by Joseph Hone
But she failed in her arithmetic, or seemed to have done. She looked at me again, making a last attempt, wrinkling her eyes up quizzically, then giving the blurred negative up for lost. Yet even if she had failed to identify me, I wasn’t sure at all of the innocence of her attempt.
‘Well, that’s a coincidence,’ I filled the silence.
‘Come on, Soheir,’ Wheel broke in lightly. ‘You’re always seeing ghosts –’
‘Oh yes. Always,’ she interrupted. ‘Farouk, Nasser, the Maadi Sporting Club – all ghosts –’
‘And now you’re seeing Mr Graham here – who’s from Scotland – as an Irishman on the hard courts in Maadi and holding the bar up afterwards with a gin sling. You know, Soheir – you’ll have to write your memoirs. I’ve always told you. She’s full of coincidences.’ Wheel turned to me. ‘Everything links up in the end, isn’t that right, Soheir? Full circle, in the eastern mythology. The Wheel of Karma, you used to call me. Mr Graham was a handsome dragon in a previous incarnation. She goes big on all that sort of thing, Mr Graham,’ Wheel added, gently ribbing her. ‘I was a Manhattan Indian – remember, Soheir? – before the Dutch bought me out for twenty-four dollars and a string of beads. Don’t take any notice of her, Mr Graham, or she’ll have you in on one of her table-tapping sessions. Talk about coincidences – if Mr Graham looks like your friend in Maadi, then you’re Mrs Meir. I’ve always told you. Sitting down – couldn’t tell you apart.’
This must have been an old joke between them and indeed there was a distinct resemblance. But at the moment Mrs Taufiq wasn’t in a mood for jokes. She was still thinking.
‘No, Adam. It’s got nothing to do with mysticism. It’s just a likeness, that’s all. A nice likeness.’ She looked up at me again. ‘What was that Irishman’s name?’
*
‘That’s the only thing with Soheir,’ Wheel said, chatting to me on the way back to his office. ‘She has this spiritual kick, a little of the crystal ball. Take no notice. It doesn’t mean a thing.’
‘I’m sure,’ I lied. ‘Of course.’ And I drew hard on Graham’s pipe like a lifeline.
‘Come on. I’ll introduce you to the Delegates’ Lounge. Best bar in New York. You could use a beer, no? Cultural shock – arrival in the New World, tall buildings, going round in circles. Don’t want you jumping out a window on your first day.’
I nodded. I could use a beer.
‘You know, there was a family arrived here a few months ago, from Ceylon. She’d never been much further than a paddy-field, up-country somewhere. He was an agricultural specialist. They put the lot of them in the Plaza building, up the road, up thirty floors. Well, after a month or so being locked up in the clouds, the wife tried to take herself and her two children back home – out of the window of the apartment. Defenestration. Funny word. You’d think it had something to do with sex. Landed on East River Drive in the middle of the rush hour. Cultural shock. Awful tragedy.’
I nodded again. I could use a second beer already. We walked towards the first of the three lift banks, each of which served a third of the building. We were on the top third, the 22nd to the 38th floors.
‘What about here?’ I asked. ‘Do you have much trouble with that sort of thing – defenestration?’
‘Well, they have the trouble. We just pick up the bits afterwards in a red blanket. But, now and again. Yes, it happens. And more often than it should. There’s a lot of subdued temperament around here It’s the nature of the business.’
‘How do they get out? None of the windows open, I notice They’re all sealed.’
‘Ah, but the Directors – the D1s and 2s – they have keys.’
‘So it’s only the senior staff that do themselves in? I’d have thought they might be the least frustrated.’
‘You have a point there. I hadn’t thought of that. Well, maybe it’s the guilt that sends the directors tumbling. That would fit. It has to be one or the other, doesn’t it? Either you tell yourself you’ve got to go, the bad faith becomes unsupportable, or else it’s just plain madness – disorientation: not knowing who you are, what you’re doing, or why. There’s quite a bit of both about here. Especially the compass spinning round like a top bit. You’ll see. Takes most people quite a while to find their feet here – their “role” as they like to call it. And some never do, my god. They head straight for the rocks.’
