The American Hospital had one of the most pleasing aspects in Cairo. Harriet, put to bed in a white, air-conditioned room with a balcony, lay for a long time with her eyes shut, waiting for someone to come and investigate her condition. When no one came, she opened her eyes and staring out at the empty sky, she thought of her death in a foreign place. The poet Mangan had died of cholera and that death seemed nearer than all the deaths in Upper Egypt. Like Yakimov, who had died in Greece, she would be buried in dry, alien earth where her body would quickly turn to dust and she would never see England again. The prospect did not greatly upset her, she felt too tired. She thought of Aidan crawling into the canvas shelter to die and could not see that she, herself, had much more reason to go on living.
She was roused by the Armenian nurse who told her in an awed whisper: ‘Doctor come.’
The doctor was not, as she had expected, an American, but an Egyptian who spoke with an American accent. He announced himself: ‘Shafik,’ and bowed slightly.
‘You have thrown up, yes?’
‘No.’
‘But your insides are upset? For how long?’
‘A long time, on and off.’
‘And now worse?’
‘Yes.’
Dr Shafik examined her critically, without sympathy, almost resentfully, as though annoyed that she should be there. She found his manner disconcerting and his appearance more disconcerting. Most Egyptians put on weight and looked middle-aged when they were thirty. Dr Shafik, who was thirty or more, had preserved his facial good looks as well as the slim elegance she had occasionally noted among young officers at the Officers’ Club. He picked up her hand and examined it as though it were an entity all on its own.
‘How much do you weigh?’
‘Seven stone. That’s one hundred pounds.’
‘I think not. I think you weigh not even eighty pounds, but we shall see. One thing I can say: you haven’t cholera.’ He obviously thought her a fool for choosing such a sickness: ‘There is no cholera in this part of Egypt.’
‘I’ve just come from Upper Egypt where people are dying in hundreds.’
‘Not of cholera. Malaria, more likely. Upper Egypt is malaria country.’
‘Is there an epidemic form of malaria?’
Harriet’s spirit broke the severe calm of Shafik’s face. His long, firm mouth twitched slightly but he turned away before the twitch could become a smile. Leaving the room, he said, ‘Tomorrow we will make tests, then we can see if you are ill or not.’
The possibility that she was not ill heartened Harriet and, seeing no reason to stay in bed, she rose, put on her dressing-gown and went out on to the balcony. The balcony overlooked the Gezira sports grounds. A grove of blue gums lined the hospital drive and looking down on them, she could see the crowns of blue-grey leaves moving and glittering in the wind. A couple of long cane chairs were on the balcony and sitting out in the brief splendour of the evening light, she was less inclined to contemplate death in Egypt. Instead she reflected on the recent news: the fact that Tobruk had been recaptured and Montgomery’s claim that he had smashed the German and Italian armies, and she began to think of the war ending and a normal life beginning again. They could go back to England. With all that before her, why should she think of dying?
The crickets, brought out by the cooling air, were noisy in the grass below. As the sun sank, the different playing-fields — the polo ground, the golf course, the cricket field, the race course — merged into a greensward so spacious, it was like an English parkland. The club servants came out with lengths of hose and began to spray the grass with Nile water. As the light failed and mist rose from the ground, the white robes of the men glimmered through the twilight. The haze deepened over the acres of green but even when it had turned to dark, the servants were still visible, drifting about in their dilatory way, an assembly of shadows.
The nurse, who called herself Sister Metrebian, came looking for Harriet. Speaking in a small, gentle voice, she said, ‘You should not be out here in the cold, Mrs Pringle,’ but she left it for Harriet to decide whether she would go in or not. She was a yellow-skinned, plain, very thin, little woman with a solemn expression that, whatever her emotions might be, never altered. She simply stood and watched Harriet until Harriet rose from the chair and returned to bed. She was sitting up, her supper finished, when Guy entered amid his usual clutter of books and papers, and with his usual air of having made a temporary landing during a flight round the earth.
He kissed her, sat on the bed and said he could not stay long. Pushing his glasses up into his hair, he gazed quizzically at her and asked, ‘What are you doing here? What’s the matter?’
‘I don’t know, but it isn’t cholera.’
‘No one thought it was, did they?’
‘Yes. Dobson couldn’t get me out of the flat quickly enough.’
He shook his head, smiling with a frown between his brows. Worried by her loss of weight, he had wanted her to apply for a passage on the ship taking women and children to England, but that did not mean that, here and now, he could believe she was really ill.
‘How long will they keep you here?’
‘If there is nothing much wrong, I might be out tomorrow.’
This sensible reply cheered him and at once convinced that there was no cause for concern, he lifted her hand and said, ‘Little monkey’s paw! You won’t be here long.’
