The Nick of Time

by Francis King

  The calls continued, sometimes in the daytime but more often in the early hours. Usually they consisted merely of that reiterated ‘Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!’, but sometimes other things, no less insulting were shouted down the line – ‘ Fucking queen!’, ‘You bad shit!’, ‘Stupid cunt!’. Appalled, terrified, he would nonetheless continue to listen to the end. ‘Why don’t you put the phone down at once?’ Igor asked repeatedly. Igor also told him that he ought to report the calls; the telephone people would soon put a stop to them and, if they couldn’t, they could always change the number. Adrian replied that, oh, no, he couldn’t do that, he didn’t want the scandal. ‘ But it’ll all be confidential,’ Igor protested. What Igor did not realize was that, in his heart of hearts, Adrian did not want the calls to end. They were the only contact that he had with Mehmet, and that contact, however alarming and disgusting, was better than none.

  Frustrated by the way in which Mehmet, merely shouting abuse and then banging down the receiver, paid no attention whatever to what he himself said in extenuation or protest, Adrian rang back three times, using the number that he had once, with so much difficulty, extracted. The first of these calls, after two o’clock in the morning, was answered by a sleepy woman’s voice, in which there was a tremor of incipient alarm. ‘ Yes, yes. Who is it?’

  ‘Is Mehmet there?’

  ‘Mehmet?’

  ‘Mehmet Ahmeti.’ Had he got the wrong number? Mehmet always spoke of a landlord, not a landlady.

  ‘No, no, love. He’s away. He usually goes away at the weekends. He’s at his cousin’s but I’m afraid I’ve no idea where his cousin lives. Do you want to leave a message for him?’ But by then Adrian was ringing off.

  On the second occasion, not long after ten, the woman summoned Mehmet.

  ‘Yes. Who there?’ The tone was fierce.

  ‘Oh, look, Mehmet, can’t we just meet to talk things over? I’d so much like to see you. I’m terribly sorry for –’

  ‘Fuck off!’

  On the third and last occasion, one afternoon, the woman said ‘Wait a mo,’ and a long silence followed. Eventually, in frustration, Adrian shouted down the line: ‘Hello! Hello! Hello!’ Again he waited.

  Then at long last the woman spoke. ‘I thought he was in his room but he doesn’t seem to be there. He must have gone out.’

  Adrian did not believe her. Unless she lived in a mansion, it would not have taken her so long to discover whether Mehmet were in or out. Probably she had been arguing with him, in an effort to persuade him to take the call.

  From time to time, Adrian would drop in at the Elephants’ Graveyard, since that was where he and Mehmet had first met. He rarely bought a drink but instead walked rapidly from one end of the upper room to the other, turning his head from side to side. He would then do the same in the basement one. ‘Hello, Adrian’ some friend or acquaintance would greet him, or ‘ Hi, there!’, some rent boy whose services he had used in the past; and he would then give a perfunctory acknowledgement, often no more than a nod or a brief smile, and hurry on.

  There was an elderly Irish barman who, despite his lugubrious looks, had always been friendly, on one occasion even coquettish, to him. Finding the bar almost empty on a Monday afternoon – Adrian had looked in after a business meeting in Park Lane – he ordered a double brandy and then leaned across the counter to ask: ‘Have you ever come across an Albanian called Mehmet here?’

  The barman thought for a while, his tattooed arms folded, and then said: ‘A lot of foreigners come here. It’s not often I get to learn their names. Is he a regular?’

  ‘I think so. I don’t know.’

  ‘What’s he look like?’

  Adrian attempted to describe him. He wanted to say ‘ He’s probably the most handsome man to have ever come into this place,’ but instead he told the barman that he was good-looking, dark, tall, well-built, pale skin, black hair, in his late twenties. As he produced each adjective, he realized that to the barman he must seem an absolute idiot.

  ‘Sorry. I don’t think I can be of any help. Has he stood you up then?’

  Adrian gave a twitchy smile. ‘In a sense – yes.’

  Eventually the calls ceased. At first, as night succeeded night without one, Adrian felt relief. But then he found himself lying awake, waiting for the telephone to emit that trill which seemed to pierce through the bedclothes and then through his body.

  Finally, many weeks later, the call came.

