Arabesque

by Geoffrey Household

  Mavis and Marthe, new, exciting and pre-war loveliness, had no difficulty in obtaining a profitable engagement where they chose. Armande decided on the Casino. It was out of bounds to British troops, and therefore less embarrassing to her first shyness; and it was about to move out of winter quarters into its attractive summer garden by the Nile. At their interview and exhibition, the proprietor, though a good business Greek, was unable to hide his enthusiasm at this unexpected gift from heaven. Armande seized the opportunity to bargain.

  Neither she nor Floarea, she said, had any intention of taking a contract which compelled them to sit at tables with the clients. Floarea added, to gild this bitter pill, that they would do so if they chose, and that she, at any rate, might often choose if her commission on the drinks were generous. The proprietor turned their offer down flat, with a regretful discourtesy of a bazaar merchant who had tendered half the real value of his wares. Armande left her address and walked out. The proprietor, as she expected, remained silent for a week—during which she and the Romanova had the utmost difficulty in persuading Floarea not to return to the Casino—and then accepted Armande’s conditions.

  Their engagement opened at the end of April. Romanova had arranged two numbers designed to show the grace and ease of her pupils, but demanding no more than a beginner’s skill upon the points. The artistes at the summer Casino were not confined between tables; there was a good stage upon which to exploit the romance of flowing skirts and swirling draperies.

  The first number was a waltz of crinoline period, with Armande in white organdie, Floarea in sea green, and an atmosphere of innocent girlhood at the court of Vienna or St. Petersburg—Armande was never sure which. In the second number they were two butterflies, and dressed in little else than wings attached to jewelled brassière and thigh, wrist and shoulder. Romanova made no secret of her intention: to show the beauty of Armande’s arms to the lover of ballet, and as much of Floarea as the police permitted to the connoisseur of women. Armande agreed only after violent argument.

  “But why, Armande,” Floarea asked at last, “are you so ashamed of your own body? It’s not too slim. It’s very pretty.”

  “I’m not in the least ashamed of it.”

  “Yes, you are. Yet you wouldn’t mind swimming in just as little as you will wear as butterfly.”

  “That’s different.’

  “But why?’

  “I suppose,’ replied Armande, flushing, “because I am not being stared at by men.”

  “But you are,” said the Romanova. “There are always a lot of cretins on any beach with nothing else to do.”

  “I’m not being paid for them to look at anyway.”

  “That’s just the point,” Romanova snapped. “At the Casino you are being paid for them to look at.”

  “Well, I won’t do it.”

  “Then you shouldn’t take the money.”

  “And think of your art,” said Floarea. “After all a butterfly doesn’t wear any clothes.”

  “But I have not the pretty habits of the hymenoptera,” exclaimed Armande sardonically, exasperated by Floarea on Art. “We needn’t go into details. For one thing I do not lay eggs. And, Mama, you talk nonsense. I am not paid to exhibit my navel. I cannot make it turn it circles like Miss Fatima.”

  “And you—you dare talk of shame!” Floarea cried.

  “All right, my darling, all right,” said Armande, wearily surrendering. “Give me my wings. Measure me for my—what do you call it, Mama?”

  “Cache-sexe,” answered Romanova modestly.

  “Well, for heaven’s sake see that it does.”

  Mavis and Marthe were received with acclamation by civilian Cairo. To the military—except security men and others with the right to wear plain clothes—they were comparatively unknown. Any uniformed soldier visiting the Casino fell into the capable hands of the Military Police.

  Armande was prepared for the usual questioning. She was certain that the security people would fuss, as soon as they looked her up in their files and found that the British subject practising so enigmatic a profession had been black-listed. In due course an elderly major turned up at the Casino, and invited her to call at an address in Gezireh the following afternoon.

