by P. H. Newby
He was able to let her go at this because she had relaxed back in her chair.
“When your divorce came through you’d still be an American citizen. Or would you? Anyway, you’re American at the moment. Know what you want to do? Get your father to put everything he’s got into your name, because the Egyptians wouldn’t touch American property, even if it was Jewish. See what I mean? You and I could be very well off, living in Port Said, as citizens of the Irish Republic.”
After a pause she said, “I love my husband, you know that?”
“Nobody loves a nut. And if he’s started the way you say he has he’s going to get a lot worse. But it’s all a lot of balls, isn’t it? Your husband, if you’ve got one, is as sane as I am, isn’t he?”
“Yes, yes,” she said. “Yes,” and stood up, this time too quickly for Townrow to grab her. He thought it was too hot to do any chasing. Anyway, he had called her bluff and was sure she’d be back.
*
He thought the piece of paper was a bill, so he did not pick it up for quite a long time. When he did he saw that it carried some smudged purple writing, as though it had been done with a ball-point not built for the climate.
“We could quite easily shoot here and we shall shoot if you are in the city tomorrow.”
Townrow looked around. The two waiters were inside the restaurant proper and sitting at these tables in the open air was only one other customer, a long-faced, bare-headed man with sideburns who was reading a Greek newspaper. Townrow went over to him and asked if he had seen anyone leave a note at his table.
Without lifting his eyes from the newspaper the man started to pick his way through the English language. “Yes, a gentleman, very correctly dressed. I have seen him about. You did not look up.”
“It was a threat.”
Still reading his paper, the man shrugged.
“Which way did he go?”
Again the man shrugged. “He went to the ferry. He walked up towards the front. He is on his way to the station. He took a taxi for the airport.”
“O.K.” Before going on Townrow turned and snapped his fingers at one of the waiters. He paid his bill—and all this time the Greek went on reading—before saying, “You put the note there yourself, didn’t you?”
“I?”
“That note gave me twenty-four hours to get out of Port Said. The police, on the other hand, have different views. They say I’m to be on hand.”
“It is difficult for you.”
“So I’m taking you along to police headquarters with me.”
The man closed his newspaper, folded it and placed it on the table. Now that he lifted his head Townrow could see he had the eyes of a tired old hound who had taken a beating or two. “I am equipped with a revolver. It is here under my left shoulder. If you should try to seize me I should shoot you through the stomach.”
“You think there’s no law in this place?”
“Not for an Englishman. You are just a man in a foreign city where nobody is afraid of you and nobody likes you. Law is just power. You have no power, so the law won’t work for you.”
“You a Cypriot?”
“I am Greek.”
The man was tipping his chair back and was altogether too relaxed to be dangerous, Townrow thought, if he went for him suddenly. But no doubt he had a mate watching from some corner. Perhaps that was the idea, to provoke him and then shoot him down. Why?
“What’s all this about?” Townrow did not put the question at all aggressively. He actually went off without waiting for an answer. He had some notion of coming back when he could think more clearly. He was shaken. That was cold truth. It was one thing to be in the army, in uniform, and all that dirt coming at you from one direction, and officially, so to speak. Quite different to be talking quietly with a man who was ready to do you in under a café awning. Once Townrow had pulled himself together he was coming back to ask this man what the hell it was all about? If he wasn’t still at this particular café he wouldn’t be far away. Port Said was not one of those big, sprawling places.
“Look,” he would say, “I don’t know who you think I am. Who is this chap you want out of town? Can’t be me. I’m not English. If it’s money you want, give me a little time, I can slip you a few hundred.”
From the end of the street he looked back at the terrace and sure enough the man was still there, reading his paper.
Being Irish, Townrow thought, or probably so, I’m as much in favour of strong patriotic feeling and free-thinking as most people, but this man is carrying it far. How would it be if I collected my passport from the hotel and took it straight back to the man? But he had an ignorant, fanatical look about him and the significance of Townrow’s being Irish would be wasted on him. What would a man like that know of history?
