Two plainclothesmen stood behind him. The ropes shrieked quickly against the side of the wood.
Then Henry went, in a larger box, like a lift plunging down a shaft, going under once more. An over-confident conjuring trick, one could see the ambitious pretence immediately.
I was almost ready to beleieve in the spirit then — complaining, implacable — rising up to indict and slander the barman, resisting the petty regulations of closing time, invoking other more civilized places.
I couldn’t hear much from a hundred yards away, pretending to look at another grave by the wall, turning my ear, bending down to look at an inscription, shielded by a flowering bush.
“… it hath pleased Almighty God of his great Mercy to takeuntohimself …”
I lost the rest of it. Herbert had stepped back into the custody of the two men, willingly, as though in all that staring masonry any protection was better than none.
Hawthorn wrapped his surplice around him and moved carefully forward towards the holes, a golfer checking an eagle.
I tried to feel that in other circumstances I would have comforted Herbert in some way, taken him on to the Estoril for a solid lunch, a long afternoon of drinks, a wake that might have eased things. And the idea came very clearly into my mind, absorbing every other thought: the dazzling linen table-cloths, moist arak glasses, the smell of lemon juice and burnt perch; purple bubbles in the Omar Khayyam and the living, stupid chatter around us.
And I saw the two of us, Herbert and me, so precisely, at the cemetery gates, the taxi humming by the kerb, waiting for Henry to join us.
Instead, I met Hawthorn back at the Cathedral and we were half-way down the Agricultural road to Alexandria by lunch time, taking a stomach-turning snack at the rest house in Tanta: raw oiled tomato salad, dry bread sandwich and a warm Coke.
We talked about the challenge of the church today, glancing now and again at the magnificent olive Land Rover parked beyond the fly-smeared windows. A hopeless old man kept on trying to sell us fifty used ball-points; two scabious dogs watched us with equal hungry patience, hunched up, shifting their paws miserably, going “click-click” like knitting needles on the old linoleum. The waiter made an error in his count, somehow getting an extra figure one in front of the fifty-three piastres total. We pointed this out to him — to his apparent delight — and he took the opportunity of wondering if we could change a few deutschmarks he happened to have on him.
The journey back was uneventful. I was so genuinely tired of it all, so divorced in my mind from the plots and machinations of the past week, that I didn’t really believe myself that I had anything to do with British Intelligence. I was what I said I was, a journalist interested in a piece of Ecumenicism and the future of the Anglican community generally in the Middle East; it was, by its very nature, a restful, self-effacing, unsuspicous role and I immersed myself in it completely.
We passed through Egyptian control at Soloum on the Libyan border without their giving me a second glance. It was not a crossing they could have expected me to leave by, nor the impeccable company I kept a likely cover for a spy. In fact, of course, the heat must have been off us all by then if, indeed, it had ever reached the slow men at this distant frontier. Egyptian Security must have been suffering an embarrassment of riches; Alexandria had been alive with the story the previous day: a nest of spies had been uncovered in Cairo and one man had been taken in the western harbour that morning, an Israeli Intelligence officer trying to make it home, head of their entire circle in Egypt, the king pin.
At Tobruk I went to the church hall and talked with Hawthorn at length about the extension; I took measurements, made little drawings and interviewed the foreman in Arabic; I licked my index finger and discussed erosion and the prevailing winds. They were impressed by it all, pleased. It was the saddest afternoon of my life.
“Thank you,” I said to Hawthorn afterwards. “I’ve decided I’ll have to go straight back from here. Time has rather run out for me and there’s a piece I want to do on Libya in any case before I go.”
“But what about your luggage and things in Cairo?”
“You know what it is in this job — here today, gone tomorrow. I’ll have the hotel send it back. Don’t worry about that. And thank you — very much indeed.”
“It was nothing,” Hawthorn said. “Nothing at all. Glad you were interested. ‘Always something new out of Egypt’ as they say.”
We laughed and shook hands in the wretched featureless street, Hawthorn in his grey lightweight clericals towering over the rubble of new buildings, the flat land beyond the edge of the road. Sand whipped around our shoes from the desert, piling up against our heels in minute dunes even as we stood.
I took a taxi to the British air base and two days later the VC 10 was falling through heavy cloud above Burford, the jets thrusting once more over dripping parkland, before we scudded down in a cloud of spray at Brize Norton.
13
Two Special Branch men were on the tarmac to meet me, a senior inspector, a tall pipe-smoking, academic-looking fellow called Kirk, and a burly junior officer, who probably hadn’t got more than four “O” levels but looked as if he could run fast and had done well in Police Federation boxing.
They drove me to London, to Scotland Yard, where I was asked to make a statement.
“I’ve nothing to say. The only statement I can give is to my own department — you must know that, the Official Secrets Act. What’s your explanation — wouldn’t that be more appropriate?”
Kirk looked unhappy and unsure of himself. He wrote something in the margin of the Crown document in front of him.
“I can understand your position, Mr. Marlow. You are not of course obliged to make any statement. We’ve been asked to interview you about your recent activities in the UAR — ”
“Don’t go on. What are the charges and then I’ll contact my solicitor.”
Kirk was horrified by my peremptory stance.
“It would come under the Official Secrets Act,” he said at length.
“Well, I didn’t suppose it would come under the Foot and Mouth Regulations. What is it, for God’s sake?”
He sighed and read from the document in front of him, going through the legal preamble before coming to the application proper: “‘… that on dates between the 7th and 10th of May, 1967, and on other dates prior to that period, you did knowingly communicate to foreign agents information which was calculated to be, or might be, or was intended to be useful to the enemy, entrusted to you in your capacity as an officer of the Crown; and that further, you did, between the same dates, knowingly communicate, to the agents of a second power, the names and rank of officers of the Crown resulting in their subsequent apprehension and arrest.” One charge to answer, under section — ”
“Is someone being funny?”
Kirk looked up, aggrieved.
“You think I’m an Egyptian agent?”
“Not I, Mr. Marlow, I assure you. The charges are being brought by the Crown, on an application made by the Chief of your department to the Director of Public Prosecutions. They’ve accepted that there is a case to answer.”
“You think I’d come all the way back here in the circumstances — if I were working for the Egyptians?”
“I’ve no idea. No doubt that’s a point your counsel will have every opportunity of presenting on your behalf in due course.”