Dust on the Paw

by Robin Jenkins

  ‘Will you not ask Mr Wahab?’

  ‘Yes. But if he denied it I should not believe him.’

  She remembered Wahab’s sad puzzled words: ‘I merely remarked that he had no children.’ And she remembered too his confession that Miss Johnstone was crippled in the left foot. Not truth only, but humanity itself, would be outraged if she supported Harold in his unforgivable lie that Miss Larsen had been insulted.

  ‘I do not think,’ murmured Mojedaji, ‘that this Miss Larsen enjoys a very good reputation. But of course that does not matter.’

  ‘My husband does not lie, Mr Mojedaji.’

  ‘Then he is most unusual among men. But in one matter any man may tell the truth. I am not expressing myself well, but English is a difficult language. Did you actually hear Wahab yourself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see. Well, that certainly disposes of it as far as I am concerned. You see, I wondered if your husband could have some personal grudge against Wahab.’

  ‘Why should he?’

  ‘True. There seemed no reason. But then, why should he come to His Excellency the Minister of Education and myself, and ask us to use what influence we had to prevent a certain Englishwoman from being given a visa to visit Afghanistan? He told us this woman was hoping to come here to marry Wahab. That did not seem to us a sufficient reason for withholding a visa, and so your husband made insinuations about Wahab which could have serious consequences.’

  Within, she felt like screaming; outwardly, she smiled and nodded. ‘My husband always has good reasons for what he does and says.’

  ‘He accused Wahab of being a Communist, of associating with persons engaged in plotting against the Government. These accusations are being investigated. If they prove to be justified we shall certainly be grateful to your husband.’

  She found her mouth dry. ‘Mr Wahab is rather a simple person. He might mix in politics without any evil intentions.’

  ‘Such fools are dangerous, Mrs Moffatt. I do not think they are tolerated in your own country.’

  ‘My country, Mr Mojedaji, is my husband’s country.’

  ‘England?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I understood you were very proud of being Chinese. And very rightly so, to my mind. Were not the Chinese civilized when the English were still barbarians dressed in animals’ skins?’

  Suddenly she saw Harold. Some men, Captain Mabie and Dean Moriss among them, had dragged him out on to the terrace. Helga Larsen came behind, laughing and holding up a bottle of whisky that had coloured ribbons round it. At first Lan thought they were going to baptize him in some way by throwing him into the pool or to anoint him with the whisky.

  ‘There’s my husband,’ she said. ‘I must go to him.’

  ‘Of course. Please let me thank you for your help.’

  As she left him and began to push her way through the crowd towards the terrace, people began to yell at Harold to make a speech. All over the large garden they took up the chant: ‘Speech, speech, speech.’ She saw the Wints chanting it and thought they were a little drunker than they had been when dancing a few minutes before. She saw the Gillies chanting too, and even the Mossaours; everyone she knew and liked.

  ‘How the bloody hell can I make a speech when you’re ramming a whisky bottle down my throat, Mabie, you mad Hindu?’

  Everybody roared with laughter, and clapped such a brilliant opening of his speech.

  He had been lifted up on to a high stool by Mabie and Moriss. His black tie was askew and his hair dishevelled. He looked sullen and unintelligent.

  ‘All right,’ he shouted hoarsely. ‘You asked for a speech, and you’re bloody well going to get one.’

  It was now or never, she knew, if their marriage was going to be saved. When people felt her pushing at their backs they turned to protest, but instead made room for her to pass. So, before Harold could say any more, she had arrived in front of him, panting, and looking up at him with an appeal that sobered Mabie at least, who hung his head and mumbled apologies in Hindi.

  Harold glared down at her.

  ‘If he tells that joke again,’ whispered Langford to Winfield, ‘and he’s drunk enough to try, I’ll throw the bastard into the pool.’ And when Howard smiled, he added: ‘What the hell is there to smile at, old man? If he insults her he insults the whole damned human race.’

  ‘That could be why I’m smiling.’

  A hearty voice roared: ‘Put her up beside him.’

  Langford and Winfield stared at each other. ‘Gillie?’ said the former. ‘Our bold and prophetic Consul himself,’ agreed the latter.

