by P. H. Newby
The harbour was alive with small craft. They were all going out with the Englishwoman which was a nuisance and meant the funeral boat was not free from attention until well after midnight; but Christou had lived among the Egyptians long enough to know, he said, how their feelings and sympathies led them at a time like this. No doubt there were men in those small craft actually crying.
“At any moment, of course, I expected to see the real Madame coming after me in one of those launches, shouting and waving. Or running along the breakwater. But the priest was able to tell me she never got up from her knees in that chapel, and she certainly never tried to leave, which was just as well because he had the gate locked. I know what worries you. Sergeant Townrow. This is not the same story I told you before.”
“You told me a story before?”
“Sure, I told you a story before.”
Townrow sighed. He didn’t hold it against Christou he was such a romancer. The fellow spoke with what seemed conviction. Providing what he said was internally consistent and Christou believed it all what more could you ask? This was the nearest Christou would ever get to speaking the truth.
“There was a Jewish gun-boat.”
“No, it was a fishing boat out of Larnaca,” said Christou.
“What about the storm?”
“There was no storm.”
“We were washed overboard. I swam with the coffin. When we fetched up on the rocks,” said Townrow, “it split. Then I knew why it was so buoyant. It was empty.”
Christou laughed so violently he must have blasted that microphone wherever it was hidden. But what was there to laugh about? Amin had produced what he said was a British passport. If Townrow was in fact British his grip on reality must be so tenuous it was unreasonable to expect an answer to that question about the B.B.C. and the trains to the concentration camps. You couldn’t answer for anything outside your own personal experience. And if you remembered your own experiences wrongly you didn’t count at all. You weren’t human.
“I can’t get it out of my head I was on that boat,” he said to Christou. “You say there was just you and these two other Cypriots?”
“You with us? Well, I didn’t notice you. It was a lovely trip. Sweet smell of honeysuckle. Cold, salt, night air.”
This talk with Christou made him think differently about the events immediately following the night visit to Elie’s grave in the convent garden. As he remembered that night, Townrow would have said it was when he began to wake up to the situation as it really was. But he now saw there was more to the chat between Mrs K and Leah than he had supposed. This took place soon after he had walked Mrs K back to her apartment and Leah had arrived to take him back to her place. He had not realised there was so much needle. Nor the significance of Christou’s ugly taunting before they went into the convent: “You killed him, m’dear, as sure as if you’d——” Townrow had heard the words. Otherwise he would not be remembering them now. But they hadn’t meant much, for some reason, at the time. Christou said so many extravagant things.
Visiting her husband’s grave would have sobered the old girl, you might think, but she never stopped talking. She was excited. She thought she had scored a great victory over Christou. He had told her to stop coming, night after night, to the spot where Elie’s body had been discovered. But with Townrow’s help she had not only defied him but made him go and pay his respects. Elie would have enjoyed the spectacle of those men standing there with their hats off.
Townrow had argued she ought to snap out of this obsession about Elie’s death and do something quickly about her immediate interests.
“You’re giving up,” she said. “I suppose you’ve had a rough time of it.”
“You began by asking me to look for something that wasn’t there.”
“Yes, it’s there. There is something. I’m utterly alone in this town. When you came I thought at least I’d find someone who’d not treat me like a fool.”
Candidly, at that time he still thought she was an old fool, but he denied it and buttered her up. It took this talk with Christou to make him realise that what she had wanted, in all probability, was the obvious follow-through from the insults Christou had shouted at her outside the convent. She wanted to be accused. She sat there, in her brightly lit, newly decorated and furnished apartment—she must have spent hundreds on it, ugly great pieces of furniture with gilt legs and mirrors, a great divan with ivory and ebony inlay and purple, tasselled cushions, and in the middle of it all a cheap, stinking paraffin stove—she sat on this great divan and looked aggressive. He remembered thinking there was something vaguely ecclesiastical, even High Church (but no, more remote and garish—Ethiopian, perhaps) about her appearance. She had removed her coat and sat in a long white dress with a silver buckle. Her hair had been given a blue rinse and piled high. Behind the steel-rimmed spectacles she looked mannish, in a wiry sort of way.
