Daniel Martin (76 page)

‘Of course.’

‘The Angel of Aswan.’

She smiled. ‘With her out-of-tune harp.’

After a moment he touched her hand.

‘You’re not cold?’

‘I don’t mind. The light’s so beautiful.’

They arrived where the river ran beneath the gardens of the famous old hotel. Omar would have waited still, but Dan paid him off, they would walk along the corniche back to the ship; tomorrow, perhaps… and then, well, why not, they made a definite appointment. He would take them again to Kitchener’s Island. They climbed up through the gardens. The interior seemed mercifully not to have changed: the same pierced screens, huge fans, tatty old colonial furniture, stone floors, silence, barefooted Nubian servants in their red fezzes; so redolent of an obsolete middle class that it was museum-like. Dan settled Jane at a table, ordered drinks, then went through the arched rooms to find the reception desk. Their reservations were all right; then the girl telephoned about seats to Abu Simbel. They were lucky, there were two left for the day after tomorrow, and Dan took them. Finally he asked the girl to get him a Cairo number and went into a booth to take the call.

Jane had nearly finished her beer when he returned and sat.

‘Sorry. I thought I’d better give Assad a ring. He sends his regards.’

‘I’ve been happy just sitting here. Absorbing the ambience.’

‘If only you had a nice print dress from the Thirties.’

‘And you in your linen suit and old school tie?’

‘I think I’d have gone native, actually.’

‘That reminds me. I must buy one or two galabiyas before we leave.

‘Me too. For Caro.’

‘I’m wondering if I ought to cable Anne to confirm Monday. If the post’s as unreliable as everyone says.’

He hesitated, staring at the brass table between them, then smiled up. ‘Could she stand a delay of three days?’

‘Why?’

He looked down before her eyes. They were suddenly alert, faintly alarmed.

‘We can fly back to Europe by Beirut. No extra charge. It only takes a few hours to get to this Syrian castle of yours and Palmyra. One can stay the night there. Then on to Rome.’

Her shoulders slumped.

‘Dan. This is wicked.’

‘Wonders of modern transport.’

‘But you know I feel bad enough already about… ‘

‘You can pay me back in twenty-four monthly instalments.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘You have to go by taxi. The Syrians won’t let you in otherwise. They’re very cheap. Assad says thirty pounds at most.’

She folded her arms, sat up again.

‘Is this why you rang him?’

‘It may not come off. It’s the Mecca pilgrimage season, and they apparently all go via the Lebanon. But he’ll try and wangle us seats.’ He eyed her blandly, pressing a smile out of his mouth. ‘At this very moment Madame Assad is ringing her sister to find us a good driver.’

She said nothing. Then, ‘I feel shanghaied.’

‘Wrong country. Valentinoed.’ She was not amused.

‘I’ve got so much to do at…’

‘You shouldn’t have played up so to the Hoopers.’

‘I was only trying to be polite.’

‘Now you must suffer for it.’ She gave his smile a doubting look. He said, ‘Be brave. Palmyra’s like the other place. Worth a mass. Even Assad says it’s not to be missed. I’d like to see it too.’

‘Your script…?’

‘Three days’ rest will do it no harm at all.’

‘Doesn’t one need visas?’

‘They give them at the frontier.’ He bit his lips, aware that her primness was fighting a losing battle against something tempted in her. ‘Scout’s honour.’

But he was not yet off the hook. He had her brown eyes again, suddenly very intellectual and authenticity-obsessed eyes, accustomed to dissecting ethical problems with a microtome.

‘Have you been planning this, Dan?’

Unaccountably, he found no further light answer, and looked down; then mumbled, like some small boy accused of cheating by a dragon of a headmistress, a truth he did not expect to be believed.

‘No. And please.’

They had no time alone together, the rest of that evening, their last on board the ship. For a few minutes in his cabin while Jane changed, Dan read through his unfinished letter to Jenny. He had written to amuse her, playing down the pleasures, exaggerating the boredoms… to suggest there was nothing very much to envy. It was not even honest at that level; and in saying little about Jane and even there presenting her as a latter-day drawing-room socialist being taught reality—and virtually nothing about his own deeper feelings and perceptions, it was a tissue of lies by omission, a cheap throwing of dust, an odious placebo, an insult to all her own recent written honesties. He crumpled the pages up, opened the cabin window, then let the ball of paper fall into the Nile a few feet below. It drifted sluggishly away, disappeared. He found a postcard of Kitchener’s Island he had bought at the Old Cataract and wrote the following.

Set this with New Mexico, Jenny. I’ve fallen in love all over again with it. Water, silence, leaves, peace, out of time—too good for filming really. Though mercifully its real self can’t be filmed. If this beautiful and noble river had one central place. It’s all helped the script, more than I expected. And Jane. He hesitated there, half a minute or more, then went on writing. I was right to bring her. I think it has helped. We’ll be here two days, then back by Beirut to visit a place called Palmyra two other passengers have sold us on. See you soon. D.

