Arabesque (28 page)

“So did my mother. I’ve never had the face to propose it to anyone else.”

“And what did you do when you grew up, Dion Prayle?”

“Nothing long.”

“But what?”

“This and that. Mining. Knocking about. Company secretary. Good little companies—not enough capital. Bad little companies—got out before they bust. Abroad a lot. Going my own
way, and taking anything that looked like being fun.”

“What sort of fun?”

“Talking to people.”

“To men, you mean?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“Don’t women count at all?”

“Not much. I just read what’s in their little pans, and sheer off.”

“Dion, you do talk such nonsense,” she said. “Look at Floarea—can you read her little pan, as you call it?”

“Yes. What does she want?”

“I won’t tell you. What’s her character?”

“Just that. All that matters to her and the Boss is—what does she want?”

Armande considered the oracle. The answer was true. Floarea’s value to herself, humanity and the Boss—yes, the dear idiot couldn’t mean an earthly boss—depended entirely
upon what she wanted. She was a fine creature because she wanted success in her profession and did not wholly measure success in terms of money. If she had wanted luxury, she would be dishonest; if
love, she might be a jealous horror like Mr. Makrisi’s wife.

“What is it you and Mr. Makrisi wish me to do?” she asked.

“Not us. A G.H.Q. racket.”

“Tell me.”

Prayle from habit lowered his voice, though there was no chance of being overheard against the baaing of the dance band and the hum of conversation.

“They want you to stay behind if we lose Egypt.”

“Yes,” she said thoughtfully, “that is the real thing, isn’t it? Then am I clear?”

“No, Armande. The black-listing is just what makes you useful—so long as it’s widely known.”

She shivered at the implication that everyone must know her secret; yet it was obvious that there her value and safety lay.

“But someone important must trust me?”

“Yes. He used to be in our game before he took to this. He knows you are clear, but can’t prove it. You must think we are all off our rockers. But it’s not so easy. You did a
spot of gunrunning, and you say you thought it was a nice, clean sport, all above board and hunky-dory. That’s the truth, but it’s wildly improbable. Especially as you were just one big
question mark in Beirut. And in Jerusalem—well, a nice little cash payment into your bank and no transfers to your account from London. So you see it was my opinion against a big, thick file.
Montagne was in the same boat.”

“What happened to Major Montagne?” she asked.

“Mr. Makrisi.”

“Of course!” Armande exclaimed. “But he’s not really so down-and-out, is he? I mean, Abu Tisein’s inventions couldn’t affect a security officer?”

“Couldn’t they just!”

Prayle sketched for her Montagne’s past; his escape and his probable position as he immediate chief in the Cairo underground.

“And this man you spoke of couldn’t clear him either?” she asked incredulously.

“He could have done more, I think. But what’s one man against the army politicians? If the French had only court-martialled Montagne, our evidence would have been convincing. But
they didn’t. Montagne was a nuisance. It was a great chance to drop him in the pail and put the lid back quickly. So they just bunged him in a fortress. Sounds very correct and military, but
the fortress was huts behind barbed wire. And our people said they couldn’t interfere with internal discipline in the French Army, and went home to tea. I hope it choked them. But it
wouldn’t. Because, after all, you can only give a hint to your allies. You can’t open their mouths and force them to ask questions if they don’t want to.”

“Poor, poor, Montagne!” she said softly. “I didn’t like him, but he was so inflexible and French and undaunted. Dion, I’ll do everything I can for him. And
he’ll never be caught—well, if he doesn’t plot for the sake of plotting. I’m to be French too, I suppose?”

“Vichy sympathies. All your papers in order.”

“Too many people know I’m British.”

“Only in this joint. And you must leave it. All they can say afterwards is that you pretended to be British. We’ll see that all your records disappear from the Egyptian
police.”

“Could I do it, Dion? Tell me the truth—should I have a chance?”

