The Spoils of Egypt

by Michael Pearce

  He went next to see the tram-driver, whom he found drinking tea with his fellows.

  ‘It wasn’t his fault!’ they chorused. ‘He couldn’t have done anything about it. She just stepped straight into him.’

  ‘You didn’t see her coming?’

  ‘How could I? She was down at the side.’

  ‘You were moving, though. She must have been ahead of you.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘There were lots of people ahead of him! You can’t see them all!’

  ‘Were there lots of people? Was there a crowd?’

  ‘There’s always a crowd in the Ataba.’

  ‘Yes, but was this woman part of a crowd or was she standing on her own?’

  ‘I didn’t see. I didn’t see her at all until there was this bump. You know at once. I jammed on my brakes and looked down and there she was!’

  ‘It was the first time you’d seen her?’

  ‘Of course! I swear on the Book—’

  But then he would.

  The conductor was strong in support.

  ‘There were a lot of people milling about. There always are. And those stupid arabeah-drivers!’

  ‘Yes, those stupid arabeah-drivers!’

  ‘It’s a wonder it doesn’t happen more often.’

  So not much joy there. Owen did a round of the stalls nearby, the tea stall, the sweet stall, the Arab sugar and Arab cucumber stalls, but although they all remembered the incident well—it had clearly made their day—and although all claimed to have been intimately involved, none of the owners, it transpired after some time, had actually seen anything.

  Next he tried the streetsellers, many of whom had regular pitches and who, being more mobile than the stallholders, had secured places near the front of the crowd. All of them, however, were observers after the event; somewhat to their regret.

  They had at least seen something, though, and he tried to turn it to advantage. Could they describe the bystanders who had been at the front of the crowd, the ones who, presumably, had been nearest when the accident, or whatever it was, had happened?

  Yes, they could: unfortunately, in implausible detail.

  But did they recognize anybody?

  ‘Don’t I remember seeing Hamidullah?’ the lemonade-seller asked himself.

  ‘Hamidullah?’

  ‘The carrier of water.’

  ‘I remember a water-carrier,’ said Owen.

  ‘It would be him.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Oh…’

  The water-carrier, apparently, made long patrols of the town, passing through the Ataba three times a day, in the morning, afternoon and evening. Owen tried to establish the times more precisely.

  The lemonade-seller did not possess a watch; could not, indeed, tell the time. Owen tried to get him to work it out in relation to the muezzin’s call but then realized that one of the times, at any rate, he knew exactly. That was the one which coincided with Miss Skinner’s fall. He would have to leave that now, however, till the next day.

  Feeling that at least he had established something, and fed up at having had to spend most of the day on this daft business, he decided he’d had enough and went in to drink coffee with the Fire Chief.

  ‘God be praised!’ said the Fire Chief. ‘You have come at last!’

  Owen explained what he had been doing all day. The Chief, who must have seen him, affected surprise.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I suppose you’ve got to look into it if it’s a European.’

  ‘Not all Europeans,’ said Owen grimly. ‘Just this one.’

  ‘Are you going to punish the tram-driver?’

  ‘Well, no, it wasn’t really his fault.’

  ‘All the same…’ said the Fire Chief, casually conveying the centuries-old Cairene assumption that punishment was related more to the satisfaction of authority than to the desserts of offenders.

  ‘From what I can make out,’ said Owen, ‘it doesn’t seem to have been anybody’s fault. It was just an accident.’

  ‘What else?’ said the Fire Chief.

  What else, indeed? Even if it had been a push, it was almost certainly an unintended one. Miss Skinner had perhaps backed into somebody and they had merely warded her off. And then perhaps they had panicked when she had fallen over and made themselves scarce. He wished he could find someone who had seen what happened. If that was all, then they could forget about it.

  It must have been something like that, an accidental jostle in the crowd, someone turning suddenly. What else could it be?

  A deliberate push? That was ridiculous. Who would want to do a thing like that? Miss Skinner was unknown in Cairo. All right, in her short time here she had not exactly endeared herself to people, but hardly to the lengths of provoking someone to push her under a tram!

