Waters said confidentially, “The only thing missing is his passport.” He’d been in the flat before with the others and was showing me round the place now with the self-importance and hushed reserve of a churchwarden describing some historic mutilation in the crypt.
“How do you know? How do you know what was here in the first place?”
“Well, I mean — he didn’t take any of his clothes or luggage. They’re still in the bedroom. He must have left in a hurry.”
“Why? He never took much with him when he went away.”
“He’d been with someone recently.” Waters was holding up a minute navy blue suspender belt as I turned. “A girl I should say,” he added in a deeply considered tone.
“Well, he wasn’t queer you know.”
A girl. A schoolgirl to judge by the size of the thing. Perhaps from the school opposite. With Henry, there had been so many girls; it was impossible to try and trace anything about him that way. “That’s what they really want, you know. We fool ourselves about the rest,” Henry had once said to me. Girls were another of his insatiable traits — what did it matter if he thought that every woman shared his appetite. He’d always been lucky with them.
There was a bottle of horseradish sauce in the fridge, frozen solid, and a plastic bag of black olives. By the gas cooker there was a little whisky left in a half bottle and a sugary saucepan with some lemon peel in it. Waters said, “He couldn’t have been eating. He must have had a cold. Unusual for the time of year.”
“Perhaps he liked a grog before bed, even in warm weather and perfect health. He wasn’t English either.”
The bare flat with its remnants of Henry’s few essential pleasures seemed so much a staging point in his life that it was difficult not to think of him in the past tense — not because he’d died, just that he’d so obviously gone on to the next station. It was true, what Waters had said — he just upped and disappeared.
“I suppose that’s the sort of life one has to expect — a man in his job. Here today, gone tomorrow. I’m not surprised. I couldn’t stick it myself. You’ll want to take a look at his papers. There’s nothing there of course. He kept the rules and all that. Nothing to associate him with us, I mean.”
There were several drawers full of books and typescripts, carbon copies of articles he’d written, proofs of book reviews for a national daily, a travel feature on Egypt for one of the glossies. Henry had written quite often about the Middle East — vivid, colourful pieces, well informed and shrewd. It had been an easy cover for him.
“I wonder he didn’t keep his books on shelves,” Waters said as I piled them up on top of the desk.
“Because there aren’t any.”
Leight Fermor’s The Traveller’s Tree, The Leisure of an Egyptian Official by Edward Cecil, Greene’s The Quiet American; they were the sort of books one keeps, that one can read a second time, and I was surprised he’d left without them.
Perhaps he had gone back to Egypt. Perhaps things had rather died for him in London. Grog, horseradish sauce, schoolgirls — even the strongest tastes must pall. I’d said to Williams that he had friends in London but I’d no idea where to start looking for them. And even if I found them — what could they say?
His friends, I realised, would be the last people to know what had happened to him since he had never involved them on a personal level. He didn’t talk to them, as he hadn’t to me, about his plans for next week or his failures last year. Instead he spoke of gazing down some small crater in East Africa, of watching the animals, and saying it felt like looking at something happening at the beginning of time and making you believe him. He shared his obsessions, not the pains he took to arrive at them. That was the basis of his friendships. It meant that in looking for him one had nothing to go on except the odd remembered vignettes from his conversation — the girl he’d once met in Singapore or the bus he’d taken from Nairobi to the coast. His friends would remember him well enough but they wouldn’t know anything about him.
“Just as if he’d gone away. For the week-end,” Waters said, picking up the bills and newspapers which had come for Henry and which had piled up just inside the door. The Times and Express and last week’s Bookseller rolled up in brown paper.
“Hadn’t you better have them stopped?” I asked. “Tell someone at the section”
“He might be coming back.”
“I don’t think so.”
His papers had gone on coming, turning up each morning like an abandoned dog looking for its owner. It was the only real “clue”. In this alone could one feel that Henry had sacrificed something: last week’s news whimpering at the door. These were his roots in London: his morning story of the world, a look at the autumn books — to have given them up he must have found something else more compelling. And perhaps too that was sufficient reason for leaving a country — having no one to stop the papers; that could be happiness for a man who had seen too much of the world — finding a place where one didn’t need them.
“You’ll be pretty much on your own of course. Except for Cherry and Usher. We haven’t got an Ambassador in Cairo any more,” Williams had said the next day.
“Cherry? Is he at the Embassy now?”
Cherry was an Irish teacher I’d known in Cairo ten years before. It seemed unlikely that he’d graduated from the mission school in Heliopolis to the Residency by the Nile.
“No, he’s not at the Embassy, Just a stringer. He’s been told simply that you’re taking over from Edwards, setting up the new circle there. That’s all. Don’t trust him with anything else except helping you make contacts. He’s good at that, knows everyone, married to an elderly French woman, the widow of one of their Embassy people out there who took a fancy to his blarney.”
I’d gone with a tape recorder. Williams had suggested it as if Egypt were still in some sort of dangerous revolutionary turmoil and one couldn’t go there quite openly as a tourist. It was a cover we sometimes used — those of us who could ask presentable questions anyway. I was doing a radio programme, an article, a book — it didn’t matter. It was no good anticipating a long stint lurking around the back streets with dark glasses; even Williams had seen that.
“Keep us informed,” he said. “You know the routine in Cairo, it’s still the same — through the council library, next to the Embassy. They’ll be expecting you. Got your passport, visa, money — your tickets?”
Williams had seen me off with all the careful zeal of an undertaker. He’d even offered me a warm gin and tonic from his private cabinet
“Cheers,” he’d said, with the genuine release of a man thankfully at the end of a meeting with a wretched visitor, and I’d taken a taxi straight to the airport.
We’d crossed the Alps, the small green valleys at the bottom of the great shafts of rocks and snow — glittering in the afternoon light like a pre-war travel poster, a promise of things never done: a winter holiday, learning to ski, hot chocolate in the sudden dark and the journey homeward from Basle in time for the New Year; something from an age when one didn’t have to go beyond the Balkans with Ambler for adventure.
I’d fallen asleep without finishing the tiny bottle of burgundy which had come with my dinner. I dreamt I’d fallen through the ice on the lake at home as a child, looking for a fountain pen I’d lost there the previous summer holiday — something precious I’d been given for my birthday — and only finding the top of it in the dark cold water. “But you only lost the top of it, stupid,” someone shouted angrily from the shore. And then, of course, I was trying vainly to struggle up again through the ice.