We got off at the third-floor staff concourse, just next the main staff cafeteria, the news and candy stand and the shoe-shine man. Wheel immediately decided on an appointment with this fellow and I waited behind him while he put his boots up.
People streamed round us, queueing up for early lunch. There was a strong smell of some foreign gravy and a warm blast of scented air from secret whirring machinery. To our left at the end of a long corridor a barber’s shop advertised itself discreetly; to our right, at an equally discreet distance, was the New York Chemical Bank with a train of grave people fiddling with their wallets making their way politely to and fro; the whole area was remarkably like the first-class passenger concourse of a big tin liner, moored disconsolately and permanently beyond territorial waters, going nowhere.
Only the shoe-shine man seemed real – a middle-aged, balding New Yorker in a short-sleeved tartan shirt, bent permanently forward on a little wooden chair over his work, head bobbing furiously, his hands and forearms a dusty brown with the years of his trade. He was like a stowaway on this listless ship full of impeccable people, someone from a ghetto who had shinned up the anchor drain on our last night in port and had now been set to work his passage by the captain.
The two men exchanged scattered, staccato pleasantries for awhile, then fell silent. The sun swept off the East River through a huge glass window baking us all, exotic but tasteless cakes in a perfumed oven
Then the shoe-shine man started to hum and sing in an abrupt and inexact high tenor: some pop song from years before.
Winchester Ca-thed-draall …
… hum dum de de dum …
As my ba-by left town …
When he was finished he suddenly thumped the shoe box with his palm: ‘Next please. Step right up.’
‘Tap, tap, tap’ – the man went now, using both hands on the box. ‘Tappety, tap; tappety, tap, tap, tap,’ as though beginning something stylish on drums or sending a morse message.
I suddenly thought I felt the first intimations of Wheel’s warning cultural shock, the compass spinning madly. The sun seemed to rip through the glass, settling on all of us with the intensity of a flamethrower.
‘Tappety, tap, tap, tap …’
The building had swelled all morning with echoes, something straining behind all the appearances, an indecipherable message trying to get through – something trying desperately to be known, but which one could never quite get hold of. The music went on in the first-class saloon but there was a hole somewhere in the bottom of the boat.
‘Winchester Ca-thed-drall …’
The man had started up again, the inane tune cutting through the busy noise of the concourse in its high register, like a clue so obvious that no one notices it.
We passed through the double swing doors at the end of the concourse and the sounds were all suddenly turned out behind us like a light. The long corridor behind, which bordered the Security Council and other committee chambers, led to the Delegates’ North Lounge over a carpet so soft and dark that it turned its travellers into skiers on some small slope in the evening, gliding slowly homewards. Everyone cut their pace here, hovered like birds, the better to fall on the right man or group, exchanging diplomatic messages, before passing back to committee or on to the lounge.
This long dark ante-room was full of precisely intentioned messages; a slip of the tongue here could ruin the false consensus; you were sure of the man here before you opened your mouth; here were endless coincidental but contrived meetings. But who might approach me in this place with whispers, I wondered, linking arms over the deep carpet? And would the message be for Graham
– or one that would not come at all, the messenger having seen me for the man I was, not Graham, but the figure Mrs Taufiq had partly resurrected earlier that morning. And if that happened – what could I expect? What penalty might they contrive for stealing their man’s identity? Mrs Taufiq had raised me up again, the man of Cairo and of Durham jail that I had thought well lost. If the place was full of echoes, I realised it was because I was listening now to everything with the ears of two people, Graham and myself, moving from person to person in unnerving stereophony.
