The Private Sector

1

In those early days in Egypt, when I was teaching in Heliopolis and before I’d met Bridget, I spent most week-ends and holidays in Cairo at the Oxford Pension at the top of Soliman Pasha Street and at the bar of the Continental Hotel in Opera Square, with a listless existence in between at one of Groppi’s cafés, various cinemas and the Estoril Restaurant. I can only think of the heat as reason for my not going further afield — the stupefying blast of muggy summer air, rising from the flooded river and the delta and saturating every pore of the city — so that one found respite, if at all, only in those few public places which had air-conditioning. One lived a sort of cave life then, surrounded by the dark panelling of the Estoril or the Regent Bar, the black mirrors in the Continental, the drawn curtains of one’s room — emerging only at night into the open, looking for variety and pleasure, with all the suppressed energy and appetite of an animal in search of prey.

Herbert Cherry — Williams’s Cherry, there couldn’t be another and he alone had stayed on in Egypt after the rest of us had left — was one of our group who taught mathematics in another school in Heliopolis. He was stout and nearing middle age and spent a lot of his time vigorously avoiding the implications of both facts. To do him justice — the way he would have seen it anyway — I suppose I should describe him as being young at heart. Much more, he reminded me then with his oblique humour, his ubiquity and his studied concern for the flesh, of Leopold Bloom. Certainly he knew as much about Dublin. He ought never to have left that city really, it was the true centre of his existence, and his life in Egypt then seemed to be no more than a series of defensive engagements — hopeless skirmishes designed to protect the lines of memory which led back to his native city and his real consciousness against the marauding sound and images of Cairo. In this wasteland I was his only sounding board.

He had a cherubic glitter, an intensity of recall, that turned him, in long nights over Stella beer, into a clown and character assassin; a Robin Hood of memory, robbing the past to pay for the present. Thus he would describe in detail various journeys made about Dublin — wordy encounters and drinking Odysseys conducted in earlier days — the flavour of the wet Georgian architecture and the slang of the city tumbling into, transforming, the present aridities. “I saw him on the steps of the National Library — of course he thought he had the job but the unfortunate thing about him was — that affair with a greyhound in the back of the taxi …” And so it would go late into the evening. His gossip was not malicious but rather a form of love.

Because of all this shuttered longing, and the heat which irked his great bulk — and because too he was merely shopkeeper Protestant-Irish (not Anglo-Irish as he often described himself) and therefore covertly British — Mr. Cherry failed conspicuously to get on with the Egyptians. He would adopt in his dealing with them an hauteur which would have seemed out of place amidst the worst excesses of colonialism in that country sixty years before. The Egyptians failed equally to understand him, though this perhaps was because they never bore the brunt of his dismissive cynicism — as I did — since he didn’t at that point speak any Arabic. None the less, in a succession of violent gestures and abusive gutturals, he would incite the locals to within an inch of his life at most opportunities. Late at night, when repeated moves from one night club to another had forced him off the Stella and on to whisky, he would sternly introduce himself to the doorman or head waiter as “Lord Salisbury and party. And hurry about it”; which usually, and quite properly, resulted in our paying double for everything before being thrown out.

I suppose it was his marriage that eventually reconciled him to the place — or perhaps it was the rather sinister attraction Arab countries can have for people with an authoritarian view who have somehow not managed to express that aspect of their personality adequately at home: Egypt had reconciled Cherry to the mild tyranny of his nature.

Angelo, a Greek Jeeves, ran the bar in the Continental and there was a small Italian orchestra that played “Ciao, Ciao, Bambino” over and over again in the evenings. Between the two it was the most enjoyable place in Cairo at the time. In the mornings, before things got going, when Angelo was getting the bottles out and clunking the ice into silver thermos bowls, I would sit at a table in the corner correcting exercise books or writing letters in the cool shade. By lunch time Cherry had usually turned up and the real shape of the day would begin to emerge.

It was during the early part of my first summer in Egypt that we met Bridget here — a tall, dark-haired girl with a confident, provocative look about her. Years before, when the English had run things in Egypt and one hardly ever came across an Egyptian in the centre of Cairo, it wouldn’t have been unusual to meet someone like her, so “English” looking, in the Continental at lunch time. It was now; since Suez there were no more than a handful of British people left in the whole country.

She was with her friend Lola from Beirut so that at first I wondered if they might have been two high-class tarts looking for Europeans since even in those days Germans and Scandinavians had started touring Egypt in high summer. In fact they were both working as secretaries, doing a job with an airline, and this being a Saturday they had the afternoon off. Bridget of course wasn’t entirely English but as a product of the old English school in Heliopolis she might as well have been. Her mother had come from England before the war and had married a Copt who had later become an under-secretary for something in Farouk’s government. Recently — and prematurely — they had retired to the suburb of Maadi outside Cairo. None of this was apparent initially as we chatted about the city and the heat — politely, inconsequentially — like tourists comparing notes. But it wasn’t long before we realised we had much more in common — that this was a meeting in a desert, a miraculous coming together of true minds and shared assumptions in a savage outpost. As soon as it became clear that we were all genuinely foreign (and being the daughter of a Christian in Farouk’s old government made Bridget more of an exile than any of us) the personal data of our lives became an open secret among us and we fell on each other with a thirsty, incestuous release.

Later, after a number of drinks, Bridget decided we should all have lunch together at their apartment and we travelled there in Lola’s car, going by a market they knew of where we loaded up with a colossal meal, including great slabs of steak, a thing I’d not seen since my arrival in Egypt.

The heat had emptied the streets, the trams had stopped; even the beggars had gone to ground while the rich had all left for Alexandria. Only at garages where men sprayed weak rainbows of water over the underground petrol stores was there any activity. In the car, even with all the windows open and bowling along, there was still only the feeling of moving through a scorching vacuum. Draped about with our bags of food and muzzy from the iced Zibib which Angelo had specially recommended as a foil against the heat no one spoke as we glided across the city.

Perhaps by now Cherry and I had anticipated something of the nature of the afternoon ahead of us. Remembering our initial meeting and that stifling journey — with its too polite opening movements, its menace of animal restraint — it seems impossible now that we coud have been completely unaware of the outcome. But I think we were, or at least I was, for Cherry never spoke of it afterwards.

The two girls had a small apartment at the top of a ten-storey building by the Nile in Garden City. And the lift was out of order. While the girls went to their bedroom Cherry and I patrolled the living-room — nervous, exhausted, unable to sit still. There was a small Victorian chaise-longue in one corner, a collection of brass and leather ornaments scattered about the place — the Arab equivalent of flying china ducks on the wall — and a tiny velvet-green card table in the middle. It was like a room in a dolls’ house, an oven perched high against the sun, and I felt like a cumbersome tenant inspecting something I knew already I didn’t want.

Turning from a photograph of Bridget on a beach I saw her come out of the bedroom, naked, except for a trail of light cotton flowing from her shoulders as she moved across the room, struggling into a day-gown on her way towards me.

“Wouldn’t you like to dress more lightly? It’s very hot here I’m afraid. We have some gin but no ice.” She moved across to the chaise-longue. Cherry had briefly noticed her arrival but had then resumed his gaze out over the city, more intently now, as if he had spotted an accident in the streets below or a thunderstorm on the horizon.

From beneath the sofa Bridget dragged a cardboard crate of Gordon’s Export gin — the one with the blue sloes down each side of the label, like an English hedgerow in autumn, and the red boar’s head in the middle. Real gin had been unobtainable in Cairo since the British had left and this, I supposed, was a memento of their departure. Lola had gone across to the kitchen and had returned with glasses and water. The mixture was warm but strong.

Bridget faced me: “We have so much of it and we never really drink it. We should shower in it.” She smiled seriously. “You really ought to take some of those clothes off. You’ll expire.”

Lola, who didn’t have the same command of English, looked at Cherry by way of similar encouragement — Cherry, with his coat off now and the pained expression of a housemaster trapped amidst a riot in the boys’ dorm.

“Will you help me in the kitchen? We will beat the steak,” Lola said and Cherry was led gently away.

Nothing seemed really to have changed. The polite tones of our rapport hadn’t altered, nor the casual indifference, as though all of us were really absorbed in other matters. Yet I was aware at last, now that a choice had quietly been made, that the significant side of the day had finally emerged: I was to have Bridget and Lola wanted Mr. Cherry.

We heard them going to and fro in the kitchen, thumping the steak, but without any accompanying voices — as if the two of them were involved in a limbering up process preparatory to some mysterious rite. Bridget and I looked at each other for a moment — she on the chaise-longue, the trails of her gown now sprawled high over the rise at the end of the couch, and I, still fearing to sit, assuming a negligent pose by the window opposite. Her skin was the palest sort of yellow, darkening towards the years of sunburn round her neck, with the still darker flow of her hair above that. A round, monkey face — like a schoolgirl’s, with a sort of permanent impertinence about it; a face made attractive through its failures — the abrupt turn of the jaw so that her mouth seemed unnaturally long, the misplaced nose that suddenly occurred between the eye line and lips before curling gracefully into a snub like a petal, breasts that were just a gesture, no more than small undulations of skin, and hips that splayed dramatically out of true below her waist.

She said nothing but looked at me with a smile of assent — as if agreeing with these wordless comments of mine about her body — seeing in her flaws and my appraisal of them a potential which delighted her. Then, as if bored with the idea and I were no longer there, she stood up, throwing her gown behind her, and with a fresh bottle of gin, cutting the foil with her nail on the way, she moved towards the bathroom. There was a splash of water for a minute or two before she called me.

She wanted to make love there and then as we mingled beneath the trickle of warm water — she in a bathing cap and I dodging awkwardly beneath the rusty surround of metal. I countered with the imminent lunch and the cramped circumstances. Instead we compromised — poured the gin over each other, drank some of it and kissed.

Cherry meanwhile must have accustomed himself more to the surroundings. I’d heard him laughing — his sudden manic shrill as he and Lola went to and fro arranging lunch on the card table. But when we all sat down together, crouched around the little velvet square like gamblers waiting for the ace, he was still firmly in possession of his clothes. Now that the overtures seemed to have been successfully concluded Bridget and Lola talked quite a bit in Arabic, as if we’d simply been friends of theirs who’d dropped by for lunch. And later we talked again about our life in Egypt and theirs. But it wasn’t the light, excited chatter of introduction any more; it was the prelude to an act.

The sun had dipped in its arc over the roof and slanted now directly into the room. But it was far from evening and the moment’s wind which sometimes came then, up the delta from the sea. We finished lunch with Turkish delight and coffee and some more gin. With its elaborate preparations, its confused chatter in different languages, its barriers of communication — it had been like a Sunday lunch in childhood years before; a ritual with strange guests talking incomprehensibly after which everybody would have to “do” something. Cherry and I both managed to prolong it, alternating requests for more coffee with small frenzies of chatter between ourselves. We had even embarked on Cherry’s Dublin — a famous row between two professors at Trinity College which he began meticulously to reconstruct — in order to stay the proceedings. But Lola and Bridget mistook our subject for small talk and the eagerness in our voices for impatience and started to clear the decks. We had a last gin together quietly while they were out of the room.

Cherry, as though bent on some high and arduous purpose, disappeared with Lola through the big double doors of the bedroom. Bridget and I made some highly unsatisfactory love together, balancing precariously on the chaise-longue. Moaning afterwards, but catching some broken sentences in between, I realised she was regretting Lola’s use of the double bed next door as much as my own precipitate performance. Charitably she saw in our discomfort the reason for my failure — saw too, perhaps, that I was not really up to the sexual obstacles, the “flaws” she had contrived for me in her idea of the shower together and her choice of the awkward chaise-longue. She changed her mood, became gently impatient.

“See what they’re doing in there. If they’ve done with the bed we could use it. It might be easier.”

At that moment Cherry’s bare arm slid through the doorway and he shook a towel at us. He called to me, softly, and clutching another towel I hurried forward to the mid-wicket conference.

“It hasn’t worked,” he whispered. “Lola says we should try the chaise-longue. Are you done with it?”

Lola and Bridget were never satisfied. The afternoon dragged on in a series of blows and parries, from room to room, place to place. Fortified, in our separate ways, with gin and desire, Cherry and I gradually faded while the girls redoubled their attack. Lola took to berating us in long storms of Arabic, her mouth forming immense shapes as the normally relaxed syllables of her tongue rose in angry and vicious gutturals towards us. “Ya-a-a-LAH”—the last three letters coming upon us like a thunder-clap. Now that the pretence of communication, the polite exchanges, had been thrown away — we laughed in return, masking our impotence with roars of indifference, as if we understood her every word.

It was then that Lola embarked on her belly dance — the Trojan horse in the proceedings, as she must have seen it, which would surprise our lust behind the fort of our fatigue and indifference.

She rooted vigorously in cupboards about the bedroom, throwing a vast hoard of tempting apparel about the place. It piled up around the bed on which Bridget was now lying back naked — these diaphonous colours of previous battles — like salad round a dish. Cherry and I watched the preparations carefully, in our underpants, from two small occasional chairs by the card table. Bridget took no interest at all but stared at the ceiling, her eyes fixed intently on a point above her, as if she expected to see in it the explanation to a mystery.

The garment which Lola eventually strapped herself into had an operative rather than a seductive quality. It was heavy and came down from her waist in a series of leather petals, embroidered here and there with a dull wink of cheap jewellery. It was a little like the skirt of a Roman legionnaire and had the unreal, unused air of a Hollywood prop. There was an attachment above it, starting with a veil over the midriff and ending in a sequinned harness about the bust. But she dispensed with this, casting it aside dramatically, making an overture out of what I suspected was simply a faulty clasp.

And then a clap and a change of eye and a strange harsh expression, fixing us with a stare that never left us, her big bones moving rhythmically, delicately, Lola started her dance around the bed — trampling with each sudden shiver of her body the finery of her wardrobe into the floor. Soon she started a song, a viciously accented accompaniment, throwing her voice passionately between the thwacks and twists of her body, working herself into an angry frenzy without a smile. She had moved far from the dull coquetry of the form and before the end she had turned the dance — hands moving tightly across her body — from a symbol of the act into the act itself. Exhausted she hurried away to the bathroom through the wide doorway and we sat there saying nothing.

Bridget had long since turned away from us and from the dance, her face to the wall, and while Cherry went into the next room to get dressed I moved across and sat beside her, against the long length and pale yellow skin of her back.

The evening had come up outside as we left the silent chaos of the flat. The expected wind stirred, shutters opened, white figures padded towards a mosque on the corner and the trams clanked again in the distance. Like signals from different parts of the city, the sounds rose one after the other on the air around us, breaking the vacuum of the afternoon, opening up the night, as though it was the beginning of another day.

2

Before the start of the autumn term that year most of the overseas teachers, except Cherry and myself, had left. Home leave was due every second summer but apart from ourselves none of the others had managed to survive the punishments of the first.

Two of the women in the group were flown back from the Valley of the Kings with sunstroke while a third, a woodwork teacher from a vocational school near Limerick, distinguished himself by running foul of the very lax Moslem attitude towards pederasty. The remainder squabbled for weeks with various uncomprehending juniors at the Ministry of Education about transferring their piastres into pounds and their tickets back home before Cherry and I, deciding that we might as well stay on in Egypt and dissociate ourselves from our hysterical colleagues, took a taxi to Alexandria for the rest of the summer.

We stayed at the Hotel Beau Rivage near the beach at Sidi Bishr — a splendidly off-hand sort of place with a terraced garden at the back with little wooden pavilions for the guests looking down over a great carpet of crimson flowers and buzzing blue insects. Here, towards midday, we had “English” breakfasts and fresh mango juice, and the summer passed quickly enough; there were only the afternoons and evenings to fill. A vegetable life.

In the afternoons I swam off the “Cleopatra Beach”—a private strand near the hotel where that lady was reputed to have once taken a bath — while Cherry paddled in the shallows, flirting with the elderly latter-day grandes domes of the city, so that out at sea his voice echoed to me over the water, the shrill of his hopelessly immature laugh, as he clowned about their deckchairs.

“Tee-hee. Ha-ha …”

Like a child being tickled.

“Oh, comme vous êtes méchant, Monsieur Chéri!”

The dialogue came across the flip-flap of small waves like snatches from a Restoration comedy.

“Quel esprit! Et vous êtes hollandais — incroyable!”

And Cherry, already exercising the beginnings of that language which he was so quickly to become adept in under their tutelage, would howl triumphantly, wagging his finger at the ancient crones:

“Pas hollandais — irlandais!”

And there would follow a barrage of squeaks and twitters and oh-la-las.

For these ladies, the last of the city’s fabled courtesans, in their dark billowy silks and the remnants of their jewel cases, nailed to their chairs and their memories — Cherry, with his profligate eccentricities and attentions, must have been a happy reminder of their youth: when the government and the Embassies took their intrigues to Alexandria for the summer, shot duck on the lakes in the autumn — and between them all the ladies had played a vital role in the careless history of the times.

In the late afternoons, during those few moments before dusk when in better times the ladies had “taken the air” of the city before dressing for dinner, Cherry would stroll back with Eugénie and Clara and Mathilde and sometimes I joined them, walking slowly behind the little troupe, down avenues heavy with flame trees and the smell of jasmine, as one by one the ladies dropped off into their crumbling villas which lay behind the sea front.

“Vous savez — comme c’était beau ici avant la guerre … Maintenant les domestiques sont impossibles. Elles ne savent rien: même faire du thé …”

The metallic rattle of their voices had softened now under the heavy canopy of trees.

“Eh! Les ‘spare parts’—ils n’existent plus. On ne conduit pas aujourd’hui …”

“Ah, mais oui, je me souviens très bien, des voyages qu’on a fait au Lac Mariout. Et les fleurs là-bas — des asphodèles, des mignonettes, des anémones. Et des autres — des fleurs tout à fait uniques. Ca n’existe plus bien sûr. Ily a un dépôt du gaz là-bas maintenant. Un odeur tout à fait différente, je vous assure!”

Like trembling excited birds they vied for Cherry’s attention. And Cherry with a pained expression would turn and stare at each of them in turn, his eyes wide open in mock astonishment — a face of incredible seriousness and unbelief. And then with a special twinkle lighting up the whole football of flesh: “Mais je peux vous conduire … Je connais le chemin!” And they would wave shaky fingers at him — “Oh! Comee vous êtes méchant!”—before breaking into enthusiastic cackles.

As we approached the gates of their villas wizened arthritic porters rose up from the dust like old newspapers in a light wind, saluting stiffly as the ladies crossed the threshold, giving Cherry and me the wary hopeless glance of crippled protectors. The broken arm of a lawn sprinkler clanked somewhere in the twilight and a Daimler lurked in a garage without wheels. I had no wish to go back to Europe.

3

“There is a train of course. The Helwan train from Bab-el-Luk. Every ten minutes. Get off at Maadi. But I imagine you’ll be taking a car.”

The Headmaster’s voice on the telephone was assured, rather condescending and impeccably English. I was surprised for his name was Dr. El Sayid and when we met he was certainly Egyptian. With the departure of so many of our group I had managed to get transferred to the El Nasr school in Maadi, previously Albert College, Cairo, and the Eton of the Middle East until a year before.

The Doctor clicked his fingers suddenly and several porters in grey serge galibeahs grabbed my luggage and disappeared into a long low prison-like compound with small windows.

“I’ll have them put your things in your room. You’ll be a form master. Fifth I think. Your rooms are above class.”

He had darted on ahead of me after the porters.

“Let’s hope you like it better here. What with the English — and I may say the Irish more recently — we’ve been having too many changes. It’s been rather unsettling — ” and he added, looking straight ahead so that I hardly heard him — “for a school like this.”

There was an edge of dangerous efficiency in the Doctor’s voice which I didn’t like, a call to order much at odds with my previous experience of the country. We had reached the door of my room on the second storey of the compound, along a low corridor reeking of that peculiar suffocating smell of baked concrete and plaster which one gets in desert countries. One of the porters produced a key and opened the door.

“Your predecessor here — a countryman of yours, I believe — kept alcohol in his room. A Mr. Simmonds. We had to lock the door. I’m sure this won’t be necessary in your case. It’s not only a matter of Moslem tradition, this isn’t Al Azhar after all, it’s a matter of policy here as regards staff. I’ll send Bahaddin up in half an hour, to show you round. He’s Captain of school. Oh and by the way,” he’d turned from the door and was rubbing his long fingers delicately together — “we don’t tip the suffragis or boabs here. There’s a fund for them at Christmas which you may want to contribute to.”

The Doctor moved briskly away down the corridor as if he’d just had a cold shower. The porters saluted dully and were about to move off when I startled them with a ten-piastre note apiece.

My room looked out over a large scabrous playing field — odd tufts of bleached grass and the rest a sandy loam with distinct intimations of the desert beneath. Maadi had been built by the English at the end of the last century along a feeder canal from the Nile ten miles south of Cairo as a sort of suburban arboretum, an Egyptian Bagshot complete with every sort of exotic shrub and tree and civil servant. Now, with the fading advertisements for soda water, Virol and Stephen’s Ink which peeled from the walls of the small row of shops by the railway line, and the departure of the men whose lives revolved around those products, Maadi was slowly withering, eroding under the desert winds, sinking back into the sand.

Bats began to flip and turn in the stillness and insects squeaked their knees together in the remnants of the herbaceous border outside the window. The sun dipped into the line of pine trees which flanked the canal at the end of the playing field — a great crimson chunk of fire spreading from strawberry into pink and finally a very pale blue over the sky above. A cricket ball, it must have been, clunked somewhere and three suffragis — skullcaps awry, their galibeahs tucked up into their pants — struggled in a manic dance in one corner of the field with the crossbar of a soccer goal.

Bahaddin seemed to be at least in his middle twenties — a minute, perfectly round face, dark, but with traces of yellow, like a ripening blackberry. In his cream school blazer, flannels and a silver name-plate around his wrist he gave the impression of a dentist in a hurry — constantly moving key-rings, nail clippers and other pieces of metal from one pocket to another. He stared at me carefully, as if wondering how best to proceed with the extraction, and then offered me a Player’s cigarette.

“My father makes them.”

I looked at him carefully in return.

“I mean — he has the Arabian concession. Sheik Bahaddin …” He didn’t finish the sentence but with an expansive gesture left the rest of his father’s identity hanging in the air as a glittering image of unlimited power and riches.

