They sit squashed amid a group of 11th Hussar officers (other ranks not admitted) and nurses from the hospital at Heliopolis; the officers throw bread rolls at each other and at one point some of them roar out their old school song. The floor show is a raddled belly dancer; the nurses fall about with laughter. There is also a singer who fills the night with full-throated sobbing Arabic popular songs. One of the Hussars, reeling drunk, grabs the microphone when she has finished and gives a parody, clutching his stomach and rolling his eyes. The compère stands by grinning awkwardly and the other officers laugh themselves helpless.
‘I think I may have had about enough of this,’ says Tom. ‘I’m evidently less acclimatised than you are.’
Camilla waves – one of the gay party now bargaining for entry.
‘Who’s that?’
‘A girl I share a flat with,’ says Claudia. ‘Let’s go, then. They can have our table.’
They pause on the bridge and lean on the railings to look down at the river. There is little traffic now, just the occasional clanging late tram, a few cars and clopping gharries. The houseboat, a couple of hundred yards downstream, continues to pulsate.
‘There are moments,’ says Tom, ‘when this city seems to me more outlandish than the desert.’
‘I don’t think I’ve really taken it in yet. Perhaps that’s something that happens much later.’
‘I suppose you’ll write a book about all this when it’s over,’ he says.
‘No.’
‘How can you be so sure? Most of your pals in the Press Corps are stashing stuff away right now, you can see it.’
Why is she so sure? She does not know – only that she is. ‘If the war hadn’t happened,’ she says, ‘I was going to do something hefty on Disraeli.’
‘Ah. Instead of which you’re getting a hefty dose of real life. Well, Disraeli will always be there when the war’s over.’
Presently Claudia says, ‘What will you do when the war’s over?’
‘That rather depends…’ He looks at her, and then down into the water. ‘… on various things.’ He takes her hand. ‘Let’s talk about them sometime. Not just now.’
9
You can no longer climb the Great Pyramid. There is an admonitory sign in English and Arabic: ‘Don’t climb the Pyramids’. ‘Are they crazy?’ demanded the Texan. ‘Who’d think of a thing like that in this heat?’ I shrugged and told him it used to be a popular sport in the nineteenth century. Gustave Flaubert, among others, made the ascent. ‘No kidding? With the clothes they wore then?’ A note of dissatisfaction had crept into his voice; he stared at the immense stepped cliff-face of the Pyramid. He felt, I knew, obscurely cheated: if Pyramid-climbing was once on offer then he should not be done out of it. He would have laboured up, just as he had, half an hour earlier, heaved himself gingerly on to the back of a camel. He was always game; I liked that about him.
Nor are there any house-boats moored on the Nile banks. The egrets no longer roost by the English Bridge and the polo grounds are gone. I felt quite dispassionate about all this. I do not think I would have wished to find them. Just as one’s previous selves are unreachable, so should their surroundings be. In any case, I would have blenched at the thought of trying to explain polo to the Texan.
There was once a city in Egypt called Memphis. I shall devote a good deal of space to Memphis, in my history of the world; it is a salutary tale, the fate of Memphis, it nicely demonstrates the fragility of places. In pharaonic times Memphis was a sprawling acreage of houses, temples, workshops – an administrative and religious centre, the seat of government, a magnet for artists and craftsmen: Washington, Paris and Rome all rolled together on the banks of the Nile. Dikes protected it from the inundations of the river. It sounds paradisial – a city of palms and greenery on the richest silt where Upper and Lower Egypt meet, with majestic temples and sphinx-lined boulevards; the hub of an intelligent complex society completely out of step with the rest of the world, constructing ashlar buildings when Europe was living in caves, recording itself in the most decorative script ever known, practising one of the most imaginative, impenetrable and perverse religions of all time.
