‘I don’t know,’ murmurs Claudia. She looks at his feet; one of his sand-encrusted boots rests upon a huge brilliant poinsettia flower, a scarlet star with golden foam at the centre.
‘We buried him that evening. The padre did his stuff. Maybe I should have asked the padre where Corporal Haycraft had gone. Nice embarrassing question. But perhaps you’re a churchgoer?’
‘No,’ says Claudia, ‘I’m not a churchgoer.’
‘Then I haven’t offended you. You can never be sure. An astonishing amount of piety goes on out here, you’d be surprised. The Lord is frequently invoked. He’s on our side, by the way, you’ll be glad to hear – or at least it’s taken for granted that he is.’
‘Are we going to win the war?’ asks Claudia.
‘Yes. I assume so. Not because of the Lord’s intervention or because justice will prevail but because in the last resort we have greater resources. Wars have little to do with justice. Or valour or sacrifice or the other things traditionally associated with them. That’s one thing I hadn’t quite realised. War has been much misrepresented, believe me. It’s had a disgracefully good press. I hope you and your friends are doing something to put that right.’
‘I hope we are too,’ says Claudia.
‘Though it’s the chroniclers I’m thinking of rather than the reporters. I take it you don’t regard yourself as a chronicler. The chroniclers, not having been in the thick of things, concentrate on justice and valour and all that. And statistics. When you find yourself in a position of a statistic it looks rather different.’
‘Yes,’ says Claudia, ‘I’m beginning to see that.’
‘What do you do,’ enquires Tom Southern, ‘– when you’re not globe-trotting in the service of the free press?’
Claudia considers several replies. She is surprised at herself. Considered response is not characteristic. She does not wish to sound brash, foolish, evasive, or pretentious. At last she says, ‘I’ve written two books.’
‘What sort of books?’
Claudia swallows. ‘Well… I suppose you’d call them history.’
Tom Southern contemplates her. ‘History,’ he says. ‘I used to be rather keen on history myself. By which I mean I enjoyed reading it. Positively sought it out, indeed. I daresay I’ll come back to it, in the fullness of time. Right now I feel rather differently. When the times are out of joint it is brought uncomfortably home to you that history is true and that unfortunately you are a part of it. One has this tendency to think oneself immune. This is one of the points when the immunity is shown up as fantasy. I’d rather like to go back to fantasising.’
Claudia can think of nothing to say. Nothing whatsoever. She sits on the battered wall of what was once a little seaside café; the convoys grind past and beyond them the sea glitters; grimy khaki figures plod to and fro. One of these, she sees out of the corner of one eye, is approaching them. Presumably this is the RAF chap who will take her to the airstrip. She looks at Tom Southern; forty-eight hours ago she had not set eyes on this man. Now she finds herself quite disconcertingly anxious for his good opinion.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ she says.
He laughs. ‘Then keep quiet and take notes. Isn’t that what you’re here for?’
‘Hello there,’ cries the approaching figure.
Tom Southern rises. ‘Your lift, I think.’ He holds out his hand. ‘Have a good trip back to Cairo.’
They shake hands. ‘Thank you for all you’ve done,’ says Claudia.
‘All in the day’s work,’ says Tom. There is a silence.
‘Perhaps…’ Claudia begins.
But he interrupts. ‘Maybe we could meet when I have some leave?’
Wars are fought by children. Conceived by their mad demonic elders and fought by boys. I say that now, caught out in surprise at how young people are, forgetting that it is not they who are young but I who am old. Nevertheless, the faces of the Russian front, the million upon million dead Germans, dead Ukrainians, Georgians, Tartars, Latvians, Siberians are the plump unlined faces of youths. As are the faces of the Somme and of Passchendaele. The rest of us grow old and tell each other what really happened; they, of course, will never know, just as they never knew at the time. The files of newspaper libraries are stuffed with these baby-faces, grinning cheerfully from the decks of troop-ships, from train windows, from stretchers. In pursuit of truth and facts, in the exercise of my craft, I have looked at them and thought of the slipperiness of whatever fact or truth it is that makes these faces change with the eyes that view them. It was not boys I saw in 1941.
