The Private Sector

1

I didn’t try to remember anything as the taxi jumped and swerved along the airport road into the city: either remember or compare. I told myself — all that was ten years ago, this was now. There were few cars on the road and fewer lights, just the swishing shadows of airline billboards and half-completed buildings on either side of the highway. I might have been driving along the airport road of any warm, desert country. I was a traveller being taken to his hotel with a decent enough suitcase, a change of linen tropicals, a carton of Philip Morris, a bottle of Haig, and an allowance of £11 a day made up in £200-worth of American Express travellers’ cheques, to include expenses …

I had simply a business connection with the city: Edwards was supposed to be somewhere in it. And perhaps, in the unlikely event of my finding him, we might have a good meal together at the Estoril, a lager at the Regent, an afternoon at Gezira, and then come back to London and no more would be said about it. And if I didn’t find him I’d do these same things anyway, make a few discreet inquiries and get back home.

I was as tired of intrigue, suspicion and difficulty as I’d ever been in my life — and I’d tell Henry so if I came across him: that was the purpose of this trip, to find him and tell him he’d been right. There was nothing else, for I’d exhausted my past in this city as well — on the flight over with too much burgundy and too little sleep.

All I needed was to finish off this business as quickly as possible, with some pleasure perhaps, and get back. Then, with or without Henry, I would decide whether Williams and the Arab press still claimed me — or whether there was any real alternative in the Olive Grove Syndrome, the song-of-the-man-at-forty, the village in Galway.

I turned the window right down. There was just a smell of burnt newspapers and urine riding strongly into the car on the night air. Had there ever been the drift of sesame and spices, cloves and brick dust, through open windows here? — or the one thing in the empty afternoons we had done so well?

They gave me a room on the top floor of the Semiramis looking out over the river. Nothing had changed in the hotel, but there was no one I recognized. It was past midnight; the huge Edwardian shell of the building seemed not so much asleep as deserted. There was a new electric map of the city by the reception desk with coloured lights behind the various tourist attractions, and buttons that you pressed underneath to identify them. One of them had stuck and a light was flashing on and off half-way up Soliman Pasha Street. I looked at the label on the button: “Ministry of Tourism and National Guidance, 12 Talaat Harb.” The old name had gone but not, I noticed, the Perroquet Night Club in the National Hotel further up the same street. I pushed the button for it, so that a green parrot started to flash on the map and not the Ministry of National Guidance.

Cherry, Herbert Cherry of Greystones, Co. Dublin, had once attempted to play the trumpet in the orchestra there and they’d taken a month’s wages off him before they’d thrown us out. I would look for Cherry in the morning. The ubiquitous, fleshy, nervous Cherry. Cherry, our man in Cairo.

The English language magazine that Cherry worked for was edited and printed from the offices of the Egyptian Gazette off 26 July Street on the road up to the main station. They’d had an old copy on the hotel bookstall and I’d looked at it over breakfast. It was called Arab Focus and was done in a print and on a paper which quite belied its title. I tried to detect some of Cherry’s idiosyncratic Dublin-English in the mass of translated articles from Al Ahram and the Cairo weeklies, but I could find nothing of him at all in the arid prose about the High Dam, the stories about the last — and the next — Arab summit. I suppose the magazine wasn’t the best market for stories about greyhounds in the back of taxis on the way to Mullingar.

“Twenty-four Sharia Zakaria Ahmed,” I’d said to the cab driver outside the hotel and he’d then repeated the address to a policeman at a kindergarten table by the head of the rank.

“What’s that for?”

“Tourist police. We have to tell them where we’re going. With foreigners. Though you don’t speak Arabic like a foreigner.”

“I used to live here.”

The driver grunted and barged the car through a crowd waiting to cross the main El Trahir Square, before swinging round, bumping within a foot of a tram, and then going up Kasr el Nil to the centre of town.

Already, at ten o’clock, the Midan was a cauldron, well on the boil: scribes and photographers under black umbrellas, gesticulating with envelopes and from behind velvet drapes, were manhandling petitioners in front of the huge Education and Home Affairs Ministry on one side of the square; hefty galibeahed and skull-capped farmers tore round the central island, Ben Hur fashion, in huge-wheeled ass carts like gun carriages on their way back into the country from market; children in oversized, stained pyjamas were selling ballpoints and grubby trinkets at every corner; soldiers with a day’s leave gazed blankly at the mysterious improbability of the flower clock next to the oily waste of the central bus stop; while the disintegrating maroon buses themselves, with dozens of people hanging on with toes and ringers to the outside, heeled over gracefully on the roundabout like fishes, the tips of the mudguards scraping up the soft tar.

Nothing had changed on the Midan in ten years: this arid, scrubby, filthy, dangerous hodge-podge of baking concrete — the “Hub of the City” which had repulsed so easily so many attempts to “integrate” it, or “improve” it since the British had left and the old Kasr el Nil barracks on the same site had been destroyed. It remained a no man’s land between the bridges over the river on one side and the town proper to the east.

I had lived here. In the blazing light with the sweat bubbling already under my arms, there was no chance of denying it now.

On Kasr el Nil, moving the old European centre towards Soliman Pasha roundabout (he had been replaced by the hero Talaat Harb, bird-limed in his cocky tarbrush), things were more shabby and broken down than ever. The once pompous Haussmann-plan streets, the ornate French-Levantine-style apartments with their excessive curly stucco, decorative rue de Rivoli arches, balconies and roof balustrades, were all rubbing away, splitting, in the crackling hot-cupboard air. The pavements were an obstacle course of blistering, volcanic mounds; the traffic lights broken coloured spectacles winking a pale white light; a plate-glass window had gone in Au Salon Vert and sand blew in through every doorway.

True, it was May and the end of the Khamseen winds — that part of the year when the city, in the best of times, very nearly gave itself back to the desert — that scorching, gritty breath which now, without money and the foreign adventurers long gone, made it seem as if all the buildings had been detonated and were simply waiting to be pushed over, like trees standing firm as ever after the blade has passed, the moment before the fall.

“Ah,” El Khoury said, “Mr. Cherry has had — an accident? — no. A trouble? — yes.” Mr. Khoury’s English stumbled and doubled back in much the same way as the language did in his magazine. He led you on with it in sudden leaps through horrible misunderstandings only to dump you, equally ignorant, in the waste spaces among “abbreviations” and “recent additions” at the end of the dictionary. His office for Arab Focus was in a corridor of the Gazette building, at one end of it in fact, so that we sat opposite each other, pretty close to, with a few feet to spare on either side of our chairs, Mr. Khoury with something less than that for he was a large man with moist locks of dark hair round his ears, broken yellowish teeth and very bloodshot eyes — eyes which seemed to have looked long and without reward on some sunspot nirvana.

“An accident? Trouble?” I queried.

“A wife — his wife,” Mr. Khoury responded vigorously, suddenly hooking on to the right words with a huge smile. “She is not very well. In fact — ” he paused, massaged his stomach under his shirt, then wiped the sweat off his hand on a blotter, “—she is very bad. You will like to see her? Yes?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. I remember her when I was last here. She’s French, isn’t she?”

“Franciowey. Aiowa.” He broke into Arabic. Then he glanced doubtfully down at his fly. Then the hand went under again.

“And you are here to do some stories,” he continued after the moment’s repairs. “The New Egypt. The new UAR as we call it. We can reprint them. The new High Dam, the new Arab summit, new pyramids from the World Bank — we are very keen. We will talk for a long time about it You will have food with us. I am very glad to see you. There will be much talk about it.”

“I’d thought really of doing a fairly simple colour piece — ‘Life in Cairo Today’‚ that sort of thing — ”

“Of course, of course,” Mr. Khoury interrupted. “We will do that. I will show you the new hotels — the El Borg, the Cairo Tower, the TV centre at Maspero, one of the very best — I think we have some English equipment — bathing, holidays, Nile cruisers. We will do everything. My wife will be very pleased to help.”

“And perhaps something on the antiquities, I’d thought. You’re doing something new at Sakkara, I understand. Looking for Imhotep’s tomb — ”

“Mr. Marlow, I tell you frankly, everything is new. With the antiquities we are doing many new and wonderful things. Very up to the minute. And I am doing a drama myself. In four acts and a prologue.”

Mr. Khoury shuffled among a crowd of typescripts and paper rubble on his desk. He produced a small booklet, a play in English by Taufiq Al-Hakim, a well-known Egyptian writer.

“There.” He handed me the play in triumph. “Mine is so much different. This man is talking about townspeople, Cairo people, talking and having their coffee in Groppi’s. I am writing a story of country folk — the world of the village. the man who comes to the city. The pressure — ” he raised both arms in hold-up fashion and then brought them together about his head, a cage of fingers over each ear “—the pressure of urban disturbances on the rural mind. The millennia of the past — ” he opened his arms out again “—faced with the millennia of the future!” He opened his arms wider still so that his fingers bumped the walls on either side of him. “These are the things of most importance. I am calling it Yesterday and Tomorrow. We will talk about it”

“It’s most kind of you — ”

“You say ten years before you were here — teaching at Maadi?” I nodded. “You know, three times I have been in London since then. Three times. The Strand Palace Hotel, I always stay there. You know Mr. El Bakri at Chesterfield Gardens? He has an apartment now near Kew Gardens. Very strange luck — no? You are knowing him, I expect. We were always eating at Lyons restaurant in Piccadilly — you are knowing that place too, I am sure. What good times we had in London — what a place! Well, we will be arranging things for you here, Mr. Marlow, I can assure you. You are at the Semiramis? At what time are you free tonight? You will meet my friends and we will talk seriously, most sensibly. And I will prepare a programme for you between time. Six o’clock at the hotel then. I will be waiting on you.”

Mr. Khoury stood up in a hurry.

“May I confirm that with you? — I have to see if I can find Mr. Cherry. Where do you think I might get him now?”

“Ah, of course, your friend Mr. Cherry. I have not seen him for some time. He writes English for us now and then. His wife is very — not well …”

“In hospital?”

“I am afraid yes.”

“Where?”

“The Anglo-American in Gezira. She’s French, you know,” he added regretfully. “Behind the Cairo Tower, you can’t miss it. A most unfortunate occurrence, I’m sure. A toudaleur then, Mr. Marlow — and I must say I can’t say how nice …”

A ragged porter, who insisted on carrying Khoury’s gift to me of the last twelve issues of Arab Focus, saw me down the dark circle of stairs smelling of machine oil, and, having had his five piastres in the hallway, ushered me out on to the boiling street.

I took a taxi back to the Semiramis and lay down at once. I’d felt very queasy in the cab and now, on the bed, the room started to tilt and veer around me; the ceiling moved. I must have had a temperature, it seemed too soon for a go of Gyppy tummy. There was a nineteenth-century Italian print on the wall: a ruined temple on a hill, with shepherds and flocks of assorted animals in the foreground. A classical landscape. It twisted slowly on its axis, goats walking up one side of the frame, the ruined temple sliding down the other. I was unable to take my eyes off it. Pain shot up the back of my neck and I realized I was twisting my head violently trying to steady the picture and get it level again. I gave up and left the frame to slide around as much as it wanted. It proceeded to spin and flutter like a wagon wheel in a Western.

The terrace doors were open and the remains of the Khamseen wind kept the muslin curtain steadily flapping against the glass. I seem to have been quite conscious of the noise it made — and of the cries drifting up distantly from the corniche outside, the water lapping against the embankment, the slowly circling ray of sunlight passing over the end of my bed — throughout the rest of the morning. All the same, during some of this time, I must have dropped off to sleep more than once. For the dream I had, in reconstructing it immediately afterwards, was half fact, half fiction — the first commenting on the second, as I fell in and out of consciousness.

I had started to think about my last day in Cairo ten years before. I was catching a TWA flight that evening back to Paris and the three of us, Henry, Bridget and I, had just left the airline office in Opera Square where Bridget worked and she had given me a folder with my ticket in it.

“A drink in the Continental?” Henry suggested. And we had gone there and sat up at the dark, mirrored bar and Angelo had served us arak in tall whisky glasses, ice-cold water circling down the outside. The bill had been forty-five piastres, plus the service, and Angelo had put the strip of paper in Henry’s little glass behind the bar, on the first shelf of bottles. Henry was staying on in Egypt, his credit was good. But my own sherry glass was there as well, full of previous chits, at least two hundred piastres worth. Was Angelo going to ask me to settle up with him now? — had they told him I was leaving? Or didn’t he know? I’d have to tell him I was leaving myself, and pay up. But when? Now — or at the end of the session? However I handled it there was going to be an awkward break — this saying goodbye to Angelo, paying my bill. It would be the beginning of the end, a public acknowledgement of my departure — and I was absorbed in wondering how to face it. I was determined not to get involved in any goodbye business.

We drank on at the Continental for an hour, swapping polite inconsequential chatter — English teachers taking the morning off with a girl in town … We’d arranged to go on for lunch at the Estoril.

All this was fact; it was exactly as it had happened. But in the moments after remembering it, when I’d fallen asleep, the dream came which was quite different. Instead of going to the Estoril we were driving down Soliman Pasha in a taxi, to Bridget’s flat in Garden City, the heat lapping round the car in waves.

The lift wasn’t working and when we’d climbed to the top of the building we had gin from the cardboard crate which Bridget kept under the chaise-longue — the three of us, romping around the small burning room, throwing our clothes off, laughing and chattering like bright sparks at a cocktail party.

And then Henry had suddenly gone into the bedroom with Bridget — as simply and naturally as though it was an arrangement, an appointment they’d had together which we’d been aware of for a long time.

I stood at the window, my back to the bedroom doors, chuckling, sipping more and more gin, looking out over the river, perfectly happy, until Bridget called me, her head half-way through the glass doors.

“It won’t work,” she said. She seemed to be shouting at me, her sun-burnt face showing up like a full stop against the yellow whiteness of her body. “We can’t get down. We’re trapped.”

“Why ever not? “I said casually. “The door isn’t locked.” And I moved towards it. It gave easily in my hand, swinging inwards, and the afternoon sun dazzled me. Instead of the door-mat and corridor there was a small window ledge where my feet were, with some withered plants in pots, and below them the outside wall of the tall apartment block, a sheer drop of twelve storeys to the corniche below.

When I woke, I had opened my eyes several times, thinking about this, but had closed them again, drawn back each time by the memory of the dream — trying to re-achieve it; its light-headed smooth dazzle, its sex, its extraordinary reality. And for moments I was part of it once more, could feel its exact shapes and sizes, but soon there was nothing left; I had exhausted it. I kept my eyes open the next time. The landscape on the wall was rock-steady, frozen goats and broken grey columns.

I got up and went on to the balcony and looked to left and right along the rooftops of the buildings on the corniche. I could just see the top of Bridget’s apartment block in Garden City beyond Shepheard’s Hotel. She was probably still there, living in the city. She might even be in the same place. Her parents were dead, I knew that, and in the years afterwards, when Henry and I had met again in London, he had never told me that she had left Egypt. After the first bits of news he had given me about her and her family, and after our marriage was dissolved, we had dropped the subject altogether.

But now it was different. Henry was no longer my only consideration in the city. For the first time in years I was thinking of Bridget again, thinking intensely, trying to imagine where she was and what she was doing, wondering whether I might not simply go up to her old apartment and ring the bell, or phone her. The dream had suddenly freshened everything about her, the details had re-created her completely: I had seen her face again, the dark triangular features, the eyes so far apart and the nose turning slightly upwards like a petal. And in the glass doorway of the bedroom the same barely formed body, the narrow shoulders and wide hips. A woman in her late thirties now, somewhere in the city. I was sure of it.

2

Bridget had gone out each evening for food, but Henry and the Colonel had not set foot outside the apartment in Gezira for more than two days. They were by now nervous and short-tempered and all of them were thankful of the three separate bedrooms which the accommodation offered. It was an old turn-of-the-century block on the island and the apartment ran right across the building, fronting on to Gezira Street and the river on one side and, from a covered terrace, looking out over the playing fields of the Sporting Club on the other.

The place had belonged to an aunt of the Colonel’s, distantly Jewish and aristocratic — a minor grande dame of the city during Fuad’s and Farouk’s time — who had spent her life there and died just before the revolution when the Colonel had quietly taken it over as a possible bolt-hole, a “safe” house. The furnishings were immensely heavy and portentous: pseudo gold-caked second Empire mixed with a few genuine oriental pieces — a wooden filigree harem screen by the drawing room door, a silver hookah with passages from the Koran finely inlaid, and some Persian lambswool rugs, barely trampled, deep and splendid as a snowfall. All the rooms were dark; there were few enough windows in the apartment in any case and over those were hung tall velvet curtains which, when they were fully opened, let in no more than just a central A-shaped panel of light.

The three inhabitants seemed to move on perpetual tiptoe over the heavy carpets. One of them would enter a room on some casual errand only to find that, without intending it, he had frightened the wits out of someone else already there. There was a telephone in the hall which they had moved on its long extension to a heavy armchair by the drawing room window, putting cushions round it, stifling the very possibility of its ringing. And it never did.

The Colonel had made two calls, both to someone in Athens — a coded message dealing with the export of so many kilos of dried fruit. He had explained that it was his contact with Central Office in London and that all they had to do now was wait.

Henry wasn’t convinced. He had never heard of any Cairo-Athens contact in his experience with the Holborn section; on the other hand, it could have been a uniquely Central Office link. In any case he wasn’t prepared to run for it on his own just yet. The only contact he could make would be with the KGB Resident in Cairo. And he hadn’t made up his mind about what welcome he might receive there. He was “resting”. That’s what the house was for, he told himself: a “safe” house.

Bridget listened to their tiresome conversations about British Intelligence, about how and when they would all get out — an English boat passing through the canal, the same thing at Alexandria, disguises at Cairo airport, or as BO AC freight. There was something false and constrained about their talk, she felt, because they wouldn’t get out, would they? The Russians — and even the Egyptians too — managed these things with ease, to spirit people away in foreign places, in trunks and packing cases with chloroform over their noses.

But not the English.

They no longer had the bite in their intelligence service for that sort of thing; their men got caught in Prague with false-walled caravans or distributing religious tracts in Red Square. And how, in the best of times, was one to leave Egypt covertly? Through the Sahara on foot with a compass or a walk on the waters? Its land and sea frontiers were as open and harsh and empty and as easily controlled as the lines on a hard tennis court. They were trapped, were they not? It was as simple as that.

They talked these things round and about in low voices, drank beer at six o’clock that, without the refrigerator which had broken, now tasted dull and watery. They listened to the hourly broadcasts on Cairo radio, shredding the dull communiqués for some sign of their pursuers, a sign that they were equally on the run — a feeling which the heavy soporific apartment completely denied them. They wanted some confirmation of the action they had taken, which had pulled them forever from a familiar world but which had not yet brought them any other life.

And they felt impelled, against their professional judgment and training, to stick together as much as possible now, each watching the other. For in a life of disloyalty which had just ended, mundane personal considerations were all that was left to them for the moment — the private concerns of ordinary men and women.

Thus they were careful in everything they did and polite to each other, taking on the colourings of their bourgeois surroundings; Bridget laid the table studiously for every meal and the men didn’t drop ash on the carpet. And at night they took to their separate beds like the inmates of a monastery and tried to read French popular novels of the utmost decorum and triteness which the Colonel’s aunt had collected in profusion.

The real strain in the ménage, of course, didn’t come from their predicament, or from the loss of a happy past; it came from the fact that neither of the men dared tell each other — least of all Bridget — that despite all the confessions and dramatic disclosures they were not what they seemed, that there was in each of them a final layer of deceit which they had not revealed. The two men weren’t prepared to risk the consequences of displaying their real allegiances, not merely for professional reasons, but because they didn’t believe their relationship with Bridget would survive such a confession.

“I am an Israeli agent.” “I work for Moscow.” The phrases themselves would sound ridiculous in the present circumstances, they thought. And they would not be said, or acted upon, except in the last resort, for to assume their final identity, although it might mean individual salvation, would also mean losing Bridget. Whereas for as long as both men held to their lie, both were trapped, both were secure, with her.

So the two men watched each other, and wondered, hiding their real absorptions, while the Colonel talked of the merits of Oxfordshire or Northamptonshire as counties to look for houses, and said he’d square things with Williams when they got back to Holborn. Henry would be all right, the ridiculous business with Yunis would be forgotten; he’d see to that. As for the fact that Henry had been a double, really working for the Egyptians — the Colonel said he would forget about that too. In the circumstances. And in the circumstances Henry agreed with him, describing his offer as a reasonable return for the cover he’d given Hamdy over the years.

The two men lied to each other, comfortably, secure in the knowledge that each of them would have to make quite different moves in the end. All that worried them was when.

3

I had dosed myself, and slept all afternoon and it was after five when I left the hotel to look for Cherry. The Khamseen, the fifty-day desert mistral, had practically beaten itself out and the city had an air of empty battered fatigue: resting for a moment on its knees, after the wind and before the oven of summer. Or so I thought: it might well have entered on its last rest for all the activity about: the City of the Dead beyond Mokattam seemed to have moved into the real city. The feluccas and barges had disappeared from the low sand-filled water and a soldier dozed, nursing an ancient sten-gun beneath the bronze Trafalgar lions which guarded the entrance to Kasr el Nil bridge.

A great network of streets had been built by the exhibition ground on the far side of the bridge, the Cairo Tower sticking up from somewhere in the middle of them, and I couldn’t make out where the hospital was in this ugly, half-built scatter of roads. I walked through the remnants of an arboretum, part of the old Gezira botanical gardens, with lines of broken Edwardian green houses on one side, down through an avenue of magnificent, towering Emperor palms. At the end was a long low wooden building, with a terrace and doors all along its length, overhung with creeper; a rackety, impermanent affair — a memory now, from the Illustrated London News, of one of the new hospitals in the Crimea.

“Mr. Cherry? — I understand he’s staying here. With his wife.”

A young man had come into the hallway, a stethoscope in his pocket, wearing plimsolls and a long white coat. A boy stood behind him in an open doorway which led to a dusty courtyard, throwing a ball impatiently from hand to hand. The man took off one of his shoes and thumped the sand out on the floor, knocking the heel vigorously against the reception desk.

“Yes. Yes — Dr. Cherry,” he said. “Dr. Cherry and his wife are in number 9. I’ll show you.”

The glass doors of the room were open, a length of dark muslin hanging between them, so that I had to bend down and struggle with the sand-coloured material to get in, like passing into a fortune teller’s booth. There was a smell of sugar and burnt milk inside. Cherry was sitting on a kitchen chair facing the bed reading the Egyptian Gazette and the woman in front of him seemed like a child who had been tucked in and gone to sleep for the night, the sheets pulled right up against her ears, lying flat out without a pillow, neat and still and straight and precisely rounded under the bedclothes — as lifeless as a roll of linoleum. There was a four-pound tin of Nescafe on the chest of drawers, some imported tinned milk and a primitive paraffin burner. Many elderly British people, governesses and the widows of civil servants on minute pensions, spent their last years permanently in this hospital, and Mrs., or Madame Cherry must have taken over one of their rooms without bothering, or having the energy, to change the ancient Empire decor.

She must have been an old woman, I thought, whoever had occupied the room previously, her roots in Egypt stretching back to before the turn of the century, married to a soldier by the looks of it — he’d probably been taken off with cholera in the Sudan forty years before — for the walls were covered with military photographs, yellowing in cross-cornered frames: a regiment of lancers lined up on some nude provincial midan, a formal group of officers sitting on elaborate garden furniture in front of their mess — thin faces and moustaches and scabbards scraping the dust. And there was a sampler which had been made into a screen on the far side of the bed; row on row of faded stitching in different Gothic lettering commemorating odd skirmishes in that part of the Empire: Omdurman, Tel el Kebir, Khartoum.

There was a bamboo bookshelf next to the window with broken struts all down one side, so that the shelves had collapsed over the books: a row of Victorian adventure novels in coloured pictorial boards — Cleverly Sahib, A Tale of the Khyber Pass — holding up another row of less inspiring books — Bishop Butler’s A Tour of the Shire River — which held up a third collection, a line of sporting memoirs — The Turn of the Wheel, MCC in Australia 1928 and Gilligan’s Men.

Cherry was sitting on a pile of thick blue books, so that he could get on a level with the closed eyes on the bed — two volumes of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia, I saw, when he stood up. The doctor had gone back to his soccer and I could hear the thump of leather on a wall and odd, quick cries in Arabic.

Cherry didn’t say anything. He might even have been crying. He put both his hands round mine and pumped them slowly.

“Well, I’d never have believed it,” he whispered at last. And his face confirmed it. He was like a remittance man suddenly confronted with the one relation from his past who had borne with him, vaguely understood his follies and given him lunch in his London club every July: a thinner figure now, sunburnt with bad eyes, squashed linen trousers and a red Irish tweed tie that had completely faded; the flesh in the face and neck just clear of the bones, falling away in small dewlaps, the air imperceptibly, but definitely, leaking from the inner tube. The moon face was on the wane and his hair had thinned out into one or two black strands which ran across his bald head sideways like earphones.

“What are you doing here, in God’s name?” He smiled and there was the old put-on glare in the eyes for a second.

“Looking. Just looking.”

“What?” he said in a roaring whisper. “You’re not playing cops and robbers, are you? For God’s sake! They arrest people out here now for that sort of thing. Nasser’ll bang you into the Siwa oasis on beans and water, you know …”

I looked at the wisp of fuzzy grey hair on the sheet, the dark coal-scuttle eye-lids, the pointed, slightly dilating nose: the doll’s head by the Omdurman sampler.

“I’m sorry to hear — ”

“Yes. Madame …”

He furrowed his brow and pouted his lips judiciously. A boy had done something serious at the back of the class.

“Yes, we’re waiting. Not long now, I should think,” he said, as though when his wife “arrived” we would all go off somewhere and enjoy ourselves for the evening.

“Is there another room? I don’t want to wake — ”

“She can’t hear a thing. She’s on the drugs. She was deaf lately as well. I’ll leave the radio on in any case. She always used to be able to hear that, so she said.”

Cherry turned on a small transistor by the bedside and an orchestra crackled out, and a voice — a Neapolitan tenor it sounded like, something from Puccini perhaps. The music surged and faded from its distant station as we clambered under the muslin and out of the dark, sweetly smelling tent, and took seats on wicker chairs on the terrace.

The late sun streamed through the vine-like tendrils that had grown up over the balcony and Cherry flapped about on his neat small feet like a waiter.

“Tell me — wait. I’ll go and make some coffee first. There’s a night nurse who comes on at six and I usually go to the Gezira Club for a drink then. It’s near enough for them to send a message. We’ll go on there.”

Cherry went back into the room and I stretched my feet out over the terrace and listened to the squeaky opera behind me. They were coming to the end of an act, a pair of voices tearing at each other in explosive counterpoint. Madame Larousse making an exit. Or was she? There had been no sign of illness or pain in the tiny features; the pencil of flesh beneath the bedclothes had been as calm as a small wave. The devoted Cherry — and Cherry the stringer for our Mid-East section. And Cherry the man who had once driven a taxi backwards over Kasr el Nil bridge, sitting on the windshield, his feet on the steering wheel, with the driver and myself navigating from the rear window. And Williams’s Mr. Cherry — “Don’t trust him — he doesn’t, and he mustn’t, know what you’re doing in Cairo.”

Cherry was the sort of person I should have gone on trusting — Williams the kind I should never have become involved with: a wrong turning made long ago; expectations lying in the gutter: that was what I’d believed of Henry, thinking myself tougher and less sensitive in accepting it all. I wondered about that now. The hell with Williams, I thought.

Cherry came back with two glasses of milky Nescafé and we stirred the mixture slowly like chemists.

“My God, when I got the message that someone called Marlow was coming out here … I thought you’d gone back to Dublin when you left here. And now it’s the bloody cloak and dagger stuff. You must be out of your mind.”

“And you? You’re in the same line of business in Cairo, aren’t you?”

“Not full time, not really. Not a London man on Establishment. What are they paying you? Four grand plus?”

“What does it matter? A sheep as a lamb — and you’re actually in the firing line. I’ve just been stacked away in a cupboard in Holborn with a lot of Arab newspapers. If they catch you they’ll really make you jump. Why — what made you do it? Greystones is pretty British and you used to wallop the wogs out here. But — ?”

Cherry said nothing, sipping his coffee, enjoying the mystery.

“What was it? Playing a role or something, the satisfaction of doing something exciting which no one ever knows about? Or did you have genuine ‘ideological’ motives?”

“Nothing as grand,” Cherry said. “You’re the first open contact I’ve ever had with London. I just give them the mood of the place, background stuff, cocktail chatter.”

“Give it to who?”

“To Usher of course. You must know about him. The Mameluke house beneath the Citadel.”

Usher. The ancient gentleman by the swimming pool at the British Embassy ten years before — carnation and spotless sea island cotton shirt. Crowther and Usher and the Queen’s birthday.

“Usher? Is he still here? He recruited me. I’d forgotten.”

Cherry looked pained. Someone from London should have known all about Usher. I think he almost began to mistrust me.

“But aren’t you setting up something new here? Or have I got it all wrong — and you’re really working for the Russians?”

“I’m looking for Edwards. Henry Edwards. You remember him from Maadi — or had you gone to Alex by then? He was going to run the circle here and now he’s disappeared. You never had any dealings with him?”

“A short fellow with glasses and a haystack of hair?”

I nodded.

“I’ve seen him several times at Usher’s place. A journalist.”

“That was the cover. Like mine. Yours too, I suppose. What a lot of writing gets done on behalf of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a real patron of the art. Anyway, he’s gone off somewhere, possibly out here. He was a friend of Bridget’s too. You remember her?”

Cherry smiled willingly enough. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to the wedding.”

“I didn’t manage yours either. Did you have a good time at the Beau Rivage?”

“We had the two days. She was quite old you know.”

“Yes.”

“I suppose you wondered.”

“A little.”

“She was a good woman, though. Amusing. Good company. She talked her head off, sensibly. There was nothing crumbling or faded, until quite recently. Ten good years, marvellous really. I was at the college in Alex, she took the music; a lot of laughter. Then we came to Cairo — Alex became barbaric. Then this.” He turned towards the bedroom. “Bone cancer. What happened to your wife?”

