The Levant Trilogy (43 page)

The American Hospital had one of the most
pleasing aspects in Cairo. Harriet, put to bed in a white, air-conditioned room
with a balcony, lay for a long time with her eyes shut, waiting for someone to
come and investigate her condition. When no one came, she opened her eyes and
staring out at the empty sky, she thought of her death in a foreign place. The
poet Mangan had died of cholera and that death seemed nearer than all the
deaths in Upper Egypt. Like Yakimov, who had died in Greece, she would be
buried in dry, alien earth where her body would quickly turn to dust and she
would never see England again. The prospect did not greatly upset her, she felt
too tired. She thought of Aidan crawling into the canvas shelter to die and
could not see that she, herself, had much more reason to go on living.

She was roused by the Armenian nurse who told
her in an awed whisper: 'Doctor come.'

The doctor was not, as she had expected, an
American, but an Egyptian who spoke with an American accent. He announced
himself: 'Shafik,' and bowed slightly.

'You have thrown up, yes?'

'No.'

'But your insides are upset? For how long?'

'A long time, on and off.'

'And now worse?'

'Yes.'

Dr Shafik examined her critically, without sympathy,
almost resentfully, as though annoyed that she should be there. She found his
manner disconcerting and his appearance more disconcerting. Most Egyptians put
on weight and looked middle-aged when they were thirty. Dr Shafik, who was
thirty or more, had preserved his facial good looks as well as the slim
elegance she had occasionally noted among young officers at the Officers' Club.
He picked up her hand and examined it as though it were an entity all on its
own.

'How much do you weigh?'

'Seven stone. That's one hundred pounds.'

'I think not. I think you weigh not even eighty
pounds, but we shall see. One thing I can say: you haven't cholera.' He
obviously thought her a fool for choosing such a sickness: 'There is no cholera
in this part of Egypt.'

'I've just come from Upper Egypt where people
are dying in hundreds.'

'Not of cholera. Malaria, more likely. Upper
Egypt is malaria country.'

'Is there an epidemic form of malaria?'

Harriet's spirit broke the severe calm of Shafik's
face. His long, firm mouth twitched slightly but he turned away before the
twitch could become a smile. Leaving the room, he said, 'Tomorrow we will make
tests, then we can see if you are ill or not.'

The possibility that she was not ill heartened
Harriet and, seeing no reason to stay in bed, she rose, put on her
dressing-gown and went out on to the balcony. The balcony overlooked the Gezira
sports grounds. A grove of blue gums lined the hospital drive and looking down
on them, she could see the crowns of blue-grey leaves moving and glittering in
the wind. A couple of long cane chairs were on the balcony and sitting out in
the brief splendour of the evening light, she was less inclined to contemplate
death in Egypt. Instead she reflected on the recent news: the fact that Tobruk
bad been recaptured and Montgomery's claim that he had smashed the German and
Italian armies, and she began to think of the war ending and a normal life
beginning again. They could go back to England. With all that before her, why
should she think of dying?

The crickets, brought out by the cooling air,
were noisy in the grass below. As the sun sank, the different playing-fields -
the polo ground, the golf course, the cricket field, the race course -merged
into a greensward so spacious, it was like an English parkland. The club
servants came out with lengths of hose and began to spray the grass with Nile
water. As the light failed and mist rose from the ground, the white robes of
the men glimmered through the twilight. The haze deepened over the acres of
green but even when it had turned to dark, the servants were still visible,
drifting about in their dilatory way, an assembly of shadows.

The nurse, who called herself Sister Metrebian,
came looking for Harriet. Speaking in a small, gentle voice, she said, 'You
should not be out here in the cold, Mrs Pringle,' but she left it for Harriet
to decide whether she would go in or not. She was a yellow-skinned, plain, very
thin, little woman with a solemn expression that, whatever her emotions might
be, never altered. She simply stood and watched Harriet until Harriet rose from
the chair and returned to bed. She was sitting up, her supper finished, when
Guy entered amid his usual clutter of books and papers, and with his usual air
of having made a temporary landing during a flight round the earth.

He kissed her, sat on the bed and said he could
not stay long. Pushing his glasses up into his hair, he gazed quizzically at
her and asked, 'What are you doing here? What's the matter?'

'I don't know, but it isn't cholera.'

'No one thought it was, did they?'

'Yes. Dobson couldn't get me out of the flat
quickly enough.'

He shook his head, smiling with a frown between
his brows. Worried by her loss of weight, he had wanted her to apply for a
passage on the ship taking women and children to England, but that did not mean
that, here and now, he could believe she was really ill.

'How long will they keep you here?'

'If there is nothing much wrong, I might be out
tomorrow.'

This sensible reply cheered him and at once
convinced that there was no cause for concern, he lifted her hand and said,
'Little monkey's paw! You won't be here long.'

That settled, he put aside the question of her
health and talked of other things. It was not simply that he wished her to be
well. Sickness of any sort was an embarrassment to him because he did not
believe in it. Forced to accept that whether he believed or not, it existed, he
saw it as a self-imposed condition, a mental aberration related to witchcraft,
religion, belief in the supernatural and similar follies. So far as Harriet
herself was concerned, he suspected a deep-seated discontent but as this could
not relate to him or his behaviour, he preferred to forget about it.

'What happened in Luxor? Why did Angela come
back so soon?'

Harriet told him of Angela's sudden anxiety and
need to return and assure herself that Castlebar was alive and well.

'She's crazy,' Guy said. 'You do realize that,
don't you? The woman's mad.'

Harriet laughed and went on to the subject of
Aidan Pratt, describing their meeting and dinner at his hotel

'He told me how he had been torpedoed in
mid-Atlantic...'

