The Avignon Quintet (89 page)

“And your secretaries – do you have them slippered?”

The Princess clapped her hands and chirped as she replied, “I told you he was all right.” But the Prince cocked an eyebrow and said, “We have much worse reserved for the secretaries!”

I am not the only secretary – there are several others, each with his own domain of activity; but they all vanish at the end of the day while I stay on to dine
en famille
or else alone in the magnificent suite of rooms I have been allotted. Everything is new and curious, so that for the moment I do not find this padded life of an honorary attaché becoming wearisome. But I have always enjoyed being on my own and I indulge the bent several evenings a week in order to write letters or scribble notes such as these sporadic annotations on the margins of history. For the moment I feel cut off from the world, almost from the human race. Egypt is like some brilliantly coloured frieze against which we move in perfect ease and normality. The country has declared itself neutral, and its cities are “open cities” – shimmering pools of crystal light at nights, of choked bazaars and traffic-laden thoroughfares by day, of lighted shops and brilliant mosques – a parody of the true Moslem paradise. We read of blackouts elsewhere; in the City of the Dead you can practically read a newspaper at the full moon. I feel at once exhilarated and lost, exultant and despairing. The world has been cut off, abbreviated to the confines of this lighted city between deserts where all is comfort and plenty. But for how long? Nobody dares to think about it.

The disturbance of the mails has called forth new conventions like the air-letter; I have armed myself with a package of them, but to what end? Will England still exist by the time my letters arrive? A profound despondency rules over this underworld of forebodings and hidden fears – I speak as much for my hosts as myself. They are beginning to realise the depths of their affection for the misty island where they had spent so many happy summers hating the English. And France, too. “France,
halas!”
It sounds somehow sadder and more absolute in Arabic, like an overturned statue. It has in it a hint of the wailing Aman-Aman (Alas-Alas) songs of the radio which scribbles over the silences of every cafe with the voice of Oum Kalsoum, the nightingale from Tanta.… I suppose
kaput
would be the translation of
halas
?

I was formally presented to my fellow scribes by the Prince himself. Professor Baladi was tall and slim and spoke fluent English. He had blue eyes and a fresh colouring and wore his red fez at a jaunty angle. He had an endearing desire to represent himself as a man about town and hinted that he would be available to assist me in exploring the city – a most useful offer. He carried an ebony-headed walking stick with great care, like a sceptre of an inconceivable preciousness. We clicked. So it was with a slower and muddier gentleman, Khanna, a Copt, who seemed at first a little shy and taciturn. Confluent smallpox had given him a skin like a colander. He had a preference for speaking French, and to express an opinion cost him a great effort. He was a brilliant soul in strict hiding; he trusted nobody. There was reserve here, but none of the animosity I had feared.

Yet the power behind the throne, so to speak, was a young and quite disarming Syrian, by name Affad. He was, I gathered, a millionaire in his own right, and only appeared upon a number of boards to support the Prince, out of pure affection. He was a remarkably attractive character with rather misty, glaucous eyes and a helpless appearance; slim and tall, he gave a curious sort of androgynous feel upon first meeting. I thought he must be some brilliant homosexual of the ancient ilk, for like Alcibiades he had a faint lisp. His line of talk was most amusing, self-deprecating, satirical; it was clear that nobody could long stay immune to his deadly charm. In dress he was of a negligent elegance which almost suggested a fashion-plate. His English was faultless, he possessed the language fully and his apparent incoherence and almost ineffectual mildness was really a ruse in order to call forth affection. When he wanted to make it so, his talk was brilliantly incisive. “Well, but I have been expecting you for some time,” he said, to my surprise. “It has taken him an age to find the right sort of secretary for his work, and once he met you he cabled me that you would be ideal and that he would try and make you an offer.” I wondered what I could have said to create an impression upon my first meeting with the Prince back there in Provence. As if he read my thoughts, Affad smiled and answered the question for me; the solution could not have been more surprising. “The Prince heard you say something most interesting about Apollonius of Tyana, and it made him realise that you would find yourself at home in Egypt.” What could I have said? I racked my brains to remember. Yes, perhaps I had mentioned something about gnosticism in Egypt in relation to the Templar heresy – to Quatrefages or perhaps to Felix. It was nonetheless astonishing. The Prince himself was far from being an erudite, an intellectual, so why should such a remark…? I thought idly of the dried and resined head in his red hat-box. I wondered what had happened to it.

