Something to Answer For

by P. H. Newby

  “Yes?”

  “They told me at the hotel you’d gone out for a walk. You’re the only man I’ve seen so far with a bandage round his head.” Her accent was faintly American. “My name’s Leah Strauss.”

  He held his head on one side and stared at her. She was in her thirties and smiling. This was not unreasonable. He assumed he looked absurd in Elie’s cotton trousers. They were too big for him. There were big folds on each hip where he had tucked them into the snakeskin belt. And they were short of a length. As he wore sandals and no socks he must have showed quite a lot of naked, hairy foot.

  “My father is David Abravanel. He’s Mrs Khoury’s lawyer.”

  “Where d’you get your American accent?”

  “I married a soldier.” She patted the seat at her side. “You’re meeting my father at eleven. Why don’t you let me take you round town for a bit?”

  “You let me do the driving.”

  “O.K.,” she said and moved over. “If it makes you happy.”

  He had to sit with his knees up to his elbows and was glad of all the room his trousers gave him. Mrs Strauss had to sit with her knees up too and this gave Townrow an opportunity to admire them and the long calves in slick, transparent stockings and the little feet in their square-toed olive Italian shoes. Townrow liked her voice. It was throaty.

  “How did your accident happen?” she asked.

  “Wish I knew.”

  At the Casino Palace he turned left and drove slowly along the front until he found one of the parking lots that served the bathing huts. This time of day it was practically empty. As he nosed towards the shelter of some trees the dust came up like brown fire.

  “What’s this all about?” He switched off the engine and the green back of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the purple shadow under the breakwater, the huts and the empty sea floated brilliantly up through the murk. The heat was worse than he had remembered. It was only just after ten in the morning and already the air was being cut off. So he did not smoke. She did. It was an English cigarette.

  “Only to say I hope you’ll take Mme Khoury back to England. Will you?”

  “If your father’s her lawyer he’ll know I won’t. Why do you want to get rid of her?”

  “My mother is dead. Because of my marriage I have an American passport. My father has an Egyptian passport. He is an Egyptian national. We are, of course, Jewish.”

  “So?”

  “So he’s liable to be jailed and if he’s jailed he’d die because he has a bad heart. Anyway, he’s an old man and it is not nice to be jailed.”

  Townrow realised he was not after all being abducted with a view to his being beaten up, stripped and left naked in the desert once more. He did not even think this woman was going to start threatening him. Her story was too complicated, and she herself was too female and responsive. It was a fight not to touch her.

  “My father is loyal. He would not abandon Mme Khoury even though she has been sending gold into Israel. This is the rumour. Is it true? It makes her a dangerous woman for an Egyptian Jew to have as a friend.”

  “She told me she hadn’t got any friends.”

  Townrow had driven into this parking lot and stopped as far as possible from any other car or building so that no one could creep up unobserved. He had not planned this splendid view of the blue water. They might have been easing out into it. Beyond the horizon the sky was white and scrubbed but for two pencillings of smoke from remote steamers. But overhead it had turned to as heavy a blue as the water itself and in his mind’s eye Townrow could see sailors emerging from it, bearded like prophets.

  “You’ve got to remember that Egypt is at war with Israel. From the Egyptian point of view this smuggling is——”

  “What smuggling?”

  “You were with her, weren’t you? There was an Englishman on that boat.”

  “An Englishman on what boat?” asked Townrow. “And what makes you think I’m an Englishman?”

  “If you don’t want to tell me.”

  “She hasn’t smuggled any gold. It’s ridiculous. You can forget it.”

  He couldn’t remember Mrs K in the boat, just Elie and himself. He opened the door of the car and struggled to put his feet to the ground. One way of checking on the passage of time would be to look at the date stamped in his passport by the Immigration Officer at Cairo Airport and comparing it with the date in that day’s paper. But he still hadn’t recovered his passport. He would have to collect it from the hotel reception before leaving, if he did leave.

