“One way or another we shall have to be certain about him,” Williams continued, as if concerned about his welfare. “And I’d like you to be responsible for the arrangements.” He detached the ten-piastre note from my report and pushed it across to me. “You’ve not been in Egypt for years. They’ll never connect you with Edwards.”
It was no use telling Williams that Edwards’s being in Egypt had just been an idea of mine. Williams didn’t believe in ideas — except his own or his superiors’.
I said, “I’m not going to kill him.”
Williams had two offices, one in our building — sparsely furnished and looking out over the back courtyard and car park — and another, a much smarter one I’d heard, in Whitehall. We were in the grubby one where he managed his routine affairs.
“I didn’t speak of killing him, Marlow. You do dramatize things. You said he had friends in Egypt, that he liked the place. You were there with him — you should know. I’m going on that. It’s only a possibility. For the moment it’s all there is.”
“He has friends in London. He liked it pretty well here too.” I expected Williams to say “We’ve looked”.
“He’s not in London. We’ve looked. He’s taken his passport.”
“Well, even if he is in Egypt and I happen to find him — when you said ‘stop him’ you meant ‘kill him’, didn’t you? That’s what you’ve meant before. I can’t do that — even if it turned out there were very good grounds for doing so. And I can’t see that there are.”
“I should have said ‘find’—that’s what I meant.” Williams, like McCoy, was always having trouble with words — the trouble one has to take to make them suit every eventuality. “You just find him, if he is to be found. That’s all I’m asking.”
“Finding sounds the same as killing him.”
“Why do you harp on about killing him? I never mentioned the word. We simply want to know what’s happened to him. Don’t you? You were a friend of his. If people just disappear — if a member of this section simply vanishes — don’t you think we should make every effort to find out what’s happened to him? Really.” Williams looked at me with pained distaste, as if I’d kicked him in the crotch during a house match. “We’ve no one reliable left in Egypt. I should think it quite fair to say that if Edwards is there, or in any trouble, you’d be as good a person as any to find out. They won’t connect you with him — yet you know the place, you have the language and … connections.”
He must have meant my wife’s family and friends. Her parents were dead now, I’d heard, but Bridget had been half Egyptian. Her mother was English, from Aldershot. It was a connection certainly — one that I didn’t want to renew. “Incompatibility” her mother had afterwards written to me, describing our failure. I suppose the vague legal expression had been a comfort to her — a way of avoiding the real reasons for the disaster, which were quite precise. Could that be a part of Williams’s reason for sending me back there, I wondered? As a sort of subtle punishment for my having failed in a sexual arrangement so opposed to his own proclivities in that field. Anything was possible with Williams.
“Start in Cairo, I should,” Williams said. “That’s where the gossip is. If he’s anywhere else in the Middle East, they’ll know in Groppi’s.”
Williams shared with so many others in our section the habit of an awkward facetiousness when speaking of something he considered important — as if he didn’t really believe in it but it was an entertaining thought anyway. Certainly I didn’t believe him; the whole idea seemed preposterous, a wild goose chase. Yet for a charade, it was dangerously elaborate. Williams usually stopped his nonsense long before — this, after all, was going to make quite an additional rent in his travel allocation for the year. I didn’t really know whether to believe him or not. One could never completely lend oneself to anything Williams said, or any of us for that matter, even if it were the truth. We had all of us, in the backwater of our section, moved so far away from reality in the hopes of establishing some purposeful, secretive, slightly eccentric personality which would justify the nonsense of our work. And in this attempt we didn’t lie but clung desperately to imagined truths. Which is what we’d done all day. On the face of it Henry had certainly disappeared and we were supposed to be looking for him; yet all we’d done was jockey for position, establish a role for ourselves in the matter, complicate the issue.
“I might as well go and look for him then,” I said.
If Williams had some crazy reason for sending me to Egypt, I now had my own: Henry had been right about the toytown — the useless imbecility of our section; the layer upon layer of deceit and half truth which we had all so carefully involved ourselves in for so long. Our lives suddenly seemed like a prologue to an act that would never come and in agreeing to go and look for Henry the only real reason I had was of wanting to find him and tell him he’d been right.
2
Henry had a small flat at the top of a decrepit terrace house near Kentish Town. Just down the street, on the opposite side from him, was an imposing red-brick Victorian council school. From Henry’s rooms you couldn’t see the wire netting and the broken concrete playground — just the arched tops of its tall, church-like windows and the steeply slated roof with its long chimneys, so that on summer evenings, when the light turned the brickwork a pale yellow, it looked a little like a minor château. But the rest of the area lacked any suggestion of romance; it was decidedly shabby, resolutely lower-middle and working class.
Several of the houses in the street had disappeared, either in the blitz or through neglect, and a rotten wooden fence lurched over into the road, saving one from a fall into the razed basement areas and exposed cellars but preventing one from using the pavement. People obviously didn’t come this way often and I suppose it is due for development Certainly Henry could have done better for himself — but I’d imagined his living here to be all part of his scheme of things; not to bother with the daily mechanics of living, with having any permanent image, but to spend his money and energy on champagne in London and brothels in Addis Ababa.
I went with Mr. Waters from Home Security in our section who had an immense bunch of skeleton keys and a borrowed Foreign Office van — with that legend clearly stamped in gilt on either side. We parked it round the corner from Henry’s house. “Not to make it too obvious,” as Waters said. And then we were off, skirting suspiciously around the drunken fence, as if it were we who were being pursued and not Henry.
I thought Henry might have left something behind, I suppose; something I’d notice, by knowing him, which the others who’d been there before would have missed. “A clue to his whereabouts”—a phrase which even Waters wouldn’t have sunk to using — kept running through my mind. There was, of course, something quite unreal about going there with Waters — cold sober to a place I’d been at home in so many times. And there were far too many “clues”: the crease in one of his ties, lying on the floor in the bedroom; the sticky empty bottle of Cointreau and the Egyptian cigarettes on the mantelpiece; the Brassens record on the dusty turntable which worked through the expensive multiband German radio — did they mean something? Was this how he’d spent his last night — drinking Cointreau and listening to Brassens — or a night weeks before? Or had he been with a girl, looking at the portable TV set at the end of his bed? That was more likely. A lot of girls liked Cointreau and Brassens and exotic cigarettes. I knew Henry didn’t.