The Private Sector (A Peter Marlow spy thriller)

by Joseph Hone

  Later, after a number of drinks, Bridget decided we should all have lunch together at their apartment and we travelled there in Lola’s car, going by a market they knew of where we loaded up with a colossal meal, including great slabs of steak, a thing I’d not seen since my arrival in Egypt.

  The heat had emptied the streets, the trams had stopped; even the beggars had gone to ground while the rich had all left for Alexandria. Only at garages where men sprayed weak rainbows of water over the underground petrol stores was there any activity. In the car, even with all the windows open and bowling along, there was still only the feeling of moving through a scorching vacuum. Draped about with our bags of food and muzzy from the iced Zibib which Angelo had specially recommended as a foil against the heat no one spoke as we glided across the city.

  Perhaps by now Cherry and I had anticipated something of the nature of the afternoon ahead of us. Remembering our initial meeting and that stifling journey—with its too polite opening movements, its menace of animal restraint—it seems impossible now that we coud have been completely unaware of the outcome. But I think we were, or at least I was, for Cherry never spoke of it afterwards.

  The two girls had a small apartment at the top of a ten-storey building by the Nile in Garden City. And the lift was out of order. While the girls went to their bedroom Cherry and I patrolled the living-room—nervous, exhausted, unable to sit still. There was a small Victorian chaise-longue in one corner, a collection of brass and leather ornaments scattered about the place—the Arab equivalent of flying china ducks on the wall—and a tiny velvet-green card table in the middle. It was like a room in a dolls’ house, an oven perched high against the sun, and I felt like a cumbersome tenant inspecting something I knew already I didn’t want.

  Turning from a photograph of Bridget on a beach I saw her come out of the bedroom, naked, except for a trail of light cotton flowing from her shoulders as she moved across the room, struggling into a day-gown on her way towards me.

  “Wouldn’t you like to dress more lightly? It’s very hot here I’m afraid. We have some gin but no ice.” She moved across to the chaise-longue. Cherry had briefly noticed her arrival but had then resumed his gaze out over the city, more intently now, as if he had spotted an accident in the streets below or a thunderstorm on the horizon.

  From beneath the sofa Bridget dragged a cardboard crate of Gordon’s Export gin—the one with the blue sloes down each side of the label, like an English hedgerow in autumn, and the red boar’s head in the middle. Real gin had been unobtainable in Cairo since the British had left and this, I supposed, was a memento of their departure. Lola had gone across to the kitchen and had returned with glasses and water. The mixture was warm but strong.

  Bridget faced me: “We have so much of it and we never really drink it. We should shower in it.” She smiled seriously. “You really ought to take some of those clothes off. You’ll expire.”

  Lola, who didn’t have the same command of English, looked at Cherry by way of similar encouragement—Cherry, with his coat off now and the pained expression of a housemaster trapped amidst a riot in the boys’ dorm.

  “Will you help me in the kitchen? We will beat the steak,” Lola said and Cherry was led gently away.

  Nothing seemed really to have changed. The polite tones of our rapport hadn’t altered, nor the casual indifference, as though all of us were really absorbed in other matters. Yet I was aware at last, now that a choice had quietly been made, that the significant side of the day had finally emerged: I was to have Bridget and Lola wanted Mr. Cherry.

  We heard them going to and fro in the kitchen, thumping the steak, but without any accompanying voices—as if the two of them were involved in a limbering up process preparatory to some mysterious rite. Bridget and I looked at each other for a moment—she on the chaise-longue, the trails of her gown now sprawled high over the rise at the end of the couch, and I, still fearing to sit, assuming a negligent pose by the window opposite. Her skin was the palest sort of yellow, darkening towards the years of sunburn round her neck, with the still darker flow of her hair above that. A round, monkey face—like a schoolgirl’s, with a sort of permanent impertinence about it; a face made attractive through its failures—the abrupt turn of the jaw so that her mouth seemed unnaturally long, the misplaced nose that suddenly occurred between the eye line and lips before curling gracefully into a snub like a petal, breasts that were just a gesture, no more than small undulations of skin, and hips that splayed dramatically out of true below her waist.

