The following morning they were on the move again, heading towards Tripoli.
Ayesha, wearing the white robes once more, her head-cloth across her face, rode several horses’ lengths in front. His face shadowed by the browfold of his headgear, Kelly watched her intently, ridiculous thoughts running through his head. There had been other girls before – the girl in New York and the Ice Maiden in Kiel – but they’d been older than he had and had made the running, enjoying teaching him the facts of life. This was different. He’d been the dominant partner and had known that this was what Ayesha had wanted.
He had awakened dazzled and humbled with her sleeping quietly alongside him, her head on his shoulder, her lips parted, her body soft and warm against him.
‘I’m glad it happened,’ she had announced gravely as her eyes had opened. ‘It makes so much more sense of all the rest of life.’
She was trying hard to be strong-minded, frank and intelligent, as doubtless she’d been taught by her English teachers. Cheltenham Ladies’ College would have been proud of her, and he wondered how much Jemil knew. The old man’s face was expressionless and he had greeted Kelly unemotionally as he had brought the horses round.
They rode all day and camped at night alongside the road to the coast, Ayesha keeping herself well away from the others, with Jemil between her and the rest of the party. During the following day, Kelly rode alongside her. She didn’t look at him but held her head up, her eyes in front.
‘I long for you,’ she said quietly.
That night, Kelly lay apart from the rest of the group, listening, his heart thumping at every sound. But no one came near him and, unable to sleep, his mind filled with thoughts of Ayesha, he tossed restlessly in his blanket. Then, long after everyone was asleep, he heard a stone click and caught a whiff of perfume. A moment later she was alongside him, clinging to him. Taking his hand, she laid it on her breast inside her robe and her lips sought his fiercely.
‘I could not stay away,’ she breathed.
They made love like children, without regard for the others, and as she lay panting alongside him, he glanced up. Dark against the night sky, a tall figure was waiting and he caught his breath. Then he realised it was Jemil and that the old man was a party to the business.
She left his side before daylight, and as they mounted in the grey light of dawn, her face was covered again and she rode ahead of them as if she’d never noticed Kelly. Eventually, they saw the sea in the distance and began to descend to the coast. The water was shining in the sun over the flat roofs of the port. As they stared at it, Ayesha dropped back.
‘Here we must be careful,’ she said quietly, the keen military planner once more. ‘Turkey might be dying of overstrain, but her military governors are men of agility and suppleness. Many of them are descendants of Greeks, Albanians, Circassians, Bulgars, Armenians and Jews, and though Turkey might be decaying, they are not.’
For a few minutes they rode together down the hill until they reached the first scattering of houses. Turkish troops moved about, their ear-flapped khaki caps over their eyes against the sun.
‘I shall never forget you,’ Ayesha murmured.
‘Ayesha, what can I do?’
Her head went up. ‘Only tell your people our needs,’ she said.
He was just about to reply when she reined in, and he saw a Turkish outpost ahead of them.
‘If anything happens,’ she said, ‘take the road to the right. It leads direct to the water’s edge. You’ll find plenty of friends.’ Her hand touched his. ‘We shall be able to hold them up if they are suspicious. Your duty will be not to hesitate.’
‘ I can’t leave you.’
‘You are used by your training to obey orders. You must not look back.’
As she kicked her horse into motion, the little column edged forward, and immediately the Turks began to emerge from a small red-tiled hut to fill the road. An officer wearing a sword appeared and the men parted for him.
Ayesha stopped. On their right was a narrow road winding between cypresses down the slope. ‘That is your road,’ she said quietly. ‘Don’t hesitate. It takes longer than this one but it will lead you into the city. You are a naval officer, so you should be able to find the sea, I think.’
As she moved forward, the little column lengthened, first Ayesha, then Jemil, then the others, with the British party waiting at the rear as they all passed, and as the leading riders stopped, the whole column came to a halt, strung out in small groups along the road like a broken bead necklace.
‘The road on the right, Rumbelo,’ Kelly said quietly. ‘If there’s shooting, that’s where we go. Without hesitation. Pass the word.’
‘What about His Nibs? If there’s shooting, he’s going to be the first to cop it.’
‘Those are our instructions. We’re expected to do as we’re told.’
Rumbelo frowned. ‘I don’t like leaving people in the lurch, sir, when they’re making sacrifices to help us.’
