by Joseph Hone
“I think perhaps, Robin, we might start. We can’t be sure of our ground out here for too long.”
Usher gave a last lazy sign and then embarked in a brighter, more formal tone.
“Ah, yes. Crowther tells me you like it out here but haven’t got any decent work. Well, we need a man—at Suez. We’ve no one there now and I gather there’s an ex-British school in the town where you could teach. We don’t need very much, just details to keep us in touch with the mood of the place, till we can get one of our own staff men back there. Details like—well, Russian tankers at the refinery: how many, how often. Who’s running the Greek Club now, morale of the Egyptian canal pilots, troop movements and emplacements on the Cairo road—and a hundred and one other small points you’ll learn about just by living there which we’ll quiz you about from time to time. Oh—and there’s an American living in Suez, working on some UN programme or other, we’d like to know about him—sounds most dangerous. That sort of thing. We could offer you the work on a contract basis—what is it, Crowther? The equivalent of a P3 minus on the permanent rate—about £80 a month after UK tax apart from what you earned yourself of course, the money payable in sterling, in London, or in any other currency you chose except that of the country you’re operating from. Security measure that. There wouldn’t in your case, I’m afraid, be an overseas allowance, locally recruited staff don’t qualify, but on the other hand we’d be most lenient about any out of pocket expenses; we have a lot of blocked piastres out here. Crowther can give you the rest of the details—a year’s contract in the first place, with thirty days’ notice on either side and with possible Establishment later. That’s about it Like to get the boring part over—what do you think?”
“Rather dangerous—”
“Not at all. It’s not an active position. We call this an I O Posting—‘Information Only’—information you’d come across in the ordinary course of your work, nothing extra. No snooping around dark alleyways with revolvers, nothing like that; no radio work, messages in code—none of that nonsense. No exposure of any sort. You’d report verbally to us, that’s all.”
I laughed. “One could get caught easily enough doing just that. The Egyptians probably know I’ve come here today and they’d certainly think something was up if I kept on seeing people here.”
“You wouldn’t—or necessarily see either of us again. You’d deal entirely with your friend Mr. Edwards. It was he who suggested you to us—you hardly think we’d have advanced this far in the matter without establishing the most comprehensive bona fides as to your character and so on. What else did he say, Basil?—that you had an “insatiably curious approach to life’—just what we need, a sharp pair of eyes.”
“Even so—I mightn’t like the idea and you’ve told me rather a lot for someone who might refuse your offer and disappear—over to the other side, who knows?” The martinis had begun to sink in.
“There’s always a risk—and a much more prevalent one, I may say, among our permanent staff who know far more about us than you do. No, once we’re certain about someone we prefer a completely open handed approach.”
“How can you be ‘certain’—about me?”
“Well, to be blunt, we thought it suited you—in your present circumstances. With a wife to support and all that. You don’t want to lose out on that—on her, I mean.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you don’t want to be the odd man out. I don’t see you going over to the ‘other side’, as you rather melodramatically put it, without your wife. And I can’t see her going off on such a caper. She’s with us too. An I O posting actually. Not active, but completely reliable, been with us some years now. So you see our offer to you is really in the nature of a safety measure—though I’m confident you can be of value to us in your own right. You’d have probably found out about Miss Girgis—Mrs. Marlow, I beg your pardon—in due course; marriage leads to so many sorts of intimacy, God help us, and this is a way of ensuring a sort of mutual security in the matter. It’s better having everyone in it together. Loose ends in this sort of operation are the only really dangerous thing. Once you married Miss Girgis we had to do something about it; you see our point, either dispense with her, which might have been awkward to say the least, or take you on—which I’m sure you’ll agree was much the more civilized response. I’m confident you won’t let us down—your marriage may depend on it.”
I looked at Usher in astonishment, yet savouring the beginnings of that elegant considerate double talk which was afterwards to become so familiar to me. Part of what he had said was true, certainly. But which part—and for what reasons? And why the need for lies and truths in the first place—and why those particular lies and truths? I hardly know now what I had no inkling of then.
