Last Letter from Istanbul. Lucy Foley
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the pipe and begins an unsteady retreat toward the property. But she sees that he does not enter – he remains on the edge of vision as a silent audience.
‘I’m sorry for the lack of courtesy.’ The doctor’s voice is gentler. ‘We don’t have many visitors here, as you see.’
She knows that this is British dissemble. Some sort of explanation is still required, he is waiting for her to make it. She would not know how to do it even if she felt he deserved one. Instead, she asks, ‘This is a hospital?’
‘Yes. It was a house, originally, the owners have since left.’ Something occurs to him. ‘Perhaps you knew them?’
‘No.’ He is still waiting, she knows, for her explanation. There is nothing threatening in his voice or manner, but then the threat is sewn into the very uniform he wears.
‘I have family,’ she says, ‘a little further down this shore. I knew of the path, I thought I would come this way, along the water.’
He frowns. She is fairly sure he is not convinced. And yet she suspects that his courtesy will not allow him to call her out in the lie.
‘Do you know why this house was abandoned? What happened to the owners? I only ask because it feels as though they did not leave long ago.’
‘I never knew them.’ She draws herself together. ‘If you will excuse me …’ She steps toward him. It is the closest she has ever been to one of them, and she feels the clench of fear again in her stomach.
For the first time he seems to realise that he is blocking her path back to dry land. He steps aside.
She walks slowly back the way she came, not caring that he will think it odd; that if her tale were true she should be walking in the other direction, past the house, not back in the direction of the ferry terminal. Her hands are trembling; she clenches them into fists.
Behind her she hears: ‘Well, that was all rather confounding—’
‘What I’m more confounded by, Rawlings, is why you are still outside.’
It could be worse, she supposes. It could have been turned into a barracks, or a nightclub like those that have sprung up in Pera, the European district. A hospital is at least less shameful than that. But her home has been colonised. All of their memories, the intimate, private life of the family. She feels the loss of it a second time. And that smiling Englishman, with his quizzical politeness. Somehow it would have been better, almost less insulting, if he had spoken to her with the abrupt rudeness of the other man.
Her mind fills with fantasies. She sees herself lunging toward him as he moved aside for her on the jetty. Pushing out with both hands … him toppling backward into the Bosphorus. His imagined surprise is a delicious thing; the indignity of his fall.
She could have run back toward the ferry … before he or that invalid had time to act.
She catches herself. She knows that she could never have done it. Her mother and grandmother, the boy, the school: there is simply too much at stake. Still, it cannot hurt to imagine. The realm of fantasy, at least, is one that cannot be occupied.
Medical Officer George Monroe watches the woman leave, picking her way along the path – surprisingly sure-footed in her long skirts. She seems a melancholy figure, but this may be nothing more than the effect of the dark clothing, and the way she holds herself against the breeze from the water.
‘Touched in the head,’ Rawlings says, authoritatively, ‘if you ask me. Found her looking as though she were about to throw herself into the Bosphorus.’
This seems a little rich coming from the man who, in the grip of a fever, asked George to bring him ‘a glass of the tawny ’05. Generously poured. And tell Smythson I’d like my usual spot by the fire.’
George feels that, actually, she had seemed as sane as any of them. With the Allied officers all gone a little wild from the heat and new freedoms and too long spent away from home, the locals sometimes seem the only ones with some connection to reality; getting on with the business of their lives.
But what on earth was she doing here?
He was not convinced by her explanation; he suspects that she is not someone used to lying. He entertains briefly, and dismisses, the idea of sabotage or espionage. A less threatening figure – a woman bathing her feet, for goodness’ sake – he cannot imagine.
A week ago. He had just been to the barber, making his way back through the streets toward the bridge. One of the figures coming toward him had been moving faster than the rest; his eye had followed it instinctively. And then, as he saw her clearly, with curiosity. There are far fewer women than men on the streets, for one thing, and this one was running. Attempting to, at least – hampered by long skirts, the cobblestones, a teetering pile of books. He watched, half-amused, half-intrigued and also with a wincing certainty that calamity was about to follow.
He had seen something fall.
When he had handed her the book she had looked at him with something close to hatred. Despite himself, he had rather respected her for it.
How odd to see the same woman twice in the space of a week … in this vast city. Yet he is beginning to understand that there are recurring motifs within this place, encounters that, at times, can make it feel more like a village. Some of the faces within it are already familiar to him: the sellers of mackerel sandwiches along the quay, the men who man the ferries, a certain French officer who seems to have the same taste for Turkish coffee as he.
He is not a superstitious man – his only belief is in the essential chaos of things. And yet he feels oddly certain that he will see her again.
The new site for the British military hospital in Constantinople is not the most convenient, but it is a peaceful spot, and will prove useful if there is a need for quarantine. It is not really part of the city at all – the wild sprawl of trees and bush behind the grounds seem desperate to swallow it and reacquaint themselves with the water. It was a case of needs must, however. A large, well-ventilated space was required, and this house was what was available: requisitioned from the Turkish authorities. Besides, it is a vast improvement upon a tent in the desert: those months during the Mesapotamian campaign. Where new flies clustered in wounds even as you swept the old ones away. Where temperatures rose to unholy, unbearable levels, even beneath the canvas, and where with no warning a gust of sand might blow in to cover everything, riming the nostrils and open mouths of men too ill to be sensible of the indignity of the invasion.
All his initial reservations about the position of the house – not built for the purpose, too far from the centre to be practical – faded at the sight of it. It is the loveliest building he thinks he has seen on the Bosphorus. It is not the largest, nor is it the most ornate. But there is a matchless elegance in the situation, in the graceful white poise of it, the dark, melancholy cypresses rising about it as though shielding it.
He has wondered how it came to be vacant. On first setting foot inside he had the uneasy impression that the former occupant had only just left – that he might return at any instant for something forgotten. There was a fine dust over everything, a pall of it hanging in the air. Evidently, it had not been occupied for some time. But much seemed to have been left, in the careless manner of one who did not know he was departing for good. Here, everywhere, were tokens of a life lived in all its chaos and elegance. In lanterns sat the half-burned stumps of candles; a heavy painted vase contained the brown exoskeletons of hyacinth blossoms. An encircling garden in which the work of a human hand is still evident: jasmine trained along a painted trellis, just beginning to run wild, shrub roses in crescent-shaped borders, a vegetable garden where huge yellow squashes rot uselessly and monstrous asparagus ferns dance in the breeze. From the bough of one of the fig trees hangs a swing seat. And centre of it all, the monarch to the court, is a grand old pomegranate tree. Most of the fruits have been split open by the birds or by the sheer force of their open unplucked ripeness. A few remaining seeds