The Mule on the Minaret

by Alec Waugh

  The air hostess came round with a tray of canapés, hot and cold. ‘I mustn’t blunt my appetite,’ he said. He took only one: a cold stuffed egg, sprinkled with caviare. How different this trip was, from that slow eight weeks journey round the Cape. The memory of that journey was very actual to him, as he sipped the cool stinging drink, just as the memory of that whole tract of four years was actual to him. He had relived those years often. They had risen like a range of hills, out of the flat, rolling countryside of his calm life as a professor. He had added to his knowledge, his understanding of them, by meetings with this and the other individual, by the reading of this and that report. Gaps had been filled in, light had been thrown on shadowed vistas. He had learnt a great deal during the last lunch with Diana. He had learnt even more from an unexpected meeting only seven months back. A year and a half ago he had been offered and had accepted an exchange appointment at Columbia. One evening his telephone had rung. A foreign voice that had seemed familiar was at the other end. ‘You’ll be surprised to hear from me,’ it said. ‘I’m Aziz.’

  The voice was still familiar, but he would not have recognized Aziz in the street. He had grown slightly bald; he had put on a little weight but not too much. He had acquired self-confidence and a presence. He was a handsome man. He had come over to America, directly after the war, to represent his uncle’s interests. He had felt immediately at home there. He had taken out first papers, to begin with as a matter of precaution, so that he would have a responsible status for his work. Then he had fallen in love with an American. He was a citizen now and the father of three children.

  ‘Do you never miss Turkey?’ Reid had asked him. He shook his head.

  ‘There are a number of Turks here. There is a large Lebanese colony in Brooklyn. I can find most of the things I liked about the Middle East, and I’m spared everything I didn’t like. New York is the place for those who don’t feel quite at home in the country of their birth.’

  They had a long talk about the past. ‘You were very kind to me,’ Aziz said. ‘You gave me encouragement and sympathy. I might not have passed those exams but for you. You gave me faith in myself. No one like you had ever taken an interest in me before. I had to prove myself worthy of it.’

  He paused. ‘I had an extraordinary time there; through that friend of yours.’

  ‘What friend?’

  ‘Captain Farrar. I don’t suppose you know. I’ve always wanted to talk to you about it.’

  Aziz told him his whole story. That was how Reid had learnt of the part Eve had played on the Taurus, going north from Ankara. Piece by piece, the jigsaw had been fitted in. During the next three weeks, imshallah, he would fit in the rest.

  The air hostess handed him a large and elaborate menu. The handiwork of Maxim’s of Paris. He could have a cream of asparagus soup, or a turtle soup with sherry. He was offered a choice of three entrées: a steak, a lobster newburg, guinea hen with wild rice. That, he supposed, was the American touch; the menu with a choice of entrées; on even so standardized an operation as a transatlantic flight, national characteristics could be observed. There was a salad with foie gras. There was ‘les fromages’; a ‘bombe surprise,’ finally fresh fruit. Three wines were offered. The Krug: a Meursault and a Pichon-Longueville ’53. ‘I’ll have the turtle soup, and the guinea hen,’ he said. ‘And I’ll have all the wines, white, red and then champagne.’

  It was now half past eight. It would be half past one in London where he was due to land at half past seven, in six hour’s time. When he arrived in Beirut at 6 p.m. Beirut time, the morning’s work would have barely started in New York. His colleagues would be finishing their first lecture. During that interval while he was being propelled, above the clouds, eastwards in pursuit of light, he would have consumed the sumptuous dinner that was about to be presented to him. There would be a breakfast shortly before reaching London: there would be another breakfast for the benefit of newly joined passengers between London and Frankfurt: between Frankfurt and Vienna there would be canapés and cocktails. Between Vienna and Istanbul, there would be a lunch as sumptuous as this present dinner. Beirut was little more than an hour from Istanbul. And there at Beirut Nigel Farrar would be waiting to take him to the cocktail party that would precede a dinner; while on this aircraft, bound for Delhi, another banquet would be being served. He was not only flying but living above the weather. He would have felt himself a disembodied spirit were the needs of his body not being attended to so richly.