“I don’t know. She’s probably still here.”

“I meant to say — I knew you’d left her. I saw her once about three years ago, a party at Usher’s, she was with your friend Edwards, I think. The haystack.”

“Three years ago?”

“Yes. I’m not likely to forget her. I kept clear.”

“She bites, you mean? You’ve become very proper, Herbert.”

“Settled down, that’s all, I suppose.”

“It wasn’t like you though.”

“I know. It won’t be for much longer.”

He stirred the sugar at the bottom of his glass and spooned it up like strawberry jam, mouth wide, eyes agape in the old staring way. He might have become a proper man, I thought, but the old matrix, the innate rumbustious folly was not quite dead.

“Are you going to look for her as well — your wife?”

I shook my head. “Not my wife now. But I might look her up.”

“For old times’ sake, you mean? The old Marlow. At the rodeo again. Into the ring …”

“‘Lord Salisbury and party and hurry about if, you mean? And a taxi backwards over the bridge.”

“You won’t get anything of that sort of thing around here nowadays. That’s all gone. All deadly serious now. You wouldn’t recognize it.”

“What is the mood here then, Herbert? That’s your department.”

“There’ll be a war. Third round. Seconds getting out of the ring at the moment. People are jumping round the place right now, vile tempers and bad hangovers. You won’t notice it at once. Battle fever — but no battle; that’s what irks them. They’ll be slaughtered if they start. Nasser knows that, but the others don’t; and not the Army. They’re going full belt over the cliff. There’s trouble at the top too. Yunis of the ASU was talking out of school in Moscow last week. Now he’s reportedly under house arrest. Moscow wants to keep things on the hop here, keep their finger well in. That’s the mood — just a matter of waiting for the bell to go.”

“I’d rather the old times.”

“We’ll look for this fellow Edwards then — and your wife? That’s just like old times — nothing serious. Nothing about your setting up a new circle here, that was just cover?”

“That’s what they want in London. ‘Find Edwards,’ they said.”

“And how have they lost this fellow — if they know he’s in Cairo? You mean he’s gone under — or over?”

“Possibly. But I don’t know if he’s even here. It was just an idea of mine. We had a meeting — ”

Cherry let out a dreadful bellow of laughter.

“That’s really serious. We need a bit of that out here. Happy days again all right: you just dropped by to see if he was here, like you’d drop into Davy Byrne’s on a wet afternoon looking for the price of a drink if Harry was there. And if he isn’t, well, I’ll drop over to McDaid’s later, he might be there. Or the Bailey. That’s how it is, isn’t it? But they shoot people out here for that sort of thing, didn’t you know?”

Cherry, with another bark, had woken up into some kind of form.

“Jesus, nothing serious all right!”

The little opera had come to an end in the bedroom behind us. Cherry got up. An elderly country woman in a baggy black cotton dress and cap flapped along the terrace in plastic toe-hold sandals, and Cherry spoke to her in Arabic, enumerating various details on his fingers, counting out the things that would have to be done for his wife that evening, like teaching a child on an abacus.

“Come on, we’ll have a beer at the Club. I’ve got to meet Khoury there in any case. My ‘editor’.”

“I was supposed to meet him back at the hotel at six.”

“You must have got it wrong. Khoury practically lives in the Club. That’s where he meets everybody.”

4

Bridget said, “I don’t damn well care. No one can see me on the balcony, unless they can look round corners. And there aren’t any buildings opposite. It’s crazy being stuck in here.”

She opened the French windows, took a paper and a drink with her and lay down on a wicker garden couch, opening her house-coat at the neck and flapping the lapels, trying to move some of the evening breeze about her damp, hot body.

They had been there three days now; nothing had happened, the papers hadn’t mentioned anything of them, nor the news. The telephone hadn’t gone. The resigned immobility of the two men was beginning to annoy Bridget. They sat around the place, talking and smoking endlessly, doing various chores in the mornings like housemaids. She had expected more urgency; she wanted something to occur. But Hamdy was damp and lethargic: “We mustn’t do anything, don’t you see? Mustn’t upset the arrangements. Just wait for them to call. It’ll take time for them to organize things. We can’t get out of here on our own, you know that…”

But she’d had her own way about going out on the balcony; the Colonel hadn’t stopped her. And now he went back to the bathroom and began to shave, as he did every evening, as if expecting an appointment or a party an hour hence.

Henry was in the kitchen tinkering with the fridge. Warm Stella drove him wild and he’d been trying to get the thing to work ever since they’d arrived.

“She doesn’t like being trapped, Hamdy,” Henry called through the doorway.

“It’s us, isn’t it? Not so much her. She goes out, after all. We’re the ones who’re stuck.”

“That’s what she doesn’t like.”

“So what does she expect me to do — call a cab to take us all out to the airport?”

Had he lost some weight? the Colonel wondered as he looked at himself in the glass. Sweating? Fear? Hardly that. There’d been a moment’s panic at Bridget’s house, but not fear: he couldn’t somehow feel that emotion about a country, about a people and a security organization he was so familiar with, whose ways he knew so deeply. It was having Henry with them that made it so difficult. If he and Bridget had simply been together … They would have slept in the same bed, the cumbersome affair with its silk hangings and hardened mattress, that she alone now occupied. That was what was wrong. He could have tended her, consoled, comforted her. He could have loved her and perhaps smothered her impatient fear. For she was frightened, he thought; simply that.

But now the situation was a French farce, with the three of them manoeuvring round the set, suspecting false doors and waiting for their trousers to slip. And he had to deny her the one sort of attention, his obsession for her, which he knew would calm her. He had to keep to the rules. And the only encouragement he had was in knowing that Henry had to keep to them as well.

He pulled the razor round in a neat half-circle between ear and chin, did the same for the other side, then soaped his face again. He remembered all the other times he had done this, preparing to go out with Bridget. He would have to do something, take some action, if only for her sake.

The Colonel wondered what their reactions would be: if he told them that the call, when it came, was for him alone, that he was not with London but with Israel, and was going back there. What would they do? They wouldn’t like it. That’s what it amounted to. Before he finished shaving he knew he would have to get out on his own without telling them anything. And yet … There was still time before a final decision. He hunted around for Bridget’s rose-water which he’d used since his own cologne had run out.

The refrigerator started to purr. Henry wobbled it and it stopped. Another jerk and it was on again. He turned the freezer carefully up to “high” and put half a dozen bottles of Stella on the top shelf, along with some local cheese which had gone like dry putty, and an oil-stained paper bag of olives. He didn’t bother about the milk or butter or the other food. He felt in better shape already. The heaviness of the past few days lifted — the depressing inactivity and befuddled thought. He had achieved something, started to work himself out of the situation, and he felt as relieved about the beer as a traveller come to an oasis having seen it hover for many days in the sky.

For those three days he’d been prepared to believe that the Colonel was one of Williams’s private appointees in their Mid-East section — or someone who had been placed in Cairo years before when the British Army still occupied the city. And that — in the secretive ways of things, the bluffs and double bluffs of his Holborn department — he’d never known about him. It would have been a natural course to take with someone so highly placed in Egyptian intelligence, keep him buried completely from everybody, even to the extent of giving him his own completely separate “supporting staff” in Cairo and elsewhere — men whose job it would have been to “service” the Colonel, warn him of possible breaks in his own Cairo apparat — and get him out of the country in the event of his being unearthed: his “ticket men”. At his level the Colonel would have had all these ancillary services, just as he’d had them himself in better days in London and New York from his Moscow source.

All that was perfectly possible. But the one thing that made no sense was that a man in such an exalted position would have run from them long ago, left them and made his own way home. Whatever his personal affections, and the Colonel obviously had these for Bridget, such a man would have bolted from the word go. And the way to do that was to do it alone, not with two other people hanging round your neck.

The information gathered from twenty years with Egyptian security, and latterly as head of counter-intelligence, would have been invaluable to Holborn and no man would risk the chance of getting it home by hanging round with friends, or even his colleagues, and least of all his mistress.

The Colonel would never have taken the risk: affection, love, personal loyalties — whatever it was — didn’t arise in a situation like this; not for someone with his professional skills.

Who was the Colonel with then — and where was he running? Henry hardly cared; he would have to run for it on his own, that was his only clear thought. London was over, and Cairo. And Bridget. The places where he wanted to be, and the people who lived there, were gone. Affection, love, loyalty — whatever it was — didn’t arise in a situation like this …

There was only Moscow and that wasn’t certain: the long de-briefing, a badly-heated apartment, unintelligible rows with a provincial housekeeper, a job in some backwater of the service, ghosting books with the others of his kind, getting drunk with them on Christmas Day: airmail copies of The Times when everybody else had thumbed through them: a life within a belief he didn’t believe in any more. It lay over the bridge, all this — the scrubbed subways and too much vodka — over Kasr el Nil and down to the hospital where the Moscow Resident worked, just a short walk away. He began more and more to think he didn’t want it; now that the fridge was going again.

Bridget finished her drink and looked across the cricket pitch to the entrance of the Club in the distance. It was six o’clock, just starting the half-hour of twilight. The day had cooled, the wind was finished: there would be a few weeks now of perfect weather before the summer really started, tearing everything to shreds. People, other friends of hers in the city, would be doing things: she’d arranged some time before to go down with a doctor’s family she knew to their farm in the delta, the remains of a once large estate: a few days walking about the dovecotes and banana groves, watching the grain being forked from pile to pile, the chaff blowing away in the north summer wind from the sea. The creak of Sakias, Shadufs, Archimedes screws; the endless lapping of water. The blanket of night. Card games.

And there were others she knew, comfortable casual acquaintances, probably some of them were walking up the drive of the Club at that moment, if she could have distinguished them, between the squash and croquet courts, on their way for an evening drink.

She wanted to be one of them; quite plainly and vehemently and suddenly she wanted to be done with all this. She wanted to walk out of the flat, down the corniche, up the long drive of the Club and into ordinary life. It was as simple as that.

Behind her the telephone started.

She heard the muffled buzz beneath the cushions in the armchair next to the window. Henry was clattering the last of the bottles into the fridge and the Colonel was dousing his face repeatedly in a flush of water from both taps, screwing his ears out with his fingers, plastering back his thin hair.

She let the phone go on ringing until it stopped. Then she got up and went to get her headscarf and shopping bag.

5

We turned up the drive to the Club with Cherry stepping along briskly in front of me — a goat on his small legs and grubby suede shoes, red tie and dirty linen coat flapping out around him and his beer belly pushing out over his trousers. He had the pedantic, bear-like, weather-beaten air of some minor British Council official who’s been thankfully out of England since Munich, traipsing round the grubby corners of the Levant on the same small salary and in the same clothes: the sort of rundown happy academic who “keeps in touch with things” at home, and ministers to the locals, with a box of lantern slides telling “The Story of Parliament” in one pocket and Desmond MacCarthy’s last book of Critical Essays in the other.

He smelled vaguely of old beer and long siestas; of ink and chalk and small evening classes on the Lake Poets in some baking upstairs room above the tramway, looking out at a statue of Garibaldi — or Ataturk, or Soliman Pasha: a bare trickle of sense seeping through into the willing, mystified faces of refined old ladies and the secretaries who dreamed of a season at the Berlitz in Oxford Street Cherry, the genuine expatriate with his weekly copy of the T.L.S. — the sort who’d never even thought of getting a job on the Third Programme.

Cherry was full of certainties; he’d found his mark in this isolated, crumbling city: it was exactly his weather. He was someone here.

The cars and taxis swirled past us on the drive, full of flannelled, blazered men and girls of “good family”. The slow “thunk” of the croquet, and the vicious “snap-FLACK” of the squash, resounding from the courts on either side of us — and Cherry strode along towards the entrance with the vigorous impatience of a child on its way to the nursery. He was someone here; yes indeed. It made all the difference.

“Yallah, Mohammed!” he called to a waiter at the top of the steps. “Entar Mabsout? Quais Ketir?”

“Aiowa, Bey! Am di’illah.”

The man saluted and we walked through the small hallway and out on to the covered terrace by the small pool beyond.

I said, “You weren’t a member here before, Herbert Rather overdoing the Raj thing, isn’t it — for a good Dubliner?”

“Nonsense, Marlow. This is for Egyptians now.” And before he went over to the table on the far side of the pool where I could see Mr. Khoury sitting, he had started to clap his hands impatiently at another waiter.

“Dine etnine Stella, fi cubia,” he shouted, as we threaded our way between the tables where the smart set in polo necks and armless cotton frocks were gathered in huge circles, the men, in groups, lying back with their feet up on opposite chairs, spinning rackets in their hands, looking serious; the girls in just as easy, confident, though much straighter, positions, skirts sometimes an inch above the knee. Before the British had entirely left Egypt ten years earlier, an Egyptian had publicly relieved himself in the Club’s small pool by the terrace. “It’s Egyptian water now,” he’d said. “Like the canal.” It was a famous incident. But in these days there was no need for such insecurity; the smarter Cairenes had replaced the English exactly in the hierarchic ecology of the Club, were indistinguishable from them in their proprietary and superior airs.

Mr. Khoury had stood up long before we reached his table, wreathed in smiles, his mouth a twinkling hollow of black gaps and gold fillings, already waving his arms and giving his companions a running biography of us and our affairs before we were near him.

“… and Mr. Marlow from London who is doing some programmes and we are going to help him.”

There was a woman near him in the latest saucer-like sun glasses and half a dozen others round the table: middle-aged, intellectual, young-at-heart. Two wine coolers with bottles of Stella rammed neck first into the middle of them stood at either end of the table.

“We don’t see many people out from England here these days,” the saucer-eyed lady said to her companion before Mr. Khoury had finished with the introductions.

“… Mohammed Said, Ahmed Fawzi, Morsy Tewfik, Ali Zaki, Mrs. Olive Moustafa …”

Mrs. Olive Moustafa. I leant across the wine coolers and shook hands. She took her glasses off. A sunburnt, small, hard-worked sort of face, neat brown hair with threads of red in it, the remnants of freckles showing through a tanned and oily forehead. She might have been Scots or Irish.

“Mrs. Moustafa works for the International Press Agency here — that right, Olive? — you’ll get all the news from her, what you won’t read in the papers. That right, Olive? Is Michael coming down?”

Olive smiled lightly, perhaps even bitterly, at Khoury.

“He might. He’s very busy right now.”

Cherry had gone over to the side of the table and was leaning over a young American, berating him vigorously, clapping him repeatedly on the shoulder to emphasize a point.

“… and why can’t we read what you write about the place? Why can’t we get your bloody paper out here — eh? You tell me.”

“You ask Morsy that, Herbert He’s Press Censor. He never gets out to the airport to check them through, that’s why. They just lie there, I think. That right, Morsy?”

Morsy Tewfik was sitting next to him — a soft, round, pulpy face, a very well-kept fellow going to fat in a silk shirt and gold cuff-links, with what used to be known as a “brilliantined scalp”: each hair flowing straight back over his head like a petrified oil slick. When he spoke it was in a perfectly enunciated, top-drawer, Oxbridge drawl.

“I don’t stop your paper, Jim. You don’t send any — except the ones for the Embassies. And the Ministry copies we get. Who is there could afford fifty piastres on the streets out here anyway? It costs too much, that’s all. That’s why Herbert doesn’t read it.”

Mr. Khoury butted in — “Jim Whelan, New York News correspondent out here. Mr. Marlow, from London …”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Marlow.”

Whelan had a tennis shirt on, with a green laurel garland embossed over the heart, fine but profusely growing hair all along his forearms, a pair of colourless spectacles — of the old-fashioned Bakelite sort that you see in photographs of Harold Ross — and behind them a slight squint. He had a bounce of flaxen hair that stood up and shivered when he spoke and was one of those ageless young Americans. He might have been anything between fifteen and forty and his permanently quizzical, disappointed expression suggested that he’d never been able to find out how old he was himself; a serious man on an even more serious earth, one felt, and by God he was going to find out the truth about it all if it killed him.

“Mr. Whelan writes about us every day,” Mr. Khoury said, as though Whelan was working out a prison sentence.

Morsy Tewfik and Whelan and Cherry embarked on an argument about the price of rice in the delta as opposed to Cairo — Whelan’s piece for the next day apparently — and Olive Moustafa leant across to me.

“Could I get some lemonade to mix with the beer?” I managed to say to Mr. Khoury, before she pinned me down.

“What are you doing …” She started off like a greyhound out of a trap.

What, where, why and for whom. She was a persistent party. I wondered who Mr. Moustafa was and how she’d come by him, but didn’t have the chance to ask. She quizzed me studiously for several minutes without getting much back.

“You ought to meet Pearson, Michael Pearson, our correspondent here. He’ll be able to fill you in,” she said, rather aggressively, I thought — the physical connotation more in my mind than the journalistic.

“Oh, I’m not doing any news stories. More background material, colour stuff. I used to live out here. It’s a trip back to look at the place as much as anything …”

We were vaguely worried about each other.

She was the sort of woman who, without any obvious show of impatience or ruthlessness, none the less gives an impression of bitter inner speculation: a sense, like the threat of a hidden time bomb, that she’d find out everything in the end so one might as well tell her straight away; it would save trouble.

She would have been just the sort of person to send looking for Henry, I thought. She’d know all the ropes, all the nooks and crannies: a greedy woman, unsatisfied — her feminine intuition not at all domestic but loose and roving: friend or enemy depending on what you fed her, and she obviously regarded my coming to the city as an interesting plate of meat.

“There’s another man who often comes out here doing odd articles — do you know him at all — Henry Edwards? He does pieces for the Spectator and some of the glossies. Ever come across him?”

I took the question on the run. “Yes, I’ve met him once or twice. Haven’t seen him recently, though. Has he been out here?”

“I saw him a month ago. I was just wondering, there was a journalist with Mohammed Yunis when he left the airport — you know about Yunis, he’s under house arrest now — and I thought it might have been Edwards. We don’t know much about it, the flight came via Munich, so it could have been a Stern man he was with. We’re trying to get something on it. Unless you came on that flight too — did you?”

She was running it hard. “No, I didn’t, as a matter of fact. Where did you meet Edwards?”

“Michael knows him really. He comes into our office when he’s here. But how does he make his money at this freelance business, that’s what I’d like to know. He’s out here half a dozen times a year and there can’t be that sort of interest in the UAR — even in the glossies …”

Mrs. Moustafa was printing now and the trick was to run with her, past her, pip her at the post.

“Has he money of his own? Or maybe he does rep work for some firm. Or perhaps he works for British Intelligence. One never knows, does one?”

“One never does.”

Mrs. Moustafa looked at me, her expression more intrigued than ever for a second; looking at me, waiting for a sign, a knowing hint that she and I were in the same line of country. I didn’t hammer it and she lost interest. But I could see she felt she was on to something, worrying at an idea: “British agent arrested in Cairo” and a pat on the back from the Chairman in London. There was a war brewing up too and perhaps she felt she might be first in the line this time, to break the story of another Suez — another “collusion”.

A small, thin man — narrowed out to the point of emaciation — weaved his way like a dancer through the tables, tiny feet skipping across the terrace, out into the last of the sunlight, and over one corner of the pool, in a frienzied quickstep; a fox face, a double-breasted linen suit and thin jet-black hair combed straight back with a central parting completed the picture of a’ thirties dance band leader running from the management with the evening’s takings. He seemed excessively worried as well as pressed. But closer to, the deeply lined face and springy movements suggested that his nervous motion was habitual, not temporary. He waved round the table and there were the barest introductions before he squeezed himself into a seat next to Olive. I turned away and engaged Mr. Khoury in a concentrated talk about Egyptian folk drama. I wanted to hear what Michael Pearson was possibly in more of a hurry than usual about.

“… and what about these rural folk-art centres, the one in the Fayoum you mentioned? Are they really inspired by anything local, or just something got up by the government? …”

“Certainly they are real, Mr. Marlow: this is the true folk drama, centuries, millennia old …”

“… Hamdy … Army Intelligence …” I barely caught the words from across the table.

“… a drama based on centuries of oppression …”

“… can’t file anything. But we’ll see …”

“… ‘Words are the only weapons of the poor.’ You remember your Sean O’Casey …” Mr. Khoury boomed, spreading his arms upwards in a half circle. “A genuine peasant drama, Mr. Marlow. These people aren’t worrying about your angst like your John Osbornes or your Louis MacNeices — they are trapped — ”, another boom and shake of the arms, “—in a prodigious drama of real events, Mr. Marlow. That’s what it is, I assure you. And now under the revolution we are uncovering for the first time …”

I said, “Of course if the revolution is making things much better for everyone, if it’s lifted the oppression — as it has — the peasants won’t have much to dramatize, will they? The raison d’être for their fine words will have disappeared rather. When the saviour actually comes he puts an end to the drama, no?”

“Certainly not. You are being subtle, Mr. Marlow. I will take you to the cultural centre at Zagazig and you will see for yourself. Let me get you some more lemonade. I know the drink — at Oxford once, we were visiting with some chaps and we had it there by the river. You call it ‘Shandy Guff’, don’t you? ‘Give me Shandy Guff,’ I remember the fellows saying.”

Shandy Guff and Colonel Hassan Hamdy … a new strip cartoon for Rose el Yussef … The gaps in the talk between Olive and Pearson had been easy enough to fill: Colonel Hamdy and Egyptian Army Intelligence. And Mr. Pearson had been in a hurry about him. I noticed now that Whelan had turned round and was talking to them, Cherry having moved back to our side of the table.

Something was afoot about the Colonel, Yunis was under wraps and a journalist had been with him at the time of his arrest. Possibly Edwards, Olive thought. They were building something; the various people being connected in some way — or were they simply being connected by the International Press Agency? Colonel Hamdy and Yunis — I could see a connection there. But Edwards? They weren’t going to tell me — unless they came to believe that I held an essential clue to the whole affair.

I turned to Mr. Khoury again and said in a voice slightly sharper than usual: “Did you ever hear of a good writer, a friend of mine, Henry Edwards? He was fond of the folk drama. Very interested.”

“Edwards? I don’t think so. No,” Khoury said reluctantly. “But we will meet, certainly we will. You will introduce me.”

Pearson had looked up, I saw him out of the corner of my eye, his flat shiny hair reflecting the light for a second — the street lamp affair which had gone on above our table.

He turned away again at once but he’d seen the bait and I knew he’d come for it again. Henry counted for something, I realized now, in the rumours he was collecting — was one of the missing pieces in the puzzle which involved Yunis and Colonel Hamdy. And they weren’t looking for this man who’d been with Yunis, this possible Henry, because he was a journalist, but because he was a possible defector. If it had been Henry at the airport with Yunis, then Pearson’s interest in him was because he smelt a Blake or a Philby in the whole affair.

Journalists believed that our service, and particularly my own Middle East section, formed an inexhaustible source of sensational copy. They had good reasons for that belief. Like hunters at a rat hole they waited for the next exit — the man who came running from the grimy depths into the light and across the guns for a second, only to disappear down another bolt-hole on the far side of the common. They were rarely caught on this blind run through the dazzle, but they were seen, or thought to be seen, and the presses rolled with half-facts and rumour. And Pearson was a real “no smoke without fire” man. On some sort of tip-off he was getting his team together outside the warren, organizing the long vigil, and no doubt Whelan would have the exclusive North American rights. Was the rumour genuine, then, that Edwards was on the run, defecting? I’d not believed anything of the sort in London. But it struck me that Pearson wouldn’t have been so excited over anything less.

Cherry was squabbling again — with Mr. Khoury this time, wagging his finger at him about an article on Palestine in the last edition of Arab Focus. I took another dash of beer. The Palestine Problem: I’d gone through the Arab press about that for ten years in London — how did Cherry have the enthusiasm for it? It was his expatriate version of the Irish Question, I suppose.

In all this talk what I wanted was a hard fact or two: was Henry in Cairo — and if so, why? Had he defected, or just been caught by the Egyptians? That was the equation.

I got up to go to the pissoir next to the showers on the other side of the pool. There was a row of small frosted glass windows, half open, above the immense porcelain urinals, and I could see part of the driveway that ran round the front of the Club, down past the cricket pitch and out of the back entrance into Zamalek.

A woman had walked past, in a crowd of strollers, with her back to me now, carrying a string shopping bag: tall, in a light cardigan and headscarf, a thin body, coming out suddenly at the hips and in again, down to long narrowing legs; not typical of Cairo at all. Looking at her moving away from the Club I tried to put a face to the body. I imagined myself on the far side, up the drive, walking towards her. That way of walking, the confident brisk step, the flat backside: what would I see if I were looking at that figure the other way about?

And the face I saw when I reversed the image was Bridget’s.

By the time I’d run round back on to the terrace, out through the main entrance and on to the driveway she had disappeared. I raced along the grass verge but the road was crowded with people, cars pushing through them, their lights blinding me as I dodged in and out of the traffic. I tried to get ahead of the strollers so that I could look back along the headlights at their faces. But when I did there was no one I recognized in the long pencils of light. Nothing. If not her, I thought, then who?

When I came back up the Club steps again Olive Moustafa was in the hallway. She seemed to have just come out of the ladies’ room, but I had the impression she’d been looking for me.

“There you are. We thought you’d gone. We’re going to play some croquet. Do you play? Morsy has the court for seven o’clock and he’s suggested dinner with him afterwards.”

Snapping at the bait again, I thought. I wondered how they would handle it.

Cherry, Whelan and Mr. Khoury came down the drive with us and sat on the balcony of one of the little wooden pavilions which ran along one side of the four floodlit courts. A suffragi flustered round them and they ordered coffee; drinks weren’t allowed near the field of play. Many Egyptians took this game very seriously, as something mystical, second in importance only to the Koran, and I’d picked up some slight skill in it myself when I’d lived here. They’d never taken to cricket, as had other former British “Dominions”, seeing it as pointless, long drawn out nonsense which denied any really individual nastiness. But croquet, perhaps because it specifically allowed for this, had some great magic for these upper-class Cairenes and they played it with a passion they gave to few other things in their life.

Mrs. Moustafa partnered Morsy and I played with Pearson.

We knocked the four coloured balls round the first three hoops with the mildest of chatter. Pearson wasn’t all that good at the game, I was worse, and the others were several hoops ahead of us as we turned up the back straight.

“You’re not looking for Edwards yourself, are you?” Pearson said, studiously and suddenly, lining up a shot for the fourth hoop.

“No. Why should I be?”

He smacked the ball up court, passing the wire and going off the edge at the far end, leaving me an impossible angle to get back on.

“Just a little worried about him, that’s all. Someone was seen at the airport with Yunis three days ago, just before he was arrested. A journalist, my contact at the airport said. Someone he’d seen out here quite often before. But he couldn’t describe him exactly — except for the hair. He said the man had a lot of hair. Henry usually drops in to see me when he’s here. That’s what made me wonder.”

I tapped my shot back to the far side of the wire, giving Pearson a straight through on his next turn.

“You think there’s a story in it?”

“Whoever was with Yunis at the time has a story. No one has any firm details on his arrest or what it’s all about We’re scratching around trying to fill them in.”

“You mean if it was this man Edwards — he’d tell you what happened?”

“He used to let me know odd things when I saw him out here. Straight news, agency stuff, things he didn’t use himself. If it was Edwards, that is …”

We’d nearly caught up with the others. Mrs. Moustafa had failed at a hoop and, if played right — it wasn’t difficult — Pearson’s next shot should croquet her. He’d then have an easy passage through the iron and, once through, could take her on down with him to the pole at the end. He missed. On purpose I’d have said. The others went ahead of us.

I said, “Who else could it have been then, with Yunis?”

“It wasn’t any of the regular correspondents — something would have broken on the story by now.”

“Why a journalist in any case?”

“Passport control. We have a little money on the right horse there. The man who came through with Yunis had a British passport — profession was marked as ‘Journalist’. That narrows it down fairly.”

The others were two hoops and a pole ahead of us. I tried to pull back a few shots but without success. Olive was playing like a demon and Pearson was fudging everything. He put his foot on his mallet like a big game hunter on a lion while the others streamed ahead up the home straight.

“We’ll make it worth your while. Very much so. Unless of course you’re contracted already. Anything you know about the Yunis business.”

“I’m not doing that sort of work out here, Mr. Pearson. I was telling Mrs. Moustafa — just background stuff.”

“That’s what I thought — ”

“I haven’t got any hard news and I didn’t come on that flight. I came in last night.”

Pearson nodded impatiently. These were preliminaries for him. I could see he believed me — as I didn’t believe him. What he wanted was to talk to me, to pretend I was a serious journalist, while searching out my real business in Cairo. And he had to have a good reason for broaching the subject of Edwards with me at all, one that would give the impression that he was interested in Edwards and myself purely from the professional point of view — as journalists who might be on to a good story: he had to cover what I was sure now was his real interest in the whole matter — that he believed Henry was running in the Philby stakes, that he’d used Yunis in some way to get into Egypt, and that I’d been sent out from London to stop him before he went over to Moscow. He’d never really bought the idea that Henry was a Fleet Street man, or that I was even a serious freelance. Pearson had made a reasonable job of the bluff, but he’d left a loophole, intentionally no doubt, knowing I’d go for it, which I shouldn’t have done; it was just his cockiness.

“You must have known who was on that flight with Yunis then. If you had his profession and nationality — your contact could hardly have overlooked the name.”

Pearson belted his shot wildly to the pavilion, smiling. The game was over, the others had tipped the post We walked back after them slowly.

“Now I’m telling you something,” he said.

“Why not? What’s the mystery?”

“You don’t know yourself?”

“Of course not. Was it Edwards?”

“Yes. It was. That was the name on the passport”

“Why the elaborate front then?”

“I couldn’t put it directly, you’d have shied away. I had to get you to ask the questions. You’re looking for Edwards too, aren’t you? We could probably help each other.”

“We probably couldn’t, Mr. Pearson. I doubt that very much.” And I left it at that.

