There was plenty to drink and a buffet of Port Said prawns and rice, grilled delta pigeon, stuffed courgettes and so on. Pearson didn’t bother me. I talked with Morsy’s wife, Leila, an attractive woman, just fractionally plump, in her late thirties, but with the weary isolated air of so many educated Cairo wives: a woman who had wanted, and been capable of, much more than she had ever got, either from her husband or from life in Egypt. She made suitable sounds about the President and the sort of society he had created in Egypt, but one felt it didn’t really touch her, not because she was frivolous or stupid, but because she came from the city’s professional upper class — from a family of bankers or lawyers or whatever — from a metropolitan society which had been liberated for generations. She would like to have exercised herself in a larger world, or at least felt a part of it — of Paris, and London and Günter Grass.
She was interested in things beyond the narrow confines of Arab nationalism and such idle preoccupations were no longer on offer in Cairo. The city was bereft of ideas. There was only one idea, the war against Israel. It made the fearful middle class nervous and short-tempered, full of upsets and hangovers, gave them thoughts of a boat to Canada.
But Leila Tewfik was committed to something she couldn’t give anything to, stuck where she was, with the latest foreign papers and magazines stacked neatly about the living room, all the news of the world her husband got before he censored it. She — and Morsy too — were part of the “new class” spawned by every revolution; except that in Egypt that class was often composed of the children of the old, inheritors of necessary intellect — and unnecessary, unsatisfied longings.
I was exhausted and left early, dropping Cherry off in a cab by the hospital. “We’ll have a drink another night. Seriously,” he said in a slow voice. “And Edwards is in town,” he added, commenting on my talk with Pearson which I’d told him about. “That should please you.”
“Vaguely. I could do without Pearson. And I hardly know where to begin.”
“Why don’t you climb that tower? You’ll probably spot him from there.”
Cherry smiled and disappeared up the avenue of palm trees to the woman who lay like a pencil, stiff and straight, lightly wrapped in a sheet. And I thought of the other woman with the flat backside and narrowing legs who’d walked away from me towards Zamalek. And again, so easily, I saw myself walking towards her, seeing her face.
6
The Cairo Tower was in the middle of the old Botanical Gardens, on Gezira Island, just across from the hospital, and I went there first thing next morning: a huge 700-foot phallus in latticed concrete wrapped round the central elevator core. It had been built, so we had been reliably informed in our Holborn section, with three million dollars innotes which the CIA had attempted to bribe Nasser with ten years before. It was a pure undisguised folly, with no function whatsoever other than that of being an affront to the “forces of neo-Imperialism”—and it succeeded well enough in that, facing as it did the expensive bedrooms of the Hilton on the opposite bank of the river — the terraces from which latter-day CIA men had to view it every morning when they woke up, sniffing the airs of the city in their towel-robes and wristlet name-plates.
A drowsy clerk, sipping a glass of milky tea and burning ruts in the pay desk with his cigarette, took my ten piastres and the lift crawled and squeaked for minutes on my way up. There was a minute cafê at the top, surrounded by glass, with a terrace beyond that and a coin-operated telescope fixed on to the concrete balustrade, leaning drunkenly down over the river.
Apart from an even more sleepy waiter who made me a coffee there was no one else about and the whole pinnacle, though it hadn’t been up for more than a few years, had a dilapidated, run-down air about it. The concrete window casements were beginning to flake away at the edges, eroding in the dry windy weather up here, a pane of glass eight feet square was cracked from side to side, and the wooden chairs and tables must have been taken from some back-street café or a mission school that had closed.
The Tower wasn’t a popular attraction apparently; perhaps there had been a scare about its safety once. It was a mysterious toy, a Trojan horse which the local people mistrusted, I imagined. Egyptians have little head for heights, theirs is a flat country, and I suppose many of them, particularly those on the bread line and beneath, must naturally have questioned the safety of such a patently useless, expensive ornament.
I went out on to the balcony, forcing the iron door open. Although the vantage point was tremendous the view was unsatisfying somehow. The desert sands, brought by the Khamseen, hadn’t yet subsided in the air so that the city was covered in a film of sepia and ochre, and the buildings seemed to flap about in the haze like dirty brown and yellow sacks. There was a monotonous sameness in the view from this height. Nothing, none of the mosques, the minarets or cupolas, stood out. Everything looked as haphazard and dirty as a collection of nomad tents thrown up about the place, which, of course, was how the mediaeval city had begun — “El Fustat”, the tent — so I suppose the view was appropriate enough. With eyes half closed against the glare one saw the unchanged continuity of a thousand years — an encampment of ragged cloth by a huge brown river. The modern city disappeared; a ribbon of dun colours took its place beneath a tired lead-blue sky.
I yanked the telescope up on its pivot and put a coin in on the half-chance that it still worked. The machine clicked, the shutter opened suddenly and I found myself looking, with startling clearness, at a plump Levantine gentleman in bathing trunks having coffee on his bedroom terrace of the Hilton. He lit a cigarette and I could see the red and white colour of the pack — “Marlboro”—though I couldn’t actually read the lettering. He screwed a finger in one ear, examined the result on the end of his nail, got up and went into the bedroom. He moved around inside, sliding out of his trunks, a brown shadow against the white counterpane of the bed.
I swung the machine round to the left, over the river, the crescent sails of a felucca jumping up suddenly in the foreshortened distance, billowing into the lens, filling the whole view, like the underbelly of some river monster. Further round the battered cricket score-board by the Zamalek entrance to the Club came into view. The last batsman had apparently made 990 runs, until I saw that the “Batsman” sign had fallen down over the “Total Runs” sign. And I remembered I’d seen the same incongruity from the balcony of the Tewfiks’ apartment the previous evening. Their place would be somewhere above and to the right of the scoreobard. I swung the telescope up and back along the line of buildings that faced out over the pitch.
The Tewfiks’ terrace had two basketwork chairs and a glass-topped bamboo table. I moved the glass to and fro along the buildings. They’d been on the third floor. I counted them up from the ground — there it was, the chairs and the little table and the French windows open behind, and a woman in a black cotton smock dusting the living-room. She came out and shook the cloth over the rail. Would Leila appear, I wondered? Perhaps she’d come out on to the terrace with an open house-coat and without her glasses … But she didn’t. I was tiring with the strain of keeping one eye screwed up, but the machine was running out with a furious ticking and I panned it once more to the balcony of the next building, upwards to the top floor, where I’d seen something move.
Another woman had come out on to the terrace in sun glasses and a short house-coat and was setting up a deck chair in the corner out of the sun. I tried to focus the lens to get a clearer view. But the shutter clicked and fell. I stood up and stretched. A last shot? I wondered. Yes. Why not? There was Bridget’s apartment, round the other way to my right, on top of the block in Garden City. I might as well see if I could get it on the machine. I put in ten piastres and was just on the point of swinging round when I saw the woman in the short house-coat again. She had stood up and was in the light now, talking, arguing, it seemed, to a man who had joined her.