Fuel for the Flame

by Alec Waugh

  Basil looked at the cheque with doubt and with misgiving. Why should the Indian pay him this? A hundred pounds in all. That settled his account with Potiphar. Did the Indian feel a sense of guilt? What was at the back of it? Basil shrugged. He had betrayed no confidence. Forrester’s inquiries had not come in a double envelope marked ‘Top Secret’. He looked at the cheque. Twenty-five pounds was a useful sum of money. He’d get Julia something.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was the morning of the Queen’s birthday, or rather in Karak it was the morning of the Queen’s birthday; in England it was still the night before. But already the compositors in Fleet Street had set up the Birthday Honours List and Kenneth Studholme blinking in the morning light visualized the page in The Times that would be surmounted with photographs of the half-dozen men and women on that list whose names would be best known to the general public. They would not necessarily be the recipients of the highest honours. It was more interesting to the general public that a professional footballer had been made a C.B.E. or that an actress who had been twice divorced had become a Dame than that a retired Cabinet Minister had been promoted to the House of Lords. Very few Londoners would do more than glance down the Foreign and Colonial Offices list. Only a few, those who were interested professionally and those who had recently made trips abroad and wanted to know to which of their friends they should send cables of congratulation, would study it with care. Not many people would say that morning over their breakfast tables, ‘I see Kenneth Studholme has got his K.’

  To get one’s K; the goal of every entrant into public service; the sunset glow for a retirement in Bath or Cheltenham. That’s what it was, for nearly everyone, but not for him. He had not reached the peak of his career at forty-six. The Karak appointment had not been a routine step; it had been a forward jump. He would not retire when he left here but go back to Whitehall for reposting. Bath and Cheltenham were a long way off. He had been lucky, desperately lucky, but he had made use of his good luck.

  He got out of bed. Last night as most other nights he had slept in his dressing-room. He had papers to read and letters to write. He usually went to bed two hours later than his household and did an hour’s work before they were awake. There were papers now on his desk waiting to be studied and letters to be revised. He never sealed the letters he had written overnight; but re-read them in the morning, often altering them. He looked at them, hesitated, then walked on to the balcony.

  Because of the air-conditioning it was warmer outside than it had been in, but the air was fresher: scented with the opening flowers. He breathed it in gratefully. Air-conditioning made it possible to work at full pressure through the day after a sleep that brought real rest, but he never liked it. He remembered nostalgically those summer nights in Baghdad, when he had slept on the roof and at four o’clock a breeze had blown up from the Tigris.

  His wife’s bedroom was next to his; the curtains were half-drawn. She liked to be woken by the sun upon her face. ‘It is like an alarm clock,’ she would say, ‘so punctual every morning, and I don’t need to wind it up.’

  The sun came up behind a hill so it did not reach her till it had been dawn an hour. He looked through the parted curtains. The sight of her curled up, with an arm tucked under the pillow, sent a nostalgic wave along his nerves. He remembered the first time that he had seen her so— on the morning after their wedding—thirteen years ago. He sighed. When people met him nowadays they always said, ‘You haven’t changed,’ and they said to Muriel, ‘You’re as glamorous as ever. …’ But they had changed inside themselves. What had happened to the feeling that had united them fourteen years ago? Dried up by ambition? He shrugged. The calls of duty, the drains upon one’s energy, upon one’s emotional force; the whole routine of matrimony; of running a joint life. Yes, but even so there was a great deal left.

  Looking at her, as she lay there, weaponless in sleep, a wave of emotion struck him. This was not only a big day for him. It was a big day for her; a big day for both of them. It was a joint achievement. Would he have got so far without her? He did not think he would. It was not only the peace of the spirit, the solace of the senses that she had given him, not only that simple restoration and refreshment, though, that heaven knew was much—many men never knew it—but the public vindication of her presence at his side. A wife was like a visa on a passport. A wife explained and interpreted a husband to the world. The world seeing them together thought, He must be all right because of her. If a man had the right wife, the world made allowances for him for her sake. It recognized that he might be arbitrary, censorious, short-tempered under the stress of duty, but basically because of her he must be warm and generous and well-meaning. If only he could tell her that! Why should marriage force you to live on a surface of trivial day-to-day eventfulness so that it became so difficult to speak out of one’s heart.