Pearson had got his sights on Edwards all right: Edwards, out of the hole and on the run, in the light for a moment before disappearing again. They’d missed it all with Philby in Beirut and they weren’t going to miss it with Edwards in Cairo. It was the same thing all over again. But was it? It was just possible that Henry had become involved with Yunis somehow, on a job which had gone wrong, and had been picked up with him by Egyptian Intelligence — by Colonel Hamdy, the other man in Pearson’s crossword.

Either way he was somewhere in the city. I knew that now and I’d no doubt that Pearson would try and make me pay for the information. He wouldn’t have given it to me unless he had been confident I had got something for him in return.

Pearson had a hunch, his network about the city had given him a lucky break, and he was going to play it for all it was worth. At this distance I couldn’t read him the Official Secrets Act or slap a D notice on him. There wasn’t enough to go on. It was a question now of who would find Edwards first; probably Pearson would. It seemed he was several steps ahead in the chase and he was also in the best sort of position to use me. All he had to do was have one of his Egyptian contacts keep an eye on me — not a difficult exercise in Cairo where every shoeshine boy, kiosk vendor and porter were keeping their eyes on somebody — for somebody else’s money.

After the croquet we all walked down the back drive, round past the Omar Khayyam Hotel and along the corniche to Morsy’s apartment It was in an old turn of the century building on the third storey. At the back there was a balcony that looked on to the Club’s cricket pitch while the main entrance on Gezira Street faced out over the river: a long narrow apartment with the usual pseudo second Empire furniture caked in gilt, cracked family portraits, heavy carpets and very few windows. It must have been awfully dark in the daytime.

There was plenty to drink and a buffet of Port Said prawns and rice, grilled delta pigeon, stuffed courgettes and so on. Pearson didn’t bother me. I talked with Morsy’s wife, Leila, an attractive woman, just fractionally plump, in her late thirties, but with the weary isolated air of so many educated Cairo wives: a woman who had wanted, and been capable of, much more than she had ever got, either from her husband or from life in Egypt. She made suitable sounds about the President and the sort of society he had created in Egypt, but one felt it didn’t really touch her, not because she was frivolous or stupid, but because she came from the city’s professional upper class — from a family of bankers or lawyers or whatever — from a metropolitan society which had been liberated for generations. She would like to have exercised herself in a larger world, or at least felt a part of it — of Paris, and London and Günter Grass.

She was interested in things beyond the narrow confines of Arab nationalism and such idle preoccupations were no longer on offer in Cairo. The city was bereft of ideas. There was only one idea, the war against Israel. It made the fearful middle class nervous and short-tempered, full of upsets and hangovers, gave them thoughts of a boat to Canada.

But Leila Tewfik was committed to something she couldn’t give anything to, stuck where she was, with the latest foreign papers and magazines stacked neatly about the living room, all the news of the world her husband got before he censored it. She — and Morsy too — were part of the “new class” spawned by every revolution; except that in Egypt that class was often composed of the children of the old, inheritors of necessary intellect — and unnecessary, unsatisfied longings.

I was exhausted and left early, dropping Cherry off in a cab by the hospital. “We’ll have a drink another night. Seriously,” he said in a slow voice. “And Edwards is in town,” he added, commenting on my talk with Pearson which I’d told him about. “That should please you.”

“Vaguely. I could do without Pearson. And I hardly know where to begin.”

“Why don’t you climb that tower? You’ll probably spot him from there.”

Cherry smiled and disappeared up the avenue of palm trees to the woman who lay like a pencil, stiff and straight, lightly wrapped in a sheet. And I thought of the other woman with the flat backside and narrowing legs who’d walked away from me towards Zamalek. And again, so easily, I saw myself walking towards her, seeing her face.

6

The Cairo Tower was in the middle of the old Botanical Gardens, on Gezira Island, just across from the hospital, and I went there first thing next morning: a huge 700-foot phallus in latticed concrete wrapped round the central elevator core. It had been built, so we had been reliably informed in our Holborn section, with three million dollars innotes which the CIA had attempted to bribe Nasser with ten years before. It was a pure undisguised folly, with no function whatsoever other than that of being an affront to the “forces of neo-Imperialism”—and it succeeded well enough in that, facing as it did the expensive bedrooms of the Hilton on the opposite bank of the river — the terraces from which latter-day CIA men had to view it every morning when they woke up, sniffing the airs of the city in their towel-robes and wristlet name-plates.

A drowsy clerk, sipping a glass of milky tea and burning ruts in the pay desk with his cigarette, took my ten piastres and the lift crawled and squeaked for minutes on my way up. There was a minute cafê at the top, surrounded by glass, with a terrace beyond that and a coin-operated telescope fixed on to the concrete balustrade, leaning drunkenly down over the river.

Apart from an even more sleepy waiter who made me a coffee there was no one else about and the whole pinnacle, though it hadn’t been up for more than a few years, had a dilapidated, run-down air about it. The concrete window casements were beginning to flake away at the edges, eroding in the dry windy weather up here, a pane of glass eight feet square was cracked from side to side, and the wooden chairs and tables must have been taken from some back-street café or a mission school that had closed.

The Tower wasn’t a popular attraction apparently; perhaps there had been a scare about its safety once. It was a mysterious toy, a Trojan horse which the local people mistrusted, I imagined. Egyptians have little head for heights, theirs is a flat country, and I suppose many of them, particularly those on the bread line and beneath, must naturally have questioned the safety of such a patently useless, expensive ornament.

I went out on to the balcony, forcing the iron door open. Although the vantage point was tremendous the view was unsatisfying somehow. The desert sands, brought by the Khamseen, hadn’t yet subsided in the air so that the city was covered in a film of sepia and ochre, and the buildings seemed to flap about in the haze like dirty brown and yellow sacks. There was a monotonous sameness in the view from this height. Nothing, none of the mosques, the minarets or cupolas, stood out. Everything looked as haphazard and dirty as a collection of nomad tents thrown up about the place, which, of course, was how the mediaeval city had begun — “El Fustat”, the tent — so I suppose the view was appropriate enough. With eyes half closed against the glare one saw the unchanged continuity of a thousand years — an encampment of ragged cloth by a huge brown river. The modern city disappeared; a ribbon of dun colours took its place beneath a tired lead-blue sky.

I yanked the telescope up on its pivot and put a coin in on the half-chance that it still worked. The machine clicked, the shutter opened suddenly and I found myself looking, with startling clearness, at a plump Levantine gentleman in bathing trunks having coffee on his bedroom terrace of the Hilton. He lit a cigarette and I could see the red and white colour of the pack — “Marlboro”—though I couldn’t actually read the lettering. He screwed a finger in one ear, examined the result on the end of his nail, got up and went into the bedroom. He moved around inside, sliding out of his trunks, a brown shadow against the white counterpane of the bed.

I swung the machine round to the left, over the river, the crescent sails of a felucca jumping up suddenly in the foreshortened distance, billowing into the lens, filling the whole view, like the underbelly of some river monster. Further round the battered cricket score-board by the Zamalek entrance to the Club came into view. The last batsman had apparently made 990 runs, until I saw that the “Batsman” sign had fallen down over the “Total Runs” sign. And I remembered I’d seen the same incongruity from the balcony of the Tewfiks’ apartment the previous evening. Their place would be somewhere above and to the right of the scoreobard. I swung the telescope up and back along the line of buildings that faced out over the pitch.

The Tewfiks’ terrace had two basketwork chairs and a glass-topped bamboo table. I moved the glass to and fro along the buildings. They’d been on the third floor. I counted them up from the ground — there it was, the chairs and the little table and the French windows open behind, and a woman in a black cotton smock dusting the living-room. She came out and shook the cloth over the rail. Would Leila appear, I wondered? Perhaps she’d come out on to the terrace with an open house-coat and without her glasses … But she didn’t. I was tiring with the strain of keeping one eye screwed up, but the machine was running out with a furious ticking and I panned it once more to the balcony of the next building, upwards to the top floor, where I’d seen something move.

Another woman had come out on to the terrace in sun glasses and a short house-coat and was setting up a deck chair in the corner out of the sun. I tried to focus the lens to get a clearer view. But the shutter clicked and fell. I stood up and stretched. A last shot? I wondered. Yes. Why not? There was Bridget’s apartment, round the other way to my right, on top of the block in Garden City. I might as well see if I could get it on the machine. I put in ten piastres and was just on the point of swinging round when I saw the woman in the short house-coat again. She had stood up and was in the light now, talking, arguing, it seemed, to a man who had joined her.

I recognized him first, the fluffy strands of unruly hair through which he was running his fingers, the ancient saucer spectacles, the full, rather debauched, boyish face. It was Henry, so that for quite a while, in my surprise, I didn’t bother identifying the woman. Just a girl he was with, I thought, someone he’d picked up in his voracious way — until he moved towards her and they kissed. I felt there was something incredibly awkward in this event — which wasn’t in their movements which were perfectly natural — and I couldn’t at first understand why I was so struck by the embrace in this way, as a catastrophe, an outrage, coming over the lens to me as a blow in the stomach.

And then I looked carefully again at the woman’s profile. The message had simply been delayed a few seconds. I’d known I was looking at Bridget before I could believe it, put it into words, before I could give a name to the woman whose fingers were linked round the back of Henry’s neck now, the house-coat flapping open about her in the windy baking haze.

I didn’t say anything to Cherry when I met him half an hour later. I’d taken a third ten piastres’ worth on the telescope, swinging it round and peering at other parts of the city, so that the waiter behind me would have no exact idea of what or where I’d been looking at if he were asked. And I knew he’d been looking at me — a natural for one of Pearson’s Egyptian pound notes.

Henry and Bridget had gone inside. They were in the apartment above and to the left of the Tewfiks’; I didn’t know if they shared the same stairway. But I knew enough. It was the same building. I had simply to decide what to do about it. Though even at that point I can remember thinking that just going up to the apartment and knocking on the door was the last thing I’d do.

Cherry had been up to his office and had brought a message back from Mr. Khoury, a schedule in fact, of trips about the city. A visit to the High Court, to the Egyptian Family Planning Association and the steel works at Helwan.

“Where are you going to find Edwards in all that?” he remarked over coffee on the hospital terrace. His wife was in better form that morning and Cherry was in a pushy mood without a drink taken. I told him that one place was as good as another, that I’d pick up something.

“I doubt you will. You’d do better to stick around Pearson.”

“I’ll find Henry before he does.”

“What about Usher? Do you want me to make any plan there? You should see him. Perhaps Henry called there.”

“In time, not now. Intelligence here knows all about Usher. His phone would be tapped or they’d nail me if I went up there to see him on my own. If there was some reason, a party or something, then I could call.”

There was only one thing to do now, stall on these various plans and proposals, and find out what was going on in the apartment on the Gezira corniche. How? Wait for them to come out? And then follow them? And then what? Nothing much, unless I could actually hear what was going on in the apartment. And that seemed impossible. There were technical tricks, of course, planting microphones on walls or through telephones, shooting mini-transmitters from an air rifle at the end of a suction pellet, but I barely knew the beginnings of them. There would have to be something else, something entirely in the realm of the ordinary.

We went on to the Club for a beer and a sandwich by the empty pool and I wondered what it could be — how to be in, but not of, the apartment which I could just make out from where we were sitting, a smudge of white concrete burning in the sun high over the cricket score-board.

Yet it shouldn’t have been impossible, I thought. I’d had some desultory training when I’d first come back to London from Egypt ten years before, a few dry lectures in shadowing and concealment, dropping a tail, and so on, before I’d subsided into Information and Library in Holborn. And in essence was there any real difference in this case? I’d dropped from the sky on a mission and except for the fact that a woman, not a country, had become the dangerous foreign territory, it was much like any other undercover job; the same principals should apply: keep your head, wait, think — do; that was the order. I’d found out about Henry, as much as was necessary for the moment. Now I wanted to find out about the woman who had been my wife.

Leila Tewfik stood on the terrace steps, twirling her spectacles round in one hand, shading her eyes with the other, surveying the few people about the place as if they were a multitude. I thought she must have seen us, we weren’t more than fifteen yards away, but she stayed where she was, dilatory and composed in a sleeveless Greek embroidered tunic with a dressing gown belt tied loosely round her waist. The dress disguised her slight plumpness and the rough oatmeal material accentuated her fluffy dark hair which she must have washed overnight, for it stood up alarmingly over her ears. Her arms and face were an extraordinary honey-coloured bronze; it was probably her best feature. She had some foreign paper under her arm and it seemed unlikely, I thought with regret, that she’d come to the Club for a swim. She put her glasses back on, saw us now, and ambled over.

“God,” she said, “I feel none too fine.”

She lay back, tilting the chair over, stretching her arms wide apart. There was a large emerald-coloured ring on one finger, no wedding ring. She shaved regularly under the arms. A neat, well tended, unattended woman.

“Morsy was up to all hours — going on with Pearson and Whelan and Khoury. Drinking, drinking. I wish Mohammed Yunis had stayed in Moscow — and his journalist friend, whoever he was. And Colonel Hamdy. Morsy doesn’t know anything about them really. He pretends. With a few drinks he becomes the President’s special confidant. As if there wasn’t one already.”

Leila Tewfik wasn’t at all as serious as I’d remembered her. She had thawed dramatically in the hangover.

“Underberg. You need an Underberg,” Cherry said.

“Ugh!” she said, enunciating the expression exactly, like an exclamation in a comic strip. “I hope not.”

“You need something fizzy to get the gas up,” I said. “A bottle of light ale, I’m told that’s a palliative, administers a sound and beneficial shock to the whole system.”

“I shouldn’t. But I will.”

She slumped forward on her chair, put her elbows on the table and cradled her chin morosely. Cherry clapped his hands for a waiter in his irritating way and she looked at me with that unwavering, warmly intense look that comes with a hangover for someone you like, when you’re no longer afraid of letting them know it.

“You know all about hangovers, don’t you? The Irish are supposed to drink a lot and we’re not supposed to at all.”

“What do you normally do?”

“When?”

“When you’ve had too much to drink.”

“I never do anything — unless I meet someone like Cherry, or you, the day after. Bed and aspirin, that’s what I usually do. But what do you do, tell me, what are you really going to write about here? Cairo life? There’s not a lot of it, is there: croquet and the fellaheen? Or are you secretly after the Yunis business, trying to scoop Pearson and the others? Whelan annoys me sometimes. He’s no eye for details, he gets it all wrong. Egyptians tend to be very formal nowadays, because they’re isolated, unsure of themselves. And the New York News is even worse. Backs up the dullness all the time. Weevils in the cotton and MiGs in the Fayoum — that’s all that seems to interest them. They’ve forgotten, we’ve forgotten, there’s anything else — forgotten how to live.”

Cherry said, “That’s true of the Americans and the Israelis as well. True of anybody at war. Wars are only fought out of a sense of uncontrollable power. And powerful people become formal bores.”

Leila looked up at the flat sky. Silence. We all looked up.

“‘Tell me where all past days are, or who cleft the Devil’s foot …’” Cherry broke in mock-mournfully. The waiter brought some more Stella.

“‘Waiting for a War’—that might be a title for you,” Leila said to me.

“Oh, I’ll find something less grave, I’m sure. I’m not a war correspondent. The lighter side is my speciality.”

“You won’t find much of that here,” Leila said. “Unless — do you play badminton? Morsy’s got a net up on the roof at home. He’s gone mad on it. That’s a lighter side.”

She looked at me carefully again, blinking through her spectacles, either coquettishly or because her eyes were hurting, I couldn’t really tell. Cherry lay back and looked upwards again, eyes agape. He sighed and then he moaned — a rising whine which he caught at the top of his nose and which was one of his many preludes to derisory comment.

“Ah-h-h-h no! Not that. Not badminton. You must be out of your mind, Leila.”

“Just because you’re past it, you large fellow.”

Badminton, I thought, on the roof of her apartment. Croquet and now badminton. Perhaps I’d get a game of cricket before this was out. The spy as sportsman. I smiled at Leila.

“You can play, can’t you?” she said. “It’s just like tennis. Only you don’t let the ball bounce. And it isn’t a ball.”

We arranged to meet at five o’clock that evening.

7

There was a separate entrance to the apartment where Henry and Bridget had been, I saw, when I got to Leila’s place that evening. But the two sections of the block shared the same long roof, with a lift shaft and laundry buildings rising up at either end, forming a barrier which prevented the shuttlecock from disappearing too freqently, though under Morsy’ indignant, untutored hammerings it sailed over the sides of the roof often enough. He had one of his suffragis down below, stationed head-in-air, scuttling round the block to retrieve them.

Cherry arrived towards six o’clock and we had some lemon juice and mopped our faces. I hadn’t really found my form, had lost every game but one, and I wandered away from them, walking with a slight limp, trying to ease the cramp which had come up in one thigh.

I looked over the edge of the roof just above the balcony where Bridget had been. It was impossible to see anything on the terrace below. The lift shaft door at the far end was open and I looked in. There was a huge spindly wheel encrusted with grease and a smell of warm oil. The laundry next to it was empty and a door beyond the row of tubs must have led down to the floor below. I couldn’t have been more than a few feet above whatever was going on beneath me but I’d learnt more about it from the Tower half a mile away that morning. It probably wouldn’t have been too difficult to introduce a microphone into the place, if one knew the tricks, if one had a microphone.

Morsey had followed me, drink in hand, looking very fit and pleased with himself. His shorts were too short and one heel of his plimsolls was working loose.

“It works, doesn’t it?”

I looked at him.

“The badminton on the roof, I mean.”

“It’s fine. You don’t get complaints from the people below, do you? Bouncing up and down?”

“There’s no one in the apartment beneath. It’s empty. That’s the beautiful thing. That’s why I got the badminton up here.”

“But aren’t there two apartments on the floor beneath? There are two lift shafts.”

“There’s no one in either of them. All the floors in this block used to be one single apartment. Then they divided them in half, filled in the connecting doorways and put another lift in at that end.”

“No one in them? What about the housing shortage?”

“Doesn’t apply, not in this part of town, in this sort of place. All these apartments are owned by the original families who bought them and quite a few of them live abroad now, or in Alex. The one underneath us on my side is sequestrated still. It used to belong to an Armenian lawyer who went back home, wherever that is, last year. And the other, underneath us here, was owned by an old lady who’s dead now. One of her relations, I think it is, uses the place sometimes. But he’s never there. So we can make as much row as we like. That’s the beauty of it. We had a party up here a month ago, even some dancing. But don’t put that in anything you write, will you? Press censors don’t dance, you know. Or give parties. Or play badminton on the roof of their apartment. It wouldn’t do at all. Shall we go down? It’s too dark for another game, I fear.”

The huge-eyed suffragi came up with the last lot of shuttlecocks, clustered gently in his hands like a nest of birds, and presented them to Morsy with all the elaborate courtesies of the messenger with the tennis balls in Henry V. Morsy likewise put them away with careful importance in their long cylinder and we trooped back to their apartment. We passed the Armenian’s doorway on the third floor and I noticed that it didn’t have the usual government sequestration seal across it, the tatty bit of ribbon and wax that I’d remembered on the doorways of British apartments after Suez.

Downstairs in the Tewfiks’ drawing room I looked around for the blocked up doorway between the two apartments that Morsy had mentioned. I passed through the sliding doors that led to their cavernous dining room in the centre of the building. Luckily there were a number of appalling family portraits hanging beyond the table in the gloom and Morsy was more than anxious to turn the lights on and explain them to me. A fat Circassian lady, in a frilly bonnet and black widow’s weeds, with a remarkable resemblance to Queen Victoria, was the principal oeuvre; and next to it a tiny eaten-up man in a tarbush.

“My grandmother and grandfather. Can you see the order he’s wearing? Only just perhaps. The Royal Victorian Order or something. He got it from Lord Cromer and my father had it painted out — when he became secretary of the Wafd executive. And this is my uncle. “Nebuchadnezzar” he was called. I don’t know why. You know your Bible. I’m a bit hazy.”

Nebuchadnezzar had a lush beard at the end of a long money-changer’s face and an even longer nose. He looked as old as God. His nickname seemed to have the most obvious origins. I didn’t comment on them.

Behind the pictures were heavy velvet drapes. I put a finger between them and touched wood.

“Was this where they divided up the apartments?”

“Yes. There are double doors there, several feet between them, bricked up in the middle. They led to the library and study beyond in the old days. My father held Wafd committee meetings there and kept a secret supply of Scotch behind a row of books. I remember as a child seeing them at it when my mother had gone to bed. Just like one of your London clubs. But all that had to be kept very quiet. We were fighting for our independence then.”

Morsy laughed pleasantly.

“I thought the Wafd was committed to parliamentary processes, getting the British out peacefully. You mean they were in there plotting armed rebellion?”

“No — they were drinking the Scotch. Guzzling it. Tippling very heavily. They couldn’t do that outside.”

“You used to watch them at it?”

“I used to spy on them, I suppose you’d say,” he said deprecatingly. “I was fascinated.”

“Through the keyhole?”

“Oh, no. I had a much better way. In the old days all these apartments had a row of ventillation strips in each room, at the top of the wall, so that the air from the ceiling fans could circulate all over the apartment, a sort of primitive air conditioning. Well, I worked one of the strips loose and could see most of what was going on next door. And hear everything, the voices echoed up through the room like a loudspeaker. You see this here?” Morsy went over to a huge sideboard in the corner of the room, four feet off the ground, with a tasselled velvet cloth over it.

“I stood up here,” he said with a ringing, sudden enthusiasm. “Look here — on that very cloth, so it made no noise. And you see the drapes on the wall? They’re the original ones too. I got some of the same material and wrapped it round me. And you know, if you stand absolutely still in the identical colour — I was perfectly camouflaged. My father walked past me once, not ten feet away, and never saw a thing.”

I looked at Morsy in genuine astonishment and then up at the ceiling.

“They’ve blocked them in now, of course. And painted them over. That was a long while ago. What a child — up to every sort of mischief I suppose …”

“Indeed.”

“One must ‘put away childish things’ …”

“Depends on what you put them away for.”

“Badminton and croquet. And cutting pages out of your Daily Telegraph. We’re a young nation as the President keeps on reminding us. A childish nation, would you say?”

We chattered away late into the night and when I left it was no effort to tell them both that I was looking forward to another game of badminton.

“Come any time,” Morsy said. “Use the place if you need somewhere quiet to work. I’m at the office in the mornings — there’s a study, typewriter, all the papers you need. If Leila isn’t here the suffragi will let you in. I’ll tell him. Or go up on the roof, there are chairs and a sunshade. Feel quite free to come and go as you please.”

I took Morsy up on the offer at once and asked if I could come round the following morning, that I’d some notes to put in order.

Morsy had had set up another table for me in his study looking out over the cricket pitch and Leila showed me the key to the roof and the other two keys that would let me back into their apartment again. Then she went out. The kitchen woman and Ahmed, the other suffragi, were padding round the rooms behind me and I pretended to work for half an hour before I picked up a book, my notes and a plastic ruler which I’d bought that morning. Ahmed wanted to come with me, to show me the way, to help “arrange” things, and I had some difficulty in putting him off. Even so he came half way up the third flight of stairs with me, past the Armenian’s door, so that I had to go out on the roof first, settle down under the sun shade, and then creep back downstairs again.

As I’d thought, one of the keys to the Tewfiks’ apartment, an old-fashioned mortice type, just about fitted the first Armenian lock; the other, a Yale-type key and lock, didn’t. The ruler cracked when I first pushed it in between the jamb and the door, trying to slide open the tongue. I pulled out the bit that was left, a narrow strip now, and suppled it vigorously with my fingers: a shoddy Russian import, I noticed, but it worked eventually.

The door opened quite suddenly, with a resounding click, so that I almost fell into the hallway and I realised that I’d been leaning on it with one shoulder which was what had been keeping the tongue in place. I was as ham-fisted at this sort of work as a bank manager.

The hallway and apartment beyond were in almost complete darkness when I closed the door behind me. But the disposition of the rooms must have been the same as downstairs, I thought, as I touched my way along the corridor, and into the drawing room at the back. A crack of light came through the heavy curtains, great shapes loomed up all around me, furniture under dust covers, and there was a sharp smell of paper, a bookish smell, when books have been stored and dried out for a long time. I pulled the inner curtain back, draped the tail of it over one of the mounds of furniture and looked round me. The books were everywhere; a whole library had been taken off the shelves about the room and dumped in piles on the floor. And on top of them were the other domestic possessions of the familydresses, carpets, pictures and kitchen equipment. The room next door — the dining room — was empty. Not a stick of furniture, nothing. I had to open the curtains inch by inch as they squeaked on their runners about the empty bell of the room.

I looked up to where the ceiling joined the wall, five or six feet above my head. The plaster was the same colour all the way up. How many books would I need?

It took me another twenty minutes before I’d carried enough of them from the other room to make a platform to stand on. I started with a large base made up from the heavy paper edition in seventy volumes of the Hearings of the Mixed Courts in Egypt 1888–1913, stacked the middle with English Common Law followed by the Code Napoléon, and ended with a number of bulky modern treatises on Company Finance. The Armenian lawyer must have had an old and comprehensive practice and in the end I had a rocksteady lookout with steps up to the top in both real and false morocco.

I prodded the tip of my ballpoint pen about the plaster just under the ceiling and soon I’d displayed a honeycomb of small holes in what had been a long rectangular metal ventilation grille, about twelve inches high. I wasn’t able to pull the whole thing out and in the end I had to chip away at the plaster which held it at the top. Then I managed to bend the whole grille out and down — a section about three feet long. There were no bricks inside, that would have been the only catch, just an empty space two feet wide and with the same sort of grille the other side, with curls of old plaster sticking through the holes, like larvae, from the wall of the apartment next door.

The light was hopeless but I started to work on one of the plaster curls on the far side as gently as possible, using the little trowel-like pen clip to chisel away at it until there was just a flat membrane of paint covering the wall on the outside.

There was a risk, but there wasn’t a way round it — I couldn’t pull the circle of paint towards me. I listened, heard nothing and pushed. A tiny iris of grey light appeared. I turned my head sideways and pushed it through into the shaft. I couldn’t see anything and there was no sound from beyond, only a smell I noticed, a new smell which obliterated the chalky lime dust of the disturbed plaster: like a blocked drain, faint but distinct. But it was fresher than drains, I decided: a recent eruption of the body, diarrhoea or vomit. I chipped away two more holes in a line downwards and by straining my head impossibly for a few seconds I could see across to the far side of the room, from the ceiling down to about the half-way stage of the wall.

Henry’s ruffled hairline bobbed into view before I had to get my neck out again, or risk dislocating it, and then they started to talk, their voices coming up to me with astonishing clarity, reflecting off the walls and ceiling, like a drum, just as Morsy had said.

“… How long do you think then?” Henry said irritably.

“Well, it’s not Gyppy tummy, is it?” Bridget replied in the same shrill vein. “It’s food poisoning. We’ve all got it. The place stinks. You put the beer in the fridge and left the rest of the stuff out. Just like you.”

“For God’s sake — you’ve been getting the food fresh every day. It shouldn’t be bad.”

“Well, Hamdy’s not going to go anywhere. He looks pretty ill to me. There’s no point — listening to him. He’ll have to have attention.”

“How — who?”

“I’ll find someone. Money. We still have that. I’ll go to Usher. He’ll know someone.”

“Don’t be mad. They’ll have his place surrounded.”

“Look — if we don’t try and contact Usher — there’s nowhere to go: the Embassy’s closed and the Consulate people aren’t likely to know anything about getting us out of here. We can’t just stay on here indefinitely.”

“You want to leave him then?”

“Of course not. But we have to do something. We know they’re not on to this building. I’ve been out every evening for the last three days. And Security here can only have a very hazy idea of what you look like. You’ve got it into your mind that you’re a marked man. If we stay cooped up here much longer you will be.”

“You know what it’s like in Cairo — every shoeshine boy is in someone’s pay. They’d be on to me pretty quick. And they must be looking for you — they went straight to your house after all. I thought we’d been over all this.”

“What, then? Is there no one else here we can contact? Get a message to London? I mean, there are three of us. I’m not important, but you are and Hamdy must be. Don’t you think London has any interest in getting us back?”

“Certainly — but the three of us aren’t going to get out together, that’s the point. However much London wants it they’re not going to be able to arrange for all of us to get to the airport and step on to a BOAC flight. That was always the problem here. If you got caught you were stuck. The only chance is to divide up, take it on our own. When Hamdy is better. God, I feel sick.”

I heard the thump of Henry collapsing on a chair.

Bridget said, “Well, that’s the first thing then. There’s another doctor I’ve thought of, he’s at the Anglo-American.”

“How well do you know him?” Henry asked with just a trace of tired sarcasm.

“You know him too, you ass. He did first year English with you at Dokki. Gamal Cherif.”

“He won’t want to get involved.”

“He won’t know. I’ll ask him to prescribe for me. We’ve all got the same bug. We can share whatever he gives.”

I tried to turn my head again in the ventilator, from a listening to a looking position, round to where I could get a glimpse of Henry, but he was out of sight somewhere in the corner of the room. Bridget passed my awkward eye line for a moment — was she taller than Henry? I’d forgotten. Her hair had turned a slight rust colour, it seemed, a mixture now of her parents’ colouring, where before it had been very nearly sheer black. And it seemed to have receded too, half an inch or more over her forehead, giving her profile a smoother shape than I’d remembered.

I just had time to see her nose before she passed out of sight, slightly turned up, the same as ever — that feature which had given her a permanent air of cheeky interest and unrest and had made her face so different from the languid boneless expressions of the other women of the city. If Egyptian Security were on the lookout, I feared for her: she had the kind of features you’d pick out in any Cairo crowd, particularly in that nervous time: confident, assured, gentle. I knew them well enough.

Indeed, I knew in the few short moments as she passed across the ventilator that I would try and follow her now myself, wherever she went, and get her back. Something had gone wrong ten years before, the time had come when the fault could be corrected. There had been some simple error in our marriage, a miscalculation, and the answer to it was in front of me now, beyond the wall. It was something which I’d simply had to wait for, which had to mature for all those years, until I’d seen her passing by for a second, a bright face glimpsed through the darkness of a ventilator.

