Arabesque

by GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD

20

AT ONE Cairo hotel after another Armande was bowed from her taxi by a gorgeously dressed luggage porter, and bowed back again. None had a room. She was weary of the polite and natty hotel clerks, weary of well-bathed officers leisurely departing from their rooms to GHQ, weary of the whole air of spurious smartness. She decided, as a last resort, to telephone the Major Honeymill recommended by Captain Fairfather.

The major’s voice was soothing. “Stay right where you are,” he said, “and I’ll come and fetch you before lunch. Let me talk to the manager.”

The manager engaged in smiling Arabic conversation over the telephone, in which there seemed to be a good deal of exclamatory backchat and, probably, of conventional masculine indecencies.

Major Honeymill evidently knew his Cairo. There was clapping of hands at the desk. A brown man in red robes and two black men in white robes made obsequious appearance. Madame would have a bath. Madame would have breakfast. It was deeply regretted that Madame could not yet be given a room, but meanwhile the hotel was at

Madame’s disposal. The chambermaid was ready with an iron.

When she came down to the lounge at midday, Armande was conscious of being fit to partner the gorgeousness of Major Honeymill.

Gorgeous he was. He wore a tall lambskin cap on his head, a green sash around the waist of his khaki sweater, desert boots, gray gabardine trousers, and bits of chain mail and shiny whistles in unexpected places. He was browned and slim as an Arab youth, though in his late thirties, and had a suggestion of Arab femininity in his sensitive face; of this he seemed to be aware, for he had grown a black mustache of remarkable ferocity.

Major Honeymill led her to an enormous staff car with an Arab driver almost as exquisitely uniformed as himself. They drove out to the Pyramids for lunch. Armande, knowing by this time how strongly the generals objected to the use for joy rides of army petrol and transport, was alarmed when the car was stopped by the Military Police. Major Honeymill gave his name and unit without the least sign of embarrassment. “What on earth will you say?” she asked.

“I shall say nothing,” he answered with a grin. “I shall just whisper. After all, it’s the Emir’s staff car. And I am merely his A.D.C. Is it not possible that I should sometimes escort to His Highness those women whom he delights to honor?”

“And you can get away with that?” she laughed. “How nice that you have a sense of humor! My dear, the simple soldiery will believe anything. But one must whisper. That is essential.”

The major was an enchanting host. His military duties were of the vaguest — mothering an aged and important Emir and training the Emir’s considerable body of retainers — and left him free, he said, for the far more important duty of preserving, in spite of all this military austerity, a reasonable standard of living in Cairo.

“I can put you up,” he said, “as long as you like, if you can stand the crush. Carry will fit you in somewhere.”

Armande protested politely but unconvincingly. “Carry will love to have you there,” he said. “I’ll telephone and let her know you are coming.”

The great car swept them back to Cairo, its driver, mindful of his master’s prestige, hooting even at the tramcars. Honeymill was dropped at his office, and Armande with her baggage taken on to his flat.

The driver let her into the flat and deposited her bags in the hall. Out of the hall opened a tiny kitchen and a very large living room, bare and masculine, but with a number of feminine garments strewn over the divans and thrown into corners. On the far side of the living room were only two doors. Armande recognized, regretfully, that there would indeed be a crush. She was going to be a nuisance to the Honeymills.

At the noise of her movements, a woman’s voice behind one of the closed doors shouted gaily, “Come in, Toots! I’m only having a bath.”

“It’s me, Armande Herne,” she said.

“Who?”

“Are you — er — Mrs. Honeymill?” asked Armande, feeling utterly foolish, for she was suddenly certain that there wasn’t any Mrs. Honeymill.

“I’m Carry Laxeter. Who are you?”

“Didn’t Major Honeymill telephone?”

“Oh, God! Toots is impossible,” came a despairing wail from the bathroom. “Wait a minute!”

The door opened, and a cloud of steam swept across the living room and out through the muslin mosquito curtains. With the mist about her strode a tall, angular woman attired in a man’s silk dressing gown. Her face had a cheerful grin, and her plucked eyebrows were humorously lifted.

“Have you come to stay with us?” she asked. “Well — yes,” said Armande, “if —”

“That’s lovely. You’ll be such a help with Xenia.”

“Xenia? ” “She’s a distressed Jugoslav. She lives here too. Jugoslavs do get so distressed. But I expect you need a drink — we can’t be bothered to make tea. There’s the gin in the cupboard. Are you any good at a Martini?”

“Yes,” said Armande humbly. “I think I am.”

“Be a darling and make me one too, then.”

Though it was only half past four, Armande mixed a couple of stiff drinks. The situation at Major Honeymill’s flat was, in the cold light of normal reason, incomprehensible; it might, she considered, fall into some sort of recognizable pattern if the outlines were softened by a cocktail.

“Cheers!” said Carry Laxeter. “That’s really good. Toots will make you mix the drinks.”

“Toots is Major Honeymill?” she asked.

“Yes. Didn’t you know? ”

“I — well, I only met him this morning.”

“Oh, God!” exclaimed Carry with a ripple of laughter. “Isn’t Toots delicious?”

