The Mule on the Minaret (11 page)

‘I was hoping that you would be back before we broke the evening up. Of course, you remember Aziz, and this is Abdul Hamid Aral. I don't quite know how I should explain Abdul Hamid. How should I explain you, my good friend?'

The Levantine chuckled. He rubbed his hands together. They were podgy hands, with long pointed polished nails. He wore a ruby ring on the little finger of his left hand, and a sapphire on the fourth finger of his right. ‘I have many irons in many fires. My ruby is ignorant of my sapphire. There is an Arab proverb: “The man is wise whose acquaintances are numerous but whose friends are few.” '

‘I hope that I am one of your friends, Abdul Hamid.'

‘There is another Arab proverb: “The friendship is strong that has not been tested.” '

Reid laughed. ‘The Arabs have another saying: “There are only seven plots in the world. And every story that has ever been told is a variation upon one of those seven plots.” '

‘That doesn't sound very pertinent,' said Farrar.

The Lebanese chuckled. ‘All truths are pertinent. All truths are reflections of Allah's wisdom.'

He looked roguishly at Reid. There was a conspiratorial gleam in his eye that Reid did not particularly fancy. Reid turned to Aziz. ‘How are the studies going?'

Aziz flushed. ‘How can I tell? I do my best'.

‘What does the tutor say?'

‘He's preparing a thesis. He's only interested in himself.'

‘That's why I said he should try Alexandria,' said Farrar.

‘Why did you come to Beirut in the first place?' Reid asked.

‘It was an excuse to travel. I felt shut in in Turkey. When my father was young, Turkey was so large; Turkey is so little now.'

He seemed resentful. There was an aggressive tone to his voice. Yet there was no suggestion of a whine in it. He was a type with which Reid was familiar. Was there all that difference between a
Turk and an Englishman? One assumed that there was because of the difference in religion. But possibly many Turks accepted the teachings of Mohammed as casually as many Englishmen accepted the implications of the catechism they had learnt at school.

‘Is this your first visit to the Lebanon?' he asked.

The young man nodded.

‘You might have chosen a better time. It can't be at its best in wartime.'

‘No country is at its best in wartime. In Turkey too there are restrictions. We cannot tell how long we shall be at peace.'

‘What do you plan to do when the war is over?'

Aziz shrugged. ‘I do not look ahead so far. I cannot guess what kind of a place the world will have become.'

‘But you know that whatever kind of a place it does become, it will be useful to have a good degree.'

‘That is what my instructors tell me.'

‘And that,' Farrar interrupted, ‘is why I suggest Alexandria. You'd find more stimulus.'

Later, after Aziz and the Lebanese had left, Reid asked Farrar why he was so insistent about the young man's going to Alexandria. ‘There really isn't anything to choose between the two universities.'

‘I daresay not, but it might be useful to have him under our supervision for a little. Eventually he'll go back to Turkey. We need Turks who'll be helpful to us. He's the kind of chap who is likely to get into mischief. He might be lured into the kind of mischief that might put him into our power.'

‘You certainly have a lot of irons in the fire.'

‘Only a very few of them are hot, as yet.'

‘What about Abdul Hamid?'

‘My contact with my cut-out.'

‘What's a cut-out?'

‘What did they teach you in that course at Matlock?'

‘Nothing that has any bearing on what you seem to be about. What is a cut-out?'

‘The point in intelligence beyond which you don't know the sources of your information. Abdul Hamid brings me information. I accept most of it as accurate. He gets that information from a man whose name I know, but whom I've never met. That man is the cut-out. What happens after him I've no idea. If there's anything shady to be done, he fixes it. I rely on Abdul Hamid to choose me a reliable cut-out.'

‘What an extraordinary amount of things go on beneath this roof, of which I've no idea.'

‘That's why you're so useful to me, old boy; you're so transparently honest that nobody can believe that I'm not, too. How did Abdul Hamid strike you?'

