The Levant Trilogy (69 page)

Guy began to think of the day's work. He said he
would take Simon back to the hospital and then go on to his class at the
Institute.

'Oh no!' Angela sat up in protest: 'You can
ditch the Institute for one night. We'll all take Simon back and then we must do
something special. Mark the occasion. Make a night of it.'

Guy, looking blank, said nothing. For him the
excitement was over. Harriet was safely back and there was no reason why life
should not resume its everyday order. But Angela, imagining he would agree with
her, had other plans for the evening. She and Castlebar intended to book in at
the Semiramis, so she said: 'We'll have dinner at the hotel and then go on
somewhere, perhaps to the Extase.'

Guy frowned but still said nothing. Harriet,
with the Semiramis in mind, said she. must go and change. Awad had put her
suitcase in the room she had shared with Guy. Now it was her room again.

She thought: 'Our room. Our very own room!' She
had gone away in despair but could not think why she had ever despaired. The
room was as it had always been; very hot, the woodwork like parched bone, the
air filled with the scent of the dry herbage in the next-door garden. It was
the day for the snake-charmer and the thin, wavering note of his pipe rose
above the hiss of the garden hose.

She opened her case and threw the clothes out.
They were the summer things she had intended to wear while voyaging down the
coast of Africa. They were very creased but one dress, a light mercerised
cotton, was still fit to wear. She shook it out and spread it on the bed, then
opened the top drawer of the chest. It had been her underwear drawer and Guy
had left it unused. There was only one object in it - the diamond heart brooch
that Angela had given her. She ran with it to the living-room.

'Look what I've found.'

She held it out to Guy who gave it an
uninterested glance. She asked: 'Did Edwina return it to you?'

'I don't know. I think I asked for it.'

'Why did you ask her for it?'

'I can't remember.' Guy turned to Simon, saying:
'We must go', then to Angela: 'I'm afraid dinner isn't on tonight. I've too
much to do. After the Institute, I have to meet some young Egyptians and give
them a talk about self-determination. I was invited by Harriet's doctor,
Shafik, and I can't let him down. You can see that. We'll have dinner another
night.'

This did not satisfy Angela who said: 'This is
absurd. Surely on a night like this, you can ditch all this nonsense you get up
to. So far as you're concerned, Harriet has returned from the dead and you want
to leave her and go and talk to a lot of Egyptians.'

'They're expecting me.'

'You can put them off.'

'It wouldn't be fair to them.'

Defeated by his belief in his own
reasonableness, Angela gave up the argument. Guy, bending to kiss Harriet,
became aware of her despondency and relented enough to say: 'Very well. I won't
stay long at the meeting. You go and have dinner at the Semiramis and I'll come
and join you afterwards. We'll all have a celebratory drink. How's that?'

'Try not to be late.'

'No. I'll come as soon as I can.'

When Guy had gone cheerfully away, taking Simon
with him, Harriet said: 'Nothing has changed.'

'No. I told you you ought to box his ears. It
would serve him right if you went away again.'

'Where would I go? I'm not much good at being
alone. My home is where Guy is and the truth is, he's more than he seems to
you. You saw how he cried when he saw me. And he made Edwina return the
brooch.'

'I'd like to know how that happened,' Angela
said, then she turned to look at Castlebar who had fallen asleep with his mouth
open: 'Poor Bill, champers doesn't agree with him.' She kissed the top of his
head and he, lifting his pale, heavy eyelids, smiled at her. 'Wake up, you
gorgeous brute,' she said. 'We're going to the Semiramis. And you, Harriet, if
you're going to change, hurry up. We must feed Bill. He badly needs a proper
meal after all those awful weeks in the Holy Land.'

At the Semiramis, Angela booked into a famous
suite on the top floor that was called the Royal Suite. There, protected by the
hotel servants, she hoped they would be safe from the assaults of Castlebar's
wife. The main room overlooked the Nile and Angela decided that before they
went down to the dining-room, they would have drinks by the window and wait for
the pyramids to appear.

Castlebar, lying on a long chair, smiled in lazy
content and said: 'Suppose we just stay here! Have supper sent up!'

'What a good idea!' Angela went to the house
phone and asked for the menu.

The little black triangles of the pyramids came
out of the mist as they had done every evening for some four thousand years.
They came like the evening star, magically, just as the red-gold of the sunset was
changing to green. Twilight fell and the star was there, a single brilliance
that for a few minutes hung in the west then was lost among the myriad stars
that crowded the firmament. While all this was happening, Castlebar kept his
eyes on his plate, eating smoked salmon, veal cutlets and a mound of fresh,
glistening dates. Harriet, who had not yet regained her appetite, ate frugally
and watched the spectacle outside.

