School for Love (8 page)

‘Where’s Nikky?’ he asked.

‘Gone out a long time,’ she replied.

‘Mr Jewel would like some coffee.’

‘Coffee!’ repeated Maria, willing enough, too new to know the regulations. She looked round the dark, dingy kitchen and fixed her eyes on a cupboard. ‘No key. Coffee, tea, rice, sugar – all locked up.’

‘Oh, thank you,’ Felix replied politely and went back, glad he had done what he had been asked to do.

‘Humph,’ said Mr Jewel, ‘that’s that. Anyway, let’s sit somewhere a bit more comfortable.’

He and Frau Wagner took seats at either end of the horsehair sofa. Felix sat in one of the arm-chairs with wooden arms. They were near the fire now and Mr Jewel shook himself with a noisy shiver as he felt the heat.

‘Like an ice-box over there,’ he said.

Frau Wagner made no reply to him, but turned to Felix with an air of great interest and asked: ‘Tell me, what will you do when you grow up?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve got to go into the army.’

‘But the war will be over first, surely?’

‘I might go in, anyway. I want to be a veterinary surgeon. I’ll have to pass exams, of course.’

‘So? In England veterinary surgeons are gentlemens, perhaps?’

‘I suppose so. My uncle’s a vet.’

‘So?’

Since Miss Bohun left, Felix had felt a tension in the room. Perhaps for no reason other than that he had promised to stay in, he wanted to go out. Frau Wagner seemed to have nothing more to say but she smiled whenever he glanced at her. Mr Jewel was occupied with his pipe that he held in two pieces in his hand. He put a pipe-cleaner through the stem. The cleaner went in white and came out brown, then he blew through the stem, joined the two
pieces together and blew again. When he was satisfied, he got out an old tobacco pouch and started to fill the pipe. It all took a long time. Felix looked at the clock. It was only half-past seven and Miss Bohun would not be back for two hours or more. He moved restlessly in his seat, feeling like a prisoner.

‘Before you came here, you lived in Baghdad?’ enquired Frau Wagner. ‘Perhaps you had a nice home there?’

‘We only lived in a
pension
.’

‘Ah, a
pension
, but that is nice. And have you lived all the war in Baghdad?’

‘Yes. At first we had a house of our own, but when my father was killed, my mother could not afford it, so we went to a
pension
.’

‘He was killed!’ Frau Wagner shook her head in regretful sympathy. ‘Such a bad thing! How came it so?’

‘The Iraqis shot him,’ said Felix, gazing intently at a piece of string he had found in his pocket. He started tying knots in it. There was a lot to tell about his father’s death but his whole attitude expressed unwillingness to tell it. How could he tell anyone who looked as German as did Frau Wagner that the rising in which his father had been killed was a German-inspired rising? His restraint communicated itself to the others and even Frau Wagner gave up trying.

At last the clock struck a quarter to eight. Mr Jewel was smoking at his pipe as though it were the most engrossing thing in the room. Frau Wagner sat upright with her clasped hands on her knees. When she caught Felix’s glance she made one last attempt and, smiling, she pursed up her mouth and told him the spring would soon be coming. ‘You will like that, Felix.’

After that the silence went on as though no one had the strength to stop it.

There was something about the two of them sitting there apart on the sofa that touched Felix painfully. He fidgeted in his chair. Because Miss Bohun had said it would be wrong to leave them, he was obsessed by the sense that they wanted him to go; he felt it like a physical force impelling him to bolt from the room. He would not have minded could he have been sure, as Miss Bohun was, of their wickedness. The trouble was that he wasn’t at all sure, and on top of his uncertainty he was beset by something he could not bear. He did not know what it was. Suddenly he jumped up and said: ‘I’m going to the pictures.’

Frau Wagner let her breath out as though it had been pent up for some time.

Felix, without another word, ran upstairs for his coat. When he returned, he said good-bye and shook Frau Wagner’s hand with the enthusiasm of relief. Frau Wagner seemed relieved, too, and said happily: ‘Ah, at the Zion there is a so funny film.’

Out in the courtyard, Felix felt like a genie that had been let out of a bottle. He started to laugh at the idea, then, almost at once, remembered he had broken his promise to Miss Bohun. He stood still, wretchedly uncertain what to do, but knowing that whatever he did, he could not go back to the sitting-room. As he stood, he stared through the dirty lace curtains that covered Frau Leszno’s little window and saw Frau Leszno lying in bed. She had her back to him – her backside made a large curve in the bedclothes, her shoulders a smaller one, and at the top was the greasy knot of her hair. She held a
book in one hand and was reading by the light of an oil-lamp. Above the bed a heart made of pink sugar dangled from a ribbon. The room had been meant for an Arab servant and was no more than a whitewashed cell to hold a mattress. Frau Leszno had somehow got into it not only her bed and chair, but a large wardrobe. This furniture was stuck together like objects packed into a box. When he realised he was doing a quite inexcusable thing – staring into a lady’s bedroom – Felix made off at once.

