The luncheon tables were raised. We passed through flat, grey country which certainly fulfilled all Professor Quelch’s remarks about the dullness of Egypt. The fields were relieved by a few oxen, the occasional donkey and its driver, some brown children and women bent over their crops, a thatched hut or two and sometimes a mud village. More rarely were the modern structures of authority to be seen, for the British maintained the policy which the police today call ‘low-profile’. They were already promising the natives full autonomy and self-government within the Commonwealth. Perhaps they had to. The War had depleted their manpower. It was becoming considerably more expensive to maintain an empire.
‘We’ve gone from gunboat diplomacy to revolver diplomacy in a couple of generations.’ Malcolm Quelch demonstrated how to fill the local pitta bread with foul and take it into one’s mouth. ‘Soon all we’ll have is chocolate-box diplomacy! And we all know how far that gets you, dearie!’
Mrs Cornelius lifted the dripping pitta up to her lovely mouth. Her eyes gave him her full attention. ‘A nice box of chocolates always worked with me,’ she said. Her mouth closed over the hors d’oeuvre, some of which dripped down her pink chin. She dabbed at it with a dainty finger. ‘But I suppose you’d fink me a bit old-fashioned.’ She sucked her finger.
In another Malcolm Quelch’s gesture might have been courtly, but the professor’s muscles were unused to so much spontaneity and his bewildered spasm jerked his glass of lemonade solidly into his lap. As his white trousers spread with yellow, he slowly cranked fastidious hands to Heaven. ‘Ugh!’
‘Oh, blimey!’ Mrs Cornelius was at once ready with her napkin. ‘Pore fing! Don’t worry. It’s not a tragedy.’
Malcolm Quelch did not respond to her. Instead, arms still in an attitude of surrender, he stared hopelessly down into his water-logged crotch, where pieces of ice glinted and winked.
Then, with the air of a man who has received some unequivocal signal from an unsympathetic God, Quelch fell back with a resigned sigh as Mrs Cornelius dabbed genteelly at his lap.
THIRTEEN
THE MIGHTIEST CITY in Africa, Cairo smells of coffee, mint, sewage, camel-dung and raw saffron; of jasmine, patchouli and musk; of lilac and roses; of kerosene and motor oil. And she smells of the far desert and of the deep Nile. She smells of ancient bones.
Through alleys and boulevards crowded with the monuments of five thousand years and a dozen conquests, each individual, be they European, Oriental, African or Native, carries upon their person a certain mixture of scents: of sweat, rosewater, starched linen, carbolic soap, tobacco, incense, macassar oil, garlic—borne on Parisian frock, Savile-Row suit, flowing gelabea or black chaddurah. A flux of trams and trucks and limousines, donkeys, camels, mules and horses, flows back and forth across the bridges spanning these narrower reaches of the Nile between Old Cairo and Gizah. This constantly moving flow of people and vehicles pours into the twitterns and parades of that infinitely tangled knot of streets until they are filled to capacity. Outside every mosque, every church, synagogue and shrine, squabbling men, youths and children scramble to sell you some tawdry fake to remind you forever of the city the great Arab poet called the City of the Book, because here, through the centuries in relative harmony, have co-existed the Jews, Christians and Moslems who share a common testament.
‘Cairo is the apex of this whole land,’ declared Malcolm Quelch. ‘She is unlike the rest of Egypt yet she contains elements of everything.’ He paused to peer through our window at the busy boulevard which, were it not for palms and tarbooshes, might have been Paris or Berlin. Cairo was the most reassuringly civilised-looking city I had known since leaving Paris. Any doubts about venturing into this hub, this nerve-centre of intellectual and fanatical Islam, were thoroughly dispelled. Wahabim or Wafd, those zealots dare not expose their crazy eyes to the light of the Cairene day.
On Professor Quelch’s advice we had chosen not to stay at Shepheard’s well-known hotel, where Cook’s had an office and to which every naive tourist aspired. There is always just such an hotel in every city, soon deserted by those who made its reputation. We were in fact beyond the trees and flowers of Ezebekiya Square at the Continental, an altogether more pleasant and restful place than Shepheard’s, which, as Professor Quelch pointed out, was forever packed night and day with people who would not feel their visit was complete without visiting the pyramids, taking afternoon tea in the restaurant or sipping a cocktail at the long bar. One was always coming across ill-mannered sightseers in the corridors who had failed to resist an urge to explore. ‘And there’s also an unfortunate semi-bohemian element,’ Quelch added priggishly. ‘Both conform to type. If they did not insist on their individuality, one might forgive them more easily their folly.’ The Continental, he said, reminded him of the best class of Broadstairs hotel, where he had holidayed as a child. For a moment a wistful expression crossed his hatchet face as if in his mind’s eye the Sahara were transformed to the Kentish sands and in his mind’s hands he clutched a red tin bucket and spade.
