by P. H. Newby
Every night at nine-thirty, he said, she went to a certain spot in town where her husband’s body had been found. Now she sent a message to Townrow saying a Cypriot was telling her to stop it. He ran a bar opposite and this nightly ceremony was bad for his trade. In a vague sort of way he had threatened her and she was frightened. She was always frightened of Cypriots. Nevertheless she was going to this same spot that very evening and in case anything happened to her she wanted Townrow to know about Christou’s threat. That was the man’s name. He was a certain John Christou who ran the Cyprus Bar and Townrow remembered him from way back, when he was here with the army. He had been in his bar once or twice this trip, too. Come to think of it, he had been in there with Mrs K herself.
That was his first outing after his convalescence, going with her again to that strip of pavement in front of the gate in the high white wall which looked across to the Cyprus Bar. There was a reason he’d come back to why he was allowed out.
He wore this same grey linen suit for the first time. It had been tailored while he had been shut up in that bedroom with nothing much to do but read, make passes at Leah and get himself measured for suits. He was not complaining. After all the days were cooler. It was October and he could sit on the balcony wearing nothing but a pair of drawers in the noon sun. He was brown in places he’d never been brown before. All the time he was getting better and Leah could see that for herself.
He called for Mrs K at nine o’clock and they walked into town not saying a great deal until she happened to say she had received a cheque for eighty Egyptian pounds from the insurance company by way of compensation for the damage to her flat and she had sent it straight back. It was absurd. The occasional table with cherubs had cost Elie fifty guineas in Wigmore Street and the grand total, the chairs, that big picture of a cock and hens, would be nearer a thousand. Townrow said she was a fool to send money back to anyone. She ought to have cashed it and said it was without prejudice to her claim for something bigger.
Townrow described this walk to Amin and the major with a kind of wonder they must have found irritating because Amin said, “Where is this getting you?”
All the cigarettes had been smoked and the major went out for some more. When he came back Townrow was explaining he was never going to make clear why he was in Port Said unless he pinned down the detail of what had been happening during October. Nothing was quite so important as what happened the particular night he was talking about. A farrash followed the major with coffee and a fly swat with which he despatched perhaps a dozen of the two or three hundred buzzing about the cell and settling on the men’s faces and hands. A ship out in the Canal gave a couple of blasts on its siren that made the floor tingle. Once out of the jail, Townrow thought, there would be a run of about two hundred yards to the Canal, a short swim, and then no doubt somebody would throw him a rope.
They arrived so punctually outside the convent gate Christou could have set his watch by it. Unusually he had a light burning outside the Bar. He burst out of his doorway, followed by maybe six other men, and began shouting with a theatrical extravagance that gave the impression he was not serious. “Go away! You get on my nerves. Remorse is a sin. You contaminate my life. The graph of my takings falls. Do you think I’m a rich man? I am an exile. I am poor. You take away my living.” He crossed the road alone, watched by his customers, and flashed an electric torch in Townrow’s face. “Haven’t you had enough? Why don’t you go away? The past is dead.”
Had enough? Townrow remembered thinking this question had the kind of peculiar comprehensiveness that came from Christou knowing more about him than he had supposed. Yes, he had had enough. How had Christou guessed? And if he had guessed so shrewdly why did he think it was so bloody funny? What was the joke?
“My past is not dead,” said Mrs K. “I shall come here if I want to.”
“Yes,” said Townrow, “why can’t she come here if she wants to? What’s it got to do with you?”
All the time Christou was talking to them in English he was keeping up a conversation across the street with his customers in Greek who laughed and now and again clapped their hands. Inside the bar the radio was turned up. It was roaring out a pop song from Athens and one of the men on the pavement was singing too. Townrow remembered this encounter with Christou beginning with threats and gaiety and singing. It was like the start of some savage festival. You would never have remembered any of these men in daylight. The electric light over the door of the Bar put masks on their faces.
Christou said this nightly visit was just the old woman’s way of getting on his nerves. She had killed Elie, poor bastard, but there was one thing she had forgotten. She wasn’t married to him, Christou. “To destroy a man you’d got first to make him love you. That was what you broke him with. Love. Now, maybe I’m not worth the full treatment. You’re rich. I’m not married. I had two wives, you know that? Both dead. Why you so modest about yourself? I’m tight half the time, and I don’t know the difference between a crutch and an armpit.”
Honestly, Townrow had never believed the old girl was frightened of anybody but she had signed over the apartment block, no more, and if she did get hit on the head he knew there was no will and the rest of the estate would go to some cousin in England. He objected to this. He still had hopes of putting her on a boat for the U.K. once she’d made a decent will. Making sure she wasn’t knocked off, then—that and a certain curiosity—made him tag along to the spot where Elie had been found; certainly not the idea she wouldn’t have gone by herself if he’d said he was too tired. She was tough. She had the courage of some half-mad old pussycat run wild.
