by Joseph Hone
“I might as well go and look for him then,” I said.
If Williams had some crazy reason for sending me to Egypt, I now had my own: Henry had been right about the toytown—the useless imbecility of our section; the layer upon layer of deceit and half truth which we had all so carefully involved ourselves in for so long. Our lives suddenly seemed like a prologue to an act that would never come and in agreeing to go and look for Henry the only real reason I had was of wanting to find him and tell him he’d been right.
2
Henry had a small flat at the top of a decrepit terrace house near Kentish Town. Just down the street, on the opposite side from him, was an imposing red-brick Victorian council school. From Henry’s rooms you couldn’t see the wire netting and the broken concrete playground—just the arched tops of its tall, church-like windows and the steeply slated roof with its long chimneys, so that on summer evenings, when the light turned the brickwork a pale yellow, it looked a little like a minor château. But the rest of the area lacked any suggestion of romance; it was decidedly shabby, resolutely lower-middle and working class.
Several of the houses in the street had disappeared, either in the blitz or through neglect, and a rotten wooden fence lurched over into the road, saving one from a fall into the razed basement areas and exposed cellars but preventing one from using the pavement. People obviously didn’t come this way often and I suppose it is due for development Certainly Henry could have done better for himself—but I’d imagined his living here to be all part of his scheme of things; not to bother with the daily mechanics of living, with having any permanent image, but to spend his money and energy on champagne in London and brothels in Addis Ababa.
I went with Mr. Waters from Home Security in our section who had an immense bunch of skeleton keys and a borrowed Foreign Office van—with that legend clearly stamped in gilt on either side. We parked it round the corner from Henry’s house. “Not to make it too obvious,” as Waters said. And then we were off, skirting suspiciously around the drunken fence, as if it were we who were being pursued and not Henry.
I thought Henry might have left something behind, I suppose; something I’d notice, by knowing him, which the others who’d been there before would have missed. “A clue to his whereabouts”—a phrase which even Waters wouldn’t have sunk to using—kept running through my mind. There was, of course, something quite unreal about going there with Waters—cold sober to a place I’d been at home in so many times. And there were far too many “clues”: the crease in one of his ties, lying on the floor in the bedroom; the sticky empty bottle of Cointreau and the Egyptian cigarettes on the mantelpiece; the Brassens record on the dusty turntable which worked through the expensive multiband German radio—did they mean something? Was this how he’d spent his last night—drinking Cointreau and listening to Brassens—or a night weeks before? Or had he been with a girl, looking at the portable TV set at the end of his bed? That was more likely. A lot of girls liked Cointreau and Brassens and exotic cigarettes. I knew Henry didn’t.
Waters said confidentially, “The only thing missing is his passport.” He’d been in the flat before with the others and was showing me round the place now with the self-importance and hushed reserve of a churchwarden describing some historic mutilation in the crypt.
“How do you know? How do you know what was here in the first place?”
“Well, I mean—he didn’t take any of his clothes or luggage. They’re still in the bedroom. He must have left in a hurry.”
“Why? He never took much with him when he went away.”
“He’d been with someone recently.” Waters was holding up a minute navy blue suspender belt as I turned. “A girl I should say,” he added in a deeply considered tone.
“Well, he wasn’t queer you know.”
A girl. A schoolgirl to judge by the size of the thing. Perhaps from the school opposite. With Henry, there had been so many girls; it was impossible to try and trace anything about him that way. “That’s what they really want, you know. We fool ourselves about the rest,” Henry had once said to me. Girls were another of his insatiable traits—what did it matter if he thought that every woman shared his appetite. He’d always been lucky with them.
There was a bottle of horseradish sauce in the fridge, frozen solid, and a plastic bag of black olives. By the gas cooker there was a little whisky left in a half bottle and a sugary saucepan with some lemon peel in it. Waters said, “He couldn’t have been eating. He must have had a cold. Unusual for the time of year.”
“Perhaps he liked a grog before bed, even in warm weather and perfect health. He wasn’t English either.”
