City of Gold

The girl watched her corporal. Only when he seemed to approve it did the girl sit down.

‘They’ll start coming in for dinner soon,’ said Peggy. ‘There are no spare tables so –’

‘We understand,’ said the corporal. ‘I suppose it’s officers only.’

Peggy West was too tired to be provoked into argument. She said, ‘Tell them Peggy said it was all right. Peggy West.’

‘Thank you,’ said the girl. ‘It’s most kind of you.’ It was the first time she’d spoken. She had a soft upper-class voice. Perhaps, thought Peggy, that explained something about their relationship; the way in which the young corporal was so prickly about the privileges accorded to officers. ‘My name is Alice Stanhope,’ said the girl.

The corporal extended a hand and Peggy shook it. ‘Bert Cutler.’ He amended it to ‘Corporal Albert Cutler, if we are being formal.’ Peggy found the Scots accent hard to detect. Perhaps he’d found it expedient to eliminate it. Or perhaps Peggy had been away from Britain too long. Cutler had a confident handshake, tanned face, pleasant smile, and clear blue eyes. He was an attractive man. It would be easy to fall in love with such a man, thought Peggy, but he would not be easy to keep. English foxhounds were never seen at dog shows and she’d never heard of one being kept as a pet.

‘Peggy West. I live here. Second floor.’

‘Thank you again, Miss West.’

Peggy smiled and left them to themselves. She didn’t believe they were cousins. Once back in the lobby she looked behind the desk to see if there was a letter from her husband, Karl, or from her brother in Canada, but there was nothing in the box. She was not surprised; mail took months and months, and it was very uncertain now that everything had to go round the Cape and so many ships got sunk.

She had gone up a few steps when a thought struck her. She retraced her steps and went into the dining room with enough fuss for them to recover themselves if they were embracing. She need not have troubled herself; they were sitting decorously, facing each other solemnly across the small marble-topped table.

‘I’m sorry to bother you’ – she looked at the girl – ‘but I suddenly wondered if you could type.’

‘Type?’ The girl looked at her as if humouring a lunatic. ‘Yes, I can type a bit. At least I could last year.’

‘You’re not looking for a job, by any chance?’

The corporal said, ‘She’s got to find somewhere to stay.’ He looked at his wristwatch. ‘I have to get back to my unit tonight.’

‘Where I work – at the Base Hospital – we need a full-time typist. In fact someone to sort out the office,’ said Peggy looking from one to the other. ‘We are getting frantic, really frantic.’ Her voice was hearty. This was Peggy West who’d been the school hockey captain, Peggy West who bargained remorselessly in the bazaars.

‘I have nowhere to sleep,’ said the girl.

Peggy closed her eyes. Those who knew her recognised such gestures as marks of great emotion. ‘I’ll find her a place to sleep if she’ll come and work for us.’ She said it to the corporal. He was the one who made the decisions, and he would not mistake the tones of a solemn promise.

The girl and the corporal looked at each other. She smiled at him. It was a smile of love and reassurance.

‘Here? A room here?’ said the corporal, suspecting perhaps that Peggy meant to send the girl to some flea-bitten lodgings on the other side of town.

‘You’d have to share a bathroom with me and another woman,’ she said. ‘The room you’d be using rightfully belongs to an officer at the front … He’s been gone into the blue since November, but he could return any time.’

The girl smiled as if she’d achieved something quite remarkable, and the same look was on her face as she turned to the corporal.

Peggy added, ‘I hope you haven’t got too much luggage. There isn’t room to swing a cat.’

‘Just the one case. That’s all I have,’ said the girl looking down at it. It was small to be a case that contained all one’s worldly possessions. The girl smiled sadly, and Peggy felt sorry for her. ‘I was beginning to think I’d spend the night in the railway station waiting room.’

Peggy wondered if she had any notion of what a night in Cairo’s main railway station would be like. The girl was like a china doll. It was difficult to guess what sort of person she was behind that shy exterior. Peggy hoped that she would get along with the others at the hospital.

