Something to Answer For

by P. H. Newby

  A couple of carpenters, stripped to the waist and wearing army plimsolls and white cotton drawers were working on the smashed doorway. Townrow was able to walk straight in, drawing Faint after him. Faint said nothing. The lift was not working and they had climbed a lot of stairs. For the moment he was just concentrating on breathing. He stood quite still, studying the wreckage. Townrow supposed that with eyes like his he could see all round, like a horse, without moving his head.

  Mrs K was sitting at a table, writing, and Townrow went up to her. “You ought to cut your losses. Why don’t you go back to England? This town is no longer any place for an English woman.”

  “This was Elie’s home,” she said. “That’s what hurts. Smashed. They smashed his home. They smashed his easel. Hassan brought the empty paint box up from the street. All the paints had gone.”

  Townrow introduced Faint who finally looked round, swinging his head in such a way that Townrow noticed for the first time what a long scraggy neck he had: he swung his head like a camel.

  “Jesus, you had the bums in?”

  “Abravanel’s ill. His daughter’s been round.” Mrs K stared at Faint resentfully. “What d’you mean, bums. I’m not in debt. Don’t judge people by your own modest circumstances, Mr Faint. You off a boat? What d’you do? Stoker?”

  “Stoker? No, there are no stokers these days, lady, not on my sort of boat. I’m captain’s steward. Captain Ferris is an old friend of mine.”

  “My father was captain in the Ellerman Line and he never allowed any familiarities from his steward.”

  “On second thoughts,” said Townrow, “you go down and wait in the hall. The old lady’s had a shock. We’ll find some place we can eat.”

  “Didn’t mean any offence,” said Faint and he picked his way through the doorway.

  “Captain Ferris is what he calls me,” Townrow explained after Faint had gone. “Says he knew me in Le Havre.”

  “When were you in Le Havre?”

  “Never been near the place.”

  He had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the hammering of the carpenters. “This town’s hostile. I know what you’re going to say. If you leave Egypt you won’t be able to realise on your capital that’s tied up here. And if they confiscate the Suez Canal why shouldn’t they confiscate the property and possessions of absentee British subjects? As they will do. Do you think it’ll stop at the Canal? Now, let me tell you something. You think that because you’ve got a Lebanese passport they wouldn’t touch your block of flats and your holdings and your island in the lake. But you never gave up your British passport, did you? When you go to the U.K. you enter on your British passport. That right? You’ve got your name registered at the British Consulate. Right? These Egyptians are not fools. Did you know I was an Irish citizen?”

  Mrs K was watching him closely with her little mouth pursed up and lines like hairs radiating from it. “I’m Irish on my mother’s side. Her mother was a Miss O’Connor.”

  “You see what I mean!” Townrow was delighted. “I’m neutral. All you’ve got to do is make over your Egyptian holdings in my name and they wouldn’t dare touch them. I could send you an allowance.”

  “That would be generous of you, all things considered.”

  “The Egyptians and the Irish have a fellow feeling. They are both victims of British imperialism and once your estate is in my name they’d no more think of sequestrating it than the Rock of Cashel itself, assuming it was on Egyptian territory and occupied by the Irish Ambassador. It makes no difference at all that there is no Irish Embassy in Cairo. A citizen of the Irish Republic always gets a welcome at the American Embassy, you know.”

  “I didn’t know you were an Irishman,” she said. “You don’t look Irish. You don’t talk like one. I don’t believe you are one.”

  “I’ll show you my passport the moment I find it. But we can’t waste time. If Abravanel is too sick to get out the documents we shall just have to find somebody else. These Egyptians are in a state of high excitement. This time next week they’ll have everything that’s British, French or Jewish in their pockets and the sooner you get your goods and chattels into the guardianship of a citizen of the Irish Republic the better. Abravanel can make everything he’s got over to his daughter. She’s got a U.S. passport. It’s not worth as much as it was since Dulles said no to the High Dam. But it’s better than being a Jew with Egyptian citizenship. What’s Abravanel’s number? I’ll ring him up.”

