Something to Answer For

by P. H. Newby

  She applied the new dressing. She fixed it in place with plaster, using the same bandage because it was reasonably clean and she hadn’t a fresh one anyway.

  Abravanel sighed. “No, no, no. It was a simple cardiac failure.”

  “Was there a post mortem?” Townrow asked. “Was there an inquest?”

  “No need. A simple doctor’s certificate.”

  “Kesab didn’t so much as lay eyes on Elie to write that certificate,” said Mrs K. “Elie’s heart was sounder than mine and I run upstairs if I want to. You’re the one with the bad heart, Mr Abravanel.”

  Townrow guessed he must have shown he had not enjoyed the trip because Elie never took him out to the island again. Another thing he remembered now was that he had had to wear civvies because Arab Town was out of bounds to troops. From that day to this he had forgotten the island. He liked forgetting. You had to forget all manner of things just to survive. Until he heard Mrs K talking he had forgotten what Elie looked like, lying on his face against the white wall, with his coat and shirt torn open down the centre seam.

  “Thanks.” He sat up and opened his one eye. He could see nothing but parallel bands of sunlight on the shutters. He patted the bandage and said, “I’d like some water.”

  “When Jack is better,” said Mrs K, “he and I are going to come along to your office, Mr Abravanel and check the list of boxes. There’s no hurry. It won’t bring Elie back. But I’m determined not to be swindled, just because I’m a simple minded old woman who’s never understood the wickedness people are capable of.”

  “I’m all right.” Townrow drank and the sweat ran off him.

  About a mile out of the basin the motor broke down. He and the pilot took it in turns to row while Elie sat in the stern and watched them. He could see that sunset across the lake as though it was yesterday. Posts, trees, birds, sail, stood black in the golden flux. Elie was black.

  “What’s that noise?” He stood with the towel in his hands, his head on one side.

  “A demonstration?” said Mr Abravanel. “A visit. What else?”

  “I hope the British Navy lines up off the coast and blows them all to hell.” Mrs K came in from the passage where the Berber had been whispering in her ear. “There are men trying to force their way into this building.”

  Townrow opened the shutters and stepped on to the balcony. The sun beat down well-nigh vertically. There was no shadow in the street. The brilliance had a sour stink. There were a hundred, perhaps two hundred heads and upturned faces and sticks and tarbooshes and banners gathered in the street. They were streaming into the building. A man in red pyjamas was looking down from a balcony opposite, apparently enjoying the fun because he was laughing, pointing and talking, presumably to someone in the room behind. The chanting turned to a steady roar.

  Abravanel stood calmly at Townrow’s side acting as interpreter. “Death to the British and the Jews. Death to the enemies of the nation.”

  “What makes them pick on this building? That’s what I’d like to know.”

  Townrow seized a small flower-pot with a dusty plant in it, balanced if for a moment in his right hand and hurled it across the street. It exploded against the shutter behind the head of the man in pyjamas who gave a startled look in Townrow’s direction and shot into the apartment.

  “I don’t suppose they will kill us,” said Abravanel. “They will throw the furniture into the street, perhaps. Somebody tipped them off. Mrs Khoury’s servant, perhaps, or the porter.”

  Mrs K was already on the telephone. “Is that the police? Put someone on who can speak English. Do you understand? You fool, I want to talk to someone who speaks English.”

  Abravanel took the phone from her, settled himself comfortably in a chair, put his right ankle on his right knee, smiled as though preparing to share a joke with an old friend; and indeed, he might have been doing just that for all the scared, angry old woman and Townrow knew, because he was murmuring, his lips close to the mouthpiece, in Arabic.

  Townrow asked Mrs K if there were any weapons in the flat. Elie went duck shooting, didn’t he? Where were his guns? With a shot gun he was prepared to have a go at blasting the lot of them back down the stairs. He did not think they would come up in the lift. And if they did? He’d blast them anyway. They would be reduced to setting fire to the building.

