The Levant Trilogy (33 page)

Crosbie, who obviously did not, mumbled 'Sir'
and setting out, stopped to enquire at every hut and bivouac that showed a
light. The commander had found the assembly point long before the jeep reached
it but Simon did not betray himself.

'Just been sent, sir, to see you've settled in.'

'Yep, all in. All tickety-boo.'

Thankful to have skirted this assignment safely,
Simon relented towards Crosbie and said, 'That wasn't too bad. Now let's hope
we can get some kip,' but their night's work was not yet over. Reporting back
to the command vehicle, Simon found a different officer in charge. He said,
'You're the new liaison officer, are you? Well, I've got a job for you. D'you
know the compound with the dummy lorries? No? I expect you'll find it easily
enough. Look out the ordnance officer and give him a signal: he's to fit the
dummies over the newly arrived tanks.'

'When, sir? Tomorrow?'

'No, not tomorrow. Everything here happens at
night. The job's to be done before first light. Now, get a move on.'

An hour later, having tracked down the ordnance
officer, Simon apologetically handed him the signal: 'I'm sorry, sir, but it's
supposed to be done before daybreak.'

Amused by his tone, the officer looked at Simon,
smiled and nodded; 'Received and understood,' he said.

Free now to sleep, Simon ordered Crosbie to park
near the command vehicle in order to be on call. Then, Simon in his
sleeping-bag, Crosbie on his ground-sheet, they dossed down on either side of
the jeep.

The assembly of the camp was growing and from
its proportions, Simon realized that the purpose behind it was not merely
defensive. And, as he had been told, everything happened at night. The convoys
and units journeyed in darkness, and in darkness took up their positions in the
camp. This, he knew, would not happen on a routine training march.

Dummy equipment was collected in dumps and
mysteriously moved about. He found, when delivering signals, that the dummy
guns and vehicles of yesterday had been replaced by real guns and vehicles, or
the real had been replaced by dummies. The purpose was to deceive, and the
deceived could only be the enemy. Simon would have been glad to have Ridley
with him to make sense of all this shifting and replacement. Several times he
almost asked Crosbie, 'What's going on?' but kept quiet, seeing no reason for
wasting words.

As Fitzwilliams had promised, he soon knew his
way around but he suffered from lack of companions. Two other liaison officers
were due and, sitting alone in B mess, he longed for their arrival.

The heat had dragged on into mid-September, and
seemed, to tired senses, more exhausting than summer. Under the tarpaulin the
air was turgid with food smells and singed by the cooks' fires. Simon was
dulled by inactivity and the atmosphere, when another liaison officer came to
join him. This was Blair, a captain, and Simon, standing up, said, 'Glad you've
come, sir.'

Blair laughed with the uncertainty of a man who
has lost his place in the world: 'Just call me Blair.'

He was soft-bodied, stoutish, puffy about the
cheeks and eyes, and his hair was growing thin. Simon thought him a very old
fellow to be living among the hardships of the desert. He was not the companion
Simon had hoped for, but any companion was better than none.

Blair sat with Simon at meal times but had little
to say for himself. When he was not eating, he would sit with his head down,
his hands hanging loosely between his knees. He had been in tanks and wore the
black beret, but not with pride. Whenever he could, he would take it off and
fold it into his pocket.

The third liaison officer, when he turned up,
had no more to offer than Blair. His name was Donaldson and although the same
age as Simon, he had finished his year as a second lieutenant. With two pips
up, he was able to treat Simon as an inferior. He tried at first to come to
terms with Blair, but finding him sad company, he ignored both his fellow
liaison officers and sat by himself.

