by Joseph Hone
“Novak wouldn’t have stopped you, Henry,” I said quietly. “Don’t be stupid. You’re twice the size. After twenty years with us they’d do anything to get you back.”
“.… ‘done my duty for my country.’ This notice was put here by Bishop Gwynne …”
“You don’t want to go back, that’s all. What have you been doing for Moscow all these years anyway?—Snooping round Farnborough on press day?”
“…. the Cathedral was consecrated by the Rev. Dr. Temple on St. Mark’s Day, April 25, 1938, who later became your Archbishop of Canterbury …”
“I believed in it all,” Henry said. “That may surprise you. That’s why I don’t want to go back.”
“The Moscow trials, Stalin, Hungary?”
“I believed in the belief, not the facts. I’ve never been to Russia.”
“… and the foundation stone was laid by Bishop Gwynne on November 20, 1936 and can be seen on the outer wall of the east end of Lady Chapel …”
“That was rather careless of you, wasn’t it?”
“No one believes in the loaves and fishes. He was a fraudulent caterer and quack doctor. But that doesn’t seem to have mattered.”
“… the architect was Adrian Gilbert Scott …”
“The English Martyrs, the Thirty Years’ War, the Huguenots—Christ!—the facts. I’m not talking about them. They never interested me. I was interested—I had to be, I was on the outside—in the selfishness of the creed. It had no message for anyone but me. It was mine. And the more the others said it was a fraud and a lie, the better I liked it. The more Hungarys there were, the more I said, ‘Screw you with your liberal notions—what have you been doing all these years? Reading Encounter by courtesy of the CIA?’ Though they don’t know it yet. Moscow seemed a better pitch than weeping tears on the box and paying super tax. I wasn’t interested in being a professional left winger writing for the Telegraph colour mag.”
“… and the general contractors for the Cathedral were Messrs. Hettena Brothers, of Shrubra, Cairo …”
“If I had to argue that’s how I did it. But it was never an argument for me. It was a suffragi who broke a decanter in Shepheard’s Hotel.”
“What happened?’
It was the story of a genuine cradle socialist, of an old Nubian waiter wounded by his father in Shepheard’s thirty years before—a cut-glass decanter more valuable than the man’s annual wages; the story of a child who smells justice down the servant’s stairs and learns to hate his father over the stench of boiled cabbage. Though of course the child wouldn’t know—and I wondered if Henry did—that it was the other way round: it was the denial by his father which had driven him underground in anger, into the warrens of duplicity and subterfuge, and bruised love, where he had remained all his life. Children are the most undetectable double agents; Henry had become a professional child. Belief lay behind the tins of raisins and the candied peel. He had found Marx in the larder, the road to Moscow through the cellar door.
Hungary, five million peasants—the greatest repression—can mean nothing to such people whose political faith is formed in childhood, a creed inextricably related to the pain and happiness of a seven-year-old. A man, once set to the task, will seek to restore imagined innocence ruthlessly and without question. Henry would justify every sort of betrayal and repression because his own identity had been formed by just the same things. He would accept every sort of collective pain because he would be denying that identity, his childhood and an old Nubian, if he didn’t.
“Gentlemen! This way please.”
The old fellow shouted for our attention. He had tired of his descriptions and had led us now quickly up towards the Lady Chapel.
“King Farouk’s Gates, the ‘Gates of Heaven’,” he said peremptorily, pointing to a sort of boudoir grille that divided the Lady Chapel from the Cathedral proper.
“I thought that was a brothel in Port Said,” Henry said. And then the men was looking for his tip in a business-like way. And afterwards he produced some half-crowns and one-franc pieces, asking Henry for Egyptian change.
“No,” Henry said shortly. “No, you’ve had your money. That money is no use to me.”
I gave the man some change instead and he disappeared without another word.
“So you’re going to Moscow then?”
“They expect everything these days. Expect it,” Henry said, looking after the swinging galibeah rounding a pillar. “They crawl, they force themselves on you, then they insist, then they want paying twice over. Then they just fuck off.”
