The Levant Trilogy (5 page)

The telephone
rang at Sir Desmond's elbow. He answered it, said urgently, 'Yes, yes, hold
on,' and, excusing himself, went to take the call in another room. A scratch of
voices came from the receiver on the table. Clifford tiptoed to it, bent to
listen but before he could hear anything, a safragi entered to replace it on
its stand.

Bowen was
indignant. 'Really, Clifford, what a thing to do! And I think we've stayed long
enough. Let's slip away.'

'No, no.'
Pinkrose was impressively impatient, This may be the very news we're waiting
for.'

'It may indeed,'
said Clifford.

The light was
deepening towards sunset. The safragi who had attended to the telephone, opened
the windows and the long chiffon curtains blew like ghosts into the room.

Bowen complained,
'It's getting late ...' but Clifford silenced him with a lift of the hand.
Before anyone else could speak, a car, driven at reckless speed, came up the
drive and braked with a shriek outside the house. They heard the heavy front
door crash open and from the hall came the sound of a stumbling entry that
conveyed a sense of catastrophe. A woman entered the room shouting, 'Desmond.
Desmond,' and seeing the company, stopped and shook her head.

The men got to
their feet. Bowen said, 'Lady Hooper, is anything the matter?' She shook her
head again, standing in the middle of the room, her distracted appearance made
more wild by her disarranged black hair and the torn, paint-covered overall
that protected her dress. Lady Hooper was younger than her husband. She was
some age between thirty and forty, a delicately built woman with a delicate,
regular face. She looked at each of the strangers in turn and when she came to
Simon, she smiled and said, 'I think he'll be all right.'

Two safragis
carried in the inert body of a boy. The three women hastily struggled out of
the ottoman and the boy was put down. He lay prone and motionless, a thin,
small boy of eight or nine with the same delicate features as his mother: only
something had happened to them. One eye was missing. There was a hole in the
left cheek that extended into the torn wound which had been his mouth. Blood
had poured down his chin and was caked on the collar of his open-necked shirt.
The other eye, which was open, was lacklustre and blind like the eye of a dead
rabbit.

Sir Desmond
entered and anxiously asked, 'My dear, what has happened?'

'We were in the
desert. I was sketching and didn't see ... He picked up something. It exploded
- but he'll be all right.'

Harriet could
scarcely bear to look at Sir Desmond but he answered calmly enough, 'My dear,
of course. I expect he's suffering from shock.'

'Do you think we
should rouse him? Perhaps if we gave him something to eat...'

'Yes, a little
nourishment, light and easy to swallow.'

'Gruel, or an egg
beaten up. What do you think?'

Sir Desmond spoke
to the safragis who glanced at each other with the expression of those who have
long accepted the fact that all foreigners are mad.

There was an
interval in which Sir Desmond telephoned a doctor in Cairo and Lady Hooper,
sitting on the sofa edge, held the boy's hand. Sir Desmond, finishing his call,
spoke reassuringly to her, 'He's coming out straight away. He says Richard
must have an anti-tetanus injection.'

'There was Dettol
in the car. I bathed his face.'

One of the
safragis returned, bringing a bowl of gruel and the visitors watched with awe
and amazement as Sir Desmond, bending tenderly over the boy, attempted to feed
him. The mouth was too clogged with congealed blood to permit entry so the
father poured a spoonful of gruel into the hole in the cheek. The gruel poured
out again. This happened three times before Sir Desmond gave up and, gathering
the child into his arms, said, 'He wants to sleep. I'll take him to his room.'
Lady Hooper followed her husband and Clifford, knowing he was defeated, was
willing to depart.

Outside, beneath
the palms and the roseate sky, he gave a long whistle. 'Now I've seen
everything.'

'They couldn't
face the truth,' Bowen sighed in pity. They couldn't accept it.'

'They'll be
forced to accept it pretty soon. And we never heard what that phone call was
all about.'