  Never had she been so little impressed. His fumbling futility was the more obvious since he had chosen his own flat in which to question her. His view of life was black and white; it would, she suggested, be a valid view among the dregs of the Egyptian populace, the drug smugglers and politicians and souteneurs, but it hardly fitted him to undertake the analysis of all the fine shades of grey in the mind of the intelligent European, especially if the European were an educated woman.

  Armande treated him de haut en bas. She was, she said, a trained dancer from her youth and entitled to earn her living; she had been unjustly black-listed, and, if he knew anything of the secrets of his own business, he shuld know that; she was respectable—and she lit up the word by the tone of a woman to whom respectability was a harmless virtue of the lower middle classes. Finally, remembering old days in London, she asked:

  “If you were to prevent me from working, would your Minister be prepared to defend such a policy in the House?”

  The major at once became tender and fatherly. He offered her a small retainer either to report on any suspicious visitors to the Casino, or, if she didn’t like that, simply to come to his flat and talk to him once a week. She refused. She thought him a pitiable, lewd and lonely old man who should have retired long since to grow roses in England. She did not appear, however, to have forfeited his good will, for Mavis and Marthe remained untroubled by any but small fry of the Egyptian police. Their half-hearted attempts at blackmail were contemptuously dismissed by the experienced Romanova.

  Toots and Rashid had vanished from Cairo. Armande received a number of visits and telephone calls from their friends, but was deliberately evasive. She writhed under an intolerable sensation that everyone was staring at her, that women despised her and that men would congratulate each other, with great guffaws and warnings to be careful, upon the entertainment of that pretty piece from the Casino.

  Carry Laxeter refused to be dropped. She did not hide her love of Armande and was adored in return. She assumed that Armande was starting, or rather continuing a serious profession as a dancer, and accepted her surroundings as amusingly eccentric rather than sordid. Armande could not really bring herself to believe in Carry’s fiction! She knew too well that she had no intention of making a career of dancing, that the whole hated business was partly an angry protest and partly a provision for eating and living in comfort. It had to be that, or else a life like Xenia’s, existing on the wealth of her emotions and other people’s kindness. Even for Xenia Armande had not allowed such a course to continue. Toots had found the girl a job in a Jugoslav camp. She served tea in the canteen, and had taken to communism with the hysterical fervour of a convert. After a vain attempt to proselytise Armande and Carry, she ignored them as lost and parasitic souls.

  Carry treated the Casino as if it was a smart London restaurant with a floor show. At least once a week she would sit with Armande, Floarea and the Romanova before and after their dance, and mischievously encourage Armande to accept an occasional invitation from the tables. The unreality of Carry’s capricious lightheartedness shocked Armande; to exhibit one’s body to fat Levantines, and to listen to their suggestive conversation (thank God most of them didn’t dance!) was a horrible way of earning a living, and witty irresponsibility made it no better. Still, Carry’s humour was a refuge. Armande clung to her as a companion, and loved her as the last existing bond between herself and her past life.

  Seen through Carry’s eyes, two at least of her fellow performers were engaging; but Carry, she knew, would only laugh if Miss Fatima ended in jail and Mlle. Joliette were pulled in for compulsory medical examination. They were objects for pity and sympathy, not for laughter. Yet, if one were thrown into their society, were, in fact, to the outer world their equal and coll
eague, an understanding laughter was the only possible working attitude.

  Miss Fatima was a pure Egyptian with the morals of the Old Testament. Her ambition was to become the concubine of the highest in the land, in order to gain power for herself and security for her relatives. Yet she—with the possible exception of Floarea—was the only sincere artist of the Casino. Fatima spent hours every day in a practice of muscle control that would have done credit to a Yogi disciple. Her object was to move breasts, stomach and abdomen in ever-increasing circles, sometimes clockwise below and anticlockwise above, while reducing the movement of her feet to a mere suggestion of action as delicate as a Chinese poem. Armande realised that it was art of the highest standard, but to European eyes it did not seem sufficiently integrated. It was so hard to watch the exquisite nuances of emotion expressed by Miss Fatima’s ankles and toes, while appalled by the gyrations of her torso.

