Land of Marvels

by Unsworth, Barry

  “Exactly.”

  “But that would mean deceiving the poor fellow, lying to him, sending him away with false hopes.”

  “In a sense, yes.”

  “In every sense, sir. I can’t be expected to do it.”

  Rampling’s sudden, painful-seeming, slightly snarling smile came and went. Nothing could better illustrate the great divide between the professional and the personal common to all career diplomats, constraining them to regard hypocrisy as a public virtue and a private vice. The Ambassador could not be expected to do what he and the whole of his tribe were expected to do in the line of duty every day in their lives. He had no such problem himself; he had thrown such futile distinctions overboard long ago. “Think of it this way,” he said. “You will deliberately give a false impression—let us not call it outright lying—for a particular purpose you wish to serve, a purpose far nobler than mere personal gain, in fact we could call it selfless, the good of our great country, which needs access to large supplies of oil, having none of its own. In his turn Somerville will deliberately give a false impression for a particular purpose he wishes to serve, not quite so patriotic perhaps, but worthy enough, the uncovering of the ancient past. Now tell me, my dear sir, wherein lies the harm? Our purposes will be fulfilled and his won’t, but that does not constitute a moral distinction, does it?”

  It was clear to the Ambassador, as he sought for a reply, that Lord Rampling of Stanton, in addition to being much richer and more powerful, outshone him on the verbal level. The thought was galling to him. “He will be deceived and we won’t,” he said. “If that is not a moral distinction, I don’t know what is.” He fore-bore to voice his doubts, though they were strongly present to his mind, as to whether Rampling’s motives were altogether as patriotic as he was making out. I was brought here under false pretenses, he thought. This cad is making use of my office.

  The silence between them lengthened. Glancing at his companion’s face, Rampling saw that it was set in lines of obstinacy and displeasure. With a perception sharpened by his long experience of making deals of one sort or another, he was aware that his guest’s resentment stemmed less from a concern for Somerville than from a sense of wounded dignity. Short-lived, soon repaired . . . “You had better consider this carefully,” he said, in slightly sharper tones. “I appreciate your feeling that the bond of the old school tie makes the deception more distasteful, but we are talking now about the vital interests of the British Empire. War is coming, every month brings it nearer. Whatever the pronouncements of the Foreign Office, this is a common assumption and has been so since 1911, when the Germans sent a gunboat to Agadir and blustered about their title to territory in Africa. You will remember the feeling in Britain at the time. All that July we were on the brink of war.”

  “Well, they climbed down, as they were in honor bound to do.”

  “Good God, what does that mean? What has honor got to do with it? They lost their nerve, that’s all. What about next time? We can be thankful there are people in this government who appreciate the threat. What was the first thing Churchill did on becoming First Lord of the Admiralty? You know it as well as I do: He converted the navy from coal to oil. More speed, less manpower.”

  “Many thought it folly at the time, and many still do.” The Ambassador’s tone left no doubt that he was one of this number. “We have the coalfields at home,” he said. “In plentiful supplies, safe, secure, easy of access.” It was just about the time of Agadir, he thought, that Rampling had started taking a close interest in oil. Hardly a coincidence.

  “Good old safe coal,” Rampling said, “in good old slow ships. If we are to maintain our naval supremacy we need oil, sir. And it is there in vast quantities in Mesopotamia. In the event of war our army in India could take possession of the region in a matter of days. Ambassador, we are in a race, and if we play safe we will lose it. In fact we are already in danger of losing it. Look at the development of armor-plated warships. Ten years ago we were the only people to have them. Ten years ago we were the only people with Maxim machine guns—now the Maxim gun is standard issue for every German infantry regiment. You will be familiar with the Crowe Memorandum, issued by the Foreign Office a few years ago, I forget the exact date.”

  “The Crowe Memorandum was issued in June of 1907.” The Ambassador’s face had warmed a little at this opportunity to correct his host, whose vagueness had been assumed expressly to bring this result about. “It is true that the memorandum revealed worrying discrepancies,” he said.

