Arabesque

by Geoffrey Household

  Armande waited another ten minutes for the telephone conversation to finish, and said good-bye. She returned to her flat, hurt and annoyed. Abu Tisein had not only refused to help Fouad, but he had disapproved of her own perfectly natural action. As for his complications—what were they? Wadiah had done a discreet favour to the British; he had every right to expect a discreet favour in exchange. It was all nonsense for David Nachmias to say that he could not protect her. He was being professionally mysterious in order to force her to do her duty.

  It was of course her duty to give up a murderer to justice—that she knew without any officious assistance from Abu Tisein—but it did make a difference that the man had taken refuge with her. Neither law nor crime was quite so clear in this strange Levantine world as at home. There were loyalties between Wadiah and Fouad, Wadiah and her, Fouad and her. Beit Chabab had cherished her, saved her, given her self-respect and happiness. To that dear society Fouad belonged. It was utterly impossible to turn him out into the street, and hear the police whistles blowing five minutes later.

  The alternative? To spend an indefinite number of nights shut up in her penthouse with a murderer. She smiled to herself at this dramatic presentation of the affair. Fouad was no more a murderer than a seventeenth-century duellist. And he did not consider her as an attainable woman. She was above his world, his protectress, his princess. If he thought of her as a woman at all, it was as his chieftain’s woman, hedged around by more taboos than she could possibly imagine.

  She told Fouad that for the present he was to remain. Then she telephoned to the charwoman, an expensive and solemn Jewess who came every morning to clean up when Armande had left for the office, to say that she would be away for a week and the flat would be shut. She moved her bed and dressing table into the living-room, leaving the bedroom and its safety to Fouad.

  The first twenty-four hours were full of flavour. It was exciting to answer the smile of the policeman on the beat, and to buy extra food at shops where she was not known. It was a calm and personal jest after her own heart to receive an officer who came to fetch her for a dance, and to imagine his horror if he were to learn that she kept a tame murderer in the next room. Only the sharing of her bathroom, to which each of the two rooms had a door, did she find hard to accept. She shuddered at the thought of a ragged Arab among the intimacies of her toilet—though in fact Fouad turned out to be scrupulously familiar with all the complexities of the Western lavatory.

  Fouad was quite content in complete idleness so long as he was well supplied with cigarettes, yet the vision of him sitting still behind closed doors began to obsess her nerves. On the third and fourth days the strain became barely tolerable. Then discipline relaxed. Fouad’s arm gave no trouble. He insisted on making a feast for her in the kitchen, on cleaning, on doing little services. Once he was nearly caught by a man who came to read the electric meter, and once he was trapped in the kitchen by Dr. Finkelkraut, who then remained with Armande for an hour, discussing the organisation of chamber music groups for flat dwellers and the influence of so social a scheme on world fellowship after the war. The trivial changes of furniture effected by female tenants were, she gathered, beneath his notice so long as nothing was broken.

  Armande began to realise that her hospitality was futile; it led nowhere, for she had no idea how to get Fouad away to a possible future. He himself could offer no suggestion except to go and take his chance. He was still expecting miracles from her influential friends, still looking a question at her whenever she returned to the flat. She saw that he had in no way grasped the truth: that she was helpless. She decided to keep him until police vigilance had relaxed. A week would surely be enough for the police to call off their inquiries and whatever unobtrusive check they were keeping on the immediate district. She hoped to God that it would seern enough to her conscience. As Wadiah said, Fouad’s life was in her hands.

  Chapter Seven

  Zion

  On the following Saturday Fouad was still in the flat. When Armande came home from the office, with a free afternoon before her, hostess and guest lunched together in the kitchen. Then Fouad returned to his idle imprisonment and his cigarettes, and Armande settled down to write to her husband.

  She wrote to him from Palestine with more ease, and her letters had been consistently cheerful, full of comment on her doings rather than her thoughts. Dear John, now proudly a petty officer! It was impossible to doubt that in convoying the merchant fleets back and forth across the Atlantic he was fulfilling himself and his dreams. She could sorrow for herself or for the partnership which she missed, but she could not pity his exposure to the cold and the danger of the seas. John was so obviously happier than he had ever been without cold and danger. He did not need her.

