The Mule on the Minaret (74 page)

‘I can see that argument.'

‘Then in that case, why will you not help with my committee? You would carry so much weight. You can explain the historical background. You can tell them of your experiences in the Middle East, of the wonderful work the immigrants have done with their collective farms, how they have irrigated the land, how they made crops grow where they never had before. The Arabs are slovenly and idle, you know that. They rely on Allah to work miracles. You are the very man we need. You could do so much for us.'

Her voice had a rich, fierce urgency. He had never believed that she had a gift of oratory. He knew now she had. He would have given anything to have acceded to her plea. But he shook his head.

‘Four years I've been living among Arabs. I have liked them personally. I have respected their way of life. I have absorbed their point of view.'

‘You are pro-Arab, that's to say.'

‘Not in the terms of a controversy: as an issue in a conflict. But as I said, I have made many good Arab friends. I cannot testify against them, in public. There are certain loyalties.'

‘Then what are you going to do? Are you going to write a letter
to
The Times
endorsing the Arabs claims, arguing for the white paper, insisting that every frontier should be watched, that these wretched refugees from terror shall be sent back to another terror, perhaps a worse terror, destitute, homeless, starving. Is that what you propose to do?'

‘It is not what I propose to do.'

‘Then what do you propose to do?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Nothing. With all these fine pro-Arab sentiments, this traditional English respect for the Arab gentleman: nothing, sit there and just do nothing.'

Her voice had struck a sneering note. He felt his temper rising, and he knew how easily when one's temper rose, one lost track of one's own identity in an argument. In order to score a point, one brought forward an argument whose validity one only in part accepted. ‘I must keep my head,' he thought. ‘I must, I must.'

‘I do not believe that there is anything a person like myself can do. It is too late.'

‘What do you think is going to happen, then?'

‘I am not a prophet, but this I know, a situation has been created that will constitute at any rate during my life a running sore in Anglo-American relations with the Arab world.'

‘And you propose to sit there on the touchline and watch it happen?'

‘What else can I do?'

‘What else can you do? How like you. What else can you do. What else can you ever do, but stand aside; the onlooker: the neutral, the impartial chairman, never losing his temper, holding the balance. That's you all through, as a man and a professor. “Catherine de Medici: was she an unmixed evil?” That was the kind of thesis you would set your students. And the papers that got the highest marks were those that patiently laid out the credit and the debit entries, setting the one against the other, and finally deciding that the world might have been a worse place if she had never lived. That's you, Professor Reid. I know you. After all these years I know you.'

She had risen to her feet and her eyes were blazing; her voice low-toned with scorn and anger. As happened so easily in family disputes, a general issue had become a personal one. The smouldering resentments of twenty years had been quickened into flame. He had read once that there was no personal relationship in the
world that could not be ruined by three sentences. ‘I've got to stop her,' he thought. ‘I've got to stop her.' But he could not see how. Not once in all their years together had she lost her temper. Nothing could stop her now. She had to get this off her chest. And nothing could ever be the same again between them.

‘That's you, Professor N. E. Reid, always collected, always calm, judicial and impersonal. Never taking sides. Never losing your temper, never embroiled. A half man, that's what you are. Thank God I met one real man before it was too late: a man who knew his mind; who when he saw what he wanted, went for it and got it. I found him; and I lost him: lost him through those foul Nazis, and how did I come to lose him, because of you, because of people like you, Professor N. E. Reid, who didn't stop the Nazis when you had the chance: who stood aside and weighed alternatives. Non-intervention in Spain. Appeasement at Munich and then when you stumble into war, you dismiss the men who'd warned you as premature anti-fascists. God, but you make me sick, you English; your smugness, your complacence. Thank God, I met one real man once, even though I lost him. It makes the world seem less cheap.'

She swung round on her heel and the door slammed behind her. Everything depends on the first night. Of one thing Reid was sure. Never again would he and Rachel live together as man and wife.

Reid met his father on the Tuesday, at the ticket barrier at Waterloo Station. They had agreed to meet half an hour before the train was due to leave. It was a long time since Reid's father had been in a train. He had heard many stories of crowded carriages. It was essential that he should find a seat; but luckily there was no particular crush. They had corner seats in a carriage with the corridor to the left, so that they would get an early glimpse of the square golden tower. The train was due at Fernhurst shortly before noon. It was almost to a minute the same train that his father had caught in 1912 when he had come down to see him, half a lifetime ago. Reid was there before his father. With a wistful look he watched him shuffle across from the ticket office to the barrier. He wondered if his father would have the energy to walk from the hotel to the cricket field. Would there be a taxi? He was as touched as he was surprised that his father should have wanted to come down with him. ‘Isn't it rather strange,' he said, ‘that we should be catching now for the first time together, the train that we've caught so often separately.'

‘That's exactly why I thought it would be rather pleasant for us to catch it now.'

There must be, he supposed, a ‘last-time' quality about everything that his father was doing now. He wanted to refresh his memory, to add to his store of memories, so that he should have more to brood over, during those final months when he sat in an armchair before the fire, listening to the radio, struggling with crossword puzzles, reading the poems read in childhood. Perhaps
too, he wanted a reassurance of continuity; to be reminded that things which he had known in boyhood still survived, which was something that England alone could offer now. England whose roads for nearly nine hundred years had been untrodden of foreign feet.

The familiar landmarks approached and faded: Westminster and the River, the Tate and Wimbledon; the Woking golf course on the left, where Joyce Wethered's concentration had been so tense that she never heard a train go by as she sank a crucial putt; the tapering tower of Salisbury's cathedral; Templecombe with its blue faced clock, then the low square tower of Fernhurst Abbey. It was a warm and sunny day. The Abbey was a bare quarter of a mile from the station. The school buildings lay behind.

