by Joseph Hone
“Don’t be stupid—you’re not going to spend the rest of your life just loving me—and nothing else. What else are you going to do?”
“What do you mean—‘what else’? Do you expect me to join the Army or something, become a lawyer, ‘settle down’? I’m just a teacher. Or was. Rather dull, I suppose.” She said nothing but looked at me blankly. “What ‘else’ is there, from your point of view? I’d like to know. It’s becoming a bore really, isn’t it? Just loving me, with nothing else in sight? None of those extra things that you might properly expect from a relationship of this sort; none of the things that came with the men you had before—martinis on the terrace at six o’clock, yelling at the suffragis, trips to the Gezira Club in the afternoons and summers on the beach at Alex: you’re looking for a future. I know what you mean.”
“You don’t. You’re just stupid.”
“She wants to marry you—what’s wrong with that?” Henry had ordered another bottle of Stella and it was dark at the end of the bar in the Cosmopolitan. It was another of our “afternoons” as Bridget called them. “You could do it at the Embassy—you were born in London, weren’t you—dual nationality. No trouble—if that’s what you want. Though I’d say you wanted a job really. No point hanging on with those private lessons if you can help it. Do you know Crowther at the Consulate here, commercial attaché? He might have some ideas about work. Go and have a word with him. He’s a friend of mine.”
*
“Don’t just marry me—because of that talk at the pyramids.”
“Of course not. I was mad. I’ll get a job. Henry has ideas, someone at the Consulate. I want to marry you.”
“And not just because it’s giving you something definite to do—marrying me instead of getting a job, because it’ll make you feel better?”
“You’re mad now. No. Though it does make me feel better. Why are you so cagey about it? Aren’t you sure?”
“Yes, I am. Just I’m surprised—now it’s happened.”
We’d walked over the Kasr el Nil bridge to the Gezira Club and across into the middle of the race course towards the huge baobab tree that stood in the centre of the park on the island. It was a Saturday, the last meeting of the season, I think, before all the horses moved to Alexandria for the summer. The bell clanged in the distance before each race, every half hour or so, and the tiny horses thundered round the perimeter, taking the curves flat out against the fence in a line, like animals on sticks in a child’s game.
“Let’s do it soon, that’s all.” There was an urgency in her voice as if she were talking about making love and saw our marrying simply as a legal means of ensuring that end on a permanent basis.
9
Mr. Crowther had the features of a frightened weasel; an unbalanced face: a broad flat forehead narrowing sharply to a point in a minute chin, eyes close together in a setting of continual alarm, fox-coloured moustache and the stringy, lazy body of someone who years before had made a habit of bowling two fast opening overs before retiring to matron with a twisted ankle. Thin silvery hair, a bow tie and a rather crumpled linen suit completed the impression of a last delicate flowering before the light desert airs blew him completely to seed.
He waved me to a sofa some way from his desk and then hurried back into his chair—as if to lessen some expected impact in what I had to say.
“Married?” he said with exaggerated concern when I had explained my business. “But that’s surely something for your Church. You should see the Provost at All Saints’ or—” and he looked at me like a doctor deciding on a diagnosis—“Father McEwan at Heliopolis.”
“No, I—we don’t want a church. I thought it could be fixed up at one’s Embassy.”
“It might be—if there were one here. But there isn’t. And no Ambassador either. In any case I understood from my friend Mr. Edwards that you were Irish—”
“Yes, but born in England—dual nationality—”
He didn’t seem to have heard; brow furrowed, looking deeply into his desk, running his finger along the woodwork, he appeared quite given up to the struggle of marshalling his own arguments.
“I’m afraid there may be difficulties, you see. Your fiancée is Egyptian you said. And you are Irish. Now, if both of you had been British—then I think something could have been arranged.”