“One of the Trucial States?”

“Yes. He’s with the Head now. I don’t think I’ll be staying on. At least if I do, only till I get enough ‘O’ levels. London University, I hope. My sister lives there. South Kensington. Do you know it? She’s doing political science.”

“I see …”

Bahaddin started to clip away at a portion of loose skin above his thumb.

“Of course I don’t really take classes here any more. I’ve been going through the material privately.”

“What — with Mr. Simmonds?”

“No. With Mr. Edwards. He does senior English here. You’ll meet him. A very decent fellow. English — or rather, White African. What does one call them from those colonies? Did you know Mr. Simmonds? He was from Ireland.”

“No. I understand he spent most of the time here locked in his room with a bottle.”

“The Doctor has a thing about that — he’s been on to you about it? Well don’t worry. I can get you all the drink you want from the Club in Maadia, I’m a member. The Doctor is mad.”

“And his leather elbows and tweed jacket — that’s part of the madness?”

“That’s the previous Head’s jacket. He had to leave nearly all his stuff here — twenty-four hours to get out of the country. So Sayid took the lot over, silver spoons, golf clubs, everything. The Head gave it all to him in fact.”

“I don’t suppose he had much alternative.”

“I don’t think it was purely, or even partly, a matter of alternatives.”

“Oh?”

Bahaddin looked at me with the confident pitying air of a judge about to pass a final and savage sentence.

“If you really want to know — I think that’s the answer.” And he’d sprung up so quickly and gone over to several old school photographs by the door that I thought for a second that he was about to unmask an eavesdropper. The Doctor himself perhaps. “There. That’s El Sayid in the back row. And that’s the last Headmaster in the front. He wasn’t the Head then of course — junior Divinity I think.”

I looked at the jolly young Arab faces in their high collars and Edwardian blazers, their dark woolly heads sticking up like ninepins along the back row — but merging at once into four more rows of solid young Empire-builders beneath.

“You see,” Bahaddin said triumphantly, “‘Albert College — 1928’. Some years they let more Arabs in than in others. It depended on the riots in Cairo, on how the Egyptians had been behaving to their Lords and Masters. That was a good year, quite a few wogs in the back row … They used to be called ‘Belcher’s Boys’, he was mainly responsible for their entry — had some idea about training them to be the future leaders of their country. Well, El Sayid was his particular cup of tea that year. That’s the story.”

“Not an unusual one in this part of the world I’d say. Has it done any harm?”

“Wait till you get to know the Doctor better — you can judge for yourself. I’d better go now. My father must be about ready to start his caravan. May I show you round the place later?”

“I’m worried about Bahaddin. I think he smokes.”

Dr. El Sayid was putting away a pair of laboratory scales when I arrived in his study and there was a package in front of him neatly wrapped up in tissue paper.

“He must be as old as I am.”

“Indeed?” The Doctor looked at me quizzically as if the fact of Bahaddin’s age had never struck him before.

“Yes. I suppose he is a little elderly for this place. But what can one do? Quite a few of them don’t pay at all now since Suez. Let alone in advance. And in gold.”

He fingered the tissue package on the desk and then thumped it against the wood a few times like a bar of chocolate.

“Desert Gold. Desert Gold …”

He murmured the words like an incantation, as though they evoked in him some deeply pleasurable memory, something which he had lost.

“Besides, he’s doing his ‘O’ levels again this year,” Dr. El Sayid went on very much more briskly.

“He told me.”

“I’d like him to get a few of them this time. Show them we aren’t quite off the map out here. We’ll just have to persevere with Bahaddin for the time being.”

The Doctor, his hands braced against the table, looked at the tissue package sadly and then he sprang up suddenly and locked it away in a large safe in the corner, shielding it clumsily with his body so that I wouldn’t see the combination.

“Well now, Mr. Marlow — to give you some essential background to the school, a little bit about our routines and ideals — the two so often go together, don’t you think? — in education. There have been changes of course. We’re not a Public School any more but the College is being run on exactly the same lines, just as it was before this recent trouble. The Minister’s very much behind me on that. Take this College for instance: the English were very good at schools like this — the great Dr. Arnold … it’s a very old tradition and we can make use of it out here today. The College can play a vital role in the new Egypt. I’d like you to see it that way in your work here.”

“I can see it’s an advantage to have people go on learning English but surely the rest of it’s just perpetuating privilege — and somebody else’s privileges at that. Was that part of the revolution?”

“I fancy that’s part of every revolution, Mr. Marlow. There has to be an élite — and nowhere more than in the sphere of education. That’s where it all begins. We have a great responsibility. One has got to be able to offer people something a little over their heads — there’ll always be a few who are tall enough, as it were, to benefit from institutions like this.”

“I should have thought it was simply a question of their being rich enough. Still.”

The Doctor seemed to consider my point with great care, furrowing his brow and looking down intently at his fingers on the table. Then, almost in the movements of a pianist embarking on a delicate and well remembered passage, he looked up slowly, his face quite cleared of any distortion or emotion, his voice carrying all the pain of both.

“I hope that before too long we may get some of our English staff back here, when things settle down. Meanwhile we shall just have to make do as best we can.”

He spaced the words out quietly and very precisely, like a nanny giving a last warning, then turned, literally, to other matters — swinging his chair round and gazing at a heavy bronze statue of a Greek discus thrower on a corner cupboard.

“As regards policy here, the rules and so on: I’m sure it won’t take you long to familiarize yourself with them. Our attitudes here are much the same, I imagine, as they were in your own school. There’s only one other thing — in which schools like this in Egypt, being a Moslem country, differ from similar ones in England. Some of the boys here, a very few I’m glad to say, are inclined to strike up associations — well, outside the norm. I suppose one might say that it’s perfectly understandable within a general context out here, we’re a friendly people after all — but I can’t have them doing it openly in the corridors in front of the others. I’m afraid to say there’s been rather too much of that in the past. I’d be glad if you’d keep your eyes open. I want to put a stop to it entirely.”

“A stop to what? I don’t understand.”

“To their holding hands! Good God, must I spell everything out? To their holding hands — and worse!” And he got up very suddenly, rising straight up into the air as though weights had been taken off his feet, and walked rapidly over to the window, slapping his hands together with insane vigour.

“I see. I’ll keep an eye open then.”

“Well, did you get the Gospel — the Book of Rules?”

“Yes. Is he really mad?”

“Not at all. Just more English than the English. The Doctor knows what he’s doing, he frightens the wits out of them down at the Ministry. Practically every Sheik and Emir and Arab tycoon in the Middle East sends his sons here — even since Suez and just because of the Doctor. They think they’re still getting the real British thing here — Eton and Harrow and toasted muffins; those leather patches and the accent — it gets them completely. The propaganda value for Nasser is enormous, not to mention the gold. As long as Bahaddin and the other Crown Princes stay on here the Doctor can do as he pleases.”

The Staff Room was empty. The other Egyptian housemasters had long since taken up their various positions in the dormitories; I’d seen their cubicles at the end of each of them — “Port Said”, “Ismailia”, “Suez”, and “Port Tewfik”—like stations of the cross the four houses in the school had been renamed after the ports on the canal in honour of the great Egyptian victories that had occurred there. Henry Edwards sat at a long ink-stained table sipping Turkish coffee and reading the Egyptian Gazette.

“I’m surprised he had any more of you Irish back here. They had job enough at the Ministry getting the Doctor to take Simmonds and he was out quick enough.”

“What did Sayid want to get rid of Simmonds for? He wasn’t Egyptian at least and isn’t that what the Sheiks want — anything but an Arab education?”

“The Doctor wants to force the Ministry to get the English back here as soon as possible. You Irish are — or were — in the way. He wants the old sort of staff back if he can get them. Duds from the home counties with the right accents. Egypt still reminds a lot of people in England of turbanned servants and gin and tonics on wicker chairs looking out over sunsets on the Nile. And for an ill-paid, overworked usher stuck in somewhere like Reading it must seem quite a paradise out here. Especially with those traditional British inclinations, if they have them. That’s still rather an inducement out here you know — the chance of getting your hands on that sort of limitless sexual provender.”

“The Doctor seems to want to put his foot on all that.”

“Does he, indeed?”

“He told me to keep my eyes open.”

“He just wants you to pimp for him, that’s all. Have you seen the Maadi Club? A fine piece of End of Empire with the local fellows beating hell out of the suffragis instead of the English.”

The old taxi swerved violently round a circle of cracked earth that had once been a lawn and deposited us at a little sentry box, brightly lit by a sort of concentration camp spotlight overhead. Henry greeted an ancient retainer dressed half in a very old cord jacket with “Maadi Sporting Club” across the front and half in a ragged galibeah a size too large for him.

“Goo’ evenin’, Mr. Henry.” The old man gave us a tired salute and I saw that he had some sort of military badge on the lapel of his coat.

“Queen’s Own 11th Hussars. Ahmed used to feed the horses.” And we were walking towards a long yellow building, surrounded by shrubs and trees, which looked like a sizeable public lavatory in the undergrowth. The main room was packed tight and very busy; a record player ground away at full volume in one corner — “I have often walked down this street before …”—and a selection of bronzed, rather bored young people were pushing each other self-consciously round the floor.

“The original cast recording … I saw it last week in New York … Marvellous …”

Some others were chatting next to the record player, led by a sallow middle-aged Egyptian in a sharkskin suit which glistened like jaundiced flesh in the hard light.

“Dear me. Gala night. They have one every month in the winter.”

Henry pushed his way to another room beyond. On one side was a long bar and the other was crammed tight with horsehair sofas and leather armchairs and tightly knit family groups — old mothers-in-law dressed completely in black and screaming five-year-old children running amok with Coca-Cola bottles and straws. Sweating, beady-eyed suffragis pushed and cursed their way among the crowd with beaten copper trays piled high with whisky-sodas and tall icy bottles of Stella on their way to a third room beyond. From here came the click of billiard balls, and sometimes a silence followed by a terrible gale of gruff laughter as a ball bounced through a doorway followed by a suffragi, laden with a tray of empty glasses, to pick it up.

Over the bar were two large yellowing photographs of the old Shepheard’s Hotel and the Cairo Turf Club and between them a gilt and mahogony panel inscribed with the names of past Club Presidents and Secretaries: a splendid roll of Anglo-Saxon names and ancient dates which I thought at first must be a war memorial until I realised that someone called Dalton-Smith couldn’t have been killed in nine successive years.

There wasn’t what any of the old Club members would have called a “European” in sight. Except Bridget who was sitting with Lola, and I presumed her parents, at the far side of the room.

“That’s the Girgises over there. With old Lola. You don’t often see them all together. He was a Minister with Farouk. You’d like them. We’ll go over later.” Henry waved at them but I’d turned around quickly and started to order.

“What would you like?”

‘No, let me. Your first day. Let’s have some champagne.”

4

How long have you known them?”

“The Girgises? I knew Bridget at the University here. She was a student of mine. Her parents live round the corner. She’s English — Mrs. Girgis. She came out here before the war. Why? Have you met them — I mean Bridget?”

“I don’t think so.”

Henry looked at me in mock astonishment, his head thrown back quizzically, smiling. He had the knack of making one lie — and then making it obvious.

“Perhaps … Bridget. I met her — I’m pretty sure — in the Continental several months ago.”

“I thought so. Most people out here now run across them at some point or other. With Lola? — at the bar.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“More than likely. They used to go to the bar in the Cosmopolitan in the old days.”

“They just move around the bars, do they? I thought they were secretaries.”

“Bridget had a fellow who lived in the Cosmopolitan. An Englishman, something to do with soda water. Chucked out with the rest of them. They were to have been married, I gather. Rather tough.”

Henry’s hair had begun to ruffle, almost to stand up on end as he ran his hands through it, and his glasses had steamed up in the heat as he quaffed great mouthfuls of the Asti Gancia. There hadn’t been any real champagne but there were still some Italians in the country.

“And Lola?”

“She just shares the flat. She was a belly dancer in Beirut. Got landed with a nonexistent film contract here with a non-existent producer. She wants to be an actress.”

“They all do, I suppose.”

“No, Lola’s quite a good actress. Too good really for the song-and-dance sort of thing that goes on around here.”

“Why does she stay then?”

“She’s happy here. A lot of people are, strangely enough. Except Bridget.”

“Mrs. Girgis — a new colleague, just arrived. An Irishman if you please, but better than nothing, a step in the right direction — Mr. Marlow.”

Henry introduced us and I shook hands all round like someone at a funeral, leaning over Lola’s shoulder so that I was aware only of her thick bluish hair and a heavy, sweet smell like old honey. I tried hard not to look at Bridget at all. But she took the initiative, as she’d done before and was so often to do again.

“Where’s your friend Cherry?” she said brightly.

“You know each other then?” wondered Mrs. Girgis. “Sit down, do.”

“But there are no chairs — Esma!” Mr. Girgis turned and bellowed at a suffragi who came dancing across towards us gesturing hopelessly.

“Ma fishe chairs, Effendi — ma fishe!”

“Yallah, yallah ala tennis court,” Mr. Girgis advised him loudly. “‘Ma fishe’ chairs indeed. It’s ‘ma fishe’ everything here these days. Since the English left. There’s a dozen chairs outside — just too damn lazy. So you’ve met my daughter then. And who is this Cherry? I knew an Irishman once, out here with the irrigation people, tried to blow up a sluice gate at Aswan. A revolutionary! Can you imagine — as if we hadn’t enough of our own. Well, it’s good news to get some of you people back here anyway. What do they say? — ‘The Best of British Luck’?”

He raised his glass in a cumbersome arthritic gesture. Mr. Girgis obviously missed the British. He had a heavy, bruised, old man’s face — sad and peasant-like and Balkan, with a droopy moustache and a white film of spittle at each corner of his mouth. He was wearing frayed dancing pumps and an Edwardian smoking jacket and might have been a waiter at the old Carlton Grill. The suffragi returned with two decrepit deck chairs which he at once got in a fearful tangle over before I straightened one of them out and put it down firmly next to Mr. Girgis. Whatever I might have to say to Bridget that evening could wait until I’d had a few more drinks. On the far side of the table Henry had placed himself between Bridget and Mrs. Girgis and had embarked on an account of the royal caravan that afternoon at the school.

“What are you drinking, Mr. Marlow? Not that fizzy Italian stuff — we can do better than that. There’s a crate or two of Haig left — not quite off the map out here yet! Esma! Esma!” He shouted wildly and clapped his hands above the din. “We’ll have a bottle.”

To my surprise the introductions had gone off with great brio, without any embarrassments. After the vegetable summer I’d obviously come back to some sort of life again. The previous disaster with Bridget hardly seemed to matter. I leaned back happily and the deck chair collapsed beneath me like a rifle shot.

Henry and Mrs. Girgis were caught in mid-sentence, like lovers, and the entire club came to a halt, except for the record player.

“That ohh-ver-pow-er-ring-feee-ling …”

Bridget laughed and I managed to raise the broken stem of my Asti Gancia glass to the company from a completely recumbent position.

For some reason, after I’d fallen over, things became easier between us all. It was as though, quite by chance, I’d fulfilled some arcane social obligation by collapsing amongst them and could now properly be admitted to their circle.

Mr. Girgis took my shoulder.

“Well done, well done! Nothing broken, I hope? That’s the spirit. No fault on your part — we can’t have deck chairs in the lounge — have to bring it up at the next meeting. Now you’ll have a decent whisky.”

He and I were suddenly friends of a casual sort, as if we’d just met again after a war spent together long ago, and I felt like a prodigal member of the Club who had returned and disgraced himself in a mild, appropriate, well remembered way as evidence of my continued solidarity with Mr. Girgis and the other stay-at-home members. I drank my whisky. Bridget had got up and was dancing with Henry. And I remembered it was Gala Night once a month so I danced with Lola.

She murmured, “You’re better at dancing …”

I smiled vaguely, brought her to me a little, and looked beyond her sly, cherubic face, her dark scented hair tickling my ear, to where Bridget and Henry, passing in their dance, had suddenly emerged from the crowd. Henry had his back towards us; they were together as closely as Lola and I, but in a way that spoke of great ease and familiarity and not embarrassment, so that I couldn’t immediately understand the sudden calm expression on Bridget’s face as she looked at me, a calmness in her eyes that was for me and not Henry.

In the second as she passed she was not, as she had been for me before, an unfortunate experience, a nonentity that one had picked up, forgotten and had happened to meet again, but she took on the form — as though we had both been prompted by a thought, I of loving: she of being its object — of someone who, because of this intuition, I was certain I would one day possess. And because of this, seeing in her glance a definite promise for the future, I paid no more attention to her all evening.

It would be ridiculous, I suppose, to imagine that there existed between us that evening — in that moment when we really knew nothing of each other — a sort of correspondence, an element of acceptance and understanding which, though neither of us was aware of it then, was the beginning of that conscious state of trust which later, in the short time we loved each other, made it equally unnecessary to ask questions, to put things into words.

In fact it must have been my obvious indifference towards her that evening which set the fuse alight and led to the opening bids of what was to become a long, rarely happy, and finally disastrous struggle to possess — subdue, dominate, exploit, hurt …

When we have to find an alternative to love it is not, unfortunately for us, hate; it is any of those other words which we choose to enact — which we know will tie us to the other, so that we won’t lose them but remain together in anger, ensuring that if the love was not mutual the punishment will be.

But the words have gone now, along with everything else: the rather awkward, widely spaced eyes — so large that one might have thought them the result of some deformity or illness — the small, sharply triangular face, the thinly disguised curiosity which lay behind her smile — her sexuality. Above all her regard: her way of looking — prompted by a thought, which became a way of thinking, and then suddenly like an explosion became an instantaneous expression of her whole life at that one moment which would never afterwards be repeated at any other.

It was a part of her living through a fraction of time which she cut away from all the surrounding facets of her existence and which, in her expression, she offered me. Smiling, looking out on the river from her room, reading a magazine, making love — those idle or intense preoccupations of hers which went on quite above language, which were nowhere concerned with words — this is what has gone. And afterwards, just before we’d left each other, all the words returned: the saying of things, that desperate telling, questioning and explaining with which, when we have lost a true language, we debase the words that are left to us so that they can do nothing but denigrate or destroy, where they will serve only as carriers of the pain which has overwhelmed us and which, like an infection, we are determined the other should catch …

I watched her dance with Henry. Why does our sixth sense not warn us at such times? — instead of drumming into our heads, “This will be happy. This one is for you.”

Henry brought some whisky home and we drank it in my room, sitting on the ugly little dormitory bed like prefects at the end of term.

“Did you make love to her then — the first time you met?”

“After a fashion.”

“Oh, why? She’s very good at it you know.”

5

“Were you with Henry — before? — I mean — ”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were a teacher?”

It was a week afterwards, another Saturday, on the terrace of the Semiramis looking over the river. She had wanted to meet as soon as I had telephoned her; not later or some other time but then, that morning, now. Already we were involved in the urgency of an affair, that extraordinary impatience in love which begins by making every meeting possible and ends by making them all impossible — “I have to go to the hairdresser, to see my aunt, my doctor, dentist.” We were a long way from the impatience of departure but we had started on it.

“A teacher? I thought it would have sounded rather a dull occupation — in the circumstances.”

“That meeting in the Continental — you thought it was just a pick up? I suppose it was.”

“There’s nothing wrong in that, is there? It was what I wanted. I don’t know about Cherry.”

And we laughed at Cherry. Already, too, there were the appropriate things in common: the beginnings of that obsessive regard for each other, the confident immunity from other people, the small jokes at their expense; the unique and secret marks we make in even the most casual relationship.

I said, “You wouldn’t have gone for a pair of dotty teachers.”

“Yes, I would. That’s why it happened. I wanted you. It was as simple as that.”

“Were you with Henry then?”

She looked at me patiently, plaintively, rubbing her nose with the glass, as though I’d asked her whether she could tell the time.

“Of course. Didn’t he tell you?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“At the University here. You’re getting the impression of a vagabond. But what’s the point of being sly about it?”

“Isn’t it rather strange?”

“You’re the schoolmaster. Aren’t children like that? Doing what they want. Isn’t it supposed to be good for them?”

“Come on …”

She frowned. “Well, anyway, there was what’s called ‘another man’ … Christ.”

“I know. I’ve heard.”

“Henry told you. ‘The man in the soda-syphon’ he used to call him.”

I had got up to order another drink.

“You don’t have to. They’ll come if you just look at them. Let’s have some more Sudanis as well.” And we ordered another lot of the little papery brown nuts in a saucer, squeezing them out of their shells through our fingers, and washing them down with gin and tonic.

“Henry seems rather a postman these days, the way he passes on everything. Still, it doesn’t matter. There’s only been him — and the soda-syphon.”

“And the others? — you just made love with them. There wasn’t anything else to it.”

“Why? Why should there be ‘others’?”

“Why make love with someone you hardly know? I’d just assumed there were.”

“Fool.”

A BOAC staging crew came in behind us and made for the bar, demanding loudly their pewter mugs which they kept there, and half a dozen bottles of Stella, and talking about a party in Uxbridge the previous week. The great lateen sail of a felucca reared up over the terrace, bleached dead white in years of the same weather, the curved mast rising again having passed under the Kasr el Nil bridge just below the hotel. The ropes squeaked sadly across the heat on the water like a small animal dying in the sun.

“Fool.’

And she took her drink up to the bar where someone called Roger, with much facetious encouragement from the others, made a great fuss over her and gave her a carton of tax-free Player’s.

She phoned me next morning at the school. Mahmoud, who dealt with the coffee in the staff room, took the call and through force of habit gave the message to Henry.

“She wants to speak to you,” Henry said flatly when he got back. And I supposed his passion for her to be as dead as mine was.

“I’m not sorry,” she said at once, her voice ringing down like the start of a song. “And you’re quite right to be offended.”

I said nothing.

“So where do we go from here?” And then, fearing the answer might go against her, she rushed on without waiting for a reply. “What’s Henry answering the phone for? I asked for you. Does he live in your pocket — messenger boy as well as postman?” And then, the wind gone out of her bravado: “Can you be separated? I’m with my parents down the road. Can you come round?” And again, like a ticker tape that won’t be answered, which tells the rise and fall of fortune in the same second, in the same hurried accents, she went on: “I am sorry. I am.”