Angela's whisky bottle had come up with the meal
and, when they had eaten, the two of them sat over it as Harriet had seen them
sit so many evenings before. The lights of Gezira came on and darkness fell. It
was time for Guy to arrive. Castlebar, replete, yawned once or twice and
Harriet became anxious, feeling she should leave but having to stay. At last,
when the bottle was nearly empty and Angela and Castlebar were nodding with
sleep, Guy was shown into the room.

'Sorry I'm late.'

Angela roused herself and laughed towards
Harriet: 'You're right: nothing has changed.'

Guy, surprised by the laughter, asked: 'What
should change?' He was himself again, relieved not only of grief but remorse
and a nagging sense of guilt, free to pursue his activities without being
tripped at every turn by the memory of his loss. He said:

'Life is perfect. Harriet and I are together
again. No one would want things different, would they?' He took Harriet's hand
and bent to kiss her.

'And how were your Gyppos?' Angela asked.

'Fine!' Guy had had a brilliant evening and
being given a vote of thanks, the leader of the group had said:
'"Blofessor Blingle has blought his influence to bear on many knotty
bloblems."'

Guy reproduced the Egyptian accent with such
exactitude that Angela had to laugh as she said: 'Knotty problems, indeed! Do
they hope to solve anything? The Gyppos play around with hazy ideals instead of
learning to govern themselves.' She had given Guy the last of the whisky and
when he had drunk it, she said: 'We must go to bed.'

'I've only just arrived. I want to talk with my
friend Bill.'

'Not now. Bill's exhausted. It's nearly
midnight. I'm afraid you'll have to talk another night.'

Guy, feeling he had been uncivilly ejected, said
when they were in the street: 'You see what I mean about Angela? She asks me to
dinner then turns me out as soon as I arrive.'

'You were very late.'

'Not unreasonably. She really is the most
irrational of women. Crazy. Pixillated. Mad as a hatter. I don't know what you
see in her.'

In July, while Cairo wearied under its blanket
of heat, the British and American forces left North Africa and crossed the sea
to Sicily. So far as the Egyptians were concerned, the war was over. But the
British, bored and restless, with no hope of going home till hostilities
ceased, knew it was not over.

Guy, who now took a much more favourable view of
the future, told Harriet it might be over in year or eighteen months, then what
were they going to do?

That was something to be thought out. Harriet
said to Angela: 'What will you and Bill do when the war ends?'

Angela smiled and said: 'Humph!' as though the
end of the war were a remote and fantastic concept. Still, she was willing to
consider it.

'Bill ought to start work again. They've kept
his job open here but I doubt if he'll go back. He'd be willing to live like
this for ever but is it good for him? I'd like him to apply for a lectureship
in England. Of course he'd only get one in a minor university but what fun to
settle down in a provincial town and act the professor's wife: make friends
with the vicar and the local nobs, have a nice, old house and cultivate one's
garden! Would you come and see us?'

'Of course. We might even come and live near
you.' Harriet, too, could see herself settling down in a provincial town. 'Make
it a cathedral town,' she said. 'What about Salisbury?'

'You goose, Salisbury has no university. I'm
afraid we'll all end up in somewhere grimmer than that.'

Harriet was the only visitor admitted to the
Royal Suite. News that the runaways had returned, bringing Harriet with them,
had been spread by the wedding guests. When it was known that Angela and
Castlebar were living in opulent seclusion at the top of the Semiramis,
Angela's old friends called at the hotel but were turned away.

Angela said: 'One of them might prove to be
Bill's wife in disguise. She'd do anything to get in here. Even dress up as a
man.'

'With her figure,' said Harriet, 'she'd look
extremely odd.'

'Still, I'm not risking it. I've got Bill in
safe-keeping and that's where he's going to stay.'

'For how long?'

'As long as need be. If she gets in here, it'll
be over my dead body.'

The suite was air-conditioned and during the
fiery days of summer, while the British and American forces occupied Sicily,
Angela and Castlebar scarcely moved from their retreat. The windows were
fitted with jalousies in the far-eastern manner. During the day, while the city
shimmered in a glare of sunlight, the rooms were shaded and the occupants as
cool as sea-creatures in a rock pool.

