The Mule on the Minaret

by Alec Waugh

  ‘That happens sometimes.’

  ‘It seemed so promising at the start.’

  ‘It seemed very promising.’

  ‘In one of your recent summaries, you said that you might be able to find some further use for him.’

  ‘I remember saying that.’ Farrar looked very straight at Reid. There was a challenge in that look. Reid did not accept it.

  On the last morning, as before at Cairo, Stallard summed up the work of the conference.

  ‘For me,’ he said, ‘it has been an even more stimulating meeting than we had last year. Perhaps because we have got to know each other better; perhaps because the war is going better; perhaps again because we are able to assess the value of the work we have been doing. At any rate, I myself shall return to my austere life rejuvenated. I have learnt a great deal and I hope that I shall be able to convince my untravelled colleagues in the War Office that what I’ve learnt was worth their learning too.’ As in the previous November in Cairo, he ran over the points that had been raised by the various Centres. Once again, he paid a particular tribute to Reid’s report and this time he threw a special bouquet to Farrar. ‘I hadn’t realized so fully before where and why the problems in Syria and the Lebanon were difficult. Major Reid did stress that point in October, but the points of difference have been accentuated during the last ten months.’

  He then came to his summing up. ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘has pleased me more, has encouraged me more than the hopeful, optimistic spirit which I have found among you all. I hope that I shall find you as cheerful a year from now. Because the next year is going to be difficult for you. The war has moved to other frontiers. You are left behind. You were all of you very proud three, two, maybe as little as one year ago when you were posted out here. You were right to feel proud; you had been handpicked. The situation is different now. Establishments are being cut down, and you who are left may be tempted to feel that it is the best who are being taken away. Cut off from your homes, you are inevitably sensitive to the picture that you are going to cut at home. You want to appear as heroes to your families. You did in the past. Will you be able to any longer? The Middle East for two years was the centre of the war. It is not any longer. England is now the centre. You are going to have the feeling that nobody is interested in you any more. You will feel neglected; abandoned. You remember the jokes they used to make about the B.E.F.? Back Every Fortnight. You’ll be making the same crack soon about M.E.F. Men England Forgot. I don’t think it’s going to be an easy time for anyone in this area; but you’ve got this consolation: it’s better for you than the rest because you are doing something active and creative. Intelligence never rests. You will know that what you are doing is important, even if your families in England think you are on a picnic. And don’t forget that we in Marylebone have no doubt how valuable your work is. Good luck to you.’

  There was a lunch after the final session. Farrar sat at the other end of the table from Reid. Afterwards, Farrar came across. ‘I’m sorry that I shan’t be able to come with you to Damascus; I can’t spare the time. Everything’s been a rush. I’ve hardly seen you at all, Prof. I’d been so looking forward to it too, but I’ve been responsible for so much of the organization of this show. Why don’t you come over quietly one time? Surely you could swing it.’

  ‘I might take some leave. I’m due for some.’

  ‘Yes, you do that. Then we can have some fun.’ And he was gone. They had not had five minutes alone together during the entire conference.

  ‘How well do you know Farrar?’ he asked Mallet that night at dinner.

  ‘Not very, why?’

  ‘I thought he seemed different somehow. Tired and on edge. There was an aggressive tone in that speech of his. He has got a good deal on his mind, I suppose. He’s been out here a long time. He’s homesick possibly. Perhaps he has a feeling of guilt about being out here, doing staff work at his age. And then he’s quarrelling with his girl. She’s flirting with some Frenchman. He’s a lot to worry him, I know. But there was something strange about him. It sounds a ridiculous thing to say, but I almost had the feeling that he was avoiding me.’

  ‘And so he may have been.’

  ‘Why on earth should he?’

  ‘Because...’ Mallet checked. His smile was quizzical. ‘It’s not too easy to put into words. But your relationship, yours and his, was an unusual one. The disparity of age and of position. It wasn’t only that he liked working with you. He was proud of working with you.’

  ‘Oh, surely now...’

