“I’m sorry. Yes — they sent me.” I swallowed some of the neat whisky. “Do you have any water?”
“I didn’t mean that. Just — the surprise. It nearly killed me. How long have you been up in the wall?” She turned away.
“Just now, this evening.” I explained, briefly, how I’d got there. But the mechanics didn’t interest her.
“Thank God you’ve come,” she said. That was what interested her. “They got Hamdy’s message in the end. It took them long enough. What — plans have you got? For getting us out of here?” And she rushed on, not wanting to seem pressed by the impersonal — “I never thought I’d be so glad to see anyone — and it’s you, of all people.”
She looked at me warmly, full of trust, as though I were a sensible friend come to sort things out with a family after a bankruptcy. We might have been in each other’s arms after a few more drinks. Not for love, for mere formal relief.
“Your hair’s going further back your head; that’s all.” She seemed to feel her way round my body with her expression.
“So’s yours.”
A smile between us, then — acknowledgement that though passion had waned to nothing, it had existed once, and might again. She was making polite inquiries. So was I.
But suddenly I couldn’t see Bridget in those terms any more, couldn’t see myself sharing any kind of emotion with her. In a second it was all finished and done with, the years of pain, the suppressed longing which had risen again when I’d seen her from the Tower, and from the café as she walked along the corniche; another man had experienced all that bright resurgence, not me.
I had re-achieved her in those seconds during which we had looked at each other warmly and talked about our faces. We had gone through all the teasing preliminaries, and I felt that I could have tossed her on to the bed beside us without more ado. And since that was possible at last, I couldn’t contemplate it seriously.
She was someone to help in a professional way, someone in trouble. It was she who must face the disappointment now.
“Henry’s disappeared,” she said lightly, after the silence. Henry in his sailor suit who had run away behind the bandstand — as though she had been given the boring job of keeping an eye on him for the morning and had no other connection with him.
“Oh,” I said. I had nothing to offer her there, not yet.
“But what shall we do — what plans do they have?” she went on, like a traveller stuck at a midland junction on a winter Sunday morning: upset but still confident.
“There aren’t any. I haven’t any plans. They sent me out to see if Henry was here. And bring him back if he was, I suppose. But I don’t see how any of us are going to get back.”
“Have they got on to you as well?”
“Yes. Cherry and Usher too for some strange reason. The whole circle.” I told her what had happended earlier in the evening.
“But what about the people in London?” she said, insisting now, but still controlled. “At Holborn?”
I tried to think of Bridget at a meeting with Williams or having a drink in the wine bar in the Strand, just as I tried to imagine Cherry and Usher getting the number eleven bus — and it didn’t work. Bridget, like them, was a part of Cairo, part of its very core; they were natural seismographs alive to its smallest tremors. They had not always been happy there; so much the more were they bound to it: they had lived a real life in the city, had given nothing false to it, in every minute passed there. Their dreams of elsewhere, of rain, ploughed fields, sloes in the hedgerow or London Transport, were as unreal as mine would have been for sun and coral, and clear blue water. The known years spent in a landscape never tie us to it, the marked calendar from which we can stand back and reflect or think of change; we are bound to a place by the unconscious minutes and seconds lost there, which is not measurable time or experience, and from which there is no release.
“Holborn doesn’t know anything about getting out of here. But I’ll let them know tomorrow. I have a contact through the library.”
She had begun to look glum and a little hopeless now, sitting on the dressing-table stool, drink in her hand, swaying out in a clumsy arc from the balance she’d made, elbow on her knee.
“But why should you want to leave? You haven’t told me.”
“We’ve been here for days. They picked Henry up at the airport He got away. They got on to Hamdy. We came here, it’s his place, they don’t know about it.”
“Hamdy’s with us, of course?”
“Yes, of course. Didn’t you know?”
“I was never active. You knew that. I’m in Library in Holborn. I don’t get to hear much about people in the field.”
“Yes, Henry told me.”
“You’ve seen quite a lot of him?”
“Odd times. When he was out here. Didn’t he tell you?”
“No.” And I could see she knew he hadn’t told me. “No, he didn’t tell me he saw you. Why should he? Why drag it up? I knew nothing about you.”
“Yes — but why? I wish you’d bothered. Sometimes.”
“Come on. It was finished, done with. We had a merry time. Then there was an unfortunate ‘professional arrangement’; if you remember”
“Our marrying, you mean?”
“If you can call it that. I meant the other thing — getting married because it suited the professional circle you all had out here.”
“It wasn’t just that.”
“No. All right, not just that, then. There were a lot of other funny things, before that. It passed off well enough, really. It could have been much worse. We could have stayed together and clawed each other for years. We were lucky to miss that. But you can see — it’s not really the sort of thing one Mothers’ about afterwards. One tends to want to forget it.”
My tone was so much the lying pedagogue: I had wanted to “bother” her about it — for years afterwards — so much. Now it was her turn: she wanted to be bothered and worried about things like that; to feel, even at this late stage, that in distant conversations between Henry and me, she had been included: I worrying, Henry consoling.
Her sense of indispensability, of course, was part of her great attraction — when you were with her, when you thought you were the only person who shared her exclusively: when she was indispensable to you.
She put her drink down behind her and looked at me, hand cupped about her chin — that gesture I knew so well, when she turned from provocation to trust: the tired child, gazing into the fire, waiting for a story. Now for the first time since I’d emerged from Colonel Hamdy’s office ten years before, it didn’t have to be, couldn’t be, a fairy tale.
“Anyway, the talk with Henry is finished. He’s gone over to Moscow. He’s probably at their Embassy here now. That’s where he’s disappeared to.”
I wondered what her first words would be in reply, thinking that I could measure in them the strength of her affection for him. “I don’t believe you” would have been a natural response, for Henry had hidden his real self just as well from her as he had from the professional spy catchers. But instead she did the most natural thing, saying in a hardly surprised, serious voice: “How do you know?”