by Alec Waugh
‘It ought to be. But would it? I don’t know. I live in a small world of my own. I’m concerned with crime and criminals; politics only come my way when they affect internal security. Studholme is the man who should know. He knows all I do and a good deal that I don’t. He is in direct communication with Whitehall. He tells me what he thinks I need to know, but not more than that. I would give a lot to know what he would prophesy.’
‘What would your prophecy be?’ Macartney asked.
‘That’s what I ask myself. In every case that comes my way I try to put myself in the other man’s position. That’s how one catches a criminal: asking oneself how one would act if one were he. We’re not dealing with criminals now, of course. We don’t know in fact with whom we are dealing. That’s one of our troubles. But let’s see what’s happening in other countries where there was an equivalent situation, where there is an oil camp and a reigning house. The local Nationalists want to capture power. There’s a move against the West because the ruling house has close links with a Western country and it relies on the West to maintain itself in power. The Nationalists are Republicans. Who are the Nationalists here? The mob can always be worked up by the cry, “Karak for the Karakis.” But who is going to work up the mob? Those who are going to profit by it: the Army and the industrialists. The Army most of all. That’s one of the features of today, the spread of military dictatorships. Did you ever read that book about the Charge of the Light Brigade, The Reason Why? It seems ridiculous that nincompoops like Raglan and Cardigan should have had men’s lives in their hands because they were born to property and privilege while professional soldiers could not get promotion; it seems ridiculous that the Duke of Wellington should have approved this system on the grounds that the army should be commanded by men who had a stake in the country so that there would be no danger of unmoneyed mercenaries staging a coup d’état, but maybe the Iron Duke was right.’
The monologue ran on, but Angus, his perceptions preternaturaliy alert, knew that Forrester was preparing some trap or other. Since there must be a point to his visit here, there must be a point to this rambling monologue.
‘I would prophesy,’ Forrester continued, ‘an attempt by the generals to seize power; if they succeed they will nationalize the oil fields. That will antagonize the British and the friends of the present régime, so they will need the support of another powerful country. There are three such countries: China, Russia and the United States. As the coup d’état will have been organized by a moneyed group, the United States will be the appropriate ally. Americans are both anti-colonial and anti-Communist; they will always encourage a country to be independent of European influence, they are ready to support with dollars any country that they can regard as a bulwark against Communism. The generals therefore will try to convince the Americans that they have staged their coup d’état to protect the country against the Communist menace. It won’t do any harm either to offer this explanation to Karaki nationals. They’d like to have some soft soap sold to them as well, but I’ve an idea I’m repeating what you said the last time I was here.’
‘I said something very much like that.’
‘But since I was out here, I’ve elaborated those ideas. You remember how we talked about Hitler having the Reichstag set alight. I’ve gone a little beyond that. The situation in Germany in 1932 was very different. There was a definite Communist party there. The Communists were the opposition. All the Nazis had to do was to fake an atrocity and attribute it to the Communists. They found a cat’s-paw in that half-wit Van der Lubbe, then filled him up with drugs. But here there is no real Communist party; at least I don’t believe there is. This is a rich country, the people are well off; Communism does not flourish in this soil; yet it is essential that the rebels should convince both outside world opinion and unpolitical nationals that a Communist menace does exist. Now what would I do, I ask myself, in that quandary? What would you do, Macartney?’
Macartney shrugged. ‘How can I tell what I’d do? I can’t picture myself in that position.’
