When I woke it was dark and the Indian hostess had changed into a sari. The VC 10 was going on to Bombay and Singapore. We few who were getting off at Cairo weren’t important it seemed; the real excitement and purpose of the trip lay beyond the first stop. We were being dropped in the desert, in that powdered sand and air like a hot cupboard that kept things the same for ever: hate and love, boredom and exhilaration, beauty and horror; Egypt dealt only in extremes, her weather extended the same charity to them alclass="underline" to the flies and the maimed beggars on their trolleys in the cities; to the temple at Karnak and the tombs in the Valley of the Kings. It was a place where nothing ever died — where death was always visible.
In memory at least, one quickly learns to avoid the tedium and failure of the past, as I had done whenever I had thought about Egypt, and one can far more readily avoid the actual circumstances of a previous unhappiness. Yet here was a country where, in returning, one might easily be forced to live it all again. It might well have preserved the disaster intact: the heavy Edwardian bedrooms, grubby, steeply raked pre-war Peugeot taxis, the smell of crushed sesame and lime dust and paraffin blowing up through the bedroom curtains in the empty afternoons when there had been nothing to do except the one thing we had done so willingly and well then. That strange weather of the place might have secured all the props of my short marriage to Bridget ten years before just as surely as it had preserved the golden evidence of Tutankhamen’s tragedy for three thousand years longer.
It was not a country, I supposed, from which once having lived there one could ever really escape — no more than one can avoid the nightmare return of childhood in the dreams of later life.
BOOK TWO
Cairo, May 1957
1
In those early days in Egypt, when I was teaching in Heliopolis and before I’d met Bridget, I spent most week-ends and holidays in Cairo at the Oxford Pension at the top of Soliman Pasha Street and at the bar of the Continental Hotel in Opera Square, with a listless existence in between at one of Groppi’s cafés, various cinemas and the Estoril Restaurant. I can only think of the heat as reason for my not going further afield — the stupefying blast of muggy summer air, rising from the flooded river and the delta and saturating every pore of the city — so that one found respite, if at all, only in those few public places which had air-conditioning. One lived a sort of cave life then, surrounded by the dark panelling of the Estoril or the Regent Bar, the black mirrors in the Continental, the drawn curtains of one’s room — emerging only at night into the open, looking for variety and pleasure, with all the suppressed energy and appetite of an animal in search of prey.
Herbert Cherry — Williams’s Cherry, there couldn’t be another and he alone had stayed on in Egypt after the rest of us had left — was one of our group who taught mathematics in another school in Heliopolis. He was stout and nearing middle age and spent a lot of his time vigorously avoiding the implications of both facts. To do him justice — the way he would have seen it anyway — I suppose I should describe him as being young at heart. Much more, he reminded me then with his oblique humour, his ubiquity and his studied concern for the flesh, of Leopold Bloom. Certainly he knew as much about Dublin. He ought never to have left that city really, it was the true centre of his existence, and his life in Egypt then seemed to be no more than a series of defensive engagements — hopeless skirmishes designed to protect the lines of memory which led back to his native city and his real consciousness against the marauding sound and images of Cairo. In this wasteland I was his only sounding board.
He had a cherubic glitter, an intensity of recall, that turned him, in long nights over Stella beer, into a clown and character assassin; a Robin Hood of memory, robbing the past to pay for the present. Thus he would describe in detail various journeys made about Dublin — wordy encounters and drinking Odysseys conducted in earlier days — the flavour of the wet Georgian architecture and the slang of the city tumbling into, transforming, the present aridities. “I saw him on the steps of the National Library — of course he thought he had the job but the unfortunate thing about him was — that affair with a greyhound in the back of the taxi …” And so it would go late into the evening. His gossip was not malicious but rather a form of love.
Because of all this shuttered longing, and the heat which irked his great bulk — and because too he was merely shopkeeper Protestant-Irish (not Anglo-Irish as he often described himself) and therefore covertly British — Mr. Cherry failed conspicuously to get on with the Egyptians. He would adopt in his dealing with them an hauteur which would have seemed out of place amidst the worst excesses of colonialism in that country sixty years before. The Egyptians failed equally to understand him, though this perhaps was because they never bore the brunt of his dismissive cynicism — as I did — since he didn’t at that point speak any Arabic. None the less, in a succession of violent gestures and abusive gutturals, he would incite the locals to within an inch of his life at most opportunities. Late at night, when repeated moves from one night club to another had forced him off the Stella and on to whisky, he would sternly introduce himself to the doorman or head waiter as “Lord Salisbury and party. And hurry about it”; which usually, and quite properly, resulted in our paying double for everything before being thrown out.
I suppose it was his marriage that eventually reconciled him to the place — or perhaps it was the rather sinister attraction Arab countries can have for people with an authoritarian view who have somehow not managed to express that aspect of their personality adequately at home: Egypt had reconciled Cherry to the mild tyranny of his nature.
Angelo, a Greek Jeeves, ran the bar in the Continental and there was a small Italian orchestra that played “Ciao, Ciao, Bambino” over and over again in the evenings. Between the two it was the most enjoyable place in Cairo at the time. In the mornings, before things got going, when Angelo was getting the bottles out and clunking the ice into silver thermos bowls, I would sit at a table in the corner correcting exercise books or writing letters in the cool shade. By lunch time Cherry had usually turned up and the real shape of the day would begin to emerge.
It was during the early part of my first summer in Egypt that we met Bridget here — a tall, dark-haired girl with a confident, provocative look about her. Years before, when the English had run things in Egypt and one hardly ever came across an Egyptian in the centre of Cairo, it wouldn’t have been unusual to meet someone like her, so “English” looking, in the Continental at lunch time. It was now; since Suez there were no more than a handful of British people left in the whole country.
She was with her friend Lola from Beirut so that at first I wondered if they might have been two high-class tarts looking for Europeans since even in those days Germans and Scandinavians had started touring Egypt in high summer. In fact they were both working as secretaries, doing a job with an airline, and this being a Saturday they had the afternoon off. Bridget of course wasn’t entirely English but as a product of the old English school in Heliopolis she might as well have been. Her mother had come from England before the war and had married a Copt who had later become an under-secretary for something in Farouk’s government. Recently — and prematurely — they had retired to the suburb of Maadi outside Cairo. None of this was apparent initially as we chatted about the city and the heat — politely, inconsequentially — like tourists comparing notes. But it wasn’t long before we realised we had much more in common — that this was a meeting in a desert, a miraculous coming together of true minds and shared assumptions in a savage outpost. As soon as it became clear that we were all genuinely foreign (and being the daughter of a Christian in Farouk’s old government made Bridget more of an exile than any of us) the personal data of our lives became an open secret among us and we fell on each other with a thirsty, incestuous release.