by P. H. Newby
“Leah, would you like to come in and see this pantomime?” he asked. “I’m sorry I can’t invite you too,” he said to Townrow, “but numbers are strictly limited.”
“I’ve played the trick myself. You go straight through the building, out the other side and you’re away and me left to pay the bloody driver.”
Townrow put himself in such a rage that Leah said she wanted to be taken home. She would not go into the Canal Company Offices. She would not go to the Yacht Club. She was upset and confused by what had happened.
“But it’s midnight,” said Stokes. “Let me just go in and sign.”
“I’ll just stay with her and look after her,” said Townrow. “Now you run along like a good boy.”
Stokes twisted his face in a noiseless snarl at this. It was the first time he had shown a human reaction that evening and as he stood there hesitating, his eyes two great black sockets under some harsh electric light, Townrow thought he was going to make more of a fight of it. But instead he shouted to Leah, “I shan’t be five minutes,” and hurried into the building.
Townrow and Leah were still sitting in the carriage. Townrow tapped the driver on the shoulder, “O.K. Jock. Rue Chérif, and make it snappy.”
Leah cried, “No, no, Leonard’s taking me home.”
“Myself, I don’t like Leonard. If he tried to see you home I’ll create such hell they’ll think the British have landed.”
“I’ll call the police. I’ll have you arrested.”
“You would, would you?” He grabbed her round the shoulders with his right arm and used his left hand to hold her chin firm. Before she could scream he was kissing her on the mouth, or her teeth, rather, because her mouth was open half an inch. She hit at him with her free hand but he took no notice. He pushed her head back against the cracked leather upholstery and began caressing her lips with his. She drew her tongue back. He was dizzy with excitement. It was as though he had been hauled out of his own body. He lost contact with it and so with hers. This was how he had been living for the past few weeks. Water, dates, bread and the savage sun. When it was not gold it was purple. The evolutionary process brought creatures out of the water to crawl on the land. But he had put that into reverse. In the heat of the day he had lain covered but for face in the stagnant water, and the frond from a banana tree over his eyes, half fish and half man. A lot of this time he had spent talking to Leah and making love to her so was it any wonder he was jealous? Dead, as he might be, and she out dancing!
He found she was kissing him back. She drew him back down into his body with her lips. “O.K., O.K.” she said, as soon as he allowed her to start breathing again. “When Leonard comes back we’ll all go across to the Yacht Club.”
“Tonight of all nights,” he said, “the blasted pilots chuck their hands in. Why can’t we go and get ourselves a drink somewhere quiet?”
Three men with arms linked tried to leave the Canal Company building together and found the door was not wide enough, so they came down the steps sideways, laughing and trying to kick their legs up like can-can dancers. They were followed by policemen wearing enormously wide leather belts. A truck, full of soldiers in steel helmets, drew up, and Townrow stood up in the gharry, shouting, “Long live King Farouk!” because he was excited at the way Leah had kissed him back and wanted to hit out at anyone who seemed to be in authority. He reckoned anybody shouting Farouk’s name would be dropped on by these brave revolutionary soldiers. But they took no notice and Townrow thought it must be his accent. Leah grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him down.
Stokes appeared out of the crowd.
“It’s all done,” he said.
Three Frenchmen singing La Marseillaise climbed into the gharry too and they trundled away into the darkness at about two miles an hour, soldiers and policemen straggling fore and aft, singing pilots in other gharries, as first one siren in the harbour sounded and then another, and then, it seemed every ship in port was blasting off and the hot, black air wobbled with what sounded like an obscene chord struck and held on some home-made giant organ. They were not letting any cars on to the ferry boat that night, which was just as well because such a mob wanted to cross to Port Fouad and they were able to stand in the tracks where the vehicle would have gone.
“These bloody Gyppos,” said Stokes, “they’ve got it coming to them.”
On the other side, the Yacht Club was five minutes from the ferry and Leah said she was going to walk between the two men, holding each of them by the arm, so that they would not get split up. Townrow was telling them about how he had survived in the lake.
