Jerusalem Commands

THIRTEEN

THE MIGHTIEST CITY in Africa, Cairo smells of coffee, mint, sewage, camel-dung and raw saffron; of jasmine, patchouli and musk; of lilac and roses; of kerosene and motor oil. And she smells of the far desert and of the deep Nile. She smells of ancient bones.

Through alleys and boulevards crowded with the monuments of five thousand years and a dozen conquests, each individual, be they European, Oriental, African or Native, carries upon their person a certain mixture of scents: of sweat, rosewater, starched linen, carbolic soap, tobacco, incense, macassar oil, garlic - borne on Parisian frock, Savile-Row suit, flowing gelabea or black chaddurah. A flux of trams and trucks and limousines, donkeys, camels, mules and horses, flows back and forth across the bridges spanning these narrower reaches of the Nile between Old Cairo and Gizah. This constantly moving flow of people and vehicles pours into the twitterns and parades of that infinitely tangled knot of streets until they are filled to capacity. Outside every mosque, every church, synagogue and shrine, squabbling men, youths and children scramble to sell you some tawdry fake to remind you forever of the city the great Arab poet called the City of the Book, because here, through the centuries in relative harmony, have co-existed the Jews, Christians and Moslems who share a common testament.

‘Cairo is the apex of this whole land,’ declared Malcolm Quelch. ‘She is unlike the rest of Egypt yet she contains elements of everything.’ He paused to peer through our window at the busy boulevard which, were it not for palms and tarbooshes, might have been Paris or Berlin. Cairo was the most reassuringly civilised-looking city I had known since leaving Paris. Any doubts about venturing into this hub, this nerve-centre of intellectual and fanatical Islam, were thoroughly dispelled. Wahabim or Wafd, those zealots dare not expose their crazy eyes to the light of the Cairene day.

On Professor Quelch’s advice we had chosen not to stay at Shepheard’s well-known hotel, where Cook’s had an office and to which every naive tourist aspired. There is always just such an hotel in every city, soon deserted by those who made its reputation. We were in fact beyond the trees and flowers of Ezebekiya Square at the Continental, an altogether more pleasant and restful place than Shepheard’s, which, as Professor Quelch pointed out, was forever packed night and day with people who would not feel their visit was complete without visiting the pyramids, taking afternoon tea in the restaurant or sipping a cocktail at the long bar. One was always coming across ill-mannered sightseers in the corridors who had failed to resist an urge to explore. ‘And there’s also an unfortunate semi-bohemian element,’ Quelch added priggishly. ‘Both conform to type. If they did not insist on their individuality, one might forgive them more easily their folly.’ The Continental, he said, reminded him of the best class of Broadstairs hotel, where he had holidayed as a child. For a moment a wistful expression crossed his hatchet face as if in his mind’s eye the Sahara were transformed to the Kentish sands and in his mind’s hands he clutched a red tin bucket and spade.

