Making It Up (23 page)

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.

So we just got on with things. Work—and as much play as we could get in. Once, we went to find her childhood home, the house where she'd grown up, outside the city. Cairo was creeping outward by then; the open country around was being slowly gobbled up by slum building. But the three big houses with their gardens were still there. The driveway to hers had an avenue of eucalyptus trees, and I remember her being quite emotional at that point—she'd had a thing about those trees, when she was a child. We introduced ourselves to the Egyptian family living there, and they were very friendly, very welcoming. But I think that for her the whole occasion was rather disturbing.

We'd both been wartime children, though our experiences were very different. She'd been in Egypt throughout, with the Germans steaming across the desert toward them, in the early 1940s. She said she was never in the least bothered; war seemed the natural and normal thing—the way in which children just accept the circumstances they are landed with. I remember feeling very much the same, as a boy. I was in Suffolk, with my mother and brother; my father was called up, of course, and we used to trace where he was on the map, when we knew, sticking in red pins—training in Scotland, then India, and eventually Burma. It never crossed my mind that he might not come back, and he did, but I barely recognized him. Penelope's family made a dash for Palestine, when a German invasion of Egypt looked imminent; what she remembered best of that time was collecting cowrie shells on a Palestine beach, and seeing General de Gaulle once in his dressing gown, in the high commissioner's house in Jerusalem.

Looking back now, I'm startled to realize that there were only a dozen years or so between that wartime, and the peace, if that is what it was, in which she and I were stepping out in Cairo. No time at all. But to us, then, it was an age: we'd gone from child to adult, we were other people.

There's a house in Cairo called the Beit il Kritiliya, beside the mosque of Ibn Tulun. It's a building that survives from the Mameluke period—sixteenth or seventeenth century—all kitted out with the most amazing collection of oriental furnishings. Courtyards with fountains, and
mashrabiya
windows, and alcoves lined with Turkish rugs. She had loved going there when she was a child—it had seemed like the
Arabian Nights
brought to life. She fantasized about it, apparently—told herself stories in which she played as Scheherazade and everyone else.

We went there. One blazing-hot afternoon; inside it was cool, as though you'd gone into another world. And I think we each saw a quite different place. I thought it was wonderful—exotic, romantic, essence of the East. And she was rather quiet and glum. She tried to explain. It was that she couldn't any longer see it as she once had: now, it was interesting and strange, but it had lost its power. The magic had gone—whatever it was that turned it into something mythical. She said she realized that the change was in her, not the house; it was to do with having grown up. She talked about how she'd felt out of place, in England, all through her adolescence. Now, she knew she wasn't at home here anymore. “It's gone,” she said. And we started to make plans about what we'd do when we got back to England.

 

 

Sarah found a note on her worktable: “I wondered if you might fancy spending this weekend up north. Think it over. I'll understand if you don't—at least, let's say I'll put a brave face on it.”

She found that she did not need to think it over.

They drove north after work on Friday, up the motorway, Verdi on the car radio, loud; whatever comes of this, she thought, that music will be forever charged now. Loaded, for ever.

His house was one of a brick terrace in a small village. Two up, two down, kitchen and bathroom; workroom extension occupying most of the garden.

“My bedroom,” he said. “And the spare.”

He put her case in the spare, and that first night she slept there, alone.

They walked. Sarah thought that she had never walked so far, and with such exuberance. She could have walked over the horizon, she felt.

“Tell me when you've had enough,” he said. “This doesn't have to be an SAS training exercise.”

They ate sandwiches in the lee of a stone wall. “All right?” he inquired.

“I can't remember when I was so all right,” she said, and he put his arm round her. She knew then that she would not spend the coming night alone in the spare.

In the small hours of the morning he said, “When I suggested this weekend I had no idea if we'd end up like this or not. I won't say I didn't have ambitions, but I wasn't at all sure how you felt.”

“And are you now?”

“I reckon so.”

She sat in an old basket chair in his workroom, reading, while he dismantled a carriage clock he'd found at a car boot sale. “I'm not so hot at clocks,” he said. “Some I can do. This one's a bugger. If I get it sorted, it's yours, as a memento of now.” He looked across at her. “This is odd. I feel as though you've always been sitting there, reading your book while I potter about.”

Later, in the car, he put his hand on her knee. “Tell me things,” he said. “Anything. Just talk. Keep me awake.”

So she did. Afterward, it seemed to her that she had gone into a kind of free flow. She had talked about last week, and about thirty years ago; she fished her life for stuff that might entertain or inform. The motorway roared by, a procession of light, and she cruised her past, trawled up incident and opinion, people and places. This is reckless self-exposure, she thought. “Have you had enough?” she said. “Aren't you tired of me?” And he touched her knee again: “I think it'll be quite a while before that happens.”

“I'm getting toward the end,” wrote John Lambert. “1956. You couldn't any longer ignore what was going on. Suez. Nasser and Eden. Most of the Brits were starting to pack, and we knew we'd have to go. Anti-British feeling was high, and if the balloon went up, it would be a sight worse. I gave in my notice at the university, and my students all trailed in to shake me by the hand and say: ‘Not your fault, sir. Down with Anthony Eden!'

“We'd had a habit of walking beside the Nile, at sunset. Penelope and I. When she was a child there had been some great trees beside one of the bridges, and she remembered how the egrets used to come in from the cultivation outside Cairo in the evenings, to roost there. She described the trees studded all over with the white birds, and more floating in, the sky full of them, and the reek of guano on the pavement below. The trees were gone now, and the birds with them, and the bridge wasn't called the English Bridge anymore, it was El Tahrir Bridge, though the lion statues at each end were still there, making you think of the Trafalgar Square lions.

“We met by the lions, the last time we walked there. I watched her coming, picking her way through the crowds, wearing a blue cotton dress and a white floppy hat. When she got near I could see at once that something was wrong. She'd had a letter from her father, sending a check for a flight home, and this messed up all our arrangements. We had planned to go by boat to Marseilles and then up through France—explore a bit. But apparently there was some family event—a wedding—and her father thought she'd like to be there, and was standing her the flight, which was expensive back then.

“We leaned against the railings on the bridge, looking at the river. ‘Damn!' she said. ‘Oh,
dammit
!' She felt she couldn't send the money back, say no. Her family didn't know about us yet; I thought I should equip myself with a real job back home before we went public, as it were. We were disappointed, with the prospect of that leisurely wander back to England together evaporating. She started to dither, wondering if maybe she could tell them now, explain, send the check back. I said, no, she shouldn't, no point in starting off on the wrong foot. I'm a pragmatic sort of bloke, always was. There'll be plenty of other chances to explore France, I said—we've got all the time in the world.