From the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of Adam Penney yanking himself into a frenzy. She shut the image out and succumbed to a blinding release.
THE TIMES
30 October 1956
AMERICAN ANGER AT ISRAELI MILITARY ACTION
LONDON, Tuesday (Reuters)
American leaders warn that Israeli action along the Egyptian border will be the spark that will ignite the Middle East, a Reuters correspondent reports.
World fears of a Middle East war grew tonight as Egypt announced she had moved against Israeli troops that had crossed into her sovereign territory in the Sinai Peninsula. A government spokesman refused to confirm or deny whether Israeli objectives included occupation of the Canal Zone.
America responded by immediately calling a meeting at the United Nations and issued a warning to Israel that in the event of a war, it would support Egypt.
The U.S. is unequivocal in its condemnation of Israel’s aggression. Although it is widely acknowledged that Egypt and its Arab neighbours have deliberately provoked Israel, the United States was reported to favour the sternest of measures to halt Israel’s sabre-rattling in the Sinai Peninsula.
Egypt announced that Israel was signing its own death warrant as Arab leaders rushed to support their Moslem neighbour. Iraq told Egypt: ‘Our army is ready to help you crush the invaders.’
This came as former friends become foes, with the U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles warning Britain and France that if they went to war over the Suez Canal they would no longer receive any military or financial aid from the U.S.
It is suspected in many quarters that France is secretly encouraging Israel. Reliable reports indicate that Israeli armed forces are equipped with far more French weaponry than U.S. authorities believed they had.
The British and French governments strongly object to the American alliance with Egypt, which they see as undermining their centuries-old dominance of the region.
An unnamed source in the British Government said: ‘The Americans have not only undermined British prestige in the Middle East, but the prestige of all white men; they have created a power vacuum in the Middle East which is rapidly being filled by the Communists. Russia, meanwhile, has done nothing to facilitate a solution of the Suez crisis. Russian misrepresentations about alleged Western colonialism have sharpened and their attitude creates the impression that it pays the Soviet Union to foster ill-will between the peoples of Asia and Africa and the peoples of the West.’
12
Cairo, Egypt
The sight of the pyramids looming above the chaotic city skyline took Ben’s breath away, as it did every time he visited the ancient city on the Nile.
‘Well, just when I thought my sense of wonder had been tapped dry . . . They really are remarkable, aren’t they?’ Ilhan observed, unnecessarily.
Ben just nodded.
As a child trying to find space for himself in a life knotted up in his parents’ rigid rules and expectations, the world of history had provided the young Benedict Hitchens with an escape route. Tucked in one corner of the library in his palatial Boston childhood home had been an antique stereoscope with a polished ebony box full of slides showing archaeological wonders of the world. If Ben was to ascribe his career choice to one thing, it would have been the countless hours he spent escaping into the three-dimensional photographs of places he knew he would one day visit. And the one image that found its way into the viewer more than any other, until its corners frayed through handling and the lettering in its margins faded to almost nothing, showed the monumental Egyptian tombs rising from the desert. Fascination grew into that singular obsession peculiar to childhood. He’d taught himself everything there was to know about the pyramids – their scale, their form, their composition, and the many conflicting theories about how they’d been built.
He’d been an adult when he’d first visited Cairo, and had experienced enough of life to know that things that are highly anticipated rarely live up to expectation. He’d approached Giza with no small amount of trepidation, carried through Cairo in the back of a decrepit taxi along streetscapes that might have been sets from a Cecil B. DeMille movie. But the tombs built for the pharaohs Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure in the middle of the third millennium BC didn’t disappoint. The pyramids appeared without warning – ethereal in the golden desert air, but still massive; a surreal apparition hovering above Cairo’s slums and dwarfing even the tallest buildings in the city. The towering stone edifices trumpeted an unassailable challenge to mortality and stood as proof of his own inconsequentiality. It was a realisation that gave Ben a peculiar sense of solace.
