by Joan Fleming
‘I mean I paid too much attention to my possessions and not enough to my soul.’
‘That sounds quite ridiculous. Look, Nuri bey!’ Triumphantly she held up the carpet-bag, the satin table-cloth bursting from it. ‘All your best treasures.’
‘No,’ he shook his head mournfully and slowly. ‘No.’
‘What do you mean, no? They’re here. Look, here!’
‘No.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘My most valuable things are not in the bag, Jenny. I took them to bed with me.’ The occasion was too vital for the words to sound absurd.
‘You what?’
He repeated it. ‘Last night, when I came home from seeing you in the yali, and discovered that my house had been ransacked, I took my best books to bed with me!’
She nearly laughed but instead hid her laugh in his coat lapel saying: ‘Darling Nuri bey: is that all you had to take to bed with you?’
‘No,’ he said violently, avoiding self-pity as though it were a dangerous adder, ‘I did it because I loved them, my wonderful old books! I see now that one must not love things to excess. I would not sell them, but if I had done so, I would have had money to do what I have always wanted to do, to go to Oxford. As it is, now I shall never go because I have nothing left to sell.’
Jenny pulled the satin table-cloth out of the carpet-bag. ‘But look what’s here!’ She held up some old volumes, taking them out one by one.
‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘there are a few good books there which I can sell for something. But not priceless, like some of my others. However, I shall sell what I have; it will keep us for a few weeks.’
‘Us?’
‘You and me, Jenny.’
‘I have been quite enough trouble to you, Nuri bey. I must go.’
‘It would be a great deal more trouble to me if you left me now; that would be what you in English call “the last straw which breaks the camel’s back”. You have nowhere to go, Jenny.’
‘Back to the yali to wait for Tony.’
‘That you cannot do. I have a great deal to tell you about what has happened today. But now I can only say you cannot go back. And, Jenny, I am almost sure your Tony is dead. Almost, but not quite.’
She nodded. ‘I knew you thought so.’
‘So, for the present, your home is where I am!’ He took a few steps back and looked at her in the dim light from the street lamp: ‘Jenny, you are in what you would call a mess. You have ruined your skirt and sweater. Your stockings!’
‘But there’s my mac, over there, quite safe!’
‘You look like a tramp!’
‘Don’t rub it in; what can I do about it?’
‘This!’ With a few skilful twists of the wrist Nuri bey had wrapped her sari-fashion in the satin table-cloth and tucked in the ends. ‘Extremely alluring,’ he said coldly. ‘Come!’
‘Where?’
‘To the only place to which I dare take you in this state. We shall get a taxi to the Hilton Hotel!’
‘Oh, my lord!’
‘American, expensive, brash and very comfortable. I know the manager, he will let us stay tonight, and tomorrow I will sell my remaining possessions to pay the bill!’
‘Oh, my lord!’
‘What is it, Jenny?’
‘It … it’s like this: I’m not as free and easy as I was! … Oh, my lord, don’t look so angry! You’re frightening me!’
‘I hope I am. I should hit you if it were not for your sore arm.’
He went off to get a taxi and Jenny drooped like a discarded flower.
When he came back and held open the taxi door and helped her in, she dared not meet his eyes. She crept into the far corner and dragged up the edge of the table-cloth towards her chin as though trying to disappear.
The arrival porch at the Hilton might have been specifically designed to dispel coolness between arriving couples. Absurd and exaggerated, the great canopy with wavy edges, supported by four elephantine pillars standing in pools of light which fire the magnificent underside made entirely of gold mosaic, it is like something erected in a pantomime for the ‘At The Palace, Night of the Ball’ scene rather than a hotel entrance.
As he handed her from the taxi Nuri bey gave one of his rare laughs: ‘If you could only see yourself,’ he said, ‘the dirty Princess!’
They waded, ankle deep, across the golden-coloured carpet of the entrance hall to the reception desk, followed by a porter carrying Jenny’s white mackintosh and the Victorian carpet-bag.
