by Joseph Hone
“How could a river flow uphill, against itself?” he said. “What would it do to the crops—if a river worked like that? And where would you put the High Dam then?—in Alexandria? And how would a boat get back from Luxor to Cairo?—for the current would be running in the wrong direction. A river can’t flow backwards.”
Don’t worry, I thought, we’re working hard on it; all the rivers will flow the wrong way soon. We’ll do everything before we’re finished.
*
We arrived back near Cairo the following evening, cool and silent, the water like a lake, cargo feluccas drifting with us, their crews asleep or crouching round small fires in the stern—a smell of river clay and burning tinder and grilled fish coming over the water which had gone bronze and violet with a burning orange dipping over the western shore.
It had been dark for several hours when we reached the first of the bridges at Giza so that we saw the finger of light from the police launch, prodding the velvet between the piers of the bridge, from some distance away.
I was about to tell the boatman to pull in when he said in the simple easy phrases of a professional describing something seen many times: “They are looking for someone. He has drowned.”
“Couldn’t they be trying to rescue him?”
“No. No, it couldn’t be that. They have a grapple with that boat. They only take it out to look for the ones who are dead.”
It was well after midnight when we finally tied up. I paid him the additional money and said I would stay on board till morning.
*
Mr. Hawthorn had a funeral on his hands when I got to the Cathedral in the morning. Two funerals, in fact.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, there’s been some trouble,” he said. “An old lady at the Anglo-American—her husband is in police custody. And another man from London—apparently he had some sort of boating accident over the weekend. They found his body above Kasr el Nil last night. I’m sorry, it will mean twenty-four hours’ delay on our trip. I’ve been on to the Consulate. Neither of the people had dependents in the U.K. They’re to be buried at the British cemetery tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry to hear it. I’ve been up at Helwan over the weekend.”
Madame. And Henry. I couldn’t think of anyone else falling out of a boat at that moment.
“How did it happen?—the accident, I mean. On one of those small boats?”
“Yes, the man hired the boat apparently, after dark. Either from the Garden City pier or from the island. No one seems to know. The thing overturned—they do if you stand up in them or do anything awkward. The boatman managed to swim back. The other person, a Mr. Edwards, didn’t.”
“Oh dear me.”
Henry had been wild drunk. He must have been. I thought how easily it could have been me.
“But why had he taken the boat in the first place?”
“They’d closed all the bridges to Gezira yesterday.” Hawthorn paused and looked at me briefly. “They were looking for someone. Someone on the island. I understand a woman was abducted, kidnapped or something. The Russians are supposed to have had something to do with it. Probably a wild rumour, you know what the place is like.”
“Yes.” Was he just trying to get off the island, back to town? Or had he been making in the other direction, for the Russian Embassy on the Giza Bank? One would never know. It was just the sort of ambiguous exit Henry would contrive for himself. And the woman? I felt equally sure that it must have been Bridget. She had never made a mistake; the first one would be decisive.
“Did they find this person—the one they were looking for? Or was that the woman?”
“They’ve been asking me that. Your colleagues. As if I knew. You’re the ones to know all about that.”
“Oh, I don’t handle news. Just background. The price of rice, how the people live—your new extension in Tobruk for example; that sort of thing.”
“Of course. ‘Colour’ material, isn’t it called? Anyway there seems to have been some considerable unpleasantness. I’m glad that still doesn’t count with the B.B.C.…”
Hawthorn got up and moved a pile of circulars from his desk to a table beneath the window of his office, thumping them down. Dust blew up into the light, like a small explosion, bringing with it the utterly dessicated odour of lime dust, peeling wood, baking concrete. The office was surrounded with diocesan photographs, groups of clerics in strange places including some recent ecumenical ones: a Nubian priest in a full regalia stood on a muddy river bank blessing naked figures in the shallows of the stream; a craggy, Anglican bishop glared angrily across the mock-Jacobean refectory table with a plastic fan in front of him.
