My Place in the Bazaar

by Alec Waugh

  The coconut grove ran right down to the grey-black powdered sand. The tide was full. We sat beneath a casuarina-tree, watching the successive waves quiver in long phosphorus-shot ripples among the rocks. It was one of those tropic nights for which the traveller, returned to northern latitudes, is for ever a little homesick. The kind of night on which it would be easy to believe that Bevan had found ample compensation here in the exchange that he had made.

  I had been long enough in the tropics, however, to know the actuality of that exchange. At that very moment mosquitoes were biting at my ankles, and the mosquito is the symbol of all the malice and poison that lies hidden in the seeming softness of a tropic scene. The climate that seems so much kinder to man than that of our northern latitudes is actually robbing him of his health and strength far faster, far more surely and cruelly than frost and cold and rain. In Europe there is glamour in the idea of a man’s ‘going native’. But actually, a man’s life with a native girl is the equivalent of a man’s marrying a woman whom his friends’ wives refuse to meet. Neither more nor less than that. I had no illusions about the exchange of Bevan’s life.

  In silence we sat on there. The mosquitoes had begun to worry at my ankles. Unless I did something about it soon, there would be a swollen rash of irritation by the morning. I stood up.

  ’I’m going back to the bungalow for a sarong. I shan’t be more than a few minutes.’

  I walked back along the path. Between the bending palms the lights of the bungalow shone friendlily. I hurried across the porch; then paused astonished.

  In the window Blunden and Sally were seated side by side. The washing-up was finished. They were close together, in the dusk. As I stepped into the room, they moved quickly away from one another. Blunden turned, saw who it was, put his hand to his left ear and tugged it. It was a secret sign between us. It meant, ‘Keep away from here. And see that other people keep away for at least an hour.’ It was not by any means the first time that Blunden had made that sign. I had little doubt as to the outcome.

  Without a sarong I walked back to the beach.

  Bevan was seated as I had left him, seated on the root, looking across the bay. There was about his pose an irritating quality of complacence.

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve got to be so pleased about,’ I said. He looked up, surprised.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean. You were the most ambitious person that I’ve ever known. You were so ambitious that you never allowed yourself to have any fun, so ambitious that none of the things that were good enough for the rest of us, the friends, the lovers, the books, the careers, the way of life, were good enough for you. You were wretchedly unhappy because you weren’t getting the things you wanted, you made everyone you met uncomfortable. Yet, now, you seem completely happy. I can’t think why.’

  The moment I had said it I was sorry. It was hitting a man when he was down. But I’d never liked him much. He had never placed any latchet on his own tongue. Besides, I was inquisitive.

  I had thought that my outburst would bring another outburst. It didn’t. It brought a question. ‘What do you mean by happiness?’ It was a rhetorical question. As I hesitated, he went straight on. ‘I’ve never had any doubt about that you see. Happiness lies in the right work, in the right friends, the right way of life, the right position. You look at my life now, you say it’s nothing. Of course it’s nothing. Do you think I don’t know that: work that is un congenial, no position, acquaintances who speak another language, a foreign climate, a marriage that is not even friendship. I know how I’ve finished up. And there’s no hope: not the slightest. I don’t need telling that. But, even so … no, even now … I don’t think that I was wrong.’ He paused. He was looking at the panorama of his past: with a detached, impersonal interest: so that he could speak of it with his voice level, with no note of acrimony.

  ‘It’s like this, as I see it,’ he went on. ‘The fact that one person fails does not mean that there is no such thing as success. Because one is driven to do work one hates, that does not prove that there does not exist the work in which a man can express his nature. Some men have found it. In the same way there’s such a thing as friendship even though your friend betrays you; such a thing as love though your wife deceives you; such a thing as talented intellectual society though your lot has cast you among boors. Those things do exist. And I wanted them so desperately. While there still seemed a chance that I might get them, that I might pick up what I see now is the thousandth ticket in a lottery, well, naturally, I was difficult. I saw things slipping from me that I couldn’t bear to lose. It’s hard to be philosophical when your life’s in the making. But when it’s once made, when it’s spoilt, irremediably, why, that’s another thing.’

