Something to Answer For

by P. H. Newby

  “Who’s they?”

  “They murdered Elie, you know that surely? Your life isn’t worth fifty piastres.”

  The boy brought the coffee and they sat side by side on the huge, damask-covered Knole settee which Townrow remembered Elie telling him had been sent out from the Army and Navy Stores as a birthday present for his wife. He had to explain that he knew very little about what had happened. When he came to early that morning he was out in the desert, naked.

  “No clothes on at all? You couldn’t have brought a lot of stuff with you, so your wardrobe must be depleted.”

  Her Cockney accent and starched vocabulary would have served her well as some Labour councillor in an East End borough; and that, by God, was where she ought to be instead of inheriting all this money in a Levantine port and tying herself into knots about it. He would tell her she had a duty to relax and enjoy herself. That’s what the old man would have liked.

  “Elie wasn’t quite so tall as you and I expect you remember him as a well-built man but the last two or three years he lost stones and there must be clothes of different sizes because he was always buying new and he never threw any away.” She took Townrow into a bedroom and began pulling underclothes out of drawers and suits out of wardrobes, flinging them on the bed and telling him to take what he wanted.

  Townrow stood in front of a mirror, holding a silk shirt to his chest. It was broad enough across the shoulders but the sleeves came only half way down his forearm. Townrow remembered this oddity about Khoury, that he had arms that seemed about six inches shorter than they ought to be, though they were very thick and hairy. He used to joke about it. With hair on his arms like that he ought to be able to walk bolt Upright supporting himself on the ground with his knuckles but the truth was he had to reach down sideways even to undo a fly button. Townrow looked at the maker’s tab inside the collar. “Doucet, Rue de la Paix, Paris.” Made to measure and worth every bit of fifteen quid.

  He had white socks, white ties, white suits. Mrs K measured a pair of trousers against his leg and it didn’t look too impossible so she made him go into another room and change out of his London worsted. Townrow didn’t object to the shirts but there was something about wearing a dead man’s trousers that made him argue. She would have none of it. She pushed him through the door with the trousers, a complete change of underclothes, a shirt, a curious yellow silk waistcoat, and a snakeskin belt. He reflected that it was, from any sensible point of view, an emergency. He could not wear any of the jackets. The sleeves were too short. So if he fell in with her wishes that night he was not committed to inheriting Elie’s complete wardrobe to the exclusion of the properly fitting suits she would in all fairness have to buy him. Even so, he wished the clothes didn’t stink of camphor.

  “That looks very well,” she said, on his return. “What size shoes do you take?” She produced a tie-pin with an enormous pinkish pearl and said, “There, you might as well have that too. What would I be doing with a tie pin? Elie’d have been glad to know you were wearing it. He bought it in India.” And, without actually crying, and without, indeed, ceasing to talk about the cuff links and the gold cigarette lighter and the Rolex Oyster, she nevertheless produced tears that slid from under the little steel-rimmed spectacles and made her somewhat pinched cheeks and pointed chin glisten. “It’s so good of you to come all the way from England, just for an old woman.”

  “Did Elie have any Canal Company shares?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “If Nasser’s taken the Canal over they won’t be worth anything.”

  “He’ll never get away with it. And even if he did he’d have to pay compensation. This country is propped up by the Americans, you understand that?”

  “As a matter of interest,” said Townrow, “how much did Elie leave?”

  “About fifty thousand Egyptian pounds.”

  Townrow could not see her eyes because her spectacles were catching the light but he guessed she was watching him as closely as he was watching her. “You mean in stock and cash?”

  “The estate. He wasn’t a rich man. He was too lazy. There’s some gold in the bank in Beirut.”

  “Gold?”

  “A few bars.”

  “He was always going to Switzerland.”

  “He didn’t have any money in Switzerland.”

  “How many bars of gold?”

  “Four. Why?”