He read what he had written. It was a worse lie; and (had he but known it) the first sentence, in view of that last ‘contribution’ of hers, even then lying unopened, in wait, at Thorncombe, a worse insult; but now the omissions and ambiguities were so flagrant that he felt his conscience eased. He dropped the card in the ship’s post-box on their way to dinner.

There was a general mingling afterwards, as if the tacit barrier between the French and the East Europeans could be dispensed with now that everyone was separating. Expressions of international-friendship were like infinitely post-dated cheques, they would never be presented; and most of the bonhomie smelt distinctly spurious. But Jane and Dan felt a genuine sadness over saying goodbye to the Herr Professor, who received a little feting from his flock and whom they failed to get on his own again; to the young Frenchman, Alain; and even to the Hoopers. They both feared a difficult future there, a marriage that must break one day. Dan had managed the grace, at dinner, to tell the couple that Jane and he were taking their advice and hoping to visit Palmyra on their way home. If the Englishman in him disliked having to concede that their opinion on such matters was worth something, a less snobbish self was amused, and touched, by the enthusiasm with which they greeted the news. Great, fantastic; they showered new descriptions, unnecessary advice, Syria itself was drab as all hell, a real police state, you had to watch with cameras.. Jane did not say much, as if to warn Dan that she still did not totally approve this wild departure from plan, but he felt that at least she seconded the little fillip he gave to the American pair’s lack of confidence.

The next morning they hired a droshky and were trotted with their bags to the hotel. There was a cable waiting from Assad. They had air reservations for Beirut, and a hotel, a car and a driver booked there. Whatever last reservations of the other kind Jane harboured were quelled, and she sent her cable to Anne about the postponed arrival in Rome. They went shopping, and bought their galabiyas. Then they drove to see the temple of Philae; a long row out into the lake, followed by the slow gondola-like tour round the submerged columns, shadowy shafts in the translucent green water. An exquisite light shimmered and danced on the parts that rose into the air. They and the guide were rowed by two old men, with scrawny wrists and mummified bare feet. Every so often, on the long haul, the pair would break into a strange question-and-answer boating-chant, half sung, half spoken. Work on transporting the temple to its new site, the guide proudly told them, would begin within the next few months; very soon sunken Philae would be abusimbelized. They didn’t argue with him, but voted it a vulgarity, the whole project, over lunch; which they took inside another vulgarity, the New Cataract Hotel. Its older branch no longer ran a restaurant.

The place was crowded, mainly with Russians working at the dam, though they saw and nodded to some of their recent fellow-passengers from the cruise. But the Russians seemed to dominate the place: stolid-faced men and solid women, seemingly all middle-aged. The food was no better than on the boat, to Dan’s taste; and the decor far worse, a ghastly hybrid between bad Egyptian and bad European interior decoration. It seemed particularly unforgivable with the model of the calm and elegant older hotel so close at hand; a small acme of twentieth-century stupidity, progress that wasn’t, every decent architectural principle butchered on the altar of Mammon and Chauvin.

‘Christ, one might as well be in Miami.’ They had just sat down at their table. ‘Even the people look the same.’

Jane murmured, ‘Aesthete.’

‘Sorry.’ He cast sarcastic eyes down the long room. ‘I was forgetting how socially useful they all are.’

She smiled, but said nothing; and some complex irritation in him, at the hideousness of the restaurant, at the memory of Philae, at Jane herself, very nearly made him force an argument on her. But then he remembered Philae again, the green water, the shadows, the way a ray of reflected sunlight from outside one of the cellae had momentarily caught her face, lighting it from below in a way that was natural in itself, yet artificial in ordinary terms: a strange softness, a gravity, she had been looking down through the water. It would have made a lovely photograph, but the moment was too transient; though that was also its beauty.

Many years before he had taken a brief interest in the Zen philosophies then popular in California, and discovered, with some surprise, that there were parallels with what he had always thought of as a product of his English country childhood, a mere way of looking at things induced by solitude and repression. Moments of intense vision had then always seemed an escape from the monotony of predictable weeks and years. He was too English, of course, to take Zen very seriously as a philosophy, but it had strengthened in him a feeling that some inner truth lay in the perception of the transient. He would have been embarrassed to define and justify it, but it lay somewhere in the importance of presentness in life; just as the value he attached to it was betrayed by his demanding or expecting more of the present than it was usually prepared to give. This was why, for instance, he had no deep political convictions, since they must depend on some form, however attenuated, of perfectibility, of belief in future; and why he could trace his actual feeling of irritation to the experience of Philae, a present about to disappear for ever, and to this crammed horror of a restaurant, a present one wished would disappear for ever; while Jane was a combination of both, a present about to disappear and, in her would-be socialist and independent self, a present that barred him from what little was left of the first kind.

All this thinking took place against a resumption of their conversation: about the shame of raising Philae, their afternoon plans, the food… but that one brief glimpse of her face in the haunting liquid and mobile under-light inside the temple had, so to speak, signalled the arrival at the fork, his growing feeling that some choice was very close, he must act; for something in the moment’s message had also been, if still not quite sexual, distinctly sensual. Even as they talked about the afternoon, he knew he would really prefer to spend it, very close to her, saying all these things he could not bring himself to speak now; in a locked room, behind shutters. It was not love, not sex, but a need to exercise, perhaps even a little to exorcize, a deep and growing affection.

