Beer in the Snooker Club (13 page)

Another period of silence.

‘I, too, was very happy that year before we came here,’ I said. ‘It is natural for me to be wholly and completely in love with you. You are, to me, an unearthly creature which, for some reason or another, bestows some of its exquisiteness upon me. I have so much respect for you, and I am so awed by the fact that you allow me to love you …’

‘Ram,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

She didn’t answer.

‘What is it, Edna?’

‘I am not as good as you think I am.’

I smiled.

That was the only time Edna used the cliché language of lovers, and I ignored it.

‘Tell me what you are thinking,’ she said after a while.

‘You know how much I have always read? Well, somehow, although I read and read, it was only reading. I mean I never thought what I read had anything to do with life. No, what I mean is, I never imagined that I could be “a character” … I’m not explaining myself properly. What I mean is, what I read were just stories, and …’

‘I understand what you mean, Ram.’

‘Well, and then somehow, when I came here, or perhaps just before I came here, I unconsciously realized that I, also, could “live”. Perhaps what I am saying is not true. I mean, perhaps there is no reason or excuse for the way I am beginning to behave; perhaps it’s just my character and that’s all there is to it. But I’ve said that already.’

‘No, it isn’t your character,’ she said.

‘Anyway, Edna; I have decided to …’ I had decided nothing at all, it just came to me as I spoke to her, ‘… leave the hotel today.’

‘Where to?’

‘I don’t know yet. But I am going to try and find a cheap room somewhere or other, perhaps in the East End, and I am going to follow that course at the polytechnic, whatever it is. I think it is mathematics or chemistry or something like that. That is the best thing for me to do now, to – excuse the expression – “find myself”.’

‘Ram, dear, are you sure a room in the East End is not a part of the books you have read?’

‘Perhaps,’ I replied.

She smiled, but there was no sarcasm in her smile.

‘Come here,’ she said.

I went and sat facing her on the edge of the bed. She pulled me towards her and held me tight against her breast.

‘I do love you, Ram,’ she said.

‘I love you too,’ I said, ‘very much.’

She took her arms away from me and asked me if I had enough money.

‘Yes,’ I said.

I was glad to find that Font was not in our rooms. I packed my things and left them with the hotel porter. Edna
was paying the hotel. Of the fifty pounds I had when I arrived in London, eleven were left.

‘Are you coloured?’ she asked. I looked at my hands to see whether I was coloured. Although I had read so much about this in Egypt, I had never encountered it in actual life. I had never wondered whether I was coloured or not (later I went to a library and learnt that I was white).

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

She was a fat woman with a mop in her hand.

‘It’s nothing to do with me, dear. They’ve told me if you were coloured I was to say the room was already let. You look white enough to me, but you never know.’

‘I am Egyptian,’ I said.

She told me to wait for a moment and closed the door.

‘Egyptian, ma’am, is that all right?’ I heard her shout.

She opened the door a moment later and told me to come in. This was in South Kensington. I had obtained the address from a notice board outside the Underground station.

A thin-lipped, long-nosed woman said ‘how-d’you-do’ through her nose and asked me to sit down.

‘You are a student, I suppose,’ she said. ‘My husband, Captain Treford, and I were in Egypt, you know. We met a surprising number of very intelligent Egyptians there at the Gezira Sporting Club.’

I was well-dressed, with a snow-white handkerchief sticking out of my breast pocket, and a pair of light brown leather gloves in my hand.

‘I wonder if you know the Kamals,’ she said, ‘Mrs Kamal – Sophie – was a very dear friend of mine.’

‘I know her,’ I said. ‘She’s my cousin.’

‘How lovely!’ Captain Treford’s wife clapped her hands. ‘Sophie is such a
wonderful
person.’

‘She’s a pig,’ I said.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I said my cousin Sophie is nothing but a pig.’

‘Really?’ she drawled. ‘Perhaps we are not talking of the same person.’

‘Do you know Dr Khairy and his wife?’ I asked.

‘Why yes, we often played bridge with them and went to their charming villa in …’

‘Well, they’re also pigs,’ I said.

‘You must understand, Mr … Mr …’

‘Font,’ I said.