We had become fairly good friends and were sharing a room at the hotel, but that particular bond which had existed between his brother and myself was simply not there. Malcolm Quelch lacked both Maurice’s charm and optimism, his gentlemanly ability to put almost everyone immediately at their ease. I still missed the captain’s dry, easy wit, his enthusiasm for literature and the arts, his determination to enjoy every experience. Perhaps I had a tendency to hero-worship in those days. I had never known a father. Mrs Cornelius was always linked in my mind with my mother but Captain Quelch had, by a subtle process I could not understand, become something of a father. History (a Marxist’s euphemism for this century’s appalling triumph of human evil) had robbed me of all my family, as well as my sweetheart. Mine had been a violent and terrifying progress into manhood and I had survived with only my life, my talents, and a pair of Georgian pistols, to begin the building of a new future. I wish that I had been able to settle, as I had originally planned, in Paris or London, in those hopeful years before the Depression, before the War. I might have founded a proper engineering business. We would have built from small inventions up to the larger ones, as the public’s confidence in my abilities grew. Within ten years I would have become the greatest inventor-engineer since Brunei or Edison, with my own company, with branches in every Western country; a vast empire of technical resources. A knighthood would have been inevitable. Britain would take a firmer grip on her Empire, her Christian responsibilities, and commission the first of my great flying cities! Instead I remain unhonoured, an outcast from the world of science and the intellect, seeing all I dreamed of stolen, devalued, misused. Towards the end of the War I had a notion of a kind of stove which could use radio waves to heat food, cooking it in a fraction of the normal time. I called it my ‘Radio Stove’ and talked about it enthusiastically with the airmen on leave in the Portobello Star, fellows with sufficient technical literacy to be stimulating, intelligent company. More than enough technical understanding, it emerged, to take my ideas for their own and apply them to the profitable new business of cooking plastics! A perfect example of that abuse of an idea! I had hoped to benefit the busy housewife. In my ideal future a Pyatnitski Radio Stove would grace every home, the greatest labour-saving boon since the Hoover. But it is some while since I expected to discover any justice in this world. A parent might have helped me avoid the pitfalls of my career. As it was I had Kolya to help me for a little, and Captain Quelch and, of course, Mrs Cornelius, but no permanent guiding hand to take the tiller, as it were, when my bewildered soul was flung upon the conflicting currents of a singularly threatening century. I should be proud, they say, to have survived so well. I escaped the carnage of the Stalin years, the hysteria of the Nazis when they began indiscriminately to arrest anyone suspected of being a Jew. And it is for these two things that I thank God most. God alone provided me with the courage, the brains and the skills to save myself from the final humiliation and degradation, or at least from death
. Professor Quelch often remarked that it was ‘one of God’s ironies. He bestows his gifts of intelligence and sensitivity upon us and then fails to provide us with the means to make the fullest use of those gifts. This surely is the crux of the human condition?’ He, too, had been cheated of his inheritance. His whole family had been ruined by a speculating and dishonest lawyer. The family was related to the Mauleverers on the distaff side. ‘We were never, in the past thousand years, anything but uncommon stock.’ There being a dearth of university positions for archaeologists like himself, men with Classics degrees, he intended never to fall into a backwater like his brother in England. ‘Reigning over an empire of grubby thirteen-year-olds scarcely a stone’s throw from where we were born. My hat! I can’t believe he’s happy. What a fate, eh?’ I gave him the confirmation he seemed to demand, but I thought I detected a note of envy. Wanting desperately to be the adventurer his brother was, his temperament was nonetheless closer to the more conservative twin’s. This seemed to me the central paradox of his character. I could see him leading crocodiles of Egyptian schoolboys in their little grey English-style uniforms up to the pyramids on a Saturday afternoon to lecture on the glories of their mutual past in which the British Empire and the Egyptian became strangely blended, as perhaps they had done in Ptolemy’s time, or in Augustus’s time, or even, just possibly, in the time of Suleiman, when the Arabian Empire was at its most powerful, its most opulent and its most liberal, when it carried the light of science, literature and the natural arts across the Mediterranean and gave Europe her mathematics, scientific instruments, alchemical and medical lore. And all this in spite of Islam! Only as the true expense of maintaining an empire manifested itself did the Moors and their co-religionists again take to squabbling amongst themselves and, having no means of moving beyond this stage of their social development, began that irregular decay into their present barbarism. Those people once envied for their decorative arts, their music, their learning, their poetry and the tolerance of their rule, became known as the world’s cruellest people, the scum of the Barbary Coast, without honour, cleanliness or conviction. And this was their shame; for they had been better and known better. Here in Cairo the dead hand of the Turk had fallen upon a once-vigorous people and it had lain there too long. To be fair, Egyptians had recovered much of their former self-esteem. The British had already granted them independence with the sole provision that a peacekeeping and administrative force be maintained in order to protect their commercial interests in the Suez Canal. The British in those days were still mainly from the old mould. They were fully aware of their Christian responsibilities to the ‘lesser breeds without the Law’. Today it is unfashionable to accept responsibility for our less privileged brothers. Then it was our duty to offer a helping hand, to pass on the wisdom of our experience, to demonstrate, without any other kind of coercion, the benefits and beauties of the Christian faith. I hardly think this is an ignoble notion. Good, brave men died in its service, as did good, brave women. It is in the nature of the generous Christian to want to spread the word throughout the globe, especially in the dark places, the cruel and evil places, where the Light of Christ is the only means of driving away the devil and his minions. If this is ‘imperialism’ then, yes, I am an imperialist. If this is ‘racialism’, then, yes, I am a racialist. I am content to leave that judgement to posterity! If, that is, anyone can still read or think when the country’s Dark Age is over! This is the time of the Beast, when all conscience and morality are powerless and those who still dare claim Christ’s birthright are derided.