‘I’ll leave you two alone now,’ said Peggy. ‘Come up to the second floor. My room is to the left of the staircase. The door has a hand-of-Fatima brass knocker.’ She smiled. ‘Don’t go wandering farther upstairs. The top floor belongs to a Russian prince. He’ll eat you alive if you go into his sanctum.’

‘Thank you, Peggy,’ said Alice softly.

When the corporal made no response, Peggy looked again at him. He was staring into space. For just one brief moment she saw within him a different person. Peggy smiled at him but he did not respond. She had the feeling that he wasn’t seeing her. Then suddenly his face changed, and he was relaxed and smiling again as if the moment had never been.

‘Yes, thank you, Peggy,’ said Cutler. ‘Thank you very much.’

Peggy West didn’t sleep well that night. She went to bed and closed her eyes tightly, but still she worried about what she had done and what she had promised. Suppose Lieutenant Anderson arrived back here without warning and wanted his room? Lieutenant Anderson was not a man to cross. A rough spoken car commander from Leeds, Andy liked everyone to know that he had been a sergeant until the desert fighting started. Since then he’d won a chestful of medals and a battlefield commission. Andy was a nice friendly fellow – despite his pug’s face and scarred cheek – but she dreaded to think what he’d be like if he came back and found his room occupied, his door locked and his kit stowed away in the storeroom.

At four-thirty AM Peggy gave up trying to sleep. She slid out of bed, boiled a kettle and quietly made herself a pot of tea. At least tea was something freely available here – only sugar and kerosene were in short supply – and tea kept the British going in times of danger. With only the bedside light on, she sat down at the dressing table that she used also as a desk. Waiting for the tea to brew, she pulled a comb through her hair and suddenly saw her mother staring at her with that wide-eyed shock and maternal concern that she’d so often provoked from her. Her mother had loved her, of course, just as her mother had loved her father. But mother’s deepest love was reserved for those damned dogs she kept in her kennels, barking and whining ceaselessly so that it drove her distracted. Her mother would stay up all night with a sick dog, but when Daddy was ill she went and made up her bed in the spare room. Peggy had never forgiven her mother for that.

Peggy poured herself a cup of tea and put some milk into it. Drinking tea revived her, and brought back memories of her childhood in England. But other thoughts intruded. Suppose the girl couldn’t type? What if she turned out to be some kind of bad-tempered monster that the other people in the office detested? Suppose she wanted too much money?

And what about that soldier? The look in Cutler’s face was that of a man under extreme stress. She had seen such symptoms at the Base Hospital. Of course when he realised that she was looking at him, he made every effort to smile and relax, and the tension went away. But that did not alter what she had seen, and what she had seen had frightened her.

Until her husband went away Peggy had never worried about anything at all. Things were different now she’d gone back to living on her own. Her finances were precarious. Would Karl ever return to her? At their first meeting, Solomon had given her a note in Karl’s handwriting. Since then the brief notes from Karl had been typewritten, and Solomon harshly dismissed any idea of her talking to her husband on the telephone. She had a nasty feeling that Karl’s money might stop any time Solomon decided that it should. She didn’t trust Solomon. There had been an unmistakable element of blackmail in his request that she keep an eye on the wretched Russian prince upstairs.

Her hospital pay would not go far without Karl’s money. Without extra income, her savings would last no more than a month or two in this town. More and more men were arriving every day: British, South Africans, Australians, soldiers and civilians, all with money to spend. Prices were rising steeply. The Magnifico’s rents had increased twice in the previous twelve months.

She poured more tea. Now that it had fully brewed the tea had darkened. She liked it like that: the way that Karl always drank it. She wished he’d never gone to take up the job in Iraq; there had been an attempt to overthrow the British rule there last year. Now Solomon said he was in trouble in Baghdad. It was such a long way away. She worried about him.

