Book Read Free

The Lion at Sea

Page 25

by Max Hennessy


  Crowded uncomfortably, they waited all afternoon as the shadows grew longer and the muezzins started their evening chant. No one came near the house, though over the wailing from the towers they occasionally heard scattered shots coming across the town. In the dusk, a small figure appeared. He was a hunchback, grinning and deformed, and Jemil pointed to Kelly.

  ‘I must say goodbye to her,’ Kelly said.

  Jemil looked angry but he disappeared into the other room. After a while he returned and nodded.

  The change in Ayesha was horrifying. Her face had sunk and the muscles of her neck were drawn taut. She tried to speak and, unable to, he saw tears roll down her cheek. Her throat worked but nothing would come and her eyes, fever-bright in the deathly-white face burned in their sockets.

  As he moved forward, Jemil tried to hold him back. From Ayesha’s frantic eyes, he knew she wanted him nearer and he pushed the old man aside with a violent shove and knelt by the bed.

  ‘I’ll come back,’ he said. ‘I’ll find you again.’

  He spoke cheerfully but he knew only too well that she could never recover from that ghastly wound which had torn away half her shoulder and back. Her breast was moving quickly up and down in little fluttering gasps and, feeling as if tears were falling on his heart one by one in small, icy drops, Kelly bent over and kissed her forehead. For a second the eyelids opened and a rational look came into the eyes through the pain, then the curtain of darkness came swiftly down once more. Jemil turned and roughly pushed Kelly from the room.

  ‘How’s His Nibs?’ Rumbelo asked.

  Kelly swallowed, unable to speak. At last the words came, stumbling and awkward, his voice dry and harsh and sticking in his throat. ‘His Nibs,’ he said, ‘is dying.’

  A week later they stepped ashore in Alexandria. They had been met outside the harbour by a destroyer and Kelly had stood in the bows of the felucca and shouted up to the spruce figure in white staring coldly down at the ragged figures on the scruffy vessel’s decks.

  ‘Lieutenant Maguire, of the submarine E19,’ he yelled. ‘With survivors and ex-prisoners of war.’

  The officer leaning over the rail stared in surprise. ‘Good God,’ he said. ‘You’d better come aboard.’

  Three hours later, still in their rags, they were in the presence of the admiral. An army colonel was with him to claim the Australians.

  ‘Well, what the devil do we do with you?’ the admiral asked. ‘There’s no longer any fleet at Mudros. Do you want to stay in the Med?’

  ‘Not particularly, sir,’ Kelly said. The Middle East could start up too many memories.

  ‘Well, it’s always been the policy for escaped prisoners to be sent home. They don’t like to chance them being captured again in case they suffer from it. There’s a destroyer heading for Gibraltar at the end of the week. You’d better be aboard her.’

  Kelly moved restlessly. ‘There’s one thing I must do first, sir,’ he said. ‘I believe there’s an Arab Bureau in Egypt.’

  ‘That’s right,’ the admiral agreed. ‘Down in Cairo. Doesn’t do much.’

  ‘I have messages for them from the Arab leaders. They’re anxious to start a national rebellion, and they think it would not only help them but also help us.’

  ‘That’s interesting.’ The admiral looked at the Australian colonel. ‘You’d better give your story to the Intelligence boys and when I’ve heard from them we’ll see if there’s anything we can do about it. You’d better get out of those rags, though. You look like a wog.’

  ‘We lived with the wogs for a while, sir,’ Kelly said stiffly, thinking of the dying girl in Tripoli. ‘We owe a great deal to – wogs.’

  The admiral glanced again at the colonel then he gestured to the flag lieutenant. ‘Very well. Fix it, Flags.’ He looked up at Kelly. ‘You any relation of Admiral Maguire?’

  ‘He’s my father, sir.’

  ‘Is he, by God?’ The admiral seemed surprised that anyone whom Admiral Maguire had sired could be so enterprising as to get himself not only captured by Turks but could also escape. ‘Then you’d better see him while you’re in Cairo. He’s on the mission staff down there.’

