There was a bamboo bookshelf next to the window with broken struts all down one side, so that the shelves had collapsed over the books: a row of Victorian adventure novels in coloured pictorial boards — Cleverly Sahib, A Tale of the Khyber Pass — holding up another row of less inspiring books — Bishop Butler’s A Tour of the Shire River — which held up a third collection, a line of sporting memoirs — The Turn of the Wheel, MCC in Australia 1928 and Gilligan’s Men.
Cherry was sitting on a pile of thick blue books, so that he could get on a level with the closed eyes on the bed — two volumes of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia, I saw, when he stood up. The doctor had gone back to his soccer and I could hear the thump of leather on a wall and odd, quick cries in Arabic.
Cherry didn’t say anything. He might even have been crying. He put both his hands round mine and pumped them slowly.
“Well, I’d never have believed it,” he whispered at last. And his face confirmed it. He was like a remittance man suddenly confronted with the one relation from his past who had borne with him, vaguely understood his follies and given him lunch in his London club every July: a thinner figure now, sunburnt with bad eyes, squashed linen trousers and a red Irish tweed tie that had completely faded; the flesh in the face and neck just clear of the bones, falling away in small dewlaps, the air imperceptibly, but definitely, leaking from the inner tube. The moon face was on the wane and his hair had thinned out into one or two black strands which ran across his bald head sideways like earphones.
“What are you doing here, in God’s name?” He smiled and there was the old put-on glare in the eyes for a second.
“Looking. Just looking.”
“What?” he said in a roaring whisper. “You’re not playing cops and robbers, are you? For God’s sake! They arrest people out here now for that sort of thing. Nasser’ll bang you into the Siwa oasis on beans and water, you know …”
I looked at the wisp of fuzzy grey hair on the sheet, the dark coal-scuttle eye-lids, the pointed, slightly dilating nose: the doll’s head by the Omdurman sampler.
“I’m sorry to hear — ”
“Yes. Madame …”
He furrowed his brow and pouted his lips judiciously. A boy had done something serious at the back of the class.
“Yes, we’re waiting. Not long now, I should think,” he said, as though when his wife “arrived” we would all go off somewhere and enjoy ourselves for the evening.
“Is there another room? I don’t want to wake — ”
“She can’t hear a thing. She’s on the drugs. She was deaf lately as well. I’ll leave the radio on in any case. She always used to be able to hear that, so she said.”
Cherry turned on a small transistor by the bedside and an orchestra crackled out, and a voice — a Neapolitan tenor it sounded like, something from Puccini perhaps. The music surged and faded from its distant station as we clambered under the muslin and out of the dark, sweetly smelling tent, and took seats on wicker chairs on the terrace.
The late sun streamed through the vine-like tendrils that had grown up over the balcony and Cherry flapped about on his neat small feet like a waiter.
“Tell me — wait. I’ll go and make some coffee first. There’s a night nurse who comes on at six and I usually go to the Gezira Club for a drink then. It’s near enough for them to send a message. We’ll go on there.”
Cherry went back into the room and I stretched my feet out over the terrace and listened to the squeaky opera behind me. They were coming to the end of an act, a pair of voices tearing at each other in explosive counterpoint. Madame Larousse making an exit. Or was she? There had been no sign of illness or pain in the tiny features; the pencil of flesh beneath the bedclothes had been as calm as a small wave. The devoted Cherry — and Cherry the stringer for our Mid-East section. And Cherry the man who had once driven a taxi backwards over Kasr el Nil bridge, sitting on the windshield, his feet on the steering wheel, with the driver and myself navigating from the rear window. And Williams’s Mr. Cherry — “Don’t trust him — he doesn’t, and he mustn’t, know what you’re doing in Cairo.”
Cherry was the sort of person I should have gone on trusting — Williams the kind I should never have become involved with: a wrong turning made long ago; expectations lying in the gutter: that was what I’d believed of Henry, thinking myself tougher and less sensitive in accepting it all. I wondered about that now. The hell with Williams, I thought.
Cherry came back with two glasses of milky Nescafé and we stirred the mixture slowly like chemists.
“My God, when I got the message that someone called Marlow was coming out here … I thought you’d gone back to Dublin when you left here. And now it’s the bloody cloak and dagger stuff. You must be out of your mind.”
“And you? You’re in the same line of business in Cairo, aren’t you?”
“Not full time, not really. Not a London man on Establishment. What are they paying you? Four grand plus?”
“What does it matter? A sheep as a lamb — and you’re actually in the firing line. I’ve just been stacked away in a cupboard in Holborn with a lot of Arab newspapers. If they catch you they’ll really make you jump. Why — what made you do it? Greystones is pretty British and you used to wallop the wogs out here. But — ?”
Cherry said nothing, sipping his coffee, enjoying the mystery.
“What was it? Playing a role or something, the satisfaction of doing something exciting which no one ever knows about? Or did you have genuine ‘ideological’ motives?”
“Nothing as grand,” Cherry said. “You’re the first open contact I’ve ever had with London. I just give them the mood of the place, background stuff, cocktail chatter.”
“Give it to who?”
“To Usher of course. You must know about him. The Mameluke house beneath the Citadel.”
Usher. The ancient gentleman by the swimming pool at the British Embassy ten years before — carnation and spotless sea island cotton shirt. Crowther and Usher and the Queen’s birthday.
“Usher? Is he still here? He recruited me. I’d forgotten.”
Cherry looked pained. Someone from London should have known all about Usher. I think he almost began to mistrust me.
“But aren’t you setting up something new here? Or have I got it all wrong — and you’re really working for the Russians?”
“I’m looking for Edwards. Henry Edwards. You remember him from Maadi — or had you gone to Alex by then? He was going to run the circle here and now he’s disappeared. You never had any dealings with him?”
“A short fellow with glasses and a haystack of hair?”
I nodded.
“I’ve seen him several times at Usher’s place. A journalist.”
“That was the cover. Like mine. Yours too, I suppose. What a lot of writing gets done on behalf of Her Majesty’s Secret Service, a real patron of the art. Anyway, he’s gone off somewhere, possibly out here. He was a friend of Bridget’s too. You remember her?”
Cherry smiled willingly enough. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to the wedding.”
“I didn’t manage yours either. Did you have a good time at the Beau Rivage?”
“We had the two days. She was quite old you know.”
“Yes.”
“I suppose you wondered.”
“A little.”
“She was a good woman, though. Amusing. Good company. She talked her head off, sensibly. There was nothing crumbling or faded, until quite recently. Ten good years, marvellous really. I was at the college in Alex, she took the music; a lot of laughter. Then we came to Cairo — Alex became barbaric. Then this.” He turned towards the bedroom. “Bone cancer. What happened to your wife?”