The Mule on the Minaret (70 page)

He was living in a vacuum. And he found it not unpleasant. He had resumed with Rachel the weekly interchange of letters that had been abandoned after her declaration of independence. They were as they had always been, cordial and affectionate. They dealt, as they had always done, with the varied interests that they shared.
Twenty years was a long time. He wondered if he would find her very different. You would expect an experience such as hers to have made her a different person. But would the difference be apparent to him? Would it show upon the surface? Had he himself seemed a different person after that first night in Damascus? He had been a different person. But had it been discernible? Would he seem different now to Rachel? He shrugged. Either way there was nothing to be done about it now. Everything would solve itself in its due season. In the meantime it was pleasant living in a vacuum; with winter passing; with the Tigris in full flood, with the little walled-in gardens bright with flowers, and the radio, morning after morning, reporting fresh victories on every front.

March became April; it could not be very distant now. G.H.Q. in Cairo was drawing up lists as to the speed at which demobilization would proceed. Officers and men were being registered under different classes in accordance with their age and length of service. Reid, at the age of forty-seven, who had been called up in August 1939, was in class 6. The first five classes were to leave together. Reid therefore was in the second batch. It could not be much longer now. When the day of unconditional surrender arrived, he let the tension slacken. Now he could start planning for himself. He was entitled to pull strings if he had access to them. The first repatriation class had drifted to Alexandria by dilatory and ‘laid-on' transport. He could do better for himself than that. Why not a few days in Beirut first? He wanted to say good-bye to Farrar. He had not seen him since that acrimonious conference in Beirut. There had not been another congress; which was proof enough of how unimportant Middle East had become; Stallard had not thought himself justified in taking a free holiday in a congenial climate. His life in the Middle East had begun with Farrar. Of all the men that he had met here, Farrar was the one whom he had liked the most. And Farrar was the one with whom he had found himself ‘at outs.' He would be happier if he could wipe that slate clean.

One of the advantages of working in ‘cloak and dagger' was that no one quite knew under whose ultimate authority one came. One said: ‘I'm Broadway,' or ‘I'm Baker Street,' or ‘I'm Maida Vale,' and the recognized legitimate channels of instruction and promotion would say: ‘Of course, ah, yes.'

Reid went to the D.M.I. and said, ‘I think it would be simpler from the point of view of the drill of the thing if I handed over to
Barnet right away, then went back to Beirut on a liaison visit and sent back to Barnet a report on anything I may find out; there are one or two loose threads that I'd like to get tidied up. Then I could go straight on independently to Alexandria and pick my ship up there.'

‘Fine. Fine. A very good idea.'

The D.M.I. could not have cared less. He was concerned both about his own repatriation and how he was so to organize it that his present acting rank of Brigadier become confirmed as a temporary rank, thereby assuring that he acquired the war substantive rank of Lt.-Colonel.

‘A sound idea, Prof., very sound idea. Good luck to you.'

So once again Reid, his head heavy after a good-bye party, on an evening in early June was being carried westwards across the desert at the Government's expense in the comfort of an air-conditioned Nairn Transport bus instead of limping in open vehicles on a scorched five-day trek. And once again at Damascus there was Farrar waiting; a much livelier Farrar than the one he had seen twenty months before; there were no longer taut lines about his eyes and mouth; his cheeks had a ruddy glow and gloss that went with the scarlet flashes on his bush shirt. He looked happy, on the crest of the wave.

All the way over the mountains, across the Bekaa Valley, they gossiped about mutual friends. ‘Annabelle?' Reid asked.

‘You'll be seeing her tomorrow. I've a cocktail party.'

‘Aziz?'

‘The one that got away? They tell me he's passing all his exams with flying colours.'

‘And Gustave, any news of him?'

‘I haven't seen him for a while. They've let him put up a star to join his crown, so they must be satisfied with him.'

‘I've never quite known what he does for us in Cairo.'

‘I wouldn't be too sure that he knows himself. It's useful to have someone who can wear mufti and look Levantine. In uniform he looks an Englishman, but put him in fawn coloured gaberdines and he looks a “gypo”. Have you ever seen him dressed up to kill?'