Kelly scowled, his own thoughts mixed and angry. ‘What’s the good of them making sacrifices if we don’t take advantage of them? If there’s trouble, we go at once. Pass it on to the others.’
They waited as a noisy argument full of shrill voices started. The day was cold and the wind blew a gritty dust in their faces. The horses fidgeted restlessly and Rumbelo shifted uncomfortably in the saddle. Up ahead the voices were growing louder and the Turkish officer was pointing to the rear of the column where they waited.
‘We’ve been spotted,’ Rumbelo whispered.
A shot rang out, the echo clattering across the valley. Immediately, as though they’d been instructed what to do, the Arabs in front of them flung themselves from their saddles and dived among the rocks, their rifles pointing towards the Turkish outpost. The Turkish officer was lying on his face in the road and the horses were curvetting and struggling as their heads were dragged round in an attempt to escape. More shots came and one of the horsemen fell off to hit the road in a puff of dust, and Kelly saw the slim white-clad figure in the middle of the skirmish sway, then there was a whole fusillade of shots and the Turks ran for the hut and the drainage ditch at the side of the road. Jemil was wrenching his horse’s head round and, as they kicked their heels into their mounts and bolted down the road to the right, Kelly saw he was gripping the reins of the grey pony and that the white-clad figure was clinging to its neck.
The road dropped away so steeply Kelly was convinced they were about to come a cropper, but they clattered downwards, hidden almost at once by cypresses and lemon groves. Above them, on their left, they could hear the rattle of firing and, glancing back, Kelly saw Jemil’s big mount thundering after them, followed by the grey.
As they halted among the houses, wondering which way to go, Jemil crashed through them, still leading the grey. Ayesha was clinging to the horse’s mane, her head-cloth still in place across her features. Dragging their horses’ heads round, they followed Jemil through the narrow streets, raising the dust and sending children and chickens flying. Eventually, in a small square, Jemil halted and dismounted. Speaking quickly to a group of Arab loafers, who appeared to be waiting for them, he gestured to Kelly and they followed him through a doorway with a pointed arch. The loafers snatched at the reins and the horses were spirited away. Within a minute the square was empty and the dust was settling.
As Kelly pushed into the dark house, he saw the big Arab had snatched Ayesha into his arms. Her head-cloth had fallen from her features and he saw a slim hand come up and lift it back into place, then their ears were filled with the sound of running feet as a Turkish patrol hurried past in search of them.
For a moment they held their breath, waiting for the thunder of rifle butts on the door, but nothing happened and eventually the owner of the house appeared, his face worried. Jemil barked at him and Kelly caught the name Jellal el Arar. The owner bobbed his head and gestured. As Jemil disappeared down a corridor, the rest of them were about to follow but Jemil reappeared and pushed them away, gesturing that they should wait. Then the owner of the house returned, calling softly, and two or three women arrived.
‘What’s happened?’ Kelly demanded and Jemil shook his head, barking a few words at him that he didn’t understand.
For a long time, they waited in the shadows, the whole lot of them crammed into a large room with a tiled porch, then the owner appeared and called Jemil. When Jemil returned he pointed at Kelly and led the way down the corridor.
Inside a shadowed room, Ayesha was stretched out on an Arab bed. She had been hit in the shoulder by a heavy lead bullet which had struck bone and spread, leaving a terrible wound the women were trying without much success to bandage. They had torn away her robes and he could see her small breasts, streaked with blood, as they fought to staunch the bleeding. Her black hair was spread across the pillow and in the pallor of her face her eyes looked enormous and tremendously, feverishly, bright.
‘Can’t we give her something to ease the pain?’ Kelly whispered.
The owner of the house shrugged. ‘Where do we get such drugs, effendi? We have none. What there were the Turks took.’
It was a torment to watch the agony in Ayesha’s face. As Kelly went to her she looked up at him. ‘You will be all right now,’ she said in a voice that was only a half-whisper but was still commanding. ‘These are friends of ours. They will find a guide for you as soon as it is dark.’ She stiffened in a sudden spasm of pain and Kelly bent closer.
‘We’ve got to get you away from here,’ he said.
She managed a weak smile. ‘That would be nice but I would only be a burden. My friends will care for me. I hope you do not blame me for making your escape more risky.’
Lifting her good arm, she reached up and touched his cheek with the back of her hand. ‘Perhaps one day you will come back here as a tourist and we shall meet again and drink coffee decorously as old friends.’
‘We’re more than friends.’