“He has been very kind,” Armande replied primly. “But perhaps I didn’t appreciate —”

“It’s just that Toots is so hospitable. Arabs, darling,” Carry added vaguely. “You know.”

“But —”

“No, not a harem. You see, he put me up when I’d run away from my husband. And that was a bit awkward. So when Xenia came along, what was easier than to put her up too? And now there’s you.”

Armande involuntarily looked round the flat. There could not possibly be more than one bedroom.

Carry smiled at her bewilderment.

“Toots sleeps there,” she said, pointing to the second door, “and Xenia and I doss down in here. And if you’ll join us there’s a third divan for you.”

It seemed to Armande that the last words had been spoken with unnecessary firmness.

“I’d love to,” she answered, “for a day or two. Where is Xenia?”

“She was crying on Toots’s bed. But I think she has gone to sleep now. She’s fallen in love with Toots,” Carry explained.

“It wouldn’t be difficult.”

“But don’t. It’s useless.”

Armande smiled sympathetically. A slight bitterness on the ironical face of her temporary hostess showed that she too had fallen or, more probably, wanted to fall in love.

“ Don’t misunderstand me. He’s an angel,” Carry Laxeter went on. “But you never know how far it is just pity. And then there’s no privacy. An impossible man. Darling, if ever there were only one woman here, you can bet two of his pals from the desert would drop in and camp in the hall.”

21

WHEN Major Honeymill returned from the private staff work of his private war, he brought with him an Arab officer. Lieutenant Rashid Abd-er-Rahman ibn Ajjueyn looked more like a soldier than any man Armande had ever seen. Not for him were the puzzled, the deliberately firm-lipped, the heartily virile expressions of European officers. He was an Arab d’Artagnan, doubtless full of religious and social conventions of his own, but obviously capable of whipping off an enemy’s head without a change in his merry, velvet eyes or his straight carnivorous smile. Armande considered that if Major Honeymill had foreseen, as he probably had, some restraint in his domestic relations, he could not have chosen a better diversion.

“But this is delightful!” exclaimed Toots.

With a wave of his hand he implied his pride at seeing two such women in his room, and his satisfaction that Armande should be confidently mixing drinks.

“How is Xenia?”

“Xenia is here,” answered a thrilling voice from the doorway of his bedroom.

Xenia was very much there, one hand on each portal of the door, her head sunk upon her left shoulder. She was wearing an astonishing negligee of lace and white satin which clung to the more voluptuous curves of her young body, and cascaded everywhere else.

“Xenia, my sweet!” cried Toots. “Come and join the party!”

“I vas veeping,” announced Xenia solemnly, as if it had been an employment which needed serious concentration.

“Did you have a nice sleep, darling?” Carry asked.

“Xenia and I have not met yet,” Armande reminded Carry.

“Xenia, this is Armande Herne. She has come to this asylum to stay. I use the word in its proper sense, Toots—a refuge from the world.”

“It is rather like a bughouse, isn’t it?” said Toots proudly.

Xenia stared at Armande for an embarrassing moment; then, as if encouraged by the quiet smile, she slipped a plump arm under the tense, slim muscles of Armande’s, and entered the room under her protection.

“You vill be my friend, yes?”

“I do hope so.”

“You are kind. Ve vill both love him, yes?”

Toots and Carry went off into ripples of laughter.

Lieutenant Rashid observed the scene with a genial smile. He seemed perfectly at ease.

“What’s in the larder, Carry?” Toots asked.

“I expect Mahmoud didn’t leave anything. Shall we go out?”

“I wondered whether Armande mightn’t be too tired to go out after her journey,” said Toots diffidently. “So Rashid and I brought a porcupine.”

Rashid sprang joyously into the entrance hall, and returned waving the porcupine by its hind legs. It was naked of spines. Its nose was very long. Its throat gaped horribly from the Mohammedan knife.

“Sucking swine!” exclaimed Xenia enthusiastically. “With fingers! Yes, please?”

“ With fingers and on the floor in the Beduw manner,” Toots agreed.

“Then I change my dress. You come!” she ordered Armande, compelling her gently towards the bedroom.

Xenia flung off her imperial negligee, and looked in the mirror. “I’m I beautiful?” she asked.

“You are young,” Armande replied.

“And nobody loves me! Nobody!”

“Oh, I’m sure they do,” said Armande weakly, embarrassed by so much flesh and emotion.

“Nobody! He say, come and live with Carry and me! I think first I be servant. Then I think I be loved. I do not know, I do not care. He is so kind. I come. My mother dead, my father prisoner. What shall I do? I come. Then I find — nothing to do. I am just nice friend. I hate this Carry. I say, I go. He tell me not to be silly. I stay.”

“I shall speak to Toots about it,” said Armande severely.

She returned to the living room with Xenia, now all bouncing in a pinafore. Carry was draped gracefully against the entrance to the kitchen. The two men had removed their tunics and were happily at work: Rashid squatting on his heels by the open back door and blowing at a charcoal brazier, Toots struggling to disjoint the porcupine.

“Let me do it,” said Armande.

“You? I thought you were so . . .”

“Helpless?”

“Never! Ethereal!”