“That sounds like the Reform Club, not the Central Committee.”
“I know. I thought last week it was a village in Galway I wanted. Now it’s just a castle with a moat. The other view—the East: you know, the desperation, the shoddiness, the eternal damp of six months’ snow, fashions five years late and lashings of raw alcohol on rough counters—all the things you saw as necessary, which you looked on with nostalgia, when you thought the Wall and the barbed wire was your prison—all that seems now just like a bad copy of the professionals, a cheaper show, a swindle bigger than the swindle of the West. But I used to think of what happened over there as a genuinely amateur performance.”
We had walked down to the end of the Cathedral, next to the mission boxes by the door, the lepers and all the penny charity of darkest Africa.
“The cold must have had something to do with it. In my mind. It was so cold there, so much snow; there was some marvellous quality there which we didn’t have in Africa. Wordsworth’s daffodils for someone in Capetown who’d never seen more than a flame tree or a thorn bush or a prickly pear. I fancied myself, I suppose. In Astrakhan.”
“It’s just as cold in North America surely?” I said. But I didn’t press it.
Henry confessing; supplication in a place cracked with the sun, rotten with heat, summoning a frozen creed. It was an odd sensation, hearing this memoir of belief from someone you thought only really cared that the champagne was cold enough; like seeing a man circled by birds, the true words homing at last, falling suddenly from nowhere, completely engulfing the isolated figure, so that one couldn’t tell whether he was being savaged or saved. And could do nothing anyway. One doesn’t “lose” faith: that would be a charity. It simply grows cold in you and stays there, a dead limb that you can never throw away, never replace. There was no use my offering anything.
“What will you do then?” I asked. “A farm in Kenya or something? Algeria?—they’re taking on every sort there these days, I hear.”
“Do you expect to have to tell them—that you’ve met me?”
“I won’t tell them anything. Except that they sent me out here on just as much of a goose chase as you.”
“And Marcus. Was he sent out here to fetch us both back?” Henry smiled briefly. “Who will they send to fetch him away, fetch him away, fetch him away? Who will they send to fetch him away …” He sang the little rhyme joyfully, not a trace of the cynic. But he slowed on the last line, a little bitterly, as if he really wasn’t expecting it: “… on a cold and frosty morning.’
“There wasn’t going to have been anything of me left to take back. Too long to go into.”
“Same sort of boat then, aren’t we? They won’t care to see you back home. If you ever make it home.”
“That’s why I’m going. Or trying to.”
“If they tried to dump you, as they did me, they won’t believe you, you know. They’ll just lock you up.”
“Go to Moscow, Henry. Worry about yourself. Even if you don’t believe in it any more—what does it matter? None of them do, you know; Blake and the others, that’s why they had to run there: they weren’t safe in the West any longer, their ideological cover was broken.”
“A plausible line. You’d go down well in Dzerzinsky Square yourself.”
“You’ll just have some stupid accident otherwise. Walk over the bridge, take the pyramid road past the zoo, you can’t miss it. They’ll probably give you a vodka
and Coke if you ask nicely. It’s the new drink, hands across the ocean. A great cure. Gets the gases up.”
“We should have it together.”
“Don’t forget to send me a copy of your book,” I called after him.
He walked out across the forecourt, busy as ever and less shaky, hands stuffed in either pocket of his blazer, pot-bellied, head down, breasting the waves of brilliant light, anxious to make it by opening time. In reality, he might have been … I couldn’t say. You could never really tell with Henry what he intended; fair enough, I suppose, for a man whose job it was to conceal things. We were friends in other ways.
I gave the half-crowns and francs to the lepers and before I went back to the Provost’s office I stood on the corniche for a moment, watching Henry pass the Trafalgar lions and turn on to the bridge.
12
He came from Gloucestershire, or perhaps Somerset.
“You’re keen on ecumenicism then?”
“Very.”