We had become fairly good friends and were sharing a room at the hotel, but that particular bond which had existed between his brother and myself was simply not there. Malcolm Quelch lacked both Maurice’s charm and optimism, his gentlemanly ability to put almost everyone immediately at their ease. I still missed the captain’s dry, easy wit, his enthusiasm for literature and the arts, his determination to enjoy every experience. Perhaps I had a tendency to hero-worship in those days. I had never known a father. Mrs Cornelius was always linked in my mind with my mother but Captain Quelch had, by a subtle process I could not understand, become something of a father. History (a Marxist’s euphemism for this century’s appalling triumph of human evil) had robbed me of all my family, as well as my sweetheart. Mine had been a violent and terrifying progress into manhood and I had survived with only my life, my talents, and a pair of Georgian pistols, to begin the building of a new future. I wish that I had been able to settle, as I had originally planned, in Paris or London, in those hopeful years before the Depression, before the War. I might have founded a proper engineering business. We would have built from small inventions up to the larger ones, as the public’s confidence in my abilities grew. Within ten years I would have become the greatest inventor-engineer since Brunei or Edison, with my own company, with branches in every Western country; a vast empire of technical resources. A knighthood would have been inevitable. Britain would take a firmer grip on her Empire, her Christian responsibilities, and commission the first of my great flying cities! Instead I remain unhonoured, an outcast from the world of science and the intellect, seeing all I dreamed of stolen, devalued, misused. Towards the end of the War I had a notion of a kind of stove which could use radio waves to heat food, cooking it in a fraction of the normal time. I called it my ‘Radio Stove’ and talked about it enthusiastically with the airmen on leave in the Portobello Star, fellows with sufficient technical literacy to be stimulating, intelligent company. More than enough technical understanding, it emerged, to take my ideas for their own and apply them to the profitable new business of cooking plastics! A perfect example of that abuse of an idea! I had hoped to benefit the busy housewife. In my ideal future a Pyatnitski Radio Stove would grace every home, the greatest labour-saving boon since the Hoover. But it is some while since I expected to discover any justice in this world. A parent might have helped me avoid the pitfalls of my career. As it was I had Kolya to help me for a little, and Captain Quelch and, of course, Mrs Cornelius, but no permanent guiding hand to take the tiller, as it were, when my bewildered soul was flung upon the conflicting currents of a singularly threatening century. I should be proud, they say, to have survived so well. I escaped the carnage of the Stalin years, the hysteria of the Nazis when they began indiscriminately to arrest anyone suspected of being a Jew. And it is for these two things that I thank God most. God alone provided me with the courage, the brains and the skills to save myself from the final humiliation and degradation, or at least from death. Professor Quelch often remarked that it was ‘one of God’s ironies. He bestows his gifts of intelligence and sensitivity upon us and then fails to provide us with the means to make the fullest use of those gifts. This surely is the crux of the human condition?’ He, too, had been cheated of his inheritance. His whole family had been ruined by a speculating and dishonest lawyer. The family was related to the Mauleverers on the distaff side. ‘We were never, in the past thousand years, anything but uncommon stock.’ There being a dearth of university positions for archaeologists like himself, men with Classics degrees, he intended never to fall into a backwater like his brother in England. ‘Reigning over an empire of grubby thirteen-year-olds scarcely a stone’s throw from where we were born. My hat! I can’t believe he’s happy. What a fate, eh?’ I gave him the confirmation he seemed to demand, but I thought I detected a note of envy. Wanting desperately to be the adventurer his brother was, his temperament was nonetheless closer to the more conservative twin’s. This seemed to me the central paradox of his character. I could see him leading crocodiles of Egyptian schoolboys in their little grey English-style uniforms up to the pyramids on a Saturday afternoon to lecture on the glories of their mutual past in which the British Empire and the Egyptian became strangely blended, as perhaps they had done in Ptolemy’s time, or in Augustus’s time, or even, just possibly, in the time of Suleiman, when the Arabian Empire was at its most powerful, its most opulent and its most liberal, when it carried the light of science, literature and the natural arts across the Mediterranean and gave Europe her mathematics, scientific instruments, alchemical and medical lore. And all this in spite of Islam! Only as the true expense of maintaining an empire manifested itself did the Moors and their co-religionists again take to squabbling amongst themselves and, having no means of moving beyond this stage of their social development, began that irregular decay into their present barbarism. Those people once envied for their decorative arts, their music, their learning, their poetry and the tolerance of their rule, became known as the world’s cruellest people, the scum of the Barbary Coast, without honour, cleanliness or conviction. And this was their shame; for they had been better and known better. Here in Cairo the dead hand of the Turk had fallen upon a once-vigorous people and it had lain there too long. To be fair, Egyptians had recovered much of their former self-esteem. The British had already granted them independence with the sole provision that a peacekeeping and administrative force be maintained in order to protect their commercial interests in the Suez Canal. The British in those days were still mainly from the old mould. They were fully aware of their Christian responsibilities to the ‘lesser breeds without the Law’. Today it is unfashionable to accept responsibility for our less privileged brothers. Then it was our duty to offer a helping hand, to pass on the wisdom of our experience, to demonstrate, without any other kind of coercion, the benefits and beauties of the Christian faith. I hardly think this is an ignoble notion. Good, brave men died in its service, as did good, brave women. It is in the nature of the generous Christian to want to spread the word throughout the globe, especially in the dark places, the cruel and evil places, where the Light of Christ is the only means of driving away the devil and his minions. If this is ‘imperialism’ then, yes, I am an imperialist. If this is ‘racialism’, then, yes, I am a racialist. I am content to leave that judgement to posterity! If, that is, anyone can still read or think when the country’s Dark Age is over! This is the time of the Beast, when all conscience and morality are powerless and those who still dare claim Christ’s birthright are derided.

