Arabesque

by Geoffrey Household

  “Armande, but they’ll make you go! It’s an order.”

  “Who’ll make me? Do you think anybody is going to bother about a cabaret girl?”

  “My sweet, why are you so bitter?” asked Carry tenderly. “What beastly thing has somebody done to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’ll never understand you. One moment you sound like Joan of Arc, and the next as if you hated us all.”

  “Not you, dear Carry. You’ve no idea what a help you have been to me. I’d love to come with you to Kenya. But here I am free, and I want to stay free. And I don’t believe a word of all this pessimism. I don’t believe Rommel will get Cairo. I don’t believe we are defeated. Don’t tell me we can’t beat the Boche when we’re on level terms. It’s just these serious lumps of staff, who keep thinking of Dunkirk and Greece and want to take precautions.”

  “Darling, they wouldn’t be right to take a chance of never getting the women away.”

  “Wouldn’t they? Well, it’s a grand excuse,” said Armande. “They must be so sick of us hanging about and weeping and falling in love and getting drunk. But they haven’t any rights over me, Carry. I won’t go.”

  “Shall I stay with you then?”

  “No, dearest. They would make any amount of trouble for you. As you say, it’s an order.”

  “We may all get back to England,” Carry suggested.

  “You won’t. No ships.”

  “Armande, don’t be so absolute! Kenya will probably insist on getting rid of us. If we do go home, is there anything I can do for you?”

  “I can’t think of anything. But if I do, I’ll write to you.”

  “John?” Carry asked.

  “If you ever run across him, don’t let him be worried.”

  “Does he know what you are doing?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Men take letters so seriously,” Carry said.

  “Yes. They don’t understand that if one is miserable, one wants to write, and that the next day it’s all over. Oh God!” Armande cried wearily. “Why do we have two sexes?”

  “Darling, I can’t leave you in this mood.”

  “That’s what Toots said.”

  “Did he? You’re not staying for Toots?” Carry asked suspiciously.

  “No.”

  “Tell him when you see him that … well, you’ll have it your own way.”

  “I should if I wanted him. But I don’t, Carry.”

  “Didn’t you ever?”

  “I tried. Just tears and confessions. Typical Cairo.”

  “Is it? Well, of course you aren’t Toots’ type.”

  “No. Nor anybody’s.”

  “Oh, darling!” exclaimed Carry repentantly. “I didn’t mean to be cruel.”

  “You weren’t. Tomorrow I shall feel I’m everybody’s type—especially in Public Bar. And no you to laugh at it. Good-bye, my darling.”

  “Armande!”

  “My Carry!”

  “And we’ll laugh at all this,” said Carry sobbing. “Lunch at Berkeley some time?”

  “London and June and peace. Don’t make me cry, my sweet.”

  As Armande closed the door and turned away, she was saved from breaking down by the assault of Mme. Ecaterina. A jelly-fish stranded on her own emotions, she babbled incoherently of Greeks and Germans and forced labour.

  “Ecaterina, why do you listen outside my room?” Armande protested gently.

  “I must hear. I must know,” screamed Ecaterina. “The Germans are in Alexandria. The English are running. Oh, who would ever have thought it? The English! Mr. Gladstone! Lord Byron! And to think that they are running!”

  “You only hear half the story in a language you don’t really understand, Ecaterina,” said Armande severely. “The English are not running. They are in a very good position with the navy on their right flank and some sort of depression or desert or something on their left. And Alexandria will not fall.”

  “But the women? All the women are going!”

  “Of course. We are useless.”

  “Useless, you and I?” cried Ecaterina indignantly. “No! Never! Do I not knit for the Greeks? Do you not dance for the soldiers?”

