The Levant Trilogy (49 page)

As Dobson had predicted, word came that the ship
would sail on 28 December. The passengers were to board the boat train for Suez
at ten a.m. on the sailing date.

'I'm sure you're thankful,' Guy said: 'You must
be tired of all this hanging about.'

'I'm tired of the whole situation, but it's too
late to argue about it. I suppose you'll come with me to Suez?'

'Come to Suez?' Guy was abashed by the very
suggestion: 'How could I possibly come to Suez? You know the show is on New
Year's Eve, and I'll be rehearsing day and night till it goes on.'

Harriet, expecting no other reply, was not even
disappointed by it but said, 'The train is at ten a.m. tomorrow. I suppose you
will
come to the station to see me off?'

'Of course.' Guy, stung by the ironical inexpectancy
of Harriet's tone, became apologetic: 'I'm sorry I can't come to Suez, darling.
It never entered my head you would want me to, but I will be at the station.
I'll dash into the office first thing then, when I've looked through my
letters, I'll go straight to the station. I'll get there before you arrive.'

Next morning, left alone in the flat, Harriet
and Marion sat in the living-room, waiting to depart. The flat was silent; even
Richard, tensed by the unusual atmosphere, had ceased to cry. Hassan had been
sent out to find two taxis, the extra one to take the excess luggage.

The others had said their goodbyes after
breakfast. Edwina, flinging her arms round Harriet, burst into tears: 'What
shall I do without you?' and Harriet, remembering Peter's answer to the same
question, breathed in Edwina's gardenia scent and wondered what would become of
her.

Its sweet redolence still hung in the air. The
curtains and shutters were closed for the day and the two women, seeing each
other, shadowy, across the room, were on edge, facing the change from a known
world to one where everything would be different.

Hassan returned. The taxis had been brought to
the door and now the travellers could start on their journey. It was the congested
hour of the morning and as the taxis were held up in traffic, Harriet became
perturbed, imagining Guy losing patience at the station and perhaps going away.
But they arrived in good time and he was nowhere to be seen. She put Marion
into a carriage then ran from one end of the platform to the other, searching
among groups of people, unable to find him. The guard, coming towards her,
shutting the carriage doors and unfurling his green flag, called to the
passengers to get on board.

The train was full of young mothers and children
and Harriet, finding her carriage, was greeted with unusual buoyancy by Marion,
happy at being in the company of others like herself.

Hanging from the window, feeling the train about
to start, Harriet saw Guy making his way along the platform, searching
short-sightedly for her face among the faces at the windows. She shouted to him
and he came running, his glasses sliding down his nose, already beginning a
lengthy excuse for failing to be there sooner. Someone had come into the office
just as he was about to leave.

'Had to have a word with him ... Didn't realize
... So sorry...'

The little time left to them was taken up by
these excuses, yet what else was there to be said? Harriet stretched her hand
down to him and he was able to hold it for a second or two before the train
moved and drew it from his grasp. He followed the carriage at a jog-trot, still
trying to tell her something but, whatever it was, it was lost in noise as the
train gathered speed.

Leaning out further, waving to him, she could
see him pushing his glasses up to his brow and straining to see her, but
almost at once she was too far away to see or be seen.

Marion had kept a seat for her and she sank into
it, unaware of the people about her, still holding to a vision of Guy standing,
peering after the train, looking perplexed because he had lost sight of her.
She did not suppose he would be perplexed for long. She could imagine, as he
turned back to his own employments, his buttocks and shoulders moving with the
energetic excitement of having so much to do.

And what could come of all that activity? He ate
himself up. He dissipated himself in ephemeral entertainments like this show
that would be a one-day's wonder and just about pay its way. To someone moving
so rapidly through life, reality and unreality merged and were one and the same
thing. There were times when she felt he drained her life as well as his own,
but he had physical strength. He could renew himself and she could not.

He had said the climate was killing her but now,
seeing the relationship from a distance, she felt the killing element was not
the heat of Cairo but Guy himself.

*      *      *

Marion was sitting next to a woman Harriet did
not know, but knew about. She was the Mrs Rutter who had once reproached Jake
Jackman for being a civilian. A rich widow, she had about her the confident
certainty of one who knew that her world was the only world that mattered. The
war had not changed it much. She lived in one of the great houses on Gezira and
kept a retinue of servants. Harriet wondered why she was leaving this land of
plenty for their beleaguered homeland where she would be no more privileged
than any other woman.