The hotel servants, heavily tipped, would allow
no intruder to reach the suite. Harriet they saw as belonging to it and she
came and went as she pleased. She need no longer spend her evenings alone in
Garden City. When the sun began to sink, she could take the riverside walk to
the hotel and join her friends on the top floor for a drink, for supper, for as
long as she cared to stay. As the heat slackened, a safragi came to pull back
the jalousies and they could watch for the pyramids on the western horizon. When
it became dark, the safragi returned to open the windows and admit the evening
air.

It was a pleasant routine but on the night that
Italy surrendered, there was a disturbing break. When Harriet arrived,
Castlebar was not in the long chair with his drink and cigarettes, but
sprawled on the bed with Angela pouring iced water for him and persuading him
to take two aspirin.

'What is wrong with Bill?'

'He has a headache. I think we've been shut in
here too long. He needs a change of scene. Why don't we all go out for a
drive?' Angela, looking anxiously at him, put her hand to his brow: 'Better?'

He gave her a languid smile: 'A little better.'
He had taken the aspirin and after a while said: 'The pain's lifting. We'll go
out if you like.'

A gharry was sent for and they drove by the
river beneath the glowing sky. As they turned on to Bulacq Bridge, boys jumped
on to the gharry steps and offered them necklaces made of jasmin flowers.
Begging and laughing, they swung the heavily scented necklaces into Castlebar's
face and Castlebar, usually amused by this sort of play, shuddered back: 'Tell
them to go away.'

Angela paid off the boys then asked: 'Where
shall we go?' When Castlebar said he did not care, she turned to Harriet who
remembered an excavated village she had seen during her first days in Cairo.
She said: 'If we drive to the pyramids, I'll show you something you've never
seen before.'

They passed through the delicate evening scent
of the bean fields out to Mena where the pyramids stood and beyond them to the
desert that stretched away to the horizon. Angela said: 'Surely there's
nothing to see here?'

'Wait.' Harriet stopped the gharry and Angela
descended with her, but Castlebar shook his head. Smiling slightly, he put his
face against the grimy padding at the back of the seat and closed his eyes.

The two women crossed the flat, stony mardam and
reached a depression that was invisible from the road. Below they could see a
whole village of narrow streets and empty, roofless houses that had been
excavated from the sand.

Angela jumped down at once and said: 'Let's
explore.' Watching her, Harriet felt an odd apprehension. She and the others
had been shown this village on the day Angela's child had died. Putting this
from her, she followed Angela. They wandered about the lanes and looked into
small rooms, amazed that lives had once been lived here in these confined
quarters. They asked each other why this isolated village should exist at all,
without water or any reason for being there.

'But, of course,' Angela said, 'before the dam
was built, the Nile would have come very near. There could have been cultivated
land here. Or, more likely, the people who lived here built the pyramids. You
know they were not slaves as scholars once thought. They were peasants,
ordinary workmen, doing a job for a daily wage. And they were fed on onions and
radishes - not much of a diet, if you had to lug blocks of stone about.'

The twilight had begun to fall between the
houses and as the women returned to the road, a wind sprang up and sand hit
their faces. They started to run as the storm roared upon them, the sand grains
striking into their flesh and blinding them. Clinging together, lost in the
dark enveloping sand, they heard the gharry driver shouting to them above the
noise of the wind.

They found Castlebar still lying back, eyes
closed, unaware of sand and wind, while the driver gestured wildly, warning
them that they must get back before the road was covered. Castlebar did not
move and Angela, sitting close to him, lifting his limp hand, said: 'The
aspirin have made him sleepy.' At Mena, she said they must go into the
cloakroom and tidy themselves before facing the guests in the Semiramis foyer.
In the cloakroom, the women looked at each other, seeing their faces coated
with a grey mask of sand. Angela threw back her head with a howl of laughter
and it was to be a very long time before Harriet heard her laugh again.

At the Semiramis, Castlebar said he did not want
supper. He would go straight to bed.

'But you'll have a whisky, won't you?'

'No, I don't fancy it. I might take a drop of
vodka.'

'Oh well, so long as you have something!' Angela
was relieved.

Food for Harriet and Angela was sent up to the
living-room. As they ate, Angela said: 'It's probably just a touch of gyppy.
What should he take, do you think?'

Harriet recalled all the remedies that were part
of the mythology of the Middle East. She recommended that great comforter Dr
Collis Browne's Chlorodyne, but it was not easy to find. One cure was to eat
only apples and bananas and drink a mixture of port and brandy. Then there was
kaolin, intended to block the gut, but a more rapid cure, in Harriet's opinion,
was a spoonful of Dettol taken neat.

'Neat?'

'Yes. It's not difficult to swallow, and it's
nice and warming.'

