The Mule on the Minaret (15 page)

A report marked ‘A' from his English teacher at the A.U.B. stated: ‘A low potential: no feeling for the language: no wish to acquire it. Well behaved in form.' A ‘B' report from a fellow-student ran: ‘Speaks fluent French but does not write it grammatically: does not interest himself in community activities: not popular, not unpopular, a cypher.' Another ‘B' report indicated that he kept late hours, that he often looked tired at morning classes.

Interspersed with these reports about Aziz were entries about the aunt and uncle. Censorship had been put on all mail entering the Amin Marun household and addressed to Aziz at the University. Madame Amin's correspondence had been submitted to a V.I. lamp but there were no indications of secret writing.

It all, in Reid's opinion, amounted to very little. His interest began to wane. Then suddenly his attention was startled by an ‘A+' report.

‘I had been asked,' it said, ‘to make any discovery I could about Aziz's love life. I called at the company's flat after dinner; we drank several whiskies; the atmosphere was cordial. The professor joined us later; we talked for a little, then I offered to see Aziz home. “It's early,” I said, when we were in the car. “Why not go somewhere for a drink?” He shook his head. “I've had enough to drink.” “I know a place where we can find nice girls.” “No, thanks.” We drove towards his home. I did not hurry. I put my hand on his knee. He made no response. I moved my hand higher. Still no response. I paused, waited. He shifted. He crossed his legs. It was not that he repulsed me; I do not believe he was aware that an advance had been made towards him. He is a very curious young man.'

Reid stopped, astounded. He re-read the report. It could only mean one thing.

He crossed the passage to Farrar's room.

‘This file,' he said. ‘Is this the truth?'

‘The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.'

‘This report of Abdul Hamid and Aziz, in the car?'

‘Sinister was the word you used.'

‘But we're encouraging this, abetting a crime.'

‘Steady, now, steady; we're abetting nothing, and it's not a crime here, remember. The places where it's a crime are very few. No one worries about it in a Moslem world. It's the women they worry about, not the men. It's difficult for a young Moslem to find a girl-friend. He has no alternative.'

‘Then if that's the case, why seduce him, if it gives you no blackmail hold as it would in England?'

‘Seduce is a big word. A young man like Aziz knows his own mind. He's one thing or another or perhaps both things. We want to find out the kind of young man he is. Then we know what use to make of him.'

‘I see.'

‘You'll find more sinister things than that in our files before you're through.'

‘I'll be on my guard.' He turned back towards the passage; as he did, the door of the next office opened and Finchley walked out through it. Diana was alone. He went straight in.

‘Are you doing anything for lunch?' he asked.

‘I'm not, no.'

‘Then would you have lunch with me? It's short notice; but this file has been a shock to me.'

‘Which file is that?'

He handed it across. She glanced at it. ‘Oh, yes, I know. I can understand, one has to get used to that kind of thing in this game.'

‘So Nigel warned me. Shall I pick you up at one?'

He returned to his study of the file. There was a report from Aunt Mildred on Aziz's father. ‘He appears to be a conventional, efficient, but not very brilliant army officer. He is employed in Q. He lives quietly, rarely entertains; is unpolitical; he plays bridge in the army officers' club, but he does not gamble. He appears to have no mistress, is not believed to be homosexual. The only suspicious thing about him is that his life is so obviously respectable. In a detective story the last man you would suspect is invariably the murderer. Nothing is known about his wife. She
follows the routine of a strict Moslem. She is never seen in a public place alone; she appears to be absorbed by her family.'

There were translations of the letters that had passed between her and her sister, and between Aziz and his mother. Aziz wrote to his mother every Friday and to his father on the last day of every month. The letters were without any interest. There were accounts of Farrar's various meetings with the Amin Maruns, including the one at the St. Georges when he had explained that Kurdistan was to become a Russian sphere of influence. ‘If any echoes of this report reach us from Turkey we can be sure that it is due to her.' There followed a note that made Reid smile. ‘I believe the Prof, will be very useful as a piece of groundbait. He will be unsuspected because he is himself unsuspecting. He also appears to have a knack for making people talk about themselves. He may be able to break down Aziz's reserve.'

