Luckily I never got to know Sofreides well enough to ask him if Bridget had slept with him that night, as Henry told me she had long afterwards in England. And she denied it vehemently when I asked her just before we split up. Certainly she and George both left us at the entrance to the block of flats at the end of the evening and went inside together. But then, of course, they both lived there.
6
Cherry seemed to have disappeared — at least he was never around the Continental bar at week-ends, where normally I would have expected to see him. And when I telephoned the Bursar at the school in Heliopolis where he’d been teaching I was told he’d gone to Alexandria.
“To Alex? But he’s only just come back from there.”
“You know him better than I, Mr. Marlow,” the pernickety old Copt who ran that side of the school’s affairs replied. More than likely, I thought.
“He has been transferred there temporarily as I understand it. You should be able to reach him there — the El Nasr College.”
The El Nasr College in Alexandria, a co-foundation with our own institution in Maadi, had been the most spectacularly British school in Egypt before 1956—and a spectacular neo-Gothic building in red brick with turrets and cloisters. Even after the English had left it had managed to maintain most of its ridiculously Anglophile attitudes and I was curious to know how Cherry had contrived to break into its cloistered calm.
“I don’t much fancy meeting your Mr. Cherry again,” Bridget said to me when I suggested taking the next half term off and visiting him. And I would not have thought of it myself had not the idea of our all being together again suggested a return to a less formal relationship than ours had become. We were intimate as it’s possible to be without going to bed together, met as often as we could and she kept suggesting I go with her to her parents’ house for Sunday lunch. If I’d had a small sports car and a taste for warm bitter we might just as well have been living in Surrey as Cairo. But I loved her. We had even stopped going to the Semiramis, or any of the other bars, and were sitting that morning at Groppi’s sipping lemon tea.
“Anyway you’ll have to phone him first and we don’t get any half terms at the office.”
“What — are you ashamed of our love?” I said mockingly.
There were the bad jokes of love then too, that only love allows. There was everything except the chaise-longue.
As it turned out the matter of my seeing Cherry was decided for me when he wrote from Alexandria saying he was getting married in the new year, to a “Mrs. Larousse, like the dictionary”, whose husband had once been French Consul in Dublin and had died recently, “at an advanced age while carrying out the same function in Alexandria”.
I met him by myself when he turned up in Cairo before Christmas at the start of the holidays. It was a baking hot, ninety-degree day, completely unseasonable weather, and for some reason, perhaps because of its frosty, tinselly associations, we went to a Bavarian restaurant off 26 July Street, not at all in line with our old haunts in the city, but then Cherry was turning over a new leaf. And perhaps, too, he saw that blatantly stolid hostelry as a sort of secular retreat, a denial before marriage, the beginning of redemption for all his imagined sins of the past. We were not disappointed. It was a grim, dark, empty room done in imported pine with heavy gothic furniture and velvet drapes over all the windows, the light coming only from the little folksy wrought-iron table lanterns. There were notices everywhere, done in an elaborate ornate script, like a Book of Hours, which might have been directions to the lavatories but in fact were hearty German sentiments of good will and other compliments of the season. A radiogram churned away in one corner, charging the air with Strauss and memories of snow. It was here, over sauerkraut and Niersteiner — an awkward mixture which Cherry insisted on ordering — that I heard the story of his demise.
“She’d been teaching music after her husband went, piano to the Junior School. I’d seen her of course before, in the common room, on the Wednesdays when she came — and it was a Wednesday I remember that I became unwell. Anyway, one day she saw me with a copy of the Irish Times that I get. She was very fond of Ireland — and, well that was it. She’s middle-aged but not unattractive. One must think of oneself.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well I won’t be going back to Ireland.”
“You mean there’s work in the old one yet, she’ll teach music and you’ll take it easy in the Cecil Bar?”
“Not quite …” Cherry was put out by my levity. “Anyway you’ll come to the wedding. It won’t be a big thing …”
“Of course we will, Herbert.” And he paid the bill, already the responsible paterfamilias, and we bowed out through the dark drapes and into the blazing weather like a pair of cotton brokers up in town for the day.
“Not quite like it was before — ‘Lord Salisbury’ and all that,” I said as we emerged. But Herbert didn’t seem to hear. He was thinking of something else.
“What do you mean ‘we’ will be coming to the wedding?”
“Bridget and I. I haven’t told you about Bridget. Where are you staying — the Continental? Let’s have a beer anyway.”
A look of horror spread over his face, that same wide-eyed clown’s stare with which only months ago he had teased the old ladies on the beach at Sidi Bishr, except that now there was a completely serious intent behind it.
“You mean — Lola and Bridget? Those two. That Bridget?”
“Yes. It’s no more surprising than you and Mrs. Larousse — less so by your account of it.”
We got no further than one of the small Greek bars behind the High Court between 26 July Street and Soliman Pasha, a place given over to desultory chatter and tric-trac games between dissolute lawyers and tailors and small businessmen of the community who came here to drink watery Metaxas throughout the afternoon siesta instead of going back to their fearful wives on the outskirts of the city.
“The scandal, the scandal,” Cherry muttered as we stood against the bar. “Imagine it. If that got around Alex — my being with Lola.” He was sweating. The ham actor who has completely lost confidence in his role.
“Nonsense, Herbert. Alex has known far worse than that. You mean Madame would throw the dictionary at you. Well we won’t come to the church. Just the drinks at the Cecil — or will it be at the Beau Rivage?”
He was clearly appalled now at the whole idea of my attending his wedding — seeing me as the jester, sprung from a raucous past, come to split the ceremony apart with laughter; the bawdy, boozy skeleton in his cupboard who would do nothing but fall over the altar chasing wine and wife.
It was Cherry’s unexpected, saddening conformities that afternoon, allied to Bridget’s, that made me think my own innate sense of the vulgar was disappearing as well. The chatter of legal business and shipping orders and spiteful marriages had reached a crescendo around us, the small merchants of the place getting in the last word before going back to their offices for the evening’s work. And I saw in them, and in Cherry, the casual hazardous joys of the country — and all the other small ways I’d learnt to be happy in the city — becoming predictable as bales of cotton: the city had become like any other, a place where people worked and had dull marriages and drank to forget both. And I was very nearly one of them.
“Get me a brandy. I’ll be back. I’m going to phone Bridget.”
Cherry laughed for a moment, the old manic whistle, as shrill as ever but with a new nervousness, and then tried to stop me. I suppose he thought I was going to suggest we go along for another set-to, a threesome in her flat.