Fortunes of War Read online

  ‘Nonsense. You’re thinking of religion, not politics.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘Darling, you’re being silly.’

  Gracey said, ‘I suppose you want to stay in Egypt?’

  ‘Is there any choice?’

  ‘No, not really. Men have been turning up from all over Europe. I’ve had to make jobs for them or get some other director to take them. They’ve gone to Cyprus, Turkey, Palestine, the Sudan — anywhere they could be fitted in. I’ve had my work cut out, I can tell you.’ Gracey looked aggrieved at the thought of the effort expended on the men from Europe and his glance at Guy seemed to say, ‘And, now, here’s another one.’

  ‘There’s not much scope for the Organization in Egypt,’ he said. ‘Here they have the Public Instruction system — the PI, as it is called — that’s been employing English teachers for years. There’s no point in duplicating their work. We have the institute, but that merely offers straightforward teaching. I can see no opening for a lecturer like yourself.’

  ‘I’m prepared to teach.’

  ‘The fact is, we’re overstaffed. We’ve a number of excellent Egyptian teachers of English.’

  Harriet said, ‘I believe Lush and Dubedat came here this morning. May I ask if you’ve taken them on?’

  Gracey, challenged, lifted his chin and looked remote. ‘I owe a lot to them. They did yeoman service for me in Athens.’

  ‘So you’re employing them here! What about Lord Pinkrose?’

  ‘Lord Pinkrose is not seeking employment at the moment. He feels he should take a holiday and as this is a sterling area, he has the means to do so. He has, I believe, a considerable private fortune on which to draw.’

  ‘If you cannot employ me,’ Guy said, ‘I must be repatriated. That is in my contract.’

  ‘Contracts, I’m afraid, don’t count for much these days. I cannot repatriate you. There’s no transport for civilians. The evacuation ships, and they are few and far between, take only women and children.’

  ‘Then I suppose I can be released from my contract and find other work.’

  ‘There’s no question of your being released. The Organization holds on to its men. You’ll just have to wait till I can think of something for you.’

  ‘Very well.’

  The strain between the two men was evident and Harriet made an attempt to improve the situation by asking about Gracey’s health. Was his back any better?

  ‘I’m glad to say it is. Much better.’ Unable to resist the chance to talk about himself, Gracey relaxed slightly as he described his treatment by a French orthopaedic surgeon in Beirut. ‘Most successful, I must say — but not at first. The spine was in a bad way. It did not respond to rest so he put me into a plaster jacket and that did the trick. I wore it for three months. Not very pleasant and not flattering to the figure, but I had to bear with it. I still get a twinge or two if I exert myself. I have to take care but so long as I do take care, and rest, and don’t overdo it, I can jog along. So . . .’ Gracey rose and extended a hand to Guy. ‘Come back in a week. By then I hope I shall have something to offer you.’

  Away from the office, Harriet said, ‘I think he was glad to get rid of us. Perhaps he really doesn’t know what to do with you.’

  ‘It’s his job to know what to do with me.’

  ‘Oh darling, don’t quarrel with him. He’s probably not as bad as we think.’

  Guy shrugged, bemused by the fact that Harriet, more critical of the human race than he was, was also, in her way, more tolerant. If he lost faith, he lost it completely. Harriet had not much faith to lose.

  Returning to their dismal quarters, Harriet knew the thing they most needed was a place of their own. She spent the week going round small hotels and pensions, finding them filled by army personnel. She was near despair when she was offered a room in the Pension Wilk. Madame Wilk, however, required a months’ rent in advance and the Pringles, handing over most of their money, faced a period of anxious penury. The pension provided meals, of a sort, but between meals, if you had no money to spend, there was little enough to do. A general evacuation still threatened and Harriet, fearing they might leave Egypt with all its sights unseen, persuaded Guy to take the tram-car out to Mena House. Guy would scarcely give the pyramids a glance. He found them neither beautiful nor useful and said he did not like them.

  Harriet, becoming cross in the heat and glare, asked: ‘What do you like?’

  They had wandered into a ‘dig’ left idle by war and Guy, tripping on the uneven ground, gave a disgusted glance about him and pointed to some small trucks used for transporting rubble. ‘I like those. They remind me of the tips on the road to Dudley.’

