“And they’re not Egyptians either. She draws the line there. Force of habit I suppose. Foolish of her; I don’t. But I agree it’s rather a bore. Let’s go and eat.”
Bahaddin appeared in the doorway, flapping the tail of his dripping shirt and mopping his brow. He’d been drinking as well as dancing.
“My dear sirs, I shall have to change before dining. George has offered me a choice from Major Collins’s wardrobe — shirts, trousers, dinner jackets, decorations, everything. Come and help me choose.”
“Take Bridget. She knows what you look best in. We’re going on to eat.”
We came indoors. Bridget had collapsed on the sofa and was running a piece of ice from her whisky over her forehead.
“What have you two men been at — making out a report on me? Can’t leave being schoolmasters, can you? Peter, come with me, will you” She got up and I joined her in the bedroom where she picked up her dress. “I know. I was supposed to meet you today, not all the others. And I will meet you. We will. Don’t you understand?”
She had so many ways of looking serious, one could never tell from her expression what degree of any feeling she intended to convey.
“It doesn’t matter.”
She went on into the bathroom and had started to undress when I arrived. I sat on a metal laundry bin by the lavatory.
“What’s wrong if I dance with them?”
“There’s so many of ‘them’—so few of ‘us’. We have to meet in bathrooms.”
She turned the shower on. Again, the pale body, the darkly sun-browned circle round her neck, the water cascading over her arms, patterning itself, dividing, merging into different whirls and eddies as it ran off the oils of her skin — not just standing under the shower, but giving herself to it, eyes closed, head tilted back, arms crossed over her breasts, like a martyr at the stake suffering a delicious agony in the fire. She opened one eye at me through the water.
“We ought to have made love properly, that first time. That’s all. Then you wouldn’t be so worried. You have this possessive thing. I know.” She opened the other eye, looking at me charitably, as if that were all I possessed.
“You think we just want each other,” I said, “in that way.”
I lit a cigarette, twirling it casually in my fingers, and she stepped out of the bath and bent down and kissed me intensely.
“You worry so much. Yes I do think that. I do. Is there anything wrong?”
The water dripped down from her hands about my face, over my collar, and I looked at her rather glumly. I do, I do… her trick of repeating a phrase like this was what really worried me. She seemed to emphasise the physical part of our relationship because she saw no additional parts to it, either then or in the future. And yet it was there, in that clinical, white-tiled bathroom with its bidet and a great round faded box of Mrs. Collins’s dusting powder which smelt of old oranges, that I first started to love Bridget, beyond simply needing her, being jealous of her. And she must have sensed this, and wanted to encourage this new emotion, for the next thing she did was to look at me with embarrassment, with an expression I’d never seen on her face before, as if I’d suddenly broken in upon her, the first man ever to see her naked. She stood there, perturbed, with an unhappy face, like a schoolgirl stuck with her prep.
“Aren’t you going to get dressed? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Throw me that towel will you, Peter.” And she draped herself carefully in it from head to foot. It was impossible to kiss her in return.
I thought at the time that our relationship had simply become more appropriate, more real; in fact it was I who had become more appropriate in her eyes; not a Guards officer or a third secretary at the Embassy, true, but something in the same line of country: an English teacher at the snob school in Cairo. Unsatisfied in sex, and therefore temporarily disapproving of it, I had drawn from her an old memory of the proprieties of love, and the ways in which it can become a means rather than an end. I had reminded her of something her mother had once told her about men — or perhaps it had been a lecture to the sixth form after class from a spinster housemistress.
I started to love her at a moment when she had ceased simply to need me, as someone to make love with, but saw in our association a less tangible, more important outcome. And that’s what it became, as it never should have done, that evening in the bathroom: an association and not an affair — a liaison with a respectable future without the limitations which pleasure for its own sake might have imposed on it. I had become something too good to waste on pleasure alone. So that now, in trying to remember when we’d been most at ease, most honest together, I think of the beginning of it all, before there were any special advantages for her in our being together: I think of our casual failure on the chaise-longue in the little room against the sun as the happiest time. Certainly, from then on, we were a success in every conventional way.
It was Bahaddin, a little drunk and wearing one of Major Collins’s boiled shirts, who first noticed the change. We were walking towards the Estoril which lay half way along a small alleyway between Kasrel Nil and Soliman Pasha. Before, the St. James had been the best restaurant in Cairo but it had closed and the weary little flower lady with her dark shawl and someone else’s child had moved her site from there to the mock-Spanish doorway of the Estoril and was now berating the customers in a wailful voice, thrusting white carnations in their faces, while the child slowed them up by their coat tails.
“Sir!” Bahaddin had given her fifty piastres and had bought us all a flower. He gave me two. I looked at him. “Sir, it is for you to give to Miss Girgis.” He was impeccably polite, bowing slightly, his feet together, his boiled shirt glistening in the lights from the restaurant, like an Edwardian stage-door-Johnny. There was something ridiculously gallant about him so that I thought at first that he was embarking on some subtle joke.
“Why Bahaddin, have you given her too many flowers yourself already?”
“Not at all, sir.” He was almost offended. “Simply Miss Girgis is with you. It is manners — for you to do the honours.”
The flower was the beginning of all those many formalities which were to plague us later but at the time I lent myself to Bahaddin’s gesture with perfect ease and just the right amount of ceremony; I lent myself blindly to the conspiracy: I pushed the flower behind Bridget’s ear and kissed her lightly. It must have been exactly what she wanted in the new roles which she had cast for us both; the evening passed without her looking at, or hardly speaking to, anyone but me. Only George was visibly annoyed. At odd moments between courses, when we had come off the tiny dance floor by the bar, he would pull himself away from some intense conversation with Henry or Bahaddin about Egyptian affairs and look reproachfully at us with his watery eyes. After all, he had made a bid for Bridget earlier which had gone unnoticed in a subsequent overwhelming suit from someone whom he could never have contemplated as a rival.
But his was a momentary shadow, his greedy disappointed attitude an encouragement even, and I completely forgot my worry about why Bahaddin and Henry were so correspondingly uninterested in Bridget that evening and how she had come about the small gold cross, Bahaddin’s gift to her. For the moment, for the first time, I felt no need to wonder about her past, her lovers, for she had, as I thought, added that extra dimension to our relationship, which I expected then of any affair, which would set me up above any mere lover: the dimensions of care and trust and permanence. The trouble was I thought such things could co-exist with passion; while she had learned to expect them only in the context of marriage, when the passion had quite disappeared. For her passion would always be a thing on its own, something she could only give to a stranger.