I felt a proper sense of direction again, knowledge of a job to do — a task properly outlined at last, something which could be pursued to an end. I had something to go on, the numbing professional mysteries of the years in Holborn and the nonsense of this present mission were dissolving, clearing into another perfectly grasped pattern: a personal enquiry.

I left the bottom mortice lock open and pulled the door to. I could get back into the Armenian’s apartment with the plastic ruler alone now, and I left the keys with the suffragi in the Tewfiks’ place downstairs.

There was a desolate riverside night club and café about five hundred yards down the Gezira corniche, a few broken chairs outside by the river wall, and a kind of dark-room shack in the middle where they served coffee and Cokes during the day; a place that years before, in the evenings, had catered for the envious fantasies of the poorer middle class. I waited for Bridget here. She would have to pass down on the far side of the corniche, going towards the Kasr el Nil bridge, if she were making for the Anglo-American Hospital.

I didn’t know exactly what I had in mind — not to follow her, there was no need for that, just to look at her perhaps, as a free person walking along a street, to see her in a complete perspective which the ventilator had not allowed — someone without the trappings of a woman on the run, or of my following her; free of all that — in a situation where I might have come out of the café and bumped into her by chance: I wanted the temptation of a casual encounter.

When she passed I did nothing. I watched her disappearing down the far side of the road, standing by the curtained window in the smelly, tobacco-stale gloom sipping a gritty, sour coffee.

One’s gaze was so drawn to her among the other passersby that I wondered how she could walk a pace without being noticed. But perhaps that was the trick which had preserved her from Egyptian Security — she was so obvious, open. They were looking in the dark corners.

I thought: I’ve only got to go to the Council Library at the back of the Embassy, make a report out to Williams, put it in the map flap of the book I’d brought with me for the purpose — a Shell Guide to the West Country — and give it to the little lady by the desk. They’d have the message in London by evening and it would be Williams’s responsibility from then on; he would have to take the decisions and make the arrangements. I would have done my job, could pass out of the picture, back to my desk, last week’s Al Ah-ram and a half view of St. Paul’s. It would have been the sort of thing one did for one’s friends, after all, apart from any professional consideration. And even Colonel Hamdy was a friend of sorts, with his quiet blackmail in the Semiramis after Suez: Hamdy who had somehow got caught up with the two of them, either trying to defect or as one of our Mid-East men all along. Perhaps that was why Henry had come out to Cairo in the first place — to make contact with him and get him out of the country. Something had gone wrong and I could put it right, play my part in rescuing them, and we should have civilised amused talk about the whole affair among ourselves for years afterwards in various separate, well appointed apartments in north London — a sweet memory of derring-do. Would Henry have married Bridget by then? — was that how it would all work out, as just a little arrangement among friends? And perhaps, for my part, I’d get some sort of promotion out of Library & Information.

And I think I would have left it at that, given in to some sort of “better judgment” in the matter, gone over the river with my Shell Guide, and dropped the personal pursuits I had in mind as regards Bridget — if Henry hadn’t come out of the apartment block a moment before I moved towards the doorway of the café. He walked fairly slowly up the corniche in the opposite direction, his usually neat footsteps shaky now, the way he used to move when he’d had too much. None the less I would have lost him, I think, if, just before he disappeared from sight, he hadn’t turned into the drive of the Omar Khayyam Hotel next to 26 July Bridge at the end of the Gezira corniche.

This splendid palace had been built as a rest-house for the Empress Eugénie on her visit to Cairo in 1869 to open the Suez Canal; now it was a stopping place for a package tour holiday organization. A coach-load of tourists were getting down outside the doorway and another group was milling about inside the hall. There seemed little risk that anyone would spot him there; Henry had chosen the place well. He’d almost certainly gone there to use the phone, I thought, but I wanted to see if I could confirm it.

The booths were out of sight behind the reception desk and I stationed myself on the far side of a group of elderly Germans in sandals and plastic straw hats who were counting their suitcases earnestly in the middle of the lobby. A bag was missing.

“A scandal!” one of the ancient Brünnhildes was shouting, and she was soon joined by a chorus: a stream of vicious gutturals falling over several beady-eyed, sweating bearers and an assistant manager.

In a minute or so Henry appeared from behind the reception desk and walked straight to the door without looking left or right. It was worth trying. I went round to the booths — there were only two of them — and picked up the receiver.

“That last call I made — I was cut off — can I have it again?” I said to the hotel operator, even capturing something of Henry’s sardonic, busy colonial voice.

“The Kasr el Aini Hospital?” the operator asked me.

“Yes, please.”

I let the phone ring and put the receiver down when the call came through.

The Kasr el Aini? Something for their Gyppy stomachs? Where was Bridget off to then? Or had Henry some other contact to make there? Or had I simply not heard some amendment to their plans after I’d left the ventilator?

8

There was a note from Pearson waiting for me when I got back to the Semiramis towards lunchtime and I took it to the bar with me just off the main hall, the ancient air conditioning throbbing and shaking the floorboards as it had done ever since I’d first come here and had gin and tonics with Bridget and Henry ten years before. And there was another moment’s doubt then: I should have been drinking here with them now — and the hell with Williams, the Egyptians and all their various cloaks and daggers. Henry had wanted an end to all that and I had agreed with him. I had come out to tell him so. And now, less than a week later, I was snooping on him and Bridget with all the gracelessness which characterises the best traditions of our trade.

Pearson was at the bar, his back to me, leaning over a chalky drink. I hadn’t noticed him.

“Ah! Good to see you, I didn’t expect — ”

“Just got your message.”

“What will you have? I’m afraid I’m on the wagon. Upset stomach. I’m prone to it.”

“You should have it looked at.”

“Yes, as a matter of fact I am. A specialist in gastric medicine. Dr. Novak, a Russian chap at the Kasr el Aini. Their fellows pick up a lot of that sort of thing out here.”

“They all go there?”

“Who?”

“The Russians.”

“Yes — why? The hospital’s full of them. Those that aren’t shipped back home at least.”

“It’s an easy way out for them, I suppose — if they were ill. The engineers at Aswan and the military people, the Russian ‘advisers’ here. They wouldn’t go on a normal flight if they were invalided out through the hospital — would they?”

As I talked I was learning — picturing a move, Henry’s move. It had never crossed my mind before. Henry the Russian defector, phoning a contact at the Kasr el Aini Hospital, Henry on his way over, without anyone knowing, not even Bridget.

“What are you getting at?” Pearson asked, curious at the direction I was taking.

“Background. Russian influence in Egypt. People want to know.”

“Yes, the Russians come in and out of here as they want. At Cairo West, at Jiyankis and Al Mansura in the north among other places. What are you doing — a piece on how to get from London to Moscow — via Cairo?”

I let that go. Pearson could think what he liked about my being in Cairo. He sipped the chalky mixture, the oiled Dixie Dean scalp and thin nose pecking in and out of the tumbler like a toy barometric duck. He looked up, smiled and spluttered, making an attempt at genuine good will.

“But you’ve not had one yourself.”

He called for Mohammed. The air conditioning plant drummed under our feet, stirring the whole floor beneath us in odd recurrent waves. It was like being on a ship in the Semiramis bar when the air conditioning worked.

Pearson said, “Look, I don’t want you to get me wrong — about all this. Let me explain: for whatever reason — let’s leave that out — I have the impression you’re looking for Henry Edwards. And why not? He’s a friend of yours — he’s a friend of mine too. And he’s missing. He came through Cairo airport last Tuesday with Yunis and he hasn’t been seen since. And Yunis, we know, is under house arrest — at the very least. That all adds up. We should be worrying about him. But now listen to this”—Pearson looked at me with pretended innocence and concern — “Someone arrived from London late yesterday, our contact at the airport picked him up for us, British passport, a business man, name of Donald MacMillan. He’s staying at the Hilton. We check them all. Businessman — what business? I said to myself. So I made a few enquiries with the hotel. Scotch whisky he was in. They didn’t know anything else. Well, I thought that was interesting enough, something I’d missed, and there might be something to file, for the Scottish papers at least, and I called down at the Hilton this morning, gave my name and asked to see him. But he wouldn’t play, wouldn’t even see me. Well, I was curious because although there’s a big market here for Scotch it’s all controlled by a single government import firm. I checked with them and they knew nothing about any Scots chap coming out

“So I waited around the Hilton and eventually, about nine, he came down to the grill restaurant for breakfast. I had eggs and coffee at a table nearby — that’s why I’m on the chalk. Well, of course, I knew at once who it was. It was that lawyer David Marcus, the one who used to be at the Scottish office and moved to the Highland Development Authority.”

Pearson obviously felt he’d come to a dramatic pause in his tale. But I had to be sure.

“So? He’s trying to do some new deal with the whisky people here. Sounds perfectly straightforward. Why tell me?”

“Because Marcus left the Development Authority six months ago. Came to Whitehall. One of the P.M.’s special advisers on security. After Blake. Interrogator chap. That’s why I thought you’d like to know.”

“If you break that sort of thing you’ll be in trouble straightaway. So I can’t see why you’re telling me about it. You’re just marking yourself and your agency before you’ve done anything. And what can you do? What’s the story? — no evidence. What have you got when you look at it? Some assorted people from British Intelligence in Cairo? All right, but that’s not going to make any headlines. You’ll just get a D notice slapped on you if the stuff gets back home. After all none of these people are smashing up lavatories or having drunken boating parties on the Nile. There’s absolutely nothing in the open on it.”

“Not now, no. It’s what might happen that interests me. I’m prepared to play this perfectly straight. There’s something on and I can make a very good guess as to what it is. Something is going to break — at the Number One court at the Old Bailey, in an apartment in Moscow, or more likely just down some dirty back street in Cairo.”

“And you’d like this lawyer to keep you in touch with developments, no doubt?”

Pearson smiled, giving me the straight look. “It’s a good story, you know.”

“I thought journalists had given up suggesting that sort of deal long ago.”

“I don’t know, Mr. Marlow. Perhaps you freelance people are a little out of touch. There’s a lot of money in a story like this.”

“Well then, you go and ask this man Marcus about it all yourself. Put your foot in the door. You professional pen men are supposed to be good at that sort of thing.”

I lowered half the shandy he’d bought me and got up.

“I will. I will ask him. Usher — you know Robin Usher, don’t you? — he’s having some people along this evening for drinks. He’s asked Marcus. No ambassador here now, so Usher acts as a kind of unofficial host when business people come out from London. Perhaps you’ll be there yourself?”

“I’ve not been asked.”

“You’re sure to get a message then.”

“You told him I was in Cairo?”

“Of course. The British are a pretty small community now. We don’t get many visitors from home. Everybody knows everyone else. There aren’t many secrets between us all out here, you’ll find.”

Pearson was a limpet, a little drummer who’d never let up. And why not? He had the makings of a story all right. As far as he was concerned British Intelligence was playing some sort of extraordinary leap-frog in Cairo. He must have known that Usher had some connection with the service, and Henry too with his frequent visits to the Middle East, and he’d guessed that I was in the same line of country. And now Marcus. He had more of a picture of what was going on than I had myself.

But what sort of leap-frog? What was the large view? What had Marcus come for? Enough was happening in the area politically at the moment to justify a visit by one of our senior staff. But Marcus didn’t fit that bill — knowing little of Arab affairs, he’d come to our section with a security brief, primarily as an interrogator, a ferret to smell out the vermin, the double dealers and defectors. He was practised in that and it must have been his role now. Presumably he was after Henry — they’d had some definite news of him since I’d left. Or had he come after both of us now? — with the idea that I was on my way over to the other side as well? Marcus was the sort of person who, if he couldn’t find a plot, would invent one. And so, I thought, was Williams. In the business of espionage they were always seeing double.

I called at reception for my key. There was another message for me — a phone call from Usher giving me his address up behind Abdin Palace beneath the Citadel and an invitation for that evening. My passport was there as well, back from its police check. I’d forgotten about it. The clerk handed it over with a little less than his usual obsequious bonhomie. He glanced over my shoulder and I knew at once what was up. Someone from the ‘authorities’ was standing behind me, waiting for me.

In fact there were two of them, over by the huge copper globe labelled COMPLAINTS at the end of the reception desk, dressed in the usual shimmering Dacron suits and Italian winkle-pickers which Egyptian plainclothesmen had made their uniform. With their tooth-brush moustaches, well kept weasel faces and dark glasses they looked like night club owners nervously and unaccountably involved in some dangerous daytime venture. For Egyptians there was something unusually aggressive about them too, a threatening, hair-trigger efficiency.

The taller one approached while the other stood back blocking the corridor which led to the rear entrance of the hotel. I might just have made it down the regal brass-railed shallow steps which faced the corniche but I honestly didn’t feel like running.

“Mr. Marcus?” it sounded like, but I must have misheard in the confusion.

“Yes?”

“You would come with us please. Thank you very much.”

“Why — what’s up?”

“Something is irregular in your passport. If you would not mind. For a few moments.”

‘What’s wrong with my passport? I had the visa through your London Embassy. The press section there …”

I opened the passport — and closed it again quickly. The photograph on the first page was familiar enough, a fellow with a receding hairline, balding slightly, not unlike my own. But the chin definitely wasn’t me, jutting out aggressively like an icebreaker, or the narrow formless lips and bitten-in mouth: the general air of disquiet and deviousness belonged unmistakably to David Marcus.

The tougher, taller man took the passport from me and his friend closed in on one side. I was certainly coming quietly. I’d got the wrong passport and they’d got the wrong man — a typical Egyptian police muddle — and I’d probably only got an hour or two before they found out their mistake: just time, if I was lucky, to find out what they were on to Marcus for.

“Very well. May we go?”

Pearson had come out of the bar to our left and I think he had it in mind to try and stop us as we moved across the lobby and out of the main entrance. But he thought better of it, his mouth twitching in agitation and surprise. Instead he followed us down the steps.

“Where are you taking him?” he shouted in Arabic, flourishing his press card, as the two men opened the door of a small Mercedes at the kerb. ‘He’s a journalist. What have they got you for?’ He made an anguished appeal to me, a hair or two out of place in his immaculate black shine so that he looked almost unkempt. I shrugged and got into the back seat. I didn’t feel like helping him. His interest was so transparent. He wasn’t worried about me, whether I was thumbscrewed, beaten about the soles or had my balls plugged into the Direct Current; Pearson was worrying about his story: the plot was thickening about him while he watched, and he was losing his way. I couldn’t blame him. He was by temperament a journalist of the old blood-and-smut school — a fiver in a saloon bar in Earl’s Court, the dead call girl in the basement opposite — and these present developments were clearly putting a strain on his self-control.

We went across El Trahir, up to Ramses Square, past the station and then along beside the metro towards Heliopolis before pulling off through the main sand-bagged entrance to the military barracks there, the armour depot and G.H.Q. for the Cairo area forces. This was where Egyptian Military Intelligence operated from, I knew, and the man I met in the weather-blown Nissen hut, still doing duty from British days, was no passport control officer: a Major with an overkeen face and unusually slim-fitting uniform for a senior Egyptian Army man. When you got anywhere in his job it was back to the tailor’s every year to let the seams out. They gave him Marcus’s passport and he put it down on the desk in front of him, fiddling with it, but he didn’t open it. And I didn’t expect to learn much from him either, for the moment he did look at it — and me — carefully, it would all be over. But I was lucky. He started straight away, confident, going in at the deep end.

‘Why have you been bringing messages in your passport, Mr. Marcus?’

‘Messages?’ I put in quickly, covering the name.

‘Microfilm.’ He held up an envelope, opened it, and took out a card with a speck of dark negative attached to it I laughed. How far could I get with him? I wondered.

‘What does it say?’

‘That is no matter.’ The Major looked puzzled.

‘I’ve not been bringing in any microfilm. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘It was under your — ’ he took up the passport, opening it at the end, and read out from the back page ‘—your Foreign Exchange Allowance. Why do you deny it? This sheet here — I see you brought in £200 with you as well.’ He spelled the figures out slowly. He seemed to have all the time in the world, an extraordinary confidence in the circumstances.

‘You were thinking of staying here for some time? What have they sent you out here to do, Mr. Marcus? Who was this message for?’

‘I told you. I didn’t bring any message. And my name is not Marcus, by the way, it’s Marlow. I don’t know anyone called Marcus.’

I’d like to have let him talk on. He was the cocky type and I’d probably have picked up a lot more. But I couldn’t afford to; if I learnt any more they couldn’t afford to let me go.

‘Are you sure you’ve got the right person? I didn’t have time to see that passport properly before your men took me away.’

The Major opened the passport again, this time at the front. He looked at the photograph, then at me. I showed him my air ticket by way of additional confirmation.

He was furious and apologetic by turns. He tried to order me some coffee and spent some time explaining how ‘these things happen’. But neither his English nor his temper was quite up to it and he was effusively relieved to drop the whole matter and see me back out into the Mercedes. The two men who had brought me were nowhere to be seen. They had disappeared — probably for a long time.

My own passport had been returned when I got back to the Semiramis. There was nothing I could do about Marcus, they’d have corrected their mistake over him during my drive back. I wondered how he’d make out with the Major. Probably not at all; effusive Security men are as dangerous as wounded animals.

Someone had framed Marcus. I took my wringing wet linen suit off, rang for some ice and soda to go with my bottle of whisky, and went into the shower. Someone had put him into it up to his neck. Or had he just been careless? — had he a message for someone in Cairo and they’d found it? It seemed unlikely. The Egyptians would hardly have checked every passport on the off chance. They must have been warned that he was coming, been tipped off by someone in London. The Spycatcher caught: who could have wanted that? Someone he was on to. That made sense. But that ‘someone’ would have to have had the opportunity to plant the microfilm. Passports needing visas went through the Staff Organizer’s department, a Miss Charlbury ran it on the floor beneath Williams’s office, and from there out to Cook’s, as if from a private person. There was room for planting something in that chain. Or had it been someone in the Egyptian Consulate, when they stamped their visa? — some devious plot-counter-plot? A possibility. But I preferred the idea of someone within our section tampering with it — someone who had sent Marcus out to get Henry, or me, or Colonel Hamdy, but who had really wanted to be rid of Marcus. Marcus wasn’t a courier, that was certain. The microfilm, that dangerous form of communication, was, with equal certainty, a plant.

I looked at the back of my own passport out of interest when I got out of the shower, pulling the gummed flap of the Exchange Allowance form away from the back page. It would have been quite simple, a matter of moments, to slip a piece of film under the gummed part and then stick it down again. Anything up to half a fingernail of negative would sit there very nicely and no one would ever spot it unless they’d been looking for it, unless they’d been told. I pushed the flap down again and started to close the passport.

A little fingernail of negative slipped across the page and into my lap.

Someone hammered on the door and I thought briskly of swallowing the thing until I remembered the ice and soda. The floor waiter came in.

Afterwards I stopped the automatic swivel on the fan, put it on top of the air-conditioning box pointing straight at the bed and lay down, stretched out in my pants and a snowstorm of talcum. It was getting far too hot. I drank a glass of soda and ice straight off before adding a finger of Scotch. “You should always start by drinking warm drinks when you first get to Egypt, tea and things.” I remembered Crowther’s advice in the Embassy the first time we met. The little foxy bastard, I thought. And all of them.

It had been me or Marcus but they’d gone for him, as the more necessary man to be rid of. Marcus had been the more pressing concern for someone, but they would have dumped me just as well and that must have been their first intention. Why hadn’t they? There could only be one reason. The two micro messages, whatever they were, must have been identical and wouldn’t have been believed if they’d turned up on two different Mid-East section men. Whoever it was that had planted them hadn’t had the time to take mine out and could never have thought I’d find it

And that was why I’d been sent to Cairo, not to chase Henry — that had been the excuse — but to be caught with the goods, to be sent down the hatch for some reason. But then Marcus had come into the firing line, had become the target — and then the carrier; the message had been duplicated in his passport and he’d been packed off. And the only man who’d been in a position to do all this posting, this cunning shuffling of the pack, was Williams. Of course. Thames Valley Williams with his violet shirts and polka-dot bow ties, bending down to his drinks cabinet, proffering me his thin pin-striped ass and a warm gin and tonic. “Drop into Groppi’s, I should. That’s where the gossip is …”

Drop into Siwa Oasis for ten years on beans and water more likely — the prison where Marcus was probably headed after a suitable show trial.

I looked at the colourless negative with the dark full stop in the centre. The print would probably be in white. I wasn’t very clear about microfilm but I thought I needed a projector.

As I turned to get up, my heel bit into something hard and sharp on the end of the bed. A long sliver of glass from the top of a soda bottle was sticking out from the back of my foot like a spear. The bloody floor waiter. I wondered if I’d swallowed any.

I pulled the glass out, a neat nasty hole, blood dripping in a trail all the way to the bathroom. I doused it under the bath tap. Every time the water cleared the blood away I could see a piece of glass still caught deep in the flesh. I needed a doctor too. Pearson’s Russian friend, Dr. Novak at the Kasr el Aini, might do very well. Two birds with one stone. Three perhaps — he might even have a projector I could borrow.

The Kasr el Aini Hospital lay on the north spur of Roda Island, up-river along the eastern corniche past Garden City — a complex of dun-coloured, featureless Victorian buildings with open terraces and one or two half completed new wings. Like most Egyptian hospitals it had the permanent air of a casualty station in bad times: bandaged figures moved around the main hall, groups of numbed country people had made temporary camp about the passages, seemingly paying court to their confined relatives; stretchers and trolleys were in constant traffic up and down, many of their occupants permanently stalled outside surgeries, operating theatres and dispensaries. There was a feeling of “maleesh”, an overpowering sense that the will of God was having it over the ways of man: a smell of leaking sores and the strongest sort of disinfectant.

I hobbled up to the reception desk, peering over a dozen chattering, frenzied heads all intent on extracting some vital information or permission from a single porter equally intent on withholding it. But the mention of Dr. Novak’s name had a steadying effect on him. He gave me a form to fill in where I had to give my own name: Henry Edwards I put. In a moment I had a response. Dr. Novak would see me at once.

He had his surgery in another, more modern wing some distance away at the back of the main building, and the single ward which we passed on the way was full of sturdy Russian gentlemen. Most of them were moving about the beds in baggy underpants listening to Borodin on a radio and reading luridly coloured Soviet engineering journals. It was ferociously hot and unpleasant in the corridor, with wafts of illness coming from somewhere, and I had qualms. If Henry really was running over to the other side it was his business, his affair if he wanted to change one toy-town for another, not mine. If there was any mistake and Novak happened to know what Henry looked like, then he would never get out. And neither might I. But I went on.

Dr. Novak had a round bouncy face, hair cut en brosse, a curling moustache and a good-natured expression which rather surprised me. He looked like a provincial baker from some French film of the ’thirties. He gestured to a chair in his tiny office, looking at me with an uncertain interest.

“I didn’t expect you so soon,” he said.

“I had the opportunity. I’ve cut myself — so I thought I’d come straight away.” I started to take off my shoe and sock. “A piece of glass. I wonder if you could take a look at it.”

There was a perfectly appropriate casual doctor-patient relationship between us. But Dr. Novak remained puzzled.

“Can you get up here?” He pointed to a raised couch in one corner and I clambered up on it.

“Yes, I can see it.” He swabbed the wound and went away to get some probes. “Would you like a local?” He seemed to have a remarkable grasp of English.

“I’ll try without.”

“How did it happen? Can you turn round and lie down flat on your stomach?” I twisted away from him so I couldn’t see anything of his face.

“A splinter from the top of a soda bottle.”

“You shouldn’t have come round here just now, you know.” He lowered his voice. I felt some steel implement clip the top of the wedge of glass, nudging it a fraction further into the flesh so that I jumped forward in pain, the sweat coming out in rivers all over me. “Jesus!”

“Sorry.” He took the probe or whatever it was out, it clattered in a dish and he went away for something else. “Have you been able to make some arrangements? Have you changed your mind?” It was just as well he couldn’t see my face. I was puzzled now.

“No — not yet. I was — hoping you could help me …”

“How?” he said urgently. “You mean I should come round to your Embassy? Tell me. Every moment is urgent. I cannot be sure of things here much longer. You said before on the phone could I help you? — I don’t understand what you mean. I have already contacted your people here, at the Consulate. I was expecting you — someone from London, they said — to make the final arrangements.”

“You will have to wait. A little longer. I came to tell you. A day or two.”

“When do you think you can get me out?”

Dr. Novak had a pained insistence in his voice now.

“It’s difficult, we haven’t an Embassy here now. We have to make different arrangements — Oooch! Christ Almighty!”

A knife, it must have been this time, cut into the skin again, through inches of it.

“You should have had a local. Keep still now for one moment. I’m getting it out.” The knife came again. I shuddered.

“Have confidence, Dr. Novak. Do nothing for the moment.”

“But I must get out of here, Mr. Edwards. I must have some firm arrangements from you. It was promised me. You are from London. We must talk. I have committed myself.” I felt something grate inside my heel, as if he’d reached the bone.

“I know,” I said miserably. “But we’ve had some difficulties on our side too.”

“I’m not interested in the Americans. Or the French. I explained that. I want to go to England. That is what I have prepared. I have prepared my de-briefing.”

“I know you have. But it’s just not as easy as that to get out of Cairo at the moment. You’ll have to take my word for it. Be patient.”

He seemed to have started to scoop the flesh out now with some kind of apple corer.

“For how long must I wait then?” S-c-o-o-p. “What will be the arrangements?” Grind. “When will be the de-briefing?” I thought I was going to faint.

“I think I’d better have that local. Dr. Novak, you have me at your disposal. If I — if we — were double crossing you I’d hardly have come here and let you go through all this with me.”

“I’m sorry. It’s finished. I was just tidying it up. You can get down now.” I hobbled back to my chair.

What, indeed, would the “arrangements” be? Who was going to run Dr. Novak out of Cairo — who was going to de-brief him? There was no counter-intelligence interrogator in Egypt. And then it was clear. The man Novak had been expecting, waiting for, was Marcus. No wonder Henry looked ill at the Omar Khayyam Hotel. His contact man was a defector himself. They had both been looking for the same sort of help. Of course, it was farcical.

The little bouncy face was crestfallen. I could see the horror this whole business had for him — looking for a bolt-hole, never knowing where trust lay.

“Well, what shall we do?”

He was fiddling with his probes and forceps. I wondered if he was more doctor than KGB man, or the other way round. What would he do in England? Where was his family? What made a man like him drop everything and run like this — and why to England? An overwhelming belief in fish and chips and a few broken down carriers east of Suez? It didn’t make much sense. Perhaps he had distant relatives in Highgate. I almost asked him, and thought of telling him the truth about what had happened to Marcus.

“Do nothing. One of us will contact you again in a few days. It might be longer. In the meantime, do nothing.”

It wasn’t until after I’d left that I realized why I hadn’t been forthcoming with him — an unconscious reticence from my years in Holborn: I couldn’t trust him; Dr. Novak might simply have been an infiltrator, a Trojan horse. That’s why we had men like Marcus in our section, to check such people out before they got into the citadel.

One checked everything and trusted nobody. It was a dull, grubby business. Going over to the “other side” was worse than staying put, not because you’d broken trust with a country or an organization but because you’d really betrayed all human contact. No one would ever be sure of Dr. Novak again, whether he was playing a double game or not. The guilty can look just as crestfallen as the innocent

The microfilm was a more difficult matter to unravel. I needed special equipment, a projector not easily come by outside a security organization. But there might be another way of deciphering it, I thought — with a good microscope and a strong light beam under the slide: a science lab would have done, the American University off El Trahir Square for example. But I needed an excuse. Microscopes … Wednesday afternoons at school. Botany, stamens and petals … Yes, the identification of rare wild flowers. Egypt had been famous for that in previous days — the fabulous carpet of spring flowers on the limestone spur beyond Lake Mariout at Alexandria. That would serve as my background and such flowers as I needed I might pick up from the dazed herbaceous border by the fountain in the Hilton forecourt.

I went round to the University at five o’clock having slept fitfully through the afternoon and picked up some dusty weeds at the Hilton. The University was an impossible building to find anyone in and the porter completely misunderstood my interest so that I found myself, in following his directions to the Science department, at the back of the University theatre. A rehearsal was just getting under way managed by a middle-aged American, shouting quickly at a lot of students standing open-mouthed on the stage. They were doing Charley’s Aunt. I’d seen the poster in the hall.

“Now, Lord Fancourt — over there in the easy chair. And remember, this is Oxford in the ’twenties: very blue porcelain, very la-di-dah. Jack Chesney? Where is Fawzi, for God’s sake?”

Fawzi peered round a door on the set, a thickset Egyptian with Presley locks and campus sweater, smoking one of the new hundred-millimeter cigarettes.

“Fawzi,” the American yelled, “make that entrance much sharper. And remember you light the cigarette after you get in. His Lordship gives it to you. So put that one out and start again.”

The Lord Fancourt in the proceedings, in plimsolls and T shirt, remonstrated at this stage direction.

“Mr. Pershore, it’s just an excuse. Fawzi’s just smoking all my cigarettes. That’s the third one I’ve given him.”

I crept up behind Mr. Pershore. “I’m sorry to bother you. I was looking for the Science lab.”

He turned and I explained my purpose, brandishing my nature study which I’d stuck neatly in the pages of a book I’d brought with me.

“It’s closed, I guess. But Magda might be able to help. She’s majoring in Science — over there. Don’t keep her too long. She’s Donna Lucia quite soon, goddammit.”

Magda, a tall girl with good legs, was more than willing and only her dramatic commitments prevented her from leaning over the microscope with me throughout. Luckily botany wasn’t her speciality. None the less she gave me some uneasy moments.

“That looks like a weed to me.”

“Yes, it is. Quite right. It’s the earth attached to the roots that I’m interested in. The properties of the soil — it’s quite different in Egypt. The Nile mud, you know. I want to see what bearing it has on the seeding. I suspect pollination here is induced by quite a different trigger mechanism than is usual. And of course this would have an important bearing on the growth and spread of wild flowers generally in Egypt.”

“Of course.”

