Arabesque (2 page)

She herself had neither duty nor comradeship. She was in the fortress and likely to remain and had no choice. There was none to give her an order and none but herself to bring up the rations. No
doubt if she became a public nuisance some efficient and impersonal machine of the beseiged would gather her up into a refugee camp, and keep her safe both from the enemy and from starvation; but
that savoured of the workhouse. To call herself ironically a parasite was to toy painlessly with a facet of truth; to feel a parasite was unendurable.

Armande had not been born to the privileges of her civilisation; that civilisation, however, had easily permitted her to acquire them. Her father was a cavalry trooper who, in 1915, married the
young proprietress of his favourite
bistro
in Amiens. After the doubtful peace he persuaded Madame to sell her falling francs and settle in England. They bought a pub in remotest
Gloucestershire, and for a year he indulged the dream of his life: to sell English drinks to English countrymen.

When she came to England Armande was seven. Memories of that candid little soul, formed in café and public house, filled her with amusement and tenderness. She had been happy at home and
in the village school, where boys rather than girls had been her playmates. Because she was fast on her feet and scandalously free of speech, she had been accepted into their games and the
innocence of their secret societies.

During four long years of peaceful childhood, the fame of Maman’s inn expanded. Bed-and-breakfast visitors came back for week-ends. Week-enders spread the news of Maman’s cooking and
talked of her in London. Maman built a new wing and a new kitchen. She advertised. She raised her prices to a guinea a day, and still the house was full, and still there was a waiting list. The bar
had Vouvray and Anjou on draught as well as beer. The villagers took their custom elsewhere.

Armande’s mental promise, her two languages and, possibly, her cricket attracted the headmistress of Bingham Priory, who was a constant and exacting client of the inn. One evening,
masculinely expansive after dinner, she persuaded Madame that a part of her profits should be spent on the education of her daughter. Armande in imagination could still see the headmistress as
vividly as that night—one predatory businesswoman with another in Maman’s sitting-room—standing, brandy glass on the mantelpiece, in front of the fire where Father used to stand,
and looking down on her with professional kindness.

When the inn became an exclusive hotel, her father retired to the simple comfort of the harness room where no one visited him but Armande. Maman was not actively unkind to her husband, but she
ignored him as an embarrassment that could neither make money nor had the heart to spend it. The guests avoided any mention of him; indeed few of them realised that the ex-soldier seen polishing
something useless in the yard was part owner of the hotel. Modest, lonely and drinking more than was good for him, he faded like some gentle animal displaced into an unnatural environment.

The famous boarding school took from him his last joy and his only companion. Even during Armande’s holidays her new life was too hurried for her father, her kisses too fleeting. Hour by
hour Maman closely managed her, forced her into activities of work and play, threw her into the society of any wealthy guests who were amused by her, compelled her to accept their invitations. To
her father she became elusive as a memory of love. When she was fourteen, he died.

Armande, developing late, had still a child’s unquestioning acceptance of events; but the sense of loss remained with her, to be examined in the self-conscious years of early youth when a
first pattern of her life, real or imaginary, was visible. Then she could not excuse her mother or herself, until the mercy of protecting nature taught her to tolerate the poison of guilt and to
forget it. Thereafter she avoided, instinctively, the storms of emotion, the spiritual revolts, which might, through dissatisfaction with her accepted self, have set the poison working. She gave
herself with docility to the life arranged by others.

At Bingham Priory she took pains to become a
jeune fille bien
é
lev
é
e.
This was the order of her mother. It was an ideal reluctantly
conceded by the school. Solid knowledge she dutifully acquired, and flowered in arts of self-expression. She could turn a pretty sonnet. She mastered the technique of painting, and indulged in
fantastic and imaginary landscapes. She worked enthusiastically under a teacher of classical dancing, for she loved movement and yet preferred not to disfigure her growing beauty by public
perspiration on the playing fields. So selfish a use of long legs was not wholly approved by the weather-beaten mistress of Bingham Priory, but was permissible, they told her, provided she
considered it serious training for an independent profession.

