“Junk shops,” said Sarah. “A flea market was my idea of heaven. Normal adolescents like to cruise round Woolworth’s. I was in perpetual search of a promising junk shop. Things. The more inscrutable the better. I spent birthday money on candle snuffers and paper knives and pincushions. My bedroom was a latter-day cabinet of curiosities. I seem to have been programmed, from an early age.”
“I don’t mind middle age,” he said. “I mind it less than I expected. I run out of steam on a steep fell rather sooner than I care for, but that’s about the size of it. The senses stay in good nick, it seems to me. Was youth such a big deal? One was always skint or in a tizz about some girl or wondering what the hell to do next. And I was a northern boy who wasn’t interested in football, which didn’t help.”
“Being young in the seventies was a status, wasn’t it? We girls drifted around in cheesecloth and strings of beads and flared jeans that trailed in the dirt, and you were supposed to smoke pot except that I tried it once and freaked out, so that was that. I was never fully-paid-up young, and I didn’t know the tunes. When they run those TV programs re-creating a decade, I seem to be watching other people’s lives—it wasn’t much like that for me. Or do we all feel that about past contexts?”
“What do you think about when you’re working?” asked Barry. “It’s not always the matter in hand, is it? Or rather, half of the mind attends to that and the other half is adrift. I was drifting in the Bronze Age this morning, working on those spearheads. Don’t know much about the period, but you start imagining a way of life. I suppose the likes of me might have done reasonably well back then—skills to offer that would have come in handy. I might have been a central figure in society, instead of on the eccentric fringe.”
“Vulcan. You could have been a god. Bashing out armory in a cave. Can you forge? Well, you would have done back then. You’d have inspired awe and reverence. They weren’t the prosaic lot that we are. Sometimes I think it odd, given the stuff we handle. I don’t believe in sympathetic magic. Magic of any kind, indeed. Mysterious forces. Ley lines and all that send me up the wall. But most of the material here has magical connotations. We treat it with the utmost respect, but we have no truck with what it represents.”
“Those blue stones in her locket—your locket—were to ward off the evil eye, of course. They don’t seem to have done the trick. I remember once seeing a newspaper photo of the Pope kneeling to kiss the ground after descending from an aircraft. The comment, of course, was—well, wouldn’t you if you’d just flown Alitalia? Sorry, that’s a bit off-color, given the circumstances. Hope you aren’t annoyed.”
“I’m not annoyed,” she said.
“Next installment,” wrote John Lambert. “You apparently felt that my last letter was of interest, and I find I’m a bit obsessed with that time. There’s no one I can talk to—my wife wouldn’t relish it—and there’s something therapeutic about getting things down.
“The thing is that she is disappearing. Penelope. I have to struggle to remember her. I can see her face, hold it for a moment, and then it dissolves. Other times, I can’t see her at all. But I have all these snatched scenes in which she features. I am there, she is there, Egypt is there loud and clear. And occasionally, I hear something else she said. The way words can hang in the head for ever.
“She’s talking about when she was a child, during the war. We’re beside the pool at the Gezira Club and she’s wearing a green swimming costume and she turns to me and she’s telling me about the soldiers that used to stay at their house, on leave from the desert. She says, ‘They were the same age that I am now.’ And I can still hear the surprised note in her voice, as though something had fallen into place for her. And I hear that and I see the green swimming costume and the high diving board above the pool. I used to dive off that; so did she.
“But the other thing is—what I remember best is how it felt, back then. How I felt. Those moments of euphoria. They don’t come so thick and fast, fifty years on. But they leave an aftertaste, believe me. You sail into the horizon, when you’re young—you’re unstoppable, and it’s always going to be that way.
“And I was in love. Well, we’ve all been there—most of us, anyway. Well-trodden ground. But that doesn’t make it any less—unique. Does it?”