That first evening in Cairo, I remember, I was dazed by the heat and the complexity of the vast overcrowded city, by the dense blend of exotic and familiar, of slender, pale fairy-tale towers and domes, of dark green tapering poplars and spreading cedars, of palms, of massive churches so strangely similar to those in my native country, of vividly dressed Coptic women whose beauty was incomparable, almost alarming. I remember the blue air of the moonlit starry sky, a powerful sense of the great brooding sands lying all about us; there were perpetual stirrings in the streets, even when they seemed deserted, sudden echoes in high-walled alleys, warrens which could never be mapped, for Cairo is a city of worlds within worlds, of mazes within mazes and cisterns within cisterns, vaults leading to other vaults and caverns boring further and further into a past that set its stamp here before even the Pharaohs rose to dominate Egypt and, after five millennia, left, some think, more of their knowledge unrecorded than recorded. German and Russian scientists now have evidence they came to the Earth in their own flying cities, from another planet. It is the only way they know to explain the sudden flowering of civilisation on the green banks of a great African river. How else are we to accept the engineering miracles, the longevity of their Empire? I have never been entirely sure what to think of these theories. I agree it is hard to believe such a refined people emerged from the dust and mud of the Nile Delta. I read a piece by Evelyn Waugh on the subject and wrote to her, but never received a reply. I met her again much later at the Royal Society of Literature. By that time she was permanently dressing as a man and had grown plumply repulsive, though had yet to adopt the famous monocle. She could pose as a man, said J.B. Priestley, in whose honour the party was, but she would never convince anyone that she was a gentleman. I laughed so heartily at this that the Bard of Bradford—with a jolly ‘bugger the little snob’—offered me a drop of whisky from his own bottle (the rest of us had only sherry); a mark, I was told, of considerable approval. I had gone to the party with Obtulowitz, the airman-poet, whose latest girlfriend had just been interned. If ‘Mr’ Waugh had read my letter she did not acknowledge it. She was unnecessarily rude when I broached the subject again and offered me the opinion that the only worthwhile thing to come out of Egypt was a cigarette and a style of kinema architecture. Perhaps she wanted me to invite her to the pictures. She brandished an empty holder. Maybe she only wanted me to offer her an exotic fag. This reminded me again of that first night in Cairo, at the nightclub Quelch took me to which reminded me powerfully of The Harlequin’s Retreat in Petersburg, a place of rabid perversity whose customers were devoted to every queer taste, in dress and no doubt in their sexual appetites. Quelch was surprised, he said, at my discomfort. He had understood from his brother that I was a man of the world. Of the world, I told him, most certainly. Of the demi-monde, I was not so sure. Quelch became a little impatient at this. In his view the club was the best place for cocktails as well as gossip, but if I felt ill at ease, he would be glad to take me somewhere a little less crowded. ‘Though you might find it a little less sympatica!’ This somewhat cryptic statement was never to be explained. We returned to the bar of the Savoy Hotel where we were almost the only people not in uniform and where it became quickly clear one was better served if one’s name were known to the staff. Realising I had done Quelch a disservice I was about to suggest we return to The Crooked Path when I recognised one of the men who had stepped into the bar. A little deeper tanned, his features as fleshless as ever, his handsome head crowned with rather more grey than when I had last seen him, Major Nye was in civilian evening clothes. The moment I signalled to him from where Quelch and I sat rather uncomfortably in cane chairs to one side of the bar, he approached with every sign of pleasure. ‘My dear old chap. How on earth did you manage to turn up in Cairo? I’d heard you were in the United States these days. By the way,’ dropping his voice, ‘no reminiscences, eh? I’m here on the quiet, rather. What?’ Naturally, I respected his incognito and merely introduced him to Malcolm Quelch as an old acquaintance from my soldiering days with the Army of the Don. Apologising for having a dinner engagement, Nye asked after Mrs Cornelius and was visibly moved to learn she was also in Cairo. I remained discreet. After insisting on ordering us some more cocktails from a noticeably more agreeable steward, he said he would send a message to my hotel. We would meet again as soon as he had a better idea of his appointments. He had only been back from India a week when London had sent him on he
re and he was still a bit of a new boy. Naturally I understood him to be on government work and did not press him for details. Mrs Cornelius, I said, would be delighted to know he was in Cairo. He did not, however, seem to share my certainty.
Jerusalem Commands Page 24
