But Mrs Cornelius is in poor temper and will not, this time, be mollified. What’s more, she announces, she finds the food less and less to her taste. If she is forced to eat one more fish that looks as if it would rather eat her she intends to become a vegetarian. The food is excellent, if more to my subtle Ukrainian appetite. I came to enjoy Turkish cuisine in Constantinople and discovered how well the Egyptians had learned from their masters! If the Levant owes nothing else to the Turks, it must forever thank them for their brik, their pastilla. My taste for corn and various beans is another preference baffling to Mrs Cornelius; neither does she have much relish for rice, especially with her fish. The fish is incomplete without the chip, she insists, just as pie is not a real pie without gravy. The baby eels are inferior to those of Whitechapel while the schnitzels and beefsteaks would, she assures me, be hurled at the wall by the diners of Aldgate or Notting Dale. On hearing this, Professor Quelch opens an eye and rises from the rainbow canvas of his chair to announce that it was very often possible to get a better meal for a shilling in Stepney than for a fiver in the West End. Certainly, if we were judging food by Mayfair standards, ours is more than adequate. Growing sentimental for her ancestral pie-shops and ale-houses, Mrs Cornelius asks him if he knows Sammy’s in Whitechapel. It is famous, she prompts, in the East End. Professor Quelch reminisces vaguely of delicious chops and sausages and thinks he might have eaten some exceptional eels there.
‘Sammy never did eels.’ She frowns. ‘ ‘E wos strictly pie an’ mash, chops an’ mash, sausages an’ mash. The eel-shop was Tafler’s next door. I never fancied ‘is likker. Wot wos it yer wos doin’ in ther East End, prof? Mish’nry work wos it?’
‘An uncle of mine took an interest in the orphaned boys.’
Esmé, chewing on a straw, casts uncomprehending eyes upon the palm-lined banks. Her thoughts are in some more urban paradise. Mrs Cornelius asks after one or two acquaintances in the various dockland missions, but he shakes his lifted head. ‘I have not been back in England since before the War, cara madonna. I really don’t think there’s anything to go back for, do you? The socialists are giving away the Empire! Ireland’s the thin end of the wedge.’
‘Well, everywhere ‘as its ups and darns, prof.’ Mrs Cornelius’s discomfort is swiftly forgotten. She sips an early gin. ‘One door closes, anower opens. You lose somefink ‘ere, yer gain somefink there. Thass life.’ She smacked optimistic carmine.
‘I happen to believe certain standards existed before the War and are worth hanging on to,’ he pronounces almost balefully - Luther summoning good Immaneus for the whore of Babylon.
But she agrees with him. ‘It’s a changin’ world, though, perfesser, an’ it’s best ter change wiv it. Any ower way’s barmy, doncher fink? I wouldn’t mind seem’ wot it wos like again.’ She grows nostalgic for London since she found old copies of The Tatler and The Play Pictorial in the little niche that serves us for a library and working-room. She is like a migratory animal which, at certain times, feels an instinctive pull towards its home territory. ‘An’ meetin’ ol’ Major Nye like that, wiv orl ‘is noos of the ‘alls an’ everythin’, I orlmos’ teared up, yer know.’ This is the first time she has referred to the evening before we left Cairo and her single dinner with the Major. Obviously he had asked her to say nothing and I had respected her silence.
‘Nye’s coming to Luxor?’ Professor Quelch is alert. ‘Dear lady? That’s the police chap?’
‘Don’ worry, prof. ‘E ‘asn’t come ter take yer ‘ome. The socialists won’t be able ter ‘urt ya. Besides ‘e’s not ‘ere fer ther dope.’ She reaches to pat his sallow cheek. ‘Picked art yer costume yet?’ The next day was Seaman’s birthday. As a concession, the Swede had authorised a limited use of the props basket. The main costumes, for the leading actors, could not be used, but there were considerable numbers of slave and soldier outfits in which it was proposed we dress the locals once we were filming again in Karnak. In our first scene the ancient city would come to life in a reverse dissolve. Ali Pasha Khamsa had recommended a family of skilled plaster-casters who would recreate the monuments of Ramesid Egypt as they had been at the height of their glory. This weary land of ruins would flourish again. It would be our tribute to the ancient world’s master-builders. How the natives would marvel when they saw their own past reborn! But would they feel pride or shame?
