Arabesque

by Geoffrey Household

  Floating in the transparent solvent of French culture were guests of many nations, Casual British officers from the various missions leaned against the bar. Cheerful Australians from the camps under the olive trees ventured doubtfully upon unfamiliar menus. Sliding their round bodies between the tables with the grace of fish were the Greco-Egyptians from Cairo and Alexandria, overwhelmingly obliging in the drinks they were enchanted to stand and the contracts they were prepared to undertake. Christians, politicians of the Lebanon, their trusses and intimate machinery creaking beneath natty trousers, presented to each other champagne and compliments, while the princes of Syria and Trans-Jordan, whose robes of chocolate and gold not only concealed but made unthinkable any infirmity of body or soul, scowled with eternal dignity over little cups of coffee.

  In and out through this invasion of males flitted a number of discreetly unattached women: young wives of the French Empire whose husbands, Free or dubious, had parked them conveniently in Beirut; mistresses of Vichy staff officers who, enthusiastically as the office cleaners and canteen proprietors, had embraced the cross of Lorraine; unmarried daughters of the Lebanon, modelling their frocks on Hollywood and their conventions on provincial society of the nineties. There were exotic plants of mountain villages, from Ararat to the Alaouite highlands, transplanted to Beirut by their admirers and now well established in the more lenient air. There were the consorts of the Alexandrian businessmen, whose sad and ruminating eyes looked out from the mascara, patiently ignoring the discomfort of too many jewels and too tight a brassière. All these flowery women spent their mornings in bed or on the beach, their afternoons at the crowded beauty parlours, their evenings at the Hotel St. Georges.

  Whatever she did, Armande felt herself to be classed among them. Their eternal delicate presence forced her into an infuriating self-consciousness. She might as well be living, she thought, in a dance hall where a beauty competition was being judged. If you dressed with some spirit, you were immediately mistaken for a competitor; if you defied local convention and were deliberately dowdy, you snobbishly set yourself apart. The competitors’ relative degrees of virtue were unimportant; they were all so obviously out to catch the judges’ eyes.

  This lack of privacy was exasperating; except in her room she had none. It was impossible to have a meal or a drink alone, and difficult to pay for either. It seemed to her that she must know all existing faces of the British Army—the kindly, the callow, the drunken, the weather-beaten and horsy, the strong-jawed and imperial, the scholarly with clean-shaven upper lip, the would-be military with neat moustache, the ultra-military with cat’s moustache. Their names eluded her, though she knew uncountable nicknames. A mumble on first acquaintance represented the surname, and never thereafter was it repeated.

  Such a multitude of her own countrymen carried her out of the slothful life of waiting. A few of these officers she had met casually in London; others had known John or her mother. The return to her husband’s kind made her feel faintly dishonourable. It was hard to explain why, like the women of the hotel, she was doing nothing, and what she was doing in Beirut at all. Romantic young officers, finding her account of herself quietly evasive, set her up as the heroine of a false and fantastic legend. From one to another they passed the word that Armande Herne had been a lovely and gallant agent of their army.

  It was on the Sunday morning after the departure of the ships that the hotel desk rang her room and announced a gentleman to see her. As the manager was normally at some pains to protect those of his clients who had no wish for unknown callers, she could guess that the credentials of this visitor were beyond dispute; the guarded voice of the reception clerk, quite unlike the tone in which he announced a friend, an admirer or a man of business, left her in no doubt that the caller was some kind—and, oh God, how many kinds there seemed to be!—of civil or military policeman.

  She spoke to the gentleman on the telephone. His voice attracted her. It was deep, decisive and with an odd musical rhythm of its own. He introduced himself as Sergeant Prayle of Field Security and said that he wished to talk to her. Armande was reluctant to be seen answering all the usual questions in a discreet corner of the hotel lounge. She told Sergeant Prayle to come up to her room in five minutes.