  The air hostess handed him his cup of soup: another filled his glass with the greenish gold of Meursault. In a mood how different from that first time, he would be arriving in Beirut in fifteen hours’ time. He saw himself standing in the hall of that mission building, he heard the clatter of Diana’s heels upon the stairway, he saw those notices on the walls ‘Think, plan and act in terms of March 1942’; he listened to Cartwright’s speech of welcome.

  He thought over that speech as he relished slowly, course by course, and glass by glass the meal that was to prove as sumptuous on the plate as it had looked on paper. He could recall that speech paragraph by paragraph. And in retrospect he could not see that the subsequent course of events had falsified a single clause of it. The men who had been in authority in the Middle East had had to look twenty years ahead. They had had to see the war not only in terms of their own immediate European interests, but in terms of the Arab world. It had not been the Arabs’ war, and the men in authority there had realized that. They had planned in terms of a long time future. And yet how disastrous from the English point of view had been the outcome of it all: not merely in terms of the liquidation of the Empire, but in loss of prestige and face and faith. There had been the quarrels with Nasser; the fiasco of Suez, the futile, humiliating campaign which had engendered in Arab hearts a distrust both of American and British policy that was as acute now as it had ever been. Then finally in Iraq, which had seemed so securely based as a sphere of British interest there had been that grim July night of regicide.

  He remembered the last dinner in London of the Anglo-Arab association which had been attended by the young King and Prince Abdulilla. There had been a distinguished list of guests at the high table; he remembered the high oratory, particularly by a former head of the British Military Mission in Iraq, who had lost an arm in the First War and fought at the great Feisal’s side, a man with a love of poetry who honoured the brotherhood of arms. His voice had glowed, as turning to the young king he had spoken of ‘how sire, your grandfather and his men swept across the desert to the sea,’ and he could still see after the dinner Prince Abdulilla, standing by himself against the wall, very slim and elegant, waiting for his friends to present themselves. There had seemed such warmth, such trust then between the countries, such confidence in what lay ahead: yet two years later there had been that grim night of shame, and there had been nothing the British could do but accept the fact. There were times when it seemed that the work over all those years of all those well intentioned men had been the pouring of so much water through a sieve.

  So he brooded as the vast silver clipper slid eastwards through the night.

  * * *

  When the top lights in the cabin were switched off, he took a last sip of his cognac and dozed off. The lights were switched on again three hours later. But he woke refreshed. Nor when the hostess offered him a breakfast, did he spurn it. He felt that it was breakfast time in England and that he should be hungry. It was a grey, bleak morning. Early lights were showing in the windows. There was no fog: he could pick up certain landmarks, the spires of Eton chapel, the rounded towers of Windsor, the curving Thames, the green sward of Twickenham. He was absorbed in a strange euphoria. It was strange to be landing like this, in transit in the country of one’s birth; to buy a copy of The Times and the Express and be offered in return for dollar travellers’ cheques, cashmere pullovers at a tourist rate. Forty-five minutes pause: then he was off again. Another breakfast was offered him, and he did not reject it. ‘No omelette, t
hank you please.’

  At what was four in the morning for New York, he was being offered in the vast bazaar of Frankfurt, Zeiss cameras for a negligible cost. Forty-five minutes and again they were in the air, with canapés and cocktails preparing them for Vienna.

  For Reid the sense of euphoria persisted. This was a unique experience for him. Everything seemed unreal. Yet he felt himself to be existing on a high metaphysical level of reality. Vienna lay below him, a patchwork effect of forests upon hills, of lakes, and the broad grey Danube. A pause. Then once again aloft, with another vast embellished menu facing him. He thought as the aircraft touched down in Istanbul, ‘If my grandchildren could see spread out on a table the amount that old Poppa has put away in the last twelve hours, they would be appalled.’ Yet he felt quite sober: he had no sense of being gorged. The French spas were specializing now in the cure de détente—how to relax the tycoon within nine days. He wondered whether the same effect could be achieved within three days, by flying a man to Tokyo and back, first class. He remembered how Harold Nicolson as a young diplomat had asked Arthur Balfour for five days’ leave, to get his nerves unwound. Balfour had said ‘Nonsense, my dear boy. Take a long week-end. Lay in a store of very good Burgundy and some detective novels. Read and drink and you will be fine on Monday.’ In Balfour’s day there had been no first-class clipper flights. Reid had rarely felt better than he did when the aircraft touched down in Beirut. ‘God knows how I look,’ he thought.