*
There was no Lebanese Consul in Port Said and the British Consul was on holiday so Mrs K spent some time talking on the telephone to Cairo. They had no record of her at the British Consulate. So far as they were concerned she was not a British subject. Mrs K told the clerk not to be impertinent. She had a British passport to prove her nationality. The fact that she had been married to a citizen of the Lebanon and travelled on a Lebanese passport had been purely a matter of convenience. She had never renounced her British nationality and what she wanted to know was whether there was any danger of British property being confiscated, though she hoped that if these Egyptians went as far as that the R.A.F. would bomb Cairo. The clerk said there was not the remotest possibility of the Egyptian Government appropriating British property. So far as he could make out, though, the property in question was not British. If she had a Lebanese passport she was technically a sister Arab and sitting pretty whatever happened. As a matter of interest, what was the date on her British passport? Mrs Khoury said she could not actually put her hand on it at that moment. Could she remember when it was taken out? 1922. That was the year she married Khoury. Before that she had been on her father’s boat and they didn’t need all these documents. The marriage to Khoury had taken place in the British Embassy in Damascus and she had needed a British passport first of all to get into Lebanon and secondly to get into Syria. Her husband came from an old Damascus family but they had been driven out by the religious riots in 1868. In fact, her father-in-law had been born in an open wagon drawn by a couple of mules on the road to Beirut. It had been a matter of pride to Mr Khoury that he should marry a European woman in the very city from which his grandparents had been driven by religious fanaticism. The ceremony had been witnessed by her father and the military attaché, Major Ratcliffe who some years later called on them en route from India and they had a champagne supper at the Casino Palace. She didn’t care if that 1922 passport had expired years ago. She was still a British subject. Did the consul know her flat had been wrecked? Why had it been wrecked? Because she was British. Everybody knew she was British. That is why she had been attacked by this mob. Would they have attacked a sister Arab? She didn’t speak a word of Arabic. If her husband had died a natural death and not been murdered in the street she would have left the country long ago, as quickly as she could have settled her affairs. But she couldn’t turn her back on a crime like that. No, she was not claiming to be a Distressed British subject. She wasn’t afraid of anybody. She just wanted to know whether Nasser would pinch her property. Yes, she would most certainly put it all in writing. Not to the Consulate. She would write to the Ambassador himself.
The Lebanese Ambassador was in Europe, the First Secretary was engaged and there was no one in the Legal Department who could speak English. Mrs K spoke to a woman who, it was claimed, happened to be passing the switchboard at the time the operator was trying to be helpful. She said that she herself was an Armenian with a Turkish passport who worked part time at the Embassy because she spoke Russian and German. There were many Russians and Germans to be spoken to in Egypt, she said, by way of explaining her existence, and if she could be of any use to madame she would be quite delighted. Mrs K said she
would write.
This was the story she told Townrow when they next met.
“It is all right,” she said. “At the British Consulate they tell me I’m officially an Arab, so Nasser won’t touch me.”
“Makes it much worse,” said Townrow, “if they can treat you as one of themselves. There’s only one thing these bastards understand, and that’s the big stick. If the British Government has washed its hands of you, then it’s God help you. An Englishwoman with an Arab passport is defenceless. I tell you there’s only one way to protect your property and that’s to have it put in the name of a neutral. As I’d have to live in the town there’d be my expenses. But the capital would remain yours. What’s more I’m quite prepaired to make a will in favour of you or anyone or any institution you care to nominate.”
“You’ll live a long time.”
“There was a man offering to kill me only this morning.”
“Then it’s no use trying to put anything in your name, is it?” said Mrs K. “It takes years to prepare any legal document in this country. You couldn’t post a parcel in twenty-four hours, let alone transfer property. Who was this man anyway?”
“He was reading a Greek newspaper. I recognised the funny print.”
“Was he sober?”
“Tell me,” said Townrow, “and I’d like you to think carefully. Did Elie have any special Greek friends? I mean Greeks from Cyprus?”