  She said nothing but looked at me with a smile of assent—as if agreeing with these wordless comments of mine about her body—seeing in her flaws and my appraisal of them a potential which delighted her. Then, as if bored with the idea and I were no longer there, she stood up, throwing her gown behind her, and with a fresh bottle of gin, cutting the foil with her nail on the way, she moved towards the bathroom. There was a splash of water for a minute or two before she called me.

  *

  She wanted to make love there and then as we mingled beneath the trickle of warm water—she in a bathing cap and I dodging awkwardly beneath the rusty surround of metal. I countered with the imminent lunch and the cramped circumstances. Instead we compromised—poured the gin over each other, drank some of it and kissed.

  Cherry meanwhile must have accustomed himself more to the surroundings. I’d heard him laughing—his sudden manic shrill as he and Lola went to and fro arranging lunch on the card table. But when we all sat down together, crouched around the little velvet square like gamblers waiting for the ace, he was still firmly in possession of his clothes. Now that the overtures seemed to have been successfully concluded Bridget and Lola talked quite a bit in Arabic, as if we’d simply been friends of theirs who’d dropped by for lunch. And later we talked again about our life in Egypt and theirs. But it wasn’t the light, excited chatter of introduction any more; it was the prelude to an act.

  The sun had dipped in its arc over the roof and slanted now directly into the room. But it was far from evening and the moment’s wind which sometimes came then, up the delta from the sea. We finished lunch with Turkish delight and coffee and some more gin. With its elaborate preparations, its confused chatter in different languages, its barriers of communication—it had been like a Sunday lunch in childhood years before; a ritual with strange guests talking incomprehensibly after which everybody would have to “do” something. Cherry and I both managed to prolong it, alternating requests for more coffee with small frenzies of chatter between ourselves. We had even embarked on Cherry’s Dublin—a famous row between two professors at Trinity College which he began meticulously to reconstruct—in order to stay the proceedings. But Lola and Bridget mistook our subject for small talk and the eagerness in our voices for impatience and started to clear the decks. We had a last gin together quietly while they were out of the room.

  Cherry, as though bent on some high and arduous purpose, disappeared with Lola through the big double doors of the bedroom. Bridget and I made some highly unsatisfactory love together, balancing precariously on the chaise-longue. Moaning afterwards, but catching some broken sentences in between, I realised she was regretting Lola’s use of the double bed next door as much as my own precipitate performance. Charitably she saw in our discomfort the reason for my failure—saw too, perhaps, that I was not really up to the sexual obstacles, the “flaws” she had contrived for me in her idea of the shower together and her choice of the awkward chaise-longue. She changed her mood, became gently impatient.

  “See what they’re doing in there. If they’ve done with the bed we could use it. It might be easier.”

  At that moment Cherry’s bare arm slid through the doorway and he shook a towel at us. He called to me, softly, and clutching another towel I hurried forward to the mid-wicket conference.

  “It hasn’t worked,” he whispered. “Lola says we should try the chaise-longue. Are you done with it?”

  *

  Lola and Bridget were
never satisfied. The afternoon dragged on in a series of blows and parries, from room to room, place to place. Fortified, in our separate ways, with gin and desire, Cherry and I gradually faded while the girls redoubled their attack. Lola took to berating us in long storms of Arabic, her mouth forming immense shapes as the normally relaxed syllables of her tongue rose in angry and vicious gutturals towards us. “Ya-a-a-LAH”—the last three letters coming upon us like a thunder-clap. Now that the pretence of communication, the polite exchanges, had been thrown away—we laughed in return, masking our impotence with roars of indifference, as if we understood her every word.