That settled, he put aside the question of her health and talked of other things. It was not simply that he wished her to be well. Sickness of any sort was an embarrassment to him because he did not believe in it. Forced to accept that whether he believed or not, it existed, he saw it as a self-imposed condition, a mental aberration related to witchcraft, religion, belief in the super-natural and similar follies. So far as Harriet herself was concerned, he suspected a deep-seated discontent but as this could not relate to him or his behaviour, he preferred to forget about it.
‘What happened in Luxor? Why did Angela come back so soon?’
Harriet told him of Angela’s sudden anxiety and need to return and assure herself that Castlebar was alive and well.
‘She’s crazy,’ Guy said. ‘You do realize that, don’t you? The woman’s mad.’
Harriet laughed and went on to the subject of Aidan Pratt, describing their meeting and dinner at his hotel.
‘He told me how he had been torpedoed in mid-Atlantic . . .’
‘Yes, he told me, too. When we first met in Alexandria.’
So the confidence had not been, after all, a confidence. She could not doubt Aidan still suffered from the experience but she suspected that now he preserved his suffering and, relating it, felt himself enhanced by it.
She said, ‘He tells it very well,’ but Guy had lost interest in Aidan and would not discuss him or his misadventure.
‘I’ve a lot on at the moment: not only the entertainment for the troops but Pinkrose’s lecture is in the offing. He’s fussing a lot. My idea had been a reasonably sized audience in the Institute hall but he thinks we should hire the ballroom at the Semiramis or the Continental-Savoy.’
Professor Lord Pinkrose had been sent out from England to give an important lecture in Bucharest but had arrived amidst political disorder so no lecture was possible. He had hoped to make up for this in Athens where there had been the same difficulty in finding a hall. In the end he had lectured at a garden luncheon given in Major Cookson’s Phaleron villa. ‘A glittering party’, he had described it: ‘A sumptuous affair’. He clearly expected the Cairo lecture to be something of the same sort.
Harriet laughed: ‘Why not get the ambassador to lend the Embassy ballroom?’
‘Yes, he thought of that, too, and made me speak to Dobson who said it’s been shut up for the duration. Pinkrose says if I don’t make it a big social occasion, he won’t give the lecture. I’ve got to humour him because the university people are impressed by him. He’s a bigger name than any of us realized.’
As Guy lifted his wrist to look at his watch, Harriet said, ‘Don’t go. When your evening begins, mine will end. So stay a little longer.’
Guy settled back on his chair but it was evident he would go soon. ‘I’ve a rehearsal with Edwina this evening. I promised I’d pick her up.’
Remembering the interlude she had overheard that afternoon, Harriet said, ‘I’m not sure she’ll feel like going.’
‘Yes, of course she will.’ Guy spoke with easy certainty, having found that people usually did what he wanted them to do.
‘I suppose you’re right.’
She had seen that, caught in the radiance of his enthusiasm, everyone proved to be a player at heart. Everyone, that was, except Harriet. She had been cast for the main part in his first production but after a couple of rehearsals, he had put her out of it. He said she was too involved with him but the truth was, she suspected, he felt she was not impressed, as the others were, by his personal magnetism. She was inclined to be critical.
For her part, she not only resented the time spent on the productions but she dreaded their possible failure. He had managed well enough so far. In Bucharest he had drawn in the whole of the British colony: a ready-made audience. In Athens, where every serviceman was a hero, he had had almost too much help and support. But here, in this big heterogeneous and indifferent city, where the soldiers were provided for and entertained till they were tired of entertainment, who would care?
She made a last appeal to him: ‘Must you go on with this show? Haven’t you enough to do?’
‘I never have enough to do.’ He jumped up, enlivened by the thought of the evening ahead: ‘You wouldn’t want my energy to go to waste, would you?’
She saw that only his constant activity enabled him to live with himself and she felt helpless against it. She began to see their differences as irreconcilable. He was never ill and did not understand illness. She wanted a union of mutual devotion while he saw marriage merely as a frame to hold an indiscriminate medley of relationships that, as often as not, were too capacious to be contained. She sighed and closed her eyes and this gave him excuse to go.
‘It won’t hurt you to have a rest in bed. I expect you overdid it, sight-seeing in Luxor.’
As he was leaving, Sister Metrebian came in with sleeping-tablets for Harriet. The sight of her with her plain face, her small chocolate-brown eyes, her reticence and air of enclosed sadness, brought Guy to a stop.
She offered the tablets to Harriet who said she did not need them. Sister Metrebian gently persisted: ‘I am sorry, but you must take them. Dr Shafik wants you to sleep very well so tomorrow you will be fresh for the tests.’
Feeling he must make a gesture towards the nurse, Guy said cheerfully: ‘I can see the patient is in good hands,’ and as he smiled admiringly on her, Sister Metrebian’s sallow cheeks were tinged with pink. Although she was by nature quiet, conveying her requests by movements rather than words, she said when Guy had gone: ‘What a nice man!’
