The Levant Trilogy (29 page)

A taxi came in the gate and a man, jumping down
and hurriedly settling with the driver, came to the whisky as though it had
sent a call out to him. This new arrival was Castlebar's friend, Jake Jackman,
who described himself as a freelance journalist, but what he really did, not
even Castlebar could say. His aquiline face, though not unhandsome, was spoilt
by an aggrieved expression that became more aggrieved when he saw Angela and Castlebar
holding hands. Still, Angela was the owner of the bottle and he had to accept
things as they were. Forced to show her some courtesy, he stretched his lips in
a momentary smile and saying, 'Mind if I join you?' sat down before she could
reply. She laughed and pushed the bottle towards him. Having taken a drink, he
bent forward and pulling at his long beak of a nose, looked angrily at Simon:
'I suppose
you're
wondering why I'm not in uniform?'

Simon began to disclaim any such interest but
Jackman was not listening. Having distracted Angela and Castlebar from each
other, he told them: 'You know that old bag Rutter? Got too much money for her own
good. Saw her at Groppi's this afternoon and what do you think she said? She
said, "Young man, why aren't you in uniform?" Impertinent old cow!'

Castlebar giggled: 'What did you say?'

'I said, "Madam, if you think I'll
sacrifice my life to preserve you and your bank balance, you've got another
think coming." That ruffled the old hen's feathers. She said, "You're
a very rude young man!" "You're dead right, missus," I said.'
Having recounted his story, Jackman sat up, willing to think of other things:
'You people going somewhere to eat?'

Angela looked tenderly at Castlebar: 'What do
you want to do, Bill?'

Castlebar, lowering his eyelids, smiled,
conveying his future plans, but for the moment he was content to eat: 'We might
get a bite somewhere.'

'The Extase, then,' Angela said and Jackman
jumped up, ready to depart.

They could have walked to the Extase, which was
on the river bank at Bulaq, but Angela waved to a taxi at the gate and it took them
across the bridge. The fare was only a few piastres and Angela allowed Castlebar
to settle it while she went into the Extase to pay the entrance fees. Simon,
unused to her largesse, hurried after her, offering his share, but she closed
his hand over the notes he was holding and led him inside, a captive guest.

Harriet had her own ways of repaying Angela's
hospitality and so, no doubt, had Castlebar, but Jackman accepted it without
question, having once said to Harriet,' If Angela insists on taking us to
places we can't afford, then it's up to her. She knows I haven't the lolly for
these parties.' This might be true but, Harriet noted, he was, more often than
not, self-invited.

Inside the open-air night club, there was the
usual crowd of officers and such girls as they could find. The officers, most
of them on leave, were drunk or nearly drunk, and there was an atmosphere of
uproar.

As they queued for a table, Harriet said to
Angela: 'Aren't you suffocated by all this noise?'

Angela's laughter rose above it: 'Can't get
enough of it.'

The Extase, being so close to the river, was
held to be cooler than other places but the arc lights poured heat down on the
guests and the guests, amorous and sweating, generated more heat. It was not a
place Harriet much liked. On a previous visit she had seen Guy with Edwina, and
the shock of this sight still remained with her although Guy had protested he
was merely comforting Edwina, who was distressed because Peter had failed to
keep a date. Looking towards the table where they had been seated, she felt an
impulse to run from the place - but she had nowhere to go and no one to go
with.

When their turn came to be led to a table,
Angela gave an excited scream and pointed to the people at the next table. One
of them was a friend and Angela demanded that the tables be placed together so
the two parties could become one. She introduced the friend as 'Mortimer'.
Mortimer, a plain girl with a pleasant expression and a sun reddened skin, was
in uniform of a sort and had with her two young captains in the regiment that
was nicknamed 'the Cherrypickers'.

Looking round the double table, Angela said, 'Isn't
this fun?' and Mortimer, mellow with drink, agreed, 'Great fun', but there was
no response from the others.

