Arabesque

by Geoffrey Household

  “He could have done more, I think. But what’s one man against the army politicians? If the French had only court-martialled Montagne, our evidence would have been convincing. But they didn’t. Montagne was a nuisance. It was a great chance to drop him in the pail and put the lid back quickly. So they just bunged him in a fortress. Sounds very correct and military, but the fortress was huts behind barbed wire. And our people said they couldn’t interfere with internal discipline in the French Army, and went home to tea. I hope it choked them. But it wouldn’t. Because, after all, you can only give a hint to your allies. You can’t open their mouths and force them to ask questions if they don’t want to.”

  “Poor, poor, Montagne!” she said softly. “I didn’t like him, but he was so inflexible and French and undaunted. Dion, I’ll do everything I can for him. And he’ll never be caught—well, if he doesn’t plot for the sake of plotting. I’m to be French too, I suppose?”

  “Vichy sympathies. All your papers in order.”

  “Too many people know I’m British.”

  “Only in this joint. And you must leave it. All they can say afterwards is that you pretended to be British. We’ll see that all your records disappear from the Egyptian police.”

  “Could I do it, Dion? Tell me the truth—should I have a chance?”

  “You would. Think of my opposite number. Kraut security sergeant. Just occupied a town of a million, with nationalties all mixed up. If you’re living quietly—not a dancer, of course—you’d go weeks and weeks before being questioned at all. And then: Papers in order? Jawohl! Can account for her time? Bestimmt! Bit hazy here and there? Naturlich! Feeling your way in a mist, Armande—that’s security. If a cove has every bloody thing in order and an answer to every question, well, he’s either a government official or there’s something wrong. Motives, movements of realm human beings, here and there they are bound to be vague. Security is only efficient in dealing with the crook and the little man. You’re much too high-class and complicated. If they get really suspicious, they’ll just intern you and not bother any more. Let’s have another before the pub shuts.”

  “I think I deserve one.”

  “Very long and very strong again?”

  “Yes. Oh, this heat! I can’t think.”

  “You aren’t supposed to. Not in Nature’s plan. The thinking season opens in November.”

  The waiter brought their drinks and presented the bill, for Cairo night life stopped at one. Prayle gave him a lordly tip, and having marked up the amount in blue pencil, carefully folded the slip and put it in his wallet.

  “That’s on the house,” he explained. “Item: To contacting agents. Now I take over from the Bank of England. Where shall we go?”

  “Home to bed.”

  “Not yet. It won’t be cool enough to sleep till dawn. And we may not see each other again for a long time.”

  “Well”—she hesitated—“anyway, wait for me while I change.”

  “Don’t run out of the back door like the Hungarians.”

  “What Hungarians?”

  “Used to staff places like this. All little Hungarian beauties. Told boy-friend to wait in a taxi at the front door, and then hopped out at the back and made a beeline for nearest limitless plain.”

  “Dion, you’re sordid! Just for that, you shall wait in your taxi and I’ll be as long as possible. And what’s more, the porter will tell you it’s no use waiting.”

  “Is it?”

  “Work it out from my little pan, Sergeant.”

  Prayle left the Casino and endeavoured to find a taxi with a full petrol tank. When he was satisfied, he gave the driver fifty piastres and delivered a speech on the admirable qualities of Egyptians and, above all, their capacity for unquestioning obedience. Then he took possession of his taxi and awaited Armande, chuckling for the first five minutes, and extremely anxious for the next ten. At last she came to him, hatless, comradely, and free as the night in a black silk frock printed with what he took to be chrysanthemums.

  “Where shall we go?” he asked, when the taxi had been running some minutes.

  Armande gave him her address.

  “Yes, of course. But I thought it would do you good to go to Helwan first.”

  “Dion, Helwan is miles out of town,” she protested.

  “Don’t like the Pyramids. Never did.”

  “But I will not go to Helwan.”

  “Jump out then.”

