The Mule on the Minaret (75 page)

Reid remembered how at James's age he had been desperately anxious that the war should not finish before he got in the trenches. No one felt that way about this total war, when civilians were often in more danger than men in uniform, when the whole resources of the country were mobilized and you were sent where you were needed most, in whatever capacity you would be most useful; when so much of the fighting was remote, in Burma, in Malaya, in the Western Desert, when the actual casualties were proportionately so many fewer, and there was no longer that hectic atmosphere of soldiers coming home from the trenches for a two weeks' leave.

‘Are you out of the army for good now?' the new chief asked him.

‘I sincerely hope so.'

‘It seems an appalling waste your ever having had to go. But I suppose it was a pleasant change.'

‘I was on the reserve. I was called up. I didn't feel justified in applying for an exemption.'

‘You had the First War feeling about that. I had it too at the beginning. But then I wasn't on the reserve. If I had wanted to join the army, I'd have been too old. They'd not have wanted me. It's been a different war, and a much more sensibly run war. In the First War no one looked ahead to the time after the war. This time we didn't rob our schools of their best masters. We let our young men finish or at least partially finish their education. We've given them a base they can return to. In some ways of course life has been very different here, because of restrictions, because of the blackout and boys leaving a year earlier, but those are surface differences. In essentials our life and work here have been going on very much the same.'

And, yes, Reid thought, that is what has been going on all over this beleaguered island. The pattern of living has been continued and maintained; each group in its separate niche. There lay the island's strength and there too, possibly, the island's limitations. After four years in the Middle East it was going to be difficult for him to find himself at home here for a little.

On the way back from the field, Reid and his father changed companions. Mark talked incessantly. He wanted to know when they would go back to the farm. He was looking forward to going back. His mother had promised him a gun. It would be fun to have a garden. Yet he would miss London, the cinemas and exhibitions and all the people everywhere. He had an engaging zest for life. Reid felt that he would manage to enjoy himself whatever happened. There was no sign of a sense of insecurity because of pulled up roots.

The evening train left Fernhurst shortly before six; the same train by which Reid thirty years before had so often seen off his father; the old man craned his neck to catch a final glimpse of the Abbey tower, golden in the evening light. He was seeing it for the last time and knew he was.

He sat back in his seat and closed his eyes. Within a minute he was asleep, breathing gently, wheezily; the flesh of his cheeks sagged. He looked very old. Would he last out the winter?

A waiter came round, announcing the first call for dinner. Reid booked two places for the second service. But when the waiter came round to announce the second service, the old man shook his head.

‘One meal a day's enough for me. You go alone, dear boy.'

‘I'm better without a second meal. I'll have Rachel make me a sandwich when I get back.'

They scarcely talked during the journey. The lights went on in the carriage after Basingstoke. ‘What a relief not to have the blackout,' Reid's father said. ‘That got one down more than anything. You were lucky to have been spared that.'

Reid smiled. Everyone seemed to imagine that he had been on a four years' holiday.

Rachel was in the flat when he got back. No reference had been made to her outburst on his first night home. No reference ever
would be made, and Palestine would never be mentioned; but the pattern for their life together had been set.

She smiled brightly as he came in, and lifted her face so that he could kiss her cheek. ‘Now tell me all about it, right from the very start,' she said.

‘If you'll make me a sandwich while I wash,' he said. ‘I've had no dinner.'

He opened a bottle of beer and they sat together at the congenial corner table. She was bright and animated; an invisible observer would have found it a moving picture of domestic happiness; they talked of the children and of their plans for the next holidays. ‘By Christmas,' she said, ‘we should be back at the farm.'

They had so much to discuss that it was eleven o'clock before his glass was empty. ‘With my early start this is late for me,' she said.

‘Why don't I breakfast at the Athenaeum?'

‘Why don't you? That might be easier for us. You can read your papers undisturbed over your coffee.'

They kissed good night as cousins; and went to their separate rooms. And this was how it would be for the next thirty years. He shivered: he had got to see Diana.

He had no idea what she was doing now, or what was her address. But in
Who's Who
next morning, he found her father's address in Kent. Even if the house was let, as he presumed it would be, the letter would be forwarded to her within a week. ‘I am back in England,' he wrote. ‘I long to exchange gossip. Please ring me here, any morning between nine and ten.'

Four mornings later the hall porter called him to the telephone. The deep contralto voice was as rich, as full as ever. ‘I can't wait to see you,' she said. ‘When can I?'

‘Which meal suits you best?'

‘Which meal suits
you
best?'

‘Have you time to linger over a lunch table?'

‘I have.'

‘Then let's make it lunch.'

‘How soon?'

‘Tomorrow?'

‘Tomorrow's fine by me.'

He felt unsteady on his feet as he walked out into the imposing hallway.

He had invited her to a French-Italian restaurant in Leicester Square. He was unfamiliar with London restaurants. He had little need for them, living in the country. But in the year when he had been stationed in London during the blitz, he had gone to this particular restaurant fairly often. He had become friendly with the manager.

He arrived early. He had been instructed in the technique for wartime restaurants. The customer was limited not only as to the amount he ate but as to the price he paid for what he ate. A manager made his profit on his wines. If you allowed him to make a sufficient profit on his wine, he might embellish your menu with special delicacies.

The manager greeted Reid with warmth.

‘It is very good to see you back,' he said. ‘I hope that we shall be seeing you very often.'

‘I hope so too. I have thought about your restaurant very often, and missed it very much. I have had many good things to eat but nothing that was worth while drinking in the Middle East. There was no wine at all. Now today, to make up for that I would like a very special wine. What is the best red wine you have. You have possibly something that is not on your list?'

‘Would you prefer a Burgundy or a Bordeaux?'

