Now for the particular. Very early in my political life I ran up against a department of the War Office specializing in general intelligence, run by a Brigadier who resented the idea that his office should bow the knee to us. A question of rank, or allowances, or some such rot; under the Commission he had been allowed more or less a free hand. Incidentally, this is the remains of the old Arab Bureau left over from 1918 which has been living on quietly like a toad buried under a stone! Obviously in the general re-alignment, his show must (it seemed to me) integrate with somebody. And now there was only an embryonic Embassy in Egypt. As he had worked formerly to the High Commission’s Political Branch, I thought he should work to me — and indeed, after a series of sharp battles, bent if not broke him — Maskelyne is the creature’s name. He is so typical as to be rather interesting and I have made extensive notes on him for a book in my usual fashion. (One writes to recover a lost innocence!)
Well, since the Army discovered that imagination is a major factor in producing cowardice they have trained the Maskelyne breed in the virtues of counter-imagination: a sort of amnesia which is almost Turkish. The contempt for death has been turned into a contempt for life and this type of man accepts life only on his own terms. A frozen brain alone enables him to keep up a routine of exceptional boredom. He is very thin, very tall, and his skin has been tanned by Indian service to the colour of smoked snakeskin, or a scab painted with iodine. His perfect teeth rest as lightly as a feather upon his pipestem. There is a peculiar gesture he has — I wish I could describe it, it interests me so much — of removing his pipe slowly before speaking, levelling his small dark eyes at one, and almost whispering: ‘Oh, do you really think so?’ The vowels drawing themselves out infinitely into the lassitude, the boredom of the silence which surrounds him. He is gnawed by the circumscribed perfection of a breeding which makes him uncomfortable in civilian clothes, and indeed he walks about in his well-cut cavalry coat with a Noli me tangere air. (Breed for type and you always get anomalies of behaviour.) He is followed everywhere by his magnificent red pointer Nell (named after his wife?) who sleeps on his feet while he works at his files, and on his bed at night. He occupies a room in a hotel in which there is nothing personal — no books, no photographs, no papers. Only a set of silver-backed brushes, a bottle of whisky and a newspaper. (I imagine him sometimes brushing the silent fury out of his own scalp, furiously brushing his dark shiny hair back from the temples, faster and faster. Ah, that’s better — that’s better!)
He reaches his office at eight having bought his day-late copy of the Daily Telegraph. I have never seen him read anything else. He sits at his huge desk, consumed with a slow dark contempt for the venality of the human beings around him, perhaps the human race as a whole; imperturbably he examines and assorts their differing corruptions, their maladies, and outlines them upon marble minute-paper which he always signs with his little silver pen in a small awkward fly’s handwriting. The current of his loathing flows through his veins slowly, heavily, like the Nile at flood. Well, you can see what a numéro he is. He lives purely in the military imagination for he never sees or meets the subjects of most of his papers; the information he collates comes in from suborned clerks, or discontented valets, or pent-up servants. It does not matter. He prides himself on his readings of it, his I.A. (intelligence appreciation), just like an astrologer working upon charts belonging to unseen, unknown subjects. He is judicial, proud as the Calif, unswerving, I admire him very much. Honestly I do.
Maskelyne has set up two marks between which (as between degree-signs on a calibrated thermometer) the temperatures of his approval and disapproval are allowed to move, expressed in the phrases: ‘A good show for the Raj’ and ‘Not such a good show for the Raj’. He is too single-minded of course, ever to be able to imagine a really Bad Show for the Bloody Raj. Such a man seems unable to see the world around him on open sights; but then his profession and the need for reserve make him a complete recluse, make him inexperienced in the ways of the world upon which he sits in judgement.… Well, I am tempted to go on and frame the portrait of our spycatcher, but I will desist. Read my next novel but four, it should also include a sketch of Telford, who is Maskelyne’s Number Two — a large blotchy ingratiating civilian with illfitting dentures who manages to call one ‘old fruit’ a hundred times a second between nervous guffaws. His worship of the cold snaky soldier is marvellous to behold. ‘Yes, Brigadier’, ‘No, Brigadier’, falling over a chair in his haste to serve; you would say he was completely in love with his boss. Maskelyne sits and watches his confusion coldly, his brown chin, cleft by a dark dimple, jutting like an arrow. Or he will lean back in his swivel-chair and tap softly on the door of the huge safe behind him with the faintly satisfied air of a gourmet patting his paunch as he says: ‘You don’t believe me? I have it all in here, all in here.’ Those files, you think, watching this superlative, all-comprehending gesture, must contain material enough to indict the world! Perhaps they do.