  “Where are you going?” The woman’s voice was nearly lost in the hiss of the palm fronds and breaking waves. “I just think you ought to take Mme Khoury to England if you are her friend.”

  “Did you ever see a soldier fall off a horse hereabouts some years back?”

  “A soldier fall off a——”

  She was luscious in the same sort of way, but silly with it. Maybe if he’d been a Port Said Jewess he’d be silly with listening to rumours too. A slice of melon lay in the sun coated with flies. Townrow gave it a kick and walked off towards the breakwater. He stuck his hands in his trouser pockets and kicked the ridged sand. A boat with a black funnel and a yellow ring near the top was sliding north on the other side of the breakwater and by the time he reached the top it was a quarter of a mile or so out to sea, sitting on a white scut of water.

  He wanted to point his mind at something.

  Looking south, he could see the main basin with its shipping, an anchored P. and O. liner, a French gunboat, a low-lying freighter flying the Turkish flag and swinging on a chain to turn into the Canal Company Workshops (presumably Nasser’s Workshops now) on the other side of the Canal. He could see down to the islands and to Port Fouad where he used to go swimming at the Club and eat bacon and eggs afterwards. Close at hand was the fishermen’s quay and half a dozen single-sailed clumsy boats. There was no other place the voyage to Lebanon could have started from.

  Townrow descended the stone steps. These boats had eyes painted on their prows. In the first boat a boy was asleep on a heap of nets. A boy was three-quarters of the way up the mast of the second, drawing the sail in with his heels and lashing it. There were baskets and a couple of rotten mullet in the third. Nobody recognised Townrow, nobody spoke to him, although a brown, knotted old man, wearing nothing but his white drawers and a turn of cloth round his head watched every move he made.

  A light flashed at the end of the east breakwater. It was too far away to make out the details with his one eye, but activity of some sort or other was going on at the gun emplacement. There was another battery at the end of the west breakwater. Townrow pointed his mind at the international situation. What happened when the British Mediterranean Fleet sailed in? He saw he stood a chance of being hit over the head again for two quite separate and unrelated reasons. The first of them, the Canal, he had no strong feelings about. If he had been an Egyptian he would not have wanted to take it over. He would have wanted it filled in. Israel, though, pulled at him because he liked Jewish women. If he was picked up for trading with Israel and if they interrogated him non-stop for three days and nights he would say that he liked Jewish women and to that extent had to admit being involved.

  Now, this woman was Jewish.

  “You are not involved,” he could imagine that Coptic policeman saying. “You are deeply implicated. Do you not think it strange you wanted to ferry Mr Elie Khoury out of the country with as much of his personal treasure as you could lay hands on? Is it possible you killed Mr Khoury? Can it be that you are an Israeli agent? Perhaps you are Jewish yourself?”

  If she had not talked about the boat he would have been sitting in the car with her still.

  Townrow climbed back to the street. It was twenty to eleven by the clock in the window of Cox and King’s Office. An armoured car followed by three truckloads of troops in steel helmets rattled down towards the Customs House. There was no time to return to the hotel before going to Mrs K’s. It was on the cards men were waiti
ng to arrest him at either place, at the Eastern Exchange for being an Englishman who had helped provoke the Egyptian Government into assuming control of the Canal; and at Mrs Khoury’s flat because he was Jewish.

  He wondered if that Jewish woman was still waiting.

  If arrested he would want to know if the police had ever seen a Jew with a foreskin and they would reply there was no end to Israeli ingenuity. Townrow would not mind. He’d settle for being Jewish. The women alone made it worthwhile. The hard case over his heart melted at the thought of the types he had known: fair haired, frosty and fleshy Jewesses with grandparents in Russia, an unusual straw-coloured woman from Ferrara, a dark-haired, little-mouthed, small-voiced harvest mouse of a woman whose family came from Lithuania when it still had forests. He could not even remember their names. By them he wanted to be thought well of as they emerged breast-high, and what breasts, from their alien corn.