Growing drowsy, Harriet, lying in darkness, drifted in memory till she seemed back again in the haunted strangeness of childhood. She had had pneumonia when she was a little girl. At first it was thought to be merely influenza and she had been put to rest on the living-room sofa, facing the fire. She remembered how the fire and the fireplace and the clock above it and the ornaments had become insubstantial, as though made of some glowing, shifting, magical stuff that enhanced the luxury of lying there, wrapped in warmth and comfort, drifting in and out of consciousness.
Her mother, becoming anxious, had put a hand on her forehead and said to someone in the room, ‘She has a fever.’ That, too, was part of luxury for her mother was not given to tenderness. She sometimes said, as though describing a curious and interesting facet of herself: ‘I don’t like being touched. Even when the children put their arms round me, I don’t really like it.’
But Harriet was different and as sleep came down on her, she told herself, ‘I want more love than I am given — but where am I to find it?’
Her first visitor next morning was Angela who arrived with an arm full of tuberoses that scented the room. She asked with intense concern, ‘What is it? What is the matter with you?’
‘Apparently nothing serious.’
‘Oh, Harriet, what a fool I was dashing back to Cairo and leaving you on your own.’
‘I was all right. I met a friend and saw the sights. But what came of your dash? — did you find Bill alive?’
‘Need you ask? I went to the Union and there he was: smirking, with his bloody Mona smirking at his side. I realized then he’d never leave her. He dare not. He hasn’t the guts. Harriet! I’ve decided, I’m going on that boat for women and children. I may go to England, or I may get off at Cape Town, but whatever I do, I’m going.’
Harriet could not take this declaration seriously: ‘You can’t go. You couldn’t leave me without a friend.’
‘I am going. I’ve already applied for a passage. I have to get away from Bill and I won’t get away unless I do something drastic. So, to hell with him and his God-awful wife. Let him sit there and smirk. I have my own life to lead and I intend to have a rattling good time.’
‘If you go to England, you’ll be conscripted.’
‘Not me. I know what to do about that. When they call you up, you just say, “I’m a tart.” Tarts are exempt (God knows why). They say, “Oh, come now, Lady Hooper, you don’t want us to think you’re a common prostitute, do you?” and you say, “Think what you like. That’s what I am: a tart,” and if you stick to it, there’s not a thing they can do about it.’
‘But you’re not a tart. You couldn’t keep it up.’
‘I could and, if necessary, I shall.’
‘So you really mean to go?’ Harriet became dejected as she saw Angela lost to her. ‘You’ve made me feel miserable.’
‘Then come with me.’
Harriet smiled. ‘Perhaps I will,’ she said.
No one was in a hurry at the American Hospital. Once there, Harriet was expected to stay there and when she asked Sister Metrebian if she could soon go home, the nurse shook her head vaguely: ‘How can I say? First, they must examine the specimens.’
‘And when will we get the verdict?’
‘Tomorrow, perhaps. The day after, perhaps.’
But the result of the tests was slow in coming and when Harriet enquired about it, Sister Metrebian became distressed: ‘How can I say? You must wait for Dr Shafik.’
‘When will he be back?’
Sister Metrebian shrugged: ‘He is a busy man.’
That was not Harriet’s impression of Dr Shafik. Sometimes, from boredom, she went out in her dressing-gown and wandered about the passages of the hospital, seeing no one and hearing nothing until, passing through a gate marked ‘No Entry’, she came into a cul-de-sac where there was only one door. Behind the door a man was shouting in delirium, expressing a terror that seemed to her more terrible because it was in a language she did not understand. As she hurried back to her own room, she met Sister Metrebian and asked her what was wrong with the man.
Sister Metrebian shook her head in sombre disapproval: ‘You should not go near. He is very ill. He is a Polish officer from Haifa where they have plague.’
‘Plague? He has got plague?’
‘How can I say? He is not my patient. I can say only: you must not go near.’
Trembling, Harriet sat on her balcony, gulping in fresh air as though it were a prophylactic, and she thought of England where there was no plague, no cholera, no smallpox, and the food was not contaminated. If she went with Angela, she would regain her health — but how could she leave Guy here alone?
She had said to Angela, ‘You know what happens when wives go home? We’ve seen it often enough.’
Angela took this lightly: ‘You know you can trust Guy. He’s not the sort to go off the rails.’
Perhaps not, but it was Guy who had first suggested she ask for a passage on the boat and she was suspicious of the fact he wanted her to go. She thought, ‘Everything has gone wrong since we came here.’ The climate changed people: it preserved ancient remains but it disrupted the living. She had seen common-place English couples who, at home, would have tolerated each other for a lifetime, here turning into self-dramatizing figures of tragedy, bored, lax, unmoral, complaining and, in the end, abandoning the partner in hand for another who was neither better nor worse than the first. Inconstancy was so much the rule among the British residents in Cairo, the place, she thought, was like a bureau of sexual exchange.
