Arms for Adonis

by Charlotte Jay

  ‘Look around you. See how quiet it is.’

  Sarah obediently looked at a vine hung with clusters of purple grapes, pink oleanders in pots, and two white cuttle-fish canoes darting towards the tunnel in Pigeon Rock.

  ‘Is it quiet because your colleague, Colonel Yazid, was assassinated last week?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘It seems so strange. Two Syrian colonels assassinated within a month or so. Do you know who killed him?’

  Raschid’s face became grim and angry. ‘I do not! The Middle East is clamorous with conflicting ideals and opinions. Is it any wonder that sometimes we stumble over one another?’

  ‘What will you do now? Return to Syria?’

  ‘Of course. It is my home.’

  ‘You know, I have always thought of Syria as being an empty land covered in sand hills.’

  Raschid laughed and Sarah thought how unpredictable he was. She had expected him to be angry.

  After a while the waiter reappeared with a mezzeh, which was enormous; olives, tabouli, homus, grilled chicken, capsicum stuffed with spiced tomato, aubergine stuffed with pine nuts and rice. There was hardly room on the table for the array of dishes. Twelve people, thought Sarah, could have made a feast of it. What a ridiculous display. The pink car all over again. For the first time she noticed the roses on his tie.

  ‘Will you begin please. I cannot eat before you and I am ravenous,’ said Raschid.

  ‘I’m not at all hungry,’ said Sarah. ‘I don’t want anything.’

  ‘But I have ordered this for you.’

  ‘No you haven’t. You’ve ordered it for yourself. You don’t seem to understand that I am not an appendage to a man, to be trailed along and do as I’m told. I never eat in the afternoon. I would like coffee please and a glass of water.’ Whatever made me say that? Because his personality is so powerful and I am afraid of him? Yes; I am afraid.

  Colonel Ahmed shouted at the waiter, glared at Sarah and, dipping his fingers into the dishes around him, began to eat wolfishly.

  ‘You insult me by refusing my hospitality.’

  ‘All right,’ said Sarah, almost in tears. ‘I insult you. There’s nothing new in that.’

  Colonel Ahmed again shouted at the waiter, dipped his hands into a finger bowl and sulked until the mezzeh was taken away and the coffee arrived.

  ‘You said you were ravenous.’

  He made no reply.

  ‘You haven’t known many western women have you, Raschid?’

  ‘On the contrary. I have known many.’

  Sarah heard herself say, ‘Did you make love to them?’ Then waited, appalled, for his answer.

  But he seemed unperturbed. ‘Of course I did.’ He pondered, giving the impression that the past years had been so fully occupied by amorous episodes, he had some difficulty in sorting them out.

  ‘Was there anyone in particular?’

  ‘No. Women in the West have won independence and power, but they have paid too high a price. I was a young man with plenty of money and I spent three years in England. A man who did not take advantage of this would hardly have been a man. As for western women, I found them hard and inflexible. Your modern painters draw women in angles and straight lines. Think of Picasso. When he looked at a woman, he saw a heap of scrap iron or a factory chimney. What artist in the past has ever drawn women in that way? The lines of their bodies flow like water and curve like fruit. That is how artists in the past have always painted them.’

  ‘I know. But there’s no point in complaining. That’s the way we are now. You’re fond of talking about history—well, this is what history has done to us. We can’t go back to what we were. If you don’t like us,’ she cried angrily, ‘then go back to your own women. There must be many beautiful women in Syria.’

  The mezzeh and the bottles of beer had been taken away. He leaned across the table toward her and spoke swiftly in Arabic. His voice had the lilting beauty of that language in its softer moods.

  Suddenly it seemed to Sarah that everything they had said had been meaningless—a deception to hide the mysterious accord that was between them.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said I do not want any woman but you, and I asked you to marry me.’

  For some moments, neither spoke. Sarah’s mind was blank and her body uncomfortably alive.

  ‘You don’t look at me,’ said Raschid gently. ‘Please look up. Let me see your eyes.’

  Sarah complied but said nothing. ‘Are you afraid?’ he asked gently. ‘I think you are afraid because you are English and I am Syrian.’

  Sarah shook her head.

  ‘Then you must be afraid because I am Muslim and you are Christian.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘What does it matter? There is one God for us all.’

  ‘There. You’ve said it yourself. You talk of God and we don’t. You pray in public, and we pray in private, if we pray at all, and most of us don’t. We call ourselves Christians, but what we really mean is that we try to behave within a moral code that derives from Christianity and that requires us to look after the old, the sick and the poor. We give money to starving people, to the Salvation Army, to the blind, the hungry, and to people who have been mutilated by our wars. But we think of ourselves a great deal and believe we are thinking of others. For you he is a reality. For us he is a symbol of generosity and correct behaviour.’

  Raschid listened to her attentively. ‘This is a very complex subject, Sarah, and you’re probably right. But what has it got to do with us? We aren’t symbols. We’re human beings. Now we must get a licence and find a church. We’ll marry here in your church and then again in Damascus.’ He took her hand and stood up, but Sarah remained seated.

