by P. H. Newby
Townrow looked back into the lift and saw there was a lot of blood on the floor. The landing was wet too where the man had been dragged. For the next hour or so Town-how and Mrs K were busy with this man. They laid him on the floor, put a pillow under his head, removed his boots, cut away his right trouser leg and put a tourniquet on his thigh. The wound was nothing serious. He had lost a lot of blood but no bones were broken. A lot of flesh had been taken away on the lower part of his thigh. Mrs K knew all about this sort of thing. She wrapped him in a blanket and tried to make him drink some coffee. She got Townrow to force his teeth apart with the ivory handle of a paper knife.
He said nothing until an unusually heavy explosion rocked the room and caused a few square feet of ceiling to fall down.
“Russian rocket,” he said. His eye fell on the mug of coffee. He lifted it without help and drank. “Russians.”
“You speak English.” Mrs K sounded reproachful. He might have been a child who had kept a secret from her. “Why didn’t you say you spoke English? You’re all right now. You won’t die. Cheer up.”
Mrs K’s servant had disappeared so she fried some liver and onions over the primus in the kitchen and they ate out of the pan with flaps of bread. The Egyptian had relapsed into silence but he drank half a glass of milk.
“I can see this boat and you, or somebody like you, sailing it. And this coffin. I’ve told you about all this?”
“You must have dreamed it.”
“Or it’s to come. Listen,” he said, “that was no dream. I can’t remember waking up from a dream like that. I just remember it.”
“You dreamed it.”
“I can see it so clearly. There was a basket under one of the seats with fishing tackle in it.”
“Quiet, isn’t it?” said Mrs K. “You can’t hear people moving about. They’ve just shut themselves up. They’re lying under the beds. If this building caught fire we’d be roasted, no mistake. An old building like this has the timber in it. I’m going to have a nap.”
By mid afternoon the fire opposite had died down. Townrow felt the Egyptian’s right leg and slackened the tourniquet slightly.
“You’ll be O.K. Would you witness my will if I drew it up? There ought to be two witnesses but I guess one will do at a pinch. I can’t ask the lady. She’s one of the beneficiaries.”
Townrow found a pad of Basildon Bond in Mrs K’s roll top desk but there appeared to be no pen or ink.
“You got anything to write with?” he asked the Egyptian.
No answer.
He found a ball-point in the man’s breast pocket and as the sounds of battle were renewed settled himself down to write. A new development was the air activity. A lot of planes were diving and firing rockets. Townrow could not imagine what they were after. But it was somewhere well away to the south. Perhaps it was the railway station. It could even be Navy House.
He had never written his will, even when he had been on active service, and had only a general recollection of the kind of legal jargon he judged necessary.
“This is the last will and testament,” he wrote, “of me, James Farrer Townrow, being thirty-five years of age or thereabouts and sound in mind and body, or reasonably so. All real estate, goods, chattels and other possessions, including the gold ring on my finger, in Port Said, I direct shall be given to Mrs Ethel Khoury, widow of my old friend, Elie, once a merchant of this city. In the event of her predeceasing me——”
Townrow put the ball-point down, stood up and watched, through the window, an immense column of black smoke rising from a point perhaps a couple of miles away. The explosion sent a red tongue a third of the way up the column which then became a great cliff of smoke. He studied it and wondered who else it made sense to mention.
The telephone service would be out of action, that was for certain. But it was worth making the experiment. He dialled the Abravanel number and was surprised to hear it ringing. At the very least that meant the building was intact. He listened to the ringing and pictured old Abravanel lying there on his bed and Leah maybe still busy with her packing.
“Listen,” he said, when she answered the phone, “you’ll think this is a crazy sort of request but I want this information for a good purpose. I want you to give it me and not ask any questions. You understand that? This is important. If you ever want to do anything for me this is it. Can I put this question?”
He could hear her breathing. “Where are you?”