Though the tables were united, there was
division between the factions. The two hussars, called Terry and Tony, had been
drinking champagne and were in an elated condition. They took no notice of
Simon but the other men, Castlebar and Jackman, roused in them a hostile
merriment. They stared unbelievingly at them then, turning to each other, fell
together with gusts of laughter that brought tears to their eyes.

Mortimer chided them,' Come on, now, boys!' but
they were beyond her control.

To make matters worse, another non-combatant,
one who had experienced Angela's liberality in the past, approached the party
and stood there like a mendicant, begging to be allowed in. He was Major
Cookson, who, having lost all his Greek property and knowing no life but a life
of pleasure, hung around places like the Extase and provided lonely officers
with telephone numbers. Harriet, meeting his humble, pleading gaze, felt
discomfited but it was not for her to invite him to the table. Angela was too
absorbed with her talk to notice him and so he stood, a very thin, epicene
figure, much aged by his changed circumstances, the nubbled surface of his silk
suit brushed with grime and his buckskin shoes, more grey than white, breaking
at the sides.

Harriet thought "The war has done for us
all' though, in fact, she and Guy were more fortunate than many. Because they
had known Dobson in Bucharest, they had been lifted out of the clutter of
refugees and given a room in his Embassy flat. She looked down at her own
sandals, whitened each morning by the servants, and felt pleased with them.
Yet, how curious it was that they could raise her self-esteem!

Cookson's behaviour during the evacuation from
Greece bad given her no cause to respect him but now, seeing him there old,
dry, brittle, seedy, like a piece of seaweed that circumstances had cast above
the tide line, she was sorry for him. She touched Angela's arm and whispered to
her. Angela, turning at once, called to him: 'Major Cookson, have you come to
join us?'

A chair was found and Cookson was fitted in
between Harriet and Castlebar. As he stretched a gaunt hand towards Castlebar's
cigarette pack, Castlebar with a snarling glance, like a hungry dog espying
another, moved it out of reach.

The Cherrypickers now found a new object for
their scornful regard. As they stared at him, Cookson, probably attracted by
their virile, youthful good looks, grew red and cast down his eyes. Terry,
leaning towards him, enquired: 'Did Lady Hooper say
Major
Cookson?'

Cookson gave a brief, unhappy nod. His rank,
acquired during the First War, was said by his enemies to have been acting and
unpaid Terry now asked with elaborate courtesy: 'Brigade of Guards, weren't
you?' This time Cookson gave a brief, unhappy shake of the head.

Terry looked at Tony: 'There was a Cookson in
the Guards, wasn't there? You must have known him?'

Tony heartily agreed: 'Jove, yes. Dear old
Cookson. We used to call him Queenie. Had a queer way of sitting, Cookson had.
Chaps used to ask "Why is Queenie like an engine?'"

Terry, knowing the answer to that one, put his
hands over his eyes and howled with laughter.

Simon, too, knew the answer to that one and it
increased his nervous disgust with the people about him. Because of his youth
and silence, he was ignored by most of them but that did not worry him. What
did worry him was their strangeness and hilarity. There were only eight of them
but for all the sense he could make of the party, there might have been a
couple of dozen. Even the Cherrypickers, on leave as he was, seemed to him
unreal in their ribald insolence. He had never known men behave so badly in
company. He was shocked. And, he remembered, it was still the day on which Hugo
had died.

There was a pause while a small boy put glasses
on the table, and a Nubian safragi, dripping sweat on to the customers, brought
champagne in a bucket. Breaking the wire with his hand, he let the cork fly
away. The ice had melted and the champagne, a gritty, sweetish German brand,
was warm. Food came with the same lack of ceremony. There was a plate of steak for
everyone.

'We didn't order steak,' Angela said.

'Only this meat,' said the safragi: 'All persons
same. Very busy this place, this time.'

