to his own employments, his buttocks and shoulders moving with the energetic excitement of having so much to do.
And what could come of all that activity? He ate himself up. He dissipated himself in ephemeral entertainments like this show that would be a one-day’s wonder and just about pay its way. To someone moving so rapidly through life, reality and unreality merged and were one and the same thing. There were times when she felt he drained her life as well as his own, but he had physical strength. He could renew himself and she could not.
He had said the climate was killing her but now, seeing the relationship from a distance, she felt the killing element was not the heat of Cairo but Guy himself.
Marion was sitting next to a woman Harriet did not know, but knew about. She was the Mrs Rutter who had once reproached Jake Jackman for being a civilian. A rich widow, she had about her the confident certainty of one who knew that her world was the only world that mattered. The war had not changed it much. She lived in one of the great houses on Gezira and kept a retinue of servants. Harriet wondered why she was leaving this land of plenty for their beleaguered homeland where she would be no more privileged than any other woman.
She was asking Marion probing little questions, keeping herself at a distance until she discovered that Marion’s husband was a diplomat in Baghdad. At this, Mrs Rutter became affable and looked approvingly at Marion and made advances to Richard who was persuaded to give her a smile. She had on her knee a large shagreen jewel-case and Marion, returning favours, said, ‘What a beautiful case!’
‘Yes, it is beautiful,’ Mrs Rutter warmly agreed: ‘I treasure it. Whenever I travel, I carry it myself, heavy though it is.’
As they talked about the jewel-case, Marion, holding Richard on her knee, put her cheek down on the top of his head, knowing she had the greater treasure.
They were now out in the desert and Mrs Rutter, saying th
e light was too keen for her, pulled down the dusty, dark blue oil-cloth blind over the carriage window. The window was open and the blind flapped in the wind. Richard closed his eyes, thinking night had fallen, and lay like a little ghost in Marion’s arms.
The other passengers fell silent in the steamy penumbra and Mrs Rutter, not wishing to be overheard, whispered to Marion, apparently conveying facts too sacred to be widely circulated. In England, she said, she had a married daughter the same age as Marion. ‘And three little grandchildren. I’ve never seen them, so I’m going home to enjoy them while they’re still babies.’
Enthralled by this information, Marion talked about her coming confinement: ‘I’m sure Richard will be easier to deal with when he’s not the only one. I always think one should have two or three.’
Mrs Rutter fervently agreed: ‘What is a home without children?’ she asked.
Harriet, not included in the conversation, thought ‘. . .or without a husband?’ She could see between Marion and Mrs Rutter a swift growing up of friendship that was likely to intensify until, on board the ship, Marion would be a surrogate daughter to the old lady, Mrs Rutter a surrogate mother to the pregnant woman. As she felt the burden of Marion slip away from her, Harriet could see even less reason now for being on a train where the younger children were peevish, the older obstreperous and the grown-ups suffocating in semi-darkness.
Hours had passed, or so it seemed, when, pulling aside the blind, she saw the canal: a flat ribbon of turquoise water lying between dazzling flats of sand. They were coming into Suez. Between the grimy house-backs, hung with washing, she could see the bazaars and wished she could visit them. But the passengers were not here on a sight-seeing tour. The train ran straight on to the quay and they had their first sight of the ship. It had a name at last. It was called the Queen of Sparta.
For some reason, the classical allusion jolted Harriet with fear: an elusive fear. She could make nothing of it as they climbed down to the quay and stood in the sea wind with the sea, itself, lapping the quayside. Then another departure came to her mind, the departure from Greece. The refugees had embarked at the Piraeus among the burnt-out buildings, the water black with wrecks and wreckage. Only two ships rode upright: the Erebus and Nox.
They had been used to transport Italian prisoners-of-war to Egypt. They were vermin-ridden, filthy, red with rust, the lifeboats useless because the davits had rusted. They were nearly derelict but the refugees had no choice. The situation compelled and they were thankful to have ships of any kind. They had to trust themselves to the Erebus and Nox; and the two old tankers had carried them gallantly across the sea to Alexandria.
The Queen of Sparta, painted umber, was the same colour as the tankers, but she looked trim enough. She was altogether a more seaworthy craft than the Erebus and Nox, yet Harriet, who had trusted the tankers, was afraid of her. While the other women busied themselves collecting children together, ordering their baggage and getting into line to embark, Harriet stood apart from them, feeling that no power on earth could get her on to the Queen of Sparta. But this, she knew, was ridiculous. She had had forebodings before without any resultant disasters and she must swallow back this foreboding and go with the others.
The queue stretched down the quay to the ship’s gangway. Seeing Marion and Mrs Rutter about mid-way, she went reluctantly to join them, thinking, ‘I want an excuse to escape. I want a last-minute reprieve.’ And what hope of that?
Harriet’s companions, still fused in the comfortable stimulation of their new relationship, scarcely saw that Harriet was with them. A truck was collecting the baggage. It had almost reached Harriet when she heard her name called.
Mortimer and her co-driver were walking towards her. Breaking from the queue, Harriet ran towards them, her arms outstretched, shouting, ‘Mortimer! Mortimer! God has sent you to save me.’
Mortimer laughed: ‘Save you from what?’
‘I don’t know. All I want is to get away from here. Take me with you.’
