by P. H. Newby
“No, it’s wrong.” She went on hissing.
She brought an elbow back smartly and struck him in the paunch. She seemed all elbows, shoulder blades and heels. It was like trying to make love to a dough-mixing machine. She wanted it, didn’t she, otherwise why all this hissing and moaning? She was like a machine in heat. Townrow felt a rage so violent the thought sparked he might even be driven to kill her. He was being shut out of all that was left to him of bliss by her stupid resistance. He could not understand why she fought. Her body did not want to fight. The hissing was voluptuous. If only he could push past the barricade of knees and elbows he would fall into a calm tenderness. Her will said no.
“Get out. It’s wrong. It’s cruel. It’s——” as he waited for the word he could hear her heart thud and the tips of his fingers slip on her greasy skin—“it’s, oh it’s so selfish and merciless. Rob, poor boy, poor Rob.”
The night crackled like a stroked cat. The night was precisely what Townrow wanted to forget. He was not going to wait for whatever hell drove out of the sea. He was so angry he no longer wanted any calm tenderness she had to offer; he just wanted to make his own particular hell now, and if brushing that poor bastard Rob out of the way was how to do it, then out of the way Rob would be brushed, and done down, and his head with a cruel boot shoved beneath the shitty surface.
She switched on the bedside lamp.
“Look! Bed bugs.”
Townrow released her and sat up. A mahogany-coloured bead balanced on her naked shoulder. He brought his thumb down on it and striped her skin with blood. He squashed another on his thigh. Leah turned over the pillow. Two huge bed bugs and a crowd of little ones rolled like rusty raindrops only to be killed as they were caught.
The window shook. A violent wind might have sprung up. But no, there was an immediate concussion that rocked the whole building. Judging by the sound of aircraft and the hiss before each explosion Townrow reckoned the R.A.F. was rocketing the beach defences. That was the direction the row was coming from. But he and Leah were concentrating on the bed bugs. They stank like excrement and bled like wounds.
The light went out though neither of them touched it and the window showed how the sky had paled.
“It’s horrible. We’ve never had bugs in this house.”
Leah was standing by the bed brushing herself with her hands. “You never saw a bug in the house when my mother was alive.”
The town rocked. This was no ordinary bombardment. The pale sky blanched and broke out in a worried pencilling of little clouds. The sun pushed up out of Asia to meet this jerky incandescence from the west. Townrow wanted to rush up to the roof as he was, naked, dragging Leah with him, their skin laced with blood.
“What is it? What are they doing?” She was so frightened she came round and hammered him with her knuckles.
“Smashing the town up, I guess.”
Townrow was frightened too. They were not just naked man and woman walking about in a top-floor bedroom, stained with crushed bed bugs, and reeking of unassuaged lust. He was slack. She was slack. The bone had gone. They were stripped down to that defencelessness of body and spirit they seemed transparent to one another. They could have walked through each other. They were ghosts. The morning came up and they faded.
Townrow slipped her dressing gown on, not for seemliness but for warmth, and went up to the roof. There seemed to be no planes about but the bombardment was so continuous and violent he could feel the shock waves bursting from the roots of the building and striking at him through the air. Gusts of wind broke in from the north. He could not see the sea. The northern sky opened and shut. He recognised the familiar squeal of shells. Even in the open air the stench of the bed bugs still clung to him. If he lived he would take a bath. Scent I That was something he had never gone for, not even an after-shave. But he would. They produced scent for men now. If he came out of this he would find a good scent and wear it. A man ought to smell nice.
The Fleet must be out there, lobbing shells in from over the horizon. None seemed to be falling in the town. They were sorting out the beach defences. Next thing the troops would be coming ashore. When his particular boat set sail who would see to it he smelled sweet? You could not leave everything to wind and salt water.
