The metallic rattle of their voices had softened now under the heavy canopy of trees.
“Eh! Les ‘spare parts’—ils n’existent plus. On ne conduit pas aujourd’hui …”
“Ah, mais oui, je me souviens très bien, des voyages qu’on a fait au Lac Mariout. Et les fleurs là-bas — des asphodèles, des mignonettes, des anémones. Et des autres — des fleurs tout à fait uniques. Ca n’existe plus bien sûr. Ily a un dépôt du gaz là-bas maintenant. Un odeur tout à fait différente, je vous assure!”
Like trembling excited birds they vied for Cherry’s attention. And Cherry with a pained expression would turn and stare at each of them in turn, his eyes wide open in mock astonishment — a face of incredible seriousness and unbelief. And then with a special twinkle lighting up the whole football of flesh: “Mais je peux vous conduire … Je connais le chemin!” And they would wave shaky fingers at him — “Oh! Comee vous êtes méchant!”—before breaking into enthusiastic cackles.
As we approached the gates of their villas wizened arthritic porters rose up from the dust like old newspapers in a light wind, saluting stiffly as the ladies crossed the threshold, giving Cherry and me the wary hopeless glance of crippled protectors. The broken arm of a lawn sprinkler clanked somewhere in the twilight and a Daimler lurked in a garage without wheels. I had no wish to go back to Europe.
3
“There is a train of course. The Helwan train from Bab-el-Luk. Every ten minutes. Get off at Maadi. But I imagine you’ll be taking a car.”
The Headmaster’s voice on the telephone was assured, rather condescending and impeccably English. I was surprised for his name was Dr. El Sayid and when we met he was certainly Egyptian. With the departure of so many of our group I had managed to get transferred to the El Nasr school in Maadi, previously Albert College, Cairo, and the Eton of the Middle East until a year before.
The Doctor clicked his fingers suddenly and several porters in grey serge galibeahs grabbed my luggage and disappeared into a long low prison-like compound with small windows.
“I’ll have them put your things in your room. You’ll be a form master. Fifth I think. Your rooms are above class.”
He had darted on ahead of me after the porters.
“Let’s hope you like it better here. What with the English — and I may say the Irish more recently — we’ve been having too many changes. It’s been rather unsettling — ” and he added, looking straight ahead so that I hardly heard him — “for a school like this.”
There was an edge of dangerous efficiency in the Doctor’s voice which I didn’t like, a call to order much at odds with my previous experience of the country. We had reached the door of my room on the second storey of the compound, along a low corridor reeking of that peculiar suffocating smell of baked concrete and plaster which one gets in desert countries. One of the porters produced a key and opened the door.
“Your predecessor here — a countryman of yours, I believe — kept alcohol in his room. A Mr. Simmonds. We had to lock the door. I’m sure this won’t be necessary in your case. It’s not only a matter of Moslem tradition, this isn’t Al Azhar after all, it’s a matter of policy here as regards staff. I’ll send Bahaddin up in half an hour, to show you round. He’s Captain of school. Oh and by the way,” he’d turned from the door and was rubbing his long fingers delicately together — “we don’t tip the suffragis or boabs here. There’s a fund for them at Christmas which you may want to contribute to.”
The Doctor moved briskly away down the corridor as if he’d just had a cold shower. The porters saluted dully and were about to move off when I startled them with a ten-piastre note apiece.
My room looked out over a large scabrous playing field — odd tufts of bleached grass and the rest a sandy loam with distinct intimations of the desert beneath. Maadi had been built by the English at the end of the last century along a feeder canal from the Nile ten miles south of Cairo as a sort of suburban arboretum, an Egyptian Bagshot complete with every sort of exotic shrub and tree and civil servant. Now, with the fading advertisements for soda water, Virol and Stephen’s Ink which peeled from the walls of the small row of shops by the railway line, and the departure of the men whose lives revolved around those products, Maadi was slowly withering, eroding under the desert winds, sinking back into the sand.
Bats began to flip and turn in the stillness and insects squeaked their knees together in the remnants of the herbaceous border outside the window. The sun dipped into the line of pine trees which flanked the canal at the end of the playing field — a great crimson chunk of fire spreading from strawberry into pink and finally a very pale blue over the sky above. A cricket ball, it must have been, clunked somewhere and three suffragis — skullcaps awry, their galibeahs tucked up into their pants — struggled in a manic dance in one corner of the field with the crossbar of a soccer goal.
Bahaddin seemed to be at least in his middle twenties — a minute, perfectly round face, dark, but with traces of yellow, like a ripening blackberry. In his cream school blazer, flannels and a silver name-plate around his wrist he gave the impression of a dentist in a hurry — constantly moving key-rings, nail clippers and other pieces of metal from one pocket to another. He stared at me carefully, as if wondering how best to proceed with the extraction, and then offered me a Player’s cigarette.
“My father makes them.”
I looked at him carefully in return.
“I mean — he has the Arabian concession. Sheik Bahaddin …” He didn’t finish the sentence but with an expansive gesture left the rest of his father’s identity hanging in the air as a glittering image of unlimited power and riches.
“One of the Trucial States?”
“Yes. He’s with the Head now. I don’t think I’ll be staying on. At least if I do, only till I get enough ‘O’ levels. London University, I hope. My sister lives there. South Kensington. Do you know it? She’s doing political science.”
“I see …”
Bahaddin started to clip away at a portion of loose skin above his thumb.
“Of course I don’t really take classes here any more. I’ve been going through the material privately.”
“What — with Mr. Simmonds?”
“No. With Mr. Edwards. He does senior English here. You’ll meet him. A very decent fellow. English — or rather, White African. What does one call them from those colonies? Did you know Mr. Simmonds? He was from Ireland.”
“No. I understand he spent most of the time here locked in his room with a bottle.”
“The Doctor has a thing about that — he’s been on to you about it? Well don’t worry. I can get you all the drink you want from the Club in Maadia, I’m a member. The Doctor is mad.”
“And his leather elbows and tweed jacket — that’s part of the madness?”
“That’s the previous Head’s jacket. He had to leave nearly all his stuff here — twenty-four hours to get out of the country. So Sayid took the lot over, silver spoons, golf clubs, everything. The Head gave it all to him in fact.”
“I don’t suppose he had much alternative.”
“I don’t think it was purely, or even partly, a matter of alternatives.”
“Oh?”
Bahaddin looked at me with the confident pitying air of a judge about to pass a final and savage sentence.
“If you really want to know — I think that’s the answer.” And he’d sprung up so quickly and gone over to several old school photographs by the door that I thought for a second that he was about to unmask an eavesdropper. The Doctor himself perhaps. “There. That’s El Sayid in the back row. And that’s the last Headmaster in the front. He wasn’t the Head then of course — junior Divinity I think.”