He mistrusted his mood; knew it was partly narcissistic, atavistic in terms of his past, his lifelong need for emotional relationships with the female, with mother-substitutes, or younger women carefully if unconsciously chosen to avoid that accusation, if such it was. He speculated again whether Jane was not indeed taking a small revenge by remaining so adamant over frontiers, so implicitly certain that no sexual current could pass between them because she did not possess that kind of attraction any more. But he dismissed it. She was simply too proud, or too sensible, or too sure that she felt no equivalent being drawn towards Dan himself-the humiliation was his also, in other words. He kept thinking of Jenny, too. His childish old vice: wanting the impossible, so living it in his mind.

They found the silent Omar duly waiting when they went down to the landing below the Old Cataract; and once again threaded their way through the islets to the far bank. This time they landed below the Aga Khan’s mausoleum, then walked a mile over the dunes to the ruined Coptic monastery of Saint Simeon: vandalized by six centuries of Bedouin nomads, but still a powerful ghost.

The place had the great peace of death, a solitude; an equal, if totally contrasting, beauty to that of Philae. They spoke of what was before them, like dutiful tourists, but Dan grew increasingly conscious of all that was not being said. It was far more like an embarrassment than an excitement; a growing embarrassment. It seemed to him almost silly, painfully adolescent—to have to think twice, as he did, about reaching out a hand to help her over rubble or on the erratic stairs to the upper terraces of the monastery; to answer nothings with even more careful nothings.

When they returned to the river, Omar took them back across to Kitchener’s Island again. They wandered and Dan took some unnecessary photographs. Then they sat for a while, in a different place, a more formal garden over the river, among beds of gerberas and geraniums. It seemed to Dan that they had regressed since the previous day; he lacked even the energy to attempt what he had tried on the bench in the cross-walk. He had the impression that Jane was, if not bored, elsewhere; most certainly not thinking of him, or their relationship.

They went to their separate rooms as soon as they returned to the hotel, earlier than the evening before; he heard the muezzin some time after their return. She wanted a bath; and then she did not appear for drinks downstairs before dinner, and he had a miserable half-hour. In the end he telephoned up from the desk. She had fallen asleep. She appeared ten minutes later, her face clasped in her hands in mock dismay, as if he might never forgive her.

They found their table had gone, the huge room seemed even more crowded than at lunch. But there was a voice. It was Alain and the photographer, there were two seats at their table. Dan would have refused, but Jane seemed to welcome the idea. She was suddenly more animated, as if relieved to have someone else to talk to.

The talk was about Philae, where the two Frenchmen had also been that day: the pros and cons of raising it. There was no argument there, they were all against, and then, as if they must find something to disagree on, they somehow moved to general attitudes towards public art, what mattered most, utility or good taste. Dan, who lacked the courage to be as silent as he felt, put a version of his thoughts earlier that day: being was now and anything that destroyed or diminished the quality of life now—let expediency trump taste—must be inherently wrong. Jane thought that if the choice was between ugly building and no building, when there was a need, then… it went on and on, social art and socialist art, the onus on education. Gaullist elitism, gloire and patrie… a cloud of words. They began to distress Dan, and he said less and less. Alain sided with Jane, and he felt almost like snarling at times—the absurdity of this sophisticated conversation, use of language, being employed to argue a jettisoning of all other intellectual and artistic values, pell-mell, before the enormity of the socialist task: it seemed to him suicidal, a secret death-wish, precisely what Lukacs had been essentially arguing against: the notion that the despised bathwater did not also contain babies. Yet he said nothing.

In fact the conversation split in two—Jane and Alain slipped into French, though still, as Dan could tell by the occasional word, discussing politics, while he and the photographer, who had done stills work in the past and knew the French industry quite well, started talking shop. He kept up a façade of interest, but one ear was listening to the other side of the table. He came away convinced that Jane had been using her table-companion to demonstrate to him the reality of that business of ‘different values’.

At last they were walking back to the older hotel together. Alain and the photographer were going on to some nightclub, but Dan and Jane had declined the invitation to join them. They had to get up early to catch the plane to Abu Simbel.

After a few steps in silence, she said, ‘I’m sorry. You wanted to leave.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘You should have given me a discreet kick on the ankles, Dan.

‘Because you were enjoying it?’

‘Because I was slow realizing that you weren’t.’

‘Never mind. It’s that damned restaurant.’

She left a pause.

‘Are you sure you want to go to Abu Simbel tomorrow?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘Yes, but… I mean, if you’d rather go off on your own. Your work.’ She added self-mockingly, ‘You worry me. I thought you’d be frantically scribbling notes all the time.’

‘Appearances aren’t my job.’

‘I forgot. Just the soul.’

‘Plus dialogue.’

They went into the Old Cataract. He thought of suggesting a nightcap, but decided his greatest need was to punish her… or perhaps, himself. He fetched their keys and they climbed the stairs. Their rooms were several doors apart. She reached out and took his hand as they came to hers, and pressed it a moment, staring at the tiled floor.