The Man Who Knew Everything

by Tom Stacey

  ‘Our Diplomatic Correspondent says the Emir Ahmed has ruled Khouwair firmly and without significant opposition for thirty-two years. He saw his relatively small island territory emerge from poverty and obscurity to become one of the richest states in the world, in terms of per capita income and reserves of wealth. Its known oil and gas reserves, onshore and offshore, rank third in the Middle East.’

  The BBC’s broadcast was followed by a brief comment from the Diplomatic Correspondent to the effect that if an abrupt change of political direction had indeed taken place in the island, the economic, political, and strategic consequences for the Free World could be profound.

  Jones, sorting through the massive typescript in the majlis, heard none of this.

  When his servant failed to make his customary appearance at 9 a.m., he was not surprised. Aziz was sickly and often too sorry for himself to fulfil his tasks. In any case, Jones had no wish to be disturbed. He boiled himself a cup of coffee and worked all through the morning getting into the correct page order the many interpolations he had made to his original draft. It was still something of a mess – the gaps unexplained, the parallel versions likewise. But it had a rough coherence now, and when he had decided he had done enough he was profoundly relieved, for his health was not good today. It seemed that every movement he made was ill-judged as if he had wrenched his whole body unawares.

  It was already midday before he flip-flopped through to his outer door to bring in the local English-language daily. It was not there. Normally it would be lying on his doorstep. He looked up and down the empty alley. He supposed it had been pilfered by a passer-by. At about 1 p.m. he picked up the telephone in the bedroom to ask the head porter at the Darwish if he had a playback wire from London. His line was dead.

  He wondered vaguely if this was his own world gently closing in on him. No paper, no telephone, no servant. He was out of tinned milk, and the shop would be shut now in the heat of the day. He had cornflakes, sugar, tea and coffee. He had half a piece of flat Arab bread. He ate the bread very slowly in the malodorous kitchen, and drank a beer out of the can. He took a handful of seed and opened the door of the parrot’s cage. He took the parrot into the bedroom and began to feed her seed, eating every alternate seed himself. On his bed once more he picked up the book about the Vatican in wartime but he couldn’t concentrate and began to wonder who could have foretold then that some forty years on he would be here all alone and almost entirely forgotten on this remote sand-dune of an island whose highest natural elevation was a hundred and eighty feet (he who grew up in the Shropshire hills!). He can recall with precision talking in El Vino’s in Fleet Street with the Foreign Editor about the delight of the PM (Macmillan, of course) at stealing the Opposition’s clothes with his ‘wind of change’ speech in Africa and of another sell-out in the offing. ‘Those Gulf sheikhs could go down like ninepins if we clear out,’ the Foreign Editor comments. ‘Mind you, I know nothing.’

  Jones is about to set off for Assam to cover the Naga rebellion – he, a smoker, a steady drinker, already well into middle age, tramping through the Indian jungle. They speculate together if he would be up to it. The Gulf has cropped up as a mere afterthought. Should he just drop in on the island on the way home? the Foreign Editor suggests. The island holds the key to the area. ‘You can bring back a yashmak for Liz – or a string of pearls. I believe they still dive for them there. Right, Gran?’ A suggestion, merely. Jones could have brushed it aside. It was the first of the strokes of caprice, such as he later came to pinpoint, on which his destiny was to hinge. Hence the precision of his memory.

  There is no hurry for the Naga rebellion, and the discussion turns on which day Jones should leave for Calcutta, the jumping-off point. The Nagas would still be revolting whether he caught a flight on the Wednesday or Thursday, and on Wednesday Paul was going back to school for his last term.

  ‘Then what?’ the Foreign Editor enquires.

  ‘Oh – university. Less expensive, thank God. He gets a grant.’

  ‘He’ll join Gavin, I suppose.’

  ‘At Sussex? It’s become instantly fashionable. I’m not sure that I trust that – it can become just as instantly unfashionable.’

  ‘Where’s Gavin aiming when he comes down? Follow in father’s footsteps?’

  ‘Gavin’s a science man,’ Jones explains. ‘He treats newspapers as a sort of disease.’

  ‘And you carry the disease, Gran?’

  ‘You have it exactly.’

  ‘What are the symptoms?’

