The Levant Trilogy (39 page)

Angela was still lying on the sofa, her head
buried in her arms. She jerked herself up as Harriet entered and demanded,
'Well?'

'It's all right. They've accepted.'

'So they were there? What are they doing?'

'Nothing much. Just sitting, drinking beer.'

'How did he look?'

'Not happy. I would say he was trapped.'

'Trapped? Ah!' Angela gave a long sigh of
agonized relief then, throwing her arms into the air, she shrieked with a
laughter that was very near hysteria.

Guy, when he heard that Mona Castlebar was a
singer, became interested in the supper party and said, 'I'd like to ask Hertz
and Allain.'

'Oh, darling, they wouldn't fit in.'

'Of course they'll fit in. They're well-mannered
and agreeable and help out whenever needed. Everyone likes them. You couldn't
find a nicer couple of guests.'

Dobson said, 'Wouldn't it be better to ask them
on their own?'

'No, they'll get on with Castlebar. They'll have
a lot in common.'

'Oh, well, if they're as charming as you say, I
look forward to meeting them.'

Edwina agreed to be in to meet Mona but when the
evening came, she said she was sorry, 'terribly, terribly sorry,' but Peter was
taking her to supper at the Kit-Kat. As a result of this defection, Harriet
felt more inclined to welcome Hertz and Allain.

They and Guy, having evening classes, were
expected to arrive late. The Castlebars, with nothing to detain them, would
probably be first. Angela, awaiting them, moved restlessly between the
living-room and her bedroom, looking as though she might, at the sound of the
doorbell, disappear altogether. Harriet said, 'Do sit down, Angela. Keep calm.
When they come, don't let them see you're worried.'

Guy brought home the two men, both young and
good-looking, with a muscular grace, like athletes in training, and Harriet
hoped they would distract Angela, but Angela seemed scarcely aware of them. As
time passed and no one else arrived, her vacant stare became more vacant. She
had nothing to say.

The young men, refusing alcohol, drank iced
lime-juice. Dobson, entertaining them with diplomatic ease, congratulated Guy
on finding two such employees at such a time.

'You must be very fond of teaching,' he said to
them

Hertz and Allain appeared gratified by Dobson's
attention. Carefully enunciating each word, Allain told him: 'Yes, we are very
fond of teaching.'

'You see it as a vocation, no doubt?'

'A vocation, certainly. We see it as a
vocation,' Allain looked to Hertz for confirmation and Hertz, as though eager
to please, smiled and vigorously nodded his head.

Guy, delighted with both of them, would have
been content to sit drinking and talking for the rest of the evening, but it
was nearly nine o'clock. The food was ready and Hassan was lurking, aggrieved,
in the doorway.

Harriet said, 'I think we'll have to eat.'

As they moved to the table, the front-door bell
rang and Angela paused, paralysed by anticipation. Hassan, answering the door,
came back with a telegram addressed to Harriet.

She read: 'Please excuse. Mona not too well,
Bill' and handed it to Angela who gave it a glance, dropped it on the floor and
made for the baize door to the bedroom. Harriet called after her: 'Won't you
have supper?'

'No, I'm not hungry.'

Guy, talking at the table, expressed his
enthusiasm for a Jewish National Home in Palestine. He was particularly impressed
by the idea of kibbutzim, based he believed on the Russian Soviets, and the
possibility of turning the Negev into arable land. The teachers, although Jews
themselves, smiled politely but had, it seemed, no great interest in these
ambitious schemes.

Dobson, who knew more than Guy did, discussed
them from a practical viewpoint: 'It all sounds fine,' he said. 'But these
things can't be carried out without money, a great deal of money. Well, the
Jews have money - much of it comes from the States - and they can buy tractors and
fertilizers and combined harvesters, while the wretched Arabs are still
scraping the ground with the same ploughs they used in biblical times. They'd
go on doing this, quite happily, if they weren't made envious by the equipment
the Jews have got. As it is, they are resentful and likely to make trouble, so,
to keep them sweet, HMG has to fork out to give them tractors and pedigree
bulls and other rich gifts...'