“There’s soccer this afternoon. I’ve got to look after it”

“Can I come round there then?”

She walked along the touch line with Henry, looking at the game every now and then, chatting with him, laughing. They might have been parents up from the country, come to see their child score the winning goal. Two of the four school houses were playing — Port Tewfik against Suez I think it was; I’m not very clear as most of the boys still called the houses by their old names — I think that afternoon it was Trafalgar against Waterloo. The ball bounced around uncertainly on the hard, cracked soil and once it disappeared into the murky canal on one side of the field.

“Send Fawzy after it, sir, he’s got bilharzia already.”

It was very hot and at half time everyone collapsed and drank Coca-Cola and pushed the tops into the large cracks in the soil.

“Sir! They’re putting the tops into the ground.”

A tiny figure with a serious adult’s face in an immaculate soccer outfit rushed up to me as I joined Henry and Bridget.

“Are they? Who are you — you’ve not been playing have you?”

“I’m El Sayid, sir. Hamdy El Sayid. The substitute, sir.”

“Substitutes aren’t allowed in soccer.”

“Yes, I know. But I’m the Headmaster’s son.”

“Oh. Well go and tell them to take the tops out again.”

He ran back to the others, shouting as he went, and they dug the tops out of the ground and threw them at him.

Henry turned towards Bridget. She was wearing a white cotton outfit with a small gold cross round her neck — like a nun in a sleeveless dress — her dark hair tamed neatly round the back of her head in a circle. There was something prim about her — prim but uncertain; a nun in the Dark Continent.

“Here comes that troglodyte Bahaddin,” she said.

Bahaddin in his blazer, with a friend in a shiny business suit, was coming towards us along the trees by the canal. Both were gesticulating violently.

“His stockbroker, I should think. Not much on the exchange out here these days. Cotton’s dropped right out of the market. They’ve mortgaged the lot to the Russians.”

“Good afternoon — Miss Girgis, Mr. Marlow.” Bahaddin bowed slightly towards me, fingering his silver wrist tag and eyeing us all very seriously. And then, with a big puff of breath and putting both hands across his chest like a man about to send a message in semaphore, he launched himself into what was obviously the real matter in hand.

“May I present Mr. Sofreides, Auctioneer.” He added his profession awkwardly, as though it were a title like Esquire. “There’s a sale tomorrow. Some sequestrated property. An English family. Mr. Sofreides is handling it and I thought perhaps you might like to come along and have a preview. There are some rather nice things, I understand — perhaps to enlighten your room, Mr. Marlow.”

“Enliven, Bahaddin. Not enlighten.”

He bowed again, very slightly, in Henry’s direction, but his eyes remained fixed on the piece of metal at Bridget’s neck.

“I’m glad to see my small gift so beautifully displayed.”

“Not at all, Bahaddin. It was a beautiful gift.” They bowed to each other again. A strained formality had come over everyone.

“You’d like to look at the things then? They’re just down the road. In Garden City. And perhaps you might do me the honour of dining with me afterwards? I’ve reserved a table at the Estoril.”

“Yes. Shall we do that, Bridget?” Henry said as though she were his wife.

“Why not?”

I tried to catch her attention but the sun had fallen in the sky behind her, blinding me as I looked towards her.

“Sir, they’ve had ten minutes.”

El Sayid’s long face pushed its way into the circle around our waists and he held out a gunmetal fob-watch towards me with a triumphant look.

“And Mr. Marlow — will you be joining us?”

Bahaddin didn’t look at me, as if my answer couldn’t be of any importance, but had turned and was examining El Sayid’s watch very carefully.

“Certainly. I’d like to.”

Bahaddin was now completely absorbed in the watch, putting it to his ear, shaking it very gently, stroking his cheek with it, cosseting it in his hand as I’d seen him do before with every piece of metal that he came across or had about his person. And then at last he said, looking at his own gold Rolex, “But why is it two hours slow, El Sayid — why is that? Exactly two hours.”

“It’s Greenwich time, Bahaddin. From Big Ben. The Greenwich Meridian, the zero line of longitude.”

Mr. Sofreides — who had very soon asked to be called George — had a large, pre-war Packard and we drove back to Cairo along the river bank just as the sun began to dip behind the pyramids on the other side of the water. An absolutely still evening, the smoke from George’s Gauloise swirling slowly back to Bahaddin and myself, the others chattering away like a family in the front.

“Major and Mrs. Collins,” George was saying. “He was retired. One of the military attachés, I think, to Farouk’s father. An old man. He didn’t want to leave. Very bad luck really.”

We had reached the outskirts of the city. The pressure lamps above the brightly decorated barrows selling rissoles and beans flared at street corners and there was a smell of paraffin and urine when we stopped at the traffic lights, drifting in from the sidestreets below the Citadel, completely obliterating the burnt French tobacco.

The flat was on a lower floor of Bridget’s apartment block in Garden City, looking out over the river across the corniche: there were the usual collection of boabs in the long hallway making up their beds in preparation for their night’s vigil and a drowsy, ill-kempt soldier with a sten-gun who got up from a chair next to the door of the flat and saluted George in a muddled way as we arrived. The remains of a clumsy wax and ribbon seal which had been over the lock hung down now like a tattered Christmas decoration.

George opened the door with a proprietary flourish, turned on a large chandelier in the middle of the hallway and gave us all a stencilled catalogue with the pompous formality of an immigration official. It was a large, high-ceilinged apartment done in expensive bad taste; half a dozen rooms leading off the central hall and drawing-room, the furniture a mixture of pseudo Louis Quinze and dowdy Home Counties without dust covers; there was a curiously lived-in feeling about the whole place though the owners must have left a year before. I noticed a package of Gauloises under the huge gilded mirror over the mantelpiece. George had gone to a cabinet in the corner and was mixing whiskies, clunking in the ice from a silver bucket which had a polo pony and a rider as a handle.

“Yes, I will be sorry to leave. It has been good here,” George said when we’d sat down in chairs looking over the river. He raised his glass to the furniture: “We’ve had some good times here together.”

“You live here then?” I asked.

“It was best to be sure of the things. Best way. There are some valuable pieces …” His heavy eyes twinkled as he looked at Bridget. He had the traditional sallow, suspicious good looks of a Levantine commercant — a condescending way of looking at people, as if he had already used them or was about to consider doing so. There was an air of tired success about him, of deep boredom with life. One felt that even before he was born someone had been in his debt.

“George has been having some trouble with his wife,” Bahaddin put in slowly, dragging out the sentence, relishing the idea, as though it were the one pleasure lacking in his own abundant marriages.

George acknowledged the fact with a gesture of mock despair and a slow smile.

“I am helping Major Collins too. There are a few pieces here and there, some silver, which he’s anxious to get back to England. By the law, of course, he can’t touch them. But I think I can help him out. So it suits everyone.” And he glanced at Bridget — casually, confidently, as a cat reminds itself of the mouse still in the corner.

“Well, let us take a look at the list. There may be something — even for you, Miss Girgis. Mrs. Collins had some rather — jolie, how do you say? — yes some rather jolie things.”

I looked down at the smudged sheet and could see nothing at all in what I imagined to be Bridget’s taste; yet I was imagining, perhaps George knew.

Louis XV style Salon furnishings, gilt and carved wood. Aubusson tapestry upholstery. Console with mirror and silver-gilt wood. Bokhara and Scutari carpets. Antique clock. Oak Secretaire. English Silver tea service. “Singer Electric sewing machine, (DC)…

The list went on interminably. There were no nylon stockings, something which would have been useful in Egypt at the time; perhaps George had Bridget in mind for the sewing machine.

We wandered round the rooms, drinks in our hands, looking at the bits and pieces without enthusiasm. There was a small bookcase in the study; two volumes of Cromer’s Egypt, Meinertzhagen’s Diaries and a number of regimental histories Bahaddin had gone into the kitchen and I could hear him shuffling his hands about in the silver drawer and then the sudden whirr of an electric blender — his metallic obsessions being given full rein. Henry was looking at the oak secretaire in the study, opening each of the minute drawers. He took out a pile of visiting cards. I looked over his shoulder at one of them:

Major Edward M. Collins, M.C.

Military Attaché

to

H.R.H. KING FUAD I

Abdine Palace

Cairo

And there was an old Kodak folder with some yellowing prints inside: a thin, unsmiling woman in a solar topee on a camel in front of the third pyramid at Giza.

George had gone into the bedroom with Bridget. I could hear his voice in the background — soft and insistent, a caricature of the Greek manner in such circumstances.

“Now what do you think of this? … Not quite of the moment, it’s true; but the material is superb. It’s going as a ‘lot’, all the dresses, but I could make an exception. In your case — ”

“I’ll have to try it on.”

And in a moment Bridget was in front of us in the drawing-room wearing a long velvet wrap with a hem dragging along the floor in mottled fur; a sort of skating dress, something, perhaps, dating from the period of Major Collins’ attachment to the last Czar.

“I like it. Let’s live here — why don’t we? Couldn’t we take over the lease — if we all paid something?”

And she swirled about on her toes, glaring at each of us in a mad way, the ghastly fur hem rising from the floor and spinning round like a ring of old ferrets chasing each other.

“Better than that dreadful monastery of a school. Better than my dingy bird’s-nest upstairs. Couldn’t we, George?”

George said nothing, but stood behind her like a satisfied ringmaster. Bahaddin had turned on a small portable radio and some dreadful squeaky Arab music emerged and he started to wiggle round Bridget, thrusting his backside violently about in time to the music, clapping his hands.

I poured myself another whisky.

“It’s a pity Lola isn’t here,” I said. “She’s rather good at that.”

George took his coat off and joined Bahaddin in paying court to Bridget, except that he circled round her in the Greek fashion, both hands arched above his head, kicking alternate legs and flapping a silk pocket handkerchief. Both of them had already begun to sweat in the humid night air, patches of dark moisture spreading in great stains beneath their armpits. I supposed they would all be showering in the whisky soon.

Henry had gone out on to the terrace.

“Why does she do it?”

“She’s unhappy, I told you. I think it’s rather splendid.”

“Unhappy about what — about not getting enough men to go to bed with?”

Henry took off his glasses and rubbed them on the tail of his shirt. He spoke as if he were explaining an important point of syntax to his class.

“You must remember Cairo’s pretty well been cleaned out of her sort — of our sort that is — in the last year. She hasn’t had much fun, and we’ve not all got your self-control. Anyway you had a go at her yourself. Why should it bother you? When the English were here it was fine. She had all the ‘right’ connections then. Now she has none. I suppose she feels now she has to take her chances, the chance to live it up like before.”

“But those tykes — in there — they’re not exactly Brigade of Guards, are they?”

“And they’re not Egyptians either. She draws the line there. Force of habit I suppose. Foolish of her; I don’t. But I agree it’s rather a bore. Let’s go and eat.”

Bahaddin appeared in the doorway, flapping the tail of his dripping shirt and mopping his brow. He’d been drinking as well as dancing.

“My dear sirs, I shall have to change before dining. George has offered me a choice from Major Collins’s wardrobe — shirts, trousers, dinner jackets, decorations, everything. Come and help me choose.”

“Take Bridget. She knows what you look best in. We’re going on to eat.”

We came indoors. Bridget had collapsed on the sofa and was running a piece of ice from her whisky over her forehead.

“What have you two men been at — making out a report on me? Can’t leave being schoolmasters, can you? Peter, come with me, will you” She got up and I joined her in the bedroom where she picked up her dress. “I know. I was supposed to meet you today, not all the others. And I will meet you. We will. Don’t you understand?”

She had so many ways of looking serious, one could never tell from her expression what degree of any feeling she intended to convey.

“It doesn’t matter.”

She went on into the bathroom and had started to undress when I arrived. I sat on a metal laundry bin by the lavatory.

“What’s wrong if I dance with them?”

“There’s so many of ‘them’—so few of ‘us’. We have to meet in bathrooms.”

She turned the shower on. Again, the pale body, the darkly sun-browned circle round her neck, the water cascading over her arms, patterning itself, dividing, merging into different whirls and eddies as it ran off the oils of her skin — not just standing under the shower, but giving herself to it, eyes closed, head tilted back, arms crossed over her breasts, like a martyr at the stake suffering a delicious agony in the fire. She opened one eye at me through the water.

“We ought to have made love properly, that first time. That’s all. Then you wouldn’t be so worried. You have this possessive thing. I know.” She opened the other eye, looking at me charitably, as if that were all I possessed.

“You think we just want each other,” I said, “in that way.”

I lit a cigarette, twirling it casually in my fingers, and she stepped out of the bath and bent down and kissed me intensely.

“You worry so much. Yes I do think that. I do. Is there anything wrong?”

The water dripped down from her hands about my face, over my collar, and I looked at her rather glumly. I do, I do… her trick of repeating a phrase like this was what really worried me. She seemed to emphasise the physical part of our relationship because she saw no additional parts to it, either then or in the future. And yet it was there, in that clinical, white-tiled bathroom with its bidet and a great round faded box of Mrs. Collins’s dusting powder which smelt of old oranges, that I first started to love Bridget, beyond simply needing her, being jealous of her. And she must have sensed this, and wanted to encourage this new emotion, for the next thing she did was to look at me with embarrassment, with an expression I’d never seen on her face before, as if I’d suddenly broken in upon her, the first man ever to see her naked. She stood there, perturbed, with an unhappy face, like a schoolgirl stuck with her prep.

“Aren’t you going to get dressed? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Throw me that towel will you, Peter.” And she draped herself carefully in it from head to foot. It was impossible to kiss her in return.

I thought at the time that our relationship had simply become more appropriate, more real; in fact it was I who had become more appropriate in her eyes; not a Guards officer or a third secretary at the Embassy, true, but something in the same line of country: an English teacher at the snob school in Cairo. Unsatisfied in sex, and therefore temporarily disapproving of it, I had drawn from her an old memory of the proprieties of love, and the ways in which it can become a means rather than an end. I had reminded her of something her mother had once told her about men — or perhaps it had been a lecture to the sixth form after class from a spinster housemistress.

I started to love her at a moment when she had ceased simply to need me, as someone to make love with, but saw in our association a less tangible, more important outcome. And that’s what it became, as it never should have done, that evening in the bathroom: an association and not an affair — a liaison with a respectable future without the limitations which pleasure for its own sake might have imposed on it. I had become something too good to waste on pleasure alone. So that now, in trying to remember when we’d been most at ease, most honest together, I think of the beginning of it all, before there were any special advantages for her in our being together: I think of our casual failure on the chaise-longue in the little room against the sun as the happiest time. Certainly, from then on, we were a success in every conventional way.

It was Bahaddin, a little drunk and wearing one of Major Collins’s boiled shirts, who first noticed the change. We were walking towards the Estoril which lay half way along a small alleyway between Kasrel Nil and Soliman Pasha. Before, the St. James had been the best restaurant in Cairo but it had closed and the weary little flower lady with her dark shawl and someone else’s child had moved her site from there to the mock-Spanish doorway of the Estoril and was now berating the customers in a wailful voice, thrusting white carnations in their faces, while the child slowed them up by their coat tails.

“Sir!” Bahaddin had given her fifty piastres and had bought us all a flower. He gave me two. I looked at him. “Sir, it is for you to give to Miss Girgis.” He was impeccably polite, bowing slightly, his feet together, his boiled shirt glistening in the lights from the restaurant, like an Edwardian stage-door-Johnny. There was something ridiculously gallant about him so that I thought at first that he was embarking on some subtle joke.

“Why Bahaddin, have you given her too many flowers yourself already?”

“Not at all, sir.” He was almost offended. “Simply Miss Girgis is with you. It is manners — for you to do the honours.”

The flower was the beginning of all those many formalities which were to plague us later but at the time I lent myself to Bahaddin’s gesture with perfect ease and just the right amount of ceremony; I lent myself blindly to the conspiracy: I pushed the flower behind Bridget’s ear and kissed her lightly. It must have been exactly what she wanted in the new roles which she had cast for us both; the evening passed without her looking at, or hardly speaking to, anyone but me. Only George was visibly annoyed. At odd moments between courses, when we had come off the tiny dance floor by the bar, he would pull himself away from some intense conversation with Henry or Bahaddin about Egyptian affairs and look reproachfully at us with his watery eyes. After all, he had made a bid for Bridget earlier which had gone unnoticed in a subsequent overwhelming suit from someone whom he could never have contemplated as a rival.

But his was a momentary shadow, his greedy disappointed attitude an encouragement even, and I completely forgot my worry about why Bahaddin and Henry were so correspondingly uninterested in Bridget that evening and how she had come about the small gold cross, Bahaddin’s gift to her. For the moment, for the first time, I felt no need to wonder about her past, her lovers, for she had, as I thought, added that extra dimension to our relationship, which I expected then of any affair, which would set me up above any mere lover: the dimensions of care and trust and permanence. The trouble was I thought such things could co-exist with passion; while she had learned to expect them only in the context of marriage, when the passion had quite disappeared. For her passion would always be a thing on its own, something she could only give to a stranger.

Luckily I never got to know Sofreides well enough to ask him if Bridget had slept with him that night, as Henry told me she had long afterwards in England. And she denied it vehemently when I asked her just before we split up. Certainly she and George both left us at the entrance to the block of flats at the end of the evening and went inside together. But then, of course, they both lived there.

6

Cherry seemed to have disappeared — at least he was never around the Continental bar at week-ends, where normally I would have expected to see him. And when I telephoned the Bursar at the school in Heliopolis where he’d been teaching I was told he’d gone to Alexandria.

“To Alex? But he’s only just come back from there.”

“You know him better than I, Mr. Marlow,” the pernickety old Copt who ran that side of the school’s affairs replied. More than likely, I thought.

“He has been transferred there temporarily as I understand it. You should be able to reach him there — the El Nasr College.”

The El Nasr College in Alexandria, a co-foundation with our own institution in Maadi, had been the most spectacularly British school in Egypt before 1956—and a spectacular neo-Gothic building in red brick with turrets and cloisters. Even after the English had left it had managed to maintain most of its ridiculously Anglophile attitudes and I was curious to know how Cherry had contrived to break into its cloistered calm.

“I don’t much fancy meeting your Mr. Cherry again,” Bridget said to me when I suggested taking the next half term off and visiting him. And I would not have thought of it myself had not the idea of our all being together again suggested a return to a less formal relationship than ours had become. We were intimate as it’s possible to be without going to bed together, met as often as we could and she kept suggesting I go with her to her parents’ house for Sunday lunch. If I’d had a small sports car and a taste for warm bitter we might just as well have been living in Surrey as Cairo. But I loved her. We had even stopped going to the Semiramis, or any of the other bars, and were sitting that morning at Groppi’s sipping lemon tea.

“Anyway you’ll have to phone him first and we don’t get any half terms at the office.”

“What — are you ashamed of our love?” I said mockingly.

There were the bad jokes of love then too, that only love allows. There was everything except the chaise-longue.

As it turned out the matter of my seeing Cherry was decided for me when he wrote from Alexandria saying he was getting married in the new year, to a “Mrs. Larousse, like the dictionary”, whose husband had once been French Consul in Dublin and had died recently, “at an advanced age while carrying out the same function in Alexandria”.

I met him by myself when he turned up in Cairo before Christmas at the start of the holidays. It was a baking hot, ninety-degree day, completely unseasonable weather, and for some reason, perhaps because of its frosty, tinselly associations, we went to a Bavarian restaurant off 26 July Street, not at all in line with our old haunts in the city, but then Cherry was turning over a new leaf. And perhaps, too, he saw that blatantly stolid hostelry as a sort of secular retreat, a denial before marriage, the beginning of redemption for all his imagined sins of the past. We were not disappointed. It was a grim, dark, empty room done in imported pine with heavy gothic furniture and velvet drapes over all the windows, the light coming only from the little folksy wrought-iron table lanterns. There were notices everywhere, done in an elaborate ornate script, like a Book of Hours, which might have been directions to the lavatories but in fact were hearty German sentiments of good will and other compliments of the season. A radiogram churned away in one corner, charging the air with Strauss and memories of snow. It was here, over sauerkraut and Niersteiner — an awkward mixture which Cherry insisted on ordering — that I heard the story of his demise.

“She’d been teaching music after her husband went, piano to the Junior School. I’d seen her of course before, in the common room, on the Wednesdays when she came — and it was a Wednesday I remember that I became unwell. Anyway, one day she saw me with a copy of the Irish Times that I get. She was very fond of Ireland — and, well that was it. She’s middle-aged but not unattractive. One must think of oneself.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well I won’t be going back to Ireland.”

“You mean there’s work in the old one yet, she’ll teach music and you’ll take it easy in the Cecil Bar?”

“Not quite …” Cherry was put out by my levity. “Anyway you’ll come to the wedding. It won’t be a big thing …”

“Of course we will, Herbert.” And he paid the bill, already the responsible paterfamilias, and we bowed out through the dark drapes and into the blazing weather like a pair of cotton brokers up in town for the day.

“Not quite like it was before — ‘Lord Salisbury’ and all that,” I said as we emerged. But Herbert didn’t seem to hear. He was thinking of something else.

“What do you mean ‘we’ will be coming to the wedding?”

“Bridget and I. I haven’t told you about Bridget. Where are you staying — the Continental? Let’s have a beer anyway.”

A look of horror spread over his face, that same wide-eyed clown’s stare with which only months ago he had teased the old ladies on the beach at Sidi Bishr, except that now there was a completely serious intent behind it.

“You mean — Lola and Bridget? Those two. That Bridget?”

“Yes. It’s no more surprising than you and Mrs. Larousse — less so by your account of it.”

We got no further than one of the small Greek bars behind the High Court between 26 July Street and Soliman Pasha, a place given over to desultory chatter and tric-trac games between dissolute lawyers and tailors and small businessmen of the community who came here to drink watery Metaxas throughout the afternoon siesta instead of going back to their fearful wives on the outskirts of the city.

“The scandal, the scandal,” Cherry muttered as we stood against the bar. “Imagine it. If that got around Alex — my being with Lola.” He was sweating. The ham actor who has completely lost confidence in his role.