That first evening in Cairo, I remember, I was dazed by the heat and the complexity of the vast overcrowded city, by the dense blend of exotic and familiar, of slender, pale fairy-tale towers and domes, of dark green tapering poplars and spreading cedars, of palms, of massive churches so strangely similar to those in my native country, of vividly-dressed Coptic women whose beauty was incomparable, almost alarming. I remember the blue air of the moonlit starry sky, a powerful sense of the great brooding sands lying all about us; there were perpetual stirrings in the streets, even when they seemed deserted, sudden echoes in high-walled alleys, warrens which could never be mapped, for Cairo is a city of worlds within worlds, of mazes within mazes and cisterns within cisterns, vaults leading to other vaults and caverns boring further and further into a past that set its stamp here before even the Pharaohs rose to dominate Egypt and, after five millennia, left, some think, more of their knowledge unrecorded than recorded. German and Russian scientists now have evidence they came to the Earth in their own flying cities, from another planet. It is the only way they know to explain the sudden flowering of civilisation on the green banks of a great African river. How else are we to accept the engineering miracles, the longevity of their Empire? I have never been entirely sure what to think of these theories. I agree it is hard to believe such a refined people emerged from the dust and mud of the Nile Delta. I read a piece by Evelyn Waugh on the subject and wrote to her, but never received a reply. I met her again much later at the Royal Society of Literature. By that time she was permanently dressing as a man and had grown plumply repulsive, though had yet to adopt the famous monocle. She could pose as a man, said J.B. Priestley, in whose honour the party was, but she would never convince anyone that she was a gentleman. I laughed so heartily at this that the Bard of Bradford - with a jolly ‘bugger the little snob’ - offered me a drop of whisky from his own bottle (the rest of us had only sherry); a mark, I was told, of considerable approval. I had gone to the party with Obtulowitz, the airman-poet, whose latest girlfriend had just been interned. If ‘Mr’ Waugh had read my letter she did not acknowledge it. She was unnecessarily rude when I broached the subject again and offered me the opinion that the only worthwhile thing to come out of Egypt was a cigarette and a style of kinema architecture. Perhaps she wanted me to invite her to the pictures. She brandished an empty holder. Maybe she only wanted me to offer her an exotic fag. This reminded me again of that first night in Cairo, at the nightclub Quelch took me to which reminded me powerfully of The Harlequin’s Retreat in Petersburg, a place of rabid perversity whose customers were devoted to every queer taste, in dress and no doubt in their sexual appetites. Quelch was surprised, he said, at my discomfort. He had understood from his brother that I was a man of the world. Of the world, I told him, most certainly. Of the demi-monde, I was not so sure. Quelch became a little impatient at this. In his view the club was the best place for cocktails as well as gossip, but if I felt ill at ease, he would be glad to take me somewhere a little less crowded. ‘Though you might find it a little less simpatica!’ This somewhat cryptic statement was never to be explained. We returned to the bar of the Savoy Hotel where we were almost the only people not in uniform and where it became quickly clear one was better served if one’s name were known to the staff. Realising I had done Quelch a disservice I was about to suggest we return to The Crooked Path when I recognised one of the men who had stepped into the bar. A little deeper tanned, his features as fleshless as ever, his handsome head crowned with rather more grey than when I had last seen him, Major Nye was in civilian evening clothes. The moment I signalled to him from where Quelch and I sat rather uncomfortably in cane chairs to one side of the bar, he approached with every sign of pleasure. ‘My dear old chap. How on earth did you manage to turn up in Cairo? I’d heard you were in the United States these days. By the way,’ dropping his voice, ‘no reminiscences, eh? I’m here on the quiet, rather. What?’ Naturally, I respected his incognito and merely introduced him to Malcolm Quelch as an old acquaintance from my soldiering days with the Army of the Don. Apologising for having a dinner engagement, Nye asked after Mrs Cornelius and was visibly moved to learn she was also in Cairo. I remained discreet. After insisting on ordering us some more cocktails from a noticeably more agreeable steward, he said he would send a message to my hotel. We would meet again as soon as he had a better idea of his appointments. He had only been back from India a week when London had sent him on here and he was still a bit of a new boy. Naturally I understood him to be on government work and did not press him for details. Mrs Cornelius, I said, would be delighted to know he was in Cairo. He did not, however, seem to share my certainty.

