by Joseph Hone
I yanked the telescope up on its pivot and put a coin in on the half-chance that it still worked. The machine clicked, the shutter opened suddenly and I found myself looking, with startling clearness, at a plump Levantine gentleman in bathing trunks having coffee on his bedroom terrace of the Hilton. He lit a cigarette and I could see the red and white colour of the pack—“Marlboro”—though I couldn’t actually read the lettering. He screwed a finger in one ear, examined the result on the end of his nail, got up and went into the bedroom. He moved around inside, sliding out of his trunks, a brown shadow against the white counterpane of the bed.
I swung the machine round to the left, over the river, the crescent sails of a felucca jumping up suddenly in the foreshortened distance, billowing into the lens, filling the whole view, like the underbelly of some river monster. Further round the battered cricket score-board by the Zamalek entrance to the Club came into view. The last batsman had apparently made 990 runs, until I saw that the “Batsman” sign had fallen down over the “Total Runs” sign. And I remembered I’d seen the same incongruity from the balcony of the Tewfiks’ apartment the previous evening. Their place would be somewhere above and to the right of the scoreobard. I swung the telescope up and back along the line of buildings that faced out over the pitch.
The Tewfiks’ terrace had two basketwork chairs and a glass-topped bamboo table. I moved the glass to and fro along the buildings. They’d been on the third floor. I counted them up from the ground—there it was, the chairs and the little table and the French windows open behind, and a woman in a black cotton smock dusting the living-room. She came out and shook the cloth over the rail. Would Leila appear, I wondered? Perhaps she’d come out on to the terrace with an open house-coat and without her glasses … But she didn’t. I was tiring with the strain of keeping one eye screwed up, but the machine was running out with a furious ticking and I panned it once more to the balcony of the next building, upwards to the top floor, where I’d seen something move.
Another woman had come out on to the terrace in sun glasses and a short house-coat and was setting up a deck chair in the corner out of the sun. I tried to focus the lens to get a clearer view. But the shutter clicked and fell. I stood up and stretched. A last shot? I wondered. Yes. Why not? There was Bridget’s apartment, round the other way to my right, on top of the block in Garden City. I might as well see if I could get it on the machine. I put in ten piastres and was just on the point of swinging round when I saw the woman in the short house-coat again. She had stood up and was in the light now, talking, arguing, it seemed, to a man who had joined her.
I recognized him first, the fluffy strands of unruly hair through which he was running his fingers, the ancient saucer spectacles, the full, rather debauched, boyish face. It was Henry, so that for quite a while, in my surprise, I didn’t bother identifying the woman. Just a girl he was with, I thought, someone he’d picked up in his voracious way—until he moved towards her and they kissed. I felt there was something incredibly awkward in this event—which wasn’t in their movements which were perfectly natural—and I couldn’t at first understand why I was so struck by the embrace in this way, as a catastrophe, an outrage, coming over the lens to me as a blow in the stomach.
And then I looked carefully again at the woman’s profile. The message had simply been delayed a few seconds. I’d known I was looking at Bridget before I could believe it, put it into words, before I could give a name to the woman whose fingers were linked round the back of Henry’s neck now, the house-coat flapping open about her in the windy baking haze.
*
I didn’t say anything to Cherry when I met him half an hour later. I’d taken a third ten piastres’ worth on the telescope, swinging it round and peering at other parts of the city, so that the waiter behind me would have no exact idea of what or where I’d been looking at if he were asked. And I knew he’d been looking at me—a natural for one of Pearson’s Egyptian pound notes.
Henry and Bridget had gone inside. They were in the apartment above and to the left of the Tewfiks’; I didn’t know if they shared the same stairway. But I knew enough. It was the same building. I had simply to decide what to do about it. Though even at that point I can remember thinking that just going up to the apartment and knocking on the door was the last thing I’d do.
Cherry had been up to his office and had brought a message back from Mr. Khoury, a schedule in fact, of trips about the city. A visit to the High Court, to the Egyptian Family Planning Association and the steel works at Helwan.
“Where are you going to find Edwards in all that?” he remarked over coffee on the hospital terrace. His wife was in better form that morning and Cherry was in a pushy mood without a drink taken. I told him that one place was as good as another, that I’d pick up something.
“I doubt you will. You’d do better to stick around Pearson.”
“I’ll find Henry before he does.”
“What about Usher? Do you want me to make any plan there? You should see him. Perhaps Henry called there.”
“In time, not now. Intelligence here knows all about Usher. His phone would be tapped or they’d nail me if I went up there to see him on my own. If there was some reason, a party or something, then I could call.”
There was only one thing to do now, stall on these various plans and proposals, and find out what was going on in the apartment on the Gezira corniche. How? Wait for them to come out? And then follow them? And then what? Nothing much, unless I could actually hear what was going on in the apartment. And that seemed impossible. There were technical tricks, of course, planting microphones on walls or through telephones, shooting mini-transmitters from an air rifle at the end of a suction pellet, but I barely knew the beginnings of them. There would have to be something else, something entirely in the realm of the ordinary.
