The Mule on the Minaret Page 10

  He stared at the small cramped script. Johnson and Gustave envied him his immunity. They thought he had no problems. Never in forty-three years of living had he felt less certain of himself.

  As duty officer he was allowed to absent himself from the office between twelve and one. He strolled down the hill to the St. Georges. It was warm enough to sit out on the terrace; he allowed himself the indulgence of a bottle of canned American beer that in New York would have cost ten cents but here cost two Syrian pounds. With the official rate at nine to the British pound, he could not afford one very often. What a cool, clean bite it had, and how good it was sitting out here by himself, without the usual throng of men in uniform. On the beach below a group of children, taking advantage of the unseasonable sunlight, were playing in the sand under the watchful guardianship of their nurses. A few tables away three Lebanese men in Western suits were talking slowly, seriously, over small cups of coffee. They would remain there over those same cups for an hour, talking in the same deliberate unhurried manner, settling, most likely, a deal in which very large sums of money were at stake. For two thousand years similar men had sat, under the shadow of Mount Hebron, weighing the ultimate value to themselves of the fratricidal strife of Greeks and Romans, Phoenicians and Carthaginians. The triremes passed and the percentage of profit stayed, and his heart warmed towards this astute, fickle, frivolous and charming people that had been true to itself, at the expense of interlopers. He could understand why so many Englishmen had been attracted to the Middle East.

  Back in his office, in the silent deserted building, he busied himself with the reading of the Mission files. There was so much here for him to learn. It would be easy for him with his sense of history and of philosophy to yield to the fascination of this new world. He could justify himself in staying on. The Government had sent him here. He was the Government’s responsibility. If the Government could not find adequate work for him, that was the Government’s fault, not his. He could revivify, rejuvenate, recreate himself. He could enlarge himself. He would have more to give the world when the war was over. And in point of fact he soon would be able to find enough work to keep his days occupied. Already the half-time occupation that Cartwright had offered him had become three-quarter time. In another month it would have become full time. Give a conscientious man a desk and a telephone and he would soon find himself employment. That was the whole theory of increased establishments. A staff of five could easily cope with all the work required. Double the staff and within a month each member would somehow or other, by duplicating duties, have managed to be busy. That was bureaucracy. Taking in each other’s washing. It might be one way to solve the white-collar class unemployment programme. But it wasn’t good enough for him, in wartime. He could not postpone the issue any longer.

  That evening as soon as the office closed and he had moved in to the duty officer’s room, he spread out a sheet of writing paper. He addressed it to the Dean of Winchborough University.

  ‘Dear Gerald [he wrote],

  ‘Thirty months ago when I told you that as a Reserve officer I was likely to be called up shortly, you strongly advised me to apply for a postponement. The University, you said, would support my application. Education was a first necessity and the authorities were not going to repeat the mistakes of 1914 and let all the young schoolmasters go to the front and leave education in the hands of the elderly and unfit. I argued in reply that if I had felt like that I should have resigned from the R.A.R.O. several years ago, that I had undertaken an obligation to be on call if I was required. Later, when my calling up papers came, you said, “Don’t forget, if you ever feel that you would be of greater service here than in the army, you’ve only got to let me know and I’ll start wheels moving.” Well, I think the time has come. Since May 1940, I haven’t, except when I was on courses, done a single full day’s work.’

  He enumerated the various posts that he had filled.

  ‘Here [he continued] it is the same thing over again. I am doing work that any fifth-form boy could do a great deal better. So, I take you at your word. Will you get the University to apply for me? I fancy that that is the correct method of procedure. It will be very good to be back again among you all. I hope that I shan’t find myself too rusty.’

  He read it over; then put it in the envelope. He did not seal it down. He would ask Cartwright if it could be sent back to England in the diplomatic bag. It might need censoring. He didn’t think it would, but it was more tactful to leave it open. And now for supper.

  He had brought a packet of sandwiches from the flat and a half bottle of Lebanese red wine. He enjoyed this kind of picnic. He sipped the wine slowly, savouring its flavour. It was more than adequate. The French were responsible for this. The Lebanese had cause to be grateful to the French. He made his meal last over half an hour. Back in the chill of England oppressed by the blackout, by rationing and restrictions, he would often feel nostalgic for the Levant. He’d miss these duty hour periods. But if he did not send this letter now he would despise himself.

  It was close on nine; he tidied up his desk. Evenings such as this provided him with a good opportunity for letter-writing. It was a week since he had written to Rachel. Should he tell her about his application? Better not. Wait till the news came through officially. She would fret at the long delay. Better keep it a surprise.

  ‘Darling [his letter started],

  ‘Here’s another week gone, with nothing of much interest happening. You don’t know the people that I’m meeting. Gossip about strangers can be very dull and anything that is of genuine interest would be cut out by the censor, so you see . . .’