“The woman’s husband is coming to the interment tomorrow. A Mr. Cherry. He was a schoolteacher here. Tragic really.” Hawthorn gazed out of the window on the small border of shrubs and bushes, tar-spattered, sand-blasted, oiled from the years of traffic that came roaring down from the station to the corniche. “The police telephoned me this morning. They’re going to come with him.” He turned. “One didn’t expect that, you know. One really didn’t. One doesn’t usually get that sort of co-operation out here you know. Don’t quote me on it.”
“They respect the dead in Egypt though, don’t they? More than the living.”
“Ah, that’s much too big a question, Mr. Marlow. We haven’t begun to answer that one. But it’s true, the Egyptians have a tradition in that matter.” He came with me to the door. “These days, of course, we fly our nationals home. We haven’t buried anyone in the British cemetery here for, oh, goodness me—it must be more than five years.”
“Now there are two.”
Hawthorn looked at me critically, as if I intended continuing with some aphorism or nursery rhyme, a query in his long face: I had stopped half-way through a message which would explain, alleviate. But I’d nothing to say.
“Yes, tragic really. They don’t seem to have had anybody at home. But—there you are.” He put his hands in his side pockets, thumbs sticking out, an umpire considering a critical decision. “Come round tomorrow then. Say around eleven-thirty. We’ll try and get away as soon as possible after the funeral.”
I went out into the scorching light, numb in the heat that danced off the water, conscious only of the steel that brayed down the corniche like bullets; the passions that led people somewhere in such a hurry: to drinks in a shadowed bar, lunch back home, to see a girl. Such appointments seemed all the more necessary now, vital.
I’d never really thought of Henry dying; it hadn’t seriously crossed my mind. Something stupid at worst—but then over to the other side: a dacha, snowshoes and hot toddy in the Moscow woods. I was sure that in the end he would be faithful to the fun of it all, if nothing else. I thought he would sacrifice his soured belief for the life principle which he held so strongly. I saw now that the belief and the principle had been identical in him. Champagne for Henry was a manifesto, not an indulgence.
But still, there was something so corny about his dying which I couldn’t follow, and couldn’t see him following: such an unnecessary bore, as he would so surely have said of it himself. He’d done it without really meaning to, like an insult late at night in the saloon bar. It was a mistake he would regret briefly when he was half-sober next morning, with a roaring headache, on the way to another pub; just a foolishness among so many in the midst of a tattered vibrant life; something he would redeem later in the continual apology Henry made with his good fellowship.
I really couldn’t see him in the river, the skin going blue, orifices suppurating, the slobber of that kind of death. He’d have lost his glasses, I suppose that’s why I couldn’t see it; Henry would have been unrecognizable without them. Waters from Home Security could clear his fridge out now, the solid horseradish and the bag of olives. And cancel the Bookseller. That was all I could really see.
*
I spent the afternoon—and later the night—lying in the shade of some flame trees on the far side of Gezira Club, reading Al A
hram which I’d picked up at a kiosk on the way. The President was pushing it—or being pushed, of course; war seemed inevitable now. If the Army needed any more confirmation to send them over the brink, the microfilm would have done it: Marcus’s little message from the Israeli Chief of Staff. Nasser could no longer restrain his generals, like Farouk, he had signed the instrument of his demise before anybody had asked him, for, of course, the more the Arabs clamoured for war, the more unready one knew they were. They were like schoolboys, taking Dutch courage with shouts and teases, for a fight against a bully. But the bully would smash them quietly behind the bicycle shed before tea. The Charge of the Light Brigade; they would need a Tennyson to salvage anything from this blitzkrieg.
I’d always suspected that the dry men in our department, and in Whitehall and Washington, would try sometime or other to get Nasser off his perch, go for him with some new trickery, another little bit of collusion—this time undetectable, except for the microfilm I still had. The headlines in Al Ahram told the whole story: six Israeli armoured divisions massing on the Syrian frontier: Marcus and I had been given the same message all right.
