Colonel Lawrence had by that time completely slipped my mind, but he had not forgotten about me. I looked at Karl, astonished, then abashed. “Oh, no, I—I couldn’t possibly.”
“Agnes, why not?” Karl cried quietly, coming inside and pulling the door closed behind him. It seemed so natural—not forward or frightening. It was the simple act of one who wished a private word with a friend. Perhaps you, too, have met a stranger with whom each hour is so open and so enjoyable that you feel you have always known each other?
Anyway, Karl sat down on the slipper chair in the corner of my room and lifted Rosie onto his lap. “Agnes,” he said, face serious and hilarious at once, “the Uncrowned King of Arabia invites you to dinner and you will refuse him? Tell me why, please. This, I wish to understand.”
Bit by bit, Karl pulled the story from me. I was trying to make a comedy of my excruciating experience at the entrance of the Semiramis when Karl raised a hand to stop me. “Winston Darling?” He looked confused and then delighted. “As in the Barrie play of Peter Pan? Like Wendy’s father, yes? Mr. Darling? Agnes, you are adorable!” he declared, then continued with specious formality: “My dear Miss Shanklin, if I am not mistaken, the gentleman’s surname is Churchill, not Darling. You really must tell me what you think of him when you meet him. I am not inclined in his favor, but I will trust your judgment.”
For my part, I trusted Karl’s own goodwill toward me, and my growing confidence in this friendship was confirmed when I got to the part about Gertrude Bell and her obnoxious remark about my clothing.
“Ah, Miss Bell,” Karl said with a roll of his eyes. “Immensely knowledgeable but not beloved, I may say to you. She must make everyone aware immediately that she is a person of importance—telling you who she knows and where she has traveled and what she has done. She believes herself the equal of any man on earth, saving her father. No doubt she is more capable than most. She can often bring men round to her way of thinking, but it must annoy her to work always through her inferiors. As for other women, well…You are distressing reminders that she herself is female. And now that all women are claiming the freedom she took for herself many years ago, she is not so special, do you see?”
Karl looked into the middle distance, considering the circumstances of our encounter. “Miss Bell used to travel like a queen—her caravans had a cook, muleteers, servants. Twenty camels. A bathtub for her tent! Wedgwood china and silver cutlery for her meals. In those days she was quite stylish—Paris shops would send crates of clothing to her tents in the sand.” His merry eyes met mine. “Perhaps,” he said with a wicked grin, “when she saw you, she was dismayed to realize that she has fallen rather behind times?”
Oh, Miss Shanklin, he really is a living doll, said Mildred, and I admit I found Karl’s suggestion deeply satisfying.
“That said,” he continued more soberly, “the entire female population of the Middle East is a millennium behind the times. Dress rules for Muslim women are quite strict. They don’t apply to infidels, but it wouldn’t go amiss if you were to cover up a bit while in public. A matter of courtesy, if you like. However, at a dinner for Europeans? You may be as fashionable as you like! Miss Bell may not even be attending, but if she is?” His hands spread and his brows rose in a theatrical display of guilelessness. “After such a catty remark, it would be fair play to show her up a bit, don’t you think?”
The ivory silk charmeuse, Mildred whispered. I turned to the wardrobe and pulled the dress out. “With pearls?” I asked.
A long, slow smile bloomed on Karl’s face. “Perfect. It’s settled. You will go to dinner with Lawrence and I’ll take care of Rosie, and you will tell me all about it when you get back!”
It was a quarter of nine before my cab arrived at the Semiramis that evening. Colonel Lawrence was waiting for me at the hotel’s taxi stand, propped against a low stone wall with arms folded over his chest. He had on the same badly fitted brown suit he’d worn the day before. Oh, my, I thought, am I completely overdressed or is that the only suit he has?
He leaned in to pay the driver and held my door open as I climbed out. We could clearly hear the chant of “Ah-bah sure-shill! Ah-bah sure-shill!” a few blocks away.
“I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” I said. “The police have roped off the road down at the corner. There’s some kind of demonstration.”
“Egyptian nationalists,” Lawrence said. “Allenby keeps smashing their uprisings, but everyone blames Winston for the bloodshed.” He took up the chant and translated it. “À bas Churchill: Down with Churchill.”