She was convinced that Karl West was not an uncaring man, but why couldn’t he get a job and settle down and make a proper home with her? Last year she’d almost abandoned all hopes of seeing him again and asked to go home to England. The British authorities in Egypt had ordered compulsory repatriation of army wives and families. Grief and anger turned to rage when some of the wives of senior officers were exempted from the order. There were places on the ships for other British civilians. At first she’d been tempted, but now she was glad she’d never put her name down. Her prospects had changed when Solomon brought her the good news of Karl. It wasn’t the money; now Peggy had something to hope and plan for. Or so she told herself.

She heard the street cleaners calling, and the back door of the kitchen slammed, as they dragged the sacks of rubbish outside. Traffic was moving. She didn’t open the curtains. She knew that by now the brawny woman across the street would be hanging washing on a clothesline on the roof. She was Italian. Egyptians always laid their washing flat to dry in the sun.

She looked again at her reflection. Everything mother warned her about had come true, or almost everything. Had her mother still been alive, Peggy would have written her a letter to confirm those old fears of hers. Her mother had always got some grim satisfaction from having her apocalyptic predictions come true. Her mother had said that Egypt was no place to have a baby. As unreasonable and irrational as it so obviously was, Peggy had never been able to forgive her mother for that letter. Had the baby lived, everything might have gone differently. Karl loved children. He might have got another job that didn’t involve endless travelling.

Peggy combed her hair more carefully and put clips into it. She wasn’t yet thirty and she was still very attractive. What was there to worry about?

6

Peggy’s fears, about taking Alice Stanhope to the Base Hospital, and getting her a job there, abated soon after they arrived the next morning. Alice Stanhope made every possible effort to fit in. The senior surgeon, Colonel Hochleitner, who had been landed with the administration problems, had been in Cairo since before the war. He greeted Alice warmly, and liked her, and that was all that really mattered. When Alice was taken into his private office she looked at the chaos of paperwork – and the piles of scribbled notes that had almost buried the typewriter – with that same placid look with which she greeted everything except Corporal Cutler, took off her cardigan, and sat down at the desk. She didn’t even complain about that ancient Adler typewriter, which clattered like a steam engine. She was not the fastest typist in the world, but she could spell long words – even some medical words and Latin – without consulting a dictionary, and the typed result was clean and legible.

‘Now perhaps the doctors in this bloody hospital can spend more time on the wards, and less time ploughing through War Office paperwork,’ said ‘the Hoch’ approvingly.

Peggy was pleased, but her pleasure didn’t last long. It was soon inspection time. She hated to walk through ward after ward that had been emptied in expectation of new casualties. The empty beds, their sheets and pillows crisply starched and their blankets boxed expertly, were exactly like the lines of fresh graves and the white headstones under which so many of the casualties ultimately ended their journeys from the battlefront.

She looked at her watch. There was not much time to get ready; then it would be like yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. The floor of the operating theatres slippery with blood and the mortuary crammed. Tank crewmen burned, mine-clearing sappers with missing legs, and all those dreadful ‘multiple wounds’, soldiers maimed by shell fragments and mortar fire. Gunshot wounds were less common this far back; those men died before getting here.

She nodded her approval and signed the book. She would check the operating theatres, make her usual rounds, and then sit down for a moment before the new arrivals. Lost in her thoughts, Peggy went striding along and did not notice the nurse until she almost blundered into her.

‘Nurse Borrows, what are you –?’

‘Sister West. Ogburn, the boy with the leg wound, died in the night.’

Peggy looked at her. The tears were welling in her eyes. She had kept it bottled up. But now that Peggy had arrived she’d said it, and, having said the terrible words, she lost control. ‘Pull yourself together, nurse.’

‘He was fine yesterday at doctor’s rounds: pulse, heart, temperature normal. And he was laughing at something on the wireless –’

‘How many times have I told you not to write letters for them?’