I looked at the jolly young Arab faces in their high collars and Edwardian blazers, their dark woolly heads sticking up like ninepins along the back row — but merging at once into four more rows of solid young Empire-builders beneath.
“You see,” Bahaddin said triumphantly, “‘Albert College — 1928’. Some years they let more Arabs in than in others. It depended on the riots in Cairo, on how the Egyptians had been behaving to their Lords and Masters. That was a good year, quite a few wogs in the back row … They used to be called ‘Belcher’s Boys’, he was mainly responsible for their entry — had some idea about training them to be the future leaders of their country. Well, El Sayid was his particular cup of tea that year. That’s the story.”
“Not an unusual one in this part of the world I’d say. Has it done any harm?”
“Wait till you get to know the Doctor better — you can judge for yourself. I’d better go now. My father must be about ready to start his caravan. May I show you round the place later?”
“I’m worried about Bahaddin. I think he smokes.”
Dr. El Sayid was putting away a pair of laboratory scales when I arrived in his study and there was a package in front of him neatly wrapped up in tissue paper.
“He must be as old as I am.”
“Indeed?” The Doctor looked at me quizzically as if the fact of Bahaddin’s age had never struck him before.
“Yes. I suppose he is a little elderly for this place. But what can one do? Quite a few of them don’t pay at all now since Suez. Let alone in advance. And in gold.”
He fingered the tissue package on the desk and then thumped it against the wood a few times like a bar of chocolate.
“Desert Gold. Desert Gold …”
He murmured the words like an incantation, as though they evoked in him some deeply pleasurable memory, something which he had lost.
“Besides, he’s doing his ‘O’ levels again this year,” Dr. El Sayid went on very much more briskly.
“He told me.”
“I’d like him to get a few of them this time. Show them we aren’t quite off the map out here. We’ll just have to persevere with Bahaddin for the time being.”
The Doctor, his hands braced against the table, looked at the tissue package sadly and then he sprang up suddenly and locked it away in a large safe in the corner, shielding it clumsily with his body so that I wouldn’t see the combination.
“Well now, Mr. Marlow — to give you some essential background to the school, a little bit about our routines and ideals — the two so often go together, don’t you think? — in education. There have been changes of course. We’re not a Public School any more but the College is being run on exactly the same lines, just as it was before this recent trouble. The Minister’s very much behind me on that. Take this College for instance: the English were very good at schools like this — the great Dr. Arnold … it’s a very old tradition and we can make use of it out here today. The College can play a vital role in the new Egypt. I’d like you to see it that way in your work here.”
“I can see it’s an advantage to have people go on learning English but surely the rest of it’s just perpetuating privilege — and somebody else’s privileges at that. Was that part of the revolution?”
“I fancy that’s part of every revolution, Mr. Marlow. There has to be an élite — and nowhere more than in the sphere of education. That’s where it all begins. We have a great responsibility. One has got to be able to offer people something a little over their heads — there’ll always be a few who are tall enough, as it were, to benefit from institutions like this.”
“I should have thought it was simply a question of their being rich enough. Still.”
The Doctor seemed to consider my point with great care, furrowing his brow and looking down intently at his fingers on the table. Then, almost in the movements of a pianist embarking on a delicate and well remembered passage, he looked up slowly, his face quite cleared of any distortion or emotion, his voice carrying all the pain of both.
“I hope that before too long we may get some of our English staff back here, when things settle down. Meanwhile we shall just have to make do as best we can.”
He spaced the words out quietly and very precisely, like a nanny giving a last warning, then turned, literally, to other matters — swinging his chair round and gazing at a heavy bronze statue of a Greek discus thrower on a corner cupboard.
“As regards policy here, the rules and so on: I’m sure it won’t take you long to familiarize yourself with them. Our attitudes here are much the same, I imagine, as they were in your own school. There’s only one other thing — in which schools like this in Egypt, being a Moslem country, differ from similar ones in England. Some of the boys here, a very few I’m glad to say, are inclined to strike up associations — well, outside the norm. I suppose one might say that it’s perfectly understandable within a general context out here, we’re a friendly people after all — but I can’t have them doing it openly in the corridors in front of the others. I’m afraid to say there’s been rather too much of that in the past. I’d be glad if you’d keep your eyes open. I want to put a stop to it entirely.”
“A stop to what? I don’t understand.”
“To their holding hands! Good God, must I spell everything out? To their holding hands — and worse!” And he got up very suddenly, rising straight up into the air as though weights had been taken off his feet, and walked rapidly over to the window, slapping his hands together with insane vigour.
“I see. I’ll keep an eye open then.”
“Well, did you get the Gospel — the Book of Rules?”
“Yes. Is he really mad?”
“Not at all. Just more English than the English. The Doctor knows what he’s doing, he frightens the wits out of them down at the Ministry. Practically every Sheik and Emir and Arab tycoon in the Middle East sends his sons here — even since Suez and just because of the Doctor. They think they’re still getting the real British thing here — Eton and Harrow and toasted muffins; those leather patches and the accent — it gets them completely. The propaganda value for Nasser is enormous, not to mention the gold. As long as Bahaddin and the other Crown Princes stay on here the Doctor can do as he pleases.”
The Staff Room was empty. The other Egyptian housemasters had long since taken up their various positions in the dormitories; I’d seen their cubicles at the end of each of them — “Port Said”, “Ismailia”, “Suez”, and “Port Tewfik”—like stations of the cross the four houses in the school had been renamed after the ports on the canal in honour of the great Egyptian victories that had occurred there. Henry Edwards sat at a long ink-stained table sipping Turkish coffee and reading the Egyptian Gazette.
“I’m surprised he had any more of you Irish back here. They had job enough at the Ministry getting the Doctor to take Simmonds and he was out quick enough.”
“What did Sayid want to get rid of Simmonds for? He wasn’t Egyptian at least and isn’t that what the Sheiks want — anything but an Arab education?”
“The Doctor wants to force the Ministry to get the English back here as soon as possible. You Irish are — or were — in the way. He wants the old sort of staff back if he can get them. Duds from the home counties with the right accents. Egypt still reminds a lot of people in England of turbanned servants and gin and tonics on wicker chairs looking out over sunsets on the Nile. And for an ill-paid, overworked usher stuck in somewhere like Reading it must seem quite a paradise out here. Especially with those traditional British inclinations, if they have them. That’s still rather an inducement out here you know — the chance of getting your hands on that sort of limitless sexual provender.”