“Major and Mrs. Collins,” George was saying. “He was retired. One of the military attachés, I think, to Farouk’s father. An old man. He didn’t want to leave. Very bad luck really.”
We had reached the outskirts of the city. The pressure lamps above the brightly decorated barrows selling rissoles and beans flared at street corners and there was a smell of paraffin and urine when we stopped at the traffic lights, drifting in from the sidestreets below the Citadel, completely obliterating the burnt French tobacco.
The flat was on a lower floor of Bridget’s apartment block in Garden City, looking out over the river across the corniche: there were the usual collection of boabs in the long hallway making up their beds in preparation for their night’s vigil and a drowsy, ill-kempt soldier with a sten-gun who got up from a chair next to the door of the flat and saluted George in a muddled way as we arrived. The remains of a clumsy wax and ribbon seal which had been over the lock hung down now like a tattered Christmas decoration.
George opened the door with a proprietary flourish, turned on a large chandelier in the middle of the hallway and gave us all a stencilled catalogue with the pompous formality of an immigration official. It was a large, high-ceilinged apartment done in expensive bad taste; half a dozen rooms leading off the central hall and drawing-room, the furniture a mixture of pseudo Louis Quinze and dowdy Home Counties without dust covers; there was a curiously lived-in feeling about the whole place though the owners must have left a year before. I noticed a package of Gauloises under the huge gilded mirror over the mantelpiece. George had gone to a cabinet in the corner and was mixing whiskies, clunking in the ice from a silver bucket which had a polo pony and a rider as a handle.
“Yes, I will be sorry to leave. It has been good here,” George said when we’d sat down in chairs looking over the river. He raised his glass to the furniture: “We’ve had some good times here together.”
“You live here then?” I asked.
“It was best to be sure of the things. Best way. There are some valuable pieces …” His heavy eyes twinkled as he looked at Bridget. He had the traditional sallow, suspicious good looks of a Levantine commercant — a condescending way of looking at people, as if he had already used them or was about to consider doing so. There was an air of tired success about him, of deep boredom with life. One felt that even before he was born someone had been in his debt.
“George has been having some trouble with his wife,” Bahaddin put in slowly, dragging out the sentence, relishing the idea, as though it were the one pleasure lacking in his own abundant marriages.
George acknowledged the fact with a gesture of mock despair and a slow smile.
“I am helping Major Collins too. There are a few pieces here and there, some silver, which he’s anxious to get back to England. By the law, of course, he can’t touch them. But I think I can help him out. So it suits everyone.” And he glanced at Bridget — casually, confidently, as a cat reminds itself of the mouse still in the corner.
“Well, let us take a look at the list. There may be something — even for you, Miss Girgis. Mrs. Collins had some rather — jolie, how do you say? — yes some rather jolie things.”
I looked down at the smudged sheet and could see nothing at all in what I imagined to be Bridget’s taste; yet I was imagining, perhaps George knew.
Louis XV style Salon furnishings, gilt and carved wood. Aubusson tapestry upholstery. Console with mirror and silver-gilt wood. Bokhara and Scutari carpets. Antique clock. Oak Secretaire. English Silver tea service. “Singer Electric sewing machine, (DC)…
The list went on interminably. There were no nylon stockings, something which would have been useful in Egypt at the time; perhaps George had Bridget in mind for the sewing machine.
We wandered round the rooms, drinks in our hands, looking at the bits and pieces without enthusiasm. There was a small bookcase in the study; two volumes of Cromer’s Egypt, Meinertzhagen’s Diaries and a number of regimental histories Bahaddin had gone into the kitchen and I could hear him shuffling his hands about in the silver drawer and then the sudden whirr of an electric blender — his metallic obsessions being given full rein. Henry was looking at the oak secretaire in the study, opening each of the minute drawers. He took out a pile of visiting cards. I looked over his shoulder at one of them:
Major Edward M. Collins, M.C.
Military Attaché
to
H.R.H. KING FUAD I
Abdine Palace
Cairo
And there was an old Kodak folder with some yellowing prints inside: a thin, unsmiling woman in a solar topee on a camel in front of the third pyramid at Giza.
George had gone into the bedroom with Bridget. I could hear his voice in the background — soft and insistent, a caricature of the Greek manner in such circumstances.
“Now what do you think of this? … Not quite of the moment, it’s true; but the material is superb. It’s going as a ‘lot’, all the dresses, but I could make an exception. In your case — ”
“I’ll have to try it on.”
And in a moment Bridget was in front of us in the drawing-room wearing a long velvet wrap with a hem dragging along the floor in mottled fur; a sort of skating dress, something, perhaps, dating from the period of Major Collins’ attachment to the last Czar.
“I like it. Let’s live here — why don’t we? Couldn’t we take over the lease — if we all paid something?”
And she swirled about on her toes, glaring at each of us in a mad way, the ghastly fur hem rising from the floor and spinning round like a ring of old ferrets chasing each other.
“Better than that dreadful monastery of a school. Better than my dingy bird’s-nest upstairs. Couldn’t we, George?”
George said nothing, but stood behind her like a satisfied ringmaster. Bahaddin had turned on a small portable radio and some dreadful squeaky Arab music emerged and he started to wiggle round Bridget, thrusting his backside violently about in time to the music, clapping his hands.
I poured myself another whisky.
“It’s a pity Lola isn’t here,” I said. “She’s rather good at that.”
George took his coat off and joined Bahaddin in paying court to Bridget, except that he circled round her in the Greek fashion, both hands arched above his head, kicking alternate legs and flapping a silk pocket handkerchief. Both of them had already begun to sweat in the humid night air, patches of dark moisture spreading in great stains beneath their armpits. I supposed they would all be showering in the whisky soon.
Henry had gone out on to the terrace.
“Why does she do it?”
“She’s unhappy, I told you. I think it’s rather splendid.”
“Unhappy about what — about not getting enough men to go to bed with?”
Henry took off his glasses and rubbed them on the tail of his shirt. He spoke as if he were explaining an important point of syntax to his class.
“You must remember Cairo’s pretty well been cleaned out of her sort — of our sort that is — in the last year. She hasn’t had much fun, and we’ve not all got your self-control. Anyway you had a go at her yourself. Why should it bother you? When the English were here it was fine. She had all the ‘right’ connections then. Now she has none. I suppose she feels now she has to take her chances, the chance to live it up like before.”
“But those tykes — in there — they’re not exactly Brigade of Guards, are they?”