Mrs K shut her eyes, her little chin came up, the lines tightened on each side of her mouth. What with her sharp, yellow nose, she looked like a dead hen. Townrow leaned towards her and said, “I want you to think carefully because I’ve flown all the way here from London where I wasn’t harming anybody. And before I know where I am there’s one lot telling me to stay put and there’s another lot telling me to move on. What I really want to know is why you asked me to come to Port Said, and then, if you feel strong enough, you might tell me where Elie is buried because I’d like to put some flowers on his grave.”
She opened her eyes abruptly. He noticed for the first time what a positive blue they were. They were like enamel. Assuming they had lightened with the years Townrow guessed that when Elie was riding her father’s boat up and down the canal they were a deep-sea irresistible, stained-glass window, bluebell blue; and they had a lot to do with his being just where he was. Who did he mean? Elie or he himself, Townrow? He was exhausted by the heat. There was no oxygen in the steaming atmosphere. The sweat trickled down his neck.
“Did Elie have Greek friends?” Townrow repeated.
“He wasn’t like that. He didn’t care whether they were Greek or British or German. He was just a businessman.”
Townrow clicked his fingers. “Now, you know what I mean.”
“He always used to say he didn’t understand belonging to different nations and countries. He was an internationalist. He used to say he was born in the Ottoman Empire and this made him a real cosmopolitan. He used to laugh about his Lebanese passport. Arabs, Jews, Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians. He didn’t care. He would do business with anybody.”
“But if he sold coals to the Devil to stoke the fires of Hell he’d know it was the Devil. You haven’t answered my question.”
They were finishing a restaurant meal on a verandah overhanging a street. Mrs K had a long line of grape pips lined up on the side of her plate. She was flicking them over the rail. “Look, I’ll be candid. I’m fed up with all these Egyptians and Greeks and Turks and Italians and what not. So far as I’m concerned they’re interchangeable. Elie would agree with my point of view on this, but of course he couldn’t express it like I do. After all, he was one of these foreigners himself.”
“I don’t get it.”
“He was a very sharp man but he was simple-minded about some things. He saw the world as just a lot of people buying and selling. You never heard him say Greeks are like this and French are like that. That’s what I mean. He’d never admit you could generalise. But you can, can’t you? I must say I was sorry to hear you were Irish. I don’t understand that. You look English. You talk English. Of course, Elie wouldn’t have cared if you were English or Irish. But I do. I never liked the Irish.”
“Why not?”
“They are untrustworthy and they tell lies and they drink. My grandfather lived at Aylesbury and he used to talk about the Irish labourers who built the railway there. They lived in tents. They lived like animals and they’d fight. There were two Irish in my father’s boat. One jumped overboard as we were coming up the Red Sea and the other followed suit two nights later. You being Irish makes a big difference to me. I’m not making anything over into your name. I’m not giving you control of my Egyptian assets.”
“I’ll be shot this time tomorrow anyway,” said Townrow.
“You could always get out on a fishing boat.”
“You want me to clear out?”
“No.”
Townrow finished his beer and looked at her. “Sometimes I feel Irish and sometimes I don’t. If I could get hold of my passport it would help. The police have collected it from the hotel. I can’t very well ask Amin what kind of passport it is, can I?”
“What did this man look like who said he’d shoot you?” She listened to his description. “That must have been Aristides.”
“You know him?”
“He organises the supply of arms to the Greek Cypriots.”
Townrow looked at her with his one eye and she looked back without blinking and without seeing him for her eyes were focused on some spot remote, not so much in space as in time. Her thin lips were twisted. It might well have been a smile.
“Was Elie mixed up in that?” he asked.
“Perhaps.”
“What do you mean, perhaps?”
Townrow was aware that his face had been brought into focus and the thin lips had straightened and parted. She opened her handbag and produced a purse. “Let’s get out of this place and go and check up on your passport.”
As they emerged into the glare and dust he said, “I’m sorry I can’t agree to you going back to the flat yet awhile, not to sleep that is.”
