The Mule on the Minaret (29 page)

Slowly, exquisitely slowly, the moments of relaxation came. He turned over on his side, his head laid back among the cushions, his hands crossed behind his head. His face wore a transfigured look. That was her doing. She had revealed him to himself. He was in a trance. And he does not yet know the half of it, she thought. ‘It will get better, it will go on getting better. I shall see to that.' He was hers; hers to transform, hers to exalt.

But for that missed footstep in the blackout, it would have been Raymond's privilege to initiate her into the ritual of love; she would have responded to his technique. She would have been the violin on which he played the melody. She would have taken the impress of his tastes; that would have been her pride and happiness. At the same time those tastes in him, those predilections, would have been implanted there by her predecessors. She would have inherited their personalities. This was very different. Aziz would take her imprint, and because of her complete inexperience, no limit would be set upon the range of her adventurous curiosity. He was in her power, not she in his; it was heady knowledge.

She slid off the couch. ‘Don't move,' she said. She put another record on the gramophone. She was thirsty. On the sideboard was a bottle of red wine that Diana had opened the night before. She filled a glass and took a long, slow sip. It warmed her blood. ‘You thirsty too?' she asked. He nodded. She filled the glass. Looking
down at him, she had an inspiration. She took a long, deep sip and held the wine in her mouth. She knelt beside the couch, put down the glass, bent over him. As she lowered her head, he guessed her meaning, opening his lips as her mouth met them. Slowly she let the wine glide over his tongue and palate.

It was a halcyon time. The sun shone out of a pale blue sky; breezes blew from the north; the
khamsin
was stagnant in the desert. They saw each other nearly all the time. They went on picnics. He borrowed a car and they drove out to the Cedars. It seemed unbelievable that there should be snow there still; that they should be ski-ing in mid-June; within half an hour of the tepid Mediterranean. But then so much seemed unbelievable in the Lebanon, ‘the land of milk and honey' that had beckoned the prisoners out of Egypt.

Most evenings they would take coffee or an aperitif on the terrace of the St. Georges. It was hard to believe that such a cosmopolitan playground could be flourishing in wartime. In one way the war seemed far further off here than it had in Turkey. Yet the Lebanon was actually the back area of a battle zone. The Legation was heavily guarded with barbed wire against an enemy commando raid. You could hear the boom of guns in the Mediterranean. The streets were filled with men in uniform.

There were other reminders of war. One morning Aziz said, ‘I've got another list of questions that I'd be grateful if you'd answer for me.'

‘You'll have to come up to Istanbul to get the answers.'

‘I know.'

‘How soon will you come?'

‘My term ends in June.'

‘It is very hot in Istanbul in July.'

‘I know that well.'

‘But you won't wait till the cool weather comes?'

‘I shall not wait.'

She asked him to introduce to her some of his Lebanese friends.

‘I have some good friends who are Armenians. I will take you there.'

It was to a tea party that he took her. Almost all the guests were in civilian clothes. Eve did not recognize any of them. A young, very self-confident man made a dead set at her. He was the kind of man she most disliked. He was good looking, urbane, witty. But
she resented the air of complacence that he exuded. He had no doubts about himself, he assumed that any woman would be flattered by his attention.

‘I haven't seen you in Beirut before,' he said.

‘It is the first time that I have been here.'

‘Where do you come from?'

‘England.'

‘I know that. You could cut your accent with a knife. What are you doing in the Middle East?'

‘I'm in Istanbul, attached to the British Council.'

‘Then how do you come to be here?'

‘Aziz brought me here.'

‘Aziz? And who might he be?'

‘That young man, a Turk, talking to our hostess.'

‘Our hostess happens to be my cousin. Aziz, yes, I do know him now I come to think of it. Madame Amin's nephew. How long are you staying here?'

‘Another ten days.'

‘Too little, and I suppose you are very busy here. Belle of the ball, no less. But I'll be coming up to Istanbul quite soon. I'll call you at the Council. You probably won't be so busy there. I didn't catch your name.'

