by P. H. Newby
The phone rang. He was stretched out in the basket chair with the instrument at his elbow and the lights from the square below spraying through the open, curtainless window, on to the ceiling of his darkened room. He had only to stretch out his hand. But it was not the exchange with the St Albans number. It was a choked voice he did not recognise, saying “I saw him,” and then a long silence followed, or rather, a wordlessness filled with a kind of snarled breathing.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
“Mrs Khoury. Who do you think?”
“Is there anything the matter?”
“I saw Elie. He was lying on the ground.”
Elie was not in question. He saw Elie in his open coffin on the blue water. Mumsy was the one he wanted to know about. He could not understand why Elie should come into the conversation. Elie was an irrelevancy.
“I want you to come round. I want you to meet me at the front of the hotel. That’s where I’m speaking from.”
“I can’t do that,” said Townrow. “I’m waiting for a call to come through. If I miss this call it will be very inconvenient.”
“He ran away.”
“Who ran away?”
“Elie. I bent over him. I was going to ring the bell of the convent but as soon as I turned my back he jumped up and ran. Me, his wife. He ran.”
Then Elie was not dead either.
“I’d like to put the phone down. I’m expecting a call.”
“If you come back with me we might find him.”
“When did this happen?”
“Ten minutes ago. I came straight here.”
At half-past nine every night Mrs K went to that strip of pavement in front of the convent door and at last somebody had decided to take a rise out of her.
“Must have been a joke. Somebody was playing a joke,” said Townrow. “You’ve got to face facts. Elie died.”
He listened to the rattle of Mrs K putting the phone down. The line had gone dead. How rude could you get? He hadn’t travelled three thousand miles to have a phone put down on him, particularly at a moment when he was engaged on the task of proving that he was an Irish citizen and peculiarly well-fitted to taking possession of every scrap of Egyptian property she had. She ought to be weeping with gratitude.
At ten-fifteen he tried to get through to the Irish Ambassador but the exchange told him there was a two hour delay on calls to Cairo. Townrow asked for his name and number to be put on the waiting list. He undid the knot that secured the bandage behind his head, tied it more tightly, and set off for the Eastern Exchange hotel, locking the door of the flat securely behind him, not taking the lift but walking down the stairs, pausing in the hall, looking keenly around before stepping into the clear moonlight. If he had known where Abravanel lived he would have called and instructed the old chap to draw up his will. “I, Jack Townrow, being a citizen of the Irish Republic and in full health and the possession of my wits do hereby bequeath.” It would be a bit premature before having word with Mumsy. She might insist he was born in Liverpool.
While he was waiting for Mrs K to come down from her room he had a couple of drinks in the bar. There were a lot of French people off a cruise liner, all drinking whisky and talking quietly among themselves. Townrow tried to get into conversation with a middle-aged couple but they took only one look at his bandaged head and ill-fitting suit before giving him the brush-off. This prompted Townrow to shout, “De Lesseps was a cuckold and I am the grandson of one of Disraeli’s bastards. Yet I held not one share in the Suez Canal Company. I’m proud of it. Can you claim as much? How many of you can deny you’ve got shares?”
By the time Mrs K joined him he was ready to apologise. “You caught me at a difficult moment,” he said to justify himself, “I was putting in motion certain enquiries. But I shouldn’t have spoken to you the way I did.”
“What enquiries?” Her dress might have been an extra tall man’s vest gathered at the waist by a thin red belt. She wore black cotton gloves up to her elbows and carried a twelve inch electric torch cased in black rubber, holding it like a club.
“You tell me you saw Elie. O.K. You saw Elie. The fact that he got up and ran away doesn’t mean somebody was playing a joke. He may have been ashamed.”
“Ashamed?”
“I sometimes think the dead are ashamed. I mean, you think worse of a man for dying, and Elie was a proud man.”
“He had no pride. I treated him badly.”