  She used those minutes to arrange her black hair in the Madonna parting which had always impressed such callers with the purity of her motives and morals. Her large grey eyes looked back at her sedately from the mirror; then lit and twinkled at the passing thought that she dressed for security men very much as for a poetry reading in her Kensington flat. Armande felt a fraud, but since at the moment she had no doubt of her beauty, conscience was amused rather than reproachful.

  Sergeant Prayle’s appearance belied his attractive voice. Armande realised that she had seen him on several occasions chatting to the reception clerks; she had taken him for one of those seedy and indefinite Englishmen who might be living precariously on language lessons or the dowry of a foreign wife. He was tall and well made, but wearing flannel trousers that did not reach his ankles, and a sports coat that had never recovered from being packed into too small a space. His lips were thin: his witch’s nose was long and one eye was slightly larger than the other. His complexion, too fair to tan, was blotched with red and peeling from overexposure to the sun.

  “Do sit down,” sad Armande, offering him a comfortable chair near the window. “What is Field Security?”

  “A racket,” answered Sergeant Prayle with relish.

  “What sort of a racket?”

  “Unfair to the workers. I share this suit of civilian clothes with three lance-corporals and the sergeant-major. And anyway it belongs to the skipper.’

  “But why not wear uniform then?”

  “Avoids embarrassment. Too many brigadiers popping in and out of bedrooms.”

  “I inderstand you want to talk to me,” Armande reminded him, primly ignoring his last remark. “But I really cannot imagine what about.”

  “Softly, softly, catcha da monkey,” he murmured, and then added, seeing her bewilderment: “That means I really don’t know myself.”

  There was charm in his crooked smile, but Armande had long ceased to have pity for mysterious males who wanted to ask questions. Moreover, French Security had never visited her in a lower manifestation than captain, and a good-looking one at that.

  “If you are some sort of policeman,’ she said sharply, “you ought to know.”

  “I don’t think I’m any sort of policeman. Just an ordinary egg.”

  “And if you want all the details about me, they are in my dossier at the Sureté Générate.”

  “I know they are,” he answered. “That’s why I only want to talk to you.”

  “But conversation with you is so difficult,” said Armande, relenting. “It’s all bits and pieces. Surely that isn’t the best way to find out what you want?”

  “Well, you know, afterwards, when one thinks about what the other person said, there’s something that sticks in the loaf.”

  “Is there?” she asked kindly. “And do you enjoy your work?”

  “Yes. I like to deal with people without trying to get money out of them. Have you ever noticed that when you really use the loaf on a stranger in civil life you’re always trying to make money?”

  Armande froze at this vulgarity and its implication.

  “I don’t mean you,” he explained. “I meant all of us—all of us.”

  “I think you must have been a commercial traveller.”

  “Sometimes. And once I roosted in a crook employment agency. Didn’t know it was one till I’d been there a month.”

  He laughed ironically.

  “So you can run straight now?” she asked.

  “Oh, quite straight! The army is like a socialist republic, you know. No temptation to make money.”

  “I should have thought you had considerable temptations.”

  “But you don’t take ’em. That’s what I mean.”

  “I think I
see,’ she replied, “though you said just the opposite to what you mean.”

  “I usually do.”

  “Isn’t it awkward?”

  “Not a bit. It has the advantage that damned fools can’t understand what I am talking about.”

  “Is that an advantage?” asked Armande, at last interested.

  “Yes. For one thing you can classify the fools and the intelligent straight off.”

  “But lonely.”

  “All alone in one’s own bughouse,” he agreed. “Still, it is one’s own.”

  Armande relaxed, and curled herself more gracefully into her chair. Her small head resting on one hand, she watched him with her individual and unconscious intensity of gaze. She was, by this time, beginning to be a fair judge of security men, though her experience had been wholly of the French. This sergeant, she thought, could surely not be typical of the British service? Where were the keen eye and the professional leading question? Where indeed was anything at all save a puzzled soul with some originality of expression? He hadn’t the faintest idea how to come to the point. She felt discomfort and pity as if a blind man were groping to touch her; she wanted to make the interview as easy for him as possible.

