by P. H. Newby
“To be frank, it is not important. Officially we don’t care whether Christou tried to bump you off or whether he didn’t. What we——”
“You sure you don’t mean a man called Aristides?”
“We’ll come to Aristides later. No, I don’t mean him. I mean Christou who ran the Cyprus Bar. What we are interested in is this business of supplying arms. If Christou was concerned, with your friend Khoury, in this traffic it is as well we know about it.”
“You mean you don’t know whether Christou was in it?”
“We suspect the attack on you is a pointer. We know why you came to Port Said. Now, the theory is that Christou thought you were doing intelligence work.”
“If Christou had wanted to kill me he’d have made no mistake about it. I can’t help you.”
There were two other men in the room, one little more than a boy, in the uniform of a lieutenant in a Rifle regiment; the other was a stooping bird of about thirty in a shiny blue suit. He had a long sallow face and a blue chin. Most of the time he had been writing in a notebook which he supported in his left hand although there were tables. Now and again Townrow had found himself exchanging glances with him. They were not friendly.
The chief inquisitor became as avuncular as his age permitted and Townrow guessed it was what he had been trained to do when interviews reached this stage. “British troops have been killed in Cyprus with arms from Port Said. You may say this is history. Here we are in Port Said and we’ve bottled up the supply. But if Christou was responsible we want to pin it on him. This civilian charge in Cyprus may not come to anything. Before we know where we are he’s operating from Beirut. Now, Mr Townrow, you can help us in this. Even after the attack on you it is our information you had conversations with this man, in his bar and in the convent opposite. We also know you were in the same prison cell for a short while. Well, what do you think? Rather, what do you know? We just want you to talk and talk and talk, all about Christou. Please don’t think you’ll bore us. We’ve all the time in the world. Even something quite trivial he said might give us a line. Now, when you walked into his bar on that first night——”
Townrow spoke abruptly. “I don’t know anything. The man’s a friend of mine.”
He could not at this stage remember the names of these three men even though they had introduced themselves politely enough. But he certainly remembered their amusement. Christou, a friend?
The way they looked at him they must have thought him a beat-up, drunken old pug. He knew how the white scar showed up on his cheek. There was a line where the hair did not grow. He had been wearing one of Elie’s old shirts without a collar. He felt cold.
“I don’t know how you can call a man your friend when he’s behaved like Christou. Personally, if I’d been in your shoes I’d have wanted his blood. He’s practically confessed to being behind an attempt to do you in. Granted he’s amusing. But he’s a killer.”
“I don’t believe it.”
A shrug. The man with the notebook went on writing. The boy officer’s mouth was slightly open.
“When did you meet Christou first?”
“I’ve nothing to tell you.”
“But damn it all man, surely you can answer questions where your country’s interests are concerned?”
“No, to hell with the country,” said Townrow. “Christou’s a friend of mine. His company’s a bloody sight pleasanter than yours is, let me tell you.”
“O.K. You’ve had a pretty upsetting time. I don’t want to be tedious. But you’ve been a soldier in the British Army. This is a business in which the lives of British soldiers have been lost. And will go on being lost. Now, it’s rubbish—be honest now—to say Christou is a pal of yours. In any case he won’t come to any more harm as a result of what you tell us.”
“I don’t talk about my friends behind their backs.”
“Is Aristides a friend?”
“Sure! He could have shot me once and didn’t. What better mark of friendship could you wish for than that? I’m not going to talk about any of these people, Christou or Aristides or——” He stopped because he realised he was on the point of saying Amin. “I’m not going to talk about any of these men for the benefit of you bastards. I don’t know you, do I? What do you represent? I don’t know you from Adam.”
“We’re British Intelligence officers. You don’t need to know us as people, do you? It’s the function that is important.”
Townrow remembered looking at them suspiciously. What did they mean by function?
“We don’t want to press you.” The man looked unbelievably childish; those round, blue eyes, those hands pressed together until the fingers whitened, the clear assumption that everything he did was right and proper, that he was on the right side. “But England expects, you know.”