He had gone on buttering her up, saying it was more than ever important to put her real estate in his name. She must have been bitterly disappointed. What she really needed was for him to say, “Yes, you are an old fool. Elie dropped dead of heart failure. There was no murderer. So far as there was one you are the murderer, you made him seize up. You put the screw on him over this arms smuggling.” He had an idea she would have taken this from him. From Christou, no. She had him, Townrow, fly out from England just to tell her she had finished Elie off with an excess of British patriotism. Obviously she could not accept this from Christou because Christou would have no time for British patriotism. Only Townrow would reassure her and tell her it was all in a good cause. She badly needed sorting out.
Instead of which he had continued this Irish talk. In all fairness, Amin had not at that time produced his British passport. “Put the real estate in my name and it will be protected by my neutral status,” was the sort of thing he had kept shouting at her; and all the time she must have been thinking. “These bloody Irish hate us British as much as the bloody Greek-Cypriots, so what kind of support am I to get from him once the idiot realises it was to protect the lads in Cyprus I drove poor Elie into the ground?”
She must have been very angry about it all. He was very angry too, in retrospect, because he had made a great deal out of his Irish citizenship. According to his passport he was dead wrong about his national status and nobody likes being taken for a sucker on a matter as basic as that. It wasn’t deceiving the old girl that would, at the time, have upset him; it was deceiving himself. But yet again, now that Christou had put him so fully in the picture concerning Elie’s martyrdom, death and burial, and now that the British were bombing the guts out of Egypt, he was both angry and hurt. Amazing how much it hurt, what the British were doing.
The night, though, Mrs K and he came back from the convent he had felt Irish enough to give a concise history of the Troubles if asked. But he was not. Mrs K had sat upright among her purple cushions, a kind of defiance on her face, like some heretical high-priest caught in the middle of a weird and wonderful ceremony; and he ought to have known she was no priest, on the contrary she was the one demanding the kind of absolution only he could give. And all he had been able to think of was swindling her.
“Do you know what the time is?” Leah had arrived in the middle of an argument about Christou. “It’s nearly three. This is your first time out. You ought to be in bed.”
“You know Christou,” Townrow said to her. “Would you say he was a Communist?”
Leah had shrugged. She hadn’t taken her eyes off Townrow since entering the room. It may have been the effect of the harsh overhead light but they seemed deep-set, dark. “I wouldn’t have thought it mattered one way or the other.”
“Of course it matters,” Mrs K had said. “Do you know what he was doing? Smuggling guns and ammunition. He’d got Elie involved. Elie was a fool. You know that? He was a fool about politics. Enosis. I ask you. The real Cypriots want to be left alone, but the Russians won’t let them. That Makarios is a Russian agent. Once Cyprus wa
s united with Greece there would be enough Cypriot Communists to start the civil war again, and win it this time. The last thing the real Cypriots want is for the British to leave. We used to go on holidays before the war. There was a house in the mountains we rented. Five pounds a month, and grapes and lemons thrown in. You could buy very good cigarette lighters for two shillings. It was a real paradise. Wonderful climate, cheap food, scenery. Lots of people retired there, from India and the Malay Civil Service. I had a cousin who married a regular soldier, a batman, and when his officer retired he went to Cyprus and Florrie’s husband went with him, and Florrie of course. They had a wonderful house up in the mountains. Wine was that cheap you could have washed in it, though it was nasty stuff to be truthful. And another thing. The Cypriots being British subjects could come and go in the U.K. as freely as you and me. Isn’t that enough for them? Of course Christou is a Communist!”
“What happened?” Leah had asked Townrow.
“It was all right. There was no trouble. Christou was there. We all went into the convent. A nun showed us a grave.”
“If it hadn’t been for that man Christou,” Mrs K had said, “Elie would be here today. He killed him, just as he nearly killed you.”
Leah had said, “Why do you go on?”