  She would have liked to tell him this adventure, but she realised that—apart from the risk of her letter being read by the censor—she could not write the story in any terms that would not shock him. He would cable her to see the District Commissioner immediately and explain her crazy act. See the man at the top and trust him—that was John favourite maxims. Of course he was right. And Abu Tisein was right. Both were perfect examples of that absolute masculine rightness which a woman who was worth anything at all could only admit and ignore.

  The letter would not write itself, for the overshadowing worry of Fouad’s presence made all her cheerful trivialities inane. The blank white paper became a hypnotic; no longer could she control the thoughts that slipped back continually to her haunted loneliness. She dropped her head on her forearm and was sinking into the hazy half-sleep of contemplative depression when she heard steps crossing the roof to her flat. Instantly she glanced round the room to see if there were any trace of Fouad. There was none at all. She opened the door. She felt wearier than ever at seeing the difficult Sergeant Prayle.

  “Bachelor girl!” said Prayle, when he had been graciously received and planted in a comfortable chair. “Aprons and inkpots! Suits you better than the St. Georges, Mrs. Herne.”

  Armande remembered that whenever the sergeant had seen her before she had been dressed for the hotel. So, indeed, had he. This was the first time she had seen him in uniform; he had lost completely the air of seediness which surrounded him when, in his borrowed clothes, he hung about the lobby. Armande could not admire his face, but she admitted that in a battle dress which was obviously cut to his tall figure—not merely issued and put on, as those of the sergeant clerks in her office—he looked competent and fully worthy of his three stripes. There was even a proper loose swagger about him, though eccentric. She was sure that her colonel would put him down contemptuously as one of those Intelligence wallahs trying to look like a soldier. But he did look like a soldier.

  “Beirut? Beirut was a cemetery!” she exclaimed.

  “Yes. Well, I don’t mind a bit of hide-and-seek among the tombstones. It’s lively. This might be a lot deader,” he answered, looking round the flat with sad approval. “It’s a next best thing.”

  “To what?”

  “To your own home. And that’s a mistake. Exiles—we all try to run up Kensington in cardboard. Or the village pub, if you like. But in the long run it doesn’t help.”

  “We aren’t all as rootless as you,” she protested.

  “Rootless? Oh, no! Roots so strong that I flower anywhere. Out on the dung heap or in among the aspidistras. Palestine isn’t for me.”

  “What don’t you like about it?”

  “Too self-conscious. British, Arabs, Jews—all of them walking about saying what fine fellows they are. Just like the first act of a tragedy.”

  “There’s not going to be any tragedy,” Armande responded at once, “unless we British make it.”

  “Well, I only arrived yesterday. And of course I’ve been talking to mere cops like myself. But one thing is clear. The Jews intend to collect enough arms and enough immigrants to impose their will whether Johhny Arab likes it or not. Am I right?”

  “Yes. And they should be allowed to. They have su
ffered enough.”

  “Oh, my aunt!”

  “Are you stationed in Palestine now?” she asked coldly.

  “No. Just calling on the Holy Places with a little bag of samples.”

  “And which of them,” she inquired politely, “interest you?”

  “Yours.”

  “Mine? You mean … have you come to see me officially?”

  “Uncle,” said the sergeant apologetically.

  Armande felt a rush of anger against all these stupid people, personified in Prayle, with their interrogations and internments and vague minds; but she could not afford to show resentment. Had they traced Fouad to her? She thought it unlikely. Did they want to question her, out of utter impertinence, about some unknown indiscretion with Zionist friends? Prayle had already led her into an expression of opinion more violent than she intended.

  “Isn’t it time uncle understood the modern generation?” she retaliated.

  “Look, Mrs. Herne,” he answered gently, ignoring her changed voice. “It doesn’t matter what you think of me—we’re in the same game. And what I want to know is so simple. Who got the Ghoraib fountain pens?”