Mr Liversage lay
asleep in the car. Bowen elected to move him over and sat beside him while Miss
Brownall joined her friend in the second car. Remembering the boy, no one spoke
as they drove through the Fayoum. The trees merged, dark in the misty evening.
Lights were flickering inside the box-shaped houses. It would soon be night. As
the oasis was left behind, the boy's death lost its immediacy and Harriet
thought of all the other boys who were dying in the desert before they had had
a chance to live. And yet, though there was so much death at hand, she felt the
boy's death was a death apart. Bowen murmured, 'A tragedy. An only child.'

'And the last
shot in the old locker,' said Clifford. They're not likely to have another.'

The sun had
almost set when they approached Mena and the last, long rays enriched the sand.
It glowed saffron and orange then, in a moment, the colour was gone and a
violet twilight came down. The passengers were sunk together with weariness but
Clifford had still not had enough. A few hundred yards before the road turned
towards Mena, he drew up and said, 'There's an ancient village about here.
Let's take a shufti.'

'Is it really
worth the effort?' Bowen asked.

'Oh, come on!'
Clifford rallied the party, insisting that if there was anything to see, it
must be seen. They wandered about on the stony mardam and found the village
which was sunk like an intaglio in the sand. Jumping down, they walked through
narrow streets between small, roofless houses. The dig must have been a
students' exercise for the dwellings were too poor to yield more than a few
broken pots and it was hard to understand why anyone had chosen to live in this
waterless spot. In the deepening twilight, it was so forlorn that even Clifford
was glad to move on to the Mena House bar.

While Bowen and
Simon were buying the drinks, Clifford moved eagerly round the officers in the
bar until he found a group known to him. Putting his head among them, he said,
'Just come from the Hooper house. Their kid's been killed by a hand grenade he
picked up. You won't believe this, but old Hooper tried to spoonfeed the boy
through a hole in his face.' Tomorrow the story would be all over Cairo.

When their drinks
were finished, Harriet said to Simon, 'Shall we climb the great pyramid?'

'Is it possible?
Goodness, I'd love to, but can you manage it?'

'I've done it
twice before. The last time, I was wearing a black velvet evening dress which
hasn't been the same since.'

They went out to
the road that was lit only by the lights of the hotel. The pyramids were no
more than a greater darkness in an area of darkness. Harriet led Simon to the
noted corner from which the ascent was easiest and as they climbed on to the
first ledge, the local Bedu sighted them and came running and shouting, 'Not
allowed. No one go up without guide. Law says you have guide.'

Simon paused but
Harriet waved him on. As they scrambled upwards the Bedu shook their fists and
wailed, 'Come back. Come back,' and Harriet laughed and waved down at them.
Standing on one ledge, she jumped her backside on to the one above then swung
her legs up after her. She was very light and moved at such speed, she passed
Simon and was first at the top. There she waved again to the guides who were
still making half-hearted complaints before they drifted away.

The apex of the
pyramid was missing, purloined to provide stone for other buildings, and now
there was a plateau some twelve yards square. Harriet, seeing it as a
dancing-ground, held out her arms to Simon as he reached it and they circled together
for a few minutes, singing 'Run rabbit' until they were overcome by laughter.
They went to the edge of the square and sat, looking into the darkness of the
desert. The sky was fogged and there was nothing visible but the blue quilt of
lights that was Cairo. Speaking as a soldier, Simon said sternly, 'There ought
to be a proper black-out.'

'You could never
enforce it. It would take the whole British army to get the Cairenes to black
their windows. Besides, it would be no use. A pilot told me that the Nile is
always visible. They'd just have to follow it. The lights frightened me when we
first came here but nothing happened and I got used to them.'

'You mentioned my
brother. You didn't say much about him. Didn't you like him?'

'Hugo? Of course
I liked him. I liked him very much. We met him in Alex. He was in the Cecil bar
and he looked so young and alone that we went over and spoke to him. He talked
about the desert. He said he was sick of it but he had to go back next day. He
asked us to have dinner with him because it was his twenty-first birthday.'