The bare flat with its remnants of Henry’s few essential pleasures seemed so much a staging point in his life that it was difficult not to think of him in the past tense—not because he’d died, just that he’d so obviously gone on to the next station. It was true, what Waters had said—he just upped and disappeared.
“I suppose that’s the sort of life one has to expect—a man in his job. Here today, gone tomorrow. I’m not surprised. I couldn’t stick it myself. You’ll want to take a look at his papers. There’s nothing there of course. He kept the rules and all that. Nothing to associate him with us, I mean.”
There were several drawers full of books and typescripts, carbon copies of articles he’d written, proofs of book reviews for a national daily, a travel feature on Egypt for one of the glossies. Henry had written quite often about the Middle East—vivid, colourful pieces, well informed and shrewd. It had been an easy cover for him.
“I wonder he didn’t keep his books on shelves,” Waters said as I piled them up on top of the desk.
“Because there aren’t any.”
Leight Fermor’s The Traveller’s Tree, The Leisure of an Egyptian Official by Edward Cecil, Greene’s The Quiet American; they were the sort of books one keeps, that one can read a second time, and I was surprised he’d left without them.
*
Perhaps he had gone back to Egypt. Perhaps things had rather died for him in London. Grog, horseradish sauce, schoolgirls—even the strongest tastes must pall. I’d said to Williams that he had friends in London but I’d no idea where to start looking for them. And even if I found them—what could they say?
His friends, I realised, would be the last people to know what had happened to him since he had never involved them on a personal level. He didn’t talk to them, as he hadn’t to me, about his plans for next week or his failures last year. Instead he spoke of gazing down some small crater in East Africa, of watching the animals, and saying it felt like looking at something happening at the beginning of time and making you believe him. He shared his obsessions, not the pains he took to arrive at them. That was the basis of his friendships. It meant that in looking for him one had nothing to go on except the odd remembered vignettes from his conversation—the girl he’d once met in Singapore or the bus he’d taken from Nairobi to the coast. His friends would remember him well enough but they wouldn’t know anything about him.
“Just as if he’d gone away. For the week-end,” Waters said, picking up the bills and newspapers which had come for Henry and which had piled up just inside the door. The Times and Express and last week’s Bookseller rolled up in brown paper.
“Hadn’t you better have them stopped?” I asked. “Tell someone at the section”
“He might be coming back.”
“I don’t think so.”
His papers had gone on coming, turning up each morning like an abandoned dog looking for its owner. It was the only real “clue”. In this alone could one feel that Henry had sacrificed something: last week’s news whimpering at the door. These were his roots in London: his morning story of the world, a look at the autumn books—to have given them up he must have found something else more compelling. And perhaps too that was sufficient reason for leaving a country—having no one to stop the papers; that could be happiness for a man who had seen too much of the world—finding a place where
one didn’t need them.
*
“You’ll be pretty much on your own of course. Except for Cherry and Usher. We haven’t got an Ambassador in Cairo any more,” Williams had said the next day.
“Cherry? Is he at the Embassy now?”
Cherry was an Irish teacher I’d known in Cairo ten years before. It seemed unlikely that he’d graduated from the mission school in Heliopolis to the Residency by the Nile.
“No, he’s not at the Embassy, Just a stringer. He’s been told simply that you’re taking over from Edwards, setting up the new circle there. That’s all. Don’t trust him with anything else except helping you make contacts. He’s good at that, knows everyone, married to an elderly French woman, the widow of one of their Embassy people out there who took a fancy to his blarney.”
I’d gone with a tape recorder. Williams had suggested it as if Egypt were still in some sort of dangerous revolutionary turmoil and one couldn’t go there quite openly as a tourist. It was a cover we sometimes used—those of us who could ask presentable questions anyway. I was doing a radio programme, an article, a book—it didn’t matter. It was no good anticipating a long stint lurking around the back streets with dark glasses; even Williams had seen that.
“Keep us informed,” he said. “You know the routine in Cairo, it’s still the same—through the council library, next to the Embassy. They’ll be expecting you. Got your passport, visa, money—your tickets?”
Williams had seen me off with all the careful zeal of an undertaker. He’d even offered me a warm gin and tonic from his private cabinet
“Cheers,” he’d said, with the genuine release of a man thankfully at the end of a meeting with a wretched visitor, and I’d taken a taxi straight to the airport.
*
We’d crossed the Alps, the small green valleys at the bottom of the great shafts of rocks and snow—glittering in the afternoon light like a pre-war travel poster, a promise of things never done: a winter holiday, learning to ski, hot chocolate in the sudden dark and the journey homeward from Basle in time for the New Year; something from an age when one didn’t have to go beyond the Balkans with Ambler for adventure.
I’d fallen asleep without finishing the tiny bottle of burgundy which had come with my dinner. I dreamt I’d fallen through the ice on the lake at home as a child, looking for a fountain pen I’d lost there the previous summer holiday—something precious I’d been given for my birthday—and only finding the top of it in the dark cold water. “But you only lost the top of it, stupid,” someone shouted angrily from the shore. And then, of course, I was trying vainly to struggle up again through the ice.
When I woke it was dark and the Indian hostess had changed into a sari. The VC 10 was going on to Bombay and Singapore. We few who were getting off at Cairo weren’t important it seemed; the real excitement and purpose of the trip lay beyond the first stop. We were being dropped in the desert, in that powdered sand and air like a hot cupboard that kept things the same for ever: hate and love, boredom and exhilaration, beauty and horror; Egypt dealt only in extremes, her weather extended the same charity to them all: to the flies and the maimed beggars on their trolleys in the cities; to the temple at Karnak and the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. It was a place where nothing ever died—where death was always visible.
In memory at least, one quickly learns to avoid the tedium and failure of the past, as I had done whenever I had thought about Egypt, and one can far more readily avoid the actual circumstances of a previous unhappiness. Yet here was a country where, in returning, one might easily be forced to live it all again. It might well have preserved the disaster intact: the heavy Edwardian bedrooms, grubby, steeply raked pre-war Peugeot taxis, the smell of crushed sesame and lime dust and paraffin blowing up through the bedroom curtains in the empty afternoons when there had been nothing to do except the one thing we had done so willingly and well then. That strange weather of the place might have secured all the props of my short marriage to Bridget ten years before just as surely as it had preserved the golden evidence of Tutankhamen’s tragedy for three thousand years longer.
It was not a country, I supposed, from which once having lived there one could ever really escape—no more than one can avoid the nightmare return of childhood in the dreams of later life.
BOOK TWO
Cairo, May 1957
1
In those early days in Egypt, when I was teaching in Heliopolis and before I’d met Bridget, I spent most week-ends and holidays in Cairo at the Oxford Pension at the top of Soliman Pasha Street and at the bar of the Continental Hotel in Opera Square, with a listless existence in between at one of Groppi’s cafés, various cinemas and the Estoril Restaurant. I can only think of the heat as reason for my not going further afield—the stupefying blast of muggy summer air, rising from the flooded river and the delta and saturating every pore of the city—so that one found respite, if at all, only in those few public places which had air-conditioning. One lived a sort of cave life then, surrounded by the dark panelling of the Estoril or the Regent Bar, the black mirrors in the Continental, the drawn curtains of one’s room—emerging only at night into the open, looking for variety and pleasure, with all the suppressed energy and appetite of an animal in search of prey.
Herbert Cherry—Williams’s Cherry, there couldn’t be another and he alone had stayed on in Egypt after the rest of us had left—was one of our group who taught mathematics in another school in Heliopolis. He was stout and nearing middle age and spent a lot of his time vigorously avoiding the implications of both facts. To do him justice—the way he would have seen it anyway—I suppose I should describe him as being young at heart. Much more, he reminded me then with his oblique humour, his ubiquity and his studied concern for the flesh, of Leopold Bloom. Certainly he knew as much about Dublin. He ought never to have left that city really, it was the true centre of his existence, and his life in Egypt then seemed to be no more than a series of defensive engagements—hopeless skirmishes designed to protect the lines of memory which led back to his native city and his real consciousness against the marauding sound and images of Cairo. In this wasteland I was his only sounding board.
