Something to Answer For

by P. H. Newby

  Townrow tried to stand up. “You’re a liar. How did she get him through the Lebanese customs? Tell me that.”

  “If you were a customs officer and a flaming red stringy woman in a white hood sails out of the sunset with a corpse in an open coffin and a bag of Maria Theresa dollars and another bag of gold sovereigns what would you do? You’d see the plain wooden cross stitched to his shroud and know him for a fellow-Christian. And even if you were a Moslem customs officer you’d reflect he was no mere heathen, but a man of the Book like yourself, with discs of gold on his closed eyelids and silver on his mouth. Elie was buried under an umbrella pine in the cemetery on the road to Beit Meri. You have to cut the rock there. The soil is thin.”

  Townrow fell sideways off his chair and struck his head against a cask. Christou tried to help him up but Townrow said No, he’d like to lie there for a bit with his cheek against the cool concrete, thinking.

  “You’ve given me a lot to think about,” he said in a slow, deep voice, like a High Court judge on a hot afternoon. “Dolphin is an intelligent beast.”

  “One mustn’t exaggerate. It’s child’s play sailing one of those little boats. You wedge yourself against the tiller and hang on to the main sheet. At night you can tie it.”

  Christou turned Townrow over on to his back.

  “What are you calling yourself Major Bray for?” he asked, and dashed a jug of water into his face.

  “Dolphins are almost human,” said Townrow. “She’d talk to it as they swam along together. And it’d talk back. It’s wet in here, Christou. It’s coming through the ceiling,” he said. “Bray? Because I’m a hired killer. I’m shooting it out in a tropical forest.”

  Christou filled his pipe and sat on the floor at Townrow’s side with his back against a crate. “So now you know why Nasser took over the Suez Canal.”

  “Nasser couldn’t take over a——” Townrow cast about. “He couldn’t take over a——”

  “Didn’t you know? You’re not in a tropical forest now, son. As soon as Nasser knew Madame had sailed out of the Suez Canal with her husband’s body, the Maria Theresa dollars, the sovereigns and who knows what-else bullion, art treasures, antiques, the finest Arabian Myrrh for the corpse, bees-wax candles and incense, he got up in the largest square in Alex, Colonel Nasser did, and proclaimed he no longer recognised the international status of the Canal and Egypt was taking it for its own.”

  Townrow tried to lift his head. “You mean, just because that crazy woman——”

  “‘She would never have dared,’ Nasser said, ‘if she’d known the Canal was Egyptian property.’”

  Townrow struggled to understand. “But she wasn’t in the Canal. She just sailed out of the harbour.”

  “Nasser said that before the Canal there was nothing here but a sandbank. Every brick and camel dropping in the twin cities of Port Said and Port Fouad is Canal. I am Canal. This boozer is Canal. You are Canal. The harbour is Canal. We’ve been nationalised.”

  “Major Bray wouldn’t have liked that,” said Townrow. Christou had to bring an ear down to catch the words because Townrow was speaking without moving his jaw. “She was only doing her duty as a wife.”

  “Being a Moslem country they’d have different ideas what constituted wifely behaviour. It struck Nasser as imperialistic ruthlessness.” Christou breathed smoke out of his nostrils and sighed. “Anyway, you can understand why I thought you were one of the advance party, Major.”

  *

  Townrow was awakened by the warmth of the sun. He could not move. He was lying on treasure. All this gold dazzled painfully and he had to shut his eyes again. He was able to move the fingers of his left hand. They dabbled in sand.

  He could tell he was quite naked and that the top of his head had been smashed in. Even with his eyes shut he could not keep out the dazzle and this set off dull explosions to one side of his skull. He rolled over on to his face and felt the sun on his buttocks. A long time later he struggled to his knees and found it was quite true, he’d been stripped. Even his socks were gone. He put a hand to his head and found it was still covered with hair. The light amazed him.

  Because it hurt so much he had to squint about cautiously. Where was he? This wasn’t home. He was kneeling in a desert of fine sand. Straight ahead was a huge lake of straw-coloured water with islands in it that were little more than sandbanks though some of them had trees on. He could see sailing boats and white birds. The sun was still very low. The water, the sand, the boats, the trees, looked so fragile he fancied he could put his hand through it all, as though it were a painting on silk not a couple of feet from his nose.

  Not the place he remembered, not the Irish countryside. One minute he had been riding along in the back of the open car, gazing over the rocky walls and the stony hillside and wondering about that grove of trees. Why trees in this rock? Perhaps a stream had washed down soil from the hills and these trees had somehow got themselves planted, real wild trees, not Forestry softwoods.

  He knelt with his back to the sun and turned his head to the right. Here was more sand and, in the distance, a city made of small pieces of white and pink, with windows flashing in the sun. Townrow looked at his wrist but his watch was not there. He could see an ocean-going steamer with a red funnel propped up on the sand about five miles away, so he knew he wasn’t at home. There were a lot of flies about too. They made for his eyes.

