Something to Answer For

by P. H. Newby

  *

  If you were accustomed to seeing a man wearing a complete set of dentures in real gold and one day you saw him with ordinary white ones you might not recognise him. Townrow walked down Republic Street and saw this man sitting in Gianola’s. He had to stop for a second look. But for the teeth, Elie looked much as he did when he was alive. He was sitting at a table under the green and red awning drinking tea and looking about in a knowing sort of way. No, though, it was not Elie. Townrow felt exhausted by the efforts of hanging on to the real world. He had to relax only for one moment and he was caught up in dreams and fantasies. This man was all in white. Even his tie was white. This time of day most of the other customers were women, some of them young and pretty, eating cream cakes. The old man’s pleasure came, it seemed, from watching them, because the moment Townrow spoke and he lifted his head his expression hardened when he saw who it was. He waved a hand defensively in front of his face. He looked surprised. He shrugged. He looked up at the awning. This was the way you might behave to one of those hawkers with postcards and fly-whisks. Townrow could not be sure it was Elie. He was like Elie after a long illness, or raised from the dead. They’d kept his teeth in Hell and given him new ones. Or restored the originals.

  This man in white jumped up and disappeared inside the restaurant. Because of the children running about Townrow could not move quickly and by the time he reached the street on the other side the old man was twenty yards away. Townrow caught him up and spoke quietly.

  “Elie, Elie, for God’s sake, Elie.” Townrow could have grabbed him but he was not sure enough of himself for that. He wanted to follow the man and see where he went. At the same time he wanted to be near enough to talk. Plenty of folk lived and enjoyed themselves their relations thought dead. Of course, you had to fake it. You had to set a car on fire, or a house. Nothing left but your charred notebook and your teeth. You could easily get yourself a set of new teeth. But this was different. Elie had been found dead in the street. There were witnesses. Townrow wasn’t sure he hadn’t seen him himself. He’d seen him lying dead in an open coffin. He could see him in the bright sun, thin as a wafer, with sailors looking down from the rail of a destroyer.

  They went north at about four miles an hour. The old man couldn’t walk faster. He gave out birdlike croaks and squawks. He arched his body away whenever Townrow came particularly close. After a while Townrow gave up demanding what the hell the game was. He received no answer, not even when it struck him the old man had not recognised him. He said, “You remember me, Townrow. I fell off that horse.”

  They left the European section and walked into Arab Town where the battered, fragile buildings were taller and every balcony had clothes hung to dry. Sea air did not penetrate. There was a smell of roast meat, latrines and incense. A man clashed a couple of cymbals and tried to sell them glasses of sherbert. There were hundreds of people about, sitting, walking in the middle of the street so that what traffic there was got through by hooting incessantly. Shouting children shot out of side alleys, playing some game.

  By the time they emerged into the late afternoon light on the far side Townrow was reviling the old man. “If you’re so bloody clever,” he said, “tell me whether I’ve got a British or an Irish passport.”

  On this open ground there were lots of trotting donkeys sending up clouds of yellow dust. The old fool has taken a room in this quarter, Townrow thought, because this is where the Lake Menzalla steamer starts from and he can get out to his island.

  He was in a lather of sweat and his thighs ached. “Everything in this filthy town is a racket. What did you want to get me mixed up in it for? Was I doing anybody any harm? What goes on? Tell me that! We were on a boat. You remember that? What happened? I’m fed up with being beaten up and exploited. What do you take me for? You think I’ll crack up, or something? Is that what you’re after? You want me to crack up?”

  The old man just disappeared at this. He was obscured by the dust and Townrow, out of exhaustion, lost sight of him. He searched round the nearest block but there was no sign. Townrow thought that if he found him he’d do him in anyway, if that was the only way of keeping a dead man down and making sure an Irish citizen got what was due to him. Even a lawyer couldn’t claim you’d done a man who was dead already. It was all too crazy. He would not have felt easy in his mind, taking over the property from the old woman if Elie himself was liable to pop up at any minute and dispossess him. At his time of life he needed a bit of security. The time had come to cut his losses. The town had beaten him. To hell with the police and anyone else who told him what to do. He’d take the evening steamer across the lake.