“You would. Think of my opposite number. Kraut security sergeant. Just occupied a town of a million, with nationalties all mixed up. If you’re living quietly—not a dancer, of
course—you’d go weeks and weeks before being questioned at all. And then: Papers in order?
Jawohl!
Can account for her time?
Bestimmt!
Bit hazy here and there?
Naturlich!
Feeling your way in a mist, Armande—that’s security. If a cove has every bloody thing in order and an answer to every question, well, he’s either a government
official or there’s something wrong. Motives, movements of realm human beings, here and there they are bound to be vague. Security is only efficient in dealing with the crook and the little
man. You’re much too high-class and complicated. If they get really suspicious, they’ll just intern you and not bother any more. Let’s have another before the pub
shuts.”

“I think I deserve one.”

“Very long and very strong again?”

“Yes. Oh, this heat! I can’t think.”

“You aren’t supposed to. Not in Nature’s plan. The thinking season opens in November.”

The waiter brought their drinks and presented the bill, for Cairo night life stopped at one. Prayle gave him a lordly tip, and having marked up the amount in blue pencil, carefully folded the
slip and put it in his wallet.

“That’s on the house,” he explained. “Item: To contacting agents. Now I take over from the Bank of England. Where shall we go?”

“Home to bed.”

“Not yet. It won’t be cool enough to sleep till dawn. And we may not see each other again for a long time.”

“Well”—she hesitated—“anyway, wait for me while I change.”

“Don’t run out of the back door like the Hungarians.”

“What Hungarians?”

“Used to staff places like this. All little Hungarian beauties. Told boy-friend to wait in a taxi at the front door, and then hopped out at the back and made a beeline for nearest
limitless plain.”

“Dion, you’re sordid! Just for that, you shall wait in your taxi and I’ll be as long as possible. And what’s more, the porter will tell you it’s no use
waiting.”

“Is it?”

“Work it out from my little pan, Sergeant.”

Prayle left the Casino and endeavoured to find a taxi with a full petrol tank. When he was satisfied, he gave the driver fifty piastres and delivered a speech on the admirable qualities of
Egyptians and, above all, their capacity for unquestioning obedience. Then he took possession of his taxi and awaited Armande, chuckling for the first five minutes, and extremely anxious for the
next ten. At last she came to him, hatless, comradely, and free as the night in a black silk frock printed with what he took to be chrysanthemums.

“Where shall we go?” he asked, when the taxi had been running some minutes.

Armande gave him her address.

“Yes, of course. But I thought it would do you good to go to Helwan first.”

“Dion, Helwan is miles out of town,” she protested.

“Don’t like the Pyramids. Never did.”

“But I will not go to Helwan.”

“Jump out then.”

“Dion, you are not to do this. Just because I—”

“Don’t say it!”

“What was I going to say?”

“I don’t know, but a suggestion that Armande Herne shouldn’t be where she wants to be.”

“She wants to be in bed!”

“Wonk!”

“And stop making bloody silly exclamations!”

“Straight off the bat!” he said admiringly. “And sounded like an understatement. You’re growing up.”

“Has it ever occurred to you, Sergeant Prayle, that I might have been using ‘bloody’ to myself ever since I was a little girl, but had sufficient good taste not to do so
aloud?”

“No, it hadn’t.”

“And now take me home, Dion dear, and don’t quarrel with me.”

The taxi was rumbling smoothly under an avenue of trees along the Nile. On the landward side of the road army lorries in two and threes, headlights blacked out, bonnet to tailboard, streamed
from the Helwan camps to Cairo.

“He says he hasn’t room to turn,” explained Prayle after conversation with the driver. “Wait till we get to the roundabout.”

“All right.”

The driver, hooting furiously, swung his taxi round to the left, and cut into the Cairo-bound traffic. The screech of brakes immediately behind them was taken up by the next lorry and the next
lorry and the next, as the sound went diminishing up the road.

“Holding up the war,” said Prayle disapprovingly, “just because you won’t see the moon at Helwan.”

“I can see it in the water,” she laughed, glancing casually out of the window—and then exclaimed at the unexpected beauty.

The Nile was smooth and calm and moonlit as any other water, but it was hurrying. The river looked like an infinite length of silver silk pouring between the rollers of some vast machine where
it had received a sheen more absolute than any brilliancy of nature.

“The worst of driving in convoy,” Prayle remarked, “is that one can’t stop.”

“Yes. I wish we could.”

