Into Suez (21 page)

Of course they would not be caught. Three men were said to be on the run. He’d seen the ‘Wanted’ posters: useless. How did you tell them apart, with their fawning faces? There ought to be some sort of crackdown but, oh no, it was the ‘kid glove’ approach, bloody public school nancy-boys, play it down. The British were afraid of the whole powder keg going up. Every other day there were riots and strikes and demonstrations in Cairo. Spies freely wandered the streets of Ish, men dressed as women, the so-called
fedayeen
freedom-fighters with their rifles up their skirts. Israel had shamed their effete army. So of course they bite the hand that feeds them. Rather than clamping down, we soft-soaped them. There’d been a slap over the wrists for the eleven airmen,
letting the side down
. And the Air Commodore saying,
The matter is viewed as a criminal rather than a political offence
. Joe had never been in a room with so many high-ups, and an Army General flung in for good measure.

The Whites’ packing was almost complete. Joe made Nia and Christopher sit on the trunks, where they bounced their small behinds and giggled, while he secured the brass locks and buckled the straps. He attached labels, more than were strictly necessary because you could never be too careful, and he wanted to be sure, he told Irene, that everything would be as comfortable and trouble-free as humanly possible in transit. At least you’re going by plane, he said, all of you, on a nice big York, what do you think about
that
, son?

‘He’s going to look after his mummy on the plane, aren’t you, my young man?’ Irene purred. Maybe when they arrived home, Irene would start to grieve. Perhaps her apparent confusion was necessary to tide her over until her husband could be laid to rest. And when you are grown up, he thought, looking down at the little blighter who was destined to look after his mummy on the plane, you will realise all that she went through for her country and for you.

They were to tow the coffin behind a Jeep on a flatbed trailer. Six sergeants were to bear the coffin, Joe being one of the first pair, at the widow’s request. Glad to do it, of course, more than glad, honoured.

The cortege of Jeeps left the mortuary at Fayid Hospital on the brief run to the cemetery, creeping along potholed roads.

Six bearers would hardly be enough, he foresaw. By no manner of means, for Chalkie had needed a lead-lined coffin, in case he had to be dug up and re-examined at some future date. In the heat bodies soon stank higher than hung
game.
She
did not know that of course. Dusty, who partnered Joe, reckoned they were going to be dealing with a couple of hundredweight in furnace temperatures. Dusty, poor sod, did not look in good shape. Puffy red eyes. Tremble in the fingers that accepted a fag. Mushy sort of bloke, Joe thought. How he had cried over the donkey he’d shot.
Milk-white it was, Taf. Poor harmless creature. I took it for a bleeding wog
. Couldn’t eat meat since then, apart from tinned. Careful about where he trod in case there was life there. Going on about Jesus entering into Jerusalem. Unhinged. And old Chalkie had said,
Come on now, Eeyore, you’re getting to look like a poor old donkey yourself.

And if they stumbled under the load, Joe thought, how disgraceful, what an offence to the honour that was owed to Roy White. But that would not be allowed to happen. And, bless him, Chalkie was scarcely a big man. Not an ounce of spare flesh on the bloke.
Thin as a whippet
, he’d say:
and by George, Taf, I can run like one!
Chalkie’s mild, lopsided grin came back to Joe, and it was impossible to believe that his pal was inside the box.

At the cemetery gate, they took off one shoe at a time and stood on one leg to buff up the other shoe with the sock, hanging on to one another for balance. Falling in, they heaved the coffin up to their shoulders.

The six sergeants stood motionless in the furnace of midmorning heat.

Something was badly out of order. No birds. Not one tweet or chirrup. Just a hawk wheeling round by the stand of eucalyptus behind the rows of white lozenges that made Joe think of a draughts-board in which all the black counters had been captured. Which was as far from the truth as could be imagined.