  ‘No, no, please hear me out. I’m glad you brought this up. I wanted to have a talk with you about it. It may become important for you in the next few months. Because . . . I haven’t had time to tell you yet, but it’s going to be all right about your taking over the Centre. I fixed that up with Cairo and with Stallard, and when you are running the Centre, it’s going to make a difference to Farrar. It’ll be a challenge to him.’

  ‘You don’t mean he’ll be jealous?’

  ‘Not in the obvious way, but indirectly. There’ll be a tension. As I see it, Prof. . . . well, you are, you know, an unusual person. You’re someone in your own rights. You’ve been that for fifteen years and you know exactly what you amount to. And because you know that, you don’t altogether see the effect you have upon other people who are not in the same position. You are not a vain man, but you’re not a modest one. You know how good you are, in your own job in England, so there’s no need to assert yourself. You’ve got yourself sized up, which most men haven’t. And because you have, you didn’t realize how much you meant to somebody like Farrar, who isn’t anyone, as yet; and may never become anyone. He had probably never met anyone like you. He had certainly never met anyone like you on equal terms. That meant a lot to him. I know from the way he talked about you. He had a proprietary way about you that was rather touching. “I must look after my Professor,” he would say. Always “my Professor”. He enjoyed being able to explain things to you, and he did, of course, value your opinion very highly. He was very happy working with you. You were a good team. One felt that seeing you together. It was a blow to him when you broke up.’

  ‘But that wasn’t on his account. There was a very personal reason . . .’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘How could you know?’

  ‘I shouldn’t know and the fact that I do know shows me how very upset Nigel was. Your going away put him on the defensive. He had to justify himself; to prove that it wasn’t on his account that you transferred.’

  ‘But he couldn’t have been easier when I first brought the matter up.’

  ‘I’m sure he couldn’t. But it was when he thought about it afterwards that he began to feel aggrieved. He found that he was lonely; he was resentful because you had made him lonely. And then you went against him over that wireless set. And Cairo took your point of view, not his. Deception is his special project, and you spiked his guns.’

  ‘This is all a complete surprise to me.’

  ‘I thought it would be. That’s why I want to put you on your guard.’

  ‘On my guard against what?’

  ‘Against what Master Farrar is cooking up.’

  ‘What is he cooking up?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I suspect that it will be something very drastic. Did you notice that he was seeing a lot of Sedgwick during the conference?’

  ‘I didn’t as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Well, Sedgwick is a tough man to deal with; in the way that only a Wykehamist can be. It’s funny about Winchester. There are those four schools—Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester—which produce their special types. Men from the other schools—Ton-bridge, Uppingham, Marlborough, Sherborne, Shrewsbury—there’s nothing distinctive about them. A man might have come from any one of them. But those four are different. Winchester produces the finest civil servants in the world, particularly Treasury officials: accurate, conscientious, infallible, impersonal, almost a machine; as a contrast to that, on the same principl
e when a Wykehamist goes to the dogs, he does it with a thoroughness that leaves an Harrovian at the starting point. And as a corollary of that, when a Wykehamist gets tough, he is completely ruthless because he is convinced that he is in the right. He is impervious to criticism. Who devised body-line bowling? A Wykehamist.’

  ‘But I don’t see how all this is going to affect me?’

  ‘It’s going to affect you because what Sedgwick and Farrar are cooking up is something particularly devilish and in Farrar’s case you are the objective.’

  ‘I still don’t see . . .’

  ‘You don’t. Perhaps you’ve got too nice a nature. Farrar wants to assert himself, to make a gesture against you, to prove his independence, to say in effect: “Don’t be so high and mighty. Have a look and see what I can do when I put my mind to it.” I prophesy that what he’s cooking up will be ingenious, will be legitimate, will definitely help the war effort. But its main propulsion will be to shock you. So be on your guard, Prof. It’ll be devilish.’

