The Sword of Fate (7 page)

Only one thing remained seemingly inexplicable. If she was
openly
engaged to this fellow Paolo, which could hardly be questioned in view of the fact that her mother had thrown a dinner-party for him that night in their house, why in the world had he come secretly to see her in the garden during the previous week; and how could one account for that curious snatch of conversation I had overheard in which she had said how much she hated the subterfuge necessary to these secret meetings, and he had replied to the effect that it was quite impossible for him to see her openly as her stepfather would never permit it? Puzzle as I would, I could make no sense at all out of that part of the business, and eventually, dead tired, muzzy but not tight and maudlin with unheroic self-pity, I fell asleep.

Next morning I had a shocking head, but after my bath I felt a bit better, although still incredibly depressed. As there was no hope of seeing Daphnis again, even the sight of Alexandria had now become irksome to me, so I set off much earlier than I need have done and was back in the camp near Cairo by mid-afternoon.

Among the New Zealanders I had made some splendid friends, two particularly: Jack Benham, who was rather a serious type and a young schoolmaster from Dunedin, and Toby Spiers, a tall good-looking boy with one of those open sunny natures which win the hearts of men and women alike. I found my brother officers anything but cheerful as the only thing they had to talk of for some days was the beating that the Nazis were giving us in Norway, and it seemed that Mr. Chamberlain’s remark about having missed the bus had been a bit premature.

In the days that followed I nursed a bitter grievance; yet, in spite of what I had magnified into a criminal betrayal, I could not prevent myself craving for Daphnis to an extent that at times became a positively physical ache. Then, just a fortnight after I had last seen her, Hitler went into Holland and Belgium, and as the news of the German successes trickled through in broadcasts and press, we all had something to think about in addition to our private worries.

Two days later it was decided to reinforce our outposts in the Western Desert, and the battalion to which I was attached was among those selected for the task. Periodically, for a long time past, Mussolini had been banging his little drum and this was one of his more bellicose periods, although few of us thought then that he would be fool enough to plunge Italy into war for the sake of obliging Hitler. It seemed so clear that he had everything to lose and nothing to gain. Abyssinia and the Italian East African Colonies would automatically be cut off from their homeland, so it could be only a matter of time before their garrisons were compelled to surrender. Libya lay naked in the breeze between the British in Egypt and the infinitely more powerful French Armies of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. We only had to squeeze and the wretched Italians, caught between two fires and cut off from succour by our Mediterranean Fleet, would be in a hopeless mess. That would be the end of the New Roman Empire. However, more, I think, with a view to reassuring the Egyptians than anything else, certain of the Australian and New Zealand troops were despatched to the Libyan border.

Mid-May was for us a period of intense activity, as the preparations for the move had to be carried out with the least possible delay, and within a few days we were converted from what had virtually been a training to a fighting unit; then there was the three-hundred-mile trek
via
Alex up to Mersa Matruh. The frontier was another hundred miles, but that was covered by outposts and flying columns of regulars. Mersa Matruh had better supplies of water than Sollum, Buq Buq or Sidi Barrani, and although it was hardly more than a large village it offered better harbour facilities, too, so for these reasons it had been selected as the main concentration point of the Imperial Forces in the Western Desert, and we were set to what then seemed the quite pointless task of strengthening its defences.

Actually, most of the work had to be done at night as one could not even lift a finger without sweating in the daytime. Sometimes the heat was so fierce that the men fainted from
comparatively trifling exertions, and the temperature often went as high as 120 degrees in the shade. Owing to the extraordinary clarity of the atmosphere, however, one could see quite well for all ordinary purposes by starlight, and the moonlight was so bright that one could easily read or write letters by it.

We had ample water to drink but little to spare for other purposes, so permission was given to the men to grow beards, and we soon looked very different from the smartly-turned-out crowd that we had been in the days when we were stationed near Cairo. The sandfleas were an absolute pest, and before we had been in our new camp for a week I counted fifty-seven bites on one of my arms. Very soon we all grew to hate the very sight of the desert; but to remain there was our war for the time being, so there was nothing to be done about it.