'Yes, he told me, too. When we first met in
Alexandria.'

So the confidence had not been, after all, a
confidence. She could not doubt Aidan still suffered from the experience but
she suspected that now he preserved his suffering and, relating it, felt
himself enhanced by it.

She said, 'He tells it very well,' but Guy had
lost interest in Aidan and would not discuss him or his misadventure.

'I've a lot on at the moment: not only the
entertainment for the troops but Pinkrose's lecture is in the offing. He's
fussing a lot. My idea had been a reasonably sized audience in the Institute
hall but he thinks we should hire the ballroom at the Semiramis or the
Continental-Savoy.'

Professor Lord Pinkrose had been sent out from
England to give an important lecture in Bucharest but had arrived amidst
political disorder so no lecture was possible. He had hoped to make up for this
in Athens where there had been the same difficulty in finding a hall. In the
end he had lectured at a garden luncheon given in Major Cookson's Phaleron
villa. 'A glittering party', he had described it: 'A sumptuous affair'. He
clearly expected the Cairo lecture to be something of the same sort.

Harriet laughed: 'Why not get the ambassador to
lend the Embassy ballroom?'

'Yes, he thought of that, too, and made me speak
to Dobson who said it's been shut up for the duration. Pinkrose says if I don't
make it a big social occasion, he won't give the lecture. I've got to humour
him because the university people are impressed by him. He's a bigger name
than any of us realized.'

As Guy lifted his wrist to look at his watch,
Harriet said, 'Don't go. When your evening begins, mine will end. So stay a
little longer.'

Guy settled back on his chair but it was evident
he would go soon. 'I've a rehearsal with Edwina this evening. I promised I'd
pick her up.'

Remembering the interlude she had overheard that
afternoon, Harriet said, 'I'm not sure she'll feel like going.'

'Yes, of course she will.' Guy spoke with easy
certainty, having found that people usually did what he wanted them to do.

'I suppose you're right.'

She had seen that, caught in the radiance of his
enthusiasm, everyone proved to be a player at heart. Everyone, that was, except
Harriet. She had been cast for the main part in his first production but after
a couple of rehearsals, he had put her out of it. He said she was too involved
with him but the truth was, she suspected, he felt she was not impressed, as
the others were, by his personal magnetism. She was inclined to be critical.

For her part, she not only resented the time
spent on the productions but she dreaded their possible failure. He had
managed well enough so far. In Bucharest he had drawn in the whole of the
British colony: a ready-made audience. In Athens, where every serviceman was a
hero, he had had almost too much help and support. But here, in this big
heterogeneous and indifferent city, where the soldiers were provided for and
entertained till they were tired of entertainment, who would care?

She made a last appeal to him: '
Must
you
go on with this show? Haven't you enough to do?'

'I never have enough to do.' He jumped up,
enlivened by the thought of the evening ahead: 'You wouldn't want my energy to
go to waste, would you?'

She saw that only his constant activity enabled
him to live with himself and she felt helpless against it. She began to see
their differences as irreconcilable. He was never ill and did not understand
illness. She wanted a union of mutual devotion while he saw marriage merely as
a frame to hold an indiscriminate medley of relationships that, as often as
not, were too capacious to be contained. She sighed and closed her eyes and
this gave him excuse to go.

'It won't hurt you to have a rest in bed. I
expect you overdid it, sight-seeing in Luxor.'

As he was leaving, Sister Metrebian came in with
sleeping-tablets for Harriet. The sight of her with her plain face, her small
chocolate-brown eyes, her reticence and air of enclosed sadness, brought Guy to
a stop.

She offered the tablets to Harriet who said she
did not need them. Sister Metrebian gently persisted: 'I am sorry, but you must
take them. Dr Shafik wants you to sleep very well so tomorrow you will be
fresh for the tests.'

Feeling he must make a gesture towards the
nurse, Guy said cheerfully: 'I can see the patient is in good hands,' and as he
smiled admiringly on her, Sister Metrebian's sallow cheeks were tinged with
pink. Although she was by nature quiet, conveying her requests by movements
rather than words, she said when Guy had gone: 'What a nice man!'

Growing drowsy, Harriet, lying in darkness,
drifted in memory till she seemed back again in the haunted strangeness of
childhood. She had had pneumonia when she was a little girl. At first it was
thought to be merely influenza and she had been put to rest on the living-room
sofa, facing the fire. She remembered how the fire and the fireplace and the
clock above it and the ornaments had become insubstantial, as though made of
some glowing, shifting, magical stuff that enhanced the luxury of lying there,
wrapped in warmth and comfort, drifting in and out of consciousness.

Her mother, becoming anxious, had put a hand on
her forehead and said to someone in the room, 'She has a fever.' That, too,
was part of luxury for her mother was not given to tenderness. She sometimes
said, as though describing a curious and interesting facet of herself: 'I don't
like being touched. Even when the children put their arms round me, I don't
really like it.'

But Harriet was different and as sleep came down
on her, she told herself, 'I want more love than I am given-but where am I to
find it?'

Her first visitor next morning was Angela who
arrived with an arm full of tuberoses that scented the room. She asked with
intense concern, 'What is it? What is the matter with you?'

'Apparently nothing serious.'

'Oh, Harriet, what a fool I was dashing back to
Cairo and leaving you on your own.'

'I was all right. I met a friend and saw the
sights. But what came of your dash? - did you find Bill alive?'

'Need you ask? I went to the Union and there he
was: smirking, with his bloody Mona smirking at his side. I realized then he'd
never leave her. He dare not. He hasn't the guts. Harriet I I've decided, I'm
going on that boat for women and children. I may go to England, or I may get
off at Cape Town, but whatever I do, I'm going.'