Moon Tiger (17 page)

She takes her hand from his crotch and touches his arm. ‘Tom?’ she says. ‘Tom?’

The main cinemas are showing
Snow White, Road to Rio
and a Sonja Henie film. There is a garden party in aid of the Army Benevolent Fund and a Choral Evensong at the Cathedral. Groppi’s serves afternoon tea and Shepheard’s an English Sunday lunch. The Club offers a race meeting or a polo match.

‘No,’ says Tom. ‘None of those things. Today I want to see something of this place, if any of it is still visible beneath the trappings of war.’

And so they wander in the packed chattering streets of old Cairo, where the smell of animals, of humanity, of kerosene, coffee, drains, roast sweetcorn and frying oil is like some rich
humus. ‘Would you like a scarab ring?’ says Tom. ‘A khelim rug? A galabieh? A pouffe with profile of Queen Nefertiti? I want to give you something. Let’s find you something to gaze at with dewy eyes when I’ve gone. Except that you’re not that kind of girl, are you? I’m not at all sure what kind of girl you are. Self-contained, it seems. Self-sufficient?’

‘Up to a point,’ murmurs Claudia, peering into the small black cavern of a shop, from the depths of which the proprietor beckons, offering handfuls of leather slippers. ‘But only up to a point.’

‘Ah,’ he says. ‘Even if the dewy eyes are out of the question I might be able to insinuate myself somehow, then?’ The slipper-seller has emerged from his lair and is scrabbling at Claudia’s feet with a tape-measure. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No, thank you.’ ‘Cheap. Very cheap. I make good price.’ ‘Yes, I’m sure – but no all the same.’ Her ankle is clutched now. ‘That’s enough,’ says Tom. ‘We don’t want them.
Imshi
…’ And then, ‘Christ – why does one talk to these people like this? The only words of Arabic I know are commands or insults.’ ‘People have been talking to them like that for centuries,’ says Claudia. ‘I suppose they’re used to it.’ ‘All the same, it would be satisfying to depart from the norm.’ ‘We’re conditioned too,’ says Claudia. ‘Some of us are less conditioned than others, or would like to be.’

‘A brooch?’ he says. ‘A silver filigree brooch? A bottle of scent called “Mystery of the Orient”? A brass pyramid paperweight? There must be something you need. Indulge me. Giving presents is one of the most possessive things we do, did you realise that? It’s the way we keep a hold on other people. Plant ourselves in their lives.’

‘I should like one of these,’ says Claudia. And so he buys her a ring, a complex ring the front of which is a little compartment with a conical lid that opens on a hinge. It is called a poison ring, says the shopkeeper. For your enemies. ‘Straight out of the Arabian Nights,’ remarks Tom. ‘Are you sure that’s what you want? What enemies do you have?’ But Claudia replies that yes, that is what she would like. The ring sits heavily on her finger. Later that day – or perhaps the next –
Tom fills the little box with sand from the Mokattam Hills, to which they have driven in the Ford V8. It is evening, the time when the Mokattams, seen from Cairo, are lilac-coloured. Claudia says that the sand should be blue, but it is not, it is the dull buff of sand everywhere.

The Nile, at night, is jewelled. The bridges wear necklaces of coloured lights; all along the banks the house-boats are ablaze, festooned with gold, glowing against the dark swirling patterned water. One of these house-boats is a nightclub; it throbs with music into the small hours.

‘He insists they’ve no table,’ says Tom.

‘Give him fifty piastres,’ says Claudia. ‘Then miraculously there will be one.’

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 much 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’.