When Major Nye had gone to keep his date, Malcolm Quelch himself proposed that we should revisit The Crooked Path. I agreed to return with him to the club but if I still felt ill-at-ease I would be perfectly happy to leave him there and take a cab back to the hotel. As our one-horse kalash bore us through the cool sibilance of Cairo’s midnight streets, he murmured that his brother had mentioned ‘a certain penchant pour la neige’. In some surprise, I admitted a connoisseur’s taste for specific drogues blanches.

I would never have expected to hear from this rather prim man the secret language of the drug fancy. He told me that while he neither approved of cocaine nor used it himself he had grown partial to morphine when wounded in the military hospital of Addis Ababa. He had fought with El Orans himself. For much the same reasons as Lawrence he had been commissioned because of his knowledge of the Bedouin and their language. Lawrence was a great man, who romanticised his life so thoroughly he came to believe in the world’s legend. ‘Well, it’s a common enough delusion, I suppose. He’ll romanticise his dying moments if he gets the chance. You’ve read his books, of course.’

That doubtful pleasure was still to come. I am all for sex. But excessive sex coupled with a cloying philosemitism is not, I fear, to my old-fashioned taste. And now, of course, it is the common currency of television! Having no desire to be reminded of those dusty, evil days, I did not go to see the ‘biopic’. Some of the Desert Raider’s work was later set in England, but the desert was his true inspiration. At heart he remained a tubercular Midlands nancy-boy and was dead, of course, before I ever arrived in England. Or, at least, there was talk of a road accident. In Mexico, I think. Perhaps he really did want anonymity. Certainly Malcolm Quelch maintained that he had that familiar type of sex-drive which, seeking complete lack of emotional attachment, only functions with nameless people. ‘He had strong affections, however.’ The publication of his early Pit Life tales proves that. I am no philistine and am always prepared to give Art, no matter how unfamiliar, her due. But there is, everyone will agree, a distinct difference between the probing finger of truth and the vulgarisation of mere pornography!

The Crooked Path, now more familiar, had become less unattractive, especially after one of Quelch’s friends suggested that I suck upon the ivory mouthpiece of a goza, the water-cooled hashish pipe. As a rule I had a deep suspicion of narcotics, but was willing to relax my guard in a company which, no matter what its degenerate appetites, was considerably more tolerant, welcoming and better-mannered than I had recently enjoyed at the Savoy. I purchased some first-class neige from a pretty young woman in a blue shot-silk ‘flapper’ dress whose fashionable page-boy haircut resembled the traditional coiffure of the Egyptian dead. Her faintly green make-up added further to the impression that some deceased Emperor’s handmaiden had taken the evening off to sell cocaine in a European nightclub. Apart from some long-haired boys in excessively loose cotton lounge-suits, some, depending upon the tastes of their masters, with make-up and earrings, there were few natives here. Even the waiters were Greeks from Alexandria, or so they all claimed. The blood has mixed so thoroughly in the cities that it is impossible to tell one race from another, except by what they claim for themselves. And people think the South African government is mad!

The increasing attraction of The Crooked Path reminded me how easily and to my detriment I had slipped into bohemian living in St Petersburg, and I drew on my usual resources of self-discipline to leave Quelch in the company of a transvestite, clearly an old friend, and take a kalash back to our hotel. Halfway before I reached the Continental I had been asked for baksheesh in return for graphically mimed services by a score of little boys, a group of youths, two whores and the driver of my cab. I waved the rest away but suffered the boys through the gaudy streets of the Wasa’a district which even at that hour remained brilliantly lit with a mixture of stained-glass oil-lamps, electrics, naphtha and candles. Each little garish hovel offered the delights of Paradise and the temptations of Hell. Women of every European nation graphically advertised their charms and skill while their negro pimps, their Greek ‘protectors’, their Italian capos, whispered to you of unspeakable gratification and the smell of their perfume made you drunk on the heat of your own blood; yet you knew they promised only profound hunger. I had known that hunger in Odessa; again in Kiev and Constantinople. But here, it gnawed more fiercely than ever. I sensed the softness of professionally yielding flesh; flesh that was never angered, never shocked; flesh that had no morality, merely a price; flesh that could take without surprise the demands one dare not make of even the most obliging and loving sweetheart. And somewhere it seemed to me I heard the wild, vicious whistling of a whip; a whip I myself wielded; a whip that was wielded upon me. My own flesh became nameless until all that filled my universe was pain, lust, more pain and a draining, terrible satisfaction.

