As for Ursula herself, she gritted her teeth at Bunty’s insensitivity and refused to let her get on her nerves, hoping that all she had to do was wait, and the untenable situation going on in her own house would resolve itself. For England had declared war on Germany in September 1939, and Bunty was forever talking of going back Home and becoming a WAAF. Ursula, entirely sick of her, couldn’t wait. Yet talk, it seemed, was all it was. Something held Bunty here, presumably in the person of James Palmer: she was by no means as naïve as she seemed, she knew very well which side her bread was buttered.
Though he was too old to fight, James was presently offered a job with an army intelligence unit, and was threatening to close the house and pack his wife off Home whether she wanted it or not. An ugly atmosphere developed at her point-blank refusal to do his bidding. Egypt was neutral, maintained Ursula, she would be safer here than in England. Depend on it, James countered, sooner or later the war would be on their doorstep, and who knew what would happen then? But it wasn’t her safety that was in question, they both knew that; it was a face-saving ploy for getting rid of her.
Yet how could she have willingly left the only thing she had ever created, her garden?
* * *
What had it all been for, the struggle and the unhappiness? More than sixty years later, despite all the love and dedication lavished upon its creation, that garden, that bone of contention, but still the one shining star in an otherwise dark night, had disappeared as though it had never existed. The old feeling of melancholy overwhelmed Ursula as she contemplated where it had once flourished. It wasn’t only, however, that the garden had gone and the courtyard had reverted to its original air of sad, dark desolation, with the fountain in the middle as dried-up as when she had first seen it, one could cope with that. It was something about the atmosphere itself that provoked such thoughts, a sort of pervasive accidie. A stain on the air, left by the events that had happened here. She felt oppressed by the thought, and the weight of her years. Or perhaps it was just that the last ten days had taken it out of her.
‘Mrs Palmer?’
She turned with weary resignation, but it wasn’t Moira Ledgerwood, being responsible. There was still half an hour of interesting things to see on the upper floors before the group descended for glasses of tea in the café. It was the doorkeeper who stood there. He said softly, ‘I’m sorry, the garden is no longer there. It grew wild. They cut it down, during the war, when the house was occupied by English officers.’
The filtered light from the windows fell on the ample figure of the doorkeeper in the white galabeya, and as he turned slightly, she saw his profile. He knew her name. And suddenly, she knew his. It was a shock. The dark curls were silvered now, but the smile was the same. She saw the young, slim, beautiful youth inside the grossly fat old man. And he, what did he see? A scrawny old woman in her eighties. ‘Khaled? How did you know me?’ she asked faintly.
‘By your hair, first of all.’
Involuntarily, her hand went up to her white, serviceably short locks. ‘How could you? I had it cut off years ago, and it turned white before I was forty.’
‘I recognized the way it grows.’
There was a silence between them. A feeling of what might have been, had they been born in other times, other places. Perhaps. Or perhaps not.
‘Mrs Palmer.’ He came forward with both hands outstretched and she saw he wore a heavy gold ring with an impressive diamond on his little finger. He clasped both her hands, something he would never have done in the old days, and she allowed him to. ‘It is so good to see you.’ Something had radically changed, apart from the fact that his command of English was now excellent. He didn’t look like a boab, a doorkeeper, a man who sat at a table and took money. He looked like the sort of man who made it.
‘But next year would have been a better time to come,’ he went on. ‘Then, there will be another garden. The men come next week to begin. I needed to have the house restored first.’
She stared at him. ‘Khaled, are you telling me—?’
‘Yes, the house belongs to me now, Mrs Palmer. After the war, after the officers left, that is . . .’ He paused. ‘It stayed empty, as you must know, until seven years ago, when I bought it, through your lawyers. The condition, the neglect!’ He threw up both hands. ‘But I was too busy to do anything about it until now. A retirement project, you might say, hmm?’ He smiled.
She digested, the information that he was rich enough to do all this. ‘You did go to university, then? You became an architect?’ The guilt that she had carried around for more than half a lifetime began to shift a little.
‘Alas, no, that was not possible, in the circumstances.’
There was a long pause. ‘And did you marry Nawal?’
His soft, dark eyes grew inscrutable. ‘No, I never married anyone at all.’ He shrugged. ‘Malish.’ That unquestioning submission to fate. Malish—never mind—it doesn’t matter. Then he laughed. ‘I became successful instead. I sell souvenirs to tourists. I have co-operatives to make them, and also shops now in New York, Paris, London. Many times I have thought of you when I am in England.’
The hopeful young man with his lofty ambitions, now an entrepreneur, a curio-seller, in effect—albeit a rich one. To such do our hopes and aspirations come.
‘Why did you run away, Khaled?’
He looked at his feet. ‘It was necessary. Who would have believed me?’
‘There were no questions asked, you should have stayed.’
‘I heard that, but I was far away by then.’ He smiled again.
