Beer in the Snooker Club (Serpent's Tail Classics) Page 5

  The world of ice and snow in winter and red, slanting roof-tops was beginning to call us. The world of intellectuals and underground metros and cobbled streets and a green countryside which we had never seen, beckoned to us. The world where students had rooms, and typists for girl-friends, and sang songs and drank beer in large mugs, shouted to us. A whole imaginary world. A mixture of all the cities in Europe; where pubs were confused with zinc bars and where Piccadilly led to the Champs-Elysées; where miners were communists and policemen fascists; where there was something called the ‘bourgeoisie’ and someone called the ‘landlady’; where there were Grand Hotels and Fiat factories and bull-fighting; where Americans were conspicuous and anarchists wore beards and where there was something called the ‘Left’; where Christopher Isher-wood’s German family lived, where the Swedes had the highest standard of living and where poets lived in garrets and there were indoor swimming-pools.

  I wanted to live. I read and read and Edna spoke and I wanted to live. I wanted to have affairs with countesses and to fall in love with a barmaid and to be a gigolo and to be a political leader and to win at Monte Carlo and to be down-and-out in London and to be an artist and to be elegant and also to be in rags.

  It was the last day before the summer holidays; all the well-to-do were going to Alexandria. Font and I were waiting for Edna near the university gate.

  ‘Here we are,’ Font said, ‘the beginning of the three months, the crowded beaches and showing-off. All the “family” girls expecting a platonic love affair and all the young men polishing their moustaches and parading on the sea-shore. The gambling and the young men driving their cars and the night-clubs and the boasting about imaginary affairs. The coloured shirts and trousers for the girls. The same old thing and all empty … no life.’

  I agreed. ‘Life’ was in Europe.

  I don’t know whether Edna had made up her mind a long time before, but unexpectedly she came out with a plan to take us to England for three months. I had never been able to penetrate very deeply into her thoughts. Why she befriended Fond and myself and initiated us into politics and was having an affair with me, I could not guess, and at the time did not think about it. Perhaps it was because the three of us had had an English education and spoke in English, perhaps she was lonely, perhaps she considered it her social duty to do all this. She never told me she loved me, and if she had, I would not have believed her. I imagined Edna loving a strong-willed, sober man dedicated to something noble which she respected, and I was very far from being any of these things. Perhaps she liked me because of that incident at my aunt’s the first time we met, but she was too intelligent not to see it had been partly an act. Anyhow, she proposed taking us to England at her expense.

  Someone wants to travel. If he has no passport, he gets one. He fills an application form, presents his birth-certificate and one or two other papers, and in a few days’ time he is given a passport. It is his birthright. It was the passports which started Font off on being puzzled, before he even reached Tilbury. It took us three months and one day to get our passports. For the three months we were on our own, and no amount of papers and excuses and pulling strings and explaining could yield us our passports. Then we met an old friend of ours whose father was well placed in the army. In the one day we obtained two passports simply by giving him two pictures each. He also got us exit-visas in half an hour.

  ‘You’d think we were criminals or something’ Font told me, ‘imagine needing a visa to leave the country. It’s disgusting. And then, after three months of useless toil, a man obtains it in half an hour. To think I go and risk my life in Suez every now and then for a country where strings still have to be pulled.’

  ‘Give them time, Font. They’ve only been a very short time in power.’

  ‘It’s not a short time,’ he answered. Later, it was Font himself who found excuses for such things. ‘Less than one per cent of the population have the urge to, can, or have to leave the country. This democratic sophistry of a right to have a passport is all right in a country where eighty per cent of the population isn’t half starving. So what, if this one per cent is restricted?’ But that wasn’t yet; at this time his ‘education’ was still at its primary stage.

