“Don’t do that. You’re out of your mind! They arrest people for that sort of thing out here you know.”
I got through to her office. It was four o’clock. She had just come in and was out of breath and distant.
“What do you mean we haven’t done anything. We’re seeing each other all the time. Tonight — aren’t we meeting tonight?”
“I mean making love, that’s what we haven’t done.”
“Not on the phone. For God’s sake. This is an extension. You’re mad. Go away. I’ll talk to you later.”
“You may not. Cherry’s getting married. I may go back to Alex with him.” There was a pause, as though she thought this might be true.
“You’re drunk.”
“I can still climb on a train.”
“Aren’t you coming round this evening? Can’t we talk about it then?”
“No. I’m going out with Cherry. You don’t want to be with him.”
“Tomorrow then. Sunday lunch. What about that?”
“Oh, God, we’ll talk about making love with your parents — over the rice pudding. Oh God, no.”
“Well, what else? Why not? The house is big enough. I have my own bedroom. There’s the afternoon.”
Thinking of Cherry’s odd middle-aged passion, his loss of nerve with the music teacher, I wanted her then, on any pretext, anywhere, before it was too late. So I said yes. Sunday lunch. When I got back to the counter Cherry, as though he’d overheard these coarse thoughts, had disappeared leaving me a Metaxas. I drank the mixture with its flavour of a vanilla cake-mix that’s been kept in the cupboard too long, and ordered a whisky.
7
The Girgises’ house was a mile or so away from the school in Maadi, shut off from the road by a mass of flowering trees — jacarandá, bougainvillea and others I didn’t know the names of — and the air around the place was as damp and sweetly oppressive as a ladies’ hairdressers. A young suffragi with a brilliant green sash at his waist and the deep velvet black skin of his Sudanese ancestors let me in. He moved his head half an inch, a minute, utterly distant bow.
He was the last of the properly Arab world that I was to see until, hours afterwards, he bowed me out of the house again. From the drawing room to my right came the confident bumpy tones of a Victor Silvester quickstep; music being poured over cobblestones: the Sunday morning overseas request programme from London. An old grandfather clock made in Bath with the quarters of the moon and the four seasons picked out in flaking colours about its face ticked in the dark of the hall. The leafy, fruity smells outside had been replaced by a suggestion everywhere of dry cedar and in the cloakroom next to three pairs of old gum-boots were a pile of Country Life and Illustrated London News tied up with string and addressed to the Anglo-American Hospital.
Bridget came down the dark stairway in a grey pleated skirt, flat-heeled shoes and a boy’s tennis shirt.
“Dear me. I didn’t bring my gumboots — or a racket. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be silly. You’ll want gumboots for the garden. They flood it every morning. Alexander’s very keen on it — you’ll be shown round — and do be a bit interested.”
We moved into the drawing-room where her parents were — a room littered with silver-framed photographs of friends and relations and interminable children, including the mandatory image of Mr. Girgis — Girgis Bey — in full regalia as an Egyptian civil servant thirty years before, looking more than ever the Turkish peasant in a tarbrush, decorated sash across his breast and a bushy moustache.
They stood up and smiled graciously, distantly — as though gently emphasising the distance between their home and the Maadi Sporting Club — and Mrs. Girgis turned the radio off.
“No — please. Don’t turn it off for me.”
“But Mr. Marlow, we want to hear about you. And anyway,” she went on in a lower voice, gesturing towards a bundle of old Army blankets in a chair near the radio which I hadn’t yet noticed, “it’s for her. Mamie. Alex’s old nurse.”
A woman of incredible age, almost completely swathed in a coarse threadbare blanket with just a wisp of white hair falling from beneath the cowl which the material formed over her head, looked at me carefully and rather malevolently from behind a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. It was an old face, grey — almost indistinguishable from the colour of the blanket — withered, shapeless as folds of sand, except for the open eyes, magnified by the glass, which were pale blue, large and fresh as a child’s. I had the impression that although I was supposed to accept her as a senile harmless old party, mentally in her dotage and physically far beyond greeting me, this was not the case — an assumption that soon proved correct. I had turned away and having finished my greetings with the Girgises was about to sit down when a squeaky, crystal-clear announcement emerged from the bundle.
“Would not Mr. Marlow shake hands with me? Would that not be manners?”
With its repeated negatives, its reproving, petulant insistence, it was an ageless, endlessly practiced injunction: honed in wars of attrition against countless bygone brats it came now over the air, a message from the past, a call to order from the nursery, a reminder that however far afield we had gone in time or place that dictatorship was ever at hand. The words were vindictive, in a way I had long forgotten, they had been put not as a question but as a sentence handed down from a court without appeal. I wondered for a moment if all of us would have to have lunch in the pantry without any pudding.
Mrs. Girgis was the first to recover herself.
“But, Nanny, I thought you never shook hands. You never have.”
And indeed there were no hands to shake. The grey blanket remained folded over the chair, completely covering the miniscule body, like the bark of a strange tree.
“I shall have my lunch upstairs as usual.” The tree came to life. Mr. Girgis in a pair of old check carpet slippers helped her to her feet with the air of a man attending a grave accident, giving her a malacca cane with which she walked slowly but firmly across and out of the room.
“I am sorry.” Mrs. Girgis was truly upset in an awkward way. “She never wants to meet anyone. She just comes downstairs for the Sunday programme — you must have come a little early. She was Alexander’s nanny. She came from the Residency. She’d been one of Kitchener’s aides before that. I simply can’t understand it.”
“I can,” Bridget said. “It’s quite simple. You ought to have introduced her to Peter.” And Mr. Girgis looked at her in astonishment.
Lunch, which was a too mild curry with an assortment of bland chutneys and chopped fruits, was rather strained. And I did nothing to add to the gaiety by preferring the local Egyptian cheese — the strangely smoky, acrid gibna of the delta — to some yellowing, sweating cheddar which I knew had been imported through a firm in Denmark by the Embassy people.
Afterwards Mr. Girgis came to life. “Come and see the garden. You’ll need a pair of gumboots. I’ve got an old pair, I think. They flood the place at midday so it’ll still be pretty wet,” and we went out into the cloakroom. The boots didn’t fit so I took off my shoes and rolled up my trousers and he gave me a tiny straw hat and took a long pruning staff for himself and we went outside like a pair of mad fishermen.
Huge trees completely circled the acre of garden and beyond the small square of lawn which led out from the terrace the undergrowth was as dense as a jungle.