“Why not?”
“I’m comfortable there. I feel I can defend myself with Elie’s gun. Short of putting a petrol bomb into the building and machine-gunning me as I jump from one of the windows there is little Aristides can do about it. I expect he’s on the phone. I’d like to talk with him.”
He could tell by her little tight face and the stiff way she was walking that she was under strain. Either she was angry with him or she was frightened. They were just crossing to the Eastern Exchange when he saw, in fact, that tears were running out of her eyes. She was grizzling quietly with her mouth turned up at the ends so that her upper lip was puckered and the few light, thin hairs of her moustache caught the light. It made him think of all those presents she had given him. He was wearing the Rolex Oyster at that moment. She had cried then, giving his these presents. He thought it had something to do with the sadness brought on by giving away Elie’s personal possessions. What she was crying for now, he could not imagine. Strain? These tears could not be for Elie himself. She’d always made it clear how much she despised the man.
*
He might have telephoned his mother. He loved his mother. He rang directory enquiries with the idea of asking whether they could tell him the number of a newsagent and tobacconist called Pullen, or Pulling or Pooling in a cathedral city near London, St Albans, very likely. He remembered his mother having a flat over this shop. If you telephoned you could hear them shouting up the stairs. The time was just after nine-thirty. That meant it was just after six-thirty in the evening in England. In St Albans, or Rochester or Canterbury, they’d be selling the last edition of the evening papers. Suez headlines. Menzies. Canal Users’ association. Commuters who hadn’t bought them in town picked up copies for the latest cricket scores stamped in the Stop Press column. It was a time of day when you could expect her to be at home. They would be stunned, in that litt
le shop, to hear the operator say, “Call coming through from Egypt.” Mr Pulling or Pullen or whatever would be incredulous. If the line was bad Townrow could imagine himself yelling, “Could I speak to Mrs Townrow. She lives in the flat upstairs?” He would have to put it that way. He could not say, “This is her son speaking. Is she still there?”
She had been a school teacher once. He could even remember being one of the class she taught. He said to the boy sitting next to him, “She’s my mother.” She was standing with her back to a window through which you could see a red brick wall, angry in the sun, with wistaria blossom blue as the teats of a gas on a low-burning ring. They had a funny little upright Morris which she used to drive because Dad couldn’t. It was part of his general ineffectiveness. The time Mumsy actually ordered him out of the car Dad was drunk. It was a summer day. The canvas hood was down; he climbed out of the back seat and walked off down an unfenced unmetalled road with enormous pea-green fields stretching on either side to a horizon made up of great groves of black trees. That couldn’t have been Ireland, not with all those trees. He wanted to cry because the wood pigeons, whirring and sobbing, seemed to be claiming his Mumsy’s attention. She wouldn’t look at him or talk to him. She listened to the wood pigeons.
She might consider he was taking after his father. Telephoning three thousand miles to ask what was his nationality, that was exactly the sort of extravagant, absurd, frightening sort of behaviour the old man was capable of. The fact is it was easier to ask Mumsy about his passport than it was to ask the police. If she was still alive she would tell him like a shot.
The Port Said exchange put him through to Foreign Enquiries who said all calls to Europe were subject to considerable delay. Townrow said he would still like this number and would they ring him back as soon as they had found it. They had the British directories, didn’t they? They knew what a cathedral city was. Canterbury for example. The operator said there was so little chance of getting a private call through he wasn’t disposed to work too hard at this little problem. Why not write a letter or cable? It might be different if the caller had some kind of priority. Townrow asked what that meant. Well, a journalist or a diplomat had priority. Townrow said he just wanted to talk to his mother, that’s all. It was years since he had last seen her. She might be ill. He wanted to give her a pleasant surprise. Norwich was too far out, said Townrow. So was Winchester. St Albans was a good bet. Try Pool, or Poole with an “e”. Pulling, maybe. He wasn’t very well himself, either, and when a man felt ill it was only natural he should want to talk to his sick mother.
