The Levant Trilogy (10 page)

Aware, at last,
of his own unwisdom, Guy said, 'Don't tell Gracey about it.'

Toby spluttered
on his pipe with joy, 'Don't worry. You know Gracey. He's got a great sense of
humour. He'll love it.'

When Guy went to
Alexandria, Harriet, who had started work at the American Embassy, remained in
Cairo. With two incomes, the Pringles could keep their double room at the
Pension Wilk and be together at weekends. They regarded the mid-week separation
as temporary. Either Guy would be permitted to return or Harriet would go to
him.

At the Embassy,
Harriet was known as the Assistant Press Officer. The title sounded important
but she was merely a stopgap employee and, sooner or later, the press office
would be taken over by a team flown out from the States. The team was slow in
coming. Harriet had been in her position for nearly a year when the latest, and
most fearful, emergency arose in the desert. By then she had become as
knowledgeable about the war as Ben Phipps. She was generally held to have
inside information and people would stop her in the street to ask for news.
But she was still temporary, and not only temporary but a member of an inferior
race.

Having grown up
in the belief that Britain was supreme in the world and the British the most
fortunate of people, she had been shocked to find that to the Americans she was
an alien who rated less than a quarter of the salary paid to an American-born
typist She protested to her superior, a Mr
Buschman,
saying, 'I'm not an alien - I'm British.' Mr Buschman liked this so much that
he managed to get her a rise in salary. The rise was not great but it
reconciled her to her alien degree and the working hours that had been imposed
on the staff after Pearl Harbor. Entering the war with the enthusiasm of
late-comers, the Americans decided on an 'all-out' war effort. The other Cairo
establishments closed from noon till five o'clock, but the Americans decided to
work through the afternoon. Given an hour for luncheon, the employees returned
to the Embassy when the whole city lay motionless in a stupor of heat.

Mr Buschman, a
young married man, neatly built, not tall, with a flat, pale, pleasant face,
was both fatherly and flirtatious with Harriet. He once tried to span her waist
with his hands and nearly succeeded. Then he measured it with a tape and said, 'Twenty-two
inches. I like that.' He asked her what she weighed. When she said 'Seven
stone', he worked it out and said, 'Exactly one hundred pounds. I like that,
too.'

And Harriet liked
Mr Buschman. She particularly liked the way he called her 'Mem' as though she
were Queen Victoria, and she felt an affectionate trust in him until the day
when the German radio put out a threat to Cairo. At half-hourly intervals, a
voice said, 'Tonight we will bomb Cairo off the face of the earth.' The threat
was in English and Arabic and Harriet's translator, Iqal, bringing her this
item, said, 'You see, Mrs Pringle, how they are seeking to frighten-us!' Short
and stout, with the heavy shoulders of a water-buffalo, Iqal shrugged so that
his shoulders rose in a hump behind his head. 'We are not much frightened, I
think.'

The American
staff did not seem frightened, either. Mr Buschman made no comment when he went
through the news sheets that contained the repeated threat to destroy Cairo but
when she left the office that evening, Harriet saw the Embassy cars gathered
outside, prepared for flight. Next morning, the cars were not there. The
Embassy seemed empty except for Harriet, Iqal and the Levantine girl typists.
When Iqal came in with the first news sheets, Harriet asked him, 'Where is
everybody?'

'You do not know,
Mrs Pringle?' Iqal was eager to tell her
what she did not
know. 'Our American friends went for a night picnic in the desert, but now the
danger is over, doubtless they will return.'

Iqal's grin held
only a trace of irony. To him the actions of his employers were above criticism
but Harriet was struck through by a sense of betrayal.

'Mr Buschman said
nothing to me about the danger.'

'Nor to me, Mrs
Pringle.'

Harriet had to
realize that so far as Mr Buschman was concerned, she and Iqal were equally
alien and equally dispensable. Now, with the Afrika Korps outside Alexandria,
the Embassy cars were again assembled, packed and ready for a getaway, but this
time she was less hurt by the sight of them. Mr Buschman remained, as he always
was, cordial and kind, but she knew now that his cordiality had its practical
side. He was concerned for the safety of the American staff but need not worry
about aliens. The American staff had diplomatic protection and could leave, if
they had to leave, in their own time. Their preparations were against the
possibility of bombing, street-fighting or an Egyptian rising, all the risks
of a base town caught up in active warfare.