  “And it has got worse since then. Look at German industrial output over the last five years, it has been enormous, they have overtaken us. Look at the money they are spending on armaments. They could put more than a hundred divisions into the field tomorrow. How many have we got, fifteen, twenty? Now there is a law at work here which is as valid in the chancelleries of Europe as it is in the gangland of East London. One who grows more powerful seeks more space, and he needs to dominate that space, and to do this he needs to diminish the power of rivals, by conquest if possible, or at least by impeding cooperation among them. Germany is in that position today, and the space she is seeking to invade is our space, that of the British Empire, the most supreme example the world has ever witnessed of cooperation among nations.”

  “Quite so.” The Ambassador’s face had lost its stiffness now in the cordiality of his agreement. “They shall not prevail,” he said. “Bullies are always cowards at heart.”

  “So they are, so they are,” Rampling said, wondering why people still uttered this cliché as if it contained some truth. “However, bullies can be bullies for a very long time before they realize they are cowards. They will not realize it at all unless they meet with a strength at least equal to their own. Failing this, they will persist in aggression, and our overseas possessions and our control of the seas will be set at risk. A quarter of the world’s land surface, a quarter of the world’s population, far-flung peoples living in security and increasing prosperity because of our just and enlightened rule. Should we not be ready to make any sacrifice required of us to guard and protect this great cooperative enterprise? Some use of subterfuge is justified in such a cause, don’t you think so?”

  “I suppose so . . . Yes, of course. So long as it doesn’t call our essential integrity into question.”

  “We must put first things first,” Rampling said.

  The Ambassador nodded, continuing to look before him at the bright water and the plunging birds. It was not easy to see what sacrifice Rampling was making, but he was right about the threat presented by Germany. If war did come, and if Turkey went in on the wrong side, this narrow waterway separating Europe from Asia would be of paramount strategic importance. A hostile Turkey could block the flow of supplies to Russia and menace England’s lines of communication with India . . .

  In response to some association of ideas of which he was barely conscious, he leaned forward and glanced to his left, a little farther down on this European side, to where the towers and walls of the Rumeli Hisar Fortress, built by Mehmet the Conqueror to control the straits and blockade the city, rose above the cypresses of the ancient cemetery. Not the first time these warring currents had decided the fate of empires. A year after this fortress was built Constantinople had fallen to the Osmanli Turks, and with it the thousand-year-old empire of the Byzantines. No accident he had built it here, where the Bosporus was narrowest, the currents at their strongest. What did the Turks call it? Sheitan akintisi, Satan’s stream.

  “We have much to lose,” Rampling said. “Do you know the gross nominal value of Britain’s stock of capital at present invested abroad?”

  “No, not exactly.”

  “It is not far short of four billion pounds. Twice as much as France, three times as much as Germany. And much the greater part of it in distant lands vulnerable to attack, Asia, Africa, the Americas. Quite a lot to set at risk, isn’t it?”

  “Tell me,” the Ambassador said, “why did you choose to inform me th
at Somerville has no prospect of success in getting the line shifted? You could have allowed me to go on thinking what I thought at the outset, that you were able to do something for him. Then I could have given him these assurances in good faith.”

  “But that would have meant deceiving you, wouldn’t it? Unnecessary deception is entirely against my code of practice. It is immoral, it is messy, no ends are served by it. I paid you the compliment, as one of His Majesty’s most respected envoys—a fact proved by your posting here, to this most crucial of embassies, at such a time—of telling you the truth. I have made it the rule of my life—”

  But the Ambassador was never to learn Rampling’s guiding principle because at this point he was interrupted by the entrance of a servant in red fez and white tunic, who announced in French that a Mr. Somerville had arrived and had been asked to wait. He was instructed to show the visitor in immediately.