So, how could she be sure of Guy? When she married him, she scarcely knew him and, now, did she know him any better? How rash she had been, rushing into marriage, and how absurd to imagine it, on no evidence at all, a perfect, indestructible marriage! Every marriage was imperfect and the destroying agents, the imperfections, were there, unseen, from the start. How did she know that Guy, under the easy-going, well-disposed exterior, was not secretive and sly, suggesting she return to England for his own ends, whatever they might be?
It was noon, the most brilliant hour of the day, when the Gezira playing-fields looked as dry as the desert. The sky was colourless with heat yet to her it seemed to be netted over with darkness. The world seemed sinister and she felt she could put no trust into it. Aidan Pratt had said of life: ‘If it has to end, does it matter when it ends?’ The same could be said of life’s relationships. If Guy were a deceiver, then the sooner she found out, the better.
Later that afternoon, when she had returned to bed, Dr Shafik entered with a springing step and, standing over her, looking satisfied with himself, he said, ‘Well, madame, we have discovered your trouble. You have amoebic dysentery. Not good, no, but not so bad because there is a new drug for this condition. The American Embassy has sent it to us and you will be the first to benefit by it.’
‘And I will be cured?’
‘Why, certainly. Did you come here to die?’ Tall and handsome in his white coat, Dr Shafik smiled an ironical smile: ‘Could we let a member of your great empire die here, in our poor country?’
‘A great many members of the empire are dying here. You forget there is a war on.’
Harriet could see from his face that Dr Shafik had forgotten but he hid his forgetfulness under a tone of teasing scorn: ‘Call that a war? Two armies going backwards and forwards in the desert, chasing each other like fools!’
‘It’s a war for those who fight it. And may I ask, Dr Shafik, why you have to be so unpleasant to me?’
Surprised by the question, he stared at her then his smile became mischievous: ‘Are you aware, Mrs Pringle, that we have here another English lady?’
‘No.’ Harriet had not heard of an Englishwoman being in hospital but there were a great many English people not known to her in Cairo. Some lived half-way between the Orient and the Occident, avoiding the temporary residents brought here by war. Some had adopted the Moslem religion and its ways. Some had married Egyptians and others, though they went to England to find marriage partners, had lived here so long, they had become a race on their own.
‘Is she very ill?’
‘She was, but now she is recovering. Would you wish her to come and talk to you?’
Harriet knew that he meant to play some trick on her but asked from curiosity, ‘What is her name?’
Shafik was not telling: ‘Perhaps when you see her, you will know who she is.’
He went, promising that the lady would visit her, and an hour later a very old woman came sidling into the room, wearing a hospital bath-robe and a pair of old camel-leather slippers that flapped from her heels. She crept towards the bed and Harriet, seeing who she was, said, ‘Why, Miss Copeland, what are you doing here?’
She had last seen Miss Copeland in the pension where the Pringles lived before moving to Dobson’s flat. She came in once a week to lay out a little shop of haberdashery which, to help her, the inmates bought, whether they needed the goods or not. She had not changed; her skin, stretched over frail, prominent bones, still had the milky blueness of extreme age. At some time during her long sojourn in Cairo, she had become deaf and had shut herself into silence, seldom speaking.
Though she knew the old woman could not hear her, Harriet said to encourage her: ‘Why are you here? You look quite well.’
Miss Copeland sat on the edge of the chair. Her pale, milky eyes observed the things about her and when they came to Harriet, she whispered: ‘They found me in bed. I couldn’t get up.’
‘What was the matter?’
‘I was riddled with it.’
Much shocked, Harriet could think of nothing to say. Seeing that her lips did not move, Miss Copeland leant towards her and enquired: ‘What did you die of?’
Before Harriet need answer, Miss Copeland jumped down from the chair: ‘It must be time for lunch. It’s nice being dead, they give you so much to eat.’ She was gone in a moment, her slippers flapping behind her.
Almost at once, Dr Shafik came in to discover how Harriet had taken the visit: ‘So, you have seen the lady? You know her, I think?’
‘I know who she is. Has she really got cancer?’
‘No. That is her little fantasy. But is she not charming? An old, harmless lady, living here among other ladies of her own country — and yet she nearly starved to death. She lay in bed, too ill to move, and no one called to see how she was. It was a poor shop-keeper, where she bought bread, who asked himself, “Where is the old English lady? Can she need help?” — and so she was found.’