  Mlle. Joliette’s technique, on the stage or at a table, was wholly Western. The base for her attack was not the Moslem promise of curious and amatory acrobatics, but the Christian appeal of innocence to chivalry. She was a blonde little angel, largely French, who had lived the first fifteen years of her life in Tunis and the last five in artistes’ hotels. Joliette was utterly indifferent to men and to sentiment; she did not care whether a client had known her an hour or whether he had been buying her champagne for a week, whether he was moderately white or definitely brown; her price was 3,000 pre-war francs, neither more nor less, and before yielding, with a delicious simulation of shyness and terror, to romance in any currency she would work out the exchange to insure that she had really been offered the magic sum. Had Joliette delivered her will-o’-the-wisp beauty for 2,800 francs she would have considered herself both dishonoured and a bad mathematician.

  As a result of Carry’s humanising or demoralising influence—Armande called it one or the other according to her mood—she began to make a few acquaintances among the less boring of the regular clients and, if so disposed, to sit with them. She needed evening frocks which would not depart too far from the showy fashions of the Casino, and would yet be bearable. Carry helped her to chose them, and also named them.

  There was Churching of Women, a pious little thing in black and white which gave her the bosom of a nursing mother. Well of Loneliness was a tube of twilit green and grey, easy to get into and the devil of a job to get out of. Public Bar, so called because the customers were inclined to lean over it, was of deep crimson velvet with no straps. Fate Worse than Death was an Empire frock of pleated white marocain, which suggested a half-ravished vestal virgin. That was the only purchase which made Floarea jealous; she complained that when Armande in Fate Worse than Death descended from the dressing rooms down the wide steps to the trees and soft lights of the garden, all her favourite clients became wistful and melancholy.

  Floarea was happily excited. After the war would come an engagement at Budapest, where the Eastern and Western circuits met, and then the night clubs of London, Paris and Berlin. To her, war was merely a temporary nuisance. She was a neutral spectator, without any love for her country’s allies, and certainly without hatred for its enemies.

  She could congratulate herself on reaching the top of her profession in her own territory. Only visiting artistes from the Western circuit and of international competence ever obtained the privilege exacted by Armande: that they were not bound to sit at tables or to dance with clients. Floarea’s contract was a useful advertisement, and evidence for any management that she was a serious performer. That was its only value to her, for in fact she spent nearly as much time at the tables as she had in days when attendance was compulsory. She liked to dance; she liked to be complimented; and she hoped to find a sympathetic protector to whom to be faithful for the duration of her stay in Egypt.

  Armande, however, decided that Floarea could not be allowed any of her half-mercenary, half-sentimental attachments. The Romanova, whose wants were amply supplied by the Casino contract, agreed. It was really Carry who had the most influence. She raked Floarea’s half-dozen candidates—who ranged from a solid detective of the Military Police to an Egyptian newspaper proprietor—with devastating ridicule. Floarea worshipped Carry’s aristocratic mixture of honesty and eccentricity, and took her for a model, even copying Carry’s graceful stride. This intrigued Armande, who perceived that in truth Floarea was imitating Floarea. The unconventional good manners and casual acceptance of anything that life might send up from the basement, which in the Rumanian were genuine, Carry had always cultivated as a pose.

  In the middle of June the Casino was as packed as ever, but the character of the audience had changed. Armande found the place more tolerable. The regular habitues, young moneyed and idle sons of Christian and Moslem business, were disappearing. The rich Greeks and Jews had gone. Joliette complained of hard times. Talk on the floor was of nothing but Rommel’s advance and the fall of Tobruk.

  The civilians comforted themselves by rumours. All the Arabian Nights imaginings about the course and object of the war, of which Armande had had her fill on the journey down to Egypt and daily ever since, increased in fantasy. But there was little comfort in rumours. This was it—the dreaded end. The Germans and Italians were coming, and the café politicians realised in sudden panic that they had no notion what the victors would do, and what they would not—it was generally admitted that there was nothing they would not.

