by Alec Waugh
As Farrar had prophesied, Reid woke up next morning at his usual hour of six o’clock, which for his colleagues at Columbia was ten o’clock on the previous night. It was a clear, cool sunny morning; very like that of the first Sunday he had spent here. ‘I’ve taken the day off,’ Farrar told him. ‘I’ll show you round the sights and we’ll lunch at Sa’ad’s. That’ll make you feel nostalgic’
It was not only Sa’ad’s that made him feel nostalgic. So much was the same, and so much was different. The night club quarter was unchanged. So was the Lucullus restaurant, so was the view from the terrace of the St. Georges; and the main shopping street, and the road along the campus; the feel of the town was the same. The new luxury hotels had not altered that. It was only on the edge of the town that the huge development of apartment buildings had made a new city of Beirut. The Bain Militaire for instance had been submerged. Its privacy had vanished; and the white and blue lighthouse could only be seen from certain angles.
‘Does it seem very different living here?’ Reid asked.
Farrar shook his head; ‘It’s what it’s been for centuries; elegant, astute, corrupt: but corrupt in a very gracious way.’
Their talk switched from one topic to another so quickly that afterwards Reid could not remember where what exactly had been said. It was a continuous conversation with interruptions.
‘How does all this seem to you in retrospect?’ Farrar asked. ‘For me who’s never left here, it has a steady continuity. My life during the war wasn’t so very different from what it had been before and what it has become since. But for you it was such a break in your routine. Does it seem now a kind of, well, I won’t say nightmare, but something that happened to someone else?’
‘Sometimes it’s so much more real than the things that are happening to me now.’
Farrar asked him about his sons. They were both doing well enough, he said. One was in Shell; the other was in the wine trade. They were both married. He had five grandchildren.
‘I read a book of yours the other day. The one on Charles V. Very interesting.’
‘Really: you found it interesting?’
‘Well, you know what I mean. Not like a novel, of course.’
Reid laughed. ‘I’ve tried to make them rather more like novels. I learnt a certain amount about that, out here.’
He told him what those summaries from Beirut had taught him about the need to maintain suspense. Farrar was delighted. ‘To think of a Professor of history and philosophy learning how to write from me. I can hardly believe that.’
‘I can only assure you that my post-war books have done much better than my previous ones.’
On the terrace of the St. Georges over a glass of arak, they talked about Baghdad. ‘You were never there, were you?’ Reid asked Farrar.
Farrar shook his head. ‘Oddly enough, I never was. By the way, you realize don’t you, who is our Ambassador there now?’
‘Geoffrey Bennett, isn’t it?’
He had looked it up in Whittaker’s in the Century Club library, and checked Bennett’s entry in Who’s Who. Farrar shook his head. ‘There was a change two months ago. Our old friend from Istanbul, Martin Ransom, is in the saddle now.’
‘I never met him.’
‘You didn’t? That surprises me. He was in on one or two of our things.’
‘I don’t need telling that. I’ll be interested to meet him.’
‘There’s something by the way I’d like to have you do for me in Baghdad.’
This part of their serial conversation was taking place on the terrace of the St. Georges, the one place where during their morning’s stroll they were completely out of earshot.
‘I’m an oil man nowadays; oil isn’t a cover for me any longer,’ Farrar explained. ‘Yet at the same time I have on the side, maintained a few contacts from those days. My advice gets asked occasionally and I get asked for help. I’ve a finger or two in several pies, I’d like you to take a message for me.’
‘That’s what you said to Gustave.’
Farrar looked at him, with a start.
‘You weren’t meant to know about that,’ he said.
‘So I gathered: but I found out. How’s Gustave doing, by the way?’
‘Not over well.’
‘What do you mean by not over well?’
‘Oh, several things. His wife divorced him. It wasn’t a pretty case. Then he was the secretary of a club. There was some confusion about the accounts. Nothing was proved, but he considered it tactful to resign.’
‘Do you ever see him nowadays?’
‘He doesn’t want to see people like ourselves any longer.’
‘How is he off financially?’
‘He’s all right there, I fancy. His current wife is comfortably heeled.’
‘How is he in himself? I was rather fond of him, you know.’
‘And so was I in a way. But one can’t worry about feelings of that kind when a war’s on. He immobilized five German divisions for half a year.’
‘That’s how Diana argued. She put it at three divisions, though.’
‘Let’s put it at four.’
‘That’s not negligible, to set against one mental casualty. Anyhow what’s this message you want me to deliver in Baghdad?’
‘It concerns Diana. Her husband is one of the few high up Army officers with a clean record. Certain interested persons want him to stay that way, in view of certain events that may take place in the quite near future. At the moment he’s in Suleimania campaigning against the Kurds. They want him to be sure to stay there between January and February: to keep out of Baghdad at all costs. They want the message sent to him by word of mouth. Security up there is very strict. You could get the message to him through Diana. Nobody else could.’
‘Where was he when the king was murdered?’