  He turned the handle of her door. It was locked, as he guessed it would be, against a burglar. He returned to his own room, and opened the connecting door. Although air-conditioning usually made a room seem slightly stale when you came into it from the open, here there was a scent of spring, an English spring and fragrance. He tiptoed towards the bed. It was a double bed. He gently pulled back the sheet and lay beside her. For a minute he breathed in the vague slight scent that rose from her. Then he put an arm round her. She stirred, woke out of her sleep, blinked. As he had looked at her through the window, he had framed the sentences in which he would express all he felt for her, but now that he was beside her, he resorted to the facetiousness that was his defence. ‘Good morning, Your Ladyship,’ he said.

  She laughed. ‘Oh, darling, thank you, congratulations.’ She turned to face him, kissed him, snuggled into his arms. ‘How does it feel to be a Knight?’ she said.

  He smiled wryly. He could have given her the answer to that five minutes ago, when he had been standing on the balcony; but now beside her, with his arms round her, the accumulated habits of a dozen years made him inarticulate, but the mood of tenderness, of devotion, of the need to be at one with her that had made him open the door was still upon him. She sighed, she drew closer to him, in another moment she would have been asleep again, but his arms tightened round her; his hands had an eloquence that his mind could not command. He put his hand under her chin and lifted it. He kissed her, gently first, but with a tenderness that deepened and grew stronger. She sighed again, a very different sigh. She was affectionate and sensual by nature; readily responsive. The flood of feeling that he could not express in words, made his wooing keen. She sighed again, a long low shuddering sigh.

  In silence they lay beside each other, utterly at peace. There was a tap on the door. The maid bringing the morning tea. ‘I leave your tea next door. Shall I go fetch it?’

  ‘No, no, leave it where it is.’

  How little privacy there was in marriage when you were a public figure. Muriel sat up in bed, stretched, blinked and shook her head. She turned to him; the look in her eyes was fond and grateful. Then it became mischievous and she laughed. ‘I wish that you were in the Honours List every morning.’

  2

  One o’clock: six o’clock in England. Eric, Studholme thought, might be awake. The bell went at half past six, schoolboys woke early in the summer. But it would be at least two hours yet before he heard the news. His father had been careful not to tell him. He wanted it to be a surprise. It was a day that the boy would remember all his life. How would the news be broken to him? Would one of the masters say, ‘There’s something in the paper that should interest you, Studholme.’ Or would the Headmaster be facetiously sarcastic. ‘I really think, Studholme, that you should come to the table with your hair parted straight in view of your family’s elevation.’

  There was no chance of Eric stumbling on the news himself; masters saw the papers before the boys did and anyhow Eric would not look at a Birthday Honours List. He’d read the cricket and then the crimes page. Suppose nobody in the school noticed his name at all? Surely his aunts w
ould let him know. Ought I to cable him, or telephone? Telephone perhaps at lunch time. Just before dinner here. Yes, that was the best thing, telephone.

  There was a tap upon the door. ‘Come in.’ The A.D.C.

  ‘Your lunch guests are ready, sir.’

  It was a small intimate lunch party. Shelagh Keable-was in town again, she and Lila were still inseparable or was it Angus’s dark eyes that brought her here. Lila had suggested that. So Angus had been asked to lunch. He had also asked Annetta Marsh between whom and Shelagh a friendship had apparently grown up on the journey out. It would be a cosy family party, just the seven of them, with the A.D.C. He could wish there were an eighth, a man that he could ask for Lila. How much pleasanter life would be for everybody if there were.

