The Mule on the Minaret (78 page)

‘You asked for a lot, Annabelle.'

‘If you ask for a lot, you get a lot. I knew what I could get and where. Would I not have been foolish to have taken him as a lover when he could be so much more attractive as a husband?'

Her eyes were twinkling: it was the old badinage of the Restoration comedies. ‘You on the other hand, my dear Professor, would have been, I think, more charming as a lover than a husband.'

‘That's the last thing I ever expected to have said about me.'

‘I know; because you are staid and sensible; a dignified member of society, who has a regard for his responsibilties, who wouldn't abandon his wife and children; yes, you are all that I know; if a woman were to ask of a husband that he should be first and foremost a good citizen, then you would stand high upon her list. But that is not really what a woman wants: she wants someone who will give himself to her, so that their two lives become one life. Could you ever do that, could you ever be that, my dear Professor? I do not think you could. You have that secret world of your own, with your books and lectures and it is such a private, such a barricaded world. I would like to ask your wife if she agrees with me.'

‘I've an idea she might.'

‘I think so too. And if a friend of mine thirty years ago had begun to take you seriously, do you know what I would have said to her?'

‘You tell me what you would have said to her.'

‘I would have given her a warning: I would have said, “He is an honourable and upright man: he is a man of talent and as his wife, you will enjoy the glory that is reflected from that kind of man. But be on your guard; six months after your honeymoon, you may find that you have done no more than acquire a new piece of furniture for the house.” That is the warning I should have given her, if her hopes were matrimonial, but if her ideas were less conventional, then my advice would have been very different. “As a lover,” I would say to her, “I think he would be delightful. He would for a few weeks break out of that prison house of his. He would concentrate on you, with all the emotion that has been bottled up for months. Nothing would exist for him in the whole world but you. You would be engulfed, submerged; you would be his sun, his moon, and all the stars. And that is what a love affair should be.” '

She paused, her eyes were twinkling still with mischief: but there was a reminiscent, almost a wistful expression on her face. ‘Do you know what I thought, my dear Professor, when I saw you first?' She paused. She turned to Farrar. ‘This is something, my distrustful Captain, that I have never told you; now is, I think, a good time to tell you when I have a witness for my protection, but this is what I thought. “I will have a romance with the Professor.” You well remember, my dearly cherished but insidious Captain, that you had been harassing me for a long time with very equivocal suggestions. I confronted your blandishments with a rigid Levantine
rectitude, but I was not impervious to their effect. I was not as confident as I appeared. I wondered if you were right and I was wrong: no, I do not mean “wrong” in resisting you: on that point I was convinced. But was I wrong in resisting everybody else. I was not going to be the easy spoil of some casual crusader; but I was a human being; I assured myself that if an appropriate opportunity were to be presented that I could accept with delicacy and discretion, I would accede; and when I met the Professor I thought “this is it”. He is over forty. He is married. He has a career. He is not the man to throw his top hat over a windmill: he will not involve me in disastrous consequences. He is healthy, he is handsome. His emotional nature has probably been slumbering for ten years. Why should I not benefit from that long somnolence; why should I not release the avalanche of his devotion. That is what I thought, my complacent Captain. And do you know why I did not?'

‘I should be most interested to learn.'

‘I did not, because I know too well what you Englishmen are like where women are concerned. The friendship between two men is to you something sacred. You would never let a woman interfere with it. It is, I suppose, because of your imperial training. Men in the jungle, men on lonely frontiers, without another white man within a thousand miles. You have to trust each other. I knew what would happen if I let the Professor see that I might not find his approaches unacceptable: he would have turned to you. “Farrar old boy,” he would have said,' and she raised her voice mimicking the English accent, ‘“Farrar old boy, that wench Annabelle. Is the coast clear there?” And you, my chivalrous Captain, would have answered, “Of course, old boy. Good luck to you.” It is one of the traits about you Englishmen that I find both engaging and exasperating; as for that matter I find so much else about you Englishmen engaging and exasperating; and somehow I did not want that to happen. Because I knew if that did happen, I should lose you, my troublesome Captain, irretrievably; and that was more of a risk than I was prepared to run. So you see, my dear Professor, what a narrow escape you had twenty-one years ago.'