  She was a European and Europeans were not exactly popular? Well, yes, but physical attacks on Europeans were few and far between. People fancied they occurred much more often than they actually did.

  And that was probably it. Miss Skinner had almost certainly imagined the whole business. She didn’t seem the fanciful sort, but you never could tell.

  What else could it have been?

  ‘I’ve got something for you,’ said the Fire Chief.

  He fished in a cupboard and produced a parasol and two or three small packages.

  ‘Someone brought them to me,’ he said. ‘He found them under the tram, just where she had been lying.’

  One of the packages was torn and Owen could see what was inside. It was a ushapti image of Osiris, about a foot tall and made in glazed faïence. It was well made but Owen was surprised. He pulled it out and turned it over in his hands.

  ‘She’d been out shopping,’ said the Fire Chief.

  ‘Yes,’ said Owen.

  But why had she bought this? For this one, well made though it was, was still a fake.

  ***

  The meeting with Zeinab had gone well; so well, that Miss Skinner expressed the wish to repeat it. And if possible in Zeinab’s own home.

  This proved a problem, for Zeinab had taken it for granted that the meeting would be in some such place as the terrace at Shepheard’s, which was where one normally met. She had no intention of allowing anyone into her appartement other than Owen.

  ‘What’s the idea?’ she said to Owen.

  ‘I think she wants to see you in your natural habitat.’

  ‘Shepheard’s is my natural habitat,’ said Zeinab.

  ‘Yes, but she thinks you have a home.’

  Zeinab considered.

  ‘Perhaps we could meet at my father’s,’ she suggested.

  Zeinab’s father was a Pasha and possessed a town house, a fine old Mameluke building.

  ‘I think—I think she had in mind an ordinary house.’

  ‘This is an ordinary house,’ said Zeinab, in a tone that brooked no argument.

  ‘It will do fine,’ said Paul hastily.

  When, however, Owen arrived, shortly before the appointed hour, Zeinab was not there.

  ‘I don’t know where she is,’ said Nuri Pasha, who had long ago given up attempting to keep track on his daughter’s movements. He admired her deeply—she reminded him of her mother, his favourite courtesan—but understood her not at all.

  ‘Miss Skinner will be arriving at any moment,’ said Owen, consulting his watch.

  ‘Cette américaine,’ said Nuri a trifle anxiously, fearing that he was going to have to provide the entertainment on his own, ‘estelle jolie?’

  Owen had not really considered the matter. He did so now. Miss Skinner’s trim form rose up before him; but also her sharp face.

  ‘Une jolie laide,’ he said at last, not wishing to discourage Nuri but feeling obliged to be truthful. Ugly-pretty.

&n
bsp; ‘Ah! C’est piquant, ça!’ said Nuri, intrigued. Like all upper-class Egyptians, he habitually spoke French.

  ‘Elle est formidable,’ Owen warned him.

  Nuri brushed the warning aside. So long as the other parts of the equation were all right, the more formidable the better, so far as he was concerned. He liked a challenge.

  Owen felt a little worried. Nuri’s interests centred fairly narrowly on politics and sex and he was inclined to associate women exclusively with the latter. Owen felt that Nuri needed more briefing.

  However, at this moment the servant came in to announce Miss Skinner’s arrival.

  ‘Chère Madame!’ said Nuri, rising to kiss her hand.

  ‘Mr Pasha!’ said Miss Skinner, surprised but not discomfited.

  ‘Call me Nuri,’ said Zeinab’s father, retaining her hand and leading her over to the divan.

  Owen was glad that Paul was there. He had a feeling that things might be about to go wrong.

  Fortunately, Zeinab appeared at this point, dressed as for a visit in discreet black, which owed, however, more to the fashion house than to Islamic tradition.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she said. ‘I’ve been at Samira’s. Her favourite niece was being circumcised and it went on for ages—’

  ‘Circumcised?’ Miss Skinner’s voice rose to a squeak. ‘Female circumcision?’

  ‘Barbaric,’ said Nuri. ‘Reduces the pleasure enormously.’

