Cleopatra's Sister

by Penelope Lively

  He hesitated, looking at her. They stood in the empty corridor. Lucy was so tired that she seemed to be fizzing, as though her limbs were slightly aerated. She and Howard were the only stable objects in a quivering frame of gilt-striped wallpaper, receding ranks of doors and a long river of chevron-patterned carpet. She gazed at him, and then he put out a hand and held her elbow for an instant. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re exhausted. Go to bed. Sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  Alone, she pulled off her clothes and dropped into the bed. She put the light out and lay flat on her back in the darkness, her mind emptied of thought. She saw, with the detachment of exhaustion, a succession of images, all of equal clarity and equal emphasis: the orange tongue of dry cheese protruding from a bread roll, the glint of sunlight on the brown hair of Howard Beamish’s beard, the clockwork action of a donkey’s hoofs, a stumbling man with blood on his face. And then she fell into a profound and dreamless sleep.

  Howard dreamed. At least, the climate was that of a dream. He awoke, in a strange bed, to the sound of hurried footsteps in a street beyond a curtained window that he did not recognize. Shouts. A sharp crack, and then another. He got up, went to the window, and looked out to see a man running, in the light of street lamps. The man was pursued by others. Soldiers. And then, as he stood there, it came to him that this was not a dream.

  One of the soldiers stopped, raised a rifle, and fired. He heard the shot. The running man was now out of his vision, beyond the window frame. The soldier fired again, and they all paused, observed, and then moved forward once more, but in a leisurely way. A couple of them were laughing.

  Howard stood at the window until the street was empty once more. Opposite was a chemist’s shop. In the window, a smiling girl in an advertisement praised in Italian the performance of a Japanese make of camera. Alongside was a gigantic dummy bottle of Chanel perfume and a display of German hairdryers. Film posters on an adjoining wall were captioned in Arabic; the showrooms beyond sold Ford cars. The place was now silent and unpeopled, bathed in neutral light; above the shops rose apartment blocks with shuttered windows. A wafer-thin cat slid from a window ledge and walked down the centre of the street, paired with its own elongated shadow. The commotion of a few moments ago – the running man, the rifles – seemed preposterous, an illusion.

  He went back to bed, and looked at his watch. It was 4.30. A glossy brochure on the bedside table described in three languages the videos available on the inoperable television set. The room had all the familiar props, but when you investigated them they were a sham: the minibar was empty, the radio dead, the telephone silent. They were as reassuring, and as useless, as the universal references in the street beyond the window. Behind the perfume and the Japanese cameras were running footsteps; the brochure’s wares (Family Viewing, Humour, Adult) were a wry reminder of normality. He had again that sensation of being set aside, flung into some eerie purgatory parallel to the real world, and was afraid. Resolutely, he turned over and tried to sleep, and when at last he did so he was thinking of Lucy, not of the running man.

  ‘Did you hear a racket in the small hours? Soldiers in the street outside, and shots?’

  ‘Not a thing,’ said James Barrow. ‘I was out cold.’

  Coming down late to breakfast, Howard found the dining-room already full. Lucy was at the far end of the table and he had to take a seat where he could. Nobody else had seen or heard anything, except Molly Wright who had had an impression of a car backfiring. Most people were more exercised by the fact that the hotel’s hot water had given out and by the absence of fresh milk. With a return to surroundings that approached familiarity, the mood of resignation had given way to a more combative one, centred on the supply of normal facilities. The family groups were keeping up a barrage of requests that the swimming-pool be filled. The head waiter, as the only apparent figure of authority, was subjected to a stream of demands and complaints. Hugh Calloway watched with incredulity.

  ‘I find this amazing. We have now been held incommunicado for nearly forty-eight hours and people are fretting about cold bath water and powdered milk.’

  ‘I suppose it’s a way of suppressing anxiety,’ said Howard.

  Calloway took out a calculator and tapped for a few moments. ‘I stand to lose somewhere around £400,000 worth of business. My own time, at a conservative estimate, is worth about 100 quid an hour.’

