by Joseph Hone
“It’s not as easy now, that’s all. My wanting you now—it isn’t in the same way.” She looked at me, perplexed, a glance for a tiresome child. “But why is it so important for you? It is for me, I know. But for you? That possessive thing? How can you love like that? Don’t you know?”
“Yes, it is the possessive thing and I don’t know.”
“God, I’ve never talked so much about making love—and done it so little, with someone I wanted so much. I want you now because I love you now. But don’t be held by it. I don’t want to—possess, be possessed, all that. So why talk, argue? Make love. I need it, mean it, want it.”
Mrs. Girgis had joined her husband outside and was following him gingerly along the duckboards, treating him in much the same way as he had dealt with Ahmed, except that, with her, the continual comments and criticisms drifted up to us in the purest tones of Refined-Surrey.
“Really far too much water, Alex … it’s not a paddy-field you know. Is it impossible to get Ahmed to understand anything? Are any of the figs ripe? Can we get some for Bridget to take back with her? Alex! My border is quite water-logged …”
“We’d better go. They’ll start to call. Make love again. Please.”
There was a noise outside on the stairway, a quick determined step on the creaking wood, and the door opened. Mamie glanced around her vaguely, with the numbed look of someone unhappily released from a deep sleep.
“Hopeful? Hopeful?”
The ridiculous name squeaked out as she peered around the trunks. “Puss, Puss!”—and she moved towards us and away again so that I thought for a second that she hadn’t seen us. And then, with the same look of perfect understanding that I had remembered from before lunch, she noticed us, peering down her nose as if she had suddenly seen some terrible, ineradicable stain on the floor.
“I thought Puss might be here. I’ll ask your father, Bridget, if he’s seen him.”
She spoke in the sad way that one speaks to a child who has done something beyond any scolding, whose crime only some infinitely high authority can now judge.
8
I met Bridget at the Semiramis a few days later. We had gone back to drinking in bars again.
“It doesn’t matter. It just means you won’t be asked for Sunday lunch again.”
“What did she say?”
“That I’d been ‘playing’ with you—you know, like children under the dining room table. The only thing is he may try to interest your Dr. El Sayid in the matter—‘not the sort of thing one expects from a guest, Doctor—in one’s own house, and in front of my old Nanny’—I can hear him.”
Which matter Mr. Girgis duly proceeded to interest the good doctor in.
Henry and I were staying at the school during the holidays and a day or so afterwards as we were passing by the side window of El Sayid’s study on our way for a game of table tennis in the basement of the Old School, there came a violent rat-a-tat-tat as he machine-gunned the window pane with a coin, as he did every day in term time, signalling in his wildly imperious manner the start of afternoon classes. A long finger beckoned me.
“We are a small community out here in Maadi, Mr. Marlow, a small but honourable one, of which this school forms very much a part. We rely on each other for our good name about the place—indeed about the whole city and the country. And even further afield. We bear a responsibility to each other for our behaviour—corporately and individually. So I am not in the least surprised, as you may be, that one of our neighbours, with whom until recently you were acquainted—Girgis Bey—has seen fit to ‘tell tales out of class’ as it were. I am very obliged to him. A matter as I understand it—and I shan’t descend to details—of ‘abusing hospitality’ as he put it, in a manner quite unbecoming to your status as a guest in his house and member of the staff here. Not a legal matter, I gather, but really—and I think this far more important in view of your responsibilities to the young here—a matter entirely within the moral sphere. To cut a long story short it would be completely unsuitable for you to remain in your present position with us. You appear, to put it bluntly, to be lacking in even the very rudiments of physical control. The dangers of allowing such licence in a place like this must be obvious to you.”
“It was a woman, Doctor. Not a boy.”
And he rose from his desk in a fury and walked vigorously towards the window, slapping his thigh repeatedly on the way.
“I don’t care what it was—man, beast or ripe melon—I insist upon your resignation. You may take two weeks’ notice from the beginning of next term—an arrangement, I think, entirely generous in the circumstances.”
