Tugging my hand, Esmé made us fall back a short distance behind Professor Quelch. She leaned her little hip against my thigh. She had a compliant, dreaming softness I had known for a while in Constantinople. I found her mood both fascinating and alarming. She was, once again, suddenly offering me the whole responsibility for her fate, her very life and soul. Flattering as it was, this did not entirely suit me. I was scarcely more than a youth and not ready to transform myself into any woman’s tower of strength. While I was quite prepared to look after my little girl and cherish her I did not wish to become, as it were, her cause. There is a considerable strain involved in being another person’s ideal. I loved Esmé as a daughter, a sister, a wife, meyn angel, meyn alts! She was everything I had ever wanted. Yet, still I could not trust a Fate which had already snatched her from me, in different incarnations, four times. I yearned to commit myself wholly to her. I knew I must do so if ever she was to believe in my devotion, yet it was almost as if I wanted to put a distance between us again. I had always known how to master her, yet I feared to master her. Even the Marquis de Sade understood that the slave is not the only prisoner; sometimes the slave owns the master more thoroughly than the world can ever guess. I have known humiliation. I understand it. But I never became a Musselman. J’entendis l’horrible fouet de Grishenko siffler dans l’air lugubre et gris. Nous criâmes au même moment.
Malcolm Quelch raised his hand to an acquaintance, a gauze-draped woman of middle years, as she drew across the sandy slabs a charge of straw-hatted schoolchildren, doubtless the daughters of diplomats and soldiers, who moved with the familiar reluctant tread I had observed in the museums of Kiev and Paris, their navy-blue pleated skirts swinging in unison and reminding me of a party of Scots I had seen during the last stages of the Civil War, when the Whites and their allies were falling back to Odessa. My own little girl was scarcely older than they. I wondered if I should not consider asking Major Nye’s help in finding a good English boarding-school where she could learn the lessons of normality and moral rectitude which would turn her into a perfect wife for a man of affairs. However, Esmé’s explicit remarks about these children were not in any way suitable and I was only glad that Quelch’s grasp of vernacular Turkish was less than perfect.
‘And how are you finding Cairo, dear mademoiselle?’ Politely our professor turned to include himself in the conversation.
‘It is very pretty,’ she said. ‘Especially the mosques.’ She flicked a fly from her blue and white parasol. ‘And the lovely trees and so on.’
‘Cairo, my dear young woman, is a City of Illusion.’ He paused to watch the schoolgirls racing towards an Italian ice-cream cart almost identical to those I used to see on the beach at Arcadia. I came ashore in Arcadia, from the Oertz when she crashed in the sea, but the carts and the bands and the pretty girls had all gone. Only the Jew met me and took me to his house. He said he worked on a newspaper in Odessa. He had been born in Odessa, he said. This did not surprise me. ‘And we can find in that city all the beauty of Illusion. But Cairo is also a frontier-town, sweet dear mademoiselle, with the familiar characteristic of such a town.’
‘A frontier to what?’ enquired my little one with honest curiosity.
‘To the past, I suppose. The North is exhausted, but the South awaits us. Are you interested in the past, mademoiselle?’
‘I am too young for the past, in the main,’ she said. ‘My interest is principally for the here and now.’
‘This is the generation of the wilful Modern Girl, I fear.’ Malcolm Quelch spoke to me in English. And he winked to show that he had made a joke. I assured him in the same language that Esmé was the very model of virtue and that he was not to judge her by either her fashionable clothes or her apparent vapidity. And Esmé, hating to be excluded by a language of which she had only the prettiest rudiments, asked in French if it were not yet time for lunch. Professor Quelch informed her that it was only nine-thirty and that at twelve, he understood, they would be bringing us out a buffet from the hotel. ‘The food is excellent. They have nothing but British-trained chefs.’
Understanding this much, Esmé darted me a look of sardonic despair. Professor Quelch, propped upon one of the lower stones, asked if she were unwell. She merely began to hop about in the loose sand, eventually removing one of her little high-heeled slippers. ‘My shoe,’ she said. ‘It is full of this awful stuff. Are we almost gone round?’
‘Not yet, I fear, charming lady. We have two more golden sides to negotiate before we shall catch sight of our friends.’
‘Oh, Maxim!’ Still hopping, my darling pointed at two men stalking by supporting a battered chair on their shoulders. I was obliged to negotiate a price with the ruffians to carry my child in our wake as Quelch and I continued to walk. I explained to him, as if sharing a secret, that Esmé had experienced a restless night and was still tired. Quelch took my meaning. A bond was growing between us. It was of a different order to the wholesome comradeship existing between his brother and me, yet I did not resist it. My respect for Quelch’s experience and scholarship was considerable and I was honoured he should be prepared to share it with me.