Now, outside the car’s grimy windows, Cairo was as frenetic as he remembered it and the passage along the city’s narrow streets torturous. The driver Ben had hired in Alexandria to transport them to the city idled behind a ridge-backed donkey hauling a cart overladen with building materials. Ahead, a camel train led by a bow-legged cameleer ambled along, the animals’ skinny rumps dipping and swaying in a mesmerising dance.
The air in the car was stifling, its roof scorched by the Saharan sun, but Ben kept the windows firmly shut – the air outside was no cooler, and carried with it the fetid stench of the street and swarms of flies that kept pace with the beasts of burden. As the car passed over the rough road it shuddered and rocked, lulling Ben into a pleasant stupor.
Their journey from the heart of Turkey to Egypt had been uneventful but protracted. It had been easy enough to find two seats aboard a cramped dolmuş that wound its way south across the Taurus Mountains through the same Cilician Gates that had once admitted Alexander the Great’s army to the Cappadocian plateau. At Mersin’s port, Ben and Ilhan had booked two berths on a virtually empty overnight boat to Alexandria. Any concerns Ben might have had about being stopped at the border amounted to nothing. As the two men had joined the scant gathering of passengers waiting to pass customs, the only thing the Turkish official who stamped their travel papers had seemed worried about was ensuring Ben and Ilhan understood they were travelling into what would soon be a war zone. Although there had seemed to be heightened activity in Alexandria’s port when they’d arrived, they’d engaged a driver without any difficulty and the journey south through the Nile Delta to Cairo had been unremarkable.
Edging round the livestock, the driver honked his horn and forced his way forward. The traffic was at a standstill. He shook his head. ‘No good. Something wrong.’ A cloud of dust appeared, billowing along the street. Cars jack-knifed as they tried to reverse, honking horns as they encountered the dense jumble of animals and vehicles jammed behind them. A fierce chanting cut through the air. The driver wound down his window and listened. He spun in his seat, eyes wide with fear. ‘You, sir!’ He flapped his hand at Ben. ‘Hat . . . you have hat?’
‘Yes.’ Ben fumbled around behind him and found his Stetson on the rear sill.
‘Hair . . .’ The driver pointed at Ben’s head. ‘You hair . . . is English . . . very English . . . Cover. Men come. They angry.’
‘And me?’ Ilhan asked.
‘You OK. Good. Brown skin. No problem. Like me.’ He pointed at Ben again. ‘But you? You problem. Head down! Please, sir!’
The car’s floor vibrated with the stamping of hundreds of feet pounding along the narrow laneway. A press of bodies surged along the street, fists slamming on car roofs and hands slapping in unison to the fearsome chanting that drove the mob forward.
As faces purple with rage pressed past the windows, Ben kept his head tilted down with his elbow lodged in the window and hand shielding his brow in what he hoped appeared to those outside to be the casual stance of a disinterested bystander. He couldn’t understand exactly what was being said, but he didn’t need to. The protestors certainly weren’t screaming terms of endearment. It was a lynch mob baying for British blood, and if anyone caught sight of him and twigged to his Anglo-Saxon heritage, he was finished.
‘So, the time has finally come when to be British is a disadvan
tage,’ murmured Ilhan beneath his breath. ‘I was wondering if we’d live to see the day . . .’
‘Shut up,’ Ben snapped. ‘And I’m not British.’
The car was buffeted by the angry Egyptians charging past. The sound of their fists on the roof was like thunder.
‘Good luck explaining that to them,’ Ilhan responded.
The storm passed quickly. Crowds began to thin and the traffic snarl unfurled.
Ben leant forward to the driver. ‘Thank you for helping me.’
The driver sighed heavily. ‘Is big shame. England friends. During war, I fight . . . England and me, we fight together. Brothers. Now . . .’ He waved his hand at the last stragglers joining their brethren on their rampage through the city. ‘This? Is big shame.’
The street opened out onto a wide promenade. Ahead, a bridge arced over one half of the most famous river in the world, terminating on an island blanketed in manicured gardens dominated by grand mansions. Bright green lawns swept down to the waterfront where pontoon jetties swayed in the eddying river as feluccas bobbed along the Nile like toy boats in a bathtub, their white sails blinding in the midday sun.