  But Farrar was apparently unshocked. ‘God, Prof., but you look wonderful, for a grandfather in his sixties.’

  Farrar himself was little changed. His hair was slightly grey, he had not put on weight, but his face was lined now and the lines suited him; they gave him dignity. Farrar had been home on leave several times, and Reid had kept in touch with him. But Annabelle had stayed behind. She had no links with England. Reid had not seen her since his last stay here, the day when Farrar had proposed. He was curious to see her. He was anxious to see them together.

  They lived in an apartment house, on the sixth floor, looking out over the Plage Saint Simon. They were high enough to be spared the worst of the midsummer heat, but Reid presumed that they went up to Aley then. Annabelle was the mother of three children. Reid had expected that she would have put on weight. She had: but not too much. She had a rich late summer beauty. A bloom lay on her cheeks.

  ‘We haven’t arranged anything for tonight,’ she said.

  ‘I’m glad you haven’t. I’ve lost touch with the clock. I don’t know if it’s day or night.’

  ‘But you’ll wake up promptly at eight tomorrow,’ Farrar said. ‘Your nerves will do that for you. I’ve done this trip often enough to know. And you’ll go through tomorrow with a dragging feeling; nothing in particular, you’ll think. You’ve got adjusted. But that’s where you fool yourself. You’ll go to bed tomorrow, at the usual time, midnight or eleven and you’ll wake up to your astonishment at noon. Then you will be adjusted. So we haven’t arranged anything for you tomorrow, only for the day after tomorrow.’

  ‘And for this evening,’ Annabelle said, ‘we’ll be quiet and Lebanese.’

  ‘Does that mean arak and tabooli?’

  ‘That is precisely what that means.’

  It was a simple, spacious flat. It could have been made to look like a European flat; but there were carpets and cushions and low stools. It had a Levantine air, and there was an effect of rooms opening out of rooms.

  The children were spaced harmoniously in age, with three-year intervals: the eldest one was fourteen. They had not had a child right away. They had given each other time to get to know each other. The children were very well behaved. They sat quiet: they did not interrupt. They answered when they were addressed. ‘We’ll have some kibbé and some pastries,’ Farrar said. Then the children can go to bed and we can talk.’

  Reid had had a bare four hours’ sleep in the last thirty hours and he had consumed an extra major meal, but he did not feel tired and he was able to eat his share not only of the tabooli but of the kibbé. He did not find himself losing grip of the conversation. They talked of mutual friends and after the children had retired, they talked about themselves.

  ‘One thing does surprise me,’ Reid remarked. ‘Twenty years ago I would have prophesied that Nigel would have got fat when he settled down.’

  Farrar laughed. ‘Perhaps I should have, if I had settled down. But I never have. Annabelle has kept me on tenterhooks all the time. I cannot take her for granted. I can never be certain that she will not turn those great dark eyes on to some young slim Armenian. I am over fifty remember. I can’t afford to give away any points.’

  It was Annabelle’s turn to laugh. ‘That’s what I always knew. I knew that my long treasured captain would make an admirable husband.’

  ‘What,’ Reid asked, ‘is your definition of an admirable husband?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘I want him to be romantic, yes. If he is that to start with, then I can keep him that way, I think. And it would follow from that, that he would make love graciously. I would like him to be generous with his money, not a spendthrift but open handed; I would like him to be kind and tender; and good company; someone who liked parties. I would like him to give me my own way, not always though, and only, and now this is most important, in the things that we can share.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘A trip to Cairo, that we could take together: a new car that would look elegant at the race course, but not a boat since he does not care for sailing.’

  ‘You asked for a lot, Annabelle.’

  ‘If you ask for a lot, you get a lot. I knew what I could get and where. Would I not have been foolish to have taken him as a lover when he could be so much more attractive as a husband?’

