‘Suzi is a rich woman.’
‘Of course, Miss Vaughan,’ said the young man from the Foreign Office, who was her next caller that day, ‘we’ve got Gardnor. But his wife has got away. She’s probably in Cairo. Have you any idea—?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t help you much,’ Barbara said in a weak-minded way. ‘It was rather a nightmare until, of course, we got off on our pilgrimage at last. The pilgrimage was all right.’
‘All these spy renegades lead nightmare lives,’ he said. ‘Odd people.’
‘I’m a bit tired,’ Barbara said. ‘Do you mind if we leave off now?’ She passed her hand up and down the side of her neck. He was a nice young man but he made her feel neurotic.
‘Of course, of course. I’m sorry. It must have been an ordeal, that return to Israel. Quite a risk. You might have caused us some trouble, you know.’
‘You make trouble for me,’ said all the voices still, in her dreams.
‘I’m expecting a telephone call from Rome,’ Barbara said. To hell with their questions. One had a private life to lead.
The young man was leaving. He said, ‘Will you spare me about twenty minutes tomorrow — a few more things.’
‘Well, yes. But I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you much on your side. Maybe one of your men in Jordan could talk nicely to Suzi Ramdez, the travel agent. She could tell you more than I could.’
‘They’ve got Suzi Ramdez, I’m afraid.’
‘Who have got Suzi?’
‘The Jordan police have picked her up. They’re very zealous when they get moving, but they usually move too late. Anyway, I’m glad they didn’t get you.’
She did not give him Abdul’s news. She said, ‘Have they really got Suzi? Are you sure?’
‘Of course. Certainly. We’re pretty alert, you know, although we don’t look it.’ Yes, and Suzi was in Athens.
‘Will she go on trial? She wasn’t really involved.’
‘One never knows what will happen in these political cases. But I’m sure she was involved with everything. Everyone out here’s involved with everything.’
Oh, go away, she thought. Keep nice and safe. Take no risk Look both ways and always brush your teeth.
He said, ‘I’ll look in tomorrow, then. It’s only to check a few things. We want to be on the safe side.’
‘One more day shut up in that room,’ said Barbara, ‘and I would have died of claustrophobia and frustration.’ — She was sitting beside Suzi in the car, dressed in her Arab clothes.
‘Or perhaps murdered Ruth Gardnor.’ And slowly, under her veil, she was rubbing ointment into the strained tendon of her neck. They were driving through the bare Judaean hills, that wilderness of John the Baptist, who was a voice crying there, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord.’ She thought, it was a voice crying from the hill-top that is meant by a voice crying in the wilderness, for she had previously always thought of that phrase as a piece of delicate rhetoric, signifying a lonely, unprevailing plaint of a wandering prophet. But it looked to Barbara that this voice in the wilderness must have been a high crag-top proclamation, good, loud and frightening, for everyone in the valleys to hear, echoing from peak to peak.
They had left the house at Jericho the day before, Sunday, at nightfall. She had followed Suzi out into the sweet air and walked to the car, two weeks after she had arrived. Their departure had been perfectly simple, for Ruth had again gone to Amman for the week-end and Joe Ramdez had left with Ricky on Friday, that day when Barbara had wandered into his room and found him in bed with Ricky. She had been all that night pacing herself to exhaustion, up and down and round her room. At two in the morning she had taken a warm shower in the small cubicle adjoining her bedroom. If only, she thought, I could lie for a long time in a warm bath, it would soothe away the irritation of Ruth Gardnor. But she turned on the shower which creaked as it sprayed. She had gone back to bed, and tried, as a spiritual exercise, to be grateful for her safety in this room and her recovery to the extent that her energy now seemed nearly to burst her skin open. But she could only tremble with anger; Ruth would come in at seven in the morning with a tray of coffee, meekly terrified of Barbara after the fight, and very anxious to propitiate her against some power she obviously suspected Barbara to hold over her, and against the eventuality of trouble. This was quite dear, although Barbara was in no way informed what sort of power Ruth feared, except that it was to do with the spy business. And Barbara fumed against Ruth’s totally womanly solicitude combined with her totally repugnant human theories, and against the total misunderstanding. She lay and tried to feel grateful, but even her capacity for gratitude felt gagged; she was the half-witted mute she had undertaken to be when she first set out with Suzi in disguise.
