Arabesque (29 page)

“I don’t want any new values.”

“Don’t you? In your own twilight, little lamp, don’t you? I know. I’ve watched you being bored with the lot of them. Of course you were. So desperately wanting to be
needed that you gave yourself to all that nonsense in Beit Chabab. And all the while I needed you. Do now. Always shall. Because I am dead without you. Isn’t that a new value? Have you ever
refused such a need of you?”

“Dion, that’s not fair!”

“It is. You’re not cruel. You just don’t see. When you’re needed, you aren’t there.”

“Dion, will you stop it?” she cried.

“No, I won’t. I need you.”

“It’s impossible—some beastly, sordid hotel.”

“No. A white room on the edge of the desert. And flowers. And when I ring the bell, a simple, sleepy, friendly black man to receive us.”

“I will not. You’ve been there before.”

“Of course. But alone.”

“Promise me.”

“All my life I have been alone. Don’t you know it?”

“Yes.”

Prayle held her across his heart as he leaned forward to order the driver:

“Back to Helwan,
habibi!
”

“No!”

“Shut up, Armande my beloved, shut up!”

“Dion, I shall never forgive myself.”

“Tell me that tomorrow. At dawn. If you believe it.”

No longer was the Middle East a fortress. The dusty beaters had driven the game out of their deserts into Tunisia, where the guns, appreciative of such excellent shooting,
stood ready for the kill. After dark the streets of Cairo blazed again with light. Hotels and bazaars, picture palaces and native theatres, shone expensively, gaily or discreetly according to the
wealth that war had presented to their owners. No longer did the café strategists discuss the virtues and failings of their garrison; no longer, indeed, had they more than spectators’
interest in its fate. Half the width of Africa was between the Axis armies and the Levant, and in and over the eastern Mediterranean the power of the British was unchallengeable. Syrian and
Egyptian, Arab and Jew, were free to attend to their domestic affairs.

Armande was happy as she had never been in all her life. Since Cairo had never been occupied, the underground organisation had not been used for its original purpose; nevertheless, it had been
busy. She began to suspect that recent jobs done for Mr. Makrisi were becoming pointless, and that her irregular wads of Egyptian pounds were no longer really earned; but her content, eager and
warmhearted, was undisturbed. She had an object, and it was Dion Prayle.

That she had been won, in the first place, by his passion and gentleness as a lover she knew, but by what was she held? By the repeated glory of his swift visits to Cairo—that was
undoubted and no matter for self-questioning—and by what she described to herself as his isolation. Dion saw life steadily, but he did not, in her opinion, see it whole. He could appreciate
and none better, the beauty in a tree, a hippopotamus or the comments and aspirations of an Arab beggar; yet anything that the world appreciated, from poetry to social or monetary success, he
treated with suspicion. Sweet it was that he should depend so utterly upon her for a sufficient companionship, but she wanted him to be more than a tense and often suffering observer of others.
Human life was, in essence, artificial; it could not be forced into his preferential mould of the strong, the raw and the simple. Both he and she were fair products of their civilisation, which had
unvaryingly pursued the idea, of the aristocratic individual, open-minded, generous and urbane; and it was a triumph for that civilisation that both of them had been produced from nothing. This
however, he would not see. He called it a triumph for the bloody Joneses; and by that conviction, he, who was so anxious to lose himself in humanity, cut himself off from humanity.

His commission had done him good. During those first precious days in Cairo and Helwan, he had accepted his commandant’s offer. He was Captain Dion Prayle now (in his service it seemed to
be understood that one only remained a lieutenant for a month or two) and, to her very private delight, he looked the part. Sergeant Prayle was eccentric and misplaced; the same face on Captain
Prayle was that of a hard-bitten original. Whether he liked his commission she could not decide. He obviously adored and mothered his Field Security Section, but he complained that a
sergeant’s life had been more amusing. One had not, he said, to put up with the conversation of officers.