“I died,” he said. “When my body was cast up on the shore they could see it belonged to some pig of a foreigner so they put me on a pile of old boxwood and set fire to it.”
“You certainly lost a lot of weight,” said Leah.
“Streaming dysentery.”
“You off a ship, or something?” said Stokes, trying to take an intelligent interest.
“I rose from my ashes. There was a whitewashed tomb. It was just an enormous egg with a little door at one side and a lot of writing. And it was all under a sort of canopy made of mud bricks and coloured over in white. There were pigeons and some goats and an old man who came out and gave me Entero-Vioform. Who’d have guessed that, eh? I lay on a mud-brick bench by the side of this tomb and this old chap with nothing on but a tarboosh and gallabieh came around. He’d got long legs like some marsh bird. He’d Entero-Vioform tablets in an old tobacco tin, Three Nuns.”
“Mrs Khoury told the police you’d been murdered, like her husband. She was round at the British Consulate the moment they opened because she’d established that even if you were an Irishman the British Consul was charged to look after your interest.”
“Was there no enquiry from Europe?” asked Townrow.
“Nothing at all. You ought to see Mrs Khoury. She’s grieved.”
“He’s out of his bloody mind,” Stokes said very quietly to Leah but Townrow heard and thought he could be right at that. “He’s either tight or sunstruck, or something. They’ll give ’im the old heave-ho out of the Yacht Club. I can’t say he’s my guest. I don’t know him from McGinty’s goat and they chucked out a steward off a P. and O. boat the other day because he wasn’t wearing a tie. This is a great night, you know. We don’t want to spoil it, do we?”
Townrow was not crazy. He’d died and risen again, that’s all, in a temperature of 105 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade approximately (but there’d been damn little shade) and humidity 95, say, and so much light coming down from the great, cavernous, empty sky that it flooded his closed eyes with blood. He could see the blood washing through the lids of his closed eyes. He never found Elie’s island but there were villages with palm trees, dark shops run by Greeks with barrels of pickles, earthenware jars of water he could pick up when he pleased and take a swig. He lived on this bench before the saint’s tomb.
“Sheikh,” said the man with heron legs and the Three Nuns tin.
“Shay-chch!” Townrow said back to him, trying to imitate the whine and the guttural.
He was out there for years. It made a good man of him. It made him want to give and to sacrifice himself and to love everybody. That was what being a saint amounted to, wasn’t it? The old man with the Entero-Vioform opened the door in the side of the white egg and showed Townrow a hole in some masonry. Townrow was made to understand he ought to put his hand through this hole and seize whatever lay beyond. He clasped some dry twigs.
When he ran out of gas he was able to buy a supply from a one-eyed man who ran a taxi service to Matarieh, or it might have been Damietta. Townrow liked to sleep by day and whine about the lake at night. There were plenty of fishing boats. But you forgot the fishing boats and the dark lake because at night everything was sky. Three quarters of what you saw was a cascade of stars, nebulae, constellations rushing through furry blueness. There were no people up there. Townrow saw no faces. In fact, it had pretty well nothing to do with him, he t
hought, but night after night he went out and gazed about him. That was what he meant by beauty. There were blue lights and green lights and red lights. On either side of the Milky Way the lights shone out like from some fantastic shunting yard, airport, seaport, some universal, mechanical, signalling haven.
The twigs were a dead man’s fingers. Townrow was never going to forget what they felt like. They crackled. He thought a stain might have been left on his own fingers, but he could see no sign of it even in full sunlight. The sheikh held him by the hand through all his bouts of diarrhoea. When the villagers, headed by his friend, the tall man, carried him out to the pyre the saint was there clutching at him. Townrow was upset by this dead man he could not shake off. He thought that if he could forgive his friend, the tall man with the Entero-Vioform, for playing such a dirty trick on him he could forgive anyone for anything. He could forgive Elie for being still in the land of the living. He could forgive this woman, Leah Strauss, with her dyed hair and crazy husband, for the way she just evaporated in the heat. He could forgive his old Dad for the way he climbed out of that car, jumped over the farm gate and walked across that green field, never to come back.
