The Alexandria Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

Police, in what he calls ‘the evening of his life’ he has just been appointed to … I hardly dare to write the words for I can see his shudder of secrecy, can see his glass eye rolling portentously round in its socket … the Secret Service. He is not alive any more, thank God, to read the words and tremble. Yes, the Ancient Mariner, the secret pirate of Tatwig Street, the man himself. How much the city misses him. (His use of the word ‘uncanny’!)….

Elsewhere I have recounted how I answered a mysterious summons to find myself in a room of splendid proportions with my erstwhile pirate friend facing me across a desk, whistling through his ill-fitting dentures. I think his new assignment was as much a puzzle to him as it was to me, his only confidant. It is true of course that he had been long in Egypt and knew Arabic well; but his career had been comparatively obscure. What could an intelligence agency hope to get out of him? More than this — what did he hope to get out of me? I had already explained in detail that the little circle which met every month to hear Balthazar expound the principles of the Cabbala had no connection with espionage; it was simply a group of hermetic students drawn by their interest in the matter of the lectures. Alexandria is a city of sects — and the shallowest inquiry would have revealed to him the existence of other groups akin to the one concerned with the hermetic philosophy which Balthazar addressed: Steinerites, Christian Scientists, Ouspenskyists, Adventists…. What was it that riveted attention particularly on Nessim, Justine, Balthazar, Capodistria, etc.? I could not tell, nor could he tell me.

‘They’re up to something’ he repeated weakly. ‘Cairo says so.’ Apparently, he did not even know who his own masters were. His work was invisibly dictated by a scrambler telephone, as far as I could understand. But whatever ‘Cairo’ was it paid him well: and if he had money to throw about on nonsensical investigations who was I to prevent him throwing it to me? I thought that my first few reports on Balthazar’s Cabal would successfully damp all interest in it — but no. They wanted more and again more.

And this very morning, the old sailor in the photograph was celebrating his new post and the increase of salary it carried by having a haircut in the upper town, at the most expensive of shops — Mnemjian’s.

I must not forget that this photograph also records a ‘Secret Rendezvous’; no wonder Scobie looks distraught. For he is surrounded by the very spies into whose activities it is necessary to inquire — not to mention a French diplomat who is widely rumoured to be head of the French Deuxieme….

Normally Scobie would have found this too expensive an establishment to patronize, living as he did upon a tiny nautical pension and his exiguous Police salary. But now he is a great man.

He did not dare even to wink at me in the mirror as the hunchback, tactful as a diplomat, elaborated a full- scale haircut out of mere air — for Scobie’s glittering dome was very lightly fringed by the kind of fluff one sees on a duckling’s bottom, and he had of late years sacrificed the torpedo beard of a wintry sparseness.

‘I must say’ he is about to say throatily (in the presence of so many suspicious people we ‘spies’ must speak ‘normally’), ‘I must say, old man, you get a spiffing treatment here, Mnemjian really does understand.’ Clearing his throat, ‘The whole art.’ His voice became portentous in the presence of technical terms. ‘It’s all a question of Graduation — I had a close friend who told me, a barber in Bond Street. You simply got to graduate.’ Mnemjian thanked him in his pinched ventriloquist’s voice. ‘Not at all’ said the old man largely. ‘I know the wrinkles.’ Now he could wink at me. I winked back. We both looked away.

Released, he stood up, his bones creaking, and set his piratical jaw in a look of full-blooded health. He examined his reflection in the mirror with complacence. ‘Yes’ he said, giving a short authoritative nod, ‘it’ll do.’

‘Electric friction for scalp, sir?’

Scobie shook his head masterfully as he placed his red flower-pot tarbush on his skull. ‘It brings me out in goose pimples’ he said, and then, with a smirk, ‘I’ll nourish what’s left with arak.’ Mnemjian saluted this stroke of wit with a little gesture. We were free.

But he was really not elated at all. He drooped as we walked slowly down Cherif Pacha together towards the Grande Corniche. He struck moodily at his knee with the horsehair fly-swatter, puffing moodily at his much-mended briar. Thought. All he said with sudden petulance was ‘I can’t stand that Toto fellow. He’s an open nancy-boy. In my time we would have….’ He grumbled away into his skin for a long time and then petered into silence again.