Nor the grey of old newsprint. In the mind’s eye is the blazing technicolour of a hot country, so that I seem to see it still squinting against the glare, dazzled by that relentless sun, moving in landscapes that shimmered in the heat haze. Mirages… Well, the mirror world, the vanishing oasis, is in my head now, not in his, and he is with it.
After I came back from the desert I was ill. I recovered and staggered out into Cairo again, half a stone lighter, pursued by complacent wailings from Madame Charlot and her mother who predicted death within a month if I did not observe the statutory convalescence. There was no time to be ill. In any case most Europeans were mildly ill a good deal of the time. I wrote up my desert experiences (three days, three paltry days – but it was still more than some of my male colleagues had achieved), pestered the Censors’ Office and bombarded every editor I could think of. And in the meantime the weeks rolled past in the usual sequence of rumours, of talk of another push, another retreat, the arrival of this general or of that diplomat. I was always hanging around in corridors, waiting for the chance of a word with so-and-so, or sitting with ears pricked in cafés and restaurants, beside swimming-pools or in night clubs. I had an old Ford V8 in which I contended with the pot-holed dust-ridden roads, driving out to Heliopolis or to the Pyramids, to Maadi and to the airport to take down the banalities of incoming dignitaries. I was too busy to think about anything except what I was doing. So that I was almost taken unawares when Tom Southern telephoned.
The polar bear, its dark yellow flanks heaving, its coat tufted like a badly mown lawn, lies in a basin of dirty water.
‘Wicked,’ says Claudia. It is May; the temperature is ninety-eight.
‘You can always tell how civilised a country is by its treatment of animals,’ says Tom. ‘The Middle East rates about as low as I’ve seen so far.’
‘I can’t stand it,’ says Claudia. ‘Let’s find some lions.’
The Zoo is laid out like a French park; zinnias and petunias are trapped in geometrical beds, carefully raked gravel paths are edged with overlapping hoops of wire, little decorative kiosks provide shade and a seat for the gossiping, knitting attendants of the European children who rush hither and thither, shrieking in French or English. Prams are parked under palms and casuarinas. A small girl in blue frock, matching hair ribbon, white ankle socks, stares beadily at them as they pass. There are jungly cries and whoops from the birds and animals penned amid the trees and shrubs; everything is labelled in English, French and Arabic. An elephant perambulates the paths with its keeper; if you give it a five-piastre piece it will salaam and pass the coin to the keeper, who grins and salaams also. The hippos share a small lake with flamingos and assorted duck; a keeper stands alongside with a bucketful of potatoes – five piastres buys a couple of potatoes which you then hurl into the pink maw of the hippo. The adult hippos wallow with their mouths permanently agape while two young ones, who have not yet got the idea, cruise fretfully up and down, occasionally struck by inaccurate potatoes.
‘Like an exotic form of hoop-la,’ says Tom. ‘Do you want a go?’
‘Do you realise that potatoes are a luxury in this place?’ says Claudia. ‘I can’t remember when I last ate a potato myself. We use yams. Mashed yam, roast yam, boiled yam. Ninety per cent of the population doesn’t even have those.’
‘Oh dear,’ says Tom. ‘Is indignation going to spoil your day? At least the hippos are happy, presum
ably.’
But Claudia knows that nothing can spoil her day – not the heat, the discomfort of an infected insect bite on her arm, the knowledge that today will give way to tomorrow. She is moving from minute to minute; she feels as though she were in a state of grace. Calm down, she tells herself. Just because this has never happened to you before. Because you have reached the ripe age of thirty-one without knowing this peculiar derangement. For derangement is what it surely is; only by stern physical effort can she keep herself from looking at him, touching him.
They wander past enclosures of gazelle and buck, cages of monkeys and birds, through the rank-smelling lion house. Grey shoebills stalk the paths or stand statuesque on one leg beside the knitting nannies. Gardeners with hoses patrol the flowerbeds; there is a rich smell of damp earth. ‘Three days ago,’ says Tom, ‘I almost came to blows with a bloke over the last can of water from the first water-cart we’d seen in two days. But that was another time and another place. This is some sort of mad fairyland.’