  The pyramids observed, not much remained. The museum was shut for the duration. Someone told them about the City of the Dead, a favourite gharry trip by moonlight, but Guy rejected it as ‘a morbid show’.

  When he returned to the Organization office, he was told that Gracey had left Cairo. He had, in fact, left Egypt. Only one of the girls remained in the outer office and she looked embarrassed as Guy faced her, dumbfounded by Gracey’s defection. He had gone to the office in hope of employment to fill his empty days, and now what was he to do? Where had Gracey gone? Gracey had gone to Palestine. As Palestine did not come under the authority of the Cairo office, Guy asked, ‘Has he gone on holiday?’

  ‘He say “on a tour of inspection”.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ The girl shook her head. ‘How long will he be away?’

  ‘I do not know how long. Perhaps a long time. It depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On what is happening. The war, you know. If the Germans come too close, people go to Palestine.’

  ‘I see. And who is doing his work while he is away?’

  The girl shook her head again. Guy, at a loss, asked for a piece of paper and wrote the address and telephone number of the Pension Wilk. He asked her to let him know when she had news of Gracey’s return. She looked sadly at the paper and said in her small, mournful voice, ‘I am so sorry but after tomorrow I shall not be here. The office is closed when Mr Gracey is away.’

  Until then the Pringles had scarcely given a thought to the emergency. The English residents in Cairo were flustered but to the refugees, still caught up in the tensions of the Greek defeat, the desert war seemed a trivial matter. Calamity for them was the German occupation of Athens and many of them wept as they heard the final broadcast from the Greek radio station: ‘Closing down for the last time, hoping for happier days. God be with you and for you.’

  The silence that followed was, for them, the silence of the civilized world.

  Most of the refugees had no wish to stay in Egypt. Most of them went to Palestine and from there managed to make their way to India, Persia or South Africa. Some, it was rumoured, even managed to get back to England. Those who could not afford to travel on their own, began to talk about a possible official evacuation, seeing it as a solution of a vacuous life spent mostly in small underground bars, the only places they could afford where they were out of the appalling sun.

  The bars, that had adopted names like the Britannia or the George to entice in the troops, sold Stella beer for which Guy acquired a taste. His closest friend in those dire days was Ben Phipps who had been a freelance journalist in Athens. Now, having reached a major war zone, he decided to offer himself to the London papers as a correspondent. He sent out eight cables to Fleet Street, claiming to be an expert on Middle East affairs, but replies were slow in coming.

  Resentful of his own displacement, Ben Phipps was scornful of the English who lived richly in Egypt. ‘A bloody good thing if the whole lot are given the boot. Let them know what it’s like to live out of a suitcase.’

  ‘What good will that do us?’ Harriet asked.

  Ben’s small, black eyes jumped angrily behind pebble glasses. ‘We’d all be in the same boat. That’s what.’

  Harriet had to agree that calamity had its uses. If they end
ed up together in Iraq or the Sudan, Gracey would have no more power over Guy.

  Two days later a London evening paper cabled, appointing Ben Phipps its Middle East correspondent. A dramatic change came over him. He no longer despised the English who had done well in Egypt. He no longer hoped for a general evacuation. Though the Middle East situation had had for all of them as much structure and relevance as a cage full of flies, Ben now talked knowingly of desert strategy and the need to hold the Levant as bulwark against the loss of the Persian Gulf oil.

  He left Cairo kitted out in khaki shorts and shirt and carrying the old portable typewriter he had brought from Greece. Guy and Harriet went with him to the train. ‘Off into the blue, eh?’ he said with relish, looking pityingly at the Pringles who would be left behind.

  Guy, unable to believe his friend had gone, said he was sure he would be back in no time. But not only Ben Phipps had gone. One by one the remaining refugees found means to go elsewhere. Soon no one known to the Pringles was left in the bars. There was no one with whom to talk through the slow, dispiriting hours between meals. No one with whom to discuss the tricks by which the penurious supported life in Cairo. No one to ask for news.