  ‘I haven’t even said I will marry you.’

  ‘Of course you have. Why do you make these stupid difficulties?’

  ‘Isn’t it the custom in your country to ask your father or the head of your family when you make a decision like this?’

  ‘My father is dead. I don’t like my uncle, and for me the head of my family is my mother, and I have already asked her.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said I want to marry an English girl because she is beautiful and brave and I want her in my bed.’

  ‘When did you say this?’

  ‘After the bomb exploded in the suk. When you were choosing a handbag.’

  ‘Oh my God!’

  Raschid roared with laughter.

  ‘That’s different. That’s just letting off steam,’ said Sarah stiffly. A short silence followed. ‘Raschid, you are asking me to go with you to a foreign country where I don’t know the language and haven’t a single friend. And all I know about you is that you’re the sort of man who gets shot at. I don’t want to be a widow half an hour after I’m married.’

  ‘I shall not be shot at when you are with me. This has already been proved. Now come along, before you think up something else.’

  Sarah, still somewhat dazed, took his hand. She felt that the pink oleandas, the sparkling sea and the two white canoes darting towards Pigeon Rock now shone as though washed by celestial rain, with a brilliance they had never shown before. She lifted her face and knew that it was beautiful, like an offering. ‘Of course I’ll marry you. I adore you. I loved you the first moment I saw you.’

  Raschid smiled. ‘I shall give you my most precious possession. A dappled grey mare with a silver tail.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We must get your passport and a visa. We must hurry.’

  ‘I’ve already done all that,’ said Sarah. ‘Mr Khalife helped me. Wasn’t it kind of him?’

  Raschid laughed. Sarah laughed.

  They laughed and laughed.

  THE END

  A F T E R W O R D

  Charlotte Jay was born Geraldine Mary Jay in 1919 in Adelaide, where she works under her married name, Geraldine Halls, as a writer and oriental art dealer. She grew up in Adelaide, attending Girton School (now Pembroke School)
and the University of Adelaide. She worked as a secretary in Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne and London during the 1940s and as a court stenographer for the (Australian) Court of Papua New Guinea during 1949. During the 1950s she and her husband, John, who worked for UNESCO, travelled and lived in Lebanon, Pakistan, Thailand, India and France. They operated an oriental art business in Somerset between 1958 and 1971, and since then, in Adelaide. (John died in 1982.)

  Charlotte Jay is the name she used to publish most of her nine mystery novels. Except for The Voice of the Crab (1974), they were first published between 1951 and 1964 and reflect a life spent travelling and her fascination with local cultures and ethnological questions, as do her six ‘straight’ novels published as Geraldine Halls between 1956 and 1982. Only her first novel, The Knife is Feminine, is set in Australia. In others, the action takes place in Pakistan, Japan, Thailand, England, Lebanon, India, Papua New Guinea, and the Trobrian Islands. Most of her Charlotte Jay mysteries were first published by Collins in London and Harper in New York. They have appeared in various editions and have been translated around the world—The Fugitive Eye was made into a Hollywood movie starring Charlton Heston—but have not until now been published in Australia. She confesses she became rather confused about her national identity during her heyday as a mystery writer. The American reviewers always referred to her as British, the British reviewers called her an Australian, and the Australian reviewers more or less ignored her. Something of Charlotte Jay’s mixed identity might be reflected in Sarah Lane, the heroine of Arms for Adonis, a young British woman who ‘felt she had been born in the wrong country and craved the sun’.

  She has described her motives and methods as a mystery writer like this: ‘I began writing mystery stories largely because of my delight in the novels of Wilkie Collins and Le Fanu and the stories of Poe. I read these books with terror and fascination when I was quite young and their influence can be seen in several of my early novels. When my first books were published most of the crime stories at that time were written by skilled writers of crime and detection, usually with a well-born ex-Oxford or Cambridge amateur as the private detective as the central character, appearing in the manner of the Scarlet Pimpernel, something of a fool, but omniscient and strides ahead of the reader. In America the same fashion prevailed along with crime stories following in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I knew I could not compete with excellent exponents of these varied trends. Many had direct experience of police procedure which I did not feel confident of learning anything much about. And indeed I felt no interest in doing so. I set out to frighten my readers by asking them to identify themselves with a character battling for survival in a lonely, claustrophobic situation. My publishers on several occasions demanded that, in the interest of logicality, my threatened character should call the police. I always contested their suggestions and sometimes rewrote whole chapters to accommodate my conviction that my characters must stumble on alone and unaided through their private nightmares.’ (From Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, St James Press, 1985).

  Arms for Adonis was first published in 1961 by Collins (UK) and Harper (USA) and in 1962 as a paperback Collier Mystery Classic. Charlotte Jay has revised and in places rewritten the novel for publication in Wakefield Crime Classics. She wrote the book during the months leading up to the invasion of Egypt in 1956 by England, France and Israel (the Suez Crisis). She was living in Beirut during a one year ‘tour of duty’ by her husband, John, who was a senior official for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in the Middle East. Her time was spent immersed in the history and atmosphere of Lebanon, a country she loved in a period of great happiness in her own life.

