Moon Tiger (14 page)

I wasn’t thinking of Tom but of myself. And of a self who seemed to be not ‘me’ but ‘she’. An innocent, moving fecklessly through the days, knowing nothing, whom I saw now with awful wisdom. This is how I have felt – how surely anyone must feel – contemplating those poised moments of the past: the night before the storming of the Bastille, the summer of 1914 in the valley of the Somme, the autumn days in Warwickshire before Edgehill. Nothing to be done; no halting or diverting the foreordained. This is the story; these are the things that must happen.

My Texan got back into the coach again, stowing his photographic equipment away, having preserved for posterity
some
mafioso
on camel-back who brandished a Lawrence of Arabia rifle in one hand and a string of plastic lapis lazuli beads in the other. ‘One helluva place to call home,’ he observed. ‘That fellow,’ I said, ‘probably lives in an apartment in Cairo and commutes out here on the bus.’ ‘You think so?’ He looked regretfully at the departing huckster. ‘I daresay you’re right. I’m a sucker for local colour. Never could spot a phoney. But you’re one sharp lady, aren’t you, Claudia?’

And I suppose I used his name too. Ed? Chuck? I don’t remember, though I do recall that easy incongruous companionship, the peculiar temporary alliance of strangers in transitory circumstances. In an odd way I was glad of him; his impervious presence was a shield. I had hesitated to make this journey, had put it off year after year but had known always that eventually it must be undertaken. And, confronted at last with the mirage – with the shining phantom of that other time – I was surprised to find that it was myself that was the poignant presence. Not him – not Tom. It was in other ways that Tom was there.

I shared a flat in Zamalek with another girl. Camilla was a frothy secretary from the Embassy, one of those silk-clad scented camp-followers who do well out of wars. Camilla, under other circumstances, would have had to spend her youth in the shires, breeding dogs, hunting and going up to town for a show occasionally. As it was, she was having the time of her life, doing a bit of typing in the mornings for someone Daddy was at school with and taking her pick of the officers of the 8th Hussars in the evening.

Teeming polyglot Cairo of the nineteen-forties seems now an apt manifestation of that strange country. The landscape, fusion of antiquity and the present, had its counterpart in the brimming life of the city, where all races met, all languages were spoken, where Greeks and Turks, Copts and Jews, British, French, rich, poor, exploiters and oppressed all brushed past each other on the dusty pavements. The pavements were all they had in common, though. I once saw an old
woman sit down on the steps of a mosque and die; across the
maidan
ice-creams and confectionery were being eaten on the terrace of a café. We Europeans rode the streets in cars or in horse-drawn gharries; alongside and among us moved the donkey-carts, the bicycles, the barefoot thousands, the trams so loaded with humanity that they looked like a bee-swarm. For some of us a war was being fought; there must have been many who had no idea what this war was, whose it was or why it was. Like some theatrical lion it roared off-stage while the actors got on with their business. And all the while the extraordinary backcloth eerily reflected the juxtapositions – that scenery in which the lush vegetable borders of the Nile ended so abruptly that you stepped from fields to desert in one pace; in which a crumbling monument might be Greek, Roman, pharaonic, medieval, Christian, Muslim; in which illiterate peasants with a life expectancy of thirty lived in shanty houses set up between the soaring columns of temples inscribed with the complex mythologies of three thousand years before. There was no chronology to the place, and no logic.

‘See the picture of Rameses the Second,’ says the guide. ‘See the king is making a sacrifice to the gods and godses. See up there the lotus. See the magnificent carved pillar. Is three thousand two hundred year old. Is twenty-three metres high. See at the top the carving of Victoria.’

‘See
what
, Mustapha?’ says the padre.

‘Please be using your binoculars, sir. See up there.’

‘Oh, I get you. Victorian, he means. Graffiti by Victorian travellers. Extraordinary thing, eh?’

‘How did they get up there?’ exclaims one of the ATS girls, and the others collapse with laughter. ‘The temple wasn’t dug out then, you ass. It was full of sand. They were walking about at the tops of the pillars.’ And they drift out into the blinding sun again, towards the gharries that will take them back to Luxor, while Tom and Claudia linger in the hot
dark shade, with Rameses the Second and the Rev. John Fawcett of Amersham in the county of Buckingham 1859.

‘Let’s go back to the hotel,’ says Tom. ‘There are only six more hours till the train.’

‘We may never be here again,’ says Claudia, staring upwards. ‘Think of the Reverend John Fawcett, stumping about over our heads, back then.’

‘To hell with the Reverend John Fawcett,’ says Tom. ‘I want to go.’

‘I love you,’ says Claudia, not moving.

‘I know. Come back to the hotel.’

