Fortunes of War

by Olivia Manning

  ‘Very well, thank you.’ And that was the truth. He had passed through the ordeal of slow recovery and he was very well.

  There was a flurry as Edwina, having gone to change, reappeared in a suit of white corded silk; a pretty girl, a very pretty girl, but the magic was no longer there. Her departure left Simon unmoved. For him, she had already gone.

  The party dwindled; the guests went off to their different offices. Dobson, before returning to the embassy, came close to Harriet and, surprisingly, squeezed her round the waist.

  There remained only Guy and Harriet, Simon, Angela and Castlebar, together with the debris of the feast. They sat down with little to say, exhausted by events.

  Guy began to think of the day’s work. He said he would take Simon back to the hospital and then go on to his class at the Institute.

  ‘Oh no!’ Angela sat up in protest: ‘You can ditch the Institute for one night. We’ll all take Simon back and then we must do something special. Mark the occasion. Make a night of it.’

  Guy, looking blank, said nothing. For him the excitement was over. Harriet was safely back and there was no reason why life should not resume its everyday order. But Angela, imagining he would agree with her, had other plans for the evening. She and Castlebar intended to book in at the Semiramis, so she said: ‘We’ll have dinner at the hotel and then go on somewhere, perhaps to the Extase.’

  Guy frowned but still said nothing. Harriet, with the Semiramis in mind, said she must go and change. Awad had put her suitcase in the room she had shared with Guy. Now it was her room again.

  She thought: ‘Our room. Our very own room!’ She had gone away in despair but could not think why she had ever despaired. The room was as it had always been; very hot, the woodwork like parched bone, the air filled with the scent of the dry herbage in the next-door garden. It was the day for the snake-charmer and the thin, wavering note of his pipe rose above the hiss of the garden hose.

  She opened her case and threw the clothes out. They were the summer things she had intended to wear while voyaging down the coast of Africa. They were very creased but one dress, a light mercerised cotton, was still fit to wear. She shook it out and spread it on the bed, then opened the top drawer of the chest. It had been her underwear drawer and Guy had left it unused. There was only one object in it — the diamond heart brooch that Angela had given her. She ran with it to the living-room.

  ‘Look what I’ve found.’

  She held it out to Guy who gave it an uninterested glance. She asked: ‘Did Edwina return it to you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think I asked for it.’

  ‘Why did you ask her for it?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’ Guy turned to Simon, saying: ‘We must go’, then to Angela: ‘I’m afraid dinner isn’t on tonight. I’ve too much to do. After the Institute, I have to meet some young Egyptians and give them a talk about self-determination. I was invited by Harriet’s doctor, Shafik, and I can’t let him down. You can see that. We’ll have dinner another night.’

  This did not satisfy Angela who said: ‘This is absurd. Surely on a night like this, you can ditch all this nonsense you get up to. So far as you’re concerned, Harriet has returned from the dead and you want to leave her and go and talk to a lot of Egyptians.’

  ‘They’re expecting me.’

  ‘You can put them off.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be fair to them.’

  Defeated by his belief in his own reasonableness, Angela gave up the argument. Guy, bending to kiss Harriet, became aware of her despondency and relented enough to say: ‘Very well. I won’t stay long at the meeting. You go and have dinner at the Semiramis and I’ll come and join you afterwards. We’ll all have a celebratory drink. How’s that?’

  ‘Try not to be late.’

  ‘No. I’ll come as soon as I can.’

  When Guy had gone cheerfully away, taking Simon with him, Harriet said: ‘Nothing has changed.’

  ‘No. I told you you ought to box his ears. It would serve him right if you went away again.’

  ‘Where would I go? I’m not much good at being alone. My home is where Guy is and the truth is, he’s more than he seems to you. You saw how he cried when he saw me. And he made Edwina return the brooch.’

  ‘I’d like to know how that happened,’ Angela said, then she turned to look at Castlebar who had fallen asleep with his mouth open: ‘Poor Bill, champers doesn’t agree with him.’ She kissed the top of his head and he, lifting his pale, heavy eyelids, smiled at her. ‘Wake up, you gorgeous brute,’ she said. ‘We’re going to the Semiramis. And you, Harriet, if you’re going to change, hurry up. We must feed Bill. He badly needs a proper meal after all those awful weeks in the Holy Land.’