The car crossed onto the island and passed into the cool shade cast by a double row of fat-trunked trees, which formed a grand avenue past wrought-iron gateways with guardhouses stationed to ward off any unwanted intrusions into the residences and embassies beyond. Cairo was a city distinguished by a sudden and very distinct geographic division between most of its populace, who lived in unimaginable poverty, and the minority who wanted for nothing. Gezira Island was a sanctuary in the heart of the city that was the exclusive enclave of the latter group of Cairenes.
‘When you said you knew someone who’d put us up here, Ben, you didn’t mention we’d be living in such palatial surrounds,’ said Ilhan. ‘I’d have packed my dinner jacket.’
Ben laughed. ‘Don’t get too excited.’ In the immaculate row of estates, one stood out – and for all the wrong reasons. They approached twin pillars of roughly painted stone flanking a potholed dirt driveway. ‘Hold on . . .! That’s it,’ Ben instructed the driver.
‘This? You go here?’ The man looked doubtful.
‘Yes.’
Through the overgrown remnants of what would once have been a grand and imposing garden, a two-storeyed house loomed like a peculiar fungus, its whitewashed walls flaking and shutters hanging by the hinges. The car swept round the leaf litter–strewn circular driveway and pulled up beneath the still-grand porticoed entrance.
Ben smiled. It had been many years, but it was exactly as he remembered it.
13
Cairo, Egypt
The weatherworn front doors were open before the car lurched to a stop. A tiny man with a neatly trimmed and very black moustache at odds with his powdery eyebrows darted forward, a faded red fez atop his bald head. He reached for the rear door handle and stepped back, head bowed in greeting.
‘Mr Hitchens, sir. Welcome to Arcadia. It is being a pleasure to be seeing you again.’
‘Farouk.’ Ben felt his hand gripped between the old man’s spindly fingers. ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’
Ilhan stepped out of the car behind him. ‘Farouk, this is my dear friend, Ilhan Aslan. Ilhan, Farouk. Farouk is . . .’ Ben struggled to find a word to describe the man who – as far as he could tell – had taken care of everything that needed doing when he’d spent time recuperating at Arcadia during the war.
‘I would say I am being Madam’s butler, sir.’
‘And – if memory serves me correctly – her chauffeur. And plumber. And cook.’
Farouk smiled. ‘You are surely too kind, sir. Your bags?’
Ilhan hefted their two small satchels out of the back seat. ‘Thank you, Farouk. We’re fine. Travelling light.’
‘If you come with me, you will be finding Madam awaiting your arrival inside.’
‘Would you mind telling me who “Madam” is, Farouk? Mr Hitchens has been very coy about telling me anything about our host.’
‘Countess Katerina Anastasia Orlova, Mr Aslan. Mr Hitchens, she is saying she is very happy to be seeing you.’
Ben gazed at the familiar façade of the mansion that had been his sanctuary during some of the darkest years of his life. ‘As am I, Farouk. As am I.’
‘Benedict Hitchens.’ A slender figure moved through the dusty haze permeating Arcadia’s grand ballroom. Backlit by the sun streaming through the windows and clad in a diaphanous white gown, Countess Orlova appeared as insubstantial as a wraith.
‘Katerina.’ He moved to take her hand. Instead, she wrapped him in her arms and warmly kissed both his cheeks. Drawing back, she placed her hands on his shoulders. ‘You’re still handsome. But you have aged.’
He laughed. ‘Haven’t we all? But not you. You’re as beautiful as ever.’
‘Always so smooth with your words.’ She spoke perfect English flavoured by her Slavic heritage. Turning, she fixed her pensive, ice-blue eyes upon Ben’s companion. ‘And you are . . .?’
Ilhan stepped forward and dipped his head. ‘Ilhan Aslan, ma’am.’
‘Delighted to meet you, Mr Aslan.’ She dropped her voice and tilted her head. ‘Ben, when you told me you were gracing me with your presence, you didn’t mention that you were travelling with such a charming Turkish gentleman.’
‘May I ask how you know my friend, countess? He hasn’t been at all forthcoming,’ asked Ilhan.
