“You used to watch them at it?”
“I used to spy on them, I suppose you’d say,” he said deprecatingly. “I was fascinated.”
“Through the keyhole?”
“Oh, no. I had a much better way. In the old days all these apartments had a row of ventillation strips in each room, at the top of the wall, so that the air from the ceiling fans could circulate all over the apartment, a sort of primitive air conditioning. Well, I worked one of the strips loose and could see most of what was going on next door. And hear everything, the voices echoed up through the room like a loudspeaker. You see this here?” Morsy went over to a huge sideboard in the corner of the room, four feet off the ground, with a tasselled velvet cloth over it.
“I stood up here,” he said with a ringing, sudden enthusiasm. “Look here — on that very cloth, so it made no noise. And you see the drapes on the wall? They’re the original ones too. I got some of the same material and wrapped it round me. And you know, if you stand absolutely still in the identical colour — I was perfectly camouflaged. My father walked past me once, not ten feet away, and never saw a thing.”
I looked at Morsy in genuine astonishment and then up at the ceiling.
“They’ve blocked them in now, of course. And painted them over. That was a long while ago. What a child — up to every sort of mischief I suppose …”
“Indeed.”
“One must ‘put away childish things’ …”
“Depends on what you put them away for.”
“Badminton and croquet. And cutting pages out of your Daily Telegraph. We’re a young nation as the President keeps on reminding us. A childish nation, would you say?”
We chattered away late into the night and when I left it was no effort to tell them both that I was looking forward to another game of badminton.
“Come any time,” Morsy said. “Use the place if you need somewhere quiet to work. I’m at the office in the mornings — there’s a study, typewriter, all the papers you need. If Leila isn’t here the suffragi will let you in. I’ll tell him. Or go up on the roof, there are chairs and a sunshade. Feel quite free to come and go as you please.”
I took Morsy up on the offer at once and asked if I could come round the following morning, that I’d some notes to put in order.
Morsy had had set up another table for me in his study looking out over the cricket pitch and Leila showed me the key to the roof and the other two keys that would let me back into their apartment again. Then she went out. The kitchen woman and Ahmed, the other suffragi, were padding round the rooms behind me and I pretended to work for half an hour before I picked up a book, my notes and a plastic ruler which I’d bought that morning. Ahmed wanted to come with me, to show me the way, to help “arrange” things, and I had some difficulty in putting him off. Even so he came half way up the third flight of stairs with me, past the Armenian’s door, so that I had to go out on the roof first, settle down under the sun shade, and then creep back downstairs again.
As I’d thought, one of the keys to the Tewfiks’ apartment, an old-fashioned mortice type, just about fitted the first Armenian lock; the other, a Yale-type key and lock, didn’t. The ruler cracked when I first pushed it in between the jamb and the door, trying to slide open the tongue. I pulled out the bit that was left, a narrow strip now, and suppled it vigorously with my fingers: a shoddy Russian import, I noticed, but it worked eventually.
The door opened quite suddenly, with a resounding click, so that I almost fell into the hallway and I realised that I’d been leaning on it with one shoulder which was what had been keeping the tongue in place. I was as ham-fisted at this sort of work as a bank manager.
The hallway and apartment beyond were in almost complete darkness when I closed the door behind me. But the disposition of the rooms must have been the same as downstairs, I thought, as I touched my way along the corridor, and into the drawing room at the back. A crack of light came through the heavy curtains, great shapes loomed up all around me, furniture under dust covers, and there was a sharp smell of paper, a bookish smell, when books have been stored and dried out for a long time. I pulled the inner curtain back, draped the tail of it over one of the mounds of furniture and looked round me. The books were everywhere; a whole library had been taken off the shelves about the room and dumped in piles on the floor. And on top of them were the other domestic possessions of the familydresses, carpets, pictures and kitchen equipment. The room next door — the dining room — was empty. Not a stick of furniture, nothing. I had to open the curtains inch by inch as they squeaked on their runners about the empty bell of the room.
I looked up to where the ceiling joined the wall, five or six feet above my head. The plaster was the same colour all the way up. How many books would I need?
It took me another twenty minutes before I’d carried enough of them from the other room to make a platform to stand on. I started with a large base made up from the heavy paper edition in seventy volumes of the Hearings of the Mixed Courts in Egypt 1888–1913, stacked the middle with English Common Law followed by the Code Napoléon, and ended with a number of bulky modern treatises on Company Finance. The Armenian lawyer must have had an old and comprehensive practice and in the end I had a rocksteady lookout with steps up to the top in both real and false morocco.
I prodded the tip of my ballpoint pen about the plaster just under the ceiling and soon I’d displayed a honeycomb of small holes in what had been a long rectangular metal ventilation grille, about twelve inches high. I wasn’t able to pull the whole thing out and in the end I had to chip away at the plaster which held it at the top. Then I managed to bend the whole grille out and down — a section about three feet long. There were no bricks inside, that would have been the only catch, just an empty space two feet wide and with the same sort of grille the other side, with curls of old plaster sticking through the holes, like larvae, from the wall of the apartment next door.
The light was hopeless but I started to work on one of the plaster curls on the far side as gently as possible, using the little trowel-like pen clip to chisel away at it until there was just a flat membrane of paint covering the wall on the outside.
There was a risk, but there wasn’t a way round it — I couldn’t pull the circle of paint towards me. I listened, heard nothing and pushed. A tiny iris of grey light appeared. I turned my head sideways and pushed it through into the shaft. I couldn’t see anything and there was no sound from beyond, only a smell I noticed, a new smell which obliterated the chalky lime dust of the disturbed plaster: like a blocked drain, faint but distinct. But it was fresher than drains, I decided: a recent eruption of the body, diarrhoea or vomit. I chipped away two more holes in a line downwards and by straining my head impossibly for a few seconds I could see across to the far side of the room, from the ceiling down to about the half-way stage of the wall.
Henry’s ruffled hairline bobbed into view before I had to get my neck out again, or risk dislocating it, and then they started to talk, their voices coming up to me with astonishing clarity, reflecting off the walls and ceiling, like a drum, just as Morsy had said.
“… How long do you think then?” Henry said irritably.
“Well, it’s not Gyppy tummy, is it?” Bridget replied in the same shrill vein. “It’s food poisoning. We’ve all got it. The place stinks. You put the beer in the fridge and left the rest of the stuff out. Just like you.”