Beer in the Snooker Club Read online

  ‘I’ll clean every bit of it,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said and went upstairs.

  Edna was sitting looking out of the window, with a cup of coffee in her hand. She was well dressed in a black suit, her elegant legs crossed. She didn’t turn when I came in. I shook hands with Levy who was helping Font wash up some dishes in a corner. Levy is tall. He thrusts his head forward, his chin horizontal, giving the impression that this is the only position to keep his spectacles from falling off. In contrast to Font, Levy’s eyebrows are pushed as far down as possible. I watched him dry the dishes, his movements awkward and absent-minded. There was something pathetic in the scene: Font handing Levy the dishes and Levy taking them, each with his own type of puzzled expression, a strange virus having struck them both and the symptoms of the disease so apparent. A silent why? on their faces. If you asked them why what? they would not be able to answer precisely.

  I took a chair and sat half-facing Edna.

  ‘It was, therefore,’ Levy was telling Font, ‘both criminal and stupid.’ Levy is a product of one of the French Lycées in Egypt. This becomes obvious when he is with either Font or myself. Compared to our English education sloppiness and vagueness, his clarity in thought and speech is conspicuous.

  ‘But do you think England and France would have attacked us if Israel had refused to participate?’ Font asked.

  ‘Yes, and Israel would have attacked without the active participation of England and France. If Israel had added her voice to that of the Arabs in protesting against the troop concentration in Cyprus, and had told the Arab people: whatever our differences, we shall not be an instrument of imperial designs on you, an inestimable amount of good would have been done.’

  ‘Yes, yes; but all your “ifs” are nonsense. You know very well that all Israelis would like to see us dominated by Europe or America. Your “if” hasn’t got a leg to stand on.’

  Levy was hurt at this. He is always being hurt anyhow.

  ‘It is a fact, Font,’ he said, ‘that a very large number of people in Israel objected to the Suez aggression. There is a large number of sincere socialists in Israel.’

  ‘Sincere socialists! I know your sincere socialists. Maurice Edelman – there is your sincere socialist.’

  I smiled. Maurice Edelman is a very handy name for us when discussing socialism with Jews.

  ‘Don’t take him as an example,’ Levy said, ‘there are people like Victor Gollancz.’

  Font has a weak spot for Victor Gollancz. ‘Victor Gollancz is not an Israeli,’ he muttered.

  ‘And neither is Edelman.’

  Those two can go on like that for hours. With English personalities as a nucleus, they circle round and round, unaware that it is the Middle East they are discussing and not the United Kingdom.

  I stopped listening to them and turned to Edna. I wondered whether Font and Levy were sexless. I wondered whether one has to be sexless to be completely sincere. I knew they had never considered Edna as a woman to be physically possessed. Doromian the Armenian once said that most men have their brains in their instruments and I wondered why Freud took so many volumes to say just that. Of course I go about pretending otherwise, but the fact is, no matter how important the subject I am discussing, let a beautiful woman appear and I know where my brain is. Except when I am seriously gambling. Perhaps, I thought, gambling is to me what socialism is to Font and Levy, but that didn’t strike me as true.

  ‘Edna,’ I whispered. She moved her head slightly but continued to gaze out of the window. I ran my finger slowly up and down her sleeve. ‘Edna … Edna … Edna …’ She turned her head and looked at me. For a moment I thought it was a shadow playing on her cheek; at the same instant my hand involuntarily flew to my eyes and covered them. There was silence and then I heard Font and Levy go outside. From the corner of her lips, up her right cheek and to the lobe of her ear, was a thick line of raw flesh. The centre of the line was depressed and of a darker hue than the rest. The stitching had pulled her lips slightly to one side, and part of the skin on her neck was similarly stretched because of the wound.

  ‘Give me a cigarette,’ she said very softly. My hands were wet with sweat. I gave her a cigarette, then took one myself and lit both.

  ‘How do you like me now,’ she said.

  ‘I love you,’ I answered.

  ‘I mean aesthetically.’

