Apple Blossom Time (7 page)

Directly in front of me, the secretary stubbed her toe and tripped. She gave a giggly squeal that – unfairly – made me really dislike her. After a few more yards, James balked.

‘Sorry – I’m not awfully good at being shut in,’ he whispered. The age-old darkness swallowed his voice and gave it back again, drained of life. ‘Sorry to be a bore. You go on and I’ll meet you outside later.’

But I followed him back out, not too sorry myself to escape, but not likely to admit it either. As we turned to go, the candle went out. The secretary squealed again. I heard the guide’s sing-song voice demanding, ‘Ten piastres, sirs and madams. Ten piastres for more light.’

Outside again, James looked very embarrassed. ‘I feel such a fool. Have I spoiled your visit?’

‘Not at all,’ I answered politely. ‘It was very stuffy in there. What would you like to do instead?’

Heavens, what was I doing there with a claustrophobic young man whom I scarcely even knew, who’d only asked me to be with him to apologize for a companion who’d tried to rape me and who was so bored and so boring that he hadn’t said a word on the journey? I’d have been better off staying behind to iron my kit for next day’s inspection. It might have been more fun.

‘Feeling fit?’ asked James, looking up. ‘Schindler’s Guide says it only takes about fifteen minutes.’

‘That sounds a bit optimistic. Anyway, why go up at all?’

‘Oh, because it’s there, I suppose. That’s as good a reason as any. Because everyone does it. Coming?’

James bounded up the sides of Cheops’s great tomb, like a Labrador puppy going upstairs. His hat fell off and tittupped down the Pyramid face, over and over, getting dustier and dustier. James’s hair was toffee brown, sun-streaked, baby soft. There was a sudden division, marked by a red pressure line, between brown face and the pale skin where his hat had been.

‘Never mind,’ he laughed and puffed at the same time. ‘I’ll get it on the way down. Gosh – fifteen minutes not up yet? It’s further than I thought. Are you all right?’

But I didn’t have breath to answer. He held out his hand and grasped mine. His was surprisingly strong, hard, golden brown and dusted with gold hairs.

In the end, we didn’t reach the top. There was a noisy party of South Africans up there doing a clumsy conga on the plateau where the Pyramid’s point had been removed. They were carving their initials next to the ones left by Napoleon’s Army of the Nile. We were content to squat a little lower down, knees and hamstrings aching, watching evening creep over the sand, gold and silver, blue and violet, spreading silkily in one direction to the green fields by the Nile and in the other, all the way to the war and forever after. It didn’t look like the same gritty, dun-coloured dust that got into our hair, our teeth, our tea.

The pedlars, tiny below us, were packing up, heading back to their villages. The South Africans came down from the top, slipping and sliding and ricking their ankles, on their way back to the cinemas and the bars. The evening breeze off the desert chilled my sweating skin. I shivered.

James was quiet. He sat forward, his arms wrapped around his knees, staring towards the desert. He was silent for so long that I thought he’d forgotten I was there.

‘We don’t have anything heavy enough to stop them, you know,’ he said at last. ‘A 2-pounder won’t stop German armour. We’ve got nothing that will hit hard enough, move fast enough. They’re blasting the hell out of us.’

His face was so naked, I couldn’t look at it. This lonely place had stripped away his youth and beauty.

‘What will it be like, d’you think?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I answered honestly. ‘I’ll never know.’

‘Will it really be like – you know – the swimmer into cleanness leaping?’

‘Rupert Brooke – yes, I know it.

“Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;

Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there

But only agony, and that has ending…”’

‘“And the worst friend and enemy is but Death,”’ he finished.

‘Tom – my stepfather – used to quote it, sometimes, and then he’d laugh.’

‘Why laugh?’

‘He drinks. Not often, but often enough.’

‘We had to learn it at school. If it’s really like that, I don’t think I’d mind too much if … if my turn comes … but if it’s not … if it’s not clean…’

That was my time to tell a lie, my time to console him with platitudes. He would have believed them. He wanted so badly to believe. He was young.

I wished I could. I wished I could help him with brave words and kind lies. But I couldn’t think of any. I said nothing.

With thin, brown fingers he picked off a flake of stone and let it bounce down the sides of the Pyramid, faster and faster, taking a little avalanche of dust with it.