  Chapter Seven

  ‘Very fine, Colonel Sahib, sir, very fine.’ With a proud grin, Reid’s Indian servant handed him the bush shirt on whose lapels red flannel flashes had been sewn. Reid slipped it on and stood before the mirror. He felt very much as he had as a schoolboy when he had first put on his first eleven blazer. A mixture of pride and shyness. At his preparatory school, it had been the custom to pinch a boy the day he appeared in a new suit, presumably because he looked awkward in it. Would any one want to pinch him when he walked into the mess at lunch? He felt he wanted to give his shirt an airing; to show it off to the world before he showed it to the mess. He ordered a car. ‘Drive me to the C.I.D.’ he told the chauffeur.

  It was a very hot day. The thermometer stood at 119°. Forester had had a brushwood screen arranged in front of his window; a water tap was allowed to run on it and the drops fell slowly from one twig to another. It was supposed to cool the room. It was Ramadan so the coffee to which every guest was treated had to be proffered in a cardboard box so that the faithful in the passages might not be shocked by the self indulgence of the infidels.

  Reid handed Forester a list.

  ‘Do you know any of these boys?’ he asked.

  It was the latest list of names that had cropped up in the investigations started through the wireless transmitter. About a hundred men were at the moment being subjected to censorship. Forester studied the list. ‘Him I know, and him, and him, not him, not him. The last two, yes.’

  ‘Shall we put them all on censorship?’

  Forester pursed his lips, picked up a pencil and scratched out a couple of names. ‘You need not trouble about those two. We might watch the others for a little.’

  They had not unearthed yet any subversive activities, but they had found out a number of facts that the persons concerned would have been dismayed to learn were known to the police; one man was evading income tax; another was smuggling carpets from Tehran; there was a flippantly phrased account of how two university students had picked up an air force corporal in a cinema, taken him back to their flat, given him too much whisky and then made use of him.

  ‘It is really very alarming,’ Reid had said. ‘Is there one of us who hasn’t got something in his life that he does not want to have known by the police? It might easily get found out through the friend of a friend being under suspicion.’

  ‘One must choose one’s friends with caution.’

  ‘If one had to watch not only one’s friends but one’s friends’ friends, one wouldn’t have any friends at all.’

  ‘Would one be much worse off?’

  Which was the kind of remark made without the flicker of a smile that made Reid enjoy his visits to the C.I.D.

  ‘This correspondence has become almost a whole time job for one of my officers,’ Reid said.

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘I’m wondering how much we are getting out of it.’

  ‘We can’t tell how much we are getting out of it until we find something definitely subversive. Once we do, a great deal of all this evidence will become of value.’

  ‘We can’t be sure that we ever shall find anything.’

  ‘As you say, we can’t be sure.’

  ‘And in the meantime that wireless transmitter may be sending messages to Ankara.’

  ‘It may.’

  ‘And we haven’t the machinery to intercept it. The Germans in Paris have trucks that can detect transmissions. We haven’t here.’

  ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘If we arrested Hassun, we’d find out something.’

  ‘We’d also lose the chance of finding out a great deal more.’

  ‘We’ll have to take action some day.’

  Forester shrugged. ‘Police work is a very slow affair. It requires a great, great deal of patience.’

  ‘You are quite happy to have it go along the way it is?’

  ‘I’m more than happy, I’m delighted.’

  ‘O.K. then. If you are satisfied.’

  But he could understand Farrar’s impatience in Beirut. The need to get on with something; to get something done. He watched a drop of water slowly gathering upon a twig. It would take that drop a long time to reach the bottom of the screen. But it would get there in the end. It was three months since he had watched Hassun carry his black suitcase across the platform. And they were no nearer to any action.