  ‘Send in your bill to the Callimbian government,’ said James, ‘I’m sure it’ll be given top priority.’

  And out there, thought Howard, in this city most of us had barely heard of until yesterday, there are people who are certainly not thinking about bath water or the value of their time.

  An argument had now broken out about the comparative expediency of patience or protest as a tactical approach. Howard applied himself to a bowl of cornflakes with powdered milk and waited for the table to disperse so that he could join Lucy.

  It was becoming apparent that the hotel was a limbo. The British passengers of CAP 500 were the only guests, and were restricted to the floor containing their rooms and to the ground floor, which provided the dining-room, foyer and lounges. Such staff as remained were there to supply basic services and had clearly been instructed to say as little as possible. The receptionist, sitting idle behind a reception desk which received no one, whose telephone was silent and computer screens blank, had nothing to do but parry queries and requests. The soldiers lounging at the entrances were impassive unless challenged, when they became belligerent.

  As the day proceeded the group tended more and more to foregather on the ground floor. Those who retreated periodically to their rooms would soon drift back, afraid of missing some news or development. At noon the doors on to the patio beyond the foyer were suddenly opened, enabling the children to run around outside. A few people took chairs there and sat in the sun. The discovery of a colony of lizards on the wall became a matter of intense interest. There was rather good seafood salad for lunch, and a selection of Italian ice-creams.

  ‘You must tell me,’ said Howard sternly, ‘if you feel that I am monopolizing you. Or if you simply want to be alone.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone else is after my company. And solitude isn’t that appealing. One begins to worry.’

  ‘Then I needn’t feel guilty. Good.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Lucy, ‘there’s the danger that we may run out of small talk. We could yet end up playing noughts and crosses.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Well, we’ve managed nicely so far. And with barely a disagreement. There was a tricky moment over voting habits. I am clearly several notches further to the left than you. And I think you are quite wrong to be so dismissive of novels. There’s a lot to be said for fiction.’

  ‘It’s the scientist’s disability,’ said Howard. ‘A terrible addiction to fact.’

  ‘Well, if we’re here long enough I can always read Anna Karenina to you.’

  ‘I’m sure that would do the trick.’

  ‘Are we being frivolous?’ said Lucy after a moment. ‘Talking like this. With what’s going on. Whatever it is. Whatever it’s going to turn out to be.’

  ‘Possibly. But solemnity isn’t going to help. And as you say it takes one’s mind off it. And …’ He looked at her. ‘And life has to go on.’

  ‘Oh, it does. It does.’

  Lucy looked away first. ‘You saw something last night? The sort of thing we saw on the way here yesterday?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Something like that.’

  ‘It’s hard to believe. Sitting here. In the middle of this …’ She waved a hand at the gilded hotel foyer, the framed posters for TWA and Lufthansa and Air India, at the other members of the group playing card games, chatting, trading paperbacks.

  ‘I know. But it won’t do us any good to harp on it. Why don’t we … Well, why don’t you tell me some of the things I don’t know about you.’

  ‘That’s a tall order,’ she said. ‘You can’t be serious. All
right, then. I was born in Luton for a reason that may seem bizarre …’