‘Eve Parish.'

‘Miss or Mrs.?'

‘Miss.'

‘Fine. That's encouraging. Mine is Alexis Belorian. I'm not married either. You'll be hearing from me.'

Having made his point, he moved away. Alexis Belorian, so that was who he was.

A little later in the afternoon she saw him talking to Aziz. Their talk appeared to be animated. She moved across to them. Alexis was talking with an arrogance which was almost insultingly detached. ‘I see your point; you are a Turk. You belong to a real race, as I do. But you have a country of your own, a diminished country, but still a country. I, on the other hand, have not. That is the difference between us. I am a child of no-man's-land. I don't care who wins the war or loses it as long as it doesn't involve another Armenian massacre. And I would say, by and large, that I would sooner the Germans won; they're too busy massacring the Jews to bother about us. The English basically have always been on the Turkish side. The last war was a mistake, as far as both of
them were concerned. The Turks and the English understand each other.'

Aziz flushed angrily. ‘You have no right to say a thing like that, here in the Lebanon.'

‘And where have I a better right? What is the Lebanon's story but the record of one invasion after another? Everybody's overrun it: everybody always will overrun it. It has no defence. We shrug our shoulders and charge our conquerors one per cent. As an Armenian, I'm more Lebanese than the Lebanese. I don't really care who wins the war, but by and large I would as soon the Germans did, and I guess forty per cent of you in Turkey feel the same.'

‘How do you know what we in Turkey feel?'

‘I often go there. As a matter of fact, I'll be going there in a month or so. I need to keep my eyes and my ears open.' He moved away.

‘I wonder who that was,' Aziz said.

‘I can tell you that: Alexis Belorian. He's a cousin of our hostess.'

‘Really, so that's who he is.'

His eyes flashed. She knew what he was thinking. She was thrilled and tremulous. Yet at the same time she felt qualms, on his account. He was getting in very deep.

Once she visited the office in the M.E.S.C. building. It was curious to meet in the flesh men whom she knew so well on paper, particularly the Professor; Aziz had spoken of him so much. He was the one person for whom Aziz had seemed to have a genuine attachment. She felt a kinship with the Professor because he was the only one in the office who had understood and appreciated Aziz. He had found the clue to him. The love of music. It was ironic that that understanding, that appreciation, had been Aziz's undoing.

She wished that she could talk to the Professor about Aziz. She wondered whether he was inquisitive about her relationship with Aziz. Diana suspected something, she was very sure. Had Diana said anything in the office? Presumably she had; or at least she must have to the Professor. But even of that she could not be sure. Diana had great reserves. She was not a gossip. It might well be that she maintained her office standards of security in her private life; if, in their kind of racket, you could be said to have a private life.

On her official visit to the office she did not discuss Aziz or either of the operations in which he was involved. Her interview was personal and social. Farrar asked her about the clubs in Istanbul, about the cafés, how much night-life there was. Was it difficult to get certain foods? What about beer? He had had some Turkish beer in Iraq. It had cost five shillings a bottle and had tasted of straw. Did they ever meet the Germans? How did the Germans seem? Arrogant and boastful, he supposed. What about the Americans? Did she see anything of them? At the end of his questionnaire, Farrar said, ‘From what you tell me, I shall do my best to avoid being posted there. I fancy Ferdinand would wilt. Not enough of the fleshpots for his “little heart of clay”.'

She had no idea whether Aziz was apprehensive about his equivocal position. She never saw moody expressions on his face. He seemed tranquil, self-composed. She rarely discussed the war with him; they did not discuss anything very much. They listened to music; they swam, they picnicked, they motored into the country. They made love; but they did not talk about making love.

‘Once,' he said, ‘I told Professor Reid that music gave me a peace of mind that nothing else did because it was not precise; not to be explained in words; it brought you into harmony with the whole universe, but did not lay down rules about the universe. It took you to the core of understanding. You understood the mystery of existence. When I told him that, he said, “There are those who say that that same paradise can be reached through love.” He paused. ‘I think the Professor was right,' he added.

