The Mule on the Minaret Read online

Chapter Four

  Three weeks later Reid was again duty officer. He woke with a feeling of anticipation. He looked forward to an evening by himself. He also looked forward to the possibility of Diana telephoning. A week earlier he had volunteered to take Johnson’s place, Johnson having an opportunity to meet a Sandhurst contemporary who might prove useful, and once again shortly before ten the telephone had gone. ‘I’ve just finished such a good dinner,’ she had said. ‘I felt so sorry for you all alone in that bleak room. I didn’t want you to feel abandoned.’

  There had been warmth and gaiety in her voice. It had filled the room with colour.

  ‘By the way,’ she had said, ‘I don’t know your Christian name.’

  ‘Noel. But I don’t use it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It doesn’t seem quite like me.’

  ‘Doesn’t it? It does to me. You sign your books with your initials.’

  ‘Don’t you think that’s the right signature for the kind of book I write? Noel is too flowery.’

  ‘What does your wife call you?’

  ‘She doesn’t call me anything.’

  ‘Just “darling”?’

  ‘Yes, just “darling”.’

  It was the first time that he had spoken of his wife to her. It was the first reference that either of them had made to the fact that he was married.

  ‘So no one’s ever called you Noel. That’s what I’ll call you, then,’ she said.

  They had gossiped for ten minutes, then she had rung off. ‘I can’t occupy that line any longer. Suppose General de Gaulle rang up from Cairo.’ The room which had seemed so private and cosy fifteen seconds earlier now seemed bare and cavernous. ‘I wonder how she knew I was “orderly dog”,’ he thought. He had not been on the duty roster.

  It was a bright clear day, after a week of rain. Spring was still six weeks distant, yet it was difficult to believe that the short Lebanese winter was not already over. The breeze had a scent of flowers. In the Rue Jeanne d’Arc there was a new animation about the workmen repairing a building partially ruined in an air raid; about the women in large straw hats propelling mules laden with provisions. Handcarts were pushed beside the pavements; long, shining cars were honking irritably; a clothes shop selling the remnants of its smart Paris stock stood next to an open kitchen where savourous stews were simmering and bubbling in low wide saucepans. Shabbiness and elegance walked side by side. There were Moslems with baggy trousers and red tarbooshes; there were young women with their black, greased hair swinging low upon their shoulders; there were veiled shuffling women with black skirts sweeping the ground; there were beggars with misshapen limbs squatted against the walls; there were men in tattered clothes, thin, grey-skinned, who might have belonged to any race; there were Arabs in long robes with their headdress held by a golden fillet, carrying in their right hands a string of yellow beads; there were men, tall and portly, sleek and prosperous, in well-cut European suits. The whole scene was rejuvenated by the sunlight and the air of spring.

  He turned right at the end of the street. Usually he caught a bus here, but he had left the flat early. He had time to walk. He slackened his pace as he went by the University. It had the typical look of an American college; red brick, spacious, square-towered with sloping grounds. The morning classes were about to start, and the street was crowded with young men and women hurrying with their satchels and their piles of books, laughing, chattering.

  He paused at the main entrance, watching them. There were Turks, Indians, Syrians, Egyptians, French. There were a few, but only a very few, with the very black skin and large pouting mouths of Central Africa. The large majority had grey, slightly darkened skins with delicate features; often with their cheeks disfigured by the scars of the big boils that were endemic to the Middle East and India. They were an attractive comely lot. They were pursuing their education just as their predecessors had done four years ago, planning their futures and careers; just as his former students were at Winchborough—except for this one difference, this basic difference: English students stood on the brink of war. These did not; this war was only theirs incidentally.

  He had been here six weeks now, and had already begun to feel himself a part of this vast world, new to him, of the Middle East. And he was beginning to see it in terms of itself: a world of its own; alien, if at times friendly, to the West.

  His in-tray was filled with papers. He might well have given the impression of being a busy person. Cartwright had told him that he would be mainly occupied with the composition of the weekly summaries, which would be a half-time job, and that the rest of his time could be devoted to the study of back files; but in point of fact a good deal of work had devolved on him, simply because he had an office and a desk.

