Daniel Martin (74 page)

The Hoopers, or their presence, made him say very little at lunch. He worried, like a dog with an old bone, at those brief tears, that one downward look: had it reproached him, or warned him? Jane gave no clue now, it was as if nothing had happened. Any reference, she managed to suggest, would have been to exaggerate the incident. But he wouldn’t quite let her get away with that. She smiled at him as they waited for their dessert, her chin poised on her clasped hands.

‘You’re being very silent.’

‘That’s how men cry.’

‘What’s your woe?’

‘I smell the return of reality.’

‘There’s still your island. I thought that was why we were here.’ He tilted his head in reluctant acknowledgment: yes, one treat left. As if to cheer him up, she added, ‘And lovely memories.’

He retreated behind a smile and a look aside; but then something, against his will, he was conscious that his smile had been too thin, made him seek her eyes again. In a way it was his equivalent of her look; certainly puzzled and questioning. Perhaps it seemed to her merely inquisitive, or contradicting the last words she had said. At any rate she gave a little interrogative shake of the head.

‘No?’

He smiled more naturally. ‘I shall try to forget the food.’

Their waiter came with the dessert, creamed rice sprinkled with cinnamon, and Jane began to eat at once, as if to tell him he was being unreasonable, spoilt indeed.

The landscape changed as they neared Aswan, the Nile ran through desert. Limitless sands broken by harsh black basaltic outcrops, scorched by millennia of unrelenting sun, stood and waited, or so it seemed, for the great river to run dry. Tropical cabbage palms became the only trees along the banks, and desert ravens, recalling the Bible again, manna, as well as Dan’s more personal memories, were the only birds. The sun burnt down through a cool north wind.

Aswan itself came as a shock, brutally interrupting an increasingly barren solitude. The town had changed considerably since Dan’s previous visit in the 1950s. Now it had the air of a boom city, with an imposing and traffic-filled waterfront, high-rise buildings, a monstrous new hotel complex on Elephantine Island. There were crowds of ferrying feluccas, motor-launches; and beyond, to the south, the blue sky was stained a pale yellow with the dust from the dam and its surrounding industries. The horizon there was festooned with wires and pylons, radar, all the ugly adjuncts of twentieth-century technology and war. Three MiGs tore low overhead as the boat came in to moor; and higher still the azure was lacerated with white con-trails.

Dan and Jane remembered what they had heard at Assad’s party; what would happen if the Aswan Dam was breached, the terrible tidal wave that would destroy the whole length of the Nile Valley and half Cairo with it… and which made all bluster about total war with Israel a sour joke—the ‘final irrigation scheme’, as Ahmed Sabry had sardonically named this sword of Damocles. Aswan was the return of reality with a vengeance, and Dan loathed it. He had an abrupt sense of a voyage ended; and the end of the dream of a different voyage, far longer.

Assad had wanted to put him in touch with the manager of a local studio, indeed offered to fly down himself, but Dan had declined. The studio facilities were not his business, there were obviously desert locations galore, and he merely wanted the feel of the place. He was even gladder now that he had been firm. They did not have to leave the ship until the next morning, when they would transfer for a couple of nights to the Old Cataract Hotel, dwarfed, he noted, by the ugly New Cataract beside it. On his own he would have moved ashore at once, but he knew that that would have offended Jane’s sense of economy; so he compromised and suggested they skipped the prescribed official tour that afternoon, but went under their own steam… or sailed, hiring their own felucca. He presented the idea as a professional necessity, he didn’t want to rush things. Jane seemed content.

So they waited until the others had left, and then walked down the corniche to where a fleet of small feluccas waited; and to save argument let themselves be captured by the first boatman who approached them. He was a grave young man, in a white galabiya and black-banded headscarf, with a small boy at his side. His name was Omar, and he spoke a few very rudimentary words of English; beneath the dark skin he had strangely Anglo-Saxon features and rather pale eyes. There was a ghost of T. E. Lawrence about him. They tacked slowly into the wind as they headed north for the sandy cliffs on the uninhabited west bank, round the tip of Elephantine Island. The motion was pleasing, after the ship; its patience and gentleness. Kites glided overhead; then there were terns fishing, a falcon circling over the ochre cliffs, and a huge bird flapped off the buoy at the end of the island, an osprey. Dan began to feel happier as the busy town receded. He found their helmsman’s taciturnity pleasing. Kitchener’s island came in sight, upstream of them, green and dense with vegetation, and he knew that there at least he would not be disappointed. Jane, too, was obviously enjoying this new scenery.