  A bloody officer. She didn’t have to tell me. A bloody bastard of an officer, come to search her house. A dashing swine of an officer with a moustache. Charming at the beginning. ‘Just routine,’ he must have said. A good lay, someone must have told him … a Jewess. What with? A knife? A broken glass?

  ‘A whip,’ she said without being asked.

  ‘So what?’ I shouted. ‘So bloody what? Aren’t there bloody officers in Israel? Haven’t they massacred Arab women and children? Isn’t Kenya full of bloody British officers? Isn’t Algeria full of bloody sadists in uniform? So what? Aren’t there Jewish officers in filthy Nato hand in hand with ex-Nazi officers? … oh, Edna … Who was it?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘Who was it, Edna?’

  But she wouldn’t tell.

  She looked very much older than myself, and very tired. A storm of affection for her whirled in me, and the uselessness of it all and the unfairness of it all dulled my senses and made me want to cover myself with bedclothes and not open my eyes or emerge for a long time. I tried to pull her towards me, but she pushed me back. I desisted and she sat back, giving me her unscarred side.

  All this is London. All this is London I told myself. All this comes of hearing Father Huddleston speak, of knowing who Rosa Luxemburg was, of seeing Gorki’s trilogy in Hampstead. It comes of Donald Soper at Speaker’s Corner, of reading Koestler and Alan Paton and Doris Lessing and Orwell and Wells and La Question and even Kenneth Tynan. Of knowing how Franco came to power and who has befriended him since, of Churchill’s hundred million to squash Lenin and then later the telegram; of knowing how Palestine was given to the Jews and why … of the bombing of Damascus and Robert Graves’s Good-bye. Oh, blissful ignorance. Wasn’t it nice to go to the Catholic church with my mother before I ever heard of Salazar or of the blessed troops to Ethiopia?

  ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she answered.

  ‘Where do you live now?’

  ‘A few yards from here.’

  ‘And your parents?’

  ‘In South Africa.’

  I stood up and walked about the room. I looked under Font’s bed and found a bottle of cognac but I didn’t feel like drinking. I looked out of the other window and saw Font and Levy downstairs with the owner of a coffee-house, sitting in chairs on the pavement and playing dominoes, the three of them. Did Font really like to play dominoes, or did the scene of himself and Levy playing with a man in peasant clothes complete a cherished self portrait?

  ‘Do you want some cognac, Edna?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered. I took the bottle from underneath the bed and poured her a glass.

  ‘Why don’t you go away, Edna? Why don’t you go to Israel or South Africa or France or anywhere else and live and be happy?’

  ‘Because I am Egyptian,’ she said.

  It took me some time to realize that this scar on Edna’s face was actually a disfigurement, and that it affected me as such; not as a repulsiveness, but in the tender way it endeared her to me. Somehow it made her more real and an individual. If only she would cry, I was thinking, if only she would cry and allow her emotions to overcome her thoughts. But in all the six years I had known her, she had never cried.

  ‘Do you ever cry, Edna?’ She brushed the question away as stupid.

  It is strange. A man gets to know a woman. For a long time they are one. They have mingled their thoughts, their bodies, their hopes, their odours, their lives. They are one. And then a while later they are strangers. They are not one any more. Just as though it had never happened, as though l
ooking at oneself in the mirror and seeing a stranger instead of one’s reflection.

  I fetched a glass. What do people who do not drink do on such occasions? Face the facts perhaps. But facing a fact is one thing, and overcoming it is another. Cognac was going to overcome the facts: overcome Edna’s willed hardness and overcome my lack of suitable words and actions. I filled my glass and hers once more, then sat at her feet in silence, she with her thoughts and I with mine. The cognac was already taking control of things. One more glass each and I kissed her on her knee, softly and affectionately. Slowly her hand came down and played with my hair and rubbed my head against her side. Spontaneous, perhaps, and unpremeditated; nevertheless a scene probably already encountered in a film or a play or an opera or a book which the brandy unknowingly evoked. Artists try to depict people; and people depict the artists’ conception of people.