  There was reality in Ecaterina’s scatterbrained agitation. Armande resisited the temptation to retort that she danced for wealthy civilians who were fleeing from Cairo as fast as trains and taxis could take them, and that Ecaterina’s prickly balaclavas were not essential in the heat of June. She envied Mediterranean woman. Screaming and yelling and scenes. Tragedy and vulgarity inextricably mixed together. Yet all the while work or an illusion of work, and a blessed sense of being indispensable. The sum of all this violent expenditure of nervous force and emotion was stability. Perhaps the bees in the hive behaved like Mediterranean women in the half hour before they slept. She and Carry and the rest of them with their eternal good taste and economy of energy—did they really produce enough of the raw material for social life?

  She suddenly folded Ecaterina in her arms, and comforted her with a kiss unused by Carry.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Home to Helwan

  Sergeant Prayle dismounted from a dusty truck, and entered the Field Security Depot. The billet was in a quiet Cairo square and known as the Bishop’s House. What ecclesiastical purpose it had served, the army never discovered; but every spring, year after year, a congregation of ancient and episcopal bugs bore witness to the resurrection of the dead.

  Prayle had passed a couple of weeks at the depot when his draft arrived from home. Cairo then had contrasted very pleasantly with the grim austerity of battered England, and had cheaply and easily quenched the thirst accumulated through six weeks of tropics and subtropics in the crowded slave holds of a troopship. The Army of the Middle East had seemed to him old-fashioned—it segregated officers and other ranks to a degree never attempted in England—yet it contrived to be gay. Many a snug little bar and restaurant bore a notice: Reserved for Warrant Officers and Sergeants Only.

  He explored and appreciated Cairo again when his section stopped for reorganisation on their way from the Western Desert to the Lebanon. Now the city had lost its glamour. To the sections in the field it represented a soft life of cinemas, amenities, approachable women and unlimited drink. They chose it for leave, but considered it an unmanly station, tainted by the proximity of G.H.Q. Sergeant Prayle strode into the depot with the air of a real soldier from the wide open spaces.

  Gathered up immediately by his acquaintances—who made it clear in the first five minutes that the Cairo underworld demanded a lot more brains than any open spaces—Sergeant Prayle felt a country cousin. Those N.C.O.’s in passage through the depot, fresh from the desert formations or their listening posts in the Egyptian towns, knew everything: what the divisions thought, what the generals said, who had been sacked and why, who ought to have been shot and when. In the Lebanon, where fortunes were not directly tied to the desert campaign, the news had not seemed so catastrophic; Rommel’s victory was a setback, and that was all. In Cairo it was a shame, a disappointment, a disaster. Every man felt that his personal failure had threatened the whole course of the war; and since, for the vast majority, there had been no personal failure whatever, the army was puzzled and bitter and crying out for leadership.

  When the spate of conversation caused by a new and interested arrival had died down, Prayle was kept busy answering questions about the more picturesque members of his section, about the morale of the Lebanon and the control of the rich refugees from Egypt. Asked what the devil he was doing in Cairo anyway, he explained that he had been sent for to give his personal advice to the Commander in Chief, and thereby, even among his discreet colleagues, gained credit for discretion. The fact was that he had not the least idea who wanted him; nor had Captain Wyne known. His instructions were simply to report to such-and-such an office and such-and-such a floor in G.H.Q. He could not remember which it was without referring to his Movement Order.

  In the morning Prayle app
roached, circumspectly, the two huge blocks of former flats that were G.H.Q.

  The office to which he reported was very small, and bore evidence of being hastily furnished for a new department of the staff. It had been a luxury bathroom. The fixtures were boxed in with plywod, and heaped with files. A staff sergeant was busily typing on the bathtub, with a fan revolving at the other end. He too, it could be seen, was a new intruder into the uniformity of G.H.Q. His shirt was open to the waist, showing a chest burned to the same shade of desert mahogany as his face.

  “Sergeant Prayle. Told to report here.”

  “Oh, you’re Prayle, are you?” answered the sergeant. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  He swept the perspiration from his countenance with a dripping arm, and cleared a space for a smile.

  “Major Furney wants to see you,” he said.

  “Furney? What’s he doing here? I thought he was Haile Selassie’s snooper-in-chief.”

  “No. After they got him down here in such a hurry, they changed their minds, and put him on to checking wog labour instead.”