‘In Suleimania, on every count his record’s clean. He’s a very sound army officer. He accepts the army code of loyalty to the authority in power. They want him to stay that way. They may need him one day; politically. Can you get that message to Diana?’
‘I can.’
They had their talk on the St. Georges terrace, shortly before lunch. They went straight from there to Sa’ad’s. It was impossible to sit in Sa’ad’s and not talk about Diana.
‘I’ve often thought about you, Prof.,’ said Farrar. ‘It was such a strange war for you. You finished up a full colonel with red flannel. I know that. But for about four years, you were in khaki, without any kind of status; you weren’t aligned with your opposite numbers; or at least those who would have been your opposite numbers in 1938. You were meeting on equal terms captains like myself, twelve years younger than yourself who were nobodies in civil life. Didn’t you find it very strange?’
‘Not very. I put the clock back twenty years.’
‘And that made you vulnerable to the kind of experience that wouldn’t have happened to you if you had stayed on in England as a Professor. I mean Diana. She must have given you a terrific jolt.’
‘She did.’
‘I don’t want to pry or anything, but I imagine that you had led a pretty steady sort of life.’
‘I had.’
‘And that in spite of all those novels about the twenties. Flaming Youth, and the Bright Young People, for someone like yourself, who was in his early twenties, who hadn’t a great deal of money, who was working very hard to make up for the time that he had lost during the war, it can’t have been all that hectic, surely?’
‘It wasn’t.’
‘So that to meet someone like Diana at the age of forty-three, to have her carry such a torch for you . . . I knew what it meant, of course, when you asked to be transferred to Baghdad, but now in retrospect, it’s twenty years ago. You’re in late middle age. How does it seem to you now? Did it make it very hard for you to settle down to—well, I suppose you could call it humdrum life in England? It’s something I’ve often wondered.’
‘It’s something I’ve often asked myself.’
Reid paused remembering that lunch in London, when he had been prepared to abandon his home and start on a new life; recalling the long slow years that followed: years professionally of much accomplishment and some achievement, of work that had both absorbed and satisfied him; years that had been in a way impersonal, when he and Rachel had run their family in an harmonious partnership. He had enjoyed the friendship of his sons; he had enjoyed watching them grow up; in particular he had enjoyed their years at Oxford: they had been so obviously getting so much out of it. It had been in the last analysis, an uneventful time, but it had been unharassed by the strain that had made him in 1939 welcome the return to uniform. He had got on well enough with Rachel, now that there were no intimate relations. He did not think he would ever have reached this calm of spirit if it had not been for Diana. He could answer Farrar reassuringly.
‘If you’ve once known the very best,’ he said, ‘you can be content with, well I won’t say the second best, because it isn’t that at all, it’s something that bears no relation to the best. If you’ve not known the best, you feel that you’ve been cheated; or you suspect that you’ve missed it through some deficiency in yourself: or maybe you think that there is no such thing as the best, that people are lying and pretending when they claim that they have known the best; that life in fact is an imposture: when you’re in that mood it’s difficult to keep a balance, but,’ he paused, searching for an aphorism that would explain in a phrase how he really felt; searching and half-finding it, ‘it’s not difficult,’ he said, ‘to live contentedly, once you’ve realized that there is such a thing in the world as happiness even though you’ve missed it and now won’t get it. Do you remember that poem of Newbolt’s, “He fell among thieves”, about the man who was going to die at dawn, brooding “in a dream untroubled of hope.” That’s the point, I think.’ He paused again. He had found the aphorism. ‘It’s easy to be happy when you know that you never will be happy.’
Chapter Four
Baghdad was hung with flags and with streamers stretched across the streets. The city was celebrating the five hundredth anniversary of the Philosopher Al Kindi and its own thousandth anniversary. But in far greater part the celebrations were a display of personal glorification for the Dictator Kassim. His photograph was on every hoarding and in every shop. For every tribute to Al Kindi, there were a dozen to the leader of the glorious July revolution.
Reid landed shortly after ten. From the window of the aircraft, it all looked familiar enough; the yellow ochre countryside, le pays beige, the twisting river, the date palms, the low houses, the golden domes of Khadimain glistening in the sunlight, but once on the ground, on his way from the airport to his hotel, he looked in vain for certain familiar landmarks. There were the rows of two-storeyed flat-roofed villas, there were the stunted, blossomless dust-covered oleander bushes, but where were the statues to Feisal and to General Maude? They crossed the river and there to the right was a fine new bridge. But the east bank of the river had lost its charm. The picturesque old wooden houses, with their balconies and courtyards were desolate and shabby. Many of them had been replaced by concrete barrack-like constructions. The low palm-dotted skyline with its mosques and minarets had vanished. The air was heavy with dust. He turned to the right and there was Rashid Street with its colonnades and shabbiness. its shuffling pedestrians, its bicycles and donkeys. His nostrils wrinkled: that old pungent smell.