Blair, after a few days, began to talk. Hesitant
and nervous, he said he had served in the desert since the first year of the
war. In those days, with only the Italians to contend with, it had been 'a gentleman's
war'. His CO had said that here in the desert, they had a 'soft option', but
then the Afrika Korps had arrived to spoil things. By hints, pauses and a
shaking of the head, he made it clear that some unnatural catastrophe had
struck him down near a place he called Bir Gubo. 'East of Retma', he said as
though that meant anything to Simon. Blair mentioned other names: Acroma,
Knightsbridge, Adem, Sidi Rezegh, which all, for Simon, belonged to the era of
pre-history when the British still operated on the other side of the wire that
marked the Egyptian frontier.

'With all that armour round you, you must have
felt pretty safe?'

Blair's eyes fixed themselves on Simon: 'Safe?
You ever seen inside one of those Ronsons after it's burnt out?'

'Not inside, no.'

'Imagine being packed inside a tin can with
other chaps and then the whole lot fried to a frizzle. What do you think you'd
look like?' Blair gave a bleak laugh and Simon said no more about tanks.

Instead, he wiped the sweat off his face and
asked Blair. 'Does it ever let up?'

'I've known worse summers, but not one that
lasted into October.'

October came. As though the change of month
meant an automatic change of weather, the hard, hot wind stopped abruptly and a
softer wind came cool out of the east and dispersed the canteen's flies. The
nights became colder and jerseys were regulation wear. Those officers who owned
sheepskin coats, now wore them swinging open so the long, inner fleece hung out
like a fringe.

Hardy, ordering Simon to clean himself up, had
said, 'You'll be among the nobs,' but 'the nobs' were much less conventional in
dress than Hardy and his staff. Hardy himself always wore a carefully knotted
tie but the officers at Corps HQ wore silk scarves, rich in colour, and their
winter trousers of corduroy velvet - khaki and serge, apparently, were for
other ranks -could be any colour from near-white to honey brown. They had for
Simon a swaggering elegance and he greatly envied them. He told Blair that when
he was next in Cairo he would buy some corduroy trousers and a sheepskin coat.

'Be careful about the coat,' Blair said. 'Those
skins can stink to high heaven if they're not properly cured. Often, with all
the smells in the Muski, you don't notice it till you get it home. If you try
to return it, the chap who sold it can't be found. I had a fine Iranian coat
once, best skins, embroidered all over. Was sorry to lose it.'

'You mean someone liberated it?'

'No, lost it at Bir Gubo. Lost a lot of things.'

'What
did
happen at Bir Gubo?'

Blair, biting into a bully-beef sandwich, tried
to smile with his mouth full. He chewed and coughed and managed to say, 'You
mean, to the coat? Got burnt.'

'Not just the coat. You and the rest of the
crew? - what happened?'

Blair cleared his mouth with a gulp of tea.
'They bought it -all except me. I'd gone for a walk ... You know, with a spade.
Heard a plane go over. Didn't see it. Didn't even know whose it was. When I got
back the Ronson was ablaze. Couldn't get near it. We'd been fart-arsing around,
not a soul in sight. Must've taken a direct hit. I don't know. Simply don't
know. I just stood there and watched till it burnt out... And when I went to
look, you couldn't tell one chap from another.'

'And what happened to you?'

'Don't know. Wandered about ... shock, I
suppose. The Scruff found me and thought I was dead. Just going to bury me when
someone saw my eyelids move. Just a twitch, as the chaps say. Saved my life.'
Blair laughed so his tea cup shook in his hand, and Simon felt he knew all he
need know about Blair's descent from a tank's officer to a messenger who
carried signals for other men.

Simon asked him, 'Any idea what's happening
here? There's a mass of stuff coming in. Do you think it's the attack?'

'Could be. Certainly looks like it.'

'When will it be, do you think?'

'Have to be soon. There's the moon, you see. And
you can't keep a show like this sitting on its arse. The jerries might see it
and strike first. There'll be a showdown all right.'

'You looking forward to it?'

'Don't know. Perhaps. Better than hanging about.'