Instead of poking Christou with the ferrule of her umbrella or giving him the edge of her tongue, she said, composedly, “I shall come as I please. You can’t frighten me. I know your game.”
“You killed him, m’dear,” said Christou, “you killed him as surely as if you’d stuffed the poor little man in the John and pulled the plug.”
Why Christou found it necessary to vilify Mrs K was puzzling. He seemed to think this kind of wit so precious it had to be translated and tossed across the street to the customers on the other side. Townrow thought there was more in the savagery than could be explained by the way these men were egging him on. It was not just a piece of brutal theatricality. But because he could not understand what lay behind it he did not know what to do. He was a man who liked to act. Quite likely he would do something to make a fool of himself. At that particular moment this was what bothered him most. “Haven’t you had enough?” Christou had said, just as though he knew precisely what Townrow had been through. By implication, it made Townrow some sort of puppet.
“What goes on?”
This was the question when Mrs K stood and faced it out with Christou, even though his behaviour became wilder, even though he threw his hands about and joined in a song that was coming over the radio. She didn’t do the obvious thing, turn and clear off. For that matter, you would have thought Christou would have tired and gone to attend to his customers. He was losing money. He had made whatever point he had to make, surely. Mrs K had made hers. Townrow had tried to persuade her to go home. She told him to shut up. He would have liked, himself, to go and have a drink. But he could not leave these two together. It would have been like leaving his identity behind.
He tried to explain it to Amin, in the course of this questioning in Port Said jail, by saying he felt, standing there opposite the Cyprus Bar, pretty much as he felt now, trying to account for himself against some background of information he knew nothing about. A spy? What the hell? Townrow said Amin was playing the same role as Christou. “Haven’t you had enough?” Amin would say in a minute. Enough of what? But all his life Townrow had been like this. You honestly did not know who you were or what you were doing. Did Amin ever have the idea he was watched and manipulated? Townrow said he used to catch himself wondering about Elie, a man who would have liked to watch and manipulate if ever he had the chance. One day a rat in one of
those experimental mazes would suspect he was a rat in an experimental maze. Then he would be as uncertain what to do as Townrow had been, listening to Christou and Mrs K. This particular rat said finally, “Why don’t we go and see the scientist?” That was what he meant. What he actually said was, “I’ve been in Port Said at least two months and I still can’t get it clear in my head where Elie is buried.”
In view of what happened this must have seemed to Mrs K and the Cypriot a childish thing to bring out, particularly at that moment. Townrow said if the officers wanted evidence of his simple mindedness here it was. To be honest he blurted the statement out without much thought. To be quite honest, he didn’t give a damn where Elie was buried, if he really was dead that is. He mentioned the burial (say he had been buried at sea, wouldn’t there be a plaque in the cathedral? Why hadn’t he been shown that?) in the hope it might persuade the old girl to speak up and say something he could understand. They operated on some level that was beyond him. They made him feel stupid. There was a coincidence here. He really was stupid though it took the air strike on the Cairo air bases to bring it home to him. He ought to have known how stupid he was the day Leah evaporated at the Greek Club. That was a mystery too. He had never been able to ask Leah about it directly. So he had inhibitions too. Everything was a mystery. Didn’t Amin think it was a mystery? Perhaps it was only stupid people who had this idea some pundit might turn up and explain all created things from some totally unexpected point of view, a cancer collector’s maybe. And this would be completely convincing. We didn’t know it but our sole justification was to provide the raw material in which cancer grew. Townrow knew this was a stupid remark to make. He was stupid. That was his alibi.
“What happened then?” said Amin.
The patience of these two Egyptians was extraordinary. They listened, made notes, smoked, drank coffee and all the time the invasion fleet was getting nearer. It was on the cards it was getting nearer. Put the Egyptian Air Force out of action and the chaps could come over on banana leaves. Next thing these two knew would be paratroopers outside the jail. Perhaps they just thought the jail was the safest place in town.
“Didn’t you all go into the convent?” asked Amin.
“Yes.” What in fact happened when he spoke of Elie’s burial was that Mrs K turned on him and said she didn’t believe in expensive funerals; all the paraphernalia of death was superstition. Prayers for the dead were superstition.
Christou, though, said, “You ought to see his grave,” and, to Townrow’s surprise went to the right of the gate and pulled on a chain which just caught the light from the bar across the street. Inside the building a bell clanged. The effect of this was to make the customers shut up. They stood on the far pavement, silent and expectant.
“Elie was good to the Sisters,” said Mrs K. “All his life he gave money. He said it was instead of having children.”
A grille opened. Christou spoke in French to whoever was on the other side and Townrow caught Elie’s name. The grille was shut, footsteps receded down a gravel path, and in the silence that followed Mrs K said, “Naturally he was brought in here. What would you expect? But they don’t speak English and I don’t speak French.”
