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This evening, though, he was putting such difficulties behind him. An Egyptian colleague had invited him round for coffee. Owen was pleased, because although he had known Mahmoud for nearly four years now, this was the first time he had actually been invited into his house.
The reason for this was partly, he knew, that Mahmoud didn’t really have a home of his own. Although he was now in his thirties, he still lived with his mother. Mahmoud’s father, a lawyer like himself, had died young and Mahmoud had taken over responsibility for the family. Being the man he was, he had probably taken it too seriously, as he tended to do with his work at the Ministry of Justice. Owen doubted if he ever got home much before midnight. He seemed to have very little life apart from his work.
Mahmoud was, in any case, as Owen had learned over the years, an intensely private individual. Owen was certainly his closest, perhaps his only, friend, but in some respects he felt he had never got to know him. He was delighted now that one of Mahmoud’s defensive walls seemed at last to be coming down.
The house was a tall, thin, three-storey building just off the Sharia-el-Nahhasin. Across its roof, surprisingly near, he could see the minarets of the Barquk and, yes, that other one was probably the Qu’alun. The street was towards the edge of the old city, balanced precariously between the new Europeanized quarters to the west and the bazaars to the east.
There was a servant but Mahmoud himself came impatiently to the door and led Owen upstairs to the living room on the first floor. It was a large, sparely furnished room with box windows at both ends, one looking down into an inner courtyard, the other out on to the street. There were fine, rather faded, rugs on the floor and one on the wall, and three low divans, arranged round a brazier, on which a pot of coffee was warming. On the little table next to it were three cups.
‘The third is for my father-in-law,’ said Mahmoud.
‘What?’ said Owen, stunned. This was the first he had ever heard about Mahmoud being married.
‘My father-in-law to be,’ Mahmoud amended.
He seemed a little embarrassed.
‘You are getting married?’
Mahmoud nodded.
Owen had never expected this. He had always taken Mahmoud to be one of nature’s celibates. In all the time Owen had known him, he had never shown the slightest sexual interest in any woman they had met.
Owen pulled himself together.
‘Congratulations! Well, this is a surprise!’
‘It is to me, too,’ Mahmoud admitted. ‘But my mother felt the time had come.’
‘I see. Yes.’ Owen couldn’t think what to say. ‘Have you known each other for long?’ he ventured tentatively.
‘About a week. Of course, our families have known each other for much longer.’
‘I see.’
‘She lives locally so I must have seen her about in the street. But I can’t say I ever noticed her.’
‘Well, you wouldn’t.’
Not in a veil, and covered from head to foot in black.
‘But I must have seen her going to school.’
‘Going to school?’
‘She’s just finished at the Sanieh.’
How old could she be? Fifteen? The Sanieh, though, was something. It was probably the best girls’ school in Cairo.
‘I said she had to be educated.’
‘Quite right. Companionship, and all that.’
‘She seemed very sensible.’
‘Oh, good. You have – you have met her, then?’
‘Oh, yes. Once. After my mother had made the contract. She seems very suitable.’
‘Oh, good.’
‘You’ll like her father. I know him quite well.’
‘Well, that’s important, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. As a matter of fact, that’s partly why I invited you. I wanted him to meet family. I know that, strictly speaking, you’re not family, but … Well, the fact is, we don’t actually have many male relatives …’
‘Glad to do what I can –’
It was no business of his. Mahmoud was old enough to arrange his own life; or, rather, to decide to let others arrange it for him. And if that was the custom of the country –
All the same, he felt bothered. In a way it was his business. Mahmoud was a friend of his and he didn’t want him to get hurt. As a matter of fact, he didn’t want her to get hurt, either, a mere schoolgirl. But what could he do about it? And who was he to interfere, anyway? Jesus, he couldn’t even sort out his own life, the way things were between him and Zeinab –
When the prospective father-in-law arrived, he felt a little better. Ibrahim Buktari was plainly such a nice man. He was short and wiry, with close-cropped grey hair and an open, intelligent face. They embraced warmly in the Arab fashion.
‘You have something in common,’ said Mahmoud, pouring out the coffee.
‘Oh, yes?’
‘You were both soldiers.’
Ibrahim Buktari’s face lit up.
‘You were?’
‘Well,’ said Owen, ‘briefly.’
‘I was with Al-Lurd,’ said Ibrahim, ‘in the Sudan.’
‘With Kitchener?’
‘That was before he was a lord,’ said Mahmoud.
‘And now he returns to Egypt!’ said Ibrahim. He shrugged. ‘Well, at least we have as Consul-General a man who knows something about Egypt.’
‘He knows it only as it was twelve years ago,’ said Mahmoud.