Harriet, seeing her luggage about to be thrown on to the truck, ran to retrieve it. She told Marion: ‘I’m not going with you. You’ll be all right, won’t you? Mrs Rutter will look after you. I hope you and Richard have a pleasant journey.’
Baffled by Harriet’s decision, Marion asked: ‘You mean, you’re going back to Cairo?’
‘No, I’m going to Damascus.’
‘Damascus!’ Marion, parting her lips in disapproval, looked like a good little girl confronted by some piece of peccant naughtiness. She breathed out a shocked, ‘Oh dear!’ then, seeing the queue had moved forward, she hurried on as though fearing Mrs Rutter, too, might forsake her.
Mortimer came over to Harriet: ‘We’re driving through the night. I expect you can get some sleep among the ammunition in the back. Hope you won’t mind a bumpy ride across Sinai? The road’s in a bad way.’
Harriet laughed and said she did not mind how she crossed Sinai for all the wonders of the Levant were on the other side.
Coda
A week after the ship sailed, rumours reached Cairo that the Queen of Sparta had been torpedoed off Tanganyika with the loss of all on board. Then another, more detailed, report reached the Egyptian Mail from a correspondent in Dar-es-Salaam. One life-boat, crowded with women and children, had got away from the sinking ship. The steering was faulty. The boat was drifting when the German U-boat surfaced and the commander took on board a heavily pregnant woman and her small son. They were put to rest on the commander’s own bunk but, a British cruiser appearing on the horizon, the U-boat had to submerge and the woman and child were returned to the life-boat. The cruiser did not sight the boat that drifted for ten days until found by fishermen who towed it into Delagoa Bay. By that time most of the children and many of the adults had died of thirst and exposure. No names were given.
That was the last that Cairo heard of the Queen of Sparta and, the times being what they were, only the bereaved gave further thought to the lost ship.
Volume Three
THE SUM OF THINGS
To the memory of Jim Farrell taken by the sea August 1979
One
In December, when the others, the lucky ones, were advancing on Tripoli, Simon Boulderstone was sent to the hospital at Helwan. Before that he had been held in a field dressing-station then moved to a makeshift first-aid station at Burg el Arab. The desert fighting had so crowded the regular hospitals that no bed could be found for him until the walking wounded were moved on to convalescent homes. While he waited, he was attended by orderlies who gave him what treatment they could. He did not expect much. His condition, he felt, was in abeyance until he reached a proper hospital where, of course, he would be put right in no time.
The Helwan hospital, a collection of huts on the sand, was intended for New Zealanders but after the carnage of Alamein anyone might be sent anywhere. Simon was carried from the ambulance into a long ward formed by placing two huts end to end. Because he was an officer, even though a very junior one, he was given a curtained-off area to himself. This long hut was known as ‘The Plegics’ because few of the men there could hope to walk again.
Simon did not know that but if he had known, he would have seen in it no reference to his own state. At that time, he exulted in the fact he was alive, when he might so easily have been dead.
He and his driver, Crosbie, had run into a booby trap and, like an incident from a dissolving dream, he could still see Crosbie sailing into the air to land and lie, a loose straggle of limbs, motionless on the ground. In his mind Crosbie would lie there for ever while he, Simon, had been picked up by a Bren and taken back to the living world. And here he was, none the worse for the curious illusion that his body ended half-way down his spine.
The wonder of his escape kept him, during those first days, in a state of euphoria. He wanted to talk to people, not to be shut away at the end of the ward. He asked for the curtains to be opened and when he looked down the long hutment, its walls bare in the harsh Egyptian sunlight, he w
as surprised to see men in wheel-chairs propelling themselves up and down the aisle. He pitied them, but for himself — he’d simply suffered a blow in the back. It was a stunning blow that had anaesthetized him, so, for a while, he thought more about Crosbie than about himself. It was not until he reached Burg el Arab that he realized part of his body was missing. It seemed he had been cut in half and wondered if his lower limbs were still there. Sliding his hand down from his waist, he could feel his thighs but could not raise himself to reach farther. Speaking quite calmly, he told the man on the next stretcher that he had lost his legs below the knees. He was not surprised. The same thing had happened to his brother Hugo and accidents of this sort ran in families. He had dreaded it but now it had happened, he found he did not mind much. Instead, for some odd reason, he was rather elated. He talked for a long time to the man on the next stretcher before he saw that the man was dead.
The male nurse who dressed his wound asked him if he needed a shot of morphine. Cheerfully, he replied, ‘No thanks, I’m all right. I’m fine.’
‘No pain?’
‘None at all.’
The nurse frowned as though Simon had given the wrong answer.
Brens were arriving every few minutes with wounded from the front lines. Simon was at the first-aid station a couple of days before a doctor was free to examine him. When the blanket was pulled down and he saw his legs were there intact, he felt an amazed pride in them.
‘Nothing wrong with me, doc, is there?’
The doctor was not committing himself. He said he suspected a crushed vertebra but only an X-ray could confirm that.
‘It’ll mend, won’t it, doc?’
‘It’s a question of time,’ the doctor said and Simon, taking that to mean his paralysis was temporary, burst out laughing. When the doctor raised his brows, Simon said, ‘I was thinking of my driver, Crosbie. He looked so funny going up into the air.’
Fortunes of War Page 42
