Michael Pearce - The Bride Box

‘Well, I haven’t seen any signs of a kid.’

‘Nor have I. But I’m just telling you. In case you do see her.’

Mahmoud’s daughter, Maryam, went to school. This was uncommon even among his colleagues at the Parquet. Having themselves got where they were by education, they were all in favour of it for their own young. For their sons, that was. Even among the relatively liberal Parquet lawyers, valuing of education and ambition for their offspring did not extend as far as educating their daughters, too.

Or in any case, only a bit. When their daughters grew old enough for their fathers to notice their existence and to start planning for their marriages a few of them were sent to special European-style finishing schools so that they might not be totally boring to their husbands when they got married, who were also likely to be bright Parquet lawyers.

Mahmoud, however, thought differently. Only the best was going to be good enough for his children, male or female, and he meant to see that right from the start they received an education along progressive Western lines. There were in Cairo one or two kindergartens chiefly for the children of well-to-do Europeans. It was to one of these that he decided to send Maryam.

When he learned what it was going to cost him he almost changed his mind. Young Parquet lawyers, no matter how bright, were not highly paid. Aisha, however, his strong-willed and equally liberal wife, who was just becoming aware of some of the arguments about the ‘New Woman’ that were currently occurring in France, did not agree. Equality of the sexes had to begin very early — indeed, from birth — and her adored Maryam was certainly going to receive as good an education as any brother.

Mahmoud, logical to the last, had to admit the force of this point of view: so Maryam went, hand in hand with her mother, to the kindergarten every morning.

And where she went, could not Leila go too? Or so Zeinab thought. Aisha was not sure about this. Leila was an adorable child, but was she as capable of benefiting from advanced education in the way that her own perfect daughter certainly would be able to?

And then there was the question of cost. Owen was barely richer than Mahmoud and Leila, damn it, was not even their daughter. Zeinab hadn’t the faintest idea about money except that she knew Owen hadn’t got any; so she applied, as she usually did, to her father. Nuri Pasha didn’t know much about money either — he left all that sort of thing to his steward — but he did know that he had less than he thought he did. However, he was interested in the latest French fashions when it came to ideas. He had brought up Zeinab very much au courant with them and had made no difference between her and his son, a decision much assisted by the fact that he couldn’t help noticing that Zeinab was about twice as bright as her brother.

So he saw no reason why Leila shouldn’t be educated, and the fact that she was the next best thing to a slave’s daughter was no problem to him. Hadn’t Zeinab’s own mother started off as a slave? And she had developed into the most beautiful courtesan in Cairo. It may be that Leila could do the same! She was a bright little girl, according to Zeinab. Why not? Stranger things had happened. So he didn’t mind paying for Leila to go to the kindergarten; it could even be looked upon as an investment.

So off now went Leila every morning, hand in hand with Maryam, usually with Aisha or Zeinab but sometimes with Musa’s wife in attendance.

The warehouse clerk and the Greek were by now great buddies. Rare was the morning when Georgiades did not drop in to take the clerk round the corner to the coffee house they favoured. The clerk felt that he was doing the Greek a good turn by lending a sympathetic ear to his tales of marital woe; and, besides, as he confessed to Georgiades, there wasn’t much happening in the warehouse at the moment. ‘But it will all be different next week,’ he said.

‘How’s that?’

‘Well, Clarke Effendi is returning and bringing with him many goods, which will all have to be put in their right places and accounted for — and, no doubt, there will soon be billing to be done.’

‘Bales and bales of gum arabic?’ said the Greek. ‘And trocchee shells?’

‘And other things, too.’

‘Pretty slave girls?’ prompted Georgiades.

‘I should be so lucky!’ said the clerk. He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no such luck. But sometimes there is a special consignment.’ He put up his hand. ‘Don’t ask me what it is,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. Clarke Effendi keeps all that to himself.’ He laid a finger along his nose. ‘He handles it all himself. Everything! The goods come in and then go out and neither I nor anyone else is allowed to go near them. Nor even the paperwork. Especially not the paperwork. Clarke Effendi does it all. “The less you know about it, the better,” he says. “If you don’t know anything, you can’t tell anyone anything. It’s better like that.” And,’ said the clerk, ‘I think it is better. Because the old bastard is up to something, you can be sure. And the less I know about it, the better.’

‘There is wisdom,’ said the Greek admiringly. ‘It’s a wise man who knows when it’s best not to know something!’

‘Of course, I have to know a bit,’ said the warehouse clerk. ‘I have to know when a consignment like that is coming in, so that I can make space for it. And it’s not just any sort of space; it’s got to be over in a corner, where people don’t come upon it by mischance. And it’s got to be in the usual place in case he wants to move it by dark. In fact, he usually does want to move it by dark. That’s another thing, you see. What people don’t see, they don’t think about, he says.

‘But once or twice I’ve had to be there to see to the moving — make sure the right boxes are collected. It would never do to have the wrong box picked up. And that would be easy to do in the dark. Of course, we’ve got torches, but still, it helps if someone who knows about it is there to see to it. Actually, he likes to see to that himself. Never trusts anybody else when it’s important. I suppose that’s why he does so well. Why he’s a rich man and I am not!’

‘There are costs to being rich,’ said the Greek. ‘That’s what I always tell my wife. You’ve got to be thinking about your money all the time.’

‘The risk!’ said the warehouse clerk.

‘Suppose it went wrong?’ said the Greek.

‘Ah, then you’re in trouble!’ said the clerk.

‘I’ll bet you didn’t say that to Clarke Effendi, though!’

‘You’d win your bet!’ said the clerk. ‘That’s another thing he says. “No silly questions, no sharp answers!”’

‘And that’s true, too,’ said the Greek.

‘Still, there are things that I know and that he doesn’t know. How to get hold of a reliable porter in Cairo, for example.’

‘Can’t trust the buggers!’ said the Greek.

‘You’ve got to stand over them. And although he’d prefer to do that himself, that’s not always possible.’

‘So you have to do it?’

‘That’s it!’

‘Even at night!’

‘Even at night. Especially at night!’

‘Because of the temptation to wander off and have a drink?’

‘He’d go mad!’

‘I’ll bet he would. But that’s what they’d do if you weren’t standing right behind them.’

‘You can’t afford for it to go wrong.’

‘Not when there’s a Pasha involved.’

‘Oh, so that’s the way the land lies, is it? I don’t envy you.’

‘Just occasionally. I don’t do it every time, of course, and I don’t know about the other times. But I know what I know.’