The Mule on the Minaret (73 page)

The bath was heated by a geyser. He was afraid that in wartime London, bath water would be tepid. But to his relief, it ran steaming hot. He had not had a hot bath since he had left the Beirut flat in the Rue Jeanne d'Arc. In Iraq it had always been showers. He stretched and wallowed. He noticed that the bar of soap had a rubber base; to prevent it getting soggy, he presumed. Soap was a munition of war. Don't waste it.

His bath revived him. He took another look at the kitchen cupboard. There was a third of a bottle of gin and three-quarters of a bottle of whisky. He would have dearly loved a whisky, but he did not know how close Rachel's quota was. How long did a bottle have to last her? He wondered what kind of a quota he would get from his own wine merchant. He looked again at the stock of bottles in the wine bin. Rachel had said she had a chicken. How long would it take to cook? Should he open a bottle to let it breathe? But how much air did a 1926 La Tache require? Better leave well alone. Better wait till she got back. He was restless, and on edge. If only it were this time tomorrow.

At last he heard her key click in the lock. He hurried into the hall to welcome her. He took her by the wrists. ‘I never had a chance to look at you this morning.' He led her into the sitting-room, into the light. ‘But you look wonderful,' he said. ‘You're radiant. You look six years younger.'

He held her away from him for a moment, inspecting her quizzically, smiling, his head first on one side then the other. Then he drew her close, and his arms went round her. It was a cousinly kiss, upon the cheeks, but it was reassuring. Her figure was pliant. It was thirty months since he had held a woman in his arms, and
his senses stirred. Was it after all going to be all right? Was a miracle about to happen?

‘It's good to be back,' he said.

‘It's very good to have you back. I'm ravenous, are you?'

‘Ready to eat, not ravenous.'

‘I suppose you hogged it at the Athenaeum?'

‘I lunched with my father at the Isthmian.'

‘Then you did hog it; I know Poppa; or rather swilled it, in these spartan days.'

‘What are we going to drink by the way with that chicken that you scrounged?'

‘Which would you prefer: a Burgundy?'

‘I think a Burgundy. How long will it take to get that chicken ready?'

‘Not more than three-quarters of an hour.'

‘Then I'll uncork a bottle.'

‘Wouldn't you like a whisky first?'

‘I nearly took one half an hour ago.'

‘Why didn't you?'

‘I didn't know how long that bottle had to last.'

She shrugged. ‘I get one a month. I keep it for occasions.'

‘That's what I suspected.'

‘But this is an occasion isn't it?'

They sat together, sipping at the fragrant liquid. She asked him about his lunch. ‘Poppa's beginning to show his age. How was he?'

‘Fine. We're going down to Fernhurst next week, to see the boys.'

‘Good, they'll love that.'

He asked her about the flat. ‘Don't you have any help?' he asked.

‘There's a woman who comes in once a week. That's all I need.'

‘What about the holidays?'

‘We manage. The boys are very good. They cook their own lunches, or go out. I do their dinners.'

‘And do you do your own dinners when you're by yourself?'

‘I'm not very often by myself. I go out most evenings.'

He nearly asked with whom, but checked. A whole new life had started for her since she came to London—with her job and her committee work. Personable women never needed to be alone in wartime.

‘Shall I find the boys very different?' he asked.

She pouted. ‘They seem the same to me but then I'm seeing
them all the time. They may not to you. Four years is a long time.'

They finished their whiskies slowly. ‘You'd like a second, wouldn't you?' she asked.

He shook his head. ‘We mustn't make it too much of an occasion. We must leave something there for other ones.'

She rose, and he rose too.

‘Can I help you?'

It was her turn to shake her head. ‘Next time; you watch me now. This is your first day home.'

He sat on the kitchen table, watching her fiddle round the stove, watching her lay the table. ‘Do you realize,' he said, ‘that this is the first time we've ever picnicked—in a house of our own, I mean?'