  The following morning Carry called on Armande at Mme. Ecaterina’s flat. She said that all British women, except essential workers, were to be immediately evacuated to Kenya, that she had been ordered by the Consulate to round up any who could not readily be reached through husbands or employers, and that she and Armande would leave together and stay together.

  “But what about Floarea and Mama?” asked Armande.

  “Darling, they’ll be all right. Even Hitler doesn’t know whose side the Rumanians are on.”

  “Yes,” said Armande doubtfully. “I suppose they will be all right.”

  She had kept the secret that they were officially Jews. That was their business. She wondered whether there were any Egyptian police records from which the S.S., scavenging in the wake of the Afrika Korps, could justifiably decide that Jews they were.

  “I don’t know what to do, Carry.”

  “Darling, you can’t dream of staying.”

  “Have you talked to anybody? What do the generals say?”

  “They smile confidently,” Carry replied, “and say that the situation is hopeless but not desperate.”

  Armande hesitated. Was there anything in this defeatism except the rotted imaginations of all these planners and administrators living at ease in the scented heat of Cairo? Impatiently she accused them of being as like soldiers as those sweetly calling kites were like curlews, and then accused herself of having the futile optimism of ignorance.

  But was she ignorant? After all, she and Carry had talked in casual contacts to troops from divisions mauled in the recent fighting. They were no longer so spruce, no longer the gay and skilful warriors of a private war far out in the desert, but their morale was unaffected. They felt that they had been outgeneralled, not outfought, and were confident of their power to defend any reasonably sound position.

  Perhaps this wretched, trembling giant of a G.H.Q. really thought the same. Perhaps the office officers were eager to defend the Canal, rifle in hand. That, in her experience, would be just what they called their cup of tea. But in that case why in God’s name weren’t they private soldiers instead of colonels and brigadiers? The war couldn’t be won by grown-up boys, full of courage but incapable of thought. What a country was this Britain in miniature at Cairo! It had no guts—beyond those necessary to die. Children! Anybody could die. To live and win—that was what mattered.

  “Carry, I’m not going to run away,” she said, utterly inconsistent with her own thoughts. “And what on earth would I do?”

  “I suppose they’ll put us in camps. You know—stew for breakfast and the t
hings they call latrines.”

  “Distressed Englishwomen!” Armande exclaimed bitterly. “Like Xenia. What a kick the army will get out of being gallant and chivalrous!”

  “Oh, darling, don’t be so morbid! We have to be sent away while there is still time. They say that if Rommel gets Cairo, he’ll go right through to Syria.”

  “I don’t believe it, Carry. And even if the whole Middle East collapses, why should I go?”

  “But if you stay, you’ll be interned.”

  “I’ve been interned, Carry. It’s not so bad as all that.”

  “What a soulful Armande! Be sensible and come with me!”

  “Where to?”

  “Kenya, darling,” answered Carry impatiently.

  “Kenya? That’s internment too. Oh, me dear, it would be like committing suicide. Happier in heaven, and all that sort of thing. If the war is lost, what does it matter where I am or what happens to me? Everything we care about will have ceased to exist. I will take it here if I must, but I won’t go off and become a useless spectator, and have to take it in the end enyway. What’s the magic of Kenya? If Egypt goes, Kenya goes too, sooner or later. You might get Japanese instead of Germnas—that’s all.”

  “Oh my God! How appalling!” Carry exclaimed. “You don’t really think so, do you?”

  “I don’t know,” Armande replied. “I think I’d rather have them. The Germans would destroy our souls and their own for ever. But the Japanese, once they had conquered, might be peaceful and polite. There’s nothing to be gained for me in Kenya, Carry. If the world is to be divided up between these brutes, I’d as soon accept my fate here as anywhere. I’m sick of running away. It just isn’t worth my pride to go, darling.”