“À bas? But that’s French, isn’t it?”
“Ever since Napoleon was here, it’s been traditional to riot in French. Where is your little dog?”
When I said I’d made arrangements for her at the Continental, Lawrence seemed disappointed. He’d been prepared to do battle on Rosie’s behalf, he told me, and produced a bad-boy giggle.
“Brace yourself,” he advised then, cryptically.
He stood aside as I approached the exalted precinct of the Semiramis lobby, grinning when I stopped dead, immobilized by a quarryful of marble, mines of gold leaf, forests of precious woods. The Continental had seemed extravagantly appointed to me, but this! This was—
“Enough to turn you Bolshevik?” Colonel Lawrence supplied, reading my expression.
“Ghastly,” I agreed.
He touched my elbow briefly to get me moving again. “The dining room’s worse,” he warned and a good thing, too, or I’d have been stupefied by the display.
Just beyond tall double doors we could see a dozen round tables. Set for eight, each was crowded with extravagantly gilded porcelain surrounded by a myriad of crystal stemware and enough silver to supply the U.S. Mint with a decade’s worth of dimes. Filled to capacity by close to a hundred guests, the room was vivid with flowers and patterned silk and beaded bags. Black tuxedo jackets and red dress uniforms contrasted dramatically with white linen tablecloths. Champagne fizzed and sparkled within candlelit cut glass. Cigarettes in ebony or tortoiseshell holders dipped and waved. Now and then, shrills of feminine laughter rang out above the manly buzz of conversation.
The entry to that Aladdin’s Cave was guarded by a gentleman who stood well over six feet tall and had the physique and demeanor of a prizefighter who has yet to lose a bout. Some of my students’ fathers were more frightening, but none of them was more imposing. He and Lawrence exchanged a few words before I was introduced to the colossus. Naturally, I offered my name and waited to hear this gentleman’s in return. He seemed surprised and gratified that anyone would bother and said, “Detective Sergeant Thompson, miss.”
I don’t know what came over me. Certainly I had taken an instant dislike to the ostentation of the Semiramis and its guests, whereas Thompson seemed one of my own kind—outranked and out of place amid that dazzling assembly. Perhaps—with Karl’s encouragement—I was simply feeling confidently well dressed, and that let me imagine what Mildred might say, although with better diction. “Nice to meet you, Sergeant,” I said brightly. “Have they got you here to keep the riffraff out of the party or to guard the silver?”
He stifled a laugh. “Bit of both, miss.” And then he turned his attention to the next pair of glittering party guests, arriving even later than Lawrence and I had.
“Thompson is Scotland Yard. Churchill’s bodyguard,” Lawrence informed me quietly as we entered the dining room. “You’re not supposed to notice him.”
“He’s rather difficult to overlook,” I pointed out, smiling over my shoulder at the policeman.
The colonel gave a little giggle, for Thompson had indeed made him look half-grown by comparison. In my heels, even I was taller than Lawrence but, as we moved through the throngs of ramrod-straight soldiers and their willowy ladies, I realized that Lawrence was deliberately making himself look worse. Slouching and shoving his hands into the pockets of his cheap brown suit like a snippy schoolboy was a sort of reverse snobbery, I think: a brazen if silent dispa
ragement of the occasion and the company.
“Gerty!” he cried suddenly, spotting Miss Bell. “You two’ve met,” he said with a significant stare, which seemed to remind that lady that she’d been put on notice to play nicely with the new girl.
Miss Bell, tall and sharp-jointed, was covered from neck to ankle in gauzy lace and mushroom-colored silk. My sleek, defiant dress received a cool appraisal, but I held my head up and met her gaze, just as she’d instructed. She nodded, acknowledging this, and I took the opportunity to thank her for sending the lovely dinner to my room the night before. She appeared puzzled. Both of us turned toward Lawrence.
He coughed and found somewhere else to look.
“Dear boy! How very diplomatic,” Miss Bell remarked dryly. “And yet, you do find a way to get credit in the end, don’t you.”
