by P. H. Newby
“According to you?”
Townrow shrugged.
*
No doubt he would have discovered, sooner or later, that Elie was buried in the Convent garden. The discovery was made that particular evening because it was the day Leah did as he asked quite unexpectedly. She came back from the bathroom wearing a dark red cotton wrap, locked the door, and then took this wrap off and then lay belly down on the bed quite naked. Her head was plunged in the soft pillow with the face turned away from him. The black, red-shot silky hair flowed forward from the nape of her neck and a white path up the back of her skull. What women did with their hair he did not know. This was so clean, so glistening, so black and yet at the same time so ruddy he guessed she’d been putting it through a rinse that morning. She had deliberately drawn her hair forward so that he couldn’t see anything of her face. She would have lain with her face pressed into the pillow; but that would have been harder for breathing and not so provocative. He noticed that her buttocks were slightly mottled. He put his hand on the right buttock and felt what seemed to be discs of hard fat or muscle just under the skin. Otherwise her back was quite white and the legs and arms, being so brown from swimming, hardly seemed to belong to the same figure. Her waist was thicker than he had expected. Once he had paraded in front of her with nothing on while she was fully dressed. Now it was the other way round. He kicked off his sandals, slipped out of his shirt and pants and laid himself face down at her side. He ran his hand across her shoulder-blades.
“That’s better,” he remembered saying. She must have thought he was better because when he said, later, that he was going round with Mrs K to see Christou she made no objection; and this was the first time he had been let out since she brought him back from the Yacht Club.
So from her point of view it must have been something of a success but frankly, as a lay, it was to begin with too determined; and brutal even. A clock struck five as they gasped in a sweaty lock. She had her eyes closed and she heard no clock striking. That was why she was doing it, not ordinary sex but a deliberate bid for oblivion. He held her tight in his arms but the long glide into a mindlessness where no clocks struck was so unmistakable he felt himself going too. She was going to wherever she had disappeared to that morning at the Greek Club when he had searched in those showers and walked about the garden and ended up drinking with that mat-chested trio. They swore she didn’t exist. Maybe she didn’t, just at that moment. She had expunged herself. She was doing it again and this time she was expunging him as well. He came to want being expunged. It was like being out on the lake again.
Then he started fighting. He had the idea she was just using him; it might have been just anyone, her husband, or that man Stokes, anyone capable of giving that fundamental massage so that she could slip out of herself and avoid the responsibility of this and that. He just had to struggle back to the land of the living. He had never been a drunk. He had never used alcohol or drugs or sex for return ticket suicide. That was the meaning of her great pelvic lunges. Never before had he felt so sorry for a woman he’d been clapped up. She was not taking her with him. That was the whole mad disappointment. She didn’t care whether he came. He understood she was the sort of woman who really would kill herself if she ever got in a really bad way. It frightened him, so far as a man can be frightened as he comes up to a sexual climax. He could never do away with himself. All this talk of oblivion and forgetfulness was, so far as he was concerned, just for the birds. If you had to put him in a category he was one of those who wanted to know. He might not have much of a brain but it was one that honestly did try to understand. He wanted to be informed. He hated bad information. He wanted to know the truth. He wanted to know who the hell to believe.
Thoughts like these and there ought to have been a fiasco. Not a bit of it. She yelled first, then he groaned and they both began laughing and straining at each other like mad things, laughing so that he could see the sunlight, reflected from the white ceiling, crimson in her staring throat. She looked at him and he looked at her. He said “My sweety, sweety,” just loving her; and she stuck her tongue out and laughed.
“Jack,” she said, with just a little spittle on her lips.
Padding along with Mrs K in the canvas shoes Leah had bought for him, making for the Cyprus Bar on the night he saw Elie’s grave in the convent garden, the very first night he had been allowed out of his prison, Townrow naturally thought of the weapon he had forced that particular lock with. He had taken a shower but he guessed he still gave off a smell of satiated sex. He was slinky inside and aggressive outwardly. He gloried in it. She’s let me out because she knows I’m going back for more. Instead of the cold metal lock and rigid key she had put him on a silky chain.
Of course he’d been gay. He had an aura. Mrs K must have hated this aura but at the time this had made her seem all the funnier. Her pinched Cockney, her umbrella, the walk that became a stumbling trot when she was in a hurry, all these were comical in themselves but when you realised she disapproved of his acknowledged sex-glow to the point of keeping away from him as much as possible, he had to laugh. She wanted to know why.
“Oh, I’m just happy,” he had said, which sounded pathetic in the light of what happened. She may not even have noticed anything unusual about him. She might have been keeping away from him simply because it was difficult for two people to make their way along a crowded pavement in any other way. He was so caught up by what Leah and he had discovered about each other that he thought his state must be signalling to anybody he came near; in this dim, hot night, perhaps an actual luminosity of flesh.
When a woman gave up her husband or lover and took a new one she didn’t; she didn’t, he meant, give up the old one, she took him with her, or as much of him as she wanted. She built him into the new one, like a bird building up its nest again after it has been shattered by a storm. Women were never unfaithful in the way men were. Men were looking for somebody different. Women were after the same man behind the different disguises. They just went on re-modelling the ideal mate, one coupling after another. Women carried forward.
