Arabesque

by Geoffrey Household

  No longer could this affair be passed off to conscience as a lovely and unreal ecstasy, of no importance to any but the two dreamers. It had to be preserved. That necessity involved, at once, all the threads that bound her as a woman to everyone she thought about, loved or tolerated. Threads binding Dion existed too, though he was pleased to believe that they did not. Yet it was Dion who insisted that John should be told.

  John need not exactly be told in so many words; she would just indicate that she was worried whether the profounder motives for their union were any longer valid, and leave him to read between the lines. The hint, without alarming him into despair, would start him wondering if after the war their marriage should continue, hoping that it could, and slowly realising that it could not.

  In the afternoon, she composed an evasive letter which would reveal to John her disturbed emotions. There were certain phrases that she knew he would take as danger signals; in the fogotten days of 1940, when she wrote from Paris and Beirut, those phrases, which then implied nothing more than temporary depression, had never failed to arouse his anxiety. She determined to keep the letter a day or two for cool revision. Two hours later, in a panic lest she should tear it up, she posted it by air mail.

  A week passed slowly for she was always expecting Dion. Correspondence from the military to a civilian, with the Middle East, travelled by devious routes of its own and remained in pigeonholes under the disapproving eyes of censors or sorting clerks.

  When at last he appeared, it was at a reasonable hour, after lunch, in the heat of the day. He was neat, polished and cool as if he had been on his way to an interview with a general. She would have preferred him to show his longing by bursting in on her, dusty and unshaven from the road, but her beloved was still sensitive about his personal appearance. As if it mattered! She teased and adored him for his childishness until he revealed, as well she knew, that his passionate impatience was satisfying as her own. Armande rejoiced in the incontinence and beauty of her naked body, caressed, while her lover of a moment since lay still, by the warm wind that blew through the shutters of the flat.

  Then she touched his face with her fingers, feeling for imaginary differences that the eyes could not detect.

  “You’ve been worrying, beloved,” she said. “What really has brought you down to Egypt?”

  “Shipped down river for promotion,” he answered lazily.

  “But how splendid! A major?”

  “A genuine phoney major?”

  “My clever love! How did you do it?”

  “Got the sack.”

  “Darling, don’t be discreet. Tell me!”

  “Just usual army practice. Man embarrasses us. Must be a clever chap to do that, but don’t want him here. How shall we get rid of him Well, sir, why not promote the bastard?”

  “Dion!”

  “Best racket in the British Army, my soul. I supplies just as many good officers as bad ones. Can’t say that of any other system.”

  “Talk to me properly. Tell me!”

  “How much have you heard?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Just Guy Furney being hollow and superior. He said that you had all done a good job and that Montagne was presumed dead.”

  “Presumed?” he exclaimed, sitting up and turning round to her. “Did Furney say that?”

  “That or some other word.”

  “He couldn’t be deader. And they know it. Presumed! Just because his body hasn’t turned up! Furney had better stop laughing at his palace eunuchs. It’s taken them four years of war to get his off, but they’ve done it!”

  “Dion, you’re disgusting.”

  “Kensington,” he murmured.

  “If you ever say that to me again, I’ll—I’ll bite you.”

  “What would Ma think if she saw you in that condition?”

  “She’s the only person who has, Dion. And …”

  “Ow! You beastly little foreigner!”

  “And black-listed. And vicious. And in love. Put me inside under 18 B, my Dion, my darling!”

  When the sun had gone down behind the tall blocks in the centre of Cairo, and the cool, green scent from the shadowed backwaters of the Nile began to drift through the eastern windows of the flat, Dion wandered out of the bedroom and mixed two long drinks from the plentiful remains of the departmental stock of liquor. When he came back, Armande was sitting before her mirror, her black hair demurely coiled, her body innocent and hieratic in a crimson and gold Bakhara dressing gown.

  “Dion, now tell me all of what happened,” she said.

  “I was just going to tell you when you interrupted.”

  “You—!”

  “Now be a good girl, and drink your medicine.”

  He began to tell the story. Armande linked her arm in his, and led him into the living-room. She sat opposite him, her love of his mouth and of every twisted phrase overwhelming her interest.

  At the death of Abu Tisein she exclaimed in pity, but it was a moment before her preoccupation with the fate of Dion would let her remember; then she had nothing but sorrow for the end of such robust vitality. She thought of him as he was in Beirut, with Madame. That poor woman! It might so easily have been Dion and not David Nachmias. Poor, broken woman! She must write.

  “And so they just told us to bust the door down when we felt like hopping it,” he ended. “And then, Armande, we found, thank God, that they had put Laurence’s motorcycle out of action! So we walked to Safad police station and stirred up the cops.”

  “David Nachmias!” she sighed. “Whatever he was—what a loss to them all in Palestine!”

  “The cops found him next morning at Tiberias in his own car. Hand stiff round the gun. And no fingerprints but his own on the steering wheel. Ingenious devils—must have towed him there.”

  “But why bother when you knew the truth?”

  “Convention, darling. Seems to be generally accepted in the Holy Land that Jews never kill Jews. They are found to have bumped themselves off.”

  “Nobody who knew Abu Tisein could ever believe he killed himself,” she said.

  “No. Laurence of course popped straight across to his tame Zionist. Man he called Josh. I never got hold of his other name. He nearly broke down when he came out. All starry-eyed. He said they weren’t quite sure what to believe. They weren’t quite sure. The poor devils! God, what distrust of the world! That Irgun man was about right when he said they would believe anything. But our own people haven’t their excuse.”

  “What do you mean, Dion?” she asked, shocked.

  There had been a faint smell of perfidy in the whole chain of official reaction ever since Furney’s coolness.

