by Joseph Hone
And then—I can’t think how or why, his unfailing nose for a good story prodding him, perhaps, even in this deepest unconsciousness—Pearson stirred. His eyes fluttered and opened and he licked his lips, before he began to push himself forward, slowly, a ghostly man, from his upholstered tomb. The officer, still holding the door open, turned and the three of us helped him out of the car.
It looked all right in the event, Pearson seeming to be afflicted with no more than a bad leg, earned gallantly at Alamein in the circumstances, stumbling with game dignity across the red carpet and up the steps in our arms. In fact he was in a speechless dream, his mind had not yet begun to catch up with events.
The young officer showed us all into a small drawing-room off the hall and we got Pearson down on to a sofa. Usher came in shortly afterwards, having parked the car, all bustle and British, going straight over to tend Pearson.
“I’m sorry about this, Captain. He so much wanted to come. An old wound. We did our best to warn him. A glass of water perhaps?”
“Certainly.” The Captain, extremely solicitous, went away to fetch the refreshment.
“That’s one of their Military Intelligence people,” Usher said. “Foreign Ministry is giving the do for Monty.”
Pearson had begun to doze again.
“I don’t suppose they’re likely to look for us here then,” Cherry offered, though his face suggested no sort of belief in the statement.
“Where can we go?” I asked. “What’s the point?”
“We shall go where we set out to go,” Usher retorted heavily. “We are not going to have orange juice with Monty, I can assure you. I’ll try and get Pearson back home, you no doubt to your hotel, Cherry to his wife. We must do as we set out to do.”
Usher immediately seemed to contradict his plan of campaign by sitting down suddenly on a tiny gilt chair, his bulk enclosing it completely, like a hen settling on a nest. He looked beaten. A pair of French windows behind the sofa led out to a closed terrace which ran all the way round the ground floor of the building. I couldn’t see any of the blazing lights coming in from the street so I assumed the room beyond must face away from Bustani Street and on to a side street.
“Perhaps there’s something out that way. Might be able to get over the balcony.” The others looked at me dully and I saw Pearson swivel with me as I moved towards the window, a look of hate creeping into the doped lines of his face.
I pushed through the half-opened curtains and went into an empty unlit terrace beyond. There was a balustrade on the outside and a drop of about ten feet down on to a side road crammed tight with cars, their drivers chattering in groups here and there up its length. I could make it, I thought. But the others? We might possibly have to run from the chauffeurs as well. And run where? I turned back. A door opened. Several people had come into the little room. One of them had started to talk. I recognized the stumbling accents at once, the extraordinary arabesques decorating the English vowels: it was the Major I had seen earlier that day in Heliopolis welcoming his unexpected guests.
“A pleasure, Mr. Usher,” he said, a caricature opening in the circumstances. He’d seen too many films. All Egyptians have. “We were just looking for you on a call to your house up-town. You were giving a reception there yourself—no? We did not expect you here. But you are—not very well—yes? But very welcome …”
I heard the tinkle of a tray and saw Usher’s arm stretch across the window. He took the glass of iced water, then his head bent into view, the long nose dipped and he started to gulp it down in one swill. Greedy to the end, I thought I turned and cocked one leg over the balustrade, suddenly feeling an appalling thirst myself.
*
The chauffeurs heard me as I hit the ground. There was a group of them fifteen yards away, probably security men as well. I brushed myself down, saluted them formally and walked casually towards the main street. I had ten seconds before they made their minds up about me, then I’d have to run. I turned the corner into Bustani Street. Ten, twenty seconds; nothing happened. I walked past a deserted police barrier towards the bottom of Kasr el Nil, stragglers moving with me now that the gaiety was over. Constables gathered in groups mopping their faces on the other side of the road and a few white-suited officers directed the returning flow of traffic.
Then they came—a whistle and raised voices behind me. I had gone beyond the point of running; they’d seen the direction I’d taken; it could only be a chase which I would be bound to lose: police were in groups every ten yards or so along the road in front of me. I pulled off my coat and tie in almost a single gesture, heeled right round in my tracks, and walked smartly back, slightly crouched, in the same direction as I’d come.
They passed me on the run, pushing the stragglers out of the way, a group of security men and an Army officer, shouting hard. One of them barged me off the pavement into the arms of a startled traffic policeman standing by the kerb. I stopped and looked after them with annoyance, but not for long. “The foreigner,” they were shouting, “in the tie and suit. The tall one!” I turned to the bemused policeman, smiled, shrugged my shoulders as he gazed at my open-necked shirt: Marks & Spencer some months back, one of the last they’d made in pure white cotton. The little man saluted me, helped me back on the pavement, and I went on my way, returning the salutation. Egyptians are much given to that form of address.
It was after ten o’clock when I’d crossed the bridge and let myself into the Armenian’s apartment on Gezira. The darkness smelt of paper; fine weave and heavy rag, manilla and best hand laid; years of warm paper. I lit the matches, one by one, carefully dousing them on the floor as I made my way across the apartment to the perch; circles of light, flaring up, dying, briefly illuminating the chronicles of the Law. I felt as secure as the passengers in the next cabin, all of us inmates now, the ship stalled and perfectly camouflaged in a Cairo backwater.
