“I don’t know. She’s probably still here.”
“I meant to say — I knew you’d left her. I saw her once about three years ago, a party at Usher’s, she was with your friend Edwards, I think. The haystack.”
“Three years ago?”
“Yes. I’m not likely to forget her. I kept clear.”
“She bites, you mean? You’ve become very proper, Herbert.”
“Settled down, that’s all, I suppose.”
“It wasn’t like you though.”
“I know. It won’t be for much longer.”
He stirred the sugar at the bottom of his glass and spooned it up like strawberry jam, mouth wide, eyes agape in the old staring way. He might have become a proper man, I thought, but the old matrix, the innate rumbustious folly was not quite dead.
“Are you going to look for her as well — your wife?”
I shook my head. “Not my wife now. But I might look her up.”
“For old times’ sake, you mean? The old Marlow. At the rodeo again. Into the ring …”
“‘Lord Salisbury and party and hurry about if, you mean? And a taxi backwards over the bridge.”
“You won’t get anything of that sort of thing around here nowadays. That’s all gone. All deadly serious now. You wouldn’t recognize it.”
“What is the mood here then, Herbert? That’s your department.”
“There’ll be a war. Third round. Seconds getting out of the ring at the moment. People are jumping round the place right now, vile tempers and bad hangovers. You won’t notice it at once. Battle fever — but no battle; that’s what irks them. They’ll be slaughtered if they start. Nasser knows that, but the others don’t; and not the Army. They’re going full belt over the cliff. There’s trouble at the top too. Yunis of the ASU was talking out of school in Moscow last week. Now he’s reportedly under house arrest. Moscow wants to keep things on the hop here, keep their finger well in. That’s the mood — just a matter of waiting for the bell to go.”
“I’d rather the old times.”
“We’ll look for this fellow Edwards then — and your wife? That’s just like old times — nothing serious. Nothing about your setting up a new circle here, that was just cover?”
“That’s what they want in London. ‘Find Edwards,’ they said.”
“And how have they lost this fellow — if they know he’s in Cairo? You mean he’s gone under — or over?”
“Possibly. But I don’t know if he’s even here. It was just an idea of mine. We had a meeting — ”
Cherry let out a dreadful bellow of laughter.
“That’s really serious. We need a bit of that out here. Happy days again all right: you just dropped by to see if he was here, like you’d drop into Davy Byrne’s on a wet afternoon looking for the price of a drink if Harry was there. And if he isn’t, well, I’ll drop over to McDaid’s later, he might be there. Or the Bailey. That’s how it is, isn’t it? But they shoot people out here for that sort of thing, didn’t you know?”
Cherry, with another bark, had woken up into some kind of form.
“Jesus, nothing serious all right!”
The little opera had come to an end in the bedroom behind us. Cherry got up. An elderly country woman in a baggy black cotton dress and cap flapped along the terrace in plastic toe-hold sandals, and Cherry spoke to her in Arabic, enumerating various details on his fingers, counting out the things that would have to be done for his wife that evening, like teaching a child on an abacus.
“Come on, we’ll have a beer at the Club. I’ve got to meet Khoury there in any case. My ‘editor’.”
“I was supposed to meet him back at the hotel at six.”
“You must have got it wrong. Khoury practically lives in the Club. That’s where he meets everybody.”
4
Bridget said, “I don’t damn well care. No one can see me on the balcony, unless they can look round corners. And there aren’t any buildings opposite. It’s crazy being stuck in here.”
She opened the French windows, took a paper and a drink with her and lay down on a wicker garden couch, opening her house-coat at the neck and flapping the lapels, trying to move some of the evening breeze about her damp, hot body.
They had been there three days now; nothing had happened, the papers hadn’t mentioned anything of them, nor the news. The telephone hadn’t gone. The resigned immobility of the two men was beginning to annoy Bridget. They sat around the place, talking and smoking endlessly, doing various chores in the mornings like housemaids. She had expected more urgency; she wanted something to occur. But Hamdy was damp and lethargic: “We mustn’t do anything, don’t you see? Mustn’t upset the arrangements. Just wait for them to call. It’ll take time for them to organize things. We can’t get out of here on our own, you know that…”
But she’d had her own way about going out on the balcony; the Colonel hadn’t stopped her. And now he went back to the bathroom and began to shave, as he did every evening, as if expecting an appointment or a party an hour hence.
Henry was in the kitchen tinkering with the fridge. Warm Stella drove him wild and he’d been trying to get the thing to work ever since they’d arrived.
“She doesn’t like being trapped, Hamdy,” Henry called through the doorway.
“It’s us, isn’t it? Not so much her. She goes out, after all. We’re the ones who’re stuck.”
“That’s what she doesn’t like.”
“So what does she expect me to do — call a cab to take us all out to the airport?”
Had he lost some weight? the Colonel wondered as he looked at himself in the glass. Sweating? Fear? Hardly that. There’d been a moment’s panic at Bridget’s house, but not fear: he couldn’t somehow feel that emotion about a country, about a people and a security organization he was so familiar with, whose ways he knew so deeply. It was having Henry with them that made it so difficult. If he and Bridget had simply been together … They would have slept in the same bed, the cumbersome affair with its silk hangings and hardened mattress, that she alone now occupied. That was what was wrong. He could have tended her, consoled, comforted her. He could have loved her and perhaps smothered her impatient fear. For she was frightened, he thought; simply that.
But now the situation was a French farce, with the three of them manoeuvring round the set, suspecting false doors and waiting for their trousers to slip. And he had to deny her the one sort of attention, his obsession for her, which he knew would calm her. He had to keep to the rules. And the only encouragement he had was in knowing that Henry had to keep to them as well.
He pulled the razor round in a neat half-circle between ear and chin, did the same for the other side, then soaped his face again. He remembered all the other times he had done this, preparing to go out with Bridget. He would have to do something, take some action, if only for her sake.
The Colonel wondered what their reactions would be: if he told them that the call, when it came, was for him alone, that he was not with London but with Israel, and was going back there. What would they do? They wouldn’t like it. That’s what it amounted to. Before he finished shaving he knew he would have to get out on his own without telling them anything. And yet … There was still time before a final decision. He hunted around for Bridget’s rose-water which he’d used since his own cologne had run out.
The refrigerator started to purr. Henry wobbled it and it stopped. Another jerk and it was on again. He turned the freezer carefully up to “high” and put half a dozen bottles of Stella on the top shelf, along with some local cheese which had gone like dry putty, and an oil-stained paper bag of olives. He didn’t bother about the milk or butter or the other food. He felt in better shape already. The heaviness of the past few days lifted — the depressing inactivity and befuddled thought. He had achieved something, started to work himself out of the situation, and he felt as relieved about the beer as a traveller come to an oasis having seen it hover for many days in the sky.