  “No, no guns,” Mr Abravanel called out when Mrs K returned from Elie’s room with a couple of cases. “These men will not hurt us. They are harmless. They will simply smash everything.” He was still at the telephone. He was on to the Military Governor of the city; or, rather, he explained, to his office. But so far he had not got past the switchboard.

  Townrow opened one of the cases and took out a Browning over-and-under that must have cost Elie a packet. Where was the ammunition? He followed Mrs K back into a shuttered room where all the lights, a standard lamp, two reading lamps, wall lights, were all switched on. There was a desk, books, corded boxes and a huge, faded, photographic portrait which Townrow surprisingly remembered was of Elie’s uncle, a Maronite bishop who when he wrote, Elie used to say, supported the paper on the palm of his left hand, never on any wooden surface. But there were no cartridges. Townrow gave up the search when he heard hammering on the front door. He threw the gun down and went off to the kitchen for a meat cleaver.

  Abravanel was there to put out a restraining hand. “It will be the worse for all of us. We can’t stop them getting in. They will have the master key from the porter downstairs.”

  Townrow had a feeling the mob were after him personally. He was their man. They had had one go at him. They were coming back. He was the enemy and he was glad of it. A great bag of pus would be slit. He grinned at Mrs K.

  “They’re coming in for me now,” he said.

  Mrs K went into the kitchen and turned the key behind her. The door shook as she pushed some heavy object, the table or the ice box, thumping against it. The Berber had evaporated. Only Abravanel and Townrow were left in this main room giving on to the hall and Townrow could see by the way the old chap was settling himself on a chair in the corner he was not going to excite himself. He sat quietly with his knees together and his hands resting on them. He shut his eyes. Maybe he hoped the gang would think he was dead.

  If they had the master key they did not bother to use it. Judging by the row they were just beating on the door with their fists and kicking it. Townrow noticed there was a bolt not pushed over and was about to spring on it when the door, creaking and whining under some enormous pressure tore open at the side of the hinges, carrying the frame with it. A youngish, bearded man with a cloth round his head forced his way through the gap. Townrow punched him in the face but the fellow scarcely seemed to notice. He made for the first object he clapped eyes on, a glass cabinet containing Mrs K’s collection of china animals; Townrow kicked him on the left ankle. He yelled, tripped and sprawled forward on his face with a few of his followers, a boy wearing a scarf, a gallabieh and bright yellow boots, another youth wearing a tarboosh and bleeding from his nose, an emaciated man dressed in what looked like a winding sheet: fists, hairy forearms, a green eye-shield as though for billiards, an eye that was all white and no retina, and with yells and a stink of sweat, bad breath and chewed nuts, they piled on top.

  A lad in a candy-striped pyjama top and khaki shorts picked up a chair with a red plush seat and hurled it over the balcony. A couple of other youths prised a gold-painted console table, all cherub faces and wings, from the wall and, staggering under the weight of its marble top moved to the balcony. They balanced it on the rail, shouted to the crowd below and gave it a heave. Abravanel, still with his eyes closed and his clasped hands resting on his knees, was lifted up in his chair and borne off like a god in a Hindu procession. The first arrivals had now picked themselves up off the floor and were taking it out of their friends who had walked over them. Townrow came in for a certain amount of the face-clawing and spitting himself. Glass shattered, pictures were torn from walls, wood splintered
. Mrs K could be heard screaming behind her closed door.

  Even if Abravanel was dead Townrow did not see why the body of a man who had been the father of such a fetching woman should be thrown into the street sixty feet below. He charged one of the chair bearers and came away with him. The fellow struggled and turned. Townrow saw it was the very man who had first burst into the flat with a cloth round his head and this encouraged him to take a tighter grip of the throat, forcing the fellow back to the balcony while Abravanel, still silent and smiling, tumbled out of his chair and crouched on the floor with his buttocks in the air, his hands over his ears.

  Townrow wasn’t strong enough to strangle his opponent with one hand, so he had to use the other as well. This left the other man’s hands and legs free. As he was now pulling a knife the question was which came first: throttling or punching? Townrow let go of the throat with one hand and grabbed the knife wrist. By pushing the chap violently against the verandah rail he thought he might break something.

