by P. H. Newby
“They wouldn’t do it,” he said, “because next to the Americans there’s nobody likes so much to be well thought of as the English. They all know the Kaiser started the 1914 War and that Hitler started the 1939 War. People who start wars and invasions and commit acts of aggression are just Bad Men. The English have become very priggish about this.”
Amin shrugged. “Tell me candidly, Mr Townrow, why are you in the United Arab Republic? Europeans don’t come to Egypt in July usually.”
“They know they’ve no real power left in the world, and all they’ve got left is their priggishness.”
“Please——”
This assumption the British were nasty enough to start a war was what annoyed Townrow. Anybody would think Amin and that Israeli at Rome Airport had been putting their heads together. He was particularly annoyed because Amin was so free from rancour; to do that Israeli journalist justice he’d been pretty berserk. Amin did not seem to know right from wrong. If he thought the British were bandits why the hell didn’t he resent it. The Israeli had spewed hate. He had values. But Amin had not even mentioned the United Nations Charter. He was amoral. Perhaps he had decided life was so harsh he could not afford to have principles. But why should he assume the rest of the world was the same?
“Don’t be polite with me,” said Townrow. “There’s no need. This country is lucky the European power it’s had most to do with is England and not Germany, or Russia, or even France. They are fine people. I say that as an Irishman. They are fine people, except when they’re in Ireland. I’d say the devil had gone out of them nowadays.”
“I don’t know if you realise the extent of my authority,” said Amin. “I am the Legal Officer. There is no such officer in the British police system. I am very like the juge d’instruction in France. In order to make my enquiries I have great powers under the law. I can interrogate witnesses.”
“Witnesses to what? Are you accusing me of something?”
“In a way yet to be determined you were concerned with the violent death of an Egyptian citizen. What I’m immediately interested in is the reason for your being in Egypt at the hottest time of the year. I called at your hotel. You were not there. I was given this address. As a foreigner you are under an obligation to keep the police informed of your movements. Is this to be your address while staying in the Republic?”
No doubt those Immigration officers had been in touch with the Port Said police and Amin knew perfectly well he’d fairly recently been a soldier in the Canal Zone. The kind of paranoia these chaps suffered from they probably thought he was there with plans to assassinate the Military Governor. If the truth were known the men who had set upon him and stripped him were members of the kind of incompetent counter-intelligence service you’d expect the Egyptians to have; so incompetent they forgot to cut his throat. It came home to Townrow that not only did Amin think the British were getting ready to mount an attack on his country but that he, Townrow, was probably part of it.
The lift gate clanged and there was Leah on the landing in a biscuit-coloured linen suit. Townrow had the front door open and all the windows so that the air could circulate.
“Come right in. This is Lieutenant Amin who thinks I’m a spy or saboteur or something. Now he can go straight back to Headquarters and say the well-known Israeli agent, Leah Strauss has blown in from the States and, what do you know, she’s made contact with the British already!”
Amin stood up, smiled, and said he hoped to see Townrow later on when he was calmer. Townrow said he was in Port Said for a long time. Maybe he’d take up permanent residence. Amin and he ought to have plenty of opportunity for getting together in the years to come and if ever Amin found him calmer than he was at present it would be because Amin had conceded the major point, that this belief in the bloodymindedness of the British was necessary to him, and any other Egyptian who though as he did, in the same way that corsets had been necessary to King Farouk, to stop him from falling apart.
“It’s quite all right to hate people for what they’ve done in the past,” Townrow yelled, “but not when it confuses you about the real world you live in.”
Amin had already gone while Townrow, who was unshaved and still wearing a pair of Elie’s pjyamas, orange with silver piping, stood in the middle of the floor, shouting and gesturing.
“You’re a nasty swine, I think,” said Leah as soon as he stopped.
“Eh?”
“You talk about justice and decency and all the time you’re busy swindling an old woman out of her property. If my father wasn’t sick he’d——”
“But he is sick and he can’t! Listen, I’m not swindling the old girl. I’m a neutral citizen and if your old man was in his right mind he’d be putting his money and real estate in my name too. Didn’t you hear that madman who was here? All these Egyptians talk like that. This week it’s the Canal, next its British property and Jewish property. They’re driven by their own sense of guilt.”
“You’re a crook. My father says you’re not Irish.”
“That’s because I’m not walking about with a pig on the end of a bit of string. He should see me at home. Excuse me!”
He went off to the bathroom, locked the door behind him, and prepared to take a shower. He had to hold his head at an angle to avoid getting his bandage wet; under a shower a man was alone without being lonely. The tepid spray set the blood running just that little bit faster and Townrow responded by thinking, Abravanel could be right at that! The thing to do was take a peep at the passport if it was still in the manager’s office at the Eastern Exchange. What sort of a man had he become that he could remember a conversation at Rome Airport but couldn’t be sure he was an Irish citizen?