  His guests rose as he came into the room. That was one of the adjuncts of authority to which he had not grown accustomed, that women should stand up and call him ‘Sir’. They were drinking out of long-stemmed glasses. He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘This is an occasion,’ his wife said. ‘I was always told that it was bad form to serve champagne at lunch. I never could think why, but I can’t see how anyone could object to champagne cocktails.’

  ‘So you’ve told them, then.’

  ‘Congratulations, sir,’ said Angus.

  ‘I’m thinking of changing my name,’ said Lila. ‘What’s the point of having a mother who is a ladyship if she has a different name?’

  ‘You’d better do what your mother did, marry someone who’s going to be knighted,’ said her stepfather.

  ‘How can you be sure he will; it’s safer to marry somebody who’s already got a title.’

  ‘Would you really like to have one?’ Angus asked.

  ‘Who wouldn’t? Look at my mother. She’s purring over it.’

  A little twinge flickered Angus’s nerves. Her thoughts were already travelling towards a day when she would be part of his life no longer. She was treating this episode as a man would a flirtation with someone of whom their different positions made it impossible for him to think in terms of marriage. He felt jealous, resentful, wounded in his pride. He had only been invited here because of his supposed interest in Shelagh. He had been placed next to Shelagh. He knew exactly what would happen. Lila would ignore him throughout the entire meal, then at the end, in pursuance of this alibi, she would say, ‘Shelagh and I were going to have our hair fixed. I wonder, Angus, if you could drive us there.’ That, too, hurt his pride, the maintenance of that alibi. Why couldn’t she acknowledge her friendship for him? Shelagh’s back was turned to him, so he turned to Lady Studholme. She was looking very youthful with a full summer radiance. Three years ago, he thought, Lila would have been a shaggy schoolgirl, and I’d have fallen for her mother. How much more satisfactory that might have been. But even as he thought that, he was acutely, tantalizingly conscious of Lila across the table, the slope of her shoulders, the way she held her head. She looked so composed, so hard: how little they knew, her mother, her stepfather and that stuffed shirt of an A.D.C., what she was really like.

  On his left he was aware of a chatter of feminine gossip across the table. Shelagh and Annetta gabbling at one another.

  ‘There’s so much I want to hear. I’ve scarcely seen you since we landed.’

  Angus closed his ears. He must concentrate upon Lady Studholme. This was the best chance he was ever likely to get of making a good impression on her. He might need her as an ally one day.

  At the end of the table Studholme listened while the two girls talked across him.

  ‘There’s so much I want to hear,’ Shelagh was saying. ‘I know so little of what’s going on. I feel like a prisoner in that oil camp.’

  ‘How do you think I feel under Royal scrutiny?’

  ‘Are you kept in purdah?’

  ‘This is not a Moslem country, but I’m watched.’

  ‘Can you see the Crown Prince in that monastery?’

  ‘If I take his aunt with me. I’m going there this afternoon.’

  ‘That can’t be any fun.’

  ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘But apart from that, how much freedom have you?’

  ‘All I want, technically. But the family wouldn’t like it. Their girls are chaperoned, I guess that I’d better conform. It won’t be for long.’

  ‘You’re to be married directly he comes out?’

  ‘That same week.’

  ‘After that you’ll be more occupied than ever. I’ll never see you. Couldn’t you come down to Kassaya? You always said you would. You never have. There couldn’t be anything wrong in that.’ She turned interrogatively to her host. A sudden idea had occurred to her. ‘Why couldn’t Gerald bring her down, as an official escort?’ Barbara must have a chance of seeing more of Gerald. ‘Don’t you think that’s a good idea? Annetta would be under your protection then.’

  ‘We might work that out.’

