School for Love (13 page)

‘Oh, do you pay more now?’ exclaimed Felix.

‘Well, not at this very moment – but I’ve written to let him know that next quarter I intend to start paying £65 a year.’

Mrs Ellis yawned so that tears stood in her eyes. She refused coffee, saying she was going to lie down. ‘I could not get a sleeper on the train. The army had all of them,’ she explained as she went upstairs.

Felix when he went up himself could hear no sound of her. Faro was not lying as she usually was in the sunlight on his desk. It was clear to him that Mrs Ellis was not the sort of person to give much time to a schoolboy – or to Miss Bohun either, he was sure – yet for her sake he had upset Faro. Feeling foolish and deserted, he opened his desk. Almost at once he heard Faro jump from a
mulberry branch on to the ledge above the door, then come along to his window-sill. Making no move that might discourage her, he pretended to be absorbed in his books. In a moment she was on his knee. He looked down at her and met her steady glance of reconciliation. He slid his hand round her silken neck and she licked him with a tongue as rough as emery paper.

At supper Mrs Ellis looked very tired; her pallor had a blue tinge; she wore no lipstick and her lips were as white as her face. She seemed to have nothing to say. Miss Bohun kept glancing at her, but received no answering glance. At the end of the meal Miss Bohun put her hand on Mrs Ellis’s arm and said as though on the spur of the moment: ‘Come up to my room for a chat!’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Mrs Ellis, ‘but really I feel too tired to-night.’

Miss Bohun drew in her lips a moment, then said quietly: ‘Oh, I do sympathise. I often get so tired myself – so very tired,’ she broke off, studied Mrs Ellis’s face a moment, then added: ‘Get to bed early and have a nice, long sleep.’

Mrs Ellis shook her head: ‘I don’t sleep very well, but I’ll have a good read.’

‘In bed!’ Miss Bohun clicked her tongue. ‘Oh, dear, what a waste of electricity.’

Mrs Ellis, already on her way upstairs, said nothing but ‘Good-night.’

At breakfast it again seemed she was not going to appear.

‘Dear me,’ said Miss Bohun, ‘I do hope Mrs Ellis won’t
make a habit of this. I don’t like to see food wasted – not that it
will
be wasted, of course.’

At that moment Mrs Ellis could be heard on the stairs and both Miss Bohun and Felix turned to look at her. Felix caught his breath, for now, rested after her journey, there was behind her pallor a glow of energy and health as though a pink globe were lighted within an alabaster vase.

Miss Bohun, her manner abruptly changing, sang out happily: ‘Come along now, we must start early for the mosque.’

‘Oh, yes, the mosque,’ Mrs Ellis sounded at once contrite and offhand. ‘I wish I could come, but I cannot. I have an appointment.’

‘Oh!’ Miss Bohun dropped her eyelids over her eyes, and asked: ‘Do you take milk and sugar in your tea?’

‘I wonder – could I have coffee?’

‘No,’ Miss Bohun spoke rather brusquely; ‘we can’t run to both tea and coffee for breakfast, so I’m afraid it has to be tea.’

Mrs Ellis did not ask why it had to be tea, but a slight frown ruffled for the first time the placidity of her expression. She took the cup of tea as though it were a little distasteful to her. Miss Bohun jumped up, jerking the table as she did so, and said to Felix in a very gay voice: ‘Now, Felix, off we go,’ and Felix, without courage to say he no longer wanted to go, was led off before Mrs Ellis had started to eat her very small piece of breakfast bacon.

It was a brilliant spring morning, but Miss Bohun did not mention it. As soon as they had shut the gate and were in Sulaiman Road, she said: ‘I must say, I’m afraid Mrs Ellis may prove rather a trying person to have in the
house. She seems to me a bit of a
poseur
– you know what I mean – actressy. And those finger-nails! Dear me! I did so hope she would fit in and we’d be just a jolly little family.’ After a reflective pause, she said half to herself: ‘She
is
an odd girl.’

Felix’s heart thumped in apprehension that these remarks should prove for Mrs Ellis what similar remarks had proved for Mr Jewel, but Miss Bohun made no threats and Felix reflected with relief that Mrs Ellis probably paid much more than Mr Jewel. When they turned into the main road, Miss Bohun, the question of Mrs Ellis apparently forgotten, said in a high, excited tone: ‘Let’s go in by the Damascus Gate. It’s
much
more fun.’