All through those long hot days we watched with growing concern the collapse of Holland, the penetrations of France, the cutting-off of the northern French, British and Belgian Armies, the over-running of Belgium and the evacuation from Dunkirk.

It was hardly to be expected that, however bravely the Dutch fought, they would be able to stand up to the full weight of the German attack for long, and the German break-through at Sedan appeared at first to us onlookers as no more than a local disaster such as must be expected from time to time in the hazards of war. But, as we followed that extraordinary campaign and saw the Nazis thrusting through St. Quentin, Cambrai, Arras, Amiens and Abbeville, right to the coast of Boulogne and so on to Calais, we began to wonder when the French would really make a stand and bring this nightmare to an end. In the mess we could talk of little else, and it was perhaps that uneasy expectancy and anxious waiting for each fresh bulletin, day after day right through the latter half of May and early June, which, to some extent, kept my thoughts off Daphnis.

Looking back on that brief affair, which for me seemed to have ended so disastrously, I could not help admitting to myself that I had read much more into Daphnis’ attitude towards me than was really justified. After all, at our first meeting I had not been conscious for more than ten minutes, on the two early-morning rides Alcis had been with us for a good part of the time, and during my first visit to the garden Daphnis and I had hardly done more than look at each other while we sat almost in silence for a quarter of an hour; so the whole affair really boiled down to that second night in the garden.

In those fleeting and now unreal hours we had exchanged
many kisses and our feelings for each other seemed to me, at least, to be beyond doubt; but that was the one and only time when Daphnis had let herself go, and that might almost be accounted for by a touch of midnight moon madness.

If I had been strong-minded I suppose I should have forced myself to put her right out of my thoughts, but instead I was lamentably weak about it, and whenever I was not occupied with routine duties or speculation as to the latest developments in the Battle for France, I tortured myself with memories of Daphnis; dwelling upon her evident complete lack of real feeling for me and the extreme unlikelihood of my ever again being able to take her in my arms with her willing consent.

Gradually my attitude changed. I began to think that there
must
be some favourable explanation for her strange conduct. The brutal shock of that last night in Alex became dulled, but the glowing picture of her beauty and her sweetness when we had been together in the moonlight remained and became more glamorous in retrospect. Slowly the resolution formed that by hook or by crook I had positively
got
to find a means of seeing her again.

For a few days I contemplated writing to her, but on consideration it did not seem to me that would do much good. It was getting on for five weeks since I had seen her, and it was utterly impossible for me to judge what sort of mood she would be in. Moreover, it was always possible that, if I wrote, I might really cause trouble for her with her parents or her fiancé.

It then occurred to me that if I wanted to marry her I was going about the business in an entirely wrong manner. That may have been because, for several years, I had been living a life of a social outcast. Otherwise I should probably have realised sooner that the most sensible line of attack was, in some way or other, to secure an introduction to her people in order that I might cultivate them socially and in due course become accepted as a friend of the family.

Owing to the exclusiveness of the wealthy Greeks in Alex I knew that getting an introduction to the Diamopholi would be no easy business, but it seemed that the old man at least must have some English friends, if only business and official acquaintances, so I sat down and wrote half a dozen letters to the various friends I had made at the English club during the first week of my leave in Alex, asking each of them if they happened to know any members of the Diamopholi family.

All the replies were disappointing except that from Barbara
Wishart, one of the sisters that I had been going out to Ramleh to play tennis with on the afternoon of my accident. Barbara wrote that the Diamopholi were very pro-British and that Madame had been to the house several times recently to sit on a Red Cross Committee of which Mrs. Wishart was chairman. She went on to say that if I could get down to Alex on the following Saturday, an excellent opportunity would present itself for a meeting, as a big Red Cross fête was being held on that day at which Madame Diamopholus would be present.