Sarah pauses to consider. She looks up from the letter and stares at the packet of cereal on her kitchen table, the mug of coffee, the fruit bowl. Love? But I’ve almost forgotten, she thinks. How was it, exactly?
We went to the Cairo Zoo. That was another time-travel trip, for her. Apparently she went there pretty well every week, when she was a child. She said, “It’s so much smaller than I thought. And scruffier.” We stood looking at a pathetic mangy polar bear in a pool of murky water, and she said that. I think she meant the whole place, not the bear in particular. We ate pistachio nuts from paper cones and fed the monkeys. The keeper was shoving green clover at the hippos with a pitchfork—berseem, that ubiquitous Egyptian animal food—and we sat and watched. Holding hands. One of the euphoria moments. Hippos, and happiness. She felt sure they were the same hippos as when she was a child. What is the life expectancy of a hippo?
I consider myself a rational man. I’ve spent my life teaching children to use their powers of reason. I’ve tried to apply the same rules to my own behavior: act sensibly, and expediently. Which works, by and large, over most things: career choices, financial decisions, relations with others. But where the system collapses entirely is over love.
Actually, the first time I met her wasn’t like that. On the terrace at Gezira, with a bunch of other people. I noticed her, yes, and we talked a bit. It was in Alexandria that I knew, a couple of weeks later. The same bunch of us had arranged to go up there for a long weekend, staying at a pension on the Corniche. Beach parties; exploring the old city. Later, back in England, when The Alexandria Quartet started to come out, I pounced on those books and I have to say I was mystified. Durrell must have been moving around on some other plane entirely. But none of us had ever heard of Lawrence Durrell, that weekend, and we didn’t know that this was a city of dark secrets and outrageous characters. Exotic, yes, and quite different from Cairo—Mediterranean, rather than Islamic. Speaking with tongues—Greek, Arabic, Yiddish, you name it. And the sea, those beaches, the cafés, the trams, the villas with gardens that overflowed with poinsettias and bougainvillea and morning glory.
We went to the catacombs, the whole gang of us. Roman? Greek? I forget. But I remember the place all right—I’ll never forget that. Deep and dark and cool after the blistering heat outside. Long narrow passages with tier upon tier of shelves carved out of the rock, where they laid the dead. That was when I knew, down there in the gloom. It was difficult to see where you were going, and she tripped on the uneven floor and almost fell. I caught hold of her elbow, and she turned and said thanks or something, and I knew. Oh my God, I thought.
Why? Why her? There were lots of girls around. She was quite nice-looking but not one of the femmes fatales. Quiet and serious some of the time. Read a lot—we courted with books, like you do. Gave each other Penguins. Working our way through Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh and Faulkner and so forth.
So there it was—the bolt from the blue down in the catacombs. And after that I spent the rest of the weekend trying to engineer that I got her to myself. Slipping into the seat next to her in the tram or the café, spreading my towel out beside her on the beach. And one evening we all went to a nightclub place where there was dancing, and by then she’d got the message. The rest of the crowd we were with might as well not have been there.
Why does love provoke love? Why do people fall in love right back? Well, they don’t always, of course. But it happens, doesn’t it?
When we were in Cairo we went to the Mouski one day and I bought her a silver locket with blue stones. A statement of intent, I think.
Barry Sanders had said, “I’m not going home this weekend. The drive’s getting me down a bit. Thought I’d hang out here, and
look around. If you’re free, I wondered if you’d care for a walk and a pub lunch?”
“I was married for fifteen years,” he said. “Then it went wrong. It was hard on the kids, but we muddled through. They’re fine now—turn up and chivvy me around every few weeks. Girls. They think I can’t boil an egg. Actually, I do a mean Sunday roast.”
“I’ve never been married,” said Sarah. “Attached, yes. Quite firmly attached, indeed. But then detachment came. I was young at the point when marriage was beginning to go out of favor. We were the lot who felt that that compulsory search for an official partner before you hit thirty seemed rather old hat. We thought we could take it or leave it, on the whole, and we lived with others, and if it led to marriage, well and good, and if it didn’t, there was always another day.”
