Somewhere on these slopes of the old city he’d been staying with Robin Usher, our Cairo Resident, a man he’d first met years earlier when he lectured at Fuad University just after the war.
“I was with Robin most of the time. You should have got to know him better. An incredible house, rather like a male harem with cushions and boys littered all over the place. But genuinely Mameluke. One of the very few left. A jolly old party, especially when he’s had a few. Though I must say the boys were inclined to get under one’s feet. ‘A thing of beauty is a boy forever’—that was rather his style. That and the Daily Telegraph — it’s all the English have left in Egypt. Can’t blame them really.”
Henry, without being aware of it, for he was a displaced colonial, used a slangy Edwardian shorthand when talking about the truly English. It was his way of admiring them without admitting it.
He had been talking about Cairo ten years after Suez and it was this new situation in the country which attracted him. ‘The fun of going back somewhere and finding it quite gone to seed,” as he put it.
He’d talked as little as possible in my office in Information and Library.
“What a terrible place to meet again,” he’d said as he shuffled through his pockets, staring sadly at the haggard walnut furniture, the files of Arab newspapers, the half-carpet, and the hat stand I never used. And then, looking out at the mass of hideous concrete that had cropped up all around us: “You used to be able to see St. Paul’s.”
I liked the way he used the phrase “meet again” as if we’d met that afternoon quite by chance and he and I didn’t work for the same organization. Not that I’d ever thought he worked for “somebody else” as Williams used to describe whoever the “other side” happened to be at the time. I thought then that Henry was simply being his own man.
We went on that evening to a wine bar further down the Strand, a place we’d gone to for years and where Henry ordered champagne — as he did whenever we met after he’d got back from a trip. I don’t think he really liked the drink; he bought it, I always thought, because it was expensive and because he could run his finger down the side — tracing a line through the condensation like a child playing on a clouded window pane — to see if it was cold enough. He enjoyed touching things carelessly, as though wondering whether to steal them — looking warmly at strangers as if he’d suddenly seen an old friend. He had that trick of immediate intimacy, a headlong approach to any experience, and he drank too much.
Because I liked Henry’s humanity — envied it obviously — and envied his sense of invention and ease of manner, I thought them to be the qualities that had made him good at his job. One never likes to think of one’s colleagues in a dull occupation as being less tied to it than oneself so it never properly struck me until after he’d disappeared that this naïveté and freshness were quite at odds with the sort of work he had to do — the depressing daily grind of extracting information from people or things — of spying on them. Though that word evokes a drama which our work never had.
I had done very little work in the field, not since I’d been a teacher in Egypt after Suez and even then there had really been a minimum of danger or personal confrontation in the job. I had prepared elaborate memoranda on the situation there when I came back on leave to England and now I did the same thing in London, from Arab newspapers, without going anywhere. Sometimes I “evaluated” reports from people in the field, which went on to the Minister, but McCoy liked to do most of that now, hogging the few excitements of our department for himself. I thought Henry by comparison was happy with his position, which at least took him all over the place, and I was surprised that evening when he said he wanted to get out.
“It’s a hack job. We shouldn’t fool ourselves. If we hadn’t been together in Cairo then we’d never have been involved. If we hadn’t had some Arabic, had connections there …”
“If we hadn’t wanted it …”
“What?”
“The excitement. That Embassy party. We thought — didn’t we? — that our bits and pieces of information were important. We were stupid enough. If we hadn’t been — things would have been different. We might have still been there. Teaching. I suppose we thought it more exciting than that.”
I spoke of the past indefinitely, as if I’d forgotten it. I knew we both had thought it was more interesting then — that summer after Suez. There had been those madmen, Usher and Crowther, at the Embassy then — whose veiled suggestions and eccentricities in that empty Egyptian summer had been a happy reminder of secret and important purposes elsewhere — when we had chatted vaguely about some distant political mischief on the Queen’s Birthday and the suffragis had chased to and fro beneath the flame trees on the huge lawn, stumbling under the weight of the ice buckets and martini trays.
There is an innocence about the beginning of things, a blindness I suppose most would call it — even in work as sordid as ours — which keeps one at the job for years in the hope that we may be able to recapture the freshness of the original impetus which drew us to it, some of the morality which we gave to it all then. And I thought this was what must be worrying Henry: the disappointment of a wrong turning long ago, of expectations lying in the gutter. Once, it had worried me too. But I’d soon come to see that sort of loss as being part of the deal.
Henry looked at a woman across at another table in the quiet back room. The commuters, the Principal Officers from Orpington and Sevenoaks, had had their dry sherries and left. The candle flames on the barrels were dead still in the air. She must have been a secretary from one of the Government offices nearby, getting on a little, with an older man who didn’t look like her husband or her boss. There was an intense awkwardness between them — as if they’d just started on something, or had just ended it.
“I wish I could wake up one morning only knowing Irish. And just the name of a village near Galway. I’d like it all to stop. And start again.”
“The Olive Grove Syndrome. The song of a man at forty,” I said. “You can’t stop it. And you’d be no good at anything else if you did. They’ve seen to that. You’ve got a job after all, a trade: how would you describe it? — to pretend, to cheat, only to go for the man when he’s down and so on. The dark side, like insects under a stone. The real world would kill you, if you ever got into it again. With its haphazard, petty deceits, its vague decencies — you’d be quite out of your depth. There’d be something wrong in it for you, things you wouldn’t follow at all. You’d feel like an innocent man in prison. When you accepted your language allowance for colloquial Arabic you accepted all the rest.”
I was facetious since I didn’t really believe Henry was being serious. But he was, I suppose. He smiled at the girl, hopelessly.
“It’s all a toytown. A lot of dour old men who can’t forget their youth and their good sense over Munich — who think they can live it all over again by casting Nasser as another Hitler. They’re as stupid now as Chamberlain’s mob were then. One could resign.” And then he added, as if he’d already made the decision — but this may be only hindsight — “You should leave too.”