“Nonsense, Herbert. Alex has known far worse than that. You mean Madame would throw the dictionary at you. Well we won’t come to the church. Just the drinks at the Cecil — or will it be at the Beau Rivage?”

He was clearly appalled now at the whole idea of my attending his wedding — seeing me as the jester, sprung from a raucous past, come to split the ceremony apart with laughter; the bawdy, boozy skeleton in his cupboard who would do nothing but fall over the altar chasing wine and wife.

It was Cherry’s unexpected, saddening conformities that afternoon, allied to Bridget’s, that made me think my own innate sense of the vulgar was disappearing as well. The chatter of legal business and shipping orders and spiteful marriages had reached a crescendo around us, the small merchants of the place getting in the last word before going back to their offices for the evening’s work. And I saw in them, and in Cherry, the casual hazardous joys of the country — and all the other small ways I’d learnt to be happy in the city — becoming predictable as bales of cotton: the city had become like any other, a place where people worked and had dull marriages and drank to forget both. And I was very nearly one of them.

“Get me a brandy. I’ll be back. I’m going to phone Bridget.”

Cherry laughed for a moment, the old manic whistle, as shrill as ever but with a new nervousness, and then tried to stop me. I suppose he thought I was going to suggest we go along for another set-to, a threesome in her flat.

“Don’t do that. You’re out of your mind! They arrest people for that sort of thing out here you know.”

I got through to her office. It was four o’clock. She had just come in and was out of breath and distant.

“What do you mean we haven’t done anything. We’re seeing each other all the time. Tonight — aren’t we meeting tonight?”

“I mean making love, that’s what we haven’t done.”

“Not on the phone. For God’s sake. This is an extension. You’re mad. Go away. I’ll talk to you later.”

“You may not. Cherry’s getting married. I may go back to Alex with him.” There was a pause, as though she thought this might be true.

“You’re drunk.”

“I can still climb on a train.”

“Aren’t you coming round this evening? Can’t we talk about it then?”

“No. I’m going out with Cherry. You don’t want to be with him.”

“Tomorrow then. Sunday lunch. What about that?”

“Oh, God, we’ll talk about making love with your parents — over the rice pudding. Oh God, no.”

“Well, what else? Why not? The house is big enough. I have my own bedroom. There’s the afternoon.”

Thinking of Cherry’s odd middle-aged passion, his loss of nerve with the music teacher, I wanted her then, on any pretext, anywhere, before it was too late. So I said yes. Sunday lunch. When I got back to the counter Cherry, as though he’d overheard these coarse thoughts, had disappeared leaving me a Metaxas. I drank the mixture with its flavour of a vanilla cake-mix that’s been kept in the cupboard too long, and ordered a whisky.

7

The Girgises’ house was a mile or so away from the school in Maadi, shut off from the road by a mass of flowering trees — jacarandá, bougainvillea and others I didn’t know the names of — and the air around the place was as damp and sweetly oppressive as a ladies’ hairdressers. A young suffragi with a brilliant green sash at his waist and the deep velvet black skin of his Sudanese ancestors let me in. He moved his head half an inch, a minute, utterly distant bow.

He was the last of the properly Arab world that I was to see until, hours afterwards, he bowed me out of the house again. From the drawing room to my right came the confident bumpy tones of a Victor Silvester quickstep; music being poured over cobblestones: the Sunday morning overseas request programme from London. An old grandfather clock made in Bath with the quarters of the moon and the four seasons picked out in flaking colours about its face ticked in the dark of the hall. The leafy, fruity smells outside had been replaced by a suggestion everywhere of dry cedar and in the cloakroom next to three pairs of old gum-boots were a pile of Country Life and Illustrated London News tied up with string and addressed to the Anglo-American Hospital.

Bridget came down the dark stairway in a grey pleated skirt, flat-heeled shoes and a boy’s tennis shirt.

“Dear me. I didn’t bring my gumboots — or a racket. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be silly. You’ll want gumboots for the garden. They flood it every morning. Alexander’s very keen on it — you’ll be shown round — and do be a bit interested.”

We moved into the drawing-room where her parents were — a room littered with silver-framed photographs of friends and relations and interminable children, including the mandatory image of Mr. Girgis — Girgis Bey — in full regalia as an Egyptian civil servant thirty years before, looking more than ever the Turkish peasant in a tarbrush, decorated sash across his breast and a bushy moustache.

They stood up and smiled graciously, distantly — as though gently emphasising the distance between their home and the Maadi Sporting Club — and Mrs. Girgis turned the radio off.

“No — please. Don’t turn it off for me.”

“But Mr. Marlow, we want to hear about you. And anyway,” she went on in a lower voice, gesturing towards a bundle of old Army blankets in a chair near the radio which I hadn’t yet noticed, “it’s for her. Mamie. Alex’s old nurse.”

A woman of incredible age, almost completely swathed in a coarse threadbare blanket with just a wisp of white hair falling from beneath the cowl which the material formed over her head, looked at me carefully and rather malevolently from behind a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. It was an old face, grey — almost indistinguishable from the colour of the blanket — withered, shapeless as folds of sand, except for the open eyes, magnified by the glass, which were pale blue, large and fresh as a child’s. I had the impression that although I was supposed to accept her as a senile harmless old party, mentally in her dotage and physically far beyond greeting me, this was not the case — an assumption that soon proved correct. I had turned away and having finished my greetings with the Girgises was about to sit down when a squeaky, crystal-clear announcement emerged from the bundle.

“Would not Mr. Marlow shake hands with me? Would that not be manners?”

With its repeated negatives, its reproving, petulant insistence, it was an ageless, endlessly practiced injunction: honed in wars of attrition against countless bygone brats it came now over the air, a message from the past, a call to order from the nursery, a reminder that however far afield we had gone in time or place that dictatorship was ever at hand. The words were vindictive, in a way I had long forgotten, they had been put not as a question but as a sentence handed down from a court without appeal. I wondered for a moment if all of us would have to have lunch in the pantry without any pudding.

Mrs. Girgis was the first to recover herself.

“But, Nanny, I thought you never shook hands. You never have.”

And indeed there were no hands to shake. The grey blanket remained folded over the chair, completely covering the miniscule body, like the bark of a strange tree.

“I shall have my lunch upstairs as usual.” The tree came to life. Mr. Girgis in a pair of old check carpet slippers helped her to her feet with the air of a man attending a grave accident, giving her a malacca cane with which she walked slowly but firmly across and out of the room.

“I am sorry.” Mrs. Girgis was truly upset in an awkward way. “She never wants to meet anyone. She just comes downstairs for the Sunday programme — you must have come a little early. She was Alexander’s nanny. She came from the Residency. She’d been one of Kitchener’s aides before that. I simply can’t understand it.”

“I can,” Bridget said. “It’s quite simple. You ought to have introduced her to Peter.” And Mr. Girgis looked at her in astonishment.

Lunch, which was a too mild curry with an assortment of bland chutneys and chopped fruits, was rather strained. And I did nothing to add to the gaiety by preferring the local Egyptian cheese — the strangely smoky, acrid gibna of the delta — to some yellowing, sweating cheddar which I knew had been imported through a firm in Denmark by the Embassy people.

Afterwards Mr. Girgis came to life. “Come and see the garden. You’ll need a pair of gumboots. I’ve got an old pair, I think. They flood the place at midday so it’ll still be pretty wet,” and we went out into the cloakroom. The boots didn’t fit so I took off my shoes and rolled up my trousers and he gave me a tiny straw hat and took a long pruning staff for himself and we went outside like a pair of mad fishermen.

Huge trees completely circled the acre of garden and beyond the small square of lawn which led out from the terrace the undergrowth was as dense as a jungle.

The little garden, between the lawn and the jungle, was like a willow pattern saucer, complete with two willow trees leaning over an ornamental pool, water lilies, clumps of papyrus with their feathery white cockades and a crooked wooden bridge. Raised duckboards, like a miniature railway line, threaded their way through these studied effects, and all around them an inch or two of water giving the whole place the air of an exotic paddy-field under the blazing sun.

Mr. Girgis splashed off across the lawn and prodded some scented flowering bush with his stick, detaching a few of the petals which rose a fraction in the air around the plant, drenching the damp atmosphere with sweetness, like a woman drying out against an electric fire in a small room.

“It needs some more water,” he said to me confidentially. “Ahmed!” He bellowed in the direction of a small hut in the trees and Ahmed, a disgruntled, sleepy gardener, appeared and was given detailed instructions about the hose and the plant. There followed a manic dance about the garden as Ahmed, mishandling the appliance, doused the three of us in a warm jet of water. He dropped the hose so that it thrashed around at our feet, the water splashing in small waves over Mr. Girgis’s gumboots.

“God damn him.” Mr. Girgis picked up his pruning staff and we paddled back to the terrace where the others had arranged the coffee.

“Nescafé is ready!” Mrs. Girgis sang out, as if heralding some incomparable nectar. “When you’ve dried yourselves.” And the two of us trooped upstairs.

“Here, I can lend you a shirt and trousers,” Mr. Girgis said when we’d dried ourselves and were in his bedroom, and I decked myself out in an old pair of flannel yachting trousers which reached halfway down my legs and a motheaten turtleneck pullover — part of the same outfit with the name “Cleopatra”, on one of Farouk’s smaller boats, on the front of it — the only thing in his wardrobe which remotely looked like fitting me and even then it stretched tight across my chest like an old sock so that it itched fearfully.

“Bridget had better show you the rest of the place,” Mr. Girgis said rather huffily, as if I’d turned the hose on him. “I shall catch my death.” And then, as an afterthought, he made the strange inquiry — “Did you have some rum? Let’s have some rum with our coffee.”

His choice of this particular drink as a reviver seemed to have been taken quite unconsciously, without reference to my nautical garb. Perhaps my clothes may have jogged to life again some deeply buried maritime experience of his long ago, a careless shipboard party off Alexandria, with the young Farouk and his English friends — perhaps a naval squadron from Malta was visiting at the time — for rum is not an expected drink in Egypt.

Downstairs he poured out two glasses of rum in his study and we sipped them in the dry air like men taking disagreeable waters.

“Some ice perhaps?” he said hopefully, after I’d lowered a second mouthful less enthusiastically than the first. And then he thought better of the idea, looking around him. “There isn’t any. It would only mean another disaster with the suffragi. Shall we join the ladies?” But Bridget had appeared in the doorway without our noticing and was smiling quietly at both of us. Mr. Girgis looked at me.

“My old summer togs — eh? Rather a sight I suppose. Well, I must get back to Ahmed. I expect you’ve had enough of the garden. I shouldn’t walk about outside in that jersey in any case — mightn’t be taken in the right spirits. Show him the paintings, Bridget.”

She moved across the room towards us, looking at me carefully, taking the damp clothes from my arm, as though she’d not heard her father speak. We finished off our glasses in one go, as if the outcome of this ridiculous charade lay in some pressing business offstage, and moved into the hallway. Mrs. Girgis was laid out on the terrace, fast asleep on the chintz-covered steamer chair. A cat I’d not noticed before, a large, over-fed tabby, was up on the small trestle table among the coffee cups lapping carefully from the silver milk jug.

“Good Lord — Mamie’s cat has got out. Down the creeper. I thought it was past it. We should have had it put away — but what can one do? She got it as a present years ago, one of the under secretaries in my department — currying favour, British love of animals and all that. Sly fellow. He wanted a trip to San Francisco, I remember. It was the start of the UN. We called the cat Hopeful — in memory of that event — and my colleague’s diplomatic ambitions. I had him posted to Addis Ababa instead. But that’s another story. Don’t waken Mamie upstairs. With any luck she’ll sleep till supper. Like a child, you know. She needs her rest.” He had put on his gumboots again and now he tip-toed away from us, hitching his dressing-gown tight about him, past his sleeping wife, lifting the cat off the table — it kept its great grey muzzle embedded in the milk jug until the last possible second — and on out to do battle with the luckless Ahmed.

The grandfather clock in the corner of the hall chimed softly, four bell-like notes in a scale. Part of a full moon, with a face like Humpty Dumpty, was creeping over the horizon of stars at the top. And at the bottom, on a corresponding scale, the month of February in a gothic script, garlanded by two plump salmon, the fish of Pisces, was coming to an end. Only the time — a quarter past three — was very nearly correct.

Bridget came up behind me and stretched her arms over my shoulders, her fingers picking at the dark cotton letters of Farouk’s ship on my chest

“It’s a mad-house,” she said slowly. “What a stupid, marvellous thing.”

“What?”

“I love you.”

“It itches like hell.”

“What does?”

“The jersey.”

“Take it off then. But not here. Upstairs. We can ‘look at the pictures’.”

In a boxroom, wedged under the eaves, beneath the burning rafters, we made love again. There were two narrow dust-covered windows looking out over the garden and we could see Mr. Girgis dictating to Ahmed, the two of them moving painfully from plant to plant like men walking a punishment course across a swamp, the rough Arabic syllables falling upon Ahmed like a succession of cures.

We lay on our clothes, her tennis shirt and her father’s yachting trousers as a pillow against the dusty floor, that small body constantly changing position, moving beneath me, locked in mine. There was an Egyptian flag in one corner, the old one, three stars and a crescent moon against a green background, and the remnants of a Hornby train set in another — a still-bright block engine lying on its side with the legend “L.N.E.R.” on the coal box.

“He plays with trains. He used to.”

In other corners of the room trunks and suitcases were piled on top of each other, and wicker boxes with P & O labels directing them to Port Said and Tilbury and the Metropole, Monte Carlo.

“Doesn’t this answer your phone call yesterday? I mean it’s better than talking about it. Making love is better.”

“Yes.” We had stopped for a moment, and lay next to each other, sweating.

“I was angry — because you wouldn’t do it the past few months, when before, the first time, it was so easy for you.”

“It’s not as easy now, that’s all. My wanting you now — it isn’t in the same way.” She looked at me, perplexed, a glance for a tiresome child. “But why is it so important for you? It is for me, I know. But for you? That possessive thing? How can you love like that? Don’t you know?”

“Yes, it is the possessive thing and I don’t know.”

“God, I’ve never talked so much about making love — and done it so little, with someone I wanted so much. I want you now because I love you now. But don’t be held by it. I don’t want to — possess, be possessed, all that. So why talk, argue? Make love. I need it, mean it, want it.”

Mrs. Girgis had joined her husband outside and was following him gingerly along the duckboards, treating him in much the same way as he had dealt with Ahmed, except that, with her, the continual comments and criticisms drifted up to us in the purest tones of Refined-Surrey.

“Really far too much water, Alex … it’s not a paddy-field you know. Is it impossible to get Ahmed to understand anything? Are any of the figs ripe? Can we get some for Bridget to take back with her? Alex! My border is quite water-logged …”

“We’d better go. They’ll start to call. Make love again. Please.”

There was a noise outside on the stairway, a quick determined step on the creaking wood, and the door opened. Mamie glanced around her vaguely, with the numbed look of someone unhappily released from a deep sleep.

“Hopeful? Hopeful?”

The ridiculous name squeaked out as she peered around the trunks. “Puss, Puss!”—and she moved towards us and away again so that I thought for a second that she hadn’t seen us. And then, with the same look of perfect understanding that I had remembered from before lunch, she noticed us, peering down her nose as if she had suddenly seen some terrible, ineradicable stain on the floor.

“I thought Puss might be here. I’ll ask your father, Bridget, if he’s seen him.”

She spoke in the sad way that one speaks to a child who has done something beyond any scolding, whose crime only some infinitely high authority can now judge.

8

I met Bridget at the Semiramis a few days later. We had gone back to drinking in bars again.

“It doesn’t matter. It just means you won’t be asked for Sunday lunch again.”

“What did she say?”

“That I’d been ‘playing’ with you — you know, like children under the dining room table. The only thing is he may try to interest your Dr. El Sayid in the matter — ‘not the sort of thing one expects from a guest, Doctor — in one’s own house, and in front of my old Nanny’—I can hear him.”

Which matter Mr. Girgis duly proceeded to interest the good doctor in.

Henry and I were staying at the school during the holidays and a day or so afterwards as we were passing by the side window of El Sayid’s study on our way for a game of table tennis in the basement of the Old School, there came a violent rat-a-tat-tat as he machine-gunned the window pane with a coin, as he did every day in term time, signalling in his wildly imperious manner the start of afternoon classes. A long finger beckoned me.

“We are a small community out here in Maadi, Mr. Marlow, a small but honourable one, of which this school forms very much a part. We rely on each other for our good name about the place — indeed about the whole city and the country. And even further afield. We bear a responsibility to each other for our behaviour — corporately and individually. So I am not in the least surprised, as you may be, that one of our neighbours, with whom until recently you were acquainted — Girgis Bey — has seen fit to ‘tell tales out of class’ as it were. I am very obliged to him. A matter as I understand it — and I shan’t descend to details — of ‘abusing hospitality’ as he put it, in a manner quite unbecoming to your status as a guest in his house and member of the staff here. Not a legal matter, I gather, but really — and I think this far more important in view of your responsibilities to the young here — a matter entirely within the moral sphere. To cut a long story short it would be completely unsuitable for you to remain in your present position with us. You appear, to put it bluntly, to be lacking in even the very rudiments of physical control. The dangers of allowing such licence in a place like this must be obvious to you.”

“It was a woman, Doctor. Not a boy.”

And he rose from his desk in a fury and walked vigorously towards the window, slapping his thigh repeatedly on the way.

“I don’t care what it was — man, beast or ripe melon — I insist upon your resignation. You may take two weeks’ notice from the beginning of next term — an arrangement, I think, entirely generous in the circumstances.”

“I’m sure it’s more than I deserve.”

I went down to join Henry in the basement of our “house” in what had been known as “Old School”. He’d got the net up and was talking to Mahmoud, the little janitor and odd-job man who had his closet down here, full of brooms and dusters, a collection of dirty coffee cups, a primus stove and a bed — though he didn’t sleep here officially. Mahmoud had quite taken to Henry and me for some reason — as opposed to the vast majority of other Egyptian teachers now employed by the school — although neither of us could follow his strangely accented Arabic and he spoke no more than greetings in English. He — or his father, one could never tell from his attempt to explain the genealogy — had been with the school practically since its foundation and perhaps he saw in Henry and me the last remnants of a preferred regime, an appropriate link with his previous masters; we must have given him, through our inability to understand each other, a comforting sense of continuity.

“I’ve been asked to leave.”

“Oh.”

Henry didn’t seem all that surprised. I suppose now that Bridget had already told him everything that had happened. Certainly he must have seen her then, without my knowing, almost as often as I did.

“Don’t worry. We can get you private lessons. Everybody wants to learn English. We’ll have a game and go down town. What does it matter? I hope you gave him hell.”

When we had finished Henry went back to his room to collect his wallet — even in those days he never seemed to have what he needed about him — and I stayed on with Mahmoud over another coffee with which he punctuated our every day like a clock.

In the old days, before Suez, this lower part of the old school had been used for all those extra-curricular activities so dear to English educational tradition, those rugged pursuits through which character is supposedly moulded and happiness usually crushed: Scouting, P.T., Amateur Dramatics and so on — and in shuttered rooms leading off this central hall were stored the instruments of all that pain, the littered remains of the white man’s burden: old footballs, punch bags, dumb-bells, chest expanders, smashed cricket bats, a number of bruised bowler hats and tattered copies in French’s Amateur Acting Edition of The Monkey’s Paw. The new regime, not yet fully aware of these riches beneath them, left the basement area entirely to the shuffling of Mahmoud; this was his dark, cool domain.

So while Henry was gone I took another, perhaps a last, look round.

In a cupboard at the end of one of the rooms — together with a lot of broken laboratory equipment, old gauzes, test-tubes, retorts and encrusted Bunsen burners — was a broken film projector, some rusty cans of film — “The Three Counties Agricultural Show 1937”, “The British Police”, and “The Port of London Authority”—a number of well rubbed copies of a booklet published in Fenchurch Street in 1939 called Wireless Telegraphy for Beginners and a radio receiver or transmitter, I couldn’t make out which.

“Come on. Well miss the train. I’m not paying for a taxi — yet.”

Henry stood in the dooryway, oddly impatient.

“They never use any of this stuff here?”

“Never. Suez was the End of Empire. Didn’t you know?”

We went to the Fontana and another club on Roda island. And the Perroquet on Soliman Pasha, ending up just before dawn in a gharry at the Auberge des Pyramids.

“Where are you going to go?” Bridget asked.

“A hotel — why not? Henry has ideas about private lessons.”

“Yes, Henry said there’s all those girls from my old English class at the University. Some of them still think they can get an external degree,”

“You could advise me on — what do they call it? — syntax. Yes, English syntax,” Bahaddin added. “And I could get you a maid’s room at the Cosmopolitan. The manager’s a friend.”

“You could live with me. Lola’s finally decided to go back to Beirut,” Bridget said lightly. And apart from that idea it was rather a grim little Christmas dinner that Bahaddin had arranged for us all on the roof restaurant of the new Shepheard’s Hotel.

A week later I moved in. The lift had been repaired.

The weather had cooled appreciably by now. It was the start of the month or so of winter in Egypt; soft, almost damp grey mornings by the river and streaky clouds far overhead and odd vicious dusty winds — intimations of the spring khamseen from the desert which swirled the low water by the corniche into momentary thrusts and eddies and clouded the sun with a fine gritty haze. And once, at the end of January, it rained for the first time since I’d arrived in Egypt, an afternoon of velvet grey clouds rolling up the delta from the sea — and then for ten minutes or so before dusk, just a few drops, like someone shaking wet hands at you.

Lola had stayed on in Beirut and we shared the big double bed at the back of the apartment and Bridget went out to work every morning and came back at lunchtime, when we often made love. I had never been happier. There was an ease in our relationship for those few months which neither I, nor I think Bridget, had ever thought possible. We loved each other and we made love, and there was nothing left to be said.

It was a marriage, I suppose, but without any obligations or rights, without the possessiveness she feared, without any of the things which were to make the marriage itself, when it came, such a disaster. Even the fact that my private lessons never came to very much and that after the first month Bridget had to pay most of the expenses didn’t seem to matter. Or so I thought then. With no more than the usual egoism felt in such circumstances I saw an indivisibility in our love, and a corresponding unimportance in the details of life. Afterwards I had assumed that things had gone wrong simply because Bridget had been less of an egoist, a much more conventional person than I’d imagined; the sort of woman who, at the end of the fun, finds her deepest needs in the traditional supports. Now — there are so many other questions involved that one has stopped, thankfully, looking for answers.