  This idle and purposeless life disturbed Guy and Harriet in different ways. Harriet longed for a home more spacious than the small, cluttered room at the pension but Guy, who had often in his youth had no home at all, only wanted employment and friends. Perhaps he wanted employment most. He was ashamed to be idle while other men were at war. He tried to outwit his workless state by planning lectures, concerts for troops, productions of Shaw or Shakespeare, but could do none of these things. He was without status, acquaintances and the means to carry out his plans.

  Soon after Ben’s departure, Guy picked up with Bill Castle-bar who lectured at the Cairo university. Castlebar occasionally went to the bars but preferred the Anglo-Egyptian Union which he recommended to the Pringles. Because they had once or twice mentioned Dobson, he was uncertain where they belonged in the social hierarchy and gave his advice with a hint of irony. ‘You may think you’re a cut above the Union, but there are worse places. The Sporting Club has more to offer, of course — polo, racing, gambling, swimming. You’d meet the local nobs there but it costs a lot of money to play with them. Perhaps you can afford it?’ Reassured on this point, he said, ‘The Union’s not smart but the conversation’s a great deal livelier.’

  ‘Can one get beer there?’ Guy asked.

  ‘Get beer! You can not only get it, you can get it on tick. They let you sign for it.’

  Introduced into the Union, the Pringles sat under the trees and knew they had found their asylum. The Union, that shared the vast lawns of Gezira, existed to promote friendship between the Egyptians and their British rulers, but few Egyptians appeared there. The British scholastics, from the university lecturers who were fairly well off to the PI teachers who lived just above the poverty line, kept the place going. There was a club house and library and a belt of ancient trees of immense height that shaded the outdoor tables and chairs. As Castlebar pointed out, you could sit there all day and no one questioned your right. In a country where the ruling caste was expected to maintain aristocratic standards, the Union succoured the English poor.

  Here Guy found company, the company usually being Castlebar and Castlebar’s friend Jackman. He was immediately at home with them and Harriet accepted them, realizing that they were exactly the sort of dissidents Guy would pick up wherever he went. He was entertained by Castlebar who wrote limericks, but had a much greater respect for Jackman. This puzzled Harriet until she learnt that Jackman had told Guy, in the greatest possible confidence, that he had fought in Spain in the International Brigade. Harriet felt an instinctive doubt of this claim and said, ‘Why don’t you ask Castlebar if it’s true?’

  ‘Castlebar knows nothing about it. Of course it’s true, but he has to keep it dark. It wouldn’t do him any good in a place like this if it got around.’

  Six weeks passed without news of Gracey and Guy, existing in a state of desperate suspension, began to hate his director and so see Cairo as a centre of waste and imprisonment. He discussed Gracey with Castlebar and Jackman and they encouraged him in a revolt of ribaldry.

  If they did not know Gracey, they knew about him. In Cairo, he lived as the permanent house guest of a rich Turk, Mustapha Quant (called by Jackman ‘Mustapha Kunt’) who maintained him in decadent splendour in a houseboat on the Nile. Their stories about Quant, Gracey and the parties given for male friends only were a delight to Guy who felt justified in ridiculing his director to all comers.

  Harriet, made uneasy, said, ‘Let’s stop talking about Gracey,’ but Guy had reached the point of anxiety in which talk was the only release. It was terrible to Harriet to see Guy’s good sense overthrown. And if Gracey did not return, he might be held here in a despairing limbo until the war ended.

  He exploded out of this condition one morning, coming from the shower, flapping his bath-towel about in his excitement, shouting, ‘Listen to this.’

  There’s Wavell of the desert,

  There’s Tedder of the planes,

  But I’m Gracey of Gezira,

  I’m the man that holds the reins.

  I live in style with Mustaph,

  Our houseboat it is fine,

  But if Rommel looks like coming here,

  I move to Palestine.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s funny?’

  ‘Not very. And for God’s sake don’t put it around.’

  ‘Of course I won’t,’ Guy assured her but when he composed another verse, he had to recite it to Jackman.

  They say Christ walked on water

  On the Sea of Galilee,

  But I’m Gracey of Gezira,

  No water walks for me.