  “We were the cat’s whiskers to start with. After all we were successful, and all hush-hush. And there was nothing on earth we could have done to save Abu Tisein. Then G.H.Q. began to give Palestine hell. There’s a little egg called Rains at G.H.Q. You wouldn’t know him. He’s a brigadier now. He said Abu Tisein had been invaluable, and the Field Security had sacrificed him. He didn’t like the gunplay at all. He thought we started it. But Palestine backed us to the limit. They insisted that what we said had happened, had happened. They told them where they could put their presumed. So we were just sacked and promoted. Laurence is going to Sicily as an economic expert. Oranges and lemons, you see. Had ’em in Palestine, and they have ’em there. Me, I’m liaising with Algiers. I said I wanted a job with lots of coloured pencils. So it had to be G.H.Q. And here we are together in the dream city by the Nile. Gin, horse dung, and the idle military.”

  “Tell me, darling,” she said, ignoring his light-heartedness, “am I to blame for all this? Am I?”

  “You? Why? Most of it falls on Abu Tisein. Some on me. A bit for Furney. And a fine slimy lump for Mr. Bloody Brigadier Rains. Not much left for you, my soul.”

  “I’ll never get mixed up in it again,” she said with a shiver of her shoulders. “We stink, as Laurence Fairfather once said.”

  “Only a little. There are lots of us t
o keep it nice and shiny.”

  “But I’m not … I don’t belong. What shall I do. Dion What use am I?”

  “Simple, darling—like everything you make the biggest fuss about. Join the A.T.S. They’re over here in thousands now and busy recruiting.”

  “What about the black list?”

  “Oh Lord! I’d forgotten that. Well, be a W.A.A.F. You’d look a pippin in their comic lid.”

  “Can I?”

  “Don’t worry. The R.A.F. have never been known to read a black list. They haven’t time.”

  “And you won’t go far away from me?”

  “Not till you are certain of yourself. That won’t be long. It’s fulfillment for you.”

  “Yes,” she answered slowly. “Fulfillment for me. I think it would be. To lose myself in the mass—all of myself that isn’t you. Not to be ashamed and proud and all without reason. Just to serve. I will do that, Dion.”

  “Then cheer up, my sweet. There’s a fortnight’s leave ahead.”

  Armande clung to him, and shook off the past by a long silence in his arms.

  “You’ll stay here,” she said. “All the fortnight.”

  “Here?” asked Dion, heaven in one eye and doubt in the other. “Wouldn’t His Majesty object?”

  “I’m his representative till the end of the month.”

  “Scandal?”

  “I’m below scandal, darling.”

  “I wish,” he said, “that you had written to your husband.”

  “I have. So there!”

  “Good girl! What did you say?”

  “This and that. Enough.”

  “An Armande letter, I suppose.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Beautiful feelings. No facts.”

  “They weren’t at all beautiful,” she said, distressed.

  Dion Prayle moved his valise and suitcase into the flat. Armande had determined not only to lose herself in love, but to guide it towards permanence. Within a week she had forgotten tact and management, since she had no occasion for either. There was only ease. Her Dion was gentle, even at his most eccentric, and never a bore. As spectators of the world, they saw the same; as participants their minor tastes differed. He would not learn to dance. He avoided the fashionable. In compensation, he could extract from the simplicity of man or woman, of restaurant or public place, riches of amusement for both.

  They had lived together for ten days when John’s answer arrived. Armande opened it in privacy. She found herself in such a turmoil of annoyance and modesty that she said nothing.

  She drank two stiff Martinis before lunch and sulked.

  “Planning Committee still hard at it?” asked Dion, having given his mixture time to work.

  “Yes.”

  “Top Secret or just Confidential?”

  “Neither,” Armande snapped. “I’ve heard from John.”

  “Ah! Got a girl, I suppose?”

  “Yes. How on earth did you know? I think he might have tried to be faithful. I did.”

  “That little loaf,” he said, “is stuffed so full of hypocrisy that—”

  “Hypocrisy? Me?” she asked indignantly. “Read it, Dion!”

  She handed him the letter. Dion composed his face into a serious expression, fixed it, and read.

  John was glad that she had given him an opening. It was, he said, just like her. John hoped she would not be hurt. He had wanted to tell her long ago, but felt that while she was serving her country in the Middle East it was his duty not to let her be upset. He was in love. An American girl in their naval service. He was sure that Armande would adore her. There had never been anyone quite like her …

  “Well, well!” said Dion cautiously.

  “But you don’t understand,” Armande insisted. “A little American isn’t at all the right woman for John. She’d be exasperated by him in a week.”

  “I can just imagine John,” he said, “if he knew you were going to marry a primitive sergeant with vulgar tastes.”

  “I’m not going to marry a sergeant.”

  “Promotion of the body, not the spirit.”

  “Marriage, Dion? For us?”

  “You know. It’s in the prayer book. For the satisfaction of lust and the procreation of children. Or I may have got it wrong somewhere. Don’t tell me you haven’t been thinking about it!”

  “Yes. I have,” she admitted. “All day and all night when you were not here. Dion darling, yes, I think so—but can’t we go on as we are till the war ends?”

  “We’ll have to—considering the queue for the divorce courts.”

  “And then? Oh Dion, I should love life with you! But what sort of life?”

  “What we can make of ourselves. We don’t know. 1944. 1945. Victory, they say. But we don’t know what it will be like. We shall be out on our feet, and the other fellow on the slab. Then we get handed back to the politicians. Gutting here and patching there. You and I—two living, unimportant cells. Chuck us in the hospital ash can? Use us to make a bit of healthy tissue. We shan’t know. We can’t choose. But at least there will be two of us.”

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1948 by Geoffrey Household

  Cover design by Drew Padrutt

  978-1-5040-0729-0

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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