The Private Sector (A Peter Marlow spy thriller)

by Joseph Hone

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

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

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

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

  *

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

  “My father makes them.”

  I looked at him carefully in return.

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

  “One of the Trucial States?”

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

  “I see …”

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

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

  “What—with Mr. Simmonds?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Oh?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  *

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

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

  “He must be as old as I am.”

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

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

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

  “Desert Gold. Desert Gold …”

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

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

  “He told me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “A stop to what? I don’t understand.”

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

  “I see. I’ll keep an eye open then.”

  *

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

  “Yes. Is he really mad?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Does he, indeed?”

  “He told me to keep my eyes open.”

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

  *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What would you like?”

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

  4

  How long have you known them?”

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

  “I don’t think so.”

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

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

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

  “Yes, I think so.”

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

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

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

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

  “And Lola?”

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

  “They all do, I suppose.”

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

  “Why does she stay then?”

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

  *

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

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