The Americans,
protected and prepared, remained calm. Only Iqal showed disquiet. On the
morning of Madame Wilk's outburst, he said to Harriet, 'What do you British do
with my country, Mrs Pringle? You come here to rule yet when the enemy is at
the gate, you run away.'

'I haven't run
away, Iqal.'

'No, but many
have. And what of your officers who disport themselves at the Gezira
swimming-bath! Where are they now?'

Harriet made a
wry face, knowing that one of the sights at Cairo at that time was the queue of
officers, half a mile long, waiting to draw their money from Barclay's Bank.
Having confounded her, Iqal was at once contrite and good-humoured and showed
her a news item he had been holding back. 'See here, Mrs Pringle,' he began to
giggle wildly, 'here they say the Afrika Korps reach Alexandria tonight. They
send a message to the ladies of Alexandria and this is what they say:
"Get out your party dresses and prepare to defend your honour."'

'Oh-ho, Mrs
Pringle, oh-ho!' Iqal's thick dark finger quivered with excitement as he
pointed to the item. 'These Germans are not deceived. Alexandria is a place of
brott-ells.'

'How do you feel
about a German occupation, Iqal?' Faced with this direct question, Iqal at once
became grave and declamatory. 'You ask me, Mrs Pringle, how do I feel? That is
an interesting consideration. What do these Germans promise us? - they promise
freedom and national sovereignty. What are those things? And what are these
Germans? They are invaders like all the invaders that have come here for one
thousand four hundred year. They come, they go, the English no worse than
others. But to govern ourselves! - that we have forgotten, so how do we do it?
And why should we believe these Germans, eh? For myself, I am brushing up my
German to be on the safe side, but all the time I am asking myself,
"Better the devil we know". In their hearts, Mrs Pringle, the
Egyptian people wish you no harm.'

'You mean, too
many people are doing too well out of us?'

'Ah, Mrs Pringle,
I see you know a thing or two.'

'Well, one thing
I do know, the Germans won't get to Alexandria. The British always fight best
with their backs to the wall, and we can't afford to lose the Middle East.'

'Can't afford?
Deary me, Mrs Pringle, how many people can’t afford? The French, the Poles, the
Dutch - could they afford?'

'Don't forget,
Iqal, we have the Americans with us now.'

At this mention
of his employers, Iqal sobered and nodding in reverential appreciation of this
truth, he whispered, 'Ah, it is so!'

Harriet worked in
a basement area too large to be called a room. Mr Buschman sat at a desk
between the French windows at the back. Harriet, who had an alcove to herself,
was in charge of a map of the eastern hemisphere that covered the whole of one
wall. Her daily job was to mark the position of the combatants with pins. There
were blue-headed pins for the allied forces, red for the Russians and Chinese,
and black for the Axis. Recently, having had to order them, Harriet had
obtained yellow pins for the Japanese.

On the morning
when news came of Pearl Harbor, Harriet had gone to work in high spirits,
seeing the war as more or
less over. She found Mr
Buschman in quite a different state. White-faced and trembling, he said over
and over again, 'The bastards! The God-damn bastards!'

Harriet said,
'Well, it's something definite. You'll have to come in now.'

Mr Buschman
struck his desk in rage. 'Definite? God-damn, it's definite all right We'll
make the bastards pay. We'll blow them right out of the water.'

But the Japanese
were advancing and Harriet sticking yellow pins into Wenchow and Gona, began
to feel that the only change brought about by the American intervention in the
war was the change in her working hours.

That day, leaving
the office at one o'clock, she met Jackman who asked her the usual question:
'Any news?'

Harriet shook her
head.

'Where's Guy! Not
still in Alex? I'd get him out of there if I were you.'