Esmé had been fascinated to watch the few rushes in which she had appeared. She admitted she had fallen in love with herself. We laughed about it. ‘Now we have something else in common,’ I said. Sir Ranalf Steeton had equipped the boat with its own darkroom and viewing-saloon, a projector already firmly in place for us, and even some films to look at if we wished. I watched a few. They were low-grade things, unmistakably British or local in origin, involving frequent loss of clothing. I had never been fond of Chaplin, let alone these badly-shot imitations, but the other men seemed to enjoy them. I was not surprised. They were almost all first-or second-generation peasants from the backward European nations. A turd on a top-hat would have been the epitome of sophisticated comedy. Today they would make a perfect audience for the Andy Warhoon comedy-Western I was forced to watch at the Essoldo last week. Thark at the Whitehall was another such fairground entertainment. Mrs Cornelius loved it. I pointed to the rest of the audience and told her to note the straws in their hair. We might have been gathered around a village marketplace watching one itinerant peasant belabour another with a blown-up pig’s bladder. The British genius is for making the banal and vulgar respectable. It is the secret of British television and why Benny Hill is watched round the world. The most splendid triumph of British philistinism came when the BBC discovered at last the lowest common denominator and blessed it as Art. P.J. Proby only understood part of the equation when he exposed his bottom to the teenage eye. Nobody would have minded if he had been wearing a dog-collar and a pair of pince-nez. Within a few years he would have received a knighthood, another Attenborough. I have watched all the careerists. In Bolshevik Russia, in Paris, in the literary and scientific communities, in Fascist Italy and Socialist Britain, in Berlin and in Hollywood they climbed by means of familiar ambition. I am no stranger to their strategies. However, my own pride refuses to let me employ such techniques. I remain, I suppose, too much of an idealistic individual.
Women recognise this. It is why some of them find me dangerous. Even Esmé said so more than once and Mrs Cornelius confirmed my girl’s opinion. ‘If ya weren’t so dumb ya’d be dangerous.’ She meant that my own good nature was frequently my downfall. She has never belittled my intellect.
The ardour of reconquest abated, I passed some time in reading to my little girl from the books we had found on board. My favourite was an English translation of Salammbô. How right was Kingsley Amis when he remarked that this, rather than Madame Bovary, was Flaubert’s masterpiece. It is much more colourful. Flaubert read a thousand books for every chapter of his own. His research for that other, far more depressing novel, was minimal. It was through this exquisite romance that Esmé and I became acquainted with the depths and complexities of Carthage, although in those days I was naive enough to believe the book no more than a piece of wonderful fiction. Insufficient has been written about Flaubert’s gift of prophecy.
We scarcely progressed a hundred pages before the eve of Seaman’s birthday. Increasingly, Esmé would take the book gently from my hand and kiss me, suggesting that we pass the time in some other way. A gentleman always, I was unable to refuse her, though as our various fantasies became less able to arouse me, I was drawn more and more towards the Frenchman’s history. My sense of foreboding would not abate. At night I took to smoking Quelch’s kif in an effort to calm my racing heart. While I have deep reservations about all narcotics, as opposed to specific stimulants, I found for a while a unique pleasure in absorbing myself in Salammbô on the deck of a boat moving steadily into Africa. The brilliant descriptions of the book were mirrored in the reality. This in turn was enhanced by the effects of the
hasheesh. But all this was still not enough to drive away my unspecific terrors, my half-sensed ghosts. It reminded me of some of the worst episodes in De Quincey. I breathed jewelled air, surrounded by exotically scented wonders and deliciously erotic sensations, but somewhere in the shadows I glimpsed the face of a goat, winking from garnet eyes, grinning through yellowed teeth; a senile goat whose only distinguishable quality was an air of implacable malice. For some reason I was reminded of Yermeloff, the Cossack camp and the night Brodmann saw me with Grishenko. Esmé! Esmé! Little teeth suck the marrow from my bones. They brand my flesh; they put their twin marks upon me, the Mark of Death and the Mark of Shame. Those camps all stink of fear. I refused to become a Musselman. They did their worst in Kiev and Oregon and Hannibal, in Aswan and Sachsenhausen. Most of them are dead now and I am still alive. If I had been born in Hellenistic times there is an operation I could have had