I had almost fallen asleep by the ventilator, for although there was a light on in the room next door, there wasn’t a sound from the place.
The smell of illness had disappeared almost completely. Had Colonel Hamdy decided to run as well? I had turned away, was resting my head against the ridge of the ventilator, when I heard the telephone start, a faint, insistent buzz from the far side of the sofa. My head was in the grille again, just in time to see Hamdy crossing the room smartly in a bath robe, eager and quick indeed for an ill man.
He answered in Arabic, calling himself Mahmoud, listened for a minute and then seemed to confirm some details about fruit, the importation of so much dried fruit, coming in on a Greek boat the following day at Alexandria. The Salonika. He repeated some customs and consignment numbers, thanked his caller in a bored way, and that was it.
A code call. Their way out. Arrangements had been made; the call they’d all been waiting for—if they could make it to Alex and get past the harbour authorities. The Colonel, not Crowther or Usher, must have been the king pin in Cairo, to be protected at all costs, and now he was on the run with the rest of them.
He came into view, slumped on one end of the sofa, lit a cigarette. His head knocked against the wall and a shudder of nausea closed up the lines over his face and neck. He rubbed the back of his skull. Then he seemed to settle, composing himself with a drawn hang-dog look, a man waiting for someone to be sorry for him; pretending.
Some time later I was in the shaft again. A door had opened and now Bridget came into the room with a package. The Colonel looked asleep.
“Hamdy? Hamdy!” She bent over him and wobbled his shoulder gently. “I’ve got the stuff at last. You’ll need some water with it. Has he come back yet?”
The Colonel opened his eyes but didn’t move. He certainly looked ill now. “No. No, I don’t think so.”
“What are you doing here—what did you get out of bed for? Did they call—did the call come?” Bridget ran through the sequence of thought with increasing urgency.
“No. Nothing came. No one. I went to the bathroom, must just have dropped off
here.” He looked up at her with genuine exhaustion.
Bridget left the room. I heard a tap go on and tried to think what the Colonel was up to. He wasn’t running in their direction at all.
“Take two of these now, and a sleeping pill. It’s food poisoning of some sort. Rest, Cherif said, just rest.”
She gave him his medicine, then sat down next to him while he was getting it down.
“Now what?” he enquired when he’d finished. “He’s been gone since midday. Probably the sensible thing. We ought to have split up long ago.”
“Fine, fine—split up and go. But where?”
“He’s obviously thought of somewhere.”
“He’d have just gone off like that, you think, without letting us know?”
“Why not?”
“He went for a walk. That’s all. He went out and got picked up somewhere. How could he think he’d make it out of Cairo on his own?” Bridget turned on the Colonel almost angrily. “How could he?”
“Well, he’s gone. And if he’s been picked up he’ll probably start to sing. Unless you want to go phoning the hospitals and police stations?”
How like Henry, I thought, to fall under a bus at this moment. But of course he hadn’t; he’d sidestepped Dr. Novak and made his way direct to the Russian Embassy. The Colonel must have been thinking of some similar asylum—where though?
“Obviously I’m not going to get out of here,” Hamdy continued. “Even if London is able to make some arrangement. I’m not fit to walk, let alone jump a ship. Why don’t you go to the Consulate? Just give yourself over. They’ll manage something for you.”
“Mad. Just madness. Why do you think that?—that I’d leave you here?”
Tenderness for the Colonel—I shouldn’t have been surprised by it. She had always had those sudden gusts of unthinking tenderness for everyone—even for someone who in this case was going to bolt and leave her. I’d seen the Colonel move across the room like a long jumper starting his run, frisky as a fox.
“Go back to bed, Hamdy. Wait. We’ll just wait longer. That’s all. When you’re better, there’ll be something then. I promise you.”
She helped him up and the two of them went through the charade of his being lumbered back to bed. They passed out of my eye-line, father and daughter, linked bravely together, refugees starting out together on the long journey away from the holocaust.
Hamdy was working for someone else. There was no end to it. The Americans? The French? The Israelis? For someone, or some country, so violently antagonistic towards Egypt, that he couldn’t trust Bridget with the information. But perhaps I was being hard on him; he was simply protecting her, as Henry had, from dangerous information. One protected people one loved.
It must be the Israelis, I thought. With any other country he’d be in their Cairo Embassy by now. It was perfectly possible. There had always been Jews in Egypt, and some of them had “gone under”, changed their names and covered their tracks, in response to the difficult circumstances; Turkish and Armenian Jews—and others from the diaspora—who had long before intermarried among the upper class of the city, merged completely with their Moslem neighbours. The Jews had never been persecuted in Egypt. Certainly if he were with the Israelis they would make every effort to get him back, unencumbered with friends or colleagues or mistresses. And that was his plan. He would bolt when the music stopped, when only Bridget would be left standing.
She came back into the drawing-room, passed out of sight then back again with a whisky in her hand. She sat on the edge of the sofa, legs forked outward, elbows on her knees. There was nothing vulnerable in her, nothing nervous in her calm expression: a sensible dark skirt and a long-sleeved blouse with a panel of embroidered lace down the front, Bahaddin’s gold cross still about her neck.