  In winter, before lunch, the officers of the Centre gathered on the long broad balcony for cocktails in the mild bland sunlight. They relished the sunlight after the five hours that they had spent in their damp chill offices. They were glad to warm their veins with a glass of Vodka or of Arak. They had need too of hot food. After lunch, they would take a bellum across the river; they would play golf, or squash or tennis at the Alwiyah Club. By half past four, they would be back at their desks, in their chill, clammy cells. In summer, it was altogether different. No one wanted hard liquor before food when the thermometer stood on the brink of 120°. Nor did anyone want heavy, greasy food: a salad, a cold soup, something in aspic, fruit and cheese and then a long siesta. It was in the evening, in summer that you sat on the terrace over long cold drinks, while the now sluggish Tigris slithered towards the Shatt-al-Arab; dinner was a parade and lunch was not. And at his first lunch as the new C.O., Reid hurried through his scamped meal exactly as he had done for the last eight months.

  It was different in the evening. This was his first appearance before the Centre as their Chief. And he took care to be on the terrace first; to each officer as he arrived, clicking his heels and bowing before he sat down, Reid said, ‘All drinks are upon me tonight.’ He no longer felt shy, as he sat in a long high chair with the red flashes on his bush shirt. He had, instead, an exciting, dedicated feeling, that carried him back to his first night at Sandhurst when the Seniors after dinner in their new-found privileged positions had stood round the piano, shouting the songs of the hour, ‘If you were the only girl in the world and I were the only boy’ and ‘Another little drink and another little drink, and another little drink wouldn’t do us any harm.’ He suddenly saw himself on that 1916 August evening, sitting overawed, with the other juniors on the left side of the anteroom, picturing the day three months distant when he would be a senior, bawling round that piano; and at the same time looking ahead to the hour, quarter of a century away, when he would command a regiment, when he would look back to this first night in the anteroom, thinking ‘it all started here.’

  Even when he had thought that, he had known at the back of his mind that the army would not be his career; but who could look far ahead in August 1916, when so very few miles away names like Hill 60, Polygon Wood and Beaumont Hamel were cutting their letters into history. But even so, Sandhurst had taught him to see promotion in terms not of privilege but of responsibility. And between this summer evening in 1943 and that August night of 1916, the road ran clear and straight. That had led to this. Because he had been there, sitting in that anteroom, as an appreh
ensive junior, he was now with red flashes, sitting in this long chair, while officer after officer clicked his heels and bowed; and because he had sat then in that anteroom, he was conscious of his duty now.

  Because British forces and British interests had been so long established in Iraq, the I.S.L.O. Centre in Baghdad was a great deal larger than the one in Beirut. There were fifteen officers under him and twenty other ranks. It was a large family, and each member of that family regarded him as a kind of parent. His authority over them was unquestioned, yet he was their protection against the higher authorities that stood over him. They would rely on him to fight their battles. He might ‘stand them on the mat’ himself, but he would argue their case for them against Brigadiers and Generals. He remembered in France in the late summer of 1917, with what excited pride and also with an awed sense of service he had seen his platoon for the first time. ‘These are my men,’ he had thought.

  It was a feeling he had never had as a Professor when he had stood before his classes. Looking over the rows of faces, he had wondered which would be the ones who would detach themselves from the group, who would become distinct and personal, who would make special demands on him. He could give only as much as they could take. The main effort had to come from them. It was a question of individual approaches. There was no joint responsibility on his part. But with a Centre now, as with his platoon then, every single man depended upon him. He would remember this evening as long as he remembered anything, and he was glad that tonight Johnson should be dining in; Johnson who was of his own generation, who alone would be able to guess at how he felt this night. When they moved over to the long refectory table, he made a gesture to Johnson to sit beside him.

  Four days later, Johnson came into his office.

  ‘I’m going to ask a favour. Will you have dinner with me, just the two of us, one night next week?’

  ‘That’s very nice of you.’

  ‘We ought to celebrate your red flannel; and there’s another thing. You know, if you live in the same mess as some one, you’re seeing them all the time, but yet you are never seeing them at all. Didn’t you ever feel that when you were living in your parents’ house? You saw more of them when you had a flat of your own, and only went out to see them on occasions. You made an occasion of those occasions. Let’s make an occasion of this dinner. Let’s have it at the Sinbad.’