“Bugger England, in that case.” He had brought the words out quietly, thoughtfully, as much as to say: if that’s the conclusion you force me to!
Possibly these men had been right. Possibly Christou was the thug they said. You could not be sure. Christou made him laugh. The man was a card. He was a liar. And now he had been illegally carted off to Cyprus. Egyptian law still operated in the town but the British had extradited him. No doubt they had been cunning enough to get some Egyptian judge to sign a document. Anyway, he was in British custody. Claiming him as a friend was a bit of bravado, perhaps, but in that particular question-and-answer set-up Townrow could not see what other attitude he could have taken than the one he did: I know him and I’m not going to do any dirt on him. He had such a sense of the man’s individuality it was mildly surprising to look round this little boat and see that he was not there. Christou had been on other short sea trips. Perhaps he had sailed out and watched innumerable coffins thrown into the sea, once the arms had been taken out that is. The question was whether the idea of exhuming Elie’s coffin and taking it out into the Med in precisely the same way would ever have occured to him if Christou hadn’t established the routine.
All the time Townrow had been refusing to talk about Christou he might, in reality, have thought it was Amin these Intelligence men were referring to. Possibly there had been a confusion in his mind. He ought to have asked them straight out “You do mean Christou, don’t you?” He had done nothing of the sort, so there would always be this slight uncertainty in his mind. But even if he had put such a question and they had replied “Yes, of course we mean Christou. Who else?” he would still have kept his mouth shut.
Mrs K knew nothing of all this. He looked at her. She had removed her glasses and was wiping them. It seemed she was having trouble with the spray. In the keen sunlight her eyes looked tiny and colourless. Poor old girl! She had sailed up and down the oceans, buried two husbands and still had not quite got one of them off her hands. She had no idea why the Allies were pulling out of Port Said. Why hadn’t they taken the Canal Zone? Why had they stopped? There was treachery at home, she said. The result was that people like her were ruined. British subjects and Jews of all sorts were ruined. Men and women born and brought up in Port Said, Maltese mainly, were on their way to winter in the U.K.
“I never told you British Intelligence tried to quiz me about Christou.”
She was hooking her glasses back over her ears. “It’s nice to know they caught up with him.”
“I said nothing. They got nothing out of me at all.”
“They should have asked me. I could have told them a thing or two.”
“I said he was my friend.”
Mrs K snorted at this but if he had been hoping for any fiercer reaction he was disappointed. She took a white cotton shawl out of a cloth bag and wrapped it round her shoulders.
“We’ll all need winter clothes when we get home. The best place for warm underclothes is Marks and Spencers.” She looked about her and addressed the chaplain. “Isn’t it time we had the service? We’re far enough out.”
*
Approaching the Egyptian coast from, say, Cyprus or the Greek islands you m
ust have been on it, certain times of the year, almost before you could haul down sail. One moment you must have been sliding south with no land in sight; then, a few minutes later, you were running up one of these shallow beaches. There were no headlands, scarcely any rise in the mud and sand beyond the breakers.
Townrow and his boatload were out a couple of miles, three miles maybe and except for the cathedral tower and the lighthouse sticking out of the water to the south they might have been fifty miles out for all the evidence of Egypt they could see. They were far enough out for the boat to be striking a different rhythm, rising and falling on a languorous swell. Townrow spotted the very moment the rhythm changed. The boat stopped, hung in the air, nobody moved; and Townrow thought, yes, why not freeze this moment of time? Mrs K was leaning forward to put one hand on the coffin. Her mouth was slightly open as if she was about to burst into prayer or song. Leah’s left hand was keeping her skirt down. Her wedding ring caught the sun and blazed. The nuns might have been carved out of wood. The chaplain had a grin on his face and his left hand flung out, pointing, like the old sailor in that painting The Boyhood of Raleigh. And the effect of this arrested motion was to make Townrow think that if time stopped and they hung on that sunny wave through all eternity he ought to have a clearer idea how they had got so far. He must stop mis-remembering. He must clear his mind. What actually had happened?
