Pack of Cards

by Penelope Lively

  ‘There's a side to men,’ said Pauline, ‘that's to my mind just not like us and that's the only way you can put it. And I don't mean sex, nothing wrong with that when the time and the place are right. I mean …’

  ‘It's a kind of men rather, I'd say. Harry's not that way, nor was my Jim. I mean, there's men that are normal men in the proper way but don't go on about it.’

  ‘In Italy,’ said Pauline, ‘all the men are the other kind. All of them. From the word go. Young boys and all. They wear bathing costumes cut deliberately so you can see everything they've got.’

  ‘Which is something you can take as read, in a normal man. It doesn't need shouting about.’

  ‘Exactly. If I were you, Jeanie, I'd give that cat a drop of cod liver oil in her milk. She's going to need all her strength.’

  Perhaps also according to the scheme of things, Ted Roper's pick-up, a while later, was involved in circumstances never clarified in a crash with Nellie Baker's Escort at the village cross-roads. No blood was shed and the pick-up, already so battle-scarred as to be impervious, lived to fight again, but the Escort was crippled and Nellie Baker too shaken and confused to be able to sort out exactly what had happened except for a strong conviction that aggression had been involved. At the Women's Institute committee meeting she held forth.

  ‘He came out of nowhere and was into me before I knew what was happening. I was either stopped or the next best thing, that I'll swear.’

  ‘What does he say?’

  ‘Whatever he's saying's being said to the police. He took off, without a word hardly. It was Mr Latham ran me home and got the garage for me. I've told them my side of it, at the police station. It's up to them now.’

  ‘The police,’ said Jeanie Banks, ‘have been down at Ted Roper's more than once. Asking about this and that. They could do some asking just now, the stuff he's got there and one wonders where it all comes from.’

  ‘The police,’ said Pauline, ‘are men. Remember Ted Roper at school, Nellie? Jeanie and I were talking about that only the other day – how we used to take him down a peg or two.’

  And, according to a scheme of things or not, no case was brought against Ted Roper for careless driving or dangerous driving or aggression or anything at all. Those who failed to see how that pick-up could have passed its MOT continued to speculate; Ted Roper's insurance company ignored letters from Nellie Baker's insurance company.

  Jeanie's Elsa had five kittens, two of them stillborn.

  Ted Roper, wiry and self-assured as his cat, continued to cruise the local roads, to make his corner of the pub an area of masculine assertion as impenetrable and complacent as the Athenaeum. From it came gusts of hoarse laughter and anecdotes which were not quite audible, bar certain key words.

  It may have been the stillborn kittens that did it, as much as anything, those damp limp little rags of flesh. Or the sight of the emptied Elsa, restored to a former litheness but subtly altered, wise beyond her years. Or months.

  Jeanie, tight-lipped, visited Marge to borrow her cat basket.

  ‘You'll take her to be done, then?’

  ‘Have to, won't I? Or it'll be the same thing over again.’

  ‘Shame.’

  ‘Just what Pauline said.’

  Marge, lining the cat basket with a piece of old blanket, paused. ‘It's like with people. Always taken for granted it must be the woman. Pills, messing about with your insides …’ She swung the door of the basket shut and tested the catch. ‘There's an alternative, Jeanie. Thought of that?’

  ‘What do you think I was down Ted Roper's for, that time?’

  ‘And much joy you got out of it. No, what I'm thinking of is we see to it ourselves.’

  The two women stared at each other over the cat basket. Marge, slowly, even rather terribly, smiled. ‘I wouldn't mind, I wouldn't half mind, giving Ted Roper his come uppance.’

  In a village, people come and go all day. Women, in particular – to and from the school, the shop, the bus stop, each other's houses. The little group of Jeanie, Pauline, Marge and Nellie Baker, moving in a leisurely but somehow intent way around the place that afternoon, glancing over garden walls and up the sides of cottages, was in no way exceptional. Nor, unless the observer were of a peculiarly enquiring turn of mind, was the fact that they carried, between them, a cat basket, a pair of thick leather gardening gloves, and a half a pound of cod wrapped in newspaper.