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  Mrs K said she had never been worried about money. When her father died he left her some slum property in Whitechapel and a house at Rickmansworth which was let, furnished. She sold the slum property to a development company and now there was a bank and a supermarket and a block of flats on the site. And what, legally, could she do with bullion? There it lay in the vaults of the bank. She was a British national, she had retained her nationality in spite of her marriage, and it was illegal for a Britisher—she used the word—to hold bullion. Elie was like her. He had never really been interested in money either. It was not having children.

  Townrow wanted a drink but he remembered that the old girl had been dead against it. Elie did all his drinking off the premises. She never allowed so much as a bottle of the stuff in the place. The left side of his face seemed even more numb than when he arrived so he said perhaps, now he had made his presence known, they had better put off any more serious talk until the morning. If she could lend him a few quid to be getting on with he would be trotting back to the Eastern Exchange for an early night.

  “It’s time for my evening walk anyway,” she said and sent Hassan for a white umbrella which had, as she pointed out to Townrow, an unusually long steel ferrule. This ferrule was no more than an eighth of an inch across at the tip. She said an attack was always possible. You could give an attacker a really nasty wound if you drove this umbrella at him with enough force. Elie had been found dead in the street at 9.30 in the evening. In spite of all the confusing rubbish talked by the police and the doctors and the lawyers she made a point of going to the spot every night at about 9.15 and hanging about. One night she would see his murderers, and, by a sign that had so far not been revealed, recognise them. “It’ll be on your way. If we walk together I can show you where Elie was found.”

  She gave Townrow a five pound note. She said that she would call at the Eastern Exchange the following morning to pay his bill. Hassan would transfer his belongings to the spare room where he would be comfortable and properly looked after. She would want to look at those stitches to see that the flesh was healing. Remember, she had been a nurse. Besides, there was no point in running up hotel bills.

  He saw he was not going to shake her off easily. She might accompany him back to the hotel and supervise his going to bed. This he would not stand for. He remembered a bar between the Eastern Exchange and the Hotel de la Poste where you could buy bourbon even in 1946 and this was what he felt he needed to combat the double vision that was now afflicting his one exposed eye. Two ghostly and overlapping women drew two stoles together over the breast with two cameo brooches showing the head of Queen Victoria. They put on white gloves, picked up the umbrellas and turned towards the door.

  In the square Townrow could smell the sea air. They were crossing one of those long, straight streets running due north and south. A clammy brininess swilled down the canyon from a remote tree with coloured lights on it standing against the blackness of sky over the Mediterranean. He could see better in the salt air. Maybe it was what his eye needed. He saw just this one tree and the red, blue and green lights slightly moving a quarter of a mile away. Except for the street market, and here there were gas flares and people shopping for vegetables, and pots of yoghourt kept warm under sacking, this was not a part of the town to draw the crowds. When Mrs K and Townrow turned west into an even worse-lit thoroughfare it was so quiet they could hear the siren on the Port Fouad ferry.

  “Do you know where you are?”

  Townrow recognised it from years back. There was the great white ga
teway and the row of low buildings opposite, a bit like the out-houses of a farm, where at one time he used to go drinking in a den called the Cyprus Bar. He wondered if it still existed. From where he stood the place seemed to be boarded up. There were no lights.

  “Elie was found in this gateway. Why they didn’t kill you too I can’t imagine.”

  “They want me to turn up in the rest of my clothes some time,” said Townrow.

  He was wearing the dead man’s silk underclothes, and his white silk shirt and his white cotton trousers. It occurred to Townrow that if anyone knowing how Elie Khoury came to pass on his equipment should emerge from the Cyprus Bar in some way that caused the light from the open door to fall on Mrs K’s face he might well think, this being the scene of the crime, that the dim figure at her side was Elie’s ghost. But the bar probably closed down when the British troops left. Christou was the man’s name. Perhaps he was dead too.

  “How was Elie attacked? I mean, what was it? A knife?”

  “There was not a mark on his body.”

  “I’ve been having dreams,” said Townrow. “Sometimes I think I’m home. My brain’s bent. I keep thinking my name is Bray.”

