Khamsin

by Denise Robins

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

Soon after Phillida Maltern joins her soldier husband at his posting by the Suez Canal, she realises that this strange country with its oppressive heat and ruinously expensive living could bring their marriage to disaster. Phillida is far from home, and the problems she faces seem to worsen daily.

Release date: June 12, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 400

Sample

It seemed to Phillida that she had waited so long and struggled so hard to get a passage out to the Middle East in order to join her husband that when the troopship finally docked at Port Said the whole thing fell rather flat.

It was, she supposed, a sort of anti-climax … and in her deep, rather serious way of thinking, she also supposed that it is one of life’s ironies that when you want a thing madly and hopelessly it is the most desirable thing in the world. But when you’ve achieved it … well, it doesn’t seem quite so marvellous after all.

Not that Phillida was really a cynic. Far from it. She was much too young for that, and at twenty-three she still had an almost childish capacity for enjoyment and an enthusiasm for beauty in art and nature. But she was, perhaps, a bit more thoughtful and analytical than most girls of her age. She had been in the Services—the W.R.N.S.—for the last four years of the war. Service life made a girl think a bit … knocked off a few of the corners … took away a few illusions, perhaps. Phillida—more generally known to her inmates as ‘Phil’—had seen a good deal of men and of life in general during those arduous and at times harrowing years of hard work, night watches, rationing and bombardments.

It had been a marvel to herself, as well as to those who knew her, that she had managed to retain so much of that disarming innocence which seemed still to cling to her life as a charming aura even when she achieved the dignified status of ‘married woman’.

This morning, early February in the year 1947, Phillida, clutching an old Service zipped bag in one hand and with her handbag under the other arm, plus a rug and a couple of books, stood at the ship’s rails and regarded Port Said with an expression of anxiety rather than excitement on her face. An essentially young sensitive face with a fair skin that blushed easily, framed in long fair hair which did not curl but which she wore madonna-wise, parted in the centre and coiled into a neat shining bun at the nape of her neck. She had wideset eyes, grey rather than blue—a little weak. She had had to wear glasses for close work since she was a child. She was not strikingly beautiful, but she was slenderly built and graceful and had lovely long legs. Her chief assets were that smooth pale gold hair and a beautifully shaped mouth with its sweet, serious expression.

At first sight some people thought her rather prim—even haughty—but on closer acquaintance became aware that Phillida was merely shy and a most kind and friendly person—almost too generous at times. She had deep reserves and an inferiority complex. Service life had really been purgatory for her. She could not bear noise and a slapdash communal existence. She loved to curl up in a chair with a book, or listen to music; she adored the country and used to help her father in his garden before a stray bomb had wrecked home, father and mother in a single night.

That night (Phillida had been away stationed in Portsmouth at the time) was one of the black dreadful incidents of her life which she did not care to remember, but which still haunted her imagination, even though it had happened four years ago: She had so loved home and parents. Being an only child, she had basked always in their love, too, and accepted their devotion as part of a happy, easy existence.

To be bereft of all in a single night had been a harrowing and bitter experience, and it was just about then that she had met Rex Maltern and soon afterwards married him.

One of a large crowd on a heavily laden ship, Phillida now stared at the unusual scene before her and wished that she could feel wildly excited. But she really felt afraid. Disappointingly enough, it was not a bright day; there was none of the heat and sunshine that she had expected to find in Egypt. It was unusually cloudy with a threat of rain, and at this early hour—seven in the morning—it was quite cold. Phillida shivered in the wind that blew strands of hair into her eyes and cut through her camel’s-hair coat.

Port Said looked rather gloomy and depressing, she thought. There were a number of ships in the harbour and many small craft. She could see a lot of boats full of natives trying to sell their wares. She was almost deafened by the noise … the hoarse screaming voices which filled the air with discordant sound. The wily Arabs flung ropes up to some of the troops on the lower decks, who caught them and hauled up all kinds of merchandise; anything from leather goods to oranges, food, sweets and nuts in small baskets. There was a good deal of haggling going on, of laughter and derision from the troops, of barter and protest and a flood of unintelligible Arabic from the men in their boats.