He had booked a room in the El Katib. He had been advised to stay in the new American style hotel that had been built between the south gate and the Alwiyah Club. But he wanted to evoke memories in a hotel that he had known in wartime. Twenty years ago the El Katib had been the smartest and most expensive; when G.H.Q. had been billeted in hotels, it had been reserved for officers above the rank of major. It was very shabby now, and was mainly patronized by Russian technicians, who had camped there like Bedouins with their wives and children and had no spare funds for the least personal indulgence. They did their own washing in their rooms, and the bar was desolate. But Reid was content enough to be here. This was the Baghdad he knew. In the American style hotel down the river, he would wake in the morning, wondering at first whether he was in Kansas or Detroit.
His room faced on the river. He walked on to the balcony. The west side of the river was little changed, there were the palm trees and the low houses many of them dating back to Turkish times, some of quite recent structure but all of them blended into the pervading atmosphere of watered dust. The river though was different. Long banks ran down to it, on which small boys were feeding sheep and goats: mud islands in the centre were planted with vegetables; the river itself was narrowed so that it had become a stream, meandering through shallows. This was December, surely the river should have risen by now. Then he remembered: there had been a heavy flood six years ago. Another few inches and the city would have been submerged. A barrage had now been erected to the north; the flow of water had been restrained and irrigation projects were under way that might restore the country to the prosperity that it had known in the days of Haroun al Rashid.
‘I must get out into the street and see what it all looks like now,’ he thought.
On his way through the hall, he was stopped by the room clerk. ‘A telegram for you, Professor Reid.’
He had hoped there would be. In Beirut, Farrar had found out Diana’s address from the Iraqi Consulate. He had invited her by cable to lunch with him at the Alwiyah Club on the day before the celebrations opened. He tore open the envelope. He read ‘Delighted, love.’ Now he could relax.
He spent the rest of the day making a long, slow, sentimental pilgrimage. It was a bright cool day; an easy day for walking. During the celebrations he would be taken he knew on a tour of the latest developments, but he wanted to see what had happened to the places that he remembered. He crossed the river by the new bridge and turned south towards the Centre’s building. The Prince Regent had acquired the mess and dormitories and planned to make a private palace there. A high tiled wall over which he could not see had been set across the entrance to the garden. No one was about. The office buildings were also empty. He looked through the windows. The rooms were in disrepair. The garden overgrown. The house would be pulled down soon. No one needed this kind of house any longer. They wanted solid blocks of concrete. Air conditioning had effected more changes in the life of Baghdad in a dozen years, than as many centuries of wars had done. He wondered if well-off Baghdadis still slept on the roof in summer. There might soon be a generation that did not know about that cool breeze that came off the Tigris at four o’clock. Not far from his old centre was Nuri Said’s house. That too was abandoned. The walls and window frames were pock-marked with the machine gun bullets that had racked it on that fatal night.
He crossed the river again and walked north from the Alwiyah Club. The East bank was cluttered now with cafés and food stalls. There were flags and photographs of Kassim: many of the streamers had been inscribed in English: in an English that was not quite English, such as ‘all homage to the creative thought.’ He did not see anyone wearing the high split felt hat—the Sidera—that Feisal had introduced. Many of the men were chewing lettuces as they strolled along.
He lunched in a café facing the river by the south gate. He ordered an arak and a plate of messé. The café was full of men under fifty drinking beer or arak. Baghdad had a beer factory now. Reid ordered a bottle; it was light and good. Most of the men wore dark Western suits. Half of them had no collars; those who wore shirts with collars attached, left the shirts unbuttoned at the neck. They looked very scruffy. The few who were wearing the traditional Arab dress looked infinitely more dignified.
There were large brown buses running now down all Rashid Street. He took one to the old part of the city, surrounding the bazaars. Here the work of demolition was in brisk operation. Whole sections were being torn apart, to be replaced by tall dun coloured barracks. Never had he seen an uglier city. Yet it had a certain poetic quality in the evening, when the fires were
lit along the river, and the broad flat fish were grilled on them.
He acquired a card of temporary membership to the Alwiyah Club. He arrived there early. The inside had been done over. He did not think that had he been brought here blindfold, he would have known where he was. There were a couple of waiters though whom he remembered and who remembered him. And the garden was the same, though somehow he had expected the grass to be more green. It was pleasant sitting there in the sun, remembering how it had been on summer evenings when young officers in bush shirts had danced on the small stone circle. He tried to pretend that he was not feeling nervous. He wondered if he would still recognize her.
But there was no need for him to wonder that.
They had their gin and tonics on the lawn.
‘I’ve something to say to you that I don’t want overheard,’ he said.
He told her what he had to tell. She nodded. ‘Yes, I understand. Thank you very much.’
There were only two other couples lunching and one man by himself. The room was bleak. It needed to be crowded to look gay. The menu was like that in an English railway station.
‘I always have cold meat and salad here,’ Diana said, ‘and don’t order wine. The beer’s really better.’
The whole thing was very far from seeming an occasion. ‘Do you know that in all my months here, I never had a meal alone in feminine company.’
She raised her eyebrows.