They came to the end of the street where Mrs K paraded every evening at nine-thirty and the moonlight was so strong on the convent side you could have seen a mouse stirring at twenty yards. With her torch Mrs K pointed to the pavement in front of the gates and even switched it on. It made a faint amber stain on the stones, as it might be where someone had patiently washed away a patch of blood.
“I’ve got over the shock,” said Mrs K.
“How was he lying? Like this?”
Townrow stretched himself, stomach down, on paving stones that smoked dust into his face; and he had to turn his head on one side, resting it on his forearm, in a way that caused him to look straight across the street into a door that suddenly opened and a man stood silhouetted against a background of barrels.
“You don’t suppose you imagined it all?” said Townrow to Mrs K’s square-toed shoes.
“No. What are you lying down there for?”
“Reconstructing your experience. How near were you when he disappeared?”
Townrow stood up and beat the dust out of his shirt and trousers. “You ought to stop coming here of nights. Go to Europe and have yourself a holiday. I’ll look after things. Abravanel can draw up a document giving me power of attorney.”
Mrs K hesitated. “It wasn’t you lying down there at nine-thirty? You weren’t making a fool of me?”
“No, I’ve thought of that too. There would never have been time for me to get to the flat before you rang.”
“Yes, there would.”
“Why should I want to do that to you? You want caring for, imagining things like this. You’d better go back to England. You could call on my mother, if she’s still living.”
“Don’t you know if she’s still alive?”
“That’s what I was telling you. I tried to phone her. You’ll have to excuse me. When you’re dead how do you know it? I might have died from that crack on the head. And how do I know I didn’t? Some people say the dead see each other. Last time I came this way that bar over there was boarded up and they told me Christou was dead years ago. I knew him. I came and drank in his bar when I was in the army. Then he was gone, he was dead and his bar was boarded up. Well, you can see the lights.”
“I’ve got it wrong,” said Mrs K. “I bent over him. I can’t remember whether he jumped up and ran away. He seemed just to disappear.”
Townrow patted her arm. “You’ve had a nasty experience and that’s the truth of the matter. A snifter of brandy won’t do the slightest harm.”
A ship gave three hiccupping shrieks on its siren and the ferry roared back. Trouble about right of way in the channel. Wog music on the radios behind bead curtains. They were ringing a bell in the convent and behind all the roof tops there was a white dancing glow that thinned as it went up the black sky to the great stars and moon. There were no lights in this street. Townrow stood in the moonlight like a man on a stage peering into the darkness on the other side, as it might be trying to see to the back of the hall. One of these fine days the house lights would go up. The scene shifters would come out and pack up everything in sight. The Canal was a great blue strip rising to the flies. Houses fell down. Ocean-going steamers folded stem to stern and were packed away in baskets. The whole damn world was a set of painted flats and when they fell down, by God, and the real people rushed out from behind, laughing their heads off you had to be sure you could adjust to the realisation of the bloody great deception that had been practised on you. You had to pretend you’d never been taken in. You had to let them think you knew all along how phone
y the game had been. Elie would be one of the first to rush out. And Mumsy. You had to be ready with a bit of composed behaviour to meet their insane laughter. Not clinically insane. Not like Leah’s husband. It was just the insane laughter of people who were laughing because they had the advantage of you. They had seen you taking with the utmost seriousness situations mocked up only to deceive. When he saw Elie or Mumsy he would play it wryly, pityingly. He’dmake them sorry they held out on him. He had no time for people who just watched. You had to give. So long as you put up with existence you had to give. You had to love.
Christou was standing just inside the door when Townrow and Mrs K entered.
“Any French brandy?” said Townrow.
“Greek or Cyprus,” said Christou.
“Give this lady a Votris.” She did not object in spite of her rules about strong drink. It showed how demoralised she was.
Townrow drew a couple of chairs up to a table. Only two other customers. Business must be bad. Christou brought two glasses on a tray and Townrow watched Mrs K touching her Votris with the tip of her tongue before saying to Christou, “You’ve lost weight.”