  In fact it was the verandah rail. Townrow was surprised Elie hadn’t maintained his property better. The wood must have been rotten, the ironwork rusted. The man with the knife went straight through, still clutching his knife, with an expression of wide astonishment on his face. He hung in the sunshine and floated down to the street. Faces scattered. They made room for a clean landing. Townrow thought he could hear the tinkle of the knife when it was jerked from the man’s hand and fell on the asphalt. After a moment’s hesitation, the man turned on his side.

  He had screamed all the way down Townrow now realised. This was what calmed everyone. Abravanel was still on the floor but he had lifted his head and opened his eyes. There was an expression of strained, quizzical expectancy on his face as though he was trying to catch a joke being whispered in the other corner. Nobody tried to stop Townrow from leaving the flat. By the time he reached the street the crowd had gathered closely round the fallen man and he had to shove his way through. He had moved again. Now he was lying on his face. Townrow kneeled and put his hand to the back of the neck. The movement was so familiar to him it might have been a ritual. He knew what to expect. He had been through this before. He felt the sudden recess in the vertebrae and remembered that the size of the black bruise depended on how long the man lived after receiving the injury. In this case, it might be only quite a small one.

  *

  At the first opportunity Leah Strauss said, “I don’t know what you mean when you say you don’t know if it was an accident. You couldn’t mean to kill him. But you tossed him over the balcony, or through it. For God’s sake, you knew what you were doing, didn’t you?” She was amazed.

  He shrugged. “How important would you say all that was?”

  “The police will think it important.”

  “I’m a good liar.”

  “I suppose I ought to admire the way you keep cool.”

  “I’m not cool. I’m so scared I spend half my time in the loo. Don’t build me up into anything. Probably it was an accident. You need more resolution than I possess to see a man off at the sort of party we had in this place. I’ve seen men off, you know. I’ve been a soldier.”

  “It’s awful. It’s terrible. It’s made my father ill. Everybody will be arrested now. What I can’t understand is the way you talk about it. Anybody would think it was a joke. Don’t you realise how serious it is?”

  “On the whole,” he said, “I am not the sort of man I’d like to be seen about with. Look, I’ve admitted to shitting myself. What more d’you want?”

  “Another thing, what did I say to offend you?”

  “When?”

  “In the car. You got out and walked off.”

  “You called me English. No Irishman likes that.”

  “Are you Irish?”

  He frowned. He wished he could be sure.

  *

  Judging by his red tabs, it had been the Military Governor himself who turned up to inspect the damage. What Townrow remembered was the way Mrs K pinned this chap in the corner and demanded government compensation, She had got over her fright. The place was uninhabitable, she said. She would have to move out. The Egyptian Government would have to pay her hotel bill. They would also have to pay the hotel bill of her guest from England. An ambulance picked up the dead man, an army truck collected about thirty of the rioters, and eventually Townrow himself was taken to an office overlooking the ferry where he dictated and signed an affidavit. He hoped to see his friend, the Legal Officer, but he gathered that a suspected spy who got mixed up in a riot and then murdered an innocent by-stander was regarded as more of a military than a civil problem. The room was full of officers in shiny brown boots.

  Surprisingly, Townrow was then told he could go. An unshaved captain with a paper clipped to a board said an inquiry into the disturbance would be held the next day, or maybe the day after, or perhaps next week. He was to hold himself in readiness and certainly he was not to leave the city. He assumed they were letting him loose for the fun of it. With a bit of luck somebody else would beat him up. And if they didn’t, well, there wasn’t much chance of his getting away. Port Said was as near as dammit an island. Perhaps they wanted to practice their surveillance techniques on him.

  *

  In the bar of the Hotel de la Poste, a man with oddly prominent eyes came over to Townrow’s table and said he hadn’t been sure at first because of the bandage but if it wasn’t Captain Ferris! He stuck out his hand.

