The Mule on the Minaret (20 page)

There was a twinkle in his eye. The brotherly look had gone, but the fondness stayed.

He looked at her steadily for a moment, then turned away; opened the door, swung his legs into the roadway, handed her out on to the pavement. He walked beside her to the entrance of her block.

‘You're very sweet, and very dear,' he said.

Kitty was still up when Eve returned. She raised her eyebrows. ‘So I gather he lost the argument?'

‘There wasn't an argument.'

‘That's dangerous; you must be on your guard.'

‘I know, I know.'

She slumped back in an armchair, letting her arms fall limply over the sides. ‘I sometimes wish I weren't myself,' she said.

‘Don't all of us?'

‘I doubt if you do.'

‘Perhaps not too often.'

‘When did you start this game?'

‘Eighteen.'

‘Was it with somebody important?'

‘Not particularly.'

‘Not a
grande passion?'

‘Heavens, no. A kind of dare.'

‘You weren't in love with him?'

‘I liked him well enough. It was a hurdle I had to carry. It seemed as good a time as any.'

‘How long did it last?'

‘How long did what last?'

‘The affair.'

‘It wasn't an affair. I saw him once or twice, but it was rather awkward. He lived a long way out, and with his parents. It became more trouble than it was worth. Besides, there was someone else.'

‘How soon was it before you really fell in love?'

‘I never have.'

‘Oh, come now, surely—'

‘No, honest, no. It's been exciting, romantic, sometimes there's
been a risk. But that feeling you read about in books—that I haven't known.'

Eve sighed. ‘If I could have started off your way I'd find life a great deal easier than I do right now.'

Kitty laughed. ‘There have to be some recompenses for my kind of life.'

‘I wish there were more for mine.'

‘There are times when I envy you.'

‘I doubt if I do myself . . . but, all the same, since that's the way it is .. .'

Since that was the way it was, she had to make the best of it. There hadn't been for her, as there had been for Kitty, a first and easy hurdle.

Across two winters she recalled another February evening, a night of fog in London during the phoney war. They had dined, she and Raymond, at the Café Royal, in the Grill Room, with its panelled mirrors that had reflected Wilde and Whistler. It was a Saturday. The room had been half full. They had lingered over their coffee. They had planned to go to a French film at the Curzon, but when they came out into the street they found that the fog had thickened. The chances of getting a cab were slight. ‘Let's go back and play records,' he suggested.

He had chambers in Albany. He had a key to the door on Vigo Street. He lived on the second floor. His rooms were warm. There was no central heating but he had left on the electric heaters. She appreciated his extravagance. She liked him for having thought: ‘We might come back; I couldn't bring her into a cold room.' The fireplace was high piled with logs and coal. He lit the papers under it and the flames leapt high. He turned down the high centre light and switched on two small lamps. Their soft light mingling with the firelight glowed in the glass of a tall Queen Anne bookcase and glinted on the silver thread of the blue damask curtains that screened the high broad window. He put on a long-playing record; he turned the volume down. She made a pile of cushions on the floor, and leant her head against the sofa. He poured her a liqueur and sat behind her, his hand on her shoulder, stroking sometimes her arm, sometimes her cheek, sometimes her hair. It was a peace, a happiness deeper and wider than anything that she had known: outside, the fog, the black-out, the chill, the slimy pavements, the shouts of ‘Taxi', the ill-tempered, ill-mannered
homegoers stumbling against each other; and here this calm, this beauty, this soothing of every nerve.

‘Darling,' she said, ‘when we are married it'll be in London, won't it?'

‘I suppose so, yes.'

‘Then let's come back here afterwards. Let's honeymoon here.'

‘Why not?' She sighed. May. What a long time to wait, until his divorce came through. If only this were May, with this their wedding night. Could they ever be closer than they were this minute, until they were really one. His fingers were stroking her cheek, gently, tenderly, but with a vibrant pressure; the music ebbed and swelled, plangent, evocative through the warm firelit dusk. Why wait?