‘Two single rooms,’ Nuri bey commanded, loudly and clearly. ‘On different floors!’
CHAPTER 17
Good morning! The breakfast menu shouted: HAVE YOU SLEPT WELL? WHAT’S NEW? And amongst the recommended new breakfast suggestions were: BOILED PORRIDGE AND FRESH MILK and TOASTS AS GRANDMA MADE THEM.
Nuri bey, fully dressed, and Jenny (because she had washed her clothes and they were drying) wrapped in the blue satin table-cloth, sat at breakfast in Nuri bey’s room in front of the window.
He was enjoying the selection of jams and honey, the variety of bread and buns and the excellent coffee. She drooped over her coffee, her hair hanging dismally forward. The fog-horn sounded its forlorn moan through the mist which still shrouded the Bosphorus.
‘Come, Jenny, you had better eat. It may be the last good meal we have for a long time to come!’
‘Tell me, please, honestly, are you really as badly off as you make out?’
‘I haven’t “made-out” how badly-off I am yet but since you ask me so frankly, I will tell you. I have a small amount of money which comes to me at the beginning of every month from a few houses which are my patrimony. Slum property, you would call it. An agent collects the rents for me. That is enough for me to live on, alone in my house. I have never earned money; I chose, instead, not to marry and have a family but to idle, if you like, my life away with my books. There you have the truth, Jenny. One of the idle poor, am I.’
‘Oh, my lord, Nuri bey, what are you going to do?’
‘Let us consider what you are going to do, Jenny. Your state would seem to me to be worse than mine.’
‘When I think,’ she answered, ‘when I think what has happened to me in less than one week, and how I’ve changed …’
‘People don’t change. We are all of us complex, full of contradictions, we can never truly, as Socrates encourages us: know ourselves. It is impossible. Montaigne, a Frenchman and much more realistic, discovered: “There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between ourselves and others.” Socrates was Greek and things said in Greek sound more important than they are.’
‘And that goes for Latin, too!’ she agreed gloomily. ‘But honestly, Nuri bey, when I think of me a week ago at this time!’
‘Tell me.’
‘Well, about this time last Friday I was lying in bed.’
‘Alone?’
‘Alone. Tony had a room reserved for him at what he calls a “ recherché little hotel” in Soho. I suppose it’s pretty squalid, really,’ she murmured thoughtfully. ‘Anyway, I moved in, to save money. I have an afternoon typing job (I suppose I should say had because I’m pretty sure to be sacked by now). I used to lie in bed most of the morning, thinking.’
‘What about?’
She chuckled. ‘About me being a Kept Woman and whether it felt any different and, you know, it didn’t! I was just beginning to get bored with it. Anyway, this time last Friday, I was wondering when Tony would be back. I went to work in the afternoon and was paid for the week and to a movie in the evening with a girlfriend and when I got back … there was Tony!’
Nuri bey looked pained.
‘But he didn’t tell me about the trip to Hong Kong till lunch-time on Saturday. He’d been out all morning “on business” and came back at lunch-time full of what we were going to do. Naturally, I was thrilled. But now, looking back at the last few days, I don’t think I’ll ever be bored again. Too much has happened, too quickly. I seem to h
ave had all my life crammed into a few days. Honestly, Nuri bey, I’m old and stale, a squeezed-out orange, me!’
‘You should go back home to your family!’
‘Oh, my lord! Everybody harps on that! But I’ll tell you something: I’m not going back to that life in Soho. I’ve had that. Shall I tell you something else? It was curiosity.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Curiosity and a kind of feeling that I was getting left behind … about sex, I mean. Every film you see, every play you go to, every book you read, every magazine you pick up … you get the feeling that if you’re not absolutely up to the neck in a love affair, or married, by the time you’re seventeen, you’re a complete, out-and-out flop; there must be something frightfully wrong about you. So I jumped into it with both feet. Bonk! There I was; a sort of amateur tart!’
Nuri bey was so shocked that he stopped eating the delicious iced sultana buns.