And so she had leapt from her bed again, convulsively, and taken another shower, a cold one. Her neck was painful. Then she had walked up and down the room till dawn.
Light footsteps outside her window: this was not unusual. Several times during the two weeks Barbara had heard these morning footsteps and, peering out, had seen a tall girl sidling along the wall of the house, pausing at every few steps as if to make sure she had not been heard. The girl had passed Barbara’s window and turned the corner of the house. The first time, she had been wearing a shirt with blue jeans. She had Asiatic features with dark, lank hair. On the next occasion that Barbara had seen her, she had at first thought this was a different girl, for she was wearing a short, pink organdie dance-dress and was barefooted, carrying high-heeled gold sandals, but Barbara recognized the girl’s features as she looked round her before turning the corner. On subsequent mornings the girl was always dressed in her pink frills, but once Barbara was puzzled by a matted pile of blonde hair until the girl turned her face enough to show that she was the same girl wearing a theatrical wig. Obviously, she was returning from a secret rendezvous.
Barbara had asked no questions about the occupants of the house, either of Ruth Gardnor or Suzi. The girl did not look like a political prisoner. But occasional ripples of talk or a shrill quarrel-burst came through an open window from the opposite end of the large house, perhaps when the breeze happened to blow in a certain direction; and once Suzi had referred to ‘the girls’ without explanation; and so Barbara was certain there were a number of girls in the house, and suspected they were enclosed under some sort of supervision for some purpose.
All through those weeks at the house in Jericho Barbara had been weaving plots to run away and take refuge at the British Embassy in Amman, or with Harry’s friend at the American Embassy. But with only the Arab woman’s clothes to wear there was scarcely any chance of her being able to stop a car for a lift, or of getting near to the town of Jericho, or of reaching a telephone. It was almost certain that she would have been picked up by the police. A bicycle … she longed to steal a bicycle. She could hear bicycle wheels occasionally approaching the house. How did one ride a bicycle in long clothes? It could be done. Cars came and went. She could steal a car. Another week and perhaps this is what she would have done. Who could tell what would have happened if her imprisonment at Jericho had lasted another week, or another day? There would have been no pilgrimage. She would not have been a jolly good sport, but merely someone who made trouble for everybody. Afterwards, she had reason to feel fairly certain that if she had tried to get away she would have fallen into danger or been caused to disappear.
But on that last Friday in the house after the troubled night of creaking shower-baths and frantic thoughts, on that early morning when she once more saw the fly-by-night girl creeping back from her enterprise, the urge pressed on her at least to leave the house and stand for a few moments breathing under the sky. She put on the cotton kimono that Suzi had lent her and left her room. She went on tip-toe along the corridor where she knew a door led to the central area of the house, which in turn led up to the courtyard. There she breathed under the sky and watched the misty pink of dawn on the cliff-tops of the Judaean desert in the distance. Only a well and a palm-tr
ee kept her company in the courtyard. She walked once round the large, spreading house, turning corner after corner, keeping near to the wall, and felt weak from the walk. She heard a sound as she turned into the courtyard and saw an old Arab man with a sack over his shoulder approaching the main door to deliver provisions. He had not seen Barbara. She turned back and tried another door, which was locked. She tried another, which was open and which led to a long corridor similar to that where her room was. She walked to the end, hearing from the various rooms on either side the sound of sleepers and of people stirring themselves to rise from bed. She found a door at the end of the corridor, and in the hope that it would lead to Suzi’s part of the house, opened it. The window curtains were drawn and streaks of pink dawn that came through the window at the sides of the curtains and at their points of meeting, enlightened a huge bed. A man and a woman lay sleeping. The woman was Ricky. The man was a dark-skinned, large-faced Semite, an Arab with a mane of grey hair. Barbara peered in the half-light of the room and definitely saw Ricky. It was Ricky with her head thrown back in sleep, a profile on the pillow, her arms outspread so that one of them lay limply across the man’s body. Barbara had not yet made another movement since opening the door, but now the man sprang up, wide awake. He seemed enormous, his legs beneath a long white shirt leaping from the bed. Barbara fled back along the corridor and out to the courtyard, pursued by the man, who shouted furiously at her in Arabic, French, English, and some other language. She was not listening. She ran to the front door where Latifa, smelling strongly from her night’s sleep, was hauling into the house the sack which the old man had brought. Barbara pushed past her, and as she sped through the entrance chamber and along the passage to her room, she heard behind her a roar and rush of abusive vowels from the doorway against Latifa. Barbara then lay on her bed, worn out. She had lost one of her sandals and her foot had been cut somewhere on the wild run. In about twenty minutes, after she had heard many unusual noises, Ruth Gardnor came in, wearing her dressing-gown. Ruth said, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have done that, Barbara. You know I’m responsible for you, I’ll be held responsible if anything happens to you. They’ll never trust me again.’