‘Darling. Do you know what I wish?' she said. ‘That this were the start of our honeymoon, that we'd been married this morning in that grim little unromantic room. Darling, do you know what I'd like?'

She paused. The suggestion would have to come from her; his sense of chivalry, based on his greater age, would hold him back.

‘I'd like us to pretend we had,' she said. ‘I'd like us to start our marriage now.'

His fingers on her cheek deepened their pressures. He drew a long, slow breath, and then stood up.

‘I want to read you a poem,' he said, ‘by a Victorian, who wrote one good poem and little else.'

He crossed to the high bookcase and took out the
Oxford Book of Victorian Verse.

‘Come, let us make love deathless, thou and I
Seeing that our footing on the earth is brief,'

he read in a full cadenced voice. He had not turned down the radiogram. Its rich tones were a harmonious background to the poetry.

‘Seeing that her multitudes sweep out to die
Mocking at all that passes their belief.
For standard of our love not theirs we take.
    If we go hence today
Fill the high rich cup that is so soon to break
    With richer wine than they!'

He finished the poem and then came back to her. Once again his arm was about her shoulder.

‘If this was fifty years ago,' he said, ‘when that poem was written, when England was starchy, stuffy, stodgy, I'd be the first to throw my challenge to decorum, to say, “We're different. We make our own rules; we live our own lives, in our way.” But the world is a different place today. Everyone is so casual; they say those things don't matter; but they do. I don't want us to be like everybody else: I want us to make our gesture; to prove that we are different; to wait till we can say to the world: “In the eyes of the world, we belong to one another.” That's what one has to mean today by “richer wine”.'

She had felt so proud, so confident. She and he were different; they were proving it; and then only ten days later, he had slipped on a curbstone in the blackout.

‘With richer wine.'.. ‘to decorate an interval.' She contrasted the alternatives. Raymond had set the highest store by the very thing that Martin was disparaging, but only because he set high store by her; he would have been no doubt ready enough to decorate an interval with others by whom he had set as little store as Martin did by her. Yet what Martin was offering would constitute a certain happiness, a certain kind of happiness. It was something that sooner or later she would have to come to; a virgin at twenty-three. She knew all the arguments against her status. And yet, and yet... Raymond had put her on a pedestal. She did not want to come down from it too casually.

A week later the censorship in Beirut intercepted a letter from Ahmed Bahjat to Aziz.

‘Dear Friend,

‘I thank you for your kind present which I appreciate greatly. I await eagerly the day when once again we can listen to Bach and Beethoven.'

The letter was photographed and filed. Three days later, the reply to Ahmed was intercepted.

‘Dear Friend,

‘The day of my examination approaches. I await it anxiously. I greatly fear that I shall not pass. This is my last chance. I do not know what will happen to me if I fail. Some English friends have suggested that I should go to the University of Alexandria. They assure me that the English professors there are excellent. But I feel that I had better return home. The difficulty is that I have no ambition. I cannot persuade myself that a University degree is all-important. I do not want to be a bureaucrat.'

The letter was put under a V.I. lamp and revealed the following sentence:

‘State chief exports Germany to Turkey Quantity and price.'

Farrar rubbed his hands.

‘And that,' he said, ‘ties our little deal up very prettily. We have now the proved admission that Aziz, a Turkish citizen, has been
handing over to a belligerent, information that in the event of war might prove useful to the enemy.'

‘And what use are you going to make of this admission?'

‘I don't know yet. It depends a little on Aunt Mildred. While Aziz is here he is not of very much value to us. He can't tell us anything we need to know, and he can't spread false information to the Germans.'

‘Do you still want him to go to Alexandria?'

‘Not now that we've got him in our power; the sooner he goes back to Turkey the better. Once he's there we can decide what to do with him.'

‘What are the possibilities?'