It was odd that her surrender to Dion should have made the writing of letters to John easier than before. At her first attempt she had been overwhelmed by a sense of disloyalty; this precluded
all emotion and any soulful effort towards intimacy, while encouraging the transmission of mere news. John had seemed delighted, and had replied with a letter that certainly showed no sense of
strain and, for him, was almost witty. Thereafter their long-distance relationship was simpler. John had ceased to be an unsatisfactory ambition, and become just a dear person with whom years ago
she had lived.

To her amusement Dion Prayle was jealous. He maintained in obscure but uncompromising phrases that John should be told and that proceedings for divorce should be started; he could not be made to
see that it was wicked to upset John in the steady course of his personal war, and that he might become careless of his life. It was not enough for Dion to lay it down that she had never been in
love with John, and that by now he must suspect it. John was not the sort of person to suspect anything which was not in full view.

Armande waited in a secluded alley of the Cairo Zoo. She was fond of the zoo; its overhanging creepers, its vast African trees and running water made it the coolest of Egyptian gardens. She had
chosen it as discreet and neutral ground for a first meeting with her chief. His request for a rendezvous was unexpected, and perplexing in that it had been passed to her by letter from Dion
instead of through the normal channel of Mr. Makrisi. The meeting meant, she supposed, that she was to be thanked and that her employment was at an end.

No Gestapo could have got anything out of her, for she never saw cause or effect of what she did. She was often used as a postbox, and sometimes she was simply told to be away from her flat on
certain dates. She would watch, and she would occasionally entertain. Once a high officer had been drunk in her flat, really drunk—he wasn’t trusting his power to act—and had
blurted out British intentions in the Dodecanese before some of Mr. Makrsis’s guests. Makrisi, with his cold hatred of the enemy that always aroused her pity of them and for him, had told her
that the evening’s work sent two shiploads of Boches to the bottom of the Aegean.

It was about time, she admitted, that they closed down. The war was far away, and their branch of Intelligence could be left to the small and efficient band of professionals. Mr. Makrisi still
seemed very busy, but she was not. She had no idea what he was up to; he was conspiratorial and uncommunicative.

Major Furney passed her seat, stopped to examine some decorative cranes in a paddock behind the bushes, repassed her and then sat down.

“It’s curious, Mrs. Herne, that we have never actually met before,” he said.

“Isn’t it? I knew your face in Beirut, but not your name.”

He thanked her very formally for her work. She couldn’t help feeling as if she were leaving school with an elaborate certificate. She realised, however, why Dion liked Guy Furney. The
precise face could not hide the fact that he enjoyed himself. He might lack depth of character, but not of insight.

“What I wanted to ask you,” he said, “is—what are your personal relations to Mr. Makrisi?”

“We have very little personal relationship. He’s not a man one can help outside the game. I’ve darned his socks and looked after his diet a bit, but he
doesn’t—well, he doesn’t encourage me.”

“You like him, I suppose?” Furney asked.

“Oh, yes. I’m so sorry for him.”

“I’m glad your loyalty isn’t engaged in any way,” he said with a smile of relief.

“My loyalty is exactly where it always has been, Major Furney.”

“Yes,” he answered with some embarrassment. “I know it and I knew it. But that question is now—academic. Mrs. Herne, I have given Mr. Makrisi no work whatever for weeks.
Does that surprise you?”

“I suppose he has been making contacts for the future,” she said.

“He had been busy?”

“Yes.”

“I’m uneasy.”

“Major Furney, it is utterly inconceivable,” Armande answered directly, “that Major Montagne would work for the enemy.”

“I’m happy you said that, though it only confirms what I too was sure of. But then, what is he doing?”

“I’m not in the picture enough to know.”

“No, of course not. That was for your own safety, you see. Have you any idea whom he is seeing?”

“There have been some Poles,” said Armande.

“Could they be Russians?”

“Not this lot.”

“French? Jews?”

“He’s the most bitter anti-Semite I ever met.”

“It rankles, does it?”

“In the bottom of his heart and all through.”

“Arabs?” Furney asked. “Has he anything to do with Arabs?”

“Naturally. All the time off and on. But you know who they are, I suppose. And there’s no one new.”

“Dion Prayle said—You know his extraordinary snap judgments?”

Armande did. It amused her that the Army should have picked up the Christian name which she had chosen for him. Dion, no longer self-conscious after her approval, had published himself as
Dion.