Armande completed her education in Switzerland and was turned out upon a world which appreciated her fastidious nature more than she did herself. She distrusted the fuller, coarser flavours of
mankind that she had known as a child, but since she knew they existed she missed them. To men of her own generation and upbringing she gave at first an eager friendship; then, bored by those very
limitations, she would drift away. Her judgment of older men was less exigent, but she felt that they treated her with the tolerance accorded to a spoiled and entertaining child. She was not a
spoiled child. She was a mature young woman whose tastes were incompatible, and she knew it. After three years of London and Gloucestershire—and one hundred and fifty-six weeks of complete
familiarity with Maman’s intrigues to marry her off—she accepted reserve as probably the most natural trait in her character and certainly the most desirable.

She married correctitude. John Herne was less patronising than his elders, more persistent than his contemporaries. He was so sanely sure of her excellence that she was flattered and happy, so
confident of winning her that she could not avoid him. John had only his salary as a budding stockbroker, but that had been enough to support a quiet standard of easy living and pleasant manners.
To be
bien
é
lev
é
e
, even in intimacy, became a habit. It had been, undoubtedly, a restful habit. Armande, sidetracked into Beirut, longed
for the three contented years before the war, for her exquisite small flat in Kensington, her dinner table, her circle whose artistic, political and intellectual sympathies redeemed the uncouth
capitalism of her husband’s trade.

As soon as war was declared, John Herne joined the navy. There was a lusty flavour of patriotism in the unthinking speed with which he offered himself to his country, but she could not help
reflecting, with an illogical sense of disloyalty, that a man whose home life was as serene as his would have waited a few months for love to be overwhelmed by duty. She herself, angry with the
futile dignity of her country’s foreign policy, was no enthusiastic patriot. It was France that she had chosen to serve. A month after John’s departure she joined the organisation of a
M. Calinot, national and decorated pundit of the French aircraft industry, and, conveniently, old friend of her mother.

The cool air drifted from the still Mediterranean under the awnings of the Hotel St. Georges, and passed out to sea again bearing the fragrance of fruit and wine. The hotel,
though run by Greeks and staffed by Lebanese, remained tenaciously French. None of the guests who strolled from bar to bathing beach and terrace to restaurant appeared to have indigestion or to
dislike the rest. Neither enjoyment nor activity nor smartness had necessarily any reality, but the hotel created a civilised environment in which anyone who wished could indulge, without effort, a
sense of well-being.

Floating in the transparent solvent of French culture were guests of many nations, Casual British officers from the various missions leaned against the bar. Cheerful Australians from the camps
under the olive trees ventured doubtfully upon unfamiliar menus. Sliding their round bodies between the tables with the grace of fish were the Greco-Egyptians from Cairo and Alexandria,
overwhelmingly obliging in the drinks they were enchanted to stand and the contracts they were prepared to undertake. Christians, politicians of the Lebanon, their trusses and intimate machinery
creaking beneath natty trousers, presented to each other champagne and compliments, while the princes of Syria and Trans-Jordan, whose robes of chocolate and gold not only concealed but made
unthinkable any infirmity of body or soul, scowled with eternal dignity over little cups of coffee.

In and out through this invasion of males flitted a number of discreetly unattached women: young wives of the French Empire whose husbands, Free or dubious, had parked them conveniently in
Beirut; mistresses of Vichy staff officers who, enthusiastically as the office cleaners and canteen proprietors, had embraced the cross of Lorraine; unmarried daughters of the Lebanon, modelling
their frocks on Hollywood and their conventions on provincial society of the nineties. There were exotic plants of mountain villages, from Ararat to the Alaouite highlands, transplanted to Beirut
by their admirers and now well established in the more lenient air. There were the consorts of the Alexandrian businessmen, whose sad and ruminating eyes looked out from the mascara, patiently
ignoring the discomfort of too many jewels and too tight a brassière. All these flowery women spent their mornings in bed or on the beach, their afternoons at the crowded beauty parlours,
their evenings at the Hotel St. Georges.