We went on to the Club for a beer and a sandwich by the empty pool and I wondered what it could be—how to be in, but not of, the apartment which I could just make out from where we were sitting, a smudge of white concrete burning in the sun high over the cricket score-board.
Yet it shouldn’t have been impossible, I thought. I’d had some desultory training when I’d first come back to London from Egypt ten years before, a few dry lectures in shadowing and concealment, dropping a tail, and so on, before I’d subsided into Information and Library in Holborn. And in essence was there any real difference in this case? I’d dropped from the sky on a mission and except for the fact that a woman, not a country, had become the dangerous foreign territory, it was much like any other undercover job; the same principals should apply: keep your head, wait, think—do; that was the order. I’d found out about Henry, as much as was necessary for the moment. Now I wanted to find out about the woman who had been my wife.
*
Leila Tewfik stood on the terrace steps, twirling her spectacles round in one hand, shading her eyes with the other, surveying the few people about the place as if they were a multitude. I thought she must have seen us, we weren’t more than fifteen yards away, but she stayed where she was, dilatory and composed in a sleeveless Greek embroidered tunic with a dressing gown belt tied loosely round her waist. The dress disguised her slight plumpness and the rough oatmeal material accentuated her fluffy dark hair which she must have washed overnight, for it stood up alarmingly over her ears. Her arms and face were an extraordinary honey-coloured bronze; it was probably her best feature. She had some foreign paper under her arm and it seemed unlikely, I thought with regret, that she’d come to the Club for a swim. She put her glasses back on, saw us now, and ambled over.
“God,” she said, “I feel none too fine.”
She lay back, tilting the chair over, stretching her arms wide apart. There was a large emerald-coloured ring on one finger, no wedding ring. She shaved regularly under the arms. A neat, well tended, unattended woman.
“Morsy was up to all hours—going on with Pearson and Whelan and Khoury. Drinking, drinking. I wish Mohammed Yunis had stayed
in Moscow—and his journalist friend, whoever he was. And Colonel Hamdy. Morsy doesn’t know anything about them really. He pretends. With a few drinks he becomes the President’s special confidant. As if there wasn’t one already.”
Leila Tewfik wasn’t at all as serious as I’d remembered her. She had thawed dramatically in the hangover.
“Underberg. You need an Underberg,” Cherry said.
“Ugh!” she said, enunciating the expression exactly, like an exclamation in a comic strip. “I hope not.”
“You need something fizzy to get the gas up,” I said. “A bottle of light ale, I’m told that’s a palliative, administers a sound and beneficial shock to the whole system.”
“I shouldn’t. But I will.”
She slumped forward on her chair, put her elbows on the table and cradled her chin morosely. Cherry clapped his hands for a waiter in his irritating way and she looked at me with that unwavering, warmly intense look that comes with a hangover for someone you like, when you’re no longer afraid of letting them know it.
“You know all about hangovers, don’t you? The Irish are supposed to drink a lot and we’re not supposed to at all.”
“What do you normally do?”
“When?”
“When you’ve had too much to drink.”
“I never do anything—unless I meet someone like Cherry, or you, the day after. Bed and aspirin, that’s what I usually do. But what do you do, tell me, what are you really going to write about here? Cairo life? There’s not a lot of it, is there: croquet and the fellaheen? Or are you secretly after the Yunis business, trying to scoop Pearson and the others? Whelan annoys me sometimes. He’s no eye for details, he gets it all wrong. Egyptians tend to be very formal nowadays, because they’re isolated, unsure of themselves. And the New York News is even worse. Backs up the dullness all the time. Weevils in the cotton and MiGs in the Fayoum—that’s all that seems to interest them. They’ve forgotten, we’ve forgotten, there’s anything else—forgotten how to live.”
Cherry said, “That’s true of the Americans and the Israelis as well. True of anybody at war. Wars are only fought out of a sense of uncontrollable power. And powerful people become formal bores.”
Leila looked up at the flat sky. Silence. We all looked up.
“‘Tell me where all past days are, or who cleft the Devil’s foot …’” Cherry broke in mock-mournfully. The waiter brought some more Stella.
“‘Waiting for a War’—that might be a title for you,” Leila said to me.
“Oh, I’ll find something less grave, I’m sure. I’m not a war correspondent. The lighter side is my speciality.”
“You won’t find much of that here,” Leila said. “Unless—do you play badminton? Morsy’s got a net up on the roof at home. He’s gone mad on it. That’s a lighter side.”
She looked at me carefully again, blinking through her spectacles, either coquettishly or because her eyes were hurting, I couldn’t really tell. Cherry lay back and looked upwards again, eyes agape. He sighed and then he moaned—a rising whine which he caught at the top of his nose and which was one of his many preludes to derisory comment.
“Ah-h-h-h no! Not that. Not badminton. You must be out of your mind, Leila.”
“Just because you’re past it, you large fellow.”
Badminton, I thought, on the roof of her apartment. Croquet and now badminton. Perhaps I’d get a game of cricket before this was out. The spy as sportsman. I smiled at Leila.
“You can play, can’t you?” she said. “It’s just like tennis. Only you don’t let the ball bounce. And it isn’t a ball.”