‘The Copts and not the Arabs are the original sons of this land.’ He indicated some chipped slogan from an earlier millennium. ‘What a paradox it all is. Even the Prophet did not consider Christianity the foe of Islam. On the whole the Moslems are the real aliens and the Copts the real aborigines. The Coptic Christians are today not loved by their Moslem fellow-citizens, despite fine speeches by eloquent young men about the brotherhood of all Egyptians united against the Wicked Foreigner!’ He glared almost cunningly at me from the edge of his eye as we turned the third corner. ‘Are you interested in paradox, Mr Peters?’
I said that as an engineer I was interested in the resolution of apparent paradox.
‘Then you are a man of your times!’ He laughed, the sound of a bolt being drawn after years of disuse. ‘I am afraid that I have accepted the irrational. It is almost the norm, these days. But you are still young enough to think you can mould the world into something better than it is.’ He had grown suddenly more effusive. ‘The God of Christ is ipso facto the God of Chance.’ He put his arm around my shoulders, patting me as an older brother might, offering encouragement and approval. Perhaps he, the youngest, had always wanted a relationship where for once he might command. I think he looked for that in me. He was a man desperately needing a protégé, while I still longed for a mentor. Perhaps I let Quelch too easily influence me for a time, to my eventual regret.
We turned the fourth corner and came up behind our colleagues. Watched by a throng of local hucksters, they had gathered about a large touring car. They were sipping lemonade proffered by an impeccably costumed servant in a tarboosh. Seated in the back seat of the great Mercedes was a small, swarthy man in a white satin suit and a gleaming panama which he lifted as Esmé rode in upon her ramshackle palanquin and was lowered to the dust. ‘Meet the boss,’ said Mrs C., introducing us to Sir Ranalf Steeton, in whose hands our immediate destiny now lay. We greeted him with the enthusiasm of shipwrecked passengers apprised of rescue. As he shook hands with Esmé he returned our enthusiasm twofold. ‘I say, what a stunner! This must be our other lovely star! Do join me in the car, ladies. I must learn everything about you.’
I walked away from Mrs Cornelius and my Esmé as they simpered beside Sir Ranalf. He was in the hands of professionals. I could rely on them to do their work and was content to let them make whatever possible gains they could for us. Wolf Seaman, unbuttoning his shirt, had turned bright red and pretended to tackle some problem with the camera. When I pointed out that our girls were currently our greatest asset he said something waspish about his talent being the best thing we had and he was about to expand on this when the car’s horn brought us back, smiling and manfully agreeable, to Sir Ranalf, whose orderly had finished handing out the packed lunches and those awful bottles of Bass. ‘I’m so sorry I can’t have you to luncheon at the Mena Palace,’ said t
he little man bending to kiss Mrs Cornelius’s dainty, pink hand with his own dainty pink lips. ‘But we shall arrange something soon.’
‘You have yet to hear from our masters in Hollywood, I take it?’ Seaman wanted to know.
‘I fear so, dear boy. It’s the holidays, do you see? Everyone’s in Florida or Vermont or wherever it is you chaps go at Christmas and the New Year. Valentino apparently left Le Havre on January 16th. I’ve sent to Alexandria and apparently Mr Barrymore walked out of his hotel and has not been seen for a couple of days. There is some suggestion that he transferred from the Hope Dempsey to Lord Witney’s yacht which was going to Corfu for the Hogmanay.’
‘Barrymore?’ said Mrs Cornelius, poised upon the running-board. ‘Wot?’
‘Your missing leading man, sweet lady. I’m most awfully sorry, but you were supposed to meet him, you see, in Alex. They were afraid he would get lost if you weren’t all there together. Apparently a wire went astray.’
‘There wos so many,’ she said.
‘Is it John or Lionel?’ Esmé was cautious.
‘I only know it isn’t Ethel. But it would not be the first time John has sent a substitute while he goes about his own business. He is, I gather, something of a prankster.’ His little, precise voice had its own peculiar melody, like the warbling of a self-contained canary, and it softened oddly when he addressed women, as if he sought to mesmerise them. I had never heard quite such a voice and I did not find it particularly pleasant. It seemed to me that Mrs Cornelius was rather repelled by him but made a considerable effort to be agreeable. Clearly, she was relieved when she could make her departure. It was left to Esmé to prove herself a most remarkable actress, with her display of reluctant separation from a man she found of consummate fascination. For his part he squeezed her hand, pinched her cheek, murmured a compliment in her tiny pink ear and let her slip slowly from him before swinging his chubby body from the rear seat to the front and, with an impatient wave, directing his driver back to Cairo.
As soon as the car was out of sight, Esmé linked her arm in mine. ‘Is it true we shall have no proper luncheon today?’ She stared with distaste at the remaining boxes in the hamper.
Seaman stopped with a sigh to pick up his portion. ‘I suspect we are on probation. At least until we hear from Hollywood. Sir Ranalf told me privately before he left I was not to worry about anything. He is genuinely on our side, I think.’