  Hearing a regular, dry, clopping sound he set his teeth and slowly rose to his feet. The blood thudded about inside his skull. He saw a man on a donkey coming along a little metalled road and tried to shout. He had no idea whether he’d succeeded. His mouth felt as though it had been scoured out with quicklime.

  “AAh!” He found he was screaming. He ran over the sand and stood in the path of the donkey, waving. The rider had a nut-brown, cheerful, bearded face. He was wearing a grey gown tucked up to his waist, so that Townrow could see his white-pantalooned legs. But he appeared not to have noticed Townrow at all until at the very last minute he twitched the donkey’s head on one side, produced a heavy stick from nowhere at all and gave Townrow an almighty crack on the side of the head as he sailed past.

  Townrow had blood in his mouth and it was less disagreeable than he might have expected. He was in some foreign country and he could not remember how he had got there. After a while he was able to stand up again and talk in something like his normal voice. He spoke to the flies. They seemed to be settling all over him.

  He could see another grey donkey. Irish donkeys were brown. This one was pulling a little flat-topped cart on which there were two men in dirty drawers and rust-coloured jackets. At the sight of Townrow they shouted. One of them had a whip with which he gave Townrow a cut across the shoulders as they rattled past. They had a load of baskets and as one of them fell off about fifty yards up the track they had to stop and pick it up. Townrow was so crazy with pain and anger he tried to catch them up, but they were away again, jeering and cracking the whip before he could get anywhere near. Now he was set in that direction he thought he might as well keep on.

  He knew by the length of his shadow it was still early. Most of what he saw was empty, pale sky. The sand, the city and the sky were all bleached. It was the sort of morning you expected to see a good drenching of dew and, sure enough, when he turned and looked back towards the lake to discover whether any more traffic was on its way, he saw his own wet footsteps. He crouched. He touched his feet. He had cut them on the stones and they were bleeding. What stones? he thought. There was just sand and this tarmac. Perhaps he had walked on a tin or broken glass. He had blood on his feet. He was much too tired to stand up. He crouched in the middle of the road, watching the little khaki-coloured closed van bear down on him from the direction of town.

  A couple of men wearing tarbooshes and old army uniforms jumped out and grabbed him. He knew superior force when he saw it and made no resistance. He supposed the man on the donkey and the two men on the cart had lodged a complaint.

  “I
am Irish,” Townrow said as soon as he was inside the van. “I’ve been robbed and beaten up. I want to go straight to my Consul.”

  For by this time he knew damn well he was not in Ireland. He tried to remember why not.

  The policemen did not speak English. They produced a pair of pale blue cotton trousers, convict’s garb by the look of it. Townrow had just put them on when the van stopped. The door opened and he was levered out into a courtyard from where he could glimpse blue water through an archway. With one hand he had to hold up his pants. The other was grasped by one of the policemen who led him out of the sunlight down a white passage and into a cell where the door was immediately locked on him. An iron bedstead with wooden slats occupied one wall of the cell. He lay on this for some hours, watching the shaft of light from the one high, barred window, move across the floor. He shouted now and again but there was such a row going on, a radio being played very loud, bells ringing, orders shouted, women crying, men screaming, boots tramping on bare boards, the ferry and other canal traffic sounding sirens and hooters, that Townrow had to choose his moment carefully. He was in Port Said. He knew that. He could even remember the journey down from Cairo. The intellectual effort was so exhausting that he fell asleep.

  “Sir!” He woke to find a man with large, sad Pharaonic eyes bending over him and touching his shoulder.

  Townrow stared up at him, saying nothing, not because he did not want to. The sounds would not come. The man produced a glass of water and held it in front of Townrow’s face. At this Townrow found his jaw slackening and sounds emerging from some point very far down in his throat. Another man now lifted him into a sitting position.

  “You are English?” said the man with the big eyes. Townrow could now see his uniform. He was an officer of some sort.

  “I’ve been murdered,” said Townrow. He had drunk the glass of water and now asked for another. “They must have taken me out of town and dumped me.”

  “It’s not so bad,” said the officer who had been quietly looking him over. “You’ll need half a dozen stitches in that cheek. The officers say you were running about naked.”

  “They stripped me.”

  Townrow could hear somebody laughing. He could see now that the cell was full of policemen, so full he could not make out who was laughing. It must have been somebody at the back.

  “And when I tried to stop a man he hit me with a bloody great cudgel.”

  Even the officer began to smile at this. Townrow looked at him carefully. His mind was functioning more clearly. He knew these gentle, big-eyed, well-spoken Egyptians, from his Army days. One had been in charge of dock labour. Another used to give Arabic lessons. But it was the first time he had seen one, a Christian that is, dressed up as a policeman in Egypt. He was reconciled to being in Egypt now. He had come there for some purpose. But what?

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I expect this man hit you with the cudgel because he was frightened of you.”

  “Frightened? A naked man? Covered with blood? A couple of swine came along on a cart and they had a go at me with a whip!”

  Whoever was laughing must have understood English. Perhaps the intellectual cream of the Port Said police force was gathered to hear Townrow’s statement; at any rate they understood enough, after a certain amount of muttering between themselves, to crow with laughter. The officer drew a handkerchief out of his sleeve to wipe his eyes. Townrow could see he was trying not to laugh.