‘And that, my good friend, is the reason why you’d never be a good policeman. You have to be able to put yourself in other people’s positions. I remember hearing a lecturer describe Balzac and Dickens as the two greatest novelists of their day because they could get under the skin of a greater number of people than their rivals could; they were, this was the phrase he used, themselves more people. The same holds true of the detective. The more people that he is, the more effective he is. He’s got to be able to guess at his enemy’s next move. So this is what I say to myself in this case, “What would you do in Karak if you were an important industrialist and you wanted it believed that there was such a thing as a Communist menace?” I’ll tell you what I’d do; I’d act as an agent provocateur. I’d search for the seeds of Communism. You can always find them. There’s always a cell somewhere; or those who are waiting to form a cell. I’d exploit those seeds: water them, cherish them and then provoke them. That wouldn’t be too difficult. The few Communists could be easily misled, easily flattered; made to believe that the Kremlin took them seriously. They’d be so anxious to be taken seriously by the Kremlin that it would be easy to persuade them to do something very, very stupid. In fact, do you know what I believe, Macartney? I believe that the attempt on Annetta Marsh was organized by the revolutionaries so that the blame for it should lie with the Communists.’
His voice did not change its pace, but Angus watching him was aware of a tension in his watchfulness. His half-closed eyes were on the old sick man, ready to note the least change in his expression. Angus looked from the one to the other. Did his father react in any way? He could not tell; the room was darkening.
‘So that’s what I should put in my sealed envelope,’ the Colonel said. ‘I believe that the Nationalist party will build up the Communist party as a toy windmill that it can one day destroy. I believe that it will fool outside opinion and its own nationals. It is a familiar pattern, after all; what do you think, Macartney?’
‘You may be right.’
The old man’s voice was steady. Angus, watching him, wondered whether the Colonel had got the result he sought. Had his father given himself away? Was his father part of a conspiracy to overthrow the throne? If he was, what was a son’s duty? To stand aside, to be a neutral? To spy upon his father? Or, a third alternative, to lay his cards upon the table, to tell his father what he knew, what he suspected; to warn his father that he was being watched, so that he could extricate himself in time? What was his duty? Or was he imagining things?
‘When do you prophesy that all this will happen?’ Angus asked.
‘Not in the old King’s lifetime. Or perhaps I should put it this way. I don’t think that Karak will make the headlines in the old King’s lifetime. But I’ve a hunch that the Communist party instigated by the generals will do a number of wild things to prepare the public temper. It is going to be a constant headache for me. I shall never be able to know where the next blow will come from. It will be a great relief to me when this royal wedding is safely over.’
Chapter Twenty-two
Annetta woke early on her wedding morning. Though the room was still dark she could hear the thudding of the launches on the river. She looked at her bedside clock: just after five. In Highgate it would be ten o’clock. Her mother would be listening to a radio play, her father would be taking a last look at the crossword puzzle. They would have talked at dinner about their daughter’s marriage. They would have toasted her in champagne, but now it had become an evening like any other. She was so far away, had moved into a different life; one that her parents could not visualize. She would return to England every other year: but she would return as a stranger with no common ground on which to meet her family and friends.
Picturing her parents, all those miles, all those hours away, she could realize how wistful an evening this must be for them. They were happy for her sake; they were flattered and excited by the prospect of their daughter as a future qu
een, but it was not the kind of marriage they had pictured. They had looked forward to a family occasion; the friends of a lifetime gathered round them. Looking beyond this wedding day they had thought of grandchildren giving a new significance and purpose to their own lives, in a continuity of tradition. As it was they would not see their grandchildren till the time came for a boarding school in England, when the children were in their teens; they would never see them as babies, which is what grandparents value most. She could hear her father saying, ‘We mustn’t be selfish about this. It’s her happiness that counts,’ but even so it must be a big disappointment to them. They must feel that life had cheated them. Was not the choosing of a daughter’s trousseau, was not the dressing of her on a wedding day one of the big moments of a woman’s life? And for a man, what prouder moment was there than the slow walk down the aisle, his daughter on his arm? They had been robbed of what they could rightfully consider as their due.
She turned over on her back, crossing her arms behind her head. Her hips ached. She had not got used yet to these hard beds. She wondered what the beds would be like in her new home. Would Rhya let her change them if they were as hard as this? Or must she get used to them? Were they really cooler? The people of a country should know what was best for themselves. To what a lot of new things she would have to get accustomed; housekeeping—with all these servants and herself speaking a bare smattering of the language. Were these hard beds typical of the kind of problem that awaited her in the new life that would start in a few hours’ time?