  *

  Half way across or thereabouts it ran hard aground and the hundred or so passengers began screaming and shouting. They would have run about if there had been room to move on the now sloping decks. It was night and moonless. Smoke and sparks belched from the funnel. A bell rang on the bridge and judging by the threshing of the screw the captain had put the steamer full astern. She did not budge. For a couple of hours Townrow had been smelling human bodies but now he could smell mud and brine. The lake bed churned to the surface.

  It took some time for Townrow to make his way to the stern. He just wanted to get off this boat. He wanted to get away from the screaming women in black cotton drapes. He wanted to get away from the smell of sweat and the conversation of that man who had latched on to him soon after sailing and told him in tortuous English how you could see cities under the water. Corn fields, pastures of green berseem, the date palms lying in the mud, statues, blocks of stone; all these things were in the lake. A soldier in golden armour had been dragged up in a net. Townrow was glad to lose this talkative fool. The stern was actually under water. Here was a long drawn out phosphorescent explosion. The screw dug earth and flung it, flecked with fire, over the black water. There was a cloud of pale vapour. A long way off were still patches of water catching starlight.

  Townrow pulled on a rope and the little boat he had spotted soon after leaving Port Said swam up. The steamer must have turned before running aground because this cockleshell emerged on the starboard side, well clear of the stern. Townrow was able to step into it, cast off and shove violently away with his foot before anybody else knew what was happening. Anyway, it was too dark and there was too much confusion for Townrow to be noticed. Except for the navigation lights and those on the bridge the steamer was in darkness. You could tell there were a lot of excited people on board only by the row they were making. Townrow found himself wobbling back to the side of the steamer and had to fend off with an oar. The water seemed to be only three or four feet deep and he was finally able to get away from the side of the steamer by using an oar like a punt pole. He found the other oar and began to row. When he was about fifty yards away he began to sweat again and realised how cooling the churned water had been. Where he now lay the water was stagnant.

  The steamer began sending out blasts on its siren. They were probably safe enough. The vessel was broad as a frying-pan and could no more capsize than it could fly. If her stern began to slip back under water and the engine-room got flooded there would be an explosion but the survivors could get out and wade. Townrow turned his attention to the stern of his own little craft; he was delighted to discover that his power of recall was efficient over the really limited period. He thought he’d seen an outboard motor. He had.

  Elie’s island could not be so very far off. He remembered how they used to lie there and watch the steamers following the channel between Port Said and Matarieh. Even if he wanted to locate the spot there was no point in trying before sun-up. But he had not come to find Elie’s island. He was going to lie in the bottom of this boat and snooze and when there was enough light he would see about trying to start that motor. He had no plans. If he came across Elie’s place by chance he would certainly go ashore. But he would not waste time looking for it. He rowed for another ten minutes. Pale green water slid from the blades of his oars, glowing and scattering back
wards across the surface. The lake broke into wings and the air went into pale scorings and sepia splashes. Wild duck! Hundreds of wild duck! He had rowed into a great settling of them and they burst off the water with honks and croaks. He was startled. Then he began to laugh.

  The steamer was still blasting away. All he could see of it now were the sparks and the fire-flushed smoke from the funnel. A voice was booming out so maybe the captain was addressing the passengers with a loud-hailer. Townrow guessed he was telling them to calm down, etc. Townrow knew the stars. Straight overhead was Orion. Over there hung Cassiopeia. Long after he had recovered from being startled by the ducks he still went on chuckling to himself. He was an atheist. His non-belief had hardened soon after they kicked him out of that Bible College. Even in his believing days he had thought life after death a ridiculous idea. But if you did survive this was the first you would know of it, floating in a boat on a great dark, bitter lake. Or something of the sort. The waters of Lethe.