‘What is it, Scobie?’ I said.

‘I’m troubled’ he admitted. ‘Really troubled.’

When he was in the upper town his walk and general bearing had an artificial swagger — it suggested a White Man at large, brooding upon problems peculiar to White Men — their Burden as they call it. To judge by Scobie, it hung heavy. His least gesture had a resounding artificiality, tapping his knees, sucking his lip, falling into brooding attitudes before shop windows. He gazed at the people around him as if from stilts. These gestures reminded me in a feeble way of the heroes of domestic English fiction who stand before a Tudor fireplace, impressively whacking their riding-boots with a bull’s pizzle.

By the time we had reached the outskirts of the Arab quarter, however, he had all but shed these mannerisms. He relaxed, tipped his tarbush up to mop his brow, and gazed around him with the affection of long familiarity. Here he belonged by adoption, here he was truly at home. He would defiantly take a drink from the leaden spout sticking out of a wall near the Goharri mosque (a public drinking fountain) though the White Man in him must have been aware that the water was far from safe to drink. He would pick a stick of sugar-cane off a stall as he passed, to gnaw it in the open street: or a sweet locust-bean. Here, everywhere, the cries of the open street greeted him and he responded radiantly.

‘Y’alla, effendi, Skob’

‘Naharak said, ya Skob’

‘Allah salimak.’

He would sigh and say ‘Dear people’; and ‘How I love the place you have no idea!’ dodging a liquid-eyed camel as it humped down the narrow street threatening to knock us down with its bulging sumpters of bercim, the wild clover which is used as fodder.

‘May your prosperity increase’

‘By your leave, my mother’

‘May your day be blessed’

‘Favour me, O sheik.’

Scobie walked here with the ease of a man who has come into his own estate, slowly, sumptuously, like an Arab.

Today we sat together for a while in the shade of the ancient mosque listening to the clicking of the palms and the hooting of sea-going liners in the invisible basin below.

‘I’ve just seen a directive’ said Scobie at last, in a sad withered little voice ‘about what they call a Peddyrast. It’s rather shaken me, old man. I don’t mind admitting it — I didn’t know the word. I had to look it up. At all costs, it says, we must exclude them. They are dangerous to the security of the net.’ I gave a laugh and for a moment the old man showed signs of wanting to respond with a weak giggle, but his depression overtook the impulse, to leave it buried, a small hollowness in those cherry-red cheeks. He puffed furiously at his pipe. ‘Peddyrast’ he repeated with scorn, and groped for his matchbox.

‘I don’t think they quite understand at Home’ he said sadly. ‘Now the Egyptians, they don’t give a damn about a man if he has Tendencies — provided he’s the Soul of Honour, like me.’ He meant it. ‘But now, old man, if I am to work for the … You Know What … I ought to tell them — what do you say?’

‘Don’t be a fool, Scobie.’

‘Well, I don’t know’ he said sadly. ‘I want to be honest with them. It isn’t that I cause any harm. I suppose one shouldn’t have Tendencies — any more than warts or a big nose. But what can I do?’

‘Surely at your age very little?’

‘Below the belt’ said the pirate with a flash of his old form. ‘Dirty. Cruel. Narky.’ He looked archly at me round his pipe and suddenly cheered up. He began one of those delightful rambling monologues — another chapter in the saga he had composed around his oldest friend, the by now mythical Toby Mannering. ‘Toby was once Driven Medical by his excesses — I think I told you. No? Well, he was. Driven Medical.’ He was obviously quoting and with relish. ‘Lord how he used to go it as a young man. Stretched the limit in beating the bounds. Finally he found himself under the Doctor, had to wear an Appliance.’ His voice rose by nearly an octave. ‘He went about in a leopard-skin muff when he had shore leave until the Merchant Navy rose in a body. He was put away for six months. Into a Home. They said “You’ll have to have Traction” — whatever that is. You could hear him scream all over Tewkesbury, so Toby says. They say they cure you but they don’t. They didn’t him at any rate. After a bit, they sent him back. Couldn’t do anything with him. He was afflicted with Dumb Insolence, they said. Poor Toby!’

He had fallen effortlessly asleep now, leaning back against the wall of the Mosque. (‘A cat-nap’ he used to