The Automobile Club of Egypt

22

The party was held in the hunting lodge in Fayoum, where the king stayed when he wanted to hunt waterfowl. It was an elegant, white two-story structure, with nothing else around it but a swimming pool beautifully illuminated at night by an underwater lighting system. Near the pool, two tables had been laid out a little distance apart so that those at one could not overhear what those at the other were saying. At the first table sat the old Princess Mahitab and her consort, Prince Shawkat, with Prince Shakib and his wife, and at the second sat Carlo Botticelli with three women, a white-skinned foreigner in her twenties, a plump olive-skinned woman in her thirties and, between them, Mitsy Wright wearing a low-cut black dress, showing off her cleavage and her beautifully turned shoulders, her long hair falling over them. Botticelli sat chatting with the three women as he looked them over with a hint of worry. He wanted to reassure himself that they were up to scratch. From time to time, Botticelli would get up and ask one of them to come with him. He would take a step backward and look at her as if examining an old master painting and then whisper a remark: “Go easy on the rouge,” “You need to freshen your eyeliner” or “Straighten the shoulder of your dress.” Then he would return to the table, letting the woman go off to the bathroom to carry out his instructions. He had already examined two of them, and now it was Mitsy’s turn. She was surprised to find him pulling her away from the table by the hand.

“I want to speak to you,” he said in English.

She got up and went with him. She had worked out what he was doing and was not going to let him give her a beauty critique as he had done with the others. If he mentioned her lipstick or her eyeliner, he would regret it. Perhaps guessing how she might react, he took a different tack. He looked at her and gave her an affectionate smile.

“You are so beautiful.”

“Thank you.”

“This night might be a turning point in your life. I hope that you appreciate the gravity of the moment.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, it’s not every day that you meet the king.”

“What exactly do you want me to do?”

“His Majesty adores beauty,” Botticelli said suavely. “And if he asks for something, he always gets it.”

Mitsy looked at him with anger in her eyes, but he continued, “You will see that His Majesty is a jolly nice chap and actually quite humble.”

Mitsy turned her back on him and returned to her table. Botticelli was not in the least worried by Mitsy’s sharp reaction. He knew that she would submit to the king if the time came. Otherwise, she would not have accepted the invitation in the first place. She had turned up, and that’s what mattered. Her edginess was just her way of overcoming her shyness in the situation. How strange women are, Botticelli thought to himself as he looked again at the three sitting there in front of him. Were someone to say to any of them that they had come to sell their bodies, she would wipe the floor with him. They had this marvelous power of self-deception. Despite his long experience with women, or perhaps because of it, Botticelli had no great respect for them. Palace rumor had it that in his youth he had been in love with a Greek woman from Alexandria, only to discover that she had been cheating on him with a friend of his, and thereafter he never trusted a woman again. After having convinced scores of women to sell their bodies and finding well-thought-of and respectable women who were ready to go to bed with the king, he no longer believed that any woman could be virtuous. These seductive and delicate creatures all wore a false veneer of innocence but were ready to lie or do anything else for riches. Each had her price. Any woman could be seduced if the time and manner were right. Not surprisingly, Botticelli’s opinion of women had led him to avoid marriage, leaving him a bachelor now in his fifties. When drinking with his friends, they would goad him about it, but he would just laugh.

“Why should I get married?” he would ask them. “I always have a mistress. Marriage is a just a chance to be a cuckold.”

His friends kept trying to convince him otherwise, but Botticelli would dismiss their efforts with a wave of his hand and declaim, “Gentlemen! You can defend your romantic image of women all you like, but no one knows them better than I do. They are fantastic creatures but with no sense of honor. That’s the sad truth, and there’s no point denying it. You are like diners waiting for your meal in a restaurant, whereas I work in the kitchen and know how the most tempting dishes are prepared.”

Waiting for the king to arrive, Botticelli sat at the table with the three prospective candidates. The table with the princes was superfluous to his plans, and they knew that they were merely extras, there to provide the right backdrop. It would have been unseemly for the king of Egypt and the Sudan to come and pick out a girl for the night surreptitiously, and so Botticelli had invited these members of the royal family to make the whole thing look aboveboard. In their part, the royal extras felt some pride that the king trusted them to observe him in his most private moments. They kept themselves removed from the main course of events, eating and drinking and chatting away in French, the princes spluttering and coughing with merriment as their wives laughed along sweetly and flirtatiously. From time to time they would cast a glance at the king’s table in order to check whether they should go on paying no attention to what was happening behind their backs or whether the moment had come for them to make their excuses to the king and depart.