“He was a man with his limitation. I don’t deny that, all to do with his nationality and his country. I’m not a Roman Catholic, you know. My father was C. of E. It had something to do with his command, conducting religious services on board, marrying people and burying them at sea. You could say it was professional. My first husband was a Congregationalist. I don’t believe in God. But I do have this feeling of obligation and duty to my husband,” she had said to Leah, “and that is not easy for some of us to understand.”
Leah had said nothing.
This was the very moment, Townrow remembered, when a light seemed to come on in his mind and he said, “I just remembered my mother was anti-R.C. She used to talk to me about her family in Ireland. She was a teacher. Crazy old bitch, really.”
“What a way to speak about your mother. And your father?”
“He left her. My mother brought me up. He was—I don’t know what he was really. He never said.”
All the time the two women were talking he was marvelling about the way his mother had brought him up. Very proud of being Irish and Protestant Irish at that; and patriotic to the point of fanaticism. It was all the odder she’d married an English soldier; and as Leah and Mrs K went for each other he thought about his mother and father. Memories came up, bright and clear. At the age of fifteen he met his father quite by chance in a bookshop, a heavy man in a stained flannel suit who breathed asthmatically and peered at him with his head on one side and his mouth screwed up. “How’s the Irishwoman?” he asked in a throaty bleat. “How’s the bloody Irishwoman?” He stank of beer. “Here’s a quid, and don’t spend it on vice, if you know what vice is. Probably you don’t, living with that Irishwoman.”
Leah was sitting and talking but although individual words registered the general sense escaped him; he was so taken up with this sudden flood of clear recollection. His mother was driving the bull-nose Morris with the canvas roof when she stopped without warning. The white dust rose on the country road behind; and the old man, he remembered, jumped down from the car and climbed a wall, or it might have been a gate and set off across a field towards a line of dark trees. He remembered sitting there with his mother watching his father, in a flapping raincoat make off across the field. “I’m glad it’s come this way,” his mother said. She put the car in gear and they moved off.
“Aren’t we waiting for him?” he had asked.
“He’ll get a train at the junction.” She had said this quite pleasantly. That must have been the last time he saw his father until he came across him in the bookshop. How had his father recognised him?
“She brainwashed me.” Townrow did not know what Leah and Mrs K were talking about, but it was rubbish, that was for sure. “I daresay my old man wasn’t as bad as all that. He called her ‘the Irishwoman’. Whenever I met him he couldn’t bring himself to say anything but ‘the Irishwoman’. He got beat up a bit in the Troubles. Funny how it all comes back.”
“I’m going.” He stood up, yawning and thinking of his mother’s Irish voice and the way a little line of hairs on her lip caught the light when she set the car in gear and they chugged off down that lane. It was a rutted lane, rather than a road. There were hard, white ruts; sunbaked chalk as hard as stone.
But what struck, thinking back on the night in the wake of the jail conversation with Christou, was the way he had somehow managed to swallow and could now regurgitate this row between Mrs K and Leah. At the time it was of no importance. He was bored. He was so tired even the sight of Leah, with the blue circles under her eyes, disgusted him.
“Going?” he remembered Mrs K saying. “With her? You’re my guest.”
He was so naive he did not understand the old girl was jealous until Leah had said “I’ve never in my life done anything wrong. I’ve never done anything I feel guilty about.”
“Everybody’s done something wrong,” said Mrs K. “You know the English expression, ‘a skeleton in the cupboard’. We’ve all done bad things.” She produced a handkerchief and blew her nose, making a surprising trumpeting. “It’s only natural. ‘Let him that is without sin cast the first stone.’ And you know what happened? Nobody moved. Now, you being Jewish, you wouldn’t know that story.”
“If somebody dared me to throw a stone I’d throw it,” said Leah. “Why not? What harm have I ever done anybody?”
“That’s a wicked thing to say.” Mrs K stood up and began waving her arms about. “I won’t have you in my house. Get out. What would your husband think of you?”
“He’s beyond thinking of me or anything but himself. You know very well.”
“And is that all a wife has to say? What about the vow?”
