by Alec Waugh
‘It was a very celibate world for most of us,’ he said.
‘No little shulamite?’
‘No little shulamite.’
‘Poor Noel; poor, poor Noel. I’d have been very surprised then, if I’d been told I’d be lunching with you here in 1962.’
‘It would have surprised me too. When I was sitting out there, in the garden, I wondered if I should recognize you.’
‘I don’t think that I’ve altered very much.’
‘Scarcely at all.’
Her hair was grizzled. She was a little thinner: and her mouth was lined, but there was no real change. He had thought that with her height and having had children, she might have become massive in middle age. She had not, though.
Their talk moved smoothly. They talked about the celebrations, a little but not much about the changes since the establishment of the new régime. She had to be careful what she said in public. They were both sufficiently familiar with police procedure, to know that their meeting would certainly be reported to police headquarters. One meeting between two compatriots, between two old friends, was to be expected. But a second meeting would have been suspicious. Besides Diana did not live in Baghdad, but on an estate two hours’ drive away. Whatever they had to say, had to be said now.
‘It seemed strange at first,’ he said, ‘your being married to an Iraqi.’
‘Why strange? Is there anything stranger about an Iraqi than a Frenchman or a Dane?’
‘Surely his being a Moslem makes a difference?’
‘Not really, nowadays. One thinks of Moslems in terms of the Holy war, and of all those wives. And I suppose if one were married to a very devout Moslem it would make a difference. But then so would it if one were married to a devout Catholic; there’s not very much difference between what Shawkat believes and what the average, casual English churchman does. The forms of worship may be different, but not the essence. Do most of us after all, have much more than a rather vague belief in God?’
She paused. She looked at him, questioningly. He did not reply. He did not know the answer to that question. He had often asked himself why he who had such a definite regard for what are called ‘the eternal verities,’ had never found it possible to embrace whole heartedly any single creed, though he accepted the communion of the Established Church, and did not consider that his taking of the communion was an act of blasphemy.
‘As a matter of fact, you see,’ she was continuing, ‘Shawkat is far closer to me in terms of upbringing than a Spaniard would be. He’d been to Sandhurst. He’d had the English grooming. He liked and respected the English way of doing things. But he wasn’t a part of it. And that’s really what I wanted in a husband. Someone who would understand me, through having seen and understood and what is more appreciated a way of life against which I was in reaction. You see what I mean.’
‘I see what you mean.’
‘A Spanish officer for example, couldn’t have been a real husband for me, for he couldn’t understand how I had come to be what I was. His attitude would have been “let’s rub it out and start afresh”; but you can’t rub out something you were born to. That’s what made Nigel Farrar wrong for me.’
‘Steady now, steady. You are going much too fast. How does Nigel Farrar come into all of this?’
‘Because Nigel, like myself, was dyed-in-the-wool English; he was reacting against England, just as I was, but in a different way, for different reasons. And for the very reason that we were so close, we were not quite close enough. We might have become enemies. Thank God, we had the sense not to marry.’
‘Was there any talk of it?’
‘Indeed, there was.’
He could not have been more surprised; a flash of intuition made him ask, ‘Did you have an affair with Nigel Farrar?’
‘Of course. Didn’t you know?’
‘I had no idea.’
‘She laughed. Oh, my darling Noel, how innocent you were. We must, all of us, have been a fearful shock to you.’
Nigel and Diana! That explained a lot. Why had he not suspected? It was as well probably that he hadn’t.
He switched the conversation. He asked her about her children. What were her plans for them? Were they to be exposed to European influences? ‘The A.U.B. should give them a chance of choosing. That’s the best I can do for them. But I hope they’ll decide to stay here. This country needs the kind of man I hope they’ll be.’
‘What did your father make of it all?’
‘Tickled to death. Just what he’s hoped for me. I can hear him talking about it, in the Rag. “That daughter of mine, no use for the kind of man that she met in her mother’s house, picked up a blackamoor in Cairo. Still she was true to her training in her way. The man had been to Sandhurst.” ’
‘Did he ever meet your husband?’
‘No, and I so wish he had. They’d have liked each other.’
‘He’s not alive still, is he?’
She shook her head. ‘But he died only three years ago.’
The talk moved easily enough. There were no pauses. Yet Reid had the feeling that they hadn’t really a great deal to say to one another. Though she had changed little in appearance he felt that he was sitting beside a stranger. Neither knew anything of what the other had been doing during the last seventeen years. The friends they had had in common had gone out of both their lives. Their interests were different, too. This is the end, he thought; the last pages of the chapter that had begun in Beirut, on that November afternoon, twenty-one years before. It seemed appropriate that it should end like this, with him lunching with Diana the bearer of a message on which the fate and future of a régime, might depend.