‘Wartime has its compensations.'

‘We missed a lot when we were young. There were always children and servants in the way.'

‘There'll be children here again in three weeks' time.'

The chicken was on the table and the wine was poured. He held his glass to his nose. ‘I hope it's as good upon the palate.' It was. ‘We're in luck,' he said. He lifted his glass to her. ‘Let's stay in luck,' he said.

He asked her about the farm. How soon could they hope to get it back. ‘I've my hands on the right strings,' she told him. He asked her about mutual friends. She shrugged. ‘I see scarcely any of them. If I were to make a list of the people who in January 1939 I thought of as my best friends, I'd be surprised if I've seen more than three of them in the last twelve months. Everything is so difficult nowadays. It's a major project to get one's hair done or to see a dentist. One does one thing at a time. One sees the people that one works with and that's all there is to it.'

‘I must ask her about her work with Palestine,' he thought. ‘But later, when things are cleared away. When we are cosy over coffee and a cognac.'

‘Jenks was at the Isthmian today,' he said.

‘Was he?'

‘I'll be going round to see him one day next week. I suppose that in spite of taxes, because of that legacy to the boys we are rather more comfortably off ourselves.'

‘We are very much more comfortably off now.'

‘Till they come of age.'

‘Exactly, till they come of age.'

Should he have mentioned that, he wondered. Perhaps he should have waited. Could he have ignored it though, completely? It had to be brought up some time. ‘How do the boys feel about it?'

‘They haven't grasped it. They take a very temporary point of view. They've never worried about money: they never heard money discussed as though it were a problem. They've always assumed there was enough of it.'

He asked about the bomb damage in London. ‘In point of fact did you know a single person who was killed in an air raid?'

‘No one that I knew well.'

‘Not nearly as many as were killed in cars or aircraft.'

‘No, not nearly.'

‘But a great number of our friends have had their houses smashed.'

‘A great, great number.'

They talked of the houses that had been destroyed. ‘You've not been round London yet. In every square and street and crescent it's the same. One or two houses gone. They all look like mouths with a couple of front teeth missing.'

The level of the wine sank slowly in the bottle. Its warmth spread along his veins. It was good to be home, even in this furnished flat, which did not contain a single personal possession. The mere fact of eating in a private house, with an attractive woman sitting across the table was a relief unbounded, after the succession of meals in messes that had been his background for close upon four years. Most of the occasional dinner parties to which he had been invited had been masculine, or, when there had been a hostess, with a masculine preponderance of six to one. He had not had a single meal alone in feminine company since he had lunched with Diana in Cairo in the late autumn of 1942, nearly three years ago.

Slowly a deep peace of spirit settled on him. He was returning from a long, long exile: an exile that had taught him to appreciate the things that he had taken for granted six years ago. He was returning to the amenities and graciousness of living. He would set the right value on them now. He had learnt his lesson, just as Rachel had. Diana was his equivalent for her American. For both of them without that experience, life would have been incomplete, would have been half lived. Now they could start afresh, on equal terms, ready to attain the happiness, how was it that de Maurier had put it, ‘that lies so easily within the reach of all of us once we
have ceased crying for the stars.' It was going to be all right. Of course it was going to be all right.

The meal ended with strawberries, started after the last drop of the Burgundy had been sipped.

‘I'm afraid that I can't give you cream,' she said, ‘but I've saved the top of the milk.'

‘They're the first strawberries I've had since I left the Lebanon. They seem very good to me.'

There was really no fruit like English fruit. The climate that made England so difficult gave it in recompense the loveliest gardens in the world and the richest, most subtle fruit.

‘Can I help with the washing up?' he asked.

She shook her head. ‘Mrs. Gaskell comes on Friday. I leave as much as possible for her, but you can help me clear away. Then we can have our coffee at that corner table.'