As Farrar had prophesied, Reid woke up next morning at his usual hour of six o'clock, which for his colleagues at Columbia was ten o'clock on the previous night. It was a clear, cool sunny morning; very like that of the first Sunday he had spent here.
‘I've taken the day off,' Farrar told him. ‘I'll show you round the sights and we'll lunch at Sa'ad's. That'll make you feel nostalgic'

It was not only Sa'ad's that made him feel nostalgic. So much was the same, and so much was different. The night club quarter was unchanged. So was the Lucullus restaurant, so was the view from the terrace of the St. Georges; and the main shopping street, and the road along the campus; the feel of the town was the same. The new luxury hotels had not altered that. It was only on the edge of the town that the huge development of apartment buildings had made a new city of Beirut. The Bain Militaire for instance had been submerged. Its privacy had vanished; and the white and blue lighthouse could only be seen from certain angles.

‘Does it seem very different living here?' Reid asked.

Farrar shook his head; ‘It's what it's been for centuries; elegant, astute, corrupt: but corrupt in a very gracious way.'

Their talk switched from one topic to another so quickly that afterwards Reid could not remember where what exactly had been said. It was a continuous conversation with interruptions.

‘How does all this seem to you in retrospect?' Farrar asked. ‘For me who's never left here, it has a steady continuity. My life during the war wasn't so very different from what it had been before and what it has become since. But for you it was such a break in your routine. Does it seem now a kind of, well, I won't say nightmare, but something that happened to someone else?'

‘Sometimes it's so much more real than the things that are happening to me now.'

Farrar asked him about his sons. They were both doing well enough, he said. One was in Shell; the other was in the wine trade. They were both married. He had five grandchildren.

‘I read a book of yours the other day. The one on Charles V. Very interesting.'

‘Really: you found it interesting?'

‘Well, you know what I mean. Not like a novel, of course.'

Reid laughed. ‘I've tried to make them rather more like novels. I learnt a certain amount about that, out here.'

He told him what those summaries from Beirut had taught him about the need to maintain suspense. Farrar was delighted. ‘To think of a Professor of history and philosophy learning how to write from me. I can hardly believe that.'

‘I can only assure you that my post-war books have done much better than my previous ones.'

On the terrace of the St. Georges over a glass of arak, they talked about Baghdad. ‘You were never there, were you?' Reid asked Farrar.

Farrar shook his head. ‘Oddly enough, I never was. By the way, you realize don't you, who is our Ambassador there now?'

‘Geoffrey Bennett, isn't it?'

He had looked it up in Whittaker's in the Century Club library, and checked Bennett's entry in
Who's Who.
Farrar shook his head. ‘There was a change two months ago. Our old friend from Istanbul, Martin Ransom, is in the saddle now.'

‘I never met him.'

‘You didn't? That surprises me. He was in on one or two of our things.'

‘I don't need telling that. I'll be interested to meet him.'

‘There's something by the way I'd like to have you do for me in Baghdad.'

This part of their serial conversation was taking place on the terrace of the St. Georges, the one place where during their morning's stroll they were completely out of earshot.

‘I'm an oil man nowadays; oil isn't a cover for me any longer,' Farrar explained. ‘Yet at the same time I have on the side, maintained a few contacts from those days. My advice gets asked occasionally and I get asked for help. I've a finger or two in several pies, I'd like you to take a message for me.'

‘That's what you said to Gustave.'

Farrar looked at him, with a start.

‘You weren't meant to know about that,' he said.

‘So I gathered: but I found out. How's Gustave doing, by the way?'

‘Not over well.'

‘What do you mean by not over well?'

‘Oh, several things. His wife divorced him. It wasn't a pretty case. Then he was the secretary of a club. There was some confusion about the accounts. Nothing was proved, but he considered it tactful to resign.'

‘Do you ever see him nowadays?'

‘He doesn't want to see people like ourselves any longer.'

‘How is he off financially?'

‘He's all right there, I fancy. His current wife is comfortably heeled.'

‘How is he in himself? I was rather fond of him, you know.'