And what is Memphis now? A series of barely discernible irregularities in the cultivation and an immense prone statue of Rameses the Second. How indeed are the mighty fallen. The political stability of ancient Egypt wavered, the dikes fell into disrepair, the Nile took care of the rest. Of the lives of the citizens of Memphis there remains no trace whatsoever, though of their deaths plenty. Pyramids, mastabas, tombs, sarcophagi, funerary monuments that litter the landscape – a people obsessed with mortality. All their beliefs are centred round the desperate flight from the idea of extinction. Well, they’re not alone in that, merely more inventive in the pursuit of solutions. People die; bodies disintegrate. But death is intolerable. So you propose, ingeniously, that if the body is preserved either actually or symbolically, if it is hidden away and provided with the equipment of daily living, then death will not have happened. Something – soul, ka, memory, whatever you like to call it – will live for ever. You give this shadow-thing all it had in corporeal life, its furnishings, its jewellery, its servants, its food and drink, and from time to time it will come from whatever eternity it inhabits to take sustenance from its shell. A complicated interesting idea. You keep the dead with you for ever and deny the possibility of your own annihilation.
Nowadays, of course, we don’t believe a word of it. Or at least we don’t believe a word of our version of their beliefs. The difficulty though is not one of credulity but of experience. I cannot strip my mind of such concepts as the heliocentric universe, the circulation of the blood, the force of gravity, the circularity of the world and various other seminal matters. The vision of the Fourth Dynasty is as irretrievable as the vision of one’s own childhood.
Christianity poses some of the same problems, of course. Science has done it a terrible disservice. Science and Reason. ‘Where is God?’ demanded Lisa, aged five. ‘I want to see Him.’ I took a deep breath, said I didn’t think there was such a person as God, but others… ‘Granny Branscombe says He’s in Heaven,’ said Lisa coldly. ‘And Heaven is in the sky.’ Later, in her adolescence, she went through one of those phases of religiosity which are feverishly sexual and which the Catholic Church caters for so much better than the prosaic C. of E. In France or Spain Lisa could have had visions or thrown fits; as it was she had to settle for confirmation classes and Sunday Matins in Sotleigh parish church.
Muslims are forbidden to eat between dawn and dusk during Ramadan. They must also pray, facing Mecca, six times a day. The lawns of Gezira were littered with up-ended gardeners, studiously ignored by their English employers since it is impolite to display furtive interest in the religious practices of others. The French are less squeamish; Madame Charlot and her mother used to spend Ramadan harassing the cook and kitchen boy, who were made feckless by lack of nourishment, and grumbling loudly every time the gardener dropped to his knees. It was always mildly satisfying to see British racial complacency matched if not excelled by French xenophobia; the contempt with which Madame Charlot and her friends could invest the word ‘arabe’ was more pungent even than the careless English ‘Gyppo’ or the curious pejorative use of ‘native’. It made us seem positively liberal-minded. Madame Charlot was majestic in her stance of Gallic purity; the fact that she had been married to a Lebanese and that her entire life had been spent in Cairo made not the slightest difference: she represented all by herself the spirit of Charlemagne and the unimpeachable superiority of France. Other Europeans were to be tolerated, with polite disdain; Egyptians were in a category of their own.
In the world in which I moved there was no social intercourse between English and Egyptians. A few eccentrics in the British Council or university circles were known to consort occasionally with the middle-class Egyptian intelligentsia – a restricted group anyway in a country composed of millions of peasants, a rich merchant aristocracy and nothing mu
ch in between. The King was accorded a certain interest – he was after all a king – but considered a joke, an irresponsible playboy with his palaces and his red sports cars, though his beautiful wife, Queen Farida, was for some reason seen as saintly and put-upon, almost an honorary European. Egyptians could not belong to the Gezira Sporting Club or the Turf Club. Those of them with sufficient information, leisure and interest watched the progress of the desert war with detachment; when Rommel seemed unstoppable notices appeared in shop windows saying ‘German officers welcome here’.
A revolution and the Assuan High Dam have changed all that. The fellaheen are still there but their mud huts have electricity now and infant mortality is no longer forty per cent. The King is gone and so are the English; that society is as distant as those of Memphis and Thebes. When Egyptians speak of the war they mean the Israeli war, not ours – which wasn’t after all anything to do with them anyway.
