by P. H. Newby
“I’ve a bloody good mind to report you to the British Consul,” said Faint. “What sort of a layabout are you? Who are you?”
“It’s a long story. If you want me to tell it why don’t you ask me in? You staying here.”
“I’ve got a friend who puts me up.”
Smoke drifted south in such opaque clouds it cast shadows. The sun was high enough for these shadows to be sharp. The smell of burning rubber was stronger. To the north enormous quantities of brittle paper were seemingly being crushed. A grotesque, exaggerated groaning like timbers under strain made the ground tremble. As yet there were no invading troops in view but there was so much shooting going on all round Townrow could only think the Egyptians were settling old scores among themselves.
“You understand Arabic?” he asked Faint.
“Course I bloody don’t.”
A van with a loudspeaker was touring in the neighbourhood.
“Who are you?” Faint shouted explosively.
“Well, I was born of a patriotic Irishwoman and an Englishman. He was just stupid, I guess. Anyway, she was a schoolteacher but the important thing about her——”
An explosion followed immediately by the tinkle of breaking glass threw Townrow against the wall. He yelped with pain.
“I’m here on holiday,” he said, “in a manner of speaking.”
“I don’t want to know your life history. Don’t be so literal minded.”
“I’ve got to tell you, Faint. Look, my mother wanted me to be a parson. Not surprising for an Irishwoman, eh? I said parson not priest. She was protestant, so you know I actually went to college. At the end of my first year——”
“Don’t want to know this. You owe me fifty quid. I want ’em back. Now.”
“Fifty quid?”
“Spun me a yarn. You are not Captain Ferris. You’re a bloody fraud. To think I’ve waited until middle age to be conned by a broken-down ponce. Fifty quid. Now, do you hand it over?”
“I haven’t got fifty quid, Faint. I just want to tell you about my life.”
“What goes on out there?” Faint spoke with irritation and waved his cigar in the general direction of what now seemed the centre of the battle. “You’d better come in. If you haven’t got fifty quid I want some sort of security for it. What the hell goes on?” He came out and stood by Townrow’s side. They looked down the street to a crossroads where a tank had taken up position, and was using its machine gun, firing straight ahead. Townrow recognised a British Centurion. Snipers from windows, parapets and balconies were concentrating their fire on the Centurion which responded by lifting its cannon preparatory, Townrow guessed, to blowing the top off one of those blocks of flats. “They’re taking their time,” Faint complained. “No sense of urgency. The bloody wogs are filling the Canal with boats loaded with concrete. It’ll be years before we get it clear. Just look at that dam’ tank! Anybody’d think they were paid by the hour.”
Townrow knew he hadn’t borrowed fifty quid from Faint. He would surely have had something to show for fifty pounds. Mrs K had kept him going. If it hadn’t been for her he would have been spent out long ago. Fifty pounds from Faint? No. He might have lost it, of course. A lot of ways fifty quid could disappear. If you really considered the situation coldly who was he, Townrow, to deny Faint had given him fifty pounds? It came back to this question Faint asked. Who was he? Did he know enough about himself to be sure Faint was the crook and not he? He would play safe. O.K. He would get fifty pounds somehow and hand it all over to Faint without question. It would be the only way of ensuring his own touching, simple-minded, contemptible innocence. Why just fifty quid? Faint ought to get interest. He’d give the bugger fifty-two pounds ten. Or, in Egyptian currency, fifty-two pounds, fifty piastres. This did not allow for the difference in value between the pound sterling and the Egyptian pound. You had to draw the line short of complete acceptance of what you were responsible for. If Faint had sterling in mind, then sterling he would be paid, or its equivalent; say fifty-two Egyptian pounds, to be on the safe side.
“I’ve got a friend in the next block. She’ll lend it to me.”
“I don’t care where you get the money from. Next block which way?”
“Midan el Zaher.”
“I’m not walking round there with you. Get shot. Tell you what, we can nip over the roof.”
