“For God’s sake — you’ve been getting the food fresh every day. It shouldn’t be bad.”
“Well, Hamdy’s not going to go anywhere. He looks pretty ill to me. There’s no point — listening to him. He’ll have to have attention.”
“How — who?”
“I’ll find someone. Money. We still have that. I’ll go to Usher. He’ll know someone.”
“Don’t be mad. They’ll have his place surrounded.”
“Look — if we don’t try and contact Usher — there’s nowhere to go: the Embassy’s closed and the Consulate people aren’t likely to know anything about getting us out of here. We can’t just stay on here indefinitely.”
“You want to leave him then?”
“Of course not. But we have to do something. We know they’re not on to this building. I’ve been out every evening for the last three days. And Security here can only have a very hazy idea of what you look like. You’ve got it into your mind that you’re a marked man. If we stay cooped up here much longer you will be.”
“You know what it’s like in Cairo — every shoeshine boy is in someone’s pay. They’d be on to me pretty quick. And they must be looking for you — they went straight to your house after all. I thought we’d been over all this.”
“What, then? Is there no one else here we can contact? Get a message to London? I mean, there are three of us. I’m not important, but you are and Hamdy must be. Don’t you think London has any interest in getting us back?”
“Certainly — but the three of us aren’t going to get out together, that’s the point. However much London wants it they’re not going to be able to arrange for all of us to get to the airport and step on to a BOAC flight. That was always the problem here. If you got caught you were stuck. The only chance is to divide up, take it on our own. When Hamdy is better. God, I feel sick.”
I heard the thump of Henry collapsing on a chair.
Bridget said, “Well, that’s the first thing then. There’s another doctor I’ve thought of, he’s at the Anglo-American.”
“How well do you know him?” Henry asked with just a trace of tired sarcasm.
“You know him too, you ass. He did first year English with you at Dokki. Gamal Cherif.”
“He won’t want to get involved.”
“He won’t know. I’ll ask him to prescribe for me. We’ve all got the same bug. We can share whatever he gives.”
I tried to turn my head again in the ventilator, from a listening to a looking position, round to where I could get a glimpse of Henry, but he was out of sight somewhere in the corner of the room. Bridget passed my awkward eye line for a moment — was she taller than Henry? I’d forgotten. Her hair had turned a slight rust colour, it seemed, a mixture now of her parents’ colouring, where before it had been very nearly sheer black. And it seemed to have receded too, half an inch or more over her forehead, giving her profile a smoother shape than I’d remembered.
I just had time to see her nose before she passed out of sight, slightly turned up, the same as ever — that feature which had given her a permanent air of cheeky interest and unrest and had made her face so different from the languid boneless expressions of the other women of the city. If Egyptian Security were on the lookout, I feared for her: she had the kind of features you’d pick out in any Cairo crowd, particularly in that nervous time: confident, assured, gentle. I knew them well enough.
Indeed, I knew in the few short moments as she passed across the ventilator that I would try and follow her now myself, wherever she went, and get her back. Something had gone wrong ten years before, the time had come when the fault could be corrected. There had been some simple error in our marriage, a miscalculation, and the answer to it was in front of me now, beyond the wall. It was something which I’d simply had to wait for, which had to mature for all those years, until I’d seen her passing by for a second, a bright face glimpsed through the darkness of a ventilator.
I felt a proper sense of direction again, knowledge of a job to do — a task properly outlined at last, something which could be pursued to an end. I had something to go on, the numbing professional mysteries of the years in Holborn and the nonsense of this present mission were dissolving, clearing into another perfectly grasped pattern: a personal enquiry.
I left the bottom mortice lock open and pulled the door to. I could get back into the Armenian’s apartment with the plastic ruler alone now, and I left the keys with the suffragi in the Tewfiks’ place downstairs.
There was a desolate riverside night club and café about five hundred yards down the Gezira corniche, a few broken chairs outside by the river wall, and a kind of dark-room shack in the middle where they served coffee and Cokes during the day; a place that years before, in the evenings, had catered for the envious fantasies of the poorer middle class. I waited for Bridget here. She would have to pass down on the far side of the corniche, going towards the Kasr el Nil bridge, if she were making for the Anglo-American Hospital.
I didn’t know exactly what I had in mind — not to follow her, there was no need for that, just to look at her perhaps, as a free person walking along a street, to see her in a complete perspective which the ventilator had not allowed — someone without the trappings of a woman on the run, or of my following her; free of all that — in a situation where I might have come out of the café and bumped into her by chance: I wanted the temptation of a casual encounter.
When she passed I did nothing. I watched her disappearing down the far side of the road, standing by the curtained window in the smelly, tobacco-stale gloom sipping a gritty, sour coffee.
One’s gaze was so drawn to her among the other passersby that I wondered how she could walk a pace without being noticed. But perhaps that was the trick which had preserved her from Egyptian Security — she was so obvious, open. They were looking in the dark corners.
I thought: I’ve only got to go to the Council Library at the back of the Embassy, make a report out to Williams, put it in the map flap of the book I’d brought with me for the purpose — a Shell Guide to the West Country — and give it to the little lady by the desk. They’d have the message in London by evening and it would be Williams’s responsibility from then on; he would have to take the decisions and make the arrangements. I would have done my job, could pass out of the picture, back to my desk, last week’s Al Ah-ram and a half view of St. Paul’s. It would have been the sort of thing one did for one’s friends, after all, apart from any professional consideration. And even Colonel Hamdy was a friend of sorts, with his quiet blackmail in the Semiramis after Suez: Hamdy who had somehow got caught up with the two of them, either trying to defect or as one of our Mid-East men all along. Perhaps that was why Henry had come out to Cairo in the first place — to make contact with him and get him out of the country. Something had gone wrong and I could put it right, play my part in rescuing them, and we should have civilised amused talk about the whole affair among ourselves for years afterwards in various separate, well appointed apartments in north London — a sweet memory of derring-do. Would Henry have married Bridget by then? — was that how it would all work out, as just a little arrangement among friends? And perhaps, for my part, I’d get some sort of promotion out of Library & Information.
And I think I would have left it at that, given in to some sort of “better judgment” in the matter, gone over the river with my Shell Guide, and dropped the personal pursuits I had in mind as regards Bridget — if Henry hadn’t come out of the apartment block a moment before I moved towards the doorway of the café. He walked fairly slowly up the corniche in the opposite direction, his usually neat footsteps shaky now, the way he used to move when he’d had too much. None the less I would have lost him, I think, if, just before he disappeared from sight, he hadn’t turned into the drive of the Omar Khayyam Hotel next to 26 July Bridge at the end of the Gezira corniche.