Leah when she took him into bed, took her nutty husband too, and they knew it, Leah and he did, in spite of the “Jack!” which sounded as though a really fresh start was being made. You would have thought he was a new man to her. But he wasn’t. He did not mind. He was a realist. This was not an issue to be conceited about. A man had to accept this was the way the female behaved. He accepted it because he would have accepted Leah on any terms. She possessed him. She made him see her as he knew perfectly well she wasn’t quite; more beautiful, shining, confident. With a woman like that at your side you would, at desperately long last, know the score. You were plugged in to the mainstream of good sense and right feeling. Even if you were defeated the shining angels were with you.
The shining angels! All that was left of his Bible college and one-time career were religious images like these; others included a cross, a betrayal, a sacrifice.
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,
Went to bed with their trousers on.
That night, and for nights after, Townrow was content to be caught up in whatever view of him Leah might have and it was not until now that it struck him the ease with which he accepted this illusion meant he loved her more than she loved him or ever could. He just knew they were both crazy. What were the Egyptians doing to her now?
*
“I suppose you are aware,” said Christou, “they haven’t put us into the same cell because they think we’ll commit an indecency or kill each other. There’ll be microphones somewhere. Maybe there’s one in that grating.”
Townrow said he was tired. There was only one bed in the cell and Christou, who was sitting on it, offered to make way but Townrow said he would be just as happy on the earth floor. It was after midnight. The night was quiet. Planes had been over earlier and there had been sound of bombs falling perhaps twenty or thirty miles away. No ack-ack. The barred window was so high they could not see the
night sky. It was entirely black in the cell and Townrow would not have known about the bed if Christou had not told him.
“What grating?”
“There’s a grating high up, opposite the window. Amin said they were putting you in here because they wanted your room for dancing.”
“Dancing?”
“Why not? The night before Waterloo the British had a ball.”
“That room’s ten feet square.”
“They’ll keep it select. Perhaps I didn’t catch what he said. Maybe it’s some other activity. Maybe he said poncing.”
It was too hot to sleep, even if Christou had let him. The man talked on and on. The Egyptians had left him his cigarettes and matches. Townrow saw the red glow and, when Christou took a real drag, the dim mask floating in the black. A match struck in cupped hands and the intent face blazed like a spirit before some background too vast to be the wall of a cell; it might have been infinite space. The talking face, with its big, broad, horse-like nose and the white hair streaming back because of the speed it rushed out of this space, drove straight at Townrow. The match went out and he was alone as he had been out on the lake. But for the talk. He dozed and woke up again. He could not be sure he was not talking to himself. Floating among the lake reeds he had certainly talked to himself.
“I hear you went to Elie’s island.” This must be Christou. The man had the power to disturb him when thought he was beyond being disturbed. Leah was probably locked up in some cell like this being talked to by Mrs K and every word of it being taken down on a tape recorder by that female commissar. It occurred to Townrow that Christou was putting on an act specially for the Egyptians. It was anybody’s guess whether he was telling the truth or not, but if it was not the truth it struck at Townrow as though it might have been. It disturbed like the truth. The sensation was like a falling dream—immense speed, a churning of the stomach, a yearning for the fall to stop and a burning for it to go on for ever. I don’t want to know all this, he said. He just wanted to know what had happened to Leah.
“So,” said Christou, “I dressed up as a woman and took the boat out myself. I had this long white dress, real knickers on underneath, silk stockings, the lot. I had a silk scarf over my head and this little silk jacket. I made up, lipstick, blacked my eyebrows, painted my finger nails. By the time I’d finished I looked more fetching than she’d ever been and there’d have been real trouble with admirers on the way to the waterfront if the two men carrying the coffin hadn’t kicked a few arses. I didn’t tell you exactly the truth before.”
“Before?” said Townrow. “When was that?”
“When you came in first.”
“You’ve told me this story before?”
“No, I’m telling you the truth now, mate.”
Even as late as this Townrow thought it could be a tale dreamed up for the Egyptians. But if it was, what point could it have? Perhaps the Egyptians were meant to be pleased when they heard about the arms smuggling. When you remembered what purpose the Greek Cypriots put them to Christou could be right at that. Sometimes the Greeks shot Turks, but sometimes they shot the British.
“It was Elie’s last wish. In spite of his wife’s attitude he couldn’t bear the thought of losing money on all this lovely Russian gunnery. He was a Phoenician. They were great sailors. Bury me at sea, he said, and fill the coffin with rifles.”
“How could you if it was full of rifles?”
“You’ve hit on it, son. Elie was no good in really practical arrangements.”