She was asking Marion probing little questions,
keeping herself at a distance until she discovered that Marion's husband was a
diplomat in Baghdad. At this, Mrs Rutter became affable and looked approvingly
at Marion and made advances to Richard who was persuaded to give her a smile.
She had on her knee a large shagreen jewel-case and Marion, returning favours,
said, 'What a beautiful case!'

'Yes, it is beautiful,' Mrs Rutter warmly
agreed: 'I
treasure
it. Whenever I travel, I carry it myself, heavy
though it is.'

As they talked about the jewel-case, Marion, holding
Richard on her knee, put her cheek down on the top of his head, knowing she had
the greater treasure.

They were now out in the desert and Mrs Rutter,
saying the light was too keen for her, pulled down the dusty, dark blue
oil-cloth blind over the carriage window. The window was open and the blind
flapped in the wind. Richard closed his eyes, thinking night had fallen, and
lay like a little ghost in Marion's arms.

The other passengers fell silent in the steamy
penumbra and Mrs Rutter, not wishing to be overheard, whispered to Marion,
apparently conveying facts too sacred to be widely circulated. In England, she
said, she had a married daughter the same age as Marion.
'And
three
little grandchildren. I've never seen them, so I'm going home to enjoy them
while they're still babies.'

Enthralled by this information, Marion talked
about her corning confinement: 'I'm sure Richard will be easier to deal with
when he's not the only one. I always think one should have two or three.'

Mrs Rutter fervently agreed: 'What is a home
without children?' she asked.

Harriet, not included in the conversation,
thought '... or without a husband?' She could see between Marion and Mrs Rutter
a swift growing up of friendship that was likely to intensify until, on board
the ship, Marion would be a surrogate daughter to the old lady, Mrs Rutter a
surrogate mother to the pregnant woman. As she felt the burden of Marion slip
away from her, Harriet could see even less reason now for being on a train
where the younger children were peevish, the older obstreperous and the
grown-ups suffocating in semi-darkness.

Hours had passed, or so it seemed, when, pulling
aside the blind, she saw the canal: a flat ribbon of turquoise water lying
between dazzling flats of sand. They were coming into Suez. Between the grimy
house-backs, hung with washing, she could see the bazaars and wished she could
visit them. But the passengers were not here on a sight-seeing tour. The train
ran straight on to the quay and they had their first sight of the ship. It had
a name at last. It was called the
Queen of Sparta.

For some reason, the classical allusion jolted
Harriet with fear: an elusive fear. She could make nothing of it as they
climbed down to the quay and stood in the sea wind with the sea, itself,
lapping the quayside. Then another departure came to her mind, the departure
from Greece. The refugees had embarked at the Piraeus among the burnt-out
buildings, the water black with wrecks and wreckage. Only two ships rode
upright: the
Erebus
and
Nox.

They had been used to transport Italian
prisoners-of-war to Egypt. They were vermin-ridden, filthy, red with rust, the
lifeboats useless because the davits had rusted. They were nearly derelict but
the refugees had no choice. The situation compelled and they were thankful to
have ships of any kind. They had to trust themselves to the
Erebus
and
Nox;
and the two old tankers had carried them gallantly across the sea to
Alexandria.

The
Queen of Sparta,
painted umber, was
the same colour as the tankers, but she looked trim enough. She was altogether
a more seaworthy craft than the
Erebus
and
Nox,
yet Harriet, who
had trusted the tankers, was afraid of her. While the other women busied
themselves collecting children together, ordering their baggage and getting
into line to embark, Harriet stood apart from them, feeling that no power on
earth could get her on to the
Queen of Sparta.
But this, she knew, was
ridiculous. She had had forebodings before without any resultant disasters and
she must swallow back this foreboding and go with the others.

The queue stretched down the quay to the ship's
gangway. Seeing Marion and Mrs Rutter about mid-way, she went reluctantly to
join them, thinking, 'I want an excuse to escape. I want a last-minute
reprieve.' And what hope of that?

Harriet's companions, still fused in the
comfortable stimulation of their new relationship, scarcely saw that Harriet
was with them. A truck was collecting the baggage. It had almost reached Harriet
when she heard her name called.