‘Do you feel like walking up, or would you rather wait for us in the hotel?'

Classes ended in the summer at half past twelve. The train was a little late.

‘I'll wait,' his father said. ‘I'll reserve my strength for afterwards. You hurry on.'

Reid stood in the corner of the courts, in the angle of the library and the sixth-form classroom, looking across the cloisters, to the School House studies; above whose lichened roofs rose the Abbey tower. It was the view of the school buildings on which photographers always concentrated. In terms of a haphazard architectural grouping, it was unique. He had seen nothing lovelier. He thought of all the European soldiers who would return nostalgically to romantic landscapes and find nothing left.

Stillness brooded over the courts. Then the first strokes of the Abbey clock chimed out, and there was a banging of doors, a clatter of feet, a surge of voices and with several hundred boys, running if they were fags, sauntering majestically if they were seniors, across the gravel. Just as they had always done. He hurried to the point in front of the abbey which his sons would have to pass on the way to the hotel. He wondered if he would recognize them, in spite of the constant supply of snaps that Rachel had maintained. But they would recognize him, of course. He hadn't changed.

He need not have worried. He recognized them right away; out of a scattered group of seven or eight who came round the wall. James in the blue hat ribbon of the sixth, Mark with the magenta and black house ribbon. There was less than two inches difference
in height between them. At the sight of him, they broke into a run. Mark said, ‘You're not in uniform.' He had deliberated on whether he should wear his uniform. They might have liked showing him off with his red tabs; on the other hand it might be better for them to meet him as the civilian that he was going to be for them in future. He laughed. ‘After wearing khaki for six years you want to see the last of it.'

He asked them if there was a cricket match on that afternoon; yes, they told him: against M.C.C. ‘Will Poppa be able to walk that far?' Mark asked.

They went straight into lunch. Mark did all the talking. He had a piece of gossip about one of the masters who was reputed to be getting black market petrol for his motor bike, and of a rag perpetrated by the lower fourth against an ineffectual temporary master. Mark was bright-eyed and dark, very obviously his mother's son. James was more like himself: with his high forehead and long nose. A modern psychologist might argue that Mark was loquacious because he was ill-at-ease, whereas James's air of reserve concealed a deep conceit: he could not be bothered to exert himself in public. It was the fashion nowadays to assert that everyone was the opposite of what he seemed, that rudeness was a mask for shyness, and cruelty the self-protection of a warmhearted nature. He preferred to think that more often than not people were what they seemed, that James was naturally reserved and Mark naturally was effervescent.

During his four years' absence when he wrote letters to his sons, Reid had kept reminding himself that all the time his sons were growing up, that a boy of fourteen was very different from a boy of twelve, and the changes effected by adolescence were profound and unpredictable. He had been on his guard against writing down to them. Yet he did not think he had ever written to them, otherwise than on equal terms.

Sitting now in this familiar room, where he had sat so often with his father, he remembered himself as he had been at fifteen, absorbed in house and school politics, in games and in promotions, in rags and rows; thinking of Latin and Greek, and history as form subjects, as steps to prefectship. He saw himself at seventeen, with the wide fields of literature opening out before him, discovering a new poet every holidays, returning each term to boast of his acquisition, larding his essays with quotations that he hoped the headmaster would not recognize.

He asked James which of the modern poets he read most.

‘Eliot, I think, and Yeats.'

‘The later or the earlier Yeats?'

‘The later one of course.'

Reid smiled. There had been no later Yeats when he had been James's age. Yeats had been ‘Innisfree.'

‘I remember reading “Prufock” when it came out first in the Catholic anthology. I was about your age. I thought it silly.'

‘It doesn't seem silly to me.'

‘Nor to me now.'

The grandfather intervened. ‘There's a time lag in appreciating poetry. The poet is ahead of his time. I'm not sure that I've caught up with Eliot.'

After lunch, they walked down to the cricket field. It was three-quarters of a mile away. Mark and his grandfather dropped behind. Reid remembered what Rachel had said about the advantage of two parents going down to see two boys. They talked much more freely when they were not together. Not that Reid had anything in particular to say to James. He felt at ease with James, as he assumed his son did with him. He and his own father had never felt the need for what one called ‘heart-to-heart' talks. They had talked openly and friendlily and casually: as he hoped he and James would. There were no immediate problems. James had taken his school certificate the previous summer. He would be sitting for his higher certificate next week. There should be no difficulty about his satisfying the University requirements. New College was waiting for him. He had another two years of school; then he would decide whether to do his military service first or go up to the University. Now that the war was nearly over, the period of military service was likely to be curtailed during the next year, so that it might be an advantage to get his military service finished first. But that was a decision that could wait.

‘I suppose you've no ideas yet of what you want to do when you come down from Oxford?'

James shook his head. ‘There's plenty of time to think about that later.'

‘And you do realize don't you that owing to this legacy, you are in the fortunate position of doing the work you like without having to worry about the immediate returns from it.'

‘I realize that all right.'

He gave his father a quick sideways look as he replied; a smile
flickered on his lips; it had a quality of mischief. Reid had an idea that women would find him attractive later on.

They strolled slowly round the field. James pointed out a man in a dark grey flannel suit, bareheaded, wearing a Hawks' tie. ‘The new chief.' The appointment had been made during the war, and Reid had not met him yet. But they had moved within the same scholastic orbit, allowing for the fact that the new chief was a Cambridge man; they were contemporaries. He felt he knew him.

He introduced himself. The new chief was burly, athletic; he looked an administrator rather than a scholar. Yet in fact he had taken a double first and was a fellow of Trinity. He had an open manner. ‘The war's stopped at the right time for your young man,' he said. ‘He can now take a shortened military service in his stride,'