The Levant Trilogy (45 page)

A brute, but, still, no ordinary brute! He was a
catch - alas, already caught! Edwina sighed. Her golden beauty drawn with
disappointment, she saw herself setting out again to find another 'catch'.
There were a great many lonely men in Cairo but few who matched up to Edwina's
aspirations.

Her regimen of emetine capsules and a bland diet
seemed so simple, Harriet thought she could treat herself at home but Sister
Metrebian would not hear of it: 'We have to carefully watch you. Emetine is
very dangerous. A toxic drug. You take too much and you kill yourself. Do you
understand?'

And, Harriet thought, how easily Dr Shafik could
kill her! When she had been in hospital a week, he entered the room in a
businesslike way and said he needed a sample of her blood. Sister Metrebian was
at his heels, carrying a knife in a kidney dish. He lifted the knife and
Harriet was startled to see it was sharp-pointed like a kitchen knife.

'What is this?' he asked: 'We have here an edge
like a consumptive's temperature chart!' He threw the knife back with
elaborate disgust and she realized it had been another joke. He did not mean to
use it, yet, in her distrust of everyone and everything, she felt a particular
distrust of Shafik. She thought, 'The smiler with the knife', and asked: 'Why
do you want a sample of blood?'

'For a little test, that is all. You are
afraid?'

'No, of course not.'

She expected him to draw off the blood with a
syringe but he had found another instrument which he wished to try. She felt he
was experimenting on her. He pressed the point of a metal scoop into the artery
of her inner arm. As the blood flowed down the scoop to a test-tube, she felt
she could bear no more. Tears ran down her cheeks and Dr Shafik spoke with
surprising kindliness: 'There, there, Mrs Pringle, don't cry. You are a very
brave girl.'

Knowing she was not a brave girl, Harriet
laughed but he did not laugh with her. The blood taken and the small wound
covered, he pressed his long, strong fingers into the region round her liver
and asked,' Does that hurt?'

'Yes, but it would, anyway, you're pressing so
hard. Why? What else is wrong with me?'

'That is a thing I must find out.'

When doctor and sister had gone, Harriet asked
herself how it was she had sunk so low, she wept at the sight of her own blood?
She despised herself and yet she wept again. Hunting round for a handkerchief,
she found among the detritus at the bottom of her handbag, the heart made of
rose-diamonds. She had forgotten it and now, holding it above her head, she was
entranced by the radiance of the diamonds and was amazed that they were not
merely in her keeping, like Aidan's votive cat, but were her property. The
heart had been given to her: an object from a richer, grander, altogether more
opulent world than any she had inhabited. She put it on the bedside table where
it lit the air, a talisman and a preserver of life.

When Guy came in that evening, Dr Shafik was in
the room, making a routine visit. He was about to rush away when it apparently
occurred to him who Guy was. He came to a stop, held out his hand and said with
awe: 'But, of course, you are the Professor Pringle that people speak of. You
are a lover of Egypt, are you not? You are one who would urge us towards
freedom and social responsibility?'

The revelation of his breadth of vision
surprised even Guy but, pink with pleasure, he seized on Shafik's hand and
admitted that he was indeed that Professor Pringle, saying, 'Yes, Egypt must
have freedom. But social responsibility? That, I imagine, can come only through
a Marxist revolution.'

Whether the doctor agreed or not, he moved
closer to Guy and said in a quiet voice: 'You know, there are many of us?'

'Of course. I've talked to students. ..'

'Oh, students! They act and so are useful, but
they do not think, and so are dangerous. But enough for now. We will talk
another time, eh? Meanwhile, I have this case of your wife. She is not well.'

Guy, forced to revert to the discouraging
subject of Harriet's health, asked: 'Aren't you satisfied with her progress?'

'Not so much. These amoebae are insidious
animalcule. They move from organ to organ.'

Guy stared and kept quiet while the doctor,
supposing the matter to be of intense interest to him, described the dangers of
amoebic infection: dangers comprehensible by a male brain but not, of course,
by a female.

'You must know that the amoebae can be carried
in the portal stream to the liver and cause hepatitis and the liver abscess. If
they reach the gall bladder that, too, can be bad. But I do not think she has
the liver abscess.'

'Oh, good!' Guy, his dismay rapidly dispersed by
this assurance, said, 'Then she's all right. There's nothing to worry about?'

'Sooner or later, she will be all right.'

'Splendid!' That decided, Guy was eager to
return to the subject of social responsibility but Shafik seemed equally eager
to evade it.

'Such talk would bore a lady, and you and your
wife must have much to say to one another.' With an amused expression, lifting
his hand in an adieu, the doctor made a swift departure.

Guy gazed regretfully after him: 'Why did he go
off like that?'

'Sister Metrebian says he is a busy man.'

'I suppose he is.'

Now that the chance to discuss social responsibility
had been snatched from him, Guy looked tired. He, too, was a busy man and he
seemed to have about him the oppression of the dusty, noisy Cairo streets. He
sat down and, as he looked at Harriet, she felt he reproached her for remaining
in a country that was destroying her health.

'Dobson was telling me that before the war,
anyone who contracted this sort of dysentery was shipped home. In England, the
amoebae leave the system and you are not re-infected. Here, if you're prone to
it, you're liable to get it again.'

'So Dobson wants to ship me home? He's absurdly
self-important at times. He thinks he's only to say the word and I'll get
straight on to the boat. Well, I won't. It would simply mean you were alone
here and I would be alone in England. A miserable arrangement!'

'He's only thinking of your good. He says when
people are depleted by acute dysentery, they pick up other diseases and...'

'And die? Well, let's wait till I show more
signs of dying.'