  It was a lie to say he was running away. But he was on the move. That was what he liked. Pressing forward. He liked new scenes, new faces, new experiences. A man who stayed put was in decay. You stepped on a plane or a boat and before you knew where you were some new game was being explored. You fell into some new relationship and you became a different person. Someone said to him a man needs an enemy as an abscess needs a poultice, to draw the poison out. He needed no enemy. Provided he kept on the move there would be no time for the poison to gather. That was what he really meant about the man who stayed put; he wasn’t so much decaying as accumulating poison. Townrow stuck the oars into the water and rowed hard. The night was hot. Sweat rolled off him and he thought of it as poison excreted.

  Sitting in this dinghy as the sun came up he knew he would remember this night and dawn whatever else might slip away. He had kept awake. He sat with a straight back talking to himself now and again. As the stars went, the surface of the lake put on a cold glow and he could see the islands emerge. All this was real. He knew he was there and the sun coming up hot. This was real and certain but nothing else was.

  The motor had to be started by pulling on a piece of cord. As Townrow stood up the boat wobbled and sent circles out across the still water. A dozen or so duck took off and rushed clamorously overhead, so near they trailed their droppings of water across him. He could not help tasting it. He passed his tongue across his lips, and the salt tang was enough to make him realise how thirsty he was. Thirst would do for him if he was not careful.

  The little motor coughed. The morning was so quiet the splutter startled him. The dinghy moved. He grabbed at the tiller, sat down and set a course due west towards a point where he could see a white building catching the early sunlight in a grove of palm trees. He was not even sure he could break through to the open sea. Hadn’t they built a road along the coast between Port Said and Damietta? The boat was light enough for him to lug it across any road. The main thing was not to be seen. Once he had picked up food and water he would head north and see if he could break through to the open sea and hail some boat bound for Europe.

  *

  The night of September 14th a man with untidy hair on his cheeks and chin asked the porter of a block in Rue Chérif which floor the lawyer Abravanel lived on. The porter took him up to the fourth and left him looking at a glass door covered with so much ornamental ironwork he could not have pushed two fingers through. Because all the light was coming from inside the flat he could see the servant silhouetted against the glass as he asked, very quietly and without opening the door, “Min?”

  But the shadow of a woman appeared almost immediately, the door opened and there was Leah, ready to go out, it seemed, with glittering earrings and a white dress and a white wrap and her face alive with expectancy. At the sight of the man on the landing she gasped and drew her little embroidered evening bag protectively up to her chest.

  “Expecting somebody?” the man asked.

  She looked at his beard and peeling face. Every time he touched it a layer of skin flaked off. He wore a bush shirt, cotton slacks and open sandals. He had a strip of some kind of striped material wound round his head like a turban.

  “Who are you?”

  “Townrow. I suppose it’s because of this beard——”

  “Where have you been?” The words were a long time coming because she was staring at him. She was still shaken. She licked her lips and was still backing away when he said, “Your father in?”

  “He’s asleep. You can’t see him. It’s gone eleven.”

  Down the stair well the lift gate clanked.

  Townrow said, “Here’s your visitor. Your husband wouldn’t like this, you know.”

  The lift rose from the depths, whining and rattling, to produce a fresh-faced, blue-eyed man of about forty who stepped out and said, “Hallo,” to Leah before looking at Townrow and saying, “What’s wrong? Anything up?”

  Townrow grinned back into the blue eyes while Leah did the introductions. Apparently his name was Stokes and he was a Canal pilot. Like Leah, he seemed set for a night out. He wore an expensive-looking suit that glistened when he moved. His tie was a dark blue bow with white spots and for cuff links he had what looked like gold sovereigns held on little chains. The manner was self-assured. Gaiety had been planned. What the hell was holding it up?

  “We’ve got to be in the office by midnight, Leah. You know I can’t be late. Everybody will be there.” The voice came from the back of the nose with no resonance.