From the Zoo they take a gharry to the Club. At the Club are more obsessively attended children, an acreage of grass that has cost a ransom in water and intensive labour, and, all around, bright confident English voices. They change into swimming costumes and sit beside the pool under a sun umbrella amid fumes of Nivea sun-cream; a suffragi brings them drinks in tall ice-chinking glasses. The swimming-pool is an intense turquoise, a mosaic of brilliant refracted light shattered every few minutes as someone dives from one of the high boards. Presently Tom and Claudia themselves plunge into the water, where the smell of Nivea is replaced by that of chlorine. Claudia floats on her back and watches Tom climb to the highest diving-board. He stands, a black outline against the piercing blue sky, the board dipping under his weight; he is unrecognisable at this distance, his outline is simply the outline of Man – head, torso, the fork beneath. ‘Poor, bare, forked animal,’ she mutters floating there, and giggles, a little wild with gin and tonic. ‘Sorry?’ says a passing swimmer, sleek seal-head turned sideways. ‘Nothing,’ says Claudia. ‘Nothing at all.’ And then Tom on the diving-board straightens, rises on his toes, raises his arms, and comes arching down; and surfaces a moment later beside her, spluttering, no longer universal, no longer symbolic, just another sunburned figure in the sparkling water.
And presently the long hot afternoon gives way to the long hot evening. ‘Are you busy?’ enquires Tom. ‘I wondered if we might have dinner.’ And Claudia is not busy (nor will be for the foreseeable future, for the three days or five days or whatever it is he has). They have dinner. They walk beside the Nile, where white felucca sails swim in the dusk and the egrets come floating in from the Delta to roost beside the English Bridge, so that the grey-green trees are speckled all over as though hung with decorations. The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained so that the hours are no longer linear but assorted like bright sweets in a jar. At one moment they are leaning over the parapet of the Citadel, with the sprawling dun-coloured minareted city spread out below them and the Pyramids like grey cut-outs on the horizon. At another they are standing at the foot of the Great Pyramid, jostled by camels and donkeys hung about with tassels, beads, trappings of puce and orange; beside the medieval panoply of the animals the crowds of tourists are a drab lot – uniformed in khaki, navy and the prosaic European hot weather wear of white or buff. The Pyramids are doing good business; they preside over a humming centre of commerce – you can buy postcards, flywhisks, a ride on a donkey called Telephone, Chocolate or Whisky-Soda, a guided climb to the top of the Great Pyramid, which is studded all over with striving figures.
It is said to take forty minutes for those in good physical condition. Most of the climbers are presumably that, ripened by desert life. It seems curious to Claudia that men engaged in fighting the most extensive war of all time should spend their leisure hours scrambling up an antique artificial mountain.
‘No thanks,’ she says. ‘I doubt if I’d make it, anyway. You go.’
‘Not me,’ says Tom. ‘I should panic and fall off. A humiliating end. Whatever would the War Office tell my parents?’
So they walk to the Sphinx instead. ‘Well,’ says Tom. ‘There it is. Not just a piece of literary self-indulgence after all. Solid rock. When the show’s over here I’m going to apply for a posting to India. It wonderfully concentrates the mind at times like these – all this contemplation of the past.’
‘When will the show be over here?’ asks Claudia.
He shrugs. ‘Who knows? Your guess is as good as mine.’ And all of a sudden he takes both her hands. ‘Not yet,’ he says. ‘Not yet.’
He is asleep. He lies beside her naked and asleep. In the twilight of the room she can only just make out the familiar shapes of wardrobe, dressing-table, chair and now this unfamiliar long shape in her bed. It is one in the morning. Beyond the shutters the gardens of Gezira chirrup with insect life; a cat yowls. Presently she must wake him and he must go to his hotel because the acute antennae of Madame Charlot would surely detect his presence in the morning; as it is, Tom and Claudia will have to creep down the stone stairs and open carefully the heavy front door. But in the meantime, for hoarded minutes, Claudia looks.
