The Mule on the Minaret (57 page)

‘There is a difference of approach; and that difference can be best exemplified by the action taken by Baghdad when a wireless transmitter was sent there by the Germans. Baghdad felt that this set would be of great value because through it they could discover what forces were working against the government and for what reasons. It will be a slow operation and its fruits will be appreciated in 1950. Baghdad's decision was supported by Cairo and I do not question the wisdom of that decision. But if a set had been sent to Beirut, there could have only been one reaction: to capture the set, arrest the agents, grill them, find out all we could, keep concealed from the Germans that we owned the set and use it to send to the Germans the kind of information we wanted them to have. We should have taken the short, fast view.' He paused. He looked
round him. His face wore a belligerent expression. ‘As I see it,' he concluded, ‘we have only one concern here in Beirut; to concentrate all our forces on the immediate objective of the war. Let the French clear up their own mess afterwards.'

His tone had changed during the last few minutes. It had a very odd effect on Reid. When he came to read it in the shorthand transcript, it would seem, he was very sure, entirely unexceptionable. It had been reasoned, judicious; it had been even conciliatory; but to Reid, who knew Farrar so well, that change of voice had indicated a very real change in Farrar. There was an air of antagonism, of defiance, of resentment; the sense of a chip upon his shoulder. Had he fancied it, or was it really there? Later on he would ask Mallet if he had noticed anything.

The meeting adjourned directly after Farrar's speech. Reid went across to him. ‘Congratulations; that was excellent.'

‘I'm glad they put me on after you. It made it all the simpler.'

‘What you said will make my job a good deal easier in many ways.'

‘I'm glad to hear it.'

‘I wasn't quite sure if you had got my point about that silly toy.'

‘I'm not sure that I had either, until I heard your speech.'

‘We oughtn't to be far apart, you know.'

‘I'm glad that you feel that.'

‘Let's make the most of this time anyhow. Let's have a meal together.'

‘I'd enjoy nothing better.'

Before they could fix a date, Stallard had come across to them. ‘Congratulations to you both. Excellent. Excellent. You should be proud of your pupil, Nigel.'

‘We should be grateful to Diana, shouldn't we?'

‘I'm going to tell her so when I get to Cairo.'

‘It seems more than two years since we had that lunch at Ajalami's.'

‘A lot has happened since.'

‘A lot can happen in two years in wartime. You wait until you see how London's changed.' He outlined some of the ways in which it had changed.

Farrar moved away. Their brief conversation, like the last sentences of his report, had left Reid with the uncomfortable suspicion that Farrar had something on his mind, that he was
harbouring a grievance. ‘I must have a real talk with him,' he thought.

Yet that was the one thing he found it impossible to do. Farrar always had people around with him, or there were people he had to go and meet; on the one occasion when they did find themselves alone, between sessions, on the terrace the of St. Georges, Farrar called someone over. It was a person of no consequence. There seemed no need for him to have been summoned over. Reid could not resist the feeling that Farrar was avoiding him.

One morning he rang up the Amin Maruns. Aziz answered the telephone. ‘I want to see your aunt,' he said. ‘But I also want to see you. Can you give me a time when you'll both be there?' Aziz laughed. ‘There's not much point in seeing either of us when the other's there. My aunt's always in on Friday afternoon, at tea time. Why don't I see you in that students' café facing the A.U.B.? Any time that suits you suits me.'

They fixed a time. ‘He's growing up.' Reid thought. ‘Eighteen months ago he would scarcely have made that remark about his aunt and himself. And if he had, he would not have made it with a laugh. He would have been evasive.'

Two days later he was to change that estimate. Aziz was not growing up. He had grown up. They met for breakfast at the café. On the previous evening he had taken tea with Madame Amin. She was her habitual phlegmatic self. She asked him about certain of her Baghdad relatives. ‘It is strange to realize,' she said, ‘that when I was a girl, Baghdad was a city in my own country, as Marseilles is for a Parisian. I wonder if they are happier there the way they are.'