  ‘Miss Nuri, there are one or two things I would like to discuss—’

  Paul somehow succeeded in detaching Miss Skinner from Nuri and leading her over to sit beside Zeinab, whose entrance, Owen thought, had not been entirely uncontrived.

  He returned and sat down beside the disappointed Nuri.

  ‘What an opportunity!’ he said. ‘The very man to tell us all the Khedive’s secrets!’

  ‘Alas, my friend,’ said Nuri sadly, ‘I am no longer one of his intimates.’

  ‘Say not so! Why, only last week I was talking to Idris Bey and he said—’

  ‘Did he?’ said Nuri eagerly. ‘Did he now?’

  At the other end of the room Miss Skinner was deep in conversation with Zeinab. Owen shuddered to think what she might be hearing. Zeinab’s knowledge of the life led by ‘ordinary’ Egyptians was sketchy but her imagination vivid.

  Paul, meanwhile, had slid smoothly on to current politics and was now, thank goodness, giving Nuri the political background to Miss Skinner’s visit.

  ‘Antiquities? I’m sure I have some. Or can lay my hands on some if Miss Skinner wishes to buy—’

  ‘No, no. It’s the actual excavation she’s interested in. But also the export of such treasures from Egypt.’

  ‘An excellent thing. What good can they do here? Some clumsy peasant is sure to break them. Much better to sell them. If only,’ said Nuri wistfully, ‘I had an unopened pyramid or two on my estates!’

  ‘Miss Skinner’s position is, I think, a little different. She wishes to stop the export of antiquities from Egypt.’

  ‘Stop!’ cried Nuri, aghast. ‘But why should she want to do that?’

  ‘She feels, I believe, that Egypt’s remarkable heritage should be preserved.’

  ‘Oh quite,’ said Nuri. ‘Absolutely.’

  He seemed, however, a little cast down.

  ‘But, tell me, my friend,’ he began again tentatively, ‘exactly what business is it of hers? These treasures do after all belong to us.’

  ‘I think she feels, mon cher Pasha, that they belong to the world.’

  ‘Belong to the world?’ said Nuri, stunned.

  ‘In the sense that they are part of the heritage of us all.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Nuri. ‘In that sense. As long as it’s in that sense. Though I still don’t see—’

  There was a little silence. At the other end of the room Miss Skinner and Zeinab chattered happily away.

  Nuri sniffed.

  ‘In any case,’ he said, ‘heritage! Pooh! That is all in the past. We must look to the future. I was saying so to the Khedive only the other day. We were discussing, as it happens, the sale of a temple, complete with colossi—’

  ‘I think,’ said Paul, ‘that would be the kind of thing she had in mind.’

  ‘The sale was to the British Museum, of course.’

  ‘A difficult balance of interests,’ said Paul, smiling and shaking his head. ‘Difficult for all of us.’

  Nuri caught at his arm.

  ‘And therefore, my friend, to be approached with circumspection. You will urge that, won’t you? This could create such problems for us—’

  ‘A few antiquities?’

  ‘Not so few. Not these days. Now that the price of cotton is so low. Some of my colleagues are going in for it in a big way. Raquat Pasha was telling me that he had appointed a European agent. Sidki Narwas Pasha has a permanent arrangement with a German museum. Two or three are getting together. Even the Khedive—’

  Owen listened with deepening gloom. They were all in it, the big Pashas, the Khedive, the museums. It was a national industry.

  ‘We rely on it,’ Nuri was saying with emphasis. ‘Absolutely rely on it. You must do something, my friend.’

  Across the room Zeinab and Miss Skinner were bringing their conversation to an end.

  ‘Surely there is something you can do, mon cher?’ said Nuri earnestly to Paul. ‘Persuade her to take up other interests, perhaps?’

  ‘Well, there is the Women Question—’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Nuri thoughtfully.

  ‘But more immediately,’ said Paul, ‘there are her archaeological interests. I am taking her down to Der el Bahari at the end of this week.’

  ‘Are you? Are you, indeed?’