  He had, for instance, the men’s mail to censor. In the First War he had looked forward to the censoring of mail, before he was commissioned, because he had thought that it would give him an insight into his men’s minds, and that his knowledge of human nature would be enlarged. He had been disappointed and surprised by the dullness and lifelessness of the letters. They had been bare bulletins of facts, presented without personality. He had wondered whether in this Second War a higher standard of education and a keener sense of independence among the new recruits would produce livelier letters. He was soon to find that it was not so. The letters that lay on his desk every morning were little different from those that he had read in 1917. Everything really personal went into the green envelopes that were censored not regimentally but at the base; the letters that came to him were in the main replies to letters that had been received from home (’Well, darling, I bet you enjoyed yourself that day Bert took you to the picnic’); health reports (‘I seem to have got over my attack of “gippie tummy” ‘); comments on the war news (’Well, Mum, I don’t think it’ll be long now. We’ll soon be giving Jerry a taste of his own medicine. Six months I give it’). There was a Lance-corporal who had been out fifteen months who numbered his letters to his wife, she numbering hers to him, whose letters consisted entirely of acknowledgements. ‘Darling, I have wonderful news. I have received your numbers 35, 36, 37, 39, 40; I wonder what happened to your number 38. I hope not enemy action. I am so relieved that you have got my 51, 52, 53, 54, 55. How well the mail is working nowadays.’ He wrote in a large spidery hand, and the provision of that amount of information practically filled the airgraph so that he was forced to wind up with his invariable, ‘Well, darling, I must now close. Keep your chin up. Won’t be long now.’ Reid wondered what the wife’s letters were like. Did she too merely repeat a list of numbers, or did she contribute news and comments?

  He had also to deal with the various suppliants who presented themselves to the Mission offices. Everyone who had a grievance felt that here was the right audience for it, and every service branch in Beirut when faced with a conundrum said, ‘Oh, try Spears Mission.’ There were consequently innumerable Lebanese complaints about houses that had been bombed or looted in the campaign, about lorries that had been requisitioned and abandoned. Photographers applied for permission to develop snapshots for the troops. Officials claimed that their loss of office under the Vichy régime was due to their pro-British sentiments. One of these claims he had copied out and filed among his records:

  ‘I know Your Excellency that it is the Syrian authority to which I should apply for my return to work. But what can I do if the said authority is unwilling to consider my grievance, and does Your Excellency’s conscience consent and get restful while there is a person complaining of deprival and injustice in a country over which the British banner waves?

  ‘I belong to a family occupying the first place in the Moslem and Arab worlds and the history certifies that; which thing prevents me from doing low work not corresponding with my social position.

  ‘I do swear by the life of his Majesty the King and Emperor, and by the glory of that most noble British nation whose civilization has been spread all over the world, and whose noble instruction has been d
istributed among mankind, that I should return with the British flag waving to the function of a district officer in compensation for the prejudice and injustice which I have undergone.

  ‘I do come before Your Excellency, just as an Arabian comes before a mighty Emir and I should find in you refuge and support, and if the field of functions will not accept me there is no doubt that the British generosity would welcome me, closing my letter by saying with all my heart, long live Britain, defender of oppressed men, and long live the Allies and God save the King.’

  There were also a number of chores which normally would have been disposed of by an A.D.C. There were the sudden visits of important personages for whom air passages had to be booked, cars ordered and trains met. There would be diplomats in transit with a retinue of prams and nurses. He was, that is to say, occupied, and he was not bored. Yet he knew that his work could have been carried out just as effectively by a junior freshman. I‘ve no real right to be here, he thought.

  Pleasantly, placidly, the morning passed. Shortly before eleven there was a tap upon his door. Gustave responded to his ‘Come in.’ Gustave’s eyes were bright and his cheeks were flushed.

  ‘That chap you share a flat with, Farrar; is he bogus?’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Well, you should know. Mutual friends and all that, isn’t it?’

  ‘We have friends in common.’

  ‘So I deduced. You know my methods, Watson, but what’s his racket?’

  ‘I didn’t know he had one.’