Phillida leaned over the rails and stared down at the dirty white gowns of the Arabs; at the red tarbooshes, the variety of turbans, the mixture of black races; she tried to be interested and amused but was faintly repelled by the smell—the odour of the East with which she was not yet familiar. And she was not a little apprehensive.

Here she was in Egypt at last. Would Rex be here to meet her? Would he have got the cable which she had sent to the Army address he had given her, telling him she was sailing?

What would her life be like out here as the wife of an Army captain? Personally, she knew more about the Navy. It seemed queer to her at times that, after all those years as a Wren, she had married into one of the other Services.

She had met some charming Naval officers in the old days and had had numerous proposals—like all good-looking girls whose work had flung them into the company of war-weary, woman-hungry men. But somehow it had been Rex who had won the day … Rex who had met her at the psychological moment so soon after that disaster to her Exeter home. Phillida was a Devon girl and came of a family who had lived in Devonshire as far back as they could trace the name Millverton.

Rex came from London. He was a mixture of Irish and English with a dash of French thrown in—his maternal grandmother came from Nice. It was from her, Phillida imagined, that he had inherited his facile charm and those gay almond-shaped brown eyes which most women found so attractive.

It was three years since Phillida had seen him. Sometimes it frightened her to think what strangers they were, for she had only known him for a month before they were married and had spent only ten days with him as his wife—ten days crammed with passionate excitement and the intense happiness of loving and being loved after all the tragic misery of losing her house and beloved parents.

They had been given no real chance to get to know each other properly. Phillida had lived on letters—and memories. Letters were unsatisfactory things and Rex’s particularly, because he proved himself a poor correspondent. Rex, when you met him, was a born orator, had tremendous powers of expressing himself, but he seemed unable to write anything more than scrappy notes which Phillida had found so disappointing. It wasn’t enough for her just to be told that somebody ‘missed her’. She wanted to know what he was thinking and feeling deep down. And Rex had never told her any of these things. He wrote about his parties, his tennis, his riding, but of himself, personally, only in the most vague fashion.

For the last two and a half years he had been in Burma. He could, she knew, from what she had been told by other people, have got back to England now, but he seemed disinclined to return to a cold climate and the austere conditions at home. He had said as much in one letter to Phil and had ‘wangled’ a further posting to the Middle East. Much better, he wrote, for her to join him, than for him to go back and ‘moulder’, as he put it, in some dull English station. He liked the life out East, the sunshine, plenty to eat and drink, and so on.

Secretly Phillida deplored this attitude. She was essentially a home lover—English to the core—and she had a grandmother still living and with whom she had made her home after her own had been demolished, whom she had hated to leave.

‘Gamma’, as the old lady was always called, was the only one of Phillida’s family left to her and they had clung together after the awful disaster which had robbed Phillida of both parents and Mrs. Millverton of a much loved son and daughter-in-law. Gamma was nearing seventy and none too well these days. Phillida had been loath to leave her alone in the tiny cottage in Alvercombe which had belonged to the Millvertons for a hundred years. She knew, too, what it had meant to the old lady to see her go … each of them had been afraid that they might never see each other again. But Rex had written:

You can’t hang on to your grandmother for the rest of your life, darling, and it would be darned selfish of her to expect it. My parents don’t expect to hang on to me, and now you are a soldier’s wife you have got to like travel and change.

Well, Phillida didn’t think she would ever learn ‘to like travel and change’. She was a creature of habit … hated to be uprooted. While she was in the W.R.N.S. every fresh posting had been a torture to her. She was so shy and found it so difficult to make new friends. But there had always been darling old Gamma and the cottage to go back to on leave.