She had weathered the years, and the men that had gone with them, with the faith of a missionary. She had believed in men; they had been her disciples. Though I had tried, I had never really been able to see her infidelities as a flaw of character, as simple greed or selfishness or stupidity: they were simply a reflection of a great need, an impossibly generous gift in a small and mean world; a gift centred on sex merely as the outward and visible form of all the other passion which for her lay behind that communion. Thus she repeated it, as gesture and symbol, with whoever came to the altar. There was, indeed, nothing possessive about her, nothing exclusive; she quite lacked self-regard—and that was her message to mankind. I had tried to tie her with those self-centred flaws, the perversions of her faith. The others, Henry and the Colonel and who else I didn’t know, had learnt to freewheel within the orbit of her love; I had always pedalled hard in the wrong direction. And it wasn’t the time to change things, just time to go. The only call I could have upon her now would be as a voice from the clouds.
“Bridget!”
She looked round towards Hamdy’s bedroom door, casually.
“No—not there. Here—up at the ceiling. The ventilator shaft.”
She turned back, lit a cigarette and took her drink. She had heard some whisper and forgotten it.
“Bridget—here! Look up.” I repeated the performance. It was an extraordinary sight. From my height above the room she got up and moved about like an animal, testing the bars, looking everywhere, then coming towards me, dipping out of sight into the wall below me.
“Henry?” Her voice rang up to me. “Henry?”
You silly bitch, I thought. And I had to stop myself from yelling next time.
“Here,” I said. “Not Henry. Marlow. Peter Marlow.”
She had come out from the wall now and was looking straight up at me. She closed her eyes for a moment and shuddered, all the top half of her body shaking involuntarily, as though facing an icy blast from the ventilator.
“Listen—I’m coming round to your door. Have it open. Don’t wake the Colonel.”
She looked at me without seeing anything, nodding wildly, her head bouncing up and down, breathless, an expression of insensible abandon on her face.
*
She closed the hall door noiselessly behind me and we tiptoed along the passage. How quickly she joined herself to the silent conspiracy, assuming all the skills of the dedicated lover: whispers from a window, the illicit meeting at the door, the utmost care in approaching the last hurdle of the creaky stair, before the vehement release in the spare room. She had, of course, just the right qualities for her job.
The remains of their tummy trouble hung in the air, a smell of rancid milk, but it had gone completely by the time we reached her bedroom at the end of the apartment, submerged in a rich blanket of powder and eau de cologne which she had doused the room with. It was stifling by the big bed; air couldn’t have reached the place in months. I took my jacket off, while she closed the door behind me, carrying whisky and two glasses.
“Henry said they might send someone after us. But not you. We never thought of you.” She stood in front of me, pouring a drink, watching the golden trail of liquid, then gazing up at me. She looked more her age now, smaller, thinner, the hair seeming to fall back from a higher point on her forehead than I’d remembered. It only made her other features more prominent—the eyes larger and more widely spaced, the nose more abrupt, turning more pointedly at the end, the mouth a fine mobile line right across her jaw: the flesh had receded with time, had left these quirks like emerging islands; startling, unvisited shapes in the drought of the years.
“I’m sorry. Yes—they sent me.” I swallowed some of the neat whisky. “Do you have any water?”
“I didn’t mean that. Just—the surprise. It nearly killed me. How long have you been up in the wall?” She turned away.
“Just now, this evening.” I explained, briefly, how I’d got there. But the mechanics didn’t interest her.
“Thank God you’ve come,” she said. That was what interested her. “They got Hamdy’s message in the end. It took them long enough. What—plans have you got? For getting us out of here?” And she rushed on, not w
anting to seem pressed by the impersonal—“I never thought I’d be so glad to see anyone—and it’s you, of all people.”
She looked at me warmly, full of trust, as though I were a sensible friend come to sort things out with a family after a bankruptcy. We might have been in each other’s arms after a few more drinks. Not for love, for mere formal relief.
“Your hair’s going further back your head; that’s all.” She seemed to feel her way round my body with her expression.
“So’s yours.”
A smile between us, then—acknowledgement that though passion had waned to nothing, it had existed once, and might again. She was making polite inquiries. So was I.
But suddenly I couldn’t see Bridget in those terms any more, couldn’t see myself sharing any kind of emotion with her. In a second it was all finished and done with, the years of pain, the suppressed longing which had risen again when I’d seen her from the Tower, and from the café as she walked along the corniche; another man had experienced all that bright resurgence, not me.
I had re-achieved her in those seconds during which we had looked at each other warmly and talked about our faces. We had gone through all the teasing preliminaries, and I felt that I could have tossed her on to the bed beside us without more ado. And since that was possible at last, I couldn’t contemplate it seriously.
She was someone to help in a professional way, someone in trouble. It was she who must face the disappointment now.
“Henry’s disappeared,” she said lightly, after the silence. Henry in his sailor suit who had run away behind the bandstand—as though she had been given the boring job of keeping an eye on him for the morning and had no other connection with him.
