Malcolm Quelch raised his hand to an acquaintance, a gauze-draped woman of middle years, as she drew across the sandy slabs a charge of straw-hatted schoolchildren, doubtless the daughters of diplomats and soldiers, who moved with the familiar reluctant tread I had observed in the museums of Kiev and Paris, their navy-blue pleated skirts swinging in unison and reminding me of a party of Scots I had seen during the last stages of the Civil War, when the Whites and their allies were falling back to Odessa. My own little girl was scarcely older than they. I wondered if I should not consider asking Major Nye’s help in finding a good English boarding-school where she could learn the lessons of normality and moral rectitude which would turn her into a perfect wife for a man of affairs. However, Esmé’s explicit remarks about these children were not in any way suitable and I was only glad that Quelch’s grasp of vernacular Turkish was less than perfect.
‘And how are you finding Cairo, dear mademoiselle?’ Politely our professor turned to include himself in the conversation.
‘It is very pretty,’ she said. ‘Especially the mosques.’ She flicked a fly from her blue and white parasol. ‘And the lovely trees and so on.’
‘Cairo, my dear young woman, is a City of Illusion.’ He paused to watch the schoolgirls racing towards an Italian ice-cream cart almost identical to those I used to see on the beach at Arcadia. I came ashore in Arcadia, from the Oertz when she crashed in the sea, but the carts and the bands and the pretty girls had all gone. Only the Jew met me and took me to his house. He said he worked on a newspaper in Odessa. He had been born in Odessa, he said. This did not surprise me. ‘And we can find in that city all the beauty of Illusion. But Cairo is also a frontier-town, sweet dear mademoiselle, with the familiar characteristic of such a town.’
‘A frontier to what?’ enquired my little one with honest curiosity.
‘To the past, I suppose. The North is exhausted, but the South awaits us. Are you interested in the past, mademoiselle?’
‘I am too young for the past, in the main,’ she said. ‘My interest is principally for the here and now.’
‘This is the generation of the wilful Modern Girl, I fear.’ Malcolm Quelch spoke to me in English. And he winked to show that he had made a joke. I assured him in the same language that Esmé was the very model of virtue and that he was not to judge her by either her fashionable clothes or her apparent vapidity. And Esmé, hating to be excluded by a language of which she had only the prettiest rudiments, asked in French if it were not yet time for lunch. Professor Quelch informed her that it was only nine-thirty and that at twelve, he understood, they would be bringing us out a buffet from the hotel. ‘The food is excellent. They have nothing but British-trained chefs.’
Understanding this much, Esmé darted me a look of sardonic despair. Professor Quelch, propped upon one of the lower stones, asked if she were unwell. She merely began to hop about in the loose sand, eventually removing one of her little high-heeled slippers. ‘My shoe,’ she said. ‘It is full of this awful stuff. Are we almost gone round?’
‘Not yet, I fear, charming lady. We have two more golden sides to negotiate before we shall catch sight of our friends.’
‘Oh, Maxim!’ Still hopping, my darling pointed at two men stalking by supporting a battered chair on their shoulders. I was obliged to negotiate a price with the ruffians to carry my child in our wake as Quelch and I continued to walk. I explained to him, as if sharing a secret, that Esmé had experienced a restless night and was still tired. Quelch took my meaning. A bond was growing between us. It was of a different order to the wholesome comradeship existing between his brother and me, yet I did not resist it. My respect for Quelch’s experience and scholarship was considerable and I was honoured he should be prepared to share it with me.
‘The Copts and not the Arabs are the original sons of this land.’ He indicated some chipped slogan from an earlier millennium. ‘What a paradox it all is. Even the Prophet did not consider Christianity the foe of Islam. On the whole the Moslems are the real aliens and the Copts the real aborigines. The Coptic Christians are today not loved by their Moslem fellow-citizens, despite fine speeches by eloquent young men about the brotherhood of all Egyptians united against the Wicked Foreigner!’ He glared almost cunningly at me from the edge of his eye as we turned the third corner. ‘Are you interested in paradox, Mr Peters?’
I said that as an engineer I was interested in the resolution of apparent paradox.
‘Then you are a man of your times!’ He laughed, the sound of a bolt being drawn after years of disuse. ‘I am afraid that I have accepted the irrational. It is almost the norm, these days. But you are still young enough to think you can mould the world into something better than it is.’ He had grown suddenly more effusive. ‘The God of Christ is ipso facto the God of Chance.’ He put his arm around my shoulders, patting me as an older brother might, offering encouragement and approval. Perhaps he, the youngest, had always wanted a relationship where for once he might command. I think he looked for that in me. He was a man desperately needing a protégé, while I still longed for a mentor. Perhaps I let Quelch too easily influence me for a time, to my eventual regret.
We turned the fourth corner and came up behind our colleagues. Watched by a throng of local hucksters, they had gathered about a large touring car. They were sipping lemonade proffered by an impeccably costumed servant in a tarboosh. Seated in the back seat of the great Mercedes was a small, swarthy man in a white satin suit and a gleaming panama which he lifted as Esmé rode in upon her ramshackle palanquin and was lowered to the dust. ‘Meet the boss,’ said Mrs C., introducing us to Sir Ranalf Steeton, in whose hands our immediate destiny now lay. We greeted him with the enthusiasm of shipwrecked passengers apprised of rescue. As he shook hands with Esmé he returned our enthusiasm twofold. ‘I say, what a stunner! This must be our other lovely star! Do join me in the car, ladies. I must learn everything about you.’
I walked away from Mrs Cornelius and my Esmé as they simpered beside Sir Ranalf. He was in the hands of professionals. I could rely on them to do their work and was content to let them make whatever possible gains they could for us. Wolf Seaman, unbuttoning his shirt, had turned bright red and pretended to tackle some problem with the camera. When I pointed out that our girls were currently our greatest asset he said something waspish about his talent being the best thing we had and he was about to expand on this when the car’s horn brought us back, smiling and manfully agreeable, to Sir Ranalf, whose orderly had finished handing out the packed lunches and those awful bottles of Bass. ‘I’m so sorry I can’t have you to luncheon at the Mena Palace,’ said the little man bending to kiss Mrs Cornelius’s dainty, pink hand with his own dainty pink lips. ‘But we shall arrange something soon.’