There was enough of a parapet to shelter him from the wind. He squatted there, in the red and blue silk that covered him feet and all, with his face turned to the east and south so that the sun would hit him. Very gently, the cold pencillings of cloud began to rust and flake off. There was a steady drizzle of red dust out there. He wanted heat. No woman would ever warm him again, that was sure. If the British bombed Egypt the only heat he was entitled to was from the sun. He could never trust a woman like he could trust the sun.
From the street below came the clatter of boots. There was shouting and small arms fire. Townrow listened intently, telling himself the sounds were caused by not what you might think. Down there were no big insects. There were no huge blackbeetles in mountains of crisp straw. They were real, frightened men, running in heavily-nailed boots, soldiers. They were running up from the beach, as he would have run had he been in their place. He stood up and looked over the parapet. A self-propelled gun was moving across the square. It charged between the palm trees, crushing ornamental railings, rubbish baskets and a white seat. It turned awkwardly and knocked one wall out of a kiosk where, Townrow remembered, the gardener kept a few tools and lay on a canvas bed smoking hashish.
Townrow imagined Amin coming out to join him on the roof.
“All she wanted to talk about,” he found himself saying to Amin, “was her bloody husband. Did she ever tell you what his name was? Poor twit. No, I’m really sorry for him.”
He was alone on that roof, of course. Amin ran towards the paras and one of them turned and shot him down without giving the matter a lot of thought. Perhaps that was just what Amin wanted. Townrow could not imagine Amin running up from the beach like those soldiers. He would have sat in a beach hut with his little gun waiting for somebody to come along and pick him off.
“Don’t sneer at me,” Townrow told him, “just because I tell you I’m sorry for her husband. D’you think I’ve got no feelings. This might happen to any man. You know that? If I was married I reckon it could happen to me, some boozed, fornicating screw having her when my back was turned. And how should I feel?”
Amin was not there and Townrow knew he was dead. “Amin,” Townrow imagined himself saying, “the last time we were in bed together I didn’t have her. I tried, but she wouldn’t let me. I could go to her husband and say with a clear conscience, ‘You know what, Rob, the last time I was in bed with your wife we didn’t actually do it.’ And I’m glad. It’s a small thing, but it’s a beginning. Can you imagine a man being actually glad about a failure like that? Anybody would think fornication was some sort of crime.”
Or gunning down a man like Amin, you’d think that was some sort of crime.
The dawn kept on widening in lurid amazement. The pounding of the beaches had been going on so long the silence, when it came, would hurt. Smoke went up. The huts burned. He could not actually see them but what else could it be but the huts?
Bombing the guts out of Egypt, you’d think that was some sort of crime the way he was happy and sickened not to be involved in it. Back home there must be a lot of people who could have been curious to see him vomiting down the front of that blue and red silk dressing gown. No that was too much to expect. They would not have been curious. They would have said vomiting was the way terror took hold of some people.
He wiped the back of his hand across his lips and stood up. He stood quietly looking north. He was steady. His limbs did not tremble. Nothing to be afraid of. This was a precision bombardment. It might be the Royal Tournament at Earl’s Court for all the harm it threatened. He had a fine grandstand view. Nothing to make a man puke but the smell of crushed bed bugs. Nevertheless he knew he was climbing up out of some dizzy pit with feelings easily mistaken for te
rror.
He went down into the flat, found no sign of Leah or her father, so went into the bathroom and took a shower. There was no towel so he tried to dry himself with the dressing gown but it just skidded over him. He found a can of talcum powder and dusted himself. As he came out of the bathroom the bombardment stopped and he put on his socks, his pants, his shirt, in the kind of embarrassed silence that might follow some grotesque vulgarity in the wrong company.
Leah was where he might have expected, in the first place, to find her. She was in her father’s room. It was shuttered and the only light came from a weak bulb over the mirror on his dressing table.
The old chap was lying in bed, very still with his eyes closed, and Leah was standing at his side looking down at him. She was wearing slippers and another dressing gown. Her hair was all over the place and Townrow thought she looked pretty savage.
“I’ve come to apologise,” he said. “I looked all over. Where were you?”
