The Levant Trilogy by Olivia Manning Page A

Alex. He'll cut it off by
going round the back. When that happens, it'll fall of its own accord. No help
for it. No supplies. Nothing. They'll be starved into surrender. You ring Guy
and tell him to take the next train to Cairo. Here he'll have a chance. There -
not a hope in hell. Tell him if he tries to stick it out, he'll only end in the
bag. And a lot of good that'll do him, you or anyone else.'
    Jackman began to
make off while Harriet was asking, 'What are we to do?' He looked over his
shoulder to shout at her, 'When they get here, grab a car and race for the
canal...'
    ' If they
get here.'
    'Nothing can stop
them now.'
    Harriet was the
only guest taking luncheon at the pension. At the other end of the hall, almost
invisible in the weak electric light, Madame Wilk sat at her table. Two tables
away from Harriet sat Miss Copeland who appeared at the pension once a week. Today was her day. She would lay out a little
haberdashery shop on one of the tables then, sitting in the silence of the
deaf, she waited to be given her luncheon, tea and supper. After that she
packed up and went to some mysterious living place. She sold sanitary towels
to the younger women at the pension, passing them over, wrapped in plain paper,
with a secrecy that suggested a conspiracy. No one knew how long she had lived
in Cairo. Harriet, who was curious about her, had learnt that years before,
when Miss Copeland still had her tongue, she used to tell people that she was
related to an English ducal family. Some people got together and wrote to the
head of the family on Miss Copeland's behalf, but there was no reply. She was
now very old and her skin, tautly stretched over frail old bones, had the milky
blue-ness of chicken skin. Each week it seemed she could not survive to the
next, yet here she was, silent and preoccupied, remote from the panic of the
times. She went through her luncheon with the intensity of someone to whom a
meal was a rare and wonderful treat.
    Luncheon ended,
as breakfast had begun, with six dates in a green glass dish. Harriet took her
coffee over to Madame Wilk's table and whispered, although Miss Copeland was in
no danger of hearing her, 'Does she know about the emergency?'
    Madame Wilk gave
her head a severe shake.
    Miss Copeland's
cottons, tapes, needles and pins were laid out this week, as every week, in
orderly rows beside a red and white chequered Oxo tin for money, when there was
any money.
    'What's to be
done about her?'
    Madame Wilk
spread her hands. 'God knows.' She and Harriet kept their heads together,
fearing to disturb Miss Copeland's happy ignorance of events. She might have to
be told, but not yet.
    Harriet set out
for work through streets coagulated with heat and empty of movement. Labourers
and beggars lay in a sort of sun syncope, pressed against walls, arms over
eyes, galabiahs tucked between legs to avoid any accidental exposure of the
parts that religion required them to keep hidden.
    Sweat trickled
like an insect between her shoulder blades and soaked the
waistband of her dress. She could smell the scorched smell of her hair. And
about her there were other smells, especially the not altogether unpleasant
smell that came from waste lots saturated with human ordure and urine. Cairo
was full of waste lots; dusty, brick-strewn, stone-strewn, hill-ocky sites
where a building had collapsed from age and neglect. The smell that came from
them was nothing like the salty, pissy smell of an European urinal. It was
rancid and sweet like some sort of weed or first war gas. Harriet thought of
phosgene, though she did not know what it was like. She had read somewhere of
soldiers mistaking the smell of a may tree for poison-gas.
    On her solitary
walks to afternoon work, Harriet had had odd experiences, induced perhaps by
the mesmeric dazzle of the light. Once or twice, she had lost the present
altogether and found herself somewhere else. On one occasion she was in a
landscape which she had seen years before, when riding