“But not for dinner. This is a rotten knife. Rashid Bey, lend me yours.”

Rashid grinned and stood up. Armande was sure that so boyish a character would have a good blade in his pocket; she expected him to go to his tunic and fetch it. Instead, he undid collar and tie, and lifted over his head a string of camel hair on the end of which was an eight-inch knife in a soft leather sheath. He laid the knife on the dresser for Armande to pick up.

“Good God!” exclaimed Toots. “I never knew you carried that thing under your shirt!”

Rashid, still grinning, watched Armande. She was absurdly proud to notice that he showed no sign of anxiety as she felt for the unfamiliar joints with the thin and precious leaf of damascened steel.

Carry said admiringly, “Darling, you are a dangerous woman!”

And from her own sex this time. Dangerous? Incompetent! What was the cause of this false impression she gave?

Rashid carried in the joints of porcupine, aromatic of herbs and charcoal, resting on a mound of rice. They put the dish in the middle of the floor and gathered round it on a ring of sofa cushions. Xenia, excited by alcohol and great gobbets of the supposed sucking pig, burst into Jugoslav song until, with startling suddenness, she fell asleep. Carry became more lavish with her terms of endearment, the more pungent her wit. Rashid flashed his merry, watchful smile, but said little. Either his habit of downing a cocktail in a single draught, or the pious Arabic exclamation which followed, seemed to act as an antidote.

At midnight Rashid carried on a courteous and conventional argument with Toots — Toots protesting that he must stay the night, Rashid swearing that it was the desire of his heart but impossible.

Toots was more decisive when Rashid had gone. He came back yawning, and produced for Armande a pair of the finest linen sheets and a heap of rough army blankets. Then he said good night and vanished into the bedroom.

“What are the arrangements for the morning?” Armande asked Carry.

“We all pretend to be asleep, darling, while Mahmoud brings Toots his breakfast in bed.”

Armande unpacked her suitcase, and went to bed. Carry turned out the light.

“Good night,” she said. “And I’m sorry.”

“What for?”

“Whatever I said that reminded you. I think that in these days every woman in Cairo has a word — you know, a sort of talisman — which will spoil her mood.”

22

I MUST earn my living,” Armande announced to Toots one afternoon when the others were out.

Toots leaned forward to flick the ash off his cigarette. “Don’t hurry. It seems only yesterday you came here.”

“It’s three weeks,” she insisted.

“What’s three weeks in a lifetime? Do take a bit more time to look round.”

“I have looked round.”

It was true; and the looking round, even with good introductions, had been depressing. For an Englishwoman without any technical qualifications, there was no possible paymaster but the army. Neither to Toots nor to any prospective employer could she bring herself to explain why the army would not do.

“I want you to stay on in the flat when I go,” he said.

“No, I won’t, Toots, my dear.”

“Who’ll look after Carry and Xenia?”

“What on earth makes you think that they can’t look after themselves?”

“Perhaps I haven’t thought of that enough,” he said courteously, but evidently considering her unkind.

“You haven’t thought of it at all, Toots. You’re just holding them as prisoners.” “But they are so lost.”

“How long will you be away?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Depends on Rommel. We might fetch up anywhere.”

“Then let Carry stop here alone, and find herself. But Xenia is no more lost than a bird. She sorrows and flutters and mates and dances, and goes through joy and agony every day of her life. Get her a job in one of the Jugoslav camps, Toots. So long as she has a lover and can be useful, she is fulfilled. . . . Where are you going?”

“Into the desert,” he replied. “And soon. That’s why I’ve had to talk to you seriously.”

“Do what I ask about Carry and Xenia.”

“I will.”

For a week Armande was all brittle courage, which led her only into exploration of Cairo and a few improbable interviews. One morning as she let herself flow through the streets upon the tide of busy human beings, hoping for inspiration from their very variety, she found Floarea Pitescu, the Rumanian cabaret girl she had met in Beit Chabab, decorating the Rue Soleiman Pasha. Armande carried her off for cakes and coffee, noticing with amused interest the appraisal that they received, and the little silences as they passed between the crowded tables of the garden café.

While they strolled through the streets, Floarea’s enthusiastic chatter, illuminated by an occasional fact tersely expressed, had made it clear that she was in Egypt to get an engagement, that the Romanova, her so-called mother, was still with her and well, and that times were hard.

“How do you like Egypt?” Armande asked. “Have you got no work at all?”

“Just odd jobs as a photographer’s model. This sort of thing!” Floarea hunted in an oversmart bag of white patent leather, and produced a photograph in which she was lying dazzlingly and completely naked on a Victorian sofa.

“Good?” she asked, with the tolerant pride of an artist in a minor but efficient production.

“Well . . .” began Armande, too startled to criticize.

Floarea’s face in the photograph was so serious and composed that it gave to the portrait a grave beauty. The pose was not languishing enough to advertise clothes — which indeed it hardly could — or any object of feminine vanity or masculine desire.

“What on earth is it for?”

“Constipation. Pills.”

“Have you got to do that kind of thing?” Armande asked.

“Why not? I am waiting to dance at a smart locale. I will not take an engagement at the secondrate.”