‘You could ask that about any country in the world. Some are better off, and some are worse off. But on the whole there are more people better off than there are people worse off.'

‘I suppose so. I suppose so. Except in the occupied countries at this moment.'

‘I am seeing Aziz tomorrow,' he told her.

‘You will find him very changed.'

‘How shall I find him changed?'

‘He knows his own mind now; or at least he pays us the compliment of confiding in us what is on his mind.'

‘And what is on his mind at the moment?'

‘He has decided to take the advice of that nice young friend of yours, Major Farrar, and go to Alexandria.'

‘But I thought he was doing very well now at the A.U.B.?'

‘He
is
doing well at the A.U.B., but he thinks that he could do better in Alexandria.'

‘So you've decided to go to Alexandria.' That was the first thing Reid said to him next morning.

Aziz smiled. ‘It seems a better idea now than it did then.'

‘How so?'

‘The world's a different place. Two years ago I thought that the Germans might win the war; now I know that they will lose it. Two years ago I thought that the future for someone like myself lay with a Turkey that was a German ally. The old partnership that the Kaiser had in view. I did not want to go to Egypt, because I should then be in the British Raj and I might fare badly when you lost the war, if I was a student in Alexandria, as a British protégé.'

‘So you thought we were going to lose the war?'

‘Didn't you?'

‘No, never, but there was a time when I thought we might not win it.'

‘When did you think that you would win it?'

‘As soon as America came in.'

Reid was following his own thoughts. If Aziz had believed that the Germans were going to win the war, and that his future lay with a Turkey that was allied with Germany, perhaps he had been spying wholeheartedly for the Germans; had been willing and anxious to be of assistance to them. His father had fought with them against the British. His uncle had been killed at the Dardanelles. He might well have been sincere during those months when Rommel was driving on to the Canal. Had that occurred to Nigel? Of course it must have done. Why hadn't it to him?

‘Even so,' he said, ‘I should have thought the A.U.B. now that you're settled down there, would be as useful as Alexandria. Isn't it as well to go on with whatever it is one has begun?'

Aziz shook his head. ‘A Turk would stand more chance in Egypt than in the Lebanon. There's still a great deal of anti-Turkish feeling here. They remember the way the Turks put down revolt. There's the Place des Martyrs to remind them. Egypt has no anti-Turkish feeling.'

‘You want to make a life outside Turkey then?'

He nodded. ‘Turkey is too limited, too narrow, too constrained.
There is a great deal I love, a great deal I respect, but I have very little in common with my family any longer. Now that I have seen the way people live here, now that I've met Europeans, I couldn't go back to that old life.'

He spoke with an assurance that was new. He was a young man now, not a youth; and a rather striking young man at that. He had lost his pimples. His skin was clear. Twenty months was a short time in the life of a mature man, but in adolescence it could be decisive. The change was no less for a man than for a woman. Aziz had found himself. Reid remembered that quotation from the preface to
Endymion
that Compton Mackenzie had quoted on the title page of
Sinister Street.
‘The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted.' Aziz had been in that period when he had met him first. It was a period that was familiar to schoolmasters and tutors. When a young man was in desperate need of guidance, when he pestered his tutor with that need for sympathy; he could be boring, tiresome, exasperating, endearing; and then suddenly he found his feet, and no longer needed guidance. And very often in his freedom he reacted against the mentor who had given him that guidance. It was human to resent the people you had wronged; it was also human to resent the people who had helped you. You wanted to assert your independence. Very often the mentor felt aggrieved. He inveighed against the ingratitude of the young. The wise man shrugged. The young used the elderly as stepping stones. And it was a privilege to be a stepping stone. Aziz had needed him twenty months ago. He did not any longer.

‘Have you any definite ideas about what you are going to do?' Reid asked.

Again Aziz shook his head. ‘I shall find out there. That's what a university is for.'

‘Did you have any difficulty in getting taken on?'

‘Major Farrar fixed that for me, through the British Council.'