Before Lawrence could respond, she introduced me to the gentleman on her right: “Lieutenant Colonel Arnold Wilson, until recently His Majesty’s high commissioner in Mesopotamia,” Miss Bell informed me. “We worked together in Baghdad.”
In his late thirties, this person matched Miss Bell’s own considerable height and had an equally commanding gaze, but seemed annoyed by the way she had characterized him. There was something muttered about “Persia, these days,” and oil, and then their interrupted conversation resumed without us.
I whispered to Colonel Lawrence as we moved on, “Those two don’t like each other much, do they.”
“It’s been a long day, and they’ve spent it arguing. Gert believes that no people will enjoy being governed very long by another. She’s for indirect rule in our Middle Eastern protectorates. Wilson is of the firm opinion that—apart from a few troublemakers—His Majesty’s colonial subjects desire nothing better than to be granted material and moral progress under the tutelage of Great Britain.”
I snorted, by way of comment. It was a bad habit, the unattractiveness of which Mumma often noted, but Lawrence smiled with enigmatic satisfaction. “I thought an American might be amused.”
“Americans,” I recalled, “were notorious colonial troublemakers.”
“As the Arabs promise to be,” Lawrence said quietly. “A considerable portion of Mesopotamia rose against Wilson’s administration last summer.” Lifting himself on tiptoe to see over and around the shoulders of the crowd, he scanned the room while remarking, “Cost His Majesty’s Government eighteen million pounds to put the rebellion down. The Exchequer has been hemorrhaging money onto the sand ever since. Ah. There’s Winston, who’s angling for chancellor and earnestly desires there be something left in the Exchequer to preside over when he gets the job.”
Lawrence introduced me to His Majesty’s secretary of state for air and for the colonies, and I received a pleasant welcome from the man I’d originally thought was “Winston Darling.” Thickset and square, with a stooping head and hooded eyes, Mr. Churchill was not yet the bulldog he would come to resemble, but all the signs were there, even in 1921. He, in turn, introduced me to his wife, Clementine, a vivacious woman in her mid-thirties, visibly in love with the husband who was perhaps a decade her senior.
Other introductions followed, the names and titles coming at me so quickly I caught only a few of them. There was an elderly couple named Cox who were some sort of nobility, I gathered. Was I to call them Lord and Lady in direct address or some other variation on that imperial theme? The honorifics stuck in my democratic throat. “How nice to meet you both,” I said warmly and let it go at that.
Just then a uniformed gentleman pulled Lawrence aside. I was immediately taken up by a stylish young woman whose name I’d already forgotten. She was holding what may not have been her very first cocktail of the evening and made a point of exclaiming over my dress.
“How lovely! And so becoming!” I was told in a voice meant to be overheard by Miss Bell. “Wherever did you get it? Cleveland? Oh, but it positively screams Paris!”
I returned her compliment, for she was wearing a brilliant green-and-gold gown cut sleeveless and low. Breathlessly up-to-the-moment. She moved to stand at my side so that we could both observe Miss Bell, layered in elaborate Edwardian drapery and holding forth among the gentlemen.
“I heard what the dreaded Gertrude said to you,” the young woman whispered. “You’re not the first, believe me. She made the very same remark to me when my husband and I arrived in Baghdad last year. Horrible old thing…”
Having found this ally, I was hoping to be seated at the children’s table with her, but Colonel Lawrence reappeared at my side and steered me toward a damask-covered expanse with the Churchills and the Coxes, Miss Bell and Colonel Wilson.
“Cleveland,” Wilson noted, having heard the drunken girl’s cry. “Standard Oil, of course. And do you know Mr. Rockefeller?”
“Colonel Wilson served in Mesopotamia until recently,” Lady Cox informed me with a condescending pat. “He is with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company now.”
My reply was delayed by the arrival of an army of Egyptian waiters. Wearing spotless white gloves and starched linen jackets, they distributed the first of what would become a farcical number of courses. I hoped everyone would forget that I’d been asked a question, but the table remained attentive, so I answered, “Mr. Rockefeller and I do not ordinarily move in the same circles, Colonel Wilson, although I did work near a settlement house named for his daughter. I was a teacher until recently. I’m here on holiday.”