  “Lousy job,” said Prayle feelingly. “They all look exactly alike and they all use each other’s passes. Is that what you do?”

  “God, no! This isn’t security. We use our brains here.”

  “Noggins Limited. Cut out the coupon and post this day.”

  “Eh?”

  “Nothing. What’s the racket, chum?”

  “Just the opposite to you chaps.”

  “I see. Who’s the big cheese? Furney?”

  “For these parts, yes. Well, I’ll tell him you’re here.”

  Prayle passed through the bathroom into a larger office where the heat was more bearable. Major Guy had again protested against his surroundings. Instead of the usual khaki shirt tucked into his khaki shorts, he wore the grey flannel of the Indian Army. Round his shoulder and disappearing into his pocket was a remarkable lanyard of crimson and gold, on the end of which he kept his pince-nez. He had grown a little fatter, and looked a more integral part of the army than in Beirut. He rose from his desk and greeted Prayle affectionately.

  “Good old Field Security! Always around when wanted! How’s Beirut and the Hotel St. Georges?”

  “Gone decent, sir. Spears Mission secretaries.”

  “And how did you while away this horrible winter? Security pub crawls?”

  “No. I had a detachment on the Palestine frontier.”

  “Not much fun unless you speak Arabic.”

  “That’s what I thought. So I learned it.”

  “Prayle, why haven’t you a commission?” Furney exclaimed. “And don’t say: ‘Baton in the knapsack, sir!’”

  “Recommended for one.”

  “Why so doubtful?”

  “It’s a good job—F.S. sergeant.”

  “You’d better hurry. There’ll be no more direct commissions soon. They are going to start Officer’s Cadet Training Units in the Middle East, and you’d never get through.”

  “Why not?” asked Prayle indignantly.

  “Speaking as an old examiner, Sergeant—and we’re all the same whether we’re dons or colonels—I should find your answers irrelevant in viva voce, and unintelligible on paper. I should also observe that while your discipline and powers of leadership were first-class, you believed the lot to be so much hooey. And so I should lose a bloody good officer for Field Security. What does your commandant think?”

  “Smiles kindly. Bats!”

  “He?”

  “No. Thinks I am.”

  “Couldn’t be better. I know him. He always chooses officers who are a bit loopy. You wouldn’t like to join us, would you?”

  “Not if I have a chance in security. What do you do, sir?”

  “We are organising what will be left behind if Egypt goes.”

  “Is it going?”

  “I don’t think so for a moment. But it would be sad if Jerry were left alone in Cairo without any of us to help him.”

  “Have you got some good chaps?”

  “Yes. And I have a useful couple in mind. You remember the mysterious Armande Herne?”

  Prayle felt his face flush with resentment.

  “Why didn’t you do anything?”

  “I couldn’t, my dear man,” Furney replied. “And apart from Mrs. Herne, do you suppose I wouldn’t have given my right hand to save Montagne? I was always crying out their innocence. I stood on the roof of G.H.Q. and screamed it. I got the whole affair reviewed by the D.M.I. But those damned palace eunuchs had a convincing case on paper. Always paper! And they just said: ‘Oh yes, it’s Guy of course. Oh yes, dear Guy, so impetuous!’ And, blast them, in a way they were right! I hadn’t a single proof beyond my own certainty and Wyne’s opinion—which meant yours. And so they went and black-listed Mrs. Herne, and the French put Montagne under close arrest. It was internment, really.”

  “He escaped, you know.”

  “I do know. He’s in Cairo.”

  “Good man!” Prayle exclaimed enthusiastically. “We have been looking for him all over Syria and the Lebanon—not too hard. Do we know officially that he’s here?”

  “No, unofficially. I’ve been told I can have him provided the French don’t find out.”

  “Sealed truck,” said Prayle. “God help the Egyptians when he’s let loose!”

  “And his cover perfect, you see. Interned by the French as a fifth columnist—what more natural than that he should escape to the enemy? Mrs. Herne’s cover is good, too.”