“I’m at Mrs K’s and she’s having a nap. We’ve an Egyptian soldier with us but he’s out of action. He’s no trouble. There’s nothing to concern yourself about on my behalf.”
He tried to make this sarcastic because he wanted to make himself as objectionable to this woman as he reasonably could. He wanted her to react in such a way she would hurt him. Then he might be able to forget her.
“What’s the question?” she asked.
“Your husband’s name and address. I mean the private address, not the hospital.”
“Rob Strauss.”
“Did you say Rob? Is that his full name?”
She spelt it. “Rob Maxwell Strauss, Two-forty three West Avenue, Albany, State of New York. What do you want this for?”
“You might as well give me the hospital as well.”
She gave it to him. “What are you doing?”
“Writing my will. Stay indoors. You’ll be all right. This will soon be finished. You’ll be O.K. You can go to the States.” He hung up.
Not wanting to be interrupted he waited by the telephone in case she should ring back immediately. After a couple of minutes he sat down to get on with his writing.
“… In the event of her pre-deceasing me I direct that all these said goods, chattels and real estate should go to Mr Rob Maxwell Strauss, of Two-forty three West Avenue, Albany, State of New York, now a patient in the Jewish Hospital for Nervous Diseases. In any case, I direct that all my property and possessions in the United Kingdom should go to the same Mr Rob Maxwell Strauss.”
And if Strauss pre-deceased him? Townrow shrugged. These cases lived a long time. If he didn’t it was too bad, everything would go to Leah, the Zephyr, the bits and pieces of furniture, the I.C.I, shares and the Unit Trusts, say five thousand quid in all. At least she would learn how he felt. He did not think he owed his mother anything. Certainly he owed his father nothing. If that girl really had been pregnant that would have rated a mention. But you could not have been a judas to somebody who did not exist.
“What are you up to?” Mrs K came out of her bedroom in time to catch him persuading the Egyptian to witness his signature. Townrow held the paper against a book to provide a writing surface and, surprisingly, the Egyptian understood and wrote his name in Arabic calligraphy.
“No, damn this,” said Townrow, “what’s your name?”
“Moustapha el-Habib,” breathed the man, and this is what Townrow made him scrawl under his own signature before handing the document over to Mrs K.
“We’re still alive. What’s all this then?” She looked around for her reading glasses.
Townrow said she was to hang on to this document because it showed the sort of man he now was; and what’s more it had legal possibilities, in spite of there being only the one signature. That was not the important aspect of the matter. He went out of the flat and stepped into the lift, intending after this long delay to go in search of Faint and put him on that vegetable cart.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A sea requiem
Two funerals, then, one on a battlefield and the other at sea. At both Townrow was wary. To begin with he had the idea that if he pressed on, jaw set, doing little jobs like picking up Faint and burying Abravanel, keeping his nose down to the job in hand, certainly not lifting his head to look in Leah’s direction, there would come a moment when he would know he had passed through a fire; either he had passed through this fire and was purified by it, or he was dead. What kept him on edge was the suspicion that nothing would happen at all. He would go on li
ving and breathing, Leah would come round and they would start loving again, the Anglo-French forces would control the Canal Zone, maybe Cairo too, and he would come to see, some time in the future, that invasion and adultery were among the good things in history.
That was equivalent to nothing happening. The possibility concerned him even more than being shot by a sniper. All the time he was driving the gharry out to the Jewish cemetery he was toying with the idea of Egyptian citizenship. How did you qualify? Did you have to learn Arabic? Did you need to be Moslem? And when he had to negotiate some crater he would turn and warn Leah so that she and the rabbi could grab the coffin and stop it sliding out. It was just resting on the floor of this horse-drawn carriage. It was not secured. They had been unable to find a rope. When the gharry went round a crater it tilted. Leah and the rabbi screamed, and had to grab the coffin by its handles. Townrow prided himself the regular driver could not have handled the gaunt nag any better. He watched the big rump bones rocking backwards and forwards under the loose skin. This was the only transport they had been able to commandeer at short notice. The driver had been hit by something and was lying dead on his box seat.