'But this is magnificent,' Guy broke in. 'Thanks
to the Jews, the Arabs are being provided for.'

'My dear fellow, it has to be paid for. And who
pays? The poor, old British tax-payer. As per usual.'

'Oh, come, Dobbie! You surely don't object to a
rich country like Britain helping the poor Palestinians?'

Dobson laughed: 'I don't object, but your Jewish
friends do.'

Reminded of his guests, Guy was quick to defend
the Jews: 'I don't believe it. I'm sure they don't object. It's up to all of us
to share the sum of human knowledge and advance the underdeveloped peoples of
the world.' His eyes glowing with faith in all-pervading human goodness, he
looked to Hertz and Allain for support, and they both solemnly nodded their
agreement with his sentiments. It looked like dispassionate agreement but
Harriet, who had watched them while they were listening to Guy, had seen on
their faces an intent expression that did not accord with their apparent
detachment from the subject in hand.

Guy pursued it, fervently postulating ethics
that Dobson good-humouredly amended, while Harriet, not much interested in
polemics, waited for a chance to go to Angela. When she went to the room, she
found her lying in darkness, made more dark by a large mango tree that blotted
out most of the sky.

Harriet said, 'Shall I put on the light?'

'No.'

Harriet sat on the edge of the bed: 'This is
Mona's doing, of course.'

'Yes, but he let her do it,' Angela raised
herself on her elbow. 'He's frightened of her and she despises him. She
despises him, yet she'll keep her hold on him simply to prevent anyone else
getting him. Her "Wolfie"! - God help us! Harriet, what's the cure
for love?'

'Another love.'

'Not so easy. You want one person, not another.
I must get away for a while. I don't want to go to the Union - which I will,
sooner or later, if I stay here. So I must go where he isn't. I want to be out
of sight. I want to get away from him. The truth is: he's a dead loss.'

'Where can you go?'

'I've been thinking. When I was with Desmond, we
used to spend every winter in Luxor. I could go back there. Would you come with
me?'

'I don't know, I'll have to see what we have in
the bank.'

'Don't be silly, it's my treat.'

'No. It can't always be your treat.'

'Well, it is this time. And what the hell does
it matter? I can afford it. If you come to please me, why shouldn't it be my
treat?'

They argued it out and agreed that Angela should
pay for the train journey but Harriet would settle her own hotel bill. By now
it was taken for granted that they would go to Luxor and Angela, seeing herself
escaping from an obsession, became excited and putting her arms about Harriet,
she promised her, 'We'll have a riotous time. We'll see everything there is to
see down there. We'll go to a hotel with the best food in Egypt. We'll live it
up, and to hell with bloody Bill Castlebar and his even bloodier wife.'

Angela's euphoria remained with her on the train
to Luxor. When they were in the dining-car, she ordered a bottle of whisky
although she would be the only one to drink it. In flight from Castlebar, she
could talk of nothing but Castlebar - and Castlebar's wife. She had heard at
Groppi's, where she sometimes took tea with friends from her married days,
that Mona Castlebar was already a subject for gossip. She had been invited to a
musical evening arranged by the American University in aid of the Red Cross.
Edwina was also invited and both women were expected to sing for the cause.
Edwina complied willingly, singing song after song, until she became aware of
Mona's critical stare, at which she broke off and turning to Mona, said, 'But
I'm being selfish. I must stop. It's your turn now.'

'And what do you think?' Angela squealed with
delight: 'Mona refused to sing. She seemed to think she was being tricked into
performing and she said "I only do it for money".'

'Did she really say that?'

'Well, no.' In the face of Harriet's disbelief,
Angela moderated her story: 'What she actually said was "I don't give my
services free".
Her services!
Heaven help us!'

As Angela paused in her laughter to wipe her
eyes, Harriet asked: 'Was Bill there?'

