by Joseph Hone
“Where’s your friend Cherry?” she said brightly.
“You know each other then?” wondered Mrs. Girgis. “Sit down, do.”
“But there are no chairs—Esma!” Mr. Girgis turned and bellowed at a suffragi who came dancing across towards us gesturing hopelessly.
“Ma fishe chairs, Effendi—ma fishe!”
“Yallah, yallah ala tennis court,” Mr. Girgis advised him loudly. “‘Ma fishe’ chairs indeed. It’s ‘ma fishe’ everything here these days. Since the English left. There’s a dozen chairs outside—just too damn lazy. So you’ve met my daughter then. And who is this Cherry? I knew an Irishman once, out here with the irrigation people, tried to blow up a sluice gate at Aswan. A revolutionary! Can you imagine—as if we hadn’t enough of our own. Well, it’s good news to get some of you people back here anyway. What do they say?—‘The Best of British Luck’?”
He raised his glass in a cumbersome arthritic gesture. Mr. Girgis obviously missed the British. He had a heavy, bruised, old man’s face—sad and peasant-like and Balkan, with a droopy moustache and a white film of spittle at each corner of his mouth. He was wearing frayed dancing pumps and an Edwardian smoking jacket and might have been a waiter at the old Carlton Grill. The suffragi returned with two decrepit deck chairs which he at once got in a fearful tangle over before I straightened one of them out and put it down firmly next to Mr. Girgis. Whatever I might have to say to Bridget that evening could wait until I’d had a few more drinks. On the far side of the table Henry had placed himself between Bridget and Mrs. Girgis and had embarked on an account of the royal caravan that afternoon at the school.
“What are you drinking, Mr. Marlow? Not that fizzy Italian stuff—we can do better than that. There’s a crate or two of Haig left—not quite off the map out here yet! Esma! Esma!” He shouted wildly and clapped his hands above the din. “We’ll have a bottle.”
To my surprise the introductions had gone off with great brio, without any embarrassments. After the vegetable summer I’d obviously come back to some sort of life again. The previous disaster with Bridget hardly seemed to matter. I leaned back happily and the deck chair collapsed beneath me like a rifle shot.
Henry and Mrs. Girgis were caught in mid-sentence, like lovers, and the entire club came to a halt, except for the record player.
“That ohh-ver-pow-er-ring-feee-ling …”
Bridget laughed and I managed to raise the broken stem of my Asti Gancia glass to the company from a completely recumbent position.
*
For some reason, after I’d fallen over, things became easier between us all. It was as though, quite by chance, I’d fulfilled some arcane social obligation by collapsing amongst them and could now properly be admitted to their circle.
Mr. Girgis took my shoulder.
“Well done, well done! Nothing broken, I hope? That’s the spirit. No fault on your part—we can’t have deck chairs in the lounge—have to bring it up at the next meeting. Now you’ll have a decent whisky.”
He and I were suddenly friends of a casual sort, as if we’d just met again after a war spent together long ago, and I felt like a prodigal member of the Club who had returned and disgraced himself in a mild, appropriate, well remembered way as evidence of my continued solidarity with Mr. Girgis and the other stay-at-home members. I drank my whisky. Bridget had got up and was dancing with Henry. And I remembered it was Gala Night once a month so I danced with Lola.
She murmured, “You’re better at dancing …”
I smiled vaguely, brought her to me a little, and looked beyond her sly, cherubic face, her dark scented hair tickling my ear, to where Bridget and Henry, passing in their dance, had suddenly emerged from the crowd. Henry had his back towards us; they were together as closely as Lola and I, but in a way that spoke of great ease and familiarity and not embarrassment, so that I couldn’t immediately understand the sudden calm expression on Bridget’s face as she looked at me, a calmness in her eyes that was for me and not Henry.
In the second as she passed she was not, as she had been for me before, an unfortunate experience, a nonentity that one had picked up, forgotten and had happened to meet again, but she took on the form—as though we had both been prompted by a thought, I of loving: she of being its object—of someone who, because of this intuition, I was certain I would one day possess. And because of this, seeing in her glance a definite promise for the future, I paid no more attention to her all evening.