As they passed through the great medieval gate, around which lay a litter of paper and orange-peel, Felix threw off the first nervousness of his infatuation with Mrs Ellis and began to think the expedition was fun. The covered lane called ‘King Solomon’s Street’, made narrower by the display of fruit, vegetables, and sweetstuffs, and café chairs, was packed with people and donkeys. Almost as soon as they entered, a woman beggar, wrapped in black, touched Miss Bohun’s arm. Miss Bohun, looking at the oval where the face should be and seeing only the stretched black and white patterned veil that made its wearer seem faceless as a leper, cried: ‘Dear me! Poor creature. How disgusting!’ and shook her off.

Miss Bohun had not much to say, but she occasionally and with determination distracted Felix from something that interested him to show him something that did not.

‘There!’ she caught his shoulder as he was watching a sudden flare-up between two Arab tradesmen who, without actually touching one another, were producing all the
uproar and excitement of a fight – ‘There!’ she made him face a heap of onions, ‘look at the price of those! Four piastres a kilo and I paid five in the Nablus Road.’

Felix murmured something, but by the time he could look round again at the fight, a third Arab, ostentatiously and with an eye on the audience, had come between the combatants and was making peace.

‘One has to pay so much for food,’ Miss Bohun said. ‘And the English are cheated all the time. Someone like Mrs Ellis, for instance, can have no idea how difficult it is. I am sure she was annoyed because we don’t have coffee for breakfast, but I prefer tea and you prefer tea.’

‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ Felix said, ‘I used to have coffee.’

‘Tea is better for you. I wish I could afford to give you milk, but it’s out of the question. Perhaps one month Mrs Ellis will take over the housekeeping and
then
she’ll understand.’

When they were brought up by the wall and gateway of the mosque a small Arab boy ran at them shouting: ‘Mamnû Ekfel.’

Miss Bohun stopped with her mouth open: ‘What,’ she said, ‘is it Friday?’ But it was not Friday. She looked very cross and brushed the small boy aside. He at once flung after her a stone he had been holding in his hand. When she had spoken to an Arab inside the gate, she beckoned commandingly to Felix: ‘Come on,’ she called and as they passed through the archway she smiled happily and said: ‘Sucks to the little boy.’

After the confined and shadowed lanes of the Old City, the great area of the mosque opening before them seemed adazzle in the early sunlight. There had been a shower in the night and the slabs of white paving-stone had a
scrubbed and powdery look. Between the stones, here and there, the jewel-green grass had pushed up as fine as hair. On the courtyard the tiled mosque with its dome, the rows of pillars, the little Dome of the Chain, the place of ablution and the single cypresses black as rook feathers stood isolated each over a distance that had a dream-like immensity.

Gazing around him, Felix whispered: ‘Oh!’

‘Haven’t you been here before?’

‘No.’ Felix had been nowhere.

‘I keep forgetting,’ Miss Bohun murmured, ‘we must do something about your sightseeing, but another day. Now, we go over here. Shoulders back, head up, walk slowly – make a good impression.’

Felix glanced sideways at Miss Bohun and modelled his movement on hers. Together they did a dead march towards a doorway in the wall through which an old Imam could be seen sitting cross-legged on a rug. The walk was a long one. Miss Bohun had time to say: ‘I remember our Major Joffey who preceded me as pastor of the “Ever-Readies”. He was such a wonderful man, such an organiser! Before we entered a meeting he would take a duster out of his pocket and polish my shoes, and polish his own shoes, and then he’d say: “Head back, shoulders square,” and we would march together into the hall. How right he was! How very right! It is so necessary to make a good impression.’

As they drew near, the old man could be seen gazing through the doorway as though completely unaware that two persons were advancing at a crawl upon him. It seemed that only when their shadows fell across his rug did they become visible for him. He made no move, but
looked up and smiled broadly. Miss Bohun gave her greetings very competently in Arabic.

‘. . . and this is my young friend and lodger Mr Latimer,’ she said.

The Imam nodded to Felix and waved towards a stone ledge that ran round the wall of the bare little room. Two or three hangers-on of the mosque, who were sprawling on this, shifted as Miss Bohun and Felix sat down. One of these was sent for coffee; the others watched the money pass with eager, interested eyes. Felix felt rather embarrassed when Miss Bohun put down, separately and with a flourish, the one pound and twenty-five piastres that she was voluntarily adding to the quarter’s rent; it seemed such a small sum, but the Imam expressed delight and Miss Bohun flushed with pleasure at his appreciation and her own liberality. When the coffee pan appeared with three set in brass egg-cups, Miss Bohun seemed to be carried away: ‘It is a long time,’ she said, ‘since I have received a visit from the ladies of your family.’

