Jerusalem Commands

FOURTEEN

JE LA PRIS SAUVAGEMENT! Elle pleurait, grognait, criait. Je la griffai jusqu’au sang. Je la mordis. Je la pénétrai et le sang coula encore. Mais cela ne suffit pas à me rassasier . . .

The rest was never a memory, simply an impression from which, at length, I stole away. I had made Esmé my own again. My mark was upon her. I had seen a new respect in her eyes. Ses yeux paraissaient de cuivre incandescent, sa chevelure luifaisait comme un halo de flammes, son corps était convert d’ égratignures, d’empreintes laissées par mes dents et de marques voluptueuses . . . And my anxieties were vanished, as were hers. We had achieved mutual release. I do not regret all that. It was an act of confirmation. One must experience it to understand it. It was a shame, after so much exertion, that my little girl was wanted for work that morning. As we boarded the hired coach to drive out to the Mena Palace Hotel, where we would organise ourselves before the day’s shooting began, both Wolf Seaman and O.K. Radonic regarded us with a kind of distant curiosity, while Mrs Cornelius even exuded a certain disapproval. None of that upset me. I am one who follows the Master. I fly like a Hawk. I cackle like the Goose. O Sovereign of all Gods delivered from that God who liveth upon the damned. I was restored to my old power and was fully a man again. I had proven my control over my own life and intended very firmly to continue with that control. I would not be diverted from my ambitions.

I had already confided some of this to Quelch as we prepared for the morning and he became positively fervid in support of my new determination. ‘We are all the slaves of Fate, dear boy. But it’s up to us to do our best and pretend that this is not so; to take up the reins of our own runaway chariot or die in the attempt! Abusus non tollit usum. That is my answer to those who would judge us.’ He had placed a friendly hand upon my shoulder as I shaved. ‘It is a motto well suited to this awful country which, I fear, is inclined to bring out all kinds of dormant or unimagined passions in the sexes. The residents here always recognised the danger. That is why it is so important to keep up appearances. Non nobis sed omnibus. But this is a rule you and I must take as it comes. We are not, after all, what they would even consider, I suspect, as omnibus.’ The tone of the older man, rather than his words, was comforting.

Malcolm Quelch was beginning to reveal depths unlike his brother’s yet just as mysterious and fascinating. His understanding of the Beast was oddly tolerant, like that of a clergyman confident in his own faith and the triumph of the Holy Ghost over Satan and His armies, even accepting of those times when he himself was in the power of the Beast. The Beast is within all of us. It is our gift from God that we learn to tame the Beast by any means we choose. Rasputin understood this. Quelch confided his ideas of God as we travelled side by side into the west, where the great ruins lay, famous and, like all great works, untarnished by familiarity. The reality was stupendous.

It was when we had changed from the car to the little open tram which carried us up the line through the sand on the last stages of our route that I was suddenly aware of the pyramids’ colossal size! I realised why it is not possible to take a picture of the pyramid that does not diminish it since one has to step back a considerable distance to include any idea of its shape and by that means lose the scale. We were fleas upon the remains of Pride; grubs crawling at the feet of the Gods. Never before have I known such awe as when I contemplated the enormous power of an individual able to dedicate the lives and resources of his entire nation to the construction of his own monument! Only Stalin has since known such total might.

‘I must say,’ Mrs Cornelius strolls up to join us, content beneath her parasol, ‘they ain’t a disappointment.’ With the satisfaction of a housewife who has seen the rising of a perfect pie she peers benignly upon the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

Behind us the film crew are unloading their equipment, observed by crowds of local hucksters and beggars controlled by our own private guards - burly men who gathered the skirts of their white gelabeas about them, using their long bamboo canes liberally and without anger upon an undismayed flock momentarily contenting itself with imprecations, wailed pleadings, filthy insults and the offer to sell any one of us anything our hearts or our lusts had ever remotely desired .