‘And so was I in a way. But one can't worry about feelings of that kind when a war's on. He immobilized five German divisions for half a year.'

‘That's how Diana argued. She put it at three divisions, though.'

‘Let's put it at four.'

‘That's not negligible, to set against one mental casualty. Anyhow what's this message you want me to deliver in Baghdad?'

‘It concerns Diana. Her husband is one of the few high up Army officers with a clean record. Certain interested persons want him to stay that way, in view of certain events that may take place in the quite near future. At the moment he's in Suleimania campaigning against the Kurds. They want him to be sure to stay there between January and February: to keep out of Baghdad at all costs. They want the message sent to him by word of mouth. Security up there is very strict. You could get the message to him through Diana. Nobody else could.'

‘Where was he when the king was murdered?'

‘In Suleimania, on every count his record's clean. He's a very sound army officer. He accepts the army code of loyalty to the authority in power. They want him to stay that way. They may need him one day; politically. Can you get that message to Diana?'

‘I can.'

They had their talk on the St. Georges terrace, shortly before lunch. They went straight from there to Sa'ad's. It was impossible to sit in Sa'ad's and not talk about Diana.

‘I've often thought about you, Prof.,' said Farrar. ‘It was such a strange war for you. You finished up a full colonel with red flannel. I know that. But for about four years, you were in khaki, without any kind of status; you weren't aligned with your opposite numbers; or at least those who would have been your opposite numbers in 1938. You were meeting on equal terms captains like myself, twelve years younger than yourself who were nobodies in civil life. Didn't you find it very strange?'

‘Not very. I put the clock back twenty years.'

‘And that made you vulnerable to the kind of experience that wouldn't have happened to you if you had stayed on in England as a Professor. I mean Diana. She must have given you a terrific jolt.'

‘She did.'

‘I don't want to pry or anything, but I imagine that you had led a pretty steady sort of life.'

‘I had.'

‘And that in spite of all those novels about the twenties. Flaming Youth, and the Bright Young People, for someone like yourself, who was in his early twenties, who hadn't a great deal of money, who was working very hard to make up for the time that he had lost during the war, it can't have been all that hectic, surely?'

‘It wasn't.'

‘So that to meet someone like Diana at the age of forty-three, to have her carry such a torch for you . . . I knew what it meant, of course, when you asked to be transferred to Baghdad, but now in retrospect, it's twenty years ago. You're in late middle age. How does it seem to you now? Did it make it very hard for you to settle down to—well, I suppose you could call it humdrum life in England? It's something I've often wondered.'

‘It's something I've often asked myself.' Reid paused remembering that lunch in London, when he had been prepared to abandon his home and start on a new life; recalling the long slow years that followed: years professionally of much accomplishment and some achievement, of work that had both absorbed and satisfied him; years that had been in a way impersonal, when he and Rachel had run their family in an harmonious partnership. He had enjoyed the friendship of his sons; he had enjoyed watching them grow up; in particular he had enjoyed their years at Oxford: they had been so obviously getting so much out of it. It had been in the last analysis, an uneventful time, but it had been unharassed by the strain that had made him in 1939 welcome the return to uniform. He had got on well enough with Rachel, now that there were no intimate relations. He did not think he would ever have reached this calm of spirit if it had not been for Diana. He could answer Farrar reassuringly.

‘If you've once known the very best,' he said, ‘you can be content with, well I won't say the second best, because it isn't that at all, it's something that bears no relation to the best. If you've not known the best, you feel that you've been cheated; or you suspect that you've missed it through some deficiency in yourself: or maybe you think that there is no such thing as the best, that people are lying and pretending when they claim that they have known the best; that life in fact is an imposture: when you're in that mood it's difficult to keep a balance, but,' he paused, searching
for an aphorism that would explain in a phrase how he really felt; searching and half-finding it, ‘it's not difficult,' he said, ‘to live contentedly, once you've realized that there is such a thing in the world as happiness even though you've missed it and now won't get it. Do you remember that poem of Newbolt's, “He fell among thieves”, about the man who was going to die at dawn, brooding “in a dream untroubled of hope.” That's the point, I think.' He paused again. He had found the aphorism. ‘It's easy to be happy when you know that you never will be happy.'