by Alec Waugh
So he argued with himself as he drove through the bright green valley of the Bekaa. It was his fault. It was all his fault. When he got back to Deraa he would write her a long letter, not of apology, but of explanation; of implied explanation. She would read between the lines and understand, and in two weeks’ time he would be in Beirut with a long tranquil late summer to be enjoyed. The world was rocking with premonitions of disaster. But they, for all they would care, might have been stranded on a Pacific atoll.
They reached Damascus shortly before one.
‘What would you like to do?’ asked Johnson. ‘Lunch at the Cercle, then a siesta in my office?’
Reid shook his head. ‘I don’t want to be back too late; I’ll miss lunch, an Arak in a café will be enough for me.’
He went to the same café where he had sat on that first morning with Diana. A shoe-black importuned him and he was too lazy to resist. He sipped the cool clouded liquid and nibbled at his mezze. A vendor of lemonade went by; under his left arm was the large bronze jug from whose mouth projected a block of ice, pinktinged across its base; under his right arm was the brassbound tray of glasses. Over his shoulder was slung the jug of water from which he could wash his glasses. He clattered two cups together as he walked. Every time he made a sale, he sang. It was the same man probably. Nothing was changed. Of course nothing was changed. In two weeks’ time he would be in Beirut, seeing her every day, seeing her every hour of every day. They would laugh together over their ridiculous behaviour. ‘How could we have been so dumb?’ they’d say. ‘It was just because we mean so much to one another that we were so dumb.’
‘And it’s much better now, isn’t it, because of that?’
‘So, so much better.’
In two weeks’ time, fourteen days.
He had slept badly the night before, but he did not doze off on the long drive to Deraa. His nerves were racing still. To left and right of him stretched the flat boulder-strewn plain, with the thin yellow mist of chaff hanging over the villages. Was it really only forty-eight hours since he had driven here with Johnson?
In his room at Deraa was a low pile of letters. He turned them over. One from his father, the others looked impersonal. They could wait till later. He went over to the depot. The flow of wheat was being steadily maintained. He watched the weighing of it. He scooped up as much as he could hold between his hands; he tossed it over: there seemed very little sand. He stayed for half an hour, checking, testing; then crossed to the desk where payment was being made. The notes were very flimsy. When would the new issue come? What a hilarious predicament. He could recall the exact pitch of voice on which she had pronounced the word. He repeated it to himself, savouring the pain as one does when one presses one’s tongue on a sore tooth. Hilarious. One day he would use that word; and she would look up quickly with a start of recognition. Their eyes would meet. She would smile. Then they would laugh together. ‘Weren’t we absurd that day? Wasn’t it hilarious?’
There was a bar in the Mess. But he kept a bottle of whisky in his room. He took his chair out in the garden and poured himself a drink to accompany the reading of his letters. There was a circular from the Athenaeum recounting what had transpired at the Annual General Meeting. The staff was apparently dealing satisfactorily with the difficulties involved by rationing and bombing. The members were thanked for their patience during the exceptional conditions. There was a list of deaths. He knew a bare tenth of them personally. ‘In another ten years,’ he thought, ‘I shall be finding my friends’ names in that list.’ There was a circular from the London Library, stressing the difficulties under which the staff were working. Mr. Cox was still at his post. At last he came to his father’s letter. It had been sent air-mail and had taken four weeks to reach him. It opened with an account of local life in Highgate.
‘In some ways, my dear boy, we are hardly aware that there is a war in progress. Bombing has ceased. We sleep well at nights. Rationing is a nuisance and there is a new system of points by which you are allowed a certain measure of choice; but it does not help me very much as the articles I particularly fancy are not available. My only real grievance is the lack of marmalade. I can dispense with eggs, but I do not feel that I have breakfasted unless I have had marmalade. The French prefer jam, so do the Americans. I wonder when our national fondness for marmalade began and why. You probably know. I suggest that you should one day write a history of national characteristics in food-diet. The British habit of being called with a morning cup of tea. When did that start? The East India Company? I don’t know. I should like to know.’