  He paused; then said about the truest thing that I have ever heard about the lot of human beings on this planet :

  ‘It’s quite easy to be happy, when once you know you never will be happy.’

  The Second World War

  My life, like so many others’, was completely disrupted by the war. As an officer on the Reserve, I was recalled to my regiment immediately, and after a few months of regimental duties was posted as an Intelligence Officer to the B.E.F. in time for the early stages of the Battle of France. In June 1940, my wife, an Australian, took our three children with her to Melbourne. I, after a year’s Staff Captaincy in London in the Ministry of Mines, was posted to the Middle East; at first to Beyrouth as a liaison officer in Spears Mission with the Free French Forces, later to an Intelligence organization in Baghdad. I remained there till I was demobilized shortly after VE day.

  When I arrived in New York in September 1945, a friend of mine asked me if I had had a ‘chic war’. No, I told her, mine was obscure and undistinguished, but it was interesting. I saw a part of the world with which I was unfamiliar; I made friends among the Arabs; during my three years in Baghdad, I was in close touch with the Police authorities and the experience I acquired was to prove very useful when I returned to novel writing.

  I wrote practically nothing during the war. When it began I was halfway through a West Indian novel. I finished it during the phoney war when I was stationed at Dorchester. But when I was transferred to Staff work, I found that after eight hours at a desk I needed relaxation. In Baghdad, however, Robin Maugham bought me, as a Christmas present, an elegantly bound manuscript book. It was so pretty that I felt I had to fill its pages; so every morning I jotted down in it, in the form of a continuous narrative, a series of wartime sketches that were eventually published under the title of His Second War. It contained a vignette called ‘Bien Sûr’.

  Bien Sûr

  Lazy, lackadaisical, and Lebanese, an uncatalogued, unclassified orderly at the military hospital, she shuffled around the dormitories in heel-less slippers, carrying trays, making beds, filling water bottles—neither sister, nor nurse, nor kitchenmaid—a general factotum, always occupied but never busy; always on the move but never hurrying; friendly, good-natured, willing; almost but not quite competent.

  She was short and plump. Her hair was black, worn low upon the shoulders as the fashion was. A grey-green apron was knotted about her waist, her sleeves were rolled up to her elbows. She had a pale, almond-coloured skin. Her chin was a little heavy. When she was not smiling, she gave the impression that she was scowling. But even when she was not smiling you were conscious of her eyes. They were dark and long-lashed and lustrous. They made all those similes of pools seem reasonable. She was eighteen years old.

  I met her for the first time in the hall when I visited a brother officer. ‘I’ve come to see Captain Boot,’ I said. She nodded.

  ‘He is here?’ I asked. Again she nodded.

  ‘Perhaps you could direct me to him?’

  ‘Bien sûr,’ she said.

  She was a person of few words, or at least she was a person with a limited French vocabulary, and I knew little Arabic. But even among her friends she was for the most part silent.

&nbs
p; It was fun, though, talking to her. It was fun trying to see how often one could take that scowl away and make her smile. It was a kind of game, an amusing game—a game that grew on me, a game that I found myself playing with increasing frequency; twice a week to begin with, then every other day, finally every day. A visit to the hospital, with its twenty minutes’ walk, filled in conveniently the slack ninety minutes between the end of lunch and the opening of my office. And she could usually be persuaded to dawdle over the tray of tea with which hospital visitors were entertained.