  “Dion, you are not to do this. Just because I—”

  “Don’t say it!”

  “What was I going to say?”

  “I don’t know, but a suggestion that Armande Herne shouldn’t be where she wants to be.”

  “She wants to be in bed!”

  “Wonk!”

  “And stop making bloody silly exclamations!”

  “Straight off the bat!” he said admiringly. “And sounded like an understatement. You’re growing up.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you, Sergeant Prayle, that I might have been using ‘bloody’ to myself ever since I was a little girl, but had sufficient good taste not to do so aloud?”

  “No, it hadn’t.”

  “And now take me home, Dion dear, and don’t quarrel with me.”

  The taxi was rumbling smoothly under an avenue of trees along the Nile. On the landward side of the road army lorries in two and threes, headlights blacked out, bonnet to tailboard, streamed from the Helwan camps to Cairo.

  “He says he hasn’t room to turn,” explained Prayle after conversation with the driver. “Wait till we get to the roundabout.”

  “All right.”

  The driver, hooting furiously, swung his taxi round to the left, and cut into the Cairo-bound traffic. The screech of brakes immediately behind them was taken up by the next lorry and the next lorry and the next, as the sound went diminishing up the road.

  “Holding up the war,” said Prayle disapprovingly, “just because you won’t see the moon at Helwan.”

  “I can see it in the water,” she laughed, glancing casually out of the window—and then exclaimed at the unexpected beauty.

  The Nile was smooth and calm and moonlit as any other water, but it was hurrying. The river looked like an infinite length of silver silk pouring between the rollers of some vast machine where it had received a sheen more absolute than any brilliancy of nature.

  “The worst of driving in convoy,” Prayle remarked, “is that one can’t stop.”

  “Yes. I wish we could.”

  They approached another traffic island. At the last moment Prayle snapped an order to the driver. The taxi came about like a yacht, rounded the island and started back in the direction of Helwan, accompanied by the curses of the lorry drivers on the other side of the road.

  “Dion!” Armande protested.

  “But you said you wanted to look at the moon again.”

  “I didn’t!”

  “Ah! Well, there’s a place a little further up where we can stop.”

  Beyond the trees and striped by their moon shadows, a tongue of grass ran down to the water. Prayle opened the door of the taxi and offered his hand. His tall, white figure was compelling.

  This dancing, stubborn mischievousness was all in the character of the sergeant she knew, all in the sixteenth-century face, yet, directed for the first time to herself instead of her circumstances, Armande found it unfamiliar. The odd rhythm of his speech was, she thought, more truly expressive of him than she had ever believed.

  “You belong to the night,” he said. “You aren’t seen. And then the black and white of your head, the eagerness of you—they suddenly appear. Whenever you’re excited or interested. You live in flashes. Why? What are you?”

  “A soul in twilight,” she answered. “But sometimes it looks across the river.”

  With a gesture she could neither foresee nor resist he smoothed her hair back from her temples, and as she turned to him, tender and surprised, he kissed her. She neither responded nor refused, fighting her excitement at t
his devastating, accumulated passion, exploded in an instant.

  “Now we must go,” she said.

  She meant it to be a cold voice from a cold thought, but the voice trembled and she dared not think any thought at all.

  “Like baby rabbits just beginning to nibble grass,” he said.

  “If you call yourself a baby rabbit—!”

  “Your lips, I meant. Do they never say anything to themselves?”

  “I don’t listen to them.”

  Armande had only a moment to be angry with her body. Then, while she rested from his second kiss, there was left neither anger nor regret. She was reminding herself desperately that she was not in love and could not be in love.

  “Armande,” he said, “my darling, I wonder why I was ever frightened of you.”

  “Or I of you.”

  “Were you? I didn’t know anybody had ever been afraid of me.”

  “Do you remember once saying to me What else is there?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “When we first met. I told you to stop being coarse, and you said What else is there?”