  ‘Absences from hearth and home.’ Jones is gazing into his dry martini. ‘It stems from what he sees as loyalty to his mama. When I told him not so long ago that I loved her he said he “disagreed”. I asked what he meant. He said if I loved her I would have given her a divorce.’

  ‘Has she asked for a divorce, Gran?’

  ‘Certainly not. But she does like to say, “What’s the point of being married?”’

  ‘She got someone else?’

  ‘Sometimes I rather wish she had.’

  The Foreign Editor is a heavy, kindly man. He likes to pretend a wide ignorance about people and the world. That way he finds out about everything.

  Jones looks up at the assembly of newspapermen: there’s no other life he knows. The Foreign Editor waits for him.

  ‘When the boys were young she used to have a map of the world on their bedroom wall and wherever I was she’d stick a flag in – she’d made a flag with my head on it. Nowadays, once I’m out of the home, I don’t think I get a mention. It’s a sort of policy: make enough of a vacuum and I could be sucked back in.’ He adds, ‘Gavin’s been quite an active vacuum.’

  ‘You ever want to chuck it in?’

  ‘How could I, Bill? What else am I good for? I’ve got the mark of Cain.’ And when the Foreign Editor speculates, unconvincingly, that there would always be a desk job for him, Jones can only return a contemptuous silence.

  ‘What about the younger boy?’

  Paul’s different. ‘If Paul’s offered love, he doesn’t look it in the mouth. They ticked him off at school for keeping my letters in his collar box.’

  The Foreign Editor sympathises. To get it exactly right is a known impossibility. ‘For most wives it’s the sheer predictability that stifles them. They want to do a Madame Bovary.’

  ‘Liz does the Citizen’s Advice Bureau twice a week,’ Jones says. And of course the garden. Every spring and summer he has to learn the names of the flowers anew.

  He couldn’t recall taking Paul back to boarding-school that last term. But he remembered joining the Naga rebels and the brutality of the Indian army which contrasted so unhappily with Nehru’s lofty international moralising. The Indians’ pique at Jones’s reports infected the British consul in Calcutta who declined to endorse his passport for the stop he meant to make on the way home – the island Emirate in the Persian Gulf. He could still hear the consul’s papery voice, trying to be facetious. ‘We have a Protective Treaty with those Arabs.’ He looks up at Jones. ‘There’s a spot of unrest there, I need hardly say. The ruler wouldn’t appreciate our flooding the island with newspaper reporters.’

  ‘I’m not exactly a flood.’

  ‘You never know who else.’ The consul is a dandy and at the acme of his powers.

  ‘I just thought I’d overnight there on my way to London.’

  ‘You mean, your paper’s not actually asked you to go there?’

  ‘Actually it has.’

  ‘Would you happen to have any evidence of that?’

  ‘Will it make any difference?’

  ‘That depends.’

  Jones fishes out a cable and passes it over reluctantly. It reads, HMG HAS AGREED DEPORT UNION LEADER AL BAKER SAINT HELENAWARDS STOP WANT YOU SOONEST GULF PROINTERVIEW BAKER AND ISLAND EMIR REGARDS BILL.

  ‘Who is Bill?’ the consul smirks.

  ‘Foreign Editor.’

  ‘He seems to think Al-Bakr is an Englishman.’

  ‘An understa
ndable slip.’

  The consul turns back to the passport.

  ‘You know you’re described here as “Traveller and Writer?” ’

  ‘I was aware.’

  ‘Is that quite fair?’

  ‘To whom?’

  ‘To whom it may concern.’

  ‘You mean, to nasty little regimes under our protection that want to keep the press out, so that the world needn’t know whose balls they are twisting off at police headquarters.’

  For this he gets another pearly smirk. ‘I’m bound to tell you, Mr Jones, that by joining those Naga rebels you haven’t done yourself any good in India. Or indeed, us.’

  It isn’t difficult to construct a flight home via the Persian Gulf so that a stopover on the island is inevitable. The solitary immigration officer on duty at the island’s primitive airport requires him to sleep on a wooden bench right there in the arrivals area. Jones concurs with a puzzled grace. But would the official kindly arrange for somebody to collect the draft of money awaiting him at the British bank in town? (Jones has already perceived that there are no facilities for eating, or even a lavatory, in this arrivals area. There’s no trick he doesn’t know.) In due course another official of superior authority is summoned to consider Jones’s disingenuous request, and since authority is worthless unless exercised, the junior official is overruled. With a bouncing motion between inky pad and page – a little movement fixed in Jones’s mind for the rest of his life as the second capricious twist of the combination that was to unlock his private destiny – a 24-hour visa is stamped in his ‘unfair’ passport.