  It was night. He had not noticed this before. The last time he had been aware of the time of day a man had been falling away from him with his mouth open through a harsh light. Now there were moths and mosquitoes pinging round the electric light bulb. The loudspeakers were bellowing in the street. The cobalt sky on the other side of the balcony pulsed. The lighthouse, he thought. The Mediterranean and the Red Sea must be full of boats wondering whether to turn back. He guessed the captains would be listening to the short wave news bulletins. Or they’d sit, waiting for the message from the owners. Observed from high enough the American Seventh Fleet would be seen to leave its tracks like a hundred snails on the black water between Cyprus and Lebanon.

  A twinge of pain made him turn his head and the picture changed. It was the road again, with the bleached broken wall running off at an angle to climb the mountain. The group of children with fair hair and naked feet were standing at a turning of this road and they were shouting, “Captain Ferris! Captain Ferris!” as he drove past, throwing money to them, on the way to some sullen, landlocked water, it might have been Galway. Somebody travelled with him but he could never make out who it was, male or female, but probably female, he thought.

  He did not ring Abravanel. He walked up to the roof and stood in the starlight. Every forty-five seconds his part of the town was blanched by the lighthouse and in between he could look south to the lights slung from the top of the cranes in the basin. A plane with a red, winking light dropped westward, to the airport. Townrow looked around him. There were cabins on the flat roof where servants like Hassan lived and in one of them an elderly, bearded man was writing in the light of a hurricane lamp. His steel-rimmed glasses flashed when he moved his head. Washing was pegged out on lines. At Townrow’s cough the man looked up but he went on writing almost immediately and Townrow turned to lean over the parapet.

  He knew perfectly well where he was, what he was doing and why he was doing it. What he had not established was the appropriate attitude. Was he amused, frightened, on the make, altruistic? He had no view of himself. One reason for this was, every time he started a conversation, somebody tried to cast him for some role he could never assume with the conviction he would have liked. You would have thought that talking to Mrs K he would at once be the genial, concerned friend of the family she judged him to be. But did she? She puzzled him. She might be playing some cunning low game and he could not be at all sure she really thought he was a friend. He was still struggling out of some sleep, some dream, and the figures who stood round and about did not convince. They were not convinced about him either. Could they even hear his voice? It seemed to have very little resonance. When he raised it there was no response or, at least, not one he could recognise. That old man writing in his shack probably thought he was a Greek grocer on the look-out for an uncurtained bedroom window. Or, perhaps, in the darkness he had taken the bandage for a turban and thought him a Sikh sailor?

  The hell of being among strangers was that nobody formed any expectation of how you would behave; therefore you did not know how to behave. You had no notion of what your appropriate conduct would be. You did not know whether you were good, bad or indifferent, not until somebody began to react in a way that told you. When there was an Empire the white man in foreign parts suffered from none of these uncertainties. At 7 p.m. he put on his tails, stepped into the dug-out canoe, and was paddled through the crocodile and hippopotami-infested waters to the formal party where decorations were worn and bridge played until two in the morning. That role had gone ou
t at roughly the time the heroine was strapped to the railroad track. A convincing new one had not been assigned. But history did not let up. You had to keep meeting people and doing things. It was vertiginous.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Townrow said when he had returned to Mrs K. “You can’t stay here. There is no guarantee that the mob won’t come back, or the police, or the military. You can have my hotel room. Get a good night’s sleep. I’ll move in here. In the morning we can get Abravanel started on those documents. You needn’t stay to get everything cut and dried. There’s such a thing as airmail and papers can be signed and witnessed in London as well as here.”

  “This is my home,” said Mrs K. “I’m not abandoning my home. Anyway, you’re not Irish.”

  “Of course you’re not abandoning your home. I’m looking after it for you, aren’t I? What I’ve got on my mind is the thought they’ll pinch it like they’ve pinched the Canal.”

