He didn’t get the chance until much later when Henry and Bridget had become embroiled in conversation with a professor they’d known at the University and I’d wandered off to one side of the lawn and gone through a hedge and into a little stone plaza with a minute swimming pool in the middle. I was surprised to see a very portly, benign-looking gentleman asleep in a deck chair under a sun shade at the far end of the pool. There was a red carnation in the buttonhole of his immaculately cut white linen suit and a half empty bottle of champagne on the table in front of him. I turned to leave thinking perhaps that it was the Ambassador being kept discreetly under wraps until diplomatic relations between the two countries were resumed. But Mr. Crowther, who must have seen me going through the hedge, was right behind me when I turned.
“Ah! Marlow — just the man I wanted to see. There’s someone here who I think may be able to help you,” he said with urgent discreetness. “I’d like you to meet. Dear me, he’s gone to sleep.”
“Help me? How?”
“About work, my dear fellow. About work. You remember — Henry told me all about it. About your looking for something to do out here.”
Crowther’s persistent interest in my well-being puzzled me at the time. I put it down simply to a concern on the part of Her Majesty’s Government for all British citizens abroad, even quasi-citizens, and have since had ample occasion to revise that opinion.
But then, I followed him willingly as he stalked quietly towards the recumbent body, jumping neatly over one corner of the pool, as if intent on cornering a thief and shaking him till he woke. He did nothing of the sort; instead, he leaned over the gross, dandified figure, close to his face, like a lover.
“Robin — Robin?” he murmured. “I’ve Mr. Marlow to see you. Mr. Marlow.” He dragged my name out very slowly in the way that one explains something to a child.
The figure stirred and then sat up, slowly, painfully, as though the least movement of the immense torso was an agony. But he was quite awake. He looked at me, a look of kindness as well as interest — a twinkly animated look as though, like Crowther, the eyes alone had survived intact in the wreck of his body.
“Oh. I dropped off.”
He twirled the champagne glass in delicate withered fingers, the skin barely covering the bones; his hands in fact looked like someone else’s, tacked on, so at odds were they with his general corpulence and air of excessive good living. He drained what was left in his glass and poured some more.
“Mr. Marlow — this is Mr. Usher.”
“How are you, Marlow? You’ve not a glass and indeed I see no chance whatsoever of your getting one without attracting ‘unnecessary attention’ as Basil would put it, although I might add that’s something I’ve been doing very happily all my life. That’s why I’m stuck here round the corner like a poor relation, pretending I’ve got a ‘bad leg’; rather unimaginative that idea of yours, Basil. Anyway I can’t see why I shouldn’t have seen Marlow in the Residency, all that nonsense about the place being bugged; Egyptians aren’t up to that sort of thing yet, hardly learnt how to use the telephone.” He looked at Crowther mournfully and cast a reptilian glance in the direction of the privet hedge, listening to the excited chatter beyond.
“All those young voices … and I can do nothing whatsoever about it.”
“Very few young people about in Cairo these days, Robin. And no one of that sort here today. Just old Lady Goodridge and a Sudanese bishop. And you wouldn’t want to meet them. Not your style at all,” Crowther said quickly, hoping perhaps to suggest that Usher’s interest in the young of the city, foreign or domestic, was entirely avuncular and that what he really missed were the great days of the Capitulations and the witty adult company of the old British Raj.
“You do go on so, Basil. You really do. Mr. Marlow knows very well what I’m talking about. What I miss are the young — the young everywhere. And there’s something compelling about voices behind hedges, don’t you agree, Marlow? Not just the idea of something clandestine but something positively obscene as well, something quite uncalled for. I suppose I shouldn’t complain of my station this afternoon; there’s something to be had on both sides of that hedge. Titillation for a jaded eavesdropper. The trouble is that I’ve found my imagination inclined to flag lately whereas my other appetites grow apace … A coarsening of the spirit in a body more than ever willing, a common thing among the old I believe. The dangerous age, not far from death.
The grand old Duke of York
He had ten thousand men
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And he marched them down again …”
Hesitating over the words he hummed the rest of the verse in a jaunty growl.
“How does it go, Crowther? I feel in that sort of mood myself: an overwhelming sense of irresponsibility.” He poured the remainder of the champagne into his glass and raised it to within an inch of his long bulbous nose. “I don’t really like it, you know; the chill’s quite gone. The trouble is once I get the taste of it in my mouth I never feel like stopping.”
He thashed the liquid about in his mouth for a moment so that I thought he was about to spit it out. Crowther had brought up two more deck chairs and we perched on the edge of them. Some rust-coloured petals eddied slowly round in one corner of the pool, moved by the breeze that had come up the river and over the wall. It was nearly evening and we sat there in front of Usher like an audience waiting for the start of an open air performance. Mr. Crowther took his cue.
“I think perhaps, Robin, we might start. We can’t be sure of our ground out here for too long.”
Usher gave a last lazy sign and then embarked in a brighter, more formal tone.
“Ah, yes. Crowther tells me you like it out here but haven’t got any decent work. Well, we need a man — at Suez. We’ve no one there now and I gather there’s an ex-British school in the town where you could teach. We don’t need very much, just details to keep us in touch with the mood of the place, till we can get one of our own staff men back there. Details like — well, Russian tankers at the refinery: how many, how often. Who’s running the Greek Club now, morale of the Egyptian canal pilots, troop movements and emplacements on the Cairo road — and a hundred and one other small points you’ll learn about just by living there which we’ll quiz you about from time to time. Oh — and there’s an American living in Suez, working on some UN programme or other, we’d like to know about him — sounds most dangerous. That sort of thing. We could offer you the work on a contract basis — what is it, Crowther? The equivalent of a P3 minus on the permanent rate — about £80 a month after UK tax apart from what you earned yourself of course, the money payable in sterling, in London, or in any other currency you chose except that of the country you’re operating from. Security measure that. There wouldn’t in your case, I’m afraid, be an overseas allowance, locally recruited staff don’t qualify, but on the other hand we’d be most lenient about any out of pocket expenses; we have a lot of blocked piastres out here. Crowther can give you the rest of the details — a year’s contract in the first place, with thirty days’ notice on either side and with possible Establishment later. That’s about it Like to get the boring part over — what do you think?”
“Rather dangerous — ”
“Not at all. It’s not an active position. We call this an I O Posting — ‘Information Only’—information you’d come across in the ordinary course of your work, nothing extra. No snooping around dark alleyways with revolvers, nothing like that; no radio work, messages in code — none of that nonsense. No exposure of any sort. You’d report verbally to us, that’s all.”