  “That?” asked Armande, amazed. “Who got them? But, Sergeant, shouldn’t this be handled on what they call a higher level?”

  “Of course it should! But keep on a low level, and the army runs smoothly. That’s what we are for.”

  “Really I know very little,” Armande said. “And what I do know I can’t tell you without instructions.”

  “Whose instructions?”

  “I don’t think I should tell you that.”

  “Well, what department?”

  “I don’t know and why do you want to be told everything? Surely you and I don’t matter enough?”

  “Not a bit,” he agreed. “But take away the cardboard, and see me as the village cop. Counting necessity and gaining nothing, like the rest of us. Well, something has gone wrong. I polish the buttons and proceed to the vicarage to take a statement. You’ve every right to send me to the devil, and to say you’ll only speak to Sir Horace. But it saves trouble if you don’t.”

  “What has gone wrong? I really don’t see what you want to know.”

  “I want to know who wiped Wadiah’s sword and buckler. We didn’t. Nor did the French.”

  “The French? No.”

  “Well, it was their business. And they started collecting a month or so after Wadiah had unloaded his stock. That’s how the story came out. Wadiah swore to Montagne—you remember Major Montagne? Puss-in-Boots. Guillotines—he swore to Montagne that he had given the lot to the British.”

  “So he did.”

  “Sure?”

  “Of course! Sheikh Wadiah is the soul of honour,” she answered indignantly.

  She saw Prayle’s face light up with tenderness, amusement, relief—impossible to analyse the emotion. His odd-sized eyes and witch nose were integrated into a merry whole. She was reminded of some half-forgotten French print—of Villon or Panurge it might have been—wherein a crooked face shone with intelligence and enjoyment.

  “Then to clear … Wadiah,” he said, “get in touch with the big cheese and tell him Field Security is interested. He’ll understand that if we aren’t in the picture there’s bound to be a stink. Auntie Catroux and Auntie Spears will start fussing, and we shan’t be able to get on with the war for weeks. But drop us a hint, and the whole business can be ironed out without anybody’s pet racket being compromised. If I come and see you tomorrow, will you try meanwhile to get permission to tell me more?”

  “Yes, but I won’t promise.”

  “Or of course you might try to get it now.”

  “I have told you that I can’t, Sergeant Prayle.”

  “Hop into the next room and ask him.”

  “Ask whom?” she replied, imitating the lazy surprise with which she invited him to explain his more abstruse remarks.

  “The gentleman behind the door that you keep glancing at.”

  “I keep glancing at the door,” she retorted, “because I want to go in there as soon as you have left.”

  “That,” he said, “was a mean trick.”

  “You asked for it.”

  “I didn’t mean your very natural response. I meant me. You see, I’ve been admiring your courage. Not once have you glanced at the door. Not once, all the time.”

  Armande saw that she was fairly caught.

  “Sergeant,” she said, “even if you were right, there might be very simple reasons for a man in my bedroom.”

  “There might. But not smoking cheap Anchor cigarettes. You forgot the north wind, you see. It’s blowing the smoke back under the door.”

  Armande stared at him in silence, her face deliberately calm and neutral.

  “What did I say?” he asked suddenly.

  “I am not going to be interrogated on my private affairs,” she snapped.

  “Not interrogating you! What did I say? It gave the whole show away. You forgot. That right. Not he forgot. Cash, please! We’d have missed that if the boss hadn’t been walking round the shop.”

  “Sergeant Prayle, I give you my word that whoever is in the bedroom has nothing to do with Wadiah’s arms.”

  “Or with Wadiah?”

  “Well—not in the sense that you mean.”

  “Blackmail, Mrs. Herne?”

  “No!”

  “You’re looking a bit harassed”—he nodded towards the table—“starting off to write a letter, and out comes the first verse of ‘Lead, kindly Light’.”

  In his voice and his queer phrase was such sympathy with helpless loneliness that Armande could not meet his eyes for fear of breaking down.

  “Tell me,” he said. “I’m not really a cop, you know.”