“I can’t say it’s making huge progress in these parts. Don’t quote me, mind you. With the Coptic Church we already have several amicable arrangements. On the other hand they and the Romans are rather wary.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Only the other day they’d achieved what I felt was a commendable rapport. The Sisters of Charity here started a Sunday School on the roof of a Coptic recreation hall at St. George’s. But it was stopped. The Mother Superior suggested the rafters weren’t all they might have been. Of course the building there is Old Testament, so she may have had a point. Don’t quote me, though.”
“I suppose it’s a question of two steps forward and one back in these matters.”
“I sometimes think it’s exactly the reverse. Still, this needn’t concern you. It was the Anglican community in the diocese here which you said interested you.”
“Very much so, yes. Especially your plans in Libya. I hear you’ve just acquired a long wheeled Land Rover.”
“Long wheel-based; yes, indeed. It will ease the visiting considerably. In fact I’m off on an expedition to Alex and then on to Libya in a day or so. You’re welcome to come along if you can spare the time, though I expect you’re pretty busy with the Field Marshal’s visit. Yes, we’re extending our premises in Tobruk, a very useful addition. You know, we’ve really been rather cramped in Libya.”
“I’d like to very much if there’s room. I—”
“Well, come along then. You can pay for your way, as it were, at the Jumble Sale now. Add your brick to the extension—what?”
Mr. Hawthorn laughed deeply and stood up, and then seemed to go on standing up. He was a tall man in any case, but his face was long too, and perhaps his heels were more than usually thick, and with his full crop of silvery hair he topped out at well over six foot six. I could hear the voice long ago in some West Country choir, sharp and true, rising clear above the other surplices, just as the boy himself had done the previous afternoon in the rugby line out.
“What B.B.C. programme did you say you worked for?” he asked as we walked across to the sale.
“I’m afraid it doesn’t go out on the Overseas Service. Just the domestic. I’ll try and see if they can send you a transcript”
“I’d be most grateful And if I may I’ll give you the names of one or two people at home; if you could let them know when it’s going out. And there’s the Church Press Office in Lambeth, you might just let them know about it too.”
“Of course,” I nodded, trapped in the hopeless lie. Though perhaps, if he’d known, he would have excused it as rendering unto Caesar. I wouldn’t, but Hawthorn was an honourable man.
I said goodbye to him before lunch.
“Be here Monday morning, then, say ten o’clock. We’ll go straight to Alex. And you’ll need a Libyan visa. They’ll give you one at their consulate in Zamalek.”
I crossed on to Gezira over 26 July Bridge and got to the Consulate just before it closed. They tried to get me to call back on Monday but I pleaded urgency: a Church mission, a parsonage in Tripoli … I was hoping to leave straight away.
In fact, I had an awkward two days to fill. The Armenian’s apartment was no use. Bridget might have been picked up by now, or Colonel Hamdy. They’d ransack his place next door, find the ventilator perhaps. My luggage was still at the Semiramis, but in any case I couldn’t risk an hotel. Necessary risks, yes, but nothing else. But I had money, most of £200, and nearly £50 in piastre notes.
I walked back down 26 July Street and on to the bridge again. It was early afternoon. All work would cease in the city within half an hour, people would have vanished from the streets, and I’d stick out like a madman. It had to be something soon.
I watched the feluccas with cargoes of terracotta pots from Luxor easing themselves down the Gezira bank, their huge thin moon masts creaking down as they came towards the bridge. It was the one thing I’d never done in Egypt, a proper trip on the river. It was a comfortable two-day journey to Helwan, fifteen miles south, there and back in one of the small cushioned feluccas that one hired below Shepheard’s—cushioned and hidden from the glare in a brown tent that covered the stern in a round awning like a nissen hut.
