I must have fallen into the first row of pews. I remember the children scattering, some laughing, others crying. I felt like a bird swooping on them, falling out of a huge blue sky, a kite over the Nile above Gezira island, attacking them. That was all.
I was sitting in one of the pews myself, collar opened, the smoked saucer spectacles peering at me, handing me a glass of water. Helen Jackson was behind her. They were both talking, but I couldn’t take in a word of what they said. The vision of those years in Cairo was still there, astonishingly real, like a dream remembered immediately on waking. I felt if I got up then and there and walked out of the room my feet would immediately sink into the desert, the fields of berseem clover around Maadi where the school had been, the hard cracked earth of the football pitch. I would float away down the feeder canal beyond the last goalpost, past the line of ragged Scots fir, sink happily into the murky water where the bilharzia snails lurked, host to that small fatiguing worm which could now freely feast on me as I trailed away to join the river.
I was suddenly filled, completely inhabited, by this past — these days of teaching and loving, before spying and marriage. I could feel the weight and texture of each of those years — as if the years had been stones in my hand, each one a clear representation of the pain, the pleasure, the ultimate stupidity of that time.
I knew then I’d never teach again, never run back that way. I wanted none of it — nothing, except one thing: the chance now of making good these lost opportunities, the wrong turnings taken long ago. And then, I thought, I’ve heard this idea somewhere before, quite recently. Someone had said it to me. Who? I drank the water.
‘Are you all right?’ Helen Jackson looked at me.
‘Yes, yes. Just faint, that’s all. The journey, culture shock. Wheel said it might happen. Lucky I wasn’t up at a high window.’
The curtains had been pulled across again, covering up the rest of the basement, isolating us. One of the other teachers had quickly taken charge of the children, distracting them with a new game. I could hear them moving about, enacting some nursery rhyme, with one child running round in a circle, chanting:
‘I sent a letter to my love
And on the way I dropped it,
And one of you has picked it up
And put it in your pocket.
It wasn’t you, it wasn’t you,
It wasn’t you,
But it was YOU!’
Then there were the sounds of mad scampering round and round the room. ‘I senta letterto my love…’ I remembered then. It had been in her letter to Graham, something about the past: ‘We think we have experienced the past …’ Yes, that was it. ‘… because, willy nilly, we have lived through it. But there were hundreds of turnings … which we knew about then but never took. I want to take them now.’ That was it, I was sure; that was her real absorption — this cartography of previous time. And I wanted to ask her about it at once. Why did she want this? What was her old life? What had gone wrong in it? At that moment all this seemed the most relevant business in the world, against which our earlier preoccupations about Graham paled. I hadn’t realised it until then, that this was what she and I really had in common — not just Graham, but a passionate attachment to an unfulfilled past.
We left the basement, moving past the suddenly quiet children, the little woman shepherding us like refugees being taken to a railhead. She had ceased to elaborate on her educational theories; Spock and Froebel and Pestalozzi died in her. Clearly, neither she nor they meant anything to us. Victims of some older, deeply punishing educational tradition, we had stormed into her firm new reason, mad and dangerous, tarred with phobias, nightmares, nursery resentments, fainting spells, upsetting all her dreamless enlightenment.
On the way out into the street I nearly fell again, into the arms of a man coming in the doorway, a tall fellow with a Pancho Villa moustache.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I am sorry,’ as though it had been his fault. He was English.
‘People from everywhere. They must do well,’ I said, doing my collar up in the bright rushing air.
‘They do. But I didn’t. I’ll find somewhere else. I’d sooner they didn’t go to nursery school at all. All these theories. And tough Madames. Hungry?’
‘What?’ I was still dazed — with the bright light now as much as anything. It seemed to be forcing itself down on me, cutting through the tall sheets of concrete, swinging round my head dangerously like a plumb-line in the quick wind.
‘Eating. Food. Fainting like that. You know, you’re thin as a rake.’
‘I should “look after myself” you mean? That’s very English. Like a landlady. What about my finding an apartment?’
‘Okay, you don’t have to eat. I should care.’
‘No. I’m sorry.’
We stood on the sidewalk outside the church — arguing, the childless couple again, married too long. No, I thought, not that again, not that.
I said, ‘Yes, I’d like something. Maybe I could do the apartment business another day? I’m exhausted.’
‘There’s a French place lower down on Amsterdam. Norman — or Breton. I’m not sure. It’s supposed to be good. Shall we try it?’
The taxi cruised down Amsterdam. I’d not yet become used to the long straight avenues, the size of the huge cars that floated about the place, gliding in and out of lanes like boats. Everything I’d learnt was so clearly from a smaller, more careful world. The huge heights, the long lengths and depths of Manhattan, the hard grid of the city — there was no subtlety but it spoke of things that I’d missed hearing in a long time. It said: ‘Things are as they seem here.’ It was blunt. There was no mystery, beauty or imagination about it. And for once — that day, the light showering down and the huge tin cigars floating about around us — I liked that. The lines of shoddy buildings and transient, three-dollar hotels, shops with steel gratings over the windows, the taxi doors locked on the inside — one knew the risks here at least, the facts — knew where you stood. And it was almost a balm — this horror, this open wound of the island — after all the polite murder, the old-school-tie men in Whitehall, their graceful houses in SW1. If you died here I felt it would be in open combat; if you were happy in the city it would be a condition truly earned, without provisos, conventions, compromises, traditions — a true state, free from the drag of the past.
‘You’re prickly. As well as thin,’ she said as though I was a fruit for bottling.
‘No. It’s just the old clichés. They weary me.’
‘But you are thin as a rake. You don’t look to have eaten properly in years.’
She was on to me again, Sherlock Holmes inspecting the mud on my boots, seemingly caring only for the present, but anxious really for the past: who was I? What had happened to George Graham? But now I had the same ambitions. Not just ‘How had she met George Graham?’ But who was she? I wanted to go right back. I was as anxious for her past as she was for mine. We’d become lovers in that respect.