Loving Monsters (31 page)

‘But there’s nothing here.’

‘I know. Plenty of battles have been fought over territory nobody particularly wants.’

‘A bit silly, don’t you think?’

At the foot of this lone promontory the sea has sculpted a series of hollows in the low sandstone bank, less caves than niches as though for a series of statues that have never been placed there. In one of these Jayjay and Adelio dump their clothes. They swim, and then hop back across the scalding beach. The sand in the shade of the little cliff feels deliciously cool to their feet. Adelio anoints his soles with chocolate ice cream and rolls his eyes in bliss in a gesture copied from the cinema. Half a mile offshore a twin-engined aircraft suddenly appears flying very low, heading westwards. It is just too far away for the markings to be visible. Adelio thinks it is a Caproni, Jayjay a Bristol Beaufort. It drones away towards Alexandria.

‘What’s going to happen?’ Adelio asks.

‘I’ve no idea. Nobody knows. If the Italians and Germans invade Egypt I expect I shall be taken prisoner and interned in a camp.’

‘Won’t you fight?’

‘I don’t know. What with? I’m not a soldier.’

‘You’ve got a pistol in the car. I’ve seen it.’

‘It isn’t loaded.’

‘Don’t you care?’

‘About what? Egypt isn’t my country, after all. It’s not my war, either. I was just caught in it here, like everyone else.’

‘Yes, but you’re British, and the British sort of run Egypt, don’t they? But don’t you care?’ he asks again.

‘Only about what happens to the people I know. My friends.’

‘Including us?’

‘Of course including you,
caro.
What do you think? Especially you. Your family has been wonderfully kind to me.’

‘But things happen in wartime, don’t they? I mean people get stuck, you know, on the wrong side and everything. You’re English, for instance, and I’m Italian.’

‘I know, it’s crazy. Wars are like that. But as I said, nobody knows what will happen. Just remember that whatever does, you and I are friends and we shall remain friends. When it’s all over in a few months’ time, or next year or whenever, we’ll simply go back to seeing each other. Back to normal again.’

‘I suppose. You make it sound easy.’

Jayjay has to admit the truth of this. He
is
making it sound easy, as though he were the child trying to comfort himself and Adelio the adult obliged to be realistic. Not for the first time he feels Adelio to be much older than he actually is, maybe even older than Jayjay is himself. Absurd; yet the boy’s brand of melancholy, already so characteristic and defined, is quite grown-up, almost elderly. It is as if he felt it necessary to voice his gloomiest fears and challenge Jayjay to put up a convincing argument against them. Maybe playing this game, Jayjay hears himself say foolishly:

‘Why should I tell you lies, Adelio? Haven’t I been keeping my promise to you?’ Suddenly to his own ears he sounds like a wheedling child. Can he really be expecting this fourteen-year-old’s
praise for not having screwed his mother? Hopelessly he tries to think of a way of retracting or re-casting this gauche ingot of rhetoric that thuds between them.

‘Oh, I know that,’ says Adelio loftily, in a tone that plainly says, ‘And I should think so too’, which also suggests he might have had a frank conversation with Mirella. ‘It’s all right, I do trust you. Honestly.’

They go swimming again, largely to wash off the sticky patches of dripped ice cream to which the reddish sand adheres. When they are dry once more Adelio asks suddenly: ‘Can I take your picture?’

‘Oh. Yes, all right. Why not?’ Surprised, Jayjay hands him the second-hand Leica he has bought with the proceeds from selling August’s work to the crowned head of Egypt.

Adelio snaps him twice. ‘Promise to give me them when you’ve developed them,’ he says. ‘It’ll prove what you’ve been saying. About us being friends, I mean.’

‘Then I shall do likewise and take your picture, too.’

As Jayjay fiddles with the camera, re-setting the aperture stop, he is aware of surreptitious movement. When he glances up Adelio is egg-naked, looking vulnerable and slightly red.

‘Go on, then,’ he says with a touch of defiance.