Discomforted, as Dr Shafik intended her to be, Harriet said, ‘We knew nothing about her. She made some money by selling little things: tapes, cottons, needles, things like that. She was independent. She lived her own life and did not seem to want anyone to call on her . . .’ Harriet’s defence faded out because, in fact, no one knew how or where Miss Copeland lived, and she wondered whether anyone cared.
Shafik nodded his understanding of the situation: ‘So you left her alone and it was an Egyptian peasant who showed pity! You see, here in Egypt, we live together. We look after our old people.’
‘Miss Copeland didn’t want to live with anyone. She wanted to be alone so, when she needed help, there was no one at hand to give it.’
Shafik gave a scoffing laugh: ‘Now you know she needs help, will you, with your large house and many servants, take her in?’
‘I might, if I had a large house and servants, but I haven’t. My husband and I have one room in someone else’s flat.’
‘Is that so?’
‘You did not answer my question, Dr Shafik. I asked why you are so unpleasant to me?’
He again left the question unanswered but later in the day, when Edwina came to see her, she had an answer of sorts.
Edwina, her tear-reddened eyes hidden behind dark glasses, said, ‘Oh, Harriet, I couldn’t come before. I couldn’t . . .’ She put her head down and sobbed again and it was some minutes before she could continue; ‘Peter’s gone back to the desert. I’ll never see him again . . . I’ll never . . .’
‘Don’t worry, you will see him again. The next thing will be a counter-offensive and they’ll all be belting back to Sollum and coming to Cairo on leave.’
‘That’s not what he thought. He said, “This time we’ve got them on the run.” ’
‘They say that every time.’
Harriet brought out a bottle of whisky, given her by Angela, and said, ‘Let’s have a drink. It’ll do us both good.’ As Edwina sniffed and drank her whisky, Harriet said, ‘Even if he doesn’t come back, there are other men in the world.’
‘That’s true. Guy’s been terribly kind to me.’
‘He’s kind to everyone,’ said Harriet who had no intention of offering Guy as one of the ‘other men’.
But Edwina was not to be discouraged: ‘You know, I think Guy arranged this whole entertainment just to take my mind off Peter.’
‘He arranged it long before Peter became troublesome.’
A number of people, Aidan Pratt among them, had imagined they were the sole recipients of Guy’s regard. And yet . . . And yet . . . It was Edwina’s singing voice that had induced him to plan a troops’ entertainment.
Warned by Harriet’s silence, Edwina said no more about Guy but diverted her by giggling: ‘I see you’ve got that gorgeous Dr Shafik! How romantic, lying here pale and interesting, with Dr Shafik taking your pulse!’
‘Amoebic dysentery is not a romantic condition.’
‘Condition du pays. I bet he’s had it himself.’
‘And he’s not gorgeous to me. He’s downright disagreeable.’
‘Oh, he’s disagreeable to all of us. He’s violently anti-British. He belongs to the Nationalist Party and that’s worse than the Wafd. They’d cut our throats tomorrow if they had the chance.’
‘Good heavens, Dr Shafik has every chance in the world here. I hope Sister Metrebian will protect me from him.’
Edwina, having finished her whisky, became wildly amused by this but her laughter changed in a moment and she choked with sobs: ‘Oh, Peter, Peter, Peter! I long to have him back!’ She was desolate but not to the point of admitting that Peter was married to someone else.
Harriet, knowing what she did know, said, hoping to pull her together, ‘I’m sorry, Edwina dear, but I think you’re well out of it. He’d make a terrible husband. All that fooling about! What a bore!’
‘You’re probably right. Yes, I know you’re right. There were times when I could have murdered him. Although he’s got a title, he’s a brute, really.’
Edwina dabbed her eyes, then murmured, ‘Still. . .’
A brute, but, still, no ordinary brute! He was a catch — alas, already caught! Edwina sighed. Her golden beauty drawn with disappointment, she saw herself setting out again to find another ‘catch’. There were a great many lonely men in Cairo but few who matched up to Edwina’s aspirations.
Her regimen of emetine capsules and a bland diet seemed so simple, Harriet thought she could treat herself at home but Sister Metrebian would not hear of it: ‘We have to carefully watch you. Emetine is very dangerous. A toxic drug. You take too much and you kill yourself. Do you understand?’
And, Harriet thought, how easily Dr Shafik could kill her! When she had been in hospital a week, he entered the room in a businesslike way and said he needed a sample of her blood. Sister Metrebian was at his heels, carrying a knife in a kidney dish. He lifted the knife and Harriet was startled to see it was sharp-pointed like a kitchen knife.
‘What is this?’ he asked: ‘We have here an edge like a consumptive’s temperature chart!’ He threw the knife back with elaborate disgust and she realized it had been another joke. He did not mean to use it, yet, in her distrust of everyone and everything, she felt a particular distrust of Shafik. She thought, ‘The smiler with the knife’, and asked: ‘Why do you want a sample of blood?’