Had Farrar still any design son Aziz? He had said in one of his recent summaries that they would have to see if they could not find some new use for him. But he did not imagine he was any longer thinking of Alexandria as a base for that. Aziz had ceased to be the kind of young man who got into debt and trouble in a foreign city.

‘You are not thinking of making a career in music.'

‘Indeed not. Only very exceptional people can make careers out of music. It will be a hobby; a great and close one, nothing else.'

Which was the practical point of view. Most young Englishmen with literary inclinations wrote reams of poetry in their teens and pictured themselves as Poet Laureates. Young men thought themselves remarkable during that ‘space between', but very soon the vision faded ‘into the light of common day.' In three years' time, he and Aziz would not have anything to say to one another. There might even be embarrassment on Aziz's side, because they had once been close.

‘Do you remember that prophecy I made?' Reid asked.

At that point, Aziz did momentarily lose his self-assurance.

‘Yes, I remember very well,' he said, and flushed.

‘I hope it turned out satisfactorily.'

‘Very satisfactorily, I thank you.'

And that was that, Reid thought. There was nothing more for them to say to one another; now or ever.

During the morning session, Reid sat next to Farrar. During the first break, he said, ‘I breakfasted with Aziz today.'

‘You did? How was he?'

‘Excited about going to Alexandria. Very grateful to you for having fixed it.'

Farrar laughed. ‘It's funny, isn't it, how often something comes to flower and fruit long after it has ceased to serve a purpose. Two years ago, I was very keen to get him to Alexandria. I set the machinery in motion. Now, when I couldn't care less, the wheels have started to revolve.'

‘That project didn't work out as well as we had hoped.'

‘That happens sometimes.'

‘It seemed so promising at the start.'

‘It seemed very promising.'

‘In one of your recent summaries, you said that you might be able to find some further use for him.'

‘I remember saying that.' Farrar looked very straight at Reid. There was a challenge in that look. Reid did not accept it.

On the last morning, as before at Cairo, Stallard summed up the work of the conference.

‘For me,' he said, ‘it has been an even more stimulating meeting
than we had last year. Perhaps because we have got to know each other better; perhaps because the war is going better; perhaps again because we are able to assess the value of the work we have been doing. At any rate, I myself shall return to my austere life rejuvenated. I have learnt a great deal and I hope that I shall be able to convince my untravelled colleagues in the War Office that what I've learnt was worth their learning too.' As in the previous November in Cairo, he ran over the points that had been raised by the various Centres. Once again, he paid a particular tribute to Reid's report and this time he threw a special bouquet to Farrar. ‘I hadn't realized so fully before where and why the problems in Syria and the Lebanon were difficult. Major Reid did stress that point in October, but the points of difference have been accentuated during the last ten months.'

He then came to his summing up. ‘Nothing,' he said, ‘has pleased me more, has encouraged me more than the hopeful, optimistic spirit which I have found among you all. I hope that I shall find you as cheerful a year from now. Because the next year is going to be difficult for you. The war has moved to other frontiers. You are left behind. You were all of you very proud three, two, maybe as little as one year ago when you were posted out here. You were right to feel proud; you had been handpicked. The situation is different now. Establishments are being cut down, and you who are left may be tempted to feel that it is the best who are being taken away. Cut off from your homes, you are inevitably sensitive to the picture that you are going to cut at home. You want to appear as heroes to your families. You did in the past. Will you be able to any longer? The Middle East for two years was the centre of the war. It is not any longer. England is now the centre. You are going to have the feeling that nobody is interested in you any more. You will feel neglected; abandoned. You remember the jokes they used to make about the B.E.F.? Back Every Fortnight. You'll be making the same crack soon about M.E.F. Men England Forgot. I don't think it's going to be an easy time for anyone in this area; but you've got this consolation: it's better for you than the rest because you are doing something active and creative. Intelligence never rests. You will know that what you are doing is important, even if your families in England think you are on a picnic. And don't forget that we in Marylebone have no doubt how valuable your work is. Good luck to you.'