'I'd never get Bill to swallow it.' Angela sent
down for apples, bananas, port and brandy and when they arrived, said: 'Let's
go and look at him and see what he'll take.'

Castlebar, in bed, his throat visible above his
pyjama jacket, looked gaunt and tired but not seriously ill. Harriet left early
and Angela, walking with her to the lift, said: 'Do you think it might be
jaundice? A lot of officers have had it. He might have picked it up in one of
these low bars.'

'

'Good heavens, does he go to bars?'

'I know he sneaks out when I'm in the bath. Poor
old thing, he wants a drink with the boys. I don't say anything.'

Harriet agreed with Angela that Castlebar would
be all right in a day or two, but two days passed and his condition was
unchanged. He was indifferent to food, and nauseated by the things that had
once pleased him most. And there were other symptoms.

Castlebar did not want company so Angela now
came down to sit with Harriet in the foyer or the dining-room. She said: 'His
temperature goes up and down; up in the evening and down in the morning. He
says his tum is sore. He doesn't like me to touch it. I want him to see a
doctor but he says "No".'

'Gyppy is painful, you know.'

'His stomach is not so much painful as tender,
and it's swollen - or, rather, it's puffy.'

'It could be food poisoning.'

'I thought of that. He sometimes slips into a
place that sells shell-fish. I've told him not to touch it but he doesn't
always do what he's told.'

At the end of a week Castlebar had developed a
rash that covered his chest and belly and Angela, now agitated, rang Harriet
and said he must see a doctor whether he liked it or not.

She shouted into the telephone: 'It could be
smallpox.'

'No. Believe me, he'd be much more ill. He'd
have high fever and be delirious; and he'd be vomiting. I know because I read
it up when I was in quarantine.'

'He has been vomiting. Oh God, Harriet, what am
I to do?'

'Is he well enough to walk? Could we get him
into a taxi?'

'Yes, he goes to the bathroom. He even took a
few bites of chicken at lunch time.' Angela's voice shook with the attempt to
reassure herself: 'He says he's not ill, only not well.'

'Then let's take him to Shafik at the American
Hospital. Shafik is a good doctor; he'll set your mind at rest.'

'You'll come with me?'

'Of course I'll come with you. Get him dressed
and I'll be round by the time you're ready to go.'

Harriet was uneasy, less for Castlebar who might
not be very ill, than for Angela who had known despair and could not face it
again. Harriet had seen her in a sate of anxiety that was near frenzy and knew
that at such moments she was, as Guy maintained, crazy. It was important to
get Castlebar's illness diagnosed before Angela again lost control of her
reason.

She took a taxi to the hotel and waited in the
hall. As Castlebar came from the lift, she was shocked by the sight of him. He
could walk, but with the shuffle of an old man, leaning on Angela who was
maintaining a precarious calm. He looked weary beyond endurance. The sweat of
exhaustion beaded his face and when Harriet spoke to him, he could scarcely
lift the lids from his sunken eyes. He smiled at her but it was a weak and
frightened smile.

The porter took his arm and helped him to the
taxi. Angela, following behind, whispered to Harriet: 'His temperature's up
again. It's 102º.'

Harriet said: 'That's not bad,' but she knew it
was bad enough.

The white hospital building and the avenue of
gum trees glimmering in the afternoon sun gave them the sense that all would
now be well. There would be no more doubts and confusion of hope and dread.
Help was at hand. Castlebar's ailment, whatever it was, would be treated and
cured.

The hospital porter, opening the taxi door,
insisted that the patient must stay where he was till a wheel-chair was brought
for him. Then, with the sympathy that the Egyptian poor show to the sick, three
male nurses came out to lift him into the chair. Castlebar tried to grin,
suggesting that all this attention was a joke, and inside the hospital, took
out his cigarettes but did not try to light one.

Harriet sent her name up to Dr Shafik. Shafik
came down at once, his handsome face beaming with astonished delight: 'How is
it you are here, Mrs Pringle? Have you been so quickly to England and back
again? Or did you decide you could not leave your Dr Shafik after all?' He was
eager to renew their past flirtatious relationship but Harriet was too worried
to respond to him. She said: 'Dr Shafik, I've brought my friends to you because
they need your help.'

Shafik turned to observe Harriet's friends and
his manner changed at once. He crossed to Castlebar, stared at him and asked:
'How long has he been like this?'

Angela said: 'About ten days.'

'He should have been brought here sooner.'

'What is it?' Angela's voice was shrill with
alarm: 'What is the matter? What can you do for him?'