  It seemed to Somerville, at the time and in retrospect, that his whole experience of this visit, from the first moment of being admitted, was one of passing through zones of light that grew ever stronger. He had crossed a small tree-shaded courtyard, waited briefly in a shuttered anteroom, where a silver altar screen, a crucifix, carved wood panels of heraldic birds and beasts kept him company in the subdued light. Then he had followed the servant through a long and very spacious hall, which ran from front to back and in which the light grew fuller as the house opened out toward the water. He entered the veranda, confused at first by the radiant flood from the open windows, the sunlit expanse of the channel beyond. Two men, complete strangers, had risen at his entrance, one corpulent and gray-haired, the other tall and thin and immaculately suited, with glinting spectacles. That will be him, he thought; the other looked wrong somehow, dressed wrongly, too old. The deduction was confirmed a moment later, when the suited man advanced with outstretched hand. “Somerville,” he said. “So good to see you after all these years.”

  6.

  It was Rampling’s definite impression that the luncheon had gone well. Hook, line, and sinker was how he expressed it to himself. He had felt no compunction, seeing Somerville’s obvious joy at the assurances they had given him. Europe was on the edge of a conflict that would claim countless lives and in which Britain’s survival as an imperial power was at stake; a railroad through a heap of antique rubble did not qualify for much regret in the scale of things. It was far from certain in any case whether the line would get so far before the outbreak of war, though he had taken care to make no mention of this to Somerville.

  In fact he had never been in any doubt of the issue. He had found it diverting to seem eager to secure the Ambassador’s agreement, to argue the matter with him, when both of them knew he had no choice. Rampling had sources of information at the embassy in Constantinople, and he knew of the recent memorandum, sent under the personal seal of the Foreign Secretary, to all diplomatic and consular officials in the Near East, instructing them diligently to obtain and promptly to forward any information regarding possible sources of mineral oil, a commodity of vital importance for Britain’s present and future needs. So sure had he been that his design would succeed that the terms of Elliott’s engagement—fee, expenses, indemnities—had all been agreed in London before he left. An excellent man, Elliott, a man after his own heart, qualified, dedicated, possessed with a crusading faith in the future of the petroleum industry.

  After the departure of his guests, who had left together for Galata to have a good old chat, as the Ambassador put it, at the embassy, Rampling slept for half an hour. He had a faculty for dropping into sleep for a brief while at any time of day. On waking, he summoned his boatman and told him to get the launch up to the jetty. Byron, his Greek valet, who traveled everywhere with him, as did his private secretary, Thomas, and his bodyguard, an ex-wrestler of frightening aspect named Dikmen, laid out his clothes and helped him to dress. Byron knew his taste; he could be relied upon completely.

  He dressed with his usual care: a pale green linen suit and a lavender-colored silk shirt very high in the neck. Tan shoes, a panama hat with a dark blue band, and an ebony cane completed the effect; he had a collection of canes and this time chose one with a silver handle in the shape of a wolf’s head.

  The launch took him down to the Galata quay in twenty minutes. Here, with Dikmen before him to ward off beggars and hotel agents, he found a cab to take him across the Golden Horn by the Pont Neuf, bargaining first with the driver, a process he always enjoyed; on this occasion he got the man down to fifteen piastres for the journey, the waiting, and the return.

  The afternoon was mild; he was a little early. It was his usual practice to arrive some minutes late for appointments of this kind, so instead of proceeding directly to the street behind the Ministry of Commerce, where the Lynch Brothers had their Constantinople agency, he descended from the cab at the ministry building and made his way into the courtyard of the nearby Nuri Osmaniye Mosque, where he lingered for a while, Dikmen in close attendance.

