The Mule on the Minaret (37 page)

What had happened? It had been a nightmare. Had it been his fault? Perhaps it had. He should have warned her. It had been one of her bad days. Those two pink gins. He had taken her off her guard. He should not have allowed his disappointment to make him irritable. He should have been exceptionally considerate. He should have wooed, cajoled her into a cosy mood, when they could have talked with a freedom, an intimacy, that was not possible when they were ‘on a date'; a different kind of freedom, a rare, a special freedom. He remembered a time two months ago when she had said ruefully as they started out, ‘I'm afraid I shan't be any use to you tonight.' He had said, ‘Then let's make it an occasion for an especially good dinner.' It had become one of their most memorable evenings, when he had felt himself a disembodied spirit, moving in a clear limpid air, in an ethereal universe. Never had
they been so close, in spirit. It was his own fault, surely, that they had not recaptured that same peace last night. She had been edgy and he had missed her mood. He had lost his temper. He had set out deliberately to rile her. Their dinner had been a battlefield. He had given us good as he had taken. It was his fault.

So he argued with himself as he drove through the bright green valley of the Bekaa. It was his fault. It was all his fault. When he got back to Deraa he would write her a long letter, not of apology, but of explanation; of implied explanation. She would read between the lines and understand, and in two weeks' time he would be in Beirut with a long tranquil late summer to be enjoyed. The world was rocking with premonitions of disaster. But they, for all they would care, might have been stranded on a Pacific atoll.

They reached Damascus shortly before one.

‘What would you like to do?' asked Johnson. ‘Lunch at the Cercle, then a siesta in my office?'

Reid shook his head. ‘I don't want to be back too late; I'll miss lunch, an Arak in a café will be enough for me.'

He went to the same café where he had sat on that first morning with Diana. A shoe-black importuned him and he was too lazy to resist. He sipped the cool clouded liquid and nibbled at his mezze. A vendor of lemonade went by; under his left arm was the large bronze jug from whose mouth projected a block of ice, pinktinged across its base; under his right arm was the brassbound tray of glasses. Over his shoulder was slung the jug of water from which he could wash his glasses. He clattered two cups together as he walked. Every time he made a sale, he sang. It was the same man probably. Nothing was changed. Of course nothing was changed. In two weeks' time he would be in Beirut, seeing her every day, seeing her every hour of every day. They would laugh together over their ridiculous behaviour. ‘How could we have been so dumb?' they'd say. ‘It was just because we mean so much to one another that we were so dumb.'

‘And it's much better now, isn't it, because of that?'

‘So, so much better.'

In two weeks' time, fourteen days.

He had slept badly the night before, but he did not doze off on the long drive to Deraa. His nerves were racing still. To left and right of him stretched the flat boulder-strewn plain, with the thin yellow mist of chaff hanging over the villages. Was it really only forty-eight hours since he had driven here with Johnson?

In his room at Deraa was a low pile of letters. He turned them over. One from his father, the others looked impersonal. They could wait till later. He went over to the depot. The flow of wheat was being steadily maintained. He watched the weighing of it. He scooped up as much as he could hold between his hands; he tossed it over: there seemed very little sand. He stayed for half an hour, checking, testing; then crossed to the desk where payment was being made. The notes were very flimsy. When would the new issue come? What a hilarious predicament. He could recall the exact pitch of voice on which she had pronounced the word. He repeated it to himself, savouring the pain as one does when one presses one's tongue on a sore tooth. Hilarious. One day he would use that word; and she would look up quickly with a start of recognition. Their eyes would meet. She would smile. Then they would laugh together. ‘Weren't we absurd that day? Wasn't it hilarious?'

