The Mule on the Minaret

by Alec Waugh

  The familiar landmarks approached and faded: Westminster and the River, the Tate and Wimbledon; the Woking golf course on the left, where Joyce Wethered’s concentration had been so tense that she never heard a train go by as she sank a crucial putt; the tapering tower of Salisbury’s cathedral; Templecombe with its blue faced clock, then the low square tower of Fernhurst Abbey. It was a warm and sunny day. The Abbey was a bare quarter of a mile from the station. The school buildings lay behind.

  ‘Do you feel like walking up, or would you rather wait for us in the hotel?’

  Classes ended in the summer at half past twelve. The train was a little late.

  ‘I’ll wait,’ his father said. ‘I’ll reserve my strength for afterwards. You hurry on.’

  Reid stood in the corner of the courts, in the angle of the library and the sixth-form classroom, looking across the cloisters, to the School House studies; above whose lichened roofs rose the Abbey tower. It was the view of the school buildings on which photographers always concentrated. In terms of a haphazard architectural grouping, it was unique. He had seen nothing lovelier. He thought of all the European soldiers who would return nostalgically to romantic landscapes and find nothing left.

  Stillness brooded over the courts. Then the first strokes of the Abbey clock chimed out, and there was a banging of doors, a clatter of feet, a surge of voices and with several hundred boys, running if they were fags, sauntering majestically if they were seniors, across the gravel. Just as they had always done. He hurried to the point in front of the abbey which his sons would have to pass on the way to the hotel. He wondered if he would recognize them, in spite of the constant supply of snaps that Rachel had maintained. But they would recognize him, of course. He hadn’t changed.

  He need not have worried. He recognized them right away; out of a scattered group of seven or eight who came round the wall. James in the blue hat ribbon of the sixth, Mark with the magenta and black house ribbon. There was less than two inches difference in height between them. At the sight of him, they broke into a run. Mark said, ‘You’re not in uniform.’ He had deliberated on whether he should wear his uniform. They might have liked showing him off with his red tabs; on the other hand it might be better for them to meet him as the civilian that he was going to be for them in future. He laughed. ‘After wearing khaki for six years you want to see the last of it.’

  He asked them if there was a cricket match on that afternoon; yes, they told him: against M.C.C. ‘Will Poppa be able to walk that far?’ Mark asked.

  They went straight into lunch. Mark did all the talking. He had a piece of gossip about one of the masters who was reputed to be getting black market petrol for his motor bike, and of a rag perpetrated by the lower fourth against an ineffectual temporary master. Mark was bright-eyed and dark, very obviously his mother’s son. James was more like himself: with his high forehead and long nose. A modern psychologist might argue that Mark was loquacious because he was ill-at-ease, whereas James’s air of reserve concealed a deep conceit: he could not be bothered to exert himself in public. It was the fashion nowadays to assert that everyone was the opposite of what he seemed, that rudeness was a mask for shyness, and cruelty the self-protection of a warmhearted nature. He preferred to think that more often than not people were what they seemed, that James was naturally reserved and Mark naturally was effervescent.

  During his four years’ absence when he wrote letters to his sons, Reid had kept reminding himself that all the time his sons were growing up, that a boy of fourteen was very different from a boy of twelve, and the changes effected by adolescence were profound and unpredictable. He had been on his guard against writing down to them. Yet he did not think he had ever written to them, otherwise than on equal terms.

  Sitting now in this familiar room, where he had sat so often with his father, he remembered himself as he had been at fifteen, absorbed in house and school politics, in games and in promotions, in rags and rows; thinking of Latin and Greek, and history as form subjects, as steps to prefectship. He saw himself at seventeen, with the wide fields of literature opening out before him, discovering a new poet every holidays, returning each term to boast of his acquisition, larding his essays with quotations that he hoped the headmaster would not recognize.

  He asked James which of the modern poets he read most.

  ‘Eliot, I think, and Yeats.’

  ‘The later or the earlier Yeats?’

  ‘The later one of course.’

  Reid smiled. There had been no later Yeats when he had been James’s age. Yeats had been ‘Innisfree.’

  ‘I remember reading “Prufock” when it came out first in the Catholic anthology. I was about your age. I thought it silly.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem silly to me.’

  ‘Nor to me now.’

  The grandfather intervened. ‘There’s a time lag in appreciating poetry. The poet is ahead of his time. I’m not sure that I’ve caught up with Eliot.’

  After lunch, they walked down to the cricket field. It was three-quarters of a mile away. Mark and his grandfather dropped behind. Reid remembered what Rachel had said about the advantage of two parents going down to see two boys. They talked much more freely when they were not together. Not that Reid had anything in particular to say to James. He felt at ease with James, as he assumed his son did with him. He and his own father had never felt the need for what one called ‘heart-to-heart’ talks. They had talked openly and friendlily and casually: as he hoped he and James would. There were no immediate problems. James had taken his school certificate the previous summer. He would be sitting for his higher certificate next week. There should be no difficulty about his satisfying the University requirements. New College was waiting for him. He had another two years of school; then he would decide whether to do his military service first or go up to the University. Now that the war was nearly over, the period of military service was likely to be curtailed during the next year, so that it might be an advantage to get his military service finished first. But that was a decision that could wait.