  “Meant it, I expect. There I am, watching them all lying and fussing and keeping up with the Joneses. Drink. Women. Battle. Anything to avoid the bitterness. And I love the bitterness. Don’t want to die at all. And if they won’t see things as they are, I make things a bit more as they are. Coarse? Well, but true. So what else is there?”

  “This.”

  She took his head between her hands, and kissed his eyes, forehead and mouth.

  “Was that coarse, Dion? Or bitter?”

  His face was transfigured by joy and amazed surrender, but in the corners of the odd eyes and thin mouth she still perceived the ghost of irony. It hurt her, for she longed to wipe out that internal suffering which he pretended to enjoy.

  “Well?” she repeated. “Was it, my dear?”

  “But was it true?”

  “Yes, for us two. All the possible truth.”

  She linked her arm in his and led him back to the car.

  “We must turn at the next roundabout,” she said when the taxi had started.

  “We’re halfway to Helwan.”

  “Dion, no!”

  “I love you so. I have always loved you.”

  “I know, and I’m so glad. But I’m not a person to be loved. Remember what you used to think of me. It was nearly right.”

  “I want it to be nearly right. You I love, Armande, no might-be Armandes.”

  “Dion, we turn here.”

  “We’ll go round and round all night, if you like.”

  Imperturbable as the driver, he passed on her order, and the taxi headed back to Cairo.

  She relaxed on his shoulder, safe in the knowledge that in another quarter of an hour she would be home. Her lips answered his without thought of past or of so short a future.

  “But I want you,” he cried. “I will not let you go tonight.”

  “No!”

  “Your breasts say yes.”

  She sat back in her corner with a sudden sense of shame—a cabaret girl taken out by a sergeant after the show.

  “I’m not responsible,” she answered angrily. “It’s the heat, the moon, the whisky. Dion, for three years I have been faithful to my husband.”

  “Would he like you to be?” he asked.

  “Of course. Well … why did you ask that?”

  “I wondered. One watches. Of course some of us have been out here longer than the Crusaders. Still, is it only absence that nips off the marriages? New values at home. New values here.”

  “I don’t want any new values.”

  “Don’t you? In your own twilight, little lamp, don’t you? I know. I’ve watched you being bored with the lot of them. Of course you were. So desperately wanting to be needed that you gave yourself to all that nonsense in Beit Chabab. And all the while I needed you. Do now. Always shall. Because I am dead without you. Isn’t that a new value? Have you ever refused such a need of you?”

  “Dion, that’s not fair!”

  “It is. You’re not cruel. You just don’t see. When you’re needed, you aren’t there.”

  “Dion, will you stop it?” she cried.

  “No, I won’t. I need you.”

  “It’s impossible—some beastly, sordid hotel.”

  “No. A white room on the edge of the desert. And flowers. And when I ring the bell, a simple, sleepy, friendly black man to receive us.”

  “I will not. You’ve been there before.”

  “Of course. But alone.”

  “Promise me.”

  “All my life I have been alone. Don’t you know it?”

  “Yes.”

  Prayle held her across his heart as he leaned forward to order the driver:

  “Back to Helwan, habibi!”

  “No!”

  “Shut up, Armande my beloved, shut up!”

  “Dion, I shall never forgive myself.”

  “Tell me that tomorrow. At dawn. If you believe it.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Mr. Makrisi

  No longer was the Middle East a fortress. The dusty beaters had driven the game out of their deserts into Tunisia, where the guns, appreciative of such excellent shooting, stood ready for the kill. After dark the streets of Cairo blazed again with light. Hotels and bazaars, picture palaces and native theatres, shone expensively, gaily or discreetly according to the wealth that war had presented to their owners. No longer did the café strategists discuss the virtues and failings of their garrison; no longer, indeed, had they more than spectators’ interest in its fate. Half the width of Africa was between the Axis armies and the Levant, and in and over the eastern Mediterranean the power of the British was unchallengeable. Syrian and Egyptian, Arab and Jew, were free to attend to their domestic affairs.