  “Poor little doings! Can’t you leave her out?”

  “She’s dancing in a cabaret, you know.”

  “Butterflies,” Prayle mumbled irritably.

  He had kept himself informed of Armande’s movements, and had filled up the gaps in his knowledge at the depot bar. He loathed the thought of her in cabaret, dancing half-naked, apparently, with some damned Rumanian tart. She, the unapproachable! Well, she wasn’t unapproachable any longer. And that was a vile thought, if there ever was one! Why the devil shouldn’t the poor kid earn her living any way she liked? His desire for her was tortured by the imagination of Armande’s beauty glowing more than ever in the meretricious adornments of the Casino, as well as by the thought of her exposed to all the outrageous suggestions of men like himself. He treasured the memory of those qualities in her that had most annoyed him. Kensington was a safeguard.

  “Cabaret is not good enough for her,” Furney added.

  “And what the hell else could she do, sir?”

  “I didn’t meant it as a criticism. You suggested that I shouldn’t bother her, but I think she might like to be bothered. A girl who could pull off that deal with Wadiah is simply wasted where she is. And she must know that she’s wasted.”

  “She’s browned off with the lot of us.”

  “Probably. But she’s patriotic. You and I know that. And her cover is not bad. She is known to the Egyptian police to be black-listed. She stayed behind when she might have been evacuated. She could pass as a Frenchwoman, and I could fix her up with a French passport and all the papers to prove her movements for the last three years. It’s a gift! That’s what I wanted you for—to swear to my bona fides. Otherwise I doubt if she’d listen. As you say, she has had just about enough of Intelligence.”

  “I’ll try to sell it, but no guarantee.”

  “Then suppose you go down to the Casino tonight, and feel out the situation?”

  “Grand Dukes, and all that?” Prayle asked.

  “Whatever you need to spend is all right. I wish to God I could have had a quarter of the funds for security that I have for this racket. And you might take Montagne with you so that they can recognise each other.”

  “With boots?”

  “No, it’s quite safe. He’s grown a beard and he is dark as an Egyptian and his name is Makrisi. There’s a little café in Boulak I’ll get him to meet you there at eight. And”—Furney hesitated, his donnish voice revealing an uneasiness or perhaps a mere dislike for change—“you mi
ght tell me your impression of him. He’s not quite the same Montagne we knew.”

  Prayle made no reply. There was nothing polite that he could say. It seemed to him obvious that Montagne, humiliated, on the run, in disgrace, would not be just the same as the cocksure, incorruptibly left-wing security officer.

  By the evening Sergeant Prayle was in a more festive mood. His worrying for and about and against Armande had receded into the background of his thoughts. The immediate future promised a lonely soldier’s heaven at the expense of Major Furney’s department. After a long spell in the wind-swept villages and black mud between Kuneitra and the springs of Jordan, he was prepared to enjoy any form of intoxication that Cairo might offer. He borrowed a white civilian suit—the Cairo City section was as well supplied with clothes as a theatrical touring company—and stuck a carnation in his buttonhole. Raffish, he decided, but genial.

  The directions that Furney had given him were delightfully systematic—no nonsense of names that would not be legible at the street corners, and no turnings left and turnings right. He had only a little map after his own heart, marked with blue arrows and red crosses. The last blue arrow led him into a lane between crumbling walls of sun-dried mud; there he came upon a native café, patched with flattened petrol tins and roofed with straw, but well supplied with bottles. Passing through the main room, he found that the last red cross represented a small yard in which were a kitchen and a few tables under a single tree. There were no troops, no Europeans. The only customers were a pair of Copric clerks who were drinking coffee. Sergeant Prayle ordered a bottle of the thick Delta wine, stretched his legs and looked up through the foliage at the moonlit sky with its shafts and vaultings of busy searchlights. Compassionately he meditated upon those two clerks, and the general tragedy of the literate in the Middle East. They were paid little more than the labourer, yet compelled to the expense of European clothes. No wonder that the Egyptian student with such a careworm future before him, was continually in revolt!