  I wrote a letter from England once, some years later, to someone in Eypt telling him not to send his son to an English school. If his son was one of those who swallowed what they were told, he would one day be disgusted. At school Font and I had been among the very few who ‘swallowed’. We said ‘this isn’t cricket’, and didn’t smoke with our school blazers on because we had ‘promised’ not to do so. We had been implanted with an expectation of ‘fair play’ from the English. This stupid thing of expecting ‘fair play’ from the English, alongside their far from ‘fair play’ behaviour, was a strange phenomenon in us. Perhaps in our subsequent outcries against the English, there was the belief that if they knew that what they were doing wasn’t fair play, they would stop it. In spite of all the books we had read demonstrating the slyness and cruelty of England’s foreign policy, it took the Suez war to make us believe it. Of course the Africans and the Asians had had their Suezes a long time before us … over and over again. I say this now, because of what happened when we tried to get entry visas for England.

  Having obtained our passports and our exit visas, we hurried to the British consulate for our British visas. Egyptians were then travelling to England, and Britons to Egypt, the situation at Suez had eased and there was talk of a settlement. We filled two application forms.

  ‘Which school did you go to?’ a clerk asked. We told him.

  ‘You’re only going for a visit?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  He came back ten minutes later and told us he was very sorry, but he couldn’t give us our visas.

  We went to see the headmaster of the school we had matriculated from. We had been fond of him as a person. He telephoned the consulate and spoke to a friend of his to see why we had been refused visas.

  ‘Good lord, man!’ he shouted into the phone, ‘that’s not a reason for refusing these two young men visas,’ then turned round and told us he was very sorry, but that there was nothing he could do. He offered us cigarettes and told us he understood our disappointment. Font said he was more disgusted than disappointed.

  The headmaster spoke quietly to us. He told us frankly that it was all a matter of politics. He didn’t mince his words. The school was run for rich Arabs and Egyptians who, it was hoped, would later rule in their parents’ place. The school was there to see that they ruled in Britain’s favour. ‘You two are Copts,’ he said, ‘and as the ruling power is entirely Moslem now, they do not bother to give you visas.’ He looked pained.

  ‘Why do you want to go to England?’ he asked me.

  ‘I don’t know, sir. Nothing in particular. To see what a pub is like perhaps; to walk in Piccadilly and to listen at Speaker’s Corner.’

  He smiled, then took his headmaster’s attitude: ‘Go to the Swedish Consulate,’ he said authoritatively, ‘and apply for a visa to Sweden. Then apply for a transit visa through England. They cannot refuse you that. In the meantime I shall write a letter to someone in England to whom you have to go as soon as you arrive in London.’ He wrote down an address and gave it to us. Then he shook hands with both of us and said he hoped we had a pleasant time.

  The Swedish Consulate politely gave us visas while we waited and the British Consulate gave us transit visas, making it clear that we were not to remain in the United Kingdom more than ten days. ‘I’ll stay ten years if I wish, you sly bastard,’ Font whispered behind the clerk’s back.

  Edna was already in Europe, in Switzerland with her parents. She had paid for our passages and was to meet us in London.

  We sat up late at night, Font and I, talking in my room. I have had many intimate relationships with both men and women since that period, but nothing has ever been near the relationship we enjoyed then. The mental sophistication of Europe has killed something good and nat
ural in us, killed it for good … for ever. To me, now, it is apparent that we have, both Font and myself, lost the best thing we ever had: the gift of our birth, as it were; something indescribable but solid and hidden and, most of all, natural. We have lost it for ever. And those who know what it is, cannot possess it … Gradually, I have lost my natural self. I have become a character in a book or in some other feat of the imagination; my own actor in my own theatre; my own spectator in my own improvised play. Both audience and participant in one – a fictitious character.

  … We left, Font and I, for London. For dreamed-of Europe, for ‘civilization’, for ‘freedom of speech’, for ‘culture’, for ‘life’. We left that day and we shall never return, although we are back here again.

  We sailed from Port Said to Tilbury. The first thing we did on the ship was to ask for a mild and bitter. It tasted watery but it was mild and bitter and that was enough for us. Then we drank a whole list of other names we knew all about but had never tasted.

  I think it was to Euston Station that we went from Tilbury. Edna stood there, smart and very beautiful, waiting for us. I don’t remember much except that the three of us were happy and that Font and I were full of gratitude to Edna. Just to stand in the streets of London was satisfaction enough for us.