It was after one in the morning, and the king had still not turned up. Mitsy sat silently while the others chatted away with Botticelli, giving forced laughs as they kept glancing at the doorway, worried that the king might not turn up at all but not daring to ask Botticelli. Mitsy sat there among them in her own world. She had a blank smile on her face and an absent look in her eyes. She felt neither timorous nor anxious. She was just astonished. She had been watching everything as if it were a piece of theater. Yet again, she felt that she did not understand herself and that she was behaving out of character, as if driven along by some irresistible force. Why had she come? To present herself to the king or, more precisely, to wait for permission to go to bed with the king. That was the truth of the matter. She had done this to herself and could not claim to be a victim. She could not claim that her father had forced her into this. He could not make her do anything she did not want to.

She had announced to her father that she would not go to the party. She had done this for the pleasure of provoking him, and they had quarreled as usual, but this time he had become so furious that she could sense the heat of his incandescent rage. She avoided him now to the point of not sitting down to dinner with him but instead eating a sandwich or two in her bedroom. Three days before the party, she had knocked at the door of her father’s study. The moment he saw her, his expression turned to one of anxiousness. He leaned back in his chair, bracing for any and all surprises.

“Have you told Mr. Botticelli that I’m not going?” she asked calmly.

“That’s none of your business,” he snapped at her. He was expecting her to answer him back, but she smiled innocently and said, “All right. If you haven’t told him that I’m not going, then don’t. I’ve changed my mind. I’ll go.”

His look of rage turned to one of astonishment and then gradually to one of delight and possibly even gratitude. He smiled and hesitantly, as if fearing that she might renege, he said, “Finally, you’ve made the right decision. I knew that you were too clever to miss this opportunity.”

“I’ll go out this evening,” she informed him drily, “and buy a new dress as you told me to.”

She did not wait for him to respond but turned and left the study, having taken in his astonishment. She seemed to enjoy foisting surprises upon him as much as defying him. Her father could never understand her behavior, but then neither could she.

She always felt the urge to rebel. She hated anything that was taken for granted or prearranged. She liked breaking rules or rushing headlong in the wrong direction. She took delight in pulling the rug from under people who were sure of themselves and their own wise decisions. She had been headstrong like this ever since she started school. If the class was sitting in silence, just at the moment when the teacher thought that he had got all his pupils quietly doing what he wanted, the temptation to make a scene would be too much for her. She would laugh suddenly or shout out to one of her friends and typically ended up being punished. How often had she had to stand in the corner throughout a whole lesson, and how many times had she had to write out the line “I must behave in the classroom”? That did not deter her, however. Her impetuosity stayed with her throughout her youth and even evolved, so that her ongoing challenge to authority also became a search for some hidden truth. As she confronted the status quo, the false smiles and hollow gestures, there was always something that she enjoyed blurting out to everyone’s shock and horror. She craved sincerity. That was why she loved Egypt. She preferred to spend time in a small coffee shop in Cairo to going for dinner at the Carlton Club in London. The people here were real, and even if life was difficult, it was authentic, whereas in London things might be refined and elegant, but people were false.

It was this fickle and headstrong nature that helped Mitsy with her acting. When she appeared in a play, she never felt that she was performing. She would lose herself in the character she was playing. Once, during a rehearsal, a director had told her, “Mitsy, you are a very special actress. It’s difficult for me to direct you because you are drawing on something inside yourself. I will talk you through your character without giving you any directions. Try to understand the character and then act her out in your own way.”

She lived as if she were acting a role on stage. She would look inside herself for specific motivation, and then, having found it, she would give herself over to it. So had she accepted the king’s invitation because she thought she might find the experience exciting or because the king’s attention would gratify her feminine vanity? These were both plausible reasons, but her strongest motivation generally had to do with her father. Her mother was cold and emotionally inhibited, spending most of the time alone with her books, taciturn and almost totally indifferent to what was going on around her. Mitsy loved her notwithstanding all that, because her mother could not bring herself to tell untruths and always called a spade a spade. Her father was the diametric opposite: he was a liar and a hypocrite. He represented everything she hated. He was condescending and arrogant, always scuttling around after money and trying to cover up his behavior with a façade of moral probity. She resented him because she understood him too well. He had pushed her in the direction of the king’s bed for his own benefit while trying to convince her that he just wanted her to be friends with the king. Her father lived in grand style in Egypt, but he never stopped complaining. He whined every day about having to live there even though he knew that in England he could not earn even half of what he made at the Automobile Club. He was paid well because he was English, not because he was the general manager of the Club. Perhaps the time had come to confront him about all his lies. Mitsy wanted to make him look in the mirror and to ask him, “So, you want me to be the king’s mistress, and you call that ‘innocent friendship’? All right, Mr. Wright. I’ll sleep with the king, and in order to show you up, I’ll make myself a pushover. I’ll part my thighs the moment I see His Majesty. I know that will be of use to you, dear Father.”

