So we just got on with things. Work—and as much play as we could get in. Once, we went to find her childhood home, the house where she’d grown up, outside the city. Cairo was creeping outward by then; the open country around was being slowly gobbled up by slum building. But the three big houses with their gardens were still there. The driveway to hers had an avenue of eucalyptus trees, and I remember her being quite emotional at that point—she’d had a thing about those trees, when she was a child. We introduced ourselves to the Egyptian family living there, and they were very friendly, very welcoming. But I think that for her the whole occasion was rather disturbing.
We’d both been wartime children, though our experiences were very different. She’d been in Egypt throughout, with the Germans steaming across the desert toward them, in the early 1940s. She said she was never in the least bothered; war seemed the natural and normal thing—the way in which children just accept the circumstances they are landed with. I remember feeling very much the same, as a boy. I was in Suffolk, with my mother and brother; my father was called up, of course, and we used to trace where he was on the map, when we knew, sticking in red pins—training in Scotland, then India, and eventually Burma. It never crossed my mind that he might not come back, and he did, but I barely recognized him. Penelope’s family made a dash for Palestine, when a German invasion of Egypt looked imminent; what she remembered best of that time was collecting cowrie shells on a Palestine beach, and seeing General de Gaulle once in his dressing gown, in the high commissioner’s house in Jerusalem.
Looking back now, I’m startled to realize that there were only a dozen years or so between that wartime, and the peace, if that is what it was, in which she and I were stepping out in Cairo. No time at all. But to us, then, it was an age: we’d gone from child to adult, we were other people.
There’s a house in Cairo called the Beit il Kritiliya, beside the mosque of Ibn Tulun. It’s a building that survives from the Mameluke period—sixteenth or seventeenth century—all kitted out with the most amazing collection of oriental furnishings. Courtyards with fountains, and mashrabiya windows, and alcoves lined with Turkish rugs. She had loved going there when she was a child—it had seemed like the Arabian Nights brought to life. She fantasized about it, apparently—told herself stories in which she played as Scheherazade and everyone else.
We went there. One blazing-hot afternoon; inside it was cool, as though you’d gone into another world. And I think we each saw a quite different place. I thought it was wonderful—exotic, romantic, essence of the East. And she was rather quiet and glum. She tried to explain. It was that she couldn’t any longer see it as she once had: now, it was interesting and strange, but it had lost its power. The magic had gone—whatever it was that turned it into something mythical. She said she realized that the change was in her, not the house; it was to do with having grown up. She talked about how she’d felt out of place, in England, all through her adolescence. Now, she knew she wasn’t at home here anymore. “It’s gone,” she said. And we started to make plans about what we’d do when we got back to England.
Sarah found a note on her worktable: “I wondered if you might fancy spending this weekend up north. Think it over. I’ll understand if you don’t—at least, let’s say I’ll put a brave face on it.”
She found that she did not need to think it over.
They drove north after work on Friday, up the motorway, Verdi on the car radio, loud; whatever comes of this, she thought, that music will be forever charged now. Loaded, for ever.
His house was one of a brick terrace in a small village. Two up, two down, kitchen and bathroom; workroom extension occupying most of the garden.
“My bedroom,” he said. “And the spare.”
He put her case in the spare, and that first night she slept there, alone.
They walked. Sarah thought that she had never walked so far, and with such exuberance. She could have walked over the horizon, she felt.
“Tell me when you’ve had enough,” he said. “This doesn’t have to be an SAS training exercise.”
They ate sandwiches in the lee of a stone wall. “All right?” he inquired.
“I can’t remember when I was so all right,” she said, and he put his arm round her. She knew then that she would not spend the coming night alone in the spare.
In the small hours of the morning he said, “When I suggested this weekend I had no idea if we’d end up like this or not. I won’t say I didn’t have ambitions, but I wasn’t at all sure how you felt.”
“And are you now?”
“I reckon so.”
She sat in an old basket chair in his workroom, reading, while he dismantled a carriage clock he’d found at a car boot sale. “I’m not so hot at clocks,” he said. “Some I can do. This one’s a bugger. If I get it sorted, it’s yours, as a memento of now.” He looked across at her. “This is odd. I feel as though you’ve always been sitting there, reading your book while I potter about.”
Later, in the car, he put his hand on her knee. “Tell me things,” he said. “Anything. Just talk. Keep me awake.”
So she did. Afterward, it seemed to her that she had gone into a kind of free flow. She had talked about last week, and about thirty years ago; she fished her life for stuff that might entertain or inform. The motorway roared by, a procession of light, and she cruised her past, trawled up incident and opinion, people and places. This is reckless self-exposure, she thought. “Have you had enough?” she said. “Aren’t you tired of me?” And he touched her knee again: “I think it’ll be quite a while before that happens.”