“What is this place?” asked Townrow as they climbed the flights of stone stairs. It was one of the older buildings, stinking, and without a lift.
“Sort of whore house.” Faint stopped to stub out his cigar on the sole of his boot. A big woman in a dressing gown with sagging cheeks and boot-polish black hair came out of a door as they passed and Faint said, “We’ll be back in five minutes. Get some breakfast on, there’s a love, I’m peckish.”
From the roof they could see over the intervening blocks to the beach. They could not see the whole beach because except due north these intervening blocks were too high. They saw perhaps a hundred yards strip. The beach huts were flaming under a purple and green pall of smoke. Tanks were rolling on to the Corniche road like woodlice on an old plank. To the east there was a glimpse of a Centurion rolling down the waterfront road towards Simon Arzt’s.
“That’s my ship.” Faint pointed to a tanker lying out in the Roads. The sun was at just the angle to set that strip of water alight all the way across to Port Fouad and the various ships hung in the dazzle. “Who is this friend, anyway, who’s going to lend you fifty quid? It’s not that bloody insulting old woman is it? Captain’s daughter, my arse! I’ve seen that type. That’s where we’re going to get across. Good jump, isn’t it?”
If it had not been for the parapets there would have been no problem. Anybody could clear eight feet if there was room to run at it. The parapets would not permit this. It was a standing jump from one to the other. In between was a drop of perhaps eighty feet.
“Unless I get this money within the next five minutes I’m not going to get it at all.” Faint was using the edge of his hand like a meat cleaver. He struck off a portion of air and knocked it in Townrow’s direction as representing five minutes. “Fifty quid,” he said and struck off another portion to represent that too. The sun shining into his eyes made them seem bigger than ever. They were prominent now, like the eyes of some hunted fish, swivelling back, Townrow could have sworn, to see what monster was in pursuit. His scarlet braces were strips of brilliance. He was breathing heavily from the exertion of struggling up ten flights of stairs. “It’s no good you thinking you’re going to give me the slip. All this bloody hoo-ha, you think you can give me the slip. If I let you get away I might never see you again. Fifty quid’s a lot of money. Wouldn’t have lent it to anybody but the Captain. Ought to have seen his face. ‘Port Said?’ he said, and laughed. Well, go on! Jump, you bugger!”
Townrow shook his head. “I wouldn’t make it.”
Faint immediately climbed on to the parapet and stood there. It was about a foot wide so there was plenty to stand on. Even so, height could have meant nothing to him. Townrow saw him, brilliantly lit by the sun, so brilliantly that he looked artificial, a dummy, against the billowing back of the northern sky. There was so much shooting going on, there were so many men with guns on other rooftops, Townrow could not know from which direction the shot actually came and plucked Faint off that parapet. All he heard was Faint’s skull exploding with a wet plop and feel the hot blood splash across his face. He was amazed there was so much blood immediately available. Faint’s body pitched out and down. Townrow saw the braces receding, almost luminous in the gloom down there, a bloody St Andrew’s Cross, getting smaller and stopping small.
Townrow lay down behind the parapet and closed his eyes. The blood thickened on his face. He was acquiring a mask.
What he had to do was immediately obvious. Mrs K would cough up the fifty-two Egyptian pounds without question. At the first opportunity he would go down to the alley and load Faint on to that fruit barrow he had noticed out of the corner
of his eyes, even as they had been fixed on those red braces. Taking the fifty-two pounds he would then set off with the barrow to the water front. Somehow he would find means of taking Faint out to the tanker. Townrow would then say to the Captain, “I owed this man fifty pounds sterling, so here’s fifty-two Egyptian.”
And the Captain would say, “You’re covered with blood man. Go and wash it off.”
“I tell you I owed this man fifty-two Egyptian quid.”
“O.K.” the Captain would say. “Now you can wash the blood off.”
In a manner of speaking he had been washed by this man’s blood. It was quite unlike the last time. For one thing he had immediately run down to the street and actually felt where the neck was broken. That was an altogether more confusing death. Did that other man fall or was he pushed? Faint had gone out, perfectly straightforward, like Amin. They had not been murdered, they had not died accidentally, they had been sacrificed.