Wincing a little, Esmé moves closer to me. She has been sharing for a moment a seat with Seaman. She insisted on coming. I eventually agreed she should continue, to further her career. Our future after all is by no means as certain as it was. Seaman is begging every one of us to give of our best today, since Sir Ranalf Steeton will be driving out later to see how we work. He does not explain that Steeton’s word to Goldfish might bless the production again. Much as I am unhappy with Esmé’s acting ambitions, it was never in my nature to force another human being to a course of action that does not suit them. As Malcolm Quelch frequently remarks, what one did in one’s own bedroom was a matter of personal taste; what one did in one’s drawing-room must always be a matter of social probity.

I was thoroughly confident in Esmé’s love and respect for me and trusted her completely, in spite of Mrs Cornelius’s untypically jealous behaviour which had led her earlier that morning to ask me if I intended to start up as a full-time pimp in Cairo. I told her, rather stiffly, that there was a fairly large difference between a pimp and, for instance, an agent. I saw nothing wrong with a man encouraging his fiancée to follow a career. Most men would, I said significantly, be jealous of their sweetheart’s desire for success. And yet, as events were to show, Mrs Cornelius might have had at least a glimmer of honest concern for her rival, some intimation of the danger which lay ahead of us all. Tel de l’acier en fusion, mon sperme emplit son anus. Je vous aime toutes les deux. Il n’y a aucun mal à être en vie. Wir steckten in einer Maschine, die weissglühend and weich war, die jedoch härtesten Stahl zerquetscht hätte. Das Mahlwerk serrieb uns. Blut spritze. Blut spritze. Sie wollten Vergeltung, den Tod. Sie baten um Gott, um den gnädigen, strafenden Jesus, der in dieser Stunde der Offenbarung über sie gekommen war. Plötzlich war ich missgelaunt. . .

Le sang jaillissait. I have no further memory.

Sweet. I did love. Sweet, sweet. I did love. Sweet. There is no more sweet, sweet. I did love.

A kite, some scout for her fellow-scavengers, flared her wing feathers high overhead, about half-way to the peak of the pyramid, and the telescopes of a score of bird-watchers swung to observe her. We had arrived at the exact same moment as a Cook’s Tour of the British Ornithological Society, ‘Here to spot Egyptian exotics and familiar wintering friends!’ The tour, I was told by an excited matron, would also include visits to the principal sites of antiquity. She handed me a neatly folded blue and white brochure couched in prose worthy of Ouida. Before she was politely moved on by one of the crew, I returned her leaflet and gave my attention to the camera and our director who, like most of us, had donned his comfortable riding clothes. The cameraman’s boy was even wearing khaki shorts, while O. K. Radonic sported a suit of loud yellow golfing pyjamas he had bought the previous day, he told us, at Davis, Bryan and Company in West Street. The clothiers was famous in Serbia for the fineness of its English cut. On a British officer, perhaps, the golfing pyjamas might have looked almost elegant. On Radonic they looked as if he had borrowed a seaside pierrot suit several sizes too large for him. But the cameraman seemed pleased with his purchase and wore the outfit with the air of one who is at last perfectly a la mode.

A tent had been erected for Grace and his boxes. He would also help the actors dress. He had acquired, at Seaman’s suggestion, a little, round-faced Jewess as his assistant. She had some experience of the European beauty salon at Shepheard’s. She seemed competent, if surly. Speaking only Hebrew, Arabic and some French, she was of not much use to the rest of us. Happily Grace proved to be familiar with French and Hebrew and even seemed to have picked up a few words of Arabic. My anxieties, already ‘grounded’ by the activities of the night before, were almost completely forgotten as I saw we were building a useful team able to work with the camaraderie which makes for greater efficiency and improved artistic quality.

