The Prince puffed out his cheeks with a proud and disdainful expression. “There is no danger at all now,” he said, “I have it on the best authority.”
“Very well, sir,” said the ruddy staff officer. “On you go, and a happy picnic to you.”
A light wind sprang up, not enough to create sand, yet enough to cool the middle hours of the day. The light with its dancing violet heart outlined this strange primeval world of dunes and wadis through which we wound our way; quite soon, like a ship which clears the horizon, we would be moving by the studied navigation of the compass, or the stars. It gave one a strange feeling of freedom. Once a small arrowhead of planes passed overhead – so high as to look like a formation of wild geese, and far too high to let us read their markings. Sam rode with the Princess, and I on another horse with the Prince. The whole journey only took about an hour and a half. We came at last to a small oasis and a series of grey escarpments, forms of striated rock, which shouldered up into the sky. “Look!” someone cried as we rounded a shoulder of dune. We saw a small oasis and within a few hundred yards the Coptic monastery came into view. Aby Fahym must once have been very beautiful, though now it was rather knocked about; one had to decipher its turrets and crocketed belfries anew to rediscover its original shape and style. But almost any building in that strange, romantic site would have seemed compelling to the imagination. The two main granaries were joined by a high ramp in the form of a bridge. The Prince was highly delighted and gazed at the old place through his glasses, exclaiming, “Well, it’s still there, the old Bridge of Sighs. They haven’t knocked it down after all.” He superintended the setting up of a shady marquee with childish pleasure, even going so far as to knock in a tent peg or two himself with a wooden mallet, until a shocked servant snatched it from his royal hand and reproached him in guttural Arabic.
Carpets were spread, divans appeared, as also the latest creation from Italy, a portable frigidaire which held countless bowls of sorbet and iced lemon tea. We were all thirsty and did justice to this initiative, seated in a wide semi-circle around the Prince. The conversation had turned to politics so that, excusing ourselves in a whisper, Sam and I set out to trudge up to the monastery. “We might put up the missing monk, eh?” said my friend with boyish elation. “There may be cisterns or cellars below ground – there’s little enough cover above,” I replied. We had both had a good look at the place with the Prince’s binoculars. On a ridge quite close to the monastery I had seen some red markers planted in the sand and wondered if somebody was surveying the place – I thought them to be for theodolites, perhaps. Somewhere to the right, upon a profile of sand dune and sky, moved a line of light tanks and command cars engaged on some obscure military manoeuvre. We turned back once or twice to wave to the colourful party in the oasis below. The camels were groaning and being bad-tempered. Then we addressed the last part of the slope and entered the baking gates of the little place. It had been built with a mixture of straw, brick and plaster which gave the walls, or what was left of them, a strange appearance of wattle-moulding in brown hide. But there was no sign of the monk, and no sign of any subterranean cellars where he might be hiding. Disappointed, we lingered a moment to smoke a cigarette, and then retraced our steps – or at least began to do so.
Then it happened – as suddenly and surprisingly as the capsizing of a canoe. The suddenness was quite numbing, as well as the immediate lack of sound which gave the illusion of a whole minefield going up silently around us. A series of giant sniffs and a crackle of splinters followed a good way after the first seismic manifestation – the desert blown up around us in picturesque billows and plumes – a whole running chain of puffs, followed after a long and thoughtful pause by the bark of the mortars, for that is what they turned out to be. “Christ,” shouted Sam, “they must be ranging.” Another series of dry crackles followed by puffs seemed almost deliberate, as if to illustrate his remark. We began to run awkwardly, stooped, hands spread out like startled chickens. The red poles I had seen must have been ranging markers. We tried to set a course away from them, running sideways downhill now in the thick sand. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that the party in the oasis had also been alerted. There was a stir of alarmed recognition. They pointed at us as we ran stumbling downhill towards them, and the servants in a sudden access of solicitude started running towards us, as if to avert the danger from us. There was a tremendous burst now – it went off between my teeth, my whole skull echoed, my mind was blown inside out.