She didn’t seem to hear. ‘Or perhaps you’ll arrive leading a victorious army on Damascus and Constantinople.’ She smiled again. ‘But, of course not. You could never do that. You are a sailor.’
Crowded uncomfortably, they waited all afternoon as the shadows grew longer and the muezzins started their evening chant. No one came near the house, though over the wailing from the towers they occasionally heard scattered shots coming across the town. In the dusk, a small figure appeared. He was a hunchback, grinning and deformed, and Jemil pointed to Kelly.
‘I must say goodbye to her,’ Kelly said.
Jemil looked angry but he disappeared into the other room. After a while he returned and nodded.
The change in Ayesha was horrifying. Her face had sunk and the muscles of her neck were drawn taut. She tried to speak and, unable to, he saw tears roll down her cheek. Her throat worked but nothing would come and her eyes, fever-bright in the deathly-white face burned in their sockets.
As he moved forward, Jemil tried to hold him back. From Ayesha’s frantic eyes, he knew she wanted him nearer and he pushed the old man aside with a violent shove and knelt by the bed.
‘I’ll come back,’ he said. ‘I’ll find you again.’
He spoke cheerfully but he knew only too well that she could never recover from that ghastly wound which had torn away half her shoulder and back. Her breast was moving quickly up and down in little fluttering gasps and, feeling as if tears were falling on his heart one by one in small, icy drops, Kelly bent over and kissed her forehead. For a second the eyelids opened and a rational look came into the eyes through the pain, then the curtain of darkness came swiftly down once more. Jemil turned and roughly pushed Kelly from the room.
‘How’s His Nibs?’ Rumbelo asked.
Kelly swallowed, unable to speak. At last the words came, stumbling and awkward, his voice dry and harsh and sticking in his throat. ‘His Nibs,’ he said, ‘is dying.’
A week later they stepped ashore in Alexandria. They had been met outside the harbour by a destroyer and Kelly had stood in the bows of the felucca and shouted up to the spruce figure in white staring coldly down at the ragged figures on the scruffy vessel’s decks.
‘Lieutenant Maguire, of the submarine E19,’ he yelled. ‘With survivors and ex-prisoners of war.’
The officer leaning over the rail stared in surprise. ‘Good God,’ he said. ‘You’d better come aboard.’
Three hours later, still in their rags, they were in the presence of the admiral. An army colonel was with him to claim the Australians.
‘Well, what the devil do we do with you?’ the admiral asked. ‘There’s no longer any fleet at Mudros. Do you want to stay in the Med?’
‘Not particularly, sir,’ Kelly said. The Middle East could start up too many memories.
‘Well, it’s always been the policy for escaped prisoners to be sent home. They don’t like to chance them being captured again in case they suffer from it. There’s a destroyer heading for Gibraltar at the end of the week. You’d better be aboard her.’
Kelly moved restlessly. ‘There’s one thing I must do first, sir,’ he said. ‘I believe there’s an Arab Bureau in Egypt.’
‘That’s right,’ the admiral agreed. ‘Down in Cairo. Doesn’t do much.’
‘I have messages for them from the Arab leaders. They’re anxious to start a national rebellion, and they think it would not only help them but also help us.’
‘That’s interesting.’ The admiral looked at the Australian colonel. ‘You’d better give your story to the Intelligence boys and when I’ve heard from them we’ll see if there’s anything we can do about it. You’d better get out of those rags, though. You look like a wog.’
‘We lived with the wogs for a while, sir,’ Kelly said stiffly, thinking of the dying girl in Tripoli. ‘We owe a great deal to – wogs.’
The admiral glanced again at the colonel then he gestured to the flag lieutenant. ‘Very well. Fix it, Flags.’ He looked up at Kelly. ‘You any relation of Admiral Maguire?’
‘He’s my father, sir.’
‘Is he, by God?’ The admiral seemed surprised that anyone whom Admiral Maguire had sired could be so enterprising as to get himself not only captured by Turks but could also escape. ‘Then you’d better see him while you’re in Cairo. He’s on the mission staff down there.’
Riding to Cairo in the train in the sweltering heat, Kelly’s mind was a blur. Dressed in a civilian suit the admiral’s flag lieutenant had lent him until the Egyptian tailor could fling together a white drill uniform, all he could see as the track followed the Nile were small haggard features and two feverishly bright eyes in a ghastly caricature of the face that had once looked at him with longing. It appeared in the clumps of palms and the waves of shimmering heat and among the slow-moving dhows. Every group of women he saw stirred his memory and every light voice he heard made him turn his head.