*   *   *

They lunched in Sa'ad's. It was a grey, cloudy day in tune with the long, dark, narrow room with its balcony in which no one ever seemed to sit. There was no one there in uniform and the restaurant was quarter full. Reid sat with his back to the light. Diana was wearing her dark office clothes with a white shirt-waist fastened at the throat by a gold brooch, set with an oval reddish stone. She had a tired preoccupied expression, as though she had something on her mind.

‘I wonder if they've any Bols gin,' she said. ‘It's the kind of thing they might.'

They had.

‘I had it on a Dutch ship once. I liked the look of the bottle, then I started liking it for itself.'

‘Where was the Dutch boat running?'

‘Tangier to London.'

‘What were you doing in Tangier?'

‘The kind of thing one goes to Tangier to do.'

They laughed together. It was nice to be able to talk in shorthand in this way. Once again he found himself wondering what kinds of love affairs she had had; had they been many, had they gone deep, had they left scars?

‘I'm missing those duty-officer-talks even more than I had expected to,' he said. ‘I felt so close. Do you yourself feel that you're more yourself when you're on the telephone?'

She smiled. ‘I feel very natural on the telephone. Something went wrong with my spine when I was ten. I couldn't walk. I had to be taken out in a wheel-chair; I had to do special exercises. It's all right now, but for two years I was cut off from all the games and sports that I should have been enjoying at that age. But it didn't cut me off from my friends. I'm gregarious; they enjoyed bringing me their stories, they'd embroider them, of course. They'd make themselves more heroic and dramatic; half of the fun of their adventures was the coming round to tell me about them afterwards. I couldn't visit them, of course. But I could call them up. I spent hours talking on the telephone. Those were my happiest times. The moment the house was empty, I'd start calling up all my friends. I loved the telephone. It saved me in those days. I love it still. I sometimes think, even now, that I'd rather talk to people on the telephone than go and see them. I feel closer to them that way.'

‘I feel very close to you now.'

‘You do? I'm glad you do. I feel close to you: in the way I always dreamed I'd be. It's funny, isn't it, that I'd made this dream picture of you through hearing Margaret talk about you.'

‘I must re-meet this Margaret some day.'

‘I shouldn't. There'd be no response. She's settled down, marriage, children. You were a stepping-stone for her, a sounding-board. And, oh, how I wanted just that for myself.'

‘You didn't find it?'

‘No, I didn't find it. I was looking for someone, for something, I didn't know what. I'm not sure if I expected to find it, but the looking for it was the thing that counted. “The quest,” I'd call it, and I needed so much someone to whom I could talk about the quest. It's wonderful to have found you here; and wonderful that you'll be here for a long time, that there's no need to hurry anything, that we're living in a small self-contained world where we get asked to the same parties, where meetings aren't planned. That's one of the things that maddened me in England, or at least my part of England. Everything was so cut and dried; these people to meet these people, and not those people; everything on time, everything to schedule; on the day a son's born, put him down for Eton and the M.C.C.'

She checked. She laughed. ‘There I go again. That old hobbyhorse of mine. And you encourage me. You shouldn't. I'll begin to bore you.'

‘You could never do that.' But he changed the subject.

‘Were you in this game before the war?'

‘On the brink of it. I knew that war would come. I wanted to be in it, but I didn't want to be in uniform. I knew that my father would want me in the A.T.S. He'd have got me a commission easily: I was on my guard; and exactly what I had expected to happen, happened. On that first Sunday in September, after we had listened to Chamberlain's broadcast, my father got up from his chair, walked over to the fireplace, stood with his back to it, his hands in his pockets. “That's that,” he said. “Now we've got to decide what each of us has to do. What are your plans, Diana? To drive an ambulance again?” “Not this time. I report for duty tomorrow as a civilian at the Foreign Office.”

‘You should have seen his face. It was one of the best moments of my life. He was so certain that at last he'd be in the strong position, that I'd have to come to him: with the game played on his home ground. But I managed to work this out for myself.'

Reid laughed. ‘This is one of the most extraordinary love-hate relationships I've ever heard of.'