We arranged to meet at five o’clock that evening.
7
There was a separate entrance to the apartment where Henry and Bridget had been, I saw, when I got to Leila’s place that evening. But the two sections of the block shared the same long roof, with a lift shaft and laundry buildings rising up at either end, forming a barrier which prevented the shuttlecock from disappearing too freqently, though under Morsy’ indignant, untutored hammerings it sailed over the sides of the roof often enough. He had one of his suffragis down below, stationed head-in-air, scuttling round the block to retrieve them.
Cherry arrived towards six o’clock and we had some lemon juice and mopped our faces. I hadn’t really found my form, had lost every game but one, and I wandered away from them, walking with a slight limp, trying to ease the cramp which had come up in one thigh.
I looked over the edge of the roof just above the balcony where Bridget had been. It was impossible to see anything on the terrace below. The lift shaft door at the far end was open and I looked in. There was a huge spindly wheel encrusted with grease and a smell of warm oil. The laundry next to it was empty and a door beyond the row of tubs must have led down to the floor below. I couldn’t have been more than a few feet above whatever was going on beneath me but I’d learnt more about it from the Tower half a mile away that morning. It probably wouldn’t have been too difficult to introduce a microphone into the place, if one knew the tricks, if one had a microphone.
Morsey had followed me, drink in hand, looking very fit and pleased with himself. His shorts were too short and one heel of his plimsolls was working loose.
“It works, doesn’t it?”
I looked at him.
“The badminton on the roof, I mean.”
“It’s fine. You don’t get complaints from the people below, do you? Bouncing up and down?”
“There’s no one in the apartment beneath. It’s empty. That’s the beautiful thing. That’s why I got the badminton up here.”
“But aren’t there two apartments on the floor beneath? There are two lift shafts.”
“There’s no one in either of them. All the floors in this block used to be one single apartment. Then they divided them in half, filled in the connecting doorways and put another lift in at that end.”
“No one in them? What about the housing shortage?”
“Doesn’t apply, not in this part of town, in this sort of place. All these apartments are owned by the original families who bought them and quite a few of them live abroad now, or in Alex. The one underneath us on my side is sequestrated still. It used to belong to an Armenian lawyer who went back home, wherever that is, last year. And the other, underneath us here, was owned by an old lady who’s dead now. One of her relations, I think it is, uses the place sometimes. But he’s never there. So we can make as much row as we like. That’s the beauty of it. We had a party up here a month ago, even some dancing. But don’t put that in anything you write, will you? Press censors don’t dance, you know. Or give parties. Or play badminton on the roof of their apartment. It wouldn’t do at all. Shall we go down? It’s too dark for another game, I fear.”
The huge-eyed suffragi came up with the last lot of shuttlecocks, clustered gently in his hands like a nest of birds, and presented them to Morsy with all the elaborate courtesies of the messenger with the tennis balls in Henry V. Morsy likewise put them away with careful importance in their long cylinder and we trooped back to their apartment. We passed the Armenian’s doorway on the third floor and I noticed that it didn’t have the usual government sequestration seal across it, the tatty bit of ribbon and wax that I’d remembered on the doorways of British apartments after Suez.
Downstairs in the Tewfiks’ drawing room I looked around for the blocked up doorway between the two apartments that Morsy had mentioned. I passed through the sliding doors that led to their cavernous dining room in the centre of the building. Luckily there were a number of appalling family portraits hanging beyond the table in the gloom and Morsy was more than anxious to turn the lights on and explain them to me. A fat Circassian lady, in a frilly bonnet and black widow’s weeds, with a remarkable resemblance to Queen Victoria, was the principal oeuvre; and next to it a tiny eaten-up man in a tarbush.
“My grandmother and grandfather. Can you see the order he’s wearing? Only just perhaps. The Royal Victorian Order or something. He g
ot it from Lord Cromer and my father had it painted out—when he became secretary of the Wafd executive. And this is my uncle. “Nebuchadnezzar” he was called. I don’t know why. You know your Bible. I’m a bit hazy.”
Nebuchadnezzar had a lush beard at the end of a long money-changer’s face and an even longer nose. He looked as old as God. His nickname seemed to have the most obvious origins. I didn’t comment on them.
Behind the pictures were heavy velvet drapes. I put a finger between them and touched wood.
“Was this where they divided up the apartments?”
“Yes. There are double doors there, several feet between them, bricked up in the middle. They led to the library and study beyond in the old days. My father held Wafd committee meetings there and kept a secret supply of Scotch behind a row of books. I remember as a child seeing them at it when my mother had gone to bed. Just like one of your London clubs. But all that had to be kept very quiet. We were fighting for our independence then.”
Morsy laughed pleasantly.
“I thought the Wafd was committed to parliamentary processes, getting the British out peacefully. You mean they were in there plotting armed rebellion?”
“No—they were drinking the Scotch. Guzzling it. Tippling very heavily. They couldn’t do that outside.”
“You used to watch them at it?”
“I used to spy on them, I suppose you’d say,” he said deprecatingly. “I was fascinated.”
“Through the keyhole?”