“I’m getting toward the end,” wrote John Lambert. “1956. You couldn’t any longer ignore what was going on. Suez. Nasser and Eden. Most of the Brits were starting to pack, and we knew we’d have to go. Anti-British feeling was high, and if the balloon went up, it would be a sight worse. I gave in my notice at the university, and my students all trailed in to shake me by the hand and say: ‘Not your fault, sir. Down with Anthony Eden!’
“We’d had a habit of walking beside the Nile, at sunset. Penelope and I. When she was a child there had been some great trees beside one of the bridges, and she remembered how the egrets used to come in from the cultivation outside Cairo in the evenings, to roost there. She described the trees studded all over with the white birds, and more floating in, the sky full of them, and the reek of guano on the pavement below. The trees were gone now, and the birds with them, and the bridge wasn’t called the English Bridge anymore, it was El Tahrir Bridge, though the lion statues at each end were still there, making you think of the Trafalgar Square lions.
“We met by the lions, the last time we walked there. I watched her coming, picking her way through the crowds, wearing a blue cotton dress and a white floppy hat. When she got near I could see at once that something was wrong. She’d had a letter from her father, sending a check for a flight home, and this messed up all our arrangements. We had planned to go by boat to Marseilles and then up through France—explore a bit. But apparently there was some family event—a wedding—and her father thought she’d like to be there, and was standing her the flight, which was expensive back then.
“We leaned against the railings on the bridge, looking at the river. ‘Damn!’ she said. ‘Oh, dammit!’ She felt she couldn’t send the money back, say no. Her family didn’t know about us yet; I thought I should equip myself with a real job back home before we went public, as it were. We were disappointed, with the prospect of that leisurely wander back to England together evaporating. She started to dither, wondering if maybe she could tell them now, explain, send the check back. I said, no, she shouldn’t, no point in starting off on the wrong foot. I’m a pragmatic sort of bloke, always was. There’ll be plenty of other chances to explore France, I said—we’ve got all the time in the world.
“So we walked by the Nile. Another sunset—the last. She said she still missed the egrets: ‘It seems all wrong without them.’ There was construction work all over the place
—tower blocks going up, the old buildings coming down. It was all change, in Cairo.
“We had dinner at our favorite café, and then we went back to her flat. A few days later, she got on that plane, and the rest you know.
“I’ll finish now. There’s no more to say, really.”
“Do you ever take that locket off?” asked Clare.
“Occasionally. When I have a bath.”
“Well, it suits you. Or something does, these days.”
Sarah had told Clare about John Lambert’s letters. “He’s finished now. End of story.”
“Sad.”
Except that it seemed also to be a beginning. But she was not going to say that. She had reread all the letters, and thought—fifty years ago, nearly half a century. And something comes full cycle. Love, again.
She found that she had entered some other time sphere, one that she had visited before but had almost forgotten. Its climate was familiar, yet also subtly different. Happiness is never the same twice over.
The days were flavored now by phone calls, by the approach of the weekend. Barry had gone home again, his contract with the museum ended. Then he was off elsewhere, on another job. Each day, there lay ahead the solace of the evening, when they could talk; each week, the hours ticked by until the moment when she would drive up north, or he would come to her.
There was now, and there had been the time before, which seemed like a period of half-life, or unknowing. And yet, she thought, it was all right, or so it seemed; I was not unhappy, I was not discontented—just, I did not know about him, about this. She was losing the solipsism of life alone; she began to think in terms of “we” and “us.” Sometimes, she was alarmed: Is this rash? Is this what he wants? Is this what I want? And then the evening would come, or the weekend, and she would know that in fact rationality did not enter into it—what was bound to happen, would happen.
And so it was that after a while—weeks? months?—he said to her, “This won’t do, will it? All this to and fro. I can’t be having it.”
“No,” she said. “Nor me.”
“So there’s only one thing for it, isn’t there?”
Forgive this tardy acknowledgment of your last letter, wrote John Lambert. I’ve been unwell. They’re not sure what it is, but discouraging noises are made by the men in white coats. All very tedious. I won’t bore you with it.
I’m all the more glad that I sent you that stuff about Cairo. About her. At least now there’s someone else who has an idea of how it was.
This time I really am signing off. But before I do so, may I offer all my congratulations and good wishes on your forthcoming marriage.
Yours,
John
Comets did fall out of the sky. I was never on one, but I remember reading in newspapers of those air disasters back in the 1950s; once, the plane was carrying passengers from Cairo, and there were names that I knew.
I never did go back to Egypt then, though I thought of doing so. I still felt the occasional gust of homesickness. A stint abroad after university was a favored option, cashing in on the one salable asset that we all had—the English language. I made a few inquiries about language schools in Cairo, and then the prospect of something else came up, my attention was diverted, and that was that.
I went to Oxford, rather more tamely, to the job as a research assistant, which offered no career prospects but brought me Jack, and, in due course, marriage and motherhood. I forgot about my brief flirtation with the idea of a job in Egypt until eventually I did go back, far into adult life, and experienced then that eerie sensation of being in a place that was both deeply familiar and entirely alien.
