Fortunes of War Read online

  And Harriet liked Mr Buschman. She particularly liked the way he called her ‘Mem’ as though she were Queen Victoria, and she felt an affectionate trust in him until the day when the German radio put out a threat to Cairo. At half-hourly intervals, a voice said, ‘Tonight we will bomb Cairo off the face of the earth.’ The threat was in English and Arabic and Harriet’s translator, Iqal, bringing her this item, said, ‘You see, Mrs Pringle, how they are seeking to frighten us!’ Short and stout, with the heavy shoulders of a water-buffalo, Iqal shrugged so that his shoulders rose in a hump behind his head. ‘We are not much frightened, I think.’

  The American staff did not seem frightened, either. Mr Buschman made no comment when he went through the news sheets that contained the repeated threat to destroy Cairo but when she left the office that evening, Harriet saw the Embassy cars gathered outside, prepared for flight. Next morning, the cars were not there. The Embassy seemed empty except for Harriet, Iqal and the Levantine girl typists. When Iqal came in with the first news sheets, Harriet asked him, ‘Where is everybody?’

  ‘You do not know, Mrs Pringle?’ Iqal was eager to tell her what she did not know. ‘Our American friends went for a night picnic in the desert, but now the danger is over, doubtless they will return.’

  Iqal’s grin held only a trace of irony. To him the actions of his employers were above criticism but Harriet was struck through by a sense of betrayal.

  ‘Mr Buschman said nothing to me about the danger.’

  ‘Nor to me, Mrs Pringle.’

  Harriet had to realize that so far as Mr Buschman was concerned, she and Iqal were equally alien and equally dispensable. Now, with the Afrika Korps outside Alexandria, the Embassy cars were again assembled, packed and ready for a getaway, but this time she was less hurt by the sight of them. Mr Buschman remained, as he always was, cordial and kind, but she knew now that his cordiality had its practical side. He was concerned for the safety of the American staff but need not worry about aliens. The American staff had diplomatic protection and could leave, if they had to leave, in their own time. Their preparations were against the possibility of bombing, street-fighting or an Egyptian rising, all the risks of a base town caught up in active warfare.

  The Americans, protected and prepared, remained calm. Only Iqal showed disquiet. On the morning of Madame Wilk’s outburst, he said to Harriet, ‘What do you British do with my country, Mrs Pringle? You come here to rule yet when the enemy is at the gate, you run away.’

  ‘I haven’t run away, Iqal.’

  ‘No, but many have. And what of your officers who disport themselves at the Gezira swimming-bath! Where are they now?’

  Harriet made a wry face, knowing that one of the sights at Cairo at that time was the queue of officers, half a mile long, waiting to draw their money from Barclay’s Bank. Having confounded her, Iqal was at once contrite and good-humoured and showed her a news item he had been holding back. ‘See here, Mrs Pringle,’ he began to giggle wildly, ‘here they say the Afrika Korps reach Alexandria tonight. They send a message to the ladies of Alexandria and this is what they say: “Get out your party dresses and prepare to defend your honour.” Oh-ho, Mrs Pringle, oh-ho!’ Iqal’s thick dark finger quivered with excitement as he pointed to the item. ‘These Germans are not deceived. Alexandria is a place of brott-ells.’

  ‘How do you feel about a German occupation, Iqal?’

  Faced with this direct question, Iqal at once became grave and declamatory. ‘You ask me, Mrs Pringle, how do I feel? That is an interesting consideration. What do these Germans promise us? — they promise freedom and national sovereignty. What are those things? And what are these Germans? They are invaders like all the invaders that have come here for one thousand four hundred year. They come, they go, the English no worse than others. But to govern ourselves! — that we have forgotten, so how do we do it? And why should we believe these Germans, eh? For myself, I am brushing up my German to be on the safe side, but all the time I am asking myself, “Better the devil we know”. In their hearts, Mrs Pringle, the Egyptian people wish you no harm.’

  ‘You mean, too many people are doing too well out of us?’

  ‘Ah, Mrs Pringle, I see you know a thing or two.’

  ‘Well, one thing I do know, the Germans won’t get to Alexandria. The British always fight best with their backs to the wall, and we can’t afford to lose the Middle East.’