Malcolm Quelch, Esmé and I were not needed for at least half-an-hour while Seaman took readings and made judgements concerning light and focus, so we decided to stroll around the base of the pyramids. Quelch, used to the children and old men who begged from us, struck about him smartly with his malacca, a thin, amused smile on his face, as if he teased dangerous dogs. Cairo was out of sight and the only buildings were a few huts, the only traffic some ancient camels used to give rides to tourists. Out of all those rose the confident walls of the Mena Palace Hotel, a sprawling building in what Quelch called the ‘Swiss Egyptian’ style. The guides now claimed it as the hunting-lodge of King Faud’s ancestors. ‘These people are paying for Romance, dear friend, not Truth. One has to give the customer what she wants, I suppose. I try to educate them to the facts of Egypt, but they simply refuse to listen. Some of them become genuinely outraged. I can be attacked at any time for mentioning some perfectly ordinary reality. Did you want to climb up? These chaps will help you.’ He tapped an affectionate cane upon a couple of native bottoms. The men grinned and pointed upwards along the flanks of the astonishing edifice where, because of uneven stones, it was possible to scale the pyramid all the way to the top. Several tourists were being pushed and pulled by muscular fellaheen as I watched. I had not really been prepared for this mixture of casual use and monumental grandeur. Even the mobs of tourists and jostling fellaheen, the tramway, donkeys and rickshaws failed to diminish them. As a hundred Brownies clicked and recorded a hundred identical memories, Malcolm Quelch paused to watch a German party as it was helped aboard its camels for a turn around the Sphynx. ‘Do you think anything is being broadened other than their already broad behinds?’ he speculated. ‘Or will they go home, as I suspect, confirmed in their conformity and xenophobia? We are in danger, as the world grows wider and more available to us in all its considerable variety, of becoming increasingly parochial and insular, even of embracing simplistic systems of ideas, like immigrant Jews, like American pilgrims, as a barrier against so much uncontrollable data. Bewildered men, trained to manipulate the universe, must first instil a fear of the “outside” in their families and then define the universe, making it something they can control, drawing up a system of values merely to justify maintaining power over the only creatures they can control, their wives and children. This, of course, is the central point to any understanding of Islam. It explains why the Arab will never progress under his own initiative. He has developed a religion, out of the original creed, which makes him ideally suited to be a client of more powerful states and peoples. Always somebody’s slave. It is what he has been bred for. It is almost a crime to offer him anything else. What are these so-called “free Egyptian elections” going to achieve? They demand as a right what the British earned through centuries of experience. Yet had the British never come here, the Arabs could not have conceived of the notion of freedom in the first place! They sneer at us, call us corrupt, tell us we are cruel conquerors. And it is we who brought them the notions of the European enlightenment! But will this produce an Arab enlightenment? I doubt it. Theirs is a religion which thrives on ignorance and belongs to the darkness. No further Enlightenment can come through Islam. It’s a dead end. These chaps must eventually make a choice between perpetual poverty and illiteracy, proud, sublime insensitivity and, if not Christianity, at least a form of secular humanism. One or the other - possibly both - will free them. Solve vincia reis, profer lumen caecis.’ He paused, as if taking control of something in himself of which he disapproved. ‘I have unfortunately inherited a touch of my grandfather’s messianism. My father, on the other hand, an altogether gentler person, did not really prepare us for the world. Grandpa Quelch’s fire and brimstone has rather more to do with the actuality of life’s vicissitudes, don’t you think?’ He led Esmé and myself around a gigantic corner, out of sight of our crew and the majority of sweating Burgers and Hausfraus, successful caterers from the Bronx and cattlemen from the Brazos, dowagers and doctors from Dijon and Delft, bored children, and ecstatic maidens jotting purple lines in palm-sized notebooks. It occurred to me, as we looked upon the barren solitude of the Western Desert, that we might easily be upon a desolated planet Mars marvelling at the grave-markers of a race of giants. Might not those beautiful, untypical Pharaohs and their queens have descended in spaceships from the dying planet? Such ideas are now the stuff of cheap science fiction and nonsensical attempts to prove not only that we were once ruled by a benign race from the stars but that the Earth is actually fiat. I have attended their meetings at the Church Hall. Mrs Cornelius was very interested in the telepathic aspects of their beliefs and I must admit I have always kept an open mind on the subject. She had several stories of ‘psychic phone omina’ as she called them. She had as little success as myself in getting someone interested in her ideas. She had, she said, ‘put it to them bland bastards at the BBC but they’re so bloody busy keepin’ mellow frough a mixture of buggery and booze they don’t ‘ave time ter fink abaht reality.’ I said that since they truly believed they had both defined and accepted reality, anything outside their definitions was therefore not real. I had the same trouble with Titbits magazine. The man interviewed me about my theories and then went back and published a story which presented perfectly sound notions in a mocking manner. They make what they do not understand into a farce so as not to consider the actual implications. Even the picture of me was altered. Neither was I flattered by a caption stating that ‘Mad Scientist Max Reveals Sphynx’s Secrets.’ These people have no respect for themselves or anyone else. I would say to them Ihtarim Nafsak! This is something the Bedouin still know. True men are judged not by their wealth but by the approval they command from their peers and the admiring fear they engender in their enemies. No one can admire or approve of those Fleet Street gutter-rats. I told Mrs Cornelius she should not sink to their level.

