by P. H. Newby
Something to Answer For
by
P. H. NEWBY
Contents
Title Page
CHAPTER ONE The Take-over
CHAPTER TWO A Fall from the Balcony
CHAPTER THREE A Sort of Patriot
CHAPTER FOUR Talk on a Hot Morning
CHAPTER FIVE Under Inspection
CHAPTER SIX A Man should smell Sweet
CHAPTER SEVEN A sea requiem
About the Author
Copyright
CHAPTER ONE
The Take-over
The old girl kept writing and complaining about the police. It was enough to start Townrow on a sequence of dreams. Night after night he floated in the sunset-flushed, marine city. He could smell the salt and the jasmine. He dreamed that Mrs Khoury, Mr Khoury and he were all sailing out of the harbour in a boat that slowly filled with water. He dreamed he was in a hot, dark room with a lot of men who argued and shouted. It must have been in the Greek Sailing Club because when a door opened there were oars and polished skiffs; and opposite, high over Simon Artz’s, on the other side of the Canal, was Johnnie Walker with his cane and top hat setting off for Suez. Or was it the Med.?
By this time, Mrs Khoury was writing to say he was the only friend she had left in the world and she wanted to buy him a ticket on a jet so that he could see for himself what a mess Elie had left his affairs in; and he could make the police track down the murderers because in spite of the Revolution and the troops leaving the Canal Zone these Egyptians still took notice of an Englishman. She was an old woman. She was at her wits end. In spite of her Lebanese passport she was Townrow’s fellow-countrywoman and, really, she had nobody else to turn to.
Naturally, he had to laugh. He wrote and explained she wouldn’t be able to send him the money because of the currency control; he had next to no money of his own, though now that Jean had married again he didn’t have to pay any more alimony, thank God. He had never actually married Liz so there was no financial liability there. Even so, times were hard. It was the height of summer, too, and in Port Said they’d be stewing. It would not be nice. He couldn’t bring himself actually to make this last point in writing. It might have seemed selfish.
No, it was a lie times were hard. He was flush now he’d started milking the Fund. That was between him and his shadow.
He had a letter from the London office of United Arab Airlines to say a first-class ticket had been paid for in Cairo. When did he want to use it? There was the usual literature with pictures of the Pyramids and boats on the Nile. Yes, but once he was there he was stuck. He’d be completely at the old girl’s mercy.
Nevertheless, he was tempted. He fished out the back letters. She was a lot younger than Elie but even so she’d be a good sixty. Twenty-five years in that climate couldn’t have done her a lot of good. She couldn’t live for ever. She was the sort of stupid old cow who didn’t make a will. This was a pity when you thought how much money Elie must have picked up one way and another. He owned the block of flats they lived in. He was a director of the Phoenician Shipping Line and for about fifty years had shipped cotton and onions out of Port Said, coffee and whisky in. What Mrs K meant by saying his affairs were in a mess probably amounted to no more than the discovery he had banking accounts in Lebanon, Switzerland and the United States; and a couple of dozen gold bars under the floor boards. She was naive. It was all hers now, even the gold and platinum dentures. If he really was the only friend she had left in the world he ought to be advising her about her will. In fact, he began to see himself as sole beneficiary.
The actual teeth were gold but the plate was platinum alloy. The set had been made in Beirut by a deaf and dumb Armenian mechanic who had learned his trade in Naples. Townrow remembered that Elie had told him all this within minutes of their first meeting on the beach at Port Said in 1946. This, the only time in his life he had been on horseback, Townrow was thrown on his head in front of the Khoury’s beach hut and Elie brushed him down with his own hands, seated him in a canvas chair, gave him some iced mango-flavoured syrup to drink, threatened the man who hired out the horses, said he was glad to make the acquaintance of an Englishman because his wife was English too, and finally hooked his dentures out for Townrow’s inspection. Townrow was still dazed and, thinking the old chap wanted to make him a present of the teeth, would have shaken his head if it hadn’t hurt so much. Elie said they were the most remarkable teeth in the world. But for the Revolution the man who had made them would have gone to St Petersburg and worked in the Fabergé workshop. But now he was dead and these teeth were his masterpiece.
“My wife,” Elie had said, pointing happily to the back of the hut where Townrow noticed, for the first time, a grey-haired woman sitting in a deck chair reading. Her blue and white striped dress was so long it hid her feet. She took no notice of her husband or Townrow. What with her rather grim little mouth and somewhat bleached cleanliness she looked like Whistler’s Mother on holiday. Elie, on the other hand, might have been an old jockey, gone to fat.
They had taken him back to their flat for supper and even now Townrow could remember the strangeness of Mrs K not saying a word until they were actually seated at table. With a real Cockney twang she then said she had been born and brought up in Stepney and she didn’t care who knew it. Townrow replied that although he was only a sergeant in the Service Corps (that was because he had been sent down from Oxford) he was one of the Lincolnshire Townrows and his old man was heartily ashamed of him; a lie, but it established a social relationship and that was all Mrs K who cared a hell of a lot that she came from Stepney, really wanted. If Townrow wondered why she’d married this foreigner she had a reason for that too. She had been a First War Widow.