  ‘Go on, Captain Mabie. Help the lady up. What would our guest of the evening be without his charming and beautiful wife?’

  Someone shouted: ‘Hear, hear.’ It was Alan Wint, and he began to clap. Paula clapped too, loyally. Others joined in. Soon the whole company was clapping.

  Delighted, Mabie and Moriss seized Lan and lifted her up on to the stool. Harold had to put his arm about her to make room.

  ‘Lan, what the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he muttered.

  They noticed she was weeping as well as smiling, and into their clapping came a note of affection. She had always been respected and admired; now those tears were making her liked. Most supposed they were of joy.

  She saw Wahab on the outskirts. He too was clapping.

  She noticed Helga Larsen also, not clapping, but smiling, as patient as a whore. When he’s sober, thought Lan, he despises her.

  She looked for Gillie, and saw him standing beside his small wife. People called him stupid, and perhaps he was not very subtle; but she had always considered him the type of Englishman who had earned for his country its reputation for fairness and decency. Under no circumstances could she think of him betraying anyone, of whatever colour or rank, as she and Harold had done Wahab.

  ‘Speech!’ they were again chanting.

  Someone brought another stool and Lan was lifted on to it. Harold’s arm was no longer round her. He turned and whispered: ‘Go on. Here’s your chance.’

  ‘For what, darling?’

  ‘Telling them what a bastard I really am.’

  ‘I love you. I’ve got nothing to say to them.’

  He flung up his hand. They cheered. Facetious advice was flung from all sides, in a variety of accents, and even of languages.

  ‘I just want to say this,’ he cried. ‘If you want to give the pool a name—’

  In great merriment they hailed that the idea was brilliant and asked him to suggest a name.

  By contrast, he was in maudlin, angry earnestness. His voice and mind were thick. If Mabie hadn’t kept supporting him he would have tumbled headlong from the stool.

  ‘You can call it what the hell you like,’ he shouted, ‘but for me it’s going to be: The Waters of Babylon.’

  Owing to the truculent drunken thickness of his voice most of them didn’t catch the name, and those they asked weren’t sure either, but it made no difference, he was a good chap, a wit, a poet even, and he was affably drunk.

  ‘Get me down from here, for Christ’s sake,’ he muttered.

  Mabie and Moriss lifted him down and he went staggering into the clubhouse.

  Then some fair-haired Germans came sprinting from the dressing room, clad in trunks, and dived into the pool. People gathered around, throwing in coloured balloons, which the swimmers tossed back. Some burst, and everyone cheered.

  Lan no longer was alone. Friends sought her out and were painstakingly kind. Paula Wint, in particular, chose to be very friendly, and seemed even to be trying hard to communicate some of her own assurance in love. Lan should have married a diplomat, she said, not a poet. Whatever one might say about diplomats – and good heavens, didn’t everybody have something nasty to say about them? – at any rate you could depend upon them to be at their most discreet when a little drunk. Of course, such discretion was not nearly as exciting as a poet’s extravagance. Who but a poet would ever have thought of ca
lling a swimming pool in Kabul ‘The Waters of Babylon’? That was the name he’d suggested, wasn’t it? Out of the Bible, or somewhere? Alan had absolutely no imagination in such matters. The names he had proposed for the children! He would have called the pool just The International Club Swimming Pool, or simply The Mill Pond, after one in Warwickshire where he had swum when a boy. By the way, had Lan heard anything fresh about this Miss Johnstone of Manchester, who was supposed to be coming out to marry Wahab? Surely if she did come she would never marry him now. A sober Afghan was bad enough, a drunken one would be the last word in horror. Didn’t Lan agree?

  Hours later, after midnight, Wahab, tired and woe-begone, but undaunted, came looking for her. He found her with some people who at once withdrew, grinning and winking at one another. At least, he thought, if I now smell of whisky, it is a more expensive and fashionable smell than that of gasoline. But perhaps what I smell most strongly of all to those people is simple-minded folly.