Tugging my hand, Esmé made us fall back a short distance behind Professor Quelch. She leaned her little hip against my thigh. She had a compliant, dreaming softness I had known for a while in Constantinople. I found her mood both fascinating and alarming. She was, once again, suddenly offering me the whole responsibility for her fate, her very life and soul. Flattering as it was, this did not entirely suit me. I was scarcely more than a youth and not ready to transform myself into any woman’s tower of strength. While I was quite prepared to look after my little girl and cherish her I did not wish to become, as it were, her cause. There is a considerable strain involved in being another person’s ideal. I loved Esmé as a daughter, a sister, a wife, meyn angel, meyn alts! She was everything I had ever wanted. Yet, still I could not trust a Fate which had already snatched her from me, in different incarnations, four times. I yearned to commit myself wholly to her. I knew I must do so if ever she was to believe in my devotion, yet it was almost as if I wanted to put a distance between us again. I had always known how to master her, yet I feared to master her. Even the Marquis de Sade understood that the slave is not the only prisoner; sometimes the slave owns the master more thoroughly than the world can ever guess. I have known humiliation. I understand it. But I never became a Musselman. J’entendis l’horrible fouet de Grishenko siffler dans l’air lugubre et gris. Nous criâmes au même moment.

Malcolm Quelch raised his hand to an acquaintance, a gauze-draped woman of middle years, as she drew across the sandy slabs a charge of straw-hatted schoolchildren, doubtless the daughters of diplomats and soldiers, who moved with the familiar reluctant tread I had observed in the museums of Kiev and Paris, their navy-blue pleated skirts swinging in unison and reminding me of a party of Scots I had seen during the last stages of the Civil War, when the Whites and their allies were falling back to Odessa. My own little girl was scarcely older than they. I wondered if I should not consider asking Major Nye’s help in finding a good English boarding-school where she could learn the lessons of normality and moral rectitude which would turn her into a perfect wife for a man of affairs. However, Esmé’s explicit remarks about these children were not in any way suitable and I was only glad that Quelch’s grasp of vernacular Turkish was less than perfect.

‘And how are you finding Cairo, dear mademoiselle?’ Politely our professor turned to include himself in the conversation.

‘It is very pretty,’ she said. ‘Especially the mosques.’ She flicked a fly from her blue and white parasol. ‘And the lovely trees and so on.’

‘Cairo, my dear young woman, is a City of Illusion.’ He paused to watch the schoolgirls racing towards an Italian ice-cream cart almost identical to those I used to see on the beach at Arcadia. I came ashore in Arcadia, from the Oertz when she crashed in the sea, but the carts and the bands and the pretty girls had all gone. Only the Jew met me and took me to his house. He said he worked on a newspaper in Odessa. He had been born in Odessa, he said. This did not surprise me. ‘And we can find in that city all the beauty of Illusion. But Cairo is also a frontier-town, sweet dear mademoiselle, with the familiar characteristic of such a town.’

‘A frontier to what?’ enquired my little one with honest curiosity.

‘To the past, I suppose. The North is exhausted, but the South awaits us. Are you interested in the past, mademoiselle?’

‘I am too young for the past, in the main,’ she said. ‘My interest is principally for the here and now.’

‘This is the generation of the wilful Modern Girl, I fear.’ Malcolm Quelch spoke to me in English. And he winked to show that he had made a joke. I assured him in the same language that Esmé was the very model of virtue and that he was not to judge her by either her fashionable clothes or her apparent vapidity. And Esmé, hating to be excluded by a language of which she had only the prettiest rudiments, asked in French if it were not yet time for lunch. Professor Quelch informed her that it was only nine-thirty and that at twelve, he understood, they would be bringing us out a buffet from the hotel. ‘The food is excellent. They have nothing but British-trained chefs.’

