by Joseph Hone
“Yes, I will be sorry to leave. It has been good here,” George said when we’d sat down in chairs looking over the river. He raised his glass to the furniture: “We’ve had some good times here together.”
“You live here then?” I asked.
“It was best to be sure of the things. Best way. There are some valuable pieces …” His heavy eyes twinkled as he looked at Bridget. He had the traditional sallow, suspicious good looks of a Levantine commercant—a condescending way of looking at people, as if he had already used them or was about to consider doing so. There was an air of tired success about him, of deep boredom with life. One felt that even before he was born someone had been in his debt.
“George has been having some trouble with his wife,” Bahaddin put in slowly, dragging out the sentence, relishing the idea, as though it were the one pleasure lacking in his own abundant marriages.
George acknowledged the fact with a gesture of mock despair and a slow smile.
“I am helping Major Collins too. There are a few pieces here and there, some silver, which he’s anxious to get back to England. By the law, of course, he can’t touch them. But I think I can help him out. So it suits everyone.” And he glanced at Bridget—casually, confidently, as a cat reminds itself of the mouse still in the corner.
“Well, let us take a look at the list. There may be something—even for you, Miss Girgis. Mrs. Collins had some rather—jolie, how do you say?—yes some rather jolie things.”
I looked down at the smudged sheet and could see nothing at all in what I imagined to be Bridget’s taste; yet I was imagining, perhaps George knew.
Louis XV style Salon furnishings, gilt and carved wood. Aubusson tapestry upholstery. Console with mirror and silver-gilt wood. Bokhara and Scutari carpets. Antique clock. Oak Secretaire. English Silver tea service. “Singer Electric sewing machine, (DC) …
The list went on interminably. There were no nylon stockings, something which would have been useful in Egypt at the time; perhaps George had Bridget in mind for the sewing machine.
We wandered round the rooms, drinks in our hands, looking at the bits and pieces without enthusiasm. There was a small bookcase in the study; two volumes of Cromer’s Egypt, Meinertzhagen’s Diaries and a number of regimental histories Bahaddin had gone into the kitchen and I could hear him shuffling his hands about in the silver drawer and then the sudden whirr of an electric blender—his metallic obsessions being given full rein. Henry was looking at the oak secretaire in the study, opening each of the minute drawers. He took out a pile of visiting cards. I looked over his shoulder at one of them:
Major Edward M. Collins, M.C.
Military Attaché
to
H.R.H. KING FUAD I
Abdine Palace
Cairo
And there was an old Kodak folder with some yellowing prints inside: a thin, unsmiling woman in a solar topee on a camel in front of the third pyramid at Giza.
George had gone into the bedroom with Bridget. I could hear his voice in the background—soft and insistent, a caricature of the Greek manner in such circumstances.
“Now what do you think of this? … Not quite of the moment, it’s true; but the material is superb. It’s going as a ‘lot’, all the dresses, but I could make an exception. In your case—”
“I’ll have to try it on.”
And in a moment Bridget was in front of us in the drawing-room wearing a long velvet wrap with a hem dragging along the floor in mottled fur; a sort of skating dress, something, perhaps, dating from the period of Major Collins’ attachment to the last Czar.
“I like it. Let’s live here—why don’t we? Couldn’t we take over the lease—if we all paid something?”
And she swirled about on her toes, glaring at each of us in a mad way, the ghastly fur hem rising from the floor and spinning round like a ring of old ferrets chasing each other.
“Better than that dreadful monastery of a school. Better than my dingy bird’s-nest upstairs. Couldn’t we, George?”
George said nothing, but stood behind her like a satisfied ringmaster. Bahaddin had turned on a small portable radio and some dreadful squeaky Arab music emerged and he started to wiggle round Bridget, thrusting his backside violently about in time to the music, clapping his hands.
I poured myself another whisky.
“It’s a pity Lola isn’t here,” I said. “She’s rather good at that.”
George took his coat off and joined Bahaddin in paying court to Bridget, except that he circled round her in the Greek fashion, both hands arched above his head, kicking alternate legs and flapping a silk pocket handkerchief. Both of them had already begun to sweat in the humid night air, patches of dark moisture spreading in great stains beneath their armpits. I supposed they would all be showering in the whisky soon.
Henry had gone out on to the terrace.
“Why does she do it?”
“She’s unhappy, I told you. I think it’s rather splendid.”
“Unhappy about what—about not getting enough men to go to bed with?”
Henry took off his glasses and rubbed them on the tail of his shirt. He spoke as if he were explaining an important point of syntax to his class.
“You must remember Cairo’s pretty well been cleaned out of her sort—of our sort that is—in the last year. She hasn’t had much fun, and we’ve not all got your self-control. Anyway you had a go at her yourself. Why should it bother you? When the English were here it was fine. She had all the ‘right’ connections then. Now she has none. I suppose she feels now she has to take her chances, the chance to live it up like before.”
“But those tykes—in there—they’re not exactly Brigade of Guards, are they?”
“And they’re not Egyptians either. She draws the line there. Force of habit I suppose. Foolish of her; I don’t. But I agree it’s rather a bore. Let’s go and eat.”