“But you’re heaps better than all these old turns in Cairo that everybody is tired of. Haven’t they given you a trial?” “Oh, yes. But the conditions, my dear! The proprietor! Even the doorman! In Bucharest one is allowed some choice. But Cairo is a great brothel.”

“Floarea,” Armande suggested, “what would happen if you and I asked for a job together?”

“You?”

“I can dance — or at least I could.”

“That doesn’t matter. But . . . are you all right? I mean, we shouldn’t have any trouble with the police?”

“Why should I have?” asked Armande indignantly. “And what about you? An enemy subject!”

“I am a Jewess,” said Floarea smugly.

“Are you? I didn’t know.”

“No, Armande. I am Orthodox,” Floarea replied, drawing out from her bosom a small gold cross and kissing it. “I wear my cross, though I hide it — and may God forgive me for the lie! But Mama found out that artistes were allowed to work and travel if they were Jews. So we learned a prayer in Hebrew, and said that we were. They say it’s dangerous in Palestine, that there is a secret Jewish police who ask too many questions. But here we were believed. Is it wrong, do you think?”

“Not for you,” Armande answered. “It’s a policeman’s world, this — and each of us must do what she can. Is there anywhere with a piano where we can practice? Then you can see how much I’ve forgotten, and make up your mind.”

“Yes. At our rooms. Mama will be there.”

The Romanova greeted Armande with reserve. Her eyebrows, painted in two appealing semicircles high on the aging forehead, were raised more in interrogation than welcome. Sitting with her was the landlady, whom she called Ecaterina. Floarea explained, in a rush of emphatic and musical Rumanian, the reason for Armande’s visit.

“Let us see,” said Romanova neutrally.

She led the way to a room which was empty except for a piano and a stool.

“Can you lend me some clothes?” Armande asked Floarea.

“I got ‘im!” said the landlady, bursting importantly into English. “Nice, clean! I know what you like.”

She had been staring at Armande with embarrassing approval. She now waddled out of the room, and returned with a neatly ironed play suit, thoroughly practical except for a quantity of fishfin frills.

“I like English,” she said.

Romanova looked critically at Armande’s legs.

“Tap?” she asked.

“Classical.”

“Not without more muscles in your calf than that, my girl! But you’ll certainly give the clients something to look at.”

Romanova seated herself at the piano. She began to play, watching Armande’s interpretation of the music.

“Oh, my God!” exclaimed Floarea regretfully.

“Little fool! After all, you don’t know a thing!” snapped the Romanova. “She can manage her arms— which is more than you ever will till you stop thinking how pretty they are. —You’re hopelessly out of training,” she added to Armande.

“I know. How long would it take to get back?”

“Months.”

“Well, that’s that,” said Armande.

“But I thought you wanted to dance with this child, not ballet. You’d be good enough to partner her in a fortnight — if you really worked.”

Floarea stood still, her shocked eyes filling with tears. Then she suddenly swooped across the room, lifted Romanova off the piano stool and kissed her.

“Mama! Will you stop trying to take the conceit out of me!”

Romanova, for the first time, smiled at Armande, as if she too must admire the relationship between this impetuous girl and her so-called mother. Armande did admire it. She also began to think more kindly of the Romanova than at Beit Chabab. There was, after all, no real reason why a woman should ever remove powder from her face if she didn’t want to.

“Can I train here?” she asked.

“Yes. Two hours in the morning alone with me. Two hours in the afternoon with Floarea. If you do less, I won’t take you. Are you eating well? You look like it.”

“Very well,” said Armande guiltily. “And — and you?”

“On tick. Ecaterina is an old friend” — Romanova lifted her eyebrows in the direction of the door through which the landlady had gone — “but getting restive. Pay for the lessons if you can.”

Armande, now committed to a future that appalled her, forced herself to ask whether Mme. Ecaterina had a room that she could occupy. Ecaterina had. It was clean, Armande discovered, and could have been cheerful if scissors had lopped off the fringes of bedcover, curtains, lamp shades, and mantelpiece.

“What’s your name when you dance?” Armande asked Floarea.

“Mavis. It’s romantic.”

“It’s suburban — but if you like it! Then I will be Marthe. Mavis and Marthe. Will that do? I will come tomorrow, Mama, for a lesson. And I will take the room, Mme. Ecaterina, at the end of next week.”

23

MAVIS and Marthe, new, exciting, and of pre-war loveliness, had no difficulty in obtaining a profitable engagement where they chose. Armande decided on the Casino. It was out of bounds to British troops, and therefore less embarrassing to her first shyness; and it was about to move out of winter quarters into its attractive summer garden by the Nile. At their interview the proprietor, though a good business Greek, was unable to hide his enthusiasm at his unexpected gift from heaven.

Their engagement opened at the end of April. Romanova had arranged two numbers designed to show the grace and ease of her pupils, but demanding no more than a beginner’s skill upon the points. The artistes at the summer Casino were not confined between tables; there was a good stage upon which to exploit the romance of flowing skirts and swirling draperies.

