Moon Tiger (18 page)

A revolution and the Assuan High Dam have changed all that. The fellaheen are still there but their mud huts have electricity now and infant mortality is no longer forty per cent. The King is gone and so are the English; that society is as distant as those of Memphis and Thebes. When Egyptians speak of the war they mean the Israeli war, not ours – which wasn’t after all anything to do with them anyway.

‘You should have been here yesterday evening,’ says Camilla. ‘Pip Leathers had this green smoke thing he’d pinched from the depot. A sort of signal. He let it off in the garden just behind Ahmed and Ahmed simply
howled
. It was absolutely killing. He thought it was an
afreet
, you see – the natives are so madly superstitious, they really believe in spirits and ghosts and things. We sat on the verandah and watched him rushing about wailing – honestly, I nearly died.’ She is sitting on the edge of her bed painting her toenails. ‘Do you want to try this, Claudia? It’s rather heavenly – Elizabeth Arden Shocking Pink.
I say – is there something wrong? You’re looking awfully browned off these days.’

‘There’s nothing wrong,’ says Claudia.

‘Gyppy tummy, I expect,’ says Camilla blithely. ‘I say – I’m going out with an Aussie tonight! Mummy would have a fit. Of course their accents
are
horrid but he’s really awfully sweet and his people are something high up in Sydney. Will you be at the Club later on?’

Claudia wanders to the other room. She goes on to the verandah and stares out over Gezira, which begins to twinkle in the dusk. He has been gone three weeks now and she has heard nothing. There are rumours that the balloon will go up in the next month or two, that Rommel will break through, that there’ll be a big show-down. Where is Tom? That rubbish-tip landscape of the aftermath of battle swims before her eyes: the shells of vehicles like animal carcasses, the intimate debris of people’s lives – a tooth-brush, a tattered letter; the men plodding around in the sand. She conjures it up and mulls over it, and there is a dull grip in the pit of her stomach. Not Gyppy tummy, as Camilla suggests, unfortunately not. The war, she realises, has become something quite different. It is no longer prowling on the perimeter, like some large unpredictable animal that she is safely watching from afar, whose doings are of scientific interest. It has come right up close and is howling at her bedroom door; the shiver it provokes is the atavistic shiver of childhood. She is afraid, not for herself but with that indistinct cosmic fear of long ago. Thus she remembers persuading herself once in some dark night of infancy that the sun would never rise again.

Within the flat Camilla is shouting for the suffragi to bring the drinks tray. Down in the garden Madame Chariot harangues a neighbour about the price of meat.

There would be silence for weeks and then a letter. One of those inconsequential wartime letters bleached of information or intimacies by the shadow of the censor. And then suddenly he would be there, unheralded, a voice on the phone – three
days’ leave, five days’ leave… We went to Luxor, to Alex. I have no idea how many days there were in all. They are distinguished now by their surroundings – the wide serenity of the Nile at Luxor, the barren silence of the Valley of the Kings, the crowds and chatter of hotels and bars, big lazy waves foaming in over the shallow beach at Sidi Bishr. And each time he went back again the lion snarled on the horizon, my scrutiny of communiqués and cultivating of press attachés took on an extra urgency. I tried again and again to get myself another trip to the desert – not because I would be anywhere near him but because I wanted to experience what it was he saw and heard and felt. I never again managed to get further than the training camps of Mersa Matruh – it was relatively easy for the men in the Press Corps, but I, and the occasional American or Commonwealth woman correspondent passing through, was frowned on by Eighth Army Battle HQ: the desert was no place for women.

‘Why not?’ demands Claudia.

‘My dear girl, it’s just not on, that’s all. There’d be one hell of a stink. Randolph Churchill took some American lass up there and we got a lot of flak about it afterwards. They just aren’t keen on females.’

‘I am merely,’ says Claudia, ‘doing a job of work. Like the field hospital staff and the ATS drivers and various other women personnel who get to the desert.’

The new Press Officer at GHQ shrugs. ‘Awfully sorry, m’dear, but there it is. I’ll do what I can for you of course – if it was up to me we’d have you on a transport plane tomorrow. Incidentally, what about a drink this evening if you’re at a loose end?’

Claudia smiles graciously, expediently.

There were weeks and months when nothing happened. All we knew was that out there the two armies were crouched motionless somewhere west of Tobruk, waiting to see what the other would do. There was little information because there was
none to give. It was then that the myth of Rommel took shape: the cunning, unpredictable foe, larger than life, a Napoleon of the sand, eclipsing the weathered homely legends of our own generals. Even Monty never had Rommel’s mystique. There must have been realists in Cairo who expected the worst, yet never even later in the wilder moments of ‘the flap’, when the Panzer Army was poised at Alamein and the ashes of burning documents rained down from the sky do I remember the smell of fear. Crisis, yes; alarm, no. Those with wives and children sent them to Palestine; a few families got on boats for South Africa or India. There was plenty of the globe left into which to withdraw, and in any case it would only be a temporary measure, until things picked up again. I don’t think anyone seriously envisaged Rommel’s officers sitting around the pool at Gezira Sporting Club. Drinks were served at sundown, as they always had been; race meetings were on Saturdays; the amateur dramatics group did a production of
The Mikado
. Mother, writing from war-straitened Dorset, said she was so relieved I was somewhere safe, but thought the climate must be trying. Did she ever look at an atlas, I wonder? She had her own problems; patient endurance was the theme of her letters – shortages, the garden sadly neglected, her good saucepans nobly sacrificed to be rendered into war weapons. The flimsy aerograms with their neat script were eloquent with stoicism. Did she ever imagine German troops surging through Sturminster Newton?

