Dust on the Paw

by Robin Jenkins

  ‘It wasn’t. The word occurs four times, and each time with a small m. Either it’s deliberate policy, or pure illiteracy. I’ll talk to Howard. I’m not having any of his Ezra Pound tricks fathered on me. By the way, have you seen Gillie this morning?’

  Bob Gillie was the Consul.

  ‘Just for a moment in passing, sir. Any special reason?’

  ‘You’ll find out in the next few minutes. He’ll be in to see you. I’ve just sent him a small present.’

  Panging with jealousy, Wint still managed a chuckle like a good sport. ‘I didn’t know it was his birthday, sir.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Alan,’ roared the Ambassador and banged his receiver down.

  Before the Ambassador, in his snow-white residence, had the glass out of his eye to give it the calm, silky wipe that always terminated a rebuke to a subordinate preparatory to beginning another, Wint was up, fleeing from his unknown folly, out of his office, and along the corridor to Howard Winfield’s.

  The Oriental Secretary, young, bespectacled, and relaxed, with bald spot tanned, was seated at his desk reading, by a coincidence, a recently published book of criticism of Pound’s poetry. Having the responsibility of ordering for the Embassy library, he ordered thrillers for the rest and esoteric volumes like the present one, which were much more expensive, for himself and anyone else he could convert.

  The four hundred copies of the news bulletin, soon to be dispatched by orderlies to the various Embassies, Legations, and Government Departments, as well as to many private addresses in the city, were piled in front of him. Indeed, the fingers of his left hand were playing on them a tune that, in its subtlety and liveliness, was giving him great pleasure though he was composing it himself. Everything he attempted gave him similar pleasure. He had been known to fail, but never to be discomfited. The collar of his dhobi-tortured shirt was frayed, but the neck it adorned was tougher, under its tan, than bronze.

  Wint had been going to warn him about the Ambassador’s annoyance but changed his mind. ‘I say, Howard,’ he said instead, annoyed himself. ‘Those girls just phoned me again.’

  Winfield smiled up, but before he could answer, the telephone rang. Sadistically Wint watched as his colleague, with characteristic delicacy, picked it up, shifted in his chair to achieve a posture of ease and grace, set his brain to work, oiled with the astutest self-interest, and said: ‘Winfield speaking,’ in that marvellously rich, sure voice that Oxford had nurtured but nature took most credit for. As he listened to the expostulatory crackles, a smile of Napoleonic craft took up position on his big flexible mouth. His ear, big too, with some dried scented soap on its perimeter, showed never a twitch. His foot, encased in native sandal of red leather decorated with gold stars, tapped on the floor, as if to cheerful music. Yet as Wint, himself an unappreciated expert, knew, Winfield danced chacha, samba, rock-and-roll, Duke of Perth, fox trot, and Viennese waltz as if they were all the same dance, to the incredible enjoyment and hilarity of his partners.

  ‘I accept responsibility in toto, sir. No, I do not hide behind that subterfuge; it was considered policy. Well, sir, there is no proper noun from which the word Moslem is derived, as there is for Christian or Buddhist. If Mohammedan had been chosen, then of course there would have been no debate: the capital would undoubtedly have been in order.’

  Then, smile unrouted, he listened to what Wint was sure must be a full-scale assault. Of course Howard was an impregnable favourite: he partnered the Ambassador’s wife at bridge and, besides having amusing prattle, played well enough for two. Wint, on the other hand, overworked in the office, at bridge squandered tricks, dropped asleep, reneged.

  ‘Granted, sir,’ murmured Winfield, with a wink at Wint. ‘But, with all due respect, would it really be politic to alter today’s issue? I mean, making the alterations would only bring notice to what I now see, thanks to your lucid explanation, sir, might be construed in certain bigoted quarters as a slight. You think nevertheless it should be altered? I shall attend to it forthwith.’ His brows went up. ‘No, sir, I do not smoke American cigarettes. Of course, the entire staff. I’m very sorry about this. The explanation may be that during my schooldays I acquired a stylistic prejudice against proper adjectives; even today I’m never sure what to do about a word like un-Christian. It could have been because I had a master who spelled his surname with a small letter. Or it might have been the example of Bernard Shaw who left out apostrophes because he thought they gave the page an untidy appearance.’