  ‘Can’t afford? Deary me, Mrs Pringle, how many people can’t afford? The French, the Poles, the Dutch — could they afford?’

  ‘Don’t forget, Iqal, we have the Americans with us now.’

  At this mention of his employers, Iqal sobered and nodding in reverential appreciation of this truth, he whispered, ‘Ah, it is so!’

  Harriet worked in a basement area too large to be called a room. Mr Buschman sat at a desk between the French windows at the back. Harriet, who had an alcove to herself, was in charge of a map of the eastern hemisphere that covered the whole of one wall. Her daily job was to mark the position of the combatants with pins. There were blue-headed pins for the allied forces, red for the Russians and Chinese, and black for the Axis. Recently, having had to order them, Harriet had obtained yellow pins for the Japanese.

  On the morning when news came of Pearl Harbor, Harriet had gone to work in high spirits, seeing the war as more or less over. She found Mr Buschman in quite a different state. White-faced and trembling, he said over and over again, ‘The bastards! The God-damn bastards!’

  Harriet said, ‘Well, it’s something definite. You’ll have to come in now.’

  Mr Buschman struck his desk in rage. ‘Definite? God-damn, it’s definite all right. We’ll make the bastards pay. We’ll blow them right out of the water.’

  But the Japanese were advancing and Harriet, sticking yellow pins into Wenchow and Gona, began to feel that the only change brought about by the American intervention in the war was the change in her working hours.

  That day, leaving the office at one o’clock, she met Jackman who asked her the usual question: ‘Any news?’

  Harriet shook her head.

  ‘Where’s Guy! Not still in Alex? I’d get him out of there if I were you.’

  Jackman drooping, with concave chest and shoulders hunched, kept his hands in his pockets as he talked. He had a thin, almost aesthetic, face, not unhandsome, but spoilt by a surly expression and the long nose that he was always stroking and pulling as though to make it longer. Looking at the ground in his hang-dog way, he said, ‘I can tell you this, Rommel won’t bother to take Alex. He’ll cut it off by going round the back. When that happens, it’ll fall of its own accord. No help for it. No supplies. Nothing. They’ll be starved into surrender. You ring Guy and tell him to take the next train to Cairo. Here he’ll have a chance. There — not a hope in hell. Tell him if he tries to stick it out, he’ll only end in the bag. And a lot of good that’ll do him, you or anyone else.’

  Jackman began to make off while Harriet was asking, ‘What are we to do?’ He looked over his shoulder to shout at her, ‘When they get here, grab a car and race for the canal . . .’

  ‘If they get here.’

  ‘Nothing can stop them now.’

  Harriet was the only guest taking luncheon at the pension. At the other end of the hall, almost invisible in the weak electric light, Madame Wilk sat at her table. Two tables away from Harriet sat Miss Copeland who appeared at the pension once a week. Today was her day. She would lay out a little haberdashery shop on one of the tables then, sitting in the silence of the deaf, she waited to be given her luncheon, tea and supper. After that she packed up and went to some mysterious living place. She sold sanitary towels to the younger women at the pension, passing them over, wrapped in plain paper, with a secrecy that suggested a conspiracy. No one knew how long she had lived in Cairo. Harriet, who was curious about her, had learnt that years before, when Miss Copeland still had her tongue, she used to tell people that she was related to an English ducal family. Some people got
together and wrote to the head of the family on Miss Copeland’s behalf, but there was no reply. She was now very old and her skin, tautly stretched over frail old bones, had the milky blueness of chicken skin. Each week it seemed she could not survive to the next, yet here she was, silent and preoccupied, remote from the panic of the times. She went through her luncheon with the intensity of someone to whom a meal was a rare and wonderful treat.

  Luncheon ended, as breakfast had begun, with six dates in a green glass dish. Harriet took her coffee over to Madame Wilk’s table and whispered, although Miss Copeland was in no danger of hearing her, ‘Does she know about the emergency?’

  Madame Wilk gave her head a severe shake.

  Miss Copeland’s cottons, tapes, needles and pins were laid out this week, as every week, in orderly rows beside a red and white chequered Oxo tin for money, when there was any money.

