‘As artificial as the rest of Egypt,’ Quelch maintained relentlessly and waved with contempt towards the vivid David Roberts postcards which Esmé had purchased at the hotel and which she now presented as proof against his argument. ‘Exactly what I have said. Those colours were never so vivid, those ruins never so artfully re-arranged. Roberts was out here for a year. Before he came he had discovered that a career could be made from a special subject. Thus he lived for the rest of his life on sketches he had made in his youth. Even at the time those sketches were exaggerated, fanciful. If that is the Egypt you want, p’tite ma’mselle, no doubt your rose-coloured glasses will provide it. But do not be disappointed if the grandeur of Roberts’s fantasy is not quite matched by the squalor of the actuality.’
‘But that is only Cairo,’ I argued. ‘Further up-river it is less spoiled, perhaps?’
‘Less spoiled? Is an old harlot less spoiled because she services a handful fewer soldiers? Egypt, Herr Peters, has been spoiled by a succession of conquerors; by Bedouin savages, by Greeks, Romans and Jews, by Christians, pagan Arabs, Moslems, Turks, Italians, Frenchmen. And now the English, with their nostalgia for anything faded and valueless, are here to offer romantic overtures to the crone! Every passing footsoldier in history has left his urine and his initials somewhere on some proud Egyptian monument. Foreign dams have poisoned the Nile and infected the fellaheen, who can no longer work and so smoke hashish to help them forget their miseries. As in China, the British managed, in a matter of decades, to destroy Egypt’s last important resource: her hardy, cheerful working people. Now she must survive only because she provides a quick route to India for our Empire’s peace-keeper, good old Tommy Atkins.’
Mrs Cornelius chuckled. ‘Yore soundin’ more like a bloody bolshevik orl ther time, prof!’
‘My views are indeed somewhat radical,’ he agreed. ‘But I prefer to think of them as independently arrived at. I am not, I think, spouting mimicry, madam.’
‘Oh, yore orl right!’ she said, and held out her glass to Joseph for another cocktail. ‘I must say I’m glad ter be orf that effin’ boat. Know any songs, perfessor? Ower than ther Red Flag, that is?’
Normally this would have served to have broken any ice, changed the topic and got us all into a more relaxed mood, but Professor Quelch was resistant to my old friend’s social powers. He drew back in his seat and pursed those large thin lips under the promontory of his nose so that he began to resemble, in profile, one of the stranger birds said to wade in the up-river reeds.
Mrs Cornelius did not follow this line. For some reason she liked Quelch and wanted to see the best in him. She leaned forward and patted his knee. ‘Didn’t mean ter get up yer nostrils, prof. Go on wiv wot yer wos sayin’, abart the Imperialists an’ that.’
He responded with a small smile, his cheeks softening and sagging. ‘I am not attacking Imperialism, madam. Merely describing its realities. An Empire is not maintained by kind words and a fatherly manner, as the Boy’s Own Paper insists. It is maintained by force. Sometimes by terror. Usually only by the hint of terror. It’s rather like most marriages, in that respect.’
So much bitterness did he express in this last remark that Mrs Cornelius became instantly curious. Even Esmé looked up from her toys. But Mrs Cornelius knew enough not to pursue the matter immediately. I watched with fascination as she charmed and calmed him. With a mixture of flattery, wit and gesture, she brought the leathery skin to a sort of glossy glow, the nearest it had been in many years to the bloom of youth. Within half-an-hour he was trying to recall the words of It Reely Woz a Wery Pretty Garden. I was full of loving admiration at my friend’s ability to discover the best in people. Soon he began to speak with some lyricism about his childhood in Kent, his envy of his brothers, who lived so often in a world of their own, his loneliness at home, his enjoyment of school. He had been sent to some famous establishment on the coast not far from where he was born and from there had gone to Cambridge where, in the family tradition, he had read Classics. ‘I am an archaeologist by vocation,’ he told us with some pride, ‘not, as it were, by degree.’ Divinity, he said, had never attracted him.
