Mohammed Fawzi ran the place. “Fawzi Esquire” as he Jiked to be addressed. I imagine he considered the suffix as an important Anglo-Saxon title, resting somewhere between plain Mister and being a Lord, so that he became known to us all as “Esquire”.
There were two other teachers there who, like me, had been sent down from Cairo, Cassis and Helmi, and the four of us spent most evenings together, sampling the few pleasures of the shoddy little town; the second show at the Regal Cinema, cards, drinks at the Refinery Club outside Suez, or the French Club at Port Tewfik, and odd trips to the Casino, a strange little night club five miles up in the Attaka hills to the south. At other times we had supper with Cassis and Helmi looking out over the Red Sea from rooms they had taken high above the oily waterway.
“‘Neither the Arabian quarter, with its seven mosques and unimportant bazaar, nor the European quarter, which contains several buildings and warehouses of considerable size, presents any attraction.’” I read them the passage out from an old Baedeker I had brought with me one evening.
“It’s not changed much, has it?”
And Cassis, who taught English, had said, “But it has a Biblical importance, or perhaps,” and he looked at Helmi who taught geography, “perhaps one would put it better by saying that the place has a certain geophysical interest.”
“Oh, yes.” Helmi took the allusion confidently and more bluntly. “If you stepped from a boat out there, way out there, you would only be above your knees.” And he went on to explain the Bible trip, how the Israelites had crossed over the Red Sea because they knew the line of sand bars which ran right across the neck of the bay and how the wicked Egyptians, who didn’t know the route, had been swallowed up. Helmi was a Copt.
“Before they made the canal you could walk right across the bay — if you knew the sands. They were very various. Even now you can walk right up to the canal channel. And that’s what happened. The first group knew their way across. And the others didn’t. Or got lost in a sandstorm maybe, that often happens here. Quite suddenly. Phut! Whizz. Finish!” Helmi moved his arms in circles vigorously about his eyes. “You see nothing and the boat can upset Here, take a look through these glasses. You can just see where the sand bank ends and the channel begins.”
I looked through the binoculars, scanning the bay from the headland at Port Tewfik right down to the red and violet haze which hung over the horizon far down the gulf. Twenty or thirty ships lay at anchor in the roads, waiting to go up the canal in the night convoy. And to the right, along the coast, in the shadow of the hills, two Russian tankers were berthed at the refinery jetty. I could even make out their names. If that was the sort of information Crowther really wanted, getting it didn’t appear too difficult.
And in due course I was able to inform Henry of these shipping movements, the frequency of buses and trains to Cairo, the name of the secretary of the Greek Club and the time of the first house at the Regal on Sundays. Henry reported that he was perfectly satisfied and Bridget agreed that Crowther seemed even more of a fool than I’d taken him for.
My relations with Colonel Hamdy were equally uneventful and satisfactory. I passed on to him exactly what I gave Henry for Crowther. And every so often I’d get a message in return: “Very glad to receive your good news. Look forward to meeting again.” This correspondence was conducted, whenever we came to Cairo for week-ends, through Rosie, the Greek telephonist at the Semiramis Hotel, and through the receptionist at the same establishment. I used the letter rack behind his desk, dropping an envelope in the compartment marked “H” for Hamdy on my way to the gents while the Colonel left his messages with Rosie; which I later picked up from the large assortment of similar billets-doux on blue paper which were kept for customers on a board outside her booth. A great many people used the hotel in this way, as both post office and telephonic poste restante, the official channels in Egypt for such communications being notoriously uncertain.
14
But I stopped working for the Colonel, as I did for Crowther and Usher, for by the end of the spring term I’d stopped living with Bridget, had left Egypt and returned to London.
Our marriage, like the events consequent on our first meeting, went through appetite, satisfaction, farce and enmity; it ran a fixed course for the rocks, the two of us struggling gamely at the wheel to keep it steady. And soon enough we had reached that point where words became as useless and unnecessary as they’d been in the times when we were most at ease and happy. We were genuinely incompatible. It was a classic journey.
Bridget resigned herself to the fact that whatever I might become, or might be “underneath”—in more favourable circumstances — I was not the person she thought I was, expected me to be. She had been mistaken. I was not the “right” person, and there would be therefore, at some future date — she didn’t know when, for she would not precipitate it — an end to it all. Meanwhile she would close up shop.
I, on the other hand, seeing her running, hiding in this way, the words drying up like a guilty witness, dropped the role of lover and assumed that of detective. I became a genuine agent — proficient, ruthless, imaginative — in a way I never did with Usher or afterwards with Williams. A St. George in dark glasses and shoulder holster. The battle was on: I would save love.
Why we play this game, to which we lend a passion we never quite give to loving, I don’t know; unless it be just one more of the unconscious steps we make towards our real ambition, evidence of our secret craving, which is to end love, to be released from it.
Bridget would be disappointed, of course, in having to assume again that truth which is implicit in all affairs — except the one shared with the “right” person — that love does not last. But to offset this there would be room for congratulation: she would have faced this demise with me — and survived; and she would have learnt something for next time, for the next person. And there would be that, wouldn’t there? — another time, someone else; in a bar or at a party, the friend of a friend. Above all she would be free again. Once more she could pick and choose from all the huge promise of the future; the charm of the unexpected, so long withheld, would once again be lying in wait for her — the unknown passions she would embrace, which already existed in the form of someone who even now was rising towards her, along the lines of destiny, to that future point where their paths would cross.
It was a girls’ story, something from a popular magazine. I thought Bridget was like that — though not at heart; I was the literate man who would bring her to better reading, wreck her conventional assumptions, explain a serious love in a long book.
Neither view was real. I was the agent running to the crime, the man from the gutter tabloid on to a good story, forcing the pace, getting a foot inside the door, flourishing the cards of desire. And it cannot have surprised Bridget; it was quite in keeping with the form these protracted endings take. It was natural that I should become the inquisitor, pondering the clues of a vanished emotion, marshalling the evidence, with which, when I knew everything else had failed, I would indict and slander her, so that we should both part satisfied, that is as enemies, happy in the knowledge that all the proprieties had been observed. It was natural, because only in being arraigned and accused in this way could she rise guiltless and clear above the sordid argument I had reduced our association to.