Daniel Martin (63 page)

‘What are you thinking?’

She smiled. ‘Nothing, Dan. just looking.’

‘It’s a marvellous river. Day and night. You’ll see.’

‘It reminds me of the Loire, I don’t know why.’

‘The feluccas are a dream in full sail. They’re the Nile’s chateaux, in a way.’ Those below had their masts lowered, to navigate the city bridges. ‘Not the boring old temples.’

‘I’m looking forward to them as well.’

Once again he had that muffled, but unmistakable, feeling of being obliquely rebuffed: he was not to prejudge her impressions or try to reform her scale of values. What she had really answered was, Yes, but I am waiting to judge for myself. They said nothing for a while, leaning on the parapet, and he thought of Jenny—how perhaps what attracted him in her was also this same always incipient contrariness, this refusal to accept his rules; although of course she was greener, less conditioned, far less sure of herself… which was equally attractive, in its way. He had spoken twice more to her since the Saturday of her third contribution’s arrival; most latterly only early that same morning in London. Her call, agreed on, had woken him at half past seven. It was really only to say goodbye, to tell him he was a rat, she hated him, but in the kind of voice that declared the opposite. She had rather noticeably said nothing about Jane. They had lost the spontaneity of the earlier calls; both knew it, and knew it could not be restored until they met again face to face. Instead, she had demanded, and he had granted: he would write, he’d try to telephone from Luxor or Aswan, he’d think of her all the time… women who always went head-on against, like a felucca going upstream, or smoothly with the current; and women who always proceeded at a tangent from the male. Jane stood back and pulled her fur collar closer.

‘Cold?’

‘It must be the river. It does seem colder here.’

They wandered the few hundred yards back to the hotel. Was she sure she didn’t want to go out on the town? Perhaps some belly-dancing? He hadn’t proposed it seriously, but it precipitated yet one last conflict of politenesses… perhaps he wanted to go somewhere? It even continued in the lift, when he thought they had firmly established that neither of them had a secret desire to do anything but go to bed. Was he absolutely sure…?

‘I should have gone to the bar and sulked if I felt thwarted.’

She smiled, and he felt inclined to tell her to stop being so English. But they came to their floor and to another potentially awkward moment, which he let her negotiate. In the corridor outside their rooms, she held out her hand.

‘Good night, Dan. You have a very grateful acolyte.’

‘Early days yet.’

She shook her head.

‘I was thinking when we were looking at the feluccas. That it was worth coming just for that.’

‘We’ll see much better.’

She hesitated, then gave him another smile and shook her head, almost like a small girl not to be deprived of a choice of toy, however illogical some adult tried to suggest it was. Then she turned away and they went into their rooms.

Dan had very little time to think of Jane that next day. Assad had arrived to take him on his tour before they finished breakfast, and a few minutes later Jane left to get ready for hers. Dan was complimented as she walked away, a charming lady… and took the opportunity to explain the real situation before some Egyptian equivalent of male elbow-nudging appeared. The mention of Anthony’s recent death took care of that. Assad made an Indian prayer-sign, as if he would have been even more courteous if he had known.

Dan discovered a good deal more about him in the course of the day. He seemed to have done everything in the industry; lighting, camera, production, directing, even on occasion acting small parts. He had lost count of the Arabic films he had helped make. The local industry was very fluid, most people in it had become jacks-of-all-trades, like Assad himself. He was very dismissive of the quality of the countless films he had been involved with; he would be ashamed to show them to Dan. There was not only no art cinema to speak of, there was not even a place for an intelligent commercial cinema. It was all rubbish, for the masses, traditional themes and treatments were inescapable; plus the now obligatory political propaganda, with the Muslim priesthood forming a powerful kind of Hays Office on another front. Assad himself had given up hope of a serious Egyptian cinema, which was one reason he was excited by the prospect of Kitchener. He seemed to feel that it might with any luck rub his own national industry’s nose ‘in the sand’—he meant in the dirt, but that was the phrase he used.