‘I suppose the beastliness of that hanging was a kind of therapy; I hated it more than I can possibly express; I felt a kind of frightful guilt, as though I had assisted in some obscene and thoroughly wicked rite. But, somehow or other, it’s cleared my mind of a whole lot of unimportant things. I can’t explain it better than that. Let’s stop talking about me, Nuri bey, and talk about you because it seems to me you’re in a pretty awful mess. Worse than me!’
He started to eat again. ‘Breakfast is the time for philosophy,’ he observed, ‘I shall not bother you with my friend Montaigne any more, Jenny, but he did say this: “There is no knowledge so arduous as to know how to live this life well and naturally.” I was, as I thought, living my life well and naturally but that has all been taken from me.’
‘All through me …’
‘So now I shall have to find another way to live my life well and naturally. In’sh Allah!’
Jenny looked round the luxurious room. ‘What’s worrying me now is how you’re going to pay for all this.’
It was worrying Nuri bey, too, though he would not have admitted it. After the meal, he opened his depleted carpet-bag and laid out the contents, his hoard, his treasure trove and a shabby enough collection it looked.
‘I came back home last night for my dagger,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I felt sure you had gone back to the yali with Miasma and I needed the dagger because I believed I would have to rescue you from there. I considered it a matter of life and death … and I still think so … but you are safely here. I do not understand why Miasma left you like that.’
‘I was a nuisance. Unnecessary, she called me. She suddenly dropped me like a hot potato!’
‘I do not understand. That is, I do not quite understand though I have a much better understanding than I had. I am going out now, Jenny, to see friends who will advise me about selling these few remaining valuables.’
He opened the carpet-bag and satisfied himself with regard to the contents. ‘But I have had quite enough of finding that you are gone; you have the disappearing qualities of a small slippery fish and I do not want to be shocked out of my wits yet again. Shall I have to ask the chambermaid to keep you locked in your room upstairs?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous! Anyway, how can I go out dressed like this?’
‘I still have your white raincoat, which I shall lock up in this room. You see, I don’t trust you, Jenny. I believe that if Tony Grand were to appear and say: “Come!” you would go.’
‘Don’t! You’re frightening me! I can’t be as unreliable as all that!’
‘And now I have no dagger. It is somewhere in that stinking black wet pile of rubble which I do not wish ever to see again. So if you go … for any reason … it will be forever, this time, Jenny.’
She did not raise her eyes but fidgeted with a tassel of the satin table-cloth in which she was wrapped.
‘It is time you grew up and stopped playing with your life as though it were some kind of game. It may be the only life you will ever have, Jenny, so you should cease to treat it like a toy balloon, one of those rubber things filled with air which are amusing to toss about but which explode suddenly, pouf! and there is nothing left but a tiny scrap of crumpled rubber!’
As though she were not listening, she was now assessing the movement of her wounded arm in which, the previous evening, the hotel doctor had put five stitches.
‘Yes, it works all right, but you had better rest it. Come!’
She tottered along the passage beside him like a Japanese in her tightly-wound wrapper. In the lift, the attendant, used to startlingly unfamiliar sights, gave them a barely curious glance. Not a word was exchanged as they went down the endless golden-carpeted passages. As she meekly opened the door of her room, still without looking at him, Nuri bey had some difficulty in keeping the expression of grim determination on his face, but he succeeded and left her without another word.
CHAPTER 18
In the tram swinging down the Istiklal Cadesi, Nuri bey tried hard to invoke a proper image of Tony Grand, the key person in the whole strange and violent situation which had developed so suddenly. ‘Just one of those things,’ he had said lightly, and ‘be seeing you.’ A careless swagger, a kind of self-assured insouciance was the impression he had left. Short, dark, his physical attributes were so negligible that Nuri bey thought he would not recognize him if he were to meet him again in the street except that he would be outstandingly dressed, in this particular city, with his sports jacket and his smart black tapered trousers.