‘You really must call me Katerina.’ She fluttered her eyelashes. ‘Ben and I met during the war, Mr Aslan –’
‘Ilhan, please.’
‘Well, Ilhan . . . it was during the war when I opened my home to officers from the British Special Operations who needed to convalesce in pleasant surroundings.’
Ben laughed. ‘Pleasant? That’s not the word I’d use to describe the parties you hosted here.’
‘Perhaps not. But you were hardly blameless in what went on, Dr Hitchens. That sofa you set alight – it was a priceless heirloom. My parents dragged it all the way here on their flight from the Bolsheviks, only for it to end up as firewood, thanks to you.’
‘Well, I was hardly the worst offender. As I recall, it was the King of Egypt who pushed your grand piano through the front window.’
‘Sixteen windows broken that night. I haven’t forgotten.’
Ilhan was transfixed. ‘It sounds as if I missed out on a very memorable moment. It could be that you’re a woman after my own heart, Countess Katerina.’
‘Many more than just the one moment, I can promise you.’ She looked at him through thick lashes. ‘You should know – I’m at least as old as your friend here, Ilhan. Surely you prefer a younger girl?’
‘I prefer a woman.’
‘Ah. I see. Farouk?’
The butler appeared from the shadows.
‘Madam?’
‘We will have aperitifs now.’
Farouk nodded. ‘Certainly. Mr Hitchens – what would you be liking to drink?’
‘Anything but the rocket fuel your mistress used to concoct. What was it you put in it, Katerina Anastasia? Plums and lemon?’
‘Peaches, if I could find them. I was attempting to replicate peach schnapps. I did my best. It was the war – what choice did I have? I was raised to be a good hostess and maintain a well-stocked bar. But with the alcohol I was using as an ingredient . . . well, it needed all the help I could give it – it came from the officers’ garage at the Gezira Sporting Club. They used it to clean out the fuel lines. I can’t believe I didn’t kill one of you boys with it. And it was one of the reasons I was delighted when the King accepted my invitation to our soirees. I tolerated him only because he came with cases of French champagne from the royal cellars.’
‘As well-meaning as it was of you to create your own cocktails, I’m too old to take a trip down that particular memory lane. I doubt my liver could survive it. So what else is on offer, Farouk?’
‘Are you still liking to be drinking the Bowmore single malt?’ the
butler asked.
‘Bowmore . . . You remembered! And you found some? In Cairo?’
Farouk nodded, pleased with himself. ‘Yes, sir. I do still have the people to be asking when I am looking to find something special. Even now, with all the troubles in the city.’ The old man shook his head and tut-tutted. ‘And for you, Mr Aslan?’
‘Do you have any raki?’
‘I certainly have arak. But it is –’
‘– virtually the same thing. I know. I’d like that, thank you, Farouk. With ice and water, please.’
The countess led the two men to a conservatory. On the way she bent and picked something up from the floor. ‘Oh, Ben – look. You remember little Vladimir Ilyich . . .?’ A brilliant green lizard with a scarlet collar climbed Katerina’s arm to solemnly take up residence on her shoulder. Katerina turned to Ilhan. ‘He is named for the bald and pencil-necked little bureaucrat with the silly beard who drove my parents from our ancestral lands.’ Tickling the reptile beneath his chin, she smiled indulgently. ‘But you’re far sweeter than that monster, aren’t you, my little man?’
Katerina lowered herself onto a settee and crossed her legs demurely at her ankles as Farouk poured and served the drinks in lead-crystal tumblers. ‘So . . . how was your journey?’
‘Generally good.’ Ben took a seat. ‘Though our reception once we arrived in Cairo was . . . heated. There was a protest.’
‘Those animals.’ Katerina pursed her lips. ‘The city you knew is gone, Ben. The Gezira Sporting Club? You remember it?’
‘How could I forget?’ Constructed as a leisure facility for the British military establishment, the club occupied one hundred and fifty acres of open land on Gezira Island and was graced with polo fields, a golf course and swimming facilities. For the gentlemen of Arcadia and their hostess, it had felt like their own private playground.
The Emerald Tablet Page 12