  The engagement over, he set down the telephone and, in subtle parody, with his smile still in good order, coolly removed his spectacles and wiped them. Having two lenses, he succeeded in outdoing the master. Wint’s admiration was a little blemished by envy. Without meditation or fancy, Howard would one day be an ambassador; it would help that his father, Sir Timothy, already was one; but there could be no gainsaying he had his own appropriate ability. Better than anyone he knew how the Ambassador abominated Shaw and all his works.

  Now he was telephoning again, his voice at its most charming, to Miss Katherine Winn, temperamental clerk and embittered exile in dusty, mud-built, department-store-less, pre-Pankhurstian, malodorous Afghanistan. He was asking her to come along for a minute, quickly, if she could. He did not add, as Wint fatally would have, out of loyalty to his chief, that the Ambassador was behind the urgency. Katherine did not get on well with H.E.’s wife, whose invitation to a dull Embassy function she had refused, on the impertinent grounds that she had a prior engagement, which turned out to be a gramophone and frankfurters party with some girls from the American Embassy.

  A minute later Katherine arrived, flushed, peevish, belligerent. ‘What is it, Howard?’ she demanded. ‘I’m fearfully busy. Certain documents have to be ready for a certain place at a certain time.’ She managed to put into the adjective the feeling that another adjective, also frequently reiterated, is alone supposed to convey.

  Wint frowned, but Winfield was chuckling. ‘Katherine, would you be so kind as to take away these ghastly bulletins and distribute them among the staff, with my most sincere regrets and apologies—Hello, Bob’—this to Gillie who, best dressed as usual in white linen suit, white shirt, and mauve tie, had come scowling in, with a sheet of paper in his hand—‘and ask them to amend each copy, thus.’ As he spoke he altered with his Biro the small m’s to bold capitals. ‘It shouldn’t take long, if everybody buckles to. There should be about fifty copies per person. Here you are, my dear.’ He placed the bundle in her hands, as if it was a bouquet of flowers.

  ‘But, Howard,’ she squealed, ‘this is ridiculous!’

  ‘Now, Katherine,’ murmured Wint.

  ‘It is ridiculous,’ agreed Winfield.

  ‘And it’s not the only thing that is,’ barked Gillie.

  ‘It’s not just ridiculous,’ she cried. ‘It’s so trivial and unnecessary, like most of the things done here. Who cares whether it’s a capital or not? All you’re going to do is to stir up a grievance in people who would never have noticed if you’d left well alone.’

  Shrewd, thought Wint; it was obvious that for years she’d worked among diplomats. But it was a shrewdness she had no right to exercise there.

  ‘But Katherine,’ said Winfield, his voice sad, ‘would you help to nip in its bud a career so full of fragrant possibilities?’

  ‘Oh, stuff!’ she said, but marched off with the bulletins, muttering something about nothing being fragrant in that country. Her last post had been Rome.

  ‘I’m afraid Katherine’s getting a bit much,’ commented Wint.

  ‘She hates the bloody place. That’s the trouble with her,’ said Gillie, in his way called blunt by his friends, coarse and rather vulgar by Wint but to Paula only. ‘And I must say,’ added the Consul, ‘that at this moment I’m not particularly enamoured of it myself. Up to the ears in work, and now this.’

  This was evidently the ‘present’, but it was of such a nature that Wint saw his jealousy had indeed been unwarranted. Fastened
with a small gilt safety-pin to a foolscap sheet of official notepaper, with the lion and unicorn waltzing at the top, was an empty cigarette pack. Scrawled under it, like the signature to a death warrant, were these words: ‘This object was found this morning in my flower bed.’ That was all, nothing else; but it was a great deal. No wonder Gillie’s big red obtuse face was growing bigger and redder and more obtuse every minute as he scowled at it. Pride in dress was an excellent quality, Wint had often thought, but unfortunately it so noticeably showed up the lack of other, on the whole more valuable qualities, such as intelligence and suavity.

  ‘Did H.E. send it?’ asked Wint.

  He put the question in spite of its obviousness, because in any discussion he liked to start from bedrock. That others less conscientious were infuriated, and fumed against him as a canny old woman, was known to but firmly ignored by him.