The moon was growing towards the full and
expectations grew with it. In the middle of the month, when anything might happen,
Simon was sent south towards the point at which he had parted from the
Cherrypickers. Of the big supply base, not a barrel remained but a small force
of camouflaged tanks were hull down in the wadi where the command lorry had
stood. The officer in charge was lying on high ground, looking westwards
through field glasses. When Simon came to him, bringing a movement order, he
said in a low voice, 'Get down.' Simon crouched beside him and he pointed to a
bluff of rock distorted by the mid-day heat: 'See over there; that's the
salient. They've been there since Alam Haifa. If you listen, you can hear them
singing.'

Lying down, Simon bent his head to extend his
hearing and there came to him, faint and clear, like a voice across lake water,
a song he had heard somewhere before: 'But that's an English song!'

'No, it's one of theirs: "Lili
Marlene". We picked it up from the German radio.'

The two men, lying side by side, remained silent
while the song lasted. Simon, moved by its nostalgic sadness, thought of the
first time he had seen Edwina. She had leant over the balcony towards him, her
face half-hidden by a fall of sun-bleached hair, her brown arm lying on the
balcony rail, her white robe falling open so he could see the rounding of her
breasts. She came back to him so vividly, he thought he could smell her
gardenia scent. He was impatient of the vision and relieved when the song ended
and the officer, laughing and jumping up, said, 'So we're to take the tanks up
north? Gathering us all in, eh? Looks like things are hotting up?'

'We hope so, sir. The signal says: "Move
only after dark".'

'Will do. Received and understood.'

As Simon drove back, Edwina was still on his
mind. He tried to order her away but she stayed where she was, smiling down on
him from the balcony. The desert air was a sort of anaphrodisiac, and he and
the other men were detached from sex, yet he could not reject the romantic
enhancement of love. He took out his wallet to distract himself, and, opening
it, looked for the photograph of his wife. He could not find it. He could not
even remember when he had last seen it. At some time during the past weeks,
perhaps during the last months, it had fallen out, and now it was lost. He
tried to recreate her in his mind but all he could see was a thin, small figure
standing, weeping, on the station platform She had no face. He struggled with
his memory but no face came to him and he wondered, were he to meet her
unexpectedly, would he know who she was?

In October, when the evenings grew cool, Dobson
ordered the servants to take blankets out of store. A smell of moth-balls filled
the flat as he distributed them, saying again and again: 'So delicious to have
a bit of weight on one at night.'

The Garden City foliage scarcely marked the
change of season. A few deciduous trees, hidden among the evergreens and palms,
dropped their leaves. These went unnoticed but one tree - the students called
it the Examination Tree - made a dramatic appearance out of nowhere, feathering
its bare branches with mauve blossom, mistaking the autumn for spring.

The morning air became gentle as silk and a
delicate mist hung over the old banyans on the riverside walk. The heat, that
had dulled the senses like a physical pressure, now lifted and minds and bodies
felt renewed. Lovers, no longer suffering the wet and sticky sheets that were
cover enough during the summer, became invigorated: and the one most
invigorated, it seemed, was Castlebar.

The inmates of the flat were astonished when
Angela first led him through the living-room to her bedroom where they remained
closeted all afternoon. Castlebar, on his way out, passed Harriet and Edwina
with a very smug smile. Angela, appearing later for her evening drink, was not
discomposed and made no comment on Castlebar's visit. The next day he was back
again.

Edwina, who had not seen Castlebar before, said
to Harriet, 'Where did Angela pick up that scruffy old has-been?'

Harriet could not believe the infatuation would
last, but it was lasting and becoming more fervent. Castlebar was with Angela
every afternoon. She confided to Harriet that the keeper of the cheap pension
where Castlebar lived had objected to her presence in Castlebar's room The
woman had demanded double payment for what she called 'the accommodation of two
persons'. Angela would have paid the required sum but Castlebar argued that he
had a right to bring in a friend. He said he would not be cheated by 'a greedy
Levantine hag' and they settled the matter by changing ground.