The first number was a waltz of the crinoline period, with Armande in white organdie, Floarea in sea green, and an atmosphere of innocent girlhood at the court of Vienna or St. Petersburg — Armande was never sure which. In the second number they were two butterflies, and dressed in little else than wings attached to jeweled brassière and thigh, wrist, and shoulder. Romanova made no secret of her intentions: to show the beauty of Armande’s arms to the lover of ballet, and as much of Floarea as the police permitted to the connoisseur of women. Armande agreed only after violent argument.

“But why, Armande?” Floarea asked at last. “You wouldn’t mind swimming in just as little as you will wear as butterfly.”

“That’s different.”

“But why?”

“I suppose,” replied Armande, flushing, “because I am not being stared at by men.”

“But you are,” said the Romanova. “There are always a lot of cretins on any beach with nothing else to do.”

“I’m not being paid for them to look at anyway.”

“That’s just the point,” Romanova snapped. “At the Casino you are being paid.”

“All right, all right,” said Armande, wearily surrendering. “Give me my wings. Measure me for my — what do you call it, Mama?”

“ Cache-sexe,” answered Romanova modestly.

“Well, for heaven’s sake see that it does.”

Toots and Rashid had vanished from Cairo. Armande received a number of visits and telephone calls from their friends, but was deliberately evasive. She writhed under an intolerable sensation that everyone was staring at her, that women despised her, and that men would congratulate each other, with guffaws and warnings to be careful, on the entertainment of that pretty piece from the Casino.

Carry Laxeter refused to be dropped. She treated the Casino as if it were a smart London restaurant with a floor show. Carry’s humor was a refuge. Armande clung to her as a companion, and loved her as the last existing bond between herself and her past life.

Seen through Carry’s eyes, two at least of her fellow performers were engaging; but Carry, she knew, would only laugh if Miss Fatima ended in jail and Mlle. Joliette were pulled in for compulsory medical examination. They were objects for pity and sympathy, not for laughter. Yet, if one were thrown into their society, were, in fact, to the outer world their equal and colleague, an understanding laughter was the only possible working attitude.

Miss Fatima was a pure Egyptian with the morals of the Old Testament. Her ambition was to become the concubine of the highest in the land, in order to gain power for herself and security for her relatives. Yet she — with the possible exception of Floarea — was the only sincere artist of the Casino. Fatima spent hours every day in a practice of muscle control that would have done credit to a Yogi disciple. Her object was to move breasts, stomach, and abdomen in ever increasing circles, sometimes clockwise below and anticlockwise above, while reducing the movement of her feet to a mere suggestion of action as delicate as a Chinese poem. Armande realized that it was art of the highest standard, but to European eyes it did not seem sufficiently integrated. It was so hard to watch the exquisite nuances of emotion expressed by Miss Fatima’s ankles and toes while appalled by the gyrations of her torso.

Mlle. Joliette’s technique, on the stage or at a table, was the Christian appeal of innocence to chivalry. She was a blond little angel, largely French, who had lived the first fifteen years of her life in Tunis and the last five in artistes’ hotels. Joliette was utterly indifferent to men and to sentiment; she did not care whether a client had known her an hour or whether he had been buying her champagne for a week, whether he was moderately white or definitely brown; her price was 3000 prewar francs, neither more nor less, and before yielding, with a delicious simulation of shyness and terror, to romance in any currency she would work out the exchange to ensure that she had really been offered the magic sum. Had Joliette delivered her will-o’-the-wisp beauty for 2800 francs, she would have considered herself both dishonored and a bad mathematician.

In the middle of June the Casino was packed as ever, but the character of the audience had changed. Armande found the place more tolerable. The regular habitués, young moneyed and idle sons of Christian and Moslem business, were disappearing. The rich Greeks and Jews had gone. Joliette complained of hard times. Talk on the floor was of nothing but Rommel’s advance and the fall of Tobruk.

The civilians comforted themselves by rumors. Then came the day when the chimneys of GHQ poured upwards a volcano of black smoke, and the ash of burned paper settled on the roofs and streets and gardens of Cairo’s diplomatic quarter. That soldiers should burn the paper they so industriously produced seemed to the Egyptians as clear evidence of impending defeat as if they had thrown away their arms. There was little comfort in rumors. This was it — the dreaded end. The Germans and Italians were coming, and the café politicians realized in sudden panic that they had no notion what the victorious armies would do, and what they would not — it was pretty generally admitted that there was nothing they would not.

The following morning Carry called on Armande at Mme. Ecaterina’s flat. She said that all British women, except essential workers, were to be immediately evacuated to Kenya, that she had been ordered by the Consulate to round up any who could not readily be reached through husbands or employers, and that she and Armande would leave together and stay together.

“But what about Floarea and Mama?” asked Armande.

“Darling, they’ll be all right. Even Hitler doesn’t know whose side the Rumanians are on.”

“Yes,” said Armande doubtfully. “I suppose they will be all right.”

She had kept the secret that they were officially Jews. That was their business. She wondered whether there were any Egyptian police records from which the SS, scavenging in the wake of the Afrika Korps, could justifiably decide that Jews they were. “Carry, I’m not going to run away,” she said. “What on earth would I do?”

“I suppose they’ll put us in camps. You know — stew for breakfast and the things they call latrines.”

