“Hamdy? Hamdy!” She bent over him and wobbled his shoulder gently. “I’ve got the stuff at last. You’ll need some water with it. Has he come back yet?”
The Colonel opened his eyes but didn’t move. He certainly looked ill now. “No. No, I don’t think so.”
“What are you doing here — what did you get out of bed for? Did they call — did the call come?” Bridget ran through the sequence of thought with increasing urgency.
“No. Nothing came. No one. I went to the bathroom, must just have dropped off here.” He looked up at her with genuine exhaustion.
Bridget left the room. I heard a tap go on and tried to think what the Colonel was up to. He wasn’t running in their direction at all.
“Take two of these now, and a sleeping pill. It’s food poisoning of some sort. Rest, Cherif said, just rest.”
She gave him his medicine, then sat down next to him while he was getting it down.
“Now what?” he enquired when he’d finished. “He’s been gone since midday. Probably the sensible thing. We ought to have split up long ago.”
“Fine, fine — split up and go. But where?”
“He’s obviously thought of somewhere.”
“He’d have just gone off like that, you think, without letting us know?”
“Why not?”
“He went for a walk. That’s all. He went out and got picked up somewhere. How could he think he’d make it out of Cairo on his own?” Bridget turned on the Colonel almost angrily. “How could he?”
“Well, he’s gone. And if he’s been picked up he’ll probably start to sing. Unless you want to go phoning the hospitals and police stations?”
How like Henry, I thought, to fall under a bus at this moment. But of course he hadn’t; he’d sidestepped Dr. Novak and made his way direct to the Russian Embassy. The Colonel must have been thinking of some similar asylum — where though?
“Obviously I’m not going to get out of here,” Hamdy continued. “Even if London is able to make some arrangement. I’m not fit to walk, let alone jump a ship. Why don’t you go to the Consulate? Just give yourself over. They’ll manage something for you.”
“Mad. Just madness. Why do you think that? — that I’d leave you here?”
Tenderness for the Colonel — I shouldn’t have been surprised by it. She had always had those sudden gusts of unthinking tenderness for everyone — even for someone who in this case was going to bolt and leave her. I’d seen the Colonel move across the room like a long jumper starting his run, frisky as a fox.
“Go back to bed, Hamdy. Wait. We’ll just wait longer. That’s all. When you’re better, there’ll be something then. I promise you.”
She helped him up and the two of them went through the charade of his being lumbered back to bed. They passed out of my eye-line, father and daughter, linked bravely together, refugees starting out together on the long journey away from the holocaust.
Hamdy was working for someone else. There was no end to it. The Americans? The French? The Israelis? For someone, or some country, so violently antagonistic towards Egypt, that he couldn’t trust Bridget with the information. But perhaps I was being hard on him; he was simply protecting her, as Henry had, from dangerous information. One protected people one loved.
It must be the Israelis, I thought. With any other country he’d be in their Cairo Embassy by now. It was perfectly possible. There had always been Jews in Egypt, and some of them had “gone under”, changed their names and covered their tracks, in response to the difficult circumstances; Turkish and Armenian Jews — and others from the diaspora — who had long before intermarried among the upper class of the city, merged completely with their Moslem neighbours. The Jews had never been persecuted in Egypt. Certainly if he were with the Israelis they would make every effort to get him back, unencumbered with friends or colleagues or mistresses. And that was his plan. He would bolt when the music stopped, when only Bridget would be left standing.
She came back into the drawing-room, passed out of sight then back again with a whisky in her hand. She sat on the edge of the sofa, legs forked outward, elbows on her knees. There was nothing vulnerable in her, nothing nervous in her calm expression: a sensible dark skirt and a long-sleeved blouse with a panel of embroidered lace down the front, Bahaddin’s gold cross still about her neck.
She had weathered the years, and the men that had gone with them, with the faith of a missionary. She had believed in men; they had been her disciples. Though I had tried, I had never really been able to see her infidelities as a flaw of character, as simple greed or selfishness or stupidity: they were simply a reflection of a great need, an impossibly generous gift in a small and mean world; a gift centred on sex merely as the outward and visible form of all the other passion which for her lay behind that communion. Thus she repeated it, as gesture and symbol, with whoever came to the altar. There was, indeed, nothing possessive about her, nothing exclusive; she quite lacked self-regard — and that was her message to mankind. I had tried to tie her with those self-centred flaws, the perversions of her faith. The others, Henry and the Colonel and who else I didn’t know, had learnt to freewheel within the orbit of her love; I had always pedalled hard in the wrong direction. And it wasn’t the time to change things, just time to go. The only call I could have upon her now would be as a voice from the clouds.
“Bridget!”
She looked round towards Hamdy’s bedroom door, casually.
“No — not there. Here — up at the ceiling. The ventilator shaft.”
She turned back, lit a cigarette and took her drink. She had heard some whisper and forgotten it.
“Bridget — here! Look up.” I repeated the performance. It was an extraordinary sight. From my height above the room she got up and moved about like an animal, testing the bars, looking everywhere, then coming towards me, dipping out of sight into the wall below me.
“Henry?” Her voice rang up to me. “Henry?”
You silly bitch, I thought. And I had to stop myself from yelling next time.
“Here,” I said. “Not Henry. Marlow. Peter Marlow.”
She had come out from the wall now and was looking straight up at me. She closed her eyes for a moment and shuddered, all the top half of her body shaking involuntarily, as though facing an icy blast from the ventilator.
“Listen — I’m coming round to your door. Have it open. Don’t wake the Colonel.”
She looked at me without seeing anything, nodding wildly, her head bouncing up and down, breathless, an expression of insensible abandon on her face.
She closed the hall door noiselessly behind me and we tiptoed along the passage. How quickly she joined herself to the silent conspiracy, assuming all the skills of the dedicated lover: whispers from a window, the illicit meeting at the door, the utmost care in approaching the last hurdle of the creaky stair, before the vehement release in the spare room. She had, of course, just the right qualities for her job.
The remains of their tummy trouble hung in the air, a smell of rancid milk, but it had gone completely by the time we reached her bedroom at the end of the apartment, submerged in a rich blanket of powder and eau de cologne which she had doused the room with. It was stifling by the big bed; air couldn’t have reached the place in months. I took my jacket off, while she closed the door behind me, carrying whisky and two glasses.
“Henry said they might send someone after us. But not you. We never thought of you.” She stood in front of me, pouring a drink, watching the golden trail of liquid, then gazing up at me. She looked more her age now, smaller, thinner, the hair seeming to fall back from a higher point on her forehead than I’d remembered. It only made her other features more prominent — the eyes larger and more widely spaced, the nose more abrupt, turning more pointedly at the end, the mouth a fine mobile line right across her jaw: the flesh had receded with time, had left these quirks like emerging islands; startling, unvisited shapes in the drought of the years.