And Elie?
He still could not get it out of his head that he was to sail out of Port Said with Elie in one of those fishing boats. Elie would tell him what a fool he was. The fifty quid would mean nothing. You really had to get out of the world, get away, to an island. You couldn’t answer for anybody but yourself and only then if you were alone. Townrow was speaking to Leah. Even as he ran his hand over her naked flank he said how sorry he was, sweet, they were breaking up but seeing what a humped-back trot she was could anybody blame him. No, he was lying again.
*
During the battle Townrow and Mrs K were in the middle of her big sitting room, with the doors and windows open, drinking coffee and talking about, among other things, religion. Mrs K said that if she took it up seriously it would be Spiritualism. It must have been in the ’twenties her sister, she was dead now, took her to a meeting in Finsbury Park and when the service was over, quite a nice, simple service with Bible readings, one of the assistants said that if she went into the Minister’s room he would have a special message for her. It turned out to be from Mrs K’s first husband, killed in the war.
“What it actually was I won’t tell you,” said Mrs K, “but it could have meant nothing to anybody else. Well, to be frank, he spoke about some snapdragons in Clissold Park. I remembered them as well as anything. In the summer of 1915 they had lovely beds of yellow snapdragons. Frederick was in khaki, of course. We looked at them together. That’s all the message was. Looking at the snapdragons was the peak of his earthly happiness. It made life insignificant, I thought. Frederick was not a fool. He’d been born, and grown up and married me, and what was the point of it all? Snapdragons!”
Mrs K laughed. She was in a good mood because Abravanel, whom she had never liked, was dead; and now that the British had landed and the Egyptians were going to be taught a lesson she was happier than Townrow remembered seeing her. She talked about religion and Spiritualism because during the night she had thought Elie was in the room with her. It was not a dream because she was not asleep. She had the distinct impression that Elie was standing at the foot of the bed, talking to her. Soon after, she got up to quench her thirst. The lights were full on. When she returned from the kitchen she could not see him but she felt he was still there.
“He wanted to be taken out of Port Said altogether,” she said, “and buried in Beirut. It’s a bit late now. He ought to have put it in his will.”
“I suppose the will was just business-like. Elie wouldn’t go in for anything, but well, the disposition of … He wouldn’t say anything about his funeral?”
“He mentioned you.”
“Me?”
“Not as a beneficiary, I don’t mean. He just wanted you to be informed when he was dead.”
For some time a tank down in the square below had been using machine guns on one of the buildings opposite. Now it started to shell the place. A silence was followed by what sounded like the rumble of some edifice squatting on its foundations and the sunlight was dimmed just as though a curtain had been drawn. Townrow went and shut the french windows to keep out the dust. That particular building had been rigged up by the Egyptians as a rough and ready fortress, so what had happened to it was not particularly surprising. Townrow could see palm trees sticking up out of a brown fog. He had Elie’s shot gun, ready loaded, in case he had to defend himself against one of these Egyptian guerrilla fighters.
“He said you were to be told before the funeral. That was impossible. Abravanel didn’t turn the will out until a week after. Elie liked you. I just imagine he wanted somebody in England to be thinking about him when he was buried. He admired the English.”
“And all the time he was shipping arms to Cyprus.”
Mrs K wiped her lips with the corner of her handkerchief. “He was just a foreigner when you came to think of it. I told you I would never have married him if he was a Jew. Lebanese are Semites, you know, but they’re not Jews. He was a foreigner, though, and foreigners don’t really think like us. They know right from wrong but they can’t act on it. He stood there at the foot of my bed. It was upsetting really. He was on about being moved to Beirut. If I hadn’t been so frightened I’d have asked him who was responsible for his death.”
