The Mule on the Minaret Read online

  ‘And then there’s all this security, so you can’t tell me where you are or what you’re doing. I shan’t be able to picture you;... only two days ago . . . and already I don’t know where you are . . . and I’m afraid that long, long journey is going to be very grim and dreary for you; being away from all your friends and interests. I do think it unfair that twice in a lifetime you should have had this happen to you.

  ‘But you do realize, don’t you, darling, how proud I am of you? It’s wonderful that they should think you important enough to be sent all that way upon that Mission. It’s different from a whole regiment being sent. This is so very special, going all by yourself. Dear one, please never forget how proud I am of you, or how proud the boys are. It means more to them than either of us can guess, to be able to say at school, “My father’s in the army; he’s in the Middle East.” ’

  Reid let the letter fall forward on his knees, overwhelmed with a sense of guilt. There was, after all, no need for him to be here. He could easily have applied for an exemption. He would have, had his home life been happier.

  On the surface it had been a successful marriage. Rachel was seven years younger than himself. They had been married eleven years when the war broke out. They had two boys, born in their first thirty months of marriage. Rachel was small and dark. Her mother, who had been Jewish, had died in the ‘flu epidemic of 1918. Her father, a successful London architect, had remarried, and by his second marriage had three children. But through her mother Rachel had received a share of a trust fund that brought her in an annual income of twenty-five hundred pounds. Their marriage, that was to say, was materially well established since Reid was able to supplement his University fees with editorial work. In his agreeable eighteenth-century house in Southwick he was in a position to indulge his taste for entertaining. Rachel was an excellent hostess.

  No marriage could have been more suitable. Each was eminently eligible. Each was at the marrying age, he thirty, and she twenty-three. Each was a flint waiting for the tinder. Yet it had been, for both of them, a romantic courtship; he had spoken of it as the coup de foudre.

  ‘We both knew right away. It all happened in the thirty seconds that it takes to walk from a head-waiter’s desk to a table in the window.’

  And what had happened to it? Their honeymoon and the picnic time that they had in their new home afterwards had been a rich enchantment. Within five months she had told him she was pregnant. For him, as for her, it had been welcome news. There had been a dream quality about these months with Rachel changing imperceptibly, becoming another person, no longer a playmate to make love with but a precious invalid to be adored and cherished. During the last weeks an ethereal beauty had transfigured her. He had not thought it possible for him to love anyone so much . . . and yet . . . and yet . . . How was it that after his son had been weaned he had never been able to get back to the gay atmosphere of courtship? He had watched her change from a playmate into an invalid: he had adjusted himself to that change, but he was not able to readjust himself to this second change, from invalid to playmate. He could not get back to his old feelings for her.

  Why, why, why? She had not lost her figure or her looks. She was as active on the tennis courts. In herself she had not changed. She had not become overwhelmingly maternal. She did not, as young mothers often did, neglect him for the child. The difference was not in her, it was in him. He no longer wanted to make love to her; it was an inconceivable situation but there it was. He had continued naturally, to make love to her. But the spontaneity, the zest had gone.

  On the surface they were a happy couple. They never quarrelled; they had similar tastes. They liked doing the same things, they liked the same people. She enjoyed, when he came back at the end of the day, sitting with him over a martini and exchanging the gossip of the day. She shared a half bottle of wine with him at dinner. She was interested in his career. She seemed contented. She was gay and cheerful. She never sulked. When he compared his marriage with other people’s, there seemed to be nearly everything right with it. All except this one thing. Making love was a delight no longer; it had become a duty.

  He had sometimes wondered whether a psychiatrist might not be able to help him. But he distrusted psychiatrists. The whole of his childhood and youth would be explored. And at the end of it all he would be informed that he had a fixation about his mother; that once Rachel had become a mother the idea of making love to her partook of incest; and because as a child he had suppressed his desire to make love to his mother, there was now a repugnance in the idea of approaching Rachel. And perhaps that might be the explanation; but what good would it do him if it were? Was it so important to know the cause of one’s problem? Wasn’t it better to recognize what the problems were and learn to live with them—in the same way that driving an old car there was no need to know how, when and where the gears, the brakes and the clutch had been strained and damaged? The point was to learn how to handle a car that possessed those disabilities; so he had let it stand. And always at the back of everything there had been this drain upon his energies, this strain upon his nerves, this recurrent, incessant burden; a subtle persistent poison. So that his first reaction on that September morning, when he opened a War Office letter and read the calling-up notice, had been one of an unqualified relief. No sense of regret, of loss at the abandonment of his career, of separation from his home; just the thought: ‘At last, at last.’ War had produced the solution to a problem to which there had seemed no solution.

  He picked up the letter again. He re-read the sentence. ‘How proud the boys are. It means more to them than either of us can guess, to be able to say at school, “My father’s in the army; he’s in the Middle East.” ’ Once again guilt overcame him. What right had he had to leave them at a time so crucial for them, for a personal whim, because he hadn’t learnt to live with his own problem?