And Williams was the driest man of them all; Moscow’s man. A war for them would have even more favourable conclusions than it would for the West. Russia was an ally in these parts after all, a friend with a foot in the door. After this they would be running the household, sacking the servants, commandeering all the stores.
That was the only thing I had not foreseen: that the powers had identical interests in this airing cupboard, in seeing matron topple. That was the new collusion. Perhaps, Yalta-like, they had already agreed among themselves that the Middle East should be a Soviet sphere of influence: as long as we could still have the oil. And keep the Jewish vote in New York.
*
It was like an exotic English garden to a great house, with flame trees round the side, bougainvillea clambering wildly over the yellow sun-burnt walls, clumps of some sort of flowering laurel, paths as neatly run as designs in a blueprint, the grass edged and clipped and watered, untrodden and undisturbed—the one park in the city where no one took his ease in holiday groups; the fruits, the first fruits of them that slept.
The weather wasn’t typical National Trust though: the usual lead-blue Cairo dome, the light so harsh and stinging that one didn’t dare look up and see where the sun had got to, how far on the day was.
They had dug the graves at the bottom of the cemetery at St. George’s: they were just under the high walls, looking back over the Mokattam Hills, in a small patch of empty ground left over from the thousands of other tombstones which raked the area, neat war graves for the most part, plain white stones, like little cupboard doors; name, rank and number: model prisoners, withholding everything to the very last.
The two sandy hollows were at the end of a line, which started with the children drowned in the Comet disaster of the early ’fifties: a watery corner, in a place where everybody seemed to be the victim of some awfully foolish mistake: a piece of shrapnel that had chosen to share the line you lived along, a faulty bolt in the fuselage on the way to see your parents, a bright day on the river that had gone on too long, with too much drink, so that you knocked yourself out on the keel which had risen like an iron reef in the darkness as the boat reversed itself. It was all a dreadful mistake.
Madame Cherry was the only person who seemed to have gone quietly, willingly perhaps. Herbert watched her now as they began the process of lowering her away, his head bowed, the bald pate stooped earnestly, the better to hear some scurrilous Dublin story. A story beyond all telling. His hands were linked together over his belly. “I’ll rest this round, thanks all the same.”
Two plainclothesmen stood behind him. The ropes shrieked quickly against the side of the wood.
Then Henry went, in a larger box, like a lift plunging down a shaft, going under once more. An over-confident conjuring trick, one could see the ambitious pretence immediately.
I was almost ready to beleieve in the spirit then—complaining, implacable—rising up to indict and slander the barman, resisting the petty regulations of closing time, invoking other more civilized places.
I couldn’t hear much from a hundred yards away, pretending to look at another grave by the wall, turning my ear, bending down to look at an inscription, shielded by a flowering bush.
“… it hath pleased Almighty God of his great Mercy to take unto himself …”
I lost the rest of it. Herbert had stepped back into the custody of the two men, willingly, as though in all that staring masonry any protection was better than none.
Hawthorn wrapped his surplice around him and moved carefully forward towards the holes, a golfer checking an eagle.
I tried to feel that in other circumstances I would have comforted Herbert in some way, taken him on to the Estoril for a solid lunch, a long afternoon of drinks, a wake that might have eased things. And the idea came very clearly into my mind, absorbing every other thought: the dazzling linen table-cloths, moist arak glasses, the smell of lemon juice and burnt perch; purple bubbles in the Omar Khayyam and the living, stupid chatter around us.
And I saw the two of us, Herbert and me, so precisely, at the cemetery gates, the taxi humming by the kerb, waiting for Henry to join us.
*
Instead, I met Hawthorn back at the Cathedral and we were half-way down the Agricultural road to Alexandria by lunch time, taking a stomach-turning snack at the rest house in Tanta: raw oiled tomato salad, dry bread sandwich and a warm Coke.