They made love with an assiduous frenzy; she threw herself into love-making with an unslaked zest. She still had not experienced that acute, devastating ecstasy, that death in life, that utter apotheosis of every nerve cell of which she had read in books. But the very fact that she had not, quickened her absorption in this new pastime. She concentrated upon his response, not her own, devising new ways to heighten and prolong his pleasure. Though she was inexperienced in the practice of love, she was not ignorant of its theory. She had read and lingered over a number of the semi-medical books that had appeared in the late thirties. Her ignorance had increased her interest in them. She had brooded salaciously over the delights she had denied herself. She had sometimes looked at girls like Kitty and had thought, ‘Has she done that; has she tried this?'

She recalled those moments. Now that she was freed from the stable, she would gallop with a loose rein over open country. She would admit no bridle. No device would be too bizarre. She rolled certain French words on her tongue as a wine-taster rolls the wine round his mouth:
Outrée
and
dévergondée.
They were self-expressive. Sometimes she felt that she was being ridden like a steed over open country; that she was galloping, galloping, faster, faster towards the kill. Had she been with a compatriot, or a man older than herself, an inherited modesty would have placed its check on her; but with this foreigner, this inexperienced foreigner, who was three years younger than herself, she could abandon herself to an utter shamelessness. The word ‘shame' did not exist for her. She studied his response, learning what he liked most, what most excited him. Had she been concerned with her own pleasure she could not have been so solicitous of his. No woman would be able to boast that she had taught him anything.

The knowledge that this thing between them could have no future gave it a special savour. They were divided by age, race, religion; sooner or later they would go their separate ways. She felt no jealousy on that account. On the contrary, she relished the prospect of his dissatisfaction with her successors. They would seem tepid after her. She wished that he could have an affair with Kitty; she could imagine Kitty's astonishment when Aziz said, ‘Ah, that little Eve, she was unique.'

He did not use the big words of love; he could not express himself with ease. But she had little doubt of the hold that she had placed on him. There was no sense of tragedy about their parting. They were sure of one another. She joked over his promise to come up in August. ‘If you want any new records, you'll have to come up, won't you, to get the answers to those questions.'

It had been arranged that Eve should be driven to catch the Taurus at Aleppo by the girl in the Spears unit who shared Diana's flat. Diana, at the last minute, decided to come too.

Jane was late. ‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘I made a night of it. What a relief not to be driving on real duty. Where duty is concerned, I'm the punctual soldier. But a routine drive like this.' Her voice was a little blurred. There were lines under her eyes. As soon as they were on the main northern route to Tripoli, Diana offered to take over.

‘That's very civil of you,' Jane said. In ten minutes she was asleep.

High on a distant hill, they saw the Crak des Chevaliers, a forlorn relic of the Crusades.

‘Do you want to make a detour?' Diana asked.

‘Why bother?'

Diana laughed. ‘Yet think of all the tourists who in peacetime spend vast sums of money to visit the Levant, and include that castle as a “must”. Can you picture us in ten years confessing why we've never seen Petra or Isfahan or the arch at Tesiphon. Simply because it is so easy, we don't bother.'

They paused at Horns where the great water-wheel turned slowly with its cranking chains. They had come south by this same road two weeks earlier, but then Eve had been too excited to notice what she was seeing. So much had happened to her during these two weeks; she was a different person because of what had happened to her in Beirut. Yet for Diana they had been two weeks like any other. Wasn't there a poem of Hardy's on those lines: ‘For them it had been an ordinary day'? Yet how could she tell if it had been an ordinary fortnight for Diana? Did she herself look any different? When she was back in Istanbul, would Kitty stop in her tracks? ‘Good heavens, kid!'

They reached Aleppo in the early evening. The train left next morning. They had booked in a Y.W.C.A. hostel.

‘I'm packing in,' said Jane. ‘I don't often get a chance of an early night like this.'