‘I must be a hell of an Important agent,’ said Barbara, not caring, at that moment, what happened to her.
‘Suzi’s told me,’ said Ruth. ‘So there’s no use pretending.’
‘Told you what? Told you what? Suzi tells everyone something different.’
‘Keep quiet, oh, please do.’
I must be even more of a hell of an Important Cairo agent, thought Barbara, than I guessed I was. She was feeling easier, though. The storm was over. She said, ‘I’ve hurt my foot,’ and let Ruth Gardnor bathe it and fuss over’ it with bits of plaster.
Barbara said, ‘Who is that man?’
‘Joe Ramdez. Fortunately, he thinks you are a whore with scarlet fever.’
Barbara said, ‘I’m hungry.’
Ruth disappeared to fetch her some breakfast, and when she returned with a large loaded tray, Barbara said, ‘I don’t want anything. I want to sleep.’
Ruth started to cry and wept for a long time. She said, ‘It isn’t only that I’ve got to look after you. I’ve become so fond of you. I’m genuinely fond of you, I really am. I admire your courage tremendously and what you’re doing for us…. And you won’t even give me a kind look.’
‘I need eyebrow tweezers,’ said Barbara. ‘Find a pair, please.’
‘What for? What for?’
‘For my eyebrows.’
Suzi had arrived early on Sunday and they were off at last. Suzi’s plans for the week to come were well-made in so far as they did not go wrong, although, in the theory of the layout, nothing should have gone right.
‘First,’ said Suzi, ‘you do not pay me for all this touring and all this schemes and trouble to me that you’ve been. You pay my brother Abdul on the Israeli territory, when you return by means that we have planned for you. Poor Abdul, he needs this money. But one time we have lost big money in sending it across to him. Money is a temptation to kill. Never will I give Abdul money to take over with him. An Arab soldier even might kill and take, and report afterwards.’
‘Does he come over here then?’
‘Oh, yes, sometimes Abdul comes. He will come next Sunday and return you to Israel with him. He knows you’re with me, because I’ve sent a message by a friend of his, Mendel, a Jew who I spoke to at the Mass in the Holy Sepulchre when you were taken sick. You were by my side that time.’
It was all one to Barbara how a Jew called Mendel had been at Mass in the Holy Sepulchre. She did not think, now, of unpicking knots, for there was some definite purpose in the air about her, liberated as she was under the black clothes with the landscape flying past the car. Knots were not necessarily created to be untied.
Questions were things that sufficed in their still beauty, answering themselves. What am I doing here on a pilgrimage, after so much involvement? Because I am what I am. Suzi said, ‘You would not have come to Jordan, perhaps, if you knew first what would happen and how it would bring you the fever. Now your relatives are anxious for you, but Abdul very soon tells them news by secret messages that you are safe.’
‘If one knew everything that was going to happen one would never do a thing,’ Barbara said.
‘Abdul will give you a great bill for the pilgrimage. Freddy does not pay nothing so far, and he keeps far from me.’
Suzi was melancholy about Freddy’s desertion. Barbara tried not to mention him very much, so greatly had Suzi taken to him, and so unhappy was she about his silence.
They entertained each other with stories from their lives. Barbara described bits of her love-affair with Harry Clegg, and her life before that, how it now seemed that she had been living like a nun without the intensity and reality of a nun’s life. ‘It was like going about in disguise,’ she said. ‘Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was no more a celibate type of woman than at the moment, under these clothes, I am your servant Kyra.’