Henry had put me in touch with Samia — a nice dull elderly girl with a wiry cloche of hair and a green dress — the younger sister of someone he had taught at the University, who was unaccountably attempting “O’ levels. Twice a week I trudged through Macbeth with her in a backroom of her father’s office in the old part of the city beneath the Citadel — down alleyways small and dirty as gutters, completely overhung by shabby wooden houses with balconies that almost linked overhead so that it was dark even at midday. Her father had his place at the end of one of these crammed passages; he was a huge mediaeval figure with a boxer’s face and the devout air of a prosperous, deeply traditional Moslem; with his rolling moustache — and without his immaculate galibeah and green turban — he might have been a Victorian paterfamilias. He ran a small export-import agency so that the whole place smelt strongly of sacking and dried beans and the sweet stench of Turkish coffee. At whatever time of day I arrived his friends were always gathered in a circle round his desk, a cabal of wizened cronies sipping from thin cups, and I would be given the inevitable cup myself before being led through to the tiny office beyond a curtain by one of the clerks, entering upon Samia, distractedly fidgeting with her notes, like a lout broaching a harem.

Her father and his friends guarded the approaches while I imparted the mysteries; their soft chatterings moving in counterpoint to my weary explanations about the three witches, which Samia followed not at all. Her attention would drift outwards, beyond the curtain, to the talk in the next room — of ships and bales and bad weather, I suppose, and foreign places, while I — in my own distraction — would remember what I’d had for lunch that day with Bridget: beans cooked in oil with lemon juice and wrapped in thin crescents of dark sour bread which she’d picked up from one of the cafés on El Trahir square and left in the oven too long while we made love.

At the end of my hour with Samia I would emerge thankfully from the closet and there would follow a lengthy exchange of “salaams” and duckings and smiles and salutes with her father and the others before I disappeared down the backstreets again, coming alive now after the still of the afternoon — paraffin pressure lamps hissing urgently above the stalls and barrows as they were pumped up, like animals provoked beyond endurance, before breaking into innumarable flares all along the passageways.

I suppose it was this background of the grubby winter city — far from the sad arrogance, the BBC request programmes and the ancient Hillmans of Maadi — a background pared of all inessentials, which gave to what happened in those months a definition, a quality of hope, which a similar time, spent say in Paris or Venice, would not have had. The grubby and unpromising can only suggest promise; at least, we persuaded ourselves, they cannot disappoint. So we are prompted to beliefs which in more favourable circumstances we would never have contemplated. I believed that I was happy; that Mamie and the folly of Dr. El Sayid had led me to my proper station in life, that everything had conspired in my favour. Only now am I aware of the proper nature of the conspiracy.

When it is over, we look back vehemently for that moment in a particular experience when the first flaw appeared that led to the end; quite perversely, like geologists tapping their way about volcanic rock, we seek the first intimation of the explosion, running our minds savagely back and forth over the affair: late mornings looking out over the river from the open window of her apartment, the bitter smell of the low water, coffee together on the Semiramis terrace on Sunday mornings; the old men flushed, with bloodshot eyes, in tarbushes and white duck suits wandering aimlessly around the pillars in the huge hall behind us, flicking their whisks dispiritedly at the few winter flies, offering elaborately formal greetings to acquaintances before moving on as though to some pressing affair; early evenings hurrying back along the aromatic side streets, from Samia or some other luckless student, towards the river again, with the sun behind the pyramids now — spreading a veneer of rose and purple over the town, cutting out the huge triangles of stone in soft charcoal from the sunset behind them …

In all the happy manoeuvres of that calm winter — when did it begin?

We’d had lunch one Sunday at Mena House and had walked up the hill afterwards towards the pyramids. It was late February and the hot weather was already in the air. We sat on the terrace of the old Viceregal kiosk at the foot of Cheops, sipping colourless tea, beating off the shoe-shine boys and camel drivers like any tourist

Suddenly, a tiny dark bean of a child appeared from nowhere at my feet and started to clean my shoes furiously, rubbing away at them with a kind of foamy black paint. They were suede, not leather.

“No!” And then the same word louder, in Arabic. But he went on eagerly as if he’d heard nothing.

“Tell him to stop for God’s sake. He’ll ruin the shoes.” I had got to my feet, appealing wildly to Bridget.

“Oh, what does it matter — what does it matter? They’re horrible old shoes anyway. I was just longing for them to be finished with. You can get another pair.”

The child in his ragged blackened nightshirt, one eye closing with trachoma, had stood up now, unsure of what to make of our outburst, and had begun to slink away before Bridget called him back and gave him five piastres.

“You’re so mean — those rotten shoes. My God, you can still get shoes out here at least.” She spoke quite calmly now and had turned away to look at the pyramid.

“I don’t have all that money.”

“No.” She sipped her tea without looking round, quite uninterested in my statement so that I felt I had to force her attention.

“Fifty piastres an hour is what I get at the moment and I can’t ask for much more, that’s pretty well the top rate. And the flat is seven pounds a week.” The annoyed, querulous tones of the forgotten remittance …

“What does the flat matter? Are we just living there together for sheer convenience?”

“No, I hope not. Just I’ve not got the money to start buying shoes, that’s all.”

“You could earn the money if you wanted to. You’ve still got your work permit — to teach in the English schools. And there are more of them besides Maadi.”

“They wouldn’t have me. We’ve talked about that.”

“Oh Lord.” She drew the words out in a sigh. “You sit around all day in the flat. You’re always there when I get back. You could do a job of some sort couldn’t you? Where’s this all getting us — you, me? What do you do here, after all? You go to the Council Library, Groppi’s, you meet Henry for lunch at the Cosmopolitan and drink in the bar there all afternoon with those awful Greek lawyers — and you come back at four in the morning from the Fontana or somewhere and expect to make love with me. And it goes on and on. And then you say you can’t buy a new pair of shoes. That sort of life suits you — and it suited me too — but does it suit us both together? I mean, why be together — if we just go on behaving in the same old way? Shouldn’t there be something — else?”

“What else?” I was thoroughly annoyed.

“I don’t know. Work perhaps, regular work — something to interest you. Aren’t men supposed really to need that, not just the other things,” she said lightly, bitterly.

“What ‘other things’?”

We had become children, quarrelling over words, throwing them heedlessly about.

“Love? Is that what you mean — that sort of thing? That’s what I don’t need — I just need the drinking with Henry and a good job in some wretched boys’ school?”

“Don’t be stupid — you’re not going to spend the rest of your life just loving me — and nothing else. What else are you going to do?”

“What do you mean — ‘what else’? Do you expect me to join the Army or something, become a lawyer, ‘settle down’? I’m just a teacher. Or was. Rather dull, I suppose.” She said nothing but looked at me blankly. “What ‘else’ is there, from your point of view? I’d like to know. It’s becoming a bore really, isn’t it? Just loving me, with nothing else in sight? None of those extra things that you might properly expect from a relationship of this sort; none of the things that came with the men you had before — martinis on the terrace at six o’clock, yelling at the suffragis, trips to the Gezira Club in the afternoons and summers on the beach at Alex: you’re looking for a future. I know what you mean.”

“You don’t. You’re just stupid.”

“She wants to marry you — what’s wrong with that?” Henry had ordered another bottle of Stella and it was dark at the end of the bar in the Cosmopolitan. It was another of our “afternoons” as Bridget called them. “You could do it at the Embassy — you were born in London, weren’t you — dual nationality. No trouble — if that’s what you want. Though I’d say you wanted a job really. No point hanging on with those private lessons if you can help it. Do you know Crowther at the Consulate here, commercial attaché? He might have some ideas about work. Go and have a word with him. He’s a friend of mine.”

“Don’t just marry me — because of that talk at the pyramids.”

“Of course not. I was mad. I’ll get a job. Henry has ideas, someone at the Consulate. I want to marry you.”

“And not just because it’s giving you something definite to do — marrying me instead of getting a job, because it’ll make you feel better?”

“You’re mad now. No. Though it does make me feel better. Why are you so cagey about it? Aren’t you sure?”

“Yes, I am. Just I’m surprised — now it’s happened.”

We’d walked over the Kasr el Nil bridge to the Gezira Club and across into the middle of the race course towards the huge baobab tree that stood in the centre of the park on the island. It was a Saturday, the last meeting of the season, I think, before all the horses moved to Alexandria for the summer. The bell clanged in the distance before each race, every half hour or so, and the tiny horses thundered round the perimeter, taking the curves flat out against the fence in a line, like animals on sticks in a child’s game.

“Let’s do it soon, that’s all.” There was an urgency in her voice as if she were talking about making love and saw our marrying simply as a legal means of ensuring that end on a permanent basis.

9

Mr. Crowther had the features of a frightened weasel; an unbalanced face: a broad flat forehead narrowing sharply to a point in a minute chin, eyes close together in a setting of continual alarm, fox-coloured moustache and the stringy, lazy body of someone who years before had made a habit of bowling two fast opening overs before retiring to matron with a twisted ankle. Thin silvery hair, a bow tie and a rather crumpled linen suit completed the impression of a last delicate flowering before the light desert airs blew him completely to seed.

He waved me to a sofa some way from his desk and then hurried back into his chair — as if to lessen some expected impact in what I had to say.

“Married?” he said with exaggerated concern when I had explained my business. “But that’s surely something for your Church. You should see the Provost at All Saints’ or — ” and he looked at me like a doctor deciding on a diagnosis — “Father McEwan at Heliopolis.”

“No, I — we don’t want a church. I thought it could be fixed up at one’s Embassy.”

“It might be — if there were one here. But there isn’t. And no Ambassador either. In any case I understood from my friend Mr. Edwards that you were Irish — ”

“Yes, but born in England — dual nationality — ”

He didn’t seem to have heard; brow furrowed, looking deeply into his desk, running his finger along the woodwork, he appeared quite given up to the struggle of marshalling his own arguments.

“I’m afraid there may be difficulties, you see. Your fiancée is Egyptian you said. And you are Irish. Now, if both of you had been British — then I think something could have been arranged.”

Satisfied he could now rest his case Mr. Crowther — Basil Crowther as I’d seen on his office door in the Consulate building behind the main Embassy — got up and moved warily towards me on the sofa, his linen suit, smudges of darkness spreading under the arms, suffering, like himself, agonies from the heat. He looked wearily at a photograph of Queen Elizabeth trooping the colour in the fresh brightness of a London summer on the wall behind me.

“The Guardsmen always used to faint, didn’t they? I remember in the old newsreels. And they just left them there. That was before Suez of course. Now they cart them away. Sic transit something … of course you being Irish you wouldn’t — really appreciate …” He left the idea hanging in the air, as if in a mental faint, and mopped his face.

A little elderly lady had appeared and Mr. Crowther ordered tea in such graceful tones that I wondered if there might not be cucumber sandwiches as well.

“No, it’s difficult. And very bad luck. I’d like to be able to help. It’s not that I’m overburdened with work at the moment either. But I’ve remembered now — it’s the Italians who deal with the Irish here. There was a nun in here last month. From Aswan or somewhere. She’d left the order. Something about a policeman — whether in Aswan or Tipperary I couldn’t quite gather. Anyway, we sent her on to the Italians. You might have a word with them. Though now I come to think of it they don’t marry people in their Embassies, one of the few countries that don’t. And you’re not Italian.”

I thought perhaps that I must have caught Mr. Crowther at a time of immediate personal pressure — “my wife or something” as he might have put it.

“What about the Cathedral — All Saints’? You could get married there, couldn’t you? Have you thought of that?” He seemed particularly pleased at the idea as if he’d solved the problem. “The Cathedral, yes. Now that would make a splendid setting. You couldn’t do better. But perhaps — ” he looked at me suddenly — “that might be a little too public for you, what? One wants a decent privacy in these things. One is not marrying one’s mother-in-law after all.”

“Ah, our tea. Thank you, Mrs. French. Lemon, Mr. Marlow?”

Mr. Crowther’s face cleared. He smiled for the first time, an awkward grin, like a dusty accountant who has got the figures out of the way with a wealthy client and feels the need to embark on brief innocuous banter to suggest his position as co-equal, if not in the social hierarchy, at least in matters of the world.

“You’ve been teaching out here, haven’t you? Edwards told me. At Albert College in Maadi — what’s it called now? — I can never remember.”

“Yes, but I’ve stopped. I’m giving private lessons.”

“But you could go back to teaching — I mean, if you wanted to. You’ve still got a resident’s permit — and a work permit, much more important?”

“Yes. But I’m not too keen. I may have to, I suppose.”

“Hmmm.”

Mr. Crowther paused and blew gently over the top of his tea, cup and saucer lifted to within an inch of his chin, little finger slightly extended, like a dowager at a tea party.

“There’s an ex-British school at Suez, isn’t there?”

“I think so. Yes. But I wouldn’t fancy going up there — was that what you meant?”

“Possibly. Edwards mentioned something about your looking for more congenial work. I’ve not been down to Suez yet. My assistant goes there sometimes, when there’s trouble on one of our boats. We used to have an honorary Consul there of course. A Greek gentleman, unfortunate business — I was just thinking. It probably wouldn’t suit you.” He fingered vaguely through my passport which had been lying on the desk in front of him along with my other papers; and then he stopped abruptly at a page near the beginning. “Born in London?” he said in astonishment. “I hadn’t realised that. I mean, that gives you dual nationality, English as well as Irish, if you wanted it. We could marry you then — you’d be a British subject, quite within our province. All we need is another passport for you — and a word with London.” He ran on in jubilation, stood up and looked through the first page of the passport against the light. “Another passport. That’s it of course! That’s the answer. Here, I’ll give you some forms to fill in.”

He seemed quite irrationally pleased with this outcome, as if it were he who had been trying to get married and not I.

“Ah! I see you went to Springhill,” he said glancing at my answers to the questionnaire under the heading “Education”—something which the wretched minor public school I’d been to in North Wales had conspicuously failed to give me.

“Yes, for a while.”

“We used to play them at cricket …”

A long time afterwards Mr. Crowther pumped my hand enthusiastically at the door, barely able to get to the goodbyes.

“You must come to our reception. Queen’s birthday. Very small do, I’m afraid. Not even official. Just a few of our friends in Cairo. After all you should be British by then. Half British anyway. You may even be married.”

We were — twenty-one days later. Henry and Bahaddin were the witnesses and Mr. Crowther officiated. The only thing I properly remember about it all was Crowther’s looking the door of his office during the short formalities …

Afterwards he smiled affably, and took us all to lunch at the Estoril. Henry, I remember, drank a little too much and spilt half a bottle of wine.

We sent a telegram to her parents and that evening went to Luxor for a week which used up the last of the money that I’d saved. It was the end of the school year too, exams were in full swing and my private lessons had dwindled to nothing.

10

June 13, the Queen’s birthday: the maple leaf over the British Embassy buildings wrapped around the flag post, a mourning drape in the still air, the heat rising like a smack in the face from the yellow, burning streets; kites motionless in the sky far away, specks in the distance, like aeroplanes, until they dipped suddenly, swerving over the trees on Gezira Island: the old Peugeot taxis braying across Kasr el Nil bridge, and the Mercedes, gliding by, curtained against the glare: a group of farmers up from the country, with sheep and goats and huge shallow metal dishes of simmering beans, camping under sheets of corrugated paper against the corniche in front of Shepheard’s Hotel. The harsh amplified prayers from a mosque at the corner of El Trahir: June 13, the Queen’s birthday.

We slunk into the Embassy grounds through the old ballroom at the back of the Residency which had been turned into the British Council’s library. Crowther’s Mrs. French took our cards at the desk for returned books, the muted crackle of Dimbleby’s commentary on Trooping the Colour coming from a portable radio behind her. Henry had come with us and we went on into the gardens in front of the Residency which ran down to the high wall which now formed one side of the corniche; before, the lawns had gone right to the banks of the river; before Suez.

It was late afternoon and the heat was dying a little and it was just bearable if one didn’t move around too much, and stayed under the flowering trees — flame trees and bougainvillea — which bordered the lawn on either side. Henry caught a suffragi in a red sash rushing past us with a tray of martinis and we gulped the warm mixture.

“Mr. and Mrs. Marlow!”

Mr. Crowther detached himself from a group of elderly ladies who were sitting on little gilded chairs at trestle tables and sped towards us with remarkable purpose — quite out of keeping with our importance as guests. A Sudanese bishop and an American in huge brogues and a Cabot Lodge tropical outfit just in front of us turned quite huffy as he passed them by with only the most perfunctory greetings.

“How nice to see you. And you’ve got drinks. How was Luxor? You stayed at the Winter Palace I hope? Not the best time of year really, though one does avoid all those awful German tourists.”

And we told him about the Valley of the Kings and Queen Hatshepsut’s temple among other inconsequential bits of chatter. But Crowther had something else on his mind; fidgeting and slightly red in the face, he seemed only to be waiting for a decent interval to pass with these opening formalities before broaching something much more important.

He didn’t get the chance until much later when Henry and Bridget had become embroiled in conversation with a professor they’d known at the University and I’d wandered off to one side of the lawn and gone through a hedge and into a little stone plaza with a minute swimming pool in the middle. I was surprised to see a very portly, benign-looking gentleman asleep in a deck chair under a sun shade at the far end of the pool. There was a red carnation in the buttonhole of his immaculately cut white linen suit and a half empty bottle of champagne on the table in front of him. I turned to leave thinking perhaps that it was the Ambassador being kept discreetly under wraps until diplomatic relations between the two countries were resumed. But Mr. Crowther, who must have seen me going through the hedge, was right behind me when I turned.

“Ah! Marlow — just the man I wanted to see. There’s someone here who I think may be able to help you,” he said with urgent discreetness. “I’d like you to meet. Dear me, he’s gone to sleep.”

“Help me? How?”

“About work, my dear fellow. About work. You remember — Henry told me all about it. About your looking for something to do out here.”

Crowther’s persistent interest in my well-being puzzled me at the time. I put it down simply to a concern on the part of Her Majesty’s Government for all British citizens abroad, even quasi-citizens, and have since had ample occasion to revise that opinion.

But then, I followed him willingly as he stalked quietly towards the recumbent body, jumping neatly over one corner of the pool, as if intent on cornering a thief and shaking him till he woke. He did nothing of the sort; instead, he leaned over the gross, dandified figure, close to his face, like a lover.

“Robin — Robin?” he murmured. “I’ve Mr. Marlow to see you. Mr. Marlow.” He dragged my name out very slowly in the way that one explains something to a child.

The figure stirred and then sat up, slowly, painfully, as though the least movement of the immense torso was an agony. But he was quite awake. He looked at me, a look of kindness as well as interest — a twinkly animated look as though, like Crowther, the eyes alone had survived intact in the wreck of his body.

“Oh. I dropped off.”

He twirled the champagne glass in delicate withered fingers, the skin barely covering the bones; his hands in fact looked like someone else’s, tacked on, so at odds were they with his general corpulence and air of excessive good living. He drained what was left in his glass and poured some more.

“Mr. Marlow — this is Mr. Usher.”

“How are you, Marlow? You’ve not a glass and indeed I see no chance whatsoever of your getting one without attracting ‘unnecessary attention’ as Basil would put it, although I might add that’s something I’ve been doing very happily all my life. That’s why I’m stuck here round the corner like a poor relation, pretending I’ve got a ‘bad leg’; rather unimaginative that idea of yours, Basil. Anyway I can’t see why I shouldn’t have seen Marlow in the Residency, all that nonsense about the place being bugged; Egyptians aren’t up to that sort of thing yet, hardly learnt how to use the telephone.” He looked at Crowther mournfully and cast a reptilian glance in the direction of the privet hedge, listening to the excited chatter beyond.

“All those young voices … and I can do nothing whatsoever about it.”

“Very few young people about in Cairo these days, Robin. And no one of that sort here today. Just old Lady Goodridge and a Sudanese bishop. And you wouldn’t want to meet them. Not your style at all,” Crowther said quickly, hoping perhaps to suggest that Usher’s interest in the young of the city, foreign or domestic, was entirely avuncular and that what he really missed were the great days of the Capitulations and the witty adult company of the old British Raj.

“You do go on so, Basil. You really do. Mr. Marlow knows very well what I’m talking about. What I miss are the young — the young everywhere. And there’s something compelling about voices behind hedges, don’t you agree, Marlow? Not just the idea of something clandestine but something positively obscene as well, something quite uncalled for. I suppose I shouldn’t complain of my station this afternoon; there’s something to be had on both sides of that hedge. Titillation for a jaded eavesdropper. The trouble is that I’ve found my imagination inclined to flag lately whereas my other appetites grow apace … A coarsening of the spirit in a body more than ever willing, a common thing among the old I believe. The dangerous age, not far from death.

The grand old Duke of York

He had ten thousand men

He marched them up to the top of the hill

And he marched them down again …”

Hesitating over the words he hummed the rest of the verse in a jaunty growl.

“How does it go, Crowther? I feel in that sort of mood myself: an overwhelming sense of irresponsibility.” He poured the remainder of the champagne into his glass and raised it to within an inch of his long bulbous nose. “I don’t really like it, you know; the chill’s quite gone. The trouble is once I get the taste of it in my mouth I never feel like stopping.”

He thashed the liquid about in his mouth for a moment so that I thought he was about to spit it out. Crowther had brought up two more deck chairs and we perched on the edge of them. Some rust-coloured petals eddied slowly round in one corner of the pool, moved by the breeze that had come up the river and over the wall. It was nearly evening and we sat there in front of Usher like an audience waiting for the start of an open air performance. Mr. Crowther took his cue.

“I think perhaps, Robin, we might start. We can’t be sure of our ground out here for too long.”

Usher gave a last lazy sign and then embarked in a brighter, more formal tone.