  And then the obvious thing to say and talk about came to me: ‘Do you remember?’ Would I have thought of that if it weren’t for the brandy? Perhaps I would have and even did; but it wouldn’t have come softly and at the right moment.

  ‘Do you remember?’

  ‘What?’ she whispered.

  We remembered, and the stranger in the mirror became familiar once more, recognizable and close and one and the same.

  Font and Levy came in and ignored the fact that my head was against Edna’s knee and her hand on my head. Such irrelevant things are never worthy of the attention of socialists. I was going to ask Font what, in his opinion, Lenin would have done had he discovered his wife with another man, but I changed my mind.

  ‘Everything is Allah’s will,’ Font began. ‘Ask him how much money a year he makes, and he answers: “Allah be praised, enough.” Ask him whether he is happy Nasser has rid us of Farouk, he answers: “Whatever God brings is good.” Ask him how much he pays his waiter, he says: “Allah knows, more than enough.” ’

  Levy said there was a ‘psychological barrier’ between Font and Kharafallah downstairs. But Font said he was only a hired hand in the snooker club, and therefore no such barrier should exist, and Edna said something about being careful not to patronize. I waited to see how the conversation would turn to English politicians. If it didn’t turn in that direction soon, I was going to steer it that way myself because they are never so happy as when beating the bush in London. However, Edna told Font he was acting like a Fabian, and Levy illustrated Fabianism by describing Bernard Shaw, and Font defended Wells, so they were on the right track and I rubbed my head against Edna’s knee.

  ‘I’ll drive you home,’ I told Edna.

  ‘I live next door,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s all go for a drive.’

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  Just as we were going out of the door, Levy turned to Edna and said: ‘Tu te sens mieux?’

  I saw her frown slightly; she didn’t like this particular intimacy simply because they were both Jewish. At the same time Levy’s face reddened at his mistake.

  We heard music as we approached the car, and I remembered the little boy who offered to clean it. He was curled up in the front seat, asleep, the rag with which he had cleaned the car still clasped in his hand. We all peered at him as I explained how he came to be there. Edna put the radio off and woke him gently.

  ‘Where do you live?’ she asked. He rubbed his eyes and looked at us from under his eyebrows, his head bent. Then he saw me and smiled.

  ‘I’ve cleaned it three times,’ he said.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said.

  ‘Where do you live?’ Edna asked again. ‘Your mother must be worried about you.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all right, mistress,’ he said, ‘I have no mother or father, so it’s all right.’

  ‘Where do you live then?’

  ‘Oh, just here.’

  ‘Which house?’

  ‘In one of the doorways, it doesn’t matter which.’

  ‘You mean you have no home?’

  ‘No, but in winter I sleep behind the police officer’s desk at the station.’

  ‘Police officer?’

  ‘Yes, he is my friend,’ he said proudly. I watched Font’s face. I could see the genuine frustration and the anger at his inadequacy and the injustice of it seep up to his eyes and blind him with useless fury.

  ‘How old are you?’ Edna asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Just then Kharafallah, the coffee-house owner, came and peered at the boy. ‘No father, no mother,’ he sighed. ‘What can we do? It’s God’s will.’

  ‘Where does he eat?’ Levy asked.

  ‘Here and there. A loaf here, a bit of cheese there; we do what we can – he is not the only one. What can we do? It’s Allah’s will.’

  ‘Doesn’t he go to school?’ Font in his dreaminess asked.

  ‘School? What school? He has no father or mother I tell you.’ Kharafallah shook his head. ‘School indeed!’ He laughed. ‘This one is lucky; the police officer, a good man, may God keep him, helps him in the cold. What can we do?’

  Edna gave Kharafallah some money and told him to look after the boy until we made some arrangement for him.

  We drove towards the Pyramids, Edna and me in the back seat, and Font driving with Levy by his side. Levy had his arms crossed in resignation. He is authentically lonely. We first met him in London, working in a Lyons Corner House, shouted at by an unpleasant manageress. He has never quite fitted in with us. Apart from our having had an English education and he a French one, there is an aura of humility about him which is sometimes embarrassing. Edna paid his passage to Egypt and Font befriended him. He teaches Arabic now to adult Egyptians who have suddenly been faced with the necessity of knowing that language, which he had studied under Moslem Sheikhs at the Azhar University. He would probably have become a scholar of repute in the Arab world had it not been for the Suez war. I wondered why he didn’t go to Israel.