There were more than a hundred or so delegates dotted about in groups and armchairs in the huge lounge at the end of the building but not more than half a dozen people standing at the bar down by the river end of the great football pitch. And the customers here all looked English or American – journalists, Wheel told me, UN correspondents for the most part, their backs firmly to the delegates, arms and elbows against the counter, pondering the bottles with all the wan humanity of drinkers. The bar didn’t belong to the room at all; it seemed to have been tipped into the plan as an afterthought, as discreet deference to the Anglo-American habit of drinking vertically and perhaps, even more obliquely, as a special acknowledgment to the latter’s major financial contribution to the running of the organisation.
When we got down to this distant fountain, Wheel put a finger into his collar and pulled. It was hotter in the lounge than anywhere else I’d been in the building. The sun, which had been cold outside, had here baked the huge room all morning through the thirty-foot windows that ran all along its length. Now, just after midday, it had gone above the building, leaving everything done to a turn.
The delegates, lightly inspired by this warmth and coffee, released a mild euphoria on the air like the end of an unimportant embargo. For once these devious men were obvious in their games over the glass field. In this huge privacy they no longer temporised, they lost their public timidity; here they could He unequivocally.
In such a place, this hypocritical Purgatory, Wheel was in his element. We twirled our glasses. Wheel had introduced me to a strong Canadian ale. We watched the dark foam ripple round the edges, smelling the sudden release of hops and barley that pricked our noses like an explosion in a brewery. Then he lifted his eyes to the moving scene in front of us like an old racegoer, weighing form.
‘That Russian there,’ he said, pointing to a peasant eminence who had stood up near us, ‘is known as the “Russian who said Yes”. Years ago – this is his second time here – he once said “Yes” by mistake at some quite unimportant committee on agricultural tariffs. He was sent home for a year. When he came back the same committee cheered him to the echo. It was uproarious. And that’s Omar Feki. The Banker. He won’t sit down. When he first got here, twenty years ago, on his first day, he sat down – there, on one of those sofas – and had his pocket picked by another Arab. A terrible business. It turned out the robber had been one of his customers in Beirut – some old disagreement about his account. So Feki’s been on his feet ever since. They call him “Once Bitten”.’
It was only then that I noticed the couple at a table opposite the bar, their backs to the sunny view, the rose gardens and the statue of Peace beyond. The bright light had shielded them from me until that moment, keeping them more or less in silhouette, so that I had to put my hand over my eyes briefly, pretending to look out on the river, before I could make them out clearly.
The man had his legs crossed, so that one foot swayed dangerously in the path of diplomats on their way to the coffee shop beyond the bar: a long, thin foot, bound in a fine dark worsted cloth and ending in a traditional, hand-made English laced shoe. He was conspicuously lean and tall, even while seated, and just as obviously English in a way – though he couldn’t have been more than forty – that was as old-fashioned and correct as his dress. A thin, firm face, something a little pinched about the lips; careful eyes and long flat ears – a certain chiselled hollowness touched up by a confident weariness: he might have taken drugs or been the last son of a profligate earl – chances very much favoured the latter.
But it wasn’t a wooden face by any means. Only its present outlines were fixed. For the moment it had simply withdrawn the currency of expression; it was resting, as if inwardly reflecting on its assets, leaving only a rough estimate of its worth on view, so that passers-by might be warned of the stakes involved before making an investment.
Yes, these barely animate remains seemed to say – I’m very ready to smile, and more besides: at the right sort of joke from the right sort of person; two events, which, as the expression confirmed, it considered extremely unlikely in the present circumstances. The man might have been in the hall of the Travellers’ Club facing at last a long and thankfully postponed lunch date with a provincial relative.
The woman was a little younger, halfway through thirty perhaps, and where he was a little wan and fluted, she had the bearing of someone likely to be generous to a fault. But with her height, for she was tall as well, the fractional plumpness about the hips and chest, far from being a disadvantage, gave her the virtues of a classical anatomy – the slightly exaggerated contours which artists used to attempt but human beings rarely achieve.
The two of them sat there, both with tubby crystals of light Scotch, with a confidence and ease that made everyone else in the long room seem misplaced. But it was a divided confidence. One could tell immediately: they were not self-, but other-seeking.