Magda left me to it. I cleaned the earth from the two glass plates, slipped the microfilm in between them and pushed the tray back under the lens. The magnification was far too high, giving me a bad photograph of light and shadow on the moon. I swivelled to the next smaller lens, and then to the one below that. Now I could make it out, at least the heading and part of the first paragraph.

It was an Israeli Ministry of Defence memorandum from the Chief of Staff, General Yitzhak Rabin, to the Commander Northern Front, General David Elazar, dated a few days previously, May 7, 1967. It outlined a series of recent El Fatah raids made from Syria and the Lebanon on Israel’s northern borders: a water pipe line at the kibbutz Hagoshrun damaged on April 29, an irrigation pump destroyed near Kfar Nahun on May 5 and an Army truck mined on the Tiberias-Rosh Pina highway on the same day the memo was written. I moved the slide up a fraction. The note went on to say that in view of this dangerous escalation of guerrilla activity General Rabin was authorizing a large military deployment near the Syrian border — six armoured brigades, an engineering corps, commando units and artillery, supported by various detachments of the local National Guard, a supply and pay corps, field hospitals, etc. The memo then outlined primary targets in Syria — the fortified village of Kalian, the hills of Tel Faq’r and Azaziat — and discussed the necessary first-strike immobilization of the Syrian 130 mm and 122 mm artillary emplacements in these areas. The note ended with a provisional strike date: May 17 at 0300 hours, a week hence.

Israel was going to knock the Syrians out of the ring in a pre-emptive strike. Nasser, with all his bellicose trumpetings of the past month, could hardly stand by and watch: with this sort of information in his hands he would be forced to mobilize his own troops on Israel’s southern flank in Sinai as a diversionary tactic. If he heeded this memorandum, as he must, he was going to be dragged into a war he couldn’t win.

The message, if Egyptian Military Intelligence believed it, was more or less the President’s death warrant. And they would believe it, wouldn’t they? — having found it on Marcus, or myself, genuine Mid-East section men. Which of course didn’t mean that the memo hadn’t been forged. But true or false its results would be the same. Who could have wished such ill will on the two of us? And on President Nasser. Williams again. We were one of his “ploys” in action, implementing his or the U.S. State Department’s view that Nasser was another Hitler and must be deposed at all costs. Marcus and I had been sent out to start a war, planted, and with Marcus the roots had taken well, I had no doubt. But why Marcus? What had he done to incur Williams’s disfavour? Just then, I couldn’t imagine.

I walked back to the Semiramis and called Cherry at the Anglo-American from my room. It was just after six and I could see across the river from my window the usual chocolate box sunset over Gezira; an orange sinking out of a violent and gold sky into the palms of the exhibition ground. And there were all the other sounds and senses of the city waking again, grinding into life, after the hours of silence. It was just the sort of evening, among so many in the past, when one felt like doing something, starting afresh. Going to a party.

“Herbert? — what are you doing? Usher’s party — are you coming to it?”

It turned out he’d had a call from Usher that morning and had been trying to contact me. I met him downstairs in the bar half an hour later.

“Well?” he said.

“Well nothing. I’ve been looking round, that’s all.”

“Not with Mr. Khoury, though. He’s been on to me all day. You were due with him out at Helwan this afternoon. And he’s got a trip arranged for Sakkara tomorrow.”

“One can’t do everything. How’s Madame?”

“The same. But listen — ” Cherry assumed one of his serious expressions, screwing his face up, tightening his skin, like air being sucked out of a bladder “—if you don’t make an effort to play the part, aren’t they going to wonder?”

“Who?”

“Khoury has friends. In Security. They all have. They talk.”

“Have you heard something?”

“The jump is on about something. They picked up someone else today. From London.”

“You’re thinking of me, Herbert. I was. They got the wrong passport. A mistake.” And I told him of my visit to Heliopolis. He would learn of that from Pearson in any case, it would be all round the place within hours. We ordered drinks and I started to try and add up what Marcus’s capture might lead to. It was possible, of course, that my laissez-passer about the city might run out if they put any pressure on him. Marcus had never had the training to withstand the water drop — or whatever the favoured technique of the moment was with Egyptian intelligence; unless one could expect his native intransigence to stand foil against any torture. It was possible.

He knew about my being in Cairo — and Herbert and Usher for that matter. Perhaps this really was the end of the Cairo-Albert circle — the end of so many good days — on so little money, for even less information.

I tried to think of Marcus under pressure, strapped to a chair or something, a moist and swarthy gentleman moving towards him with a carpet beater. Was that how they did it? But whatever they did to Marcus he wouldn’t see Holbora again for a long while. And the rest of the picture suddenly came into focus: I saw why Williams had switched to Marcus, made him take the fall instead of me: Marcus, the spy-catcher, had been on to him. Williams didn’t work for Holborn or the CIA. He could only have been from the other side, from Moscow. And I saw, too, how the Israeli memo would serve Russian purposes even better than our own: a war with Israel, which Egypt would lose, and Nasser’s subsequent fall which would allow Moscow really to take over in Egypt; to make good their battle losses and install a properly Marxist government with someone like Yunis at the head of it. Nothing would suit Moscow better than that Egypt should suffer a quick knock-out blow from Israel, a blitzkrieg war over the cities and across Sinai; such an outcome would ensure the Soviet position in Egypt for years to come.

Williams must have been the fourth man who had come into British Intelligence before Philby and the others, who had outlasted them all, and who now worked alone at the heart of it. Marcus had somehow stumbled on this. And Williams had somehow got him out to Cairo — to interrogate Dr. Novak, but to be picked up before he got near him. It didn’t matter that the circle out here would be broken up as a consequence of this highpowered tit for tat; it mattered not at all. All that was necessary was that Williams should survive. And he would, with increased credit in Holborn, as the “war maker”, the man who did for Nasser at last — until the Russians made the real capital out of that disaster. For the West certainly never would; we’d be selling arms to South Africa by then. And to Rhodesia.

The Egyptians would be the only ones really to suffer in it all; they, and people like Herbert and Usher who would get ten years apiece in Siwa. They would have to be warned. God knows how many contacts Usher had about the city — innocuous old clerks and waiters who remembered the British affectionately — or how quickly he would turn them over to ease whatever pains Egyptian Intelligence might have in store for him.

“What will you do, Herbert, when — things come to an end here? Go back to Greystones?”

I was wondering how Cherry might do in Information and Library: a quiet job on £2,380 plus the London weighting. Ten to five, leaving just enough time for an easy stroll down to the wine bar in the Strand before it opened. They were going to need one or two replacements in Holborn.

“Why? Why should things be coming to an end?”

“They are, I’m pretty sure. Though there’s no point in giving you details. But if I told you to get out — now, this moment, go and buy tickets tomorrow — would you do it? Would you believe me?”

“She can’t move.”

“Yes. I see that.” Of course, it was hopeless.

“That’s all there is then, isn’t it? No point in telling me anything. Talk to Usher. Perhaps he’ll have some ideas. He’s been getting out of things successfully all his life.”

I’d never seen Usher’s genuine Mameluke house beneath the Citadel. I’d not fancied his collection of desert bric-à-brac, or the boys of the same sort that I’d been told went with it. And I’d thought of Usher himself as a punishing old rogue the few times I’d met him: an agreeable monster by the Embassy pool dabbling in champagne and running a circle with almost criminal insouciance. Now I could almost look on him with affection.

By comparison with Williams, Henry, Colonel Hamdy and perhaps Bridget, Usher had the outlines of a straightforward man — of someone whose intense sexual preoccupations over the years, his indulgence and irresponsibility suggested a kind of loyalty: he was true to his proclivities, and indeed, from what one knew, to his country. He was a patriot — but a scoundrel in the last resort. That was his honesty. And at that moment I was prepared to admire something certain and unchanging in a man, even if they were characteristics based on the slimmest sort of belief, sustained by the grossest appetites.

9

The house lay in a narrow, steeply sloping alleyway right under the wall of the Citadel — between the fortress and the towering wall of the El Rifai mosque which was perched further down the hill on a large plaza where half a dozen other streets merged into it. Few people lived up here, in this high corner of the mediaeval city. The streets were deserted and lit only by one huge art nouveau lamp-standard with a clover of frosted globes on top. Herbert knew the way, otherwise one would never have found the place in the confusing shadows and different levels of the terrain: an arched doorway in almost total blackness except for the flicker of firelight coming from somewhere behind it.

Inside was a rough ante-chamber like a cow byre, with soil underfoot and smoky beams high overhead. A woman was squatting over a fire of tinder and desert brush, Gagool-like, in rags, warming herself in the acrid smelling mist. She seemed to have sunk to her knees a long time ago and never bothered to get up; deformed by her own ill will rather than by any natural or unnatural process. She held out her hand. I had stepped past, thinking we had not yet come to the proper entrance to the house, but Herbert gave her some coins.

“She looks after the place. Storyteller, sorcerer, witch, fortune teller, jester — the whole pack rolled into one; you mustn’t pass without some financial attention. Otherwise the place falls down. Or you do. She has friends in all the shadows.”

I gave her a coin myself.

We stumbled up some steps and along a passageway towards a jaundiced light. At the end was a stained-glass door, in brown and yellow, like the window in a Victorian lavatory. From beyond came a smell of sizzling onions and mince, and from somewhere else, it seemed in the far distance, the subdued roar of party chatter.

“We’re on the high level here, next to the kitchens and the old harem. Usher had it converted. Normally one would have come into the building from the other side, where it faces the mosque. But he’s turned the proper hall on that side into a garage. You’ll see, we’ll look down on the multitude, like the girls did.”

Cherry opened the glass door and we stepped on to one side of a gallery which ran right round the building, with shadowed haphazard passages leading off it, and a marvel-lousy delicate wooden filigree harem screen built up from the outside ledge. Twenty feet below us was the reception room, the formal Mameluke Salamlek, the size of half a tennis court, paved in blue mosaic, a fountain in the middle, and set about with a quantity of divans, silk bolsters, cushions and half a dozen small pearl-inlaid coffee tables, each with its elaborate silver hookah beside it Everything was as it might have been in Saladin’s Cairo seven hundred years before — except for the people, who, from their uncomfortable dress and apologetic demeanor, were clearly the remains of another and different dynasty, the descended remnants of those northern Caliphs, the last of their kind, who had once usurped and ruled the city.

Usher I could see at one end, dressed in fine cottons and a scarlet cummerbund, draped over the only proper seat in the room, a high-backed mock-Jacobean affair in velvet with tasselled heads, one of his billowy sleeves extending far out over the arm, balancing a crystal goblet between the clutch of fingers. Scattered about him — and having to stand so that they inevitably seemed to be paying court to him — were his friends. In deference, no doubt, to the semi-official nature of the occasion few of these appeared blatantly to suffer, or enjoy, any sexual inversion. Apart from several young suffragis in richly embroidered galibeahs and dazzling emerald cummerbunds serving drinks, there couldn’t have been more than half a dozen Egyptians present — among them Leila and Morsy Tewfik. The other guests were clearly English: just as their faces exhibited a distinct lack of thought, so one could identify their provenance without thinking: several military men, thin and old, with tobacco-stained faces, arrayed in wide pin-stripe suits, double-breasted in the pre-war fashion; several substantial ladies in polka-dot navy blue dresses and cumbersome, sensible shoes; and several thin ladies, dressed like black pencils, in Empire-line silk and gilded slippers; a clergyman in a smart grey lightweight worsted, and a red-haired priest in a soutane who moved one hand about constantly beneath its drapes, as though tightening, or loosening, something of vital importance beneath; some serious, awkward, hunted-looking men and their wives, obviously the skeleton staff from the Consulate; two long-locked youths and a scrubbed girl in a pony tail, a trio probably doing a little volutary work overseas, made up the more noticeable guests. Mr. Pearson was there too, but David Marcus had obviously been delayed.

We came down the narrow winding stairway on the far side of the harem and I made my way over towards Usher. But Pearson was right in with his feet before I got half-way across the crowded mosaic, gibbering in a state of some energy and excitement.

“Well, my God, man, what happened?” He was obviously holding the front page.

“Nothing. A police muddle. The usual thing. I was given someone else’s passport. They hadn’t got a proper visa.”

“And Marcus? — our friend Marcus?” Pearson fidgeted nearer, taking a pushy stance. “Where’s he got to?”

“Your friend, Mr. Pearson. And where should he have got to? Here, I thought you said. Isn’t he?” I looked around.

“He was picked up at the Hilton about an hour after you were.”

“Probably had business with his whisky people then.”

“Like hell. These were jokers from the same pack as you had.”

“How unfortunate. I expect he’ll be along any minute. Probably had something wrong with his passport too. They’re very careful about that sort of thing out here now, aren’t they?” I moved on.

“Mr. Marlow! How long it’s been. What a very long time.” Usher actually stood up. His voice was full of mild generosity. “I was so hoping you could come. Feel responsible for you in a way,” he went on in a lower voice, leading me by the arm up some steps behind his throne and into a minute whitewashed cell-like ante-room.

“Have a drink. Some champagne, I remember it was, last time. How have you been? No hard feelings, I hope; that business over your wife. I hear it ended badly. She was due along here tonight but I couldn’t get any answer from her number. Probably just as well. Let old acquaintance be forgot, in the circumstances, I imagine.”

There was a huge double bed, with a Moroccan weave counterpane, filling half the space; a camel-saddle stool and a lot of champagne on ice in several buckets: an austere room, but not entirely unrelieved.

“Quieter here. And we should talk. Henry Edwards?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. David Marcus, late of the Scottish Office?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Pearson, the news hound?”

I nodded. “You know all about it then.”

“I thought so. An awkward business, especially with Monty here. Truth to tell there’d have been a hell of a row by now, but for that. They’re playing it down. Don’t want to spoil their military reunion. Monty’s showing them how to drive a tank. Otherwise we’d all be in Heliopolis barracks by now.”

“I expect so.”

Usher smacked his lips and, bending down, he nursed a bottle out of the ice and cracked it with a resounding pop. He relished the proprieties, holding the foaming mouth high in the air for a second before quickly dousing it in two gold-stemmed Arab goblets. The crystal winked in the soft light and the bubbles sparkled and I thought, “He has the conviction of his clichés; you live for ever like that. You become myth.”

How old was he, in fact? — ten years on from whatever he’d been when I last saw him — had he been sixty-odd then? At least. But he didn’t look seventy now. He had lost weight since, the eyes were more a pearly watery blue than ever, islands of mischief and abandon in the parchment map of his face. The skin here was tired and blotchy if one looked closely, but the lips were as full and purple as ever, the hair as white and blossomy. He had obviously put up so little resistance to the attack of age, cared so little how time might damage him, that he had escaped into the last lap of life practically untouched. Contrary to expectation, and all the other grim cold Saxon warnings long ago, fidelity to pleasure had preserved him, even made him younger — that fidelity which, in betraying it, other people grow genuinely old. Usher was a living affront to all his dead nurses and mentors.

He held up his glass, spun the stem a fraction in his fingers, his eyes clear blue orbs surveying the sparkle. There was nothing of the antiquary in the gesture, or the wine snob; it was an expression of genuine, deeply-felt greed.

“Pearson particularly,” I said. “He’s been on at me about Edwards and Marcus ever since I got here. I suppose he can’t be prevented from filing something now that they’ve taken Marcus. He’s probably been on the blower already.”

“No, he hasn’t. I said I had something for him on all that — later this evening. And I have. It would be quite the wrong moment for anything to appear on Marcus in the U.K. While Monty’s here. And more importantly, while we’re here. The Egyptians will keep the whole thing under a lid — as long as we do. If we break anything, they’ll be bound to as well. And rope us all in. Our friend Williams has made a cock-up: first Edwards comes out here running, then you, then Marcus. And you’re the only one left. Williams has effectively smashed the entire circle. Any idea what’s behind it?”

“No. I was sent out simply to look for Edwards.”

“A likely tale. And Marcus to check out a Soviet defector, a Russian doctor at the Kasr el Aini. And the result: at least two of our men in jug — and probably your wife as well. And the rest of us hanging on by the skin of. The whole circle smashed — don’t know why they haven’t picked you up before now; don’t follow it at all. But the message I get from the Egyptian side is clear enough: as long as we make arrangements to break up and clear ourselves out of here in the next few days, or at least before Monty leaves, we won’t get the hammer. The others will, no doubt: a trial and what have you — and a spell in Siwa. But there’s nothing to be done. Mr. Williams has a lot to answer for. I had three of my Saudis off today to Bahrein; nice boys. I’ve got an English teacher from some mission school downstairs running round in circles, a ticket man and an airport officer wondering about their pensions, plus Cherry and myself — all to be sent packing in the next forty-eight hours. What sort of arrangements have you made?”

“I have a return ticket.” It was like saying I had wings.

“Well, keep out of the way after this and get straight to the airport tomorrow. You seem to be in the clear, probably the only one of us. And remember, if we don’t get back — remember what I’ve said: find out what the hell Williams has been up to; take it to the highest level if necessary.”

“What happens if they decide to hold you people?”

“I should have a warning, if they’re coming for us. I still have contacts.”

“But if you do have to go under — how would you get out of the country? What arrangements are there?”

“You mean you weren’t told?” Usher looked at me in some astonishment. “Williams must really have it in for you. There isn’t a ‘way out’—for us, not since Suez. No escape plans, couriers, code messages or false moustaches. If you go under here — you stay under as far as Holborn is concerned. Now, you go out and circulate a bit and I’ll deal with Mr. Pearson. We shall be all right for an orderly retreat unless he breaks some coat-trailing story about ‘missing diplomats’ in Cairo.”

Usher was approaching this climacteric in his life with too great a show of efficiency and unconcern, I thought. I wondered if he really intended moving out from fifty years in Egypt with just a toothbrush, taking a taxi to the airport. But perhaps the flabby lips deceived the eye; he had been with Lawrence in the Hejaz after all, survived the self-destructive ambitions so favoured by that tortured martinet; there must have been a fiery streak in him somewhere, which this lifetime’s interlude of pleasure had damped but not extinguished. I thought how quickly he would age in St. John’s Wood.

I found myself talking to the smart-suited clergyman when I came out again into the Salamlek. He was among a group of people, which included the red-headed American priest, being lectured to by Herbert in his best hectoring, low-church manner: he had chosen the Problems and Principles of Ecumenicism as his theme. His argument seemed to be that his church, the Church of Ireland, that is — and I remembered the arrogant granite parish building in Greystones — should be the ideal to aim for in the present attempts at a united Christian congregation, that its lack of mystery, its plain speaking, its dowdiness even, represented the proper Christian ambition in these confused times. Cherry had his tongue in his cheek, but they weren’t the sort of people to notice that. Just the opposite: the two divines were part of an ecumenical study group visiting Egypt and the Middle East, set up by some excessively wealthy American foundation to consider just such fool-headed opinions as Herbert’s. Thus they paid him careful and completely unmerited attention.

“I wasn’t aware there were so many differences between the Anglican and Irish communions,” Mr. Rostock said to me, smiling. He was the incumbent of a new town near Aylesbury.

“I think you’d be surprised. We manage to make our version of the faith very dull in Ireland — practically invisible. You’re not hoping to rope the prophet Mohammed into your united congregation, are you?”

“No, indeed. Not in any strict sense of a shared communion. Though we naturally hope for greater bonds between all faiths — as a result of our deliberations. Our visit here is part of a general look at the Anglican communion in the Middle East. The diocese here, of course, is administered by the Archbishop in Jerusalem.”

“Of course, though you’ve not actually come from there, have you?”

“Well, no, as a matter of fact. There are one or two temporary difficulties in the way of direct travel about the diocese at the moment. We came via Cyprus actually. I’m staying with the Provost’s deputy at All Saints’ here. Mr. Hawthorn. Do you happen to know him?”

“Not the present occupant, I think. I knew his predecessor. He gave the prizes away one year at a school I was at in Cairo. He had a loud voice — most of them do, I suppose?”

“You ought to look him up then, the Cathedral on the corniche. He’d be pleased to see you. They’re doing a lot of interesting work; here in the UAR, in Libya and the Sudan. In fact Hawthorn’s making a trip this week to Alexandria and then on to the sub-diocese in Benghazi and the one in Tobruk. They’re extending the parsonage there. A tour of the parish, you might say. It could make quite a nice story for your paper.”

“How does Mr. Hawthorn travel on these pastoral missions?’

“Oh, my goodness me, I know all about that. I’ve been hearing about it non-stop for days: the immense efforts over the past five years with the parishioners here. Raffles, bingo, jumble sales, amateur dramatics — even the lenten collections: they’ve got themselves a long wheel-based Land Rover. Can you imagine? Punitive import taxes, but they managed it in the end. A real go-getter, that’s all I can say, Mr. Hawthorn. A very smart affair. He’s anxious for a long spin in it.”

“Well, I must look him up, if I have the time. He certainly sounds a forward looking man.”

“‘Six forward and two reverse’—as he says of his progress in the parish here. Talking about the gears of course.”

The Rev. Mr. Rostock chuckled, but not convincingly, vaguely aware of the banality of the joke. He was young really, hardly out of his thirties. Only a comprehensive and premature baldness gave him an irredeemably older, careworn look, as if his hair alone had succumbed to the unhopeful routines of a home counties presbytery — visiting the antiseptic, Scandinavian bungalows on the new estates and counting ten times the plate money at Christmas and Easter — while the rest of his body yearned for gospel safaris in the Libyan desert.

The idea struck me then and there, of course. There was a British air base at Tobruk, a direct RAF Transport Command flight back to Brize Norton. But Usher had said to keep my ticket and go to the airport. That would be tomorrow.

I saw Usher put his arm round Pearson and manoeuvre him towards the little cell at the end of the room, and then Leila Tewfik bumped into me.

Tomorrow, I thought, and that will be the last of it; not any more of it — ever. Not here. For she looked at me with a quite unexpected warmth. There would be an end of that, the chances of women in foreign places, and it might be no bad thing: I had gone through that routine once before in these parts. Yet how easily I could have taken up with Leila at that moment, not for any sort of consolation, just the opposite: we would fall to it with all the skill of trained adventurers, believing that having emerged from the vengeance and disappointment of one affair we were now qualified to avoid those pitfalls in a second. Leila put one in mind of a really professional, joyous few weeks. I don’t suppose it was a realistic notion; such thoughts at Cairo parties rarely are — and it was this potential of the city that I was going to miss: its electric vacancy which begins by making every plan possible and ends by making them all unnecessary; the airs of a place whose citizens have long ago come to genuine terms with their ambitions.

“Well,” she said, “did you get plenty of work done this morning?”

“Thank you. I’d meant to say so before but I’ve not stopped running. I gave the keys back to Ahmed.”

“How long are you staying here?” She crooked her glass in an elbow, took off her glasses and wiped them.

“What are you thinking? A trip to Helwan on a boat together? I’ve never done that.”

She put her glasses back on and blinked at me for a moment, focusing, her eyes narrowing a fraction into the smallest of smiles, nose dipping in an even smaller nod.

“Trouble is I’m supposed to be going back tomorrow. If all goes well.’

“And if it doesn’t?”

“I’ll come and do some more work on the roof if I may. Where do the boats go from these days?”

“Below Shephearďs, by Garden City. Why don’t you come? Tomorrow morning. Morsy might come. And he might not. I could find out.”

The little conspiracy was perfectly presented.

“Can I let you know?” A suffragi had tapped my arm; Usher wanted me to come to his cell.

“Please. Will you let me know?”

“I’ll be back.”

Yes, we could have begun there and then; trips to Helwan and the Viceregal kiosk by the pyramids, cocktails on the Semiramis terrace, and cold hangover beers in the stuffy back bar of the Cosmopolitan: we could have pushed off straight away into the infinitely shoddy glamour of the city which would so soon become precious for us. But again, I was bitten by tomorrow: a half view of St. Paul’s lurking behind the vile new concrete, from a matchbox office where one would hardly remember the crumbling architecture of this changeless valley.

I saw that Cherry had been given the same message from Usher and was following me through the crush of people. The festivities were at their height.

Usher was standing at the door and when we were both inside the small room, he closed it carefully and locked it. Pearson was lying stretched out full length on the Moroccan counterpane, legs apart, arms wide in a position of suggestive abandon. His shoes were on the floor and his tie loose. For a moment I thought he was awake and waiting for something untoward, and that Cherry and I had been invited to participate or witness it. And then I remembered Usher’s phrase, that he “had something” for Pearson. He had obviously received it.

Usher was moving round the bed with fussy efficiency. The shoes were back on now, the tie fixed. Finally Usher carefully replaced a number of papers from Pearson’s inside pocket.

“Poor chap. I’d forgotten his ulcer. Stomach wall must have very low tolerance for that kind of medicine. Went out so fast I barely caught him. Now I need your help. These knock-out drops will keep his curiosity at bay for forty-eight hours. I want to get him home to his wife in Zamalek. She doesn’t care for me; I think she may well come to hate me after tonight. But there’s no matter — the point is he’ll be too ill to file anything until we’re all out of here. And he certainly won’t get his ten o’clock news circuit to London this evening.”

Usher bent over him, lifted an eyelid, checked his breathing. He stood up like a policeman.

“Funny things, these new cough drops. You know what they do? — they give you an almighty go of Gyppy tummy. Appropriate, what? Just the same symptoms; clever fellows, those boffins. Like to get him home before that starts. Of course he was filing on Marcus. It was in his pocket — Informed sources here suggest’ sort of thing; he’s going to inconveniently mislay the cable; hope he loses his mind as well. Now, if you two could help me downstairs with him. I’m rather too old for much potato work.”

Cherry looked on hopelessly and I tried to find a cigarette.

“Downstairs how? Where? There’re no windows or doors. You’re not thinking of taking him back through the party?”

“Well, upstairs, really. Then downstairs. That’s why I needed you.”

Usher stood up on the bed, between Pearson’s feet, and pulled at a red silk canopy which covered the ceiling in folds. “Had no roof in the old days, this room. So I put in a false one when I converted the place. Now you get up there, Marlow — that’s right, you’ll have to use your arms.”

I had joined Usher on the bed and had started to pull myself up between the frame of an open trap-door immediately above us. When I was up and had turned round, bracing myself against the rafters, Cherry and Usher grasped Pearson by either arm, and the three of them commenced a brisk dance about the bed springs for some moments, trying to steady themselves, in a fearful drunken fandango, Pearson’s head lolling about between them, his dancing pumps dragging about the counterpane, marionette-fashion.

It struck me that Usher was doing something seriously stupid, that he’d kill the man, snap his neck or asphyxiate him with his antics. Then Cherry tried to steady himself by grasping the edge of the trap-door but instead managed to drag the entire canopy down over himself and Pearson.

“For God’s sake man,” Usher murmured. “Pull yourself together. Don’t tear the material.”

I lay down along the rafters burying my arms in the bouncing red shape, crooking my arms beneath two armpits. Then I pulled hard.

“Wrong one, old fellow,” Usher said after a moment. “Pull the other one.”

We got Pearson up. Cherry followed, and together we hauled Usher after us. We even managed to replace most of the canopy.

“A ladder would have been useful,” Cherry suggested, as we carried Pearson across the beams to some other part of the Mameluke warren.

“No doubt,” Usher puffed. “Never got round to it. I don’t normally use this exit myself. It’s really a direct entrance from the garage to my bedroom for some of my more limber acquaintances.”

We came to the end of the attic, moved through some angled joists, through a plywood door, and nearly fell headlong into a garage twenty feet below us. Here there was a ladder, and we moved more quickly now, with Pearson in a fireman’s hold over my shoulder.

Usher opened the back door of an immense old navy blue Rolls and I toppled Pearson straight in.

“This used to be the main entrance,” Usher said. “It gives straight out on to the street behind the mosque. Open the doors and I can run down hill as far as Abdin Palace without starting the engine. Very convenient.”

“This car is a bit much, though, isn’t it, Robin? Bit conspicuous for a job like this. I didn’t think you still used it.” Cherry was excusably nervous and was trying to work off his forebodings on Usher. “Doesn’t it rather irritate people out here?”

And it could well have done with its shapely arrogance, its immense spokeless wheels and tall coach-like box for the passengers behind. The radiator might have caused particular offence for instead of the usual winged angel there was some antique automobile club emblem — a wheel in the shape of a large Union Jack.

“It belonged to the editor of the Egyptian Mail in Alexandria. He had it specially made for him in the ’twenties. Why should it irritate anyone, Herbert? Envy, perhaps. But not irritation.”

“I didn’t think we wanted to draw attention to ourselves, that’s all.”

“One of the secrets of secret work is to be conspicuous; I’ve often told you. The more obvious you appear, the less suspicion is aroused. To slink round town in a Morris 8, in my position, would be to invite both mistrust and cramp. Come now, let’s not argue methods of approach at this juncture: I’ll prime the motor, open the doors, and I’ll drop our friend back home. You two go back to the party. If anyone asks you can tell them I’ve been helping the press in their inquiries. And I think one could hardly deny it. Drunken sods …”

Usher climbed aboard and began tinkering with various levers attached to the central rung of the steering wheel. Things whirred and clicked and groaned beneath the long bonnet. Cherry and I opened the two doors. The garage gave on to a narrow unlit side street, which ran across the hill, away from the El Rifai and Hassan Plaza on our left down towards the El Azhar mosque and the Mousky bazaar northwards to our right.

There was no one about, a moonless, close evening with the ticklish smell of pepper in the air, and no sound apart from the distant crash of traffic down in the city. Cherry saw them first, he was on that side of the door looking along to the Rifai Plaza a hundred yards away, though we had heard the sounds half a minute before, standing rooted to the spot: the groan of heavy diesel engines changing down through the gears as they came up the hill; a line of military vehicles circling now round the plaza and going on up to the higher road which led to the new entrance to Usher’s house; a small convoy of jeeps, followed by several police Fiats, and two Military Police lorries with bren-guns mounted on the cab roof.

Another historic ambush which would end a dynasty was under way: it was Mohammed Ali’s massacre of the Princes at the Citadel all over again; the remnants of the Saxon Raj as victims this time, rather than the last of the Mamelukes. Amongst the startled multitude damask and richest silk would have given way to cotton polka-dot print, chain mail to faded pin-stripe, and there would be no caparisoned chargers at the door, just a few ruined Hillmans; but the result would be the same: trapped in a narrow defile beneath the fortress walls there would be no escape for the lumbering Lords and Ladies as they sought vainly for release in stout Northampton boots.