‘On Wednesday morning you’ll be in the desert again.’

‘You aren’t supposed to think of that.’

‘I have to,’ says Claudia. ‘In order to keep a grip on things.’

For there are moments, out here in this place and at this time, when she feels that she is untethered, no longer hitched to past or future or to a known universe but adrift in the cosmos. At night she looks at the sizzling stars, which cannot be the same stars that glimmer in English skies, and she feels eternal, which, far from being tranquil, is like some hideous fever – a psychological version of the malaria, typhoid, dysentery and jaundice that smite each and all at some point in this continent.

You lived from day to day. That of course is a banality but it had a prosaic truth to it then. Death was unmentionable and kept at bay with code-words and the careless understated style of the playing fields. Women whose husbands had bought it during the last push were seen a few weeks later being terribly plucky beside the swimming-pool at Gezira Sporting Club. I remember laughing immoderately. Dancing. Drinking. People flowed into my life and out of it again, people I have never seen since, people I knew intimately: cronies in the Press Corps, men on leave from the desert, attachés at the Embassy,
éminences grises
at GHQ, and the flotsam of Cairo itself, the long-term residents, professional Middle Easterners running banks and
businesses, peddling culture with the British Council or the English language to schools and universities. The heroes of the hour – the swashbuckling brigadiers and colonels and majors of the Eighth Army – flitted like medieval barons between the battlefield and the sybaritic excesses of the city. They left their tanks to come back for a few days’ polo or some snipe shooting down at the Fayoum. I knew a whiskered colonel who kept a string of ten polo ponies and a couple of Egyptian grooms, a laconic Hussar who set up a pack of hounds at Heliopolis to harry the jackals. The very form of the war itself seemed to stress the analogy – sieges, tented armies, raids and skirmishes, a seasonal ebb and flow as the desert itself dictated advance and retrenchment. And, as the myth of Rommel grew, it was as though Saladin himself lived again – the cunning but gentlemanly enemy, giving no quarter but essentially chivalrous. I wrote a piece about the modern Crusaders and sent it to a leftish London weekly – and got a tart response from an editor who did not see an analogy between the conscripted British working class and feudal retinues. Well, he had a point, of course, but at the same time you had to be stubbornly literal-minded not to perceive in this war an echo of that other European descent into the desert, that other pouring of men and weaponry into an alien landscape. I sent the piece to Gordon, tongue in cheek, and had his answer flung back at me months later – ‘Typical Claudia romanticism.’ I didn’t notice or care; by then I was thinking of other things.

In the Press Corps war was our business, of course. We hung around waiting for communiqués, press releases, rumours. We pursued those close to the moguls of GHQ, curried favour with crisp young attachés who might get us an interview here, some off-the-cuff remarks there. We sat grumbling at the Censors’ Office, waiting our turn in the labyrinthine processes of getting our copy to London. Or to New York or Canberra or Cape Town, for we were as international a bunch in our small way as the Cairo crowds. And I have to admit that like that chicken-brained Camilla with whom I shared a flat I too had a sexual field-day. I was one of very few women in what was predominantly a male occupation, and I was by far the best
looking. As well as the most resourceful, the most astute, the least deceivable.

And the most immodest.

‘And how did you wangle yourself out here?’ he enquires.

‘Natural talent,’ replies Claudia crisply. And immediately wishes she hadn’t. It is the wrong note to strike – slick café society talk and they are not in Cairo now but somewhere in Cyrenaica and they are sitting on petrol cans eating a meal of bully beef, tinned rice pudding and marmalade. Tom Southern looks at her and then down at his map. Someone puts a tin mug of tea into Claudia’s hands. ‘Thank you,’ she says, humbly; she has learned, in these brief twelve hours out here, the value of such an offering.

It is perhaps midnight, and very cold. They sit outside the Press Tent. Within, the New Zealander is clattering out his account of the interview with the C.-in-C. All around, figures move darkly against the silver sand, going to and fro between the just defined shapes of vehicles and tents. The sky is an immense black dome spiced with brilliant stars; the long white fingers of searchlights wander across it; the horizon flames with orange tongues; Very lights fly up – red, white and green. Somewhere beyond it – where and how far no one is prepared to tell them – is The Front, that elusive shifting goal: a concept rather than a place. The men are hunched into greatcoats or tattered sheepskins. Claudia wears slacks, two sweaters and an overcoat and still shivers. Jim Chambers – who caught up with them again a couple of hours ago – yawns and says he will turn in now. Claudia and Tom Southern are left alone.

‘Actually,’ she says, ‘I talked my way into it somehow.’

He folds the map and puts it back in his pocket.