  One afternoon I arrived late. I had lunched at the French Club in congenial company. They served no half-bottles at the Club. A bottle was put before you. When you had reached what you judged to be half you would, if you were strong-minded, call the waiter and ask him to remove it. There was invariably a point when you wondered whether you had reached the half or not. There was a point half a minute later when you wondered whether you could honourably call what was left in the bottle half a litre: a thought to which every so often came the inevitable corollary: ‘Would it not be better to retain one’s honour and finish the bottle where it stood?’ At this particular lunch, however, I had not reached the punt of the bottle by any such process of deliberation. I had ordered a whole bottle right away. It was in an anapaestic mood that I made the mile between the Club and the hospital in fifteen minutes.

  She was crossing the hall as I arrived. She was carrying a tray of tea, for which someone presumably was waiting. She was never too busy, however, to stop and talk. She paused, resting the tray upon her hip. It looked a very heavy tray. Too heavy a tray, I thought, for a young girl, when the carrying of that tray was not just one excursion, when that tray was one of many. It couldn’t be much of a life for her, I thought. I wondered what her home was like. I wondered how much fun she had. ‘What about our going to a cinema?’ I asked.

  ‘Bien sûr,’ she said.

  We dined at Saad’s—a restaurant that had a feel of London: that was a single narrow room with a balcony at the far end of it; a restaurant where there was no table-d’hôte, where you could order Arab dishes—kibbe and curries and curdled milk; a restaurant that was out of bounds to other ranks, that was expensive and quiet that the majority of British officers considered dull, that was patronized by the Lebanese rather than by the military.

  She was there within five minutes of my arrival. Her hair and eyebrows glistened with oil. She was wearing white network gloves and a white muslin blouse. She had a black, long-sleeved woollen cardigan that she pulled off the moment she was seated. She looked round her, caught the waiter’s eye, and smiled. From the manner of their greeting, they seemed old friends.

  What would she like to eat, I asked.

  ‘Quelque chose de bon.’

  She did not listen, though, to what I ordered. She had begun to introduce herself. She was, she said, the eldest of a family of six. She and her elder sister had been born in Brazil, where her parents, like so many other Lebanese, had hoped to make a speedy fortune. But her father could never have made a fortune anywhere. He drank. Brandy had absorbed the dot he had taken out with him. Back in Beyrouth, Arak had consumed the capital that his parents left him. Nothing was left now except the house; which was her mother’s and which he could not touch. It was lucky, she explained, that he had six children. If he had not so many to look after him now that he was getting old, heaven knew how he would have managed.

  She shook her head when she spoke about him. He was very difficult, very ill-tempered, always about the house, ill half the time. So difficult, so ill-tempered, that she had never dared to tell him about her marriage. Oh yes, she had been married. The day after her sixteenth birthday. It hadn’t worked—gambling was all he cared about. She had stood it for five months, then she had got divorced. It was quite easy in the Greek Church to get divorced. You just went and asked. Her parents had never guessed. She had gone on living at home all through it. There had been the afternoons. And now she was half-engaged, she told me, to a young French sailor, who had been wounded in the July campaign, whom she had nursed in hospital. His right shoulder and arm were shattered. No, she did not think she was in love with him, but she just did not see how he was going to manage without someone to look after him.

  She told her story with her habitual phlegmatic calm; cheerfully, but casually, as though there was nothing remarkable about this record. She finished her story and was silent. It was my turn to talk. I was uncertain of what to say. It was the first time I had been alone with her. I had no idea what her tastes or interests were. I began to talk about Beyrouth, about its cinemas and cabarets, about the brother officer who was sick in hospital, about … but she was not listening. I soon realized that she had something on her mind. Was it the food? Wasn’t this fish mayonnaise her idea of quelque chose de bon, or the wine? Would she rather have had beer or Arak? Were they really all right? I asked her.

  ‘Bien sûr,’ she said, and indeed she was making steady progress with the course.

  ‘I wonder which film you’d like to see?’ I asked. ‘There’s the French film at the Rialto.’

  She seemed, however, to take little interest in her choice.

  ’N’importe,’ she said and relapsed into cogitation. Really, but this was being rather a bore, I thought, as I returned to a dissertation on the resemblance between Beyrouth and a similar town on the Riviera. ‘The chief difference that I can see,’ I started, but she interrupted me.

