Michael Pearce - The Face in the Cemetery

‘Panamanian wouldn’t do. Panama doesn’t have consular privileges.’

Under international treaties imposed on Egypt many foreigners had so-called consular rights. Among them was the right to be tried not by an Egyptian court but by a court set up by the consul concerned, usually in another country and at a time far distant; which made possession of foreign nationality in some cases highly attractive.

‘If you can get him out,’ said Zeinab persuasively, ‘I’ll see he becomes something else.’

Nationality was a loose concept in Egypt. It could be acquired simply by recourse to a local consul, plus, of course, the payment of an appropriate sum; and brothel-keepers and the owners of gambling dens tended to change nationality with astonishing frequency.

Egyptians were cavalier about nationality partly because there was so much of it about. Egypt was one of the most cosmopolitan countries in the world. One eighth of the population of Cairo was foreign born and the proportion was even higher in Alexandria. Greeks, Italians, French, Albanians, Montenegrins and Levantines of all sorts jostled shoulders in the narrow Cairo streets. The Khedive himself was Turkish. And then there were the British, of course.

The British kept themselves very much to themselves. They worked alongside the Egyptians, but outside the office they seldom met. A few people – Owen, himself, for instance – had Egyptian friends, and the people at the Consulate, Paul especially, mixed socially with upper-rank Egyptians. But to a very considerable extent the two nationalities kept apart.

If this was true of the men, and true, too, of the women for that matter, it was especially true of relationships between men and women.

An Englishman could be in the country for years and not meet an Egyptian woman. He would rarely meet an Italian, Greek or Levantine woman either, since all round the Mediterranean men kept a peculiarly jealous eye on their womenfolk; but in the case of Egyptian women it was even worse. They were perhaps no longer confined to the harem as in the past (only the rich could afford harems these days), but instead were relegated to some dark back room, from which they only emerged heavily veiled and dressed in a long, dark, shapeless gown that revealed nothing of the woman underneath.

They were never seen in public. If they went out, say, to do the shopping, they would be accompanied by a servant who would zealously defend them against any exchange with a man. If, rarely, they went to some public place such as a theatre, they would sit on separate, screened benches. If their husband received guests at home they would stay out of sight.

Young men of any kind, not just British, had a hard time of it and possibly would not have survived had it not been for the obliging ladies in the streets off the Ezbekiya Gardens.

In the case of the British, extra help came annually in the form of ‘the fishing fleet’, as it was known, the arrival of dozens of young women from England for the start of the Cairo season. One effect of this, though, was to reinforce the existing social division between the British and the Egyptians, which was almost complete; and Owen never ceased to give thanks that very early in his time in Egypt he had had the good fortune to meet Zeinab.

It had come about through a case involving her father, Nuri. Nuri was a Pasha and, like most of the old Egyptian ruling class, French-speaking and heavily Francophile in culture. Partly in reflection of this, and partly, it must be admitted, from his own idiosyncrasy, he had allowed his daughter a degree of latitude quite unusual in Egyptian circles. He saw no objection to his daughter meeting Owen; and, once met, things had developed from there.

Zeinab had established her independence to such an extent that quite early on she had acquired a flat of her own, where she lived, she assured her father, very much à la française . Nuri, impressed, had acquiesced; not, perhaps, quite comprehending that even in Paris at this time for young women to live on their own was not entirely comme il faut . In this unusual setting it had been possible for the relationship between Zeinab and Owen to develop; and over time it had developed very strongly.

Lately, however, they had begun to notice just how much time. They were both now over thirty and were becoming aware that many of their friends, even those as young as themselves, were getting married. They wondered whether they should do so too.

Here, though, they came up against that division between Egyptian and British, a division that was not just social but brought with it all the extra baggage that went with nationality: race, religion, customs, expectations and assumptions. And this was especially true when one of the nations concerned was an occupied country and the other the country that was occupying it.

It was not actually forbidden for a member of the Administration to marry an Egyptian, but there was a kind of invisible wash of discouragement. It manifested itself in all kinds of ways: questions about whether it would be possible for a person holding a post like Owen’s to be seen to be impartial if he were married to an Egyptian (no one else in Egypt thought the British were impartial, anyway); sudden shyings away in the Club; the frown of the Great (which was one of the things Owen had against Kitchener).

On Zeinab’s side, too, there were all kinds of cuttings-off: political separation from her artist friends, many of whom would see her as having gone over to the enemy; social repudiation by many of the circles in which Nuri moved and which she had grown up in; and, perhaps above all, an alienation from Egypt itself and a mass of Egyptians actually unknown to her but from whom she was reluctant to distance herself.

And yet, in the end, it was the walls inside themselves, not the obstacles outside, that were the problem. Or so they were coming, tentatively, to think. But those, argued Owen, were things they could do something about. They could try to work themselves through them. And somehow, by what chain of reasoning they were not entirely clear, this had led to their decision to move into a new apartment together.

Zeinab, Owen knew, remained far from convinced about it; but then she had a lot more to lose. Owen himself, aware of the extent to which she felt herself vulnerable and exposed, was beginning to think they ought not to leave things like that for too long. Whatever their doubts about themselves, they ought to resolve things one way or the other.

And, besides, he was coming to think, might not this be their chance? Surely, with Kitchener out of the way and everyone’s minds on the war, a private exercise of discretion – well, yes, you could call it that – might go unremarked; or if not quite unremarked, at least without having the same degree of significance attached to it as in more normal times.

Still unhappy about the issue of service rifles to ghaffirs, he rang up the Ministry and asked if he could see a copy of the inspector’s report.

‘By all means,’ said the Egyptian civil servant he spoke to. ‘It’s rather a good one, actually.’

And when it came round, Owen could see why people were impressed. It was immensely thorough. The inspector had visited lots of districts – Owen recognized the references to Minya – and gone into great detail. Certainly, from what he said about Minya, he appeared to have a good grasp of the nature of the ghaffir’s work and the sorts of local problems that he faced. The analysis was respectable, the arguments well set out, and the conclusions appeared to follow from the arguments. The only thing was that they were daft.

He rang up the Ministry again and got the same obliging Egyptian as before.

‘About the Report,’ he said. ‘Do you think I could have a word with your inspector?’