A sweet stink stole up through his nose, into his brain. It seemed to coat his mouth and throat. Chalkie’s corpse. The stench came through a gap in the coffin by Joe’s left temple into which, great God alive, Nia could almost have wriggled her pinkie. At the other side, Dusty gagged and uttered a whimper. Joe could not see him. He fought his own urge to retch, heave, spit, run. Murmured,
Get a grip, Dusty my boy
. The bastard Air Force skimped on the coffins, leaving them presumably to the Gyppos to bang together, leaving gaps round the screw fittings, and he would like to know – as he would say to Dusty afterwards in the mess – if the officers were buried in bodged coffins. No prize for correct guesses, boy.

But of course they enjoyed a better standard of dying altogether. Buried by their own kind in the company of their own kind, with flags and bugles and full dress uniform.

Sweat pooled in the little dip you had under your nose and above your mouth that Nia called your
tosie
. No way to wipe. Therefore, duty to ignore. Hope not to sneeze.

The blabbermouth RC padre approached, ambling; the bluebottles beat him. Smelling out Chalkie’s whereabouts, they crawled in to him between the loopholes and, crawling back out, made for the lips and eyes and noses of the six sergeants.

Come on, you bastard biretta. Chuck your fucking incense and be done with it. Joe stood quivering and nauseous in the heat, making faces and snorting air at the flies, for both hands were occupied and there was no way to bat the devils away. The burial party swayed alarmingly under two hundredweight of lead. With an intuitive shuffle, they righted themselves. Joe’s eyes watered from
the smoking incense, which at least had the advantage of driving off the flies. Half the squadron took flight. The rest disappeared into the coffin.

Oh and holy fucking water now. A faceful of that. Thanks, I needed a cool-down. And more mumbo jumbo, such that Mr Mansell at Libanus Chapel would have risen to denounce the idolatrous tricks of the Purple Whore of Rome. Slow, slow, the priest led off. The party followed, perfectly in step, the lead weight digging down into their shoulders, sharp-edged, and Joe thought they must all have been pulling the identical face, a teeth-gritting grimace.

Through the heat haze, several hundred yards away across the green, a knot of black-veiled women wavered, waiting round a hole.

At the end of the priest’s palaver, all delivered in broadest Irish so that you could understand hardly one word in ten, the time came for Irene to scatter a handful of earth. She scooped it into Christopher’s hand instead and gestured for him to throw it. He was a man. Took precedence. Christopher narrowed his eyes with astonishment, peering at the dirt in his palm, though it had all been explained to him beforehand. Full of germs, he had been told Egyptian soil was: Joe had many times heard her warning the little chap not to touch dirt. Now Irene mouthed,
Throw it! On your daddy
. And Christopher obeyed, starting back from the edge as he heard its dry clatter on the coffin-lid. The widow threw hers then.

Finally, the order for the firing party to give the salute. Joe brought himself smartly to attention. The volley of three shots rang like cracks of thunder. So close the riflemen stood that Joe was deafened. He saw Irene reel, as if she had taken a hit, but she collected herself and,
looking down at Chalkie’s boy, smiled without any blood in her lips. And Ailsa, darling Ailsa, was there, standing behind the pair of them, supporting them, tears coursing down her face. Beside her stood Hedwig Webster, face half hidden behind the dark net of a mourning veil, like a spider’s web.

The third rifleman was a darkie or a half-caste rather. Indian bloke from the RAF Regiment. Was it beyond anyone’s gumption to have found a white rifleman?

At the tomb’s mouth stood twin sentinels, an elderly Egyptian ticket-collector in his
gallabiyya
and a soldier with a rifle. The flanks of the hills shone in the low afternoon sun, amber-yellow beneath a turquoise sky. A shaft led deep into the body of the hill. And I am here, Ailsa thought, and Mona is here, and we are together at the mouth of the underworld. The peaks of the Valley of the Kings were ochre in shadow, golden in the winter sun. Ailsa stood in a place of quietness and immensity. The tawny colours reminded her of autumn at home: copper and rusty-yellow leaves and bracken that always seemed to hold a remnant of the sun, a vestige and promise of light. She waited for Mona to come from the Jeep, incredulous but serene as she had been since they’d escaped together. Two women in one dream.