It would be ridiculous, I suppose, to imagine that there existed between us that evening—in that moment when we really knew nothing of each other—a sort of correspondence, an element of acceptance and understanding which, though neither of us was aware of it then, was the beginning of that conscious state of trust which later, in the short time we loved each other, made it equally unnecessary to ask questions, to put things into words.
In fact it must have been my obvious indifference towards her that evening which set the fuse alight and led to the opening bids of what was to become a long, rarely happy, and finally disastrous struggle to possess—subdue, dominate, exploit, hurt …
When we have to find an alternative to love it is not, unfortunately for us, hate; it is any of those other words which we choose to enact—which we know will tie us to the other, so that we won’t lose them but remain together in anger, ensuring that if the love was not mutual the punishment will be.
But the words have gone now, along with everything else: the rather awkward, widely spaced eyes—so large that one might have thought them the result of some deformity or illness—the small, sharply triangular face, the thinly disguised curiosity which lay behind her smile—her sexuality. Above all her regard: her way of looking—prompted by a thought, which became a way of thinking, and then suddenly like an explosion became an instantaneous expression of her whole life at that one moment which would never afterwards be repeated at any other.
It was a part of her living through a fraction of time which she cut away from all the surrounding facets of her existence and which, in her expression, she offered me. Smiling, looking out on the river from her room, reading a magazine, making love—those idle or intense preoccupations of hers which went on quite above language, which were nowhere concerned with words—this is what has gone. And afterwards, just before we’d left each other, all the words returned: the saying of things, that desperate telling, questioning and explaining with which, when we have lost a true language, we debase the words that are left to us so that they can do nothing but denigrate or destroy, where they will serve only as carriers of the pain which has overwhelmed us and which, like an infection, we are determined the other should catch …
I watched her dance with Henry. Why does our sixth sense not warn us at such times?—instead of drumming into our heads, “This will be happy. This one is for you.”
Henry brought some whisky home and we drank it in my room, sitting on the ugly little dormitory bed like prefects at the end of term.
“Did you make love to her then—the first time you met?”
“After a fashion.”
“Oh, why? She’s very good at it you know.”
5
“Were you with Henry—before?—I mean—”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were a teacher?”
It was a week afterwards, another Saturday, on the terrace of the Semiramis looking over the river. She had wanted to meet as soon as I had telephoned her; not later or some other time but then, that morning, now. Already we were involved in the urgency of an affair, that extraordinary impatience in love which begins by making every meeting possible and ends by making them all impossible—“I have to go to the hairdresser, to see my aunt, my doctor, dentist.” We were a long way from the impatience of departure but we had started on it.
“A teacher? I thought it would have sounded rather a dull occupation—in the circumstances.”
“That meeting in the Continental—you thought it was just a pick up? I suppose it was.”
And we laughed at Cherry. Already, too, there were the appropriate things in common: the beginnings of that obsessive regard for each other, the confident immunity from other people, the small jokes at their expense; the unique and secret marks we make in even the most casual relationship.
I said, “You wouldn’t have gone for a pair of dotty teachers.”
“Yes, I would. That’s why it happened. I wanted you. It was as simple as that.”
“Were you with Henry then?”
She looked at me patiently, plaintively, rubbing her nose with the glass, as though I’d asked her whether she could tell the time.
“Of course. Didn’t he tell you?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“At the University here. You’re getting the impression of a vagabond. But what’s the point of being sly about it?”
“Isn’t it rather strange?”
“You’re the schoolmaster. Aren’t children like that? Doing what they want. Isn’t it supposed to be good for them?”
“Come on …”
She frowned. “Well, anyway, there was what’s called ‘another man’ … Christ.”
“I know. I’ve heard.”
“Henry told you. ‘The man in the soda-syphon’ he used to call him.”
I had got up to order another drink.