  Leah was still passing the tip of her tongue backwards and forwards between her lips. “God, I could do with a drink.” She could not take her eyes off Townrow. “We all thought you were dead. Where have you been?”

  “Are you asking me? Who walked out, eh? Who cleared out of the Greek Club without so much as a word? Then you ask me where I’ve been.”

  “The Greek Club?”

  “Yes, when I went to look for you you’d gone. You said your father wanted to see me. Here I am.”

  “But not at this time of night.”

  “Leah——” The pilot was impatient.

  “The police have been looking for you. Mrs Khoury has been out of her mind.”

  “I’ve been travelling,” said Townrow. “You’re not going out with this fellow, are you? He doesn’t look straight to me. Does he know you’re a married woman?”

  “Straight? You talk of being straight?”

  Townrow tried to turn up the point of his beard. “When I use the word straight I’m talking about sex. I can see you give it a wider application. I’ve no strong views on the moral life.”

  Leah shut the door of the flat behind her. Stokes held the door of the lift open.

  “You’re not really going out with this twit, are you?” Townrow asked.

  “Leonard,” she said, “is going down to the Canal Company Offices together with all the other British and French pilots to hand in his written resignation. You don’t seem to realise the Egyptian Government may put them all in jail. They’re all resigning.”

  “Is that what you’re dressed up for?”

  “We’re going over to the Yacht Club afterwards to see what happens to the first convoy. It’s due in at nine in the morning.”

  “You mean the convoy will be coming up with Egyptian pilots?”

  “For the first and last time,” said Stokes. “They’ll be screaming for help at two in the morning by my reckoning.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Townrow.

  “Go round to Mrs Khoury’s flat. She’s been worried. She’ll be pleased.” Leah put a hand on Townrow’s arm. “We all thought you were dead. It was just like seeing a ghost, you standing there. I just thought I was seeing things. You go round to Mrs Khoury’s flat. Leonard and I will drop you off there.”

  “The old girl can wait. Sounds as though there’ll be some drink going at the Yacht Club.”

  “Mr Townrow was a friend of Elie Khoury,” Leah explained to Stokes, “and then Elie Khoury died and Mr Townrow came out f
rom England because the widow—you see they were clients of my father.”

  “Mr Townrow, is it?” said Townrow. “Anyway, who said Elie was dead? Can you show me his grave?”

  “If we don’t go,” said the pilot, “we won’t be there by midnight.”

  “You a married man?” said Townrow. “There, what did I tell you? He’s married. With kids.”

  They rode in an open gharry, Leah in the middle, under a full, blazing moon. Every window in town seemed to have a light in it. There were crowds in the cafes. The loudspeakers at the corners were playing music most of the time but now and again a voice broke in and the little crowd gathered before each one cheered and waved Egyptian flags. Townrow thought the pilot must be grinding his teeth over the way he had tagged along; but if he was he smiled at the same time and even talked. He was the sort slow to take offence.

  So they all thought he was dead! Leah thought he was dead. But it did not stop her going out with this jerk and having a good time. His corpse might have been lying on a mud-bank but she’d be drinking and dancing and laughing.

  “You heard from your husband, Leah? How’s he responding to the shock treatment?”

  He wanted to be sure this pilot knew about Leah’s psychotic husband. Leah said no, she hadn’t heard, in a casual, flat sort of way out of the side of her mouth and then went back to listening to Stokes talking about the Gyppo pilots and how, if you didn’t keep an eye on them, they had the ships climbing up the banks of the Canal. They panicked easily. There was an Egyptian pilot with double vision who always thought there was twice as much shipping about as in fact there was.”

  “You going back to England when you sign off?” asked Townrow.

  “We’re staying on. Within twelve hours Nasser will be on his knees begging us to go back.”

  Townrow would have liked to go into the Canal Company Offices to see these pilots signing their chits but he calculated that if he stayed outside in the gharry with Leah he might persuade her to come round to the Eastern Exchange once Stokes’s back was turned. The thought may have passed through Stokes’s mind too.