‘I saw him the day he went to Ankara. How did that work out by the way?'

‘Supremely well.'

‘You wouldn't like to tell me about that, would you?'

‘My dear Prof. I'd hate to.'

‘I shall be in Alexandria for a couple of days before I sail. I'll try to get in touch with him.'

‘Do that. He's a very soft spot for you.'

‘Shall I ask him about that mission?'

‘I wouldn't if I were you; no, on second thoughts, I wish you would. Then write and tell me what he says. I'd be amused. Did you hear what happened to that man before you? Mallet...'

So it ran on as that car swung down out of the hills towards the haze of heat in which the gay, frivolous little city smouldered. At the sight of its towers and minarets, Reid felt a quickening of his nerves. Of all the places he had seen in the last forty months, Beirut lay nearest to his heart.

They arrived shortly after five. ‘You've got your old room in the flat,' said Farrar. ‘What a pity we had to break up that arrangement. I've got to look in at the office. I'll leave you to your own devices. Let's meet at eight on the St. Georges terrace. Then dine at the Cercle. And we'll put you on the house for the last time, as we did the first. “With thee begun with thee shall end the day.” I don't expect you've had anything but Palestinian wine to drink for several months. They've still got some champagne at the Cercle.'

It was a very good bottle of champagne. He had not tasted anything to touch it since the last conference. ‘That's what I've missed more than anything,' he said. ‘Good wine. When my house in England was requisitioned, I got the agent who made the inventory to send out my cellar list. I used to read it over when I felt depressed. That's something to look forward to, I'd think. Now I'm wondering how they'll have stood up to it. Burgundies age fast; I've got some ‘23s and ‘26s. They should have been drunk five years ago.'

‘How are you feeling about going back? Excited?'

‘Yes, but apprehensive too.'

‘Well, aren't we all? But for you it's different. You are established, going back to a settled niche, picking up the threads where you dropped them.'

Reid smiled. There it went again; the conviction that his case was completely different because he was over forty, established, with a family. In point of fact, was anyone in Middle East returning to a more uncertain future?

‘Apprehensive's the right word, Prof. We've all of us been away too long. It's nearly six years in my case. So many changes have taken place in England, I feel they'll have been going six years in one direction and six years in another. That's a twelve-year gap. And there's another thing in my case, my age. Nearly all of my contemporaries will have seen fighting service. Do you remember that first talk we had when I said that someone had to pick up the good hand in every deal. I wasn't boasting. I believed that then. Moreover, I was doing much more important work out here than they were at home in England, waiting to be called up or learning elementary musketry. Besides I thought there would be real fighting here, and I'd be in it. But there wasn't; not here at least; while as for all those others who were idling around in England in offices and barracks during the phoney war, think of what they've been through since, in the desert, at Anzio, in France, and now there's Japan waiting. While me, in all this time I haven't even heard a bomb fall. One'll feel so out of everything. One'll have lost all contact.'

‘When are you going back?'

‘Now that's the question,' he paused. A mischievous look came into his eyes. ‘I tell you what,' he said. ‘I'd like you to ask me just that question, in just that tone of voice, tomorrow, at the cocktail party, when Annabelle's around: do it dramatically. You know how I mean, in a pause.'

‘I'll do just that.'

‘Ah, Prof., you're wonderful. And I'd never thought of it till this very minute. You solve all my troubles.' He paused. He grinned. ‘I shouldn't get worked up like this. It's only because you're here. I can talk to you. You're older and you're wiser and you amount to something; yet in the military machine we're opposite numbers. We are contemporaries; that's rather special. Why should I grumble because I've had the good luck to have an easy war? But damn it, I've worked hard; even if I've had a lot of fun. Why shouldn't one have fun in wartime, providing one's not shirking? And it has been fun, hasn't it? A lot of it?'

Farrar was once again the laughing congenial companion who had welcomed him to Beirut all that while ago. The angry, self defensive, aggressive mood of the last conference had vanished. Mallet had probably diagnosed that mood correctly. It was good to have got back to that old comradeship; it was not very likely that they would meet again, other than casually. But this evening
together set his whole time in the Middle East within a frame.