‘You should have been here yesterday evening,’ says Camilla. ‘Pip Leathers had this green smoke thing he’d pinched from the depot. A sort of signal. He let it off in the garden just behind Ahmed and Ahmed simply howled. It was absolutely killing. He thought it was an afreet, you see – the natives are so madly superstitious, they really believe in spirits and ghosts and things. We sat on the verandah and watched him rushing about wailing – honestly, I nearly died.’ She is sitting on the edge of her bed painting her toenails. ‘Do you want to try this, Claudia? It’s rather heavenly – Elizabeth Arden Shocking Pink. I say – is there something wrong? You’re looking awfully browned off these days.’
‘There’s nothing wrong,’ says Claudia.
‘Gyppy tummy, I expect,’ says Camilla blithely. ‘I say – I’m going out with an Aussie tonight! Mummy would have a fit. Of course their accents are horrid but he’s really awfully sweet and his people are something high up in Sydney. Will you be at the Club later on?’
Claudia wanders to the other room. She goes on to the verandah and stares out over Gezira, which begins to twinkle in the dusk. He has been gone three weeks now and she has heard nothing. There are rumours that the balloon will go up in the next month or two, that Rommel will break through, that there’ll be a big show-down. Where is Tom? That rubbish-tip landscape of the aftermath of battle swims before her eyes: the shells of vehicles like animal carcasses, the intimate debris of people’s lives – a tooth-brush, a tattered letter; the men plodding around in the sand. She conjures it up and mulls over it, and there is a dull grip in the pit of her stomach. Not Gyppy tummy, as Camilla suggests, unfortunately not. The war, she realises, has become something quite different. It is no longer prowling on the perimeter, like some large unpredictable animal that she is safely watching from afar, whose doings are of scientific interest. It has come right up close and is howling at her bedroom door; the shiver it provokes is the atavistic shiver of childhood. She is afraid, not for herself but with that indistinct cosmic fear of long ago. Thus she remembers persuading herself once in some dark night of infancy that the sun would never rise again.
Within the flat Camilla is shouting for the suffragi to bring the drinks tray. Down in the garden Madame Chariot harangues a neighbour about the price of meat.
There would be silence for weeks and then a letter. One of those inconsequential wartime letters bleached of information or intimacies by the shadow of the censor. And then suddenly he would be there, unheralded, a voice on the phone – three days’ leave, five days’ leave… We went to Luxor, to Alex. I have no idea how many days there were in all. They are distinguished now by their surroundings – the wide serenity of the Nile at Luxor, the barren silence of the Valley of the Kings, the crowds and chatter of hotels and bars, big lazy waves foaming in over the shallow beach at Sidi Bishr. And each time he went back again the lion snarled on the horizon, my scrutiny of communiqués and cultivating of press attachés took on an extra urgency. I tried again and again to get myself another trip to the desert – not because I would be anywhere near him but because I wanted to experience what it was he saw and heard and felt. I never again managed to get further than the training camps of Mersa Matruh – it was relatively easy for the men in the Press Corps, but I, and the occasional American or Commonwealth woman correspondent passing through, was frowned on by Eighth Army Battle HQ: the desert was no place for women.
‘Why not?’ demands Claudia.
‘My dear girl, it’s just not on, that’s all. There’d be one hell of a stink. Randolph Churchill took some American lass up there and we got a lot of flak about it afterwards. They just aren’t keen on females.’
‘I am merely,’ says Claudia, ‘doing a job of work. Like the field hospital staff and the ATS drivers and various other women personnel who get to the desert.’
The new Press Officer at GHQ shrugs. ‘Awfully sorry, m’dear, but there it is. I’ll do what I can for you of course – if it was up to me we’d have you on a transport plane tomorrow. Incidentally, what about a drink this evening if you’re at a loose end?’
Claudia smiles graciously, expediently.