  We stayed at an hotel near Hyde Park Corner. The second day of our arrival we wrote to Dr Dungate, the man whose address had been given us by our old headmaster, and promptly received an answer asking us both to spend Sunday with him and his family in their house in Hampstead.

  Edna was good enough not to talk politics during those first days. The only thing she did was to introduce us to the New Statesman and The Guardian. We went to the theatres and twice to the Houses of Parliament. As I have said, I never thought Edna was in love with me, and during those first days in London, I was sure she wasn’t. I was too dependent on her. I followed her too meekly for her to feel anything but affection and friendliness towards me. A woman will never fall in love with a man who does not dominate her, however slightly. She took me as her lover sometimes and I was wise enough not to show her how much I loved her. Perhaps it was this fact of my not manifesting my love which attracted her to me; it introduced an element of mystery in our relationship. Women sometimes confuse curiosity with love.

  On Sunday, Font and I decided we wouldn’t go empty-handed to Dr Dungate.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Edna said, ‘you don’t have to take anything. You’re in England now, not in Egypt.’

  We agreed, but bought flowers on the way all the same. We were still natural. If it was not in our nature to go empty-handed, we didn’t. If someone had told us, ‘don’t be so damned Oriental in your ways,’ we would have been perplexed to think we could be anything else but that.

  Contentedly standing in a queue, we waited for a bus in Park Lane.

  ‘Two sixpences,’ Font said. We liked to say ‘two sixpences’ and ‘two fours’ and ‘three twos’, it was London to us.

  ‘ ’Ere you are, luv.’

  ‘Ta,’ said Font.

  Most passengers alighted at Marble Arch and we were the only ones on the top. The conductress stood behind us; a small woman in her forties.

  ‘Oo’s the lucky girl?’ she asked, pointing to the flowers.

  ‘As a matter of fact, they’re for a man,’ I said.

  ‘Gaw on!’ she teased.

  ‘Well, they’re for a family.’

  ‘Flowers are ever so nice, they are. Nothin’ so cheerful as ‘avin’ ’em at home. I’m sure they’ll be ever so pleased with them.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  She went forward and tapped the ‘all clear’ signal with her foot.

  ‘You’re not English, are you, luv?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘we’re Egyptian.’

  ‘Egyptian! Fancy that now. D’you like it ‘ere, luv?’

  ‘Yes, very much.’

  ‘Fancy you being Egyptian and my Steve just back from … now wot’s the name of that place …’

  ‘Suez,’ Font said.

  ‘That’s right, Suez. Ever so ‘appy ’e was there ’e said. As dark as an Indian ’e came back, wot with the swimming and the sun. Beautiful place ’e said it was.’

  ‘I’m glad he liked it,’ Font said.

  ‘ ’Ere,’ she said, ‘you come an’ ’ave a cup of tea with us next week. Steve’ll be ever so pleased to meet you, I’m sure.’

  ‘Thank you,’ we both said.

  ‘Steve said as ‘ow ’e never got to know the natives there, wot with army rules and all that. I’m sure ’e’ll be ever so pleased to meet you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ we said.

  ‘You been long ‘ere, luv?’

  ‘About a week.’

  ‘It’s cold for you I ’xpect. You want to be careful, dears, and wear something warm next to your skins. You want to keep your bodies nice and warm ’ere, luv. That’s our house there, number twelve. Now you be sure and come on Saturday, then we can nip round the corner and ’ave a Guinness,’ she winked. Her name was Mrs Ward. She wrote her address on the back of a ticket and ran downstairs. We got off at West Hampstead and waved to her.

  We walked in silence to Hampstead via Swiss Cottage. The double-deckers and the slanting roof-tops and the pubs and the Underground stations were all there. We walked and watched and felt the little hustle of people at Hampstead station penetrate to us. Hampstead was more England than Knightsbridge.

  Dr Dungate lived in a semi-detached house up a narrow, sloping street. We pressed the bell and waited. Somehow I expected the exact replica of our old headmaster to open the door.