  ‘Adrian?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Me. Mehmet.’ As if he didn’t know. ‘I sorry. Sorry about past. Sorry about calls. Sorry I make big trouble for you. I don’t know – I crazy. You are best friend I have in England and I quarrel with you. Crazy! Crazy! I think of you often, Adrian. We have so much good time together – flat, country, parties, cinema, theatre, restaurant. I think I am crazy. Sorry, Adrian, sorry.’

  First relief and then joy fizzed through Adrian.

  ‘Oh, don’t keep apologizing. I was also to blame. I said – and did – unforgivable things. I didn’t realize how important you were to me. Irreplaceable. I’ve been so unhappy about everything that happened – and about not seeing you.’ Over and over he had rehearsed this declaration while thinking of Mehmet in the most improbable places – at board meetings, during a performance of La Bohème, at the dentist, at Trumper. He had never thought that he would have a chance actually to say it.

  ‘You not still angry with me?’

  ‘No, of course not. No. I just want to see you.’

  ‘Difficult.’

  ‘Why difficult?’

  ‘You know.’ He laughed, indulgently it seemed to Adrian, certainly with no derision. ‘ But no mind. We forget past. Begin again. Yes? Friends, not enemy.’

  ‘Oh, yes, yes! Why should there be any difficulty? I can meet you any time, any time you wish.’

  ‘You come all way to Egypt?’

  ‘You’re in Egypt?’ Adrian was astounded.

  ‘Sure. I call from Egypt. Luxor.’

  ‘Oh, I hadn’t realized …’

  ‘Oh, Adrian, why you pretend?’ The tone of his voice had become suddenly acrid. Then, with the former sweetness, he continued: ‘Never mind. All in past. Home Office make long, long delay. Then – very quick. Never mind. Never mind! Adrian, I want see you. Why you no come holiday in Luxor? I show you Luxor. Beautiful. Many tombs. You know Luxor?’

  ‘I’ve never been there, no. I once went to Cairo on business. And once to Alexandria.’ Adrian was thinking. It was crazy, he could not once again go through all that he had gone through with Mehmet. But Christ, even if it was the last thing he did, he must once again see him and have sex with him. He hesitated. ‘I’d love to see Luxor – perhaps even take a Nile cruise. We could take it together. You could be my guide and interpreter. As a matter of fact, I was going to send one of my people out to Cairo in a month or two. But I could go myself instead. Yes, I could do that. Why not? Business with pleasure.’

  ‘When you come?’

  Oh, he sounded so eager! Adrian, alone in the bedroom, the receiver to his ear, smiled beatifically. ‘As soon as I can make all the arrangements. How do I get in touch with you?’

  ‘Better I call you. Now I live with friend but tomorrow, next day must move. I call you. This time, this day, next week. Yes?’

  Reluctantly, eager to hasten this whole process of re-entering what he now saw as a paradise lost, Adrian said: ‘All right then. Ring me in seven days. At this time, here, not at the cottage. I’ll have made all the arrangements by then. I hope.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Oh, Mehmet, I feel so happy. Why did we have that hideous quarrel? It was so bloody stupid of us.’

  But Mehmet was already saying: ‘Goodbye, Adrian. I ring next week. OK?’

  Then the phone went dead.

  It was much later that Adrian asked himself why Mehmet should be in Luxor of all places. Then he remembered: Now I live with friend …’ Who was this friend? Harry! It must be Harry!
That nasty little Egyptian queen, with the bad breath … He was overcome with disgust and jealousy.

  Why did arrangements with Mehmet always have to be so complicated? He refused to come out to the airport to meet Adrian, he refused to meet him at the Winter Palace Hotel, where Mike, his travel agent friend, had booked him a room for five days. Instead he told Adrian to meet him at eight o’clock in the morning in the car park of the Hilton Hotel. He would come there in a car that he had managed to borrow.

  ‘Couldn’t you come to the Winter Palace?’

  ‘No. Better Hilton.’

  ‘I’d so much like to have dinner with you after my arrival.’

  ‘No. Better you sleep early. Then ready for sightseeing. We start early because later very hot. Hilton car park. Eight. OK?’

  ‘But why the Hilton?’

  There was no answer, only again that ‘OK?’

  ‘OK.’ It was useless to argue.