“Do think about it—think about what I’ve said. We’re not scoundrels, old fellow. We didn’t hire the Embassy for the afternoon, you’re not being invited to join some illegal organization, a lot of gangsters; this is all perfectly above board—relatively speaking.”
He ended the sentence in high good humour, accentuating the idea of a gang being involved in this charade as a ham actor might play up the role of a wicked uncle in a Victorian melodrama.
“And now, Basil, would you help me indoors before that inquisitive Bishop finds me here. Though perhaps,” he said, turning to me, “only the truly inquisitive could have found their way into this privy. You’ve really invited this on yourself, Marlow. Uncanny really, we thought we might have to use some pretext … it shows very suitable initiative on your part, if I may say so. Just what we want.” And he bowed slightly in my direction, inclining his great white head just a fraction in a gesture of patriarchal assent; and then an equally limited flicker of his eyelids, the skin passing very rapidly up and down over the watery blue orbs, like a coquette in a silent film. And he was gone, propelled by Crowther on what I now saw to be not only a deck chair but a deck chair on wheels.
It was impossible to say whether he really had a bad leg, was pretending to have—or had no legs at all. Henry didn’t seem to know either.
*
“I couldn’t tell you about it. They had to make their own minds up. I put you in touch with them—they knew about you anyway, through Bridget. I told Crowther I thought you could work for us—and what he told you about ditching Bridget was perfectly true. It may seem nasty—I mean underhand in a personal way, from your point of view, but the alternative could have been worse—”
“Christ Almighty—how could it be worse? Marrying someone who doesn’t tell you what they’re doing, what they’re really up to. What could be worse?”
I’d left the Embassy, furious. “You’d better talk to Henry, I can’t explain,” Bridget had said. “Obviously not,” I’d added, and Henry and I had gone once more to a corner of the bar at the Cosmopolitan.
“What sort of lark is this anyway? If it was anything serious you can be sure they wouldn’t have let me in on it—those two pooves. That reptile Usher—does he really have a bad leg, or no legs—or what? It’s a lot of utter nonsense. Cloak and dagger nonsense.”
“I don’t know how many legs he works on. I deal with Crowther anyway.”
Henry smiled wearily and shuffled his hair about with unusual timidity. I wondered how much of his explanation had been prepared, for he must have been briefed about, expected, this confrontation for some time. Were there to be lies from him as well?—lies one would never know of. Henry had always seemed to me congenitally blunt and straightforward; it was difficult to see in his character any sort of restraint—least of all a discretion imposed on him by others.
“Yes, it is a bloody lark,” he went on. “And cloak and dagger. The lark part—is Usher and Crowther. But remember, they’re only ‘countrymen’—liaison with London. And at that end it’s all perfectly serious. The more so now since the serious gents, the hatchet men, who used to be here, they’ve all been chucked out. Crowther and Usher are the only two left here with what’s called �
��open cover’; they can live here under quite proper bona fides—Crowther in the Consulate and Usher in his Mameluke house by the Citadel. He’s an Arabist, a Moslem—and God knows what else in that line. The place is crawling with all sorts of youngsters and desert knick-knacks. The fact is the two of them can behave pretty much as they like, for the moment—drum up every schoolboy fantasy, since they’re the only two senior people left in the circle out here. They’re indispensable from London’s point of view—and they know it. Hence their rather unorthodox approach in your case. It’s also true of course that they really want someone in Suez. They tried to send me. Anyway, that’s about them. In fact they must have complete confidence in you, or else, as you say, they’d have hardly embarked on the details today. Usher would have just weighed you up and I wouldn’t have been saying all this.”
