There was a wealth of affection in those few words and gestures. Warmed by this, I saluted and climbed into the car, facing a haughty Herr Seaman and an eager Esmé who was, as always, delighted by the prospect of a new city with new shops. Mrs Cornelius sat beside me. ‘I ‘ope they ‘ave cold beer at this place. It’s not too English, is it?’
When I pointed out that it was only about 65° - a temperature we had come to think of as cool in Los Angeles - she replied that she had always hated warm beer, even in winter.
Before the car started, Captain Quelch leaned through the open window and said, sotto voce to me, ‘Oh, and by the way, old boy, it looks like the law’s caught up with poor Bolsover. I hear he’s to be arrested this afternoon. Drugs, apparently, poor chap.’ He winked and blew me a platonic kiss. And then he was stepping back. ‘Remember, dear boy,’ as the car moved off, ‘put your trust only in God and Anarchy.’
We turned now onto a palm-lined seafront promenade of white hotels and summer residences looking directly at the sea. With its wrought-iron balconies and its air of calm gentility, it reminded me very much of Yalta in the spring. But I could not have saved those girls if I had tried. They were thoroughly given up to the thrill of the situation. I had no intention of joining in and left them all to it. Along the promenade, a light wind stirred breakers and fronds while the traffic was chiefly horse-cabs, private motors and the occasional tram, all as spick and span and Bristol-fashion as was ever possible in that dusty nation. Even in Alexandria, between the ocean and a lake, one quickly became used to the fine, khaki-coloured dust that settled on newspapers, books, clothing and the well-polished counters of bazaars. Everything turned yellow or brown. Now, as the ochre fog cleared, a soft blue sky appeared above the stately rooftops. Pale, golden light gradually spread over blue waters, white promenade and stern granite institutions, intensifying the delicate colouring of the palms from lemon-yellow to sage-green. The oranges, browns and reds of their trunks, the variety of grasses which grew at their bases, helped the palms soften the severity of authority’s brick and diplomacy’s sandstone, giving a gaiety rather than a dignity to the national flags and blazons, giving the stucco flanks of native palaces the sheen of freshly-woven cotton. In those moments the city seemed to possess the patina of an old mural; it was as if her vivid colours forced themselves through layers of time before they reached us. I grew almost drowsy with the pleasure of the vision alone and, since I had slept very little that night, was dozing by the time the car pulled up outside an edifice that was a cross between a crusader castle and a Mexican bordello. Professor Quelch was amused by my surprise as I dismounted from the running-board and looked up at the hotel’s five magnificent storeys. ‘This is what we should have seen if the Moors had conquered Troon,’ he whispered. His remark came to mean something only twenty or more years later, when I visited Scotland. The British have a habit of taking a local style and turning it into something cheerfully unalarming. The cool interior of the hotel smelled of beeswax and jasmine, her palms were washed and polished to unnatural brilliance, at one with the dark woods and Turkish inlays of the reception hall. We were welcomed by the manager, a Greek with a French name. We had been given an entire floor of the hotel for ourselves. The Christmas holidays had begun and many residents were up-country or visiting relatives in England. The wealthy Egyptians and the British all tended to summer in Alexandria but remained in Cairo during the cooler months. I never did keep the name of the hotel in my mind, but I think it was named after some English lord, perhaps the Hotel Churchill. Its airy rooms looked out to the corniche and harbour where, if you felt a little nervous of the country’s interior, or her natives, you were immediately reassured to see the British flag flying from the masts of half-a-dozen modern ships of war, while from time to time came the well-disciplined riders of the Egyptian Mounted Police, in handsome blue or scarlet, with red fezzes or képis, riding their beautiful Syrian Arabs along the wide roadways, their assured masculinity in contrast to the soft, white ghosts who drifted in and out of the shadows, pausing to murmur to one another or address some disconcerted tourist already in difficulties with his Baedecker or Guide Bleu. Many of these wore the official tarboosh, cream gelabea and red slippers of the official guides, who displayed large bronze discs around their necks as proof of their legality, the self-styled dragomans whose daily ambition was to attach themselves to a party of well-heeled Americans greedy for a certain kind of Romance. Little groups of children, frequently in rags and bearing the signs of disease, scuttled about the beaches and gardens, avoiding the police, running after any carriage which bore a European or an Egyptian of the better class. Strolling native policemen gestured them on their way with stern good humour. Here was the daily bustle of a modern cosmopolitan port. I had returned to civilisation!