Mrs Cornelius looked at him with wondering sympathy. ‘That little porker’s a greedy bastard, mark my words. ‘E’s art fer hisself an’ ‘e’s orlready makin’ the most o’ this. ‘E’s up ter somefink. Come on. Let’s git shootin’ before it’s too bloody ‘ot an’ orl me effin make-up runs again!’
I watched the two women retreat to their costumes, unhappy tent-mates, calling for Grace and the Jewess.
Malcolm Quelch had found himself a folding chair and a garden umbrella. He sat some distance off with his lunch on his lap, observing the little natives as they ran about our perimeter shrieking with excitement, sticking out their tongues and occasionally pointing to their arses in a manner which was either inviting or insulting, it was impossible to guess. Quelch’s attitude was innocent and avuncular, but if any boy came too close he did not miss the chance to whack him smartly with his cane. Meanwhile Seaman was working himself up into the peculiar frenzy with which he normally directed studio flapper parties and which seemed oddly inappropriate here, hands waving and shrieking as wildly as our surrounding audience. Radonic, ballooning vivid lemon behind his camera, took readings off his grip and, having made-up and dressed, I busied myself with the trial scene, our opening shot where Mrs Cornelius and myself embrace against the background of the pyramids and Esmé strolls by to glance idly at me - an action which of course will have considerably greater significance later in the story. For these shots it did not matter if the watching crowd behaved in any way it pleased, but if the footage proved usable, we would employ it in the editing. If not, it would still give us needed information. I knew an immediate sense of elation as the ladies emerged in their special frocks, Esmé in deep blue, Mrs Cornelius in pale pink, a cloudscape of undulating feathers, lace and silk, to stop at last before me, to glance towards the camera and the whining, scowling Scandinavian who, with nervous hands upon the cameraman’s careless shoulders, was whispering complicated instructions in his native tongue, of which Radonic had not a syllable. Mrs Cornelius turned fabulous powder, mascara and rouge upon me so suddenly that a sharp, delicious frisson stabbed through my whole body. I moved dreamily into her embrace, my eye-shadow so weighting my lids that I was forced to raise them very slowly to stare into her exquisite blue eyes, automatically mouthing the lines which came from Seaman’s shriek of ‘Action’.
Bobby: I know that I have loved you since the world began.
Irene: And we shall love each other until the world shall end.
This was my epiphany. It was as if I had reached the quintessential moment of my existence, from which radiated all the possibilities of past, present and future. Behind me were the wars, the turbulence and terrible cruelties, the filth and the bloody corpses of the century’s struggles; ahead lay a silver and gold vision, the ethereal splendour of my independent flying republics, my healthy, handsome citizens in a cleaner, more rational world, with sentimentality abolished and self-respect made the rule. It was as if all the promises of my life were to be fulfilled and every disappointment and betrayal redeemed! It was almost as if I had been sent a heavenly sign, an affirmation and a confirmation of my noblest ideals. I was so close I could barely control my trembling. Her perfume was sweet as morning roses, her flesh so wonderfully soft it was scarcely flesh at all, her body radiating such sensuality I could barely control the shivering of my blood. Esmé was momentarily forgotten. Mrs Cornelius was my Goddess, my Muse, the great constant of my life, my Guardian Angel, the one friend who always cared for me (up or down, right or wrong), who shared so much of my vision and respected the wholesome idealism behind it, the hatred not of other peoples, but of confusion, of mongrelism. The love of my own culture and people is a fundamental of my life. She shared my distaste for lies and hypocrisy, my admiration for nobility, self-sacrifice and courage in all its forms, my willingness to extend a helping hand to anyone who wished to better himself, black, white, olive or yellow, so long as each accepted his equal responsibilities in the order of things. The simple moral lessons of my Russian childhood are not, I think, inappropriate to these chaotic times! Neither are they limited to the Slav. Nordic peoples share them in one form or another and they exist where Christians have left their mark, in Italy, Spain and, still, sometimes, in Greece, the centre of all our learning and our pride. They are the ideals of the Enlightenment, of the Age of Science, and if I alone still hope to convince the world of their message, and point to the road to our salvation, this does not, I hope, make me mad. I continue to speak for my people, for my past, for honest patriotism. Love of country, respect for one’s own culture surely helps us understand another’s emotions for the things he calls his own? The tribes of Europe might have co-existed peacefully for centuries had not the tribes of Oriental Africa, with their alien allegiances, observed our wealth and power and hungered for it. Let Palestine take her Jews and Morocco her Moors. I have no quarrel with them while they remain firmly on their own side of the Mittel Sea. My inventions and ideas would benefit everybody. I yearned to share my genius with the world. What a different place it would be today! This is the understanding I had in common with Mrs Cornelius. With me she is the only one left alive who knows how perfect was our lost future. I grieve for it, still.