For a few extra pounds one could stay on the boat overnight. And for a few more one could ensure that there were no questions. Informers in Egypt were a business-like lot; it was simply a matter of paying them something more than the last policeman had. I would go to Helwan for the weekend: a perfectly appropriate voyage for an inquiring Englishman. The man might question my lack of company; I questioned it myself. In better circumstances I might well have made the journey with Leila Tewfik. Cairo used to be famous for this sort of leisurely waterborne affaire; one took hampers and small lanterns for the night. But that was before my time.
*
I took a taxi down to Garden City and did a deal with one of the boatmen. Not too much money. And not too little. £15 for the two days, with a promise of a further £5 on safe return.
The man seemed not in the least surprised; I played my slightly eccentric role to perfection. Williams, I remembered, had recommended just such a front less than a week before—the only piece of advice that I took from him that wouldn’t have landed me in jail. Williams by now would have heard about Marcus and the others and been well pleased. He must have thought that every one of us was on beans and water already. But he could wait; every dog has his day. With luck, one man was sailing gently back to him now—dog-in-the-manger, skeleton in the cupboard, to take his bone away.
I lay back inside the awning, stretched my feet out over the scrubbed white floor boards … the man cast off and poled the boat out into the stream.
He was old and immensely practised; a small, tight, ebony face with a white half-moon of stubble, eyes that understood everything in a glance spared from the business in hand. He flapped about the wide edges of the boat in his bare feet, stabbing the water judiciously with his pole, like a bored snooker master, chipping into the triangle and putting away the colours in a mammoth break.
We punted along the shoreline, very gradually pushing out towards the small wind which we would catch near midstream once we had passed the tip of Roda Island jutting out into the river in front of us. The water began to flip and scurry along the bottom of the boat, singing between the runnels of the old wood—the slow current which would take us back to Cairo, just as surely as the breeze from the sea would carry us gently upstream.
The boatman stood up for a moment in the prow, resting his pole in the current. A minute squall of wind flapped his long sleeves, a series of small pistols going off in an ocean. Then it was quiet again. The reedy whisper of water beneath us slowed, almost died. The man turned against the flat blaze of light in front of us and looked back at the city. It had come into its proper context now that one couldn’t see it clearly any more, the ochre ribbon of buildings disappearing in the haze. One forgot completely the cracked and broken glitter of the streets, the slops by the doorways, the years of rubbi
sh congealed in hillocks of tar by the pavements. The detritus of all its history, from Pharaonic shards to Coca-Cola bottles, belonged to a country one had heard much of but never visited, passing slowly half a mile off the coast, looking to the land as though it were a territory in permanent quarantine.
People suffered there, mysterious plagues beyond the medicine books; the sky burnt them mercilessly, fevers never dropped: flies pursued them, a hybrid super-species; they were watched from doorways, sent on endless last journeys; no ease and little joy—characters bound up in a long book of pain, exiled in this desert for no other reason than the water which had brought them here, and was now their only relief. And to be far out on that huge brown stream was never to know the illness, only the cure.
*
We journeyed to Helwan, stayed there overnight on the shore beyond the town, and came downstream the next day. A day and a night and another day. We travelled like a nineteenth-century Arabist and his dragoman, self-sufficient, but always concerned; a page from Lucie Duff Gordon’s memoirs, a dazzling white-sailed caique moving slowly through the curves of the river by day, suspended at noon under a clump of palm by the water’s edge, making good passage in the wind that came with the last hour of light, finding refuge in the darkness, when the sky lit up the river with tinsel and a shaft of undulating white marble from a large moon.
The man cooked beans on a paraffin burner he had with him, stuffed them into bladders of dark bread, and we brewed a milky tea, spitting the leaves overboard.
I asked him about his life on the river and he talked about it slowly in a whisper-harsh voice, ragged and disrupted from years of calling across water.
As with his ancestors he didn’t speculate about the river; his involvement was uniquely practical. He had no other curiosity about it. It sprang from mud, meant toil, gave life. It flowed northwards, like every river. And when I told him that there were other streams which ran south, in just the opposite direction, he looked at me as if I were professing a new and dangerous faith.