‘You must understand, Mr Font, that the Captain and myself have decided to let the room purely out of a sense of social duty …’

‘Excellent,’ I interrupted in a rich and easy manner, ‘you should give it free of rent.’

‘Ooha ooha ooha,’ she laughed through her nostrils; ‘we can hardly do
that
 … ooha ooha. And so, Mr Flint,’ she continued from where I had interrupted, ‘you will have to keep your little jokes to yourself.’

‘Yes indeed, Mrs Trickleford,’ I said, and uttered three oohas. ‘Do you think ten guineas … a week of course … would be suitable?’

She jumped up and said certainly, certainly, and anyhow it wasn’t a matter of money at all. In fact she was very pleased to do Sophie a good turn, even though, between her and me, Sophie could be a bit of a … of a …

‘Pig,’ I said. ‘I won’t bother to see the room now, but I
shall send my chauffeur over with my bags. You don’t happen to have a garage? … It’s a Bentley,’ I added.

I left, but somehow didn’t feel as victorious as I might have been. After walking in the East End for a whole day, I decided I wouldn’t like to live there after all. On the third day I took a room in Battersea with a mechanic’s family: a small room with a hospital bed, a sink, a table and chair and nothing else. But I had an independent entrance and it was cheap and, anyhow, it had ‘colour’, and, strangely enough, I began to ‘live’. Of course no one who ‘lives’ in the sense I mean knows he is living; it is only when he ceases to ‘live’ that he realizes it.

I hadn’t seen or telephoned Font or Edna until I found that room in Battersea. Then I went to see them. I had five pounds left.

I found Font packing. He was disgusted with me, he said. I could at least have told him I was leaving the hotel, and as for flirting with Steve’s girl friend and sleeping out that night, it was filthy. To think we had gone to Steve’s house and accepted his hospitality, and then I’d tried to take his girl away; it made Font want to vomit. I was no better than all these
fils-à-papa
Egyptians who had nothing else to do but to run after every skirt and no scruples about whose skirt it was either. Font had never expressed an opinion about rich Egyptians before. I told him Steve had probably murdered hundreds and hundreds of women and children … poor, miserable, innocent children in Aden and all over Africa and Cyprus, and if he thought I was going to have any scruples about Steve, he was wrong. He didn’t quite believe me, but put it at the back of his mind for consideration some other time.

‘Is Edna in her room?’

‘Edna left England yesterday.’

One only realizes the extent of his love when he thinks he has lost the one he loves; and unhappily, very often only begins to love when he feels his love is not returned.

‘Don’t worry,’ Font said, ‘she’s coming back.’

‘Why did she leave, Font?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Was she angry?’

‘No. But she said not to forget we are Egyptian and must return.’

‘Jesus, I love her,’ I said.

He gave me a typical Font look and told me I possessed a very unorthodox way of showing my love.

‘Don’t be stupid, Font. What I did with Shirley had nothing to do with being in love with Edna.’

‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I haven’t quite reached your standard of sophistication.’

‘Oh, shut up, Font.’

After a while he showed me two letters. One was from the Home Office.

Dear Sir,

The Under Secretary of State directs me to inform you that your application for an extension of stay in the United Kingdom may not be considered unless proof of adequate means of support is forwarded to him within a week.

Your obedient servant …

(I have a number of letters from this obedient servant, the last of which is an answer to a private letter I sent him, telling him he was not an obedient servant at all.)

The other letter was from Didi Nackla in Paris saying she intended coming next summer and would we find her a reasonably priced flat. ‘A reasonably priced flat’. Didi Nackla could have bought a castle for the summer if she had wanted to.

‘How much money have you got, Font?’

‘Fifteen pounds.’

‘Between us we have eighteen pounds. The Under Secretary won’t consider that adequate for anything.’

‘Edna has left us two tickets for Egypt.’

‘I am not going to use mine,’ I said.

‘Neither am I,’ he said.

I lay down on the bed while he continued packing. His eyebrows went up and up, then down. Then up again.

‘Where are you going, Font?’

‘I have to look for a room.’ But his eyebrows still ascended and descended.

‘What is it, Font?’

‘Look, Ram. Edna has left three hundred pounds with me in case we needed them. She has spent enough money on us as it is. I am not going to touch any of that money. But you do what you want.’

