Was that what had kept her going in Cairo all these years, Edwards wondered: the idea of returning eventually to England once with him, once with Marlow, and now with the Colonel? When the story finally broke, and all their cover gone, she might, if they were very lucky, achieve a lifetime’s ambition; come into her due reward: something small and half-timbered in Sussex, a paddock and a fast midday train to the London shops, with Hamdy sipping gassy bitter in the Wheatsheaf at weekends. “Tea planting, don’t you know. Back from a little trouble in Ceylon.”
Was that the dull reason for her attachment to the Colonel? In his twenty years as a double in Egypt he must have outranked everyone except Williams in the Holborn section. Perhaps, she may even have reckoned, Hamdy might be in line for a manor in the Cotswolds — if they ever made it home.
Intrigue, Edwards thought, what a lot of bloody intrigue. He took the bottle of whisky with him. He would have to look to his own intrigues from now on. Moscow perhaps. He too needed time to make preparations; the only sort of house he wanted at the moment was a safe one.
They turned left at the T junction from Maadi on to the Helwan road, swung the old Chrysler round facing Cairo three hundred yards away under some trees by the river, and waited. There was only one road back to the city on the narrow stretch of land between the Mokattam Hills and the Nile, the road they’d have to use if they were coming after the Colonel.
Fifteen minutes later they came, not fast and not all together: a Mercedes and then two jeeps, recent Russian models, without markings. They turned off into the clumpy velvet evergreens of the estate, one jeep stopping to block the road out, and the other two vehicles turning round the circle by the Club and going on towards Bridget’s house.
Edwards and the Colonel crouched down in the back seat and Bridget, waiting another minute for some other cars to pass, drove quietly after them towards the city.
BOOK FOUR
CAIRO, MAY 1967
1
I didn’t try to remember anything as the taxi jumped and swerved along the airport road into the city: either remember or compare. I told myself — all that was ten years ago, this was now. There were few cars on the road and fewer lights, just the swishing shadows of airline billboards and half-completed buildings on either side of the highway. I might have been driving along the airport road of any warm, desert country. I was a traveller being taken to his hotel with a decent enough suitcase, a change of linen tropicals, a carton of Philip Morris, a bottle of Haig, and an allowance of £11 a day made up in £200-worth of American Express travellers’ cheques, to include expenses …
I had simply a business connection with the city: Edwards was supposed to be somewhere in it. And perhaps, in the unlikely event of my finding him, we might have a good meal together at the Estoril, a lager at the Regent, an afternoon at Gezira, and then come back to London and no more would be said about it. And if I didn’t find him I’d do these same things anyway, make a few discreet inquiries and get back home.
I was as tired of intrigue, suspicion and difficulty as I’d ever been in my life — and I’d tell Henry so if I came across him: that was the purpose of this trip, to find him and tell him he’d been right. There was nothing else, for I’d exhausted my past in this city as well — on the flight over with too much burgundy and too little sleep.
All I needed was to finish off this business as quickly as possible, with some pleasure perhaps, and get back. Then, with or without Henry, I would decide whether Williams and the Arab press still claimed me — or whether there was any real alternative in the Olive Grove Syndrome, the song-of-the-man-at-forty, the village in Galway.
I turned the window right down. There was just a smell of burnt newspapers and urine riding strongly into the car on the night air. Had there ever been the drift of sesame and spices, cloves and brick dust, through open windows here? — or the one thing in the empty afternoons we had done so well?
They gave me a room on the top floor of the Semiramis looking out over the river. Nothing had changed in the hotel, but there was no one I recognized. It was past midnight; the huge Edwardian shell of the building seemed not so much asleep as deserted. There was a new electric map of the city by the reception desk with coloured lights behind the various tourist attractions, and buttons that you pressed underneath to identify them. One of them had stuck and a light was flashing on and off half-way up Soliman Pasha Street. I looked at the label on the button: “Ministry of Tourism and National Guidance, 12 Talaat Harb.” The old name had gone but not, I noticed, the Perroquet Night Club in the National Hotel further up the same street. I pushed the button for it, so that a green parrot started to flash on the map and not the Ministry of National Guidance.
Cherry, Herbert Cherry of Greystones, Co. Dublin, had once attempted to play the trumpet in the orchestra there and they’d taken a month’s wages off him before they’d thrown us out. I would look for Cherry in the morning. The ubiquitous, fleshy, nervous Cherry. Cherry, our man in Cairo.
The English language magazine that Cherry worked for was edited and printed from the offices of the Egyptian Gazette off 26 July Street on the road up to the main station. They’d had an old copy on the hotel bookstall and I’d looked at it over breakfast. It was called Arab Focus and was done in a print and on a paper which quite belied its title. I tried to detect some of Cherry’s idiosyncratic Dublin-English in the mass of translated articles from Al Ahram and the Cairo weeklies, but I could find nothing of him at all in the arid prose about the High Dam, the stories about the last — and the next — Arab summit. I suppose the magazine wasn’t the best market for stories about greyhounds in the back of taxis on the way to Mullingar.
“Twenty-four Sharia Zakaria Ahmed,” I’d said to the cab driver outside the hotel and he’d then repeated the address to a policeman at a kindergarten table by the head of the rank.
“What’s that for?”
“Tourist police. We have to tell them where we’re going. With foreigners. Though you don’t speak Arabic like a foreigner.”
“I used to live here.”
The driver grunted and barged the car through a crowd waiting to cross the main El Trahir Square, before swinging round, bumping within a foot of a tram, and then going up Kasr el Nil to the centre of town.
Already, at ten o’clock, the Midan was a cauldron, well on the boiclass="underline" scribes and photographers under black umbrellas, gesticulating with envelopes and from behind velvet drapes, were manhandling petitioners in front of the huge Education and Home Affairs Ministry on one side of the square; hefty galibeahed and skull-capped farmers tore round the central island, Ben Hur fashion, in huge-wheeled ass carts like gun carriages on their way back into the country from market; children in oversized, stained pyjamas were selling ballpoints and grubby trinkets at every corner; soldiers with a day’s leave gazed blankly at the mysterious improbability of the flower clock next to the oily waste of the central bus stop; while the disintegrating maroon buses themselves, with dozens of people hanging on with toes and ringers to the outside, heeled over gracefully on the roundabout like fishes, the tips of the mudguards scraping up the soft tar.
Nothing had changed on the Midan in ten years: this arid, scrubby, filthy, dangerous hodge-podge of baking concrete — the “Hub of the City” which had repulsed so easily so many attempts to “integrate” it, or “improve” it since the British had left and the old Kasr el Nil barracks on the same site had been destroyed. It remained a no man’s land between the bridges over the river on one side and the town proper to the east.