  “What was it you really wanted to know?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “But you must have come with some idea?”

  “I did. I haven’t got it any longer.”

  “May I know what it was?”

  “Cats!” he exclaimed, his odd-sized eyes staring at her, as if fixed in a moment of merriment.

  “Yes?”

  “I was only reminded of them. Intelligence tests. The doc says curiosity and you say cats, and then he makes a note on your card: ‘Will be fit for brigadier in later stages of war if beard not too long’.”

  “What are you thinking of now?” she asked invitingly.

  “You know.”

  Casually, abominably, he waved his hand in a gesture that included her room, her bed, herself, as if the disposal of the lot were a mere convenience.

  Such coarseness produced, always, a cold anger in Armande. Her normal reaction was to shut up and be conscious of good breeding. She might lose a shade of colour, but indifference, untouchability, were as obvious to the offender as to her. She was therefore horrified to feel herself blushing.

  The sergeant watched her gravely. His attitude was more exasperating than ever. He had the impudence to look protective—the sort of swine, she thought, who fails to make physical contact and then starts a sort of mental pawing.

  “You know, you go all luscious and motherly,” he said, ignoring her embarrassment as if it were of no importance, “and then are surprised at the trouble it causes.”

  “I do not!” snapped Armande, angry with herself for answering at all.

  “Damn you!”

  “Are you mad?”

  “No, no,” he explained. “I was only helping. ‘I do not, damn you’, was what you wanted to say.”

  “I never thought of it.”

  “Then you should have thought of it.”

  Armande rose.

  “Tell your commanding officer,” she said, “that I shall be very pleased to give him any information he wants.”

  “We only discuss such matters with the firm’s principals,” murmured Prayle. “Now pack up your little Hoover, and the office boy will see you safely past the hatstand.”

  Armande smiled faintly and politely, and then found that the corners of her mouth were quivering. The smile would not contract.

  “I’ve tired you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  She hesitated, and then answered simply:

  “I am very tired. None of you leave me alone.”

  “I suppose not. Well, we shan’t bother you any more.”

  “Oh, come again if it’s your duty,” she said with weary courtesy.

  “No need. I told you I hadn’t got my idea any more.”

  “Good-bye then.”

  “Très bien!” he exclaimed in an execrable French accent.

  It was annoying to be patronised, but she did want to know why he had come.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “It was just that all your men—no, not fair, that!—all these young men will have it that you belong to the British Secret Service as they call it.”

  “I have never said or implied—” she began indignantly.

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’ve talked to you. You haven’t that kind of vanity. And you aren’t interested in money.”

  “And suppose I wanted to get information out of them?” she suggested.

  “Then a security sergeant would be a very useful friend. My approach was abrupt of course. And beastly true. Still, if you had been expecting something of the kind … As it was, your gentle response—seven wise virgins with seven large lamps. Bang, bang! Crash, crash! All on your uncle’s noggin!”

  “You are a vulgar beast,” said Armande with a half laugh.

  “Yes. It’s a pity.”

  “Stop it, then.”

  “Stop it? Why should I stop it?” he answered with sudden bitterness. “What else is there?”

  When Sergeant Prayle had left, Armande settled her aching head on the pillows and lay still, staring at the ceiling. She was exhausted by Prayle and the military in general. These men all gave her a sense of being on the defensive, morally and sexually. Yet what on earth had she done? Stayed in Beirut when she should have left. That was all. Loujon thought she was a British agent. Prayle thought—God knew what he thought! This ridiculous Prayle did not think at all. He jumped from one intuition to another.

  Loujon was right. It was certainly time to do something. But what? She had two offers from senior officers at G.H.Q. who wanted personal private secretaries. When she pointed out that she knew no shorthand and was a two-finger typist, they didn’t seem to think it mattered. Secretaries in Cairo were evidently very personal and private.