They were in a Red Lion or a White Horse somewhere, which seemed as good a place as any in which to talk about such things.
“I make it sound very heartless,” she went on. “It wasn’t, of course. The standard amount of emotion all round.”
“I grew up in Leeds,” said Barry. “In the working-class north people didn’t consort out of wedlock, even then. I dare say it’s caught on now, but not in 1975, when I got married. At least, there was plenty of consorting, but if it was at all serious, you had it properly certified. There was an older generation breathing heavily in the background who had standards.”
Around them, there were couples—young couples and old couples and in-between couples with children—and a gaggle of men at the bar and an old chap on his own with the newspaper in the corner by the window.
“I suppose we were the degenerate south,” she said. “And of course the word ‘liberated’ was knocking around in quite a big way. We made much of our liberations.”
“That never reached me. I don’t remember having that line to hand when I was arguing my dad into letting me go to art school. And my mum. They’ve just about come round to it now, but you tend to give up the fight a bit when you’re pushing eighty.”
They walked across fields, down through woodland, heading for the river. Pausing at a gate, they spread out the map and sought the footpath, head to head. He rested his hand on her shoulder, and the world seemed to tilt a little. What’s this? she thought. What’s this?
Dear Sarah:—I am relieved that you were not put off by my maunderings about the operation of love. I thought afterward—for heaven’s sake, she doesn’t need this kind of stuff, all she wanted was to know a bit more about her sister, and that year in Egypt. But you even seemed rather interested. I like your theory about an immune system—weak in youth and increasingly robust as life goes on, but always susceptible to failure. If this is the case, mine has been impermeable for many a year. Just as well.
The locket. How extraordinary. That gave me quite a shock. All this time, and it survives. No, please keep it. I like the idea that you will wear it. I like the thought of it being restored. A kind of regeneration.
I certainly do not feel that your interest in that time is intrusive—rather the opposite. I am glad to take it out and look at it while I still can. I am one of the few people who remembers her. I am seventy-four. When I go . . .
When we came back from that weekend in Alex, it began in earnest. We were both working pretty hard so we could only see each other at weekends and the occasional evening. She was finding teaching quite hard—not cut out for it. I guess. Her language school catered for the well-heeled Cairene young who wanted to spruce up their English—spoiled girls and boys who were more interested in each other than in paying attention to her efforts. My lot at the university were more satisfying, probably—at least acquisition of a degree was of some importance to them. Anyway, she rather endured the school, though she was fascinated by the students, and always had choice anecdotes about their goings-on. She said: never again, teaching—at least I know now what I can’t do. She liked the idea of journalism, but didn’t know how you got started. She tried sending articles to the Egyptian Gazette, and one got taken, I remember. But the point was simply to be in Egypt for a while, for both of us, and after a bit the point was to be together as much as possible.
Every love affair has its own trajectory, I suppose. The first kiss, the first time you say it, the first time you make love. Don’t worry, I’m not going into all that. And then the calming down, the settling into the longer term. Marriage, if it is going to be that. But of course we never got beyond the heights, because of what happened.
We went out to Mena, in those early days. Camel ride round the pyramids, tea at Mena House Hotel—the classic program. They served English tea, at the hotel—Earl Grey with a slice of lemon, cucumber sandwiches, little iced cakes—sitting in the gardens with gravel paths and palm trees and rose-covered pergolas, and hoopoes strutting around on shaven grass. I told her I’d been doing the Romantic poets with some of my students and I’d had them do some learning by heart—that was still educationally respectable back then. Which set us off on a sort of mad career through all the stuff we had in our own heads, seeing how long we could keep going, trading line for line: “The splendour falls on castle walls /And snowy summits old in story . . . A Book of Verses underneath the Bough . . . In Xanadu did Kubla Khan . . . The boy stood on the burning deck / When all around . . .” The game was to keep going for as long as we could, without touching down, as it were: “O Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being . . . Earth has not anything to show more fair.” We flung Shakespeare at each other: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears . . . To die, to sleep: To sleep: perchance to dream . . . The quality of mercy is not strained . . .” In a state of hilarity, we were—of exuberance. It was one of those defining moments—the beginning of that archive of shared experience that you need, the treasury of private jokes and references. And even now, those snatches send me back to that afternoon, and the suffragis in their white robes and red sashes, doling out silver trays, and we two twenty-somethings rapping out the canon—tea and laughter.
