Loving Monsters (18 page)

– I don’t know. I can’t remember the details of all his pictures. Maybe he’d shot most of them in the slums of Omdurman. He certainly had a good few pictures of non-Nubians with altogether lighter, Arab features. Heaven knows where he took those. He moved about, did old August. I do remember he had problems preserving film in the heat, getting it processed, keeping dust out of the camera. He had a friendly technician in the Siemens lab in Khartoum, which I believe was the only one of its kind in the country in those days. He had a Siemens cine camera before it was stolen. Then he bought a Kodak Cine Special with two lenses, which is the one I saw. Brand-new model, a beautiful camera for its day, actually. Quite compact and light. I remember it could even do tricksy things like fade-outs and dissolves. No doubt that was how August made his stuff look so professional.

– I must have spent about three weeks in Khartoum, quite a lot of it with him. The rest of the time I roamed about the area trying to work out what to do. (Always that question!) Khartoum was much hotter and dustier than Cairo, besides which it felt immensely provincial. None of that immemorial Egyptian decadence and sophistication that occasionally reeked of ancient Greece. It was definitely Africa we were in. I could see that August’s life there was an end in itself for him. He was content to go on living at an imaginative point where certain things important to him converged: vision, voyeurism, lenses, black skin, sex, dust, twigs. But I knew I wasn’t like that. Those all interested me, of course, but they were tangential. Some of us do indeed make better observers than participants, but I’m not one of them. I like to get my hands grubby. What I wanted, as I now perceived it, was
contacts.
I wanted to know the useful and meet the powerful: people who could walk through the grandest doors without noticing that I might be following them into the room. And I now thought I knew how to go about it.

– Every so often when he needed money August would pack up a fresh batch of pictures and send them off on an Imperial Airways flight to Cairo where a chap called Mehdi-something passed them on to a few contacts like Mansur and the Greeks in Suez. They relied entirely on street trash to hawk it around, especially in the Port Said and Suez docks. They also farmed some of it out to people like Milo for duplication in little dark rooms on top of hotels. But distribution was haphazard and amateurish. They were not getting the stuff efficiently and reliably into the hands of people who would pay real money: the Egyptian middle classes, the Pasha class, the diplomats in the foreign legations, all the people whom it was worth squeezing. Above all, there was a large British floating population in Cairo, with small branches in places like Alexandria and Port Said and even, in season, Luxor. Lots of grandee drones and litty, Lawrence Durrelly sorts. Well-born ladies who liked muscular Pyramid guides out at Gisa. Well-born gentlemen who had a
liking for boat-boys on
dahabiyas
moored on the Nile. I could see distinct possibilities.

– So I sold my watch. It was a Benson, rather a nice one my father had given me as a travelling present. That afforded me several pangs, actually. But I’d met a fellow in a café who liked it and I think I let it go because it was a constant reminder of home and my father. I hadn’t even written to him about leaving Anderson & Green, though no doubt by now they would have told him. As far as he was concerned I must have fallen off the map. Anyway, I sold his watch to buy pornography, which now looks to me a decisive act for any son. I bought a bundle of carefully selected films and negatives from August, told him I could put his pictures into the hands of paying connoisseurs rather than leering touts, embraced him like a brother and set off back down the Nile to seek my fortune. –