Death due to extreme sickness and diarrhoea in this land wasn’t so unusual as to cause many enquiries to be made, especially when it was known that the victim was not Egyptian and had been suffering from stomach upsets for ten days or more before dying. It had been put down to one of the many ills European flesh was heir to, and for that matter Egyptian flesh, too, in this land, where clean water was unknown and a mosquito bite could kill.
* * *
She and Khaled had been pruning the shrubs. The jasmine had already grown into a tangle, and the pink, white and red oleanders, though pretty, needed to be kept in check. Bunty, decidedly under the weather, was sitting in the shade of the stone alcove, too unwell to do anything but watch. Ursula threw her a long, speculative glance and pensively snipped off an oleander twig, careful not to let the milky sap get on to her hands. ‘That’s a nasty cough you have there, Bunty,’ she said eventually. ‘Why don’t you ask Nawal for some of her cough syrup?’
‘It’s this wretched dusty wind,’ said Bunty, coughing again, her eyes red and sore. ‘This khamsin. I’m going indoors.’
‘Go and lie down, and I’ll bring you the medicine. It’s very good.’
‘We-ell, all right. Do you think she might have something for my gippy tummy at the same time?’
‘I go bring,’ said Khaled, and departed with unusual alacrity.
The dry, rasping cough came again and another griping pain almost doubled Bunty up. It wasn’t only cholera and malaria, or worse, that one had to fear, here in Egypt. Stomach upsets, and quite often being slightly off-colour for unspecified reasons, were unavoidable hazards, facts of life. Bunty looked wretched, but Ursula had little sympathy for her predicament. She had a passion for sticky native sweetmeats, and one didn’t care to think about the flies. Ursula had actually seen her carelessiy drinking water from the earthenware chatty by the kitchen door because it was always cool, and because the water which Ursula and James forced themselves to drink tasted so nastily of chemicals and didn’t, as Bunty pointed out, necessarily make them immune; James himself hadn’t quite recovered yet from the same sort of malaise that Bunty was suffering from now, and was still extremely queasy, even with the care he took. As for Bunty, it was hardly surprising that her usual rude health sometimes deserted her.
Death, though! No one could have foreseen that. These things took unexpected turns, however, madame, they said at the hospital, shrugging, affected
different people in very different ways. A constitution already weakened by bouts of sickness and diarrhoea . . . inshallah. There were few formalities.
Afterwards, the desire to shake the dust of Egypt from their feet had been mutual. Home was all there was now, wartime England. It had been Ursula, after all, who joined the WAAF, taking a rehabilitation course in horticulture when she was demobbed.
‘I made another garden, Khaled, in England, in Surrey. It became a commercial success. Hollyhocks and lupins, as well as roses.’ They smiled, remembering. ‘But no oleander. The climate is too cold there for oleander.’
‘Ah.’ The smiles faded as their glances met.
That day, after she’d administered Nawal’s medicine, which Khaled had brought, Ursula had come downstairs again and sat on the carved wood bench where Bunty had sat, to wait. The garden was tidy, and so still, apart from the splash of the fountain. The oleander twigs which had lain scattered on the brightly patterned tiles had already been swept away and cleared, she noticed.
Nerium oleander. All parts of which, including the nectar, are deadly, even the smoke from the burning plant, and especially its milky sap. Causing vomiting if ingested, sweating, bloody diarrhoea, unconsciousness, respiratory paralysis and, finally, death.
The memory of that day was etched into her brain for ever: the sultry heat, the metallic smell of dust, the perfume of the roses. The silence in her head, as though the habitual din of life beyond the high walls had been stopped to let the world listen to what she was thinking. Even the Arab music from the kitchen was stilled. The waiting.
Within half an hour, the sickness had begun, and twenty-four hours later, it was all over.
* * *
Khaled was looking at her earnestly. ‘And you, Mrs Palmer? Have you had a happy life, Mrs Palmer?’ he questioned acutely.
A happy life! How could that have been possible? Living with the tedium of Bunty’s bright inanities, year in, year out. But there were many ways of expiating guilt. In the end, she’d become quite fond of her. A delicious irony indeed.
‘I have—had no regrets.’
‘Meesees Palmer!’ Hassan’s voice, rounding up his flock, echoed down the staircase.
‘Ursula!’ Moira Ledgervvood was coming in, looking for her protegée, finding her. ‘Oh, the things you’ve missed! What a pity you didn’t come with us.’ She looked curiously from the old lady to the old doorkeeper.
Ursula held out her hand. ‘Goodbye, Khaled. Good luck with your project.’
She turned to go and then turned back, as he said softly, for her ears only, ‘Your husband should not have died. Nawal’s medicine was good.’
She smiled. ‘It must have been intended, Khaled. Inshallah, hmm? He must have been too ill for it to make any difference. Who knows?’
Khaled watched her go. And perhaps Bunty Cashmore would have died, too, if she hadn’t been so violently sick again, immediately after swallowing her own dose.
‘Who knows, Mrs Palmer?’ he said into the empty room.
Account Rendered & Other Stories Page 21