Christou rubbed one side of his face and then the other. “We know each other, then? Difficult to recognise you with that bandage. You got a bad eye? You got an infected eye, eh?”
“I used to come in when I was stationed here with the army. We had a pan of brandy on fire in the back room. You remember that? We burned the curtains. Remember?”
“No,” said Christou. “It’s a long time ago and there’ve been many soldiers. The light is bad in here.” The light bulb hung on such a long flex he could reach up and move it a couple of yards nearer Townrow’s face. He shook his head. “No, if you took the bandage off I might remember your face. You British, eh?”
Townrow let that pass because Christou was standing so close that his knee actually pressed against Townrow’s elbow. There seemed no reason for this. Unless these little nudges Christou was giving him were a message. Christou remembered him very well and wanted to talk to him privately, perhaps, out of earshot of the other customers. Townrow looked at them, middle-aged, unshaven men with shirts open to the waist. Christou was putting so much pressure on him with his knee that Townrow moved his chair abruptly, Christou laughed and went off to the back of the shop. He brought a half bottle of Votris and said, “Go on, you are my guests.”
Judging by the grin on his face and the way he patted Townrow on the shoulder there might have been some private joke between them. Another customer came in, this time for a glass of wine, and all the time Christou was serving him he kept his eyes on Townrow, smiling and winking whenever Townrow looked back.
“I can’t drink this,” said Mrs K. “I want to go.” Christou brought her a glass of water but she said her objection was to taking anything at all in this establishment. If she had been more herself she might have realised where Townrow was bringing her.
“You’ve got real colour in your cheeks again,” said Townrow. “You’re looking a lot better.”
“It’s no accident Elie should have died just across the street.”
Christou clapped his hands. “It’s Mme Khoury. This is a pleasure and a privilege.”
“I know all about you,” she said. “You rat.”
“Sit down,” said Townrow. “He’s an old friend. I don’t know where this rumour came from, you were dead. Somebody said the whole place was boarded up.”
“I am not dead. The years have passed their rough hands over me. We shall never have those days again. Fifty men in here drinking before the place was put out of bounds. Do you remember Staff-Sergeant Wetherby? There’s a photo of his wedding group.” Christou pointed and, sure enough, there was a yellow photograph pinned high up on the wall. “Greeks and English will always be friends, in spite of everything. We are happy together. We are good for one another.”
“As an Irishman, not even English, I don’t know why you Greeks should want to kill me.”
Christou dropped his hands in astonishment. “Kill you? Who did you say you were? Sergeant Townrow? You did not marry that Copt girl from Ismailia? No. Don’t tell me. Townrow!” He brought the light over again. Actually he was shaking with laughter. It had such a grip on him he slobbered. “I know! You had a sister in the Camel Corps! Ten years is a long time but I remember your dear sister reaching down from her saddle and grabbing some Aussie sergeant by the hair. That’s what I call love. No? Never mind.”
“Why does Aristides threaten me?”
“Aristides!” Christou went over to the two open-shirted men and spoke to them in Greek. He stood to attention to laugh like one of those jocular, sneering sergeant-majors and shouted, “Aristides has been threatening him! Aristides!”
The two men laughed too. Christou seized a bottle and filled up their glasses. “To Aristides!” He shot out his left arm and extended a finger in Townrow’s direction. Townrow lifted his half empty glass of Votris, the two men swallowed wine and Ghristou himself drank out of the bottle. “To Aristides!”
Mrs K was the only one who did not drink the toast and she was not laughing either. “If it wasn’t for the British you wouldn’t be sitting here at all, drinking and swearing and—and spitting.”
“Hear! Hear!” said Townrow.
“You’re a lot of animals,” she said with a sob.
Townrow still had the scrap of paper in his pocket. He passed it to Christou who read it aloud, “We could quite easily shoot here and we shall shoot if you are in the city tomorrow.” He translated it into Greek for the benefit of the two men who listened intently and then threw themselves back violently in their chairs, screaming with laughter. Tears of laughter ran down Christou’s cheeks. “Aristides always talks like that,” he said. “I shall speak to him. He is my friend.”
