The consequences. Surely, if it were ever discovered by Usher or Crowther, there could only be one consequence in working for “both sides”. They didn’t retire people in the middle. They would have something quite different in store: like burying their mistakes. A house in Wimbledon or a dacha in the Moscow suburbs? For the lucky ones, perhaps, yes. For the really valuable men. I wasn’t one of them. I was simply an inconvenience — unmarked, untrained; involved simply of necessity, through the accident of friendship, as the Colonel had said. I certainly wouldn’t be missed. For Crowher it might even be a pleasure. He wouldn’t hesitate in getting me out of the way if he thought I’d been near Colonel Hamdy. And Bridget was one line of communication to him.
Bridget was a tired child that one couldn’t trust. Children told stories out of school. And Henry was no use either. For there was another Henry, not just the friend whom I was protecting by keeping silent. There was the Henry who’d known Bridget long before I had, whose past with her — days and nights together, things said and done — was still a mystery to me because I’d left it that way. There had been arrangements between them; and there still were. He was her operator after all. They had their secrets too, I felt, which I wasn’t to know simply by being in their “circle”. It was simple enough: neither of them was to be trusted.
And I thought with clarity, the idea standing out sharply as none other did: this is what it’s really like. The game. This is how it touches you — in everything, each detail of life, not just the job itself which by comparison I could see becoming a source of release, as something quite prosaic. I had come into a narrow world suddenly, made up of secrets and deceits, traversed by long and careful lies, defended everywhere against trust. And I would have to remember this each time I said anything or looked at anyone in the future. I would be reminded of it everywhere, as an endlessly repeated feeling of nausea.
This was what stretched in front of me: a disability — as if I’d emerged from the room in the Semiramis, as from a car crash, without a leg and a crutch for the rest of my life.
Bridget lit one of my cigarettes.
I said, “Let’s have a drink,” needing it now in a way I’d not done before.
“What did they ask you? Who did you see?”
She appeared so calm.
“Just my connections with Bahaddin. The school and so on. I told them the truth — as we agreed. That we went on to the Club, that Henry joined us there.”
She drew deeply on the cigarette, sipped the whisky the waiter had brought us and said hopefully, with relief, as if she too felt that our life was beginning all over again, but in a happy way: “The thing now, surely, is to continue as if nothing had happened. Get the job in Suez. Apart from Crowther — it would be something for you to do. Some work.”
“Why do you suppose I would get work there? I’ve been thrown out of one ex-British school here already.”
But I knew there would be no trouble. When I’d put the same point to the Colonel he’d smiled and said it would be the easiest thing in the world; they actually needed an English teacher in Suez, apart from needing a double agent there as well. It was something which he’d hardly have to “fix” at all. Once I’d made my decision I was to apply to the Ministry of Education in the ordinary way. The application would go straight through, the place would be kept open for me.
“You could try it, go and see the Ministry. We could go to Suez now in any case. There’s a new resort down the Red Sea. Underwater fishing. Couldn’t we do that — and get out of here?”
“Money?”
“We’ve got it. I got it this morning, through the Council library; that’s the way we’re keeping in touch now, through books, I’ll tell you about it later. It’s your money, from Crowther. And I’m due two weeks’ leave from the office. We could leave the place altogether …”
She was happy, enthusiastic. It seemed a sensible change, a move from the unbearable city that Cairo had become, something which, in ordinary life, we would probably have done in any case: a few weeks by the sea, lying in the sun, and looking at the fish. In fact it was a cliché, perfectly translated into action — it was the point of no return. Once on the road to Suez I was in Crowther’s hands, the Colonel’s. And Bridget’s. They came together in a package; the professional, the personal, obligations. The alternative was an exit visa. Or a boat coming through the canal. And both were as unlikely a means of escape as a trip on foot across the Sahara … It hardly mattered now. I would have to work for them. The Colonel had made that decision. But again, the feeling swept over me, one had to pretend; if one spoke at all one had to lie; that was the other side of the coin, the second secret of survivaclass="underline" only pretend.
And I thought, we blame life for our disillusions whereas much more it’s the trespass we make away from it that sends us over the precipice.
13
No one has written a true book about happiness, so they say. But that fortnight was happy. So perhaps it alone, among the incidents of this story, may not bear description.
We lay on the beach under a long canvas awning that had been put up over the sand and we swam with goggles over the coral that sloped gently out to sea, and among the coloured sea plants and strange fish. At night we slept in a small wooden cabin at the end of the line, naked in the dry air of that burnished marine sandscape. The cabin was like a cell; just a chair, a medicine cupboard with a mirror and two army camp beds which we strapped together with an extra sheet that Bridget had weedled out of the manager. The resort had only just opened and apart from the goggles had no other underwater facilities. None the less it was full up and the other guests never lost an opportunity of telling us how unlucky we’d been in getting one of the end cabins that hadn’t been “properly finished”. We didn’t listen. We were living again in the present, after so much that had been unreal; living in that uncomplicated adventure of the moment, caught for once in the fabric of life where we saw or felt nothing except with the eyes and heart. We looked at each other again; and it was that regard which played by far the biggest part in our loving each other then: her face, moved into so many patterns by her thoughts — thoughts, I know now, she could not admit and others she was barely conscious of — which rose up, like the tide filling the indentations of a strand, flooding her face with desire, humility, sadness — with all that she really felt, so that her real words, when she spoke, seemed no more than apologetic, unnecessary captions to a series of unique photographs.
We invent passion: so that it can become a thing in itself, without past or future. It has to be invented. We made love then, we lived, so fluently that I can only see that passion as a quite separate creation, as something which had nothing to do with our real selves, and which died when those selves intruded and demanded the same accents.
I had spoken to her one day about our staying on in Egypt, not going back to England, of my making a career there in some way. And she had said doubtfully, “You mustn’t cut off the approaches, your approaches, to yourself. This country won’t always satisfy you.”
“Us, I meant. Won’t it satisfy us? Don’t you have to live here?”
“How can I tell anything now? What should I say?”
“Why are you so doubtful?”
“I’m not.”
But she was.
On our last day she sent a postcard to Henry.
“What’s the point?” I asked. “We’ll be seeing him when we get back to Cairo. Or you will anyway.” And she said seriously, “How do you know?”
In the middle of September we went to Suez. The school was a tiny yellow building with a corrugated iron roof at the other end of the main street from the Bel Air Hotel where we lived. It sat right on the edge of the desert so that on coming into the town from the Cairo road it loomed up before the other buildings of the place came into sight like a small fort, an abandoned outpost from Beau Geste, with a wall round it, a tall flagpost in the concrete yard at the back and a lifeless flag.