‘He seemed intelligent.'

‘He's that all right. Did he strike you as being devious?'

‘A number of Lebanese strike me as being devious. He didn't seem any more devious than the rest. But I did think him sinister.'

‘Sinister? Yes, perhaps that's the word, “sinister”, and that's what he should be in this racket.'

Three weeks later Reid was again duty officer. He woke with a feeling of anticipation. He looked forward to an evening by himself. He also looked forward to the possibility of Diana telephoning. A week earlier he had volunteered to take Johnson's place, Johnson having an opportunity to meet a Sandhurst contemporary who might prove useful, and once again shortly before ten the telephone had gone. ‘I've just finished such a good dinner,' she had said. ‘I felt so sorry for you all alone in that bleak room. I didn't want you to feel abandoned.'

There had been warmth and gaiety in her voice. It had filled the room with colour.

‘By the way,' she had said, ‘I don't know your Christian name.'

‘Noel. But I don't use it.'

‘Why not?'

‘It doesn't seem quite like me.'

‘Doesn't it? It does to me. You sign your books with your initials.'

‘Don't you think that's the right signature for the kind of book I write? Noel is too flowery.'

‘What does your wife call you?'

‘She doesn't call me anything.'

‘Just “darling”?'

‘Yes, just “darling”.'

It was the first time that he had spoken of his wife to her. It was the first reference that either of them had made to the fact that he was married.

‘So no one's ever called you Noel. That's what I'll call you, then,' she said.

They had gossiped for ten minutes, then she had rung off. ‘I can't occupy that line any longer. Suppose General de Gaulle rang up from Cairo.' The room which had seemed so private and cosy fifteen seconds earlier now seemed bare and cavernous. ‘I wonder how she knew I was “orderly dog”,' he thought. He had not been on the duty roster.

It was a bright clear day, after a week of rain. Spring was still six weeks distant, yet it was difficult to believe that the short Lebanese winter was not already over. The breeze had a scent of flowers. In the Rue Jeanne d'Arc there was a new animation about the workmen repairing a building partially ruined in an air raid; about the women in large straw hats propelling mules laden with provisions. Handcarts were pushed beside the pavements; long, shining cars were honking irritably; a clothes shop selling the remnants of its smart Paris stock stood next to an open kitchen where savourous stews were simmering and bubbling in low wide saucepans. Shabbiness and elegance walked side by side. There were Moslems with baggy trousers and red tarbooshes; there were young women with their black, greased hair swinging low upon their shoulders; there were veiled shuffling women with black skirts sweeping the ground; there were beggars with misshapen limbs squatted against the walls; there were men in tattered clothes, thin, grey-skinned, who might have belonged to any race; there were Arabs in long robes with their headdress held by a golden fillet, carrying in their right hands a string of yellow beads; there were men, tall and portly, sleek and prosperous, in well-cut European suits. The whole scene was rejuvenated by the sunlight and the air of spring.

He turned right at the end of the street. Usually he caught a bus here, but he had left the flat early. He had time to walk. He slackened his pace as he went by the University. It had the typical look of an American college; red brick, spacious, square-towered with sloping grounds. The morning classes were about to start, and the street was crowded with young men and women hurrying with their satchels and their piles of books, laughing, chattering.

He paused at the main entrance, watching them. There were Turks, Indians, Syrians, Egyptians, French. There were a few, but only a very few, with the very black skin and large pouting
mouths of Central Africa. The large majority had grey, slightly darkened skins with delicate features; often with their cheeks disfigured by the scars of the big boils that were endemic to the Middle East and India. They were an attractive comely lot. They were pursuing their education just as their predecessors had done four years ago, planning their futures and careers; just as his former students were at Winchborough—except for this one difference, this basic difference: English students stood on the brink of war. These did not; this war was only theirs incidentally.

He had been here six weeks now, and had already begun to feel himself a part of this vast world, new to him, of the Middle East. And he was beginning to see it in terms of itself: a world of its own; alien, if at times friendly, to the West.