  They argued. By now the carpenters had rigged up a makeshift door that actually locked but they stayed on to listen to the row. Several times Townrow pretended to concede defeat and said he had this friend off a boat waiting for him in the hall below; he had a damn great cabin all to himself with a spare bunk in it and if Mrs K really thought she could manage the Egyptians by herself Townrow had this line of retreat. Before the sun came up he would be in the spare bunk and well out into the Med. Or half way down the Canal. He didn’t know which way the boat was pointing. It was immaterial, if Mrs K had no further use for him. Of course he was Irish.

  Eventually Mrs K said she would go to the Eastern Exchange, just for that night, so long as he promised to admit nobody to the flat in her absence and to telephone immediately in case of trouble. She took an hour and a half to pack a couple of suitcases. He carried them down to the street and found a taxi for her.

  Townrow was not at his best talking to Mrs K. He was not at his best talking to any woman. There were too many unsaid things to remember. Nowadays people talked a lot of cant about the equality of men and women. The fact was, though, that Mrs K had been dispossessed of her flat because she was a woman and he was a man. He was wide awake. Sleep was impossible. He removed his bandage, dipped it in water, and put it on again, fixing it with a gilt safety pin he found on Mrs K’s dressing table. As the water evaporated his face was cooled. He sat between the open window and the open door to benefit from the moving air. The gun rested on his knees but nobody came.

  “O.K. You can come out now,” he called. “You can come out, Elie. She’s gone.”

  But of course Elie didn’t come out from anywhere and Townrow never expected that he would. He opened the wardrobes, though. He looked inside that big chest in the kitchen. One door was locked and as Townrow could not find the key anywhere he took it into his head to blow it open, the way they did in movies, both barrels, up and down. There was an explosion that seemed to shake the whole building and Townrow took a blow on his right shoulder. After the smoke cleared the lock still held. Indeed, it seemed quite undamaged. Maybe, the cartridge was blank. He looked at the cartridges left in the box. 12-gauge shot. Now the room stank of sulphur. No reaction to the shot from the rest of the block. No hurrying footsteps, no shouts, no whistle. Townrow switched the light out and watched the fumes silver in the starlight.

  “You must have got the key in your pocket, Elie. Just try it in the lock and see if it still works. You can come out now. The coast is clear.”

  Townrow took the handle of the door and shook it. “I tell you there’s nobody else here, Elie.”

  He was just normally sexed, not too much, not too little. Before he’d had any it didn’t worry him. Now there had been twenty years of it he wouldn’t have regarded it as any kind of obstacle to entering a monastery which was what he might well do even now if he continued in this innocence about the behaviour expected of him. That way you accepted your innocence, or did he mean ignorance? There you were, alone in your cell confronting the fact of existence. That would be soothing. It would be nice. It would be unalarming. If, on the other hand, it turned out he was defrauding the old bitch he might finish up in a cell of a different sort and grow embittered. If there was anything he hated it was embitterment, particularly in women. Leah was a nice name. Her husband being that way she must have been put to it for sex. It must be on her mind.

  Captain Ferris? Who was Captain Ferris? Where was the maniac with the bulging eyes who had invented Captain Ferris? Townrow even went to the trouble of trotting down the eight flights of stairs to see whether he was still waiting. “I’m sorry, old chap, but you’ve made a mistake,” he would say to him. “You’ve been deceived by some sort of likeness but in point of fact I’ve never been in Le Havre in my life.” Naturally the man had gone, hours ago probably, and Townrow climbed the eight flights again, thinking it was the mention of china clay that had caught his imagination. On the other side of the Canal, way beyond Port Fouad, were the evaporation beds and hills and peaks and pyramids of salt which, when the Ities dropped their flares in a raid during the war, looked not unlike tents; a plain of marquees and bell tents. Perhaps it was of these salt hills that he was thinking, and not the white mountains of Cornwall, when Faint spoke of the rough channel crossings and the coffee rum in the Café-Bar de la Republique. Perhaps in some other port, Naples or Rangoon, the real Captain Ferris was crossing a crowded floor to a cow-eyed lonely sailor, saying, “Faint, It is Faint, isn’t it?”