  During the course of the day the three-year-old with diarrhoea took a turn for the worse and a doctor was summoned by the hotel authorities, after relentless pressure from Molly Wright. The doctor supplied medication and declared the child in no danger. The parents were too preoccupied to press the man for information but Molly cornered him on his way out and elicited from him the comment that there was much trouble in Callimbia and for some people it was not good, not good, before he clammed up and scuttled from the hotel. In the middle of the afternoon there was a great din of passing vehicles from without and those who hastened to the front windows of the foyer were able to see a convoy of jeeps crowded with armed militia rattling past before they were hustled away by an irritable sentry and the curtains firmly drawn. At five the hot water came back on again for long enough for those with quick responses to grab a bath. Someone found a cache of glossy magazines behind a sofa, a discovery which raised morale in some quarters and prompted lengthy discussion about fair distribution and exchange. Alliances and antipathies were becoming more pronounced. James Barrow joined the businessmen for a poker game which degenerated into a barely suppressed quarrel. Barrow left the game and went out on to the patio, where he proceeded to expose a startlingly hirsute chest to the sunshine. The nuns had taken under their collective wing a sixteen-year-old girl travelling alone to rejoin her parents. Various unassertive people had emerged from relative anonymity: an English-language teaching expert on his way to an assignment with the British Council, who proved a dab hand at improvising board games for the children, a young woman teacher called Denise Sadler, a very young bank employee, Ted Wilmott, the only member of the group so far to show serious signs of demoralization. He was rallied by Molly Wright, and later joined the poker game. In the early evening there was an unexpected service of soft drinks. This reawoke the lust for alcohol and brought James Barrow in from the patio for a further unproductive set-to with the head waiter.

  ‘I was born in Enfield,’ said Howard. ‘A fact of no significance whatsoever.’

  ‘What’s the first thing you remember?’

  ‘Picking up a fossil on a beach in north Somerset. I have it still.’

  ‘What sort of fossil?’

  ‘An ammonite. Psiloceras planorbis. I use it as a doorstop. When we get back to London perhaps I could show it to you.’

  ‘I’ll look forward to that,’ said Lucy. ‘When we get back to London. Goodness, London … You know, I have this odd feeling of having been flung sideways. Into some other dimension of time. Not unreal, exactly. Surreal, maybe.’

  ‘I know what you mean. So do I, in a way. In another way, very much the opposite.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘You.’

  ‘Me …’

  ‘You don’t seem unreal or surreal or other-dimensional or anything of the kind.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘That’s a relief.’

  ‘I feel as though I’ve known you for a long time. Oh, God, what an unbelievably crass remark. Please don’t hold it against me.’

  ‘I shan’t. Actually I quite like it. I feel a bit the same way.’

  ‘Do you?’ said Howard. ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If we weren’t where we are …’

  ‘Mmn?’

  ‘I mean, if there weren’t all these people all round …’

  ‘Yes?’ she said, not looking at him.

  ‘Nothing. Just … Well, maybe at some point we …’

  ‘Look,’ said Lucy. ‘Perhaps you should go on telling me about being born in Enfield.’

  ‘I’ve exhausted that topic, I’m afraid.’

  ‘And you feel it doesn’t signify. The fossil, on the other hand, does?’

  ‘Oh, resoundingly. Thence springs, I suppose, my entire life. Including, come to think of it, being here now.’

  ‘Definitely I have to see this fossil,’ said Lucy.

  As dusk fell, the group’s mood became more querulous. The girl on the reception desk was subjected to endless questioning and hectoring until eventually she fled and was replaced with fresh blood, a young man evidently well rehearsed in parrying the complaints of disaffected travellers. Yes, he said, interpreter is coming back here very soon. In the morning. Certainly in the morning. Yes, telephones will be working again very soon. Tomorrow, bar will open tomorrow. There are some problems in Marsopolis, but soon everything will be very nice again.

  ‘Look, we don’t want to be in bloody Marsopolis,’ roared James Barrow. ‘What we want is to get out of bloody Marsopolis. You get on to that telephone and tell that interpreter guy to get over here, right?’

  ‘Very soon.’

  Dinner was late but lavish. Some members of the party were so mollified by lobster salad and a choice of elaborate desserts that they lapsed into a state of relative quiescence. Others did not, and continued to harangue the hotel staff and debate amongst themselves as to the best course of action. There were by now internal conflicts between those like Molly Wright whose instinct favoured collective discussion and united decision and those who preferred lone moves. Several people – including Barrow and Calloway – tried private bribery of the hotel staff for access to a telephone. None of them got what he wanted. Others appeared to be becoming slightly traumatized by the situation, and to be settling into a sort of glazed compliance. A couple – the bank clerk Ted Wilmott and one of the young mothers – were on the edge of hysteria.