‘They use their bloody whips a good deal too bloody much,’ said Mrs Cornelius next morning, when I found her in the dining-room alone at breakfast. The large, net-curtained windows looked out upon wonderful landscaped gardens and a passing four-wheeler. Ezebekiya Square was the very centre of the European quarter. ‘It makes yer wanna walk everywhere, dunnit, Ivan?’ She and Seaman had gone to dinner that evening with Goldfish’s local representative. The Egyptian market was one of the most rapidly growing of all. Sir Ranalf Steeton, a cousin of Storrs Pasha, the immediate power in Egypt, was now principal agent for all the major British, French and American studios. He had also done some work as an independent producer, chiefly, he had told Mrs Cornelius, for the tourist market in Cairo and Port Said. ‘ ‘E reckons ‘e’s a plain, blunt Yorkshireman ‘oo don’t like ter beat abart ther bush,’ she said over her fried eggs and trimmings, ‘but ‘e sahnds like ther usual posh toff wot’s ‘ad ter find a job o’ work, nar the butler’s votin’ Labour an’ wants ‘is larst ten years’ back wages. Anyway, ‘e wos tellin’ us that Cairo’s the flash place ter be at ther mo’. Becos o’ Tutenkhamun an’ that. There’s plenty o’ money ‘ere an’ lots to be made, ‘e sez. But it’s bringin’ wot ‘e corls undesirables in. Conmen an’ stuff. So wotch yer bloody wallet, Ivan. Yore the first ter fall fer a line y’d be ashamed of if it woz one o’ yer own!’

This was my opportunity to mention my meeting with Major Nye. She brightened at the name. ‘Loverly ol’ geezer. I ‘ad a soft spot fer ‘im. ‘E understood me. Even when I wanted ter go back on ther stage.’

‘He seemed to think you might not be happy to see him.’

‘ ‘Appy? I’m ecstatic. I did ‘ave ter borrer a few quid ter set meself up an’ I ‘aven’t ‘ad ther chance ter pay ‘im back yet, but thass orl water under the bridge, eh, Ive?’

The English major was evidently in love with her and was terrified she would again reject him. He thought of the money only as a barrier he had unwittingly thrown between them.

‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘it turned art ter be a decent littel inves’ment orl in orl. I’ll get Wolfy ter write ‘im a cheque as a sub on me wages. Did ‘e say wot ‘e wos doin’ ‘ere?’

It was my belief he was on secret government business, probably in relation to the bandit problem. Acting as usual under the banners of ‘nationalism’, they had assassinated a couple of officials and ineptly blown up a few administrative and military buildings. No sane Egyptian condoned them. The king himself condemned these activities. Personally he favoured his country’s complete absorption into the fabric of the British Empire, where conditions for the common man would inevitably improve together with his own security. Islam, as is perpetually demonstrated today, habitually selects new leaders through a succession of murderous betrayals, rather than by the less dramatic and more prolonged methods of the West. Fanatics like the Wafd’s Roshdi threatened not only the king’s life but the lives of his entire family. The king knew as thoroughly as anyone that the rule of Law was synonymous with British rule and that the moment His Majesty’s advisers left, his country would revert to the blood-feuding characterising all those countries which had known only enslavement to Turkey or Baghdad or, in modern times, the Great Powers. How right he was to look at his choices and thankfully link his fortunes with the British! It takes an Arab to understand who makes the best master. He is used only to masters. It is all he can himself aspire to.

‘ ‘E was with some sort o’ special police, larst I ‘eard,’ she said. ‘A kind of elevated copper. Ter do wiv drugs or somefink. Y’d better wotch yer step, young Ivan.’

I told her I did not think I had much to fear from a white man.

‘Cairo’s ther world’s drug capital these days,’ she continued. ‘Opium an’ keef from Lebanon an’ Syria. Cocaine from Bulgaria, mostly. Morphine an’ heroin from orl over. Sir Ranny reckons ther big in’ernational racketeers’re gettin’ in’erested in Cairo. The p’lice fink they got it under control. They fink an ‘eavier fine and roundin’ up a few dealers an’ ‘ores ‘as solved it.’ She laughed. ‘I’ll tell yer, Ivan, wiv orl these crooks abart I’m on’y too pleased to be legit. Iss bad enough in bloody Whitechapel or Notting Dale when ther big crooks start fightin’ amongst themselves.’