“Distressed Englishwomen!” Armande exclaimed bitterly. “Like Xenia. What a kick the army will get out of being gallant and chivalrous!”

“Oh, darling, don’t be so morbid! We have to be sent away while there is still time.”

“Where to?”

“Kenya, darling,” answered Carry impatiently.

“Kenya? That’s internment too. Oh, my dear, it would be like committing suicide. If the war is lost, what does it matter where I am or what happens to me? I will take it here if I must.”

“Shall I stay with you then?”

“No, dearest. They would make any amount of trouble for you. As you say, it’s an order. Goodbye, my darling.”

24

SERGEANT PRAYLE dismounted from a dusty truck and entered the Field Security Depot in a quiet Cairo square. Gathered up immediately by his acquaintances — who made it clear in the first five minutes that the Cairo underworld demanded a lot more brains than any open spaces — Sergeant Prayle felt a country cousin. Asked what the devil he was doing in Cairo anyway, he explained that he had been sent for to give his personal advice to the Commander-in-Chief, and thereby, even among his discreet colleagues, gained credit for discretion. The fact was that he had not the least idea who wanted him; nor had his section officer, Captain Wyne, known. His instructions were simply to report to such and such an office on such and such a floor in GHQ. He could not remember which it was without referring to his Movement Order.

In the morning Prayle approached, circumspectly, the two huge blocks of former flats that were GHQ. They were surrounded by formidable barriers of barbed wire, guarded by Egyptian ghaffirs. GHQ were certainly in a flap, he decided, but they did look purposeful. Good old army good old country if it came to that — which always had to hit bottom before it did any work!

The office to which he reported was very small, and bore evidence of being hastily furnished for a new department of the staff. It had been a luxury bathroom. The fixtures were boxed in with plywood and heaped with files. A staff sergeant was busily typing on the bathtub.

Prayle passed through the bathroom into a larger office where the heat was more bearable. Major Furney had grown a little fatter, and looked a more integral part of the army than in Beirut. He rose from his desk and greeted Prayle affectionately.

“Good old Field Security! Always around when wanted!”

“What do you do, sir?”

“We are organizing what will be left behind if Egypt goes.”

“Is it going?”

“I don’t think so for a moment. But it would be sad if Jerry were left alone in Cairo without any of us to help him.”

“Have you got some good chaps?”

“Yes. And I have a useful couple in mind. You remember the mysterious Armande Herne?”

Prayle felt his face flush with resentment.

“Why didn’t you do anything?”

“I couldn’t, my dear man,” Furney replied. “And apart from Mrs. Herne, do you suppose I wouldn’t have given my right hand to save Montague? I got the whole affair reviewed by the DMI. But those damned palace eunuchs had a convincing case on paper. Always paper! And they just said: ‘Oh yes, dear Guy, so impetuous!’ And, blast them, in a way they were right! I hadn’t a single proof beyond my own certainty and yours. And so they went and black-listed Mrs. Herne, and the French put Montagne under close arrest.”

“He escaped, you know.”

“I do know. He’s in Cairo.”

“Good man!” Prayle exclaimed enthusiastically. “We’ve been looking for him all over Syria and the Lebanon — not too hard. Do we know officially that he’s here?”

“No, unofficially. I’ve been told I can have him, provided the French don’t find out. His cover is perfect, you see. Interned by the French as a fifth columnist — what more natural than that he should escape to the enemy? Mrs. Herne’s cover is good, too.”

“Poor Little Doings! Can’t you leave her out?”

“She’s dancing in a cabaret, you know.”

“Butterflies,” Prayle mumbled irritably.

He had kept himself informed of Armande’s movements, and had filled up the gaps in his knowledge at the depot bar.

“Cabaret is not good enough for her,” Furney added.

“And what the hell else could she do, sir?”

“I didn’t mean it as a criticism. You suggested that I shouldn’t bother her, but a girl who could pull off that deal with Wadiah is simply wasted where she is.”

“She’s browned off with the lot of us.”

“Probably. But she’s patriotic. You and I know that. And she is known to the Egyptian police to be black-listed. She stayed behind when she might have been evacuated. She could pass as a Frenchwoman, and I could fix her up with a French passport and all the papers to prove her movements for the last three years. It’s a gift! That’s what I wanted you for — to swear to my bona fides. Otherwise I doubt if she’d listen.”

“I’ll try to sell it, but no guarantee.”

“Then suppose you go down to the Casino tonight, and feel out the situation. And you might take Montagne with you so that they can recognize each other. He’s grown a beard and he is dark as an Egyptian and his name is Makrisi. There’s a little café in Boulak. I’ll get him to meet you there at eight.”

By the evening Sergeant Prayle had borrowed a white civilian suit — the Cairo City section was as well supplied with clothes as a theatrical touring company — and stuck a carnation in his buttonhole. Raffish, he decided, but genial.

The directions that Furney had given him were delightfully systematic — a little map after his own heart, marked with blue arrows and red crosses. The last blue arrow led him into a lane between crumbling walls of sun-dried mud; there he came upon a native cafe, patched with flattened petrol tins and roofed with straw, but well supplied with bottles. The last red cross represented a small yard in which were a kitchen and a few tables under a single tree. There were no troops, no Europeans. The only customers were a pair of Coptic clerks who were drinking coffee. Sergeant Prayle ordered a bottle of the thick Delta wine, stretched his legs, and looked up through the foliage at the moonlit sky.