The sea funeral kept him on the stretch too. There he was, in the fresh air with the sun shining and the blue water racing on either side, but this dream had him by the throat. With him in the boat were Leah in a fur coat with suitcases, Mrs K with her cases and baskets, three nuns in grey habit sitting up at the front, a fresh-faced, boyish army chaplain with a prayer book, and, of course, the brown, stained coffin. It really was happening. The funeral was not as he remembered it. The nuns and the army chaplain were an innovation. But essentially it was the same experience, and he sat at the stern, wearing one of Elie’s old overcoats buttoned at the throat, handling the crude tiller these rough and ready sailing boats went in for, thinking that having come so far with Leah it would be more than he could bear if she escaped him now. Went to the States, that is to say.
The first funeral had found him thinking exactly the opposite. Life and sanity depended on giving the woman up. The second funeral made it seem life and sanity depended on grabbing her. He realised his desires were running in opposite directions. He had not changed. The explanation was not that the first funeral came before the second—by about three weeks, to be exact—but that he was still torn. What, for the moment, pushed him in the direction of Leah was the feeling only she could get him out of this dazed ritual of boats and death.
Just a boat, water, death. They were facts of nature. He looked astern. What little wake the boat was making flattened the crisp morning waves. He screwed up his eyes and looked at the De Lesseps statue which seemed to be waving its right arm with imperial confidence to indicate the masts and superstructure of the wrecks in the Basin—dredgers, cranes, tugs. But the arm was not actually moving. The fidgeting came from the huge White Ensign and the French Tricolour the troops had tied to it before embarking. Behind the statue was an enormous Union Jack flapping from a pole. Jet fighters toured the morning. Landing craft bobbed out from the beaches.
He shut his eyes and opened them again. Everything was still there. Everything in view was nothing more than a lot of objects and they had no particular meaning. He had to fight against the idea some kind of message was being handed out. Little red clouds became colourless as the sun climbed and he fancied there was real danger of their running together to form a filmy mask, with blank eyes and staring mouth. That really would have been a message. If he had seen that he might have yelled and thrown himself into the water. So he stopped looking at those gauzy clouds. Thank God there were no birds. The ibis and wild duck were scattered in the marshes far on the other side of the blistered town, miles away in safety. Birds came into his mind because, now that he remembered the event more clearly, he could see that as his father walked across the field to the line of trees two huge black birds, they must have been crows, rose so suddenly they might have been let out of a box. It had seemed to mean something at the time. If there had been birds about while the British and French evacuated Port Said that too might have meant something. But all he could see was H.M.S. Duchess looking so bright she might have been scoured from funnel to water line with steel wool. Oh, and all the other warships he did not know the names of. The landing craft hit the waves violently and threw up white water.
Townrow had steered so close to a torpedo boat he could shout to a man on the bridge who had been studying the little fishing boat through his glasses.
“We’re going to a funeral.”
“What’s that?” bellowed the fellow through his loud-hailer.
Townrow waved his hand to indicate his passengers and cargo. The chaplain held his prayer book up, as though for inspection, and waved it cheerfully. The three nuns up at the front looked straight ahead. Plainly they were enjoying themselves too. Mrs K sat with her thin grey hair blowing about her face. Townrow knew she was probably the angriest woman in the Eastern Mediterranean. Nobody would have guessed it by looking at her. She stretched out her mouth in what might equally well have been a grin of amusement or a way of coping with the wind. Townrow thought that once they had hurled the coffin over the side she would take off on a broomstick. Leah seemed to be fast asleep, sitting up. She had covered her head tightly with a yellow scarf.