In the end, it had been so easy. All Ailsa had had to do was to ask Joe if he minded her going on the sergeants’ wives’ excursion to the Valley of the Kings, to Luxor and
Karnak. Do you mind, darling? Hedwig’s going. I’d really love to. But I won’t if you mind. Just say the word.

Of course he didn’t
mind
, Joe assured her. However could she imagine that he’d begrudge her this opportunity? He’d take a few days’ leave and have a special time at home with Nia. They’d try not to tread egg and bacon into the carpet as they’d somehow managed to do that time she was ill. This winter had been a hard time for Ailsa, what with one thing and another. And he’d been a right old so-and-so, a pain in the neck, he knew that. Go, please do, I want you to go. Sign up for it before all the places are taken.

Since Irene and the boys had left for England, directly after Chalkie’s funeral, Joe had been quieter, darker. Once he’d awoken in the night, his own hands at his throat, making choking noises. She’d snapped on the light, peeled his hands away from his neck. Propped on one elbow, Joe had stared at his hands, shaking. Embracing and kissing him, Ailsa had whispered reassurance.
Forgive me, Ailsa. Please, please forgive
. She had insisted that there was nothing in the world to forgive. He’d slept again but she had not. Some veil that should never be tampered with had been twitched aside. She wanted it put back but perhaps it could not be done. Joe would occasionally come out with ugly words against the Egyptians, filth and barbarity. He’d see her flinch back and would immediately silence himself – but it was as if a patch of vomit lay between them, reeking, staining the intimate fibres of their marriage. Its ghost would never be washed out of the sheets.

Lately he’d calmed right down. She’d allowed herself to get in touch with Mona again; to meet in the
Café
Grec 
and at the bungalow, a forbidden home-from-home. Mona was working on Beethoven’s piano sonatas: Ailsa received private recitals. One day she would tell Joe and bring it out into the open – but, for a complex of reasons, not yet. Most of the refugees had either been accommodated or had moved on to Cairo, leaving Mona space for herself. And now Joe seemed genuinely delighted for Ailsa that she had a chance of an adventure, even though it excluded him. He’d be turning over a new leaf for the New Year, on his honour. Take some photos, he’d urged, inserting a film in the precious Kodak and handing it to his wife.

The two of them had been so blissfully and tenderly close then, in the subsequent week, that Ailsa hadn’t wanted to come away from Joe, even to be with Mona. He’d had to argue her into going but –
no, I’d rather stay with you
– she’d clung to him, deep in the intimate warmth of their bed. It’s only for a few days, Joe had insisted. She’d torn herself away from him. Yet at Luxor she’d hardly given her husband a thought.

Mona came bounding down from the Jeep, oil on her hands, looking, Ailsa thought, like a girl soldier in her khaki shorts and grey shirt, athletic and rangy, sleeves rolled up, a safari hat on her head. On a whim she’d had her hair cropped close to her head, as it had been at the Old Brewery, giving her face a naked, boy-girlish look. For each of the three days of the tour, Ailsa checked out of the group activity and was swept off by the Wing Commander’s wife, who just happened to be on holiday, staying at the Luxor Hotel. Hedwig, seven months pregnant, turned her eyes away. She wandered round temples and monuments under a pink parasol, at the tail of the group, and kept her own disappointed company.
She’d only come along because Ailsa would be there, she let fall. And Norman had not been keen. She’d seemed too low-spirited, when they met over breakfast, even to mention the word
Kultur
, though excess of
Kultur
lay all around. What was Ailsa Roberts thinking of? Reckless behaviour it was, Ailsa knew – but the chance of a lifetime, and she seized it. There’d be time to devote to Hedwig on the last night, when they could talk German to their hearts’ content. Hedwig missed her homeland. With the birth so near, she craved the comfort of having her mother near at hand.
Mutti
had been so practical. You felt so safe. Ailsa knew that Hedwig’s mother and brothers had died in the Hamburg firestorm. And her father was missing, presumed dead, in Russia. A hell of fire and ice cut her off from her home. I’ll spend lots of time with her until the birth, Ailsa vowed.

All the same she went skipping off with Mona, like big girls in the school playground.