Bahaddin appeared in the doorway, flapping the tail of his dripping shirt and mopping his brow. He’d been drinking as well as dancing.
“My dear sirs, I shall have to change before dining. George has offered me a choice from Major Collins’s wardrobe—shirts, trousers, dinner jackets, decorations, everything. Come and help me choose.”
“Take Bridget. She knows what you look best in. We’re going on to eat.”
We came indoors. Bridget had collapsed on the sofa and was running a piece of ice from her whisky over her forehead.
“What have you two men been at—making out a report on me? Can’t leave being schoolmasters, can you? Peter, come with me, will you” She got up and I joined her in the bedroom where she picked up her dress. “I know. I was supposed to meet you today, not all the others. And I will meet you. We will. Don’t you understand?”
She had so many ways of looking serious, one could never tell from her expression what degree of any feeling she intended to convey.
“It doesn’t matter.”
She went on into the bathroom and had started to undress when I arrived. I sat on a metal laundry bin by the lavatory.
“What’s wrong if I dance with them?”
“There’s so many of ‘them’—so few of ‘us’. We have to meet in bathrooms.”
She turned the shower on. Again, the pale body, the darkly sun-browned circle round her neck, the water cascading over her arms, patterning itself, dividing, merging into different whirls and eddies as it ran off the oils of her skin—not just standing under the shower, but giving herself to it, eyes closed, head tilted back, arms crossed over her breasts, like a martyr at the stake suffering a delicious agony in the fire. She opened one eye at me through the water.
“We ought to have made love properly, that first time. That’s all. Then you wouldn’t be so worried. You have this possessive thing. I know.” She opened the other eye, looking at me charitably, as if that were all I possessed.
“You think we just want each other,” I said, “in that way.”
I lit a cigarette, twirling it casually in m
y fingers, and she stepped out of the bath and bent down and kissed me intensely.
“You worry so much. Yes I do think that. I do. Is there anything wrong?”
The water dripped down from her hands about my face, over my collar, and I looked at her rather glumly. I do, I do … her trick of repeating a phrase like this was what really worried me. She seemed to emphasise the physical part of our relationship because she saw no additional parts to it, either then or in the future. And yet it was there, in that clinical, white-tiled bathroom with its bidet and a great round faded box of Mrs. Collins’s dusting powder which smelt of old oranges, that I first started to love Bridget, beyond simply needing her, being jealous of her. And she must have sensed this, and wanted to encourage this new emotion, for the next thing she did was to look at me with embarrassment, with an expression I’d never seen on her face before, as if I’d suddenly broken in upon her, the first man ever to see her naked. She stood there, perturbed, with an unhappy face, like a schoolgirl stuck with her prep.
“Aren’t you going to get dressed? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Throw me that towel will you, Peter.” And she draped herself carefully in it from head to foot. It was impossible to kiss her in return.
I thought at the time that our relationship had simply become more appropriate, more real; in fact it was I who had become more appropriate in her eyes; not a Guards officer or a third secretary at the Embassy, true, but something in the same line of country: an English teacher at the snob school in Cairo. Unsatisfied in sex, and therefore temporarily disapproving of it, I had drawn from her an old memory of the proprieties of love, and the ways in which it can become a means rather than an end. I had reminded her of something her mother had once told her about men—or perhaps it had been a lecture to the sixth form after class from a spinster housemistress.
I started to love her at a moment when she had ceased simply to need me, as someone to make love with, but saw in our association a less tangible, more important outcome. And that’s what it became, as it never should have done, that evening in the bathroom: an association and not an affair—a liaison with a respectable future without the limitations which pleasure for its own sake might have imposed on it. I had become something too good to waste on pleasure alone. So that now, in trying to remember when we’d been most at ease, most honest together, I think of the beginning of it all, before there were any special advantages for her in our being together: I think of our casual failure on the chaise-longue in the little room against the sun as the happiest time. Certainly, from then on, we were a success in every conventional way.
It was Bahaddin, a little drunk and wearing one of Major Collins’s boiled shirts, who first noticed the change. We were walking towards the Estoril which lay half way along a small alleyway between Kasrel Nil and Soliman Pasha. Before, the St. James had been the best restaurant in Cairo but it had closed and the weary little flower lady with her dark shawl and someone else’s child had moved her site from there to the mock-Spanish doorway of the Estoril and was now berating the customers in a wailful voice, thrusting white carnations in their faces, while the child slowed them up by their coat tails.
“Sir!” Bahaddin had given her fifty piastres and had bought us all a flower. He gave me two. I looked at him. “Sir, it is for you to give to Miss Girgis.” He was impeccably polite, bowing slightly, his feet together, his boiled shirt glistening in the lights from the restaurant, like an Edwardian stage-door-Johnny. There was something ridiculously gallant about him so that I thought at first that he was embarking on some subtle joke.
“Why Bahaddin, have you given her too many flowers yourself already?”
“Not at all, sir.” He was almost offended. “Simply Miss Girgis is with you. It is manners—for you to do the honours.”
