Eleven days later I arrived with Wanda in Istanbul. As we drove along the last long stretch of road, lurching into the potholes, the Sea of Marmara appeared before us, green and windswept, deserted except for a solitary caique beating up towards the Bosphorus under a big press of sail. Our spirits rose at the thought of seeing Istanbul when the sun was setting, but when we reached the outskirts it was already quite dark. We had planned to enter the city by the Golden Gate on the seaward side, for it sounded romantic and appropriate and we had been stoking ourselves all the way across Europe with the thought of it, not knowing that for several hundred years the gate had been sealed up. Instead we found ourselves on an interminable by-pass lined with luminous advertisements for banks and razor blades. Of the wall constructed by Theodosius there was no sign. It was a fitting end to an uncomfortable journey.
We left the car in the courtyard of the old Embassy and changed our money with one of the gatekeepers. We asked him where we should stay.
‘Star Oteli, clean Oteli, cheap Oteli, good Oteli, Oteli of my brodder.’
‘Not so far; take taxi, always taxi. Bad place, at night bad menses and girlses.’
‘Order a taxi.’
He uttered some strange cries. As if by magic a taxi appeared. It was driven by a huge brute with a shaven head; sitting next to him was another smaller man. They were a sinister pair.
‘What’s the other one for?’
‘He is not for anything. He is brodder.’
‘They don’t look like brothers.’
‘He is brodder by other woman.’
With a roar the taxi shot forward. After fifty yards it stopped and the brother opened the door.
‘Star Oteli.’
With sinking hearts we followed him up a nearly vertical flight of stairs to the reception desk. I prayed that the hotel would be full but it wasn’t. We set off down a long brilliantly lit passage, the brother of the gatekeeper leading and the brother of the taxi man bringing up the rear to cut off our retreat. The doors on either side were open, and we could see into the rooms. The occupants all seemed to be men who were lying on their beds fully clothed, gazing at the ceiling. Everywhere, like a miasma, was the unforgettable grave-smell of Oriental plumbing.
‘Room with bed for two,’ said the proprietor, flinging open a door at the extreme end. He contrived to invest it with an air of extreme indelicacy, which in no way prepared us for the reality.
It was a nightmare room, the room of a drug fiend perhaps. It was illuminated by a forty-watt bulb and looked out on a black wall with something slimy growing on it. The bed was a fearful thing, almost perfectly concave. Underneath it was a pair of old cloth-topped boots. The sheets were almost clean but on them there was the unmistakable impress of a human form and they were still warm. In the corner there was a washbasin with one long red hair in it and a tap which leaked. Somewhere nearby a fun-fair was testing its loud-hailing apparatus, warming up for a night of revelry. The smell of the room was the same as the corridor outside with some indefinable additions.
After the discomforts of the road it was too much. In deep gloom we got back into the taxi. The driver was grinning.
‘Pera Palace!’
As we plunged down the hill through the cavern-like streets, skidding on the tramlines, the brothers screwed their heads round and carried on a tiresome conversation with their backs to the engine.
‘Pera very good.’
Never had a city affected me with such an overpowering sense of melancholy.
‘No.’
‘Very good Istanbul.’
‘Very good taxi.’ We were heading straight for a tram that was groaning its way up the hill but passed it safely on the wrong side of the road.
I asked if anyone was ever killed. ‘Many, many, every day.’
‘How many?’
‘Two million.’
At the Pera Palace we took a large room. Originally it must have had a splendid view of the Golden Horn, now there was a large building in the way. We sent our clothes to the laundry and went to bed.
There had been no news of Hugh at the Embassy, but before sinking into a coma of fatigue, we both uttered a prayer that he would be delayed.
Early on the following morning he was battering on our door. He had just arrived by air and was aggressively fit and clean. Between his teeth was a Dunhill pipe in which some luxurious mixture was burning; under his arm was a clip board full of maps and lists. His clothes had just the right mixture of the elegant and the dashing. He was the epitome of a young explorer. We knew what he would say. It was an expression that we were to hear with ever-increasing revulsion in the weeks to come.
‘We must leave at once.’
‘We can’t, the wagon’s got to be serviced.’
‘I’ve already arranged that. It’ll be ready at noon.’
Like survivors of an artillery bombardment we were still shaking from the spine-shattering road we had taken through Bulgaria. What the pre-war guide had described as ‘another route’.
‘It’s been rather a long drive.’ We enumerated the hardships we had undergone, how we had been stripped by customs officials on the Yugoslav frontier, the hailstones as big as pigeons’ eggs in the Balkans, the floods, landslips, mosquitoes, all the tedious mishaps of our journey; but lying in our splendid bed we were not objects for obvious sympathy.
‘I shall drive. You two can rest.’
‘You don’t seem to realize,’ I said, ‘there’s no rest in that machine, there’s so much stuff in it. After a bit we were fighting one another to drive. Besides, damn it, we want to see Istanbul.’
‘You can always see Istanbul some other time. It’s been here for two thousand years.’
‘You mean you can always see it another time.’
He looked at his watch reluctantly.
‘How long do you want?’
Only Wanda had the courage to answer. ‘Three days,’ she said.
We grew fond of the Pera Palace; the beds had big brass knobs on and were really comfortable. Our room seemed the setting for some ludicrous comedy that was just about to begin. Probably it had already been played many times. It was easy to imagine some bearded minister of Abdul Hamid pursuing a fat girl in black stockings and garters round it and hurting himself on the sharp bits of furniture. In the bathroom the bath had the unusual facility of filling itself by way of the waste pipe without recourse to the taps. We watched this process enthralled.
‘I think it’s when the current’s running strongly in the Bosphorus.’
‘It can’t be that. It’s warm.’
‘Why don’t you taste it?’
‘I can’t remember whether the Bosphorus is salt or not. Besides it’s a very curious colour sometimes.’
It was Wanda who discovered the truth. I found her with her ear jammed hard against the wall of the bathroom.
‘It’s the man next door. He’s just had a bath. Now he’s pulled out the plug. Here it comes.’
For the second time that day the bath began to fill silently.
By contrast the staff were mostly very old and very sad and, apart from our friend in the next bathroom, we never saw anyone. There was a restaurant where we ate interminable meals in an atmosphere of really dead silence. It was the hotel of our dreams.
Three days later we left Istanbul. The night porter at the Pera Palace had been told to call us at a quarter to four; knowing that he wouldn’t, I willed myself to wake at half past three. I did so but immediately fell into a profound slumber until Hugh arrived an hour later from his modern Oteli up the hill, having bathed, shaved, breakfasted and collected the vehicle. It was not an auspicious beginning to our venture. He told us so.
There was a long wait for the ferry to take us to Scutari and when it did finally arrive embarkation proceeded slowly. Consumed by an urgent necessity, I asked the ferry master who bowed me into his own splendidly appointed quarters, where I fell into a delightful trance, emerging after what seemed only a moment to see the ferry boat disappearing towards the Asian shore with the motor-car and my ticket. At the barrier there was a great press of people and one of three fine-looking porters stole my wallet. It was the ferry master himself who escorted me on to the next boat, ‘pour tirer d’embarras notre client distingué’ as he ironically put it. For the second time in my life I left Europe penniless.