Meanwhile Affad poured me a drink and assured me that I should find my post a deeply satisfying one from several points of view. This I was beginning to believe. Never had I fallen among such agreeable and gentle folk. To work for them, with them, promised to be easy and pleasurable.

There remained my compatriots; we spent a morning and an afternoon upon them, since form decided that I must at least register at the Consulate and fill in an availability form in case I should ever be called up. My passport was examined by a disagreeably lordly little grocer’s assistant (it would seem) called Telford –
Mister
Telford, sir, if you please! He was thus addressed by his sycophantic pro-consul. “You will have to stay on call for the present. I can guarantee nothing.”

The Prince was nettled by his tone. “Well, I think I can,” he said icily, “we are seeing H.E. this afternoon and he is aware that Mr. Blanford is engaged as my secretary.” Telford shrugged and handed back my passport with disdain. “So be it,” he said and waved us away into the noisy street where the Prince’s car waited.

In the afternoon we went up to the Consulate to sign the book and to make our obeisances to the Minister. He was sitting in a deck-chair far out upon the dusty lawn, a thin, tall, rather attractive man in his shy way. He had chosen a strategic spot midway between a couple of large water sprinklers which were hard at work in the heat keeping the paper-dry lawn alive. The water pushed large blocks of tepid air about around his chair, giving the faint illusion of freshness and coolth. We stepped between the columns with care so as not to get our trousers sprinkled, and were received kindly enough by the Minister, whose servants came running with further deck-chairs which were placed with equal strategy round about us; also a table upon which appeared in due course a large English tea complete with rock cakes, ginger biscuits and drop-scones. How strange it seemed to find this in Egypt! I commented on the fact and our host smiled and said, “You should find it reassuring, should you not? With the present situation on our hands we shall need all the morale-building tea we can get.” Then he added as he stirred his cup, “I have had you officially ‘frozen’ for a year, as the saying goes. This means that H.M. regards your job as a privileged one and essential to the war effort.” I did not quite follow how and was about to ask, when the Prince turned to me and did the explaining himself. “It’s because I am a Colonel on the Military Mission, and also head of the Red Cross in Egypt. That is why H.E. wants you to keep an eye on me and see that I don’t get into mischief by inviting Mehar Pacha to lunch one day, eh?”

The Minister did not rise to the jest but on the contrary looked rather pained. “You will soon know,” he said, turning to me, “just how lucky we are to have someone like the Prince to consult on policy. Egypt is terribly tricky politically, and doubly so at the moment with the present options.”

The talk then generalised itself into gossip about the war situation which, despite some lucky strokes on our side, was still appallingly full of hazards; it gave a highly provisional air to these orders and dispositions and it was obvious that the Minister was weighed down by these fearful contingencies which hedged us in between the deserts, still with inadequate forces and armour to confront the worst that the enemy might think up. He did not say any of this, but his tone implied it – and of course the facts of the general situation were so widely reported that there was nothing secret in the matter that any newspaper reader might not know. Our tea-party ended on an amiable but subdued note. “I know that you will be in and out of the Chancery on business matters,” said the Minister as we rose to shake hands, “I will tell my social sec to see that you receive all standing invitations. But if you ever need to see me personally, don’t hesitate to ring up and come round.” We thanked him for his warmth. A swerve of the water sprinklers sent a gust of cool air towards us; it dislodged a leaf from the bundle of despatch-paper on the little wicker table. I picked it up as it fell to the ground and handed it back. It looked at first to be a cipher. Then I saw that it was a game of chess described in cablese. He thanked me as he took the paper back and said, “I see you caught a glimpse of the positions. Do you play chess?” But there I had to disappoint him. “Canasta, bridge or pontoon – nothing else.” We took our leave.

