“You’re the schoolmaster. Aren’t children like that? Doing what they want. Isn’t it supposed to be good for them?”
“Come on …”
She frowned. “Well, anyway, there was what’s called ‘another man’ … Christ.”
“I know. I’ve heard.”
“Henry told you. ‘The man in the soda-syphon’ he used to call him.”
I had got up to order another drink.
“You don’t have to. They’ll come if you just look at them. Let’s have some more Sudanis as well.” And we ordered another lot of the little papery brown nuts in a saucer, squeezing them out of their shells through our fingers, and washing them down with gin and tonic.
“Henry seems rather a postman these days, the way he passes on everything. Still, it doesn’t matter. There’s only been him — and the soda-syphon.”
“And the others? — you just made love with them. There wasn’t anything else to it.”
“Why? Why should there be ‘others’?”
“Why make love with someone you hardly know? I’d just assumed there were.”
“Fool.”
A BOAC staging crew came in behind us and made for the bar, demanding loudly their pewter mugs which they kept there, and half a dozen bottles of Stella, and talking about a party in Uxbridge the previous week. The great lateen sail of a felucca reared up over the terrace, bleached dead white in years of the same weather, the curved mast rising again having passed under the Kasr el Nil bridge just below the hotel. The ropes squeaked sadly across the heat on the water like a small animal dying in the sun.
“Fool.’
And she took her drink up to the bar where someone called Roger, with much facetious encouragement from the others, made a great fuss over her and gave her a carton of tax-free Player’s.
She phoned me next morning at the school. Mahmoud, who dealt with the coffee in the staff room, took the call and through force of habit gave the message to Henry.
“She wants to speak to you,” Henry said flatly when he got back. And I supposed his passion for her to be as dead as mine was.
“I’m not sorry,” she said at once, her voice ringing down like the start of a song. “And you’re quite right to be offended.”
I said nothing.
“So where do we go from here?” And then, fearing the answer might go against her, she rushed on without waiting for a reply. “What’s Henry answering the phone for? I asked for you. Does he live in your pocket — messenger boy as well as postman?” And then, the wind gone out of her bravado: “Can you be separated? I’m with my parents down the road. Can you come round?” And again, like a ticker tape that won’t be answered, which tells the rise and fall of fortune in the same second, in the same hurried accents, she went on: “I am sorry. I am.”
“There’s soccer this afternoon. I’ve got to look after it”
“Can I come round there then?”
She walked along the touch line with Henry, looking at the game every now and then, chatting with him, laughing. They might have been parents up from the country, come to see their child score the winning goal. Two of the four school houses were playing — Port Tewfik against Suez I think it was; I’m not very clear as most of the boys still called the houses by their old names — I think that afternoon it was Trafalgar against Waterloo. The ball bounced around uncertainly on the hard, cracked soil and once it disappeared into the murky canal on one side of the field.
“Send Fawzy after it, sir, he’s got bilharzia already.”
It was very hot and at half time everyone collapsed and drank Coca-Cola and pushed the tops into the large cracks in the soil.
“Sir! They’re putting the tops into the ground.”
A tiny figure with a serious adult’s face in an immaculate soccer outfit rushed up to me as I joined Henry and Bridget.
“Are they? Who are you — you’ve not been playing have you?”
“I’m El Sayid, sir. Hamdy El Sayid. The substitute, sir.”
“Substitutes aren’t allowed in soccer.”
“Yes, I know. But I’m the Headmaster’s son.”
“Oh. Well go and tell them to take the tops out again.”
He ran back to the others, shouting as he went, and they dug the tops out of the ground and threw them at him.
Henry turned towards Bridget. She was wearing a white cotton outfit with a small gold cross round her neck — like a nun in a sleeveless dress — her dark hair tamed neatly round the back of her head in a circle. There was something prim about her — prim but uncertain; a nun in the Dark Continent.
“Here comes that troglodyte Bahaddin,” she said.
Bahaddin in his blazer, with a friend in a shiny business suit, was coming towards us along the trees by the canal. Both were gesticulating violently.
“His stockbroker, I should think. Not much on the exchange out here these days. Cotton’s dropped right out of the market. They’ve mortgaged the lot to the Russians.”
“Good afternoon — Miss Girgis, Mr. Marlow.” Bahaddin bowed slightly towards me, fingering his silver wrist tag and eyeing us all very seriously. And then, with a big puff of breath and putting both hands across his chest like a man about to send a message in semaphore, he launched himself into what was obviously the real matter in hand.
“May I present Mr. Sofreides, Auctioneer.” He added his profession awkwardly, as though it were a title like Esquire. “There’s a sale tomorrow. Some sequestrated property. An English family. Mr. Sofreides is handling it and I thought perhaps you might like to come along and have a preview. There are some rather nice things, I understand — perhaps to enlighten your room, Mr. Marlow.”
“Enliven, Bahaddin. Not enlighten.”
He bowed again, very slightly, in Henry’s direction, but his eyes remained fixed on the piece of metal at Bridget’s neck.
“I’m glad to see my small gift so beautifully displayed.”
“Not at all, Bahaddin. It was a beautiful gift.” They bowed to each other again. A strained formality had come over everyone.
“You’d like to look at the things then? They’re just down the road. In Garden City. And perhaps you might do me the honour of dining with me afterwards? I’ve reserved a table at the Estoril.”
“Yes. Shall we do that, Bridget?” Henry said as though she were his wife.
“Why not?”
I tried to catch her attention but the sun had fallen in the sky behind her, blinding me as I looked towards her.
“Sir, they’ve had ten minutes.”
El Sayid’s long face pushed its way into the circle around our waists and he held out a gunmetal fob-watch towards me with a triumphant look.
“And Mr. Marlow — will you be joining us?”
Bahaddin didn’t look at me, as if my answer couldn’t be of any importance, but had turned and was examining El Sayid’s watch very carefully.
“Certainly. I’d like to.”
Bahaddin was now completely absorbed in the watch, putting it to his ear, shaking it very gently, stroking his cheek with it, cosseting it in his hand as I’d seen him do before with every piece of metal that he came across or had about his person. And then at last he said, looking at his own gold Rolex, “But why is it two hours slow, El Sayid — why is that? Exactly two hours.”
“It’s Greenwich time, Bahaddin. From Big Ben. The Greenwich Meridian, the zero line of longitude.”
Mr. Sofreides — who had very soon asked to be called George — had a large, pre-war Packard and we drove back to Cairo along the river bank just as the sun began to dip behind the pyramids on the other side of the water. An absolutely still evening, the smoke from George’s Gauloise swirling slowly back to Bahaddin and myself, the others chattering away like a family in the front.