  ‘I suppose you’ve no ideas yet of what you want to do when you come down from Oxford?’

  James shook his head. ‘There’s plenty of time to think about that later.’

  ‘And you do realize don’t you that owing to this legacy, you are in the fortunate position of doing the work you like without having to worry about the immediate returns from it.’

  ‘I realize that all right.’

  He gave his father a quick sideways look as he replied; a smile flickered on his lips; it had a quality of mischief. Reid had an idea that women would find him attractive later on.

  They strolled slowly round the field. James pointed out a man in a dark grey flannel suit, bareheaded, wearing a Hawks’ tie. ‘The new chief.’ The appointment had been made during the war, and Reid had not met him yet. But they had moved within the same scholastic orbit, allowing for the fact that the new chief was a Cambridge man; they were contemporaries. He felt he knew him.

  He introduced himself. The new chief was burly, athletic; he looked an administrator rather than a scholar. Yet in fact he had taken a double first and was a fellow of Trinity. He had an open manner. ‘The war’s stopped at the right time for your young man,’ he said. ‘He can now take a shortened military service in his stride,’

  Reid remembered how at James’s age he had been desperately anxious that the war should not finish before he got in the trenches. No one felt that way about this total war, when civilians were often in more danger than men in uniform, when the whole resources of the country were mobilized and you were sent where you were needed most, in whatever capacity you would be most useful; when so much of the fighting was remote, in Burma, in Malaya, in the Western Desert, when the actual casualties were proportionately so many fewer, and there was no longer that hectic atmosphere of soldiers coming home from the trenches for a two weeks’ leave.

  ‘Are you out of the army for good now?’ the new chief asked him.
r />   ‘I sincerely hope so.’

  ‘It seems an appalling waste your ever having had to go. But I suppose it was a pleasant change.’

  ‘I was on the reserve. I was called up. I didn’t feel justified in applying for an exemption.’

  ‘You had the First War feeling about that. I had it too at the beginning. But then I wasn’t on the reserve. If I had wanted to join the army, I’d have been too old. They’d not have wanted me. It’s been a different war, and a much more sensibly run war. In the First War no one looked ahead to the time after the war. This time we didn’t rob our schools of their best masters. We let our young men finish or at least partially finish their education. We’ve given them a base they can return to. In some ways of course life has been very different here, because of restrictions, because of the blackout and boys leaving a year earlier, but those are surface differences. In essentials our life and work here have been going on very much the same.’

  And, yes, Reid thought, that is what has been going on all over this beleaguered island. The pattern of living has been continued and maintained; each group in its separate niche. There lay the island’s strength and there too, possibly, the island’s limitations. After four years in the Middle East it was going to be difficult for him to find himself at home here for a little.

  On the way back from the field, Reid and his father changed companions. Mark talked incessantly. He wanted to know when they would go back to the farm. He was looking forward to going back. His mother had promised him a gun. It would be fun to have a garden. Yet he would miss London, the cinemas and exhibitions and all the people everywhere. He had an engaging zest for life. Reid felt that he would manage to enjoy himself whatever happened. There was no sign of a sense of insecurity because of pulled up roots.

  The evening train left Fernhurst shortly before six; the same train by which Reid thirty years before had so often seen off his father; the old man craned his neck to catch a final glimpse of the Abbey tower, golden in the evening light. He was seeing it for the last time and knew he was.

  He sat back in his seat and closed his eyes. Within a minute he was asleep, breathing gently, wheezily; the flesh of his cheeks sagged. He looked very old. Would he last out the winter?

  A waiter came round, announcing the first call for dinner. Reid booked two places for the second service. But when the waiter came round to announce the second service, the old man shook his head.

  ‘One meal a day’s enough for me. You go alone, dear boy.’

  ‘I’m better without a second meal. I’ll have Rachel make me a sandwich when I get back.’

  They scarcely talked during the journey. The lights went on in the carriage after Basingstoke. ‘What a relief not to have the blackout,’ Reid’s father said. ‘That got one down more than anything. You were lucky to have been spared that.’

  Reid smiled. Everyone seemed to imagine that he had been on a four years’ holiday.

  Rachel was in the flat when he got back. No reference had been made to her outburst on his first night home. No reference ever would be made, and Palestine would never be mentioned; but the pattern for their life together had been set.

  She smiled brightly as he came in, and lifted her face so that he could kiss her cheek. ‘Now tell me all about it, right from the very start,’ she said.

  ‘If you’ll make me a sandwich while I wash,’ he said. ‘I’ve had no dinner.’

  He opened a bottle of beer and they sat together at the congenial corner table. She was bright and animated; an invisible observer would have found it a moving picture of domestic happiness; they talked of the children and of their plans for the next holidays. ‘By Christmas,’ she said, ‘we should be back at the farm.’