So the long days of my secretarial engagements outlined themselves, full of variety and novelty. The interests of the Prince were multifarious; as president of the Red Cross he had a fine set of offices in the centre of the capital, where I was accorded a small room by the teleprinter from which I had to harvest a huge correspondence; then there was the dusty, agreeable Consulate which he so frequently visited – though here he had no foothold. We wandered about the Chancery at will. My palace office was the central one, the key to everything else. But the Prince, as an honorary Colonel of Regiment to the Egyptian Field Artillery, was also entitled to an imposing office at headquarters which he adored visiting in his uniform – a British colonel’s outfit topped with a traditional fez. He wore a spray of service decorations on his breast and it was obvious that they gave him immense pleasure, for he stroked them unendurably during formal conversations with the obsequious young officers of his regiment.

Yes, this new world is full of colour and sensation; nor would it be possible to overpraise the beauty of this gorgeous, dusty city with its bubble-domes topped with new moons, its blazing souks, its brilliantly lit riverside suburbs, its bursting shops. The whole of Europe is in darkness and we are here in a night-long incandescence permitted only to the cities which have been declared “open”. No bombers snarl out of this velvet-blue night sky. There are no signs of the war save the soldiers on leave. Occasionally, just before dawn, a stealth of tanks and carriers might emerge from the barracks and rustle across the deserted roads, making for the desert on tiptoe, as it were; but so circumspectly that they make less noise than the thudding of camel pads on the asphalt – for just before dawn long columns of camels bring in the vegetables to the town markets together with other loads like cotton, reeds,
bercim
– clover for animal fodder.

“The Princess rather mocks my uniform,” said the Prince, “but I keep it for it enables us to picnic in the Western Desert when we want; without it I would be a civilian and the desert is out of bounds to ordinary civilians. That reminds me, I must have you gazetted to the Egyptian army as a volunteer second lieutenant. Then you can come as my aide.” An alluring prospect – to wear British service kit with a scarlet flower-pot on my head. Strangely enough, both Prince and Princess were deeply moved when I walked in on them, dressed in full fig complete with tarboosh. “Now you are really one of us,” she cried, and tears came into her eyes. I looked an awful fool in the flower-pot.

England was an occasional pang, an occasional twinge of conscience away; the new life was all-engulfing in its variety, while the information which it profferred so liberally was persuading me to see this ancient country not as something exhausted by history, existing through its ruins, but as something still thrillingly contemporary, still full of an infernal mystery and magic. Of course I owed most of this to Affad, though at first, while I was settling in, I had little to do with him; my fellow scribes occupied the centre of the stage. Professor Baladi, for example, with his quaint Victorian-novel English, could have earned music-hall renown had he so wished. “Mr. Blanford, I esteem that there is nothing more sublime in nature than a glimpse of an English lady’s bubs.” He watched me curiously for my reaction, head on one side. “Really, Professor, you are making the blush start to my cheek.” He laughed airily and said with a certain archness, “I only said it to make you chortle.” And so I obliged him with a chortle – or what I took to be such a thing, something between a chirp and a giggle.

“I have been told that the Egyptians are mad about pink flesh, hence the pimp at Port Said who offered his little daughter, crying ‘all pink inside like English lady’.” It was a very old joke, but he had not heard it, and it threw him into a silent convulsion of decorous laughter; tears poured out of him. He mopped them with the sleeve of his coat. But we had put our foot in it. We realised this when we caught a glimpse of our fellow-scribe’s face – the face of poor Khanna the Copt. He was crimson with anguish and evidently deeply shocked. Baladi did a wonderful toad-swallowing act as he saw this, and his laughter abated somewhat, subsiding away into sighs touched with contrition, though from time to time a small seismic convulsion seized him midriff, and at the thought of the jest he hid his face for the space of a second in his sleeve. I thought the best way to atone was to go all silent, speechless and industrious for a full quarter of an hour, in order to let the dust settle. Outside on the green lawns the sun shone, the sprinklers played, turning and turning their slim necks like sunflowers. Somewhere in the palace the telephones rustled – their bells had been gagged, for their sound was judged indecorous. I pondered the war news in the
Egyptian Gazette
and allowed England a slight ache of nostalgia; but secretly my heart turned to the Pole Star of Provence – a Provence now forever peopled by Felix, Constance, Hilary, the vanished friends of that last summer of peace. Where might they all be now? Dead for all I knew. And the most painful evocation of all, that of Livia. Last heard of in Germany – the girl I had insisted on marrying, like a fool.