‘One of the “Commuter Specials”,’ Wheel said. ‘Wall Street brokers take them on the round trip every day. From Long Island, Westchester and other costly suburbs.’
Wheel had joined me at the window, seeming to be as pleased as I was at this slap in the face of the dull ways of the world.
‘I suppose the staff here come the same way? — with all that money.’
Wheel might almost have been annoyed. He shook his head viciously several times before speaking and closed his eyes as if to erase the first impossibly rude words of his reply.
‘You’ve got it all wrong, sir! We’re all saving to go home here. We don’t spare the money on sail boats for the kids, don’t talk about sea-planes. We don’t know life at all. We don’t deal with that sort of thing — never. That wasn’t a sea-plane you saw then — that’s imagination; that’s what you saw. Imagination at work. I laugh when I think of it,’ Wheel said gently. ‘It’s like a million dollars, those floats and canvas. We must want it, yet we must despise it. It’s everything we can’t admit here, in the organisation: rampant ambition, individuality, survival of the fittest — all the things that made this city are wrapped up in those commuters and their box of tricks, and in theory, U Thant should be up on the roof gunning for them. But it’s not like that, Mr Graham, not at all. We’re all trying to thumb a ride with them.’
Wheel suddenly laughed uproariously. ‘Jesus, I’ll have to make you pay for this if I go on much longer. I tend towards the ironic view. Think nothing of it.’
But I did. I wondered for a moment if Wheel might be my ‘contact’. His talk of ‘going home’, his political bias, which he had tried to discount as mere irony — these might have been clues to a professional commitment to the Left.
We went in next door to my office and Wheel introduced me to my secretary. She was a well-intentioned and proportioned Latin-American lady of middle years whose minimal though enthusiastic greetings suggested that her working English would follow a similar pattern, a guess which she was later to confirm many times. Wheel called her ‘Mrs Antonio’, which seemed to surprise her, as though this was neither her marital status nor her name, and this too I afterwards found to be correct. Her name was Miss Fernandez. She was a newcomer to the organisation and, like myself, still capable of surprise.
Outside our offices was a large, windowless secretarial pool, lined with filing cabinets and filled with an assortment of strange and tongue-tied women — silent and unusual because they shared no common national identity or language and were thus forced into a quite unnatural abstinence of gossip and chit-chat. Due to the unique nature of their employer, these ladies were a more than usually divided lot. They sat about the area at various haphazardly placed desks, some with small partitions round them, some nude to the view, some in groups and others distantly isolated, as though the women had been attempting to repeat the geographical dispositions and political alliances of the countries which they came from.
There were small, china-boned Asiatic girls with wide-spread blackberry eyes like islands in faces that were otherwise quite blank maps — and bigger, older women from the more developed lands, who had missed affection many years before, whose eyes spoke loudly of that loss but were still full of dangerous hope, beacons of long and sharply-drawn desire, waiting, each one, for their Captain Cook.
Afterwards Wheel introduced me to the rest of his department, the monk-like occupants of many other small steel cubby-holes whose windows gave out on either side of the narrow building. They were a forbiddingly dull lot — except for the last of them.
‘Let’s end up with Mrs Soheir Taufiq, who covers our Arabic interests,’ Wheel had said brightly — anxious as I was, it seemed, for some vision of life in the building.
Mrs Soheir Taufiq was straight from the Great Earth Mother department; an overflowing Egyptian of indefinable years, hair built up at the back of her head in a huge bun and big black grapes for eyes. Her face was leathered and deeply grooved, forceful, competent.
She had two girls with shorthand notebooks beside her, and was ministering to them alternatively with words and figures which they stumbled over and which she clarified with powerful and forbearing accents.
I had assumed that she was conducting UN business in her dictation. But Wheel told me later that she was most often to be found at her own correspondence, a matter which she needed considerable assistance with, since she wrote at length and had a wide circle of friends.
‘Yes, I know,’ Wheel had continued afterwards, ‘but she’s invaluable to us here. Such a diplomat. And she has contacts all over the Middle East which even the SG couldn’t easily make. They consult,’ he added, in as dark a manner as he could muster, ‘whenever he wants another angle on Sadat and the rest of his friends. A real diplomat.’
And indeed, for me, she had been just that. Of all the staff I met that morning, apart from Wheel, she was the only one who showed any real interest in my arrival, an uncomfortable interest almost. She must have studied Graham’s UN application and curriculum vitae fairly closely and as a result of this I had, for the first time, to properly inhabit the man and his past — to go back over his career, over the many details of his life I had so laboriously learnt in Marylebone and on the boat journey over, right back to the time when he had taught in Cairo in the mid-fifties, before I’d ever gone there myself.
And she spoke to me in Arabic, not English. Mrs Taufiq suddenly moved from a relaxed Anglo-American idiom to an equally colloquial argot of Cairo, full of those awkward vowels, sudden elisions and clamorous consonants that I’d not heard in four years but which drew me back to the city as surely as if she’d taken a blindfold from my eyes and plugs from my ears and placed me squarely next the pastry counter at Groppi’s on Soliman Pasha in the middle of that dirty, blazing, busy city, where the smells rose with the sun, lime dust and coffee dregs, the slops of five thousand years, urine and burnt newspapers — all brooding in the alleyways, running along the streets and climbing up the shattered concrete that shook and danced all day in the pounding it took from the waves of light. She led me back there so surely in her words. Had I closed my eyes I might have been her lover in that distant time, for she mimicked perfectly all the elements of disquiet that I had taken from that language and the women then.
But now, with my eyes open, her words carried a different menace: were they part of an innocent inquiry or an interrogation with a special motive? Was she merely politely interested in George Graham or intent on proving his credentials? The curtain had gone up at last and I was linked with her in the first words of that long dialogue I was to play with her and with others, re-writing and acting the words simultaneously, enacting a drama that a week before had actually been a man’s life; a dramatist who had since fallen out of favour — whose works, in fact, had been ruthlessly obliterated.
Graham was dead; long live George Graham. I had been handed a few props, some of his tattered belongings in a sack, an old Hamilton square-faced watch, a pair of flannels and a Mentmore fountain pen, along with some pages of a prompt copy from the original production. Yet the dry bones would have to move again and the words flow, for McCoy and Harper, I remembered, had never stopped impressing upon me how Graham, in his time, had taken life and its pleasures with the confidence of a king.