  ‘What’s to be done about her?’

  Madame Wilk spread her hands. ‘God knows.’ She and Harriet kept their heads together, fearing to disturb Miss Copeland’s happy ignorance of events. She might have to be told, but not yet.

  Harriet set out for work through streets coagulated with heat and empty of movement. Labourers and beggars lay in a sort of sun syncope, pressed against walls, arms over eyes, galabiahs tucked between legs to avoid any accidental exposure of the parts that religion required them to keep hidden.

  Sweat trickled like an insect between her shoulder blades and soaked the waistband of her dress. She could smell the scorched smell of her hair. And about her there were other smells, especially the not altogether unpleasant smell that came from waste lots saturated with human ordure and urine. Cairo was full of waste lots; dusty, brick-strewn, stone-strewn, hillocky sites where a building had collapsed from age and neglect. The smell that came from them was nothing like the salty, pissy smell of an European urinal. It was rancid and sweet like some sort of weed or first war gas. Harriet thought of phosgene, though she did not know what it was like. She had read somewhere of soldiers mistaking the smell of a may tree for poison-gas.

  On her solitary walks to afternoon work, Harriet had had odd experiences, induced perhaps by the mesmeric dazzle of the light. Once or twice, she had lost the present altogether and found herself somewhere else. On one occasion she was in a landscape which she had seen years before, when riding her bicycle into the country. It was an ordinary English winter landscape; a large field ploughed into ridges that followed the contours of the land, bare hedges, distant elms behind which the sky’s watery grey was broken by gold. She could smell the earth on the wind. There was a gust of rain, wet and cold on her face — then, in an instant, the scene was gone like a light switched off, and she could have wept for the loss of it.

  Once an old man, white bearded, of noble appearance, had stopped her and held out his hand. He was wearing priestly robes and a green fez. They talked for a while about life and her reasons for being in Egypt, then he asked her to marry him, saying he had had many wives in a long life but never one who would go out in the heat of mid-day without a covering on her head. She asked how it was his fez was green while all others were red and he said he had had it specially made for him to indicate to the world that he was a descendant of the prophet. He was a jocular old man and they parted with a lot of laughter.

  Now, reaching Suleiman Pasha where the shop blinds were pulled down but doors were ajar in case custom should come, unlikely though it was, Harriet saw ahead of her a single living creature. It was a man in khaki shirt and shorts, a lost British soldier, hung over with baggage. When he reached the Midan he sank down on the steps of an office block and began pulling the straps off his shoulders. Beneath the straps, under his armpits, in every crevice of his clothing the cloth was black with sweat. He was wiping his face when Harriet approached him.

  The large buildings of the Midan threw one side of the square into shadow so deep it gave an illusion of darkness. Although the sky was a pure cerulean blue, the eye, reacting against excess of light, covered it with a dark film. The banks and office blocks, ponderously imitating western buildings, seemed as flimsy as theatre flats. The whole Midan might have been made of cardboard, not painted but blotted over and bloated with grey, black or umber dye, uneven and dimmed by dust.

  Seeing Harriet, the soldier called out, ‘Excuse me, miss. You English? I thought so. Strange how you can tell.’ He plashed his hand over his pink brow, drew it down his cheeks and shook the sweat from his fingers. ‘I missed the transport, went to the barracks and they say I got to wait till seventeen hundred hours. Thought I’d look around but what a place! I was just saying to m’self, “Where do you go now, chum? What’s to see and do around here?’”

  Harriet, looking about her, wondered what there was to see and do in the wide, empty streets of Cairo at this hour. She told him: ‘There’s the Rivoli cinema not far from here. It’s air-conditioned and so chilly, you might catch a cold. I’ve caught cold myself there.’

  ‘Can’t be too chilly for me.’ The soldier rose and looking her over said with jaunty fervour, ‘’Spose you wouldn’t come with me?’

  She smiled, knowing to these lost men an Englishwoman, any Englishwoman, was not an individual but a point of contact with desirable life. ‘I’m sorry. I have to go back to work, but I’ll walk part of the way.’