There was a page of gossip about mutual friends. Then he wrote:
‘I paid a visit on Rachel last Sunday. It is very pleasant to have her close at hand. She was very wise to let her house; it was too big for her. Too much housework and she was lonely during the term-time. She is getting a good rent from the Government, though most of it will be consumed, I suppose, by income tax. She will have told you of her flat in Bloomsbury. It is very handy for her work; and I think she is happy at the M. of I. She should be very useful there. I liked the young women with whom she shares the flat. They have friends in for drinks and it all seemed to me cosy and convivial.
‘She has, I am sure, told you about all this. And I am sure that she has also told you about her spare work with the Committee of Jewish Relief. But has she told you how very important this work has become to her? She is deeply distressed about the fate of the Jews in Germany and Poland, as we all are, of course. But she is especially distressed because of her Jewish blood. It is something I tend to forget. She never knew her mother. She was brought up in the Christian communion. I have never thought of her as Jewish; and after all we in England do not have a Jewish problem. We think of ourselves as English; which we are. But in fact Rachel is half Jewish and half of her blood relations are Jewish. She cannot help wondering what would have happened to her and them if Hitler had invaded England or if her mother had married a European. She has also, I fancy, a sense of guilt because she has not shared the bitter experiences of her race. She feels a need to make compensation. This is a new side of her that you would be, I am sure, wise to handle with care. In a sense this letter is one of warning. Be on your guard when you write to her not to say anything about Palestine that might offend her. In one of your letters you referred to the difficulties that the Palestinian problem was making in your present dealings with the Arab world. I do not know exactly what you said in your letter; but she was definitely indignant. “Doesn’t he realize,” she said, “that the world has a sacred duty to restore the Jews to their ancestral home?” I was surprised at her vehemence. So I think, my dear boy, that you should be on your guard.’
Reid frowned, as he put down the letter. What had he said about Palestine? He could not remember. During his few months in the Middle East he had come to feel, as did most Englishmen who had lived in the Middle East, that almost every conceivable mistake had been made at the Peace Conference after the First War. The Arabs had been deceived, if they had not actually been betrayed. Europe and the U.S.A. had had no more right to create a Jewish State in the Middle East than in Cornwall, Brittany or Florida. You had no right to lop off a section of other people’s territory and hand it over to an alien race. Yet at the same time he was a pragmatist to the extent that he believed that an established fact must be accepted. You could not put back the clock. All you could do was attempt to lessen the consequences of mistakes. You could not solve your problems; you had to learn to live with them.
What had he said to upset Rachel? But what he had said seemed less important than the fact that she had been upset. It was so unlike her. He had no more than his father thought of her as being Jewish, but then in England, he, as his father, had classified his compatriots as being English: equal under the Crown. This was a new slant, a new problem for himself.
He finished his whisky slowly. The sky darkened quickly; the crested head of the date palm stood in silhouette above the roof, against orange f
irst, then green, and now a deepening blue. Time to go into dinner.
The Town Major was leaning against the bar. He raised his arm in a mock Hitlerian salute. ‘Heil, Prof. And how was the bright city? How was Jeanette’s, how was the Mimosa? We drank your health last night. Nothing like a professor on the spree. Where did you eat; what did you eat? Was she blonde, a brunette, a redhead? Regale us, let us be seated. Let us eat.’
Corned beef had been converted into a cottage pie. There were stewed pears and Bird’s custard. There was a sardine on toast. Afterwards tea was served. Throughout the meal the Town Major maintained a flow of heavy-handed badinage. ‘He won’t tell us. Didn’t I warn you all last night? Discretion, that’s the scholastic line: virtuous as our Holy Father through the week, then when the last desk-lid drops on Saturday—oh, boy, the purple crescent; come on, Prof., give us the low-down. Cyril’s going down next week. Give him the green light. Save him the fate worse than death.’
So it ran on, and Reid did his best to reply on a note of appropriate jocularity. A film was being shown that evening in the N.A.A.F.I., but he excused himself. ‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘I’d only fall asleep.’