It was not true Mrs K had insisted on bringing Elie with her. She had been all for staying in Port Said, even when the Consul and an officer out of Movement Control called and said all British nationals, French nationals, United States citizens, in fact pretty well everybody without Egyptian papers, were being evacuated. They accepted no responsibility for her safety. And what she said, once she had recovered from her annoyance the evacuation was taking place at all, was, “I am not leaving this town. I’m not afraid of the Egyptians. This building is my husband’s property. Was his property. He’s buried in this town. I’m too old to quit. Ten years ago I might have quit. There’s nothing for me anywhere else. I’m comfortable here. I can’t start again. It’s come all too late. Elie is in this town and I’ll stay with him.”
“I’ll stay too,” Townrow had said.
“You’ll what?”
“I’ll stay. You’d be the only British citizen in town.”
“You clear off out. Nasser won’t touch an old woman like me but if they laid hands on you, well, it’s God help you. You staying wouldn’t do me any good.”
“I’ll stay,” he said. “I reckon that’s the right thing to do. People have got to stick together at a time like this.”
“But they won’t let us stick together. I’m only doing what Elie would do if he’d lived. He’d stay and he’d tell you to go.”
“I’ll stay,” Townrow had said, because he thought she might still need him, though he couldn’t guess in what way.
“What’s in it for you? Is that girl staying too? Is that why?”
“It’s a theory,” he agreed, “but it doesn’t hold.”
“I’m a realist. She’s Jewish. Being born here or an American citizen won’t make any difference. The Egyptians will jail her if they do nothing worse.”
“She’s going. She’d have gone before if she could have got transport.”
“England too hot for you?”
“Once the Egyptian army has moved back into town and I’ve seen to it you’re all right I’ll go.”
“No, they’ll do for you, and they’ll probably do for me too, but I’m not going. I’m ashamed of being British. Why start an invasion if you don’t mean to go through with it? Why stop when you’ve got as far as this? I’ll tell you what, we British have lost our nerve. People of my father’s generation wouldn’t have lost their nerve. Thank God he’s dead and spared the shame. It was bad enough for him me marrying a foreigner but he’d have been really upset at the thought of British troops giving way to the United Nations, black Africans most of them, or yellow men, though I know that for the sake of appearances they sent mostly white troops. But there are Indians. Did you see the Yugoslavs? Now, there’s a people I admire, not their politics, but they’re independent, you see, and they’ve got this pride. I was a nurse in Montenegro in the First War and I know. They just never give up, those Balkan people. But there was a lot of tipping. In some ways they had no self-respect. You tipped shop assistants. But they’d never have quit like the British. So that’s one reason why I’m staying.”
“I’ll just hang around and see to it you’re all right.”
“You don’t think I’m afraid of dying? I wouldn’t be afraid of dying. There’s nothing in it, dying.”
“Sometimes I’m afraid and sometimes I’m not.”
“No, I’ve never been afraid,” she said. “I don’t want you staying in Port Said on my account. I don’t mind dying but I hate being thought in any way responsible for other people dying.”
“Does that happen often?”
“Not often,” she said. “I don’t want to see you any more. Have anything you want that was Elie’s, or mine for that matter. And look!” She went to her little mahogany writing desk and opened a drawer. He had not been paying close attention because in spite of everything he was still thinking of Leah. How was he going to say goodbye to her? Would he kiss her? All the time he had been trying to impress on Mrs K the fact he was not leaving her in the lurch he was holding imaginary conversations with Leah. Even now it was exciting just to think of her. When he was in the same room with her he felt bigger and brighter. Hashish mixed in the tombac of a water pipe did as much for you. Yes, but she was woman. Objectively, she probably was not bright, not too beautiful either, but she changed the chemistry of his blood. A doctor could measure it. There were tests you could make in a laboratory with specimens of his blood. You could classify them. “This one was taken when the subject was in the same room as the woman. This one shows they were a mile apart. This one five miles.”