Furnished in the ubiquitous Indian colonial style, my rooms did not adjoin Esmé’s. It had not been possible to control the key allocation at the reception desk without raising suspicions. In fact Mrs Cornelius and Esmé shared a suite in the southern corner of the hotel and I was very glad that we were due to stay in Alexandria only for one further night before taking our reserved places on the Cairo Express. I was equally relieved not to be billeted with Wolf Seaman and to find that Malcolm Quelch would be my room-mate for the next thirty or so hours. I looked forward to further intimacy. His brother had not been misled, it seemed, in his enthusiasm for Malcolm’s scholarship and local knowledge.
That afternoon, after a late lunch, Esmé and I went shopping. Her normally cheerful spirits had returned and she was full of interest in the world around us, the well-tended gardens and ornamental trees, the beautifully ordered avenues, the jostling fellaheen who filled the sidestreets, the heavily veiled women, the gaudy Jews and the sober Copts, and all the other myriad creeds of this city, which had welcomed most and persecuted few; and everywhere were casual reassurances to show how the founder of the city was still acknowledged. There were signs in Greek everywhere. There were Greek cafes and bazaars and shops of all kinds. There was a Greek cinema and a Greek theatre, Greek newspapers, Greek churches. Here the two great defenders of our Faith had come together to bring order and renewed life to that old and decadent nation, just as Ptolemy, following in Alexander’s godlike footsteps, brought a refreshing and outgoing new dynasty to the country at its most corrupt moment, when it most needed honourable leaders. Since then Egypt has always sensed when new leadership was needed, from the time of Cleopatra, who so yearned for Mark Antony to rule both her heart and her destiny. Sadly, we were to see little of Ancient Greek nobility. We had struck a bargain with a carriage-driver who elected himself our guide, taking us to those parts of the city he believed to be suitable for Europeans and avoiding most of the Arab quarters. ‘Very dirty,’ he would say. ‘Very bad. Not nedif.’ He was a man of about my age, with large frank brown eyes, a small, neatly trimmed beard, a fez and a European linen jacket worn over the local trousers which, Captain Quelch had told me, were commonly called shitcatchers. There was nothing to do but to give ourselves up to our Oriental Chingachgook, who eventually drew the carriage to a halt in a large and impressive square. ‘Place Mohammed Ali,’ he told us. ‘Good European shops. I will wait for you here.’ He demanded no money and, after helping us down, lit himself a thin cigarette then settled whistling on the steps of his carriage. I was careful to make sure I would find him again, across from a large equestrian statue, presumably of the hero himself, which graced the well-ordered flower gardens. This wide square was flanked by a number of official-looking buildings in the usual European styles, a Gothic church and what I took to be a bank, on the same lines as the church. Elsewhere were glittering cafes whose decor and elegance could rival anything in Paris, where a grand pallor of European ladies and gentlemen took tea and a murmuring interest in other Europeans moving with the grace of so many fine yachts about their business. I became increasingly impressed by the prevailing aura of calm and good taste, and when we entered the Rue Sharif Pasha we were all astonished to find it lined with the shops one might normally encounter in only the greatest of European capitals. I could not help but be taken back to Petersburg and the wonderful months of freedom in the early days of the War. Odessa in her splendid confidence had been rich and happy. When I spoke of these things to Esmé, I was a little disappointed that she gave me a fraction of the attention she gave to the contents of the store windows. By the time the sun was flooding, blood-red, upon the evening roofs, we had visited three dress-shops, a hat-shop and a shoe-shop and Esmé was satiated with silks, beads and ostrich-feathers - at least until we reached Cairo. I could not begrudge my darling these few indulgences. She must still remember my betrayal of her. Yet so naturally gracious was she that she never reminded me of that moment when, arriving on a foreign shore, she had scanned the rows of waiting faces and failed to find mine.