Usher got down from his bridge on the Rolls and looked out with us.

“Pearson must have got something through after all,” I said.

“Or they may have just changed their minds about us. They’re like that.” Usher seemed unaffected by their arrival. Was there a hint of relief even in his voice, now that he realised he might not be seeing St. John’s Wood for some time?

“Never mind. I’ve burnt all the papers. Never kept many papers anyway. We might as well all go together then. Rather fortuitous even.”

“Go where?” Herbert asked bluntly, shades of anger and despair gathering in his voice. The M.P.s had left their lorries and were ringing the plaza, blocking off the south end of the lane, their backs towards us. “I’ll really have to be getting back to my wife,” Herbert continued. “I’ve been out long enough already.”

Cherry and Usher had commitments in Egypt, I realised again, ties of pleasure and misfortune, and I suppose it must simply have been Usher’s dedication to form which made him run that night: a sense of keeping his end up. Or he may just have felt it was too good a chance to miss, a last excessive raspberry in the face of authority.

“Come on then, Herbert. I’ll drop you home.”

The chatter above us had suddenly died. There was a sound of glass breaking.

“I wonder who that was,” Usher said with real indignation. “That’s the second tonight of those goblets. Shan’t bring them out again.” He got back behind the wheel. “Give us a push.”

The huge car glided out of the garage like a boat, a noiseless blue craft indistinguishable as velvet in the darkness, the Union Jack moving in a steady circling arc at the distant end of the bonnet like a gunsight on the bows. Usher locked the wheel to the right with vigorous pumping movements, one hand flashing over the other, thwacking on the wood as it spun, his jowls shuddering, white hair bouncing in strands over one ear. With a yachting cap he would have been Sir Thomas Lipton caught in a squall.

Cherry and I crouched in the leather cathedral of the huge interior, Pearson propped up in the seat behind us. But as we moved away down the lane with nothing following us we got up off the floor, pulled the jump seats out, and sat down.

Usher still hadn’t fired the engine and I couldn’t make out whether he was trying to or not. We had long since left the lane, turned into Bab el Wazir and from there into the narrow streets which skirted the Mousky bazaar, going downhill, heading northeast, roughly in the direction of Opera Square. Market stalls lay within a foot of either side of us now, pressure lamps flaring above each of them in a snake-like dazzle that went all down the street, and a huge crush of people moving in between them, buying their evening meal. We had arrived in the middle of that interminable Egyptian supper time, in which whole streets of the city become dining rooms, and the going was difficult.

Usher fired the engine now, a delicious warbling, throaty roar, which was drowned only by the klaxon on the vehicle which he started to exercise violently. Whole families sprang from their food, running for the gutter in a clatter of tin dishes, galibeahs pulled about them, jumping for their lives. Our progress could not have been more noticeable or better judged to support Usher’s theories on the art of inconspicuousness.

And strangely enough few people seemed to pay us any real attention; no one shook fists after us in the rear mirror or threw marbles under the wheels. True, we were passing down one of the oldest parts of the mediaeval city, between the Blue Mosque and the Bazaar, whose populace, since the days of the Fatamids, had long been inured to foreign arrogance in a variety of the most eccentric forms. Not half a mile away the insomniac Caliph Khumaraweh had had himself rocked to sleep on an air mattress on a lake of mercury, a sybaritic transport not far removed from our own extravagant progress in the Rolls. For some of the older bystanders our headlong career may have seemed no more than happy evidence that the British had at last returned to Egypt and they could look forward to sharpening their wits and financial idioms again.

And we would have made any destination we chose in the city that night, I think, if an elderly, courteous policeman at the entrance to Opera Square had not spotted the car and its proud enamel colours on the radiator, and thought almost exactly this: not that the British had returned in any permanent form, but that they had come back temporarily and were on their way to a little reunion downtown, which he, among many of his colleagues, was helping to effect smoothly.

The man stepped gallantly up on the wide running board while we were at the lights at the top of Adly Street, saluted Usher with one white-gloved hand, while holding on to the side of the car with the other. The white gloves gave me the clue. Cairo police wore them on only the most auspicious occasions. But I couldn’t get any further. It seemed simply that we were being arrested with more than the usual Egyptian courtesy.

Then the blossomy round old face shouted at Usher above the din of traffic, “Montgunnery, sir! You wanting Montgunnery party. Follow me!” The man tightened his grip on the car, urged Usher forward, while at the same time lashing out at some luckless pedestrians with one foot. I would have run for it there and then if Usher hadn’t driven off smartly, breaking the lights, while thanking the old fellow profusely in Arabic.

Other traffic police waved the car on now in a gale of whistles, and we were passed through a barrier at the end of Adly Street and into Soliman Pasha which had been cleared of all traffic. The crowds were fairly thick on either pavement, held back by police every few yards, and further down by Lappa’s and Groppi’s they were six-deep, quiet, full of interest, devouring ice cornets.

Cherry and I sat rigid in the jump seats; prominent, upright men — detectives I supposed they’d think us — accompanying some Ambassador who had unaccountably dozed off in the back of the car. I straightened my tie and wondered if we should wave to the crowds in lieu of our master. Cherry drummed his fingers on the upholstered floor, his arms hanging down across his body in the minute seats, like an ape about to spring.

“What does Usher think he’s up to? We’ll never make it. Not a hope.”

“I should think that was exactly what we were going to do,” I replied.

The moon face was wild and sweating now, as he shook his head from side to side in desperation. He had at least managed a suit in place of his usual crumpled flannels and stained linen coat. Usher, of course, was resplendent, while my linen tropicals were still in fair order. From the sartorial point of view it struck me we would make it all too well. Conversation, on the other hand, might be more difficult.

“What was your war like, Herbert? A good armoured regiment, I hope. Monty has a horror of backsliders. And he’s northern Irish, isn’t he? Not southern.”

And there was Mr. Pearson of the International Press Agency dreaming of a Stop Press behind us. I wondered what Monty would make of him? He might take it that, on this occasion, the press had gone a little too far.

We swung round Soliman Pasha quickly and on down towards the river. There was a queue of limousines in front of us, turning off to the right at Bustani Street, light blazing from the covered terraces of the Mohammed Ali Club on the corner. Usher had stumbled on a suitable place for our Valhalla; the Club had been previously only less select than the Khedival Club; now it was where the Egyptian Foreign Ministry held their most dignified receptions.

We turned — there was no alternative now, the rest of Soliman Pasha was barred against us — and drew up outside the huge doorway with its two glittering brass street lanterns illuminating the red-carpeted space between us and the marble steps. A young army officer in full dress uniform approached and opened the back door. There was absolutely nothing for us to do but get out, leaving Pearson where he was, propped up in the corner of the seat, eyes closed, the foxy nervous face perfectly at peace, the not-too-popular ‘thirties bandleader coming into a show stopper, now a sweet melody that would fell them all at the Metro Ballroom, Huddersfield, next week.

And then — I can’t think how or why, his unfailing nose for a good story prodding him, perhaps, even in this deepest unconsciousness — Pearson stirred. His eyes fluttered and opened and he licked his lips, before he began to push himself forward, slowly, a ghostly man, from his upholstered tomb. The officer, still holding the door open, turned and the three of us helped him out of the car.

It looked all right in the event, Pearson seeming to be afflicted with no more than a bad leg, earned gallantly at Alamein in the circumstances, stumbling with game dignity across the red carpet and up the steps in our arms. In fact he was in a speechless dream, his mind had not yet begun to catch up with events.

The young officer showed us all into a small drawing-room off the hall and we got Pearson down on to a sofa. Usher came in shortly afterwards, having parked the car, all bustle and British, going straight over to tend Pearson.

“I’m sorry about this, Captain. He so much wanted to come. An old wound. We did our best to warn him. A glass of water perhaps?”

“Certainly.” The Captain, extremely solicitous, went away to fetch the refreshment.

“That’s one of their Military Intelligence people,” Usher said. “Foreign Ministry is giving the do for Monty.”

Pearson had begun to doze again.

“I don’t suppose they’re likely to look for us here then,” Cherry offered, though his face suggested no sort of belief in the statement.

“Where can we go?” I asked. “What’s the point?”

“We shall go where we set out to go,” Usher retorted heavily. “We are not going to have orange juice with Monty, I can assure you. I’ll try and get Pearson back home, you no doubt to your hotel, Cherry to his wife. We must do as we set out to do.”

Usher immediately seemed to contradict his plan of campaign by sitting down suddenly on a tiny gilt chair, his bulk enclosing it completely, like a hen settling on a nest. He looked beaten. A pair of French windows behind the sofa led out to a closed terrace which ran all the way round the ground floor of the building. I couldn’t see any of the blazing lights coming in from the street so I assumed the room beyond must face away from Bustani Street and on to a side street.

“Perhaps there’s something out that way. Might be able to get over the balcony.” The others looked at me dully and I saw Pearson swivel with me as I moved towards the window, a look of hate creeping into the doped lines of his face.

I pushed through the half-opened curtains and went into an empty unlit terrace beyond. There was a balustrade on the outside and a drop of about ten feet down on to a side road crammed tight with cars, their drivers chattering in groups here and there up its length. I could make it, I thought. But the others? We might possibly have to run from the chauffeurs as well. And run where? I turned back. A door opened. Several people had come into the little room. One of them had started to talk. I recognized the stumbling accents at once, the extraordinary arabesques decorating the English vowels: it was the Major I had seen earlier that day in Heliopolis welcoming his unexpected guests.

“A pleasure, Mr. Usher,” he said, a caricature opening in the circumstances. He’d seen too many films. All Egyptians have. “We were just looking for you on a call to your house up-town. You were giving a reception there yourself — no? We did not expect you here. But you are — not very well — yes? But very welcome …”

I heard the tinkle of a tray and saw Usher’s arm stretch across the window. He took the glass of iced water, then his head bent into view, the long nose dipped and he started to gulp it down in one swill. Greedy to the end, I thought I turned and cocked one leg over the balustrade, suddenly feeling an appalling thirst myself.

The chauffeurs heard me as I hit the ground. There was a group of them fifteen yards away, probably security men as well. I brushed myself down, saluted them formally and walked casually towards the main street. I had ten seconds before they made their minds up about me, then I’d have to run. I turned the corner into Bustani Street. Ten, twenty seconds; nothing happened. I walked past a deserted police barrier towards the bottom of Kasr el Nil, stragglers moving with me now that the gaiety was over. Constables gathered in groups mopping their faces on the other side of the road and a few white-suited officers directed the returning flow of traffic.

Then they came — a whistle and raised voices behind me. I had gone beyond the point of running; they’d seen the direction I’d taken; it could only be a chase which I would be bound to lose: police were in groups every ten yards or so along the road in front of me. I pulled off my coat and tie in almost a single gesture, heeled right round in my tracks, and walked smartly back, slightly crouched, in the same direction as I’d come.

They passed me on the run, pushing the stragglers out of the way, a group of security men and an Army officer, shouting hard. One of them barged me off the pavement into the arms of a startled traffic policeman standing by the kerb. I stopped and looked after them with annoyance, but not for long. “The foreigner,” they were shouting, “in the tie and suit. The tall one!” I turned to the bemused policeman, smiled, shrugged my shoulders as he gazed at my open-necked shirt: Marks & Spencer some months back, one of the last they’d made in pure white cotton. The little man saluted me, helped me back on the pavement, and I went on my way, returning the salutation. Egyptians are much given to that form of address.

It was after ten o’clock when I’d crossed the bridge and let myself into the Armenian’s apartment on Gezira. The darkness smelt of paper; fine weave and heavy rag, manilla and best hand laid; years of warm paper. I lit the matches, one by one, carefully dousing them on the floor as I made my way across the apartment to the perch; circles of light, flaring up, dying, briefly illuminating the chronicles of the Law. I felt as secure as the passengers in the next cabin, all of us inmates now, the ship stalled and perfectly camouflaged in a Cairo backwater.

I had almost fallen asleep by the ventilator, for although there was a light on in the room next door, there wasn’t a sound from the place.

The smell of illness had disappeared almost completely. Had Colonel Hamdy decided to run as well? I had turned away, was resting my head against the ridge of the ventilator, when I heard the telephone start, a faint, insistent buzz from the far side of the sofa. My head was in the grille again, just in time to see Hamdy crossing the room smartly in a bath robe, eager and quick indeed for an ill man.

He answered in Arabic, calling himself Mahmoud, listened for a minute and then seemed to confirm some details about fruit, the importation of so much dried fruit, coming in on a Greek boat the following day at Alexandria. The Salonika. He repeated some customs and consignment numbers, thanked his caller in a bored way, and that was it.

A code call. Their way out. Arrangements had been made; the call they’d all been waiting for — if they could make it to Alex and get past the harbour authorities. The Colonel, not Crowther or Usher, must have been the king pin in Cairo, to be protected at all costs, and now he was on the run with the rest of them.

He came into view, slumped on one end of the sofa, lit a cigarette. His head knocked against the wall and a shudder of nausea closed up the lines over his face and neck. He rubbed the back of his skull. Then he seemed to settle, composing himself with a drawn hang-dog look, a man waiting for someone to be sorry for him; pretending.

Some time later I was in the shaft again. A door had opened and now Bridget came into the room with a package. The Colonel looked asleep.

“Hamdy? Hamdy!” She bent over him and wobbled his shoulder gently. “I’ve got the stuff at last. You’ll need some water with it. Has he come back yet?”

The Colonel opened his eyes but didn’t move. He certainly looked ill now. “No. No, I don’t think so.”

“What are you doing here — what did you get out of bed for? Did they call — did the call come?” Bridget ran through the sequence of thought with increasing urgency.

“No. Nothing came. No one. I went to the bathroom, must just have dropped off here.” He looked up at her with genuine exhaustion.

Bridget left the room. I heard a tap go on and tried to think what the Colonel was up to. He wasn’t running in their direction at all.

“Take two of these now, and a sleeping pill. It’s food poisoning of some sort. Rest, Cherif said, just rest.”

She gave him his medicine, then sat down next to him while he was getting it down.

“Now what?” he enquired when he’d finished. “He’s been gone since midday. Probably the sensible thing. We ought to have split up long ago.”

“Fine, fine — split up and go. But where?”

“He’s obviously thought of somewhere.”

“He’d have just gone off like that, you think, without letting us know?”

“Why not?”

“He went for a walk. That’s all. He went out and got picked up somewhere. How could he think he’d make it out of Cairo on his own?” Bridget turned on the Colonel almost angrily. “How could he?”

“Well, he’s gone. And if he’s been picked up he’ll probably start to sing. Unless you want to go phoning the hospitals and police stations?”

How like Henry, I thought, to fall under a bus at this moment. But of course he hadn’t; he’d sidestepped Dr. Novak and made his way direct to the Russian Embassy. The Colonel must have been thinking of some similar asylum — where though?

“Obviously I’m not going to get out of here,” Hamdy continued. “Even if London is able to make some arrangement. I’m not fit to walk, let alone jump a ship. Why don’t you go to the Consulate? Just give yourself over. They’ll manage something for you.”

“Mad. Just madness. Why do you think that? — that I’d leave you here?”

Tenderness for the Colonel — I shouldn’t have been surprised by it. She had always had those sudden gusts of unthinking tenderness for everyone — even for someone who in this case was going to bolt and leave her. I’d seen the Colonel move across the room like a long jumper starting his run, frisky as a fox.

“Go back to bed, Hamdy. Wait. We’ll just wait longer. That’s all. When you’re better, there’ll be something then. I promise you.”

She helped him up and the two of them went through the charade of his being lumbered back to bed. They passed out of my eye-line, father and daughter, linked bravely together, refugees starting out together on the long journey away from the holocaust.

Hamdy was working for someone else. There was no end to it. The Americans? The French? The Israelis? For someone, or some country, so violently antagonistic towards Egypt, that he couldn’t trust Bridget with the information. But perhaps I was being hard on him; he was simply protecting her, as Henry had, from dangerous information. One protected people one loved.

It must be the Israelis, I thought. With any other country he’d be in their Cairo Embassy by now. It was perfectly possible. There had always been Jews in Egypt, and some of them had “gone under”, changed their names and covered their tracks, in response to the difficult circumstances; Turkish and Armenian Jews — and others from the diaspora — who had long before intermarried among the upper class of the city, merged completely with their Moslem neighbours. The Jews had never been persecuted in Egypt. Certainly if he were with the Israelis they would make every effort to get him back, unencumbered with friends or colleagues or mistresses. And that was his plan. He would bolt when the music stopped, when only Bridget would be left standing.

She came back into the drawing-room, passed out of sight then back again with a whisky in her hand. She sat on the edge of the sofa, legs forked outward, elbows on her knees. There was nothing vulnerable in her, nothing nervous in her calm expression: a sensible dark skirt and a long-sleeved blouse with a panel of embroidered lace down the front, Bahaddin’s gold cross still about her neck.

She had weathered the years, and the men that had gone with them, with the faith of a missionary. She had believed in men; they had been her disciples. Though I had tried, I had never really been able to see her infidelities as a flaw of character, as simple greed or selfishness or stupidity: they were simply a reflection of a great need, an impossibly generous gift in a small and mean world; a gift centred on sex merely as the outward and visible form of all the other passion which for her lay behind that communion. Thus she repeated it, as gesture and symbol, with whoever came to the altar. There was, indeed, nothing possessive about her, nothing exclusive; she quite lacked self-regard — and that was her message to mankind. I had tried to tie her with those self-centred flaws, the perversions of her faith. The others, Henry and the Colonel and who else I didn’t know, had learnt to freewheel within the orbit of her love; I had always pedalled hard in the wrong direction. And it wasn’t the time to change things, just time to go. The only call I could have upon her now would be as a voice from the clouds.

“Bridget!”

She looked round towards Hamdy’s bedroom door, casually.

“No — not there. Here — up at the ceiling. The ventilator shaft.”

She turned back, lit a cigarette and took her drink. She had heard some whisper and forgotten it.

“Bridget — here! Look up.” I repeated the performance. It was an extraordinary sight. From my height above the room she got up and moved about like an animal, testing the bars, looking everywhere, then coming towards me, dipping out of sight into the wall below me.

“Henry?” Her voice rang up to me. “Henry?”

You silly bitch, I thought. And I had to stop myself from yelling next time.

“Here,” I said. “Not Henry. Marlow. Peter Marlow.”

She had come out from the wall now and was looking straight up at me. She closed her eyes for a moment and shuddered, all the top half of her body shaking involuntarily, as though facing an icy blast from the ventilator.

“Listen — I’m coming round to your door. Have it open. Don’t wake the Colonel.”

She looked at me without seeing anything, nodding wildly, her head bouncing up and down, breathless, an expression of insensible abandon on her face.

She closed the hall door noiselessly behind me and we tiptoed along the passage. How quickly she joined herself to the silent conspiracy, assuming all the skills of the dedicated lover: whispers from a window, the illicit meeting at the door, the utmost care in approaching the last hurdle of the creaky stair, before the vehement release in the spare room. She had, of course, just the right qualities for her job.

The remains of their tummy trouble hung in the air, a smell of rancid milk, but it had gone completely by the time we reached her bedroom at the end of the apartment, submerged in a rich blanket of powder and eau de cologne which she had doused the room with. It was stifling by the big bed; air couldn’t have reached the place in months. I took my jacket off, while she closed the door behind me, carrying whisky and two glasses.

“Henry said they might send someone after us. But not you. We never thought of you.” She stood in front of me, pouring a drink, watching the golden trail of liquid, then gazing up at me. She looked more her age now, smaller, thinner, the hair seeming to fall back from a higher point on her forehead than I’d remembered. It only made her other features more prominent — the eyes larger and more widely spaced, the nose more abrupt, turning more pointedly at the end, the mouth a fine mobile line right across her jaw: the flesh had receded with time, had left these quirks like emerging islands; startling, unvisited shapes in the drought of the years.

“I’m sorry. Yes — they sent me.” I swallowed some of the neat whisky. “Do you have any water?”

“I didn’t mean that. Just — the surprise. It nearly killed me. How long have you been up in the wall?” She turned away.

“Just now, this evening.” I explained, briefly, how I’d got there. But the mechanics didn’t interest her.

“Thank God you’ve come,” she said. That was what interested her. “They got Hamdy’s message in the end. It took them long enough. What — plans have you got? For getting us out of here?” And she rushed on, not wanting to seem pressed by the impersonal — “I never thought I’d be so glad to see anyone — and it’s you, of all people.”

She looked at me warmly, full of trust, as though I were a sensible friend come to sort things out with a family after a bankruptcy. We might have been in each other’s arms after a few more drinks. Not for love, for mere formal relief.

“Your hair’s going further back your head; that’s all.” She seemed to feel her way round my body with her expression.

“So’s yours.”

A smile between us, then — acknowledgement that though passion had waned to nothing, it had existed once, and might again. She was making polite inquiries. So was I.

But suddenly I couldn’t see Bridget in those terms any more, couldn’t see myself sharing any kind of emotion with her. In a second it was all finished and done with, the years of pain, the suppressed longing which had risen again when I’d seen her from the Tower, and from the café as she walked along the corniche; another man had experienced all that bright resurgence, not me.

I had re-achieved her in those seconds during which we had looked at each other warmly and talked about our faces. We had gone through all the teasing preliminaries, and I felt that I could have tossed her on to the bed beside us without more ado. And since that was possible at last, I couldn’t contemplate it seriously.

She was someone to help in a professional way, someone in trouble. It was she who must face the disappointment now.

“Henry’s disappeared,” she said lightly, after the silence. Henry in his sailor suit who had run away behind the bandstand — as though she had been given the boring job of keeping an eye on him for the morning and had no other connection with him.

“Oh,” I said. I had nothing to offer her there, not yet.

“But what shall we do — what plans do they have?” she went on, like a traveller stuck at a midland junction on a winter Sunday morning: upset but still confident.

“There aren’t any. I haven’t any plans. They sent me out to see if Henry was here. And bring him back if he was, I suppose. But I don’t see how any of us are going to get back.”

“Have they got on to you as well?”

“Yes. Cherry and Usher too for some strange reason. The whole circle.” I told her what had happended earlier in the evening.

“But what about the people in London?” she said, insisting now, but still controlled. “At Holborn?”

I tried to think of Bridget at a meeting with Williams or having a drink in the wine bar in the Strand, just as I tried to imagine Cherry and Usher getting the number eleven bus — and it didn’t work. Bridget, like them, was a part of Cairo, part of its very core; they were natural seismographs alive to its smallest tremors. They had not always been happy there; so much the more were they bound to it: they had lived a real life in the city, had given nothing false to it, in every minute passed there. Their dreams of elsewhere, of rain, ploughed fields, sloes in the hedgerow or London Transport, were as unreal as mine would have been for sun and coral, and clear blue water. The known years spent in a landscape never tie us to it, the marked calendar from which we can stand back and reflect or think of change; we are bound to a place by the unconscious minutes and seconds lost there, which is not measurable time or experience, and from which there is no release.

“Holborn doesn’t know anything about getting out of here. But I’ll let them know tomorrow. I have a contact through the library.”

She had begun to look glum and a little hopeless now, sitting on the dressing-table stool, drink in her hand, swaying out in a clumsy arc from the balance she’d made, elbow on her knee.

“But why should you want to leave? You haven’t told me.”

“We’ve been here for days. They picked Henry up at the airport He got away. They got on to Hamdy. We came here, it’s his place, they don’t know about it.”

“Hamdy’s with us, of course?”

“Yes, of course. Didn’t you know?”

“I was never active. You knew that. I’m in Library in Holborn. I don’t get to hear much about people in the field.”

“Yes, Henry told me.”

“You’ve seen quite a lot of him?”

“Odd times. When he was out here. Didn’t he tell you?”

“No.” And I could see she knew he hadn’t told me. “No, he didn’t tell me he saw you. Why should he? Why drag it up? I knew nothing about you.”

“Yes — but why? I wish you’d bothered. Sometimes.”

“Come on. It was finished, done with. We had a merry time. Then there was an unfortunate ‘professional arrangement’; if you remember”

“Our marrying, you mean?”

“If you can call it that. I meant the other thing — getting married because it suited the professional circle you all had out here.”

“It wasn’t just that.”

“No. All right, not just that, then. There were a lot of other funny things, before that. It passed off well enough, really. It could have been much worse. We could have stayed together and clawed each other for years. We were lucky to miss that. But you can see — it’s not really the sort of thing one Mothers’ about afterwards. One tends to want to forget it.”

My tone was so much the lying pedagogue: I had wanted to “bother” her about it — for years afterwards — so much. Now it was her turn: she wanted to be bothered and worried about things like that; to feel, even at this late stage, that in distant conversations between Henry and me, she had been included: I worrying, Henry consoling.

Her sense of indispensability, of course, was part of her great attraction — when you were with her, when you thought you were the only person who shared her exclusively: when she was indispensable to you.

She put her drink down behind her and looked at me, hand cupped about her chin — that gesture I knew so well, when she turned from provocation to trust: the tired child, gazing into the fire, waiting for a story. Now for the first time since I’d emerged from Colonel Hamdy’s office ten years before, it didn’t have to be, couldn’t be, a fairy tale.

“Anyway, the talk with Henry is finished. He’s gone over to Moscow. He’s probably at their Embassy here now. That’s where he’s disappeared to.”

I wondered what her first words would be in reply, thinking that I could measure in them the strength of her affection for him. “I don’t believe you” would have been a natural response, for Henry had hidden his real self just as well from her as he had from the professional spy catchers. But instead she did the most natural thing, saying in a hardly surprised, serious voice: “How do you know?”

I showed her the plaster round my heel and told her of my visit, under Henry’s name, to Dr. Novak at the Kasr el Aini Hospital.

“You mean you suspected he was going over — London thought he was?”

To cut a long story short I said, “Yes, that was what happened.”

“And what if he were to walk in here — now?” She wanted so much to see me wrong, almost believing about Henry, but not quite, not yet.

“If he were to do this, do that — Bridget, he’s not going to walk in the door. He’s gone out, over. He’s with Moscow. It’s the one thing he’d never have told you; nothing to be upset about.”

“I thought you knew him — as well as I did”

“Yes, and I’m not surprised. Henry was like that, one knew everything about him except the boring things that mattered.”

“What on earth is he going to do in Moscow?” she went on with mystified concern.

“Write books, perhaps. He was good with words. Books and drink; argue with the housekeeper, read the English papers. A medal later on when they’ve squeezed him dry and put him out to grass. There are girls in Moscow too.”

I couldn’t resist the easy cruelty.

“That’s just spite. You might just be inventing the whole thing.”

“You know I’m not. I didn’t come all this way just to do you down, I can tell you.”

“Why did they send you then?” she said in a higher, faster voice, heading for a point where she would break. “You said you only worked in Library.”

“I don’t know why they sent me. Because I know the place, the language — and wasn’t known here now. That was the official reason.”

“You’re just the same sort of vague fellow, aren’t you? Bumbling round the place, letting everyone use you. It used to be teaching, now it’s spying — but never really knowing what you’re doing. Or why.”

“You’re overdoing it. You’re probably the only person who ‘used’ me, as you put it. But that doesn’t matter, as I said. What are you going to do? That’s the question.”

“There are the other arrangements.” She was almost prim now. “Hamdy was making them through a contact in Athens. That’s through central office, not Holborn. I thought for a moment you were that contact. That’s all. We just have to wait till he calls back. Hamdy’s ill anyway.”

“He’s not And there won’t be any call. Hamdy has nothing to do with our section, or with central office. That’s why I wanted him kept out of the way.” I stood up to fill my glass for I honestly thought she might go for me on the bed. And I wanted to stop her too if she decided to make a run for his bedroom. But she did nothing except ease her legs on the stool.

“I suppose you think he’s going over to Moscow as well — for a row with the servants.”

“No, I don’t Somewhere else. As far as I can make out he’s with the Israelis.”

“Ha, ha,” she said in a dry way. “Give me some more too, will you?”

I moved across, poured, added some water.

“You’ve let your imagination get the better of you, you really have.” She looked at me a moment, questioning. Then smiled, suddenly at ease. I was mad. Henry would be back later, a little drunk, but safe, and Hamdy was recovering in the other room. They’d be off together as soon as the call came, as it would come. I had given her hope at last because, of course, I was mad.

After the years of bureaucracy in Holborn, doing nothing but thumb through Al Ahram, this trip into the field — into the world of guns and golden Dunhills and dark glasses — had driven me off my head: I was a gambler speculating wildly, suggesting complex allegiances, where, in reality, everything was as it seemed. For Bridget, the business of espionage was dull — but true, and it was wearisome enough to have to accept that situation. That it and the people involved were dull but untrue, as I had suggested, was beyond her comprehension. It was time to humour me. The man who calls “Wolf” once too often — I was the child now who need never be believed. Relief flooded across her face.

“You really worried me.” She got up, walked over and bent down for a moment, hands on knees. “Why do you do it? After so long — what was the need to try and hurt again? You really didn’t have to. To hurt and possess, always that, never giving up. It’s what went wrong before and you’re still at it.”

She stood up. The grave, widely-spaced eyes were an admonition linking past with present. It was part of the same expression that had brought things to an end ten years ago — and it was intended to serve the same purpose now: a look of kindness, even worry, above all a deeply mystified, discursive inspection, as a drunk might study someone overboard from a yacht.

“I’d better see how he is. But for God’s sake don’t be stupid. I won’t tell him. Let’s just concentrate now on getting out of here without all this drama. All of us. That means you too.”

“That’s good of you, I’m sure.” She moved away towards the door. I swivelled the drink round in the glass and sighed.

She called me a few moments later. The light was on beside the bed, the table next to it piled high with old French novels, even an early Colette. There was a bottle of chalky medicine and an open box of pills. There were cigarettes and matches and the coverlet was nicely turned down — slippers, pyjamas, dressing gown at the ready. Someone was expected.

“Who sleeps here?” I asked. “Henry?”