With scattered wits and panic fear we raced, Sam and I, along the side of the dune, in the hope of cover. But before we reached our objective we were overtaken by the whole solid weight of the desert. It was flung over us like a mattress. We collapsed like surfers overtaken by the rollers of the ocean, like ants overwhelmed by a landslide.
It seemed as if huge fragments of this shattered desert composure were blown about on all sides of me; my brain swelled and became full of darkness and sand. I felt my tongue swell up and turn black with heat, I felt it protrude. All this while falling sideways into space and vaguely hearing groans and whispers magnified on my right. Then thump – someone or something buried an axe in the middle of my back and the pain spread out from this centre of crisis until it reached the confines of my body, tingling in the fingertips like an electric current. I tried with all my might to rise to my feet but there was no traction to be had. My companion had fallen too, propelled skidding by the same sandspout as my own. And now in a lull came the crackle of shell splinters among the hot rocks, the sizzling spittle of the invisible guns.
From this point on everything becomes quite fragmentary, broken up descriptively like strips of cinema film, with just a frame here or there showing an image, indistinct and alarming. And even more alarming were the shattered fragments of conversation, or of voices calling. Guttural Arabic shouts and sobs – the servants in their devotion had shown great bravery. They reached us as we fell half rolling down the sandhills, in a welter of bloody smears which had begun to print themselves on the new khaki drill of our uniforms. I suppose we were picked up, joints all loose like rag dolls, and transferred bodily to the canvas tarpaulin which allowed Drexel to examine us, but only perfunctorily for the firing had become nearer at hand, and the whole party was retiring in the utmost confusion, leaving half their possessions behind in the oasis. In a moment of lucidity I heard the Princess say, “God! my veil is covered in blood.” Sad and reproachful she sounded. And then Drexel saying, “Give me a chance; I want to examine them.” And the Prince suddenly petulant says, “He is a doctor, after all.” I was moved about moaning and thumped down on canvas; I heard the clean clicking of scissors and felt air where my clothes were being cut away from me. Then in a lower register a voice I could not identify said, “I think the other one’s gone.” There were groans of vexation and the curious whimpering noise of the servants – to echo the anxiety of their employers was a formality of good manners. They did not fear death as much as blood, black blood which oozed like the Nile, or spouted darkly from a severed artery, or inundated a whole section of the skin with wine-red smears. “There’s a field dressing station by the wire,” said Drexel. “We can clean them up a bit there; but for the rest.… what can one do?”
“I shall never forgive myself,” said the Prince in a low, hissing voice. “The whole thing is my fault.”
A smatter of Arabic voices now took up the tale, cajoling, excusing, explaining, or so it seemed. The sun seemed to be playing upon my very eyeballs. The pain was one continuous even throb now, with its own anaesthesia – when it reached a certain degree of intensity one fainted away for a moment.
Now the shuffle of car wheels and the grinding of gears; we were heading back for the wire. Somebody suggested whisky and water but Drexel said, “Not with such bleeding please.”
“I shall never forgive myself,” said the Prince.
A sympathetic group of voices hovered like an overturned beehive at the wire. We were treated with kindness and
despatch. The officer was disposed to crow over our mishaps, but the Prince bit his head off with a crisp, “That’s enough. Can’t you see we have two casualties? Where is the dressing station?”
Dust and whirring sand, and flies settling on blood in swarms. A needle, a drink of cold water, sleep.
I was not to know till later that Sam was dead.
Nor that the guns responsible for the accidental assault on us had been our own – Cypriot mule-borne mortars at target drill.