He looked round the room. It had not changed in the least degree. It did not even look any shabbier. The tables were as crowded with the same mingling of French and British uniforms, with the same sprinkling of female dresses. There were even a couple of nursing sisters with four male escorts at the table where Diana had been sitting. What a lot had started on that evening. But for her he would never have been posted to the Centre.

‘What's happening to Diana?' he asked Farrar.

‘In London still, as far as I know. Don't you hear from her?'

‘She's not the letter writing kind.'

‘Isn't she? I wouldn't know.' He paused. ‘Have you got over that all right?'

‘On the surface.'

‘Isn't that all one ever can do when a thing goes deep?'

The cocktail party the next afternoon was very much the same in spirit, as the very first ones that he had known there. Annabelle had put on a little weight, but she was radiantly good looking. She was gay and happy. And there was between herself and Nigel Farrar none of the asperity that there had been on that last occasion; they were back to their old easy eighteenth-century badinage. ‘When the party quietens down,' Reid thought, ‘I'll fulfil my commission.'

There were about twenty guests. He felt that he should know some of them; they looked familiar, but in point of fact there was scarcely one that he knew. ‘I'd expected to see Jane Lester here,' he said.

‘She's gone back to England,' she said. ‘She needed a change of air.'

‘Have you any idea how she's making out?'

‘I've no idea. When people leave, they leave. There are no postmortems.'

Reid looked round him; he should not be surprised, he supposed, that the guests at a Centre party should seem familiar, even if they were not. Farrar was drawing on the same material now in 1945 as he had been in 1941. Still there might . . . yes, there at last . . . there was. A large, florid, youthful figure in a pearl grey cotton suit; the brisk, self confident Armenian whom he had interviewed in that discreet apartment with the independent entrance. The
world seemed to be treating him all right. He walked across to him. There was no sign of recognition in Belorian's eyes. ‘Don't you remember me?' he asked.

‘I didn't think I was supposed to recognize you.'

‘I see that Farrar's acquired an apt pupil.'

‘I do my best.'

‘I gather that it's been a very good best.'

Reid told Belorian that he was going home.

‘That's what you all are doing. I'm going to be very lonely. I shouldn't say it, I suppose, but I'm not enthusing about this war ending. I was having fun and being paid very nicely.'

‘I don't think a man of your capacities will fail to do very nicely in the peace. Beirut is going to boom.'

They gossiped for a moment or two. Then he moved away. Nigel and Annabelle were standing side by side. It was time he fulfilled his promise. He moved across to them. ‘There was one thing you never told me last night,' he said. ‘You've been out here longer than any of us. When are you due for repatriation?'

‘That is what we are all asking ourselves,' said Annabelle. ‘And oh, with what concern and trepidation.'

Farrar took a long slow breath and drew himself to his full height. ‘My poor, my most dear Annabelle,' he said, ‘you are now about to be robbed, you are now robbing yourself of the greatest moment in a woman's life.'

‘And what is that that I am going to lose, my Captain?'

‘My Colonel, please.'

‘Ah, but to me you will always be my Captain, my dissolute and misguided Captain. Tell me what is this greatest moment in a woman's life of which I am for ever to be deprived.'

‘It is the moment, my most sweet Annabelle, when a man who has been long courting her, but in a devious guise, says: “I have things to say to you that I must say alone. Will you let me take you for a drive?” And it is a warm, bland summer evening such as this; and he will drive her out of town to a high point on the cliffs; and there will be a gentle breeze blowing from the mountains, and the lights of the town will be twinkling along the harbour; he will switch off his engine; he will place his hand over hers. “My dear one,” he will say, “for a long time now I have been courting you; and at the start, I cannot deny it, it was a rather casual courtship; I was a foreigner, here for a brief interval. I hoped to decorate that interval with a little dalliance. But you resisted. You had no use
for that kind of decoration. I was disappointed, but I persisted. And the weeks went by, and disappointment became despair. And I tried to leave Beirut. I asked for a posting to Alexandria. But it was not granted. My duty kept me here. And then you began to flirt with a scruffy little Frenchman.” '