They approached another traffic island. At the last moment Prayle snapped an order to the driver. The taxi came about like a yacht, rounded the island and started back in the direction of
Helwan, accompanied by the curses of the lorry drivers on the other side of the road.

“Dion!” Armande protested.

“But you said you wanted to look at the moon again.”

“I didn’t!”

“Ah! Well, there’s a place a little further up where we can stop.”

Beyond the trees and striped by their moon shadows, a tongue of grass ran down to the water. Prayle opened the door of the taxi and offered his hand. His tall, white figure was compelling.

This dancing, stubborn mischievousness was all in the character of the sergeant she knew, all in the sixteenth-century face, yet, directed for the first time to herself instead of her
circumstances, Armande found it unfamiliar. The odd rhythm of his speech was, she thought, more truly expressive of him than she had ever believed.

“You belong to the night,” he said. “You aren’t seen. And then the black and white of your head, the eagerness of you—they suddenly appear. Whenever you’re
excited or interested. You live in flashes. Why? What are you?”

“A soul in twilight,” she answered. “But sometimes it looks across the river.”

With a gesture she could neither foresee nor resist he smoothed her hair back from her temples, and as she turned to him, tender and surprised, he kissed her. She neither responded nor refused,
fighting her excitement at this devastating, accumulated passion, exploded in an instant.

“Now we must go,” she said.

She meant it to be a cold voice from a cold thought, but the voice trembled and she dared not think any thought at all.

“Like baby rabbits just beginning to nibble grass,” he said.

“If you call yourself a baby rabbit—!”

“Your lips, I meant. Do they never say anything to themselves?”

“I don’t listen to them.”

Armande had only a moment to be angry with her body. Then, while she rested from his second kiss, there was left neither anger nor regret. She was reminding herself desperately that she was not
in love and could not be in love.

“Armande,” he said, “my darling, I wonder why I was ever frightened of you.”

“Or I of you.”

“Were you? I didn’t know anybody had ever been afraid of me.”

“Do you remember once saying to me
What else is there?
” she asked.

“No.”

“When we first met. I told you to stop being coarse, and you said
What else is there
?”

“Meant it, I expect. There I am, watching them all lying and fussing and keeping up with the Joneses. Drink. Women. Battle. Anything to avoid the bitterness. And I love the bitterness.
Don’t want to die at all. And if they won’t see things as they are, I make things a bit more as they are. Coarse? Well, but true. So what else is there?”

“This.”

She took his head between her hands, and kissed his eyes, forehead and mouth.

“Was that coarse, Dion? Or bitter?”

His face was transfigured by joy and amazed surrender, but in the corners of the odd eyes and thin mouth she still perceived the ghost of irony. It hurt her, for she longed to wipe out that
internal suffering which he pretended to enjoy.

“Well?” she repeated. “Was it, my dear?”

“But was it true?”

“Yes, for us two. All the possible truth.”

She linked her arm in his and led him back to the car.

“We must turn at the next roundabout,” she said when the taxi had started.

“We’re halfway to Helwan.”

“Dion, no!”

“I love you so. I have always loved you.”

“I know, and I’m so glad. But I’m not a person to be loved. Remember what you used to think of me. It was nearly right.”

“I want it to be nearly right. You I love, Armande, no might-be Armandes.”

“Dion, we turn here.”

“We’ll go round and round all night, if you like.”

Imperturbable as the driver, he passed on her order, and the taxi headed back to Cairo.

She relaxed on his shoulder, safe in the knowledge that in another quarter of an hour she would be home. Her lips answered his without thought of past or of so short a future.

“But I want you,” he cried. “I will not let you go tonight.”

“No!”

“Your breasts say yes.”

She sat back in her corner with a sudden sense of shame—a cabaret girl taken out by a sergeant after the show.

“I’m not responsible,” she answered angrily. “It’s the heat, the moon, the whisky. Dion, for three years I have been faithful to my husband.”

“Would he like you to be?” he asked.

“Of course. Well … why did you ask that?”

“I wondered. One watches. Of course some of us have been out here longer than the Crusaders. Still, is it only absence that nips off the marriages? New values at home. New values
here.”