  Armande was happy as she had never been in all her life. Since Cairo had never been occupied, the underground organisation had not been used for its original purpose; nevertheless, it had been busy. She began to suspect that recent jobs done for Mr. Makrisi were becoming pointless, and that her irregular wads of Egyptian pounds were no longer really earned; but her content, eager and warmhearted, was undisturbed. She had an object, and it was Dion Prayle.

  That she had been won, in the first place, by his passion and gentleness as a lover she knew, but by what was she held? By the repeated glory of his swift visits to Cairo—that was undoubted and no matter for self-questioning—and by what she described to herself as his isolation. Dion saw life steadily, but he did not, in her opinion, see it whole. He could appreciate and none better, the beauty in a tree, a hippopotamus or the comments and aspirations of an Arab beggar; yet anything that the world appreciated, from poetry to social or monetary success, he treated with suspicion. Sweet it was that he should depend so utterly upon her for a sufficient companionship, but she wanted him to be more than a tense and often suffering observer of others. Human life was, in essence, artificial; it could not be forced into his preferential mould of the strong, the raw and the simple. Both he and she were fair products of their civilisation, which had unvaryingly pursued the idea, of the aristocratic individual, open-minded, generous and urbane; and it was a triumph for that civilisation that both of them had been produced from nothing. This however, he would not see. He called it a triumph for the bloody Joneses; and by that conviction, he, who was so anxious to lose himself in humanity, cut himself off from humanity.

  His commission had done him good. During those first precious days in Cairo and Helwan, he had accepted his commandant’s offer. He was Captain Dion Prayle now (in his service it seemed to be understood that one only remained a lieutenant for a month or two) and, to her very private delight, he looked the part. Sergeant Prayle was eccentric and misplaced; the same face on Captain Prayle was that of a hard-bitten original. Whether he liked his commission she could not decide. He obviously adored and mothered his Field Security Section, but he complained that a sergeant’s life had been more amusing. One
had not, he said, to put up with the conversation of officers.

  It was odd that her surrender to Dion should have made the writing of letters to John easier than before. At her first attempt she had been overwhelmed by a sense of disloyalty; this precluded all emotion and any soulful effort towards intimacy, while encouraging the transmission of mere news. John had seemed delighted, and had replied with a letter that certainly showed no sense of strain and, for him, was almost witty. Thereafter their long-distance relationship was simpler. John had ceased to be an unsatisfactory ambition, and become just a dear person with whom years ago she had lived.

  To her amusement Dion Prayle was jealous. He maintained in obscure but uncompromising phrases that John should be told and that proceedings for divorce should be started; he could not be made to see that it was wicked to upset John in the steady course of his personal war, and that he might become careless of his life. It was not enough for Dion to lay it down that she had never been in love with John, and that by now he must suspect it. John was not the sort of person to suspect anything which was not in full view.

  Armande waited in a secluded alley of the Cairo Zoo. She was fond of the zoo; its overhanging creepers, its vast African trees and running water made it the coolest of Egyptian gardens. She had chosen it as discreet and neutral ground for a first meeting with her chief. His request for a rendezvous was unexpected, and perplexing in that it had been passed to her by letter from Dion instead of through the normal channel of Mr. Makrisi. The meeting meant, she supposed, that she was to be thanked and that her employment was at an end.

  No Gestapo could have got anything out of her, for she never saw cause or effect of what she did. She was often used as a postbox, and sometimes she was simply told to be away from her flat on certain dates. She would watch, and she would occasionally entertain. Once a high officer had been drunk in her flat, really drunk—he wasn’t trusting his power to act—and had blurted out British intentions in the Dodecanese before some of Mr. Makrsis’s guests. Makrisi, with his cold hatred of the enemy that always aroused her pity of them and for him, had told her that the evening’s work sent two shiploads of Boches to the bottom of the Aegean.