Where the Clocks Chime Twice Page 11

  “Bien sur,” she said, and indeed she was making steady progress with the course.

  “I wonder which film you’d like to see?” I asked. “There’s the French film at the Rialto.”

  She seemed, however, to take little interest in her choice.

  “N’importe,” she said and relapsed into cogitation. Really, but this was being rather a bore, I thought, as I returned to a dissertation on the resemblance between Beyrouth and a similar town on the Riviera. “The chief difference that I can see,” I started, but she interrupted me.

  Where did I live? she asked.

  “On the edge of Regent’s Park.”

  “Regent’s Park.”

  I began to explain about London’s parks. She shook her head. No, she hadn’t meant that: she hadn’t wanted to know where I lived in England, she wanted to know where I lived here. …

  “I’ve got a flat,” I said. “Just …” But she was not interested in knowing where it was. Her face brightened. Her preoccupation left her. The thing, whatever it was that had been worrying her, had ceased to be a problem. She could now enjoy her evening. She was prepared to discuss the film that we were going to. An American film, she said, with a lot of action.

  We took an arabana, and she slipped her hand into mine. “I’m glad you’ve got a flat,” she said. “A hotel or a pension—if my mother were to hear of my going into a hotel or a pension, she would never have forgiven me.”

  Her eyes were bright, her expression animated, as we took our seats. This was a great treat for her, she said. She was hardly ever taken to the pictures. Before the film had been running for five minutes, however, she was fast asleep. She slept right through the show, soundly and soundlessly. The moment the film stopped she was awake, her eyes were bright, the animated expression was on her face. “What about coming back for a moment, for a drink,” I asked her.

  “Bien sur,” she said. But she was not thirsty.

  A dying moon was rising out of the sea as we walked back to her home. The streets were quiet and ghostly in the partial blackout. The snow on the mountains glistened. It was hard to believe that Beyrouth was in a forward area, that all down the coast guns were manned against invasion, that all that day I had been busy with the provisioning of those defences with ammunition.

  “You will come back again?” I asked.

  “Bien sur.”

  The next night she dined with me. And twice in the next week. Then she broke a date. Her small brother, a boy of seven, was waiting outside Saad’s with a message that she could not come that night but she would next day. Next day at the last moment I found myself on duty. I went round to her house to tell her so. She lived, she and her family, on the ground floor of a house that could with little renovation have been converted into what is called a mansion in the Lebanon. It was a typical small house. A large, central living-room with doors opening off it. Her mother was sitting over an open charcoal fire, puffing at a narghile. She received me graciously. Her daughter would be back in a few minutes, she explained. She wiped the mouthpiece of the narghile and offered it to me to smoke. A girl of about twelve brought out two cups of coffee. A small boy of six came in, was introduced, stared at me, then ran out of the hall, and stood half-concealed behind a door peering at me. Behind another door there was another urchin watching.

  We dined together on the following night. But when I went round to Saad’s two evenings later her brother was waiting with a note. She was busy and suggested Thursday. On Thursday, however, she was not there. She frowned when I called round on the following morning. Her mother, she explained, was not happy about my seeing her so often, afraid of her getting talked about.

  But how otherwise, I asked, could we arrange it? My friend was no longer in the hospital. I had no longer an excuse for calling there, and if I could not call for her at home. … I paused, waiting for her solution. She pondered, the surly phlegmatic expression was on her face. Then her face brightened. It was difficult for her, she said, to fix things in advance. Sometimes she was kept at the hospital. Sometimes she was tired. Sometimes she was not in the mood. But if I would dine alone at Saad’s every Wednesday and every Friday she would join me whenever she was able.

  Sometimes she came, sometimes she did not come. And whenever she did come I had the consoling knowledge that she had come because she wanted to. How often, in London and New York, had I not found myself taking out young women whose distant manner had suggested that they were only there because they had made a date six days earlier, and that when the day had come they would have given anything to have stayed at home and written letters and washed their stockings—or gone out with someone else.