‘It’s the new boys catch it, they say. If you survive six months, you’ll probably make it. Only I don’t want to let everyone down – the lads, you know. I’m afraid I’ll scream and shout for help and put people in danger to come and save me. That wouldn’t be right. But maybe I won’t be able to help it.’

‘You’ll be all right,’ I said softly, not knowing whether I believed it or not.

‘Will I?’

But I couldn’t make a promise.

*   *   *

We woke our snoozing driver, who drove us back to Cairo faster than he brought us out. It was too dark to see the egrets roosting in the driftwood along the river banks, but we could smell the eucalyptus – winter in England, drops on a handkerchief to clear a stuffy nose, Vick spread on flannel and bound round a skinny chest – and hear the leaves rustle drily in the evening river breeze. The bridge was decked with coloured lights. There were houseboats, light-spangled, with music that blared and jangled. It was wartime, but the war had not touched us then.

‘I’m sorry. I’ve talked too much. Boring for you.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘No, really. It was very rude. I don’t usually. It must have been the tunnel and the dark. All that careful preparation for death. It made me feel – funny. What an awkward time to choose to bare my soul. Not very entertaining for you. Sorry.’

‘I didn’t mind. Really.’

‘When I come back, may I see you again, please?’

‘Yes. That would be nice.’

I wouldn’t have let him kiss me. It hadn’t been that kind of day. But anyway, he didn’t try.

*   *   *

The war crept closer and still we went to ENSA concert parties,
Hello Happiness
and
Spotlights,
to the open air cinema, Shafto’s Shuftis, to see
Gone with the Wind.
At the end of the performance, as the Egyptian national anthem was played, the British soldiers leaped to their feet and began to sing to Verdi’s music:

‘King Farouk, King Farouk, you’re a dirty old crook

As you walk down the street in your fifty-shilling suit

Queen Farida’s very gay, ’cos she’s in the family way—’

and it got a lot worse than that. It was the sort of happening when you don’t know whether to join in and snigger or walk out in indignation. Heaven knows how the Egyptians bore it. Pansy was scandalized.

Vee was utterly captivated by Scarlett O’Hara. She went round for a week after that, tossing her head and flicking her skirts and trying to lift one quizzical eyebrow (but, no matter how she screwed up her face, the other one kept following it).

‘She had the right idea, that one. Always leave them wanting more. Oh, if only some man would carry me upstairs like Clark Gable and have his wicked way with me – but most of the blokes round here couldn’t even lift me, let alone carry me.’

We went swimming at the Maadi club, where kind volunteer ladies served tea and sandwiches. We danced and danced, with no shortage of willing escorts. A girl could be out every night of the week with a different man and no-one would call her fast and loose, the way they might in England. Besides, there was safety in numbers. How could you get too serious about a man if you only saw him once? as Vee remarked.

In the early morning, before the heat became too much, we drilled on the dusty square. With Grace now as right marker, so she couldn’t trip anyone up, we formed fours and went off at a cracking pace, convinced that our little platoon was the equal of the Brigade of Guards any day. Sergeant Gulliver bawled at us to slow down.

‘Westonbirt – bring that squad back here! What do you think you are – the Rifle Brigade? If the drill book says a 27-inch pace, ladies, then a 27-inch pace I shall have, and not an inch more nor less.’

Grace and Vee struggled daily to keep their vehicles roadworthy. They constantly had to strip down and clean sand out of carburettors and filters or adjust plugs. We’d been reinforced by a new draft from home by then, clerks and storewomen, and all the beds in our hut were occupied, but we four, the originals, stuck together in rather a clannish way. We weren’t surprised that more than one of the new girls arrived pregnant – there weren’t many ways to while away the time on a troopship!

We had fire drills and air-raid drills. We scrubbed latrines. We had kit inspections, when a diffident Miss Carstairs tried not to enquire too closely as to the state of our clothing.

‘You seem to be short of all your collars, Westonbirt.’

‘At the laundry, ma’am.’

‘And a suspender belt.’

‘Laundry, ma’am.’

‘And your spare shoelaces.’

‘Laundry, ma’am.’

Sergeant Gulliver had no such scruples. She was only too keen to point out if we were diffy a hook on a khaki brassière or our knicker elastic was frayed. She poked and meddled amongst our belongings in a way that really put my back up. I hated even more when, before a parade, she’d jerk our hats straight or tweak our ties.