There were weeks and months when nothing happened. All we knew was that out there the two armies were crouched motionless somewhere west of Tobruk, waiting to see what the other would do. There was little information because there was none to give. It was then that the myth of Rommel took shape: the cunning, unpredictable foe, larger than life, a Napoleon of the sand, eclipsing the weathered homely legends of our own generals. Even Monty never had Rommel’s mystique. There must have been realists in Cairo who expected the worst, yet never even later in the wilder moments of ‘the flap’, when the Panzer Army was poised at Alamein and the ashes of burning documents rained down from the sky do I remember the smell of fear. Crisis, yes; alarm, no. Those with wives and children sent them to Palestine; a few families got on boats for South Africa or India. There was plenty of the globe left into which to withdraw, and in any case it would only be a temporary measure, until things picked up again. I don’t think anyone seriously envisaged Rommel’s officers sitting around the pool at Gezira Sporting Club. Drinks were served at sundown, as they always had been; race meetings were on Saturdays; the amateur dramatics group did a production of The Mikado. Mother, writing from war-straitened Dorset, said she was so relieved I was somewhere safe, but thought the climate must be trying. Did she ever look at an atlas, I wonder? She had her own problems; patient endurance was the theme of her letters – shortages, the garden sadly neglected, her good saucepans nobly sacrificed to be rendered into war weapons. The flimsy aerograms with their neat script were eloquent with stoicism. Did she ever imagine German troops surging through Sturminster Newton?
But in those static months of early 1942 war seemed a permanent condition – a chronic disease that while not life-threatening impeded progress of any kind. I went to Jerusalem to try to get an interview with de Gaulle, who was rumoured to have turned up there, failed to get near him and did a piece on the Stern Gang instead. One or two of my colleagues, restless with the inactivity, took off altogether for more interesting centres and had to come belting back in a hurry when eventually the desert sprang into life again. It was a time that seemed even while it was in progress to go on for ever. The winter inched into spring; the temperature rose; at some point – when or for how long I do not know – he was there again.
‘Let me tell you something extremely odd,’ says Tom. ‘I have never felt so good in my life.’
She considers him. He is lean; his muscles are like rope; his dark hair has a conflicting golden burnish from the sun. ‘You look healthy, certainly.’
‘Health is not really what I’m talking about. The spirit is what I had in mind. I’m quite remarkably happy. In the midst of all this. I think you are a sorceress, Claudia. A good sorceress, of course. A white witch.’
She cannot reply. No one, she thinks, has ever spoken to me like this before. I have never made anyone happy before. I have made people angry, restless, jealous, lecherous… never, I think, happy.
?
??And you?’ asks Tom.
‘Me too,’ she says.
‘Après moi le déluge,’ says Tom. ‘That is my unworthy sentiment these days.’
‘Well,’ she says. ‘It may well be the case, I suppose. But even so there would be nothing we could do about it. I’ve always thought it a fairly reasonable sentiment.’
‘Kiss me.’
‘We’re in a mosque,’ she objects. ‘We shall cause a riot.’
But even the mosque of Ibn Tulun has remote sequestered places.
‘This is getting too much for me,’ says Tom presently. ‘We shall have to go back to your flat.’
‘We haven’t climbed the minaret.’
‘I don’t want to climb the minaret. I want to go back to your flat.’
‘We may never come here again.’
‘You are a remarkably obstinate woman,’ he says. ‘Or else you are putting me to some kind of test. All right – we’ll climb the minaret and then we’ll go back to your flat.’
And presently, looking down into the maze of humanity and animals and balconies of washing Claudia says, ‘What are you going to do after the war?’
‘Ah. I wondered when we’d get to that.’ He puts his arm around her. ‘I’d thought of raising the matter myself. Well… First let me tell you what I was going to do after the war. I was going to go home full of fervour and high-minded notions and pronounced views on how society should be set to rights and stand for Parliament in some violently hostile constituency and retire beaten but unquenched. Or I might have settled for trenchant journalism in one of the better-class newspapers.’
‘But you’re not going to do this now?’ murmurs Claudia – watching, far above her head, the kites that float in huge considered circles in the pale, pale blue sky.
‘No. I feel less evangelical and more cynical and above all I’ve got other things in mind.’
‘Such as?’ asks Claudia. She tries to imagine the view from that kite’s-eye height; can they see the curvature of the earth? The Red Sea? The Mediterranean?