“Of course. ‘Colour’ material, isn’t it called? Anyway there seems to have been some considerable unpleasantness. I’m glad that still doesn’t count with the B.B.C.…”
Hawthorn got up and moved a pile of circulars from his desk to a table beneath the window of his office, thumping them down. Dust blew up into the light, like a small explosion, bringing with it the utterly dessicated odour of lime dust, peeling wood, baking concrete. The office was surrounded with diocesan photographs, groups of clerics in strange places including some recent ecumenical ones: a Nubian priest in a full regalia stood on a muddy river bank blessing naked figures in the shallows of the stream; a craggy, Anglican bishop glared angrily across the mock-Jacobean refectory table with a plastic fan in front of him.
“The woman’s husband is coming to the interment tomorrow. A Mr. Cherry. He was a schoolteacher here. Tragic really.” Hawthorn gazed out of the window on the small border of shrubs and bushes, tar-spattered, sand-blasted, oiled from the years of traffic that came roaring down from the station to the corniche. “The police telephoned me this morning. They’re going to come with him.” He turned. “One didn’t expect that, you know. One really didn’t. One doesn’t usually get that sort of co-operation out here you know. Don’t quote me on it.”
“They respect the dead in Egypt though, don’t they? More than the living.”
“Ah, that’s much too big a question, Mr. Marlow. We haven’t begun to answer that one. But it’s true, the Egyptians have a tradition in that matter.” He came with me to the door. “These days, of course, we fly our nationals home. We haven’t buried anyone in the British cemetery here for, oh, goodness me — it must be more than five years.”
“Now there are two.”
Hawthorn looked at me critically, as if I intended continuing with some aphorism or nursery rhyme, a query in his long face: I had stopped half-way through a message which would explain, alleviate. But I’d nothing to say.
“Yes, tragic really. They don’t seem to have had anybody at home. But — there you are.” He put his hands in his side pockets, thumbs sticking out, an umpire considering a critical decision. “Come round tomorrow then. Say around eleven-thirty. We’ll try and get away as soon as possible after the funeral.”
I went out into the scorching light, numb in the heat that danced off the water, conscious only of the steel that brayed down the corniche like bullets; the passions that led people somewhere in such a hurry: to drinks in a shadowed bar, lunch back home, to see a girl. Such appointments seemed all the more necessary now, vital.
I’d never really thought of Henry dying; it hadn’t seriously crossed my mind. Something stupid at worst — but then over to the other side: a dacha, snowshoes and hot toddy in the Moscow woods. I was sure that in the end he would be faithful to the fun of it all, if nothing else. I thought he would sacrifice his soured belief for the life principle which he held so strongly. I saw now that the belief and the principle had been identical in him. Champagne for Henry was a manifesto, not an indulgence.
But still, there was something so corny about his dying which I couldn’t follow, and couldn’t see him following: such an unnecessary bore, as he would so surely have said of it himself. He’d done it without really meaning to, like an insult late at night in the saloon bar. It was a mistake he would regret briefly when he was half-sober next morning, with a roaring headache, on the way to another pub; just a foolishness among so many in the midst of a tattered vibrant life; something he would redeem later in the continual apology Henry made with his good fellowship.
I really couldn’t see him in the river, the skin going blue, orifices suppurating, the slobber of that kind of death. He’d have lost his glasses, I suppose that’s why I couldn’t see it; Henry would have been unrecognizable without them. Waters from Home Security could clear his fridge out now, the solid horseradish and the bag of olives. And cancel the Bookseller. That was all I could really see.
I spent the afternoon — and later the night — lying in the shade of some flame trees on the far side of Gezira Club, reading Al Ahram which I’d picked up at a kiosk on the way. The President was pushing it — or being pushed, of course; war seemed inevitable now. If the Army needed any more confirmation to send them over the brink, the microfilm would have done it: Marcus’s little message from the Israeli Chief of Staff. Nasser could no longer restrain his generals, like Farouk, he had signed the instrument of his demise before anybody had asked him, for, of course, the more the Arabs clamoured for war, the more unready one knew they were. They were like schoolboys, taking Dutch courage with shouts and teases, for a fight against a bully. But the bully would smash them quietly behind the bicycle shed before tea. The Charge of the Light Brigade; they would need a Tennyson to salvage anything from this blitzkrieg.
I’d always suspected that the dry men in our department, and in Whitehall and Washington, would try sometime or other to get Nasser off his perch, go for him with some new trickery, another little bit of collusion — this time undetectable, except for the microfilm I still had. The headlines in Al Ahram told the whole story: six Israeli armoured divisions massing on the Syrian frontier: Marcus and I had been given the same message all right.
And Williams was the driest man of them all; Moscow’s man. A war for them would have even more favourable conclusions than it would for the West. Russia was an ally in these parts after all, a friend with a foot in the door. After this they would be running the household, sacking the servants, commandeering all the stores.
That was the only thing I had not foreseen: that the powers had identical interests in this airing cupboard, in seeing matron topple. That was the new collusion. Perhaps, Yalta-like, they had already agreed among themselves that the Middle East should be a Soviet sphere of influence: as long as we could still have the oil. And keep the Jewish vote in New York.
It was like an exotic English garden to a great house, with flame trees round the side, bougainvillea clambering wildly over the yellow sun-burnt walls, clumps of some sort of flowering laurel, paths as neatly run as designs in a blueprint, the grass edged and clipped and watered, untrodden and undisturbed — the one park in the city where no one took his ease in holiday groups; the fruits, the first fruits of them that slept.
The weather wasn’t typical National Trust though: the usual lead-blue Cairo dome, the light so harsh and stinging that one didn’t dare look up and see where the sun had got to, how far on the day was.
They had dug the graves at the bottom of the cemetery at St. George’s: they were just under the high walls, looking back over the Mokattam Hills, in a small patch of empty ground left over from the thousands of other tombstones which raked the area, neat war graves for the most part, plain white stones, like little cupboard doors; name, rank and number: model prisoners, withholding everything to the very last.
The two sandy hollows were at the end of a line, which started with the children drowned in the Comet disaster of the early ’fifties: a watery corner, in a place where everybody seemed to be the victim of some awfully foolish mistake: a piece of shrapnel that had chosen to share the line you lived along, a faulty bolt in the fuselage on the way to see your parents, a bright day on the river that had gone on too long, with too much drink, so that you knocked yourself out on the keel which had risen like an iron reef in the darkness as the boat reversed itself. It was all a dreadful mistake.
Madame Cherry was the only person who seemed to have gone quietly, willingly perhaps. Herbert watched her now as they began the process of lowering her away, his head bowed, the bald pate stooped earnestly, the better to hear some scurrilous Dublin story. A story beyond all telling. His hands were linked together over his belly. “I’ll rest this round, thanks all the same.”