“Ah, yes. Crowther tells me you like it out here but haven’t got any decent work. Well, we need a man — at Suez. We’ve no one there now and I gather there’s an ex-British school in the town where you could teach. We don’t need very much, just details to keep us in touch with the mood of the place, till we can get one of our own staff men back there. Details like — well, Russian tankers at the refinery: how many, how often. Who’s running the Greek Club now, morale of the Egyptian canal pilots, troop movements and emplacements on the Cairo road — and a hundred and one other small points you’ll learn about just by living there which we’ll quiz you about from time to time. Oh — and there’s an American living in Suez, working on some UN programme or other, we’d like to know about him — sounds most dangerous. That sort of thing. We could offer you the work on a contract basis — what is it, Crowther? The equivalent of a P₃ minus on the permanent rate — about £80 a month after UK tax apart from what you earned yourself of course, the money payable in sterling, in London, or in any other currency you chose except that of the country you’re operating from. Security measure that. There wouldn’t in your case, I’m afraid, be an overseas allowance, locally recruited staff don’t qualify, but on the other hand we’d be most lenient about any out of pocket expenses; we have a lot of blocked piastres out here. Crowther can give you the rest of the details — a year’s contract in the first place, with thirty days’ notice on either side and with possible Establishment later. That’s about it Like to get the boring part over — what do you think?”

“Rather dangerous — ”

“Not at all. It’s not an active position. We call this an I O Posting — ‘Information Only’—information you’d come across in the ordinary course of your work, nothing extra. No snooping around dark alleyways with revolvers, nothing like that; no radio work, messages in code — none of that nonsense. No exposure of any sort. You’d report verbally to us, that’s all.”

I laughed. “One could get caught easily enough doing just that. The Egyptians probably know I’ve come here today and they’d certainly think something was up if I kept on seeing people here.”

“You wouldn’t — or necessarily see either of us again. You’d deal entirely with your friend Mr. Edwards. It was he who suggested you to us — you hardly think we’d have advanced this far in the matter without establishing the most comprehensive bona fides as to your character and so on. What else did he say, Basil? — that you had an “insatiably curious approach to life’—just what we need, a sharp pair of eyes.”

“Even so — I mightn’t like the idea and you’ve told me rather a lot for someone who might refuse your offer and disappear — over to the other side, who knows?” The martinis had begun to sink in.

“There’s always a risk — and a much more prevalent one, I may say, among our permanent staff who know far more about us than you do. No, once we’re certain about someone we prefer a completely open handed approach.”

“How can you be ‘certain’—about me?”

“Well, to be blunt, we thought it suited you — in your present circumstances. With a wife to support and all that. You don’t want to lose out on that — on her, I mean.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you don’t want to be the odd man out. I don’t see you going over to the ‘other side’, as you rather melodramatically put it, without your wife. And I can’t see her going off on such a caper. She’s with us too. An I O posting actually. Not active, but completely reliable, been with us some years now. So you see our offer to you is really in the nature of a safety measure — though I’m confident you can be of value to us in your own right. You’d have probably found out about Miss Girgis — Mrs. Marlow, I beg your pardon — in due course; marriage leads to so many sorts of intimacy, God help us, and this is a way of ensuring a sort of mutual security in the matter. It’s better having everyone in it together. Loose ends in this sort of operation are the only really dangerous thing. Once you married Miss Girgis we had to do something about it; you see our point, either dispense with her, which might have been awkward to say the least, or take you on — which I’m sure you’ll agree was much the more civilized response. I’m confident you won’t let us down — your marriage may depend on it.”

I looked at Usher in astonishment, yet savouring the beginnings of that elegant considerate double talk which was afterwards to become so familiar to me. Part of what he had said was true, certainly. But which part — and for what reasons? And why the need for lies and truths in the first place — and why those particular lies and truths? I hardly know now what I had no inkling of then.

“Do think about it — think about what I’ve said. We’re not scoundrels, old fellow. We didn’t hire the Embassy for the afternoon, you’re not being invited to join some illegal organization, a lot of gangsters; this is all perfectly above board — relatively speaking.”

He ended the sentence in high good humour, accentuating the idea of a gang being involved in this charade as a ham actor might play up the role of a wicked uncle in a Victorian melodrama.

“And now, Basil, would you help me indoors before that inquisitive Bishop finds me here. Though perhaps,” he said, turning to me, “only the truly inquisitive could have found their way into this privy. You’ve really invited this on yourself, Marlow. Uncanny really, we thought we might have to use some pretext … it shows very suitable initiative on your part, if I may say so. Just what we want.” And he bowed slightly in my direction, inclining his great white head just a fraction in a gesture of patriarchal assent; and then an equally limited flicker of his eyelids, the skin passing very rapidly up and down over the watery blue orbs, like a coquette in a silent film. And he was gone, propelled by Crowther on what I now saw to be not only a deck chair but a deck chair on wheels.

It was impossible to say whether he really had a bad leg, was pretending to have — or had no legs at all. Henry didn’t seem to know either.

“I couldn’t tell you about it. They had to make their own minds up. I put you in touch with them — they knew about you anyway, through Bridget. I told Crowther I thought you could work for us — and what he told you about ditching Bridget was perfectly true. It may seem nasty — I mean underhand in a personal way, from your point of view, but the alternative could have been worse — ”

“Christ Almighty — how could it be worse? Marrying someone who doesn’t tell you what they’re doing, what they’re really up to. What could be worse?”

I’d left the Embassy, furious. “You’d better talk to Henry, I can’t explain,” Bridget had said. “Obviously not,” I’d added, and Henry and I had gone once more to a corner of the bar at the Cosmopolitan.

“What sort of lark is this anyway? If it was anything serious you can be sure they wouldn’t have let me in on it — those two pooves. That reptile Usher — does he really have a bad leg, or no legs — or what? It’s a lot of utter nonsense. Cloak and dagger nonsense.”

“I don’t know how many legs he works on. I deal with Crowther anyway.”

Henry smiled wearily and shuffled his hair about with unusual timidity. I wondered how much of his explanation had been prepared, for he must have been briefed about, expected, this confrontation for some time. Were there to be lies from him as well? — lies one would never know of. Henry had always seemed to me congenitally blunt and straightforward; it was difficult to see in his character any sort of restraint — least of all a discretion imposed on him by others.

“Yes, it is a bloody lark,” he went on. “And cloak and dagger. The lark part — is Usher and Crowther. But remember, they’re only ‘countrymen’—liaison with London. And at that end it’s all perfectly serious. The more so now since the serious gents, the hatchet men, who used to be here, they’ve all been chucked out. Crowther and Usher are the only two left here with what’s called ‘open cover’; they can live here under quite proper bona fides — Crowther in the Consulate and Usher in his Mameluke house by the Citadel. He’s an Arabist, a Moslem — and God knows what else in that line. The place is crawling with all sorts of youngsters and desert knick-knacks. The fact is the two of them can behave pretty much as they like, for the moment — drum up every schoolboy fantasy, since they’re the only two senior people left in the circle out here. They’re indispensable from London’s point of view — and they know it. Hence their rather unorthodox approach in your case. It’s also true of course that they really want someone in Suez. They tried to send me. Anyway, that’s about them. In fact they must have complete confidence in you, or else, as you say, they’d have hardly embarked on the details today. Usher would have just weighed you up and I wouldn’t have been saying all this.”

The son of an Egyptian landowner, down to his last million, and a regular at the Cosmopolitan at this time of night, struggled up to the far end of the bar, swinging his arms about and shouting, in a wave of lonely bonhomie. Henry returned his greeting diffidently, only raising his hand towards him, palm outwards, in a way they had always acknowledged each other’s presence. On other nights Henry would have joined him, or he us, but tonight something kept us apart; again, that unexpected restraint on Henry’s part — like a drunkard far gone, embarking unwillingly and for the first time on a cure. Henry had a job to do with me. I wondered what it was.

“I suppose they think they’ve got me in some way — that’s why they’re confident — through Bridget: that I’m bound to work for them since I’ve married her. What have they got on her?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Her parents. They’d blow her and that would be the end for them in Maadi — and Bridget. It’s an old hold — and there’s no use arguing the morality of it because there isn’t any in this sort of snooping and there never was. It’s just a job. You can kill people with just a wrong word down the telephone anyway.”

“No morality, all right. But belief surely? Usher and Crowther, they believe in it. And you?”

“Oh yes, they believe in it,” Henry said, easy suddenly as though giving the response to a well-known riddle. “And that’s more than enough morality for them. Crowther and Usher, they believe all right. In different things. Usher has the old Anglo-Arab approach, Lawrence and so on; the Englishman and his desert: the delicious punishment under the stars, the mystique of the empty places, the ritual in everything; the extreme concepts of honour and pleasure — honour among men and pleasure with the boys; the tough, sink-or-swim male society with its inexplicable, cruel, deeply pleasurable rules — like school. In fact for people like Usher the Arab world is just a great big public school, with the deserts for playing fields and Mohammed as the mysterious Headmaster, where they never have to grow up. And Usher hates Nasser for doing away with it all, for closing the old place down. Crowther’s just a Tory civil servant who believes in the Englishman and his castle, that the Suez Canal runs through his drawing room on the way to India and so on. He believes in the toy soldiers aspect of it all — and giving the wogs a lesson. And he likes the mystery and the rumour and the deceit of the job as well — the hiding from Nanny before bedtime. That’s how he never grows up. They believe, and I understand it. It’s the romantic attitude.”

“And you?”

“I don’t believe. I took the job on years ago, at a low ebb. Money, interest, adventure even — perhaps I wasn’t able quite to throw over the Boy’s Own Paper stuff — but I don’t believe in it. Perhaps that’s the pity.”

“But they don’t have anything on you — you could get out.”

“Perhaps I’m fitted for the job. People are, you know. It suits them to do certain things, it’s good for them even, like a regular bowel movement or an apple a day.”

“And you’d ‘blow’ someone — you wouldn’t worry — if you were told to?”

“That would be London’s decision — area committee or head of section — ”

“But would you do it — do away with someone, which is what it amounts to? Bridget for example — if you were asked to ‘blow’ her, as you call it, or if you even knew about it, what would you do?”

“See that it didn’t happen, that it never got to that stage.”

“If you didn’t know anything was happening?”

“That would be awkward, certainly. Except that I think I would know about it — unless they wanted to blow me as well — since I run her. I’m her ‘operator’, I’d have to know, unless, as I say, they wanted me for the high jump as well, since I’d have to get well clear of her before that happened. Bridget and I have open contact as well as cover — our circumstances happened to have allowed for that. If the Egyptians got on to her I’d be the next most obvious link in the chain — or you — even if she didn’t break down which she probably would. That’s the way we have to work it out here now — open cover, open contact, almost nothing clandestine — which is another good reason why they want you involved. You’re one of us. Married to Bridget. There’d be something suspicious if we weren’t all together a lot of the time. But for Christ’s sake don’t take it all so seriously — this business about blowing people out here — it’s not going to happen, there are far too few of us. They want to get people, not blow them.” He grabbed a handful of Sudanis, threw them into his mouth, and finished his gin. “Come on, let’s go back to Bridget and have some food. Don’t be so glum about it, you’re with us now. At least we won’t have to pretend any more.”

“That’s charming, I agree. One doesn’t want to deceive one’s wife more than is absolutely necessary. What would you call our arrangement now? An ‘open troika’, I suppose?”

Henry smiled briefly, warmly; the smile between friends when one of them has said something quite without consequence. He got up and left the barman a ten-piastre note in a busy fashion and we went down the steps of the hotel and into the night, like a steam bath now and loud with the racket of the tric-trac boards in the small cafés which bordered Soliman Pasha, and the wail of music from the radios on the shelves beneath the portraits of the President: photographs, garish oil paintings, posters — in whatever form, a reminder everywhere of a disputed Saint; a saviour or a rogue — or simply an object of indifference? I had never thought about it: that ubiquitous, tigerish face, like an ambitious barber’s with its darkly brilliantined scalp: caught in the unflattering glare of the coloured neon so that it readily assumed all the lineaments of “the enemy”.

Suddenly I felt as though I’d just arrived in a different, well remembered country and despite the overwhelming presence of the street — the smells of some sharp spice, ginger or nutmeg or copra, riding on an air of paraffin and old leather above the cooling dust — I felt there should be train whistles and snow and soot in the night air, the sense of something unwanted and forgotten, and not any of those other marks of the city that I’d become so familiar with.

“The train now standing at platform seven is the 8:45 Irish mail for Hollyhead, stopping at Rugby, Chester, Crewe… change at Rugby for North Wales …”

I remembered. The damp, cold succession of Septembers and Januarys, seven-and-six for the taxi and the first month’s pocket money, the doors slamming all along the train, greyhounds whimpering in the guard’s van, the condensation already thick on the view of Chester Cathedral: the end of every summer and Christmas — the beginning of a journey to a bell at seven next morning, to a life where life would be out of my hands. That was what I remembered — what Henry and Bridget and Crowther and Usher had reminded me of all day.

“Damn it — this bloody place.” Henry was struggling with his shoe which had stuck in a patch of moist tar on the pavement. We’d stop at the Soliman Pasha roundabout waiting for the run of traffic to pass.

“Perhaps not a ‘troika’, Henry — aren’t we all ‘double agents’? Isn’t that the term you use? After all, you and I and Bridget — we don’t really believe in any of it, do we?”

Henry walked out from the pavement suddenly so that I had to grab him off the wing of a taxi.

11

Bridget was laughing the moment she opened the apartment door, rushing forward to kiss me, as if there had been guests and jokes behind her and we’d arrived a little late for a party. On the sideboard were several bottles of wine and a bottle of that Gordon’s Export gin which I’d thought we’d finished long ago. This was to be a celebration of sorts: a private affair, not in any of our old public haunts, but behind curtains with the lights turned down and the radio tuned to the BBC, like proper conspirators. She’d arranged the table in the living room — an intimate dinner for three: a red tablecloth, which we never use, and a silver candlestick, a cherub supporting a bowl, a present from someone which she usually kept out of the way on the top of the bookshelf.

And it was a new Bridget; a public Bridget, no longer petulant, diffident, but liberated, now that all three of us had been joined in a secret: a woman perfectly released by the outcome of a professional arrangement, not through any private association, not by love, not by me. For the first time since I’d met her a year previously in the Continental she had assumed again, freely, willingly, that true intensity of character which had first attracted me to her and which I knew now she had withheld from me ever since.

There was a vast pleasure in her face, her bearing, in the way she looked at both of us, touched as casually as we moved around her — a fierce coquetry, as if, in amazement at the chance, she were starting an affair again with two old lovers simultaneously. She seemed to want this to be a joyous, irresponsible, loving homecoming, in which every failure and disappointment of the past, hers and ours, would be forgotten. As an echo of this happy determination, perhaps, she was wearing the same cotton house-coat that I knew from a year before and I remembered the casual, clumsy beginnings of our relationship which I had shared with Cherry in the same room the previous summer. Yet Cherry, at that moment, with his bumbling passions, his innocence — seemed to be part of a far more happy and irresponsible world than this.

“Dear Peter.” And I was kissed again, while Henry poured out the gin and went into the kitchen for some ice. This time, I thought, there’s ice. In just a year we’d passed from awkwardness to respectability.

“You seem happy.”

“I couldn’t tell you. Didn’t Henry explain?”

“Yes. That he was your ‘operator’. It all seems so childish.”

“Perhaps.” And she sat down on the old chintz chaise-longue, head in hands, collapsing like a puppet, a sad doll. “Surely it’s better though? That we all know now. Now that you’re with us.”

“Oh yes. That’s what Henry said. It’s all much better, now that I’m on ‘your side’. But you see I thought I was already. I didn’t know I had to go through a second initiation with you. And another with Crowther. And Usher. And Henry. It’s like that game — tugging children across the drawing room over a handkerchief at Christmas — what’s it called? — ‘Nuts in May’. As childish as that. And not as fun. I thought I was part of the fun already.” I went over, drew the curtains back and looked out towards the Kasr el Nil bridge and the lights of one of Farouk’s old boats on the far shore which had been turned into a night club. “Not that I was given much choice in the matter — whether I played the game or not. You don’t mind my opening the window? I mean, you’re not expecting an air-raid or anything?”

It was hotter with the window open. The day’s heat, rising from the streets, finding no escape through the dense furnace of air which lay above the city, fell back in one’s face, with a sour, rotten smell of dust and urine. Bridget had leant back against the end of the chaise-longue, hands clasped behind her head, her back towards the window. One side of the cotton house-coat had fallen away from her body on to the floor.

“Take your coat off or something, for God’s sake. You’ll expire.”

“You said that last year.” I turned and sat down at the dining room table and fiddled with the wooden corkscrew which had been neatly laid out between the two wine bottles. “Were you preparing for all this? The dinner and so on? Was it all arranged, as a sort of grand finale to our going to the Embassy and my being conscripted? Or would there have been two places laid and not three if things hadn’t gone off properly? And which of us, Henry or I, would have been left out? I mean, if they hadn’t liked the look of me, what then? How were you so sure there’d be three of us for dinner this evening, that I’d be here?”

“Henry was sure.”

“Were you?” I turned. Henry had come in from the kitchen.

“Pretty certain. I told you. They need people here. Badly. Your credentials were impeccable and now let’s stop going on about it.”

“What happens if I decide to go back to England?”

“That’s up to you.” Henry squeezed a quartered lemon into his gin, then made one up for me.

“Oh God.”

He walked over and put the glass of gin and tonic very carefully on the table beside me like a doctor leaving medicine for a patient after the bad news. I drank half of it down, looking at Bridget over the rim of the glass, quite still on the sofa — fear, nervousness, in her face, love perhaps — as if she saw completely my predicament and had no idea for the moment how to deal with it.

Then she came across and knelt in front of me, arms on my knees, hands in mine.

“Peter, it was because of this, my work with Henry, Crowther and the rest of them, that I didn’t want to get involved with you in the first place. So that you thought me a sort of whore when we were first together. But with you, eventually, I told Henry I couldn’t go on, with not telling you. It was my idea that you go to see Crowther, that you become involved in all this — because that was the only way you could know about me. I couldn’t live with it, the idea of losing you.”

“‘Losing me’—how? You’d have stopped your goings on with Crowther, with Henry, if I hadn’t been ‘acceptable’, wouldn’t you?”

Henry started to open one of the wine bottles officiously behind us, the cork squeaking fiercely against the glass.

“Of losing you, yes,” she went on hesitantly, ignoring my question, seeing no help from Henry. “Because you can’t stop in this business, whatever they say. There’s no getting out — if they don’t want you to get out. And they didn’t, with me. So it was losing you — or giving it all up, and losing my parents. Or getting you in — and its being all right.”

“What sort of madmen are they? You mean they said ‘Square Marlow or else — ’ Get me in on the deal or else get me out of your way? And if you did neither they’d blow you — let the Egyptians know you’d been involved with them?”

“Yes.”

“It’s true,” Henry said, and he popped the cork and sniffed the top of the bottle. It was a French burgundy, rarely obtainable in those days, a Pommard. I wondered where she’d got it from. Henry, I suppose — or Bahaddin or the Greek auctioneer. I felt as if I’d crashed a bottle party, without a bottle.

“I told you, the two of them have a completely free hand here. They can do what they please. They’re fanatics. They are madmen. That’s the danger. They mean what they say; they’d certainly shop Bridget — if they’d thought there was any danger in her being with you. But they haven’t, they took a liking to you. We’ve been lucky. Now for God’s sake realise the situation. It could have been quite hopeless — Usher could have said ‘get rid of him’—he didn’t.”

Henry moved away to the window, waving the bottle gently in his hand.

“Bridget, there’s no food. I forgot to pick it up. Let’s drink the wine and go out.”

“Let’s finish the gin first.” Bridget got up, kissing me briefly again — as if these small repeated contacts might somehow convince me of her good intentions in the whole stupid matter — and went back to the sofa. We finished off our gins, vehemently, quickly, like strangers suddenly trying to be friends.

“We can go to the boat,” Henry said hopefully. “There’s food there. We can dance.”

“Bahaddin’ll be there. He usually is. Bahaddin.” Bridget repeated his name abruptly, almost with disgust. “He’s part of the whole thing as well. He’s with us. Henry was going to tell you.”

Henry nodded his head sadly, as if embarrassed by the further complicity, this additional character in the charade.

“Oh — what is he? ‘Active’ or ‘passive’? Or ‘Information Only’—or is he the gunmetal man, stalking the alleyways and embassies with a.38?”

The whole thing had begun, faintly, to amuse me; Bridget and Henry’s seriousness — in minutes they had become dull and unhappy and I felt it was my fault, that I had broken a pleasant day and evening, wrecked the homecoming. I smiled and they looked at me hopefully — a well-disposed audience desperately hoping for relief, looking for a laugh in a bad comedy.

“All right, it’s making us all so boring. Let’s forget about it for the moment. I’m sure you’re right, there’s nothing to it, Usher just wants me to give him a bit of gossip about the morale of the canal pilots, and I’m being obstructive, pedantic. Just I never missed the toy soldiers thing as a child. And I don’t miss it now. It all seems rather mindless to me.”

The farmers had settled down for the night underneath their corrugated paper huts against the river wall and their evening fires crackled with light all along the far pavement as we walked towards Kasr el Nil bridge. The smell of sesame, and beans cooking, and desert tinder drifted over to us, mixing with the terrible sweetness of jasmine which groups of Pyjama boys hawked around the hotel entrances, the great garlands looped around their arms and necks turning them into Michelin children.

Since afternoon the taxis had redoubled their attack, charging to and fro along the corniche, picking up and depositing groups of chattering frenzied people bent on the same pursuit as ourselves. And above all the heat, rising from the darkness, embracing everything, like a huge steaming towel: a breathless, moist evening in which everything seemed just about to suffocate and then to survive, with an immense gasp, at the last moment: everything poised for the relief of a storm which one knew would never come. Ten o’clock, June 13, the Queen’s birthday.

The boat, the Nefertiti — one of Farouk’s Nile steamers, a long graceful Edwardian affair — was moored on the far side of Kasr el Nil bridge near the main entrance of the Gezira Club. Its aft promenade deck had coloured lights along the rails and streaming down from the mast, and a small Italian orchestra was tuning up, plucking dissident strings, underneath the funnel.