Mrs Cornelius, asking him if he knew London, saw him pause and begin to fade. Some harsh memory, some unwanted recollection. Quickly, she brought him back to the sunshine again, to ask him what he thought of China and India, where he had gone shortly after leaving England for the last time. His dismissive answers were brief and witty. He had enjoyed his time with the bank in Macao, he said. The Portuguese were very easy to work with. He had been lucky, sharing quarters with a cultured Lisbonite enduring a spell in the family business before returning to the Portuguese capital and a desk he would never use. ‘Manuel is a celebrated poet now. But like so many people these days he involved himself in politics. A dangerous game in the modern world. Where politics was once a worthwhile occupation for gentlemen, even in England the professional politician now holds sway. It’s the death of democracy, of disinterested representation. Their only alternative is mob rule. One day soon London will be like Alexandria. And serve her right.’
Again that wave of wounded outrage bandaged by dismissive cynicism.
‘Are you sure you won’t ‘ave a drink, love,’ said Mrs Cornelius. ‘Maybe just a lemonade?’
Like an old, abandoned cat gradually being reminded of the pleasures of the fireside, of regular meals and a loving hand upon his fur, he allowed himself to be coaxed. Even I, watching this performance, felt bathed by the same warmth, embraced by the same intensity of interest emanating from Mrs Cornelius. She was an Earth goddess. She was Isis.
‘I began life as something of a Graecophile.’ The lemonade in his thin fist, Quelch folded himself like a stick-insect joint by joint back into his seat. ‘But Athens has become impossible since the War.’
‘It reelly ‘as, ‘asn’t it?’ Mrs Cornelius convinced us all that she had known Athens since the beginning of Time. She had visited the city once, I believe, with her Persian playboy.
‘And after all that terrible business around Lawrence. The scandal and so on. Well, it was hushed up, of course, but that didn’t stop people here talking. I tried to get a publisher interested. There are several who do my little pamphlets, and I wrote to Seeker in London, but apparently these days he is only interested in elegant fictions. They’re what pay, I suppose. Ecstatic texts by followers of Goethe and Freud. You know the sort of thing.’
‘Awful,’ she agreed.
Esmé was watching Mrs Cornelius in a new way, almost like a tennis-player watching a fellow sportswoman’s serve. I remained filled with disappointment that these two wonderful women could not be friends. It was not as if they competed for the same man! Esmé had me. Mrs Cornelius had Wolf Seaman, who currently cast the occasional gloomy glare along the carriage’s sun-dappled luxury as our train left Alexandria behind to begin the journey across the fields, marshes and canals of the peninsula, where wild birds were startled by our loco’s arrogant bark and old men straightened up from ancient wooden ploughs to display fleshless arms and toothless grins. I sympathised with the wretches doomed to such an existence, when even the advent of the Cairo Express was more interesting than any other event in their lives. Yet the success of our cinema was based on such people, all over the world. At last the illiterate mass possessed a great art form of its own! It is no wonder that the most prolific cinema industries in the world are based in Egypt, Hong Kong and India. And it has become a means of controlling us. Now the peasant has no incentive to read at all. He finds the titles merely diverting. That is why the tycoons and their stooges make so much of violent action being the natural expression for film. It is no more the ‘natural’ function of film than it is of the novel. We have made an aesthetic theory from the realities of commercial necessity and political chicanery. Now the new directors in Hollywood can explain in the language of academia why the husband is knifed, the wife raped and the villain hunted down and killed during a car chase. I have asked the Cornelius girl if the opposite of ‘free speech’ is ‘imprisoned speech’ - or perhaps ‘imprisoning speech’. It is the kind of speech used to justify and maintain opinions no longer of relevant use or moral value in the world. We imprison ourselves by means of words far more frequently than we free ourselves. Vi heyst dos? Ikh red nit keyn ‘popsprecht’. Tsidiz doz der rikhtiker pshat? I watch these TV programmes. Every night I have to listen to the English explaining why they are superior to everyone else in the world. Turkish television is not, I would guess, so different now.