‘I don’t suppose you got much sleep last night,’ said the Town Major. ‘Come clean, Prof. Why hold out on us?’
In his room awaiting him was the table on which night after night he had poured out on paper the saga of his adoration. As he had driven back that morning he had pictured himself this evening, seated at the table once again, explaining in a contrite mood his ill-humour of the previous evening. A long letter but a light one, not apologetic, not complaining, not self-pitying, lit with raillery; a letter that would woo her back to him. It was barely nine o’clock. He was not sleepy, but now that the time to write had come he was in no mood to write. Better wait until tomorrow. Better wait until his mind was rested. He took his chair on to the pathway, hung the electric bulb over the window so that its light fell upon his book, and turned desultorily the pages of the Oxford Book of English Verse.
He did not write that night, nor the next. ‘Tomorrow,’ he would say. But when tomorrow came he would find himself in the same mood of torpor. He was living in a vacuum. He brooded over his father’s letter about Rachel. Clearly there was a problem there. But at the moment there was nothing he could do about it. There would be no repatriation from the Middle East until the war was over, and the war had several years yet to run. His English problems had to await his return. So could Diana.
So once again, day after day, he drove between the depots that lay under his charge, listening to the complaints of villagers weighing the arguments of the moukhtars, turning the wheat over in his hand, waiting and listening, and delivering himself of fulsome oratorical compliments which the interpreter would clothe in appropriate Oriental symbolism. He would conduct himself as though ‘time’s winged chariots’ were reined and bridled, as though Rommel were not beating on the Western Gate, as though autumn would never yield to winter, as though harvests would continue through the October rains; and all day long the sun beat out of a cloudless sky, with the glare of the parched earth dazzling him; and always just before sunset a breeze would blow from the Eastern mountains and the outline of the Eastern hills would merge into a succession of level layers of rich, soft colours, and his palate would savour in advance the sting of the first whisky that awaited him on the paved pathway by the little garden. He was in a vacuum. Let him enjoy it while he could.
Four days before his stay was up, he wrote Diana a brief note.
‘You know as well as I do,’ it ran, ‘that I’ll be coming back on Thursday, but I did want you to be quite sure that I’ll be expecting you to dine with me my first evening and get me posted on all the Beiruti gossip. I aim to get in in the afternoon, and will be round in the office before six. Let’s make it the Lucullus. I need French food—and wine. It will be good to see you. Very good.’
He left early in the morning; he did not pause in Damascus; he wanted to make a detour so that he could lunch in Zahlé. He sat in the same restaurant, at the same table, where he had lunched with Farrar and Diana. The restaurant was completely empty. He savoured its coolness, its quiet and its peace, with the rustle of the water cradling his thoughts and the canopy of boughs and leaves dappling the stream’s ruffled surface. If Lebanon ever enjoyed a tourist boom, what a fortune would be made by the restuarants along this bank.
He reached Beirut in mid-afternoon. On its outskirts the smell of stale Arak tickled his nostrils. It was good to be back; and it was good to find his flat looking exactly as he had left it. He had packed away a few personal belongings in a suitcase: a couple of Persian miniatures on ivory; a Damascene dagger; a Turkish prayer rug; a set of liqueur glasses and a decanter. He arranged them on his desk and table and on the mantelpiece. He had bought a bottle of cognac in the N.A.A.F.I. He filled the decanter. It all looked exactly as it had on that last night five weeks ago. He took a long, slow look round him, as he paused in the doorway, before starting out. Soon, very soon, he thought.
It was now midsummer and Beirut was appreciably hotter than it had been two weeks before. The air had a close, overpowering humidity. The sun was half veiled by the heat. None of the Lebanese were wearing jackets. Most of them had discarded their ties; there was a feeling of languor and exhaustion. The women’s hats looked damp, their shirt-waists limp. ‘I’d been warned about this,’ he thought. He sauntered slowly along the waterfront. His bush-shirt clung against his shoulders. Even so, how good it was to be back here, to be able to accept the present, looking forward confidently into the future: with work that was of interest and value; with the hour to hour routine lit by Diana’s presence. Nothing was changed. Everything would be the same.
