On our last evening in Cairo we were joined for dinner in the hotel restaurant by a local businessman who liked to socialise with the English tourists. He drew up the chair beside mine. The chair on his other side was vacant. The amplified music was too loud to permit general conversation across the table so the poor man was stuck with just me. Our table was a large one right next to the stage.
He was a small, calm, dapper man. Every thought, word and gesture was so carefully measured I wondered whether he might be addicted to tranquillisers. Everything that I said he pondered carefully, as though my words were laden with the wisdom of Solomon. Being essentially dull-witted, I’m not immune to flattery of this sort.
He also had a way of slowly turning his moist eyes on mine and searching them with a sustained intensity that I found disconcerting at first.
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