There was a bar in the Mess. But he kept a bottle of whisky in his room. He took his chair out in the garden and poured himself a drink to accompany the reading of his letters. There was a circular from the Athenaeum recounting what had transpired at the Annual General Meeting. The staff was apparently dealing satisfactorily with the difficulties involved by rationing and bombing. The members were thanked for their patience during the exceptional conditions. There was a list of deaths. He knew a bare tenth of them personally. ‘In another ten years,' he thought, ‘I shall be finding my friends' names in that list.' There was a circular from the London Library, stressing the difficulties under which the staff were working. Mr. Cox was still at his post. At last he came to his father's letter. It had been sent air-mail and had taken four weeks to reach him. It opened with an account of local life in Highgate.

‘In some ways, my dear boy, we are hardly aware that there is a war in progress. Bombing has ceased. We sleep well at nights. Rationing is a nuisance and there is a new system of points by which you are allowed a certain measure of choice; but it does not help me very much as the articles I particularly fancy are not available. My only real grievance is the lack of marmalade. I can dispense with eggs, but I do not feel that I have breakfasted unless I have had marmalade. The French prefer jam, so do the Americans. I wonder when our national fondness for marmalade began and why. You probably know. I suggest that you should one day write a history of national characteristics in
food-diet. The British habit of being called with a morning cup of tea. When did that start? The East India Company? I don't know. I should like to know.'

There was a page of gossip about mutual friends. Then he wrote:

‘I paid a visit on Rachel last Sunday. It is very pleasant to have her close at hand. She was very wise to let her house; it was too big for her. Too much housework and she was lonely during the term-time. She is getting a good rent from the Government, though most of it will be consumed, I suppose, by income tax. She will have told you of her flat in Bloomsbury. It is very handy for her work; and I think she is happy at the M. of I. She should be very useful there. I liked the young women with whom she shares the flat. They have friends in for drinks and it all seemed to me cosy and convivial.

‘She has, I am sure, told you about all this. And I am sure that she has also told you about her spare work with the Committee of Jewish Relief. But has she told you how very important this work has become to her? She is deeply distressed about the fate of the Jews in Germany and Poland, as we all are, of course. But she is especially distressed because of her Jewish blood. It is something I tend to forget. She never knew her mother. She was brought up in the Christian communion. I have never thought of her as Jewish; and after all we in England do not have a Jewish problem. We think of ourselves as English; which we are. But in fact Rachel is half Jewish and half of her blood relations are Jewish. She cannot help wondering what would have happened to her and them if Hitler had invaded England or if her mother had married a European. She has also, I fancy, a sense of guilt because she has not shared the bitter experiences of her race. She feels a need to make compensation. This is a new side of her that you would be, I am sure, wise to handle with care. In a sense this letter is one of warning. Be on your guard when you write to her not to say anything about Palestine that might offend her. In one of your letters you referred to the difficulties that the Palestinian problem was making in your present dealings with the Arab world. I do not know exactly what you said in your letter; but she was definitely indignant. “Doesn't he realize,” she said, “that the world has a sacred duty to restore the Jews to their ancestral home?” I was surprised at her vehemence. So I think, my dear boy, that you should be on your guard.'

Reid frowned, as he put down the letter. What had he said about Palestine? He could not remember. During his few months in the Middle East he had come to feel, as did most Englishmen who had lived in the Middle East, that almost every conceivable mistake
had been made at the Peace Conference after the First War. The Arabs had been deceived, if they had not actually been betrayed. Europe and the U.S.A. had had no more right to create a Jewish State in the Middle East than in Cornwall, Brittany or Florida. You had no right to lop off a section of other people's territory and hand it over to an alien race. Yet at the same time he was a pragmatist to the extent that he believed that an established fact must be accepted. You could not put back the clock. All you could do was attempt to lessen the consequences of mistakes. You could not solve your problems; you had to learn to live with them.

What had he said to upset Rachel? But what he had said seemed less important than the fact that she had been upset. It was so unlike her. He had no more than his father thought of her as being Jewish, but then in England, he, as his father, had classified his compatriots as being English: equal under the Crown. This was a new slant, a new problem for himself.

He finished his whisky slowly. The sky darkened quickly; the crested head of the date palm stood in silhouette above the roof, against orange first, then green, and now a deepening blue. Time to go into dinner.

