“The Doctor seems to want to put his foot on all that.”
“Does he, indeed?”
“He told me to keep my eyes open.”
“He just wants you to pimp for him, that’s all. Have you seen the Maadi Club? A fine piece of End of Empire with the local fellows beating hell out of the suffragis instead of the English.”
The old taxi swerved violently round a circle of cracked earth that had once been a lawn and deposited us at a little sentry box, brightly lit by a sort of concentration camp spotlight overhead. Henry greeted an ancient retainer dressed half in a very old cord jacket with “Maadi Sporting Club” across the front and half in a ragged galibeah a size too large for him.
“Goo’ evenin’, Mr. Henry.” The old man gave us a tired salute and I saw that he had some sort of military badge on the lapel of his coat.
“Queen’s Own 11th Hussars. Ahmed used to feed the horses.” And we were walking towards a long yellow building, surrounded by shrubs and trees, which looked like a sizeable public lavatory in the undergrowth. The main room was packed tight and very busy; a record player ground away at full volume in one corner — “I have often walked down this street before …”—and a selection of bronzed, rather bored young people were pushing each other self-consciously round the floor.
“The original cast recording … I saw it last week in New York … Marvellous …”
Some others were chatting next to the record player, led by a sallow middle-aged Egyptian in a sharkskin suit which glistened like jaundiced flesh in the hard light.
“Dear me. Gala night. They have one every month in the winter.”
Henry pushed his way to another room beyond. On one side was a long bar and the other was crammed tight with horsehair sofas and leather armchairs and tightly knit family groups — old mothers-in-law dressed completely in black and screaming five-year-old children running amok with Coca-Cola bottles and straws. Sweating, beady-eyed suffragis pushed and cursed their way among the crowd with beaten copper trays piled high with whisky-sodas and tall icy bottles of Stella on their way to a third room beyond. From here came the click of billiard balls, and sometimes a silence followed by a terrible gale of gruff laughter as a ball bounced through a doorway followed by a suffragi, laden with a tray of empty glasses, to pick it up.
Over the bar were two large yellowing photographs of the old Shepheard’s Hotel and the Cairo Turf Club and between them a gilt and mahogony panel inscribed with the names of past Club Presidents and Secretaries: a splendid roll of Anglo-Saxon names and ancient dates which I thought at first must be a war memorial until I realised that someone called Dalton-Smith couldn’t have been killed in nine successive years.
There wasn’t what any of the old Club members would have called a “European” in sight. Except Bridget who was sitting with Lola, and I presumed her parents, at the far side of the room.
“That’s the Girgises over there. With old Lola. You don’t often see them all together. He was a Minister with Farouk. You’d like them. We’ll go over later.” Henry waved at them but I’d turned around quickly and started to order.
“What would you like?”
‘No, let me. Your first day. Let’s have some champagne.”
4
How long have you known them?”
“The Girgises? I knew Bridget at the University here. She was a student of mine. Her parents live round the corner. She’s English — Mrs. Girgis. She came out here before the war. Why? Have you met them — I mean Bridget?”
“I don’t think so.”
Henry looked at me in mock astonishment, his head thrown back quizzically, smiling. He had the knack of making one lie — and then making it obvious.
“Perhaps … Bridget. I met her — I’m pretty sure — in the Continental several months ago.”
“I thought so. Most people out here now run across them at some point or other. With Lola? — at the bar.”
“Yes, I think so.”
“More than likely. They used to go to the bar in the Cosmopolitan in the old days.”
“They just move around the bars, do they? I thought they were secretaries.”
“Bridget had a fellow who lived in the Cosmopolitan. An Englishman, something to do with soda water. Chucked out with the rest of them. They were to have been married, I gather. Rather tough.”
Henry’s hair had begun to ruffle, almost to stand up on end as he ran his hands through it, and his glasses had steamed up in the heat as he quaffed great mouthfuls of the Asti Gancia. There hadn’t been any real champagne but there were still some Italians in the country.
“And Lola?”
“She just shares the flat. She was a belly dancer in Beirut. Got landed with a nonexistent film contract here with a non-existent producer. She wants to be an actress.”
“They all do, I suppose.”
“No, Lola’s quite a good actress. Too good really for the song-and-dance sort of thing that goes on around here.”
“Why does she stay then?”
“She’s happy here. A lot of people are, strangely enough. Except Bridget.”
“Mrs. Girgis — a new colleague, just arrived. An Irishman if you please, but better than nothing, a step in the right direction — Mr. Marlow.”
Henry introduced us and I shook hands all round like someone at a funeral, leaning over Lola’s shoulder so that I was aware only of her thick bluish hair and a heavy, sweet smell like old honey. I tried hard not to look at Bridget at all. But she took the initiative, as she’d done before and was so often to do again.
“Where’s your friend Cherry?” she said brightly.
“You know each other then?” wondered Mrs. Girgis. “Sit down, do.”
“But there are no chairs — Esma!” Mr. Girgis turned and bellowed at a suffragi who came dancing across towards us gesturing hopelessly.
“Ma fishe chairs, Effendi — ma fishe!”
“Yallah, yallah ala tennis court,” Mr. Girgis advised him loudly. “‘Ma fishe’ chairs indeed. It’s ‘ma fishe’ everything here these days. Since the English left. There’s a dozen chairs outside — just too damn lazy. So you’ve met my daughter then. And who is this Cherry? I knew an Irishman once, out here with the irrigation people, tried to blow up a sluice gate at Aswan. A revolutionary! Can you imagine — as if we hadn’t enough of our own. Well, it’s good news to get some of you people back here anyway. What do they say? — ‘The Best of British Luck’?”
He raised his glass in a cumbersome arthritic gesture. Mr. Girgis obviously missed the British. He had a heavy, bruised, old man’s face — sad and peasant-like and Balkan, with a droopy moustache and a white film of spittle at each corner of his mouth. He was wearing frayed dancing pumps and an Edwardian smoking jacket and might have been a waiter at the old Carlton Grill. The suffragi returned with two decrepit deck chairs which he at once got in a fearful tangle over before I straightened one of them out and put it down firmly next to Mr. Girgis. Whatever I might have to say to Bridget that evening could wait until I’d had a few more drinks. On the far side of the table Henry had placed himself between Bridget and Mrs. Girgis and had embarked on an account of the royal caravan that afternoon at the school.