Jackman drooping,
with concave chest and shoulders hunched, kept his hands in his pockets as he
talked. He had a thin, almost aesthetic, face, not unhandsome, but spoilt by a
surly expression and the long nose that he was always stroking and pulling as
though to make it longer. Looking at the ground in his hang-dog way, he said,
'I can tell you this, Rommel won't bother to take Alex. He'll cut it off by
going round the back. When that happens, it'll fall of its own accord. No help
for it. No supplies. Nothing. They'll be starved into surrender. You ring Guy
and tell him to take the next train to Cairo. Here he'll have a chance. There -
not a hope in hell. Tell him if he tries to stick it out, he'll only end in the
bag. And a lot of good that'll do him, you or anyone else.'

Jackman began to
make off while Harriet was asking, 'What are we to do?' He looked over his
shoulder to shout at her, 'When they get here, grab a car and race for the
canal...'

'
If
they
get here.'

'Nothing can stop
them now.'

Harriet was the
only guest taking luncheon at the pension. At the other end of the hall, almost
invisible in the weak electric light, Madame Wilk sat at her table. Two tables
away from Harriet sat Miss Copeland who appeared at the pension
once a week. Today was her day. She would lay out a little
haberdashery shop on one of the tables then, sitting in the silence of the
deaf, she waited to be given her luncheon, tea and supper. After that she
packed up and went to some mysterious living place. She sold sanitary towels
to the younger women at the pension, passing them over, wrapped in plain paper,
with a secrecy that suggested a conspiracy. No one knew how long she had lived
in Cairo. Harriet, who was curious about her, had learnt that years before,
when Miss Copeland still had her tongue, she used to tell people that she was
related to an English ducal family. Some people got together and wrote to the
head of the family on Miss Copeland's behalf, but there was no reply. She was
now very old and her skin, tautly stretched over frail old bones, had the milky
blue-ness of chicken skin. Each week it seemed she could not survive to the
next, yet here she was, silent and preoccupied, remote from the panic of the
times. She went through her luncheon with the intensity of someone to whom a
meal was a rare and wonderful treat.

Luncheon ended,
as breakfast had begun, with six dates in a green glass dish. Harriet took her
coffee over to Madame Wilk's table and whispered, although Miss Copeland was in
no danger of hearing her, 'Does she know about the emergency?'

Madame Wilk gave
her head a severe shake.

Miss Copeland's
cottons, tapes, needles and pins were laid out this week, as every week, in
orderly rows beside a red and white chequered Oxo tin for money, when there was
any money.

'What's to be
done about her?'

Madame Wilk
spread her hands. 'God knows.' She and Harriet kept their heads together,
fearing to disturb Miss Copeland's happy ignorance of events. She might have to
be told, but not yet.

Harriet set out
for work through streets coagulated with heat and empty of movement. Labourers
and beggars lay in a sort of sun syncope, pressed against walls, arms over
eyes, galabiahs tucked between legs to avoid any accidental exposure of the
parts that religion required them to keep hidden.

Sweat trickled
like an insect between her shoulder blades
and soaked the
waistband of her dress. She could smell the scorched smell of her hair. And
about her there were other smells, especially the not altogether unpleasant
smell that came from waste lots saturated with human ordure and urine. Cairo
was full of waste lots; dusty, brick-strewn, stone-strewn, hill-ocky sites
where a building had collapsed from age and neglect. The smell that came from
them was nothing like the salty, pissy smell of an European urinal. It was
rancid and sweet like some sort of weed or first war gas. Harriet thought of
phosgene, though she did not know what it was like. She had read somewhere of
soldiers mistaking the smell of a may tree for poison-gas.

On her solitary
walks to afternoon work, Harriet had had odd experiences, induced perhaps by
the mesmeric dazzle of the light. Once or twice, she had lost the present
altogether and found herself somewhere else. On one occasion she was in a
landscape which she had seen years before, when riding her bicycle into the
country. It was an ordinary English winter landscape; a large field ploughed
into ridges that followed the contours of the land, bare hedges, distant elms
behind which the sky's watery grey was broken by gold. She could smell the
earth on the wind. There was a gust of rain, wet and cold on her face - then,
in an instant, the scene was gone like a light switched off, and she could have
wept for the loss of it.