‘If you didn’t fall in love with Harry that time, you would remain a spinster like me,’ Suzi said.
‘It’s better to be a spinster like you and have lovers that you can give some actual love to, than have shadows in your heart of men that you don’t know, and hate them.’
‘Many women, not spinsters, do like this,’
‘Yes, and men too.’
Still, now and then, Suzi fell gloomy about Freddy’s desertion. She said, ‘Alexandros has guessed that I had love with Freddy, but he’s too delicate to judge me for it. He’s a Catholic Arab and can have one wife only; he does not possess me. Freddy did not pay me for his lodging, nor nothing.’ Whenever Suzi came to the depth of her disappointment with Freddy she always fell back on the question of his failure to pay the bill. It was a way of kicking the piece of furniture into which one had bumped in the dark and hurt one’s leg; and it was easier for her to accuse him about money than say nothing. Barbara said, ‘I’ll pay Freddy’s share to Abdul.’ That’s not the point,’ said Suzi. Barbara knew it was not the point. Love, love-affairs, men and women and true-life stories formed the daily entertainment and talk of their week’s travelling. Barbara said, ‘I’m quite sure Freddy isn’t well.’ And a few days later, when they had chewed it all over again. Barbara said, ‘It may be that he wasn’t really well that week-end, for he was rather different from his normal self. But I never noticed him so happy before.’
All the nights of the pilgrimage were spent under strange roofs, off the main tracks, in the desert villages of the Transjordan. The first night, Suzi drove straight to Madaba and, leaving the car outside the Orthodox church there, led Barbara in the moonlight among the poor, low-built houses that formed themselves into streets, part-streets, and no streets. Three small boys joined them silently. The paths were stony and steep. The children stared at Barbara from time to time, as if discerning, without being able to place the cause, that she was no Arab woman. They came to a house and Suzi stopped.
She spoke to the boys, who disappeared together in another direction. Suzi murmured, ‘They are gone to bring a doctor for you. I know these people and arrange this last week with them, so you need not fear. This is Transjordan country, not Palestine, and here they are more real Arabs that understand arrangements. Here is the house where Abdul was born. You don’t speak, just follow.’
‘I feel all right, Suzi. Only tired. I don’t really need a doctor.’
‘I like a doctor to see you, now, to be O.K. for the pilgrimage.’
‘You’re kind.’
‘Don’t speak.’
It was difficult, anyway, to express gratitude to Suzi. She said, ‘You pay to Abdul the expenses. All arrangements with everyone is costing me money.’
‘Yes, but I mean —’
‘I do it for Alexandros, not Freddy.’ She had opened the door to a long room lit by an oil lamp at the far end. She stood on the threshold and listened for a moment. ‘Also,’ she whispered, ‘I do these things for you as you are more worth than fifty of Miss Rickward.’ And she led the way along the room, which now produced three arches on either side and was paved with dusty, broken mosaic designs. It was obviously an ancient and priceless hovel, one of many that stood unselfconsciously haphazard among the dilapidated buildings of the present century in the towns and villages where Barbara spent the nights of the pilgrimage. And as she followed, she saw, within alcoves leading off these arches on either side, many sleeping or merely reclining women, their clothes hung on pegs all round the walls. No one stirred or spoke. Barbara followed Suzi. At the blank end of the room a passage now appeared, turning off to the right. They went along it, descended some of the winding stone stairs, and were in a lamp-lit cellar furnished with a large bare mattress on a wooden base, a tall water-jug on a table with a small water-jug. A thin film of dark sand covered the floor. Suzi said, ‘Here we sleep with our clothes on in case of damp. This was a better house when Abdul was born. He doesn’t remember it, but he remembers often the other house where they took him the next year, where I was born. It is in Palestine. My father was only a teacher then.’ She took Barbara’s arm and showed her a small door which might lead to a cupboard, but when opened, it gave off a strong smell of disinfectant. Suzi brought close the oil lamp and laughed. ‘This is lady’s toilet.’ There was a hole in the earthy floor. ‘You pour water down from the big jug when you use. This is Arabian Nights’ Entertainment,’ said Suzi.