  ‘Either that,’ replied Gillie, lowering his voice, ‘or else some poltergeist temporarily residing in his body sent it.’

  ‘What is its significance?’ then asked Wint.

  ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to discover for the past ten minutes,’ grunted Gillie. He gave the impression he had had a magnifying glass on it.

  ‘American,’ commented Winfield. ‘Now I see why he asked me if I smoked American cigarettes.’

  ‘No one on the staff does,’ said Gillie. ‘I’ve gone over every name.’

  ‘Is it empty?’ asked Wint, suddenly appalled at the thought of what it might contain. He had no idea himself, but the possibilities seemed appalling.

  ‘Yes, it’s empty.’

  ‘Odd, I must agree.’ As soon as it was said, Wint regretted it. Somehow he had supported Gillie’s poltergeist theory.

  ‘Hello, hello. Mind if I join the congregation?’ It was Bruce Rodgers, the Military Attaché, who came breezily in. To be breezy wasn’t really his nature, but it helped to conceal what that nature might be. All his conscious days he had played at that concealment, and had married a woman willing to play at it too. An artifice in the game was his long sandy moustache, so well groomed that it caught and kept diverted inquisitive attention. He had, too, a habit of screwing his right eye tight without actually closing it, when looking at anything carefully. His wife took every opportunity to remark that Bruce had had that habit in his last post; indeed, he had acquired it during the war, when he had been an artillery lieutenant looking at distant explosions through binoculars.

  Now he picked up paper and pack, and looked with care. Boyish amusement, or professional solemnity, could be read on his smooth well-shaved face, according to one’s estimate of his intelligence. He sniffed it and smelled tobacco. Briskly he asked and dourly was told how it had come into Gillie’s possession.

  ‘Some careless fellow chuck it there?’ he asked.

  ‘I think it’s a kind of concealed intelligence test,’ said Winfield.

  ‘Do you?’ grunted Gillie. ‘I take it it’s my intelligence you think’s in need of testing.’ He glowered at each in turn, but longest at Wint.

  Well really, thought Wint, smiling, you are often a bit slow and cumbersome, Bob. After all, that furniture for the big house, ordered from the Ministry of Works, Delhi, months ago, still isn’t even on its way. No doubt your letters and telegrams of protest have been logical, coherent, and sufficiently imperative, but still they must have lacked that essential something. Gillie of course was a category B diplomat.

  ‘I meant all our intelligences, Bob,’ Winfield was saying. ‘The brightest is the one that first discovers the solution.’

  ‘Surely it’s simple?’ said Wint. ‘Bruce is right. H.E. is simply objecting to his flower bed being used as a trash basket.’

  ‘Or as a philanderer’s couch,’ suggested Winfield.

  ‘Go on,’ said Gillie. ‘Every suggestion exhaustively considered. One carton, empty, clean, small, doesn’t constitute garbage. Philanderers haven’t time to smoke.’

  Some of the clerks had American girl friends, and Katherine often had Americans to tea, afterwards taking them for a walk through the grounds. But, surely, thought Wint, if there were to be any spooning, or petting, nobody would be so foolish as to do it right under H.E.’s drawing-room windows, in the midst of his antirrhinums? He uttered the thought.

  ‘American seductresses,’ said Winfield, ‘all seem to have read Freud, in digested versions naturally.’

  ‘Well?’ Gillie waited.

  ‘The empty pack, if left by a woman, might signify the empty womb.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Howard, be serious.’ Gillie turned on Rodgers. ‘Bruce, the garden’s your pigeon.’

  ‘Hardly that, Bob old man. I mean, you won’t find it entered anywhere among my official duties, will you?’

  ‘Granted.’ But Gillie grunted it as if he doubted whether he’d find any duties at all entered there, except touring the countryside. This was his constant grievance, his burden so heavy, and the M.A.’s so light that the latter had time to collect and drill his fabulous set of toy soldiers. ‘But you do superintend it, all the same. I mean, it’s you who decide, let’s say, what trees ought to come down.’

  Last autumn while the Gillies were on a few days’ leave, a big walnut tree in their garden had been cut down, at the Colonel’s order. To be fair, he had also ordered one in his own garden to be felled, but his hadn’t been the only supplier of shade and privacy. Neither Gillie nor his wife would ever forget or forgive.