  ‘Are we being antisocial?’ said Lucy.

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Do you think it matters?’

  ‘Actually,’ said Howard. ‘I don’t really care.’

  ‘I have the feeling that people may be beginning to avoid us.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘We are becoming a bit conspicuous, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘I think I can live with that,’ said Howard.

  ‘We’ve been talking for hours …’

  ‘Have we?’

  ‘We have indeed,’ she said. ‘And at lunch and dinner. Some of them think we’re travelling together, you know.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘In fact that mother with the baby – Ann something – asked me if we were on our honeymoon. Oh, shit – I shouldn’t have told you that. It’s made me blush. Now I’m embarrassed in every direction.’

  ‘It’s intensely becoming,’ said Howard. ‘A sort of rosy glow, including even the ears.’

  ‘And the more you look at me like that, the worse it gets. Please stop.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ he said. ‘I can’t promise.’

  Night fell upon Marsopolis. A velvet Mediterranean night that drew the group out on to the hotel patio beyond the foyer. The back of the hotel and those of neighbouring buildings rose around it like the walls of a canyon; far above was a square of indigo sky spiced with stars. Moths glimmered in the shafts of light from the hotel, and amid these the group sat or wandered. The talk was of everyone’s pressing need for a change of clothes, of the prospect of hot water, of the moths, the heat, the pervading smell of kerosene. Behind and beyond this chatter there hung the sense of anxiety resolutely held at bay. Periodically tension was manifest in an irritable exchange, a hectic movement, a commotion over a fretting child. The day had been very long, and now the evening and the night seemed static, an immobile lump of time. Some people went glumly to their rooms; others embarked upon defiant diversions – card games, paper games, an absurd ant-racing contest with bets laid and money changing hands.

  ‘It’s nearly midnight,’ said Lucy.

  ‘So it is. Go on about your sister’s boyfriend.’

  ‘My sister’s boyfriend,’ said Lucy, ‘is a bricklayer and saxophonist. A feckless guy in some ways, but a good sort. How can you possibly be interested?’

  ‘Oh, but I can,’ said Howard.

  ‘You’ve heard about my sister’s boyfriend, and about my mum, and my brother, and my entire l
ife history, just about, not to speak of my views on just about everything. Either your stamina is amazing, or you have extraordinarily good manners. Or …’

  ‘Or what?’

  ‘Or nothing. I think maybe I should go to bed. Soon we’ll be the last people left down here.’

  ‘Would that matter?’

  ‘Well, not really. It’s just that …’

  ‘That what?’

  ‘It’s just that here are we, sort of absorbed in each other like this and meanwhile there’s this happening. Whatever it is that’s happening. To all of us stuck here. To this country.’

  ‘I know,’ said Howard. ‘I’ve thought of that too. But we can’t help it, can we?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘We can’t.’

  And so, presently, they rode up once more in the lift and stood again in the empty, padded, floodlit corridor. In silence, looking. The air between them humming, it seemed, with the unstated issue.

  ‘Good night,’ said Lucy, at last.

  And, ‘Good night, then,’ replied Howard. He moved towards her, hesitated, and put his hands for an instant on her shoulders. ‘It may sound absurd and inappropriate, but this has been a wonderful day.’

  And then he turned and walked down the corridor to his own room.

  5

  ‘Everyone leave hotel now! Get luggage and leave hotel – quickly! Bus is waiting!’

  They were in the middle of breakfast. Everyone stopped eating and gazed in bewilderment at the army officer who had appeared suddenly at the dining-room entrance. Then a babble broke out. Chairs were pushed back, the meal abandoned.

  ‘They must have got us a plane – about bloody time too!’

  ‘Why couldn’t they have told us last night, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘At least something’s happening …’

  Hugh Calloway accosted the officer: ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Information will be given very soon. Get luggage now, quickly.’