  Studholme had listened with mixed feelings to the two girls’ chatter. It was spontaneous and wholesome and he was touched by it. Yet at the same time he was saddened. He compared the different kinds of life that awaited these two girls. They were both completely English. Had Annetta visualized the destiny she had accepted? He thought of those Englishwomen who had married Germans and Italians in the nine teen-twenties, believing that a period of universal peace had begun and that war had been outlawed by Geneva. Who could foresee the political explosions, the reversals of policy, the changing of camps that the next decade might see? By marrying the Crown Prince of Karak, she would surrender her British passport. Fifty years ago that would not have seemed a very serious step. Fifty years ago there was no such thing as a British passport. But today when the world had grown so small that you could circle it in half a week, the roots that held you to the country of your birth had become increasingly important. Did she realize what she was giving up? He turned towards her, slightly turning his back on Shelagh. It was high time that Shelagh talked to her young man.

  ‘I make the same speech to every newcomer,’ he said. ‘I made it to Shelagh when I met her at the race meeting. I repeat what a novelist once said to me. “I may stay five months in a place but in the end I always recognize that I learnt everything worth knowing in the first five days.” First impressions are what count. You have had very exceptional first impressions. I would like to know, it would be of value to me to know, how it is striking you.’

  Annetta hesitated. She had seen so much, had heard so much. She had encountered a new climate and a new way of living. She could have enlarged for an hour on differences in detail, but in the final analysis, did it not all come back to this, that none of it seemed real?

  ‘Not real,’ he said. ‘In what way not real?’

  ‘An absolute monarchy. I didn’t know that such a thing could exist today.’

  ‘An absolute monarchy isn’t a bad thing for a certain kind of people, in a certain area, in a certain stage of development. A number of countries seem to prefer dictatorships to democracy.’

  ‘But the way the money is distributed. All these royalties from oil, and all of it going to the King. Don’t the people wonder what is happening to that money?’

  ‘They see new roads, new schools, new houses; they are all better off now than they were. They trust their King and love him. Look at Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Are those countries any different in essentials?’

  ‘Maybe not but it does not seem real to me that one day all this money will be Rhya’s.’

  ‘You won’t see much of it. It’ll be wealth on paper, not in the bank.’

  ‘Even so. I can’t believe that it can go on like this. I can’t believe that twenty years from now Rhya and myself will be sitting here distributing oil royalties as a form of charity. Something is bound to happen.’

  ‘It’s part of my job to guess at what is likeliest to happen. I sometimes ask myself if I’m not sitting on a volcano.’

  ‘Doesn’t that worry you?’

  ‘Sometimes, but more often I’m exhilarated. Kara
k is unique; anything might happen here.’

  ‘That’s what Francis Reynolds said.’

  ‘Francis Reynolds?’ Studholme looked at her quickly, his attention suddenly alerted. ‘Where did you meet him?’

  ‘On the plane coming out. He got off at Singapore. Do you know him then?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I know him.’

  ‘What exactly does he do?’

  ‘That’s hard to say. I don’t quite know myself. I met him during the war, in Baghdad. He was a half-colonel, and he was living very well. In the Middle East there were a great many gentlemen who had cover jobs. You know what I mean by that. They were, shall we say, nominally arranging the distribution of wheat in Syria, but actually they were organizing a group of saboteurs to pursue a scorched-earth policy if the Germans broke through the Caucasus. They called themselves “cloak and dagger merchants”. We nicknamed them “the funnies”. The same kind of thing is going on in international finance. How did he strike you?’

  ‘He made himself very agreeable. He was good-looking, a man of the world; I liked him.’

  ‘In that case, when he comes here, I’ll ask you to the party that I give for him.’

  ‘He’s coming here?’

  ‘In a month or so.’

  ‘He must have changed his mind then. He didn’t know he was coming when I saw him.’

  ‘Didn’t he? I’ve known for a long time he was coming. But that’s how “the funnies” are. Their right hands don’t know what their left hands are doing. Somebody in Whitehall changed his plans for him after he’d set out.’