The Cairo in which Jayjay arrived on his Nile steamer in 1937 was the biggest, liveliest and most sophisticated city on the entire African continent, as well as the most cosmopolitan. It was also jumping with intrigue and skulduggery that represented the cross-currents of European politics in the run-up to war as they intersected with the various factions of Egyptian nationalism. The nationalists had mainly turned into amateur seers, desperately trying to predict which alliance with which great power might prove most advantageous to the cause of Egyptian independence and to their own elevation. The sizeable British community held itself considerably aloof and ignorant of these cryptic currents. In the way it managed this lay something fatally in tune with the end of Empire. Most British residents made no effort to mix with Egyptians and it was quite possible to spend years in the country without speaking to any other than one’s house servants. The British had their own shops and clubs and hotels; there was an endless social whirl of parties and dances and entertaining visitors. As usual the military formed a special sub-species with its own
barracks and cantonments, its own sports and dances and social life, its peculiar codes and traditions. None of this prevented there being many individual Britons in a wide range of professions scattered the length and breadth of the country who greatly loved Egypt and its people. They often worked tirelessly to demonstrate a fundamental benevolence in the British presence. But in Cairo, at any rate, most British civilians seemed devoted largely to the pleasures of their own bizarre exclusivity, which typically entailed a degree of scorn for those excluded. At the end of 1937 Jayjay was to be introduced to Dr Cecil Alport, a distinguished man who had recently arrived from London to take up his appointment as Professor of Clinical Medicine at Cairo’s main teaching hospital. Years later Dr Alport was to publish the memoir I had found in Jayjay’s lavatory in Il Ghibli which recorded his astonishment on discovering this aspect of the British presence. He wrote that

It was as an ostensible member of this curious society that Jayjay arrived from the Sudan, very tanned and travel-stained and with a large and heavy wooden crate of pornographic images that smelt pungently of resin and acetic acid.

*

– You might think I would be glad to find myself among my fellow countrymen, but you would be wrong. I was still entranced with being on the loose in the world. I’d spent the first eighteen and a half years of my life among Britons and I could spare their company for some while yet, except as potential customers. I had very little money, no job and nowhere to stay; but my number-one priority, I remember, was to lose my virginity with a woman. In Suez I had taken to heart Milo’s warnings about not risking it with girls one couldn’t be sure of. We were all wary of venereal diseases then, you know. No penicillin in those days, and sulphonamides were still being developed. I’d heard horrendous tales about young men whose lives had effectively been ruined by a chance encounter. After all that voyeurism you can imagine I was pretty attuned to the idea, but so far I’d met nobody in Suez or the Sudan with whom I was prepared to risk it. August had certainly shown me some bedraggled whores in Khartoum who were a powerful argument for chastity. I now reasoned that Cairo could supply a good selection of nice English or other European girls who might welcome the odd carnal aside. This is exactly what preoccupies young men most of the time, of course, even as they pretend to be laying the foundations of a serious career. No doubt you can remember what it felt like. I had reached the stage when I could eroticise anything I looked at. Laundry on a roof, a ruined house, even a donkey cart passing in the street: they could all be turned instantly into props for fantasies. My damned penis dangled over any and every landscape like a rare and bursting fruit. There was no avoiding the thing, and nor did I wish to. It’s a very powerful combination when youthful sexual energy is added to the egotism of childhood. It reduces the entire planet to a matter of sets and actors among whom one performs one’s starring role
over and over again in an infinite variety of costumes. Do you remember that?

– I used August’s contacts as well as a couple I’d inherited from Mansur. They helped me find some cheap lodgings down towards Sayyida Zeinab. Very
baladi
but I didn’t want to go to an obvious expat area like Zamalek. Too expensive, too European. It was an apartment above a row of shops owned by some Greeks. Just a couple of cockroachy rooms, but they were a pied-à-terre. Somewhere south of our street began the unmapped warren of Sayyida Zeinab proper. Crowded mud houses, no sanitation, filthy wells, left-over palm trees. In the middle was the mosque of the good Sayyida Zeinab herself, who is not only the patron saint of Cairo but the Prophet’s grand-daughter. She has a big cult following, something like Padre Pio’s here in Italy, and her mosque is a great centre of pilgrimage. At once I had a sense of there being at least two Cairos: the one of the grandees, many of them foreign, and the other of the ordinary Moslem people. Indeed, I hardly met a Briton who wasn’t completely incredulous when he heard where I was living. It sounded both wilful and dangerous, even perverse. I was accused of slumming. Still, nobody down in Sayyida Zeinab seemed to mind. If they thought it odd they never said so. I don’t think they gave a damn. Egyptians are very easy-going about things like that. There were already a few Greek and Italian traders in the area, plus some Lebanese who sold home-made sweetmeats that all seemed to be made of nougat or honey. In this ancient cosmopolitan city nobody cared about a boy from Eltham with shady contacts.