Her father was captain of a cargo ship that made regular runs between Europe and the Far East. She took to sailing with him to get used to being a First War Widow. Four times a year they went through the Suez Canal and after the first two trips there was Elie Khoury regularly waiting for her at Port Said or Suez as the case might be to make the journey through the canal with them and try to persuade her to marry him. He was a widower, nearly as old as her father, and violently in love. He gave her a silver photo frame, a little watch set in diamonds, pearl earrings, a silk stole, a gold-plated pen, an alligator-hide suitcase, ropes of Turkish Delight stuffed with nuts and cream, bottles of perfume and a pair of German field-glasses. And she was in her mid-thirties. They were married in 1922. What do you expect, she had seemed to demand, after a war in which all the better men had died?
Elie had listened to all this with a grin.
“Even so, I’d never’ve married him if he’d been a Jew or an Arab no matter how much money he’d got, but Lebanese is different, they’re almost European in a way and Elie is Christian, of course, which makes a difference even though he’s R.C. My mother was strong Baptist and she would not have liked me marrying an R.C. His English is as good as mine, if not better.”
She was a shrewd, practical, hard old trot. Townrow thought of her when his father was dying and they sent for him after all those years. It was an invitation to the death of a stranger. Anyway, the ward sister lifted Dad’s eyelid and said, “You see, no reaction! He’s not conscious of anything,” then pulled her finger away to watch the lid close over the sightless white as though it was a blind over the window opposite. She was no more than idly interested. That would have been Mrs K all over. She had done a bit of Red Cross nursing in, of all places, Montenegro in 1918. She must have slipped into the basilisk eye and tight lip routine like a pro. All the more surprising, then, that the death of Elie should set her shouting for help in this girlish way. If Townrow had been asked he would have said she wanted little more from life than a pe
rmanent farewell to Port Said. She hated the place. Now was her chance. She might have to cut a few losses. The Nasser government could scarcely be expected to make life easy for an absentee rentière but if she really wanted to live in Tunbridge Wells Townrow was sure Elie had fixed his estate so that she could do just that, and in style. Instead, there was all this screaming about murder. If there really was some question of foul play Mrs K herself was as much of a suspect in Townrow’s eyes as anybody else in Port Said.
Until he fell on his head outside the Khoury beach hut in 1946 Townrow had no special feelings about the place. He was a sergeant in the military Embarkation Office waiting to be demobbed and if you were in that line of business, putting troops on or off ships, Port Said was the sort of place you were likely to be. But when he had this accident he saw it differently.
For one moment he balanced on his right ear and shoulder, his legs straight up in the air. As he so balanced he saw, upside down, a girl in a bathing costume. She stood with her legs slightly apart and was so relaxed and contented inside her big, glossy thighs and pouting breasts that Townrow thought she must be one of the happiest people alive. Beyond her was a cloud ribbed evening sky and one of the red-brick cathedral towers. The stiffening went out of him, he crumpled and lay on his back looking into Elie’s anxious eyes.
Either the girl then went off to another part of the beach or she was a vision because Townrow saw no more of her. Of the two possibilities the vision, he thought, was the likelier. The city quivered in her after-glow. The sun was low enough for those clouds to be red. Beyond the black palm trees the Casino Palace Hotel lost its colour, thinned and broke apart over the night rising quickly out of Asia. Concrete, steel, glass, sand and salt water belched a warm sexuality into his face. He could smell all Egypt, from the mud of the Nile to the roasting corn cobs on the De Lesseps breakwater. No ordinary girl could have done that to him.
As he shaved a muscle twitched at the corner of his left eye and he put down his razor to look out at the north London roof tops. It was a grey day. Perhaps it would be no bad thing to be out of England for a couple of months.
*
At Rome there was a sixty-minute wait and Townrow spent it in the airport waiting room and the bar. A big man in an expensive-looking panama came over to him and said, “You English?”
Townrow realised the man was younger than he looked. In spite of the weight, the stoop, and the quivering blue cheeks he was probably in his late twenties. He had a good vocabulary but a thick accent. “I am from Israel. I am a journalist. I’ve been in the States on a trip.”
In addition to Townrow there was already one man sitting at the table. Over the tarmac there was a view of the control tower. Because of the heat the air rippled over the tarmac like water and the main buildings and the base of the control tower rippled too. This other man had been complaining to Townrow about the heat and saying it would be even worse in Athens. He was a Greek who worked for a travel agency in Paris.
“What can I do for you?” Townrow said to the Israeli. He did not ask the man to sit down and as he himself remained seated the atmosphere was not friendly. The Israeli seemed to be in a rage. Perhaps he was drunk. But no, it wasn’t that.
“In March, 1942,” said the Israeli, “I was living in Budapest with my father and my uncle. Now we listened to the B.B.C. of course. Why did your government not warn us about going on those trains?”
“What trains?”
“You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?” said the Israeli to the Greek who nodded pleasantly and indicated the vacant chair. Even so he did not offer to buy the Israeli a drink. He was smoking a cheroot and drinking whisky.