Satisfied he could now rest his case Mr. Crowther—Basil Crowther as I’d seen on his office door in the Consulate building behind the main Embassy—got up and moved warily towards me on the sofa, his linen suit, smudges of darkness spreading under the arms, suffering, like himself, agonies from the heat. He looked wearily at a photograph of Queen Elizabeth trooping the colour in the fresh brightness of a London summer on the wall behind me.
“The Guardsmen always used to faint, didn’t they? I remember in the old newsreels. And they just left them there. That was before Suez of course. Now they cart them away. Sic transit something … of course you being Irish you wouldn’t—really appreciate …” He left the idea hanging in the air, as if in a mental faint, and mopped his face.
A little elderly lady had appeared and Mr. Crowther ordered tea in such graceful tones that I wondered if there might not be cucumber sandwiches as well.
“No, it’s difficult. And very bad luck. I’d like to be able to help. It’s not that I’m overburdened with work at the moment either. But I’ve remembered now—it’s the Italians who deal with the Irish here. There was a nun in here last month. From Aswan or somewhere. She’d left the order. Something about a policeman—whether in Aswan or Tipperary I couldn’t quite gather. Anyway, we sent her on to the Italians. You might have a word with them. Though now I come to think of it they don’t marry people in their Embassies, one of the few countries that don’t. And you’re not Italian.”
I thought perhaps that I must have caught Mr. Crowther at a time of immediate personal pressure—“my wife or something” as he might have put it.
“What about the Cathedral—All Saints’? You could get married there, couldn’t you? Have you thought of that?” He seemed particularly pleased at the idea as if he’d solved the problem. “The Cathedral, yes. Now that would make a splendid setting. You couldn’t do better. But perhaps—” he looked at me suddenly—“that might be a little too public for you, what? One wants a decent privacy in these things. One is not marrying one’s mother-in-law after all.”
“Ah, our tea. Thank you, Mrs. French. Lemon, Mr. Marlow?”
Mr. Crowther’s face cleared. He smiled for the first time, an awkward grin, like a dusty accountant who has got the figures out of the way with a wealthy client and feels the need to embark on brief innocuous banter to suggest his position as co-equal, if not in the social hierarchy, at least in matters of the world.
“You’ve been teaching out here, haven’t you? Edwards told me. At Albert College in Maadi—what’s it called now?—I can never remember.”
“Yes, but I’ve stopped. I’m giving private lessons.”
“But you could go back to teaching—I mean, if you wanted to. You’ve still got a resident’s permit—and a work permit, much more important?”
“Yes. But I’m not too keen. I may have to, I suppose.”
“Hmmm.”
Mr. Crowther paused and blew gently over the top of his tea, cup and saucer lifted to within an inch of his chin, little finger slightly extended, like a dowager at a tea party.
“There’s an ex-British school at Suez, isn’t there?”
“I think so. Yes. But I wouldn’t fancy going up there—was that what you meant?”
“Possibly. Edwards mentioned something about your looking for more congenial work. I’ve not been down to Suez yet. My assistant goes there sometimes, when there’s trouble on one of our boats. We used to have an honorary Consul there of course. A Greek gentleman, unfortunate business—I was just thinking. It probably wouldn’t suit you.” He fingered vaguely through my passport which had been lying on the desk in front of him along with my other papers; and then he st
opped abruptly at a page near the beginning. “Born in London?” he said in astonishment. “I hadn’t realised that. I mean, that gives you dual nationality, English as well as Irish, if you wanted it. We could marry you then—you’d be a British subject, quite within our province. All we need is another passport for you—and a word with London.” He ran on in jubilation, stood up and looked through the first page of the passport against the light. “Another passport. That’s it of course! That’s the answer. Here, I’ll give you some forms to fill in.”
He seemed quite irrationally pleased with this outcome, as if it were he who had been trying to get married and not I.
“Ah! I see you went to Springhill,” he said glancing at my answers to the questionnaire under the heading “Education”—something which the wretched minor public school I’d been to in North Wales had conspicuously failed to give me.
“Yes, for a while.”
