She disagrees. She is no feminist. ‘Orl I can say is, Ivan, that you keep yore little John Willy in yore bloody trousers or risk, pardon my French, an ‘undred per cent bollock loss!’ In some ways her views are too conservative for me. My thinking has always tended towards the radical. There is little point in trying to reason with most women when it comes to matters of rational behaviour. They are creatures of impulse and I suppose we would be mad to want them any other way.
Esmé pointed to where a brown-necked raven glided in the sky overhead, searching the debris along the bank for some titbit. ‘Is it an eagle, Maxim?’
Amused, I told her that only she could see such beauty in a carrion bird. She insisted it was still beautiful. I marvelled silently at that ability women have to look upon something ordinary, even lowly, and make of it an object both noble and desired. Valentino is an example. The raven spread his wings to perch for a moment upon our tasselled roof, just above the wheelhouse where the plump Egyptian captain, important in his grubby whites, and his laughing, bare-chested Nubian mate directed our final casting-off, moving us further towards midstream, our paddles slapping against the tide until my view of the city was almost completely obscured by a billowing white spray.
Within half-an-hour we were leaving Cairo behind, looking out across wide fields, an endless game of noughts and crosses produced by dozens of narrow canals. The rural scenery had scarcely changed since the Pharaohs raised their first great pyramids. Beyond the palm groves the fields were a vivid green and yellow patchwork of corn and cotton, while at the wells and locks old camels circled endlessly, moving the water in which all our destinies had been born.
For a while the Egyptian wedding-boat sailed in our wake, its occupants waving and smiling and offering us mysterious salutes, but then a gust of wind caught the tall sail and sent the felucca almost at a complete right-angle, narrowly missing our port wheel which continued its relentless gushing and groaning, sounding for all the world like a camel of the river, ill-tempered and sturdy. The felucca veered away, its occupants roaring with laughter at their close brush with an appalling death!
Mrs Cornelius returned, cocktail in one hand, and in the other a grinning Professor Quelch. She opened her wonderful mouth and screamed hilariously, ‘Yer c’n be a norty littel boy when yer wanna be, carn’t yer, Morry?’ He had her complete drunken approval and was close to winning her sober blessing, too. She had a soft spot for the people she called the ‘walking wounded’ of the world.
We were passing palm-lined levees now, raised against the flood, the date orchards, the figs and the olives French and English managers restored to Egypt, and as I turned to look at the distant shore to port I was surprised to see a native in a very well-cut European suit, a crimson tarboosh on his impeccable head, climbing up the stair to the open deck. He bowed and salaamed to the ladies and advanced towards us with his hand outstretched. I saw Quelch respond as I did, but there was nothing to do but shake it. Quelch became oddly formal and made a bitter to-do of introductions. We were introduced to Ali Pasha Khamsa whom I immediately recognised from several issues of The Times of Egypt as, under a different name, a highly-placed member of the Wafd, the recently ‘independent’ parliament of Egypt!
I realised that he was the better breed of pale, round-faced Egyptian, uncorrupted by Semitic or negro blood. No matter what my opinion of his politics, I felt an immediate respect for him, regretting my hasty judgement. Since those days, I have learned to know a man by his actions, not by the colour of his skin or his creed. There are, for instance, Nile-dwelling fellaheen whose blood is that of those who created the first literary writing, the first temples and tombs. It is scarcely their fault that alien invaders came to rob them of their inheritance and their beloved Christianity and if they have degenerated it has been through the efforts of the Jewish and Arab drug-dealers who have found it profitable to sap these hardy men of their energies, already debilitated from waters poisoned by imperfect British engineering. The British were the first to agree that the dam had unfortunate side-effects. They argued that they were doing their best to control the problem, yet refused to see how they had helped to create it. This was often the genius of the British abroad and at home. Their philosemitism was their particular ruin. I still believe they held the key to the way forward. Even ‘Socialist Herbert’ Wells understood the duties the British began to ignore in those terrible, self-doubting years immediately following the Great War. The spectre of Bolshevism terrified them. Only in England was it unexpected! Wells’s hero in Things to Come proudly predicts a future where Man will conquer Chaos throughout the Universe - and only then will he begin to learn! How close this was to my own frustrated vision. Now I have learned that Chaos is God’s creation and it is our duty merely to order our own part of the universe. Perhaps we were all too slow to accept responsibility. I cannot blame the British Empire, nor the American, nor Hitler, nor Mussolini, without accepting some blame myself.
Ali Pasha Khamsa had been educated in England at a school whose name I did not recognise but which clearly gave Professor Quelch some pause. I received the impression that Quelch’s education, though honourably thorough, lacked the excellence of Mr Khamsa’s. The Egyptian also had a degree from Cambridge. We were therefore a little uncertain how next to proceed but, needless to say, it was Mrs Cornelius who broke the ice, linked her arms in Mr Khamsa’s and Professor Quelch’s and chuckled, ‘Ain’t I a lucky lady, now, ter be entertained by two such brainy and ‘andsome gents.’ She led them off, slightly startled sheep, and again Esmé and I were alone.
The Egyptian’s presence had made her uncomfortable. ‘He reminds me of those Turkish officers. They were bastards to all the girls.’
A little sharply I told her to forget her Constantinople life. She would soon be my wife and a film star in her own right. She had been born in Otranto, with Doctor Gastaggagli presiding. Before that, I reminded her, there was only the inchoate miasma of pre-existence. She lowered her eyes, admonished. ‘I’m sorry, Maxim.’ Of course I forgave her at once.