What a long way away Alvercombe seemed now, Phillida thought, as she looked with her wide serious eyes at Port Said. How lovely it was … the little whitewashed cottage, the garden full of old-fashioned flowers, and that view of Alvercombe Bay and the sea. At this hour Gamma would still be asleep. But Phillida knew exactly what she would be doing in an hour’s time; she would put on her electric kettle for an early cup of tea, then go down to cook her solitary breakfast, and then, when Mrs. Brothers, who ‘did’ for her, came to clean the cottage, Gamma would take her stick and brave the poor weather—and her sciatica which had given her so much trouble lately—and trudge forth to buy the day’s food.

Of course it was absurd that she should be missing Gamma and Alvercombe when she was here about to meet her husband and at last start with him that married life for which she had so ardently longed.

But, she thought ruefully, she hadn’t really wanted to begin that life in married quarters in the Middle East. She had foolishly built up a picture of Rex in a home job, able to live out … in a cottage in the country (Devonshire for preference), leading the quiet life she had always led; only with Rex at her side.

‘There I go again,’ she thought. ‘I must snap out of it and face up to the fact that it will be years before Rex retires and I can have my cottage in Devonshire—or settle down. …’

Besides, Rex wouldn’t want her to ‘get settled’. He was so much the opposite. He adored change and adventure and he was not country or cottage minded. A flat in London for him if anything at all in England. And a fast car to take them down to a racecourse for a day’s meeting, or out for a night’s dancing. (Rex was a marvellous dancer and if he had any pretensions to being artistic at all, he was musical. He could play ‘swing’ like a professional.)

What would he be like after three years in Burma? How would he look? she wondered. He had sent her snapshots but they had never really told her anything. Occasionally a brother officer had come back and looked up ‘little Mrs. Maltern’ who was still in the W.R.N.S. and given her the sort of news that has no meaning … ‘Old Rex is as fit as a fiddle …’ or ‘Rex always enjoys life … dickens of a chap’ or ‘Your husband told me to give you this parcel … silk stockings, I think …’ or ‘I saw him in the bar at the club the night before I left Rangoon. Full of beans,’ and so on.

None of that had brought Rex any closer to her. It merely inferred that he was enjoying life.

Whilst Phillida, despite her work which kept her occupied until she was demobilised and the sweet tranquil leaves at home with her grandmother, had not really been enjoying life at all. Marriage and that short honeymoon with Rex had made her more in love with him than ever and she had felt desperately lonely and unfulfilled all these years. For a long time she had had her name down on a list of ‘wives’ awaiting their turn to join their husbands abroad. But the waiting and frustration seemed to go on endlessly until she had reached this present stage of feeling estranged from Rex and half reluctant to sail when at last the chance was offered her and she boarded that troop ship at Southampton.

She tried to tell herself that once she saw him all the old marvellous love and excitement would return and he would make her forget England and Gamma … that she was just a bit muddled in her mind and emotions for the moment because they had been separated so long, and that it would all pass the instant she set eyes on him.

She heard a voice behind her:

‘Oh, Phil! I’ve been looking for you everywhere. …’

Phillida turned and saw a dark-haired girl of her own age, also laden with bags and parcels. Just behind her, carrying a suitcase, was a tall, fair, nice-looking man in uniform which was wet and glistening, for it had been raining hard until a few minutes ago.

Phillida’s anxious face relaxed into a smile. This girl had been one of the eight with whom she had shared a cabin on the rather tiresome journey from England. Her name was Mrs. Cubitt. Everybody called her ‘Steve’, which apparently had been her nickname since her childhood, and with her rather strong features and short curly hair she looked like a boy, particularly in the slacks which she was now wearing.

Steve was the only person with whom Phillida had really become friendly on board ship.

‘Oh, hello,’ Phillida said. ‘I wonder how long it will be before we go ashore and can find our husbands.’

Steve proudly tucked an arm through that of the tall man beside her.

‘I’ve already found mine. Isn’t it lucky, Phil? Geoff’s been in Port Said for the last forty-eight hours on a job, and has just managed to come out in one of those R.A.S.C. motor-boats to find me.’

‘Oh, what marvellous luck! I am pleased for you!’ said Phillida, and shook the hand which Major Cubitt extended to her.

