“Oh, what does it matter — what does it matter? They’re horrible old shoes anyway. I was just longing for them to be finished with. You can get another pair.”
The child in his ragged blackened nightshirt, one eye closing with trachoma, had stood up now, unsure of what to make of our outburst, and had begun to slink away before Bridget called him back and gave him five piastres.
“You’re so mean — those rotten shoes. My God, you can still get shoes out here at least.” She spoke quite calmly now and had turned away to look at the pyramid.
“I don’t have all that money.”
“No.” She sipped her tea without looking round, quite uninterested in my statement so that I felt I had to force her attention.
“Fifty piastres an hour is what I get at the moment and I can’t ask for much more, that’s pretty well the top rate. And the flat is seven pounds a week.” The annoyed, querulous tones of the forgotten remittance …
“What does the flat matter? Are we just living there together for sheer convenience?”
“No, I hope not. Just I’ve not got the money to start buying shoes, that’s all.”
“You could earn the money if you wanted to. You’ve still got your work permit — to teach in the English schools. And there are more of them besides Maadi.”
“They wouldn’t have me. We’ve talked about that.”
“Oh Lord.” She drew the words out in a sigh. “You sit around all day in the flat. You’re always there when I get back. You could do a job of some sort couldn’t you? Where’s this all getting us — you, me? What do you do here, after all? You go to the Council Library, Groppi’s, you meet Henry for lunch at the Cosmopolitan and drink in the bar there all afternoon with those awful Greek lawyers — and you come back at four in the morning from the Fontana or somewhere and expect to make love with me. And it goes on and on. And then you say you can’t buy a new pair of shoes. That sort of life suits you — and it suited me too — but does it suit us both together? I mean, why be together — if we just go on behaving in the same old way? Shouldn’t there be something — else?”
“What else?” I was thoroughly annoyed.
“I don’t know. Work perhaps, regular work — something to interest you. Aren’t men supposed really to need that, not just the other things,” she said lightly, bitterly.
“What ‘other things’?”
We had become children, quarrelling over words, throwing them heedlessly about.
“Love? Is that what you mean — that sort of thing? That’s what I don’t need — I just need the drinking with Henry and a good job in some wretched boys’ school?”
“Don’t be stupid — you’re not going to spend the rest of your life just loving me — and nothing else. What else are you going to do?”
“What do you mean — ‘what else’? Do you expect me to join the Army or something, become a lawyer, ‘settle down’? I’m just a teacher. Or was. Rather dull, I suppose.” She said nothing but looked at me blankly. “What ‘else’ is there, from your point of view? I’d like to know. It’s becoming a bore really, isn’t it? Just loving me, with nothing else in sight? None of those extra things that you might properly expect from a relationship of this sort; none of the things that came with the men you had before — martinis on the terrace at six o’clock, yelling at the suffragis, trips to the Gezira Club in the afternoons and summers on the beach at Alex: you’re looking for a future. I know what you mean.”
“You don’t. You’re just stupid.”
“She wants to marry you — what’s wrong with that?” Henry had ordered another bottle of Stella and it was dark at the end of the bar in the Cosmopolitan. It was another of our “afternoons” as Bridget called them. “You could do it at the Embassy — you were born in London, weren’t you — dual nationality. No trouble — if that’s what you want. Though I’d say you wanted a job really. No point hanging on with those private lessons if you can help it. Do you know Crowther at the Consulate here, commercial attaché? He might have some ideas about work. Go and have a word with him. He’s a friend of mine.”
“Don’t just marry me — because of that talk at the pyramids.”
“Of course not. I was mad. I’ll get a job. Henry has ideas, someone at the Consulate. I want to marry you.”
“And not just because it’s giving you something definite to do — marrying me instead of getting a job, because it’ll make you feel better?”
“You’re mad now. No. Though it does make me feel better. Why are you so cagey about it? Aren’t you sure?”
“Yes, I am. Just I’m surprised — now it’s happened.”
We’d walked over the Kasr el Nil bridge to the Gezira Club and across into the middle of the race course towards the huge baobab tree that stood in the centre of the park on the island. It was a Saturday, the last meeting of the season, I think, before all the horses moved to Alexandria for the summer. The bell clanged in the distance before each race, every half hour or so, and the tiny horses thundered round the perimeter, taking the curves flat out against the fence in a line, like animals on sticks in a child’s game.
“Let’s do it soon, that’s all.” There was an urgency in her voice as if she were talking about making love and saw our marrying simply as a legal means of ensuring that end on a permanent basis.
9
Mr. Crowther had the features of a frightened weasel; an unbalanced face: a broad flat forehead narrowing sharply to a point in a minute chin, eyes close together in a setting of continual alarm, fox-coloured moustache and the stringy, lazy body of someone who years before had made a habit of bowling two fast opening overs before retiring to matron with a twisted ankle. Thin silvery hair, a bow tie and a rather crumpled linen suit completed the impression of a last delicate flowering before the light desert airs blew him completely to seed.
He waved me to a sofa some way from his desk and then hurried back into his chair — as if to lessen some expected impact in what I had to say.
“Married?” he said with exaggerated concern when I had explained my business. “But that’s surely something for your Church. You should see the Provost at All Saints’ or — ” and he looked at me like a doctor deciding on a diagnosis — “Father McEwan at Heliopolis.”
“No, I — we don’t want a church. I thought it could be fixed up at one’s Embassy.”
“It might be — if there were one here. But there isn’t. And no Ambassador either. In any case I understood from my friend Mr. Edwards that you were Irish — ”
“Yes, but born in England — dual nationality — ”
He didn’t seem to have heard; brow furrowed, looking deeply into his desk, running his finger along the woodwork, he appeared quite given up to the struggle of marshalling his own arguments.
“I’m afraid there may be difficulties, you see. Your fiancée is Egyptian you said. And you are Irish. Now, if both of you had been British — then I think something could have been arranged.”
Satisfied he could now rest his case Mr. Crowther — Basil Crowther as I’d seen on his office door in the Consulate building behind the main Embassy — got up and moved warily towards me on the sofa, his linen suit, smudges of darkness spreading under the arms, suffering, like himself, agonies from the heat. He looked wearily at a photograph of Queen Elizabeth trooping the colour in the fresh brightness of a London summer on the wall behind me.