“Are you still there?” he shouted through the door. “I don’t see what a man’s private life has got to do with his political judgement. It’s a well-known fact that some very decent people, abstainers, non-smokers, pious men, have been politically very aggressive. Don’t forget that Gladstone bombarded Alexandria. I’m not sure whether Gladstone drank. But he was obviously O.K. in a way I’m not. Compared with me Bismarck, to take another example, no doubt at all, was O.K. I don’t agree I’m a crook but I do have spasms of dishonesty, lechery and disloyalty. I’ve had a hard life. This doesn’t mean I’m not entitled to speak out for a bit of international decency. You must try and understand the kind of patriot I am.”
Forgetting where he was, he drew his head in like a tortoise and got it, bandage and all, soaked. He swore and threw over the lever that stopped the shower. He took off the bandage and looked at his purple, blanket-stitched face in the mirror. It looked like a carefully repaired plum.
“What’s your father’s infallible test for an Irishman?” he asked after he had thrown open the door and marched out to confront her. “The poor man has never had a chance. He’s never seen me anything but sober.”
“I suppose you realise you’ve no clothes on,” said Leah.
“I like to stand in a draught when I’m still wet this kind of weather. As the water evaporates it cools the body. I’m not unpleasant to look at. You’ll admit my belly is flat. I have dark and curly hair in all the appropriate places. The hips are narrower than the shoulders. What you see is a hundred and seventy two pounds of masculinity. Does it surprise or appal you? Have you learned anything you did not know before? Don’t go!” he shouted. “Don’t walk out like this. People might think I’d done something to annoy you.”
“Let me get by will you?”
“Not until you tell me what I’ve got to apologise for?”
“Just apologise,” she said. “People like you should be apologising all the time. They need justifying, perhaps as some obscenity that nature’s gone in for experimentally. What are you offering me? Rape?”
“It’s an idea.” Townrow sat down and planted a hand on each knee. “Now that you come to mention it. But I thought we were discussing on a more theoretical basis. Your father says I’m not Irish. Well, that’s his opinion. But what do
you think?”
“Only an Englishman could rob an old woman with your show of high-mindedness.”
“So you think I’m English.” Townrow scratched his right calf where he had preserved a patch of dry skin since childhood. “The truth of the matter is that you know all Irishmen are as ugly as sin and it puzzles you I’m so handsome. Look at my long Irish skull.” He turned his head sideways. “And every Irishman has an upper lip as long as the width of two fingers.” He put two fingers under his nose. “My pubic hair is darker than the hair of my head and if you see the sun catching the hair of my chest, my calves or my forearms, you’ll know it is golden. I am golden, Celtic, or should it be Gaelic, man. Look at my buttocks!” He stood up and turned round. “Kicked flat by the British. Look at the whiteness of my skin where the sun doesn’t get at it. White as a summer cloud from rinsing in the acid bog water. Men like me have been dug up entire after a thousand years from the acid peat bog, their flesh white as a chicken. Don’t be deceived by my Kensington English. It started as a cunning disguise. Now it has become inescapable habit. Anyway, I left Ireland when I was very young.”
“I still don’t like you,” she said, “and frankly it doesn’t matter to me what you are. You’re obviously on the make, in more ways than one.”
The tip of her nose had an odd way of going white when she was excited. The lobes of her ears, though, were weighed down with rich blood. Why did he always like women best when they were showing how much they hated him?
“Anyway,” he said, “what are you doing away from your husband?”
He was so excited that if, at this stage, she had said something extraordinary, such as, “Are you out of your mind? What are you raving like this for? Do you want to go back home? Is that what all this fuss is about? You know damn well you’re my husband!”
If she had said this he would have grinned and put his clothes on.
Instead, she suddenly looked like an exhausted child. “They said that if he didn’t respond to the drugs in a couple of weeks then he probably wouldn’t respond.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Too long.”
He stood with his hands on his hips, watching her. “I’m really sorry about your husband,” he said, and hunted around until he found a pair of shorts which he was able to slip on as a way of demonstrating the depths of his concern and sympathy.
“Leah,” he said. She made him feel they had known each other for years. It might have had something to do with the way she hadn’t batted an eyelid when he was prancing about naked. He had observed in her certain manifestations of boredom, a tired frown, for example, when she wasn’t demonstrating irritation. The way he had stood there, calling attention to certain of his physical characteristics, had been unnecessary. She knew all about him, no doubt of it at all. She probably even knew about that patch of dry skin on his right calf. He pushed his right foot out and pointed to it. “That was where I had a very bad boil, when I was a child,” he said, “and that is how it left me. No hair grows on that patch. I used to tell the other boys it was leprosy.”
She gave no sign of remembering. That was not the point. What other adult had he ever told about his dry patch? Nobody, so far as he could remember, none of his women. He was easier with her than he’d been with any other women he had ever met, in spite of the way she was angry with him and the cool, contemptuous look she’d given his prick. They understood one another. He put this understanding to the test by suggesting she drove him down to the hospital to have his stitches taken out. Sure enough, she just said, “They’re not ready to come out yet. But if you put a shirt on I’ll drive you down there so they can give you a check-up.”