“You don’t have to. They’ll come if you just look at them. Let’s have some more Sudanis as well.” And we ordered another lot of the little papery brown nuts in a saucer, squeezing them out of their shells through our fingers, and washing them down with gin and tonic.
“Henry seems rather a postman these days, the way he passes on everything. Still, it doesn’t matter. There’s only been him—and the soda-syphon.”
“And the others?—you just made love with them. There wasn’t anything else to it.”
“Why? Why should there be ‘others’?”
“Why make love with someone you hardly know? I’d just assumed there were.”
“Fool.”
A BOAC staging crew came in behind us and made for the bar, demanding loudly their pewter mugs which they kept there, and half a dozen bottles of Stella, and talking about a party in Uxbridge the previous week. The great lateen sail of a felucca reared up over the terrace, bleached dead white in years of the same weather, the curved mast rising again having passed under the Kasr el Nil bridge just below the hotel. The ropes squeaked sadly across the heat on the water like a small animal dying in the sun.
“Fool.’
And she took her drink up to the bar where someone called Roger, with much facetious encouragement from the others, made a great fuss over her and gave her a carton of tax-free Player’s.
*
She phoned me next morning at the school. Mahmoud, who dealt with the coffee in the staff room, took the call and through force of habit gave the message to Henry.
“She wants to speak to you,” Henry said flatly when he got back. And I supposed his passion for her to be as dead as mine was.
“I’m not sorry,” she said at once, her voice ringing down like the start of a song. “And you’re quite right to be offended.”
I said nothing.
“So where do we go from here?” And then, fearing the answer might go against her, she rushed on without waiting for a reply. “What’s Henry answering the phone for? I asked for you. Does he live in your pocket—messenger boy as well as postman?” And then, the wind gone out of her bravado: “Can you be separated? I’m with my parents down the road. Can you come round?” And again, like a ticker tape that won’t be answered, which tells the rise and fall of fortune in the same second, in the same hurried accents, she went on: “I am sorry. I am.”
“There’s soccer this afternoon. I’ve got to look after it”
“Can I come round there then?”
*
She walked along the touch line with Henry, looking at the game every now and then, chatting with him, laughing. They might have been parents up from the country, come to see their child score the winning goal. Two of the four school houses were playing—Port Tewfik against Suez I think it was; I’m not very clear as most of the boys still called the houses by their old names—I think that afternoon it was Trafalgar against Waterloo. The ball bounced around uncertainly on the hard, cracked soil and once it disappeared into the murky canal on one side of the field.
“Send Fawzy after it, sir, he’s got bilharzia already.”
It was very hot and at half time everyone collapsed and drank Coca-Cola and pushed the tops into the large cracks in the soil.
“Sir! They’re putting the tops into the ground.”
A tiny figure with a serious adult’s face in an immaculate soccer outfit rushed up to me as I joined Henry and Bridget.
“Are they? Who are you—you’ve not been playing have you?”
“I’m El Sayid, sir. Hamdy El Sayid. The substitute, sir.”
“Substitutes aren’t allowed in soccer.”
“Yes, I know. But I’m the Headmaster’s son.”
“Oh. Well go and tell them to take the tops out again.”
He ran back to the others, shouting as he went, and they dug the tops out of the ground and threw them at him.
Henry turned towards Bridget. She was wearing a white cotton outfit with a small gold cross round her neck—like a nun in a sleeveless dress—her dark hair tamed neatly round the back of her head in a circle. There was something prim about her—prim but uncertain; a nun in the Dark Continent.
“Here comes that troglodyte Bahaddin,” she said.
Bahaddin in his blazer, with a friend in a shiny business suit, was coming towards us along the trees by the canal. Both were gesticulating violently.
“His stockbroker, I should think. Not much on the exchange out here these days. Cotton’s dropped right out of the market. They’ve mortgaged the lot to the Russians.”