Mortimer and her co-driver were walking towards
her. Breaking from the queue, Harriet ran towards them, her arms outstretched,
shouting, 'Mortimer! Mortimer! God has sent you to save me.'

Mortimer laughed: 'Save you from what?'

'I don't know. All I want is to get away from
here. Take me with you.'

Harriet, seeing her luggage about to be thrown
on to the truck, ran to retrieve it. She told Marion: 'I'm not going with you.
You'll be all right, won't you? Mrs Rutter will look after you. I hope you and
Richard have a pleasant journey.'

Baffled by Harriet's decision, Marion asked: 'You
mean, you're going back to Cairo?'

'No, I'm going to Damascus.'

'Damascus!' Marion, parting her lips in
disapproval, looked like a good little girl confronted by some piece of peccant
naughtiness. She breathed out a shocked, 'Oh dear!' then, seeing the queue had
moved forward, she hurried on as though fearing Mrs Rutter, too, might forsake
her.

Mortimer came over to Harriet: 'We're driving through
the night. I expect you can get some sleep among the ammunition in the back.
Hope you won't mind a bumpy ride across Sinai? The road's in a bad way.'

Harriet laughed and said she did not mind how
she crossed Sinai for all the wonders of the Levant were on the other side.

A week after the ship sailed, rumours reached
Cairo that the
Queen of Sparta
had been torpedoed off Tanganyika with
the loss of all on board. Then another, more detailed, report reached the
Egyptian
Mail
from a correspondent in Dar-es-Salaam. One life-boat, crowded with
women and children, had got away from the sinking ship. The steering was
faulty. The boat was drifting when the German u-boat surfaced and the commander
took on board a heavily pregnant woman and her small son. They were put to rest
on the commander's own bunk but, a British cruiser appearing on the horizon,
the u-boat had to submerge and the woman and child were returned to the
life-boat. The cruiser did not sight the boat that drifted for ten days until
found by fishermen who towed it into Delagoa Bay. By that time most of the
children and many of the adults had died of thirst and exposure. No names were
given.

That was the last that Cairo heard of the
Queen
of Sparta
and, the times being what they were, only the bereaved gave
further thought to the lost ship.

Olivia
Manning

The
Levant Trilogy

To the memory of Jim
Farrell taken by the sea

August 1970

In December, when the others, the lucky ones,
were advancing on Tripoli, Simon Boulderstone was sent to the hospital at
Helwan. Before that he had been held in a field dressing-station then moved to
a makeshift first-aid station at Burg el Arab. The desert fighting had so
crowded the regular hospitals that no bed could be found for him until the
walking wounded were moved on to convalescent homes. While he waited, he was
attended by orderlies who gave him what treatment they could. He did not
expect much. His condition, he felt, was in abeyance until he reached a proper
hospital where, of course, he would be put right in no time.

The Helwan hospital, a collection of huts on the
sand, was intended for New Zealanders but after the carnage of Alamein anyone
might be sent anywhere. Simon was carried from the ambulance into a long ward
formed by placing two huts end to end. Because he was an officer, even though a
very junior one, he was given a curtained-off area to himself. This long hut
was known as 'The Plegics' because few of the men there could hope to walk
again.

Simon did not know that but if he had known, he
would have seen in it no reference to his own state. At that time, he exulted
in the fact he was alive, when he might so easily have been dead.

He and his driver, Crosbie, had run into a booby
trap and, like an incident from a dissolving dream, he could still see Crosbie
sailing into the air to land and he, a loose straggle of limbs, motionless on
the ground. In his mind Crosbie would he there forever while he, Simon, had
been picked up by a Bren and taken back to the living world. And here he was,
none the worse for the curious illusion that his body ended half-way down his
spine.

The wonder of his escape kept him, during those
first days, in a state of euphoria. He wanted to talk to people, not to be shut
away at the end of the ward. He asked for the curtains to be opened and when he
looked down the long hutment, its walls bare in the harsh Egyptian sunlight, he
was surprised to see men in wheel-chairs propelling themselves up and down the
aisle. He pitied them, but for himself - he'd simply suffered a blow in the
back. It was a stunning blow that had anaesthetized him, so, for a while, he
thought more about Crosbie than about himself. It was not until he reached Burg
el Arab that he realized part of his body was missing. It seemed he had been
cut in half and wondered if his lower limbs were still there. Sliding his hand
down from his waist, he could feel his thighs but could not raise himself to
reach farther. Speaking quite calmly, he told the man on the next stretcher
that he had lost his legs below the knees. He was not surprised. The same thing
had happened to his brother Hugo and accidents of this sort ran in families. He
had dreaded it but now it had happened, he found he did not mind much. Instead,
for some odd reason, he was rather elated. He talked for a long time to the man
on the next stretcher before he saw that the man was dead.