In the month-long agony of lying half insensible from shock – both the shock of my friend’s death, and the post-operational shock from all the spinal excavations I had had to undergo in the “cleaning-up” process – much else had happened. Cade had appeared from nowhere, to my dismay and consternation. Thanks to the Prince he had succeeded in getting himself transferred to the Egyptian mission and appointed to me as a batman. It was intended as a kindly gesture on the part of my hosts. How could they have divined the depression and horror I felt to wake and find, sitting at the end of the bed, the yellow weasel of my mother’s last days – her manservant and reader of the Bible, Cade? He sat there in expressionless silence, with an air of profound disapproval of everything – Egypt, the war, the Prince, my disposition— everything. It took less than nothing to start him off whining about the army, the Germans, the war, the peace, the weather. He wore his puritan life like a dead crow round his neck. Every day I was tempted to sack him, and yet … He was useful to me. He had once been a male nurse in an asylum and he knew how to wash and change me, and how to massage my splintered limbs. Also my eyes seemed to have been affected by my other tribulations, and I allowed him to read to me – the new correspondence which flowed out of Geneva: the letters of Constance, who by now was fully abreast of events, in possession of the truth. “So Constance doth make cowards of us all,” I heard Sam’s voice in my ear as Cade read her brave letters, so full of a contained hysteria, so free from bravura. “I am puzzled, for it has keeled me over: yet in a way it was to be expected. Aubrey, send me every scrap of detail, however horrible. I want to experience as deeply as possible this terrible yet perhaps most valuable experience. Did he speak of me, did he miss me? Why should he? He loved me, and was as free as a butterfly, his wings turned sunward. Here in the sleet and snow it all seems unreal – down there by the Nile. By the way, I thought for a long time your Sutcliffe was imaginary, but I find he is all too real. What could you have meant by that? I am treating his wife – standing in for a colleague on leave of absence. What a ménage! He asked to see me, I complied. He brought up the question of Freud’s sofa without my prompting him and I knew he was ‘your’ Sutcliffe. I told him it had arrived safely. We are friends now, close friends. He is a weird man. Strangely enough, the sort of man a woman could love. An old wart-hog with dandruff – so he says of himself. It has meant a lot just now, with Sam, having someone like this to talk to. Aubrey, please recover, please tell me all.”
Cade folded the letter with distaste and looked at the wallpaper with a mulish expression devoid of emotion. I was tempted to sigh. “If foreigners did not exist the English would not know who to patronise,” I said angrily, and I asked him to take a letter back to Constance. He seated himself at the desk with the portable typewriter before him, waiting, his pharaisical hatred of everything flowing out from him into the room in waves, in concentric circles. Horizontal, I drew a long breath and hesitated peevishly, for Constance had now made a coward of me: I simply could not tell her the truth. I would certainly report that he had died instantaneously with a bullet through the head. After all, what did she really want to hear? “His spine was shivered, his organs splattered with thorns of shrapnel, the works of his watch shot into his wrist? Nothing could stop the flow of blood, our blood. The car cushions were daubed, the canvas sheets on which we lay were smoking with flies. Rib-cage stove, thorax broken and bruised, ankles snapped like celery…” It was disgusting. Moreover, what was the point? Worst, it was selfish. It was not part of her loving, it was a medical therapy to test her professional composure. No, I could not tell her the truth.
Every day now the contrite Prince came to sit by my bed, for the most part with the Princess; but usually they separated these visitations. She came in the afternoon to have tea with me, he just before lunch to discuss any work problems which might have arisen in the morning, for we kept up the pretence that I was still in his employ, neither side wishing to let the relationship lapse.
For the rest, it was Cade who waited upon me now, who dressed and fed me; why did I tolerate this man whom I found so detestable? His insolence – examining the fillings in his back teeth with the aid of my shaving mirror, doing his hair endlessly in the bathroom with my combs and brushes! Sometimes he did not answer when I spoke but just looked at me, his head on one side, with a benign contempt. But when I raised my voice his assurance wilted and he became a slave again, cringing though still loitering. Was it because he had witnessed the death of my mother? Or because it was to her that he had read the Bible every night? Nowadays he kept up the same practice, spectacles on the end of his nose. His lips moved as he read.… He sat now before the machine, his head bowed, waiting. I simply could not bring myself to write to Constance through such an emissary. “That will be all, Cade,” I said, much to his surprise. “I am beginning to ache. I’ll record a letter later.” He looked at me keenly for a moment and then got up, shrugged, and removed the typewriter. They had loaned me a little magnetic recorder, and this meant I could have my recording typed out in the Red Cross offices and so keep it from the prying eyes of Cade. “You can go now,” I told him. “I am going to sleep for an hour.”