  Although exhausted from two days of business discussions and lavish hospitality in Cairo, Adrian hardly slept that night of his arrival in Luxor. But as he lay awake, the air-conditioning humming in his ears, he felt none of the customary anxiety or frustration of insomnia. For once anticipation was not merely without any restlessness but was even pleasurable.

  It was only a few minutes after five when he left his bed. I feel terrific, he thought. He hummed to himself as he shaved with the utmost care. Then he had a long soak in a foam bath, courtesy of the hotel, got into his freshly laundered open-necked shirt and his beige, raw silk suit, and surveyed himself in the full-length mirror in the bathroom. Even Savile Row tailoring could not disguise how hippy and paunchy he was getting; but in general he was pleased with himself. He went down to breakfast, which, amazingly, because of the parties of tourists setting off for the other side of the Nile before the day heated up, was served from six o’clock.

  The taxi drive from the one hotel to the other was unexpectedly speedy, through streets almost wholly devoid of traffic. In consequence, he had twenty minutes to spare before the rendezvous. He wandered through the garden of the Hilton – an elderly, emaciated gardener, raking a lawn, looked up and said ‘Good morning, sir’ as he passed him – and down to the river. A boat was moored at a jetty and three men, two old and one young, were between them carrying a huge, rusty cooking range on to it. The young man was stripped to the waist. The brown skin seemed to glow with the morning light reflected off the milky, sluggish water. After the three of them had deposited the range and were returning for their next load, the man looked at Adrian, seated on a bench, and gave him a smile of what could only have been encouragement. At any other time, Adrian would have wondered how to carry this casual encounter to fruition. But now he was totally uninterested, and so, without even a smile, he turned his head away. He looked at his watch. There were only twelve more minutes to wait but, unable to do so in patience here on the bench, with the heavily-scented garden behind him and the wide, passive river before him, he jumped up and returned to the car park.

  At its far end there was a small, dilapidated Fiat and seated at its wheel a man in dark glasses, with a beard and a straw hat pulled down low over his forehead. Was it …? Adrian approached, trying to appear insouciant in case the man was not Mehmet. Then the man turned, faced him, and smiled.

  ‘Mehmet!’ Adrian cried it out in joy. He held out both his hands.

  Mehmet clambered out of the car. He was wearing a short-sleeved, white shirt, khaki shorts and the Reebok trainers that Adrian had bought him when they had gone on a visit to Bath. He smiled. Then he walked forward, took Adrian’s hands, and leaned forward to kiss him first on one cheek and then on the other. His lips felt oddly cold on a morning already so warm; but that only added to Adrian’s excitement. ‘ Oh, it’s wonderful, wonderful, to see you!’ He looked down at Mehmet’s muscular, hairy legs, spellbound. Then he looked up again. ‘But why the beard?’

  ‘You no like?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure. I’ll have to get used to it. It makes you look older. Beards are really only for men with receding chins. Oh, you look terrific. I can see that Egypt agrees with you.’

  Mehmet opened the door of the car. He bowed, in mock deference. ‘Please.’

  Adrian hesitated. He had to ask the question: ‘ Whose car is this?’

  ‘Friend’s.’

  ‘Yes, but what friend’s.’

  ‘Friend’s. Just friend’s.’ Mehmet smiled, head on one side.

  Adrian gave up. He knew that he would never get the confirmation that the friend was Harry.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Across river. To see tombs. Everyone come Luxor to see tombs.’

  ‘Of course!’ Adrian felt a huge excitement and joy. Forgetting Harry, he clambered into the car and Mehmet then walked round it and got in beside him. The two men looked at each other and smiled. Then Mehmet leaned forward and turned on the ignition.

  ‘What a beautiful day!’ Adrian said.

  Mehmet nodded. ‘All days in Luxor beautiful.’

  Adrian was happy with the silence that followed. He felt wholly relaxed and at peace, with no feeling that he should be making conversation. He gazed out of the window beside him at the paddy fields, at the men thrashing overburdened donkeys to get them to move faster, at the women striding out erect under huge loads, at the children with matted hair and bare feet. ‘So this is your new home,’ he eventually said.

  Mehmet said nothing.

  ‘Are you working?’

  Mehmet merely shrugged, staring at the potholed road ahead of them.