Well, this is what happened: one day I found a characteristic document from Maskelyne on my desk headed Nessim Hosnani, and subtitled A Conspiracy Among the Copts which alarmed me somewhat. According to the paper, our Nessim was busy working up a large and complicated plot against the Egyptian Royal House. Most of the data were rather questionable I thought, knowing Nessim, but the whole paper put me in a quandary for it carried the bland recommendation that the details should be transmitted by the Embassy to the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs! I can hear you draw your breath sharply. Even supposing this were true, such a course would put Nessim’s life in the greatest danger. Have I explained that one of the major characteristics of Egyptian nationalism is the gradually growing envy and hate of the ‘foreigners’ — the half-million or so of non-Moslems here? And that the moment full Egyptian sovereignty was declared the Moslems started in to bully and expropriate them? The brains of Egypt, as you know, is its foreign community. The capital which flowed into the land while it was safe under our suzerainty, is now at the mercy of these paunchy pashas. The Armenians, Greeks, Copts, Jews — they are all feeling the sharpening edge of this hate; many are wisely leaving, but most cannot. These huge capital investments in cotton, etc., cannot be abandoned overnight. The foreign communities are living from prayer to prayer and from bribe to bribe. They are trying to save their industries, their life-work from the gradual encroachment of the pashas. We have literally thrown them to the lions!
Well, I read and re-read this document, as I say, in a state of considerable anxiety. I knew that if I gave it to Errol he would run bleating with it to the King. So I went into action myself to test the weak points in it — mercifully it was not one of Maskelyne’s best papers — and succeeded in throwing doubt upon many of his contentions. But what infuriated him was that I actually suspended the paper — I had to in order to keep it out of Chancery’s hands! My sense of duty was sorely strained, but then there was no alternative; what would those silly young schoolboys next door have done? If Nessim was really guilty of the sort of plot Maskelyne envisaged, well and good; one could deal with him later according to his lights. But … you know Nessim. I felt that I owed it to him to be sure before passing such a paper upwards.
But of course Maskelyne was furious, though he had the grace not to show it. We sat in his office with the conversational temperature well below zero and still falling while he showed me his accumulated evidence and his agents’ reports. For the most part they were not as solid as I had feared. ‘I have this man Selim suborned’ Maskelyne kept croaking ‘and I’m convinced his own secretary can’t be wrong about it. There is this small secret society with the regular meetings — Selim has to wait with the car and drive them home. Then there is this curious cryptogram which goes out all over the Middle East from Balthazar’s clinic, and then the visits to arms manufacturers in Sweden and Germany.…’ I tell you, my brain was swimming! I could see all our friends neatly laid out on a slab by the Egyptian Secret Police, being measured for shrouds.
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nbsp; I must say too, that circumstantially the inferences which Maskelyne drew appeared to hold water. It all looked rather sinister; but luckily a few of the basic points would not yield to analysis — things like the so-called cipher which friend Balthazar shot out once every two months to chosen recipients in the big towns of the Middle East. Maskelyne was still trying to follow these up. But the data were far from complete and I stressed this as strongly as I could, much to the discomfort of Telford, though Maskelyne is too cool a bird of prey to be easily discountenanced. Nevertheless I got him to agree to pend the paper until something more substantial was forthcoming to broaden the basis of the doctrine. He hated me but he swallowed it, and so I felt that I had gained at least a temporary respite. The problem was what to do next — how to use the time to advantage? I was of course convinced that Nessim was innocent of these grotesque charges. But I could not, I admit, supply explanations as convincing as those of Maskelyne. What, I could not help wondering, were they really up to? If I was to deflate Maskelyne, I must find out for myself. Very annoying, and indeed professionally improper — but que faire? Little Ludwig must turn himself into a private investigator, a Sexton Blake, in order to do the job! But where to begin?