She told herself that she would go to bed with the king, but how would His Majesty get her there? Would he first kiss her? Would he ask her to strip completely naked in front of him? At this point, she thought back to Thomas, a ginger engineering student in London who never stopped laughing. He was the first man who taught her how to love, and they were happily together for two whole years before it ended abruptly. Did love have its own life span? Did it always burn for a specific amount of time and then splutter out like a candle? Still deep in her thoughts, Mitsy noticed Botticelli laughing away with the other two women, who were pretending to be amused by him. How she hated this slimy pimp. When she had first shaken his hand, she felt so defiled by his touch that she went straight to the bathroom to wash up. Now she felt like doing something to unmask the whole charade. She wanted to tell Botticelli that he was nothing more than a procurer and then to dash the haughtiness of those princes and princesses sitting at the other table by pointing out the true nature of their role as adjunct pimps, with their artificial chatter and forced sickening laughter. It was two a.m., and the king had still not made an appearance. The two other candidates had twice gone to the bathroom to adjust their makeup. Mitsy looked at them and said to herself, “You poor little tarts. So much time have you spent making yourselves beautiful only to see your hopes dashed.”

Suddenly the one sitting on her right spoke, “Mr. Botticelli, hasn’t His Majesty arrived yet?”

Botticelli gave her a cold stare.

“His Majesty is not a prisoner of punctuality. You can leave if you so wish.”

The girl looked worried.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That’s not what I meant. Of course I shall wait for His Majesty to appear.”

“Whether you go or stay,” retorted Botticelli sarcastically, “is of no importance. I don’t think that the king will be greatly chagrined if he doesn’t find you here tonight.”

“Of course, Monsieur Botticelli,” she said sycophantically. “I’m just aching to see the king, that’s all I meant.”

Botticelli averted his gaze from her as if to punish this insolence and started chatting with the other girl. But by half past two, the princes and the pimp were getting a little worried themselves, knowing the king only too well. If His Majesty was in the casino, then time lost all meaning for him. If he was losing at poker, he would sit there all night trying to claw back his losses, ignoring any appointment, no matter how important. When the clock struck three, Botticelli was certain that the king would not appear, but the guests could not go home until they had the king’s permission. Botticelli decided to call His Majesty at the Club and request his permission for the guests to leave. Before Botticelli could get up and make the call, however, there was a commotion with the waiters scurrying here, there and everywhere. Then Alku strode out from the lodge and stood bolt upright in his gold-trimmed white uniform near the swimming pool. He looked behind him a few times as if waiting for some signal and then bowed and announced with pomp, “His Majesty the king of Egypt and the Sudan.”

The guests all surged over to greet His Majesty the king, who looked at Botticelli and the girls around him and laughed.

“Carlo, quel joli bouquet de fleurs vous avez mis là,” he said.

This magnanimous royal compliment moved Botticelli deeply.

“I am Your Majesty’s humble servant,” he said with some emotion, and then he presented the women.

He started with the olive-skinned girl, Inji, the daughter of the aristocrat Hasan Sharkis. Then he introduced the French danseuse, Chantal, who was currently performing at the Auberge des Pyramides nightclub. When it came to Mitsy, Botticelli gave the king a knowing look and smiled with pride as if drawing his attention to the pick of the litter.

“I should like to present to Your Royal Highness Miss Mitsy, daughter of Mr. James Wright, general manager of the Automobile Club.”

“Delighted to meet you,” the king said with a smile. “I know your father. He’s a good man.”

Mitsy muttered some words of thanks.

“And what do you do with your time?” the king continued.

“I’m a drama student at the American University.”

This appeared to interest the king, and when they sat down at the table, he chatted with her to the complete exclusion of the others, who tried as hard as they could not to appear jealous. It became obvious that the royal choice had been made. The guests from the other table started coming over to request permission to leave, the king seeing them off with a nod.

Botticelli got up with a self-satisfied look and bowed. “I beg Your Majesty’s permission to leave,” he said. “I should be taking these two beautiful ladies back home.”