  The elm trees in the courtyard were in first leaf, and the pale buds glistened softly in the sunshine. Some men were crouching at the fountain, washing face and hands and feet before entering the mosque. But what took his eye and held it were the hundreds, perhaps thousands of strutting, gobbling pigeons in the paved area on his right. Against the slate-colored pavement their breasts looked vivid, blue almost. There was an old blind woman sitting on the edge of the curb with on her knees a tray piled with grain, which she gathered deftly and made into little packets and offered to passersby who might feel an impulse to feed the pigeons. Her fingers ruffled continuously in the grain; she buried her thin hands to the wrists in it, took it up in handfuls, poured it back in trickles into the tray, heaped it up in mounds, smoothed it down again. Rampling grew absorbed, watching her. As if she were counting gold, he thought, and indeed the grain was dark gold in color. No, not counting it, just caressing it, loving it—like a miser. Every so often she would pause to throw a handful into the mass or dislodge with a sweep of the arm any bird bold enough to settle on the edge of her tray.

  He watched her for several minutes, and in this time her hands were never at rest. But it was the behavior of the pigeons that struck him most in the end because they seemed in a certain way to epitomize what he felt human societies might be capable of if totally subjected to the beneficial stimulus of having to compete for limited resources: They did not quarrel, that was the remarkable thing; any handful of grain that was thrown into the mass caused a local flurry of hopping and fluttering, but this lasted for seconds only. The birds were united; no discord, no dispute were allowed to get in the way—there was simply no time for it; in all that pullulation of creatures not a single second was wasted on acts of aggression; all was harmony and order—no wars, no territorial encroachments, just a never-ending scramble for life. Utopian really. Supplies would have to be strictly controlled, of course; that would be done by the people who made up the packets . . . The woman’s eyes were blank and terrible; there was a discharge from them, as if white pebbles could weep. He gave Dikmen a five-piastre piece to put into the woman’s hand and heard her mumbled blessing.

  The office was on the third floor, and there was no lift. Rampling took the stairs slowly, Dikmen’s hand at his elbow. Conservation of energy, he thought, as he felt his heartbeat quicken. Like the pigeons.

  He left Dikmen in the outer office, where his massive build, shaven head, and drooping mustache caused visible perturbation to a thin clerk in a fez seated there behind the typewriter. Two men were waiting for him in a smaller room adjoining. One he knew already, the commercial agent Balakian, whose office this was and who greeted him with a low bow; the other was a representative of the Lynch Brothers, the nephew of a senior member of the firm, introduced to him now as Mr. John Saunders, who had come from Baghdad for this meeting.

  An office boy appeared as if by magic, and he was sent down for coffee from the nearby bar with instructions from Balakian to lose no time on the way if he knew what w
as good for him, a severity that did nothing to disturb the boy’s composure or quicken his movements, as he knew it to be merely assumed by his employer as a mark of respect to the visitor.

  Little was said until the coffee arrived; by time-honored custom all semblance of haste in the broaching of business had to be avoided. Rampling was amused to see that portraits of King George and Lord Salisbury—the latter, bearded and heavy-lidded, looking directly down at him—had been hung on the office wall. He noticed also a loosely furled Union Jack on a short pole propped up behind the desk. Balakian did business with a wide variety of people, and he had a collection of portraits and flags, which he changed in accordance with the nationality and allegiance of his visitor.

  Rampling was content to say little as they waited; it gave him an opportunity to rehearse in his mind the things he intended to say. He had a financial holding in the firm, a weekly steamer service operating between Baghdad and the port of Basra on the Shatt al Arab, under the name of the Euphrates and Tigris Steam Navigation Company. He knew, as did the directors of the company, whose sources of information were excellent—a member of the Lynch family sat in the House of Commons—that it was now the aim of the Turkish government and the German railway company to divert the line from the Tigris to the Euphrates and take it beyond Baghdad, down the valley to Basra, thus increasing the threat to river traffic. It was a matter primarily of giving assurances to the Lynch Brothers of his continued support while at the same time committing himself as little as possible. It was the need for discretion that had made him choose Balakian’s office, which was frequented by all manner of people, rather than his own house, for this meeting. The same need had made him prefer verbal to written assurances.