“No, Hamdy.”

“Where is he? The bathroom? Is he ill again?”

“No.” Bridget closed one of the paperbacks lying on the pillow, tucked the sheet in, pushed the slippers under the bed.

“He’s gone.” Then she turned the light off. “Why the Israelis of all people?”

“I don’t know.”

We went back into the drawing-room.

10

We talked in more normal voices now; it made the apartment all the more silent.

Bridget went into the bedroom, and brought the drinks back in with her five minutes later. She had tidied her hair, powdered herself or something; there was a physical difference I couldn’t quite identify. It wasn’t a fall of confidence, much more a careful self-regard. She moved about the drawing-room settling things, rearranging cushions, emptying ash-trays. I had become a visitor who had dropped by at an awkward moment.

“If you work it out — I don’t see who else he could be with. Moscow would have got him out of here long ago — ”

“—No, you don’t have to go on about it It fits. Everything fits.”

I wondered if she would cry, once. But of course not.

“Before you came back this evening — that call did come, when I was up in the ventilator. He mentioned the name of a Greek boat in Alex. You could get — ”

“—Something Tel Aviv must have fixed up for him,” she said brightly.

“Couldn’t you have gone with him?”

“No, I couldn’t. You don’t run risks getting someone like him back home. Nor would Henry. I can see the problem. Now that I can see who they were really working for.”

“You couldn’t have guessed.”

“I should have. I’ve known them long enough. Both of them. Hamdy better than any. You wouldn’t know that; Henry didn’t.” She started to talk quickly now, to herself at first, then to me, turning, pecking her face in quick starts like a hen querying something. “Hamdy knew my parents. I’d known he was working for the British almost from the start. I thought it was the only thing he never told me.”

“I told you once in the Semiramis — there’ve been too many men; still. We’ve all been playing games. You and I, Henry and the Colonel. Point is, though, they’ve kept a last trick up their sleeves. We should have had one too.”

She raised her eyebrows, blew some air into her cheeks, trying to give her face the one expression it could never naturally assume — a stupid, deceived cast.

Blinded by these men? Could it ever have been so? Was she really one of those women who are natural camp followers, taken and used everywhere, only to be discarded at the final battle? I didn’t think so.

There was a simpler explanation. She had been as close to Henry and the Colonel, as involved, as it’s possible to be. She had given them every truth about herself. But she didn’t really know them at all. So the passion was maintained — on mystery, on things that could never be counted. In my case, where there had been gross expectations and disappointment, she had come to know everything about me, so that we fell apart.

“If you ever do get out of here what will you do? What do you want — something in Holborn?” It was a rhetorical question; I knew she’d never be sorting cables on the fourth floor. The risk would have been too great with anyone who had been so directly involved with Henry. I supposed, if she did get back, they would give her some money and help her to find a small flat. Already I saw her as a burden, as someone I might have to remember Christmas cards for, wilting away like a poor cousin in Kensington. But perhaps she might decide to go to Israel.

“Or go to Israel?”

“No. Not that and not Holborn. I can get out of the whole thing now. I can do that at last.”

“I’ll go to the Consulate library tomorrow morning, get a proper message through to London. Then we can decide.”

“You surely won’t get near the Consulate. Or the library. They’ll have the place surrounded.”

“We’ll see. We’ll think of something.” I didn’t know what, for she was right.

“Yes,” she said easily, “let’s think about it tomorrow.”

The heat, with the whisky, had made us sweat. I got up and poured some more. There was nothing else to do. The apartment smelt of rotten lilac, powder and tobacco — curtains of different steaming smells as one moved across it. My face was burning, pumping with blood; and my heel had started to throb. I gave Bridget what was left in the bottle.

“You always dress out here like an Arctic explorer, Peter. Why is it?”

I looked at her, wondering if she had introduced this old sartorial theme with the same sexual innuendo behind it that we had understood so readily years before. But her expression was no more than tired inquiry; she seemed to have quite forgotten its earlier implications. I was annoyed at thinking differently. For me she was a woman who had come to mean exactly what she said; there were no overtones with her now. It was all precise words; and the words would support us as long as we used them officially, kept them to the professional matters in hand. They would bear no real weight.

Yet her remarks about my dress reminded me — as something dead but otherwise intensely real in a museum — of the life they once had: a talisman still capable of stirring desire. She had used those same words once, with feeling, and they would do now as encouragement for any woman.

“I’m hot, that’s all. I’ll take a shower and lie down. I’m exhausted.”

“Don’t eat any of the food.” Her voice trailed casually after me as I left the room. “It’s all bad, I’m afraid.”

She had tucked her legs up beneath her on the sofa, shoes spilled on the floor, kness bent double like two delicate ivory ornaments, Bhuddist carvings beneath the dark hem of her skirt which had risen up her thighs. She was sitting in a way she never used to — except when we were alone together, high up in Garden City, the windows open, waiting for the evening. An unthinking remnant of our intimacy had survived at least, I thought, but only as a formality, with no more meaning than the chivalry we mimic in shaking hands with a stranger.

I let the shower play over my face and through my mouth, spitting out water and saliva and the taste of whisky every now and then in white-flecked oily globules which ran slowly in the rushing stream along the bottom of the bath, before gathering speed in the current and spinning furiously into the whirlpool of the drain.

I almost fell asleep on my feet looking at the liquid cone of water, and I would certainly have dropped off had I been taking a bath. But I wanted to stay awake.

The drawing-room was empty when I got back, towelling my hair, just wearing my pants, and I went along the corridor to the bedroom we’d been in. The door was half open, light shining through into the darkness beyond. Bridget was in the huge bed, beneath a single sheet, arched on her side, facing me. She opened her eyes.

“I’m sorry.” I let the towel fall around my shoulders. After the long rush of cold water I felt a moment’s chill run down my back and shuddered. “I’m going on the sofa. Goodnight.”

I had my hand on the door ready to close it. “Shall I close the door?” But already, in asking the question, I had opened the door slightly, moved a fraction into the room.

“Come in. Close the door.”

She pulled the sheet back as I walked towards the bed.

Of course, I said to myself, if we hadn’t drunk so much, been so tired, it would never have happened. It was a combination of despair, drink and exhaustion which had made our bed for us that night, I thought. But I thought wrong.

She wanted me as much as I did her: we were equally dedicated to the idea. Now that there were no overtones, no emotion, no backlog of frustration and no future to the business, we could give ourselves to each other with the same uncluttered vehemence as we’d done on the first occasion we’d met. There was nothing perverse in it; it was purely self-seeking. We took to each other with the sharpest sort of appetite — that of perfect strangers.

No sixth sense warned us that the future might be sour, the next morning or a month hence. We didn’t have that sort of future and we knew it. No debts would have to be paid, nothing lay in wait for us; no days over the smelly summer river, arguments over coffee at the Semiramis, or lies with dinner at the Estoril; no plots, misunderstandings; no tears or departure; no Usher and no Henry — no one to manipulate the slight events we might try and shape our lives with. There was no more of that life to shape. The professional, the personal, exploitation was at an end.

I had arrived in a country years before where nothing was as it seemed, a territory defended everywhere against trust, and I had come now to a broken barrier at the end of a smashed and empty landscape, a deserted customs post — to a point where no one stopped or chased you; where you simply stepped over the border and walked away.

She must have gone very early. I had woken once in the night and seen her leave the room, the long naked back and widely-spaced legs moving in clear silhouette towards the shaft of light in the corridor, sharply isolating the narrow rectangle between her thighs.

And then I had woken a second time, abruptly with a headache in the darkness, the place beside me empty, and I had stayed where I was, waiting for her to come back as before, eager for her again. But I knew within moments that this time she had really left.

I moved fretfully around the apartment, wondering what she had taken with her, looking for some evidence that would tell me she had gone, and where, perhaps, and why. But there was nothing; a few of her clothes in the wardrobe, a sleeveless white dress I’d remembered her in, some soiled cosmetics on the dressing table, a small pile of underwear on the bathroom floor.

Not London, she had said. And not Israel. She was simply getting out of it all. But where? I almost began to miss her — that infection of sex, as if she and I had, after all, a future. There was a surge of bitterness, a moment’s fierce resentment that I had lost her once more and would now have to start the search for her all over again.

I went to the window in the drawing-room, eased the heavy curtain back a fraction, and looked out on the brown grass of the cricket pitch at the Club. The early sun slanted over it in a bright golden wave. A man with a hose paddled about the edge swamping the boundary in pools of grey-blue water. Kites fell about the sky like footballs and the flame trees by the back entrance were just beginning to explode into rusty crimson light.

The minute Egyptian spring was finished, the Khamseen had whirled itself out over the dunes to the south; the dog days had arrived on the dot, when the heat would lie over the city for six months like a plate. From now on one would need the Stella really cold.

I wanted to be out of this too-known country, where the seasons were invariable, where duty and pleasure and sleep rang out as clearly as a monastery bell, but where I could never again be an indistinguishable part of the foliage. I was no longer part of the timetable, had lost all the habits. I wanted to leave it as quickly and violently as I could, and I thought for a moment of just going out to the airport and chancing it. But the chance didn’t really exist. And then I remembered the Provost’s deputy at the Cathedral: Mr. Hawthorn was going on a tour of his Christian dominions in a long wheel-based Land Rover. Anything — anything would do.

I left the apartment, making as quick a passage as I could from the darkness to the light.

11

The Cathedral of All Saints’ stood up on the left as I walked over Kasr el Nil bridge, dun-coloured, with its bulbous central tower like some atrocious chocolate shape; a boast of some Scottish bishop fifty years before, an empty fortress now, relegated to an imaginery holding operation against the alien faith. For many years the City Corporation had planned to build a bridge over the river at the point where the Cathedral fronted on to the corniche, but the cost of demolishing the gigantic pile had disheartened them. It was now the fourth pyramid within the city’s boundaries, only thirty years old, but already eroding, chipping away at the edges, taking on the mysterious patina of the other three: an abode of men who had been gods, who like their Pharaonic predecessors had disappeared without trace.

Mr. Hawthorn was at a meeting, I was told by his secretary, a defiant middle-aged English lady, when I called at his office on one side of the Cathedral forecourt. “An Ecumenical Committee.” Perhaps I’d care to call back? The lady moved from one outer room to the other, very fast, carrying envelopes and brochures to and fro with terrible concern. I was barely able to keep up with her.

“I’ll call back,” I shouted, as she settled in one room and began cranking an old duplicating machine.

“Do. In half an hour Mr. Hawthorn should be free. Before he goes to the Jumble Sale at twelve.” She stopped cranking. She looked at me, pondering my credit worthiness.

“Oh, there’s a sale, is there?”

“Yes. In the hall opposite. You may like to buy something while you’re here in Cairo. It’s in aid of the new extension at Tobruk.”

“I’ll take a look in, certainly.”

The lady warmed. “Here!” She drew off an early sheet from the machine and handed it to me. “It’s our Libyan plan. It may be of interest”

“Indeed — it was just what I wanted to talk to Mr. Hawthorn about” I looked at the page of rough yellow foolscap:

“The Churchwardens again take this opportunity of announcing the opening of a fund to provide an extension to the present severely limited office and domestic accommodationat the parsonage in Tobruk.…”

The gods were not quite dead yet; the remnants of the last dynasty were counter-attacking; a message was on the way, an outpost would be relieved; once more the infidel would be repelled. There was even talk at this very moment of a united army gathering in the north, implacable legions blessed by nearly all the disparate Princes. God had been mocked and had retreated; but now there were plans at last: this was the second front.

The lady in the long cardigan cranked the machine again, the inky paper peeling off ominously, orders for the day; a General Mobilisation: “The dogs of war … The Cannon’s Mouth … Citoyens, aux Armes …”

I went into the Cathedral to pass the time, through the minute side door into the dusty golden-moted cavern beyond. One’s eyes were lost at once following the Odeon curves and pillars into the shadows above; mid-’thirties, high renaissance ferroconcrete. A silver grille in front of the Lady Chapel at the top of the Cathedral, a distance that seemed hundreds of yards away over an empty no man’s land of wooden trenches, the chairs running from north to south in yellow, untrammelled pine, disused communication lines between the opaque glass of the high windows on either side, last occupied by the Eighth Army.

On the walls, at distant intervals, like brief footnotes to a lost history book, were plaques and memorials from other long since ruined churches within the diocese; headstones and memento moris rescued from Port Said, Suez, Zagazig and even further afield.

“In the midst of life we are in death.”

“Lt. Col. R. W. T. Gordon, 93rd Sutherland Highlanders. Died at Port Said from a fever contracted during the Suak-in expedition …” “Robert Septimus Grenfell, Lt., 12th Lancers. Killed in charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman, aged 23 …” “Lt. Col. Baker, who died in Egypt, November 17, 1887. He highly distinguished himself at the battle of Tachkessen while in command of a small Turkish force … a service which was brilliantly and successfully carried out … sincere friends and admirers — a token of their respect … qualities of the highest order which he possessed as a soldier and commander.”

“Justice is the foundation of Empires.”

In the dust-inflamed Cathedral with its soft and pulpy curves, its neutral colouring, the men became a film, a coloured epic; lancers and swordsmen in red or blue tunics. They were the only thing that moved in the yellow spaces, the shafts of empty light. There was nothing of any god here; no mercy, pity or resurrection; nothing remotely Christian. The building was simply a memory of violent life, the plaques an album of adventure turned to stone. Battles and games — sunrise, noon and night; exultation falling, nipped by a mosquito finding the one flaw in the net after an exhausting day’s march from the coast towards some empty quarter; fantasy dying, killed by some small, frightened men with greasy hair rising from behind a thorn bush in the Blue Nile Province while your back was turned; a dismal winter rectory in Worcestershire thrown into real mourning, nanny weeping on the servants’ stairs, through just a piece of bad luck as the pony swerved in the last chukka at the end of a warm afternoon at Gezira: it was the rumour at nightfall, the sound of drums, the parley on the hill top, the pipe of a false peace and a lot of liberal politicians at home, umpires blowing shrill and distant whistles, calling foul.

It was just a lot of bad luck really; they always sold you short — just as you’d got the boot in and had cracked a first skull. When the maxim platoon had a proper alignment and trajectory, and it was going nicely, the black gentlemen scurrying over the hill, you had a telegram from some competition wallah in Whitehall and picked up a dose of blackwater fever on your way back to H.Q. You never made that first class cabin on the Port Said boat; another telegram to the War Office took your place instead, while you lay up in the little cemetery beyond the French Club, looking over the canal, watching the boats go home forever. Justice is the foundation of Empires.

It wasn’t so very different these days, I thought. The fevers and the maxim guns had gone, and nanny had died weeping for the brave and foolish. But the umpires were still around in Whitehall, men like Williams, and far from liberal. And in Washington. And Moscow. There wasn’t the sound of any whistles now. They knocked on the door late at night; and there was still no boat home.

The Blue Nile Province had become an acrid-smelling barracks, or a nissen hut in Heliopolis — or in Athens or in Saigon. But the men died just the same, on the direct current, with ruptured kidneys or gangreened shins. The brave and foolish went to the wall, just as they had always done, but at midnight now, not high noon; in a cellar, not an empty quarter. And there wouldn’t be any memorial; no one would weep, for no one would ever know. It was a foolish story about history.

Something scraped over the glass in a corner window, high up; a shadow flicked across a row of yellow pews like a bird flying quickly over furrowed stubble. I turned and saw a lizard, six inches of still, mottled-green flesh, splayed out on the Gordon memorial window, a tiny cross of Lorraine stamped in the sun above the legend “I have done my duty for our country”. I moved down a row of benches to take a closer look at it.

Charles General Gordon, C.B.,

1833–1885

I thought the lizard had moved a second time when I heard the scraping sound again. But it was in just the same position when I looked up — a misplaced heraldic device, an idea the artist had forgotten to rub out in the cartoon of the window. I looked to my right.

Henry was standing beside a pillar at the top of the wall aisle, just beneath psalm numbers for the previous Sunday. For an instant I thought he might have been one of the Church-wardens. He was wearing a navy blazer I’d not remembered him in, and his hair toppled about in wild growths, grey matted strands, some upright, some flattened like an unsettled harvest. His eyes sloped down on either side of his face, with tiredness or drink, as if someone had tried to make him up as an oriental and got it wrong from the start. There was nothing sinister or hunted about him; there never had been. When Henry was worried he simply looked in need of a bath. A shave and a haircut wouldn’t have been wasted either. He seemed to me defiantly conspicuous.

“Sorry,” I said. “I thought you were one of the sidesmen or something.”

He came towards me, those busy small steps neatly and exactly marking out the space between us as though he were measuring a pitch.

“Didn’t mean to give you a fright.” I put out a hand in astonishment, but he didn’t see it. “I saw you walking along the corniche, couldn’t think what you were coming in here for.”

“I came to see the Provost.”

“Didn’t know you’d taken to good works.”

“I may be able to get a lift out of here with him. He’s going to Libya. By car.”

Henry considered the idea and I looked at him, waiting. I wanted to see what he had in mind. But he said nothing.

“It seems there’s only you and I left.”

“You think there’d be room?” He smiled briefly, an expression half meant, half not; waiting to see how the land lay as well.

“I didn’t know you wanted to go back. In that direction.”

“Where are the others then?”

“The Colonel disappeared last night. Bridget this morning. I don’t know where they went. I thought she might be with you. The others — Usher, Cherry, Marcus — they were picked up earlier still. Probably in Heliopolis now.”

“In the Army Hospital at Maadi. But that’s another story.”

He brushed his hair back, put a finger in one eye, wiping sleep away. His glasses had broken, I noticed, and he’d mended the hinge with tape. We started to walk down towards the font at the west end of the Cathedral.

“Why didn’t you go straight to the Russian Embassy — when you got the wrong end of the stick from Dr. Novak?”

Henry stopped and began fiddling with the metal ring on top of the covered bowl.

“You’ve really been working.”

“I haven’t done a stroke. You’ll have to go somewhere. Won’t you?”

“I don’t have to go anywhere. That’s the nice thing. I don’t have to spin off anywhere and get broken up. I just have to stay put. Wait till they’ve forgotten about me. Then I can move off. Not somewhere Williams knows of, or Moscow. Or you. Leave the busybodies out.”

“The toytown, you told me — last week.”

“And you came running with a miniature baton and a set of traffic lights. That was a trick to buy from Williams — invoking the old pals act.”

“I’ve been just as cunning as you.”

“Why haven’t you ‘turned me over’ then?”

“If you thought that, you’d hardly have followed me.”

“I didn’t think it. I was curious. Can’t seem to drop the habit. What was Williams up to? Why did he send you?”

I told him nothing of the microfilm. I supposed, even then, that Henry might make it back to Moscow and would warn them that I had my theories about Williams — and I wanted to be left to deal with Williams entirely on my own.

“He thought you might have had an accident, that you’d just disappeared, been abducted or something. I thought you might have come here — so he sent me after you, said I had good ‘connections’ in the place. What did you come here for?”

“Some cockeyed idea Williams had about subverting the ASU. I knew he was on to me the moment he suggested it.”

“On to your being with Moscow? Listen, if you’ve spent twenty years doubling for the KGB you might as well get out of it in one piece. Take the pickings, go home. Go to Moscow, for God’s sake. Don’t hang around here, you’ll get nothing but fifteen years for that, or a bump on the head in some alley. They can get you out of here with no difficulty. Go. Good seats at the Bolshoi, a pass to the dollar shop. Take it. And stop frigging around the Nile in dark glasses. They shoot people out here for that sort of thing, you know.”

“Good news from Her Majesty’s Government. I never expected to hear the like. Aiding and abetting treason. You’d get fifteen years yourself.”

“If Williams is on to you — run. You could be on a plane out of here tonight.”

Henry was indignant. “You met Novak, didn’t you? He’s the Moscow Resident here. One made for the hospital, not the Embassy; that was the way out for people like us. And when I used it, I found him coming the other way. If a Resident wants to come over, finds things that bad — you think I want to swap places?”

The Cathedral door creaked — a whine of pity that seemed to last forever.

An old suffragi in a skull cap and patched galibeah crept into the arena and made his way gradually towards us, pretending carefully to dust the immense spaces which separated us. While he was still some distance away I turned and scowled at him, but he took this as his welcoming cue; yellow-faced and obsequious, he saluted smartly, and padded forward in the busy, unstoppable way these men have; a manner which fawns and insists in exactly equal measure.

“Good morning, sah! I will show you Gordon’s Window, King Farouk’s Golden Gates and very interesting things. Come with me.”

“No. No, thank you. We’re just looking round on our own.” I tried to tip him off but he brushed past us, wiping his nose with a sleeve, the bright dark eyes close together, glittering like a conqueror passing over the border who knows the few essential phrases of command but nothing else in the language of the people he has set upon.

“Come this way, please.”

We wandered after him. He might have started to make a fuss. He was determined to do his duty, echoing the General’s sentiments, as he stopped in front of his window.

“Great General Gordon, sirs. His head was taken off by the Mahdi and sent down here. This is his window. Very fine glass made in England by Pimplingtons, the extraordinary manufacturers. You are English — yes?” We weren’t paying attention. He looked at us doubtfully, two laggards who might be American and upon whom he would thus be wasting his eccentric knowledge of Sudanese and British industrial history. But he chattered on comfortably when I nodded.

“Novak wouldn’t have stopped you, Henry,” I said quietly. “Don’t be stupid. You’re twice the size. After twenty years with us they’d do anything to get you back.”

“.… ‘done my duty for my country.’ This notice was put here by Bishop Gwynne …”

“You don’t want to go back, that’s all. What have you been doing for Moscow all these years anyway? — Snooping round Farnborough on press day?”

“…. the Cathedral was consecrated by the Rev. Dr. Temple on St. Mark’s Day, April 25, 1938, who later became your Archbishop of Canterbury …”

“I believed in it all,” Henry said. “That may surprise you. That’s why I don’t want to go back.”

“The Moscow trials, Stalin, Hungary?”

“I believed in the belief, not the facts. I’ve never been to Russia.”

“… and the foundation stone was laid by Bishop Gwynne on November 20, 1936 and can be seen on the outer wall of the east end of Lady Chapel …”

“That was rather careless of you, wasn’t it?”

“No one believes in the loaves and fishes. He was a fraudulent caterer and quack doctor. But that doesn’t seem to have mattered.”

“… the architect was Adrian Gilbert Scott …”

“The English Martyrs, the Thirty Years’ War, the Huguenots — Christ! — the facts. I’m not talking about them. They never interested me. I was interested — I had to be, I was on the outside — in the selfishness of the creed. It had no message for anyone but me. It was mine. And the more the others said it was a fraud and a lie, the better I liked it. The more Hungarys there were, the more I said, ‘Screw you with your liberal notions — what have you been doing all these years? Reading Encounter by courtesy of the CIA?’ Though they don’t know it yet. Moscow seemed a better pitch than weeping tears on the box and paying super tax. I wasn’t interested in being a professional left winger writing for the Telegraph colour mag.”

“… and the general contractors for the Cathedral were Messrs. Hettena Brothers, of Shrubra, Cairo …”

“If I had to argue that’s how I did it. But it was never an argument for me. It was a suffragi who broke a decanter in Shepheard’s Hotel.”

“What happened?’

It was the story of a genuine cradle socialist, of an old Nubian waiter wounded by his father in Shepheard’s thirty years before — a cut-glass decanter more valuable than the man’s annual wages; the story of a child who smells justice down the servant’s stairs and learns to hate his father over the stench of boiled cabbage. Though of course the child wouldn’t know — and I wondered if Henry did — that it was the other way round: it was the denial by his father which had driven him underground in anger, into the warrens of duplicity and subterfuge, and bruised love, where he had remained all his life. Children are the most undetectable double agents; Henry had become a professional child. Belief lay behind the tins of raisins and the candied peel. He had found Marx in the larder, the road to Moscow through the cellar door.

Hungary, five million peasants — the greatest repression — can mean nothing to such people whose political faith is formed in childhood, a creed inextricably related to the pain and happiness of a seven-year-old. A man, once set to the task, will seek to restore imagined innocence ruthlessly and without question. Henry would justify every sort of betrayal and repression because his own identity had been formed by just the same things. He would accept every sort of collective pain because he would be denying that identity, his childhood and an old Nubian, if he didn’t.

“Gentlemen! This way please.”

The old fellow shouted for our attention. He had tired of his descriptions and had led us now quickly up towards the Lady Chapel.

“King Farouk’s Gates, the ‘Gates of Heaven’,” he said peremptorily, pointing to a sort of boudoir grille that divided the Lady Chapel from the Cathedral proper.

“I thought that was a brothel in Port Said,” Henry said. And then the men was looking for his tip in a business-like way. And afterwards he produced some half-crowns and one-franc pieces, asking Henry for Egyptian change.

“No,” Henry said shortly. “No, you’ve had your money. That money is no use to me.”

I gave the man some change instead and he disappeared without another word.

“So you’re going to Moscow then?”

“They expect everything these days. Expect it,” Henry said, looking after the swinging galibeah rounding a pillar. “They crawl, they force themselves on you, then they insist, then they want paying twice over. Then they just fuck off.”

“That sounds like the Reform Club, not the Central Committee.”

“I know. I thought last week it was a village in Galway I wanted. Now it’s just a castle with a moat. The other view — the East: you know, the desperation, the shoddiness, the eternal damp of six months’ snow, fashions five years late and lashings of raw alcohol on rough counters — all the things you saw as necessary, which you looked on with nostalgia, when you thought the Wall and the barbed wire was your prison — all that seems now just like a bad copy of the professionals, a cheaper show, a swindle bigger than the swindle of the West. But I used to think of what happened over there as a genuinely amateur performance.”

We had walked down to the end of the Cathedral, next to the mission boxes by the door, the lepers and all the penny charity of darkest Africa.

“The cold must have had something to do with it. In my mind. It was so cold there, so much snow; there was some marvellous quality there which we didn’t have in Africa. Wordsworth’s daffodils for someone in Capetown who’d never seen more than a flame tree or a thorn bush or a prickly pear. I fancied myself, I suppose. In Astrakhan.”

“It’s just as cold in North America surely?” I said. But I didn’t press it.

Henry confessing; supplication in a place cracked with the sun, rotten with heat, summoning a frozen creed. It was an odd sensation, hearing this memoir of belief from someone you thought only really cared that the champagne was cold enough; like seeing a man circled by birds, the true words homing at last, falling suddenly from nowhere, completely engulfing the isolated figure, so that one couldn’t tell whether he was being savaged or saved. And could do nothing anyway. One doesn’t “lose” faith: that would be a charity. It simply grows cold in you and stays there, a dead limb that you can never throw away, never replace. There was no use my offering anything.

“What will you do then?” I asked. “A farm in Kenya or something? Algeria? — they’re taking on every sort there these days, I hear.”

“Do you expect to have to tell them — that you’ve met me?”

“I won’t tell them anything. Except that they sent me out here on just as much of a goose chase as you.”

“And Marcus. Was he sent out here to fetch us both back?” Henry smiled briefly. “Who will they send to fetch him away, fetch him away, fetch him away? Who will they send to fetch him away …” He sang the little rhyme joyfully, not a trace of the cynic. But he slowed on the last line, a little bitterly, as if he really wasn’t expecting it: “… on a cold and frosty morning.’

“There wasn’t going to have been anything of me left to take back. Too long to go into.”

“Same sort of boat then, aren’t we? They won’t care to see you back home. If you ever make it home.”

“That’s why I’m going. Or trying to.”

“If they tried to dump you, as they did me, they won’t believe you, you know. They’ll just lock you up.”

“Go to Moscow, Henry. Worry about yourself. Even if you don’t believe in it any more — what does it matter? None of them do, you know; Blake and the others, that’s why they had to run there: they weren’t safe in the West any longer, their ideological cover was broken.”

“A plausible line. You’d go down well in Dzerzinsky Square yourself.”

“You’ll just have some stupid accident otherwise. Walk over the bridge, take the pyramid road past the zoo, you can’t miss it. They’ll probably give you a vodka and Coke if you ask nicely. It’s the new drink, hands across the ocean. A great cure. Gets the gases up.”

“We should have it together.”

“Don’t forget to send me a copy of your book,” I called after him.

He walked out across the forecourt, busy as ever and less shaky, hands stuffed in either pocket of his blazer, pot-bellied, head down, breasting the waves of brilliant light, anxious to make it by opening time. In reality, he might have been … I couldn’t say. You could never really tell with Henry what he intended; fair enough, I suppose, for a man whose job it was to conceal things. We were friends in other ways.

I gave the half-crowns and francs to the lepers and before I went back to the Provost’s office I stood on the corniche for a moment, watching Henry pass the Trafalgar lions and turn on to the bridge.

12

He came from Gloucestershire, or perhaps Somerset.

“You’re keen on ecumenicism then?”

“Very.”

“I can’t say it’s making huge progress in these parts. Don’t quote me, mind you. With the Coptic Church we already have several amicable arrangements. On the other hand they and the Romans are rather wary.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Only the other day they’d achieved what I felt was a commendable rapport. The Sisters of Charity here started a Sunday School on the roof of a Coptic recreation hall at St. George’s. But it was stopped. The Mother Superior suggested the rafters weren’t all they might have been. Of course the building there is Old Testament, so she may have had a point. Don’t quote me, though.”

“I suppose it’s a question of two steps forward and one back in these matters.”

“I sometimes think it’s exactly the reverse. Still, this needn’t concern you. It was the Anglican community in the diocese here which you said interested you.”

“Very much so, yes. Especially your plans in Libya. I hear you’ve just acquired a long wheeled Land Rover.”

“Long wheel-based; yes, indeed. It will ease the visiting considerably. In fact I’m off on an expedition to Alex and then on to Libya in a day or so. You’re welcome to come along if you can spare the time, though I expect you’re pretty busy with the Field Marshal’s visit. Yes, we’re extending our premises in Tobruk, a very useful addition. You know, we’ve really been rather cramped in Libya.”

“I’d like to very much if there’s room. I — ”

“Well, come along then. You can pay for your way, as it were, at the Jumble Sale now. Add your brick to the extension — what?”