  She said she would walk him back to the hotel and he agreed on condition she went home in a taxi, but as luck had it there were no taxis free once they reached the main Sharia; they were charging about full of singing, cheering youths, some sitting on the roofs, waving flags. In one of the side streets leading to the Canal a public meeting seemed to be going on. A mounted police officer in a steel helmet was reaching down for a glass of water from a waiter at one of the pavement cafés.

  Townrow said they had better wait until the excitement died down and edged her into Jack’s Bar where they still had the tartan-covered stools and sold a good bourbon. Mrs K took a pineapple juice.

  “My grandmother was a Miss Bray,” she said.

  The only other customers were a couple of German sailors drinking bottle beer. Townrow had another bourbon and still Mrs K did not complain so he reckoned she needed him too badly to run the risk of offending him; and, sure enough, she opened her handbag and produced a gold chain with a slim, handsome gold watch at the end of it, with Lemoine, Genève, inscribed in tiny black copperplate on its ivory face.

  “This was Elie’s. I know he’d have liked you to have it.”

  The watch was not going. Townrow wound it up, set it by the bar clock to 10.10, and held it to his ear. Either the night air or the bourbon had worked on his optic nerves because he could see everything clearly now and, what was more, his throat was cool and he could have sung if he’d thought the Huns would join in. But he did not know any German songs.

  He held the watch in his right hand and patted Mrs K’s arm with his left. “This is a fine watch and I’m proud to be its owner and in these circumstances. You know, I liked Elie. Do you dream much?”

  “I never dream.”

  “Do you ever dream the same dream twice?”

  “I don’t dream.”

  “There are dreams I have come again and again, like this one of Elie lying in his coffin at the bottom of a boat and me sitting there at the stern with the sail smacking. Never believe that you can’t dream in colour. This water is real blue. When the water breaks along the line of a wave it’s not just white, it’s dazzling. The coffin is open. You can see the little bird face.”

  Mrs K sat upright with her pineapple juice untasted before her. She began stabbing the floor with her umbrella. Townrow thought she might be annoyed, but he was only describing a dream and that is what the little bony mask had looked like.

  “There’s a boatload of Jews coming out to take a look at us. On the way out I had a row with an Israeli who said we didn’t warn the Jews.”

  “Dreams bore me.” Mrs K was preparing to leave. Townrow swallowed his drink and followed her out on to the pavement.

  “You’ve got to make allowances,” he said.

  The town was noisier than ever. An armoured car was being eased through a mob up from Arab Town, all excited and shouting. He wanted to walk all the way home with her but she said no, he could call at eleven in the morning. She would have something important to tell him.

  “You’ve got to make allowances for Jews,” he said. “It’s natural for them to be suspicious.”

  Mrs K was using her umbrella to clear a way. “In this town it’s everybody for himself. There’s no real law.”

  “If you say the British Government just doesn’t behave in that way, they ask,’ How do you know?’ We just know they don’t.” Townrow stopped Mrs K by putting a hand on her shoulder. “I ought to have taken his name and address so that I could write. I could let him know the facts. Dates and that.”

  She had to remove his hand from her shoulder. “Go to bed and get some sleep. You need a good sleep and then you’ll be better in the morning. Remember, I’ve got things to tell you.”

  Townrow just could not get through to her. Perhaps he had not explained very well. Governments made mistakes, O.K., but you had to feel they were doing their best.

  “It was in 1942,” he said. “Nobody knew about the gassing in 1942. There couldn’t have been any warnings.”

  “Goodnight, Jack,” said Mrs K. “I do make allowances. You had this bang. But you’ve changed, and that’s a fact, and not for the better.”