  Townrow took it and gestured the man to sit down. But he said nothing. Ferris? Did he know anyone by that name? It seemed familiar. After what he had been through, Townrow was slightly rocked at being accosted by this Englishman with the horribly bulging eyes. They stuck out so much the pupils were surrounded by half an inch of white. Unusually prominent eyes like this indicated some disease. Either that or the man was an Armenian (because all Armenians had bulging eyes). Yet again, it might be a sign the man was good at languages. Townrow had heard somewhere that good linguists often had bulging eyes. It revealed a physical type normally possessed of certain intellectual characteristics. Armenians were good at languages, so he understood. Townrow would have preferred not to go into all this. He was very tired and had been drinking scotch on an empty stomach.

  “My name’s not Ferris,” he said.

  Those protuberant eyes could not look sly. The man went about just staggered by whatever happened to fall within his field of vision. That was the impression given; continuous amazement. But when he leaned forward and Townrow was able to see the red net in the sclerotic the amazement was touched with an obvious knowingness. He didn’t actually lay a finger along his nose.

  “Whatever you say, old chap, but I never forget a face.” He said it was a small world and he’d never regretted the switch out of china clay into oil. Shunting back between St Austell Bay and Le Havre was no lark for the winter months even if at one end of the trip was the Café-Bar de la Republique with Mme Ferris and her coffee rum. As snug a refuge as you could wish for. But you had no idea the luxury on these oil tankers. He was captain’s steward. He had his own private bathroom and two kinds of toilet paper, soft and crisp. The weather was better, too.

  “We’re tied up in the Roads waiting to go through the Canal empty. Some row about the toll. Captain’s waiting for Shell to tell him who to pay it to. With these wogs running it the Canal will be back to duck marsh in a year or two.” He brought Townrow another couple of inches of scotch from the bar. “I just sat in the corner looking at you. Knew it was a familiar face. But I couldn’t be sure because of the bandage. You had an accident?”

  Townrow remembered driving through a tiny Cornish port handling china clay. The trucks and the railway stock, the sheds, the cranes, the derricks, were covered with the stuff. The ground was white and the dockers went about like millers. Out in the Channel the water might be turquoise. It was easy to think of some battered coaster, looking as though it had been dipped in flour and breadcrumbs, swimming into that turquoise water and making for
the French coast with this gooseberry-eye soak in the galley.

  They smoked real Havana cigars which Faint, that was his name, had bought in Bahrein and talked about the old days when Captain Ferris, ex-infantry, once of the War Graves Commission, stood behind the counter of the Café-Bar de la Republique, the property of his French wife, Andrée, serving dockers, sailors, locals, railway men, troops: the real hard stuff, most of the time, rum, brandy, pernod.

  “If you’ll forgive the familiarity,” said Faint, “Madame was a good bit older’n you.”

  “It was a love match,” said Townrow. “I punched a chap who said I’d done it for the drink.”

  “Where is she now?”

  The tanker run was cushier but Faint contradicted himself and said he’d never been so happy as when carrying china clay. It got in the food and scoured the great gut. His health had been good. It neutralised acids. It absorbed the bodily poisons into itself and thus discharged them from the body. Now, he sat in a deck chair most of the time putting on weight and eating rough oats for breakfast to supply roughage. With china clay you didn’t need roughage.

  “But for the difference in age,” said Faint, “you seemed ideally suited. It all seems a long time ago. What I liked about the Le Havre run was going into this French bar and finding a Britisher behind the counter. It was nice, somehow.”

  Faint said once he’d had something to eat he would have to think about getting back on board.

  “I know a place to eat,” said Townrow.

  He took Faint by the arm so as not to lose him on the way to the Midan el Zaher, not saying a great deal because he was thinking of all those bottles in the Café-Bar de la Republique. In spite of his bug-eyes Faint seemed less surprised to come across his old acquaintance than he might have been. Townrow was still grappling. The shock had sent him straight back to that cobbled quay. Faint was right to ask about Andrée. What the hell had happened to her?