Arabesque (21 page)

Armande, utterly disgusted, got up and stood in the corridor. From the blackness of the train, she could see through the windows the moonlit sand and scrub of the Sinai Desert, grey emptiness
after grey emptiness slowly rumbling past. After a while the Latin joined her in the corridor, and offered a cigarette. His eyes were humorous, and indicated that he, too, preferred the desert to
such humanity as the compartment offered.

“I couldn’t hear any more of it,” she said.

“Oh, you mustn’t mind!” he answered, as if defending the Middle East where he had made his home. “It’s not their war.”

“Do they really believe it all?”

“Consciously, yes.”

“And unconsciously?”

In the dim light she could just see his face crinkle with pleasure at so promising an opening to café conversation.

“At heart they don’t believe a word of it. They are terrified, you see, at the nearness of all these modern, Western engines of destruction. That accounts for their wild
stories—anything to persuade themselves that the war will never reach them.”

“I hope it does,” Armande said savagely.

“No, I wouldn’t wish that on them—not even if my own country escaped.”

“Which is that?”

“Palestine. But I was Italian till Mussolini reminded me I was a Jew as well.”

“And do you like it?”

“I love it. Palestine is
my
country,
my
landscape. Our colonists should be drawn from the Mediterranean—Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, North Africans …”

Armande resigned herself to listen. A professional Italian with a gift for eloquence and a woman for an audience could not be interrupted. Moreover, she was in need of masculine chivalry. An
hour away was Kantara with all the complications of the frontier, of food and drink, of the ferry over the Canal, of finding a seat in the train on the other side.

All these minor problems the Palestinian Italian solved for her efficiently; and of their former travelling companions only the Syrian correspondent, by now too sleepy to be a bore, was in their
compartment on the Egyptian side of the Canal.

At dawn Armande’s morale was low. Reluctant examination of her face and uncombed hair in the mirror reminded her that in another three years she would be thirty. A swift and sufficient
glance at the lavatory, combined with the sickening smell of the eau de Cologne in which the Syrian was cat-washing his face, left every too fastidious nerve offended. The train drew in to the
shrieking Cairo station. When the Italian had handed out her bags through the window, she stood on the platform feeling lost and helpless as in a nightmare.

Her luggage was seized and borne aloft through the crowd by a porter whose great height and immense pot-belly made him grotesque as a pregnant woman. In the anxiety of following him she lost
touch with her Italian. At last, limp and feeling humiliatingly inefficient, she was led by the porter to a taxi. He then stood between her and the haven of the taxi door, yammering for more money.
Other porters scenting the impressionable infidel, joined him, and bayed and pranced before her in support of their colleague’s demands. Desperate, she flung them bits of paper until the
menacing noise changed to exaggerated and almost tearful thanks. The grinning taxi driver consented to drive away.

Not even the warmth of Cairo had any appeal to her; it was too soft a warmth, sweetly tainted as if a beflowered and undecaying corpse were drying in the sun. At one hotel after another she was
bowed from her taxi by a gorgeously dressed luggage porter, and bowed back again. None had a room. She was weary of the polite and natty hotel clerks, weary of well-bathed officers leisurely
departing from their rooms to G.H.Q., weary of the whole air of purious smartness. The faint smell of horse dung in the streets, which greeted her whenever the taxi door was opened, made her
homesick, recalling her father and the inn stables when she was a little girl.

She appealed to the taxi driver for the address of a hotel less likely to be crammed to the attics with military. He took her to a pension. Her overworked nose immediately revolted from
yesterday’s cabbage and a vintage lavatory pan. She decided, as a last resort, to telephone this Major Honeymill.

Again she had to accuse herself of inefficiency. She could make nothing of the complicated welter of military exchanges. She drove back to the most sympathetic of the hotels, where French had
seemed to be a native language rather than a mere medium for polite robbery or refusal, and demanded, hating herself for shrillness, that the hotel clerk should get her Major Honeymill on the
telephone. He seemed to have no difficulty whatever.

The major’s voice was soothing. Armande wondered whether that manner was usual to him, or whether she herself, by this time, sounded like an hysterical patient demanding admission to a
psychiatist’s consulting room. He did not bother with unintelligible directions. He put an immediate end to this wandering through Cairo streets in charge of a leering taxi driver.