Leah made no answer. She drew the sheet over her father’s face, so Townrow supposed he was dead. Momentarily he was stopped in what he intended to say. Abravanel’s death perplexed him. It came at a moment when it was impossible to give one’s mind to it. He would have liked it postponed. In the circumstances the best he could do was to defer making any sort of comment, even expressing sympathy.
“Sorry about what happened in the night.” Even Townrow knew this was a ludicrous thing to say at such a moment. But he did not care what impression he made. He was fighting for his life, or what seemed like his life.
“You stopped me from doing something that shouldn’t be done. Well, you’ve got to make a start, haven’t you? I mean you’ve got to start with yourself. That’s all you know about. So you’ve got to start patiently putting one foot right and another foot right. That’s what I’m thanking you for.”
To Townrow it seemed he had made a statement of such magnificence it was surprising she did not respond with at least a smile. Perhaps she had not understood. True, her father dying like that, he had not timed it well. But it was the only time he had. Odd she did not look at his face more carefully. The expression might have said more than words, but no doubt that single weak bulb threw shadows.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s terrible for you. But are you sure he’s not in some sort of coma? You want a doctor.”
She ignored him so he went and removed the sheet from Abravanel’s face. She had closed the eyes. The cheek was like cardboard when Townrow touched it. The skin was so blue he must have been dead for hours. Townrow replaced the sheet. Leah went round the room picking up small objects of value, a silver box, a photograph of a woman framed in what looked like gold, a watch, rings, even money, and dropping them into a basket. Abruptly she sat down at the dressing table and studied her face in the mirror, putting her hands up to her cheeks, then lifting and tidying her hair with the tips of her fingers. Her face had sharpened. The expression was wild.
“I love you,” he said, “and now I’m trying to break it all up.”
She turned in the chair. “You what?”
“Yeah, that’s right I mean it. So far as I’m concerned wherever you’ll be, that’s the centre.”
She turned away again and he saw she was watching him in the mirror. She picked up her father’s silver-backed hair brushes and handed them to him. “I’d like you to have these. I think my father would have liked you to take something.”
“Thank you.” He was still holding them and examining the design of bearded faces and leaves when she walked out of the room across the hall and into her own bedroom where, because she had left the door wide open, he could see her drag an enormous black suitcase out from behind a wardrobe. She had it open by the side of the bed and was throwing her clothes into it. The first garment to go in was a fur coat he had not seen before. It was a smoky brown; musquash, he thought, the sort of thing that would set you back eight hundred guineas at Swears and Wells. Then suits, stockings, underclothes. She was just throwing them in. She was a poor packer.
“Would you like me to phone for the doctor?”
“Sure! You do that.” She did not stop for a moment. He half expected her to say, “Phone for a doctor in this bombardment?” Because all the time they had been talking, or not talking but reacting silently and trying to catch up with what was going on, the shells had been falling on the beach not much more than half a mile away. “Are you crazy? You expect Catafago to turn out at a time like this?”
Nothing of the sort. Once he had contacted the doctor she would want him to make the funeral arrangements, and as these could be expected to go through quickly in that climate, tomorrow at the latest, Townrow could see them following the hearse through a battlefield. He dialled Catafago’s number but although he hung on for five minutes by that French clock supported by a gilt cherub there was no reply. Townrow went and asked Leah whether he could make her some coffee.
“Sure! You do that,” she said, still throwing clothes into the black suitcase.
Townrow stood looking at her. He wanted to look at her with the eyes of some unsympathetic stranger, somebody who would notice the lines, and the undeniable tiny hairs she had at the corners of her mouth, all the bad, ugly qualities, the slightly rounded shoulders for example. He wanted to see her as somebody quite ordinary he did not need to love. It was an effort. He had to stick at it.