  He was pro-Semitic. You had to be pro-Semitic when you remembered what the Nazis had done. But, to be honest, his attitude had as much to do with a girl as it did with politics. She worked at the Reception Desk at the Union Jack Club in the Waterloo Road and turned out to be Jewish, a very lively girl with a little round head and a lot of curly brown hair in a style that didn’t come naturally to it. They went dancing once or twice. He put his fingers through her hair and said there was so much of it, bunched up on her neck, some people might think it was a wig. She gave Townrow the feeling they had always known each other. She was very gay. She told him about her family. He told her things about his family he had never told anyone else, about his father being such a drunk, for example, and even when he tried to put his hand up her skirt she wasn’t outraged or frigid, she was just physically very strong and pushed him right back against the door of the cab they happened to be riding in. She told him he was a man and he wasn’t to be ashamed of his sexuality, it was perfectly natural. She also said she could not understand how it was possible to believe another human being came back from the dead and you had to worship him as God. He couldn’t remember her name. This happened on leave in, it must have been’44.

  Not the sort of thing he would have wanted to tell that Israeli in Rome Airport, not during the row they had. Another time he might. He could quite easily see himself marrying one of these women, and you couldn’t say fairer than that. You couldn’t be anti-Semitic and want to marry a Jewish woman. It could happen to any Englishman. It could happen to anybody in the Government. There were Jews in the Government, weren’t there? That was what that Israeli, never having been in Britain, (at least, only in transit, that was for sure) would not understand. There were Jews in the B.B.C. Must be. You couldn’t see them being party to keeping quiet about those trains.

  There was nothing to be party to. You couldn’t see Churchill and Attlee and Eden and Macmillan and that lot turning a blind eye to the Jews being massacred. All governments stink a bit. The Greek had been right about that. There were some dirty deals, no doubt. But the British system was too open for anything really shameful. They shot the Irish martyrs but the ghosts walked. Ireland was the exception. It was the dark stain, forty years ago, but the British had no stomach for it now.

  The Israeli in Rome couldn’t have made a bigger mistake, picking him, of all people, for this sick talk. He could have been a Jew himself and worn a little cap and a shawl. What was an Irishman but a sort of Jew?

  If Townrow ever ran into that Israeli again he would have to say that even he, an Irishman, knew the British would have warned the Hungarian Jews in’42. Frankly, he reckoned they did. They must have.

  Townrow walked on, not thinking about what he wanted to think about.

  *

  He was ten minutes late and had the feeling he was interrupting a row. Mrs K did not even look round. She was sitting at a writing table in the corner with a business ledger open in front of her. A reading lamp was switched on because although the windows and door to the balcony were wide open to admit air the shutters were closed to keep out the sun.

  She examined a piece of paper and began writing in the ledger. “This is Mr Abravanel. He’s a lawyer. Mr Townrow, from England, the only friend I have.”

  Abravanel stood so close to the shutters that slivers of horizontal brightness jumped up and down on his dark suit as he moved. They seemed to break like spray. He was old. He had grey coconut matting hair, dark glasses and narrow, shrugging shoulders. Abravanel, too, did not look at Townrow, but went on talking to Mrs K rather sadly, each sentence ending with a lulling cadence and a sigh. “You have become a silly old woman, Hah! Illusions are for the young. Aah! People of our age should look at life for what it is. Hmm! Elie was old and died. Nobody attacked him. Nobody murdered him. Can’t a man die of natural causes any more? Hhh! There is enough malice in the world without inventing it. But there!” For the first time he looked at Townrow. He extended his right hand and came some paces across the room, tut-tutting at the sight of Townrow’s bandage. At close quarters he revealed too much skin about his cheeks and throat, as though at one time he had been much fatter. “I suppose we need enemies as plants need the light,” he said.

  To grasp his hand was like holding a bundle of pencils. “I trust you are not suffering. Mrs Khoury told me of your——”

  “I just met your daughter.”