‘For a little test, that is all. You are afraid?’
‘No, of course not.’
She expected him to draw off the blood with a syringe but he had found another instrument which he wished to try. She felt he was experimenting on her. He pressed the point of a metal scoop into the artery of her inner arm. As the blood flowed down the scoop to a test-tube, she felt she could bear no more. Tears ran down her cheeks and Dr Shafik spoke with surprising kindliness: ‘There, there, Mrs Pringle, don’t cry. You are a very brave girl.’
Knowing she was not a brave girl, Harriet laughed but he did not laugh with her. The blood taken and the small wound covered, he pressed his long, strong fingers into the region round her liver and asked, ‘Does that hurt?’
‘Yes, but it would, anyway, you’re pressing so hard. Why? What else is wrong with me?’
‘That is a thing I must find out.’
When doctor and sister had gone, Harriet asked herself how it was she had sunk so low, she wept at the sight of her own blood? She despised herself and yet she wept again. Hunting round for a handkerchief, she found among the detritus at the bottom of her handbag, the heart made of rose-diamonds. She had forgotten it and now, holding it above her head, she was entranced by the radiance of the diamonds and was amazed that they were not merely in her keeping, like Aidan’s votive cat, but were her property. The heart had been given to her: an object from a richer, grander, altogether more opulent world than any she had inhabited. She put it on the bedside table where it lit the air, a talisman and a preserver of life.
When Guy came in that evening, Dr Shafik was in the room, making a routine visit. He was about to rush away when it apparently occurred to him who Guy was. He came to a stop, held out his hand and said with awe: ‘But, of course, you are the Professor Pringle that people speak of. You are a lover of Egypt, are you not? You are one who would urge us towards freedom and social responsibility?’
The revelation of his breadth of vision surprised even Guy but, pink with pleasure, he seized on Shafik’s hand and admitted that he was indeed that Professor Pringle, saying, ‘Yes, Egypt must have freedom. But social responsibility? That, I imagine, can come only through a Marxist revolution.’
Whether the doctor agreed or not, he moved closer to Guy and said in a quiet voice: ‘You know, there are many of us?’
‘Of course. I’ve talked to students . . .’
‘Oh, students! They act and so are useful, but they do not think, and so are dangerous. But enough for now. We will talk another time, eh? Meanwhile, I have this case of your wife. She is not well.’
Guy, forced to revert to the discouraging subject of Harriet’s health, asked: ‘Aren’t you satisfied with her progress?’
‘Not so much. These amoebae are insidious animalcule. They move from organ to organ.’
Guy stared and kept quiet while the doctor, supposing the matter to be of intense interest to him, described the dangers of amoebic infection: dangers comprehensible by a male brain but not, of course, by a female.
‘You must know that the amoebae can be carried in the portal stream to the liver and cause hepatitis and the liver abscess. If they reach the gall bladder that, too, can be bad. But I do not think she has the liver abscess.’
‘Oh, good!’ Guy, his dismay rapidly dispersed by this assurance, said, ‘Then she’s all right. There’s nothing to worry about?’
‘Sooner or later, she will be all right.’
‘Splendid!’ That decided, Guy was eager to return to the subject of social responsibility but Shafik seemed equally eager to evade it.
‘Such talk would bore a lady, and you and your wife must have much to say to one another.’ With an amused expression, lifting his hand in an adieu, the doctor made a swift departure.
Guy gazed regretfully after him: ‘Why did he go off like that?’
‘Sister Metrebian says he is a busy man.’
‘I suppose he is.’
Now that the chance to discuss social responsibility had been snatched from him, Guy looked tired. He, too, was a busy man and he seemed to have about him the oppression of the dusty, noisy Cairo streets. He sat down and, as he looked at Harriet, she felt he reproached her for remaining in a country that was destroying her health.
‘Dobson was telling me that before the war, anyone who contracted this sort of dysentery was shipped home. In England, the amoebae leave the system and you are not re-infected. Here, if you’re prone to it, you’re liable to get it again.’
‘So Dobson wants to ship me home? He’s absurdly self-important at times. He thinks he’s only to say the word and I’ll get straight on to the boat. Well, I won’t. It would simply mean you were alone here and I would be alone in England. A miserable arrangement!’
‘He’s only thinking of your good. He says when people are depleted by acute dysentery, they pick up other diseases and . . .’
‘And die? Well, let’s wait till I show more signs of dying.’
He was about to say more when he noticed the rose-diamond brooch on the table beside her and he became animated: ‘Where did you get this?’
‘Angela gave it to me. She bought it in the Muski.’
He picked it up and laughed as he examined it: ‘It’s vulgar but it has a sort of panache. Let me have it. I’ll give it to Edwina to cheer her up.’