Make no mistake about it, he could have cleared out of the stinking country. He could have lugged this dinghy out into the Med and he wouldn’t have needed to head very far north to be in the shipping line. It was like Oxford Street out there. He could have picked any boat he liked. But he talked himself into not going. He had to find out what was happening in Port Said, and what the hell was going on inside himself when he was in Port Said. He had a notion that once back in England Port Said would seem a pretty normal place and letters would start arriving again from old Mrs K saying Elie was dead and she did not know which way to turn. Lies! And that Jewish woman! He’d know for sure he wasn’t her husband.
Townrow wanted to lean right across Leah and scream in Stokes’s face, “No, I’m not out of my mind. I just forgive and love everybody, Christ knows, even you with your hen’s arse for a mouth and your Hairy He-Man’s perfume (Yes, I can smell it!) because if I can forgive my old pal with the tobacco tin of Entero-Vioform for playing such a stinking trick on me, I reckon I can forgive even you. Forgive you for what? Well, you exist, don’t you?”
He had lain at the bottom of his dinghy watching the half-moon slip west when the dead saint’s fingers suddenly ceased to press against his, and Townrow thought, “I’m a good man now. I’ve been born again. I’m saved, and my friends won’t recognise me.”
But instead of talking about his state of mind he said he’d always understood the Canal pilots were well paid.
“Money isn’t everything,” said Stokes.
“As they used to say in my theological college, don’t you wish it was?”
“We’re not packing in because of the money, if that’s what you’re driving at.”
“I said, ‘Don’t you wish it was?’”
“We know what we’re doing, all right.”
“I’ve been trying to give money away for years,” said Townrow. “Thousands of pounds.”
They turned into a garden where lights were hanging in the trees and climbed wooden steps to a verandah. Leah said she would rather stay outside. Judging by the roar of conversation the Club House was pretty full and anyway she was fed up with politics, she didn’t want to be where she had to listen to people talking about bombing and invasion and the Egyptians putting the Canal out of action. She just wanted to sit where it was cool. She would sit there all night if they wanted her to but she’d rather dance or get tight or play cards, anything but talk politics.
“We can go through to the grass on the other side,” said Stokes. “There’ll be a breeze off the water.”
At the bar Townrow found himself next to an Englishman of about sixty with a fresh, well-scrubbed slightly wobbly face and a silky little yellow moustache.
“Christ,” said this man to him. “You smell! You know that?”
“Guest of Captain Stokes.”
“Mud, you smell of mud. Where’ve you blown in from then? Haven’t seen you before. Still, this is a time when we shouldn’t ask questions, I suppose. If you’re a guest you can’t buy drinks. What’ll you have, Mr——?”
“Townrow. I’ve been travelling. What’s the latest?”
“Name of Thompson,” said the well-scrubbed man. “But if I don’t ask questions I don’t answer any. Fair enough?”
“Fair enough,” said Townrow, taking his whisky neat.
“Anyway, these French paratroops. You knew that? Cyprus. Landed today. But I’m against it. It’s crazy. You can’t occupy the Canal Zone. You’ve got to occupy Cairo. Nasser would set up a government in Khartoum. I understand Arabic. I’ve an ear for languages. You know, I once travelled passenger on a boat from Bombay to Tilbury, varicose veins, and by the time we docked I was speaking Malay. Lascar crew. I could talk to them. On the radio just now I heard General Hakim Amer say ’The Egyptian Army is prepared to the smallest detail.’ Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t like the Egyptians any more than you do. They’re a crazy, treacherous people. Have another.”
“It’s my turn.”
“No, you’re a guest. And this conference in Lancaster House fixing to run the Canal by committee! I wouldn’t have gone to that if I’d been Nasser. Would you?”
“Did he?”