  The song, for Guy was now singing it to a music-hall tune of no originality, amused not only Castlebar and Jackman but anyone sitting near them at the Union. Harriet, torn between pride in Guy and fear of reprisals, begged those who heard the song not to repeat it. ‘If it got back to Gracey, Guy could be in real trouble.’

  ‘Who would tell Gracey anything?’ said Jackman, pulling his long nose and shifting his thin backside about as he sniggered, acting amusement without any amusement in his eyes.

  People who barely knew Guy congratulated him on his temerity in composing the song. The word ‘temerity’ alerted Guy to his own rashness yet he remained defiant. Life was precarious and he might not have any future to worry about.

  Then the atmosphere changed. The British had retaken Sollum and were chasing Rommel out of Egypt. Though Cairo seemed to them as empty and crowded as a railway junction, they would have to settle down there. Harriet started looking for a job.

  Guy learnt of Gracey’s return from Toby Lush. Toby, coming along the crowded pavement with his trotting walk, saw Guy and was about to rush across the road when Guy caught his arm. ‘Where have you been?’

  Toby sprang back, pretending to ward off a blow. ‘Hey, old cock, don’t eat me.’ His face slopping about like bilge water in his attempt to appease Guy and also impress him, Toby said that he, Dubedat and Pinkrose had gone on a sightseeing tour of upper Egypt. ‘Pinkers hired a car and I did the driving. Amazing what we saw. Gracey joined us two weeks ago and we all came back together.’

  ‘Perhaps now Gracey’ll let me know what he has in mind for me.’

  ‘He will, old cock, but you’ve got to realize he’s a lot on his plate. Trouble is, you said you didn’t want to work in Cairo.’

  ‘I said nothing of the sort.’

  ‘Been a bit of misunderstanding, then, but don’t worry. I’ll put in a word for you. And I say,’ Toby became alert and encouraging, ‘what’s that song you wrote: “Gracey of Gezira”? The old soul roared when he heard it. He said it’d be the institute’s theme song.’ The ‘old soul’ was Dubedat.

  Aware, at last, of his own unwisdom, Guy said, ‘Don’t tell Gracey about it.’

  Toby spluttered on his pipe with
joy, ‘Don’t worry. You know Gracey. He’s got a great sense of humour. He’ll love it.’

  When Guy went to Alexandria, Harriet, who had started work at the American Embassy, remained in Cairo. With two incomes, the Pringles could keep their double room at the Pension Wilk and be together at weekends. They regarded the mid-week separation as temporary. Either Guy would be permitted to return or Harriet would go to him.

  At the Embassy, Harriet was known as the Assistant Press Officer. The title sounded important but she was merely a stopgap employee and, sooner or later, the press office would be taken over by a team flown out from the States. The team was slow in coming. Harriet had been in her position for nearly a year when the latest, and most fearful, emergency arose in the desert. By then she had become as knowledgeable about the war as Ben Phipps. She was generally held to have inside information and people would stop her in the street to ask for news. But she was still temporary, and not only temporary but a member of an inferior race.

  Having grown up in the belief that Britain was supreme in the world and the British the most fortunate of people, she had been shocked to find that to the Americans she was an alien who rated less than a quarter of the salary paid to an American-born typist. She protested to her superior, a Mr Buschman, saying, ‘I’m not an alien — I’m British.’ Mr Buschman liked this so much that he managed to get her a rise in salary. The rise was not great but it reconciled her to her alien degree and the working hours that had been imposed on the staff after Pearl Harbor. Entering the war with the enthusiasm of late-comers, the Americans decided on an ‘all-out’ war effort. The other Cairo establishments closed from noon till five o’clock, but the Americans decided to work through the afternoon. Given an hour for luncheon, the employees returned to the Embassy when the whole city lay motionless in a stupor of heat.

  Mr Buschman, a young married man, neatly built, not tall, with a flat, pale, pleasant face, was both fatherly and flirtatious with Harriet. He once tried to span her waist with his hands and nearly succeeded. Then he measured it with a tape and said, ‘Twenty-two inches. I like that.’ He asked her what she weighed. When she said ‘Seven stone’, he worked it out and said, ‘Exactly one hundred pounds. I like that, too.’