His in-tray was filled with papers. He might well have given the impression of being a busy person. Cartwright had told him that he would be mainly occupied with the composition of the weekly summaries, which would be a half-time job, and that the rest of his time could be devoted to the study of back files; but in point of fact a good deal of work had devolved on him, simply because he had an office and a desk.

He had, for instance, the men's mail to censor. In the First War he had looked forward to the censoring of mail, before he was commissioned, because he had thought that it would give him an insight into his men's minds, and that his knowledge of human nature would be enlarged. He had been disappointed and surprised by the dullness and lifelessness of the letters. They had been bare bulletins of facts, presented without personality. He had wondered whether in this Second War a higher standard of education and a keener sense of independence among the new recruits would produce livelier letters. He was soon to find that it was not so. The letters that lay on his desk every morning were little different from those that he had read in 1917. Everything really personal went into the green envelopes that were censored not regimentally but at the base; the letters that came to him were in the main replies to letters that had been received from home ('Well, darling, I bet you enjoyed yourself that day Bert took you to the picnic'); health reports (‘I seem to have got over my attack of “gippie tummy” ‘); comments on the war news ('Well, Mum, I don't think it'll be long now. We'll soon be giving Jerry a taste of his own medicine. Six months I give it'). There was a Lance-corporal who had been out fifteen months who numbered his
letters to his wife, she numbering hers to him, whose letters consisted entirely of acknowledgements. ‘Darling, I have wonderful news. I have received your numbers 35, 36, 37, 39, 40; I wonder what happened to your number 38. I hope not enemy action. I am so relieved that you have got my 51, 52, 53, 54, 55. How well the mail is working nowadays.' He wrote in a large spidery hand, and the provision of that amount of information practically filled the airgraph so that he was forced to wind up with his invariable, ‘Well, darling, I must now close. Keep your chin up. Won't be long now.' Reid wondered what the wife's letters were like. Did she too merely repeat a list of numbers, or did she contribute news and comments?

He had also to deal with the various suppliants who presented themselves to the Mission offices. Everyone who had a grievance felt that here was the right audience for it, and every service branch in Beirut when faced with a conundrum said, ‘Oh, try Spears Mission.' There were consequently innumerable Lebanese complaints about houses that had been bombed or looted in the campaign, about lorries that had been requisitioned and abandoned. Photographers applied for permission to develop snapshots for the troops. Officials claimed that their loss of office under the Vichy régime was due to their pro-British sentiments. One of these claims he had copied out and filed among his records:

‘I know Your Excellency that it is the Syrian authority to which I should apply for my return to work. But what can I do if the said authority is unwilling to consider my grievance, and does Your Excellency's conscience consent and get restful while there is a person complaining of deprival and injustice in a country over which the British banner waves?

‘I belong to a family occupying the first place in the Moslem and Arab worlds and the history certifies that; which thing prevents me from doing low work not corresponding with my social position.

‘I do swear by the life of his Majesty the King and Emperor, and by the glory of that most noble British nation whose civilization has been spread all over the world, and whose noble instruction has been distributed among mankind, that I should return with the British flag waving to the function of a district officer in compensation for the prejudice and injustice which I have undergone.

‘I do come before Your Excellency, just as an Arabian comes before a mighty Emir and I should find in you refuge and support,
and if the field of functions will not accept me there is no doubt that the British generosity would welcome me, closing my letter by saying with all my heart, long live Britain, defender of oppressed men, and long live the Allies and God save the King.'

There were also a number of chores which normally would have been disposed of by an A.D.C. There were the sudden visits of important personages for whom air passages had to be booked, cars ordered and trains met. There would be diplomats in transit with a retinue of prams and nurses. He was, that is to say, occupied, and he was not bored. Yet he knew that his work could have been carried out just as effectively by a junior freshman. I‘ve no real right to be here, he thought.