Whatever she did, Armande felt herself to be classed among them. Their eternal delicate presence forced her into an infuriating self-consciousness. She might as well be living, she thought, in a
dance hall where a beauty competition was being judged. If you dressed with some spirit, you were immediately mistaken for a competitor; if you defied local convention and were deliberately dowdy,
you snobbishly set yourself apart. The competitors’ relative degrees of virtue were unimportant; they were all so obviously out to catch the judges’ eyes.

This lack of privacy was exasperating; except in her room she had none. It was impossible to have a meal or a drink alone, and difficult to pay for either. It seemed to her that she must know
all existing faces of the British Army—the kindly, the callow, the drunken, the weather-beaten and horsy, the strong-jawed and imperial, the scholarly with clean-shaven upper lip, the
would-be military with neat moustache, the ultra-military with cat’s moustache. Their names eluded her, though she knew uncountable nicknames. A mumble on first acquaintance represented the
surname, and never thereafter was it repeated.

Such a multitude of her own countrymen carried her out of the slothful life of waiting. A few of these officers she had met casually in London; others had known John or her mother. The return to
her husband’s kind made her feel faintly dishonourable. It was hard to explain why, like the women of the hotel, she was doing nothing, and what she was doing in Beirut at all. Romantic young
officers, finding her account of herself quietly evasive, set her up as the heroine of a false and fantastic legend. From one to another they passed the word that Armande Herne had been a lovely
and gallant agent of their army.

It was on the Sunday morning after the departure of the ships that the hotel desk rang her room and announced a gentleman to see her. As the manager was normally at some pains to protect those
of his clients who had no wish for unknown callers, she could guess that the credentials of this visitor were beyond dispute; the guarded voice of the reception clerk, quite unlike the tone in
which he announced a friend, an admirer or a man of business, left her in no doubt that the caller was some kind—and, oh God, how many kinds there seemed to be!—of civil or military
policeman.

She spoke to the gentleman on the telephone. His voice attracted her. It was deep, decisive and with an odd musical rhythm of its own. He introduced himself as Sergeant Prayle of Field Security
and said that he wished to talk to her. Armande was reluctant to be seen answering all the usual questions in a discreet corner of the hotel lounge. She told Sergeant Prayle to come up to her room
in five minutes.

She used those minutes to arrange her black hair in the Madonna parting which had always impressed such callers with the purity of her motives and morals. Her large grey eyes looked back at her
sedately from the mirror; then lit and twinkled at the passing thought that she dressed for security men very much as for a poetry reading in her Kensington flat. Armande felt a fraud, but since at
the moment she had no doubt of her beauty, conscience was amused rather than reproachful.

Sergeant Prayle’s appearance belied his attractive voice. Armande realised that she had seen him on several occasions chatting to the reception clerks; she had taken him for one of those
seedy and indefinite Englishmen who might be living precariously on language lessons or the dowry of a foreign wife. He was tall and well made, but wearing flannel trousers that did not reach his
ankles, and a sports coat that had never recovered from being packed into too small a space. His lips were thin: his witch’s nose was long and one eye was slightly larger than the other. His
complexion, too fair to tan, was blotched with red and peeling from overexposure to the sun.

“Do sit down,” sad Armande, offering him a comfortable chair near the window. “What is Field Security?”

“A racket,” answered Sergeant Prayle with relish.

“What sort of a racket?”

“Unfair to the workers. I share this suit of civilian clothes with three lance-corporals and the sergeant-major. And anyway it belongs to the skipper.’

“But why not wear uniform then?”

“Avoids embarrassment. Too many brigadiers popping in and out of bedrooms.”

“I inderstand you want to talk to me,” Armande reminded him, primly ignoring his last remark. “But I really cannot imagine what about.”