“We used to play them at cricket …”
A long time afterwards Mr. Crowther pumped my hand enthusiastically at the door, barely able to get to the goodbyes.
“You must come to our reception. Queen’s birthday. Very small do, I’m afraid. Not even official. Just a few of our friends in Cairo. After all you should be British by then. Half British anyway. You may even be married.”
*
We were—twenty-one days later. Henry and Bahaddin were the witnesses and Mr. Crowther officiated. The only thing I properly remember about it all was Crowther’s looking the door of his office during the short formalities …
Afterwards he smiled affably, and took us all to lunch at the Estoril. Henry, I remember, drank a little too much and spilt half a bottle of wine.
We sent a telegram to her parents and that evening went to Luxor for a week which used up the last of the money that I’d saved. It was the end of the school year too, exams were in full swing and my private lessons had dwindled to nothing.
10
June 13, the Queen’s birthday: the maple leaf over the British Embassy buildings wrapped around the flag post, a mourning drape in the still air, the heat rising like a smack in the face from the yellow, burning streets; kites motionless in the sky far away, specks in the distance, like aeroplanes, until they dipped suddenly, swerving over the trees on Gezira Island: the old Peugeot taxis braying across Kasr el Nil bridge, and the Mercedes, gliding by, curtained against the glare: a group of farmers up from the country, with sheep and goats and huge shallow metal dishes of simmering beans, camping under sheets of corrugated paper against the corniche in front of Shepheard’s Hotel. The harsh amplified prayers from a mosque at the corner of El Trahir: June 13, the Queen’s birthday.
We slunk into the Embassy grounds through the old ballroom at the back of the Residency which had been turned into the British Council’s library. Crowther’s Mrs. French took our cards at the desk for returned books, the muted crackle of Dimbleby’s commentary on Trooping the Colour coming from a portable radio behind her. Henry had come with us and we went on into the gardens in front of the Residency which ran down to the high wall which now formed one side of the corniche; before, the lawns had gone right to the banks of the river; before Suez.
It was late afternoon and the heat was dying a little and it was just bearable if one didn’t move around too much, and stayed under the flowering trees—flame trees and bougainvillea—which bordered the lawn on either side. Henry caught a suffragi in a red sash rushing past us with a tray of martinis and we gulped the warm mixture.
“Mr. and Mrs. Marlow!”
Mr. Crowther detached himself from a group of elderly ladies who were sitting on little gilded chairs at trestle tables and sped towards us with remarkable purpose—quite out of keeping with our importance as guests. A Sudanese bishop and an American in huge brogues and a Cabot Lodge tropical outfit just in front of us turned quite huffy as he passed them by with only the most perfunctory greetings.
“How nice to see you. And you’ve got drinks. How was Luxor? You stayed at the Winter Palace I hope? Not the best time of year really, though one does avoid all those awful German tourists.”
And we told him about the Valley of the Kings and Queen Hatshepsut’s temple among other inconsequential bits of chatter. But Crowther had something else on his mind; fidgeting and slightly red in the face, he seemed only to be waiting for a decent interval to pass with these opening formalities before broaching something much more important.
He didn’t get the chance until much later when Henry and Bridget had become embroiled in conversation with a professor they’d known at the University and I’d wandered off to one side of the lawn and gone through a hedge and into a little stone plaza with a minute swimming pool in the middle. I was surprised to see a very portly, benign-looking gentleman asleep in a deck chair under a sun shade at the far end of the pool. There was a red carnation in the buttonhole of his immaculately cut white linen suit and a half empty bottle of champagne on the table in front of him. I turned to leave thinking perhaps that it was the Ambassador being kept discreetly under wraps until diplomatic relations between the two countries were resumed. But Mr. Crowther, who must have seen me going through the hedge, was right behind me when I turned.
“Ah! Marlow—just the man I wanted to see. There’s someone here who I think may be able to help you,” he said with urgent discreetness. “I’d like you to meet. Dear me, he’s gone to sleep.”
