Cherry said, “That’s true of the Americans and the Israelis as well. True of anybody at war. Wars are only fought out of a sense of uncontrollable power. And powerful people become formal bores.”
Leila looked up at the flat sky. Silence. We all looked up.
“‘Tell me where all past days are, or who cleft the Devil’s foot …’” Cherry broke in mock-mournfully. The waiter brought some more Stella.
“‘Waiting for a War’—that might be a title for you,” Leila said to me.
“Oh, I’ll find something less grave, I’m sure. I’m not a war correspondent. The lighter side is my speciality.”
“You won’t find much of that here,” Leila said. “Unless — do you play badminton? Morsy’s got a net up on the roof at home. He’s gone mad on it. That’s a lighter side.”
She looked at me carefully again, blinking through her spectacles, either coquettishly or because her eyes were hurting, I couldn’t really tell. Cherry lay back and looked upwards again, eyes agape. He sighed and then he moaned — a rising whine which he caught at the top of his nose and which was one of his many preludes to derisory comment.
“Ah-h-h-h no! Not that. Not badminton. You must be out of your mind, Leila.”
“Just because you’re past it, you large fellow.”
Badminton, I thought, on the roof of her apartment. Croquet and now badminton. Perhaps I’d get a game of cricket before this was out. The spy as sportsman. I smiled at Leila.
“You can play, can’t you?” she said. “It’s just like tennis. Only you don’t let the ball bounce. And it isn’t a ball.”
We arranged to meet at five o’clock that evening.
7
There was a separate entrance to the apartment where Henry and Bridget had been, I saw, when I got to Leila’s place that evening. But the two sections of the block shared the same long roof, with a lift shaft and laundry buildings rising up at either end, forming a barrier which prevented the shuttlecock from disappearing too freqently, though under Morsy’ indignant, untutored hammerings it sailed over the sides of the roof often enough. He had one of his suffragis down below, stationed head-in-air, scuttling round the block to retrieve them.
Cherry arrived towards six o’clock and we had some lemon juice and mopped our faces. I hadn’t really found my form, had lost every game but one, and I wandered away from them, walking with a slight limp, trying to ease the cramp which had come up in one thigh.
I looked over the edge of the roof just above the balcony where Bridget had been. It was impossible to see anything on the terrace below. The lift shaft door at the far end was open and I looked in. There was a huge spindly wheel encrusted with grease and a smell of warm oil. The laundry next to it was empty and a door beyond the row of tubs must have led down to the floor below. I couldn’t have been more than a few feet above whatever was going on beneath me but I’d learnt more about it from the Tower half a mile away that morning. It probably wouldn’t have been too difficult to introduce a microphone into the place, if one knew the tricks, if one had a microphone.
Morsey had followed me, drink in hand, looking very fit and pleased with himself. His shorts were too short and one heel of his plimsolls was working loose.
“It works, doesn’t it?”
I looked at him.
“The badminton on the roof, I mean.”
“It’s fine. You don’t get complaints from the people below, do you? Bouncing up and down?”
“There’s no one in the apartment beneath. It’s empty. That’s the beautiful thing. That’s why I got the badminton up here.”
“But aren’t there two apartments on the floor beneath? There are two lift shafts.”
“There’s no one in either of them. All the floors in this block used to be one single apartment. Then they divided them in half, filled in the connecting doorways and put another lift in at that end.”
“No one in them? What about the housing shortage?”
“Doesn’t apply, not in this part of town, in this sort of place. All these apartments are owned by the original families who bought them and quite a few of them live abroad now, or in Alex. The one underneath us on my side is sequestrated still. It used to belong to an Armenian lawyer who went back home, wherever that is, last year. And the other, underneath us here, was owned by an old lady who’s dead now. One of her relations, I think it is, uses the place sometimes. But he’s never there. So we can make as much row as we like. That’s the beauty of it. We had a party up here a month ago, even some dancing. But don’t put that in anything you write, will you? Press censors don’t dance, you know. Or give parties. Or play badminton on the roof of their apartment. It wouldn’t do at all. Shall we go down? It’s too dark for another game, I fear.”
The huge-eyed suffragi came up with the last lot of shuttlecocks, clustered gently in his hands like a nest of birds, and presented them to Morsy with all the elaborate courtesies of the messenger with the tennis balls in Henry V. Morsy likewise put them away with careful importance in their long cylinder and we trooped back to their apartment. We passed the Armenian’s doorway on the third floor and I noticed that it didn’t have the usual government sequestration seal across it, the tatty bit of ribbon and wax that I’d remembered on the doorways of British apartments after Suez.
Downstairs in the Tewfiks’ drawing room I looked around for the blocked up doorway between the two apartments that Morsy had mentioned. I passed through the sliding doors that led to their cavernous dining room in the centre of the building. Luckily there were a number of appalling family portraits hanging beyond the table in the gloom and Morsy was more than anxious to turn the lights on and explain them to me. A fat Circassian lady, in a frilly bonnet and black widow’s weeds, with a remarkable resemblance to Queen Victoria, was the principal oeuvre; and next to it a tiny eaten-up man in a tarbush.
“My grandmother and grandfather. Can you see the order he’s wearing? Only just perhaps. The Royal Victorian Order or something. He got it from Lord Cromer and my father had it painted out — when he became secretary of the Wafd executive. And this is my uncle. “Nebuchadnezzar” he was called. I don’t know why. You know your Bible. I’m a bit hazy.”
Nebuchadnezzar had a lush beard at the end of a long money-changer’s face and an even longer nose. He looked as old as God. His nickname seemed to have the most obvious origins. I didn’t comment on them.
Behind the pictures were heavy velvet drapes. I put a finger between them and touched wood.
“Was this where they divided up the apartments?”
“Yes. There are double doors there, several feet between them, bricked up in the middle. They led to the library and study beyond in the old days. My father held Wafd committee meetings there and kept a secret supply of Scotch behind a row of books. I remember as a child seeing them at it when my mother had gone to bed. Just like one of your London clubs. But all that had to be kept very quiet. We were fighting for our independence then.”
Morsy laughed pleasantly.
“I thought the Wafd was committed to parliamentary processes, getting the British out peacefully. You mean they were in there plotting armed rebellion?”
“No — they were drinking the Scotch. Guzzling it. Tippling very heavily. They couldn’t do that outside.”