But in those static months of early 1942 war seemed a permanent condition – a chronic disease that while not life-threatening impeded progress of any kind. I went to Jerusalem to try to get an interview with de Gaulle, who was rumoured to have turned up there, failed to get near him and did a piece on the Stern Gang instead. One or two of my colleagues, restless with the inactivity, took off altogether for more interesting centres and had to come belting back in a hurry when eventually the desert sprang into life again. It was a time that seemed even while it was in progress to go on for ever. The winter inched into spring; the temperature rose; at
some point – when or for how long I do not know – he was there again.

‘Let me tell you something extremely odd,’ says Tom. ‘I have never felt so good in my life.’

She considers him. He is lean; his muscles are like rope; his dark hair has a conflicting golden burnish from the sun. ‘You look healthy, certainly.’

‘Health is not really what I’m talking about. The spirit is what I had in mind. I’m quite remarkably happy. In the midst of all this. I think you are a sorceress, Claudia. A good sorceress, of course. A white witch.’

She cannot reply. No one, she thinks, has ever spoken to me like this before. I have never made anyone happy before. I have made people angry, restless, jealous, lecherous… never, I think, happy.

‘And you?’ asks Tom.

‘Me too,’ she says.

‘
Après moi le déluge
,’ says Tom. ‘That is my unworthy sentiment these days.’

‘Well,’ she says. ‘It may well be the case, I suppose. But even so there would be nothing we could do about it. I’ve always thought it a fairly reasonable sentiment.’

‘Kiss me.’

‘We’re in a mosque,’ she objects. ‘We shall cause a riot.’

But even the mosque of Ibn Tulun has remote sequestered places.

‘This is getting too much for me,’ says Tom presently. ‘We shall have to go back to your flat.’

‘We haven’t climbed the minaret.’

‘I don’t want to climb the minaret. I want to go back to your flat.’

‘We may never come here again.’

‘You are a remarkably obstinate woman,’ he says. ‘Or else you are putting me to some kind of test. All right – we’ll climb the minaret and
then
we’ll go back to your flat.’

And presently, looking down into the maze of humanity and
animals and balconies of washing Claudia says, ‘What are you going to do after the war?’

‘Ah. I wondered when we’d get to that.’ He puts his arm around her. ‘I’d thought of raising the matter myself. Well… First let me tell you what I
was
going to do after the war. I was going to go home full of fervour and high-minded notions and pronounced views on how society should be set to rights and stand for Parliament in some violently hostile constituency and retire beaten but unquenched. Or I might have settled for trenchant journalism in one of the better-class newspapers.’

‘But you’re not going to do this now?’ murmurs Claudia – watching, far above her head, the kites that float in huge considered circles in the pale, pale blue sky.

‘No. I feel less evangelical and more cynical and above all I’ve got other things in mind.’

‘Such as?’ asks Claudia. She tries to imagine the view from that kite’s-eye height; can they see the curvature of the earth? The Red Sea? The Mediterranean?

‘I want things I’ve never had much of a taste for hitherto. I want stability. I want to live in one place. I want to make plans for next year and the one after that and the one after that. I want’ – he lays a hand on her arm – ‘… I want to get married. Are you listening to a word I’m saying?’

‘I’m listening,’ says Claudia.

‘I want to get married. I want to marry you, in case I’m not making myself absolutely plain.’

‘We could be evangelical together,’ says Claudia, after a moment. ‘I’m rather that way myself. You’ve no idea…’

‘Well, all right then, if there’s time. But I shall have to earn a living, which is something I’ve never bothered too much about up to now. I don’t see why you should starve in garrets; I’m sure it’s not what you’re accustomed to.’

‘Well, no. But I’m really quite good at fending for myself.’

‘You can contribute,’ says Tom, his arm now tightly around her. ‘You can write these history books. For myself, I’m going to become a sober citizen. A son of toil. I want to get my hands dirty. Perhaps I’ll be a farmer. I want to live somewhere where
it rains a lot and things grow furiously. I want to see the fruits of the earth multiply and all that sort of thing. I want to make provision for the future. I want to lay up riches on earth since I don’t believe in heaven. Not material riches – I want green fields and fat cows and oak trees. Oh, and there’s one more thing I want. I want a child.’

‘A child…’ says Claudia. ‘Goodness. A child…’ She looks up again at the swirling kites; one is now much larger than the others, starting its slow descent upon some selected target.

10

‘Ah,’ says Sister, ‘there you are, Mrs Jamieson. Well, we’ve had a bit of a crisis though I must say she’s rallied marvellously this morning. But it was rather touch and go at one point. Anyway, Doctor doesn’t think there’ll be any more trouble for the moment. She’s asleep now, if you want to sit with her for a bit. She was talking about you last night – not that she was compos mentis really, poor dear.’

Lisa looks through the porthole. Claudia is lying flat, eyes closed; one arm sprouts tubes and brightly coloured plastic pouches. ‘What did she say?’

‘She thought she was in childbirth again, bless her. She kept saying “Is it a boy or a girl?” ’ Sister laughs gaily. ‘Funny, isn’t it – women often go back to that, towards the end. A lot of our old ladies harp on that. She was in a proper state – kept grabbing my arm: “Tell me if it’s a boy or a girl…” So I said – you are her only one, aren’t you, Mrs Jamieson? – I said, “It is a girl, Miss… Miss Hampton, but that was a long time ago.” ’ She clears her throat sharply: ‘Of course the Miss is professional, I realise that, a lot of professional ladies keep Miss and I quite agree that Mizz business people use nowadays is awful. Well, there you are, Mrs Jamieson – you go on in, though I doubt if she’s going to respond much today. But she may well know you’re there.’