In what had been the Royal Lounge under the bridge there was another orchestra, a restaurant and a bar, and here we had a drink before going out for supper on the fore deck. It was early and hardly crowded. I recognized Farid, the manager of the boat, with a party of friends at a large table outside near the rail. Some of his guests hadn’t turned up, there were empty spaces here and there, but he was in high good humour — jumping up and down, toasting and being toasted, a little scut of a man, bald, with a half rim of hair going from ear to ear round the back of his head. It was his birthday too, apparently. Giant pitch-black Nubian waiters in blues and golds, like coloured pictures from a child’s Bible, padded aloofly round their table, pouring out whiskies and dumping ice from great silver bowls, strangers to this tribal feast.

“Bahaddin! We thought you’d come. How are you?”

Bridget was the first to see him as he ambled up to the bar in a crisp white jacket, slacks, frilly Italian dress shirt and a bow tie. In the light of her earlier bored attitude to the possibility of his being on the boat that evening she seemed unaccountably pleased by his arrival.

“Good evening.” He kissed her hand, bending down much lower than necessary, more than usually punctilious in these gracious formalities which he so enjoyed.

“What are you doing? Have dinner with us.”

Perhaps it was just the day’s drinking that gave such extraordinary warmth to Bridget’s invitation.

“I’m very sorry — I’m with Farid and his party. I wish it were otherwise.” Still holding her hand they looked at each other for a moment with an awkward knowingness, like two people in a wedding photograph, before he turned away.

“How are you, Henry? — and don’t ask me about my ‘O’ levels. I’ve given them up for the summer. I’ll try again next year, if you’re still around to help me.”

And he laughed easily, as if these exams were an old joke between them, worn thin with use, a cover for quite a different pursuit, as I now knew them to be.

“What, you didn’t get them then?” I asked.

“I’m afraid I didn’t sit for them, sir.” And he took out some money and began to play with it on the counter, looking at me curiously, and then at Henry behind me.

“Don’t go on calling me ‘sir’, Bahaddin. I’m not a schoolmaster any more.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I had been wondering how things were with you — about work. I’m sure I could help you out — ” And he added, as if the fact were proof against all mortal difficulties: “My father is coming over from Aden next week …”

He looked at me with genuine concern, running what I now saw to be a Maria Theresa dollar between the fingers of one hand like a conjurer.

“It’s all right, Bahaddin. We’re getting Peter a job. He’s with us now,” Henry broke in quietly. “We’re all together. Are you going to buy us a drink?”

“I won’t congratulate you — I won’t take your hand, too obvious — but I’m very glad. Most happy.”

And he was. Like everything he did or said, he meant it. He nodded his large head slowly at me several times, like an old cricket coach from the boundary, determined to offer some acknowledgement of my honour, albeit clandestinely. He was a person, I realized afterwards, with a far too highly developed sense of the proprieties for the job in hand.

“Yes — a drink. By all means,” he continued. “A quiet celebration, a decent drink, before I have to fulfil my other objectives.”

“Obligations, Bahaddin, not objectives,” Henry said. And Bahaddin ordered champagne from Mustafa, the squat Sudanese barman.

We lifted the tall tulip-like glasses — which Mustafa said he’d rescued from Farouk’s pantry, keeping them for just such an occasion as this — and drank a minute toast to each other. From a distance, if anyone had been interested, our little group must have appeared suspiciously subdued. I was beginning to feel drunk and didn’t like the taste; the champagne fizzed in my mouth, reanimating all the other tastes of the day, with a stale nausea. Bahaddin drained his glass.

“Well, I mustn’t stay — but very good wishes.”

He bowed again, picked up his cigarette case and gold Dunhill and made off, pushing his way delicately among the crowd of people who were rapidly filling up the room.

“Everyone’s pleased. It’s as if I’d just got engaged — though I can’t remember anything like this when I was …”

“Let’s not talk about it here.”

“Come on, Peter. Dance with me — before you fall off the stool. Get some air.”

“I’ll join you.” Henry went off towards the lavatory. Bahaddin meanwhile had joined Farid’s party amid scenes and shouts of great welcome. Their long table faced over the small brightly lit square in the centre of the foredeck where couples were trying vainly to keep up with the measure of a new Italian number. The orchestra, a recent import from Milan, and perhaps unaccustomed as yet to the fiery Egyptian nights, were themselves showing signs of fatigue in sustaining the fast rhythm, and had it not been for the sudden and unexpected arrival of Bahaddin on the floor they would, I’m sure, have quickly changed to something slower in tempo. As it was they were forced to keep up the murderous pace for a good five minutes more, going full blast, as Bahaddin and a woman careered over the boards in a frenzied, kick-stepping dance, half Charleston, half twist, clapping their hands, separating, coming together again and even squirming around each other’s backs, arms linked overhead, their hips and feet retaining the furious beat of the music.

I’d not seen the woman before. She must have arrived by the front gangway, one of several latecomers to Farid’s party. Perhaps she was Bahaddin’s new girl or something and yet, besides the interest which Farid, like everyone else, was taking in this wild dance — which had really become an act, clearing most of the other dancers off the small floor — there was as well in his wrinkled urbane face a distinct measure of distaste as he watched their antics; Farid looked at the woman as if she, as well as her dancing, were out of place. There was no good-humoured understanding in his consideration of the spectacle — an attitude he might well have taken, as he had before, in the high spirits of his birthday guests; she might have been an unpleasant stranger to him and I thought simply, remembering Farid’s real proclivities in sexual matters and Bahaddin’s good looks, “He’s jealous of her. She’s snapped up Bahaddin before he’d got his hand in. He’s the angry suitor. He shouldn’t have asked her.”

The woman — girl really, she hardly looked twenty — could have been Italian or Greek, not Egyptian, with her long, sharply triangular features and dark hair parted down the middle; a classic strangely formal face, childlike and unmarked, bland and empty in a way, like a photograph taken before first communion or a Renaissance virgin in the Uffizi. And yet it was she who led the dance, encouraging Bahaddin to ever greater flights, always one step ahead of him.

Henry had joined us and we sat round the table we’d booked on the opposite side of the deck to Farid’s party, next to the river wall.

“Who is she?”

“No idea. Not one of Farid’s friends. He’d never risk inviting someone so attractive. One of the girls with the orchestra perhaps. She’s quite something.”

People had come out of the bar and had crowded round the floor, several deep, thinking the cabaret had started early, so that we had to stand up to see the last tumultuous flourish of the dance. Their hands linked across the floor together, the girl was spinning Bahaddin round in circles like a weight at the end of a piece of string — his face quite without expression, his body so relaxed, inert, that its animation seemed due to centrifugal force alone and not to any muscular process. The music finally exhausted itself in a long crescendo of chords and drums. But the two figures spun on in silence afterwards, only gradually losing momentum, unwilling to release themselves from what appeared now as an intensely private affair, not connected with the music or the place. At last they stopped, faced each other for a moment in surprise, like strangers, standing quite still — and then, taking no account of the applause which broke over the deck, they disappeared among the press of people on the far side of the floor.

“What on earth got into Bahaddin? Was he drunk? He didn’t look it,” Bridget asked and the people drifted away and the band mopped their faces, looking pleased and super-cilious as if they, and not the girl, had been the reason for this outburst of enthusiasm.

“Who is she?” someone asked at the next table.

We could see Farid’s party now but she wasn’t there. Bahaddin had his back towards us and was sitting next to an elderly European lady who seemed to be congratulating or berating him without receiving the smallest flicker of a response.

The orchestra broke into a ragged version of “Happy Birthday” and everyone at Farid’s table stood up, glasses in hand, and toasted the beaming figure at the end, now fully restored in his traditional self-satisfied humour. They mouthed the ridiculous words with embarrassment, for they hardly knew them, so that the old lady had to lead the song, like a matron at Sunday school. I supposed that Farid had once had some service of her — as an entrée to a sexual opportunity among the English community in the old days perhaps — and that thus, unwittingly, she had been numbered among his guests this evening. And I was wondering about this when I saw her trying to manhandle Bahaddin to his feet.

For everyone had stood up except Bahaddin.

Instead, with the old lady’s prodding, he fell across the table like a happy drunk. And because we all thought this to be the case, that drink and exhaustion had taken him, and seeing the waiters help him indoors, we thought nothing of it until fifteen minutes later.

Henry and I were with Farid when Mustafa came up to tell us that Bahaddin looked more than drunk. And he did. When we got to the cabin amidships he was quite obviously dead.

“My God. At my birthday party. Are you sure?” And Farid looked at us hopefully, humming something light-hearted under his breath, as if there were still some small chance that the evening’s entertainment might yet be saved.

“How can you be sure?” he continued desperately. Henry told him to shut up.

They had opened Bahaddin’s frilly collar and he lay on the bare coiled springs of an immense brass bedstead with Farouk’s initial worked in gilded metal above his head. The cabin had been part of the king’s private quarters and was now used as an office and a store room so that Bahaddin lay surrounded by crates of whisky and wine and piles of tablecloths which had been thrown off the bed on his arrival. One of Farid’s assistants sat at his desk, talking to the police, apparently unaware that Bahaddin was dead, for he kept on mentioning the word “drunk”.

“Yes, completely drunk, passed out. Can you send someone round to take him off? Yes — the Prince. Bahaddin. Yes, I’ll be careful. No. Just too much to drink.” He turned to look at the little group round the bed as if to confirm this last point but Henry had moved to block his view. He looked at me briefly and then nodded towards the door. Farid was still fussing round the body, pinching Bahaddin’s cheeks, slapping his face, vigorously massaging his chest — as if his life, and not Bahaddin’s, depended on it. He was almost in tears.

“My God — what will I do? He cannot be dead!” He might have been his father.

“Just stay here, Farid. Ill get a doctor.” And we left the room.

“Get Bridget off the boat. Go to the Gezira Club. I’ll join you there. Don’t wait. Hurry — move.”

I picked up Bridget and we got off the boat moments before a police car swung off the bridge behind us and turned into the Gezira corniche.

“What’s happened to Bahaddin? What’s going on?”

“He’s dead. I don’t know how. Henry’s going to meet us at the Club.”

“No. That’s nonsense. Let’s go back.” She spoke seriously, precisely, as if I were drunk and playing some stupid prank. She turned and we both looked back at the boat. Already the police had barred both gangways, a second car had arrived with plainclothesmen and the music had stopped: there was a confused angry murmur of voices, the sounds of orders and imprecations. We walked on briskly towards the Club.

It struck me how quick and efficient the police had been in getting to the boat — just for a drunk. And then I remembered that it was a dead drunk and the implications were suddenly clear: I’d come to see Bahaddin in several ways: as a friend, as an engaging part of the city’s décor — the eternal playboy always doing his “O” levels, suitably weary, almost middle-aged; as head prefect at Maadi, taking assembly, going in first to bat, sharing his endless packets of Player’s with me late at night in my room; Bahaddin with his suite on the top floor of the Cosmopolitan and his many wives back home. And that was the clue, the thing about him I’d quite forgotten: Bahaddin, the scion of one of the great families of Islam, heir to one of the richest thousand square miles in the world, to an ancient kingdom whose strategic, financial and moral position in the Middle East was of vast importance to Nasser in his bid for leadership of that world.

To have such a figure publicly drunk as a guest in one’s country was bad enough; that he should die apparently as a result of that excess suggested an embarrassment to Egypt so monumental that I could only guess at its political implications. But that was what it amounted to. And the next step was easy enough. What if someone had contrived such an embarrassment? — and there were many who might have — the French, the Israelis, the British; they had done their best to get Nasser off the map a year previously; how better to continue their efforts than by eroding Nasser’s prestige among his Arab neighbours — by knocking off one of their Crown Princes? And finally there was Bahaddin the British agent, his last role, which everything else had been a cover against, and perhaps the one that had killed him. It hardly seemed credible, least of all when Henry explained that he’d had a heart attack.

We’d met later on that evening in one of the Club lounges looking over the cricket and croquet pitches, the last few elderly members folding up their bridge games under the table lights so that we were almost in darkness.

“Yes, I got a doctor. And there was another who came from his Embassy. A coronary.”

Bridget had been numb with some sort of emotion and had hardly said a word in the half hour that we’d waited for Henry. Now, her fear or nerves quite gone, she levelled a barrage of impatient whispered questions at Henry.

“How? A heart attack? He was perfectly well. They must have got on to him, that he was with us. I thought they’d got you too.”

“No. There was no question of that. It was the dancing, I suppose. It must have been. Some people just go like that. Suddenly.”

I remembered the girl with the dark hair.

“The girl then. What about the girl?”

“What about her?” Henry said. “Unless she knew that Bahaddin had some sort of heart condition. What’s she got to do with it?”

“They’ll do a post-mortem?” Bridget asked.

“I doubt it. His father was coming over here anyway next week. They’ll take the body home. Untouched. Like the Jews, these families don’t go in for the idea of cutting up their relatives. I can’t see why it wasn’t just an attack — why do you think it wasn’t?”

“I can’t see why you’re so sure it was. It’s too convenient. People of Bahaddin’s age, whatever it was, don’t drop dead after a few drinks and a dance. He’d been doing that sort of thing most of his life.”

“Perhaps that’s what happened. It finally hit him.”

“The point is, Henry — and you’re being very thick about it — surely he was murdered in some way: if they weren’t after Bahaddin because of us, then what could they have been after him for — and who could? Anyone who wanted to do Nasser a very bad turn. And who would that most likely be?”

“A lot of people — ”

“But particularly who?”

“The French, the Israelis — ” Henry paused, resenting the logic of Bridget’s questions.

“And the British,” she added. “What about them? What about London?”

“Don’t be mad. I’d have known about it.”

“They could have sent someone in.”

“Why would they? He was crucial to the circle out here. London knew that perfectly well — worth far more alive, for his work, than as a pawn in any power game. The main thing is they’re not after us.”

“How do you know? Security here may have had a lead on Bahaddin — which would have led to us — if he hadn’t had his ‘heart attack’. That would have been reason enough to get rid of him.”

“You mean Crowther and Usher? They had something to do with it — and didn’t tell me? Hardly.”

“You said they were madmen, quite fanatic about the whole thing out here — that they’d do anything,” I added. “If they’d heard something about Bahaddin …”

“I don’t know what you’re going on about. There’s a chance he may have been killed. All right. It’s a possibility. Some personal trouble or jealousy back home — one of his numerous uncles or brothers wanting a crack at the throne, it’s happening all the time where he comes from. But the idea that he was part of some international plot is absolute conjecture, I don’t go for theories. Until I know any more I’ll settle for what the doctors said it was — heart failure.”

And so his death was described on the back page of the Egyptian Gazette the following day. What wasn’t reported, on that day or any other, was that the Sheik’s Mission to Egypt was withdrawn by the end of the week, along with thirty-eight million sterling held on deposit with the Bank Misr as part of a development loan to Egypt, and that the Ambassadors and other senior officials of three other Arab states had left the country by the end of the month. A good part of the Arab world outside Egypt was aflame with indignant editorials though no breath of this appeared in the Egyptian press and no other papers which dealt with the topic got further than the censor at the airport. None the less these facts and rumours — this scandal, along with its glittering centre-piece — quickly spread among the bars and cafés of the city: that Bahaddin had been poisoned. By whom? Unlike Henry, the Cairenes were much given to theories and Bahaddin’s death provided them with an orgy of speculation.

Incidental to all this, everyone who had dealt with Bahaddin at the school, or who had been in any way connected with him in the city, was closely questioned by the police. It must have been a long job, which in my case, at least, was conducted with meticulous thoroughness.

“Yes, I was on the boat that night. We spoke to Bahaddin just before he joined Farid’s party. I was a teacher at Maadi, out here on a contract, yes, you know about that. With the ex-British schools …”

I rambled on through the details of my connection with Bahaddin and my presence in Egypt. And Colonel Hassan Hamdy, from the Army’s special security branch, I assumed, made a pretence of noting these facts although I could see that he had in front of him my file from the Ministry of Education and must have known nearly as much about my activities in Egypt as I did.

For some reason I’d been called not to the main police building up by the railway station in Ramses Square but to an office at the top of a new twelve-storey apartment block which housed the Ministry of Information in Soliman Pasha. And then it struck me that, of course, with anyone who’d been as closely involved with Bahaddin as I’d been — and likely to give a lead — this part of the investigation would have been passed over to the Army who ran everything of importance in Egypt in those days — then as now.

“Forgive me for pressing these details but you can see our embarrassment in the whole affair. We have to go into everything very carefully. You’ve heard the rumours of course?”

“I’ve heard a few, yes.”

“You don’t have to worry about incriminating yourself, Mr. Marlow, this isn’t Scotland Yard. I mean, that he was murdered, poisoned?”

“I’d heard that, yes.”

“Of course there’s no proof. They wouldn’t let us touch the body. But the police doctor thinks it wasn’t a heart attack, some sort of quick poisoning. Of course normally we would have thought that he’d been killed by one of his own people, a relation, a rival for the succession. But that’s not the way his family see it. And I must admit that nothing’s happened in his own country since to suggest that any sort of coup de palais was the reason for his death. So we have to look into all the other possible motives.”

Colonel Hamdy was unlike the usual Egyptian army officer at that time in that he spoke English perfectly, with barely any accent, and was middle-aged — early fifties, I’d have said. He might have been a British colonel really, with his little half-moustache, his tired, civilized features, his lanky frame and air of casual lack of interest in everything. He seemed to have finished with his wars long ago; there was no sense of urgency or viciousness in his approach, which I had expected. We might almost have been chatting in a London club, except for the heat, which the tiny fan on his desk did nothing to alleviate, and the baking smells of refuse and hot tar which rose from the street engulfing the small room. He pressed a buzzer on his desk and ordered coffee.

“How do you like it — mazbout?”

“Please.”

He came out from behind his desk and we sat down at a table with a tourist map of Egypt embedded between two sheets of glass on top of it. He must have taken over the office from someone in that division of Egyptian Information and I noticed an elaborate legend on the map, surrounded by dolphins and a mass of coloured fishes, south of Suez town, advertising a new underwater fishing resort on the Red Sea.

“Suez,” Usher had said. “We need someone in Suez.” But I wasn’t worried that the Colonel knew anything of this. I’d not yet come to think of myself as being on the far side of the law.

“You like it here, don’t you, Mr. Marlow? I suppose most people in your position would have gone home — having lost their job. Most of your colleagues have left, haven’t they? When their contracts ran out.”

“Yes, I like it. I’m married to an Egyptian.”

“Oh? At All Saints’?”

“No. The British Consulate.”

“Mr. Crowther?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re not English.”

“No. But there’s no Irish Consulate here. And I was born in London. They can do that sort of thing — you take out dual nationality.”

“Yes, I suppose so. It just seems strange — your being Irish. I thought you people didn’t get on too well with the British …?”

“That was years ago.”

“So you intend staying on here then?”

“Yes, for the time being anyway. I was hoping for another job. Teaching.”

“Well, I wish you luck.”

The Colonel switched the conversation rather awkwardly, as if, having done his duty in putting me at my ease, he had now, regretfully, to embark on the real purpose of our meeting, a more delicate topic.

“You knew the Prince pretty well — didn’t you?”

“He was a friend, yes. I liked him, we got on well together. I suppose you could describe him as being rather mature for a schoolboy. We got on as equals. I can’t see why anyone would have wanted to kill him,” I added without thinking, as if the dialogue we were having was part of a play.

“Can’t you?”

“I mean — apart from one of his relations, as you said.”

“You mean he wasn’t the sort of person to be mixed up in these sort of affairs, these political intrigues?”

“Yes. What intrigues — ?” I stopped short. The dialogue had suddenly gone wildly astray from the text.

“Well, he was a British agent, their Middle East Intelligence. The Cairo-Albert circle. Called after the school I suppose. Rather a hopeless outfit, though of course they’re short-handed at the moment. Even so, it was extraordinarily amateur. I hope you may do better in it. Add a little sense to the whole thing. You’re not a fool.”

The Colonel looked at me with an easy, appreciative expression and went over to his desk where he picked up a pipe and a flimsy sheet of paper which he brought back and handed to me. It was a copy of some sort of Intelligence report, with the heading United Arab Republic: Ministry for the Interior. It was in Arabic except for the anglicized names which were written down in a column mid-way through:

Usher

Crowther

Edwards

Girgis

Prince Bahaddin

And then with some sort of explanation in Arabic before my own name:

Marlow

“I see our Security people here assume that you’ve already joined them.” The Colonel lit a pipe. “Their usual optimism. You’re still thinking about it, aren’t you? And Miss Girgis — she’s your wife. Isn’t that right?” There was a polite tone of enquiry in his voice, almost of condolence, as if she’d had an accident. “Mrs. Marlow it should be now of course. A husband-and-wife team. That was rather an ambitious ploy of Usher’s, wasn’t it? Getting you involved with them in that way. I wouldn’t have credited him with it How would you describe it? Investing in the private sector?”

“You see, Usher found out that we were on to Bahaddin — and had him killed. It suited him rather well really. Apart from stopping Bahaddin talking, and I fancy our people here would have got him to do that, there was the bonus, the quite substantial bonus, of the embarrassment he knew his death would make for us. And he was quite right: one of the few professional things Usher’s ever done. Quite in line with the accepted principles of this sort of work — a pawn for a queen. What puzzles me is how Bahaddin ever got involved with them in the first place, what they had on him, how they got him in. In his position I’d have kept a mile away from Usher and his friends. He must have realized that he was a more than usually valuable property in the game, marvellous potential as a sacrifice, not so much for his work but because of his political importance. He must have known they’d get rid of him if his cover was ever broken, if not before, for the sake of the capital gain.”

The Colonel’s voice took on a chatty, enquiring tone. He seemed genuinely curious about the whole matter and to be inviting my comments on it. I said nothing.

“Perhaps it was all just part of his Anglophilia — like Hussein of Jordan, walking around without proper security and shopping at Harrods; a sort of dare-devil foolhardiness. I suppose that English school at Maadi bowled him over with those old-fashioned ideas, about adventure and empire and the lesser breeds. He may have seen himself as a sort of Lawrence of Arabia in reverse — ‘Bahaddin of England’—I’ve seen a lot of my contemporaries go like that out here. I can’t see what’s wrong with being an Arab. He was a real one too. You’d have understood that surely? Being Irish. And married to an Egyptian. Don’t you find it all rather tiresome? This wanting to be something else, somebody else, in life — and not what you are?”

“It’s the curse of the profession, I should think. But I agree. It is stupid. I said so at the time.”