“Help me? How?”
“About work, my dear fellow. About work. You remember—Henry told me all about it. About your looking for something to do out here.”
Crowther’s persistent interest in my well-being puzzled me at the time. I put it down simply to a concern on the part of Her Majesty’s Government for all British citizens abroad, even quasi-citizens, and have since had ample occasion to revise that opinion.
But then, I followed him willingly as he stalked quietly towards the recumbent body, jumping neatly over one corner of the pool, as if intent on cornering a thief and shaking him till he woke. He did nothing of the sort; instead, he leaned over the gross, dandified figure, close to his face, like a lover.
“Robin—Robin?” he murmured. “I’ve Mr. Marlow to see you. Mr. Marlow.” He dragged my name out very slowly in the way that one explains something to a child.
The figure stirred and then sat up, slowly, painfully, as though the least movement of the immense torso was an agony. But he was quite awake. He looked at me, a look of kindness as well as interest—a twinkly animated look as though, like Crowther, the eyes alone had survived intact in the wreck of his body.
“Oh. I dropped off.”
He twirled the champagne glass in delicate withered fingers, the skin barely covering the bones; his hands in fact looked like someone else’s, tacked on, so at odds were they with his general corpulence and air of excessive good living. He drained what was left in his glass and poured some more.
“Mr. Marlow—this is Mr. Usher.”
“How are you, Marlow? You’ve not a glass and indeed I see no chance whatsoever of your getting one without attracting ‘unnecessary attention’ as Basil would put it, although I might add that’s something I’ve been doing very happily all my life. That’s why I’m stuck here round the corner like a poor relation, pretending I’ve got a ‘bad leg’; rather unimaginative that idea of yours, Basil. Anyway I can’t see why I shouldn’t have seen Marlow in the Residency, all that nonsense about the place being bugged; Egyptians aren’t up to that sort of thing yet, hardly learnt how to use the telephone.” He looked at Crowther mournfully and cast a reptilian glance in the direction of the privet hedge, listening to the excited chatter beyond.
“All those young voices … and I can do nothing whatsoever about it.”
“Very few young people about in Cairo these days, Robin. And no one of that sort here today. Just old Lady Goodridge and a Sudanese bishop. And you wouldn’t want to meet them. Not your style at all,” Crowther said quickly, hoping perhaps to suggest that Usher’s interest in the young of
the city, foreign or domestic, was entirely avuncular and that what he really missed were the great days of the Capitulations and the witty adult company of the old British Raj.
“You do go on so, Basil. You really do. Mr. Marlow knows very well what I’m talking about. What I miss are the young—the young everywhere. And there’s something compelling about voices behind hedges, don’t you agree, Marlow? Not just the idea of something clandestine but something positively obscene as well, something quite uncalled for. I suppose I shouldn’t complain of my station this afternoon; there’s something to be had on both sides of that hedge. Titillation for a jaded eavesdropper. The trouble is that I’ve found my imagination inclined to flag lately whereas my other appetites grow apace … A coarsening of the spirit in a body more than ever willing, a common thing among the old I believe. The dangerous age, not far from death.
The grand old Duke of York
He had ten thousand men
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again …”
Hesitating over the words he hummed the rest of the verse in a jaunty growl.
“How does it go, Crowther? I feel in that sort of mood myself: an overwhelming sense of irresponsibility.” He poured the remainder of the champagne into his glass and raised it to within an inch of his long bulbous nose. “I don’t really like it, you know; the chill’s quite gone. The trouble is once I get the taste of it in my mouth I never feel like stopping.”
He thashed the liquid about in his mouth for a moment so that I thought he was about to spit it out. Crowther had brought up two more deck chairs and we perched on the edge of them. Some rust-coloured petals eddied slowly round in one corner of the pool, moved by the breeze that had come up the river and over the wall. It was nearly evening and we sat there in front of Usher like an audience waiting for the start of an open air performance. Mr. Crowther took his cue.