  ‘Ah, come now, listen. How could anyone without a racket be living in the style he does on a captain’s pay?’

  ‘Some people have private means; he was out here before the war, with I.P.C. He hasn’t told me anything, but I daresay they make up the difference between his pre-war salary and his army pay.’

  ‘I see.’ Gustave hesitated.

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I want to know what’s cooking.’

  ‘What’s cooking where?’

  ‘Oh, come now, you know that.’

  ‘I’ve not the least idea what you are talking about.’

  ‘You haven’t, honest?’

  ‘I assure you, honest.’

  ‘Oh.’ His face clouded. ‘I thought it was something you’d fixed up between you.’

  ‘I’m still in the dark.’

  ‘If you are then, Prof., there’s no more to be said. I came to thank you. If it hadn’t been for you, asking me up to have that drink, I wouldn’t have met Farrar and this wouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘My going to Cairo for an interview; if things work out, and Farrar says they should, I’ll be working in his outfit there, and as a captain.’

  ‘Which is exactly what you wanted, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’ll say it is.’

  ‘Congratulations, then. Good luck.’

  ‘Thanks; and it really is all due to you. Even if you didn’t wangle it. You’re a good guy, Prof.’

  So that was another of the missionaries settled. By now they had most of them found employment, as Cartwright had prophesied, all except Johnson and himself: the two First War veterans.

  There was a tap upon the door. A corporal with the mail. ‘Three for you, sir.’

  They were all on the new airgraphs by which a large sheet of paper was reduced by photography to the size of a small postcard. They were the first of these that he had received. One was from Rachel, one from his father, the third, in large printed capitals, was from his younger son. He opened his son’s first:

  ‘Dear Daddy,

  ‘Happy Christmas. I am excited. What will Santa bring. No prize for me this term. Much love, Mark.’

  He opened his father’s next. His father, a widower and treasury official, had retired a few years before the outbreak of war. He lived in Hampstead and had been given half-time employment as a censor. He left his home every morning at half past nine, lunched at the Athenaeum, and was home by half past four. He missed the discomfort of crowded tubes and buses and did not have to travel in the blackout. He wrote on a cheerful note:

  ‘It seems rather shocking for me to admit it, but I am actually having a more entertaining existence than I had three years ago. The hours are not long. The work makes no great demands on me; it is routine work, but it is not uninteresting. I am in the Italian section, and there is something a little special about everyone who is writing or being written to in Italian. I feel I am in the swim, and when I lunch at the Athenaeum, I have something to contribute to the conversation—without, I hasten to assure you, indulging in careless talk; moreover I don’t have to hurry over my lunch, as the important figures in Whitehall have to. In fact the war came at a lucky time for me. If it had come eight years ago, when I was head of my section, I should have been putting in a nine to ten hours day, six days of the week. I might have finished up with a Knighthood, but I don’t fancy that I should have lived to enjoy it very long.’

  Timing, his son thought, everything was timing, and it probably was true that his father, at the age of seventy-two, was leading, because of the war, a more satisfactory life than he could have anticipated for himself when he was fifty. He made a point of writing cheerfully, but in actual fact he was relatively cheerful. He had a sunny nature, and he had good health.

  ‘I had a telephone talk with Rachel the other day,’ [his letter ended]. ‘She is having, I suspect, a rather dreary time, poor dear, but she is being very brave about it. I am hoping that after Christmas she will bring the boys up to London for a day and that I shall have a chance of seeing them. Children forget so quickly. I want them to have a real memory of their old Poppa.’

  A rather dreary time; poor Rachel. And it was his fault that she was having it.

  The telephone rang beside him. A female voice was at the other end. ‘Is that Captain Reid? Will you please hold on a second for Mr. Cartwright?’

  Reid’s spirits lifted. Was this the call that he expected daily? The news that an appointment had been found for him? ‘Is that you, Reid? Cartwright here. It’s very short notice, but I wondered if you were free for lunch today?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m Duty Officer.’

  ‘Too bad. I have a friend from London. I think you’d have interested one another. Well, it can’t be helped. Another time. He’s going to be here two weeks. There may be another chance; when I know his plans I’ll let you know.’