The three of them talked for a moment.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen my husband or know him,’ said Phillida wistfully. ‘He’s Captain Maltern—in the Midland Regiment—he’s at G.H.Q. in Fayid.’

Geoffrey Cubitt grimaced.

‘Poor chap! Is he indeed? It’s a bit tough out there in the desert. No, I haven’t come across him, I’m afraid.’

Steve Cubitt gave a friendly smile at Phillida, whom she liked and admired more than any girl she had met for some time.

‘But isn’t it wonderful, Phil? We shall be quite near you because Geoff is stationed in Cairo at the moment, but everybody’s moving out, and we shall all be down in the Canal Zone by the end of March, so we are bound to see each other.’

Geoffrey Cubitt also smiled.

‘Yes, I’ve been telling Steve she will only have a few weeks of civilised life in a nice pension in Cairo and then it will be a bed-sitting-room for her in this Married Families’ Camp they are putting up in the desert fast and furiously to accommodate G.H.Q. officers and their families.’

‘But Rex is working in Fayid already,’ said Phillida.

‘I expect he’s in the advance party,’ said Cubitt. ‘The married quarters aren’t ready for the women yet. He’ll be living in a tent. But I dare say he has got you a room in Ismailia.’

Steve asked her husband the question which was on Phillida’s lips. ‘And what’s it like in Ismailia?’

‘Quite the nicest spot in Egypt,’ volunteered Major Cubitt. ‘Full of Suez Canal Company families—about fifty miles from here by road, and about twenty-eight from Fayid. Delightful little place—all green trees and flowers.’

‘Oh, that will be lovely!’ exclaimed Phillida, who had secretly dreaded life in the desert. Rex had warned her in one of his letters that the married quarters that were being put up in G.H.Q. were blocks of rooms—and a ‘quarter’ meant one bed-sitting-room for the wives of all officers under the rank of Brigadier, with communal public lounges, dining-rooms and bathrooms. It did not sound like home life to her.

Geoffrey Cubitt leaned over the rails to look at the harbour. The sun was breaking through the straggling clouds now—that hot penetrating sunshine which was never long absent here. In another moment it would be very warm. The water was taking on the colour of a sapphire. Port Said, with its big white buildings along the front, looked stately and much more inviting.

Phillida said to Steve:

‘How awfully nice your husband seems and what fun his being able to come on board to fetch you!’

‘It’s grand,’ said Steve Cubitt, and her strong face—not pretty, but attractive with the firm white teeth and bright hazel eyes—looked very tenderly at her husband’s broad back. ‘Just think, Phil … four whole years since Geoff and I were together!’

‘And you don’t find him much changed?’

‘Not at all. The moment he grabbed hold of me and kissed me, I felt we’d slipped right back to where we were when we said good-bye.’

Phillida sighed.

That sounded promising. Perhaps it would be like that with her and Rex. Steve looked so happy! She had a poise and assurance which Phillida secretly envied her—she had noticed it once they became friends and talked a lot together. … She seemed so certain of herself, of life and of her adored Geoffrey.

‘If only I were as sure of myself and of the future!’ thought Phillida.

It was that touch of timidity in her nature which she knew was a weakness to be conquered, for life these days was hard and events moved swiftly—there was no place for the weak or ultra-sensitive. Rex had said that once during their honeymoon when she had shown hesitancy; been unable to make up her mind about something as quickly as he wanted to. Rex was impulsive. He always liked to act on the spur of the moment. Sometimes his impulsiveness almost scared Phillida. Several times during this voyage she had decided that she must try to be as strong and forthright as Steve. Rex would like it.

‘Oh, Steve, I do hope we shall see more of each other,’ she said.

‘I am quite determined that we shall, my dear,’ said Steve. ‘Now look … I think they are sending out the tenders. We shall all be ashore in a moment, and then you’ll find your Rex waiting for you.’

