The Face in the Cemetery

by Michael Pearce

  ‘But that would be only a temporary solution,’ objected one of the staff officers.

  Owen smiled.

  ‘In Egypt,’ he said, ‘things can sometimes take a long time.’

  ***

  Lawrence came up to Owen at the end of the meeting.

  ‘How many guns did you say there were?’

  ‘Fifty thousand at most.’

  ‘Fifty thousand!’ said Lawrence thoughtfully. ‘I could do a lot with them.’

  ***

  The Army was so relieved that it readily agreed to send a detachment south to put down the brigands.

  ***

  Faruq Rahim, that agile climber of the bureaucratic ladder, had at last put a foot wrong and was sent to a place where he could disappoint his colleagues no longer.

  ***

  Cavendish came across to him in the bar.

  ‘Good work!’ he said. ‘You’ll be invaluable on the committee.’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘You know,’ said Cavendish, ‘I’ve been thinking. You’ll be needing some help when that strange Scotsman has gone. I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘I wonder, actually, if he is quite the right chap for the Army,’ said Owen. ‘He would be of much more use here.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ***

  Paul appeared alongside Owen a little while later. He, too, had been thinking about the recent changes.

  ‘First, Kitchener; then McPhee. They are robbing us of all our talent. I expect to be next.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I wanted to have a word with you about my own position. Have you had a chance to—?’

  Paul shook his head.

  ‘Not a hope!’ he said. ‘Cavendish has put an absolute veto on it. You’re much too valuable here, he says.’

  ***

  Owen went to see Fricker.

  ‘You have found the missing guns? That is good!’

  He seemed genuinely pleased. He had, he said, been worrying about it. Owen thought it was like Fricker to worry about someone else’s administrative problem.

  He shrugged when Owen told him about the decision to make the ghaffirs hand in their guns.

  ‘Circumstances change,’ he said, ‘and we in administration have to change with them. Perhaps after the war—’

  Owen told him about the Hanafis. Fricker listened in silence.

  ‘So,’ he said after a while. ‘So.’

  He asked if it would be possible to write to Hanafi. Owen said it would.

  ‘Would you mind,’ Fricker said, ‘if I wrote it now and gave it to you? The new commandant does not allow correspondence. I asked him why and he said it was against Regulations. I asked him if I could see a copy of the Camp Regulations but so far he has not replied.’ Fricker seemed puzzled. ‘I thought, perhaps, I could make one or two suggestions—’

  Owen went for a walk round the camp while Fricker was writing his letter and thought that perhaps when he got back to Cairo he might make some suggestions of his own.

  Fricker was just sealing the envelope when Owen returned. He stopped.

  ‘Perhaps I should not—? You may read it if you wish.’

  Owen said it wasn’t necessary. He took the letter and put it in his pocket.

  Fricker thanked him formally.

  Afterwards, he stood there for a moment.

  ‘I have been thinking,’ he said, ‘and perhaps, after all, I do understand it. They loved each other so much that they could not bear to be parted. I think that was partly because they were afraid. Afraid of what might happen if they were parted. Would their marriage survive? And if it did not survive, what would become of them? As individuals?

  ‘They had become so dependent on their marriage, you see. They had invested so much in it. Everything. They had given up everything else for that—music, career, their families, society. And they had put it all into their marriage.

  ‘And now they were beginning to wonder if they had been right. They had to have been right or else everything was meaningless. They could not risk having to face the possibility that they had been wrong. They had to stick to their marriage, it was all they had.

  ‘And then when it seemed that it was going to be taken away from them—’

  ‘Taken away?’

  Fricker looked at him in surprise.

  ‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘Hilde was German, you see. Like me.’

  ***

  ‘I don’t see,’ said Zeinab.

  ‘She would have been taken into internment,’ said Owen. ‘They could see that was going to happen. And then they heard that I was coming down. That’s what precipitated it. They thought it was the end. Of everything. So why not end it themselves? Together.’

  He was silent for a moment. Then he said:

  ‘You want to know who really killed her? I did.’

  ‘Not you. Internment. The war.’

  ‘You can’t divorce administrative processes from people,’ said Owen.

  Zeinab didn’t say anything for quite a while. Then she said:

  ‘It wasn’t just a marriage of love, it was a marriage of fear. Perhaps it wasn’t like that to start with. It was just love. But then as the world pressed in on them and they didn’t seem to be able to hold their own, fear began to come into it. The outside world was too strong for them, there were too many obstacles, difficulties, so they turned inwards. In the end they couldn’t face the world; so when the world came calling…’

  She looked at him.

  ‘We wouldn’t be like that,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you were thinking.’

  ‘No.’

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