'Really!' Simon
was entranced by this information. "You were with him on his
twenty-first?'

'Yes, we went to
Pastroudi's and had a great time.'

'How splendid!'
Simon waited, expecting to hear more about this momentous dinner-party, but
Harriet had said all she meant to say. The numinous sequel to that dinner was
not for Simon. It had been the night of full moon. Passing through the
black-out curtains at the door, they had entered the startling brilliance of
the night and stood together to say good-bye. Hugo, his handsome, smiling,
gentle face white in the moonlight, thanked them for giving him their company
on his birthday. Guy wrote down a telephone number saying, 'When you come back
on leave, let's meet again,' and a voice inside Harriet's head said, 'But he won't
come back. He is going to die.' She felt neither surprise nor shock at this
foreknowledge, only the certainty that it was true.

Simon broke into
her memory, saying, 'I must try to find him but I'm not sure if I can. I don't
know what it's like out there.'

'I don't know
either. It's strange, living here on the edge of a battlefield. It's like
living beside Pluto's underworld.'

Simon, knowing
nothing about Pluto's underworld, moved to a more desirable subject 'You know
Edwina's Hugo's girl. She's really something, isn't she. She's very beautiful.'

Harriet laughed,
saying only, 'I hardly know her. She's an archivist at the Embassy.'

'I say, is she?'
Simon could not have said what an archivist did but the word impressed him. He
wanted to hear more about Edwina but felt the need to curb his interest.
'Actually, I'm married. My wife's called Anne. We were only together for a week
and then I had to go to Liverpool and join the draft.
She came to the station to
see me off and she couldn't speak. She just stood there, crying and crying. I said,
"Cheer up, the war can't go on for ever," but she only cried. Poor
little thing!'

Simon's voice
faltered so Harriet feared that he, too, would cry. She wanted to agree that
the war could not go on for ever but she had no certainty. She stood up and
said, 'The others will wonder where we are. Having come up at top speed,
there's nothing to do but go down again.'

The cars no
longer stood outside Mena House. Harriet sent Simon to the hotel desk,
expecting a message had been left, but there was no message. Clifford's party
had gone and she and Simon were left behind.

Abashed, Simon
said, 'But Edwina told Clifford to take me back to her. She made me promise to
return.'

'I see.' Harriet
could imagine Clifford seizing the chance to decant a rival, even such a young
and temporary rival as Simon. If Edwina asked where Simon was Clifford could
say, 'He went off with a girl,' and that would be the end of Simon.

'It was my fault.
I shouldn't have taken you away like that.'

'It was an
experience. I've been hearing about the pyramids since I was a kid but I never
expected to go up one.' Simon smiled to show he did not blame her but it was a
dejected smile. Harriet, thinking how few experiences might be left for him in
this world, felt enraged that Clifford, so much concerned for his own safety,
could abandon Simon who would soon be risking his life. She said, 'Don't worry.
We'll find a taxi and I'll drop you off in Garden City.'

'But can I just
barge in like that?'

'Of course. If
Edwina invited you ...'

'Yes, she did
invite me.'

They waited
outside the hotel until a taxi, coming from Cairo, was willing to take them
back. Harriet was relieved to see a light in the living-room of the flat where
Edwina lodged. Simon, too, looked up, delighted, never doubting that Edwina was
there.

He said, 'I say,
I'm terribly grateful. We
'll meet again, won't we?'

'I expect we
will. '

The safragi who
opened the door of the flat seemed to con
firm Simon's expectations. Inviting him in, the man grinned in an
intimate, insolent manner as though conniving at some act of indecency. He
said, 'Mis' Likkle here,' but Simon found the person in the living-room was not
Edwina. It was a man in late middle age who rose and gazed on him in courteous
inquiry. 'Miss Little invited me here.'