which would have undone my father’s hygienic decision and enabled me to put behind me a confused and crowded past, whose fictions and distortions would have taken a further lifetime to untangle. My own vision was a clear, uncluttered vision of the Future. The past became my enemy. I could have saved us all, Esmé. I could have shown you Paradise. It is not true that I am filius nullius. I am related to the most distinguished blood in Russia. Those great, scattered families represent the heart and soul of our country. I carry their secrets with me. I have never betrayed them. Ikh veys nit. Ikh bin dorshtik. Ikh bin hungerik. Ikh bin an Amerikaner. Vos iz dos? Ikh farshtey nit. I saw the film about the heroes of Kiev. It was in ‘Sovcolour’ and ‘Sovscope’ and was made by a ‘Sovdirector’ with ‘Sovactors’, yet it conveyed much of the force of those old legends, the stories of our fights against the brute hordes of Asia Minor. I had a great relish for films until it became the fashion to depress us all the time. And they wonder where their audiences went! Why their cinemas turned into bingo halls! They blamed the public for staying away. In this, at least, they had the truth. Who in their right mind, having spent a long day in a factory or an office, can relax in the dark watching an inferior and inaccurate account of life in an office or a factory? Do not mistake me - a musical or a Western or a romance are fantasy, but these new melodramas are merely unreal. In the International Cinema, Westbourne Grove, I watched The L-Shaped Room, set in Notting Hill. The theatre filled with spontaneous laughter as we enjoyed the profound inaccuracies of character and scene. Like most of the audience, I left half-way through. We wanted our lives made legend, not merely sentimentalised and thus enfeebled. This was the message of The Great Escape?
Esmé made me close my eyes and then admire her costume. She had taken one of the houri outfits. To the blossoming scarlet trousers, metallic breastcups, and gauzy accessories she added a pretty veil which, if anything, enhanced her beauty. I told her she looked wonderful but warned her against wearing such revealing clothes during the day. On the night of the party, when we were all dressed up, there would hardly be problems. She pouted. She thought I would be stimulated by having a slave-girl of my own, but I was not, I gently pointed out, the kind of man who needs public confirmation of a conquest. Then, understanding I had hurt her feelings, I quickly added that since she was already the most beautiful girl in Egypt I was afraid some powerful Pasha would cast lustful eyes upon her and demand she be captured for his harem. While this flattered and consoled her, I still insisted it was imprudent of her to wear the costume out of context. For my own part I was to dress as a Wahabi warrior, in simple black and white, but sporting the dark glasses which those tribesmen wore as a mark of their civilised dignity, while Captain Quelch had settled on Rameses Il and Mrs Cornelius would be our Cleopatra, some general Ptolemaic consort rather than that most famous Egyptian queen. To swell the feminine ranks, Grace had decided upon Nefertiti. Only Seaman himself, our birthday boy, refused these childish excitements as if he felt it was his duty to maintain an appropriate directorial gravitas.
When he emerged at lunchtime on his birthday, a small group of us had already gathered at the bar to sing the English birthday song and insist on his drinking a special cocktail which Mrs Cornelius had ordered. Very rapidly he began to enjoy our company and, for a change, we his. I remember little of the afternoon, save that I became at one point emotional and wept for a while. Professor Quelch and Mrs Cornelius helped me back to my cabin and I slept until Quelch, his exposed flesh darkened by a solution of Mars Oil and cooking butter, woke me to say that it was after seven and the party itself was due to begin at eight. A little cocaine brought me back to the world and after a brisk shower I was ready to slip into my simple gelabea, burnoose and set of false whiskers fixed to my chin by gum arabic. As I stepped into the passage, one of our Nubians caught sight of me and addressed me in his native tongue. When I asked him to translate he laughed and apologised. He had taken me for one of those Wahabim barbarians, he said. ‘I had thought us captured, effendi.’ I was still a little the worse for the cocktails but this restored my spirits as I made my way up to the deck. Like pantomime conspirators we gathered around a small table on which sat an enormous iced cake blazing with candles. How they managed to get the chef to bake and then decorate this work of art I do not know! While the pastry itself was somewhat oversweet and the icing a riot of local geometric designs, calligraphy and pidgin English, Seaman seemed deeply moved by this expression of kindness and was weeping as he poised his knife.