  ‘Levy,’ I asked, ‘have you ever thought of going to Israel?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You can be sure that at one time or another, every Jew has thought of going to Israel.’

  I don’t know why, but it reminded me of: ‘At one time or another every married man has thought of divorce.’

  ‘In the midst of Jews,’ he continued, ‘I lose all individuality. I agree with everything they say. I act and say whatever they expect of me; I end up by having no thoughts of my own. It would be an act of suicide from my part.’

  … Un acte de suicide de ma part,

  Si je ne me tiens pas à l’écart.

  ‘I’m a poet,’ I told them.

  We passed the house where my aunt lives and where I met Edna for the first time. I saw her smile slightly. I wondered whether the closeness we had recaptured at Font’s had dissipated. I searched for her hand and found it, but there was no response to my caress. I was afraid she would imagine I was feeling sorry for her because of the wound. I was feeling sorry, but that had nothing to do with my desire to hold her hand. I loved her.

  We drove up to the base of the Pyramids and went out of the car. There they stood. Material monuments of immaterialism. In the darkness they didn’t seem man-made, but a godly imposition on this earth, a sign of the stability of some unearthly power. Had they been built much earlier, and had their history been unknown, some Moses or other might well have used them as a sign to some Abraham:

  And lo! fire was kindled in the bosom of whoever it was and three earthquakes moved the earth and the waters, and the heavens showered square pillars and filled the earthquakes and behold! built three monuments one by the side of the other: three hundred and three score something or other in height and as many steps as a young lamb will use in one day and one night in breadth. And the fire smouldered in his heart and he bade his five sons to be brought unto him and he smote them and gave orders to sacrifice all the newly wedded on the base of the largest of the monuments. For such was the Lord’s wish.

  I held Edna’s hand and we went off together to see the Sphinx. We stood loo
king at it in silence for a quarter of an hour, then I turned round and faced her and put my hand on her scarred cheek and told her I loved her. She continued looking at the Sphinx, but I put my mouth on hers and kissed her and held her tight. We walked back to the car, my arm round her waist and hers round mine, like English couples at Brighton.

  We drove back in silence. No matter how many times I go to the Pyramids at night, I am always awed, and the return journey is made in silence. We dropped Levy on the way and then Font drove to his rooms. He left the engine running, said good night, and went upstairs. We sat for a while in the back seat without speaking. It had been a long day for me; I had drunk too much and was tired. But I had an overwhelming desire for Edna; a chokingly tender need to caress her and to love her.

  ‘Where do you live?’ I asked.

  ‘Come, I’ll show you.’

  One room, Moorishly furnished with a low sofa on which she slept; but I couldn’t see very much because she didn’t turn the light on. I knew she wouldn’t want lights any more. I sat, Arab fashion, on the sofa and then she came and sat in the same way in front of me. I started to undo her hair as I had often done before, then she handed me a comb and I combed her auburn hair with long, slow sweeps, from her forehead down to her waist; then I plaited her hair and tied the ends with a piece of string she gave me, and undid her clothes and peeled her jacket off, then her blouse and everything else, and she sat in front of me, bare and very beautiful with her head bent. I told her ‘I love you’ many times, and kissed her, and whispered love and tenderness and memories in her ear. At last she turned round and breathed close to me and we became one. Two bodies and two brains and two lives clasped together, and nothing else mattered. To be loved by, and to possess the person we love is why we were born.

  PART II

  About six years earlier the aunt who had signed away those acres, was having a reception – a soirée they called it – in honour of her son Mounir, just back from America. It was a large affair in her Pyramid Road villa. Liveried servants, cut glass and champagne. I went late. There were about thirty guests around an enormous table having supper; my chair conspicuously empty.