Bullet marks on the inside of Miasma’s front door and a pair of brown suède shoes didn’t by any means prove that he was dead but Nuri bey passionately hoped that he was, otherwise he must find him and he would be obliged to kill him. Without his dagger, it would be a disgusting proceeding but to leave him alive, ranging about the world with raw opium, carelessly depriving young virgins of their virginity would be a great deal more disgusting, and not to kill him would be cowardly. He had shown himself to be part of the world’s lumber. Nuri bey’s eyes flickered over the crowds who moved up and down the main street endlessly, closely avoiding the traffic as they overflowed from the narrow pavements into the gutters. If he were not at the bottom of the Bosphorus in a sack weighed down with basalt rocks, where was he? And if he were at the bottom of the Bosphorus, a fine and safe place for him to be, how could Nuri bey ever be sure? And so long as he was not sure, how could he ever have a peaceful hour again?
He hurried up the third hill towards the mosque of Bayazit II and through the courtyard where the smug pigeons waddled about, monarchs of all they surveyed, and the tiny starving kittens mewed out from the shadows as they died standing up, under the branches of the great and splendid plane tree, through the archway and into the bookshop.
‘Good day, good day, Efendim.’ The bookseller bowed and even remained bowed, possibly less humbly and more dispiritedly, when he heard that Nuri bey had come not to buy, this time, but to sell.
But Nuri bey’s heart was uplifted because he at once noticed that a dark corner of the shop was filled with the huge, toad-like figure he had been hoping would be there. This character, whom Nuri bey always thought of as the Toad because he was shapelessly dark, mysteriously lumpy and throbbed with clearly perceptible regular throbs in the region of his neck, if he had a neck, exactly like a toad, was important because he was a kind of scout, or agent for dealers who bought and sold important books and incunabula to the great museums and libraries of the world.
For years this person had been waiting for the time when Nuri bey would use the word ‘sell’. One or two of the books in Nuri bey’s possession were well known by many to be most rare and would fetch glittering prices in the world markets. He did not start excitedly at Nuri bey’s words but he did what was his nearest approach to it: he opened his eyes, an action which happened in two stages so that his lids were raised first to display a red nictitating inner membrane which, in turn, was slowly raised in the manner of a heavily sleeping dog at night. When the operation was complete, his eyes were fully open and were seen to be
big and bulging and greedy. In his horny grey fingers he held a short string of blue beads, the Moslem rosary or tespyeh, which dangled incongruously on his protruding stomach. He fiddled with the thirty-three beads, running them through his fingers as his eyes bulged out over Nuri bey.
And now the winged lion of the Book of Revelations had not only his six wings about him, but his wits also. He gave a short but important speech, listened to in such complete silence that the imaginative might think they heard the throb in the Toad’s neck. What he said was to the effect that the time had come for him to travel; he had never left his country but had sat in his study and read and read and read, all the wisdom and all the history of other countries of the world. Now, he felt, with the coming of spring, the end of Ramadan, that he had read himself to a standstill. His library had nothing more to offer him. He now intended to travel and to take with him a small selection of his most valuable possessions: to Paris, to New York, to Oxford. In order to live whilst in these cities he would be obliged to do what he had, up to now, sworn he would never do; in short: sell, to the highest bidder, one by one.
The bookseller’s eyes and the Toad’s eyes were lowered from Nuri bey’s face to the carpet-bag, where they stayed. After a good many more words, flowery and a little off the point, he said that his first requirement was ready money for the journey and for his immediate needs until such time as he was able to get in touch with the actual buyers in the museums and libraries of the world. And as he talked he lifted his carpet-bag on to the counter and opened the top, slowly and deliberately, and brought out the best of what he had with him, the excellent illuminated psalter.
The Toad spoke for the first time and his voice sounded like a small fall of rock. ‘You have much better than this—this pigeon food!’
‘Naturally, but I seek to sell my best in the world markets, as I have said.’
The bookseller and the Toad were knit together in silent, mutual consternation and the blue beads passed a little more rapidly from finger to finger. The psalter, barely medieval but colourful, lay disregarded.