Next day the celebrations started. They were highly tedious. The speeches were much too long. A remarkable array of Mayors had been assembled from places as remote as Rome, Tashkent and Peking. Each of them spoke at length. The mayor of Moscow considered it a suitable occasion to deliver an attack on the British colonialism to which Baghdad had been subjected. By universal acclaim the laurels, had there been any, would have gone to the mayor of Damascus who spoke as a scholar and a poet. The receptions were even more tedious than the sessions. Kassim always arrived late, and insisted on long conversations with individual delegates. On one occasion it was eleven o’clock before the guests reached the supper-room. There was a dearth of alcohol.
For Reid the proceedings were wrapped in an uneasy atmosphere of foreboding. Kassim was invariably escorted by a heavily armed bodyguard and men with tommy guns stood around the lavatories. Reid wondered if the others were conscious of this omen. Would he have been, if Farrar had not entrusted him with a message? The day after the celebrations ended, the British Ambassador gave a dinner party to which Reid was invited. The old residence had been burnt down during the July revolution, and the Ambassador now lived on the west bank. ‘I am afraid,’ he said, ‘that this house will seem a sad declension from the high days that you remember.’
Reid was curious to meet Sir Martin. He was even more curious to meet his wife. She was tall and handsome, some ten years younger than her husband. Arriving at the same time as three other guests, he had no opportunity of talking to her before dinner. But seated three places away from her, he had chances of glancing at her during the meal and of overhearing snatches of her talk. She had a slight transatlantic accent: he fancied it was Canadian. She talked lightly, almost flippantly. She was smiling half the time. She was dressed simply, but expensively. She wore little jewellery, but that little looked very good. He assumed that she had money of her own. She seemed a good foil for an Ambassador.
On his left was an Iraqi lady, the wife of a government official. She was in her middle forties. She had daughters in their late teens and early twenties. He asked if they were closely chaperoned. She laughed. ‘They are by their standards, but my mother’s shocked out of her wits. She can’t think what’s happening. She thinks the world’s headed for perdition.’
‘They don’t go out with young men alone, do they?’
<
br /> ‘No, but they go out in parties of four and six. At parties they sit in couples. They’re freer than late Victorian girls were in England. The next generation will be as free as your sisters were.’
On his other side was one of the secretaries at the Embassy. ‘Were you here on that July night?’ Reid asked.
‘I’ll say I was.’
‘Was it all a great surprise to you?’
‘Yes and no. We had warned Nuri that Kassim wasn’t to be trusted. But Nuri said that he had had it out with Kassim and that Kassim was his man.’
After dinner, the Ambassador beckoned to Reid to sit beside him. ‘It’s strange that we never met during the war,’ he said. ‘I knew of course that you were here, and I’ve read a number of summaries that I presumed were written by you. As a matter of fact only the other day, I was re-reading one of them. I wanted to recreate the past and I thought I could do worse than see what you chaps had been saying then. I found some of them very helpful. Particularly one you wrote about that schoolmaster with the wireless set.’
‘I remember that one. What happened to that master, by the way?’
‘He’s doing well enough. He’s a headmaster now. You must have had an interesting time out here.’
‘It was more than interesting; it was exciting.’
‘And pleasant too, I’d think.’
‘Yes, in many ways.’
‘It’s more than it is now. One’s virtually a prisoner. If you want to go out for a day’s shooting, you not only have to get a special permit, but take a policeman with you, in your car.’
‘It’s sad to think of how little’s survived out of all the solid work that was done by sincere and really first-class men.’
The Ambassador shook his head. ‘One’s taking a short view if one thinks that,’ he said. ‘Look back fifty years: read an account of how Baghdad was then, as capital of a villayet in the Ottoman Empire. It was wretched and filthy. And so were the Iraqis. Immense progress has been made; that progress couldn’t have been made without us. The Iraqis may not seem grateful now. But the people that one helps rarely do show gratitude. In time they may. The Indians are very friendly with us now. This moment is the lowest point of the curve.’
He spoke with authority. He had the smooth easy manner of the diplomat, but he could, clearly, be very firm. Reid wondered how much he knew about what was going on beneath the surface here. During the 1930s there had been an idea that official Embassies did not know as much as newspaper reporters. But his experience in the Middle East had taught him that Embassies had access to all the information that a journalist could reach and a great deal else besides. In the 1930s had not Sir Horace Rumbold from his Berlin Embassy warned the British Government of what the Nazis were preparing, as cogently as any journalist had done. Ransom had probably a very shrewd idea of what the next months held.
They talked for a little about their separate experiences during the war, then the Ambassador pushed back his chair. ‘Time we were going next door,’ he said. ‘Oh by the way, there was a young woman in your organization who was in Istanbul, Eve Parish. Do you know what happened to her?’
‘She married a soldier, someone in the 60th.’
‘And it turned out well?’
‘From all accounts, it has.’
‘I’m glad to hear that: yes, I’m very glad.’
Reid’s flight for Beirut left at noon. He was to stay a couple of nights with Farrar, then catch his Pan American clipper. He looked forward to the strange euphoria of that westward flight, with meals following one another in an unaccountable succession, breakfast followed by breakfast and lunch by lunch, with a cascade of champagne restoring every wakeful hour. Then he would think things out. He was too tired now.