He had a cherubic glitter, an intensity of recall, that turned him, in long nights over Stella beer, into a clown and character assassin; a Robin Hood of memory, robbing the past to pay for the present. Thus he would describe in detail various journeys made about Dublin—wordy encounters and drinking Odysseys conducted in earlier days—the flavour of the wet Georgian architecture and the slang of the city tumbling into, transforming, the present aridities. “I saw him on the steps of the National Library—of course he thought he had the job but the unfortunate thing about him was—that affair with a greyhound in the back of the taxi …” And so it would go late into the evening. His gossip was not malicious but rather a form of love.
Because of all this shuttered longing, and the heat which irked his great bulk—and because too he was merely shopkeeper Protestant-Irish (not Anglo-Irish as he often described himself) and therefore covertly British—Mr. Cherry failed conspicuously to get on with the Egyptians. He would adopt in his dealing with them an hauteur which would have seemed out of place amidst the worst excesses of colonialism in that country sixty years before. The Egyptians failed equally to understand him, though this perhaps was because they never bore the brunt of his dismissive cynicism—as I did—since he didn’t at that point speak any Arabic. None the less, in a succession of violent gestures and abusive gutturals, he would incite the locals to within an inch of his life at most opportunities. Late at night, when repeated moves from one night club to another had forced him off the Stella and on to whisky, he would sternly introduce himself to the doorman or head waiter as “Lord Salisbury and party. And hurry about it”; which usually, and quite properly, resulted in our paying double for everything before being thrown out.
I suppose it was his marriage that eventually reconciled him to the place—or perhaps it was the rather sinister a
ttraction Arab countries can have for people with an authoritarian view who have somehow not managed to express that aspect of their personality adequately at home: Egypt had reconciled Cherry to the mild tyranny of his nature.
Angelo, a Greek Jeeves, ran the bar in the Continental and there was a small Italian orchestra that played “Ciao, Ciao, Bambino” over and over again in the evenings. Between the two it was the most enjoyable place in Cairo at the time. In the mornings, before things got going, when Angelo was getting the bottles out and clunking the ice into silver thermos bowls, I would sit at a table in the corner correcting exercise books or writing letters in the cool shade. By lunch time Cherry had usually turned up and the real shape of the day would begin to emerge.
It was during the early part of my first summer in Egypt that we met Bridget here—a tall, dark-haired girl with a confident, provocative look about her. Years before, when the English had run things in Egypt and one hardly ever came across an Egyptian in the centre of Cairo, it wouldn’t have been unusual to meet someone like her, so “English” looking, in the Continental at lunch time. It was now; since Suez there were no more than a handful of British people left in the whole country.
She was with her friend Lola from Beirut so that at first I wondered if they might have been two high-class tarts looking for Europeans since even in those days Germans and Scandinavians had started touring Egypt in high summer. In fact they were both working as secretaries, doing a job with an airline, and this being a Saturday they had the afternoon off. Bridget of course wasn’t entirely English but as a product of the old English school in Heliopolis she might as well have been. Her mother had come from England before the war and had married a Copt who had later become an under-secretary for something in Farouk’s government. Recently—and prematurely—they had retired to the suburb of Maadi outside Cairo. None of this was apparent initially as we chatted about the city and the heat—politely, inconsequentially—like tourists comparing notes. But it wasn’t long before we realised we had much more in common—that this was a meeting in a desert, a miraculous coming together of true minds and shared assumptions in a savage outpost. As soon as it became clear that we were all genuinely foreign (and being the daughter of a Christian in Farouk’s old government made Bridget more of an exile than any of us) the personal data of our lives became an open secret among us and we fell on each other with a thirsty, incestuous release.