The Israeli sat down and the chair creaked. He must have been twenty stone. He looked into Townrow’s eyes. “Whenever I see an Englishman I ask him this question. Never is there a good answer. I have vowed to put this question to every Englishman. It is what I owe to the dead.”
“You’ll have to spell this out a bit.”
“The Final Solution,” said the Greek, nodding his head rhythmically, as though in time with music audible to him alone. “If the Allies had agreed to exchange lorries millions of Jews would still be alive. I know this. I was in the Resistance. I was in touch with G.H.Q. Middle East, Cairo.”
“I was in Budapest,” said the Israeli.
“I may even have helped you to escape, no?”
“No.”
“I helped many Jews,” said the Greek.
The Israeli was impatient. His eyes had not left Townrow’s face. “The question I put is this. We listened every night to the B.B.C. Very good. You know what would happen if we were caught listening to the B.B.C.? Death. We all listen. We sit in the dark, and so I sat in the dark with my father and my uncle. At no time, I tell you, did the B.B.C. warn us about those trains. It is useless to deny it. Why was there no warning? We Jews did not know. We were told the men went to Germany to work in factories and on the land. Why did the British not say,’ Stay away from those trains. Do not go on those trains. They are death trains. They will take you to the extermination camps.’? If the British had said this my father and my uncle, do you think they would have gone? They would have killed themselves first. They would have gone across the river into Yugoslavia.”
“So that is how you escaped,” said the Greek. “Through Yugoslavia.”
“I was there when the war ended. I went to Israel when the war ended. Do you know what I think,” the Israeli said to Townrow. “This was British Government policy. What other explanation could there be? The British Government connived. What are the Jews of Europe to the British? They connived with the Nazis. It was part of their anti-Zionist policy.”
“What date are you talking about?”
“In March, 1942, my father and my uncle went on a death train.”
“Maybe at this time the British Government didn’t know.”
The Israeli laughed savagely and gestured with his open hand. “Yes they knew.”
March 1942 was a time Townrow could remember because it was in the Easter of that year he was slung out of college and went into the army. But he just could not remember what was generally known about the concentration camps at that time. If there were stories in the papers people might have written them off as propaganda.
“They didn’t know. Or if they did know they did broadcast these warnings and you didn’t hear them.”
The Israeli laughed again.
“Every time I meet an Englishman I rub his face in this connivance. When you are in England, ask about: why did the government not warn the Jews in Europe? I myself would never visit England because of this responsibility your government shares for the death of my father and my uncle and——”
“I’m not listening to this.”
“Why should I lie? Tell me that!”
“No British Government would do this. You’re crazy. Look, I’m bloody sorry about your father and that, but you mustn’t say things like this. It’s mad.”
“The British Government knew and said nothing. You think the British Government never do anything disgraceful?”
“You’re bloody mad.”
“I’m not talking about you and the English people. I’m talking about the government.”
“No British Government is like that.”
They were attracting attention from neighbouring tables. Why should this Jew have pounced on him in this way? Perhaps it was the English clothes. Thank God, being an Israeli he couldn’t possibly be on the Cairo flight. Speaking for himself he’d always been pro-Jewish, especially pro-Jewish women, and it was maddening to have this fanatic come up and spit in his face. He could not get up and just walk away. For one thing, he suspected the Israeli would run after him, shouting; for another, he wanted to stay and ram the stupid accusation down the fellow’s throat.
“The English,” said the Greek travel agent, “are not a grateful people. In spite of my services I myself was suspected. Can you imagine that? I didn’t expect too
many decorations.” He shrugged. “I am a Greek. But I was sent for, to Cairo. I was accused of being a double agent. Can you imagine all this?”
“When there’s a war on——” Townrow began.
“That’s exactly what the British Government said in 1942,” the Israeli shouted. “This is our opportunity to get rid of the Jews.”
“Aw, you’re just sick. No British Government——”
“How do you know?” The Israeli seemed really amused now, as though Townrow had made a good joke. He dropped his voice to a conversational level. “You don’t know what goes on at government level in times of crisis.”
“He is English,” said the Greek, “so he thinks he does.”
“No British Government could do anything too obviously nasty. The system won’t let it.”
“The system!” said the Israeli, sneering.
The Greek snapped his fingers for a waiter and tried to order drinks all round but Townrow and the Israeli declined. So he ordered scotch for himself and lit another cheroot.
“I was two years at school in England. I understand the English. You sir, and I,” he said to the Israeli, “know that all governments are bad. In Greece, we have a corrupt government. I say this openly, here in Rome. I would say it in Athens. The French have a corrupt government. Any Frenchman will tell you. Americans, Russians, Venezuelans—I have been in Venezuela—will say they have crooked government. This is how it is. The Englishman is not like this. He thinks he is good and sincere himself and he believes he has a government that is good and sincere too. I don’t care whether it’s a Labour Government or a Conservative Government. He may disagree with it but he does not think it is corrupt. This is what he understands about life. Every Englishman, when he is abroad, feels he can speak authoritatively for Whitehall. An illusion. They think, in Britain, that private life and public policy is one seamless garment. Every country has its special illusion. This is the British illusion.”