There was no sentry at the M.E.S.C. main door. That was part of ‘the purloined letter’ system of security. Anyone who wanted could walk in. Suspicion was disarmed. Nor was there any sentry at the office door, on which was affixed a handwritten notice—‘I.S.L.O. Walk in.’ The door was closed. It was very quiet. His heart began to beat faster. It was no good his trying to pretend that he was not excited. The door of Diana’s room was open. He looked inside. A female form was silhouetted against the window, facing it. A small and dumpy one. Who on earth was that? He walked on quickly. Farrar’s door, too, was open. Farrar was at his desk. He jumped to his feet.
‘Welcome back. It’s good to see you. I’m getting overworked. So’s everybody else. We’ve so much work on hand. And the heat. Didn’t I warn you? Still, it won’t last long. Another month, six weeks.’
Reid was not listening. ‘Who’s that girl in Diana’s office?’
‘priscilla Marston.’
‘And who may she be?’
‘The new secretary.’
‘What about Diana?’
‘Gone to Cairo.’
‘What?’ He stared, astounded. ‘When did she go?’
‘Last week.’
‘She never told me.’
‘She had no time. She left at forty-eight hours’ notice.’
‘Is she all right?’
‘Of course she is. Why shouldn’t she be?’
‘Why did she go?’
‘Posted there. You know how it is in our racket. The boys in the small back room have a new idea and we all change seats.’
‘But why should she go to Cairo?’
‘Someone whom she knew in London has been posted there. He asked for her.’
‘Did she want to go?’
‘She didn’t have any choice. Cairo has first call on us.’
‘But all the same...’ He was so astonished, so overwhelmed, that he could not realize that it had happened. Beirut and no Diana. He said the first silly thing that came into his head. ‘I’m going to miss her.’
‘We’re all going to miss her. But Priscilla’s very good. As a matter of fact, she’s a better typist. Not that Diana wasn’t good.’
Reid was not listening. Beirut without Diana. ‘How long will she be gone?’
&
nbsp; Farrar shrugged. ‘Presumably for ever; it’s a posting.’
Beirut without Diana. He blinked. Mentally he shook himself. ‘Well, if she’s gone, she’s gone. That’s that. I’d better get those files and read myself back into the picture.’
‘Let it wait. There isn’t all that hurry. You must be tired. Besides, I’ve got a small party at the flat tonight. The end of term. Aziz is going back to Istanbul. It’s to say au revoir to him. Annabelle’s coming. I was only waiting till you arrived to go. Let’s be on our way.’
The flat in the Rue Jeanne d’Arc looked just as much the same as his own flat had done. Beirut without Diana. Yet it was the same Beirut. And here was Annabelle with her inevitable brother; and she and Farrar were sparring like lovers in a Congreve comedy, exactly as they had been in December. They had made no progress.
‘I am very sorry for Lebanese young men, in one way,’ he was saying.
‘In what way, pray?’
‘In the way of love.’
‘They are not accustomed to complain.’
‘That is their good manners.’
‘It is agreeable for young men to have good manners.’
‘Perhaps they do not know any better.’
‘Do you think that European young men have greater cause to be contented?’
‘They at least have an opportunity of knowing what the young lady whom they intend to marry is really like.’
‘And do you think, my exacting captain, that that is an advantage? We do not think so here. We consider that the mystery of marriage is one of its greatest charms.’
‘How can you say that, Annabelle?’
‘Because that is how we are instructed by our elders. We are introduced to a number of young men, we dance with them, we flirt with them, but we never know what they are like when they are alone. We wonder, we are curious, inquisitive. We look at those seven, those eight young men. Which shall we choose? Which is the one we really need? Finally, we select one. But still we do not know what he is really like. What mystery. What romance. Finally, the great day arrives. The knot is tied. We drive away together. We are alone, to reveal at last our secrets to each other. What mystery, what romance. How can you compare with that your European honeymoon, where the bride and groom can have scarcely a remaining secret for each other: their picnics, their petting parties, their drives in cars. No, I don’t envy them.’