  ‘I keep thinking about that last night,’ the letter ended. ‘I couldn’t believe it was the last night. It seemed so like every other night. I couldn’t believe that in twenty-four hours’ time I should be back here, having seen you off at Euston and that you’d be on your way north in a train to Glasgow, bound all those miles away. Perhaps it’s best, isn’t it, that it should have been like that; that it should have seemed an ordinary evening, not an occasion, something to be taken as part of the routine of marriage.’

  Was that really what she thought, or was it an alibi, a cover, an attempt on her part to make him feel that everything had been as it should have been on that last evening? Did he ever know really what she was thinking? That was one of the strange things about marriage. In a way you knew somebody so well; you knew what would amuse them, and what annoyed them. You learnt what to avoid, and what to do. You talked in a kind of shorthand. But did you know what went on underneath? Did you ever talk openly with one another? In every marriage there were scenes; you were anxious to avoid their repetition, unless yours was one of those marriages that are fed on scenes, that are kept electric and alive by scenes, a kind of self-tortured torturing. You recognized the danger signals of a scene; you saw it on the horizon. You learnt how to avoid it. And that was what you called in marriage, ‘getting to know each other’; but in fact it was not that at all. It was a learning how to elude each other. You never put your cards upon the table. Because you had scenes no longer, you boasted that you had no secrets from each other; and then suddenly a chance remark would draw aside the curtain and you would realize that you had no idea what the other person had been feeling.

  How did he know what Rachel had been feeling through that long, last day? They spent it in London, coming up from Sussex in the morning. They had booked a room at her club, the International Sportsmen’s, to which, during wartime, members were allowed to take their husbands and to which she had often come up during this year at the Ministry of Mines. They had seats for Blithe Spirit; the curtain went up at seven. They had a sandwich first, arranging, because of the difficulty of getting taxis, to dine afterwards at Grosvenor
House. It was a usual routine for them. There was no point in departing from it. Yet all through the day he had been thinking, ‘This is an occasion. This must be an occasion. This is our last night. We shan’t be seeing each other again for four, five years; we shall look back to this night so often, reliving it, remembering it. It must be made special for her. The right kind of last night will be her assurance that we’ll re-start life happily when the war is over.’ Balzac in his physiology of marriage had said that everything depended on the first night. Didn’t everything in a wartime separation depend on the last night? It must be right for her.

  He glanced at her more than once during the play. She was laughing with every appearance of light-heartedness at this light-hearted comedy. She appeared not to have a worry in the world. It might be any evening. He had noted it with irritation. How could he make it an occasion if she was not in the mood for an occasion?

  That was what he had thought then in London, but here, ten weeks later in Beirut, her letter in his hand, he wondered. He must have seemed as unconcerned to her as she had to him. Beneath the calm surface, she may have been torturing herself with doubts, saying to herself, ‘I must make this night memorable for him, so that he’ll think of me the way I want him to, during this long separation. But how can I, on my own, after thirteen years of marriage, if he treats it like any other night?’ She might well have been thinking that, in the same mood of despair, under the same pressure, hopelessly trying to break out of the inexorable pattern that marriage had established.

  By the time they were back at Grosvenor House his nerves were taut.

  ‘I think we should have champagne,’ he said. ‘Heaven knows when I shall have another chance of drinking it.’

  He cursed himself the moment he had said it. Why had he put it that way? Why couldn’t he have made it personal; have said, ‘Let’s wish ourselves luck with Bollinger.’

  ‘What would you like with it?’ he asked. ‘Oysters?’

  She shook her head. ‘You won’t get any game on a troop ship. Let’s split a grouse.’

  ‘Hot grouse, or cold?’

  ‘I’d prefer it cold.’

  ‘So’d I.’

  The amber wine sparkled. He raised his glass. ‘Good luck to us,’ he said. The wine was light and gay. It sent a reassuring glow along his veins. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ he thought, adding as a corollary, ‘It’s got to be all right.’

  But later as he lay in bed watching her at her dressing-table, he was conscious only of exhaustion. There had been so many little chores during the last few days, the inoculations, the tropical kit, the issuing of a passport, the packing, the deciding what to take and what to leave. He was like a runner at the end of a long race.

  She brushed her hair slowly in long sweeps. He always enjoyed watching her brush her hair. It was like watching an artist before an easel, the slow creation of a thing of beauty. It tranquillized his nerves. By long habit drowsiness came over him. She stood up. She was wearing a transparent nightgown: with the light behind her he could see in silhouette her soft curved outline. In just that way in their first year of marriage he had seen her in silhouette against a lamp. She was ten weeks’ pregnant, but her figure had not begun to change. Her breasts had lifted the bodice of the nightgown so that it hung away from her body, veiling but not hiding it. He had seen nothing lovelier. At the same time he had thought, ‘I’m seeing it for the last few times and this one glimpse of it is a chance effect of lighting and of grouping. It may not come again; and in a few more days that line will have been distended. It will never return wholly, the perfection of the breasts will vanish, gone for ever.’ The sense of imminent loss had struck him. ‘Look thy last on all things lovely,’ and he had opened his arms, hungrily.