In the street, he again did not know what to do. It was near the end of the month and he had no money for the cinema. His mother, who had lived on an allowance that died with her, had left a few hundred pounds that the British Consul in Baghdad, acting as executor, was doling out to Felix at the rate of £22 a month.

When the Consul heard that Miss Bohun was charging Felix £21 a month, he wrote to someone he knew at the Y.M.C.A. and discovered that Felix could live there for £4 less. He then wrote to Felix: ‘You would have your own room, with central heating and hot running water and I’m told the food is excellent. I advise you to put your name down at once.’

Felix tore up this letter in small pieces and burnt each separately, afraid Miss Bohun might see it and think that, after all her kindness, he was planning to leave for the sake of £4. But now he could not help thinking that an extra £4 a month would be jolly useful.

At Herod’s Gate he turned right and went uphill beside the long, dark city wall to the Jaffa Road. The Jaffa Road was the centre of life in Jerusalem, but after dark it looked like everywhere else, shut and deserted. A strict black-out was imposed on everything, except, of course, military
headquarters. The only sign of life appeared when someone opened a café door; with the momentary flash of light, there came a smell of fried food that made Felix realise he was still hungry. Indeed, at Miss Bohun’s he was always more or less hungry, but there was nothing to be done about it. Miss Bohun would never buy on the black market and there was very little food anywhere else.

As he passed the Jaffa Road cafés, he occasionally heard from behind the black-out curtains the sound of voices; in one café the wireless was repeating some Arab saga, in another someone was playing a kanoon. He, out in the cold, dark street, felt lost and without destination in the world. He went over the people he knew here – Miss Bohun and Mr Posthorn, Mr Jewel and Frau Wagner, Frau Leszno, Nikky and Maria. The only one who did not enhance the isolation of his youth was Mr Jewel, and Mr Jewel had Frau Wagner. Felix came to the first cinema and stood a long time staring at the ‘stills’ pinned into cases behind wire mesh and lit by small blue bulbs. They were pictures of a cowboy film he had seen in Istanbul months before. They were familiar but, because of the strange, inadequate light, they looked mysterious and exciting, and for some reason they reminded him of the dream he had had on the aeroplane.

He had never dreamt of his mother again. He might dream of Mr Posthorn or of Maria or of a camel he had seen pass the house, but he did not dream of his mother, who was the person most in his waking dreams. Now as he thought of her, he was filled with a longing for her so profound, his eyes swam with tears.

He went on down the street till he came to Zion Circus
and the cinema with the funny film that Frau Wagner had mentioned. This was the film he most wanted to see and he was able to put in a lot of time looking at the stills. He took out his money and recounted it, but he had not enough. Cinemas were expensive here; last week he had gone twice, for now the only place in which he was happy was the cinema; the world to which it gave him access was as much his as anyone’s. When the cold drove him on, he took a roundabout walk through the side-streets to look at two more cinemas he had discovered during his early days in Jerusalem. One had the stills inside a passageway that was warm and well lit, with basket-chairs and a palm or two. By pretending to be waiting for someone he was able to spend half an hour there. Sometimes he pulled aside his cuff a little as though glancing at a wrist-watch and sometimes he stared with an anxious, grown-up frown at the clock inside the paybox, but however long he stayed no one would come to say: ‘Hello Felix, darling, so sorry I’m late. I can’t think what kept me.’ (His mother was always late and never knew why.) He had to go in the end.

Twice, as he wandered about, he passed the post-office to see the time. He was afraid of returning too soon, but he arranged things so well that when he reached the gate of the house from one direction, Miss Bohun was coming towards it from the other. They met on the step. She peered at him through the darkness: ‘Is that you, Felix? You went out? You left them alone? After you
promised
me!’

He had expected her to be hurt, but because she was merely indignant, he did not mind so much. He said: ‘I couldn’t stay. They didn’t want me to. I thought perhaps you’d understand.’

‘Couldn’t stay? My dear boy, that’s exactly why I wanted you to stay.’

He hurried ahead with some idea of warning Mr Jewel and Frau Wagner that Miss Bohun was behind him, but he found the sitting-room dark and empty. As Miss Bohun crossed the yard, he ran up the stairs and managed to get out of sight before she switched on the light.