We talked about the challenge of the church today, glancing now and again at the magnificent olive Land Rover parked beyond the fly-smeared windows. A hopeless old man kept on trying to sell us fifty used ball-points; two scabious dogs watched us with equal hungry patience, hunched up, shifting their paws miserably, going “click-click” like knitting needles on the old linoleum. The waiter made an error in his count, somehow getting an extra figure one in front of the fifty-three piastres total. We pointed this out to him—to his apparent delight—and he took the opportunity of wondering if we could change a few deutschmarks he happened to have on him.
The journey back was uneventful. I was so genuinely tired of it all, so divorced in my mind from the plots and machinations of the past week, that I didn’t really believe myself that I had anything to do with British Intelligence. I was what I said I was, a journalist interested in a piece of Ecumenicism and the future of the Anglican community generally in the Middle East; it was, by its very nature, a restful, self-effacing, unsuspicous role and I immersed myself in it completely.
We passed through Egyptian control at Soloum on the Libyan border without their giving me a second glance. It was not a crossing they could have expected me to leave by, nor the impeccable company I kept a likely cover for a spy. In fact, of course, the heat must have been off us all by then if, indeed, it had ever reached the slow men at this distant frontier. Egyptian Security must have been suffering an embarrassment of riches; Alexandria had been alive with the story the previous day: a nest of spies had been uncovered in Cairo and one man had been taken in the western harbour that morning, an Israeli Intelligence officer trying to make it home, head of their entire circle in Egypt, the king pin.
At Tobruk I went to the church hall and talked with Hawthorn at length about the extension; I took measurements, made little drawings and interviewed the foreman in Arabic; I licked my index finger and discussed erosion and the prevailing winds. They were impressed by it all, pleased. It was the saddest afternoon of my life.
“Thank you,” I said to Hawthorn afterwards. “I’ve decided I’ll have to go straight back from here. Time has rather run out for me and there’s a piece I want to do on Libya in any case before I go.”
“But what about your luggage and things in Cairo?”
“You know what it is in this job—here today, gone tomorrow. I’ll have the hotel send it back. Don’t worry about that. And thank you—very much indeed.”
“It was no
thing,” Hawthorn said. “Nothing at all. Glad you were interested. ‘Always something new out of Egypt’ as they say.”
We laughed and shook hands in the wretched featureless street, Hawthorn in his grey lightweight clericals towering over the rubble of new buildings, the flat land beyond the edge of the road. Sand whipped around our shoes from the desert, piling up against our heels in minute dunes even as we stood.
I took a taxi to the British air base and two days later the VC 10 was falling through heavy cloud above Burford, the jets thrusting once more over dripping parkland, before we scudded down in a cloud of spray at Brize Norton.
13
Two Special Branch men were on the tarmac to meet me, a senior inspector, a tall pipe-smoking, academic-looking fellow called Kirk, and a burly junior officer, who probably hadn’t got more than four “O” levels but looked as if he could run fast and had done well in Police Federation boxing.
They drove me to London, to Scotland Yard, where I was asked to make a statement.
“I’ve nothing to say. The only statement I can give is to my own department—you must know that, the Official Secrets Act. What’s your explanation—wouldn’t that be more appropriate?”
Kirk looked unhappy and unsure of himself. He wrote something in the margin of the Crown document in front of him.
“I can understand your position, Mr. Marlow. You are not of course obliged to make any statement. We’ve been asked to interview you about your recent activities in the UAR—”
“Don’t go on. What are the charges and then I’ll contact my solicitor.”
Kirk was horrified by my peremptory stance.
“It would come under the Official Secrets Act,” he said at length.
“Well, I didn’t suppose it would come under the Foot and Mouth Regulations. What is it, for God’s sake?”
He sighed and read from the document in front of him, going through the legal preamble before coming to the application proper: “‘… that on dates between the 7th and 10th of May, 1967, and on other dates prior to that period, you did knowingly communicate to foreign agents information which was calculated to be, or might be, or was intended to be useful to the enemy, entrusted to you in your capacity as an officer of the Crown; and that further, you did, between the same dates, knowingly communicate, to the agents of a second power, the names and rank of officers of the Crown resulting in their subsequent apprehension and arrest.” One charge to answer, under section—”
