The little garden, between the lawn and the jungle, was like a willow pattern saucer, complete with two willow trees leaning over an ornamental pool, water lilies, clumps of papyrus with their feathery white cockades and a crooked wooden bridge. Raised duckboards, like a miniature railway line, threaded their way through these studied effects, and all around them an inch or two of water giving the whole place the air of an exotic paddy-field under the blazing sun.
Mr. Girgis splashed off across the lawn and prodded some scented flowering bush with his stick, detaching a few of the petals which rose a fraction in the air around the plant, drenching the damp atmosphere with sweetness, like a woman drying out against an electric fire in a small room.
“It needs some more water,” he said to me confidentially. “Ahmed!” He bellowed in the direction of a small hut in the trees and Ahmed, a disgruntled, sleepy gardener, appeared and was given detailed instructions about the hose and the plant. There followed a manic dance about the garden as Ahmed, mishandling the appliance, doused the three of us in a warm jet of water. He dropped the hose so that it thrashed around at our feet, the water splashing in small waves over Mr. Girgis’s gumboots.
“God damn him.” Mr. Girgis picked up his pruning staff and we paddled back to the terrace where the others had arranged the coffee.
“Nescafé is ready!” Mrs. Girgis sang out, as if heralding some incomparable nectar. “When you’ve dried yourselves.” And the two of us trooped upstairs.
“Here, I can lend you a shirt and trousers,” Mr. Girgis said when we’d dried ourselves and were in his bedroom, and I decked myself out in an old pair of flannel yachting trousers which reached halfway down my legs and a motheaten turtleneck pullover — part of the same outfit with the name “Cleopatra”, on one of Farouk’s smaller boats, on the front of it — the only thing in his wardrobe which remotely looked like fitting me and even then it stretched tight across my chest like an old sock so that it itched fearfully.
“Bridget had better show you the rest of the place,” Mr. Girgis said rather huffily, as if I’d turned the hose on him. “I shall catch my death.” And then, as an afterthought, he made the strange inquiry — “Did you have some rum? Let’s have some rum with our coffee.”
His choice of this particular drink as a reviver seemed to have been taken quite unconsciously, without reference to my nautical garb. Perhaps my clothes may have jogged to life again some deeply buried maritime experience of his long ago, a careless shipboard party off Alexandria, with the young Farouk and his English friends — perhaps a naval squadron from Malta was visiting at the time — for rum is not an expected drink in Egypt.
Downstairs he poured out two glasses of rum in his study and we sipped them in the dry air like men taking disagreeable waters.
“Some ice perhaps?” he said hopefully, after I’d lowered a second mouthful less enthusiastically than the first. And then he thought better of the idea, looking around him. “There isn’t any. It would only mean another disaster with the suffragi. Shall we join the ladies?” But Bridget had appeared in the doorway without our noticing and was smiling quietly at both of us. Mr. Girgis looked at me.
“My old summer togs — eh? Rather a sight I suppose. Well, I must get back to Ahmed. I expect you’ve had enough of the garden. I shouldn’t walk about outside in that jersey in any case — mightn’t be taken in the right spirits. Show him the paintings, Bridget.”
She moved across the room towards us, looking at me carefully, taking the damp clothes from my arm, as though she’d not heard her father speak. We finished off our glasses in one go, as if the outcome of this ridiculous charade lay in some pressing business offstage, and moved into the hallway. Mrs. Girgis was laid out on the terrace, fast asleep on the chintz-covered steamer chair. A cat I’d not noticed before, a large, over-fed tabby, was up on the small trestle table among the coffee cups lapping carefully from the silver milk jug.
“Good Lord — Mamie’s cat has got out. Down the creeper. I thought it was past it. We should have had it put away — but what can one do? She got it as a present years ago, one of the under secretaries in my department — currying favour, British love of animals and all that. Sly fellow. He wanted a trip to San Francisco, I remember. It was the start of the UN. We called the cat Hopeful — in memory of that event — and my colleague’s diplomatic ambitions. I had him posted to Addis Ababa instead. But that’s another story. Don’t waken Mamie upstairs. With any luck she’ll sleep till supper. Like a child, you know. She needs her rest.” He had put on his gumboots again and now he tip-toed away from us, hitching his dressing-gown tight about him, past his sleeping wife, lifting the cat off the table — it kept its great grey muzzle embedded in the milk jug until the last possible second — and on out to do battle with the luckless Ahmed.
The grandfather clock in the corner of the hall chimed softly, four bell-like notes in a scale. Part of a full moon, with a face like Humpty Dumpty, was creeping over the horizon of stars at the top. And at the bottom, on a corresponding scale, the month of February in a gothic script, garlanded by two plump salmon, the fish of Pisces, was coming to an end. Only the time — a quarter past three — was very nearly correct.
Bridget came up behind me and stretched her arms over my shoulders, her fingers picking at the dark cotton letters of Farouk’s ship on my chest
“It’s a mad-house,” she said slowly. “What a stupid, marvellous thing.”
“What?”
“I love you.”
“It itches like hell.”
“What does?”
“The jersey.”
“Take it off then. But not here. Upstairs. We can ‘look at the pictures’.”
In a boxroom, wedged under the eaves, beneath the burning rafters, we made love again. There were two narrow dust-covered windows looking out over the garden and we could see Mr. Girgis dictating to Ahmed, the two of them moving painfully from plant to plant like men walking a punishment course across a swamp, the rough Arabic syllables falling upon Ahmed like a succession of cures.
We lay on our clothes, her tennis shirt and her father’s yachting trousers as a pillow against the dusty floor, that small body constantly changing position, moving beneath me, locked in mine. There was an Egyptian flag in one corner, the old one, three stars and a crescent moon against a green background, and the remnants of a Hornby train set in another — a still-bright block engine lying on its side with the legend “L.N.E.R.” on the coal box.
“He plays with trains. He used to.”
In other corners of the room trunks and suitcases were piled on top of each other, and wicker boxes with P & O labels directing them to Port Said and Tilbury and the Metropole, Monte Carlo.
“Doesn’t this answer your phone call yesterday? I mean it’s better than talking about it. Making love is better.”
“Yes.” We had stopped for a moment, and lay next to each other, sweating.
“I was angry — because you wouldn’t do it the past few months, when before, the first time, it was so easy for you.”
“It’s not as easy now, that’s all. My wanting you now — it isn’t in the same way.” She looked at me, perplexed, a glance for a tiresome child. “But why is it so important for you? It is for me, I know. But for you? That possessive thing? How can you love like that? Don’t you know?”
“Yes, it is the possessive thing and I don’t know.”
“God, I’ve never talked so much about making love — and done it so little, with someone I wanted so much. I want you now because I love you now. But don’t be held by it. I don’t want to — possess, be possessed, all that. So why talk, argue? Make love. I need it, mean it, want it.”