They were not going back. This was the end. What they could not carry with them was lost to Nasser. True, Mrs K had some extraordinary idea of sailing round to Alexandria when they had gone through the committal ceremony. With her Lebanese passport she would then go to Cairo and see a Minister, Nasser himself if need be, ultimately catch a train to Port Said and repossess herself of her property. But this was whistling to keep her courage up. She knew she was beaten. She knew she would never see Egypt again. Nobody was returning. Even the boat would be scuttled once they were safely aboard one of these warships. As an American citizen Leah counted on being put ashore in Cyprus and flown to the States where Townrow supposed she would at once set about trying to realise the value of whatever her father had left. There would be no difficulty over her mother’s jewellery. She had shown some of it to him; a string of Bahrein pearls, diamond earrings, rings, brooches. She said she had been unable to have these when her mother died because it had been forbidden to take jewellery out of the country. There was her father’s fine gold watch. When sold all these would keep her going for a while. There was stock: Argentine Railways, she said, and the Brazilian Coffee Company. Ironically, there was a bunch of Suez Canal Company shares.
Maybe it would all go on her husband’s treatment. He had heard it was expensive over there.
She moved her coat, still without opening her eyes, and revealed a stretch of thigh. It was enough to make him understand he was not the man he supposed he had become as a result of this and that during the past few weeks. Port Said had been an education, and when the Intelligence Branch put the screws on he thought finally he’d seen the light. At long last he had been so placed he could wring some of the sour sweat of deceit and bad faith out of the air. He had counted himself purged of some shame, not a great deal, but it counted. He went through the questioning with such virtue he had felt decency settling into his system, ready for use when the next occasion offered. It only needed a glimpse of the top end of a stocking to know it had all been a lot of bloody self-deception. He had seen no light. He hadn’t stumbled across any new wisdom.
He sat watching Leah’s face. It was wet with spray. Tiny beads of water were trapped by her eyelashes. Then they ran down her cheeks to the corner of those lips. He had kissed those lips and wanted to kiss them again. He wanted to hold her. He wanted her body warmth around him. He wanted the tight clutch of her flesh and the imagined thrust hurt. It almost made him cry out. He kept his eyes fixed obsessively on her face as a way of isolating her and him from the marine rout and comedy going on all round. He was an unregenerate louse and always had been. Probably he had stuck to his denials over Christou out of conceit or bloody-mindedness. They were drips. He had faced t
hem out. Practically anybody else would too.
Townrow. They had been polite but they didn’t go in for much ceremony and they had called him abruptly by his surname, though they were younger than he was. Even the man in the grey thornproof could not have been out of his thirties in spite of the receding hair. Townrow didn’t give a damn to begin with. They were British. Being interrogated by the British made a change. It was only after the exchanges grew tense he suggested he had a handle to his name.
“Mr Townrow,” said the man in the thornproof. “Of course. Sorry.” They had been friendly, shoving packets of cigarettes about and flicking lighters. The little man in the middle smoked a pipe and the atmosphere thickened. The windows were shut. The door was shut. Outside was a paratrooper with a gun.
“What I hate,” this man with the pipe and the papers had said, “is giving the impression we do a lot of snooping around. I mean, the ordinary citizen gets a bit shirty. Natural British reaction. But we’ve got this job to do and after all Port Said was one of the places where arms used to get shipped into Cyprus.”
“This invasion must suit you down to the ground.”
“So we came over, you see, sort of to look around. We knew about your friend, Mr Khoury, of course. Did you? I mean did you know he was in the gun running business?”
“I had my suspicions.”
“We know perfectly well your own relationship to the Khourys was innocent. There is no question about that. It is kind of you to help us. There are a lot of things we don’t understand. For example, why did Khoury’s friend Christou try to kill you?”
“Did he?”
“You see, this is a point we’re pretty well briefed about. I don’t need to remind you that Christou is a British subject and that what’s more he’s been wanted back in Cyprus to face certain criminal charges. As a matter of fact he is in Cyprus. He’s been back there for ten days or so.”
“Christou didn’t try to kill me.”