Maskelyne’s only direct lead on Nessim was through the suborned secretary, Selim; through him he had accumulated quite a lot of interesting though not intrinsically alarming data about the Hosnani holdings in various fields — the land bank, shipping line, ginning mills, and so on. The rest was largely gossip and rumour, some of it damaging, but none of it more than circumstantial. But piled up in a heap it did make our gentle Nessim sound somewhat sinister. I felt that I must take it all apart somehow. Specially as a lot of it concerned and surrounded his marriage — the acid gossip of the lazy and envious, so typical of Alexandria — or anywhere else for that matter. In this, of course, the unconscious moral judgements of the Anglo-Saxon were to the fore — I mean in the value-judgements of Maskelyne. As for Justine — well, I know her a bit, and I must confess I rather admire her surly magnificence. Nessim haunted her for some time before getting her to consent, I am told; I cannot say I had misgivings about it all exactly, but … even today their marriage feels in some curious way uncemented. They make a perfect pair, but never seem to touch each other; indeed, once I saw her very slightly shrink as he picked a thread from her fur. Probably imagination. Is there perhaps a thundercloud brooding there behind the dark satin-eyed wife? Plenty nerves, certainly. Plenty hysteria. Plenty Judaic melancholy. One recognizes her vaguely as the girl-friend of the man whose head was presented on a charger.… What do I mean?
Well, Maskelyne says with his dry empty contempt: ‘No sooner does she marry than she starts an affair with another man, and a foreigner to boot.’ This of course is Darley, the vaguely amiable bespectacled creature who inhabits Pombal’s box-room at certain times. He teaches for a living and writes novels. He has that nice round babyish back to the head which one sees in cultural types; slight stoop, fair hair, and the shyness that goes with Great Emotions imperfectly kept under control. A fellow-romantic quotha! Looked at hard, he starts to stammer. But he’s a good fellow, gentle and resigned … I confess that he seems unlikely material for someone as dashing as Nessim’s wife to work upon. Can it be benevolence in her, or simply a perverse taste for innocence? There is a small mystery here. Anyway, it was Darley and Pombal who introduced me to the current Alexandrian livre de chevet which is a French novel called Moeurs (a swashing study in the grand manner of nymphomania and psychic impotence) written by Justine’s last husband. Having written it he wisely divorced her and decamped but she is popularly supposed to be the central subject of the book and is regarded with grave sympathy by society. I must say, when you think that everyone is both polymorph and perverse here, it seems hard luck to be singled out like this as the main character in a roman vache. Anyway, this lies in the past, and now Nessim has carried her into the ranks of le monde where she acquits herself with a sharply defined grace and savagery. They suit her looks and the dark but simple splendours of Nessim himself. Is he happy? But wait, let me put the question another way. Was he ever happy? Is he unhappier now than he was? Hum! I think he could do a lot worse, for the girl is neither too innocent nor too unintelligent. She plays the piano really well, albeit with a sulky emphasis, and reads widely. Indeed, the novels of Yours Truly are much admired — with a disarming whole-heartedness. (Caught! Yes, this is why I am disposed to like her.)
On the other hand, what she sees in Darley I cannot credit. The poor fellow flutters on a slab like a skate at her approach; he and Nessim are, however, great frequenters of each other, great friends. These modest British types — do they all turn out to be Turks secretly? Darley at any rate must have some appeal because he has also got himself regally entangled with a rather nice little cabaret dancer called Melissa. You would never think, to look at him, that he was capable of running a tandem, so little self-possession does he appear to have. A victim of his own fine sentiment? He wrings his hands, his spectacles steam up, when he mentions either name. Poor Darley! I always enjoy irritating him by quoting the poem by his minor namesake to him:
O blest unfabled Incense Tree
That bums in glorious Araby,
With red scent chalicing the air,
Till earth-life grows Elysian there.
