The Watering Hole

Description

A vaulted basement in the Frankish quarter, hollowed out of the ruins of a former two-storey building — the only cool room in Suez and the reason everyone in it stays until closing. The bars are lashed barrels with planks laid across the top. The floor is compacted dirt. The chairs are a chaotic collection scavenged from half a dozen cultures, no two alike.

The crowd is Europeans, Asians and Africans in roughly equal measure, and the noise is proportionate.

Notable Features

• The owner is a Portuguese man who got stuck in Suez twenty years ago and spent most of that time trying to drink himself to death. He gave up and opened a bar instead.
• The cellar keeps odd stock. After some deliberation, the bartenders produced a dusty bottle of mead from somewhere in the back for the party’s unusual request.
• Live music most nights — flutes, fiddles and jew’s-harps, played by whoever is in the room. It supports dancing of the arm-linking, knees-up variety, and no ballroom in Europe would recognise a step of it.
• Company men drink here and are starved for news from home. So do Russian travellers, and anyone else the Red Sea has stranded.

Connections

• Sam and George walked the party down here on their first evening in Suez, and George bought the drinks.
• Alan passed the tip about the Shah Alam here — the intelligence that got the party out of Suez.
• Pew, newly back from Calcutta, warned Freddy about a man named Ashworth.
• Elizabeth Ashby took Adrien’s arm here and told him the whole truth of her history.
• Georgiana toasted a contingent of Russian travellers in vodka, to their considerable surprise; Emma led the dancing.

Appearances

Relationships

• Part of Suez — In the Frankish quarter, in the cellar of a collapsed building