– In fact it was a most interesting place to live. It turned out that a group of nationalist students used to hold meetings in a nearby house to which army officers came wearing
galabeyas,
with turbans to disguise their haircuts. It was all quite political, though it took me a little time to discover it. I later found out they were members of Aziz el Masri’s ‘Ring of Iron’ group. Meanwhile I’d found the man with the studio and started negotiations. I had met Petron once before in Suez when Mansur introduced us. He
had a studio up in Mousky at the back of Ezbekiah Gardens. It was part of a small printing company he owned. There were quite a few presses in that area churning out calendars and cheap dictionaries and a mass of other stuff. A photographic studio meant you could make your own plates, and quite a lot of Petron’s revenue came from advertisements: pictures of famous doctors in fezzes recommending their own ointments, or bonny Egyptian children who were growing up big and strong thanks to Virol or Radio Malt imported from the UK. So running a line of pornography on the side was pretty lucrative since he was merely using his own facilities out of hours. He did all that sort of work at night after his staff had gone home. The costs of contact paper and developer were simply passed on to his ordinary customers.

– I was quite firm with Petron. I told him that from now on August Moll-Ziemcke was dealing directly with me and with nobody else, and showed him a selection of ‘teasers’ from the films I’d brought with me from the Sudan. We did a deal on the spot. He admitted that as a non-Briton he’d found the upper echelons of Cairene society impossible to break into; but somebody like myself, well, that was a different cattle of fishes, wasn’t it? So I had myself some trousers and a jacket made and started hanging around obvious places such as hotel foyers: Shepheard’s, the Continental, the Metropolitan, working my way up to the Gezira Club, as it were, though that was far too grand and exclusive for the likes of me. Groppi’s café was particularly good. Their so-called ‘Garden’ branch was just across Ezbekiah from the studio. I found exactly what I was looking for: limp and dusty memsahibs puce from the heat, fanning themselves at tables shaded by ferns. They were often accompanied by daughters who had come into town to buy stuff for a new fancy-dress costume or something and were doing the rounds of department stores such as Davies Bryan’s, Robert Hughes and Cicurel’s. I was fair-haired and quite comely and more than young enough to be part of their set. The freeloading mentor I’d met at that Lloyds funeral in my early teens came to my aid in spirit. These were not difficult people to
pick a conversation with. Thereafter, with some adroit lying and worming, I was in and making friends of my own. I kept very quiet about having been an apprentice clerk with a shipping line, of course. Being an impostor seemed to come so naturally. I dissembled prettily and mysteriously, my tan and my desert reminiscences and snatches of Arabic hinted at Lawrence-of-Arabian derring-do. I sold more of August’s footage to Petron and had some better clothes run up. I now could lounge in the foyer of the Metropolitan looking like one of those boy dandies in Saki’s stories with names like Clovis and Reginald. I still had no regular income, and I still returned to cockroachy rooms off Sayyida Zeinab where I had to fold away my finery in dark paper with camphor or it would have been devoured. Most people’s clothes smelt of mothballs then; nobody noticed such things in the tropics.

– I put the word around that I would give lessons in conversational English and soon had several students. I remember some Egyptians and one or two Europeans, including a young diplomat from the Italian legation. I don’t remember his name but he turned out to be a crucial contact. In the meantime I’d met Mrs Maunsell. Agnes Maunsell was the wife of an army officer who I think was based out Heliopolis way, probably at Abasiya barracks where they had married quarters. She was almost twice my age but that still only put her in her mid-thirties and she looked younger. I’d stopped off for a mid-morning coffee and a meringue at Zubi’s on Shari’a Adly Pasha, between Groppi’s Garden and the Turf Club. I was reading a newspaper on one of those wooden holders and trying to look coolly cosmopolitan, and now and again between pages I noticed her glance at me. Finally she came over to my table and excused herself before asking if I was Bobby Onslow’s son Patrick whom she’d heard was down from Cambridge and in town on vacation. No, I said, unfortunately I wasn’t. That’s a pity, she said, because I was about to ask him to a party. I told her that was perfectly all right and that she could just as easily ask me to the party, especially since
Patrick Onslow was notorious for having halitosis and no conversation. I’m sure we were both ad-libbing furiously but she played up and said, Oh dear, that doesn’t sound very promising, does it? Would I be disturbing you if I joined you for a moment? You seem to be someone who could help me with my guest list. By all means, said I, gallantly, and had the waiter fetch her coffee over.

