Home life
Holiday reading
Alice Thomas Ellis
Cairo
efore setting out on the hols I grab- bed a few books more or less at random, except that I imposed on myself a certain discipline, eschewing the Agatha Christies, Margery Allinghams, - Patricia Went- worths, Ngaio Marshes etc that I usually take for relaxation. There is absolutely nobody who writes like them any more, so it is fortunate that I always forget who dunnit and can re-read them constantly. This time I took Rose Macaulay's Orphan island (not her best), Madame Bovary, some Maupassant short stories and Hugh Lloyd-Jones's translation of the Oresteia. They weren't enough, of course, so I had to read them all twice — and a guide book to Alexandria and two four-day-old Tele- graphs, From one of these I learned that a book teaching the biddies how to live with daddy when he emerges from the closet and shacks up with his friend had been circulating in London schools and reflected that I only have to turn my back on the country for five minutes and it goes mad. I seem to remember a picture of two chaps with no pyjamas sitting up in bed smiling, with a puzzled-looking child between them. They are taking breakfast. As I wrote that, the thought occurred to me that perhaps I had got a touch of the sun and had been hallucinating, so I looked up the newspaper in question and there it was: Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin. There is a packet on the breakfast-tray with some- thing Knacke written on it. Is this a joke? What is a joke? It has quite ruined my holidays, since half the fun of being abroad is observing the strange ways of foreigners and I do assure you that there is nothing here to compare in sheer nuttiness with that book. There is no satisfaction in remarking, 'Well, of course things are quite different in England,' if the differ- ence lies in the fact that the English are getting rapidly weirder. Sometimes when I go out I go 'covered' in order to look less conspicuous and Ingleesy. I have acquired a wee hat and a thing to drape round it and am mostly taken for Turkish.
I have also acquired a pile of brightly coloured mats and two donkey panniers to carry them in. Not to mention a bird-cage and a walking stick. We were negotiating for a cat-basket but luckily the price went through the roof. I say 'luckily' because it is the third son who will have to carry most of these things and I inadvertently men- tioned the cat-basket while we were sitting over a bottle of 7-Up. There was a rather terrible silence. When he had gained suffi- cient control he asked — very quietly, `What cat-basket?' It was clearly the final straw and he would have denied all know- ledge of me at the airport. We were sitting outside a cafe one evening when one evening an itinerant salesman tried to sell us a chrome hat-stand. 'Stop me', as the son observed, 'and buy one.' However, I do know where to draw the line.
Relaxing over Madame Bovary I was surprised to find that I had previously misunderstood this book. I had read it first as an innocent girl and had failed to notice that her love affairs were not all in the mind, assuming that the poor lady lived in frustrated fantasy. When I discovered what she had been up to she lost my sympathy. It seems to me she had a most eventful time — not the years of undiluted provin- cial tedium I had thought were her lot. I got exasperated when everything ended with the mouthful of arsenic. Agatha Christie would have started there. As it was, no questions seem to have been asked at all and the ending is highly unsatisfactory.
The other book I have been studying is an English-Arabic phrase book. I haven't got very far and am feeling stupid. I sound stupid too. If all you can say is 'Please' and `Thank you', 'The moon is beautiful' and `A mosquito has bitten me on the stomach' then you're not going to sound like Brain of Britain 1986. Happily most of the people I meet can speak some English and are charmingly patient and polite. In response I smile a lot and have hidden the Daily Telegraph in case anyone should glance through it. With the language problem I can't see how I would ever he able to explain that one away. I have already had some trouble trying to persuade a gentle- man that he was wrong in supposing that the majority of English mothers habitually sell their daughters into prostitution and live off the proceeds. We are a very respectable people, I told him — very sane, very sensible and we look after our daughters most carefully. But that was before I'd seen Jenny breakfasting in bed with Eric and Martin.
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