Cherry, as though bent on some high and arduous purpose, disappeared with Lola through the big double doors of the bedroom. Bridget and I made some highly unsatisfactory love together, balancing precariously on the chaise-longue. Moaning afterwards, but catching some broken sentences in between, I realised she was regretting Lola’s use of the double bed next door as much as my own precipitate performance. Charitably she saw in our discomfort the reason for my failure — saw too, perhaps, that I was not really up to the sexual obstacles, the “flaws” she had contrived for me in her idea of the shower together and her choice of the awkward chaise-longue. She changed her mood, became gently impatient.
“See what they’re doing in there. If they’ve done with the bed we could use it. It might be easier.”
At that moment Cherry’s bare arm slid through the doorway and he shook a towel at us. He called to me, softly, and clutching another towel I hurried forward to the mid-wicket conference.
“It hasn’t worked,” he whispered. “Lola says we should try the chaise-longue. Are you done with it?”
Lola and Bridget were never satisfied. The afternoon dragged on in a series of blows and parries, from room to room, place to place. Fortified, in our separate ways, with gin and desire, Cherry and I gradually faded while the girls redoubled their attack. Lola took to berating us in long storms of Arabic, her mouth forming immense shapes as the normally relaxed syllables of her tongue rose in angry and vicious gutturals towards us. “Ya-a-a-LAH”—the last three letters coming upon us like a thunder-clap. Now that the pretence of communication, the polite exchanges, had been thrown away — we laughed in return, masking our impotence with roars of indifference, as if we understood her every word.
It was then that Lola embarked on her belly dance — the Trojan horse in the proceedings, as she must have seen it, which would surprise our lust behind the fort of our fatigue and indifference.
She rooted vigorously in cupboards about the bedroom, throwing a vast hoard of tempting apparel about the place. It piled up around the bed on which Bridget was now lying back naked — these diaphonous colours of previous battles — like salad round a dish. Cherry and I watched the preparations carefully, in our underpants, from two small occasional chairs by the card table. Bridget took no interest at all but stared at the ceiling, her eyes fixed intently on a point above her, as if she expected to see in it the explanation to a mystery.
The garment which Lola eventually strapped herself into had an operative rather than a seductive quality. It was heavy and came down from her waist in a series of leather petals, embroidered here and there with a dull wink of cheap jewellery. It was a little like the skirt of a Roman legionnaire and had the unreal, unused air of a Hollywood prop. There was an attachment above it, starting with a veil over the midriff and ending in a sequinned harness about the bust. But she dispensed with this, casting it aside dramatically, making an overture out of what I suspected was simply a faulty clasp.
And then a clap and a change of eye and a strange harsh expression, fixing us with a stare that never left us, her big bones moving rhythmically, delicately, Lola started her dance around the bed — trampling with each sudden shiver of her body the finery of her wardrobe into the floor. Soon she started a song, a viciously accented accompaniment, throwing her voice passionately between the thwacks and twists of her body, working herself into an angry frenzy without a smile. She had moved far from the dull coquetry of the form and before the end she had turned the dance — hands moving tightly across her body — from a symbol of the act into the act itself. Exhausted she hurried away to the bathroom through the wide doorway and we sat there saying nothing.
Bridget had long since turned away from us and from the dance, her face to the wall, and while Cherry went into the next room to get dressed I moved across and sat beside her, against the long length and pale yellow skin of her back.
The evening had come up outside as we left the silent chaos of the flat. The expected wind stirred, shutters opened, white figures padded towards a mosque on the corner and the trams clanked again in the distance. Like signals from different parts of the city, the sounds rose one after the other on the air around us, breaking the vacuum of the afternoon, opening up the night, as though it was the beginning of another day.
2
Before the start of the autumn term that year most of the overseas teachers, except Cherry and myself, had left. Home leave was due every second summer but apart from ourselves none of the others had managed to survive the punishments of the first.
Two of the women in the group were flown back from the Valley of the Kings with sunstroke while a third, a woodwork teacher from a vocational school near Limerick, distinguished himself by running foul of the very lax Moslem attitude towards pederasty. The remainder squabbled for weeks with various uncomprehending juniors at the Ministry of Education about transferring their piastres into pounds and their tickets back home before Cherry and I, deciding that we might as well stay on in Egypt and dissociate ourselves from our hysterical colleagues, took a taxi to Alexandria for the rest of the summer.
We stayed at the Hotel Beau Rivage near the beach at Sidi Bishr — a splendidly off-hand sort of place with a terraced garden at the back with little wooden pavilions for the guests looking down over a great carpet of crimson flowers and buzzing blue insects. Here, towards midday, we had “English” breakfasts and fresh mango juice, and the summer passed quickly enough; there were only the afternoons and evenings to fill. A vegetable life.
In the afternoons I swam off the “Cleopatra Beach”—a private strand near the hotel where that lady was reputed to have once taken a bath — while Cherry paddled in the shallows, flirting with the elderly latter-day grandes domes of the city, so that out at sea his voice echoed to me over the water, the shrill of his hopelessly immature laugh, as he clowned about their deckchairs.
“Tee-hee. Ha-ha …”
Like a child being tickled.
“Oh, comme vous êtes méchant, Monsieur Chéri!”
The dialogue came across the flip-flap of small waves like snatches from a Restoration comedy.
“Quel esprit! Et vous êtes hollandais — incroyable!”
And Cherry, already exercising the beginnings of that language which he was so quickly to become adept in under their tutelage, would howl triumphantly, wagging his finger at the ancient crones:
“Pas hollandais — irlandais!”
And there would follow a barrage of squeaks and twitters and oh-la-las.
For these ladies, the last of the city’s fabled courtesans, in their dark billowy silks and the remnants of their jewel cases, nailed to their chairs and their memories — Cherry, with his profligate eccentricities and attentions, must have been a happy reminder of their youth: when the government and the Embassies took their intrigues to Alexandria for the summer, shot duck on the lakes in the autumn — and between them all the ladies had played a vital role in the careless history of the times.
In the late afternoons, during those few moments before dusk when in better times the ladies had “taken the air” of the city before dressing for dinner, Cherry would stroll back with Eugénie and Clara and Mathilde and sometimes I joined them, walking slowly behind the little troupe, down avenues heavy with flame trees and the smell of jasmine, as one by one the ladies dropped off into their crumbling villas which lay behind the sea front.
“Vous savez — comme c’était beau ici avant la guerre … Maintenant les domestiques sont impossibles. Elles ne savent rien: même faire du thé …”