  A scarred taxi carries him to a venerable hotel, the Darwish, built long ago for some other purpose on a spit of land. Here a perspiring Greek provides him with a peeling room far too high-ceilinged and spacious for the grinding, weeping air conditioner to render cool. So Jones puts an end to the machine’s vain struggle, and opens the french windows upon an opal sea, a harbour arm, and, there beyond, a hunched dun-coloured Arab town of roofs that were also evening rooms, and tight alleys, hidden garden sanctuaries, and minarets.

  The British Resident is known, so it seems, by the Arab honorific for trusted advisers as ‘the Wazir’. Alternatively he is Sir Geoffrey Burton. He has taken pains over the years to keep the island free of the international press, but once Granville Jones of the Post has slipped in he is wise enough not only not to have him thrown out, but to have him in for a chat. Jones finds himself being received with a wily humour, about which he can do little, since he knows that Burton knows he stole into the island, and has done so because young Al-Bakr has pushed the place into the news. Burton, like the consul at Calcutta, reminds Jones that the island is not a British colony, as such. It is rather, he says – and at this point all comparison with the consul ends – ‘a colony of the sun and sea and Allah. They are the arbiters. We provide a little shade, a little spring of worldly wisdom.’

  From the upper floor of the Residency, desert and sea lie beyond the verandah in three directions, and a brand new sparkling palace. And, much closer, the Union Jack atop its mast in the compound. By clutching this mast, slaves win freedom by the hand of Britain’s Resident, as ancient treaty has decreed. Burton has come round from behind the desk and has settled beside Jones in an easy chair. On the wall hang two matching photographic portraits, one of the Queen of England and one of the Emir of this island who, in his head-cloth, has the aspect of a buzzard. Soon enough the conversation veers away from the affairs of the island, with Burton doing most of the talking, to the affairs of the world where Jones’s views are sought. Gone already is the wily humour. Jones draws back the thread of talk so that it weaves between them freely, in and out of the region. A great slow fan in the ceiling accompanies their tour d’horizon, for the new-fangled air conditioner has yet to penetrate the British Residency. Jones supposes Burton seldom has anyone to talk to with much to add to his own ‘spring of worldly wisdom’. Within the past twelve months Jones himself has talked with Nasser in Cairo, Khrushchev in the Kremlin, and the Shah in Iran.

  Both men are of an age, albeit Burton senior by ten years or so; both are brown from the sun, both in their way powerful men, vigorous, though Jones is lean and tall and the other chunky. They are curiously complementary in bearing and in mind, the one rooted deep in a single theatre, Arabia and its Gulf, the other commanding an extraordinary global eclecticism. Jones’s eyes drift to the distance and he reflects on this harsh flat treeless waste growing to be such a crucible of politics and human rivalry. When his time is up, it comes to him as no surprise to find himself invited to dinner that very evening (it will mean at least a 36-hour extension to his visa): their discussion has a good way to run yet.

  Burton is at once on to the veranda, calling to someone in the compound beneath.

  ‘Will you tell Purvis, my dear, there’ll be one extra tonight.’

  ‘What’s that, Wazir?’

  The woman below, Jones can see, is in a bush shirt and trousers and an army issue denim hat.

  ‘One extra for dinner tonight.’

  ‘Right-o.’

  It occurs to Jones that Wazir Burton may have married a second time to have a wife so apparently young.

  The two other guests that evening are already there in dinner jackets when Purvis, the ducal Goan butler as black as your hat, admits Jones in a crumpled suit. Their hostess, soignée now and deeply bronzed in a white cocktail dress wrapped in a V across her bosom, her heavy sunbleached hair pinned up in a chignon, comes forward instantly to put Jones at his ease. She is scarcely past thirty, yet every inch the experienced diplomatic hostess.

  ‘You are Mr Granville Jones. I’m so glad you could join us. I’m Romy Burton.’