“I’m sure it’s more than I deserve.”
*
I went down to join Henry in the basement of our “house” in what had been known as “Old School”. He’d got the net up and was talking to Mahmoud, the little janitor and odd-job man who had his closet down here, full of brooms and dusters, a collection of dirty coffee cups, a primus stove and a bed—though he didn’t sleep here officially. Mahmoud had quite taken to Henry and me for some reason—as opposed to the vast majority of other Egyptian teachers now employed by the school—although neither of us could follow his strangely accented Arabic and he spoke no more than greetings in English. He—or his father, one could never tell from his attempt to explain the genealogy—had been with the school practically since its foundation and perhaps he saw in Henry and me the last remnants of a preferred regime, an appropriate link with his previous masters; we must have given him, through our inability to understand each other, a comforting sense of continuity.
“I’ve been asked to leave.”
“Oh.”
Henry didn’t seem all that surprised. I suppose now that Bridget had already told him everything that had happened. Certainly he must have seen her then, without my knowing, almost as often as I did.
“Don’t worry. We can get you private lessons. Everybody wants to learn English. We’ll have a game and go down town. What does it matter? I hope you gave him hell.”
When we had finished Henry went back to his room to collect his wallet—even in those days he never seemed to have what he needed about him—and I stayed on with Mahmoud over another coffee with which he punctuated our every day like a clock.
In the old days, before Suez, this lower part of the old school had been used for all those extra-curricular activities so dear to English educational tradition, those rugged pursuits through which character is supposedly moulded and happiness usually crushed: Scouting, P.T., Amateur Dramatics and so on—and in shuttered rooms leading off this central hall were stored the instruments of all that pain, the littered remains of the white man’s burden: old footballs, punch bags, dumb-bells, chest expanders, smashed cricket bats, a number of bruised bowler hats and tattered copies in French’s Amateur Acting Edition of The Monkey’s Paw. The new regime, not yet fully aware of these riches beneath them, left the basement area entirely to the shuffling of Mahmoud; this was his dark, cool domain.
So while Henry was gone I took another, perhaps a last, look round.
In a cupboard at the end of one of the rooms—together with a lot of broken laboratory equipment, old gauzes, test-tubes, retorts and encrusted Bunsen burners—was a broken film projector, some rusty cans of film—“The Three Counties Agricultural Show 1937”, “The British Police”, and “The Port of London Authority”—a number of well rubbed copies of a booklet published in Fenchurch Street in 1939 called Wireless Telegraphy for Beginners and a radio receiver or transmitter, I couldn’t make out which.
“Come on. Well miss the train. I’m not paying for a taxi—yet.”
Henry stood in the dooryway, oddly impatient.
“They never use any of this stuff here?”
“Never. Suez was the End of Empire. Didn’t you know?”
We went to the Fontana and another club on Roda island. And the Perroquet on Soliman Pasha, ending up just before dawn in a gharry at the Auberge des Pyramids.
*
“Where are you going to go?” Bridget asked.
“A hotel—why not? Henry has ideas about private lessons.”
“Yes, Henry said there’s all those girls from my old English class at the University. Some of them still think they can get an external degree,”
“You could advise me on—what do they call it?—syntax. Yes, English syntax,” Bahaddin added. “And I could get you a maid’s room at the Cosmopolitan. The manager’s a friend.”
“You could live with me. Lola’s finally decided to go back to Beirut,” Bridget said lightly. And apart from that idea it was rather a grim little Christmas dinner that Bahaddin had arranged for us all on the roof restaurant of the new Shepheard’s Hotel.
A week later I moved in. The lift had been repaired.
