He had taken a place at the very back of the plane, where he always sat, next to the cabin staff, hoping that none of the new arrivals would get that far. To discourage the possibility he put his briefcase and a pile of newspapers on the two vacant seats to his left and looked determinedly out of the window like a stuffy woman travelling below her class.
He’d always had an obsession about sitting by himself on journeys; he couldn’t bear enforced company, being with anyone, in fact, whose presence he hadn’t actively encouraged. As a child — it had begun then, at the end of term: the vicious, howling cabal of schoolboys savaging each other with their peaked caps and bunching in the corridors on the train away from Capetown — the sense of release he’d craved then, as he did now, and had only found when he’d changed at the junction and was sitting alone in the rackety wooden carriage which took him along the branch line to his uncle’s home up country.
“May I?”
Edwards nodded distantly, barely turning his head, as the small, perky, almost balk figure in a glistening Dacron suit moved the papers diffidently and sat down on the far seat from him. Nodded, and closed his eyes again. But he couldn’t avoid hearing the storm of Arabic which followed from the man — the brusque, admonitory phrases of someone too long accustomed to giving orders, as he shouted for the steward. Apart from the rough country accent — from Upper Egypt, probably Aswan — the voice might have belonged to some petty court functionary from Farouk’s time and not Nasser’s. But then Nasser had been in power now for as long as Farouk had, Edwards thought, and one regime is much like another as far as the functionaries are concerned. When they get into their stride you couldn’t tell them apart: obsequiousness by the well-heeled, with the well-heeled, and stuff the people; the secret society of boot strappers: the new rich, and the “government class”; and between them the shared nightmare memory of a mud village lost in the delta two decades before, when the night came down in black frustration and you were the only person in the café with trousers, talking revolution over the sizzling pressure lamp.
And the revolution had come; others had brought it, sought death for it, denned it — you were buying stamps in the General Post Office at the time. Never mind. It was just what you’d always talked about in the village café, it had come to pass exactly as you had said — it was yours, your number had come up at last. You were out in the streets for the rest of the week, you yelled more than anybody and looted a little. And later you bought a jacket to go with the trousers and had a word in someone’s ear — a friend of your uncle’s who had actually been seen with a stick in his hand on the first day.
Now the ranks had closed again after the whirlwind, you met the fixers again, the ones you’d rallied against in the village, only they wore suits now — you met them again, came together like long-estranged and passionate lovers: the ten per cent man; the kick-back, as violent and profitable as American football; government by baksheesh: the call from the hotel lobby before the tender is put out, the piece of marshy land beyond Ismailia bought from a small family for £200, already surveying it in the mind’s eye, seeing the graceful curve of the new road, the tall chimneys of the chemical factory …
The trouble was he’d gone on thinking there was a difference, between one sort of government and another, for too long. The man’s arrogant, peremptory attitude came to him as a shock, he realized — as another indisputable sign of something he’d long wanted to avoid recognizing: that the things some people fought for didn’t make the rest any better, that if there were improvements in their life they took them as being no more than their due; that was the accepted order of things — personal advantage, material gain — these were the things that came first whichever side you were on, whatever you had fought for. Edwards wished that he could start now like everyone else, dreaming of a colour television set and a second car, that he’d never come to believe in sides.
The man was loudly demanding the basket of sweets before take-off, like a fractious child, and when the steward came he grabbed a whole fistful, and then another, and stuffed them in his pocket, some of them dropping down between the seats.
“Please, Your Excellency,” the steward fawned in Arabic, “I can arrange for you to take a bag of them with you before we get to Cairo.”
His conciliatory, false voice — how quickly the steward had changed from privileged official to grovelling servant. It reminded Edwards of his father’s basement office next to the cellars in the old Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo and the monthly agony of paying, and docking, the servants’ wages. Edwards had worked there for a few months when he’d left school at a time when his parents still hoped he’d follow them in the hotel business. “Please, Effendi — Please, Mr. Edwards — ” when some floor waiter had broken something or had had a complaint laid against him. And he remembered the repeated pleas of one particular servant who had smashed a decanter, an elderly Nubian who spoke like a child as his father calculated the three-month deduction from his salary: “Please, Effendi, I’ll never do it again, I’ll never do it again.”
He’d wanted a world then, really ever since he could remember, where saying things like that would never again be possible. That was when the vehemence had begun, the anger that had lit all his life, and which seemed to be dying in him now.
Sweets, he thought — that’s what it all comes to. That’s all they want. That’s all the anger has really been about.
“Sweets,” the man in the seat next to him said affably, sucking and chomping on one loudly. “You can’t get them like this in Cairo these days, I’m afraid. My grandchildren love them. What can one do?”
Edwards had to turn now and was about to nod his head again in vague assent when he saw that it was Mohammed Yunis who had spoken. His Excellency Mohammed Yunis, Secretary General of the Arab Socialist Union.
For a moment Edwards thought he saw the answer to London’s riddle: that Williams had organized some kind of incredibly subtle end for him, whose instrument was to be Yunis. The first stages were already under way.
Or perhaps the plan was that he and Yunis were to go down together, literally, on the flight to Cairo. But it couldn’t have been planned like that, nothing could have been organized so that he should meet Yunis in this way: he’d changed his flight himself at London Airport, as he often did, from a BOAC one to another an hour later on United Arab Airlines. Still, there was an advantage in seeing Yunis — it confirmed his only course of action. Yunis, he saw now so clearly, was nothing more than the largest cog in what they were pleased to call the “elected government” of Egypt — the Arab Socialist Union which was simply a rubber stamp for the President’s intentions. He might have been somewhat to the left of Nasser but not nearly enough, and quite without sufficient support in the country, for anyone in the West ever to think of approaching him with ideas of a counter-revolution. Yunis was just a dapper, greedy old socialist, anxious for trips to Berlin and London, for good English sweets, properly boiled, and long-playing records of Jewish musicals. Edwards thought: anyone who could see him, as Williams apparently did, in battledress, master-minding a coup, didn’t have Nasser’s end in mind but his own. Yunis would have him in the hands of the police the moment he suggested such a scheme.
It was a fortunate coincidence in fact, Edwards thought again, this meeting with Yunis. It had come as a last warning, a clear sign pointing to sanity and survivaclass="underline" he would have to disappear; into Egypt or further south, from where he’d come. Williams had burnt his boats on one side and he couldn’t see Moscow taking him back.