The room began to lighten. In a few minutes it would be daylight. Dawn came quickly here: what a contrast with the long twilights and false dawns of England. To what a different wedding morning she had pictured herself as waking and to what a different marriage. She had pictured that day so often; what young girl hadn’t? As a twelve-year-old she had dreamed of an elopement; a twentieth-century equivalent of the chase by horses to a channel port; two high-powered cars roaring up the Great North Road to Gretna Green. It was reluctantly, at fifteen, that she had come to recognize that you only had elopements when you had family opposition, and that her parents were not the kind to raise difficulties. Even if she were to want to marry someone impossible, someone much older, or somebody from a different walk of life, or with some obvious disability, a waster, somebody who drank or had been to prison, she had known how her father would behave. ‘It’s your own life. You have to make your own decisions,’ he would have said, ‘but you should give it a little thought. Go abroad for six months, why not? Don’t see him, write to him, of course, but give yourself a chance to think it over steadily. If you feel the same when you come back, then it will be up to you.’
There would be no reason for an elopement when her family concurred. If there was opposition on the other side … but her vanity could not picture the situation when a family would not welcome her as the son of the house’s bride. She might fall in love with a married man—someone who would say to her, ‘We’ve got to cut and run.’ Other people found themselves in a fix like that. You read of it in the papers every day. If she were to fall in love with a married man who wanted her to run away, there would be no alternative to an elopement. She would not tell her parents, she could not stand discussions; she would cut and run. And that would be exciting. The starting off from Highgate as though she were going into London for a morning’s shopping, but instead of getting out of the tube at Piccadilly going straight on to the air terminal at Gloucester Road. She would brandish her handbag at the man. ‘This is all I’ve brought,’ she’d say. ‘I’m going to be a great expense to you.’ That would be exciting, and so would the sending of the telegram on their arrival, at Paris, Nice, Geneva, wherever they had flown. ‘Please don’t worry. Am all right and happy. Writing immediately.’ With the romantic sixteen-year-old’s yearning for self-sacrifice in the cause of love, she had relished the picture of herself as a fallen woman, against whom her contemporaries would raise their eyebrows; but by the time she was seventeen she had started to shy away from that. The marriage that would eventually follow an elopement was not the kind she wanted: a register office, an ordinary day-time London dress, no bridesmaids, half a dozen witnesses and a lunch party afterwards at the Savoy. If fate ordained it, she would make the best of it, but it was not the kind of marriage that she wanted.
She knew the kind of marriage that she wanted: a conventional English marriage; the announcement in The Times, the photograph in the Tatler, the choosing of the engagement ring in Bond Street, the letters of congratulation, the choice of bridesmaids, drawing up the list of guests, ‘Must we ask Angela?'; all the shopping, the interviews with house agents; finding the right small house in Hampstead, poring over catalogues; then the presents coming in and all the thanking for them. Wasn’t that what every young girl wanted? And hadn’t her imagination brooded as much as anything on that last day: the last-minute feeling at every moment of that day—Til never do this again’—the last evening in her own home, the last dinner: they would all be tired and excited; so many last-minute chores had demanded their attention. They would drink champagne, because it was the thing to do; there would be a raising of glasses; but no oratory. They would be too tired for that. Probably before half past nine, almost immediately after the news, she would go up to bed. This house had been her home for fifteen years; when she had come here first she had been too young to stay up for dinner. Supper upstairs and her mother tucking her in. It was only on occasions that she had stayed up. How proud and grown up she had felt when she had come home from St. James for her first holidays and her mother had said, ‘I suppose you’re old enough now to stay up to dinner.’ But the ritual of being tucked up had been maintained, even as a grown-up girl, and she always said when she kissed her mother good night, ‘You’ll come up, won’t you?’