She was twenty-two, I was twenty-five. That seems younger now than it did then. Youth wasn’t an official status, in the mid-fifties. You leapt from the quarantine pen of undergraduate life onto the level plain of adulthood. Nobody dressed young; girls looked like their mothers, we men wore gray flannels and tweed jackets, with the suit for interviews, weddings and funerals. And you expected to do the grown-up thing: get married.
My wife and I have been together for forty-five years. We met in 1958, two years after I left Egypt. I have never talked much to her of that time, or indeed to anyone. It seems now like some disturbing hiatus in my life, an unfinished story.
“It’s the big day,” said Barry. “The locket is finished.”
Sarah was examining some new acquisitions; she looked at him across a bag made recently in Tobago from old matchboxes, a nice example of recycling. “How exciting. Can I see?”
“No. I had in mind a ceremonial handover. Maybe I could call in at your flat this evening?”
She bought fillet steak, new potatoes, sugar snap peas. Stilton. Grapes. A Chilean Merlot. She knew his tastes by now—a meat-and-two-veg man. She knew his tastes and some of his views and the way he pursed his lips when he was considering something and the mole on the back of his hand and the sound of his laugh. She knew the blue shirt and the red one and the black sweater and the brown leather jacket with worn elbows. She knew that he liked to play grand opera full blast when driving, had a weakness for onion-flavored potato crisps and did the Guardian crossword over lunch. She found herself disproportionately interested in all of this, and was alarmed.
“So . . . ,” he said. “Behold!”
It lay in his palm—a plump shiny disk, patterned with incised fronds and twirls, inset with sky blue stones.
“The chain is the original, that’s come up nicely. And it opens well, with the new hinge. You’ll have to decide what to put in it. A photo is traditional, is it not? Or a lock of hair.”
She took it from him. “It’s lovely. I don
’t know how to thank you.” She put the chain round her neck, and began fumbling with the fastening.
“I’ll think of some way, in due course. That steak will do fine, for now. Here—let me.”
He came round behind her. She felt him push her hair aside, and then his fingers against her skin. Please do that again, she thought. Go on doing it.
“We went to Luxor,” wrote John Lambert. “By train. Days, it seems to have taken, in recollection. Pottering along beside the Nile, stopping at stations where men sold oranges and soft drinks through the train window. We couldn’t afford sleepers, so we sat up all night, and I remember the dawn sky over the river, reflected, molten copper; she was asleep against my shoulder and I woke her up to show her—you couldn’t miss that. And at Luxor we stayed at a cheap pension run by a Greek lady who took us for man and wife. We didn’t disillusion her—it made us feel adventurous and complacent, both at once. And anyway, I’d asked Penelope by then. I won’t go into that—suffice it to say that we knew where we were heading, or so we thought. I had to get a proper job, once we were back in England, and then she’d have told her parents.
But the Suez crisis was starting to rumble. Eden sounding off; Nasser defiant. Demonstrations in Cairo; anti-British feeling on the up. My students would march around with banners denouncing Britain, and then rush into my office to assure me it was nothing personal: “Not your fault, sir.” We all felt pretty fed up about it—we thought Nasser had a point, several points indeed, we thought the Israelis might start something, we mistrusted Eden. But it seemed like background noise—we were too busy with our own lives to pay much attention. Especially she and I.