“He’s not going to kill me, eh?”
“Wouldn’t go as far as to say that. A great man. While the rest of us talks he acts.”
“Look——”
“No, I quite agree. He should not give you such notes. It is not nice.”
Mrs K had already left and when Townrow found he could get no more out of these men than free drink and laughter he went too. He heard the door locked behind him. He stood in the darkness listening to the sneezing laughter going on and on, the scraping of chairs, a clock chiming, whistles, muted, remote sirens, radios playing some kind of old-fashioned Balkan jazz. Mrs K was walking down the middle of the street, where shadow and moonlight met, swinging her torch and moving fast.
*
It was still dark when Townrow was awakened from heavy sleep by banging on the door of the flat. He opened the door and found he had soldiers. With only a dressing gown thrown over his pyjamas and his feet thrust into a pair of Elie’s slippers he was rushed off to H. Q. in a car with the sliding roof open. The legs of a soldier sitting on the roof dangled in front of Townrow’s face. Another soldier drove and an officer sat in the back seat, humming to himself, belching now and again, reeking of the roast ground nuts he had been chewing, and holding a revolver to the back of Townrow’s neck.
The same red-tabbed officer who had turned up to inspect the damage at the flat sat in a large room where all the windows were boarded up and one of the two neon tube lights on the ceiling flickered neurotically. This colonel said they had decided to deport Townrow straight away. He would be put on a plane at Port Said, flown to Cairo and transferred to the first jet out.
“Where to?” asked Townrow.
“New York.”
Townrow hesitated, then asked for his passport.
“Sure,” said the colonel and spoke to a clerk who immediately began rummaging in a drawer. Time passed without anything to show for it and the colonel began to shout. Townrow was waiting to see his passport before asking why they were sending him to the States. If he turned out to be an American he would have to revise some of his basic ideas. He might even turn out to be Leah’s husband.
The colonel began emptying drawers on the floor. Soldier
s jumped up and down. Officers came in and out. Within minutes there were papers and files all over the floor. The colonel began hitting the top of his desk with a swagger stick. Dust rose. The colonel sneezed. Townrow thought there was no knowing whose passport they would provide him with eventually.
He was exhausted. With his one eye he saw two of everything. He just wanted to get the British, Irish and American consuls together and tell them about his life so far, as he understood it.
Townrow realised that the colonel and he were alone in the room. Through the wall came sounds of heavy furniture being moved.
“We shall be contacting you,” said the colonel, “as soon as we have all your papers in order.”
Townrow did not like to ask him why he was so sure it was an American passport they’d been looking for and was driven back to the flat in the same car with the open sliding roof just as the sun came up. It came up tangerine-coloured at the end of long, deserted streets.
CHAPTER FOUR
Talk on a Hot Morning
By the time his cheek had sufficiently healed for the stitches to come out, the excitement over the Canal had died down. But for the hordes of Egyptians bathing at the Plage des Enfants you would not have known there had been a take-over. It was the beginning of August. The Plage was Canal Company property in Port Fouad. Egyptians were never seen there. Townrow knew it from his army days. There was a glittering, eyebrow-shaped beach, changing rooms and sweetwater showers. You could swim out to brightly coloured floats with diving boards. The porpoises were friendly. They snorted out of the blue water, played around, rollicked. Jelly fish sometimes floated just below the surface of the water like great lilac-coloured poached eggs and if you hit one coming down a chute your skin turned to blisters. A lot of naked little boys, youths in loosely tied white drawers, big men with black, matted hair on their chest who stood in the sea wearing sun glasses and smoking, these now commandeered the place and after one look Townrow took Leah back over the ferry. She had given up being in a rage over what he had said about her husband. They hired a sailing boat and went swimming in the outer harbour. The water was still and clear. With the sail down they could both dive off the boat and swim around in the knowledge they could get back whenever they liked. It might drift a few yards, no more.