Understanding this much, Esmé darted me a look of sardonic despair. Professor Quelch, propped upon one of the lower stones, asked if she were unwell. She merely began to hop about in the loose sand, eventually removing one of her little high-heeled slippers. ‘My shoe,’ she said. ‘It is full of this awful stuff. Are we almost gone round?’

‘Not yet, I fear, charming lady. We have two more golden sides to negotiate before we shall catch sight of our friends.’

‘Oh, Maxim!’ Still hopping, my darling pointed at two men stalking by supporting a battered chair on their shoulders. I was obliged to negotiate a price with the ruffians to carry my child in our wake as Quelch and I continued to walk. I explained to him, as if sharing a secret, that Esmé had experienced a restless night and was still tired. Quelch took my meaning. A bond was growing between us. It was of a different order to the wholesome comradeship existing between his brother and me, yet I did not resist it. My respect for Quelch’s experience and scholarship was considerable and I was honoured he should be prepared to share it with me.

‘The Copts and not the Arabs are the original sons of this land.’ He indicated some chipped slogan from an earlier millennium. ‘What a paradox it all is. Even the Prophet did not consider Christianity the foe of Islam. On the whole the Moslems are the real aliens and the Copts the real aborigines. The Coptic Christians are today not loved by their Moslem fellow-citizens, despite fine speeches by eloquent young men about the brotherhood of all Egyptians united against the Wicked Foreigner!’ He glared almost cunningly at me from the edge of his eye as we turned the third corner. ‘Are you interested in paradox, Mr Peters?’

I said that as an engineer I was interested in the resolution of apparent paradox.

‘Then you are a man of your times!’ He laughed, the sound of a bolt being drawn after years of disuse. ‘I am afraid that I have accepted the irrational. It is almost the norm, these days. But you are still young enough to think you can mould the world into something better than it is.’ He had grown suddenly more effusive. ‘The God of Christ is ipso facto the God of Chance.’ He put his arm around my shoulders, patting me as an older brother might, offering encouragement and approval. Perhaps he, the youngest, had always wanted a relationship where for once he might command. I think he looked for that in me. He was a man desperately needing a protégé, while I still longed for a mentor. Perhaps I let Quelch too easily influence me for a time, to my eventual regret.

We turned the fourth corner and came up behind our colleagues. Watched by a throng of local hucksters, they had gathered about a large touring car. They were sipping lemonade proffered by an impeccably costumed servant in a tarboosh. Seated in the back seat of the great Mercedes was a small, swarthy man in a white satin suit and a gleaming panama which he lifted as Esmé rode in upon her ramshackle palanquin and was lowered to the dust. ‘Meet the boss,’ said Mrs C., introducing us to Sir Ranalf Steeton, in whose hands our immediate destiny now lay. We greeted him with the enthusiasm of shipwrecked passengers apprised of rescue. As he shook hands with Esmé he returned our enthusiasm twofold. ‘I say, what a stunner! This must be our other lovely star! Do join me in the car, ladies. I must learn everything about you.’

I walked away from Mrs Cornelius and my Esmé as they simpered beside Sir Ranalf. He was in the hands of professionals. I could rely on them to do their work and was content to let them make whatever possible gains they could for us. Wolf Seaman, unbuttoning his shirt, had turned bright red and pretended to tackle some problem with the camera. When I pointed out that our girls were currently our greatest asset he said something waspish about his talent being the best thing we had and he was about to expand on this when the car’s horn brought us back, smiling and manfully agreeable, to Sir Ranalf, whose orderly had finished handing out the packed lunches and those awful bottles of Bass. ‘I’m so sorry I can’t have you to luncheon at the Mena Palace,’ said the little man bending to kiss Mrs Cornelius’s dainty, pink hand with his own dainty pink lips. ‘But we shall arrange something soon.’

‘You have yet to hear from our masters in Hollywood, I take it?’ Seaman wanted to know.

‘I fear so, dear boy. It’s the holidays, do you see? Everyone’s in Florida or Vermont or wherever it is you chaps go at Christmas and the New Year. Valentino apparently left Le Havre on January 16th. I’ve sent to Alexandria and apparently Mr Barrymore walked out of his hotel and has not been seen for a couple of days. There is some suggestion that he transferred from the Hope Dempsey to Lord Witney’s yacht which was going to Corfu for the Hogmanay.’