“Good afternoon—Miss Girgis, Mr. Marlow.” Bahaddin bowed slightly towards me, fingering his silver wrist tag and eyeing us all very seriously. And then, with a big puff of breath and putting both hands across his chest like a man about to send a message in semaphore, he launched himself into what was obviously the real matter in hand.
“May I present Mr. Sofreides, Auctioneer.” He added his profession awkwardly, as though it were a title like Esquire. “There’s a sale tomorrow. Some sequestrated property. An English family. Mr. Sofreides is handling it and I thought perhaps you might like to come along and have a preview. There are some rather nice things, I understand—perhaps to enlighten your room, Mr. Marlow.”
“Enliven, Bahaddin. Not enlighten.”
He bowed again, very slightly, in Henry’s direction, but his eyes remained fixed on the piece of metal at Bridget’s neck.
“I’m glad to see my small gift so beautifully displayed.”
“Not at all, Bahaddin. It was a beautiful gift.” They bowed to each other again. A strained formality had come over everyone.
“You’d like to look at the things then? They’re just down the road. In Garden City. And perhaps you might do me the honour of dining with me afterwards? I’ve reserved a table at the Estoril.”
“Yes. Shall we do that, Bridget?” Henry said as though she were his wife.
“Why not?”
I tried to catch her attention but the sun had fallen in the sky behind her, blinding me as I looked towards her.
“Sir, they’ve had ten minutes.”
El Sayid’s long face pushed its way into the circle around our waists and he held out a gunmetal fob-watch towards me with a triumphant look.
“And Mr. Marlow—will you be joining us?”
Bahaddin didn’t look at me, as if my answer couldn’t be of any importance, but had turned and was examining El Sayid’s watch very carefully.
“Certainly. I’d like to.”
Bahaddin was now completely absorbed in the wat
ch, putting it to his ear, shaking it very gently, stroking his cheek with it, cosseting it in his hand as I’d seen him do before with every piece of metal that he came across or had about his person. And then at last he said, looking at his own gold Rolex, “But why is it two hours slow, El Sayid—why is that? Exactly two hours.”
“It’s Greenwich time, Bahaddin. From Big Ben. The Greenwich Meridian, the zero line of longitude.”
*
Mr. Sofreides—who had very soon asked to be called George—had a large, pre-war Packard and we drove back to Cairo along the river bank just as the sun began to dip behind the pyramids on the other side of the water. An absolutely still evening, the smoke from George’s Gauloise swirling slowly back to Bahaddin and myself, the others chattering away like a family in the front.
“Major and Mrs. Collins,” George was saying. “He was retired. One of the military attachés, I think, to Farouk’s father. An old man. He didn’t want to leave. Very bad luck really.”
We had reached the outskirts of the city. The pressure lamps above the brightly decorated barrows selling rissoles and beans flared at street corners and there was a smell of paraffin and urine when we stopped at the traffic lights, drifting in from the sidestreets below the Citadel, completely obliterating the burnt French tobacco.
The flat was on a lower floor of Bridget’s apartment block in Garden City, looking out over the river across the corniche: there were the usual collection of boabs in the long hallway making up their beds in preparation for their night’s vigil and a drowsy, ill-kempt soldier with a sten-gun who got up from a chair next to the door of the flat and saluted George in a muddled way as we arrived. The remains of a clumsy wax and ribbon seal which had been over the lock hung down now like a tattered Christmas decoration.
George opened the door with a proprietary flourish, turned on a large chandelier in the middle of the hallway and gave us all a stencilled catalogue with the pompous formality of an immigration official. It was a large, high-ceilinged apartment done in expensive bad taste; half a dozen rooms leading off the central hall and drawing-room, the furniture a mixture of pseudo Louis Quinze and dowdy Home Counties without dust covers; there was a curiously lived-in feeling about the whole place though the owners must have left a year before. I noticed a package of Gauloises under the huge gilded mirror over the mantelpiece. George had gone to a cabinet in the corner and was mixing whiskies, clunking in the ice from a silver bucket which had a polo pony and a rider as a handle.