LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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