Jayjay is too surprised even to raise the camera; shocked, actually, by this unexpected provocation, this baring of more than flesh. His first thought is that Adelio must have found out about his commercial activity and is swept by acute embarrassment. That the boy should imagine this is the sort of picture he might want is humiliating. Yet the way Adelio now sits with his knees drawn up, meekly staring out to sea, suggests something quite different. There is nothing whatever salacious in his manner or pose; no knowingness, no trace of teasing. What there is, Jayjay decides as he lines up the picture, is an astonishing generosity. This is not pornography but a family snap. Adelio is letting him record his side of a friendship which Jayjay has so far only verbally and tritely asserted. It is a gesture of trust, all the more so since he
is at an age when adolescents are usually modest about nudity, especially with adults.

Is this, then, what August has felt in the early days of his camera-work down in that lonely village in the Sudan? The excitement at finding in sharp focus what was so long sought? A thudding of the heart and a breathlessness that make the camera hard to hold steady while the viewfinder blurs and swims? All in a rush Jayjay is ambushed by love. The vertical glare on the beach exposes the moment: the two of them alone in North Africa, nobody for miles, Jayjay’s own shadow puddled around his feet like clothes out of which he has just stepped. Did he have some idea that this picnic snatched from the world’s last moments of peace might end erotically? Not really. He has never mistaken Adelio for another of the flirty children he has so often dallied with at houseboat parties. Rather, he is more like the younger brother he never had, or something between a stepson and a ward, with potential lover hovering only indistinctly in the gaps. Certainly Jayjay has sometimes fantasised a moment when the boy might offer himself with an adolescent’s polymorphous guilelessness. Yet now the moment has arrived it is quite different, altogether more serious and fraught with consequence. In one leap Adelio has gone too far and in doing so has revealed himself as defenceless. His awkward bravery in demanding the right kind of love fills Jayjay with a hopeless tenderness.

Adelio allows him to shoot an entire roll even as Jayjay begins to wonder whether after all there mightn’t also be a small component of exhibitionism in the boy’s demure willingness to be shot sitting, standing, lying, and finally knee-deep in the sea. Yet there is still no real hint of flaunting and nothing in the way he holds himself to suggest anything more than disclosure. As best he knows, he is giving himself. When the film is finished Jayjay slips an arm around his thin waist and hugs the hot body to him protectively, feeling the child subside against him and watching heartbeats flutter beneath the skin of his throat.

‘I’ll make you another promise,
caro
. I’ll never show these to anybody else. They’re just for us. Hey, you’re awfully hot. Hurry up and put some clothes on otherwise you’ll get sunburned. Besides, that Beaufort might come back.’

‘Caproni.’

The moment has not quite passed. Standing there on the shore together Jayjay finds he still cannot tell Adelio he loves him as he wants to and as the boy clearly means him to. He is inhibited by the sundry chasms that divide families from outsiders, children from adolescents, adolescents from adults, males from males and Britons from Italians. Their mutual confusion depresses him by the way it aborts every useful impulse and kills the moment even as he feels oblivion’s endless ocean lapping just beyond the tips of their toes. It always would be too difficult, too late. Yet in this startling fashion an afternoon that had seemed foregone has now acquired new intimacy. If so, Jayjay thinks sadly as he starts the car, it is entirely because of Adelio’s initiative and not through anything I have said or done. He is moved to an intense feeling of protectiveness towards this peculiar boy, the ‘Little Frying Pan’ who made no effort to conceal his mocked ears from the camera’s lens. Indeed, as Jayjay soon discovers when he develops the pictures, no detail is hidden of the narrow, bony body with its tendons and kneecaps and elbows, the pointed chin and sticking-out ears. ‘This is who I am,’ the attitudes say uncompromisingly. ‘This is me.’ Only the eyes maintain their strange veiled gaze. Not even the brilliant sunlight can completely eradicate the faint shadows around them. Adelio looks out of the photographs with a glance that is bruised, already hopeless of finding a sight he can entirely trust, even one that will surprise or ravish him. His whole expression suggests an inwardness, an early friendship with desolation: a pact with the sound of a door closing, a school bell, the sigh of wind in tussocks. A week later when the first Ju 88s begin dropping bombs on the city it is the instant thought of Adelio that makes Jayjay desert his post and tear across Alexandria in the Fiat. As he goes pelting up the stairs to the apartment it is not Mirella’s
name that he shouts. He is not looking for the woman he once planned to take to bed, but for her son.

*

– The Axis forces never did take Alexandria, as it turned out. We held them at bay although the air raids continued that summer and about seven hundred civilians were killed. I was suddenly kept busy and the Boschettis unfortunately had to be left to fend for themselves. I did lean on someone to ensure they received new diplomatic IDs that at least kept them from being interned.

