Bridget listened to their tiresome conversations about British Intelligence, about how and when they would all get out — an English boat passing through the canal, the same thing at Alexandria, disguises at Cairo airport, or as BO AC freight. There was something false and constrained about their talk, she felt, because they wouldn’t get out, would they? The Russians — and even the Egyptians too — managed these things with ease, to spirit people away in foreign places, in trunks and packing cases with chloroform over their noses.
But not the English.
They no longer had the bite in their intelligence service for that sort of thing; their men got caught in Prague with false-walled caravans or distributing religious tracts in Red Square. And how, in the best of times, was one to leave Egypt covertly? Through the Sahara on foot with a compass or a walk on the waters? Its land and sea frontiers were as open and harsh and empty and as easily controlled as the lines on a hard tennis court. They were trapped, were they not? It was as simple as that.
They talked these things round and about in low voices, drank beer at six o’clock that, without the refrigerator which had broken, now tasted dull and watery. They listened to the hourly broadcasts on Cairo radio, shredding the dull communiqués for some sign of their pursuers, a sign that they were equally on the run — a feeling which the heavy soporific apartment completely denied them. They wanted some confirmation of the action they had taken, which had pulled them forever from a familiar world but which had not yet brought them any other life.
And they felt impelled, against their professional judgment and training, to stick together as much as possible now, each watching the other. For in a life of disloyalty which had just ended, mundane personal considerations were all that was left to them for the moment — the private concerns of ordinary men and women.
Thus they were careful in everything they did and polite to each other, taking on the colourings of their bourgeois surroundings; Bridget laid the table studiously for every meal and the men didn’t drop ash on the carpet. And at night they took to their separate beds like the inmates of a monastery and tried to read French popular novels of the utmost decorum and triteness which the Colonel’s aunt had collected in profusion.
The real strain in the ménage, of course, didn’t come from their predicament, or from the loss of a happy past; it came from the fact that neither of the men dared tell each other — least of all Bridget — that despite all the confessions and dramatic disclosures they were not what they seemed, that there was in each of them a final layer of deceit which they had not revealed. The two men weren’t prepared to risk the consequences of displaying their real allegiances, not merely for professional reasons, but because they didn’t believe their relationship with Bridget would survive such a confession.
“I am an Israeli agent.” “I work for Moscow.” The phrases themselves would sound ridiculous in the present circumstances, they thought. And they would not be said, or acted upon, except in the last resort, for to assume their final identity, although it might mean individual salvation, would also mean losing Bridget. Whereas for as long as both men held to their lie, both were trapped, both were secure, with her.
So the two men watched each other, and wondered, hiding their real absorptions, while the Colonel talked of the merits of Oxfordshire or Northamptonshire as counties to look for houses, and said he’d square things with Williams when they got back to Holborn. Henry would be all right, the ridiculous business with Yunis would be forgotten; he’d see to that. As for the fact that Henry had been a double, really working for the Egyptians — the Colonel said he would forget about that too. In the circumstances. And in the circumstances Henry agreed with him, describing his offer as a reasonable return for the cover he’d given Hamdy over the years.
The two men lied to each other, comfortably, secure in the knowledge that each of them would have to make quite different moves in the end. All that worried them was when.
3
I had dosed myself, and slept all afternoon and it was after five when I left the hotel to look for Cherry. The Khamseen, the fifty-day desert mistral, had practically beaten itself out and the city had an air of empty battered fatigue: resting for a moment on its knees, after the wind and before the oven of summer. Or so I thought: it might well have entered on its last rest for all the activity about: the City of the Dead beyond Mokattam seemed to have moved into the real city. The feluccas and barges had disappeared from the low sand-filled water and a soldier dozed, nursing an ancient sten-gun beneath the bronze Trafalgar lions which guarded the entrance to Kasr el Nil bridge.
A great network of streets had been built by the exhibition ground on the far side of the bridge, the Cairo Tower sticking up from somewhere in the middle of them, and I couldn’t make out where the hospital was in this ugly, half-built scatter of roads. I walked through the remnants of an arboretum, part of the old Gezira botanical gardens, with lines of broken Edwardian green houses on one side, down through an avenue of magnificent, towering Emperor palms. At the end was a long low wooden building, with a terrace and doors all along its length, overhung with creeper; a rackety, impermanent affair — a memory now, from the Illustrated London News, of one of the new hospitals in the Crimea.
“Mr. Cherry? — I understand he’s staying here. With his wife.”
A young man had come into the hallway, a stethoscope in his pocket, wearing plimsolls and a long white coat. A boy stood behind him in an open doorway which led to a dusty courtyard, throwing a ball impatiently from hand to hand. The man took off one of his shoes and thumped the sand out on the floor, knocking the heel vigorously against the reception desk.
“Yes. Yes — Dr. Cherry,” he said. “Dr. Cherry and his wife are in number 9. I’ll show you.”
The glass doors of the room were open, a length of dark muslin hanging between them, so that I had to bend down and struggle with the sand-coloured material to get in, like passing into a fortune teller’s booth. There was a smell of sugar and burnt milk inside. Cherry was sitting on a kitchen chair facing the bed reading the Egyptian Gazette and the woman in front of him seemed like a child who had been tucked in and gone to sleep for the night, the sheets pulled right up against her ears, lying flat out without a pillow, neat and still and straight and precisely rounded under the bedclothes — as lifeless as a roll of linoleum. There was a four-pound tin of Nescafe on the chest of drawers, some imported tinned milk and a primitive paraffin burner. Many elderly British people, governesses and the widows of civil servants on minute pensions, spent their last years permanently in this hospital, and Mrs., or Madame Cherry must have taken over one of their rooms without bothering, or having the energy, to change the ancient Empire decor.
She must have been an old woman, I thought, whoever had occupied the room previously, her roots in Egypt stretching back to before the turn of the century, married to a soldier by the looks of it — he’d probably been taken off with cholera in the Sudan forty years before — for the walls were covered with military photographs, yellowing in cross-cornered frames: a regiment of lancers lined up on some nude provincial midan, a formal group of officers sitting on elaborate garden furniture in front of their mess — thin faces and moustaches and scabbards scraping the dust. And there was a sampler which had been made into a screen on the far side of the bed; row on row of faded stitching in different Gothic lettering commemorating odd skirmishes in that part of the Empire: Omdurman, Tel el Kebir, Khartoum.