Unconsciously he had been leaning over Mrs K as she wrote. But when she tore the cheque out of the book and handed it to him he realised for the first time what she had been doing.
“You’ll find this will be honoured.” It was a cheque for ten thousand Swiss francs drawn on a bank in Geneva.
“What’s this for?”
“In a manner of speaking I’ve been employing you.”
“No, you take it back.” When she refused to accept it he tore the cheque into small pieces and threw them into the waste paper basket. God knows she had made him angry before but he had never let her have it as he did now. “You stubborn old bitch, you’ve got to get out of this town. They’ll drain the blood out of you pint by pint. I don’t want your filthy money!”
He saw by the appalled expression on her face she was getting herself up to date fast. Any moment now she would realise he was not the crook she supposed and come out with the final stunning revelation that—oh, Elie was deep in the Mediterranean ooze and his grave in the nunnery garden was plugged with a coffin full of gold bars, or sovereigns! He would shut her up. He was not interested. Didn’t she know an honest man when she saw one? He was watching himself so narrowly and censoriously the very words now dragged out of him were legalistic, even punitive.
“You are a racialist bitch.” At least, what seemed to him legalistic and punitive. “You despised your husband.” He even wondered if he was demonstrating how objectionable she was simply as a way of emphasising how big he was to stay on and look after her. Certainly, he was making the absurd gesture, and the larger the better. He was so incorruptible acid would not touch him, that was certain, but only by convincing her how much he despised her was he going to bring this particular piece of truth home. If he did not bring his almost fanatical altruism home to Mrs K who else was there for him to bring it home to? Now that Elie was dead and Amin was dead and Christou was gone it seemed the only other person he now knew sufficiently well to be impressed by any change in him was Leah, and it was not impossible she would put it down to a spell of sexu
al impotence, brought on by excess, or the wrong diet, or nervous trouble, or just terror. There had been excuse for being terrified in Port Said the past few weeks.
“I’m staying here in Port Said with you,” he had shouted at Mrs K while she looked at him with her little thin mouth pinched up.
“It’s something I owe myself. I was a fool to ask you to come. I suppose I lost my nerve. Where Elie is I stay. This is the end of everything.”
“I might take you with me yet,” he had yelled, and walked out, slamming the door behind him.
That must have been the turning point. Until then he had been busy with an Egyptian army jeep he had commandeered, driving round the streets with crates of flour, tinned milk and corned beef handed out by the British. He signed chits and took the stuff to Arab Town, driving over the rubble and smashed woodwork of the collapsed balconies, out to the Manach district where the shacks had been burned to the ground. Women in black cotton gowns scraped among the wreckage while their men sat in armchairs, smoking, staring, turning their heads and waving. Townrow made for the children. He handed stuff over to the nearest woman and made off to the store for another consignment. The Major i/c Stores wanted him to wear a beret. It would put the official seal on his activities. Townrow said they were not getting him back in the army as easily as that. He used to go out where the troops did not, out to a camp that had sprung up on the edge of the lake.
It was the turning point—going out and slamming the door—because until then the lawlessness of the city had seemed just a phase. Since the Cease Fire the British had shot back only when attacked. They had their own particular order and discipline, intended mainly to keep as many troops alive as possible. Outside the sectors they controlled was anarchy. Townrow would drive around, not quite knowing whether he was acting out of bravado, or a genuine wish to be helpful, or whether he had finally turned suicidal. It was even exciting after a while. Anything goes. If he had wanted to loot a shop he could have done it. He had the freedom of the tiger in its forest. There was nothing to check him but his own conscience, if a tiger can be said to have a conscience. He was a tiger, he thought, who had picked up inhibitions. The anarchy would continue. Every morning there were new corpses in the streets. It came to seem this condition was not particular to Port Said. Lawlessness was general. It would continue to the end of time. Townrow even acquired a savage grin.