“Bon soir, my policeman!”

Montagne’s low voice was the first indication of his presence. He was the perfect small Christian employee, in broken shoes, dirty alpaca suit, and frayed linen. They certainly learned a thing or two in the French service, Prayle thought. If there was anything wrong with his disguise, it was that he looked too well-fed. Only his deep, fanatical eyes were recognizable.

“Congratulations!” Prayle said. “I should never have known you.”

25

PRAYLE and Montagne arrived at the Casino just before the show began. On the whole, Prayle gave the place his blessing; it was not one of those dives which would wreck Armande’s health and complexion, and it was not primarily arranged for talking to the artistes in quiet corners. The Casino, he observed, was more a garden theater than a cabaret, and, if there had been no Armande and no duty, he would have dragged Montagne off to some other joint more likely to reward his long abstinence upon the desert hills.

The audience he could not love. Yet why in the world he should consider the lazy gentle Egyptians and Egyptian Europeans to be less desirable contacts for Armande than boiled shirts and brigadiers he could not tell. The trouble was, he decided, that whenever he thought of Armande he was slightly corrupted himself by her conventional background.

He thought of her often and vividly, as if she were in the next tent or a village down the road, likely to turn up at any moment. He could not deny that she had become an essential part of his life, though he preferred to ascribe her intrusion simply to their partnership in the disposal of Fouad. He treasured her last message as evidence, at least, of friendship: a message which Fairfather, delivering it quite casually one day when they met over a crazy hunt for parachutists on the slopes of Hermon, swore that she had uttered with decent repentance and in all sincerity — Give him my love.

“lndigne,” murmured Montagne with bitter emphasis. He referred to the acrobats. This new Montagne — and the old one, too, to some extent — was as bad as an earnest reformer for taking the pleasure out of anything one might be doing. Thank God that he appeared to approve of the next turn! Miss Fatima’s rolypoly nakedness roused him to remark; “She works, that animal!”

But Mlle. Joliette failed to enchant. Montagne poured a whiskey into the untidy gap between his beard and mustache and called her a putain.

Armande and Floarea floated onto the stage in their first number.

“And that — that is responsible,” said Montagne, as if marveling that anyone so unimportant as a cabaret dancer, or, perhaps, anyone so unsubstantial as Armande, could have caused him disaster.

“She suffered too,” Prayle reminded him.

“Yes, Furney explained to me. But, all the same, what folly! Well, she must love those Zionists as much as I do. I did not remember that she was so pretty.”

The dancers sank in a curtsey at the end of their waltz, and Prayle caught Armande’s eye. She looked at him almost with resentment, her expression changing instantly to delighted surprise. She waved a hand to assure him she would come over after the show.

Prayle was contented. His Little Doings hadn’t changed a bit. That moment of doubt, followed immediately by generosity, was like her. Of course the silly little piece would be ashamed to be kicking up her legs in front of a friend she used to patronize, and of course, one second afterwards, she would be happy that he was a friend and there.

Sergeant Prayle took a deep draught of his whiskey and soda and relaxed.

After the show Armande swept through the tables towards him, her movements followed by the turning of scores of deep brown, melancholy eyes. Prayle had never seen her so lovely, so spiritually unapproachable. She looked, he thought, like a priestess or like a willing sacrifice, a Jephthah’s daughter. Her only ornament was a gold belt. The pleats of her soft white frock opened and closed, as she walked, over the smooth outlines of knee and thigh.

“Well, Sergeant Prayle?” she asked, as he rose to meet her.

It was a general humorous question, inviting comment on everything from her surroundings to his military career. Her face had changed; it had preserved its delicacy, but was less mannered.

“Too good for this place,” he answered, and then added, feeling obscurely that what he had said was a needless platitude: “Your dance, I mean.”

Armande smiled. Sergeant Prayle in his white suit and carnation was delicious. He looked like some tall, spare colonial statesman out on a spree, his crooked face so full of intelligence, embarrassment, and good will.

“This is Mr. Makrisi,” he said.

Montagne put his hand on his heart, bowed and gabbled a compliment.

“Where did you learn such beautiful French?" Armande asked.

“In Paris, Madame. — Well, my sergeant, I am off. Tomorrow at eleven. Same place.”

As soon as he had gone, Armande remarked, “ I’ve seen him before somewhere, and he hadn’t a beard. Should I or shouldn’t I try to remember?”

“Just bring to boiling point and let it simmer,” Prayle replied. “What will we drink? Does the management give you colored water in this place?”

“It does if we want it. But tonight,” she said, acknowledging his loyalty with soft and merry eyes, “I would like a very long, very strong whiskey and soda with lots of ice in it. Tell me about Fouad.” “Nothing to tell. We got away with it. He’s a full corporal, I hear, and bursting with pride. Fun to be an Arab when there’s a war on!”