Linking arms, the two women walked up the path to the opening of the tomb.

‘
Salaam aleicum
,’ Ailsa greeted the ticket-collector, raising and opening her left hand in token that she brought nothing insidious with her, in the rather beautiful gesture of Arab greeting Mona had taught her. They smiled into one another’s faces.

‘
Shokrun
,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

‘
Aleicum salaam!
Welcome,
mesdames
, welcome,
bienvenues
!’ he said, beaming, head on one side. His eyes were an amazing green, surrounded by smile-wrinkles.

Meeting those eyes, Ailsa felt freed from chains, able to recognise the other for the person he was.
I exist, and you also exist
, her eyes told him.
I have a right to live, and this
is also your right
. There were ways of ducking under the fence her tribe erected against other tribes, a criminal barrier made of fear, greed and guilt. A rare moment in history was transacted in every personal meeting. Such open, friendly people Ailsa found the Egyptians she encountered in Mona’s company. She loved their dry sense of humour and wished she could converse properly with them in their own tongue, eagerly absorbing the fragments of Arabic Mona taught her. To welcome the white invader as an honoured guest: why ever should they stoop to do so? Ailsa was seeing hospitality where before she’d seen – or apprehended – veiled hostility.

Perhaps, she’d said to Mona, friendship will do the trick. Every meeting between persons of good will is political. Each one closes the gap.

I need you
, Mona had replied.
You help me hope.

The duty soldier at the tomb did not return Ailsa’s smile. He stared without blinking, chin raised so that although he was not a tall man, he managed to look down upon her. His glance said, as clearly as if he’d spoken aloud,
Brazen British whore, cover yourself up
. Ailsa faltered, bunching up her collar at her neck. She was aware of his cold rifle butt pointed at their backs, as they made their way down the slope into the gloom, gripping the wooden railing worn smooth by many hands.

No wall decorations: how odd. In other tombs they’d visited, the walls had been alive with gods and goddesses, pharaohs and queens. Painted deities with hawk or cobra faces, terrible and still, had towered over them every step of the way. No such murals decorated the passage or antechambers to Tutankhamun’s resting place. The boy king had suffered sudden, untimely death; a lower-caste
tomb had been requisitioned to accommodate his hasty funeral. So their pre-war guidebook told them. Holding tight to one another, the two women edged downwards, the air muggy and stale.

At Cairo Museum they’d viewed the exquisite chairs, bed and chariot the young man would need to equip him in the next life; the life-size black and gold sentinels who represented his soul, his
ka
. The three magnificent coffins that had nested together around the precious cadaver. The gold canopic shrine housing his guts, lungs and liver, round which four tutelary goddesses stretched their arms in a gesture of protection so tender and gracious, so human and motherly, that Ailsa’s bowels had gone to water. With a pang she’d thought of the frailty of the thread from which your child’s life hung. At Fayid Cemetery on the day of Chalkie’s interment she’d noticed the graves of children who’d died of some trivial ailment that could have been treated back home without a thought. The dead had to be buried immediately and abandoned by the Great Bitter Lake when the parents’ time came for a home posting.

But why worry about Nia? Why feel tugged in the region of your navel, by the invisible cord that bound you to your child? Nia reared in Ailsa’s mind’s eye and stared past her, implacable as a baby god.
Shan’t be long,
Ailsa had wheedled, lingering in the doorway with her case.
Have a gorgeous time with Daddy
. But the child, who was your judge, weighed you in the balance and, finding you wanting, averted her head.
You will only have me for so long. You know this and yet have shortened the time left to us
. The airlessness of the passage made Ailsa light-headed. Why go on? Because you couldn’t go back. Mona led the way into the passage forking right.

