‘Yer did yer level best ter make it work, Ivan.’ She is still beautiful, seated in her ancient armchair, all her memories piled around her. ‘It ain’t yore fault if ther effin’ world wosn’t up ter yer expectations. It’s the same wiv kids. Take it as it bloody comes, I say. One effin’ day at an effin’ time.’
She was a fantastic legend - yielding in my arms. I gasped. The joy was almost anguish. Esmé went by and her eye met mine. She smiled. I returned my gaze to Mrs Cornelius, holding her with all the passion of the years until the ‘Cut!’ I most dreaded and she was fanning herself with her feathers, pursing her perfect lips to blow air up into her face and calling enthusiastically for a beer. ‘Phew! This ain’t the wewer for ‘uggies and smarmies is it, Ive?’
Hardly able to breathe, let alone speak, I indicated that I agreed with her, but secretly I was nurturing the ambience. If Goldfish’s erratic temper permitted no other take, I had at least recorded the fulfilled ambition of those many years! Finally I had held the quintessence of all women (the woman who had been my wife) sober, in my arms for one infinitely thrilling moment! I think Esmé, strolling smoothly through her own part, sympathised, as women can, with my profound physical and intellectual pleasure; something she herself could never quite inspire. Though she satisfied my noblest longings and my every ideal of womanly perfection, though Esmé understood my soul, and my most primitive desires, only Mrs Cornelius really understood my heart.
‘OK shot! OK shot!’ Radonic, in vivid cotton, raised his thumb, his highest praise. Wiping his forehead, Wolf Seaman’s lugubrious features had an expression of faint astonishment. We all knew we had recorded a moment of screen magic.
It was later, as I vomited into the sand at the base of the Great Pyramid, that I realised with surprise that I had caught the sun.
FIFTEEN
OUR STORY BEGAN to take shape at last and, recovering slowly from my mild sunstroke, I was euphorically self-assured, anticipating our movie play’s glorious resolution, which would echo the prologue and the central scene in the burial chamber (I was now sketching the clearly visualised final draft). A somewhat schematic writer, I possessed classical skills perfect for a romantic narrative needing a certain detachment lest it be plunged into bathos. Filming was going smoothly, with Sir Ranalf Steeton underwriting our expenses from his own pocket, and we were grateful for this display of confidence. On my birthday, the fourteenth of January 1926, in full Egyptian costume, I embraced Mrs Cornelius once more, but she was ill at ease in so little clothing and we looked forward to shooting the scene again later. It had become obvious even to our patron, Sir Ranalf, that we needed fresh locations. Memphis having proved less ruin than aura, and Sakkarah merely unimpressive, we jumped at Steeton’s suggestion that as soon as it could be arranged we take a steamboat up the Nile to Luxor and the famous monuments of Karnak, the centre of the great Theban Empire where we should at this time find fewer tourists and, as Malcolm Quelch said in an aside to me, far fewer distractions. ‘The land of the Hawk, my dear boy, where people can trace their ancestry back to the beginning of Time. Of course, you must be hugely imaginative to get anything from the place at all. Basically it is a ramshackle Arab settlement pitched upon the ruins of an earlier and superior civilisation like a fungus on a dying oak, hardly a town at all.’ Perhaps because he was now assured of regular wages and was consequently consuming morphine rather generously, he had grown more expansive. He was able to obtain both his own drug and mine in substantial quantities. Indeed, it soon became clear to me that he was discreetly supplying half the team. I did not blame him if he made a small profit, given that he risked up to a year in prison and a stiff fine if he was caught. I told him I was concerned only for him. He assured me it was almost impossible for the British police to conceive of a middle-class Englishman having anything to do with drugs and the Egyptian police had the sense or the greed to leave him well alone. ‘It’s only the dagos and the natives who get picked up, dear boy, and most of those with any influence or money are soon sent substitutes or bought free. As far as the good Russell Pasha is concerned the drag trade is a filthy native appanage.’ Bertrand Russell was at that time the Cairo police chief.
It gave me a rather dishonourable thrill to spend an evening in Major Nye’s company. I never mentioned this to Quelch, for fear of disturbing him. The major had asked me to be his go-between and I had a little reluctantly acted as message-bearer for both him and Mrs Cornelius.
He was not, it emerged, pursuing the drug traffic but following a lead British Intelligence had received concerning the arms trade. That was in the days when selling arms to Arabs was still not respectable and was called gun-running. I gathered he was working for the Government of India. ‘Through some loopholes in former treaties we can’t stop Muscat importing firearms. Muscat therefore is as flourishing a market for wholesale gun-merchants as Baghdad is for sweetmeat sellers and curio dealers! You can buy as many rifles and boxes of ammo as you can afford. The only problem you have then is getting it to your next destination. Once the stuff is across the Oman Gulf and reaches Persia it can’t legally be confiscated. The Indian government instituted a sea patrol out of Jashk on the Persian coast. Most of those guns are going into Afghanistan. Naturally, we want to stop ‘em.’ But he would not elaborate, although he spoke at another time of going by gunboat into the Gulf to board a native dhow. He had taken from the Jashk barracks half-a-dozen sepoys, in charge of a subahdar and a half-caste Baluchi as interpreter. By some accident of fate they had stopped not a gun-runner but a slaver. ‘Bodies packed like maggots in the hold. We let ‘em come up, but the stench was dreadful. Blacks mainly, and a couple of Asiatic women from God knows where.’
We had not heard from Goldfish in weeks, which somewhat surprised me since earlier he had managed to send an average of two cables a day. Eventually we taxed the head of our Egyptian office. Sir Ranalf was massively apologetic. He had wired several queries, he said, but Goldfish still seemed to be away. What was more, the missing actor had last been seen at Cherbourg on January 13, had not been found in Cyprus and there was some talk of his having fallen overboard. This news threatened to dissipate my sense of well-being, but I recovered as much of it as I could and was glad when early one morning the porter came to take me and my baggage to the quayside and the paddle-steamer Nil Atari, already sighing and gasping in a ladylike way as her boilers were fired. The old mahogany and time-polished brass, her sturdy hull, quivered as we made our way through the usual pleading rabble to the gangplank guarded by Nubian youths wearing dark blue and red uniforms in the local style. Sir Ranalf Steeton was waiting for us on the arrival deck. He wanted, he said, to tell us the news himself. When we had found our cabins we should assemble on the bar deck where he would make a little speech to the whole team.
Although small, our cabins were very solidly built from the best woods, with fittings of brass and chrome and mother-of-pearl and everything neatly stowable, under bunks, above cupboards, within mirrors. It was possible to secrete one’s treasures in a hundred unlikely crannies. The horsehair mattresses were first-class and a reassuring smell of Pine disinfectant permeated everything. A place is never clean to a Briton unless it smells of his native fir. I have observed this in some of the filthiest homes in the kingdom: the dirtier the floor, the more it reeks of the Scottish wilderness. So powerful was this resinous charm against infection in the British psyche that I still find myself deeply reassured by it, especially if ill. Mrs Cornelius, as she grew to count the years, paid less attention than most to what she called ‘fussy ‘ousekeepin’ ‘. The smell of damp and mildew (as well as the unfortunate problems of her drains and the sewer which never recovered from next-door’s Flying Bomb) grew to be unmanageable in the end. But for many years a good, strong whiff of Pine allowed me to take my tea with confidence.