We went to the Fontana and another club on Roda island. And the Perroquet on Soliman Pasha, ending up just before dawn in a gharry at the Auberge des Pyramids.
“Where are you going to go?” Bridget asked.
“A hotel — why not? Henry has ideas about private lessons.”
“Yes, Henry said there’s all those girls from my old English class at the University. Some of them still think they can get an external degree,”
“You could advise me on — what do they call it? — syntax. Yes, English syntax,” Bahaddin added. “And I could get you a maid’s room at the Cosmopolitan. The manager’s a friend.”
“You could live with me. Lola’s finally decided to go back to Beirut,” Bridget said lightly. And apart from that idea it was rather a grim little Christmas dinner that Bahaddin had arranged for us all on the roof restaurant of the new Shepheard’s Hotel.
A week later I moved in. The lift had been repaired.
The weather had cooled appreciably by now. It was the start of the month or so of winter in Egypt; soft, almost damp grey mornings by the river and streaky clouds far overhead and odd vicious dusty winds — intimations of the spring khamseen from the desert which swirled the low water by the corniche into momentary thrusts and eddies and clouded the sun with a fine gritty haze. And once, at the end of January, it rained for the first time since I’d arrived in Egypt, an afternoon of velvet grey clouds rolling up the delta from the sea — and then for ten minutes or so before dusk, just a few drops, like someone shaking wet hands at you.
Lola had stayed on in Beirut and we shared the big double bed at the back of the apartment and Bridget went out to work every morning and came back at lunchtime, when we often made love. I had never been happier. There was an ease in our relationship for those few months which neither I, nor I think Bridget, had ever thought possible. We loved each other and we made love, and there was nothing left to be said.
It was a marriage, I suppose, but without any obligations or rights, without the possessiveness she feared, without any of the things which were to make the marriage itself, when it came, such a disaster. Even the fact that my private lessons never came to very much and that after the first month Bridget had to pay most of the expenses didn’t seem to matter. Or so I thought then. With no more than the usual egoism felt in such circumstances I saw an indivisibility in our love, and a corresponding unimportance in the details of life. Afterwards I had assumed that things had gone wrong simply because Bridget had been less of an egoist, a much more conventional person than I’d imagined; the sort of woman who, at the end of the fun, finds her deepest needs in the traditional supports. Now — there are so many other questions involved that one has stopped, thankfully, looking for answers.
Henry had put me in touch with Samia — a nice dull elderly girl with a wiry cloche of hair and a green dress — the younger sister of someone he had taught at the University, who was unaccountably attempting “O’ levels. Twice a week I trudged through Macbeth with her in a backroom of her father’s office in the old part of the city beneath the Citadel — down alleyways small and dirty as gutters, completely overhung by shabby wooden houses with balconies that almost linked overhead so that it was dark even at midday. Her father had his place at the end of one of these crammed passages; he was a huge mediaeval figure with a boxer’s face and the devout air of a prosperous, deeply traditional Moslem; with his rolling moustache — and without his immaculate galibeah and green turban — he might have been a Victorian paterfamilias. He ran a small export-import agency so that the whole place smelt strongly of sacking and dried beans and the sweet stench of Turkish coffee. At whatever time of day I arrived his friends were always gathered in a circle round his desk, a cabal of wizened cronies sipping from thin cups, and I would be given the inevitable cup myself before being led through to the tiny office beyond a curtain by one of the clerks, entering upon Samia, distractedly fidgeting with her notes, like a lout broaching a harem.
Her father and his friends guarded the approaches while I imparted the mysteries; their soft chatterings moving in counterpoint to my weary explanations about the three witches, which Samia followed not at all. Her attention would drift outwards, beyond the curtain, to the talk in the next room — of ships and bales and bad weather, I suppose, and foreign places, while I — in my own distraction — would remember what I’d had for lunch that day with Bridget: beans cooked in oil with lemon juice and wrapped in thin crescents of dark sour bread which she’d picked up from one of the cafés on El Trahir square and left in the oven too long while we made love.
At the end of my hour with Samia I would emerge thankfully from the closet and there would follow a lengthy exchange of “salaams” and duckings and smiles and salutes with her father and the others before I disappeared down the backstreets again, coming alive now after the still of the afternoon — paraffin pressure lamps hissing urgently above the stalls and barrows as they were pumped up, like animals provoked beyond endurance, before breaking into innumarable flares all along the passageways.
I suppose it was this background of the grubby winter city — far from the sad arrogance, the BBC request programmes and the ancient Hillmans of Maadi — a background pared of all inessentials, which gave to what happened in those months a definition, a quality of hope, which a similar time, spent say in Paris or Venice, would not have had. The grubby and unpromising can only suggest promise; at least, we persuaded ourselves, they cannot disappoint. So we are prompted to beliefs which in more favourable circumstances we would never have contemplated. I believed that I was happy; that Mamie and the folly of Dr. El Sayid had led me to my proper station in life, that everything had conspired in my favour. Only now am I aware of the proper nature of the conspiracy.
When it is over, we look back vehemently for that moment in a particular experience when the first flaw appeared that led to the end; quite perversely, like geologists tapping their way about volcanic rock, we seek the first intimation of the explosion, running our minds savagely back and forth over the affair: late mornings looking out over the river from the open window of her apartment, the bitter smell of the low water, coffee together on the Semiramis terrace on Sunday mornings; the old men flushed, with bloodshot eyes, in tarbushes and white duck suits wandering aimlessly around the pillars in the huge hall behind us, flicking their whisks dispiritedly at the few winter flies, offering elaborately formal greetings to acquaintances before moving on as though to some pressing affair; early evenings hurrying back along the aromatic side streets, from Samia or some other luckless student, towards the river again, with the sun behind the pyramids now — spreading a veneer of rose and purple over the town, cutting out the huge triangles of stone in soft charcoal from the sunset behind them …
In all the happy manoeuvres of that calm winter — when did it begin?
We’d had lunch one Sunday at Mena House and had walked up the hill afterwards towards the pyramids. It was late February and the hot weather was already in the air. We sat on the terrace of the old Viceregal kiosk at the foot of Cheops, sipping colourless tea, beating off the shoe-shine boys and camel drivers like any tourist
Suddenly, a tiny dark bean of a child appeared from nowhere at my feet and started to clean my shoes furiously, rubbing away at them with a kind of foamy black paint. They were suede, not leather.
“No!” And then the same word louder, in Arabic. But he went on eagerly as if he’d heard nothing.
“Tell him to stop for God’s sake. He’ll ruin the shoes.” I had got to my feet, appealing wildly to Bridget.