‘What I want is to touch every bit of this money,’ I told him. ‘Money? What’s money to Edna? She’s got tons and tons of it. Why shouldn’t we touch it?’

‘Do what you want,’ he said, and turned his back to me pretending he was very busy packing.

‘What’s the matter with you, Font?’

‘The matter with
me
?’

‘I mean what’s the matter with you, thinking I am serious
when I say I want that money. Of course I am not going to touch it either.’

‘Look, Ram. You’ve changed since we’ve come here. I don’t know you any more.’

‘All right,’ I sighed. ‘Anyway, I’ve got a good plan. We can use that money indirectly.’

‘What do you mean, indirectly?’

‘Just listen to me. We’ll put the money in a bank in my name …’

‘Do as you want,’ he said.

‘
Shut up
,’ I screamed. ‘We put that money in the bank in my name, and if you say anything now, I’ll murder you; then I ask the bank to give me a note saying that I have three hundred pounds in the bank. I withdraw the money, place it in another bank in
your
name this time, and also obtain a note saying you have deposited that much money. So we’ve both got “adequate means of support” for that Under Secretary’s information.’

This idea pleased Font, although he tried not to show it. So I told him to apologize and admit I was the most intelligent, honest, sincere, lovable, and faithful person he had ever known. He had finally closed his suitcase after jumping on it and pushing the lid down for ten minutes. As he refused to repeat what I had said, I opened the suitcase and the lid flew up. We had a friendly tussle and were friends again.

‘Let’s gamble,’ I suggested.

‘Who, you and me?’

‘Don’t be stupid. Let’s play poker or something like that with rich people.’ But of course we knew no rich people we could play with; so I suggested we go to the race track. But
first we had to find a room for Font. I was in high spirits that day. Perhaps it was because Edna had left. After the initial shock of learning she had gone away, I experienced a surge of freedom and, anyway, she was coming back.

We took Font’s suitcase downstairs and then went to the nearest pub in which to consider the best way of finding him a room.

But although she sent us money, Edna did not write or return for a year. And when she did come back we became lovers again although she would not marry me and would not give me a reason … and my character had really changed. Then Didi Nackla turned up in London and stayed with us for eight months. It’s strange that in spite of what happened between Didi Nackla and myself at that time, when I think of London I never think of Didi Nackla.

I opened my eyes in the morning to the call to the faithful: a beautiful call, mingled with the rustle of a palm tree outside and the noise of Kharafallah putting tables out on the pavement downstairs. Even the shadows on the closed shutter seemed to play in harmony with the call. A beautiful call from a high steeple telling us all about ‘No God but God’ and who his prophet is. Does it matter who his prophet is? ‘No God but a God’ would be better, I thought, or just ‘No God, no God’, but in the same beautiful voice. And who is going to climb those stairs and give us a call if a revolution – a real one – takes place? No one. A sad thought. Yes, I sighed, a beautiful call which has never been described as anything but a ‘wail’ in the countries whose culture I’ve lapped up like a puppy.

I looked at Edna sleeping, her scar more conspicuous in the morning, and her hair a mass of tangles on the pillow. Somerset Maugham once described love as the ability of two persons to use the same tooth-brush. Tooth-brush love? I brought my head a bit closer to Edna’s and a ripple of breath, of scent, a fine wire of reminiscence of her, Edna, fell softly upon me. The sense of smell is much more a retainer of things past than is the sense of hearing or of sight. We had very seldom spent the whole night together. There had always been an aloofness on her part which I rarely overcame and I had never been able to take her for granted. We had never embraced just out of habit, and my passion for her had always remained intact.

Our bodies, our beings, seem to be filled with venoms and poisons wriggling inside us like snakes wanting to escape. Serpents of sex and love and emotion and longing and frustration coil and uncoil and show their heads now
and then. We drown them in alcohol and passion and subdue them at times at the gambling table or even on the football field, but their turgidity returns again and we are faced once more with their torturing pressures. Now and then, they all seem to escape, giving us a respite which we call happiness or contentment or even serenity. I felt light and peaceful as though all my serpents had shrivelled or shrunk or completely escaped for a while. Even my flesh seemed to cling tighter and neater around my bones. Like those Indian ascetics who search for the secret of a serpentless life.