“How nice for you,” Mrs. Churchill said after an awkward pause that conveyed what everyone was thinking: Why on earth has Lawrence invited a nonentity like her to the table? Is this some sort of prank?
“Miss Shanklin’s sister was my hostess in Jebail when I was starting my thesis on crusader military architecture,” Lawrence told them.
I’d spent enough time with schoolboys to find his tone suspiciously innocent, but everyone else seemed happy with his explanation. Parallel conversations quickly developed. With a teacher at the table, Mrs. Churchill took the opportunity to talk about her children, the latest of whom was a daughter named Marigold, of all things. No, the children were not traveling with their parents, my query was answered. The Churchills had been separated a great deal during the war. This trip to Cairo was a chance for the couple to enjoy some time together, a sort of second honeymoon.
Over and around Mrs. Churchill’s praise for the nanny who was taking care of her younger children while she traveled, snatches of the conversation across the table reached me. Colonel Wilson, Mr. Churchill, and Miss Bell were all engrossed in the topic of oil and the administration of the lands it lay beneath. Lord Cox merely harrumphed occasionally, as though dismissive of everything he heard. He reminded me of the mummies at the Egyptian Museum: fleshless, lipless, rigid. On my right, Colonel Lawrence grinned, taking it all in and occasionally tossing out an incisive remark, rarely more than a few words long. Happily left out of that discussion, I leaned toward Lawrence to ask, “Were you by chance a middle child, Colonel Lawrence?”
“Temporarily,” he whispered. “I was the second of five brothers, and you’re right: one had to be quick to slip a word in.”
“What you must understand, Wilson, is that the British people are sick of war,” Mr. Churchill rumbled in a slightly slurred baritone. “We simply cannot sustain an expenditure of thirty millions a year to control the place.”
“You know as well as anyone, Winston: the Royal Navy needs oil,” Colonel Wilson replied. “There’s every indication that Mesopotamia has fields as productive as Persia—”
“The cost is all out of proportion to whatever we can expect to reap from that wilderness. If we pull the troops back, Trenchard assures me that we can keep order with airpower.”
“Nonsense,” Wilson snapped. “We need more troops on the ground, not fewer.”
“And with Marigold ill with influenza, the whole experience was positively nightmarish!” Mrs. Churchill was saying.
I tried to look interested and sympathetic, but I was distracted by a rising tension between M
iss Bell and Colonel Wilson. They sat side by side, staring straight ahead, but now addressed their remarks to each other. Mrs. Churchill and Lady Cox began to discuss the scandalous state of “checkers.” When I looked lost, Lawrence told me in a low voice that they were speaking not of the board game but of the prime minister’s official residence. “Chequers was built in the reign of Henry II for his clerk of the Exchequer. Hence the name,” he said. The home was last remodeled in 1580. I gathered it was in need of repair.
“Arnold,” Miss Bell was telling Colonel Wilson, “when we have made Mesopotamia a model state, there won’t be an Arab in Syria or Palestine who won’t want to be part of it, but they will never accept direct rule. You saw that last year.”
“Gertrude,” he countered, “you cannot simply draw a line around Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra and declare everything inside it a nation! It won’t matter whom you use as the figurehead.”
“Well, of course,” Miss Bell said airily, “we’ll have to take Kurdish sentiments into account.”
“I rather like our Gertrude’s idea,” Mr. Churchill declared. “Saves the expense of administration in triplicate.”
“It will cost more in the long run,” Colonel Wilson insisted. “What do you propose to do about the Shi’a in Karbala and Najaf? The level of religious bigotry in those regions is staggering! The Persian clergy spends half its time fostering hatred—”
“And what age of child do you teach, Miss Shanklin?” Mrs. Churchill asked, trying to draw me back into the ladies’ conversation.
“Fifth grade,” I said. “That would be ten-year-olds, for the most part.”
“Tikrit!” Colonel Wilson cried. “Don’t talk to me about Tikrit—that city is home to the most brutal, boorish, savage—”
“Ten? Why, that’s just my Randolph’s age,” Mrs. Churchill said, raising her voice slightly as Colonel Wilson’s grew louder.
“You must miss him very much,” I offered, hoping to send her off on a maternal soliloquy so I could hear what Miss Bell would say in reply.
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