  Jones affects to feeling lanky and unkempt. ‘I fear I’ve come without the appropriate wedding garment. I hope it won’t mean wailing and gnashing of teeth.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter in the least, Mr Jones. Do I say a “jot or tittle”? But’ – eyeing his mock-awkward stance – ‘if it’ll put you at your ease, I’ll fetch you one of the Wazir’s bow-ties.’

  Jones says, ‘I’m probably best as my scruffy self. It’s a sign of a defunct newspaperman when he starts aping the gentry.’

  ‘Come and meet Mr Stuart-Smith who’s just been building a most glorious new palace for the Emir.’

  Stuart-Smith exudes a tennis-court fitness and has a handshake like a forehand drive.

  ‘And this is a very old friend of ours, Richard Fenton, from our consulate-general in Jeddah. Richard is honouring us by spending a few days of his leave with us.’

  Fenton isn’t old at all, not yet thirty-five, but one of those whose brain has sucked up his bodily vigour as if through a long straw. ‘We were just talking of you, Mr Jones. I see you’ve been “writing up” the Naga rebels in Assam.’ He pronounces ‘writing up’ like a term of daring. ‘It must have been dreadfully strenuous.’

  Stuart-Smith gives a condescending smile. ‘You chaps do get around.’

  ‘What brings you here?’ Romy asks, but Fenton intervenes archly,

  ‘Not the island “rebels”, I trust.’

  ‘My paper asked me to mop up the situation on the way home.’

  ‘Ah, the instant expert,’ says Stuart-Smith. ‘With his mop,’ adds Fenton, the instant wit. And both dart Romy Burton glances of complicity, though neither, it seems, achieves a response. Fenton has long wrists and a prominent Adam’s apple.

  Burton himself now enters in a white dinner-jacket and Romy signs to Purvis to put the cold cucumber soup on the table.

  ‘Wazir,’ she says, ‘Mr Jones was just about to tell us why he’s here.’ But deflects her own challenge at once. ‘You’re the first pukka journalist from Fleet Street I think we’ve ever invited in.’

  ‘I wasn’t really invited,’ Jones demurs. ‘I slipped by.’

  To which Burton adds, ‘Having done so, I thought we ought to make the most of him.’

  ‘I’m a lucky butterfly,’ Jones says, ‘with a day to
live and do my mopping up.’

  ‘It’s possible that the Emir might be interested to hear from you what Nasser had to say about the Gulf.’

  Stuart-Smith is not to be outdone and assures Jones, on behalf of them all, ‘The Emir’s a very good chap, you’ll find.’ He had, after all, awarded Mr Stuart-Smith and his company a lucrative contract.

  Romy, at one end of the dining-table, has Jones on her right. The relatively larger gap between her age – hardly less than thirty years – and Burton’s seems to Jones to diminish the twenty-year gap between hers and his. Her vitality affects him in a strange way, as if his body were a parched landscape webbed with dried-up irrigation channels that her river flooded. The whole region could become virid and beautiful and the river itself discover its forgotten purpose. (Years later, he became uncertain if he thought of the river at the dinner party or dreamt it that night.)

  During the dessert the overweening Stuart-Smith appends to a tedious item of pretended confidence he has let slip, ‘Of course, I must be careful what I say,’ with a facetious half-glance at Jones.

  ‘I don’t think you need worry about Mr Jones’s discretion,’ Burton assures him from his end of the table.

  But Stuart-Smith is in waggish spirits. ‘What was it Churchill said about the “privilege of the whore” – if our charming hostess will forgive the quotation?’

  Jones reminds him that Churchill was a journalist himself. Could Mr Stuart-Smith be referring to Baldwin who spoke of the press having ‘power without responsibility – the role of the harlot throughout the ages’?

  ‘That’s exactly it,’ Stuart-Smith exclaims, oblivious, in his self-delight, of who it is that has provided what he chooses to take as an endorsement.

  ‘You needn’t ever be afraid,’ Burton assures him, ‘of finding harlots at my table.’

  Jones comments, ‘I never quite understood Baldwin. I would match the press’s sense of responsibility against the politicians’ any day.’

  ‘Oh – steady on,’ Fenton protests.

  Stuart-Smith scents more support. ‘You writer-chappies are after headlines, Mr Jones. Anything goes. Not with you personally, of course.’