  The conversation ended and the women rose together.

  ‘You do see now, don’t you, Pasha,’ said Paul quietly, ‘the importance of these political questions?’

  ‘Oh, quite,’ said Nuri. ‘Oh, quite.’

  ‘It would be very unfortunate if Miss Skinner were to get the wrong impression.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Nuri Pasha. ‘I know exactly how to handle Miss Skinner.’

  ***

  Owen stuck his head into the bar room.

  ‘Trevelyan here?’

  ‘No,’ said someone. ‘He left this morning. He’s on his way to Der el Bahari by now.’

  ‘With our blessings,’ said someone else.

  ‘There’s a lot of money riding on it,’ said Carmichael, from Customs.

  ‘Why’s that?’ asked Owen, coming definitely into the room.

  ‘It’s that damned woman,’ said someone, Jopling, from Finance. ‘We’ve promised him free drinks for a month if he can keep her down there for a fortnight.’

  ‘More if he can do it for longer.’

  ‘It’s the end of the year,’ someone explained, ‘the financial year, that is. We’re up to our eyeballs in work reconciling everything in sight. And then this damned woman comes along, poking her nose in.’

  ‘I don’t mind her poking her nose in,’ said Jopling. ‘It’s having to take time off to answer her silly questions.’

  ‘If she’d just read the Accounts,’ said someone else, obviously also from Finance, ‘that would be fine. But she wants to go behind them, keeps asking what they mean.’

  ‘As if they meant anything, other than just an end-of-year story to keep everybody happy.’

  ‘So we promised Trevelyan he could have free drinks every evening if he’d only get her out of our hair.’

  ‘It’s worth it.’

  ‘It certainly is,’ said Owen. ‘I’d have cut myself in if I’d known. Wahid whisky-soda, min fadlak.’

  He collected the whisky-soda and sat down in a corner with Jopling and Carmichael.

  ‘Has she been ge
tting in your hair, too?’ asked Carmichael.

  ‘My God, Owen,’ said Jopling, ‘if she’s been looking at your finances—!’

  ‘Thank you, not yet. She’s concentrating on the whitewash boys rather than the workers. It’s the antiques export business,’ he said to Carmichael.

  ‘That? The export license stuff?’

  ‘She can forget that,’ said Jopling. ‘The Treasury people back in Town are all Free-Traders. Now that the Liberals are back in power. They won’t hear of a licence.’

  ‘I don’t know where she stands on the licence business,’ said Owen. ‘From what I’ve gathered, it’s more a question of whether to allow antiques to be exported at all.’

  ‘She wants to ban that? Bloody hell, that would create a rumpus.’

  ‘It would. It is already.’

  Jopling regarded him curiously.

  ‘How do you come to be involved? It’s not really your line, is it?’ Like many people, he was uncertain exactly what was the Mamur Zapt’s line. ‘More Carmichael’s.’

  ‘Enforcement,’ said Carmichael. ‘He’s on the enforcement side.’

  ‘Stopping the smuggling? Blimey, you’ve got a job on! Good luck, mate!’

  He drained his glass. Carmichael ordered another round.

  ‘That’s not the only thing,’ said Owen. He told them about the incident in the Ataba.

  ‘Somebody tried to push her under a tram?’ said Jopling. ‘Wish I’d thought of that. Might have been cheaper than the beer.’

  ‘No one did anything,’ scoffed Carmichael. ‘She’s imagining things.’

  ‘That’s a bit like the conclusion I’m coming to,’ said Owen.

  ***

  Owen heard the water-carrier before he saw him. Even in the uproar of the Ataba-el-Khadra he heard the clanging of the little brass cups. They gave out a note as clear as a bell.

  And there he was, the brass cups slung round his neck in front of him, on his back a resplendent brass urn and, lower down, dangling from his waist, two black bulging water-skins.

  In the richer parts of the city the water-sellers sometimes wore the old national dress; in the poorer, they dressed in rags. This one compromised, wearing shirt-style tunic on top, rags below, so that it didn’t matter when he walked into the Nile to replenish his skins.