  He had not expected Mrs Moffatt to be pleased at his taking her away from her friends, but neither had he expected her annoyance to be so sharp. Reconciliation with her husband had apparently given her claws. Though he smiled, his heart sank lower still: he had counted on her at least as a friend for Laura; otherwise he would never have told her about Laura’s foot. Well, it didn’t matter: Laura wouldn’t be coming. It had been a dream, and now he was awake, yawning and shivering.

  ‘I am sorry, Mrs Moffatt. But, you see, it is time for me to go home.’

  She found herself resenting his humility. If she lost Harold, this simpleton would be to blame. He was not as harmless as she had supposed. Let Mojedaji deal with him as he deserved.

  ‘I would not have disturbed you, Mrs Moffatt, but I wished to find out if there would be someone at your house to open the gate for me. My bicycle is there. If it is not convenient, I shall walk home.’

  ‘How far away do you live?’

  ‘Not far. About three miles.’

  She looked in her bag and took out a key. ‘I would ask one of the servants to go with you, but they are busy.’

  ‘It is not necessary.’

  ‘This is the gate key. After you have got out your bicycle, please lock the gate again.’

  ‘And then shall I bring the key back to you?’

  ‘No. My husband has one, and the servants have another.’

  ‘What shall I do with it?’

  ‘Return it whenever convenient.’

  ‘Perhaps I could throw it over the gate, wrapped in a piece of paper?’

  ‘If you like. Mr Wahab, has Mr Mojedaji spoken to you tonight?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He smiled. ‘I am not quite so drunk as others are, Mrs Moffatt.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He just smiled.

  ‘Well, if he has not spoken to you yet, he certainly intends to. In the meantime, my advice to you now is to write to Miss Johnstone and stop her from coming.’

  ‘This is a big change, Mrs Moffatt, in such a short time.’

  ‘I did not know then—’ she hesitated, wondering which lie to use.

  ‘That she was a cripple?’

  ‘That, and other things.’

  ‘No,’ he said, in a curiously gentle voice. ‘You are not speaking the truth.’

  ‘How dare you!’

  ‘What did you say? “You will make the dream come true.” ’

  ‘That was before you told me she was a cripple.’

  His smile too was gentle. ‘No. After I told you, you said: “She will come here and you will get married.” How do I remember your words so well? I have been saying them in my mind all night.’

  ‘I think, Mr Wahab, you will be able to help your country more if you marry an Afghan. If you marry this Englishwoman you will find yourself involved in too many personal difficulties.’

  ‘That may be true. You are in a position to know, I suppose. Good-bye, Mrs Moffatt.’

  He did not altogether blame her for this change in her attitude; indeed, he had been expecting it sooner or later. In every English person he had met, with the exception of Laura, he had encountered this change from cordiality to indifference, in some instances, as here, to active dislike. Mrs Moffatt, Chinese herself, had inevitably acquired English characteristics from her husband. Would he, after sleeping and eating and talking with Laura for years, have become English in some of his ways, and the possessor of arrogance and hydrogen bombs? But was not Laura as far away as Orion? As he stared after Mrs Moffatt the sight of the great constellation above her head confused him, so that as he turned away and went down the path between the fairy lights, and out of the gate into the earth street with its ruts and holes, he kept staggering and muttering to himself, as if he were drunk.

  Behind him the music and laughter grew more faint, and soon, coming to a bundle of rags against a wall where some homeless old man tried to sleep, he had a feeling that, dead, he had been banished from paradise and sent for the purification of his soul among the damned. This was the first of many he would see. It was therefore with a kind of defiance of God Himself that he cautiously crossed the ditch, and crouching, sought for the creature’s hand to place in it a couple of coins that would buy at least a slab of nan in the morning.

  As he went on again he heard the murmurs of surprise and gratitude behind him, and tears came into his eyes. Why do we hate one another? he wondered. Why do we devote our energies and abilities to it? Why do we take pride and pleasure in it? You, Mojedaji, with your gold ring and your secret brotherhood: you, Harold Moffatt, with your poetry and your lies; you, Mrs Moffatt, with your strange beauty and mysterious mind; and you, Mr Gillie, with your big, red face and redder rose: all of you, please remember, good or bad, are in the eyes of God no better than that abandoned old man, even if for purposes of His own He has decided to allow you houses and money and good clothes and always plenty to eat, while he sleeps cold and hungry against a wall pissed against in daylight by dogs and little boys. How do you know, indeed, that the old man is not God Himself?