Simon knew that coming to Cairo had been a
mistake. The men spoke of it as though life here was a perpetual carousal but
to him it seemed a mad-house. Even the waiters were mad. When he learnt that
Hugo was dead, he should have foregone his leave and returned to his unit.
There, if he had nothing else, he had the comfort of familiar routine. The men
would have understood how he felt but here no one understood or cared. But, of
course, only two of them - Harriet Pringle and that odd, excitable woman called
Lady Hooper - knew of Hugo's death. He looked at Harriet who, feeling his
dejection, smiled at him and he smiled back, grateful that she had once had
supper with Hugo and knew a little about him.

The table served, the Cherrypickers started up
again. Discussing Queenie's favourite flower, they decided that it was a
pansy. But was it a yellow or a white pansy?

Harriet was bored by the Cherrypickers yet
scarcely knew with whom to ally herself. They were fighting men and, unlike
Jackman, they were ready to risk their lives for others. Their trousers were
purple-red in colour because - so the story went -in some early engagement,
they had fought till the blood from their wounds flowed down to their feet.
They could claim to have earned their amusement, but Cookson was poor game.

Moved to his defence, she said, 'Your jokes are
so feeble. Can't we talk of something else?'

They gaped at her, silenced by their own
astonishment, and Mortimer, looking at Harriet, nodded her approval. Feeling
they were in sympathetic agreement, the two women began to talk to each other.
Mortimer, Harriet discovered, was drowsy not from alcohol but from lack of
sleep. She and a co-driver had driven to Iraq and back, taking it in turns to
cat-nap so they could keep going through the night. This, she explained, was
against regulations but gave them twenty-four hours of freedom when they got
back. The co-driver had taken herself to bed but Mortimer had gone to the
Semiramis bar for a drink.

'Where I met these two blighters,' she said,
yawning, damp-eyed with tiredness yet keeping awake from sheer cordiality.

'I envy you,' Harriet said: '1 was about to join
the Wrens but got married instead.'

They talked about the days immediately before
the war when there was no longer caution or pretence that a show-down could be
avoided. Realizing that war was inevitable, the English were united in a
terrible excitement.

'We were all doomed, or thought we were,' said
Harriet.

Mortimer asked, 'How did you get out here?' and
Harriet explained that her husband, on leave, was ordered back to his lectureship
in Bucharest. He and Harriet, having married in haste, travelled eastwards
through countries mobilizing troops and reaching Bucharest on the day England
entered the war.

Mortimer, at the same time, was embarking on a
troopship for the Middle East. 'And I might have been with her,' Harriet
thought, before she went on to explain how she and Guy had been evacuated to
Greece and then to Egypt.

She asked, 'What is your first name?'

Mortimer, laughing and yawning at the same time,
said, 'These days I have only one name, I'm Mortimer.'

The rich, red-brown of Mortimer's round face was
set off by the periwinkle blue of her scarf, the privileged wear of a service
that had once been voluntary and still had a scapegrace distinction.

'I suppose I wouldn't be allowed to join out here?'
Harriet asked.

'No, there are no training facilities here.'

Angela said: 'You wouldn't qualify, darling. To
get into Mortimer's outfit you have to be a lizzie or a drunk or an Irishwoman.'

Looking at Mortimer with her cropped hair,
crumpled shirt and dirty cotton slacks, Harriet asked: 'Which are you?'

'Me? I drink.'

A small man had come on to the stage wearing
white tie and tails. Clasping his hands before him like an opera singer, he
opened his mouth but before he could make a sound, a man in the audience
bawled: 'Russian.' This was immediately taken up and from all over the audience
came a clamour of: 'Russian, Russian, Russian. We want Russian.' The performer
threw out his hands, in a despairing gesture, and Tony asked, 'What's all this
about?'

Angela told him that the performer sang a
gibberish which he could make sound like any language the audience chose, but
he could not do Russian. The Cherrypickers, with expressions of concern, looked
at each other and Terry said, 'Can't do Russian? M'deah, how queah!'

Jackman who had been silent, having no interest
in any conversation but his own, now lost patience and said to Castlebar: 'A
tedious lot, our wooden-headed soldiery!'