‘Your guess is as good as mine. I'd like to make a double agent of him. When he crosses the frontier we could have one of our agents pick him up, tell him he's on the carpet, that he, a Turk, has been selling information to the Lebanese. If the Turks find out, it'll be a long prison sentence, if not death. He'll have to play our game. We've got photostats of his letters and we've got his receipts. The great thing is to get him across the frontier. Next time you are with Madame Amin, find out what chance there is of his going up to Istanbul for a holiday. It wouldn't be a bad idea for you to give her the idea: put it into her head. It's curious how often people have to have ideas given them; something in the subconscious, needs bringing to the surface.'

‘Galsworthy had never thought of being a writer, so he said, until a woman suggested it. “Why don't you write?” she said. “You're just the person.” You'd have thought a born story-teller like Galsworthy would have known it from the start.'

‘Exactly. And it may very likely not have occurred to Madame Amin that it might do Aziz a lot of good to see his parents.'

‘What do you propose to do about his friend, Ahmed?'

‘Keep an eye on him. He might be of some use to Aunt Mildred. He's in Turkey and we can put the pressure on him. But that might be risky at the moment. We don't want to start too many hares. Keep him on ice a little. And one thing, Aziz must never suspect that we know anything about this business. He can still go on sending routine inquiries to Ahmed. When Aziz returns he'll be contacted by quite a different person, someone whom you and I don't know. There's going to be a whole lot of amusement out of this operation. Believe you me.'

That afternoon there was a letter from Rachel:

‘Last week [she wrote] I went up to London, for the first time this year. There isn't much reason now that you aren't there. How gay those Fridays were; and London itself was more gay then. There was a feeling of challenge in the air. We were in the front line ourselves; the bombing gave an edge to everything. But now the war has gone in other directions and we're left high and dry; there's a certain listlessness about it and now that the bombing is over people are coming back to their London flats and houses. That means that everything is crowded. There are all these foreigners here, too; you see far more foreign than British uniforms in the streets. It is hard to get a table in a restaurant and when you do, you get dreary food and very little of it. Taxis are scarce; it isn't really much fun going out.

‘On Saturday, I am going down to see the boys. They seem to be happy enough and doing well, but it is not easy to tell from their letters. They simply say, “Thank you for your letter. I had a letter from Daddy. He says he likes Middle East. It has rained a lot. The ground is too wet for football so we go for runs. I do not like runs. Gainsford's father has given him a new model aeroplane. No more news. Love.”

‘But it isn't as satisfactory going down to see them by myself. I'm with both of them all the time and if one of them has something special to say to me he's afraid of saying it before the other. When you are with me, each gets a chance of being alone with each of us. This is one of the many little ways in which I'm missing you. And it's so hard to foresee any ending to it all. Unless it's we and not Hitler who have the secret weapon.

‘One result of that trip to London by the way is that your father suggested I should take on a job in the Ministry of Information. I believe he's right. Then I could let the farm. What do you feel? I believe the boys would get more out of their holidays in London; and there's no danger of bombing any longer, and I hate doing nothing for the war.'

That evening he went to the Amin Maruns' in the early evening; one of the pleasantest features of his work with the Intelligence was that he did not have to keep office hours. His duty allowed him visits to prospective clients.

Aziz was in a surly mood. One of the spots on his chin was bleeding and he kept dabbing it with his handkerchief. Reid asked when his exams began.

‘On Monday week.'

‘They last about a week, I suppose.'

‘Yes.'

‘And how long will it be before you hear the result?'

‘Three weeks.'

‘You'll take a holiday, I suppose? Will you go back to Turkey and see your family?'

‘I hadn't thought of it.'

His aunt looked up quickly at the suggestion. ‘It might be a good idea, you know.' She turned towards her husband. ‘What do you think?'

‘An excellent idea.' He said it forcefully. He appeared to welcome the idea. Perhaps he would be glad to have his own house to himself again.

Reid turned to Aziz. ‘Are you going to the concert at the A.U.B. tomorrow?'