I now understood exactly why both Stavisky and Major Nye were interested in this part of the world. Such a vast volume of tourist traffic would allow the, perhaps unconscious, travellers to carry the dope to where, of course, a large European market was willing to pay generous local prices. As well as the Egyptian upper classes who were all connoisseurs, the poor fellaheen made up the basic market for hasheesh and horribly adulterated heroin. I had already heard stories in The Crooked Path about the old woman near the Khalifa cemeteries who had discovered that ancient human skulls could be ground into a fine enough powder to ‘cut’ the heroin used by the area’s quarrymen and carters. The creature who told me this found it amusing that they were snorting the skulls of their own ancestors back into their living brains. I had merely been a little sickened by the anecdote.

‘I bet ther major’s ‘ere on account o’ ther drugs.’ Mrs Cornelius reached with conviction to the rack for another slice of toast. ‘That’ll be it.’

Privately I was in full agreement with Authority’s efforts to wipe out the trade in so-called ‘black’ drugs - the opium and hasheesh draining the energies of working people - but it seemed unsophisticated to ascribe the same life-sapping qualities to cocaine, for instance, which was ever a boon and a source of energy, a stimulant to the imagination. As for morphine, to make it unavailable to the likes of ex-servicemen like Quelch, needing to kill the pain of old wounds, was positively inhuman. There had to be selection and moderation in the control of drugs just as there was with alcohol, for instance. I found the whole subject distasteful, so asked gracefully after our great director.

‘Wolfy got up early ter go out ter give ther pyramids ther once-over. ‘E wants ter get down ter work as soon as poss. In that I’d agree wiv ‘im. I’m bored art o’ me pants, Ivan. It’ll be a relief ter ‘ave me nose ter the powder-puff again!’ And she laughed heartily at that and could not stop even when a sallow Quelch came almost surreptitiously into the restaurant, caught my eye reluctantly and then even more reluctantly advanced upon our table. I pulled back a chair for him. Slowly, in that deliberate way he had of re-ordering his limbs into a new position, he lowered himself to join us.

He was afraid I would embarrass him. He had not been in his bed when I rose that morning and came in as I was leaving. He had mumbled that he had only had time for a quick wash and change of clothes. He had no reason to distrust my discretion and as this came clear he even managed a small smile when Mrs Cornelius suggested that the sausages were a bit ‘funny-tastin’ ‘ and might be ‘strickly Moslem’, made from camel meat. Again she demonstrated her power to lift the ill-humour of someone whom she liked. Her effort, however, was not of quite the intensity it had been on yesterday’s train. I suspected her energies to be a little more widely distributed now. She called him a gay dog. She laughed and said I had told her he had not come home until after nine o’clock that night. ‘You’ve bin ‘angin’ rahnd them museums an’ libraries again, ‘aven’t yer, prof?’

He was happy to give some vague sign of acquiescence and even giggle as if she had somehow put her finger on his most terrible vice. My understanding of his character was growing with almost every passing hour! At a suitable time, perhaps when we were on the ship back to Los Angeles, I might indeed tell Mrs Cornelius that I had last seen her ‘innocent’ full of dope and ginger ale in the arms of an extravagantly dressed Albanian transvestite while he quoted excitedly from the more sensational passages of Juvenal! Pinching his cheek with the air of a fond mother who would be happier if her boy were just a little more manly, Mrs Cornelius finished her saucer of tea and rose from the table. ‘I’ll leave you two norty boys ter tork abart the Redline togewer.’ Referring jokingly to the district ‘redlined’ by the British for licensed brothels, she did not guess it was where Quelch and I had actually spent the better part of the evening. Meanwhile, our encounter at the Savoy offered sufficient explanation as to our whereabouts of the previous evening.

‘Our reputations, dear boy, remain intact,’ hissed Malcolm Quelch with a wink containing something of his brother’s devil-may-care insouciance, but the expression faded almost at once, as if he realised he had been in danger of revealing something to me. His features seemed visibly to narrow. ‘It would not do to disturb the lady’s feelings.’