  The telephone beside him rang. Diana, he wondered? And his heart contracted. That was another thing that he would miss, and miss a lot.

  It was Diana. But her voice was abrupt and business-like.

  ‘Are you free for lunch tomorrow? You are? That’s fine. You said, didn’t you, that you’d like to leave the Mission if you got an opening somewhere else. The man who runs our show is up here now. We call him “the Controller”; Gavin Stallard. Have you heard of him? No, well, I don’t see why you should, you move in different worlds. I’ve mentioned you to him. He wants to meet you. Don’t say anything about it yourself, wait for him to bring it up. It’s very possible he won’t. Not at the time, or maybe not at all if he thinks “better not”; but it should work out, I think you’ll like each other. Tomorrow at Ajalami’s, one-fifteen.’

  She rang off quickly. She had not called up to gossip but to give a message. He looked at the envelope on his desk. Maybe he would not need to post it, after all.

  Ajalami’s was on the edge of the old town. The kitchen was in the open, at the end of a souk, with tables set out under the protection of a high-curved roof. Slices of meat were roasted on skewers over a charcoal fire. There were cauldrons of rice and steaming vats of stew. The cook scooped the rice up in a bowl so that when inverted on a plate it was a rounded hillock over which the stew could be poured or slices of meat and fish arranged. It was unpretentious, excellent and expensive.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind my bringing you to a place like this,’ said Stallard, ‘but I’m only here for three days and I don’t want to eat at the St. Georges the same kind of meal that I can eat at Clar-idge’s.’

  Stallard was tall, broad-shouldered, with a heavy jowl. He was clean shaven but his chin was already darkening. He looked about fifty. He was the kind of man whom in London you would expect to see wearing a black pin-stripe suit, a stiff white collar, with a bowler hat and a rolled umbrella over his arm. He was now wearing a light check suit that had faded, but sat well upon his shoulders. He had on a striped shirt and a Brigade tie. His manner was genial and outgoing. His nose was lined with red veins. You had the impression that all his life he had eaten and drunk rather more than he should, but had kept his weight down by violent exercise. Reid’s first thought was: ‘Possibly a faux bwon homme.’

  Stallard ordered himself an Arak. ‘You needn’t have on
e if you don’t want. Whisky’s much better for you, but in England I’m one of the lucky few who can get it still. I’ve got a number of wine merchants. How that pays off! Each gives me a couple of bottles a month. Do you remember what Dr. Johnson said about debts: “concentrate them; have two or three major ones, not a lot of little ones. You can dodge the cannon balls, you can see them coming, but the bullets will get you down.” That may be good advice in peacetime, but it’s not in wartime, at any rate where spirits are concerned. Think of all those poor wretches who used to buy their gin and whisky from the local grocer. They are stranded now. What’ll you have, Diana? Arak, like me, or something different? Gin and Italian, fine. How much longer shall we be able to get Italian? And what for you, Reid? The same? Fine. It’ll take me a little time to finish my Arak so we’ll make them doubles. Ah, but it’s something to be back here for a little. I shall go back to England with such gusto after two weeks of this. It’ll stop me creeping up the wall. When this war began I made up my mind on one point: to keep on the move. No sitting in a Whitehall office for fifty weeks a year. Half my friends are round the bend already. Sitting on that narrow island, with the blackout, the bombing, and the restrictions: a new restriction of some kind every month. Heaven knows what state they’ll be in by the time the war is over; an advanced state of claustrophobia.’

  He sipped his Arak, with slow appreciation.

  ‘What’ll we eat?’ he said. ‘I’d suggest that we each order something different, treat the whole mélange as hors d’ceuvres, put it in the centre of the table and have picks at it: after all, that’s what the Arabs would do, only I’m not suggesting that we should eat it with our fingers. Will you let me order?’

  Reid wondered what exactly Stallard had done before the war; who he was and what his background was. The Brigade tie came from the First War; he had had a pre-First War life. He belonged to the generation of Raymond Asquith that had acquired a mystical significance to Reid’s own, which had not seen active service until 1917 by which time the fine flower of that earlier world had been mown down at Loos and on the Somme. Stallard had found himself presumably in 1919 at the age of twenty-seven with scarcely a contemporary. He had shrugged and done his best to do a deal with the mammon of unrighteousness. Who was to blame him on that account? What had he done between the wars? Endless committees, endless boardrooms, first in a junior then in a leading capacity; the man who always knew the right moment at which to intervene; when the others had talked themselves to a standstill he would interject his ‘Now, I’ve been thinking this: surely between our various divergent views we have one shared objective, out of which perhaps we could decide on a temporary probationary policy . . .’ He was the catalyst, and such as he, rode the storm.

  ‘Timing’s everything,’ he said. ‘For me the war came at exactly the right time. I wasn’t a regular officer in the First War so there was no R.A.R.O. nonsense in my case. I was forty-seven, there was no question of my being put in charge of a platoon, but you were in a different position, so you were automatically called up in that first September. How did it all turn out? How did it happen that you find yourself here, twenty-nine months later?’