  Her eyes were twinkling: it was the old badinage of the Restoration comedies. ‘You on the other hand, my dear Professor, would have been, I think, more charming as a lover than a husband.’

  ‘That’s the last thing I ever expected to have said about me.’

  ‘I know; because you are staid and sensible; a dignified member of society, who has a regard for his responsibilties, who wouldn’t abandon his wife and children; yes, you are all that I know; if a woman were to ask of a husband that he should be first and foremost a good citizen, then you would stand high upon her list. But that is not really what a woman wants: she wants someone who will give himself to her, so that their two lives become one life. Could you ever do that, could you ever be that, my dear Professor? I do not think you could. You have that secret world of your own, with your books and lectures and it is such a private, such a barricaded world. I would like to ask your wife if she agrees with me.’

  ‘I’ve an idea she might.’

  ‘I think so too. And if a friend of mine thirty years ago had begun to take you seriously, do you know what I would have said to her?’

  ‘You tell me what you would have said to her.’

  ‘I would have given her a warning: I would have said, “He is an honourable and upright man: he is a man of talent and as his wife, you will enjoy the glory that is reflected from that kind of man. But be on your guard; six months after your honeymoon, you may find that you have done no more than acquire a new piece of furniture for the house.” That is the warning I should have given her, if her hopes were matrimonial, but if her ideas were less conventional, then my advice would have been very different. “As a lover,” I would say to her, “I think he would be delightful. He would for a few weeks break out of that prison house of his. He would concentrate on you, with all the emotion that has been bottled up for months. Nothing would exist for him in the whole world but you. You would be engulfed, submerged; you would be his sun, his moon, and all the stars. And that is what a love affair should be.” ’

  She paused, her eyes were twinkling still with mischief: but there was a reminiscent, almost a wistful expression on her face. ‘Do you know what I thought, my dear Professor, when I saw you fir
st?’ She paused. She turned to Farrar. ‘This is something, my distrustful Captain, that I have never told you; now is, I think, a good time to tell you when I have a witness for my protection, but this is what I thought. “I will have a romance with the Professor.” You well remember, my dearly cherished but insidious Captain, that you had been harassing me for a long time with very equivocal suggestions. I confronted your blandishments with a rigid Levantine rectitude, but I was not impervious to their effect. I was not as confident as I appeared. I wondered if you were right and I was wrong: no, I do not mean “wrong” in resisting you: on that point I was convinced. But was I wrong in resisting everybody else. I was not going to be the easy spoil of some casual crusader; but I was a human being; I assured myself that if an appropriate opportunity were to be presented that I could accept with delicacy and discretion, I would accede; and when I met the Professor I thought “this is it”. He is over forty. He is married. He has a career. He is not the man to throw his top hat over a windmill: he will not involve me in disastrous consequences. He is healthy, he is handsome. His emotional nature has probably been slumbering for ten years. Why should I not benefit from that long somnolence; why should I not release the avalanche of his devotion. That is what I thought, my complacent Captain. And do you know why I did not?’

  ‘I should be most interested to learn.’

  ‘I did not, because I know too well what you Englishmen are like where women are concerned. The friendship between two men is to you something sacred. You would never let a woman interfere with it. It is, I suppose, because of your imperial training. Men in the jungle, men on lonely frontiers, without another white man within a thousand miles. You have to trust each other. I knew what would happen if I let the Professor see that I might not find his approaches unacceptable: he would have turned to you. “Farrar old boy,” he would have said,’ and she raised her voice mimicking the English accent, ‘“Farrar old boy, that wench Annabelle. Is the coast clear there?” And you, my chivalrous Captain, would have answered, “Of course, old boy. Good luck to you.” It is one of the traits about you Englishmen that I find both engaging and exasperating; as for that matter I find so much else about you Englishmen engaging and exasperating; and somehow I did not want that to happen. Because I knew if that did happen, I should lose you, my troublesome Captain, irretrievably; and that was more of a risk than I was prepared to run. So you see, my dear Professor, what a narrow escape you had twenty-one years ago.’