  Riding to Cairo in the train in the sweltering heat, Kelly’s mind was a blur. Dressed in a civilian suit the admiral’s flag lieutenant had lent him until the Egyptian tailor could fling together a white drill uniform, all he could see as the track followed the Nile were small haggard features and two feverishly bright eyes in a ghastly caricature of the face that had once looked at him with longing. It appeared in the clumps of palms and the waves of shimmering heat and among the slow-moving dhows. Every group of women he saw stirred his memory and every light voice he heard made him turn his head.

  Cairo was full of troops, all listless in the enervating lassitude that lay over the city. Rising out of its steamy soil, the heat intensified in a pall of dust and filth that lay over the streets. The dirt was everywhere. Cairo, corrupt, lackadaisical, easy-going and romantic at night when you couldn’t see the dirt, was always a city of beggars and fabulously rich families. Troops marched in squads among the teeming thousands in their white jellabas, with military cars and dozens of army mules. There were British and Indians and Gurkhas and troops from West and East Africa, and no sign of the war anywhere.

  Faintly disgusted with the scene, Kelly went into a bar where staff officers in immaculately pressed uniforms looked down their noses at his shabby figure in the rumpled linen suit. The man on the next table kept staring at him and eventually he realised there was a cold curiosity in the glance.

  As he turned the man spoke. He was a middle-aged major, red-faced, balding, with cold eyes and a face like a meat axe.

  ‘You British?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Kelly said. ‘I am.’

  ‘Likely-looking young feller.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Pity you don’t volunteer.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘What for? The army, man! The army!’

  The major had a loud voice and looked as though he’d arrived in uniform from some Middle East business venture. Several eyes turned in Kelly’s direction, most of them also cold and disapproving.

  Kelly stared back at the major, a hot flush of anger filling his cheeks. ‘I don’t see the need,’ he said, and the major’s face darkened.

  ‘Don’t see the need?’ he snorted. ‘Back home, boy, they’re bringing in conscription!’

  ‘Won’t affect me.’

  ‘Why not? Got something wrong with you?’

  ‘No.’

  The blustering voice rose. ‘Then you could bloody well volunteer, couldn’t you? Out here, we’re in need of everybody we can get. Others have. Businessmen like me. Even the bloody archaeologists digging up the desert. There are any amount of wogs, of course, but they were never any bloody good to anybody and never will be.’

  Black rage filled Kelly, and he finished his beer and rose. Everyone had stopped drinking and he was conscious that they were all hanging on to his words. He glared round at the immaculate khaki figures, deciding that he loathed the lot of them.

  ‘They won’t want me,’ he said loudly, ‘because I happen to be already in the Navy. I’m a submariner, as a matter of fact, and I was sunk in the Dardanelles and I’ve just escaped after being a prisoner of the Turks.’

  The hard red face sagged. ‘Oh, my God,’ its owner said. ‘I didn’t realise. Look here, boy, may I shake your hand and buy you a drink?’

  ‘You can choke on your bloody drink!’ Kelly snorted. ‘And it might interest you to know that, but for a few of those bloody wogs you dislike so much dying to save me, I’d still be a prisoner of the Turks!’

  His father’s office was in a block of flats, and the admiral, dressed in white, seemed to be very comfortably established with a woman secretary who looked as though
she’d been chosen for her looks rather than for any ability she might have.

  ‘My boy!’ Admiral Maguire jumped to his feet as Kelly appeared. ‘I got a signal from the C-in-C to say you’d turned up. My God, what a shock! Have you informed your mother?’

  ‘I sent her a telegram,’ Kelly said.

  His father had grown fatter, as though the fleshpots of Cairo suited him, and Kelly wondered bitterly how often he, too, used the bar he’d just left.

  Admiral Maguire sat down. ‘I couldn’t believe it. What a war you’re having, eh? You won’t have heard of your Uncle Paddy, of course?’

  ‘No, Father. What about him?’

  ‘Did rather a good job at Ypres and they gave him a battalion. He was killed at Neuve Chapelle.’