“Stay right where you are,” he said, “and I’ll come and fetch you before lunch. Let me talk to the manager.”

The manager engaged in smiling Arabic conversation over the telephone, in which there seemed to be a good deal of exclamatory backchat and, probably, of conventional masculine indecencies.

Major Honeymill evidently knew his Cairo. There was clapping of hands at the desk. A brown man in red robes and two black men in white robes made obsequious appearance. Madame would have a bath.
Madame would have breakfast. It was deeply regretted that Madame could not yet be given a room, but meanwhile the hotel was at Madame’s disposal. Armande sighed with relief, and suffered
herself to be led to hot water and coffee.

After a bath, Armande felt more charitable towards the Cairo winter climate. Beneath the windows of the hotel a café garden was filling with idle and overdressed women, who were obviously
not depressed by the Palestine or any black list—if Egypt ever bothered with the collection of such butterflies. Armande dived to the bottom of a suitcase in a search of more colour and less
warmth than had been called for by Jerusalem. The chambermaid was ready with an iron. When she came down to the lounge at midday, she was conscious of being fit to partner the gorgeousness of Major
Honeymill.

Georgeous he was. He wore a tall lambskin cap on his head, a green sash around the waist of his khaki sweater, desert boots, grey gabardine trousers, and bits of chain mail and shiny whistles in
unexpected places. He was browned and slim as an Arab youth, though in his late thirties, and had a suggestion of Arab femininity in his sensitive face; of this he seemed to be aware, for he had
grown a black moustache of remarkable ferocity which would more properly have given tone to the characterless face of a young cavalry officer. Armande, now feeling more cheerful, thought, as she
shook hands, of the belief that where a cat’s whiskers can pass, its head can also go. She decided that the whole of Major Honeymill’s slender, sweatered body could follow his moustache
with ease; so, no doubt (for his eyes were wholly Western and commanding), would his Arab irregulars.

Major Honeymill led her to an enormous staff car with an Arab driver almost as exquisitely uniformed as himself. They drove out to the Pyramids for lunch. Armande, knowing by this time how
strongly the generals objected to the use for joy rides of army petrol and transport, was alarmed when the car was stopped by the Military Police. Major Honeymill gave his name and unit without the
least sign of embarrassment.

“What on earth will you say?” she asked. “Can I help at all?”

“I shall say nothing,” he answered with a grin. “I shall just whisper. After all, it’s the Emir’s staff car. And I am merely his A.D.C. Is it not possible that I
should sometimes escort to His Highness those women whom he delights to honour?”

“And you can get away with that?” she laughed.

“How nice that you have a sense of humour! My dear, the simple soldiery will believe anything. But one must whisper. That is essential.”

The major was an enchanting host. His military duties were of the vaguest—mothering an aged and important Emir and training the Emir’s considerable body of retainers—and left
him free, he said, for the far more important duty of preserving, in spite of all this military austerity, a reasonable standard of living in Cairo. He chatted agreeably of London, of Arab politics
and of Laurence Fairfather, for whom he had a great regard. There had evidently been a long history of mutual amusement inspired by alcohol, and of favours done and received, often at a distance
and always without question. He was unobstrusively tactful. It was impossible to guess whether he thought that Fairfather had been her lover or merely a good Samaritan. Armande warmed to his liking
of her for herself.

“I can put you up,” he said, “as long as you like, if you can stand the crush. Don’t bother with hotels. Carry will fit you in somewhere.”

Armande protested politely but unconvincingly.

“Carry will love to have you there,” he said. “I’ll telephone and let her know you are coming.”

The great car swept them back to Cairo, its driver, mindful of his master’s prestige, hooting even at the tramcars. Honeymill was dropped at his office, and Armande with her baggage taken
on to his flat.

It was on the ground floor of a large new apartment house, facing a quiet little square with a garden in the middle. The flat had its own front door. Pepper trees across the road gave shade;
bougainvillea and flowering shrubs around door and windows allowed individuality. It was just like Honeymill, she thought, to have found the equivalent of a bower of roses in the midst of all the
comfort of a modern block.