“That’s not what I would call an unpleasant task!”

Everyone had now gone, leaving the king and Mitsy alone in the lodge. The servants were all standing close by in case His Majesty should need them but out of earshot of His Majesty’s conversation with his guest. Mitsy was listening to the king with a fixed smile, finding the situation so strange. Her previous impression of the king had been completely off. Was this flabby man sitting in front of her, who looked so ordinary, really His Majesty? The king ordered a bottle of wine and gestured to the waiter to let Mitsy taste it. She took a sip but noticed that he did not fill the king’s glass.

“Isn’t Your Majesty drinking?” she asked in a disembodied voice.

“Actually, I don’t like the taste of wine.”

She took another sip, feeling the need of the alcohol.

“Do you know,” the king said, “why people taste the wine before drinking it?”

“I don’t.”

“That custom has a story to it,” he said, sounding like some old sage. “The king of France was ill, and his doctor had forbidden him to take any wine. This king gave a party for his nobles and courtiers, and it went on late into the night. Every time someone made a toast, the guests drank, and the king did not. The wine by now had gone sour, but they were obliged to drink it. Not a single one of them dared to mention this to the king. The next day, every last guest fell ill. When the king learned of this, he launched the custom of the host tasting the wine first before serving it to the guests.”

“I have learned something new, Your Majesty,” Mitsy said with a laugh.

“I read it in a history book,” the king answered proudly.

“Does Your Majesty read a lot?”

“At least four hours a day.”

She knew he was lying, but she raised her eyebrows and said, “How wonderful.”

Why was she kowtowing to the king? Yet again she could not fathom her own behavior. How she hated her own false smile and the sound of her voice. But why was she being so obsequious when she was about to fall into a pit?

“Let’s be friends.” The king smiled. “From this night on.”

“Your friendship would be an honor for me, as it would be for anyone.”

The king nodded, and as if thinking about something deeply, he said, “Let me tell you something. I don’t judge friendship by time but by my feelings. There are some people I have known for donkey’s years, but to me they don’t feel like friends at all. On the other hand, I sometimes meet someone for the first time and feel as if I’ve known him for ages. It’s so nice to be able to talk to you. Lately, I have been feeling really lonely.”

“Oh, what a sad cliché,” Mitsy thought, but she carried on with her part and forced a sad smile. She gave the king a sympathetic look and asked, “How can Your Majesty feel lonely when you are surrounded by people who love you?”

“A man can be surrounded by people,” he said with a sigh, “and feel lonely at the same time because no one understands him.”

“This dull king is trying to come across as some sort of great thinker,” she thought.

He spoke of his hard, austere life and the royal responsibilities, which left him no time for recreation.

“I appreciate Your Majesty’s hard work,” she told him. “But you must find a way to relax.”

“How can I, when I shoulder the responsibility of Egypt, the most important country in the East?”

Even as she kept nodding in agreement, she could not help thinking, “What a hypocrite! He gambles the night away at the Automobile Club and then goes running after women. All this is part of your national duties?”

Suddenly the king fell silent. “Why have you stopped drinking?” he asked her.

“I drink slowly.”

“Well keep drinking, because I love to look at the rim of the glass as it touches your lips.”

He motioned to a waiter, who rushed over and refilled her glass with a bow.

She took another sip, and the king appeared on the verge of saying something. Suddenly, she felt his enormous hand squeezing hers. Her breath quickened, and she thought she was about to faint. He held her hand up, and as he kissed it, she whispered, “Thank you, Your Majesty.”

He took a glass from the table. “Usually,” he said, “I don’t drink, but I shall tonight in your honor.”

She said nothing as he moved so close that she could feel his breath on her face as he whispered lasciviously, “I shall drink from your glass. I shall place my lips where your lips have touched, and that way I shall absorb all your secrets.”

Mitsy gave a smile of complete naïveté. “That is one honor,” she said, “that I should not like to have.”

“What do you mean?” the king said with some irritation.

Mitsy kept smiling and continued gently, “Please do not drink from my glass, Your Majesty.”

“And why not?”

“I’m not too well. I have a serious throat infection. My doctor has told me that it is rare but extremely contagious and can be passed on to anyone who comes too close or uses things I have used.”

The king stared at her, his smile vanished and his pupils dilated, apparently unable to take this in. Mitsy took a step back and told him apologetically, “My apologies. It’s just that I am worried about Your Majesty, with all those responsibilities, catching the infection.”