  There was a tap on the door. It was Johnson, his eyes narrowed and his cheeks flushed.

  ‘Busy?’ Johnson asked.

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘Mind if I sit down?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Johnson took out a cigarette and lit it. He drew the smoke deep into his lungs, breathing it slowly out. ‘Nothing came out of that fellow in Ninth Army,’ he said at length.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘So am I. I was banking on it; thought I had the thing sewn up. They said I wasn’t young enough. That means that I’m not fit enough; out of training; well, so I am. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.’

  He checked. Reid said nothing. What was there he could say?

  ‘The British Council are looking for men,’ said Johnson. ‘One or two of our group have got in on that. But then they’re scholars. The British Council wants men who can teach something. What could I teach? All I can do is look after troops; and I’m too old for that. I’ve led the wrong kind of life for office work. You, of course . . .’ He paused; he looked at the heap of files in Reid’s in-tray. ‘You’re trained for this kind of work; I’m not. It’s a continuation of your peacetime life. But me . . .’

  Reid made no reply. They all say the same thing, he thought, that it’s different for me. They all imagine I’ve no problems because I’ve an established position in peacetime England, because I’ve a job waiting for me. Well, let them go on thinking it. It was hard to enter imaginatively into lives alien to one’s own. That was one of th
e historian’s functions, to explain to the public why men and women of whom their taste, training, instincts disapproved, acted in the way they did.

  He waited. Johnson stubbed out his cigarette, stood up, moved towards the door, hesitated. ‘I suppose you haven’t any whisky, have you?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I have.’

  It was the custom for Mission officers, during the last half-hour of the day, to take a drink in their offices before going out to dinner, but it was the first time that a morning drink had been suggested. He took a bottle of whisky from his deep bottom drawer.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you, if I don’t join you?’

  ‘Not in the least, not in the very least.’

  Reid handed him the bottle and a tumbler. ‘Help yourself.’

  The tumbler was squat, wide and solid. Johnson poured himself out a half-inch shot, checked, then poured another quarter-inch. He sat down again. ‘You’re sure you’re not in any hurry?’

  ‘Dead sure. This is only half-time employment.’

  ‘But you’re on the establishment.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s all that matters. As long as a man’s on the establishment and doesn’t put up a black, and you’re not the kind of man who does put up a black, there’s nothing to worry over. Half-time employment; think how fresh you’ll feel when you get back to your university.’

  Johnson did not mix any water with his whisky. He lifted his glass and took a quick, deep gulp. He blinked and shook his head.

  ‘I needed that. One good thing about being out here is getting whisky at a reasonable rate. It’s in very short supply in London.’

  Four more gulps and the glass was empty. ‘Thanks, I’m better now. I fell among friends last night.’ He rose; walked briskly to the door. He certainly did look better.

  Reid picked up the last letter. Rachel’s; it was strange to see her handwriting reduced to such minute proportions.

  ‘Darling [the letter read],

  ‘They tell me that this kind of letter will get to you more quickly than an ordinary airmail letter, because it can be flown out to you direct, whereas an airmail letter goes part of the way by sea. Do tell me if that is so. Your airgraph reached me in ten days but I haven’t had a real letter yet. I’m longing to hear what you are doing, if you are allowed to tell me, that’s to say. It’s wonderful for you to be out there and have a real use found for you at last. I know how exasperated you got at that Ministry of Mines, putting letters into envelopes. It was painful to watch you sometimes, you looked so frustrated. I’m sure that one gets more tired by things that bore one. I’m so glad for your sake that you are where you are. But it is dreary here without you. Those week-ends made such a difference, and then there were your telephone calls; even when you were in London you seemed very close. I didn’t realize how much those calls meant until now, when I haven’t got them. But I mustn’t grumble. You’re not to worry about me. I’m all right. I’ll get used to it, but it is a change for me. We’ve been so very much together. It isn’t as though you were one of those husbands whose work took him away from home. How quickly I’ve got to the end of the sheet. Have I written so small that it won’t be clear? Do let me know, or better still send me back this airgraph so that I can see what it looks like. All my love, my darling.’