I have no half sister. My parents were divorced when I was twelve, and by a subsequent marriage my father had two sons, when I was in my twenties. As a solitary child, my fantasies featured a mythical sister, along with the cast of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Maybe Sarah is the last gasp of this unfulfilled need, in which case it is only natural that I should wish to give her a happy ending.
Number Twelve Sheep Street
I drifted into writing. Today, there is a career structure, it seems: master of arts degrees in creative writing are available up and down the land from prestigious universities. At a lower level, serious aspirants can cut their teeth in writing groups, or on writing courses. If there was anything like that around in the 1960s and 1970s, I did not know, and would have been alarmed at the idea, I suspect. I was entirely ignorant about publishers and had never heard of literary agents. Writing my first book, I could not imagine that it would arouse any interest, but why not have a go?
I was not particularly young. The whole process felt fortuitous, and only gradually did writing come to seem inevitable: what I did, and now would always do. At that early stage, some sharp discouragement would have deflected me easily enough, I now think. Or perhaps not; alongside that memory of being surprised, ambushed almost by what had happened, there is another one—of private absorption and application. Where should I go next? Which new ideas should I seize? What I was now doing felt like a kind of neat reversal of what I had always done: reading had become writing.
I did not go to any school until I was twelve years old; until then, my home-based education centered entirely upon reading—pretty well anything that came to hand, prose, poetry, good, bad, indifferent, any page was better than no page. At a barbaric boarding school, where the authorities saw a taste for unfettered reading as a sign of latent perversion, I went underground and read furtively, hiding books like other girls hid Mars bars or toffees. At university, there was that great swath of required reading, which was fine, but I liked to read off-piste, shooting into English literature, which was not supposed to be my subject, and into areas of history ignored by the syllabus. There was never enough time. Grown-up life—syllabus-free, exam-free—came as a relief; now, there was the day job, but also the opportunity for unbridled reading. I became a public library addict, dropping in several times a week for my fix, and this continued into married life and motherhood, when I read my way through the small branch library of our Swansea suburb, pushing the pram there with the baby in one end and the books in the other.
You write out of experience, and a large part of that experience is the life of the spirit; reading is the liberation into the minds of others. When I was a child, reading released me from my own prosaic world into fabulous antiquity, by way of Andrew Lang’s Tales of Troy and Greece; when I was a housebound young mother, I began to read history all over again, but differently, freed from the constraints of a degree course, and I discovered also Henry James, and Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Evelyn Waugh, and Henry Green, and William Golding, and so many others—and became fascinated by the possibilities of fiction. It seems to me that writing is an extension of reading—a step that not every obsessive reader is impelled to take, but, for those who do so, one that springs from serendipitous reading. Books beget books.
Would I have become a writer if I had been denied books? Plenty of people have done so. Would I have gone on writing in the face of a blizzard of rejection letters? Others have. Unanswerable questions, but they prompt speculation. Looking back at that diffident beginning, bashing out a story on a typewriter whose keys kept getting stuck together, the endeavor seems precarious indeed.
And if it had foundered, what then? Short of specific skills—derisory shorthand, inaccurate typing—I had nothing to offer but a degree in history and a brief experience as someone’s research assistant. Oh, and a few years’ intensive child-minding. At the time, I was rather taken with local history, with exploring the landscape. And, of course, I read. I read myself into one preoccupation after another.
A house that contains books has concealed power. Many homes are bookless, or virtually so, as any house hunter discovers. And then suddenly there is a place that is loaded—shelf upon shelf of the things—and the mysterious charge is felt. This house has ballast; never mind the content, it is the weight that counts—all that solid, silent reference to other ma
tters, to wider concerns, to a world beyond these walls. There is a presence here—confident, impregnable.
Books invade; they arrive, and settle. They are a personal matter, as in book-affected homes, but they are also commercial, archival, official. A map displaying the distribution of books in Hawkford, a historic market town in midland England, would show serious infestation in the High Street (the sites of George Bain Books, the Country Bookshop, and the County Library), with light local occurrences elsewhere, and entire streets and housing estates virtually untouched. The County Library, at this point in the early 1970s, is still in a prelapsarian state. These are the good old days of card indexes, a table with newspapers, and books. No screens; the Internet and the online catalog are a mere gleam in someone’s eye. There is a swath of fiction—straight, romance, crime, sci-fi—a respectable cross-section of history, a gesture toward psychology, philosophy, sociology; some photography, upholstery making, tie-dying and quilt making for the hobby-minded, plus all the usual suspects in travel and biography.
The Country Bookshop deals in cookery, gardening, nature, humor, children’s picture books, popular fiction, and biographies of sportsmen and actors. This is where you find a Christmas present for an aunt or something for a godchild. The range reflects both local demand and the taste of the proprietor: nothing too taxing, nothing that will sit forever on the shelf, sex and violence in the strictest moderation.
George Bain Books, Antiquarian and Second-Hand, is on the other side of the street and very far away indeed in mood and method.
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