We scarcely progressed a hundred pages before the eve of Seaman’s birthday. Increasingly, Esmé would take the book gently from my hand and kiss me, suggesting that we pass the time in some other way. A gentleman always, I was unable to refuse her, though as our various fantasies became less able to arouse me, I was drawn more and more towards the Frenchman’s history. My sense of foreboding would not abate. At night I took to smoking Quelch’s kif in an effort to calm my racing heart. While I have deep reservations about all narcotics, as opposed to specific stimulants, I found for a while a unique pleasure in absorbing myself in Salammbô on the deck of a boat moving steadily into Africa. The brilliant descriptions of the book were mirrored in the reality. This in turn was enhanced by the effects of the hasheesh. But all this was still not enough to drive away my unspecific terrors, my half-sensed ghosts. It reminded me of some of the worst episodes in De Quincey. I breathed jewelled air, surrounded by exotically scented wonders and deliciously erotic sensations, but somewhere in the shadows I glimpsed the face of a goat, winking from garnet eyes, grinning through yellowed teeth; a senile goat whose only distinguishable quality was an air of implacable malice. For some reason I was reminded of Yermeloff, the Cossack camp and the night Brodmann saw me with Grishenko. Esmé! Esmé! Little teeth suck the marrow from my bones. They brand my flesh; they put their twin marks upon me, the Mark of Death and the Mark of Shame. Those camps all stink of fear. I refused to become a Musselman. They did their worst in Kiev and Oregon and Hannibal, in Aswan and Sachsenhausen. Most of them are dead now and I am still alive. If I had been born in Hellenistic times there is an operation I could have had which would have undone my father’s hygienic decision and enabled me to put behind me a confused and crowded past, whose fictions and distortions would have taken a further lifetime to untangle. My own vision was a clear, uncluttered vision of the Future. The past became my enemy. I could have saved us all, Esmé. I could have shown you Paradise. It is not true that I am filius nullius. I am related to the most distinguished blood in Russia. Those great, scattered families represent the heart and soul of our country. I carry their secrets with me. I have never betrayed them. Ikh veys nit. Ikh bin dorshtik. Ikh bin hungerik. Ikh bin an Amerikaner. Vos iz dos? Ikh farshtey nit. I saw the film about the heroes of Kiev. It was in ‘Sovcolour’ and ‘Sovscope’ and was made by a ‘Sovdirector’ with ‘Sovactors’, yet it conveyed much of the force of those old legends, the stories of our fights against the brute hordes of Asia Minor. I had a great relish for films until it became the fashion to depress us all the time. And they wonder where their audiences went! Why their cinemas turned into bingo halls! They blamed the public for staying away. In this, at least, they had the truth. Who in their right mind, having spent a long day in a factory or an office, can relax in the dark watching an inferior and inaccurate account of life in an office or a factory? Do not mistake me - a musical or a Western or a romance are fantasy, but these new melodramas are merely unreal. In the International Cinema, Westbourne Grove, I watched The L-Shaped Room, set in Notting Hill. The theatre filled with spontaneous laughter as we enjoyed the profound inaccuracies of character and scene. Like most of the audience, I left half-way through. We wanted our lives made legend, not merely sentimentalised and thus enfeebled. This was the message of The Great Escape?
Esmé made me close my eyes and then admire her costume. She had taken one of the houri outfits. To the blossoming scarlet trousers, metallic breastcups, and gauzy accessories she added a pretty veil which, if anything, enhanced her beauty. I told her she looked wonderful but warned her against wearing such revealing clothes during the day. On the night of the party, when we were all dressed up, there would hardly be problems. She pouted. She thought I would be stimulated by having a slave-girl of my own, but I was not, I gently pointed out, the kind of man who needs public confirmation of a conquest. Then, understanding I had hurt her feelings, I quickly added that since she was already the most beautiful girl in Egypt I was afraid some powerful Pasha would cast lustful eyes upon her and demand she be captured for his harem. While this flattered and consoled her, I still insisted it was imprudent of her to wear the costume out of context. For my own part I was to dress as a Wahabi warrior, in simple black and white, but sporting the dark glasses which those tribesmen wore as a mark of their civilised dignity, while Captain Quelch had settled on Rameses Il and Mrs Cornelius would be our Cleopatra, some general Ptolemaic consort rather than that most famous Egyptian queen. To swell the feminine ranks, Grace had decided upon Nefertiti. Only Seaman himself, our birthday boy, refused these childish excitements as if he felt it was his duty to maintain an appropriate directorial gravitas.
When he emerged at lunchtime on his birthday, a small group of us had already gathered at the bar to sing the English birthday song and insist on his drinking a special cocktail which Mrs Cornelius had ordered. Very rapidly he began to enjoy our company and, for a change, we his. I remember little of the afternoon, save that I became at one point emotional and wept for a while. Professor Quelch and Mrs Cornelius helped me back to my cabin and I slept until Quelch, his exposed flesh darkened by a solution of Mars Oil and cooking butter, woke me to say that it was after seven and the party itself was due to begin at eight. A little cocaine brought me back to the world and after a brisk shower I was ready to slip into my simple gelabea, burnoose and set of false whiskers fixed to my chin by gum arabic. As I stepped into the passage, one of our Nubians caught sight of me and addressed me in his native tongue. When I asked him to translate he laughed and apologised. He had taken me for one of those Wahabim barbarians, he said. ‘I had thought us captured, effendi.’ I was still a little the worse for the cocktails but this restored my spirits as I made my way up to the deck. Like pantomime conspirators we gathered around a small table on which sat an enormous iced cake blazing with candles. How they managed to get the chef to bake and then decorate this work of art I do not know! While the pastry itself was somewhat oversweet and the icing a riot of local geometric designs, calligraphy and pidgin English, Seaman seemed deeply moved by this expression of kindness and was weeping as he poised his knife.
Esmé, a dream in her slave-girl pantaloons and flimsy silks, made a delicious frou-frou whenever she moved and it was clear our Nubians were gripped not by lechery but by adoration. She was a little goddess to Mrs Cornelius’s magnificent Queen. Both women sported extravagant peacock-feather headdresses at least a foot higher than Pola Negri’s. They swayed at alarming angles through the course of the evening as we danced to the music of O. K. Radonic’s portable phonograph. Since women were in short supply, we cheerfully agreed that each man should take his turn. If he became impatient, we said, then he was more than welcome to ask Grace for a pirouette or two around the deck. As the evening wore on, more than one of us gave in to boredom and Grace was rarely without a partner, albeit a somewhat drunken one. Professor Quelch, heroically teetotal, had grown expansive in his role and attached himself to Esmé, promising her ‘the finest tomb in Egypt’ if she would only permit him a kiss. She found him amusing. She would gladly give him a kiss before the tomb. I think it was Esmé who first saw the lights of Luxor ahead, a scattering of electric bulbs and oil-lamps in the forward blackness. Professor Quelch raised his eyes from her tiny chest and licked his lips, sniffing deeply. ‘No question of it. That’s Luxor.’ He straightened to accept from one of our boys a glass of Vichy and a slice of cake. ‘You can smell the sewage from here.’ Then he got to his feet, raised his paper wig to Esmé, and drew the boy into the shadows.