by Joseph Hone
“How do you mean?”
“Well I won’t be going back to Ireland.”
“You mean there’s work in the old one yet, she’ll teach music and you’ll take it easy in the Cecil Bar?”
“Not quite …” Cherry was put out by my levity. “Anyway you’ll come to the wedding. It won’t be a big thing …”
“Of course we will, Herbert.” And he paid the bill, already the responsible paterfamilias, and we bowed out through the dark drapes and into the blazing weather like a pair of cotton brokers up in town for the day.
“Not quite like it was before—‘Lord Salisbury’ and all that,” I said as we emerged. But Herbert didn’t seem to hear. He was thinking of something else.
“What do you mean ‘we’ will be coming to the wedding?”
“Bridget and I. I haven’t told you about Bridget. Where are you staying—the Continental? Let’s have a beer anyway.”
A look of horror spread over his face, that same wide-eyed clown’s stare with which only months ago he had teased the old ladies on the beach at Sidi Bishr, except that now there was a completely serious intent behind it.
“You mean—Lola and Bridget? Those two. That Bridget?”
“Yes. It’s no more surprising than you and Mrs. Larousse—less so by your account of it.”
We got no further than one of the small Greek bars behind the High Court between 26 July Street and Soliman Pasha, a place given over to desultory chatter and tric-trac games between dissolute lawyers and tailors and small businessmen of the community who came here to drink watery Metaxas throughout the afternoon siesta instead of going back to their fearful wives on the outskirts of the city.
“The scandal, the scandal,” Cherry muttered as we stood against the bar. “Imagine it. If that got around Alex—my being with Lola.” He was sweating. The ham actor who has completely lost confidence in his role.
“Nonsense, Herbert. Alex has known far worse than that. You mean Madame would throw the dictionary at you. Well we won’t come to the church. Just the drinks at the Cecil—or will it be at the Beau Rivage?”
He was clearly appalled now at the whole idea of my attending his wedding—seeing me as the jester, sprung from a raucous past, come to split the ceremony apart with laughter; the bawdy, boozy skeleton in his cupboard who would do nothing but fall over the altar chasing wine and wife.
It was Cherry’s unexpected, saddening conformities that afternoon, allied to Bridget’s, that made me think my own innate sense of the vulgar was disappearing as well. The chatter of legal business and shipping orders and spiteful marriages had reached a crescendo around us, the small merchants of the place getting in the last word before going back to their offices for the evening’s work. And I saw in them, and in Cherry, the casual hazardous joys of the country—and all the other small ways I’d learnt to be happy in the city—becoming predictable as bales of cotton: the city had become like any other, a place where people worked and had dull marriages and drank to forget both. And I was very nearly one of them.
“Get me a brandy. I’ll be back. I’m going to phone Bridget.”
Cherry laughed for a moment, the old manic whistle, as shrill as ever but with a new nervousness, and then tried to stop me. I suppose he thought I was going to suggest we go along for another set-to, a threesome in her flat.
“Don’t do that. You’re out of your mind! They arrest people for that sort of thing out here you know.”
I got through to her office. It was four o’clock. She had just come in and was out of breath and distant.
“What do you mean we haven’t done anything. We’re seeing each other all the time. Tonight—aren’t we meeting tonight?”
“I mean making love, that’s what we haven’t done.”
“Not on the phone. For God’s sake. This is an extension. You’re mad. Go away. I’ll talk to you later.”
“You may not. Cherry’s getting married. I may go back to Alex with him.” There was a pause, as though she thought this might be true.
“You’re drunk.”
“I can still climb on a train.”
“Aren’t you coming round this evening? Can’t we talk about it then?”
“No. I’m going out with Cherry. You don’t want to be with him.”
“Tomorrow then. Sunday lunch. What about that?”
“Oh, God, we’ll talk about making love with your parents—over the rice pudding. Oh God, no.”
“Well, what else? Why not? The house is big enough. I have my own bedroom. There’s the afternoon.”