Harriet and Angela were neighbours in the
bedroom corridor and Harriet overheard more than she wanted of the chambering
next door. She had no hope of a siesta and went to the living-room to read in
peace. Dobson, whose room was in the main part of the flat, once or twice
wandered out, a towel tied like a sarong round his waist, and realizing why
Harriet had retreated, shook his head over Angela's fall from grace.

'The goings-on!' he grumbled after they had been
going on for a week: 'To think she would take up with a shocker like Castlebar!
And I'm told he's got a wife somewhere. What does she see in him?'

Harriet tried to imagine what Angela saw in him.
In the picture that came to her mind, Castlebar, worn down by self-indulgence,
middle-age and the Egyptian climate, had a folded yellow skin and a mouth that
looked unappetizingly soft, like decayed fruit..

She shook her head: 'I don't know. But what does
anyone see in anyone? Perhaps that's what Yeats meant by "love's bitter
mystery"!'

Dobson, though he had never objected to Peter
Lisdoonvarna's presence in Edwina's room, said he meant to be firm with Angela.
'It's going too far. You might drop her a word. Tell her I don't like it,'

When Harriet attempted to drop the word, Angela
broke in to ask, 'What has it got to do with him? Perhaps he wants me to pay
double expenses?'

'Angela, you're being disingenuous. He feels
that Castlebar's not worthy of you - he debases you socially.'

The two women laughed and Harriet felt it best
to avoid Dobson and his complaints. A few afternoons later, keeping to her
room, she was startled by a ringing crash followed by Castlebar's half-stifled
snuffling titter. After he had gone, Harriet, passing Angela's door, found her
on her knees, mopping water from the floor.

'Sorry if we disturbed you.'

'I didn't hear a thing.'

'Bill knocked down a dish of water. He keeps it
by the bed because he's inclined to come too soon so, when he's over excited,
he dips his wrist in the water and it cools him down.'

This explanation, unblushing and matter-of-fact,
took for granted Harriet's acceptance of the situation and she could only say,'
I see.'

'And you can tell bloody Dobson that Bill won't
be here much longer. He's found himself a flat.'

'He's been very clever. When we wanted one, we
couldn't find a thing.'

'The situation's easier now as some of the
officers are going. And the university has a few flats for its men. Bill put
his name down for one as soon as he heard his wife was determined to get back.
He had to. He said if he didn't stir himself on her behalf, she'd raise hell.'

'You mean, he's frightened of her?'

'Terrified. Poor Bill!'

Angela smiled in amused contempt, and yet the
enchantment remained. Their afternoons together were not enough for her, she
had to see him again in the evening. If, by chance, they had not made an
arrangement to meet later, she would go to the Union in search of him, always taking
Harriet with her. She was generous with her friends who, in return, were
required to support her in her caprices.

Now that the nights were growing cold, the Union
members were retiring from the lawn into the club house and there Angela chose
a corner table and held it as her own. The chief safragi, heavily tipped, would
place an 'Engaged' notice on the table and she would sit for as long as need
be, awaiting Castlebar.

Her friends were not the only ones to marvel at
her intimacy with him. When he appeared, as he did sooner or later, those
sitting around would glance askance at the two of them and then at each other.

None of this worried Angela and Castlebar, who
openly held hands, Castlebar cleverly manipulating his cigarette and drink with
his right hand while his left kept its hold upon Angela. They would put their
heads together and whisper. They giggled over jokes known only to themselves.

Harriet, feeling an intruder, gave her attention
to Jackman, tolerating him for want of better company. Jackman, himself,
resenting Castlebar's preoccupation with Angela, came for the drink and
pretended he had an audience of three. At that time his talk was all about
movements in the desert. There were rumours of vast quantities of equipment
arriving at Suez and being sent to the front. Always after dark, he said. A man
with a famous name, one of a family of prestidigitators, had been flown out to
Cairo and was met at parties. He was quiet and pleasant, but gave nothing away.
If no one else knew why he was there, Jackman knew.