  As he left the main road and turned down the avenue in which the Moffatts’ house was, he was yawning. Several times he yawned, but when he came nearer the gate his mouth stayed open, no longer in sleepiness, but in astonishment and alarm. There, outside the gate, stood Moffatt’s little German car.

  He thought at first Mrs Moffatt must have got her husband to drive her home. But no, the car faced the way he was walking and must have come from the Club by the same route. It could not have passed him without his noticing it.

  Approaching it like a thief, in spite of his fear that the soldier might be lurking somewhere, he saw there was no one in it. The gate was locked. The moonlight shone on the lock. It was easy to find the keyhole. The key fitted. He turned it. There was no rusty shriek. The gate too was silent as he pushed it open. Seconds later he was inside, the gate closed again, his back to it, and his eyes on the house, dark save for a lance of light lying on the terrace.

  There, where he had left it, was his bicycle, leaning against the wall. Fondly, he pressed its tyres; they were still hard enough. He searched in his pockets for the key of the thief-proof lock that imprisoned the back wheel. As he put in the key and turned it, he remembered the creak Mohebzada’s back wheel had made and hoped that it too, like the baby, had been cured. Then, taking the trouser clips from the handle bars, he fastened them round his ankles. That done, he was ready to go.

  But he could not go; that spear of light from the curtained room was deep in his heart; he could not go until it was plucked out, and the curiosity that, sharper than steel, was paralysing his vitals.

  What was more likely than that Moffatt had sneaked back to the house with the blonde woman with the big breasts? And what could be a more succulent feast for his own revengeful eyes than to peep in and see the pair enfolded in their guilt?

  Those were sinful speculations, and he giggled at them, in shame; but still, they did not stop, the screen in
his mind did not go dark, and what kept it bright, with those pictures of illicit love-making, was the most shameful thing of all, his delight that the victim was Mrs Moffatt who, more cruelly than her husband, had made it obvious to him that not only was he unworthy of Laura at present, but also that he would never have the opportunity to prove himself worthy. At the heart of the conspiracy to deprive him of his sweetheart, and of his faith in his country and himself, smiled Mrs Moffatt. Therefore, taking her imaginary hand in his – he could feel its coolness as he had done already that evening when she had helped to bathe his eyes – he took her with him along the side of the house to the terrace steps, and up these one at a time, his shoes and knees too squeaking, so great a strain did his caution impose on them. Luckily his companion seemed anxious also not to be discovered. She, and her expectation of horror, were so real to him that if she had suddenly screamed he would have been appalled but not surprised.

  At last he was on the terrace, along which like a row of guardian dogs slept the flower pots. He noticed the moon shining on the mountains beyond the city. The sight was so beautiful, and so familiar, that he felt sad and guilty. He did not know where he should have been at that time of the morning, but certainly he should not have been there, on that terrace like a thief, holding captive by the hand the ghost of Mrs Moffatt. It was not yet too late to recover honour and so be able to face the beauty and grandeur of his native land without sickening shame. All he needed to do was to let Mrs Moffatt go and watch her vanish into the moonlight, and then himself return to his bicycle. Within two minutes he could be on his way home, pedalling quietly so as not to invite attack from homeless men or dogs.

  But he spent those two minutes in another way altogether. Tiptoeing up to the French window, he put his eye to the space where the curtains did not quite meet. His heart pounded so noisily he felt sure that the two within must hear it, but he was past caring. Nevertheless, though scruple was at last trampled on, he kept telling himself that if ever a man had a legitimate excuse for playing Peeping Tom, it was he; not just because Moffatt was his enemy accusing him of foulness, but also because through Moffatt’s machinations it was likely that he, Wahab, would be deprived of his natural rights as a procreator. This peeping then was not merely revenge, it was also a kind of compensation.