  It was a very satisfactory arrangement. Whenever she came it was to the certainty of a happy evening. And when she did not come … well, I am someone who has spent a good deal of his life alone; I like dining by myself.

  All through the winter and that spring every Wednesday and every Friday I dined at Saad’s at the same table underneath the gallery.

  2

  I left Beyrouth in August 1942 and much has happened since. The story has been fully told by the person best qualified to tell it, both on account of her own high merit as a writer and of her unparalleled opportunities of seeing from every angle what was happening—by Mary Borden, the wife of General Spears, in Journey Down a Blind Alley. It is a story of mistakes and of misunderstandings, of bloodshed and brutality and broken faith. It ended in revolt and the French had to go.

  It would all be very different now, I told myself, as I began the long drive over the mountains from the Damascus airport, as I followed the familiar road, across the Bekaa valley, through Stoura where I had paused so often to lunch under the trees; as I saw from the high hills of the Anti-Lebanon the projecting promontory of the port, which always by an optical illusion looks as though it were mounting to a peak; as I saw to its left the red-brown stretch of the Plage St. Simon. It would all be very different. Would it, I wondered, be as charming. So much of its colour had been drawn from the presence of the French. I remembered the terrace of the St. Georges on Sundays before lunch, the officers in their pale képis, clicking their heels and bowing from the waist; I remembered the Circassian horsemen in their high astrakhan caps and long curved swords and elaborate bullet belts guarding the long, low, yellow residence. So much that was picturesque would have vanished from the scene.

  I was wearing a tweed suit to reduce the weight of luggage; the heat became oppressive. Cars were honking, dust was on the air; new buildings were going up on every side. For a moment I wondered whether it might not, after all, have become too different; then suddenly out of a side street came a familiar smell, the stale and acrid smell upon the morning air of last night’s Arak. I had not smelt it for six years, and it brought the whole thing back. I was home again. Everything was going to be all right.

  Everything was very much all right.

  Certainly there were many changes; much building was in progress. The old Turkish houses were coming down and modern blocks of flats were going up, flats that were less suitable to the climate; but low-ceilinged rooms occupied less space and were economical. To accommodate a vast new telephone establishment a whole section of the old town had been destroyed. Six Roman columns had been found under the foundations, and a special square had been constructed, opposite the museum, for their display. The St. Georges had been redecorated, with another storey added, and the whole ground floor done over. The water-front was stabbed with neon-lighted Arabic inscriptions indicative of a newborn nationalism. The streets were crowded with new cars. Beyrouth, so the Syrians say, has become a garage. Outside every hotel and restaurant, at every turn of a corner, I was importuned with a cry of “Taxi”. The mildly ‘advanced’ book store that had been stocked in 1941 with piles of Saucy Stories was now resplendent with Obelick Press publications. Proudly the manager indicated the latest addition to his list, ‘Plus cochon que Frank Harris,’ he assured me.

  American salesmanship is now activ
e in a territory that French influence once kept closed to it. Saudi Arabian oil is being brought to Sidon and, in place of the smart French officers with their képis and clicking heels, the lounges and corridors of the hotels are noisy with coatless American oil men without ties and with unbuttoned collars.

  I drove out one afternoon with one of the Tapline (Trans-Arabian Pipeline Company) directors to see their installation. The whole thing is a typical transatlantic project. The oil boys have brought with them practically everything they need, not only the tanks and equipment and the camp itself—two-man bungalows in unpainted aluminium, a new device to keep off the sun—but their food as well, steaks and pumpkin-pie and coffee. They have even brought their own potatoes, a precaution that has been criticised by the Lebanese who maintain that they should have purchased locally—a typical example of the problems that beset an affluent guest; for, had the Tapliners fed on the country, they would have been accused both of depriving the peasant of his food and forcing up the cost of living.