‘If she touches me just once more, I swear I’ll swing for her!’

‘Can’t you see, she enjoys it more when you’re angry,’ said Vee, wisely. ‘She looks into your face and she knows you’re fizzing and she loves it. Don’t get mad – there’s no future in it. Just keep your face straight, say “Yes, sergeant!” like a good little girl and think to yourself
Ma’alish!
’

Pansy put her first tape up. We’d always known she’d be the one. We toasted her in cocoa, as she stitched the single chevron into place.

‘It could have been any of us, really,’ she said, modestly. ‘I was just lucky they were short of a shift NCO in the cookhouse.’

‘Absolute rot,’ Grace retorted. ‘You deserve it.’

We wrote letters home and had airgraphs, miniaturized on to film to save cargo space and enlarged at their destination, back. When they came, we read them to each other, sharing families. We heard about Grace’s grandfather, who was a Scottish earl, complaining that his shoot had gone to blue blazes because his keepers had all enlisted. We heard about Vee’s grandmother, whose shop-front had been blown in by a land mine, but who’d opened a stall in the street outside the very next morning rather than close down for ‘that bloody little Herr Schicklgrueber’. We all felt as proud of her as though she were our own joint grandmother.

We wrote a round robin to the crew of a ship on Atlantic convoy who’d appealed for penpals and sent them a snap of the four of us and a camel. With hats at every angle but the correct one and arms linked, we grinned out from the picture, tanned, laughing, confident. We hoped it would give the sailors a few smiles. God knows they deserved one, out there on the freezing Atlantic run. On the back, Vee scribbled, ‘Guess which one’s me (and it’s not the one with a hump)!’

Busy, busy girls. Don’t you know there’s a war on?

*   *   *

The lights still blazed and the music still played. Cold, dark England, rationing and air raids seemed a lifetime away. The sun still shone, blinding, pitiless, a white light that lanced through your eyes and into your brain.

*   *   *

After a month, James came back out of the blue for two days. We dined at Le P’tit Coin de France and danced at the Deck Club. How extraordinary – I was really pleased to see him. We seemed to laugh a lot – I don’t know why, everything seemed funny – but James didn’t say very much.

I never knew where he’d been, what he’d done, what he’d seen. And I couldn’t tell him what I had been doing, either. We had no friends in common, no shared background; none of the shorthand that passes for conversation made much sense. We had nothing to talk about. So we didn’t talk.

‘Do you have a snap of yourself?’ he asked as he dropped me back at camp on his last evening. ‘I’d rather like one, if you don’t mind. It would remind me that there’s something in my life apart from sand and flies.’

So I gave him one that Vee had taken outside our hut. I was squinting into the sun, shielding my eyes with one hand. Not very flattering, but it was the only one I could lay hands on.

I watched James put it in the top pocket of his battledress and button down the flap. Then he was gone. I’d have watched the tail lights of his car disappear down the road, but a raucous carload arrived at the gate, so I turned and went in.

And when he’d gone, up the blue, not knowing when he’d be back, I couldn’t get the last dance we’d danced to out of my mind.

‘“I’ll be with you in apple blossom time…”’ I sang in the voice that had got me thrown out of the church choir, until even Pansy said she’d scream if I didn’t choose something else.

*   *   *

‘Chucking up again, love?’ Vee said to Pansy. ‘That’s the third day in a row.’

‘Touch of gyppy tummy, I expect,’ answered Pansy, wiping the sweat from her face. ‘Everyone in the kitchen’s got it.’

‘Boiled eggs, that’s what you should eat. Nothing but boiled eggs. Never fails. They bind you, you see.’

‘If the cooks have got it,’ said Grace, looking up from painting her nails, ‘God help the rest of us.’

My dear Laura

Thank you so much for the snaps. Your friends all look very jolly – apart from the camel. I’m so glad that you’re happy and that Pansy and you have not been separated.

We are all well here. Kate had a few days’ leave last week and looks as though life in the WRNS really suits her. She is a dispatch rider now and delivers urgent messages on her motorcycle round
– here Mother had scratched out the name of the naval base –
the town where she is based. I worry about the raids, which are very heavy there, as they are all round the coast. Do you think the censor will leave that bit in? I’m sure everyone knows that if Kate is in the WRNS she must be based by the sea somewhere. Letter writing is so difficult nowadays. One never knows what will be officially disapproved.