They landed and climbed up to see the rock tombs in the Kobbet el Hawa cliff, where the Herr Professor had had his strange first experience of timelessness. They had been too long occupied by nomads to show much more than pretty fragments and perversely, though he had complained so much at the royal sites, Dan now found himself missing their craftsmanship and finesse of detail. From outside the tombs they could look back over the mid-river islands and survey the mushrooming town to the east, the industrial landscape stretching behind it and to the south. It was like a huge scorpion, pincered, menacing the little oasis of blue and green at their feet; reminded Dan a little of Los Angeles, seen from Mulholland Drive—or indeed, from Jenny’s apartment. In some way this depressing sense of a spatial invasion transferred itself to his sense of personal time… how briefly they were there, how short the permitted entry into the oasis. The man who had guided them round the tombs pointed out various landmarks in the town, but Dan was lost in his own thoughts.

Then he had a very peculiar few moments of disorientation. Perhaps there really was some genius loci, though his experience was not of timelessness, but of somehow being outside his own body, as if he were a camera, merely recording, at a remove from present reality. For a brief but abyss-like space he was not at all sure where he was, what he was doing. This landscape, this voluble guide, the way the wind moved this woman’s hair… it was like a mechanical trip in the normal current of consciousness, a black-out, an epilepsy, and he found it, during the few seconds it lasted, ominous, unpleasant; as if he, all around him, was an idea in someone else’s mind, not his own.

He paid and tipped the guide, then followed Jane down the narrow path to where their felucca and its two attendants waited. He would have liked to try to describe to her what had just happened, but felt the old German had in some way pre-empted him; it would seem silly, like exclaiming over some experience of déjà vu, whose metaphysical strangeness could not be conveyed, and must always sound suspect to an outsider. The evanescence, the illusion of lost angle he had had the same feeling once or twice before, when he was tired, on film-sets. Nothing existed except as a record of another pair of eyes, another mind; the perceived world was as thin as an eggshell, a fragile painted flat, a back-projection… and behind, nothing. Shadows, darkness, emptiness.

He watched Jane’s back, as she descended the steep slope just before him. She was wearing bell-bottomed jeans, a pale terracotta-coloured shirt beneath a kind of loose woollen cardigan-cum-coat, too long to be one, too short to be the other, that she had often worn on their forays from the ship. It was unashamedly sui generis, and managed to hit, more than anything else she wore, that blend in its owner between the ancient bluestocking’s indifference to clothes and a contradictory, but not altogether casual, respect for how personality is conveyed through choice of them. Then the rush-basket she was carrying—that touch of domesticity, of being on a shopping expedition as well: she was wearing the silver comb in her hair, but a dark strand had escaped.

And once again Dan had a moment, like that one on the Dorset down, of imagining that they had married, had been married since the beginning; he saw his wife, not Anthony’s widow; a hand on her shoulder, a moment’s stopping, a replacing that escaped strand, an indulgent little marital nothing. Then he felt frightened again. Perhaps his brief experience above, which part of him was already dismissing as a curious trick of the brain-cells, a second or two’s lapse of those responsible for maintaining one’s normal state of consciousness—was premonitory; just as he had, a few moments before it happened, slipped from an outer spatial to an inner temporal analogy over the invading town, perhaps there had been some warning of an imminent greater slip, into something pathological, a madness, a declared schizophrenia… the ground levelled out and he came beside her, damning death and introspection.