The flower was the beginning of all those many formalities which were to plague us later but at the time I lent myself to Bahaddin’s gesture with perfect ease and just the right amount of ceremony; I lent myself blindly to the conspiracy: I pushed the flower behind Bridget’s ear and kissed her lightly. It must have been exactly what she wanted in the new roles which she had cast for us both; the evening passed without her looking at, or hardly speaking to, anyone but me. Only George was visibly annoyed. At odd moments between courses, when we had come off the tiny dance floor by the bar, he would pull himself away from some intense conversation with Henry or Bahaddin about Egyptian affairs and look reproachfully at us with his watery eyes. After all, he had made a bid for Bridget earlier which had gone unnoticed in a subsequent overwhelming suit from someone whom he could never have contemplated as a rival.
But his was a momentary shadow, his greedy disappointed attitude an encouragement even, and I completely forgot my worry about why Bahaddin and Henry were so correspondingly uninterested in Bridget that evening and how she had come about the small gold cross, Bahaddin’s gift to her. For the moment, for the first time, I felt no need to wonder about her past, her lovers, for she had, as I thought, added that extra dimension to our relationship, which I expected then of any affair, which would set me up above any mere lover: the dimensions of care and trust and permanence. The trouble was I thought such things could co-exist with passion; while she had learned to expect them only in the context of marriage, when the passion had quite disappeared. For her passion would always be a thing on its own, something she could only give to a stranger.
Luckily I never got to know Sofreides well enough to ask him if Bridget had slept with him that night, as Henry told me she had long afterwards in England. And she denied it vehemently when I asked her just before we split up. Certainly she and George both left us at the entrance to the block of flats at the end of the evening and went inside together. But then, of course, they both lived there.
6
Cherry seemed to have disappeared—at least he was never around the Continental bar at week-ends, where normally I would have expected to see him. And when I telephoned the Bursar at the school in Heliopolis where he’d been teaching I was told he’d gone to Alexandria.
“To Alex? But he’s only just come back from there.”
“You know him better than I, Mr. Marlow,” the pernickety old Copt who ran that side of the school’s affairs replied. More than likely, I thought.
“He has been transferred there temporarily as I understand it. You should be able to reach him there—the El Nasr College.”
The El Nasr College in Alexandria, a co-foundation with our own institution in Maadi, had been the most spectacularly British school in Egypt before 1956—and a spectacular neo-Gothic building in red brick with turrets and cloisters. Even after the English had left it had managed to maintain most of its ridiculously Anglophile attitudes and I was curious to know how Cherry had contrived to break into its cloistered calm.
“I don’t much fancy meeting your Mr. Cherry again,” Bridget said to me when I suggested taking the next half term off and visiting him. And I would not have thought of it myself had not the idea of our all being together again suggested a return to a less formal relationship than ours had become. We were intimate as it’s possible to be without going to bed together, met as often as we could and she kept suggesting I go with her to her parents’ house for Sunday lunch. If I’d had a small sports car and a taste for warm bitter we might just as well have been living in Surrey as Cairo. But I loved her. We had even stopped going to the Semiramis, or any of the other bars, and were sitting that morning at Groppi’s sipping lemon tea.
“Anyway you’ll have to phone him first and we don’t get any half terms at the office.”
“What—are you ashamed of our love?” I said mockingly.
There were the bad jokes of love then too, that only love allows. There was everything except the chaise-longue.
*
As it turned out the matter of my seeing Cherry was decided for me when he wrote from Alexandria saying he was getting married in the new year, to a “Mrs. Larousse, like the dictionary”, whose husband
had once been French Consul in Dublin and had died recently, “at an advanced age while carrying out the same function in Alexandria”.
I met him by myself when he turned up in Cairo before Christmas at the start of the holidays. It was a baking hot, ninety-degree day, completely unseasonable weather, and for some reason, perhaps because of its frosty, tinselly associations, we went to a Bavarian restaurant off 26 July Street, not at all in line with our old haunts in the city, but then Cherry was turning over a new leaf. And perhaps, too, he saw that blatantly stolid hostelry as a sort of secular retreat, a denial before marriage, the beginning of redemption for all his imagined sins of the past. We were not disappointed. It was a grim, dark, empty room done in imported pine with heavy gothic furniture and velvet drapes over all the windows, the light coming only from the little folksy wrought-iron table lanterns. There were notices everywhere, done in an elaborate ornate script, like a Book of Hours, which might have been directions to the lavatories but in fact were hearty German sentiments of good will and other compliments of the season. A radiogram churned away in one corner, charging the air with Strauss and memories of snow. It was here, over sauerkraut and Niersteiner—an awkward mixture which Cherry insisted on ordering—that I heard the story of his demise.
“She’d been teaching music after her husband went, piano to the Junior School. I’d seen her of course before, in the common room, on the Wednesdays when she came—and it was a Wednesday I remember that I became unwell. Anyway, one day she saw me with a copy of the Irish Times that I get. She was very fond of Ireland—and, well that was it. She’s middle-aged but not unattractive. One must think of oneself.”