  “They were fishermen,” he explained. “They bring up baskets of prawns every morning.”

  “British Consul,” said Townrow. “Get me to the Consul.”

  “But if you were riding along,” the officer insisted, “and a wild man, all naked, jumped out at you, wouldn’t you hit him with your whip? Of course you would.’

  “I did not jump out. You a Cop?”

  “Yes. I am the Legal Officer, Lieutenant Amin.”

  “If you’re a Christian you must know the story of the Good Samaritan.”

  “But in your case,” said Lieutenant Amin, more amused than ever, “the Levite did not pass by on the other side. He hit you with a cudgel. Don’t misunderstand us. We are not laughing because we are cruel men, or even because you are English and because you have been beaten. We are laughing because you were reduced to the essential human condition. You were naked and hurt. You were as any one of us might be if God decided. And then, in this, the classic situation, if I might put it so, you naturally and hopefully turn to a fellow human being for aid. And what does he do? He hits you. That’s what we find so funny.”

  The lieutenant shook with a suppressed laughing, or could it have been sneezing? He blew his nose and straightened his shoulders. “I daresay you were very drunk last night if the truth is known.”

  “What of it?”

  The Legal Officer gave an order and the mob tramped out of the cell, leaving a sergeant with a ball-point and sheet of paper clipped to a board.

  “Give all your particulars to the sergeant,” said the Legal Officer, “then we’ll run you down to the hospital.”

  *

  That evening Townrow was talking to Mrs K on the telephone. She did not know he had even left London.

  “Where are you?” She sounded cross.

  “I wanted to warn you I’ve got a damn great bandage round my head. I’ve had four stitches just under my left eye. No, it’s nothing. I just didn’t want you to be surprised.”

  The police had picked up the rest of his gear from the hotel and by the time Townrow had put it on in a cubicle in the Casualty ward his only reserves were three pairs of socks, two pairs of underpants and three vests, two shirts, three ties, handkerchiefs and a plastic raincoat. He had travelled light. This worsted grey suit and the brown shoes he now stepped out in were all he had in that line. Oh, there were the two pairs of pyjamas but he wasn’t wearing pyjamas in the street. Men did, of course, in Port Said but they were a special cut, with no flies. He hadn’t a piastre. Luckily, his passport was in the hotel office where they had been using it to fill in forms. No, he wasn’t reporting to the British Consul. That would mean more forms.

  The Khoury flat was the top floor of a building looking south over the Midan el Zaher. Townrow made it after five minutes hesitant walk. With only one eye functioning he could not judge distances. He seemed, if not actually floating, at least not quite in touch. There seemed altogether too much excitement, too many lights, too many big unshaven men in double-breasted suits rushing about and shouting. The cafés were full. Twangling music and throaty, rhythmical singing came from the loud-speakers slung up at all the corners. When the eye surgeon asked him what he thought the British Government would do about the nationalisation of the Canal Townrow had not answered immediately. The question, or it might have been the bright light, or the smell of anaesthetic, or the way his cheek had gone numb, made his stomach tremble. This question had been put to him before. He couldn’t remember where.

  “Get very nasty, I shouldn’t wonder,” he had said. “When did all this happen? Why don’t people tell me these things?”

  The surgeon had been surprised. “You did not know?” he said in the slightly W. C. Fields accent he had picked up at the American University, Beirut.

  Townrow did and he didn’t. He would have liked to see a newspaper to discover whether there was any mention of him in connection with the grab. He felt guilty about it.

  Townrow thought it was hard that when for once he had decided to do the decent thing and help this old trot settle her late husband’s estate, make a sensible will and see that no piastres fell through the grating, he should feel this check to his confidence. It was not true he did not know about the nationalisation of the Canal. Somebody had told him. Somebody had told him it was entirely his fault. He wished he could remember where he had been last night.

  The front door was opened by a Berber servant wearing a little round hat covered with glass beads that caught the light and made Townrow’s one eye ache. The lad had lips that
reached very nearly from his nose to his chin. At the sight of Townrow’s bandaged head the rest of his face became eyes.

  Mrs K’s voice could be heard. “Is that you, Jack? Come on through, for God’s sake, and Hassan will get you some coffee. We shall all be dead in a fortnight.”

  She had been sitting in a basket chair on the verandah. Behind her the sepia fronds of the palm trees caught the light of the street market below. This door to the verandah must have been open all day because there was dust everywhere, quite grey on the dining table, and the smell of unrained-on streets hung in the air. In spite of the heat she had hanging from her shoulders what looked like a stole of white silk lace. She must have lost a lot of weight. It seemed a long way from the high, bony forehead to the sharp, prominent chin. And he had remembered it as a round face. The only roundness was now supplied by the small-lensed steel-rimmed spectacles. She looked at his bandage and said, “They’ve been after you already. How did they know you’d arrived? That’s what I find so frightening. Even I didn’t know you were in Port Said. But they discovered it.”