Esmé, a dream in her slave-girl pantaloons and flimsy silks, made a delicious frou-frou whenever she moved and it was clear our Nubians were gripped not by lechery but by adoration. She was a little goddess to Mrs Cornelius’s magnificent Queen. Both women sported extravagant peacock-feather headdresses at least a foot higher than Pola Negri’s. They swayed at alarming angles through the course of the evening as we danced to the music of O. K. Radonic’s portable phonograph. Since women were in short supply, we cheerfully agreed that each man should take his turn. If he became impatient, we said, then he was more than welcome to ask Grace for a pirouette or two around the deck. As the evening wore on, more than one of us gave in to boredom and Grace was rarely without a partner, albeit a somewhat drunken one. Professor Quelch, heroically teetotal, had grown expansive in his role and attached himself to Esmé, promising her ‘the finest tomb in Egypt’ if she would only permit him a kiss. She found him amusing. She would gladly give him a kiss before the tomb. I think it was Esmé who first saw the lights of Luxor ahead, a scattering of electric bulbs and oil-lamps in the forward blackness. Professor Quelch raised his eyes from her tiny chest and licked his lips, sniffing deeply. ‘No question of it. That’s Luxor.’ He straightened to accept from one of our boys a glass of Vichy and a slice of cake. ‘You can smell the sewage from here.’ Then he got to his feet, raised his paper wig to Esmé, and drew the boy into the shadows.
All I could smell was jasmine. Under the awning, by the piano, Wolf Seaman had begun to play some repetitive Scandinavian polka and sing mournfully to Sri Harold Kramp in his native tongue. From time to time he darted wounded and significant looks at Mrs Cornelius, who, having pursued Malcolm Quelch and the boy below decks, now returned, grinning to herself. Grace, overwhelmed by excitement and alcohol, was puking over the rail and O. K. Radonic was waltzing with our captain, Yussef al-Sharkiya, a gargling fat man who held a cigar in one grubby hand and a defiant glass of whisky in the other. Our Charon had a faded blue gelabea, a dirty white turban, a pair of sandals made from tyre-rubber and lips permanently stained from the nuts he chewed. Earlier that week he had approached me with effusive good humour, making some mysterious proposal. When I failed to understand him, he had withdrawn in disgust; thereafter speaking to me only in the most formal terms while having nothing but greasy smiles for most of the others. I believe he had somehow lost face with me and was embarrassed. I had no notion, however, of the circumstances or the cause. Resting for a moment in a chair near the port rail I watched Captain Yussef cast glances of extraordinary heat at Mrs Cornelius and, had I been a little more sober, would have offered him
some sharp admonishment. I already knew such men frequently lusted to possess a beautiful European woman but those around us were generally discreet with their fantasies. The captain, his habitual caution banished by unfamiliar alcohol, was now incapable of hiding his disgusting longings. Soon even Mrs Cornelius herself noticed his glances and wagged a chiding finger. She wished no man to get into trouble on her account. Returning from the lavatory, Esmé suggested we dance. I summoned as much of my resources as were left and once again took the floor, uncertain whether to follow Radonic’s groaning, wound-down Am I Blue? or the erratic chords of Seaman’s Nordic folklorique. Meanwhile, from somewhere amidships, I thought I detected the tumbling rhythms and twanging catgut of a Nubian concert, as our servants celebrated the director’s nativity and our saviour’s sacrifice in their own quarters. The steam-whistle’s vast bellow drowned all of this suddenly when the captain returned to his wheelhouse, intent on alerting Luxor to our imminence. There was a stirring of comic Bedouin, fanciful Pharaonic dignitaries, caricatures of tarbooshed Cairenes and Theban soldiery as members of our party understood the signal to mean we were sinking and ran about shouting loudly before being calmed. Esmé became urgent, drunkenly eager, leading me below decks to my cabin forward. We reached it. She was already sinking to her knees before me. To my angry frustration, my door was stuck. It did not occur to me that the cabin was anything but empty as I put my shoulder to the panel and flung my weight to smash the lock, exposing my angel to the nightmarish sight of Professor Malcolm Quelch lifting a red and terrified mouth from the rampant genitals of our youngest Nubian.
Jerusalem Commands - [Between the Wars 03] Page 32