*
The weather had cooled appreciably by now. It was the start of the month or so of winter in Egypt; soft, almost damp grey mornings by the river and streaky clouds far overhead and odd vicious dusty winds—intimations of the spring khamseen from the desert which swirled the low water by the corniche into momentary thrusts and eddies and clouded the sun with a fine gritty haze. And once, at the end of January, it rained for the first time since I’d arrived in Egypt, an afternoon of velvet grey clouds rolling up the delta from the sea—and then for ten minutes or so before dusk, just a few drops, like someone shaking wet hands at you.
Lola had stayed on in Beirut and we shared the big double bed at the back of the apartment and Bridget went out to work every morning and came back at lunchtime, when we often made love. I had never been happier. There was an ease in our relationship for those few months which neither I, nor I think Bridget, had ever thought possible. We loved each other and we made love, and there was nothing left to be said.
It was a marriage, I suppose, but without any obligations or rights, without the possessiveness she feared, without any of the things which were to make the marriage itself, when it came, such a disaster. Even the fact that my private lessons never came to very much and that after the first month Bridget had to pay most of the expenses didn’t seem to matter. Or so I thought then. With no more than the usual egoism felt in such circumstances I saw an indivisibility in our love, and a corresponding unimportance in the details of life. Afterwards I had assumed that things had gone wrong simply because Bridget had been less of an egoist, a much more conventional person than I’d imagined; the sort of woman who, at the end of the fun, finds her deepest needs in the traditional supports. Now—there are so many other questions involved that one has stopped, thankfully, looking for answers.
Henry had put me in touch with Samia—a nice dull elderly girl with a wiry cloche of hair and a green dress—the younger sister of someone he had taught at the University, who was unaccountably attempting “O’ levels. Twice a week I trudged through Macbeth with her in a backroom of her father’s office in the old part of the city beneath the Citadel—down alleyways small and dirty as gutters, completely overhung by shabby wooden houses with balconies that almost linked overhead so that it was dark even at midday. Her father had his place at the end of one of these crammed passages; he was a huge mediaeval figure with a boxer’s face and the devout air of a prosperous, deeply traditional Moslem; with his rolling moustache—and without his immaculate galibeah and green turban—he might have been a Victorian paterfamilias. He ran a small export-import agency so that the whole place smelt strongly of sacking and dried beans and the sweet stench of Turkish coffee. At whatever time of day I arrived his friends were always gathered in a circle round his desk, a cabal of wizened cronies sipping from thin cups, and I would be given the inevitable cup myself before being led through to the tiny office beyond a curtain by one of the clerks, entering upon Samia, distractedly fidgeting with her notes, like a lout broaching a harem.
Her father and his friends guarded the approaches while I imparted the mysteries; their soft chatterings moving in counterpoint to my weary explanations about the three witches, which Samia followed not at all. Her attention would drift outwards, beyond the curtain, to the talk in the next room—of ships and bales and bad weather, I suppose, and foreign places, while I—in my own distraction—would remember what I’d had for lunch that day with Bridget: beans cooked in oil with lemon juice and wrapped in thin crescents of dark sour bread which she’d picked up from one of the cafés on El Trahir square and left in the oven too long while we made love.
At the end of my hour with Samia I would emerge thankfully from the closet and there would follow a lengthy exchange of “salaams” and duckings and smiles and salutes with her father and the others before I disappeared down the backstreets again, coming alive now after the still of the afternoon—paraffin pressure lamps hissing urgently above the stalls and barrows as they were pumped up, like animals provoked beyond endurance, before breaking into innumarable flares all along the passageways.
I suppose it was this background of the grubby winter city—far from the sad arrogance, the BBC request programmes and the ancient Hillmans of Maadi—a background pared of all inessentials, which gave to what happened in those months a definition, a quality of hope, which a similar time, spent say in Paris or Venice, would not have had. The grubby and unpromising can only suggest promise; at least, we persuaded ourselves, they cannot disappoint. So we are prompted to beliefs which in more favourable circumstances we would never have contemplated. I believed that I was happy; that Mamie and the folly of Dr. El Sayid had led me to my proper station in life, that everything had conspired in my favour. Only now am I aware of the proper nature of the conspiracy.