‘But it’s mine. It was given to me.’
‘Surely you don’t want it. You couldn’t be seen wearing a thing like that. It’s a theatrical prop: just right for Edwina when she sings, “We’ll meet again” or “Smoke gets in your eyes”.’
‘She doesn’t sing those sort of songs.’
‘She does in the show. It’s for troops and the troops will love this thing.’
‘It’s a valuable piece of jewellery. They’re real diamonds and cost a lot of money.’
‘Even so, it’s tawdry. It looks cheap.’
Smiling his contempt, he held the brooch away from him and she saw it degraded from a treasure and a talisman into a worthless gewgaw. She could not defend it, yet she did not want to lose it.
She said, ‘Give it back,’ unable to believe he would take it from her, but he slipped it into his pocket.
‘Darling, don’t be silly. You know you don’t want it. Let Edwina have it. Well, I must go.’
She watched, silent in disbelief, as he left with the brooch, delighted that he had something to give away.
‘But what he gives, he takes from me!’ She went to sit on the balcony, feeling, as the first shock of the incident wore off, a sense of outrage that the brooch was gone. Gazing over the greensward where she sometimes saw men on polo ponies and other men swinging golf clubs, she asked herself, ‘What is there to keep me here?’
When Angela came to see her again, she said, ‘I’ve been thinking about England. I could get a job there. I’d be of some use in the world.’
‘Do you mean you might come with me?’
‘Yes, I do mean that. I’ve been watching those men out there playing ridiculous games while other men are being killed, and I thought how futile our life is here. I felt I wanted to get away.’
‘If you’re serious, you’ll have to apply at once. There’s a rumour that the ship’s over-full already. Shall I speak to Dobson? Get him to use his influence?’
‘Yes, speak to Dobson.’ But though she agreed, Harriet was still half-hoping that the ship was too full to take her and she would have to stay.
Still, she had put the matter into Angela’s hands and before they could say anything more about it, she was visited by Major Cookson. He had not come alone. His companion, whose function had probably been to pay for the long taxi drive to the hospital, did not follow him to the bed but stood just inside the room as though bewildered at finding himself there.
Cookson sat on the bed edge and whispered to Harriet and Angela: ‘I’ve brought an old friend, very distinguished. I knew you’d be pleased to meet him.’ He turned and summoned the friend in a commanding tone: ‘Humphrey, come over here.’ Then returning to the women, he whispered again: ‘It’s Humphrey Taupin, the archaeologist. You were in Greece, Harriet. You must have heard of him.’
They all looked at Humphrey Taupin as he managed to make his way to the bedside where he stood, swaying, as though about to crumple to the floor.
Cookson brought a chair for him, saying, ‘Sit down, Humphrey, do!’ but Taupin remained on his feet, looking at Harriet, a smile reaching his face as though from a great distance.
Harriet had heard of him. He had been a famous name around the cafés in Athens. When he was very young, on his first dig, he had come upon a stone sarcophagus that contained a death-mask of beaten gold. The mask, thought to be of a king of Corinth, was in the museum and Harriet had seen it there. This find, that for some would have been the beginning, was for him the end. She could imagine that such an achievement at twenty might leave one wondering what to do for the next fifty years. Anyway, confounded by his own success, he had retired to the most remote of the Sporades; and no one had thought of him when the Germans came.
But he had escaped somehow and here he was, in Cairo, standing beside her bed. When she smiled back at him, he moved a little closer to her and a smell of the grave came from his clothes. His light alpaca suit hung on him as on a skeleton. He was in early middle-age but his hair was already white and his face was crumpled and coloured like the crust on old custard.
She asked him how he had escaped from Greece. When it occurred to him that she was speaking to him, he did not reply but bent towards her and offered her his hand. She took it but not willingly. She had heard that he had been cured of syphilis, but perhaps he was not cured. Feeling his hand in hers, dry and fragile, like the skeleton of a small bird, she remembered the courteous crusader who took the hand of a leper and became a leper himself. When Taupin’s hand slipped away, she felt she, too, was at risk.
Cookson plucked at his jacket, telling him again to sit down but his senses seemed too distant to be contacted He smiled then, turning, wandered back across the floor and out of the room.
Cookson tutted and said, ‘He really is a most unaccountable fellow. I’m sorry. I thought he would amuse you.’
Harriet, still feeling on her palm the rasp of Humphrey Taupin’s hand, asked, ‘How did he get here?’
‘He’s just arrived from Turkey. His Greek boys managed to get him to Lesbos in a caique in the middle of the night. He went on to Istanbul and he hung around there till the Turks threw him out.’
‘Why did they do that?’
‘Hashish, y’know. They’re sticky about that.’
Angela asked: ‘Is that why he’s so vague?’