“Well when I first put you and Montagne on the job, I asked him to give me his impression on Montagne. He said that he had an inner light, and it wasn’t mine.”

Armande warmed to Dion’s words, coming secondhand out of past time. Darling Dion! Like some twisted medieval alchemist—incomprehensible, but so often right.

“That describes Montagne well,” she said, smiling.

“But, he’s done splendidly for us. So have you.”

“That doesn’t mean we don’t have a private life.”

“No. And now there’s time for it. Could he be playing for the French? He’s never been particularly pro-British.”

“He has not forgiven either French or British,” said Armande slowly. “And he doesn’t care what happens to either of us so long as we down Hitler. I hate that in him, but
there it is.”

“That sounds as if he might be a communist.”

“He isn’t, Major Furney. He despairs of politics. He could be an anarchist, except that he’s too intelligent, fiendishly intelligent.”

“Fiendishly? Inner light?” Furney repeated, a slight raising of his voice showing that he deprecated such exaggeration. “I wonder if you and Dion Prayle aren’t too much
impressed by that satanic look of his. He always had it, you know. Well, put a name to all your apocalyptic suspicions, will you?”

“How?”

“Watch him.”

“I’ve no organisation except his.”

“I’ll give you the start of one,” he said. “Do you remember a certain Rashid, Rashid Abd-er-Rahman ibn Ajjueyn?”

“Rashid! Very well.”

“He’s devoted to you. He’d take your orders, and raise a few of his people to carry them out.”

“Where is Major Honeymill?”

“D.S.O. Posthumous, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, no! Poor Toots!” Armande protested, fighting the shock of sorrow and her tears. “I didn’t know! I haven’t spoken for months to anybody in the army but
Dion.”

“They were playing hell with Rommel’s communications, and based on nothing themselves. They knew it couldn’t go on for ever.”

“And Rashid got clear?”

“Yes. He was wounded. But he and the few who were left passed clean through a German diversion carrying Honeymill’s body, and buried him at Derna. Rashid is out of hospital now, and
at a loose end.”

Armande compelled herself to concentrate.

“He fought against us in Palestine, you know,” she warned him.

“That doesn’t matter. Arabs give themselves to people, not causes. Rashid belongs to anyone he admires. Would you like him?”

“More than ever—if you are satisfied.”

Major Furner looked at her primly over his glasses.

“I—er—don’t upset him, will you?”

“I meant,” she replied with a Mona Lisa smile, “that it’s easier for me than it was to keep him as a friend.”

“That’s all then. You can ring me up and fix a meeting whenever you need to talk. Is there anything else that you think you are likely to want?”

“Could you help me to pay a debt?”

“How much?”

“Not that kind. A debt of friendship. You know the Rumanian I used to dance with at the Casino, and her mother?”

“Indeed I do. A pure Byzantine type. Most interesting.”

“I want her to have a real chance. Aren’t there empty planes going to South Africa?”

“There are. But I can’t go shipping off pet cabaret girls. Only generals can do that.”

“Suppose she had worked for you and her life were in danger?” Armande suggested.

“Is it?”

“Not in the least. But if it were, you’d put her on a plane.”

“Oh my aunt! And her mother?”

“Yes.”

“They keep right out of the war. All Floarea Pitescu wants is to dance in the capital of the winner. I think Johannesburg would be a good stop on the way.”

“I can’t do it. Really I can’t,” he said regretfully.

“Whisper, Major Furney. The simple soldiery will believe anything.”

Armande could not keep back her tears. All this while she had forced down a grim, military cover upon her longing for a lonely minute in which to weep for Toots; and now, thinking with half her
mind of that day when he had first met and comforted her, the memory of his voice and of his laughing words, which she had just used in his own tone, came back to her too vividly.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Mrs. Herne,” Guy Furney was repeating. “In the end I’m just a mass of files like the rest of them. Give me their passports, and
I’ll do it. I promise you it shall be done.”

He patted her hand in agitation. Armande choked on a hoarse sound that was neither a laugh nor a sob. She who had never deliberately used tears on a man was childishly, ironically, astonished to
discover how effective they were.