  Nursing was attractive: intimate, and balanced and gentle. And scarlet and grey suited her—though she suspected that only regular nurses might wear them. She would have liked to give herself to the care of sick and wounded if only there had been a chance of serious training in the Middle East. She could no doubt be useful washing dishes and sweeping the wards, but such humble employment was a waste of her education and ability.

  John was always asking her why she did not join one of the women’s services. There seemed to be any amount of them at home. In the Middle East they did not exist. Englishwomen, in fact, were not supposed to be in the fortress at all. The wives and daughters who had managed to avoid evacuation were all passably efficient secretaries, or running indispensable canteens and funds.

  Was there, she wondered, any sort of amateur intelligence work that she could do? Everyone assumed that she was fitted for it, though the opinions as to who might employ her apparently varied. She remembered a hint thrown out by David Nachmias. He had only made a casual remark to the effect that there were interesting jobs around if one looked for them, but Abu Tisein was not conversational without a purpose.

  Although he was known to everyone and to Armande by his Arab nickname, he was a Jew, born and bred in Palestine. Upon his broad and muscular stern, a firm base for operations wherever he set it down, he sat peacefully in the hotel listening to his excitable wife. When she disappeared, always in a flurry of smart scarves and feminine business, he sat on listening, equally peacefully, to Moslem and Christian Arabs. His quiet manners, his quality of outward simplicity, appealed to Armande. What David Nachmias was doing in Beirut so soon after the occupation she had no idea. It was pretty evident that the British approved of him. He was said to be one of the Arab experts of the Jewish Agency, and a mine of information on the politics and personalities of Syria.

  In the afternoon she went down to the terrace of the hotel, sure of finding the Nachmiases. The crowded tables along the balustrade formed a semicircle between the sea a
nd a dance floor. A band played hopefully, but it was too soon after the hour of the beauty parlour for the women of Beirut to risk their complexions in the sticky heat. An Australian officer and a nurse, snatching a moment of civilisation after months of disciplined discomfort, were laughing gaily and dancing stiffly, alone on the floor, completely indifferent to the flashy foreigners who watched.

  Abu Tisein had chosen a table as far as possible from the band. He was moodily drinking coffee, while his wife’s plump hands fussed over the tea, the slices of lemon, the cakes and ice cream. It was hard to guess their nationality or religion. Madame, tightly corseted in body and soul, outwardly expensive, was French to eye and ear. Abu Tisein, with his short hawk nose, clipped moustache and powerful head, looked like a bored and prosperous Spanish manufacturer.

  When their eyes met, Madame bowed and gave Armande a signal of round white fingers which the former jeune fille bien élevée recognised as a masterpiece. It combined the geniality proper to a place of public amusement with all the etiquette of the upper bourgeoisie, and elected Armande as the only lone woman in the hotel who might unquestionably and without further invitation join Mme. Nachmias at her table.

  Armande went over to them, and was almost immediately served by a rushed waiter with a gin fizz. Tea was inadequate to deal with her odd combination of light-heartedness and a headache. She approved of David Nachmias. He never appeared to give an order, and he never howled for the maître d’hôtel. While you were engaged with Madame or looking at the sea or criticizing the Assyrian curls of Lebanese women, miniature gestures of thumb and forefinger played between Nachmias and the nearest waiter, and what you wanted appeared.

  “How do you manage it?” she asked Abu Tisein.

  She had never waited less than a quarter of an hour for a drink when sitting with anyone else.

  “I am a Turk,” he said solidly. “I understand them.”

  “Mais, chéri!” screeched Madame. “He is mad, my husband! He is no more a Turk than I am.”

  “But everyone knows you were educated in France, my dear,” replied Abu Tisein with lazy irony—whether true or not, Madame took good care that it should be known. “Whereas I am a child of the Ottoman Empire.”