Round the Bend (41 page)

Because of this, he was very, very tired on the last leg of the journey home. He sat, or lay propped up with cushions on his divan, and he no longer wanted to look at the maps, or hear where we were, or any of the details of the flight. He did not talk to anyone, and he refused all food, though now and again he took a few sips of water. I know before we reached Karachi Dr. Khaled had suggested to him that we should stop there for the night, or possibly for more nights than one, but he had got a bottle from the old Sheikh who was only anxious now to get back to the places and the people that he knew. He wanted to be back in his palace at Baraka, even if it killed him.

We made a night landing at Bahrein at about half past eight,
local time. I had been talking to them on the radio for the last hour and telling them to ring through to Sheikh Muhammad’s Wazir to tell him that the Sheikh of Khulal would be arriving at the aerodrome at eight-thirty very tired by his long journey, and to ask for cars to be on the tarmac for the party without fail to meet us when we landed. One of my pals from the chummery, a bloke called Alec Scott, was in the Control room, and I didn’t scruple to call him every ten minutes in the last hundred and fifty miles to make sure that he had passed on all my messages.

So, when we taxied to a standstill before our hangar in the floodlit darkness and stopped the engines, the maroon Hudson was alongside the machine before we could get the steps down. We were able to get the old man down on to the ground and into the car within five minutes; he could hardly stand alone, and drove away with one of his servants sitting on each side of him on the broad rear seat to hold him erect in case he should fall sideways on a corner. He was as bad as that.

There were other cars there for the rest of the party and their luggage, and in ten minutes or so they, too, were gone. I stood with Gujar Singh and watched the last car disappear into the darkness. We were all tired, too. “Well, thank the Lord we’ve got him home safely,” I said heavily. “I wouldn’t have liked it if he’d died on the way home.”

“I was afraid of that,” said Gujar. “It would have made great trouble if he had died in India, a Hindu country. I do not think he could have been buried there.… If that had happened, I would have suggested that we just flew on as quickly as we could, and brought him home.”

“We couldn’t have done that,” I said. “Not for two days, in heat like this.”

“We could have flown high, above the freezing level.”

“We’d never have got him through the customs at Karachi,” I said. “But anyway, he didn’t die on us, so that’s all right.” But I was only partially correct because, in fact, the old man never left his palace again. He died a few months later. He’d known that he was near the end, of course, before he started on his journey to see Connie.

It was a disappointment to me that Nadezna was not there to
meet us; I didn’t look forward to the prospect of telling her that I had failed to make Connie consider marrying Madé Jasmi, but I had looked forward to meeting her, all the same. I went into the office and found my desk completely empty and bare, not a paper on it except one little note, which read,

I grinned, and took the hint, and went to bed.

I was in the office bright and early next morning, but Nadezna was there before me, and my desk was stacked with correspondence, invoices, receipts, release notes, official pamphlets, and all the other paper clutter that a business can accumulate in a fortnight. Before beginning upon this, I told her about Connie and the girl. “I didn’t cut any ice at all,” I said. “I don’t think he’s got any intention of marrying.”

“No,” she replied. “I don’t think he has. It was a chance, though. Tell me, is she nice?”

“She’s a very nice girl,” I told her. “She’s just a village girl, of course—she can’t read or write. He’d have to make his life there if he married her, but there are worse places to live than that. They live simply and eat well. Her mother must be forty-five at least, and she’s a beautiful woman still. A man who was prepared to settle down and live there quietly could have a very happy life.”

“I thought it was like that,” she said. “But that’s not Connie’s way.” She paused, and then she said, “Oh, well, that’s over, then. How was he in himself?”

“You mean, his health?”

She nodded.

I thought for a minute before replying. I did not want to alarm her unduly. “He’s very, very thin,” I said at last. “He seems to get tired easily, too. I think he’s quite all right, though. Dr. Khaled examined him.” I told her about what was going on at Karachi.