But, oh no, here he was, the American archaeologist, Mr Bothmer from Brooklyn, who’d talked them round a series of tombs this morning, until their heads had pulsed and their legs ached. In subterranean chambers, some like cathedrals, he’d interpreted paintings, commenting on the preservation of the colours, praising the cutting of reliefs, solving hieroglyphic enigmas. Not that she’d have missed it for the world: such a privilege to be instructed by one so cultivated and knowledgeable. The last tomb they’d visited belonged to Tuthmosis III. The electric current being switched off, their route had been lit by a paraffin lamp held up by a
ghaffir
, as Mr Bothmer called him. They’d climbed a steep mountainside and descended into a crevice hand over hand down a rickety iron ladder; then negotiated rock steps, deep, deep into the mountain side, to penetrate halls and corridors of vast dimension. When they’d emerged,
soft-spoken
and courtly Mr Bothmer, a handsome, suave man with a leonine head of hair, went off with the guard to share a cigarette on a rush mat in the guard’s stone hut.

Now he swept his hat off to them and murmured something about destiny.

The three stood together at the wooden rail, looking down at the chamber Howard Carter had unsealed thirty years before, discovering the nest of caskets, like Russian dolls, that for three thousand years had housed the boy’s corpse. The removal of the treasures had left on display only this central emptiness. At the base of the pale stone room lay a modest coffin containing the boy-king’s mummy, surrounded on four walls by pictures and hieroglyphs.

Mr Bothmer was scathing about Tut’s tomb. ‘So disappointing for you ladies,’ he said. ‘Nothing to be seen. An inferior tomb.’

But he perked up when Mona asked about the meaning of the monkeys on the west wall. He had much to say about baboon symbolism in Egyptian resurrection mythology. The ancients had observed, he said, that when baboons awaken in the morning, the first thing they do is to turn themselves in the direction of the sun. To Ailsa, half listening, the rows of identical baboons looked endearingly like the pattern of a child’s nursery wallpaper. She would tell Hedwig about this. Hedwig would be touched; her eyes would swim. For here the truth of human life was laid bare for all to see: mothers’ immortal tenderness for babes beyond saving.

A chest of board games had been found here with ivory counters to amuse the young man in eternity. The paintings on the north wall showed his mouth being opened, to restore his senses for use in the afterlife: Mr Bothmer took them through the symbolism at a gallop, for time was pressing. Dark Anubis, the jackal god, led the pale Pharaoh on his journey through death, a quest fraught with terror and danger. Over the river of death. Into the presence of the most terrible gods in the pantheon. The boyish heart was weighed in judgement. Into the sky he ascended, the living image of the god Amun.

‘Do
you
believe in life after death?’ Ailsa asked Mr Bothmer.

‘Oh, well. As a Christian, naturally,’ he said, shuffling backwards, giving a high-pitched cough, which he covered with his hand.

It was as if an impropriety had been committed. Shortly Mr Bothmer said he would leave the ladies for now, as he had an engagement with Miss Natacha Rombova of the Bollingen Foundation and her little dog,
which accompanied her everywhere, even into the tombs, where it barked the place down.

When he’d gone they stood in silence, hands on the railing. For ages the murals had been sealed unseen. They were painted for the gods’ eyes, Ailsa thought. The gods’ eyes see in the dark. But now we come along and breathe on their eternity, defiling them with many-times
rebreathed
carbon dioxide and sulphur and bacteria. She peered from the side of her eye at her friend: two silver chains on Mona’s throat picked up threads of light, the ankh Ailsa had bought her at Karnak and the key to the house in Jerusalem.

Love for Mona suffused Ailsa. I’d risk anything for you, she thought. I don’t know what will come of it. Or what it’s all about. And immediately the tenderness was streaked by perplexity, a dark slick tainting the clear water of friendship. But what could adulterate true friendship? And theirs was true. Why should their affection feel compromised, aside from its necessary secrecy? Mona’s hand reached for Ailsa’s and clasped it. Or was it secrecy itself that contaminated what they had, Ailsa thought, at the same time as it kindled excitement and transformed fellowship into something hot, ardent? Dangerous, even. If they could just be ordinary, low-key, this passionate glow would fade. Did she want that? Did Mona? There was something more than life-sized about Mona: a spirit that burned to live on the heroic scale. It had chosen Ailsa as its partner. This force carried Ailsa along, racing dreamily down the current of another’s desire.