Thinking of Cherry’s odd middle-aged passion, his loss of nerve with the music teacher, I wanted her then, on any pretext, anywhere, before it was too late. So I said yes. Sunday lunch. When I got back to the counter Cherry, as though he’d overheard these coarse thoughts, had disappeared leaving me a Metaxas. I drank the mixture with its flavour of a vanilla cake-mix that’s been kept in the cupboard too long, and ordered a whisky.
7
The Girgises’ house was a mile or so away from the school in Maadi, shut off from the road by a mass of flowering trees—jacarandá, bougainvillea and others I didn’t know the names of—and the air around the place was as damp and sweetly oppressive as a ladies’ hairdressers. A young suffragi with a brilliant green sash at his waist and the deep velvet black skin of his Sudanese ancestors let me in. He moved his head half an inch, a minute, utterly distant bow.
He was the last of the properly Arab world that I was to see until, hours afterwards, he bowed me out of the house again. From the drawing room to my right came the confident bumpy tones of a Victor Silvester quickstep; music being poured over cobblestones: the Sunday morning overseas request programme from London. An old grandfather clock made in Bath with the quarters of the moon and the four seasons picked out in flaking colours about its face ticked in the dark of the hall. The leafy, fruity smells outside had been replaced by a suggestion everywhere of dry cedar and in the cloakroom next to three pairs of old gum-boots were a pile of Country Life and Illustrated London News tied up with string and addressed to the Anglo-American Hospital.
Bridget came down the dark stairway in a grey pleated skirt, flat-heeled shoes and a boy’s tennis shirt.
“Dear me. I didn’t bring my gumboots—or a racket. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be silly. You’ll want gumboots for the garden. They flood it every morning. Alexander’s very keen on it—you’ll be shown round—and do be a bit interested.”
We moved into the drawing-room where her parents were—a room littered with silver-framed photographs of friends and relations and interminable children, including the mandatory image of Mr. Girgis—Girgis Bey—in full regalia as an Egyptian civil servant thirty years before, looking more than ever the Turkish peasant in a tarbrush, decorated sash across his breast and a bushy moustache.
They stood up and smiled graciously, distantly—as though gently emphasising the distance between their home and the Maadi Sporting Club—and Mrs. Girgis turned the radio off.
“No—please. Don’t turn it off for me.”
“But Mr. Marlow, we want to hear about you. And anyway,” she went on in a lower voice, gesturing towards a bundle of old Army blankets in a chair near the radio which I hadn’t yet noticed, “it’s for her. Mamie. Alex’s old nurse.”
A woman of incredible age, almost completely swathed in a coarse threadbare blanket with just a wisp of white hair falling from beneath the cowl which the material formed over her head, looked at me carefully and rather malevolently from behind a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. It was an old face, grey—almost indistinguishable from the colour of the blanket—withered, shapeless as folds of sand, except for the open eyes, magnified by the glass, which were pale blue, large and fresh as a child’s. I had the impression that although I was supposed to accept her as a senile harmless old party, mentally in her dotage and physically far beyond greeting me, this was not the case—an assumption that soon proved correct. I had turned away and having
finished my greetings with the Girgises was about to sit down when a squeaky, crystal-clear announcement emerged from the bundle.
“Would not Mr. Marlow shake hands with me? Would that not be manners?”
With its repeated negatives, its reproving, petulant insistence, it was an ageless, endlessly practiced injunction: honed in wars of attrition against countless bygone brats it came now over the air, a message from the past, a call to order from the nursery, a reminder that however far afield we had gone in time or place that dictatorship was ever at hand. The words were vindictive, in a way I had long forgotten, they had been put not as a question but as a sentence handed down from a court without appeal. I wondered for a moment if all of us would have to have lunch in the pantry without any pudding.
Mrs. Girgis was the first to recover herself.
“But, Nanny, I thought you never shook hands. You never have.”
And indeed there were no hands to shake. The grey blanket remained folded over the chair, completely covering the miniscule body, like the bark of a strange tree.