*
Once she started talking about her husband Townrow could not stop her. He could not make out whether this was because she loved her husband a lot, hated him or was just inventing him. For the first few years everything was fine. Rob had this good job in the automobile plant. She liked the States. People were polite. They were really nice to each other. The old and blind were helped across the street, not like here. She did not know what it was like in other parts but where she was neighbours helped you out when you were in trouble. When Rob went into hospital people in the next apartment called. This would never have happened in Egypt. Mind you, they could tell by her accent she wasn’t American. Everybody thought she was French. Once, she was with Rob in a shoe store and the clerk paid her compliments. Although Rob was standing there right by her side this clerk said she was beautiful and what about a date. They just took it for granted foreign women were immoral.
Rob was depressed. He went to some clinic where they gave him a course of drugs. This cost eight hundred dollars but he seemed better for a time. In the plant there was an inter-com system and Rob came home one day, saying statements about him were being put through this system. What sort of statements, she had asked, and he had been vague about this. She’d asked whether they were statements about being Jewish. Rob had been angry when she said this. He said didn’t she know they were in the States now, not in Europe. There was no anti-semitism in the States. Anyway, he was Jewish only on his father’s side. She ought to watch herself. That was the way delusions started, thinking there was anti-Jewish feeling when there wasn’t.
Cooking was quite one of her interests. She used to do grills and ragouts and special omelettes. Rob was particularly fond of the way she roasted duck with grated lemon peel, wild rice and sweet chestnuts all mixed up together. But he went off his food. That was when he started not sleeping. He used to be up half the night, listening to the radio. He had one of those radios you could hear the police and the taxis on. When she asked him what was interesting about this he said you never knew when you might hear something about yourself.
“Are you married?” she asked Townrow.
“No, I used to be.”
This story about her husband made Townrow wonder if she was in Port Said to get away from him; otherwise she would have waited until after the hot season. She needed cheering up a bit. There had been no call to give him all this stuff. If she wanted to tell anyone about it at all, there was her father and, Port Said being her home town, there must have been friends. Perhaps she had given them as much as they could take. Perhaps she bored them to hell. Perhaps she just wanted an audience. It was hard to see what other reason she had for putting up with his company, considering she had called him a nasty swine, and all that. He wasn’t bored. He had no interest in her husband as such, of course. Rob Strauss? It didn’t sound particularly Italian to him.
It occurred to him that if it had cost eight hundred dollars for a course of drugs in a clinic Rob must be running up quite a bill in whatever hospital he now was. Leah agreed that it had taken all their savings. Townrow wanted to know how much the hospital charged. Treatment for any kind of mental illness took a long time and no matter how big your savings were there must be limits to what you could afford. Leah was vague about this. She said he was in the Jewish Hospital for Mental Ailments. She felt sure there would be no money trouble from this particular hospital. Anyway, Rob had a big insurance.
“I’m a failure,” she said. “D’you know how old I am? I’m thirty-eight, and what have I done with my life, nothing. I used to play the piano. I was a very good pianist, d’you know that? I could have been a concert pianist. But I never even had any children. D’you ever get this feeling of complete uselessness and waste? I was brought up to want to do something with my life. What? I could have been a writer. I’ve got talent. I was smart enough at school.”
He said something about it being difficult for a Jewish girl to carve out a career in Egypt.
“I could have gone to Israel. I could have gone to Europe. My father never made any trouble. No, there’s a real failure of will. It’s my will. I tell you it’s the most awful thing to know you’ve got all these potentialities and yet you’ve done nothing about them, and you can’t do anything about them.”
They had been to the hospital where a surge
on in Casualty had examined Townrow’s face and told him the stitches were not ready to come out. Leah waited outside. She said her father wanted to talk to him about Mrs K making over her property, but they went to a cafe instead and sat under an awning drinking out of tall glasses of half-frozen yoghourt whipped up with apricot juice. Townrow even put some of it on his wound.
She had an attractive way of sitting with her knees together and her ankles wide apart so that her flimsy little white shoes fell away from her heels. The awning put a shadow across the upper part of her face. Here the skin was a smooth, greeny dusk and the eyes glittered like metal. In the sun her chin was bone white. He felt he’d known her since the beginning. He felt they’d been married, divorced and married again. They were, both of them, lying about this paranoic schizophrenic mate of hers and enjoying every minute of it.
“I’d like you to come and see my father. I want you to be nice to him.”
“When you said you were a failure, that’s all hooey, isn’t it? Your old man can’t live for ever. He’s an old man and he looks very ill, if you ask me. And if your husband’s as bad as you say they’ll never let him out of that hospital he’s in. You can divorce him. That’s grounds for divorce, isn’t it? Insanity? In the States? Well, if it isn’t it ought to be. Then you’ll be as free as a bird. What’s thirty-eight? You’ve got all your life in front of you.”
Her face rocked back into the shadow and there was no white chin and white teeth, all natural he’d take a bet, to look at. She was so angry she began to get up but Townrow caught her wrist.
“But it’s true. You’ve got to face facts.”
“You’re cruel and—and rough!”
“You’ve got your own life to live. The first time we met it was because you were worried about the effect Mrs K being here might have on your father’s safety. You’ve got to look forward and see what your own real interests are. You could marry me, for example.”