‘That’s what I assumed,’ he says. He smiles. He has the red-eyed, fixed look that they all have. A few hours earlier Claudia listened to a man talking in the deliberate, slurred tones of, as she thought (faintly incredulous), a drunk. Until she realised that what she was hearing was the voice of
exhaustion. Many of these men have not slept for nights on end. The last push was only three days ago.

And they begin to talk not of pushes or of flaps or of the next show, but of another time and another place. ‘When I was a child,’ says Tom Southern, ‘I was fascinated by the idea of deserts. Who wouldn’t be, raised in deepest Sussex? It all stemmed from the notion of John the Baptist howling in the wilderness, and the illustrations in the Sunday School Bible – all those people in fancy dress with camels and donkeys. We once made a flour and water relief map of the Holy Land, I remember, with the Red Sea painted bright blue and Sinai a good hot yellow. Sometimes when I look at the maps in HQ I remember that.’

He has been here six months. Training in the Delta and now commands a troop of tanks. Was in last week’s action.

‘The nearest I’ve ever been to a desert,’ says Claudia, ‘is the beach at Charmouth. My brother and I used to collect fossils there. Fight over fossils.’

‘There are fossils here,’ says Tom Southern. ‘I found one yesterday. Would you like it?’ He rummages in the pocket of his battle-dress.

‘Thank you,’ says Claudia. ‘It’s a starfish, isn’t it? Goodness. All this was sea, once, then.’

‘Must’ve been. Which somehow puts one in one’s place.’

‘Yes,’ says Claudia. ‘It does.’

They sit, hands cupped round tea-mugs. Inside the tent the New Zealander’s typewriter still clatters; the skyline still roars and sparkles; the shadowy figures plod to and fro across the sand.

‘I keep a diary,’ says Tom. ‘Nicely cryptic, of course, in case I get put in the bag. But one of these days one may want to remember what all this was like.’

‘What is it like?’ asks Claudia after a moment.

He lights a cigarette. He stares at her. His face, in the moonlight, is not brown but a blackish colour. ‘Hm… What is it like? Let’s see…’ But before he can go on the New Zealander appears, shuffling typescript and offering a hipflask
of whisky. And it is decided that Claudia (who protests, of course) shall sleep in the Press Tent while the others will use the truck. Tom Southern is going to the coast tomorrow to bring up some tank replacements and has offered them a lift.

Claudia lies in a sleeping-bag in the tent. She does not sleep much. Once she raises the flap of the tent and looks out over the sand. There are other tents around, so small that she can see the booted feet of their occupants sticking out at one end. Elsewhere, bundled shapes lie up against trucks and jeeps. A petrol can cooking-stove quietly smoulders. She turns on her side and the starfish, which she has put in her pocket, grinds against her hip. She takes it out and lies with it in her hand, running her fingers from time to time over the gritty stone, the five symmetrical arms.

No, I don’t still have it. I used it as a paperweight in the Cairo flat. It lay on the table in front of the mesh-covered window before which I was writing, looking out on to a garden brilliant with zinnias and bougainvillia and red canna lilies. A garden boy would sweep the paths, very slowly, all morning, or wander with a length of hose among the flower beds, chivvied by the French landlady. When I left I gave Madame Charlot the few bits and pieces I had accumulated – the brass tray from the Mouski, the leather pouffe, the primus stove. Perhaps the starfish is in that garden, edging a path.

Madame Charlot referred to herself as French. In fact her father was Lebanese and her mother one of those essentially Cairene figures of an ancestry as complex as the city – a tiny red-haired old lady whose native language certainly appeared to be French but who also spoke Arabic and Russian and a maverick form of English. She and her daughter festered their days away in an overfurnished under-aired room full of Empire chairs and sofas from which they emerged to harry the servants and cast inquisitive looks upon their tenants. Madame Char-lot’s sharp eyes would peer from beyond the latticed wood folding screen that shielded their private rooms as Camilla’s admirers clattered up and down the stairs. When in the
evenings we entertained friends on the balcony of our flat she would patrol the garden, watering the lurid lines of zinnias and glancing covertly upwards. She always wore shapeless black dresses, topped by a grey cardigan in winter, and with stockings throughout the stifling Cairo summer. I never once heard her refer either to the war or to her husband who was never seen or heard of. Both, presumably, were inconveniences kept at bay by ignoring their existence. When I returned from that trip to the desert I told her where I had been and she persisted in referring to ‘
votre petite vacance
’. Did she ever consider what would happen to her should the Germans reach Cairo? She and her mother would simply have melted into the cosmopolitan soup, I imagine – have become someone else, changed their skins to fit the background like those other old Cairenes, the chameleons that lurked in the garden trees, skew-eyed and spiral-tailed, creeping invisible along the branches with their three-fingered gloved hands.