As Townrow understood it, Elie had been engaged in smuggling arms to Cyprus and got caught between the Greeks on the one hand and his wife, when she learned about it, on the other. She said she wasn’t going to let him send guns to Cyprus where they might be used to shoot English boys. But he had the boats, he had the international connections, he had the capital. You could imagine Elie talking about the opportunities. This was what Mrs K meant when she had said he had been brought up in the Ottoman Empire and wasn’t a politician but a business man. So she put the screw on. And the Greeks put the screw on too and the pressure broke him down. His health deteriorated. He was an old man, of course. He could not have lived for ever. But now he saw his end coming. And it was his idea to fill the coffin with rifles! Can you imagine that? Showed his heart was in the right place in spite of his old woman. He had no children. There was nobody to leave the money to but this old Englishwoman, so it showed he loved her to be so interested in money right up to the last. It wasn’t only the coffin. There were other crates on board. For Elie Khoury’s estate it represented a clear profit of something over ten thousand pounds sterling. The money had been handed over. They were men of honour.
“If it hadn’t been for the patriotism of Mrs Khoury Elie would have been with us today. Not in this cell you understand. He was a brother Arab. But alive! He was just ground down by his wife’s disapproval. That’s putting it gently.”
“Where was I?” said Townrow.
“Where were you? When?”
Townrow remembered the very first time he had met Leah she accused him of being the Englishman on this very boat Christou was talking about; but behind this memory were other memories. He could see, quite clearly, Elie’s dead beaked face with the hot sun on it, the coffin open to the briny heat and sailors in white looking down from a rail.
“Silk stockings? Make-up? You must be a pervert to dress like that. Why can’t you dry up?”
Christou talked until there was enough light to make out the position of the window. Townrow had been lying for some time holding the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. This steadied him. He felt less dizzy. The moment he could locate the window he felt even better. He was no longer falling through space. The window grew brighter and firmer.
It would have been impossible, Christou said, for him to take that boat out of the harbour in any other way. The Egyptian respected the eccentricities of an Englishwoman regarding the last rites.
“They thought you were Mrs K?”
There were soldiers saluting on the breakwater. At the East Fort they presented arms. An officer in white gloves waved. Naturally there were planes about and when one of them dipped it might have been coincidence but Christou thought there was more in it than that. The Egyptians were a generous people. There was police intimidation, there was a callous bureaucracy, there was almost criminal stupidity among the officials; but the set-up was mitigated by kindnesses and courtesies, like the way this plane dipped overhead as Elie’s funeral boat bobbed into the Mediterranean. Christou said he waved at the plane. He wore elbow length black gloves, bought in Simon Artz’s store, because he assumed that was the way Englishwomen dressed for a funeral. They had tried to find a black sail but there was no such thing in port and no time to dye one. The coffin was decked with honeysuckle. A boy had been sent to the top of the mast with an enormous bow of black satin. One of the other two Cypriots in the boat was dressed as a priest. He wore a black overcoat buttoned high on his chest and a stiff collar worn back to front. This man, said Christou, made gestures as they sailed out of harbour. He might have been blessing the blue water, the fish that swam in it and the craft that sailed over it. He might have been blessing the strollers on the breakwater. The third man was spinning the chambers in a revolver and squinting down the barrel. It was so hot the spray was left as glittering crystals on his face.
“There were no rifles in that coffin.” Townrow dragged this information out of some obscure part of his mind. He would be talking about his life in the womb next. He wondered if he was in a trance. The dead would begin to speak. Having seen that grave in the convent garden he was sure, now, that Elie was dead. So if this was the trance of a medium the next thing would be for him to croak out a message in Elie’s prissy English. Elie was there all right, at the back of the consciousness, like a rat in the rafters.
“Right.” Christou seemed interested in this remark of Townrow’s and turned to look at him in as much of the dawn light as filtered
down from the window. “You don’t get as many rifles into a coffin as the theoreticians argue. Elie was a good business man but he was a bit academic. We just stacked the crates under the false deck. Hell, it was Elie’s funeral, wasn’t it? If he’d been alive I could have talked him into coming. I got all the documents out of the undertaker but Madame would not let us borrow the corpse. She had him in one of the chapels of the cathedral, candles at his head, candles at his feet, candles all round. The air was blue. It stank of burning wax. It was a tremendous great blaze of light. Imagine being in a gas cooker with stained glass windows. The old girl kneeled there in the heat. When she got up there was a pool of her liquid fat on the marble floor. She must have lost ten pounds. We borrowed another corpse.”
“Another corpse?”
“In this town that’s easy,” said Christou. “Whoever he was he had a most dignified committal ceremony.”
And what a send-off from the harbour! Christou said it was a real peak in his life. The Customs and Excise came aboard. They unscrewed the lid, removed their hats, and looked down at the thin, bearded face of whoever it was, saying, ‘Peace be on him!’ and ‘He’s like my own father was,’ and ‘In the capitalist west they burn them in ovens’, which is not what they would have remarked about a lot of rifles. Christou said that he stood at the front of the boat to explain to a launch absolutely full of officers from the battery on the mole why the committal was in the late afternoon. He put on a squeaky voice and spoke in English. The coffin was to slide into the water at sunset. As the western waters turned to blood so Elie would go home. What chiefly amazed them was a woman going to her husband’s funeral. How could she support such grief in public? It was pitiable and shocking, they said, like so many other non-Egyptian customs. Where else but in Egypt did you find deep feeling and a way of life that respected the bitterness women had to suffer?