On the receipt of this good news I decided to ask for a week’s special leave. In the ordinary way I was not due for leave again for another seven or eight weeks, but my job as interpreter put me in rather a different category from the other officers. As long as the battalion was in an inhabited area I had quite a bit of work to do in keeping smooth the relations of my unit with Egyptian officials and Arab landowners and traders, but out here in the Western Desert there was nobody for me to interpret to, and of course I had no troops directly under me, so almost my sole occupation at the moment was running the H.Q. Mess and helping the Padre to organise games and sing-songs.

I found the Colonel, a lanky New Zealander with a pleasant grin, whom we had nicknamed ‘Long Willie’, sitting in his office tent, employed upon the uncongenial task of making out a Report.

“Come in, Day,” he called, as soon as the orderly who was on duty outside had poked his head through the flap of the tent to say that I was there. “Come in and sit down. What’s the trouble?”

“No trouble at all, sir,” I smiled, “but I’d be awfully grateful if you could see your way to grant me a week’s special leave from the morning of June the 7th.”

He drew a deep breath and sat back, mopping his perspiring forehead.

“What, fed up with the sand and the flies already?”

“No, sir, it’s a case of urgent private affairs in Alex.”

“I bet the urgent private affair has something to do with a young woman!” he laughed.

“Guilty!” I grinned back. “But after all there’s practically nothing for me to do here.”

“That’s true, and we might as well be back in New Zealand for all the good we can do while the only fighting is two thousand miles away. I wish to God they’d send us to France. Perhaps they will if a new B.E.F. is despatched to help hold a line north of Paris. Now the Channel ports are gone there’s a chance they might decide to draw on Egypt for reinforcements
via
Marseilles.
But if that happened we’d have to embark from Alex and you could rejoin us there.”

“You don’t think there’s any likelihood of Musso coming in, sir, and things flaring up here?”

“Good God, no! He’s much too wily an old bird to cut his own throat, and Hitler can’t possibly want him to. Italy’s entry into the war would close the one big leak in the blockade through which the Nazis are getting nine-tenths of their supplies.”

“Can I take it that it will be all right about my leave, then?”

“Yes. Put in your application form, and I’ll sign it.”

Having thanked him, I went off in high humour to fill up the form, and it duly returned marked ‘Granted’ from Brigade two days later.

On the Friday night I was back in Alex and I took Barbara Wishart out to dine and dance at the Windsor; feeling that was the very least I could do in view of the help she was going to give me with the Diamopholi. Barbara was a tall, fair girl and she would have been quite good-looking if she had taken more care of her complexion instead of allowing it to be ruined by the Egyptian sun. However, I had never been attracted to her except on account of her rather amusing conversation, and I am sure she had no special interest in me; so there were no bones broken when over dinner she asked the reason for my interest in the Diamopholi, and I told her about Daphnis.

Of course I suppressed that part of the story which concerned our meetings in the garden for obvious reasons, merely stating that I had fallen for her badly when she had patched me up after my smash, and that I had met her out riding on the beach a few days later, which had enabled me to follow up our unofficial acquaintance. Then I asked Barbara if she had met her.

“Oh yes,” she replied, “once or twice, but only on account of these charity dos in which she helps her mother. She’s pretty enough, but a dull little thing.”

“Dull nothing!” I protested quickly.

“God! How you do rise, Julian!” Barbara laughed. “As a matter of fact I haven’t the faintest idea if she’s dull or not, as I’ve only seen her with her mother. She looks as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, but probably it’s a case of ‘still waters’. Since she patched you up, though, why didn’t you call? You should have, even out of common politeness.”

“I wanted to,” I said, “but she seemed to think that her people wouldn’t like it.”

Barbara nodded. “Yes, these rich Greeks keep very much to
their own set, and frankly I don’t give much for your chances. I heard the other day that she’s engaged. Sorry if that’s a knock, old boy, but I thought I ought to tell you.”