Cairo was full of troops, all listless in the enervating lassitude that lay over the city. Rising out of its steamy soil, the heat intensified in a pall of dust and filth that lay over the streets. The dirt was everywhere. Cairo, corrupt, lackadaisical, easy-going and romantic at night when you couldn’t see the dirt, was always a city of beggars and fabulously rich families. Troops marched in squads among the teeming thousands in their white jellabas, with military cars and dozens of army mules. There were British and Indians and Gurkhas and troops from West and East Africa, and no sign of the war anywhere.
Faintly disgusted with the scene, Kelly went into a bar where staff officers in immaculately pressed uniforms looked down their noses at his shabby figure in the rumpled linen suit. The man on the next table kept staring at him and eventually he realised there was a cold curiosity in the glance.
As he turned the man spoke. He was a middle-aged major, red-faced, balding, with cold eyes and a face like a meat axe.
‘You British?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ Kelly said. ‘I am.’
‘Likely-looking young feller.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Pity you don’t volunteer.’
‘What for?’
‘What for? The army, man! The army!’
The major had a loud voice and looked as though he’d arrived in uniform from some Middle East business venture. Several eyes turned in Kelly’s direction, most of them also cold and disapproving.
Kelly stared back at the major, a hot flush of anger filling his cheeks. ‘I don’t see the need,’ he said, and the major’s face darkened.
‘Don’t see the need?’ he snorted. ‘Back home, boy, they’re bringing in conscription!’
‘Won’t affect me.’
‘Why not? Got something wrong with you?’
‘No.’
The blustering voice rose. ‘Then you could bloody well volunteer, couldn’t you? Out here, we’re in need of everybody we can get. Others have. Businessmen like me. Even the bloody archaeologists digging up the desert. There are any amount of wogs, of course, but they were never any bloody good to anybody and never will be.’
Black rage filled Kelly, and he finished his beer and rose. Everyone had stopped drinking and he was conscious that they were all hanging on to his words. He glared round at the immaculate khaki figures, deciding that he loathed the lot of them.
‘They won’t want me,’ he said loudly, ‘because I happen to be already in the Navy. I’m a submariner, as a matter of fact, and I was sunk in the Dardanelles and I’ve just escaped after being a prisoner of the Turks.’
The hard red face sagged. ‘Oh, my God,’ its owner said. ‘I didn’t realise. Look here, boy, may I shake your hand and buy you a drink?’
‘You can choke on your bloody drink!’ Kelly snorted. ‘And it might interest you to know that, but for a few of those bloody wogs you dislike so much dying to save me, I’d still be a prisoner of the Turks!’
His father’s office was in a block of flats, and the admiral, dressed in white, seemed to be very comfortably established with a woman secretary who looked as though she’d been chosen for her looks rather than for any ability she might have.
‘My boy!’ Admiral Maguire jumped to his feet as Kelly appeared. ‘I got a signal from the C-in-C to say you’d turned up. My God, what a shock! Have you informed your mother?’
‘I sent her a telegram,’ Kelly said.
His father had grown fatter, as though the fleshpots of Cairo suited him, and Kelly wondered bitterly how often he, too, used the bar he’d just left.
Admiral Maguire sat down. ‘I couldn’t believe it. What a war you’re having, eh? You won’t have heard of your Uncle Paddy, of course?’
‘No, Father. What about him?’
‘Did rather a good job at Ypres and they gave him a battalion. He was killed at Neuve Chapelle.’
Kelly thought of the boozy middle-aged man who had seemed to be lolling about the house throughout his entire youth and found he could feel remarkably little emotion. Uncle Paddy seemed to have redeemed a lot of his former lack of effort, however, and perhaps he had made a better wartime soldier than a peacetime one.
‘It’s quite a place, this,’ his father was saying. ‘We have so much to do and find it damned hard to do it because the wogs don’t help much.’
‘Don’t use that word, Father!’
The admiral’s head jerked up as his son barked at him. ‘What word?’
‘“Wog.” If it hadn’t been for the wogs, I wouldn’t be here now. They deserve a bit more dignity than a name like that.’
The admiral’s eyes widened. ‘But everybody calls them–’ he stopped. ‘If it weren’t for the – I mean – oh, my God, boy, you can’t stop calling them wogs just because–’ he stopped again, at a loss. He didn’t know another word and he didn’t know what to say.