The male nurse who dressed his wound asked him
if he needed a shot of morphine. Cheerfully, he replied, 'No thanks, I'm all
right. I'm fine.'

'No pain?'

'None at all.'

The nurse frowned as though Simon had given the
wrong answer.

Brens were arriving every few minutes with
wounded from the front lines. Simon was at the first-aid station a couple of
days before a doctor was free to examine him. When the blanket was pulled down
and he saw his legs were there intact, he felt an amazed pride in them.

'Nothing wrong with me, doc, is there?'

The doctor was not committing himself. He said
he suspected a crushed vertebra but only an X-ray could confirm that.

'It'll mend, won't it, doc?'

'It's a question of time,' the doctor said and
Simon, taking that to mean his paralysis was temporary, burst out laughing.
When the doctor raised his brows, Simon said, 'I was thinking of my driver,
Crosbie. He looked so funny going up into the air.'

At Helwan, he was still laughing. Everything
about his condition made him laugh. After the early days of no sensation at
all, he became subject to the most ridiculous delusions. At times it seemed
that his knees were rising of their own accord. He would look down, expecting
to see the blanket move. Or he would imagine that someone was pulling at his
feet. Once or twice this impression was so strong, he uncovered his legs to
make sure he was not slipping off the end of the bed.

And then there was his treatment. His buttocks
were always being lifted and rubbed with methylated spirits: 'To prevent bedsores,'
the nurse told him. Every two hours he was tilted first on one side and then on
the other, a bolster being pushed into his waist to keep him there. The first
time this happened, he asked, 'What's this in aid of?'

The nurse giggled and said, 'You'd better ask
the physio.'

The physio, a young New Zealander called Ross,
did not giggle but soberly told him that the repeated movements helped to keep
his bowels active. Not that they were active. The first time a young woman had
given him an enema, he had been filled with shame.

She had said, 'We don't want to get all bogged
up, do we?' Soon enough the enemas were stopped and suppositories were pushed
into him. He became used to being handled and ceased to feel ashamed. He had to
accept that his motions were not his to control but after a while, he
recognized the symptoms that told him his bladder was full. His heart would
thump, or he would feel a pain in his chest, and he must ask to be relieved by
catheter.

Ross came in three times a day to move his knees
and hip joints, performing the exercises carefully, with grave gentleness.

Everything they did to him enhanced for him the
absurdity of his dependence. 'You treat me like a baby,' he said to Ross who
merely nodded and tapped his knee.

The tap produced an exaggerated jerk of the leg
and Simon, interested and entertained, asked, 'Why does it do that?'

'Just lack of control, sir. Your system's
confused - in a manner of speaking, that is.'

Once when his left leg gave a sudden move, he
called for Ross, saying, 'I must be getting better.'

Ross shook his head: 'That happens, sometimes,
sir. It means nothing.'

Even then, Simon's laughter went on, becoming,
at times, so near hysteria that the doctor said, 'If we don't calm you down,
young man, your return to life will be the death of you.'

He was given sedatives and entered an enchanted
half-world, losing all inhibitions. Seeing everything as possible, he asked the
staff nurse to telephone Miss Edwina Little at the British Embassy and tell
her to visit him.

'Your girlfriend, is she?'

'I'd like to think so. She was my brother's
girlfriend. I don't know whose girlfriend she is now but she's the most gorgeous
popsie in Cairo. You wait till you see her. D'you think I'll be out of here
soon? I'd like to take her for a spin, go out to dinner, go to a night club
...'

'Better leave all that till you're on your feet
again.'

'Which won't be long now, will it, nurse?'

'I can't say. We'll have to wait and see.'

'You mean it's just a matter of time?'

The nurse, making no promises, said vaguely: 'I
suppose you could say that,' and Simon was satisfied. So long as he felt
certain he would eventually recover, he could wait for time to pass.