  Kelly thought of the boozy middle-aged man who had seemed to be lolling about the house throughout his entire youth and found he could feel remarkably little emotion. Uncle Paddy seemed to have redeemed a lot of his former lack of effort, however, and perhaps he had made a better wartime soldier than a peacetime one.

  ‘It’s quite a place, this,’ his father was saying. ‘We have so much to do and find it damned hard to do it because the wogs don’t help much.’

  ‘Don’t use that word, Father!’

  The admiral’s head jerked up as his son barked at him. ‘What word?’

  ‘“Wog.” If it hadn’t been for the wogs, I wouldn’t be here now. They deserve a bit more dignity than a name like that.’

  The admiral’s eyes widened. ‘But everybody calls them–’ he stopped. ‘If it weren’t for the – I mean – oh, my God, boy, you can’t stop calling them wogs just because–’ he stopped again, at a loss. He didn’t know another word and he didn’t know what to say.

  The Arab Bureau was in a vast shabby old palace that was full of jangling bells and bustle, and the smart men in neat uniforms irritated Kelly.

  He was still seething from his father’s lack of sensitivity. They had tried hard to behave warmly to each other but it had remained an uncomfortable interview with neither of them able to touch anything in the other’s affections. The admiral was obviously enjoying his war and, with Kelly still bitter at his imprisonment and shocked by Ayesha’s death, their conversation had limped to an uncomfortable halt and they had both been glad to say goodbye.

  The hallway of the Arab Bureau was filled with military policemen in starched shirts and shorts, who clearly didn’t approve of Kelly’s ill-fitting suit. One of them stepped abruptly in front of him with the smack of boots on the floor.

  ‘Whom do you wish to see, sir?’

  Kelly explained his identity and his errand and they stared at each other, baffled. Obviously no one there had ever thought much about helping the Arabs to wage war.

  ‘Better show him into him,’ one of them said.

  Following the military policeman down a long shadowed corridor, Kelly found himself in a dusty room full of maps and papers, where a fan revolving in the ceiling stirred up the stale air. A small, fair-haired staff captain with a long jaw was sitting behind the table and as Kelly appeared he got up and approached to shake hands.

  ‘Well, a new factor’s certainly needed here in the Middle East,’ he admitted as he listened to Kelly. ‘Gallipoli was a disaster, thanks to lack of interest at home, and the Indian Army’s made a hopeless mess of Mesopotamia.’ He gave a curiously effeminate shrug. ‘We need something that will outweigh the Turks in numbers, output and mental activity.’

  Standing with his feet together, he rested his heavy jaw in his right hand and put his right elbow in the palm of his left hand as if he were hugging himself. Yet there was a curious tension about him and a strange burning quality of leadership.

  ‘There’s been no encouragement from history to think that those qualities can be supplied ready-made from Europe, however,’ he went on cheerfully. ‘The efforts of the European powers to keep a footing in the Levant have always been uniformly disastrous.’

  He seemed clear-headed and incisive and Kelly broke in, driven more by emotion than anything else. ‘You’ve got to do something for these people,’ he said.

  The staff captain shrugged. ‘Well, the solution would have to be local, but fortunately the standard of efficiency need only be local, too, because the competition’s Turkey and Turkey’s rotten. Personally, I think you’re quite right and that there’s enough latent power among the Arabs to do the job. After all, they’ve served a term of five hundred years under the Turks and if they don’t know them, no one does. What had you in mind?’

  ‘I was told that the Sherif of Mecca’s with us.’

  ‘I’ve been told that, too. In fact we had his son, the Amir Abdulla, down here to sound us out.’

  ‘And are you going to do anything?’

  ‘Things have a habit of moving slowly in Cairo.’

  Kelly could hear a proud voice pleading for understanding. ‘There’s a whole nation of allies here,’ he said earnestly. ‘Only wanting to help us by helping themselves. Can’t you bloody idiots in Cairo give them guns and rifles?’

  The staff captain laughed, a curiously shrill laugh, then his face became grave again. ‘Well, military thinking’s somewhat atrophied out here, I have to admit, but we do have a few clever chaps in Intelligence. We had hopes of Mesopotamia because the Arab independence movement had its beginnings there, but I think we can forget it now since Kut, and unfortunately the Indian government’s none too keen on pledges to Arab nationalists which might limit their own ambitions.’