  The memory of that moment returned poignantly, as she lifted her hand to switch off the light. She pulled back the curtain, and a shaft of moonlight lit the room. She turned towards him. The club-room had twin beds; at Hirst Farm they shared a bed, though he had a dressing room. She hesitated: he flung back the sheets; she slid in beside him. She nestled herself against him and his arms went round her. His heart was heavy. The words that he wanted to say deserted him. Gently, very gently, he stroked her shoulder. ‘Darling,’ he murmured, ‘darling.’ His fingers ran the length of her arm in a slow caress. So often in the past he had soothed her this way, wooing her to sleep. On her, too, the compulsion of habit began to work. Her breathing became regular and gentle. She mustn’t go to sleep, he thought, not tonight. She mustn’t, mustn’t; but his fingers could not stop their slow caress. Her breathing became steady. She’s asleep, he thought, asleep. He slid his arm slowly from beneath her shoulders. She did not stir. He edged away from her. He had a sense half of relief, half of despair; weariness returned. He closed his eyes. In a few minutes he was asleep himself.

  He was roused, he did not know how much later, but the room was dark, by a slight movement at his side. She was trying to slip out of bed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you. I thought you’d sleep better by yourself.’

  He did not answer. He drew her back beside him. Once again she nestled up to him. Once again he began to stroke her shoulder, but this time it was different, and they made love gently, tenderly. Within a very few minutes, still in each other’s arms, they were asleep.

  Thirty hours later Rachel, back in Southwick, was writing the letter that he held in his hand; and that last night was the pledge that they had made each other, the amulet that would have to protect them against loss of faith during this long separation. He shrugged. What was there that he could do about it now?

  * * *

  He was finishing his breakfast when the telephone bell rang.

  ‘Is that you, Prof? This is Gustave. Sorry to bother you so early, but I wanted to catch you before you left. Could you spare me a minute?’

  Gustave was the subaltern—one of those billeted in a pension—whose eyes had followed Diana down the stairs.

  ‘Where are you speaking from?’ Reid asked.

  ‘The lobby.’

  ‘Then come right up.’

  If he were in a dressing-gown he would have an easier excuse for getting rid of Gustave. Gustave tended to be garrulous. The fact that he had acquired the nickname Gustave was indicative of his personality. He was short, wiry, athletic; he looked to be in the early thirties, but was actually only twenty-four. He had dark, curly hair; his cheeks were pale. He had a foreign look. His father was an Englishman who had entered the cotton business in Alexandria before the First World War. His father was dead. His mother might be anyone. It was an Alexandrian marriage. Who could assess an Alexandrian background? Greek, Armenian, Jewish, what you will. Gustave had been to an English school, to Stowe, but his guardian had chosen Grenoble for his university. Gustave had been in France when the war broke out; he had hurried back to England. Commissioned quickly, he had asked for a posting to the Field Security Personnel, had commanded a section in the north of England, and then . . .

  Like most of those posted to the Mission he had been the victim of mischance. He had been on a parachute course, broken a bone in his ankle and been in hospital six weeks. When he returned to duty his section was in another’s hands. He had awaited a fresh posting; none had come. When Spears Mission had applied for volunteers, the adjutant had said, ‘Might not this be the thing for you, Gustave; Middle East, Egypt? Don’t you speak Arabic? Shall I put in your name?’

  Reid, from his experience of two wars, knew well how this kind of thing came to happen. Colonels did not recommend ‘duds’ when applications for special appointments reached them, but they put barriers round the men they really needed. Gustave’s colonel probably had nothing specific against Gustave. His foreign background?—Yes, perhaps, in part. Alexandria? Who was his mother, after all? And why Grenoble? Why not an English redbrick university? A certain foreignness, some basic difference? A sense that he was not quite one of them? If he had not had that accident no one would
have considered having him supplanted. But since he had had that accident, what a lucky chance. For five weeks Gustave had been at a loose end. He had felt humiliated. Like all the other missionaries he had been proud and excited, restored in his own self-esteem, by his new appointment. Now he was back where he had started, like the rest of them.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you with this,’ he said. ‘It’s outrageous of me. It’s quite unimportant in the long run, but at the moment... I did think it would save time. I’ve always thought of you as the senior of our group. Not in rank, of course, but what does rank matter. You’ve got a name. People know who you are. In ten years’ time these majors and colonels will be again the nobodies they were three years ago; I shouldn’t say that, of course, but there it is.’

  ‘Gustave, let’s get to the point.’

  ‘I know, exactly, Prof, but I had to lead up to this. You were very decent to us younger fellows on the boat; you never gave yourselves any airs though you had a perfect right to.’

  ‘Please, Gustave, please.’

  ‘I know; I’m sorry. I will come to the point. You stayed behind afterwards with the boss. You were the one he picked. He recognized you as our spokesman. What did he say was going to happen to us?’