  ‘The tree was dangerous, old man,’ said the Colonel amiably. ‘H.E. himself took a look at it.’

  ‘I’ve said it before,’ said Gillie, ‘and I’ll say it again. You could have waited until we returned.’

  Wint had noticed an orderly hovering outside with a slip of paper in his hand. That meant a visitor had called and was waiting to be interviewed. The slip would have on it his name and business, and the name of the official he wished to see. From Gulahmad’s smile Wint himself in this instance was the official.

  Glad of the excuse he went out and took the slip.

  ‘Moffatt Sahib,’ said Gulahmad.

  ‘Thanks, Gulahmad. I’ll go along and fetch him myself.’

  He read the slip, expecting and finding that facetiousness so unfortunate in such an able fellow. At the top Moffatt had printed in block capitals CONFIDENTIAL, and, in the small space where the nature of his business should have been briefly and clearly stated, he had written in unnecessarily microscopic letters: 1 Operation Diploma 2. Operation St George.

  Wint strode along the corridor to the waiting room, smiling, ready with a vigorous and sincere welcome, for despite his shortcomings Harold Moffatt must not be made to feel alien here, on this patch of British soil in a foreign land – even though he had, incredibly, a Chinese wife met in Indonesia, drove a Volkswagen, tutored the Russian Embassy in English, taught at the University, wrote poetry published in the New Statesman, advised Prince Naim, third son of the King, on British affairs, had once founded and now presided over the International Club, and never contradicted a claim, often made on his behalf at various functions and cocktail parties, that he did more for British prestige and influence than the whole Embassy combined.

  Two

  IN A country where most Western people grew thin, Harold Moffatt was tubby and fat-bottomed. Along with that plumpness, his soft flaxen hair with moustache to match, pink seemingly ingenuous face, and mild voice, all combined to disguise his fiery humaneness and his liability to erupt into reckless enterprises. Though he was prone to facetiousness in Wint’s opinion (irony, in his own), he could cause astonishment all around by suddenly displaying a stubborn sense of responsibility that he would as soon relinquish as a bulldog its grip on an enemy’s throat. Yet most of the time he was placid and mild-mannered, which his friends attributed to the influence of his small, dainty, sweet-natured, and imperturbable wife.

  He was seated in the waiting room under a portrait of Sir Winston Churchill. He looked rather more subdued than Wint had expected, judging from those flippancie
s upon the slip.

  ‘Good morning, Harold,’ he cried, with genuine cordiality. ‘You want to see me?’

  ‘I think it should be you, Alan. You can tell me if it isn’t.’

  Wint laughed. ‘All right. Shall we go along to my office and make ourselves comfortable? No trouble, I hope? Personal, I mean.’

  ‘Well,’ said Moffatt, grinning, ‘what was it Donne said about the tolling of the bell?’

  ‘Nobody ill, I hope?’ Yet it could easily be Moffatt’s wife Lan, who always struck Wint as being much too fragile for ordinary knockabout existence. Her place was in a museum with other frail, beautiful things. Paula, no Amazon, could make two of her.

  ‘No.’ He hadn’t expected Wint to understand his allusion, and was again surprised to find himself liking the tall diplomat for his peculiar unawareness, which left him so vulnerable to ridicule but which seemed to Moffatt to have its source, partly at least, in a fog of innocence. Wint was eight years older than himself, yet he often thought of the Head of Chancery as in many ways still a schoolboy, the captain of the school, with a code of honour and duty so absurdly unsuited to the shabby intrigues and expediencies of the adult world as to be quite furiously resented by most of his subordinates, some older than himself, who objected to being rallied like rebellious fags or wilting teammates five minutes from the final whistle.

  On his way along the corridor to Wint’s office Moffatt was greeted cheerfully three times, once by Howard Winfield, once by Douglas Fairbairn, the archivist, turning small m’s into big ones, and once by John Langford the Commercial Attaché, who invited him to his house afterwards for a glass of beer and a chat about the forthcoming production of the drama society. Moffatt declined the invitation, which Wint had listened to with smiling envy. The Head of Chancery also got invitations but somehow never to friendly and witty chats over beer.

  In the office he asked Moffatt to take a seat.

  ‘Now, Harold old man,’ he said, ‘tell me about these two operations, Diploma and St George.’