‘Barrymore?’ said Mrs Cornelius, poised upon the running-board. ‘Wot?’

‘Your missing leading man, sweet lady. I’m most awfully sorry, but you were supposed to meet him, you see, in Alex. They were afraid he would get lost if you weren’t all there together. Apparently a wire went astray.’

‘There wos so many,’ she said.

‘Is it John or Lionel?’ Esmé was cautious.

‘I only know it isn’t Ethel. But it would not be the first time John has sent a substitute while he goes about his own business. He is, I gather, something of a prankster.’ His little, precise voice had its own peculiar melody, like the warbling of a self-contained canary, and it softened oddly when he addressed women, as if he sought to mesmerise them. I had never heard quite such a voice and I did not find it particularly pleasant. It seemed to me that Mrs Cornelius was rather repelled by him but made a considerable effort to be agreeable. Clearly, she was relieved when she could make her departure. It was left to Esmé to prove herself a most remarkable actress, with her display of reluctant separation from a man she found of consummate fascination. For his part he squeezed her hand, pinched her cheek, murmured a compliment in her tiny pink ear and let her slip slowly from him before swinging his chubby body from the rear seat to the front and, with an impatient wave, directing his driver back to Cairo.

As soon as the car was out of sight, Esmé linked her arm in mine. ‘Is it true we shall have no proper luncheon today?’ She stared with distaste at the remaining boxes in the hamper.

Seaman stopped with a sigh to pick up his portion. ‘I suspect we are on probation. At least until we hear from Hollywood. Sir Ranalf told me privately before he left I was not to worry about anything. He is genuinely on our side, I think.’

Mrs Cornelius looked at him with wondering sympathy. ‘That little porker’s a greedy bastard, mark my words. ‘E’s art fer hisself an’ ‘e’s orlready makin’ the most o’ this. ‘E’s up ter somefink. Come on. Let’s git shootin’ before it’s too bloody ‘ot an’ orl me effin make-up runs again!’

I watched the two women retreat to their costumes, unhappy tent-mates, calling for Grace and the Jewess.

Malcolm Quelch had found himself a folding chair and a garden umbrella. He sat some distance off with his lunch on his lap, observing the little natives as they ran about our perimeter shrieking with excitement, sticking out their tongues and occasionally pointing to their arses in a manner which was either inviting or insulting, it was impossible to guess. Quelch’s attitude was innocent and avuncular, but if any boy came too close he did not miss the chance to whack him smartly with his cane. Meanwhile Seaman was working himself up into the peculiar frenzy with which he normally directed studio flapper parties and which seemed oddly inappropriate here, hands waving and shrieking as wildly as our surrounding audience. Radonic, ballooning vivid lemon behind his camera, took readings off his grip and, having made-up and dressed, I busied myself with the trial scene, our opening shot where Mrs Cornelius and myself embrace against the background of the pyramids and Esmé strolls by to glance idly at me - an action which of course will have considerably greater significance later in the story. For these shots it did not matter if the watching crowd behaved in any way it pleased, but if the footage proved usable, we would employ it in the editing. If not, it would still give us needed information. I knew an immediate sense of elation as the ladies emerged in their special frocks, Esmé in deep blue, Mrs Cornelius in pale pink, a cloudscape of undulating feathers, lace and silk, to stop at last before me, to glance towards the camera and the whining, scowling Scandinavian who, with nervous hands upon the cameraman’s careless shoulders, was whispering complicated instructions in his native tongue, of which Radonic had not a syllable. Mrs Cornelius turned fabulous powder, mascara and rouge upon me so suddenly that a sharp, delicious frisson stabbed through my whole body. I moved dreamily into her embrace, my eye-shadow so weighting my lids that I was forced to raise them very slowly to stare into her exquisite blue eyes, automatically mouthing the lines which came from Seaman’s shriek of ‘Action’.

Bobby: I know that I have loved you since the world began.

Irene: And we shall love each other until the world shall end.