“I shall have my lunch upstairs as usual.” The tree came to life. Mr. Girgis in a pair of old check carpet slippers helped her to her feet with the air of a man attending a grave accident, giving her a malacca cane with which she walked slowly but firmly across and out of the room.
“I am sorry.” Mrs. Girgis was truly upset in an awkward way. “She never wants to meet anyone. She just comes downstairs for the Sunday programme—you must have come a little early. She was Alexander’s nanny. She came from the Residency. She’d been one of Kitchener’s aides before that. I simply can’t understand it.”
“I can,” Bridget said. “It’s quite simple. You ought to have introduced her to Peter.” And Mr. Girgis looked at her in astonishment.
*
Lunch, which was a too mild curry with an assortment of bland chutneys and chopped fruits, was rather strained. And I did nothing to add to the gaiety by preferring the local Egyptian cheese—the strangely smoky, acrid gibna of the delta—to some yellowing, sweating cheddar which I knew had been imported through a firm in Denmark by the Embassy people.
Afterwards Mr. Girgis came to life. “Come and see the garden. You’ll need a pair of gumboots. I’ve got an old pair, I think. They flood the place at midday so it’ll still be pretty wet,” and we went out into the cloakroom. The boots didn’t fit so I took off my shoes and rolled up my trousers and he gave me a tiny straw hat and took a long pruning staff for himself and we went outside like a pair of mad fishermen.
Huge trees completely circled the acre of garden and beyond the small square of lawn which led out from the terrace the undergrowth was as dense as a jungle.
The little garden, between the lawn and the jungle, was like a willow pattern saucer, complete with two willow trees leaning over an ornamental pool, water lilies, clumps of papyrus with their feathery white cockades and a crooked wooden bridge. Raised duckboards, like a miniature railway line, threaded their way through these studied effects, and all around them an inch or two of water giving the whole place the air of an exotic paddy-field under the blazing sun.
Mr. Girgis splashed off across the lawn and prodded some scented flowering bush with his stick, detaching a few of the petals which rose a fraction in the air around the plant, drenching the damp atmosphere with sweetness, like a woman drying out against an electric fire in a small room.
“It needs some more water,” he said to me confidentially. “Ahmed!” He bellowed in the direction of a small hut in the trees and Ahmed, a disgruntled, sleepy gardener, appeared and was given detailed instructions about the hose and the plant. There followed a manic dance about the garden as Ahmed, mishandling the appliance, doused the three of us in a warm jet of water. He dropped the hose so that it thrashed around at our feet, the water splashing in small waves over Mr. Girgis’s gumboots.
“God damn him.” Mr. Girgis picked up his pruning staff and we paddled back to the terrace where the others had arranged the coffee.
“Nescafé is ready!” Mrs. Girgis sang out, as if heralding some incomparable nectar. “When you’ve dried yourselves.” And the two of us trooped upstairs.
“Here, I can lend you a shirt and trousers,” Mr. Girgis said when we’d dried ourselves and were in his bedroom, and I decked myself out in an old pair of flannel yachting trousers which reached halfway down my legs and a motheaten turtleneck pullover—part of the same outfit with the name “Cleopatra”, on one of Farouk’s smaller boats, on the front of it—the only thing in his wardrobe which remotely looked like fitting me and even then it stretched tight across my chest like an old sock so that it itched fearfully.
“Bridget had better show you the rest of the place,” Mr. Girgis said rather huffily, as if I’d turned the hose on him. “I shall catch my death.” And then, as an afterthought, he made the strange inquiry—“Did you have some rum? Let’s have some rum with our coffee.”
His choice of this particular drink as a reviver seemed to have been taken quite unconsciously, without reference to my nautical garb. Perhaps my clothes may have jogged to life again some deeply buried maritime experience of his long ago, a careless shipboard party off Alexandria, with the young Farouk and his English friends—perhaps a naval squadron from Malta was visiting at the time—for rum is not an expected drink in Egypt.