  They had so much to discuss that it was eleven o’clock before his glass was empty. ‘With my early start this is late for me,’ she said.

  ‘Why don’t I breakfast at the Athenaeum?’

  ‘Why don’t you? That might be easier for us. You can read your papers undisturbed over your coffee.’

  They kissed good night as cousins; and went to their separate rooms. And this was how it would be for the next thirty years. He shivered: he had got to see Diana.

  He had no idea what she was doing now, or what was her address. But in Who’s Who next morning, he found her father’s address in Kent. Even if the house was let, as he presumed it would be, the letter would be forwarded to her within a week. ‘I am back in England,’ he wrote. ‘I long to exchange gossip. Please ring me here, any morning between nine and ten.’

  Four mornings later the hall porter called him to the telephone. The deep contralto voice was as rich, as full as ever. ‘I can’t wait to see you,’ she said. ‘When can I?’

  ‘Which meal suits you best?’

  ‘Which meal suits you best?’

  ‘Have you time to linger over a lunch table?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Then let’s make it lunch.’

  ‘How soon?’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow’s fine by me.’

  He felt unsteady on his feet as he walked out into the imposing hallway.

  He had invited her to a French-Italian restaurant in Leicester Square. He was unfamiliar with London restaurants. He had little need for them, living in the country. But in the year when he had been stationed in London during the blitz, he had gone to this particular restaurant fairly often. He had become friendly with the manager.

  He arrived early. He had been instructed in the technique for wartime restaurants. The customer was limited not only as to the amount he ate but as to the price he paid for what he ate. A manager made his profit on his wines. If you allowed him to make a sufficient profit on his wine, he might embellish your menu with special delicacies.

  The manager greeted Reid with warmth.

  ‘It is very good to see you back,’ he said. ‘I hope that we shall be seeing you very often.’

  ‘I hope so too. I have thought about your restaurant very often, and missed it very much. I have had many good things to eat but nothing that was worth while drinking in the Middle East. There was no wine at all. Now today, to make up for that I would like a very special wine. What is the best red wine you have. You have possibly something that is not on your list?’

  ‘Would you prefer a Burgundy or a Bordeaux?’

  ‘My guest is a lady, so as it is lunch perhaps a claret would be better.’

  ‘I have a Poyferré ‘34.’

  ‘That used to be very good.’

  ‘It still is.’

  ‘We’ll settle for that, then.’

  ‘I’m afraid, sir, that it will not be cheap.’

  ‘I should not expect it to be. Now what have you on your menu that would go well with it?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I do, by good fortune have a very tender piece of steak.’

  ‘Nothing could be better, and instead of an aperitif, I will have a half bottle of dry white wine.’

  The half bottle in its steaming bucket had just been set upon the table, when Diana came through the door. It was nearly three years since he had seen her. He had once again the sense of seeing her for the first time, with the instantaneous shock of recognition along every nerve. It was a cool day and she was wearing a coat and skirt, a dark, rich, brownish red, with a couple of white roses on her lapel. ‘I’ve chosen a wine that will exactly match that dress.’ he said.

  She had looked immensely tall as she came through the door, but she seemed of medium height once she had sat down. ‘Now tell me about everything.’ she said.

  He had so much to tell her. There was so much for him to hear. He told her about Farrar first. ‘After all these years he and Annabelle really are going to get married.’

  ‘They are, I so hoped they would. I was afraid they wouldn’t. They were so right for one another. But he couldn’t see her in an English marriage. And he couldn’t see himself transplanted to Beirut. I suppose that it wasn’t till the war was over, and he had to face r
epatriation, that he realized he had more roots in the Lebanon than in London. He was scared of coming back. At least that’s how I suppose it was.’

  ‘It is difficult to feel at home, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’ll say it is.’

  ‘Everyone behaves as though one had been away for a long week-end. They are not in the least interested about where one’s been. They say, “I haven’t seen you for a day or two”. I answer. “I’ve been four years in the Middle East.” They say, “Oh, have you” and start telling me how they’ve managed to find a part-time gardener.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Sometimes, sitting by the Tigris, organizing all those subversive activities of ours, I’d think of my former colleagues in their lecture-rooms and studios, doing exactly the same things they had in 1935. How they would envy me, I thought. How excited they would be to hear about it all, how careful I should have to be to know where to stop, how to respect the Official Secrets Act. I couldn’t have been more wrong.’

  ‘You certainly could not.’

  ‘They aren’t in the least interested in what I’ve been doing.’

  ‘They couldn’t care less.’

  He asked her how some of the others who had been repatriated were settled down. ‘What about Jane Lester?’

  ‘Jane’s all right: after those two extremes, first with the bottle then the bed, she’s sailing on an even keel.’

  The white wine had been quickly finished. The claret had been set on its side in an ingenious silver nineteenth-century contraption, that by the turning of a screw lowered the neck and raised the punt of the bottle, so that the wine could be poured without disturbing the sediment. Customers, Reid suspected, often ordered a more expensive wine than they had intended, for the privilege of having their bottle cradled in it. It was a status symbol on a table.