He is so sunburned that the parts that have not been exposed seem unnaturally pale – they glimmer in the darkness: his feet, an armpit, his buttocks and above all his crotch. The colour changes at his navel – above is brown, below is another man, as though like some crustacean a tough protective shell harboured a different creature, soft and vulnerable. White skin, curling black hair, and the wrinkled penis in the middle, with a knob like an acorn. She reaches out and lays a hand on it; he does not wake but his penis twitches a little at her touch.
An hour ago he kneeled above her. And, misinterpreting what he must have seen as panic in her eyes, said, ‘You’re not… Claudia, I’m not the first?’ She could not speak – only hold out her arms. She could not say: ‘It’s not you I’m afraid of, it’s how I feel.’
She takes her hand from his crotch and touches his arm. ‘Tom?’ she says. ‘Tom?’
The main cinemas are showing Snow White, Road to Rio and a Sonja Henie film. There is a garden party in aid of the Army Benevolent Fund and a Choral Evensong at the Cathedral. Groppi’s serves afternoon tea and Shepheard’s an English Sunday lunch. The Club offers a race meeting or a polo match.
‘No,’ says Tom. ‘None of those things. Today I want to see something of this place, if any of it is still visible beneath the trappings of war.’
And so they wander in the packed chattering streets of old Cairo, where the smell of animals, of humanity, of kerosene, coffee, drains, roast sweetcorn and frying oil is like some rich humus. ‘Would you like a scarab ring?’ says Tom. ‘A khelim rug? A galabieh? A pouffe with profile of Queen Nefertiti? I want to give you something. Let’s find you something to gaze at with dewy eyes when I’ve gone. Except that you’re not that kind of girl, are you? I’m not at all sure what kind of girl you are. Self-contained, it seems. Self-sufficient?’
‘Up to a point,’ murmurs Claudia, peering into the small black cavern of a shop, from the depths of which the proprietor beckons, offering handfuls of leather slippers. ‘But only up to a point.’
‘Ah,’ he says. ‘Even if the dewy eyes are out of the question I might be able to insinuate myself somehow, then?’ The slipper-seller has emerged from his lair and is scrabbling at Claudia’s feet with a tape-measure. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No, thank you.’ ‘Cheap. Very cheap. I make good price.’ ‘Yes, I’m sure – but no all the same.’ Her ankle is clutched now. ‘That’s enough,’ says Tom. ‘We don’t want them. Imshi…’ And then, ‘Christ – why does one talk to these people like this? The only words of Arabic I know are commands or insults.’ ‘People have been talking to them like that for centuries,’ says Claudia. ‘I suppose they’re used to it.’ ‘All the same, it would be satisfying to depart from the norm.’ ‘We?
??re conditioned too,’ says Claudia. ‘Some of us are less conditioned than others, or would like to be.’
‘A brooch?’ he says. ‘A silver filigree brooch? A bottle of scent called “Mystery of the Orient”? A brass pyramid paperweight? There must be something you need. Indulge me. Giving presents is one of the most possessive things we do, did you realise that? It’s the way we keep a hold on other people. Plant ourselves in their lives.’
‘I should like one of these,’ says Claudia. And so he buys her a ring, a complex ring the front of which is a little compartment with a conical lid that opens on a hinge. It is called a poison ring, says the shopkeeper. For your enemies. ‘Straight out of the Arabian Nights,’ remarks Tom. ‘Are you sure that’s what you want? What enemies do you have?’ But Claudia replies that yes, that is what she would like. The ring sits heavily on her finger. Later that day – or perhaps the next – Tom fills the little box with sand from the Mokattam Hills, to which they have driven in the Ford V8. It is evening, the time when the Mokattams, seen from Cairo, are lilac-coloured. Claudia says that the sand should be blue, but it is not, it is the dull buff of sand everywhere.
The Nile, at night, is jewelled. The bridges wear necklaces of coloured lights; all along the banks the house-boats are ablaze, festooned with gold, glowing against the dark swirling patterned water. One of these house-boats is a nightclub; it throbs with music into the small hours.
‘He insists they’ve no table,’ says Tom.
‘Give him fifty piastres,’ says Claudia. ‘Then miraculously there will be one.’