  Townrow watched her go. After a while he wanted to run after her. In the U.K. you trusted people. In the main you took it for granted people acted decently. You made an assumption about the man who sat next to you in the Tube. You didn’t know for sure. You just assumed. Well, if you didn’t make assumptions like that how could you trust the government? Townrow wanted to tell Mrs K that trust in big things started with personal relations, he didn’t see why she should rough him up, but she was lost in the crowd. If he started running he might trip and fall. If he fell he might find it difficult to get up again and if he lay on the ground this mob would trample him flat. So he just stood there, waiting.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Fall from the Balcony

  In the English language paper was a picture showing Nasser standing up in a car and waving what looked like a huge white handkerchief, or it could have been a sheet of paper. Townrow counted the number of faces in this photograph. Excluding the people on the balconies and in the smudged distance there were thirteen. They looked healthy. In the right foreground was a handsome, smiling officer with a moustache, obviously a squash-playing teetotaller, and in the left foreground, was a thinner, more intellectual type who might have been straight from the polo field. They wore British-style berets at a British angle and this made Townrow think they must be pretty good. Real pros. Nasser himself had the kind of well-fed radiance that would have looked good in an ad for vitamin pills. His teeth shone, his eyes shone, his cheeks had a glow on them and his neat, well-brushed hair was free from dandruff and every hair follicle was undoubtedly fat with the appropriate nourishing oil. Townrow could not remember seeing Egyptians with faces like these. He remembered pear-shaped faces, hollow faces with big eyes, ferret faces, noseless faces, faces that were a bit unreal in their studied reserve, like masks. Perhaps these new faces were what appeared after the masks had been whipped off. It must have been a real Revolution after all.

  The report said the Egyptian Government had requisitioned the staff of the Canal Company and that traffic through the Canal would continue without interruption. Townrow went down to the waterfront and watched a French oil tanker and a Dutch passenger ship, the Oranje, slide out towards the Mediterranean.

  Townrow could see out of his one eye without distortion. The double vision had gone. Perhaps he did not feel so fit as Colonel Nasser looked, but he would cope. He did not take the bandage off to shave. He thought he would never get it on again without help; so he shaved half his face and could now feel the unshaven bristles tickling under the wrappings. This was unimportant. What worried him was his mind. It had skidded. It might skid again. He remembered, as a child, seeing his mothe
r put her hand into a coal fire and draw it out again, blazing like dry wood. He knew that was a dream. But you couldn’t pin everything down, everything ridiculous that is, as a dream.

  Five years time and he would be really middle-aged. That was when you needed a bit of give in your character. If you had no give you might snap in two. A bridge that was rigid would snap if it carried too much traffic and maybe the way he remembered ridiculous things that had not happened was a sign of too much traffic. Elie in his coffin was a sign of too much traffic. He had seen the wooden cross in the sun. There were other signs. International politics. He had never been too exercised about politics of any sort, he was more the religious type in spite of being flung out of that college, but he had been really worried by what that Jew said in Rome. Wasn’t that ridiculous? Perhaps he just had a weakness for Jews. Perhaps he was just getting old and confused.

  He put a hand up to the bandage. You deserved that, you snake! You know you wanted it. You enjoyed it. But, by God, if ever he laid hands on the bloke who did it he’d kill him.

  “Mr Townrow?”

  He turned and saw a woman sitting in one of those miniature Fiats with the engine at the back. This one was putty coloured. All the windows were down and it had stolen right up to the kerb behind his back without his noticing. He paid more attention to the car and what was going on in the immediate neighbourhood than he did to the woman. So far as he could tell it was just an ordinary car. It was a couple of years old, perhaps, and it looked as though it had not been cherished. There were dents. The front bumper was tied up at one end with string. She was parked immediately opposite Simon Artz’s store and nothing in any way remarkable seemed to be going on. A Chrysler was parked outside the cable office. A long way down to the left cars were queueing for the ferry. A small group of what, judging by their little hats and wide shoulders, might be German tourists with a ship’s officer in attendance were away up towards the front looking at the Anzac memorial. It was only ten o’clock but the sun had a bite. Townrow now looked at the woman and saw that she had fine teeth, a long dark face and the kind of smoky-red hair that was naturally black.