Henry nodded his head sadly, as if embarrassed by the further complicity, this additional character in the charade.
“Oh — what is he? ‘Active’ or ‘passive’? Or ‘Information Only’—or is he the gunmetal man, stalking the alleyways and embassies with a.38?”
The whole thing had begun, faintly, to amuse me; Bridget and Henry’s seriousness — in minutes they had become dull and unhappy and I felt it was my fault, that I had broken a pleasant day and evening, wrecked the homecoming. I smiled and they looked at me hopefully — a well-disposed audience desperately hoping for relief, looking for a laugh in a bad comedy.
“All right, it’s making us all so boring. Let’s forget about it for the moment. I’m sure you’re right, there’s nothing to it, Usher just wants me to give him a bit of gossip about the morale of the canal pilots, and I’m being obstructive, pedantic. Just I never missed the toy soldiers thing as a child. And I don’t miss it now. It all seems rather mindless to me.”
The farmers had settled down for the night underneath their corrugated paper huts against the river wall and their evening fires crackled with light all along the far pavement as we walked towards Kasr el Nil bridge. The smell of sesame, and beans cooking, and desert tinder drifted over to us, mixing with the terrible sweetness of jasmine which groups of Pyjama boys hawked around the hotel entrances, the great garlands looped around their arms and necks turning them into Michelin children.
Since afternoon the taxis had redoubled their attack, charging to and fro along the corniche, picking up and depositing groups of chattering frenzied people bent on the same pursuit as ourselves. And above all the heat, rising from the darkness, embracing everything, like a huge steaming toweclass="underline" a breathless, moist evening in which everything seemed just about to suffocate and then to survive, with an immense gasp, at the last moment: everything poised for the relief of a storm which one knew would never come. Ten o’clock, June 13, the Queen’s birthday.
The boat, the Nefertiti — one of Farouk’s Nile steamers, a long graceful Edwardian affair — was moored on the far side of Kasr el Nil bridge near the main entrance of the Gezira Club. Its aft promenade deck had coloured lights along the rails and streaming down from the mast, and a small Italian orchestra was tuning up, plucking dissident strings, underneath the funnel.
In what had been the Royal Lounge under the bridge there was another orchestra, a restaurant and a bar, and here we had a drink before going out for supper on the fore deck. It was early and hardly crowded. I recognized Farid, the manager of the boat, with a party of friends at a large table outside near the rail. Some of his guests hadn’t turned up, there were empty spaces here and there, but he was in high good humour — jumping up and down, toasting and being toasted, a little scut of a man, bald, with a half rim of hair going from ear to ear round the back of his head. It was his birthday too, apparently. Giant pitch-black Nubian waiters in blues and golds, like coloured pictures from a child’s Bible, padded aloofly round their table, pouring out whiskies and dumping ice from great silver bowls, strangers to this tribal feast.
“Bahaddin! We thought you’d come. How are you?”
Bridget was the first to see him as he ambled up to the bar in a crisp white jacket, slacks, frilly Italian dress shirt and a bow tie. In the light of her earlier bored attitude to the possibility of his being on the boat that evening she seemed unaccountably pleased by his arrival.
“Good evening.” He kissed her hand, bending down much lower than necessary, more than usually punctilious in these gracious formalities which he so enjoyed.
“What are you doing? Have dinner with us.”
Perhaps it was just the day’s drinking that gave such extraordinary warmth to Bridget’s invitation.
“I’m very sorry — I’m with Farid and his party. I wish it were otherwise.” Still holding her hand they looked at each other for a moment with an awkward knowingness, like two people in a wedding photograph, before he turned away.
“How are you, Henry? — and don’t ask me about my ‘O’ levels. I’ve given them up for the summer. I’ll try again next year, if you’re still around to help me.”
And he laughed easily, as if these exams were an old joke between them, worn thin with use, a cover for quite a different pursuit, as I now knew them to be.
“What, you didn’t get them then?” I asked.
“I’m afraid I didn’t sit for them, sir.” And he took out some money and began to play with it on the counter, looking at me curiously, and then at Henry behind me.
“Don’t go on calling me ‘sir’, Bahaddin. I’m not a schoolmaster any more.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I had been wondering how things were with you — about work. I’m sure I could help you out — ” And he added, as if the fact were proof against all mortal difficulties: “My father is coming over from Aden next week …”
He looked at me with genuine concern, running what I now saw to be a Maria Theresa dollar between the fingers of one hand like a conjurer.
“It’s all right, Bahaddin. We’re getting Peter a job. He’s with us now,” Henry broke in quietly. “We’re all together. Are you going to buy us a drink?”
“I won’t congratulate you — I won’t take your hand, too obvious — but I’m very glad. Most happy.”
And he was. Like everything he did or said, he meant it. He nodded his large head slowly at me several times, like an old cricket coach from the boundary, determined to offer some acknowledgement of my honour, albeit clandestinely. He was a person, I realized afterwards, with a far too highly developed sense of the proprieties for the job in hand.
“Yes — a drink. By all means,” he continued. “A quiet celebration, a decent drink, before I have to fulfil my other objectives.”
“Obligations, Bahaddin, not objectives,” Henry said. And Bahaddin ordered champagne from Mustafa, the squat Sudanese barman.
We lifted the tall tulip-like glasses — which Mustafa said he’d rescued from Farouk’s pantry, keeping them for just such an occasion as this — and drank a minute toast to each other. From a distance, if anyone had been interested, our little group must have appeared suspiciously subdued. I was beginning to feel drunk and didn’t like the taste; the champagne fizzed in my mouth, reanimating all the other tastes of the day, with a stale nausea. Bahaddin drained his glass.
“Well, I mustn’t stay — but very good wishes.”
He bowed again, picked up his cigarette case and gold Dunhill and made off, pushing his way delicately among the crowd of people who were rapidly filling up the room.
“Everyone’s pleased. It’s as if I’d just got engaged — though I can’t remember anything like this when I was …”
“Let’s not talk about it here.”
“Come on, Peter. Dance with me — before you fall off the stool. Get some air.”
“I’ll join you.” Henry went off towards the lavatory. Bahaddin meanwhile had joined Farid’s party amid scenes and shouts of great welcome. Their long table faced over the small brightly lit square in the centre of the foredeck where couples were trying vainly to keep up with the measure of a new Italian number. The orchestra, a recent import from Milan, and perhaps unaccustomed as yet to the fiery Egyptian nights, were themselves showing signs of fatigue in sustaining the fast rhythm, and had it not been for the sudden and unexpected arrival of Bahaddin on the floor they would, I’m sure, have quickly changed to something slower in tempo. As it was they were forced to keep up the murderous pace for a good five minutes more, going full blast, as Bahaddin and a woman careered over the boards in a frenzied, kick-stepping dance, half Charleston, half twist, clapping their hands, separating, coming together again and even squirming around each other’s backs, arms linked overhead, their hips and feet retaining the furious beat of the music.