“I suppose they think they’ve got me in some way — that’s why they’re confident — through Bridget: that I’m bound to work for them since I’ve married her. What have they got on her?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Her parents. They’d blow her and that would be the end for them in Maadi — and Bridget. It’s an old hold — and there’s no use arguing the morality of it because there isn’t any in this sort of snooping and there never was. It’s just a job. You can kill people with just a wrong word down the telephone anyway.”
“No morality, all right. But belief surely? Usher and Crowther, they believe in it. And you?”
“Oh yes, they believe in it,” Henry said, easy suddenly as though giving the response to a well-known riddle. “And that’s more than enough morality for them. Crowther and Usher, they believe all right. In different things. Usher has the old Anglo-Arab approach, Lawrence and so on; the Englishman and his desert: the delicious punishment under the stars, the mystique of the empty places, the ritual in everything; the extreme concepts of honour and pleasure — honour among men and pleasure with the boys; the tough, sink-or-swim male society with its inexplicable, cruel, deeply pleasurable rules — like school. In fact for people like Usher the Arab world is just a great big public school, with the deserts for playing fields and Mohammed as the mysterious Headmaster, where they never have to grow up. And Usher hates Nasser for doing away with it all, for closing the old place down. Crowther’s just a Tory civil servant who believes in the Englishman and his castle, that the Suez Canal runs through his drawing room on the way to India and so on. He believes in the toy soldiers aspect of it all — and giving the wogs a lesson. And he likes the mystery and the rumour and the deceit of the job as well — the hiding from Nanny before bedtime. That’s how he never grows up. They believe, and I understand it. It’s the romantic attitude.”
“And you?”
“I don’t believe. I took the job on years ago, at a low ebb. Money, interest, adventure even — perhaps I wasn’t able quite to throw over the Boy’s Own Paper stuff — but I don’t believe in it. Perhaps that’s the pity.”
“But they don’t have anything on you — you could get out.”
“Perhaps I’m fitted for the job. People are, you know. It suits them to do certain things, it’s good for them even, like a regular bowel movement or an apple a day.”
“And you’d ‘blow’ someone — you wouldn’t worry — if you were told to?”
“That would be London’s decision — area committee or head of section — ”
“But would you do it — do away with someone, which is what it amounts to? Bridget for example — if you were asked to ‘blow’ her, as you call it, or if you even knew about it, what would you do?”
“See that it didn’t happen, that it never got to that stage.”
“If you didn’t know anything was happening?”
“That would be awkward, certainly. Except that I think I would know about it — unless they wanted to blow me as well — since I run her. I’m her ‘operator’, I’d have to know, unless, as I say, they wanted me for the high jump as well, since I’d have to get well clear of her before that happened. Bridget and I have open contact as well as cover — our circumstances happened to have allowed for that. If the Egyptians got on to her I’d be the next most obvious link in the chain — or you — even if she didn’t break down which she probably would. That’s the way we have to work it out here now — open cover, open contact, almost nothing clandestine — which is another good reason why they want you involved. You’re one of us. Married to Bridget. There’d be something suspicious if we weren’t all together a lot of the time. But for Christ’s sake don’t take it all so seriously — this business about blowing people out here — it’s not going to happen, there are far too few of us. They want to get people, not blow them.” He grabbed a handful of Sudanis, threw them into his mouth, and finished his gin. “Come on, let’s go back to Bridget and have some food. Don’t be so glum about it, you’re with us now. At least we won’t have to pretend any more.”
“That’s charming, I agree. One doesn’t want to deceive one’s wife more than is absolutely necessary. What would you call our arrangement now? An ‘open troika’, I suppose?”
Henry smiled briefly, warmly; the smile between friends when one of them has said something quite without consequence. He got up and left the barman a ten-piastre note in a busy fashion and we went down the steps of the hotel and into the night, like a steam bath now and loud with the racket of the tric-trac boards in the small cafés which bordered Soliman Pasha, and the wail of music from the radios on the shelves beneath the portraits of the President: photographs, garish oil paintings, posters — in whatever form, a reminder everywhere of a disputed Saint; a saviour or a rogue — or simply an object of indifference? I had never thought about it: that ubiquitous, tigerish face, like an ambitious barber’s with its darkly brilliantined scalp: caught in the unflattering glare of the coloured neon so that it readily assumed all the lineaments of “the enemy”.
Suddenly I felt as though I’d just arrived in a different, well remembered country and despite the overwhelming presence of the street — the smells of some sharp spice, ginger or nutmeg or copra, riding on an air of paraffin and old leather above the cooling dust — I felt there should be train whistles and snow and soot in the night air, the sense of something unwanted and forgotten, and not any of those other marks of the city that I’d become so familiar with.
“The train now standing at platform seven is the 8:45 Irish mail for Hollyhead, stopping at Rugby, Chester, Crewe… change at Rugby for North Wales …”
I remembered. The damp, cold succession of Septembers and Januarys, seven-and-six for the taxi and the first month’s pocket money, the doors slamming all along the train, greyhounds whimpering in the guard’s van, the condensation already thick on the view of Chester Cathedraclass="underline" the end of every summer and Christmas — the beginning of a journey to a bell at seven next morning, to a life where life would be out of my hands. That was what I remembered — what Henry and Bridget and Crowther and Usher had reminded me of all day.
“Damn it — this bloody place.” Henry was struggling with his shoe which had stuck in a patch of moist tar on the pavement. We’d stop at the Soliman Pasha roundabout waiting for the run of traffic to pass.
“Perhaps not a ‘troika’, Henry — aren’t we all ‘double agents’? Isn’t that the term you use? After all, you and I and Bridget — we don’t really believe in any of it, do we?”
Henry walked out from the pavement suddenly so that I had to grab him off the wing of a taxi.
11
Bridget was laughing the moment she opened the apartment door, rushing forward to kiss me, as if there had been guests and jokes behind her and we’d arrived a little late for a party. On the sideboard were several bottles of wine and a bottle of that Gordon’s Export gin which I’d thought we’d finished long ago. This was to be a celebration of sorts: a private affair, not in any of our old public haunts, but behind curtains with the lights turned down and the radio tuned to the BBC, like proper conspirators. She’d arranged the table in the living room — an intimate dinner for three: a red tablecloth, which we never use, and a silver candlestick, a cherub supporting a bowl, a present from someone which she usually kept out of the way on the top of the bookshelf.