  Presently, the cat basket now evidently heavy and bouncing a little from side to side, they emerged somewhat breathless from the field behind the pub and made their way rather hurriedly to the garage of Nellie Baker's house, where an old Morris replaced the deceased Escort. The Morris drove away in the direction of Chipping Norton passing, incidentally, the very school playground where once, donkey's years ago, four outraged and contemptuous schoolgirls had a go at the arrogance of masculine elitism.

  In a village, also, change is more quickly observed than you might think. Even change so apparently insignificant as the girth of a cat. In this case, it was habits as much as girth. A cat that has previously roamed and made the night hideous, and which takes instead to roosting, eyes closed and paws folded, in the sun on the tops of walls, idling away the time, will be noticed.

  And the more so when the change eerily extends to the cat's owner.

  At first it was just the paunch jutting below the sagging belt of Ted Roper's jeans. Then, balancing the paunch, came a fullness to the face, a thickening of the stubbly cheeks, a definite double chin. ‘Put on a bit, haven't you, Ted?’ people said. ‘Have to cut down on the beer, eh?’ And Ted would wryly grin, without the perky come-back that might have been expected. With physical expansion went a curious decline of those charismatic qualities: the entourage of youths dropped off. Some nights, Ted sat alone in the pub, staring into his glass with the ruminative and comfortably washed-up look of his seniors. A series of mishaps befell the pick-up: punctures stranding Ted on remote roads, a catastrophic fuel leak, a shattered windscreen. It was driven, presently, in a more sedate way; it no longer rode or cruised but rattled and pottered.

  It was as though the old assertive stringy cocky Ted were devoured and enveloped, week after week, by this flabby amiable lethargic newcomer. The jeans gave way to a pair of baggy brown cords. He began to leave his corner of the public bar and join the central group around the fireplace; there, the talk was of onions, the ills of the nation, weather and fuel prices.

  And, in the village or outside his own gate, meeting Nellie Baker, say, or Marge or Pauline or Jeanie Banks, he would pass the time of day, initiate a bit of chat, offer small gifts by way of surplus timber, useful lino offcuts, the odd serviceable tyre.

  ‘Poor old so-and-so,’ said Pauline. ‘They're easily taken down, aren't they? That's what comes of depending on the one thing. You can almost feel sorry for them.’

  A Long Night at Abu Simbel

  IN CAIRO they had complained about the traffic and at Saqqara Mrs Marriott-Smith and Lady Hacking had wanted a lavatory and blamed her when eventually they had to retire, bleating, behind a sand-dune. She had lost two of them at Luxor airport and the rest had sat in the coach in a state of gathering mutiny. Some of them were given to exclaiming, within her hearing, ‘Where's that wretched girl got to?’ At Karnak the guide hadn't shown up when he should and she had had to mollify them for half an hour with the shade temperature at 94°. On the boat, a contingent had complained about having cabins on the lower deck and old Mr Appleton, apparently, was on a milk pudding diet, a detail not passed on to the chef by the London office. She knew now that not only did she not like foreign travel or tour leading but she didn't much care for people either. She continued to smile and repeat that they would be able to cash cheques between five and six and that no, she didn't think there was a chiropodist in Assuan. When several of them succumbed vociferously to stomach upsets she refrained from saying that so had she. They sought her out with their protests and their demands when she was skulking in a far corner of the sun
deck and throughout every meal. In the privacy of her cabin she drafted her letter of application to the estate agent in Richmond where there was a nice secretarial job going.

  At Edfu the woman magistrate from Knutsford was short-changed by a carpet-seller, to the quiet satisfaction of some of the others. At Esna Miss Crawley lost her travellers’ cheques and Julie had to go all the way back to the temple and search, amid the pi-dogs and the vendors of basalt heads and the American party from Minnesota Institute of Art (biddable and co-operative, joshing their ebullient blue-rinsed tour leader). They all called her Julie now, but on a note of querulous requirement, except for the retired bank manager, who had tried to grope her bottom behind a pillar at Kom Ombo, and followed her around suggesting a drink later on when his wife was taking a nap.