  At the Semiramis, Angela booked into a famous suite on the top floor that was called the Royal Suite. There, protected by the hotel servants, she hoped they would be safe from the assaults of Castlebar’s wife. The main room overlooked the Nile and Angela decided that before they went down to the dining-room, they would have drinks by the window and wait for the pyramids to appear.

  Castlebar, lying on a long chair, smiled in lazy content and said: ‘Suppose we just stay here! Have supper sent up!’

  ‘What a good idea!’ Angela went to the house phone and asked for the menu.

  The little black triangles of the pyramids came out of the mist as they had done every evening for some four thousand years. They came like the evening star, magically, just as the red-gold of the sunset was changing to green. Twilight fell and the star was there, a single brilliance that for a few minutes hung in the west then was lost among the myriad stars that crowded the firmament. While all this was happening, Castlebar kept his eyes on his plate, eating smoked salmon, veal cutlets and a mound of fresh, glistening dates. Harriet, who had not yet regained her appetite, ate frugally and watched the spectacle outside.

  Angela’s whisky bottle had come up with the meal and, when they had eaten, the two of them sat over it as Harriet had seen them sit so many evenings before. The lights of Gezira came on and darkness fell. It was time for Guy to arrive. Castlebar, replete, yawned once or twice and Harriet became anxious, feeling she should leave but having to stay. At last, when the bottle was nearly empty and Angela and Castlebar were nodding with sleep, Guy was shown into the room.

  ‘Sorry I’m late.’

  Angela roused herself and laughed towards Harriet: ‘You’re right: nothing has changed.’

  Guy, surprised by the laughter, asked: ‘What should change?’ He was himself again, relieved not only of grief but remorse and a nagging sense of guilt, free to pursue his activities without being tripped at every turn by the memory of his loss. He said: ‘Life is perfect. Harriet and I are together again. No one would want things different, would they?’ He took Harriet’s hand and bent to kiss her.

  ‘And how were your Gyppos?’ Angela asked.

  ‘Fine!’ Guy had had a brilliant evening and being given a vote of thanks, the leader of the group had said: “‘Blofessor Blingle has blought his influence to bear on many knotty bloblems.’”

  Guy reproduced the Egyptian accent with such exactitude that Angela had to laugh as she said: ‘Knotty problems, indeed! Do they hope to solve anything? The Gyppos play around with hazy ideals instead of learning to govern themselves.’ She had given Guy the last of the whisky and when he had drunk it, she said: ‘We must go to bed.’

  ‘I’ve only just arrived. I want to talk with my friend Bill.’

  ‘Not now. Bill’s exhausted. It’s nearly midnight. I’m afraid you’ll have to talk another night.’

  Guy, feeling he had been uncivilly ejected, said when they were in the street: ‘You see what I mean about Angela? She asks me to dinner then turns me out as soon as I arrive.’

  ‘You were very late.’

  ‘Not unreasonably. She really is the most irrational of women. Crazy. Pixillated. Mad as a hatter. I don’t know what you see in her.’

  Twenty-one

  In July, while C
airo wearied under its blanket of heat, the British and American forces left North Africa and crossed the sea to Sicily. So far as the Egyptians were concerned, the war was over. But the British, bored and restless, with no hope of going home till hostilities ceased, knew it was not over.

  Guy, who now took a much more favourable view of the future, told Harriet it might be over in year or eighteen months, then what were they going to do?

  That was something to be thought out. Harriet said to Angela: ‘What will you and Bill do when the war ends?’

  Angela smiled and said: ‘Humph!’ as though the end of the war were a remote and fantastic concept. Still, she was willing to consider it.

  ‘Bill ought to start work again. They’ve kept his job open here but I doubt if he’ll go back. He’d be willing to live like this for ever but is it good for him? I’d like him to apply for a lectureship in England. Of course he’d only get one in a minor university but what fun to settle down in a provincial town and act the professor’s wife: make friends with the vicar and the local nobs, have a nice, old house and cultivate one’s garden! Would you come and see us?’