The Town Major was leaning against the bar. He raised his arm in a mock Hitlerian salute. ‘Heil, Prof. And how was the bright city? How was Jeanette's, how was the Mimosa? We drank your health last night. Nothing like a professor on the spree. Where did you eat; what did you eat? Was she blonde, a brunette, a redhead? Regale us, let us be seated. Let us eat.'

Corned beef had been converted into a cottage pie. There were stewed pears and Bird's custard. There was a sardine on toast. Afterwards tea was served. Throughout the meal the Town Major maintained a flow of heavy-handed badinage. ‘He won't tell us. Didn't I warn you all last night? Discretion, that's the scholastic line: virtuous as our Holy Father through the week, then when the last desk-lid drops on Saturday—oh, boy, the purple crescent; come on, Prof., give us the low-down. Cyril's going down next week. Give him the green light. Save him the fate worse than death.'

So it ran on, and Reid did his best to reply on a note of appropriate jocularity. A film was being shown that evening in the N.A.A.F.I., but he excused himself. ‘I'm tired,' he said. ‘I'd only fall asleep.'

‘I don't suppose you got much sleep last night,' said the Town
Major. ‘Come clean, Prof. Why hold out on us?'

In his room awaiting him was the table on which night after night he had poured out on paper the saga of his adoration. As he had driven back that morning he had pictured himself this evening, seated at the table once again, explaining in a contrite mood his ill-humour of the previous evening. A long letter but a light one, not apologetic, not complaining, not self-pitying, lit with raillery; a letter that would woo her back to him. It was barely nine o'clock. He was not sleepy, but now that the time to write had come he was in no mood to write. Better wait until tomorrow. Better wait until his mind was rested. He took his chair on to the pathway, hung the electric bulb over the window so that its light fell upon his book, and turned desultorily the pages of the
Oxford Book of English Verse.

He did not write that night, nor the next. ‘Tomorrow,' he would say. But when tomorrow came he would find himself in the same mood of torpor. He was living in a vacuum. He brooded over his father's letter about Rachel. Clearly there was a problem there. But at the moment there was nothing he could do about it. There would be no repatriation from the Middle East until the war was over, and the war had several years yet to run. His English problems had to await his return. So could Diana.

So once again, day after day, he drove between the depots that lay under his charge, listening to the complaints of villagers weighing the arguments of the
moukhtars,
turning the wheat over in his hand, waiting and listening, and delivering himself of fulsome oratorical compliments which the interpreter would clothe in appropriate Oriental symbolism. He would conduct himself as though ‘time's winged chariots' were reined and bridled, as though Rommel were not beating on the Western Gate, as though autumn would never yield to winter, as though harvests would continue through the October rains; and all day long the sun beat out of a cloudless sky, with the glare of the parched earth dazzling him; and always just before sunset a breeze would blow from the Eastern mountains and the outline of the Eastern hills would merge into a succession of level layers of rich, soft colours, and his palate would savour in advance the sting of the first whisky that awaited him on the paved pathway by the little garden. He was in a vacuum. Let him enjoy it while he could.

Four days before his stay was up, he wrote Diana a brief note.

‘You know as well as I do,' it ran, ‘that I'll be coming back on Thursday, but I did want you to be quite sure that I'll be expecting you to dine with me my first evening and get me posted on all the Beiruti gossip. I aim to get in in the afternoon, and will be round in the office before six. Let's make it the Lucullus. I need French food—and wine. It will be good to see you. Very good.'

He left early in the morning; he did not pause in Damascus; he wanted to make a detour so that he could lunch in Zahlé. He sat in the same restaurant, at the same table, where he had lunched with Farrar and Diana. The restaurant was completely empty. He savoured its coolness, its quiet and its peace, with the rustle of the water cradling his thoughts and the canopy of boughs and leaves dappling the stream's ruffled surface. If Lebanon ever enjoyed a tourist boom, what a fortune would be made by the restuarants along this bank.