  None of them had read the itinerary properly. When they discovered that they had an hour and a half to wait at Assuan for the flight to Abu Simbel they rounded on her with their objections. They wanted another plane laid on and they wanted to be assured that they wouldn't be with the French and the Japanese tours and Lady Hacking said over and over again that at least one took it, for goodness sake, that there would be adequate restaurant facilities. She got them, eventually, into the plane and off the plane on to the coach, where the guide, Fuad, promised by the Assuan agency, most conspicuously was not. She went back to the airport building and telephoned; the Assuan office was closed. The man at the Egypt Air desk knew of no Fuad. She returned to the coach and broke the news in her most sprightly manner. The American coach and the French coach and the Japanese coach, smoothly united with their Fuad or their Ashraf, were already descending the long road to the temples in three clouds of dust.

  They said their say. The coach driver spat out of the window and closed the door. They bumped across the desert. Lake Nasser lay to their right, bright blue fringed with buff-coloured hills. Those who had sufficiently recovered from their irritation at the non-appearance of Fuad exclaimed. Those who had not continued loudly to reiterate their complaints. The coach driver pulled up at the top of the track down to the temple site. They disembarked. Miss Crawley said she hadn't realised there was going to be even more walking. They straggled off in twos and threes and stood, at last, in front of the blindly gazing immensities of the god-king. Mrs Marriott-Smith said it made you think, despite everything, and Miss Crawley found she had blistered both feet and the chartered surveyor's wife was sorry to tell everyone she couldn't, frankly, see a sign of anywhere to eat. They stood around and took photographs and trailed in the wake of the guided and instructed French and Japanese into the sombre depths of the temple and when they were all out of sight Julie left them.

  She walked briskly up the hill to where the American coach, its party already aboard, was revving its engine. She got on and went with them back to the airport, where, with a smile, she deposited an envelope containing twenty-two return halves of Assuan-Abu Simbel-Assuan air tickets with the fellow at the EgyptAir desk. She then boarded the plane, along with the American party. They were shortly joined by the Japanese and the French. The plane left on time; it always did, the stewardess said, truculently, glancing out of the window at the solitary airport building tipping away beneath.

  The Magitours party continued to devote themselves to the site. They gathered in front of the stone plaque unveiled by Gamal Abdul Nasser as a memorial of international collaboration for preserving a human heritage. The other tours were now wending their way up the track to the coaches. ‘Peace at last!’ said Lady Hacking. ‘I don't know which drive me dottier – those American women screaming at each other or the French pushing and shoving.’ Mr Campion, the senior police inspector, being in possession of an adequate guide-book, assumed the role of the absent Fuad and briefed them on Rameses the Second and on the engineering feat involved in hoisting the temples to their present position. The party, appropriately humbled by the magnitude of both concepts, moved in awe around the towering pillars of the temple and the equally inhuman twentieth-century shoring-up process within the artificial hillside. They all agreed that it was frightfully impressive and well worth coming for. Those still suffering from internal disorders were becoming a little fidgety, and Mrs Marriott-Smith was longing for her dinner, but on the whole the mood was genial. They emerged from the temple and sat around admiring the lake, tinged now with rose-coloured streaks as the late-afternoon sun sank towards the desert. Some of the women put their woollies on; it was extraordinary how quickly it got chilly in the evenings. Mr Campion read out more from the guide-book. None of them paid any attention to the distant hootings of the coach driver, at the top of the hill. Someone said, ‘That damn girl's vanished again.’

  The coach driver, hired for so long and no longer, hooted for five minutes. Then, in the absence of any instructions, he threw his cigarette out of the window and drove his empty coach back to the depot.

  The sun had almost completely set when the first of them reached the airport building. The stragglers, including the grimly stoical Miss Crawley, now hideously blistered, continued to arrive in dribs and drabs for another quarter of an hour. It had been a good two miles. It was Mr Campion who discovered the envelope with the flight tickets, shoved carelessly to one side of the EgyptAir desk. And it was another ten minutes or so, as the party slowly gathered around him, subdued now and in a state of mingled fury and apprehension, before the penny dropped. ‘I simply do not believe it,’ said the chartered surveyor's wife, over and over again. The EgyptAir official, subjected to a barrage of queries, shrugged, impassive. Those on the edges of the group, who could not quite catch what was going on, pushed closer, and as the enormity of their plight was conveyed from one to another, the murmurs grew louder. Mr Campion, determinedly keeping his cool, concentrated on the EgyptAir fellow. ‘When is the next plane, then?’ There was not another plane; the last plane left each evening at five-thirty.