“What vow?”
“In sickness or in health. What do you think a vow is for? Or don’t you make vows in Jewish marriages?”
“There are limits, if you ask me. I haven’t done anything wrong. I’ve got a clear conscience. Shall we go?” she said to Townrow.
Leah’s claim she had no guilt feelings did not weigh with him at the time. This was how a woman talked when she was cornered. He had thought she was lying; but there were times when lying was just part of the game and it did not matter because nobody believed you and you knew they didn’t. Now, a fortnight later, he could see she had not been lying, she was dead sincere. She was a nice kid, and she knew it, that’s all. She did not deliberately set high standards and torture herself if she could not live up to them. She just struggled on, being nice to people. It was the kind of niceness that went with a general hopelessness about the future. She was tough. She fought to get her old man out of Egypt. Her niceness and hopelessness did not mean she hadn’t a mind to make up and keep to. He could see her sticking it out to the last in some hopeless situation. She honestly thought there was nothing really bad about her; and this was one of the reasons why Townrow marvelled. She made him envious. Why couldn’t he be nice to himself like she was nice to herself? Could she show him now? She troubled his mind, made him eager and expectant. With her he was like some kid on Christmas morning. He was sure he could no longer walk into any place, lose sight of her, and fail to find her again like that day at the Greek Club. She was in his head and guts.
Christou was still asleep when a soldier brought in tea, some flaps of bread and chunks of soft white cheese. Another soldier with an automatic rifle stood at the open door while this first soldier shook Christou, who cursed, swung his arm round and knocked the tray out of his hand. Some of the hot tea splashed across Townrow’s leg. Christou went back to sleep. The soldier left the tray and the scattered food where it lay and walked out. Townrow was so hungry he picked up the bread, wiped the dirt off the cheese, and ate. The food was O.K. It amazed him the Egyptians treated them so well. P
erhaps they would come back in a few minutes and shoot them. They were bad organisers. The British might deliberately give a man breakfast before shooting him. The Egyptians would intend not to and then forget to warn the kitchen. Townrow tried to think about his other women. They
were all so different from Leah. None seemed quite so pleased with themselves, if you wanted to put it in a mean sort of way. She honestly didn’t consider that life was all her fault. He didn’t exactly believe he was the authentic man who pulled the lavatory chain and the house fell down. At some time, though, Leah might, he hoped, let some of her own personality smudge off. He envied her and wanted to feel easy like she did.
*
Townrow and Christou were allowed to walk about the compound for half an hour or so. There were rumours the Israelis had taken Gaza. They were then given shovels and marched off through a gateway to what looked like open desert. Christou said the latest was that the Israeli army was coming down the old Kantara line in a special train, Pullman coaches mainly, three sittings for lunch and dinner. He and Townrow would now be invited to dig their own graves. It had been established beyond all doubt that he was the Rabbi of Jerusalem. His story about disguising himself as a woman and taking a dead man and a few crates of rifles out into the Med. had not been believed. The only point seized upon had been Townrow’s reference to the gunboat and this stamped him as an agent of the C.I.A. It was thought that Townrow’s real name was Cohen.
Actually, they were only joining the other prisoners to dig slit trenches in the soft sand. These prisoners wore loose-fitting brown cotton slacks and shirts and seemed cheerful. There must have been over a hundred. They joked among themselves and with the half a dozen or so sentries who smoked, strolled about and shifted their Czech automatic rifles from one shoulder to another. Townrow had an idea the convicts were looking forward to air raids. Anything to break the monotony. Who knew? When the Jews came they might be able to make a break for it in the general confusion. That seemed to be the spirit. The sand shone like a mirror. Overhead the sky was a heavy blue, fading to the horizon. To the north the sun was sucking a lot of haze up out of the Med. A couple of jet fighters went round the town as though whirled round at the end of pieces of string. Christou and Townrow had just succeeded in digging a hole deep enough to provide shade from the sun when Amin arrived with an open truck and said he was taking Townrow into Port Said where a military tribunal was already sitting.