  ‘Do bloody politics have to come into it?’ Kelly snapped.

  The staff captain pulled a face. ‘Unhappily, yes. Nevertheless, conditions are suitable for an Arab movement. Perhaps we should get in touch with them.’

  Kelly decided that the staff captain was laughing at him. He seemed too much of an intellectual to be involved in the war, and his own thoughts concerned only a dying girl and a set of promises he’d given.

  ‘I’d like to know how it goes,’ he said icily. ‘My name’s Maguire. Kelly Maguire. Lieutenant, RN. I’ve no idea what my ship is because I’ve had two sunk under me and God alone knows what will happen now. But you can get me through the Admiralty.’

  The little staff captain twisted round, moving his hand in a delicate gesture as he reached for a pen. ‘I’ll not forget,’ he promised. ‘And so that you can be reassured of my good intentions, I’ll give you my name, too.’ He wrote quickly and passed the paper across. ‘Lawrence,’ he said. ‘Thomas Edward Lawrence.’

  Part Three

  One

  ‘You’re different, Kelly.’

  Charley’s eyes rested on Kelly’s face, puzzled and troubled by the grimness she saw there. ‘You seem older.’

  Kelly shrugged. ‘Marines and pongos can be made up in boxes of a dozen,’ he said. ‘Sailors are always different. And I’m older because it’s eight months since I saw you and a lot’s happened in that time.’

  They were alone in the house at Bessborough Terrace because Mrs Upfold had disappeared to see Chu Chin Chow with Mabel. With them were a highly-decorated young man from the Royal Flying Corps on leave from France, and the young man’s mother. The young man’s father, like General Upfold and Uncle Paddy, had disappeared to France in the early days of the war and, like them, had vanished in the first awful clash of gigantic armies. Half the country seemed to have been bereaved already by the ill-prepared offensives of 1915 and only the almost hysterical certainty of victory with a big new push said to be coming on the Somme enabled everybody to go on believing in the future.

  At last, however, Mrs Upfold seemed to be regarding Kelly as a possible future husband for her younger daughter and he had noticed that, despite the young airman, even Mabel had eyed him with a renewed interest.

  ‘I have to trust you, Mr Maguire,’ Mrs Upfold had said archly as she had disappeared. ‘
Especially with my baby.’

  ‘Your baby’s safe with me, Mrs Upfold,’ Kelly said coldly ‘She always has been.’

  ‘She thought you were dead at first,’ Charley pointed out with a chuckle as the party disappeared. ‘And I think it worried her a bit because she’d begun to think that someone who could get a medal as quickly as you got yours might possibly have a future, after all.’ She stared at him. ‘Everybody went into mourning,’ she ended.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘I didn’t think you were dead.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It didn’t seem like you.’

  ‘What? To be dead?’

  ‘Yes. You’re the most alive boy I know.’

  ‘I’m not such a boy now, Charley. I’m twenty-three and a half. Time’s running out for me.’

  As they talked, they heard a low wailing in the distance and Charley put her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, dear,’ she said. ‘It’s an air raid. The zeppelins are such a nuisance these days.’ She gave a little giggle. ‘At least, it’ll keep Mother out a bit longer. They’ll have to go to a shelter. I don’t think she’ll ever get used to it.’

  Certainly London was different. The streets were full of Australians, New Zealanders, Indians, Canadians, Montenegrins, Portuguese, Belgians in tall forage caps, and a few lost Russians in blue. At every alley-end shysters sold iron crosses and spiked helmets won in France by better men, and all the smart women seemed to be on the arm of a wounded officer. Despite the vitality of the young men, however, there was a lot of gloom such as Kelly had never noticed in the services, a great deal more military punctilio – especially from fat little men in officers’ uniforms who were running remount parks, stores depots and maintenance units – and more prostitutes than he’d ever seen before.

  He became aware of Charley studying him. ‘You have changed, you know,’ she said. ‘You’re harder, somehow, more commanding.’

 

‹ Prev