Tom McCarthy - C

“Is that true?” he asks Pollard a few hours later.

“Apparently,” Pollard replies. “The tombs they’ve been unearthing constantly for the last hundred years are so full of these bandaged creatures that they’re twenty to the dozen, and quite nutrient-rich to boot. Whether or not you’re getting the real thing each time you buy a jar of ground-down ancient cat in a market is another question. Same goes for the scarabs and papyri: half of them are fake.”

Wallis, warming to the theme of forgery, tells Serge to double-check his change in shops and cafés: there’s a glut of counterfeit 10-piastre pieces and 5-livre égyptienne banknotes going round these days. It’s not just currency that’s counterfeit: people themselves are often of dubious provenance-especially Europeans. You never know whether the person you meet in a restaurant is a surgeon or minor statesman as he claims, or a card-sharp, pimp or hustler. The Gazette’s awash with stories of well-spoken Englishmen who waltz into the Continental, introduce themselves as middle-men for jewellers and take consignment of gold watches and diamond rings to show to clients, never to reappear; or ones who scour the social pages to learn who’s pitched up in town and where they’re staying, then set out to befriend, seduce and generally swindle them. A well-known bigamist, one article announces, who’s wanted for gross deception, extortion and manslaughter, is rumoured to be passing through Cairo incognito: “HE COULD BE ANYONE,” the headline shouts excitedly. It’s true: anyone and everyone seems to pass through here; it’s the gateway to the Middle and Far East. Oil prospectors, irrigation-pump importers, engineers, brokers, general speculators: they’re all milling around, waiting for boats or business, trying to buy or sell something or other. One evening, in the Savoy Palace brasserie, Serge runs into his old Hythe training partner, Stedman.

“You survived!” they blurt out simultaneously, equally incredulous.

“Did anybody else?” Serge asks.

“Pepperdine got taken prisoner on his first flight, I heard. Spurrier got wounded and shipped home. The rest are dead, I think.”

“And you?”

“Bullet-resistant. Like a reverse magnet: they just veered away from me. Must be some magic powers those lacrosse girls had. I went through five observers-no, six. The best part of the ground crew in my squadron got killed too; but I was in the air each time the bombing raids came. I’ve been flying ever since: figure it’s lucky for me…”

“Flying where?”

“Joy rides over London until last year.”

“I read about those,” Serge says, his head filling with Amazonians and Osram Lamp advertisements. “From Croydon, right?”

“Exactly,” Stedman answers. “Now I’m heading for the Levant, to do aerial surveys for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.”

“If they can still afford it, that is,” a fellow diner to whom Serge was vaguely introduced some nights ago, and who’s been listening to their conversation while he reads the Gazette at the bar, chips in. “Their share price is down three-sixteenths.”

“Three-sixteenths isn’t so bad,” counters Pollard, who’s wandered over, having failed to secure an invitation to the table of a minister whose wife he’s been buying drinks for. “The Agricultural Bank’s down a whole pound, and the Banque d’Orient’s fallen two since independence. If they can take it, Angie-Percy can drop the odd sixteenth and bounce back.”

“Bounce back?” the Gazette-reader scoffs. “I’m not sure any of them can ‘take it,’ as you say. We’ll all be lucky to avoid a run.”

“I don’t think…” Pollard begins-but the man, warming to his subject, cuts him off:

“Least of our worries, anyway: says here there’s talk of a complete withdrawal.”

“I can assure you that that option’s not being-” Pollard tries to tell him, but the man continues:

“Even the Copts want us out, apparently. If our fellow Christians won’t stand by us, then what hope have we got? And to top it all, we’re being assassinated left, right and centre.”

“Bit of an exaggeration…” Pollard answers soothingly.

The man waves his Gazette at him. “Page seven: ‘Italian Lawyer Shot in Labban.’ Page eight: ‘E. Brown, of Ministry of Public Instruction, Shot in Abdine.’ Further down the same page: ‘F. Bloch, of Egyptian State Railways, Bludgeoned-’ bludgeoned!-‘in Boulaq.’ ”

“Got a nice alliterative ring to it,” Serge says.

“Meanwhile,” the gazetteer continues, “they’re not even guaranteeing our pensions.”

“Not so,” Pollard disagrees. “Pensionable-age officials are being told that they can leave on ad-hoc-”

“Right,” the other jumps in again, “but only if we can show that we’re working under ‘unacceptable conditions.’ What’s unacceptable? Being shot at’s only unacceptable once it’s occurred, and by then it’s too late.”

“What ministry are you in?” Pollard asks him.

“Finance,” the man answers resentfully. “I’m having to help ratify this great injustice. And to add insult to injury, I’m being made to divest my own powers to some underqualified and smirking local. ‘Disentanglement,’ they call it; I call it rubbing ourselves out.”

He makes a frotting motion with his hand. Serge, his magnetic thought-poles influenced by Stedman’s presence, thinks of Walpond-Skinner’s ledger, then of balls of wool, then of Widsun, whose ‘appendix’ he has yet to write…

Besides British officials and their civil servants, labourers from all over Europe and entrepreneurs and hustlers from the earth’s four corners, the town’s also full of tourists. They seem quite oblivious to the political upheaval taking place around them-yet they have their own brand of disquiet. Serge spends an evening in the company of one: an Abigail he picks up, like some fraudster, at the Continental and, giving her parents, a Chelsea banker and a Lawn Tennis Association social secretary, the slip, takes to one café, then another, then another, the establishments’ respectability diminishing as they progress, until they find themselves surrounded by horse-players and their bookies, courtesans on breaks and worse. The conversation buzzing around them is full of High Nile stakes and boxing odds, of anxious speculation about what will happen if capitulations are repealed and foreign miscreants tried in native rather than consular courts before being locked up, unsegregated, in Manshiyya. Abigail, insensible to these strands that Serge’s ear’s unpicking, coughs on the Melkonian he offers her and, waving smoke from her eyes, complains:

“The brochure says we’re meant to ‘discover’ the Pyramids. But they’ve already been discovered. Egyptology’s a hundred years old. Did you know that?”

“I suppose-” Serge begins, but she continues:

“I read it in the Times before we left: a hundred years exactly since that French chap Champignon deciphered that old tablet.”

“Second Babel in three feet-” Serge starts to say, but she interrupts him again:

“I mean, my grandfather remembers seeing the Egyptian court in Crystal Palace as a child. And I read as well, in the same article-was it the same one? Doesn’t matter: that one or another like it-that until recently you could pitch up here with a compass and a map, and your hosts would arrange for you to find-to ‘find’-” her voice goes high and squeaky at this point-“a tomb, which they’d prepare overnight for you, mummy and all, while you slept on Oriental cushions. It’s all so… fake!”

She drags on her cigarette again, then, puffing the smoke out in a rush, continues:

“We got all the guidebooks before we set out. The Cook’s one told us we should read Herodotus, so as to come here not as tourists but as ‘travellers,’ ‘individual explorers.’ So we got that too. But now it turns out everybody else on our tour is carting round a copy of Herodotus-which they got told to buy by Cook. What’s individual about that?”