‘There's not much hate about it. It's mostly love. We get a huge kick out of one another. He couldn't do without me.'

‘Does he know what your Foreign Office work consists of?'

‘He's a pretty good idea. His friends at “the Rag” could tell him.'

‘Wasn't it a shock to you to discover the kind of work it was?'

‘I guessed at it.'

‘But things like that file today.'

‘You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.'

‘But to try to corrupt a young man.'

‘That's the schoolmaster in you talking. Is it worse to teach a young man bad habits which he'll outgrow if he hasn't got a special bent that way, than send a platoon of infantry on a forlorn attack, as a diversion, to mislead our enemy? Both involve sacrifice; both are necessary.'

‘One seems a cleaner way of fighting.'

‘Cleaner? Is there such a thing as a clean fight, in modern warfare? With gas and flamethrowers and bombs. It's not like Agincourt and Crécy; when a battle was a series of private duels, begun and ended in a day.' She spoke scornfully, angrily. Her eyes were flashing. She was genuinely roused. He had never seen her in quite the mood before. She checked and flushed. ‘I'm sorry.
I sometimes get worked up. I don't know why it is. Let's change the subject. Have you heard any news about the General coming back?'

Had she, he wondered, lost a lover in the war? Was that why she was so intense? Later he returned obliquely to the subject.

‘Has anyone you cared for a good deal been killed in the war?' he asked.

‘Killed as far as I'm concerned. He was on the other side.'

‘A German or an Austrian?'

‘A German.'

‘What happened to him?'

‘I don't know. I don't want to know. He wrote to me once through a friend in Switzerland. I didn't answer.'

‘Too risky?'

‘No, it wasn't that, it was just that it was over. Things could never be the same again. Best cut it out. Some of the girls I knew went on writing to their German friends. During that phoney war period they'd talk of how it would be all over within a year. “Christmas 1940; we'll be packing our skis again.” I knew better.'

‘Was that how you met him, ski-ing?'

‘At Kitzbühel.'

‘I've never skied. I've always wished I had.'

‘There's nothing like it. It's so beautiful, and you feel so well; and everyone looks so handsome. He was tall and blond, the Nordic type. He took his ski-ing so seriously. That was one of the lovable things about him, because he wasn't very good; but he'd try so hard; his forehead would wrinkle. It made him such a little boy, his being so serious about it; but then in the evenings with his accordion, when he sang, he was so different then, so in his element. The way he rocked to the music; that's how I felt he ought to be, that's how I felt Germans ought to be, young and gay in the things they have a knack for, not being serious and solemn about things that they're no good at. The Germans are no good in the long run in the things that they take seriously; they'll lose this war in the end; they're bound to with America against them, and then in twenty years they'll start taking themselves seriously again and once again they'll make idiots of themselves with furrowed foreheads. Why can't they stay Bohemians? But he was wonderful after those hours in the snow; he seemed like a legendary god; his blue eyes were so blue and he looked—I can't say
that he looked incandescent—but that's really what I do mean: he looked as though something had been lit up inside him.'

‘You may meet him again, you know.'

‘I may; but I hope not. It wouldn't be the same thing. Keep things in their setting.'

‘You sound very ruthless when you talk like that.'

‘Ruthless? Do I? I've had that said to me before; perhaps it's true. But I'm someone who knows what she doesn't want, even if I don't know what I do want. Perhaps that makes me unfair to men, to some men. I've tried to figure it out. I know I'm mean, but I can't keep being mean. I've an unsolved question on my hands. I meet a man. I think he has the answer. I throw myself into something; then I come up for breath and find I haven't found the answer; and I'm resentful. Which is unfair of me. I asked more of him than he had to give, and I try and console myself by saying that for a few days or weeks I gave him more than he deserved to get. But he's not grateful, damn it. He thinks I'm mean. Oh, I don't know, I reckon that I don't fit in, but I think the balance is equated. I hurt myself more than I hurt anybody else. But. .. oh, well . . . ruthless: that's the word they use.' She checked. She leant across the table. She put her hand over his. She pressed it. ‘Let's hope you never have to use that word to me.'