– An hour later we were in bed. I couldn’t believe it. The phrase ‘bored army wife’ evokes the wrong image for Agnes, although that is indeed what she was. It implies a leathery old campaigner with a gin habit and there was nothing remotely leathery about Agnes. She had very good skin and smelt of Fayyum roses. She started off in Zubi’s by telling me her cat had been run over by a gharry earlier that morning and it had had a strange effect on her. Yes, she was sad about the cat because she’d been fond of it. But it had triggered one of those sudden perspectives when you become quite bleak and see life grinding on to no particular purpose or pleasure, stuck in Cairo and bored out of your wits with a husband who has malaria he can’t shake. Trying for children hasn’t worked and is no longer much fun and I can’t imagine why I’m telling a youngster like you all this out of the blue, please forgive me … A tear or two, quite genuine. Nobody noticed things like that in Zubi’s, anyway. It was full of men in fezzes with their Lebanese mistresses and tears were all part of the ambience, as were occasional slaps and furious arguments behind potted palms. Agnes was sad, an obviously affectionate and sensitive person who didn’t greatly like her life and who had just glimpsed a long stretch of identical years before the pay-off. And the pay-off would have been bad enough on its own: a small rose-girt bungalow near Camberley (or similar) which was supposed to be compensation for all those years of service but which that morning must have looked to her like the bitter end.

– So there we were, letting ourselves into an apartment on Kasr el Nil which was owned by some girlfriend of hers who was out at work all day and had given Agnes a key so that she could
have a place to escape to when Abasiya barracks became insufferable. I was dreadfully excited and at the same time very nervous because I was about to commit adultery. The flat was small and hot and the
persiane
were all closed so the light was thrown on to the ceiling in stripes. We were standing in this gloom with all our clothes on and it was very
adult.
It felt less like a madcap exploit on her part than a temporary remedy for the sort of problems one only encountered by being married. It was such things that made her seem older than I, rather than any physical signs; but it was exactly that which made it exciting because she was doing it knowingly, deliberately. It was me she had chosen in Zubi’s. It was me she wanted.

– The thing I remember best from the whole encounter with Agnes was her erotic silence. Until then she had been quite chatty, but now she took her clothes off without a word. I found myself doing the same; and it was as if she had drawn a curtain around the bed enclosing us and excluding everything else so the traffic noise and the hawkers’ shouts filtering through the shutters from the street below seemed to withdraw. I suppose no-one ever forgets the first time he embraces someone completely naked. The entire body turns to nerve-endings and becomes precarious from head to foot. I remember thinking that this was it, this was what I was meant to be, a lover. Not a shipping clerk, not a pornographer, not an empire-builder. Just a lover, albeit a still very inexperienced one. I was apprehensive about knowing what to do and in what order, and in my nervousness made some facetious remarks; but she knew everything and spoke not a word. Soon I became too distracted for speech. That sense of having been invited into a private world was the thing which most touched me about her: that she should have chosen me as company. Her silence was inclusive. We must have been on that bed for three hours and in all that time I believe she spoke only one word, though several times:
Again.
If ever I began some post-coital pleasantry, such as wondering whether all Egyptian flats smelt of Flit and paraffin, she laid a finger on my lips. It made the
whole experience serious, not at all casual. For long afterwards the memory of her small command
Again
was deeply erotic to me.