'Yes. And they say he was horribly embarrassed
and begged her to sing "just one little
Lieder" - Lieder's
her
thing - but she wouldn't, and there she sat on her big bottom, in a long green
dress, with that mantelpiece of a bosom sticking out of it, her face grim, as
obstinate as a pig. No one could get a squeak out of her.'

'How did Bill come to marry such a woman in the
first place?'

'Oh, he's a simple soul. She paraded the bosom
and kept the legs out of sight. He told me he thought she was "the Great
Earth Mother", now he says she's a lout. Yet she's only got to turn up and
he's at her heels. It makes me sick.'

'He'll rebel sooner or later.'

'Too late for me. I've finished with him.'
Angela emptied her glass and put the cap back on the bottle. 'This'll do for tomorrow.'
Her merriment had started to flag - and a desperate merriment it was, Harriet
thought. She looked haggard and weary and said, 'Let's go to bed.'

They had first-class sleepers and slept well,
but next morning the excursion took on a different aspect. At breakfast in the
dining-car, Angela would take nothing but coffee and had little to say. They
looked out of the window at the disturbing sight of graves beside the track,
dozens of them, each one a mound of sand with a palm leaf stuck at the head.
The train was running through a cemetery and at stations, where a lively crowd
usually gathered to gape at the tourists, the platforms were deserted except
for a few forlorn villagers who stood about listlessly with dejected eyes.

Angela, to whom Upper Egypt was well known,
could make nothing of this desolation. And the graves continued: new graves,
not simply dozens of them but hundreds. She called a waiter and spoke to him in
Arabic then translated his reply: 'He says there's been an epidemic and many
people have died.'

'But of what?'

'He doesn't know. He just says "a bad
sickness".'

'Why weren't we told about this? There was
nothing in the papers. Ask him why it was kept secret.'

The waiter, a small, light-coloured man with a
gentle face, was unable to answer this question. He knew nothing of newspapers
and the deceits of governments, but his expression as he looked from the window
was uneasy and Harriet, seeing the other waiters gathered at the end of the
car, said, 'They're all frightened.' The visitors came here in ignorance but
the waiters came because they could not afford to refuse.

The few officers and nurses at the other tables
seemed unaffected by the conditions outside the train. Seeing that one of the
men wore the insignia of a medical officer, Angela called to him, 'Doctor,
what's the matter here? The whole place is a graveyard.'

The doctor, looking out, appeared to see the
graves for the first time. 'Rum go,' he said and shouted for the head waiter.
Why, he wanted to know had the epidemic not been reported to the army?

'Hotels want people to come,' the head waiter
earnestly explained.

'They do, do they? And what have they got here?
Plague, smallpox, spotted fever? - some little thing like that?'

The head waiter grinned. Taking the doctor's
angry humour for facetiousness, he tried to make light of the trouble: 'It is
nothing. It is a thing they have here.'

The doctor's tone changed: 'Come on, what is
it?' Challenged by this important-sounding officer, the head waiter went back
to his subordinates and they conferred together. He returned to say: 'Malaria,
effendi. Not too bad. You take quinine, you all very well.'

The doctor rejected malaria and made his own
decision. He told his fellow diners: 'It's probably cholera. Nothing to worry
about if you're careful. Eat only cooked food, and eat it hot. Avoid tap water,
salads, fresh fruit. Drink bottled spring water. French, if you can get it.'

Reassured, Harriet and Angela began to discuss
the dangers of life in the Middle East. Harriet told how she had danced at the
Turf Club with an officer who was sickening for smallpox. Angela, becoming more
animated, said she had been to a dinner party where a certain Major Beamish
was expected but did not arrive: 'Then another guest, an MO, said, "I did
a PM on a chap called Beamish this morning" and the host said "It
couldn't be our Beamish. He was alive and well when we saw him last
night." But it was their Beamish. While we waited for him, he was in his
grave, dead in the night of poliomyelitis.'