  This tranquil, yet intense awareness is vividly and beautifully reflected in the sensual description of landscape. One of Charlotte Jay’s skills is to give a scene, a setting, a country, a living presence (as in the evocations of jungle in Beat Not the Bones, Wakefield Crime Classics, 1992). Beirut and Lebanon are both minor protagonists in Arms for Adonis. Odd moments, snapshots, cameo portraits fill the opening chapter and they variously allow the reader to ‘touch’, ‘smell’, ‘see’ Beirut.

  Later, the country’s interior comes to life:

  The broad green valley stretched away to north and south, and in front of them, surprisingly near, the long range of the Lebanon rose up like a barrier. These are extraordinary mountains, appearing from over the Beka’a both massive and delicate, their lower slopes intricately folded and pierced by innumerable valleys, their crests glittering with snow—not the abundant whiteness of winter, this had melted away—but summer snow like veins of silver struck down between the naked grey ridges.

  The lower slopes were warm with sunshine; rocks and stones shone blinding white in the thin, clear air and almond and peach trees putting out new leaf trembled and shimmered as though green water was netted in their branches. But as they mounted higher the mood of the landscape became sad and threatening; huge ash-grey clouds moved swiftly down the mountain slopes blotting out the road ahead.

  As they went higher, the mist thickened. The posts at the side of the road, grey boulders, thorn bushes, and almond trees black and twisted like corroded iron, appeared like spectres. A shepherd in a white keffiyeh and baggy trousers stood watching over them, a ghostly figure with the mist whirling around him.

  These random instances represent Charlotte Jay’s creative method in this book—the overwhelming use of the metaphorical trope of light and white, sometimes dazzlingly so. The device is brilliant and justified, because the story revolves around the Greek myth of Venus and Adonis (the Romans ‘claimed’ Venus as Aphrodite). The myth links the political thriller and the love strands of the story—Colonel Ahmed is Adonis; Sarah, Aphrodite. Alert readers should have picked the inevitability of their union for they were destined for one another. As Charlotte Jay commented in conversation with the editors, ‘You cannot step out of a myth.’ And why the Adonis myth? Let Charlotte Jay explain: ‘Adonis is very important in Lebanon. You see, the Adonis river rises in Lebanon … although it is a Greek myth, somehow or other, Lebanon seems to have taken it to itself. You have the source of the Adonis and then about ten miles away, over the top of the mountains, there is a lake and it’s said that the pilgrims from the Adonis festivals practised fertility rites when the males severed their penises and walked along the ancient Emperor Domitian’s Road and threw themselves into the lake for purification.’

  This aspect of Lebanon’s mythic past is joltingly described in Sarah’s vision during her escape from Äin Houssaine.

  Arms for Adonis has been classed as a brilliant travel book—‘excellent scenery and local colour’ (Saturday Review) and, tragically, it could be so read. ‘Tragically’ because Jay’s Beirut and Lebanon no longer exist. (As we write this afterword in 1993, the Israeli army bombs the civilian population of Southern Lebanon.) Her lovely evocations represent lost journeys. Obviously, this travelogue view is only partly accurate. There are more important emphases.

  The political aspect of the book needs no development here other than to point out Jay’s sanity in her depictions of the crazy fluctuations and alliances in the Middle East. Her method is that of the skilled novelist, allowing her characters in situ to comment on the larger actualities, often with a wry, ironic humour. Much of the blame for every problem, then, was targeted at Britain, the cynical diplomatic manipulations of America and France being unremarked for the most part. Jay puts it neatly: ‘in the Middle East … so much that was distressing to the humanitarian mind—the refugee camps in the Jordan valley, the devastated areas of Jerusalem where Jew had murdered Arab and Arab had murdered Jew, even purdah, beggars and the suspicions of the Syrian customs officials—could, if one felt so inclined, be laid at the door of British imperialism.’ Britain has gone, but the wild switches of policy and emotions are no different now from what they were forty years ago. Jay does offer, however, a civilised, if wistful, solution to the chaos, one utterly devoid of politica
l and international correctness and, therefore, likely to be derided by the mad political leaders of our era.

  In the final analysis the book is about marriages, comings together, workable assimilations. Sarah’s name is both Jewish and Muslim; St Joseph’s Maronite church ‘seems to embody the pagan temple, the mosque and the church—an oriental and Mediterranean synthesis’; Sarah (an Englishwoman) realises a ‘mysterious and frightening accord that was between them’ (between herself and Raschid Ahmed, a Syrian); Jay says of Beirut that ‘it is both European and Asian and must perforce face both ways—or, at any rate, it cannot afford to alarm its own divided nature by looking too fixedly in one direction’.

  These compromises are themselves part of the ‘mystery’ of the book, in which shifting commitments and liaisons represent the political and personal realities in a fictional and actual world which has no apparent fixed centre. That descriptions of the chaos can still satisfy the reader is a reflection of Charlotte Jay’s skill and romantic optimism, probably the only sensible resolution of a story set in a strange and mad time.

  PETER MOSS AND MICHAEL J. TOLLEY

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