  ‘Then,’ said Mr Campion with restraint, ‘You'll have to call Assuan, won't you, and have them send up another plane.’ The EgyptAir official smiled.

  ‘Oh, rubbish,’ said Mrs Marriott-Smith. ‘Of course they can send another plane. Tell him not to be so silly.’ The EgyptAir official shrugged again and made a phone call with the air of a man prepared, up to a point, to placate lunatics. The outcome of the call was clear to all before he put the receiver down.

  ‘All right, then,’ said Lady Hacking. ‘We shall just have to endure. Ask him where the local hotel is.’

  The police inspector, a man accustomed to matters of life and death, did not bother to reply. The woman's manner had been getting on his nerves for days anyway. He simply pointed towards the long windows of the airport building, overlooking a vista of desert enlivened here and there with a scrubby tree or a skulking pi-dog and sliced by the single runway. The sand, now, was lilac, pink and ochre in the sunset. The rest of the group also followed Mr Campion's pointing finger.

  ‘Heavenly colours,’ said the Knutsford magistrate. She had tended to display artistic sensibilities since the first morning in Cairo Museum.

  The dismay, now, was universal. ‘I don't believe it,’ said the chartered surveyor's wife. ‘You'll damn well have to,’ snapped her husband. The group, with appalled mutterings, surveyed the uncompromising reality of the airport hall. There were half a dozen rows of solid plastic bucket seats in bright orange, welded to a stone floor with a thick covering of dust, two or three plastic tables, and a soft-drinks counter attended by a young boy who, like the EgyptAir official and the several cleaners or porters, watched them now with mild interest. There was also the EgyptAir desk, on which the official had placed a grubby sign saying CLOSED, some tattered posters on the walls of the Taj Mahal and Sri Lanka, and a great many overflowing rubbish bins. Those who had already sped into the ladies’ lavatory had found it awash at one end with urine and attended by a woman who handed each client a dirt-spattered towel and stood expectantly at their sides. Lady Hacking pointed accusingly at the swilling floor; the woman nodded and indicated one o
f the cubicles from which fumed a trail of sodden toilet paper: ‘Is no good.’ ‘Then do something,’ said Lady Hacking sternly.

  It was now six-thirty. The group, with gathering urgency, had converged on the soft-drinks counter. It was Miss Crawley, a late-comer, who revealed that all that was left were half a dozen cans of 7-Up and four packets of crisps. Those in possession of the only three packets of sandwiches and the single carton of biscuits sat watching, in defiance or guilt according to temperament. ‘There are thirteen of us,’ announced Miss Crawley loudly, ‘without anything at all.’ The principle of first come first served was in direct collision now with some reluctant flickerings of community spirit. The two retired librarians offered a sandwich to Mrs Marriott-Smith, who accepted it graciously; they did not offer, it was noted, to anyone else. The temperature had now fallen quite remarkably. The few who had coats put them on; most people shivered in shirt-sleeves and light dresses. The architect who had served in Libya in 1942 reminisced, as he had done before – too often – about the desert campaign. The chartered surveyor's wife told everyone that bloody girl would be bound to get the sack, if that was any comfort. Miss Crawley, with a sigh, took a book from her bag and began ostentatiously to read. A clip-eared white cat lay on one of the plastic tables, luxuriantly squirming. The Knutsford magistrate reached out to stroke it; the cat flexed its claws and opened a red mouth in a soundless mew; Miss Crawley observed without comment.

  Outside, it became dark. The Egypt Air official was no longer there. Those sufficiently interested – and resentful – pin-pointed a bungalow at a far corner of the airfield in which lights cosily glimmered. The soft-drinks boy continued to slump at his counter and the ladies’ lavatory attendant emerged and squatted on the floor outside. The one remaining porter or watchman came to squat beside her, smoking and exchanging the occasional desultory remark. They ignored the Magitours party, who were now dispersed all over the hall in morose clumps, sitting on the upright bucket seats or leaning against the EgyptAir counter. The architect tried, unsuccessfully, to get together a foursome for whist. Those who were unwell sat near the lavatories, grim-faced. The Knutsford magistrate offered the cat a crumpled ball of newspaper; it lashed out a paw and she withdrew her hand with a squeak.