‘My guest is a lady, so as it is lunch perhaps a claret would be better.'

‘I have a Poyferré ‘34.'

‘That used to be very good.'

‘It still is.'

‘We'll settle for that, then.'

‘I'm afraid, sir, that it will not be cheap.'

‘I should not expect it to be. Now what have you on your menu that would go well with it?'

‘As a matter of fact, I do, by good fortune have a very tender piece of steak.'

‘Nothing could be better, and instead of an aperitif, I will have a half bottle of dry white wine.'

The half bottle in its steaming bucket had just been set upon the table, when Diana came through the door. It was nearly three years since he had seen her. He had once again the sense of seeing her for the first time, with the instantaneous shock of recognition along every nerve. It was a cool day and she was wearing a coat and skirt, a dark, rich, brownish red, with a couple of white roses
on her lapel. ‘I've chosen a wine that will exactly match that dress.' he said.

She had looked immensely tall as she came through the door, but she seemed of medium height once she had sat down. ‘Now tell me about everything.' she said.

He had so much to tell her. There was so much for him to hear. He told her about Farrar first. ‘After all these years he and Annabelle really are going to get married.'

‘They are, I so hoped they would. I was afraid they wouldn't. They were so right for one another. But he couldn't see her in an English marriage. And he couldn't see himself transplanted to Beirut. I suppose that it wasn't till the war was over, and he had to face repatriation, that he realized he had more roots in the Lebanon than in London. He was scared of coming back. At least that's how I suppose it was.'

‘It
is
difficult to feel at home, isn't it?'

‘I'll say it is.'

‘Everyone behaves as though one had been away for a long week-end. They are not in the least interested about where one's been. They say, “I haven't seen you for a day or two”. I answer. “I've been four years in the Middle East.” They say, “Oh, have you” and start telling me how they've managed to find a part-time gardener.'

‘Exactly.'

‘Sometimes, sitting by the Tigris, organizing all those subversive activities of ours, I'd think of my former colleagues in their lecture-rooms and studios, doing exactly the same things they had in 1935. How they would envy me, I thought. How excited they would be to hear about it all, how careful I should have to be to know where to stop, how to respect the Official Secrets Act. I couldn't have been more wrong.'

‘You certainly could not.'

‘They aren't in the least interested in what I've been doing.'

‘They couldn't care less.'

He asked her how some of the others who had been repatriated were settled down. ‘What about Jane Lester?'

‘Jane's all right: after those two extremes, first with the bottle then the bed, she's sailing on an even keel.'

The white wine had been quickly finished. The claret had been set on its side in an ingenious silver nineteenth-century contraption, that by the turning of a screw lowered the neck and raised the
punt of the bottle, so that the wine could be poured without disturbing the sediment. Customers, Reid suspected, often ordered a more expensive wine than they had intended, for the privilege of having their bottle cradled in it. It was a status symbol on a table.

Diana held her glass between her hands, warming it, then raised it to her nose, breathing in its perfume. She took a long deliberate sip.

‘This is very good,' she said.

‘I can't believe that it's nearly three years since we drank wine together.'

‘It wasn't such good wine then.'

‘It didn't seem to matter, did it?'

It did not seem to matter either, that there had been not only a three-year gap, but a break in sympathy. Three years ago in Cairo they had been watchful, on their guard, almost adversaries. They were back now to their old easy intimacy; there might never have been a gap. There might never have been a break. They were at one again. She was unique. There was no one like her.

‘Do you remember Eve Parish?' she asked.

‘Eve Parish?'

‘She was in our branch in Istanbul. She came down to Beirut on leave.'

‘Of course yes, I remember. Wasn't she mixed up with that Turkish protégé of mine, Aziz?'

‘She certainly was.'

‘Aziz faded out of the picture suddenly. Something funny happened there, I never knew what it was.'

Diana laughed. ‘I can tell you what it was.'

She told him. It was strange, he thought, how in that intelligence racket of theirs, you only knew half the story at the actual time; then gradually you began to fit in the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle; months later, possibly, when the whole thing had ceased to matter.

‘What's happened to Eve Parish?' he asked.

‘She's married. A major in the 60th, a regular.'

‘A decent fellow?'

‘Thoroughly: the kind of man you'd like to have your sister settle for. You know.' He knew, exactly. They didn't need to explain themselves to each other, he and she. They could still talk in shorthand. They were as close surely as they had ever been. This was like one of those winter lunches at Sa'ads when they had risen
from the table at three o'clock, with the office not due to open for two hours and without any discussion had taken an arabana back to the old town. They were back at the beginning once again; he felt himself drawn within the mantle of her magic.

‘You remember Gustave?' he asked.

‘Of course, what of him?'

‘He's a half-colonel now.'

‘He was that before I left.'

‘I can't think why he was.'

‘For services rendered, I suppose.'

‘I saw him in Alexandria as I came through.'

‘How was he?'

‘He rather puzzled me. He was arrogant and self-important yet he was on the defensive.'

‘I'm not surprised.'

She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘You saw him, didn't you, when he came back from Ankara?'

‘Yes.'

‘How was he then?'

‘In a jumpy state: either talked too much or didn't say a word; ordered wine for the whole table, and gulped it down half a glassful at a time. He'd lost some teeth and was self-conscious about that.'

‘How many teeth?'

‘Two.'

‘That all?'

He looked at her quickly, searchingly. The phrasing of her questions and the tone in her voice had put him on his guard. The antennae of his intuitions quivered. ‘I've an idea that you know what Gustave's mission was.'

‘I certainly do. I was very much in on it.'

‘Can you tell me what it was?'

‘There's no reason why I shouldn't. It's all over now. You were in our show. It was only chance that you weren't in on it. Nigel knew that you would object. It isn't a pretty story.'