And it was a new Bridget; a public Bridget, no longer petulant, diffident, but liberated, now that all three of us had been joined in a secret: a woman perfectly released by the outcome of a professional arrangement, not through any private association, not by love, not by me. For the first time since I’d met her a year previously in the Continental she had assumed again, freely, willingly, that true intensity of character which had first attracted me to her and which I knew now she had withheld from me ever since.
There was a vast pleasure in her face, her bearing, in the way she looked at both of us, touched as casually as we moved around her — a fierce coquetry, as if, in amazement at the chance, she were starting an affair again with two old lovers simultaneously. She seemed to want this to be a joyous, irresponsible, loving homecoming, in which every failure and disappointment of the past, hers and ours, would be forgotten. As an echo of this happy determination, perhaps, she was wearing the same cotton house-coat that I knew from a year before and I remembered the casual, clumsy beginnings of our relationship which I had shared with Cherry in the same room the previous summer. Yet Cherry, at that moment, with his bumbling passions, his innocence — seemed to be part of a far more happy and irresponsible world than this.
“Dear Peter.” And I was kissed again, while Henry poured out the gin and went into the kitchen for some ice. This time, I thought, there’s ice. In just a year we’d passed from awkwardness to respectability.
“You seem happy.”
“I couldn’t tell you. Didn’t Henry explain?”
“Yes. That he was your ‘operator’. It all seems so childish.”
“Perhaps.” And she sat down on the old chintz chaise-longue, head in hands, collapsing like a puppet, a sad doll. “Surely it’s better though? That we all know now. Now that you’re with us.”
“Oh yes. That’s what Henry said. It’s all much better, now that I’m on ‘your side’. But you see I thought I was already. I didn’t know I had to go through a second initiation with you. And another with Crowther. And Usher. And Henry. It’s like that game — tugging children across the drawing room over a handkerchief at Christmas — what’s it called? — ‘Nuts in May’. As childish as that. And not as fun. I thought I was part of the fun already.” I went over, drew the curtains back and looked out towards the Kasr el Nil bridge and the lights of one of Farouk’s old boats on the far shore which had been turned into a night club. “Not that I was given much choice in the matter — whether I played the game or not. You don’t mind my opening the window? I mean, you’re not expecting an air-raid or anything?”
It was hotter with the window open. The day’s heat, rising from the streets, finding no escape through the dense furnace of air which lay above the city, fell back in one’s face, with a sour, rotten smell of dust and urine. Bridget had leant back against the end of the chaise-longue, hands clasped behind her head, her back towards the window. One side of the cotton house-coat had fallen away from her body on to the floor.
“Take your coat off or something, for God’s sake. You’ll expire.”
“You said that last year.” I turned and sat down at the dining room table and fiddled with the wooden corkscrew which had been neatly laid out between the two wine bottles. “Were you preparing for all this? The dinner and so on? Was it all arranged, as a sort of grand finale to our going to the Embassy and my being conscripted? Or would there have been two places laid and not three if things hadn’t gone off properly? And which of us, Henry or I, would have been left out? I mean, if they hadn’t liked the look of me, what then? How were you so sure there’d be three of us for dinner this evening, that I’d be here?”
“Henry was sure.”
“Were you?” I turned. Henry had come in from the kitchen.
“Pretty certain. I told you. They need people here. Badly. Your credentials were impeccable and now let’s stop going on about it.”
“What happens if I decide to go back to England?”
“That’s up to you.” Henry squeezed a quartered lemon into his gin, then made one up for me.
“Oh God.”
He walked over and put the glass of gin and tonic very carefully on the table beside me like a doctor leaving medicine for a patient after the bad news. I drank half of it down, looking at Bridget over the rim of the glass, quite still on the sofa — fear, nervousness, in her face, love perhaps — as if she saw completely my predicament and had no idea for the moment how to deal with it.
Then she came across and knelt in front of me, arms on my knees, hands in mine.
“Peter, it was because of this, my work with Henry, Crowther and the rest of them, that I didn’t want to get involved with you in the first place. So that you thought me a sort of whore when we were first together. But with you, eventually, I told Henry I couldn’t go on, with not telling you. It was my idea that you go to see Crowther, that you become involved in all this — because that was the only way you could know about me. I couldn’t live with it, the idea of losing you.”
“‘Losing me’—how? You’d have stopped your goings on with Crowther, with Henry, if I hadn’t been ‘acceptable’, wouldn’t you?”
Henry started to open one of the wine bottles officiously behind us, the cork squeaking fiercely against the glass.
“Of losing you, yes,” she went on hesitantly, ignoring my question, seeing no help from Henry. “Because you can’t stop in this business, whatever they say. There’s no getting out — if they don’t want you to get out. And they didn’t, with me. So it was losing you — or giving it all up, and losing my parents. Or getting you in — and its being all right.”
“What sort of madmen are they? You mean they said ‘Square Marlow or else — ’ Get me in on the deal or else get me out of your way? And if you did neither they’d blow you — let the Egyptians know you’d been involved with them?”
“Yes.”
“It’s true,” Henry said, and he popped the cork and sniffed the top of the bottle. It was a French burgundy, rarely obtainable in those days, a Pommard. I wondered where she’d got it from. Henry, I suppose — or Bahaddin or the Greek auctioneer. I felt as if I’d crashed a bottle party, without a bottle.
“I told you, the two of them have a completely free hand here. They can do what they please. They’re fanatics. They are madmen. That’s the danger. They mean what they say; they’d certainly shop Bridget — if they’d thought there was any danger in her being with you. But they haven’t, they took a liking to you. We’ve been lucky. Now for God’s sake realise the situation. It could have been quite hopeless — Usher could have said ‘get rid of him’—he didn’t.”
Henry moved away to the window, waving the bottle gently in his hand.
“Bridget, there’s no food. I forgot to pick it up. Let’s drink the wine and go out.”
“Let’s finish the gin first.” Bridget got up, kissing me briefly again — as if these small repeated contacts might somehow convince me of her good intentions in the whole stupid matter — and went back to the sofa. We finished off our gins, vehemently, quickly, like strangers suddenly trying to be friends.
“We can go to the boat,” Henry said hopefully. “There’s food there. We can dance.”
“Bahaddin’ll be there. He usually is. Bahaddin.” Bridget repeated his name abruptly, almost with disgust. “He’s part of the whole thing as well. He’s with us. Henry was going to tell you.”