This was my epiphany. It was as if I had reached the quintessential moment of my existence, from which radiated all the possibilities of past, present and future. Behind me were the wars, the turbulence and terrible cruelties, the filth and the bloody corpses of the century’s struggles; ahead lay a silver and gold vision, the ethereal splendour of my independent flying republics, my healthy, handsome citizens in a cleaner, more rational world, with sentimentality abolished and self-respect made the rule. It was as if all the promises of my life were to be fulfilled and every disappointment and betrayal redeemed! It was almost as if I had been sent a heavenly sign, an affirmation and a confirmation of my noblest ideals. I was so close I could barely control my trembling. Her perfume was sweet as morning roses, her flesh so wonderfully soft it was scarcely flesh at all, her body radiating such sensuality I could barely control the shivering of my blood. Esmé was momentarily forgotten. Mrs Cornelius was my Goddess, my Muse, the great constant of my life, my Guardian Angel, the one friend who always cared for me (up or down, right or wrong), who shared so much of my vision and respected the wholesome idealism behind it, the hatred not of other peoples, but of confusion, of mongrelism. The love of my own culture and people is a fundamental of my life. She shared my distaste for lies and hypocrisy, my admiration for nobility, self-sacrifice and courage in all its forms, my willingness to extend a helping hand to anyone who wished to better himself, black, white, olive or yellow, so long as each accepted his equal responsibilities in the order of things. The simple moral lessons of my Russian childhood are not, I think, inappropriate to these chaotic times! Neither are they limited to the Slav. Nordic peoples share them in one form or another and they exist where Christians have left their mark, in Italy, Spain and, still, sometimes, in Greece, the centre of all our learning and our pride. They are the ideals of the Enlightenment, of the Age of Science, and if I alone still hope to convince the world of their message, and point to the road to our salvation, this does not, I hope, make me mad. I continue to speak for my people, for my past, for honest patriotism. Love of country, respect for one’s own culture surely helps us understand another’s emotions for the things he calls his own? The tribes of Europe might have co-existed peacefully for centuries had not the tribes of Oriental Africa, with their alien allegiances, observed our wealth and power and hungered for it. Let Palestine take her Jews and Morocco her Moors. I have no quarrel with them while they remain firmly on their own side of the Mittel Sea. My inventions and ideas would benefit everybody. I yearned to share my genius with the world. What a different place it would be today! This is the understanding I had in common with Mrs Cornelius. With me she is the only one left alive who knows how perfect was our lost future. I grieve for it, still.

‘Yer did yer level best ter make it work, Ivan.’ She is still beautiful, seated in her ancient armchair, all her memories piled around her. ‘It ain’t yore fault if ther effin’ world wosn’t up ter yer expectations. It’s the same wiv kids. Take it as it bloody comes, I say. One effin’ day at an effin’ time.’

She was a fantastic legend - yielding in my arms. I gasped. The joy was almost anguish. Esmé went by and her eye met mine. She smiled. I returned my gaze to Mrs Cornelius, holding her with all the passion of the years until the ‘Cut!’ I most dreaded and she was fanning herself with her feathers, pursing her perfect lips to blow air up into her face and calling enthusiastically for a beer. ‘Phew! This ain’t the wewer for ‘uggies and smarmies is it, Ive?’

Hardly able to breathe, let alone speak, I indicated that I agreed with her, but secretly I was nurturing the ambience. If Goldfish’s erratic temper permitted no other take, I had at least recorded the fulfilled ambition of those many years! Finally I had held the quintessence of all women (the woman who had been my wife) sober, in my arms for one infinitely thrilling moment! I think Esmé, strolling smoothly through her own part, sympathised, as women can, with my profound physical and intellectual pleasure; something she herself could never quite inspire. Though she satisfied my noblest longings and my every ideal of womanly perfection, though Esmé understood my soul, and my most primitive desires, only Mrs Cornelius really understood my heart.

‘OK shot! OK shot!’ Radonic, in vivid cotton, raised his thumb, his highest praise. Wiping his forehead, Wolf Seaman’s lugubrious features had an expression of faint astonishment. We all knew we had recorded a moment of screen magic.

It was later, as I vomited into the sand at the base of the Great Pyramid, that I realised with surprise that I had caught the sun.