Later, after a number of drinks, Bridget decided we should all have lunch together at their apartment and we travelled there in Lola’s car, going by a market they knew of where we loaded up with a colossal meal, including great slabs of steak, a thing I’d not seen since my arrival in Egypt.
The heat had emptied the streets, the trams had stopped; even the beggars had gone to ground while the rich had all left for Alexandria. Only at garages where men sprayed weak rainbows of water over the underground petrol stores was there any activity. In the car, even with all the windows open and bowling along, there was still only the feeling of moving through a scorching vacuum. Draped about with our bags of food and muzzy from the iced Zibib which Angelo had specially recommended as a foil against the heat no one spoke as we glided across the city.
Perhaps by now Cherry and I had anticipated something of the nature of the afternoon ahead of us. Remembering our initial meeting and that stifling journey — with its too polite opening movements, its menace of animal restraint — it seems impossible now that we coud have been completely unaware of the outcome. But I think we were, or at least I was, for Cherry never spoke of it afterwards.
The two girls had a small apartment at the top of a ten-storey building by the Nile in Garden City. And the lift was out of order. While the girls went to their bedroom Cherry and I patrolled the living-room — nervous, exhausted, unable to sit still. There was a small Victorian chaise-longue in one corner, a collection of brass and leather ornaments scattered about the place — the Arab equivalent of flying china ducks on the wall — and a tiny velvet-green card table in the middle. It was like a room in a dolls’ house, an oven perched high against the sun, and I felt like a cumbersome tenant inspecting something I knew already I didn’t want.
Turning from a photograph of Bridget on a beach I saw her come out of the bedroom, naked, except for a trail of light cotton flowing from her shoulders as she moved across the room, struggling into a day-gown on her way towards me.
“Wouldn’t you like to dress more lightly? It’s very hot here I’m afraid. We have some gin but no ice.” She moved across to the chaise-longue. Cherry had briefly noticed her arrival but had then resumed his gaze out over the city, more intently now, as if he had spotted an accident in the streets below or a thunderstorm on the horizon.
From beneath the sofa Bridget dragged a cardboard crate of Gordon’s Export gin — the one with the blue sloes down each side of the label, like an English hedgerow in autumn, and the red boar’s head in the middle. Real gin had been unobtainable in Cairo since the British had left and this, I supposed, was a memento of their departure. Lola had gone across to the kitchen and had returned with glasses and water. The mixture was warm but strong.
Bridget faced me: “We have so much of it and we never really drink it. We should shower in it.” She smiled seriously. “You really ought to take some of those clothes off. You’ll expire.”
Lola, who didn’t have the same command of English, looked at Cherry by way of similar encouragement — Cherry, with his coat off now and the pained expression of a housemaster trapped amidst a riot in the boys’ dorm.
“Will you help me in the kitchen? We will beat the steak,” Lola said and Cherry was led gently away.
Nothing seemed really to have changed. The polite tones of our rapport hadn’t altered, nor the casual indifference, as though all of us were really absorbed in other matters. Yet I was aware at last, now that a choice had quietly been made, that the significant side of the day had finally emerged: I was to have Bridget and Lola wanted Mr. Cherry.
We heard them going to and fro in the kitchen, thumping the steak, but without any accompanying voices — as if the two of them were involved in a limbering up process preparatory to some mysterious rite. Bridget and I looked at each other for a moment — she on the chaise-longue, the trails of her gown now sprawled high over the rise at the end of the couch, and I, still fearing to sit, assuming a negligent pose by the window opposite. Her skin was the palest sort of yellow, darkening towards the years of sunburn round her neck, with the still darker flow of her hair above that. A round, monkey face — like a schoolgirl’s, with a sort of permanent impertinence about it; a face made attractive through its failures — the abrupt turn of the jaw so that her mouth seemed unnaturally long, the misplaced nose that suddenly occurred between the eye line and lips before curling gracefully into a snub like a petal, breasts that were just a gesture, no more than small undulations of skin, and hips that splayed dramatically out of true below her waist.
She said nothing but looked at me with a smile of assent — as if agreeing with these wordless comments of mine about her body — seeing in her flaws and my appraisal of them a potential which delighted her. Then, as if bored with the idea and I were no longer there, she stood up, throwing her gown behind her, and with a fresh bottle of gin, cutting the foil with her nail on the way, she moved towards the bathroom. There was a splash of water for a minute or two before she called me.
She wanted to make love there and then as we mingled beneath the trickle of warm water — she in a bathing cap and I dodging awkwardly beneath the rusty surround of metal. I countered with the imminent lunch and the cramped circumstances. Instead we compromised — poured the gin over each other, drank some of it and kissed.
Cherry meanwhile must have accustomed himself more to the surroundings. I’d heard him laughing — his sudden manic shrill as he and Lola went to and fro arranging lunch on the card table. But when we all sat down together, crouched around the little velvet square like gamblers waiting for the ace, he was still firmly in possession of his clothes. Now that the overtures seemed to have been successfully concluded Bridget and Lola talked quite a bit in Arabic, as if we’d simply been friends of theirs who’d dropped by for lunch. And later we talked again about our life in Egypt and theirs. But it wasn’t the light, excited chatter of introduction any more; it was the prelude to an act.
The sun had dipped in its arc over the roof and slanted now directly into the room. But it was far from evening and the moment’s wind which sometimes came then, up the delta from the sea. We finished lunch with Turkish delight and coffee and some more gin. With its elaborate preparations, its confused chatter in different languages, its barriers of communication — it had been like a Sunday lunch in childhood years before; a ritual with strange guests talking incomprehensibly after which everybody would have to “do” something. Cherry and I both managed to prolong it, alternating requests for more coffee with small frenzies of chatter between ourselves. We had even embarked on Cherry’s Dublin — a famous row between two professors at Trinity College which he began meticulously to reconstruct — in order to stay the proceedings. But Lola and Bridget mistook our subject for small talk and the eagerness in our voices for impatience and started to clear the decks. We had a last gin together quietly while they were out of the room.