The son of an Egyptian landowner, down to his last million, and a regular at the Cosmopolitan at this time of night, struggled up to the far end of the bar, swinging his arms about and shouting, in a wave of lonely bonhomie. Henry returned his greeting diffidently, only raising his hand towards him, palm outwards, in a way they had always acknowledged each other’s presence. On other nights Henry would have joined him, or he us, but tonight something kept us apart; again, that unexpected restraint on Henry’s part—like a drunkard far gone, embarking unwillingly and for the first time on a cure. Henry had a job to do with me. I wondered what it was.
“I suppose they think they’ve got me in some way—that’s why they’re confident—through Bridget: that I’m bound to work for them since I’ve married her. What have they got on her?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Her parents. They’d blow her and that would be the end for them in Maadi—and Bridget. It’s an old hold—and there’s no use arguing the morality of it because there isn’t any in this sort of snooping and there never was. It’s just a job. You can kill people with just a wrong word down the telephone anyway.”
“No morality, all right. But belief surely? Usher and Crowther, they believe in it. And you?”
“Oh yes, they believe in it,” Henry said, easy suddenly as though giving the response to a well-known riddle. “And that’s more than enough morality for them. Crowther and Usher, they believe all right. In different things. Usher has the old Anglo-Arab approach, Lawrence and so on; the Englishman and his desert: the delicious punishment under the stars, the mystique of the empty places, the ritual in everything; the extreme concepts of honour and pleasure—honour among men and pleasure with the boys; the tough, sink-or-swim male society with its inexplicable, cruel, deeply pleasurable rules—like school. In fact for people like Usher the Arab world is just a great big public school, with the deserts for playing fields and Mohammed as the mysterious Headmaster, where they never have to grow up. And Usher hates Nasser for doing away with it all, for closing the old place down. Crowther’s just a Tory civil servant who believes in the Englishman and his castle, that the Suez Canal runs through his drawing room on the way to India and so on. He believes in the toy soldiers aspect of it all—and giving the wogs a lesson. And he likes the mystery and the rumour and the deceit of the job as well—the hiding from Nanny before bedtime. That’s how he never grows up. They believe, and I understand it. It’s the romantic attitude.”
“And you?”
“I don’t believe. I took the job on years ago, at a low ebb. Money, interest, adventure even—perhaps I wasn’t able quite to throw over the Boy’s Own Paper stuff—but I don’t believe in it. Perhaps that’s the pity.”
“But they don’t have anything on you—you could get out.”
“Perhaps I’m fitted for the job. People are, you know. It suits them to do certain things, it’s good for them even, like a regular bowel movement or an apple a day.”
“And you’d ‘blow’ someone—you wouldn’t worry—if you were told to?”
“That would be London’s decision—area committee or head of section—”
“But would you do it—do away with someone, which is what it amounts to? Bridget for example—if you were asked to ‘blow’ her, as you call it, or if you even knew about it, what would you do?”
“See that it didn’t happen, that it never got to that stage.”
“If you didn’t know anything was happening?”
“That would be awkward, certainly. Except that I think I would know about it—unless they wanted to blow me as well—since I run her. I’m her ‘operator’, I’d have to know, unless, as I say, they wanted me for the high jump as well, since I’d have to get well clear of her before that happened. Bridget and I have open contact as well as cover—our circumstances happened to have allowed for that. If the Egyptians got on to her I’d be the next most obvious link in the chain—or you—even if she didn’t break down which she probably would. That’s the way we have to work it out here now—open cover, open contact, almost nothing clandestine—which is another good reason why they want you involved. You’re one of us. Married to Bridget. There’d be something suspicious if we weren’t all together a lot of the time. But for Christ’s sake don’t take it all so seriously—this business about blowing people out here—it’s not going to happen, there are far too few of us. They want to get people, not blow them.” He grabbed a handful of Sudanis, threw them into his mouth, and finished his gin. “Come on, let’s go back to Bridget and have some food. Don’t be so glum about it, you’re with us now. At least we won’t have to pretend any more.”
“That’s charming, I agree. One doesn’t want to deceive one’s wife more than is absolutely necessary. What would you call our arrangement now? An ‘open troika’, I suppose?”