  ‘Right-e-o.’ He put the straps back and with all his belongings lurching around him, went with her towards Fuad al Awal. Eyeing her with some curiosity, he said, ‘Funny meeting someone from England, just like that! What you doing here, then?’

  ‘Egypt’s full of English people. My husband has a job here.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ At the mention of a husband the soldier retreated into respectful silence and Harriet, to start him talking again, asked how he had come to miss his transport.

  ‘It was like this, see. Me and my mates went down into one of those bars and had a few beers and I passed out. Not in the bar, mind you. I went in — well, if you’ll excuse me mentioning it — I went in the toilet. They didn’t know I’d passed out, did they? I mean, I could’ve gone after a bint, couldn’t I? Can’t blame them, can you?’

  ‘No, it could happen to anyone.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  She could see how pained he had been at finding himself deserted and how much he needed company, but she was late already. Pointing to the cinema, she said regretfully, ‘I have to go the other way.’ Before she turned the next corner, she looked back and saw him standing like an eager dog, staring after her, hoping she would change her mind.

  At the Embassy the only sign of life was the hopping of the hoopoes in and out of the garden sprays. Mr Buschman always played golf in the middle of the day and, coming rather late to the office, would put salt tablets into a large glass of water and drink it with a grimace. Lined up on his desk in different coloured boxes were pills and capsules which he called vitamins. Harriet had never heard of salt tablets or vitamins and Mr Buschman, amused by her innocence, said, ‘They’re sent out to us through the bag. They look after us, you see.’ The vitamins were distributed among the American staff but not, of course, the aliens.

  Looking over the news sheets, Mr Buschman laughed aloud. “‘Defend their honour” — that’s rich!’

  Harriet had tried to ring Guy from the pension and had been told that all the lines to Alexandria were engaged. She decided that if she could not reach him by telephone, she must go to him, and she said to Mr Buschman, ‘I’ve been trying to get in touch with my husband but can’t get hold of him. He ought to leave Alexandria . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry, mem. He’ll leave when he’s ordered to leave.’

  ‘There’s no one to order him. The director’s gone to Palestine, the office is shut — but he doesn’t know this. He’s alone up there. He’ll just wait expecting to receive orders that won’t come, and he’ll be trapped.’

  Harriet gulped and Mr Buschman, putting a hand on her shoulder, said, ‘Hey, hey, mem, don’t cry. Give the girls his number an
d tell them to ring it every five minutes till they do get through.’

  ‘But, Mr Buschman, if they can’t get him, I’ll have to take a day off and go up to Alex and tell him how things are.’

  ‘You do just that, mem,’ Mr Buschman gave her shoulder a squeeze and his kindness, his concern, his ready willingness to help her, rayed from his face like love. Much moved, Harriet asked him to come over and look at the wall map. She pointed to the two sets of pins, one in the desert, the other in the Ukraine, converging on the Middle East like two black claws. ‘You see what it is, Mr Buschman: it’s a giant pincer movement.’

  Mr Buschman stared at the map and slowly shook his head. ‘Looks like it. But don’t forget, mem, that’s only a map. There’s a mighty big bit of territory between those pincers.’

  ‘Yes, they’ve a long way to come but the Germans move quickly.’ Harriet had seen the German news films in Bucharest. She had seen the golden-haired boys standing up in their tanks, singing, ‘What does it matter if we destroy the world? When it is ours, we’ll build it up again,’ as they drove with all speed on to Paris. She thought how quickly they could eat up that almost unguarded territory between the pincers. ‘If the Ukraine collapses, what’s to stop them? We can’t even keep them out of Egypt.’

  Nonplussed, Mr Buschman stared, rubbing his hand across the back of his neck, then went back to his desk leaving Harriet unassured. She saw the Middle East cracking between the pincers like a broken walnut and asked herself: what would happen then? She tried to work out on the map the strategy of defeat. The British troops, she supposed, would retreat into Iraq and make a last stand in defence of the Persian Gulf. But suppose there were no troops? Supposing the whole 8th Army was caught between the converging pincers and not one man remained to retreat and defend what was left? What would they do then? There was almost relief at the thought of it. Responsibility would cease. They would not have to run away again.