Mrs. Girgis had joined her husband outside and was following him gingerly along the duckboards, treating him in much the same way as he had dealt with Ahmed, except that, with her, the continual comments and criticisms drifted up to us in the purest tones of Refined-Surrey.
“Really far too much water, Alex … it’s not a paddy-field you know. Is it impossible to get Ahmed to understand anything? Are any of the figs ripe? Can we get some for Bridget to take back with her? Alex! My border is quite water-logged …”
“We’d better go. They’ll start to call. Make love again. Please.”
There was a noise outside on the stairway, a quick determined step on the creaking wood, and the door opened. Mamie glanced around her vaguely, with the numbed look of someone unhappily released from a deep sleep.
“Hopeful? Hopeful?”
The ridiculous name squeaked out as she peered around the trunks. “Puss, Puss!”—and she moved towards us and away again so that I thought for a second that she hadn’t seen us. And then, with the same look of perfect understanding that I had remembered from before lunch, she noticed us, peering down her nose as if she had suddenly seen some terrible, ineradicable stain on the floor.
“I thought Puss might be here. I’ll ask your father, Bridget, if he’s seen him.”
She spoke in the sad way that one speaks to a child who has done something beyond any scolding, whose crime only some infinitely high authority can now judge.
8
I met Bridget at the Semiramis a few days later. We had gone back to drinking in bars again.
“It doesn’t matter. It just means you won’t be asked for Sunday lunch again.”
“What did she say?”
“That I’d been ‘playing’ with you — you know, like children under the dining room table. The only thing is he may try to interest your Dr. El Sayid in the matter — ‘not the sort of thing one expects from a guest, Doctor — in one’s own house, and in front of my old Nanny’—I can hear him.”
Which matter Mr. Girgis duly proceeded to interest the good doctor in.
Henry and I were staying at the school during the holidays and a day or so afterwards as we were passing by the side window of El Sayid’s study on our way for a game of table tennis in the basement of the Old School, there came a violent rat-a-tat-tat as he machine-gunned the window pane with a coin, as he did every day in term time, signalling in his wildly imperious manner the start of afternoon classes. A long finger beckoned me.
“We are a small community out here in Maadi, Mr. Marlow, a small but honourable one, of which this school forms very much a part. We rely on each other for our good name about the place — indeed about the whole city and the country. And even further afield. We bear a responsibility to each other for our behaviour — corporately and individually. So I am not in the least surprised, as you may be, that one of our neighbours, with whom until recently you were acquainted — Girgis Bey — has seen fit to ‘tell tales out of class’ as it were. I am very obliged to him. A matter as I understand it — and I shan’t descend to details — of ‘abusing hospitality’ as he put it, in a manner quite unbecoming to your status as a guest in his house and member of the staff here. Not a legal matter, I gather, but really — and I think this far more important in view of your responsibilities to the young here — a matter entirely within the moral sphere. To cut a long story short it would be completely unsuitable for you to remain in your present position with us. You appear, to put it bluntly, to be lacking in even the very rudiments of physical control. The dangers of allowing such licence in a place like this must be obvious to you.”
“It was a woman, Doctor. Not a boy.”
And he rose from his desk in a fury and walked vigorously towards the window, slapping his thigh repeatedly on the way.
“I don’t care what it was — man, beast or ripe melon — I insist upon your resignation. You may take two weeks’ notice from the beginning of next term — an arrangement, I think, entirely generous in the circumstances.”
“I’m sure it’s more than I deserve.”
I went down to join Henry in the basement of our “house” in what had been known as “Old School”. He’d got the net up and was talking to Mahmoud, the little janitor and odd-job man who had his closet down here, full of brooms and dusters, a collection of dirty coffee cups, a primus stove and a bed — though he didn’t sleep here officially. Mahmoud had quite taken to Henry and me for some reason — as opposed to the vast majority of other Egyptian teachers now employed by the school — although neither of us could follow his strangely accented Arabic and he spoke no more than greetings in English. He — or his father, one could never tell from his attempt to explain the genealogy — had been with the school practically since its foundation and perhaps he saw in Henry and me the last remnants of a preferred regime, an appropriate link with his previous masters; we must have given him, through our inability to understand each other, a comforting sense of continuity.
“I’ve been asked to leave.”
“Oh.”
Henry didn’t seem all that surprised. I suppose now that Bridget had already told him everything that had happened. Certainly he must have seen her then, without my knowing, almost as often as I did.
“Don’t worry. We can get you private lessons. Everybody wants to learn English. We’ll have a game and go down town. What does it matter? I hope you gave him hell.”
When we had finished Henry went back to his room to collect his wallet — even in those days he never seemed to have what he needed about him — and I stayed on with Mahmoud over another coffee with which he punctuated our every day like a clock.
In the old days, before Suez, this lower part of the old school had been used for all those extra-curricular activities so dear to English educational tradition, those rugged pursuits through which character is supposedly moulded and happiness usually crushed: Scouting, P.T., Amateur Dramatics and so on — and in shuttered rooms leading off this central hall were stored the instruments of all that pain, the littered remains of the white man’s burden: old footballs, punch bags, dumb-bells, chest expanders, smashed cricket bats, a number of bruised bowler hats and tattered copies in French’s Amateur Acting Edition of The Monkey’s Paw. The new regime, not yet fully aware of these riches beneath them, left the basement area entirely to the shuffling of Mahmoud; this was his dark, cool domain.
So while Henry was gone I took another, perhaps a last, look round.
In a cupboard at the end of one of the rooms — together with a lot of broken laboratory equipment, old gauzes, test-tubes, retorts and encrusted Bunsen burners — was a broken film projector, some rusty cans of film — “The Three Counties Agricultural Show 1937”, “The British Police”, and “The Port of London Authority”—a number of well rubbed copies of a booklet published in Fenchurch Street in 1939 called Wireless Telegraphy for Beginners and a radio receiver or transmitter, I couldn’t make out which.
“Come on. Well miss the train. I’m not paying for a taxi — yet.”
Henry stood in the dooryway, oddly impatient.
“They never use any of this stuff here?”
“Never. Suez was the End of Empire. Didn’t you know?”