The Imam, who understood but could not speak English, made a pleased gesture with his hands and replied: ‘Bukra’.

‘Ah!’ Miss Bohun nodded, her cheeks pink: ‘Bukra fil mish-mish,’ and the Arabs roared with laughter.

Felix watched the exchange with admiration so that even Mrs Ellis passed from his mind. As they walked back Miss Bohun seemed equally admiring of the way she had carried off the visit to her landlord: ‘But English women are highly respected here,’ she said. ‘Of course we have Lady Hester Stanhope and people like that to thank, but, apart from that, I think the Arabs appreciate our spirit. I’m told that an English woman is the only sort of person
that can travel in safety from one end to the other of the Levant. That is one of the things that draws me to this country. As an Englishwoman, one has standing,’ and she smoothed the front of her dress with satisfaction. ‘And then,’ she continued as they passed out into the dark lanes full of smells of fruit, wine, drains and stale meat, ‘there is their wonderful, old-world feeling for hospitality. We understand it; we appreciate it. And in return, of course, you need only make a gesture – like my inviting his wives and daughters to come and see me. They won’t come, of course. I don’t suppose the older ladies ever leave the house.’

At the Jaffa Gate, where there was a perpetual noisy traffic of men and beasts in the spring sunlight, they stopped at a small fish-shop and Miss Bohun bought sardines. The man tried to add another to make the half kilo but she would not take it. ‘They’re really quite expensive,’ she explained to Felix, ‘and two-and-a-half of them make a good meal for anyone.’ At another shop she bought cabbage and then all the way to Fullworth’s she talked about the price of vegetables until Felix felt guilty at being part of the cause that involved her in so much expense. If it had not been so near to luncheon and he could have thought of any excuse to go off, he would have gone, but as they returned through the Russian Compound he was rewarded for staying.

‘Look, look,’ Miss Bohun touched his arm. ‘Can that be Mrs Ellis?’

‘Yes, it is Mrs Ellis.’

‘Coming out of the Government Hospital! How very odd!’

‘Perhaps she’s been to see someone.’

‘Yes,’ murmured Miss Bohun with a deep and speculative frown, ‘perhaps she has.’

Frau Leszno left a few days later. Felix did not see her go: as far as he was concerned, she simply ceased to be there. Miss Bohun never mentioned her again, nor did she replace her. Everything was done now by Maria, who cooked neither better nor worse than Frau Leszno and who did her work much more willingly. Felix noticed it was she who now cleaned the windows and knives, but he was much too wrapped up in his admiration of Mrs Ellis to reflect on the possibility of Maria’s being overworked.

The next time he went to see Mr Jewel, he longed to talk about Mrs Ellis and only Mrs Ellis, but he was forced to avoid mentioning her for fear Mr Jewel would guess the attic was now occupied.

Mr Jewel was sitting on a bench in the garden, a blanket over his knees, and as he lifted his faded, blue-white eyes to the sky he said: ‘The sun – that’s what a feller needs.’ Behind his head bloomed a little jacaranda tree, a delicate branch of colour feathering out violet against the pallid stonework of the wall. He lifted his face round to smile at it: ‘And flowers,’ he said. ‘Sun and flowers.’

‘Don’t you ever want to go back to England?’ asked Felix, who privately thought England might be the best place for Mr Jewel.

‘No. When I came to Alex, I had an accident and in hospital they used to wheel me out every day on to the balcony, and there I lay in the sun and I thought: “This is the stuff – this is what I’ve always wanted. No grey skies, no rain, no cold – people in England don’t know what they’re missing.”’

‘But haven’t you any relatives there?’

‘Only my brother Samson, and I doubt he’s forgotten me now. Lord, no!’ Mr Jewel brooded a while, then shook his head: ‘An English winter’d do for me.’

Mr Jewel had always been a frail old man, but there was about him now a rustling, silvery dryness like that of a skeleton leaf.

Felix, sitting on the grass that was already turning yellow in the sun, gazed at Mr Jewel’s bone-thin, dry, old hands spread on the blanket; he supposed Mr Jewel was better off in this part of the world where, however poor a man might be, he was more often hot than cold; but Mr Jewel twitched inside his clothes and shuddered down his spine: ‘This has been a chilly spring,’ he said. ‘And it was a cold winter. A cold winter!’ Suddenly something seemed to strike him: ‘Has she said anything about the rent?’