I had started to think about my last day in Cairo ten years before. I was catching a TWA flight that evening back to Paris and the three of us, Henry, Bridget and I, had just left the airline office in Opera Square where Bridget worked and she had given me a folder with my ticket in it.
“A drink in the Continental?” Henry suggested. And we had gone there and sat up at the dark, mirrored bar and Angelo had served us arak in tall whisky glasses, ice-cold water circling down the outside. The bill had been forty-five piastres, plus the service, and Angelo had put the strip of paper in Henry’s little glass behind the bar, on the first shelf of bottles. Henry was staying on in Egypt, his credit was good. But my own sherry glass was there as well, full of previous chits, at least two hundred piastres worth. Was Angelo going to ask me to settle up with him now? — had they told him I was leaving? Or didn’t he know? I’d have to tell him I was leaving myself, and pay up. But when? Now — or at the end of the session? However I handled it there was going to be an awkward break — this saying goodbye to Angelo, paying my bill. It would be the beginning of the end, a public acknowledgement of my departure — and I was absorbed in wondering how to face it. I was determined not to get involved in any goodbye business.
We drank on at the Continental for an hour, swapping polite inconsequential chatter — English teachers taking the morning off with a girl in town … We’d arranged to go on for lunch at the Estoril.
All this was fact; it was exactly as it had happened. But in the moments after remembering it, when I’d fallen asleep, the dream came which was quite different. Instead of going to the Estoril we were driving down Soliman Pasha in a taxi, to Bridget’s flat in Garden City, the heat lapping round the car in waves.
The lift wasn’t working and when we’d climbed to the top of the building we had gin from the cardboard crate which Bridget kept under the chaise-longue — the three of us, romping around the small burning room, throwing our clothes off, laughing and chattering like bright sparks at a cocktail party.
And then Henry had suddenly gone into the bedroom with Bridget — as simply and naturally as though it was an arrangement, an appointment they’d had together which we’d been aware of for a long time.
I stood at the window, my back to the bedroom doors, chuckling, sipping more and more gin, looking out over the river, perfectly happy, until Bridget called me, her head half-way through the glass doors.
“It won’t work,” she said. She seemed to be shouting at me, her sun-burnt face showing up like a full stop against the yellow whiteness of her body. “We can’t get down. We’re trapped.”
“Why ever not? “I said casually. “The door isn’t locked.” And I moved towards it. It gave easily in my hand, swinging inwards, and the afternoon sun dazzled me. Instead of the door-mat and corridor there was a small window ledge where my feet were, with some withered plants in pots, and below them the outside wall of the tall apartment block, a sheer drop of twelve storeys to the corniche below.
When I woke, I had opened my eyes several times, thinking about this, but had closed them again, drawn back each time by the memory of the dream — trying to re-achieve it; its light-headed smooth dazzle, its sex, its extraordinary reality. And for moments I was part of it once more, could feel its exact shapes and sizes, but soon there was nothing left; I had exhausted it. I kept my eyes open the next time. The landscape on the wall was rock-steady, frozen goats and broken grey columns.
I got up and went on to the balcony and looked to left and right along the rooftops of the buildings on the corniche. I could just see the top of Bridget’s apartment block in Garden City beyond Shepheard’s Hotel. She was probably still there, living in the city. She might even be in the same place. Her parents were dead, I knew that, and in the years afterwards, when Henry and I had met again in London, he had never told me that she had left Egypt. After the first bits of news he had given me about her and her family, and after our marriage was dissolved, we had dropped the subject altogether.
But now it was different. Henry was no longer my only consideration in the city. For the first time in years I was thinking of Bridget again, thinking intensely, trying to imagine where she was and what she was doing, wondering whether I might not simply go up to her old apartment and ring the bell, or phone her. The dream had suddenly freshened everything about her, the details had re-created her completely: I had seen her face again, the dark triangular features, the eyes so far apart and the nose turning slightly upwards like a petal. And in the glass doorway of the bedroom the same barely formed body, the narrow shoulders and wide hips. A woman in her late thirties now, somewhere in the city. I was sure of it.
2
Bridget had gone out each evening for food, but Henry and the Colonel had not set foot outside the apartment in Gezira for more than two days. They were by now nervous and short-tempered and all of them were thankful of the three separate bedrooms which the accommodation offered. It was an old turn-of-the-century block on the island and the apartment ran right across the building, fronting on to Gezira Street and the river on one side and, from a covered terrace, looking out over the playing fields of the Sporting Club on the other.
The place had belonged to an aunt of the Colonel’s, distantly Jewish and aristocratic — a minor grande dame of the city during Fuad’s and Farouk’s time — who had spent her life there and died just before the revolution when the Colonel had quietly taken it over as a possible bolt-hole, a “safe” house. The furnishings were immensely heavy and portentous: pseudo gold-caked second Empire mixed with a few genuine oriental pieces — a wooden filigree harem screen by the drawing room door, a silver hookah with passages from the Koran finely inlaid, and some Persian lambswool rugs, barely trampled, deep and splendid as a snowfall. All the rooms were dark; there were few enough windows in the apartment in any case and over those were hung tall velvet curtains which, when they were fully opened, let in no more than just a central A-shaped panel of light.
The three inhabitants seemed to move on perpetual tiptoe over the heavy carpets. One of them would enter a room on some casual errand only to find that, without intending it, he had frightened the wits out of someone else already there. There was a telephone in the hall which they had moved on its long extension to a heavy armchair by the drawing room window, putting cushions round it, stifling the very possibility of its ringing. And it never did.
The Colonel had made two calls, both to someone in Athens — a coded message dealing with the export of so many kilos of dried fruit. He had explained that it was his contact with Central Office in London and that all they had to do now was wait.
Henry wasn’t convinced. He had never heard of any Cairo-Athens contact in his experience with the Holborn section; on the other hand, it could have been a uniquely Central Office link. In any case he wasn’t prepared to run for it on his own just yet. The only contact he could make would be with the KGB Resident in Cairo. And he hadn’t made up his mind about what welcome he might receive there. He was “resting”. That’s what the house was for, he told himself: a “safe” house.