  It was then that Lola embarked on her belly dance—the Trojan horse in the proceedings, as she must have seen it, which would surprise our lust behind the fort of our fatigue and indifference.

  She rooted vigorously in cupboards about the bedroom, throwing a vast hoard of tempting apparel about the place. It piled up around the bed on which Bridget was now lying back naked—these diaphonous colours of previous battles—like salad round a dish. Cherry and I watched the preparations carefully, in our underpants, from two small occasional chairs by the card table. Bridget took no interest at all but stared at the ceiling, her eyes fixed intently on a point above her, as if she expected to see in it the explanation to a mystery.

  The garment which Lola eventually strapped herself into had an operative rather than a seductive quality. It was heavy and came down from her waist in a series of leather petals, embroidered here and there with a dull wink of cheap jewellery. It was a little like the skirt of a Roman legionnaire and had the unreal, unused air of a Hollywood prop. There was an attachment above it, starting with a veil over the midriff and ending in a sequinned harness about the bust. But she dispensed with this, casting it aside dramatically, making an overture out of what I suspected was simply a faulty clasp.

  And then a clap and a change of eye and a strange harsh expression, fixing us with a stare that never left us, her big bones moving rhythmically, delicately, Lola started her dance around the bed—trampling with each sudden shiver of her body the finery of her wardrobe into the floor. Soon she started a song, a viciously accented accompaniment, throwing her voice passionately between the thwacks and twists of her body, working herself into an angry frenzy without a smile. She had moved far from the dull coquetry of the form and before the end she had turned the dance—hands moving tightly across her body—from a symbol of the act into the act itself. Exhausted she hurried away to the bathroom through the wide doorway and we sat there saying nothing.

  Bridget had long since turned away from us and from the dance, her face to the wall, and while Cherry went into the next room to get dressed I moved across and sat beside her, against the long length and pale yellow skin of her back.

  The evening had come up outside as we left the silent chaos of the flat. The expected wind stirred, shutters opened, white figures padded towards a mosque on the corner and the trams clanked again in the distance. Like signals from different parts of the city, the sounds rose one after the other on the air around us, breaking the vacuum of the afternoon, opening up the night, as though it was the beginning of another day.

  2

  Before the start of the autumn term that year most of the overseas teachers, except Cherry and myself, had left. Home leave was due every second summer but apart from ourselves none of the others had managed to survive the punishments of the first.

  Two of the women in the group were flown back from the Valley of the Kings with sunstroke while a third, a woodwork teacher from a vocational school near Limerick, distinguished himself by running foul of the very lax Moslem attitude towards pederasty. The remainder squabbled for weeks with various uncomprehending juniors at the Ministry of Education about transferring their piastres into pounds and their tickets back home before Cherry and I, deciding that we might as well stay on in Egypt and dissociate ourselves from our hysterical colleagues, took a taxi to Alexandria for the rest of the summer.

  We stayed at the Hotel Beau Rivage near the beach at Sidi Bishr—a splendidly off-hand sort of place with a terraced garden at the back with little wooden pavilions for the guests looking down over a great carpet of crimson flowers and buzzing blue insects. Here, towards midday, we had “English” breakfasts and fresh mango juice, and the summer passed quickly enough; there were only the afternoons and evenings to fill. A vegetable life.

  In the afternoons I swam off the “Cleopatra Beach”—a private strand near the hotel where that lady was reputed to have once taken a bath—while Cherry paddled in the shallows, flirting with the elderly latter-day grandes domes of the city, so that out at sea his voice echoed to me over the water, the shrill of his hopelessly immature laugh, as he clowned about their deckchairs.

  “Tee-hee. Ha-ha …”

  Like a child being tickled.

  “Oh, comme vous êtes méchant, Monsieur Chéri!”

  The dialogue came across the flip-flap of small waves like snatches from a Restoration comedy.

  “Quel esprit! Et vous êtes hollandais—incroyable!”