“Nobody was responsible for his death,” said Townrow. “You can put that out of your mind. He was an old man and he had a bad heart. What d’you expect me to do?” Townrow was alarmed by the way the building was shaking or he would not have talked like this. “Anybody’d think you’d brought me all the way from England to accuse you of murdering him. You couldn’t find anybody in Port Said to do it, so you sent for me. For God’s sake,” he shouted, “it wasn’t even your fault. You were a good wife.”
Mrs K’s face was expressionless. “He liked you.”
Townrow shrugged.
“These foreigners are intelligent,” said Mrs K, “they know right from wrong as well as you or I do. But they can’t act on it and that was Elie’s tragedy.”
“What do you think he’d say about this invasion?”
“He’d be pleased.”
Somebody was coming up in the lift. The door to the landing was wide open so they could hear the whining and rattling in the lift shaft and they could count. Past the first floor. Past the second. Townrow slipped the catch on the gun and sat with it trained on the gates. Anybody getting out at this particular floor was coming to see them or taking the little flight of stone stairs to the roof. When the little mahogany and glass cabin rose into view and stopped nothing happened at all, though. There was no light inside but Townrow could see through the windows that the cabin was empty. He considered this. The only way of bringing the lift up to the fifth floor was by getting inside it and pressing the appropriate button. Either that, or standing on the fifth floor and pressing the call button. Reason told him there must be somebody in the lift, sitting on the floor where he would be hidden by the mahogany panels that made up the lower halves of the two doors. As these panels did not meet by about half an inch somebody was, Townrow guessed, sitting there in the darkness and watching him through that gap. He stared at that vertical black strip but could make out nothing beyond.
Townrow told Mrs K to go and sit in the corner out of harm’s way. He himself moved as far to the right as was possible without losing sight of the lift altogether. The main thing was to be out of the line of fire from that gap between the two doors. From his new position Townrow could see the buttons inside the lift. What he was watching for now was a hand coming up to press one of them.
“Fire’s getting hold.” Mrs K was looking, from her corner, through the double windows and across the square. Townrow realised that what he had thought was shooting could only be the crackling from this fire.
“We ought to be getting down to street level some time. Does this building have a cellar?”
“In Port Said? You’d never keep the water out. That’s why Elie had a lead lining.”
Anybody coming out of that lift with a rush would be checked. You might not kill a man with a 12-bore shotgun but you could check
him. It would provide a breathing space. Maybe there’d be time to talk.
“A lead what?”
“Inside the coffin. It cost over a hundred pounds. I’d no idea lead was so expensive.”
“Like gold,” said Townrow. He went to the doorway and peeped round. Then he stood on a chair to gain height and peeped round. He could see some way down into the lift but made nothing of it at all. Possibly somebody on the ground floor had been able to get out of the lift after pressing button number five. Townrow asked Mrs K if this was possible but she said she did not know, it was not the sort of game she would play.
Townrow opened the gate to the lift and found himself looking into the eyes of a man who was apparently sitting on its floor. He was bare-headed and in uniform. After staring at Townrow for some moments his eyes switched uneasily from side to side. He was an Egyptian army officer, a lieutenant judging by the two little green crescents on his shoulder. He was a youngish man, certainly no more than thirty.
Getting the lift doors open was not easy because the Egyptian had his legs against them and he was not cooperating. Once his eyes had stopped switching from side to side he just watched with interest.
“You speak English? If you don’t get out of this lift somebody’s going to press the button and you’ll go down to the ground again.” This was not true. Townrow had the gate open and that immobilized the lift but he had to say something.
“He’s hurt.” Mrs K had come out on to the landing and was standing behind Townrow.
“I wouldn’t know yet. Let’s get him out.” Townrow had the door open sufficiently for him to get his foot in and give the man a shove. Then he stepped inside and took him under the arms. The Egyptian was wearing heavy black boots that laced nearly to the knee. No weapons. All the time Townrow was dragging him out he was drumming on the floor with his heels.
“Leave the gate open. Prop the gate open. We don’t want anybody else operating this lift.”
“He’s bleeding.”