*
Townrow was on his way to Mrs K’s some time after the shelling stopped when a voice that was unmistakably English hit him from an alley. Bullets whined about the streets. Now and again a man in army boots and one of those nightgown gallabiehs clumped past. Townrow had the idea a lot of Egyptian soldiers were disguising themselves as civilians. As genuine civilians, boys of about fifteen or sixteen were running about with old Czech automatic rifles, there was a good chance of a general shoot-up when the British arrived. You would not be able to blame them for potting at anyone in a nightshirt who moved. There was a strong smell of burning rubber. Townrow was on his way to Mrs K partly because there had been no reply when he had phoned her and Elie would have wanted him to check she was all right; and partly, the mood he was in, he wanted to be sure anything Amin would have dared he would dare too. To be out on the streets was not so much dangerous as lunatic.
“Hey! I want a word with you.”
Townrow turned his head and saw this Englishman. He was standing in an open doorway. He wore brown boots, a pair of tight cavalry twill trousers held up by a pair of scarlet braces, a lemon-coloured shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a cigar in his right hand. Obviously, he had just taken it out of his mouth to shout. The real abnormality was the eyes. They protruded hideously. Townrow recognised him at once. Faint. Those bulging eyes gave the man an expression of perpetual amazement. Only by gaping, as he did now, could he convey anything approaching incredulity. “You bloody fraud,” he said, “giving yourself out as my old friend Captain Ferris. I was in Le Havre three weeks ago. He said he’d never been in Port Said. Andrée confirmed it. What’s more, you don’t even look like him, not very much anyway.”
Somebody had a machine gun at the top of one of the buildings on the other side of the open-air cinema and seemed to be testing it. Sandbags nearly blocked some of the windows. Rifles stuck out through the remaining gaps. During the night the place had been turned into a crude fortress. So far as Townrow could tell the bullets smacking into some large wooden doors about twenty feet away from him came from that top floor.
He stepped into the alley to be out of the line of fire.
“I remember you,” he said. “You chose a bad time to turn up again, Faint.”
“Got to hand it to you. I was taken in. Captain Ferris, I said, ex-War Graves Commission. You’re not half the man.” Faint was colouring with anger. “You’re just a common, bloody scrounger. You didn’t think I’d turn up again, did you? Let me tell you I’m through Port Said three times a year, regular as clockwork. I thought there was something fishy. While the ship was discharging I went ov
er to Le Havre. I went to the Café-Bar de l’Europe and Captain Ferris laughed, he said, Port Said? No, I haven’t been in Port Said. I told him about you and he said I was lucky to get away with losing what I did. That’s not the point. “I hate a liar.” Faint cut the air with his left hand so vehemently that his heels clicked. He was in a shocking temper. I hate deception. What the hell’ve I ever done to you you should want to pitch me that bloody yarn?”
“I pitched you no yarn. Anyway, times have changed.”
Townrow could not be absolutely sure he had not told this fool he was Captain Ferris of the Café-Bar de l’Europe but he was in no mood for compromise. “You’re crazy to wear braces that colour. One of the amateur marksmen will pick you off just for the fun of it. I wonder you’re not wearing a Union Jack, Maybe they’ll think you are wearing a Union Jack. That’s fine when the British land but until then you’d be safer in one of these nightshirts.”
Small arms fire was breaking out all over. Townrow supposed he was a bit crazy himself. He had not slept. He did not really know what was happening. He was not to cuckold a madman and he was to disbelieve all information received. He would tell the truth. He remembered perfectly well finding Leah again at the Greek Sailing Club. He would not embezzle the Disaster Fund. No, he did not know why the B.B.C. failed to broadcast warnings about those death trains. In future he could only answer for himself and by God he was going to see it was a simple answer.
“What’s your name?” Faint put the cigar back in his mouth and waited. Real Havana, Townrow remembered, bought in Bahrein. He had boxes and boxes of them. Faint ignored the battle and cared for nothing but getting to the bottom of this mystery about Townrow’s identity. True, he had not seen Amin shot. He had been through no experience like that. But he was tough and you had to admire him. He was concentrating on what really interested him. No, this did not include the shooting.