  “Elie often spoke of you. Surprising we never met when you were here before. He was fond of you. He admired you. Strange. I mean it was strange because it was French culture that interested him. I was the Anglophile. And yet Elie it was who married an English wife and had an English friend. My wife was of very good family but she never spoke a word of English, only Arabic, Italian and French. So you have met Leah. You know what? She married an American with father and mother in Livorno, a good Jewish family, but now he has gone depressive in Cleveland and he has drugs and shock treatment and douches. She told you all this? They spent all their money. She was not eating.”

  “Where are the deeds to the island?” Mrs K called out. She had turned in her chair and was jabbing her fountain pen in Abravanel’s direction.

  “They don’t exist.” Abravanel went on looking into Townrow’s face and talking gently. “It wasn’t Elie’s island.”

  “That’s how he talked about it.”

  “In any case it is worth very little. It was a place to shoot duck. All that part of the lake belongs to the Antiquities Department. You know that? There is a pillar lying in the mud.”

  “Elie was always talking of sinking a well. Would he have talked like that if he didn’t own it?”

  “Certainly. He was very romantic. Only a romantic would talk of sinking a well in a marsh.”

  “Before we go any farther,” Mrs K said to Townrow, “I want you to lie down on that settee with your head on a cushion. I must look at that eye of yours.”

  The little Berber had brought coffee and glasses of water but Mrs K told him to take the tray away again and bring a bowl and some hot water. From a drawer in her desk she produced a pack of cotton wool and a bottle.

  “I was going back to the clinic this evening,” said Townrow.

  “In this climate I’ve seen wounds go gangrenous in minutes.”

  Townrow realised the blood was pumping harder than usual on that side of his face anyway. Why shouldn’t he take the weight off his neck? The blood pumped so hard he could almost hear it forcing the stitching apart. The pain went right round to the other side of his head, to a point just over his right ear. He lay down on the settee, putting his head on the pillow. Mrs K switched on a reading lamp some three feet from his eyes and he had to close them. He could feel the heat playing on his face. Normally he would not have been sensitive to it. Of that he felt sure.

  While she unwound the bandage she supported the back of his head. But for the stabs of pain he might have fallen asleep. He gazed dreamily through the blood of his closed lids as she stripped off the plaster and removed the dressing. He fell through the warm, red silence that followed.

  “What’s tha
t?’ His cheek had chilled.

  “Alcohol.” She was cleaning the wound. He heard the snip of scissors.

  “Tch! Tch! Tch!” Mr Abravanel made sympathetic clucks.

  “It’s clean. It will heal.” Mrs K sounded disappointed. “There!” He could hear the opening of a tin box and the rustle of paper. “You remember the island, don’t you, Jack?”

  She must be talking about that place out in Lake Manzala. Elie picked him up in a taxi, just the once, at the dock gates and they went straight down past the Municipal Nursery Gardens to the Manzala Canal basin with a couple of straw paniers containing flaps of bread, goat cheese, cold roast chicken, grapes and beer. Two hours later the motor-boat landed them on a sandy atoll with a single palm tree. A mile or so away you could see the lake steamer following the channel to Matarieh. Elie said that if you followed the channel you could get right through to Damietta. But the lake was mostly marsh. There were a lot of ibis and duck. Flies came up from the mud in clouds. Elie showed him a block of granite covered with hieroglyphs. They sat in the shadow of a mud wall which was all that remained of a building. Their pilot slept with one naked foot resting on the gunwale. Every half hour or so a duck whirred up from the reed beds.

  “It was a real rest cure out there,” he said, “or it would have been if it wasn’t for the flies.” He really could not remember Elie saying anything about the island being his. It would have seemed unlikely. If the lake was lower than the Mediterranean as some people said the sea would flow in one day. Perhaps you could have built the island up. Now Townrow came to think of it they had passed other, bigger islands with houses on them.

  “Don’t know what you mean,” Mrs K scolded, “saying Elie died naturally. There was a bruise on the back of his neck. It was broken just as if he’d been hanged. This bruise went down to his shoulder blades.”