  Eventually they had crossed the river and were following behind a number of tourist buses, their fumes thick and acrid. Adrian fastidiously took a clean handkerchief out from the breast pocket of his jacket and held it to his nose. ‘No Clean Air Act here, I can see.’ He always spoke to Mehmet as though to someone whose first language was English. ‘I hope I’m not going to have an asthma attack.’ But then he reminded himself that he was too happy to suffer one. It was only when he was anxious or miserable that he did.

  The buses stopped but Mehmet drove on. ‘Where are they all going?’ Adrian asked, as he peered back at a party of Japanese in sun hats.

  ‘Tombs of Kings. We come back. Now too many people. I show you other tomb. No people. Found one, two year ago. Beautiful. I show you.’

  They were driving up into the blue-grey hills. The engine gave a premonitory cough, followed by another, louder one, and for a moment Adrian thought that they were about to have a breakdown; but then it picked up again, its chugging rhythm resumed. He looked down at Mehmet’s bare thigh. He had a tremendous craving to touch it, just to touch it, but Mehmet hated any physical contact other than when they exchanged those two formal kisses at first meeting or parting, or when they were having their brief, brutal sex. Adrian could no longer resist. He put his hand down on the thigh, first tentatively, then firmly. He began to move it upwards, feeling himself suddenly harden in his trousers. There was no responding hardening when, at long last, inch by inch, his hand reached its destination. But, amazingly, Mehmet suffered it to stay there, as never in the past.

  The car chugged up a side road and, where there was a dark, gaping wound in the hillside on the right, it came to a halt. ‘Tomb,’ Mehmet said. He pointed. Then he began to get out of the car and Adrian did likewise. He wondered, embarrassed, if Mehmet would notice his erection.

  It was a steep climb up to the black rent in the hillside and the sun was now blazing down. Adrian grew breathless, he could feel the sweat under his arms, along his backbone and on his forehead. Suddenly he noticed that Mehmet was carrying a plastic bag and, as the bag swung round from his hand, that the bag was a Harvey Nichols one. Fancy carrying a plastic bag from Harvey Nicks on a hillside in Luxor! He must have brought it from England. There was something touching about that.

  He paused to gasp for breath. Yes, despite his happiness, those fumes had brought on his asthma. He pointed: ‘What have you got in there?’


  ‘Water. Torch. Camera. We take photograph in tomb with flash.’

  They trudged on. Then the entrance to the tomb gaped before them and Mehmet, again with that ironic bow, signalled to Adrian to go in first.

  It was wonderfully cool. It was also, to eyes used to the sunshine outside, impenetrably dark.

  ‘I can’t see anything. Are there some steps? I don’t want to fall.’

  ‘Wait a moment. I get torch.’

  Adrian turned. Mehmet was stooping, a hand extended to reach into the bag at his feet. Then he straightened up.

  Against the brilliant light outside, his body was only a black silhouette. Adrian moved towards him. What would be more wonderful than to have sex with him here, now, in this ancient hole in the hillside far away from Luxor and London?

  ‘Oh, Mehmet!’

  Something flashed high above the black silhouette, glittering and blinding, like a flash of lightning.

  It was the final coup de foudre.

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Laurence sat at his desk, elbows on it and chin cupped in palms. He shivered. It was getting chilly in the mornings, it was time that they put on that central heating. Ruminatively, eyes watering, he stared out into the garden, where the autumn leaves glinted like shards of rusty metal through a slowly dissipating mist. Oh, blast that girl! Suddenly he saw that, in jeans, an overlarge shapeless sweater and Wellington boots, one of the gardeners was on a ladder hacking away at a branch of a camellia. He lumbered to his feet, preparatory to rushing out to shout to her to stop. But then he thought, Oh, what the hell, and slumped back into the chair.

  He stretched out an arm and drew towards himself a sheet of writing paper. On it was embossed the address of the Brompton Square house that, so many years ago now, he had reluctantly sold to a journalist on some rag or other. He picked up his pen, put a line through the address, and below added the date. He began to write:

  My dear Marilyn

  I have felt for a long time that I must write you this letter but I do not really know how to do so. I have produced so many versions of it over the past weeks, and all have ended up in the waste-paper basket. It is partly a confession of the terrible wrong that I did to you and partly a plea to you to find it in your heart to forgive me.