The unhappy conventions of grave sickness – I had not known them before; you become a burden to those who nurse you. The dressings and the drugs and the tiptoe people only emphasise what you would be only too glad to forget – your utter helplessness. The world closes in, one affronts it from a lowly horizontal position; those who help you you come to hate. For me at this stage the future had vanished as inexorably as the past – even if the war lasted a century it would not modify my condition. And how ignominious to be put out of action by one’s own side! Drexel came in sometimes in the afternoon to talk to me, and showed me the pictures he had taken on that fatal afternoon. The Bridge of Sighs, so-called, in the far distance, with Sam and me in the foreground turning to wave – within a minute of being blown up! I was glad of his presence, for he could examine and talk about my wound; Cade had simply held up a doubled fist and said, “You got an ’ole this size in your spine, sir.” Drexel for the first ten days assisted at night with the dressings and bindings. “You will have to be re-strung like an old piano, I am afraid; thank goodness we have a first-class orthopaedic unit with the Indian Div. But you will need at least two more ops which I don’t think can be performed here – so delicate; unless the Prince has some foreign talent up his sleeve. Ask him.” But the Prince had nobody except competent local doctors – Egyptians of his class were used to being treated in Zurich or Berlin for any malady graver than a common cold. I entered the dark tunnel of this illness with a tremendous depression, for my whole life seemed to have been compromised by it. Sometimes in the shuttered afternoons with the white ripples of the Nile reflected on the ceiling of the tower-room into which I had been moved for convenience, I awoke in the blaze of fever to see my valet’s face bend over me to take thermometer readings to log my progress. Then there came as well exhausted days of remission and coherence where I found I could speak and craved company. The Prince’s children came and played in my room sometimes: I tried to get them to pass me the holster on the mantelpiece which contained a service revolver – part of my Egyptian army kit. But they refused, and must perhaps have told someone, for when next Drexel came I noticed that he broke it and tilted out the cartridges. Neither of us said anything. “Different sorts of fever,” he said once, quietly. “My own is a girl with dark hair and black eyes.” I did not know it then, but the reference was to Sylvaine, the d
ark sister-ogre with whom we had travelled up the Nile. The information came from Affad, who also dropped in regularly with papers and presents of chocolates. “It’s a strange love trio,” he said, “quite worthy of Ancient Egypt. They have great plans of retiring from the world after the war and locking themselves up in their Provençal chateau.”
After the war! “Have you seen the news?” I asked him, and he replied, “Yes, I know.” How could anyone dream of an afterwar state? He lit a cigarette and quoted some Chinese sage: “In this life they are only dreaming they are awake.” Yes, it was true – we lived like parvenus, like vulgar provincials in the city of God. And now to be helpless in a foreign land, far from love and its familiarities, strapped down to an ironing-board with a pound of lead on each foot and the plaster sticking to the hairs of the skin in an agony of heat … I had been assured that it would not be for long though. I closed my eyes and saw Constance walking by the grey lake, a whole landscape of iron-black trees quivering under snow. I would have given anything to be walking beside her. “I took them to the oasis of Macabru – you should have come. There is a little sect of gnostics who meet there at this time of the year; they carry on ancient rites and beliefs. They admitted us, and we took a good deal of hashish and had visions.” He laughed softly. I asked him, “How would you define gnosticism?” but he only shook his head doubtfully and did not answer.
The coming of Theodora changed everything. She was the new nurse from the Greek Hospital in Alexandria who had been drafted to Cairo. The Prince without telling a soul had engaged her to live in and look after me. One morning she was simply there. She stood in the doorway divesting herself of her shawl and eyeing me a little sideways with her yellow goat’s eyes, as if she were listening to some invisible pulse-beat. She said good morning with complete assurance in French and Greek – her accent sounded very plebeian in both languages. Then she rolled up her sleeves and came towards me slowly, stealthily, as one boxer approaches another to deliver a blow. At this moment Cade came in, and turning to him she gave him a long yellow look and then pointed at the door, saying, “Moi massage le Monsieur. Sortez.” The manservant slunk out of the room without a backward glance.
The Avignon Quintet Page 65