  Long before these lines appear, pumping will have begun and the construction boys gone home. But their places will have been taken by a new team of marines and gaugers, several of whom will have brought out their families. The American colony is rapidly increasing. A number of American houses are appointing representatives. The staff of the Legation has been trebled and a branch of the United States Information Services established. As I sat in a car outside the community school, watching the students of scattered ages, between five and sixteen, pour out after their lessons, I might have been in any small town in America.

  The English colony, too, had been proportionately increased— by the Legation staff (taximen still call the Legation ‘Spears’, and the Minister’s residence ‘Beit Spears’), by the British Council, and by representatives of business houses. De Gaulle, were he to return, would hunch his shoulders. “What did I tell you? You have turned us out and made it an Anglo-American sphere of influence.”

  Two weeks before my arrival Coca-Cola had hit the town, and shop after shop, hoarding after hoarding, was gay with the familiar red-and-white publicity of ‘the pause that refreshes’. Its success was causing considerable concern to the local manufacturers of lemonade. During the war I was brought into contact with an officer attached to a ‘hush-hush’ section whose chief job was to spread through the bazaars crude stories derogatory to the dignity of the Axis leaders. Many of these stories centred round Hitler’s alleged impotence. I was amused to notice the same technique at work, the manufacturers of lemonade arguing that Coca-Cola made you sterile, while the Coca-Cola salesmen counter-argued that it was an aphrodisiac—‘remember those G.I.s’.

  Yes, there were many changes. The Bain Militaire is now a club and anyone can join it. It had been ‘improved’—‘how modern can you get?’—with new dressing huts, new raft, new steps down from the rocks, a loud-speaker relaying dance tunes, a restaurant whose bright paint makes the little fish restaurants on the cliff look shabby. A battalion of new apartment houses line the hills. The white and blue lighthouse has ceased to stand out in solitary state. You do not feel you are in the country. You feel shut in: the bay is a part of the sea no longer. It is all brand new, but it has lost its chic.

  A little farther down the coast, however, at the Plage St. Simon, I was to find the identical atmosphere that had made the Bain Militaire delightful. Elegance was there and charm and privacy; a long row of private cabins, some of them quite elaborate, built in cement, half yachts, half penthouses, but even the simplest one with its own verandah and its shower and a small sitting-room to picnic in; with a neighbouring restaurant where you can buy iced beer and Coca-Cola, or food should you not have brought your own; while on the sand below, like an Attic frieze, is a constant coming and going of slim dark-haired girls. What the Bain Militaire had been in 1942, the Plage St. Simon is to-day.

  I spent as many hours as I could manage there. For me that plage symbolised what had happened to Beyrouth. There has been a shift of setting, that is all. In spite of the surface change, the general feel of the place is what it was. The garden walls are draped with bougainvillæa, pale blue jacaranda lights the squares. Though the resident of the 1940s would not know where he was if a magic carpet were to deposit him in the lobby of the St. Georges the view from the terrace is the same—the curving waterfront, the sun-scorched mountains, the coastline fading north to Tripoli. The night-club section may have been refurbished, but it still has the air of something run up overnight. Colin Reid, the Daily Telegraph correspondent with whom I had originally come out by convoy and with whom I had spent my leaves, described it as a stage-set. “I’m always afraid that the scene shifters will move the props away overnight,” he said, “and that I shall wake up to find myself in a Persian Garden.”

  Beyrouth is five years farther down the course; but that is all. Places remain in character just as people do. One thought so often in the war: “What will so-and-so be like when it’s all over, after all he’s been through.” And yet when one saw him, one realised he was the same person basically. Once the original pattern has been formed, the effect of external events is superficial, until the pattern itself begins to crumble.