  Where did I live? she asked.

  ‘On the edge of Regent’s Park.’

  ‘Regent’s Park.’

  I began to explain about London’s parks. She shook her head. No, she hadn’t meant that: she hadn’t wanted to know where I lived in England, she wanted to know where I lived here.…

  ‘I’ve got a flat,’ I said. ‘Just …’ But she was not interested in knowing where it was. Her face brightened. Her preoccupation left her. The thing, whatever it was that had been worrying her, had ceased to be a problem. She could now enjoy her evening. She was prepared to discuss the film that we were going to. An American film, she said, with a lot of action.

  We took an arabana, and she slipped her hand into mine. ‘I’m glad you’ve got a flat,’ she said. ‘A hotel or a pension—if my mother were to hear of my going into a hotel or a pension, she would never have forgiven me.’

  Her eyes were bright, her expression animated, as we took our seats. This was a great treat for her, she said. She was hardly ever taken to the pictures. Before the film had been running for five minutes, however, she was fast asleep. She slept right through the show, soundly and soundlessly. The moment the film stopped she was awake, her eyes were bright, the animated expression was on her face. ‘What about coming back for a moment, for a drink?’ I asked her.

  ‘Bien sûr,’ she said. But she was not thirsty.

  A dying moon was rising out of the sea as we walked back to her home. The streets were quiet and ghostly in the partial black out. The snow on the mountains glistened. It was hard to believe that Beyrouth was in a forward area, that all down the coast guns were manned against invasion, that all that day I had been busy with the provisioning of those defences with ammunition.

  ‘You will come back again?’ I asked.

  ‘Bien sûr.’

  The next night she dined with me. And twice in the next week. Then she broke a date. Her small brother, a boy of seven, was waiting outside Saad’s with a message that she could not come that night, but she would next day. Next day at the last moment I found myself on duty. I went round to her house to tell her so. She lived, she and her family, on the ground floor of a house that could with little renovation have been converted into what is called a mansion in the Lebanon. It was a typical small house. A large, central living-room with doors opening off it. Her mother was sitting over an open charcoal fire, puffing at a narghile. She received me graciously. Her daughter would be back in a few minutes, she explained. She wiped the mouthpiece of the narghile and offered it to me to smoke. A girl
of about twelve brought out two cups of coffee. A small boy of six came in, was introduced, stared at me, then ran out of the hall, and stood half-concealed behind a door peering at me. Behind another door there was another urchin watching.

  We dined together on the following night. But when I went round to Saad’s two evenings later her brother was waiting with a note. She was busy and suggested Thursday. On Thursday, however, she was not there. She frowned when I called round on the following morning. Her mother, she explained, was not happy about my seeing her so often, afraid of her getting talked about.

  But how otherwise, I asked, could we arrange it? My friend was no longer in the hospital. I had no longer an excuse for calling there, and if I could not call for her at home … I paused, waiting for her solution. She pondered, the surly phlegmatic expression was on her face. Then her face brightened. It was difficult for her, she said, to fix things in advance. Sometimes she was kept at the hospital. Sometimes she was tired. Sometimes she was not in the mood. But if I would dine alone at Saad’s every Wednesday and every Friday she would join me whenever she was able.

  Sometimes she came, sometimes she did not come. And when ever she did come I had the consoling knowledge that she had come because she wanted to. How often, in London and New York, had I not found myself taking out young women whose distant manner had suggested that they were only there because they had made a date six days earlier, and that when the day had come they would have given anything to have stayed at home and written letters and washed their stockings—or gone out with someone else.

  It was a very satisfactory arrangement. Whenever she came it was to the certainty of a happy evening. And when she did not come … well, I am someone who has spent a good deal of his life alone; I like dining by myself.

  All through the winter and that spring every Wednesday and every Friday I dined at Saad’s at the same table underneath the gallery.