For those three days he’d been prepared to believe that the Colonel was one of Williams’s private appointees in their Mid-East section — or someone who had been placed in Cairo years before when the British Army still occupied the city. And that — in the secretive ways of things, the bluffs and double bluffs of his Holborn department — he’d never known about him. It would have been a natural course to take with someone so highly placed in Egyptian intelligence, keep him buried completely from everybody, even to the extent of giving him his own completely separate “supporting staff” in Cairo and elsewhere — men whose job it would have been to “service” the Colonel, warn him of possible breaks in his own Cairo apparat — and get him out of the country in the event of his being unearthed: his “ticket men”. At his level the Colonel would have had all these ancillary services, just as he’d had them himself in better days in London and New York from his Moscow source.
All that was perfectly possible. But the one thing that made no sense was that a man in such an exalted position would have run from them long ago, left them and made his own way home. Whatever his personal affections, and the Colonel obviously had these for Bridget, such a man would have bolted from the word go. And the way to do that was to do it alone, not with two other people hanging round your neck.
The information gathered from twenty years with Egyptian security, and latterly as head of counter-intelligence, would have been invaluable to Holborn and no man would risk the chance of getting it home by hanging round with friends, or even his colleagues, and least of all his mistress.
The Colonel would never have taken the risk: affection, love, personal loyalties — whatever it was — didn’t arise in a situation like this; not for someone with his professional skills.
Who was the Colonel with then — and where was he running? Henry hardly cared; he would have to run for it on his own, that was his only clear thought. London was over, and Cairo. And Bridget. The places where he wanted to be, and the people who lived there, were gone. Affection, love, loyalty — whatever it was — didn’t arise in a situation like this …
There was only Moscow and that wasn’t certain: the long de-briefing, a badly-heated apartment, unintelligible rows with a provincial housekeeper, a job in some backwater of the service, ghosting books with the others of his kind, getting drunk with them on Christmas Day: airmail copies of The Times when everybody else had thumbed through them: a life within a belief he didn’t believe in any more. It lay over the bridge, all this — the scrubbed subways and too much vodka — over Kasr el Nil and down to the hospital where the Moscow Resident worked, just a short walk away. He began more and more to think he didn’t want it; now that the fridge was going again.
Bridget finished her drink and looked across the cricket pitch to the entrance of the Club in the distance. It was six o’clock, just starting the half-hour of twilight. The day had cooled, the wind was finished: there would be a few weeks now of perfect weather before the summer really started, tearing everything to shreds. People, other friends of hers in the city, would be doing things: she’d arranged some time before to go down with a doctor’s family she knew to their farm in the delta, the remains of a once large estate: a few days walking about the dovecotes and banana groves, watching the grain being forked from pile to pile, the chaff blowing away in the north summer wind from the sea. The creak of Sakias, Shadufs, Archimedes screws; the endless lapping of water. The blanket of night. Card games.
And there were others she knew, comfortable casual acquaintances, probably some of them were walking up the drive of the Club at that moment, if she could have distinguished them, between the squash and croquet courts, on their way for an evening drink.
She wanted to be one of them; quite plainly and vehemently and suddenly she wanted to be done with all this. She wanted to walk out of the flat, down the corniche, up the long drive of the Club and into ordinary life. It was as simple as that.
Behind her the telephone started.
She heard the muffled buzz beneath the cushions in the armchair next to the window. Henry was clattering the last of the bottles into the fridge and the Colonel was dousing his face repeatedly in a flush of water from both taps, screwing his ears out with his fingers, plastering back his thin hair.
She let the phone go on ringing until it stopped. Then she got up and went to get her headscarf and shopping bag.
5
We turned up the drive to the Club with Cherry stepping along briskly in front of me — a goat on his small legs and grubby suede shoes, red tie and dirty linen coat flapping out around him and his beer belly pushing out over his trousers. He had the pedantic, bear-like, weather-beaten air of some minor British Council official who’s been thankfully out of England since Munich, traipsing round the grubby corners of the Levant on the same small salary and in the same clothes: the sort of rundown happy academic who “keeps in touch with things” at home, and ministers to the locals, with a box of lantern slides telling “The Story of Parliament” in one pocket and Desmond MacCarthy’s last book of Critical Essays in the other.
He smelled vaguely of old beer and long siestas; of ink and chalk and small evening classes on the Lake Poets in some baking upstairs room above the tramway, looking out at a statue of Garibaldi — or Ataturk, or Soliman Pasha: a bare trickle of sense seeping through into the willing, mystified faces of refined old ladies and the secretaries who dreamed of a season at the Berlitz in Oxford Street Cherry, the genuine expatriate with his weekly copy of the T.L.S. — the sort who’d never even thought of getting a job on the Third Programme.
Cherry was full of certainties; he’d found his mark in this isolated, crumbling city: it was exactly his weather. He was someone here.
The cars and taxis swirled past us on the drive, full of flannelled, blazered men and girls of “good family”. The slow “thunk” of the croquet, and the vicious “snap-FLACK” of the squash, resounding from the courts on either side of us — and Cherry strode along towards the entrance with the vigorous impatience of a child on its way to the nursery. He was someone here; yes indeed. It made all the difference.
“Yallah, Mohammed!” he called to a waiter at the top of the steps. “Entar Mabsout? Quais Ketir?”
“Aiowa, Bey! Am di’illah.”
The man saluted and we walked through the small hallway and out on to the covered terrace by the small pool beyond.
I said, “You weren’t a member here before, Herbert Rather overdoing the Raj thing, isn’t it — for a good Dubliner?”
“Nonsense, Marlow. This is for Egyptians now.” And before he went over to the table on the far side of the pool where I could see Mr. Khoury sitting, he had started to clap his hands impatiently at another waiter.
“Dine etnine Stella, fi cubia,” he shouted, as we threaded our way between the tables where the smart set in polo necks and armless cotton frocks were gathered in huge circles, the men, in groups, lying back with their feet up on opposite chairs, spinning rackets in their hands, looking serious; the girls in just as easy, confident, though much straighter, positions, skirts sometimes an inch above the knee. Before the British had entirely left Egypt ten years earlier, an Egyptian had publicly relieved himself in the Club’s small pool by the terrace. “It’s Egyptian water now,” he’d said. “Like the canal.” It was a famous incident. But in these days there was no need for such insecurity; the smarter Cairenes had replaced the English exactly in the hierarchic ecology of the Club, were indistinguishable from them in their proprietary and superior airs.