Of course, we dont mind, Tooley.
Youve been so kind, Mr. Pulling, she said. I dont know what Id have done without you. I mean it was a bit like the dark night of the soul.
I realized then that I preferred her to call me Smudge.
Go gently on the cigarettes[154], Tooley, I advised her.
Oh, she said, I dont need to economize now. Theyll be easy to get, I mean at the Gulhane. You can get anything at the Gulhane. Even acid. Ill be seeing you both again before we go, wont I?
But she didnt. She had become one of the young now[155], and I could only wave to her back as she went ahead of us through the customs. The two Americans still walked hand in hand, and the Vietnamese boy carried Tooleys sack and had his arm round her shoulder to protect her from the crowd which was squeezing to get through the barrier into the customs hall. My responsibility was over, but she stayed on in my memory like a small persistent pain which worries even in its insignificance; doesnt a sickness as serious as cancer start in just such a way?
I wondered whether Julian was waiting for her. Would they go on to Katmandu? Would she always remember to take her pill? When I shaved again more closely at the Pera Palace I found I had missed in the obscurity of my coach a small dab of lipstick upon the cheek. Perhaps that was why my aunt had jumped to so wrong a conclusion. I wiped it off and found myself wondering at once where she was now. I scowled at my own face in the glass, but I was really scowling at her mother in Bonn and her father somewhere in the CIA, and Julian afraid of castration, and at all those who ought to have been looking after her and yet felt no responsibility at all.
Aunt Augusta and I had lunch in a restaurant called Abdullahs and then she took me around the tourist sights the Blue Mosque and Santa Sophia but I could tell all the time that she was worried. There had been no message waiting for her at the hotel.
Cant you telephone to the general? I asked her.
Even at the Tunis Embassy, she said, he never trusted his own line.
We stood dutifully in the centre of Santa Sophia the shape, which had been beautiful once perhaps, was obscured by ugly Arabic signs painted in pale khaki, so that it looked like the huge drab waiting-hall of a railway station out of peak traffic hours. A few people stood about looking for the times of trains, and there was a man who carried a suitcase.
Id forgotten how hideous it was, my aunt said. Lets go home.
Home was an odd word to use for the Pera Palace, which had the appearance of an Eastern pavilion built for a world fair. My aunt ordered two rakis in the bar, which was all fretwork and mirrors there was still no message from General Abdul, and for the first time I saw my aunt nonplussed.
When did you last hear from him? I asked.
I told you I heard from him in London, the day after those policemen came. And I had a message from him in Milan through Mario. Everything was in order, he said. If there had been any change Mario would have known.
Its nearly dinner-time.
I dont want any food. Im sorry, Henry. I feel a little upset. Perhaps it is the result of the trains vibration. I shall go to bed and wait for the telephone. I cannot believe that he will let me down. Mr. Visconti had a great belief in General Abdul, and there were very few people whom he trusted.
I had dinner by myself[156] in the hotel in a vast restaurant which reminded me of Santa Sophia not a very good dinner. I had drunk several rakis, to which I was unaccustomed, and perhaps the absence of my aunt made me a little light-headed. I was not ready for bed, and I wished I had Tooley with me as a companion. I went outside the hotel and found a taxi-driver there who spoke a little English. He told me he was Greek but that he knew Istanbul as well as if it were his own city. Safe, he kept on saying, safe with me, waving his hand as though to indicate that there were wolves lurking by the walls and alleys. I told him to show me the city. He drove down narrow street after narrow street with no vista anywhere and very little light, and then drew up at a dark and forbidding door with a bearded night watchman asleep on the step. Safe house, he said, safe, clean. Very safe, and I was reminded uncomfortably of something I would have gladly forgotten, the house with the sofas behind the Messaggero.
No, no, I said, drive on. I didnt mean that. I tried to explain. Take me, I said, somewhere quiet. Somewhere you would go yourself. With your friends. For a drink. With your friends.
We drove several miles along the Sea of Marmara and came to a stop outside a plain uninteresting building marked WEST BERLIN HOTEL. Nothing could have belonged less to the Istanbul of my imagination. It was three square stories high and might well have been built among the ruins of Berlin by a local contractor at low cost. The driver led the way into a hall which occupied the whole ground space[157] of the hotel. A young woman stood by a small piano and sang what I supposed were sentimental songs to an audience of middle-aged men in their shirt-sleeves sitting at big tables drinking beer. Most of them, like my own driver, had big grey moustaches, and they applauded heavily and dutifully when the song was over. Glasses of beer were placed in front of us, and the driver and I drank to each other. It was good beer, I noticed, and when I poured it on top of all the raki and the wine I had already drunk, my spirits rose. In the young girl I saw a resemblance to Tooley, and in the heavy men around me I imagined Do you know General Abdul? I asked the driver. He hushed me quickly. I looked around again and realized that there was not a single woman in the big hall except the young singer, and at this moment the piano stopped, and with a glance at the clock, which marked midnight, the girl seized her handbag and went out through a door at the back. Then, after the glasses had been refilled, the pianist struck up a more virile tune, and all the middle-aged men rose and put their arms around each others shoulders and began to dance, forming circles which they enlarged, broke and formed again.