That was something that all the Egyptian newspapers had said when the appointment was announced. Especially the. Nationalist ones. When Kitchener had been here before, Egyptian nationalism had been in its infancy. But a lot of things had changed since then and among them was that there was now a Nationalist movement which touched almost all parts of the population, especially the young professionals. Like Mahmoud.
How would Kitchener handle it? Would he try to work with it, as his predecessor, Gorst, had done? Or would he – and this was what was feared in Egypt, given his recent record against the equally Nationalist Boers in South Africa – try to suppress it? Was that the point of putting a general into what had hitherto been a civilian post? Was that why Kitchener had been made Consul-General?
When Kitchener had been here before, at the time of his conquest of the Sudan, Owen had been just a junior subaltern on his way out to India to take up his first posting.
‘India?’
Ibrahim began to question Owen eagerly about campaigning conditions in the North West Frontier. Seeing them getting along well together, Mahmoud, who had in truth been slightly apprehensive about his prospective father-in-law’s visit, sat back happily and let them talk.
The conversation was still in full flow when the door opened suddenly and an elderly woman came into the room. She was very agitated and wasn’t even wearing a veil.
‘Mahmoud!’ she said. ‘You are needed. Sidi Morelli has collapsed.’
Mahmoud sprang up and hurried out of the door.
‘Sidi Morelli?’ said Ibrahim, standing up too. ‘Perhaps we can help,’ he said to Owen.
‘It was in the coffee house,’ said Mahmoud’s mother, lighting them down the stairs.
Owen had noticed the café as he had turned into Mahmoud’s street. Indeed, he could hardly help noticing it, for its tables and chairs spread out right across the street and into the Nahhasin also. Now there was a large crowd gathered at the corner, their faces all strange in the light from the café’s vapour lamps. He could see Mahmoud bending over a man lying among the tables.
‘Has anyone sent for an ambulance?’ asked Ibrahim Buktari.
‘We have, Ibrahim, we have,’ said someone. ‘But it is taking a long time coming.’
‘All the ambulances are at the front,’ said someone, ‘because of the war.’
‘A hakim, then?’
Mahmoud looked up.
‘There is no need for a hakim,’ he said.
Someone in the crowd gasped.
Mahmoud straightened up.
‘Cover him,’ he said.
Several people at once stripped off their long outer gowns and laid them over the body.
Mahmoud glanced round.
‘It didn’t happen here,’ he said.
‘It happened over there, Mahmoud. Just round the corner!’
Some of the men took him by the arm and led him a little way along the Nahhasin to where an alley snicked off among the houses.
‘It was here, Mahmoud. I found him here,’ said one of the men, distressed. ‘I nearly fell over him. I didn’t see him, it was so dark.’
‘And then I called for help, Mahmoud,’ said another man, ‘and we carried him back to the coffee house.’
‘We laid him down,’ said someone else, ‘and then we saw – saw that it was Sidi Morelli.’
‘Sidi Morelli!’ Some in the crowd had clearly not realized previously who it was.
‘But he had been here!’ said the patron of the café, bewildered, ‘only the moment before!’
He pointed to a table at which three elderly men were sitting, stunned.
From further along the street there came the sound of a bell and then a moment later someone crying: ‘Make way!’ A covered cart, drawn by two mules, was trying to work through the crowd.
‘Make way for the ambulance!’
Somehow it forced its way through the mass of people and drew up alongside the coffee house. A short, thickset, youngish man, Egyptian, but dressed in a suit not a galabeah, began organizing things.
‘It is good that you are here, Kamal,’ Mahmoud said affectionately.
‘I had just got here. I was still shaking hands –’
He seemed, for all his efficiency, bewildered.
The body was lifted, passed over the heads of the crowd and laid in the back of the ambulance.
‘To the death-house,’ instructed Mahmoud. ‘Not to the hospital.’
The crowd watched sombrely. Many of them were weeping. Owen was surprised; not at the crowd, for if there was anything that drew a crowd in Cairo, it was an accident or a fatality, but at the extent, and sincerity, of the feeling.
‘Sidi Morelli, Ibrahim!’ The man beside them shook his head as if in disbelief.
Everyone here, thought Owen, appeared to know everyone else.
Ibrahim Buktari seemed suddenly to have aged.
‘I shall go home, I think. Excuse me!’
He shook hands with Owen.
The efficient young man whom Owen had noticed earlier appeared beside them. He put his arm round Ibrahim Buktari’s shoulders and led him gently away.
Mahmoud touched Owen’s arm.
‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘We shall have to end our evening early. Another time, perhaps.’
‘Of course!’
The crowd was breaking up.
‘I have work to do,’ said Mahmoud.
