City of Gold. Len Deighton

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