It was a congenial corner table, with two stiff backed but well upholstered chairs set at right angles to one another. You were comfortable, but you were not lolling back; no one could talk effectively when they were lolling back. ‘I'm afraid this coffee will seem terrible after what you've been used to in the Middle East.'

‘England was never good at coffee.'

But this particular coffee was worse than anything that he remembered. ‘The brandy's very good,' he said. He had very rarely drunk French brandy since he had left Lebanon. In Baghdad he had been restricted to South African brandy, which was well enough mixed with ginger ale but was not a liqueur. ‘It's a relief to drink cognac again,' he said. He took a long slow sip and held the time-ripened liquid against his tongue. How good to be able to do that again, instead of having to swallow quickly for the effect.

‘Tell me about this Palestine committee of yours,' he said.

‘That's exactly what I want to talk about. You can be most helpful to us.'

‘I, helpful? How? In what?'

‘In joining our committee, taking the chair at public meetings, helping us draft appeals. You are the very man we need, with your status as a historian and a professor, then your being just back from the Middle East, and as a Colonel too. You'd carry real authority. How long can you wear uniform?'

‘For three months.'

‘And I know you're sick of it, but just for these few occasions,
you wouldn't mind. I know it would make all the difference. We must make the most of these three months.'

Her eyes were shining; there was a glow in her voice that he had not heard before. He had not believed her capable of so much enthusiasm; she had always been so restrained.

‘But what is your committee working for?' he asked.

‘The scrapping of that ridiculous white paper; to let as many Central European Jews as are still alive get into Palestine right away.'

‘Do you think that is fair to the Arabs?'

‘What do the Arabs matter? They never made a proper use of Palestine. They neglected Palestine. Think what the Jews have done there within twenty years.'

‘We have a treaty with the Arabs.'

‘Treaties are made to be modified, to suit new conditions.'

‘It's the Arabs' country.'

‘Only because the Jews were dispossessed. It is their spiritual home: the centre of their faith and culture. For centuries they have carried round with them their sacred Torahs, sounding the Shofars on the Eve of their Holy Days, The Eve of Yom Kippur, on Rosh Hashanah, praying for the day of their return. Surely you must realize . . .'

He half-closed his eyes. Her arguments were familiar enough to him. There was no answer to them, any more than there was any answer to the arguments that Hassun had flung in his face in his Baghdad office. It was an impossible situation. There was no solution. He had suspected when he left Middle East that he would be involved in this kind of argument; and he had resolved that he would be non-committal: that he would stand on the touchline as he had during the Spanish Civil War. He would not take sides, since he could not give himself wholeheartedly to either party. He had foreseen such arguments.

He waited until Rachel paused. ‘It's a very complicated business,' he said. ‘There are arguments on the other side.'

‘What are the arguments?'

He gave them to her. In the main what he had to say was a paraphrase of Hassun's denunciation. She listened carefully and her eyes were hostile. She did not interrupt. She waited till he had finished. ‘Is that what you believe yourself?' she asked.

‘You didn't ask me what I believed myself. You asked me what were the arguments on the other side.'

‘And what do you believe yourself?' Her voice was glowering now not glowing.

‘I believe,' he said, ‘that from the beginning the whole thing has been a mistake, a misunderstanding and a profound misfortune. The issue of the Middle East was handled after the First War carelessly and stupidly by politicians who were too concerned with their own European interests to understand the Arab problems that were involved in the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. I think the Arabs can justifiably consider themselves betrayed, not only by the creation of Palestine, but by the dismemberment of the country into British and French spheres of influence. At that time it was no one's intention to create in Palestine an independent Jewish state. The population of Palestine at that time was only nine per cent Jewish. The Balfour Declaration referred to a spiritual home for the Jews, a national home for the Jewish people, was his phrase, not an independent Jewish State. No one could have foreseen then the Hitlerian persecution; it was that persecution that created an argument for a Jewish State.'

At that point she interrupted him. ‘I wouldn't say an argument for; I would say a need for; I would go beyond that, I would say the necessity for.'