Mr. Khoury had stood up long before we reached his table, wreathed in smiles, his mouth a twinkling hollow of black gaps and gold fillings, already waving his arms and giving his companions a running biography of us and our affairs before we were near him.
“… and Mr. Marlow from London who is doing some programmes and we are going to help him.”
There was a woman near him in the latest saucer-like sun glasses and half a dozen others round the table: middle-aged, intellectual, young-at-heart. Two wine coolers with bottles of Stella rammed neck first into the middle of them stood at either end of the table.
“We don’t see many people out from England here these days,” the saucer-eyed lady said to her companion before Mr. Khoury had finished with the introductions.
“… Mohammed Said, Ahmed Fawzi, Morsy Tewfik, Ali Zaki, Mrs. Olive Moustafa …”
Mrs. Olive Moustafa. I leant across the wine coolers and shook hands. She took her glasses off. A sunburnt, small, hard-worked sort of face, neat brown hair with threads of red in it, the remnants of freckles showing through a tanned and oily forehead. She might have been Scots or Irish.
“Mrs. Moustafa works for the International Press Agency here — that right, Olive? — you’ll get all the news from her, what you won’t read in the papers. That right, Olive? Is Michael coming down?”
Olive smiled lightly, perhaps even bitterly, at Khoury.
“He might. He’s very busy right now.”
Cherry had gone over to the side of the table and was leaning over a young American, berating him vigorously, clapping him repeatedly on the shoulder to emphasize a point.
“… and why can’t we read what you write about the place? Why can’t we get your bloody paper out here — eh? You tell me.”
“You ask Morsy that, Herbert He’s Press Censor. He never gets out to the airport to check them through, that’s why. They just lie there, I think. That right, Morsy?”
Morsy Tewfik was sitting next to him — a soft, round, pulpy face, a very well-kept fellow going to fat in a silk shirt and gold cuff-links, with what used to be known as a “brilliantined scalp”: each hair flowing straight back over his head like a petrified oil slick. When he spoke it was in a perfectly enunciated, top-drawer, Oxbridge drawl.
“I don’t stop your paper, Jim. You don’t send any — except the ones for the Embassies. And the Ministry copies we get. Who is there could afford fifty piastres on the streets out here anyway? It costs too much, that’s all. That’s why Herbert doesn’t read it.”
Mr. Khoury butted in — “Jim Whelan, New York News correspondent out here. Mr. Marlow, from London …”
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Marlow.”
Whelan had a tennis shirt on, with a green laurel garland embossed over the heart, fine but profusely growing hair all along his forearms, a pair of colourless spectacles — of the old-fashioned Bakelite sort that you see in photographs of Harold Ross — and behind them a slight squint. He had a bounce of flaxen hair that stood up and shivered when he spoke and was one of those ageless young Americans. He might have been anything between fifteen and forty and his permanently quizzical, disappointed expression suggested that he’d never been able to find out how old he was himself; a serious man on an even more serious earth, one felt, and by God he was going to find out the truth about it all if it killed him.
“Mr. Whelan writes about us every day,” Mr. Khoury said, as though Whelan was working out a prison sentence.
Morsy Tewfik and Whelan and Cherry embarked on an argument about the price of rice in the delta as opposed to Cairo — Whelan’s piece for the next day apparently — and Olive Moustafa leant across to me.
“Could I get some lemonade to mix with the beer?” I managed to say to Mr. Khoury, before she pinned me down.
“What are you doing …” She started off like a greyhound out of a trap.
What, where, why and for whom. She was a persistent party. I wondered who Mr. Moustafa was and how she’d come by him, but didn’t have the chance to ask. She quizzed me studiously for several minutes without getting much back.
“You ought to meet Pearson, Michael Pearson, our correspondent here. He’ll be able to fill you in,” she said, rather aggressively, I thought — the physical connotation more in my mind than the journalistic.
“Oh, I’m not doing any news stories. More background material, colour stuff. I used to live out here. It’s a trip back to look at the place as much as anything …”
We were vaguely worried about each other.
She was the sort of woman who, without any obvious show of impatience or ruthlessness, none the less gives an impression of bitter inner speculation: a sense, like the threat of a hidden time bomb, that she’d find out everything in the end so one might as well tell her straight away; it would save trouble.
She would have been just the sort of person to send looking for Henry, I thought. She’d know all the ropes, all the nooks and crannies: a greedy woman, unsatisfied — her feminine intuition not at all domestic but loose and roving: friend or enemy depending on what you fed her, and she obviously regarded my coming to the city as an interesting plate of meat.
“There’s another man who often comes out here doing odd articles — do you know him at all — Henry Edwards? He does pieces for the Spectator and some of the glossies. Ever come across him?”
I took the question on the run. “Yes, I’ve met him once or twice. Haven’t seen him recently, though. Has he been out here?”
“I saw him a month ago. I was just wondering, there was a journalist with Mohammed Yunis when he left the airport — you know about Yunis, he’s under house arrest now — and I thought it might have been Edwards. We don’t know much about it, the flight came via Munich, so it could have been a Stern man he was with. We’re trying to get something on it. Unless you came on that flight too — did you?”
She was running it hard. “No, I didn’t, as a matter of fact. Where did you meet Edwards?”
“Michael knows him really. He comes into our office when he’s here. But how does he make his money at this freelance business, that’s what I’d like to know. He’s out here half a dozen times a year and there can’t be that sort of interest in the UAR — even in the glossies …”
Mrs. Moustafa was printing now and the trick was to run with her, past her, pip her at the post.
“Has he money of his own? Or maybe he does rep work for some firm. Or perhaps he works for British Intelligence. One never knows, does one?”
“One never does.”
Mrs. Moustafa looked at me, her expression more intrigued than ever for a second; looking at me, waiting for a sign, a knowing hint that she and I were in the same line of country. I didn’t hammer it and she lost interest. But I could see she felt she was on to something, worrying at an idea: “British agent arrested in Cairo” and a pat on the back from the Chairman in London. There was a war brewing up too and perhaps she felt she might be first in the line this time, to break the story of another Suez — another “collusion”.