When they were waiting it was a time not like any time that had gone before; and afterwards it was different too. It was not joined on to the rest of what Townrow’s mind accepted as time. He stood there with Mrs K’s bony fingers tightening on his upper arm. She had very long, strong fingers that really could take a grip. And Christou stood on the other side, smelling like a brandy cask. What made this time of waiting different was the confidence. They were expectant, God knows why, and if not cheerful at least calm about what they were expecting. This was unique in Townrow’s Port Said experiences, he said. When those footsteps came back and the door opened he would not have been in the slightest surprised if Elie himself had stepped out and shaken hands with him.
Instead it was an old woman in a grey habit carrying an ex-army hurricane lamp. It was only a panel of the great door she had opened. First Mrs K stepped over the threshold. Then Townrow said he went. Christou followed. They were some yards along the path on the other side—they found themselves in a garden—when, hearing a noise, Townrow looked back and saw the half a dozen men who had stood outside the Cyprus Bar stepping through the doorway, too, scrutinised by the old Sister as they came, her hurricane lamp held up face high. They took their caps off with little flourishes.
Amin and the major must know all about this grave. Townrow was telling the story this way to show the kind of innocence he lived in. The only light in this courtyard was from the swinging lamp. Pillars and open stone doorways rocked from side to side. They advanced and receded. They might have been blown by some great silent wind pressing out of that star-blasted sky. He remembered how the sound of the night changed as all those footsteps moved off the gravel on to the paving stones. Nobody talked. Even Christou’s customers kept their traps shut.
Innocent? He didn’t even know there were gardens like this in the middle of town. They had to push along a path whipped by dry leaves to a point where paths radiated between the trunks of palm and great cabbage-like plants stinking of wet earth. And there, between one of these paths and what looked like a giant yucca, was a slab of polished stone with a small wooden cross resting on it. No inscription. They all stood there, jostling each other, coughing and whispering while the old Sister held the lantern as high as she could.
“I never come here,” Mrs K had said in Townrow’s ear. She said it sulkily and impatiently. It was too obvious, really, to need saying. “The sisters gave him this plot. The least they could do. He must have given them thousands, one way and another.”
That is what she had said. She felt nearer to Elie on the pavement where they had found him. Christou was talking about the small feet Elie had. Elie once gave him some shoes he had finished with but they were too small. Townrow went into this kind of detail because he wanted these Egyptians to know what he saw when he shut his eyes.
When you see a stone slab, obviously marking the site of a grave even though it has no inscription, and you stand there in silence with a man’s widow and with others who knew the man, the assumption is obvious. This is where he lies. But Townrow could not accept it. Even the Sister with the lamp, which she had now hooked on to the end of a long pole resting on the ground, so that the slab was in shadow from the lamp’s own base, even that silent Sister was incredible. Since when did a nun open the door of her convent late at night for a lot of men? Who was she? What was this place? How do you know the slab didn’t swing open to show a flight of steps leading down to—well, it might be to some cave, or the seashore, or an airport. Once you knew you’d been misled you naturally grew suspicious. Townrow could just see himself walking into that airport lounge and getting into an argument with a stranger.
“He’s buried in Beirut,” Townrow would say.
“No, he’s not dead,” this quarrelsome man in the airport lounge would say. “He’s buried at sea. He’s on an island.”
“You’ll be glad to know your passport has been found,” said Amin.
Townrow lifted his head and saw there was a blue British passport on the major’s desk.
“That my passport?” Townrow asked.
“Yes.”
“British?”
“Yes. Christou is a British subject too, isn’t he? When did you first meet him?”
Instead of answering, Townrow said he wanted to pee. The major stood up, opened the door so quickly the soldier outside, leaning against a wall, did not have time to stand up. Townrow followed this soldier across the yard with another soldier bringing up the rear. In a whitewashed mud hut was an open sewer sonorous with flies. Townrow paused when he came out and sniffed the dusty air, listening. If the British were bombing Port Said airstrip they were doing it very quietly. The hot noonday sun reeked of disinfectant. The air was motionless between these high walls; it was hot and sickly.
“Thanks,”
he said, when he was back in front of Amin. “What you’ve been telling me isn’t something to make me talk?”
“You mean the British attack?”
“Cairo.”
“You don’t understand Arabic? No? We could switch Cairo radio on for you and you would hear the kind of talk the British are putting out for the benefit of Egyptians.”
“On Cairo radio?”
“Cairo radio has been put out of action by your Air Force. This is a station in Cyprus broadcasting on the same wavelength.”
“How can you tell?”
Amin shrugged. “Tell us what you know about Christou. That’s where we’d got to. When did you meet him first? He has already told us you used to go into his bar when you were stationed here with the British Army. What I want to know is when you first made contact with him on your present visit to Port Said.”
“Is he arrested too?”
“Yes.”
It was so hot in the room that when Townrow shut his eyes it seemed the sockets filled up with sweat. He just could not get it into his head the R. A. F. was bombing Cairo.
“On this visit,” Amin repeated patiently, “when did you first see Christou?”
“According to him it was the night before I met you.”