‘Oh, my dear, yes. I went to that island of his once. Quite an ordeal, getting there and even more of an ordeal staying there. He kept you sitting up, talking, all night and if you got any sleep, it was during the day. Only one meal was served and not very good either. He called it breakfast. It arrived about ten in the evening and then the talk began.’
‘I suppose he was more compos mentis in those days?’ Harriet asked.
‘Much more. He was quite the tyrant before he got on to hashish. He had three subjects: sex, literature and religion. You discussed one a night and then you were told the boys would row you back to Skiros. There was no knowing how long you would have to wait for the boat back to Athens.’
‘And that was the routine?’
‘Yes. Invariable. Everyone who went, talked about it.’
‘But they did go?’
‘Yes. Out of curiosity, as much as anything. We formed quite a little élite, those of us who’d braved the island. We felt we’d done something remarkable.’
‘Yet when the Germans were coming, you all forgot about him?’
‘Oh!’ Major Cookson’s mouth fell open, then he tried to excuse himself: ‘It was so sudden, the German breakthrough. They came so quickly.’
‘Still you had time to prepare your get-away.’
Major Cookson hung his head, knowing that the manner of his departure from Greece might be forgiven, but it would never be forgotten.
Having discovered that Harriet was the wife of a professor who was a lover of Egypt, Dr Shafik changed towards Harriet. Whenever he had nothing else to do, he would stroll into her room and entertain her with flippant and flirtatious talk. He did not suppose her capable of discussing an abstruse problem but he would gaze at her thoughtfully, even tenderly, and accord her his especial care. Harriet knew that Arabs, when not laughing at the female sex as a ridiculous aberration in nature, were romantic and generous, but she became bored by his levity. She broke into it to ask, ‘Is your plague patient still alive?’
‘Yes, he is alive. How did you know I have such a patient?’
‘I heard him crying out in delirium. It was frightening. And he’s still alive! Is there a new drug with which to treat bubonic plague?’
‘Yes.’ He was rather sulky at being forced into this conversation and she had to question him before he would tell her: ‘There is a serum which is effective, sometimes. But his heart will be weak.’
‘You are not afraid for yourself?’
‘Naturally I have been inoculated. We wear special clothing and so on. The danger is not great.’
‘The man is a Polish officer, isn’t he? Why was he brought to a civilian hospital?’
‘He had to be isolated, and the military have no suitable place. You know, on this spot, a long time ago, there was the old quarantine station and hospital. The island was only half formed then, and it was desert.’
Harriet’s interest, arising out of her horror of contagion, led Shafik to talk in spite of himself. He told her it was there that patients were brought during the plague epidemic of 1836. ‘There was a Dr Brulard. He wanted so much to know how plague was transmitted, he took the shirt from a dead man and wore it himself. Was he not brave?’
‘My goodness, yes. And did he catch plague?’
‘No, nor did he solve the mystery of how it was transmitted. And there was typhus — now, how did they catch typhus?’
Harriet laughed nervously and Shafik refused to tell her any more about plague and typhus, but, leaning towards her, said, ‘You are getting better. Are you glad you did not die and go to heaven?’
‘I thought there was no heaven for women in your religion.’
‘Wrong, madame, wrong. The ladies have a nice heaven of their own. They are without men but there is a consolation: they are beautiful for ever.’
‘If there are no men, would it matter whether they were beautiful or not?’
‘Ha!’ Dr Shafik threw back his head and shouted with laughter: ‘Mrs Pringle, I am much relieved. You are, after all, a true woman.’
‘Why “after all”?’
‘I wondered. I thought you were too clever for your sex.’
‘And you’re not as clever as you think you are.’
‘Oh, oh, oh!’ Shafik shook his hand as though it had been burnt: ‘How ungrateful, after I have so cleverly cured you!’
‘Perhaps you didn’t cure me. Perhaps I cured myself. You see, I have given in. I’m going back to England.’
‘You are going to England?’ he stared with concern and dismay: ‘Just when we have become friends! And Professor Pringle? — he, too, is going to England?’
‘No. He has to stay here till the war ends.’
‘But does he want you to go?’
‘He thinks I will never be well while I remain here.’
‘I’m sorry you are going.’
‘I’m sorry, too.’
Before she left the hospital, Harriet asked if she might see Miss Copeland again, but Miss Copeland was no longer there. When he suggested that the Pringles should give her a home, Dr Shafik had been making fun of Harriet. A home already had been provided by the Convent of the Holy Family and there Miss Copeland could stay for the rest of her life.
Shafik, saying goodbye to Harriet, held her hand between his two strong, slender hands and said, ‘One day you will come back to Egypt and then you will come to see me. Yes?’
Harriet promised that she would. Looking into his large, dark, emotional eyes, she almost wished she had an Oriental husband, especially one who looked like Dr Shafik.