3
At Cairo the water of the Nile divides to make the island of Gezira the coolest and most desirable residential area in the city. The moorings on the western side of the island had by 1942 become crowded with houseboats. They were mostly rented to visitors who liked the noisy parties and bohemian atmosphere. This too was a part of the city of gold.
With a small effort of the imagination, even the brown shiny ripples in the sluggish waters of the river Nile became gilding on a dark bronze underlay. There was something golden about the music too: subtle reedy Arab dissonances that came across the water mingled with the traffic and the street cries and other sounds of the city to make a hum like that from a swarming beehive. Wartime Cairo was like a beehive, thought Peggy West: a golden beehive frantically active, dribbling with honey, and always ready with a thousand stings. It was an inclement habitat for any unprotected woman. Peggy had no other home; seeing the city like this, at night across the waters of the Nile, she felt lonely and afraid.
‘My master will receive you soon, madam. May I bring you coffee?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘Sukkar ziada, madam?’ Only Cairo’s wealthy residents could afford servants who spoke clear English. This one – Yusef – did, but he persisted in using Arabic phrases as if to test her.
‘No thank you, no sugar; saada.’
The servant stared at her and smiled insolently. He was very thin. His face was hard with hollow cheeks and large brown eyes. He had a slight limp but was without the warped stance that is the product of malnourishment. Once he must have been very handsome. Now a broken nose marred the servant’s looks, giving to his unsmiling face a fierceness that did not reassure her.
She had told him on previous visits to the houseboat that she didn’t like the sweet coffee that they always served to women. But women counted for nothing in Egypt. Girl children were unwanted. Women wore the veil, held their tongues, and kept out of sight; women belonged to their husbands and took sweet coffee. He bowed his head to acknowledge her and soon brought coffee for her. It was in a tiny china cup decorated with flowers. He placed it on a brass tray that formed the top of the side table where she was sitting.
‘The master will not keep you waiting much longer,’ he said. He bowed again and departed without waiting for a reply. There was nothing to be said. Women – even educated European women like Peggy West, a highly respected nursing sister at the Base Hospital – could not expect to be treated like men. When Peggy West visited the boat she often had to wait here on the upper deck and drink coffee. It was arranged like this; important men made people wait.
She picked up the coffee cup. Even before she put it to her lips she could smell the heavy sugar syrup with which it had been made. She swore and resolved to complain about the wretched man. But she drank it anyway as he knew she would. As she sipped it she stared at the river. Coming to the island over the Khedive Ismail bridge, she’d noticed that the old Semiramis Hotel was fully lit. The once grand Semiramis was now taken over as the headquarters of ‘British Troops in Egypt’. The electric lights made the windows into yellow rectangles. Every room was lit; it was almost unprecedented for the British army to be working so late. Rommel was on the move again. The army that the British had chased to a standstill in the desert had suddenly revived itself and lunged forward. Cairo was in danger.
She buttoned her coat. There were rumbling sounds that might have been gunfire, and then a truck, with headlights on, went rattling over the nearby English Bridge and two more followed it as if trying to keep up. She recognised them as Morris Quads, curious-looking humpbacked vehicles used to tow 25-pounder field guns. The artillerymen were in a hurry, and they were heading for the Western Desert. Rommel’s soldiers were rushing to meet them. No one could guess where the big battle would take place.
It was easy to sit here and fancy she could hear the gunfire or smell the desolate space that started only a few miles down the road, but that was the sort of silly imagining that newcomers were prone to: the flashy English reporters and pink-faced officers straight out of school, who desperately wanted to become the heroes they’d so recently read about in their comic books.
Peggy always thought of her husband Karl, when she came out here to see this fellow Solomon and collect her money. It was natural that she should; Solomon was a close friend of her husband, or so he said. She sighed as she thought about it. You could not depend upon anyone here to tell the truth. The army, the Arabs, and even the BBC all smoothly lied like troopers when it suited their purposes.
She’d lived in this part of the world for a long time. She’d proved to her own satisfaction that a young Englishwoman with an ordinary suburban background could work and wander in the same casual carefree style that men so frequently did. She knew the southern Mediterranean coast all the way to Tunis, where she’d first arrived armed only with her nursing qualification and the promise of a job in a hospital supported by the funds of local European fruit farmers. Soon she discovered that an experienced nurse with European certificates could get a job almost anywhere along that coast.
Even after she fell in love and got married, her travelling did not end. Her husband liked to joke about his Italian mother and Canadian father; that’s how spaghetti and meat-balls was invented, he said. Karl was an engineer working for an oil company. In the autumn of 1937, Karl had taken her on a long-delayed honeymoon in Cyrenaica. He had close friends there, and he spoke wonderful Italian. Little Italy, they called it. They’d celebrated with sweet local champagne and paradiso cake – made from almonds – for their wedding feast. The scenery was breathtaking: so green and beautiful, the Mediterranean had never been such a radiant blue as it was that day from the balcony outside their bedroom window. Seven glorious days, and then they’d driven their beloved V8 Ford all the way back to Cairo. Or almost back to Cairo. The poor old car had served them faithfully, but without warning it expired. Its gear-box gave out, and with great sadness they abandoned it. They lugged their suitcases to the nearest village – little more than a railway station and a dozen primitive dwellings – and drank chilled beer and untold cups of coffee while they waited five hours for the Cairo train.
They’d been so in love that it had seemed like a heaven-sent opportunity to talk. They talked about everything in the world. She’d told Karl her whole life story: her loving and constantly worrying parents in England, her craving to travel. She remembered that stopover so vividly: the railway station at El Alamein, the flea-bitten spot where they’d spent half the night. That honeymoon was a long time ago: four, or was it five years? Now Karl was working out a five-year contract, assigned to one of the oil exploration teams that ranged through the deserts of Iraq. It was eighteen months since he’d last had leave. She wondered if Karl thought about her as much as she thought about him. He sent the money without fail; he must love her, surely? In some ways she had to be thankful. After marrying her, Karl had obtained a British passport. Had they stayed in England he might now be in one of those trucks going up to the battlefront. She would have been worried sick. So many of the men who went to the desert would never come back. Sometimes she had nightmares in which she watched Karl being sewn together on the operating table.
She shivered. January was always the coldest month in Cairo’s year. At night she had two blankets on her bed. She wondered why Solomon, the man she’d come to see, didn’t live somewhere more comfortable and permanent. He had prevaricated about that when once she asked him. Solomon liked to call himself Solomon al-Masri – Solomon the Cairene or Solomon the Egyptian; the language made no distinction. It sounded like an assumed name but so did many genuine ones. This man had an almost pathological obsession with secrecy. To arrange the first few visits to him she’d had to phone an Austrian dentist in Alexandria and say she needed treatment. She didn’t object. She knew that some men liked to cloak everything they did in mystery. Her husband Karl was like that. At first she’d thought he was keeping a mistress, but later