I recognized him first, the fluffy strands of unruly hair through which he was running his fingers, the ancient saucer spectacles, the full, rather debauched, boyish face. It was Henry, so that for quite a while, in my surprise, I didn’t bother identifying the woman. Just a girl he was with, I thought, someone he’d picked up in his voracious way — until he moved towards her and they kissed. I felt there was something incredibly awkward in this event — which wasn’t in their movements which were perfectly natural — and I couldn’t at first understand why I was so struck by the embrace in this way, as a catastrophe, an outrage, coming over the lens to me as a blow in the stomach.
And then I looked carefully again at the woman’s profile. The message had simply been delayed a few seconds. I’d known I was looking at Bridget before I could believe it, put it into words, before I could give a name to the woman whose fingers were linked round the back of Henry’s neck now, the house-coat flapping open about her in the windy baking haze.
I didn’t say anything to Cherry when I met him half an hour later. I’d taken a third ten piastres’ worth on the telescope, swinging it round and peering at other parts of the city, so that the waiter behind me would have no exact idea of what or where I’d been looking at if he were asked. And I knew he’d been looking at me — a natural for one of Pearson’s Egyptian pound notes.
Henry and Bridget had gone inside. They were in the apartment above and to the left of the Tewfiks’; I didn’t know if they shared the same stairway. But I knew enough. It was the same building. I had simply to decide what to do about it. Though even at that point I can remember thinking that just going up to the apartment and knocking on the door was the last thing I’d do.
Cherry had been up to his office and had brought a message back from Mr. Khoury, a schedule in fact, of trips about the city. A visit to the High Court, to the Egyptian Family Planning Association and the steel works at Helwan.
“Where are you going to find Edwards in all that?” he remarked over coffee on the hospital terrace. His wife was in better form that morning and Cherry was in a pushy mood without a drink taken. I told him that one place was as good as another, that I’d pick up something.
“I doubt you will. You’d do better to stick around Pearson.”
“I’ll find Henry before he does.”
“What about Usher? Do you want me to make any plan there? You should see him. Perhaps Henry called there.”
“In time, not now. Intelligence here knows all about Usher. His phone would be tapped or they’d nail me if I went up there to see him on my own. If there was some reason, a party or something, then I could call.”
There was only one thing to do now, stall on these various plans and proposals, and find out what was going on in the apartment on the Gezira corniche. How? Wait for them to come out? And then follow them? And then what? Nothing much, unless I could actually hear what was going on in the apartment. And that seemed impossible. There were technical tricks, of course, planting microphones on walls or through telephones, shooting mini-transmitters from an air rifle at the end of a suction pellet, but I barely knew the beginnings of them. There would have to be something else, something entirely in the realm of the ordinary.
We went on to the Club for a beer and a sandwich by the empty pool and I wondered what it could be — how to be in, but not of, the apartment which I could just make out from where we were sitting, a smudge of white concrete burning in the sun high over the cricket score-board.
Yet it shouldn’t have been impossible, I thought. I’d had some desultory training when I’d first come back to London from Egypt ten years before, a few dry lectures in shadowing and concealment, dropping a tail, and so on, before I’d subsided into Information and Library in Holborn. And in essence was there any real difference in this case? I’d dropped from the sky on a mission and except for the fact that a woman, not a country, had become the dangerous foreign territory, it was much like any other undercover job; the same principals should apply: keep your head, wait, think — do; that was the order. I’d found out about Henry, as much as was necessary for the moment. Now I wanted to find out about the woman who had been my wife.
Leila Tewfik stood on the terrace steps, twirling her spectacles round in one hand, shading her eyes with the other, surveying the few people about the place as if they were a multitude. I thought she must have seen us, we weren’t more than fifteen yards away, but she stayed where she was, dilatory and composed in a sleeveless Greek embroidered tunic with a dressing gown belt tied loosely round her waist. The dress disguised her slight plumpness and the rough oatmeal material accentuated her fluffy dark hair which she must have washed overnight, for it stood up alarmingly over her ears. Her arms and face were an extraordinary honey-coloured bronze; it was probably her best feature. She had some foreign paper under her arm and it seemed unlikely, I thought with regret, that she’d come to the Club for a swim. She put her glasses back on, saw us now, and ambled over.
“God,” she said, “I feel none too fine.”
She lay back, tilting the chair over, stretching her arms wide apart. There was a large emerald-coloured ring on one finger, no wedding ring. She shaved regularly under the arms. A neat, well tended, unattended woman.
“Morsy was up to all hours — going on with Pearson and Whelan and Khoury. Drinking, drinking. I wish Mohammed Yunis had stayed in Moscow — and his journalist friend, whoever he was. And Colonel Hamdy. Morsy doesn’t know anything about them really. He pretends. With a few drinks he becomes the President’s special confidant. As if there wasn’t one already.”
Leila Tewfik wasn’t at all as serious as I’d remembered her. She had thawed dramatically in the hangover.
“Underberg. You need an Underberg,” Cherry said.
“Ugh!” she said, enunciating the expression exactly, like an exclamation in a comic strip. “I hope not.”
“You need something fizzy to get the gas up,” I said. “A bottle of light ale, I’m told that’s a palliative, administers a sound and beneficial shock to the whole system.”
“I shouldn’t. But I will.”
She slumped forward on her chair, put her elbows on the table and cradled her chin morosely. Cherry clapped his hands for a waiter in his irritating way and she looked at me with that unwavering, warmly intense look that comes with a hangover for someone you like, when you’re no longer afraid of letting them know it.
“You know all about hangovers, don’t you? The Irish are supposed to drink a lot and we’re not supposed to at all.”
“What do you normally do?”
“When?”
“When you’ve had too much to drink.”
“I never do anything — unless I meet someone like Cherry, or you, the day after. Bed and aspirin, that’s what I usually do. But what do you do, tell me, what are you really going to write about here? Cairo life? There’s not a lot of it, is there: croquet and the fellaheen? Or are you secretly after the Yunis business, trying to scoop Pearson and the others? Whelan annoys me sometimes. He’s no eye for details, he gets it all wrong. Egyptians tend to be very formal nowadays, because they’re isolated, unsure of themselves. And the New York News is even worse. Backs up the dullness all the time. Weevils in the cotton and MiGs in the Fayoum — that’s all that seems to interest them. They’ve forgotten, we’ve forgotten, there’s anything else — forgotten how to live.”