However, he was more optimistic with the other arts. There were some good writers—he mentioned one or two novelists, though Dan had to confess that he had never heard of them—and one very interesting new dramatist, whom he hoped Dan was to meet that night. He wrote satirical comedies and had lived a highly dangerous life under the Nasser regime, and a still precarious one under that of Sadat. They were talking about this over lunch, in a Lebanese restaurant Assad had taken him to—much more interesting food than at the hotel, and Dan rather wished Jane had been there to enjoy it. The playwright’s name was Ahmed Sabry, he was a famous Cairo character, a great clown, it was a pity Dan could not see him in a cabaret-cum-music-hall act he occasionally did. Assad was obviously anxious that they shouldn’t despise Sabry for not being very daring by British standards. He glanced round the crowded restaurant, then smiled at Dan with his lazily ironic eyes.

‘Ahmed says nothing you would not hear at any table here. But to say it publicly—in this country, that is… ‘ he opened his hands.

‘It takes courage.’

‘Or a little madness.’

On the practical side of things Dan very soon knew that Malevich had picked a good man. Assad came out quickly with cost estimates for the most likely locations they saw; every so often he would stop, and make a director’s frame-finder with his hands, to be sure Dan saw the visual possibilities. The kind of disruption problems that bedevil location work in other cities, the clearing of long shots, the traffic handling and all the rest, were not going to be allowed to hinder matters here. Dollars mattered more; the minister had decreed. Dan took a few photographs of various old khans and Mameluke town houses, though all this wasn’t really his province, and he didn’t intend to rewrite scenes just to fit likely locations. He did see one thing he was looking for, a corner of the great souk of Mouski that might do for a small incident (to show Kitchener’s almost Goering-like mania for collecting antiques) he had yet to write. But that was about all.

Every so often they glimpsed the insubstantial papier mache of the Pyramids outside the city, the ochre Mokattam hills, and Dan wondered how Jane was getting on. But he enjoyed the day, and ended it with a better feel for Cairo… tired, unwashed, seemingly full of aimless soldiers and burst sandbags, a sad little emblem of the nation’s military pretensions—but a great city, for all that. He also culled from Assad a list of the Arabic phrases he needed to pepper some of his dialogue with.

Assad dropped him at the hotel just after six, and offered to come back to pick them up for the dinner at eight. But his flat was only half a mile away, and Dan insisted that they could do it by taxi. He I knocked on Jane’s door, but there was no answer; which was explained by a note that had been pushed under his own. She had had a ‘fascinating’ day, she was having her hair washed. He had a shower and changed into a suit; then sat down to write some notes. A minute or two later he heard Jane enter her room, and called through to tell her he was back; and how about a drink before she changed? She came through at once, still in her clothes of that morning.

‘Good day?’

‘Incredible. It’s been so interesting.’

He poured her a whisky, and she sat in an armchair near the writing-table. She smiled.

‘And I don’t agree at all with you. They took us round one of the mastabas at Saqqara. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything more beautiful. So delicate. It’s like the Renaissance three thousand years before it happened. All those lovely birds and animals.’

‘And the Sphinx?’

She tilted her head. ‘A shade déclassé, perhaps? But the museum, I could have spent hours there.’

He asked her what else she’d seen: the souk, El Azhar with its Muslim ‘dons’ (‘I could just see Maurice Bowra and David Cecil)… sat by their columns with their classes squatted around them, what thirteenth-century Oxford must have been like; some Coptic church, Sultan Mohammed Ali’s mausoleum… and what on earth were the huge brown birds that floated along the Nile?

‘Kites. They were city birds in Europe once.’

‘The American woman beside me insisted they were vultures. I knew they couldn’t be.’ She pulled a face. ‘Incidentally she gave me a copious list of all the medical horrors. I shall see bilharzia and even more ghastly diseases on every plate now. Absolute old ghoul.’

He grinned. ‘Did you tell her so?’

‘Of course not. My father would have been proud of me.’

She had caught a little colour during the day, from the sun.

‘Were there many on the tour?’