She wanted to know a lot of things then, how he was eating, how he was sleeping—all the usual enquiries. I had one or two to make of her. “Has he ever had anything like this before?” I asked. “Any sort of illness?”

She shook her head. “Not that I know of. He’s always been thin, and he’s always lived a great deal on his nerves. I mean, I’ve seen him get very tired sometimes, when he’s been talking a lot. But I don’t ever remember him being in the doctor’s hands at all.”

“It’s probably nothing,” I said. “He may need something with his diet down there—cod-liver oil and malt, or something like that.”

I settled down then to pick up the threads of my business, and I worked with Nadezna on the papers for the whole of that day. Johnson came on the telephone in the middle of the morning wanting to know the earliest date for the Tramp to leave again for Bali and for the Maclean Dakota to meet it there; having given up a trip to the Sheikh of Khulal, the Arabia-Sumatran Company had an accumulation of scientific equipment and staff wanting to go through to the East Alligator River oil field as soon as possible. I checked the work on the machine with Chai Tai Foong, and came back to the office and rang through to Johnson and told him the machine could take off at dawn the day after tomorrow. I got a cable off to Maclean Airways, and then I sent for Arjan Singh and warned him for the trip, with Kadhim as second pilot.

I got up before dawn that morning to see the Tramp loaded, and to have a final word to the two pilots before they went. I always think it helps if the boss shows up on an early morning show like that, especially if it’s the start of a long flight. There was really no need for me to be there, of course; Arjan had done the trip several times before, and though Kadhim was new he’d got over a thousand hours in with the Iraqui Air Force and Iraqui Airways on the Baghdad-Mosul route.

I said to Arjan, “Tell Shak Lin we got the old Sheikh back all right. He’s still in bed, though—I think he’s pretty sick. Shak Lin’s sure to want to know how he is.”

He nodded gravely, “I will tell him everything.”

In the first light of dawn the Tramp taxied down to the far end of the runway, and took off over the sea, and swept round in a great left-hand turn to get on course, and vanished into the sunrise. I went back to the chummery and had breakfast and shaved, and went to the office. I had a Proctor booked to take a couple of surveyors out to a place called Marib in the desert later in the day, and I intended to take them myself since I should be fairly clear of office work by then.

At about half past eight, half an hour before the surveyors were due, the maroon Hudson passed my office window with Dr. Khaled and Wazir Hussein in it, and swung round to park. I was dictating to Nadezna at the time. “Christ,” I said. “Look, pack up this. Nip out and see if you can find Gujar Singh, and tell him I’d like him to take this Proctor to Marib, because I’m tied up here after all. And look—tell Dunu to go over to the restaurant and order us three cups of coffee—Turkish.”

I got up to meet my visitors as they came in. “This is a great honour,” I said. Probably they had come to talk about Connie, but one had to let them start it in their own time. “I hope the Sheikh of Khulal was not too tired by the journey?”

They said something or other, and we made the usual polite conversation till the coffee came. When Dunu had gone out the Wazir came to the point.

“We have received the report about El Amin from Karachi,” he said. “It is not good.”

“Oh,” I replied. “What does it say?”

He spoke to Khaled, who produced a white printed form, filled in with a few words of typescript. The Wazir handed it to me; it was in English. There were spaces for Sputum and for Urine, and opposite each of these was typed the one word, “Negative.” There was a space for Blood, and here was typed:

There was a further space at the bottom for Remarks, and here it said:

That, with a signature, was all there was.

I looked at Hussein. “Well, this doesn’t mean a thing to me,” I said. “What is Myelogenous Leukaemia? I’ve never heard of it.”

“Dr. Khaled tells us that it is a disease of the blood,” he said. “It is a very bad disease.”

“How bad?” I asked. “What’s the treatment?”

He turned and spoke to the doctor in Arabic. It was evidently the continuation of a discussion that had, perhaps, been gone over many times. The doctor spoke emphatically with some gesticulation, but he spoke Arabic with a strange accent to me and he spoke quickly, so that I could not get very much of what he said.