When it is over, we look back vehemently for that moment in a particular experience when the first flaw appeared that led to the end; quite perversely, like geologists tapping their way about volcanic rock, we seek the first intimation of the explosion, running our minds savagely back and forth over the affair: late mornings looking out over the river from the open window of her apartment, the bitter smell of the low water, coffee together on the Semiramis terrace on Sunday mornings; the old men flushed, with bloodshot eyes, in tarbushes and white duck suits wandering aimlessly around the pillars in the huge hall behind us, flicking their whisks dispiritedly at the few winter flies, offering elaborately formal greetings to acquaintances before moving on as though to some pressing affair; early evenings hurrying back along the aromatic side streets, from Samia or some other luckless student, towards the river again, with the sun behind the pyramids now—spreading a veneer of rose and purple over the town, cutting out the huge triangles of stone in soft charcoal from the sunset behind them …
In all the happy manoeuvres of that calm winter—when did it begin?
We’d had lunch one Sunday at Mena House and had walked up the hill afterwards towards the pyramids. It was late February and the hot weather was already in the air. We sat on the terrace of the old Viceregal kiosk at the foot of Cheops, sipping colourless tea, beating off the shoe-shine boys and camel drivers like any tourist
Suddenly, a tiny dark bean of a child appeared from nowhere at my feet and started to clean my shoes furiously, rubbing away at them with a kind of foamy black paint. They were suede, not leather.
“No!” And then the same word louder, in Arabic. But he went on eagerly as if he’d heard nothing.
“Tell him to stop for God’s sake. He’ll ruin the shoes.” I had got to my feet, appealing wildly to Bridget.
“Oh, what does it matter—what does it matter? They’re horrible old shoes anyway. I was just longing for them to be finished with. You can get another pair.”
The child in his ragged blackened nightshirt, one eye closing with trachoma, had stood up now, unsure of what to make of our outburst, and had begun to slink away before Bridget called him back and gave him five piastres.
“You’re so mean—those rotten shoes. My God, you can still get shoes out here at least.” She spoke quite calmly now and had turned away to look at the pyramid.
“I don’t have all that money.”
; “No.” She sipped her tea without looking round, quite uninterested in my statement so that I felt I had to force her attention.
“Fifty piastres an hour is what I get at the moment and I can’t ask for much more, that’s pretty well the top rate. And the flat is seven pounds a week.” The annoyed, querulous tones of the forgotten remittance …
“What does the flat matter? Are we just living there together for sheer convenience?”
“No, I hope not. Just I’ve not got the money to start buying shoes, that’s all.”
“You could earn the money if you wanted to. You’ve still got your work permit—to teach in the English schools. And there are more of them besides Maadi.”
“They wouldn’t have me. We’ve talked about that.”
“Oh Lord.” She drew the words out in a sigh. “You sit around all day in the flat. You’re always there when I get back. You could do a job of some sort couldn’t you? Where’s this all getting us—you, me? What do you do here, after all? You go to the Council Library, Groppi’s, you meet Henry for lunch at the Cosmopolitan and drink in the bar there all afternoon with those awful Greek lawyers—and you come back at four in the morning from the Fontana or somewhere and expect to make love with me. And it goes on and on. And then you say you can’t buy a new pair of shoes. That sort of life suits you—and it suited me too—but does it suit us both together? I mean, why be together—if we just go on behaving in the same old way? Shouldn’t there be something—else?”
“What else?” I was thoroughly annoyed.
“I don’t know. Work perhaps, regular work—something to interest you. Aren’t men supposed really to need that, not just the other things,” she said lightly, bitterly.
“What ‘other things’?”
We had become children, quarrelling over words, throwing them heedlessly about.
“Love? Is that what you mean—that sort of thing? That’s what I don’t need—I just need the drinking with Henry and a good job in some wretched boys’ school?”