Wheel noticed them just after I did and raised his hand. The man stood up in answer and, leaning over the woman, took her glass. Her eyes followed him as he came towards us.
‘The Jacksons,’ Wheel said. ‘Compatriots of yours, Mr Graham. Guy’s with the politicals. Floor above us.’ And when her husband was being introduced to me the woman’s eyes met mine in a brief gaze, smiling a little social message, as if to say: ‘I’m glad you’ve met him, for now so much the more easily will you meet me.’
The three of us went back to join her at their table, our glasses refilled.
‘George Graham – just joined us from London. Guy Jackson – Helen Jackson,’ Wheel pointed each of them out with his arm to me, repeating the formalities of introduction with them both individually as though he was as much aware of their separateness as I had been.
‘Mr Graham is going to report on our reports – a new spy in the nest.’ Wheel looked at both of them and laughed, but got little response. Both of them were looking at me intently, as if I was an expected guest.
And of course I was expected, by him at least. I realised that at once: Jackson was my SIS contact with London, with McCoy and Harper. They had briefed me about him. And I saw those two rugged, despoiled faces, cracked and devious in their separate despairs, rising up like a shudder in the warm and alcoholic air.
As for Helen Jackson, her name rang out for me with an echo I couldn’t catch, until suddenly I saw how it summed up her classic proportions. But at that moment, though, just after we had been introduced, she reflected her Trojan namesake like a statue. The warmth of her overture was still there, brightly on her face, but it had developed no further. The expression of welcome had frozen everywhere on her skin, startled to death.
Wheel set her animation going again with some sly remark about her presence in the building and her husband took me up with an interest in which the quality of restraint was obviously feigned, as though he were trying to get me to sell him something he wanted badly without my realising this and putting too high a price on it.
‘Wheel told me you were coming over,’ he said agreeably, as if I were a neighbour of his and had just dropped by from the end of the street. ‘With the COI, weren’t you?’
‘Yes, Reports Officer. East Africa mainly.’
Jackson lifted his glass and I noticed a brassily gold signet ring on the marriage finger. It struck one as glaringly out of place with the rest of his restrained decor, like a dropped ‘h’ in the middle of a speech from the throne. It seemed precisely intended as a vulgar flourish, calling at
tention to itself; an obscenity in the middle of the general refinement which he had purposefully isolated. I felt suddenly that he wore it as a mark of failure and not of love, as evidence of an unachieved fidelity, like a campaign medal from a dirty war.
‘God knows what you’ll make of our UN reports,’ he went on, and I could hear Wheel’s inquiries of Helen Jackson from the other side of the table ‘… and the kids?’ Guy Jackson’s voice was soft, I realised now, like an old man’s; his words spaced out too, as though he was anxious to give himself the maximum amount of time for thought still compatible with coherent expression.
‘I’m above you – the SG’s political department. Very few reports come out of us, thank God. We keep it to ourselves. But the rest of the building is an absolute snowfall. No doubt Wheel has told you. You were on the Africa desk in London, weren’t you?’
‘Latterly, yes. East Africa, Malawi, a bit of Rhodesia.’
‘I know that part myself. I farmed there for a while. In the south. Where are you staying?’
“They’ve put me up temporarily at the Tudor Hotel round the corner. Till I get an apartment.’
I was still considering the problems of accommodation ahead, the dull business of phone calls, arguments and too much money, when I stopped thinking of everything, as if I’d been shot, all die senses shocked out of me, and I was still running like a chicken without a head.
Africa. It was Africa again. ‘I farmed there for a while.’ I fell on Jackson’s casual words like a man in a music quiz trying vainly to complete a verse in a popular song. ‘… farmed there for a while. In the south’ …? The south. Farming up-country? In the old Rhodesias or South Africa? And then the answer flew at me, the corresponding phrase, the next line of music: ‘Once he was someone in the country; now, just something in the city’ – the words of some married woman (‘He doesn’t know’) in letters to George Graham. The letters I had read in Marylebone and on the boat over.