Mr. Hawthorn laughed deeply and stood up, and then seemed to go on standing up. He was a tall man in any case, but his face was long too, and perhaps his heels were more than usually thick, and with his full crop of silvery hair he topped out at well over six foot six. I could hear the voice long ago in some West Country choir, sharp and true, rising clear above the other surplices, just as the boy himself had done the previous afternoon in the rugby line out.

“What B.B.C. programme did you say you worked for?” he asked as we walked across to the sale.

“I’m afraid it doesn’t go out on the Overseas Service. Just the domestic. I’ll try and see if they can send you a transcript”

“I’d be most grateful And if I may I’ll give you the names of one or two people at home; if you could let them know when it’s going out. And there’s the Church Press Office in Lambeth, you might just let them know about it too.”

“Of course,” I nodded, trapped in the hopeless lie. Though perhaps, if he’d known, he would have excused it as rendering unto Caesar. I wouldn’t, but Hawthorn was an honourable man.

I said goodbye to him before lunch.

“Be here Monday morning, then, say ten o’clock. We’ll go straight to Alex. And you’ll need a Libyan visa. They’ll give you one at their consulate in Zamalek.”

I crossed on to Gezira over 26 July Bridge and got to the Consulate just before it closed. They tried to get me to call back on Monday but I pleaded urgency: a Church mission, a parsonage in Tripoli … I was hoping to leave straight away.

In fact, I had an awkward two days to fill. The Armenian’s apartment was no use. Bridget might have been picked up by now, or Colonel Hamdy. They’d ransack his place next door, find the ventilator perhaps. My luggage was still at the Semiramis, but in any case I couldn’t risk an hotel. Necessary risks, yes, but nothing else. But I had money, most of £200, and nearly £50 in piastre notes.

I walked back down 26 July Street and on to the bridge again. It was early afternoon. All work would cease in the city within half an hour, people would have vanished from the streets, and I’d stick out like a madman. It had to be something soon.

I watched the feluccas with cargoes of terracotta pots from Luxor easing themselves down the Gezira bank, their huge thin moon masts creaking down as they came towards the bridge. It was the one thing I’d never done in Egypt, a proper trip on the river. It was a comfortable two-day journey to Helwan, fifteen miles south, there and back in one of the small cushioned feluccas that one hired below Shepheard’s — cushioned and hidden from the glare in a brown tent that covered the stern in a round awning like a nissen hut.

For a few extra pounds one could stay on the boat overnight. And for a few more one could ensure that there were no questions. Informers in Egypt were a business-like lot; it was simply a matter of paying them something more than the last policeman had. I would go to Helwan for the weekend: a perfectly appropriate voyage for an inquiring Englishman. The man might question my lack of company; I questioned it myself. In better circumstances I might well have made the journey with Leila Tewfik. Cairo used to be famous for this sort of leisurely waterborne affaire; one took hampers and small lanterns for the night. But that was before my time.

I took a taxi down to Garden City and did a deal with one of the boatmen. Not too much money. And not too little. £15 for the two days, with a promise of a further £5 on safe return.

The man seemed not in the least surprised; I played my slightly eccentric role to perfection. Williams, I remembered, had recommended just such a front less than a week before — the only piece of advice that I took from him that wouldn’t have landed me in jail. Williams by now would have heard about Marcus and the others and been well pleased. He must have thought that every one of us was on beans and water already. But he could wait; every dog has his day. With luck, one man was sailing gently back to him now — dog-in-the-manger, skeleton in the cupboard, to take his bone away.

I lay back inside the awning, stretched my feet out over the scrubbed white floor boards … the man cast off and poled the boat out into the stream.

He was old and immensely practised; a small, tight, ebony face with a white half-moon of stubble, eyes that understood everything in a glance spared from the business in hand. He flapped about the wide edges of the boat in his bare feet, stabbing the water judiciously with his pole, like a bored snooker master, chipping into the triangle and putting away the colours in a mammoth break.

We punted along the shoreline, very gradually pushing out towards the small wind which we would catch near midstream once we had passed the tip of Roda Island jutting out into the river in front of us. The water began to flip and scurry along the bottom of the boat, singing between the runnels of the old wood — the slow current which would take us back to Cairo, just as surely as the breeze from the sea would carry us gently upstream.

The boatman stood up for a moment in the prow, resting his pole in the current. A minute squall of wind flapped his long sleeves, a series of small pistols going off in an ocean. Then it was quiet again. The reedy whisper of water beneath us slowed, almost died. The man turned against the flat blaze of light in front of us and looked back at the city. It had come into its proper context now that one couldn’t see it clearly any more, the ochre ribbon of buildings disappearing in the haze. One forgot completely the cracked and broken glitter of the streets, the slops by the doorways, the years of rubbish congealed in hillocks of tar by the pavements. The detritus of all its history, from Pharaonic shards to Coca-Cola bottles, belonged to a country one had heard much of but never visited, passing slowly half a mile off the coast, looking to the land as though it were a territory in permanent quarantine.

People suffered there, mysterious plagues beyond the medicine books; the sky burnt them mercilessly, fevers never dropped: flies pursued them, a hybrid super-species; they were watched from doorways, sent on endless last journeys; no ease and little joy — characters bound up in a long book of pain, exiled in this desert for no other reason than the water which had brought them here, and was now their only relief. And to be far out on that huge brown stream was never to know the illness, only the cure.

We journeyed to Helwan, stayed there overnight on the shore beyond the town, and came downstream the next day. A day and a night and another day. We travelled like a nineteenth-century Arabist and his dragoman, self-sufficient, but always concerned; a page from Lucie Duff Gordon’s memoirs, a dazzling white-sailed caique moving slowly through the curves of the river by day, suspended at noon under a clump of palm by the water’s edge, making good passage in the wind that came with the last hour of light, finding refuge in the darkness, when the sky lit up the river with tinsel and a shaft of undulating white marble from a large moon.

The man cooked beans on a paraffin burner he had with him, stuffed them into bladders of dark bread, and we brewed a milky tea, spitting the leaves overboard.

I asked him about his life on the river and he talked about it slowly in a whisper-harsh voice, ragged and disrupted from years of calling across water.

As with his ancestors he didn’t speculate about the river; his involvement was uniquely practical. He had no other curiosity about it. It sprang from mud, meant toil, gave life. It flowed northwards, like every river. And when I told him that there were other streams which ran south, in just the opposite direction, he looked at me as if I were professing a new and dangerous faith.

“How could a river flow uphill, against itself?” he said. “What would it do to the crops — if a river worked like that? And where would you put the High Dam then? — in Alexandria? And how would a boat get back from Luxor to Cairo? — for the current would be running in the wrong direction. A river can’t flow backwards.”

Don’t worry, I thought, we’re working hard on it; all the rivers will flow the wrong way soon. We’ll do everything before we’re finished.

We arrived back near Cairo the following evening, cool and silent, the water like a lake, cargo feluccas drifting with us, their crews asleep or crouching round small fires in the stern — a smell of river clay and burning tinder and grilled fish coming over the water which had gone bronze and violet with a burning orange dipping over the western shore.

It had been dark for several hours when we reached the first of the bridges at Giza so that we saw the finger of light from the police launch, prodding the velvet between the piers of the bridge, from some distance away.

I was about to tell the boatman to pull in when he said in the simple easy phrases of a professional describing something seen many times: “They are looking for someone. He has drowned.”

“Couldn’t they be trying to rescue him?”

“No. No, it couldn’t be that. They have a grapple with that boat. They only take it out to look for the ones who are dead.”

It was well after midnight when we finally tied up. I paid him the additional money and said I would stay on board till morning.

Mr. Hawthorn had a funeral on his hands when I got to the Cathedral in the morning. Two funerals, in fact.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, there’s been some trouble,” he said. “An old lady at the Anglo-American — her husband is in police custody. And another man from London — apparently he had some sort of boating accident over the weekend. They found his body above Kasr el Nil last night. I’m sorry, it will mean twenty-four hours’ delay on our trip. I’ve been on to the Consulate. Neither of the people had dependents in the U.K. They’re to be buried at the British cemetery tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. I’ve been up at Helwan over the weekend.”

Madame. And Henry. I couldn’t think of anyone else falling out of a boat at that moment.

“How did it happen? — the accident, I mean. On one of those small boats?”

“Yes, the man hired the boat apparently, after dark. Either from the Garden City pier or from the island. No one seems to know. The thing overturned — they do if you stand up in them or do anything awkward. The boatman managed to swim back. The other person, a Mr. Edwards, didn’t.”

“Oh dear me.”

Henry had been wild drunk. He must have been. I thought how easily it could have been me.

“But why had he taken the boat in the first place?”

“They’d closed all the bridges to Gezira yesterday.” Hawthorn paused and looked at me briefly. “They were looking for someone. Someone on the island. I understand a woman was abducted, kidnapped or something. The Russians are supposed to have had something to do with it. Probably a wild rumour, you know what the place is like.”

“Yes.” Was he just trying to get off the island, back to town? Or had he been making in the other direction, for the Russian Embassy on the Giza Bank? One would never know. It was just the sort of ambiguous exit Henry would contrive for himself. And the woman? I felt equally sure that it must have been Bridget. She had never made a mistake; the first one would be decisive.

“Did they find this person — the one they were looking for? Or was that the woman?”

“They’ve been asking me that. Your colleagues. As if I knew. You’re the ones to know all about that.”

“Oh, I don’t handle news. Just background. The price of rice, how the people live — your new extension in Tobruk for example; that sort of thing.”

“Of course. ‘Colour’ material, isn’t it called? Anyway there seems to have been some considerable unpleasantness. I’m glad that still doesn’t count with the B.B.C.…”

Hawthorn got up and moved a pile of circulars from his desk to a table beneath the window of his office, thumping them down. Dust blew up into the light, like a small explosion, bringing with it the utterly dessicated odour of lime dust, peeling wood, baking concrete. The office was surrounded with diocesan photographs, groups of clerics in strange places including some recent ecumenical ones: a Nubian priest in a full regalia stood on a muddy river bank blessing naked figures in the shallows of the stream; a craggy, Anglican bishop glared angrily across the mock-Jacobean refectory table with a plastic fan in front of him.

“The woman’s husband is coming to the interment tomorrow. A Mr. Cherry. He was a schoolteacher here. Tragic really.” Hawthorn gazed out of the window on the small border of shrubs and bushes, tar-spattered, sand-blasted, oiled from the years of traffic that came roaring down from the station to the corniche. “The police telephoned me this morning. They’re going to come with him.” He turned. “One didn’t expect that, you know. One really didn’t. One doesn’t usually get that sort of co-operation out here you know. Don’t quote me on it.”

“They respect the dead in Egypt though, don’t they? More than the living.”

“Ah, that’s much too big a question, Mr. Marlow. We haven’t begun to answer that one. But it’s true, the Egyptians have a tradition in that matter.” He came with me to the door. “These days, of course, we fly our nationals home. We haven’t buried anyone in the British cemetery here for, oh, goodness me — it must be more than five years.”

“Now there are two.”

Hawthorn looked at me critically, as if I intended continuing with some aphorism or nursery rhyme, a query in his long face: I had stopped half-way through a message which would explain, alleviate. But I’d nothing to say.

“Yes, tragic really. They don’t seem to have had anybody at home. But — there you are.” He put his hands in his side pockets, thumbs sticking out, an umpire considering a critical decision. “Come round tomorrow then. Say around eleven-thirty. We’ll try and get away as soon as possible after the funeral.”

I went out into the scorching light, numb in the heat that danced off the water, conscious only of the steel that brayed down the corniche like bullets; the passions that led people somewhere in such a hurry: to drinks in a shadowed bar, lunch back home, to see a girl. Such appointments seemed all the more necessary now, vital.

I’d never really thought of Henry dying; it hadn’t seriously crossed my mind. Something stupid at worst — but then over to the other side: a dacha, snowshoes and hot toddy in the Moscow woods. I was sure that in the end he would be faithful to the fun of it all, if nothing else. I thought he would sacrifice his soured belief for the life principle which he held so strongly. I saw now that the belief and the principle had been identical in him. Champagne for Henry was a manifesto, not an indulgence.

But still, there was something so corny about his dying which I couldn’t follow, and couldn’t see him following: such an unnecessary bore, as he would so surely have said of it himself. He’d done it without really meaning to, like an insult late at night in the saloon bar. It was a mistake he would regret briefly when he was half-sober next morning, with a roaring headache, on the way to another pub; just a foolishness among so many in the midst of a tattered vibrant life; something he would redeem later in the continual apology Henry made with his good fellowship.

I really couldn’t see him in the river, the skin going blue, orifices suppurating, the slobber of that kind of death. He’d have lost his glasses, I suppose that’s why I couldn’t see it; Henry would have been unrecognizable without them. Waters from Home Security could clear his fridge out now, the solid horseradish and the bag of olives. And cancel the Bookseller. That was all I could really see.

I spent the afternoon — and later the night — lying in the shade of some flame trees on the far side of Gezira Club, reading Al Ahram which I’d picked up at a kiosk on the way. The President was pushing it — or being pushed, of course; war seemed inevitable now. If the Army needed any more confirmation to send them over the brink, the microfilm would have done it: Marcus’s little message from the Israeli Chief of Staff. Nasser could no longer restrain his generals, like Farouk, he had signed the instrument of his demise before anybody had asked him, for, of course, the more the Arabs clamoured for war, the more unready one knew they were. They were like schoolboys, taking Dutch courage with shouts and teases, for a fight against a bully. But the bully would smash them quietly behind the bicycle shed before tea. The Charge of the Light Brigade; they would need a Tennyson to salvage anything from this blitzkrieg.

I’d always suspected that the dry men in our department, and in Whitehall and Washington, would try sometime or other to get Nasser off his perch, go for him with some new trickery, another little bit of collusion — this time undetectable, except for the microfilm I still had. The headlines in Al Ahram told the whole story: six Israeli armoured divisions massing on the Syrian frontier: Marcus and I had been given the same message all right.

And Williams was the driest man of them all; Moscow’s man. A war for them would have even more favourable conclusions than it would for the West. Russia was an ally in these parts after all, a friend with a foot in the door. After this they would be running the household, sacking the servants, commandeering all the stores.

That was the only thing I had not foreseen: that the powers had identical interests in this airing cupboard, in seeing matron topple. That was the new collusion. Perhaps, Yalta-like, they had already agreed among themselves that the Middle East should be a Soviet sphere of influence: as long as we could still have the oil. And keep the Jewish vote in New York.

It was like an exotic English garden to a great house, with flame trees round the side, bougainvillea clambering wildly over the yellow sun-burnt walls, clumps of some sort of flowering laurel, paths as neatly run as designs in a blueprint, the grass edged and clipped and watered, untrodden and undisturbed — the one park in the city where no one took his ease in holiday groups; the fruits, the first fruits of them that slept.

The weather wasn’t typical National Trust though: the usual lead-blue Cairo dome, the light so harsh and stinging that one didn’t dare look up and see where the sun had got to, how far on the day was.

They had dug the graves at the bottom of the cemetery at St. George’s: they were just under the high walls, looking back over the Mokattam Hills, in a small patch of empty ground left over from the thousands of other tombstones which raked the area, neat war graves for the most part, plain white stones, like little cupboard doors; name, rank and number: model prisoners, withholding everything to the very last.

The two sandy hollows were at the end of a line, which started with the children drowned in the Comet disaster of the early ’fifties: a watery corner, in a place where everybody seemed to be the victim of some awfully foolish mistake: a piece of shrapnel that had chosen to share the line you lived along, a faulty bolt in the fuselage on the way to see your parents, a bright day on the river that had gone on too long, with too much drink, so that you knocked yourself out on the keel which had risen like an iron reef in the darkness as the boat reversed itself. It was all a dreadful mistake.

Madame Cherry was the only person who seemed to have gone quietly, willingly perhaps. Herbert watched her now as they began the process of lowering her away, his head bowed, the bald pate stooped earnestly, the better to hear some scurrilous Dublin story. A story beyond all telling. His hands were linked together over his belly. “I’ll rest this round, thanks all the same.”

Two plainclothesmen stood behind him. The ropes shrieked quickly against the side of the wood.

Then Henry went, in a larger box, like a lift plunging down a shaft, going under once more. An over-confident conjuring trick, one could see the ambitious pretence immediately.

I was almost ready to beleieve in the spirit then — complaining, implacable — rising up to indict and slander the barman, resisting the petty regulations of closing time, invoking other more civilized places.

I couldn’t hear much from a hundred yards away, pretending to look at another grave by the wall, turning my ear, bending down to look at an inscription, shielded by a flowering bush.

“… it hath pleased Almighty God of his great Mercy to takeuntohimself …”

I lost the rest of it. Herbert had stepped back into the custody of the two men, willingly, as though in all that staring masonry any protection was better than none.

Hawthorn wrapped his surplice around him and moved carefully forward towards the holes, a golfer checking an eagle.

I tried to feel that in other circumstances I would have comforted Herbert in some way, taken him on to the Estoril for a solid lunch, a long afternoon of drinks, a wake that might have eased things. And the idea came very clearly into my mind, absorbing every other thought: the dazzling linen table-cloths, moist arak glasses, the smell of lemon juice and burnt perch; purple bubbles in the Omar Khayyam and the living, stupid chatter around us.

And I saw the two of us, Herbert and me, so precisely, at the cemetery gates, the taxi humming by the kerb, waiting for Henry to join us.

Instead, I met Hawthorn back at the Cathedral and we were half-way down the Agricultural road to Alexandria by lunch time, taking a stomach-turning snack at the rest house in Tanta: raw oiled tomato salad, dry bread sandwich and a warm Coke.

We talked about the challenge of the church today, glancing now and again at the magnificent olive Land Rover parked beyond the fly-smeared windows. A hopeless old man kept on trying to sell us fifty used ball-points; two scabious dogs watched us with equal hungry patience, hunched up, shifting their paws miserably, going “click-click” like knitting needles on the old linoleum. The waiter made an error in his count, somehow getting an extra figure one in front of the fifty-three piastres total. We pointed this out to him — to his apparent delight — and he took the opportunity of wondering if we could change a few deutschmarks he happened to have on him.

The journey back was uneventful. I was so genuinely tired of it all, so divorced in my mind from the plots and machinations of the past week, that I didn’t really believe myself that I had anything to do with British Intelligence. I was what I said I was, a journalist interested in a piece of Ecumenicism and the future of the Anglican community generally in the Middle East; it was, by its very nature, a restful, self-effacing, unsuspicous role and I immersed myself in it completely.

We passed through Egyptian control at Soloum on the Libyan border without their giving me a second glance. It was not a crossing they could have expected me to leave by, nor the impeccable company I kept a likely cover for a spy. In fact, of course, the heat must have been off us all by then if, indeed, it had ever reached the slow men at this distant frontier. Egyptian Security must have been suffering an embarrassment of riches; Alexandria had been alive with the story the previous day: a nest of spies had been uncovered in Cairo and one man had been taken in the western harbour that morning, an Israeli Intelligence officer trying to make it home, head of their entire circle in Egypt, the king pin.

At Tobruk I went to the church hall and talked with Hawthorn at length about the extension; I took measurements, made little drawings and interviewed the foreman in Arabic; I licked my index finger and discussed erosion and the prevailing winds. They were impressed by it all, pleased. It was the saddest afternoon of my life.

“Thank you,” I said to Hawthorn afterwards. “I’ve decided I’ll have to go straight back from here. Time has rather run out for me and there’s a piece I want to do on Libya in any case before I go.”

“But what about your luggage and things in Cairo?”

“You know what it is in this job — here today, gone tomorrow. I’ll have the hotel send it back. Don’t worry about that. And thank you — very much indeed.”

“It was nothing,” Hawthorn said. “Nothing at all. Glad you were interested. ‘Always something new out of Egypt’ as they say.”

We laughed and shook hands in the wretched featureless street, Hawthorn in his grey lightweight clericals towering over the rubble of new buildings, the flat land beyond the edge of the road. Sand whipped around our shoes from the desert, piling up against our heels in minute dunes even as we stood.

I took a taxi to the British air base and two days later the VC 10 was falling through heavy cloud above Burford, the jets thrusting once more over dripping parkland, before we scudded down in a cloud of spray at Brize Norton.

13

Two Special Branch men were on the tarmac to meet me, a senior inspector, a tall pipe-smoking, academic-looking fellow called Kirk, and a burly junior officer, who probably hadn’t got more than four “O” levels but looked as if he could run fast and had done well in Police Federation boxing.

They drove me to London, to Scotland Yard, where I was asked to make a statement.

“I’ve nothing to say. The only statement I can give is to my own department — you must know that, the Official Secrets Act. What’s your explanation — wouldn’t that be more appropriate?”

Kirk looked unhappy and unsure of himself. He wrote something in the margin of the Crown document in front of him.

“I can understand your position, Mr. Marlow. You are not of course obliged to make any statement. We’ve been asked to interview you about your recent activities in the UAR — ”

“Don’t go on. What are the charges and then I’ll contact my solicitor.”

Kirk was horrified by my peremptory stance.

“It would come under the Official Secrets Act,” he said at length.

“Well, I didn’t suppose it would come under the Foot and Mouth Regulations. What is it, for God’s sake?”

He sighed and read from the document in front of him, going through the legal preamble before coming to the application proper: “‘… that on dates between the 7th and 10th of May, 1967, and on other dates prior to that period, you did knowingly communicate to foreign agents information which was calculated to be, or might be, or was intended to be useful to the enemy, entrusted to you in your capacity as an officer of the Crown; and that further, you did, between the same dates, knowingly communicate, to the agents of a second power, the names and rank of officers of the Crown resulting in their subsequent apprehension and arrest.” One charge to answer, under section — ”

“Is someone being funny?”

Kirk looked up, aggrieved.

“You think I’m an Egyptian agent?”

“Not I, Mr. Marlow, I assure you. The charges are being brought by the Crown, on an application made by the Chief of your department to the Director of Public Prosecutions. They’ve accepted that there is a case to answer.”

“You think I’d come all the way back here in the circumstances — if I were working for the Egyptians?”

“I’ve no idea. No doubt that’s a point your counsel will have every opportunity of presenting on your behalf in due course.”

“I’ll call my solicitor then.”

“Certainly. Meanwhile you will be held in custody. Oh, ‘and I must warn you that anything you say will be taken down …’”

He ran on with the legal procedure hurriedly, an old lady scrabbling for something forgotten in her bag, trying to tumble it out as I stood at the door, waiting with a sergeant. When he was finished I was taken downstairs. They made a list of my belongings, including my passport. They didn’t, of course, spot the microfilm behind the foreign exchange allowance, and I didn’t tell them about it. I thought, somehow, that once that emerged in the right quarters I would be done with the whole business and Williams would start the first of his many turns with the gentle Inspector Kirk.

I was given some warm buttered toast on a large tin plate and a cup of sweet tea. Looking up from my cell through the area window I saw a narrow ribbon of gusty blue and grey spring sky over the embankment and I thought: “I’ll be out in that in a minute, get caught in a nasty squall on my way home if I’m not careful.” I’ve since learnt that this is a common delusion suffered by prisoners during the initial part of their confinement.

My solicitor came afterwards, when it had got dark and the lights had mysteriously gone on in the tiled cubicle. That was the point when I knew I wasn’t going to get home that night — when I realized that they did things here for you literally without asking.

I told the solicitor that I wanted to bring a counter charge against the head of my department, and wished to make a statement about that, and he said, when I’d finished, that he would lay the information with the Special Branch and if they took no action it would undoubtedly form a major part of my defence when I came to trial. He seemed hopeful about this new evidence, said it gave us something positive to work on. I thought so too.

After he had gone I thought about Williams; there was little else I felt like thinking about. He hadn’t ditched Usher, Herbert, Marcus and the others — I had, and no doubt he would manipulate the evidence to convince any jury. What would my piece of microfilm be worth then? Just something I’d been given by the Egyptians to frame him with. “A Russian agent, my good fellow? — you’ve got it all wrong …”

And so it went at my trial twelve weeks later, some of it held in camera, at the Number One court in the Old Bailey. They’d had their way by then, of course; the Russians had swamped Egypt in the meantime; Williams’s plan had gone off without a hitch — unless one looked at the five thousand Egyptians slaughtered in the Mitla Pass as a hitch, but I’m sure Williams didn’t; they were running away after all.

My counter accusation against Williams looked pretty thin when one got down to it: pure supposition with all my possible witnesses in Siwa oasis, for, of course, the Egyptians had dealt with them very summarily before the Six Day War.

The evidence against me on the other hand, though almost entirely circumstantial, sounded pretty convincing: if not I, then who was it who had betrayed a whole circle within the space of four days? It was Blake all over again. I was the only person present at the place and time in question (that was a typical phrase) who had comprehensive knowledge of the people involved; I was the only one subsequently to remain at liberty …

What was the motive then? And here a principal point of evidence was brought against me which was quite unexpected and which tore to shreds the remnants of my own case: it was that I and my former wife had been Soviet agents in Cairo for more than ten years. This staggered me until I saw the evidence: a recent photograph from a West German magazine of Bridget walking away hurriedly from a store in a Moscow street, a haggard, frightened, unwilling, unhappy shape in a headscarf, but undeniably her.

The story beneath described her as part of a KGB husband-and-wife team active for many years in Cairo who had infiltrated a British Intelligence circle there during the Suez adventure. Subsequently the husband had arranged to divorce the woman and he had left Egypt to take up an important post with the SIS in London.

The whole thing was a carefully executed plant by Moscow, but other than denying it completely there was no way I could prove that it was untrue. Only Williams, who had arranged it, could have done that.

Of course, I remembered Hawthorn’s rumour the day before I left Cairo, the woman that had been kidnapped by the Russians that week-end on Gezira: Williams had thought of everything. My counsel thought it barely worth bringing up, but I insisted. They could check with Hawthorn if needs be.

The Attorney-General, a well meaning, confident fellow who had behaved during the whole trial like a tall man knocking-up at the net, dealt with the matter immediately: “If I may say so, my Lord, Cairo has been a hotbed for this sort of story since the Holy Family were rumoured in Heliopolis. But let us take it in this instance the rumour was true: I would suggest that it was leaked by the KGB for the obvious purpose of clearing the defendant of any connection with Miss Girgis. If they abducted his wife it was hardly likely to be thought that the defendant was working for them. In reality I would suggest that what happened was that things had got too hot for Miss Girgis, she was being withdrawn from the field, while her previous husband was thus left free to pursue his subversive activities in London. We must thank the German press for some smart detective work and, in this case, we may safely allow our credulity rein in a climate notorious for its deceitful airs: very well, then, Miss Girgis was ‘kidnapped’, I accept that; but willingly … knowingly. She was not deceived, nor should we be.”

We argued that if such were the circumstances I was hardly likely to make such strenuous efforts to get back to England; I would have returned to Moscow myself.

“Experience in these matters clearly shows that this is exactly what the KGB do not do,” the Attorney-General put in. “Once a man has a good placing, impeccable bona fides, as the defendant had, they do their utmost to ensure that he remains at the station he has penetrated.” The man paused, looking around the court, making one of his rare but beautifully timed applications to Actors’ Equity; then he continued in an off-hand way: “My Lord, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, one has only to consider the case of Harold Philby to appreciate the lengths to which the KGB will go to ensure that their men remain at a penetrated station.” There were suitable mutterings all round.

His final address came shortly after and at the end he returned with relish to the same theme: “… It has been the folly of the past to retain such men as the defendant in British Intelligence — even after their disloyalty was strongly suspected, even to the extent of unofficially re-employing them, making them privy once more to the most sensitive policy areas, when they had been officially sacked. Such was the case with Philby; he was trusted in high places to the bitter end; and that it was such, and worse, I think no one here need contend. Let us not dally with that trust ever again. Let us be firm for once, not fools; let us be forearmed, since certainly we have been forewarned.”

He paused once more, just for a moment, nothing dramatic this time: “I ask that the defendant suffer the full penalty which the law allows,” he said in a small voice, suddenly bowing his head and starting to put his papers together before he’d begun to sit down.

I did: twenty-eight years. After Blake they were obviously being more cautious with their sentences.

I remember glancing up at Williams in the public gallery as I went down. He had got up and was moving out with McCoy and some of my other colleagues, straightening their coats, blowing their noses, chattering to each other in businesslike whispers. I could almost hear the fatuous, facile talk: “… a meeting has been arranged … we shall need someone … a new Cairo circle? … well, I hardly think at the moment … operate strictly from Beirut from now on. McCoy, make me out a work chart on our Beirut commitments, what we can spare from there … had quite a blow you know, losing all those chaps … dear me, yes …”

They shuffled on out into the bright afternoon, the baking weather which lay all over London that summer. It was just coming on to 5:30 when I got down to the cells, but by then I’d ceased to miss opening time; the piquancy of the hour barely crossed my mind.

I wondered how long Williams would last as we rolled along out of London, in convoy, and up the M1. I caught a glimpse of a fast bowler just starting his run towards the last of the sunlight in a park below the North Circular flyover. Yes, his reputation must have taken a fearful knocking over the whole business and Marcus might not be in Siwa Oasis for ever. On the other hand they were right about the KGB: Williams would stay where he was to the bitter end; and so, in the nature of things, would I.

I was surprised all the same, some time later, when I came to go over the case for my appeal, to hear from my solicitor that my allegations against Williams would now have to be directed to the Deputy Chief of Service of British Intelligence. Williams had left his Holborn office for good.

Of course, he’d been kicked upstairs after the fracas in Cairo; perhaps the KGB had intended that in their plans from the beginning: a kick it may have been, but the fool now had free run of all the secrets in the attic: a pawn for a queen. It was a good move.

“I don’t know how far well get with this appeal,” my solicitor said, a touch of weariness in his voice. He had travelled all that day on the way up to the top security jail in Durham and was understandably tired. “People at that height tend to be pretty sure of their ground — tend to protect themselves thoroughly, you know.”

He looked at me anxiously, seemed to gaze through me, as though searching for something, a spot a long distance away on the horizon. “I know,” I said. “I know.”