His suitcase was packed. He walked out on the balcony: in all human probability he was looking down for the last time on the Tigris. In spring the snows would melt and the gates of the barrage would be opened. Once again these low sloping banks would contain a brown fierce swirling torment. In his mind’s eye he could see it.
The telephone bell rang behind him. ‘My car already?’ But it was not his car. It was the rich contralto voice that he had heard for the first time as duty officer in Beirut.
‘Noel, is that you: oh, but I’m so glad I got you. I was afraid I wouldn’t. This line is terrible. And there was something that I had to say: that I couldn’t say across a lunch table. You remember me. I’m most myself when I’m on a telephone. So please let me say this now. Don’t interrupt. Let me say what I have to say. Then I’ll ring off.’
At the Alwiyah Club at lunch, seated beside a woman who had changed in seventeen years inside herself, he had felt that he was with a stranger, but now hearing her voice, not seeing her changed features, he was transported to those early days, to Sa’ad’s, and the Lucullus and that dark flat below the minaret. Once again the mantle of her magic was about him. The years slipped away. He was a captain in his early forties. His heart was singing as he listened.
‘I had to say this to you. I don’t want to be misjudged by you. I told you at the start that I was ruthless: but I’m every bit as ruthless with myself. That’s what you’ve got to realize. You mustn’t think those months, that all that started in Damascus, was only a casual passade. It wasn’t. It was the real thing. And it was the first time that I’d known that. That was why I was frightened. I had to get out, fast. There is a point in a love affair, where you can get out. If you once pass that point you’re lost. I couldn’t afford to let that happen. Because though it was the real thing, I wasn’t convinced it was the right thing, for either of us. And if it hadn’t been the right thing for us, we’d have ruined one another. I know myself. I can’t live with a compromise. If a thing isn’t right for me, then it’s more than wrong. But I couldn’t have told you that. You’d have over persuaded me. And I’d have so wanted you to do just that. I couldn’t trust myself. And so I ran. And even now I’m not sure if I was right to run. I’ll never know. We might have been wonderful for one another, but if we hadn’t, we’d have been disastrous. And it hasn’t turned out so badly for us, has it? I had to say this to you. Now you’ll understand. You’ll think about me in the way I want you to. And now I’m going to ring off. Good-bye, my darling, bless you.’
There was the click of the receiver. He walked out on to the balcony; but he could not see the brown sluggish river, the date palms and the dun coloured houses on the bank. There was a mist before his eyes. Through his ears and along every nerve cell the viols in her voice were echoing.
Postscript
This novel is a piece of fiction and all the characters and events in it are fictitious. It is, however, based on personal experiences. I am, myself, of the same age as the central character, Professor Reid. In the First War, as he did, I went to Sandhurst and in 1919 transferred to the Regular Army Reserve. In September 1939, I was recalled to my regiment with the rank of Lieutenant. In September 1941, I was posted to the Spears Mission (Syria and the Lebanon) as a liaison officer with the Free French Forces. After nine months in Beirut and Cairo, I was transferred to Baghdad to work in counter-espionage.
The general background of those years is, I hope, accurately reported. But there was in Middle East no organization whose work bore any resemblance to that of the I.S.L.O. described in this story. None of the incidents I have described took place.
On their arrival in Beirut in November 1941, the prospective members of the Spears Mission were received at the legation by the chargé d’affaires, my good friend, J. A. de C. Hamilton. His speech of welcome is here, in large part, reproduced. In retrospect it seems to me that I heard in that speech more sound sense than I was to hear in my remaining forty-two months in Middle East. But the Cartwright of this book is scarcely a portrait of Hamilton.
In Baghdad I worked in close co-operation with the British Technical Advisor to the C.I.D. He bore no resemblance to the Forester in this story.
I was in Baghdad in December 1962, during the Al Kindi celebr
ations, but I did not attend any of the functions. The British delegate was Professor Max Mallowan who very kindly supplied me with some information about them. The British Ambassador at that time was Sir Roger Allen who honoured me with his hospitality. He bears no resemblance to the fictional character who in this book is accredited to the Iraqi government. As far as I know, no message was sent to an officer in the Iraqi Army, advising him to avoid Baghdad, during the early weeks of 1963. I repeat this is a piece of fiction.
During my years in Baghdad, I became a close friend of Majid Khadduri, now a Professor at Hopkins University and the author of a number of important books. His Independent Iraq is essential reading for any student of this area. I am most grateful to him for the help that he has given me. I have also been helped by Peggy Mann’s book, Israel.
The first half of this book was written and the manuscript was finally revised at the MacDowell Colony, Peterboro, New Hampshire. Once again I must express my warmest gratitude to the Directors of the Association. My debt to them is very great. I simply do not know how I should have managed without the colony during the last fifteen years.
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
Copyright © Alec Waugh 1965
The moral right of author has been asserted
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication
(or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital,
optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written
permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this
publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages