Beer in the Snooker Club (Serpent's Tail Classics) Page 10

  ‘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 anothing 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 chara
cter 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.

  PART III

  Se sacrifier a ses passions, passe;

  Mais a des passions qu’on a pas?

  GIRODET

  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.

  And if, at such moments, you let your thoughts wander, they transcend every-day pettiness and smallness and seem to hover high up, gazing at the world detachedly and even benignly. And a perception, an awareness of the complete scene below is registered with a lucidity and a clarity which you sometimes imagine to come very briefly across during certain stages of drunkenness.

  This hovering gaze which could have embraced the whole world in its scan, focused only on Edna, and with a terrible intensity I realized the extent of my love for her and also realized that we would have to part. I saw her bullied by nationalities and races and political events and revolutions and dictatorships and particularly by her own vague idealism. I held her tenderly in my arms and also saw my own shallowness and unworthiness in contrast to her deepness and sincerity.

  She opened her eyes. We remained close, looking at one another.

  No amount of talking or explaining will really bring two lovers or two friends closer than they can be in silence.

  ‘Please, Ram,’ she whispered. ‘Go away now.’

  I dressed quietly and went out. Downstairs was Yehia’s car, which I had borrowed the night before and in which we had driven to the Pyramids.

  I drove the car to Yehia’s, then walked home.

  ‘Haven’t you spent the night here?’ my mother asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where, then?’

  ‘I was with Yehia,’ I said.

  After a while she asked me what Yehia was now doing.

  ‘He’s at the university,’ I said.

  ‘Really? Hasn’t he finished his studies yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Very strange. How long has he been at the university?’

  ‘Ten years.’

  ‘Of course they’re very rich,’ she said. ‘His mother was with me in school, you know. What fou-rires at the pensionnat! I remember the mère-superieure insisting on putting us in different dormitories, we were such devils when together. She was very lucky, of course; Yehia’s father is a man très comme-il-faut. Deauville each year, my dear, and one beautiful mistress after another.’ She moved her head from side to side in appreciation.

  ‘I went to tante Noumi yesterday,’ I said.

  ‘Tu as bien fait, Ram. I am very happy you went to see her. I am always hoping you become good friends with your cousin Mounir. He is becoming very influential. Il est très elegant, ce garçon; and then think of the future you may have with your aunt’s influence behind you. Can’t you see yourself, Ambassador in a European country? You have all the qualities for it; tall, good-looking, languages and then, of course, your English education. Un vrai gentleman. People like you are very rare nowadays.’ Then she said she hoped I hadn’t gone empty-handed to my aunt, and I laughed.

  ‘Your father was very considerate in such matters,’ she said, ‘although he didn’t really belong to our milieu. Dire à quoi nous sommes arrives, Ram. You were too young to remember my father’s house; what luxury. The servants, handsome Sudanese with starched robes and red bands round their waists … even your aunt Noumi doesn’t live in the style we were brought up in.’

  We both lit cigarettes.

  ‘And what did you tell your aunt?’

  ‘I asked her to give me a thousand pounds,’ I said.

  ‘A thousand pounds? Why do you want so much? You haven’t been gambling again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I want to go and live in Europe for a while.’

  ‘Be reasonable, my son. Au fond I don’t blame you. Where is the cosmopolitan life we led? Of course if you get into the Diplomatic Corps …’

  I went outside to the balcony for a while, then came back.

  ‘As I was telling Mimi yesterday,’ my mother continued, ‘the boy has travelled and it is difficult for him to work here the same as everyone else.’

  ‘Do you think I can become Ambassador to London?’ I asked.

  ‘Why not? Who is our Ambassador there now?’

  ‘There is none.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not? Of course you can’t become Ambassador straight away; you’re too young for one thing.’

  ‘Pity,’ I said. I went to my room and lay down on my bed.

  Our servant, Corrollos, told me breakfast was ready. He is a Copt like us, Corrollos, with all the characteristic Coptic traits: the slyness and perpetual intrigue, the sychophancy, even his thin face with the blue veins sticking out at the temples, is us. He is always bending down a little, devouring the floor. He has been with us for twenty-five years.

  ‘How is your wife, Corrollos?’

  He bent even further down and said she was very sick, bless me for asking.

  ‘And your children?’

  God keep me, he was trying to save enough money to have a doctor look at them.

  ‘I’ll get one of my doctor friends to see them,’ I said.

  Impossible, he said. The likes of him could only afford the very cheapest of doctors.

  ‘You’ll not have to pay anything.’

  He shook his head and brushed the carpet with his hand.

  ‘Are you sick, too?’

  The Saviour knew, he was not thinking about himself; he was going to die soon anyway.

  We Copts have something about being sick. I sprang out of bed and went to my mother.

  ‘You don’t look well,’ I told her.

  ‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘I didn
’t want to tell you, but I am a very sick person. I have never recovered from my operation.’

  I smoked after breakfast and then didn’t know what to do with myself. I walked three times round my room, then to the balcony, back to my room, and then to the sitting-room and my mother. A propos of nothing she suddenly said she had sacrificed her life for me.

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘You cannot imagine …’

  ‘I can, Mummy. I know you have sacrificed your life for me.’

  ‘Ever since …’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Ever since you married.’

  My mother didn’t love her husband, and she believes she married him solely to give me a respectable father. The fact that she conceived me two years after her marriage, she finds irrelevant. I was responsible for the whole thing.

  ‘Thank you, Mummy,’ I said.

  I took a bath and dressed carefully. There is a tailor in old Cairo who has been cutting suits for our family for years. I go to him, choose a cloth, have it tailored, and somehow the bill is mysteriously paid.

  ‘Where are you going?’ my mother asked.

  I stood at the door jingling the house-keys in my pocket. I didn’t know where I was going.

  ‘To the club,’ I decided.

  There is something about that club. Just walking along the drive from the gate to the club-house, seeing the perfectlykept lawns on either side, the specially-designed streetlamps hovering above you, the white stones lining the road, the car-park, and then the croquet lawn – croquet! a place where middle-aged people play croquet. Imagine being a member of a place where middle-aged people play croquet. This ease; this glide from one place to another; the crispy notes in crocodile wallets; the elegant women floating here and there. Mobile sculptures. And then into the club-house, through it, and out to the swimming-pool where members move as though they were a soft breeze.

  The strange thing about this club is that in the early days of the revolution, it was condemned as a symbol of exploitation and was taken over by a committee or something like that. Well, all the members are still members, with a few additional military members. I repeat the word ‘members’ à propos the military newcomers, because they too have acquired this floating, breeze-like, ethereal quality.