The driver let her into the flat and deposited her bags in the hall. Out of the hall opened a tiny kitchen and a very large living-room, bare and masculine, but with a number of feminine
garments strewn over the divans and thrown into corners. On the far side of the living-room were only two doors. Armande recognised, regretfully, that there would indeed be a crush. She was going
to be a nuisance to the Honeymills.

She pushed back a chair, and settled herself to wait gracefully for Carry or Honeymill, whichever should arrive first.

At the noise of her movements, a woman’s voice behind one of the closed doors shouted gaily:

“Come in, Toots! I’m only having a bath.”

“It’s me, Armande Herne,” she said.

“Who?”

“Are you—er—Mrs. Honeymill?” asked Armande, feeling utterly foolish, for she was suddenly, simultaneously certain that there wasn’t any Mrs. Honeymill.

“I’m Carry Laxeter. Who are you?”

“Didn’t Major Honeymill telephone?”

“Oh, God! Toots is impossible,” came a despairing wail from the bathroom. “Wait a minute!”

The door opened, and a cloud of steam swept across the living-room and out through the muslin mosquito curtains. With the mist about her strode a tall, angular woman attired in the major’s
silk dressing gown. Her height and the grace of her decisive walk gave her an air of distinction. Her face had a cheerful grin, and her plucked eyebrows were humorously lifted in an expression that
seemed to call aloud for Armande’s understanding, and alliance against the unaccountability of men.

“Have you come to stay with us?” she asked.

“Well—yes,” said Armande, “if—”

“That’s lovely. You’ll be such a help with Xenia.”

“Xenia?”

“She’s a distressed Jugoslav. She lives here too. Jugoslavs do get
so
distressed. But I expect you need a drink—we can’t be bothered to make tea. There’s
the gin in the cupboard. Are you any good at a Martini?”

“Yes,” said Armande humbly. “I think I am.”

“Be a darling and pour me one too, then.”

Though it was only half-past four, Armande mixed a couple of stiff drinks. The situation at Major Honeymill’s flat was, in the cold light of normal reason, incomprehensible; it might, she
considered, fall into some sort of recognisable pattern if the outlines were softened by a cocktail.

“Cheers!” said Carry Laxeter. “That really good. Toots will make you mix the drinks.”

“Toots is Major Honeymill?” she asked.

“Yes. Didn’t you know?”

“I—well, I only met him this morning.”

“Letter of introduction?”

“Yes.”

“Maiden in distress?”

“Well—in a way.”

“Oh, God!” exclaimed Carry with a ripple of laughter. “Isn’t Toots delicious?”

“He has been very kind,” Armande replied primly. “But perhaps I didn’t appreciate … I mean—”

“It’s just that Toots is so hospitable. Arabs, darling,” Carry added vaguely. “You know.”

“But—”

“No, not a harem. You see, he put me up when I’d run away from my husband. And that was a bit awkward. So when Xenia came along, what was easier than to put her up too? And now
there’s you.”

Armande involuntarily looked round the flat. There could not possibly be more than one bedroom.

Carry smiled at her bewilderment.

“Toots sleeps there,” she said, pointing to the second door, “and Xenia and I doss down in here. And if you’ll join us.

It seemed to Armande that the last word had been spoken there’s a third divan for you.” with unnecessary firmness.

“I’d love to,” she answered, “for a day or two. Where is Xenia?”

“She was crying on Toots’ bed. But I think she has gone to sleep now. Shall we have a look?”

Carry got up, carefully balancing her Martini, and opened the door of the bedroom. Xenia was huddled up with her back to them, gently snoring. Armande’s first impression was of a mass of
coarse black hair spread over the pillow and a mountain of fine, peasanty bottom, in the shortest of slips, occupying the rest of the bed. She put down Carry as a highly civilised cat, who had
known perfectly well that no one, for at least twenty-four hours, could get over such an unfavourable introduction.

“She’s fallen in love with Toots,” Carry explained.

“It wouldn’t be difficult.”

“But don’t. It’s useless.”

Armande smiled sympathetically. A slight bitterness on the ironical face of her temporary hostess showed that she too had fallen or, more probably, wanted to fall in love.