The Arab Bureau was in a vast shabby old palace that was full of jangling bells and bustle, and the smart men in neat uniforms irritated Kelly.
He was still seething from his father’s lack of sensitivity. They had tried hard to behave warmly to each other but it had remained an uncomfortable interview with neither of them able to touch anything in the other’s affections. The admiral was obviously enjoying his war and, with Kelly still bitter at his imprisonment and shocked by Ayesha’s death, their conversation had limped to an uncomfortable halt and they had both been glad to say goodbye.
The hallway of the Arab Bureau was filled with military policemen in starched shirts and shorts, who clearly didn’t approve of Kelly’s ill-fitting suit. One of them stepped abruptly in front of him with the smack of boots on the floor.
‘Whom do you wish to see, sir?’
Kelly explained his identity and his errand and they stared at each other, baffled. Obviously no one there had ever thought much about helping the Arabs to wage war.
‘Better show him into him,’ one of them said.
Following the military policeman down a long shadowed corridor, Kelly found himself in a dusty room full of maps and papers, where a fan revolving in the ceiling stirred up the stale air. A small, fair-haired staff captain with a long jaw was sitting behind the table and as Kelly appeared he got up and approached to shake hands.
‘Well, a new factor’s certainly needed here in the Middle East,’ he admitted as he listened to Kelly. ‘Gallipoli was a disaster, thanks to lack of interest at home, and the Indian Army’s made a hopeless mess of Mesopotamia.’ He gave a curiously effeminate shrug. ‘We need something that will outweigh the Turks in numbers, output and mental activity.’
Standing with his feet together, he rested his heavy jaw in his right hand and put his right elbow in the palm of his left hand as if he were hugging himself. Yet there was a curious tension about him and a strange burning quality of leadership.
‘There’s been no encouragement from history to think that those qualities can be supplied ready-made from Europe, however,’ he went on cheerfully. ‘The efforts of the European powers to keep a footing in the Levant have always been uniformly disastrous.’
He seemed clear-headed and incisive and Kelly broke in, driven more by emotion than anything else. ‘You’ve got to do something for these people,’ he said.
The staff captain shrugged. ‘Well, the solution would have to be local, but fortunately the standard of efficiency need only be local, too, because the competition’s Turkey and Turkey’s rotten. Personally, I think you’re quite right and that there’s enough latent power among the Arabs to do the job. After all, they’ve served a term of five hundred years under the Turks and if they don’t know them, no one does. What had you in mind?’
‘I was told that the Sherif of Mecca’s with us.’
‘I’ve been told that, too. In fact we had his son, the Amir Abdulla, down here to sound us out.’
‘And are you going to do anything?’
‘Things have a habit of moving slowly in Cairo.’
Kelly could hear a proud voice pleading for understanding. ‘There’s a whole nation of allies here,’ he said earnestly. ‘Only wanting to help us by helping themselves. Can’t you bloody idiots in Cairo give them guns and rifles?’
The staff captain laughed, a curiously shrill laugh, then his face became grave again. ‘Well, military thinking’s somewhat atrophied out here, I have to admit, but we do have a few clever chaps in Intelligence. We had hopes of Mesopotamia because the Arab independence movement had its beginnings there, but I think we can forget it now since Kut, and unfortunately the Indian government’s none too keen on pledges to Arab nationalists which might limit their own ambitions.’
‘Do bloody politics have to come into it?’ Kelly snapped.
The staff captain pulled a face. ‘Unhappily, yes. Nevertheless, conditions are suitable for an Arab movement. Perhaps we should get in touch with them.’
Kelly decided that the staff captain was laughing at him. He seemed too much of an intellectual to be involved in the war, and his own thoughts concerned only a dying girl and a set of promises he’d given.
‘I’d like to know how it goes,’ he said icily. ‘My name’s Maguire. Kelly Maguire. Lieutenant, RN. I’ve no idea what my ship is because I’ve had two sunk under me and God alone knows what will happen now. But you can get me through the Admiralty.’
The little staff captain twisted round, moving his hand in a delicate gesture as he reached for a pen. ‘I’ll not forget,’ he promised. ‘And so that you can be reassured of my good intentions, I’ll give you my name, too.’ He wrote quickly and passed the paper across. ‘Lawrence,’ he said. ‘Thomas Edward Lawrence.’