  ‘Do you think a butler opens the door?’ Font asked.

  ‘Of course,’ I answered. ‘Jeeves himself will usher us in and announce our names in perfect Arabic and ask if we would like an ouzo or whatever we Egyptians are supposed to drink.’

  Instead, there was a buzz and the door opened by itself.

  ‘Come in, come in, young men,’ a voice shouted from the top of the stairs. ‘Hang your coats and come up. Was it difficult finding your way?’

  ‘No, sir,’ we shouted, just like schoolboys. We hung up our overcoats and went upstairs. There was a very tall man, stooping under his length, waiting at the top. He wore an old tweed jacket, tight and too short at the back, with leather protection at the elbows.

  ‘Now which of you is Ram and which is Font?’ he asked.

  ‘I am Font, sir,’ said Font, ‘but I am surprised you know that name; it’s only a nickname.’

  Dr Dungate laughed. ‘Ha,’ he said, ‘I have a little biography of you two, here.’

  He heartily shook hands with us.

  ‘You are very welcome here,’ he said, ‘and we don’t want you to feel in the least bit strangers. Come and meet the family. Ha,’ he said, looking at the flowers. ‘That’s very nice of you. That’s for Mother I expect; she’s in the kitchen and we’ll visit her in due course. But here, first, is my son and my daughters.’

  He had three daughters in their twenties and a thirty-year-old son who looked like his father. ‘That’s Jean, that’s Barbara, that’s Brenda and that’s my son John.’ We all shook hands and they said ‘hello, Ram’ and ‘hello, Font’.

  ‘Now come and meet Mother. We’re having a typical Sunday meal for you, and Mother is making sure it is one of her best.’

  We followed him to the kitchen. He put a hand each on our shoulders and sort of gave us to his wife.

  ‘Here they are, Mother.’

  She was also tall and rather thin, with a lively look in her bright blue eyes.

  ‘What lovely flowers,’ she said, wiping her hands; ‘it’s very nice of you to have thought of that.’ She shook hands with us and told us we were both welcome.

  We went back to the sitting-room and sat, rather shy, with our arms crossed, answering questions. Our old headmaster turned out to be Mrs Dungate’s brother, and we were told he had always loved Egyptians, ‘but unfortunately he is having trouble reconciling his vi
ews with those of the governing body of the school’. Dr Dungate was reading the letter to him about us.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, skipping a page, ‘we have this spot of bother about the visas. I cannot promise you anything and I do not want you to be disappointed, so I shall not give you any high hopes. You must bear in mind that if you are refused an extension of your stay, you must make sure you leave by the specified date.’ He lowered the letter and looked at us from above his spectacles by bending his head. There was both amusement and severity in his look. Mrs Dungate stood at the doorway listening.

  ‘If I were you I wouldn’t leave … if you want to stay, that is.’ It was John who said that.

  ‘Now don’t put any foolish ideas in their heads, John,’ his mother said. ‘I’m sure we’ll do all we can to have them stay, but they must not do anything against the law.’

  ‘I suppose you call eighty thousand of our soldiers in Suez against Egyptian wishes, not against the law?’ he said, standing up and walking about, his hands deep in his pockets.

  ‘Please, John.’

  ‘I’m sure every one of them has a visa duly stamped and paid for at the Egyptian consulate, otherwise they wouldn’t be in Suez. We English never break the law,’ he said; ‘it’s so malleable in our capable hands.’

  ‘We’ll jolly well see you stay,’ one of the girls said.

  ‘Now, now,’ Dr Dungate said, ‘we shall discuss the possibilities calmly, and see which is the best way of going about it. I am going to ask a Labour Member of Parliament I know to …’

  ‘Labour M.P.!’ pooh-poohed John. ‘Dad, you always refuse to see the true colours of most of those Labour M.Ps. Have you forgotten Sere …?’

  ‘I can hardly ask the Communist Party to help them, can I?’ his father said. John thrust his hands deeper in his pockets and sat down.

  Did Englishmen really rage against their own injustices? Font, his eyebrows reaching a good zenith of height, was staring at John with all his might.