For my part I did not offer any opinion. He could do very little to disturb that particular lady’s feelings! My friend was a woman of the world. Like me, she had lived by her wits throughout the entire period of the Bolshevik War. In those circumstances one very quickly learns to adapt. The Cornelius boy has a phrase I believe he has borrowed from one of his pop tunes. He says we must all ‘ride with the tide and go with the flow’. But I have no time for his washing-machine analogies. In certain terrible circumstances, it is true, the human being will adapt in order to survive. But might it not be our duty to ensure that the terrible circumstances themselves do not occur? Unless we learn to control our appetites we are doomed forever to be in the power of random Nature. This new romantic movement that talks about ‘ontology’ and ‘ecology’ instead of the Zeitgeist is merely another celebration of the irrationalism Jean-Jacques Rousseau turned to such a handsome profit while incidentally offering a posthumous blessing to the Terror - indeed, to a series of Terrors, some of which we are still enjoying! Has not this century seen enough of such tainted ideals?

It was almost noon before Quelch and I left the table, returning to our room where he would instruct me in some of the more important Egyptian symbols I might incorporate into my designs. I was in this, as in everything I did, conscientious to the point of obsession. I had already accumulated a great sheaf of designs, both of costumes and sets, and my script was ready for shooting. Though my own part would not be a starring one, I felt it would counter any suggestion that I was a mere ‘programmer’ idol and show me in my best light as a dramatic actor. I was still reluctant to include Esmé, but Seaman had insisted upon it. I could only agree with him that Esmé’s death would probably bring the audience to tears in the final reel and there were after all only two scenes where she appeared with Mrs Cornelius. Thus I combined talent with strategy, diplomacy with humanity, to help create a film to justify everything D.W. Griffith ever taught us - a romantic, stirring spectacle with a strong moral tone. That was what audiences had come to demand and it was what I could cheerfully give them. Today’s cinema has lost the willingness to combine those two key elements. What is the surprise if it is thus losing its audiences? Even in Weimar’s most decadent days we could be uplifted by a moving tale. There is certainly nothing amoral about Die Erdgeiste. Our movie had my full commitment on both levels. I became more and more absorbed in the realisation of my great story, in which the ancient and modern were (as in Griffith’s masterful Intolerance or De Mille’s Ten Commandments) held up as mirrors, one to the other. I began to feel it was almost ‘in the can’.

Naturally enough, it was at this point that Professor Quelch and I, ascending from the lobby, stepped from the electric elevator to the soft carpet of our floor to be confronted by a Wolf Seaman who had clearly caught the sun and had hay fever. He was burning red. There were tears in his eyes. I suggested he should lie down. I would send someone to him. Perhaps he required a doctor. He spoke in incoherent, guttural Swedish. I could understand hardly a word. In his hand he held a crumpled buff form, obviously a telegram. After we had taken him back to his room and ordered him a large gin and tonic, he was able to tell us that he had stopped at Sir Ranalf Steeton’s office on the way back from the pyramids. Sir Ranalf had been hoping to see him. He had accepted a cable from Goldfish on Seaman’s behalf. At last the Swede permitted me to examine the wire. I remember it clearly:

where are you stop if not there inform me immediately of whereabouts stop stop all production stop where is your star since cherbourg stop await further instructions stop ps has he gone to tangier stop s.g.

Seaman was baffled. I, of course, understood something of Goldfish’s bewilderment and, I suspect, anger. In my obsessions with my own problems I had forgotten to pass on the earlier message to remain in Alexandria until our new star arrived. Clearly the star had arrived and, finding us gone, with Goldfish’s steamer getting ready to depart for Tangier, where Captain Quelch had further business, had decided to take passage on the Hope Dempsey.

I advised Seaman to relax. This was just another of Goldfish’s self-contradicting cables. He sent them when he was bored. Tomorrow would bring us a further wire countermanding everything in the previous one. We should proceed as normal and begin shooting tomorrow.

‘That would be wonderful,’ said Seaman with that heavy tone he intended for irony, ‘if Sir Ranalf Steeton did not have to authorise all our bank orders. We have no money, gentlemen. We cannot pay crew, actors or our hotel without Steeton’s authority. We have only the money we carry. And Steeton’s master is Goldfish. He must do as Goldfish commands. I respect him for that.’

‘But tomorrow or the next day Goldfish will be asking us why we have no “footage”,’ I said. ‘We shall waste time if we pay too much attention to this cable.’