She would say that for the last time on the night before her wedding, and the moment when her mother sat beside her on the bed would be a moment of recognition of, of gratitude on her part for all that her mother had done for her, had meant to her, had given to her during all those years. Would they say anything special or would they chatter inconsequently of indifferent things? She did not know; the moment would decide; but either way, as she lay back for the last time among her pillows, while her mother sat beside her, they would be utterly at one.
And as she looked up at her mother’s profile in the half-lit room, she would be envisaging the day when she would sit beside her own daughter’s bed, on the eve of that daughter’s marriage; and she would be praying on her wedding eve that when that day came her daughter would be feeling in her heart one half of the devotion and the gratitude she was feeling in her own heart now. She had seen those few minutes as the highlight of her marriage, of all, at least that came before marriage. She was never to know those moments. Nor was her mother.
Lying back, her hands clasped under her head while daylight filled the room, she pictured the day that lay ahead. She would go down with Rhya to see their future house. She had no idea what it would be like. She did not even know where it was; a priest wrapped in a saffron robe would scatter it with lustral water. She would receive the King’s blessing at the Palace. She would be wearing for both these ceremonies European clothes; after lunch at Aunt Ladda’s house, she would assume her ceremonial robes. They were voluminous and rich in texture. Red and blue silk, shot with gold and silver threads, draped over a tight-fitting jacket that buttoned high at the neck and at the wrist. Her head was to be wrapped in a gold turban. Her shoulders would support a collection of heavy gold and silver bangles that, to her, resembled the collar of a horse’s harness.
At half past two Rhya would call for her and they would drive to the Palace for the reception. At the far end of a long room they would kneel side by side at a kind of praying stool, their hands hanging over the edge while the guests came up, one by one, to pour lustral water over them; the water would drip into a bowl of roses. There would be no procession through the streets; though the streets by which the
y would drive had been carefully cordoned off. Forrester was on his guard against a repetition of the incident at Kassaya. There would be no party for the guests; on arrival the guests would hand over their presents to an attendant; after they had poured the water, they would be given, as they left the room, a souvenir of the occasion: a brooch for the women, a tiepin for the men, in silver and enamel. A wedding in Karak was a private occasion, not a public one. The reception would last about an hour.
When the last guest had gone, she and Rhya would drive to their own home. It would be the first time they had been alone together for six months. That was going to be the strangest thing about the day; stranger than the ceremonial robes and the lustral water. It would have seemed less strange to be married to someone whom she scarcely knew, who had been chosen for her by her parents. A Moslem bride had never seen her bridegroom before her wedding day. She could adapt herself to a situation such as that, if that was the custom of the country. The slow process, undertaken together, of self-discovery and self-revelation was a natural one. But the process of her relationship with Rhya was anything but natural. They had become lovers within eight hours of their meeting; for three months they had conducted a light-hearted liaison. She had not taken it seriously; she had never thought of it as something that would last. It was the greatest fun. She had never had such fun before. Day after day she had thanked heaven that she had known it. When she was a staid and venerable figure, long past frivolities, she would relive it in memory. I don’t mind being old, she’d think, because I’ve had the best. She would chuckle when her grandchildren said, ‘Of course you wouldn’t understand, Granny, things were different in your day.’
She had not even asked herself whether she was in love with Rhya. She had been having too good a time. What did one mean by love? The feeling of which she had read, that you could not face existence without a certain person, was something she had not felt for Rhya, because she had never for one moment imagined that she would not very soon have to live without him. Nor had she loved him in the tortured ecstatic manner of star-crossed lovers who grab in desperate greed at the crumbs of happiness that are vouchsafed them. There had been no strain, no torture, no sense of guilt and of frustration about her times with Rhya. It had been a halcyon honeymoon. She had prayed, ‘Let it end before the bloom is off it.’