Henry smiled briefly, warmly; the smile between friends when one of them has said something quite without consequence. He got up and left the barman a ten-piastre note in a busy fashion and we went down the steps of the hotel and into the night, like a steam bath now and loud with the racket of the tric-trac boards in the small cafés which bordered Soliman Pasha, and the wail of music from the radios on the shelves beneath the portraits of the President: photographs, garish oil paintings, posters—in whatever form, a reminder everywhere of a disputed Saint; a saviour or a rogue—or simply an object of indifference? I had never thought about it: that ubiquitous, tigerish face, like an ambitious barber’s with its darkly brilliantined scalp: caught in the unflattering glare of the coloured neon so that it readily assumed all the lineaments of “the enemy”.
Suddenly I felt as though I’d just arrived in a different, well remembered country and despite the overwhelming presence of the street—the smells of some sharp spice, ginger or nutmeg or copra, riding on an air of paraffin and old leather above the cooling dust—I felt there should be train whistles and snow and soot in the night air, the sense of something unwanted and forgotten, and not any of those other marks of the city that I’d become so familiar with.
“The train now standing at platform seven is the 8:45 Irish mail for Hollyhead, stopping at Rugby, Chester, Crewe … change at Rugby for North Wales …”
I remembered. The damp, cold succession of Septembers and Januarys, seven-and-six for the taxi and the first month’s pocket money, the doors slamming all along the train, greyhounds whimpering in the guard’s van, the condensation already thick on the view of Chester Cathedral: the end of every summer and Christmas—the beginning of a journey to a bell at seven next morning, to a life where life would be out of my hands. That was what I remembered—what Henry and Bridget and Crowther and Usher had reminded me of all day.
“Damn it—this bloody place.” Henry was struggling with his shoe which had stuck in a patch of moist tar on the pavement. We’d stop at the Soliman Pasha roundabout waiting for the run of traffic to pass.
“Perhaps not a ‘troika’, Henry—aren’t we all ‘double agents’? Isn’t that the term you use? After all, you and I and Bridget—we don’t really believe in any of it, do we?”
Henry walked out from the pavement suddenly so that I had to grab him off the wing of a ta
xi.
11
Bridget was laughing the moment she opened the apartment door, rushing forward to kiss me, as if there had been guests and jokes behind her and we’d arrived a little late for a party. On the sideboard were several bottles of wine and a bottle of that Gordon’s Export gin which I’d thought we’d finished long ago. This was to be a celebration of sorts: a private affair, not in any of our old public haunts, but behind curtains with the lights turned down and the radio tuned to the BBC, like proper conspirators. She’d arranged the table in the living room—an intimate dinner for three: a red tablecloth, which we never use, and a silver candlestick, a cherub supporting a bowl, a present from someone which she usually kept out of the way on the top of the bookshelf.
And it was a new Bridget; a public Bridget, no longer petulant, diffident, but liberated, now that all three of us had been joined in a secret: a woman perfectly released by the outcome of a professional arrangement, not through any private association, not by love, not by me. For the first time since I’d met her a year previously in the Continental she had assumed again, freely, willingly, that true intensity of character which had first attracted me to her and which I knew now she had withheld from me ever since.
There was a vast pleasure in her face, her bearing, in the way she looked at both of us, touched as casually as we moved around her—a fierce coquetry, as if, in amazement at the chance, she were starting an affair again with two old lovers simultaneously. She seemed to want this to be a joyous, irresponsible, loving homecoming, in which every failure and disappointment of the past, hers and ours, would be forgotten. As an echo of this happy determination, perhaps, she was wearing the same cotton house-coat that I knew from a year before and I remembered the casual, clumsy beginnings of our relationship which I had shared with Cherry in the same room the previous summer. Yet Cherry, at that moment, with his bumbling passions, his innocence—seemed to be part of a far more happy and irresponsible world than this.