He pleads with me blushingly to desist, though I cannot tell which Darley he is blushing for; I continue in magistral fashion:
Half-buried in her flaming breast
In this bright tree she makes her nest
Hundred-sunned Phoenix! When she must
Crumble at length to hoary dust!
It is not a bad conceit for Justine herself. ‘Stop’ he always cries.
Her gorgeous death-bed! Her rich pyre
Burn up with aromatic fire!
Her urn, sight-high from spoiler men!
Her birth-place when self-born again!
‘Please. Enough.’
‘What’s wrong with it? It’s not such a bad poem, is it?’ And I conclude with Melissa, disguised as an 18th Century Dresden China shepherdess.
The mountainless green wilds among,
Here ends she her unechoing song
With amber tears and odorous sighs
Mourned by the desert where she dies!
So much for Darley! But as for Justine’s part in the matter I can find no rhyme, no reason, unless we accept one of Pombal’s epigrams at its face value. He says, with fat seriousness: ‘Les femmes sont fidéles au fond, tu sais? Elles ne trompent que les autres femmes!’ But it seems to me to offer no really concrete reason for Justine wishing to tromper the pallid rival Melissa. This would be infra dig for a woman with her position in society. See what I mean?
Well, then, it is upon Darley that our Maskelyne keeps his baleful ferret’s eyes fixed; apparently Selim tells us that all the real information on Nessim is kept in a little wall-safe at the house and not in the office. There is only one key to this safe which Nessim always carries on his person. The private safe, says Selim, is full of papers. But he is vague as to what the papers can be. Love letters? Hum. At any rate, Selim has made one or two attempts to get at the safe, but without any luck. One day the bold Maskelyne himself decided to examine it at close range and take, if necessary, a wax squeeze. Selim let him in and he climbed the back stairs — and nearly ran into Darley, our cicisbeo, and Justine in the bedroom! He just heard their voices in time. Never tell me after this that the English are puritans. Some time later I saw a short story Darley published in which a character exclaims: ‘In his arms I felt mauled, chewed up, my fur coated with saliva, as if between the paws of some great excited cat.’ I reeled. ‘Crumbs!’ I thought. ‘This is what Justine is doing to the poor bugger — eating him alive!’
I must say, it gave me a good laugh. Darley is so typical of my compatriots — snobbish and parochial in one. And so good! He lacks devil. (Thank God for the Irishman and the Jew who spat in my blood.) Well, why should I take this h
igh and mighty line? Justine must be awfully good to sleep with, must kiss like a rainbow and squeeze out great sparks — yes. But out of Darley? It doesn’t hold water. Nevertheless ‘this rotten creature’ as Maskelyne calls her is certainly his whole attention, or was when I was last there. Why?
All these factors were tumbling over and over in my mind as I drove up to Alexandria, having secured myself a long duty week-end which even the good Enrol found unexceptionable. I never dreamed then, that within a year you might find yourself engaged by these mysteries. I only knew that I wanted, if possible, to demolish the Maskelyne thesis and stay the Chancery’s hand in the matter of Nessim. But apart from this I was somewhat at a loss. I am no spy, after all; was I to creep about Alexandria dressed in a pudding-basin wig with concealed earphones, trying to clear the name of our friend? Nor could I very well present myself to Nessim and, clearing my throat, say nonchalantly: ‘Now about this spy-net you’ve got here.…’ However, I drove steadily and thoughtfully on. Egypt, flat and unbosomed, flowed back and away from me on either side of the car. The green changed to blue, the blue to peacock’s eye, to gazelle-brown, to panther-black. The desert was like a dry kiss, a flutter of eyelashes against the mind. Ahem! The night became horned with stars like branches of almond-blossom. I gibbered into the city after a drink or two under a new moon which felt as if it were drawing half its brilliance from the open sea. Everything smelt good again. The iron band that Cairo puts round one’s head (the consciousness of being completely surrounded by burning desert?) dissolved, relaxed — gave place to the expectation of an open sea, an open road leading one’s mind back to Europe.… Sorry. Off the point.
The Alexandria Quartet Page 57