Phillida looked down at the harbour. She saw the first tender coming out. Her heart began to beat faster. Her spirits rose. she felt much more enthusiastic than she had done a short time ago. She forgot about the country and the beloved grandmother she had just left. It would be wonderful to see Rex … to feel his arms around her again. He had such complete mastery of her. In those arms she felt so secure. There was no need to be afraid of life; no need to be uncertain of her own attractions. He had told her a hundred times that he found her lovely and most desirable, and that she was the only girl he had ever wanted to marry. It was marvellous to think that he felt like that about her. Her gay, handsome Rex who was run after by so many girls. He had told her that he had been a confirmed bachelor until he met her!

The Cubitts said good-bye. … Steve was to have the privilege of being taken off by Geoffrey in the R.A.S.C. launch, straight away. She and her husband would be catching the boat train to Cairo, but they’d keep in touch, she said, as she kissed Phillida good-bye.

Then they were lost in the crowd. Once again Phillida was alone with her own thoughts, standing there, waiting to go ashore. And while she waited, she looked back to that first day of her meeting with Rex.

It had been in the month of June, on one of those wet windy days which the long-suffering English people call summer. She had been to Torquay to see old Mr. Brocklebank, the family solicitor who was winding up her father’s estate. They had had a melancholy lunch together. She was on compassionate leave, staying with Gamma. She knew now that she had left to her her father’s life insurance money and the war insurance which would eventually be paid on her demolished home. In all, perhaps, she would have an income of £50 or £60 a year for the rest of her life and that was all.

She had never had to worry about money. Mr. and Mrs. Millverton had not been rich. But before the war George Millverton was a dentist with a good practice and they had lived in a delightful little house and garden. Phillida had gone to a good school and would have been sent abroad but for the world-shaking events of 1939. After the second year of war Mr. Millverton had a stroke, after which he was never able to work again. He had sold his practice and they had afterwards spent most of their capital, but none of this had affected Phillida financially. She had her pay as a Wren and her doting parents or her grandmother had seen to it that she always spent the most lovely leaves with one or other of them.

But to be alone in the world and homeless except for Gamma’s cottage was another thing. So, with Mr. Brocklebank’s help, Phillida had had to turn her attention to banking accounts and so many details of the kind that had never troubled her before.

She had decided to hitch-hike back to Alvercombe. Mr. Brocklebank dropped her in his car at one of the main crossroads. It was late afternoon. She stood in the rain, a lonely, rather pathetic young figure in her blue uniform … long legs looking longer and slimmer than ever in black silk stockings, Naval hat perched at a rather drunken angle over one eye; the long fair hair looped back as usual into a sleek bun.

Then a car came along—a racy-looking old Alvis tourer, hood up, torn mica windows flapping; a young man in grey flannels, hatless, cigarette between his lips, at the wheel.

Phillida held up her hand.

The Alvis slowed down with a slurring of tyres and a grinding of brakes. The young man leaned out. Through a blur of rain they had looked at each other, Phillida and Rex. She had thought him marvellously good-looking with his thick chestnut hair and those sloe-dark eyes—a striking combination—and he had given her a most engaging smile. He—so he had told her afterwards—had thought she looked a comic little thing, bedraggled by the rain, but with those incredibly beautiful legs, and that was why he had stopped. He made no bones about it. Rex was nearly always frank, if at times embarrassingly so.

The next moment she was sitting in the Alvis beside him and they were roaring along the wet road. He always drove too fast; her first impression of him had been that he was overwhelmingly vital and high-spirited. But he was the sort of man she had dreamed of … he didn’t make her feel self-conscious or shy like so many of the gauche young Naval officers who were often as tongue-tied as herself. He put her at her ease in a moment, gave her no time to think. And he was disarmingly brazen.

‘Of course I stopped when I saw those marvellous legs!’ he chuckled when she humbly thanked him for pulling up when he was in a hurry.

And later:

‘I have had a hell of a day with the C.O. at a demonstration. He’s an awful old woman and loathes me. However, I little knew the gods were about to send me a dream in Wren’s uniform to soothe my shattered nerves.’

Phillida had started to giggle. He was such fun after Mr. Brocklebank and all the dreary business of wills and those awful revived memories of Mummy and Daddy and seeing the heap of rubble that had once been her home.