'If you hear the hun's belting back to Libya as
fast as his wheels'll take him, it's because this chap has fixed up a magic
show.'

'What sort of magic show?'

'Ah, that would be telling. But he creates
illusions. This time, it'll be millions of them.'

'And when is this going to happen?'

'All in good time, my child.'

Meanwhile the Germans were fifty miles from
Alexandria, which was exactly where they had been for the last four months.
There, like the luckless engineers of some too long drawn out siege, they
seemed likely to remain until boredom or starvation sent them home again.

Cookson, searching for drink and company,
tracked Angela down to her table at the Union and was admitted to the company.
He came intermittently at first then, thinking he had confirmed his position,
began to appear nightly to the annoyance of Castlebar who whispered to Angela.
Angela murmured, 'Poor old thing, I can't tell him he's not wanted.'

'Let me do it, darling.'

'Well, if you must - but be tactful'

'Naturally, I will.'

The next night Cookson thought he could go
further: he brought a friend. He knew several people in Cairo whom no one else
wanted to know and one of these was a youth who had no name but Tootsie. Before
the war Tootsie had come on holiday to Egypt with his widowed mother. The
mother had died, her pension had died with her and Tootsie, cut off by war from
the rest of the world, wandered around, looking for someone to keep him. The
sight of Tootsie lurking behind Cookson caused Castlebar to lower his
eye-tooth. He made a noise in his throat like the warning growl of a guard-dog
about to bark.

Cookson, aware of danger, paused nervously, then
made a darting sally towards the table, saying on a high, exalted note: 'Hello,
Lady H! Hello, Bill! I knew you wouldn't mind poor Tootsie...'

Castlebar spoke: 'Go away, Cookson. Nothing for
you here.'

'Go away?' Cookson appeared flabbergasted: 'Oh,
Bill, how could you be such a meanie? Tootsie and I have had such a tiring day
around the bars.'

'Go away, Cookson.'

'Please, Bill, don't be horrid!' Cookson, near
tears, took out his handkerchief and rolled it between his hands while Tootsie,
unaware of the contention, made himself agreeable to Harriet. He had a
favourite, and, indeed, an only interest in life: the state of his bowels.

He bent over Harriet to tell her: 'It's been
such a week! Senna pods every night and nothing in the morning. But
nothing!
Then, only an hour ago, what a surprise! The whole bowel emptied out, and
not before time, I can tell you...'

Harriet, who had heard about Tootsie's bowels
before, held up a hand to check him while she watched Cookson, now pressing the
handkerchief to his cheek, shifting from one foot to the other in shame.
Tootsie, taking no notice of Harriet's appeal, continued in a small, breathy
voice, asking her whether she thought the recent evacuation would be a daily
event.

She shook her head and Cookson, driven beyond
bearing, called to Angela: 'Dear Lady Hooper, please...'

Angela, who had sat with eyes lowered, was
forced to look up. She said 'I'm sorry, Major Cookson. You heard what Bill
said.'

'But
do you
want me to go, Lady Hooper?'

'I want what Bill wants.'

Cookson, crestfallen, plucked at Tootsie,
saying, 'I understand. Come along, Tootsie. We have to go.' As they went in
confusion, Angela said with mock severity to Castlebar, 'You weren't very
tactful, were you? You dreadful, lovely brute!' and she gave him an admiring
kiss on the side of his mouth.

This incident had been observed by some thirty
Union members, among them an oil agent called Clifford who had been one of the
intruders present when Angela brought home her dead child. As Clifford keenly
watched and heard Cookson's dismissal, Harriet remembered how he had recounted
the story of the boy's death to the first people he met.

She was not surprised when Dobson complained to
her a day or two later: 'Angela's outrageous. The whole of Cairo's talking
about her wretched liaison. It's getting the flat a bad name. And where, oh
where, will it all end?'