‘Frankly, sir, I doubted.’
‘So did I, really.’ Then he burst out: ‘But they will have to act, simply have to; I am not going to be put aside like this.’ (He was thinking: ‘London will make our lives a misery until I can give them some sort of satisfaction.’) Hate for an image of Nessim whose features had somehow — as if by a trick of double-exposure — become merged with those of the saturnine Maskelyne, flooded him again. Crossing the hall he caught sight of his own face in the great pierglass and was surprised to notice that it wore an expression of feeble petulance.
That day he found himself becoming more and more shorttempered with his staff and the Residence servants. He had begun to feel almost persecuted.
*******
XIV
If Nessim had the temerity to laugh softly now to himself as he studied the invitation: if he propped the florid thing against his inkstand the better to study it, laughing softly and uneasily into the space before him; it was because he was thinking to himself:
‘To say that a man is unscrupulous implies that he was born with inherent scruples which he now chooses to disregard. But does one visualize a man born patently conscienceless? A man born without a common habit of soul? (Memlik).’ Yes, it would be easy if he were legless, armless, blind, to visualize him; but a particular deficit of a glandular secretion, a missing portion of soul, that would make him rather a target for wonder, perhaps even commiseration. (Memlik). There were men whose feelings dispersed in spray — became as fine as if squeezed through an atomizer: those who had frozen them —
‘pins and needles of the heart’; there were others born without a sense of value — the morally colour-blind ones. The very powerful were often like that — men walking inside a dream-cloud of their actions which somehow lacked meaning to them. Was this also Memlik? Nessim felt all the passionate curiosity about the man which an entomologist might have for an unclassified specimen.
Light a cigarette. Get up and walk about the room, pausing from time to time to read the invitation and laugh again silently.
The relief kept displacing anxiety, the anxiety relief. He lifted the telephone and spoke to Justine quietly, with a smiling voice:
‘The Mountain has been to Mahomet.’ (Code for Mountolive and Nur.) ‘Yes, my dear. It is a relief to know for certain. All my toxicology and pistol-practice! It looks silly now, I know. This is the way I would have wanted it to happen; but of course, one had to take precautions. Well, pressure is being put upon Mahomet, and he has delivered a small mouse in the form of an invitation to a Wird.’ He heard her laugh incredulously. ‘Please, my darling’ he said, ‘obtain one of the finest Korans you can get and send it to the office. There are some old ones with ivory covers in the library collection. Yes, I shall take it to Cairo on Wednesday. He must certainly have his Koran.’ (Memlik.) It was all very well to joke. The respite would only be a temporary one; but at least he need not for the moment fear poison or the stealthy figure lurking in an alley which might have…. No. The situation seemed not without a promise of fruitful delay.
Today in the sixties the house of Memlik Pasha has become famous in the remotest capitals of the world chiefly because of the distinctive architecture of the Banks which bear their founder’s name; and indeed their style has all the curious marks of this mysterious man’s taste — for they are all built to the same grotesque pattern, a sort of travesty of an Egyptian tomb, adapted by a pupil of Corbusier! Irresistibly one is forced to stop short and wonder at their grim faзades, whether one is walking in Rome or Rio. The squat pillars suggest a mammoth stricken by sudden elephantiasis, the grotesque survival, or perhaps revival, of something inherently macabre — a sort of Ottoman-EgyptianGothic? For all the world as if Euston Station had multiplied by binary fission! But by now the power of the man has gone out through these strange funnels into the world at large — all that power condensed and deployed from the small inlaid coffee-table upon which (if ever) he wrote, from the tattered yellow divan to which his lethargy held him tethered day by day. (For interviews of particular importance, he wore his tarbush and yellow suede gloves. In his hand he held a common market fly-whisk which his jeweller had embellished with a design in seed-pearls.) He never smiled. A Greek photographer who had once implored him in the name of art to do so had been unceremoniously carted out into the garden under the clicking palms and dealt twelve lashes to atone for his insult.
Perhaps the strange mixture of heredities had something to do with it; for his blood was haunted by an Albanian father and a Nubian mother, whose dreadful quarrels tormented his childhood sleep. He was an only son. This was perhaps how simple ferocity contrived to be matched against an apparent apathy, a whispering voice raised sometimes to a woman’s pitch but employed without the use of gesture. Physically too, the long silky head-hair with its suggestion of kink, the nose and mouth carved flatly in dark Nubian sandstone and set in bas-relief upon a completely round Alpine head — they gave the show away. If indeed he had smiled he would have shown a half-circumference of nigger whiteness under nostrils flattened and expanded like rubber. His skin was full of dark beauty—spots, and of a colour much admired in Egypt — that of cigar-leaf. Depilatories such as halawa kept his body free from hair, even his hands and forearms. But his eyes were small and set in puckers, like twin cloves. They transmitted their uneasiness by an expression of perpetual drowsiness — the discoloured whites conveying a glaucous absence of mind — as if the soul inhabiting that great body were perpetually away on a private holiday. His lips too were very red, the underlip particularly so; and their contused-looking ripeness suggested: epilepsy?
How had he risen so swiftly? Stage by stage, through slow and arduous clerkships in the Commission (which had taught him his contempt for his masters) and lastly by nepotism. His methods were choice and studied. When Egypt became free, he surprised even his sponsors by gaining the Ministry of the Interior at a single bound. Only then did he tear off the disguise of mediocrity which he had been wearing all these years. He knew very well how to strike out echoes around his name with the whip — for he was now wielding it. The timorous soul of the Egyptian cries always for the whip. ‘O want easily supplied by one who has trained himself to see men and women as flies.’ So says the proverb. Within a matter of a year his name had become a dreaded one; it was rumoured that even the old King feared to cross him openly. And with his country’s new-found freedom he himself was also magnificently free — at least with Egyptian Moslems. Europeans had still the right, by treaty, to submit their judicial problems or answer charges against them at Les Tribunaux Mixtes, European courts with European lawyers to prosecute or defend. But the Egyptian judicial system (if one could dare to call it that) was run directly by men of Memlik’s stamp, the anachronistic survivals of a feudalism as terrible as it was meaningless. The age of the Cadi was far from over for them and Memlik acted with all the authority of someone with a Sultan’s firman or dispensation in his hands.
There was, in truth, nobody to gainsay him. He punished hard and often, without asking questions and often purely upon hearsay or the most remote suspicion. People disappeared silently, leaving no trace, and there was no court of appeal to heed their appeals — if they made any — or else they reappeared in civil life elegantly maimed or deftly blinded — and somehow curiously unwilling to discuss their misfortunes in public. (‘Shall we see if he can sing?’ Memlik was reputed to say; the reference was to the putting out of a canary’s eyes with a red-hot wire — an operation much resorted to and alleged to make the bird sing more sweetly.)