Captain Maltern went on talking in his gay fashion; he told her that he was stationed quite close to her grandmother’s home on a course, but was going out to Burma at any moment. He had just got out of uniform and was about to meet a pal at a favourite pub of his, about five miles from here. Why wouldn’t Phillida join them? Phillida was the hell of a pretty name; and how strange that their surnames both began with an M. It was a good sign. How long was she to be on leave? He expected to be in Devonshire another month. He would like to see more of her. And so on; taking Phillida’s breath away. She had plenty of experience, in a mild way, with enamoured young N.O.s, but Rex was the fastest worker of them all and the most irresistible.

It all ended with him breaking his appointment at the pub and going back to the cottage with her. There he made himself excessively agreeable to old Gamma, whose heart he won instantly. Rex had ‘a way’ with old people. And with tradesmen and servants too; a most ingratiating way. Later, when she got to know him better, Phillida realised that it was all part of an egoistical make-up and his tremendous vanity. He liked to be liked. He would go to any lengths to gain popularity, but she saw nothing unattractive in that for the moment. It all seemed part of his charm.

He sat until dark in Gamma’s pretty oak-beamed sitting-room, talking and drinking, the whisky which Gamma had brought out much to Phillida’s delight (she kept it locked in a cupboard for what she called medicinal purposes). When she told Rex that he roared with laughter, showing his fine white teeth, and said:

‘Then I’m permanently in the doctor’s hands, Mrs. Millverton.’

And he pleased her by showing a superficial knowledge of gardens and her rockery, which she took him out to examine as soon as the rain had stopped. And admired her collection of lustres which were her passion. He was boyishly appreciative of everything, and all the time kept looking at Phillida, who had hastily got out of her damp uniform and put on a cotton frock.

Later he said:

‘You look an awful kid in that short pink-and-white thing. And I love those grave eyes of yours and that wonderful mouth dimpling with laughter. As for your hair, I have an absolute passion to take the pins out and see it all tumbling round your neck … you wouldn’t look so demure or prim, I bet!’

And it made him laugh, he said, when she gravely put on her glasses to look at any close work, and turned herself into a prim little old-fashioned schoolmistress with her fair ‘bun’ of hair.

He had shaken her heart when he had talked of pulling down her hair. No man had ever said anything quite so intimate to her before. He had held her hand in a firm possessive clasp at the garden gate, standing by the Alvis.

‘I want to see you again, little Phil,’ he said; ‘there is something about you which appeals to me.’

She wanted to see him again, too.

After he had gone, she and Gamma talked a lot about him. He was in the Regular Army. He had two homes, he had informed them. He had made them laugh about it although old Mrs. Millverton thought it rather tragic. He was the son of divorced parents. His father had a flat in Jermyn Street, a retired Regular, too old for service in this war; Rex could get a bed there whenever he wanted one. His mother was married again, and had a house in Roehampton. She was smart and amusing, Rex said, but he couldn’t get on with his stepfather, so he didn’t stay with them very often.

They were always telling him to get married to some nice girl who’d look after him, he said. He was twenty-eight, and had had lots of love affairs but had never met the right girl, and so he spent his money on new cars and having wonderful leaves.

‘But I think he’s rather lonely, don’t you, Gamma?’ Phillida had said thoughtfully, and felt sorry for him. (Phillida liked to feel sorry for lonely, unhappy people.) Gamma agreed that under all that gaiety and swagger he was probably a rather solitary and unsatisfied young man. He had been through Dunkirk, and now he was going out to fight those beastly Japs and might get killed. How awful, Phillida had thought, even to imagine Rex Maltern being killed, and shut her eyes and recalled his lithe figure and the brownness of his skin, and the shatteringly open admiration in those narrow eyes whenever he looked at her … no man had ever looked at her in quite that way before.

She was certain that she would never see him again. It was just a chance meeting. He would never bother to come back … she was depressed at the thought.

But he did come back. That very next day, as soon as he was free to get away from camp, he rushed over in the old Alvis and took her out. They had tea together in a h. . .