  And Cherry, already exercising the beginnings of that language which he was so quickly to become adept in under their tutelage, would howl triumphantly, wagging his finger at the ancient crones:

  “Pas hollandais—irlandais!”

  And there would follow a barrage of squeaks and twitters and oh-la-las.

  For these ladies, the last of the city’s fabled courtesans, in their dark billowy silks and the remnants of their jewel cases, nailed to their chairs and their memories—Cherry, with his profligate eccentricities and attentions, must have been a happy reminder of their youth: when the government and the Embassies took their intrigues to Alexandria for the summer, shot duck on the lakes in the autumn—and between them all the ladies had played a vital role in the careless history of the times.

  In the late afternoons, during those few moments before dusk when in better times the ladies had “taken the air” of the city before dressing for dinner, Cherry would stroll back with Eugénie and Clara and Mathilde and sometimes I joined them, walking slowly behind the little troupe, down avenues heavy with flame trees and the smell of jasmine, as one by one the ladies dropped off into their crumbling villas which lay behind the sea front.

  “Vous savez—comme c’était beau ici avant la guerre … Maintenant les domestiques sont impossibles. Elles ne savent rien: même faire du thé …”

  The metallic rattle of their voices had softened now under the heavy canopy of trees.

  “Eh! Les ‘spare parts’—ils n’existent plus. On ne conduit pas aujourd’hui …”

  “Ah, mais oui, je me souviens très bien, des voyages qu’on a fait au Lac Mariout. Et les fleurs là-bas—des asphodèles, des mignonettes, des anémones. Et des autres—des fleurs tout à fait uniques. Ca n’existe plus bien sûr. Ily a un dépôt du gaz là-bas maintenant. Un odeur tout à fait différente, je vous assure!”

  Like trembling excited birds they vied for Cherry’s attention. And Cherry with a pained expression would turn and stare at each of them in turn, his eyes wide open in mock astonishment—a face of incredible seriousness and unbelief. And then with a special twinkle lighting up the whole football of flesh: “Mais je peux vous conduire … Je connais le chemin!” And they would wave shaky fingers at him—“Oh! Comee vous êtes méchant!”—before breaking into enthusiastic cackles.

  As we approached the gates of their villas wizened arthritic porters rose up from the dust like old newspapers in a light wind, saluting stiffly as the ladies crossed the threshold, giving Cherry and me the wary hopeless glance of crippled protectors. The broken arm of a lawn sprinkler clanked somewhere in the twilight and a Daimler lurked in a garage without wheels. I had no wish to go back to Europe.

  3

  “There is a train of course. The Helwan train from Bab-el-Luk. Every ten minutes. Get off at Maadi. But I imagine you’ll be taking a car.”

  The Headmaster’s voice on the telephone was assured, rather c
ondescending and impeccably English. I was surprised for his name was Dr. El Sayid and when we met he was certainly Egyptian. With the departure of so many of our group I had managed to get transferred to the El Nasr school in Maadi, previously Albert College, Cairo, and the Eton of the Middle East until a year before.

  The Doctor clicked his fingers suddenly and several porters in grey serge galibeahs grabbed my luggage and disappeared into a long low prison-like compound with small windows.

  “I’ll have them put your things in your room. You’ll be a form master. Fifth I think. Your rooms are above class.”

  He had darted on ahead of me after the porters.

  “Let’s hope you like it better here. What with the English—and I may say the Irish more recently—we’ve been having too many changes. It’s been rather unsettling—” and he added, looking straight ahead so that I hardly heard him—“for a school like this.”

  There was an edge of dangerous efficiency in the Doctor’s voice which I didn’t like, a call to order much at odds with my previous experience of the country. We had reached the door of my room on the second storey of the compound, along a low corridor reeking of that peculiar suffocating smell of baked concrete and plaster which one gets in desert countries. One of the porters produced a key and opened the door.