“You’ve not joined up with them yet then — have you?”

“No.”

I knew already what Colonel Hamdy had in mind: the same sort of blackmail that Crowther and Usher had used, except that he would introduce it more discreetly, in the same agreeable manner that he’d brought to our conversation since the beginning.

“Can you have lunch with me? I must just change my clothes.”

When he came back, the Colonel was in almost bell-bottomed slacks, a yellow cotton shirt and faded silk cravat.

“I have a room at the Semiramis — a dining room. You go on. The first floor, at the end, number 136. I’ll meet you there.”

We had lunch on the terrace of what must have been a sort of senior security men’s dining club, under a parasol, looking over the river. There were grilled steaks of Nile perch to start with and a bottle of white Ptolémées on ice.

“From the old Roman vineyards outside Alex. Have you been there? A Greek gentleman — there he is, Gianaclis, on the bottle. I used to know the family — he started it up again in the last century. I rather like it. In fact, unlike some of my colleagues, I’ve never doubted the civilizing influences of all the many cultures who’ve found a place in this country over the centuries. Though I must admit I never expected to see the Irish as part of that great tradition. Your health.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to take the job you’ve been offered, Mr. Marlow. That’s all. If you’ve been in any doubt about it let me tell you it would be the best course open to you — for you and your wife. And your friend Mr. Edwards. And I want you to tell us all about it.”

“I thought you knew all about their operation here. You seem to.”

“In Egypt, yes. But I’m sure you won’t be spending all your life here. If you do well, and I think I can arrange things so that you will, you’ll be promoted, sent back to London, where some of the real news about the Middle East comes from. We’d like to know about that. Obviously. Does the whole thing shock you? I mean, you don’t seem to have been very enthusiastic about working for Usher and you may not be for us either.”

“I don’t think I have much choice — from either of you.”

“On the contrary. You do have a choice. You could go and tell Usher what’s happened and he’d have to pull you all out of here — including himself. We could put that to some advantage. We could make something of that.”

“You could round us all up and give us thirty years apiece too, couldn’t you? Or shoot us. Wouldn’t that be even better?”

“Yes, we could do that. If we had to, if it were forced upon us. But it’s a much better idea, isn’t it, now that we know about you all, so that your outfit is harmless to us anyway, to turn the screw the other way, to make it a long-term operation, find out how your people manage things at the centre, in London, as I was saying.”

“Why me? Why didn’t you go for Crowther? Or Edwards? You could have got a lot more from them.”

“We wouldn’t.”

The Colonel eased his cravat, ventilating his body against the heat, and looked out over the river. He drained his glass with an expression of kindly patience.

“You’re a beginner, not marked yet. Not trained. The others would have shut up shop at once, wouldn’t have given a thing away. They’d have had their thirty years rather than let out a squeak. And it would hardly have done to bring your wife into the matter.” He smiled, not facetiously, but in a way that made me think he meant this. “But really, what I’m getting at is if you thought it worth your while working for Usher — then why not us? Apart from the accident of your birth you’ve no special connections with Britain. Just the opposite in fact, I’d have thought — being Irish. You should ask yourself again — why work for Usher, why consider him and not us? What are you having next? There’s a set lunch or would you like to have something from the à la carte? There’s not a great deal, I’m afraid. Perhaps a salad and a steak. And some of Gianaclis’s Red? The Omar Khayyam. That’s rather good too.”

He rang a bell for the waiter who didn’t recommend the steak. We had Kebab Semiramis instead: the pieces of lamb and red pepper cold, on a skewer, in a marinade of oil and lemon; and Gianaclis’s Red.

“Personally I’ve always thought it madness to go round threatening people — prison sentences, shootings and so on — unless you have to. Think about it, be rational. What we’d want from you would be no more than Mr. Usher wants of you. And if you can in any way justify his needs in the matter above ours I’d be pleased to hear how you do it.”

“I can’t. I don’t see any justification for either point of view. And that’s the trouble surely — to do this sort of work properly you have to believe in it. And I don’t. I prefer looking out over the river, being here, in the world, drinking the wine. I’ve never taken to those hard-bitten frontiers of right and wrong — in nationalisms or private affairs; a sort of tabula rasa of belief, I’m afraid. I came too late to see countries in a pecking order, one above the other, one against the other, too late to see people as toy soldiers. I never played that game.”

I looked at the Colonel’s striped cravat, like a regimental tie, and thought: he has. And he’s tired of it in some way; the slacks and the chatter about wine; toy soldiers and some army’s colours; they suited him once, they were part of an obsession — but not any more.

I felt that I had talked to him in the way I had because some great disenchantment in his character had allowed it, encouraged it even; because he secretly agreed with me. There was none of Crowther’s cunning or Usher’s flamboyant theatricality in the Colonel. And I felt suddenly that Egypt might well be my home, as Bridget was my wife, and that between the two of them perhaps, if anywhere, lay the kernel of the only sort of belief I was capable of. I was beginning to like Colonel Hamdy.

“Yes, perhaps you’re right,” he said. “Toy soldiers. A younger generation, fed up with the mess; the kind of world we’ve left you with. I can see all that. You’re quite right to want no part of it, to get away from something that we’re trapped in. But you see — I can’t escape it — ”

“—Then what are we worrying about? You agree with me. I’m not your man.”

“I said I could see your point of view, Mr. Marlow; not that I could agree with it. That’s always the tragedy, isn’t it? Seeing but not believing, not being able to. You see, as far as we’re concerned in Egyptian security you are one of Usher’s people. There’s no going back on that. I may believe otherwise, in fact I do, but the others never will. And that being so the rest follows. What I said earlier.”

“That I work for both of you?”

“One without the other wouldn’t be much use to us.”

“And if not?”

“I’d prefer not to go over it all again. Believe me, I really don’t choose to use threats. I’d hoped to appeal to your logic, to suggest to you where your real interests might lie — and I still do: I want you to see the thing in reason. And I think you will. But the real point I was going to make before you interrupted was that you’re trapped, just as much as I am. With the toy soldiers. You’re completely compromised. And that wasn’t us, remember. That was Usher, Crowther, your friend Edwards. Your wife even. You were compromised by your friends, Mr. Marlow; you became part of their circle. They had no alternative but to include you in their real affairs. Nor have I.”

12

We met that afternoon at Groppi’s and had lemon ices on the terrace. It was July and the heat had become unbearable.

“Did you have lunch?”

“A sandwich.”

“Well, tell me all about it. What did they say to you?”

“Nothing much. Routine. They don’t have anything on us.”

I was lying to her, at last. I knew something which she didn’t. But I felt no sense of responsibility, of doing the right thing, the only thing; for her good and Henry’s. The Colonel’s secrets ran about in my mind, oppressive, inescapable, like the weather — an almost physical presence, I thought, which anyone could have recognized if they’d looked at me, like a tic or a bad haircut.

Bridget sat there easily on the little garden stool, the line of her body arched over the table, elbows on her knees, hands clasped around her face; there was an air of comfort and trust about her. She was like a tired child looking into the fire waiting for a story.

I thought: I could tell her now. Tell her all about the Colonel: get it over with. Aren’t we more important than their games? Even than her parents, even Henry … Couldn’t we accept the consequences, ride it out together?

The consequences. Surely, if it were ever discovered by Usher or Crowther, there could only be one consequence in working for “both sides”. They didn’t retire people in the middle. They would have something quite different in store: like burying their mistakes. A house in Wimbledon or a dacha in the Moscow suburbs? For the lucky ones, perhaps, yes. For the really valuable men. I wasn’t one of them. I was simply an inconvenience — unmarked, untrained; involved simply of necessity, through the accident of friendship, as the Colonel had said. I certainly wouldn’t be missed. For Crowher it might even be a pleasure. He wouldn’t hesitate in getting me out of the way if he thought I’d been near Colonel Hamdy. And Bridget was one line of communication to him.

Bridget was a tired child that one couldn’t trust. Children told stories out of school. And Henry was no use either. For there was another Henry, not just the friend whom I was protecting by keeping silent. There was the Henry who’d known Bridget long before I had, whose past with her — days and nights together, things said and done — was still a mystery to me because I’d left it that way. There had been arrangements between them; and there still were. He was her operator after all. They had their secrets too, I felt, which I wasn’t to know simply by being in their “circle”. It was simple enough: neither of them was to be trusted.

And I thought with clarity, the idea standing out sharply as none other did: this is what it’s really like. The game. This is how it touches you — in everything, each detail of life, not just the job itself which by comparison I could see becoming a source of release, as something quite prosaic. I had come into a narrow world suddenly, made up of secrets and deceits, traversed by long and careful lies, defended everywhere against trust. And I would have to remember this each time I said anything or looked at anyone in the future. I would be reminded of it everywhere, as an endlessly repeated feeling of nausea.

This was what stretched in front of me: a disability — as if I’d emerged from the room in the Semiramis, as from a car crash, without a leg and a crutch for the rest of my life.

Bridget lit one of my cigarettes.

I said, “Let’s have a drink,” needing it now in a way I’d not done before.

“What did they ask you? Who did you see?”

She appeared so calm.

“Just my connections with Bahaddin. The school and so on. I told them the truth — as we agreed. That we went on to the Club, that Henry joined us there.”

She drew deeply on the cigarette, sipped the whisky the waiter had brought us and said hopefully, with relief, as if she too felt that our life was beginning all over again, but in a happy way: “The thing now, surely, is to continue as if nothing had happened. Get the job in Suez. Apart from Crowther — it would be something for you to do. Some work.”

“Why do you suppose I would get work there? I’ve been thrown out of one ex-British school here already.”

But I knew there would be no trouble. When I’d put the same point to the Colonel he’d smiled and said it would be the easiest thing in the world; they actually needed an English teacher in Suez, apart from needing a double agent there as well. It was something which he’d hardly have to “fix” at all. Once I’d made my decision I was to apply to the Ministry of Education in the ordinary way. The application would go straight through, the place would be kept open for me.

“You could try it, go and see the Ministry. We could go to Suez now in any case. There’s a new resort down the Red Sea. Underwater fishing. Couldn’t we do that — and get out of here?”

“Money?”

“We’ve got it. I got it this morning, through the Council library; that’s the way we’re keeping in touch now, through books, I’ll tell you about it later. It’s your money, from Crowther. And I’m due two weeks’ leave from the office. We could leave the place altogether …”

She was happy, enthusiastic. It seemed a sensible change, a move from the unbearable city that Cairo had become, something which, in ordinary life, we would probably have done in any case: a few weeks by the sea, lying in the sun, and looking at the fish. In fact it was a cliché, perfectly translated into action — it was the point of no return. Once on the road to Suez I was in Crowther’s hands, the Colonel’s. And Bridget’s. They came together in a package; the professional, the personal, obligations. The alternative was an exit visa. Or a boat coming through the canal. And both were as unlikely a means of escape as a trip on foot across the Sahara … It hardly mattered now. I would have to work for them. The Colonel had made that decision. But again, the feeling swept over me, one had to pretend; if one spoke at all one had to lie; that was the other side of the coin, the second secret of survival: only pretend.

And I thought, we blame life for our disillusions whereas much more it’s the trespass we make away from it that sends us over the precipice.

13

No one has written a true book about happiness, so they say. But that fortnight was happy. So perhaps it alone, among the incidents of this story, may not bear description.

We lay on the beach under a long canvas awning that had been put up over the sand and we swam with goggles over the coral that sloped gently out to sea, and among the coloured sea plants and strange fish. At night we slept in a small wooden cabin at the end of the line, naked in the dry air of that burnished marine sandscape. The cabin was like a cell; just a chair, a medicine cupboard with a mirror and two army camp beds which we strapped together with an extra sheet that Bridget had weedled out of the manager. The resort had only just opened and apart from the goggles had no other underwater facilities. None the less it was full up and the other guests never lost an opportunity of telling us how unlucky we’d been in getting one of the end cabins that hadn’t been “properly finished”. We didn’t listen. We were living again in the present, after so much that had been unreal; living in that uncomplicated adventure of the moment, caught for once in the fabric of life where we saw or felt nothing except with the eyes and heart. We looked at each other again; and it was that regard which played by far the biggest part in our loving each other then: her face, moved into so many patterns by her thoughts — thoughts, I know now, she could not admit and others she was barely conscious of — which rose up, like the tide filling the indentations of a strand, flooding her face with desire, humility, sadness — with all that she really felt, so that her real words, when she spoke, seemed no more than apologetic, unnecessary captions to a series of unique photographs.

We invent passion: so that it can become a thing in itself, without past or future. It has to be invented. We made love then, we lived, so fluently that I can only see that passion as a quite separate creation, as something which had nothing to do with our real selves, and which died when those selves intruded and demanded the same accents.

I had spoken to her one day about our staying on in Egypt, not going back to England, of my making a career there in some way. And she had said doubtfully, “You mustn’t cut off the approaches, your approaches, to yourself. This country won’t always satisfy you.”

“Us, I meant. Won’t it satisfy us? Don’t you have to live here?”

“How can I tell anything now? What should I say?”

“Why are you so doubtful?”

“I’m not.”

But she was.

On our last day she sent a postcard to Henry.

“What’s the point?” I asked. “We’ll be seeing him when we get back to Cairo. Or you will anyway.” And she said seriously, “How do you know?”

In the middle of September we went to Suez. The school was a tiny yellow building with a corrugated iron roof at the other end of the main street from the Bel Air Hotel where we lived. It sat right on the edge of the desert so that on coming into the town from the Cairo road it loomed up before the other buildings of the place came into sight like a small fort, an abandoned outpost from Beau Geste, with a wall round it, a tall flagpost in the concrete yard at the back and a lifeless flag.

Mohammed Fawzi ran the place. “Fawzi Esquire” as he Jiked to be addressed. I imagine he considered the suffix as an important Anglo-Saxon title, resting somewhere between plain Mister and being a Lord, so that he became known to us all as “Esquire”.

There were two other teachers there who, like me, had been sent down from Cairo, Cassis and Helmi, and the four of us spent most evenings together, sampling the few pleasures of the shoddy little town; the second show at the Regal Cinema, cards, drinks at the Refinery Club outside Suez, or the French Club at Port Tewfik, and odd trips to the Casino, a strange little night club five miles up in the Attaka hills to the south. At other times we had supper with Cassis and Helmi looking out over the Red Sea from rooms they had taken high above the oily waterway.

“‘Neither the Arabian quarter, with its seven mosques and unimportant bazaar, nor the European quarter, which contains several buildings and warehouses of considerable size, presents any attraction.’” I read them the passage out from an old Baedeker I had brought with me one evening.

“It’s not changed much, has it?”

And Cassis, who taught English, had said, “But it has a Biblical importance, or perhaps,” and he looked at Helmi who taught geography, “perhaps one would put it better by saying that the place has a certain geophysical interest.”

“Oh, yes.” Helmi took the allusion confidently and more bluntly. “If you stepped from a boat out there, way out there, you would only be above your knees.” And he went on to explain the Bible trip, how the Israelites had crossed over the Red Sea because they knew the line of sand bars which ran right across the neck of the bay and how the wicked Egyptians, who didn’t know the route, had been swallowed up. Helmi was a Copt.

“Before they made the canal you could walk right across the bay — if you knew the sands. They were very various. Even now you can walk right up to the canal channel. And that’s what happened. The first group knew their way across. And the others didn’t. Or got lost in a sandstorm maybe, that often happens here. Quite suddenly. Phut! Whizz. Finish!” Helmi moved his arms in circles vigorously about his eyes. “You see nothing and the boat can upset Here, take a look through these glasses. You can just see where the sand bank ends and the channel begins.”

I looked through the binoculars, scanning the bay from the headland at Port Tewfik right down to the red and violet haze which hung over the horizon far down the gulf. Twenty or thirty ships lay at anchor in the roads, waiting to go up the canal in the night convoy. And to the right, along the coast, in the shadow of the hills, two Russian tankers were berthed at the refinery jetty. I could even make out their names. If that was the sort of information Crowther really wanted, getting it didn’t appear too difficult.

And in due course I was able to inform Henry of these shipping movements, the frequency of buses and trains to Cairo, the name of the secretary of the Greek Club and the time of the first house at the Regal on Sundays. Henry reported that he was perfectly satisfied and Bridget agreed that Crowther seemed even more of a fool than I’d taken him for.

My relations with Colonel Hamdy were equally uneventful and satisfactory. I passed on to him exactly what I gave Henry for Crowther. And every so often I’d get a message in return: “Very glad to receive your good news. Look forward to meeting again.” This correspondence was conducted, whenever we came to Cairo for week-ends, through Rosie, the Greek telephonist at the Semiramis Hotel, and through the receptionist at the same establishment. I used the letter rack behind his desk, dropping an envelope in the compartment marked “H” for Hamdy on my way to the gents while the Colonel left his messages with Rosie; which I later picked up from the large assortment of similar billets-doux on blue paper which were kept for customers on a board outside her booth. A great many people used the hotel in this way, as both post office and telephonic poste restante, the official channels in Egypt for such communications being notoriously uncertain.

14

But I stopped working for the Colonel, as I did for Crowther and Usher, for by the end of the spring term I’d stopped living with Bridget, had left Egypt and returned to London.

Our marriage, like the events consequent on our first meeting, went through appetite, satisfaction, farce and enmity; it ran a fixed course for the rocks, the two of us struggling gamely at the wheel to keep it steady. And soon enough we had reached that point where words became as useless and unnecessary as they’d been in the times when we were most at ease and happy. We were genuinely incompatible. It was a classic journey.

Bridget resigned herself to the fact that whatever I might become, or might be “underneath”—in more favourable circumstances — I was not the person she thought I was, expected me to be. She had been mistaken. I was not the “right” person, and there would be therefore, at some future date — she didn’t know when, for she would not precipitate it — an end to it all. Meanwhile she would close up shop.

I, on the other hand, seeing her running, hiding in this way, the words drying up like a guilty witness, dropped the role of lover and assumed that of detective. I became a genuine agent — proficient, ruthless, imaginative — in a way I never did with Usher or afterwards with Williams. A St. George in dark glasses and shoulder holster. The battle was on: I would save love.

Why we play this game, to which we lend a passion we never quite give to loving, I don’t know; unless it be just one more of the unconscious steps we make towards our real ambition, evidence of our secret craving, which is to end love, to be released from it.

Bridget would be disappointed, of course, in having to assume again that truth which is implicit in all affairs — except the one shared with the “right” person — that love does not last. But to offset this there would be room for congratulation: she would have faced this demise with me — and survived; and she would have learnt something for next time, for the next person. And there would be that, wouldn’t there? — another time, someone else; in a bar or at a party, the friend of a friend. Above all she would be free again. Once more she could pick and choose from all the huge promise of the future; the charm of the unexpected, so long withheld, would once again be lying in wait for her — the unknown passions she would embrace, which already existed in the form of someone who even now was rising towards her, along the lines of destiny, to that future point where their paths would cross.

It was a girls’ story, something from a popular magazine. I thought Bridget was like that — though not at heart; I was the literate man who would bring her to better reading, wreck her conventional assumptions, explain a serious love in a long book.

Neither view was real. I was the agent running to the crime, the man from the gutter tabloid on to a good story, forcing the pace, getting a foot inside the door, flourishing the cards of desire. And it cannot have surprised Bridget; it was quite in keeping with the form these protracted endings take. It was natural that I should become the inquisitor, pondering the clues of a vanished emotion, marshalling the evidence, with which, when I knew everything else had failed, I would indict and slander her, so that we should both part satisfied, that is as enemies, happy in the knowledge that all the proprieties had been observed. It was natural, because only in being arraigned and accused in this way could she rise guiltless and clear above the sordid argument I had reduced our association to.

It ended. A simple failure of the imagination. I came to inhabit the cliché: I couldn’t accept another man’s future with her, someone unknown, the stranger who would climb on my shoulders into the light, smiling, after a strong gin and a romp, appreciating the river view; the man who would replace me in those empty afternoons when there was nothing to do except the one thing we had done so well. I shouldn’t have worried about strangers; I knew the men well enough at the time, and came to know them even better. In other circumstances I should never have charged Bridget with infidelity. Fidelity was really her strong point.

The three of us had a drink in the Continental the day I left to get my plane to London, Henry with us, as I thought, in the guise of a friendly receiver for a bankrupt. It was early summer, with the usual warnings of savage heat to come — the crowded first class carriages to Alex, the flocks of shimmering cars on their way out over the bridge through Dokki to the desert road, while those who remained in town became animals, searching out intuitively the darkest corners, the deepest shade, emerging only at nightfall to feed and ravage. We had Zibib and talked about the weather; polite inconsequential chatter. We left each other as perfect strangers.

Henry had said he would get Usher to recommend me for a job with Mid-East Intelligence in London, something quiet, “Information Only”. I told him not to bother, that I was thinking of something else altogether. “Besides,” I’d said, “you don’t know about it, but I met someone, a Colonel Hamdy …” And I told him what had happened six months before. He laughed.

“Hamdy? Military Intelligence? As long as it wasn’t the Political Intelligence, they’re more serious. But Hamdy, he’s doing that all the time. It’s happened to most of us out here at one time or another — happens to almost everyone in this business; subversion, blackmail, infiltration — we played a game with each other out here, his set-up against ours. I shouldn’t worry about that.”

I didn’t. I never mentioned the fact when Williams first interviewed me. But of course I joined headquarters establishment in London before the rot set in, when there were still things to hide, secrets to betray, and little or no screening. I got in just before the vets arrived, before the doors were finally bolted on the deserted stables.

Why? Why did I bother with a pursuit that had already wrecked one good part of my life? In those weeks in Cairo I had acquired a taste for conspiracy, and deceit, almost a craving, a loyalty towards betrayal. This ridiculous sense of vengeance didn’t last but it was enough to carry me to Holborn, to make me almost a professional in a trade I had scorned before. One speaks of “turning” a man in our line of country — turning him into a double through psychological or physical pressure; of making him deny his own “side”. But the expression is misleading in that context; one is “turned” in this way from the very beginning, through some reverse or imagined slight, or some long-nurtured sense of injustice; it can start in childhood, or later, through a childish response; the seed blooms in secrecy that is the nature of the business, doing much ill; one is “turned” only from the business of sensible life.