– It was a very interesting time politically and as 1941 went on relations became steadily worse between the Egyptian Palace, our embassy and the Egyptian nationalists. I was still stuck in Alexandria when Colonel Robert Laycock’s so-called ‘Layforce’ was plotting fantastic behind-the-lines operations that either fizzled out or turned into downright farce. Evelyn Waugh was one of his subalterns stationed in Sidi Bishr. He grew an appalling beard and became known as ‘the Ginger Runt’ or something, I forget what it was exactly, so he shaved it off. He once asked to see some of August’s pictures and I showed him a selection. He examined them half greedily, half disdainfully, as if he had seen a good deal of that sort of thing from an early age, and then pronounced them ‘rancid and doggy’, a phrase I’ve never forgotten. He and Randolph Churchill came to borrow radio sets from our warehouse as part of their doomed attempt to drive the Germans out of Crete. They lost the lot on that little caper and did well to get back to Egypt alive, full of quite justified rage about the crass incompetence of the military brass-hats.

– Much of 1941 was purely chaotic as far as our war effort in Egypt was concerned. We didn’t get a really good field commander until Montgomery was appointed in the summer of Forty-two. People were incredibly slack and disordered. It was as if all our brisk Anglo-Saxon purposefulness was too easily undermined by the prevailing outlook of a host nation whose roots went back so many times longer than our own. We seemed to become infected with a kind of Pharaonic inertia broken by
intense panics over trivia. Strange military units proliferated, often working at cross-purposes. I suppose Cairo’s being so far removed from Europe and even from the battlefields of Cyrenaica, plus the ready availability in the shops of all the things that were most rationed or unavailable in Britain, produced an unreal atmosphere. Personally, I’ve always thought that was the year we British lost Egypt for good, if indeed we had ever had it. It culminated in early 1942 with Sir Miles Lampson, our Ambassador, surrounding Abdin Palace with military vehicles and marching in to demand that King Faroukh sign his own abdication. Unbelievable when you think about it, especially in view of the Treaty we had signed in 1936. But well before then relations had decayed to the extent that there were graffiti all over Cairo saying ‘Long Live Rommel!’ while drunken Allied soldiers were carousing through the streets singing parodies of the Egyptian National Anthem with words like ‘King Faroukh, King Faroukh/Hang your bollocks on a hook!’ and ‘Queen Farida, Queen Farida/Of all wogs you are the leader!’

– Meanwhile I had been approached by the publicity section of the British embassy who wanted me to ditch SOE and come and work on a counter-offensive against what was called the ‘Whispering Gallery’ of pro-Axis sentiment in Egypt. So I did. My job was to run a group of a couple of dozen Egyptians who could go around spreading anti-Axis sentiment. I’m afraid wars, like politics, really are conducted at this level of banality. Still, there was undoubtedly a lot of leeway to make up where our public image was concerned. Apart from the ubiquitous slogans extolling Rommel there was much café debate as to whether the estimable Mohammed ’Ider, as they called Hitler, mightn’t be just the man to help Egypt obtain its independence, given that both the French and the English had become the manifest enemies of Islam by infamously reneging on their words of honour in the Arab countries they occupied.

– I must say I enjoyed the work. Besides being something of a challenge it enabled me to get back on the street and use my
Arabic, even though the line I was supposed to promote was not the one I would have chosen. But there were plenty of other advantages, including living in Cairo and not having to shoot anyone. I knew perfectly well I should be wasting my time trying to convert any of the hard-line nationalists but most ordinary Egyptians were quite easily swayed. I had no doubt that if ever the military tide turned and we looked like winning, the Rommel notices would be torn down overnight and replaced by posters welcoming the Allied effort. Not many months previously I had seen the pastry chefs of Alexandria hastily re-icing their cakes so they now smirked up from the patisserie windows saying ‘Well played, Tommy!’ and ‘Rule, Britannia!’ to passing British and Anzac troops. Suddenly I was free to use all sorts of old contacts even as I established relations with interesting and potentially useful people passing through the embassy. Good parties in the evening, too. And being assigned to a strange section that was neither military nor quite diplomatic also had its uses. Technically, I was listed as a Services Officer, which conveyed absolutely nothing to anyone.