  Reid proceeded to explain. Stallard was a good listener. He had no doubt interviewed many hundreds of applicants for jobs. He knew how to show interest and at the right moment ask the question that would make it easy for the applicant to talk.

  ‘I see,’ he said finally. ‘Yes, I see. It’s a typical War Office miscalculation. From your point of view it was rather a pity that you were in the R.A.R.O. If you hadn’t been . . .’ He paused. ‘Take my case as an example. I’m in business, a company director, a lot of irons in a lot of fires. I hadn’t much doubt after Munich that we’d be in a war in eighteen months, so I went round to White’s and asked a few of my contemporaries what they were going to do about it. I soon found out that the War Office was running an intelligence course in the evenings for men of a certain age with a certain experience of the world who spoke one or two foreign languages. That means I got in on the ground floor and I was in touch with the men who were running my present racket. So that when the balloon went up, they said, “You’d better come in with us,” and as the army, or rather as the services, expanded, I found I was in a lift that was going up. Now you, on the other hand, because you were in the R.A.R.O., didn’t make any effort after Munich. You said to yourself. “The army knows where I am; if it needs me it’ll send for me.” If you hadn’t been in the R.A.R.O. you’d have probably done in the Athenaeum what I did in White’s. You’d have started asking questions. I don’t know much about the Athenaeum, but it is, I take it, very full of high level civil servants, permanent officials, the men who run Ministries. They would have put you into touch with the right people. The Ministry of Information had its staff ready to take over the day war broke out. Then there was the Ministry of Economic Warfare; the British Council was enlarging too. The important thing would have been that men like that wouldn’t have offered you a job unless it bore some relation to your capabilities and status. You would have moved along on your own level. As it was, you reverted to the position that you had held twenty years before, without being as well equipped to fill it as you were then. Have I diagnosed the case correctly?’

  ‘I guess so. I’d never thought of it that way before. I’ve accepted myself as someone whom it was hard to place.’

  ‘Which is just what you were, but only because you were trying to find yourself a niche below your level; though actually you weren’t trying to place yourself at all. You were waiting to be placed. First War psychology that: you offer your services to your country unreservedly and your country decides how it can make the best use of you. And for a fighting man that’s the pattern still; but we’re not fighting men, you and I, and careers in wartime are run in just the same way as they are in peacetime. You have to manoeuvre yourself, pull strings. You wouldn’t have got where you have in your own field if you hadn’t known how to plot a graph. But that’s in the past, we can’t alter that. The thing is to see what we can do about the present. Now Diana tells me that you are not very happy in the Mission.’

  ‘I’m happy enough. But I don’t feel I’ve anything to do there. I’m marking time till they find the right niche. I’ve been there five weeks. Nothing seems to be happening.’

  ‘That’s what I’d heard. I was wondering whether you’d like to come in with us. We’re expanding here. We’ve got a new establishment. There’s a vacancy that you can fill. Do you know anything of the kind of thing we do?’

  ‘Very little. Farrar’s most discreet.’

  ‘That means that you are taking a jump in the dark. But... well, I’ll take a parallel. Are you a Mason?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I am, and if you asked me why I became one I’d find it difficult to give a convincing answer. You are not supposed to join because of any advantages that it might bring you; there are advantages, of course, but no good Mason would consider that. I felt it must be a good thing because of the kinds of men who were Masons. That’s how it is with us. You know Nigel and Diana, and you’ve met me. That’s a reasonable cross-section. A secretary, a section chief and the Controller.’

  ‘Should I be working under Farrar?’

  ‘You’d be working parallel, under instructions from Cairo.’

  ‘Would I be still in uniform?’

  ‘For the time being. And you’ll still rank as a captain. Sometimes we give local rank if you have to meet “high-ups” on level terms, but here you’d be more useful if you went about as someone not particularly important. But in terms of pay, now, that’s another thing. You are expected to entertain, you have to travel; that comes out of service funds and there are no questions asked. It’s a cosy enough game. The Mission won’t mind letting you go, I suppose?’

  ‘They’ll be relieved.’

  ‘Then we’d better break the good news to Nigel.’

  ‘Nigel’s not going to regard it as good news,’ Diana said.


  That surprised Reid. ‘I thought we were getting on rather well together.’

  ‘Precisely. You were getting on far too well. You were his cover. He took you everywhere and no one questioned him because they knew who you were. He didn’t mind having to leave the Mission building as long as you stayed on. But now you’ll have to leave; and that isn’t all; you’ll have to leave the flat as well. He’ll not want to appear in public with you, and he’ll set about finding someone else from the Mission to share his flat.’

  ‘Is that really necessary?’ Stallard asked.

  ‘Nigel thinks it is. He’s the most security-minded man I’ve ever struck, even in our racket.’