The Wazir turned back to me. “It is a long and complicated treatment,” he said. “It needs X-rays to cure it, and very modern things that are not found in many cities of Asia. It would be better that Shak Lin should go to Europe, Dr. Khaled says. He can arrange the necessary treatment in Paris.”

“I see,” I said. I sat in thought for a few minutes. There was no question of expense in my mind, or of the work. Connie’s job at Bali was a sinecure that could be done by any good reliable engineer. If this thing was serious he must come straight back to Bahrein and go on to Paris or to London for his treatment; I could get him back to England from Bahrein in a couple of days.

I raised my head and spoke to the Wazir. “He shall certainly go to Europe for his treatment if he’s really got this thing,” I said. “If we get him back to Karachi for a start, could we have him properly investigated at the hospital there in the light of this report, to get a second opinion?”

Dr. Khaled said that could be done.

“The next thing,” I said to Wazir Hussein, “is just this. Will he come?”

“He will come if you say that he must come,” the Wazir said. “I think that you are right. He would not change his way of life or travel to Europe for his health, for himself alone. But if you
say he must do that for reasons of your business, I think he may agree.”

I bit my lip. I wasn’t a bit sure, myself. Connie was so much a part of the East that it was difficult to visualize him as a patient in a hospital ward in London or in Paris, in countries where he had no friends at all, where nobody had any reverence for him. “I think the first thing to do is to get him back to Karachi for a proper examination,” I said at last.

Dr. Khaled spoke quickly to the Wazir. As I had thought, he could understand English all right, though he was reluctant to try to speak it. The Wazir turned to me. “My master wishes to spare no expense,” he said. “If he is to come to Karachi for examination, it would be better that a specialist should come from Paris or London to examine him at Karachi, in the hospital. My master insists that he should have the best advice.” He paused, and then he said, “This has been a great trouble to my master, this news of El Amin.”

I said, “It is a great trouble to me, too.” I sat in thought for a moment. “It’s bad luck that the Tramp left this morning for Bali,” I said. “It will be back here in nine days, and going down again”—I glanced at the calendar—“on the fourteenth. To get him back here on this trip means I must try and explain the situation to him in a telegram, and persuade him to come back to hospital at Karachi. That’s not going to be very easy.”

Wazir Hussein asked, “If he came by the next trip, when would he reach Karachi?”

“On the 22nd or the 23rd,” I said. “It means he wouldn’t reach Karachi for about three weeks from now.”

We discussed this for a time. If he could be induced by skilfully worded telegrams to come back to Karachi with the present trip he could be there in about seven days’ time. It was doubtful if the Arabs, with all the power of their wealth, could get a specialist from Europe there so soon as that. They would have to write to their agents in London and the letter would take three days; the man then had to be found and induced to leave his work in London or Paris to fly to Karachi. No specialist of any repute would leave his other patients in midair and unattended, whatever the fee paid. It seemed to us that such a man would need at least a
week to settle his affairs before coming out to Karachi, and then the flight would take at least two days. It would be a fortnight at the earliest before he could be there.

Dr. Khaled, pressed by the Wazir, said that he did not think that El Amin’s physical state would alter very greatly in a fortnight. The disease was probably getting worse, and if unattended death might well occur in a year or eighteen months. Since the specialist could hardly reach Karachi for at least a fortnight, if Connie came on the next trip the greatest time that would be lost would be one week.

We decided that that would be the best course, that he should come back upon the following trip. Wazir Hussein said, “Will you write him a letter?”

“Yes,” I said slowly. “I’ll write to him by air mail.” I thought quickly. “It can go by Orient Airways tomorrow to Karachi, and I’ll get the pilot to see that it gets on to the K.L.M. for Batavia there.” I knew that any letter for Shak Lin would get whatever special treatment was required. “Wazir,” I said. “Would your master, the Sheikh of Khulal, write a letter to El Amin, too? We shall have difficulty in persuading him to leave his work and come to Karachi to hospital. I know a letter from your master would have weight with him.”