‘He has never been so adamant.’

‘You have never understood him to be so,’ I coolly pointed out. Thus, little by little, I was able to calm the Swede long enough to get his agreement not to inform the others. It would cause unnecessary alarm. Meanwhile, we would begin shooting as planned, early the next morning when the sun’s rising above the pyramids would be the backdrop to the first love-scene between myself and Mrs Cornelius.

Our story must become an actuality! Mrs Cornelius and I would appear in a prologue where, as modern lovers doomed by society’s rules to separate, we meet, ostensibly for the last time, and embrace beneath the stern and battered features of the Great Sphinx; I, Bobby Sullivan, the playboy, apparently debonair and fancy-free; she, Colleen Gay, the debutante, engaged to a titled man of honour and probity whose heart and reputation she dare not and will not threaten. Our story would then sweep back in time some three thousand years, to the age of the Boy King. Now ‘Colleen Gay’ is unhappily betrothed to the sickly child whom she loved as a brother and to whose cause she is committed. I, too, as the new young High Priest, am loyal to the Boy Emperor. However, there is another, namely Esmé’s Cleopatra, who also loves me and is prepared to bring down the entire dynasty to further her own petty ends. When Tutenkhamun is poisoned, we, of course, are blamed. A motive is obvious in our almost unendurable love. Wolf Seaman had found the story moving and he was sure it would appeal to the audience jaded by his sexual comedies.

Even Goldfish had known this could be the movie play of the decade, one which would heighten his reputation, more, even, than The Squaw Man. He, better than any, understood the value of a strong moral where heroic self-sacrifice, preferably from both male and female leads, is the turning-point of a tale in which virtue is finally rewarded.

Several times, Seaman wavered. Professor Quelch, doubtless concerned about his fees, lent his voice to mine, pointing out that only he knew the great secret places in the desert, the old temples and tombs which would best serve our story. The combination of authentic locales, strong scholarship, a powerful script and wonderful actors would be bound, under Seaman’s inspired direction, to win a vast world audience.

Seaman needed audiences. His old brand of pessimistic irony was no longer finding favour with a public regaining its pre-war optimism. Flame of the Desert would attract the kind of universal success he needed. That success was his only motive. Genuine artistic integrity destroyed Griffith’s career, but Seaman had his eye forever on the market. Within another ten years he would be making his fortune on Lash LaRue, Tim Holt and Sunset Carson, adventures which a greedy public demanded in vast quantities. He knew pretty clearly where he was going!

It took Quelch and me the rest of the afternoon to restore Seaman’s confidence and remind him that his crew awaited orders to begin a shooting schedule. With the help of several more gins he pulled himself together and by six o’clock was the centre of attention in the small meeting-room we had hired to discuss the next day’s work. Even Esmé attended, sitting near the front in one of her loveliest cream lace outfits. The sight of her seemed to restore Seaman’s confidence further and when he came to address us on our duties and responsibilities he was able to do so with a certain authority.

I must admit that secretly I was, from time to time, faint with anxiety, fearing the end of all my ambitions. Indeed by the time dinner was over my anxiety had become almost uncontrollable. Under normal circumstances cocaine is a wonderful means of recovering myself, but it was not effective then. I had little experience of dealing with such feelings. Anxiety came to me later in life than to many. Childhood and adolescence were virtually free of worry and it was only after I began to understand my responsibility for others that I experienced real anxiety. Whereupon I knew only one means of releasing myself from its grip: through the pursuit of sexual gratification. I had this in common with Clara Bow. Until recently careless lust rid me entirely of my fears. But since 1940 I chiefly used local prostitutes from Colville Terrace and Powys Square. They had no expectations of me. I had none of them. There is nothing but pain to be gained from attachments to the women one uses for the Release of the Beast, as I call it. In 1926 I had not yet learned that lesson and, when dinner was over, addressed Esmé on the matter. It was now perfectly safe for me to visit her in her room. With Wolf Seaman, Mrs Cornelius planned to be at Sir Ranalf Steeton’s for the rest of the evening. Esmé was feeling tired. I told her I would bring something to make her more wakeful. At length, almost as if she were wearying of the debate, she agreed to receive me.

By the time I arrived in her room, I was determined to make up to my darling for all those long months of unfulfilled desire. That night I planned to show her no mercy. That night, I discovered, she expected none.