  The gun was where he had put it, lying across the chair. Stupid to leave it like that. In spite of trotting up and down those stairs he was not short of breath and his heart beat no faster. He was in better condition than he thought.

  “Irish?” a voice could be heard saying, or rather pronouncing, on the other side of that locked door. “Townrow is not an Irish name.”

  “Neither’s De Valera. You can’t argue from names. There’s lots of Protestant Irish from Cromwellian times.”

  “You never told me you were an Irishman.”

  “Elie, you were never an easy man to lie to.” Townrow rapped on the door with his knuckles. “Open up there, you old fraud.”

  This was followed by complete silence so Townrow began battering the lock with the stock. He never had a conscience about lying to women. It was part of sex.

  Of all the eight, nine, ten doors in the flat this was the only one locked and although Mrs K had not actually forbidden him to enter it was enough to try a man’s curiosity. This, when he came to think of it, was one way of reading his relations with women. They were the great shutters-out. They shut him out from themselves, they shut him out from some state. He could not have put it any clearer. The word was “state”, in all its meanings; situation, condition, country, kingdom, empire, splendour, glory and transfiguration.

  “If you don’t come out I shall fire through the panels.”

  He could hear a cock crowing. This was an astonishing sound in the middle of a city in the small hours. Perhaps time had passed more quickly than he thought. There were, of course, birds and animals everywhere on these rooftops. In addition to chickens some people even kept goats and sheep. For the milk.

  But what chiefly astonished him was that he should be standing there in a wrecked flat, holding a gun, listening to the crow of a Port Said cock and thinking, years and years after the event, of the little blue-smocked girl who had seduced him. What her name was he could not remember. He did remember going to the principal who immediately kicked him out of college. “I’m grieved but I have to tell you this means you cannot go on with your training for the ministry.” If only he had kept his silly mouth shut. It was a false alarm. She wasn’t pregnant.

  He switched the light on and immediately saw that built into the lock was a little bolt you could slip the end of your finger into. He pushed it up and the door swung open. He fumbled around for the light switch and saw the room was used just for lumber and storage. There were boxes, leather and tin trunks, piles of books and old newspapers, a plaster bust of Socrates and a stepladder. In one corn
er was a heap of shavings. But no sign of Elie.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Sort of Patriot

  “Mr Townrow, I am sorry, but every time I think of you I have to laugh. “Lieutenant Amin sat down M on the Knole settee, spreading his knees wide apart.” You were naked and these men hit you with whips and cudgels. How is your face? You have not yet had the stitches out? Mr Mansoury, the surgeon, is a friend of mine. He is expecting to be transferred to Cairo. But now there is to be a war he will be requested to remain, I have no doubt. Here, in Port Said, we shall be in the front line.”

  “What war?”

  “We have nationalised the Canal. This the British will not be able to tolerate. I am a realist. There will most certainly be a war.”

  What particularly annoyed Townrow was that he, an Irishman, would now have to quarrel with Amin’s simple-minded view of the English.

  “I don’t mean,” said Amin, “to condemn the British Government for attacking us. If I were in Mr Eden’s position that is what I should do myself, without doubt. The British national interest calls for an attempt to take the Canal back again. The Egyptian national interest is to resist. I shall be killed in this resistance, quite possibly. I strike no moral attitude. Perhaps you will be the one to kill me. Perhaps I shall kill you. We are not free to decide. England and the United Arab Republic are not free to decide. But this is not,” he said, smiling again, “what I have come for, which is to ask how you are, and then to make certain enquiries.”

  He took out his notebook and asked Townrow if he could borrow a pen or a pencil, something to write with.

  This defence of the British that Townrow now found himself launched upon came hard to a man who had stormed a barricade of horsehair sofas, dustbins and old carts (in the spirit, that is to say) to get at the flat-capped British in the Dublin streets. He could not be as old as that. The fighting was in 1916 and he could tell, by looking at the backs of his hands, that they hadn’t the skin of a man that old. The fighting must have been before he was born.