  Lebanon has taken in its stride everything that has happened in the last six years—the departure of the French, UNO and UNESCO, Marshall Aid, the war with Israel, the Palestinian refugees, currency restrictions, the pipeline to Sidon, the closing down of the oil refineries in Haifa and the consequent transfer of the I.P.C. staff to Tripoli; taken it in its stride, in terms of its own acquired capacity to absorb and to adapt.

  I arrived during a slump. The fashionable night-clubs—the Kit-Cat—the Lido—Ciro’s—were three-quarters empty, a sure sign that money was in short supply. There had been, I was informed, an over-purchase of commodities, of which the herd of automobiles was a typical example. One man owned £25,000 worth of frigidaires. The traders had had an idea that war was imminent and that well-stocked warehouses would be a good investment. At the moment they appeared to have been improvident, but by and large they have been tacking skilfully in the economic storm.

  The Lebanese have, as I said, an ear to the ground in every port. An agent in Sydney warns his cousin in Beyrouth that a cargo of wool is on its way to Singapore. A buyer in Hong-Kong reports to his Beyrouth employer that there is a shortage there of wool— the cargo is purchased in mid-ocean and redirected. Lebanon is a free money market, where you can buy and sell any currency. Each transaction leaves its residue of profit. They will buy in London, in sterling, a consignment of cloth; the bales are never unpacked, but shipped straight to New York, where they are sold for dollars. The Lebanese quota for Scotch whisky is very small, so the dollars which the cloth produces are exchanged in part for Scotch to attract Egyptian tourists and partly for the nylon toothbrushes which the Swedes are not allowed to buy out of their reserves of dollars.

  They are astute in business, they are also sensible. I was given a good example of this in the petty pilfering to which I was subjected in Beyrouth. I had sailed from New York in a French liner, I had spent a month in England, I had paused in Italy, and had acquired consequently a supply of varied currencies. Since I had had to declare these sums at every frontier I knew exactly what I had. I was surprised therefore when I was going through my wallet to find that I had only one instead of two ten-dollar bills. I assumed that I had dropped one on the road from the Damascus airport. It was early. I was drowsy with Seconal, and I had had to count out my money to three different officials. I cursed my carelessness and thought no more about it.

  Two days later I found I had only two 1,000-lira notes instead of three. I became suspicious. At the end of the week, instead of the five single pound notes that I had brought out of England, I had four. There could be no doubt at all. I had kept my wallet locked in a suitcase; clearly either the maid, the valet, or the waiter had found where I kept my keys. I changed the hiding-place of my keys and reflected on the intelligence and restraint of the thief who had contente
d himself with one note at intervals of two or three days. I should not have spotted him unless frontier controls had forced me to take an exact inventory of my possessions. My new hiding-place was ingenious and I suffered no further loss.

  On the last morning, however, I was counting out my Lebanese money before settling my bill. My weekly account would be around 180 Lebanese pounds (£20 sterling). I had eight twenty-five Lebanese pound notes. I had no toilet in my room and had to go down the passage. I put the money in my drawer and locked my door on the outside. I was not away two minutes. When I returned there were only seven notes. This time I was genuinely angry. Twenty-five Lebanese pounds is quite a little money: besides, I was most anxious not to have to cash another dollar-based travelling cheque. I rang for the valet. I asked if anyone had been in my room. He shook his head. I explained that this was the fourth time I had missed money, and that though I knew he could not possibly have taken it, it did seem certain that someone had.

  He looked most concerned. He called the maid. She, too, shook her head. She had not been in the passage herself, but even so. … “Let us make a search,” she said. They turned back the sheets, shook out the pillows, ransacked every drawer. Finally they pulled up the carpet. Under it was my twenty-five pound note. My respect for the pilferer was trebled. The note could not possibly have got there by any but human agency. If I had not noticed the loss, the note would have been found after I had gone. But if I did notice it, then the note could be found for me in the course of a routine search. I apologised to the valet and the maid for my suspicions. They did not, I am glad to say, bear me the least ill-will. The whole incident gave me the greatest confidence in the future of the new Republic.