Thompson stared at Townrow fixedly and seemed to realise for the first time he not only stank but looked a bit of a tramp. He lifted his eyes to the headcloth. “Say, you just blown in from the desert or something? Of course Nasser didn’t go to London. Everybody knows that.”
Townrow went off with a John Collins for Leah and a double scotch for Stokes but he could not find them anywhere and settled in a chair. He was feeling tired all of a sudden. He ought not to feel tired. Hadn’t he had enough sleep during the past few weeks? He did not know how long he had been away. But he had slept at least half the time. He thought that perhaps he’d established a habit. He was at one end of the verandah, near the steps, so that he could see anyone coming in from the garden. As the pilots and their women prepared to mount the three shallow steps they looked up and the verandah light caught their faces. Tables were set about the grass, each under its light and nimbus of moths. Waiters in white gowns and red sashes glided with trays. For all his fatigue Townrow thought something extraordinary was about to happen. These Yacht Club lawns were on the very edge of the last big basin before shipping entered the Canal proper. It was like a stage setting. Nothing moved on the water. There were lights on the big cranes on the other side of the water but none moving between them and the Yacht Club. The sky was as black as the water.
Leah woke him up. She touched his shoulder.
“So that’s where you were.”
The temperature was about blood heat and the chair so comfortable that Townrow dipped in and out of sleep easily.
“If it’s to be a long night I thought I’d better get ready for it. Where’s Stokes?”
“He’s on the telephone half the time. They’re getting reports from stations down the Canal. Or they’re trying to. I don’t know.”
“Do you mean,” said Townrow, “all these pilots have asked for their cards? It’s bluff. They get a hundred quid a week. I don’t believe they’d walk out. Or it’s done on orders of the British and French as a deliberate bit of wrecking. I’ve got a drink for you there.”
She sat down and picked up the glass.
“You’re different.”
“Different?”
“You’ve changed. You haven’t been round to see Mrs Khoury? You know she’s moved back into the flat.”
“I came straight to your place. What does your father want to tell me?”
“Something about Mrs Khoury. They hate each other. You knew that, didn’t you? They’ve always hated each other.”
He wanted to possess this woman. He wanted to do it openly so that everyone knew about it. And he didn’t want her to give him any trouble about it. He hadn’t the s
trength or the patience for a lot of stalking. And he wanted her to accept him without thinking particularly well of him. Love? He’d rub her nose in it if he had half the chance. He unwound the striped cloth from his head. He began playing with it and noticed how intently she was watching his hands. Her eyes seemed to be made up of lots of little facets, reflecting the overhead light one facet at a time as she moved her eyes to watch his hands. Suddenly he threw the cloth over her head and shoulder and drew her towards him over the table. She screamed, but not too strongly.
“There! Look what you’ve done.” It was her glass. It had smashed on the floor.
“Did you ever send money to the Lydney disaster fund in 1949?” he demanded.
A waiter picked up the broken pieces of glass and Townrow told him to bring another John Collins and a treble whisky. All the time his eyes were fixed on Leah’s. Her face was no more than six inches from his. He could see she thought he was up to some game and that in a moment he would kiss her. She had never heard of the Lydney disaster fund. Why should she? She was a Port Said Jewess and Lydney was in Gloucestershire.
“I just wanted to tell you how I earned my living, that’s all,” he said. He didn’t just want to kiss her with the table dividing them. The way she was laughing at him dazed him. He could see her teeth and the tip of her tongue. What was extraordinary was that she didn’t think he was crazy. He knew he wasn’t crazy but how did she know. She wasn’t afraid of him at all. She just laughed.
“You’re different from the way you were. Do you know what I think? You’re an agent. You’re here for the British Government. But don’t talk about it. Even if you could. I don’t want to know.”
“You’re sure I’m not your husband?”
“No, of course you’re not my husband. You’re almost a stranger to me,” she said in the playful way she might have spoken if he was her husband. “We scarcely know each other, do we, Mr——?She was so arch it pained him.