  “But you might be forced to behave like one.”

  “By what?”

  “Oh … duty.”

  “Got two of ’em. One’s to the neighbour.”

  “Beit Chabab,” she began. “You know I was there?”

  “Of course.”

  “And if I may I’ll tell you why. But—well, Sheikh Wadiah thought I was more important than I am.”

  Sergeant Prayle nodded. That delusion was not confined to Wadiah.

  “And naturally I did things for the Ghoraibs—all the nasty little favours that Arabs ask.”

  “Human,” he corrected her. “Not nasty.”

  “Yes, I agree really. Only not everyone understands. And then his major-domo killed a man in Damascus. And Wadiah sent him to me, of all people, to get him off. I can’t get him off and I won’t let him go, and there you are.”

  “And now,” said Prayle, “let’s have all the details. How did he get here? And how much do the police know?”

  Armande told him the story of Fouad’s arrival.

  “And still you approve of yourself?” he asked.

  “Yes. I don’t see what else I could have done.”

  “Nor do I. But it was so much harder for you than anyone else.”

  “Why?”

  “Laughter isn’t one of your vices.”

  “Laughter? I enjoy things quietly. I enjoyed this for the first two days, but a week is a long time to go on smiling at the respectable Mrs. Herne sheltering a murderer. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. And I wasn’t fair. I’ve never had the luck to see you when you were happy.”

  “Oh, I don’t bubble at any time,” she smiled. “And one of me is too serious, I know. But the other me has a lot of fun all by herself. An ironical sort of fun.”

  “Which is the conventional one?”

  “Both—if you call good taste convention,” she answered firmly.

  “Do I? Must apply the loaf to that. Your hospitality, for example. Hardly conventional, even by Arab standards. But in excellent taste. Well, I’ll have to make Fouad disappear for you.”

  “But how?”

  “Just wave the wand.”

  “Are you sure you can do it without getting into tro
uble?” she asked anxiously.

  “Were you?”

  Armande called in Fouad from the bedroom. Prayle stumbled through the Arabic greetings, watching the man as he gravely answered. His eyes were merry and honourable. He was neither sullen nor effusive, and showed no sense of guilt. He was as naturally courteous as if he had met Prayle upon his own mountains and were inviting him to enter his house.

  The word devotion sprang into the sergeant’s mind. That was his instinctive summing-up of Fouad. It was no rare quality among the Eastern Christians. They might be easygoing—in every bad sense as well as good—but they could love.

  He smiled into the composed and lovely little face that watched the pair of them so intently. Here was the girl he had imagined, with immense reserves of loyalty and courage. He packed away the knowledge, to be squared some time, whenever his army life gave him the hour and the solitude for slow reflection, with her exasperating and unreal detachment.

  “Hardest, first,” he said. “That moustache has got to come off.”

  Fouad, recognising word and gesture, looked appealingly at Armande; then burst into sad and passionate Arabic.

  “Not quite sure,” Prayle interpreted, “but I think he said that if he has to swing, moustache swings too. It would be a proud day, you see, and he ought to look his best. How do you talk together, by the way?”

  “Oh, Fouad understands simple French. I’ll get his moustache off him. Is there anything else you want?”

  “Ravishing blondes,” he said thoughtfully. “I had shares in a dance hall once, and we used to make a packet out of selling beauty preparations—whenever our tame chemist wasn’t all hopped up. No demand for mouse brown. But can do, I suppose?”

  “Can do,” she laughed, “if I bleached him first. I’ll see my beauty parlour.”

  “Good. His skin is so fair, you see, that he’d look quite a different person with brown hair and no moustache.”

  Sergeant Prayle talked himself out of the room, remarking casually that he would see her or telephone her the following evening about their various troubles. He did not again refer directly to Wadiah’s arms. Armande, amusedly seeking the cause of his embarrassment, suddenly realised—and her heart leaped up with appreciation of his queer delicacy—that he was eager to impress it on her that there was no bargain, and that he completely dissociated the disposal of Fouad from the answer he demanded and expected.