Downstairs he poured out two glasses of rum in his study and we sipped them in the dry air like men taking disagreeable waters.
“Some ice perhaps?” he said hopefully, after I’d lowered a second mouthful less enthusiastically than the first. And then he thought better of the idea, looking around him. “There isn’t any. It would only mean another disaster with the suffragi. Shall we join the ladies?” But Bridget had appeared in the doorway without our noticing and was smiling quietly at both of us. Mr. Girgis looked at me.
“My old summer togs—eh? Rather a sight I suppose. Well, I must get back to Ahmed. I expect you’ve had enough of the garden. I shouldn’t walk about outside in that jersey in any case—mightn’t be taken in the right spirits. Show him the paintings, Bridget.”
She moved across the room towards us, looking at me carefully, taking the damp clothes from my arm, as though she’d not heard her father speak. We finished off our glasses in one go, as if the outcome of this ridiculous charade lay in some pressing business offstage, and moved into the hallway. Mrs. Girgis was laid out on the terrace, fast asleep on the chintz-covered steamer chair. A cat I’d not noticed before, a large, over-fed tabby, was up on the small trestle table among the coffee cups lapping carefully from the silver milk jug.
“Good Lord—Mamie’s cat has got out. Down the creeper. I thought it was past it. We should have had it put away—but what can one do? She got it as a present years ago, one of the under secretaries in my department—currying favour, British love of animals and all that. Sly fellow. He wanted a trip to San Francisco, I remember. It was the start of the UN. We called the cat Hopeful—in memory of that event—and my colleague’s diplomatic ambitions. I had him posted to Addis Ababa instead. But that’s another story. Don’t waken Mamie upstairs. With any luck she’ll sleep till supper. Like a child, you know. She needs her rest.” He had put on his gumboots again and now he tip-toed away from us, hitching his dressing-gown tight about him, past his sleeping wife, lifting the cat off the table—it kept its great grey muzzle embedded in the milk jug until the last possible second—and on out to do battle with the luckless Ahmed.
The grandfather clock in the corner of the hall chimed softly, four bell-like notes in a scale. Part of a full moon, with a face like Humpty Dumpty, was creeping over the horizon of stars at the top. And at the bottom, on a corresponding scale, the month of February in a gothic script, garlanded by two plump salmon, the fish of Pisces, was coming to an end. Only the time—a quarter past three—was very nearly correct.
Bridget came up behind me and stretched her arms over my shoulders, her fingers picking at the dark cotton letters of Farouk’s ship on my
chest
“It’s a mad-house,” she said slowly. “What a stupid, marvellous thing.”
“What?”
“I love you.”
“It itches like hell.”
“What does?”
“The jersey.”
“Take it off then. But not here. Upstairs. We can ‘look at the pictures’.”
*
In a boxroom, wedged under the eaves, beneath the burning rafters, we made love again. There were two narrow dust-covered windows looking out over the garden and we could see Mr. Girgis dictating to Ahmed, the two of them moving painfully from plant to plant like men walking a punishment course across a swamp, the rough Arabic syllables falling upon Ahmed like a succession of cures.
We lay on our clothes, her tennis shirt and her father’s yachting trousers as a pillow against the dusty floor, that small body constantly changing position, moving beneath me, locked in mine. There was an Egyptian flag in one corner, the old one, three stars and a crescent moon against a green background, and the remnants of a Hornby train set in another—a still-bright block engine lying on its side with the legend “L.N.E.R.” on the coal box.
“He plays with trains. He used to.”
In other corners of the room trunks and suitcases were piled on top of each other, and wicker boxes with P & O labels directing them to Port Said and Tilbury and the Metropole, Monte Carlo.
“Doesn’t this answer your phone call yesterday? I mean it’s better than talking about it. Making love is better.”
“Yes.” We had stopped for a moment, and lay next to each other, sweating.
“I was angry—because you wouldn’t do it the past few months, when before, the first time, it was so easy for you.”