  ‘Of course. We might even come and live near you.’ Harriet, too, could see herself settling down in a provincial town. ‘Make it a cathedral town,’ she said. ‘What about Salisbury?’

  ‘You goose, Salisbury has no university. I’m afraid we’ll all end up in somewhere grimmer than that.’

  Harriet was the only visitor admitted to the Royal Suite. News that the runaways had returned, bringing Harriet with them, had been spread by the wedding guests. When it was known that Angela and Castlebar were living in opulent seclusion at the top of the Semiramis, Angela’s old friends called at the hotel but were turned away.

  Angela said: ‘One of them might prove to be Bill’s wife in disguise. She’d do anything to get in here. Even dress up as a man.’

  ‘With her figure,’ said Harriet, ‘she’d look extremely odd.’

  ‘Still, I’m not risking it. I’ve got Bill in safe-keeping and that’s where he’s going to stay.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘As long as need be. If she gets in here, it’ll be over my dead body.’

  The suite was air-conditioned and during the fiery days of summer, while the British and American forces occupied Sicily, Angela and Castlebar scarcely moved from their retreat. The windows were fitted with jalousies in the far-eastern manner. During the day, while the city shimmered in a glare of sunlight, the rooms were shaded and the occupants as cool as sea-creatures in a rock pool.

  The hotel servants, heavily tipped, would allow no intruder to reach the suite. Harriet they saw as belonging to it and she came and went as she pleased. She need no longer spend her evenings alone in Garden City. When the sun began to sink, she could take the riverside walk to the hotel and join her friends on the top floor for a drink, for supper, for as long as she cared to stay. As the heat slackened, a safragi came to pull back the jalousies and they could watch for the pyramids on the western horizon. When it became dark, the safragi returned to open the windows and admit the evening air.

  It was a pleasant routine but on the night that Italy surrendered, there was a disturbing break. When Harriet arrived, Castlebar was not in the long chair with his drink and cigarettes, but sprawled on the bed with Angela pouring iced water for him and persuading him to take two aspirin.

  ‘What is wrong with Bill?’

  ‘He has a headache. I think we’ve been shut in here too long. He needs a change of scene. Why don’t we all go out for a drive?’ Angela, looking anxiously at him, put her hand to his brow: ‘Better?’

  He gave her a languid smile: ‘A little better.’ He had taken the aspirin and after a while said: ‘The pain’s lifting. We’ll go out if you like.’

  A gharry was sent for and they drove by the river beneath the glowing sky. As they turned on to Bulacq Bridge, boys jumped on to the gharry steps and offered them necklaces made of jasmin flowers. Begging and laughing, they swung the heavily scented necklaces into Castlebar’s face and Castlebar, usually amused by this sort of play, shuddered back: ‘Tell them to go away.’

  Angela paid off the boys then asked: ‘Where shall we go?’ When Castlebar said he did not care, she turned to Harriet who remembered an excavated village she had seen during her first days in Cairo. She said: ‘If we drive to the pyramids, I’ll show you something you’ve never seen before.’

  They passed through the delicate evening scent of the bean fields out to Mena where the pyramids stood and beyond them to the desert that stretched away to the horizon. Angela said: ‘Surely there’s nothing to see here?’

  ‘Wait.’ Harriet stopped the gharry and Angela descended with her, but Castlebar shook his head. Smiling slightly, he put his face against the grimy padding at the back of the seat and closed his eyes.

  The two women crossed the flat, stony mardam and reached a depression that was invisible from the road. Below they could see a whole village of narrow streets and empty, roofless houses that had been excavated from the sand.

  Angela jumped down at once and said: ‘Let’s explore.’ Watching her, Harriet felt an odd apprehension. She and the others had been shown this village on the day Angela’s child had died. Putting this from her, she followed Angela. They wandered about the lanes and looked into small rooms, amazed that lives had once been lived here in these confined quarters. They asked each other why this isolated village should exist at all, without water or any reason for being there.