He was about to say more when he noticed the
rose-diamond brooch on the table beside her and he became animated: 'Where did
you get this?'

'Angela gave it to me. She bought it in the
Muski.'

He picked it up and laughed as he examined it: 'It's
vulgar but it has a sort of panache. Let me have it, I'll give it to Edwina to
cheer her up.'

'But it's mine. It was given to me.'

'Surely you don't want it. You couldn't be seen
wearing a thing like that. It's a theatrical prop: just right for Edwina when
she sings, "We'll meet again" or "Smoke gets in your eyes".

'She doesn't sing those sort of songs.'

'She does in the show. It's for troops and the
troops will love this thing.'

'It's a valuable piece of jewellery. They're
real diamonds and cost a lot of money.'

'Even so, it's tawdry. It looks cheap.'

Smiling his contempt, he held the brooch away
from him and she saw it degraded from a treasure and a talisman into a worthless
gewgaw. She could not defend it, yet she did not want to lose it.

She said, 'Give it back,' unable to believe he
would take it from her, but he slipped it into his pocket.

'Darling, don't be silly. You know you don't
want it. Let Edwina have it. Well, I must go.'

She watched, silent in disbelief, as he left
with the brooch, delighted that he had something to give away.

'But what he gives, he takes from me!' She went
to sit on the balcony, feeling, as the first shock of the incident wore off, a
sense of outrage that the brooch was gone. Gazing over the greensward where she
sometimes saw men on polo ponies and other men swinging golf clubs, she asked
herself, 'What is there to keep me here?'

When Angela came to see her again, she said,
'I've been thinking about England. I could get a job there. I'd be of some use
in the world.'

'Do you mean you might come with me?'

'Yes, I do mean that. I've been watching those
men out there playing ridiculous games while other men are being killed, and I
thought how futile our life is here. I felt I wanted to get away.'

'If you're serious, you'll have to apply at
once. There's a rumour that the ship's over-full already. Shall I speak to Dobson?
Get him to use his influence?'

'Yes, speak to Dobson.' But though she agreed,
Harriet was still half-hoping that the ship was too full to take her and she
would have to stay.

Still, she had put the matter into Angela's
hands and before they could say anything more about it, she was visited by Major
Cookson. He had not come alone. His companion, whose function had probably been
to pay for the long taxi drive to the hospital, did not follow him to the bed
but stood just inside the room as though bewildered at finding himself there.

Cookson sat on the bed edge and whispered to
Harriet and Angela: 'I've brought an old friend, very distinguished. I knew
you'd be pleased to meet him.' He turned and summoned the friend in a
commanding tone: 'Humphrey, come over here.' Then returning to the women, he whispered
again: 'It's Humphrey Taupin, the archaeologist. You were in Greece, Harriet.
You must have heard of him.'

They all looked at Humphrey Taupin as he managed
to make his way to the bedside where he stood, swaying, as though about to
crumple to the floor.

Cookson brought a chair for him, saying, 'Sit
down, Humphrey, do!' but Taupin remained on his feet, looking at Harriet, a
smile reaching his face as though from a great distance.

Harriet had heard of him. He had been a famous
name around the cafes in Athens. When he was very young, on his first dig, he
had come upon a stone sarcophagus that contained a death-mask of beaten gold.
The mask, thought to be of a king of Corinth, was in the museum and Harriet had
seen it there. This find, that for some would have been the beginning, was for
him the end. She could imagine that such an achievement at twenty might leave
one wondering what to do for the next fifty years. Anyway, confounded by his
own success, he had retired to the most remote of the Sporades; and no one had
thought of him when the Germans came.

But he had escaped somehow and here he was, in
Cairo, standing beside her bed. When she smiled back at him, he moved a little
closer to her and a smell of the grave came from his clothes. His light alpaca
suit hung on him as on a skeleton. He was in early middle-age but his hair was
already white and his face was crumpled and coloured like the crust on old
custard.

She asked him how he had escaped from Greece.
When it occurred to him that she was speaking to him, he did not reply but bent
towards her and offered her his hand. She took it but not willingly. She had
heard that he had been cured of syphilis, but perhaps he was not cured. Feeling
his hand in hers, dry and fragile, like the skeleton of a small bird, she
remembered the courteous crusader who took the hand of a leper and became a
leper himself. When Taupin's hand slipped away, she felt she, too, was at risk.

Cookson plucked at his jacket, telling him again
to sit down but his senses seemed too distant to be contacted He smiled then,
turning, wandered back across the floor and out of the room.

Cookson tutted and said, 'He really is a most
unaccountable fellow. I'm sorry. I thought he would amuse you.'

Harriet, still feeling on her palm the rasp of
Humphrey Taupin's hand, asked, 'How did he get here?'

'He's just arrived from Turkey. His Greek boys
managed to get him to Lesbos in a caique in the middle of the night. He went on
to Istanbul and he hung around there till the Turks threw him out.'

'Why did they do that?'

'Hashish, y'know. They're sticky about that.'

Angela asked: 'Is that why he's so vague?'

'Oh, my dear, yes. I went to that island of his
once. Quite an ordeal, getting there and even more of an ordeal staying there.
He kept you sitting up, talking, all night and if you got any sleep, it was
during the day. Only one meal was served and not very good either. He called it
breakfast. It arrived about ten in the evening and then the talk began.'

'I suppose he was more
compos mentis
in
those days?' Harriet asked.

'Much more. He was quite the tyrant before he
got on to hashish. He had three subjects: sex, literature and religion. You
discussed one a night and then you were told the boys would row you back to
Skiros. There was no knowing how long you would have to wait for the boat back
to Athens.'

'And that was the routine?'

'Yes. Invariable. Everyone who went, talked
about it.'

'But they did go?'