On Sunday morning Felix was hanging around the kitchen door. He was unencouraged but gained from the nearness of Nikky and Maria a sense of being in company. Ten minutes before he had watched Miss Bohun go off to the ‘Ever-Readies’, with Frau Leszno half a step behind. Miss Bohun, wearing her ‘cartwheel’, was giving instructions or advice, and this was met every few moments by Frau Leszno’s subservient whine: ‘Yes, Miss Bohun.’ ‘No, Miss Bohun.’ ‘Yes, Miss Bohun.’ The two women seemed now to be on better terms, a condition made more obvious to Felix by the fact that Miss Bohun had scarcely noticed him since his defection. He felt very low, very much in the wrong, and the cathedral bells with their repeated frill of noise seemed to him to be mapping out the monotony of the friendless days to come.

He leant against the kitchen door-frame and gazed fixedly at Nikky and Maria. Neither noticed him. Nikky was sitting on the kitchen table smoking a chocolate-coloured cigarette, and Maria, as slowly as a slow-motion film, was drying the breakfast dishes.

Maria was telling Nikky how, on her afternoon off, she had helped her son kill two tame pigeons at his place of employment.

‘My son,’ she was saying, ‘took the first and I held the second, so, so,’ she put down the tea-towel and cupped her two dark claws tenderly over nothing, ‘the first moved – ah, very much, but my son with a strike, so, cut off its head. And when the second one saw what had happened to her friend – ah, her little heart failed and her head drooped so, so—’ Maria’s head fell slowly to her shoulder, ‘and I called to my son: “Quickly kill this one or it will die,” and quickly, before it could die of fright, while I held it fainting so, he cut off its head.’

Nikky was not watching the old woman’s actions but staring out through the kitchen window. He smiled distantly and acknowledged the story with a down-twist of the lips.

Maria put the tip of her finger to a tear that lay in the wrinkle by her nose and trailed it off the edge of her face. ‘I have wept since.’

‘The old weep easily.’ Nikky took a slow, elegant pull at his cigarette and narrowed his eyes at the distance. His face was touched with amusement as he saw Mr Jewel go into the bathroom opposite with his slop-basin. He nodded towards the closing bathroom door:

‘We’re getting rid of that one,’ he said.

‘What? What?’ Maria turned quickly to look. ‘He is going, the old man upstairs?’

‘Yes. She has said to him: “Please Mr Jewel, take up your bed and walk.” To-morrow, he walks.’

‘You say!’ Maria breathed, then pursed her lips and shook her head slowly with surprise.

Felix was surprised, too. He had, it was true, overheard Miss Bohun promise Frau Leszno to ‘think about the attic’, but that had seemed to him no more than a
formula putting things off indefinitely – but now, suddenly, it was all accomplished; and behind his back. All the week Mr Jewel had been as silent as ever. Miss Bohun had been preoccupied, but when Felix spoke, she had answered with bright, aloof efficiency, forestalling the possibility of the suggestion that there was anything wrong anywhere. Yet, at some time, Miss Bohun had seen and spoken to Mr Jewel: everyone – Miss Bohun, Mr Jewel, Frau Leszno and Nikky – had known of the change coming in the house: Felix alone had known nothing. Used to his mother’s habit of discussing with him every move for days before making it, and used also to her inability to keep up a quarrel, he was startled by Miss Bohun’s withdrawal. Also the swiftness with which she had acted against Mr Jewel, seemed to him ruthless and frightening. To feel contact with someone, he spoke to Nikky, knowing as he spoke, he’d be snubbed for it.

‘But what will happen to Mr Jewel?’

Nikky slid his eyes round to look at Felix, then, without turning, twisted his mouth so that the smoke he blew out went in Felix’s direction. ‘This is a kitchen,’ he said. ‘A kitchen is for servants, not for little gentlemens. Now, be so kind and hop it.’

Felix went off slowly. He wandered down the passage to the garden. It was a bright morning. Osman, the gardener, stout and slow-moving, was bending awkwardly to pluck the new grass up from the gravel path. On seeing Felix, he straightened himself with relief, grinned and gave a greeting, touching his brow and heart. As all the language they had in common were the words similar in Palestinian and Iraqi colloquial Arabics, Felix knew from experience that it was not much use trying to talk to
Osman; besides, Miss Bohun had told him that Osman was paid by the hour so was not there to waste time in talk. Osman seemed only too happy to waste it. He made a long speech with gestures towards the sky and the grass. Felix smiled and nodded and replied, from habit, in Iraqi-Arabic; then began calling: ‘Faro, Faro.’