They set off again, against the current but with the breeze behind them, down the reach towards Kitchener’s Island. The sun was beginning to decline and high on the sandy dunes that crowned the western cliffs there was a congregation of the kites, some twenty or thirty of them, perched on the sand, dark brown and hieratic. Omar brought them in past the first green walls of the trees of the island; strange flowers, leaves, boughs sweeping the water. There were no houses on this side of the river, the town was lost; and one might, as they came closer still beside the towering wall of sunlit vegetation, with the quiet water, have been on one of the summer Oxford rivers. Some hidden warbler bubbled an out-of-season song. It was delicious, after the arid desert of earlier that day: a profound and liquid, green and eternal peace. Once again Omar moored. They disembarked, and after a few steps up under a huge canopy of bougainvillea, found themselves in one of the island’s walks.

Though some attempt had been made to maintain the island as the great botanical garden Kitchener had initiated—here and there massive leaden labels with exotic Latin names and distant countries of origin still hung suspended round trunks, and from time to time they saw gardeners at work—the place had a charmingly haphazard and unkempt quality. It had literally run to seed, and bred the pleasing air of a once stern scientific purpose succumbed to the mere existing of shady vistas, countless birds, coolness, simplicity… the simplicity of the finest Islamic architecture, of centuries of folk-knowledge exercised on sanctuaries against the sun. It was an Aihambra composed of vegetation, water, shadow; and perhaps nicest of all, it remained almost exactly as Dan had remembered it—one of the loveliest and most civilized few acres in his knowledge of this world, a tropical bonne vaux. He was careful not to prompt Jane, but she too fell for the place at once. They had strolled hardly a hundred yards before she touched his sleeve.

‘I want a house here, Dan. Please.’

He grinned. ‘That’s what Andrea and I felt.’

‘It’s like a Douanier Rousseau version of the Garden of Eden. And how clever of you to think of it for your film.’

‘I hope they’ll use it. It’ll make a nice point of return.’

After a while they sat on a bench in one of the sidewalks. There were other strollers on the main paths, specks of distant colour who idled through the sun-shot shadow like figures not from a Rousseau, but in a Manet or a Renoir. They discussed what they would do those next two days, the other things to see, whether they should fly down to Abu Simbel or not… a number of their fellow-passengers were going to do so, the Hoopers had reported it was worthwhile, or so they’d been told, just for the vast landscapes of Lake Nasser—and the engineering side of it, of course, the ‘fantastic’ raising of the temple from the ancient site. Jane had resisted the idea on the cruise, but now she gave way, one might never have the chance again… the day after next, they decided. Then a band of some dozen or so young Egyptians came by, a mixture of boys and girls, in European clothes. There were looks, things said, as they approached the two foreigners. And as they passed one of the boys cried, as if it were a joke, in English, ‘Good morning!’

Dan smiled and said, ‘Good evening.’

‘Ingleesh?’

‘English.’

‘Very good. Ingleesh very good.’

And suddenly the kids gathered round Jane and Dan, in a close little crescent, amused brown eyes, the girls biting their lips.

‘You make holiday?’

‘Yes. And you too?’

But the boy didn’t understand the question. A girl beside him spoke; she was pretty, less broad-faced than most Arab women, with long dark hair and finely shaped eyes.

‘We have free day today. No work.’

‘Speak Ingleesh very good,’ said the first boy.

She was shy, but she did speak better English. Her father was an engineer at the Dam, a year ago a young sister had had to have some complicated heart operation, and she had spent three months in London with her mother and the sick sister. She was seventeen, she and her friends were from the leading high school in Aswan. She wished she could live in Cairo, they all wanted to live in Cairo, or Alexandria. It was too hot here, too ‘dirty’. Jane asked if it ever rained.

‘I live here two year, I never see rain.’

There were giggles from her companions as she spoke, murmurs in Arabic, and every now and then her dark eyes would flash sideways reproachfully at whatever taunt she was receiving. She talked mainly to Jane, and the others began to drift away, until only the gazelle-eyed girl and two others were left. They learnt English at school, but they had to learn Russian as well. They didn’t like it, but it was the law. They liked English much better. She wished she could find an English pen-pal.