Floarea and the Romanova came down the steps, and sat at a beflowered table. Armande made no signal. After a while they joined Miss Fatima and a party of South Africans in civilian dress.

“I like Auntie,” said Prayle approvingly. “Circus horse retired. Does she take a commission?”

“Auntie does not,” Armande replied. “But she shares whatever is going, and she deserves it.”

Prayle grinned approvingly at her firmness.

“Doghouse for me,” he said. “But a year ago Auntie — well, she wouldn’t have been your type. I’d have said.”

“She trained me.”

They sipped their drinks and exchanged the bare facts of the recent past.

“Don’t you dance?” Armande asked.

“No.”

“Then what do you usually do in a place like this?”

“Play the fool on the floor if I get drunk enough.”

“Did you never dance at home?”

“Not my style of beauty.”

Sergeant Prayle, then, had never been in love; or, if he had, had never made any determined effort to win his beloved. Armande warmed to him. He was so certain that he was not attractive to women; yet attractive he was, if one looked, as it were, at the vitality of the drawing and not the caricature itself. He had already changed the subject. She was suddenly certain that Sergeant Prayle was profoundly interested in her, and doubtful about admitting it even to himself.

“Now don’t get alarmed,” he was saying. “It has nothing to do with security this time.”

“What hasn’t?”

“Weren’t you listening?”

“I was thinking of something else. But tell me.”

“Mr. Makrisi and I came to see you about a job. Cloak and dagger.”

“I don’t want to be involved in any more of it.”

“King and Country,”

“But they don’t need me.”

“They do. It’s all on the square. That’s why I was sent for to Cairo — to give you my word that it’s the real goods this time.”

“And do you think it is?” she asked.

“So real that I hope you’ll say no.”

“I’m glad you think I’ll say yes. So glad.”

To Prayle the emotion in her voice was astounding. He had never dreamed that she cared what he thought of her. In fact he was sure that up to now, or up to, perhaps, some indefinable point in her private life, she never had cared. The whole essence of his relationship with her, since their first antagonistic interview, was that neither his appearance nor his opinions could be of the slightest importance to her. “I know you so well, Mrs. Herne,” he said, his deep, tender voice expressing the melancholy of such useless knowledge.

“Why not Armande?”

“Always were, really.”

“Well?” she asked merrily. “And am I to go on calling you Sergeant Prayle? What about your Christian name?”

“Damn awful.”

“I might like it. What is it?”

“Percy.”

“Yes, I wouldn’t choose it any more than you,” said Armande frankly. “Got any more?”

“Worse and worse. Dionysius.”

“Percy Dionysius Prayle,” she repeated with smiling respect. “It ought to have D.D. after it. An obscure but eminent scholar.”

“Probably what Pa intended.”

“What was he?”

“Under porter in an Oxford college.”

“Ah!” Armande exclaimed, suddenly seeing in proper perspective her sergeant’s classless intelligence, his social nihilism. “Well, I shall call you Dion. 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 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 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.

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

“Not us. A GHQ 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 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 aboveboard 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, 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, David Nachmias’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 her 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 army politicians? If the French had only court-martialed 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. 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.”

“Poor, poor Montagne!” she said softly. “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 nationalities all mixed up. 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? Natürlich! 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.

“You won’t be pulled in for serious interrogation unless you slip up. If you are, play Kensington. Look at the Gestapo sergeant as if he were a piece of mud. Then he’ll think you’re Churchill’s French cousin, or something. Terrific sense of class the Krauts have. You’ll get interrogated by a major with a monocle. Keep him interested, and he’ll be so busy making excuses for Hitler that he’ll forget half the questions he meant to ask. 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. 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, 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.”

26

PRAYLE left the Casino and endeavored to find a taxi with a full petrol tank. When he was satisfied, he gave the driver fifty piasters 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.”

“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.”

“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 twos 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, 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, 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.

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.”

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

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.

“Was that coarse, Dion? Or bitter?”

“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 whiskey. 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.”

“I don’t want any new values.”

“Don’t you? In your own twilight, little lamp, don’t you? I know. I’ve watched you being bored with the lot of them. Of course you were. So desperately wanting to be needed that you gave yourself to all that nonsense in Beit Chabab. And all the while I needed you. Do now. Always shall.”

“I can’t help it.”

“You can. I need you because you are the only human being I love, really love. Because I am dead without you. Isn’t that a new value? Have you ever refused such a need of you?”

“Dion, that’s not fair!”

“It is. You’re not cruel. You just don’t see. When you’re needed, you aren’t there.”

“Dion, will you stop it?” she cried.

“No, I won’t. I need you.”

“It’s impossible — some beastly, sordid hotel.”

“No. A white room on the edge of the desert. And flowers. And when I ring the bell, a simple, sleepy, friendly black man to receive us.”

“I will not. You’ve been there before.”

“Of course. But alone.”

“Promise me.”

“All my life I have been alone. Don’t you know it?”

Prayle held her across his heart as he leaned forward to order the driver: “Back to Helwan, habibi!”

“No!”

“Shut up, Armande my beloved, shut up!”

“Dion, I shall never forgive myself.”

“Tell me that tomorrow. At dawn. If you believe it.”

(To be concluded)