  ‘But, of course,’ Angela said, ‘before the dam was built, the Nile would have come very near. There could have been cultivated land here. Or, more likely, the people who lived here built the pyramids. You know they were not slaves as scholars once thought. They were peasants, ordinary workmen, doing a job for a daily wage. And they were fed on onions and radishes — not much of a diet, if you had to lug blocks of stone about.’

  The twilight had begun to fall between the houses and as the women returned to the road, a wind sprang up and sand hit their faces. They started to run as the storm roared upon them, the sand grains striking into their flesh and blinding them. Clinging together, lost in the dark enveloping sand, they heard the gharry driver shouting to them above the noise of the wind.

  They found Castlebar still lying back, eyes closed, unaware of sand and wind, while the driver gestured wildly, warning them that they must get back before the road was covered. Castlebar did not move and Angela, sitting close to him, lifting his limp hand, said: ‘The aspirin have made him sleepy.’ At Mena, she said they must go into the cloakroom and tidy themselves before facing the guests in the Semiramis foyer. In the cloakroom, the women looked at each other, seeing their faces coated with a grey mask of sand. Angela threw back her head with a howl of laughter and it was to be a very long time before Harriet heard her laugh again.

  At the Semiramis, Castlebar said he did not want supper. He would go straight to bed.

  ‘But you’ll have a whisky, won’t you?’

  ‘No, I don’t fancy it. I might take a drop of vodka.’

  ‘Oh well, so long as you have something!’ Angela was relieved.

  Food for Harriet and Angela was sent up to the living-room. As they ate, Angela said: ‘It’s probably just a touch of gyppy. What should he take, do you think?’

  Harriet recalled all the remedies that were part of the mythology of the Middle East. She recommended that great comforter Dr Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne, but it was not easy to find. One cure was to eat only apples and bananas and drink a mixture of port and brandy. Then there was kaolin, intended to block the gut, but a more rapid cure, in Harriet’s opinion, was a spoonful of Dettol taken neat.

  ‘Neat?’

  ‘Yes. It’s not difficult to swallow, and it’s nice and warming.’

  ‘I’d never get Bill to swallow it.’ Angela sent down for apples, bananas, port and brandy and when they arrived, said: ‘Let’s go and look at him and see what he’ll take.’

  Castlebar
, in bed, his throat visible above his pyjama jacket, looked gaunt and tired but not seriously ill. Harriet left early and Angela, walking with her to the lift, said: ‘Do you think it might be jaundice? A lot of officers have had it. He might have picked it up in one of these low bars.’

  ‘Good heavens, does he go to bars?’

  ‘I know he sneaks out when I’m in the bath. Poor old thing, he wants a drink with the boys. I don’t say anything.’

  Harriet agreed with Angela that Castlebar would be all right in a day or two, but two days passed and his condition was unchanged. He was indifferent to food, and nauseated by the things that had once pleased him most. And there were other symptoms.

  Castlebar did not want company so Angela now came down to sit with Harriet in the foyer or the dining-room. She said: ‘His temperature goes up and down; up in the evening and down in the morning. He says his turn is sore. He doesn’t like me to touch it. I want him to see a doctor but he says “No”.’

  ‘Gyppy is painful, you know.’

  ‘His stomach is not so much painful as tender, and it’s swollen — or, rather, it’s puffy.’

  ‘It could be food poisoning.’

  ‘I thought of that. He sometimes slips into a place that sells shell-fish. I’ve told him not to touch it but he doesn’t always do what he’s told.’

  At the end of a week Castlebar had developed a rash that covered his chest and belly and Angela, now agitated, rang Harriet and said he must see a doctor whether he liked it or not.

  She shouted into the telephone: ‘It could be smallpox.’

  ‘No. Believe me, he’d be much more ill. He’d have high fever and be delirious; and he’d be vomiting. I know because I read it up when I was in quarantine.’

  ‘He has been vomiting. Oh God, Harriet, what am I to do?’

  ‘Is he well enough to walk? Could we get him into a taxi?’

  ‘Yes, he goes to the bathroom. He even took a few bites of chicken at lunch time.’ Angela’s voice shook with the attempt to reassure herself: ‘He says he’s not ill, only not well.’