‘Americans? No, hardly any. Just two other couples. Far more Russians and French.’

‘I should have warned you about the beggars. They’re like piranhas if they see you’re a soft touch.’

‘They warned us on the coach. It was rather curious, it must have been my coat. They apparently thought I was Russian too. Hardly pestered me at all, compared to my blue-rinse friend. I didn’t realize at first. I was quite hurt.’

‘They obviously knew a hard-hearted socialist when they saw one.’

‘I did give one rather beguiling little girl something. But she was so surprised she forgot to ask for more.’

‘Probably because you gave her far too much in the first place.’

She smiled, then looked down at her glass. ‘I bought a booklet at the museum. About the fellaheen.’

‘People-shock?’

‘Yes. I think it’s what I’m going to remember most.’

He wondered what she really thought—how theory and intellect met a situation where it was so obvious that no political system could provide an answer. Perhaps she was playing polite again, and letting her tourist self camouflage one that was secretly outraged. She asked then about his own day, and Dan was left no wiser. Soon after that she went to get ready for the dinner-party.

Though there were a pair of cronies of Assad’s from the Egyptian film world, Dan’s fears that he would be solicited for jobs proved wrong; and it turned out to be a surprisingly enjoyable evening. The flat wasn’t very large, but it was furnished in a pleasant blend of the European and the Oriental. Assad’s wife was a plump but still quite attractive Lebanese woman in her late thirties; apparently one of the best-known translators in the Arab world from the French. According to Jane she spoke the language flawlessly, though her English was much poorer than her husband’s. They were introduced to the other guests. Besides the two film men and their wives, there was another couple, an Egyptian novelist—who also did film-scripts—and his Turkish wife, and two unattached males. One was a professor of history at the American University in Cairo. Assad smilingly said, ‘We have to tolerate him, because he knows more about Islam than any of us’—and he also knew all about the Kitchener period of Egyptian history, as Dan was to discover in the course of the evening. He turned out to be an untypical Texan—indeed Texan only in his drawl: an agreeably dry man, like his host; a collector of Islamic pottery; and militantly indifferent to the ancient culture. The other single man was the promised satirical playwright, Ahmed Sabry.

He was the only one there not conventionally dressed; a huge seal of a man with a laconic, rubbery face and melancholy, pouched eyes, that reminded Dan at once of a younger and sallower Walter Matthau. He wore an old jacket, a black polo-necked sweater; one guessed at once at a born anarchist, though he said very little before they ate. Assad apologized for giving Dan Lebanese food again, but it was excellent, countless small dishes and titbits, to which they helped themselves from a huge circular brass table. The informality suited such a hotch-potch of backgrounds and nationalities. They disposed themselves round the room in loose groups, in a mixture of the three great languages of the Levant: English, French and Arabic.

Dan saw Jane across the room, talking French with Mrs Assad and one of the local movie-world couples. She had put on a black dress, very simple, Empire, rather low-cut, a cameo pendant on the bared skin, making her look like a latter-day Jane Austen. It had made him tease her when he first saw it at the hotel—it was apparently one of her last-minute buys, and he informed her that she wasn’t doing too badly for someone who had brought nothing dressy. He was sitting himself with the novelist and Ahmed Sabry. Assad had rather boyishly shown Dan, before they ate, his ‘proudest possession’— a framed photograph of himself, slimmer and younger, though even then going bald, standing with Bernard Shaw. He had worked in England on one of Pascal’s film productions of the plays, and the old man had come to watch the shooting one day. The photograph was signed by Shaw across the bottom.

Though Sabry’s spoken English was erratic, and voluble to the point of incoherence, he turned out, once his initial mask of withdrawnness was dropped, to be a great admirer of Shaw, though with all that characteristic foreigner’s ignorance of how the dead are now regarded in their own countries: an obviously intelligent man, and a heavy shade larger than life. They soon got onto politics; Nasser, Sadat, the economic problems of Egypt, the ‘grand folly’ of the Aswan Dam, the dilemmas of Arabic socialism.